Immortality for the Rich; The Room Where It Happens

And all your money can't another minute buy.
--"Dust in the Wind" Kansas 

In many cultures there is the story of the man who wishes for eternal life rather than eternal youth, Merlin, some Greek guy, they get an eternity of suffering as they age.

Aging certainly looks like a disease, as elasticity, strength, vigor, all the senses decay. The wisdom of age is hardly a compensation. Most of us really get no wiser, still crazy after all these years.

Ross Douthat, in today's NY Times column about how President Trump needs some one with a functioning brain to advise him, threw in an allusion to the New Yorker article about the ultra rich, often on the West Coast,  who are enjoying life so much, they are beginning to dread the inevitable end to their joy ride, and want to believe scientists can rescue them from the ultimate fate, the great leveler, which brings us all to the same place--well, unless you believe in Heaven and Hell.

Personally, I'm more inclined to believe in recycling souls. Everything in our universe seems to be cyclical--so dying Bill Gates rich and waking up, born in some impoverished village in Bangladesh or Africa would make sense to me.  Or Adolph Hitler born to a despised Jewish family or Strom Thurmond being born to a life as a 400 pound Black woman. I don't know why. All that just sounds right to me.

On the same page as Douthat's article was another about Trump voters in Oklahoma who had benefited from federal government programs he is now trying to destroy. They, of course, are still fans. 

Listening to them, I tried to assume a Christian attitude: "They know not what they do." But I failed. All I could think was: Good, rot in your own terrestrial version of Hell until such time as you are willing to say, "Lord, what was I thinking? Get this guy out of office!" 
Or words to that effect.
But they never will. 
You will have to, figuratively speaking, pry that idea, like their guns, from their cold, dead fingers before they will ever admit to themselves or anyone else they might have been fools.

This morning, I watched "Master and Commander" with Russell Crowe. This is such a masterpiece on so many levels, but one of the many issues which it explores is the nature of a society in which the mass of men are ignorant but not entirely unintelligent.  
"What they need, what they want, is a leader who will be strong," Captain Jack Aubrey tells his friend, the ship's surgeon.  He's referring to his crew, a collection of swabs and superstitious, ignorant but brave men.
"That's been the excuse for every tyrant from Caesar to Napoleon," replies the doctor.

Captain Aubrey is a man of his age. Handed a model of a double hulled wooden warship, he turns it about in his hands, admiringly, and says, delightedly, "Behold the new! What an age we live in! The modern age."

And, of course, the modern audience, watching him, is thinking, "You ain't seen nothing yet."  He could not possibly conceive of a metal warship, propelled not by wind but by coal, or oil or nuclear energy, to say nothing of ships which sail under the surface.

Watching him teach his ensigns to use a sextant before the advent of radar, not to mention global positioning satellites, is sheer joy. He is so consumed with repairing his wooden ship after a near disastrous engagement with the double hulled dreadnought, he cannot take time to dream of revolutionary changes, imaginings beyond a second wooden hull. He would not believe that,  just decades later, his country will be building a fleet of steel ships. 
There were only 69 years between Custer's last stand and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  Custer, killed by a stone age weapon could hardly have  imagined the bomb which destroyed an entire city, nor the airplane, flown in the air from miles away.

The dreamers of the eternal youth efforts and the immortality projects will spend their money and tell us they are not fools to dream big, because if you don't dream of an airplane or a global positioning satellite, you cannot build it. 

But, what happens if your Captain is not simply preoccupied with rebuilding his wooden boat, but incapable of listening to advice from those in the room who might help him, and save his current wooden boat?

Throughout "Master and Commander" the Captain receives and rejects advice from his friends and subordinates. He makes bad choices but his general strategy is aggressiveness, intelligent, masterful aggressiveness, and that guides him to success.

Douthat suggests Bannon and Preibus will not be enough to save Trump. Douthat lists some of the dozens of conservative think tanks which might provide people who can help Trump think through the implications of policy decisions, but you know none of these people will be in the room.

The room where it happens, as they say in "Hamilton."

For those Silicon Valley billionaires the rooms they are in are where the discussions of immortalization of cells are happening. They hope what is said in those rooms will affect everyone outside the rooms. 

That's a thought. Trump sitting in a room making decisions which affect everyone--EVERYONE--outside that room.

Fortunately, outside of launching a nuclear strike, there are precious few decisions like that  he can make. Unless of course, he starts to believe in science.