02 March 2008

Secular Sabbath


Cheeta at his piano, 2005

Epiphany!

On the holy day, you are not supposed to work. It is devotional, as I understand it. We don't have them much anymore in the West, but there is a growing movement to turn off the devices. Turn them all off. People are doing it all over. They are putting down the Blackberry, refusing to insert the Verizon access card in the laptop, and turning off the MP3 player.

They are calling it a Secular Sabbath, or at least Mark Bittman does, and since he is actually getting published in the Times, he must be onto a trend. He wrote about it this morning. In order to get calibrated for the day, I read him in the online version under the warm incandescent glow of the reading lamp in the pre-dawn.

I have to get one of those energy-saving florescent bulbs, I know that, but I don't know how the clip-on shade is supposed to grasp the coils. I wrestled with that, and the controversy about whether global warming is real or not on the way to finishing the paper and the queue of electronic notes that had piled up overnight.

Some of them were really good. The Royal Navy is apparently going into the staffing business for billionaire yachters, whose private craft now rival frigates in size. There is justifiable concern about the damage-control proficiency of the crew, and professionalism is considered to be the logical answer.

There is something seriously out of balance in the world. Another string seriously took on the issue that there may be only a few hundred real terrorists in the world, and the rest are just Internet junkies whose commitment to the faith is not as large as their commitment to testosterone and chatrooms.

The explosions, the contention goes, are just the result of acting out. It is simply the logical progression of young men egging each other on.

I mean, what would the result have been if the President had acted on a hot tip about the 9/11 plot, connected all the dots, grounded all the airliners, and the whole thing never happened? They would have called him an idiot, and as it turned out, they did anyway.

Which played nicely to the argument about same-sex education, which revolves around the heated discussion about whether male and female brains are wired differently.

Like, duh. We are the same species, but according to the 2005 landmark genome analysis conducted by the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, we actually share 99% of our identical material. Even accounting for some unique insertions and deletions in the DNA, humans and chimps share 96 percent of the same DNA sequence.

It is actually an issue, since we tend not to euthanize our close relatives, even if we do not date them except in West Virginia and Utah. The initial response to the HIV epidemic resulted in a huge increase in the population of chimps in captivity. I had barely worried about the matter, even after learning that the whole thing was a mistake, and that chimps did not contract the human variety of the scourge, and thus were completely useless for research.

There are too many of them, and they have become acclimatized and cannot be sent back into the wild. Some live to be in their seventies, just like we do. What is alarming is that the ones used outside the labs, in show biz, are only good on camera until they are five or six years old. After that, they become too strong and opinionated to be of much good. Just like we do.

Did you know that Cheeta, the chimp from the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies is still alive? He was born in 1932, and is retired in Palm Springs where he plays the piano, which is the God's truth, though not that well.

God, it is tempting to just turn of the flow. I worked through the Saturday, trying to edit the professional publication that is supposed to come out, inexorably, every four months. My eyes finally crossed around seven pm, and I wandered out to the kitchen to pretend to cook.

The spaghetti sauce turned out spicier than it should have, and my stomach gurgled as I watched a marvelous little Brit film called “Keeping Mum” on DVD to try to avoid colliding with news of the endless campaign. I am hoping for a coup de grace on Tuesday, one way or another, so the candidates will stop talking for a little while.

Coup de grace is what the film was about, in a round about fashion. See, the story is about this housekeeper who arrives at a rural vicarage and does a sort of twisted Mary Poppins thing- she fixes the dysfunctional family by whacking the neighbors who are causing trouble. She deposits the bodies in the pond in front of the Vicarage, including a golf pro with wandering hands played by Patrick Swayze, who is starting to show his years, although he is still a handsome man.

I enjoyed it a lot, but between the spaghetti sauce and all the murders, you can't blame me for tossing and turning through the night. The dreams were vivid, and I won't go into the sub-texts and vignettes, but you know the way the mind is wired. You probably wouldn't be surprised to learn that billionaire oligarchs, terrorists and chimpanzees featured prominently in a nautically-themed running dream.

I was distressed, right before the alarm went off, to discover that I was running low on ammunition.

Later, sitting in front of the Times, still in the dark, I thought that turning off all the devices is the only thing that makes any sense. I think I will have a secular and silent Sabbath, right after I finish editing the magazine, fill out the SF-86 on-line security form that is overdue and check the company e-mail I ignored all Saturday.

I swear.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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