For my Wise and Generous Masters, apropos creatures of the Blue Planet:
Fortunate was your suggestion to insert myself subroutine of an introspective native, to spend 'quality time' (as trendier say) aboard this blue ship of serendipitous chaos.
This being the host's 57th year, weariness softens "our" thoughts. Running through his memories invokes intellectual vertigo, so I have become wary of where I venture.
That post-pubescent testosterone cocktail was invigorating - but pleased it has passed! Without the awareness of their body's chemical roller-coaster I'm surprised the adolescents survive to reach maturity. Many times during youth I was found asking "what exactly are you (the host) doing?"
With those days gone, though testosterone is available and a desirable treatment, his body appears typical for age. Still, the stirrings of exuberant youth call to him often.
Television
The power of this diversion cannot be overstated.
This evening a television 'sitcom' sparked an observation worth recording. Speaking as a native, we enjoy the TV scripts and relive them the next day with friends and colleagues. Though written by social spin doctors, scripts still exemplify real life - in the uncritical minds of our captive audience. Sitcoms are extraordinarily popular and cherished.
Sitcom scripts, despite being a string of clichés, platitudes and throwaway lines, are, nevertheless, the apogee of social intercourse: playful, clever, and inventive thrust of modern thinking at its most intuitive level.
Scriptwriters might fill with glibly-coined anecdotes but every episode, each new series, evolves societal norms and expectations to a hitherto unforeseen level of witty, shrewd and cute, with no end in sight.
The vibrant global village grows enriched, its inhabitants gaining sophistication, year by year from mere trite entertainment!
"Movies" constantly step outside the norms that define offense, delivering abhorrence to entire religious States, while eliciting mild admonition from socially conservative minorities within larger democracies.
Television, more constrained by immediate public "conscience," achieves similar gains by the stealth of sheer volume.
This is runaway social evolution - and a fun ride it is!
The noosphere is heating up, as the visionary Teilhard de Chardin foresaw. Not mere random vortices and eddies of thought, these television shows engender bountiful swarms of feedback, each learning and acquiring from its predecessor.
Religion
More another time on inertial forces that smooth the arrow's course, but a brief a comment on the puzzle of religious fundamentalism trying to cope with the excesses of freedom coupled with unbridled social sophistication in modern democratic societies.
Generous and Revered Guardians, little separates the Muslim, Christian, or Hindu at the conservative reach. Though the Christian is more likely to suggest 'Satan worship' the Muslim would blanket behaviour with the term "infidels," in firm conviction that democratic (coincidentally, mostly Christian) societies are "based on sex".
I'm uncertain of my ability to absorb the Muslim viewpoint in my remaining time and might request a sequel stint (if your wisdom commands) living under the culture of Islam. Moderate Muslims are quite 'western' and equally at home with technology, and I could comfortably live as one. Conservative and traditional adherents to the Koran, as more literally understood, have not moved from their opposition to the Western drift as it follows science away from God (yes, that was very ambiguous).
Like most aborigines of all lands, the overly-devout Muslim would have been side-lined long ago and be facing irrelevance and extinction were it not for the attention forced upon him by oil wealth.
Despite this incredible resource, vast populations within oil-rich nations see no gain in quality of life, despite a century peddling black gold, and turn to religion and ritual for comfort - blaming wealthy nations, not entirely without cause. Wealthy oil-dependent nations have maintained tight control over the traditional owners of petroleum deposits, and their heavy-handedness fuels a bitterness that now strikes back.
Everything in human affairs reduces to an arm wrestle.
In this first decade of what should be a marvellous 21st century, on the sweetest of watery green and blue planets, I find paradise indeed being lost, degraded unforgivably by the astonishing arrogance and greed of successive American (U.S.) administrations and their military-industrial caravan.
Not yet drawn as a comparison but as plain as the nose upon one's face, America in Iraq is most reminiscent of an incident involving an early American soldier named Custer, or more recently Westmoreland. Slow learners indeed.
The United States has (again) lost its reason. The Middle East its new Wild West. Iraq might well be its Alamo. As if Vietnam wasn't lesson enough.
With Respect and Love
Your Beloved and Faithful Acolyte