"Technology and Politics"

                                                                    Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Technology and Politics”

August 28, 2020

 

“The successor to politics will be propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology,

 but the impact of the whole technology of the times. So, politics will eventually be replaced

 by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image,

 because the image will be so much more powerful than he could ever be.”

                                                                                                            Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)

                                                                                                            Interview with Peter Newman

                                                                                                            Editor-in-Chief, MacLean’s, 1972

 

A friend recently sent an e-mail in which he pointed out that Apple had installed, without my knowledge, a COVID-19 sensor app on my iPhone. The app notifies me if I’ve been near someone that has been reported as having COVID-19. My iPhone already knows where I am. Now it will know with whom I meet and speak. How soon before it knows if I am with a Communist, a neo-Nazi or a supporter of Trump?  At five months shy of eighty, the old man in me says it is good for my phone to know where I am. On the other hand, the libertarian in me says, whoa! Do I really want to live in a society where government, or some organization, tracks my every move and knows with whom I associate?

 

We live in an extraordinary time, where advances in technology outpace our ability to understand their consequences. Absent a return to a new Dark Age, technological advances will persist. It is the potential to manipulate thoughts and actions that should concern us. “Communism is a monopolistic system, economically and politically. The system suppresses individual initiative, and the 21^st Century is all about individualism and freedom. The development of technology supported those directions.” So spoke Lech Walesa in a 2002 interview with Julia Scheeres in a June 2002 interview for Wired. Eighteen years later, technology has advanced beyond what most people thought possible twenty years ago. Today, our every movements can be monitored. Individual freedom has bowed to the happiness of security and the collective promise of Socialism. Over seventy years ago, George Orwell saw this coming: “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”

 

Dystopian novels, from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, George Orwell’s 1984, to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 have shown how a repressive society can be propagandized a utopian future. It is the promise of Socialism, Communism and Nazism, where ends justify means. In words that provide an eerie precursor to the cancel culture that led to the New York Times 1619 Project, George Orwell, in 1949, wrote in his novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

 

The American people have been softened up, made susceptible to state control. Universities have banned conservative speech. Political correctness and identity politics have put a damper on open debate. Violent protest groups, like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, with their demands for blind allegiance, have wrecked the businesses and destroyed the lives of those they claim to represent. The reaction to COVID-19 has been Orwellian, in the herding of people to obeisance without questioning the diktats of government. Forty-three states imposed lockdowns, directing residents to stay home, except for essential needs. In New York, reminiscent of Nazi Germany, COVID-19 residents were placed in nursing homes amidst the uninfected, thereby endangering and killing thousands. Businesses deemed nonessential were closed. Over twenty million American were unemployed by May, up from just over six million in February. Social distancing and masks are commonplace and Vice President Joe Biden has said that if he is elected President masks will be mandated. Schools and colleges were closed. According to the CDC, one in four young people between the ages of 18 and 24 seriously contemplated suicide this summer. A line attributed to Mark Twain is relevant: “It is easier to fool the people than to convince them they have been fooled.” Progress has always relied on the initiative of the individual, not robotic responses of the masses to bureaucratic orders.

 

A concern about the size and power of government is not new. In a letter dated 27 May 1788, Thomas Jefferson wrote to fellow Virginian Edward Carrington: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and for government to gain ground.” Any aspirant federal employee wants to see his or her agency expand. Wishes have been realized. The budget of the federal government, now with 2.6 million employees, has grown from 8.7% of GDP in 1960 to 22.2% of GDP today.

 

What does this portend? California, a blue state run for years by progressive Democrats, may offer a clue. “California,” as resident Victor Davis Hanson wrote this month in National Review, “as some of the Democratic primary candidates bragged last year, is the progressive model of the future.” Not many years ago, the state was known as the “Golden State,” named after the gold rush of 1848 and the fields of golden poppies (Eschscholzia californica) that appear each year across its land. The state’s cliff-lined beaches, giant Redwoods, the magic of Hollywood and its once beautiful cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco lured people from across the country and around the world. Silicon Valley made billionaires of risk-taking technologists. Today, California has more billionaires than any other state. It has the highest GDP of any state (eight highest on a per capita basis). But the state is the most heavily taxed in the nation and has the fourth highest income gap of any state in the union, with one fifth of its residents living below the poverty line. With 12% of the country’s population, it has half the nation’s homeless and a third of its welfare recipients. Its public schools rank near the nation’s bottom, and the state is subject to human-caused droughts and power blackouts. Should this be the model to which we aspire? In his article, Mr. Hanson concluded that California is “now a civilization in near ruins.”

