The furniture in the child-mind's playroom

In 1975, Carole King wrote songs for an animated musical movie with children’s writer Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are, etc..). The album from Really Rosie is actually one of Carole Kings stronger releases and is one of those things thats literally been in my life longer than I can remember. I’d have been
2 or 3 when this music appeared in my house, earlier than my earliest long-term memories and so I literally cannot recall my initial reaction to it. It just one of those things that’s always been there.

Now I can remember listening to the album (rather a lot) as a child, and so it is strongly embedded in my permanent memory. Perhaps in a similar vein, I can’t really remember seeing Star Wars for the first time, but I’m so familiar with it that I can actually listen to the John Williams score and quote about 80% of the dialog in perfect timing. Useless and geeky, I know, but this is what’s embedded in the foundations of my brain.

Anyway, back to Really Rosie. It’s only really recently however that I’ve actually stopped to take notice of the contents. We bought a bunch of Scholastic DVDs for Laz, and one of these includes excerpts from Really Rosie. Now I grew up with the album, which came with a booklet of pictures, but I don’t think I’d ever actually seen the movie. (Of if I have, it’s lost in the mists of my pre-memory). Seeing this as an adult, I’m struck by the oddness of the content. There’s a song about a boy who gets eaten by a lion and then befriends him (in that order). There’s a song about a boy obsessed with Chicken Soup, (and dies eating it according to one of the songs on the album). There’s a counting song about a boy who want’s to be left alone and threatens to eat all his unwanted guests. There’s a lot about eating. Weird.

Anyway the thing that struck me this morning is not that it never occurred to me that these things were weird, but that I’d never even noticed them before. They were just there as part of the landscape of my existence from my haziest early memories. Just an example of a large class of things that I “knew” long before I’d “understood”. When and where did I learn the concept of mortality? Or the idea of “God”?

The latter is a particularly interesting question since my family was never particularly religious. They weren’t militant atheists raging against religion. Rather it was just largely absent. So in what context did I discover that people believed in a God or Gods or the like? I have no memory of learning this rather astonishing piece of information. To this day I have a significant discomfort engaging with deeply religious people. It’s not that I’m afraid they are going to despise me or attack me or whatever. Its a much more fundamental hind-brian feeling. It’s xenophobia pure and simple. It’s a version of the same chill up the spine you get when confronted with a snake or an insect or a spider. The recognition of being in the presence of the alien. Somehow the landscape of my child-mind included both the knowledge of religious belief and the understanding that it was not I, well before I was ever able to consciously discern and evaluate these things. I can only assume that the reverse must be true of many of those brought up in strong religious traditions.

Watching the interaction of this phobia with my burgeoning interest in zen has been interesting to say the least. It’s probably no accident that the kind of spirituality that speaks most directly to me is the kind that is least personified. Spirit in 3rd person is easy to accept: God is everything. Great. I can even just about get with Spirit in 1st person: God is me. But the concept of Spirit in 2nd person: a conscious personal God which is external and other stings like a 9-volt battery on the tongue. Creeps me out like a Ridley Scott movie, and yet that very surrender seems to provide great comfort to others.

All of which seems miles away from where this started.
Hmm...
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Astronomy: not American enough for John McCain?

So apparently John McCain doesn’t see my profession as a worthwhile occupation for good wholesome Americans. In one of his rabid rants about spending he views as wasteful came the following tweet:

#2. $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii - because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy
1:56 PM Feb 27th from web

Now, I don’t know anything about that particular appropriation, but if it’s anything like most astronomy grants it is probably money that would indeed mostly be spent employing people. Certainly the ~$300k grant that I submitted to the NSF last November to study exploding stars is exactly the kind of thing that he seems to be raving about in his top-10 lists on twitter. This sounds like a lot, but mostly it goes to pay for salary, etc, for graduate students. True a great big chunk gets siphoned off by the university, but even that pretty much ends up paying for salaries somewhere.

The implication here seems to be that investing in Astronomy isn’t investing in people. Apparently employing astronomers isn’t employing people. Granted, not many people make a living in astronomy, but I fail to see why it should be discounted as a profession. It certainly pays my bills and has for some dozen years or so. Indeed, many of the things he complains about sound like legitimate proposals for basic research, most of which will ultimately pay for salaries because that’s usually the cost of doing science. Even expensive equipment purchases ultimately boil down to paying someone down the line for their time. Either McCain doesn’t understand this, or he discounts this because research is the activity of “The Elite”. It takes training and education to be a researcher, and so perhaps this isn’t the work of “real Americans”? Are we seeing the classic Republican ploy of conflating elite (i.e. educated) with elitist (the belief that I’m better than all of you).

In either case, to borrow a phrase from a certain 31st century average American: John McCain can bite my shiny metal ass.