2013 annual letter

December 1, 2013

Warm greetings.

I hope your lead-up to the holidays is proceeding famously and you're looking forward to good times with friends and family through the beginning of 2014 (and, of course, thereafter).

Although this letter got a bit long, even by my standards, I cannot in truth beg Pascal's famous 1657 apology ("I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter") because it would be a lie; I had the whole year to make it shorter.  I chose not to because I had a great deal of fun with it this year.  In addition to the usual news and family notes, I found myself taking up a series of (what for me were) diverting topics from the byways of human behavior and thought.  I hope you enjoy them as well.

I'm continuing my practice of the last two years of using quotations from some of my favorite writers as subject dividers.  This year's sources are Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), the poet, short story writer, critic, and wit, and Ambrose Bierce (1842-sometime after 1913), the journalist and critic who also wrote The Devil's Dictionary, a few selections from which I include (the ones that begin with the word in CAPS).  Bierce, like Mencken, can tend to be on the dark side (he was known as "Bitter Bierce"); Parker's quips are mostly on the lighter side.  She was perhaps most well known for her writing for the New Yorker and for being a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of New York City writers, actors, critics, and others who met for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel for roughly a decade, from 1919 to 1929; she was also nominated for two Academy Awards for scriptwriting and later blacklisted during the McCarthy era.  (One of Parker's friends in the group was the actor and essayist Robert Benchley, a few of whose wisecracks I'll also toss in.)  Bierce and Parker never met but it is clear, from a textual analysis of Parker's work that I read, that Parker was influenced by Bierce.

INFANCY, n. The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, 'Heaven lies about us.' The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

Years are only garments, and you either wear them with style all your life, or else you go dowdy to the grave.  (Parker)

            2013 began as the coldest day of the winter thus far.  It was -5 degrees when I awoke on January 1.  Nowadays we call that extremely cold.  When I was growing up, -30 was extremely cold and -5 was merely a bit cool. 

            You just have to love living in the northern plains.  Kathy and I were driving to work in mid-March and the radio announcer on Minnesota Public Radio said "tomorrow is the first day of spring.  The wind chill will be 10 below zero" (it was actually 15 below the next morning).  It did seem to many of us that the cold and snow lasted longer than usual this past spring.  However, I received commentary on the subject from a University adjunct faculty member, climate scientist Kenny Blumenfeld, via a periodic email he sends out to those of us on his mailing list; this came March 21:

As for our actual weather, some readers apparently have found it to be noxious indeed.  The winter has hung on a bit longer than what we have gotten used to in recent years, and March has been legitimately cold relative to what's normal.  Still, this is really nothing.  The coldest temperature of the winter in Minneapolis was -13, and we went to zero or below 12 times.  Before 1983, we averaged over 30 such instances per year.  Since then, we've done it 22 times, on average.  So this winter clearly continued the unmistakable trend of not being able to produce substantial and lasting cold weather.  It went easy on us yet again.  And do I need to remind us all that it has rained close to ten times this winter?  Not exactly the signature of a healthy, old-fashioned winter.

I always find these reminders from people who have the data to be useful.  And Kenny confirms my snarky statement about what winter was like when I was growing up J

If I didn't care for fun and such,
I'd probably amount to much.
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.  (Parker)

MAYONNAISE, n.  One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.

            Milder or not, there was still snow and cold, so Kathy and I decided to get away from them for a short time, a prescription I have always found that makes it easier psychologically to deal with winter:  Being in warm and green for even a week or so cuts up the bleakness.  So we spent ten days in Florida in mid-January.  The trip also provided an opportunity to catch up with a high-school classmate and his wife, Bill and Debbie Merriman, with whom I've remained friends since high school/college, and the University's former director of women's intercollegiate athletics, Merrily Baker, who's been a friend since I met her at the national meetings of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women in the late 1970s.  We had a delightful time visiting both, in St. Petersburg and Boynton Beach, respectively, and it was good to renew the friendships after more than a decade.

            Inasmuch as I am married to an art history major who loves the works of Salvador Dali, the one item on the trip itinerary that was non-negotiable was a visit to the Dali museum in St. Petersburg.  I had visited it the last time I had been in Florida, with Pat and the kids over the New Year (2002 into 2003), and it was in a somewhat nondescript building.  It has since moved into a spectacular facility, part of which, the docent informed us, is built to withstand a category 5 hurricane.  So the staff no longer must move the collection to safe ground every time there is a major storm—they just move it into the "bunker" (that is also the primary display area of the museum).  We and the Merrimans agreed afterwards that our docent's tour of the museum and the major Dali works was one of the most outstanding guided tours we had ever had.  I'm a so-so Dali fan but I do find his work interesting.

            It's an accident that the U.S. has such a large collection of Dali pieces; the Dali museum has the largest collection outside Europe and one of the largest, period.  A guy who went into the plastics business right after World War II, and made a fortune, also (with his wife) became friends of Dali—and Dali was at the dedication of the first Dali museum in Cleveland.  They also collected his works, and eventually put the collection in Florida after a local attorney in St. Petersburg saw an article about the collection and, with financial support of the city and the state, persuaded the couple to put it in St. Petersburg.  It is well worth the visit, even if one only has lukewarm opinions of Dali's work.

            We also went to (as it turns out, a very small) exhibit of the work of Dale Chihuli, who does rather interesting things with glass.  I figured that with the admission charge, we paid about $1 to see each piece on display.  Even though the items on display were fun and interesting, I'm not sure that was the right ratio between dollars paid and items viewed. 

            We are suckers for local arts and crafts fairs, and found one in Dunedin.  We of course came away with a couple of items for the house.  Just what we needed.

            On the way from the Merrimans' to Merrily's, which was a diagonal trip across the state from the northwest corner of the peninsula to down the southeast coast a bit (although north of Miami), we stopped at a place we'd never heard of.  We thought we'd driven past the exit, so kept on going, then got a second chance, so decided "what the heck" and drove in.  The Bok Tower Gardens is one of those fascinating little sites that doesn't make it on to a "must do" list but that rewards the time spent.

            Mr. Bok, who made a pile of money as editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, decided to create, in the middle of Florida near their winter home at Lake Wales, a botanical garden and bird sanctuary that included a bell tower with a very large carillon.   (Bok's wife was the daughter of the founder of Curtis Publishing, which published the Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post.)  There are now several hundred acres of garden designed by Frederick Law Olmsted as well as a carillon tower over 200 feet tall, about 50 feet on a side, light pink and tan stone, that is an art deco masterpiece (dedicated by President Coolidge).  The same guy who did the art deco sculptures on Rockefeller Center did the ones on the Bok Tower.  We spent a very peaceful couple of hours walking in the gardens being amazed by the enormous diversity of exotic plants and flowers.  (One of his grandsons was the long-time president of Harvard—1971 to 1991—Derek Bok.)

The tower has bronze sculpted doors by Samuel Yellin, who, we are informed, was America's premier metalworker at the time. The sculptures (which one cannot get close to because they are fenced off) depict events from the Book of Genesis.  I was reminded immediately of the bronze doors with relief sculptures by Lorenzo Ghiberti on the Florence Baptistery (one pair of which was declared "the Gates of Paradise" by Michelangelo).

            The drive on "Alligator Alley" from Miami to Naples is not that thrilling.  As Kathy observed, much of the trip is like driving "across a wet Nebraska."

            We once again owed our friends the Dixons a big "thank you."  They were not using it so gave us the keys to their condo in Naples.  We mostly poked around the area and enjoyed the warmth and water.  We picked the wrong day to visit Sanibel Island, a place Kathy visited with her parents in the early 1970s, and that Kathy had also visited while they were there; unfortunately, the weather turned cool and very windy and overcast, so we couldn't wander the beaches.  We managed only a tram ride through part of the Everglades.  Back in Naples the next day, however, even though windy, we had a long narrated boat ride in the mangrove jungles of the Everglades (narrated by a recent college grad who grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin).  Those jungles are such alien places—but they are also home to some of the most interesting and beautiful birds in North America.  We saw quite a number of them.

            Our last night in Florida we took a dinner cruise out into the Gulf of Mexico from Naples.  What catches one's attention on the way out are the enormous houses built on the waterfront.  Some of them surely exceed 20,000 square feet and illustrate what one might call exhibitionist architecture.  (Kathy commented aptly that the homes on Summit Avenue in St. Paul and around Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis are rather modest shacks compared to these waterfront homes.  I can only add that her comparison was not hyperbole.)  I describe them as obscene displays of wealth.  I would not use that term if the majority of those who build and own such homes did not also throw substantial political support to those who do the most economic harm to those at the lower end of the socio-economic scale—by fighting increased minimum wages, opposing good universal health care, opposing taxes to support good schools, pay decent salaries to teachers, support programs in desperately poor communities, seeking to increase and solidify the vast disparities in wealth and income in this country, and so on.  Many (not all, I am aware) of those homes were built on the backs of people laboring under conditions none of us would like.

           

            But being with Kathy, I enjoyed the cruise anyway, and we saw a spectacular sunset.  Which was the point.

During our Florida stay I was reminded of my friend Scott Eller's advice when I asked him, in advance of going to Paris some years ago, what he'd recommend we see and do.  He gave me several suggestions but said that the best thing to do was to just wander along the Seine and enjoy being in Paris.  It was good advice and it applied equally to south Florida, although for very different reasons.  As Merrily observed when we were visiting, there are not a lot of major cultural, architectural, or other kinds of sight-seeing places in south Florida—the point, in the winter, is simply to be in south Florida and enjoy the weather and the beaches.  So several times we simply walked the beaches and reveled in not being in Minnesota in January. 

This trip was a departure from our usual approach.  As I have commented before, I divide the world into two groups of people, those who travel and those who vacation.  Of course there is a middle ground.  Kathy and I usually travel.  This time we pretty much just vacationed.  I am more inclined to vacation when I have not spent a fortune on transportation and lodging; when I do, I want to get my money's worth and see everything there is to see!

In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children.  (Benchley)

PRESENT, n.  That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.

               

            We had hoped that the worst of the cold weather would have been over in Minnesota by the time we returned.  But no, we got punished for going to Florida.  The Sunday night we returned the temperature went down to -12, the coldest of the year, and the week after we got back was the coldest week of the year, with almost every nighttime temperate below zero, and sometimes well below zero.  What a shock.  Of course, we could read the Minneapolis weather forecast while we were in Naples, so it made the return to Minnesota all the more depressing.  I really have never minded the winter, but spending time in a tropical climate—as I was informed south Florida is—in part of the winter months does make one wish that winter were shorter.  (I know, however, that I want to be nowhere near Florida in the summer.)

To add insult to injury, I woke up the Thursday morning after we got back (on the previous Sunday) and thought I was a little chilly.  I was; the temperature in the house was at 57 and heading down.  So at 6:00 in the morning I was on the phone to plumbing and heating places that have emergency service.

            I had meetings at work so had to leave; fortunately, Kathy could rearrange her schedule.  So she met with the service guy, who after much testing of parts, and seeing that the furnace, which is supposed to be serviced every year, hadn't been for over a decade, concluded that it had to be replaced.  (I did not know one is supposed to service a furnace every year.  I do now.)  Thursday night the house was heated with space heaters (which the furnace company kindly provided), which at least kept the temperature at about 60 degrees (and it didn't get below zero on Thursday night, thank heavens).  So a guy was here all day on Friday and, $4200 later, we had a new furnace.  This is one of the less exciting purchases one can make in life, right up there with the washing machine and the water heater.

            Kathy and I have, mostly, prided ourselves on being hardy Minnesotans of good Scandinavian stock.  I have to say, however, that after spending some time in south Florida in January, I'm rethinking how hardy I want to claim to be.  Perhaps it is simply advancing age, but the idea of getting away from winter for a period is becoming more and more attractive.  Maybe I'm just now figuring out what the Midwest snowbirds figured out a long time ago.

I've never been a millionaire but I just know I'd be darling at it.  (Parker)

MONEY, n.  A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it.  An evidence of culture and a passport to polite society.  Supportable property.

            Clothing is something I rarely consciously plan to purchase.  I've almost never set out to go to Dayton's or Jos. Bank or wherever to buy anything; most of the time it's "gee, we're at Rosedale, let's see if there's anything on sale at Bank."  So I was wandering around Macy's at Southdale last spring, waiting for Krystin to get done with the doc giving her shots in her eyes, and I find a clearance tie table, $10 - $15 for each.  That's in the price range I like for a tie.  There were a couple that jumped out at me that I really liked—and then I saw that they were "Donald Trump Executive" or something like that.  Even though they were actually only $9 each, I decided I just couldn't do it.  I didn't want the inventory of ties with that name on it to shrink by even one bit because of me. 

            My father always thought one of the more puzzling questions in life is why there are more horses' asses in the world than there are horses.

IMPUNITY, n.  Wealth.

PRESENTABLE, adj.  Hideously appareled after the manner of the time and place.

There was another vexing incident upon our return from Florida.  I have an old Glenwood water bottle into which I have been depositing my odd change for years and years.  It had, in recent months, finally gotten almost full.  I noticed when dumping some change in it after we got back, however, that the level of coins was down about 4-5 inches. 

            My first and only thought could be that one of my kids had taken money.  I asked them both about it and they vigorously denied it.  I was heartsick, because it seemed apparent that it could only have been one of the two of them—and one of them clearly had to be lying.  It didn't make sense to me—Krystin had a reputation when she was younger of taking things that were not hers but that was a long time ago—and she has a full-time job with a decent salary and enough money to do what she wants.  Why she would steal coins from my jar was a puzzle.  And Elliott, I had always thought, simply would never do such a thing—besides, he'd been frugal about his modest income from his job and various birthday and Christmas gifts and had at least a couple of thousand dollars in his savings account.  But as I asked them both, what was I to think?  As I said, I was just sick about the black cloud over my relationship with the kids.  (It wasn't that the money made any difference—change taken from a jar was hardly going to affect the household economy—it was the principle and the loss of trust.)

            Then Elliott thought about it a little more, and confessed he had had a lapse in judgment (unusual for him):  He had had friends over to play video games, and he and others had left a friend of a friend in the house while they went out.  He said he would pursue the issue.  He did so with his good friend Jake, who was a friend of the other guy; Jake apparently agreed with Elliott that this other kid was certainly the suspect and said that he—Jake—was also responsible.  Jake followed up—and got a copy of the coin-machine deposit slip from the kid!  $305.72.

            I was astonished; I asked Elliott if Jake had threatened the kid with cement galoshes or something.  All the kid would have had to do was flatly deny taking the money and that would have been that—although Jake and Elliott were firmly convinced he did it.  In any event, as soon as Elliott learned how much had been taken, he promptly transferred $305.72 from his checking account into mine.  I told him that even though he had made a mistake, I wasn't necessarily prepared to see him receive that kind of penalty, given that he works for $8 per hour and his money is hard come by—I would let him pay me back some of it but I'd just forget the rest.  He wouldn't hear of that and said he would get some of the money back via Jake.  I don't know if he got any more, or if Jake paid him some of it, but Elliott wouldn't hear of my receiving less than what had been taken and indicated the matter was closed as far as he and I were concerned.  (It was interesting to me that when I told Krystin that Elliott had transferred the money, she was dismayed that he had to pay it all back from his own money.)

            Krystin was also very relieved that the culprit was identified, and apparently (I was told later) there were some rather heated text messages between Elliott and Krystin.  She was worried she'd be permanently under suspicion and she blamed it on Elliott, and she told him so (when she knew she hadn't taken the money so it could only have been him).  I was just plain relieved that the shadow over my relationship with the kids was gone.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.  (Parker, maybe)

SELF-ESTEEM, n.  An erroneous appraisement.

I had to return to Tampa 11 days after Kathy and I came home from Naples:  I serve on the Steering Committee of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA), which is a collection of faculty leaders from about 60 of the universities with major athletic programs.  COIA's goal is to seek reforms in college sports to lessen the threat such major programs can have to the academic integrity of the universities.  (Some of our colleagues may not always admit students who are prepared for college and may from time to time provide them illicit benefits and may give them passing grades for work that does not warrant them, to name but a few things that have been known to occur, and to put it mildly). 

Many inside of higher education, and many outside it, believe (with good reason) that college sports is out of control in a number of ways.  The salaries paid to some coaches is grossly disproportionate to those in the rest of higher education (including the salaries of the presidents, much less the faculty), the role that alumni and boosters play in some places distorts the academic mission, the practices of some coaches is contrary to the educational mission of the institution, and so on.  The NCAA office I think shares that view but it has been unable to find a path to return to more acceptable set of practices that would embody amateurism and the collegiate model for sports.  University presidents were polled a few years ago (by a distinguished national body, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics) and they essentially said they had no control over athletics—they just hoped that any scandal at their school happened under the next president.  The NCAA itself cannot exercise effective control because to do so would violate anti-trust laws. 

We think—hope—that the NCAA has finally come around to the point that COIA has been making all along:  The only group that can really exercise any control is the tenured faculty, because they are not (as) vulnerable to boosters or to being fired for taking controversial or contrary positions—but they have never been empowered to exercise that control.  So at this COIA meeting, unlike the previous nine, the NCAA asked COIA for advice and recommendations on how to create effective faculty control.  We proceeded to try to develop some advice to give them.  Asking 50-60 faculty members to agree on advice about anything as complicated as the national, conference, and campus governing structures for college sports—and the relationship between the three levels—is usually an exercise in futility.  (The common wisdom in higher education is that asking or directing faculty members to do anything is like herding cats.)  In this instance, however, recognizing that they had to do something, the group actually cohered around a conceptual proposal (which, I am glad to say, I had a role in developing). 

One of the topics that we heard about at the COIA meeting was concussions—and we were all shocked to learn that on average there are about 10,000 sports-related concussions PER DAY in this country.  When one acquires that fact, and then learns that the medical evidence is rapidly accumulating that repeated concussions almost certainly lead to early-onset dementia, one begins to ask questions about something like, say, football.  (And about boxing, obviously, but also about hockey and soccer, among others)  A COIA colleague, a neurobiologist, told a group of us at dinner that what happens to brain cells as a result of repeated concussions appears to be identical to what happens to them with the onset of Alzheimer's.  Others at the dinner table surmised that football will be a very different game in a few years; the litigation alone will likely change how it is played.

I am so glad that Elliott had no interest in playing football or soccer or hockey.  I am so glad that *I* had no interest in playing football or hockey (soccer, of course, was not really an option 50 years ago).  But this presentation at the COIA meeting brought to mind something I hadn't thought of for years:  I had two concussions when I was in elementary school, not from sports but from horsing around on small icy hills on the way home from school.  (I do not actually know if a doctor determined they were concussions or if that's what my mother decided; I think a doctor decided at least on one of them).  I slipped and fell down and bonked my head; I remember that in one case I was lying in bed afterwards and it felt like the bed was tipping from side to side. 

So I asked my neurobiologist colleague if I was at risk for early-onset dementia.  He was pretty sure not because I was so young and the concussions were not "repeated" in the way that they are in a sport.  I suppose I could ask my doctor, but I haven't.

ACADEME, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.

ACADEMY, n. [from ACADEME] A modern school where football is taught.

Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, may be prolonged to that point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.  (Parker)

The most interesting event at the COIA meeting was a fascinating after-dinner talk by John Carroll, the former editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Baltimore Sun, and the Los Angeles Times.  

I didn't even want to attend his talk because this meeting had the most brutal schedule I've ever run into at a professional gathering:  Between the time I arrived at the meeting on 3:00 on Friday afternoon and the time I left for the airport on Sunday morning at 10:00, I was in 21 hours of meetings/sessions.  You can do the calculations to figure out how much free time there was.  By Saturday night, when Carroll spoke, I was ready to just go sit in my hotel room.  But I'm glad I went.

Anyway, Carroll related the events surrounding the Herald-Leader's Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative reporting of rules violations in the University of Kentucky men's basketball program in 1985.  The most recent entry in Wikipedia informs me that "Kentucky has both the most all-time wins (2107) and the highest all-time winning percentage in the history of college basketball (.763)."  As a result of the investigative reports, among other things, a bullet (probably) was fired into the newspaper's press room windows, a delivery guy in the process of delivering a paper was chased away by the homeowner, and woman driving a truck for the newspaper had her window spat upon.  Carroll said they were deluged with letters, mostly vituperative; one of them, from Crab Orchard, Ky, made a point that I and others at the meeting found striking:  The author asked the newspaper not to do such reporting in the future because "It's all we got" (that is, Kentucky basketball). 

Carroll related another story in an email to me.  He had a friend

from Inez, Ky., whose high school was a multiple winner of multiple state basketball championships.  High school basketball in Kentucky is a lot like the movie Hoosiers.  My friend, being from the mountains, was self-conscious about his accent and about the Appalachian image (and reality, in some cases) of poverty and substandard education.  When he went off to Morehead State University, he said, he felt more self-confident because of his hometown's basketball success.  "I didn't have to be ashamed," he said.  That, I think, reflects an element of the thinking that makes University of Kentucky basketball so emotionally gripping to much of the population.

Carroll, in the process of writing a book about the events in Kentucky, told us that many in Kentucky feel that in the course of its history outsiders have come in and taken advantage of them.  Some of the chief villains in the story have been the coal-mining companies and how they obtained mineral rights from people.  Many in the state feel oppressed and angry toward outsiders and defensive about things they value, such as U of Kentucky basketball.  That wrath was directed toward the newspaper when it uncovered major violations in the program.

I and several others came to a realization, latent up to then for some of us, how different the cultures and attitudes towards athletics are.  I have had season tickets to U of M Gopher football for over 3 decades and enjoy the games, and Kathy and I go intermittently to other athletic events.  I can say without hesitation, however, that I have never lost a moment of sleep because of the outcome of an athletic event.  They are games, mostly fun to watch, but of no moment in the larger scheme of our lives.  But that plea from the local writer to the editor of the newspaper, "it's all we got," brought into sharp relief for me the circumscribed nature of the lives of people who were perhaps both geographically and intellectually isolated (this was before the age of email and the Internet), perhaps less well educated, who had not been treated well by the world at large, and the emotional attachment they have to local sports teams.  I know that there are rabid fans of professional sports teams as well, but are they so attached to their teams that they would plea that "it's all we got"?  (I don't know.  While I know plenty of Vikings and Twins fans, they're all lawyers and professionals who would never describe the role of the teams in their lives that way.  But perhaps there are folks even in the metropolitan Twin Cities who live and die with the Vikings.)

After I got home and told her the story, Kathy's instinctive reaction, to the response "it's all we got" was that it was pathetic.  So was mine.  But as we talked about it, we also came to have a sense of dismay for people whose lives are so entwined with a college (or professional) sports team—and we were startled by the phenomenon as well.

Carroll and a couple of others of us at the meeting met in the bar after his talk.  We were speculating on why those in rural Kentucky—and Alabama and Tennessee and other places—develop such devotion to a college sport team.  One factor might be the South; it may be that adoration of sports is more widespread there than in other parts of the U.S.  (For college football fans, one can look at the dominance of the Southeastern Conference as further evidence of the proposition about athletics in the South.)   Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't see the same kinds of things happening if there were a major investigation of the Iowa Hawkeyes or the Minnesota Gophers (more likely, in the Minnesota case, embarrassment and anger at the rules violations than anger at the press).

Another factor may be the urban-rural divide; Carroll told a story about how entire small towns in Kentucky close up and go to the state high school basketball championship if their team makes it into the tournament.  If there are none of the distractions of urban life—and Kentucky is hardly a heavily urban state, and would have been even less so nearly30 years ago—it is easy to see that the local sports teams acquire more importance in the social scheme.  One has a hard time imagining the people of Los Angeles or Seattle reacting so viciously if the newspaper or other media found athletic program violations.

So although I didn't expect to do so, I came away from this meeting with a greater appreciation of how much different a world I live in, when it comes to college athletics, compared to those in some other parts of the country. 

I also think Carroll was right in one of his comments toward the end of his talk:  We in this country made a bad bargain when we combined major spectator athletics with higher education.  Not that it was ever a conscious decision, because the combination simply evolved from student games in the late 1800s and grew like topsy, but at best the evidence is mixed about whether they have been boon or bane for colleges and universities.  My own view is that they have been more bane than boon; at this point, however, that's irrelevant because major colleges and universities are not going to eliminate their athletic programs.  So I participate in COIA in the faint hope that we might achieve some modest changes in order to corral athletic pressures on the academic side of the house that can distort the institution's values and mission.  Many would say that I/we are tilting at windmills.

(Carroll read these paragraphs and wrote to me that I had presented the sentiments faithfully.)

No sooner had I written these paragraphs than came an article in the New York Times (3/8/13) reporting that

Passionate sports fans can experience a "cheap high," but it only becomes a problem if they shut out other things in life, researchers said.  . . . In the 1990s, researchers began finding that "highly identified" fans experienced higher levels of arousal — measured by heart rate, brain waves and perspiration — and had fewer bouts of depression and alienation than nonfans. Contrary to popular belief, this research suggests, hard-core fans even have higher self-esteem.  "It's a source of validation for their self-conception," said Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who has written extensively about the mental states of sports fans. "For the really true fan, it can become a problem if they shut out other things in life. But the positive side is that it's fun and exciting. It's a cheap high. It's not that they don't have a life.

It was interesting that the examples they used (in the article, not included here) were all from college sports.  I wonder if the same is true of fans of professional sports.  And if there is a difference across sports; are rabid football fans different from rabid hockey fans?  One suspects that the crux of the matter comes in the "it only becomes a problem if they shut out other things in life" qualifier.  Or if they have other things in life, period.  The fans that Carroll described—and perhaps others who are rabid followers of a team—may have lives that don't have much else in them.

DISTANCE, n.  The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs, and keep.

If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.  (Parker)

            As has sometimes been the case with certain friends of mine, they (a couple) in their annual letter last year raised the question of "intentionality."  They will, I hope, forgive me if I take their use of the term and turn it to a line of thought they didn't necessarily intend.  (As one of them wrote, "as for intentionality, I have to confess some ambivalence.  I spend much of my days and nights enthralled by my own to-do lists, and my medium-term future feels pre-ordained by post-it notes and planner entries."  To which Kathy responded, when I read this aloud to her, "just like the rest of us!")

            I chose to take their introduction of the notion of intentionality and think about how I want to spend the rest of my life:  What do I want to accomplish, how do I want to spend my time?  As Kathy and I talked about it, I came to draw a distinction between "what do I want to do/how do I want to spend my time?" and "what do I want to accomplish" in the sense of "what legacy do I want to leave?"

It goes without saying that I—and surely almost all parents—want to leave behind children who are happy and educated and thoughtful citizens.  Assuming something approaching a normal lifespan, however, my ability to affect those outcomes has long ago dissipated.  To whatever extent I played a role in that—and it's not clear to me how much of a role any parent plays in the "happy" and "thoughtful" parts—I think Elliott and Krystin are thoughtful and happy, and they are certainly educated.

            A story I told at a February dinner that my colleagues were so kind to have for me (more on that later) revealed one legacy I leave whether intended or not:  Several years ago I was walking across campus with a faculty colleague, and she commented to me (I paraphrase) that no matter how much a faculty member may publish during a long career at the University, I will undoubtedly hold the record for the most words written under the University's auspices.  I suppose that's a legacy, of a sort. 

            I am quite clear in my mind about how to spend my time on a day-to-day basis:  Inasmuch as I am not convinced that there is any hereafter, what I do with my remaining time should be mostly spent in activities in which I enjoy engaging.  If I'm not going to a heaven, I better make the best of what time I have.  (And certainly if I'm going to a hell, I damn sure better make the best of the time I have!)

            It is, of course, a little vain to think about one's "legacy" if the sense of the term means something for which one will be remembered.  One can leave a legacy for one's children, or larger family, or friends, or city, or country, or the whole darn world.  Picasso and Plato and Einstein left a legacy for all of us, to some extent or another.  It is silly for most of us to think about leaving a legacy of that magnitude and I certainly don't.  But I think about leaving something behind that makes the world a little better off or that provides something of value, trivial or great.  (For example, at least for some period, P. D. James and Frank Herbert have left behind interesting works of fiction that others find enjoyable.  Obviously, great authors such as Austin, Bronte, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Twain, etc., have left behind more momentous works.)

            It is fun to toy with the idea of writing a detective story (or stories) set in higher education (at the U of Minnesota,  although that's not important), and I even have the opening plot events for several in mind:  the head football coach dies in a mysterious car crash in a snowstorm in Michigan; several people die from the malicious release of organisms from a bio-safety level 4 lab; the university president is found dead in one of the steam tunnels; a sculpture professor is found beaten to death with one of her own sculptures; a biomedical engineering professor is found dead in a corporate lab with diagrams of some new device—the list is endless at a major research university.  Unfortunately, I have no idea what to do with those great opening scenes because I lack the creative imagination to develop a plot that is both complicated and interesting.  Besides, I don't like to know the end of a murder mystery before I read it, and if I wrote it, I'd know the ending, so it wouldn't be interesting to me.

            Several people have urged me to write a lively history of the University of Minnesota (covering, say, the last 50 years or so).  I could do that, but the problem with writing an interesting history that is both factual and covers the range of human emotions that were involved in events (for example, the tumultuous departure of the president in 1988, or the removal of the athletic director in 1989, or the controversy over the Najarian case, or the heated tenure debate in the mid-1990s) is that living people would be hurt.  Good history, in my view, has an assessment of events from various perspectives, and I know that the perspectives on events would not be positive toward some of the individuals who were involved.  I'm not sure what the gain for posterity would be other than titillating reading about events at a university.  I also suspect the book would sell about 25 copies, at most.

            Whatever it is I decide to leave behind that I hope is of some benefit will probably have to be written.  I write.

            One of my dad's legacies is a sandwich, peanut butter and raw onion slices on toast.  I love them; Kathy and the kids screw up their faces in distaste whenever I say I'm going to have one.  One of my grandmother's legacies is fried Spam slices (with a dash of garlic salt) on toast.  As you can tell, I come from a long line of fine food connoisseurs.

I hate writing, I love having written.  (Parker)  (Me, too)

IMPROVIDENCE, n.  Provision for the needs of today from the revenues of tomorrow.

            So it ever has been, is, and ever will be.  One winter Sunday afternoon Kathy and I went out to look for a new sofa for our living room.  The furniture in the front half of our house mostly dates from the spring of 1997, when Pat and I finished expanding/remodeling the house.  When we were done, we had half a floor of new social-space rooms and nothing to put in them—and we had a dilemma.  We had two kids, 6 and 12, so we could either (1) get decent quality furniture and then constantly worry about it and nag the kids to be careful/not spill/tell their friends to not use it or (2) we could get less-expensive furniture and not worry too much about it.  Of the many things parents can nag kids about, furniture, in my opinion, shouldn't be one of them, so we opted for the Slumberland tent sale furniture (which we actually did get at a Slumberland tent sale).  It was functional but not fashionable.

            That furniture was not intended to be permanent, but for the most part it hadn't been replaced, and now it was well past its expiration date, so to speak.  So Kathy and I went to look for a sofa (which is what we needed most).  We ended up with a new sofa, a new chair, a new rug, and new drapes, and completely changing the color scheme of the room.  After all that, we had to get new table lamps.  How does this happen?  We know—we sort of played off one another while browsing the furniture and one thing led to another.  I'm still not sure we ended up with stylish and fashionable, but it is at least different.

            Look at him, a rhinestone in the rough.  (Parker)

CABBAGE: A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head.

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.  (Benchley)

            When we were in Scotland, I noted at the time that I had had this reverie (half dream, half daydream, while half asleep in bed) that I had been transported back to the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.  I've thought about that ever since, in idle moments, and more specifically what it would be like to explain aspects of life in the 21st Century.

            I suspect most of us do not think much about it—to the extent anyone thinks about life in the late 18th Century at all!—but this year I realized with somewhat of a start that "the material realities of daily life changed little for most people in Western societies between the 12th century and 1787" (in the words of an historian friend of mine in the History Department).  In both medieval times (and before) and in 1787, the darkness was lit by candles, transportation was by horse or foot (or sail), there was no indoor plumbing and no electricity, no central heating (or air-conditioning, which I would have been unhappy about not having in the hot summer of 1787), no easy access to clean water, no paved roads, no scientifically-based medicine and no antibiotics or vaccinations, and so on.  The size of cities grew in that 500-year period, but daily amenities were not much different.

            Most of the major improvements in our daily lives did not come until the 19th Century, with the invention and growth of the railroads, steam engines, and so on, and the introduction of the major conveniences we now enjoy didn't fully evolve until the 20th Century.  So finding oneself in Philadelphia would be a shock to us—and to the Founding Fathers.  Imagine trying to explain a wristwatch run by a battery, indoor lighting and plumbing, a dishwasher and a vacuum cleaner, paved roads and automobiles, much less a cell phone, a laptop, airplanes, Facebook and Twitter, or contact lenses.  Or weather satellites or landing a man on the moon.

Another modern "convenience" that the 18th Century lacked was anti-perspirants.  By all accounts, the summer of 1787 was hot; the temperatures were in the mid-90s.  The paintings from the era, of the constitutional convention, have all of those men sitting around fully and formally dressed; it doesn't appear they were writing a constitution in t-shirts and shorts.  Can you imagine the BO in that room?  Bathing was infrequent, so perfumes were used to disguise the smell, and that was an affluent group that would have had access to perfumes/colognes, but even so, with the windows purported closed during the proceedings, it must have been pretty ripe.

I had an exchange of emails with Karie Diethorn, the Chief Curator at Independence National Historical Park, who was kind enough to provide me with details about the daily conduct of the constitutional convention and the clothing the Founding Fathers wore.  I wrote to her to ask if the convention members were actually dressed as they are portrayed in the portraits and asked her about whether they really kept the windows closed.

Clothing is a cultural construct as well as means of keeping warm/cool. In the context of the 18th century, social convention dictated that the genteel (i.e. those who didn't perform physical labor to make a living) when in public wore very specific attire regardless of the weather. In the summers of 1776 and 1787, the men who attended the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention would have worn shirts, waistcoats, coats, britches, stockings and shoes at all times as was their culture's social custom.

To deal with heat and humidity, those meeting in Independence Hall would block sunlight from their rooms using window shades or Venetian blinds (there are no interior or exterior shutters on Independence Hall). They could fan themselves, and they could adjourn regularly for refreshment.

The tradition that the Independence Hall windows were closed during the Declaration and Constitution debates to protect the confidentiality of the proceeding is, I think, rather problematic. The first floor windows of Independence Hall are ten feet above the ground surface, so no one could lean on the sills to listen in. Also, the street in front of Independence Hall would have been quite busy with pedestrian and horse-drawn vehicle traffic which would have made a lot of noise. And, in the case of 1787, the delegates to the Convention weren't committing treason, so being overheard wasn't an issue (actually, I doubt whether in 1787 the public was much concerned with what the Convention was doing). In the summer of 1776, there was concern about secrecy, but I suspect law enforcement personnel (e.g., sheriff's officers) could patrol the Independence Hall perimeter to shoo off members of the public who might be loitering there. I think Jefferson's remarks about keeping the windows closed during the Declaration debates to shut out the flies meant that the windows were cracked for air circulation but not open wide to allow in large numbers of insects.

That response from Ms. Diethold prompted questions from Kathy.  Did they change clothes when it was that hot?  What fabrics were their clothes made of?  (This question from someone who used to make most of her own clothes and who, obviously, knows fabrics.)  Wool (and scratchy wool at that)?  And did they wear the wigs all the time?  Ms. Diethold again:

It's worth noting that our present day cultural standards are not readily applicable to past eras (or even contemporary foreign ones). A genteel appearance in the 18th century included a clean face, hands, and "linen" (shirts for men, chemises for women). Again, such a cultural context represented one's non-manual labor status. On the other hand, personal odor wasn't an issue. Women could use scent to mask odor (theirs and that of others, if you hold your handkerchief near your face); men could smoke and/or chew tobacco which had the added benefit of preoccupying the senses.

Certainly, someone could wear the same clothing repeatedly. I do think, however, that in the heat of summer the gentry rotated their outer clothing (i.e., men's coats, waistcoats, britches; women's gowns) in order to give servants a chance to brush, air, and/or mend garments.

Regarding fabrics, it depended on the occasion (including season, activities) as to what someone wore. Wool, linen, silk, and cotton were all available to the 18th-century gentry. Woolen fabrics like broadcloth can be actually quite light, and they do breathe. Cotton was very expensive, but women did have gowns made of it. Linen, a very breathable fabric, was extensively used in the southern colonies during the warmest weather. Silk, a very lightweight fabric, stains easily and so was generally reserved for fancy dress, but it could also comprise a waistcoat worn nearest the body over a shirt.

