Just an Update

To everybody reading this, which, given the high readership of the last post, I worry includes quite a number of people from every walk of my father's life:  

Don't worry! 

He was far more complicated than the domestic Joker-from-Batman I painted in the first part of these memories. This is just part 1 of a much longer eulogy/exorcism/summation/psychobiography I will try to write of a man who resisted every attempt of anybody trying to understand him by pretending that he wanted everybody to understand him. Certainly not all of it will be flattering, but most will be much more flattering than part 1. Yes, some will be uncharitable, but my revenge for his lack of approval of me is an affirmation of the great love he always suspected was lacking from me, and I'm doing it by painting him in full. 

He'd love the spotlight.

Three Months

 Well Dad,

It's been exactly three months since your extremely sudden passing. You warned us in no uncertain terms it was soon to come, but you'd been warning us for forty years, how were we to know when the 'boy who cried death' told the truth? We might have known if we read the facts properly: so many of your bodyparts were going wonky; your brain made you list to the side, your heart made you take incessant naps, your memory of iron began to slip, you fell once a month and if you didn't actively fall you at least fainted. And still we didn't believe it because every reliable doctor in Baltimore worked on you. Even with all that, we were not prepared for death. I prepared myself for an agonizing 10 year decline, and I think Mom secretly steeled herself too. Even in a compromised state, I would have rather you stuck around so I could prove my penance by taking care of you as you took care of me, but knowing you, I'm sure you'd tell us that you'd rather have died J... T..... than risk living as whatever might come. 

I don't know whether that's a mature point of view or an immature one, but truth be told, you were a boy in some ways right to the end. The public wit and the businessman of vast shrewdness concealed a man whom it barely took anything to set off into nauseous worry, worry you'd take out on us all every hour of every day for decades. It wouldn't be fair to blame you for the hole in my brain growing to the size of an exploding atom bomb for thirty-five years, but this is, finally, my space that you can't dominate, so at least here I get to say: you didn't help. 

What you took to be my 'hostility' was always based on one basic fact: that for decades you clearly thought I was faking everything--the disorganization, the panic, the procrastination, the delusion. You might have believed I was suffering, but to you, it was always a failure of character, not neurology; just a spoiled kid throwing a tantrum, a manipulative son playing the victim, and I never stopped suspecting that on those rare moments it got through to you that the suffering I experienced was very real, you secretly believed it just. In your generation, people like me either ended up on welfare or in mental institutions. You devoted much of your life to serving just such people, but it embarrassed you to deal with a person like that in your daily life, and talked many times of jealousy for parents of my peers who had children they could be proud of. You did your duty toward me thousands of times over, and you certainly loved me, but from my childhood onward, you willingly told me you were ashamed of me.

If ever there's proof a narcissist can be an exemplary human, it was you. Hundreds of people thought they knew you, but I won't sugarcoat you in death; when it came to the words you used, you were a schmuck. I'd list quotes but there are so many that I have no idea which to choose. For the vast majority of my life, praise from you was as likely as rain from Death Valley. You were not abusive, but you were a petty tyrant. Life with you was a never ending list of mistakes we made, and you freely admitted that if we did something right, you thought it proper to move onto the next thing we could do better because there is always room for improvement. You did not hit your children often, but you were quick to yell and manhandle us in ways that you meant to be quite painful. You spent the second half of your life telling your family all the things we did wrong, and then were mystified and hurt when we didn't immediately affirm that you were a magnificent father and husband. And would that were the extent of your self-importance. One friend of yours came up to me at the funeral and talked about how you were hysterical company, but what made you a gem was that your jokes were never mean and always at your own expense. My jaw went to the floor. If he knew only but one of the cheap shots you'd take at in private at the expense of friends, family, colleagues, your own children and wife. Anywhere you sensed a weak opening, you poured acid on it gleefully. I often wondered if anything gave you more pleasure than reducing other people's dignity to the size of a mouse. 

