Samir Chopra's Blog, page 105

Breaking Badder Than I Thought

Almost exactly a year ago, I speculated about how Breaking Bad would wrap up.

I wondered about Walter White‘s eventual fate:

[P]erhaps the writers will give Walter a glorious back-to-the-wall-defending-his-family-shootout kind of death, saving  them from the depredations of a ruthless set of ganglords, thus redeeming himself in spectacular fashion even as he loses his life….Hank will finally catch up with Walter, his Heisenbergean nemesis, a man who has nearly caused his death, and caused him plenty of misery.

I seemed to be on the mark here. In a fashion. But there were other speculations that I got wrong:

[W]hen Hank catches up with Walter, it will be too late; Walter will be dying, and Hank will let him go, cognizant of the price to be paid by the family if Walter’s cover is blown. Most centrally, Hank will keep Walter’s identity secret so that Junior does not come to know his father was a demented meth cook….As for Jesse, Walter will apologize for having induced such a catastrophic trajectory to Jesse’s life, but I do not know if he will ever spill the beans about his role in Jesse’s girlfriend’s death….These redemptions add up to a happy ending of sorts: there will be a funeral and tears will be shed, but Walter will have provided for his (extended) family, eased the uncertain torments of Hank, and maintained his image in the eyes of his befuddled son.

As the series heads for its finale next week, it’s pretty clear there will be few happy endings. Indeed, the only outcome that could count as such would be Jesse liberated from his horrific servitude. Every thing else would be very weak balm on a large sucking wound. Walter White is at the bottom of a deep pit; it’s going to take some desperate scrambling up its slimy sides to get ‘out.’

Not that there’s much waiting up top:  his money seems destined to go waste; wiping out a gang of feral killers seems unlikely. As does reconciliation with his family, the unkindest cut of all. And of course, a painful death from lung cancer awaits in any case.

Vince Gilligan had indicated that Breaking Bad would ‘not end well,’ and if the current trajectory of the show is any indication, that seems very  plausible. Still, I have been surprised by the bleakness of these last few episodes and wonder how much of the feel-good wrap-up style I had relied on in my earlier speculations will be on display in its conclusion next week. Walter donning his Heisenberg hat and the flash-forward earlier in the season which showed him with a gun suggest that at least some dramatic, blood-soaked resolutions lie ahead, and the wrinkle introduced by the mention of Gray Matter Technologies is certainly an interesting one.

If Gilligan remains uncompromising and bring the White nightmare to an end in as unsparing fashion as he has shown recently, then Breaking Bad will have performed a very useful service: it will make conventional endings look almost unsustainably trite.   It has already set new standards for bleakness–Jesse Pinkman‘s recapture and Andrea‘s execution were merely the latest flourishes.

I’ll be sad to see the show end, but I wouldn’t mind a little relief either.

NYPD to CUNY Students: Drop Dead

Corey Robin has an excellent post on the latest twist in the ‘General Petraeus at CUNY‘ fubar situation: students protesting Petraeus’ presence at CUNY are treated, first, to a tongue-lashing by various CUNY administrators including the University Faculty Senate, and then, when six of them are arrested, manhandled, and have the book thrown at them by New York City police, the same folks shrink into stony silence.

I don’t have anything to add to Corey’s perspicuous analysis of CUNY administrators’ continued kowtowing to the powers that be. I do, however, want to make a few remarks about what this incident shows about CUNY students and their relationship with New York City police and the rest of the city.

When videos of the CUNY students’ arrest first became available, angered by what I had seen, I posted a link to the video on Facebook and added the following intemperate status:

NYPD’s thugs are back in action. At :33 you can see four of the City’s finest holding down a student while one punches him in the back [addendum: to be more precise, in the kidneys]. And for sheer porcinity it’s hard to beat that thug at 1:44.

