"A Cockeyed Optimist"

 It’s raining in Connecticut today, the greyness of the day matching the mood of the Country, as Democrats seem intent on moving forward with Biden as their standard bearer in a quest for another four years in the White House, while Donald Trump seems intent on fracturing Republicans and undermining their attempt to replace Mr. Biden. 

 

Perhaps this essay, with its message of hope, will lift your mood.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“A Cockeyed Optimist”

April 23, 2023

 

“Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.”

                                                                                                                William James (1842-1910)

                                                                                                                The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902

 

“I know America is a land of opportunity, not a land of oppression. I know it because I’ve lived it.”

                                                                                                                Senator Tim Scott (R-SC)

                                                                                                                Speech, April 12, 2023 

 

It is easy to be pessimistic:

 

Americans’ trust in government, according to a June 6, 2022 Pew Research Center study, has fallen from 75% in 1958 when the study began to 20% today. Total Fertility Rates, which measure the average number of children born to a female over their lifetime, have declined in the United States from 3.58 in 1960 to 1.64 in 2020. (To maintain population, the TFR must be 2.1.) The numbers portend a shrinking labor force and an increasing number of retirees. A February 2023 WSJ/NORC poll showed that only 21% of Americans feel their children will be better off financially than they are. Belief in God has fallen to 81%, down six percentage points from 2017, and the lowest since the question was first asked by Gallup in 1944.

 

Less than half of all Americans express a great deal of confidence in the military, with 77% of young Americans physically unfit to serve. Only 9% of those eligible to serve wish to do so, according to an op-ed in the April 15-16, 2023 issue of The Wall Street Journal by the authors of Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America. For more than fifty years, Cassandras have been predicting climate apocalypse. A generation ago, the UN Environment Program claimed that “…entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” Undeterred by past failures, they continue to predict catastrophe. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently issued a report: “We’re hurtling down the road to ruin and running out of time to change course.” Failure has not chastened these prophets of doom.  

 

Wherever we turn, there is bad news. Crime rates and mass shootings make daily headlines, with perpetrators too often seen as “victims.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, weekly earnings for private-sector workers, adjusted for inflation, declined 3.6% over the past two years, the longest stretch since the 1970s. High school math and reading scores on international tests (PISA) remain low, while political indoctrination is high. Interest rates on U.S. Treasuries have risen, but remain below the rate of inflation, implying negative real returns. Abortion is a super-charged political issue, yet, according to the Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortions in the U.S. was 930 thousand in 2020 versus 1.6 million in 1990, and 93% of all abortions occur in the first trimester, according to the same source. Rational debate is off the table, and ignored is the wisdom of President Clinton from 1992: “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” Keep in mind, we were all fetuses once and were given the chance to live. At this point, it looks like voters in 2024 could be faced with the same Hobson’s choice they had in 2020 – the Scylla of a cognitively challenged and corrupt Joe Biden, or the Charybdis of an ego-infested, unprincipled showman, Donald Trump. As a nation, can we not have better choices? Despite two individuals having declared for the Democrat primary, the DNC says there will be no Democrat primary debates.

 

The world is dangerous. Our enemies have the ability to nuke our cities. They have the means to disrupt our financial markets, banking and utility systems, and air travel, via cyber warfare or knocking out satellites. Commerce would be brought to a stand-still. And all the while, our political class is more interested in stuffing their bank accounts and gender identification than in enabling our military and cyber defense systems; universities are more interested in protecting students from harmful words than in preparing them to become good citizens, and the media would rather delegitimize those with conservative political views than expose weakness in our nation’s defense systems. 

 

It is easy to see the future in dark tones. And yet, no matter how bleak the world seems; no matter how foolish politicians responsible for the management of our nation’s affairs act or how biased is the media, and no matter the phony accusations of racism, idiotic calls for stakeholder capitalism, or the encouragement of transwomen to compete in women’s sports, I awake each morning and thank God for the fortune to have been born and to live in this country at this time: Conservatives are speaking out. Parents are fighting to regain control of their children’s education. The Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard was recently formed, even though it has only attracted 71 faculty members out of 1,196 eligible. Young people are taking an interest in public service, brilliant and sensible ones like Vivek Ramaswamy – at 37, a man closer in age to my grandchildren than my children. Combined with others, these factors tell me that all is not lost. I look at our three children, their spouses, and the ten grandchildren they have produced, and I am inspired for the future – a future I may never see, but one in which I have hope, in which I believe.

