Read no Further

Zero-sum shopping

2012-02-11T06:51:00.000-08:00

The new CEO of the J.C. Penney department store chain, Ron Johnson, has publicly admitted that his store's prices were needlessly inflated and its frequent claims of special sales and discounts useless and misleading. As reported in a recent issue of Time:

"According to the management-consulting firm A.T. Kearney, more than 40% of the items we bought last year were on sale. That's up from just 10% in 1990. Penney has been a notorious discounter, with nearly three-quarters of revenue coming from goods sold at 50% or more off list price--whatever that is--and less than 1% from full-price merchandise.

Inspired by the no-gimmicks pricing that enabled him to make Apple stores a retail powerhouse, Johnson intends to recast pricing at Penney's along rational lines and treat the public fairly:

"Instead of facing infinite discounts and promotions--there were 590 different 'sales' at Penney alone in 2011--the department store's shoppers will now see just three price categories. One will represent discounted seasonal items that change monthly. Another is clearance merchandise marked down on the first and third Fridays of each month. But the majority of goods will be offered every day at 40% or 50% less than the prices Penney used to charge. In retail parlance that's called EDLP, as in 'everyday low price.'"

Johnson is betting that the public is heartily tired of the fact that "all those Sunday circulars, flash deals and holiday sales events--which seemed more intense than ever last year--have turned shopping into retail combat."

"Johnson believes Penney's customers will appreciate pricing clarity, not to mention sleeping in. 'I don't think customers like having to come to a store between 8 and 10 a.m. on a Sunday in order to get the best price on swimwear,' he said."

Laudable as this is, some doubt its practical wisdom:

"'My intuition is that, in the long run, the changes won't be effective,' says Kit Yarrow, consumer psychologist and author of Gen BuY: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail. 'A discount gives shoppers the incentive to buy today. Without that, there's no sense of urgency for people to purchase things that, frankly, they probably don't need.'"

I have no doubt that Johnson's conscience will be as pure as that of an innocent child and that he will sleep the sleep of the just at night. I am about as sure that he may as well tell his employees to start looking for other jobs and expect to be employed elsewhere within a year or two. Amazingly for a retail executive, he seems strangely blind to the parts of human psychology that affect the shopping experience in the first place.

There are at least two major kinds of transactions in the way people interact with each other. One is open, non-competitive, and based on the idea of everyone getting a piece of the pie. We see this in toy drives for poor children at Christmas; in that context, the idea that anyone in a disadvantaged group should suffer a loss, strikes all of us as intolerable.

The other kind, much more common--and, indeed, the mainspring of business, politics, sports, and, in its own way, even academics--is competitive. Your loss is my gain. Your second-place finish leaves open my shot at first place. When I recruited teams to compete in trivia tournaments, I and my team were always quite sincerely encouraging toward the teams we beat; we wanted the excitement and suspense of close competition. At the same time, as I often reminded my team, "It only takes one point to win."

Shopping is, to a large extent, the second type of transaction, and probably for reasons that don't do most of us a great deal of credit. Look at the inescapable power of words, meaningless in their actual context, such as "Exclusive," applied to sales, or "Confidential," on the cover of a tabloid; each encourages the consumer to imagine that he is about to be the beneficiary of something not generally available. To be sure, coupon-clipping is a harsh necessity in our struggling economy and in fact, I can remember rushing into Target in the half-dark of a winter morning, years ago, to buy diapers for my as-yet-unborn son because of a "special" price.

But even without the goad of necessity or any personal animus toward other consumers, shopping is, for many, a competitive activity in which my gain becomes sweeter if it is achieved at your expense. Laboring under a vague feeling, through much of life, that we are missing out on what should have rightfully been ours, we welcome the chance to claw back some otherwise forfeited value by buying better things at lower prices than our neighbor, in "exclusive" deals that our neighbor was too dull or timid to take advantage of. Black Friday sales are not some sort of aberration but a sign of something deep in human nature.

What will happen, as Time asks, when the novelty of Penney's reasonable and honest pricing wears off? Johnson hopes that shopper gratitude for the chain's straightforward approach will keep them coming back. I wish him well in that thought, but I think, rather, that he and his employees will find themselves in the position of the perfectly polite and well-groomed young man who finds, to his amazement, that even nice girls don't date him for long and turn, instead, to his tattooed, troubled, and footloose friend for excitement.

© Michael Huggins, 2012. All rights reserved.

"Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it." - Alan Watts

2012-02-04T16:39:00.000-08:00

It's funny how much of our time is occupied with a constant, silent craving and twitching restlessness. Some people turn on the TV or radio as soon as they wake up, because they need reassurance that they are not alone. Others check their Twitter or Facebook pages for retweets or "likes," or the dating web site they signed up for, for new matches. Others watch the scales obsessively for the new, glamorous person they hope to be, or check their investments throughout the day for signs of pending wealth.

I've always been fascinated by the story of Taylor Touchstone, a 10-year-old autistic boy in Florida who spent several days naked, hungry, scratched, insect-bitten, and completely alone in 1996 in a Florida swamp crawling with alligators and poisonous snakes, where four Army Rangers had died on a training exercise the year before. An avid swimmer, Taylor had floated down a creek, away from home, and gotten lost; for days, he unknowingly eluded round-the-clock searches by local deputies, Green Berets, Rangers, and others. What struck me was that when he was found, but for some dehydration and sunburn, he showed no evidence of distress. With no sign of trauma, he simply commented that he had seen lots of fish and calmly sang "Row, row, row your boat" as he was being taken to a nearby medical center for observation.

The laser-like focus that seems common to autistics apparently preserved Taylor's emotional equilibrium; to him, everything, including tangled thickets, snake, alligators, insects, and severe thunderstorms, were merely objects of calm fascination.

I have never been consistent in attempts at meditation, but I have noticed that one occasional effect has been to achieve a state of mind where one really doesn't want anything, in the needy, craving, itching, grasping sense. If it's a sunny day with a beautiful mountain view, a commendation from your boss, and plenty of invitations from friends, that's nice, and if it is cold, damp, dreary, with a bleak landscape in sight, an empty social calendar, and your boss muttering about staff cutbacks—well somehow, that's all right too, and it's all the same. I am not referring to a torpid indifference that clouds the understanding and paralyzes the will, but a stop to the chattering radio station in one's head that is constantly going on and on about how disappointing everything is and you surely deserved better. How few of us achieve that, even after a long life; how different the world would be if more of us did!

© Michael Huggins, 2012. All rights reserved.

You can't buy a reputation

2012-01-20T19:57:00.000-08:00

Warren Buffett is on the cover of Time this week, while Newt Gingrich is attempting one of many comebacks. The world's second-richest man has designated 99% of his wealth for charity upon his death, drives himself in a 2006 car, prefers Cherry Coke to fine wines, takes most of his meals at the same local restaurant, and still lives in a house of quite modest scale in Omaha that he bought in 1958. The former Speaker of the House has a $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany's.

Buffett succeeded by focusing on fundamentals: as a "value investor," he picks underrated companies and holds them, as his profile says, "between ten years and forever." A single share of Berkshire-Hathaway purchased 47 years ago for $19 is worth $116,000 today.

Gingrich is perpetually at risk of destroying whatever he has achieved. Blamed for the government shutdown of 1995, he lost his "Contract with America" and was bounced from the Speakership a few years later over ethics charges.

Buffett can be justifiably proud of his achievements but is apparently a plain man. Gingrich presents himself as a pompous megalomaniac convinced that he alone can save the Republic from a dire fate. Buffett, wealthy enough not to care what anyone else thinks, speaks bluntly about the dangers of income inequality in our society and the bad example of the rich not paying taxes proportional to their wealth. Gingrich wants inner-city children to be put to work as janitors in their own schools.

Buffett married his wife, Susan, in 1950 and remained devoted to her until, late in life, Susan herself decided she needed to broaden her horizons a bit beyond what Omaha had to offer and moved, alone, to San Francisco, where she eventually died of cancer. Quite unconventionally, she actually approached another woman and brought her and Buffett together in a domestic partnership; the three even sent out Christmas cards as a group. Buffett accepted the arrangement but is still heartbroken over his late wife's death, according to the profile in Time.

Gingrich apparently broached the subject of divorce to his first wife while she was in the hospital recovering from surgery. Now, we learn from his second wife that he approached her about "open marriage." On that subject, a British woman, apparently a participant in a rather complex polyamorous arrangement, has weighed in via The Guardian. As she quite sensibly points out, Gingrich did not openly discuss his desire for a prospective new relationship with his then-spouse; he came to her after the fact and sought her acquiescence in a clandestine liaison that he had already carried on for some time. Whatever one may think of the unusual domestic arrangement of the Buffetts and Warren's new partner, it was undertaken honestly, without subterfuge and with the knowledge of all parties.

Forget Buffett's money; there is something in the character of such a man that is forever beyond the likes of Gingrich. Newt can fume about the media all he likes; in the end, one is reminded of a passage from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure:

There is a kind of character in thy life,
That to the observer doth thy history
Fully unfold.

Meaning in no sound

2012-01-19T11:02:00.000-08:00

I love silence. It is the place where thoughts are born, meaning is conveyed, and insight is achieved. What if no one said anything unless he had something to say?

Of course I love good conversation, beautiful music, the sound of the wind through the trees, a running stream, a child's happy laughter, or even the train whistle in the night. But silence, to me, has a message of its own; it speaks of things in good order and a mind at work.

At 3:00 this morning, briefly awake, I lay in the dark and noticed that there was absolutely no sound. It was not the emptiness of deafness but the peace of an hour that no one nearby felt moved to fill with mindless clatter. I felt like celebrating. I almost wished to stay awake to savor the beauty of such a moment.

© Michael Huggins, 2012. All rights reserved.

I complained that I had no Bentley, until...

2012-01-10T11:57:00.000-08:00

Six or seven years ago, a young woman slated to attend her state university on full scholarship was in a car wreck while driving home from a wedding reception, and it changed everything. She endured months of surgery and physical rehab; one still sees the place where they had to open her throat to insert a tube. She moves, walks, and speaks awkwardly, reminding an onlooker perhaps of a victim of a neurological impairment. Of course driving is impossible, and she works at home, telecommuting on a freelance basis for a non-profit organization, but the hours are few and the compensation very modest.

I met her last April as I was coming home from my lunchtime walk. She had just crossed a busy intersection; it would have been an ordeal for her in any event, but she was trying awkwardly to carry some sacks of groceries. I stopped her and offered to help, and we walked to her apartment complex, which is just down the street from mine, chatting along the way. She was quite forthright about herself and her background, said the car wreck had been caused by her own negligence, described her determination to make a real life for herself despite her limitations, and said the groceries were for her first foray into cooking; she had only recently moved out of her parents' house into her own place.

Near her apartment, we parted, and I had never seen her since; when I happened to think of her, I wondered if she even lived in those apartments any longer.

We met again just over an hour ago as I was heading home, once again, from my lunchtime walk. She was startled when an apparent stranger called out to her by name, but I reminded her of our long-ago meeting, and she remembered. She's still cooking and had even ordered a cookbook online, which she hopes her mother will pick up at the Post Office today. Her work with the non-profit organization continues, though the hours are still quite limited.

She also was returning home, in her case from International Paper headquarters, just up the street, where she had attended a Toastmaster's meeting. To improve her confidence and her speaking voice, she had begun to attend Toastmasters, where she has become a Club Ambassador, which involves visiting other clubs, and is now working on her Distinguished Toastmaster's ranking.

Amazing the resilience of an admirable few in responding to adversity. While many of us grumble because we didn't get served fast enough at a restaurant, or we don't have a better credit score, or the car we bought didn't have all the options we wanted, here is someone whose range of effective operation, unaided, is contracted to a few blocks along one of the city's busiest streets, dangerous for her to cross, but with her attitude, she prevails and makes it the scene of a series of continuing triumphs. What if we could all demand that of ourselves as a matter of course, without needing to suffer a setback first?

© Michael Huggins, 2012. All rights reserved.

'Tis the season to be prudent

2011-12-12T16:48:00.000-08:00

My ex and I overspent considerably for Christmas of ’83 (it was mostly my fault) and were miserable when the bills arrived. We resolved ever after to faithfully save for Christmas club and spend not a penny more than we had accumulated for the year. The first year, we saved $404, and we increased it by about a hundred dollars each year.

By 1989, we had saved $900 for the year, and when we learned that good friends at church would have to choose between buying winter coats for their three growing boys or buying them Christmas gifts, we looked at each other and easily decided to give the family $100 out of our Christmas fund. Our friends bought gifts for their boys, along with the winter coats, wrapped them, and put them under their tree. While they were gone to Nashville to visit grandma, someone broke into their house and stole all the gifts.

On the other hand, I recall that in 1988, we spent a grand total of $50 to buy seven gifts for our 2-year-old daughter, and she was perfectly happy with what she got. (And we learned that while you are busy assembling the drum set for which you paid a pretty penny at Toys ’R’ Us, your kid has forgotten all about it and is busy playing with the box it came in.)

Has anyone noticed that no one ever gives Thanksgiving gifts (even though, in a way, it would seem to go naturally with the theme of that day) or, usually, even sends Thanksgiving cards? Attempts have been made to promote gift-giving and card exchange for Thanksgiving, but they have mostly fallen flat. Apparently, the prospect of good food and good fellowship are enough for most people. What if there were a change in our culture such that something similar happened at Christmas?

I’m not necessarily arguing for a culture of radical frugality. I am well aware that retailers make about half their yearly revenue in the Christmas shopping season. There are still small mom-and-pop businesses whose owners sit up at night wondering if they will last for another year or even make payroll this month, to support their families and contribute to the local economy, and I have no wish to see them go under. And even in the large retail chains, there are people reporting to work for their $9 an hour jobs for whom this is their only prospect of employment and their only chance to buy anything at all for their own kids or even pay the bills.

The point of Christmas as it exists now, sadly, is that one experiences either wild relief that he is not impoverished and humiliated, or equally wild despair that he is.

Still, I’m not out to persuade people to stop shopping. I do wonder, though, what it would be like if our culture changed so that the crowds at Black Friday were there to snap up the most popular toys—but for the purpose of donating them to the local orphanage—where clothes flew off the rack at stores, but so that you could give a sweater or a pair of slippers to your elderly neighbor or give new sneakers to the kids down the block whose parents were unemployed. What if each person wished only for a token gift for himself—some note paper, or a paperback book, or a CD—but was really excited by the prospect of how much he could buy for others who had no prospect of reciprocating?

Of course I know that even wise parents, not caught up in the mad rush for the latest fad toy, get a good deal of genuine pleasure in giving to their own children for Christmas. My parents would sit up until 2 a.m. wrapping many more gifts for my brothers and me than they could afford and give each other perhaps two small gifts apiece.

On the other hand, I’ll never forget when I took my daughter along—again, she was 2 at the time—while I put a frayed dress shirt in the Goodwill repository and told her I was giving a shirt to the poor people because that was what God wanted us to do. She beamed and gave me a big hug, and the next time a guest entered our house, she blurted out “Daddy gave a shirt to the poor people!” I still wonder if it isn't possible to generalize such a reaction throughout our society. Sales need not fall or cash registers stop ringing, but I can’t help but think there would be a subtly different flavor in a line full of people with their shopping carts piled high, most of whom were standing there to buy one or two things for themselves and the rest of their huge pile of goods for those who had nothing. I think it would really start deserving the name of “Christmas” shopping once more.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

Notable birthdays on St. Andrew's Day

2011-11-30T12:37:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the Anne of Green Gables books, were all born on this date—Churchill and Montgomery on the very same day, in 1874. As one gets older, he may be uncomfortably reminded of these lines from "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift," written in 1731:

"Plies you with stories o'er and o'er
He told them fifty times before
How does he think that we can sit
To hear his out of fashion wit?

"But he takes up with younger folks
Who, for his wine, will bear his jokes
Faith, he must make his stories shorter
Or change his comrades once a quarter!"

When I was a boy, my mother read Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer aloud to my brothers and me, chapter by chapter. Later, at 13, I read Huckleberry Finn and Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and was very taken by both, though too young at the time to fully understand Twain's satire on the King and the Duke in Huck Finn. Years later, to my surprise, I learned that Connecticut Yankee was the first exposure to Arthurian lore for the young C.S. Lewis, whose outlook was about as incompatible with Twain's as it was possible to be. Just as improbably, Twain and his wife, Livy, turn out to have been very good friends with the Scots Christian mystic and author George MacDonald, author of Phantastes, which Lewis credited with having quickened the whole supernatural world to him as a young man.

Twain thought little of the young Churchill and his imperialist enthusiasms; another who took a similarly unenthusiastic view was American actress Ethel Barrymore, 5 years Churchill's junior, who refused his courtship with the observation that she could not tell that he would ever amount to anything. Tellingly, the woman Churchill eventually married, Clementine Hozier, was another statuesque beauty whose appearance strongly reminded others of Barrymore.

Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote the Anne of Green Gables books with an uplifting message though, sadly, Montgomery herself suffered from severe depression, and it is possible that her death in 1942 was actually a suicide instead of death from heart disease, was was officially reported. In a final improbability, Montgomery seems to have modeled the face of her heroine on a photograph of a "Gibson girl," New York ingenue Evelyn Nesbit, the sometime mistress of famous architect Stanford White; when White was shot to death in 1906 by Nesbit's madly jealous husband, Harry K. Thaw, Nesbit became a star witness in Thaw's sensational murder trial.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

The real spirit of Thanksgiving as practiced in the land of plenty

2011-11-24T09:51:00.001-08:00

Taken near my apartment just now.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

A Muslim to fit western tastes?

2011-10-16T12:25:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if Boeing wanted to reassure western travelers that Muslims were not only safe, but glamorous, just like our own best images of ourselves; or to suggest to Muslims that flying Boeing's new 747-8 Intercontinental would make them glamorous (and, thus, less likely to be summarily removed from airline flights, like poor Irum Abbasi), but from anything I think I know about Muslims, Boeing has laid an egg with the photo in their new ad campaign.

What in Allah's name were they thinking of? Muslim women don't wear the hijab gaping oh-so-slightly open to reveal a tantalizing hint of hair, and no self-respecting Muslim woman would be caught dead in a pose that suggested that (a) she was intrigued by the non-believing male behind her and that (b) she was perhaps subsconsciously inclined to loosen the hijab just a little bit more, to attract his notice.

Are these people cracked? Do they think they are in some way doing Muslims a favor by portraying them this way? I for one tend to take a pretty dim view of the way Islam affects women, but aside from that, chastity seems to be something that the advertising industry just doesn't get.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

Absolutely, positively, pointless

2011-10-16T05:01:00.000-07:00

For years, employment at FedEx was the technical writer's dream. It was like lifetime employment at the Postal Service, but with self-respect and an aura of glamour. I did a contract stint there in '87, helped edit their Line Haul Ops manuals for an FAA Audit, wrote policies and procedures for their Information and Telecommunications Division, and actually met Fred Smith; I wanted to get on permanently, but that was the year of the stock market crash, and they imposed a hiring freeze.

It's a fine company that enjoys well-deserved success, but like any large corporation, suffers from a large volume of communication that appears to have been written by a nervous mid-level manager, struggling to inflate his words to sound important and with an anxious eye cast over his shoulder at the Vice-President who might be reading it. This morning, a job ad apparently written by one such manager appeared in my e-mail inbox, titled "Project Management Principle." (In this case, it's supposed to be Principal, meaning "the chief person involved.")

It begins by telling me what everyone knows: that FedEx is a dynamic and growing company. It continues with the following glut of pointless and misleading verbiage as to what a project management "Principle" does:

This position is part of the Corporate Initiatives Program Management team. The team supports strategic programs of FedEx Corporation by facilitating and executing on programs that are critical to the long term success of the Corporation. The position supports the implementation of Project Renewal across the operating companies and Services by facilitating various work- streams, creating and implementing departmental program management processes, tools and techniques. Leads projects to enable realization of benefits for the programs, ensures best practices are used, and provides visibility to senior management on the current status of programs. Provides mentoring for the development of those in less senior positions.
Position Information:

Translation: The Corporate Initiatives Program Management Team manages projects, ensuring good results by using best practices and mentoring less-senior employees.

If a member of this team ever joins the ranks of the unemployed and becomes desperate, instead of standing at an interstate ramp with a sign that says "Homeless and hungry, please help, God bless you," it may say something like this:

The bearer of this display is part of a growing constituency of American stakeholders seeking to restore equity and maximize individual well-being by soliciting targeted placement of discrete amounts of capital, with the goal of leveraging such voluntary disbursements to realize enhanced synergies with the market economy and move toward full parity with other stakeholders. Investors are invited to review opportunities in this sector and consider what commitment level will most effectively align their own goals with those of this segment of the economy.

For now, at least, the writer of the job description is still employed, and he finally gets around to saying what this position actually is, and does:

Responsible for assigning security and creating profiles for new users in Primavera P6. Maintaining P6 Global dictionaries and administrating services. Maintaining P6 P6 Documentation, with the assistance of IT Technical writers, including but limited to, Configuration documentation, Oracle services agreement, and External interface documentation. Responsibilities will also include development and adherence to, P6 standard administration guidelines and change control process. Responsible for development and use of reports to assist administration activities. Responsible for verifying data population and interface operation to ensure data integrity, trough reporting and error logging software. Will provide a single point of contact with IT support personnel and a primary point contact to all Renewal Purple Core users.

Translation: sets up users to use a software package called Primavera, assigning passwords, creating user profiles, etc. Works with tech writers to make sure Primavera-related terms are clearly defined and written down somewhere, so they can be explained to anyone who needs to know, and that instructions for using the software are available. Keeps tabs on how many people are using the system. Keeps the system running through (not trough) staying on top of other software that flags errors and problems. Acts as the go-to person for Primavera for the rest of the computer division and key business users.

In other words: it's not a Project Management Principle (or Principal) position at all, or even a tech writing position: it's basically an administrative position of the type that, had computers been more widely used in my dad's day, might have been done by someone who had had 2 years at community college.

And the qualifications for this job include...? You probably know already. "Master's degree preferred." Absolutely, positively, unnecessary.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

Mission accomplished?

2011-09-12T20:27:00.000-07:00

I love my country and want to see it reclaim its former greatness, which is why I grieve to see how far wrong we went in response to 9/11. On that day, the whole world was with us. In response to the events of that day, our then-President urged everyone to go out and shop, insisted on finding a non-existent link between 9/11 and Saddam, initiated a war in Iraq that eventually brought Al Qaeda to Iraq where it had not been previously, bungled the chance to capture Osama at Tora Bora, eventually involved us in two wars which he refused to raise taxes to fund, squandered our entire budget surplus, illegally bypassed his government's own FISA courts to engage in warrantless wiretapping on American citizens, countenanced waterboarding, a practice for which we had court-martialed American officers in the Phillippines War of 1900 and had hanged Japanese officers as war criminals after WWII; and, finally, multiplied a security state apparatus so that the many agencies, and the number of people holding top secret clearances, are larger than Al Qaeda itself, while airline passengers submit to invasions of their personal dignity that would have outraged the Founding Fathers.

All this happened, in part, because the Bush Administration could not be bothered to pay attention to warnings about Al Qaeda in intelligence briefings (and even a warning of the risk of attacks on tall buildings via airplane) before the event and even allowed some of the 9/11 hijackers to board flights, although they were listed on "no fly" lists, because government personnel didn't check the lists.

We fought two wars not only without paying for them but without reinstituting a draft, staffing the whole endeavor by sending family men and women from the National Guard and blue-collar kids who saw this as their only chance to get a college degree. We sent them into Iraq without adequately reinforced vehicles or adequate body armor, sending them home as shattered wrecks while the government sought to cut veterans' benefits and had to dismiss the commandant of its own Walter Reed Medical Center over the scandal of poor care. We sent enlistees into multiple tours of duty through "stop loss" orders. Our military is overstretched, while the recently departed Secretary of Defense had to fight his own bureaucracy to cancel ridiculously expensive weapons systems that didn't even work, and a quarter of the money spent on military contracts for the past 10 years turns out to have been wasted.

Today, we no longer have the respect of the world. It hesitates to follow us on military undertakings, doubts the continuing soundness of our currency as a worldwide reserve currency, looks on aghast as a small faction of yahoos and know-nothings holds the United States Congress hostage, resisting the control of its own party leadership and all but bringing government to a halt over the issue of raising the debt ceiling, which had already happened 87 times since World War II (mostly under Republican administrations!). The country we delivered from Saddam is now moving steadily into the orbit of Iran, while in Afghanistan, soldiers of that country's army are deserting in droves. Meanwhile, the world beats a path to China's door to seek its friendship, while fewer people in the United States are employed than were in the work force on 9/11, middle-class wages have actually decreased, in real terms, since 1970, and Warren Buffett pays less in taxes than does his secretary.

Is this why people died on 9/11? So that we could present a face to the world as a once-great country steadily being ruined by clowns and thugs, bankrupt of principles and proudly indifferent to ideas?

We elected a man 3 years ago as leader of the free world who seems, in retrospect, to have been chiefly interested in showing how balanced and adult he was. He inanely proclaimed that his advent would mark the moment when the rise of the oceans began to decrease, but had to go to the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change empty-handed. He personally traveled to Europe to seek the endorsement of Chicago for the Olympics, but faced with toxic, hostage-taking political tactics from his opposition, he continually gives in. His self-esteem is perhaps intact, but he is not functioning as a leader, and more's the pity, considering his high intelligence. Meanwhile, among the most intelligent candidates for his office from the opposition, all but one had affirmed a monumentally stupid pledge to refuse a budget arrangement that would have included only a dollar in tax increases for nine dollars in reductions. One of his most likely opponents governs a state where the largest segment of workers holds minimum wage jobs and touts this as an economic miracle, and denies that climate science is settled, while wildfires rage unchecked throughout his state, the worst in recorded history, exacerbated by conditions whose origin he refuses to acknowledge.

This is not the America I grew up in. We are badly in need of a course correction. We need to recognize that actions (including the actions of man toward the environment) have consequences, that wars must be paid for, that social burdens should be shared, that the debt ceiling is merely the way we pay for programs that have *already* been passed, and not a new referendum on them, that the way to fight terrorism is not through an undeclared "war" against no sovereign state with no boundaries and no foreseeable end, that turns our nation into a "security state" that would not seem unfamiliar to residents of constitutionally oppressive regimes and that has government agents forcing women to remove breast prostheses and adult diapers at airports; that our crumbling infrastructure of roads, bridges, and tunnels is a national danger and a scandal in the rest of the developed world; that we spend twice as much per capita as the rest of the developed world on medical care while having health outcomes that lag behind theirs, and that we rank 44th in the world, behind Turkey, in public acceptance of biological evolution, while candidates for the office of President feel obligated to show up at a venue like Saddleback Church and prove their good character to the likes of Rick Warren.

Have we lost our minds?

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

Promise is not performance

2011-03-30T08:28:00.000-07:00

What is the point of staking your business's reputation on something that, in the nature of the case, you can't possibly control?

I am thinking of the new billboard ad for Kroger that promises "faster checkout," as well as the ad for Walgreen's that I just heard on AOL Radio saying that a customer went to Walgreen's and "with no lines, he was in and out in a flash." (Never mind that that seems to imply that people have stopped shopping there, which is one of the only reasons that there would be no lines.)

I have shopped at both Walgreen's and Kroger for over 35 years now, and speed is not among the virtues of either. Indeed, as I have pointed out to a Walgreen's manager, it is my experience that, even if I am there at 2:00 in the morning and with no other customers in the store, I will have to wait. Walgreen's clerks dawdle, and it seems to make little or no difference how much or how little customer traffic there is at a given hour.

I won't say that Kroger cashiers are *as* bad, but they aren't much better. Even when one of them tries his or her best, the store's equipment may malfunction; the cashier who checked out my entire order this past Sunday had to call another employee to help her figure out why the scanner would handle everything but the bunch of bananas I was trying to buy.

(Sadly, those aren't the only issues. As long as their shelves are fully stocked, all is well, but ask for a product that you normally buy there that you couldn't find on this visit, and you are wasting your time—indeed, in my observation, employees and management of both places seem bewildered and unaware of the product you are describing there to begin with, even when it is their store brand!)