Unsurprisingly, when the same video made the rounds of many other sites, opinions on the police’s actions were split roughly evenly between reactions like mine, which see these actions as yet another instance of heavy-handed policing, and others, which amounted to describing the students as scruffy hooligans, not fit to lick Petraeus’ boots, who needed the ass-whipping that had been sent their way by New York’s Finest.  This contrary reaction is, as noted, hardly noteworthy.

What, I think, is more problematic, is that New York’s police force, which is, I think, drawn from the same demographic as most CUNY students are, seem to hold the same blinkered opinion about them; they do not, now–having made it through the police academy, and become part of the Grand American Correctional Apparatus–feel any solidarity with them.  They are committed now to protecting the Powerful and manning their barricades; they see no resonance in the struggles of these students, not even on behalf of their own children, who in all probability will attend the same city university. Surely, they aren’t dreaming that their salaries will enable them to climb up this American ladder, whose rungs are disappearing upward quicker than ever, and allow them to pay the tuition at one of those swanky schools that the plutocrats’ children go to?

The police is a unionized force made up of working class folks; its struggles should be seen by them as existing on a continuum with those of the students who attend a public university like CUNY.  But so successful has the brainwashing and indoctrination of the police been, that every time they step out, booted, uniformed, swaggering and strutting on a city street, swinging their night-sticks, and see a ‘long-haired punk,’ they fail to recognize a little bit of themselves. With every blow they hand out to a protester, they merely ensure that their miserable state of endless precinct-centered resentment and bitterness will continue.

The pity is that they don’t suffer alone; they make the rest of us bear the burden of their anomie too.

Mallory Kane Goes ‘Haywire’

Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire is–perhaps literally–a kick-ass little guilty pleasure. It is so because through its snappy 94 minutes, there is plenty of ass-kicking carried out by its redoubtable heroine Mallory Kane (Gina Carano, the formidable mixed martial arts fighter turned movie actress). Indeed, the movie could have been rather profitably–and more accurately–named Don’t Mess With Mallory Kane. Soderbergh might have kicked off an entire franchise, complete with action dolls, had he done so. Kane is that captivating. (I realize I’m in the minority in this regard as the movie has had only mixed receptions from both critics and audiences.)

Haywire has a plot of sorts. A private contractor for the US Government (I think), Mallory Kane is double-crossed by her handlers and almost assassinated; she then goes on the run, seeking clarity and revenge, all the while fending off, and sometimes creatively attacking, in rather spectacular jaw-breaking and groin-smashing style, her varied pursuers and quarries: sometimes once-fellow operatives, sometimes policemen, sometimes SWAT teams.  Some of her opponents survive, and are lucky to get off with broken arms or legs; others are not. There are rooftop chases, a car chase of sorts, and plenty of close-quarter fighting in enclosed spaces. You really don’t need to know much more than that; it’s pretty clear from the beginning who we are to be rooting for; the bad guys are marked out soon enough as well; the plot details are incidental.

Like any good ‘international espionage’ movie, there are dizzying changes of glamorous locales and scenery, made a shade more dazzling thanks to Soderbergh’s non-linear narrative, rapid-cut editing and David Holmes‘ soundtrack: we begin in upstate New York, cut back and forth to Barcelona, then Dublin, then New Mexico and finally, Majorca. (Apologies if I missed out a locale or two.)  An all-star cast that includes Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, Matthieu Kassovitz, Michael Fassbender and Channing Tatum lend a hand. But they all play second fiddle to Ms. Carona, who looks glamorous and tough throughout–the movie’s dark palette aids her in this endeavor–and by the end of the movie has established herself as an avenging angel par excellence. (The movie’s ending confirms this transformation.)

Haywire could have been a rather run of the mill martial arts movie, all too similar to most of other members of this rather depressing genre, one that I do not think has ever recaptured its aura since the days of Bruce Lee; it is not so because it is helmed by a skilled director and because its central character manages, somehow, despite inadequate development, to get the viewer on her side. There are some attempts to give Kane’s character heft: we know she is an ex-Marine, presumably brought up solo by her author father, who might have been a military person himself (as his warnings to Kane to ‘check your six‘ suggest). But these don’t add much, and in the end, they are entirely superfluous.

