HOROSCOPES

PLANET WAVES by Eric Francis

Enough people suggested, without further comment, that I get my rump to A Beautiful Mind that I actually took a minor risk on Hollywood. Even if you can’t overlook the sanitizing of the purported bisexuality, divorce and unsavory racial theories of its lead character, Princeton University mathematician John Nash, it’s still an interesting and worthwhile film. I say this mainly because it speaks clearly about our current situation, our still-unfolding dilemma surrounding the difference between madness and sanity in a world where potential nuclear annihilation is a significant problem.

And we also face possibilities that were more like jokes during the peak of the Cold War—a missing suitcase bomb, for example, finding its way to some major city at the hands of someone with an agenda. (This was the approximate subject of a rather hilarious 1959 Peter Sellers film called The Mouse That Roared, which predated the indispensable Dr. Strangelove, 1964.)

We don’t think about these things much any more, and we don’t like to. As individuals, we can no more stop a stray Russian nuke from popping off Wall Street than we can stop Flight 11. And if you’re obsessed with the end of the world, you probably need more sex, Prozac, or shock therapy. Right? But whether we can do anything about it or not, if we think about it, we have to take it personally. It is personal. I don’t care who’s fault it is; radioactive fallout is bad for my health.

A Beautiful Mind is the story of a brilliant Cold War-era math professor who was simultaneously working for the Department of Defense at MIT. He teaches classes, but his real job is serving the defense establishment, sharing in the many boring tasks of the fast-bloating military-industrial bureaucracy. But while he’s doing this, he gets drafted to use his talents for a special mission: to decode the messages of Russian spies that are encrypted in the text and advertising of newspapers and magazines. We know enough about what happened during these dark, frantic years—when there was basically a race for who could destroy the world worst and fastest—to feel that his assignment is perfectly plausible.
The theme here is that Nash, like most people, is very concerned about the nuclear threat, but unlike most people, he gets to help prevent it. But questions arise about how much of what he’s experiencing is real, and how much is based on paranoia and mental illness. And this is an enormously relevant question today because we are all faced with it. For the first time since the Cold War era, with its duck-and-cover drills, fallout shelters, and horrifying newsreels warning us of the advancing Russian threat, our National Fathers have sounded the alarms of a general fear of everything: fear of the mail, fear of potential disasters in shopping malls, at ball games, while traveling to see loved ones, and so on. Fear of e-mail, fear of who we send faxes to, fear of all Arabs. We hear warnings about the vulnerability of the food and water supplies, of smallpox, and of course, major military incidents in our urban centers.

But while we’re all supposed to be vigilant of anyone who looks suspicious, or of a stray paper bag left behind on a ferry boat crossing Puget Sound (where “all vehicles are subject to possible search”), or of letters with too much postage or written in sloppy handwriting, we are supposed to remain perfectly calm and content.
Everyone knows that if you tune into that stuff, you make it real. So just ignore it and everything will be fine. Right? Everyone else knows that nobody has time to think about that. We have to go shopping and sit in traffic, after all. We must also have compassion for people whose nerves are so frail that they can’t handle this at all, not the meekest thought of it, save for a glance at the headlines. We must also remember that it’s “all in God’s hands” anyway, that the fate of the Earth is not our responsibility. Am I right? We must pray. And don’t touch that joint! Drugs are part of the scourge of terrorism. You must mellow out naturally, on Xanax.

Meanwhile, we also know this is one of the greatest times in human history. We have such unparalleled opportunities for freedom, for happiness, for creative potential, for living well, for eating well—as long as we have three jobs that pay more than $5.15 an hour, and can survive being constantly terrorized, and can endure hanging out with people who respond to these threats, for the most part, by shutting down mentally and emotionally. In one sense, apathy really is the answer in these great days.
But unless one is rather talented at the art of living, and can consciously devote one’s life to being awake in other ways, and has friends who are capable of the same, apathy (which means the inability to feel pain, or pathos) comes with a price: mainly, joining the living dead.

We who have spent the last year or five or ten or twenty years on the “spiritual path” need to do better.