 

As politics is always about power, allow me to add one more quote from Orwell’s 1984. “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” For Americans, whose revolution established a republic, that statement may seem amiss, but consider the French Revolution of 1789-1799, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Beware of promises and the kindness of strangers.

 

At the Democratic National Convention, President Obama, in seductive mellifluous tones (in contrast to President Trump’s impolitic words), told the world that, with the upcoming election, democracy is on the line. I agree. But the policies of which Party would cause democracy to tremble? Which Party is more likely to use technology to help educate, influence and control the American people? The one that supports individualism or the one that created “Julia’s World?” Which Party advocates lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government and increased self-reliance, and which supports higher taxes, increased regulation, bigger government and greater dependency? Which Party sees immigrants as opportunists, and which sees them as victims? This election is crucial. Democracy is on the line. Is the COVID-19 app on my iPhone a canary in the coal mine? Shall we blindly allow technocratic bureaucrats to intrude in our lives, or should we try to understand the consequences of what technology has done to politics?

 

 

 

"Voting"

                                                                      Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Voting”

August 25, 2020

 

“Our American heritage is threatened as much by our own indifference,

as it is by the most unscrupulous office or the most powerful foreign threat.

The future of this Republic is in the hands of the American voter.”

                                                                                                Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)

                                                                                                New York Herald Tribune Forum

                                                                                                October 24, 1949

 

The ability to vote is a privilege, as well as a responsibility. It should not be denied any eligible individual, nor should it be granted to any non-citizen. Voters should learn all they can about candidates and their policies. To paraphrase Sy Syms’ ads from the 1980s, democracy depends on an educated electorate. “The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all,” said John F. Kennedy.

 

Many of us live in one-party states. A consequence is that if one is registered with the “out” party, there is a tendency to feel one’s vote will not matter, for example a Democrat in Wyoming or a Republican in San Francisco or New York City. Trends in voter registration suggest dissatisfaction with both parties. Twenty years ago, 30% of all voters were registered as Independents (up from 20% in 1960), today that number is 40%, according to a Gallup Poll conducted in May 2020. Nevertheless, not voting should never be one’s decision. “Nobody will ever deprive the American people the right to vote,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt, “except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.” And we should vote based on knowledge and reason, not inanity and emotion. Voting should be convenient and simple and should protect against fraud.

 

The presence of COVID-19 has many skeptical of being anyplace where crowds gather, including polling stations. One proposed alternative is to send ballots to every registered voter. There are about 153 million registered voters in the U.S. There are approximately 140,000 polling stations. Tracking legal voters is not easy. Every year, approximately 14% of the population – roughly 21 million voters – moves; another 1.5 million die and a similar number attain voting age. Keeping accurate records is a formidable task, which is why, historically, people have gone to their local polling stations to vote. Three states – Colorado, Oregon and Washington – have instituted a system to vote by mail, and their experience lends credibility to the viability of the process, but all three have been doing so for several years, ten years in the case of Colorado and twenty years for Oregon. Nevertheless, to take the process national will not be easy. “But running a vote-by-mail election is surprisingly complicated, and there’s a lot of room for things to go wrong. Validating and counting a deluge of posted ballots in an open and accountable way presents a major challenge, one that only half a dozen states are fully prepared for,” so ran an article in the August 9^th edition of The Oregonian. In close elections, unintentional errors are viewed with mistrust.

 

Absentee ballots are issued on request in every state, in some states for any reason. (When living in Connecticut but spending the work week in New York, I would go to the town hall in Old Lyme on the Friday before Election Day where, after showing ID, I would be given a ballot. I would fill it out, seal it and hand it back to the registrar.) Some commentators equate universal mail-in-voting and absentee voting, but they are different. In the first instance, ballots are sent to last-known addresses; in the second, ballots are sent by request. The mailing of 153 million ballots, having them filled out accurately and then having them returned and secured by election day eve is bound to encounter obstacles – ballots undelivered by the U.S. Postal Service, errors and confusion among voters and fraud, especially by those who “harvest” ballots. “A potential disaster arises not because of any deficiency at the post office but because of unrealistic ballot deadline and validation standards imposed recklessly by the states,” wrote Holman Jenkins in last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. Anyone who thinks the process will be easy, free of error and not lead to recriminations is living in fantasy land.

 

This year’s primaries provided trial runs in states new to universal-mail-in ballots. The results should serve as a warning for national elections on November 3: Two months after the election, the outcome of New York’s 12^th Congressional District remained unknown, as did results from Paterson, New Jersey’s Third Ward City Council elections, where 24.3% of ballots were deemed ineligible. Ballots were left in the foyers of apartment buildings, not delivered to eligible citizens. The Center for Voter Information has said that half a million inaccurate applications for ballots were sent to Virginians two weeks ago. In Florida’s 2018 elections, a state Trump won in 2016 by a margin of 1.8%, 1.2% of mailed in ballots were rejected. Margins of victory in Presidential elections have narrowed over the past two decades, making disputes more likely.