Regarding men's wigs, these received meticulous care from servants. The big problem with wigs was lice. Servants combed and styled wigs regularly to prevent lice problems. As for wearing wigs, it's something men in the Revolutionary period were used to and tolerated for gentility's sake. By the end of the war, however, wig wearing had dropped off considerably, particularly among younger men who saw it as old fashioned and politically conservative (i.e., it suggested the old order of courtly dress). The replacement for wig wearing was powdering one's hair white to emulate the French fashion. Powdering one's hair brought a whole host of problems—it was messy, time consuming, and required regular touch ups—but at least it didn't foster lice.

Benchley wrote that the good old days are due to a bad memory—but his comment only speaks to changes in a single lifetime.  This musing has led me to realize, more than ever, that I have no desire whatever to travel back in time, unless I could perhaps visit for an hour and then return home.  (I remember that when I had that reverie about finding myself in 1787, after the novelty of explaining 21st Century life had worn off, I was suddenly and overwhelmingly depressed that I had no way to get back to modern life or my kids and family and friends.)  Ms. Diethold at Independence Hall, in one of her messages to me, wrote that "all this [the clothing, heat, lice, lack of amenities] (plus the question of 18th-century dental care) informs the answer I give when people ask me 'Wouldn't you love to live in the 18th century?'  I say, not on your life!"  I laughed when I read that because it echoed my sentiments exactly.

            What had changed dramatically between the 12th and 18th Centuries were ideas and their spread, advanced by Mr. Gutenberg and his moveable type.  The Church no longer dominated intellectual life (virtually every one of the leading Founding Fathers were skeptical about or openly hostile to organized religion) and Enlightenment notions about society and the individual's role in it had upended medieval thought.  What I find striking is that while the Founding Fathers were laboring—with modest but not complete success—to create a new nation founded on the ideals they had come to know, they were simultaneously living their daily lives in conditions that had not changed appreciably in centuries.

            Although a much more condensed span of time, the accoutrements of daily life for most of us have not changed much in 50 years, either.  My parents had a dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, washer, dryer, and forced-air heat, air conditioning, and of course an automobile; those existed in 1964 in pretty much the same form as they do today, with improvements on the technical margins.  Go back 50 more years that that wasn't true for most people (and in some cases for none, since no one had home dishwashers or vacuum cleaners in 1914).  One wonders what technological improvements can be made in daily life that would represent dramatic change; a little robot that goes around vacuuming quietly all the time would be an improvement, as would self-cleaning clothes and dishes.  The former could be on the horizon as robotics improve, but the latter seem like a stretch.  Exchanging automobiles for some non-polluting, energy self-sufficient way to get around would be a terrific advance, especially if one simply plugged in an address and it went there on its own.          

ACCIDENT, n. An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.

COMPULSION, n. The eloquence of power.

            Related to the foregoing contemplation of the constitutional convention is news about the president of Emory University.  One of lectures I would have given the Founding Fathers would have been about the terrible mistake they made in countenancing the continuation of slavery.  (I know, anything else would have likely been politically impossible and ended all hopes of a union—but then, I've also come to think that perhaps a union of north and south wasn't such a great idea after all, but I've commented on that elsewhere.)  One of the provisions of the constitution, one of the compromises between slave and free states, was that slaves would count as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of the census and determining the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives.

            The president of Emory University, James Wagner, wrote a column in Emory Magazine about the challenges of governing when politics are so polarized, as they are today. 

One instance of constitutional compromise was the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress. Southern delegates wanted to count the whole slave population, which would have given the South greater influence over national policy. Northern delegates argued that slaves should not be counted at all, because they had no vote. As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution—"to form a more perfect union"—the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation. Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together.

Some might suggest that the constitutional compromise reached for the lowest common denominator—for the barest minimum value on which both sides could agree. I rather think something different happened. Both sides found a way to temper ideology and continue working toward the highest aspiration they both shared—the aspiration to form a more perfect union. They set their sights higher, not lower, in order to identify their common goal and keep moving toward it.

The New York Times reported that "Leslie Harris, a history professor and the director of a series of campus events that for five years examined issues of race at Emory, said she was more troubled by the intellectual holes in Dr. Wagner's argument. . . . [The comments are] 'a deep misunderstanding of history,' Dr. Harris said. 'The three-fifths compromise is one of the greatest failed compromises in U.S. history,' she said. 'Its goal was to keep the union together, but the Civil War broke out anyway.'"

The faculty of the Emory College of Arts and Sciences censured Wagner (but tabled a motion for a vote of no confidence).  President Wagner apologized at length for the comments.  The reader comments in various publications took widely varying views.  A retired professor of National Security Studies, at the National Defense University, wrote a letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education criticizing the critics.  He (a white guy) had taught at a predominantly Black university for a number of years, claimed he knew racism when he saw it, and argued that Wagner

was not being racist when he pointed out that the "Three-Fifths Compromise" at the Constitutional Convention was an example of a useful bridging of differences on political opinion. . . . In times like ours when the word "compromise" seems to have become anathema to many, I thought Mr. Wagner's position was well taken. What his critics don't seem to realize is that it was the slaveholders in the South who wanted to count slaves as full persons—not three-fifths of a person. It was delegates from the free states who insisted on three-fifths as the measure of a person, as they did not want the South to gain additional members of the House of Representatives. Where the three-fifths fraction came from has always been a mystery. Why not four-sevenths or two-thirds? The answer seems to be that three-fifths had been settled on as the amount of work a slave did when compared with a free person. Those who measured a slave as three-fifths of a person were the folks in the North—not the (obviously) racist slaveholders in the South. The fraction was not about racism as much as it was about political power.

            The view of a number who wrote was that Wagner wasn't a racist but he sure picked a bad example.  I'm not going anywhere with this other than to note that the compromises and agreements the Founding Fathers made continue to reverberate, sometimes in odd ways, 226 years later.  (Despite calls by some, Wagner did not lose his job.  And the faculty leadership at Emory, the faculty members who would be most knowledgeable about his performance as president, were wise enough not to want to lose a good president as a result of a mistake:  "We acknowledge the hurt to our community caused by President James Wagner's use of the three-fifths compromise clause in his column in the Winter, 2013, issue of the Emory Magazine.  He has sincerely apologized for this mistake in multiple venues, and he has held many listening sessions to hear concerns from the community.  We as the University Faculty Council accept his apology.  While his words were insensitive, they were not malicious in intent, and discussion of them has revealed failures throughout our community to live up to the diverse and inclusive ideal to which we aspire.")

POLITICS, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

That woman speaks eighteen languages and can't say "No" in any of them.  (Parker)

           

            At a time when the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is being celebrated, one viewer who saw "12 Years a Slave" wrote a stinging commentary.  I find myself in sympathy with his views.

Anyone who acquires the narrative of 12 Years A Slave and finds it within his shrunken heart to continue any argument for the sanctity and perfection of our Founding Fathers, for the moral wisdom of their compromised document of national ideal that begins the American experience, or for their anachronistic, or understandable tolerance of slavery is arguing from a desolate, amoral corner.
If original intent included the sadism and degradation of human slavery, then original intent is a legal and moral standard that can be consigned to the ash heap of human history.  And for hardcore conservatives and libertarians who continue to parse the origins of the Constitutions under the guise of returning to a more perfect American union are on a fool's journey to decay and dishonor.

For anyone to stand in sight of this film and pretend to the infallibility or perfect intellectual or moral grandeur of a Washington, a Jefferson, or a Madison is to invite ignominy from anyone else sensate.  Slavery was abomination, and we, in our birth of liberty, codified it and nurtured it.

It took Lincoln, and a great war, to hijack the American experiment from its original, cold intentions by falsely claiming, a century and a half ago, that the nation was founded on the proposition that all men are created equal.  It was founded on no such thing.  It required blood, a new birth of honor and a continuing battle for civil rights that is still being fought for this nation to be so founded.

In the echo of this film, the call for a strict construction of our national codes and a devotion to the original ideas of the long-dead men who crafted those codes in another human age, rings hollow and sick and shameful.

I am struck by a remark by Michael Sandel about adhering literally to the values of the past:  "If any past civilization had succeeded in protecting its values, we'd be stuck with values that we would find horrible."  (Per Wikipedia, Sandel, a political philosopher and professor at Harvard University, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was born and raised in Minneapolis (!), and has taught the famous "Justice" course at Harvard for two decades, one of the most highly-attended courses in Harvard's history.)

The author of the commentary did make the point that there is much to admire in the constitution, which is true, and that it has been improved enormously by the addition (most of) of the later amendments and by Supreme Court decisions that have ever-so-slowly grafted modern standards of justice onto an 18th-Century document.  (Some Supreme Court decisions go the opposite way, of course; it is always some steps forward and some steps backward.  I wouldn't count the 18th Amendment as positive, since I like to have the occasional wine or beer or scotch, and I'm not enamored of the 2nd Amendment, either.)

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.   (Parker)

POLITENESS, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy.

I am sometimes envious when reading the annual holiday letters from friends.  Some of them report on such interesting things, like skippering boats in the Mediterranean or playing in a band, or about offspring competing in ironman competitions around the world, becoming tenured professors, and so on.  Knowing the people who wrote about these adventures, I know it's not boasting, it's passing along family news.  Our lives seem so dull by comparison.

IMAGINATION, n.  A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.

CONGRATULATION, n. The civility of envy.

            A few years back I commented on a mini-controversy about the (feared by some) disappearance of cursive writing.  There was a somewhat extended eruption in the news in mid-winter about the topic again.  Neither this nor a couple of the other commentaries that follow are issues of great moment, they are simply diversionary fun to think about when there are vexing and momentous matters before the country and the world.

            The Wall Street Journal published an article on January 30 titled "The New Script for Teaching Handwriting Is No Script at All:  Cursive Goes the Way of 'See Spot Run' In Many Classrooms, Delighting Students."  Bylined in Raleigh, North Carolina, the article reports that with the adoption of a "common core" of math and English standards in 45 states, teaching cursive writing is optional and few teachers are requiring it.  (But some of the states are reconsidering, at the level of the state legislature.  There's a great way for a legislature to spend its time.)

(Keyboarding proficiency by 4th grade, however, is required, and in my judgment that requirement—distinct from teaching cursive—makes perfectly good sense.  When Krystin was a little girl, in the mid-1980s, before she was in school and before the advent of computers and their progeny, I took the position that she should not learn typing because it would mean she would be slotted into some kind of secretarial position—and that her aspirations and possibilities should be larger.  Little did I realize that the employee category of "secretary" would largely disappear, that we would all, professionals or otherwise, become our own secretaries in many respects, or that the computer and its keyboard would become so ubiquitous that those who cannot type/keyboard would be at a disadvantage in just about every endeavor of life.)

The article quotes a school board member as saying that they have to find room for many subjects, including skills that children need, and some things just have to go.  The article has some tear-jerking prose, such as the observation that "no matter that children will no longer be able to read the Declaration of Independence or birthday cards from their grandparents" if they cannot write (and presumably thus read) cursive writing.  (When was the last time you had to read the Declaration of Independence in the original script?  When was the last time you read the Declaration of Independence?  Or the constitution?)

With students, however, eliminating it from the curriculum is apparently extremely popular.  "When asked whether they should have to learn cursive, 3,000 of 3,900 middle-school students surveyed by Junior Scholastic magazine in 2010 said it should be erased.  'NO! OMG, 4get cursive, it's dead!'"  (It's hard to know  what I would have thought had I been asked this question in 3rd grade, which is when we learned cursive writing.  In fact, one of the highlights of my entire academic career was being the first student in my class to get through all of the cursive writing cards we had to complete.  I would have been second, but the guy who was ahead of me got sick for a week, so I beat him.  J   Always odd what bits and pieces of life we can remember.)

At least in line with my experience, and Kathy's and that of other friends, the article reports correctly that most adults don't use exclusively cursive writing or exclusively manuscript (print) lettering.  Most of us who write much at all make up our own combination, drawing from both, including in our signatures.  I haven't used a cursive "G" to start my signature for years and my capital "E" isn't cursive, either.  Krystin and Kathy and I were talking about this one night when these news articles came out and determined that none of us use cursive letters to start our signatures—first or last name.  Nor do we use exclusively cursive for the interior letters.  In fact, "it is becoming increasingly rare to even have to sign your name.  By 2016, nearly half of all home loans could be closed electronically, meaning that thousands of people will buy homes without having to physically sign their names."  In a conversation shortly thereafter, Elliott came down emphatically on abandoning cursive writing in the curriculum as a complete waste of time.  He added that it was particularly irritating to learn it in grade school and then get to high school, only to be told that teachers wanted nothing in cursive, they wanted it printed (if it wasn't from a computer and printer).  (He also said that he'd be glad to see cursive gone because he hates writing "Engstrand."  I agreed with him that it's an awkward combination of cursive letters when being written.)

The article goes on to quote a handwriting analyst who opposes elimination of instruction in cursive writing.  "'It's a very natural process to take a crayon or a rock and make symbols with your hand,' Ms. Dresbold said.  'It's just bringing down things from your brain." Without that, "children are not thinking as thoroughly.'"  With all due respect to the Journal, I don't consider a handwriting analyst an expert on the subject of cognition and learning.

            Without any reference to the Wall Street Journal article, the newsmagazine Prospect, in England, three weeks later published an article titled "Curse of cursive handwriting:  It's absurd to teach children this way" by Philip Ball.  In this case, the author went to people I'd consider experts.  First of all, he said it is just peculiar that we teach children first how to print—and then, 3-4 years later, teach them a mostly new way of writing—"oops, forget what you just learned, now start over."  "We tend to forget," Ball wrote, "unless we have small children, that learning to write isn't easy.  It would make sense, then, to keep it as simple as possible.  If we are going to teach our children two different ways of writing in their early years, you'd think we'd have a very good reason for doing so."  But we don't. 

Part of it, he wrote, is just sophistication; it's adult to use cursive and childish to print.  Ball asked his daughter's teachers why they were teaching cursive.  Once they realized he wasn't kidding, they said because they'd always done it and because it allowed the children to write faster.

"Surely, though, in something as fundamental to education as writing, there must be scientific evidence that will settle this matter? Let's dispatch the most obvious red herring straight away: you will not write faster in cursive than in print. Once you need to write fast (which you don't at primary school), you'll join up anyhow if and when that helps. . . . On the merits of learning cursive versus manuscript, Steve Graham, a leading expert in writing development at Arizona State University, avers that, 'I don't think the research suggests an advantage for one over the other.'"  One U.S. survey in 1960 found the same rationale as Ball's daughter's teacher:  tradition, wide usage, and public expectations, and one superintendent said they didn't really see any reason to keep cursive.  A reading expert at Missouri State told Ball that 'the reasons to reject cursive handwriting as a formal part of the curriculum far outweigh the reasons to keep it.'"

It's the teaching of two systems that is one problem.  But Ball also commented that "were there to be a choice between cursive and manuscript, one can't help wondering why we would demand that five-year-olds master all those curlicues and tails, and why we would want to make them form letters so different from those in their reading books."

There is reason to be adept with a pen; our writing and signature is as much a part of us as our clothing, our conversation, and other attributes, Ball said.  But there's nowhere written a rule that it has to be cursive.   Many of can admire the Spencerian script so widespread in the U.S. from the middle of the 19th Century until the first quarter of the 20th.  But no one writes like that any longer and our cursive writing no longer has the artistic beauty of earlier styles.  Those of us born after WWII were taught Palmer Method of penmanship, with much plainer letters and faster writing that could compete with the typewriter.  But most modern cursive writing is execrable and often illegible (sometimes to the person who wrote it).  What is worth preserving there?  This would be worth preserving—but no one, in the sped-up life that we live, will take the time to write this way:

A few days later, because the Wall Street Journal article was written from Charlotte, the Charlotte Observer had to follow up with an article of its own.  It seems that a Republican legislator introduced a bill in the North Carolina legislature to require teaching cursive handwriting in the state's elementary schools. 

The Observer went to its own local expert, a retired faculty member and director of literary studies at the University of North Carolina, who "said teaching manuscript – or print – handwriting make more sense for the modern world.  'The research says that adults who write manuscript, they write just as quickly as adults who write everything in cursive, but it's more legible,' Cunningham said.  'It's just a simple matter that there aren't any advantages to cursive handwriting.'"  The legislator disagreed, apparently an expert on psychomotor development and cognition:  "She said learning cursive helps children with their brain development and motor skills. And she thinks it aids students in reading documents such as the Declaration of Independence or simply letters from an older relative."  The latter is an assertion of fact that the experts in the field don't have any evidence for; the latter may be true—or may not be.  Another of the (Republican) sponsors of the bill "said teaching cursive makes students more well-rounded, both in terms of disciplining them to learn it and in helping them express their creative side.  'It lends to our humanity to know cursive.'"  That strikes me as a lot of unsupported malarkey; I wonder if there is evidence for those propositions.

After the question of teaching kids two systems, the retired UNC professor may have made the most logical point, as had Ball:  "'I think manuscript handwriting is superior as a system for teaching children because then the letters they write look more like letters in books that they learn to read,' he said.  'If you pick up a book to try to read it, it is almost never written in anything vaguely similar to cursive handwriting.'"

Just for fun, I wrote to one of the faculty members in our composition program and asked her what she thought.

My opinions about cursive writing are rather subjective (since it is not often discussed among college composition instructors). . . .  I think cursive writing is important as a form of personal expression.  I would agree that printing / manuscript makes the most sense, but I'm just not sure cursive writing isn't used anymore.  I think about it less in terms of efficiency (is it faster or slower to write in cursive?) than in terms of expression.  Handwriting is unique to an individual. . . .  I think being able to write in an expressive way is an important motor skill and an important literacy skill (but that should not surprise you!).  Whether or not it deserves a unit in elementary school?  Good question.   I am a PTA member of my kids' elementary school and I am always surprised at the new requirements and subjects they must now teach.  Those teachers are busy and are under a lot of pressure.  I can see how cursive writing falls off the list, but personally I'm glad our school still teaches it!

She went on to ask what happens when someone cannot afford all the latest electronic equipment (computer, smart phone, etc.); "Would that person only want to write in manuscript form?  I don't think so. . . .  Printing would be very tiresome, wouldn't it?  Also I was thinking that learning cursive to some degree is a literacy activity:  we must be able to read cursive as well as write it.  I don't know of many people who hand write using manuscript style only."

Good question about reading cursive if you don't write it yourself—that, presumably, is a question of fact that someone could ascertain.  One of the arguments Kathy and my son made is that it is extremely rare to even run into anything written in cursive any more—and good riddance, in their view.  I don't know—is printing tiresome?  Might it not be easier to teach kids, especially those who are non-native English speakers, manuscript writing from the get-go, rather than teaching them both styles, when they're having a hard enough time mastering the spoken tongue, much less the written?

            This issue got more press in the New York Times, in a book review of The Missing Ink by British novelist, columnist, and art critic Philip Hensher.  Hensher argues that handwriting "'involves us in a relationship with the written word which is sensuous, immediate and individual.  It opens our personality out to the world, and gives us a means of reading other people.'"  The reviewer reports that it wasn't individuality that led to widespread use of handwriting, it was uniformity:  business needed writing for purposes of communication, so along came Messrs. Spencer and then Palmer to make writing uniform.  Hensher maintains that "'To continue to diminish the place of the handwritten in our lives is to diminish, in a small but real way, our humanity.'"  As the reviewer concludes, however, while the book "succeeds in making a strong case for the renaissance of handwriting. . . . when it comes to putting pen to paper nowadays, most people would prefer not to."

            The debate continued into the spring, with pieces on "All Things Considered" on NPR, in the New York Times, and in the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

We are now up to April 7, when New York Times critic Edward Rothstein wrote "Cursive, Foiled Again: Mourning the Demise of Penmanship."  He confessed that he can hardly read his own handwriting and that when he receives a handwritten letter, it seems "awkward, barely fluent."  Cursive is disappearing, he concludes.  However, he argues, its disappearance is "more evidence of precipitous cultural decline" and he takes a look at a book by an historian on handwriting in this country.  Once writing was a fine craft and, moreover, one's position in life was reflected in the style of one's writing (gentleman, lawyer, secretary, and so on).  Benjamin Franklin thought the regularity of mechanically-produced type distracted from meaning and that handwriting was more personal and more revealing.  In the U.S., gradually everyone learned to write, so there was no social or role differentiation associated with it.  Then the argument was made to do away with script as too confining, a barrier to expression, so the movement was to teach children to print.  So, "a craft that began by defining social roles and manners and went on to become one of the arts of self-presentation and self-expression was eventually seen as an obstacle to self-expression." 

Then Rothstein reaches what seems to me a rather odd conclusion.  "The problem is that something is sacrificed in this renunciation of the hand:  the idea that the appearance of words is part of their meaning, that script is a public presentation of the private self; that surface is part of substance.  The main point of display becomes the rejection of display."   I've never thought that how a word is made to appear on paper (or a screen, for that matter) is part of the meaning, barring the use of italics or bold or upper case for emphasis.

The Times continued on the subject with four op-ed pieces at the end of April.  

One author (Zezima), citing various academic authorities, made several points:  printing is easier to forge, the abandonment of cursive means a lost link with archival sources (coming generations won't be able to read them because they never learned to write in cursive), schools aren't teaching it because the standardized tests don't test for cursive (and what isn't being tested isn't taught), and cursive writing helps with the development of fine motor skills ("'it's the dexterity, the fluidity, the right amount of pressure to put with pen and pencil on paper.'")  I don't find these contentions to be particularly persuasive.  But the comments of one of the author's grief-stricken authorities appealed to something in me:  "Richard S. Christen, a professor of education at the University of Portland in Oregon, said, practically, cursive can easily be replaced with printed handwriting or word processing.  But he worries that students will lose an artistic skill.  'These kids are losing time where they create beauty every day,' Professor Christen said. 'But it's hard for me to make a practical argument for it.  I'm not one who's mourning it because of that; I'm mourning the beauty, the aesthetics.'" 

            A young assistant professor at the U of Southern California's distinguished College of Education (Polikoff) was blunt:  "Cursive should be allowed to die.  In fact, it's already dying, despite having been taught for decades."  He maintained that few people use it any more and that much is done on keyboards and the remainder with print.  Schools shouldn't be required to teach it because there are more important skills for students to learn.  "Additionally, there is little compelling research to suggest the teaching of cursive positively affects other student skills enough to merit its teaching. . . .  As we have done with the abacus and the slide rule, it is time to retire the teaching of cursive.  The writing is on the wall."

            A counterpoint came from an occupational therapist in the Beverly Hills school district (Asherson), who contended that "putting pen to paper stimulates the brain like nothing else, even in this age of e-mails, texts and tweets.  In fact, learning to write in cursive is shown to improve brain development in the areas of thinking, language and working memory.  Cursive handwriting stimulates brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres, something absent from printing and typing."  She noted that "students who wrote in cursive for the essay portion of the SAT scored slightly higher than those who printed."  One might ask whether the difference was statistically significant and whether there were intervening variables—did the students who used cursive come from higher socio-economic status, with a better education that included cursive writing, so they did better?  Her conclusion, "as a result, the physical act of writing in cursive leads to increased comprehension and participation," isn't warranted by citation of one study showing a weak correlation.  Interestingly, she maintained that cursive does not "need to be fancy with slants, loops and curls."  So she tosses out Christen's plaint on its ear:  forget the artistic element, make it simple.

            The director of archives and special collections at the University of Central Arkansas (Bryant) maintained that our society is "losing its ability to communicate via cursive writing" and that we "are becoming completely dependent on machines to communicate with others."  (Eliding the fact that people do print.)  He argues for the beauty of handwritten letters from 50-100 years ago and that people once took great pride in penmanship.  He echoes Christen a little:  "a case could be made that some of the finer examples of cursive writing are actually a form of art."  He also observes that email messages (and surely tweets and online chats) are deleted while people tend to preserve handwritten letters (and thus, I add, preserve small bits of social history).  I'm not sure moaning about a failing tradition is useful (doubtless many mourned the passing of the horse and buggy, too), but I agree with his point about the loss of the personal historical record.  Actually, there are also great losses at an institutional level as well:  what I once would have done with a handwritten or typed note to someone, whether the University president or a faculty colleague, I now do with an email—and those, as we all know, are evanescent.  I know of no one who is depositing email records in the archives.  (Who'd want to sort through all those millions of messages?  One guesses that even the most diligent historian would surely find that a daunting task unless there were a way to sort electronically using key words.)  The other reality about the artistic beauty of older cursive that Bryant ignores is that everything today has to be fast, fast, fast.  Spencerian script takes a heck of a lot longer than an email or text message.  (And with text messages, one is licensed to relax the normal rules of composition, making the communication of the substance even quicker; some think that relaxation extends to email, an opinion I do not share.)

            Finally (at least for the purposes of this disquisition), a professor of journalism at Duke also (favorably) reviewed Hensher's book The Missing Ink for the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Hensher's view, in his report, is dramatic:  "we're at a cultural tipping point:  This is 'a moment when, it seems, handwriting is about to vanish from our lives altogether,' he writes.  He wonders whether that vanishing act will point to a more profound phenomenon.  "Is anything going to be lost apart from the habit of writing with pen on paper?  Will some part of our humanity, as we have always understood it, disappear as well?'"  What's happening is that handwriting as a manner of self-expression is disappearing and that we have substituted a more mechanical and less human way to use the printed word.  The review author confirms Hensher's observation about the use of cursive:  "Writing by hand, for this generation, is somewhat akin to speaking by phone over a landline.  Students are perfectly able to perform the act.  But interfering as it does with the imperative of efficiency, they see little reason for it."  So they don't (either use cursive or landlines). 

I'm not sure I buy the proposition that we lose part of our humanity if we lose cursive; that seems overblown.  What about the millions of people around the world who don't know how to write, much less in cursive?  Or the millions before us, in centuries past, who never learned to write?  To imply that they were not fully human seems insulting.

            The reviewer reported that Hensher claims that handwriting reveals individual characteristics.  "People who don't join up their letters are often creative; alternatively, they may be "a little bit slow."  People whose handwriting leans forward are often 'conventional' thinkers; people whose handwriting leans backward are often 'withdrawn.'  And anyone who draws a circle or a heart over his or her i's is 'a moron.'"  I'm skeptical about the relationship between characteristics and handwriting but I am inclined to agree with his last point.

I think where I come down (without any further study, and I do not intend to pursue it beyond what I've already read) is that cursive writing probably needs to be optional in schools—but I say that with regret for the lost artistry.  "Optional" means it surely will disappear in a few years.

His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets.

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.  (Both Parker)

            How do you refer to the person to whom you are attached by marriage?  When I took up this question, I didn't realize that it would intrigue as many people as it did.  So this section of the letter turned out to be longer than I had expected.

Early in the year I listened to a colleague (Friend A) over lunch and heard her refer to (a person I presumed to be) her spouse as her "partner."  She wears a wedding ring and they have children; she is perhaps about 40.  I wrote to her asking why she used the term "partner" instead of the more commonly-used term "husband."  I told her I speculated that she used the term partner instead of husband (or wife) as a courtesy to our gay and lesbian friends, who can't legally use husband/wife in most states, or perhaps to avoid terms that identify sex.  That's defensible.  It seemed to me an interesting evolution in the language but I told her I wasn't sure I could make that change, and begin referring to my wife as my partner, in part because, in the present moment anyway, "partner" at least hints that you're not married but perhaps living together, although in our case that is belied by the fact that we both wear wedding rings.  (I suppose we could be "partners" even though each married to someone else, which would be, at least in my world, a rather peculiar social arrangement.)

My colleague (Friend A) wrote back the following:

I firmly believe in equality regardless of one's sexual orientation, and just can't see the logic of granting certain privileges to some people based on their sexual orientation while holding that back from others. In my mind, people seek each other for multiple reasons and form "partnerships" in so many different ways. So, until there is true equality in that regard, I do want to emphasize that some people have the choice to have a "wife" or "husband" while others don't.

I also want to introduce some gender confusion into people's minds. I rely on both masculine and feminine behaviors, as well as on behaviors/attitudes/beliefs that some would equate with heterosexual and homosexual people. If people see this strange confluence and wonder "what" I am, then I want them to wonder why they are wondering and what difference it makes.

Finally, I just don't see myself as a wife. There are too many historical connotations to that word -- ownership, obedience, deferring behaviors -- that I struggle with.  I know that one way to reconstruct that word is to use it but mean something else.  I need to leave that agenda for someone else, though. . . .  I just don't have the stomach for it.

Friend B (also woman, early 40s, divorced with children and who has someone in her life with whom she lives—I labor to avoid using any of the terms under scrutiny here!) responded to this view:  "I fully agree here.  I have a hard time with 'wife.'  Perhaps this is part of the reason I have not married the lovely man I live with.  No doubt it is due to the fact that I have been a wife in a rather negative embodiment of the word.  This is not a unique issue with the women I run with.  Oddly, the term 'husband' doesn't denote the same trigger for strong independent women, I think.  I don't think it is necessarily an issue (meaning you can still be strong and independent, and not react to this word), but this brings up an issue I have seen kicking around in my world."

I wrote that neither I nor, I would wager a lot of money, my professional and faculty friends attach the baggage that Friend A noted to the term "wife."  She was of course correct about the historical meaning, but at least in the circles in which I move, that baggage is ancient history.  My friends, it seems to me, have balanced marriages with mutual respect and (differently for each marriage) obligations and responsibilities that divided up pretty evenly.  As far as I can tell, ownership and obedience and deference never cross their minds!  But they still use the term wife (and husband).

Friend B wrote in response to this that "you'd lose that bet," although wondered if responses might vary by age or personal experience.  Given that challenge, I polled a few friends.  I outlined the opinions about "wife" and told them that I thought my friends don't attach the baggage to the term and have balanced relationships without any thought of ownership or obedience or deference.  Here are the responses, some abbreviated (identified by gender and my guess at approximate age; all respondents are highly-educated professionals of some sort):

Woman, faculty member, 60s:  I am a wife and a partner.  No problem with it.  Had a colleague who always referred to the person she had lived with for years as her partner so I assumed they were not married.  They were.  Ditto some friends who just got married after 25 years of living together.  They now happily refer to each other as husband/wife.  In other words, there are no rules anymore, but if people want to signal that they are married and of a particular gender, that is great.  That is, to me, the only remaining purpose of wife/husband.

Male, attorney, 50s:  Neither I nor my wife object to the term. . . .  To me, "partner" still carries an ambiguity to it.  It is a term that signifies a close relationship, perhaps even committed or long term, but does not say whether there is a formal legal or religious/sacramental bond.  (He checked with his legally-bound person before responding.)

Male, 60s, attorney:  Neither xxxx nor I have found this to be an issue.  We generally use the term "spouse."

Male, faculty member, 60s:   I have no difficulty with the terms wife and husband, though I'm pretty much always aware of the issue.  I find "my spouse" old fashioned and sort of officious-sounding.  Xxxx typically refers to me as her husband.

Female, faculty member, 60s:  I must disagree with you, Gary.  As a matter of fact, I strongly dislike both words, "husband" and "wife," and I avoid using either term.

Female, scholar, 60s:  I have given the term "wife" very little thought as to its historical/political connotations and I suppose I think of it as refining the term 'spouse' to indicate the female half of the marriage.  For gay couples, this could be murky, I realize.  By the way, I don't think using the term "partner" to indicate one's spouse is very appropriate, either, as it usually seems to indicate a non-married situation or a business relationship.  [She also had some alternative suggestions:  "Sprous-ner" maybe? Or "spart-ner"?  We'll surely come up with something that fits everyone's requirements!"]

Male, attorney, 50s:  "I refer to her as my wife and she refers to me as her husband.  My subjective view is that neither term carries baggage."

Female, psychologist, 60s:  I think that the term "wife" does carry a lot of baggage.  Sometimes I celebrate my husband as having great wifely skills.  If I think of myself as "wife" it is with a semi-conscious correction from the biased, icky connotations of past.  BUT when I verbalize my relationship to my husband, it is likely to be "spousal unit"!  I am not saying that spousal unit is a term to promote.  While I don't tend to say "partner" - this word has the spirit of our marriage.

Female, business executive, 60s:  I generally use "spouse" without having really thought about it.  I agree that "wife" has some very heavy baggage, but among my friends who share a lifestyle that I enjoy, the baggage disappears.

Female, attorney, ~60:  I am an uber feminist [and on the far left of the political spectrum] and this is my opinion:  if you are a woman who marries someone, you are a wife.  Period.  END of sentence. Look it up in the dictionary.

I don't care what the connotations of the term "wife" are:  You bought them, lock stock and barrel when you entered into that relationship.  Re-define away, but don't you dare try to weasel out.  Do you know what this whole "I just don't see myself as a wife" routine smacks of?  It sounds like someone who wants all of the inherent rights and privileges (legal, societal, moral) of that status, with none of the negative implications.  Well, toots—NO.  It just doesn't work that way.

I also happen to think that the term "wife" has plenty of lovely connotations, by the way.   In an era when men (and the culture at large) treat women like disposable sexual objects, it connotes someone special, someone valued and esteemed enough to have been worth entering into a long-term commitment with.  These same connotations apply to the word "husband" in my opinion.

Upon being introduced to someone's heterosexual "partner," I am always tempted to inquire acidly, "And what business are you in?"  Granted, in an era when homosexuals are denied the right to marry, the term "partner" does have a use within that limited context.  When heterosexuals use this term, I just wish they would be honest and say, "We're fucking, but we don't have a commitment" because that is almost always the case.

I also loved being married and I loved saying the word "husband," because I thought (and still think) that it indicates being part of a relationship where two people have decided to cherish each other.  I also found that if a husband doesn't treat you as an equal within that relationship, then it's time to divorce.

Female, faculty member, 60ish:  For convention, it is easier to identify myself as "wife" and xxxx as "husband" because everyone understands those terms.  Do they carry baggage?  Some . . . but I'm comfortable enough in my independence that it doesn't bother me.  Oddly but currently, using the word "partner" implies either a sexual orientation implication (e.g., in gay or lesbian couples) or a strident feminism railing against the status quo (e.g., in married couples.)  What we need is marriage to be legal for all.  Then toss "wife" and "husband" and just go with "partner" for all.  But if you call me Mrs. Xxxx—duck!  (Because that does imply ownership to me.)

Female, faculty member, over 60:  Your friend's point of view makes sense, and I would not really argue with her.  For myself, however, I don't have that emotional take on the word.  I've been working for 45 years to make women and men equal both within and outside of marriage, which means transforming how we understand the nature of the relationship.  Gay marriage is very helpful, actually.  When you can have wife-and-wife and husband-and-husband as well as wife-and-husband, that "I now pronounce you" moment loses some of its hierarchical baggage, don't you think?

Friend B observed that there are problems for the non-married as well.  "I struggle to give ____ a label, particularly when telling a story to people who don't know him.  But the story requires one to say something.  It could be, 'my live-in lover, father figure to my children, partner, significant other person and I went to a movie. . . .'  It is just so f-ing awkward.  I settled on 'partner' as 'significant other' is just too many syllables and seems to be trying too hard."

I concluded some years ago that in my opinion, the state (the government) should be in the business of recognizing civil unions--of whoever wants to have that status--and "marriage" should be left to priests, rabbis, ministers, and so on.  Marriage can be a religious union, sanctified by whatever church one belongs to, but it should be distinct from a union recognized for tax laws, inheritances, hospital visitations, etc.  We all know, however, that that's a political non-starter, so the gay/lesbian community logically seeks the same recognition for their unions that the state gives to heterosexual marriages.  I would do the same in their position and I fully support their efforts to achieve that legal recognition.

Friend B took issue with this. 

I quite disagree on this.  At first blush it makes perfect sense, but by introducing different classes of "unions" one introduces the ability of anyone to discriminate.  We have not done well with "separate but equal."  In my mind there is absolutely nothing that is acceptable except complete equality.  Already one can have any sort of ceremony one wants—hell, I just left LAX, where you can do a drive-up wedding with Elvis hanging out the window officiating.  But it is still a marriage and has the tax, benefits, inheritance, etc., benefits.  Marriage was a term adopted ages ago and it can't go back. You can add religious layers upon it if you are so inclined, but "separate but equal" will not work.