This is not great cinema by any stretch but it was most definitely great entertainment.

CLR James on the ‘Surprisingly Moderate’ Reprisals of the Haitian Revolution

Here are two very powerful passages from CLR James‘ classic The Black Jacobins: Touissant L’Overture and the San Domingo Revolution (Vintage Books, second edition revised, New York, 1962, pp. 88-89):

The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. They knew that as long as these plantations stood their lot would be to labour on  them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them. From their masters they had known rape, torture, degradation, and at the slightest provocation, death. They returned in kind. For two centuries the higher civilisation had shown them that power was used for wreaking your will on those whom you controlled. Now that they held power they did as they had been taught. In the frenzy of the first encounters they killed all. Yet they spared the priests whom they feared and the surgeons who had been kind to them. They, whose women had undergone countless violations, violated all the women who fell into their hands, often on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers. ”Vengeance ! Vengeance” was their war-cry, and one of them carried a white child on a pike as a standard.

And yet they were surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them. They did not maintain this revengeful spirit for long. The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased. As the revolution gained territory they spared many of the men, women, and children whom they surprised on plantations. To prisoners of war alone they remained merciless. They tore out their flesh with redhot pincers, they roasted them on slow fires, they sawed a carpenter between two of his boards. Yet in all the records of that time there is no single instance of such fiendish tortures as burying white men up to the neck and smearing the holes in their faces to attract insects, or blowing them up with gun-powder, or any of the thousand and one bestialities to which they had been subjected. Compared with what their masters had done to them in cold blood, what they did was negligible, and they were spurred on by the ferocity with which the whites in Le Cap treated all slave prisoners who fell into their hands.

The italicized line is footnoted as follows:

This statement has been criticised. I stand by it. C.L.R.J.

I can imagine some of the contours of this criticism: How could you defend rape and murder and pillage? The killing of babies? The savage treatment of prisoners?

James offers a defense in the same passage and it is interestingly plausible.  The slave revolt, the uprising, was bound to be a convulsion, a shaking-off, one that could not but, given the history of their oppression–described in gruesome detail in Chapter 1–result in some reprisals. But this striking back would not be, and perhaps couldn’t be, anything more than a brief spasm of cruelty and anger, a cathartic and horrible outpouring of accumulated anger and grief. It would not be followed by enslavement and the systematic, prolonged brutality the slaves had been subjected to. The violence inflicted on the slaves was directed at the perpetuation of a very particular system of control; that which the slaves directed at their masters was a momentary outburst.  The mutilations, floggings, rapes, and live roastings–among other humiliations and obscenities–the slaves had suffered were to ensure the breaking of their spirit, the assertion of owner privilege; they were the visible features of an ideology of utter and total control. They broke bodies and minds alike. The cruelties of the retaliation meted out by the slaves, in contrast, appear as a momentary expression of revenge, the passions underlying which, hopefully, would soon subside. There is nothing systematic, nothing codified, about them.

These considerations do not, I think, condone the violence but they do put them into some perspective.

On First and Second Languages – III

In this ongoing series of posts on partially mastered languages and my frustrating relationships with them, I’ve written about German and Spanish. Today, I come to the most vexed alliance of all, the one with Punjabi.

My last name is a giveaway: I’m a Punjabi. But I’ve never lived in the Punjab. I did, however, spend many years in a city with a large Punjabi population: New Delhi. My parents never spoke in Punjabi with me (they did so with their parents) and so while I grew up listening to a great deal of Punjabi, I acquired no fluency in it whatsoever. In the tenth grade, during two years spent in boarding school, away in India’s north-east, I struck up a friendship with two Sikh lads and started some rudimentary practice. On returning to Delhi to finish high school, I initiated some tentative conversations with my grandmothers and attempted to learn some Punjabi from them. I noticed that none of my cousins, and indeed, no one in my generation of urban Punjabis in New Delhi spoke the language.