 

The greater concern, in my opinion, is early voting, a separate issue, but also a consequence of universal-write-in voting. Voting early does not accord with an informed electorate. Partisans vote straight Party lines, but as Independents have become the largest segment of voters, time favors those who wait until election day. However, politicians love early voting. Each vote cast is one less to seek. People are encouraged to vote early, especially after boisterous rallies, before enthusiasm dims. Forty states, plus the District of Columbia, offer early voting options, some allowing voters to vote forty-five days in advance. Early voting diminishes, not enhances, democracy.

 

Elections should be free and fair. Results should express the intent of voters. Winners should be magnanimous in victory and losers gracious in defeat. There will always be those unable to get to their designated place to vote, thus a need for absentee ballots. Voters should base decisions on thoughtful considerations of the best and latest information available. The media should put aside bias and be alert to fraud. In the same column by Holman Jenkins quoted above, he wrote: “Elections, in fact, are on the list of things that people like to steal and will steal if opportunities are available.” Problems are fewer when voters go to polling stations on election day. That may not be possible in this season of COVID-19 and with government’s Orwellian response; so be ready for a fight that will make hanging chads in the 2000 election seem like a fond memory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Wokeness - An American Cultural Revolution?"

                                                                     Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Wokeness – An American Cultural Revolution?”

August 9, 2020

 

“The problem with wokeness is that it doesn’t inspire action; it freezes it. To be woke is first

 and foremost to put yourself on display. To make a problem seem massively intractable

 is to inspire separation – building a wall between you and the problem – not a solution.”

                                                                                                            David Brooks

                                                                                                            New York Times

                                                                                                            June 7, 2018

 

It may seem hyperbolic and overly provocative to refer to the “wokeness” that has permeated our society as a cultural revolution; for it brings to mind China’s Cultural Revolution that lasted ten years and caused, perhaps, twenty million lives. On the other hand, it may prove to be longer lasting but less deadly, more like the Romanticists of the 19^th Century, who questioned the intellectual foundations of Enlightenment-derived, reason-based western culture. Like then, todays “woke” have abandoned liberalism and objective truth for narratives and stories based on the belief we live in a Marxian world of oppressors and oppressed.

 

Wokeness: noun, a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality. (Definition provided by the Cambridge English Dictionary.) That definition sounds harmless. We should all be concerned about social problems, helping the needy, playing fair, being respectful and applying the Golden Rule. But wokeness steps across the line. It takes its ideology from “critical theory,” a social philosophy that stems from Karl Marx and the 1930s Frankfurt School. Critical theory offers social justice in place of real justice. It challenges traditional power centers; though it does not permit challenges to its own structure. To be woke, in this sense, is to be awake to the concept that what matters is diversity of identities, not ideas – that, for example, all blacks, all gays, all women should express ideas based on identity, not individual thought. Individual opinions are seen as oppressive. Black conservatives are anomalous, in that it is claimed they support white oppression. (I suspect, however, if one asked Condoleezza Rice, Thomas Sowell, Alveda King, Clarence Thomas, Candace Owens, Tim Scott or scores of other Black conservatives if that were true, the accusation would be denied.)

 

Wokeness divides people into victims and victimizers. Black failure, therefore, is due to “systemic” racism, not individual shortcomings. Qualities that lead to success, such as hard work and two-parent households, are said to be examples of a white-dominant culture, not universal truths. Wokeness is a philosophy of denial, in that it shuns individual accomplishments and failures. It is, in fact, a reactionary philosophy. Andrew Sullivan of The Weekly Dish recently described it: “liberalism [classical] can include critical theory as one view of the world worth interrogating. But critical theory cannot include liberalism, because it views liberalism as a mode of white supremacy that acts against the imperative of social and racial justice.” Those who claim “wokeness” say their decisions are based on science, but when facts do not accord to prescribed narratives they are not open to disagreement or debate. For example, in the climate wars, they accuse opponents of ignoring science, yet it is they who shun debate. These same tactics have been resurrected during the current pandemic. “Unfettered dialogue isn’t a liberal-arts luxury,” wrote Vivek Ramaswamy in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal; “it is a necessity for science and democracy.”