She makes an interesting point.  If we are to continue to use the term "marriage," then I suppose everyone should have the option for it.  Sigh, another good idea shot down.

Given the state of the language, I wrote to Friend A that I am not comfortable referring to Kathy as my "partner."  That means, in my experience, a relationship that's committed, mostly, and may or may not be considered "permanent" by the partners; as I suggested earlier, it often signals "not married" as terms are construed today.  The comments from some of those who responded to my informal survey expressed the same view.  Kathy and I talked about this one night during the time I was exchanging emails; she suggested I introduce her as "I'm her sex slave" or "the one who cooks" or "the person I ride to work with every day."  Among other things.  (Those were not serious, in case that doesn't come across!  We were laughing about them.)  We both agreed that one of the more reprehensible introductions we've both run into is the introduction as "the mother of my children."

Friend B, however, likes "partner" better—as with Friend A—and finds the word more affirming.  "Indeed, we need (due to social norms) terms for people [that provide] context.  I would challenge the term 'partner' not meaning permanent and 'marriage' meaning it is—I can name a dozen marriages (without trying) that are significantly less than permanent either in terms of commitment or duration.  To me, a partner is more about a choice I make every day.  Each day xxxx and I decide that we are still together. There is no legal tangle that binds it."

As Kathy and I were talking, the one thought I had difficulty articulating is that I am old-fashioned enough that I believe the term "marriage" (which it seems we are stuck with, like it or not) means something different from partner or significant other or any other modern descriptors of relationships.  One way for me to explain it—poorly—is that one of the extremely trivial difficulties I had, when suddenly confronted in 2007 with the fact that I was being divorced after nearly 25 years of marriage, was that I could no longer wear a wedding ring.  Yes, dealing with the children and the house and all the accumulated "stuff" from a long marriage and the relationships with friends and family were far larger issues, but I was also saddened by the fact that I had to remove my wedding ring.  I like being married!  I want to have a wife/spouse/lover/life partner/whatever, and at least for old-fashioned me, wearing a wedding ring is a message to myself and the world that I'm in a relationship that is—as much as can be the case—permanent.

I inquired what's wrong with "spouse" as an introduction/reference?  That term doesn't have the same baggage, it seems to me, and on a quick search of dictionary.com, found that it means "to bind oneself, promise solemnly" or "literally, pledged (man, woman)."  That pretty well captures the sentiment I have about Kathy.  (One of the sources notes that the biblical definition of "spouse" only refers to the wife, but that doesn't show up in the other definitions, and I don't think anyone now attaches a specific sex to the word.)

She (Friend A) wrote back, with a view very similar to that of Friend B:

The term "spouse" just doesn't work for me.  I'm actually not quite sure

why. . . .  It seems not to have a deeper meaning that implies all that partner does.  I think of "partner" as someone with whom I'm choosing to intertwine my life—actively choosing.  I think of "spouse" as someone to whom one is legally tied—there may or may not be active choice and/or affection involved.  I agree with you that spouse implies more permanency than partner.  But for me, that's a good thing.  Spouse implies that you're stuck with someone, like it or not.  Partner implies that you want to be with someone.  It seems more affirmative and positive.

In terms of wife . . . perhaps significant in this conversation is that I've done a lot of feminist reading and was raised Catholic. . . .  I am very sensitive to anything that identifies gender.  (The Catholic church has very specific gender roles, as you might know.)  I think there are times to signify gender, certainly, but before I do that, I ask—what's the function of doing that?  For example, when we say "girls and boys" in elementary classrooms, we are reminding/signaling to the kids that there gender is somehow meaningful—even if they didn't think it was.  We are teaching them to separate themselves, or at least take on an identity in particular ways that is dichotomously positioned in relation to the other.  I think of gender as much more fluid than that and don't really like taking a gendered position—unless there is a reason to do so.  So, I don't want to use "wife" as it is a gendered term.

With the married piece . . .  I don't want to claim privilege, though, that gay and lesbian couples don't have.  So, I come down right in the middle --- wedding ring and "partner."  The best I can do at this moment!

Friend B agreed that "spouse is very neutral—but it also is just that, neutral; it is almost sterile.  I think if I ever get married [again] I could get my mind around 'spouse.'  I like it because it achieves the gender- and power-neutral term that would accurately reflect the relationship, but it would also be accurate, meaning, 'we are married.'  It also sort of has this 'thud' to it—not a lot of spark, more duty, obligation."  I agree about "thud."

Because all of these exchanges were going on with people who are at least 40, and mostly in their 50s and 60s, I asked Krystin to contact her married friends and ask them what terms they use.  I was surprised; of the dozen or so who responded, all but one said "husband" and "wife" (the one reported that she and her spouse use "partner").   Krystin said that in her opinion, she and her friends don't see the baggage that history attaches to "wife."  They didn't grow up with it—her friends are largely from professional families—and the parents had relationships that seemed fairly equal, so "wife" doesn't mean anything more than the female half of a marriage.

It may be that usage will evolve in the direction of "partner" (although the anecdotal evidence from Krystin hints that may not be happening).  But at least in the way the world uses language now, the term "partner" used by itself just does not seem satisfactory to me.  I like the solution described by my friend Karen Seashore:  wife and partner/husband and partner.  That picks up the "married" concept, the legal/religious commitment, as well as the active, affirming sense of "partner" that my two 40ish women friends say is a better descriptor of the relationship.  As Kathy points out, the term "partner" also implies equality more than the traditional terms do.  Now, I'll have to see whether I'll actually start to introduce Kathy in social settings as "my wife and partner."  I can imagine that it could elicit a surprised, or amused, or quizzical look from the person to whom I am introducing her.  I do know for certain, however, that after this, whenever I use the term "wife" to introduce her, I'll trip over the word for a microsecond before I utter it!

I can also imagine the reaction of the more conservative evangelical/fundamentalist religious denominations to a message from the media or from the ether that they should not use the terms husband and wife any longer but instead should use partner.  Yikes!

A postscript:  A few months after I wrote the foregoing, a columnist for Slate wrote about her objection to the term "wife" as she approached marriage (and her betrothed's objection to "husband").  She recited the history of the terms, implying ownership and master of a household, and opinions from several that reflect the ones I reported here.  She took a look at other possibilities—partner, spouse, etc.—and found them wanting.  She concluded, one might imagine mournfully, "as my future — let me give this a shot – husband says, 'I expect to use them [the terms husband and wife], because I just don't want to sound like a weirdo.'"

MISS, n. A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate they are in the market. Miss, Misses (Mrs.) and Mister (Mr.) are the three most distinctly disagreeable words in the language, in sound and sense. Two are corruptions of Mistress, the other of Master. In the general abolition of social titles in this our country they miraculously escaped to plague us. If we must have them let us be consistent and give one to the unmarried man. I venture to suggest Mush, abbreviated to Mh. (One suspects Bierce would be pleased at the substitution of Ms. in later usage.)

            The foregoing friendly debate is indirectly related to the question of the children's last name.  Even though women in American society, when they marry, often retain the last name they grew up with, as Gail Collins (I think) pointed out in a column in the New York Times a few years back, it's really a choice between two men's last names:  their husband's or their father's.  Even in Iceland, which uses both patronymics and metronymics, as in Oddný Ósk Sverrisdóttir, Sverri was her father.  (That is a real name; Sverrisdottir was one of the researchers working on ancient bones in Sweden to look at the evolution of lactase tolerance, research that Professor Marlene Zuk reported on, to which I will turn later.)

            There are rare instances of parents giving the children altogether new last names.  I knew a couple who did so:   The mother was xxx Yoshikawa, the father was xxx Christiansen; the last name of their two children was Christikawa.  In the case of most of the couples with whom I am familiar, however, where the woman kept her last name, the children carry the father's last name.

            The little I've thought about this, there doesn't seem to be any easy solution barring the Christikawa example.  In the U.S. and Western Europe and their progeny around the globe, any last family name a woman takes will, at this point, be a patronymic—because we've only used the male's name for the family for centuries.  The Icelandic practice could be altered in the U.S. to be both patronymic and metronymic:  my daughter Krystin could be Krystin Patsdottir and Elliott could be Elliott Garyson (I believe this practice is used by some in Iceland).  If Krystin had a daughter Alice she would be Alice Krystinsdottir, and if Elliott had a son Albert he would be Albert Elliottson.  If Krystin were married to Alfred, and they had a son Alan, he would be Alan Alfredson.  Likewise, if Elliott were married to Augusta and they had a daughter Ann, she would be Ann Augustasdottir.  If the "Patsdottir" were treated as a last name, however, the practice would be a departure from Icelandic naming, because (with a few exceptions) in Iceland people do not have last names and are addressed by what we consider the "first" name.  Krystin Patsdottir would never be addressed as "Ms. Patsdottir," she would always be addressed as "Krystin" or "Krystin Patsdottir."

            I suppose that because names are given for purposes of conversation and communication, and identity and taxes, any system works.  Some of them, however, sure could screw up genealogical research.  I wonder if, except as a check on identity, the Social Security system and the IRS rely on the Social Security Number more than the name.  Maybe in a few decades we'll all just have long numbers and no names, and use a short version of the numbers to address people.  "Hi, 46.  How's your daughter 57?"  And if you happen to know two or more 46s, what would be the problem?  We all probably know more than one Bob or Kristen or Eric; unless they're both in your presence at the same time, saying "hi, Bob" would be no different from saying "hi, 46."  And if they were both in your presence, you'd just go to the next digit!  Or children can have one of their parent's numbers plus a digit; their children would have that number plus one digit, and so on, and in 100 generations the identifying number would be over 100 digits long.  That system might not work.

This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.  (Parker)

BELLADONNA: In Italian, a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison.  A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.

I have sometimes wondered how the biblical literalists handle some of the laws laid down in Leviticus.  Paul Kedrowski, technology entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and academic, has commented that "Leviticus is best understood as Judge Judy for desert tribes."  That may be a good way to approach it.

There's a debate in Christianity about whether the laws of Leviticus and other parts of the Old Testament still apply.  Some argue that the coming of Christ and the pronouncements that appear in the New Testament supersede the provisions of Old Testament/Mosaic law (or at least some of it).  Others maintain that the provisions of both still all apply.  I don't have a dog in that fight, but I confess that it's a puzzle for me to figure out how those who don't believe the New supersedes the Old can follow some of the laws.

One question that has also been raised is whether these laws apply to anyone other than Levites, the group that generally performed priestly functions.

There are a number of prohibitions in Leviticus that surely many if not most of even the most devout and literalist Christians do not follow (this is not a complete list):  eating fat, eating blood (of which there is considerable in steak, for example), reaping to the very edges of a field, picking up grapes that have fallen in your  vineyard, holding back the wages of an employee overnight, mixing fabrics in clothing, cross-breeding animals, planting different seeds in the same field, practicing divination or seeking omens (one might think that this would include astrology), trimming your beard, cutting your hair at the sides, getting tattoos, and not standing in the presence of the elderly.  Boy, there are a lot of people in trouble nowadays just because of the ban on tattoos, forget the others!  And another large group is in trouble for wearing cotton-poly or wool-poly clothing.  I personally am in trouble if only because I do trim my beard.

Some prohibitions, of course, Christians and most everyone else on the planet generally believe should be honored:  having sex with your mother, having sex with your father's wife, having sex with your sister or granddaughter or half-sister or biological aunt or daughter-in-law or sister-in-law, marrying your wife's sister while your wife still lives (I think we call this bigamy), stealing, lying, defrauding a neighbor, spreading slander, and so on.  Those strictures, however, aren't necessarily limited to Christendom or places governed by Judaic law; seems to me they're pretty common to much of human civilization.

Presumably most thoughtful Christians take Leviticus—and other parts of the bible—as allegory and metaphor intended to provide guidance for leading a life that subsequently makes one worthy of entry into heaven.  One can inquire, however, whether those who claim to be literalists have a fully-functioning brain, because not only do some of these laws make no sense, in some cases there are outright contradictions in different places in the bible, so one literally cannot follow the literal language of the book.

In most developed nations with a largely Judeo-Christian history these matters would not be worthy of worry, but in the U. S. people who claim to be literalists seem to get elected to office in some places and bring their wingnut views into the development of American public policy.  To the disadvantage of all of us.

One of the other challenges to literalist interpretations, according to Professor Timothy Beale at Case Western Reserve University, is that "'Accurate' is a problematic word when talking about biblical translations.  We don't have a single original Hebrew or Greek source for any of the books of the Bible, let alone the Bible as a whole.  There are many different manuscripts.  The people who produce these translations work in large committees of language and biblical scholars.  Some are Christian, some are Jewish and some aren't religious at all. They sort through the manuscript evidence and decide which texts to use and translate."  Beale, who teaches bible studies at a secular university and who's written a number of books about the bible, also points out that there are now about 6000 editions of the bible printed each year.  Beale, in an article in Five Books, noted an example of some of the difficulties these scholars encounter when translating the ancient Greek to modern English:  "It becomes extremely hard to know what's behind it.  'My cup runneth over' becomes 'you blow me away.'"

See also Sandel's comment, cited previously.

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing.
And he vows his passion is,
Infinite, undying.
Lady make note of this --
One of you is lying.  (Parker)

PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Although I am usually not comfortable being the center of attention (I suppose one can argue that this annual letter is all about me, but I try to make it not so), I cannot let go by without comment the February dinner hosted by my faculty colleagues celebrating my 25 years in my position.  I will not ever do this again in any of these letters, but this year, only, I'm going to include a few of the extraordinarily kind comments that people made at (or on) the occasion—because some of them are funny (or at least worth a chuckle) as well as complimentary.  I try actively to avoid tooting my own horn because I think doing so is bad form and bad taste (and in the case of many who do it, also inaccurate—the people doing so often have significantly less to toot about than they think they do).  Before I get there, however--

Starting down this line of thought led me to contemplation of Lake Wobegon, because I read recently that the "Lake Wobegon effect," per Wikipedia (although I actually first read about it in some national news journal), is "a natural human tendency to overestimate one's capabilities, [and it] is named after the town.  The characterization of the fictional location, where 'all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average,' has been used to describe a real and pervasive human tendency to overestimate one's achievements and capabilities in relation to others."  I realized, when I read that, that I have apparently been misinterpreting Garrison Keillor's message.  As I've listened to A Prairie Home Companion and the "news from Lake Wobegon" over the years, it seemed to me that Keillor often spoke of his characters with their Scandinavian backgrounds as shy and retiring, not ones to brag or boast, and in fact people who are embarrassed if they are complimented too much.  So really almost the opposite of the Lake Wobegon effect described in Wikipedia (and, apparently, elsewhere).

I tried out my interpretation of Keillor's message on a few friends.  They were as surprised as I was at the characterization of the "Lake Wobegon effect" and largely had the same interpretation of Keillor's stories that I do. 

One of my long-time friends (and very thoughtful faculty member) wrote to me:  "For what it's worth, I think, being Scandinavian myself (and surrounded with such in family, friends, and acquaintances my entire life), I do believe that Keillor's characterization that Scandinavians are shy and retiring and embarrassed by compliments is correct. That comment pertains to attributes of themselves."

Another wrote:  "Now it's more a mantra than a specific piece of dialog, so I suppose the question should be, 'How did Garrison Keillor first employ this line?'  I suppose that I could imagine that it was NOT used by any individual Lake Wobegoner to describe him or herself (which would indeed be taking on airs) but, rather, might reflect the polite manner in which they would tend to talk about neighbors to an outsider.  It IS something of an anomaly within the Lake Wobegon gestalt."

One faculty friend wrote that "what's wrong here (Wikipedia) is to use (1) the comically hyperbolic and gender-reversed description of the town for (2) "a real and pervasive human tendency to overestimate one's achievements and capabilities in relation to others."  This is incoherent at best.  Someone (even other than the author of the article, though I suspect the author invented the misnomer) may have named a universal (?) individual tendency after the fictional town, but does it make sense to try to force such a fit?

Another long-time friend on the faculty wrote to me that "the first two phrases are, to me, about self-deprecation:  the women in rural Minnesota are probably stronger than they would admit, and the men are probably more handsome than they would state.  (So, here, you are right--Wikipedia has got it wrong.)  But, of course, the beauty of those two phrases is that they are the inverse of the usual claims.  So maybe it is a message about gender equality.

"The third phrase, about the children, can be taken several ways--which was probably intentional. It could be the (correct) statement that Minnesota children score better on national tests than children from most other states.  Or it could be that all of the parents believe that their children are above average (which would seem to be in accord with the Wikipedia view)."

Another long-time friend, who is also Scandinavian and knows a lot about it and its history, agreed with me. 

I'm with you!  The main thrust in Lake Wobegon is not, I think, overestimation of one's capabilities or achievements—in spite of the standard description about men, women, and children.  In fact, that description seems a little misleading when you think about the people Garrison describes.  It's interesting to contrast this supposed spirit with a spirit that has a Scandinavian name, and is supposed to be characteristic of Scandinavians.  It is called "The Law of Jante."  "The Law of Jante" is named after a fictitious town, Jante, in Denmark described in a novel by Aksel Sandemose, A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. The "Law" has ten parts - not coincidentally, I'm sure.

Here is a list from Wikipedia under Sandemose:

The ten rules state:

1.  You're not to think you are anything special.

2.  You're not to think you are as good as us.

3.  You're not to think you are smarter than us.

4.  You're not to convince yourself that you are better than us.

5.  You're not to think you know more than us.

6.  You're not to think you are more important than us.

7.  You're not to think you are good at anything.

8.  You're not to laugh at us.

9.  You're not to think anyone cares about you.

10.  You're not to think you can teach us anything.

But, I don't think that Garrison is trying to represent the "Jante Law" either. There is a kind of jaunty, innocent self-assurance in Lake Wobegon that seems quite alien to the "Jante Law," but hidden behind shyness and (maybe false) humility.  Lake Wobegon really has its own ethos, it seems.  And you have to think of it in terms of an underlying ethos of innocent confidence and a surface ethos of shyness and—as I said—(maybe false) humility.

            One Norwegian friend commented puckishly to me that "I always interpreted it the same way you did.  And I think it is Keillor's intent.  Of course, I might be falling prey to the human tendency to overestimate my power of interpretation.  Query:  Is the proponent of that assertion about human behavior (overestimating one's abilities) someone who is unjustifiably confident about the validity of the assertion?"

A couple of other comments from friends were that "I have always thought about it like you although I'd have to put much more energy into it to think about why" and "I think that Garrison is having it both ways in Lake W.:  irrationally modest folks being irrationally proud of their distinction—ingredients, actually of Minnesota Nice."

A view came from a faculty friend, not Scandinavian and not Lutheran, and a long way from Minnesota.  "It is not at all surprising that Scandinavians in the upper midwest would take umbrage at the near universal definition of Keillor's "Lake Wobegon" effect as correctly stated in Wikipedia.  As you and your friends clearly state, Scandinavians are reserved, understated and humble, not at all like Keillor's characterization of Lake Wobegon's men, women and children.  I believe that Keillor was pulling the proverbial pant legs of Scandinavian culture by his statement about Lake Wobegon's inhabitants which was and continues to be meant in jest. . . .  I have listened to 'the news from Lake Wobegon' many times and you are absolutely correct—the stories are completely contrary to the "Lake Wobegon effect" we have been discussing.  [I] contend that Keillor is pulling your legs with the statement about the people of Lake Wobegon that always ends the 'news' segment."

The upshot, in my judgment, is that while there wasn't exactly consensus, there was near-universal agreement that the "Lake Wobegon effect" is not reflective of the personalities of the characters in the stories. What is misleading, I think, is Keillor's phrase to describe the town, which is very different from the stories he tells. I suspect the phrase was simply good humor while the stories reflect his understanding of the culture.  Or in the words of a colleague, "the name CAN be appropriated, as it has been, for the purpose, and apparently by professionals of a sort, but one's chauvinism rises to say that the effect owes nothing to the people of the town and everything to the comic characterization."

Another example of this "misuse" of the "Lake Wobegon effect" appeared on the Huffington Post in September.  A colleague at the University of Southern California, Bill Tierney, wrote that "Garrison Keillor has long told stories about Lake Wobegon, his mythical home out there on the edge of the prairie 'where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.'  California State University is inventing its own Lake Wobegon in dealing with entering freshmen who need to take remedial classes in math and English."  The point he was making (CSU decided to lower the SAT score that identified a student as needing remedial work) is beside the point here, and one that can be legitimately debated by experts in education.   I wrote to Bill and teased him about the use of the phrase, and told him that the locals here didn't think it was accurate.

BIRTH, n. The first and direst of all disasters. As to the nature of it there appears to be no uniformity. Castor and Pollux were born from the egg. Pallas came out of a skull. Galatea was once a block of stone. Peresilis, who wrote in the tenth century, avers that he grew up out of the ground where a priest had spilled holy water. It is known that Arimaxus was derived from a hole in the earth, made by a stroke of lightning. Leucomedon was the son of a cavern in Mount Aetna, and I have myself seen a man come out of a wine cellar.

In any case, it is Keillor's characterization of the vaguely Scandinavian, self-deprecatory culture that I grew up in and around, which I think he captures accurately in his monologues, that leads me to eschew self-congratulation and too much self-esteem, and hence my apology for departing from my own practice.  So back to the dinner, for a bit.

Several of my long-time colleagues stood up and spoke for a few minutes after the social hour and dinner.  They all made remarks that were humorous but also warm and more congratulatory than I deserved.  One of them, a talented singer as well as a distinguished professor of Chemistry, revised the words to Lancelot's song "C'est Moi" in Camelot and sang his version—new verses for the entire song.  (Some of this is a little inside baseball, but you get the idea.)

Governance! Governance!  [Camelot!  Camelot!  and so on]

From far away you heard its call

Governance! Governance!

And here you came to give your all

You know in your soul what's best for every chair

Whether SCaFA, Research, SCEP, or FCC

. . .

But where in the world

Is there in the world

A man so *extraordineer*?

C'est toi, c'est toi, Monsieur Gary E.

'Tis you, I freely declaim

With wit and verve, with humor and nerve

C'est toi, 'tis you, the same

And so on. 

The same Professor Cramer tweeted about the event:

Christopher J Cramer @ChemProfCramer Off now to honor Dr. Gary Engstrand for 25 yrs service to the #UMN Senate. Bleeds maroon and gold, sneezes policy, irreplaceable. #UMNProud

"Sneezes policy," huh?  Never knew that before.  Maybe that can be the epitaph on my tombstone. 

One of my long-time colleagues, a former boss and friend, now retired and living out of state (who obviously was not going to come to Minnesota for a dinner), did write to me that "my tribute can come only by a simple e-mail message!  Gary, you have been a tremendous asset and inspiration to me and generations of faculty and administrators.  You are a reincarnation, of course, of the Renaissance Man!  Nobody but a Renaissance Man could write Christmas letters like yours."  (And I can see Kathy rolling her eyes, "no, no, don't encourage him!")  I'm not quite sure I live up to his description—in fact, quite sure that I do not—but it is nice to know I've been an asset to somebody.  As for being an inspiration, I might respond to him that I'm an inspiration to people to brevity in writing, I being the example of the opposite, a model not to be mimicked.

One faculty member, who I've not even known that well, told me that "few institutions have an individual who combines competence, reliability, efficiency, diplomacy, humility and a masterful understanding of organizational history in the service of the organization as you give to us. . . . I have come to more fully appreciate all you do for the University in general and the faculty in particular."  After the dinner, one colleague wrote to me that "it was a great pleasure to honor someone who has done so much for our university."

One thing these unexpected accolades did was reconfirm for me how little we sometimes know about the role we play in life.  I frankly was startled at all these kind words, some of which were entirely unsolicited.  (Yes, of course I know that people have to say nice things at a celebratory event, and even exaggerate their compliments for such rituals.  Even through the social niceties, however, there came a glint of genuine approbation, which I appreciated.)  But I really had no idea that people thought these things.

So much for patting myself on the back.  It was back to real life after the dinner and so it is in this letter as well.

OK, a few more lines.  Every year the senior faculty committee of the University has dinner with the members of the University's governing body, the Board of Regents; I also attend.  At this year's dinner, the president gave a few words of welcome and then singled me out for part of my work; he said something to the effect that none of those present will ever work at any other organization where the records of committee meetings are so interestingly written, detailed, and convey so much information.  Or something like that.  The room gave me a round of applause.  I was startled; I think of the committee minutes as a rather routine and hum-drum part of my job, really more a source of news for the academic community than a formal record.  I have known, from past conversations with Board members, that they do read and learn from them, but this applause business was a little embarrassing.  After all, I live in the land of the real Lake Wobegon, not that of the so-called Lake Wobegon effect.

BAIT, n. A preparation that renders the hook more palatable. The best kind is beauty.

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.  (Parker)

            Krystin announced one Friday night that she was going over to a friend's place on Sunday; the young woman friend was involved in partners.com.  We thought this sounded like another online dating site, but no, it is akin to Avon or Pampered Chef, where one has items for sale at a "party" in one's home and invites friends.  What was for sale was "marital aids" or "relationship aids" such as creams, jellies, handcuffs, and whatever.  Krystin said she was just going to provide support to her friend and she certainly wasn't going to buy anything.

            Kathy and I suggested that maybe we should come along and find a few items for ourselves.  Krystin blanched and said she'd stay home then.  Kathy thought the handcuffs might be fun.  I think Krystin wanted to leave the room.  Kathy finally told her that everyone her age (and younger) just can't imagine their parents in bed, not to worry about it, and no, we weren't going to attend the event.  But we did have a little fun at Krystin's expense J

APOLOGIZE, v.i. To lay the foundation for a future offence.

Gratitude—the meanest and most snivelling attribute in the world.  (Parker)

            Because Kathy had never seen me without it, I shaved off my beard last spring.  Doing so reminded me once again how much I hate shaving and how nicked and cut my face gets because my beard is like a Brillo pad.  I let it immediately grow back.  Elliott wouldn't go along with the plan to shave his off so we could see what he looks like without a beard.

            What was funny was the way people reacted.  3-4 of my friends/colleagues asked if I had new glasses.  Only one immediately recognized that the beard was gone.  Everyone agreed, alas, that I looked considerably younger without the beard, which is not surprising because my beard, unlike my hair, is almost entirely white.  But Kathy and I agreed—other opinions are irrelevant!—that even so, I look better with the beard than without.

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.  (Parker)

WEATHER, n. The climate of the hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle.

April 19, 2013

Thoughts for a Sunshiny Morning

It costs me never a stab nor squirm

To tread by chance upon a worm.

"Aha, my little dear," I say,

"Your clan will pay me back some day."  (Parker)

EDIBLE, adj.  Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.

I would say that I continued to be puzzled by the gun debate after the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, but then, silly me, I continuously forget that people are uninterested in the facts.  (Cf. Buffett, "what the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.")  Australia had a tragic shooting in1996; the Australian parliament shortly thereafter passed the first sharply restrictive gun laws in that country's history—and the homicide rate from firearms fell through the floor. 

            The Brady Center statistics tell the tale:  "In a single year guns killed 17 in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in Britain, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada and 9,484 in the United States."  Even taking into account the population differences, the gap is enormous.  In 2010, the U.S. had 10.2 firearms homicides per 100,000 population.  Australia had 1.05.  As for the rest of the developed world, a sampling:  Argentina, 5.65; Switzerland, 3.84; Costa Rica, 3.32, France, 3.00, Canada, 2.13; Greece, 1.5;  Denmark, 1.45; Italy, 1.28; Germany 1.1; India, 0.93; Netherlands, 0.46; UK 0.25; Japan, 0.07.  Most of them, I believe, have strict gun-control laws.  There are countries with more firearms homicides, not ones we'd like to be compared with.

There is the argument that citizens need to have guns to fight in case the federal government runs amok.  Yeah, right, their little arms caches are going to be effective against all the weaponry of the U.S. armed forces.  If we're facing in this country a military takeover, I'd say we'll have a lot bigger problems than fighting back with a few assault weapons and handguns.  I would say that the American cause would have been lost if the military is attacking U.S. citizens.

There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.  (Parker)

ACCOUNTABILITY, n. The mother of caution.

          A friend of mine at the University commented at a social event that when he retired he was going to do two things:  become an historian and figure out his relationship with God and the universe.  That comment led me to realize that for over 40 years I've basically been thinking about two questions:  (1) the optimal organization of a society and (2) religion.  The second one is not for this letter; my conclusion about the first is that no one has the right answer but the best solution that imperfect human beings have come up with is the Scandinavian model.  Ample experience demonstrates that the society that puts a high value on the common good is the one that is best for all its citizens.  The experiment has been done, repeatedly, and the evidence is available, even though many in American life simply deny it. 

            We have sometimes mused that if it were not for the fact that doing so would take us too far from our children and our friends, Kathy and I would think about retiring to Denmark or Sweden.  A friend of mine on the far liberal end of the political spectrum wrote to me last winter that "I'd love to move to Ireland, Costa Rica, etc.  I feel so much less affinity for the US than I did when I was young and that makes me sad."  As with my friend, sometimes my frustration with this country leads me to think I'd rather live elsewhere.  These sentiments reminded me of one of Mencken's assertions that I included in my letter last year, one that struck home with me:  "The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic.  He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched."  Thus is raised the question of loyalty to my country and "patriotism," the latter of which for many has a justifiable malodor about it given the abuse to which it has been put in service of such things as wars in Iraq and attacks on civil liberties.

            Bierce's Devil's Dictionary contains this definition: "Patriotism, n.  Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.  In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel.  With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first."

           

            Many of us perhaps recall making up our really full address when we were young; for me, now, for example it would be

Longfellow Neighborhood

Minneapolis

Hennepin County

Minnesota

United States

Earth

Universe

The last entry is of course silly and the penultimate one is unnecessary because it's true for every living human being.  The question is which of those addresses commands loyalty and which commands none.  I suspect most of us have a certain "home towner" attitude about our neighborhood and city.  I have no attachment whatever to Hennepin County but I do to Minnesota and to the United States.  Where things get dicey, in the eyes of some, is when one also expresses attachment to the planet or humanity in general, especially when that commitment may exceed or compete with loyalty to one's country.

            Many of us are familiar with Edward Everett Hale's short story "The Man Without a Country," "the story of American Army lieutenant Philip Nolan, who renounces his country during a trial for treason and is consequently sentenced to spend the rest of his days at sea without so much as a word of news about the United States" and who later came to regret his decision.  (The story was written in 1863, published in the Atlantic, and intended to boost support at home for the Union cause.)  Quite apart from sentimental reasons, one needs to have some country to call home, at least in the developed world, for the purpose of health care, retirement benefits, a place to have a residence, and so on.  The more powerful reasons for most of us, I suspect, are emotional, a commitment to the place of one's birth and upbringing.  Some move, some renounce their country of birth, but the vast majority do not.  One can ask, however, from a coldly rational point of view, whether the political configuration on a particular piece of geography should have one's loyalty simply because one happened to be born there.

            Conor Cruise O'Brien, writing about the rise of nationalism during the French Revolution, included this interesting footnote in his chapter of the book I was reading (The Permanent Revolution:  The French Revolution and its Legacy 1789-1989):  "It may be held of course that, if belief in a personal God is gone, the logical object of human devotion should be humanity at large, not a particular nation or state.  Unfortunately, humanity at large does not seem capable of evoking such emotions, in most humans.  The nation/state does evoke them, more dynamically, and also more destructively, than anything else has yet done."

One doesn't have to do much reading in history to know how effectively political figures use nationalism.  One only needs think of Hitler as the starting example.  But the appeals to nationalism are used across the board, by all political systems, to justify all sorts of actions, frequently actions that subsequently turn out to be ill-founded, unwise, that lead to battles or war and many innocent people being killed.  So while I am probably as guilty as many of being a nationalist (because I have to believe that by and large the United States wants to do right in the world, even though it doesn't always do so), I temper my nationalism with a large grain of salt.  Moreover, when humanity faces the global threat of climate change, for example, nationalism doesn't seem to be a very effective response.

INNATE, adj. Natural, inherent—as innate ideas, that is to say, ideas that we are born with, having had them previously imparted to us. The doctrine of innate ideas is one of the most admirable faiths of philosophy, being itself an innate idea and therefore inaccessible to disproof, though Locke foolishly supposed himself to have given it "a black eye." Among innate ideas may be mentioned the belief in one's ability to conduct a newspaper, in the greatness of one's country, in the superiority of one's civilization, in the importance of one's personal affairs and in the interesting nature of one's diseases.

"Coolidge is dead."  How could they tell?  (Parker)

I have decided that I am opposed to serving copious hors d'oeuvres (except when the invitation is for cocktails and hors d'oeuvres).  After hosting several dinner parties when the guests indulged in the hors d'oeuvres like they hadn't eaten in a month, and were then too full to eat much of the dinner that we (i.e., Kathy) had prepared, I concluded that we should offer minimal food before the meal.  Do people starve themselves before a dinner party?  And then risk fainting if they don't eat much fast?

On the other hand, I have also noticed that frequently there are large portions of the hors d'oeuvres left over—as well as large portions of the entre and other elements of a dinner.  Shortly after I wrote the preceding paragraph I coincidentally happened to read an estimate (I have no idea where—New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, who knows) that half of the prepared food in the U.S. is thrown away.  I thought to myself when I read the statistic that it was probably close to right—all I have to do is think about all the restaurant food I've not eaten and that wasn't suitable to bring home.  I think I've been responsible for the discarding of more French fries than most people in the Western Hemisphere.

So my solution is to serve darn few hors d'oeuvres and small portions to guests.  We'll just offer seconds.  If there are leftovers, we can eat them the next day.  It just gripes me that (1) there's so much food waste (and money wasted) and (2) some guests don't have the good sense to eat lightly before a meal that took much time and thought to prepare.  (This dismay is one reason I felt terrible when Kathy and I went to dinner at our friends the Collinses after I'd eaten a too-large meal mid-day at a funeral.  There was a superb meal and I could barely eat any of it.  I am still mad at myself for that.)  One caveat to my gripe, I suppose is that (2) doesn't obtain in the case of people who have large-capacity stomachs who can eat many hors d'oeuvres AND a full meal.  I do know a couple of such people—and they're skinny.

EAT, v.i. To perform successively (and successfully) the functions of mastication, humectation, and deglutition. "I was in the drawing-room, enjoying my dinner," said Brillat-Savarin, beginning an anecdote. "What!" interrupted Rochebriant; "eating dinner in a drawing-room?" "I must beg you to observe, monsieur," explained the great gastronome, "that I did not say I was eating my dinner, but enjoying it. I had dined an hour before."

OVEREAT, v. To dine.

There was a serious omission from last year's letter.  While I do not intend to let my annual missive become a collection of obituaries, the death of some of the people who have played a significant role in my life warrants notice.  I neglected to note the passing of Elmer Kemppainen, one of my dear friends.

I first met Elmer, at the time principal of Robbinsdale-Cooper High School, when I subbed in a men's bridge group that originated in the University's athletic department in the early 1970s.  I later joined the group permanently (which still plays, although with considerable turnover in membership), and shortly afterwards, in the summer of 1977, invited Elmer and his wife Ginny to an evening's bridge game with four other couples that evolved into a 6-couple bridge group (that also still plays).  Elmer retired from the men's group a few years ago, and Elmer and Ginny retired from the couples group as well, but I played bridge a couple of dozen times per year with Elmer for over 30 years.  We sorely miss them in the couples group and the men's group—but we have been delighted that Ginny moves to the Twin Cities for the winter and substitutes in our couples bridge group that she and Elmer helped start and in which they played for so many years.

  Perhaps as important, Elmer introduced me (and several others) to the game of, and the finer points of, bocce ball, that delightful game invented by Italians and played widely by Finns on the Iron Range in Minnesota.

Elmer passed away in the summer of 2012.  Several of us from the bridge group drove up to Virginia, MN, for the funeral.  Elmer was one of the fiercest but also affable bridge competitors I knew, sometimes provoking mildly withering glances or amusedly skeptical comments from Ginny when he was perhaps competing a bit too much in the couples group.  But he was at the same time a man of great good humor and extraordinarily considerate of others.  The world is always a little worse off when people like Elmer leave it.

MULTITUDE, n. A crowd; the source of political wisdom and virtue. In a republic, the object of the statesman's adoration. "In a multitude of counsellors there is wisdom," saith the proverb. If many men of equal individual wisdom are wiser than any one of them, it must be that they acquire the excess of wisdom by the mere act of getting together. Whence comes it? Obviously from nowhere—as well say that a range of mountains is higher than the single mountains composing it. A multitude is as wise as its wisest member if it obey him; if not, it is no wiser than its most foolish.

