Style Points

(Music: Short, brassy Olympic fanfare)
Pompous Network Announcer, voice like Howard Cosell: Welcome back! And now skating to center ice for the Men's Long Opinion Program is Rusty Pipes.
Expert Commentator, voice like Scott Hamilton: Rusty's managed to put some zingers into his last few programs and yet still maintain an overall secular humanist viewpoint. Let's see if he can bring it off again.
Network Announcer: What do you mean again? A lot of people were upset when he implied Bush was getting drunk last month. I think the judges, especially the USA's, will be tough to please this time. But anyway here we go...
(The camera zooms in for a one shot of Rusty, the lights dim and schmaltzy over-orchestrated music begins to play. Just as the crowd realizes it's actually a cover of "Satisfaction", Rusty begins.)

I told you it would be a good year for scandals, the Ole Limping Games were full of them this year! What a difference a few tenths of a point makes! The best controversy was the judging of Pairs Figure Skating of course. You know, beauty is so much in the eye of the beholder, but then I'm easily amazed by their artistry, both of them looked good to me. 5.3, 5.7 5.9, I can't tell the difference unless they fall and even then it was enough to still get a Bronze in Michelle Kwan's case. I can't even go out on the ice without falling on my ass and these people are jumping off the stuff, spinning in the air what seems like a couple hundred times before landing. And all those fancy names for the moves! I couldn't tell you the difference between a single toe loop, a double lutz or a triple chocolate malted salchow. I guess that's why they pay the skating judges the big bucks to understand these moves down to tenth-of-a-point accuracy. I hear pretty soon we'll arrest exactly who paid them the big bucks too.

And speaking of big bucks, judging and style points do you think Winona Ryder will lose a few points for her recent performance in the shoplifting quarter finals? This beauty was caught beholding a bundle of stuff that didn't belong to her, 4.7, 4.8 thousand worth. Quite a high score before she got, um, disqualified. Why does she need to shoplift though? The excuse her lawyers are putting out is that she shoplifted while under the influence of too many sedatives or something. Granted she may be depressed over not commanding as much per flick as Julia Roberts but I assume she gets several million so she'd have to be pretty looped to have not known where her credit card was. Wait, that's it! She was attempting a special Beverly Hills quintuple Xanax toe loop! It's a shoplifting move with a low degree of difficulty that a few rich folks still perform, in spite of the fact that it won't win you any medals.

Expert: That was a nice transition, bringing in a reference to a celebrity's troubles. It's a crowd pleaser but ultimately meaningless though. Now here comes a required move, a few sentences on the downward economic spiral.

Likewise no medals for America's board members and CEO's. How much do they really need to earn before they stop authorizing double reverse bookkeeping axels like they did at Enron and Global Crossing? Wait a minute, did I say "earn"? They may have gotten paid but they sure didn't earn anything. Anyway, how many millions does it take to satisfy these people? Ken Lay's wife recently lost several style points for saying that Enron's demise ruined their family's finances and they were penniless now. Then last week it was printed that the Lays had sold a home in Aspen for a piddling $10 million. Maybe it will be only 3.4, 3.5 million after they pay off some debts. Aww, poverty sucks doesn't it?

Millions, billions, trillions, we toss around numbers so easily. In California somebody just won $193 million in the lottery. Now, you might think that would make them high rollers, but that's peanuts! A member of Global Crossing's Board made almost $360 million in that Ponzi scheme's stock according to the LA Times. But even if executive pay wasn't measured in astronomical units, when are we going to have a proper accounting for all their corporate operations? Who can tell what is really going on at these companies any more? I have an MBA myself and I couldn't begin to tell a truly healthy company from one pulling the wool over their shareholders' eyes like Enron was. The financial ratios that are normally used by investors are pumped up like so many Iron Curtain athletes, full of price-to-earnings steroids and asset-to-liability blood doping. And the weird thing is that most of these strategies are still within the letter of the law.