 

What we are witnessing, while discomfiting, is not new. As mentioned above, it has ancestral roots in 19^th Century Romanticism, which was, in part, a backlash against the Enlightenment – against reason, in favor of mysticism and emotion. As well, in his autobiographical book, A Personal Odyssey, Thomas Sowell foresaw in 1969 what we see today: “Where there is little attention paid to reasoned arguments about legitimate problems and a total capitulation to force, ‘moderate’ or ‘rational’ leadership cannot deliver the results that more uninhibited leadership can deliver.” What is new (and scary) is the rapidity with which corporate America, professional sports, Hollywood, the media, the entertainment industries, unions and politicians from both political parties, in a desire to be seen as woke, have jumped on board this illiberal bandwagon.

 

There is hypocrisy in this virtue signaling. Keep in mind, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors described herself as a “trained Marxist.” In their statement of belief, they say they are “self-reflexive and do the work to dismantle cisgender privilege” and “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” Yet our lives have improved because of capitalism, and most of us who are white never realized that being cisgender or being raised in a traditional two-parent family was white privilege. Goldman Sachs, in refusing to take public any company that does not have at least one minority board member, sets itself as the sole arbiter as to who counts as diverse. Nike claims wokeness, yet they employ 600 or so Uighurs working in forced labor camps in China.

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the test of a first-rate intelligence “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time.” For example, slavery was a sin of American history, yet it is also true that the 13^th Amendment, ratified on December 6, 1865, abolished “slavery and involuntary servitude.” Over 700,000 Americans died in the Civil War to end slavery. Jim Crow laws ended with the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 and anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. have been repealed for over fifty years. Public approval of interracial marriage rose from 5% in the 1950s to 80% in the 2000s. Mixed-race marriages were less than one percent of all marriages in 1960; today they represent over 15 percent. We may have further to go, but progress has been made. Being woke ignores such advances – that no matter historical facts, their claim is we remain a systemically racist nation. Being woke means not allowing opposing ideas. It is a pessimistic view of the future. In the same op-ed quoted in the rubric, David Brooks wrote: “…it’s a blunt fact that most great social reforms have happened in moments of optimism, not moments of pessimism, in moments of encouraging progress, not in moments of perceived threat.”

 

The most striking thing about “wokeness” is how illiberal it is. In its essence, it is Marxist. Like Black Lives Matter, it sets one group of people against another, and it tolerates the violence of Antifa. It requires followers to hew to a preordained narrative, spouting Orwellian truths. It subscribes to “cancel culture,” removing from the historical record that which is not supportive of its aims. It provides the false security of “safe places” and denies politically incorrect speech, for fear that free speech might inspire the curiosity of the inquisitive. It arose in universities and now, within a frightening short time, is consuming our lives, in a bedlam of virtue signaling, letting science and universal truths sink into the abyss of a new dark age. Is this a true cultural revolution? Where will it lead us? Will democracy withstand it? How will it end?

 

 

 

 

 

"A Personal Odyssey," by Thomas Sowell

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Burrowing into Books

“A Personal Odyssey”

August 13, 2020

 

“Although marching to your own drummer has its downsides, both personally

 and professionally, it also made me no stranger to controversy.”

                                                                                                            Thomas Sowell (1930-)

                                                                                                            A Personal Odyssey, 2000

 

This memoir was written twenty years ago, so some will have read it. I had not. Sowell is a man I have long admired for his independent thinking on many issues. Trained as an economist, he writes as well on education and race, and of how politics, protests and policy prescriptions influenced his thinking.

 

Like Odysseus’ return from Troy, we follow him from birth and young boyhood in rural North Carolina, through his school years in Harlem, and his leaving home at age seventeen. We follow him into the Marine Corps, and we learn of his years in college and graduate school, of marriage and children. We read of his years of teaching, writing and thinking, and, finally to his Ithaca, Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where he researches and writes – a passage through trials to triumph.

 

He was born in 1930. His father died before he arrived and his mother, who could not afford to feed and care for him, had to give him up to his father’s Aunt Molly. The poverty in which he lived was bleak. His first home: “Like most of the houses in the area, ours had no such frills as electricity, central heating, or hot running water…The toilet was a little shed on the back porch.” At age nine, his family moved to New York City, to a shared apartment in Harlem. In 1944, his intelligence got him admitted to Stuyvesant High School where he first spent time with white children. But he quit before graduation. He worked and went into the Marine Corps: “Never in my life did race mean less than during those two months at Parris Island. The Drill Instructors saw their job as making everybody miserable, and they did so without regard to race, color, creed or national origin.”

 

Honorably discharged, he passed exams allowing him to enter Howard University, but soon realized that there “was no way for my mind to develop in the stultifying atmosphere there.” He transferred to Harvard, from which he graduated Magna Cum Laude.  From there it was on to Columbia where, under Arthur Burns, he wrote his master’s thesis on Marx’s business cycle theory. He received a PhD from the University of Chicago, with Milton Friedman as his advisor. His thesis was on Say’s Law, which says that production is the source of demand. In one of Friedman’s courses he was assigned Friedrich Hayek’s essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” which “showed the role of a market economy in utilizing the fragmented knowledge scattered among vast numbers of people.”