 

The left has become shrill as they use authoritarian means to defend what they claim are democratic values: They do not allow school choice for the nation’s poor, because it violates the wishes of teachers’ unions; they substitute racism and gender preference for merit, thereby destroying the historic excellence of schools and colleges, an excellence which allowed people and the county to prosper; they demonize conservative blacks like Justice Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell for the temerity to think for themselves, rather than comply to a prescribed progressive line; they allow children as young as ten to select their gender preference, which has created an understandable backlash among concerned parents. The shrill left has invaded Wall Street and corporate board rooms, with innocent sounding calls for “stakeholder” capitalism, ignoring the fact that every successful company must balance the needs of owner/shareholders, employees, customers, and communities, without the need to train workers in “bias breaking,” “psychological safety,” and other forms of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” words that mean whatever the corporate executive wants them to mean. 

 

As for immigrants, the United States has always attracted those with a sense of “can-do.” Immigrants who come legally do not come for handouts. They are attracted by opportunities our nation offers: its freedom; its democratic form of government; its economy based on free market capitalism; and, most important, its belief in the individual, that if one uses his or her native talent, works hard, adheres to the law, respectful of others, and is personally responsible, then success will ensue. Education is at the core of individual success, which is why teachers’ unions have become an impediment, especially in the nation’s poorest sections. It is why the push for charter schools, or for letting money follow the student – for choice – is critical if we want to be fair to those less advantaged. And that push for choice has become more prevalent.

 

A pessimist is one who looks at the present and extrapolates all that is wrong and concludes that that is the future. An optimist is one who studies the past, lives the present, and then eyes the future and dreams of what is possible. With that as a definition, I remain an optimist. Reason tells me that the obstacles we face are formidable. It’s easy to be pessimistic, but in my heart, I feel as did Mitzi Gaynor in South Pacific, as war loomed around, when she sang: “I hear the human race/ is fallin’ on its face/ and hasn’t very far to go…But I’m only a cockeyed optimist.”

"Humor - Where Has It Gone?"

 Yesterday, London’s The Telegraph, among the English-speaking world’s better newspapers, reported that Penguin, in re-issuing some of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, are removing prose that sensitivity readers deem unacceptable. Since, in the first paragraph of the attached essay, I quote Bertie Wooster perhaps this piece should carry a trigger warning. But it won’t, as I assume you are all adults.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Humor – Where Has It Gone?”

April 16, 2023

 

“Humor is your own unconscious therapy. Like a welcome summer

rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.”

                                                                                                                                Langston Hughes (1901-1967)

                                                                                                                                American poet, playwright, novelist

                                                                                                                                The Book of Negro Humor, 1967

 

There is a sentence in P.G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves, in which Bertie Wooster speaks to Jeeves, that reminds me of today’s listening-challenged politicians and pundits: “On the occasion when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across the primaeval swamp…the clan has a tendency to ignore me.” Like Wodehouse’s Aunt Agatha, today’s politicians bellow and do not listen; so, concerns, if they are not of the woke variety, are ignored. 

 

What have we become? Today’s transgender movement, with a biological male winning ‘woman of the year’ and with trans women athletes competing against biological females, is like watching a 1950s Hasty Pudding show. John Kerry and his crowd, in preaching of an impending climate apocalypse, remind us of a mythological Zeus hurling lightning bolts from atop Mount Olympus. Diversity, equity, and inclusion pronouncements could have been taken from Mad Magazine. Separate and segregated college graduation ceremonies are reminiscent of Jim Crow days: Dean Karayanis of The New York Sun recently wrote “that three dozen institutions from Yale to Ohio State are returning us to the days when ‘mixing the races’ was a secular sin, implementing policies that would make the most avowed Confederate grin.” Race and gender outrank merit in college selection and corporate advancement. Minorities, women, and the LBGTQ communities are told they are victims, and that they cannot rise above that appellation. 

 

Political arrests and prosecutions remind us of Stalin’s Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man, and I will show you the crime.” Mass shootings elicit the expected response from the usual suspects: a Second Amendment defense from the right and more regulated sales of guns from the left. Ignored are the estimated 450 million guns already out there, many of them illegally acquired; gun safety rules, which in my youth came with the ownership of a firearm, are never mentioned by elected officials, and neither is the disturbing emotional behavior of most shooters as a possible cause. Declining birthrates will bring future demographic challenges, as the work force shrinks and the ranks of retirees expand. But progressives are focused on the right to abortion, at any time and any place. School choice is “fine for me but not for thee.” Families have disappeared into the maws of politicized governmental ‘communities,’ which encourage a lack of individual responsibility and accountability and that discourage the dignity of work and the benefits of personal independence. Future generations will wonder at today’s absurdities when preferred progressives’ ends were used to justify regressive means. In this overly sensitive world, there is no laughter. 