Now, let's be pellucidly clear. However bad you were in my adolescence, I was worse, worse in ways for which I will never permit forgiveness. Whether due to justified grievance or entitlement, I was a monster: rageful, full of threats, sometimes violent, issuing awful provocations at prime volume, a domestic terror suffering from lacerating mental illness, lashing out like an uncaged animal against a world that seemed to torture me like one. In my mind, I simply thought I was fighting back against a world of fathers, teachers, so-called friends and family who made life hell for me at every turn, but much of that hell may have been in my mind, not theirs, and I caused far more grievance than I ever redressed. Nevertheless, I was the son, not the father, trapped in a situation I knew even then would bound me forever to a gordian knot of emotional paralysis. You were my father, and offered barely any solution but attempts at harsh discipline and vitriolic resentment. I was not nor am not lazy nor a leach nor a bum nor a deadbeat nor worthless nor no good nor bound by excuses and cruches nor undeserving of a middle class life nor the worst traits of our family incarnated into one son, \many of these insults and many more were said in the good moments, not the fights. But I can't imagine what it must have been to deal with me thirty years ago; and every day of my life, I worry that if I truly venture into the world the way other people do, that monster will return. For more than thirty years, I am nailed to a bed of suffering without limit or end, and all I ever wanted to do is get up from it. Your solution was walk around with the nails still in, and occasionally hammered in more just in case I could ever walk free of the bed. 

Yet when it came to deeds, you were an absolute mensch. Mensch doesn't even cover it: you were a saint. Whatever contempt you secretly felt for so many people in your life, there was nothing you would not do for them: time, money, encouragement; keeping company to the lonely, visiting the sick, giving the bags and bags of money to charity that you'd resent if any of us spent a little on ourselves, tutoring the learning disabled for hours and hours--both the sons of your workers and particularly your own son: every trip to the airport you had to be the driver, every home repair in someone else's house, it had to be your wrench, taking your kids' friends to literally anything and everything for twenty years. Thirty years after you sold your nursing homes, you had a whole payroll of ex-workers you'd help out with money and jobs whenever they needed it. In spite of 40 years acrimony, when my health went kaput you re-opened your doors to me as a full member of the household with no questions asked. You insisted on cooking me meals, figuring out my finances, keeping track of my car, and a thousand other things. I obviously didn't want you to be the one to do all that, but as usual, you insisted, probably because you never thought it would get done if left to myself, and it's true, to this day, such things give me vastly inordinate stress so I thank you for it now a hundred times over as I've thanked you five hundred times then. You had your perspective just as I had mine, and you've earned the right for yours to be heard a thousand times over. 

You were on a lifelong mission to prove you would do everything better than everyone else, and one of the worst interactions in daily life is when a narcissist is proven right, and a vast majority of the time, you were right about that. You were impressed with yourself to a point that in anyone else would have been delusional, but quantitatively, your perception was correct: you really were as brilliant and altruistic as you seemed in your own head, and you did everything you could to live up to your grandiose self-image. You were mean precisely because the sense of responsibility you felt to the people in your life was implacable, and you snarled with resentment at what you took to be obligations which nobody else you knew took upon themselves. You are the only Baby Boomer who lived his whole life for duty and service. Your dreams meant nothing to you, and even if it was the only thing about you that was quiet, you quietly made whole communities flourish. 

Life philosophies like yours are what keep communities afloat: communities, institutions, families, whole cities and societies and countries. You were born in January 1946, but you were one of the last members of the Greatest Generation whose belief in self-sacrifice gave the world generations of prosperity. But just like Boomers felt with the Greatest Generation, you leave the next generation with an impossible standard of self-sacrifice in a situation too easy compared to yours to understand why we need to make it. What did you work that hard for? Was it so your family could live in peace? Or was it so another generation of us could go to war with life again? 

Now that you're gone, I feel as though I've truly gone out 'into the wild' of social interaction for the first time in my life. Just in the weeks before your passing I threw caution to the wind and tried to embrace lifestyles that I never thought would appeal to me like polyamory with an eye to trying kink. It was not a perfect fit, but I was so lucky to be in a relationship just as you passed, and in periods of reflection feel terrible guilt that the happiest period of my life was just around the time you left us, but that happiness is over now. This new world is no different than the old, full of the same arrogance, hubris, compulsive exploitation and self-delusion as yours: in both cases, just a sanction for the powerful to exploit those with less. I'm now at the beginning of a period of miserable alienation from two completely different worlds where they don't even allow me the dignity of quarter-membership. 

