Congratulations. You've found ...

The 'Secret' Page

ES, IT'S ALL TRUE. There is a "secret" page on this site — and you've found it. Admittedly, it's not precisely a hidden page: Anyone randomly mousing the banner area of any page can find it quite by accident. But you will find no buttons on pages in any section for it, no text link (which means virtually no search-engine results), and not even a mention on the site map. It is hidden only in the sense that the Minister D—'s letter was hidden in Poe's "The Purloined Letter."

Why did I make it secret?

In a perfect world, would we have to keep secrets from anyone? Heavens to my Great Aunt Betsy, no! But let's remember that people are fungible, so —

Er, sorry. I seem to be channeling the Secretary of Defense again. Please stand by.

[Pause.]

All right, having read the foregoing, do you really wonder why this page is secret? If so, here it is in the proverbial nutshell: This page will contain my most random ruminations of all — the ones that didn't make it into my actual Random Ruminations page.

On the other hand, you will find things on this page that exist nowhere else.

As of its inception, this page will present: (a) A few words about the flag itself and (b) a sort of retroactive periodic blog-like entity consisting of my often-offbeat analyses of various issues and trends. Over time, other letters of the alphabet will appear here — and, with them, some additional "secret" material that I may choose to release only to those who find this page. A reward, if you will, for the curious.

The flag

Our frangible world, with no boundaries visible from space, stands alone in an illimitable void. We are all, as the proverb has it, in this together, whether for weal or for woe. We either take the steps, together, as a species, that are necessary to preserve this earth and all that makes it worth living on, or we do not.

And so, when it came time to design a flag for the Unity Party, I kept it simple. Starkly so.

There is our terraqueous globe, a few thin turquoise lines of latitude and longitude etched on the shattering black cold of the void, and no more. There are no continents, as in the United Nations flag, for such cannot be depicted without either bias or inaccuracy (in the case of the U.N., Australia is visible in a depiction viewed from the North Pole ... it was either that or exclude it and appear to prefer the northern hemisphere). And the background is black, despite any popular associations of that color with piracy, because space is essentially black.

The flag was drawn and animated to my specifications by a member of the Solidarity Alliance who currently prefers to remain anonymous, but I will take this as an opportunity to express my thanks.

That blog-like entity

May 8, 2004:

We are one world and one species, but we place imaginary lines across land, sea and air, and fight each other over them. We claim that we fight and kill and die in service of lofty ideals and principles, but in reality our logic is compromised by patriotism, the culturally programmed assumption that our nation's moral supremacy justifies any action. This in turn blinds us to the actual reasons for our wars, which are fought to further the parochial, short-term economic and political interests of our respective ruling elites.

War is but one manifestation of domestic and foreign policies written categorically to aid those elites and the corporations they control: History is full of examples, from before the time of Caesar to this day in the early 21st century, of plutocrats using their wealth, obtained in part through their disproportionate influence over the state, to dictate policy with an eye to their own further enrichment. And today, corporations have managed to enact "free trade" initiatives that are really "accountability-free trade" plans; in effect, states, being limited in jurisdiction to their own borders, have surrendered their effective ability to regulate trade that extends across borders.

The consequence: Those who wield ultimate power in this corrupt scenario (the owners and directors of metanational corporations) are free to ignore the increasingly irrelevant imaginary lines that divide us, while we, who must be empowered to constrain corporate power, are expected to continue to respect those lines.

As I will discuss elsewhere, the corporate charter — the "rules to live by" for big business — makes for some alarming reading. In essence, as any advocate of "free trade" will tell you, corporations exist to make a profit ... and to maximize that profit. It is generally held that any executive who seriously threatened to reduce a corporation's profit margin, and accompanying stock dividends, by voluntarily improving conditions for workers, tightening pollution controls or using better materials would be a candidate for dismissal. Thus, it is futile to expect corporations to behave responsibly; they are institutionally incapable of doing so in any sustained manner.

Thus, as long as commerce remains metanational, regulation and enforcement must come from a similarly metanational body. Logically, this demands a world government. The United Nations, as currently constituted, cannot wield sufficient authority, and its charter leaves too much veto power in the hands of a few nations for that to change. A new metanational union must ultimately arise, this one a federation to which each member government has willingly ceded a degree of sovereignty.

Such a union will also become increasingly essential outside the commercial realm, where crime, political and economic imperialism and terrorism/asymmetrical warfare have also become metanational. There are ever-growing challenges that we as a species must collaborate in meeting, or ours will become a dystopia worthy of the darker visions of a William Gibson: a vast global sprawl of overcrowded humanity elbowing for breathing room in a world whose other animals have all perished through loss of habitat and life itself has become a disposable commodity.