Don't expect the SEC to ride to the rescue on this. The king of playing fast and loose with numbers is certainly our government itself. It's been pointed out many times but the deficit is actually a lot worse than anyone's willing to admit, because the income put in the Social Security "lockbox" is counted like it's regular taxes to make the deficit look smaller. You are not supposed to do that because it's not for general spending, but they use it that way and have been for decades. And the same thing applies to the topic-du-jour, campaign finance reform. How can we expect a law to be properly written that will regulate the very people that are writing it? You know, the ones who've never shown any inclination to reign in excessive influence before?

Network Announcer: There wasn't much new there.
Expert: Solid work but you're right, he lost a little speed there in the Enron section.
("Imagine" begins to play, stringy and syrupy but recognizable. )
Uh-oh, the music's changing to a minor chord, I think he's going to get serious on us.

Government has never been very good at keeping numbers straight. Look at how the number of dead at the World Trade Center kept dropping. It's actually below the number that we've killed in Afghanistan now. Or so I believe, because I've only read an estimate of the dead in The Progressive, and that came from Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire. He set 3767 as the number of dead there as of December. I'm sure it's much more now, but it's not clear if the number is a mixture of civilian and military deaths. Who knows how he got his figures while at his desk in New Hampshire anyway? Others say let's not put down America's efforts claiming that if we left the Taliban in place that there would have been many more deaths, based on estimates that the Taliban was killing about 100,000 people a year there. Maybe, but that's still a rationalization, we may easily have killed more folks than the terrorists did at the WTC. So exactly how much blood is on our hands? Is 3767 deaths right or not? Our armed forces may well take exception to Mr. Herrold's total, but so far their silence on civilian casualties is deafening.

Oh well, we'd never get a straightforward number out of them anyway. "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics," as Benjamin Disreali said. But in a larger sense, it should be obvious to everyone that things don't add up in this universe. Think about it; you know something is not right when CD labels cost more than the blank CD!

Network Guy: That sudden bit of irony there seems out of place!
Expert: A little jerky perhaps but Rusty is in the middle a difficult combo move, a transition from his political-economic tailspin theme into a whirl of religious dogma with a forward twist just in time for Easter. Let's see if he can pull it off!

Actually there's better proof that things don't add up. Did you know that Dogs have more chromosomes than Humans? Yeah! We have only 46 and Dogs have 78! Maybe it's supposed to be the Dogs that inherit the Earth, not the meek humans. Or maybe it's just something that's fundamentally wrong with the way humans understand numbers. How do we know God doesn't really operate in base 3 numbers anyway?

Expert: Wow, he completed an ascending trivia spiral!
Network Guy: Did he get those in the right order though? I think the audience only cares about the cost of CD labels!
Expert: Maybe. Anyway he still has to lean back to stretch this out and then leap to a big philosophical generalization.

C'mon, base 3! Work with me, think "Trinity" here. You know, Father Son and Holy Ghost. Like Three-In-One Oil. Maybe that's too slick; need a better image? It's kind of like how Madonna, Britney Spears, and Christine Aguilera are all the same person and yet are all different.

A Christian I talked to once saw the Trinity everywhere. "Reality comes in threes," he'd say triumphantly. "What form does reality come in? Space, Time and Matter! What forms does matter come in? Solid, Liquid and Gas! What are the three dimensions of space? Length, Width and Height! What are the three states of time? Past, Present and Future!" Well, it sounds good on the surface, but it doesn't hold up very well when you think about it.

Human beings are pattern seeking animals, but sometimes we invent patterns or think we see a connection that's not really there. I never tried to get my Christian friend to reconcile the number of our chromosomes to the Trinity. 46 is one of those numbers that doesn't get any respect. Sure you think you can see 5.8's in a skating performance or threes in the way reality is formed, but are they really there as such? Ancient Hebrews thought the number seven was sacred. They also liked things in twelves and forties. Buddha had The Four Noble Truths and The Eight Fold Path. Greeks, Romans, Norse and Hindus all had dozens of gods and demigods. All these cultures sliced reality to fit those numbers too. Seeing everything in threes like my friend does is really just bending things just to support your conception of God as three-in-one.