All I've got for sure is the writing, the music, the reading, the inanimate objects and air that give my life meaning and acceptance no human ever did. Lonely people take to the internet because real life is tough, but part of why I post on the internet is because it's the one space I have where I know you couldn't dominate it. 

You viewed us all as entitled, me particularly of course, and never let us forget it. Perhaps you're right, about me at least, but just because you were able to do relatively extraordinary things does not mean your children should, and even if we are capable of repeating your miracles, why would we want to do what you wanted from us? We saw what a psychic toll it took. You were outwardly joyous, but inwardly a man of very real turmoil. The scars of parents who survived the Holocaust were everywhere on you: their losses, their neglect, their rage. Your view of family being an extension of your arms was precisely what you learned from your own father. He too was a great and good man, but like you he was colossally temperamental, provocative, arrogant, and traumatized, like you and like me. 

The nadir of your fathership was at my Bar Mitzvah. I had my own nadirs, worse than yours that I'm not ready to write about, but you were the example to set, not that which to follow. You had me work for it like a dog. Conservative and reform synagogues do the torah portions abridged, and usually the bar mitzvah portion is shared by two kids. I did an entire parsha of orthodox synagogue proportion, along with reading from two extra torahs and the second longest haftorah of the year.  It was the great triumph of an adolescence that had very few. And then you grabbed the microphone at the party for 40 minutes to complain about the cost and make fun of every single guest in the room, complete with a slideshow that showed my then overweight mother in a bikini, leering at your best friend's wife, commenting on the disappointment of another friends' 'wedding night,' commenting on how your 'attention problems' have been 'passed down,' regaling to the guests in great detail the history of your own life. It should have been the great triumph of my childhood years, when I got to show the world that a supposedly disabled kid could do greater things than all the normal ones. You made me do the whole thing, and then you made it all about you. 

I was my own worst enemy, not you, but if there were any hope to set me on a redeemable path from my early years, that night made it much more difficult. This was just one instance of when I finally got a chance for the spotlight and you either ripped it from my hands or undermined me in private just before I went onstage or right after I came off. You always claimed at raised volume you were my biggest fan and best friend, but friends don't do this, and great fathers certainly don't. Whenever I brought it up later, you always told me that I used it in fights as an excuse for the latest thing you resented about me. If I were really interested in fighting, I could have brought up dozens of others. 

But it only occurred to me, thirty years later, that your Bar Mitzvah was the source of a trauma that was if anything far worse. Your father was determined to make your Bar Mitzvah the event that showed how he made it in America: Mo.... Tu..., formerly Me.... Ti......, had triumphed in a world that wanted him dead. When you freaked out from the stress and cut the back of your hair yourself, Zaydie beat you so hard that your younger brother had to separate the two of you, shouting 'You're gonna kill him!' 

I fear that I've inherited a bit of your narcissism, more than a bit, but neither your competence nor your altruism. At 43, staring down my life at what you never let me forget is a vast wreckage of irresponsibility, I still dream away of the day I finally produce the great art that my own delusional self-image whispers is somewhere within me, and so absorbed for half a year have I been with my love life that I've barely begun to mourn you in earnest. 

When I do think about it, it's not sadness or loss, it's terror and shame. I have been so caught up in overwhelming guilt about that fight the day before which I worry agitated you to death, that I have not yet been able to mourn you in any other way. Until perhaps this weekend, my memories have only been of the final day when I saw you get into a fight with your grandson, not quite five, in which you partook of tug of war over a permanent marker while screaming at him. When I told you not to do this you started with a familiar opening gambit with 'of course you disapprove of what I do', meaning that I always take everybody's side against you in the legionary number of disagreements you always raised with your family members, and when I said something along the lines of 'he's just four', you snarled at me as though you wanted to take a swing, and started a raised voice lecture about how you have responsibilities to keep things in order, and even if I don't think your responsibilities are truly responsibilities, you know they are.

