Hamlet, Skull in Hand

I’m not entirely sure why this occupied my mind this morning, but it did, so I thought I’d type it up.

My dad’s favorite episode ever of Star Trek: the Next Generation was one in which Picard findshimself stranded on a planet with an alien he can’t communicate.  It’s not that they don’t share a common language; as is the case in most episodes of Star Trek, everyone and everything speaks the Queen’s English (or Starfleet’s English).  

No, the problem is that while the alien’s individual words might be decipherable, the underlying meaning of them is not.  The reason is that the alien speaks in nothing but literary analogies alluding to myths from his own culture.  Without having a grounding in the culture of the alien, Picard can make no sense of koan-like sayings, such as “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” or “Temba, his arms wide.”

Eventually, Data and the trusty Enterprise computer figure out where this alien comes from and provide Picard with a Wikipedia-esque understanding of the characters and situations the alien makes reference to, and this allows communication to take place.  Picard even creates his own version of this language, using phrases from his own culture's repository of literary allusions, such as “Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk.”  Not only does this newfound common language of analogy allow Picard and his companion to defeat a monstrous beast that attacks them, but to forge a bond between themselves and their cultures. 

Don't Believe the (Tax) Hype

One of the things that fascinates me is the ability of people to believe something despite all evidence to the contrary.  Some chalk this up to stupidity, but I think it's usually more complicated than that, involving attempts to resolve cognitive dissonance, a desire to forward an agenda, and a lust to make the world comprehensible (among other things). This is one reason I ended up doing my dissertation on conspiracy theories--what purpose does it serve to rhetorically construct an alternative reality that bears little to no resemblance to the known facts?  Why, for example, despite overwhelming evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald (and no one else) shot President Kennedy, do the majority of Americans no accept this explanation?

This interest resurfaced this week with the tea party/teabag tax protests.  Despite the caterwauling about the "socialist" tendencies of the current administration and the huge tax burden faced by the American people, the fact is that the tax burden for the overwhelming majority of Americans is lower than it's been in a long, long time.  That's right: unless you are ungodly rich, your federal taxes have gone down in President Obama's first year, not up. 

That's so contrary to the conventional wisdom and the narratives spun by not only the teabag crowd but by the mainstream media that it surprised even me.  Yes, I follow the news, so I knew that Obama campaigned on and delivered a modest tax cut to middle-income Americans.  That put me ahead of a lot of my fellow countrymen and women, but I was honestly surprised at the historic nature of this dip in taxes. 

It's a testament to the power of narrative that even someone disinclined to believe them and who probably reads more news than the average bear found himself surprised at this news.