According to the old spiritual it was a “wheel within a wheel”. According to modern economics, it is God’s command, written in blazing golden letters on a cloud bank :

“Steal whatever you can from one another.”

No, of course it isn’t. I am trying to provoke you into reading some subversive thoughts of mine. They follow. If they get too ridiculous, simply stop reading.

Our planet has limited supplies of

• Air

• Water

• Land

In the immortal words of your local realtor, “They ain’t makin’ any more.”

This being so, our increasing numbers are becoming a growing burden on all three, and we are in need of a common agreement as to who is entitled to how big a share of them, and how they should be allocated. Richard Branson may come to our rescue with his rockets and give us access to other planets worth plundering.

Or maybe not.

In the event he doesn’t come to our rescue in time, we need to face some basic facts in organizing our approach to the question of what to do. (Pace, Donald, such things as facts do exist.)

First, the gods (From the Greeks to the Buddhists to the Confucians, to the Zoroastrians to the Krishnans to the Mayans to the Jews to the Christians and all the rest) have proved themselves unreliable as mentors, since their recipes have differed from Day One. (Even about the date of Day One.)

Second, there is not a pre-religious source to turn to. Each religion has had to improvise from scratch or build on a predecessor’s gospel.

Third, we are so entangled in our nationalistic histories that it is hard to believe we will ever be able to reach any sort of international consensus.

Still, we must try. Our survival will depend on our ability to find one.

So the time is ripe for a new perspective — some fresh vantage point from which a new set of interrelations can be discerned before :

• The air becomes unbreathable,

• The water becomes hopelessly polluted,

• The land has been totally either raped or paved over and rendered useless for producing the food we need,

and we discover that our planet is no longer inhabitable, whether we live in a palm-frond hut on the banks of the Amazon or in a Fifth Avenue tower. We risk being the choking, retching, starving relics of an experiment gone sour. Some other race, with better survival mechanisms and (perhaps) more intelligence will have to take over. Or our pretty blue planet will become just another space rock.

Where to begin a serious search?

I suggest the question of personal entitlement. What, if anything, entitles Donald Trump to claim ownership of a spread of landscaped acres punctuated with eighteen little holes in which he can shoot little white balls to amuse himself, while a member of an Amazon tribe has to content himself with a fire-hardened wooden tool with which to fight to make a tiny open space in the jungle big enough for a taro root garden and his shack and his family?

I know. Mr Trump bought his acres and paid for them (unless he just stiffed the previous owner, as his record might suggest). The Amazon tribesman just found himself where he happened to be born, and never heard of such things as deeds and titles and lawyers and government bureaucrats and tax evasion. But whom did Mr Trump pay, and how did that previous owner acquire his ownership, and so on and so on, all the way back? Back to what? “It’s turtles all the way down” won’t satisfy me as an answer. I want a narrative that tells me why Donald’s claim is any more firm than the tribesman’s. Who “owned” everything to start with?

Adam and Eve, in their metaphoric sense, will do for an answer. They “found themselves” in Eden, just as the tribesman did. But when Cain started casting envious glances at Abel’s garden (or maybe at Adam’s wife, who knows?), evil was born. Thievery began. It hasn’t stopped since. The fact (again pace, Donald) that thieves have over the millennia developed elaborate stories to promote the impression that their “legal” claims stem from anything other than force doesn’t change the fact that it was all simply appropriated. And nobody “gave” it to Abel, either. If one of the gods gave it to a chosen people, he failed to convince the un-chosen, because we are still arguing about it.

So throw all that history out. We now happen to find ourselves here. The situation is tenable, but tenuous. We happen to have developed the smarts to keep it functioning — so far. We are running out of exploitation time. We need a new approach. Bedminster is not the answer. All its official deeds cannot guarantee clean air, clean water, and clean soil, and without clean air and clean water and clean soil all those deeds are just worthless bits of paper. Ever try eating a deed?

What is the answer, if there is one?

You will find my suggestions far-fetched. I will agree that they are far-fetched. Our predicament would have seemed far-fetched a couple of hundred years ago, before we started testing the atmosphere for pollution, before we discovered the Texas-sized plastic-filled gyre in the North Pacific Ocean, before we realized that our paving and concrete-pouring and coal-digging and fracking was doing irreparable damage to our ability to use the energy available from our nearest friend, the sun. So our answer will have to be equally far-fetched to have any chance to be effective.

We have tried the idealists : Jesus, Moses, and Marx; and we have tried the conquerors : Alexander, Caesar, Hitler — and none of them turned out to be the solution. Cain still covets and Abel still suffers the consequences. We all suffer the consequences. Abstract justice is a fragile intellectual web spun by intellectual spiders. So now we come down to the realists.

What if there were no owners? What if there were only the Commons? What if everything on earth were recognized as common property, to be used for the common welfare instead of personal enrichment? Could we then think of getting together to devise sensible steps to protect it equitably for the benefit of everyone?

Yes, and pigs could fly if they had wings, yes?

Presumably yes. If there was air to breathe when they got winded and water to drink when they got thirsty and soil to hold the great oaks that dropped the little acorns that fed them. If they had the wings and the brains to refrain from killing each other and would simply concentrate on the welfare of the race of pigs. (That wouldn’t be of much help to, say, rattlesnakes for example, but we can’t know why rattlesnakes or athletes’ foot fungus were in the original mix in the first place, and we are not gods. One thing at a time.)

There have been other proposals. I shall start mine with the desired outcome and get to the difficulties of achieving it afterwards.

The outcome would be a world in which individual ownership — of anything — is limited to a “fair share” of the world’s wealth. How do we determine that fair share? We set a monetary value (we have not yet been clever enough to develop a better sort of measuring tool) on everything, from gold to radishes and add it all up to give us a number representing the wealth of our whole planet. Then we count heads and come up with the total number of current inhabitants of our planet. By dividing the second number into the first we can come up with a figure we can call each person’s birth entitlement. Each of us is entitled simply by having been born here (I am getting tired of saying pace, Donald), simply because we are alive. This figure would become the basis for determining what responsibility each of us has for maintaining this place as a habitat.

If we have more than the correct amount, we shall have to take steps to reduce our share; if we have less, whoever’s in charge will have to take steps to increase our allocation. The objective is not to level out ownership or income or opportunity — the objective is to level out responsibility. From each according to his ability; to each according to his need. Ring a bell? There has never been a better definition of fairness. Prejudiced courts and bureaucracies have come up with every kind of twisted rationale to justify their selfishness, but no one has yet improved on Messrs Marx and Engels’ formulation.

So how do we proceed?

1. Perform that long division and come up with a number.

2. Using it as a standard, establish an open-ended time scale on which we can fix things. Five generations? Four? Ten? How many years will we need to level things out, a little at a time? As painlessly as possible.

3. Establish a Commons Fund. Into it every year the rich will deposit a fraction of their wealth, and the poor will withdraw enough to make a dent in their poverty, the amount to be determined by their distance from the Magic Number and the number of years assigned to the correction process. Call it taxation, sharing, desperation, whatever you like. It is our last-chance at recognizing humanity as a common inheritance.

4. If Branson wants out, and has the rockets, wave him a good-luck goodbye. The rest of us will inherit a rededicated blue planet. He can make do with the red one.

