Meeting Challenges/Why I Write

Ready for a Challenge!

I thought I was well prepared for cold weather and was not surprised on Monday morning to learn that the outdoor temperature was a frigid three degrees Fahrenheit, not expected to rise above 10 degrees by afternoon. After all, that’s what the forecast had shown in preceding days. And it is January in northern Michigan. So, from under the bedcovers, with coffee and book and dog at hand, it seemed like a pretty ordinary winter morning until, finally, I noticed that the bedroom was colder than it should be, the house unusually quiet. Why wasn’t the furnace blower coming on? Up to investigate! Only 45 degrees in the living room? Even I am not that frugal! 

 

Four days earlier I’d checked the outdoor propane tank and called to order a refill, but no way could I have gone through 20% of a tank in four days! Checked the circuit breaker box. No problem there. Emergency call to my furnace guy (had to leave a message), and then Sunny and I went out for a very short, quick run. As snow quickly turned to ice between her paw pads, she gave me no argument about cutting short out first sortie of the day.

I won’t go through my Monday morning hour-by-hour but instead will cut directly to the chase to say that the furnace guy found the propane tank was empty, after all. I’d probably gotten a false reading from the gauge, he said, sharing that his home tank gauge had once read zero when the tank turned out to be 85% full. I called for propane delivery once again, explaining the emergency situation, and by 12:30 p.m. my house was on its way back to normal. By 2:30 the chicken I’d planned to cook in the big cast iron pot, braising with it vegetables, was at last underway, and I’d managed to read almost 40 pages of Eig’s biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., much of that reading accomplished—before the propane delivery—with a sleeping bag over my legs, throw around my shoulders, wool scarf around my neck, and knitted cap on my head. 

 

Life lesson: No one is coming to save us. Now that’s not 100% true, is it? After all, the furnace guy came, and the propane delivery came, and my goose would have been cooked—no, frozen!—without them. But, no one made the calls for me or unearthed the space heaters to aim at pipes under kitchen and bathroom sinks or filled the bathtub and kitchen sink and washing machine with hot water to keep things under control until the situation was resolved. Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth wouldn’t have gotten any of those jobs done. Wishin’ and hopin’ and dreamin’ would not have accomplished a thing.

 

People are often asked what advice they would give to their younger selves, if such a thing were possible. I’d say, “Cowgirl up! What’s the first step? Take it! Then take it from there.” 

 

When someone says “Cowgirl Up!” it means rise to the occasion, don’t give up, and do it all without whining. [Source of quote online here.]

 

Sometimes, honestly, the first step is hard to see. What does need doing? What should I do? For me, even if I can’t see right away the first step to resolve a particular situation, there’s always something that needs doing. It may be completely unrelated, but experience has taught me (I only wish it hadn’t taken so long!) that doing anything constructive, even if it’s nothing more than cleaning the bathtub, makes me feel more effective, more capable in general, and that staves off the paralysis of helplessness and hopelessness. 

 

That’s probably the reason I keep writing these blog posts, these little-noticed bits of thought that I toss out into the great uncharted ocean of humanity, like messages in bottles, without knowing if they will ever even make landfall. Writing is something I feel capable of doing, and when I do it, I feel more capable of dealing with life in general. 

Strength comes from dreams, too.

Playing Defense, Yet Again

No, not football (sorry, Lions fans!), but ah yes, philosophy. If a book review in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section, a review of a new book on Henri Bergson, is any indication of the contents of the book, I can certainly skip ordering Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, by Emily Herring. As it is, I’m only worried that too many people will read either the review or the book or both and never read Bergson to realize how inaccurately his philosophy is too often portrayed by others. 

 

(I see that the reviewer of Herring’s book, Anthony Gottlieb, a British historian of ideas and admirer and defender of Leibniz, has a book on Wittgenstein coming out in the coming year. Will he also find the later Wittgenstein “nonintellectual”? We shall see.)

 

Gottlieb quotes Bertrand Russell:

 

Bertrand Russell complained that Bergson rarely argued for his views, relying instead on “their inherent attractiveness, and on the charm of an excellent style.” 

- Anthony Gottlieb, in New York Times Book Review, "The French Philosopher Whose Romantic Theory of Time Was All the Rage," 11/23/2024 review of Herald of a Restless World, by Emily Herring 

Is Russell’s accusation itself an argument? I think not. (Was he jealous of Bergson’s style? Perhaps.) Russell’s critiques have always made me wonder if he ever read Bergson at all. He certainly did not do so carefully. Russell once wrote that Bergson’s views on duration based on sensory perception were all vision-based. Absolutely false. Possibly because Bergson’s artist daughter, his only child, was deaf, he focused more than once on auditory perception, one example involving a clock chiming the hours. We don’t have to have begun counting with the first sound, Bergson notes, to have a sense of the final number, because we have retained the whole in memory (as we hear a melody, not simply one note and then another).

 

As for Einstein and Bergson, working in very different domains, neither one understood the other’s concerns.

