Getting Even, Going MAD

During the Cold War, military strategists concocted the notion of mutually (or mutual) assured destruction as a deterrent to nuclear war. The prospect — no, the potential and imminent reality — of nuclear war allegedly would be so ghastly and unthinkable as to stop each side from pressing the button, if in fact buttons would be pressed instead of dials turned, detonators plunged, or switches flipped. The concept was known by the suitable acronym MAD.

As the folks at Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (nuclearfiles.org) succinctly put it, “Whoever shoots first, dies second.”

According to one report, the term was coined in 1962 by one Donald Brennan of the Hudson Institute, which was led by Herman Kahn. The 1964 Stanley Kubrick movie “Dr. Strangelove” wickedly satirized elements of Kahn’s strategies.

I am not qualified to comment on whether MAD is or was a viable option. (“Viable option” seems oxymoronic at best.) I am not schooled in war theories or military history; during the Vietnam War, I applied for conscientious objector status. 

But I do claim to be a wordsmith, so let’s start with that.

Mutually assured destruction. Does it work as a relationship tool? Let’s see. Person A threatens to blow the relationship up. Person B counters with, “Go ahead! Go nuclear. Then we both have nothing. We both destroy the planet we currently inhabit.” Kids, house, income, savings, two dogs, three cats, and the pet iguana neither of you ever wanted but the child insisted on all go up in smoke, more accurately it all turns into domestic shrapnel sent flying from your respective attorneys’ offices.

Sound familiar? Veterans of divorce understand this scenario. They and those in their nuclear testing zones intimately and tragically know the radioactive fallout of this strategy when it fails. “Fails” may be the wrong word. It’s safe to say the approach may have worked in the short term — even for years or decades. “Worked” is putting it kindly. It held divorce at bay, the way religious strictures and stringent civil prohibitions against divorce once prevailed.

One need not go the marriage-divorce route to comprehend this. It might just as easily go from threats of infidelity to actual carnal misdeeds, ending with one’s worldly possessions on the curb in the rain.

It all might end with the clanging silence of ghosting, a muffled neutron bomb without detritus.

Maybe MAD works infinitesimally better in domestic relations than on the world stage. An after-nuclear-war planet presumably doesn’t have second and third chances. But uncoupled and divorced people connect anew or remarry all the time, getting a chance to try MAD all over again. Or they trod a lessons-learned path, such as mutually assured security (MAS),  albeit another military analogy.

If you like, carry this same MAD metaphor into the workplace, financial markets, parenting, legislating, and sports. Game-theory enthusiasts and negotiation experts already have.  

Does all or nothing, “whoever shoots first, dies second” ever work in any context?

In the field of substance-abuse and addiction recovery, there’s a tough-love tactic that says, “Maybe you haven’t had enough. Go out and try some more.” Even if it kills you. It’s all or nothing. No half-measures. You don’t hear this much — how else would rehabs make money? Would this be provisionally assured destruction and reconstruction (PADAR)?  

Being twice divorced and not wishing to add the adjective “thrice” to that past participle, I will not suggest strategies for domestic harmony. But as for MAD as a useful gambit in other realms?

Who knows.

The fateful question is: Are you sacrificing a pawn or a king?