Obviously this is a pipe dream. As Nancy Pelosi has observed, you don’t get power by asking for it; you have to take it from them. Who is “them”? She didn’t say, but in this case Pogo had it right. Them is us. If it takes Madame Guillotine’s intervention to convince us, then call it the Law of the Swamp. Lord Donald of the Fiery Tress promised to drain the swamp — let him come forth from his cave and make good on his promise or suffer the consequences.

All a far-out impossible dream. Right. You got a better one?

Some 4,500 yeas ago a Chinese emperor encouraged the first attempts to read tea leaves. According to archeologists, he was probably preceded by earlier shamans who worked with the cracks produced on animal scapulars by the heat of cooking. That procedure seems to have gone out of fashion, but tea-leaf reading is still with us today.

Brew your tea with tea leaves just as they come from the plant — large and floppy. Pour your hot tea from a teapot that allows them to fall naturally into your cup. When you have drunk your tea slosh the leaves around and pour off the tea. You are ready to “read”. The mess in your cup will resemble Rorschach blots. To the expert, the patterns nearest the rim of the cup are predictions of the near future, those deeper down relate to progressively more distant times. Louis XIV and his roistering crowd added a French elaboration to the ritual — throwing the used cups into the fireplace afterward. (“Tasse-tossing” to snobbish English speakers who want to show off their knowledge of other languages, tasse being the French word for cup.)

I am herewith going out on a limb and predicting a resurgence of the popularity of tasseography among today’s Republican politicians, now that the difference between the near and far future has been more clearly illuminated by yesterday’s voting. Clearly, near-term fidelity to Sir Orange has been rewarded among the elder generation of spineless wonders in the Senate and in red states with large populations of farmers, the dissed undereducated, the never-satisfied income-tax dodging retirees, and the climate change deniers. Senators who survived this round have been assured of six more years of a perk-filled life in Washington where they are treated with old-fashioned southern deference in restaurants (well, most restaurants) and other public venues. This assurance, coupled with the promises of cushy corporate directorships awaiting them on retirement, may well be enough to keep them in Trump’s ring-kissing line.

But the long-term prospects are not so favorable. The surge of women and young insurgents qualifying for Congress and governorships and local positions all over the map may be the first sign that Trump was an aberrant signal that will now be reversed as the nation comes to its senses and recovers from its deep-seated frustration at the failure of the rich to concern themselves with the poor. If that should prove to be the case, fidelity to the Tweeter-in-Chief could prove fatal to the long-term ambitions of those who so recently believed themselves on the gravy train of lifetime employment on the public payroll by echoing his every inanity and joining the know-nothing chants of his flag-draped supporters.

And choosing now is necessary, while the eventual outcome is still in doubt. Choosing wrong could smash those dreams, as regrettable quotations surface in future electoral campaigns. It will require delicate and statesmanlike editing of all public utterances for the next two years, something the current batch of sycophants have not shown themselves to be good at so far.

All that aside, the election results have been encouraging to those who had faith that you can’t fool all the people all the time. Eventually voters will begin to ask embarrassing questions and peer under suspicious tent flaps and demand explanations — of how tax cuts for the wealthy are going to help them pay their mortgages and how condemning them to the threat of medically caused bankruptcy is going to improve the readiness of the nation to face the problems of a hamburger-flipping and waiting-on-tables future. When Toto-Hannity pulls aside the curtain and reveals the Wonderful Orange-Haired Wizard adjusting the volume sliders on his Fox mixing board certain questions are going to become increasingly difficult to field. If that is going to be the direction of the future, now is the time for career hopefuls to start thinking about preparing their foxholes. Get ready for a lot of “on the one hand and on the other hand”s in Congress, although not much follow-up action.

Let us hope the tea leaves are in our favor. I would happily sacrifice a few Meissen cups with good old Louis if I thought it would help.

You’re the wealth tax guy?

I guess so. I’ve been writing about it.

All right. I have some questions for you.

Wow! First I have a question of my own. Most people’s eyes glaze over when I propose to talk about taxes. Unless they are billionaires interested in figuring out how to hide more of their billions from the IRS. What prompts you to want to talk about it?

I’m not one of those nuts who think all taxes are unconstitutional. But I do think we are oversupplied with taxes as it is. Why do we need another one? Our money is already taxed, usually before we get our hands on it. Isn’t once enough? Do we really need to get it taxed still another time?

We surely don’t. But the Wealth Tax would not be an added tax. It’s a single tax. to replace all the ones that presently exist. Henry George, the British writer (he would have hated the term “economist”) who advocated for it in the 1840s, called it just that. His disciples called themselves Single Taxers. His proposal was that the government would own all land, which then would be the sole basis for the tax rolls. A land tax would be the only tax anyone would pay. We would each pay just once on the land we used (or didn’t) instead of all the nibbling taxes we are now subject to — income tax, sales tax, value-added taxes, gasoline taxes, sin taxes, toll roads, or any other kind of taxes. Just the one land tax. One and done.

But a lot of us don’t use any land any more. Nowadays the profit isn’t in something made in a factory or on a farm; it’s jut as likely to be made from a service on the Internet. All you need is enough tabletop space for a laptop.

True. So I don’t call it a land tax; I call it a wealth tax. Our capital may no longer be exclusively in the form of land, but it is all still based on some form of ownership. You have to own something in order to collect rent on it — call it a farm or a copyright or a patent or an apartment building or a share of stock. How much you make is your business; how much capital you are allowed to own, since there is only so much available, is the community’s business. So we should all pay a tax on that portion of the community wealth we own.

So same rate for everyone, from Bill Gates all the way down to me?

Correct.

And with that one payment I’m free and clear? No snoopy employer deducting anything from my paycheck or sneaky IRS prying into my bank account? No need to save my lunch receipts and my chits for travel expenses or how much I got in tips?

Right.

But how would the government know what I own?

Because you would tell them. You would make a list of your property. As of every December 31st. You would file it and sign it, and send it in. A list of everything you owned as of that date. Here or overseas or on Mars or the moon or the Internet. No exceptions.

And the IRS would take my word for it? I wouldn’t bet on that!

They take your word now, don’t they?

Well, no. They don’t trust me. My employer sends them my records. My 1040 has to match my W-2. My bank files 1099s on my interest. “My” company publishes the size of my dividend. The IRS knows most of the numbers even before I do.

True : with a Wealth Tax the IRS would initially have to accept your word. You could lie, but the statute could make the consequences of cheating rather unpleasant.

Like for instance? How? What if I just chose to “forget” to list my second car?

Russian roulette. You might get away with it. The odds would be in your favor, at least at first. The government isn’t about to finance a new horde of salaried bureaucrats to check your garage. On the other hand, someone who didn’t like seeing that Lamborghini in your driveway next to his Honda when he knows you are a $60,000 a year municipal councilman might decide to be nosey. With a Wealth Tax in force your possessions, like his, would be on the public record. He might wonder how you managed to do it on a city councilmen’s salary. He could be tempted to become a whistleblower. Whistleblowers would still get 15% of whatever the IRS recovered from cheaters. Plus, if you “forgot” to put it on your list, the car would become “unclaimed” property, therefore no longer yours. It would belong to the government, subject to confiscation. A repo man would come and get it and a US marshal would put it up for auction.

That’s pretty strong. What if I truly just forgot to list it?

