Incoherent, Nonsensical Ranting from a Conspiracy Theory Might’ve Been

Incoherent, Nonsensical Ranting from a Conspiracy Theory Might’ve Been

By Bobby Neal Winters

There are times when I think I wasted my time getting a PhD when I may have been born to be a conspiracy theorist.  (I think a lot of people at universities have made that mistake, but let me struggle to stick to the topic.)

I am surrounded by people from both ends of the political spectrum and all colors in between.  I don’t like to waste time arguing. (And it is a waste most of the time because hardly anyone changes their mind; most don’t even modify their argument.  They just charge on mouthing the same talking points.)

One thing I’ve heard over and over, is the statement that Trump is stupid.  I am open-minded enough to periodically entertain the notion that might be true, but--speaking to those who say this--that is a very dangerous thing to think about your political enemy.  Perhaps they want you to think they are stupid; perhaps there are things they have to say to placate their base; perhaps they are operating with constraints you can’t see; perhaps their agenda is not what you think it is.

These are all possibilities that should at least be entertained. Entertain those from time to time, while I periodically think that maybe Trump is stupid.  Given what comes out of his mouth sometimes, it’s hard not to.  But let’s continue.

Among those many colors of the spectrum I’m surrounded by, there are two individuals who’ve said independently of each other: Don’t listen to what he says, watch what he does.

What follows is my analysis coming from doing just that.  There are people who pay far more attention to this than I do; there are people who are far smarter than I am; there are people who know more about politics than I do.  What follows is my analysis of what is happening, it’s not necessarily what I want to happen or what I think ought to happen.

In other words, don’t shoot the messenger, especially when he is admittedly a would-be conspiracy theorist.

In that which follows, I am going to use the word hegemon. The internet defines a hegemon as “a dominant leader, country, or group that exercises significant influence or authority over others.”  The United States is the current world hegemon, and we have been since WWII.  Before that it was Great Britain; before that it was the Netherlands; before that it was Spain; before that it was Portugal.

There are perks to being a hegemon.  It helps you make money.  Indeed, if you do it right, it helps everyone make money.  A world hegemon acts like a world policeman.  They take care of the international spaces that don’t belong to anyone--like the oceans, for example--and keep the malefactors from malefacting.  On the oceans, they keep the pirates from running wild. That is why in all of those old pirate movies, it was always the British who were coming after the pirates.

We are now the ones taking care of the pirates.  That’s us.  We have a magnificent navy that dominates the oceans.  I think it is probably the best that the world has ever seen, but I don’t have data to back that up.  Since I am just on a conspiracy theoretic rant, I shouldn’t worry about it, but there  you go.

We similarly maintain a strong military. 

This is very expensive.  It is a huge part of our budget every year, and maintaining it has added to our huge national debt.  I hate to name the number because it might be even bigger than that, but anyway it’s so big that even if I wrote it down, it would be difficult to understand in a meaningful way.

We are spending a lot of money on being the world’s hegemon.  At the same time, many of the countries we are protecting and whose trade we are protecting have used their money not on the military, but on healthcare and education for their people.

All of this said, the actions that are being taken look like they will ultimately take us out of the position of being the world’s hegemon.

I would like it if the citizens of the US were the healthiest, best educated people in the world.  What could possibly be wrong with that?

Ah, but there’s the rub.  It’s like in a western when the old sheriff steps down.  Who is going to be the new sheriff?

China?

Ask India, Japan, and South Korea what they think about that.

There was a time between WWI--which basically gutted Great Britain--and WWII--after which the US took over--when the world effectively didn’t have a hegemon.  That period was marked by the rise of Fascism and Communism.  Hitler and Mussilini; Stalin and Mao.

Maybe my analysis is wrong.  I am just a conspiracy theorist could’ve been, after all.

But this is what I’ve been thinking about.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 The Sound of Silence

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was walking down the Watco Rail Trail today near where it meets Broadway when the Youtube music algorithm brought me Disturbed's cover of “The Sound of Silence.”

It’s always been a haunting song. While there are some surface interpretations to it, I’ve always felt there was more there.  Just as Bob Dylan was prophetic in many of his songs, I think Paul Simon was playing that role when he wrote this one. 

Not long after hearing the lyric

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls//

And tenement halls

I was walking down Broadway and read the graffiti-style mural that read: “Your music is in you.”

This is an example of what Carl Jung called synchronicity.  I can’t actually define synchronicity. I’m not that smart, for sure. But I know an example of it when I see one.

