An Unplanned Conversation

"As the explanations get more desperately minute, the apologies get ever vaster.  David Bentley Hart's recent "The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss" (Yale) doesn't even attempt to make God the unmoved mover, the Big Banger who got the party started; instead it roots the proof of his existence in the existence of the universe itself.  Since you can explain the universe only by means of some other bit of the universe, why is there a universe (or many of them)?  The answer to this unanswerable question is God.  He stands outside everything, "the infinite to which noting can add and from which nothing can subtract", the ultimate ground of being. This notion, maximalist in conception, is minmalist in effect. Something that much bigger than Phil is so remote from Phil's problems that he might as well not be there for Phil at all.  This God is obviously not the God who makes rules about frying bacon or puts harps in the hands of angels.  A God who communicates with no one and causes nothing seems a surprisingly trivial acquisition for cosmology -- the dinner guest legendary for his wit who spends the meal mumbling with his mouth full."

Bigger than Phil, by Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker
February 17 & 24, 2014

"My confidence that there is a loving God who cares at all for your health or your longevity, based on what I see in the physical universe, is so low that it is not something that I would spend any time investing in, to try to explore any further about whether or not it's true.  I'll let other people do that exploring.  And, if they bring the evidence to me, that's fine."

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Starman, by Rebecca Head
The New Yorker
February 17 & 24, 2014

A Glimpse into my Future

Mr. Leno’s emotional last bow was poignant not because he is a legendary figure who can never be replaced, but because he is the nice guy who worked really hard, did a great job and will barely be missed come Monday morning.

Alessandra Stanley
An Emotional Jay Leno Bids Goodbye
New York Times, February 7, 2014

Time to stop waiting for Godot

Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent.  Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.  Is he both willing and able? Whence then is evil?

     David Hume
     quoted by Joan Acocella
     Misery
     The New Yorker, December 16, 2013

"Death gives birth to the first question -- Why? -- and seems to kill all the answers."

"...once a life is contained, made final, as if flattened within the pages of a diary, it becomes a small, contracted thing. It is just a life, one of millions, as arbitrary as everyone else's, a named tenancy that will soon become a nameless one; a life that we know, with horror, will become thoroughly forgotten within a few generations."

Why?
James Woods
The New Yorker
December 9, 2013

Through a Glass, Darkly

Before 1999, the great powers had intervened three times in the Balkans.  The first was at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 when European diplomats agreed to replace Ottoman power by building a system of competing alliances on the Balkan peninsula.  The second began with the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia in the summer of 1914 and culminated in 1923 with the Treaty of Lausanne and the Great Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey.  The third started with Italy's unprovoked attack on Greece in March 1940 and ended with the consolidation of unrepresentative pro-Soviet regimes in Bulgaria, Romania and a pro-Western administration in Greece. 

These three interventions were so destructive that they guaranteed the Balkans' relative economic backwardness, compared to the rest of Europe. And the violence that these interventions encouraged, often inflicted by one Balkan people on another, ensured the continuation of profound civil and nationalistic strife.  In the West however, these events are rarely regarded as the result of external intervention.  On the contrary, the Balkan countries are seen as culprits who force the reluctant outside powers into their unfathomable conflicts.  This imagined Balkans -- a world where people are motivated not by rational considerations but by a mysterious congenital bloodthirstiness -- is always invoked when the great powers seek to deny their responsibility for the economic and political difficulties that the region has suffered as a consistence of external interference.  "The Balkans," Theodore Geshkoff wrote in 1940, "are usually reported in the outside world only in time of terror and trouble; the rest of the time they are scornfully ignored." It is during these long periods of neglect that the Balkan counties have badly needed the engagement of the great powers.  Yet the only country to demonstrate a sustained interest in the economic development of the Balkans was Nazi Germany during the 1930s. 

The Balkans

Misha Glenny

What he was, he was:
What he is fated to become
Depends on us.