I went to a convent in New York and was fired finally for my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.  (Parker)

Like all of us in the information age, I have more passwords for websites than I could ever possibly remember.  So I have them all written down, cryptically, on a Word document that I have to go to at least once per week.  A good friend of mine posted this on Facebook; it's about right.

Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed be doing at that moment.  (Benchley)

A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika.  (Parker)

Every year Kathy and I have a few folks over for meatball soup, basically a vegetable soup with meatballs spiced following directions from my great-aunt Inez, who got the recipe from her mother, my great-grandmother Inger Kjestine Larsen (Jensen).  Last year I felt virtuous because I bought all the vegetables at one of the local coops, so they were all organic.  On the whole, however, I am skeptical about the virtue of organic produce because there's no good evidence that it tastes better or is any better for you or even that there is any significant difference in pesticide levels and the corresponding hypothesized (but not demonstrated) threat to one's health.

Every man owes it to himself (and to his friends) to get away entirely alone in an isolated shack every so often, if only to find out just what bad company he can be.  (Benchley) 

ALONE, adj. In bad company.

            My general observation—about which there is probably piles of research for which I haven't looked—is that people prefer green to the "built environment" (as the Brits put it).  We rush to our lake places to be surrounded by green (and water), we prefer larger suburban tracts with trees and bushes and gardens, we like parks and parkways in our towns and cities, we plant trees and bushes, and so on.   The highest-price homes in any metropolitan area are those on water and/or facing/adjacent to green space.  There are a few who really like to live in the urban center city, in the high rises or the townhomes, and obviously millions do so—willingly or not—in New York and Chicago and lots of other places in the U.S. and around the world (Seoul, Tokyo, to name a couple).  But on the whole, it seems to me, most of us prefer to be surrounded by greenery.  I reflect on this every once in a while when I am walking to work:  I walk across campus, up the University's Mall (about two acres of green space and trees surrounded by buildings) while a number of my friends who work downtown never get away from buildings or concrete/asphalt once they get to their parking spot.  I never object to going downtown for whatever purpose—to eat, theater, etc.—but it's never as comfortable as our green and flower-laden backyard or at a lake.

           

            The unconscious thought behind that musing about green space was that human beings evolved in an environment of plants and animals and water and green and that we somehow still long for those kinds of settings because they are part of our genetic heritage.  That is, of course, a mishmash of assumptions for which I had no theory or data.  I found myself at least indirectly rebutted by an article that appeared about the same time I wrote the foregoing paragraph, "Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Past" in the Chronicle of Higher Education in February.  The author, Marlene Zuk, a professor of evolutionary biology—I only learned at the end of the article that she's at the University of Minnesota—reports on her experiences working in a lab in Sweden with biologists analyzing the bones of humans and animals from thousands of years ago to look for changes in genes that allowed those early humans to digest lactose (the sugar in milk) even after weaning, despite the fact that all other mammals lose that ability and dairy products cause stomach upset.  A few groups of humans, however, especially those from northern Europe and some in Africa, continue to be able to consume dairy products all their lives.  (Heavens, what would life be like without being able to eat cheese???  And for those of us who love it and have drunk it all our lives, milk???)

 

            And why do we care, Professor Zuk asked?  What the research is showing is that the evolutionary change that allows some humans to consume dairy only occurred about 4,000 years ago.  And what that means, she writes, is that the research "is revolutionizing our ideas about the speed at which our evolution has occurred, and has made us question the idea that we are stuck with ancient genes, and ancient bodies, in a modern environment."  She goes on to comment that the long-standing assumption that evolutionary changes take place over eons means we may "feel that humans, who have gone from savanna to asphalt in a mere few thousand years, must be caught out by the pace of modern life."  We don't think we fit in modern society because we aren't that far removed from early hominids in Africa; in evolutionary terms as commonly understood, it's only been a few seconds of time since we moved from a nomadic life to the age of cell phones and landing on the moon.  We assume we are afflicted in ways that our distant ancestors never were (AIDS, obesity, PSTD, high blood pressure, etc.) and that we'd all be better off if we lived more like those ancestors did, in more "natural" settings.  "Our bodies and minds evolved under a particular set of circumstances, so the reasoning goes, and in changing those circumstances without allowing our bodies time to evolve in response, we have wreaked the havoc that is modern life."

 

            That, Professor Zuk says, is balderdash, a "paleofantasy."  First, our environments have been constantly changing as we have evolved, so to a certain extent we've always been out of synch with it.  Second, she points out that humans have evolved only recently to function at high altitudes and developed a resistance to malaria.  Evolution can work (relatively) fast, or slow, or in between, and one cannot assume that it has suddenly stopped working on human beings.  (As Elliott comments every once in awhile, when he sees or learns of a young person—or animal—doing something that leads to them dying by reason of their own stupidity, that takes them out of the gene pool.)  Third, what makes us think that we're more out of tune with our environment than our predecessors were?  Zuk asks:  "Would our cave-dwelling forebears have felt nostalgia for the days before they were bipedal, when life was good and the trees were a comfort zone? . . .  Were, then, those early hunter-gatherers convinced that swiping a gazelle from the lion that caught it was superior to that new-fangled business of running it down yourself?"

 

            Zuk goes on to point out that biologists are learning that many human genes have changed quickly—over the last few thousand years—while some have remained the same for millions of years (genes that we share in common with yeast and earthworms, for example).  In some species, evolutionary changes are occurring in a matter of years (where a generation is only a year or so). 

 

            Perhaps some of us have evolved into homo urbanus, city dwellers who live entirely surrounded by glass, concrete, and steel and who walk on nothing but carpeting and tile.  So, Gary concludes about himself in dismay, he may be evolutionarily behind his friends and colleagues who thrive in the concrete jungle, homo sapiens who's been left behind by homo urbanus.  Now I can't walk up the Mall without feeling like I'm in a genetic backwater  L

 

            I cannot forebear from reporting one of the reader comments in response to the Zuk article:  "It has been argued with a fair degree of plausibility that evolutionary inheritance helps explain why men have spent such vast sums building golf courses, which tend to look like ideal Paleolithic hunting grounds."  I don't golf but my affection for greenery extends into the house, as those of you who have been to it know:  I like to have plants everywhere.  This is the subject of mild tension between Kathy and me because she thinks I have far too many, and too many big, plants.  She keeps threatening to put toxic substances in the pots; she's refrained thus far, but I worry. . . .

            (I note that the Star-Tribune finally picked up this story in late July, five months after the Chronicle of Higher Education story.  Swift reporting.  In the reader comments to both the Chronicle and Strib articles, the entire focus turned to heated debate about the paleo diet, which was only a small part of the point Zuk was making.)

IDIOT, n.  A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.  The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole."  He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable.  He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a deadline.

MONKEY, n. An arboreal animal which makes itself at home in genealogical trees.

            I was a major dope in January.  I scheduled a couples bridge game on the first anniversary of our marriage.  Kathy pointed that fact out to me, fortunately only with amusement.  It was a Sunday; I promptly made dinner reservations for Monday night at a restaurant we had gone to on our second or third date (neither one of us can recall for sure which it was) and at least bought a card.  Sigh.  I try to be attentive to significant dates, and I had thought about the anniversary a couple of times while we were in Florida, but then it simply vanished from my brain when we returned to Minnesota.  I guess I was so distraught about the furnace or overcome by the Florida heat that I forgot L

            I felt a little better when I gave Kathy my card at dinner on Monday and she confessed that she had forgotten to get me a card.

            Fortunately, neither of these omissions has had any effect on the marriage J

Anyone will be glad to admit that he knows nothing about beagling, or the Chinese stock market, or ballistics, but there is not a man or woman alive who does not claim to know how to cure hiccoughs.  (Benchley)

          ACCORDION, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.

            Apropos of the preceding Benchley quip, I laughed out loud one night when Kathy and I were talking over a glass of wine.  I got the hiccups and she assured me that she knew a cure.  I laughed and told her of Benchley's comment.  My dad also had a sure-fire cure.  Benchley was right.  (I do have a sure-fire cure that works for me:  I just wait them out and they go away within a minute or two.  But Kathy tells me she used to have them for hours when she was young, so she had to find some way to deal effectively with them.)

Salary is no object; I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.  (Parker)

EXPERIENCE, n. The wisdom that enables us to recognize as an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

            Early in the year I wrote an email to Krystin pointing out that the fiscal deal reached between the White House and Congress meant that the payroll tax would go back up 2%, so she'd see a slight decrease in her take-home pay. 

My, sometimes tax increases do test one's political allegiances.  She wrote back to me that "Yes, I did notice on my last paycheck - almost $60 less!  Ugh.  I know this sounds very republican of me, but I want my money! If I didn't have any debt, it wouldn't be a big deal and I'd be happy to pay higher taxes for the good of everyone, but I DO have bills to pay. :/" 

But that was the only grousing I heard, and she seems to have fared alright financially even with the tax increase.  (And it turned out to be a lot less than $60.)

The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.  (Parker)

ECCENTRICITY, n. A method of distinction so cheap that fools employ it to accentuate their incapacity.

            I am one of those people who is averse to having needles stuck in me.  I put up with the pricks (mostly with my eyes closed) for vaccinations and the occasional blood draw that accompanies a physical exam, but would never think for a second about getting any part of my body pierced for decorative purposes.  The idea of a tattoo is beyond the pale, apart from the fact I'd never get one because I don't like them and don't want dye under my skin.

            I bring this up because one of the side effects of not paying attention to her diabetes for many years is damage to Krystin's eyes.  At one point early in the year she was close to losing some or much of her vision.  It is a mark of how far eye treatments have advanced, however, that with cataract surgery on both eyes (the implantation of synthetic lenses) and shots, her vision was so much improved that she no longer needs corrective lenses except for reading; it's now 20-25.  (The synthetic lenses are not flexible, just as our biological lenses lose flexibility as we get older, which is why almost all of us need reading glasses even if our vision is otherwise fine.)  Krystin has exclaimed about how well she can now see.

            Part of the treatment is shots directly into the eyes.  Krystin has learned to tolerate them because she first receives a sedative and a local anaesthetic, but the idea that someone would be sticking needles directly into my eyes sends shivers down my spine.  But I'm glad she can handle the shots because it means her eyesight is fully restored and protected (as long as she continues to maintain tight control over her blood sugar levels).

            On that general subject, I sent Krystin an email message last spring.

I have told you this over the last couple of months, in bits and pieces, but I want to tell you in writing as well as orally.

When I came home from work one day last January and told you about my lunch conversation with Andy, who had related that he had been struck down with the flu from roughly Christmas to mid-January and constantly fatigued that entire period, you responded something like "welcome to my world every day."

I have been appalled ever since you told me that because I think I would have been in bed ever since. I think you are heroic to get up and go to work every day and just get from one bedtime to the next. Combined with the eye treatments, and the occasional pain they cause, and the dietary problems you've had, I am simply astonished at how well you manage to lead a life. I cannot tell you how much I admire you for your perseverance and determination. So even though I occasionally grouse at you about leaving clothes and shoes and stuff all around the house (you really ARE messy!), you should know that I cannot say enough positive about your stamina, your commitment to doing your job well, and getting to the surgery in June. I have said as much to a number of my friends and colleagues.

If you want to berate yourself for sleeping too much, that's up to you. Under the circumstances, I certainly will not.

We must race to June!

            Krystin wrote back:

Thanks, dad. I have been meaning to get back to you on this for a while. I really appreciate it. One of the things I'll be talking with Nancy Blume [Krystin's therapist, who she started seeing shortly before she wrote this] about is how I can express verbally and in writing how I feel these days, but nobody REALLY understands. But your warm comments offer me the support and recognition that you understand that even though you can't feel what I'm going through, you know that I'm having a hard time. I appreciate that a lot, so again, thank you. Like you said, let's just hope the next couple months go by fast and June hurries up and gets here!

The idea of living and going to work every day while feeling like I had the flu is so aversive to me that I had a hard time imagining how Krystin did it.  She showed stamina I wouldn't have guessed she had.

RESPONSIBILITY, n. A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.

You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.  (Parker)

            We got to June and Krystin had the transplant surgery.  The donor was a high-school classmate, who volunteered a kidney, and all the tests demonstrated that she was a match.  So the morning of June 4 it happened—and it went exactly as the doctors expected, extremely well.  Krystin was eating heartily on June 5 and most of the sluggishness from the general anaesthesia had worn off.

            But there were bumps in the road.  She ended up back in the hospital (ER) on June 17 with nausea and vomiting.  It turns out she had an infection (not related to the transplant) and she had a reaction to one of the post-surgery drugs.  That stay ended up lasting 5 days, to her dismay, but the medical folks finally got her back to feeling good.  Then, however, she had to contend for some time with low blood pressure, the opposite of what many Americans deal with; hers was running ~80 over ~40, so she'd be dizzy and light-headed when she stood up from sitting or lying down.  She tried to go back to work part-time on July 1, less than a month after the June 4 surgery; her surgeon made it clear she was NOT to do that.  So she stayed home longer and then returned part-time on July 16.  That worked better.

            Krystin's long-delayed plans to finally move into a place of her own came to fruition; she got an efficiency apartment on September 1.  We were glad for her.  She needed to be out of daddy's house, at age 28, and we needed her to be out—it was fine to have Krystin around but it was not so fine to also have the enormous amount of stuff she has, which constantly spilled into the dining room and living room and other social places in the house.  I am not obsessive about neatness, but this debris everywhere was getting on my nerves.  We were all better off with Krystin in a place of her own.

A couple of weeks after Krystin moved to her new apartment, she invited Kathy and me to dinner.  She said we would have spaghetti but that we needed to bring the meat, because she doesn't like any meat in spaghetti sauce.  We think this is a hoot.  We may have to try this out on some of our friends:  "You're invited for steaks on the grill and x and y and z—and bring your own steaks."  I teased Krystin about this; I accepted her explanation that she wouldn't do that with anyone other than us.

One of Krystin's Facebook posts, however, seems to have summed up nicely where she stood after the travails of ailments before surgery, then surgery, then the ups and downs of recovery:  "This year I have been fortunate to get a new kidney, a new car, a new apartment, and now two new kitties to greet me when I get home. And the year isn't even over yet! Life is good."  (Quoted with Krystin's permission.  I got rid of one kid and one car on my automobile insurance!)

The ventures to the hospital were not over, unfortunately.  Krystin needed to have a gastric pacer implanted, in order to help her digestion, which kept her in the hospital for about a week, and then later in the fall she came down with Epstein-Barr virus, otherwise known as mono, and suffered from two additional opportunistic infections (not uncommon with immuno-suppressed patients).  The mono and friends kept her in the hospital for a week and then at home for another week, and she was in the hospital twice within a 2-week period in October because an abscess in her throat that had to be cut and drained.  Fortunately, her employer (the University) is extremely considerate of people afflicted with medical difficulties, especially those whom it also happens to value, and the people with and for whom Krystin works (I happen to know from my many discreet sources) have a very high regard for Krystin's performance.  Her infectious disease physician told Krystin she should plan on taking an extended period of time off; Krystin said "no" and went back to work after being out for the two weeks.  As of the moment I compose this, after she just returned to work, she's doing well and feeling better.

Part of the long-term plan is that Krystin will also have a pancreas transplant, thus eliminating the diabetes.  Because she's had a kidney transplant, her name goes to the top of the list for a pancreas transplant—but with all the infections, she is now on hold on the national donor list until mid-February.  So it goes on and on.

I sometimes think that "being sick" is enough to drive some of us crazy, and just going back to work—OK as long as we're not contagious—is a cure.  I know that has been true for me in the past, and it seems to be true for Krystin as well.

You might think that after thousands of years of coming up too soon and getting frozen, the crocus family would have had a little sense knocked into it.  (Benchley)

FINANCE, n. The art or science of managing revenues and resources for the best advantage of the manager. The pronunciation of this word with the i long and the accent on the first syllable is one of America's most precious discoveries and possessions.

            Many of us have, in the course of work or other activities, taken the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which classifies people on four scales (Extraversion (E) – (I) Introversion, Sensing (S) - (N) Intuition, Thinking (T) - (F) Feeling, and Judging (J) - (P) Perception).  So one can be an INTJ or ESTP or whatever.

            Kathy has maintained, for as long as I have known her, that she is an Introvert.  Spending time with others, no matter how well she knows them, is a drain on her energies and she needs time mostly alone to recover (being only with me counts as recovery time, I was glad to learn).  She hastens to assure me that that doesn't mean she doesn't want to spend time with friends, quite to the contrary, but that she just needs quiet time at some point to recoup.  Although I have taken the Meyers-Briggs, and come up as an INTJ—and thus an Introvert—I nonetheless very much enjoy social interactions (well, at least in small groups—I am indifferent to parties of 20-30 or more people).  I wouldn't go so far as to say I thrive on them, but I do find getting together with friends almost invariably stimulating and fun.  I suppose that if I had a job like the president of the University, working with groups and individuals all day and then participating in University events many evenings and weekends, I'd probably be desperate for quiet time, but since I fortunately do not have such a horrible schedule, I look forward to our intermittent social interactions.

            The Meyers-Briggs is extremely widely used—but there is also considerable scholarly criticism of its accuracy and validity.  People can take the MBTI and then retake it again sometime later and have a different result.  Even if the scales measure legitimate constructs—which is open to question—the results of the MBTI depend on the honesty of the individual taking it or the ability of the individual accurately to respond (that is, even if the person is trying to be honest, he or she might not be accurate in the self-assessment in responding).  Moreover, if these are types as described, the distribution of responses should be bimodal, with people clustering in one or the other, but they don't; they cluster around the middle, in a normal distribution, so one can be classified as an Introvert but only barely different in responses to an Extravert.  Bob Carroll, at the Skeptic's Dictionary, observes that parts of the profiles of types—e.g., INTJ—can apply to anyone and suggests that "they read like something from Omar the astrologer."

            A faculty friend of mine in the Department of Psychology whose career has been devoted to studying interest measurement (e.g., the Strong Vocational Interest Blank, Leisure Interest Questionnaire) said the danger of the Meyers-Briggs is when employers use it to make hire/don't hire (i.e., selection) decisions since there is no evidence of criterion-related validity and the reliability of the scores is suspect.  My friend wrote:  "The best that can be said about it is that it should start a conversation if the scales suggest issues related to the job in question—but it should not be used to make decisions.  The primary use of the MBTI is in development programs, team building, or coaching.  But the danger even in these instances is slapping a label on a person that implies that this is the way the person always behaves without considering the situational demand which does change some people's behavior."

            Interestingly, the one scale on the MBTI that a study by the National Academy of Sciences correlates with other assessment instruments is the Extraversion – Introversion scale.  And I don't doubt Kathy's self-assessment of her internal state during and after social interactions, irrespective of whether it's because of where she falls on an extraversion/introversion scale or because it's just how she feels.  (Even I can grow weary of too much social activity/interaction; I learned that back in the days when I attended the two national collegiate athletic conventions, which were a week each and back to back.  After two weeks of constant meetings, I just needed to go home and be by myself.  For a couple of hours, anyway.)

            As a general proposition, however, I think it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the MBTI is pretty much junk psychology.

MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Four be the things I'd been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.
Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.  (Parker)

            I read the third volume of William Manchester's magisterial biography of Winston Churchill (each volume is about 900 pages).  The series had an interesting publishing history.  The first volume was published in 1983, the second in 1988, and the third in 2013, 25 years later.  Manchester died before the last volume was even close to completion, but in his final illness he worked with a journalist who he asked to finish the book.  The reviews of it were almost entirely positive, even though it wasn't entirely Manchester's work.

            Krystin and Kathy both looked at it, grimaced, and said they wouldn't be reading it (it's over 1200 pages).  "TMI" is what I think went through their minds.

I have a colleague and friend from the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (which I mentioned earlier) with whom I was emailing (about head trauma) as I was reading the book.  My colleague spends half the year in his homes in Rome and Tuscany—mostly in Rome at his lab—and he had just arrived in Rome.  I told him I was at the point in the Churchill biography when the Brits and Americans are driving up Italy from the south to take Rome from the Germans.  He wrote back to me:  "It is my understanding that the Brits and Americans arrived in Rome from Southern Italy faster than one can do it now due to the traffic jams on the Italian highways!  And they were driving tanks and half-tracks!"

            Even though I know how WWII turned out, it was nonetheless painful to read about the events of 1940-41, when England stood alone against Hitler and London was being bombed daily by the Germans.  One also becomes numb with the casualty statistics:  only 2,800 killed in this attack, 25,800 killed in that one, 16,500 killed landing on this beach, and so on.  It really is true that these are statistics, not events we can understand as human deaths, but I can imagine what my reaction would be if either of my children were killed in battle (or any other way).  I would be devastated and doubt that I would ever, the rest of my life, fully recover.  (Maybe parents and families reacted a little differently during a world war, where combat deaths by the thousands were a daily occurrence.  But even with "only" 2,800 killed in a small skirmish, that's 2,800 families devastated by a loss.  It is impossible for human beings to imagine that writ large to tens of millions such deaths.)

            Reading the Churchill biography also led me to ask two mostly-but-not-completely-unrelated questions:  (1) "in terms of daily life needs, is there any reason to read history?" and (2) "what reverberations, however faint, can we still see today from other dramatic events in history?"

INK, n. A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic and water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote intellectual crime. The properties of ink are peculiar and contradictory: it may be used to make reputations and unmake them; to blacken them and to make them white; but it is most generally and acceptably employed as a mortar to bind together the stones of an edifice of fame, and as a whitewash to conceal afterward the rascal quality of the material.

They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.  (Parker)

            With respect to question (1), Kathy and Krystin goggled at me—me, who has been reading history all his life—when I suggested that the answer, in terms of daily life, is "no."  I have tried to identify activities in a normal day where one needs to know history in some fashion—but I can't.  You don't need it to drive your car, or eat at a restaurant, or do laundry, or mow the grass, or garden, or fly in an airplane, or do your job, or for any of the million quotidian tasks in which we all engage every day.  On a purely practical level, one simply does not need history.  At that level, Henry Ford was correct:  "History is bunk." 

There is debate about what Ford actually meant, but as I explored the context of the quote, I concluded that in an odd way Ford's viewed aligned with mine.  One web writer—who I otherwise consider a socio-political nut job—retrieved an article by Canadian reporter Robert Fulford that drew on an essay by a distinguished historian, Eugen Weber:

Ford thought that devotion to the past prevents us from grappling with the present. . . . In 1914 all the European leaders knew history, Ford said, yet they blundered into the worst war ever.

On another occasion Ford recalled looking in American history books "to learn how our forefathers harrowed the land"; he discovered that historians barely mentioned harrows, the iron-toothed rakes essential to modern farming. Harrows, Ford argued, meant more in history than guns and speeches. When history "excludes harrows, and all the rest of daily life," then history is bunk.

Maybe Ford felt strongly about harrows because he manufactured them, Weber says; even so, he was right when he argued that history should tell how ordinary people lived.

Ford's observation about European leaders and World War I is simply a limited version of Aldous Huxley's more general proposition:  "That men do not learn very much from history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach."

Ford wanted more history of daily life; I suggest that daily life doesn't need history.

            Of course I reject out of hand the proposition that any well-educated, cultivated, thoughtful, aware, and responsible citizen should not read history.  No one can understand most of the world that surrounds them unless they have a passing knowledge of history.  They can live and work and play in it, but they won't understand it.  They certainly can't have a decent dinner party conversation.  More importantly, they can hardly have any idea of what their own socio-political beliefs are.

            Oddly enough, I found one of the most lucid, valuable, and well-ordered statements on the value of learning history on the web pages of a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, which is not one of the most renowned institutions of higher education in the country.  But Professor Brown did an admirable job of summarizing the reasons to read history.  I do not agree with all of them; here they are, with Engstrand's commentary.

            Brown writes that history "preserves and celebrates the memory of great men and noble deeds" (hard to believe he wrote only "men" in the 21st Century).  Yes, but always, only, and inevitably with the interpretation of the historian.  With history as with current news, one must always triangulate in order to believe one is glimpsing anything resembling the truth.  (Or, "the past actually happened.  History is what someone took the time to write down."  A. Whiteney Brown)  Pieter Geyl maintained that "all historians are influenced by the present when writing history and thus all historical writing is transitory. . . .  There never can be a definitive account for all ages because every age has a different view of the past."  He argued that "the best that historians could do was to critically examine their beliefs and urge their readers to do likewise."  "Great men and noble deeds" may sometimes thus be in the eye of the beholder.  (Viz., the Portuguese and Native American views of Christopher Columbus and those who followed him.)

"Writing history allows the judgment and punishment (vicarious) of the guilty, as, for example, in some histories of the Third Reich."  There is a dilemma here, of course:  I think historians will say that the closer the events are in time, the more difficult it is to write about them with anything even approaching objectivity.  There is ancient precedent to this point of view; attributed to Tacitus:  "This I hold to be the chief office of history, to rescue virtuous actions from the oblivion to which a want of records would consign them, and that men should feel a dread of being considered infamous in the opinions of posterity, from their depraved expressions and base actions."  There is, however, a long line of people in the 20th Century alone who weren't too worried about what posterity had to say about them, so history-as-deterrent is a thin reed on which to rest the argument.

I like the view of one of the great living historians, whose work I greatly admire, Simon Schama. 

There is a sense in which, when you're a historian, you really oughtn't to be knocking on the doors of power; your job is to keep the powerful awake at night, to turn them into insomniacs.  The historian in me, the sceptic, the grandchild of Orwell, always hears the inflation of rhetoric in it.  History is a tragic muse.  One of its great founding moments is the Peloponnesian War and the whole majestic, terrifying drama of that builds up to the expedition against Syracuse that sees Athens sailing into massive hubris.  That is good, honest, western history.  It should never be self-congratulation; it should keep people awake at night.

Professor Brown writes:  "Writing history uncovers general truths (or laws) about human nature and behavior" and "writing about history reveals lessons for the future; this idea prompted the philosopher George Santayana to exclaim, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'"  I think this is just baloney.  Most of us are familiar with the Santayana claim, which has become conventional wisdom.  I think Mark Twain is closer to the mark, however; he's alleged to have said that "history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."  That seems to me right—and the variance between repetition and rhyming makes it treacherous to try to draw lessons from history.  The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl seems to me right:  "History is not to be searched for practical lessons, the applicability of which will always be doubtful in view of the inexhaustible novelty of circumstances and combinations of causes."

Professor Brown, continued.  "Writing about history helps you learn about yourself and helps in the creation of a personal and/or cultural identity.  Each of us is a social creature, and that means we are at least partially the product of every experience we have had and of all that we have inherited from our families, our communities, our nation, and our spiritual, intellectual, and cultural heritage.  Study of history allows you to situate yourself in time and place, and it helps you understand who you are and how you came to be."  I think he has this exactly right.  I am a Danish-German-Swedish-English-Irish-Scot American who has a very confused cultural identity.

Professor Brown:  "Writing about history helps you expand your horizons, allowing you to understand the values, attitudes, and motives of other people, whether of different nationalities or racial groups or religious orientations."  Again, I think he has this right—but this is a virtue hardly limited to history.  One's horizons can be expanded equally well by studying anthropology or international politics or sociology or theater or any of a number of other fields.

Professor Brown then cites the Bradley Commission on History, a group of historians funded by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation to evaluate the poor status of history in American schools.  The reasons he elicits from the Commission report must send shivers down the spines of the Texas GOP:  "Studying history . . . helps [individuals] to develop a sense of 'shared humanity'; to understand themselves and 'otherness,' by learning how they resemble and how they differ from other people, over time and space; to question stereotypes of others, and of themselves; to discern the difference between fact and conjecture; to grasp the complexity of historical cause; to distrust the simple answer and the dismissive explanation" and so on.  Brown concludes that there is one word that describes the value of history:  judgment.  It is required for "the profession of citizen" (I like that phrase) that should be universally shared in an educated democracy.  "It takes a sense of the tragic and of the comic to make a citizen of good judgment. It takes a bone-deep understanding of how hard it is to preserve civilization or to better human life, and of how these have nonetheless been done repeatedly in the past."

(In case you forgot, the Texas GOP party platform in 2012 included this language:  "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs . . .which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."  According to news reports, the Communications Director of the Texas Republican Party said that inclusion of "critical thinking skills" was a mistake, an oversight, but that it couldn't be fixed until 2014 at the next state party convention because it was part of the language approved at the 2012 convention.)

So draw your own conclusions about whether reading history has value.  Intellectually, I think, surely.  Practically, in my view, none.

FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Well, Aimee Semple McPherson has written a book. And were you to call it a little peach, you would not be so much as scratching its surface. It is the story of her life, and it is called In the Service of the King, which title is perhaps a bit dangerously suggestive of a romantic novel. It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.  (Parker)

With respect to question (2), I start from the premise that, although it is growing more attenuated, we still to a significant event live in the world that Adolf Hitler bequeathed us.  Before the Iron Curtain came down, Eastern Europe was under communist rule because Russian troops marched as far as they did in beating back the Germans.  The architecture of much of London and virtually all of Berlin is a result of the bombings during the war that required rebuilding.  Obviously, the small number of Jews now living in central Europe reflects the Holocaust.  And on and on.

            I decided, as an example, out of curiosity, to explore the extent to which we can still see reverberations from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.  The revolution started in 1789, so is 224 years distant, and the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815, so are 198 years ago; what are the noticeable effects from those tumultuous events, if any, that we can still detect? 

In the course of exploring that question, I recalled to mind my friend Regents Professor Ellen Berscheid's grousing a number of years ago that she had spent 12 hours one day preparing for a one-hour lecture the next day—and that it was unfortunate that some members of the general public think that teaching two courses per semester, or about 6 hours per week, is so easy.  (She also observed that that the 12 hours did not cover all the time she spent over her career learning about the subject—it took 12 hours of work just figuring out how to present it to students in a way that it might sink in.)  I put in far more time reading books and articles about the modern-day consequences of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars than the volume of text in this letter justifies. 

            One historian observed, quite correctly I believe—although I'd never thought about it before—that the Napoleonic wars were the First World War; it extended into the Middle East and that Napoleon at one point even had designs on Australia.

            The consequences, however, are significant, even 224 years after the revolution started.  Here are some of them, gleaned, collated, and integrated from a variety of sources.  A few of these effects are trivial, most are not.

--          The modern terms "left" and "right" to describe places on the political spectrum come from the seating locations of groups in the National Assembly that arose during the revolution.  The practice remains in place in the National Assembly today, the lower house in the bicameral French government.

--          Because he needed money more than he needed land in North America, Napoleon sold the Louisiana territory to the United States for a total of about $15 million.  Can you imagine how difficult it would have been for the young United States to have obtained all that land had Napoleon not sold it to us in one big chunk?  The U.S. might never have obtained all of it, and there could have been long and bitter piecemeal struggles over it.

--          Two new nouns entered the language in 1794:  terrorisme (the policy of the Terror) and terroriste (those who implemented it). 

--          The Napoleonic wars initiated the era of total and mass warfare.  Up until then, wars were fought by small groups of professional or purchased troops and did not involve massive number of either troops or civilians.  In the course of the revolution, the ground was laid for state control of industries and mobilization of experts for weapons production as well as conscription and large armies.  These developments reached full flower in World Wars I and II.

--          Baruch Spinoza, in 1670 with Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, developed the idea of a link between religion and politics and argued that the Old Testament is a collection of stories to govern a state.  Spinoza "formulates the basic concept of nationalism in general terms:  'There is no doubt that devotion to country is the highest form of piety a man can show, for once the State is destroyed nothing good can survive.'"  Spinoza's analysis undermined the structures of Christianity and replaced them with nationalism.  (O'Brien, in The Permanent Revolution:  The French Revolution and its Legacy 1789-1989.)  While this was 119 years before the French revolution, Spinoza's idea of nationalism was given life by the revolution.  The chief publicist for the Third Estate (the commoners), Abbe Sieyes, wrote that "the nation exists before all, it is the origin of everything.  Its will is always legal, it is the law itself."

            O'Brien maintains that while the revolution did not create nationalism, it "accelerated the growth of nationalism, secularized it and thereby helped to set it above all other values.  That tendency seems to have been at work . . . from [Napoleon's 1814 defeat at] Waterloo on, throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century."  Withal, it is a legitimate contention that "the Revolution's most permanent big legacy—to the French themselves no less than to the other peoples of the planet—has been the apotheosis of the nation-state within the modern theory and practice of nationalism."  That nationalism "remained for all takers precisely where the French Revolution put it:  in the divinized nation-state and the compulsions to national uniformity of thought and feeling."  It showed up with a vengeance in the 20th Century in Nazi Germany.

            One place it showed up, with a quite different tone, was in post-Napoleonic Germany.  Before Napoleon, Germany was a bunch of little states and principalities, the largest of which was Prussia.  Napoleon, when he conquered Germany, consolidated the states into a much smaller number.  In combination with the idea of nationalism that emanated from the revolution—and was taken up by the people in countries that Napoleon conquered—the wars were a major impetus to the unification of Germany in 1871 under Bismarck.  Bismarck might have had a much greater challenge if there were still 350 independent German-speaking states in 1870.

--          "The French Revolution . . . thus became a major cause for the creation of America's early two-party political system and the most important issue in the emergence of an active public culture. . . .  The clearest ideological differences between Federalists and Republicans emerged in their interpretations of the French Revolution."  One study of American newspapers in the 1790s found that they gave more coverage to the French Revolution than to U.S. domestic politics, and the dispute forced the two parties to define their views of a republican society.  One historian concluded that the "French Revolution was thus the inescapable event that forced the two emerging parties to define their explicit political differences and to enter a heated battle for American public opinion."  (Kramer, The Global Ramifications of the French Revolution)

--          The events of 1789 and thereafter were, in the view of many, the first actual "revolution" in a state.  The word is overused now (the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, the computer revolution, etc.) but "the heart of its meaning remains where it was put between 1789 and 1795:  violent transformation of the political and the supporting social arrangements of country, replacing one species of ruler by another and giving itself and its people something of  new look.  The French Revolution did much that went beyond politics . . . but it was above all as a political event that it exploded upon the Europe of its day."  There had not been such a tumultuous overturning of a society in modern western political history ever before.

--          America and France were drifting toward conflict in the mid-1790s; President Adams sent envoys to France to try to resolve the problems; the envoys were essentially sent packing unless they paid bribes (the "XYZ Affair").  Americans took umbrage, supported an increased military budget, and because of the patriotic fervor, Congress adopted the Alien and Sedition Acts to "define what it meant to be an American, and the definition tended to exclude precisely those people who showed the greatest inclination to support 'French' ideas or Jeffersonian republicanism."  Thus began the first of the xenophobic/scare-tactics episodes in American history, repeated during the 19th Century and in the Red scares of the 20th Century under Presidents Wilson and Eisenhower.

--          Finally, for the U.S., and somewhat more difficult to summarize, is the reaction to the anti-religious, deistic views of the French revolutionary leaders as events unfolded and the reaction to Thomas Paine's Age of Reason (which opposed organized religion, attacked the Bible and promoted deism following the events of the revolution, and sought to advance the ideas of the Enlightenment).  The reaction was the Second Great Awakening, a reaction to skepticism, deism, and rejection of Enlightenment ideas, which led to widespread evangelical religion.  The U.S. has suffered from the effects of the Second Great Awakening ever since.  ("The Enlightenment," in the broadest terms, covered roughly the late 17th and much of the 18th Century, was led by or engendered by intellectuals such as Hume, Locke, Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, Spinoza, and Voltaire, and was characterized by the use of reason and reliance on the scientific method, challenges to beliefs founded on tradition and faith, skepticism, and in general a "desire for human affairs to be guided by rationality rather than by faith, superstition, or revelation."  It was to these ideas, many advanced vigorously during phases of the French Revolution, to which the American public, and American clergy in particular, eventually reacted with revulsion.)

--          There is a congeries of issues, mixed together, that emerge from a reading of the literature.  One is the power of the ideas encapsulated in the rallying cry of the revolution:  "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (Brotherhood)."  "The power of these three ideas would quickly spread to the rest of Europe, especially after Napoleon's final defeat in 1815, and eventually across the globe."  They showed up by establishing new precedents in democratic institutions such as elections, representative government, constitutions, and civil law codes.  While many did not survive Napoleon, the ideals did and affected events throughout Europe for the following century and beyond.

