Eastern Standard Tribe, Cory Doctorow [reading e books TXT] 📗

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--


Dedication

For my parents.

For my family.

For everyone who helped me up and for everyone I let down. You know who you are.
Sincerest thanks and most heartfelt apologies.

Cory

--


1.

I once had a Tai Chi instructor who explained the difference between Chinese and
Western medicine thus: "Western medicine is based on corpses, things that you
discover by cutting up dead bodies and pulling them apart. Chinese medicine is
based on living flesh, things observed from vital, moving humans."

The explanation, like all good propaganda, is stirring and stilted, and not
particularly accurate, and gummy as the hook from a top-40 song, sticky in your
mind in the sleep-deprived noontime when the world takes on a hallucinatory
hypperreal clarity. Like now as I sit here in my underwear on the roof of a
sanatorium in the back woods off Route 128, far enough from the perpetual
construction of Boston that it's merely a cloud of dust like a herd of distant
buffalo charging the plains. Like now as I sit here with a pencil up my nose,
thinking about homebrew lobotomies and wouldn't it be nice if I gave myself one.

Deep breath.

The difference between Chinese medicine and Western medicine is the dissection
versus the observation of the thing in motion. The difference between reading a
story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and
killing the story and looking at its guts.

School! We sat in English class and we dissected the stories that I'd escaped
into, laid open their abdomens and tagged their organs, covered their genitals
with polite sterile drapes, recorded dutiful notes *en masse* that told us what
the story was about, but never what the story *was*. Stories are propaganda,
virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly
into your emotions. Kill them and cut them open and they're as naked as a
nightclub in daylight.

The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing it: "What is the
theme of this story?"

Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it and understand
it. The theme of this story is: "Would you rather be smart or happy?"

This is a work of propaganda. It's a story about choosing smarts over happiness.
Except if I give the pencil a push: then it's a story about choosing happiness
over smarts. It's a morality play, and the first character is about to take the
stage. He's a foil for the theme, so he's drawn in simple lines. Here he is:

2.

Art Berry was born to argue.

There are born assassins. Bred to kill, raised on cunning and speed, they are
the stuff of legend, remorseless and unstoppable. There are born ballerinas,
confectionery girls whose parents subject them to rigors every bit as intense as
the tripwire and poison on which the assassins are reared. There are children
born to practice medicine or law; children born to serve their nations and die
heroically in the noble tradition of their forebears; children born to tread the
boards or shred the turf or leave smoking rubber on the racetrack.

Art's earliest memory: a dream. He is stuck in the waiting room of one of the
innumerable doctors who attended him in his infancy. He is perhaps three, and
his attention span is already as robust as it will ever be, and in his dream --
which is fast becoming a nightmare -- he is bored silly.

The only adornment in the waiting room is an empty cylinder that once held toy
blocks. Its label colorfully illustrates the blocks, which look like they'd be a
hell of a lot of fun, if someone hadn't lost them all.

Near the cylinder is a trio of older children, infinitely fascinating. They
confer briefly, then do *something* to the cylinder, and it unravels, extruding
into the third dimension, turning into a stack of blocks.

Aha! thinks Art, on waking. This is another piece of the secret knowledge that
older people possess, the strange magic that is used to operate cars and
elevators and shoelaces.

Art waits patiently over the next year for a grownup to show him how the
blocks-from-pictures trick works, but none ever does. Many other mysteries are
revealed, each one more disappointingly mundane than the last: even flying a
plane seemed easy enough when the nice stew let him ride up in the cockpit for a
while en route to New York -- Art's awe at the complexity of adult knowledge
fell away. By the age of five, he was stuck in a sort of perpetual terrible
twos, fearlessly shouting "no" at the world's every rule, arguing the morals and
reason behind them until the frustrated adults whom he was picking on gave up
and swatted him or told him that that was just how it was.

In the Easter of his sixth year, an itchy-suited and hard-shoed visit to church
with his Gran turned into a raging holy war that had the parishioners and the
clergy arguing with him in teams and relays.

It started innocently enough: "Why does God care if we take off our hats, Gran?"
But the nosy ladies in the nearby pews couldn't bear to simply listen in, and
the argument spread like ripples on a pond, out as far as the pulpit, where the
priest decided to squash the whole line of inquiry with some half-remembered
philosophical word games from Descartes in which the objective truth of reality
is used to prove the beneficence of God and vice-versa, and culminates with "I
think therefore I am." Father Ferlenghetti even managed to work it into the
thread of the sermon, but before he could go on, Art's shrill little voice
answered from within the congregation.

Amazingly, the six-year-old had managed to assimilate all of Descartes's fairly
tricksy riddles in as long as it took to describe them, and then went on to use
those same arguments to prove the necessary cruelty of God, followed by the
necessary nonexistence of the Supreme Being, and Gran tried to take him home
then, but the priest -- who'd watched Jesuits play intellectual table tennis and
recognized a natural when he saw one --