Ferguson reveals three material realities otherwise missed in our ostensible post-race, post-ideology world: (1) systemic racism is alive and well and ultimately a product of class
relations, (2) historically, police have served capital by preventing large scale, organized resistance, and (3) today’s police force, like the military, is a Keynesian strategy that sustains itself by often creating the very problems that necessitate its existence.

Those who know Being avoid octopus carpaccio.  I was a synapse before an impulse, and the hors d’oeuvres were killing me.  Lights poured over Allan, cameras flashed everywhere, and Kathy Rageous from DCS asked if there is a God.

“Mr. Benkle, is there a God?”

Today at Dawn’s Dan Dearslacks stopped rubbing shoulders.  

“I’m not really sure.”

Rageous held her smile. 

The London Havoc’s Center Room managed its 128th International Conference on Being with tremendous grandeur, though many luminaries were sweating. 

“I believe what Miss Rageous is trying to say, Mr. Benkle, is if your discovery can make us better individuals—at work, fathers, golf—then isn’t it time to drink ‘NEW AND IMPROVED ACTION SODA!’”

A neon orange can from nothing. 

A middle finger from three o’clock. 

“Weasel.”

“Who?” 

“Atavism Ant owns BPS, Today at Dawn, Dearslacks, and Action Soda.  Have you ever seen such a worm?”

I had in New Jersey.

Boris Landon and his Calvin Tech Neurons fired relentlessly, but Allan couldn’t explain the answer to them.  I wanted to save him from all of this.  I would tell the world how the mind works. 

“Mr. Benkle, is the brain our friend?” Senator Wy Crimson tugging tie.

“Excuse me,” said Exciting Science’s Fritz Ginner.  “I’m not sure if you truly appreciate the amount of corticoid required by your system.  Or maybe you just don’t like corticoid.  Where did you receive your Ph.D.?”

“Corticoid?” said Gentoctoe’s Ernie Karr.  “What does corticoid have to do with autosomal dominant pleiotrophic effects on hippocampal morphogenesis?”

“I wasn’t talking to you or your team,” returned Ginner. 

“I don’t think so,” said a man from United, Inc.  “Next you’ll say there’s a gene for the Talmud.”

“What did Cortez say when he conquered the Aztecs?  Men make their own history—”

“Harrumph.”

“No, wait!”

Allan was lost in Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, a defense mechanism and favorite film with Katsuhiko Sasaki. I waited patiently for the opportunity to ask my question, the very reason I had dropped my last dollar on a flight to England and this conference.  I opened my diary and read.

“Excuse me, Mr. Benkle,” said The Last Show with H. Thomas Cowell’s H. Thomas Cowell. “It’s totally cool what you’re doing with the brain and everything.  Can you tell us how you figured it out?”

“Have you read Sartre and Camel?” Dearslacks. 

“Is it true that your brain is like a sponge,” said Rageous, “and the damn thing floats?”

“Um, I’d like to say something,” said Allan Benkle, somewhere between London and Tokyo, Disraeli and Mothra.  “I want to thank you for inviting me to speak.”

Huge applause, save Calvin Tech. 

“I, um, never planned on all of this.  If you want to know the truth, I was making a sandwich for somebody when I came up with the idea that—”

“Mr. Benkle, Dan Dearslacks, BPS.”

“Oh, yes, hello.”

“Mr. Benkle—Allan—we’ve been told that you understand how the brain works, that you have solved a remarkable mystery that has troubled man for eons and eons and eons and eons. We’re talking eons here. That your ideas will forever change the world as we know it.  But how about ‘ACTION SODA’S NEW DYNAMITE FLAVOR CRYSTALS!’”    

Prime Minister Strouffe held out his Action Soda, smiled into camera four, and guzzled for the world. 

That Allan Benkle found himself working behind an East Brunswick deli counter at twenty-eight was by no means a sign that he was inadequate. He wasn’t guilty of a deadly sin either. If he was guilty of a deadly sin it wouldn’t be sloth as his father often suggested, it would be gluttony, or rather that he once forgot gluttony’s meaning when his mother called his father a fat pig.  

Allan took what was dealt to him as one would a pair of jacks: neither with unbound enthusiasm nor in utter despair.  At four, he swallowed a pair of jacks. At eleven, there was hope that his wavy brown hair would make up for his awkwardness. At twelve, his looks would endure as mediocre.  Allan’s older sister Shari raked in most of the advantageous genes from a thrall of upper-echelon hobgoblins found grazing at five-stars on dead princess biographies.

This is not to say that Allan Benkle was Christ-like. It’s to say that Allan Benkle solved consciousness somewhere between a pound of potato salad and cobbled ham. 

I had a question for Allan, but would fall back on its surface.  If Allan really understood the mind then he would know why I had no self.  During college Allan had me pegged as another neurotic, but I was merely mirroring him.  I never had a self to claim neurosis.  Cartesians will argue that the very questioning of one’s identity demands a self, but Descartes never earned tenure.

“Allan!”

“Yes?”

“Isauthenticitypossibleifone’sideasareneverone’sown?”  I shook. My words were so important to me yet they belonged to John Galsworthy.  

“Will?”

“Hey.”

Allan asked me for something to write on.  I made my way to the stage and gave him my social security card.  Allan scribbled furiously:

“WHAT THE HELL IS ACTION SODA?”

I knew this answer, and smiled with savvy. 

“Excuse me,” said Loxford’s Ha Kablum. “We believe consciousness can be explained with advanced string theory. String theory will give us the mind.”

