The Tower

Meet me at the top

מגדל  בבל

4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
— Genesis 11

I try not to drink anyone's Kool-Aid. Especially my own, of which I have oceans. Mine is all in a well protected place, neatly bottled, labeled and stored in my climate controlled Kool-Aid cellar. It's there, I know it's there. Buried deep and locked up tight, but strangely readily accessible. Any time I want I can take a sip. Or try and slip a sip into someone else's carafe.

I can't help it. Quite often I'll catch myself automatically accepting a thing I hear or read if it supports one of my own erector set colossuses of opinion and prejudice. If I don't watch myself I'll incorporate it into one of my mental machines. Another wheel, another pulley, another level, more brick and mortar and the mental ziggurat grows. Soon I will reach unto the heavens. I will then challenge the throne of God with my marvelous mental machine. My golden path to a better paradise. I'll just take another sip first. Try some.

Then I have to stop myself and ask the question, How do you prove it? Where's the evidence? Where is the rebuttal? The source? What are their qualifications? Their bona fide? Is this legitimate? Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. Many times it's ambiguous. I don't want errors in my marvelous revelation machine. I would hate to reach for heaven and find myself in a hell of my own design.

So I'm a contrarian. No matter what position you are presenting, what cocktails of Kool-Aid you are serving, pro, con, left, right, up, down. I'll say, Prove it!

I will intentionally seek out works that are, shall we say unpopular? I've read Mein Kampf. I'm reading The Gulag Archipelago. I have never read Mao's Little Red Book, though I own a copy. I understand that it is mostly plagiarized from Confucius and Sun Tzu and other Chinese philosophers, but since I never read it, I have no right to an opinion. I read Vladimir Putin's speeches and listen to his four hour long press conferences. There are reporters there from Der Spiegel, Al Jazeera, CNN, and many others.

Questions could be softball, or domestic, or they can be quite penetrating.

Mr. President. What do you think about the reviling of yourself and Russia happening during the American presidential run? That's just campaign trail rhetoric. Next January we are prepared to work with whomever is in the White House.

Mr. President. Last year you pledged to fix such-and-such problem. Nothing appears to have improved. Can you explain this? Sometimes he will report that progress has been made, but some times he will admit that they were unable to fix it. Some problems, like corruption, just keep coming back.

Can you imagine any American Politician admitting a problem might be too insidious to fix? Me, neither.

I lived in Israel before it became an apartheid state. I bungled my way around Europe by rail and stayed in youth hostels. I traveled through Russia, talking to people, asking questions, many quite sensitive, seeing if they were free with their opinions or were they looking over their shoulders in case the KGB was watching?

I read web sites before simply dismissing them as 'conspiracy theories.' Alex Jones, Breitbart. Art Bell (an old one.) When I am convinced that they have nothing to say, I stop. Although Art Bell was harmlessly amusing.

People will say, Why are you reading that propaganda? Are you a Putin puppet/conspiracy theorist/racist/misogynous/something else I don't like? I'll say, Oh. Is THAT what I am? And I thought I was practicing due diligence in verifying something before believing it! I suppose I should believe your propaganda instead? What flavor is your Kool-Aid? Take another swig. Here, have some of mine.

I've pretty much given up on western news sources. I mentioned to someone once that Thursday is gay night in all the gay bars and clubs in Russia. Her jaw dropped. Nobody told you that? Isn't that kind of important when discussing Russian culture's approach to gays?

Propaganda is not always about lying. It's more about cropping the truth, clipping off carefully what you don't want anyone to know or masking off bits like a gerrymandering politician. Or making unreferenced and repetitive accusations. Anything relevant that you don't want anybody to know goes down the memory hole. Confusion of tongues, indeed.

Now is the point where people say, What we all have to do is... and tell everybody else what they should do, but not what the speaker should do. Climb my ziggurat! It goes all the way to heaven! Don't look over there. Look up here at my beautiful Tower of Truth. Just drink this, you'll feel great...

And, of course everyone else is thinking the same.

We don't need a LORD to confound our tongues and scatter us abroad upon the face of all the earth. We're doing a great job by ourselves.