The funny thing is The Trinity was never in the Bible in the first place. The concept was invented to account for some theological contradictions that Saint Paul created. You see, until Constantine made it respectable, Christianity was all underground, so Christian groups in some places had evolved thinking God The Father was supreme, some were worshipping only Jesus, and still others were worshipping the Holy Spirit. By the way, Paul first used the Greek word "Christ" to describe the Holy Spirit which invaded and bonded to him upon the road to Damascus. Jesus never used "Christ" to describe himself. Reconciling these three views of God was one of the main compromises put together when the Church was first assembling their dogma in the Fourth Century at the Council Of Nicaea.

There are whole branches of Christianity that do not believe in the Trinity by the way, I guess because it goes against the basic monotheistic idea of One God. Orthodox Christianity certainly split off from the Catholics over this issue. The Mormons were in the news a lot lately and frankly I'm not sure where they stand on it but why argue? Let's have all three in a big single Catholic church! That's what they eventually decided. But whether you call it political compromise or spiritual truth, The Trinity doesn't mean that Reality is also operating in threes.

Network Guy: I'm not sure about all this theology stuff. It's like he doesn't believe the Bible is the Word of God.
Expert: Shh! Can't you see he hasn't finished putting his spin on things yet?

My friend's sets of three don't always hold up either. Einstein would talk about space-time as one thing versus matter. Moreover, matter occurs in liquid, solid and gas only in the gravity of planets about our size. Plasma is another state of matter that occurs in suns and the "solid" matter found in a black hole certainly would be unlike any solid found on Earth, dropping through it like it was a gas. Physicists often talk of Time being the fourth dimension in addition to Length, Width and Height. Maybe if they included Mother Mary in with the Trinity that would make sense, but at the Steve Hawking level they supposedly talk about reality in twelve dimensions. Oh well!

Reality is what it is, in spite of all our games with numbers. How you see it is in your perspective; it's all how you slice the data. And speaking of number games, personally I don't see how you can reliably apply a number from one to six to a skating performance that's accurate to a tenth, but let's at least be truthful and stop making up numbers that don't pertain to reality at all. And that applies to corporate bookkeeping, casualties in Afghanistan, and how much you should have paid for clothes in Beverly Hills too.

That reminds me, I have to send in my application to be Winona's guidance counselor right away. The poor girl needs a warm nurturing environment right now! Sorry, the rich girl. Anyway she'll be sentenced soon, so I'd better root it out of the Closet here tout-suite. Thanks for reading and until next month the Closet is closed.

(Music fades and the crowd roars)
Expert: Brilliant landing. A sweeping generality with a current events twist and right into the usual closing of the Closet door!
Network Guy: I didn't think he could pull off that landing! I gotta say the crowd loves it.
Expert: I liked it too but I must say there were a couple motifs that were not filled out as much as they could be, especially in those numbers that looked like skating scores in the opening paragraphs, but they sort of petered out. All in all a fine program, especially with the added degree of difficulty created by having two onlookers doing commentary.
Network Guy: I'm not sure if all that Trinity stuff belongs in a program that's essentially about numbers and being truthful.
Expert: In a short weekly column I'd agree with you, but since this column is monthly the judges allow much more leeway. It did make for some sudden jumps in the subject matter though.
Network Guy: I'm still not convinced that this will win over any new fans, either, in fact it may generate a number of slander suits.
Expert: We'll know soon, as we'll get the marks from the judges any time now. Stay tuned after this break.

(C) 2002 - Rusty Pipes

Official Disclaimer: The disclaimer has been removed pending an investigation by the governing body of the IPC (International Philosophers' Counsel) into the fairness of the disclaimer and allegations that the editor who wrote it was pressured by the Chinese editor to write a particularly harsh disclaimer in Mr. Pipes' column. Details will be made available as they come to light.