You would have the right to bid on it at the auction like anyone else, but you would also have the obligation as the former owner not only to match the winning bid but to pay an extra ten percent penalty. Might make you think twice. Especially if the “forgotten” item was a 41 million dollar yacht or a Swiss bank account with a half a zillion dollars in it.

It well might. So all right. On December 31 I would just send in my check along with my list?

No, because no one will know on December 31st what the year’s tax rate is going to be. Congress would have been busy all year estimating the cost of the upcoming year’s operations and passing their final budget, which then divided by the total of everyone’s wealth, would determine the flat national rate. Should be available as usual by March, payable in April 15th. All of us can do our own math.and then send our checks.

And what about the big corporations? The non-profits? The churches? The NGO’s? Would they also have to pay?

They wouldn’t pay anything. Only flesh and blood people would be subject to tax. People who bleed when cut, as Shylock defined it. Corporations don’t bleed, so they are not people, no matter what the Supreme Court says. You can’t put a corporation in jail for lying or thievery. So they are not people. But they are owned by their shareholders. The non-profits and the churches and the universities have endowments and bank accounts in which their contributors have put funds. The ownership of those funds can be determined . Everything is in the end owned by an identifiable individual, and everything — all personal wealth — is taxable. Philanthropy is a choice; it can be applauded but it cannot be used as a tax loophole.

But what about what the government itself owns? Things we all own together? Battleships? Monuments?Buildings?Highways? Missiles? That’s all part of our common wealth.

Exempt, except that portion of course that is financed by treasury paper, borrowed from flesh and blood people who then own the bonds. Why would there be a tax on our shared ownership of a railroad bridge when we all need it and all use it and all have paid for it long ago? Or the Washington Monument? It would be far too complicated to figure out who owns those things.

All right. But after the taxes are collected, who would allocate the money among all the cities and states and towns and villages that depend on taxes for their public services? Would everything become what they call block grants? So much to Texas, so much to Rhode Island, so much to Puerto Rico? Based on population, or acreage or need or what?

We would argue about that, just as we do now. And we would still elect local officials to fight for our own localities and special interests, just like always. But the details would be fought over lower down in the food chain instead of in the backrooms of Congress. The people inside the Beltway could spend their time more productively on the proportion of assets allocated to specific national expenses — what proportion to infrastructure, how much for military, what are we willing to spend on refugees, or foreign aid. It would free them up to do some serious work instead of spending their time trying to reward their private campaign donors.

*

So far so good. I could go for all that on the grounds of fairness alone. Those who have cashed in most successfully on the national economy should rightly bear the greater burden for keeping everything going. But what about that national rate? What do you think it would likely be? Would I be likely to pay more or less than I pay now?

There is no way to answer that until we see the result of the first actual national asset tally. I have found on the Internet such wildly conflicting estimates of our national net worth — from both official and private sources — that I wonder if any of them are worth paying serious attention to. But using the ones I judged middle-of-the-road I came up with the following:

Since the national budget for 2018 is expected to be somewhere between 3.5 and 4 trillion, this would indicate that a flat tax rate of around 1.5% would be sufficient to cover the costs. Maybe as much as 2% if we elected to use some newfound revenue to fix up a few problems that are currently going unaddressed. Like teachers’ salaries, minimum wages, support money for caregivers, and universal tuition and health care, for example. But all this is just speculative. We wouldn’t know until the first year’s tallies came in how much we had to work with, so all we can do right now is guess.

So it’s a blind dive off the high board? You really think you could get American voters to go for that?

Well, we could start by discussing the mechanics of collecting the money. “Net worth of all American families” sounds like an easily determined figure. Take all the assets of each family — bank accounts, land, homes, cars, insurance policies, whatever’s in the safe deposit box or under the mattress — add it all up and subtract whatever people owe — mortgages, car loans, education loans, payday lender loans — and you have the national net worth.

Problem is, of course, who’s going to do the adding up. Each family will be primarily concerned with keeping its number lows; the IRS will be concerned with keeping them honest. Cheaters will be trying to find ways to keep it less than accurate.

For example, estimates by experts say that today’s black economy (second jobs, tips, gigs, barter, unrecorded purchases, sales among individuals, and plain outright cheating) amounts to approximately ten percent of our GDP, which would make it roughly $2 trillion. That tells you that average American families are already pretty good at hiding some of their assets from the IRS, even without the high-priced white-shoe accountants the wealthy employ to make sure their Picassos are “stored in transit” in offshore warehouses and the yacht docked in Florida is registered in Panama. Confronted with the new task of calculating their own net worth, their ingenuity can only be expected to increase. Americans love puzzles. Applying educated guesses to how all that would work out might serve to get people interested beyond just “Not taxes again! Boring subject.”

If you say so.

And it would have to be an honor system. Not only would a policing bureaucracy be prohibitively expensive, it would be an intolerable intrusion on our privacy. (We are already on the honor system, of course — you fill out your own 1040 — but as you point out your employer and your bank act as police backup.) But this one would be different. Today if you “forget” to list that second job, and the employer files a W2, you will get a corrected 1040 back from the IRS and you will be liable for the revised total and a small penalty. All courtesy of a couple of computer algorithms that purport to know what ratios to look for in your calculations.

So why wouldn’t we just continue that way?

Too complicated. If you were asked to calculate your net worth tomorrow, first of all you would bitch about the new requirement and the time it would take away from your football or sitcom watching, and secondly you would start making sure that your assets were valued as modestly as possible (the inverse of what you do now when you take out homeowners’ insurance on your valuables, and which might even move you to re-evaluate some of that insurance). If you included a Modigliani or two among your assets it might even move you to take a second look at that art appraiser’s letter you bought and stashed in the safe deposit box. There might be more art forgeries hanging on high-rise penthouse walls than we ever dreamed of. Better to admit that you got conned by the art dealer than to accept the obligation to pay a continuing 2% on that purchase price every year forever and ever. Or maybe not.

What if you just completely “forgot” to list something on the form you filed with your estimate? You could get away with that for so long as no whistleblower decided that his 15% bounty for reporting it would make up for his loss of your friendship. (Remember that the penalty for forgetting would be that since you didn’t declare your ownership, it was “abandoned” property and hence subject to confiscation and being auctioned off for the benefit of the treasury. Yes, you could enter your bid and top the winning bidder by ten percent and buy it back, but there would be the added penalty of “shame” as well as the cost of the item.)

The problem here is that to give the whistleblowers a fair shot everyone’s numbers would have to be open to inspection. While Americans don’t seem to mind giving up their privacy for the privilege of instant messaging and cell phone coverage and looking at pornography, they have always been secretive about their earnings. Some employers have even taken advantage of that reluctance to forbid their workers to share wage information with their co-workers, to make life harder for union organizers. Could this attitude be reversed in exchange for the benefits of a Wealth Tax? Could curiosity about one’s neighbors’ prosperity overcome reluctance to disclose one’s own numbers? The experience of Facebook would seem to say we seem to be quite comfortable giving up our privacy for the privilege of posting snapshots of our personal small domestic triumphs for the world to see, but omertà is deeply ingrained in all Americans, not just in the Family. A snitch is reviled. On the other hand, 15% of a million dollars is a powerful temptation. At the very least it would be a test of allegiances in which everyone would have to balance his ethics and desire for personal privacy against his greed, and his independence against his sense of civic virtue. It could be revealing to see how some of our loudmouth super patriots responded to that challenge.