 

As a black man, civil rights were important. Everyone, he knew, should be equal before the law. “But,” he wrote, “to expect civil rights to solve our economic and social problems was barking up the wrong tree...” He saw quality education as providing the best route out of poverty but did not see that as the plan of civil rights activists. “In education, the agenda was racial integration in general, including busing. Discussions of first-rate all-black schools were a distraction from that agenda.” Busing, in the 1970s, had become a symbolic action. “My research on affirmative action likewise convinced me that it was counterproductive for its avowed purpose, except for a relatively few affluent individuals.” In last Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Barton Swaim wrote, “Thomas Sowell and others have shown that choice and competition would benefit black children far more than doubling or tripling funds for public schools, but white liberals and black civil-rights leaders studiously ignore it.”

 

What struck this reader is his common sense and his wish for other blacks to have the advantages he had. He credits his success to genetics and to the environment in which he has lived. A mathematics gene was common in the family, as were other characteristics: “Some remarkable similarities in personality traits also showed up as between me and my siblings, even though we were raised in separate households hundreds of miles apart.” Environment was important. He left the south “before I would have fallen irretrievably far behind in inferior schools,” and then passed through public schools in New York, “at a time when they were better than they had been for the European immigrant children of a generation earlier and far better than they would be for black children of a later era.”

 

His story is personal; we meet his son John, a brilliant child but a late talker, a condition that prompted his writing Late-Talking Children, one of the more than thirty books he has written. Summing up his life thus far, he added: “With all that I went through, it now seems in retrospect almost as if someone had decided there should be a man with all the outward indications of disadvantage, who nevertheless had the key inner advantages needed to advance.”

 

Sowell is an icon of conservatives, but he is not political. He notes how he developed a “…lifelong immunity to Potomac fever.” Asked to join the Reagan Administration, he demurred. His last membership in a political party was as a Democrat; he became an Independent in 1972. He does not have, he wrote, “…the political skills or temperament to accomplish anything that would justify the aggravation that going to Washington would involve.” He is an intellectual, with an interest in truth based on facts, not policies based on politics of identity. While his common sense would be refreshing in Washington, his wisdom is available to all who can read. This book is a good place to start.

"Her Last Flight," by Beatriz Williams

                                                                    Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Burrowing into Books

“Her Last Flight,” Beatriz Williams

August 8, 2020

 

“I am Persistence, Olle. I am Curiosity. I am Heartbreak.

 I am Survival. I am Recklessness and Perseverance. You can’t win.”

                                                                                    The narrator, Janey Everett speaking to Olle Lindquist

                                                                                    Her Last Flight, 2020

                                                                                    Beatriz Williams (1972-)

 

This novel is loosely based on Amelia Earhart and the mystery surrounding her disappearance. We visit Burbank, California where the heroine of this novel Irene Foster learns to fly. It was from Burbank that Ms. Earhart used to fly. We spend two weeks on Howland Island, a coral reef just north of the equator in the central Pacific, which was Earhart’s destination when she disappeared in July 1937. We travel to Guernica in April 1937, right after Germany bombed this small village in the Basque region of Spain, a horror depicted in Picasso’s eponymous painting. We meet historical characters like Stanley Bruce, Prime Minister of Australia and John Baird, Lord Stonehaven, Governor General of Australia.

 

Like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon women, Beatriz’s women are strong and determined. She has George Morrow (based on George P. Putnam who married Amelia Earhart in 1932) say to Foster, “The great story of our time isn’t this Volstead business; it’s the emancipation of the female sex.” We meet Irene Foster, who is based on Amelia Earhart, a “tall and athletic” girl, on the beach in Santa Monica in March 1928 where she surfs in the early morning. There she meets Sam Mallory, a famous pilot who surfs and flies out of an airport in Burbank. Irene falls in love with flying, and she falls in love with Sam.

 

As in all her books, there are different timelines – 1928, 1937 and 1947, with flashbacks to 1944 Paris where Janey Everett, the narrator of this story, was stationed as an army photojournalist. Janey, who is researching a story on Sam Mallory, follows a lead to Irene Foster. She tracks down the reclusive aviatrix to Hanalei, Hawaii (a small town on the north shore of Kauai). Irene had disappeared on a flight in 1937, somewhere in the western Mediterranean while participating in a solo round-the-world race. Now, living under the radar and avoiding all publicity, she is married to a pleasant, protective man, Olle Lindquist. While Janey narrates the 1947 timeline, the other timelines are excerpts from her journal, titled “Aviatrix,” which tells the story of Sam and Irene.

