The Tower Of Blather

2013

I speak several languages with varying degrees of expertise.

All of them with a Boston accent.

Linguists estimate that there are over 6700 languages spoken on the planet Earth with English acting as the prime lingua franca or most popular bridge language at present.

Unfortunately silence is not a language.

This morning at the Academy Dinner I listened to a young man converse with his friend about how easy women were if you pretended to be a filmmaker or photographer.

I knew the speaker.

Ray lectured his friend's about his failure as a lady's man.

"No one wants to hear the truth. You tell them you know Spike Lee and their eyes light up thinking they going to Hollywood and the fastest route to stardom is your bedroom. I know you ain't likes that, but you can't argue with success."

Ray ranted on and on.

Everyone in the diner heard him.

He didn't care and neither does anyone else talking on the phone.

Most of what they have to say is meaningless, which is why most people text messages.

So no one can eavesdrop on the inanity of their words.

Billions and billions of words spoken each day to unite mankind by the creation of a Tower of Blather.

As the King James version of the Bible puts it: "And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."

The Lord hated the language of Blather and said, "Let's go down and confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech, so the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Blather; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Telecommunications draw us close.

I can speak with my children in Thailand.

But most of what people say is meaningless.

Then again it has always been so.

Where Are We?

I spotted these four tourists on 6th Avenue and 58th Street in Midtown Manhattan. All four were on their cell phones, trying to figure out where they were. I almost helped them, but realized their impoverished sense of direction was a curse of GPS and they were better off lost.

Stupid.

Of course, since no man will admit to being lost.

No one has a map.

No one can read them or fold a map, but a report has come out that cellphone callers' reliance on their devices to discover their whereabouts has shrunken the brain's natural GPS and even worse that people don't see where they are, because all they see is their cellphones.

Where are we.

The land of the lost.

Big Ears

The NSA has existed as an electronic intelligence organization since World War I. The Cipher Bureau sought to analysis the coded messages of the German High Command for the naval convoys seeking to evade U-boats in the North Atlantic. According to Wikipedia on July 5, 1917 the unit consisted of Herbert O. Yardley and two civilian clerks sitting in a townhouse on East 37th Street in New York City.

M-18 or the Black Chamber was disbanded in 1929 by the Secretary of State.

"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

The Communist threat changed the moral code.

American agents listened to everything with interest.

The NSA backed up the allegations of a North Vietnamese attack on the American destroyer USS Maddox during the Gulf of Tonkin incident as well as illegally wiretapped the phones of Senators Frank Church, Howard Baker, and Dr. Martin Luther King.

They learned nothing.

After 9/11 the NSA was given carte blanche to investigate the world.

Eric Snowden blew a whistle on the agency.

He gave his files to the Guardian.

We learned that the NSA listened to everyone. No one really cares about this intrusion of privacy. They have nothing to hide. Communications over the cellphone are bullshit judging from my eavesdropping on inane monologues of mobile phone users.

I regard them as victims or potential zombie food.

All their senses have collapsed into an atrophied coma.

See nothing.

Hear nothing.

Feel nothing.

Same as the NSA and the US Government.

No one can see the light when they stare into the darkness.