I bought the new Stars album the other day. It’s okay. It sounds like they learned, somewhere on the wide road between their home in Toronto and their fans in the States, that they need to take themselves seriously. I’ve met one of their managers but I’m sure it’s not her fault.
In the August 30, 2007, New Yorker, David Owen writes about humanity’s lack of contact with the heavens that have been with us since forever, before it all. “And civilization’s assuault on the stars has consequences far beyond its impact on astronomers. Excessive, poorly designed outdoor lighting wastes electricity, imperils human health and safety, disturbs natural habitats, and, increasingly, deprives many of us of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping, wonder.”
Adam Gopnik, another of my favorite writers, in the same issue speaks of Philip K. Dick’s new relevance today, despite his death in the early 1980s. Gopnik writes about the central metaphor of Dick’s work: “The social arrangement of power is always that of a brute oligarchic minority forcing its will on a numbed population, with amusements the daily meal and brutality the implicity threat; for all that has changed technologically, that fatal pattern has never really altered.” And this: “The vision of an unending struggle between a humanity longing for a fuller love it always senses but can’t quite see, and a deranged cult of violence eternally presenting itself as necessary and real–this thought today does not seem exactly crazy.”
Today, Google <a href="announced that users of Google Earth could now see the stars above their location with the application’s latest version. This is perhaps the last way humans will see the heavens above.

I saw a recent documentary in which the earth’s history was represented by a 24-hour clock. If the planet is at Midnight now, bacteria have filled the planet with oxygen since 8:00 this morning. The dinosaurs came on the scene around 9:30 pm. Humans entered about 30 seconds ago. By this scale, I figure we polluted the planet in the last 1/16 of a second.

I returned today from a trip back East, to both Philadelphia and New York. On my flight from Philly to Minneapolis, I got to sit with an U.S. Army medic and soldier who was just coming back, hours ago, from Baghdad. We had a three-hour long, rambling conversation about the United States, Iraq, the future of the war, and media coverage. I’m not as bleary-eyed as he was, but I did get up at 3:30 am. Here is what I learned:
A lot of soldiers in Iraq, despite 7 years under President Bush, blame President Clinton for having done very little in the 1990s to stem and unroot Al Quaeda. The USS Cole was a defining moment in this history – many soldiers feel he was diddling around while fundamentalists in Afghanistan were gaining strength and sway. I didn’t ask about the relationship between 9/11 and Iraq, but the implication from this one soldier was that neither would have happened had the United States taken out Al Aqaeda ten years ago.
My soldier friend also told me that “CNN is a joke” – and that every single news vehicle (from any country) doesn’t have the big or little story on Iraq. He said he read the New York Times online every day and that it didn’t even begin to scratch the stories in and around Baghdad. He did say, a number of times, that he felt the U.S. was doing a lot of good there, though I kind of felt he was saying this out of some sense of obligation to those still serving there.
Another issue he brought up was the status of soldiers. The overall care he recieved in Baghdad was excellent, he told me. Every evening, they would have 31 flavors of Baskin Robbins ice cream available for dessert. The hospitals were superb and the medical care was top notch, for soldiers. In his estimation (he worked in the main U.S. hospital in Baghdad), 99% of all U.S. and Iraqi injuries were from IEDs and suicide bombers. There was absolutely nothing the U.S. could do to stop these, he explained, and there is no end in sight for a decrease in insurgency attacks.
I asked about the draft. He agreed with me that the U.S. will, indeed, have to institute a draft pretty soon if recruits aren’t being gained. Even the $40,000 sign up fee, the educational benefits, and quick-start career opportunity of the Army are not convincing young Americans to serve their country.
Perhaps most interesting was his photographs. He had taken many dozens of photos and showed them to me and other passenger on his laptop. He did not shoot blood or gore but he did clearly show the damage that tanks and other armored vehicles have sustained from various IEDs and bombs: the 5-inch thick glass windows pierced by a bomb, the 4-inch thick gash in the side of a Humvee, the demolished vehicles in the middle of the desert that are already sand-covered and useless. But he also showed me photographs of some of the holiest Christian and Muslim shrines in the country – places he went to with obvious risk. These were thousands of years old; some were pockmarked with recent bullets and armament while others stood intact.
After we deplaned, I ran into him again in the terminal. He said that people, in the past 12 hours since he’s returned, have said to him, over and over again, “Thank you.” And then he shook my hand and said to me, “Peace be with you.”