 

Janey’s persistence causes the retiring Irene to gradually open up. Her looks attract Leo, Olle’s son by a former marriage. Her journal provides the reader the background to the story. Beatriz is at her best when writing suspense: Irene’s emergency landing on Howland Island, minus one engine and without fuel; the German bombing of an airfield in republican-dominated Basque country in 1937, and surfing a killer wave” in Hawaii: “This monster rises up behind me and gathers me in its mighty jaws and spits me to shore in a jumble of board and bone and hair and salt water…” And she philosophizes: Janey, thinking back on her time in Paris, remembers lost loves: “You cannot call back those you have lost, however much your bones ache with missing them, however giant and mysterious the holes they leave behind.” Also, as in all her books, this one has a twist at the end, an O. Henry-like surprise, which I did not catch. But, if you read carefully, the clues are there. An exciting and enjoyable read.

"Anger"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Anger”

August 4, 2020

 

“Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.”

                                                                                                Aristotle (385BC-323BC)

 

Anger has been a constant in American politics since the beginning. On July 11, 1804, a long and bitter feud between Vice President Aaron Burr and former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton ended in the latter’s death by gunshot on a field in Weehawken, New Jersey. On February 6, 1858, as the House of Representatives debated the Kansas Territory’s pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution, Pennsylvania’s Republican Galusha Grow and South Carolina Democrat Laurence Keitt traded insults and then blows. On March 1, 1954 four Puerto Rican nationalists in the visitors’ gallery unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and opened fire on members of Congress, wounding five. When heated political dialogue becomes angry words (or worse), the nation loses. The 1960s were angry years, fed by opponents and proponents of Civil Rights and an unpopular war in Southeast Asia. We are living through another period where anger has become pervasive and political extremism has made the middle way a difficult passage.

 

We are in a summer of discontent, made inhospitable by Covid-19, an economic depression and unprecedented hatred for the President of the United States. Political extremism has always been around, but usually on the fringes. Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace and Lester Maddox once represented right-wing extremists, just as Henry Wallace and George McGovern did on the left. (George Wallace and Maddox were both Democrats, but extreme rightwing in their views). However, they were all marginalized by the far larger center-right and center-left parts of their respective Parties. That is no longer the case. Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist, is contributing to the Democrat platform. Like a mutating cell infected with a virus, the country has been dividing and separating, creating extremists on both ends.

 

Anger is defined as strong feelings of annoyance, displeasure and hostility. Anger can be a positive force when used with deliberation. Colin Powell once said, “Get mad, then get over it.” It is when anger emanate from hatred and its manifestations devolve into violence that should concern us. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25^th spawned understandable protests across the United States, but which rose to incoherent violence in some cities and the rebirth of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa movements. Corporations, schools and colleges were quick to demonstrate their “wokeness.” What that exactly meant is of less interest to them than in how they are perceived. If you aren’t “woke,” you are racist. The lockdown of the economy in response to COVID-19 has made inner cities tinder boxes, with demonstrators protesting government edicts that violate rights to assemble, especially in places of worship. 

 

While rioters call for defunding police, murder rates in the Country’s fifty largest cities have risen 24% through July. Disrespect for law enforcement has abetted property destruction. A July 27 editorial in the Wall Street Journal headlined “A Weekend of Urban Anarchy,” spoke to assaults on public and private property in the cities of Seattle; Portland, Oregon, Louisville, Kentucky; New York; Atlanta, and Baltimore. “Lawlessness begets lawlessness, and in recent weeks we’ve seen reports of vigilantes and far-right activists joining the melee from Richmond to Philadelphia. Local officials are allowing this to happen, and the more it is indulged the worse it is likely to get.” Legal restrictions imposed by the Seattle City Council banning the use of pepper spray caused Carmen Best, Chief of the Seattle Police Department to issue a statement in which she said that in order to protect her officers, she would have an “adjusted deployment” in response to any demonstrations that threaten private property.  She would not place her officers at risk, with them unable to respond.

 

Second quarter GDP numbers showed a preliminary decrease of 32.9% (down 9.5% from the same quarter a year ago), the worst quarterly GDP report on record. Fear of COVID-19 had employed government politicians and bureaucrats order businesses to close, creating unemployment; they urged people to stay home, regardless of economic costs. Their actions were supported by employed media workers. If we persist on this path, more lives will be destroyed, perhaps not by the coronavirus, but by poverty, isolation, bankruptcies, increased drug usage and suicide. Ironically, one of the worst performing sectors during the quarter was the health industry, led by a halt in elective surgeries, fewer cancer screens and less heart monitoring. Government spending cannot make up the difference. No federal or state agency can replicate the efficiency of the free market, comprised of billions of decisions by millions of people. As a nation, we should ensure that the most vulnerable are protected from COVID-19, while encouraging the rest to act responsibly and allow the economy to recover. It is little wonder that the response to the virus, which has been largely political, has given rise to frustration, leading to anger.