In any case, I’ve been thinking about words and numbers.  There are folks--both English majors and Math majors--who like to draw a line, a very dark and thick line, between words and numbers.

I believe that is a mistake, a really, really big mistake.

Numbers are words.

This came to me when I was watching one of my grandsons learning to count.  He was laying out potato chips on the dining room table counting, “One, two, three, four,...” and continued to do so, saying a word every time he put down a potato chip.

It occurred to me that the only thing that would stop him was when he ran out of the names that he knew for the numbers. (Or ran out of potato chips, but it was a pretty big bag.)

In American English, at least the nontechnical part, we run out of names for numbers at about a trillion.  Well, let me make that more precise: most educated people start struggling to think of names for numbers at one trillion (1,000,000,000,000). There are names beyond that: quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion. And you can go a lot farther, but it gets complicated and the vast majority of humans aren’t going to know and don’t want to know.

Some of you might be old enough to remember the folks back in 2012 who were all worried that the world was going to come to an end because the Mayan Calendar ended in the year 2012.  My understanding--and the person I think I learned this from has an office next door to mine--the truth of the matter was the Mayans simply didn’t have words for the numbers in their calendar beyond that date.

But let me get on with my rant. 

Numbers are words. Since there are more numbers than we know how to pronounce, there are words we have no way to say. Words that are forever silent.

Truths that can never be uttered.

The poets, the prophets, and the mathematicians stretch themselves to try to pass on these silent truths, but the struggle is in vain so much of the time.

The math lecture is slept through.

The prophet is ignored.

The words of the poet go unsung.

They echo in the sound of silence, as it were.

That doesn’t mean that the truth dies. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get passed along.

It means the truth is not passed from mouth to ear. It must go from heart to heart.

The truth doesn’t die.

And while it can always be spoken, it can never be silenced. For certain, what can’t be spoken most certainly can’t be silenced.

Because your music is in you. It always was and always will be. It will echo in the sound of silence.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Jesus, God, the Bible, and all that

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am a teacher.  My style of teaching requires that I learn something myself first through experience and then I pass it on.  There are some things that I can’t pass on in the classroom because (a) I teach math and (b) I teach in a state institution. If you don’t want to learn about religion right now, I recommend our excellent sports page to you. Well, that might be a religion too, but you know what I mean.

Traditional Christian teaching understands God as the Mystic Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  We believe that Jesus was God.  In particular, we believe he was fully God and fully Human.

This has been a point of contention.  Blood has been shed; ink has been spilled; hot air has been expended.

It’s been a big deal.

All my life I have believed, and I still believe. It was the way I was raised, the way I was educated.  But now as I grow older, grow more dispassionate, I find that the nature of my belief has been odd.

What do I mean?  I mean that I’ve had no difficulty seeing Jesus as God.  My difficulty has been seeing him as a human being.  I think that is something that I need to correct.

We are told in the Gospel of John that no one has seen God.  One might assume that he’s talking about his readers because there are scriptural references to Adam walking with God in the Garden and to Moses seeing God however obscurely.  But it’s safe to assume none of John’s readers were among those selected few.  

John goes on to explain that we see God through Jesus: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.”

As I said, I am well aware that there is disagreement on this. There are whole religions of very fine people who disagree with my tradition on this. I am not here to argue about it.  I am a math teacher: I don’t argue, I just explain why you are wrong.  My purpose is to start with this line from John’s gospel and go from there.

Most of the people I’ve met have an idea of God.  And here I will add even the atheists, nay, especially the atheists.  

The atheists have an idea of God. They are definite.  It is clear to them. They have done more study on it than you or me or almost any clergyman that I know. They take their disbelief in God very seriously.

They disbelieve in God, and when I’ve listened to their idea of God, I find I don’t believe in that God either. This is a statement that is by no means unique to me.

But don’t let me wander too far. My point here is not to try to change an atheist’s mind. God forbid. (It’s a joke; lighten up.) My point is that even atheists have some idea of God, and I think most people do.

Whether or not God exists, there is a natural tendency for people to believe. I’ve read articles that have stated that there is a part of the brain that is wired for holy experiences.  I’ve seen that used in arguments for the non-existence of God.  The same people don’t use eyes in arguments for non-existence of the sun, but there I go again wandering off again; it is not my point.

We have a natural tendency to believe in God.  But we have competing notions of what God is.

In the Bible, we have a record of one tradition’s experience of wrestling with God and/or that tradition’s notion of Him. (I’m using the traditional pronouns here. Make a drinking game of it, and let it roll over you.)  