If I were a Walgreen's or Kroger manager, I might, indeed, privately hand a token to two or three customers each day and tell them that if they weren't checked out in 5 minutes, their order would be free, and I would then use that as a tool to improve the quality of service. But even the very best business should expect, as a result of its success, to have more traffic, which means more and longer lines. For a business whose service isn't even very good to begin with, to advertise itself as though it offered better service than other places is absurd.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

Chacun a son date

2011-03-26T07:40:00.000-07:00

It's too intriguing not to look into, so I'll definitely log on to Alikewise.com, a free dating site for bibliophiles, based on the idea that "you can tell a lot about a person by looking at his or her books" (well, more precisely, by asking someone to list the books that he or she has actually read). As I said to my son, a devout Eastern Orthodox Christian of a scholarly turn, "When you meet a woman, be sure to ask her how many volumes of the Church Fathers she's read, so she'll be in no doubt as to what kind of man she is dealing with." Fortunately, he's aware of my sense of humor.

My only caveat will be what I have already encountered: those who are well read also tend to be pro-choice absolutists and to assume that all conservatives are mentally deficient, which tends to make for brief conversations. Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised.

On the other hand, if someone started a site called IcanSpellCorrectly.com, he would confer a tremendous benefit on those of us who stop reading dating ads at the point where the other says she likes "quite" evenings at home.

Cupidtino.com brings Apple fans together, arguing that they match well because they "tend to have creative professions, a similar sense of style, and an appetite for technology." Yup, that's pretty much what I thought—I'll run the other way.

420Dating.com matches lovers of pot. Nuff said. (I could start a site called I_tried_pot_years_ago_and_thought_it_was_kinda_dumb.com.)

WeWaited.com matches virgins. I truly respect chastity and am disgusted by the lax modern ethos that seems to hold that reserving oneself for marriage is somehow morbid; as I said to one of my kids once, "There's only one first time." Having said that, something about this site's name and self-advertisement strikes me as being as creepy as the religious family therapist I heard once who suggested, quite sincerely, that a dad give his daughter a bouquet of flowers when she has her first period. I'm not kidding.

In any case, I too waited—until I found the wrong one (but then, so did she), whereupon I resolutely set to work. I am truly happy for those who wait and have their prudence rewarded in a blissful union with a truly compatible mate; I have to question whether focusing primarily on that criterion is likely to help seekers achieve that goal.

Honestly, after getting into the habit of rising at 4 a.m. to walk 3 miles before breakfast and recalling the appreciation that I silently extend to other similarly dedicated souls that I happen to see out walking or jogging at the same time, I'm rather inclined to start a site called UpBeforeDawn.com. Like the one about virginity, it would certainly disclose something important about those who responded.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

I should have stayed home and listened to the Brandenburg Concertos

2011-03-24T19:40:00.000-07:00

We all have to make a living, but Liam Neeson's latest action thriller, Unknown, which I saw this evening, should really be titled "Forget It." Neeson is OK, I suppose, though Bruno Ganz was more interesting, and if cab drivers in Berlin look like Diane Kruger, I will definitely plan a visit and see if I can find one to give me a ride.

Basically, the film is The Bourne Identity for AARP members, and of course I'm glad to see Neeson, who is three months younger than I, proving that people our age can still kick butt over something more important than a parking space. Still, the basic existential issue here is whether a man our age can attract and hold the interest of January Jones, to which, alas, the answer is "Not unless you look like Jon Hamm—sorry." (Which reminds me: if Neeson's character had just spent his time doing what Barry Pepper did to January Jones in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, he wouldn't have bothered with car chases and knife fights.)

If you want to see two good films that amount to pretty much the same thing as this one, watch Roman Polanski's (yes, I know, but watch this anyway) 1988 film Frantic, with Harrison Ford and Emmanuelle Seigner, or the better-known The Fugitive, from 1993.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

Mecca can wait

2011-03-24T19:30:00.000-07:00

Life is a matter of choices, as every adult knows. You choose one thing and give up someting else. Safoorah Khan and the Obama Justice Department are having a hard time getting their heads around this. After just 9 months teaching middle school math, Ms. Khan wanted 19 days' leave to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Nothing wrong with doing her religious duty. Meanwhile, there is the small matter of the school kids who actually need a teacher, pilgrimage or no pilgrimage. Ms. Khan was refused her leave, resigned, and made the pilgrimage anyway. The Justice Department is suing on her behalf for religious discrimination.

I am one who welcomes attempts to incorporate peace-loving Muslim citizens into our national life. A Muslim may be your doctor, accountant, the engineer at a local plant, or the hard-working business analyst who occupied the cubicle across the aisle from me for several months. I am disgusted by yahoos who think all Muslims are secret agents of terror and want to harass and intimidate people who merely want to build secure and prosperous lives for themselves and their families in the United States.

Having said that, I wonder if 19 days of leave after only 9 months would have been expected by an adherent of any other religion: a Christian wanting to spend Easter week in the Holy Land, a Buddhist wanting to honor the Buddha at one of the venerable shrines of Japan or Cambodia, a Wiccan wanting to visit Stonehenge. I think not.

“This was a profoundly personal request by a person of faith," said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights, who compared the case to protecting "the religious liberty that our forefathers came to this country for.” Thomas, please. It was a profoundly inconsiderate request by a person who can see only one side of her faith—a particular duty, which doesn't have to be performed in your first 9 months on a job—while overlooking the larger context of that faith, which includes a strong teaching on alms-giving and our duty to those in need. Which, for a schoolteacher, would include children. Funny that someone should overlook something so obvious.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

Remember that thou art but mortal

2011-03-15T17:38:00.000-07:00

Caesar died on this day in 44 BCE; Nicholas II of Russia, whose title, Czar, derived from Caesar's name, was forced to abdicate the same day 94 years ago. Both were gruesomely murdered, Caesar by those who feared both the man and his power; Nicholas and his family, by those who despised or perhaps even pitied the man but feared the use that powerful nations might make of him. The remains of Nicholas and his family have been exhumed and venerated; Caesar's mortal remains are immaterial to his legend. Caesar, like Madonna and Jackie, needs only one name to be immediately known; Nicholas briefly achieved nearly that degree of fame some years ago, with the publication of Robert K. Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra, later made into a film.

Caesar was about 6 years older, at the time of his death, than Nicholas at the time of his, though decades older in ruthlessness and cunning. Nicholas was too uxorious for his own good, while Caesar boldly displayed the masks of his first wife's Marian ancestors at her funeral though, like almost everything else he did, it was a calculated bid for power. Derided as "that boy in petticoats" by a scornful instructor when he was a military cadet, Caesar witnessed, firsthand, the savage conflict between the populist forces of his uncle, Gaius Marius, and Marius's opponent, one of the few men who matched or exceeded Caesar's own ruthlessness, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who ordered one of his men to bring him the teenaged Caesar's heart, when Caesar defied Sulla's order to divorce his wife. Like John F. Kennedy as a young man, Caesar was underestimated by many around him and thought a youth of slender promise.

Captured by pirates in his youth, Caesar charmed them with his charisma and ransomed himself but promised to find the pirate band and crucify them, which he did. As a young soldier, Caesar was entitled to an ovation whenever he entered the Senate, for having saved a Roman legion by his courage.

The men who murdered Czar Nicholas were those who would never have been admitted to his presence at all except on saints' days, while Caesar's murderers were led by a man of his own class and, indeed, possibly his own illegitimate son. Caesar and Brutus were both descended from the ancient Roman nobility, though neither family had seen a member occupy the consular chair for centuries. In America, it would be as if a Winthrop, having been elected President and reaching for unconstitutional powers, had been dispatched by a Cabot. The murder did not take place in the Capitol or, indeed, in the Forum at all, but in Pompey's Theatre, where Caesar fell, wounded, at the feet of a statue of his former partner and son-in-law, later rival. His wounds might not have been fatal but for the fact that his partisans fled, leaving their leader to bleed to death over a period of 2 hours on the floor. If he had sufficient presence of mind while dying, Caesar may have remembered the words whispered in the ears of every Roman conqueror in his triumphal parade, by a slave standing immediately behind him in his chariot, "Remember that thou art but mortal."

Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed a film adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in 1953, with an amazing cast that included James Mason, Sir John Gielgud, Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr, and a 29-year-old Marlon Brando as Marc Antony, as well as Alan Napier, later to achieve fame as Batman's butler, Alfred, in a cameo role as Cicero. The film's producer was John Houseman, who made every penny of the budget count, filming several scenes on the abandoned set of the 1951 epic, Quo Vadis, which had also featured Kerr. For the mob that alternately cries out for Brutus and then for Antony, Houseman had only a small group of extras, but he backed them up with a tape mixed of sounds that included a jet engine and the roar of a crowd at a Whitesox game. In one of his several entertaining memoirs, Houseman recalled walking the set on the day they were to film the scene of Caesar's triumph, and an assistant director, seeking to pump up the crowd of extras, cried, "OK, kids! It's hot! It's Rome! And here comes Caesar!"

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

Girl, interrupted, by the Golden Horde

2011-03-15T16:38:00.000-07:00

Alexandra Wallace, a student at UCLA, laments on YouTube© that she is dismayed by the multitude of Asians at her school. Whether at the sight of Asian students' large and attentive families coming around dormitories on weekends to cook, clean, and shop, or at the sound of the students themselves enthusiastically chattering on their cell phones in the library in their native tongues, either to catch up with friends or to discover whether their families survived the tsunami, Ms. Wallace considers herself aggrieved. Her Asian fellow students' library behavior is particularly annoying, she says, because they tend to interrupt her epiphanies.

Ms. Wallace certainly puts me in mind of a library in one respect, since her own natural endowments are at least as impressive as the twin volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary sitting on my shelf and don't even require the aid of the magnifying glass thoughtfully provided with the dictionary, to appreciate. I am at least as gratified to see the word "epiphany" occur in the unscripted conversation of a modern college student. And I certainly second her desire for silence in the temple of learning, believing, with Gibbon, that "Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius."

Ms. Wallace, who criticizes the Asians for not adopting "American manners" may not realize just how rare she is. She has apparently lived all 20 years or so of her admittedly brief life without being aware that loud, heedless discussions of purely private matters inflicted on bystanders in public places via cell phone are American manners. The poor Japanese, known for their alacrity in copying, and seeking to improve, the best of American inventions, may simply be trying to fit in. As for Ms. Wallace, perhaps she was raised among the Amish, though her speech doesn't suggest it and her mode of dress would indicate that if that is her origin, she seems to have discarded that group's dress code with abandon.

If Ms. Wallace has, indeed, lived this long and remained so little aware of real American manners as to find public cell phone conversations peculiarly Asian, she has certainly achieved a kind of distinction; indeed, it occurs to me to wonder if her obliviousness arises from having read a Zen text and become lost in contemplation of the Diamond Sutra or something. I too detest loud, public cell phone conversations though admittedly, hearing one in an oriental tongue would at least spare me the litany of "I was like...he was like...whatever, dude!"

Perhaps Ms. Wallace is like the woman I once worked with, some years ago, who went to Hong Kong for a week with her husband. When she returned, the rest of us asked her how she liked it. With a gesture of distaste, she said, "It was OK, I guess--but good God, all those Orientals!"

In any case, I must admit that I, too, have misgivings about Asians in libraries—they have an unsettling tendency to show up the rest of us.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

All things to all people, and nothing definite to anyone

2011-03-14T18:20:00.000-07:00

In thinking about "Campaigning as All Things to All Republicans," the article about former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty's nascent Republican presidential candidacy in today's New York Times, one should be heartened, first, by the fact that it occurred to anyone at the Times to make a Biblical reference, even obliquely, by invoking a phrase from St. Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 9, verse 22. Indeed, I imagine that the article was written by someone about my age, who may have been quizzed by a younger copy editor: "Interesting turn of phrase--where did you come up with it?"

Pawlenty is amiable and intelligent and is who I thought Senator McCain would choose before McCain began to demonstrate, rather embarrassingly, the truth of the adage that hope deferred makes the heart sick, and made some embarrassing choices.

Pawlenty's own choices this electoral season are not easy ones, though he should realize the extent to which he sounded a cautionary note for his own candidacy when he uttered this home truth:

“I think the people who get tossed around in this process are people who don’t have their compass set, who don’t have their feet firmly planted on the ground. And then they start to just grab for the wind and they flop around."

Indeed.

And granted that Pawlenty doesn't have a Michael Bloomberg fortune, his visits to New Hampshire were not thought experiments or philosophical exercises but, presumably, early tests of strategies to garner votes. Accordingly, as the Times tells us:

"At a recent Tea Party Patriots rally, he pronounced, 'The government’s too damn big!' To an evangelical audience, he declared, 'The Constitution was designed to protect people of faith from government, not to protect government from people of faith.' And to Republicans in New Hampshire, he closed with a gentle plea: 'Please leave with hope and optimism.'”

Nothing wrong with making potential supporters feel at home, I suppose. But I can't help but wonder if the estimable former governor might be on more solid ground—philosophically, at least—if he had something like the following to his respective constituencies:

To the Tea Party: "At some point, you need to make up your mind if you want the central government provided by the United States Constitution or the toothless mockery of national government that existed under the Articles of Confederation. The Founding Fathers understood the difference. Do you?"

To Evangelicals: "The first instrument of government in North America did, indeed, begin with the words 'In the name of God, amen.' It was the Mayflower Compact. It was sufficient to organize a small settlement in a day when men literally believed in witches; it was not a suitable foundation on which to build an entire nation made up of people of many widely varying beliefs. Our Constitution is a product of the age of the Enlightenment, not the age of Jonathan Edwards or Cotton Mather. It is important to know the difference and act on it."

To the New Hampshire Republicans: "Please leave with hope and optimism, but only after realizing that the only sound basis of such is to reject the know-nothingness that threatens to hijack the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt."

Now that would make for an interesting candidacy, even though, in today's political climate, it might well be over almost before it started. And then Mr. Pawlenty could go home and read Albert J. Beveridge's biography of John Marshall or Marshall's biography of Washington.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

Listen, my children, and we shall sing, of the ignorance of Peter King

2011-03-10T17:52:00.000-08:00

Is Deroy Murdock rehearsing for April Fool's Day? The National Review contributor called New York Republican Congressman Peter King a "modern Paul Revere" for his nonsensical and time-wasting hearings on Islamic radicalization. A closer description might be H.L. Mencken's memorial summation of William Jennings Bryan: "A charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity."

Never mind the fact that King has loudly defended Irish Republican Army terror in Northern Ireland and compared the slippery Gerry Adams to George Washington(!) Begosh and begorra, if the damn'd Mooslims would just hoist a glass or two and act as if they longed to return to auld sod, they might find a soft spot in the Congressman's heart and he'd forget the whole thing. But it at least makes you wonder how the man decides who his enemies are.

Does Islamic radicalism exist among some middle-class westerners and is it preached by some irresponsible imams? Yes and hell yes. Nothing has amazed and exasperated me more, in frequenting message boards and chat rooms peopled by atheists and agnostics, than to discover a certain type of skeptic of religion who, when he loudly objects to God, really means Christianity: Buddhism is enlightened, Hinduism is exotic, Taoism is nonjudgmental, and as to violent manifestations of Islam, well, who are we to judge—anyway, ever heard of the Crusades? As long as no one in their neighborhood is being beaten, stoned, or beheaded, they don't want to talk about it. That kind of two-facedness disgusts me.

Yes, there is Islamic radicalism, and I would say it has certainly shown its problematic face in Britain and other parts of Europe, though not so much here. (The Times Square bombing attempt, Ft. Hood shooting, and attempted "underwear bombing" were reprehensible incidents so far isolated, in the U.S.; in Britain, there is more of a trend.) King says that Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano lie awake nights worrying about it, and insofar as the nature of their assignments is to anticipate events and head off terror before it could happen, I don't blame them. When I worked at Memphis's City Hall and was in the anteroom of the Mayor's office one day, I was amazed at the fact that we were in the direct line of sight of any sniper wannabe who cared to park himself on the walkway to Mud Island, but it never occurred to me to try to get the Mayor to convene hearings on the risk of psychos posing as tourists. Holder and Napolitano have their quite valid concerns, which include wondering about the next Anwar Al-Awlaki or Nidal Malik Hasan, while King has his tawdry search for the limelight, which includes exploiting an aggrieved dad from Memphis who mourns for the son who became radicalized and is now dead. His grief for his son is as real as was the tragedy, but isolated instances do not make a trend, and King has shown nothing to prove otherwise.

Can a single Al-Awlaki exercise a dangerous influence? Certainly. Could 50 Al-Awlakis sow the seeds for hundreds of Fort Hood shootings? I have no doubt of it. Does King have any evidence that such vipers are being nurtured in American mosques? Thus far, as the Washington Post noted today, there is a large ratio of drama in his hearings to real substance.

Meanwhile, the likely effect of his hearings is to needlessly demonize the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who live peaceful productive lives in the United States and are as horrified by bombings, female genital mutilation, and the like, as you or I. Does King have facts and figures to show that the other kind of Muslim is somehow in the ascendant in our country? If so, let him cite them. If not, let him remember the lamentable example of a certain United States Senator of 50 years ago who went down to everlasting and richly deserved disgrace.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

Forgetting Miss Daisy

2011-03-02T18:35:00.000-08:00

Memphis's Victorian Village exists today mainly because one determined old woman was too stubborn to move out.

In the 1880s, Adams Avenue was known as "Millionaire's Row." James Columbus Neely, a wholesale grocer, bought an imposing pile at 652 Adams in 1883 for $45,000 and made it still more grand, adding a third storey, hand-painted wallpaper, faux wood grain on the cypress doors, and, later, Tiffany-inspired stained glass bought at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. His oldest daughter, Pearl, married a son of the former Mayor of Atlanta in the house in 1890, in front of 400 guests. A replica of Canova's sculpture "The Kiss," purchased by the Neelys, was so heavy that the parlor floor under it had to be reinforced by a brick column built in the basement. Neely lighted his parlor with some of Memphis's first electric lights and was buried from it when he died at 75 on the same day as Queen Victoria, in 1901.

His second daughter, Frances, known as Daisy, entered the house as a girl of 12 in 1883 and died upstairs in her half-tester bed 10 days before the first Apollo Moon landing in 1969. Too frail to ascend the steep stairs in her 80s, she had one of Memphis's first non-commercial elevators installed.

By the '20s, Memphis society no longer dwelt on Adams, some of whose houses stood vacant or were used as boarding houses or, in the case of one of the decaying mansions, as an art school. Daisy refused to leave the house where her parents had lived and died and from which she buried her own husband, Barton Lee Mallory, in 1938; the house where she had raised three children and where she lived with memories of her oldest son, Bill, a decorated soldier of the Second World War, who died a few days before the end of the conflict in an aviation accident. She had hired Annie Cartwright Bess as a nanny for her children in 1907; she moved Annie into the room next to hers when both were in old age.

Her uncle's equally imposing mansion next door, for which the Tennessee State Legislature and Supreme Court had suspended sessions to attend the housewarming, was torn down to make way for the Juvenile Court; stone dogs that once adorned the front steps still keep watch in front of the court building. Had Daisy moved out, as did her neighbors the Fontaines, around 1929, the house would have been sold and eventually demolished, to be replaced eventually by a housing project or a parking lot. But Daisy refused to leave. A local paper says of her that, participating in a fox hunt around 1897, she caught up to the fox, being mauled by the hounds, dismounted her horse, drove the dogs off, and cradled the dying fox in her arms as she rode back to rejoin the hunt. The same determination informed her treatment of the imposing old place where she had engaged in tableaux vivantes at the turn of the century and where her book club, inspired by an idea that occurred to her and her friends on a tennis court one day in 1895, had gathered to improve their minds.

She willed the house to the Daughters of the American Revolution, who first operated it as a museum in the 1970s, but its maintenance proved too much for their slender resources, and they sold it to the City of Memphis around 1987. The city operated it as a house museum, a nationally recognized example of the Italianate Gothic style and late Victorian decorative art (the carriage house behind the mansion contains a 1988 doctoral dissertation of 800 pages on nothing but the house and its contents).

I volunteered as a docent there in 2003 and 2004, after spending years taking my children there when they were small, to give them a sense of history. My daughter thought it was the natural fate of a house to become a museum after the death of its occupants and, when we went home, took me to her bedroom and showed me where she wanted the silk ropes placed a century from now.

The Fontaine House, two doors away, abandoned by the 1960s, was magnificently refurbished and is now operated by the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities. A mansion across the street from it, built as a wedding gift for a Fontaine daughter, is an upscale lounge. Up the street, the 1859 Greek Revival Pillow-McIntyre house contains law offices. Next door to the Fontaine House, the Goyer-Lee Mansion is the periodic beneficiary of enthusiastic corporate volunteers who spend a day refurbishing it and non-profit organizations who propose to develop it for community use, and those plans generally come to nothing.

Daisy's house was closed by the city in 2004 for lack of funding to maintain it, and its reopening is perpetually postponed. Following an agreement between the city and the federal government in 2005 to make all city facilities ADA-compliant, the house must await that necessary work, as well as $268,000 in repairs to the roof and refurbishing of a third of its 70 windows, at $4,000 apiece.

Meanwhile, if someone would only lend me a key, I would gladly go there on weekends and continue to give tours, as I once did.

If, as we read, the Pompeiian ruins are crumbling away from sheer neglect and the Renaissance palazzos of Venice are sinking into the sea, one must be philsophical about the deterioration of a single house not 200 years old; if, as a friend assured me yesterday, a part of our city's continuing financial troubles is the fact that city employees received no raises for 3 years, we must rate the urgent needs of the present over the stained glass and hand-stencilled wallpaper of those long dead.

Still, the likes of the Mallory-Neely house is something we can ill-afford to lose. More than faded wallpaper and forgotten fashions, such houses are a link to an era, the understanding of which is moving away from us as rapidly as galaxies recede from each other while the universe forever expands. In these houses, the telephone was kept in a closet and answered by the butler; bathrooms were a luxurious innovation that no one was ever seen entering because they were concealed in small hallways; husbands and wives slept in adjoining rooms and "kept each other company" by invitation and agreement; the disposition of a visiting card spoke volumes, eloquent in their silence. Men welcomed the discharge of factory smoke as the harbinger of a modern age and studied new and more advanced weapons as devices to forever keep barbarism at bay. A single financier saved the United States from catastrophe in the panic of 1903, and more modern thinkers who proudly called themselves "Progressives" fervently hoped that the 20th century would herald a new era of peace and prosperity.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

Numbered and swiped

2011-03-01T16:32:00.000-08:00

My e-mail brings me an offer of a photo-personalized check card from my bank. If it makes it easier to retrieve it in case of loss, well and good; my father's first Mastercard©, issued in the 1970s, bore his photo for identification.

But that does not seem to be all my bank means; because businesses are reduced, nowadays, to proffering a degree of fulsome flattery to John and Jane Doe that, one hopes, would have embarrassed the vainest Renaissance cardinal, I understand that my bank intends to convey the promise of a sort of apotheosis in this life if I consent to adorn my check card with my 58-year-old face. "Show off your image every time you make a purchase!" it says, encouragingly. Frankly, I can think of purchasing some personal necessaries where a public display would not be the first thing I would want, rather like asking the clerk at the drug store for the restroom key and then listening to her announce over the store's public address system, "Restroom key to register 1!"

Offers like this tempt me to use a photo in which my back is turned to the camera or, better yet, I am lying in a casket. What, I wondered, would the Man in the Iron Mask, or Young Goodman Brown, or the Lone Ranger have made of this? Life is a balance of self-disclosure and private reserve; the second seems to be vanishing away.

But even before I thought of the mischievous photo possibilities, I considered the e-mail in the light of interpreting the offer quite literally: your check card is your personality; that is, we are reduced, for purposes of modern living, to the status of a piece of plastic, so thin as to be barely 3-dimensional, bearing a stripe (and not the healing sort) that contains all the information about us that anyone feels he needs to know, numbered, security-coded, and capable of enduring a confirming swipe between two restraining metal lips, that confirms our identity and give us leave to function another day, until our expiration date. All else is ephemera. And perhaps that's why, as the canny bank marketers anticipate, we need to compensate by posting our faces on these pieces of plastic, to reassure ourselves and all others that we are in fact more than the light and disposable tokens to which we seem to have been reduced.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

February 27, 1926

2011-02-27T16:15:00.000-08:00

My grandparents, Rayford and Phoebe Huggins, were married on this day in 1926. He was 19; she was 17. Rayford was two hours late for the wedding, having forgotten the appointment while shooting pool with friends. Phoebe sat crying in her wedding dress, while customers of the lunch counter her parents ran out of their home on Mallory Avenue in South Memphis jeered at her and told her to change, because her groom would never show. Eventually, there was a knock on the door and Rayford stood there sheepishly, with his hands in his pockets and the question, "Well, do you still feel like getting married?"

They were together 61 years, until his death two days after Christmas, 1987. They raised three boys and had 6 grandchildren, but many more became their "children" through the concern they showed to the unfortunate. Papaw was a carpenter, while Phoebe was a Pentecostal preacher. Neither of them had more than an 8th grade education but had practical wisdom. Those who were down on their luck found a temporary home at Phoebe and Papaw's house, and many received gifts of food, clothing, and other help from them.

Temperamentally, they were quite different. Phoebe was a firecracker, and if you happened to differ with her on any point of scripture, she would preach a summary of the whole Bible to you right then and there, from Genesis through Revelations. Papaw sat quietly in his armchair and smoked his pipe. Phoebe didn't care much for his pipe (which he eventually gave up) but once, trying to be helpful, she washed all his pipes in dishwater and proudly presented his "cleaned" pipes to him when he came home from work.

Other surprises were even less convenient. Tired of urging him to remodel their kitchen, she simply tore out the back wall of the house one day while he was at work, and when he came home that night and entered the kitchen, he found himself looking into his own back yard. The kitchen was redone in short order.

They kept working into old age and were still accepting house painting jobs into their 70s. A ladder collapsed out from under Papaw and he took even this in stride, maintaining his balance and landing on his feet, unhurt. Phoebe and I climbed the steps of a fire ranger's observation tower once, when she was 65 and I was 21. I was the one who was out of breath; when I reached the top, she was standing there happily chatting with the ranger.

She frequented a senior citizens' center in her 70s, though not as a customer, but as a volunteer. It never occured to her that she was supposed to be elderly. I asked her once if they were coming to Memphis for Thanksgiving (they had moved to Heber Springs) and she said "Honey, I'd like to, but if I don't stay here, there's be no one to pay attention to the poor old senior citizens, so I need to stay and help."

After Papaw's death, Phoebe lingered until January 14, 1996, and would have lived longer but for a tumor that she purposely left untreated because she felt it showed a lack of faith in God to seek medical help. She let herself be taken to a hospital exactly once in her life (her three sons were delivered at home by midwives); about 3 months before her death, at 87, she was a patient for a couple of days at Methodist Hospital North. She couldn't get it through her head that she was supposed to lie quietly and let herself be cared for; she was constantly up and about, trying to help the nurses take care of others. Shortly, the staff realized that she couldn't be made to fit any model of convalescence they knew of and released her.

She saved everything and died still having among her possessions a paper container of peanuts and candy from my parents' wedding in 1951, the dress she had worn to their wedding, her diaries from the 1950s, and a parents' day program from Cummings School in 1940.

In 1958, she had bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder and left behind many recordings of family evenings including singalongs. My brother Tim found a machine of that type on eBay 10 years ago and made 2 CDs of family performances, for which I supplied names and dates. Today, I can hear Phoebe and Papaw, along with their three sons--my dad and his two brothers--and my great-grandmother, Amy Huggins, singing "If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again," recorded one night in 1966, as well as my own voice at age 5, sounding like Alfalfa on "The Little Rascals," singing "Put Your Hand Into the Hand of God," and my brother David learning to talk. I can hear Phoebe preaching and playing "Under the Double Eagle" on her accordion. I can hear Phoebe and Papaw singing "When He Reached Down His Hand for Me." I can remember them driving my brothers and me to the little one-room church they pastored in St. Francis County, Arkansas, in a converted ambulance from the 1940s, with nothing so unnecessary as a seat belt. I can taste the salt pork that Phoebe would fry for breakfast and the pork neckbones that she prepared for supper.

Above all, I can hear her saying about some scoundrel, "He meant well." After their deaths, this became a standing joke in our family, and to this day, if we reflect on someone whose behavior seems particularly discreditable, someone will chime in with "Well, he meant well."

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

Theodicy and the Epicurean Paradox

2011-02-27T09:45:00.000-08:00

The "Epicurean Paradox" is expressed in these words:

"Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?"

I posted the following last summer to an online message board in which another poster asked if anyone had a response to this argument:

I doubt that there could be one that is compelling.