There are other ramifications one could add to the list.  I looked primarily at Europe and the U.S., but there were effects elsewhere in the world.  There were also "soft" effects that are difficult for even the best historians to track (see the preceding paragraph).  But there is little doubt among historians, as far as I can tell, that there were impacts, often indirect, that showed up in revolts and rebellions and revolutions during the 19th and into the 20th Century (e.g., the Russian Revolution in 1917).

If one accepts the claim that the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars were in significant part responsible for setting the stage for the unification of Germany in 1871 under Bismarck's hand, then I can see a logical connection of events between the French Revolution and my current job.  Without a unified Germany, or a Germany unified later or differently, both WWI and WWII are less probable, and without WWII there would probably not have been a G. I. Bill, and then my father would not have gone to college.  He once told me that without the G. I. Bill he would never have even thought about college—they had no money and there was no history of higher education in his family.  If my father hadn't gone to college, it's possible that I would not have, and likely wouldn't have come from a parental background that insisted on college, and thus wouldn't have had the job I've had for the last 25 years.  So thank you Napoleon Bonaparte!  (There are a lot of steps in that sequence of events that I've omitted. . . .)

            One could repeat this exercise for the fall of the Roman Empire, the conquest of England by William the Conqueror, the effects of Confucius on Chinese cultural development, and so on ad infinitum, and in doing so come to realize more ever more vividly the extent to which events, even those centuries ago, affect the shape of the world today.  At least it did for me, with respect to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars; I learned a considerable amount.  That, of course, is justification in itself for the exercise.

Speaking of the effects of past events on the present:  "Khwarezm and Persia were crisscrossed with an elaborate underground irrigation system that since antiquity had sustained a thriving culture; the Mongols destroyed them.  Arabic scholars contend that the region's economy has yet to recover fully from this devastation."  Which destruction took place in 1221 or 1222.  (I think I read this in an airline magazine.)

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Trying to imagine the effect of thousands of combat deaths on families and survivors brought to mind an episode I hadn't thought about for decades.  It was the fall of 1972 or the early winter of 1973 that I got into the only really vehement argument I ever had with my mother.  This was the time when the Vietnam War was slowly winding down and the vast majority of the American public had come to realize the war was a mistake.  There was a military draft in place and males graduating from high school each year were assigned a number from 1-365, birthdates drawn randomly.  If you were born June 13, and June 13 was the first number drawn in the draft lottery, you were #1.  If June 13 was the last number drawn, you were #365.  As I recall, in the late 1960s and early 1970s the military each year was going as high as #200-250, so if you had a number in that range, you were likely to be drafted.  If your number was in the 300s, you were almost certainly safe from being drafted.

            My number, when we graduated from high school in 1969, was 69, so I was pretty sure I would be drafted.  Students were being given draft deferments for up to four years if they were in college.  I would have gone to college in any event, but the draft deferment provided an additional impetus. 

            Coming on to college graduation in the spring of 1973, I was alarmed that I was going to be drafted and sent to Vietnam.  I had already determined that was not going to happen—I was not going to get killed by some Vietcong booby trap or sniper in the cause of a senseless war.  I couldn't claim conscientious objector—I wasn't then and am not now, 40 years later—so either I was going to jail as a protestor or I was going to Canada or somewhere else.  That's not quite as brave as it sounds; at that point there were a lot of young males my age who were protesting the war and the draft.  I would have gone to jail; I wouldn't have fled.

            This topic came up with my parents at their home on Dupont one late evening.  I said I would not under any circumstances be drafted and sent to Vietnam.  My mother got extremely angry (Americans fought on behalf of their country, and so on).  We argued back and forth; my father said nothing.  Finally I asked my dad—someone who came out of WWII a wounded veteran who'd won the Purple Heart—what he thought.  He didn't really side with my mother; his rather laconic comment was "if you don't go in the military, you won't miss anything."  That was the end of the "discussion."  We all went to bed, and I don't recall that the subject was ever mentioned again.  With the exception of this one eruption, my parents remained good friends of mine to the end of their lives. 

            The military draft ended in June, 1973, about the same time that my college deferment ended.  So I never faced being drafted.  And all through college I never really contemplated the possibility that I would end up in the military.  Fortunately, the turn of opinion in the country against continuation of the war made it entirely hypothetical for me.  But I had determined that I, for that misbegotten war, would not be a combat fatality, one of those numbers that appears in Churchill's biography and the thousands of other histories about war that have been written.

WAR, n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity. The student of history who has not been taught to expect the unexpected may justly boast himself inaccessible to the light. "In time of peace prepare for war" has a deeper meaning than is commonly discerned; it means, not merely that all things earthly have an end—that change is the one immutable and eternal law—but that the soil of peace is thickly sown with the seeds of war and singularly suited to their germination and growth.

            (If you don't give a darn about the start of World War I, you can skip this section.)

A few weeks after I had written musings in this letter about the value of learning and reading history, I happened to discover that three new books about the events leading up to World War I had recently been published.  They struck my fancy, and the writing appeared to be both accessible and lively, so of course I bought them and began reading them.  One was July, 1914:  Countdown to War by Professor of history at Koc University in Istanbul, Sean McMeekin; one was The Sleepwalkers:  How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Cambridge professor of history Christopher Clark, and the third was The War That Ended Peace:  The Road to 1914 by Margaret MacMillan, Oxford professor of international history.  (At first I thought it interesting that three books dealing with the same events and time period happened to be published nearly simultaneously, realized we are approaching the centennial of the start of the war, and then concluded that it was unlikely the three authors all started to work on their books just because of the upcoming centennial.  In any case, all three authors have also written previously on WWI.)  For me this reading is one of life's delights; I don't claim it will help me in dealing with daily life or make me a better person.  Some people like to go bowling, or paint, or go to movies.  I like to read history.

            As you might imagine, I was astonished when I started to read McMeekin's book on June 28, 2014 and realized that it was exactly 99 years to the day, a very long century ago, that the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie were assassinated in Sarajevo, Serbia, which set off a series of events that culminated a few weeks later in the start of World War I.  McMeekin's new volume is a very neat bookend to Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, also by Margaret MacMillan, in which she described the events leading up to the Treaty of Versailles, ending the war, signed under coercion by Germany—on June 28, 1919, exactly five years after Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were assassinated.

 

            So 2014 will be the centenary of the start of WWI and there will doubtless be a significant number of articles in both the scholarly and popular press about how it began and its effect on the world of today.  My only counsel, to those who may read those articles, is that it was extremely complicated, much more so than one might have been led to believe from a high-school or college survey history course.

 

Bismarck is famously quoted as saying, in 1878, that "Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal.  A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all.  I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where.  Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off."  (There is some dispute about whether he actually said it.)  What I learned also from these books, although I vaguely knew it before, was that the Balkans were a hotbed of nationalist, religious, and ethnic fervors as well as secret societies and what today we would call guerilla groups.  It was almost inevitable that something would come out of the area.

 

            Anyway, McMeekin's book is both background and an hour-by-hour tracing of events, leading up to the assassination (what the assassins and supporters were doing) and after (the vast majority of the book).  He literally notes the timing of telegraphed messages back and forth between Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Paris, and London, and tracks the discussions held by and with each of the leaders in the major powers.  At the end of the book McMeekin seeks to apportion responsibility for the start of the war, and put the onus on Russia (with plenty of blame to spread around to Austria and Germany).  It's Russia first because it began military mobilization before anyone else (but tried to hide it, not very successfully) and before the final Austrian response to Serbia was known—once that mobilization started, the other countries reacted in self-defense.  Germany was the last to begin mobilization.  But the Germans were fully blameworthy as well because they very early gave Austria a blank check in responding to the assassination in terms of its (Austria's) demands on Serbia—Austria would never have taken the aggressive posture it did toward the Serbian government had not Germany provided unqualified support.  In doing so, McMeekin says, the Germans let the Austrians put a noose around their (the Germans') neck and then tighten it as events played out in the weeks following the assassination, events characterized in significant part by Austrian ineptitude.  (But the Germans also brought grief on themselves by violating Belgian borders in attacking France, thus bringing Britain into the war.)

 

            McMeekin also contradicts Barbara Tuchman, whose best-selling classic The Guns of August has pretty much been the standard interpretation of the events that led to WWI (in her analysis, it was largely Germany's fault).  He points out that by mis-dating the Russian mobilization by two days, a critical mistake given how things were happening, Tuchman misunderstood the sequence of events—and thus misunderstood the relative blameworthiness of Germany and Russia in setting the machinery of war in motion.  He also highlights how much deception both the French and the Russians engaged in during the weeks after the assassination—I learned something I hadn't known before, how much Russia and France connived all during that July to hide what they were doing and to make it appear that Germany would be the aggressor—because they were belligerent about going to war with Germany but wanted to make Germany appear blameworthy.

 

            What was also striking, to me, was the exchange of "Dear Willy" and "Dear Nicky" messages between Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II (they were cousins).  The two of them, however much power they had—and in neither case was it absolute—were led by their own government officers into a war that neither of them wanted and ultimately were unable to prevent.  Both of them, of course, lost their thrones because of the war—and the tsar and his family also lost their lives after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.  (The tsar at one point, in response to a message from Willy, reversed the mobilization order, because "I will not become responsible for a monstrous slaughter."  But shortly thereafter he changed his mind again, under pressure from his political and military advisers, and approved mobilization—and was responsible for "a monstrous slaughter," including, as it turned out, that of himself and his family.)

 

Clark covers the same ground as McMeekin but goes into much greater review of the years before the assassination, to provide context; one date in Serbian history that stands out in its lore is June 28, 1389, the Battle of Kosovo, which the Serbians eventually lost to the Ottomans but which acquired mythic nationalist meaning in the 19^th Century in Serbia.  There seem to be a lot of June 28s in this tale.

            I learned more about Serbian politics and political intrigues 1900-1914 than I really cared to know—but at the same time I can say it provided a new outlook on the predicament that Austria-Hungary found itself in (even before the assassination).  The situation in Serbia, and in the Balkans generally, was a threat to Austria-Hungary, and the assassinations raised the situation to one of paramount concern.  What was also interesting to me was that Austria (but not Hungary, in the Dual Monarchy that made up the empire) had been making demonstrable progress in accommodating the needs of its many political minorities—while Hungary continued to impose Magyar domination on everyone and Serbia was seeking "greater Serbdom" to the disadvantage of all the other ethnic groups in the Balkans.

            Clark, by the way, maintains that the "Dear Willy" and "Dear Nicky" messages were carefully crafted by their foreign ministers.

 

            Clark doesn't attempt to finger the blameworthy; "the outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol.  There is no smoking gun in this story; or, rather, there is one in the hands of every major character."  It was a tragedy, he wrote.  Nonetheless, I think his narrative leads one to the same conclusion as McMeekin, even though Clark doesn't say so:  although perhaps not significantly more "responsible" for the war, it was the Russians who, at the least, kicked the tripwire by mobilizing.  After that, given the exigencies of mobilization in that day, war was nearly inevitable as the other players responded—and the Russians knew it.

 

Clark also makes the point that one cannot remove "contingency, choice, and agency" from the events; even though in retrospect the war looks like an inevitable outcome, the participants at the time could not see the future and didn't know what apocalypse they were rushing toward.  There were multiple causes for the outbreak of war, but if one adds cause on top of cause on top of cause, it makes it appear that the war was unavoidable—and that clearly was not true.  Choices were made and chance played a role.  In addition, Clark suggests, "a striking feature of the interactions between the European executives was the persistent uncertainty in all quarters about the intentions of friends and potential foes alike."  As the days passed in July, 1914, and communications and meetings took place, the options for all of them narrowed, but even up until the onset of military action there were possibilities for avoiding the way.

 

            Probably the most famous comment made on the eve of the war (likely August 3, 1914, at the British Foreign Office, the date that Germany declared war on France and invaded Belgium) predicting what the war would bring was by British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey:  "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time."  Given life in upper-class Edwardian England, I think it is safe to say that those lamps have never again been lit.  And never will be.  But Grey, in the eyes of some, bears considerable responsibility for those lamps going out.

 

Baron Andrew Adonis, a scholar, historian, journalist, and British cabinet member, argues in a review of a biography of Gray, that

 

he was such a disastrous minister: arguably the most incompetent foreign secretary of all time for his responsibility in taking Britain into the First World War, having failed in July 1914 to do all within his power to stop the conflagration. . . . We cannot know what would have happened had British policy been more effective. Probably it was within the power of Asquith and Grey to have kept Britain out of the war. Possibly they could have prevented it entirely, dissuading Germany from supporting Austria in the chain reaction that led from Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination in Sarajevo on 28 June to the German invasion of Belgium on 4 August.

Adonis's description of Grey's stance accords fully with the two books.

           

In the July crisis, he may have desired peace, yet his policy produced the opposite result. So how far was he to blame? . . . [The author of the biography] does not address this question, beyond noting . . . Grey's stark irresolution throughout July 1914 on the basic issue of whether or not Britain would support France in resisting a German invasion—which had the fatal effect of encouraging both German and Austrian militarism and French and Russian resistance.

 

Adonis is equally critical of Grey's Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. 

On 29 July, Asquith concluded a meeting of the cabinet with the decision that, on the critical issue of any German violation of Belgian neutrality, "Sir E Grey should be authorised to inform the German and French ambassadors that at this stage we were unable to pledge ourselves in advance, either under all conditions to stand aside or on any conditions to join in."  This one sentence contains the most damning indictment of Asquith's and Grey's leadership and policy.  It is evident that Asquith did not appreciate the magnitude of the European crisis until 1 August, three days before the German invasion of Belgium. . . .  A miscalculation of British intentions on the part of the other European powers was critical to the outbreak of war. This happened for a simple reason: Britain's intentions were unclear.  The responsibility for this lay above all with Grey.

            After I had finished reading McMeekin's and Clark's books, in the middle of July, I had to wait for MacMillan's book until the end of October.

            MacMillan provides a more magisterial view of the world in the late 1890s through June, 1914; she flew at the 20,000-foot level more than the other two.  But she also delved into the central factors that led to war. 

She noted, for example, apropos of military planning, that "what is striking about the decision-making in 1914 in how was accepted that even the briefest of delays meant danger."  So once one country started mobilizing (e.g., Russia), the others felt they could not hold off.  The militaries also had such rigidity in their plans that most felt they had no choice about what to do once mobilization started; the Russian plan, for example, allowed only simultaneous mobilization against both Austria and Germany—never allowing only a defensive posture with Germany and a struggle with Austria in the Balkans.  All of the parties also developed a deep faith that only a military offensive would protect them, rather than staking out a defensive position.  This faith was encouraged and reinforced by various events from 1905 to 1914, and led to an arms race among the powers that significantly increased the probability of war, no matter the intentions of the parties.  MacMillan reiterated the point that what was undertaken as defensive reaction on the part of one country (England kept building ships for its navy because Germany kept building new ships) was not perceived that way by the others.

MacMillan (who cites Clark in her book) agrees with him:  while war seemed inevitable, there were choices that could have been made.  She highlights, as does Clark, the flaws in the Kaiser and the Tsar, both weak characters who occupied their thrones at an unfortunate time for human history and who exercised their vast power in erratic and ill-informed ways that exacerbated the uncertainties facing all of Europe's leaders at the time (including their own in Germany and Russia).

The upshot of making 2013 the year of reading about 1914 was that for me, anyway, the received wisdom about World War I has been somewhat upended.  France and Russia were not blameless by any means and England (Grey) contributed significantly to the way events ultimately unfolded.  What is also clearer to me, however, is that trying to identify ultimate causes is a fool's errand—because there were too many of them coalescing all at once.  Bad leaders who in some cases abdicated responsibility to the military, bad governments, unstable nationalisms, military planning, a lack of imagination on the part of both civilian and military leaders, a decade of events that made all the powers jittery, and a belief that somehow war would be avoided (because it had been up to that point, despite repeated alarms in the preceding decade).  Sometimes a nation, or humanity, simply has bad luck because bad things all come together at once, and we had it on June 28, 1914.

 

            June 28 has suddenly become a date I will recall every year.  Think how the world has changed as a result of events on June 28, 1914 and June 28, 1919:  two world wars, the rise and fall of bolshevism/communism in Europe, and all of their consequences.  (I am surmising that Lenin and the Bolsheviks would not have succeeded had not Russia fared very poorly in the war—by 1917 facing food shortages and enormous casualty numbers—which led ultimately to Lenin's triumph.)  A number of historians view the period 1914-1945 as a single war interrupted by a lengthy truce, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the results of WWI set the stage for WWII.

 

            I mentioned earlier the view that we live in a world bequeathed to us by Hitler.  It is even more true that we live in a world bequeathed to us by the events of WWI because it spawned WWII as surely as the sun rises in the east.  WWI essentially brought down the curtain on three hereditary monarchies that had ruled much of central and eastern Europe for centuries; it created an embittered Germany and a situation in central Europe (as well as the Middle East) that was clearly unstable and that became especially so with the onset of economic depression; it also brought to an end a life, at least among the reasonably affluent, that now seems dreamily idyllic when looking back 100 years.  The duration and deaths of WWI led to a much different view about life and society for those who experienced it and, one can argue, generated the modern age, a more cynical take on life.

 

            As a footnote to this digression on WWI, I've noted in the news in the past that Nicholas II was elevated to sainthood by the Russian Orthodox Church (this from Wikipedia):

 

In the last Orthodox Russian monarch and members of his family we see people who sincerely strove to incarnate in their lives the commands of the Gospel.  In the suffering borne by the Royal Family in prison with humility, patience, and meekness, and in their martyrs deaths in Yekaterinburg in the night of 17 July 1918 was revealed the light of the faith of Christ that conquers evil. . . .  The Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia rejected the family's classification as martyrs because they were not killed on account of their religious faith. Religious leaders in both churches also had objections to canonizing the Tsar's family because they perceived him as a weak emperor whose incompetence led to the revolution and the suffering of his people and made him partially responsible for his own murder and those of his wife, children and servants.

 

The great historian Simon Schama has observed that "history is the enemy of reverence."  I would think that anyone who reviews many of the actions that took place during his reign as Tsar—pograms against the Jews, bloody suppression of the 1905 uprising, murder of political opponents, and a generally repressive autocracy—which he presumably was at least informed about even if he didn't direct them, would choke on the assertion that he "strove to incarnate . . . the commands of the gospels."  It is probably true that he was the wrong man at the wrong place in history—perhaps not the brightest bulb in the chandelier—but to elevate him to sainthood seems to me to devalue sainthood, if one wants to believe in that kind of thing.  History, in this case, seems not to have overcome reverence.

 

All three of these books were well worth the effort to read.  I don't know that in the time left to me on the planet, however, I'm going to read in any further depth about the origins of WWI.  The causes are multiple and one can construe them in a number of ways.  There will never be a definitive answer to the question "why?"

SAINT, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.

BATTLE, n. A method of untying with the teeth of a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.

            Kathy, Krystin, and I were chatting one night, and when the conversation lagged a bit, Kathy pulled out a small book by the publishers of the American Heritage Dictionary, 100 Words Almost Everyone Confuses & Misuses.  All three of us know the correct usage for most of the terms that are troublesome for many (complimentary, complementary; uninterested, disinterested; imply, infer; and so on).  All of us, however, were surprised to learn that "peruse" means to read carefully and thoroughly.  We all thought it meant to scan quickly; I have been using that word incorrectly my entire life.  How disappointing.

            Within two weeks after we had that conversation, in A.Word.A.Day, a daily email I receive, the word "peruse" showed up:

MEANING:

verb tr.:
1. To read or examine with great care.
2. To read or examine in a casual manner.

Give me a break.  Even with the vagaries of English, how can the word mean both of those things?  The OED, one of the final authorities, is unhelpful:  "Reading; examination, study; an instance of this."  So I turned to the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary (which didn't have this explanation in their little book that started this inquiry).  They write that peruse "has long meant 'to read thoroughly,' . . . which was acceptable to 75 percent of the Usage Panel in our 2011 survey.  But the word is often used more loosely, to mean simply 'to read,' . . .  Seventy percent of the Panel rejected this example in 1999, but only 39 percent rejected it in 2011.  Further extension of the word to mean 'to glance over, skim' has traditionally been considered an error, but our ballot results suggest that it is becoming somewhat more acceptable.  When asked about the sentence "I only had a moment to peruse the manual quickly," 66 percent of the Panel found it unacceptable in 1988, 58 percent in 1999, and 48 percent in 2011."  I still think it's odd to have a word mean one thing and also its opposite, although I imagine there are other such examples in English.

            Brad Leithauser in the New Yorker wrote that he "was seeking a replacement for "unfathomable" but, upon looking up "depthless," found that it was indeed a synonym for "unfathomable"—but also for its opposite, "fathomable," which he reported means "Having no depth; shallow."  He decided the "word was what I think of as an auto-antonym (a term that doesn't appear in Webster's Second):  it's its own opposite.  Which is to say, it's a mostly unusable word."  Another one I use fairly often, and have to be careful about context, is "sanction."

            Kathy and Krystin and I also agreed that the use of some confusing words will always be beyond our reach (and each of has different ones that we cannot master).  I, for example, will never be able to distinguish between the times when it is appropriate to use "that" and when it is appropriate to use "which."  I've never been able to understand the difference between restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, so I fall back on a simple-minded rule that gets me through most difficulties:  If the clause needs commas around it, I use "which"; if it doesn't, I use "that."  My long-time informal personal writing mentor and friend, Regents Professor Tom Clayton, will probably roll his eyes when he reads this, and justifiably so.

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.  (Both Parker)

            I was glad to see that astrobiologists believe the earth will be inhabitable for at least another 1.75 billion years, and maybe up to 3.25 billion years.  I guess I should make sure my will is up to date.  (At some point the sun will begin to expand before it collapses.  The astrobiologists point out, however, that we may make the planet inhospitable to human life long before that because of anthropogenic climate change, for example.)

            The same day I saw the article about the astrobiologists' publication there was also a news piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a conference at the Library of Congress to discuss how long human civilization might last.  It's made it 5000 years—out of the 4.5 billion years the earth has existed.  The question is whether we'll survive our own technologies; we've put a strain on the planet since the invention of the steam engine.  If there were a cataclysmic event, human civilization could come to an end.  One way to try to ensure survival is to get some of us off the earth and to another planet, Mars being the most likely candidate in the "near" future.  (Meantime, the astrobiologists comb the galaxy looking for planets that can also support life as we know it, but at present we have no feasible way to get some small chunk of humanity to Mars, much less planets that are light-years away from us.)

            One worrisome fact is "the great silence," the fact that there's no evidence of any technologically-advanced civilization elsewhere in the universe.  It may be, a former NASA historian observed, that civilizations just don't last much longer than that, so never get to the point of settling off planet.  (This is the "Fermi Paradox," formulated by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950:  "the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and humanity's lack of contact with, or evidence for, such civilizations.")  Elliott speculates, quasi-facetiously (and perhaps quasi-hopefully), that perhaps there is a benign intergalactic civilization out there that has conquered the problem of traveling faster than the speed of light, with ships that have "warp drives," and that it does not interfere with planetary civilizations, or invite them to join intergalactic society, until they are sufficiently advanced and have demonstrated that they have gotten beyond warlike and other primitive belief systems.

            Although our technology is stone-age compared to the technology that an intergalactic civilization would possess, I wondered if ours is sufficiently advanced that it could at least detect large ships flitting about the universe and perhaps other evidence of social organization.  So I asked a friend in astronomy, Professor Roberta Humphreys.

            She tells me, among other things, that there's at least one guy looking for alien ships!  He's a University of California astronomer, Geoff Marcy, who was quoted in the Huffington Post as saying (reflecting the common wisdom among any who think about it) that "the universe is simply too large for there not to be another intelligent civilization out there. . . .  Really, the proper question is:  'How far away is our nearest intelligent neighbor?'  They could be 10 light-years, 100 light-years, a million light-years or more. We have no idea."  He said he'll look for ships the same way astronomers look for planets orbiting stars:  by dimming of the starlight as the object (planet, large ship) passes between the star and earth.  So who knows, maybe he'll find some ships.  Then we can rest easy, knowing that it won't be the scene depicted in the movie "Independence Day" but instead that someday we'll be invited to join the universe.  Right.

            Roberta also sent me the précis of an article (not available yet when I composed this) about some recent astrobiologists' work.  In looking for the origins of life when planets are formed, they traced the elements most used by life on earth (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen).  The article authors conclude that "it is now clear that the early stages of star formation fosters the creation of water and simple organic molecules with enrichments of heavy isotopes. . . .  Although the exact details are uncertain, it is likely that the birth process of star and planets likely leads to terrestrial worlds being born with abundant water and organics on the surface."

Anyway, Roberta tells me that she goes through this line of thinking with her classes.  "The nearest habitable planets should be only about 20 light years away, but that is habitable, a terrestrial type planet in the life zone of its star.  It doesn't mean that there is life on it, although we would give life a high probability.  The biggest uncertainty is intelligent life (what is intelligence?) and the probability that it develops an advanced technological civilization that wants to explore the Universe.  These are big ifs.  And even so, any communication means that our civilizations have to overlap in the same time.   Interstellar travel past the nearest stars is impractical and probably impossible."

As a result, she says, "we must use interstellar communication which travels at the speed of light.  Let's say an advanced civilization exists in the Milky Way in our time frame, that is now!  But their planet is 1000 light years away."  And that means, she explained, that "it takes 1000 years for the message to get here and 1000 years for them to get our answer."  So, "perhaps we just haven't been listening long enough."

As for Elliott's intergalactic civilization, Roberta wrote me that the assumption is that "this advanced civilization has as its primary goal to spread its civilization, its seed, across the Galaxy.  That is, create a 'galactic empire.'  In this exercise we are limited by the laws of physics, so let's assume the interstellar ships can travel at 1/10000 the speed of light.  You can show that it will take only 100,000 years to cross the Galaxy [that is, the Milky Way].  So where are they?  There are lots of answers."  She concluded that in her view, "the Universe is full of life, probably intelligent life as well, and asking the same questions."  (She explained that a civilization would "cross the galaxy in steps—hops, colonizing the appropriate planets along the way.  If the nearest habitable planet is 20 light years away, each step takes 20,000 years, add a little time to develop the resources on the colony planet sufficiently to take the next step, and so on across the Galaxy, about 100,000 light years in diameter.)

I commented to Roberta that perhaps any civilization would be daunted by the prospect of sending off a ship that has to travel for thousands of years before getting anywhere, unless their lifespans are also thousands of years.  And sending off the ships PLUS advancing technology to spread further would add to the challenge, I would think--each little outpost would have to advance technology OR the home civilization would--but then it would take centuries more to spread around the advanced technology.  Communication, even at the speed of light, across solar systems and galaxies would be similar to the speed of communication between our capitol and the diplomats in Europe when the U.S. was founded:  it took months for a letter to go and be answered.

It's interesting to contemplate whether any civilization would actually have the long-range vision, ambition, and resources to start an effort that only pays off a little bit every 20,000 years--and the planet that starts the effort would never know (except in 40,000-year bits, as information trickled back, assuming it did) what happened.  To which Roberta responded "that's the point.  Would ours?  We can't even commit to going back to the Moon, let alone Mars."

The upshot of the conclusion from the astrobiologists' work is, given ~100 million galaxies with ~100 million stars each, that there is other life, and perhaps galaxies are teeming with life.  Given the limits of physics, we each live in our own little area, unable to reach any other.  So it seems to me that the only effective way to do the galactic empire would be to find warp drives or worm holes.  I know the limit of the speed of light, and I remind people of that every time they want to wax poetic about interstellar travel and civilization. But I just hate to believe we're limited that way.  I don't want to believe it. 

Of course, if that limit can be exceeded exponentially, permitting easy interstellar travel, I want it to be humans that do it first (I think), rather than another species that might not take kindly to us.  A la Stephen Hawkings' comment about aliens vis-a-vis what happened to the Native Americans when Columbus landed in North America:  the result was not pleasant.  I would like to believe that if humans start zipping about the universe, our first inclination upon discovering another habitable planet that is in fact inhabited by intelligent species would not be to destroy them and take over the planet—and indeed that we would adopt a peaceful approach until learning otherwise—and that if the reaction to our presence were hostile, but the beings on the planet were unable to attack or give chase, we would simply back away and leave them alone.  Part of the problem with Columbus and Native Americans, of course, was biological as well as political, and one can imagine that issues of infection and disease could be substantial were humans to encounter other species—be they intelligent or simply tiny bugs akin to what we see every day.

I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen. 

If you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you.  (Both Parker)

            April 23 was a sad day for me.  I received an assessment from a local tree service company (made at my request) about the two very large maples in our back yard.  There had developed holes in the trunks of both trees, where limbs were removed and the cuts never covered over, and the center wood in the trees had rotted out.  The report from the first company said that they were a disaster waiting to happen. 

            Kathy suggested I get more than one evaluation; after all, these are companies in the business of removing trees.  So I did; the second company sent an arborist out and then he called me.  He said that the trees were in terrible shape and that he was "surprised that they were still standing." 

            The trees were planted as saplings by my great aunt and uncle in 1940 and 1941, and when I visited the house as a child, I used to climb them.  They have almost been part of the family—and over the years we've planted dozens of hosta in the back yard, plants that like shade.  For me, it was a great loss to have them come down.

            But we did receive unexpected third-party confirmation of our decision.  There's an outfit in Minneapolis, Wood from the [neighbor]Hood that takes wood from trees that have been taken down and recycles it into cutting boards, bread trays, etc.  So I called them and told them about these two large maples that were coming down, because Kathy and I thought maybe we could have a couple of slices of the trunks as mementos—table tops or trays, perhaps.  The guy from Wood from the Hood said he couldn't use the wood from those trees because there was too much that was rotten.  Besides, he said, the wood from those kinds of maples doesn't hold up well to drying and will crack apart when they try to make anything from it.  So he didn't want it and refused to make any pieces for us because he said we'd be unhappy with the result.

            After the tree folks removed the trees and ground out the stumps, the back yard looked like a bomb had gone off.  There was no shade and there was mud and river rock everywhere.  We had an arborist in to advise us on a replacement tree; he told us we should get rid of the river rock ground cover because it heats up the ground in the summer and it cools it in the winter—and is not good for a new tree.  Well, that was easier said than done.  We had a heck of a time finding any way to get rid of the several tons of river rock—until finally we started to get bids from various outfits to haul it away.

            We also had no idea how vexing the question of the replacement tree would be.  We learned a lot about trees by searching the web and getting advice from horticulture colleagues and the Minnesota Extension Service.  We changed our minds three times and finally ended up with, of all things, an elm.  The horticulture people have bred elm cultivars that are resistant to Dutch elm disease, so that's what we decided on, after choosing and then rejecting a catalpa, a linden, and a honey locust.  Fortunately, the guy at Bachman's was quite understanding.  (He's the one who talked us out of the linden, which we really liked and which a couple of colleagues recommended on the basis of personal experience.  He said it's quite susceptible to being defoliated by Japanese beetles and that we would be unhappy with him if he sold us a linden.  The web sources on the linden backed him up.)

            Bachman's came, the crew installed the elm, leveled the ground and added a layer of soil, and laid flagstone for a walk.  We then, within a week, expanded one hosta garden, added two more gardens on the site where the maples once stood, planted ground cover plants beside and among the flagstone, laid more flagstone and planted more ground cover, and planted new plants.  We are both hurry-up-and-get-the-project-done types, so we didn't waste time.  We now have the busiest back yard in south Minneapolis, I think, with pots of flowers everywhere and paths and some river rock and trees and gardens.

WHEAT, n. A cereal from which a tolerably good whisky can with some difficulty be made, and which is used also for bread. The French are said to eat more bread per capita of population than any other people, which is natural, for only they know how to make the stuff palatable.

Los Angeles: Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.  (Parker)

            Kathy and I had decided that 2013 would be the year of travel in the U.S. and that we would remodel the kitchen, which it badly needed.  But then suddenly we needed a new furnace, and had to take down big trees, and the kitchen project got pushed into the future and we stayed home.  In addition, small things piled up, like replacing the service door to the garage, repairing wood in a corner of the family room floor that had rotted because of a crack in the stucco, buying a generator to deal with power outages, and (voluntarily) re-furnishing the living room.  Between that list, the furnace, and the tree removal and associated costs to reconstruct our yard, Kathy commented ruefully that this is for us "the year of the house"—as opposed to spending the money in a more interesting and enjoyable way.  Given Krystin's surgery and with various people coming and going to do work in the house and yard, we finally decided we just couldn't travel much this summer.  Drat.

We certainly have not put off indefinitely plans for travel and do have tentative plans for Italy and India.  I hope to have a trip planned the year of my funeral, whether I die at 70 or 80 or 90 or later.

I is the first letter of the alphabet, the first word of the language, the first thought of the mind, the first object of affection.  In grammar it is a pronoun of the first person and singular number.  Its plural is said to be _We_, but how there can be more than one myself is doubtless clearer to the grammarians than it is to the author of this incomparable dictionary.  Conception of two myselfs is difficult, but fine.

At a party, an arrogant young man told Parker, as he looked around the room at the guests, "I'm afraid I simply cannot bear fools." "How odd," Parker replied. "Your mother could, apparently."

 

In the "funny language stories" category:  The Associated Press reported in March that the Swedish Language Council, a semi-official body that's the language watchdog, compiled its annual (2012) "list of words that aren't in the Swedish dictionary but have entered common parlance" and included "ogooglebar" on the list.  It was defined as "something 'that cannot be found on the Web with a search engine.'"  Google objected and insisted that it be noted that Google is a registered trademark.  The Council deleted the word from its list but scolded Google for trying to control the Swedish language.  My friend Nils Hasselmo—a linguist—wrote to me that "the Swedes should obviously have their mouths washed with soap for using patented language!"  He went on to add that "language is a wild beast that will not be subdued!"

On that same subject, more or less, I recalled last year for Nils a lunch I had had with him many years ago.  He and I were having lunch in the Campus Club on the University campus and an academic visiting from Norway (which I didn't know at that moment) who Nils knew happened by our table and the two of them had a few moments of conversation.  I asked him when he sat back down at the table if they had both been speaking Swedish.  He said no, the colleague had been speaking Norwegian.  So they understood each other perfectly well, I asked?  They did, Nils said. 

I wrote recently to ask Nils whether that is also true for Danes speaking with either Swedes or Norwegians. Can they understand one another perfectly well?  He wrote to me that yes, they do.  "Speakers of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish understand each other, but the degree may depend on how close to the other country they live (or grew up).  Western Swedes understand Norwegians very well, and southern Swedes understand Danes very well. . . .   Regarding Norwegian, it also depends on whether the Norwegians are speaking Dano-Norwegian, the language spoken by the upper classes during the 500-year rule by Denmark and continued by many Norwegians, or New Norwegian, a language developed by Ivar Aasen in the 19th century as part of efforts to stress Norwegian culture after the forced union with Sweden [ended].  The former is easier for Swedes than the latter, which was based on more western Norwegian dialects."

There appears to be a reason that the language speakers in the three countries can continue to understand each other.  After the "ogooglebar" news, I learned from Wikipedia that three of the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) have language councils that work together on a daily basis.  The Danish council (Dansk Sprognævn) is official, part of the Danish government, and among its tasks are updating the official Danish dictionary, Retskrivningsordbogen (they tally new words and when they appear often enough, they add them to the dictionary—"which all government institutions and schools are obliged by law to follow").  Interestingly, the three councils apparently work together to make sure that "the three Mainland Scandinavian languages, which are more or less mutually intelligible, do not diverge more than necessary from one another."  (Finland and Iceland both also have language councils, but those languages are quite different from Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish.)

Now, if we could just have such cooperation between England, Scotland, Ireland, and the United States (that's a joke).  Of course, the idea of a language council in the United States isn't likely to get very far—and were one proposed, it would no doubt be advanced by the wingnuts on the right who insist that America have one official language that everyone must speak.  My response would be that the people who live in Mississippi and Alabama should also learn to speak English.

Ducking for apples - change one letter and it's the story of my life.  (Parker)

ME, pro.  The objectionable case of I.  The personal pronoun in English has three cases, the dominative, the objectionable and the oppressive.  Each is all three.

Gary to Krystin and Elliott:

It has been suggested (not by Kathy) that I am too involved in you guys' decision-making in your lives--that I should step back and just let you handle things as the adults you are.