Those in my tradition, use Jesus as a lens on the Bible (“the writings” as the authors of the New Testament referred to their scripture).  Through Jesus, the Human, his life and deeds, they came to an understanding of God.

Through that lens, those who knew him, those who were closest to him, wrote such things as “God is Love.”

We see God in the acts of Jesus: Acts of healing; acts of teaching; acts of expelling demons; acts of feeding the multitude.

Acts of loving kindness. 

Jesus is a lens that magnifies the picture of God that was given in the Old Testament.

So there you go.  There will be those who disagree. 

That’s okay.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 What Do You Know?

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been told in the past, and I pass it along from time to time, that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

We can only learn something, we can only know something, when we are ready.

What do I know now?  One thing.

I am happy.

Given all that is wrong in the world at this point, that might be a surprising or even a disappointing statement. Be either surprised or disappointed as it gives you pleasure.

But I am happy.

There is scientific research that says--much to the surprise, or perhaps, disappointment of some--older people are happier.  So it could just be that my happiness is a consequence of statistics. I am open to that. 

But I’ve got my own reasons.

I am back in the classroom full time after an absence of many years.  Okay, truth be told, I never quit teaching, but teaching one or two classes a semester is not the same as teaching four classes and the teaching thereof being your raison d’etre. 

It’s not so much the teaching per se as being back at my calling.  I am doing what I was put on this earth to do.

The happiness comes from a combination of that and having become old enough to realize that.

Perhaps at a more basic level happiness comes from wanting to do what you are doing, not doing what you want.  Feel free to go back into that sentence with a compass, a sextant, and a notepad and explore it a while.

As I look back at previous times, I see myself as doing something, but resenting that I wasn’t doing something else. I wasn’t trying to find the joy in the task at hand, but simply wishing it would be over.

I will admit that there are some activities that are objectively unpleasant.  What I am talking about is, lecturing in class, but wishing I was preparing a lesson; preparing a lesson, but wishing I was doing research; doing research but wishing I was spending time with my family; spending time with my family, but wishing I was reading.

And so on.

With the passage of time comes, perhaps, an appreciation of activities for being themselves.

Okay, I don’t like to grade papers.  If I said I did, they would stick me in a straight-jacket and drag me away by my heels.

And rightly so.

But I’ve learned the art of owning the grading of papers as part of my chosen profession.

I think that is part of the happiness that comes with aging: the knowing of oneself.

There are certain mysteries that we are presented with in the course of our lives.  At least there have been for me.  These are things I think about in the night, both as I lay awake, but also in my dreams.

These are mysteries which I am at the boundaries of my intelligence even to think about.  They are mysteries that stretch me.

Recently, I’ve been waking up during the night, and saying, “That’s it. I understand now.  I could explain it to someone.”

The thing to do would be to get up, go to my computer, and write those thoughts down.  Share my pearls with you.

Instead, I roll back over and drift off again.

The answers--and even the questions that evoked the answers--are gone by the morning.  The only thing left is the feeling that I’ve encountered the Transcendent in the night and it has escaped.

An artifact of my happiness, and perhaps the cause of it, is that I am okay with that. I’ve mapped the Abyss; I’ve plumbed its depths; I’ve witnessed the battle of Gog and Magog; and I have let it go.

And I’m okay with having let it go, because I am happy.

Or am I happy because I am now able to let it go.

Perhaps the solution that can only be grasped in the darkness of the wee hours is best left in the darkness of the wee hours.

Knowledge comes to us when we are ready to receive it.  That is something I know from my calling as a teacher.  

The knowledge that has come to be now is that I am happy.

I suppose I was ready for that.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

Turning Bois D'arc

 Turning Bois D’Arc

By Bobby Neal Winters

My people call it Bois D’Arc.  Folks around here tend to call it Hedge.  There are some refined educated folks who call it Osage Orange, and they are welcome to do so.  

It is a free country.

But my people call it Bois D’Arc and pronounce it bow dark.  That is an example of a genuine folk etymology which is to say that knowing what something is influences the way you pronounce it.  You see, my people know that Indians (Native Americans, Indigenous people; pick one that makes you happy and push on) made bows from the wonderful wood of this tree.  

The French knew it too.  That’s why they called it bois d’arc.  But the bois is pronounced bwah and means “wood” and the d’arc means “of the bow.”  So it all makes sense and the folk who I call my people just don’t want anyone to forget that connection.  

It’s about history; it’s about reality.

I got a piece of bois d’arc from my brother some time back.  I want to say a year ago Thanksgiving. It might’ve been longer than that, but if so not too much.

