“We have excellent theoretical
and philosophical reasons
to think we live in a multiverse.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson
Do parallel universes exist? I have proof that one does. I confirmed the hypothesis in a manner very like that of the young Isaac Newton, who was sitting in a garden when an apple dropped on his head. I was standing in a convenience store when a Sunday New York Times dropped on my foot. Newton, in a stroke of brilliant insight, comprehended gravity. I, in a throb of bruised toe, opened the April 22, 2018, Sunday Review section.
It had long been my opinion that the writers and editors of the New York Times and, by extension, their readers live on a different planet—the planet where a martini costs $20. But, upon perusal of the Sunday Review section, I see that I was wrong. They do not live on another planet. They live in another cosmos—a universe with different physics, different mathematics, different scientific constants, and different laws of nature.
The lead essay in the Sunday Review is by Amy Chozick, adapted from her new book Chasing Hillary. The headline is a quotation from Hillary Clinton: “They Were Never Going To Let Me Be President.”
The Hillary Clinton of Universe New York Times (UNYT) is similar to the Hillary Clinton of the known universe (U1) except that in UNYT she was the rightful winner of the 2016 election.
Chozick’s subject is time travel—impossible in U1 but commonplace in UNYT . By means of technology unknown to the inhabitants of U1, Chozick transports her UNYT readers to an ancient period of fossilization that political paleontologists of U1 have named “Who Cares?” There, she and her audience experience phenomena hardly imaginable to us. In U1 we sometimes beat a dead horse, but in UNYT they feed it and groom it and ride it around.
Also on the Review’s front page is “Adapting to American Decline” by Christopher A. Preble. In the formal logic of UNYT there is no “question-begging epithet” or any other type of petitio principii where it is logically erroneous to assume that what is to be proven is already true.
Circular reasoning is valid proof in UNYT . Says Preble, “Admitting that the United States is incapable of effectively adjudicating every territorial dispute . . . in every part of the world is . . . a wise admission of the limits of American power.” Preble argues that there are limits to America’s power by asserting that America’s power is limited.
Preble is the author of The Power Problem: Hows American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free. The book title would indicate that in UNYT the attack on Pearl Harbor was ignored.
Inside the Sunday Review we find “States Are Doing What Scott Pruitt Won’t.” They’re quitting? A splendid idea for some states I could name. Although, skimming the piece, I find that what states are actually doing is making up their own rules and regulations about pollutants and such. Article I of the U.S. Constitution, Section 8, Clause 3—the commerce clause—doesn’t exist in UNYT . States can wreak whatever havoc they like upon interstate commerce. One wonders what other parts of the Constitution UNYT is lacking.
I mentioned time travel. Thus we get “What America Looks Like in 10,000 Years” with detailed maps. UNYT time tourists will find, perhaps to their consternation (but to my relief), that New York City, San Francisco, Portland, and Disney World are all under water.
A feature called “Exposures” goes “Inside Bangladesh’s factories, where $2 shirts get made.” Working conditions are poor and pay is paltry. But, as I said, this universe has a different mathematics. Personally, I am more indignant about $20 martinis than $2 shirts. (Switching the price of these two items is, I gather, not an option in UNYT .)
However, to be fair, maybe UNYT has a different geography and a different history as well as a different mathematics. I spent some time in Bangladesh a quarter of a century ago, before the shirt factories arrived. In those days people (child laborers included!) didn’t have anywhere to work. Therefore the working conditions weren’t poor. And the pay wasn’t paltry because there wasn’t any. Bangladeshis were starving.
“What Hospitals Can Teach the Police” informs us that hospitals are better at “de-escalating” volatile situations with patients than police are at de-escalating volatile situations with criminals. This is doubtless true in every universe. Patients are usually sick and weakly while criminals are often in rude good health. But only in UNYT does a hospital de-escalation training instructor give the advice, “Never point with your index finger: It’s accusatory, even when indicating a direction. Instead . . . direct with the sweep of an open hand, like a maître d’ saying, ‘Right this way.’ ” To jail, Bud.
In “The Problem With Miracle Cancer Cures” a doctor claims the problem is that the cures usually don’t work. The miraculous nature of miracles is, I gather, news to the UNYT reading public.
I suppose naïveté is understandable among those who can do preternatural things such as voyage back to when Hillary was important or forward to when the Little Mermaid Ariel greets Disney guests in her natural element, full fathom five.
But UNYT readers do seem to be easy prey to dreams and fancies and generally given to acting like Cortez and all his men looking at each other with a wild surmise—silent, upon a peak in Darien. (Darien, Connecticut, and never mind that it was Balboa who discovered the Pacific.)
How else to explain why the editors of the Sunday Review feel a need to print Frank Bruni’s faint hope, “The Republicans’ Big Senate Mess,” and a fishing-in-the-wishing-well piece, “The Business Deals That Could Imperil Trump.”
An advice column, “Ask Roxane,” is headlined “Am I Terrible for Not Doing More?” The column addresses a problem unique to UNYT. This is something called “outrage fatigue.” It seems to involve the duly elected government of the United States, but it’s hard to tell from the letter the advice-seeker wrote, which contains such phrases as “I have considered that I am coping with the allostatic load of living . . . ”
Of course, in the universe where we really live, to claim “outrage fatigue” would be to talk nonsense, like saying “my quantum mechanics are getting pooped.” In our world outrage is infinite and expanding at the speed of light—literally, via Twitter. Apparently this is not so in UNYT and we can only envy them.
Or not. Because another piece is titled “My Smiling Boycott.” It begins, “I decided to stop smiling because I was tired.” It continues, “American smiles are more assertive, reflecting Americans’ rating of themselves as more dominant.” And it further continues, “to be commanded to smile takes away our right to our own feelings.”
At which point . . . I smiled. And I quit reading the New York Times Sunday Review.
