“Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our closest living relatives are chimpanzees, gorillas, and orang-utans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just six million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.” –Yuval Noah Harari, from Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

I guess I had seen the book on Amazon, but didn’t make the effort to tackle it until this past week, after a recent interview Stephen Colbert did with the author. It was published in 2015. It is heavy—both literally and as a work of literature, science, history, anthropology, and sociology. It would make for an interesting, i.e. challenging read in a book-of-the-month club at your average house of worship, since Harari posits that myth-making plays such a huge role in our civic structures and governance, that agreed-upon myths are basically the glue that holds everything together, extending to religious beliefs many hold near and dear.

A bit further along (the above quote is on page 5), Harari focuses on the species Sapiens of the genus Homo, and how they emerged as the alpha among all other human species living on the planet—because they had developed the capacity for myth-making, and living and communicating in very large groups. He covers this in a section entitled The Cognitive Revolution. Somehow– and it’s not clear how– Homo Sapiens gained the ability to, as Harari puts it, cooperate successfully by believing in common myths, myths that only exist in peoples’ collective imagination. Myths that include things like the principles and ideals in the Declaration of Independence, or the tenets of Christianity or Buddhism, or the provisions of LLCs, or the existence of nation states.

One more passage from the book: “Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees, and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations, and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today, the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.” (pg. 32)

OK, one more: “Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths– by telling different stories.” (pg. 32)

Might we ponder the implications?

I’m on page 33. I don’t know where this book is going to take me, but I fully expect to enjoy the ride.

Night or day.

Dark or light.

Up or down.

Black or white.

Yes or no.

Depending on where one stands—whether blue or red—this is what one is liable to see, the assessment one is liable to get. No middle ground, just extremes.

Thank you, Donald. You’ve been so good for the country that we need another round of your Prince of Darkness routine. Well, you and the Steves. Or does Mr. Miller prefer Stephen?

The sparrows sound like they’re happy, robins meet the dawn with their soothingly familiar tune, there’s a squirrel that frequents our locale who just lounges about from time to time. High overhead, Canada and maybe Snow Geese have been heading north.

The crocuses are up and blooming, lilies are 6” tall, what grass we have is greening up, the hydrangeas and clematis are trimmed. We bought a soil thermometer the other day, so we can keep tabs on the germination schedule of all the crabgrass in our back yard—gonna try to nip that in the bud, so to speak, this time around. And we might even get a soil sample kit and send it off to Penn State.

It’s like we’re being serious horticulturalists this year. Looking forward to getting started.

Yes, people can get super-rich in a capitalist economy. Good for them. But it’s like Bernie Sanders says—it’s the power and influence and blindness that get concentrated in the hands of this microscopic minority, while a much higher percentage of Americans have to prioritize and decide between medicine or food.

I don’t begrudge anyone the opportunity to make it big, to be educated in the ways of commerce and business, to realize a vision. To be ambitious and talented and clever, or to just stumble onto something that turns into a pot of gold.

It’s more what happens after a business takes off into the stratosphere. There are interests at play, stakes and stakeholders, a desire to maintain a certain lifestyle and control. Even a desire to maximize market share and make more money than any one person would need in a thousand lifetimes.

And the opinions of some mega-rich probably matter more than they should, in part because forceful egos go into hyperdrive.

Words like “skewed,” and “corrupted” and “selfish” and “self-important” and “eccentric” start getting batted about. The rich get rich in part by not paying taxes, or paying significantly less than their fair share, hiding behind the perhaps unspoken assumption that their mere presence in any given community is like a gift from God and how dare they be taxed, and hindered from maximizing profits that get directed to off-shore tax shelters or into elaborate, ostentatious End Times bunkers that sound more like giant Playlands with flammable moats.

Apparently, this is what several mega-rich are doing with the billions they’ve gained under the pretense of producing desirable things. By fleecing America, gaming the system, and forgetting about everyone else. Giving back is a token gesture, and sharing the wealth is a four-letter concept, anathema to the average free-enterprise capitalist.

What the hell was Trump trying to do the other day? It couldn’t have been an effort to inspire. On his way to wrapping up the nomination, he calls us a third world country, paints a picture of failure and despair and darkness? What sort of strategy is this, besides a Miller-inspired rant?

People need to understand that the picture Trump paints is not the reality. It’s not what we aspire to. Good leaders don’t dwell on the negatives. They can surely acknowledge that we have work to do, but they don’t dwell in the dark basement and proclaim they are the only ones who can lift us into the light.