 

Gottlieb winds up his review of Herring’s book by speculating that the reason for Bergson’s falling out of fashion was (“Perhaps”) that his “ideas were not substantial enough to endure.” It’s true there is no school of “Bergsonism,” but careful reading of the French existentialists and phenomenologists reveals a strong debt to Bergson, all too frequently unacknowledged. Merleau-Ponty, for example, takes great pains to distinguish his views from those of Bergson, but methinks he doth protest too much. Read Bergson first, then Merleau-Ponty, and the genealogy of the ideas is clear. 

 

 

Bergson was not “nonintellectual” or anti-intellectual. He did not denigrate intellect at all but recognized its essential function in our daily, practical life. His concern, as a philosopher, was that our mind’s analytic powers, equipping us brilliantly to deal with the material world, were misplaced when called on for answers in areas outside its expertise. 

 

Similarly, he was an admirer of physical science and all its (intellectual) achievements but opposed to what we now call ‘scientism,’ a worship of the scientific method that leads us astray when we seek to apply it outside its domain. Chemistry, for example, rests on a base of discrete and separable elements, physics on invariable laws, but human psychology as a subject of study, particularly as applied to human emotions and motivation, can only be deformed if submitted to rigors such as found in chemistry and physics laboratories. So must the intellect, in order to act effectively on the material world, deform time by representing it as a series of intervals (le temps, time as objectively measured in segments) rather than a continuous flow (la durée, time as intuitively experienced). 

Call me strong, don’t call me resilient. (Or do.)

Standing or caving?

‘Resilient’ is an important and strong and wonderful word, but I have to admit I’m weary of it. 

 

Widows and widowers, traumatized children, oppressed communities of color, survivors of cancer and war and natural catastrophe—and on and on and on—are all called resilient. When we say someone or a group or someones are resilient, are we saying anything more than that people keep putting one foot in front of the other and taking the next breath instead of lying down, giving up, and dying? Sometimes, in spite of my admiration for strength and perseverance, I want to say, Can’t we just realize that life is resilient and move on?

 

Really, though, my annoyance with that word is simply what I see as its overuse, and I’m being petty. It’s an important word and not at all offensive. It’s important to celebrate strength. Yeah. Forget I said anything. ‘Resilience’ is a good word. Let’s keep it going.

 

Ah, but what about ‘hack’ used as a noun? I am really sick of hearing any helpful tip or shortcut referred to as a hack, and overuse is not the only problem here. Let’s remember that hacking started out as a kind of virtual breaking and entering. Not a good thing. In fact, criminal. So when we offer an easy way to open a pomegranate and call it a hack, we’re erasing an important distinction. I have a similar gripe with anything beautiful being called ‘porn,’ as in bookshelf porn—God forbid! Whose bad idea was it to start calling helpful or beautiful ideas or things by ugly names, as if there’s no difference between good and bad?

 

Then there’s the business of referring to something bad or ugly with a neutral term or one that can even sound (if you don’t look too closely) positive? The worst such phrase in my book (I’ve written about this before) is ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Think about it. It’s good to be clean. Genocidal policies and practices, therefore, when called ethnic cleansing, are put forth as something good for a particular country, and it’s easy to see why a dictator or any other oppressive government would want to cloak its sins in clean-sounding language, but why do journalists around the world allow themselves to be led around by their noses, parroting this term in print, online, and on the airwaves? Trampling on human rights, deporting people because of their religion or ethnic background, putting their very lives at risk, sometimes taking their lives—there’s nothing clean about using euphemisms to refer to cruel and ugly actions and policies. 

 

Before I started writing this post, the words I first thought of were simply annoying. Words that elicited in me a peevish response. Modern locutions like ‘monetize,’ ‘privatize,’ incentivize,’ etc. Then came ‘hack,’ and I had a sudden insight as to why it strikes me as so offensive, and my post turned serious. I could never make a living as a nightclub comedian. Guess I’ll stick to bookselling. 

The Man from Plains

President Carter attended high school here.

 

You often hear it said: “Funerals are for the living.” For years, whenever I experienced anticipatory grief over the inevitable death of President Jimmy Carter, I couldn’t imagine him having a huge state funeral. He was such a modest, unassuming man, not the kind of person to take on the trappings of royalty or to exalt himself personally in any manner. His concentration on negotiating for the release of hostages instead of his re-election campaign in 1980, for example, may have helped him (along with the hostage crisis) lose a second term in the White House, but he was never in doubt about the priorities of that time. 

 

Political ambition is necessary in a political campaign, but Carter’s was not egoistic ambition. Rather, he saw a job that needed doing and that he believed he could do. I have written before today about Jimmy Carter’s presidency and how I see it. The words of Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic policy advisor, go far beyond my own and are worth reading carefully. But every tribute at the state funeral for President Carter in Washington, D.C., was moving. Ted Mondale read the words his father, former Vice President Walter Mondale, would have spoken had he not preceded Carter in death, words he and Carter agreed best summed up their four years of the Carter-Mondale White House: “We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace.” 

 

The first Carter news conference I watched when he was president astonished me. People from the press asked him questions – and instead of evading the questions, he did his best to answer them! 

 

Obeying the law – shouldn’t that be a necessary basic assumption for any man or woman fit to sit in the Oval Office?

