Everything and Almost Nothing: Consiousness and the Theory of Everything

In this article we will travel from large to small in two ways; for the first, we will travel on the thoughtship of philosophy; for the second our minds will hurtle down to almost nothing on the abstract vehicle of particle physics.  On the first journey the last stop is transcendence; on the second it is the theory of everything (TOE).We will finish by interpreting where we've been.

1. Almost Nothing, The Journey of Simone Weil

Simone Weil (1909-1943) is very hard to categorize.  She was a social activist, and was sometimes referred to as "the Red Saint,"although she never joined the Communist party, and eventually became highly critical of communism.  She is best known for her religious philosophy.  Some refer to her as a Christian mystic, although she never converted to Christianity and would probably have objected to the term, "mystic."  Albert Camus held her in the highest regard, for him she was "the only great spirit of our times."  In contrast, Charles de Gaulle thought she was "crazy."  Still others refer to her as the greatest female philosopher who ever lived.

The aphorisms about life, nature and God, collected in a book after her death entitled, "Gravity and Grace," are astounding--at least that's this author's opinion.   Inwardly she experienced God; she was well aware of the outward absence of God as well.  In this essay, our journey begins with the following aphorism: "Every order which transcends another can only be introduced into it under the form of something infinitely small."

This pithy statement might seem inconsequential at first, but that would be incorrect, for this aphorism contains a great and essential truth.  Weil did not elaborate; the sentence came from her notebooks and was not "fleshed out" for publication.  Putting muscle onto this skeletal framework results in a body whose message is of great philosophical and religious import.

Let us first consider the largest order to be transcended: space.  (Space is something and is never empty; what we refer to as "empty space" is the vacuum, a volume containing no or very very little matter. This vacuum is seething with activity at the magnitude at which space breaks down, the Planck scale, which is unimaginably small.)  From our perspective, space is the void.  If we refer to substance as matter, the universe is much much much more space than substance.  Even our  own solar system is mostly space; all the known planets could easily fit into the space between Earth and the moon.  Earth is 93 million miles from the sun; this is defined as one astronomical unit. Neptune, the farthest away from the sun of the eight known planets, is over thirty astronomical units from the source of its faint day.  Recently, there has been convincing evidence, based on the gravitational behavior of planetoids father away than Neptune, of a ninth planet.  Its calculated orbit extends to 100 astronomical units! Beyond that,  the huge stretches of interstellar space begin.

To gauge the size of the visible universe, distance is calculated in light-years. The human mind can only mathematically comprehend a light-year.  Light traveling 186,000 miles per second covers a lot of space in one year.  Yet as a measure of the size of the universe a light-year is very, very small.  Our own galaxy imeasures 100,000 light-years across!  Andromeda, the closest galaxy to us is about 2.5 million light-years away!  The light from the galaxies farthest away from us has taken over 13 billion years to reach our eyes!  Invisible to the naked eye, these large bodies appear as mere specks even to the Hubble telescope--to put it mildly, there is a lot of space between them and us that from our non-mathematical perspective, it might as well be considered an infinite distance.  It doesn't stop even there, however--the visible universe is thought to be only a fraction of the actual universe, invisible to us because not enough time has elapsed since the universe came into being for it to reach our eyes. Yes, it doesn't stop even there; many scientists assert--string theory demands it--that there might be other universes, perhaps an infinite number of them.  Space, Space, space!

Yet to us space is made negligible due to an "infinitely small" element that transcends it.  When we look at the night sky, it is not space which impresses us, but the sparsely dispersed stars which shine through it.  The volume of space taken up by suns and planets compared to the volume of matterless space is truly infinitesimal.  Yet it is this matter--(we exclude here dark matter which is about five times the mass of the total amount of planets and stars in the universe, since we cannot see it)--which gives space definition.  Space for us is the background.  The infinitely smaller element of heavenly bodies transcends it.

We could view habitable planets as the next small order which transcends a larger one.  There might be billions of them, but their total mass compared to the total mass of stars and uninhabitable planets is infinitely small.  But let's skip to the reason why we are so interested in hospitable planets: life.  The bio-mass of Earth is infinitely small when compared to the mass of the entire planet, not to mention the total mass of suns and planets in the universe.  We would all agree that from our perspective life is a smaller yet higher order which transcends the vast order of inanimate matter.

Once again, we can consider the next higher order as intelligent or multicellular life, but let's jump to the most important one for us: human life.  It comprises a fraction of the Earth's bio-mass and has only been on the planet for a million years or so of the four and a half billion years of Earth's existence.

That human intelligence is the highest order known is demonstrated by the fact that the universe does not understand itself; a stone has no science; the tremendous size of the universe fits, as it were, snugly inside the human skull--an astonishing "miracle!"

Simone Weil did not intend for us to stop with human intelligence; for her, the supernatural being called God, is behind all existence.  The divine is an infinitely small element because it would overwhelm human existence if it were any larger.  For Weil, this ultimate higher order gives everything else definition.  It is so small that it is almost nothing; there is, in fact, no evidence for it.

This is the ultimate God-of-the-gaps position.  It is non-falsifiable, meaning that it is not a scientific view.  It is, however, a respectable view, it is natural to intuit that God exists.  In our summary, we shall discuss whether this view is necessary for one to consider oneself religious.

Addendum: Almost Nothing

Simone Weil had a great influence on me, especially in the past.  Here is a poem I wrote twenty-five years ago, excerpted from my first collection of poems, Dance Fire Dance, which demonstrates how important Weil's axiom was--and is--for me:

Almost Nothing

Every order which transcends another can only be introduced into it as something infinitely small--Simone Weil

Compared to nothing, what is matter?
A few grains in an empty silo;
a few flecks of dust scattered
here and there through a deep tarn;
seen cosmically or quantumly,
nearly everything is space,
almost everything's nothing at all.

Compared to mater, what is life?
A lichen patch on surface rock;
upon vast, ancient inorganics,
a few unstable molecules
propagating selves on top,
a fraction of this tiny planet's,
almost nothing compared to the sun.

And, capable of self-removal,
an inch on evolution's scale,
compared to the rest of life,
what are we?  Almost nothing;
there are more germs in you now
than the number of people in China,
ancient and modern, combined.

(June bug on a mountain stream
approaching a vast waterfall,
what is an individual?
Almost nothing; can one blame you
if you wish to close your eyes
and wish to create yourself, a god
stalking the primeval forest?)