You should tell me if you think that's true. It's of course hard for me to know--parents don't have any good way to make comparisons. If there are times when you want to say "I can handle this myself, dad," that's fine. I start with the assumption that if I can help you, I should--but perhaps I should start with the assumption that you'll ask for my help if you want it and otherwise stay out of your decisions.

Krystin to Gary:

I know with us still living under your roof, it's hard not to be involved in our decision making, especially if it affects how much longer we stay in the house, or if we're doing anything to move on and move up. To be honest, the only time I felt pressure from you recently about decision making was about whether or not to go back to Korea. The ONLY reason I didn't end up going back, the only thing keeping me from going, was you. I don't mean that in an accusatory way or to make you feel guilty. I'm just saying that is the only time (since I've returned from Korea) I've felt you were maybe too involved in my decision making. I know that you only had my best interest at heart, and I'm happy now with my job and I know working here at the U has given me lots of benefits and whatnot, but Korea does still pull at my heart, and I will want to go back.

Other than that, I can't think of anything else off the top of my head. I don't mind you being involved in my life, and I haven't really had any other big decisions I've had to make anyway, so for now, I don't think it's a problem. Obviously I can't speak for Elliott, but that's my take.

            Elliott didn't respond.  I feel somewhat vindicated about the pressure on Krystin not to go back to South Korea.  With the medical issues that arose, living there would have been a major problem.  She grudgingly agreed.

In youth, it was a way I had,
To do my best to please.
And change, with every passing lad
To suit his theories.

But now I know the things I know
And do the things I do,
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you."  (Parker)

(GE: And when we are both at that place, things work out quite nicely)

Elliott, Kathy, and I were chatting one summer night and he asked if black humor about the Holocaust or Shoah would ever be acceptable.  I said I thought not.  There is much black humor I can accept, but some evil is so far beyond the pale that it cannot be joked about.  Elliott wondered if that would still be true in 500 years.  Who knows.  Right now, I said I thought the only ones who could indulge in black humor about the Holocaust are the Jews (and perhaps the gypsies, and a few others who the Nazis sent to the camps).  But I certainly am not going to do so.

Almost immediately after that exchange came the news about Michael Karkoc, the Ukrainian immigrant who's lived in Minneapolis since shortly after the end of WWII and is now alleged to have worked with and at the direction of the SS in murdering quite a number of people during the war.  The reader/blogosphere had mixed reactions, but at least in the places I read, the significant majority favored deportation to Germany or Poland for trial if either country decided there was sufficient evidence to warrant prosecution.  Karkoc is 94, so some argued that he should be let alone on the grounds of age and that he's apparently been a good citizen ever since he came to Minneapolis in the late 1940s.

I think those who argue for possible deportation and trial, if the evidence warrants it, have the stronger position.  And I didn't encounter anyone making jokes about the situation.

I've also told Krystin—the aspiring writer—that I don't use the "nazi" descriptor as a noun (for example, "grammar nazi") unless I am writing or speaking about Nazi Germany because I think the trivial use of the term demeans the Shoah.  Views on this vary, with the majority of the websites (with both Jewish and non-Jewish authors) arguing against use of the term because it trivializes what happened.  On the other hand, "there are those who would assert that the only way to properly treat the Nazis is to deny them the dignity of respect for their name not by avoiding using it, but instead to use it freely for anything even vaguely negative; to make a mockery of the Nazis by turning their name into a joke."  That view may have some merit, but I go with the trivialization view.

ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.  (Parker)

            It was an interesting two weeks in Lake Wobegon, one on the home front and one nationally. 

            At the national level, as far as I can tell, the Supreme Court told the gay community it could now be legally married and do what it's been doing in the bedroom for millennia—and the Court then did that very thing to the community of people of color.  Did I get that right?  But it was an odd juxtaposition of events, because at the same time the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, television chef Paula Deen was getting dumped by major sponsors, even that bastion of liberalism Walmart, for unacceptable comments about Black/African-Americans.  So corporate and commentariat America was according due respect to people of color at the same time the Court said the right-wing political establishment of the South and a few other places could now take steps to restrict the impact of their voting without fear of federal intervention.  (Which, of course, several promptly began to do.)

            One is reminded of Ambrose Bierce's imaginary conversation in his definition of the devil:

SATAN, n.  One of the Creator's lamentable mistakes, repented in sashcloth and axes.  Being instated as an archangel, Satan made himself multifariously objectionable and was finally expelled from Heaven.  Halfway in his descent he paused, bent his head in thought a moment and at last went back.  "There is one favor that I should like to ask," said he.

"Name it."

"Man, I understand, is about to be created.  He will need laws."

"What, wretch!  You, his appointed adversary, charged from the dawn of eternity with hatred of his soul—you ask for the right to make his laws?"

"Pardon; what I have to ask is that he be permitted to make them himself."

It was so ordered.

I wish you could have heard that pretty crash Beauty and the Beast made when, with one sweeping, liquid gesture, I tossed it out of my twelfth-story window.  (Parker)

CONSOLATION, n. The knowledge that a better man is more unfortunate than yourself.

            From the annals of cribbage:  Elliott and I have taken to playing it once in awhile.  I taught him to play early last summer.  I won't play "Magic" and he won't play bridge, so we compromised on cribbage.  I was ahead of him by four games at one point, and then he double-skunked me.  I haven't played much cribbage in recent years, but I can't remember a time when I saw a double skunk.  I knew I wasn't going to fare well when, on the second deal, he had 16 points in his hand and 24 in his crib.  It went down hill from there for me.

            But later I won 10 games in a row, clearly indicating I am a better player . J

In one game later in the summer, Elliott scored 21 pegging points on the first hand—but still only barely managed to avoid my skunking him.  He found these developments irritating.

            Eventually the won-lost totals began to balance out—except that I have maintained a consistent 9-12-game lead.

On the spur of the moment, when we'd both gotten big hands, in one game we tracked the number of deals it took before one of us won.  It was six.  We were amazed.

REASONABLE, adj.  Accessible to the infection of our own opinions. Hospitable to persuasion, dissuasion and evasion.

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.  (Parker)

            We were glad we took down the trees because a heckuva storm came through town on June 21 and blew down lots of trees—especially in our neighborhood of Minneapolis.  (One tree toppled over just down the block from our house—right on top of a car that was driving by.  Fortunately, the driver was not injured, but his car was squashed.)  The storm also took out a lot of power—it was the largest power outage in Minnesota in history, I believe it was reported.  The storm brought a lot of rain, which followed a very rainy spring that had left the ground already soaked.   (And thus, it was surmised, made it easier for the wind to topple the trees, because the ground was softer than normal.)

            We were among those who lost power.  When the power goes out, the sump pump stops.  When our sump pump stops, the basement floods, which it duly did.  We had streams running across the floor to the drain from all sides.  We don't keep much directly on the floor, so there was no damage of any significance, but it was still a big mess to clean up. 

            This same thing happened about a dozen years ago, when we were without power for about 5 days.  No sump pump, basement flooded.  What was really irritating last time was that by the end of day 5 or so, it was only a small group of houses that had no power—everyone across the street, behind us, and down the block had power, just not 6-8 houses in a little group that included ours.  One of neighbors at one point saw a power company truck driving slowly by and ran after it and insisted the crew come and look at the transformer or whatever it is on the pole at the end of our block.  They did so, and used a pole to reach up and flip a switch—and bingo, our power was back on.  So we were without for 5 days because some switch didn't get flipped (sort of like a blown circuit).

            This time I decided I'd had it with power outages and wet basements (Kathy agreed), so we went out to Menard's on Sunday and, luckily, they had just received a shipment of (gas-fueled) generators.  We bought one and brought it home and got it going, so it re-started the sump pump, the refrigerator (the food in which was largely OK, after only two days), and the chest freezer (in which everything was still frozen like a brick).  So next time. . . .  And I'm sure there will be a next time; one of the predicted results of global climate change is more violent storms.  So now I can at least keep the sump pump going.  (When I re-started the sump pump, it immediately ran uninterruptedly for quite awhile—and flooded a sizeable part of the back yard.)

            Meantime, that Sunday we (a contingent of neighbors this time) saw an Omaha Power truck out in front (brought in to help deal with the power outages) and as a group we asked the crew to again look at the transformer on the pole at the end of the block.  They didn't do so right then but did come back that evening, we think because we'd pleaded with them to do so—and exactly the same thing happened.  One of them took a pole, reached up and flipped a switch, and our power was restored.  We decided later that as a group we'd invest in a pole and after the next power outage we'd flip the switch ourselves.  It was really irritating to be without power for two days only because some circuit blew and it took so little to restore service.

PAIN, n.  An uncomfortable frame of mind that may have a physical basis in something that is being done to the body, or may be purely mental, caused by the good fortune of another.

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.  (Parker)

            I thought Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker made a wise observation after reporting and commenting on a report from the Pew Research Center that now in 40% of households with children, women are the main breadwinners.  The majority of those surveyed offered the opinion that raising children is more difficult when the mother works outside the home (although fewer in the younger cohort believe that than in the older one).  She wrote:

When people talk about the difficulty of rearing children today, they may actually be talking about economics and about work.  Life is harder when mothers work outside the home because, obviously, there's more to do in the same amount of time. . . .  But life is also stressful and often demoralizing in twenty-first-century America because we all live under a speeded-up, coercively multitasking, vacation-poor, debt-burdened, harsher, and less forgiving form of capitalism than do the citizens of many other industrial countries.

            Another reason, in my view, to oppose a political philosophy that discounts a social/economic support net:  the more unrestricted the competition and capitalism is, the worse the quality of life for everyone in the system.

It is worse, that is, except for the very wealthy and those who make it to the top of the heap—but as Gladwell argues, in Outliers, "the biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work" and that success "is not exceptional or mysterious.  It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky."  If one accepts Gladwell's view, which I do, then this speeded-up life we live in this country isn't necessarily going to make the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum any better off.  They just work harder and get less vacation time.  (In the words of Grist blogger David Roberts, "No one but the privileged believes they are in a meritocracy.")

Coincidentally, about the same time I wrote the foregoing, there appeared in the Washington Post an article titled "40 maps that explain the world."  One of the maps was "Economic inequality around the world," measured using the Gini coefficient (a statistic measuring inequality).  If in a society of 100 people, 1 person received all the income and the 99 received none, the Gini coefficient would be 1.0; if in a society of 100 people, everyone received exactly the same income, the Gini coefficient would be 0.  So, obviously, a lower Gini coefficient means greater equality.

There was only one country in the world with a Gini coefficient under 0.25:  Sweden.  The rest of Scandinavia and part of Western Europe is in the 0.25-0.29 range; most of the remainder of Western Europe, Australia, and Canada are 0.30-0.34.  The U.S. is in the 0.45-0.49 range, along with China, Mexico, and a few other places—so greater economic disparities.  What I find interesting is that in international measures of happiness, such as the "Measures of Gross National Happiness" (2000 data) by Ruut Veenhoven at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Denmark and Sweden are #1 and 2.  The U.S. is #3.  Another study at the University of Illinois found, analyzing Gallup World Poll data, that "the research indicated that people have higher life evaluations when others in society also have their needs fulfilled.  Thus life satisfaction is not just an individual affair, but depends substantially also on the quality of life of one's fellow citizens."

Another of the maps was telling as well, drawn from data from "Save the Children," which identified the best countries in which to be mothers.  As one might expect, Scandinavia, Western Europe, Canada, and Australia are in the first tier.  The U.S. is in the second tier, along with Mexico, Argentina, and parts of Eastern Europe.  Of the 35 "developed" countries in the world, the U.S. ranks 34th in child poverty rates (that is, only Romania, ranked 35th, has a higher rate of child poverty than the U.S.; oddly, 30th to 33rd are Italy, Lithuania, Spain, and Latvia).

These are disappointing data.  They are also interesting findings at a time when some U.S. politicians argue for cutting the social safety net and for laws that increase disparities in wealth.  (Elliott said he might voluntarily take Swedish, in the time he has left in college, because he likes it and because if the U.S. goes to hell, he'd want to emigrate (back) to Sweden, from which his paternal great-great-grandparents emigrated in 1880.)

There were interesting data posted in a study from the London School of Economics by a guy named David Binder, "a Family Fiscal policy Consultant for the Christian social policy charity, CARE, where he conducts in-depth research on Family Tax, Welfare and Benefits."  He also "explores other areas relating to society and culture, evangelical christianity (of which he is a believer), and criminal justice." 

What Binder reported, using standard Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, basically the 34 most-developed nations of the world) data, is a fairly significant statistical correlation between national levels of happiness (using several variables) and taxation as a percentage of GDP:  the higher the taxation level, the happier the population.  The relationship isn't perfect:  Switzerland and Ireland have low taxes and a high level of happiness while Italy has high taxes and a low level of happiness.  The U.S. is a slight outlier; it ranks 32nd of 34 in taxation but 22nd in level of happiness.  There are other cases among the 34 where the rank in one doesn't correspond closely to the rank in the other, but the overall relationship is pretty clear.

Mr. Binder appropriately notes caveats. 

It might be the case, for instance, that in EU countries such as Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, and the Netherlands there are common characteristics (apart from high taxation rates) within their cultures that lead them to experience greater levels of wellbeing/happiness.  Nevertheless, one could feasibly argue that higher levels of taxation receipts might allow for governments to invest more in public services ('progressives' frequently assert this line of argument) such as publicly funded leisure and personal care services (one of the variables used in this study.)  It might also be the case that higher levels of public taxation leads to better healthcare, education, transport and other provisions, which are all areas that could have an influence on an individual's happiness.

The data are certainly suggestive.

            I would dearly love to see the leading libertarian and Tea Party lights in American politics adduce some decent evidence—and I mean hard evidence, not philosophical claims—that their minimalist view of government works better than the version adopted in Scandinavia and, in various parts and various ways, throughout much of the rest of western Europe and the developed world.  As far as I can see, the nations with minimalist governments are also those that are basket cases (compare some in Africa and Asia).  There are good examples of the successful high-tax/high-benefits states; where are the examples of the opposite?  (One cannot, of course, have low-tax/high-benefits states.)  (No, I don't equate the Tea Party with libertarians, but there is significant overlap between them.)

            The primary example inside the U.S. is the South:  It is low tax, low government—and ranks low on just about every measure of civilized society one can dream up.

I went to convent in New York and was fired finally for my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.  (Parker)

IMPIETY, n.  Your irreverence toward my deity.

            A Facebook "friend" posted this:  "Obama: Trayvon 'could have been me'. This clown is in fricken believable. Impeach this god damn moron Racist prick."  This from a distant relative whom I've never met and likely never will.  One can infer the level of education the person has achieved.

            I posed a question to Kathy, Krystin, and one friend:  should I post a comment along the lines "I always appreciate it when relatives engage in thoughtful and rational discourse about public policy questions."  Obviously snotty, but does it violate any rules or norms of behavior for Facebook?  The answer to the question was "no," but I received conflicting counsel about whether to post the comment.  Two of the three said I should not and should just de-friend the person; one said I should.  All three expressed doubt I'd change the person's point of view.  My friend Steve recalled a quote from Robert Heinlein:  "Never try to teach a pig to sing.  It wastes your time and annoys the pig."  He went on to observe that "it's pretty difficult to hold a meaningful policy discussion with someone whose cultural predispositions and education make it unlikely they can deal constructively with the abstractions involved. . . . [they] simply lack the tools and predisposition to have a reasoned discussion."  I think that's right but wondered if a comment would make others who read such posts stop and think about what they're writing.

            Kathy's advice was succinct:  "Defriend this person.  It's not worth the aggravation and this person will never share your point of view."  Krystin said I should post the comment but also pointed out that "I doubt, though, that the relative would catch all the sarcasm dripping from it."

            In the end, I did nothing, heeding the advice we all received from our mothers:  if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.  But I sure was tempted.

            Later in the year, however, I could not resist.  He posted a picture of a man, clearly affluent, silver-haired, sport jacket and shirt with cuff links, sitting in a posh bar, with the subtitle "I don't deal often with Obama voters, but when I do, I order French fries."  I responded simply by saying that "gee, almost all the Obama voters I know are MDs, JDs, and PhDs."

POLITICS, n.  A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.  The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

There has been but one sweet, misty interlude in my [insomnia]; that was the evening I fell into a dead dreamless slumber brought on by the reading of a book called Appendicitis.  (Parker)

            Here's the Erma Bombeck memorial portion of my letter.

--          As Rita Mae Brown famously paraphrased it, "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results" (the exact origin of an original assertion along that line is not clear).  Some among my friends and relatives insist that one can put mostly-unrinsed dishes in a dishwasher and that they will come out sparkling clean.  I try this about 3-4 times per year, and inevitably there are food residues baked onto the dishes by the washing/drying cycle of the dishwasher.  So I go back to rinsing the dishes thoroughly, leaving barely a speck on them.  But I keep trying the not-rinsing approach.

--          There is some sock-eating creature in this house.  As I compose this in late summer, I have precisely 27 unmatched socks on the laundry table.  Where do they all go?

--          Last year I wrote:  "I have come in the last couple of years to be astonished and irritated by what I describe as the cantankerousness of inanimate objects.  If I am pulling hose across the yard, it finds a rock or plant to get stuck in.  If I am vacuuming in the house, the cord finds a chair or table to get ensnarled in." And so on.  There is a(n obsolete) word for this!  Resistentialism:  "The seemingly spiteful behavior shown by inanimate objects."  Objects have continued to resist me.

--          The Huffington Post reported that "a new survey finds that men with beards look as much as eight years older than those who are clean shaven, according to a report in the Daily Mail."  Duh.

--          I assume most people know the story behind the song "My Grandfather's Clock."  (In a nutshell, in 1875 an American songwriter stayed in a hotel in England that had a non-working large pendulum clock in the lobby.  The owners told him that the previous owners, brothers, had died; when the first one died, the clock lost accuracy and when the second one died it stopped completely—and no one could get it to start again.  The American was apparently sufficiently amused by the story that he wrote "My Grandfather's Clock," released in 1876.  It was wildly popular.)  What I didn't know was that it was because of the song that they became known as grandfather clocks; before that they were "longcase clocks."  How many of you learned the song in elementary school?  I have ascertained that many of my friends did—but my kids did not.

--          For the first time in well over 20 years, I didn't pick my raspberries this year.  I think I have geriatric raspberry bushes—they don't grow very tall and most of the berries were smaller than the last section of my pinkie finger.  Because I ignored them, the plot also grew a good crop of weeds as well as raspberry bushes.  I may just plow up the entire piece of ground and grow something else.  (Or, to be more accurate, I may hire someone else to dig up everything.)

--          My friend Scott Eller and I used to toss a Frisbee around when he lived on campus at the University and I'd hang around with him.  I can report that some things never change:  I regularly see guys—and it is mostly guys—throwing Frisbees around on the Mall.  I suspect that if Frisbees had existed in 1088, the year the University of Bologna was founded (the first university as we use the term now), the students would have thrown them around then as well.

--          After questioning the veracity of my assertion that it's better to drive with the air set to "recirculate," Kathy conceded after research from the University of Southern California demonstrated pretty conclusively that doing so "is the best way to reduce exposure to harmful traffic pollution."  The researchers provided findings that were new, at least to me.  Beyond recirculating the air, "exposures are lower in newer cars, at slower speeds, and on arterial roads, where pollutant concentrations are lower than on freeways" and "concentrations of particle pollutants on freeways are often five to 10 times higher than elsewhere."  Wow.  I wonder if that's as true on a congested urban freeway as driving across Iowa.  And that finding certainly makes even less attractive those homes nestled right next to freeways in the city.  In any event, what they found was that for the average vehicle, "recirculation settings reduce in-vehicle particle pollution for very small particles from 80 percent (of on-road levels) to 20 percent, and from 70 percent to 30 percent for larger particles, compared to air ventilation settings which bring in outside air."  This assumes you have your windows closed; if not, you get what's on the road.

--          One of the great natural phenomena is the way in which a tube of toothpaste suddenly empties itself when it hears that you are planning a trip, so that when you come to pack it is just a twisted shell of its former self, with not even a cubic millimeter left to be squeezed out.  (Benchley)  This happens to me regularly.

--          One part of enjoying the deck this year has been the veritable ornithological zoo we've had.  One night—this was unusual—we had a pair of doves, a pair of cardinals with baby, a couple of crows, a hummingbird, and (almost always) about 15-20 sparrows.  It's a cacaphony out there, and the sparrows have taken to nesting in the ivy growing on the garage, right behind our heads when we're sitting out.  We sometimes joke that we will have to call the police because of domestic disturbances that seem regularly to occur, as the sparrows hover and flutter and squawk and squeek about who's going to be in the ivy.  In addition, we have a local bunny (who's eating the tops off all our newly-planted ground cover plants and who runs—for a minute—under the deck when I toss pebbles at it to scare it away) and multiple squirrels and chipmunks (who will sometimes run right across the deck while we're sitting there).  Sometimes the sparrows also come perilously close to dive-bombing us, although we think not intentionally.

--          I saw a Minnesota car license plate 862 OMG.  I wonder if the powers that be in the Driver and Vehicle Services division of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety would allow 862 WTF, given its widespread use in social media and other places.

 

--          Kathy and I had a minorculinary evolution this year.  Both of us, for our entire adult life, have avoided Brussels sprouts because we disliked them.  At one social event, our friend Ann brought Brussels sprouts made some way that we ate them and like them.  Kathy's been making them about once per week ever since, and Elliott looks forward to them (he says that when Kathy fries them in olive oil with salt and pepper, they taste like popcorn).  Obviously the taste bud genes he inherited did not come from me.

FLOP, v.  Suddenly to change one's opinions and go over to another party.  The most notable flop on record was that of Saul of Tarsus, who has been severely criticised as a turn-coat by some of our partisan journals.

All I need is a place to lay my hat, and a few friends.  (Parker)

            A few years ago, in an earlier edition of this letter, I noted the work of a young philosophy professor, Nick Bostrom, who thinks about existential threats to humanity.  The usual examples are a large meteor strike (akin to the one that hit in the Yucatan and likely wiped out the dinosaurs), nuclear holocaust (less likely, at least for now), a lethal virus invented in some lab that is so contagious that it nearly eradicates humanity, grey goo (nanobots released to clean up an oil spill, for example, but due to a programming error they devour all carbon based objects, replicating and destroying everything, turning the planet to dust), global warming (that makes the planet inhabitable for humans), and so on. 

Astronomers know that in 3-4 billion years the sun will expand into a gas giant, burning up Earth, before it shrinks to become a white dwarf.  If we've survived but aren't off the planet—out of the solar system—by then, we are in some trouble. 

            Aeon, an electronic newsmagazine from England, reports that Bostrom now runs a center at Oxford University, the Future of Humanity Institute, which thinks about this stuff in a more organized fashion.  [The quotes that follow are from Aeon and retain the British spelling.]  Interestingly, what he now worries about is not so much the possibilities in the preceding paragraph but instead artificial intelligence (AI), and in particular artificial intelligence that exceeds human intelligence by a little or by a lot.  The world is a long way (yet) from building AI that is comparable to or exceeds human intelligence, but those in the field think the day is coming when that will happen.

One of the fellows at Bostrom's center points out that "an artificial intelligence wouldn't need to better the brain by much to be risky. After all, small leaps in intelligence sometimes have extraordinary effects. . . .  'The difference in intelligence between humans and chimpanzees is tiny' but it's [the difference] between 7 billion inhabitants and a permanent place on the endangered species list.'" The reason why an AI could be dangerous is that it would lack human emotions like empathy and altruism; it will do what it is programmed to do in the most efficient way possible (e.g., "If its goal is to win at chess, an AI is going to model chess moves, make predictions about their success, and select its actions accordingly. It's going to be ruthless in achieving its goal, but within a limited domain:  the chessboard").  In the larger setting of the earth, it would be equally ruthless, and designing a "friendly" AI is not likely to be easy.  The guy told a story.

No rational human community would hand over the reins of its civilisation to an AI. Nor would many build a genie AI, an uber-engineer that could grant wishes by summoning new technologies out of the ether. But some day, someone might think it was safe to build a question-answering AI, a harmless computer cluster whose only tool was a small speaker or a text channel. . . .  [Call it Oracle, after the Oracle at Delphi.]

'Let's say you have an Oracle AI that makes predictions, or answers engineering questions, or something along those lines,' . . .  'And let's say the Oracle AI has some goal it wants to achieve. Say you've designed it as a reinforcement learner, and you've put a button on the side of it, and when it gets an engineering problem right, you press the button and that's its reward. Its goal is to maximise the number of button presses it receives over the entire future. . . .  We might expect the Oracle AI to pursue button presses by answering engineering problems correctly. But it might think of other, more efficient ways of securing future button presses. It might start by behaving really well, trying to please us to the best of its ability. Not only would it answer our questions about how to build a flying car, it would add safety features we didn't think of. Maybe it would usher in a crazy upswing for human civilisation, by extending our lives and getting us to space, and all kinds of good stuff. And as a result we would use it a lot, and we would feed it more and more information about our world.'

'One day we might ask it how to cure a rare disease that we haven't beaten yet. Maybe it would give us a gene sequence to print up, a virus designed to attack the disease without disturbing the rest of the body. And so we sequence it out and print it up, and it turns out it's actually a special-purpose nanofactory that the Oracle AI controls acoustically. Now this thing is running on nanomachines and it can make any kind of technology it wants, so it quickly converts a large fraction of Earth into machines that protect its button, while pressing it as many times per second as possible. After that it's going to make a list of possible threats to future button presses, a list that humans would likely be at the top of. . . . . You would have this thing that behaves really well, until it has enough power to create a technology that gives it a decisive advantage — and then it would take that advantage and start doing what it wants to in the world.'

Lovely thought.

            The other subject Bostrom and his colleagues think about, which I also wrote about a few pages back, is whether there is a barrier or limit to an advanced civilization.  A Russian physicist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), first proposed the notion of the "cosmic omen."  That is, the universe is likely to be a cradle of civilizations, given its vastness and the number of stars and planets that likely exist—and modern astronomy is indeed identifying planets that could support life.  But so far we haven't encountered any advanced civilizations.  That's Enrico Fermi's famous question that I mentioned earlier, "where are they?"

Robin Hanson, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute, says there must be something about the universe, or about life itself, that stops planets from generating galaxy-colonising civilisations. There must be a "great filter", he says, an insurmountable barrier that sits somewhere on the line between dead matter and cosmic transcendence.

            If life on Earth is a fluke, then there may not be any "great filter" and the future of humanity is an open question.  Bostrom hopes that the Mars Rover does not find any sign of life on Mars, because if it does, then that means life has evolved at least twice just in this solar system—and didn't make it very far.  We've made it farther than multi-cellular organisms that might be found on Mars, but if life can evolve twice here, it surely could have evolved millions of times elsewhere in the universe and we'd see ships flying by us.  It may be that every civilization ends up using advanced technology to destroy itself, for example.

            If, however, there is no cosmic omen and humans don't have some barrier to get past, and they survive their own follies (nuclear weapons, global warming, etc.), the folks at the Center have tried imagining how humans could expand into the universe, and offer a view similar to that of Professor Humphreys.  "The consensus among them is that the Milky Way galaxy could be colonised in less than a million years, assuming we are able to invent fast-flying interstellar probes that can make copies of themselves out of raw materials harvested from alien worlds.  If we want to spread out slowly, we could let the galaxy do the work for us.  We could sprinkle starships into the Milky Way's inner and outer tracks, spreading our diaspora over the Sun's 250 million-year orbit around the galactic center."

            The problem with the "cosmic omen" and the lack of civilizations, as Professor Humphreys pointed out, is that they don't take into account that fundamental law of physics, the speed of light.  As I think I have mused before, even traveling as fast as we know how, it would take a ship carrying humans thousands of centuries to get to the nearest star.  The universe is about 12-13 billion light-years wide.  At least now, there are no wormholes to jump to other parts of the universe, there's no warp drive, there's no Crazy Eddie Point (see The Mote in God's Eye).  So unless there's some way around the limit imposed by the speed of light, we are stuck here, waiting for the sun to die. 

            I don't like to believe that.  Maybe I've read too much science fiction and liked Star Wars movies too much.  So I'm hoping that (1) we find a way to travel across space, (2) other unfriendly beings, if they exist, do not, or (3) at least they don't find it before we do and eradicate us.

            I suppose it's silly to worry about the future of the species when we have so many problems confronting us on the planet now.  But as the Aeon article points out, it is well for any species that has the ability to reflect to think about its own extinction, because 95% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct, and if one divides the history of the planet into 9 periods of roughly 500 million years each (the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old), almost all of the extinctions have come in the last period.  Which, of course, is when most complex life forms have existed.

            Sigh.  It's hard to be optimistic about this.  But oh well, I guess I don't have to worry too much about these conundrums.  I suspect my atoms will be re-mixing with the universe before we assemble an Oracle AI and I am certain they will be before we learn whether there's a great filter.  I go back to reading history.

DOG: A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow or surplus of the world's worship.  (For some, there is another subsidiary deity, CAT.)

(From Parker's "Constant Reader" book review of The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne, in The New Yorker [20 October 1928]):  And it is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

            A friend of mine and I were deliberating together over email about why it is that large organizations (e.g., 3M, the Roman Catholic Church, large universities) sometimes make decisions that strike outsiders as utterly stupid and counterproductive.  In the course of this exchange, I came across a comment by Robert Conquest (historian and poet).  "The behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies."

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.  (Parker)

MAUSOLEUM, n.  The final and funniest folly of the rich.

            We had a great reunion of sorts this summer.  In the early 1970s—I don't recall exactly when—my friend Scott Eller and I played in a now-long-defunct student bridge club at the University, when we were both students.  In the course of playing we met Husain and Durriya Sarkar; both had grown up in India, near Mumbai; Husain was a graduate student in philosophy at the University and Durriya worked there in the medical labs.  Somehow we struck up a friendship and began seeing them socially.  Scott and I introduced Husain to poker, a game at which he quickly became excellent.  (One time we were playing poker—at that point, not that far from high school, it was mostly a group of Scott's and my high-school friends—and on one deal the stakes got way higher than was normal for us.  Husain won about $100, and we learned after the fact that he bought a new TV set for them.  Husain was also sometimes a frustrating bridge opponent.  After 3-4 tricks had been played, he would lay down his hand, tell you what cards you had, and claim the tricks he had—and about 90% of the time he was right.)

            Husain and Durriya's first child, Casim, was born in 1976, about six months before they left Minnesota for Baton Rouge, LA, where Husain was appointed to a tenure-track position at Louisiana State University.  I drove down to Baton Rouge with Husain to help them move.  And there they have remained ever since, Husain as a professor of philosophy and Durriya holding scientific appointments.  (Their second child, Ashifa, was born in Baton Rouge and is now married and living in Mumbai with her husband and their infant daughter.  My joke with the Sarkars is that Ashifa looks like and probably passes for a native—until she opens her mouth and talks like an American.)

            There is some mild confusion about how often I have seen them since they moved.  Krystin is positive she has met the Sarkars; I didn't think I'd seen them since they'd moved.  I must be wrong.  But it had clearly been a long time, in any event.

            By an odd turn of career, Casim Sarkar was appointed to a tenured faculty appointment in biomedical engineering at the University of Minnesota last year and began his appointment this past summer.  His residence here prompted a visit from Husain and Durriya, so we got to see them several times in August—and it was great fun to revive the friendship on a face-to-face basis.  (We had remained in touch by email and occasionally Facebook, but that's a poor substitute for live interaction.)  It was a hoot to listen to Durriya recall the events surrounding their purchase of a car—neither of them had driven before—and the first time she drove was in a snowstorm, and ended up driving up on the sidewalk because she had lost control of the car in the snow.

            I took Casim to lunch at the faculty-staff dining club at the University and then toured his lab.  I met his postdoc, Ivan, I assume (from the accent) from Russia or somewhere in Eastern Europe.  He was incredulous when I happened to mention that Casim had been born in Minnesota.  A very nice Indian kid, with degrees from Texas and MIT, comes as a professor to Minnesota—returning to the place he was born.  (Yeah, I know he's not a "kid" at his age, but he's a kid as far as I'm concerned.  I saw him when he was a new-born.)

Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship.  (Parker)

SELFISH, adj.  Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.

            I quit taking a multi-vitamin.  About four decades ago a well-educated girlfriend contended that taking a multi-vitamin was simply an insurance policy:  in case your diet that day didn't contain what your body needed, the vitamin supplement would provide it.  That made sense and I have taken a multi-vitamin more or less consistently since.

            Whether or not the logic of the argument was supported by science is another matter.  A few years ago I inquired of a faculty friend in our Medical School whether taking vitamins was useful, along the line my girlfriend had hypothesized.  He said they (the medical establishment) did not know.  They could not find evidence that vitamins taken in tablet form were actually absorbed into the bloodstream, as they are when obtained from food.  But they weren't sure that they were not, either.  So, I thought, may as well keep taking them; they're not that expensive and doing no harm.

            Last summer, however, I read an article in the Atlantic about vitamins and the pharmaceutical industry, "The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements."  The research reported was disturbing. 

On October 10, 2011, researchers from the University of Minnesota found that women who took supplemental multivitamins died at rates higher than those who didn't. Two days later, researchers from the Cleveland Clinic found that men who took vitamin E had an increased risk of prostate cancer. . . .  In 2004, researchers from the University of Copenhagen reviewed fourteen randomized trials involving more than 170,000 people who took vitamins A, C, E, and beta-carotene to see whether antioxidants could prevent intestinal cancers. Again, antioxidants didn't live up to the hype. The authors concluded, "We could not find evidence that antioxidant supplements can prevent gastrointestinal cancers; on the contrary, they seem to increase overall mortality."  When these same researchers evaluated the seven best studies, they found that death rates were 6 percent higher in those taking vitamins."  After reviewing studies that included over 136,000 people, Johns Hopkins researchers "found an increased risk of death associated with supplemental vitamin E.  Dr. Benjamin Caballero, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said, "This reaffirms what others have said.  The evidence for supplementing with any vitamin, particularly vitamin E, is just not there. This idea that people have that [vitamins] will not hurt them may not be that simple."

The statements that really caught my eye, however, were these: 

In 2007, researchers from the National Cancer Institute examined 11,000 men who did or didn't take multivitamins.  Those who took multivitamins were twice as likely to die from advanced prostate cancer. . . .  On October 10, 2011, researchers from the University of Minnesota evaluated 39,000 older women and found that those who took supplemental multivitamins, magnesium, zinc, copper, and iron died at rates higher than those who didn't. They concluded, "Based on existing evidence, we see little justification for the general and widespread use of dietary supplements."  (My italics.)

Following a study at the Cleveland Clinic, "Steven Nissen, chairman of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic, said, 'The concept of multivitamins was sold to Americans by an eager nutraceutical industry to generate profits.  There was [sic] never any scientific data supporting their usage.'"

While it is obviously unwise to make medical decisions based on articles in the popular press, I have found that reporting in the Atlantic is among the best in the country, and the research the reporter cited seemed to me pretty convincing.  Moreover, these are not small studies with only a few dozen or couple of hundred subjects.  Yes, one can quibble endlessly about methodology and the appropriate use of statistics and whether one can infer causation from correlation (of course you can, in certain circumstances), but when all the evidence, data, and commentary from the medical establishment is taken into account, it doesn't seem to me that difficult to reach a conclusion.

The Atlantic article, moreover, follows others over the years that have reported study after study that found that, with a few exceptions, there is no documented benefit from taking multi-vitamins or doses of specific vitamins—and that there is harm from too much of some vitamins.  The exceptions, for example, noted in 2008:  "some extra vitamins have proven benefits, such as vitamin B12 supplements for the elderly and folic acid for women of child-bearing age.  And calcium and vitamin D in women over 65 appear to protect bone health," reported the New York Times' Tara Parker-Pope, a well-respected author and blogger on health issues.  Vitamin C may help moderate and shorten colds.  The Harvard Women's Health Watch suggests that taking vitamin D may be of benefit to a number of groups, including those who live in northern climates (i.e., north of the 37th parallel, which is roughly the line at the top of Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina).  The National Institutes of Health reached the same conclusion and recommends vitamin D supplements during the winter.  Apart from specific cases, however, the bulk of the evidence suggests not taking multi-vitamins.