 

Is there not absurdity in the idiocy of releasing criminals into poverty-stricken inner cities and then complain about an increase in crime? Do we help the nation’s most impoverished when we deny them choice in education and when we open the border to increased demand for welfare assistance? Where are the leaders who could offer perspective? Humor served Lincoln during the dark days of the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt reassured the American people through fireside chats during the Depression, and he reminded them of their commitment, as citizens, to personal honor and national service during the Second World War. Forty years later, Reagan used humor, as the country emerged from a decade of antiwar demonstrations, a prolonged recession, and crippling inflation.

 

Victory in the Cold War brought an end to the USSR, which as an enemy had united both sides of the political aisle. Now “the enemy,” as Walt Kelly once wrote in a different context, “was us.” Polarization, which began in the Clinton years, added fuel during George W. Bush’s tenure (with about a one-year hiatus following 9/11), gained steam under Obama’s time, got out of control during Trump’s four-years, and has derailed under Biden. Under all five Presidents, humor dissipated while anger intensified. 

 

There was a time when the media was trusted to offer a balanced view. We remember William Shrirer, Edward R. Murrow, Lowell Thomas, and Walter Cronkite. They spoke to all America, and we trusted them to provide a balanced offering of the news, which for the most part they did. On January 16, 1787, Thomas Jefferson, then in Paris, wrote Edward Carrington of Virginia that, since America’s new government is based “on the opinions of the people,” that if he had “to choose between a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”  Today’s press is a far cry from Jefferson’s ideals or from the news we were offered seventy years ago, which allowed individuals to form their own opinions. Today’s news is presented in soundbites and thrives on exaggeration. Some wag recently wrote that if a conservative pundit has not been called a fascist it means she or he is not effective. And if a progressive is not called a socialist, it means he or she is failing at their job. It is unsurprising that Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow have some of the highest-ranked TV news shows because both substitute opinions for news. Neither one smiles and both exude self-righteousness. In the early 20^thCentury, Oscar Wilde, in a Critic in Pall Mall, wrote: “It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously.” How pertinent are his words today.  

 

When radicals dominate both ends of the political spectrum, it is hard to smile. As America grew wealthy, left-wing politicians, to stay relevant, focused on racial and gender inequities. They united their followers behind veils of extremism, as they divided the rest of us by age, race, gender, and ethnicity. They became intolerant of ideas that did not conform to theirs’. Yet there are a few who see humor’s value. Senator John Neely Kennedy (R-LA) is one who effectively uses it. Still, there is concern; Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), who lost one eye in Afghanistan and suffered a detached retina in the other, wrote in Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage: “I fear we are losing this ability to laugh off the small stuff, and we are even closer to losing the ability to laugh at the big stuff…Comedians are worried they’ll offend an overly sensitive generation of students looking for any reason to be offended. This is deeply unfortunate…”

 

For this octogenarian, this lack of humor is sad. Still, it is fun to watch politicians wriggle out from uncomfortable positions, a talent necessary for political success. A hundred years ago, Ambrose Bierce amusingly defined the word politician in his The Devil’s Dictionary: “politician, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles, he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice.” Today’s politicians have also mastered the art of saying nothing in a thirty-minute speech. But, sorrowfully, it is rare to witness the self-deprecating humor used so effectively by Lincoln and Reagan, to deflect criticism, and to put a smile on the face of listeners. Not only did it cause their opponents to laugh, it lightened the nation’s mood.

"The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s," Alexander Nemerov - a review

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s,” Alexander Nemerov

April 13, 2023

 

“The observer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, saw trees as secrets. With the

‘knotty fingers’ of their roots, they held onto the mystery of themselves.”

                                                                                                Alexander Nemerov (1963-)

                                                                                                The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, 2023

 

The 1830s saw the end of a pastoral age and the start of the Industrial Revolution: The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made lumber, mining ore, and farm produce from the Middle West available on the East Coast; a factory system brought division of labor and efficiencies to manufacturing; America’s first railroad, the New Jersey Railroad Company, dates to 1832; the daguerreotype process was developed, and the first mechanical sewing machine was patented during the decade, which saw America’s population increase by a third and move west. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 made available 25 million acres to white settlers; the decade concluded with the 1837-1839 “Trail of Tears.” 