Would this country become like Italy, where paying taxes is looked down upon with all the scorn of Leona Helmsley’s “only little people pay taxes”, and scamming the treasury is a national sport? No way to tell except to dive off that high board and see.

Maybe a more forgiving economy with improved health care and free education for your children and a more secure safety net would allow people to see honesty as more attractive than loopholes and graft. Who knows?

One thing I think you could count on, and I would consider it a welcome change. Some snarky professions might see their influence reduced. Professionals like my accountant who once advised me that if I chose the right pension plan for my small business he could set one up that would end up finally paying almost everything to me instead of to my employees. Or the lawyer who suggested that with the “right” corporate structure I could live comfortably on “business expenses” right up till the day I declared bankruptcy. (Check out Al Sharpton, who seems to have hired him after I declined.) We might also anticipate a diminution in the ranks of those “advisors” in the “wealth management” departments of our big banks. None of them would be much missed, at least by me.

You make it sound like a Progressive cure-all.

Not “all”, but there is more. The “commons” is economists’ name for public property available for anyone’s use. Think, for instance, what a wealth tax would do to land speculators, those who sit on thousands — even millions — of acres of undeveloped wilderness, waiting for the suburbs to arrive and turn their fallow acres into dollars. Even though their holdings might be drastically undervalued by bribable local assessors, they would still have to pay some tax on every acre every year — and if the market value of adjacent properties could be shown to be creeping upward, that could be grounds to increase their taxes in proportion. Henry George said, (correctly at the time — we were then mostly an agricultural society), that ownership of land ultimately was the source of all wealth. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill had said pretty much the same thing earlier. (Not labor, as Marx claimed) but land. And land was originally a gift of God, not a human construct, and therefore anyone who chose to make use of it should pay God’s community for the privilege. He claimed a rather large following before the combined forces of capitalism and the industrial revolution undermined his analysis. Like Marx, who blamed all problems on the exploitation of labor by bourgeois capitalists, he was right for the time and place he lived in, but the times moved on. Nowadays the idea of the commons has a harder and harder struggle to remain relevant. Even the Internet version is being chipped away by monster global companies and their hired legislators. The need to raise cash for paying taxes on their vast idle acres and bank accounts just might induce their owners to forego some of that deferred bounty by selling some of their acres and putting their money into the general economy where it might do some good for people not in such protected positions.

Point. What else?

Well, take the business of everyone’s net worth being in the public domain. This would undoubtedly cause some anguish. Scammers who tried to convince people of the Ponzi possibilities of their schemes would be severely handicapped. Strivers who formerly had been able to brag about their phenomenal falsified successes in order to associate with the truly wealthy — yes, I am thinking of Mr. Trump — would have to find another ploy, since their bank accounts would be open to everyone’s inspection whether they decided to run for president or not. It has even been suggested that disclosures of the vast gap between the members of the top tenth of one percent and the working single mothers living from paycheck to paycheck (and having their meager earnings further diminished by the interest owed to payday lenders) might embarrass the high earners into accepting smaller salaries, to reduce the threat of having the tires slashed on their Mercedes Benzes in their luxury hotel parking lots, but I don’t have much faith in that. It has been my observation that the resentment of the poor is one of the great attractions to the rich of striving to become wealthy. After all, no matter how rich you are there is always someone else on a rung higher on the ladder than you except for the one top guy. Status is measured by comparison, since a rich man can still only eat three meals a day, and wealth in itself is useless — it has to be flaunted to bring any satisfaction. Public rankings might just make the competition more exciting.

Anything else?

We are pretty far along the road of pure speculation, but I would venture to add one more possible benefit. The necessity of allocating the tax take among all the worthy and unworthy seekers of government support just might subject former legislature-real-estate boondoggles to greater examination than they have been getting in the present system of earmarks and “member items”. Plain thievery in the guise of “non-profit charitable trusts” run by politicians’ and their family members is rampant today, and condoned by legislators who anticipate benefiting from their own similar arrangements. If a tax abatements in Arizona had to be defended beyond the boundaries of that state’s political establishment — say by comparison to a request for a grant to repair Puerto Rico’s electrical grid — the relative value of each to the general national welfare would have to be at least discussed publicly before the contracts were given out, and since the terms of the contracts would be public there would be a certain pressure to keep them within the bounds of reasonableness. That may sound like a utopian vision, but it would put some quid-pro-quo deals off the table unless crooks from Arizona and Puerto could be enlisted in the same kickback schemes. With our bitterly divided electorate, and our throw-more-fuel-on-the-fire Republican politicians at the ready with their gasoline cans, it seems just possible that they might wind up policing each other instead of allocating each other more elbow room at the trough.

I think you are pretty far out into never-never land now.

You’re right. Not everything can be fixed at once. But small advances are to be treasured.

*

All right. Now what about the big question : what are the real chances that any of these visions could actually make it through the politics of corrupt statehouses and get enacted into law?

Pretty near zero, I would say. Henry George got nowhere. He is as totally forgotten today as Norman Thomas, for whom my father unwaveringly cast his futile presidential vote all through the Roosevelt era. But I have noted with interest something new on the political horizon in the past year, provoked by #MeToo and the reactions of women to the threat posed by Trumpism to the gains they had made over the past seven decades. Women don’t seem to be intimidated as easily as they used to be. When it comes to defending their rights to control their own bodies and keep them out of the clutches of the Harvey Weinsteins and Franklin Graham Juniors and the Pope’s minions, they are showing a new spark of determination and willingness to get out and do the groundwork of door-to-door electoral organization.

Women are fifty percent of our population. No other bloc comes even close to being as numerous or as solid. While the men have been studying the usual “political science” claptrap in Ivy League schools and private universities, the women have been reading up on sociology and spending time doing hands-on PTA and library work. Raising children who have to be coerced into doing what’s good for them without understanding what it’s all about is not that different from coercing voters to back programs they probably don’t understand. Mothers face this every day. They are perfectly willing to let their husbands talk balance of trade ratios and ten-year trends if it will make them feel smart, but they know that this makes not one whit of difference to Joe Voter. What he wants is security — some recognition that he is important — some admiration for his hard work. This is not easy to give him. What is needed is a common program for that women’s bloc, and the Trumpists seem to be determined today to hand it to them on a platter.

If every self-styled Progressive were to make a single resolution this November — “In any race where there is a woman entered I will vote for her instead of the guy” — we could up-end the Establishment, drain the swamp, whatever the metaphor is, and be on our way to a radical re-design of our country.

“I’m for Her”, although it lost, was a far-sighted battle cry. It failed in it’s first outing, but there are wars to come. I think it could be resurrected, and be successful. All we have to do is forget the details. Let the women sweat them after they have gotten the power. They cannot do worse than the men have done. Golda Meir and Hanan Ashrawi originally set the tone. Angela Merkel functions like a pro in the male world of diplomacy. Think what she could accomplish in a world of like-minded women!

Does any of this hold out hope for doing something about the growing economic inequality gap? How do we go about transferring money from the top to the bottom?

Whoa! One thing at a time. If there were a magic solution that would cure all the world’s problems with the same medicine I would be right there rooting, but that’s too much to ask. Bite off only what you can chew. Once you have swallowed and digested that bit there will be time enough to look for the next forkful.