 

Mainstream media would have us believe that this anger is the fault of the mercurial Mr. Trump, but, in truth, it did not begin with him. The “Billy Goat” behavior of President Clinton angered those who felt he had tarnished the Presidency. The invasion of Iraq by President George W. Bush was based on allegations that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. When no such weapons were found, opponents became angered. The IRS targeting of conservatives, lies about Benghazi, Fast and Furious and cash sent to Iran were scandals that enveloped the Obama Administration and angered those who felt they had been snookered. Nevertheless, the vitriol then did not reach levels seen today.

 

Anger is a tool of the inarticulate and bubbles to the surface when reason is absent. Hatred for Donald Trump is ubiquitous; his personality and his promise to “drain the swamp” that links lobbyists to government employees has led to anger towards him. Hatred for those whose political opinions do not coincide with ours has led to anger toward our neighbors. Hatred for our Country is a consequence of dubious claims that “systemic” racism is rampant in the United States.

 

Lost in this anger is an appreciation for how rare is the freedom that was the promise of our Founders more than two centuries ago. As a nation, we are a work-in-progress, but the foundation on which our liberties are built is solid, if we can keep them, as Benjamin Franklin admonished. While some are born into wealthy, two-parent loving families and others have obstacles to overcome, every person born in this Country is privileged. Where else in the world would one have equivalent opportunities?

 

The purpose of government is not to give everyone an easy life. It is to provide the infrastructure that keeps people safe from enemies without and oppressors within – safe to be free and independent, to enact and execute laws that protect property and persons, to ensure against those who misuse power, whether political or economic and to give each person the opportunity through education to improve their lot. Education is the crucible where ideas germinate and tolerance is formed. As former U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R- UT) wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, “Restoring intellectual honesty to our universities is key to rebuilding credibility in the expert class.” So true. Let calm replace anger, so Aristotle’s fool gains wisdom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Cross of Snow," Nicholas Basbanes

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Burrowing into Books

“Cross of Snow,” Nicholas Basbanes

August 1, 2020

 

“But to me, a dreamer of dreams.

To whom what is said and what seems

Are often one and the same, – “

                                                                                    “The Bells of San Blas,” March 12, 1882

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as Nicholas Basbanes writes in the introduction, has gone out of favor – “widely revered in one century, methodically excommunicated from the ranks of the worthy in the next.” A poet of gentility, tradition and respectability is incongruous when lyrics to popular songs and the language of late-night TV hosts would make blush a Vietnam War combat veteran or a Salomon Brothers trader. Yet, this is a man worth knowing – a brilliant linguist, a popular professor and the most renowned poet of his time. When first picking up the book, I wrote a note to myself: “I am embarking on an adventure to know a remarkable man, his life and times.” And that is what Mr. Basbanes has done in this very personal biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

 

The “Cross of Snow” in the title comes from a poem Longfellow wrote in 1879 as a tribute to his late wife Fanny who had died eighteen years earlier. The poem was inspired by the landscape artist Thomas Moran’s painting “Mountain of the Holy Cross,” a peak in the northern Sawatch Range of the Colorado Rockies

 

“There is a mountain in the distant West

That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines

Displays a cross of snow upon its side.

Such is the cross I wear upon my breast

These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes

And seasons, changeless since the day she died.”

 

Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine in 1807. After graduation from Bowdoin College in 1825 (in a class with Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne), he spent three years in Europe to better his knowledge of modern languages, which he would teach at Bowdoin. “Your tour is one for improvement rather than pleasure,” his brother Stephen wrote. He became fluent in German, Swedish, French, Italian and Spanish. When he died, his library contained over 11,000 books, in fifteen languages, all of which he could read. Returning to Bowdoin, he took up teaching duties. Six years later, he married Mary Potter. Four years later, he was offered the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard. He was again asked to travel to Europe to brush up on languages and to purchase books for the college. Mary went with him, only to die of complications from a miscarriage on November 29, 1835 in Rotterdam. She was twenty-three. Her last words: “Henry, don’t forget me.” He was deeply saddened. In his diary he wrote. “…at night I cry myself to sleep like a child.” He later admitted that bringing her was the biggest mistake he had made. He did not forget her. Four years later, he completed Footsteps of an Angel, which includes this stanza:

 

“And she sits and gazes at me

With those deep and tender eyes,

Like the stars, so still and saint-like,

Looking downward from the skies.”