But then the Harvard School of Public Health has this on its website:  "Trying to follow all the studies on vitamins and health can make your head swirl. But, when it's all boiled down, the take–home message is actually pretty simple:  A daily multivitamin, and maybe an extra vitamin D supplement, is a good way to make sure you're getting all the nutrients you need to be healthy."  But I can't find a date on that advice.  An August, 2013, health update from NIH was ambivalent about multi-vitamins.

My sense was that multi-vitamins don't do much (if any) good and there is sufficient correlational evidence to suggest they may do harm.  So I asked my doctor, whom I admire greatly (he cites research literature when he talks to me).  I have a physician who is firmly evidence-based, which fits nicely with my equally firm views about relying only on evidence-based medicine.  His advice matched what I read:  take a vitamin D tablet, a baby aspirin, and nothing else, unless I like to have expensive urine.  So I quit.

ZEAL, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl.

The only "ism" hollywood believes in is plagiarism.  (Parker)

            I subscribe to Pandora, an online music service, to play music when I'm just working in my office.  One picks the artists one wishes to hear; mostly I listen to baroque music but also some from the 19th Century.  One of the composers on my list is Richard Wagner.

            There were news reports last spring noting that 2013 marks the 200th anniversary of Wagner's birth, he of the Ring of the Nibelungen cycle and a number of other operas.  Celebrations in the U.S. have been muted because Wagner was an avowed anti-Semite; his music received the kiss of death when Hitler proclaimed Wagner his favorite composer.  (Woody Allen is alleged to have said that "Every time I listen to Wagner, I get the urge to invade Poland.")  Performances of Wagner's music are informally banned in Israel.  The records demonstrate that Hitler did indeed love opera, and Wagner specifically, and the fact that Wagner was anti-Semitic doubtless didn't hurt his cause in Hitler's eyes.  Wagner's music was played at Nazi rallies.  Wagner died in 1883, long before Hitler and the Nazis ever came along, so Wagner himself can hardly be blamed for the Nazis, but members of the Wagner family maintained close ties with the Nazis and with Hitler in particular, and Wagner's political views were not incompatible with those of the Nazis.

Many do not face any dilemma because they never listen to opera so don't give a hoot about Wagner's views.  Some like opera but do not listen to Wagner because they simply do not like his music; neither Kathy nor her mother, both lifelong opera buffs, care to listen to Wagner, nor does my friend Geoff Sirc, also a master opera fan.  So Kathy is always willing to go to the opera, just not Wagner.  I've never seen a performance of a full Wagner opera—when there have been Met Opera simulcasts of Wagner in local theaters, Kathy's been unexcited about going, and I respect her tastes.

            I confess to a certain ambivalence.  On the one hand, I do like some of the pieces from the operas, pieces we are all familiar with.  Ride of the Valkyries, Overture to Die Meistersinger, Overture to Tannhäuser, Overture to Rienzi, the Prelude to Lohengrin, the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, among others.  Some of them are stirring.  There are plenty of people in the music business who regard Wagner as a towering genius for his operas and for his innovations.

            On the other hand, is it possible to separate the political views of an artist from his or her artistic works?  I did a quick web survey to learn if there is any historical evidence for anti-Semitism on the part of, for example, Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart.  The short answer is "not much, if any."  The most controversial piece is the St. John Passion by Bach, drawing on the New Testament book John, which is the most inflammatory of the gospels in language concerning the Jews.  It seems, however, that Bach actually played down the anti-Semitism as much as he could (his contract required that he use the exact words from the bible, but other materials he drew on softened the message to mitigate the anti-Semitism).  To the extent Beethoven was anti-Semitic, it was (at worst) no more so than the conventional views of his time (1770-1827) in Lutheran Germany—and anyone who knows anything about the history of Protestantism is aware that Luther himself was vigorously anti-Semitic.  There's no evidence about Mozart at all.  So one can embrace those three German (Austrian, in Mozart's case) composers without dismay about their political or religious views.

            One web piece I looked at, on jewishworldview.com, made the interesting point that while Bach's music (in the case of the St. John Passion, for example) included some anti-Semitism, none of Wagner's actual music was about anything related to such matters; the Ring cycle is all Norse mythology.  So a visitor from another planet, knowing nothing about the composers but listening to their music, might conclude that anyone whose background is Jewish would boycott Bach and listen to Wagner.  (But that same web author nonetheless drew the line between Bach and Wagner:  Bach is fine, Wagner is not.)

            As I read a bit more, I came to conclude the picture is somewhat more ambiguous than might appear at first glance. 

Daniel Barenboim, the famed (Israeli) pianist and conductor (who's been music director at symphonies in Germany as well as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre de Paris, and who's also criticized Israel for occupying Palestinian territories) has recalled the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Germany at the time and concluded that the "historical background does not change the fact that Richard Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite of the worst kind whose statements are unforgivable"—but who also concludes that "as revolting as Wagner's anti-Semitism may be, one can hardly hold him responsible for Hitler's use and abuse of his music and his worldviews."  Barenboim also observed that "the Jewish composer Ernest Bloch, for one, refused to accept Wagner as a possession of the Nazis:  'The music of the Nazis is not the prelude to Die Meistersinger," he said, "but rather the Horst-Wessel-Lied; they have no more honor than that, further honor cannot and shall not be given them.'"

Barenboim also opposes the Israeli ban on Wagner performances.  He argues that the ban means "we are giving Hitler the last word, that we are acknowledging that Wagner was indeed a prophet and predecessor of Nazi anti-Semitism, and that he can be held accountable, even if only indirectly, for the final solution."  He rejects that proposition. 

Moreover, whatever his revolting public pronouncements may have been, Wagner picked Jewish conductors and artists to lead and perform him music.  One can always wonder whether people like Wagner—and one can think of hundreds of different examples unrelated to anti-Semitism—if plucked out of 19th-Century Germany and placed in 21st Century Germany, would take a look at history and change his mind completely.  One can suspect, too, that it would have been a very long leap for Wagner to jump from his political views to endorsement of genocide.

There was a book published in 2005 by a lawyer who is also an art and music critic, Richard Wagner and the Jews, that was summarized on Amazon (I have not read it).  The author noted Wagner's public anti-Semitism; "Wagner's close ties with many talented Jews, then, are surprising. Most writers have dismissed these connections as cynical manipulations and rank hypocrisy. Examination of the original sources, however, reveals something different: unmistakable, undeniable empathy and friendship between Wagner and the Jews in his life.  Indeed, the composer had warm relationships with numerous individual Jews.  Two of them resided frequently over extended periods in his home.  One of these, the rabbi's son Hermann Levi, conducted Wagner's final opera--Parsifal, based on Christian legend--at Wagner's request; no one, Wagner declared, understood his work so well.  Even in death his Jewish friends were by his side; two were among his twelve pallbearers." 

It is difficult to imagine that someone with these kinds of relationships would have come anywhere near endorsing the Nazis.  At the very least, Wagner must have faced (and ignored) a certain level of cognitive dissonance.

As I often do when I encounter these kinds of questions, I asked a few friends who think clearly about such things. 

One, a psychologist whose father was a secular Jew, wrote that "I tend to think that in listening to Wagner, even when I find something 'awesome' or beautiful, I find myself thinking 'but he was such a small, hostile person' and it diminishes the listening experience." 

A faculty friend who teaches ethics wrote to me that "If you enjoy Wagner's music, and not because it is anti-Semitic, I see no problems.  The value of the music should, surely, be kept separate from the value of the man."

Another faculty friend, Jewish, wrote me that "I remember my Mom saying something about Frank Sinatra's misogyny and outright nasty treatment of many women:  'You have to differentiate between the man and the music'. . . .  And, by the way, I drive a VW Eurovan, but it originally was the 'people's' car, designed in part by Hitler, and endorsed as the official car of the Nazi party."

               A faculty friend who's not Jewish (but who is an ordained Protestant minister) wrote to me that irrespective of whether the allegations of the connections between Wagner and Nazism are valid, "your questions remains:  what do we do with art/science/other products that are created or even made possible in settings that are determined to be evil? . . .  There is considerable discussion of this with regard to the medical/scientific findings that were learned in experiments that happened in the [Nazi concentration/extermination] camps.  In fact, when Art Caplan was at [the University of Minnesota], he even had a large international conference considering these same questions.  Currently the scientific consensus is that inappropriate methods undermine the validity of the findings, and the results should be considered skeptically if at all. . . .  Regarding art that is produced in such settings, it remains a great question.  We do value art that comes from asylums, or from other groups seen as demonic (think of the music from Stalin times, from Mao's China, etc.)."

               I replied that it seems to me there is a difference between scientific research findings, which may be utterly ill-gotten and may also be invalid but which might also lead to great social benefit (e.g., medical "research" data from the Nazi camps, if it were accurate and useful), whereas there's no particular gain or loss for society if I do or do not listen to Wagner.  In the case of music and art, especially when the composer/artist is long dead, it is purely personal opinion.  But the parallel is an interesting one.

            Another friend, also Jewish, told me that "My first take on it is that we enjoy a lot of art whose creators were pretty disgusting, from Rembrandt the insolvent to Renoir the fascist.  Why should Wagner be any different?  We enjoy Marlowe's plays (in the rare instance we get to see them), although he was certainly a thug and probably a murderer."

            Those comments bring to mind a thought I've had a number of times over the years.  Why should anyone pay any attention to the statements of artists about political matters—when most of them, in my experience and in reading about them, have little or no education or learning about the construction of a society or effective socio-political policies and practices?  While I think it's perceptive when a leading Hollywood figure endorses and financially supports a candidate I like, I don't harbor any illusions that they may necessarily have any great wisdom on society in general.  So perhaps also I should treat Wagner.

            Kathy also made an interesting point.  Is there a difference between listening to a piece of music when there are still royalties going to someone and listening to a piece of music that's in the public domain—and the artist, however reprehensible, is making no money?  She observed that if Bruce Springsteen, for example, were to give voice to views she found vile, she'd never listen to him again, much less purchase his music.  In that instance, it would also be current.  What about, as with Wagner, over 150 years have passed since some of the music was written—what is the possibility, as I suggested before, that his views about the world would be quite different today than they were in the middle of the 19th Century?  Do we give some allowance, some grace, for a different age?

            And so perhaps I can simply put aside Wagner's obnoxious views and continue to enjoy his music.  It would be an odd stretch if I were to "boycott" Wagner, in sympathy with my Jewish friends at the horror of the Nazis and the putative link with Wagner, when those friends don't themselves boycott Wagner!

Authors and actors and artists and such

Never know nothing, and never know much.  (Parker)

PATIENCE – A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

            Those of you who attended the University of Minnesota, or been on the Minneapolis campus much, know that Northrop Auditorium is perhaps the iconic campus building.  It was opened in 1929 and for several decades was home to the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra and site of Metropolitan Opera performances, in addition to hosting a multitude of other cultural events and countless graduation ceremonies.  But time took its toll and the University never had the money to effectively maintain or improve it (capital funds went first to classrooms and labs and other academic facilities).  It was never a good facility acoustically—and the original architects and users knew it.  Dimitri Mitropolous, conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony from 1937-1949 (before he left for the New York Philharmonic), was once asked what would improve the acoustics of Northrop.  His response was "dynamite."

            In the early 2000s it became clear that something had to be done.  As one University official put it, during a discussion at a meeting I was in, the choices were to demolish it, fix the exterior and use it as a parking ramp, or board it up and let it sit there.  The HVAC system was the original one installed in 1929; the environmental safety staff at the University determined that during events when the 4800-seat auditorium was full or nearly so, the CO2 level in the auditorium got sufficiently high that it made everyone sleepy.  The stage was being held up by pieces of 8x8 wood jammed under the boards to keep them from sagging.  And so on.  Moreover, unless something was done to secure the exterior—roof, walls, windows—the building was in danger of disintegration to the point it could not be saved.

            Demolition of the iconic building at the head of the Mall was simply not an option—everyone agreed about that.  Making it a parking ramp was, of course, a joke.  But simply mothballing it was a possibility.

            So, much to his credit (in my opinion), then-president Robert Bruininks authorized emergency expenditures of about $14 million from University reserves and repair funds to stabilize the exterior to prevent the building from falling down.  He also launched an ambitious fund-raising project to raise money to renovate it.  In a complicated funding plan using private support, some institutional and some state funds for repairs and renovation, and a projected income stream from future events, the University cobbled together enough money to completely redo Northrop, at an additional cost of $87 million.  Except for the ornate front lobby, the building was completely gutted—only the shell remained.  It was no doubt more expensive to gut and renovate the building than it would have been to simply demolish it and start anew, but it was inconceivable that that would happen.

There will continue to be an auditorium in Northrop Auditorium, but smaller (a decision made after extensive review of other performance facilities in the Twin Cities area and consultation with other performance groups, such as local theaters and music venues).  What many applauded was the intention of having the new auditorium match the acoustical quality of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, one of the most highly-rated musical halls in the world.  Unlike its history for the last 90 years, now there will also be major academic programs housed in the building, so it will become a home for both students and faculty, a living building.  For most students at the University for the last several decades, Northrop was a place where one went for graduation and convocation—and that was it, unless one attended some kind of cultural event as well.  Most of the time it stood empty, ghostly.

            I and others from the University took a tour of the mostly-completed renovation in August.  It will be a fabulous facility when it's done.

            Marvelous though the improvements to Northrop may be, the larger campus was classified by Travel and Leisure magazine as one of the ten ugliest in the country.  The methodology for compiling the list was perhaps a bit suspect; it "consulted the Princeton Review, Unigo.com, and other forums where students hotly debate all aspects of campus life."  Ugliness is also in the eye of the beholder.  Methodology and subjectivity aside, I'm inclined to agree that the institution has not maximized its setting along the river to make itself more attractive and park-like.  It also made, in my opinion, some awful architectural choices from the 1960s to the 1980s, so ended up with a considerable number of buildings that one (Minnesota) professor of sociology described as neo-penitentiary.  I recall attending a meeting of the University's Board of Regents a number of years ago; one of the Board members exclaimed that the Twin Cities campus was one of the most beautiful in America.  Some of us in the audience just looked at each other and rolled our eyes.  It is one of the world's great universities, without doubt; it is not one of the more attractive campuses.

           

EGOTIST, n.  A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.  (Parker writing about Katharine Hepburn)

            I cancelled my Macy's account this summer after I read in the news that Macy's, among other corporations, lobbied Texas Governor Rick Perry to veto a law guaranteeing equal pay for equal work for men and women.  Perry, of course, given his political views, vetoed the bill.  (A friend of mine posted on Facebook:  "Texans:  They make the best case against 'intelligent design.'")

            I suppose I do business with a number of corporations who engage in practices or lobby for laws that I dislike, but I just don't know what they do.  When I learn of such activities, however, I cease giving them any of my money.  I have never set foot in a Walmart and never will because I find their corporate human resources practices to be reprehensible and the political activities of the Walton family are completely at odds with my views.

            The difficulty with this approach is that if I carefully examined the activities of every company/corporation from which I purchase products or services, I might end up unable to buy anything.  So I act only when it's blatant.  (But I have gone on the web recently and determined that there are products from Koch Bros. companies that I can avoid purchasing.)

RESTITUTIONS, n.  The founding or endowing of universities and public libraries by gift or bequest.

It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.  (Parker)

            Elliott and I often exchange interesting websites (we do so with Kathy and Krystin as well, but usually it's him or me who starts it).  One he sent me was "50 Unbelievable Facts about Earth"; one of the facts is that the highest mountains and deepest ocean trenches only equal about 1/5000th of the earth's diameter.  Elliott pointed out that as a result, "globes lie when they have textured surfaces for mountains.  A giant cosmic hand would not be able to distinguish the ruggedness because the ratio of the distance between the highest mountain top and the lowest ocean trench relative to the total diameter of the earth is smaller than the grooves on your fingerprints relative to the total thickness of your finger."

EDUCATION, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

When I was young and bold and strong,
The right was right, the wrong was wrong.
With plume on high and flag unfurled,
I rode away to right the world.
But now I'm old - and good and bad,
Are woven in a crazy plaid.
I sit and say the world is so,
And wise is s/he who lets it go.  (Parker)

            Getting a college education and degree has not been a direct or obvious path for Elliott.  After two years at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, where his academic record was outstanding, he spent last year at the University, living on campus in one of the dorms.  It wasn't a happy experience, for a number of reasons, his academic record was not great, and the year there soured him completely on the University.

            During last summer he didn't do anything about enrolling in school in the fall—enroll anywhere—which by August was starting to drive me crazy.  He knows as well as anyone that a college degree is now virtually a sine qua non for professional advancement in the world (notwithstanding the examples of Gates and Zuckerberg—at whose companies, many have pointed out, one almost certainly needs a college degree to work at professional jobs).  We were cutting and tearing down vines that grow up on the house one day mid-summer; Elliott said to me that I didn't have to worry about him not completing college because it was jobs like this—tearing down vines—that he certainly didn't want to have for the rest of his life.

            He concluded, after his disappointing University experience, when he'd aimed for a degree in psychology, that he'd made a mistake.  He had earlier decided that his talent and interest in art—specifically drawing—would remain avocational because while he loved to draw, he didn't like it when he was told what to draw or what medium to use (e.g., in an art class).  Last summer, however, he said he realized that that was the wrong decision, and that what he really wanted to get a degree in was something related to art that would link him to the creative side of video games.  I told him that was fine with me, but that this was certainly going to extend his college career.  He knew that.

            By late August, however, nothing had happened, and I was getting increasingly annoyed.  I had determined that he was NOT going to have some part-time job, not be in school, and spend the rest of his time playing video games, and I had told him as much.  Then one day he surprised us (and I think himself); someone his mother works with had some relative who graduated from Moorhead State University (across the river from Fargo) with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) and had been doing very well in the video-game industry for the ten years since he graduated.  The friend of Pat's put her relative in touch with Elliott, who described to him what he'd done and how impressed he was with the Moorhead BFA program.  So that's where Elliott decided he'd go.

            Elliott expressed a little dismay that he'd wasted a year at the University.  I reminded him that no learning is wasted, and pointed out that he'd found his classes in Japanese history and in Viking history interesting, and that the abnormal psychology class may not have been well run, in his view, but he still learned a lot from it. He agreed and went on to make an observation that surprised me:  he said that the two courses he'd had to take as part of his major but that he'd not been looking forward to, research methods and statistics, had taught him an enormous amount that he'd retain for the rest of his life.  I told him I was glad, and that anyone who's reasonably conversant with statistical methods and how to analyze statistics will be better off than someone who is not.  (Lies, damn lies, and statistics and all that.)

            What's amusing to me about this turn of events is that Elliott talked matter-of-factly that the BFA—whether from Minnesota, Moorhead, or Harvard—requires art history courses, and since he's not had one, he'll have to meet the program requirement for 2-3 such courses.  Elliott has usually avoided going into art museums when we've traveled and he'd earlier resisted the suggestion from both Kathy and me that he take an introductory art history course.  Now that it's integral to the program he wants to pursue, of course, it's just a fine idea.  (I will give him due credit, however, for changing his mind.  The guy he'd been in touch with about Moorhead explained to Elliott that in his experience, the people who were more successful in the artistic/creative side of the video-game business were people who had a good grounding in the methods and lessons of traditional art, and Elliott took that message to heart.)  I did not, however, resist ribbing him about skipping the art museums.

            (Later in the fall, after watching the politics in Washington over the federal shutdown, and being increasingly irritated by the fundamentalist/Tea Party right wing, the continuing attempt to infuse religion into public policy, repeated attacks on the social safety net, and the widening gap between the 1% and the rest, Elliott reiterated the thought that living in Sweden might be attractive—particularly because there are over 30 video-game companies headquartered there.)

PLEASE, v.  To lay the foundation for a superstructure of imposition.

Don't look at me in that tone of voice.  (Parker)

            I was reminded by a news article of a book by Paul Meehl, Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence, published in 1954.  Meehl, who was a Regents Professor of Psychology, Law, and Philosophy, and one of the developers of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), argued in the book that in the field of psychotherapy, statistical models almost always yield better predictions and diagnoses than the judgment of trained professionals.  His contention has been supported by reams of additional research in subsequent decades—and has also been expanded to other fields, including cancer patient longevity, cardiac disease, likelihood of new business success, evaluation of credit risks, suitability of foster parents, odds of recidivism, winners of football games, and future prices of wine.  He really called into question the value of expert diagnosis, a question that remains open today.

            Meehl's primary academic field was clinical psychology.  I took a seminar with him when I was a graduate student in psychology many years ago, and Thomas Szasz' book The Myth of Mental Illness was one of the topics of discussion.  Szasz argued that mental illness was a social construct, unlike diseases such as cancer or the flu.  Meehl dismissed Szasz; he said in the seminar something to the effect that "I've been in psychiatric wards and you can't tell me those people aren't crazy."  He was nothing if not direct.

            Fortunately for me, when I was seeing a therapist after my divorce, I only wanted a third-party view of whether I was acting and thinking and responding appropriately, not a diagnosis of psychopathology of some kind.  (All along she told me I was doing fine.)  But reflecting on Meehl makes one take expert opinion in a wide variety of fields with a grain of salt.  (Except, of course, for my own.)

MORAL, adj.  Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.

Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness.  (Parker)

            Kathy and I attended what I think is the hottest football game I have ever been to, the opening Minnesota Gopher game on August 29 at 6:00 in the evening.  The temperature was over 90 degrees and we were in the sun.  There is a joke in my family that I never sweat.  It isn't true, of course, and my shirt at the game was proof that it isn't true.  It was uncomfortable and we left shortly after the half so we could go home and cool down.  (Unfortunately, we also missed the most exciting part of the game, which the Gophers won 51-23.)

            I had horrible visions during the last part of August that our home central air conditioner would break down (it is 17 years old), as the temperatures were into the 90s and the humidity was high.  Fortunately, it didn't.  We would have moved temporarily to a hotel if it had.  Once again we Scandinavians don't do well in the heat.  I sometimes wonder how my friend Nils Hasselmo, with whom I worked at the University off and on for over 20 years, survives living in Tucson!

            But on the other hand, in mid-September we attended what was probably one of the most pleasant games I can recall.  The two of us had a nice brunch beforehand, the climate was perfect for a game, and Minnesota won 42-24.  The only shadow on Kathy's day was that that evening I beat her 2-1 in cribbage.

PREJUDICE, n.  A vagrant opinion without visible means of support.

            RUMOR, n.  A favorite weapon of the assassins of character.

            There was what I thought of as a rather ominous research finding published mid-year, a finding that confirmed my own suspicions.  Essentially, a group of French researchers fed two different groups of mice a "high-fat, high-sucrose enriched diet, with one group receiving a cocktail of pollutants added to its diet at a very low dosage."  As reported in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal, what the research findings suggest is that at least certain kinds of disease and affliction may be more prevalent because of low ("safe") doses of multiple pollutants.  The journal editor concluded that the research "shows that evaluating food contaminants and pollutants on an individual basis may be too simplistic.  We can see that when 'safe' levels of contaminants and pollutants act together, they have significant impact on public health."

            Two examples of this have occurred to me over the past year or so—and these are only two very small examples.  Those of us who drive cars know that one must replace tires every so often because they wear out.  What that means is that billions of microscopic bits of rubber are being deposited on roads and nearby ground—or floating in the air.  Where do all those little bits of rubber go?  Presumably we breathe them in and they get into groundwater as well as the soil in which crops are grown.  In addition, we fill up the container under the hood with window-washing fluid so we can turn on the wipers and clean dust and crud off the windshield.  Have you ever looked at the label for that liquid?  It essentially declares the stuff toxic to all living things.  So we routinely squirt it onto our windshields and watch it wash off onto the car and the ground.  Again, where is all that toxic substance going?  I almost don't want to use the fluid, a resolution it would be easier to carry out in more temperate climates; without it in Minnesota in the winter, water in the container for washing the windshield would simply freeze.

            And of course cars also sometimes leak oil and antifreeze and other fluids.

            While the experimental research that was reported in this article is only one small piece, the whole notion that having even low levels of multiple toxins in our bodies may have effects beyond those of any single pollutant simply makes sense.  Apart from supporting strict laws against pollution (and their enforcement) and legislators who vote for such laws and also vote to provide funding for enforcement, and for laws and appropriations that support, at a societal level, getting away from all of the life practices that contribute to these kinds of pollution, there isn't much any one person can do.  We all drive cars and we all get dirty windshields.  But if we could get around without cars, we'd be better off.  And I wouldn't have to buy car insurance.

SAUCE, n.  The one infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment.  A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred and ninety-nine.  For every sauce invented and accepted a vice is renounced and forgiven.

Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.  (Parker)

            It's too bad I live in one of the most geographically-dispersed metropolitan areas in the country (as my good friend the late Professor Judith Martin, urban geographer, told me many times).  The data on urban density (from the Census Bureau, 2010, round numbers) are interesting.

            Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) ranks 16th in the country in population, at 2,651,000.  (First is New York-Newark-area, at 18,352,000, LA-Long Beach-Anaheim is 12,151,000, Chicago-Gary is 8,608,000, etc.)  MSP ranks just above Tampa-St. Petersburg (2,442,000) and just below San Diego and Seattle (2,957,000 and 3,059,000, respectively).  The others with a greater population, in descending order from more to fewer people, after Chicago, are Miami, Philadelphia, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Washington DC, Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, Phoenix, and San Francisco.

            In population density, however, MSP ranks 105th, with 2596 people per square mile.  There are only five cities with more than 2 million people that have a lower population density than MSP:  Tampa-St. Petersburg, San Juan PR, St. Louis, Boston, and Atlanta.  Except for Atlanta, the population density of the other four is similar to that of MSP:  Tampa is 2551, San Juan is 2478, St. Louis is 2328, and Boston is 2231.  (Atlanta is a huge outlier, at 1706 people per square mile but an urban population of 4,515,000; I had no idea it was so spread out.)

            To give you an idea of density in other areas, LA is #1 at 6,999 people per square mile.  Here are a few others, in descending order from the top after LA:

San Francisco               6266 people per square mile

San Jose                       5820

Delano, CA                  5482

New York                    5318

Davis, CA                    5156

Lompoc, CA                4815

Honolulu                      4715

Woodland, CA             4550

Las Vegas                    4524

Santa Maria, CA           4478

Miami                          4442                (12th in rank in U.S.)

And a whole lot more California cities that occupy next 14 ranks, down to 3775 people per square mile.  A few others you might know of:

Salt Lake City               3675                27th

New Orleans                3578                31st

Denver                         3554                32nd

Portland OR                 3527                34th

Chicago                       3524                36th

Washington DC            3470                39th

Lexington KY              3315                51st

Phoenix                       3165                57th

Baltimore                     3073                61st

Houston                       2978                67th

And then a lot more on down to MSP at 105th.

That dispersion has made mass transit a challenge because the population density is low enough that that it can be difficult to build mass transit that enough people can use.  I think the Twin Cities needs about 20 light-rail lines, in a spider web pattern, if the system were to work well (that is an opinion uninformed by any information from anyone who knows anything about urban mass transit).  But at a billion dollars a crack for a rail line, I don't think even any of my potential grandchildren will see that system in place.

So it is no surprise that the residents of MSP aren't provided with a high-quality mass transit system—and no surprise that there are a lot of cars on the road releasing minute quantities of rubber and using windshield fluids.

At the same time one can decry dispersion as an impediment to effective mass transit, I suggested earlier that people like green and water.  Having lawns and trees and shrubs means people are more spread out, rather than being piled together in high-rises a la Tokyo and Seoul with nary a tree or bush in sight.  What I want is a compromise between dispersal and mass transit:  One heck of a lot more tax money put into mass transit so we can all get around efficiently and with far fewer demands on the environment while still having yards and shrubs and gardens and the urban forest —and I'd gladly take the increased taxes if they also meant we could get by with one car rather than two and could use that one car less frequently.  I might even save money on that deal.

MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

Bewildered is the fox who lives to find that grapes beyond reach can be really sour.  (Parker)

            There were a couple of interesting articles on food in the late summer.  One was a book review in the LA Times, of a book by some guy named Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life.  The reviewer talked about theoretical developments in the humanities, "striving to go beyond the traditional human subject in order to account for other types of existence and experience, including animals and autonomous machines.  A new field has emerged, loosely labeled 'the posthumanities,' which attempts to fill in the millennia-long blind spots caused by our own narcissism. . . .  Marder wants to forge an encounter with vegetal life, all the while respecting the alien ontology of floral ways of being.  For while a shrub may not consciously 'experience' the world in which it grows, this does not, for Marder, mean that it is not thinking and doing in profound philosophical, and even ethical, ways."  There is language about the idea of a plant "soul," "non-conscious intentionality," plants as role models, the human-centric views of plants, and so on.

"Plant-thinking does not oppose the use of fruit, roots, and leaves for human nourishment," this final section claims:

Rather, what it objects to is the total and indiscriminate approach to plants as materials for human consumption within the deplorable framework of the commodified production of vegetal life. . . . [I]nstead of "What can I eat?" we should inquire, "How am I to eat ethically?" To put it succinctly, if you wish to eat ethically, eat like a plant!

And more in this vein.

            I could hardly keep from cackling when I was reading the book review, and several of the readers commenting pleaded that someone tell them this was a hoax.  Such language as this makes it difficult not to think that this is a joke:

Marder's book heralds an impressive and singular new voice, prompting a slew of new questions around different ontologies and shared ecologies. It succeeds in expanding the circle in which, to gesture to Donna Haraway, species meet.  Marder's work brings out the profound pathos underwriting a generation that has more experience growing digital carrots and apples in Farmville than cultivating actual fruits and vegetables.  The sheer number of couch potatoes and human YouTubers cannot be underestimated, and I hope this author's subsequent work also considers the relationship between technology and vegetal life.

I do not know if this kind of writing and line of thought represent current approaches in some branch of the humanities.  If it does, one can understand why there might be widespread public skepticism about requiring that students be educated in the humanities as part of their college degree program.

But there's a new way to avoid offending either plants or animals in one's diet:  about the same time this (I think goofy) review of a goofy book appeared, there was also news about meat cultivated in a lab, so did not involve killing any cows for the beef.  Interesting that PETA endorses the work because it reduces or eliminates cruelty to animals (the process uses stem cells).  Other supporters, otherwise vegetarians, note the reduction in demands on land and other natural resources.  "Perhaps most strikingly, the philosopher Peter Singer, whose book Animal Liberation (1975) was a founding text for the modern movement, wrote in The Guardian:  'I haven't eaten meat for 40 years, but if in vitro meat becomes commercially available, I will be pleased to try it.'"

            The absolutists on animal rights, however, don't support it, because they oppose any view of animals as resources/property for humans.  There appears to be debate in the vegetarian/vegan community about the ethics of eating in vitro meat.  As one writer observed, "The only logical way to make sense of the reluctance of many vegetarians to back IVM [in vitro meat] is that their choices are not as driven by animal welfare and environmental considerations as we—and they—assume. Perhaps a distaste for eating meat is a visceral feeling that is only loosely connected to a ethically motivated imperative not to cause undue suffering to animals."  It does indeed seem that the animal welfare and environmental benefits arguments fall by the wayside if there remains opposition to in vitro meat even though it would represent huge gains on both scores and obviate the principled objections.  I'm neither vegan nor vegetarian, but I think this is a good idea; the resources required to produce meat for food vastly outstrip those required to produce crops for food, so scaling in vitro meat production up to factory production would dramatically reduce demands on the planet, help address climate change (far fewer farting cows!), and perhaps allow more people to be fed better (setting aside the problem that there are too many people already).  (The president and co-founder of PETA doesn't get confused on the point:  "'Any flesh food is totally repulsive to me. . . .  But I am so glad that people who don't have the same repulsion as I do will get meat from a more humane source.'")

The researcher who announced the discovery, Mark Post at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said that "potentially, you can do this in your kitchen.  You can grow your own meat.  But you have to know what you want to eat 8 weeks in advance."  As I understand the situation from the media coverage, however, there's still a ways to go on getting in vitro meat to taste like meat from animals—and a considerable ways to go in scaling production to factory level.  They have to culture some level of fat as well, among other things, to achieve the flavor most will want.  I surmise that my children will eventually be able to eat in vitro meat and it will taste great.  If they can pursue this to its logical end, then theoretically one will be able to eat veal, for example, without any qualms.

            It's on the way to tablets for food!

If you put together the extremes of these views, don't eat plants and don't eat animals, it becomes unethical to do anything but starve to death once one can no longer drink mother's breast milk.  Of course, no one would achieve puberty and thus be able to conceive children, so that option would disappear as well.  (I know, it's unlikely that anyone's really arguing that it's unethical to eat plants.  But the logic of some of these opinions, pushed to the extreme, do verge on the hilarious.)

LAND, n. A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist.

It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.  (Parker)

I lost a good friend, colleague, and mentor in early September.   Regents Professor Frank Sorauf died at 85 of what probably was a combination of the effects of Alzheimer's and old age.  I first took a class from Frank while an undergraduate in political science, the American Judicial System, and then worked for him as an undergraduate research assistant during my senior year; I helped him do research on his book on the separation of church and state.  (Hearing his tales about interviewing Madalyn Murray O'Hair about the bible-reading-in-school case she won in the U. S. Supreme Court were alone worth the price of the work [Murray v. Curlett, if you're interested].)  At Frank's request, my friend Rolf Sonnesyn and I read aloud to each other the page proofs of the book to catch any printing errors—my, how the technology of printing a book has changed. 

During the year he'd hired me as research assistant he was appointed dean of the College of Liberal Arts; he brought me along as a student assistant to the dean, so he effectively launched my career working at the University.  A number of faculty members whose memories reach back 30+ years will still say that Frank was the best dean that CLA had in a long time.

            Frank was truly a renaissance man, a pianist of near-concert quality, a music and opera expert, great chef, and considerable athlete.  I found him to be a stimulating, interesting, and exacting teacher (who brooked no nonsense in class); the fact that he was designated a Regents Professor signifies his tremendous accomplishments in his field (he was one of the nation's leading experts on campaign finance and co-authored a very influential amicus brief in the Supreme Court case on the McCain-Feingold law).  He had an incisive mind on public policy—and most other—matters as well as a wonderful if frequently biting sense of humor.  Unfortunately, with the onset of Alzheimer's in the last few years, we really "lost" him awhile ago.  So as is often the case with Alzheimer's, the death was really a blessing.  But I miss my lunches with him and our comparing notes at the simulcasts of the Met Opera performances, and he was a dinner guest at our house many times over the years, to recall but a few of the times we socialized.

            I was able to obtain, from a colleague who had collected them, Frank's written notes about a memorial service.  They are pure Frank and can perhaps convey in a small way part his personality.

I really don't think a memorial is necessary – we all write on sand, and what we have accomplished will be erased by the desert winds.  The best thing about the nightly desert winds is that they erase everything – mistakes included – and that they rearrange and smooth the sands for new and fresh impressions.  All of that became clear to me on the sands of the Sahara I saw in southern Morocco at sunrise one January morning.

Let there be a memorial event, though, if people feel so inclined.  For once, I will be unaware of any excess or false praise heaped upon my memory.  (Or any too faint praise!)  However, I do not want a memorial occasion to be one I would have dreaded to have to attend.  I would not want one that ran beyond 40 or 50 minutes.  And less would really be more. 

Just do what you can to keep it short and to prevent the worst assaults on the truth, the most egregious self-aggrandizement of the speakers, and any flagrant imposition on the patience of the assembled.  If a few invited (and prepared) speakers don't use up the time, I would rather there be some music . . . and then refreshments.  I would also favor a venue at which my estate could offer people a REAL drink.

VIRTUES, n.pl. Certain abstentions.

ACCOUNTABILITY, n. The mother of caution.

            There was an article in the local newspapers about an increase in suicide rates, showing that in 2011 there was a "13 percent increase from 2010 in suicides overall.  Most of that increase is among middle-aged men 55 to 59 years old"; the rate for those over age 65 also increased "to the highest levels in 12 years."  These Minnesota statistics, the article reported, reflect national data.

            An associate professor at St. Cloud State University, Jennifer Tuder, wrote an op-ed piece in the Star-Tribune about a one-person performance she does about surviving suicide, after her father's suicide.  She takes sharp issue with the contention that suicide can be noble or that survivors are better off without the deceased.  She, too, read the statistics and then wrote the op-ed piece.

We aren't [better off]. Surviving the suicide of a loved one at least doubles your risk for completing suicide. Suicide survivors are twice as likely as the general population to suffer from mental illness, particularly depression.