I will suggest, though, that the problem is definable. It is simply to find a mechanism to effect a wealth transfer that creates its own feedback, so that modest success to start with is followed by increasing efficiency under its own steam. Step number one would have to be to reach consensus on what constitutes a “reasonable” amount of personal wealth, especially dynastic wealth passed along from one generation to the next regardless of merit or talent. “What the traffic will bear,” otherwise known as Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”, has proved cruel and indefensible. I suggest that a new definition could start with dividing the national wealth by the number of people in the country, and then finding the average. That’s how much the economy could provide each of us, if it were evenly divided. How much of a departure from that, in either direction is considered acceptable is a matter for a fruitful national debate. That new money added at the top must be counterbalanced by more money added at the bottom is obvious. How, and how much more, are the questions. The numbers revealed by the wealth tax might at least give us real big data to work with. The mechanism itself would not be hard to devise — every dollar added at the top would have to be matched by x dollars added at the bottom. The proper value of x would form the basis for an illuminating discussion.

It has been suggested that once we know what the economy will support, by discovering the average wealth of citizens, only those people richer than the average would pay all the taxes, while those whose wealth didn’t measure up to the average would get a subsidy — a so-called “negative” tax. Not enough to bring them fully to the average level, but pushing them gradually in that direction. In time (generations?) we might get there. The acceptability of this would depend on what the numbers, and the tax rates, would prove to be, and how strong the forces of morality and good sense could prevail against pure greed and selfishness.

Finding ways to defeat those who would (undoubtedly) strive to game the wealth tax system would also be entertaining to watch. Insurance scams to pass wealth from one generation to the next, efforts to provide increases in value from scarcity or artistic sequestering might be another. There is one thing sure. We could find all this a sustainable debate for years to come. Maybe it would give us something to talk about besides white supremacy, misogyny, and ethnic prejudice. I would welcome that.

Now that the shouting is over, let us take stock.

We have put two sniveling, lying crybabies on the Supreme Court, the biggest lying crybaby of them all in the White House, and watched as a majority of Senators have sold their integrity and their votes in hopes of executive favors (campaign support in the upcoming elections), and their majority leader has abandoned his responsible leadership role for that of cringing consigliere to a narcissist real estate tax cheat currently postponing numerous court suits only by virtue of his White House tenancy.

The cloak of dignity having thus been stripped from three of our most revered institutions by these actions, I offer you some historic quotes I find relevant :

George Washington: (who had recently declined to be acclaimed king)

“But lest some unlucky event should happen unfavorable to my reputation, I beg it may be remembered by every gentleman in the room that I this day declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with.” 

Brett Kavanaugh: (sobbing in frustration as he saw his cherished nomination endangered)

“I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process. You’ve tried hard. You’ve given it your all. No one can question your effort, but your coordinated and well-funded effort to destroy my good name and to destroy my family will not drive me out. The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out. You may defeat me in the final vote, but you’ll never get me to quit. 

Clarence Thomas: (after likening opposition to his nomination to a “lynching”)

I was smart enough to use pot without getting caught, and now I’m on the Supreme Court. If you were stupid enough to get caught, that’s your problem. Your appeal is denied. This 40 year sentence just might teach you a lesson.

The one from Washington is to remind you that we used to consider modesty and civility virtues.

The one from Kavanaugh is to illustrate how far we have come from that long ago time when political opponents respected each other as representatives of all their constituents, regardless of party, and could express themselves with dignity and at least the pretense of a larger mission than mere personal ambition.

The one from Thomas is to revive the memory of a time when a personal desire for revenge in a written court decision would have resulted in a public outcry for impeachment. (Yes, Virginia, there actually was such a time.)

I decline to choose any specific one from among the thousands of recorded quotes from our current President, since I am confident he would either (1) deny it, or (2) contradict it, or (3) make merciless fun of the physical characteristics of whoever brought it up. As to any by his errand boy, Mr O’Connell, I refer you to his announcement, before the Kavanaugh hearing, that nothing Dr Ford or Mr Kavanaugh could say at that hearing was going to change his mind about installing another vote for repeal of Roe v. Wade on the high court. (He later expanded this to include anything the FBI might uncover as well, if I understood him correctly. Remember, too, that he used legislative legerdemain to change the numbers required for submitting a Supreme Court nominee’s name to the full Senate from 67% to 51% — a coup for relentless partisanship fully equal to the founding of the Church of Gerrymander.) The Republican senators who cheerfully followed where his mooning led them will have to speak for themselves, especially those who have the misfortune to be running this November.

Let us hope that there are still some “shreds of decency” left in the land (as invoked in a once widely admired quote from Joseph Welch, Joe McCarthy’s nemesis), and that in future the language of paranoia and bigotry will be drowned out by the votes of a chastened electorate newly reminded of its duty to democracy.

As the story of Facebook unfolds in the various courts that are considering how many billions in fines they can levy and stash in the Treasury, we are learning more about the business. We knew, of course, from the beginning that Mr. Zuckerberg was not just interested in facilitating communication among his classmates. He probably was not yet contemplating fighting for first place in the Richest Man on the Planet competition, either. Things just developed. In any case, we capitalist believers are obliged to admire him for his success. If you’re not careful envy has a way of turning all too easily into anger.

Mr. Zuckerberg has been careful. The question is whether he has been careful enough. Wiping out malaria and guinea worm counts for a lot when you are in that Richest Man race. Confrontation with Washington legislative committees maybe not so much. The success of Facebook turns on the difficult job of computer parsing uncontrolled speech into a series of neatly categorized boxes that can be counted, sorted, searched, analyzed, and sold to the highest bidder.

I had some personal experience with this problem once, trying to write a program that would identify the grammar of the words and phrases of the titles of scientific articles for the purpose of creating index references that would sound as though they had been written by humans. I had some successes, along with some spectacular failures. (My algorithm never figured out what to do with “Quo Vadis?” as a title of an essay on the future of the specialty of thassalemia research) If this was a problem in deconstructing the titles of scientific research papers whose authors have presumably been at some pains to make their titles clear enough to attract readers, how much more severe is it when trying to figure out private e-mails or intercepted messages deliberately crafted to hide secrets? Great progress has been made, as we would expect from someone who has made billions of dollars from devising a basically simple search program capable of responding to my query of “thasselemia” with a corrected spelling and a list of references. There is nevertheless a remaining area of confusion and misunderstanding, and consequent danger of illogical actions based on the results.

The answer to the problem is simple and attractive : eliminate natural language. Reduce original communication to a series of checked boxes and cute emojis, whose meanings are defined in advance. While this can probably not be enforced on the Internet world, even by Mr. Zuckerman, it can be made so attractive to the lazy or semi-literate media user that coercive enforcement may not be necessary. Like the shortcuts “u” or “r” offered e-mailers and texters as one-stroke options on their smart phones, properly defined boxes for checking are tempting just as time-savers and keyboard-error-avoiders. Emojis are not only quick, but like texting abbreviations, they are sort of fun and show that the writer is on the crest of the wave. That they can also be subtly coercive, by channeling the writer’s thoughts into a few identifiable (and thus classifiable) choices rather than allowing him the freedom of nuance, is presumably not of concern to Mr Z, who has to worry mostly about his bottom line, but it should be of major concern to users of his services, who have varying motives. These variations are what makes literature different from laundry lists, and keeps secrets from Big Brother, but they, it seems to me, are equally important to a civilized society. Few things in life are more inspiring than a perfectly structured poem or a carefully reasoned essay, and few things are more important to my sense of individuality than my belief that I am entitled to keep certain secrets from the prying eyes of others. The standardized, analyzable tools we already have available (called words and language) give us the power to communicate in ways that are novel and inspiring as well as merely efficient. A string of emojis or a succession of boxes is unlikely to have such power. It would be like turning the library over from Melvil Dewey to Hallmark.