When has the power of prayer
cut through death's closing-in vines
to lead us where spring water falls
in the jungle of necessity?
What is superhuman grace
compared to the world of blind force?
Again, almost nothing at all.


ll.  Effective Theory--The Journey of Physics

This journey is similar to the first in that the road leads us from largest to smallest; it differs, however, in a very significant way: it is a scientific journey.  The description of each realm we pass through must be proven by the scientific method, that is, by (direct or indirect) observation; if it isn't we can proceed no farther.  The string theory has devised a plausible path for the last steps toward the Theory of Everything; although eloquent, many questions remain.  It is unproven and remains a theory.  (Einstein's theory of general relativity which asserted that the mass of an object bends light wasn't demonstrated until 1919.  The position of Mercury appeared closer to the sun than it actually is, due to the bending of its light by the mass of the sun.  Breaking news: today, February 11, 2016, it was announced that LIGO--the laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory-- confirmed the existence of gravitational waves--101 years after Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted their existence!)  Exploration of the final steps are impossible; the distances are too small necessitating an unimaginably huge amount of energy to explore them.  However, a piece of the puzzle might be found at the energy level of CERN or at another collider in the near future. This would be of tremendous importance and is a top priority.  It would be a good indication that the string theory actually describes the way nature works.

We will now travel from huge to tiny via effective theories.  What is an effective theory?  It is a technical term. An effective theory is one that describes the workings of nature without explaining why nature works in a specific way.  It is necessarily incomplete--the theory of everything, however, is not an effective theory, it is the final theory.

A good example is cosmology.  To understand the movement of all heavenly bodies you need to know only two things: mass and gravity.  Newton discovered the laws of gravity in the seventeenth century.  Utilizing them, Kepler determined the orbits of the planets with great accuracy.  Once the mass of an object is known--even the entire mass of a galaxy can be determined--its movements can be demonstrated and observed to be in perfect accord with Newton's laws. (Stars do not move in accordance with the gravity supplied by heavenly bodies; there has to be a huge amount of unseen matter to explain their movements.  This invisible matter is dark matter; scientists have theories of what dark matter might be; none of them has as yet been proven.)

Newton, however, had no idea how gravity worked.  For the effective theory of cosmology this knowledge is not necessary.   To help explain a particular effective theory, we need more information; this is called input, which corresponds to the "higher order" of Weil's maxim.  What is the underlying structure of mass?  

The next effective theory on our way to the final theory is the theory of atoms.  You don't have to know anything about the inner structure of atoms at this level.  All we need know are the elements and the electromagnetic force, which enables atoms to form molecules.  It makes no difference if one knows about the existence of quarks for the effective theory of atomic behavior..  An important question, however, remains unanswered: What is the structure of atoms which causes them to behave the way they do? As we proceed from the effective theory of the behavior of atoms, we need quantum input.  The particles which compose the quantum world are referred to in aggregate as the Standard Model.  The essential and last piece to be discovered was the Higgs boson, which occurred  in 2015.  The Standard Model is now complete.  

The Higgs boson gives mass to quantum particles.  But why are the masses just what they are; what is the cause of the mass of the electron, for instance?  For this we need the input of the final theory, the Theory of Everything.  At this level, bosons, various examples of which are responsible for the four forces of nature, (gravity,  the electromagnetic, the weak and the strong forces), are very different from fermions, the matter particles.  In the final theory, fermions and bosons are interchangeable.  Absolute unity exists at this level; no further explanation is necessary or scientifically possible.  Absolute unity simply is.

Weil's journey is plausible--from our point of view; many would agree that  the hierarchy of existence culminates in God.  The scientific leads to a theory which explains why things are the way they are.  God of the one voyage and absolute unity of the other are not the same thing, unless God is viewed in an absolutely impersonal way.  Weil's "infinitely small" higher order ("extremley small" would be a better term) corresponds to the input of each  effective theory all the way down until unity is reached and effective theories are no longer needed.


One is a journey of the heart; the other is a journey of the mind. But what is the source of both the heart and the mind in which both journeys exist?

Conclusion

We will answer that question shortly.  First, I must assert that my Weltanschaung, my world-view, has changed somewhat over the years.  I can no longer follow Weil's journey to its last step, at least the last step as she envisioned it.  For her, God is a supernatural phenomenon, that is, God exists out there, and is able to intervene, however sparingly, in human history.  In other words, God exists beyond consciousness and not only within it.  I do not find a shred of evidence for this.  For me the source of both the heart and the mind is consciousness, and consciousness alone.

Buddha believed that when anyone asserts a dogmatic statement about ultimate reality, the only proper response is, "Nahi, nahi," "no, no" that is, "not this, not that."

Jesus is the only begotten Son of God?  Muhammad is the final prophet?  The Lord presented the Jews with the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai?  Nahi, nahi, nahi! Such assertions are metaphors--and can be very meaningful as such--but they are not facts.  I don't understand how any twenty-first century mind can believe the contrary--although some very educated people, much smarter than I am, still do.  But they are apparently becoming rarer and rare.

The all is not lost, however.  It can indeed be asserted that God exists within.  As Jesus of Nazareth said, "The Kingdom of God is within you."

As the great poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things."  Zen teaches that a diamond of pure consciousness exists within us.  One can access it through meditation as one rises about superficial concerns.  We eventually not only realize but fully experience, at least in our best moments,  that everything is connected. This is wisdom.  One puts wisdom into practice through selfless action.  This is love.

Mind you, I stated that "it can be asserted that God exists." It is not necessary.  One may call the God within the inner light, as the Quakers do, or "the still small voice" or the core of conscience, or well, cosmic consciousness.  Call it any awesome name you like, it does not matter.  That you access it and act upon it, however, matters a great deal.

One might object that a God that exists merely (in Shakespeare's time "merely" meant "entirely") in consciousness is not the living God, but just another idea, a fantasy, albeit a noble one. For God to be real, according to this view, God must have an objective existence.  But what does objective existence man?

Modern physics can help us here.  Like the ancient Hindus, some scientists are convinced that it is consciousness that in a very real sense creates the world.  Many top physicists assert that there is no objective reality without the observer.  (There is, of course no observation without consciousness.)  John Wheeler, one of the greatest scientists of the past century, was convinced that  observation has a central role in the nature of reality.  I will close with a quote by the eminent particle physicist, Andrei Linde, as quoted in Michio Kaku's wonderful book, "Parallel Worlds":

For me, as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers...The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I can't make any sense of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...In the absence of observers, the universe is dead.

Another way of saying this: consciousness creates "objective" reality by interacting with the ghostly quantum world which cannot be called objective in any real sense. (Caveat: observation cannot choose which quantum outcome arises.  Volition has nothing to do with it; it is an entirely impersonal process.  You can't win the lottery with the "power of positive thinking!") Therefore, what is outside us is not independent of what is inside us.  In a real sense, therefore, outside is inside.  Thus, the Kingdom of God within us is also the Kingdom of God in our world.  It takes a leap of faith to believe in an external God, that is, a deity with an independent existence beyond consciousness who controls everything; there is, as we have asserted, absolutely no evidence in the material world that supports this view.   This belief,  however, as we have is unnecessary.  Wisdom is ultimately all we need to know; love is ultimately all we need do. What we experience is consciousness, and it is enough.