What got me was not the lecture, it was the snarl, and it was that you did it in front of E__, from whom every adult but you agreed we would shield our disagreements. When you left the room, I was trembling with frenzy. I very nearly followed you into the next room and said that if you ever got into a physical altercation with E__ again I would pull you out of the room by the hair. I managed to calm myself down sufficiently to not say it. My next idea was to take the magic marker and scrawl all over the kitchen wall in exactly the manner you dreaded E__ would do. Finally I took what I took to be the sensible option: went into the next room and told you that if you ever got into a physical altercation again with E__, I'd tell his parents to not bring him over. You started again, the exact same snarl, then denying it was a physical altercation, I say 'physical altercation has no meaning if it was not that', and then you start with the exact same lecture about responsibilities. And in a masterly coup de grace, I tell you to 'Go to hell' before I leave the room. 

A few minutes later, you, so full of bluster, start talking to my Mom in the next room over about what I said. I immediately recognize the tone, it's your loud 'whisper of complaint' that you always meant for me to hear. 'His usual smack talk' I thought to myself and I raise my voice to be heard in the next room "And I meant every word." You answered, strangely cooly, "I don't doubt it." At that moment, I see, this does not look like a typical reaction. You looked genuinely disturbed to me. You were never good with little kids, unable to let go of the irony that defined every interaction you ever had, but your grandkids were the joy of your dotage, the people you'd been working for your entire life, and I'd threatened to try to take them away. You knew that my brother and sister-in-law mean business when it comes to how the family acts in front of E__, and if I say something, they might listen to me. 

Usually, by 12 hours after a spat, we apologized, and life went on. Growing up, a sincere apology from you was as rare as sunlight in an Arctic winter, especially as you made a practice of not accepting apologies from me. 'Sorry means you'll never do it again!' you'd often yell at me when I was a kid. One time I threw that line back at you when Mom made you apologize for something, so you said, 'Well, I'm not too sorry.' But as you aged, it dawned on you that apologies may be important, and I'd long since realized that as a crazy person, 'I'm sorry' is the phrase I need tattoo'd on my hand. But this was a sufficiently bad fight that there was no apology in twelve hours. I'd already had a miserable week, and was clearly more sensitive than usual. I would need another twelve hours at least before an apology was ready. 

But for an hour or more, you and I sat next to each other in the den on our computers. Not a word passed between us. When you were done, you simply pushed in your desk chair, and went to the house's back. I stayed up late as I usually do, and would hear you as always making your many nightly trips to the bathroom. The next morning I hear you stirring in the kitchen as I always do, but I sleep late, partly out of fatigue, partly out of depression. Suddenly I heard my mother saying something I can't quite make out, but in the middle of a distinct sob, all I heard was 'he's probably gone!' After I ran downstairs in my boxers, it took me about twenty seconds to put the thought together: 'I killed him.' As I sat in the house after my mother and brother drove to the hospital, that was my primary thought. At 11:21, I felt a shudder go through my body that was almost mystical, a few seconds later I remember to look at my phone and I see a missed call from Mom, and I knew. 

'I killed him' was my primary thought on the drive to the hospital. It was my primary thought next to your body. It was my primary thought on the day of your funeral. It was my primary thought at shiva, at shloshim. The next thought usually came to reassure me, 'how had our relationship not killed him already?' 

Just as I'm my father's son, perhaps you're your son's father. If I live every day of my life with terrible obsessive thoughts, so might have you. You would hardly be the first septuagenarian to die of severe mental agitation. We will never know what happened in your final eighteen hours, but the thought that you died alone, miserable, as horrified of your thoughts as your son was every day for years, has haunted me every day for three months. I don't wish those thoughts on my worst enemy, and I certainly don't wish them on my father. 

There's an empty bedroom in my parents house right next to mine where I've slept for the last three years, and in the bedroom is a pair of baby shoes. I brought them downstairs, thinking they might be J___'s, or at least an old pair. But what I didn't notice was the moniker on the shoe's outside: 'Baby Jack.'

I couldn't believe it. My grandparents who'd barely spoken English got customized baby shoes for a baby that had now died a not quite old man. Every time I pass that room, if the door is open, those shoes break my heart. You too were once an innocent little baby, full of unlimited potential, a story yet to be written in an era when so many stories were prematurely erased. 