Certainly, we should stipulate that if there were a God, by which we mean a Being of Infinite Wisdom (or at least much smarter than us) and given that we can't know the reasons for everything, it would be logically possible for God to commit acts or allow them that looked monstrous to us but that turned out, unknown to us, to be justified.

If I were walking down the street with small children and saw someone who, unknown to to the children, had a partly concealed weapon, and if I could know the person was about to assault us with deadly force, and if I attacked the other person instead and killed him, the children might well think they had witnessed an unprovoked and monstrous attack on an innocent bystander, but they would be mistaken.

Having said all that—which I suppose must be the best one can say for such an argument—it remains true that the gap between the supposedly benevolent and omnipotent God and the world we see, is simply too great for us to rest an attribution of justice and power to Him on anything but blind faith.

Someone has mentioned C.S. Lewis, whom I respect as an able reasoner on some questions, and Alvin Plantinga, a Christian philosopher whom, as I understand, many professional philosophers take very seriously indeed, including some who are atheists and agnostics. I feel that I owe it to myself to read Plantinga at some point, though I haven't done so yet.

Plantinga and Lewis argue along the lines of saying that the world we have may be the best that any power could have created, if we were to have anything but a fantasy world that changed at any moment. Lewis develops this at some length in his The Problem of Pain. The same firmness that makes wood suitable for building a house, he says, also means I can use it as a club to bludgeon my neighbor. If God took it upon himself to suddenly make the wood harmless if used for assault, He may as well go the whole way and make my mind so that it could not frame such an intention to begin with, but then, we would not be human.

All that is very well, as far as it goes, but it strikes me as odd, for people so concerned to stress human free will as a constraint on God (not to mention that invoking human free will still doesn't answer the issue of why there are earthquakes, floods, and plagues), that it never seems to occur to them to wonder why God would not have offered everyone the courtesy of the ultimate in "free will"—asking them if they cared to be incarnated into such a world in the first place.

It is not impossible to imagine a Deity creating conscious but disembodied "souls" and making a speech to them something like the following:

"I will give you a very basic choice. You may remain as you are and know me through mental pleasures, contemplating my splendor and majesty through the ages, unchanged from what you are at this moment.

"Or you may elect to be placed in a world where you may experience hunger, pain, disease, or worse. There are too many variables even for me to make it the undifferentiatedly happy place I might wish. You may, it is true, be born with good genes, loving parents, in a good climate, in a comfortable household; you may find a loving mate, pursue a worthy career, beget loving children who are a credit to you, and die, after a long lifetime of illustrious achievement, mourned by all who know you.

"You may, on the other hand, be born into a place called Darfur, see your father cut down by outlaw militia, see your mother savagely used by the same people, watch your little brother die of starvation, and be sold into slavery.

"You may opt for one or the other, but if you choose the physical life, once you're in, you're in. There is no panic button to push that lets you out, and whatever hideous tortures, mental or physical, you may happen to suffer, you will do so knowing that you unfortunately happened to draw the short straw in a world that simply couldn't be made pleasant for everyone.

"Now choose."

Now if a Deity offered such a choice, however stern and extreme we might think it was, everyone would at least know what they were dealing with.

But the scenario I've just described doesn't really seem to appear in many forms of religious belief. Instead, we seem to be meant to assume that we had no choice but to be born into this world, but on the other hand, God can't interfere with our free will! Say again?

Lewis, to his credit, says in one of his books, that if God's justice is so unlike any notion we have of right and wrong that we can scarcely comprehend it, that the whole idea may as well be meaningless, and I think he has hit on the exact problem. Let's return for a moment to the pre-birth scenario and suppose that instead of offering the unborn Darfurian child a choice, God simply says:

"You will be born into starvation, conflict, disease, and misery, live a short life of pain, without dignity or freedom, and finally see your life snuffed out in a miserable and humiliating death. And you have no choice but to be born and go through this.

"Still, on the other side of this miserable interlude is an eternity of dwelling in my presence, in everlasting bliss, and even though your puny mind cannot understand why, the bliss would not have been possible without the intervening horror. I in my infinite wisdom know this, even though you never can or will."

Very well. Could any of us, if we had the power, say this in good conscience to any being? Even one?

The question answers itself. Logically, yes, everything I just said above could be supposed to be true, but the sheer impossibility of knowing it is true, reduces us as much to blind faith as we would be similarly reduced if some maniac locked us in his basement for years and abused us but assured us that it was all for the best. If the kind of faith required here is really necessary to believe in a good and powerful God, it robs us of our humanity as much as the putative loss of free will that occasions Lewis's and Plantinga's caveats about automatons.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Twitter© revolution

2011-02-23T17:50:00.000-08:00

I appreciate The Economist sponsoring a debate on whether or not the internet is a net force for democracy. While that may seem too obvious seriously to question, one should not underestimate the malicious uses to which technolgy can be put if a repressive regime has sufficiently talented hackers in its employ. I posted the following to the debate discussion board:

Dear Sir,

It would be interesting to simulate a war game between an internet-equipped Lenin and Trotsky, on the one hand, and a similarly armed Pyotr Rachkovsky, on the other, to see who would win. Pessimists should doubtless be given their full due in this matter: in even not very sophisticated hands, the internet offers countless opportunities for malicious operators to discredit and disrupt forces of reform through planted posts, doctored e-mails and photos, and dishonest chat participants, not to mention more standard tactics such as denial of service attacks, stolen credit card and bank account numbers, and the like.

In the end, as I see it, this comes down to the old saying that the only way to get rid of alligators is to drain the swamp. The manifestation of the internet in modern life is such that the swamp can't be drained. Mubarak turned off the internet once; no one imagines that its proponents are idly sitting around hoping no one thinks to do so again. Safeguards are no doubt already being built. Technology experts polled by a journalist for the website Tech Republic for their views on Joe Lieberman's fantastic proposal to let an American President shut down the net responded that first, it probably couldn't be done and second, the net is so intricately connected with every aspect of modern life that if a western government tried it, the law of unintended consequences would exact its comical revenge.

The net, like Wordsworth's world, is too much with us and, absent a civilization-ending meteor strike, it will never be otherwise. It is true, certainly, that there are virulent pockets on the net even now who deny the holocaust and global warming, doubt our President's citizenship, insist on the deleterious effects of vaccines, and call for the relaxation of the age of consent for reprehensible reasons. Those diseased enclaves also will not go away, or will do so only to be replaced by other things equally as bad.

Having said that, the redoubtable Rachkovsky, were he back in operation, could recruit half the population to harass the other half, and he could still not, finally, overcome the fact that the net provides an unstoppable channel for any view of any description to become accepted worldwide, an opportunity limited only by the rhetorical skills of its advocates. Repression, grievous as it is, is like the Gulf oil spill; eventually, it is dissolved in the sheer volume of the medium in which it is suspended, and the oyster beds are found to have survived. This is no utopian hope but a simple reflection of the countless paths that cross online, and the myriad of opinions that travel them. Each has a hearer and an advocate; none can finally be silenced.

And who is my brother?

2011-01-19T10:41:00.000-08:00

I suspect that Alabama Governor Bob Bentley should discuss his religion in the way the Savior advised his followers to pray: in secret. He has told his fellow Christians what they already believed and thrown secular America into a panic, convinced that new Salem Witch Trials are just around the corner.

At a black church in Birmingham, the not-so-subtle Bob announced that those who did not profess faith in Christ were not his brothers and sisters and, from the reaction I'm seeing online, skeptics everywhere are ready to begin impeachment proceedings.

Everyone take a deep breath.

I'm a lot more alarmed, frankly, by reports that have come out of the Air Force Academy in the last few years about cadets being pressured to be "soldiers of Christ."

The governor's remarks took place, not in the legislative chamber, but in a church. Does he somehow forfeit the right to speak of his faith for no reason than that he holds public office?

The remarks seems to have been made in the course of a clumsy attempt to portray himself as more tolerant (racially). He wanted to make the point that color made no difference to him as to Christian brotherhood, but faith in Jesus did.

In the context of Christian theology, what he said was precisely correct. The sort of Christian who believes in the necessity of being "born again" reserves the terms "brother" and "sister" for those who also profess that experience; they are not meant as expressions of general approbation, as they are for much of society at large.

A poster on one message board speculated on what would have happened had a non-Christian said this, and I agree it's worth examining. If an Orthodox Jewish Mayor had stood in an Orthodox synagogue and said "Anyone who doesn't keep Kosher is not truly my fellow Jew," narrow-minded as that might have been, would anyone conclude from that, that the Mayor was about to impose Kosher dietary laws on the entire city or appoint only fellow Orthodox Jews to important posts?

If a Sunni Muslim city councilman stood in a mosque and said "Only my fellow Sunnis are true servants of the prophet; Shia is a perversion of the faith," would anyone believe he was proclaiming jihad in America?

This was a Christian, speaking in a church, using a term to which his kind of Christian attaches a very precise meaning. He specifically said that those who did not have faith in Jesus were not his brother and sister, meaning that in the theology of what he believes, the matter of their salvation is not settled as he believes his is. And are those of us who wouldn't care to join his club in the first place going to gripe because, though we have no interest in being born again, he doesn't speak of us as if we were?

Why?

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?

2011-01-17T17:23:00.000-08:00

Sherwin Nuland's 1994 book, How We Die, records the horrifying story of a young girl butchered on a street in Connecticut in front of her mother by a powerfully built psychotic who had somehow slipped through the cracks of the state's mental health system. Instances like this, the Virginia Tech murders, and, now, the tragedy in Tucson make everyone wonder, "But why doesn't someone do something about those people?"

This needn't imply a judgmental attitude toward those who commit violent acts. Mental illness is just that; several attempts were made on the life of Queen Victoria, but it was obvious that the shooters were insane and, though convicted of treason for attempts on the life of the monarch, they were not executed, even in that harsh age. Sarah Jane Moore, who missed the head of President Gerald Ford by just six inches when she fired at him in 1975, was similarly disturbed and apparently still is; as late as 2009, she said she was glad both that she had failed to kill the President and that she had tried. (Never mind the irony of her having been an FBI informant at the time of the attempt!)

It doesn't matter to the victims that, as an article in The New Republic points out, one's chances of being killed by the mentally ill in a given year are one in 14 million; if you are within range of Seung-Hui Cho in West Ambler Johnston Hall in Blacksburg, Virginia, on the morning of April 16, 2007, the rarity of your predicament is cold comfort. If you are the bereaved survivor of a victim, you are enraged.

My cousin lost his 13-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter to the rage and irrationality of a man who shot them and their mother to death one night 2 years ago; an enterprising reporter tracked down the man's former wife, who said that she had often urged him to seek counseling for the violent thoughts and fantasies that were a continuing part of his mental experience, but he had refused. State government was not aware of his problem and employed him as a park ranger; although it was not required for his work, he legally carried the gun with which he slaughtered his wife and stepchildren.

What should be done? States should look very seriously at adequate funding for mental health programs. As the article in The New Republic points out, some states, such as New York, are setting up structures of outpatient services, combined with assertive efforts to contact those who seem to be in need and encourage them to use the services.

Background checks for gun ownership should be more thorough. In the aftermath of the Tucson tragedy, background checks were sharply on the rise, and that's as it should be.

Public figures should be aware of the need for security in an age of increased risk and plan accordingly. It need not be oppressive or even very obvious; according to one article I read this week, no public figure has been killed in the United States since 1978, while pacifistic Sweden, ironically, has tragically lost two politicians to violence. We don't have to risk another absurd "Don't tase me, Bro!" episode simply to take reasonable steps to protect public servants.

What should not be done? Panic-based broadening of the criteria for commitment. It took 15 years of involuntary and unnecessary confinement of a man locked up in Florida with hardened criminals, subject to daily abuse, though he was no danger to anyone, to get the courts to erect a safe standard to preserve individual integrity in this matter. Not every oddball is a threat. A woman walked around Midtown Memphis for years, approaching strangers for bus fare and loudly cursing those who did not comply, but she was not dangerous. I encountered a man named George wandering the campus of the University of Memphis, wearing a turban, approaching guest lecturers and holding up a crystal to their faces that he claimed enabled him to read their thoughts, until the University forbade him to attend lectures any more. George fantasized that he was the confidant of the world's intelligence agencies and that every woman who smiled at him at a coffee counter was interested. Eventually, he blew his brains out for sheer loneliness. He needed help but was not a danger to anyone else.

If we had geniune psychics walking around like the ones that predicted murders about to happen in the film Minority Report of a few years ago, we could spot the potential Jared Lee Loughners and Seung-Hui Chos and take preventive action. Absent that capability, we can't, and we are at risk for targeting the merely eccentric and constructing a paranoid society so intrusive, so punitive, that it makes airport security groping seem inconsequential by comparison and forces everyone who is strikingly different in some way to hide behind a bland mask. It would have clapped Stonewall Jackson in a confinement ward after enough people noticed Jackson's eccentric tendency to march the streets of Lexington, Virginia with one arm continually raised high in the air to "align his organs." It would isolate the decidedly individualistic and anyone who didn't happen to fit a conventional frame of reference.

My late friend Charles was interviewed by a social worker in a child custody dispute. She spotted his Wild Turkey on the sideboard and his Sons of Confederate Veterans plaque; he voluntarily showed her the licensed pistol he kept in an upstairs closet, unloaded and with the safety on. She wrote up a report portraying him as a whiskey-guzzling, gun waving, yahoo who was a potential danger to his own son. That is one of the outcomes I fear.

I volunteered at a street mission once (to write operations manuals for them in their use of computers); the young man who showed me around later confided that "the Lord" had shown him that I had "put a curse on his head" and that he had to repel the demons. I don't want him locked up, and I don't care to be confined either, at the behest of his fervent fellow believers. I don't want to see mental warrants sworn out by spiteful family members or score-settling neighbors or co-workers. The system we have now is quite imperfect--Sarah Jane Moore had been vetted by the Secret Service before that fateful day in 1975 and labeled not dangerous--but so is the thinking that would have everyone peering into everyone else's hearts and minds in an inclination to see danger, not realizing the extent to which they were seeing the vagaries of their own minds.

© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.

A moment’s reflection

2011-01-11T14:38:00.000-08:00

I agree with what Emerson wrote in his essay "Social Aims":

“It is an excellent custom of the Quakers, if only for a school of manners—the silent prayer before meals. It has the effect to stop mirth, and introduce a moment of reflection.”

That custom seems in danger of going the way of dinner table conversation and handwritten thank-you notes.

The skeptic may plead that he is aware of no definite Being to whom he could address anything like a prayer. I think something like the following should be suitable:

May we be grateful
For blessings that enrich us through no efforts of our own.
May we be mindful
Of those who spend each day in want through no fault of their own.
May we determine
To seek the good of all and not our private gain alone.
May we discover
Grace, wisdom, strength to aid us facing challenges unknown.

Death on a cold day

2011-01-10T11:25:00.000-08:00

Chesterton once wrote that while everyone was seeking to accommodate themselves to the spirit of the age, most progress in history had occurred at the hands of men who refused to accommodate themselves to anything.

William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, died on this day in 1645, on Tower Hill by the headsman's axe, on orders of Parliament. He was 71 and so loathed that only his advanced age had spared him the gruesome evisceration that many wished to inflict on him.

Laud, with Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, had formed the chief support of the detested political and religious policies of Charles I, a painfully well-meaning man and one of the most egregiously unfit ever to occupy the English throne. Laud resisted the Puritans, the Tea Party of their day, suppressing unauthorized pamphlets and having their authors confined to the pillory with their ears sheared off. He walled off the east wall of churches to contain the altar and enforced bowing at the name of Jesus in the Anglican liturgy, as well as the wearing of the surplice. He and Strafford developed a policy they called “Thorough” for upholding the King's edicts that provoked howls of outrage in England and Ireland alike. Execrated by his opponents and laughed at behind his back by his royalist confrères—Queen Henrietta Maria saw him, accurately, as a fussy, pompous little man—he was unyielding in his determination to see things done as his judgment told him was best and wept while attempting to bestow a final benediction on his friend Strafford as the latter was being led to the block in 1641.

Laud was not a lovable man. Peevish, temperamental, self-important, impatient, suspicious—after a dinner party, he counted his silver spoons to make sure the guests had not stolen any—he was mocked even by the King's fool, Archie Moore, who quipped “All glory to God and little Laud to the devil.” His intolerance of opposition and his relentless insistence on a beautiful and orderly liturgy made him so hated that the first and only attempt to introduce his edition of the Book of Common Prayer into Scottish worship at St. Giles' Cathedral in 1637 provoked a riot. Macaulay, the paradigmatic Whig, objected to Laud's fate only because, as he put it, ignoring the deposed prelate would have been the best punishment that his Parliamentary foes could have inflicted on the “ridiculous old bigot.”

Typical of his imperious nature, Laud was a man of contradictions. He was Chancellor of Oxford, where he endowed a professorship of Arabic, but he expelled undergraduates and disciplined faculty who objected to his religious views. Detested as a crypto-Roman Catholic by thousands, he refused the offer of a cardinal's post from the Vatican if he would only convert.

Why remember him? Against all expectations, Laud, who had lived and died by the principle that a church that had “one Lord and one faith should speak with one heart and one mouth” influenced the course of his mother church more than he might have hoped or his enemies feared. Because of him, Anglicanism swerved neither to the right nor the left: it did not turn into a species of Presbyterianism with bare liturgical overtones or, on the other hand, a mere curiosity, a pale echo of the religion of Rome, a forlorn orphan pining for its parent. Anglicanism remained whole and complete, and echoes of Laud's standards and beliefs can be discerned in Anglican worship today; it descended even to the Episcopal Church of the new American nation when, following the Revolutionary War, the first bishop of the American Church, Samuel Seabury, had to be consecrated by Scottish bishops using Laud's prayerbook of 1637. English bishops could not consecrate an American, because their form of worship would have required a swearing of allegiance to the English King.

How ironic that a man so consumed with his own importance, so full of anger and peevishness, so capable of harshness and cruelty, should have been the means through which the spirit of his church was preserved! The Deity does, indeed, work in mysterious ways. Those contemporaries of Laud considered in his day to be among the lights of Christian piety—Lancelot Andrewes, George Herbert, William Juxon—are known today mostly to specialists of that period. Herbert's poems, beautiful as they are, are an assignment for graduate students in English. The figures of speech in Andrewes's sermons are sometimes ridiculously overdone, and his book of private devotions, valuable as it is, is seldom consulted. No one remembers any longer that it was Juxon who accompanied Charles I to his own appointment with the headsman on another January morning, 4 years after Laud's death, so cold that Charles wore two shirts so that onlookers would not think he was trembling from fear.

No, it was neither Herbert, nor Andrewes, nor Jeremy Taylor, nor even later luminaries like Thomas Ken who preserved Anglican worship as something worthy and distinct, but this cranky little man, nearly eaten alive with impatience that the world could not see things his way and that he could no longer whip it into conformity, forced to witness the gleeful dismantling of everything he had fought for, and finally crying out, in a sort of despairing faith, “Lord, I am coming to you as fast as I can,” as his contemptuous jailers came to lead him to the chopping block. In a final moment of uncharacteristic humility, he said this prayer, which is found today in the Book of Common Prayer. It is his best epitaph:

Gracious Father, we pray for thy holy Catholic Church. Fill it with all truth, in all truth with all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in any thing it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Savior. Amen.

Judge righteously between a man and his fellow countryman

2010-12-27T17:41:00.001-08:00

I like Livy's approach to history. Provided with materials about early Rome that he knows are shot through with myth and borrowings from the history of Greece, he admits that no one can know these things for certain and simply presents them leavened with his best judgment. I like also that, without denigrating religion in general, he doesn't mind telling us that Romulus was said to have been taken up to heaven in a cloud (but may in fact have been torn apart by jealous senators) or that a prominent Roman pretended to have a vision of the dead Romulus to reassure the people.

For Livy, history is the study of events driven by human character, and his portraits are striking. Numa Pompilius, an early Roman king, is noted for his piety and his emphasis on building Rome's moral fibre through attention to religious rites (though Livy notes that Numa constantly pretended to commune in private with the goddess Egeria to support his program). Tullus Hostilius, his successor, respects religion but lives for the glory of conquest in war. Discovering the treachery of Mettius, a confederate king, Tullus has him tied to two chariots that are driven in opposite directions, tearing the traitor apart before the eyes of the horrified crowd. Tullus later comes to grief over religion: attempting a complicated rite in a temple of Jupiter, Tullus gets the formula wrong, whereupon the angry god destroys the building with fire, consuming Tullus in the conflagration.

His successor, Ancus Marcius, is called by Livy one of the greatest Roman kings who ever lived, equally respectful of religion and alert to the need for a powerful stance toward Rome's dissatisfied and sometimes marauding neighbors. Refusing to hold the entire warmaking power in his own hands, he inaugurates a principle that war is to be formally declared by envoys acting on behalf of the entire Roman city state—a lesson that American Presidents of the last 50 years would have done well to heed.

I was reminded of character when reading of George Monck, first Duke of Albemarle, who variously served both the Royalists and later the Parliamentary cause in the English Civil War and finally, alarmed and exasperated by Britain's near-anarchy, contrived the Restoration of the Monarchy in the person of Charles II. So balanced in his perceptions of the merits of each side and calm in his temper that he was regularly suspected of disaffection by extremists in whichever side he fought for, Monck was above the rancor of party wrangling, firm in his convictions, prudent in command, blessed with the confidence of the men who served under him, and firm to the point of severity when required. His own brother, a clergyman, was sent by the Royalists to sound Monck out on his plans to restore the Monarchy, and as Hume relates:

"When [Monck's brother] arrived, he found that [General Monck] was then holding a council of officers, and was not to be seen for some hours. In the mean time, he was received and entertained by Price, the general's chaplain, a man of probity, as well as a partisan of the king's. The [brother], having an entire confidence in the chaplain, talked very freely to him about the object of his journey, and engaged him, if there should be occasion, to second his applications. At last, the general arrives; the brothers embrace; and after some preliminary conversation, the doctor opens his business. Monck interrupted him, to know whether he had ever before to any body mentioned the subject. 'To nobody,' replied his brother, 'but to Price, whom I know to be entirely in your confidence.' The general, altering his countenance, turned the discourse; and would enter into no further confidence with him, but sent him away with the first opportunity. He would not trust his own brother the moment he knew that he had disclosed the secret, though to a man whom he himself could have trusted.

"His conduct in all other particulars was full of the same reserve and prudence; and no less was requisite for effecting the difficult work which he had undertaken."

As Franklin observed, "Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead."

© Michael Huggins, 2010. All rights reserved.

"Damn'd be him that first cries 'Hold! Enough!'"

2010-12-26T17:21:00.000-08:00

Lev Grossman's cover story on Mark Zuckerberg as Time's person of the year for 2010 pays due regard to Zuckerberg's intelligence and drive, both of which are considerable (though I wouldn't be too thrilled, if I were he, to have to admit that I had never heard of E.M. Forster) and even extends the wunderkind the benefit of a doubt: he's not opposed to privacy, you see; he simply doesn't get it, similarly, one supposes, to his reported colorblindness to red and green. Well perhaps, but if that be true, no matter how big his achievement and his personal fortune, it's a flaw in his makeup.

Grossman is sharp and perceptive. I think this paragraph nailed it:

"[Facebook] herds everybody — friends, co-workers, romantic partners, that guy who lived on your block but moved away after fifth grade — into the same big room. It smooshes together your work self and your home self, your past self and your present self, into a single generic extruded product. It suspends the natural process by which old friends fall away over time, allowing them to build up endlessly, producing the social equivalent of liver failure."

"Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius," as Gibbon wrote. I'll never claim to have achieved the latter state but greatly enjoy the solitude of a lengthy walk along the Shelby Farms Greenline, something I have done for some weeks now, to the benefit of both my health and peace of mind. In fact, I do occasionally meet people I know, including, at various times, fellow trivia buffs Jennifer Larkin and Saravan Chaturvedi, and if I happened to have company and good conversation on a walk, I would welcome it, but I also like the way the setting erects a corridor so apart from the rest of life that it seems almost strange when you happen to cross a street traveled by cars. The interstate, with its frequent whooshing noise of cars, is literally only yards away for much of the route and sometimes visible, but often, the trees mask the sight and to some extent, the sound.

It would hardly have satisfied C.S. Lewis, who wrote, describing his ideal day:

"...by two at the latest I would be on the road. Not, except at rare intervals, with a friend. Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one (such as I found, during the holidays, in Arthur) who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared."

I thought today that whereas I welcome the very proximity to the interstate because the foliage defiantly filters it, as the foliage and the rushing fountain do in the lovely Meditation Garden on the grounds of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, the whole experience would have been destroyed for poor Lewis, who would have found the constant noise of traffic, even filtered, pretty well intolerable. How much our experiences and expectations change in just a few generations.

Once you've made yourself feel virtuous with a 10-mile walk on a winter day, you don't mind treating yourself to the perfect winter evening: a bowl of hot soup with a glass of wine, then a fire in the fireplace, a good book, and cognac. I'm finishing Peter Biskind's Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America (and no, it's not only about one thing!) and starting Livy's Early History of Rome, and I suppose two more different books could hardly be imagined, except that Beatty, like the legendary Romulus, is relentless in his purposes.

© Michael Huggins, 2010. All rights reserved.

No one believed. They listened at his heart...

2010-08-16T20:22:00.000-07:00

My stepfather has been dead 8 hours now. This was not supposed to happen. He was vigorous, a daily walker, still carrying on a busy consulting schedule at age 78. His Outlook inbox was full of e-mails that said "See you in Washington on the 16th." He flew there and was met by a colleague, who began to drive him to a conference he never made; his remains will be flown back the day after tomorrow.

He had quit smoking decades ago to relieve the strain on his heart, from the nicotine, overwork, and general stress. About 7 years ago, his heart raced for hours one night at sickening speeds that would have killed many; the doctor said there was permanent damage, but we couldn't feel the reality of it. In our eyes, he was supposed to live to 85, 90, or beyond.

For Karst to die was like Warren Buffet suddenly finding that his credit card would not cover lunch at Bennigan's. Karst was competent, organized, and effective, all contingencies covered. Where is the restore disk, the reset button, the error message that says this was an invalid transaction? They're not working.

His oldest brother is still living, at 88. His mother was ambulatory and lucid until two months before her death at age 100. His father died at 89, an age that seemed a little premature to everyone. Some people work themselves to death; Karst's clan tended to make careers that lasted as long as other people's entire life spans.

Few things took him by surprise, as this did. He was once dragged into testifying on behalf of his federal agency to a hostile Congressional committee on a few minutes' notice when his boss chickened out; he handled it with aplomb, which surprised no one. Had he suspected that the terminal event was upon him, he would have taken steps to plan things better. Is there a protocol for calling a total stranger, a woman of 77 a thousand miles away and informing her that as of five minutes ago, she is a widow? I have no doubt that the ER doctor in Maryland was as polite as he could be when he called Mom this afternoon. How does one prepare to make or receive such a call?

Last night, Karst was opening a bottle of Bordeaux to enjoy with Mom. This morning, she kissed him goodbye and perhaps stroked his head, which he shaved completely bald, while sporting a sea captain's bushy beard.

This evening, the Transplant Council of Washington called Mom asking to harvest skin from Karst's remains for transplants for burn victims. The three Memphis brothers, Mom's kids, agreed; everyone's cell phone or Blackberry then came out to track down our stepsister in Connecticut and her brother in Maryland to get their OK. My stepbrother, not one to mince words, said "Vampires" but agreed. Karst would have thought it worthwhile.

As Frost's poem says, "And they, since they were not the one dead, went about their affairs."

Business will not wait. Donor tissue must be harvested within 24 hours. Karst would have understood. His own father, Jacob Besteman, whose parents had emigrated here at the turn of the last century from Friesland, saw his first business fail on a Friday and started another the following Monday morning. He had to; he was supporting his elderly parents in the days before Social Security and helping keep ruined neighbors afloat in the depths of the Depression. There was no time to mope.

Jacob was of stern Dutch Calvinist stock. His own father had stopped attending one Dutch church when they changed from singing metrical Psalms to hymns composed by men; he found it "worldly." When my mother, in her late 40s, visited the Besteman clan in Grand Rapids for the first time and casually got up from the table after supper, Karst's hand quietly but firmly pulled her back down to her seat. You did not leave the table until Jacob had read aloud a chapter from the Bible and said a prayer. His children, by now in their 50s, sat quietly for this daily ritual.

For his youngest child, Karst, born March 26, 1932, Jacob envisioned a ministerial calling and sent him to Calvin College in Grand Rapids, for pre-seminary studies. Earlier, with his older brothers, Karst had worked in the family produce business and helped with their other business of raising and showing quarter horses. At age 15, he drove trailers of horses over 200 miles to Indianapolis to show in the Indiana State Fair. In an elevator in Indianapolis's grand hotel, he met actor Charles Laughton who was there to show the trotting horses he and his wife, Elsa Lanchester, raised for a hobby.

Karst, whose name is the Dutch word for "Christian," went to Calvin College and paid close attention to his religious studies, as to an interesting problem requiring serious attention. He had a strong and abiding faith, but his heart was not in pastoral work. Eventually, he went home and confessed as much to his father, who said "Then you might as well put on work boots and dig ditches."

Karst knew he was better than that. He earned a Master's in social work and entered the Public Health Service. In his 30s, he traveled to the backwoods and interviewed characters out of Deliverance to find the whereabouts of their friends who had been treated for addiction in a government program years before; the government wanted to do a followup study. The backwoodsmen were suspicious and hostile; they did not want to tell him where their friends were, but they hadn't reckoned on Karst's tenacity. He persisted and learned from them what he needed to know.

He was always absorbed in his work. Leaving his office at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky one evening when he had achieved the rank of Admiral, his mind was so much on his work that he drove right past the lowering of the flag, breaking a cardinal rule of military etiquette. An indignant MP chased him down and sputtered, "Sir, I'll have you know that at Ft. Campbell, we respect the colors!" Karst thanked him and apologized. For the rank and recognition he achieved, he had less ego than anyone I've ever known.

He had married a childhood friend, Esther, and they raised two kids, Karst David and Elizabeth. Esther often had to be both parents because of the demands of Karst's own work. His growing expertise in drug treatment and his efficiency at work earned him recognition and brought him to the attention of powerful and influential people. The names he knew were the people you read about in Newsweek. Karst himself was never on the cover of Time and didn't care. He cared that the Reagan Administration, in his view, was pursuing a shortsighted policy with regard to the spread of cocaine in our society and told them so, in the Oval Office itself. It was a long time before he was invited back.

But he was too valuable for his services to be dispensed with, and he had the confidence of people like C. Everett Koop and the ear of people who could make a difference. His opinions were sought and valued. One of his brothers, camping with his family in the Canadian wilderness to "get away from it all," turned on a battery-operated TV in his tent one night. The first thing he saw was Karst being interviewed on TV about drug policy!

Esther was stricken with cancer in her early 40s and was cruelly taken from her family, leaving a husband who wished he could have spent more time at home and two teenaged kids. Karst tried to mend fences at home and also threw himself even more vigorously into his work.

Around 1981, he was named the Director of the New York Regional Office of Health and Human Services. Getting to his desk very early each morning as his work ethic demanded, he was intrigued at the 48-year-old woman who was invariably at her own desk at 6 a.m. He learned that she too had been widowed, two years before. My mother did not care for Karst at first but then saw the worth of his character. She bought two tickets to a Broadway show and asked him out. He said, "I am breaking two of my own rules--first, never to date someone from the office, and second, never to date a woman who asks me out." Against his earlier instincts, he continued to see her and always found her fascinating. They were married March 17, 1984, at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland, in their early 50s, still only just young enough that both sets of elderly parents were present at the wedding. Karst stood up to make a speech: "It's not often that people in our circumstances find anotber chance at love. We've left our youth behind..."

Mom interjected, "Speak for yourself!"

That kind of humorous badinage was typical of them. Mom would get agitated about something, and Karst would interrupt with something witty or just a hearty laugh. His laugh, his friendly smile, and a firm handshake were always among his trademarks.

To blend in with our family, one had to accept the sometimes rather pointed humor. Waiting outside a Broadway theatre showing Annie to meet Karst for the first time and not knowing what he looked like, my brothers and their wives said to each other, "Well, how bad can he be? At least he won't be fat and bald." Minutes later, when Karst, at a portly period in his life and with a head bald as a cueball, walked up with Mom, all of them were almost falling down laughing.

We kidded him but always respected him. His reading and knowledge were formidable. Some people have everything; Karst seemed to know everything. There were very few topics you could bring up to which he could not add an intelligent comment.

At 50, he decided that government service had grown stale and looked for new challenges. He worked for non-profit foundations that promoted drug abuse education and maintained his contacts with National Institutes of Health and National Institute on Drug Abuse. He applied for the directorship of one foundation and they wouldn't give it to him because he had no M.D. next to his name. They then hired an M.D. with little organizational sense and then had to hire Karst to actually run the place! Still later, Karst ran two drug rehab clinics in downtown Washington, D.C., the only ones of their type I have ever heard of, in which the addicts were expected to pay a small fee for each treatment session. It sounded crazy and I'm sure didn't even cover costs, but that wasn't the point; by asking something of the addicts themselves, it helped give them back their self respect.

He left that position a few years ago, when he and Mom moved to Memphis from Washington, D.C. but still continued to telecommute via computer, while making occasional trips back to Washington for conferences. He also read avidly, went on daily walks with Mom, became active in their neighborhood association, swam in their pool, and even discovered one quieter, more contemplative hobby: standing in their livingroom overlooking the Mississippi River, he would look out through his field glasses at the barges and tugboats; he had bought a registry that listed every tugboat and marked them as they passed. Whether spending a quiet evening at home with Mom, listening to music or watching the sunset, or entertaining family in their livingroom that is the size of an office building lobby, he was content.

His roots were in Grand Rapids, but he will be buried in Memphis's historic Elmwood Cemetery, founded in 1852, the resting place of governors and generals, the sort of people who valued Karst and whose exercise of power he understood, though he was never overawed by it. Unyielding as the granite monuments at Elmwood, he had a quiet strength that could not be daunted or broken. His final appointment came much earlier than we wanted or expected and like the slow and powerful barges that he liked to watch, left us gazing after the trailing wake.

© Michael Huggins, 2010. All rights reserved.

It's 3 a.m. Do you know where your roofer is?

2010-07-12T01:30:00.000-07:00

It's 18 minutes after 3 Monday morning. Forty minutes ago, I felt a single drop of water hit my shoulder when I stood up in my bedroom to investigate the tap...tap...tap coming from just above the ceiling while a thunderstorm sounded outside.

Thunderstorms generally don't bother me, even though I believe they will get worse and more frequent with climate change. I like living on the third floor of my well-constructed building that is probably no more than 40 years old, because no one is walking over my head, my heating bill is probably less in winter, there is a vaulted ceiling in my livingroom, and it feels like living in a treehouse. The main view of the world from my apartment is a large sliding glass door just off my livingroom which looks out past my balcony to the upper branches of large pine trees. If the wind ever reaches my balcony enough to make the wind chimes sound or the rain fiercely enough to splash it, I know it is worse beyond the stand of pines. A flowering tree, standing between my balcony and the parking lot, is left untrimmed to the point where its blossom-laden branches hang down very nearly to the roof of my parked car.

I've always liked "living up under the eaves" and have done so when I could. In 1967, my family bought an old Dutch Colonial house with an absurdly large 3rd-floor attic, which my dad and I finished into an apartment for me. In graduate school, the professor I worked for occupied a large corner office on the top floor of the University of Memphis's Patterson Hall, and when I entered the office each morning, I looked out the windows directly into leafy tree branches. When I was 10, I remember being awake at 3 one morning with one of my brothers, and we sat at the attic windows of my paternal grandparents' house, listening to the pigeons cooing just outside, in the nest they had built under the eaves.

This morning, alas, the outside world is no longer merely a show and the fourth wall has been breached. The tap...tap I heard some time ago was like a small, sinister footstep in the dark, though fortunately it didn't end with a visit from Samara Morgan. After I noticed water stains in a corner of my bedroom ceiling a few weeks ago following heavy rains, the property manager asked me to wait a week or two until we had had no rain, after which he would have the roof repaired above my ceiling. This was supposed to have been done a couple of weeks ago, and a man came to the apartment Friday and put a new piece of sheetrock in the damaged corner of my ceiling.

Well it looks like he'll probably have to do so again. I can't see any fresh stains, but there must be water in the attic space between the ceiling and the roof.

The last time anything like this happened to me was nearly 40 years ago, when I occupied the upper floor of a house that had probably been built before the First World War. I had just moved in a few days before and was awakened by the sound of water spilling outside my bedroom door but inside the house. Rushing out into the hall, I saw a stream pouring down from the attic, splashing water and plaster flakes all over a box of books. I thought I remembered it hitting my copy of the Greek New Testament, but I found it just now and couldn't see any water stains.

I say that was the last time, but a variation happened about 9 years ago in the building where I lived before moving here, a place a little older and not so well maintained. A fire broke out in a nearby apartment, and smoke came pouring through the air vents into mine. No fire came to my apartment, but a fireman had to enter and punch a hole in my dining room ceiling with his fire axe, to make sure there was no fire in the attic. After he left, I taped a garbage bag over the hole until it could be repaired. To this day, some of my books and papers remain a dingy gray, left that way by the smoke.

Those episodes were unpleasant but not completely unexpected, but this is not "supposed" to happen. A friend lives in the African nation of Chad and looks out through her screen door to find herself being observed by a curious goat who has wandered by, but in the richest country in the world, we are supposed to be sealed, sanitized, waterproofed, and warrantied. With a thunderstorm raging outside, I have a computer desk, too large and heavy to move, laden with snaking wires and cables, and I don't expect the least danger or inconvenience from the elements to my HP color printer-copier-scanner, my Dell computer, my Acer monitor, my DSL modem, or my Logitech web cam. My expected mode of life is 90 years and a world away from the expectation of my paternal grandfather when a boy, waking up on a winter morning just 85 miles east of here and brushing the snow off his blanket that had come through the roof in the night, or of my paternal grandmother, unable to sleep because of the hideous din of rain and hail on the tin roof of the farmhouse she and her family occupied in a field in St. Francis County, Arkansas.

Actually, something like this still does happen to my mother and stepfather, who live in a very large and attractive house downtown overlooking the river, for which they were willing to pay a handsome price a few years ago, thinking it had been well built. It seems now that that wasn't strictly true, and if they experience leaks, the water may drip on polished hardwood and tasteful antiques and works of art, which is certainly worse than anything happening here!

What can the roofers have thought they were doing a couple of weeks ago? I assume they actually did climb to the top of my building and didn't somehow place fresh shingles above the wrong apartment by mistake, so why is a tenant reduced to listening watchfully in the dark at 3:30 a.m., wondering if a corner of his ceiling is about to give way and pour a muddy mixture from the storm outside into his room, ruining the fragile tangle of wires that connects him to e-mail, news updates from The New York Times and The Washington Post, FaceBook, Amazon.com, Netflix, and his online banking?

And that, really, is the thing that causes the most worry in 2010. My maternal grandparents were related by marriage to a family in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, who, 80 years ago, left their house on purpose every year in anticipation of the spring flooding of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers and later returned to clean out the mud and snakes from their house's lower storey. Within the last 10 years, when the neighbor of a former colleague of mine died in rural Tennessee, the hearse could not get to the home of the deceased to pick up the remains because of flooding, and the neighbors had to improvise their own way to get the body to where it needed to be. Two months ago, one of my colleagues at work had neighbors camping out in her house in Nashville and her entire neighborhood was cut off from the rest of the city by flooding. She could not reach her office, but she remained connected to the outside world because her cellphone service included a data plan.

And when I get right down to it, that's why I keep listening for the dripping sound to resume: the risk that a breach of the fragile fabric that keeps out the elements may throw me back to a time when I didn't have the choices that now make me feel deprived if they are closed off. On one of the eight bookcases in my apartment is a two-volume life of St. Paul published in 1858 that I have owned since 1977 but not read, as well as a four-volume edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson that my parents bought for me in a garage sale in 1967; I actually have read through that one, but, like Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible, it bears rereading throughout one's life. My entire dining room table and my coffee table are piled high with books and magazines, and if the Internet went the way of the Hummer, I would still have plenty to do.

But not the same choice. Now, if I awake to a noise in the night, I can immediately publish a reflection about it that at least two people are likely to read, both in other states and one of whom I haven't seen in 40 years or, if I wish, I can enter a message board and explain to someone in England or Australia why Hitler was not a Christian, despite their wish to believe it so. I can listen to Orlando Gibbons via Radio at AOL or click on a scene from Citizen Kane posted to YouTube. If I lose all those choices, even for a few days, it's no more than irksome, but I'd still as soon avoid it. Now, turning to my e-mail in-box, I see the daily headlines from the Times, informing me that governors have expressed grave concerns about immigration, as well as another Times notice that assures me that there is a "boatload of water fun" to be had at Clearwater and St. Petersburg, Florida. Meanwhile, the dripping has resumed 4 feet above my shoulder, steadier now and more insistent.

© Michael Huggins, 2010. All rights reserved.

Why not the best?

2010-06-24T15:06:00.000-07:00

Listening to the rapid patter of a radio announcer the other morning as she rattled off facts that were never worth knowing about movies I’ll never see, reminded me of Charlie.

I met Charlie 40 years ago, when we were both freshmen at Evangel College in Springfield, Missouri. I was standing in the men’s washroom shaving, when Charlie came in on his crutches; as he prepared to shower, he introduced himself. I was struck both by the extraordinarily deep resonance of his voice and the grotesque twisting of his frame. A genetic defect and a difficult birth had left Charlie at about the height of a 9-year old, with twisted legs that hung useless and a spine that would never allow his entire body to face in the same direction at once, surmounted with powerful shoulders and a head that was rather too large for his frame. Raised by his father in a small Missouri town, Charlie relied on a friendly personality and his remarkable voice for any hopes he had of worldly advancement.

My own voice had matured early. My late father had an operatic baritone voice, but when I was growing up, my voice was so deep for my age that adults blinked in amazement when I spoke, and my 8th-grade classmates called me “Lurch.” When we did a Sunday school play, I was always the voice of God. All this stood me in good stead in public speaking and debate, and some were heard to comment on my “radio announcer” voice, but I didn’t have the hunger or need for whatever it might bring me, that Charlie did.

I had also had educational advantages that someone from Charlie’s background probably couldn’t have had. My mother was always an avid reader, and I became one too, at an early age. When I was 11, my parents moved to a rather well-off community in the suburbs of northern New Jersey where we really couldn’t afford to live and found a place there only by virtue of a cheap rental house, but the taxpayers believed in having a school system second to none and paid for it. Our public schools were like private schools, and some of my teachers might have distinguished themselves equally as college professors, had they chosen to. The written word was always easily and rapidly accessible.

I’m not sure I fully realized how little this was true for many others. Of course I understood that when my late paternal grandparents would take my brothers and me during the summer to the small town in Arkansas where they pastored a Pentecostal church, there were what we called “country people” who could barely read a newspaper editorial and stumbled over passages in Scripture. Two of them got into an argument once, when one read the passage from the Gospels that says that one cannot serve God and mammon, and another cried out, “Now hold on! What about manna from above?”

But they were not alone. Years later, attending the Episcopal church with urban professionals, I noted with exasperation that every Pentecost Sunday, when the lectors read (what they must have known for a whole year they would have to read) the passage from Acts chapter 2 that records the astonishment of men from all nations upon seeing the descent of the Holy Spirit—“Parthians and Medes and Elamites and dwellers in Mesopotamia and Cappadocia,” etc.—they would look sheepish and stumble through the passage as though someone had suddenly required them to juggle flaming torches while changing their underclothes. I think a lot of this was just laziness, of the same kind that makes some people unable to distinguish between “mitigate” and “militate” or between “access” and “assess.”

Charlie, in any case, worked hard, not only at his lessons, but as an announcer at the campus radio station. One afternoon, a professor in the Speech and Theatre Department asked Charlie and me to come to his office. He had been contacted by two local businessmen who needed young men with good reading voices to record a radio ad, and he thought of the two of us. One of the businessmen came for us in his car, and we rode downtown to the recording studio, agreeing that we would both simply audition on the spot—may the best man win.

The businessmen handed us a script and asked us to take turns reading. I thought we did about equally well, but the businessmen kept prompting us to “read it with more enthusiasm.” We kept modifying our approach until we had both reached a level of dramatic expression that sounded absurdly overdone, but our prospective clients were still not satisfied. Finally, they offered to play us a tape of another announcer who had the sound they wanted. It turned out that what they had really wanted the whole time (but somehow couldn’t figure out how to say!) was that they wanted us to read more rapidly—again, at a rate that approached the absurd.

This changed everything. Charlie began to attempt rapid reading but began stumbling at once; something quite like this had probably never been expected of him before. He stopped after about 15 seconds, and the men asked me to try. All my early advantages stood me in good stead, and although I felt silly doing so, I picked up the script and began to read loudly and at a ridiculously fast rate, fluently and without stumbling.

As I did so, I happened to catch a glimpse of Charlie. Unnoticed by anyone else, his face was set in mortification, and a large tear rolled down his cheek. This opportunity represented all he really expected from life, and he hadn’t succeeded.

I continued reading, but I would have given anything at that moment, to be anywhere else.

As it happened, neither of us got the assignment. The two men thanked us for our time, drove us back to campus, and I never heard from them again.

Charlie continued his studies and his radio announcing. I returned to school one year and learned that he was no longer there. Whatever he had hoped for at Evangel didn’t happen; his spirits sank,and he began to do things that were not only considered rude but that violated the school’s religious standards. He was asked to leave.

About ten or 12 years later, I learned somehow that Charlie had died in an automobile accident, after returning to the town where he had grown up and lived there for the rest of his brief and frustrated life.

I hadn’t thought of that incident of the recording audition in years until I heard the announcer just the other morning. What happened to Charlie and me took me by surprise, and I couldn’t have pretended to read badly in the hopes they would pick Charlie instead—I doubt it would have fooled anyone, and besides, Charlie simply couldn’t do what they wanted, even had he been their only candidate.

Hopefully, we all believe in striving to be the best we can, and life sorts us out, sometimes ruthlessly. I once applied for a job as a sewing machine operator at a factory, and the two male owners gave me a small board and some pins to insert in slots in a timed test, to measure my manual dexterity. I had the kind that would enable me to play the violin, but not the kind to do justice to those pins, and the two men had to try very hard not to laugh in my face. I’m sure they were grateful that I had provided them with an entertaining break in their busy day.

Life sorts us out, but some overcome, astonishingly so. As a child, I knew a boy named Gary, whose body appeared as twisted as Charlie’s, also from a difficult birth. Gary was a sort of pathetic “Tiny Tim” figure at our church.

Years later, visting the same church for my father’s memorial service, I was startled when a deep, confident voice called my name, but I couldn’t see anyone. “Down here!” the voice said.

I looked down and saw a well-muscled man who radiated confidence and strength, though his misshapen legs would not support him, but he got about by using his arms, instead of sitting in a wheelchair. “It’s Gary,” the man said. “I own a chain of weight-lifting studios.” I was just about speechless with amazement.

In a way, I’m rather glad that I didn’t get that announcer assignment and only wish I had taken the trouble later to offer to help Charlie with rapid reading aloud, though who knows but that such an attempt might have seemed clumsy and patronizing. The moment when fortune takes us by surprise and sometimes forces us to face things in ourselves where we never even suspected a lack, can be a severe test, and some don’t pass. We who see it happen may be equally surprised and can only hope to have the tact and presence of mind to offer what help we can until the other person’s balance is restored. The rest, of course, has to be up to the other and what he makes of his experience.

© Michael Huggins, 2010. All rights reserved.

We which are alive and remain

2010-06-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

Edith’s funeral was held today. She died 37 days ago; three more days and, were she Greek Orthodox, they would be chanting the Trisagion (“thrice blessed”) prayers in her memory.

Edith’s epilogue was different; the drama began when she was being taken to the hospital morgue, where she remained another 10 days before anyone would claim her. Edith had been at odds with her only surviving brother, whose daughter, not on the best of terms with Edith herself, thought Edith’s friend, Steve, should bury her out of the proceeds of a small insurance policy on Edith’s life, of which Steve was named as beneficiary. Steve, who is disabled, on oxygen, and the survivor of a serious automobile accident from a few months ago, needed the money to tide him over until the other driver’s insurance settles. And in any case, Edith’s policy has not paid off.

Thus Edith, who in life was a very giving person, remained unclaimed in death, literally frozen until something should happen to resolve the standoff. Her two children were dead years ago, her surviving brother is himself not long for this world, the rest of her family was estranged from her, and her friends lacked funds or legal standing to proceed at all. I’m not sure who blinked first, but she was cremated last week, and I learned two days ago that a brief memorial service would be held today.

It was the first funeral I had ever attended that had to be postponed a half hour because the family was late, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. Her long-time friend and neighbor, Tim, who lives across the street and made sure Edith wasn’t bothered by the local drug pushers, sat patiently with his daughter. Tiffany, for whom Edith cared when Tiffany was an infant, sat there alternately attending to her own one-year-old son and weeping disconsolately. Mary, Tiffany’s mother, who had been Edith’s friend until Edith caught Mary helping herself to small sums from Edith’s checking account, was heard to say that “Anyone who cain’t even put Miz Edith’s ashes in the ground and put a marker over her don’t deserve to be here.” Steve stayed away.

Several friends of Edith attended. Carol, a woman in her early 50s, told me she had known Edith since Carol herself was 16; she called her “Mom.” Carol’s own adult daughter is dead of leukemia, and Carol introduced her 9-year-old granddaughter. Two other ladies told me that they had visited Edith in the hospital and helped her find a wrestling match to watch on television the last night of her life; deathbed or not, Edith was not going to miss her favorite lifelong entertainment.

Someone played a recording of Elvis singing “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” A young Baptist minister got up and gave a standard appeal: “If you know Jesus, you will meet Miss Edith in heaven, and if you don’t know Him, Miss Edith would want you to.” I don’t doubt his sincerity, but he had never met Edith and was young enough to be the son of most of the people there, so I suspect his words were more endured than heeded.

Funerals are always a mixed bag. I was fortunate that the first one I ever attended, when I was just 10 years old, of a 70-year-old great-great aunt whom I had never seen, was presided over by another minister of about 45 whose air of calm authority mixed with humane care, added warmth and reassurance to what could otherwise have been a frightening and unsettling experience for a small boy. He frankly admitted that he had not known the deceased but managed to make his listeners believe that she and her faith mattered to him personally.

The next funeral I attended, the following year, was quite different. The minister, considerably younger, also did not know the deceased, and his tone and manner, as he read the words of St. Paul, were rather cold, as though he were reciting a not altogether agreeable lesson by rote. At age 11, I remember thinking to myself, “He’s as cold as the air-conditioning in here. How different this is from last year!”

Then, there are ministers who believe they are clever and creative and preach something topical, on the order of “He crashed into the gates of heaven, just like the space shuttle” (I’m not kidding!) The same minister said “It’s beautiful to hear this music today, but just think what it will be like in heaven, when we get to hear Elvis all the time!” Ahem…even as some physicists speculate that there may be multiple universes, one is tempted to hope for alternate celestial realms!

Sometimes, the missteps come from the deceased themselves who, anticipating their own deaths, took the trouble to write out “inspiring” services of their own; e.g., “We have the husk with us, though the nut is gone” (again, I’m not making this up!)

A book of etiquette from 1836 describes funereal behavior with cynical realism; it recommends that the mourner compose his features into a semblance of grief while inevitably thinking of last night’s party or the current political primary. And I’ve heard that in at least one African country, perhaps the Côte D’Ivoire, funerals are very well attended for the simple reason that the young mourners find them to be promising venues to find new relationship partners!

Today’s service was meaningful because of the love shown by the several female friends of Edith who attended. One of them got up and read one of those poems you are practically bound to hear at a funeral, that goes something like

“I knew there would come a day
When you must go away
I grieve for you with love
Hoping to see you up above…”

It won’t win a prize, but before she read it, the woman blinked back the tears and said “Y’all bear with me while I try to get through this,” and what she felt for Edith was what we all shared, and that was all that mattered.

I got up afterward and said a few words, to the effect that Edith was rich in friends. The young minister had preached the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, with the rich man crying out afterward from his torment. I said Edith’s story reminded me rather of the instance when Jesus saw rich people contributing to the temple treasury and then an elderly widow putting in a single coin. “These all gave out of their abundance,” he said, “but she has given all she had.”

I slipped out during the closing prayer and drove around the corner to the apartment Steve moved into a week ago after Edith’s niece threatened to evict him from Edith’s house. We chatted in his open doorway; the reek of cigarette smoke coming from the place was at a level I have experienced only once before, years ago. He was philosophical about the whole thing and is still trying to get the insurance company to pay on the small policy. The company wants to see an obituary, which Edith’s family has not supplied.

I knew Edith when she was old and frail; I was surprised, in a way, to see that most of the photographs displayed next to the urn containing her ashes were of a stronger and more robust woman than I had known; one of them had her standing, arms akimbo, in a pose that challenged the onlooker, though with frank good humor. I think that if she could know what happened after her passing, she would snort in amusement and have a good chuckle.

© Michael Huggins, 2010. All rights reserved.

Mind not high things

2010-05-16T13:38:00.000-07:00

What first struck me when I entered the room and found Edith dead this morning was how out of place it seemed. We are fragile creatures made of mud with expected life spans of fewer than 30,000 days, but because we reason, hope, laugh, and grieve, the cessation of breath seems like an offense that somehow ought to be set right.

Edith was still warm when I kissed her goodbye, not waxy and lukewarm as my father had rapidly become within a half-hour after his passing, in that horrible simulacrum of life that is so revolting precisely because it is so mockingly near the vital condition of living warmth. Her eyes were wide open, focused on something far away, dully indifferent to the trivia of her immediate surroundings, the wires, tubes, pans, and towels that had been part of her last hours. Her mouth was agape as though exclaiming, in awe and amazement, "Is this, then, what it is really like?" It had been her last discovery.

I had walked past her doctor and nurse on the way to her room, neither party recognizing the other, and when I called the nursing station, they rapidly reappeared, and we all spoke to each other in tones of near-apology, though no one had been delinquent and there had been no surprises. Her attending physician had already told her she was at 20% heart function and had fewer than 6 months; I knew she had less than 90 days. When I had left her at 8:30 last night, I had urged her to hang on until Monday.

The doctor and the nurses had been present when she died. At one moment, she was talkative and in good spirits, and then her heart protested for the last time, in a ventricular fibrillation. They applied the pads to her chest to shock her, but her heart was having none of it, and she stopped breathing. I arrived about 15 minutes later.

Edith Main was born in Memphis on November 14, 1930, 9 1/2 months after my father. While my father's family lived in South Memphis, Edith was raised in the Greenlaw neighborhood that, 55 years before, had been Memphis's first subdivision and where late Victorian redbrick townhouses were still inhabited. She was sent to Catholic schools as a girl and got her knuckles duly rapped by nuns. That was the least of what happened to her in life.

Standing outside the Green Beetle, a well-known Memphis bar, at age 15, waiting for the city bus that would take her home from school, Edith was jostled by two drunks propelled out of the front door and literally pushed under the moving bus; the city had to pay her father a large sum for her hospital expenses. Beguiled by a boy three years her senior in high school and seeking to escape a bad home life, she married him at 15 and endured the humiliation of an intimate examination ordered by a judge upon her father's petition to have the marriage annulled; when it was found that marital relations had taken place, her father and her uncle both beat her new husband.

Edith married four times and was unhappy in almost all her choices but loved her two children. Butch was a devil-may-care young man who eventually enlisted in the Marines; Donna Marie was, as her photographs showed, a lovely young woman.

Much as she loved her children, Edith was a spitfire and wouldn't let herself be imposed upon. When Butch and his new wife arrived at Edith's house one night in their new Lincoln to leave a bawling infant with Edith with no supply of diapers or milk, Edith warned them not to leave her like that, and when Butch ignored her and started to drive away, she heaved a brick through the windshield of his car. Her instincts informed her choice of entertainment; throughout her life, one of her greatest pleasures was to watch wrestling matches. Years ago, it was her constant weekly recreation at Memphis's old Ellis Auditorium downtown; when I visited her last night for what turned out to be the last time, she was enjoying a match on TV.

Butch was convicted of murder and sent to prison for life. I have no idea whether he was guilty or not, but the victim's family swore to Edith that the first day of Butch's parole would be his last day of life. Butch's bad-boy charm followed him into prison, and he once made Edith laugh by writing to her that the smitten female prison dentist had gladly rendered more than dental care to him behind the locked door of her clinic.

While Butch was in prison, Edith's daughter, Donna Marie, was murdered, while still in her 20s. The murderer was never caught.

Butch became a model inmate and even earned a law degree in prison. I met Edith in 1999 because I was corresponding with, and visiting, another prisoner, Jerry, who had known Butch since both were young men; both were transferred to the same minimum security prison about 145 miles from Memphis, and Edith was unable to drive there on her own to visit her son.

She began to ride with me, and for payment, would always have us stop at a small barbecue place in Savannah, Tennessee, where she would treat us both to a rib dinner. On the drive back to Memphis, she would tell me about her life and then ask me to sing the old evangelical gospel songs to her.

After 25 years, Butch was about to be paroled. A month before he would have come home, he complained about not feeling well, was ordered out onto a work detail on a hot day by an unsympathetic guard, and was brought back dead on the truck. He was 49.

Because he had been a Marine, Butch was given a military funeral by two crisply uniformed servicemen, who performed the ritual with faultless precision and respectfully presented Edith with the customary American flag. The veteran's cemetery was miles from Edith's part of town, but from time to time, Mary, a friend, would drive her there to visit Butch's grave.

For the next 8 years or so, our friendship mostly consisted of a single yearly contact. At Christmas, she would send me a card, and I would send her one and would order a gift to be delivered to her by mail. Then, about a week before Christmas, I would go to her house and pick her up and we would drive to Barnhill's Country Buffet on Stage Road in Bartlett for lunch or dinner. She would present me with a gift, which was often a large sampler of chocolates, something else she loved, but one year, she gave me a pair of hand-tooled leather cowboy boots that Butch had owned, which meant more to her than any of the rest.

As time went on, I tended to make our yearly appointment at mid-day on a Saturday rather than at night, since I had no idea what might happen to my car while parked in front of her house. Edith lived in the Nutbush section of North Memphis, a place where your neighbor may deal drugs or show a sudden inclination to violence. She and her boarder, Steve, had to have their Shar Pei put down recently when one of the neighborhood kids apparently gave drugs to Stretch as a joke, which drove the poor animal wild and caused him to attack Edith herself.

Still, she was not alone. No one on the street bothered her, and there were always friends who looked after her, though those friendships all tended to go bad, for some reason.

Jerry, the prisoner I had originally been visiting, boarded with Edith after he was paroled. Edith came home and found him smoking pot in her house and then learned that he had become violent with a wheelchair-bound woman down the street and had to throw him out.

Peggy, another friend for whose small business Edith had once worked, took Edith under her wing and seemed to provide her not only with moral support but financial help as well. This continued until Peggy defrauded Edith of $38,000 to cover Peggy's gambling debts at Tunica.

Steve, a scrappy little guy with a head of angry red hair and a face that looks as though it, too, has known the wrong side of a bus, moved into Edith's house and rented a room and is sitting there now. They bantered and sometimes fought, but Steve genuinely cared for her as no one else. Edith intended to revoke a previous will and leave her house to Steve, since he has nowhere else to go but the kind of motel where you rent rooms by the week. She died before a new will could be completed.

Mary had been a friend of Edith's for 20 years, ever since Edith had been the babysitter for Mary's infant daughter, Tiffany, who is now 21. Mary decided she didn't like Steve and pestered Edith to put him out of the house. Edith then discovered that Mary herself was siphoning money in small amounts from Edith's bank account. She ended her friendship with Mary but continued to care about Tiffany, now herself an unwed mother.

Edith was very clear on what had happened to her but never lamented or cried over it, that I could tell. She was furious at Mary's impertinence in trying to force Steve out, but as to the deaths, the faithless friends, the straying husbands, and all the rest, she acted as though those things were simply events like hailstorms or high winds, something she had endured but need not dwell on afterward except as the subject of an interesting story.

We had a standing arrangement that if she were hospitalized, one of her friends would call to notify me. She was always sent to St. Francis, which is literally within sight of where I live. Steve, meanwhile, was unable to visit her, since he is on oxygen and unable to carry one of his portable tanks from the hospital parking lot to a patient room, though he tried once. After that attempt, he confined his contact with her to the phone, while I visited.

When she was hospitalized in February, she temporarily lost her memory because of low blood pressure. I had to explain to her all over again who I was, who Steve was, and the fact that she had had two children who had died. It was a very strange experience, but I knew that when she came home, she would see Donna's and Butch's pictures hanging on her livingroom wall and wonder who they were.

In the spring, she began to be concerned about setting her affairs in order. Marc and Wendy Overlock called her from Nashville--both attorneys, they had befriended Butch years earlier while doing prison outreach work and continued to send Edith small checks at Christmas through the years--and supported her wish to draw up a living will, a general power of attorney, and a last will, even though they couldn't assist with any of it.

We began the process, and she gave her power of attorney for health care to Steve and me. Time overtook her before she could do the rest.

She wanted Steve to be her heir, claiming that her suriviving brother had offended her by refusing to help with Butch's funeral expenses. She knew that I not only didn't want but wouldn't accept anything substantial from her, but we managed to settle on two small glass elephant figurines that I spotted on her bureau; they are now on my bookshelf, next to the large folio-sized Bible she gave me for Christmas a few years ago.

A week ago, she had a heart attack and was hospitalized once more. She had removed Mary as beneficiary from two small life insurance policies and named Steve as the beneficiary, with the understanding that she would bequeath her house to him and he would use the insurance to bury her.

Tonight, Edith is in the hospital morgue, unclaimed. Her family, including a niece, are indignant at the prospective expense of burying her and threatening to evict Steve who, of course, has no right to remain in the house beyond whatever the law allows. Today, I have listened to lengthy laments from her niece on the unfairness of it all and sat in Edith's house, as Steve chainsmoked, quaffed Budweiser, and breathed his oxygen, while we watched several episodes of Law and Order and Steve gathered his thoughts. Edith's niece and her boyfriend called and talked of eviction. Mary called, screaming and cursing, when she realized she had been removed from the insurance. Steve retched into his bedside wastebasket between smokes.

In the corridor outside St. Francis's room 915, where Edith died this morning, is an engraving of Venice's famous Bridge of Sighs, connecting the Venetian prison with the interrogation rooms of the Doge's Palace, the passage through which condemned prisoners passed on their way to being put to death. Edith has crossed, and others are left struggling.

I had planned to do four things today. The first was to meet my friend Brett this morning at The Bagel Company on Poplar for a tasty breakfast and good conversation, which in fact we did. We arrived at 9 and lingered until 11; my apartment is 3 minutes down the street, and Edith was dying as I walked into my living room.

I sat down and prepared to carry out my second goal and type a last will for Edith to sign, knowing that her final moment was close, though not how close. Before I could type anything, Steve called and told me to get to the hospital at once.

My third plan had been to visit an antiquarian booksale held, appropriately enough, in Memphis's Parkview Hotel, a landmark from the 1930s that is now a retirement home. Never got there!

My fourth plan had been to go to the Belz Museum of Asian and Judaic Art downtown and see a French-made documentary about Marranos, Spanish and Portuguese Jews forcibly converted to Christianity by the Inquisition but continuing to practice their faith in secret. I'm afraid they had to show it without me. "Life," as the saying goes, "is what happens when you're busy making other plans."

I was asked in 9th grade to write an essay about Willa Cather's wonderful novel My Άntonia, on the question of whether the book's eponymous heroine had been a success in life. I thought she was not. Pregnant out of wedlock in her teens, she was discovered years later by her childhood friend, plowing a field. What had her life amounted to, as such things are usually measured?

Edith Main lived an obscure and unremarkable life of slender means, made some unfortunate choices, never saw grandchildren, found her greatest amusement in wrestling matches, and gravitated, as her indignant niece made sure I understood this afternoon, to "drunks, convicts, and losers." But she was a good friend and a person who met the almost absurd amount of bad fortune she encountered in life with a degree of equanimity I have seldom seen in others less severely afflicted. Last night, on the last time we would ever see each other, she opened the conversation by earnestly assuring me, "I just shit for an hour," but she always thanked me for coming to see her, as if I might have chosen not to. I think that two of the most important things that happened to me today were to kiss her still-warm forehead goodbye and to see the look of amazement on her face.

© Michael Huggins, 2010. All rights reserved.

The view from 58

2010-03-23T20:02:00.000-07:00

I turned 58 today. I distinctly remember my fourth birthday party, at my paternal grandmother's house at 1243 Azalia St. in South Memphis.

As I commented to one of my cousins, I am the age my maternal grandfather was when I was 12, in 1964. He always seemed "old" and "dignified" to me; I have to wonder now if he too thought of himself as basically the same person as the boy had had once been, only with gray hair and not-quite-so-good eyesight.

In another month, I plan to drive to New Jersey for my 40th-anniversary high school reunion. I hope to tour Gettysburg where, as I hear, you can hire a private guide for a couple of hours, and I expect to definitely pick his brains!

The same grandfather I mentioned related to me how, though he didn't remember the man's name, he once sat as a child in his one-room rural school house in West Virginia as the children were addressed by the elderly John McCausland Jr., brigadier of the Confederacy, the last Confederate general to die, which he did on his farm near Point Pleasant, in 1927. McCausland had burned the town of Chambersburg, PA in retaliation for Union depredations in the Shenandoah and, so my granfather told me, spent the rest of his life unwilling to have his back to a window, for fear of a revenging gunshot.

Here is one of my favorite quotes, from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, even though I've never really lived up to it:

From Maximus I learned self-government, and not to be led aside by anything; and cheerfulness in all circumstances, as well as in illness; and a just admixture in the moral character of sweetness and dignity, and to do what was set before me without complaining. I observed that everybody believed that he thought as he spoke, and that in all that he did he never had any bad intention; and he never showed amazement and surprise, and was never in a hurry, and never put off doing a thing, nor was perplexed nor dejected, nor did he ever laugh to disguise his vexation, nor, on the other hand, was he ever passionate or suspicious. He was accustomed to do acts of beneficence, and was ready to forgive, and was free from all falsehood; and he presented the appearance of a man who could not be diverted from right, rather than of a man who had been improved. I observed, too, that no man could ever think that he was despised by Maximus, or ever venture to think himself a better man. He had also the art of being humorous in an agreeable way.

That is certainly Stoicism at its best, and if anyone ever really lived that way, he was admirable.

Here are some thoughts on life that I posted recently on an online message board:

1. Don't ever "settle" in a relationship. You may lie down by yourself at night, but you can still have your dignity and your peace of mind.

2. Sit down quietly, even for half an hour a day, and read something that has nothing to do with finding a mate, getting your next promotion, or improving your investments.

3. Get in the habit of saving, even if it's only $10 a paycheck to start. If you don't, when you reach 40, you'll wish you had.

4. As you approach the age for which Viagra was invented, remember that the most potent sex organ is the brain.

5. Exercise, even if it's nothing but a brisk, half-hour walk each day.

6. Try not to reach age 50 and have to say, as Samuel Johnson did, that he had known about as much at 18 as he knew when he reached 50.

7. At least once a month, turn off the phone, the computer, the TV, and any other electronic devices and live all day without using any of them.

8. Do the same with your car.

9. Realize that you may think you're hot stuff now, but one day, there will be people who seem to you about 15 years old, who will be sitting in business meetings with you and barely concealing the fact that they think you're an old fart.

10. If you're a parent, no matter what your kids do, you can't stop loving them. Even after they are grown and gone, you will think about them every day.

11. If you are religious, be very clear as to why you believe. Try to be sure it is your belief and not merely a legacy from your parents and grandparents that you kept following from nothing but habit.

12. If you are not religious, be very clear why you don't believe. Don't be a skeptic for no reason than that you are still mad at your Sunday school teacher of 40 years ago or from a secret fear that the Deity wouldn't approve of your private life.

13. Set some outrageous goal, like climbing Kilimanjaro at 60. Whether you realize the goal or not, the mere fact of trying seriously to make it come about may take you to interesting places.

14. If you have a remarkable ability of some kind, or a notable achievement, accept any recognition for it graciously but always be ready to give as much credit as you can to those who worked with you.

15. Don't engage in idle flattery, but try to make others feel important and appreciated, as much as you honestly can.

16. Don't tell your kids how you walked 2 miles to your violin lesson when you were their age. Even if it's true, they either won't believe you or won't find it relevant to anything they're interested in.

17. Every so often, ask yourself, if you knew you would die this week, what estimate you could make of your own life.

18. Don't give advice that you either haven't followed or wouldn't care to even now.

Another one I thought of was "From time to time, ask yourself, 'If I went missing, where would they look for me?'"

And finally (from the same message board—something I wish I'd said but didn't): "In any compromise between good and bad, bad is always the winner." How true!

© Michael Huggins, 2010. All rights reserved.

The truth will out

2010-03-17T04:11:00.000-07:00

The cancellation of a planned raid by the Israeli Army after a soldier posted the details on FaceBook goes under the headings of "something you couldn't make up" and "why does this not surprise me?" It reminds me of an observation by William F. Buckley, Jr. that I read long ago, about Phil Donahue interviewing Geraldine Ferraro and asking, what was still considered a little tactless even in 1984, what it felt like to be confronted by the revelations of her husband's venality.

Buckley commented that Ferraro regarded Donahue, "Who probably would have asked Christ on the cross what it felt like to be crucified" in dignified silence for a moment and then said "Phil, some things are personal," which, as Buckley observed, "to Donahue, was like the revelation to physicists at Los Alamos in 1945 that E does, indeed, equal MC squared."

The foolish Israeli soldier who betrayed his battalion's plans was removed from combat duty and imprisoned for ten days. Had he been sentenced to serve his time in offices of the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles, he could at least have pondered his folly in silence, after the DMV canceled its subscription to Muzak, following numerous customer complaints. That's a start, certainly, though it's less certain how to cancel boors who sit down near you and start loud cellphone conversations. I'm hoping that Sharper Image will eventually start selling a jamming device that you can activate silently from your pocket in such an event.

© Michael Huggins, 2010. All rights reserved.

Bitten by bytes

2010-03-09T13:12:00.001-08:00

It appalls but does not completely surprise me that a 3-month-old Korean girl slowly starved to death while her feckless parents haunted a nearby internet café playing computer games; the horrible irony is that the game that addicted them was a simulation in which they raised a virtual child online.

The article from the Guardian Online cited yet other instances of the same social evil:

A 22-year-old Korean man was charged last month with murdering his mother because she nagged him for spending too much time playing games. After killing her the man went to a nearby internet cafe and continued with his game, said officials. In 2005 a young man collapsed in an internet cafe in the city of Taegu after playing the game StarCraft almost continuously for 50 hours. He went into cardiac arrest and died at a local hospital.

Admittedly, distraction from the obligations of the immediate was not born with the Internet. In Gulliver's Travels, Swift satirized absent-minded thinkers who needed minders to follow them around through the day and periodically tap them on the shoulder to remind them where they were. A guilt-ridden Mark Twain confessed in his Autobiography that his oldest son's death was his fault; sunk deep in thought as he took a carriage ride one winter day with the toddler, Clemens did not notice that the blanket had slipped off the boy's bare legs; his son caught a chill and died shortly after.

Perhaps the difference with the Internet is that it is interactive and that there is an immediate payoff; this, plus the distraction from tedium, must be among the reasons that people text while driving. As long as people are obsessed with the world online, they could do worse than to spend their time addressing one of the next great issues in national security: the ease with which unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, can be assembled, chillingly detailed last week in Newsweek by P.W. Singer:

At least 40 other countries—from Belarus and Georgia to India, Pakistan, and Russia—have begun to build, buy, and deploy unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, showcasing their efforts at international weapons expos ranging from the premier Paris Air Show to smaller events in Singapore and Bahrain. In the last six months alone, Iran has begun production on a pair of weapons-ready surveillance drones, while China has debuted the Pterodactyl and Sour Dragon, rivals to America's Predator and Global Hawk. All told, two thirds of worldwide investment in unmanned planes in 2010 will be spent by countries other than the United States.

When we invaded Iraq, I explained to my worried son, then 14, why Saddam couldn't send planes to bomb us as we could bomb Baghdad. Times are changing: Singer's article mentions that a 77-year-old blind man in Canada designed a drone that flew across the Atlantic to Ireland. These home-made gadgets actually gain from being less advanced than the machinery of our current defenses:

Smaller UAVs' cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles; Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, but at $3 million apiece such protection comes at a very steep price. Even seemingly unsophisticated drones can have a tactical advantage: Hizbullah's primitive planes flew so slowly that Israeli F-16s stalled out trying to decelerate enough to shoot them down.

According to a robotics expert cited in the article, an amateur could build a machine for less than $50,000 that could shut down Manhattan. Actually, our own government nearly achieved that when some nitwit let Air Force One fly over the city for a photo opportunity last year, panicking thousands.

Getting back to UAVs, the "Popular Mechanics" aspect isn't the only problem; even worse, it seems that overlooked and easily exploitable security flaws aren't limited to the Giant of Redmond:

More recently, The Wall Street Journal reported, the U.S. ignored a dangerous flaw in its UAV technology that allowed Iraqi insurgents to tap into the planes' video feeds using $30 software purchased over the Internet.

Until this Terminator-like future arrives, one can still take refuge in the quiet pleasures of an art museum (though the guard at the Phillips Collection in Washington nearly assaulted me last year when my flash went off as I photographed Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party), but according to Newsweek staffer Jennie Yabroff, art appreciation can have its own hazards:

Stendhal syndrome isn't included in the draft version of the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, released last month, but with proposed additions including "apathy syndrome" and Internet addiction, it's probably only a matter of time. The affliction takes its name from the 19th-century French writer, who was overcome after visiting Florence's Basilica di Santa Croce. In 1989 an Italian psychiatrist named Graziella Magherini published La Sindrome di Stendhal, describing more than 100 tourists who suffered dizziness and heart palpitations (some requiring hospitalization) after seeing the Florentine sights. According to Magherini, great art can make you sick.

Yabroff cites Stendhal's own account of the experience that caused Magherini's diagnosis:

Stendhal visited Florence in 1817: maybe he was suffering Grand Tour pressure to have a properly edifying travel experience. But what actually happened? He writes, "On leaving the Santa Croce church, I felt a pulsating in my heart. Life was draining out of me, while I walked fearing a fall."

I doubt that any age has ever equalled ours for discovering previously unknown disorders and tagging them with clinical names, but I think there may be something to this. What happens if a work of art really grips you? If it is sufficiently powerful, it may affect the viewer, on a smaller scale, like the feeling described in Sylvia Plath's poem, "Mystic":

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?
Once one has been seized up

Without a part left over,
Not a toe, not a finger, and used,
Used utterly, in the sun’s conflagrations, the stains
That lengthen from ancient cathedrals
What is the remedy?

How many transformative experiences can one endure in a single day? As my son wisely observed after we had toured the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, "I think I'm all museumed out for now."

© Michael Huggins, 2010. All rights reserved.

What once loomed large and now seems almost quaint

2009-12-31T20:16:00.001-08:00

I think it was Calvin Coolidge who said that if you see ten problems coming down the road to meet you, the likelihood is that nine of them will fall off in a ditch before you ever have to deal with them. Fifty years ago tonight, I was at the home of my grandmother in Memphis, watching the TV news announcer count down to 1960. A few days before, President Eisenhower had announced to the nation on TV the severing of diplomatic relations with Cuba over Castro's increasing closeness to the Soviets. We worried that Russia would bomb us and had drills at school where we huddled under our desks.

Forty years ago tonight, I was at my church's parsonage in Newark with several high school buddies. Back then, we earnestly debated when the Second Coming of Christ would occur (we were all quite sure that it would be long before now) and whether Paul McCartney was really dead (as seemed to be indicated by mysterious clues on a Beatles album). The United States was still fighting in Vietnam, and I and my friends were just short of draft age.

Thirty years ago tonight, I had gone to a bar in Memphis that once stood on the site of Zinnie's East and played classical music and had been invited home by a group of people at the next table. I went with them and sat up all night talking and engaging in a singalong with two people who played the guitar. The Iranian hostage crisis had erupted just over a month before. As I did some last-minute Christmas shopping at Target, I saw footage of the poor hostages bravely singing "Silent Night" in their confinement, as a clergyman of some Orthodox jurisdiction had been allowed in to hold a Christmas service for them.

Twenty years ago tonight, my ex wife and I had a late supper at the Peabody. The Food and Beverage Manager was our next-door neighbor, and as we dined in the old Dux restaurant, just off the lobby, he stopped by our table to greet us. The United States had recently deposed Manuel Noriega, the drug-connected President of Panama. It was my son's first Christmas. The mercury in Memphis had been around 0 on Christmas Day, and the pipes had frozen beneath our kitchen sink. The Berlin Wall had fallen a month or two before, and there was intense debate as to whether this really heralded the beginning of the end for the Soviet empire (a surmise that was confirmed just 2 years later, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist on Christmas Day of 1991) or was merely a retrenchment.

Ten years ago tonight, I sat at home recovering from the flu and nervously looking at news reports online to see whether the countries where it was already New Year's Day were suffering from the anticipated effects of Y2K. I was not one of those who thought civilization would collapse, but I did think that on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 representing major disasters, we would suffer a 5 or 6. Having spent most of a technical writing career working in information technology environments, I fully believed in the severity of the problem and had almost no confidence in the likelihood of it being fixed in time.

Tonight, my worries are about Iran once more, climate change, Afghanistan, and the future of the Republican party.

© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.

A one-way ticket to Mars? You first!

2009-10-04T08:55:00.000-07:00

Physicist Lawrence M. Krauss recently suggested, in The New York Times, that one way to cut the costs of a manned mission to Mars was to make it a one-way trip for the astronauts. After all, Krauss reasons, the original American colonists didn't expect to return to England. Krauss claims that, heartless as his proposal may sound (really, you think?), informal polls among scientists encountered in his travels show that the majority would be happy to go to Mars with no thought of return.

Which only goes to show how extraordinarily intelligent people sometimes seem to lack the sense to come in out of the rain. Krauss is at least properly skeptical of claims that human space exploration is justified by humans being able to conduct scientific experiments better than robots, which is probably not true. His reasoning is that we need to establish ongoing human life on Mars in case something catastrophic happens to our native planet. Considering the almost insane challenges of the Martian environment for human life, Krauss's purposes would be nearly as well served by a proposal to colonize the submerged parts of the continental shelves of Earth's various land masses.

No one should doubt the invaluable additions to knowledge of properly conducted scientific research on Mars. Its age is similar to that of Earth, and it is the most earth-like planet in our Solar System, though the two planets' respective outcomes have been radically different. Whether liquid water exists far beneath its surface and, even more intriguing, whether biological life exists in some primitive form on Mars are important issues for understanding our own planet's history.

But not the issue here. No human could survive unaided on Mars's surface for 10 seconds. Because its atmosphere is of a thinness to be found at altitudes 19 times that of Denver, liquids boil and evaporate very quickly; a human's blood would boil inside him in seconds. Mars's temperatures are generally worse than those on Antarctica, while its thin atmosphere leaves the surface more vulnerable to the Sun's radiation than the hottest parts of the Sahara. Its atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide, and it is plagued by storms of red dust lasting months at a time and capable of raising dust clouds 25 miles high.

No, the original American colonists did not expect to return to England, but they did expect to hunt, fish, and farm. Mars is not a candidate for any of those things. Indeed, the very need to protect astronauts from the radiation they are likely to encounter simply getting to Mars in the first place (the shortest possible trip would take 7–8 months) might make their transport craft too heavy to make the trip at all! Krauss acknowledges the issue, supposing a crop of astronauts arriving on Mars with their life expectancies radically cut short by radiation exposure. A promising start for establishing human life on the red planet!

Of course we have, or can develop, the technology to create habitable environments on Mars, perhaps beneath the surface. Let's suppose that, to prepare for such an eventuality, NASA constructs an artificial habitat somewhere on Earth and confines a group of male and female scientists there for some months. There is no TV, radio, or internet, and no real-time communication with the rest of humanity, only data links twice a day, as has been the case with the Mars Rover. One can't go outside without heavy protective equipment, and one may not be able to go outside for months at a time, because of the fierce dust storms, raging at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per hour. Oxygen and water must be manufactured, and attempts must be made to begin cultivating edible plants inside. No health care is available except for what can be provided right there. And these conditions will never change because of the very nature of the environment itself.

I suspect the eventual human result would include murder, insanity, sexual slavery, and rationing of food, water, oxygen, and medical care by some dominant personality and his clique to enforce his will on the rest of the group.

But supposing that didn't happen—that humans somehow learned to adapt and coexist in a civilized way completely inside an artificial environment, forever—Mars has two remaining disadvantages. Since it has so little atmosphere, it is much more vulnerable to meteor strikes than Earth, whose atmosphere burns up many of the debris from space that would otherwise wreak havoc here. Finally, Mars is a great deal smaller than Earth, so its likely future as a human outpost must be quite limited.

And lest we forget, in the light of what we know of evolution, the isolation of two previously compatible groups from the same species generally results in each group eventually developing characteristics so different that they can no longer mate and reproduce with members of the other group. The facts of biology tell us that unless we dispatched additional colonies to Mars at regular intervals to add to its human population, there would eventually come a time when the two groups would be of no further use to each other for propagating common descendants.

We are still too haunted by the ghost of Star Trek, which showed humans boldly going, not only to places where man had never been before, but where he simply can't go, unless we discover usable shortcuts through space-time. Mars, the one planet in our Solar System where humans might have even a remote chance of establishing an outpost, has the disadvantages described above. The closest possibility of another Earth-like planet lies in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri, 4.37 light-years from Earth. Light travels 5.8 trillion miles in a single year; at our current 18,000-mile-per-hour speed of space travel, it would take 37,200 years to travel the extent of a single light-year. Which reminds me of a joke by Johnny Carson. "The space shuttle is under warranty...120,000 miles or ten seconds." I think the late lamented king of late-night television had more common sense about this issue than our physicist friend Krauss. In the dawning age of robotics, there is no more reason to send humans to Mars or any other inhospitable environment than there is to station some hapless soul 11,000 miles above the Earth's surface on a GPS satellite to make sure motorists here below can continue to find their way.

© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.

The buck...well, bounces around a great deal

2009-10-01T17:46:00.000-07:00

Anita Tedaldi, military wife and parent of five daughters, who has made a name for herself blogging about motherhood, gave up her adopted 18-month-old son when she realized she just didn't feel all that close to him. She told her story to Lisa Belkin of The New York Times, who also appeared with her when Tedaldi was interviewed on The Today Show. Apparently encouraged by her exposure to the world of journalism to be even-handed, Tedaldi gently informed her audience that the failure to bond "really went both ways." Well I'm all for holding kids accountable, certainly.

There is the awkward matter of Tedaldi having outspokenly criticized another adoptive couple, in print, for doing pretty much the same thing just last year, but, as Lincoln once observed, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present." Meanwhile, the U.S. Military, who owns the web site on which Tedaldi's earlier article appeared, is obligingly treating the matter about like they did the death of Pat Tillman; the text is no longer there.

I read a couple of years ago the troubling story of a single mom in England who adopted an African girl about the same age as the mom's biological 7-year-old daughter. If her account is to be believed, she did everything she could to welcome the adopted child and blend her into the family, to no avail. Eventually, the adopted girl's hostility, not only toward the mother, but even more so against her adoptive sister, reached a point at which the mother feared for her biological daughter's safety. With tremendous reluctance and chagrin, she made the decision to give up the adopted child. Perhaps there was nothing else she could do.

I certainly don't wish for little "Baby D," as Tedaldi refers to her adopted son, to grow up in a house where his closest caregiver is continually judging his bonding skills and finding them wanting; he deserves better, and I hope he is placed in an emotionally healthy home. I could even respect Tedaldi if, chastened by her experience, she took time off from blogging about motherhood for a period of reflection. But we must be realistic; book deals and appearances on Oprah wait for no one. Who knows but that one day the little tyke may pen his own book about "Mommy T" and the strange mismatch between her blogging skills and her nurturing abilities.

This week's other poster child for forgiving one's own mistakes and blowing off the stodgy critics is Roman Polanski, on whose behalf over 100 luminaries of the entertainment world have signed a petition demanding his immediate release from custody, following his recent arrest in Switzerland. These include Woody Allen, whose nude photos of his adopted stepdaughter broke up his long-time partnership with Mia Farrow, and the noted moral philosopher Harvey Weinstein, who can see more clearly than most of us that Polanski was sufficiently punished for his "so-called crime" with a 30-year inability to attend Hollywood parties.

As is well known, Polanski accepted an unchaperoned visit from aspiring 13-year-old model Samantha Gailey at the home of Jack Nicholson (never mind!) in 1977, photographed her nude, plied her with champagne and quaaludes, and then sexually assaulted her, ignoring her repeated protests and requests to leave.

No one but Hollywood libertines are in serious doubt as to the hideous nature of Polanski's actions that night. Yes, I know future Chief Justice John Marshall started courting his future wife when she was 14 and Marshall was 26, but that was in a day when Marshall would have been shot by her outraged father had he so much as kissed her and not followed through shortly after with a trip to the church to make good. And it may be that 15-year-old Nastassia Kinski acted with perfectly free choice upon beginning a sexual liaison with Polanski; frankly, if I had a maniac like Klaus Kinski for a father, I too might find even Polanski's company a desirable alternative.

Polanski's actions with Gailey, in any case, were completely beyond the pale, and he was rightly convicted. The moral issue is clear. What is tangled is the legal issue, an entanglement caused by the egregious misconduct of the late judge Laurence Rittenband, who first approved, and then gave every indication of intending to renege on, a plea bargain supported by the victim's own family. Rittenband seems to have done this, moreover, on the advice of a District Attorney who wasn't even involved in the case, itself an instance of judicial misbehavior. In desperation, Polanski fled the court's jurisdiction and then went abroad, which was another crime added to the one for which he had already been convicted.

If Polanski's celebrity status should not win him special treatment, neither should it have made him the special victim of a judge's personal pique, in violation not only of judicial ethics but of an agreement that the victim and her family had acknowledged was in her best interests. The larger legal issue is whether, having reached a court-approved plea bargain, a defendant for any crime, at any level of wealth or social prominence, should have to wonder if the court will honor its own agreement or decide, on a whim, to suddenly "get tough."

Polanski is apparently an unrepentant reprobate, and one could wish to see him humiliated and abused as his victim was that night all those years ago. But the law should serve justice, not become an instrument of popular revenge. If they wanted his hide, the court should have rejected the plea bargain and insisted on imposing the maximum sentence to begin with. If a foolish, publicity-hungry judge can do this to a celebrity, what might he do to any of us? Polanski's original sentence was for time previously served; to this, a reasonable penalty of additional time should be added for having fled legal jurisdiction.

© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.

A bit different from "Jingle Bells"

2009-10-01T05:07:00.001-07:00

I've been listening to one of my favorite pieces from Bach's Christmas Oratorio: Schlafe, Mein Liebster ("Sleep, my dearest," imagined as a melody sung by the shepherds to the Christ Child). What if they played this in department stores? The lengthy and sustained development of the theme, so demanding on the baroque soloist, might just about equal the length of one's wait to be checked out by a sales clerk, and meanwhile, beguiled by the peaceful and contemplative mood induced by the music, you might forget to buy anything at all!

I think Macy's set a record of sorts about 3 years ago by starting to play Christmas music around September 10th. Of course, denouncing commercialism at Christmas is a favorite trope the world over, but I was startled to learn, a few years ago, that Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer was created by a man whose wife was dying of cancer at the time and who sought to divert their small daughter. Jack May, a copywriter for Montgomery Ward department stores, was asked to write a jingle as a promotional gimmick and came up with Rudolph. His only hesitation was that the image of a red nose was popularly associated with drunkenness, but he had an artist friend sketch a deer with a shiny nose, which sold his employers on the idea. Eight years after the song's successful release, he persuaded the store to assign the royalties to him, so that he could discharge the medical bills left over from his wife's death.

© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.

Global dimming?

2009-09-28T17:53:00.000-07:00

How ironic that Josiah Franklin wanted his son Benjamin, the future discoverer of electricity, to follow Josiah's own trade of soap and candle maker, removing his son from school for that purpose when Ben was just ten years of age. As a child, fascinated by the Founding Fathers, I sometimes regretted that I had not lived in the 18th century, but as someone born in the 20th century, I am too used to the conveniences of bright light. A Christmas Eve candlelight service is all very well, but imagine having that kind and degree of light as one's sole illumination all the time. This scene from Kubrick's 1975 film Barry Lyndon gets the look about right. I can understand how Dr. Johnson had to sit so close to his candle for reading that he would singe his wig; what seems nearly incredible is the idea of men and women of that day reading and playing cards by the hour without going nearly blind.

I thought of that when I read the following from Amy Myers Jaffe of The Economist, quoted in the current issue of The Week:

To replace the global energy produced today by fossil fuels, we would need to build 6,020 new nuclear plants across the globe, or to produce 133 times the combined solar, wind, and geothermal energy currently harvested. Barring such a “monumental” transformation, we’re stuck with oil—or with “walking.”

Or candles. The problem is that it takes many candles to equal the illumination of a single bulb, and candles emit more carbon.

It gets worse, and more ironic. The same issue of The Week quotes The New York Times as saying that

To satisfy the exploding worldwide electricity demand caused by flat-screen TVs, game consoles, personal computers, and other gadgets, nations will have to build the equivalent of 560 coal-fired power plants, or 230 nuclear plants, over the next two decades. The average American now owns 25 electronic products.

I read once that if the whole world enjoyed the American standard of living, it would take the resources of three planet earths to support such consumption. Now imagine the world going dark for the sake of the Xbox, Twitter, and flat screen TVs!

And speaking of differences between the 18th century and our own, if an educated man of that day could be resurrected in ours and read the following, which opened an auto review that I read this evening, I think he would quickly ask to be reentombed:

Retirees love Cadillac’s flagship DTS, and the CTS goes up against sporty European rivals, but the SRX is taking on the Lexus RX 350 in the crossover SUV market.

A single spot on a pristine surface

2009-09-27T11:38:00.004-07:00

One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry upon reading the word euphemisms, in the New York Times obituary of William Safire, misspelled as "euphamisms." The writer, Robert D. McFadden, is not likely to have responded to my profile on dating web sites, when I used to use them; but his sisters-in-kind used to write that they enjoyed "quite" evenings at home, which immediately caused me to stop reading.

Safire himself is probably laughing at McFadden's gaffe. It reminds me of Garrison Keillor, whose Writer's Almanac program I greatly enjoy, telling us every April 9 about Lee and Grant meeting "at the Appomattox Court House" to negotiate the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. They didn't meet in a court house but in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's farm house; "Appomattox Courthouse" was simply the name of the nearest town!

On the other hand, I liked it very much when Keillor described one of the last acts of William Shawn, longtime editor of The New Yorker:

"Four days before he died in 1992, Shawn had lunch with Lillian Ross, and she showed him a book cover blurb she had written and asked if he would check it. She later wrote of that day, "He took out the mechanical pencil he always carried in his inside jacket pocket, and ... made his characteristically neat proofreading marks on a sentence that said 'the book remains as fresh and unique as ever.' He changed it to read, 'remains unique and as fresh as ever.' 'There are no degrees of uniqueness,' Mr. Shawn said politely."

I had not known that Safire arranged Nixon's famous "kitchen debate" with Kruschev and had forgotten that, as a former White House speechwriter, he was apparently the source of the phrase made famous by Spiro Agnew: "Nattering nabobs of negativism."

The ability to convey a great deal with a few well-chosen words is all too rare. I greatly admire the opening paragraph of James Gleick's biography of Sir Isaac Newton:

Isaac Newton said he had seen farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, but he did not believe it. He was born into a world of darkness, obscurity, and magic; led a strangely pure and obsessive life, lacking parents, lovers, and friends; quarreled bitterly with great men who crossed his path; veered at least once to the brink of madness; cloaked his work in secrecy; and yet discovered more of the essential core of human knowledge than anyone before or after. He was chief architect of the modern world. He answered the ancient philosophical riddles of light and motion, and he effectively discovered gravity. He showed how to predict the courses of heavenly bodies and so established our place in the cosmos. He made knowledge a thing of substance: quantitative and exact. He established principles, and they are called his laws.

The prose is lithe and supple; Gleick's longest sentence, the second, is a series of short clauses and is immediately followed by the elegant eight-word "He was chief architect of the modern world." He uses three-word series but does not overuse them, as Samuel Johnson sometimes did. In 142 words, there are only 15 of 3 syllables or more—only 2, quantitative and philosophical—of 4 syllables or more. The tone is intimate and yet somehow commanding, making the reader feel as if he has encountered something important that ought to require his full attention.

C.S. Lewis would have quarreled fiercely with Gleick's assertion that knowledge became "a thing of substance" by being "quantitative," but he shared Gleick's talent for powerful writing, intelligent and yet accessible to the general reader. As someone who no longer agrees with Lewis's beliefs in the most important things, I was still startled, this past week, to hear an intelligent friend who shares Lewis's faith, remark that Mere Christianity was so written that my friend couldn't really consider it very clear or engaging. Out of curiosity, I reread it for the first time in about 15 years, surprised to find it available online in .PDF format.

I remembered Lewis's flaws well enough but had forgotten some of his strengths. I can't finally agree with the book but found it quite gripping in places. As to writing style, Lewis knew the value of pithiness as much as anyone, but was still a very perceptive critic of that quality used for meretricious ends. I have often enjoyed, and still agree, with his comments on Bacon's Essays from Lewis's History of English Literature in the 16th Century:

"Even the completed Essays of 1625 is a book whose reputation curiously outweighs any real pleasure or profit that most people have found in it, 'a book' (as my successor admirably says) 'that everyone has read but no one is ever found reading.' The truth is, it is a book for adolescents. It is they who underline (as I see from the copy before me) sentences like 'There is little friendshipe in the worlde, and least of all betweene equals': a man of 40 either disbelieves it or takes it for granted. No one, even if he wished, could really learn 'policie' from Bacon, for cunning, even more than virtue, lives in minute particulars. What makes young readers think they are learning is Bacon's manner; the dry, apophthegmatic sentences, in appearance so unrhetorical, so little concerned to produce an effect, fall on the ear like oracles and are thus in fact a most potent rhetoric...."

In another place (I thought it was here but can't find it), Lewis says something like "Nothing could be less practical than the desperate practicality of Bacon's maxims." Actually, it may be just as well that poor Lewis has gone on to his reward; were he alive today, so far from complaining about the too-great attraction of the Essays for adolescents, he would be chagrined to learn that the likelihood of high school students appreciating or even comprehending Bacon's work on any grounds is considerably less than it was in Lewis's own day. In fact, I had forgotten until writing this that one night, about 10 years ago, some young person instant-messaged me on AOL® out of the blue, having seen the word "writer" in my profile and wondering if I could help her understand, what she had been given as homework, Bacon's essay "Of Truth." With more charity than sense, I gave her a long explanation of it, at the end of which she said "Yes, but what does it mean?"

© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.

What shall it profit a man, if he gains the world and has no clue?

2009-03-02T11:52:00.000-08:00

I won't say I'm glad I'm not wealthy. Samuel Johnson once rebuked his longsuffering friend, Hester Thrale, for repeating a rather fatuous moral from David Garrick: "I'd smile with the simple and feed with the poor." Johnson rightly replied, "Nay, madam, I'd smile with the wise and feed with the rich," although he might have added that one doesn't always find both in the same place.

When West Virginia businessman Jack Whitaker won his record lottery payout in 2002, I noticed that his granddaughter's name was Brandi Bragg, and since Bragg is my maternal grandmother's maiden name, I facetiously suggested that my family call Whitaker and tell him we were long-lost cousins. Of course, his own buffoonish decline since and poor Brandi's pathetic end just 2 years later are a cautionary tale about the influence of riches without a sufficient sense of purpose.

On the two occasions in my own life when I suddenly acquired rather sizable cash windfalls, I noticed that, if anything, my new and temporary fortunes only made me even more irascible and peremptory than usual, so I'm not sure that wealth would be my best condition. I would at least want to avoid the frame of mind of the two museum-goers that I read about in The American Scholar 20 years ago: seeing some priceless artifact, an Etruscan drinking vessel or the like, one expressed her admiration for it, while the other replied, "Yes, but if I bought it, where would I put it?"

I was reminded of this today on reading Peter Plagens' survey of the impact of the recession on the world of contemporary art, published a week ago in Newsweek:

Right up until last September, even the greenest postgraduate painter showing for the first time in a barely reputable gallery was asking—and getting—$10,000 to $20,000 per picture. The number of still-living (not to mention merely middle-aged) contemporary artists commanding a cool million dollars for a single work at auction is edging toward 100. Anecdotes about art-world excess are legion. A collector at an art fair was shown a previously undiscovered canvas by a midlevel abstractionist from the 1960s and told that the price was under $100,000. "Well, I suppose I could enjoy that," she said to the dealer, "if I were poor."

Well we must all keep up our standards, certainly.

I would like to have enough money not to worry about whether Courvoisier is costing me too much, to buy books from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, and to collect black and white photography and antique clocks. I don't know if this will ever happen. But I certainly want to avoid the trap of the "vanishing wealthy" that I heard interviewed a few years ago in an investigative feature on NPR.

The reporter, an enterprising young woman, asked who was considered financially well off in today's society. First, she approached a two-paycheck couple in a nice suburb in Northern New Jersey, with a combined income of $100,000 (which is most certainly not wealthy, especially if you're raising a family). The wife replied, "Well off? Good heavens, no! Sure, we have our kids in private schools and give them music and ballet lessons, but we live from paycheck to paycheck."

Next, the reporter approached a businessman in the same area with an income of $325,000. "Well off?" the man exclaimed, clearly annoyed. "Are you kidding me? You should see the taxes I pay!"

Finally, the reporter talked her way into a 4-storey brownstone, the single-family home of a $1 million-a-year investment banker and his wife and children. "Wealthy?" the wife reflected. "Well no, not really. I actually don't have that many designer dresses in my closet."

The reporter was almost speechless. "Well if you're not wealthy," she exclaimed, "who in the world is?

The wife replied, "Oh, I don't know—perhaps someone with $20 or $30 million."

For another interesting look at the contemporary art world, see Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock, the story of a feisty, truck-driving grandma from the Midwest who became convinced that her $50 thrift shop purchase was a genuine lost Pollock (of whom she had never heard). Needless to say, the art world, including still-living patrons and collectors who had known Pollock, were having none of that.

© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.

No Rime for the Ancient Naturalist

2009-02-10T17:18:00.000-08:00

Why did Darwin lose his taste for poetry late in life?

That may seem like a strange question in our day when, for many of us, the chief experience of poetry was memorizing Paul Revere's Ride and reciting it in grade school. Darwin, of course, born 200 years ago, grew up in a culture where daily exposure to the poetic cadences of the King James Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer was standard, where acquaintance with the works of Shakespeare and Dryden was expected of any educated man and the poetry of Lord Byron was fashionable. Former President John Adams, in his 80s when Darwin was a child, reread the complete works of Shakespeare every year; just 35 years ago, veteran journalist Arthur Krock recited Thackeray's whimsical Ballad of Buillabaisse for a young visitor, having read it once 50 years previously.

One expects the senses and appetites to diminish with age, but hopefully, never the taste for art, music, or poetry. One need not argue that Darwin's scientific interests were a bar to appreciation of the Muse; it was on the voyage of the Beagle that he took along a volume of Milton and read through Paradise Lost.

Yet in his old age, Darwin penned this forlorn confession in a letter to his wife, Emma:

Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds…gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare…. Formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music.… I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did.… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Of course he was 30 when he made his voyage. This loss of aesthetic enjoyment apparently became part of the Darwin legend, especially after the publication of some of his private correspondence, to the point where his son, William, felt compelled to deny it at a Darwin Centennial gathering in 1909.

Unacquainted with any but the bare outline of Darwin's life and career, I knew none of this—the early appreciation of poetry and its subsequent loss—until I read today that Darwin's great-granddaughter, Ruth Padel, had published a poetic biography of her distinguished ancestor; the review, in that noted journal of the arts, The Economist, was favorable, though I was keeping my fingers crossed, imagining filiopietistic hagiography buttressed with bad verse (how many rhymes are there for fossil?).

Fortunately, it seems I was wrong, if this excerpt from her book is typical:

The deck is dazzle, fish-stink, gauze-covered buckets.
Gelatinous ingots, rainbows of wet flinching amethyst
and flubbed, iridescent cream. All this
means he's better; and working on a haul of lumpen light.

Polyps, plankton, jellyfish. Sea butterflies, the pteropods.
'So low in the scale of nature, so exquisite in their forms!
You wonder at so much beauty - created,
apparently, for such little purpose!' They lower his creel

to blue pores of subtropical ocean. Wave-flicker, white
as a gun-flash, over the blown heart of sapphire.
Peacock eyes, beaten and swollen,
tossing on lazuline steel.

Whatever her other accomplishments, Padel is certainly a poet.

But what of her poor great-great grandfather? The religious critic has no trouble seeing, in Darwin's loss, a just requital of his supposed offense against faith; the man whose works imply denial of Divine creation ends by seeing part of his own humanity wither away.

Even in a less orthodox context, I can imagine Coleridge casting a Darwin-like figure as a ruthless hunter whose scientific inquiry, like a crossbow, transfixes and kills the creatures he studies, making everything dead and dry in proportion to his knowledge.

I don't know what happened. I would like to think that, like the man utterly convinced of a fact that consumes and shapes his entire being, as described in Emerson's essay on Character, he came to need nothing else but this knowledge that changed everything—yet he describes himself as having suffered a loss. I would like to think that, like the yogis who achieve the state of nirvikalpa samadhi, described as an entrance into unitary consciousness from which the adept never returns, he reached a point where any works of the imagination seemed feeble and derivative compared to the reality that he had come to know intimately through his studies.

But Darwin himself describes his state as unhappy, and in any case, all this is uninformed speculation on my part.

I am certain that if rejection of religious faith leads to desertion by the Muse, we would have a hard time accounting for the poetic power of A.E. Housman, whose unbelief was, if anything, even more definite than Darwin's own. I have read no biographies of Darwin and have nothing but the evidence of his own words; if we must take them at face value, I am sorry for what happened to him but grateful for the unrelenting pursuit of the truth; as Dobzhanksy said of natural selection, "Nothing in biology makes sense without it."

© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.

It was the minor moments that counted

2009-01-20T09:53:00.000-08:00

One of the very best things about today's inaugural ceremony was the closing prayer by Rev. Joseph Lowery, a veteran of the civil rights struggles of 40 years ago. Lowery, who has more gravitas in his little finger than the simpering Rick Warren does in his entire body, gave an eloquent benediction that made one mercifully forget the clumsy "poem" by Elizabeth Alexander that preceded it, gave the most honorable and dignified presentation possible of the new President's commitment to govern the nation by the ideals of his faith, and, at the end, erased Warren's comically condescending attempt to be inclusive to Jews and Muslims.

As to dignity, I don't know what possessed the Chief Justice of the United States, who is my age, to act in a way that was just this side of the president of a local high school student council, overwhelmed at the opportunity to be at a grand event and misquoting the oath of office to the point that Obama, self-possessed as always, was reduced to staring at him in dignified, waiting silence, until he got it right. I can only hope that Roberts, who seems to have a well-deserved reputation as a distinguished jurist, admired by right and left alike, is better at conducting sessions of the Supreme Court. Speaking of the Supreme Court, it was interesting, as Aretha Franklin ascended the podium, to see the brutish mug of Antonin Scalia right behind, her, staring out at the world with his customary look of belligerence and self-complacency.

Warren, who doesn't belong within 10 miles of any occasion to which the words "grand" or "solemn" might be attached, reminds me of someone who intends to sign me up for a multi-level marketing plan and, when he learns that I prefer reading, assures me, with a wink and a nudge, that he can probably get me a good deal on a set of Reader's Digest Condensed Books (so you can get through them faster!). His prayer did, indeed, contain some good things about the hopes and struggles of the American people, but it was destroyed by the cringe-inducing climax, in which he said "I pray this in the name of the one who changed my life, Yeshua, Isa, Jesus," etc. Technically, one can't fault a Christian minister for offering a prayer in the name of Jesus, which is all but a formal theological requirement (although fellow-Protestant Lowery simply ended with "Amen"), but to assume, as Warren must have, that he would somehow make Jews and Muslims feel better by including Jesus's Jewish name or the name by which he is referred to in the Koran (where, of course, he is referred to as a prophet only and not worshipped as divine) was astonishing in its fatuousness. There are times, as Warren perhaps has yet to learn, that the best way to show awareness of something is a prudent silence.

Obama himself gave a competent and workmanlike speech, as he always does, though little in it rose to the level of anything that could be called inspirational, and I can only assume that he had let Al Gore's speechwriter contribute a phrase or two when he ran into that clumsily worded patch in which he said "These things are subject to data, statistics, and analysis"—good God! It's probably a good thing the statue of Lincoln sitting in the Memorial down the Mall could not come alive at that point, or he might have uttered something hardly in keeping with the decorum of the occasion—or, better still, spat a marble gob of tobacco juice into the Reflecting Pool to give that part of the speech a fitting response. I turned the TV off after about 12 minutes, reflecting that watching Obama speak reminds me of what Emerson said about the elder William Pitt: "It was said of the Earl of Chatham that there was something finer in the man, than in anything he said." Obama inspires, all right, but it is by the impression he makes, more than by what he says. There was more applause when he appeared than there was during the speech itself (indeed, the camera caught his brother-in-law suppressing a yawn as he sat behind him!). Nevertheless, he said one thing, at least, that was extremely important: that we as a nation repudiate the belief that we must sacrifice our ideals for the sake of security.

Aretha Franklin's appearance was symbolically important, but the measured, majestic 18th-century musical phrasing of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" hardly suited her rather informal performance style. For my money, one of the best parts of the ceremony was the brief instrumental ensemble that included Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, a female pianist, and a black clarinetist, performing an arrangement by famous movie composer John Williams of themes from Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. Once again, today's arrangement wasn't exactly right—Williams had a fine opportunity, which he seems to have missed, to have also included a theme built on a black spiritual—but the performance seemed to be a musical reflection of how our new President seeks to present himself and his proposed government: cool, simple, elegant, direct, drawing from history but arranging the themes in new ways, a blending of different voices, a performance executed without flaw. It seemed to me that it was that performance, as much as his own inaugural address, that set the standard by which he will be judged.

© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.

If not now...

2009-01-19T18:01:00.000-08:00

For years, I never thought I would live to see the day when Leningrad would be called St. Petersburg once more. If my expectations of an African-American President were not quite so dismal as my hopes for the fall of Communism, they were at least projected into an ever-receding future of perhaps 30 to 50 years. The last time I watched a Presidential inauguration on television, in 1961, the Civil Rights Act had not been passed, and the University of Mississippi had not been integrated. Many adults I knew regarded Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a dangerous radical.

I remember that in 1988, George F. Will suggested that the Republican Party nominate Colin Powell for Vice-President and steal a march from the Democrats, but that opportunity was forfeited by both parties. (Senator, you were no Colin Powell!)

Tomorrow's inauguration comes 200 years after the birth of the Great Emancipator, 120 years after the death of a sad and unrepentant Jefferson Davis, 100 years after the founding of the NAACP, about 70 years after FDR nominated Benjamin O. Davis as the first African-American general in the U.S. military (his son, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., later became the first black Air Force general), and roughly 100 years after Teddy Roosevelt outraged many Southerners by having Booker T. Washington to the White House as his dinner guest. When Roosevelt had visited Memphis, in 1902, he had spoken at Church Auditorium, built several years earlier by millionaire black Memphis businessman Robert Church Sr., since local laws forbade him and his fellow blacks to use city parks and other facilities.

Writing in today's New York Times, Henry Louis Gates and John Stauffer argue, quite plausibly, that Lincoln himself, a man of his own time, would likely have been horrified by the thought of the government of the United States being entrusted to a black man. I agree. As the article points out, Lincoln casually used such terms as "Sambo," "Cuffee," and "nigger," and addressed Sojourner Truth as "Aunty." On the eve of issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, he invited black leaders to meet with him and discuss the possibility of founding a black republic in Central America to which freed slaves would be urged to emigrate. Like the author of the words "All men are created equal," Lincoln saw no possibility of racial equality as consistent with a stable system of government.

Having said that, Lincoln should be honored, not only for political measures, but for his own efforts to transcend the attitudes of his day and stretch his understanding of the possibilities between whites and blacks, as he did, for instance, in cultivating a personal friendship with his contemporary, the charismatic black spokesman Frederick Douglass. Nor was he alone; even former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had became notorious for the slaughter of black troops at Fort Pillow, attended an Independence Day picnic in Memphis as the invited guest of black organizers in 1875, 2 years before his death. Admitting privately after the event that he had been quite uncomfortable, the former slave trader addressed the gathering and said that he was ready to offer the hand of friendship and assist the black man in achieving any station in life to which his talents entitled him. For the founder of the Ku Klux Klan to utter such words was like walking a thousand miles, and I doubt that any of us today, having been raised in this more inclusive age, have progressed as far in our own attitudes about race.

© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.

Google Warming

2009-01-12T12:00:00.000-08:00

I'd heard about the losing battle that newspapers are fighting to stay afloat as they steadily lose ad revenue to the net, and perhaps that accounts in part for the article in yesterday's Times of London that painted Google as a carbon-spewing behemoth. But I see the article is actually carried in their online edition, so perhaps they are daring Google to block searches to their damning report and thus incidentally redeem itself from the sin of environmental spoliation. Or perhaps, since they draw a comparison between a Google search and the homely English cup of tea, it's a belated rebuke, 235 years late, to our disrespect of their favorite brew in Boston Harbor long ago.

In any case, the article quotes Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross as saying that two Google searches generate about as much carbon as brewing a single cup of tea, about 15 grams, and of course, if we multiply that by all the millions who are looking up baseball scores, their favorite celebrities, or their horoscopes online, instead of brewing a cup of tea and opening a paper copy of The Times, the worldwide impact could be severe. If Samuel Johnson could be made to understand the issue here, he, at least, would feel vindicated, since he is said to have consumed tea by the basinful after he gave up wine and liquor. On the other hand, he peopled his attic with a swarm of scribes to help him mark and copy passages from books for use in illustrating the definitions in his Dictionary. Presumably, he supplied them with candles, so perhaps their labors were not more energy-efficient than if they had used Google.

To be sure, the computer industry worldwide is not lagging in its efforts to burn kilowatt hours and is said to contribute to 2% of the planet's carbon emissions, about the same as world aviation. On the other hand, since greater energy use adds not only to the deterioration of the materials in networks and computers but to their operating costs, it's in the interests of information technology to discover better materials, more rational designs, and greater energy-efficiency. For that matter, the growing capacity of smart phones is leading us to a future in which much of what is done from desktop or laptop computers today is about to take place in the palm of the user's hand, instead. Meanwhile, the consumer who shops online, the reader who reads online, and the traveler who goes online and finds the quickest routes and lowest prices all contribute to saving energy, compared to older and more conventional means of accomplishing the same things.

Google published a response that denies Wissner-Gross's figures and asserts, instead, that the carbon involved in a Google search is many times smaller, involving, in fact, about the same amount of energy that the human body burns in about a tenth of a second. Indeed, Google says, its networks are so efficient that the the seeker's journey to the desired information consumes less energy than the computer sitting on one's desk.

Meanwhile, the Washington Posts's TechCrunch feature notes that the average book is responsible for 2,500 grams of carbon (Ayn Rand, you should have trimmed some of John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged!), while a cheeseburger accounts for an unseemly 3,600 grams, not to mention what it does to the profile and the digestion.

The London Times article certainly has a point in saying that a great deal of time and energy is wasted by sharing with the world what would have been confined to one's diary a century ago ("Walked the dog; it was hot today; rosebushes are not doing well," etc.). Indeed, that's one of the reasons that I've never seriously considered carrying a cell phone and would have little interest even if I had more room in my budget: I refuse to become part of an enterprise in which millions worldwide pay to say at a distance what was never worth saying face to face in the first place. Air quality isn't the only issue here; we also have noise, thoughtlessness, and what I'll call spiritual pollution to reckon with. Still, Google represents a force that, used wisely, ought to increase our efficiency and make knowledge more widely available, and at a lesser cost.

© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.

Get thou behind me

2008-12-31T16:09:00.001-08:00

Anxious to know when he would see his mistress once more, Benvenuto Cellini tells us in his autobiography that he went to the deserted ruins of the Colosseum late at night with a friend, to consult the spirits of the dead on the happy event. The spirits apparently manifested themselves in such a frightful way that Benvenuto, beside himself with fear, confessed that he made "the noise of a thousand flatulent trumpetings." The sonnet that opens his interesting book reminds us that "the wind, it beareth man's thoughts away," but unfortunately it faces a tall order in disposing of the methane of cattle—it seems that the average cow emits 500 liters of methane every day—and since methane has 20 times the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide, we may have Clarabell to blame if the time comes when Miami can only be viewed from above, through glass-bottomed excursion boats. The government is considering the possibility of a tax on cow emissions, a measure that might be aptly named "Cork and trade," and of course farmers are very displeased.

Perhaps it was solicitousness for public opinion on that proposed measure that has caused our Memphis Pink Palace Museum to offer an educational exhibit on animal waste (I'm not kidding). The flyer I received last night invited me to a members-only preview to "Get the Scoop on Poop: learn the science of what animals leave behind." Actually, I feel I have sufficient education in that already from my neighbors' two unsupervised dogs; indeed, one evening, having stepped unaware in their leavings while walking to my car to go to a movie, I spent much of the show wondering why the dolt sitting a few seats away couldn't practice basic hygiene before going out in public and actually considered moving to another seat to evade it, which just goes to prove the adage, "Wherever you go, there you are."

As to the exhibit, yes, I know that important scientific knowledge may be gleaned from feces, and I have listened to jokes about what bears do in the woods, but I never expected to be invited to ponder such matters in a museum. To ensure that members would find the prospect sufficiently attractive, the flyer helpfully noted, "Light refreshments will be served" which, for sheer tone-deafness, reminds me of the honest comment made by a courageous young model once, who said "When you're in Playboy, you really get a lot of exposure."

The sights, though fortunately not the smells, of nature were on silent and austere display this afternoon when my son and I drove to the William B. Clark Nature Preserve near Rossville, Tennessee. Several hundred acres of river bottomland are protected from development and may be viewed by walking a third of a mile along a sturdy boardwalk that takes you into the heart of the swamp. But for the gentle swaying of the trees, bare in winter and standing like unlit candles in the afternoon sun, the only movement we saw was a solitary hawk wheeling overhead. No planes, no wires, no voices. At first, I wondered why Mark kept taking out his cell phone, but I now realize it was to photograph the quiet beauty of the scene.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

Hast thou philosophy, shepherd?

2008-12-30T14:35:00.001-08:00

It was my father who went to college, but my mother whom I always remember absorbed in a book. Mom did not go to college until she was in her 30s. Dad was intelligent and well-spoken, but for him, the purpose of knowledge was to learn useful things or guide his thoughts in the right paths. For mom, reading was a key to asking why things were this way instead of another.

That difference appeared again a few years ago when our new Memphis Public Library building was dedicated, and local citizens were outraged to discover that among quotes from famous authors etched into the pavement near the Library's entrance, there were some from authors of whom they didn't approve, including Marx. One outraged citizen wrote to the local newspaper in protest, declaring, with perfect sincerity, that a library was supposed to be "a place of indoctrination."

For all I know, the person who wrote that absurdity held a college degree, though it didn't save him from completely misunderstanding the whole educational enterprise. Indoctrination is instruction in a prescribed set of norms that are not meant to be disputed; training is the impartation of facts, principles, and techniques meant to be mastered by rote, though that mastery may eventually lead to insights over and above the mere body of material that the student originally learned. Education, to be sure, builds on facts—there's not much point in discussing the effects of European discovery of the New World if one doesn't know when Columbus came over—but it is more than that. Education takes facts and teaches students to think. And that is really the problem.

This has nothing to do with whether most people could cultivate contemplative and analytical habits of mind if they wished; it is to reflect, instead, on the fact that the willingness to sift, to compare, to ask "why" and "what if" often causes discomfort not only to others but to the questioner himself. Philosopher James P. Carse was right to comment that "Many people read to have their views confirmed; the educated person reads to be surprised."

It may be that just about anyone could benefit from wrestling, at some point in his life, with the insights of Plato or Shakespeare; the question is whether he should pursue this as a private interest or be forced to pay thousands of dollars to do so as a requirement for obtaining the most ordinary employment. Charles Murray, of the American Enterprise Institute, made this point in an excellent article in The New York Times last Sunday:

My beef is not with liberal education, but with the use of the degree as a job qualification.

For most of the nation’s youths, making the bachelor’s degree a job qualification means demanding a credential that is beyond their reach. It is a truth that politicians and educators cannot bring themselves to say out loud: A large majority of young people do not have the intellectual ability to do genuine college-level work.

If you doubt it, go back and look through your old college textbooks, and then do a little homework on the reading ability of high school seniors. About 10 percent to 20 percent of all 18-year-olds can absorb the material in your old liberal arts textbooks. For engineering and the hard sciences, the percentage is probably not as high as 10....

But I’m not thinking just about students who are not smart enough to deal with college-level material. Many young people who have the intellectual ability to succeed in rigorous liberal arts courses don’t want to. For these students, the distribution requirements of the college degree do not open up new horizons. They are bothersome time-wasters.

A century ago, these students would happily have gone to work after high school. Now they know they need to acquire additional skills, but they want to treat college as vocational training, not as a leisurely journey to well-roundedness.

Lest this seem like another dyspeptic rant on "today's good-for-nothing youngsters," a similar perspective was provided in the June Atlantic by an anonymous professor teaching English 101 and 102 in a "college of last resort" to classes made up mostly of forty-somethings who must complete a degree for job advancement:

Some of their high-school transcripts are newly minted, others decades old. Many of my students have returned to college after some manner of life interregnum: a year or two of post-high-school dissolution, or a large swath of simple middle-class existence, 20 years of the demands of home and family. They work during the day and come to class in the evenings. I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work.

My students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but because they must. Both colleges I teach at require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two courses. For many of my students, this is difficult. Some of the young guys, the police-officers-to-be, have wonderfully open faces across which play their every passing emotion, and when we start reading “Araby” or “Barn Burning,” their boredom quickly becomes apparent. They fidget; they prop their heads on their arms; they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had been tasered. Their eyes implore: How could you do this to me?

The goal of English 101 is to instruct students in the sort of expository writing that theoretically will be required across the curriculum. My students must venture the compare-and-contrast paper, the argument paper, the process-analysis paper (which explains how some action is performed—as a lab report might), and the dreaded research paper, complete with parenthetical citations and a listing of works cited, all in Modern Language Association format. In 102, we read short stories, poetry, and Hamlet, and we take several stabs at the only writing more dreaded than the research paper: the absolutely despised Writing About Literature.

The author relates the heartbreaking story of Mrs. L., a mature student assigned to do a research paper citing both sides of a historical controversy. Not only could she not write a coherent paragraph; she was never really able to understand the nature of the assignment in the first place. This has nothing to do with socio-economic status; I remember an article in The American Scholar some years ago remarking that for a certain sort of 60-something member of the country club class, taking graduate courses was seen as an interesting alternate form of recreation.

I overheard half of a telephone conversation once, in which one of my fellow students tried to reassure her caller that she would give her the help she needed in writing a comparison-and-contrast paper, a concept that the caller seemed unable to grasp. After the call was over, my fellow student chuckled merrily and said "Oh, that Anne! What a character! She just loves education. She has got herself two Master's degrees, and she has come back for more!" And if she continued to pay fees, no doubt the school saw no reason not to collect them.

A college degree has become a sort of űber-high school diploma in the minds of many employers and for no good reason. While I agree that a study of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is probably one of the best introductions ever to office politics, I see no reason to require a clerical worker to learn it as an indispensable step to promotion, unless she simply wants to, and if she does, more power to her. Meanwhile, I have a step-cousin, a very sharp individual who has contributed computer code to NASA's missions to Mars, who cannot get permanent positions in the private sector for want of a college degree.

Once, it was assumed that a college degree was undertaken only as preparation for the ministry or a teaching career, and I agree with that archaic standard to the extent that everyone who sought it knew exactly what they were after and why. Again, to admit that college is not for everyone has nothing to do with misanthropy or invidious social distinctions. In 1983, 30-year-old Robert Martin was found living near Rossville, Tennessee, barefoot, with half his teeth missing, in a shack with no electricity or running water, with his elderly grandmother. He owned a Bible and a copy of Milton's works, and he knew both very nearly by heart. Taken to Vanderbilt, he amazed the professors with his knowledge. He had a hunger to know, and to think consequentially about what he had learned. I think it's time to leave liberal arts educations to those constituted like Martin and let the rest of the workforce demonstrate their competence through certification exercises that actually have something to do with their occupations. If they discover, at some point, that they have an urge to learn what Chaucer's pilgrims were up to and why, then I hope they find a willing teacher who can make those characters speak once more.

Brokeback or bareback?

2008-12-29T15:27:00.000-08:00

From an article posted Friday in Slate, I learn that two names that were googled this year with a frequency matching Sarah Palin and John McCain were Heath Ledger and Miley Cyrus. Ledger I can understand, and I hope he gets a posthumous Oscar for his performance in The Dark Knight, which was simply amazing; as to the other search object, I'd certainly rather gaze on a pretty young woman, even chastely, than on McCain any day—but Miley Cyrus? Who is she and why should anyone outside her friends and family be interested in her? Two years ago, her name was an item that I included on a list of practice questions for my office trivia team; now, tickets to her performances are scalped.

Her notoriety this year came from the Annie Leibovitz photos in Vanity Fair, and if viewers of the pictures took exception to Leibovitz tastelessly posing Cyrus with her boneheaded father in ways that looked like boyfriend and girlfriend, I agree. It seems there are times when no one has less common sense than artists, as Peter Lynch showed, for instance, when he filmed the humiliating near-rape scene between Willem Dafoe and Laura Dern in Wild at Heart and called it "An episode of female empowerment" (I won't say "Hand me a barf bag" because that motif was another element all too evident in the film). But what got everyone searching for Miley was a single shot that revealed no more than my then-14-year-old daughter did when she donned her new Speedo and went swimming a few years ago: a bare back. Of course society must reject the prurient exploitation of minors, but the last time I checked, shoulder blades were not secondary sexual characteristics, nor their display pornographic.

It's ironic—in April, touring a restored mansion in the annual "pilgrimage" of ante-bellum homes in nearby Holly Springs, Mississippi, I was startled to see several photographs, in one room, of what I assume was the owner's 12-year-old granddaughter in various states of undress, though the photos were very tastefully posed and could not be taken as pornographic. For that matter, on another historic homes tour a year or two ago, passing through some private family rooms, I came across a nude oil portrait of a young woman, and a moment later, found myself face to face with the original (dressed, of course), trying to contain her amusement at the startled glances of the guests. Cyrus's photo is pretty tame compared to those instances, and it seems the feverish interest is based on "concern" over what might have happened had she not adequately draped herself; frankly, it's all beginning to sound to me like John Ashcroft veiling the statues in the lobby of the Justice Department. Let little 15-year-old Destiny Hope do her television show and worry about dating and leave the rest of us to recollect ourselves and consider when our fixation on a young woman's bare back reflects things about our own thoughts that we'd just as soon not reveal.

No bailout bargain

2008-12-29T14:06:00.001-08:00

It would be nice if the economy would have a Clive Huggins moment. Clive was my late father, and, having been raised in the Depression, was always fearful of the prospect of paying too much for something; thus, he was often punished by the rule that says you get what you pay for. The Christmas trees he brought home looked like the last survivors of a worldwide drought, while he grumbled that he had overpaid. I, on the other hand, being perfectly willing to pay a premium price where I can afford it (though, on my budget, such willingness is more often a state of mind than an actual monetary transaction) and am likely to gain real quality by doing so, sometimes find myself buying perfectly creditable items for absurdly low prices. When that happens—e.g., paying $85 for $250 luggage or $18 for a $120 lounging robe—I call it a Clive Huggins moment. One of the largest Christmas trees I ever had, a tree so large I actually had to block one of the doors of my apartment to find a place to set it up, cost me $2, which was ridiculously low even for 1974.

Jeffrey Garten, writing in Newsweek recently, was convinced that we are trying to nickel-and-dime our way out of the current financial crisis and that nothing but an investment of $1 trillion, or 7% of GDP over the next 2 years, will give the economy the necessary infusion of capital and inspire consumer confidence once more:

The fundamental issue is fear. Despite the colossal problems in the U.S. economy, the dollar continues to strengthen, which just shows that investors fear other markets even more. Billions of dollars are flowing into three-year U.S. Treasury bills, whose interest rate is zero, so investors are merely trying to minimize losses, not make money. Clearly, the governments have not succeeded in restoring calm. Their efforts look improvised, confused and ineffective to the average consumer or investor. The poster child for this problem is the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program in the United States. The bitter congressional debates over the program and its shifting purpose—from buying toxic assets to injecting cash—has left the public feeling that Washington isn't quite sure what it is doing. For many weeks now, the Treasury and the Fed have appeared to be constantly on the brink of unveiling yet another new program, leaving the impression that even they don't believe the current ones will work.

I only wish someone could figure out the ratio of fear to real potential economic damage. Of course the government needs to spend, but how much? The exasperating thing is the extent to which the crisis is driven by emotion. I think of this, for instance, when I read of homeowners who, we are told, are still stuck paying on homes that are now worth less than the balance of the mortgage. So? My Saturn Ion is worth less than what I owe on it, even at the 0% APR financing I obtained from a desperate car dealer last year (another Clive Huggins moment), but that doesn't keep it from getting me to work, and I am still making payments. There is a real economic crisis—no argument there—and an additional amount of hand-wringing that is no doubt making the situation potentially much worse than it needs to be.

Actually, psychology is as interesting in figuring out how we got here as it is in figuring out how to get out of this mess. Henry Blodget, once notorious as a Wall St. tech stock analyst forced out of his occupation after the dot.com meltdown by Eliot Spitzer (never mind), provides a very incisive analysis of why there will always be economic bubbles and why perfectly intelligent, well-intentioned people will miss them until it's too late, in his article "Why Wall Street Always Blows It" in the current Atlantic:

...most bubbles are the product of more than just bad faith, or incompetence, or rank stupidity; the interaction of human psychology with a market economy practically ensures that they will form. In this sense, bubbles are perfectly rational—or at least they’re a rational and unavoidable by-product of capitalism (which, as Winston Churchill might have said, is the worst economic system on the planet except for all the others). Technology and circumstances change, but the human animal doesn’t.

One of the biggest culprits, as Blodget points out, is the recurring belief that "it's different this time" in a way that is supposed to make caution irrelevant:

Those are said to be the most expensive words in the English language, by the way: it’s different this time. You can’t have a bubble without good explanations for why it’s different this time. If everyone knew that this time wasn’t different, the market would stop going up. But the future is always uncertain—and amid uncertainty, all sorts of faith-based theories can flourish, even on Wall Street.

In the 1920s, the “differences” were said to be the miraculous new technologies (phones, cars, planes) that would speed the economy, as well as Prohibition, which was supposed to produce an ultra-efficient, ultra-responsible workforce. (Don’t laugh: one of the most respected economists of the era, Irving Fisher of Yale University, believed that one.) In the tech bubble of the 1990s, the differences were low interest rates, low inflation, a government budget surplus, the Internet revolution, and a Federal Reserve chairman apparently so divinely talented that he had made the business cycle obsolete. In the housing bubble, they were low interest rates, population growth, new mortgage products, a new ownership society, and, of course, the fact that “they aren’t making any more land.”

In hindsight, it’s obvious that all these differences were bogus (they’ve never made any more land—except in Dubai, which now has its own problems). At the time, however, with prices going up every day, things sure seemed different.

In fairness to the thousands of experts who’ve snookered themselves throughout the years, a complicating factor is always at work: the ever-present possibility that it really might have been different. Everything is obvious only after the crash.

The other deadly ingredient in bubbles is that investment professionals won't keep their jobs if they restrict themselves to prudent courses leading to merely reasonable returns; the same competition that fuels a free market also drives each fund manager to chase larger and larger returns for his investors, on peril of a forced retirement. Blodget cites the instance of fund manager Julian Robertson, whose Tiger Management company lost 66% of its assets to withdrawals by disgruntled investors and finally closed its doors because Robertson correctly anticipated the tech stock meltdown and moved his investors' funds elsewhere (where returns were lesser, though on safer ground).

In other words, we don't want the slick mortgage broker, the BMW-driving realtor, or the glib investment pitchman to do the right thing for us but the thing, instead, that will make us feel as well off as our neighbors occupying the houses that they also couldn't afford. Frankly, I wonder if the Dutch had the right idea when they went nuts over tulip bulbs in 1634; the Semper Augustus bulb was commanding prices equal to that of a house on the Amsterdam market, but at least that was a product of nature.

Actually, Jane Bryant Quinn quotes financial advisor Steve Leuthold in a recent column as saying that investors should buy just about anything at this point, on the grounds that it is likely to be a bargain. That was certainly true of the $22.99 box of firelogs I talked an exasperated Kroger manager into selling me for $5.99 yesterday, after it had been mislabeled, but I don't think that's what Leuthold meant. If stocks scare you too much, perhaps you could consider bidding on Jeff Koons's metal "Hanging Heart" sculpture, a colossal piece of kitsch that recently sold for $27 million, which proves that a fool and his money are soon parted. I think my best buy today was ordering Facing Mount Kenya from Amazon.com on the advice of the Kenyan clergyman of the church I have been visiting; an ethnographic study done at the London School of Economics by a young Jomo Kenyatta in the 1930s, it is supposed to be a very insightful analysis of Kikuyu life and culture. I got it for just $1.75.

Barack Jindal

2008-12-28T14:23:00.001-08:00

I voted for Obama and would be delighted to see him fulfill his apparent promise. After the sheer boneheadedness of the officers of government my fellow Republicans had been content to elect, it was time for a change. I heartily agreed with Christopher Buckley's explanation for his defection:

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of "conservative" government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me.

Exactly. Still, don't throw out your Republican campaign literature yet, Christopher; like 10-year-old Cameron Bright reappearing as Nicole Kidman's deceased husband in Birth comes the Gipper reborn—or so many are beginning to hope—as a 36-year-old up-and-comer restoring competence and honesty to a state nearly as corrupt as Rod Blagojevich's Illinois. The comparisons are a bit of a stretch; Reagan never pretended to a résumé that included graduating from Brown at 21 and completing a Rhodes Scholarship at 23, but this most quintessentially American of 20th-century Presidents would certainly warm to a small boy, a son of Indian immigrants, who suddenly announced at age 5 that he would answer to no name but Bobby because that was his favorite character on The Brady Bunch. Republicans today, as described in Andrew Romano's piece in a recent issue of Newsweek, are flocking to the young Governor of Louisiana for a combination of style and substance, as Grover Norquist describes it:

First of all, he's brilliant....Two, he's from an immigrant community, so that speaks to immigrant experience, period. Three, he's a Catholic who lives his values instead of shouting at you about them. Four, he's a principled Reagan Republican. Five, he's from the South but doesn't look like a Southern sheriff. And he's got more successes as a governor, already, one year in, than George W. Bush or Obama had when they ran for president. He's exactly what we need.

I don't want Jindal to run as a sort of rebuke or comeuppance to Barack Obama; if the President-elect is as principled as he is intelligent, if he governs wisely and well, if he can truly effect needed changes in energy, the economy, and healthcare without incurring a ruinous debt, if he can restore our damaged credibility among nations, more power to him. No, I want Jindal to enter the arena because more nearly-matched competition puts each contestant on his mettle and forces voters to be very sure of why they are choosing one over the other; I want him to run also so as to put to rest for good the idea that the incoherent, swaggering, shoot-a-moose-from-a-helicopter style of another governor is seen once and for all as the tasteless national joke that it is.

Jindal claims he has no intention of running in 2012, and if he really means that, he needs to be reminded that Iowa is not in his jurisdiction, but whenever he chooses to run, can he win? There are at least two points of vulnerability: his uncompromising opposition to abortion under any circumstances whatsoever, and his self-attested participation in an amateur exorcism at Brown.

The majority of voters—even self-described pro-choice advocates, it seems—do not wish to see the wanton taking of unborn life for convenience but wish only to see abortion, as the phrase goes, become "safe, legal, and rare." It has to be a comfort even to those who are strongly pro-life, as I am, that the incidence of abortion has actually declined since the early 1990s. I hope for a cultural change of the type that caused the rate of smoking to drop by half over the past 40 years: the emergence of a culture that regards unborn life with such care and reverence as to see abortion as a regrettable choice and avoid it if possible; a blanket refusal to so much as consider it even for medical necessity is not likely to win votes for a candidate for national office. As to the rest of his religious views, I can only trust that someone with a biology degree from Brown will exercise his apparently considerable intelligence and not resort, for political or any other reasons, to the asinine prescription to "teach the controversy" to public school students, a controversy that would never have existed but for the perverse refusal of the scientifically ignorant to assent to what they don't want to understand.

Detroit's Appomattox

2008-12-27T12:25:00.001-08:00

If Southerners act in concert, their purpose must be sinister, or so says Michael Lind in his article last week in Salon, "How to End the South's Economic War on the North." The action of Senators Shelby, Corker, and McConnell to block the bailout of Detroit's Big Three cannot possibly be ascribed to a failure to understand why Toyota, Nissan, and BMW should be penalized for not raising their per-hour labor costs from $46 to Detroit's standard $71 or to add $1,500 in worker health-care costs to the price of every car, as Ford does; it must, instead, be a plot to avenge Jeff Davis and express contempt for the rest of the country. If Lind were not the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, he should be a novelist or perhaps a psychologist; while analyzing others, he might try to get a clearer insight into his own outrage over the fact that the South will not acquiesce in his contempt for the region or submit to being told what is best for it by enlightened liberals like Lind. I think this is one Whitehead that needs to be squeezed.

I take no pleasure in reading about the wasteland of Flint or the prospect of faithful and competent auto-workers being turned out into the cold because of factors over which they have no control. For that matter, I do think the Big Three must not be allowed to fail altogether, for the ripple effect both of the size of their work force and in their supplier relationships. But their prospective failure is not a plot, from the South or anywhere else, but simply a result of management's own mistakes and of competition from those who do their jobs better. Yes, it is true that the states of the old Confederacy spend less on public services such as education and healthcare than others, and that ought to be rectified; it is also true that the large payrolls made possible by foreign auto-makers in those regions help to improve the quality of life for the workers and their families (see Daniel Gross's article in the December 22 Newsweek on the economic impact of the foreign auto industry on the South). In any case, is there something sacrosanct about living in the Snow Belt? Just as Southern laborers once migrated north for better jobs, perhaps it's time for workers in Michigan to abandon their frozen habitations and do the opposite. If they come in sufficient numbers, they may even vote higher taxes for public services, if they wish.

I understand that the elephant in the room is union vs. non-union labor. Union work rules are sometimes necessary to protect the worker against the caprice of management; I remember reading the reminiscences of an early labor leader in which he recalled that no matter how bad economic conditions became, somehow, the members of the company baseball team were never included in layoffs. Unions happened because corporate management of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were as blind as GM and Chrysler management have been for some time now, and their contributions to equity in the workplace should not be simply dismissed. If union contracts eventually saddled the employer with health-care and pension obligations that can no longer be sustained, they were at least an understanding for worker and employer alike that faithful service over the employee's working life would result in comfort and economic security.

Now it is time to renegotiate all of it, if not the basic principle of mutual obligation, then the details of how such a principle can be honored in today's economy. The solution lies neither in abandoning the Detroit worker to freeze and starve nor in wild-eyed calls from the likes of Lind for a "New Reconstruction" in which the South eventually becomes as bankrupt and hamstrung as the North, but in an honest understanding between management and labor about building cars that work, that do not despoil the environment, and that the worker can afford, along with reasonable health and pension benefits. Instead of punishing Dixie for its success, others would do well to emulate it.

Better to light a candle

2008-12-26T15:43:00.000-08:00

I admire the ways in which civilization is maintained and spread in the face of hardship. In the rude days of the Saxon Heptarchy, Theodore of Tarsus taught the Scriptures, Greek, poetry, and astronomy to young Anglo-Saxon scholars at Canterbury. Young Edward Taylor took his leave of Harvard President Charles Chauncy and set out into a New England winter in 1671 to travel 100 miles to the frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts, where he served the next 58 years as pastor, doctor, and counselor, while writing the only known Metaphysical poetry by an American author. On Sundays, his parishioners often worshipped while listening for a drumbeat that would warn them of Indian attack.

Today I learn that Andrew Jackson, thought to be the least educated U.S. President of his day (his predecessor, John Quincy Adams, who detested him, refused to attend a ceremony in which Harvard, Adams's alma mater, conferred an honorary degree on Jackson) studied, as boy in upstate South Carolina, with a Presbyterian minister, emerging with an ability to quote Plutarch and Pope, and having memorized verbatim the Westminster Shorter Catechism, a 4,500-word-long compendium of Reformed Protestant theology, consisting of 107 questions and answers on the Bible and church doctrine. Famous for his violent temper and his irregular courtship of a still-married woman (amazingly, it had been his mother's hope that he would become a minister), Jackson read 3 chapters of the Bible daily and, for inspiration in valor, cherished Jane Porter's 1809 The Scottish Chiefs, her rather breathless retelling of the struggles of Sir William Wallace. (It's a tribute to Jackson's love of reading that he could be so influenced by a book that was not published until he was 42 years old and had already served as a Senator, Major-General of Militia, and Tennesee Superior Court Judge.) He was raised and educated in a frontier settlement so primitive that his own father's pallbearers drank themselves into besotted confusion and lost Jackson senior's casket in the snow, as they stumbled through the wilderness to bury him. Orphaned at 14, young Jackson estranged himself from his only surviving family, relatives of his mother, by his violence and irascibility.

Sometimes even those qualities served him in good stead. Riding the circuit as a Tennessee judge, he found a small-town sheriff too frightened to arrest a man accused of mutilating one of his own children in a drunken frolic. Jackson confronted the man, who was armed, and told him to surrender or die.

His legend has come down to us as that of a man almost pathologically angry and I wondered what, besides his physical courage, made men respect and follow him, but as Jon Meacham's biography points out, Jackson, as a perpetual outsider, had managed to cultivate a certain degree of charm, and that, added to his bravery, drew men to him. Fleeing hostile Indians in the wilderness of Tennessee with his legal colleague, John Overton, Jackson was nearly swept over the edge of a waterfall to his death; at the last moment, he calmly extended an oar to Overton, standing on the riverbank, who caught it and pulled Jackson to safety. “You were within an ace, Sir, of being pulled over the brink and dashed to pieces,” Overton observed.

Jackson calmly replied, “A miss is as good as a mile. Follow me and I’ll save you yet.”

We are all descended from grandfathers

2008-12-24T21:04:00.000-08:00

Not least among the mysterious laws of nature is the principle that if you had a past life, you must be descended from a pharaoh or priestess; either the street sweepers and outhouse collectors didn't reincarnate or the rest of us are new creations. Whatever the reason, I can never get enough of the historical recreation reality shows, in which modern people from various backgrounds and occupations are placed in historically accurate settings and required to live for 3 months or more as they might have lived in 1900, 1867, and so on. Participants generally find that they can eventually adjust to cold baths and shampoo improvised from egg yolks; what often breaks them and sometimes causes angry defections is the requirement to treat anyone else besides one's own inner child with deference.

All these tendencies are on full display in the series I've been watching this week, Regency House Party, filmed 5 years ago for British TV. The program places 10 eligible singles in an English country house and asks them to engage in the social rituals, including the quest for a suitable mate, that would have been their most important business in 1811. It may be true that in our day, dating has gone the way of the minuet and been replaced by hookups, but in 1811, such behavior was social suicide, and physical contact between the sexes is confined mostly to furtive hand squeezing during formal dances. As was true of that time, the men find plenty to do, what with shooting matches, athletic contests of various sorts, and heavy drinking, flavored with indiscreet references to their female housemates, while the ladies must content themselves, for the most part, with embroidery and occasional outside walks, carefully guarded by parasols against the sun. Interestingly, the first defection is by a man from a working-class background in modern life; assigned to portray a British Army Captain from the minor aristocracy of that day, he balks at learning the bearing, walk, and manners of a gentleman and, declaring that he wants to be a "regular bloke," packs and leaves early on.

Naturally, modern entertainment devices are nowhere to be seen (indeed, a high point of technological progress comes when the assembled guests witness the lighting of an early gas lamp, enabling them to see each other more clearly than by candlelight), so they must resort to the diversions of that day. Among the amusements on display is the armonica, an instrument in which shallow glass dishes are suspended on a wooden spindle that runs through their centers like an axle; the whole assembly is suspended, in turn, in an open cabinet-like structure. It is played by lightly wetting one's fingers and then stroking the edges of the glass dishes, which make eerie tones sounding rather like the calls of whales or dolphins. The reverberations last so long that you can't play anything very fast on it; it seems designed to play the likes of the Pachelbel Canon except that there would be too much overlap the moment the second round began, and it would all melt into a meaningless shimmering mixture.