In my view, this is the only way to be deeply religious without coming in conflict with science.

Addendum: The Actual Apple

Everything is connected with everything else; a fully separate existence is an illusion.  As we have asserted, this is wisdom.  I would like to conclude with a poem by Michael Ende, which I translated years ago. It is the same journey as the two we took in this article, except in reverse, namely, from the small to the large.   Feel free to substitute yourself for the apple!

The Actual Apple

A writer and a  realist, well known

for his literality,

searched for something found at home

to delineate from A to Z:

an apple, for instance, an organic bit,

and all that goes along with it.

He described the core, the pulp, the skin,

the stem, the leaves, the branch, the tree,

the roots, the ground the roots grew in,

and Newton's Law of Gravity--

But that wasn't the actual apple at all;

he must include spring, summer, winter, and fall,

the sun and the moon and the stars--

He filled enough paper to paper a wall,

yet the ending seemed farther than quasars:

for actually he belonged there too,

this man of prose who hated verse,

and Adam and Eve and I and you

and God and the whole universe--

Finally he became fully aware

that apples are just indescribably there;

neither he nor another shall ever define

something so common, something so sublime--

He lifts his apple to the light;

smiling now, he takes a bite.

Michael Ende

--translated from the German by

Thomas Dorsett



Your comments are most welcome!

Redrad Porridge and Gach; Two Healthful, Tasty Dishes

Our family tends to eat well and healthfully.  A good result our good relation to food is that none of us ever diets and none of us has a BMI in the overweight range. We eat what I would call a green Mediterranean diet; vegetables and salads are our staples.  We have wine with our evening meal, otherwise it's only water, coffee or tea.  Ours is more accurately called an Indo-Mediterranean diet, since we are very fond of Indian cuisine.

One might assume that we're rather Spartan in our eating habits, but we're not.  We put a major emphasis on taste.  In fact, we only eat what is healthful if we can make it taste good.  And we can--at least to our satisfaction.  (We do, however, rather severely limit our added sugar intake, consuming even less than the recommended amount of about six teaspoons per day, including the sugar found in processed foods.  For some more details of our opinion on added sugar, please refer to "The Sweet God of Premature Death," on my blog,)

Once in a while we invent our own recipes, though we usually merely modify to our taste and whims recipes that we either know well or have found online.  I would like to share with you two  original recipes.  I make no claims that they are especially creative; I make no claims of being a gourmet.  That both these dishes are easy to make, taste good--at least to my family's taste--and are good for you is, however, undeniable.  I will include a little information about why they are so healthful.

1.  Redrad Porridge

Ingredients: radishes, tahini and beet hummus.

Health Benefits: Regarding radishes, there is a well known proverb in China that is a variation of "An apple a day keeps the doctor away."  The benefits of eating radishes are considerable.  They contain very few calories and much fiber--they thus satisfy hunger in a healthful fashion.  They are also rich in antioxidants, vitamins, and other good things.
When I went into my local grocery store and asked if they had tahini, the clerk was completely flummoxed and replied, "Ta-WHO?" It's actually not too hard to find, though.  The basic ingredient is sesame seeds.  In our local ethnic grocery, a large bottle sells for under $4.00.  Some have more oil, which floats at the top of the bottle.  This is ideal; simply mix the contents up.  The benefits of tahini are also considerable; it is rich in minerals, protein, calcium and vitamins, especially vitamin E and B-group vitamins. (We assert that there is no reason to take vitamins by mouth if one eats well--which is easy to do once one decides to do it.)
Hummus is better known and is also conducive to good health; it is rich in vitamins and minerals as well.   It is made from chickpeas, olive oil, garlic, and sesame seeds.

Directions:

Take four large radishes per person, cut them up--quarter them or cut them into slices.  Put them in a bowl.
Add three heaping tablespoons of tahini and two heaping tablespoons of beet hummus.  Mix together to a loose paste.  (If too dry, add a bit of olive oil.)  Optional: add a little bit of lemon juice to taste; add a dash of ground pepper; garnish with finely cut radish slices. 

That's it!  Eat it with a spoon like porridge.  If beet hummus is not available, any variety of hummus will do.  Redrad porridge is ideal as a snack.  Instead of having a piece of cake or a cookie with your tea or coffee, try this easily-prepared dish.

2, Gach

Ingredients: whole-wheat penne or any other form of whole-wheat pasta, turmeric, chili powder (cayenne powder), karela powder, garlic, extra-virgin olive oil, sea salt

Although we don't serve pasta often, it is often this dish when we do. The recipe dates back to the early 1990s.  The name refers to a dish--a very different dish--served during an episode of a very popular TV show at the time.  (If you know the name of the series, let me know in the comment section.)

Health Benefits: whole-wheat pasta, compared to refined, white pasta, has a much higher nutritional value; it contains all three parts of the grain, while white pasta contains only one.  The glycemic index (that is, the tendency to raise blood sugar) is lower as well.  The benefits of olive oil, an integral part of the Mediterranean diet, are well known.  There is evidence that heat destroys some of the nutritional value; the olive oil in this recipe, however, comes straight out of the bottle. Turmeric has been called "the world's healthiest food" for a variety of reasons.  There is evidence that it lowers blood sugar, prevents cancer, and reduces the risk of Alzheimer's disease, etc.  It is quite high in antioxidants.  Karela or bitter melon is not only highly nutritious but possesses considerable glucose-lowering properties as well.  The vegetable  can readily  be found in Indian and Chinese grocery stores or online; the powdered form is rarer. If it is unavailable, one can omit this ingredient and still wind up with a tasty dish. The benefits of garlic are proverbial.

Directions:

Cook 8 oz of whole-wheat pasta al dente, drain, and place in a serving dish.  Add a generous quantity of olive oil until all the pasta is covered, without any pooling of oil at the bottom of the dish, about three or four tablespoons. Add four cloves of garlic via a garlic press.  Add one teaspoon of turmeric powder, half a teaspoon of chili powder and 3/4 teaspoon of karela powder.  Finally, add a pinch or two of rock salt.  Combine.  May be garnished with grated Parmesan cheese. Serves two to three as a side dish.

That's it!

We wish you happy and healthy eating by following these two simple recipes and other ones like it. I invite you to provide in the comments section recipes and food tips of your own.

The Blizzard of 2016: An Illustrated Prose Poem

Snow ages us.  One day after the 2016 blizzard, which broke all local records, we Baltimoreans are still confined to four walls, multiplied by how many rooms earned, rented or inherited.  

Snow falls, fells us into the future: tomorrow I will be sitting on the porch doing nothing save watching a squirrel nibble at a collapsing pumpkin, softened after a three-month-long stay on an uneven step; today a wizening septuagenarian is doing nothing but reading, talking--and, of course, writing--while sipping cocoa from a rocking chair before a crackling hearth.  

