"Lighten Up, America"

 Tuesday morning my wife and I will go to the polls at the Essex Town Hall. Afterwards, we will drive to the Griswold Inn, also here in Essex, where my daughter-in-law Beatriz Williams and her two co-authors, Lauren Willig and Karen White, will discuss their latest book, An Author’s Guide to Murder, over lunch. The book is being released that day. The event promises to be good fun – three delightful, smart, articulate and funny ladies, as they take the audience through a rollicking good mystery. Agatha Christie, eat your heart out!

 

On Wednesday we begin a six-day trip to visit two grandchildren in college in Pennsylvania and one in boarding school in Virginia, so your e-mail in-box will be free of my offerings, at least for a few days.

 

God speed, and may your candidate win…though I hope mine does!

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Lighten Up, America”

November 3, 2024

 

“Like a welcome summer rain, humor may

suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.”

                                                                                                                The Book of Negro Humor, 1966

                                                                                                                Langston Hughes (1901-1967)

 

While Kamala Harris began her campaign with a promise of joy, it soon deteriorated into character smears against her opponent, with Ms. Harris calling him “fascist” and a “Hitler,” and with President Biden referring to Mr. Trump’s supporters as “garbage.” What makes the “fascist” label ironic is that, as Victor Davis Hanson wrote in last Thursday’s issue of American Greatness, “…he [Trump] has been the target of fascists machinations from her own party and supporters for nearly a decade.”

 

Mr. Trump has always appeared devoid of humor, except when polls swing his way. Writing in the current UK issue of The Spectator, Kate Andrews noted “…in the past few weeks, something has restored Trump’s humor.” As the audience left a recent rally in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, she quoted a man speaking to his family: “That was better than Netflix.”  Most of us smiled when Mr. Trump, wearing an orange reflector vest (and in response to Mr. Biden’s remark), jumped into a garbage truck in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Nevertheless, Mr. Trump does have a habit of calling his opponents names that would make Gordon Gekko blush. Amidst this war of words, America seems an unhappy place. Last Thursday, The Washington Post editorialized: “…in an increasingly angry nation…incidents of road rage escalate across the country.”  As in 1888 Mudville, there is little joy in the U.S. today.

 

We have, as J.D. Vance recently reminded us, become overly sensitive, unable to distinguish between a comedian’s attempts at humor and the mean-spiritedness of a politician. Nevertheless, as a society, we (if not our politicians) have also become more sensitive to the feelings of others, a good thing. For generations, tasteless ethnic, racial, religious and sexual jokes were common. Perhaps because of that we were told that words could not hurt us. However today, we are told they can. Students and employees are warned against using “harmful” words. One consequence: we may become less of a melting pot than in those pre-and-post-World War II years – that our differences, not our similarities might define us. When my wife grew up in New York City, Little Italy, Chinatown, Germantown and Spanish Harlem were distinct places. While new enclaves have developed with new immigrants, those old boundaries can now be found only in history books. Immigrants of yesteryear, whether from Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Puerto Rico, or Asia, found it more comfortable, initially, to live in neighborhoods with people who spoke their language and understood their customs. Many new immigrants do so today. As time went by, those earlier immigrants added to the quilt that is the American people, and they became indistinct from their neighbors. Let us hope that today’s politics aimed at dividing us will not prevent the natural forces that unify us. Integration into our nation’s culture is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

 

It is important to remember that the build-out of a diversified population over the past half century happened despite an array of tasteless ethnic, religious and racial jokes. Those jokes – common forty-fifty-and-sixty-years ago – did not hinder the intermarriage of immigrants’ children and grandchildren. The Census Bureau reports that White-Hispanic marriages, White-Asian and White-Black marriages have soared over the past few decades. In 2022, 19% of newlyweds in the United States were married to someone of a different race or ethnicity, versus 3% in 1967. Will political correctness, which has led to the compartmentalization of people, cause that trend to slow or reverse? I don’t know. I am not advocating we revert to telling ethnic jokes. What I am saying is that, accompanied by self-deprecation, that form of humor did no lasting damage.

 

Campaigns, politics and governing are serious endeavors. But perspective is wanted. As the late, legendary ballerina Margot Fonteyn once said: “The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one’s work seriously and taking one’s self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.” In dividing people into groups – ethnic, religious, racial, gender – progressive politicians have focused on our differences rather than our similarities. The poking of fun is no longer allowed. This fear of offending others has ushered in a culture of avoidance, for fear of affronting – widening already existing gaps between political parties, and gender and ethnic groups.

