Running for Your Life: Harari Heard From

Tech appears to be so awash with guilt for what it is doing to the common good that it would pay thousands in fees to an Israeli philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari, and call him a futurist in order to tag his analysis as commercial rather than academic.

Alas, in America, serious science and fine art must pay homage to entertainment.

Imperial orders organize surrounding bread and circus. Harari ain’t bread, so he must be circus.

Harari, author of “21 Lessons for the 21^st Century,” sees a near future of two classes: elite and useless.

We are so quick to adopt the convenient path before the moral one. We don’t protest or be dubbed a luddite, the phrase, “Your options have changed.” Instead, we regard it as being material to accommodating to the tech-facilitated world.

By this standard, those who go and stay off line accept a lesser life.

Harari rejects this precept. Why? Because he predicts artificial intelligence will disrupt to the point of dissolution of what it means to be human.

Does Silicon Valley clap its ears, or challenge this doomsday message?

No, Silicon Valley invites Harari to speak to its workers.

Why? Surely in order to develop a vaccine to inoculate the virus.

Smart people in power seek a way – above all else – to stay in power.

How best not to neutralize the threat that Harari’s ideas pose but to co-opt them.

Inside, he is pitched to workers as one of them, something to be hacked and, then, exploited.

Even when he preaches the terrible destruction that thrives in the core of the social media tech virus that is bigger than all us.

Next: Running for Your Life: Simply “Reporter”

Running for Your Life: Required Reading

When it comes to writing for a blog, or writing in general, there’s an imperative that lurks unspoken.

That is the writer, as a creature of habit, not of Google algorithms, makes unconscious demands of his readers.

Call it hubris, or nerve, an unrealistic  expectation, but in all things to get the best out of something requires a little work.

It’s actually not selfish but unselfish. You know, the common good, sort of thing.

So, in that spirit, I’m asking you to read two books (or at minimum look them up on Google Nation):

“21 Lessons for the 21^st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari, and

“Reporter” by Seymour Hersh

in preparation for blog posts to come.

P.S. Buy the books if you have the money. It’s part of the message.

Next: Running for Your Life: Harari Heard From

Running for Your Life: Faulkner Fix

Being a native Canadian in America can have its befuddlements … Like trying to figure out US race relations.

Ah, that’s where William Faulkner helps. Consider this theme line in “Go Down, Moses,” that goes a long way to humanizing an understanding from the mind of my kind of Southern Man:

“He’s more old Carothers than all the rest of us put together, including old Carothers. He is both heir and prototype simultaneously of all the geography and climate and biology which sired old Carothers and all the rest of us and our kind, myriad, countless, faceless, even nameless now except himself who fathered himself, intact and complete, contemptuous, as old Carothers must have been, of all blood black white yellow or red, including his own.”  

Next: Running for Your Life: Fall Rhythms

Running for Your Life: Letters and Penmanship

When it comes to disrupting the disrupters, think outside the box, as in outside the pocket computer, tablet, laptop, Alexa, Oculus, Portal+ …

Write a letter. Not an e-mail, a letter, what Lord Byron called,

“The only device combining solitude with good company.”

Not to your “friend” or Congress-friend, but to a loved one: your mom, your BFF, a pal having a hard time of it.

Don’t wait for a reply. Just write another letter.

Buy some correspondence that appeals to you, some first-class, global stamps.

The legibility of your unpracticed script may be on the ugly side in the beginning, but give yourself time. It will improve. And you’ll be so much the better for it.

My advice? Get thee to an artist supply shop and test some pens.

They are not all created equal. Ballpoint can be smudgy; fountain, precious; craftsman, too arty.

I was touched by what I saw in “The Banished Immortal: The Life of Li Bai,” by Ha Jin, about the eponymous hero of this unreadable novel. It seems that some calligraphy has been discovered and attributed to the eighth century poet.

The calligraphy – his penmanship – is seen as a treasure trove for those looking to define the character of this ancient legend to the Chinese.

Sure, Western folks have handwriting analysis, that is associated with voodoo pseudosciences like the horoscope, but Chinese calligraphy study is seen as the real deal.

Find that pen that says your “John Henry” and get down to putting your special words on paper. Yes, the old-fashioned way.

Next: Running for Your Life: Faulkner Fix

Running for Your Life: Pittsburgh 2019

I started this blog going on nine years ago.

The impetus, in part, was a decision to return to marathon running after a hiatus of 23 years.

It began in Pittsburgh, where the Penguins, a team I’ve been following since I played bantam ice hockey in Owen Sound, Ontario, play. The Penguins starting franchise goalie, Les Binkley, was a chum of my local hockey star cousin, Bruce Neath.

So, Pittsburgh it was.

A light rain fell on that day in May 2010. I shocked myself with a personal best time, and the community’s outpouring of support – electric garage bands playing under leaky tarps, come to mind – was also the best I ever experienced during a marathon.

I love this city.

It is with determination and a heavy heart that I will be going back to western Pennsylvania to compete in the 2019 Pittsburgh Marathon on Sunday, May 5.

I will run, as I’m sure countless others will too, in the loving memory of those 11 Jewish worshipers who were massacred last month during services at the Tree of Life Synagogue in the city neighborhood of Squirrel Hill.

Pittsburghers will surely be out in force to cheer on those who’ve chosen this city to run in the months after the killings. It is that kind of close-knit town.

Regardless of my race time next May, this marathon promises to be the best in so many ways, far beyond the personal.

Next: Running for Your Life: Penmanship