A crick in the knee feels like a harbinger of a figurative crack in the wall through which I, like us all, must eventually pass, into a landscape where snow is endless and never melts--

I hear the voice of an angel just beyond my front door.  It is my wife's. Will you please stop writing and help me clear a path? Inevitability opens my cage.  Blow, snow blow, shouts an intermittently youthful, unbent Lear, as he shovels snow into the wind. 

Prose Translation: O you beautiful flake-time!/Wherever I look I see snow/ Snow's so cool even though white/Beautiful, leisurely flake-time!

The Sweet God of Premature Death

An eminent theologian of the past century, the German-American Paul Tillich, defined God as one's ultimate concern.  In other words, whatever is most important to you is your god.  Since mind and body form a unity, your gods are reflected in what you do as well.  A variation of this truth pertains to  what your body "worships" in order to survive: you are what you eat.  Sweet.

Or should I say, sweets.

When you walk into the supermarket in my neighborhood, this is what greets you:

This is but one of our many secular altars to what may be called The Sweet God of Premature Death. You will find in any large supermarket an entire aisle dedicated to soft drinks, where communion with this god can be bought at bargain prices.  Walk into any convenience store in America and you will find a little idol house, a secular church offering its congregants a perennial rite where the wine is cola and the host is chips.

Most of us know that junk food is harming us.  Most of us know that the queen of  dietary demons is sugar.  I am writing this article as a public service, since I recently discovered that hardly anyone knows the degree to which we are sacrificing our bodies and minds to (eventually Bitter-) Sweet Kali.

Why do we need to cut down on our intake of sugar and how does one accomplish this?  The answers to these questions are the subject of this article. Its specific objectives are two: first, how much sugar should we be consuming each day, and second, how does one convert grams of sugar into teaspoons of sugar? This knowledge is essential, as we shall see.

The Problem

The sugar problem is far worse than most people imagine.  I will now provide a brief summary of these dismal statistics.  Almost ten percent of the population of the United States is diabetic.  Among seniors, it is a whopping twenty-five percent.  Many cases remain undiagnosed, which means that considerable damage to the body proceeds apace without the mind even knowing that there is a problem.  Even worse: 30% of the population suffer from pre-diabetes--often without knowing it.  (Pre-diabetes is the state characterized by impaired glucose (that is, sugar) metabolism; if it is not countered by proper eating habits and exercise, diabetes will most likely develop, often in  a matter of a few years.)  Worst of all: 70% of Americans are classified as being either overweight or obese (17% are obese, roughly the same percentage of those who are overweight).  The rate of diabetes rises in tandem with the rate of obesity. In other words, just about everybody needs to control their sugar intake. Why?  The sweet tooth in your head is rushing you along on your inevitable dead-end journey from head to skull!  Diabetes is now the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S.  Heart disease, the leading cause of death, is associated to a high degree with both diabetes and obesity. Other leading causes share this unfortunate association as well, including stroke, Alzheimer's disease and cancer.  "Killing me sweetly with his song" is a ballad every American needs to sing to every piece of cake.

As you can see, America is one of the very few countries that gets more than 600 calories of sugar per day.

Towards A Solution: What you Need to Know

Space does not permit this to be an in-depth essay, but it contains a very pithy message in the form of two objectives, as stated previously: how much sugar should we be consuming and how do we monitor our consumption of empty calories?  The answer to the first question is simple: we should be consuming no more than six to eight teaspoon of added sugar per day. The average American consumes four to five times as much as that.  Remember, we are talking about added sugar, not about fructose, the sugar found in fruits, which is metabolized more slowly.  The answer to this first question, however, isn't really all that simple.  Many people think that reducing sugar intake involves cutting down on table sugar alone.  In fact, most of the added sugar we consume comes from processed foods in the form of high fructose corn syrup and not from the sugar we add to tea or coffee.  High fructose corn syrup is in just about everything: cakes, cookies, ketchup, sauces, etc. etc.  The biggest culprits are, by far, soft drinks.

(I must politically digress here, sorry.  Most conservatives vehemently oppose food stamps.  For instance, Jeb Bush wants to eliminate the food stamp program, now known as SNAP, The Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, entirely.  This is unconscionable.  First of all, the program provides effective nutritional help to those who need it--about fifty percent of whom work, yet still can't afford to feed themselves and their families adequately.  The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan organization, states that for every dollar spent on food stamps the economy receives $1.50 in return.  It is very much a win-win situation.  Part of the Act which provides food relief to the poor provided subsidies to agribusiness as well. --At present, farm subsidies are mostly in the form of crop insurance, an indirect way of paying the wealthiest farmers directly-- This is not just a waste of money; Agribusinesses are responsible for the production of high-fructose corn syrup, which is enormously profitable, since it is found in just about all processed foods--in many, it's the main ingredient.   In other words, taxpayers are paying to be poisoned.)

How do we manage our sugar consumption.  Another simple answer: we have to read labels.

In America, calories from sugar are listed by weight in grams, not by teaspoons.  The first thing people need to learn is how many grams of sugar constitute one teaspoon of the powdery drug.  (Sugar is quite addictive.)

What triggered my writing this essay is my discovery that very few people know the answer.  My wife and I recently attended a party; while people were chomping down, I proceeded to ask twenty-five of them two questions: How many teaspoons of added sugar is the daily limit, and, how many grams of sugar are in one teaspoon of sugar?  NOBODY KNEW !  Not one!  Not even the diabetics!  This is a terrible situation that is easily remedied.

If you don't know already, and if you're like most other people you don't, there are four grams of sugar in every teaspoon of sugar.  This is a very important piece of information that the makers of high-fructose corn syrup and, especially, the beverage industry don't want you to know.  (I've heard that the beverage industry has blocked legislation to require that the amount of sugar be listed in teaspoons, which everyone understands.  I wonder why.)

If we should consume no more than eight teaspoons of sugar daily at the most, this means no more than 32 grams of sugar.  One can of cola contains 39 grams of sugar!  Now that you can convert grams to teaspoons of sugar, proceed to be horrified by the sugar content in, say,  a Starbucks latte.  There are many online sources that provide such useful information.  An example: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/262978.php

Try to determine the added sugar intake in your diet as precisely as you can for one day.  You will be surprised!

Two things you should do, whether you monitor the sugar in your diet or not.

1. Stop drinking soft drinks!  Fruit juices contain almost as much sugar--Get your fruit from, well, fruit.  Drink water instead, with moderate amounts of tea, coffee, and if you are an adult, wine--all of which have definite health benefits and are all, at least to this writer, enjoyable beverages.

2. Limit as much as possible the consumption of processed foods.  If something has more than four or five listed ingredients, especially if they are chemical additives, put the item back on the shelf and proceed to produce. It's not hard to cook simple meals with lots of vegetables! And, of course, eat lots of salads.

(Along with limiting sugar, one needs to exercise and limit one's calories in order to maintain a BMI (Body Mass Index) in the normal-weight range.  Calorie restriction and exercise, both crucially important, are beyond the scope of this essay.)