Elegy for JFK
W.H. Auden

November 22, 1963

 

Crucifixion

And the night comes again to the circle studded sky
The stars settle slowly, in loneliness they lie
'Til the universe explodes as a falling star is raised
Planets are paralyzed, mountains are amazed
But they all glow brighter from the brilliance of the blaze
With the speed of insanity then he died

In the green fields a turnin', baby is born
His cries crease the wind and mingle with the morn
An assault upon the order, changing of the guard
Chosen for a challenge that is hopelessly hard
And the only single sound is the sighing of the stars
But to the silence of distance they are sworn

So dance, dance, dance
Teach us to be true
Come, dance, dance, dance
'Cause we love you

Images of innocence charge him to go on
But the decadence of destiny is looking for a pawn
To a nightmare of knowledge he opens up the gate
Binding revelation is laid upon his plate
That beneath the greatest love is a hurricane of hate
And God help the critic of the dawn

So he stands on the sea and he shouts to the shore
But the louder that he screams, longer he's ignored
For the wine of oblivion is drunk to the dregs
And the merchants of the masses almost have to be begged
'Til the giant is aware, someone's pulling at his leg
And someone is tapping at the door

To dance, dance, dance
Teach us to be true
Come, dance, dance, dance
'Cause we love you

Then his message gathers meaning and it spreads across the land
The rewarding of his pain is the following of the man
But ignorance is everywhere and people have their way
Success is an enemy to the losers of the day
In the shadows of the churches, who knows what they pray
For blood is the language of the band

The Spanish bulls are beaten, the crowd is soon beguiled
The matador is beautiful, a symphony of style
Excitement is ecstatic, passion places bets
Gracefully he bows to ovations that he gets
But the hands that are applauding are slippery with sweat
And saliva is falling from their smiles

So dance, dance, dance
Teach us to be true
Come, dance, dance, dance
'Cause we love you

Then this overflow of life is crushed into a liar
The gentle soul is ripped apart and tossed into the fire
First, a smile of rejection at the nearness of the night
Truth becomes a tragedy limping from the light
All the canons are horrified, they stagger from the sight
As the cross is trembling with desire

They say they can't believe it, it's a sacrilegious shame
Now, who would want to hurt such a hero of the game?
But you know I predicted it, I knew he had to fall
How did it happen? I hope his suffering was small
Tell me every detail, I've got to know it all
And do you have a picture of the pain?

So dance, dance, dance
Teach us to be true
Come, dance, dance, dance
'Cause we love you

Time takes her toll and memory fades
But his glory is broken in magic that he made
Reality is ruined, it's the freeing from the fear
Drama is distorted, what they want to hear
Swimming in their sorrow, in the twisting of a tear
As they wait for a new thrill parade

Yes, the eyes of the rebel have been branded by the blind
To the safety of sterility, the threat has been refined
The child was created, to the slaughterhouse he's led
So good to be alive when the eulogy is read
Climax of emotion, the worship of the dead
And the cycle of sacrifice unwinds

So dance, dance, dance
Teach us to be true
Come, dance, dance, dance
'Cause we love you

And the night comes again to the circle studded sky
The stars settle slowly, in loneliness they lie
'Till the universe explodes as a falling star is raised
Planets are paralyzed, mountains are amazed
But they all glow brighter from the brilliance of the blaze
With the speed of insanity then he died

Phil Ochs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im2lYDnDdIU

The big lie about genocide in central Europe in the 20th century

All Balkan massacres this century have enjoyed the specific approval of state organs, whose agents have usually been the instigators as well.  This is not merely a case of an army commander winking to his troops surrounding defenceless women.  In Turkey during the Great War, in Croatia during the Second World War and in the Republika Srpska during the Bosnian war of 1992-5, the legal system was turned on its head -- murder was encouraged and approved by the state and its propaganda apparatus.  Not participating in murder, conversely, was regarded if not as 'illegal' then certainly as hostile behaviour. Such events are invariably accompanied by a historical justification which can usually be boiled down to the simple formula of 'eternal enmity' between two communities.  The construction of this justification by historians, newspapers and other media under state influence, however, tends to mask the real intentions of the elite.

The Balkans 1804-1999
Misha Glenny 

April 15th, The Other Independence Day

"Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity.  The wealthy pay more because they have benefited more.  Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare.  Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible.  Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers.  Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine.  During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services.  For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food."

"Tax Time"
Jill Lepore
The New Yorker
November 26, 2012

Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

Vincent Bugliosi's mammoth, totally convincing examination of the assassination of John Kennedy is encapsuled in one sentence on page 1,437:

"...Oswald, a lone nut, killed Kennedy and was thereafter killed by another lone nut, Ruby."


On page 1,461, Bugliosi summarizes his conclusion:

"After over forty years of the most prodigiously intensive investigation and examination of a murder case in world history, certain powerful facts exist which cannot be challenged:  Not one weapon other than Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano rifle has ever been found and linked in any way to the assassination .  Not one bullet other than the three fired from Oswald's rifle has ever been found and linked to the assassination. No person other than Oswald has ever been connected by evidence, in any way, to the assassination.  No evidence has ever surfaced linking Oswald to any of the major groups suggested by conspiracy theorists of being behind the assassination.  And no evidence has ever been found showing that any person or group framed Oswald for the murder they committed."