By the time I left India for the US, my fluency in Punjabi was still minimal. Matters picked up, ironically enough, on moving to a land ten thousand miles away from ‘home.’ I was keen to practice, keen to establish a very particular sort of contact with the few Punjabis I met. I also made contact with a brand new community of Punjabi speakers: Pakistanis. Indeed, it seemed to me that more Pakistani Punjabis, even urban ones, spoke Punjabi than Indian ones. My vocabulary improved, as did some aspects of my grammar.

Moving to New York City in 1993 facilitated this process even further. The city is home to a large Punjabi community and opportunities for practice were only limited by my enterprise and shyness; they still are. I discovered that the Punjabi spoken in the Punjabi hinterland–of whose representatives in New York City there were many–was far harder to master, and I would frequently, embarrassed, switch to Hindi/Urdu in the middle of a conversation, unable to keep up with the barrage of incomprehensible words coming my way.

My attempts to practice my Punjabi had unexpected consequences: on occasion, a cab driver from the Punjab–Indian or Pakistani–delighted to make acquaintance with a fellow homeboy, would simply decline my payment of the fare, and give me a free ride. I grew embarrassed at these inordinately generous offers and would try my best to pay, but to no avail. (This followed me to Sydney, when on arriving there for my post-doctoral fellowship, the young man who drove me to the University of New South Wales also declined payment.)

My fluency in Punjabi is a couple of rungs short of full-fledged mastery; I need a period of immersion to make what I consider would be a significant breakthrough. (In the winter of 2006/7 on a visit to India, my family and I made a short road trip to the Punjab; my spoken Punjabi improved even in the space of those four days.) I do not think I will ever have the time or the patience to master the script but spoken mastery lies well within my reach provided I can achieve total immersion. Even two weeks, I suspect, would do it.  I’m not sure when and how I will be able to bring this about though; work and family seem to leave little time for such an adventure.

So near, and yet so far.

Creationism, Climate Non-Change, And All That

Phillip Kitcher‘s Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism (MIT Press, 1982) makes for depressing reading. Not because of any problems with its arguments, style, or content, but rather because, even as you read it, you realize that though the book was published in 1982, essentially the same points–in addition to others that would bolster the scientific standing of evolutionary theory–would have to be made today in any debate against creationists and their latest incarnation, the Intelligent Design-ers. Those folks are the Undead–zombies, vampires, take your pick–they won’t go away, they won’t stay down. And they certainly won’t listen to reason.

Kitcher’s thirty-one year old dismantling of creationist ‘arguments’ and polemics against evolution is careful and thoughtful and–though he occasionally lapses into an ironic or sarcastic aside–scrupulously fair to his opponents. I will confess that I have never read any creationist text in its entirety; my exposure to it over the years has been piecemeal, and perhaps the closest I’ve come to any serious engagement with its arguments was when I taught a section on intelligent design in my philosophy of biology class a few semesters ago. Thus, I was appalled to see the arguments that Kitcher set out to combat; their understanding of evolutionary theory being vanishingly small was the least of their errors. The sense of depression I alluded to above was exacerbated by the thought that a) book-length versions of this nonsense have been written, published and widely promulgated and b) they now require book-length refutations. (To Kitcher’s credit, his brief is literally so; it clocks in at a breezy two hundred or so pages.)

A dozen or so years ago, I saw an article in The Onion titled ‘Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law of Thermodynamics‘. An attached image showed a protester with a sign that read ‘I Don’t Accept the Fundamental Tenets of Science and I Vote’. I chuckled when I read the story and later that night, told a physicist friend of mine–he studied quantum many-body interactions–about it. His reaction was interesting; at first, he guffawed loudly, and then suddenly, he sobered up, his expression changing to one of concern and alarm as he said, ‘You know, that’s actually not funny. There really are people who think like that.’ Till then, I had been chuckling away too; on hearing this, I stopped. My friend was right; the Onion story was funny all right, but in a pretty disturbing way, one that reminds us that arguments like Kitcher’s–and many more that have been made since–need to be made and disseminated as carefully as they are because of a very particular context, one populated by a particularly intransigent mind-set.