 

Fifty-seven essays (and 48 pages of prints and paintings) take us from an axe factory in Collinsville, Connecticut (“The changing country brought a new obscurity of individual actions…”); to the Great Dismal Swamp on the southeastern border of Virginia and North Carolina, where the author imagines a meeting between Nat Turner and Edgar Allen Poe (“Poe also thought of the swamp. Maybe he thought of it enough that – by envisioning it, by calling it into his mind as a true place of the imagination – he succeeded in meeting Turner there…”); to the Swiss-American artist Karl Bodmer and his 1832 painting of the Fox River in New Harmony, Indiana. (“In the picture no one is there, not even the artist himself.”)

 

There are cameo appearances of Araminta Ross, better known as Harriet Tubman; Samuel Morse; Thomas Cole; Alexis de Tocqueville; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Emma Willard; Noah Webster; Ralph Waldo Emerson; John James Audubon; James Fenimore Cooper; Andrew Jackson, and the 54 survivors of the slave ship “Amistad.”

 

In an essay titled “The Gasbag of Louis Anselm Lauriat,” Professor Nemerov wrote words that provide a portrait of the start of the decade: “The trees were so complete that it seemed no human being need ever look anywhere than to them for a view of life.”

 

Professor Nemerov teaches humanities at Stanford. Given his imagination and lyrical prose, it is unsurprising he is the son of Howard Nemerov, twice Poet Laureate of the United States. While he calls his short pieces fables, they struck me as vignettes, with brief appearances of historical figures and ordinary people. His book provides the reader the good and the bad of what life was like in the United States during the 1830s. The stories reveal changing values and social evolution over the past two hundred years. The decade saw the transition from a time when forests dominated man to one when man dominated forests. It would be half a century before the National Park System restored dignity to trees that had covered so much of America. In a postscript, Professor Nemerov wrote: “Reading books, filling in the blanks with my imagination, I sought to restore the figures in the original I had not seen…” Take note, writers of historical fiction.

"Walking"

 

This is the week of Passover; today is Good Friday and Sunday is Easter – a time to celebrate and to be thankful for the greatness of God. As for those of us who do not always get our religion packaged, a walk through the woods, to commune with nature, provides a sense of reverence – for a Being or a Spirit that is greater than anyone of us.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

April 7, 2023

“Walking”

 

“I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. When body and mind are out of

gear…I know that I shall only have to call in my doctors, and I shall be well again.”

                                                                                                                George M. Trevelyan (1876-1962)

                                                                                                                Clio, A Muse and Other Essays, 1913

 

6,198 steps. That is what my iPhone tells me I have done so far today, at 3:00pm on April 4. But that is more than most days; I averaged 4,911 steps in March. Of course, the weather was worse then, and today is beautiful. Nevertheless, I am a piker compared to my wife. She just returned with the news that her Fitbit has her at 14,883 steps. Walking is healthy for the body and the mind. In Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” 

 

Bertrand Russell reviewed George Trevelyan’s essay in the December 4, 1913 issue of The Cambridge Review. In it he wondered whether Providence had placed Oxford and Cambridge “at exactly the right distance from London for a comfortable day’s walk.” The philosopher Russell, who died in 1970 at the age of 97, must have had a strong constitution and long legs, as each city is about 60 miles from London’s center – 15 hours at four miles per hour! Even an Olympian, walking at a record pace, could not make the trek in under eight hours.

 

Shortly after he died in May 1862, Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking” was published in The Atlantic Monthly. His preference was to saunter, a word, he mused, that might be derived from idle people in the Middle Ages who, looking for handouts, claimed they going to the Holy Land, la Sainte Terre; thus, they became known as the “Sainte Terrers.” He added, however, others believed the word comes from sans terre, meaning without land, but in a good sense: “having no home, but equally at home everywhere.” “My vicinity,” Thoreau wrote, “affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day…I have not yet exhausted them.” The same could be said for where I live – a hundred acres of trails, abutting a thousand acre preserve.

 

In her 2000 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit wrote that Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett’s “solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social atmosphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think…” Seventy-eight years ago, following two and a half months of combat, my father had similar thoughts. Then with the 10^th Mountain Division and camped along Italy’s Lago di Garda’s eastern shore and having covered 250 miles on foot, he wrote my mother on May 3, 1945: “I was able to go for a little walk today and enjoyed myself. I discovered that when you walk without a pack or rifle you practically feel as if you were floating through the air.” 

 

Today, I enjoy woodland walks, with their seasonal marvels. In Forest Walking, Peter Wohlleben wrote of trees in springtime: “As they transition from a restful winter to being more active in spring, they are pushing more water than usual up their trunks.” Without pack or rifle, I have leisure to think. Often I bring pen and paper and jot down random thoughts, most of which get discarded, but every now and then one germinates and blossoms into an essay, like this one.