What prompts these observations is a recent attempt on my part to engage the Internal Revenue Service in a discussion about the clarity (or rather, lack of clarity) of certain instructions in their 1040 tax instructions. Specifically, while certain information about my age is requested on a worksheet, there is no clear instruction about whether or where or how to apply it, although the implication clearly is that it I am entitled to a special exemption if I was born before 2 January 1952. (You didn’t really need to know this detail, but more clarity always helps, in my opinion.) Since I do not have the patience to wait during the infuriating silence that follows the automated words : “Due to an unprecented number of calls …”, and the IRS, in its bureaucratic wisdom refuses to give me an e-mail address to which to direct my inquiry, I elected to pretend that I was such a Luddite that I had no access to the Internet, and I WROTE THEM A LETTER! An old-fashioned letter on a piece of paper. I typed it out and put it in an envelope with a stamp sent it by snail mail to the address of their office nearest to me.

In due course I received a reply. I have seldom seen a document so perfectly crafted to appear to respond to the question that prompted it and at the same time so opaque. It was something called a 1040X form, on which the taxpayer who has recognized a problem with his original 1040 is allowed to amend the previous version and recalculate his obligation, specifically relating each revision to a specified line of the original 1040 form. This was impossible for me, since the line to which it would have referred was exactly what was missing (it was on a worksheet. buried in the bowels of the pages and pages of helpful hints that accompanied the original form). So, I WROTE THEM A SECOND LETTER, using the file number their reply had given me explaining the difficulty and rephrasing my question.

This elicited another written reply from the IRS, which, instead of directly addressing the problem, reiterated the requirement that I identify the specific line on my original 1040 that I wanted to change, but all this was itself in the form of boxes to be checked and requests for “documentation”. Not Dear Sir, we are not clear what you want. Please elaborate. No. A box checked by my correspondent : Please provide documentation for the line(s) you are altering.

I chose to provide a scanned copy of my Army Discharge Certificate to prove my age, and I replied with still another snail-mail letter. The Reduction in Paper work Act was being egregiously violated. As of this writing I have not received an answer. I think I have created panic in the Kansas City office of the IRS by stepping outside the safe boundaries of boxes into the realm of actual writing. I suspect that since there is no little box saying “We don’t deal in words; we deal in boxes.” the diligent little cubicle chipmunks in Kansas City are flummoxed. They have forgotten how to use the language we as taxpayers have spent so much money on teaching them in our public school system. (That’s the one Betsy De Vos is busily attempting to do away with.). Without little boxes, they are stymied.

I am, too. I am tempted to put a lot of the blame on Marc Zuckerman, but that may be unfair. He didn’t invent emojis.

Addendum : I eventually received a check from the Treasury for an amount slightly different from what I had recalculated. There was no cover letter; just the check. Down in one corner, in small type, was the notation : “1040X 2016.” It was so small, bracketed by other small and esoteric numbers of significance only to the IRS, that I didn’t notice it at first. I was suspicious. A Treasury check with no explanation? Didn’t sound kosher. I wondered whether I was being set up for some sort of scam, such as “We made a mistake. Please cash the check and deposit the proceeds in the bank account shown below, and we will issue you a new one”, so I wrote still ANOTHER letter, including a copy of the check, asking what it was for. Turned out finally it was genuine and the discrepancy was a matter of the few dollars in interest that had accrued since 2016. I was eventually informed of this in a phone call from a very friendly gentleman who identified himself with a badge number, his full name and address, and (I think) the license plate number of his car. I had apparently finally exhausted their supply of little boxes. The solution would seem to be a box to be checked with the question : Would you be up for a conversation about this? Here’s my e-mail address and private phone number.

But little boxes are so much easier. I wish they were a little larger, so I could fit 😦 inside.

We do seem to have a hard time managing Supreme Court seat nominations in America. This is understandable, since the Court is supposed to be independent of politics but politicians have been put by the Constitution in charge of hiring the judges. Job interviews can therefore sometimes present a less than edifying spectacle, dominated generally by conflicting interests, often not germane to determining the best-qualified candidate. The current hearings over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination have been particularly ugly, an almost word-for-word rerun of the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas farce of 27 years ago, from which we appear to have learned very little. Applicants in these job interviews, if sufficiently ambitious and opposed, can sometimes become emotional and even partially unhinged. (“Lynching.” “Democrat conspiracy.” “Hillary’s revenge.”)

In an effort to be helpful and contribute to a more civilized tone to the next such interview (sadly, it’s too late for this one) I offer below a suggestion for a generic opening address to the Senate Judiciary Committee for use by the next nominee.

*

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I have just a few brief remarks to make before I deal with your questions. First, I consider my presence here as a candidate for this nomination an honor that will not be diminished in my own estimation no matter what the outcome. I am proud that the record of my career thus far has recommended me to the President for this honor. A place on the Supreme Court bench is the highest position anyone in my chosen field can hope to attain. I thank him, and I thank you for this opportunity.

“I am ___ years old. It is ___ years since I was a callow teen-ager, no more nor less mature than any other ___-year old. In your questioning it may be revealed that I committed acts in my youth that I would not repeat today. If so I ask for your indulgence. I am no longer that callow teen-ager. I have learned, and I hope grown wiser with the passage of time.

“My experience in the justice system has taught me many things, among them the uselessness of attempts at revenge. Rifts must be patched up. Progress is never served by vendettas. Disagreements must not be allowed to fester. Second chances are mandatory if we are to advance together toward the goal of enlisting everyone’s talents in our common search for a better future.

“Memory can be fallible, even selective. Mine, I am sure, is no exception, but I promise to do my best to be truthful and responsive to whatever concerns you may have about my record. As to my beliefs, I will be equally open except that I will not comment here on any specific case I might have to later sit in judgment on. My core beliefs are an open book.

“I am aware that an effective court system requires a body of precedents to modify the differing individual insights of particular judges serving in particular times. I will argue firmly for what I believe, but I promise I will not filibuster. If selected, I will have eight colleagues to help me keep that promise, and I will respect their views.

“And now I will do my best to answer any questions you may have.”

*

Feel free to use this template if you are ever nominated to be a Supreme Court judge. Feel free to use it as a reference if you are ever a critical watcher of such a selection proceeding.

I can’t believe it!

What?

We had it locked up. Mitch did his number on Merrick Garland, Grassley was right there doing his “quick hearing” bit, the Boss was keeping his nose clean, and everything was set for you to be confirmed. I even had your wife find an “old family bible” in the bookcase. Then this bitch suddenly shows up from nowhere. After 36 years. Says you tried to rape her at a drinking party in high school. 36 years ago! Can you believe to what depths Democrats will sink to try to deny the Boss his nominees? It boggles the mind.