Community Values

The TV is on in the Community Room. The community is undefined, but presumably it means the people who live in the building’s 40 apartments, and their guests or friends. The community is entitled to use of the room for family events: birthday parties, wedding or baby or baptismal or confirmation showers, graduation galas, family reunions, divorce or annulment commemorations, book signings, candidate kickoffs or pronouncements, landlord-sponsored and –contrived get-to-know-each-other gatherings with pizza, wings, and soda and coffee, and post-funeral gatherings. We’re in a basement. At the top of one wall are windows facing up at grates on sidewalk level. The opposite wall features glass walls and doors with venetian blinds. The blinds are typically closed. When the TV is on, it most often is tuned to the local Time Warner Spectrum channel with its endless, night-or-day loop of local weather, stories of death and mayhem or small-town thievery or depravity, the scores of high school teams, their success or failure in the sectional championships, the regional marching band competitions, the stray murder or rape, the drunk driver rocketing the wrong way on the Thruway, the statement from the sheriff’s office about the latest suspects, the mug shots of the young and accused with their surprised, scarred, and scared or defiant faces.  All to be repeated again after an appointed duration that viewers are trained to expect, such as “news on the nines” or “weather on the ones.” I walk by in the hallway outside the Community Room. As a resident, count me as a member of the community. No one is in the room. The blinds are drawn. The lights are off. The television is on, the newsreaders’ voices solemn and barely audible to a passer-by. I walk in and pick up one of two remotes sitting on the firm, faux leather chair. I click the O/I power button. Nothing happens. Someone once told me O/I stands for Out of Operation and In Operation. That does not seem plausible three decades later — if that is what I was truly told. Time was, we saw Off / On as the choices. It couldn’t be O and O, for off and on, could it? Too confusing. (I am pausing here to let you Google this modern-day mystery on my behalf. What did you discover? Thanks for coming back to finish reading.) I click the O/I on the other remote, and the massive screen on the wall goes blank, fades and cracles to black-but-not-quite-that-color, accompanied by a palpable silence. The local voices are silenced. The hearth is doused. No smoke puffs toward me or up a chimney. The electronic hearth with its comforting chatter and hum is snuffed out. The Community Room’s temperature is lowered by 1.7°F. I walk out. I do my laundry. When I return to the hallway by the Community Room, its lights are out, its blinds still drawn. And the TV is on again. I keep walking.

what is a cell phone?

Before we answer the question at hand, let me digress (if one can do so with nothing to digress from). I prefer cellphone as one word. Why? Because the typical evolution in American English is to go from two words to a compound word with a hyphen and then to one solid word combining the original two words. Why not skip all that and go straight to one word? After all, we don't say tele-phone anymore. But most style guides go for cell phone as two words, so I will obey, which is not my nature. Here's a rather fascinating and in-depth look at the issue, from an Australian writing 10 years ago. And I won't digress from a digression to ponder smart phone vs. smartphone.

What is a cell phone? 

Wikipedia says: "A mobile phone, known as a cell phone in North America, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while the user is moving within a telephone service area. The radio frequency link establishes a connection to the switching systems of a mobile phone operator, which provides access to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Modern mobile telephone services use a cellular network architecture, and, therefore, mobile telephones are called cellular telephones or cell phones, in North America."

Well now! I couldn't have said it better myself. Who knew? Not me. Who knew that this is what that ubiquitous ever-present thing is and how it works, if you understand all that technical stuff.  

But that doesn't get to the existential nature of the thing. I mean, how would Soren Kierkegaard or Martin Heidegger answer the standing question? And would they possess one? 

I'm going to allow for a lot of wiggle, or wriggle, room and say that defining a cell phone depends on circumstances and intent. I won't foolishly say, "It's all relative." I had a philosophy professor at Le Moyne College, the Rev. John J. McNeill, S.J., who told our class about a debate on situation ethics he participated in around 1970. When his opponent said, "It's all relative" or "Everything is relative," McNeill retorted, "You can't make a statement like that. It contains an absolute. It subverts your argument." I always thought that was quick and clever. 

Where were we?

Permit me the Socratic method. Isn't that when the philosopher (which I am not) asks a series of leading questions so that the student formulates a reasoned response?

Is a cell phone a communication device? Obviously. They say that it is. But --hold on -- I submit it is equally, if not more so, a miscommunication device, especially when SMS, or texting, is employed. So we cannot with certainty claim that a cell phone is a communication device. Even if one texts another saying "bring some milk home," the sender assumes the receiver received the message, on time, in English, and without sarcasm, doubt, irony, etc. Throw an emoji in there and land mines may be planted.

Is a cell phone a weapon? You would think so, the way the "device" is brandished. Especially on business calls, isn't the object used as a weapon in the arsenal of persuasive tools? Just watch someone's posture, mannerisms, volume, and word choices.

Is a cell phone a walkie-talkie? It can be, especially if someone is in the attic talking to someone in the basement, if there's service coverage.