Such a hell on earth is not yet ineluctable. We can unite, as I believe is our historical destiny; and, as another great writer, T.H. White, so eloquently phrases it, "The imaginary lines on the earth's surface only [need] to be unimagined." It will be a tremendous struggle, and one that will very likely not end in my lifetime, but that is what the Unity Party ultimately seeks.

February 26, 2004:

If meter is the letter, then cadence is the spirit of verse.

September 11, 2003:

Racism and nationalism are alike no more than applied prejudice. As such, they are offensive to reason as well as to justice.

September 11, 2003:

When George W. Bush was running for president, he promised that, if elected, he would run America like a business. And he has.

Unfortunately, Bush forgot to tell us the name of the business he had in mind: Enron.

September 3, 2003:

Is creative genius incompatible with complete sanity?

I would not be amazed to find it so, for it appears to me that there is a driving and sustaining obsession of some kind that alone can furnish the animating spark of quasidivine abnihilation that some call their muse.

Too "well-rounded" a personality may diffuse itself among manifold pursuits; the abnihilator turns exclusively to his or her particular metier. Once in every hundred billion births, however, there comes that singular child who will grow into a polyabnihilator: one who exercises many creative talents in unrivalled abundance. Examples include Leonardo da Vinci and virtually no one else known to history.

September 2, 2003:

Odd.

Here I am, a Macintosh user since 1986, the former managing editor of a newspaper edited and formatted by computer, and a webmaster ... and yet, I can't compose freely, somehow, on a computer. This despite 18 years of practice.

I will perhaps be called (wrongly) a Luddite, and (rightly) sadly, grossly inefficient, but here is the sad, gross truth:

I verily believe that every sentence I have written that may outlive me, I have written on paper and in ink.

Perhaps pixels are just too fleeting.

(As a 21st-century John Keats might eulogize: "Here lies one whose name was writ on electrons.")

September 2, 2003:

In light of an article I've now read on BBC.com pinpointing the right cerebral cortex as the locus of pessimistic thinking, and the left as that of optimistic, I'm rethinking an old humorous adage:

"Left-handed people are the only ones in their right minds,"

It is also generally known that artists and musicians ply trades that call upon talents residing chiefly in the right hemisphere. It is somewhat less known — although a separate BBC story appearing alongside the first, while it specifically examined jazz musicians, did several times refer to it as if it were common knowledge — that there is a clear correlation between those trades and markedly elevated rates of mental illness, mood disorders, substance abuse and suicide.

I cannot help but wonder, now, what applications this information will find, and what will be its implications for left-handers, artists, musicians, the mentally ill, and society as a whole.

September 2, 2003:

There seems to be a bit of my brain (and I have an odd hunch that it's somewhere in my right cerebral cortex) that I can't control and which in fact operates uniformly to thwart and frustrate my aims, and particularly those of import or nobility.

Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, I will call it my "Imp of the Perverse."

Quite apart from its significant role in constant carping, endless disputes with my every decision, and frequent dominations or subjugations of my better self for the express purpose of undermining my greatest plans and projects, this imp is guilty of a crime that nothing can ever redress.

It is the source and seat of all the song-fragments that get caught up in its toils, digested in its vitriolic humors, and endlessly — sometimes even audibly — regurgitated, a toxic sludge worthy of the Erie Canal at its finest, into my futilely protesting encephalon for immediate processing. (This process assumes absolute, preemptive priority over such lesser functions as coherent cogitation.)

August 27, 2003:

The bigot's motto:

Ah, how fine, how perfect this world could be
(If only everyone were just like me)!

August 13, 2003:

My word of honor on this: If I am ever elected to any public office, or even try running for one, I will never employ a speechwriter. Let each candidate speak only his own words, articulate her own thoughts and principles, and voters will be able far more clearly to assess the character and intellectual wherewithal of each prospect and cast their ballots accordingly.

August 11, 2003:

Where is the curiosity in what passes for mainstream American journalism today?

We know, for example, that the infamous "sixteen words" in George W. Bush's State of the Union fiasco were false: Iraq had not tried to buy uranium from Niger. We also know that the "intelligence" upon which the fatal words were predicated had been gleaned from a forged document.

Hooray.

Now, when is someone in the major media going to ask who forged that document and why?

August 2, 2003:

When the current neoconservative cabal elevated George W. Bush to the White House, it hired, however unwittingly, Jerry Jones' "501st man." (The original 501st man was Barry Switzer. Remember him, Dallas Cowboys fans?)

August 1, 2003:

The better to defend America's security, the Pentagon recently tried to allow terrorists to win money by betting on when they were going to attack. Feel safer yet?

RETURN TO HOME PAGE

GO TO SITE MAP

RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE