Levels of disaster

On one level, the whole sorry saga of Malaysian Flight 370 is faintly ridiculous. The ill-fated airliner flew into oblivion while Malaysian air traffic controllers simply couldn't be bothered to notice that an airliner was flying over their territory, drastically off course. On another level, the loss should be a wakeup call to aviation administrators to collect data from planes in flight in real time, something that is technologically feasible and long overdue.

On a third level, the level at which a 3-year-old kid in New Zealand, a child of one of the plane's passengers, is continually asking his mom, "When will daddy be coming home," it's heartbreaking.

The plane and its passengers are almost certainly lost. It would be good if they could locate the craft, or at least its black box, and then get to the business of honoring the memories of the dead. Hopefully, this will be an alert to responsible authorities to get their heads out of their back sides and start paying attention to airline safety in a world still large enough for an airliner to vanish.

© Michael Huggins, 2014. All rights reserved.

Seeing, not wanting

Sometimes, you get in a frame of mind where you are simply a spectator of each moment as it happens, not holding an opinion about it but merely observing, and all the struggles of your self-will--the girl you want to ask out, the boss you want to tell off, the new car you are saving up for--are still present to your conscious mind but become something of an irrelevant side show, a movie running in a small corner of your mental screen, with the volume turned off.

This may happen through some mental discipline such as meditation or simply by a small triggering event, as simple as suddenly noticing a falling leaf or watching someone pedaling a bicycle. Everything is the same and yet everything is suddenly changed. Every leaf on a tree or pebble on your path is a matter of grave and deep interest. You seem to see everything and need nothing. In its own way, it is like seeing an X-ray of the world.

You know that within 15 minutes, you may very well be back to your customary egotistical, complaining, deluded self, but while the sudden detachment lasts, it is as though you are on a different plane, and you begin to think what may bring the feeling back again. Since you know it is possible, you know that when it returns, you will welcome it.

© Michael Huggins, 2014. All rights reserved.

It's just 50 years, but in a way, it seems like 200

If you were born after 1980, it may be hard to imagine the small but important ways in which the world of 50 years ago--the world of my childhood--was different from today. There were no ATMs. Postage stamps cost 5 cents. There was no internet, no e-mail, no Twitter, no Netflix, no cable TV, no cell phones, no Wikipedia. Most cars did not have seatbelts. There were no SUVs--people bought large station wagons with fake wood panels on the side. Telephones had dials on them, but the very first pushbutton phones had been introduced. We had not yet been to the Moon.

Most people smoked. Most men wore hats, and most women wore hats to church. Most women wore dresses. Many cars were still not air-conditioned.

When you flew on an airplane, you were served an actual meal, served with tableware and napkins, like a restaurant meal but on a plastic tray.

Real-time TV broadcasts across the ocean only became possible in 1963, with the introduction of the Telstar satellite. My parents called me into our livingroom to watch a real-time broadcast of French people singing folk songs.

Many TV shows were in black and white, and if a show was in color, that was special. A peacock symbol would come on TV, and the announcer would excitedly say, "The following program is brought to you in living color!" Words like "sex," "pregnant," etc. could not be mentioned on TV. Married couples in TV sitcoms were shown going to sleep in twin beds, not touching. Seriously.

What did this mean on the day Kennedy was shot?

Walter Cronkite had to announce the news first on audio only, because it took 20 minutes to get a camera set up.

Half the President's cabinet, including the Secretary of State, next in the line of Presidential succession after the Vice President, was on a government plane flying from Hawaii to Japan. Their only connection to the day's events were radio transmissions to and from the White House situation room. When they heard what had happened, they turned around. Their being informed and turning around was a matter of a couple of hours.

When a federal judge in Texas, Sarah T. Hughes, was tapped to go on Air Force 1 to administer the oath of office to Vice President Johnson, she said, "Is there an oath?" No one could find it, and they had to devise one.

CBS News didn't know for a couple of hours if President Johnson had been sworn in, or where he physically was.

Compared to today's instantaneous communications, via Twitter and other means, this all sounds like the era of parchment and quill pens. And yet it was only 50 years ago.

© Michael Huggins, 2013. All rights reserved.

Little clues, large truths

Small details can yield real insight into who and what a person is. In a book of reminiscences about life in Washington, DC, compiled by Katharine Graham, I read that one Washington socialite summed up President Herbert Hoover by the fact that, while listening to a performance of a Beethoven sonata, he absent-mindedly clinked the change in his pocket.

Making my way through John Ferling's excellent Jefferson and Hamilton and the Rivalry that Shaped America, I read that Jefferson had Hamilton to dinner one evening when they were both new members of Washington's first cabinet and were just getting to know each other. Hamilton noticed portraits of John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, and Sir Francis Bacon hanging in Jefferson's house and asked who they were.

"The three greatest men that the world has ever produced," Jefferson answered.

"The greatest man who ever lived was Julius Caesar," Hamilton replied.

At once, Jefferson saw how great the gulf was that separated him from his soon-to-be antagonist.

© Michael Huggins, 2013. All rights reserved.

All is lost and much is missing

I think I'll head to Studio on the Square to see the new Robert Redford movie, All is Lost. No, it's not about my dating life but about a man sailing the Indian Ocean alone, who must struggle to survive after his boat is struck by floating debris from a cargo ship. That part, sadly, is true: the world's oceans are now dotted with islands of floating garbage, some several acres in extent, from causes ranging from losses from cargo ships to the Japanese tsunami of a few years ago. Other than that, it occurs to me that, in the current cultural context of movies, the title "All is Lost" may refer to the fact that the movie contains no car chases, no explosions, no romantic interest or bedroom scenes, no other actors at all, and almost no dialogue. In other words, the viewer's interest must be held by the eloquent expressiveness of the face of a 77-year-old actor, which is kind of like being on a 4-hour walk with nothing but one's own thoughts to keep one company, an unthinkable condition for many.

© Michael Huggins, 2013. All rights reserved.

Gaiety then and now

I suppose there could hardly be a better time to read historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s A Thousand Days, his 1965 memoir of the Kennedy White House, than this month. Schlesinger's combination of an observant eye and his historian's instinct for little-known facts lead him to paint a vivid picture of Camelot; we learn, for instance, that the core thought of "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do your country" is one that Kennedy had turned over in his mind for quite some time, but it also echoed a sentiment in a Memorial Day speech given by future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in 1884. We read that Kennedy caustically dismissed Eisenhower as disloyal to old friends and only interested in playing golf with "a bunch of rich guys that he met after 1945"; on the other hand, speaking of Barry Goldwater, whose politics and background were the polar opposite of Kennedy's own, Kennedy called him a man of character and decency.

I'm reading a description of the similarities and differences between Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson, twice the Democratic nominee for President and, later, Kennedy's Ambassador to the UN. Schlesinger says that visits to the homes of either Kennedy, in Massachusetts, or Stevenson, in Illinois, "had very much the same mood and tempo--the same sort of spacious, tranquil country house; the same patrician ease of manners; the same sense of children and dogs in the background; the same kind of irrelevant European visitors; the same gay humor"...umm, how's that again? Gay humor? Well, no, not *that* kind of gay (though just such rumors were floated, at one point, about Stevenson, because of his lifelong bachelorhood, but in fact, he was just as much a ladies' man as Kennedy). It's funny...this book was written only 48 years ago, but almost no one uses "gay" any more in its traditional sense, as Schlesinger used it. How the world has changed.

© Michael Huggins, 2013. All rights reserved.

Is Cruz crazed?

Some straight talk from Jonathan Tobin of Commentary, who was as stalwart as anyone on blaming the debt crisis on Obama but still recognizes facts when he sees them:

"...after weeks of suffering the opprobrium of the mainstream media as well as increasing the distrust felt by many Americans for their party, what exactly did the GOP accomplish via the shutdown tactic?

"Did trying a government shutdown defund ObamaCare? No. Did it force President Obama to make a single tangible concession to Republicans or give way on something that would help them fight the battle against growing deficits and debt or the ObamaCare fiasco further down the line? No. Did it weaken and further divide the Republican Party? Yes.

"That leaves us with one more question: Are those that egged Boehner on to force a shutdown fight happy with these results?"

Well Ted Cruz took the gamble of his career. He's betting that his party is as nutty as he is. He will either be proven right and ride this sorry episode to the GOP nomination in 2016, or he will be the object of a huge and richly deserved backlash. I honestly don't know which will happen.

© Michael Huggins, 2013. All rights reserved.