Summary

This is not all you need to know, but it's a very important start:

REMEMBER; ONE TEASPOON OF SUGAR IS EQUIVALENT TO FOUR GRAMS OF SUGAR

REMEMBER; LIMIT THE CONSUMPTION OF ADDED SUGAR TO SIX TO EIGHT TEASPOONS A DAY, THAT IS, 24 TO 32 GRAMS PER DAY.

You don't have to be Spartan about this: good food tastes best.  If you follow easily obtainable recommendations regarding sugar consumption, you will undoubtedly feel better and very likely live longer.  Not bad.  Even better:

See to it that your sweetness is mostly metaphorical! That is, if it is chiefly derived from an attitude dissolved in your mind and less from  a high-fructose lolly that dissolves on your tongue, you will be wise as well.

Baltimore Online Book Club: Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is the seventh edition of the Baltimore Book Club.  Approximately every six weeks, we meet--we are a group of six--at the home of a member and discuss a book over a meal of good food and wine.  As I informed readers in my review of "The Blue Angel," by Francine Prose, posted on 12/23/2015, our choice for the 1/4/2016 meeting was F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night."  A few days after each meeting, I post a review of the work most recently discussed.  Our next selection, (we will meet on 3/10/2016), is "The Notebook of Maya" ("El Cuaderno de Maya"--some of us will be reading it in the original Spanish) by Isabel Allende.  We invite cyberspace members to read the book along with us, and to provide comments once the online review is posted.

Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Scribner, New York, 1934, 1982
315 pages

"Tender Is the Night" is one of the greatest American novels ever written.  It has been widely reviewed and commented upon; we decided that it would be a bit presumptuous to post another one.  We will therefore provide a very brief summary and discuss the novel from a novel angle, which we call that of The Clever Contemporary--we will explain.

The novel has a dual purpose.  One is to portray the life of the fantastically wealthy during the gilded age, the Jazz Age of the 1920s.  The other is to tell a good story, full of well-depicted characters and their interactions.  Fitzgerald triumphs on both accounts.  The central plot of the book is the  moral and social disintegration of Dick Diver, a brilliant psychoanalyst. At the outset, the dapper, widely admired, high-living doctor is the center of attention, idolized by almost everyone. His basic problem is an inordinate need to be loved and a limited ability to love.  When the women in his life, his wife Nicole, and the young actress Rosemary Hoyt, no longer need him, he rapidly descends into alcoholism.  Nicole divorces him and remarries.  Far from the high-life of wealthy American expatriates in France, he winds up in obscurity as an unstable country doctor in upstate New York.

So much for summary; we will now proceed with our analysis under the rubric of "The Clever Contemporary."  In 1947, Rudolf K. Goldschimdt-Jenner published a wonderful little book entitled, "Der Kluge Zeitgenosse, Fehl-Urteile der Kritik," ("The Clever Contemporary, Faulty Judgments of Critics.")  We don't have to give examples of unwarrented put-downs from German literature, English literature has many examples as well: Emily Dickinson's poetry was not appreciated during her lifetime; a contemporary critic of Keats, one of the foremost poets of the English language, found his poetry to be nothing more than "imperturbable drivelling idiocy."

We are certainly not going to be so harsh in our judgement of outdated notions that enjoyed wide currency in Fitzgerald's time, which albeit tempered by the alembics of genius, still found their way into the novel.  Our criticism will be more in accord with an essay I wrote long ago, "The Folly of Our Times," in which I asserted--and still assert--that important truths are missed by previous generations only to become obvious truths in the future, much as one is blind to a large portion of ambient light while wearing polarized glasses.  (An example: the--relatively--enlightened Thomas Jefferson "owned" slaves.)  Let us now turn our discussion to such follies in the novel, which were widely accepted when "Tender Is the Night" was being written in the 1920s, (it was first published in 1934).

1. The Clever Contemporary: No more Wars

The first section of the novel takes place in France, where Nicole and Dick are living in style with a wealthy set of friends and acquaintances, consisting mostly of American expatriates.  They visit an area that was roiled by intense carnage during World War I, which had ended only five years earlier.  Dick Diver says the following to Rosemary Hoyt, with whom he is falling in love:
                                                                       
"See that little stream--we could walk to it in two minutes.  It took the British a month to walk to it--a whole empire walking very slowly dying in front and pushing forward behind.  And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rags.  No European will ever do that again in this generation."
                                                                   --page 57

Fifteen years later the bloodiest and most horrible war in history began.

Dick goes on to explain why a European war is no longer possible.  We sadly shake our heads in disbelief while reading this pathetically unprescient view  of a clever, albeit fictional, contemporary of the Jazz Age.  Fitzgerald was not being ironic; he wrote this at a time when the trauma of the First World War was quite fresh.  How could civilized people be so stupid as to choose war again?  A good question.  Unfortunately, they were soon to behave in an abominably uncivilized fashion, as we now know only too well.

2. The Clever Contemporary: Homosexuality is Evil

Dick, a psychiatrist at a prestigious Swiss clinic, receives a visit from a wealthy merchant from South America who is greatly upset due to the "moral corruption" of his twenty-year old son:

"I am at the end of my invention.  My son is corrupt.  He was corrupt at Harrow; he was corrupt at King's College, Cambridge.  He's incorrigibly corrupt.  Now that there is this drinking it is more and more obvious how he is, and there is continual scandal.  I have tried everything--I worked out a plan with a doctor friend of mine, sent them together for a tour of Spain.  Every evening Francisco had an injection of cantharides and then the two went together to a reputable bordello--for a week or so it seemed to work, but the result was nothing. Finally last week...I made Francisco strip to the waist and lashed him with a whip."
                                           
                                                --page 244

Dick finds the boy to be "handsome and alert," that is, quite intelligent and perky. Dick asks him which came first, the drinking or the "abnormality." The boy responds as follows:

"I think the drinking is caused by the other." He was serious for a while--suddenly an irrepressible facetiousness broke through and he laughed, saying, "It's hopeless.  At King's I was known as the Queen of Chilli (Chile).  The trip to Spain--all it did was to make me nauseated at the sight of a woman."
                                   --page 244

Dick talks "pleasantly" with the intelligent young man for about an hour. "It was as close as Dick had ever come to understanding such a character from any but the pathological angle--he gathered that this very charm made it possible for Francisco to perpetuate his outrages..."

