Duke's Redux

EIRONIA, or Socrates, Please
A Parable of Our Times

Introduction: Duke Redux or A Cautionary Word from Our Moderator

It had come to me once at an exhibition of impressionistic painting:
they, the painterly philosophers, had virtually, perhaps by way of some
now lost pineal perception, perceived quanta before this intuited
physics had been codified by Planck and Bohr or even divined through
sheer philological finger-pointing by Nietzsche 's "will to
power"-------their aggregation of the physical essences of color/light
was a clear rendering of an underlying fuzzy reality. The powerful and
the proles, however, did/do not see, believing the work product to be
fuzzy pictures of a clear, harsh reality. Their "impressions" depicted
the obverse, when one peered behind, and through, the atomic curtain,
itself no more than synchronously spinning electrons about their
nuclear masters at a seemingly agreed-upon frequency, if Bohm's plasmal
findings are to be believed (yes, but by whom/what/how and why?). Such
questions, going to the heart of commonly-accepted beliefs about
"reality", had no place in a seminal state-of-the-world conference
would be the claim of even those many defenders of the status quo who
either coveted ------ or owned ------ such masterworks, albeit if only
decorative and framed resumes for the cameras of Architectural Digest.
Pragmatic meliorism was what was paramount for the agenda: ironically,
it has been the enormous practical economic success of applied quantum
mechanics which has brought us/them to the very factual premise of the
New Symposium: is such "progress" either sustainable or otherwise
desirable in the "real world". And so in true Socratic
irony-----"eironia"----- this task has befallen me as I must serve the
Truth and yet utter less than we know. Heavy on the Platonic erudition,
sans drinking, not to mention the party ambience.

The New Symposium was to finally lay bare the disingenuous whys and
wherefores of the state of world affairs: "The Status Quo: The End of
Zero-Sumness" was the latest title; my most recent preference "Why Does
the Status Quo Have a Latin Name and What Does that Tell Us" was hotly
debated as too confrontational; for all its triple- monkey history it
seemed to me that confrontation of the primary primates was the least
that was needed.
As Chair I had been asked to expound upon the much-overlooked epitaph
of that status quo ["All are punished!" Act V, Scene ]; this
distinction was attributable to my overrated genealogical connection to
that famous Duke of Verona, he of belated condemnation of the Montagues
&; Capulets fame.

My wish-list of guests, sadly, favored mostly dead giants: Einstein, so
thematically simpatico via his enjoinder that it is less than useful to
undertake the solution with the same mindset responsible for the
problem; or Fuller of age-as-no-barrier to pragmatic truth-loving
individual-led design science-driven Revolution; or perhaps above all
old Socrates himself, to shame all other invitees in need thereof into
humility before the truth, much of it unknown to them/us. In lieu of
raising the dead, I was tasked with assembling the beacons of a motley
of "isms"------postmodern, post capitalist, anarchist [they simply
wanted an empty chair with a boldface sign: "EVERYONE MUST GROW UP AND
INDIVIDUATE", Signed Carl Jung, deconstruction; et.al. The last one was
appropriately gloomy, Derrida having held forth that no critique can
hope to ever totally escape from that which it is criticizing, not to
mention the "criticism"----there it is-----of the anarchist sign as
elitist and virally infected with language [semiotics gone mad]. (The,
I suppose, "popular" temptation to empanel Yogi Berra, for all its
contrapuntal drama, was resistible, if only to avoid his merciless
exploitation by the less ardent enemies of the "State-us" Quo seizing
upon the apparently all-purpose and endlessly protean notion that the
proverbial obese lady's apparent absence on the world stage and other
undeserved affronts to the very concept of Hope was evidence of the
presence on that stage of another favorite of theirs, a small
loquacious chicken; surely with such adherents perhaps hope itself was
hopeless).