 

President Carter went beyond keeping peace by pursuing it for other parts of the world, notably the Middle East. 

 

Since mine is a TV-free house, a friend who knows my longstanding devotion to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter invited me to her house to watch the funeral, a state event with all the pomp and dignity and ritual owed to a man who probably had greater integrity than any other occupant of the White House in United States history. And the point was made that Jimmy Carter himself had planned his funeral, speakers and music selections and all. 

 

It wasn’t long into the service that I realized why. He wouldn’t have done it for himself. After all, he was not in the audience, and, as I say, he was never a president to showcase himself as royalty. No, it was for us. His funeral was for the American people. He knew we needed it. And he was so right. We needed his reminder that we are one country and need to love our neighbors as ourselves.

 

Do you believe in miracles? Are you a dreamer? Or do you think that only hearts like mine, already yearning for the integrity of our 39^th president, would or could be moved by the tributes spoken in memory of this good, good man? I want to think that words of praise for Jimmy, like the man himself, might open hearts and turn them toward the good. 

 

Accomplishments are important, and Eizenstat among others listed many of President Carter’s, but the very least, I maintain, that we must ask of anyone coming to preside over our country is this: 

 

We told the truth.

We obeyed the law.

 

Keeping the peace is undoubtedly harder--perhaps not always possible--but any human being has it in his or her power to tell the truth to the American people and to obey the laws of the land. We cannot do better than to honor the legacy of this great man by following his example.

Carter's boyhood home, Archery, GA

Guns and Money

H E A D L I N E    N E W S!

 

John Kenneth Galbraith, in his book The Age of Uncertainty, listed explanations commonly given for why, in an era of abundance (the 20th century), there should continue to be poverty in the world. “...[S]o many different and conflicting answers … given with so much confidence and such nonchalance,” he noted. In the list he compiled were: lack of energy and ambition; race or religion; lack of natural resources; faulty economic system; inadequate education, technical, scientific, administrative talent; consequences of past colonial exploitation, racial discrimination, and national humiliation. Galbraith’s answer is:

 

There is no one answer—obviously. It is because so many explanations have a little truth that so many are offered [my emphasis added]. But one cause of poverty is pervasive. That is the relationship, past or present, between land and people. Understand that, and we understand the most general single cause of deprivation. 

 

The “land question” has long been studied, as has population, but neither has yet been solved. That, however, is not my topic today. 

I have been thinking about another knotty problem, another question to which “many explanations,” each with “a little truth,” have been offered, and that is the question, the problem, the fact of gun violence in America. I won’t go over old ground and list all the various explanations Americans espouse for school shootings and other shootings of multiple people in public places, often strangers to the shooter. Instead I want to propose a parallel to Galbraith's claim. 

 

Might there not be an underlying relationship beneath and behind the epidemic of mass shootings in America? What can it be other than guns and money? All the other explanations play their little parts, but only because the basic relationship exists in the first place. At least, that’s what I’m thinking and what I’m asking others to consider.

 

There are a lot of stories we can tell ourselves and each other. We do it all the time. Some stories help us solve problems, while others—the unquestioned myths--insure that the problems will remain enshrined in our national culture.

 

Random Remarks: Michener’s “Young Colonels”

 

The old man

James Michener, in This Noble Land: My Vision for America, warned against what he called “the young colonels,” writing that what is often called a "revolt of the generals" (a military overthrow of democracy) is more often a rebellion led by younger men who take radical action, “fearing that time is being lost.” Michener thought that revolutions in Algeria, Liberia, and Haiti all had this flavor and considered Hitler the “archetype” of the young military rebels he was describing. 

 

I was curious then about the ages of our own Founding Fathers. Benjamin Franklin, of course, was an “old man” of the American Revolution, but on July 4, 1776, Ages of the Founding Fathers on July 4, 1776, James Monroe was only eighteen years old! Aaron Burr was twenty, Alexander Hamilton twenty-one, and James Madison a venerable quarter-century. 

 

The 1770s, however, were not the 1960s, and the young men put a lot of trust in Thomas Jefferson (age 33) and John Adams, Paul Revere, and George Washington (all in their 40s). Firebrand Patrick Henry was also a mature 40 years old, John Hancock nearly that age. 

Michener did not mention Americans among the impatient "young colonels" in his brief survey. And of course our Founding Fathers were not part of a standing army.

The young ones

The Explanation Is Simple

Traditionally and historically, an American president's Cabinet was a group of advisors to the president. No one has experience in every facet of governance, and everyone at times needs advice from someone with specific knowledge -- or simply a different perspective. That was the role of the Cabinet. Until 2017.

Now once again, half the public, many elected officials, a number of past and present ranking military officers, and reporters from all over the country and the world gasp at each new appointment made by the president-elect. Why? He is also a former president, so you have seen this act play out before. What don't you understand?

A man who does not want advice and does not see that he needs any is not looking for advisors. This man, as we have seen before, wants flunkies. Toadies. Yes-men and -women. Anyone not ready to nod like a bobblehead wouldn't last a week in his Cabinet, and anyone seriously qualified is, ipso facto, disqualified from the get-go.

Really, what else did you expect?