Dick advises the unhappy young man as follows: "It's a hole-and-corner business at best," Dick told him...If you want to face the world you'll have to begin by controlling your sensuality--and, first of all, the drinking that provokes it."
                                  --page 245

Times have changed, and, in this regard, definitely for the better.  The greatly increased acceptance of homosexuality is, however, fairly recent.  When I was in medical school, in the late 1960s, I remember a psychiatry lecture I attended.  It took place in a conference room that accommodated about 20 students.  The psychiatrist who gave the talk was, I thought then, ancient--but was probably no older then than I am now.  He suffered from a progressive neurological disease, however, and reached his seat with great difficulty.  He also had a rather marked tremor in both hands.  He was quite stern as was his wife who accompanied him.  (She knitted throughout the session with a grim expression on her face, without saying a word; she reminded me of Madame Defarge.)  The doctor asserted that homosexuality was a grave mental and moral illness.  He commented that W.H. Auden was indeed a great poet, but was quite mentally ill due to his alleged deviant orientation.  What bullshit, I thought, but kept silent, as did everyone else--most of whom probably were in agreement with the decrepit expert, whom I nicknamed "The Not-So-Grand Inquisitor."  His view of homosexuality, however, had wide currency at the time.   But not for long: The American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973.  Progress was slow at first, but  steadier ever since. Who in my graduating class of 1972 could have imagined that gay marriage would be legal in the United States four decades later?  I certainly didn't.

The encounter between Francisco and Dick is, I think, quite subtle.  Dick is a "clever contemporary," but not exclusively so.  He realizes that the young' man's sexual orientation would not be altered by therapy or by willpower, which was a progressive view at the time.  Dick views homosexuality as a disorder much like drinking--it is not a "sin" but must be controlled--a view that is no longer appropriate today, although it is, sadly, still the official position of the Catholic Church.  Dick, obviously, is promoting a double standard: if Francisco had been "sleeping around" with women while at college, he probably would have gotten a pat on the back.  Activity that is viewed in one case as "sowing one's oats"  is in the other case considered to  be scandalous, even though the oats, albeit sowed in different fields, are exactly  the same.  The idea that Francisco might eventually fall in love and have a stable, loving relationship with a man was not a thought that ever crossed Dick's mind--oh, the folly of the times! Dick, a charmer himself, is, however, undeniably captivated by Francisco's winsome personality.

Fitzgerald portrays Dick, a character based on himself, as biased here, but much less biased than the homophobic zeitgeist of the times.  Fitzgerald as the omniscient narrator presents, however, a much subtler picture.  Francisco's father considers his son to be a horrible pervert.  The narrator presents him as a intelligent vivacious individual of considerable charm.  The implication is that the problem is with the father, and, to a less degree, with Dick.  If Fitzgerald's position had been more in accord with the father, Francisco's personality would have most likely  been colored with a much darker brush. The very understated implication is that Francisco is normal.  Such a view was scandalous in the 20s.  It is a tribute to Fitzgerald that he implied, albeit subtlety, that the scandal was homophobia, not homosexuality.  He was able to laugh, albeit almost inaudibly,  at one of the follies of his time.



3. The Clever Contemporary: Women are this and thats while Men are Thats and Thises

Although gender roles were changing rapidly at the time "Tender Is the Night" was written, the untamed lions of patriarchy were still roaring during the roaring twenties. Proud male lions were still very much in control of the pride, even though, in the wilds of Western civilization as in the wilds of Africa, lionesses did much of the work.  Fitzgerald did not entirely escape this rebarbative jungle, as the following passage from the book demonstrates:

He (Dick) saw that no provision had been made for him, or for Nicole, in Mrs. Speer's plans--and he saw that her amorality sprang from the conditions of her own withdrawal.  It was her right, the  pension on which her own emotions had retired.  Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such "man-made" crimes as "cruelty." So long as their shuffle of love and pain went on within proper walls Mrs. Seers could view it with as much detachment and humor as a eunuch.  She had not even allowed for the possibility of Rosemary's being damaged--or was she certain that she couldn't be?

                                                               --page 163


Before I discuss the gender issue, I would like to bring to the reader's attention two characteristics of Fitzgerald's writing, which are very much present here, as they are on just about every page of the book: remarkable psychological depth and a lyrical, figurative  style of expression that is as beautiful as it is apt. "The pension on which her own emotions had retired" and "their shuffle of love and pain..within proper walls" are fine examples of the latter.

The above-quoted passage contains a fine example of the former as well. The fictive Mrs. Speers rivals the all-too-real mother of Judy Garland in her ambition for her daughter.  She encourages her daughter, Rosemary Hoyt, now a young actress, to have an affair with Dick not with a goal of permanent relationship in mind, but in order to get more experience and become more sophisticated.  Fitzgerald, always the good psychologist, convincingly portrays her as a ruthlessly ambitious women, who, thwarted in her own life, transfers her insatiable desires onto her daughter.  Most of us have encountered persons like Mrs. Speers during the course of our lives; only about half of them, however, can flaunt a beard. Fitzgerald's error, a folly of his time now apparent to us all, is that he partially excuses Mrs. Speers's behavior because, well, that's the way women are.

I call this the Oedipal Fallacy, that is, attributing to nature what is attributable  to nurture.  Freud believed that the oedipal complex was an inevitable part of human nature. In his day, the women raised the children with love and acceptance; the distant fathers provided the discipline.  In our day, many fathers are close to their kids; when fathers "mommy" the oedipal complex thrives as well as an oak tree thrives in the desert--that is, not at all.  That women, thwarted in their ambitions, sometime behave like Mrs. Speers, is not due to the intrinsic nature of women, but due to extrinsic pressures of a society which demanded that female wings, as it were, must always be worn in a lady-like fashion, that is, clipped.

Fitzgerald, however, was not a male lion asleep in the jungle while his females prowled.  We have seen that his views on homosexuality were hardly those of a fundamentalist; similarly, Fitzgerald's women are far more formidable than the cardboard cuties whom the zeitgeist of the times espoused. One shouldn't forget that Mrs. Speers's ambitions were centered on a daughter, who, despite the former's potentially damaging interventions, became a successful, self-assured woman, whose inner pockets were as full of empathy as her outer pockets--not in pants, but in a pocketbook--were full of cash.

Am I exaggerating when I consider Fitzgerald to be a proto-feminist?  Perhaps, but just as in Lake Wobegone, all the women in the novel tend to be strong; the men, in contrast, tend to be weaker. For instance,  Dick, who had everything handed to him, succumbs to his own narcissism.  Nicole, who had everything taken away from her when her monstrous father sexually abused her, understandably descends into mental illness.  Yet her inner strength eventually triumphs.  By the end of the book, her assertiveness is the foil for her husband's passivity.  

Weak men and strong women appear throughout the book. For instance,  Abe North, who, as a musician, has apparently been permanently diverted from the Yellow-Brick Road of Early Promise to the Dun-Stone Path of Ongoing Lack of Success, becomes an alcoholic and suffers a shameful death in a speakeasy. Another instance: the fantastically wealthy Baby Warren, Nicole's sister, is indeed a monster, but a very powerful one.