Trump does this all the time, and he never comes through. Because he can’t. He’s entirely incapable of exerting that much energy on behalf of anyone but himself.

It’s not like the border is the only issue on Joe Biden’s plate. Republicans will do whatever they can to ensure that it’s the only thing voters hear about, but surely we must know there are other items on a long list.

What will happen tonight? Will the President deliver a SOTU for the ages, or will Republicans do their best to distract and interrupt and act like tenth-grade morons?

Tough times for America right now. Trump has sown up the nomination, as has Biden. They’re both old, but Trump seems, overall, still capable of handling the rigors of a crazy schedule, even as his agenda is self-serving and absolutely awful in every way. Biden, on the other hand, seems frail at times, more likely to succumb to the never-ending obligations and stress of tending to so many fires.

I don’t know. I like Joe Biden. He was who we needed in 2020, but I have my doubts about his resilience and stamina over the course of another four years. He’s gonna need capable people around him. What no one needs, even if they don’t realize it, is another Trump presidency. Trump and his cronies are poison. A Trump victory cannot happen, for so many reasons. Maybe it wouldn’t be the end of us, but it would go a long way to rendering us unrecognizable in the eyes of many in the world.

Still eight months to go. Yikes. Time enough to envision what makes for true greatness.

Hint: it ain’t whatever Trump is selling, in all its dystopian, dysfunctional darkness.

They must know. Trump supporters can’t be that clueless.

Still, I’d like to know what they expect of him, what they think is going to happen—to them—if he is elected in November. They must be expecting good things, and have no sense of doom, no feel for the coming retribution and chaos that will drag us all down, his supporters included.

It’s very hard to believe that they feel the way they do about him. They get emotional when talking about him. They claim he’s been put through a lot, and look—he’s still standing! He’s so strong, he’s so selfless…

They’re so wrong.

Colbert interviewed Yuval Noah Harari on Monday night. My first reaction was, “Who”? By the end of the interview I was saying, “Amen!”

Harari is a philosopher, an historian, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, a book I need to read now. He is an intellect we would do well to listen to. He spent a fair amount of time talking about AI, but ended on the topic of humankind’s propensity for war and fighting. He said people fight less over food and territory than they do over the imaginary stories in their minds—over “who is God’s favorite child,” or who God gave Jerusalem to, for example.

Harari maintains that if we have conflicts over objects only, then armed conflict is the only solution. But if we’re fighting over who has the best story, then there’s a chance, in some instances, that we can avoid the warring by simply changing the story, finding one that both sides can be happy with. Sounds simplistic, but worth a try, maybe the only option that has a chance of working.

Fighting over who God likes best is never going to end well. Never.

It’s not like there’s nothing else to write about. I could go in lots of different directions, but I seem to dwell on the political stuff, because I’m always trying to make sense of it, trying to get my head around the craziness and the craven abdication of moral duty on the part of people like Trump and the rest of his blind mice.

It’s not like they’re trying to hide anything. He and they are blatantly awful, on some mission to subvert, to steal, to destroy. What is their end game? Seems like there would be many more losers than winners.

And it is all about winning and losing, at least for Trump.

Why are we still talking about him? His monumental neediness should be apparent to everyone by now. We’ve given him the inch and he’s taken a million miles.

Maybe the challenge for Democrats is their hesitancy to not play by some set of rules, which is actually honorable. Keep your heads about you!

The Republicans abandoned that nicety a long time ago, mostly because they were and are desperate. They know the score, they know that what they’re trying to sell is archaic in many ways, quite undesirable– ok, grossly racist and paranoid and self-serving– so they abandoned tact and patience and went directly to pulling wool and cheating and heavy-handed dealings.

They mastered the dark art of gerrymandering, they bought into just being assholes about everything. They’ve sold their souls to foreign players, they’ve apparently decided that a two-party system is cumbersome, especially when the other party wants to spend so much time on social justice and lending a hand and separating church and state and actually wrestling with issues.

When Trump came along, all that was blown out of the water. It became less about listening and rational governance and policy development, and more about simply winning and having control.

The developing tragedy is that the likes of Trump and Miller and Bannon are finding a way to prevail. The nation is suffering because genuine needs are playing second fiddle to stale ideology and a lust for power. And what’s really galling is that this minority appears to be steering the ship.

The actual majority is too acquiescent, maybe lazy. In any case, too quiet. Perhaps there’s a balance to be struck– between reason and decorum, and in your face.