The climate non-change folks aren’t quite yet at the level of those that resist evolutionary theory but they are getting there. Their attainment of that standard of hostility to empirical investigation and careful theorizing will be made visible to us–if it hasn’t already–by the marker indicated above: when they become the subject of an article in the Onion.

One that will make a scientist first laugh, and then grimace.

The ‘Trickery’ of Robots

Maggie Koerth-Baker reports on a case of supposed trickery–(‘How Robots Can Trick You Into Loving Them‘, The New York Times, 17 September 2013)–that has come to light as robots become more ubiquitous and enter an increasing number of social spaces:

In the future, more robots will occupy that strange gray zone: doing not only jobs that humans can do but also jobs that require social grace. In the last decade, an interdisciplinary field of research called Human-Robot Interaction has arisen to study the factors that make robots work well with humans, and how humans view their robotic counterparts.

H.R.I. researchers have discovered some rather surprising things: a robot’s behavior can have a bigger impact on its relationship with humans than its design; many of the rules that govern human relationships apply equally well to human-robot relations; and people will read emotions and motivations into a robot’s behavior that far exceed the robot’s capabilities.

None of this should be surprising in the least. Human beings have always relied on a combination of relentless anthropomorphization and agency ascription to make sense of the world around them. In doing so they have cared little for the ‘inside’ of the beings they encounter, and have instead, concerned themselves with which interpretive framework enables them to enjoy more fruitful relationships with them. As Koerth-Baker notes, “Provided with the right behavioral cues, humans will form relationships with just about anything — regardless of what it looks like. Even a stick can trigger our social promiscuity.” Robots will be no different in this regard.

In a world full of action, we are inclined to find agents everywhere; the interesting bit comes when we have to individuate these agents–figure out where one starts and ends and another one begins–and what kind of ‘inner life’ we ascribe to them. Chances are, the more those agents resemble us, the more likely we are to ascribe a rich set of inner states to them. But as the robots and stick example shows, a sufficiently rich behavioral repertoire might even overcome this inhibition.

The more fascinating question of course, is whether this style of social interaction will become the preferred modality in preference to talking about the robot’s innards or design. Will humans describe the robot’s ‘beliefs’ and ‘desires’ as the causes of the actions it takes? Doing so would regard robots as originators of the actions they take: in other words, they would be considered ‘true’ agents in the philosophical sense.

One prominent asymmetry should also become apparent in robot-human interaction: those who know a great deal about the robot’s innards–its engineering principles, its software, its internal design–will be less inclined to anthropomorphize and ascribe social graces and capacities to robots. They will sometimes find that the best explanations they can offer of the robot’s behavior will be more expeditiously expressed in a language that refers to their physical composition or logical design. But this subset of users is likely to be a very small one and as robots become more complex and more capable of a sophisticated range of behaviors it might be that even those users will find the language of propositional attitudes a more convenient one for dealing with robots.

Eventually, we might come to treat robots as authorities when it comes to reporting on their own inner states. When that level of sophisticated interaction and behavior is possible, we’ll face a genuine conundrum: as far as social relationships are concerned, what, other than their innards, distinguishes them from other reporters–like human beings–that we consider authorities in similar fashion?

Manil Suri on the Beauty and Beguilement of Mathematics

Manil Suri has an interesting Op-Ed on math–How To Fall In Love with Math–in The New York Times today. As befitting someone who is both a mathematician and a novelist, there are passages of writing in it that are both elegant and mathematically sound. The examples he provides of mathematical beauty–the natural numbers, n-sided regular polygons that become circles as n approaches infinity, fractals–are commonly used, but for all that they have not lost any of their power to beguile and fascinate.