The fiction of male superiority is more apparent than real in Fitzgerald's transcendent fiction. Although not immune from follies of his time, the omniscient narrator of this novel, that is, Fitzgerald himself, possessed great insight into the human condition.  Not only that, Fitzgerald has given us perhaps the greatest portrait of the Jazz Age in fiction; not only that, he accomplishes this with the creation of a story replete with human, perhaps all-too-human, vivid characters, that hasn't lost its ability to amaze and delight almost a century later, and, presumably, for centuries to come.

                                         *
We invite you to become a cyberspace member of our club.  In addition, we welcome any comments you may have.  We also invite you to read Allende's "The Notebook of Maya" in preparation for the eighth edition of the Baltimore Online Book Club.  In the meantime, we wish you quiet hours of contended reading.

I Loved Lucy, I admit It Part 2

In part one, we briefly discussed how TV changed things forever.  Once the big brass band of tiny black and white images marched into eyes and ears, we put all our books down and stared.  Oh, no we didn't.  That took time.

                                      Ernie Kovacs

In 1949, when we got our first TV, I was four years old.  We working-class children didn't have much diversions in those days.  Toys didn't talk back; and the few that did sounded as if  they were dying from an awful, metallic disease.  And who could have imagined then the menagerie that followed?  Computers, cell phones, Ipads--lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my!  Don't get me wrong--these are among the great technological advances that have improved our lives.  We were living in the stone age then; we thought phone booths and dial phones would last forever.

The potential for learning; the ability to communicate almost instantly with anyone in the world; the reception of entertainment of the highest quality--without them many of us would feel as lost as Charlie Sheen locked in a monk's  cell.

(There is, of course a downside to everything: an example of the misuse of technology--there are many--is described in a short essay, "My Walt Whitman Moment," accessible --via the internet!-- on this blog.)

I don't want to descant, I don't want to rant; I would just like to briefly relate how TV changed my life and provide a little glimpse of how things were before it's too late.

Although its words will remain in the cloud, this body that thinks them approaches a shroud. It's time to write a few memories down with the reader, young or old--that means you--foremost in my mind

2.

In the early fifties, television was a family affair.  That soon changed, as the networks added programs, some for kids, some for adults.  Saturday morning was reserved for children.  Howdy Doody, Buffalo Bob and the peanut gallery became staples.  One show, The Buster Brown Show, featured a goofy Andy Divine, who attempted to tell a story.  He would say something like, "Yesterday I met my new neighbor while I was on the way to the movies.  He was walking his poodle, and I said, 'Howdy, neighbor--,' whereupon he was interrupted by a talking puppet of a frog who completed his sentence with something like,  "--which one of you is the dog?"  The camera then flashed to the audience of children screaming with delight.  The frog didn't look anything like Kermit.  He looked malicious and swayed to and fro with schadenfreude as he tripped up poor Andy.  I forgot the name of the show, but an appropriate title would have been, "Little Brats in Training."  Kids, with Froggy Gremlin as their model, were getting their first lessons on how to be sarcastic.  We didn't talk back to adults in those days, but, with Froggy's help, we soon did.  Our incipient rudeness was as accomplished as a five year old hesitantly playing jingle bells on the piano with one hand; it took a generation before kids dared play the scales of talking back to Mom and Dad up and down the keyboard like cross and spoiled Franz Liszts.

Another children's show, I forget its name as well, gives a good indication of 1950s TV technology.  We had to get mom or dad to send away for a kit so we could interact with the TV.  I was so happy when it came in the mail!  It contained a little transparent plastic cover , which we taped onto the TV screen.  Then we took a magic marker and, following the instructions of the program's host, would trace lines and circles that began to appear on the screen.  After we had been instructed, say, to trace out two circles and fill them in with a yellow marker, we were told that the fun was about to begin.  Suddenly the circles became the noses of two clowns; then they'd become the wheels of a car; then they'd turn into balloons on a string,  each of which was held by a cartoon child.  If the tech-savvy gremlins of today could have seen my amazement, what would their comments have been?  "LOL! OMG!"  I remember one Saturday when I couldn't find the little plastic protective covering.  Refusing to miss all the fun, I traced the morning's worth of squiggles directly onto the TV screen.  My mother, with good reason, was irate.  I washed off the marks as best I could.  Froggy Gremlin didn't make a sound; if he grumbled at all, he ketpt his grumbles inside.

Our family began to be hooked.  We watched more and more shows, and now not always together.  Nightly activities began to center on TV shows.  For instance, our English setter, Spooky,(1948-1962), the dog of my life, gave birth to seven pups in our living room in about 1954 while we watched The Sid Caesar Show. "How many now?" my brother asked.  "We'll check during the next commercial," I replied.

The programs proliferated--My Little Margie, Our Miss Brooks, Gunsmoke,The Today Show hosted by David Galloway and his chimp. Mugs, As The World Turns and,  my grandparent's favorite, The Lawrence Welk Show, etc.  I was especially fond of The Ernie Kovacs Show.  Although his career was short-lived--he died in a car crash--he was important in the development of the medium, and often broadcasted innovative, albeit weird, clips such as this one:

3. I Continued to Love Lucy

In those days, before DVDs, NetFlix, etc. you only got to watch things once.  (My nephew, Roger, who is making a film, recently told me that he had seen Casablanca about fifty times!) Much as primitive photosensitive cells, such as those on each limb of a starfish, eventually evolved into eyes, the starfish phase of what currently enables my son's roommate to  binge watch old episodes of Frazier, began in 1954, with the advent of Million Dollar Movie, which premiered on a New York TV station, WOR-TV channel 9, in 1955.  It showcased one movie every day for an entire week, sometimes broadcasting it twice daily.  It began with the theme song from Gone With The Wind; the Million Dollar over-the-top version which I heard so many times will remain in my betz cell library for as long as it exists.  Here is how the program began:

In 1955, Lucy  was my idol still; when I found out from our copy of TV Guide that the feature film for the following week on MiIlion Dollar Movie would be an old movie staring Lucille Ball, I could hardly wait to see it.  The movie in question was a 1942 version of a Damon Runyon story entitled, "The Big Street" starring Lucille Ball, the young Henry Fonda, and, among others, Agnes Morehead.  The first time we watched it together as a family; I subsequently watched it every day after school for a total of about five times.  I didn't quite understand the film, but certain snippets from it were permanently deposited in my memory bank.  After renting a copy of the film from Netflix and watching it with my wife a few days ago, and watching it for the first time in over sixty years, I will close with a summary and review of the film from a perspective very different from the one I had decades and decades ago. (Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?  Where are the snows of yesteryear? Melted.  Thank God.)