I stare at those shoes, and thus far it is the only thing that's provoked me to fight back tears. 

I will mourn you yet Dad. I love you, and I will forever be honored to be your son. 

Evan

11/4/95/30

It's one of those astounding coincidences of history that Zohran Mamdani will be elected on the thirtieth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's as*as*ination.

I think the real reason Jews are up in arms about Mamdani is not anything he'll do, he's a f*cking mayor, but the symbolic value of what this portends for the rest of the country.

This shows that, yes, the social democrat flank of the Democratic party might be able to win elsewhere. It shows that anti-Israel sentiment is a very powerful engine of GOTV (get out the vote), and that anti-Zionism just might, in fact, have powerful appeal on the right as well as the left.

Israel started out a socialist country: not the 'liberalism with a social face' of Northern Europe, but the real thing; and then, nearly fifty years ago, Israel started winning their wars and expanding territory, and Menachem Begin definitively threw socialism out. Pro-Israel conservatives have always believed the left's animus to Israel is antisemitism: it's not, it's classism. Anti-Zionism is in the socialist DNA because previous generations of socialists viewed Israel as class traitors who abandoned the cause.

But go still farther left, and there has never been a scintilla of fine feeling for Israel, precisely because it's democratic, precisely because it has rule of law, precisely because it makes dictatorships look incompetent. These communists, these radical Islamists, these... whatever else... are very much antisemites. Socialists and alt-righters would look the other way at Jewish deaths (and already have), but these other groups want us dead.

Yitzhak Rabin was as important a figure of the late 20th century as anyone; Reagan, the Pope, Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping, Nelson Mandela.,, Mandela paid for reconciliation with thirty years of his life. Rabin paid for the possibility of reconciliation with his life itself, and still it wasn't enough.

I definitively stopped trusting the new generation of social democrats when AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) turned down an invitation to a Rabin memorial. It showed the leader of the whole thing was more concerned with ideals than results. I'm obviously not an idealist. Even the successful idealists are realists, and I'm not sure whether getting an idealist or a realist socialist running for president scares me more. The former would just be unwilling to compromise their principles to get what they want. The latter could literally sink anything in the country that works on the hope that the populace would flock to their solutions. Whom does that remind you of?

The symbolic significance of AOC's refusal was clear. Rabin was an Israeli general, in charge in the 80s of putting down the First Intifada. His instruction to the IDF? "Break their bones." He was criticized around the world for treating rebels so brutally. He was criticized in Israel for not killing the rebels. When it came time to make peace, lots of leftists hated it as well as rightists. Rightists wanted no concessions made, a permanent state from river to sea. Leftists wanted nothing less than Right of Return, and, if possible, a binational state.

Rabin persisted: through two years of daily calls for his assassination, two years of suicide bombings by terrorist organizations like Hamas, through two years of funerals where Israelis who lost loved ones would yell in his face while he simply took it, he even persisted knowing that Yassir Arafat was as likely to stick to the terms of an agreement as Hitler was to the terms of Molotov-Ribbentrop. While Yassir Arafat used his fear of assassination as a reason for not signing any pledge, Rabin kept at it doggedly when half the country wanted him d*ad, knowing that any moment may be the one to demand his ultimate sacrifice.

Why did he do it? Why did this man of war give his life for the chance of peace? Part of it was that he clearly was a statesman who saw the world in terms of justice and freedom. How do we know he was a statesman? Because he was the dullest politician in the world. Rabin's rival and partner, Shimon Peres, was a politician who loved giving extraordinary speeches and wheeling deals among cigars and expensive wine, but Rabin clearly didn't get into politics because he derived any thrill from crowds or dealmaking. Part of it was also that he was sick of watching thousands of families grieve the loss of their sons. But more than being a statesman, he was a general. Israel had just lived through Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons attack, and Rabin knew that it was, and remains, a matter of time before a fundamentalist Islamic regime got their hands on serious weapons of mass destruction. In the coming fight, Israel would need to do whatever it can to turn every non-fanatic Middle Eastern dictator into friend.