Anyone trying to make a case for a a different shooter, more shooters, shadowy figures or organizations behind the killing, has to deal with this one central fact.  Beyond more than a reasonable doubt, beyond a rational doubt, it is clear that Oswald shot Kennedy.  From that starting point, any conspiracy would have had to been put in place before November 22nd and would have had to have been so vast (including the Secret Service, the FBI, Dallas police and prosecutors, doctors at Parkland Hospital and at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, etc) as to be thoroughly beyond belief.  One example: why would any person or group that was able to cover up so much for so long have recruited anyone as unreliable as Oswald and then have allowed him to use an old Italian military rifle, purchased for $15 mail-order, that had a defective scope?  

I didn't start this book with an open mind.  For years, having followed the assassination very superficially through press reports, I believed what so many did, that Kennedy was killed by some combination of the New Orleans mob, anti-Castro Cubans, and the CIA.  (After all, didn't the House Assassinations Committee conclude there was a fourth shot, proving the existence of another shooting and therefore a conspiracy?)

My thinking was changed completely by, of all things, watching Oliver Stone's JFK.   The movie convinced me, on a gut level, that Oswald acted alone (certainly not Stone's intention.)  It was the conversation between the fictionalized Jim Garrison and the fictional X, played by Donald Sutherland, when X explains in great detail the hows and whys of the American military-industrial conspiracy that was behind the shooting.   Watching this conversation, it became inconceivable to me that, in the nearly 50 years since Kennedy was shot, someone involved or aware of this massive undertaking would not have spoken out.  Either out of pride, guilt, religion, death-bed terror, money, or any combination, someone would have come forward by now.  That many people could not have kept this big a secret for this long.

As evident in the passage quoted above, Bugliosi dismisses much of the conspiracy theories as lacking any kind of evidence to support them.  He avoids the truism that lack of evidence does not constitute evidence of lack, but his arguments are compelling anyway.  Virtually all conspiracy theorists focus on some combination of two points.  First, they identify some group (CIA, Hoover, LBJ, Castro, Kruschev, organized crime, etc) that would appear to gain from Kennedy's death.  Having apparent motive, they are off and running, even if a more careful reading of the relationships is less convincing about the motive.

The other approach is to focus on some seemingly contradictory fact or testimony that appears to be inconsistent with the findings of the Warren Commission or the House Assassinations Committee.  Bugiliosi goes into great detail to explore and debunk these apparent anomalies, finding most to be misreading of the evidence and problems in human perceptions of rapidly occurring and complex events.

Kennedy's death was a seminal event for many people of my generation. Certainly there was no event before or since that drew the universal attention of the world so intensively.  It is hard for many of us to believe that something so important, someone so important to so many, could be suddenly struck down by an inconsequential nobody.  Yet, that's what happened. 

"2048"

Close up of a man, thin, very short steel gray hair, heavily lined face, late 50s to early 60s, stressed, bothered, talking.

"First they replaced Medicare and Social Security with vouchers and individual retirement accounts . My folks were both dead,  retirement was decades away, I figured I could do a better job with my money than the government could, so no problem."

"Then they got rid of college scholarships for poor kids. Hell, I had to work when I went
to school and I'm still paying off the loans. And so what if some of them can't go past
high school. We still need mechanics, and janitors, and construction workers, And with
the border closed and the illegals gone, somebody's got to do those jobs".

"Minimum wage was next. Sure I was 29 and still pouring coffee, but as soon as the tax
cuts kicked in, we knew the good jobs were going to come back."

"We opened up more of the country for drilling and built more nukes, so we don't need oil
from the Middle East anymore. Of course, the air's not so good, and it is too bad about
San Diego."

"Turns out global warming wasn't a hoax, of course. Food shortages are getting pretty
common, with the droughts and the crazy storms. I always wish I'd seen New Orleans
when I had the chance."

Slowly pull back, showing a small, sparsely furnished room.

"I remember 2012. Getting rid of Obama seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, I'm
not so sure....."

Anecdote is not the singular of data.

--- found in comments on an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Derivation unknown.

Once more down the rabbit hole...

...Cornell University’s Suzanne Mettler points out that many beneficiaries of government programs seem confused about their own place in the system. She tells us that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on Medicare say that they “have not used a government program.” 

The truth, of course, is that the vast bulk of entitlement spending goes to the elderly, the disabled, and working families, so any significant cuts would have to fall largely on people who believe that they don’t use any government program.