I fear though that Suri’s message–that math is beautiful, creative, elegant, not to be confused with routine number crunching, and worthy of wonder and exaltation and careful study–will not be heard through the haze of the very math anxiety he seeks to cure. Suri needn’t feel too bad about this though; many others have tried and failed in this very endeavor in the past.  If, as Suri suggests, we are wired for math, we also sometimes give the appearance of being chronically, congenitally, incurably anxious about it.

A personal note: I came to a realization of mathematics’ beauty late myself. Like many of the math-phobic that Suri refers to in his article, through my school years my attitude toward the study of math was fraught with fear and befuddlement. I was acceptably competent in the very junior grades but a harsh teacher in the seventh grade ensured that I would earn my worst grades then. My concerned father took it upon himself to drill me in algebra and I regained a little confidence. Not enough though, to want to study it at the higher levels that were made available to us in the ninth and tenth grades. But the pressure to study engineering at the university level meant I had to return to the study of more advanced mathematics for the eleventh and twelfth grades.

In those two years, I was exposed to calculus for the first time and came to love it; its connection with motion, the slopes of curves, the use of differential equations to model complex, dynamic systems; these all spoke to me of a logical system deeply implicated in the physical world around me. Once I had learned calculus, I saw it everywhere around me: in a stone’s dropping, a car’s acceleration, a rocket’s launch, an athlete’s push off the starting block.

I majored in mathematics and statistics at university, but if I saw any beauty in mathematics in those years, it came when I saw some good friends of mine working out complex problems with some style. I had lost motivation and interest and barely survived my college years. My graduate studies in computer science didn’t help; I was able to–unfortunately–skip the theory of computation and graduate.

Years later, when I encountered mathematical logic as part of my studies in philosophy, some of my appreciation for the world of abstract symbol manipulation came back. It helped that my dissertation advisor was an accomplished mathematician whose theorems and proofs sparkled with style and substance alike. From him, I regained an appreciation for the beauty of the symbolic world.

I was never a mathematician, and don’t work in logic–mathematical or philosophical–any more. But my brief forays into that world were enough to convince me of the truths that Suri refers to in his piece:

[Mathematics] is really about ideas above anything else. Ideas that inform our existence, that permeate our universe and beyond, that can surprise and enthrall.

The ‘Historic’ Statue Toppling That Wasn’t

In his essay ‘The Toppling: How the media inflated a minor moment in a long war‘ (The New Yorker, January 20, 2011), Peter Maass provides, by way of context and background, a useful deflationary account of the famous toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square on April 9, 2003. The statue’s downfall had always had a stage-managed feel to it, even at the time; Maass’ account makes clear it was a journalist’s event through and through, with few Iraqis in the square, and even those outnumbered by war correspondents, cameramen and the like, and cheering only when the cameras  panned to them.

The over-the-top, prematurely celebratory response–of the Bush administration–to the statue’s toppling, part of the delusional description of the war, one made especially poignant by our knowledge now, of the mayhem that lay ahead for Iraq, was egged on by the media:

The powerful pictures from Firdos were combined with powerful words. On CNN, the anchor Bill Hemmer said, “You think about seminal moments in a nation’s history . . . indelible moments like the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that’s what we’re seeing right now.” Wolf Blitzer described the toppling as “the image that sums up the day and, in many ways, the war itself.” On Fox, the anchor Brit Hume said, “This transcends anything I’ve ever seen. . . . This speaks volumes, and with power that no words can really match.” One of his colleagues said, “The important story of the day is this historic shot you are looking at, a noose around the neck of Saddam, put there by the people of Baghdad.”