What surprised me in a series so well researched (e.g., it turns out that meals in the Regency Era were not served in courses, as was customary later, but in balanced groups of sweet and spicy dishes, following the lead of George IV's French chef), is that they never mention that the armonica was the invention of our great American polymath, Ben Franklin. Perhaps the omission can't be charged exclusively to the state of modern scholarship; in Franklin's own day, Wedgwood sold figurines of Franklin sometimes labeled "Country Gent." or even "Geo. Washington" (I actually saw a copy with the Washington label on it in a house in Charleston some years ago).

One ought to follow the path of learning wherever it leads, but what I could have done without in the Regency series was the introduction among the visitors of controversial Professor Gunther von Hagens, who practices plastination of the dead for public display. Yes, I know Michael Jackson tried to purchase the skeleton of the Elephant Man in 1987, that Jeremy Bentham's skeleton presided over board meetings of a London Hospital for 92 years, and that deceased Spanish royalty were deposited for centuries in the "rotting room" of the Escorial, but the public display of plastinated human bodies in various states of dissection, arranged in artistic poses, is obscene if the word means anything at all. In one scene of the series, von Hagens comments at dinner(!) that when he dissected a close friend, who had died young, he felt the friend was communicating with him more than ever in a special way; I can only hope the poor fellow meant to say something like, "If I could get up off this table, I would tear your balls off." It's something of a relief when an heiress comments later, "I could see him wanting my body, but for all the wrong reasons."

I suspect that if von Hagens had encountered the feisty seventh President of the United States, Old Hickory would have horsewhipped him and then run him through with his sword cane for good measure. My children thoughtfully gave me Jon Meacham's new biography of Jackson, American Lion, for Christmas, so I think I'll get my mind off plastic cadavers and get started on that instructive book. Meacham's photos always give me the impression that he is about to weep under the intensity of a self-awareness of his own enlightenment and the pleasurable feelings resulting therefrom, but he does write well, so I have high hopes.

It ain't over 'til it's over

2008-12-23T12:40:00.000-08:00

If only scientists would stop learning new things, I could be comfortable in my previous assumptions. For several years, I have accepted as true that we confront the modern age with essentially Stone Age minds and that human evolution had receded to vanishingly small levels, shielded from adaptive challenges by technology.

That some people speak and act with Neolithic sensibilities seems indisputable in my experience, but in general, I may be premature in marking an end to human evolution and guilty at least of oversimplication in thinking that we are mostly wired to hunt Mastodons. Writing in the December Scientific American, Peter Ward describes the ways in which agriculture and urban life have contributed to changes in the human genome:

...over the past 10,000 years humans have evolved as much as 100 times faster than at any other time since the split of the earliest hominid from the ancestors of modern chimpanzees. [Scientists attribute] the quickening pace to the variety of environments humans moved into and the changes in living conditions brought about by agriculture and cities. It was not farming per se or the changes in the landscape that conversion of wild habitat to tamed fields brought about but the often lethal combination of poor sanitation, novel diet and emerging diseases (from other humans as well as domesticated animals).

As to the Stone Age mind, philosopher David Buller argues in the same issue that we can't really know enough about the environment of our ancestors to describe their psychology with any precision and, that, indeed, the concept of a Stone Age mind does an injustice both to our pre-human past and to our more recent development:

[The] claim that human nature was designed during the Pleistocene, when our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers, gets it wrong on both ends of the epoch.

Some human psychological mechanisms undoubtedly did emerge during the Pleistocene. But others are holdovers of a more ancient evolutionary past, aspects of our psychology that are shared with some of our primate relatives. Evolutionary neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp of Bowling Green State University has identified seven emotional systems in humans that originated deeper in our evolutionary past than the Pleistocene. The emotional systems that he terms Care, Panic and Play date back to early primate evolutionary history, whereas the systems of Fear, Rage, Seeking and Lust have even earlier, premammalian origins....

The view that “our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind” gets things wrong on the contemporary end of our evolutionary history as well. The idea that we are stuck with a Pleistocene-adapted psychology greatly underestimates the rate at which natural and sexual selection can drive evolutionary change. Recent studies have demonstrated that selection can radically alter the life-history traits of a population in as few as 18 generations (for humans, roughly 450 years).

Of course, such rapid evolution can occur only with significant change in the selection pressures acting on a population. But environmental change since the Pleistocene has unquestionably altered the selection pressures on human psychology. The agricultural and industrial revolutions precipitated fundamental changes in the social structures of human populations, which in turn altered the challenges humans face when acquiring resources, mating, forming alliances or negotiating status hierarchies. Other human activities—ranging from constructing shelter to preserving food, from contraception to organized education—have also consistently altered the selection pressures. Because we have clear examples of post-Pleistocene physiological adaptation to changing environmental demands (such as malaria resistance), we have no reason to doubt similar psychological evolution.

I don't know if the Internet rises to the level of a selection pressure or not (for me, post-divorce encounters with Internet dating sites have acted more as an inducement to celibacy), but some hold high hopes for it. Futurist Raymond Kurzweil believes that human and machine intelligence will eventually merge, perhaps improving both. Other observers believe and hope that the Internet will enable a qualitative advance in communication that results in the merging of all minds into a super-mind, a whole greater than the sum of its parts (an expectation that I think is completely unfounded, for the simple reason that two cars don't make a bus).

Still others are deeply skeptical about the influence of the Net on civilization, and the two sides have lined up in a clear and vigorous debate, as noted by David Brin in his article "Will the Net Help Us Evolve?" in today's Salon:

Some of today's most vaunted tech philosophers are embroiled in a ferocious argument. On one side are those who think the Internet will liberate humanity, in a virtuous cycle of e-volving creativity that may culminate in new and higher forms of citizenship. Meanwhile, their diametrically gloomy critics see a kind of devolution taking hold, as millions are sucked into spirals of distraction, shallowness and homogeneity, gradually surrendering what little claim we had to the term "civilization."

Call it cyber-transcendentalists versus techno-grouches.

Nicholas Carr weighed in for the skeptics with his article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in the July Atlantic. Carr laments:

...what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing....Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?”

....Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Responding to Carr in the Encyclopedia Britannica Blog, Clay Shirky agrees that

The web presents us with unprecedented abundance. This can lead to interrupt-driven info-snacking, which robs people of the ability to find time to think about just one thing persistently. I also think that these changes are significant enough to motivate us to do something about it. I disagree, however, about what it is we should actually be doing.

Shirky suspects that Carr has misdiagnosed his own pain and only thinks it's about the Net while actually, it is a lament for a literary culture that was vanishing before the computer age even began:

Despite the sweep of the title, it’s focused on a very particular kind of reading, literary reading, as a metonym for a whole way of life. You can see this in Carr’s polling of “literary types,” in his quoting of Wolf and the playwright Richard Foreman, and in the reference to War and Peace, the only work mentioned by name. Now War and Peace isn’t just any piece of writing, of course; it is one of the longest novels in the canon, and symbolizes the height of literary ambition and of readerly devotion.

But here’s the thing: it’s not just Carr’s friend, and it’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting.

This observation is no less sacrilegious for being true. The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream. Much of the current concern about the internet, in fact, is a misdirected complaint about television, which displaced books as the essential medium by the 1970s....

And this, I think, is the real anxiety behind the essay: having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace.

While agreeing that the need to focus must not be lost, Shirky argues that the challenge with which the Net presents us is not an avalanche of intellectual junk but merely a selection problem analogous to what happened a couple of centuries ago when the printing press produced so many works that one man could no longer hope to be master of all knowledge. The concept of the sage as cathedral-like structure, Shirky says, must give way to the idea of a shopper in a bazaar.

Brin isn't ready to wholeheartedly sign up with either side. He agrees with Carr that the internet tempts some to become part of a dim-witted mob but also hails the same abundance that so delights Shirky and his fellow techno-enthusiasts. His solution is to ensure that there are tools on the web for winnowing the wheat from the chaff:

...what's needed is not the blithe enthusiasm preached by Ray Kurzweil and Clay Shirky. Nor Nicholas Carr's dyspeptic homesickness. What is called for is a clear-eyed, practical look at what's missing from today's Web. Tools that might help turn quasar levels of gushing opinion into something like discourse, so that several billion people can do more than just express a myriad of rumors and shallow impulses, but test, compare and actually reach some conclusions now and then.

But what matters even more is to step back from yet another tiresome dichotomy, between fizzy enthusiasm and testy nostalgia. Earlier phases of the great Enlightenment experiment managed to do this by taking a wider perspective. By taking nothing for granted.

Being temperamentally inclined toward the conservative and curmudgeonly, I ought to give Shirky his due. Folly didn't begin with the Internet, and gullibility existed in the days of the papyrus scroll and before. By itself, the Net can't keep people from reading Milton any more than widespread popular use of the transistor radio in the '50s could destroy interest in Antonio Vivaldi; indeed, Vivaldi enjoyed a revival in that decade, as did Georg Philipp Telemann in the decade after, which was also, of course, the decade of Woodstock. As to reading great works, it was true once, as Samuel Johnson said, that "Classical quotation is the parole of educated men the world over," but sadly, no longer (I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the moment in The Sixth Sense when Bruce Willis, playing a Ph.D. in Psychology, had to look up the meaning of De Profundis).

Still, I'm less concerned over whether or not someone can quote Vergil than whether he is inclined to examine questions rigorously on the evidence, and in sufficient detail to verify anything. As to verification, Farhad Manjoo correctly points out in his book True Enough that many people no longer care as much for the truth as their truth, and their truth may be that Obama is a Muslim or that the Pentagon secretly planned 9/11. How is this any worse on the Net than in print 200 years ago? It spreads more quickly, and its credit is aided by the almost superstitious awe in which many people hold technology—for some, the Internet itself is taken as a sort of verification of even foolish claims.

As to reading at length, I have seen the way instant messaging and the BlackBerry® have transformed the workplace; for many, if it can't fit on a BlackBerry screen, it's superfluous. Shirky partly misses the point by focusing specifically on Carr's mention of War and Peace; under the trend to fragmented reading and thinking promoted by the Internet, how many people does he imagine are willing, even today, to read a piece of the length and conceptual complexity of his own essay?

Lord Chesterfield wrote:

A man is fit for neither business nor pleasure, who either cannot, or does not, command and direct his attention to the present object, and, in some degree, banish for that time all other objects from his thoughts....steady and undissipated attention to one object is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.

Were he alive now, Chesterfield might be hired for his skill at making himself liked, but his disapproval of multitasking would make him an odd egg in today's business environment.

A book or essay, whether sitting on my shelf or downloadable online, reminds me of what Robert Maynard Hutchins called "The Great Conversation," a dialogue that has lasted for centuries, on texts that were the result of wrestling with important questions. The Internet, which makes its users impatient to read any one thing for very long, is less like a symposium than a food fight. Just as the democratic character of Wikipedia® made guardians of content more necessary than ever, the openness of the internet, the variety of its distractions, and the brevity of many of its offerings make it necessary for the user to recollect himself and ask if the entertaining site he has discovered conveys the truth of the matter or is the online equivalent of a supermarket tabloid. It is a question that I think fewer and fewer are willing to ask.

The purpose-driven inaugural

2008-12-22T12:22:00.000-08:00

Many in Barack Obama's base feel betrayed by the planned appearance of Rick Warren at the inaugural ceremony next month, though their candidate openly avowed his opposition to gay marriage in his appearance at the Saddleback Church last summer. My fellow skeptics of religion can hardly feel similarly hoodwinked, since Obama is openly Christian. I could wish, though, that the President-elect had exercised as much taste as calculation in his choice and avoided selecting someone who represents the MacDonaldization of religion.

I won't complain that Warren's appearance makes it doubtful that he has made much progress in the time-honored religious virtue of fasting, since my own waistline has been overdrawn by several inches for some years now. But I must wonder what the fortunes of his church would be if there were a prolonged power blackout. The ancient church sustained their faith in darkened catacombs illuminated only by torchlight; they steeled themselves against the prospect of hideous deaths or were transported by religious ecstasies at the prospect of the Savior's imminent return to judge the world. The modern megachurch, by contrast, would silently implode after 3 successive weeks without electric power; its kind of spirituality, lacking tongues of fire, is sustained only by flashing lights, PowerPoint, large display screens, and high-priced sound systems. Its culture invites the attendee to be seated, be entertained, and be generous in support of this institution so happily designed to allow the worshipper to bathe in good feeling about himself.

It so happens that Saddleback and its pastor are apparently among the best of the breed—Warren not only accepts no salary from the church but has purposely repaid every penny of salary he received during its first 25 years of existence; moreover, he lives on just 10% of his income, donating the balance to worthy causes. Neither a sleazy hypocrite in his personal life, like Swaggart or Ted Haggard, nor a severe ranter on putative damnation for trivial offenses, Warren has actively worked to highlight environmental and social justice concerns among Evangelicals, giving in support of AIDS relief and differing markedly from his compeer James Dobson in raising awareness of global warming.

All this is to the good. Still, what kind of recommendation is it to praise him on the grounds that he is simply not as objectionable as other instances of a phenomenon that is meretricious at its core? Should we admire Warren and his church members because they have finally acknowledged what the International Panel on Climate Change has been documenting for nearly 20 years?

Really, why did Obama invite this man to be a central figure at his inauguration? It reminds me of what I wondered when I read an article in Time last week about the social contagion of happiness; I was startled to read that the odds of one's increased personal happiness were 34% greater if his neighbor were happy (and 10% greater if that neighbor's friend were happy, even if the neighbor's friend were unknown to the original subject!), the odds for happiness increased by just 14% if one's sibling were happy, and by only 8% if one's spouse were happy. One is tempted to leave that last point alone since, sadly, it isn't hard to imagine two married partners discovering that the happiness of each is inversely proportional to the contentment of the other, but still, you have to wonder. I suppose we must have evolved in such a way that whereas we assume a reciprocal commitment to each other's welfare in our relations with spouses and family members, we realize that our neighbor's benevolence is by no means so certain and, thus, feel an obligation to work harder to win his good will. If there is anything to that, I suspect that Obama is confident that his core supporters will trust the integrity of his voting record and formal beliefs, which are politically liberal, whereas he hopes to encourage Warren, a bellwether of Evangelical opinion, to lead his flock in a more centrist direction.

There's a great deal of political good sense in that, certainly, but as someone who declines to share Warren's metaphysics altogether, I still hope the day will come, decades from now, where a candidate for President, invited to come and be cross-examined at Saddleback or its like, will respond with a statement like the following:

Thank you for your interest in my campaign, and I welcome the support of all fair-minded voters. I will not accept your invitation, and I hope my opponent will join me in declining as well. I refuse not because I am uninterested in what your members think but because I cannot discover on what grounds a church is a fitting venue for examining the qualifications of a candidate for high office under the Constitution of the United States. I may happen to hold similar or even identical moral positions to those held by you or some of your members, but I cannot consent to have that agreement linked, in the public mind, to beliefs about a Sky Spirit that I simply do not share; in particular, I refuse to given even token consent to the very foolish notion that without believing in such a Sky Spirit, we would all revert to savagery. Those are your opinions, and you are entitled to them, but they have nothing to do with my ability to devise or implement policies that would make this country prosperous and safe. Instead of meeting in a temple of religious worship, I propose, instead, that we all gather in a more neutral environment where every voter of every shade of belief or no belief feels that he enters, and his opinion is valued, without regard to his views on matters that no one can ever prove.

To have died in vein

2008-12-21T20:04:00.000-08:00

I knew next to nothing about Interview with the Vampire before watching a Netflix® copy this evening, and since I associate an ineluctable quality of glossiness with both Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, it was hard for me to discover the poignancy and horror that Neil Jordan seemed to be searching for; the movie came closest to those qualities in the slow corruption of 12-year-old Kirsten Dunst. For creating horror and poignancy, I think The Hunger, with Catherine DeNeuve, David Bowie, and Susan Sarandon, which I watched a couple of months ago, was more successful.

Paul Fussell commented in his cruel but witty 1983 book, Class, that the very wealthiest Americans, the type who used to build palaces on 5th Avenue and "cottages" on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, had prudently vanished from public view after the mid-20th century; even the very rich who grace the covers of Town and Country are likely to be one rung down from the "top out of sight," according to Fussell. The rest of us vaguely intuit that there are two classes of humanity who seem wholly other, apart, and, to most people, very strange: the ultra-wealthy and the very cerebral, and I think that such images as vampires, the Addams family, and Hannibal Lecter in pop culture are one way that our culture deals with them. The very wealthy, like Southerners, cannot be merely happy and wise; they must be saddled with crippingly narrow sympathies, live in obvious or impending ruin, and have ambiguous relationships with their fathers or sisters; as to the very bright, in the case of a Hannibal Lecter, they are savage in proportion to their very refinement.

I did like the portrayal of Bradd Pitt's character as operating under a burden because he retained something like a human soul, a quality that had fled even from his child protégée. In his last scene with Tom Cruise, he gently but firmly dismissed his ruined mentor, forced to embrace the pursuit of blood for his own survival but refusing to take pleasure in it.

You can't turn it off

2008-12-20T15:00:00.000-08:00

Beowulf begins with the bard exclaiming Hwaet! (the ancestor of our "What!" but meant, in this context to stand for "Listen to this!"). That arresting moment occurs in a different type of production when you realize that the conventional frame doesn't contain the story; it comes early in Noises Off when the action on the stage is suddenly interrupted by the director of the play, striding down an aisle of the theatre from behind the viewer and upbraiding the performers on the stage for getting it wrong; it comes at the end of EXistenZ, a film about virtual reality, when one participant, dazed by the ordeal, plaintively inquires, "Tell me the truth, are we still in the game?" In The French Lieutenant's Woman, you're aware of it from the first and watch the actors go continually from the 20th century to the 19th and back again, but it also adds to the viewer's uncertainty about the motives of both the Victorian characters and the modern actors who play them in the film within a film.

In England, My England, Tony Palmer's "experimental biography" of 17th-century composer Henry Purcell, the "What!" moment comes immediately after watching Simon Callow crowned as Charles II upon the Stuart Restoration in 1660; with no warning, someone off camera hands Charles an already-lit cigarette, which he begins to enjoy as the camera pulls back and reveals a 21st-century London theatre employee assisting Callow backstage during a performance about the dissolute monarch and his court. Though much is known of Restoration England, and the works he composed even during a short life of 35 years guaranteed Purcell a place among the immortals of music, there are few verifiably documented facts about the composer's own life, a condition reflected in the movie itself, which conveniently has Purcell born in 1660, the year of Charles's Restoration, whereas it is more likely that he had actually been born the year before. The haunting march that begins the funeral music he composed for the 1694 funeral of Mary II, Queen and Consort of William III (the same music was used for Purcell's own funeral a year later) may be remembered as the music that begins Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, where its use was either boldly apt or a travesty, depending on how you look at it.

In the Purcell film, it's interesting to see that the actor Callow encounters when he returns to his dressing room is Murray Melvin, who was wonderful in his minor role as Lady Lyndon's chaplain in Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and does a brief turn here that reminds me of Tom Courtenay in The Dresser. Callow himself is always great; he was memorable as Emanuel Schikaneder in Miloš Forman's Amadeus, with Tom Hulce, as well as in Mike Newell's Four Weddings and a Funeral, but for me, one of his most characteristic and loathsome roles was the cynical barrister in an earlier Newell film, The Good Father, with Jim Broadbent and Anthony Hopkins. Callow often portrays the kind of sang froid that would have enabled him to write the entry in Samuel Pepys' diary for October 13, 1660, upon witnessing the execution for treason of Thomas Harrison, one of the Parliamentary regicides:

I went to see Major General Harrison hung, drawn, and quartered; he looked as cheerful as any man could in that condition.

In fact, that line is spoken in England, My England, though it is used to refer to the posthumous fate of Oliver Cromwell.

Debris, diabolical and divine

2008-12-19T10:24:00.000-08:00

I once corresponded with a prisoner and visited him when I could. Jerry was in for 12 years for DUI resulting in a fatality; his own wife had been killed when Jerry drove through an intersection at a very high speed. After a few years, he came up for parole, and I testified for him at his hearing. Jerry was released but soon violated parole and fled the state. Eventually, he was recaptured. From prison, he placed a collect call to an elderly widow that he and I both knew and asked her to give me a message: "Tell Michael to buy me a TV set." When the widow, who herself lives on a small Social Security pension, protested that I probably couldn't afford such a gesture, Jerry was undaunted and proposed that she and I split the cost.

I thought of Jerry when reading about the impudence of Rod Blagojevich. The late Frank Gorshin once defined chutzpah as a policeman writing you a traffic ticket and borrowing your pen to do so. The Governor of Illinois, who looks and comports himself like an aging 24-year-old detected in the act of shoplifting smutty magazines, is apparently so bereft of shame or sense that, incredibly, he had even talked to associates about a Presidential run in 2016, or perhaps an ambassadorial post, according to Time. At the rate things are going, I half expect him to end up like former Dyersburg, Tennessee Chancery Court Judge David Lanier, who, outraged that he had been indicted for corruption, went on the run and presently called the police who had a warrant for his arrest and warned them that he would give them just one more chance to stop pursuing him.

Equally lacking in shame or sense are Heath and Deborah Campbell of Easton, Pennsylvania, who named their little girl JoyceLynn Aryan Nations Campbell and their son Adolf Hitler Campbell. The dad, who touted the names as an indication of pride in his German heritage, took umbrage at the manager of a local ShopRite®, who refused to sell the Campbells a birthday cake bearing little Adolf's name, for his third birthday. (Again, this must go under the heading of things you couldn't make up!)

Beside all this, the arrest of Bristol Palin's future mother-in-law on drug charges sounds refreshingly normal. If, as Dilbert creator Scott Adams suggests in his book, God's Debris, the Universe and all within it consists of particles of the Deity progressively reassembling themselves as the reinstantiation of the Supreme Mind, Blagojevich and the senior Campbells may belong to a class of particles that need to be vacuumed up, instead.

Smiles of a winter night

2008-12-18T12:25:00.001-08:00

Had I known that Robert Prosky lived within blocks of my mother and stepfather's former home on Capitol Hill in Washington, I would probably have knocked on his door on one of the many Christmases we visited the area to express appreciation of his work. I know he played a variety of roles, not all of them sinister and some even kindly—in fact, my then six-year-old son sat on my lap, a few minutes from Prosky's house, watching him as kindly judge Harper in Miracle on 34th St. in 1995—but the role I'll never forget was Prosky's first, the chillingly soft-spoken mobster, Leo, in Michael Mann's 1981 film, Thief. This scene is the epitome of what Prosky was capable of (be warned: the language is very foul, though the performance is amazing).

It's not certain that even Leo the mobster was the equal of Sam Zell, the foul-mouthed corporate pirate who bought the Tribune Company, parent of major American newspapers, for $8.2 billion and then started cutting newsroom staff; the supreme irony is that Zell had put up just $315 million of his own, financing the balance with Tribune employee pension funds, without their consent. (I can think of nothing that such an action reminds me of so much as committing sexual assault and also convincing your victim to take out a second mortgage to pay you for doing so.) Commenting on the subprime mortgage crisis last April, the veteran capitalist offered this hardheaded advice:

This country needs a cleansing. We need to clean out all those people who never should have bought in the first place, and not give them sympathy.

You said it, Sam. As a firm believer in free enterprise and individual initiative, I look at the likes of Zell and wonder if Marx perhaps had virtues that we've overlooked; as someone who doesn't believe there is an afterlife, I am tempted to hope that Zell is headed where his tactics are rapidly sending major newspapers: a place that rhymes with his last name.

But speaking of Marx, it's interesting that Poland's last Communist dictator, the heavy-handed General Wojciech Jaruzelski, now 85 and on trial for his 1981 imposition of martial law, is winning some sympathy, even from still-living victims of his repressive methods, according to Time. Did Jaruzelski pre-empt a planned Soviet invasion by his crackdown and save Poland from worse, or did he in fact do the Soviets' dirty work for them, disingenuously using the invasion threat to justify his own desire for power? Even erstwhile opponent Lech Walesa, one of 10,000 detained during the crackdown (90 were killed), thinks Jaruzelski's trial after so long—if convicted, he faces 10 years' imprisonment—may be a mistake. I admire Walesa's moderation, but the truth needs to be shown for what it is, no matter what sentence is handed down. After all, such tactics are not confined to the past, and age is not keeping 84-year-old Robert Mugabe from holding a feast while Zimbabweans starve.

Hold that thought

2008-12-17T19:43:00.000-08:00

On the morning of my late maternal grandfather's funeral, when I and others came back from the cemetery and were allowed into his room to select a single keepsake apiece, I quietly plucked his reprint of Thwaites and Kellogg's 1905 Dunmore's War from his book shelf to take home; 15 years earlier, he had gently intimated that he would donate it to the public library instead, by way of expressing disapproval of my youthful personal life. Tonight, at my son's request, I ordered something for him for Christmas that I trust an apt descendant will take from his bookshelf on the morning of his passing, about 65 years from now, though with the donor's previous blessing: the Odes of Pindar. Fourteen years ago, at age five, Mark came home from kindergarten, face aglow, reciting "A-a-apple...buh-buh-ball," fascinated by phonics and the power it gave him to unlock texts for himself; within months, he looked over my shoulder, spotted the Norton Critical Anthology of Swift's writings on the bookshelf behind me, and triumphantly sounded out, "The Witches [Writings] of Joe-Nathan Swift!"

I like to discover personal inscriptions in old copies of books. My copy of Richard Halliburton's Royal Road to Romance, which I picked up in a street fair a few years ago for a dollar, is inscribed "Ada Norfleet Fuller, 1930"; Mrs. Fuller was a Memphis socialite of the early 20th century. More surprising was the inscription in a copy of the 1834 novel Alice Paulet, which I have been reading online: about a quarter of the way through the book, some 19th-century reader warns us, in antique penmanship:

Kind reader if you have endured this book to this point, do not proceed further for it grows no better.

Actually, that reader picked an odd place to break off; his or her warning comes immediately after a country clergyman is murdered and before a duel and a suicide; in any case, I'm about halfway through it, so I think I'll continue.

So Czarry

2008-12-16T07:32:00.001-08:00

Mickey Kaus aptly observes in Slate that the government might as well appoint a Czar Czar to oversee the work of all the other ad hoc plenipotentiaries. Kaus links to Laura Meckler's balloon-deflating piece in The Wall Street Journal on a concept that seems to be about as useful as a Fabergé egg:

"There've been so many czars over last 50 years, and they've all been failures," said Paul Light, an expert on government at New York University. "Nobody takes them seriously anymore." He pointed to officials placed in charge of homeland security and drug policy.

The problem is that "czars" are meant to be all-powerful people who can rise above the problems that plague the federal agencies, he said, but in the end, they can't.

"We only create them because departments don't work or don't talk to each other," Mr. Light said, adding that creation of a White House post doesn't usually change that. "It's a symbolic gesture of the priority assigned to an issue, and I emphasize the word symbolic. When in doubt, create a czar."

The enterprising reporter traces the Czar concept only as far back as the Clinton Administration, but a few of us were born before that time, and I seem to remember that the first person to be called Czar was former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon, appointed Energy Czar by Richard Nixon in the early seventies. It's strangely relevant that Simon eventually authored a book called A Time for Truth. Indeed.

Czar is too haughty a title to ascribe to the Prince of Peace, humbly born into the world in a manger, but that doesn't satisfy the curmudgeonly Christoper Hitchens, who vents articulately as always in his article "'Tis the Season to be Incredulous." Christopher definitely feels crowded:

The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.

As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events. Originally Christian, this devotional set-aside can now be joined by any other sectarian group with a plausible claim—Hanukkah or Kwanzaa—to a holy day that occurs near enough to the pagan winter solstice.

His facts are all quite true, of course, though the reaction is his own (and the label "mythical events," even though I agree with him, seems an unnecessary gibe). I'm just glad they don't display Warner Sallman's Head of Christ that used to be so ubiquitous in my childhood, or poor Hitchens might have to be blindfolded for his own sanity. I agree with him that the concept of Heavenly Hosts is more inspirational than factual, but fortunately, I don't find myself in the same distress as he does, though I may come close when the holiday mélange played over my office intercom includes, of all things, Christmas Tree from Home Alone II, God help us, as though that were becoming a holiday treasure! If Hitchens wants to man the barricades on that one, I'm with him!

Perhaps Hitchens, whose mental acuteness I respect a great deal, can so condition himself that whenever he hears the Christmas Muzak, he can go into a trance and believe himself to be listening, instead, to the marvelous Christmas Concerto of Arcangelo Corelli. Exactly what Corelli had in mind when he wrote it I can't say, but it fits the Season of Advent, reminding the listener of someone hastening to a momentous event, quickened by anticipation of a meeting long desired.