What can I say? Only that I’m not the same person I was 36 years ago.

Don’t ever say that! That’s tantamount to admitting you did it.

Well, I very possibly did/ We were a pretty rowdy bunch in those days. There were many evenings I no longer recall. A lot of that time is lost in an alcoholic haze.

I’m telling you to never say that! What do you mean, “possibly”?

Well, I don’t remember this lady in particular, but I do remember that I was pretty randy in my student days. And pretty soused a lot of the time. We concentrated on staying soused those years, all of us. Something like she describes might very well have happened. All I can do at this point is apologize and hope she can forgive.

Are you completely nuts? You think that will fly in these days of MeToo? There’s no way. These hyperventilating crones want blood. They want sacrificial victims. They want trophies — severed heads on pikes. You see what they’re doing to the Cosbys and Moonves. Those guys were big. I mean BIG! And they’re getting clobbered in spite of their power. The witches will have no problem with you. You don’t even have a Neilsen rating — no name recognition outside your little legal world — essentially no allies. You’re a sitting duck.

Well, what do you suggest I do?

I’m not suggesting, my friend. I am dictating. This is serious business. If you want the job you play it my way, word for word, exactly as I say :

1) You didn’t do it.

2) You have no recollection of any drinking parties, you were in your room praying and doing your homework.

3) This woman is a publicity hound. She is angling for her own reality show on TV. She’s going to write a book. She is being financed by political troublemakers. Secret Deep Staters.

4) There are no witnesses. It’s “she said, he said” all the way, and he will always win those because most judges are men.

But what about the lady herself? What if she’s telling the truth? What if I really tried to rape her and scarred her for life?

Believe me, she’s no lady. She’s a plant dragged out by Schumer and Pelosi to gum up the works.

How do you know that? I read that she’s a respected university teacher with a PhD and an impressive résumé and a nice family.

Of course you did. That’s the standard tactic of the fake media. They love to create a fight. If everything is going like clockwork you don’t hear a peep from them. The minute there’s the slightest hitch they’re all over you, like leeches. Enemies of the people.

Enemies of which people? The women who say they were wronged? The grown-up little boys and girls who were once the playthings of priests and the moguls?

What are you, some kind of socialist? You and I know they don’t matter a shit. What matters is that we Republicans stay in office forever so nobody finds out what else we are doing. Hasn’t the Boss’s success made that clear to your picky little legal mind?

No. It hasn’t. I am more concerned with my conscience. I believe I am a nice person today, but I admit that I may not always have been. I will be dead some day, and I will be dead a long time. I want my children and my wife to able to say I played it straight. I also want to sleep nights for the rest of my allotted life.

You’ll sleep nights, alright. Back in the second tier, where the goody-goody guys go. And to think of the opportunity you had — to wear the black robe for the rest of your life and have everyone look up to you …

Like they do to Clarence Thomas?

He’s in, isn’t he? And you’re out. And he’ll stay in, liar that he was. And we’re in. And if you stick to your stupid Boy Scout act, you’re out. You’ll never get in.

Then so be it. I have to live with me.

It was Sol Wachtler, Chief Judge of New York State, reflecting on the power of impersonal bureaucracy over the individual, who said that “district attorneys could get grand juries to indict a ham sandwich”.

You, sir, are the spiritual leader of an evangelical church whose members I understand number in the millions?

I am.

May I ask its name?

You may ask, but I’m not going to answer you on TV. We’re a religious organization, and the IRS has rules about advertising. We can’t afford to lose our tax-free status.

But I would recognize the name?

For sure.

And you are here to discuss with me the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to be a justice of the Supreme Court?

It’s my pleasure.

What, then, briefly, is your position on this nominee?

I have none.

What do you mean? I have read that your church is mounting a campaign to push his appointment through as quickly as possible. And you just said …

I just said I have no position on the gentleman himself. We are determined to get him approved, but that doesn’t mean we have any opinion about him as a person. We have essentially no information about him. What he represents to us is a vote to repeal Roe v. Wade, and that’s our only goal.

You mean that literally? If it should turn out that he did what Dr. Blasey Ford accuses him of, that he had so little consideration for another person’s well-being or pleading for mercy, that would have no effect on your position?

Correct. This is not about Dr. Ford, or about Judge Kavanaugh; it’s about the babies. Those poor helpless victims of a misbegotten law passed by Godless Democrats when they were in the majority.

And the Republicans who voted with them out of conviction, or for whatever other reasons.

Outnumbered and forced to surrender, after a valiant fight.

May I ask whether these are the same babies for whose welfare you will instantly wash your hands of responsibility once they have emerged from the womb by denying support to single mothers unable to find a job or hold one in the face of nagging requirements that they present themselves at various enforcement agencies at times when their employers need them? Are they the same babies who will then grow up in dangerous poverty-stricken neighborhoods where they will learn to be crooks and worse in order to survive?

That will be their choice, not ours. Every soul is responsible for its own conduct. The rules are the same for everyone, rich or poor. We have only to follow them to be accepted by Jesus.

And do you think Jesus is happy to see you working with a protégé of a man who is busy piling up government debt in order to give his buddies larger mansions and longer yachts — debt that these same children will eventually have to find a way to pay if they don’t get blown up first?

I think that’s a contentious statement, not a question. I would have to attribute your attitude to the Deep State conspiracy that has been resisting this presidency since its inception. What has Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination got to do with tax cuts? We have no idea what his opinions are about tax cuts. Nobody has asked him.

Oh, yes, they have. But his handlers have refused to make the answers public. They have chosen to keep a seal on thousands, maybe millions of pages of opinions and speeches that are supposed to be on the public record, having been commissioned and paid for by taxpayers. You don’t seem to be concerned about that.

I told you, it’s simple. It’s entirely about the babies. The fetuses, to be more precise. A guaranteed vote against Roe v. Wade on the court, to be exactly precise.

You mean that Judge Kavanaugh could be Jack the Ripper himself and that would make no difference? And Dr. Blasey Ford’s years of suffering count for nothing in the final accounting?

Correct. You have finally understood.

They met in college in 1942 — the second year of WW2 for America — where they were taking a course in celestial navigation as a hedge against being drafted into the army. That turned out to be a bummer when radar made sextants and Bowditch tables obsolete. They were drafted. Into the Army, despite their special skills. They served as grunts. They watched in horror as the world tore itself apart leading up to D-Day, but they hoped for better days to come. They watched in 1945 as the West managed to get its act together with the Marshall Plan and afterwards tore itself apart again in the Cold War. Thanks to the GI Bill, they went back and finished up their degrees, as Astronomy majors. They became post-docs, then associate professors, and finally got their PhDs and got steady jobs at the same mountain top observatory, supported by the same government grant. They watched as Russia went down the tubes, and they hoped that a less ideologically motivated and more realistic Russia would be better off once and less difficult once Gorbachev pulled the plug. They were, of course, disappointed

“Apparently we humans don’t think straight with no enemy to unite us,” concluded Professor Rashid.

“Seems so,” replied Professor Doberstein.

“What if we,” said Professor Rashid, “given the prestige conferred by our PhDs, were able to create one?”

“Create one? We two? Are you crazy?” said Professor Doberstein. “How would we do that?”