Paul Krugman

The New York Times

February 17, 2012

Yet there is still a territory we call Bohemia, even if it cannot be seen or photographed: it is a territory of romance, risk, choice, commitment, and passion.  Its terrain is fraught with perils, for those who choose to dwell there set themselves apart from the inhabitants of the earth while remaining, of course, among their number.  As such they are open to all kinds of attack, some rational, some not, from those who choose more conventional lives.  It is uncharted territory, where there are no rules or rulers, and in this anarchic, motley, exciting, and timeless land, Louise Bryan still lives as queen.

Queen of Bohemia
The Life of Louise Bryant

Mary V. Dearborn

Blue Song

I am tired.
I am tired of speech and action.
If you should meet me upon the
street do not question me for
I can tell you only my name
and the name of the town I was
born in -- but that is enough.
It does not matter whether tomorrow
arrives anymore.  If there is
only this night and after it is
morning it will not matter now.
I am tired.  I am tired of speech
and of action.  In the heart of me
you will find a tiny handful of
dust.  Take it and blow it out
upon the wind.  Let the wind have
it and it will find its way home.

--- Tennessee Williams

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Britain

Another well written popular history from Erik Larson (I previously read Devil in the White City and Issac's Storm).  This book focuses on the family of U.S. ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd. It combines a vivid day-to-day portrayal of the growing Nazi menace with gossipy details of Martha Dodd's very active love life. 

Larson did a great deal of research into the years when Dodd was serving in Berlin, but there is little feeling for the impact of the Versailles treaty and life in the Weimar Republic during the first years of the Hitler period (hard to picture Sally Bowles in this Berlin). Understanding Hitler's rise to power requires a good background in the German sense of humiliation from the treaty terms and the economic hardships during the 1920s. 

The Bonus Army: An American Epic

Written by Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen and published in 2004, this is a very well researched history of the World War I veterans who wages a long campaign to force the government to pay the cash bonus promised to compensate them for their service.  During the war, solders were paid $1 per day while workers back home were making much higher salaries as the economy hummed along. 

In 1924, over Coolidge's veto, Congress approved a bonus of $1.25 per day for oversees service and $1 per day for domestic service (less the $60 discharge payment).  This wasn't really a bonus, however, as it was only payable at death or in 1945, making it more of a twenty year endowment life insurance policy.  Veterans were given certificates showing the amount due in 1945, including twenty years of interest.

This was acceptable in 1924, but less so once the Depression began and veterans, as so many other people, lost their jobs and their homes.  Pressure from veterans began to build for immediate payment.  (Not all veterans' groups agreed: the VFW was supportive, the American Legion was not). 

Members of Congress, notably Wright Patman, a Texas Democrat, introduced and introduce bills to issue payment, only to have them vetoed by Hoover and Roosevelt.  Opposition varied, from concerns about the cost of the bonus, to reluctance to giving handouts and discouraging the veterans work ethic, to putting money in the hands of African Americans (primarily a Southern concern).

In 1932, as many as 45,000 veterans came to Washington by car, truck, railroad car, and foot, to demand immediate payment.  Despite the best efforts of Pelham Glassford, the D.C. police chief, Hoover's government eventually decided to clean out the camps and unleashed Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, a reluctant Dwight Eisenhower, and the U.S. Army.  There were only a few deaths, but the veterans and their families were pushed out without their belongings and the camps were burned.  Many other familiar names show up, including J. Edgar Hoover, as the government used the almost non-existent threat of communist control of the Bonus Army as part of their justification to put tanks in the streets.

Ultimately, in 1936, the bonus was finally paid, over FDR's perfunctory veto. This was not before hundreds of veterans died in a New Deal work camp in the Florida Keys in 1935.  The veterans, and others, could have been evacuated, but government agents waited too long, despite sufficient warnings.  A cover-up that rose to the highest levels of the U.S. government prevented a serious effort to bring criminal charges.  Ernest Hemingway, a Roosevelt hater, wrote the only honest account of the not-natural disaster.

The book concludes with the passage of the G.I. Bill, showing that at least something was learned from the WWI bonus fight.

While reading this book, it's easy to see the differences between the Bonus Army and the Occupy movement, but there are also a lot of similarities, as both groups of Americans attempt to hold their societies accountable for the disparities resulting from the two greatest economic catastrophes of the last 100 years.