I used some of it to make some woodworking mallets, but I still had some left.  I’d cut it from one of my brother’s trees. It’s about 3 or 4 inches through and it still has the bark on it.  

The Bois D’Arc is not a pretty tree.  Indeed, one might say without too much fear of contradiction that it’s ugly.  It’s got thorns on its limbs.  

It bears a fruit that not many animals find attractive, no matter how hungry they might be. The internet tells me that only the seeds are really edible and that the latex that permeates the fruit can irritate your skin.

But it is tough.  

It will grow in poor soil, in inhospitable places.

It is defiant. 

Yesterday, I took a piece of what my brother gave me and turned it on the lathe.

It is hard.

Very hard.

I had my doubts that I would be able to do much with it until I got past the bark, past the dry part of the wood.  When I got down to the wet part, the part that was still “green,” it turned easier.

I called it green, of course, just because it hadn’t dried out yet.  The wood beneath the bark was actually yellow, a beautiful, beautiful yellow.

I am just starting with the lathe, so I don’t know how to make much.  So far what I’ve done is make squarish objects into cylinders. Those things and a lot of saw dust.

But I’d seen a Russian guy on Youtube making whistles.

And I thought, “Hmm, whistles.”

That’s what grandpas do.

I made a couple from other wood: one from cedar and one from pine.

I thought to make one from bois d’arc.  The wood of my people.  The wood that exemplifies my people.

I turned it between centers to knock the bark off and to make it round.  I then stuck one end in a chuck while still having the other end held secure.  

I began taking off wood to take it down to the size of a whistle.

The yellow just got deeper and more beautiful.  But it’s still as hard as iron inside.

I was able to drill a hole down the axis without too much trouble, but cutting a wedge from the side with a chisel to make the whistle was just about as much as I could do.

With all the bark removed, it is revealed to be beautiful on the inside, but it’s still hard, still unrelenting, still something you don’t really want to mess with if you don’t have to.

The wood of my people.  

It is right.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

What is the Right Word?

 What is the Right Word?

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am trying to find the right word for something.  

It would be a word that would describe a situation or a mindset.  It strikes me as something that is basic to dealing effectively in and/or happily with the world.  Because of this, there must be some word in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew for what I am talking about.  Likely as not, I’ve heard it, but I didn’t recognize its importance.

Since I don’t have the One Word, let me now use a lot of them.

When I tell students how to study their math, I tell them to pick a spot and prepare it.  Get their paper, their calculator, their pen, their pencil, their protract, that is to say get everything that they are going to need and gather it around them.  Turn OFF the flipping TV (and I don’t mean flipping), music, social media. Urinate--maybe on the social media. Take a deep breath.  Let it out slowly, and then get started, doing what they are going to do.  To those who’ve had jobs, I tell them to go at it like a job.

This is one example of the situation/mindset I am talking about.

This was my only example for many, many years.  As I’ve gotten into woodworking, I’ve noticed that you need the same mindset to do good woodworking.

Consider how you cut dovetails. Get your workbench cleared off.  That means you need to actually have a workbench.  Have your chisels, saws, marking implements, squares, and dovetail jigs close at hand.  Make sure that your wood is square and properly sized.  Make sure you have a clamp at your workbench so that you can clamp your board to the bench when it comes time to chisel out your dovetails.  Maybe I should have begun with the notion that you should have thought the entire process through from beginning to end before you sat down to cut the dovetails, but it (almost) goes without saying.  That might mean it should be said more often.

I am now learning how to use a lathe.  As with every other powertool I’ve learned about, a lathe is kind of scary.  I think that fear is left over from childhood.  Our parents didn’t want us to get hurt, so that created a general fear in us.

The cure to that fear is knowledge.  You can hurt yourself with a lathe. You can kill yourself with a lathe.  But you gain knowledge of how to deal with a lathe so as to minimize that possibility.  

You could say to just stay away from the lathe and you won’t get hurt.  The same philosophy will keep you safe from cars, dogs, cats, and the opposite sex.

While there are things that we leave alone because the learning curve of dealing with them safely overrides any benefit from dealing with them, we try to keep that set small.  I’ve got bungee jumping and skydiving in that set, but I know others who’ve crossed that line.

Somewhere within this notion is the idea that we become the despots of a small piece of spacetime.  We set aside a place where we are the absolute rulers of our environment for a carefully prescribed interval of time. For that time, in that space, whatever we say goes.

