The Trip

My close friend Atuarre had to make an abrupt move from St. Louis across the country in order to care for his family in California. Flying in on Monday, he had to make all arrangements, pack, and leave by Thursday in order to make it back before the following Monday. I went along to help out and share the driving. Google Maps provided us with 3 routes, and we chose the most southerly, given that a massive ice storm had just blanketed Oklahoma and other parts of the Midwest. We also chose to avoid Las Vegas and the narrow mountain pass from Reno, given that we would be driving a truck pulling a car trailer. This route required over 2,000 miles of driving.

Rather than any kind of travelogue, which would be largely hampered by the conditions in which we drove (dark, fog, sleep deprivation) and the time pressure, I thought I would instead compile a few things we learned along the way.

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In a provocative yet sensible thought experiment, David Foster Wallace asks if the American idea(l) is still considered worth the price of innocent lives, if “ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life” as is frequently heralded in our history for past generations. While it is always easier to consider any sacrifice in the abstract, the quick rejoinder to Wallace’s notion - that the Americans who died on 9/11 could be considered a fair trade, the martyrs for our freedoms - is to dismiss it as tasteless and disrespectful. Yet how else can we penetrate the shroud of rhetoric that surrounds the War On Terror in the inviolable tones of righteousness? With the very meaning of ‘freedom’ diluted with its repetition as the basis for exchanging civil liberties (freedoms to) in return for the promise of protection from further attacks (freedom from), Wallace invokes the Benjamin Franklin caution that, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

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Lately, I see systems. This is less Sixth Sense and more Little Man Tate, although without the glowing blue lines or floating numerals. Simply put, subjects that previously held no interest for me - politics (particularly political rhetoric), international relations, macroeconomics, business organization - are suddenly fascinating because they share a common platform of complex systems. This revelation ought perhaps to come as little surprise, given the predilection among the geek set for the systematic and ordered. In a post detailing aspects of the nerd psyche (with workarounds!), Rands describes the obsession with systems as a coping mechanism. For example, the nerd “sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through the day.” This system-centric perspective is also broadly attributed as the cause for abnormal geek socialization, since most social conversation is not directly results-oriented (I once gave up on conversational segues, much to the bewilderment of my interlocutors, before reading S.I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action). Likewise it could explain the attraction of conspiracy theories, which neatly knit together compelling fact or fact-like statements to make a reassuring whole that explains some otherwise puzzling event.

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