Despite my high-IQ Mary Shelley fantasy, I was guardedly optimistic
concerning the penetrative impact of this gathering: many (Post)
Modern-Day Medici's had actually bought up live universal coverage on
all television outlets planet wide-------and no narcotizing beer ads,
just this once. I would serve best as Socrates II, pointing out that
without candor met with consequent action we might all be sharing, if
not seeking, our collective hemlock. Finally, as a bonus against
boredom and in the interest of reanimation of those sages so available,
archival film was assembled to fairly portray the true views of many of
the dead giants needed: I also decided to structure the entire video
augmented presentations around Bucky Fuller's comprehensive Critical
Path. All participants in the New Symposium had agreed that he, of all
had indeed lived the examined ---- and cosmically examining-----life
well worth living.

Round One: Gentlemen/Ladies Start Your Ingenuities

The symposiasts were arrayed at a huge round table in a soccer stadium
much like a rock concert, deep-thinking knights of the day. Bucky would
have been pleased as his World Game would finally get the exposure it
warranted: his ambitious- then, deserving of a serious first look -now
computerized depiction of a world-around time-energy accounting system
for the family of "homo sap2" aboard Spaceship earth, complete with
Blimpcam, an eye on the newest Nazca lines. Ah, we must begin the
proceedings:
"Ladies &; Gentlemen, fellow passengers on Spaceship Earth, what you
are about to witness is nothing less than the child of all preceding
gatherings for the purpose of presenting, unedited and unfiltered, the
best cumulative thinking and its fruition for the best -----for
all-------ways &; means for all life and its effective affirmation
on this vessel in our Universe as we know it today", posited
symposiarch Federico Fabergente. Not only was there simultaneous
translation computer -imaged on the screens from homes to rural
villages, but the translators had been given special programs to insure
the simplification of names and coded argot into a lingua franca for
the masses. In other words, no bullshit------[there, you see the
programs have already kicked in].

"Centuries ago, my great ancestor was portrayed as having uttered the
ultimate condemnation of his kinsmen; today, his Elizabethan-inspired
words ring true on a global scale: All are punished!" Indeed, unless we
embrace what we either have known---or should have known----for some
time to be Truth in all its dimensions and realms of human endeavor in
a truly Nonzero sum way, abandoning Machiavellianism for Meliorism, we
are all condemned to relative but certain disasater." This was unique
in modern times: a form of technology actually used toward awakening
those whom its exploiters had deliberately anesthetized and, then,
somnambulized to their devious dealings under the veil of jingoistic
legerdemain. For the deservedly skeptical, a process well-known to the
mass audience, the game show factual arbiter system had been magnified
and sanctified with Academy Award -style hermetic securing of all known
objective evidence needed according to the topical agenda, itself only
known to me, the moderator, and a team of computer-selected bores with
impeccable stacks-only library science credentials from the stuffiest
tome tombs on Earth.
As a Kafka-like failsafe, the leading terrorists of the world had
agreed to launch pandemonium if the factual arbitration system was in
any way rigged! To be filed under "Who is Guarding the Asylum" in the
Zone of Twilight database, presumably.

[NOTE: EDITORIAL ITEMS------
1. Refine, for accuracy &; sardonic humor, references to
"isms"----Research, research!
2. Aim at conclusion featuring alternative realities wherein narrator
is, in "fact", somehow constrained or confined from/to the whole of the
contemplated action-----per Mouth of Madness treatment;
3. Overall, hone to sharp edge the "time travel" flavor brought by
2500+ year span, from Socrates to Bohm &; beyond!
4. Submit to: New Yorker; Atlantic Monthly; Paris Review; ET.
Al.]

Utilizing another banal but equally familiar technique of mass appeal,
a lottery was transparently held as to the introductory order
commentary/questioning of one another, etc. In this all-important forum
at least, function most definitely follows form. The first comments,
etc. were to be from the venerable Albert Einstein, courtesy of
digitized stock film; this was a hopeful portent.
AE: "

Writer - 1