Many, many years ago--more than twenty--I had a class where one of the students thought he was smarter than me.  That doesn’t bother me. It happens all the time, and I enjoy it.  His thinking he was smarter wasn’t the problem.  The problem was that one day he tried to take over.  I came to class, and my desk at the front of the room was covered with boxes of donuts, a jug of milk, a jug of orange juice etc.  

He’d decided that we were going to have a party.

I didn’t say a word.

I sat down my books and began removing the accoutrements from the desk. After they were gone, I began to teach as if nothing had happened.

When you are the teacher, you are in charge. You decide what will be done that day.  Good teachers will read the room and take input from the students.  But if you let them take charge, why exactly are you getting a paycheck?

The student didn’t like me after that.

However agreeable you are, you must learn to draw the line, to be in charge, to take control:

“Hey, Eve, God told us not to eat that, and I won’t.”

“No, taking bribes is wrong, and I won’t do it.”

“No, I don’t think main-lining cocaine is a good idea, and I won’t do it.”

So, anyway, I’m trying to come up with the right word to describe this.  I know I will feel stupid when someone tells me, but I would like to know.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Invisible Joinery

By Bobby Neal Winters

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about making a frame for a cedar chest.  My intention was to segue off that and talk about frameworks in a more abstract way, but I got sucked into a vortex of writing about woodwork and ran out of space.

I could just leave it lay, but the topic won’t let me go. Frameworks just keep popping into my head.  My preference as a teacher is to put a good solid example in the student’s mind before going off on an abstraction, so if you didn’t read that article, you might want to get on the web and find it.

We’ve got frameworks everywhere around us.  Let’s start with math.  Say you are going to add 5 to 7.  You could just remember that 5 plus 7 is 12, but you don’t have to, because we’ve got a framework.  As you learn to count, you learn to count by fives. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, etc.  You are familiar enough with numbers to know that 7 is 5 plus 2.  So 5 plus 7 is 5 plus 5 plus 2.  Five plus five is ten, so 5 plus 5 plus 2 is 10 plus 2 which is 12.

That’s some trouble, and it’s easier to memorize it, but it will help you get by until you do.

You can do this sort of thing with bigger numbers.  Say you want to multiply 27 by 8.  Well, 25 times 8 is 200; that’s not so hard.  Now 27 is 2 more than 25 and 2 times 8 is 16, so 27 times 8 will be 216.  Here you are using a framework of multiples of 25.

You get your framework in place and you work from that.

For me teaching became a lot easier, when I learned how to use the calendar as my framework.  I sit down before the beginning of the semester and look at the university calendar.  I note where the breaks are; I note the times that I will have to be off campus; I pick the test days at roughly equal intervals.

After I have those test days picked, the rest of the time is just talking to intelligent young people and grading tests. I keep track of what I’ve done; I keep track of what has worked and what hasn’t; I refine my teaching.

The value of a calendar as a framework can’t be overstated.

As is my predilection, let’s go back to the first chapter of Genesis. In verse 14 it says, “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years.’”

People have wasted a lot of time arguing about Genesis, what I will say is that when I read this, I can see that the author of Genesis knew that that constellations were connected to the seasons of the year. Even now, you can tell when winter is coming or summer is coming by where Orion the Hunter is in the night sky.

Put that together with the phases of the moon, and you’ve got the start of a calendar.

I’ve pointed out one way I use the calendar, but it’s everywhere. We schedule everything.  Everything from 7th grade B-teams playing basketball in Frontenac to the Superbowl is on the calendar.  

The days, months, and years are all framed out, and we can put our events on them.

There was a time when we paid more attention to the week.  We recalled that the story in Genesis set aside one day a week to rest. Don’t work; don’t let your servant work; don’t let your wife work. Don’t work.  Restaurants would be closed; stores would be closed.

But someone came along and said, “Don’t let those religious fanatics tell you what to do. You can work every day. That’ll show ‘em.”

So we now get to work everyday if we want to.  And sometimes even if we don’t want to because if we don’t someone else will.

We showed ‘em, all right.

But I digress.

To return to my point, we’ve got these invisible frameworks around us that work like the frame I made for my cedar chest.  You can attach other things to them and they will hold it together. They make our lives easier but are invisible.

Since the 1960s, there has been a reexamination of some of the frameworks that keep our society together.  We don’t trust institutions any more.  Membership has gone down in service clubs and churches.

These invisible structures, invisible frameworks of civilization are being lost, and it’s not clear what is replacing them. 

If anything.

I suppose time will tell. It might be quite a show.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.