“Interesting, Ha,” said Dembridge’s Charles Lury, “but string theory won’t do much for a Being whose throwness into its there is ontologically fallow to being with—I mean, to begin with.”

Kablum sighed. “Charles, you forget that I deconstructed Being and Skin.  Your ‘magnum opus’ is a road map. Nothing more.”

“Ha—”

“Yes?”

“—Kablum, what the hell’s a physicist doing deconstructing!”

“Plagiarist!” said Kablum. 

“Oh shit.”

“That was a matter of fonts,” said Lury. “Read Wiki much?”

“Enough!” screamed a voice from the Center Room’s perimeter, and then a buzzing.  The dense audience parted.  “Let’s hear the young man already!”

There gliding before us in his platinum GTP golf cart with Gibson girl and “ol’ Cappy” capybara was Salvo Thoreaumeoffacliff, the modern-day Einstein who held the Big Chair of Mathematics at Tarpo Institute.  The last person to hold that chair was Gil Murphy, who died of a heart attack at forty-four.  

Oohs, aahs, wows, and Thoreaumeoffacliff continued: “What is his theory?”

Theory?  This wasn’t theory, this was fact.  Allan figured out figuring out.  I would throw Thoreaumeoffacliff off Tower Bridge. 

“Well, Mr. Tonkle? I’ve come all the way from a small suburb in Indianapolis and haven’t heard a thing.  Do you plan to tell us what you’ve found?  What’s your theory, man?  What-is-your-theeee—!”

Thoreaumeoffacliff must have hit the wrong button. His golf cart spun violently, faster and faster. Smoke rose from the floor.  The temperature soared. The golf cart burned through the center of the Center Room.  We were drawn in. 

“A singularity!”

“Impossible!”

“Look at your shoes!”

Questions raced through me: Was there any chance of escape once over Thoreaumeoffacliff’s event horizon? Would we be torn into a million pieces as black hole theory predicts?  Should I revise and resubmit?

I panicked and reached for the first thing that I could find. Kathy Rageous was no blonde, but her tresses saved several of us when they caught onto Calvin Tech’s double helix.

Some missed the event horizon, others fell in. 

Then, all at once, the black hole disappeared. 

What was a magnificent conference room was now a Dali landscape.  No, something Bauhaus.  I looked around and found Allan playing solitaire. I waved my social security card.

“Allan!”  

“Right!” said Havoc security.  “Sorry, no one gets Mr. Benkle.”

“But I’m his friend.”

“Right. Sorry. Cheers.”

I looked to Allan for help. He was winning.

“Cheers.”   

Later that night, I tossed and turned.  A broken air conditioner left my Havoc suite unbearable.  From the next room, a ribald trio grinded out a version of “Been a Long Day” from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.  I didn’t want to listen but couldn’t help myself:

1^st Man: “Maintenant, elle pense …”

 Woman: “I’m gonna bleach my teeth real nice.”

1^st Man: “Et il pense …”

 2^nd Man: “I better check my pants for head lice.”

1^st Man: “Et elle pense …”

 Woman: “Dearslacks interviews better than he screws.”

1^st Man: “Et il pense …”

2^nd Man: “I hope Rageous sleeps through her news.”

All: “Well it’s been a long day. Well it’s been a long, been a long, been a long day, been a long day.”

My flight back to New Jersey was less turbulent.

Like its heavenly antecedent 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Interstellar (2014) is sublime in the Burkean sense, that is, in its capacity to bring viewers to the event horizon of existential terror and despair. Where Kubrick’s rendering of spacetime is like a spaghetti Jackson Pollock whose meaning depends as much on the viewer as it does on the artist, Nolan’s provides answers, the answers given that they come from theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. The science is indeed impressive, but Interstellar’s ethics are the main reason why the film has drawn such an enthusiastic response. The science works so effectively on us because quantum relativity is depicted as being perfectly in line with secular humanism: humans can save humanity through a Theory of Everything which may not require an alien or a god. Interstellar ethics also means good parenting, literacy, and solidarity. Love, too, matters even as Brand’s (Anne Hathaway) floppy reflection on the subject is the film’s weakest moment (and no fault of the excellent Hathaway). Such hopeful humanism comes as welcome relief to the global warming weary moviegoer.

2001’s final scene is of a human fetus floating in space, what could be Kubrick’s strong anthropic principle, eternal recurrence, or unwavering anthropocentrism in light of an extraterrestrial monolith. In any case, Kubrick’s spacetime is the lonelier and more disturbing of the two mentioned here. Both, however, are equally profound in their sublimity, in most if not all possible worlds.

“The Americans are much more addicted to the use of general ideas than the English, and entertain a much greater relish for them: this appears very singular at first sight, when it is remembered that the two nations have the same origin, that they lived for centuries under the same laws, and that they still incessantly interchange their opinions and their manners. This contrast becomes much more striking still, if we fix our eyes on our own part of the world, and compare together the two most enlightened nations which inhabit it. It would seem as if the mind of the English could only tear itself reluctantly and painfully away from the observation of particular facts, to rise from them to their causes; and that it only generalizes in spite of itself. Amongst the French, on the contrary, the taste for general ideas would seem to have grown to so ardent a passion, that it must be satisfied on every occasion. I am informed, every morning when I wake, that some general and eternal law has just been discovered, which I never heard mentioned before. There is not a mediocre scribbler who does not try his hand at discovering truths applicable to a great kingdom, and who is very ill pleased with himself if he does not succeed in compressing the human race into the compass of an article. So great a dissimilarity between two very enlightened nations surprises me.”

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America