 

Several months later, on that same trip, in July 1836, Longfellow met nineteen-year-old Fanny Appleton in Switzerland. She was traveling in Europe for a year with her father and siblings, her mother having died the previous year. Fanny was an observant and intelligent young woman. On a trip to Pompeii, she wrote in her journal: “The awe of the Past never came so strongly upon me as here, frail matter doomed to revisit the glimpses of the moon…Matter can be embalmed but the free soul was not cased in, by even the bondage of a million years.” Longfellow was smitten, but it took seven years of courtship before they married. In the interim, he wrote Hyperion, an unflattering semi-autobiographical piece – his second worst decision according to Mr. Basbanes. Hyperion speaks to Longfellow’s long pursuit of Fanny. She wrote to her friend Emmeline Austin about the story: “There are really some exquisite things in this book, tho it is desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches, like the author’s mind.” Nevertheless, teaching duties occupied him and he continued to write – in 1839 The Wreck of the Hesperus and The Village Blacksmith, and three years later Poems on Slavery, a mildly pro-abolitionist collection.

 

It was during their eighteen-year marriage Longfellow was most productive, especially after retiring from his teaching duties in 1854. During those years he published Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858). He and Fanny hosted scores of America’s and England’s literati, as well as artists and musicians, at their home on Brattle Street in Cambridge, a house that had once been George Washington’s headquarters and is now called the Vassall-Cragie-Longfellow house. Among those entertained: Prince Edward (later Edward VII), Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Louis Agassiz, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Edwin Booth, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt and Jenny Lind. Fanny bore six children, five of whom survived into adulthood. Sadly, she died in a tragic accident at age forty-three on July 10, 1861.

 

Dante had been a favorite of Fanny’s; so, with her gone and with his eldest son in the Union Army, Longfellow translated Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. “In the months following Fanny’s death, Henry found comfort in Dante’s exploration of the heavenly spheres, with the idealized Beatrice at his side.” His effort, which took six years to complete, is still considered one of the best English translations. In 1868-69, he took a final trip to Europe, traveling with his three living daughters, his son Ernest and his wife, his brother Samuel and brother-in-law Tom Appleton. He dined with Charles Dickens and was received by Queen Victoria, who afterwards told Sir Theodore Martin, then working on a biography of her late husband, “I noticed an unusual interest among the attendants and servants…I am surprised and pleased to find that many of his poems are familiar to them.” His popularity in Britain was such, Basbanes writes, “that he was outselling Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson on their own turf.”

 

Longfellow is best remembered for sentimental poems like The Village Blacksmith, Paul Revere’s Ride and The Song of Hiawatha, whose lines we recall: “By the shores of Gitche Gumee/By the shining Big-Sea-Water.” It was poetry that people my age once memorized, but which does not fit today’s more cynical age. In this intimate biography, Nicholas Basbanes writes of his poetic achievements, his professorships at Bowdoin and Harvard and his translations. Longfellow condemned slavery, but not with the adamancy of some of his friends, perhaps because his father-in-law’s mills depended on southern cotton. However, people knew where he stood. One of his best friends was Senator Charles Sumner, a staunch abolitionist, once caned into unconsciousness on the Senate floor by South Carolina Democrat Preston Brooks in 1856.

 

 Longfellow continued to translate, write poetry and welcome guests at Craigie House, as he “…resumed his agreeable pace.” He did so until his death on March 24, 1882. His home on Brattle Street in Cambridge is now a museum. During his lifetime it was the most visited home in the United States, second only to Mount Vernon. In 1875, he attended his 50^th reunion at Bowdoin at which he read an ode written for the occasion, Morituri Salutamus, which includes these two lines:

 

“So many memories crowd upon my brain

So many ghosts are in the wooded plain,”

 

An evening in his company, Anthony Trollope reflected, was memorable: “…the stranger is apt to drop the poet in the gentleman, the distinguished man of letters to the uncommonly pleasant fellow whom he has encountered.” In her comments to Sir Theodore Martin, Queen Victoria added, “No other distinguished person has come here that has excited so peculiar an interest. Such poets wear a crown that is imperishable.” The writer William Winter (1836-1917), who regarded Longfellow as a mentor, is quoted: “…a perfect image of continence, wisdom, dignity, sweetness and grace.” Many years after his death, his son Ernest wrote of his father: “He was not a rushing river, boiling and tumbling over rocks, but the placid stream flowing through quiet meadows.”

 

This biography, by a sensitive and diligent author, is a delightful tribute to a poet whose soothing and bucolic voice deserves to be heard and to be read once more, especially in these turbulent times.