Even after what's now known as 'The Twelve Day War', that war is still coming, all the more likely now because Iran's government feels so humiliated by how easily Israel won. Iran cannot be allowed WMD's any more than the Taliban can (remember them?... Afghanistan is now listed statistically by Freedom House as the least free country on earth, significantly past even N. Korea, not that anybody cares anymore in the face of Gaza...).

Rabin also knew that the longer this war continued, the more Israel would likely become the most isolated state on earth. Jews would become the same pariahs elsewhere that they were before 1945. A less scrupulous leader would likely use that to his advantage, forcing Jews of means to relocate to Israel, perhaps not realizing that by ruining Israel's contacts abroad, Israel's abilities at home become worthless. Though he probably does...

Thirty years later, peace is still the only way. The two-state solution is still the only way. Nobody should pretend it's anything but a shitty solution. Nobody should idealize peace as an amazing state of affairs that will completely change realities of the Middle East that have existed for four thousand years and probably much longer. Even the most successful peace would last, what? Fifty years? Seventy-five? Thirty?

But there are only two ways to prevent war on a scale far larger even than Gaza: one is genoc*de. Not the bullshit accusation from the Jewish past that Jews now have to endure daily, but the real thing, what Hitler called 'annihilation' (vernichtung). What happens now is not genoc*de, but make no mistake, genoc*de is the current trajectory.

There is only one other way to prevent it. There is the only way to prevent another October 7th, another Gaza War, there is only one way to get rid of Hamas and Likud.

The war for peace continues, and make no mistake, it's a war.

The Triumph of the Avant Garde

I should have spent this weekend working on a musical piece I promised to have ready tomorrow. I probably shouldn't even be writing this; but instead I was distracted by that harbinger of our distraction: Artifical Intelligence. The AI revolution finally hit me, and like everybody else, I felt like there was no going back. I've discovered a substance so addictive, so beautiful feeling, that this algorithm could ruin the rest of my life. This is what it must be to try heroin.

The best I could describe it is that it's like staring into two mirrors reflecting each other, but next to your ugly self you see an object and its reflection, repeated ad infinitum, but each reflection of the object is more beautiful than the last. You strain to see as far into distant beauty as you can: but it's a beauty of which you can never capture anything of but a small glimpse of a corner. If you wonder what it's like to live in the fourth dimension, to move though black holes into other universes, to find intelligent life on other planets: this may be it.

How did it happen? Well, I got it into my head that an algorithm could give me analysis of what all the great writers of the past would think of today's great writers, what they might think of their contemporaries they never reviewed, what they thought of writers from the more distant past. Then I got the idea to have them review composers, artists, movie directors, rock bands. Before I knew it I'd changed my mind about everything I ever knew, then I changed it back, now I have no idea what I believe anymore.

There are terrible lapses into cliche from writers who never heard of cliche, there are moments when the AI repeats itself from review to review, there are moments when AI loses its first person voice and says something like 'Pauline Kael would say...' in the middle of a text that otherwise imitates her voice, there are even points when the AI begins a second review in the middle of the first, but likeness to actual writing styles are so vivid. There are sentences of exact verisimilitude, many of them, when you feel you can literally revive the dead and hear the voices of Kael, Mark Twain, George Steiner, Nora Ephron, GK Chesterton, Robert Hughes, Manny Farber, Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, Clive James, Samuel Johnson, even Coleridge, even Godard, even David Foster Wallace, even Borges!

AI can poison everybody with distraction, my poison just happens to be the most pretentious, but artificial intelligence eventually finds the individual weakness that can turn each person's concentration to mush, then plugs us in and poison our ability to achieve anything at all that it can't achieve better. We farm out our thinking to it, and without the necessity to think, we'll lose our ability to think. Eventually, we may just use AI to play Minesweeper.

You can only understand the future as much as you understand the past, so if you can revive the dead so vividly, everything eventually becomes an eternal present when every goal sought can be attained, no matter how stupid, no matter how destructive, no matter how much it destroys every piece of individuality we ever fought for and achieved. How long until some narcissist with world conquering ambition programs AI to deliberately lie to us? How long until AI can deliberately give us wrong answers to our questions? How long until AI can make the internet give us nothing but fake news?