4. The Big Street

The Big Street was adapted for the screen from a short story by Damon Runyon, who was a well-known journalist and writer at the time.. The name of the story is "Little Pinks;" It appeared in the January 1942 edition of Collier's Magazine, a once popular magazine.  The movie was made the same year; the screenplay by one Leonard Spigelgass, must have been written very quickly. Runyon wrote sentimental stories, mostly about the demi-monde of Broadway and of those involved in the  entertainment industry.  His stories were centered in New York; the distinctive style of his writing, called "Runyonesque," attempted to capture the no-nonsense argot of tough NewYorkers.  "Runyonesque" at its best is quaint and out-dated; at its worst it is unintentionally ridiculous.  An example: As  the arrogant Gloria Lyons (Lucille Ball), now an impoverished invalid, is carried by Pinks (Henry Fonda) into her new and humble digs, she must pass by the loving but unglamorous Violette (Agnes Morehead) who has been helping her; Gloria dismisses her with the following words: "How's your tapeworm, Sister?"  That's all you need to know, I think, about the once famous and now entirely forgotten folderol called Runyonesque.

The film itself might be classified by a well-traveled critic--who has had a few drinks--as an example of Alabaster Bolllywood--that is, glamorous inanities with music and an all-white cast. A brief summary of the plot: Gloria Lyons, (played by Lucille Ball, who was known at that time as "Queen B"--The Queen of B movies), a  singer who is even more haughty than she is beautiful, performs in a nightclub owned by a hood, Case Ables.  (She is obviously his mistress; censorship in Hollywood films in those days, however,  was as strict as censorship in Bollywood films of today.  No direct references to mistress-making was allowed.  Anyone over twelve, however, had at least subliminal knowledge about the source of Gloria's diamonds.  --I was completely unaware of their relationship when I saw the film for the first time(s).  I have a good excuse: I was only nine.)

Lucy/Gloria falls for a young dandy named--another example of Runyonesque--Decatur Reed. When she tells Case she has found a better date, he slaps her hard.  She falls down the stairs and is, alas! paralyzed for life.  Pinks (Henry Fonda) who works in the club as a waiter, not only loves Lucy, he worships her.  He and his kindly working-class neighbor, Violette (Agnes Morehead), that good soul with the imaginary tapeworm in her belly, take care of her.  Lucy is deathly ill--Metasisizing Paralysis?  They sell all her jewels to pay the hospital bills.  She is better now, but destitute.  (There is a ridiculous scene in the hospital during which Lucy learns she has become an invalid.  There she is, all dolled up, sitting up in bed trying to move her hips to a rumba blaring from the radio. After several boot(y)less attempts to wiggle her rump, she realizes that her rumba days are gone forever.  She pouts, she cries. In the meantime, Violette has married and moved to Florida.  Poor Lucy is cold and wants to join them.  Henry has no more money, but if proto-Disneyland is what she wants, proto-Disneyland is what she'll get.  He has no choice but to attempt to push her in a wheelchair all the way to balmy Dade County.  After hitching rides, they arrive.

Pinks plunks the still ever-so-glamorous yet immobile Lucy on the beach.  Guess who passes by?  Decatur Reed.  When he finds out that she can't move her rump anymore, he can't get away quickly enough.  Lucy, in a fit of Grade B movie emotional turmoil, lashes out at poor Pinks, since he's the only one left who listens to her.  He can't take it any more and leaves her.  Apparently Lucy's emotional state has exacerbated her Intermittent Metastatic Paralysis; she is near death once again.  The doctor is not optimistic.  Humbled now, Lucy wishes she could play the role of a bejewelled crooner at a big club just one more time.  Pinks, of course, doesn't lose any time making her wish come true.

Guess who has a night club, not only in New York, but in Miami as well?  Guess who, along with Decatur Reed, has miraculously been transported by bad writing to Miami?  Case Ables, mean as ever, agrees to give Lucy her big night.  Why? Pinks has uncovered some of his criminal activities and threatens to report him to the police if he doesn't do what Little Pinks tells him.  That night, during a lavish Hollywood-style gala attended by the haute monde.  Lucy sings her signature song.  (The real Lucy couldn't sing; it was someone else's voice.) She sits in a chair, dressed in a beautiful evening gown, big-lipped, big-eyed and pouty as ever.  She realizes she loves Pinks now.  She's learned her lesson.  The hussy inside her is dead; the housewife inside her has triumphed.  She tells Pinks that she will be satisfied with a life of knitting as long as they're together.  Oh, but only if she could dance one more time!  Oh, but only if she could see the ocean one more time as well!  I'll help you, says Henry, with fierce determination.  After a few halting steps, Lucy dies in Henry Fonda's arms.  He carries her, limp as a rag doll, up the swanky, long staircase, while the soundtrack supplies a sorrowful version of Lucy's song; she gets her last wish, and sees, metaphorically at least, the sea.

The movie is even worse than my summary indicates.  When Lucy lies in the hospital, gravely ill after she and Henry break up, Henry and friends gather in front of her room.  They ask her extremely serious doctor whether she will survive.  The doctor gives them the devastating news.  "Have you ever heard of--Paranoia?"  No one dares speak. They apparently hadn't ever heard of it, but they surmise, from the doctor's expression, that it must be something terrible.  The doctor explains: Paranoia is when you pretend you're someone you're not.  Oh, it works for a while, but one day you discover the truth and..." You die!  When Lucy finds out she is a housewife and not a hussy, it's all over.

Were audiences in 1942 ignorant enough to listen to such rubbish with a straight face?  Apparently; the movie received fairly good reviews.  Apparently not: The Big Street was released in the same year as the sophisticated Casablanca.  The target audience of a Grade B 1940s film was undoubtedly very different from the target audience of a Grade A one.

The nine year old I was once didn't understand the film very well.  Lucy, because of her arrogance, was sarcastically referred to as "Your Highness."  The little kid really thought she was a princess.  He never, however, forgot the words and melody of Lucy's (very mediocre) torch song, "Who Knows?"  After watching the film for the first time in over sixty years, I went to the piano and played it.  I didn't cry.  I laughed.  

After the age of ten, my love for Lucy rapidly faded,  At the height of my TV craze, I averaged about one or two hours a night.  Now I average three or four hours  a week.  A dose of entertainment here and there is like a daily glass of red wine; it is very pleasant and good for body and soul.  In larger does, however--well, you know what can happen then.  Lucys continue to amuse us, but abuse us perhaps even more  The American Academy of Pediatrics informs us that kids today spend an average of seven hours every day playing video games or watching TV. That's way way too much.  Along with entertainment overuse came a whole host of ills plaguing society today: processed foods, obesity, unspoken conversation and unread books, to name only a few.  The curmudgeon in me thinks that it is the drug of entertainment that keeps the working class pacified.  For many the TV screen (or computer monitor) has taken over their entire field of vision.  And yet there is hope: you have chosen to read this essay instead of watching another episode of The Big Bang.  I wish I had entertained you better; I hope, however, that I provided some pleasure along with  something to think about in a time-proven, wondrous and old fashioned way: with words.  May your tribe increase!  

Yes, Inner Angel is still optimistic.  Inner Curmudgeon looks up for a moment from a book of poems, shakes his head in contempt, and then returns to Keats.