Is a cell phone a tether? Is it not a cable, a rope, a binding to the mother ship, your network, your friends, even your enemies, your spouses (plural in my case), your lovers, your ex-lovers, your would-be lovers, and your would-be ex-ex-lovers or would-be ex-ex-spouses? Ask yourself this: what happens if you sever that tether? Can you do it? What happens when baby's pacifier pops out of the mouth and rolls onto the pavement and slips down a storm drain? Tantrum, right? And what does the unshackled slave do without the familiar grip of tyranny?

What is a cell phone?

Tell me.

Testify.

Capturing En Passant

The gray car in front of me dawdles. It's a compact sedan, of the Subaru-Suzuki-Toyota-Saturn class. It has mildly snarky enviro-gendero bumperstickers on the back. When I say "dawdles," I mean driving at the appointed city speed limit of 30mph, obeying every caution light, cautiously proceeding without changing lanes. Steady. The driver is a young female, so you can dispose of your notion of a geezer refugee from Florida driving in snowy Syracuse.

As would be the case, I am in a hurry. Or I am in a hurry more than she is. Rather, I am in a hurry more than she appears to be. Even that's wrong. The only "hurry" I'm in is in my head; I have no pressing appointment I am late for, no work-related or social appointment ahead of me. I just want to get home. It's not even that. Ms. Dawdles slows me down, alters my rhythm, puts me at 45rpm when I want 78rpm; she's frustrating me. Can't she see that?! I assume she's not doing it on purpose, because when I pass her (that's how I know she is a young female, in her twenties), she is stoic, impassive, determined, focused on the task at hand, blinders on, oblivious to me, as she should be.

I pass her.

As in a video game, I snake around her and weave through traffic, not hazardously, but quickly enough to erase the frustration of her vehicular dead weight in front of me. I turn right at the light at the crest of a hill and sail toward my apartment building. For no known reason, I sneak in through the western entrance, from the front, not through my typical entrance, near the parking lot.

Have you heard that experts claim weaving in an out of traffic gets you no further along more quickly? I don't know if the so-called expert findings apply only to highway traffic. Nevertheless, I can testify that on more than one occasion I have passed a slo-mo vehicle only to find I have beat him or her to the next red light, where we both wait, as equals, one on the left, another on the right. True, sometimes I have sensed victory be squeezing by, through the caution light, leaving the passed car in the dust, captured there by time and space until the light turns green -- and initiating the remote possibility we shall meet again, as equals, at the very next red light.

Chess has a move called capturing en passant. It means capturing in passing in French and refers to a change in the rules, so to speak, that enables a pawn to be captured when it advances two squares just as if it had advanced one square. Sort of like the aforementioned meet-at-the-red-light scenario.

When I turned right to go to the parking lot for my apartment, approaching from the south not the usual north, guess who slowly glided past me? You got it. Ms. Dawdles! She beat me! How? And don't recirte that turtle and hare fable.

She got out and walked toward the building entrance. She must have been a visitor because I did not recognize her car.

I chuckled to myself, not being someone who typically erupts into LOL. (Who really is?)

I don't know what this portends or what lesson to learn.

I'm refraining from easy metaphors.

I'm not so "quick" to go there now, anyway.  