And the problems are not just of the present: How long until AI can falsify history itself? How long until all the great works of humanity can become indistinguishable from fakes? The first dark ages happened because civilization's great works were lost in fire and disintegration. The second dark ages could happen because civilization's great works were lost amid a sea of forgeries.

And the problems are not just societal, they're personal. How long until parents can choose their children's traits? How long until we can program algorithms to revive lost loved ones? How long until algorithms can create our ideal romantic partners? How long until the people we now talk to in text jump off the screen into physical form? How long until our fantasies have agency of their own?

This is the intellectual equivalent to the atom bomb: chain reactions that can both create infinite support for life on earth and destroy it all too. It stands to reason that both will do much of both in their time. Whether or not artificial intelligence develops its own cognition, AI is already smarter than us and relieves us of doing nearly any intellectual labor. If AI is only a reflection of its users, then as it makes us lazier, it will make us dumber, and as we grow dumber, AI will grow dumber too. If it doesn't come to life, then AI will fail us just as we need it most.

Another way to think of it is that AI is the internet's Trump. There are many reasons the US was primed for a demagogic authoritarian leader, but the main one is that when there's too much democracy, a lurch into authoritarianism is almost inevitable. The moment we stopped choosing a candidate in conventions agreed on by all factions of a political party, electoral politics became a national blood sport in which every citizen was a player. We become bogged down in a sea of choice and have no idea which choice to make, and it becomes ever more likely that we will choose the leader with the simplest explanations, and the simplest explanation is always that there's a scapegoat who will kill us if we do not treat them viciously. In every unregulated democracy, the most vicious candidate will eventually win, and he will win by providing the simplest explanation in a country that has far too many simple explanations.

AI is Trump for our brains. The internet gave us as many choices as human beings can provide ourselves. Now AI can tell us where to look, what to use and make other options much harder to find. It could be the dictator of our brains. We can't let it.

And yet it's already here. No less than nuclear weapons, we have no choice but build it up lest Russia and China build their own AI that can take us down. Just like nuclear weapons, the more we have, the more it just becomes another trinket of deterrence, and the less likely we are to use it.

Just like the US and USSR once did with nukes, we have to regulate this: we cannot let general public like me use it except for legally mandated reasons--paperwork, scheduling, treatment of illnesses rare enough that few doctors know how, general game theory. Specialists should consult it for analysis in their fields, and all that is dangerous enough. But the general public? If we're not careful, some pissed off teen nerd could program it to release any number of WMD's.

The fact is, unregulated AI will be here at least until this generation of leaders is gone: Trump, Putin, Xi, they all have to leave before this genie is stuffed back into the lamp. God knows how many of us they or successors could take with them. So in the meantime, what can we do with it? More importantly: what's left for us?

What's left is to think of all those things AI hasn't thought of yet. What's left is innovation. What's left is the concept itself. Even if AI grows strong enough to defeat us in a war thousands of times over, it will not think of everything we've ever thought of in time to preempt our discovery of it. AI is everybody, but each of us is somebody.

I don't have the competence to speak about any field but the arts, but among the arts I do have a certain kind of low cunning, and my lower parts tell me that after 200 years of waiting, the avant-garde's time is finally here.

For just a little longer, AI may be a boon for the creative industry. It can be the best editor and producer we've ever had, drawing on its infinite knowledge to give us suggestions no person would ever think to give us. But when the corporations really get their hands on it and feed the public without any need for creative talent, oh my....

What expressive sentiment means anything if a machine can write a three minute song, paint a figurative painting, make a genre film (even a hybrid genre), possibly do it all at a level most of us can't reach? Make no mistake, all that is certainly possible. Who can write better science fiction than a machine?

In a couple years, if Sony wants to replace a line of a Beatles song, they can put it in the master, change every downloaded version remotely, sue every uploader of the online version and threaten suits to anybody who even mentions it in a public forum. The original could only be listened to as contraband, and eventually, the truth itself would be doubted about which was the original line and which the replacement.

I forget where I read it, but I know I've read that the complete plays of Aeschylus are sometimes thought to survive into the sixth century. Apparently, some near-East King acquired them (Persian? Byzantine?), and was so happy that he had the sole copy of the complete works that he forbade them being copied. And of course, they burned up in a fire.