“Well, nobody off-campus thinks about astronomy any more. They think it’s about horoscopes. The real thing — all that endless vastness, our total insignificance — is too scary. Mind-boggling. There are no prizes or 20% returns on your money. You don’t get to sign autographs or create sneakers for million-dollar contracts. There are no stars with cleavages getting pulsars named after them. That means that any cockamamie story we could come up with will be swallowed whole provided we keep our beards and our job titles and our dignity.”

“Distinguished scientists? That has a nice ring to it. We could try”

*

Which is how the Great Terrestrial Union got off the ground. Using their observatory positions and their lack of any known political connections, reputations as credentials they called a press conference and announced that they had lately detected signs of alien activity in our solar system. In fact, very close to our orbit. Mysterious radia2tion that was apparently being modulated by something or someone to send some sort of messages. This much they had established by the presence of non-random patterns. Definitely beyond the possibility of accidental occurrence, but offering no clue as to what the messages might be. Their best efforts had so far failed to decode them, but anyone could tune in on TV and listen to the beeps and hear the patterns for themselves. (The two investigators said they had found that the mysterious strangers were using as carriers gravity waves, whose origins were poorly understood.)

The initial public reaction was disbelief, followed in due course by the usual cycle of denial, followed by worry, followed by fear, followed by panic, followed by extravagant muscle flexing. Evangelicals saw the first signs of Armageddon. Politicians feared the disruption of their hard-won seniorities and connections and threats to their post retirement corporate board directorships. Generals and admirals saw both their pride and their pensions deflated, their influence weakened, and their medals devalued. Jihadists saw Allah’s glorious revenge in the offing in a fiery cataclysm that would soon consume both non-believers and believers alike and transport the Chosen directly to Paradise. Jews knew that it would somehow soon be discovered that it was all their fault. Dealmakers of all kinds tried desperately to find a way to make first contact to gain an advantage and get exclusive rights before anyone else could horn in.

But, surprisingly quickly, rationality asserted itself.

If there really were outsiders observing us and discussing their observations among themselves, certain things were indisputable:

1. They were obviously intelligent and technically advanced to have been able to travel into our corner of space in the first place.

2. Having come so far they must have some sort of plan for whether they intended to approach us as colonists, marauders, or potential friends.

3. They would have to make the first move, since they presumably knew how and we hadn’t figured out how to talk to them.

These considerations led to

4. We had better get prepared.

There was obviously no way to know whether the aliens’ intentions were friendly or warlike, so we needed to be prepared either way. If we guessed wrong, the consequences would be irreversible. If we spread a welcome mat and it turned out we had surrendered to alien predators without a fight, that would be one kind of disaster. If we attempted to mount a defense, and refused a hand of friendship that was possibly being offered, that would be another, but equal disaster.

One things was clear : walls, missile shields, suicide vests, jacked-up border patrols, tightened immigration laws and indeed national borders themselves, were not likely to be of any use. What was needed was international consultation on a coordinated worldwide strategy. That would require rounding up people capable of the best thinking we could muster.

So we identified and enlisted our best and brightest brains in devising a response, from whatever country or race or skin-color they might come. In a truly united UN this time, not an over-hyped overstuffed and overpaid debating society, but a true assembly of top minds and skills with a definite goal and a deadline (a short one, since no one knew how quickly the showdown might come).

To everyone’s amazement, after a brief period of wheel spinning and xenophobic bloviation, serious negotiations actually began. With a series of well timed nudges from the two astronomers to a suddenly fawning audience, as they became gurus, the pace quickened. There was no other place for the conferees to turn for information. As gurus they issued their bulletins in parsimonious dribbles calculated to keep cooperation at a maximum and controversy at a minimum. The world painfully raised itself by its bootstraps and finally modernized the single functional body that had half-heartedly kept everyone’s eye on the ball on 45th Street for seven decades. There was no further clarification of the threat, but neither was there any bickering over who understood the threat better. The one big thing drew them all together in the fox’s den and left the nitpicking hedgehogs outside.

A quick-response council was established, with a small rotating executive membership, with authority to react immediately without further consultation. Orbital surveillance was instituted so that every inch of our globe’s surface was soon being watched 24/7. Missiles were made omni-directional so that nuclear warheads could be launched at any target anywhere, either terrestrial or in space. Logistic plans were put in place so that emergency supplies could be distributed anywhere they were needed on a moment’s notice. Democrats and Republicans, Sunnis and Shi’ias, Buddhists and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians, Han and Uigurs put their differences aside. Everyone was taught to recognize supposed danger signs. People were well fed and had their physical and mental weaknesses attended to so as to ensure their ability to resist when they should be called upon. They were educated and encouraged to feel self-sufficient and self-confident in case they had to become resistance guerillas overnight. Everything took second place to the defense of our little blue planet, whose essential frailty we suddenly realized. And all this was accomplished without the usual bickering over whose country or whose district would get the plum installations, or whose politicians or insiders would get how much of a cut of every expenditure. It was amazing how effective the organizing was when everybody’s shoulder was put to the same wheel.

*

Now, it was twenty years on, and still no sign of aliens, and here sat the two astronomers in the chill night air inside their open dome, letting the flickering computers do the job of keeping the mirror fixed on its pointer star, and debated.

“We can’t keep this up indefinitely, you know.”

“True. Eventually the truth will out.”

“Question is, do we do the right thing by letting it happen without explaining ourselves — do we just die without further comment — or do we reveal the truth, and hope humanity has learned a lesson from its enforced unity?”

“Either way, we’ll be villains.”

“Which doesn’t matter. We’ll be dead.”

“Well, I admit to a twinge of pride. It would make me feel better to know we got some credit.”

“We could leave a message in a bottle.”

“Very funny. But if we could, what would the message be? See how easy it was, once you thought you had a common enemy, or Now that you have the GTU in place, don’t be stupid and lose it? Wouldn’t everybody just be furious at having been duped?

“And if we simply die without telling our story, and little by little the world discovers it has been tricked? Would that be any better?”

“Can’t we somehow leave things a permanent mystery — so no one will never be sure about these ‘aliens’?”

“Doubtful. The gravity wave shtick is too simple. Some smart grad student will figure it out eventually.”

“So which way has a better chance of making the GTU — and the Earth
— permanent?”

“You tell me.”

“I think it’s better that we simply die and leave the problem for someone else. I am nervous about this playing God bit, anyway. Too much responsibility.”

“But if we have played it this far, we should do whatever we can to make it stick.”

“How?”

“I say send a message. We have now deciphered the code. The word is that ‘they’ have perceived no evil intent from us, and they will therefore go back home and leave us alone, and maybe come back in a few centuries to see how we’re doing. If we’ve been good, they’ll leave us alone for another while.”

“Like the Twelfth Imam, or Jesus?”

“Right. It’s worked for their believers.”

*

At that moment, there was a whirring sound outside the dome An odd-shaped vehicle appeared. Two post docs in the lab next door couldn’t agree later what it looked like, except that it didn’t look like anything they had ever seen before. The night porter said that Rashid and Doberstein simply walked out of the dome on their own, as if in a trance, their arms stretched out in front of them like sleepwalkers, a door in the bottom of the vehicle opened showing a gleam of blue-green light inside, the door closed again, and the craft simply disappeared. Just vanished. The whirring sound stopped.

We haven’t blown ourselves up yet, and no other alien sightings have yet been reported, so there’s hope.