The invocations of ‘seminal,’ ‘indelible,’ Berlin Wall,’ ‘power,’ ‘historic,’ in these breathless descriptions of ‘ a minor moment in a long war’ are galling. They serve as good evidence for a thesis I have privately entertained for a long time: rare is the journalist who does not self-servingly succumb to the temptation to describe a reported event in precisely these terms because doing so increases their sense of self-importance as well. After all, if it’s a historic, momentous, seminal moment, then aren’t the journalists reporting on it carrying out equally momentous work, equally deserving of their place in history? Perhaps they should be written about next, made the subjects of detailed reportage, praised for their presence at The Event?

Descriptions like those cited above are thinly veiled exercises in self-glorification.  This was never more clear to me than during the Monica Lewinsky affair.  Then, confronted by one breathless television reporter and talking head after another, it rapidly became clear to me that what they all seemed to be desperately hoping for was an impeachment of a US president on their watch. Imagine: the memoirs you could write, detailing your role in the coverage of this ‘crisis’, the blow-by-blow accounts you could detail  of every manufactured twist and turn, every ‘intervention’, every skillful and perceptive and brilliant report you provided, as you expertly shepherded The Event and its actors towards its final, earth-shattering conclusion. I was there; this is what I saw.

It’s hard, apparently, to not want to be part of the story.

The Baby Industrial Complex

When you bring home a baby, you bring home something else as well: a subscription, a ticket to a strange new domain, one populated by goods designed and manufactured for babies–and their parents–to better equip them for all of life’s supposed challenges, to train, dress, entertain, edify, and amuse them. An industry of industries churns out one product after another, first placed on baby registries, then procured and presented, and then, sometimes, handed on down, to the generations to follow. They cater to many, many needs, some imagined, some real; they cater to anxieties and insecurities; they reassure, comfort, sustain; they prop up the edifice of upbringing and rearing.

There are wipes, fragrance-free, made of the right chemicals that won’t corrode skin; high-technology diapers that could soak up a mid-grade tsunami; breast-feeding aids, boppies, that promise comfort to the exhausted mother; ointments, creams, lotions, shampoos, all carefully calibrated for the tender infant’s epidermis; towels that will dry and warm; rattles that will distract and amuse; books in bright and dark contrasting colors, all the better to train babies’ eyes with; cribs and cots with adjustable bottoms and padded walls; bottles of plastic and glass sporting a dazzling variety of nipples and shapes; bottle cleaners and sterilizers; breast pumps, which introduce a new sound, disturbingly industrial, to the daily rhythms of the household; hand sanitizers to ensure the non-transmission of germs from caretakers and enthusiastic visitors to the baby; food processors for blending, whirring pureeing, and chopping, to prepare those mysterious concoctions that babies so happily and messily consume; musical toys, sometimes classical, for the more refined sensibility and the more ambitious parent, sometimes plebeian; talking toys, sometimes jocular, sometimes perky; toys with flashing lights; video and audio monitors; diaper changing tables; diaper pails, which, sadly, need to be emptied periodically; strollers and perambulators, their sizes ranged along a spectrum marked out by gigantic, tank-like behemoths at one end and slender whippets at the other; baby carriers for placing the infant in front, at the back, or on the side of the parent’s body and then carrying around; car seats for safe automotive transportation–you can’t bring home your baby from the hospital without one; high-technology noise machines to ensure an undisturbed daytime nap while the sounds of the city–the fire engines, the ambulances, the road construction crews, the police cars, the sanitation trucks–rage outside; bibs to keep the soon-to-be-soiled cute onesies and dresses clean; the high chairs for dining; the door swings; the rocking chair; the plastic tub and rubber duckies for the bath; the numbered blocks for learning to count; the snot-suckers; the thermometers; the pediatric vitamins.

The list goes on; you get the picture. A dazzling array of products conceived and constructed with every need, every eventuality, every possibility, seemingly kept in mind, anticipated, and catered for. And then, placed on the market, advertised and hawked as indispensable aids for life’s journey.

Tiny creatures; but ones apparently requiring a complex, expensive, and intricate infrastructure, all made available for the right price.