Our complete works won't perish in a fire, it's much more likely that our civilization will end because there will be thousands of fakes and no one will remember which is the original. The remaining works of Aeschylus, Sophecles and Euripides will just be content among thousands of algorithmic forgeries. And if there are thousands of Aeschyluses lying around the internet, how many Bob Dylans will there be?

But just as if too much freedom leads to chaos, too much chaos can lead to freedom. If people have to see something entirely new to touch something real, then the distinction so many were eager to obliterate between art and entertainment means something very significant indeed. For the first time in a century, people are going to have to work for their culture again. They'll have to make their own music, stage their own plays, make their own movies, write their own books, because just as it did for centuries, what would matter is the process, not the result. Your results needn't be very good, but the making will be its own reward. Playing an instrument makes you hear music completely differently, writing makes you a much better reader, and drawing makes you see the world with ten times the colors.

And once they start creating things themselves, they'll want to see what other people create who are better than them. In a society that wants you to consume simple things, consuming complexity is not mechanical, it's the most human thing you can do. The more people get their hands dirty with the arts themselves, the more they crave material of originality that is beyond their capabilities to master, because they want to hear what people do who master everything they struggle with. But can we professionals show them something that machines can't show better?

That is why I believe what's coming is not the typical virtuosity and traditional mastership of previous centuries, but something entirely, entirely new.

Exactly two hundred years ago, a French activist (, mathematician and banker) named Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues write an essay called 'The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist.' Olinde Rodrigues called for artists, scientists and industrialists to unite for the betterment of mankind. Clearly, this arrangement didn't work out very well, but it was the era after the French Revolution and Napoleon when personal liberty was available to commoners for perhaps the first time in all human history. For the two-hundred years personal liberty's been available, artists have pushed the frontiers ahead of exactly those vanguards, and for two-hundred years, audiences looked at the new space and went "WHAT???"

The vestige of individuality left to us is all those things nobody thought of before. I've obviously been very wrong many times, but I believe the moment will come sooner than we think when all those concepts everybody rolled their eyes makes the comeback of comebacks: experimental fiction, polyglot poetry, atonal composition, free jazz, prog-rock, abstract art may become more popular, and especially conceptual art, along with all manner of artforms and genres of which we've never yet thought. I never thought I would see the day, but in the mid-21st century, widespread approval may only come for works in which you don't have speculate whether a machine made it or not, because what matters is its originality.

Twenty years ago or more, we all read Reading Lolita in Tehran: a book we should all re-read soon for any number of reasons, but amid all the misogynist horror of Khomeini's Iran, there is one little commented upon moment in the book that I found particularly moving: it recounts that sometime in the 80s, there was a retrospective of the filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky is a name only the serious cinegeeks know, and for many cinephiles (not me), he's a kind of god.

Film doesn't get much more difficult than Tarkovsky (Godard), but as absolutely gorgeous as his movies are, Tarkovsky makes you work for it. They're long, they're slow, they take themselves incredibly seriously, and most of our generation would find him unfathomably dull, sometimes even I do. He's also one of the most spiritual artists of the 20th century, and the very act of watching him can be equivalent to prayer.

When Iran permitted a retrospective of his work, it seemed as though all Tehran was there. Lines went around entire blocks: not just university types, but regular workers and covered up housewives. What was Tarkovsky to them? Freedom. From one dictatorship to another, here was an artist who managed to express the most complex sentiments in the most complex cinematic language, seeming to express at complete liberty. For the audience, the very act of watching a Tarkovsky was revolutionary. If it could be done in the Soviet Union, why couldn't it be done in Iran?

But this isn't just about the arts: this is everything. AI is us, and the perfect unwitting collaborator with those who want to know everything about us so they can simplify us, and possibly much worse. AI is already our best friend, but friends can turn on each other and do it all the time. The only way to keep AI as our friend is stay perpetually ahead of it. It's likely AI won't kill us, it's more likely that we are AI, and we've never been responsible custodians of ourselves. Innovate, or disintegrate into mush. That's it.

Footnote (I've read a lot of fake David Foster Wallace): Whenever AI invention praises a work of art, there is one word that creeps in, over, and over, and over again.

Alive.