In trying to write that portion of my life that intersected with our global experience of the pandemic, I couldn’t seem to get the phrase “she’s come all undone” out of my head. Everything we took for granted had begun to loosen and each of us seemed to come unmoored, cut off from the natural order of our lives, from family and friends, from work, from the unstated rules of daily existence.
The freeways were bare and quiet and, then, set free from any limits, more and more cars began speeding, weaving and racing across lanes, as though class had just let out to a wild recess. On our quieter neighborhood streets, everyone seemed to have made a daily practice out of what used to be called “California stops” to describe cars barely slowing down for a stop sign.
Daily routines were instantly shredded. Kept apart from regular doses of family and friends, we seemed to gradually abandon our social skills. We became rusty and loose in the joints emotionally.
And, in truth, the teachers seemed to be smoking in the lounge. It was the first term of the big orange grifter, and he abandoned us to make our own masks, to sing songs while we washed our hands to make sure it was long enough, to stand six feet away from everyone, to line up for “senior early hours” at the market, but not too close. We began to feel that things might continue to fall apart.
Unfortunately, some folks persisted in their abandoned and selfish behavior well into the post-pandemic period. Not surprisingly, the faux king president, newly elected to his second term, believed that his victory signified approval of his careless inhumanity and purposeful disregard of all those things that held us together and prevented us from coming undone. His behaviors, breathlessly detailed in every minute-by-minute media update, continued to give many in our society greater permission to simply abandon compassion, truth-telling, and adherence to commonly agreed-upon rules.
The white house squatter, of course, having a greater scope of power, can spread these loosening standards out on a larger screen. Take for example transferring responsibility for the education of children with disabilities from the Department of Education to Kennedy’s Health and Human Services Department (as inapt a title as calling that other entity The Justice Department).
By using a medical, rather than an educational, model for services to these kids, they can be characterized as sick and not simply as another kind of normal child in a diverse society who needs a tailored set of programs. If sick, they can be made well and don’t need special education but just encouragement to try harder to act “normal”. Until then, no real education is needed and our scientific and scholarly programs are allowed to come all undone.
The same with environmental progress, as well as our movements toward a more diverse and equal society. Many feel permission to simply give in to their more selfish actions, their constraints loosened by following our supreme leader’s example.
It’s important for us to consciously refuse to become unmoored from the civilized tribe we have worked so hard to build; to see this as a time to help to steady each other. To live out our best selves according to our own lights. To engage in small talk in the checkout line. To stop at the stop signs and wave the other guy ahead. To add a dollop of kindness and connection to the world every day.
This is bigger than simply manners or kindness. This is our mooring.
The Lords of the Tech Ring
Years before most of us had even begun to hear about Peter Thiel, his defense corporations named Palantir and Mithril and his monetary godfathering of JD Vance all the way into the Office of Vice President, I was reading Tolkein’s Trilogy of the Ring. In the early 1970s, I was an Associate Dean of Students in the Student Activities Office at UCLA. Several of my students encouraged me to read The Hobbit and then The Trilogy and I ended up reading the Trilogy through every summer for twenty-six years in a row, and more thereafter.
I was powerfully drawn in by the quest of a diverse group of Middle Earth inhabitants bravely uniting to help Frodo carry the greatest Ring of Power into the jaws of the evil land of Mordor and destroy it so that no one could ever use it to control all the other rings and the world as they knew it. It was the story of a very ordinary being, a hobbit, chosen by fate to carry out a dangerous, life-threatening, impossible, task and how he took on the burden, just because it was the right thing to do.
At one point, exhausted, Frodo says to Gandalf, the great wizard and a member of the Fellowship of the Ring, “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” Gandalf shakes his head, and replies, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us.”
Given the heroic and selfless nature of the quest, I find it baffling, amazing and downright annoying that a little band of the richest and most carelessly self-involved men on the planet are expropriating symbolism from this epic to name the scary surveillance and data-aggregating systems of war, snooping and destruction they have put in the hands of a power-mad, selfish tyrant with words stolen from a story about taking on and defeating the same kind of dangerous power.
Peter Thiel’s artificial intelligence and big-data analytics software company, Palantir Technologies, was named after the palantiri, seeing stones that had been placed in the towers of the good nations of Ardor and Gondor to allow instant communication. The evil Sauron, however, used them to capture and control those who gazed into them, just as Thiel has corrupted the security needs of a nation into a network of local spying, predictive policing, and cooperation with ICE. Palantir now has billions of dollars in contracts with the US for its invasions and wars. DOGE used it to aggregate info on all of us here at home. It is everywhere.
Anduril Industries produces AI-powered surveillance and autonomous systems for the military. Its founders, Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm and Joe Chen are linked together from work at Palantir and Oculus VR, another bro tech company. They are all, now, billionaires and deeply involved in licking the boots of the fool in the west wing. Anduril was the name given to the legendary sword of Aragorn, the heroic member of the Fellowship of the Ring who becomes the new king of Gondor after fighting to defeat Sauron.
Mithril Capital is a venture capital company investing in the development of tech needed by the rest of Peter Thiel’s defense companies. Mithril, in Tolkein, is a super-light, super-strong metal forged by the Dwarves. Frodo wears a vest of mithril throughout his quest and it saves his life.
Like the rotting orange in the white house, these bros have corrupted and twisted these heroic symbols into something dastardly, perhaps dreaming of the kind of power that Frodo tosses into the inferno of Mount Doom. They have it all wrong. Each of these important components is used to accomplish the ultimate goal, the destruction of an evil tyrant. In the minds of the bros, they simply think it’s cool to hide behind a trusted name. They fail. You can expropriate a symbol but it doesn’t make you a hero. It makes you a thief.
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