Cryptonomicon

This is the first Neal Stephenson novel I've read.  The book follows three threads, two set in World War II, that focus on a Marine and an academic recruited as a code breaker by the U.S. government. The third thread is set in the present time (published in 1999) featuring a computer whiz involved in a somewhat shady deal to create a data depository in a small Pacific island country that will be anonymous to its clients (a kind of digital Switzerland).  Moving through 1,130 pages, the stories converge in the jungle of the Philippines when what was lost becomes found.

Very intellectual thriller, with much detail on code breaking, including an appendix with explanation of how to use a very unique and (according to its creator) very secure encryption algorithm using two decks of cards.

Stephenson's novels include many generation of the same family, over long periods, plus one character who seems to appear throughout.  My next book, Quicksilver, the first volume in the Baroque Cycle, set in the 17th and 18th centuries. 

Very innovative and well written, with compelling characters.  I recommend the book, but some readers (me for one) will skim through some of the more highly technical parts.

Speak (not too) softly and carry a (not too) big stick.

"Roosevelt loads his gun too heavy. ...The recoil hurts him more than the shot does his enemy.  He is bound to make a big noise but the kick of the gun is so much power taken from the force of the bullet.  People react vigorously against him as they always do to his surplus verbal energy."

John Burroughs
quoted in
The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America
Douglas Brinkley

Another crazed left-wing radical

Every civilized government which contains the least possibility of progress, or in which life would be supportable, is administered on a system of mixed individualism and collectivism and whether we increase or decrease the power of the state, and limit or enlarge the scope of individual activity, is a matter not for theory at all, but for decision upon grounds of mere practical expediency.

A paid police department or paid fire department is in itself a manifestation of state socialism.  The fact that such departments are absolutely necessary is sufficient to show that we need not be frightened from further experiments by any fear of the danger of collectivism in the abstract.

Theodore Roosevelt
quoted in The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America
Douglas Brinkley
pages 739-740

Perhaps not

And yet these facts were largely incommunicable.  He spent his time among businessmen, not scholars.  He rarely invited people to dinner, and could be emphatic and monologic.  He tended to flourish his facts as querulous challenges rather than as invitations to conversation, though this wasn't perhaps his real intention.

James Wood
The New Yorker
November 7, 2011

There and back again

...as he got older and busier, he acquired far more books than he could read...  The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.

James Woods
The New Yorker
November 7, 2011

Best dedication ever?

To the Beatles,

     to the Airplane and the Spoonful and the Dead,

     to Simon and Garfunkel, Joplin and Hendrix,   

     to Buffalo Springfield and the Rolling Stones,

     to the Doors and the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas,

     to Melanie, to Donovan, to Peter, Paul, and Mary,

     to the Who, and the Moody Blues, and Moby Grape,

     to Country Joe and the Fish, Paul Revere and the Raiders,

     to Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs and Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell

     to the Mothers of Invention and the Smothers Brothers,

     to the Hollies and the Association and the Beach Boys

         and even Herman and the Hermits,

     to Creedence Clearwater Revival,

     to lost innocence and bright, shining dreams,

and, especially, to Paris:

     looking at you, I hear the music.

The Armageddon Rag

George R. R. Martin

Past the Tipping Point

…when you're under murderous assault is precisely not the time to turn your entire political culture inside out. That's what the terrorists want you to do, that's what they are dying for you to do. But you're supposed to resist that temptation.

Instead, in thrall to the serpentine blandishments of fear, we spooked ourselves (or at any rate allowed our political class to spook us) into the grotesque disfigurations of the Patriot Act; the witch hunts aimed at Arabs and South Asian immigrants (many of them second- and third-generation American citizens); the botched invasion of Afghanistan; the calamitous Iraq fiasco; the preposterous fetishizations of Hallowed Ground and the Families and the Heroes; in sum, the hysterical deformation of virtually all of American politics, which in turn allowed the egregiously incompetent President George W. Bush that second term with its Katrina debacle, burgeoning deficits, and the whole clueless build-up to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

...

The 10 years just passing, as we all must realize if we are being honest with ourselves, constituted the hinge decade, the decade when something substantial had to be done if the world were going to avoid the exponential catastrophe into which we have now embarked. (You can't go on sagely noting, year after year, that we have only 10 years left within which to confront the crisis, without at some point those 10 years having run out.) Perhaps we could have done both: honored the victims of 9/11 while at the same time tending to the far greater devastation bearing down on us. The point is that, obviously, we weren't able to, and in almost every conceivable way, the result has been an utterly squandered decade.

Shame. Shame on us.

Lawrence Weschler, New York Institute for the Humanities, New York University

The Chronicle Review, August 11, 2011