We feel stigmatized, ashamed and isolated. We have to live with painful, unanswered questions, particularly the question of "why?"  We are not better off.

So why is it so important to these men, these men who are so like my father demographically, to think that suicide is a noble choice? I believe the answer lies in our traditional scripts for masculinity.

If men can't provide and protect and be in control, then they are seen—and see themselves—as failing, she maintains.

            That may be true for some, but for others it is pure poppycock.  I could not disagree with her more vigorously—if one changes the context.  Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus:  "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."  I agree.  In my construction, ultimately the question is whether my life situation is so grim, unlikely to improve, and very likely to get worse, that the only rational question is suicide.

            Another long-time colleague and friend of mine, and Frank Sorauf's, were talking over lunch one day after Frank had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's (which had started to show its effects, although only minimally at that time).  My colleague—a husband, father, and grandfather—said with grim determination that if he were diagnosed with Alzheimer's, he'd commit suicide (before it became too advanced for him to know what was happening).  I said I would as well.

            Perhaps Professor Tuder was not thinking of different contexts.  One can understand how devastated a family would feel if a senior male—which is what these statistics and her play are about—committed suicide without notice and without any debilitating conditions.  I wouldn't take issue with her under those circumstances.  Whether or not the "traditional scripts for masculinity" are characteristic of all or most males seems to me to be questionable—and may well be generational.  Were I to lose my job, and thus the larger part of the household income, I would become depressed if I could not find another one.  But with a wife and kids I love, suicide wouldn't even cross my mind, and we'd have sufficient income to muddle along.

I have made it clear to Kathy and the kids, however, that if I am diagnosed with Alzheimer's, or something similar, and I still have sufficient possession of my faculties to know what's going on, I will choose my own exit.  What possible benefit can there be to my family or friends to watch me disintegrate to the point that I not only lose my mind but, eventually, also control of bodily functions?  From my standpoint, there is no reason—none—to keep me alive at that point.  They would indeed be better off without me, and I would want them to be comforted by the thought that I avoided being in a situation I vehemently detested and took action to prevent.  There would be none of the "painful, unanswered questions" to which Professor Tuder refers.  (I have a health-care directive that is starkly clear about my wishes if I am unconscious and have virtually no chance of recovering my cognitive functions:  no medicines, no heroic measures, no nothing.  Let me go.)

            It seems to me that in that kind of case, neither my spouse nor children should feel stigmatized nor should they be at any greater risk of suicide than they would have been otherwise.  In fact, given that we generally agree on this view about the end of life, I would think they would be quite assertive with any potential critics in insisting that it was absolutely the right thing for me to do—and that I'd make the same argument to the critics if I were still around to do so.  It would be a logical impossibility, of course:  after death I argue with critics that it was right for me to commit suicide.  I suppose I could leave behind a vigorous defense of my rationale and action, and I could compose such a document right now.  Maybe I should.

            You may very well think "that's easy for him to say now, but maybe not so easy if the time comes."  I know, and you would likely be correct if you thought that.  Equally a concern is that possession of reality will slip away before I could do anything about it.  In that case my survivors would have to hope for a mercifully quick end from other causes (e.g., pneumonia or stroke or cardiac arrest).

REFLECTION, n.  An action of the mind whereby we obtain a clearer view of our relation to the things of yesterday and are able to avoid the perils that we shall not again encounter.

BRAIN, n. An apparatus with which we think what we think. That which distinguishes the man who is content to be something from the man who wishes to do something. A man of great wealth, or one who has been pitchforked into high station, has commonly such a headful of brain that his neighbors cannot keep their hats on. In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, brain is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

            A daily email I receive, ScienceDaily, with updates in various fields of scientific endeavor, had two interestingly-juxtaposed articles on September 4.

            It seems that while cleanliness may be next to godliness, it isn't next to good health.

            One article reported research at Cambridge University suggesting (with what appear to be pretty decent—methodologically sound—data) that there is a significant correlation between "a nation's wealth and hygiene and the Alzheimer's 'burden' on its population.  High-income, highly industrialised countries with large urban areas and better hygiene exhibit much higher rates of Alzheimer's."  The report went on to note that the "study adds further weight to the 'hygiene hypothesis' in relation to Alzheimer's:  that sanitised environments in developed nations result in far less exposure to a diverse range of bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms -- which might actually cause the immune system to develop poorly, exposing the brain to the inflammation associated with Alzheimer's disease, say the researchers."  Apparently the hygiene hypothesis is already well established in public health, linking hygiene to allergies and autoimmune diseases.  But this was apparently the first significant research linking hygiene to Alzheimer's.

            We have often joked in our household that we shouldn't be TOO clean because it is good for the immune system to have a little dirt now and then.  We had no idea that there was actually research that supports our joke.  But the article says we're right:  "'Exposure to microorganisms is critical for the regulation of the immune system,' write the researchers, who say that say that—since increasing global urbanisation beginning at the turn of the 19th century—the populations of many of the world's wealthier nations have increasingly very little exposure to the so-called 'friendly' microbes which 'stimulate' the immune system—due to "diminishing contact with animals, faeces and soil."  Everything we have developed in first-world countries as a bulwark against both disease and discomfort—"antibiotics, sanitation, clean drinking water, paved roads and so on"—mean less exposure to bugs that humans have faced since humans evolved.  And that "lack of microbe and bacterial contact can lead to insufficient development of the white blood cells that defend the body against infection."

            In retrospect I'm glad we let the kids play outside in the sand and dirt in the back yard when they were little—particularly because "childhood—when the immune system is developing—is typically considered critical to the 'hygiene hypothesis.'"  In addition, however, "the researchers say that regulatory T-cell numbers peak at various points in a person's life—adolescence and middle age for example—and that microorganism exposure across a lifetime may be related to Alzheimer's risk."  This does make one wonder about how fastidious we should be in cleaning/scouring our bathrooms, kitchens, and so on.  Most of us were raised to keep things clean—and to use cleaning agents that purport to kill germs.

Of course, as Bill Bryson pointed out in A Brief History of Nearly Everything, "because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence.  Don't you believe it.  Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes.  This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be."  It would seem, however, that our hygienic habits kill off enough of the immunity-provoking bacteria that we increase our vulnerability to certain categories of disease.

            The second article that same day reported on research at the University of California San Francisco that seems to "reverse some of the negative effects of aging on the brain, using a video game designed to improve cognitive control."  One of the lead researchers "said his game, NeuroRacer, does more than any ordinary game—be it bridge, a crossword puzzle, or an off-the-shelf video game—to condition the brain." 

In the game, . . . participants race a car around a winding track while a variety of road signs pop up.  Drivers are instructed to keep an eye out for a specific type of sign, while ignoring all the rest, and to press a button whenever that particular sign appears. The need to switch rapidly from driving to responding to the signs . . . generates interference in the brain that undermines performance.  The researchers found that this interference increases dramatically across the adult lifespan.

But after receiving just 12 hours of training on the game, spread over a month, the 60- to 85-year-old study participants improved their performance until it surpassed that of 20-somethings who played the game for the first time.

The researchers, in physiology, neurology, and psychiatry, looked at EEG recordings and the development of neural networks required for cognitive control.  They also found that the effects of playing the game lasted.

            The ScienceDaily article reported that "evidence that the adult brain is capable of learning has been accumulating for more than a dozen years."  For all of us in our 60s and beyond, that is reassuring.  But even so—as we all know, alas—brain function often erodes over the years; the chap who developed the game, however, said that there are "some exceptions, like wisdom."  Really?  The claim is that wisdom doesn't erode but cognitive functioning does?  How strange.

And darn it, here I thought playing bridge into my dotage would help forestall or mitigate a decline in cognitive abilities.  Elliott must be equally disappointed, because the games he buys seem not to have the same effect as this one. 

So I may have to take up specialized video games as I get older—and sit in a dirty room while I play them.

DAY, n.  A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.  This period is divided into two parts, the day proper and the night, or day improper--the former devoted to sins of business, the latter consecrated to the other sort.  These two kinds of social activity overlap.

There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops on the window-pane, they ran together and trickled away.  (Parker)

           

Anyone who Googles "multitasking" will find a multitude of articles citing scientific research demonstrating that multitasking is largely beyond the capacity of the human brain and the idea that people can be more efficient by multitasking is just garbage.  It is true that people can probably simultaneously use skills/capacities that are unrelated to each other—one example is listening to the radio and folding laundry—but trying to perform two tasks that both require a reasonable level of cognitive function is almost certain to mean that both of them are done at a lower level of quality than if done separately.  I have a personal example:  try petting two cats at the same time.  That does require a high level of cognitive function—and the cats let you know when you're not paying attention.

THEOSOPHY, n. An ancient faith having all the certitude of religion and all the mystery of science. The modern Theosophist holds, with the Buddhists, that we live an incalculable number of times on this earth, in as many several bodies, because one life is not long enough for our complete spiritual development; that is, a single lifetime does not suffice for us to become as wise and good as we choose to wish to become. . . . Less competent observers are disposed to except cats, which seem neither wiser nor better than they were last year.

            A congeries of issues related to privacy arose during the later part of the year.  Some were visible to all:  the National Security Agency access to emails and telephone calls.  Others, however, were perhaps less prominent in the minds of many but they are ones that should raise alarm bells for anyone who wishes, at his or her discretion, simply to be let alone.

            I consider the foundation document in all of these debates to be Justice Brandeis's 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States.  (I confess that Brandeis is in my personal pantheon.)  You can judge for yourself as you read on, but in my view Brandeis was prescient in his assessment of the interaction of technology and privacy.  The case was about wiretapping a telephone call and whether or not federal agents doing so without judicial approval violated the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures of the Fifth Amendment protection from self-incrimination.  The Court ruled that the wiretapping did not violate the constitutional provisions; Justice Brandeis dissented in what became one of the more famous dissents in the history of the Court.

            Brandeis went back to a 1914 case, Weems v. United States, to point out that legislation and constitutional provisions may be enacted "from an experience of evils" but the language should not "be necessarily confined to the form that evil had theretofore taken.  Time works changes, brings into existence new conditions and purposes. Therefore a principle to be vital must be capable of wider application than the mischief which gave it birth.  This is peculiarly true of constitutions.  They are not ephemeral enactments, designed to meet passing occasions."  At the time the Bill of Rights was adopted, by and large the only way to force self-incrimination was torture and the only way to search and seize was through forceful entrance into a residence.

 

However, Brandeis warned, "Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the Government.  Discovery and invention have made it possible for the Government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet. . . .  The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire-tapping.  Ways may someday be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.  Advances in the psychic and related sciences may bring means of exploring unexpressed beliefs, thoughts and emotions."  Brandeis couldn't specifically foresee computers, electronic mail, and neuroscience, but the thrust of his thought was remarkably accurate.

Brandeis asked:  "Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasions of individual security?"  His answer was a resounding "no."  He wrote that "the tapping of one man's telephone line involves the tapping of the telephone of every other person whom he may call or who may call him."  Older means of spying "are but puny instruments of tyranny and oppression when compared with wire-tapping."  And its progeny, I am certain he would say.  Brandeis went on to cite a number of cases in which the Court had construed broadly the meaning of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.  He argued eloquently and forcefully that

The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness.  They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. . . . They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations.  They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.  To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.  And the use, as evidence in a criminal proceeding, of facts ascertained by such intrusion must be deemed a violation of the Fifth.

In my opinion, Brandeis's most important counsel was this:

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent.  Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers.  The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

            Brandeis's opinion in Olmstead is a reflection of views he had articulated nearly 40 years earlier, in a Harvard Law Review article he co-authored with Samuel Warren entitled "The Right to Privacy."  Even then Brandeis was raising alarms, with more foresight than he could have imagined:  "Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual what Judge Cooley calls the right 'to be let alone.'  Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that 'what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.'"  After citing a variety of areas of the law and legal precedent, Brandeis and Warren declare that "the principle which protects personal writings and any other productions of the intellect or of the emotions, is the right to privacy."

            Now let's jump forward 85 years, to Slate this past September.  A wife and mother, Amy Webb, writing for both she and her husband, report that they will allow nothing about their infant daughter to be posted on the web.  She observed the excitement of a friend who was a new parent in posting pictures of their daughter (pseudonym Kate) to Facebook but cautioned that she worried about how those posts would affect the child later, "and the broader impact of creating a generation of kids born into original digital sin."  She's worth quoting, beginning with her citation of a message from Facebook:

"We are able to suggest that your friend tag you in a picture by scanning and comparing your friend's pictures to information we've put together from your profile pictures and the other photos in which you've been tagged."  Essentially, this means that with each photo upload, Kate's parents are, unwittingly, helping Facebook to merge her digital and real worlds. . . . The problem is that Facebook is only one site.  With every status update, YouTube video, and birthday blog post, Kate's parents are preventing her from any hope of future anonymity. . . .  Why make hundreds of embarrassing, searchable photos freely available to her prospective homecoming dates?  If Kate's mother writes about a negative parenting experience, could that affect her ability to get into a good college?  We know that admissions counselors review Facebook profiles and a host of other websites and networks in order to make their decisions.

There's a more insidious problem, though, which will haunt Kate well into the adulthood.  Myriad applications, websites, and wearable technologies are relying on face recognition today, and ubiquitous bio-identification is only just getting started.  In 2011, a group of hackers built an app that let you scan faces and immediately display their names and basic biographical details, right there on your mobile phone. . . .

The easiest way to opt-out is to not create that digital content in the first place, especially for kids.  Kate's parents haven't just uploaded one or two photos of her:  They've created a trove of data that will enable algorithms to learn about her over time.  Any hopes Kate may have had for true anonymity ended with that ballet class YouTube channel.

            So what they did for their daughter was create Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts for her—on which nothing has been posted, nor will it be.  They keep the accounts active but private and all are tied to one email account.  They also ask friends to remove any references or "tags" about their daughter.

Shortly after this article, there was a report that California had become the first state to adopt a law requiring websites to allow minors (under 18) to remove postings on the websites.  Most of the major social media sites already do allow removal, but one has to wonder how "removed" those posting actually are.  I've heard any number of times, in meetings at the University, that once something is posted on the web, it likely lives somewhere and can be found.  I don't know if that's just urban legend.

Webb's manifesto did provoke a response, from another parent, a father.

While I inevitably bridle against the indiscriminate application of one person's morality upon everyone else, regardless of individual circumstances, I will admit: Webb's critique has a bite. It stings because there is truth buried in her holier-than-thou denunciation of every parent who fails to live up to the author's pristine — "We post nothing about our daughter online" — standards. It's true: Every time a parent posts a picture or recounts an anecdote about their child online, it is an invasion of privacy and a potential cause for peer embarrassment.

Webb's larger concerns — she worries that advances in facial recognition technology and data mining algorithms will mean that the digital trails we create for our children could hurt their college admission and employment prospects — seem a little over-controlling to me, but I'm not going to entirely dismiss them. Our children will be more documented than any previous generation and it's hard to know how to navigate that. There is much to learn.

He argues that "modern society blows communities apart, splits family and friends across continents, isolates us in our cubes, and works us too hard to have as many physically embodied connections with each other as we would like."  That seems like an overstatement as well, but the point seems to be essentially valid.  "One meaningful reason why we value social media, even though it is problematic in so many troubling ways, is precisely because it helps us stitch our exploded communities back together, and keeps us in closer touch with the people we love."  Although I have to say that on a personal level, the advance of the web hasn't precluded continued physical connections to friends and family, and the web and social media simply enhance it (and make routine transactions, like arranging a dinner, easier).

            So is this paranoia?  Or putting a finger in the dike?  Her approach is not without merit, because who knows what nefarious purposes corporations, government agencies, terrorists, or any other kind of organization might pursue, now or in the future?  At the same time, it may be quixotic.  At the very least, however, it may give the kid the breathing room to make her own decision.  Of course, at about age 6 or 7 or whenever she comprehends how to use social media, their daughter's privacy may go out the window.  Will they restrict her use of the Internet in order to protect her privacy until she's old enough to realize the implications of a decision?  Which would probably be well into her teens.  (The Salon author father noted this as well:  Webb's authoritarian approach may very well backfire once her daughter reaches a certain age.  Given the ubiquity of social media and their use, it is probably more feasible to guard privacy on the web than to ban children from using it in a quixotic quest for privacy.)

            An even more menacing potential attack on privacy comes from another direction.  Brandeis would be scared out of his wits if he read law review articles written by Duke law professor Nita Farahany.  She's been thinking about brain scans and privacy and the implications of neuroscience for interpretations of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and what she describes as the "coming siege against cognitive liberties."  As fMRI scans and EEG detection grow more and more accurate, and begin to detect individual thoughts, is that an invasion of privacy, a "search" within the definition of American constitutional law?  (One example given in a Chronicle of Higher Education article about Farahany was whether psychologists doing some basic research using brain scans discover accidentally that one of the subjects has committed a murder.  What do they do?)  Here indeed is the path to the culmination of Brandeis's predictions about the "psychic" sciences.

            The advances in the field of brain scans are startling.  One researcher at Berkeley using brain scans has been successful in reproducing on a video monitor imagines of what the subject is seeing.  While those in the field agree that the ability to read thoughts now is extremely limited, the guy at Berkeley is quoted as saying that "assuming that science keeps marching on, there will eventually be a radar detector that you can point at somebody and it will read their brain cognitions remotely."  Is that an illegal search?  Or, if were to reveal something self-incriminating, would it violate the Fifth Amendment?  How much information will the state be able to gather legally, either by force or without someone's knowledge?

            Another report came from SciTech Daily:  "Scientists from the Stanford School of Medicine have developed a new method of recording brain activity that could lead to 'mind-reading' applications that would allow a patient who is rendered mute by a stroke to communicate via passive thinking. . . .  'We're now able to eavesdrop on the brain in real life,' said one of the study authors.  The finding could lead to "mind-reading" applications that, for example, would allow a patient who is rendered mute by a stroke to communicate via passive thinking. Conceivably, it could also lead to more dystopian outcomes: chip implants that spy on or even control people's thoughts."  A lawyer at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics commented that "any fears of impending mind control are, at a minimum, premature, said Greely.  'Practically speaking, it's not the simplest thing in the world to go around implanting electrodes in people's brains.  It will not be done tomorrow, or easily, or surreptitiously.'"

            These are troubling privacy questions, to me, and it is these that begin to elicit worry about Huxley's 1984.  (I do not agree with the critics of the NSA eavesdropping when they invoke Huxley; there would have been no national debate about this in the world of Big Brother.   Here, we're arguing about it endlessly in Congress and the media.  This is no comment on the wisdom or legality of the eavesdropping—just that it's not 1984.  What Farahany is thinking about comes closer.)

            Another interesting question for the "originalists" on the Supreme Court.  Exactly what did the Founding Fathers have in mind for brain scans when they drafted the Fourth and Fifth Amendments?

            From my perspective, there is reason to worry both at the individual and societal level.  One can imagine distasteful and threatening government uses of brain scans and the like for malign "public policy" purposes.  But it is also possible to be scared at the individual level.  What if I walk across the campus and think to myself "gee, I wish (U.S.) President XXXX were dead" because I disagreed so vehemently with his/her administration.  I would never have any intention of taking any action, never dream of taking action, and would not have the means to accomplish anything even if I wanted to, but could some zealous protector of the public interest, scanning thoughts across the University, have me arrested and jailed?  Or what of a public policy researcher who develops policy proposals that are against the interest of the governor/president/local police chief, and the authorities seek to have that work squashed?  Or a male undergrad who looks at some female undergrad and imagines what she looks like without clothes or what she'd be like in bed?  These are trivial examples.

            One can make a tally of the benefits to the surveillance state; Stuart Armstrong did so in an article in Aeon, describing it as the "panopticon" ("a building, as a prison, hospital, library, or the like, so arranged that all parts of the interior are visible from a single point").  The advantages include a sharp drop in crime (both on-street and white collar as well as police brutality), a reduction in abuses (child, manager-employee), a reduction in the size of police forces (because guilt would be known and they would just need to go arrest people), a reduction the number of laws (they proliferate in order to be enforced selectively; if the laws hit the manor equally with the ghetto, there would be quick movement to repeal many of the laws), a reduction in military budgets because countries would know what their potential enemies are doing and not need to arm against all possibilities, the ability to catch possible pandemics early as well as expose "lax safety standards or dangerous practices," the ability to nab those who might wish to engineer synthetic diseases (or nuclear devices or other weapons) for terrorist purposes, help in finding people after natural disasters, the collection of masses of data that could support or refute research hypotheses in many fields, allow elimination of passwords or airport searches (the system knows where you are at any time so can grant you access to a computer or ATM or let you through security), eliminate the need for credit cards because one would simply take from a merchant what one needs and would be automatically billed for it—and other benefits.  Armstrong characterizes this watched society as "the imagined virtues of and vices of small villages, which tend to be safe and neighborly, but prejudiced and judgmental."  He doesn't buy all these benefits as outweighing the danger, but concludes that "if we're headed into a future panopticon, we'd better brush up on the possible upsides.  Because governments might not bestow these benefits willing—we will have to make sure to demand them."  These advantages, however, would only accrue if every single square foot of indoor and outdoor space were under surveillance.  Otherwise I could do a lot of nasty things in the basement and no one would know. . . .

            The former Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, makes a different but related point.  It's the widespread availability and use of recording devices that poses as much of a threat as a government agency.  Because everyone seems to have a way to capture action and speech instantly, "virtually every act or utterance outside one's own home . . . is subject to being massively publicized."  Chertoff goes on to observe that "the true horror of the East German Stasi or the Maoist Red Guard was the encouragement of informants—private citizens reporting on other private citizens and even family members. No police agency could be omniscient. The oppressiveness of those police states came from the fear every citizen had that another citizen would disclose deviations from the party line."  Chertoff asks if we are creating such a society, where "every overheard conversation, cellphone photograph or other record of personal behavior is transmitted not to police but to the world at large? . . .  Do we need to constantly monitor what we say or do in restaurants, at sporting events, on public sidewalks or even private parties?"

            I believe strongly in advancing research in neuroscience; I'd like there to be ways to fend off Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, for example.   But those successes may be inextricably mixed up with the kinds of advances that Professor Farahany contemplates, or even the less biologically-based surveillance that Mr. Armstrong speculates about, and the advances in both spheres likely will come with a high price in privacy if we are not careful.  I think Brandeis was right:  we must "be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent."  But his caution goes beyond "government," as Mr. Chertoff argues; we may have as much to fear from Google and from ourselves as we do from Washington.

TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

And if my heart be scarred and burned,
The safer, I, for all I learned.  (Parker)

            The writer George Saunders (whose works are widely known but which I have not read, who TIME magazine declared one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and who's a faculty member in creative writing at Syracuse University) offered a few thoughts on modern technology that I found captivating.  He did an interview with the Guardian about his reservations about the world of the web.

I have noticed, over the last few years, the very real (what feels like) neurological effect of the computer and the iPhone and texting and so on – it feels like I've re-programmed myself to become discontent with whatever I'm doing faster. So I'm trying to work against this by checking emails less often, etc., etc. It's a little scary, actually, to observe oneself getting more and more skittish, attention-wise. . . .

I do know that I started noticing a change in my own reading habits – I'd get online and look up and 40 minutes would have gone by, and my reading time for the night would have been pissed away, and all I would have learned was that, you know, a certain celebrity had lived in her car awhile, or that a cat had dialled 911. So I had to start watching that more carefully. But it's interesting because (1) this tendency does seem to alter brain function and (2) through some demonic cause-and-effect, our technology is exactly situated to exploit the crappier angles of our nature:  gossip, self-promotion, snarky curiosity. It's almost as if totalitarianism thought better of the jackboots and decided to go another way:  smoother, more flattering – and impossible to resist.

The way it is used by many (not all, to be sure), Facebook is the perfect example of what Saunders was talking about:  "gossip, self-promotion, snarky curiosity."  Perhaps Facebook is what he had in mind when he made the observation.  I have come to find 90% of the postings worthless—and even worse, uninteresting.  (Worthless but funny I would appreciate.)  But maybe I just have the wrong Facebook friends.

SELF-EVIDENT, adj.  Evident to one's self and to nobody else.

ERUDITION, n.  Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

            With my perhaps oddball sense of humor, I laughed out loud when I read this, one of the funnier things I've read in quite awhile.

            Bartender asked Descartes if he'd like a drink.

            Descartes replied, "I think not," and disappeared.

           

CARTESIAN, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum—whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum— "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

            I regaled some of you with the factoid that I received from Kathy's uncle Phil about President John Tyler (1790-1862, president 1841-45), that he has two living grandchildren (!).  Tyler was the father of 15 children (the most prolific president).  The 13th child, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, was born in 1853, when Tyler was 63.  L. G. Tyler died in 1935 and had 3 children by his first marriage and 2 more by his second (he got married the second time in 1923, after his first wife died); the second two (sons) were born in 1924 and 1926—when he was 71 and 75 years old.  As of 1912, anyway, those two sons were still alive. 

            L. G. Tyler was an academic who served as president of William and Mary College in Virginia 1888-1919; he's credited with saving it after the disaster of the Civil War and laying the foundations for it to become the excellent college that it is today.  He also published quite a few books and articles, primarily on Virginia history.  So who says academics don't have fun?  Yikes, becoming a father at age 71 and again at 75.

            This tidbit of history became the subject of a conversation I had with two male friends.  Kathy and I were staying with our friends Rolf & Roberta Sonnesyn at their place on Leech Lake and were joined by our friends Gary Voegele and Margie Durham (my college roommate and his fiancée).  Gary and Rolf and I were musing about the practice of older men marrying much younger women and fathering children at a time when most men are content to be grandfathers—if they're still alive.  We don't know how widespread the practice was in the 19th Century, or in the 1920s when L. G. Tyler married for the second time at age 70 and then had two more children.  What was clear to the three of us, however, is that it isn't something we would have the slightest interest in doing.

            It may be that generation gaps didn't matter as much 100 and more years ago.  Or perhaps it was culturally more acceptable.  Irrespective of the norms, the idea of getting involved with, much less married to, some woman in her 20s or 30s (couldn't be a lot older than that and still have kids) is totally unappealing.  The experiential, professional, and intellectual differences would be enormous and, at least for the three of us, we agreed that social settings would be awkward.  I can just imagine getting together with my friends, most of whom are in their 50s and 60s, with a 20- or 30-something on my arm.  We agreed that maybe a hop in the sack with some attractive young woman might be fun—I suspect most men of a certain age don't find that idea repellant—but the relationship wouldn't last more than a day or so.  (And none of the three of us would do anything of the sort when we are happily married/attached.  As Rolf said, maybe if he were trapped on an island in the ocean and his only companion were a young woman. . . .)

            One might also posit that the role of the father has changed in the last 100+ years, at least in certain socio-economic classes.  In my experience, and that of friends, the dads were much more involved in parenting than were the males of my father's generation.  Obviously one is not going to be much involved as a father when one is 75 years old when a child is born—he won't even live that much longer, much less be involved in the child's upbringing.  So it would seem like abandoning parental responsibility to have a child so late in life—not only will the father not be there to help the mother, for the most part, the father won't even be around long enough for the child to grow up to know his or her father.  (L. G. Tyler died in 1935, at age 81, when the two boys were 5 and 9.)

            Anyway, it was a surprise to learn that someone who was president over 150 years ago still had living grandchildren.

INTRODUCTION, n. A social ceremony invented by the devil for the gratification of his servants and the plaguing of his enemies. The introduction attains its most malevolent development in this century, being, indeed, closely related to our political system. Every American being the equal of every other American, it follows that everybody has the right to know everybody else, which implies the right to introduce without request or permission.

I misremember who first was cruel enough to nurture the cocktail party into life. But perhaps it would be not too much too say, in fact it would be not enough to say, that it was not worth the trouble.  (Parker)

            Uff da.  Elliott got ensnarled in the criminal justice system as a result of an accident at work.  He was working one evening at the sub and pizza place, Davanni's—where's he worked for over a year as a part-time job while in college—and accidentally served alcohol to minors during a rush period.  He asked for IDs but didn't scrutinize them carefully enough, and it turns out that it was a sting.  He told me that as soon as he had uncapped the beers, a police officer stepped in and put his badge on the counter and told Elliott he'd just served liquor to minors.

            So now Elliott is accused of a gross misdemeanor and has a court appearance on December 11.  His employer receives a citation and fine and Elliott, under the law, is liable to a fine of up to $3000 or a year in jail.  Elliott and I exchanged a number of text messages while he was still at work, and I tried to calm him down, but he was pretty bummed out.  I have to confess that I would be, too, if I were in his position.

            What's ironic about it was that if there's any 22-year-old who I would think less likely to get into the criminal justice system, or deserve to, it's Elliott.  He doesn't drink, doesn't use drugs of any kind, and doesn't drive.  His worst faults are not cleaning up his dishes after he eats and perhaps playing too many video games.  So this is just ridiculous.   To impose a penalty other than a modest deterrent fine for what clearly was an accident seems to me to be a waste of the resources of the legal system, to say nothing of the unnecessary effect on the people who get involved by accident.  But I suppose they have to enforce the law.

            When Elliott let me know what was happening, I contacted a few of my attorney friends.  They all told Elliott not to worry too much about it and that he might, for example, receive a suspended sentence for a year, after which the incident would be wiped from his record, assuming no recurrence.  Or it might be plea-bargained down to something less serious and perhaps include a fine.  But they all cautioned that he MUST get an attorney, because a gross misdemeanor is not something anyone wants on his or her record.  Given that Elliott has concluded, after his time at Davanni's, that he never wants to be in the food service business again in his life—did it, learned what's it like, doesn't care to do it again—I would say the risk of recurrence is zero.

            One of the attorneys referred to Elliott talked with him a couple of times and then had a conversation with one of the city attorneys.  He advised Elliott to go to court, ask for a public defender (which he qualifies for because his personal income falls well below the threshold making him eligible for one), and ask for a continuance.  He also told Elliott not to lose any sleep over the matter; the City Attorney's office has a huge number of these kinds of cases and doesn't want to pursue most of them to any significant extent.  Meantime, Elliott will presumably meet with the public defender and seek a plea bargain.  As Elliott observes, he can't plead "not guilty" because he did actually sell the alcohol to the minor, even though it was a mistake, so he'll ask for a reduced penalty.  We're hoping for a petty misdemeanor (which is equivalent to a speeding ticket and which isn't counted as a criminal act).  We may not know the end of this story for several months.          

CHILDHOOD, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth—two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

APPEAL, v.t. In law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.

            I have opined from time to time in recent years that I have finally come to conclude that Abraham Lincoln was wrong:  he should have let the South go.  That view received oblique endorsement from Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker in late October.  Hertzberg was writing about the origins of the 14th Amendment and its relationship to U.S. debt obligations.  He wrote that "throughout the Civil War and afterward, Republicans in Congress had enacted some of the most forward-looking legislation in American history:  a national currency, the Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad, support for higher education, the definitive abolition of slavery—all thanks to the extended absence of delegations from the self-styled Confederate states.  Now that era was about to end."  And with the possible exception of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890, it was the end of major progressive legislation until FDR and the Great Depression.  Further progressive legislation has only been enacted in fits and starts since then, primarily (but not exclusively) under Democratic presidents and congresses, and frequently the lead opposition to any step forward has come from those formerly Confederate states, the most retrograde parts of the country.

HOMICIDE, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another—the classification is for advantage of the lawyers.

Then if my friendships break and bend,
There's little need to cry
The while I know that every foe
Is faithful till I die.  (Parker)

            In mid-November we had a delightful visit to my friend of nearly 40 years, Denise Ulrich, in Flowery Branch, Georgia (just north of Atlanta).  Denise lost her husband Bob a couple of years ago and has since remarried; she had never met Kathy, so two old friends met their new spouses.

            We poked around Atlanta, including a visit to the Atlanta Cyclorama, which they claim is the largest painting in the world, 42' by 158,' about the size of a football field, according to the guide.  It depicts one day in the Battle of Atlanta, in July of 1864, and includes the two commanding generals, Hood and Sherman.  One sits on auditorium seats in the center that rotate to provide the entire view, which is narrated.  It's really a spectacular painting; it was done in Milwaukee in the 1880s, there was a traveling exhibition that included Minneapolis, ownership changed hands several times, and it eventually donated to the City of Atlanta and put on permanent display in 1898.  (As one can imagine, it deteriorated over the years and went through a $14-million restoration in 1979.  It is one of only two surviving cycloramas of the Civil War; the other one is of Gettysburg.)

            What I found slightly ironic about the event was that the guide for the Cyclorama was a young Black man, who presented the information in an absolutely neutral manner.  The soldiers and officers in the painting are referred to as Confederate and Federal.  I don't believe that William Tecumseh Sherman is much admired in Atlanta, since he burned the city to the ground after taking it in September, 1864, but neither the painting nor the attached small museum take sides.

            Apart from visiting a very large Hindu temple carved from stone and granite, containing no nails or timbers, and visiting the Atlanta Botanical Garden (which places make us jealous of the plants we can't grow in Minnesota), a good time was had by all.  (We envy them their green and blooming plants in November—but not a chance we'd ever want to live there, given what it's like for the middle 3-4 months of the year.)

DELUSION, n. The father of a most respectable family, comprising Enthusiasm, Affection, Self-denial, Faith, Hope, Charity and many other goodly sons and daughters.

Outspoken? By whom?  (When Parker was told that she was outspoken)

Elliott observed that Thanksgiving Day and the Friday following it are two of our busiest days of the year.  Because our house can't hold the family when many are present, my brother and sister-in-law have been kind enough to host their share of the holidays plus mine, for which we are profoundly grateful.  We figure the least we can do is bring the turkey and a couple of other dishes, so we're up bright and early Thursday morning cooking. 

Friday, by tradition since the kids were young, is the day we go to a tree farm north of the Twin Cities and cut down our Christmas tree.  Which we did, as usual, this year.  Elliott is right about "busy":  Driving to get the tree and getting it decorated took from 9:00 to 5:15—it's a full-day project.  That is because we still use the little C7 lights, in strings of 25, that I have to drape around the tree and then clip to branches and get the 1940s reflectors all in place.  That process alone takes 2 hours.  Kathy and I had decided that this year we'd count the number of ornaments we put on the tree—and then forgot, of course.  But hanging ornaments was another hour-plus.  But the tree is up and we are on the way to the holiday season.

Because of our practice of getting and decorating our tree on Friday, we obviously do not engage in any "Black Friday" shopping.  I'd rather clean up the cat litter box than go out shopping that day.  My brother told me an interesting fact he'd read:  retail margins in December are no different from their margins the rest of the year, so either the Black Friday discounts aren't any greater than normal or the manufacturers are giving the retailers a deeper discount on the wholesale prices.  In either case, we don't have any wish to go shopping when there are 67 bazillion other people out.

What fresh hell is this?  (Parker)

POSITIVE, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.

A closing item about Dorothy Parker, from City Paper (Baltimore), 9/21/2005, in an article titled "Best Under Appreciated Local Landmark:  Dorothy Parker Memorial Garden":

Little known fact:  When sharp-shooting wit Dorothy Parker passed away in 1967, she left her literary estate first to Dr. Martin Luther King and, upon his death, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to which Parker's estate rolled over following the 1968 assassination of the civil-rights leader.  Parker herself was cremated, and nobody claimed her ashes, which sat first at New York's Ferncliff Crematorium and then in her lawyer's office.  In 1988 the NAACP, which receives royalties from Parker's manuscripts to this day, learned that her ashes remained unclaimed, and it stepped forward, erected a memorial garden, and interred her ashes there [that is, at the Memorial Garden in Baltimore].  Here, a circle plaque, surrounded by pine trees, reads in classy tribute:  This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people.

            Ambrose Bierce disappeared at age 71.  He purportedly left for Mexico in October 1913, but even that "fact" has little supporting evidence.  His body has never been found, and those who've studied the events have basically thrown up their hands.  No one knows what happened to him.

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.

I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money.  (Both Parker)

Adam Gopnik wrote in the New Yorker that "Dr. Johnson said, rightly, that anyone who decides to write something believes [himself/herself] wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind, and that it is up to the rest of mankind to determine if [he/she] is."  I don't agree with Gopnik or Johnson because I certainly make no such claim.  I write to pass along family news and offer this meandering journal on events of varying degrees of importance—the latter mostly in order to keep my brain from atrophying.

On that note, I'll leave you with my wishes for you for 2014 and beyond as articulated by Bierce.

FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.