haiku 1 winter 2018

crackling-nostril cold

breath exhalations rising

vertical ice plumes

kit-kat club

Driving upon the snowy, slushy streets of Liverpool, the one in New York, not the one of Beatles fame, I paused because the traffic in front of me had paused, as the parade of vehicles waited for a light (officially called a "signal" by transportation officials) to change (having mentioned The Beatles, I owed you "A Day in the Life" reference). (Notice that the preceding sentence, discursive and parenthetically laden as it is, constitutes one legit grammatically and anatomically correct sentence in the English language. One of the most annoying observations by lay people is that a long-winded or Proustian sentence is "a run-on sentence." Wrong. A run-on sentence has nothing whatsoever to do with sentence length; size does not matter. Go ahead; Google it if you must.) I noticed that the light had indeed changed (with nobody blowing their mind out in a car, by all appearances). The traffic started moving again, imprinting the white-gray mush with snow- or all-season tires' signature treads. A bluish-gray Mazda hatchback inched along immediately in front of my 2007 VW Rabbit (141,000 miles). Without warning, my eyes caught a flash of fuzzy-furry white jumping onto a shelf (not exactly a shelf but I don't know what else to call it) in the back of the Mazda. It was not a projectile of knitting wool as one might purchase a skein of in Reykjavik (not white), as I had bought for soon-to-ex-wife in 2016. It was not some plush toy tossed by a frustrated, hungry, or unruly child sitting in a carseat in back. No. It was a cat! A living, alive, moving cat. A cat whose catface expression conveyed annoyance, adventure, impertinence, play, irritation, and frustration. A cat whose movement was swift and certain. It jumped up, scouted the shelf and the scene outside, and darted away out of my sight. gone. I saw it. It was not a vision. The frisky feline gave no evidence of seeing the driver who was arrested by his or her sudden movement. What evidence could there possibly be? Beats me. It couldn't wave. Hold it. As a matter of fact, it catpawed at the air, as if trying to capture an invisible mouse or sparrow. It couldn't help doing that. Its catnature demanded such alert alacrity. Could the feline  -- I wanted to say felicitous feline, just to be alliterative, but I can't be certain said cat was felicitous or infelicitous -- have signaled a quick wave to me, a hello, an acknowledgment of a fellow-living-creature's presence, a greeting, or a fuckyou message? I'll never know. I can't interview the cat because the car moved along, the cat stayed in the car as I did in mine, and we went our merry human and feline ways. The thing is, have you ever seen a live cat in a car before? Not a cat in a cat carrier. A live-prancing-around-as-if-in-the-wild-or-in-a-living-room cat? (That's a lot of hyphens, buster.) I don't recall ever seeing a cat catting around in a car before. Is it legal? Is it safe? Do dogs mind? (Mice and birds don't mind, as long as the cat stays in the car.) Is there a risk of escape and therefore cats in cars is only a wintry, closed-window phenomenon? Finally, there's the most solemn and deep question of all: why?

eyes wide closed

I've been a napper for as long as I can remember. I was a preemie, and my mother says I've always needed more sleep. I invoke that to defend any nap, anytime, all these years later. About twenty years ago, a colleague and I would leave our workplace and drive to Snooze Alley, as my co-worker labeled it. Near a strip mall a mile down the road from our office, we would eat our lunches in our respective cars and then take a little snooze. Chris would go all in, reclining his seat all the way back. I was not that radical. Nevertheless, we never overdid it. Our snoozes never made us late for returning to the office. Close, but not quite. A good 15 or 20 minutes was fine. This was before the term "power nap" came into vogue. Chris and I believed in the restorative benefits of our nearly daily habit. In Japan, sleeping on the job is a sign of diligence. It's called inemuri, "sleeping on duty." It says, in effect, that this person is working so hard they need a break. But it is fraught with cultural distinctions. Men get away with it more readily, as does upper management. No inemuri on the assembly line. The culture also dictates that inemuri practitioners obey unwritten norms regarding form and space. In other words, don't sprawl out under the conference table, or take up half the subway seat or park bench. I suspect drooling is frowned upon. Don't you agree that America could use a healthy dose of inemuri? I do. Along somewhat different lines, the Japanese have traditionally put employees out to pasture in ways that differ from ours. Sometimes an employee regarded as a has-been is assigned to become a window watcher, a member of the “madogiwa zoku,” or the “window seat tribe.” They sit by the window, with nothing to do, and get paid for it. This would not be allowed in our Puritan-work-ethic-driven society. I guess the idea is to force the members of this glum lot to resign. I suppose they could simply sit by the window and snooze, combining the best of inemuri and madogiwa zoku. These practices make me want to go to Japan, or to evangelize such practices in America. America has forgotten the virtue of laziness. People in hot countries enjoy their siestas. They've been around a lot longer than we have. In the long run, they are not lazy. They are sensible and human. This year, France instituted a law that limited after-hours emails. Workers have a right to disconnect. Volkswagen did this with its employees in 2012. Glad I have a 2007 VW Rabbit. Time for a nap. See ya.