 

In the Essays of Michel Montaigne, the 16^th Century French philosopher wrote: “The highest wisdom is continual cheerfulness; such a state, like the region above the moon, is always clear and serene.” Humor prevents us from taking ourselves too seriously. It helps us find the balance between being sensitive to the needs and wants of others, while being honest about ours, and others, strengths and weaknesses. When the going gets tough, humor greases the skids. Mark Twain is alleged to have once said: “Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.” 

 

We live in serious – some might say perilous – times. Nevertheless, laughter has long been an antidote to dreariness. In his 1851 novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville wrote: “However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity.” It is not mindless ‘joy’ we seek, but respectful and good-humored toleration of our differences, be they racial, gender or political. Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s opening stanza to her 1883 poem, as printed in The New York Sun, lends pertinence:  

 

“Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep and you weep alone:

For the sad old world must borrow its mirth,

But has trouble enough of its own.”

 

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In two days the tension of the election will be behind us. Half the country will be happy; the other half disappointed, but we will survive. Results of elections are never as good as winners would have us believe, nor as bad as losers claim. My recommendation is to pick up a Wodehouse. Sink back into Edwardian England where the sun always shone, birds flew overhead, bees buzzed about, and Uncle Fred could be found flitting along a garden path, spreading “sweetness and light.” Whether or not your choice for President was successful, a smile will crease your face.

"Why Read Moby-Dick?" by Nathaniel Philbrick

I was excited to come across this book a few weeks ago, which speaks to one of America’s most beloved novels. Perhaps it is age, but I find comfort in re-reading books I have enjoyed. Estimates are that between 500,000 and a million books are published each year through traditional publishers, which means that we can only read a small fraction of each year’s annual output. Yet there are authors that have stood the test of time – Shakespeare, Austen, the Brontë sisters, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Trollope, Wharton, Wodehouse, E.B White, and Melville, just to name a few – that deserve a re-reading. Every year I try to re-read a few and am always glad I did. 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Why Read Moby-Dick? Nathaniel Philbrick

October 26, 2024

 

“‘Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this

combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards

them both with equal eye.’ This redemptive mixture of skepticism and hope, this genial

stoicism in the face of a short, ridiculous, and irrational life, is why I read Moby-Dick.”

                                                                                        Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick

 

Like many, I read Moby-Dick in my youth. I read it as a sea adventure about half-mad captain Ahab chasing the white whale that had cost him a leg. I read it again about ten years ago and found the story had improved with (my) age – what happens when man interferes with nature, and the harsh realities of a crazed person seeking redemption. In Nantucket about a month ago, my wife and I visited the Nantucket Shipwreck and Lifesaving Museum. There, I came across this short (127 pages) book by Nathaniel Philbrick, published in 2011.  Philbrick is the author of several histories, best known for In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. 

 

The book is a tribute to Herman Melville’s classic. It is a series of essays, each independent, though collectively cohesive – a mixture of re-telling the story and biographical sketches. It begins with Melville in the Berkshires, his difficulty in putting on paper the story he wanted to tell, and his mentee-like friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, a man within whose stories expressed “…truths so profound and disturbing they ranked with anything written in the English language.” We are told of how Melville, ten years before the 1851 publication of his novel, shipped out on the whaler Acushnet from Fairhaven, Massachusetts; so had familiarity with his fictional whaling ship Pequod. He compares Ishmael, the narrator of Melville’s story, to Holden Caulfield, as an “engaging…vulnerable wiseass who invites us to join him on a quest…” We learn that Ahab’s search for Moby-Dick mimicked Melville’s search for an explanation of being.

 

As Philbrick writes, it took almost seventy years for Moby-Dick to be recognized as the classic it is. He reminds us of how, in the intervening years, the United States had changed: A Civil War had been fought to end slavery, the westward push altered the contours of the United States, and industrialization ended the nation’s rural origins. The story is part of our past. In the final chapter, “Neither Believer nor Infidel,” Philbrick quotes Hawthorne, from his 1856 journal, of Melville’s quest for eternal truth: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” Moby-Dick is fiction, but it is also part autobiography.

 

Like the well-known opening sentences in Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, Tolstoy’ Anna Karenina, and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the three-word first sentence of Moby-Dick is one you will not forget: “Call Me Ishmael.” You will want to read the second, third, and fourth…until you finish the book.

 

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Reading Philbrick’s book has prompted me to read Moby-Dick once again. The copy I bought is a hard-cover from Sea Wolf Press, with the cover and illustrations by Mead Schaeffer taken from the 1923 Dodd, Mead & Co. edition.

"Fear and COVID-19"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“Fear and COVID-19”

July 21, 2020

“Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out.”

                                                                                                Karl Menninger (1893-1990)

                                                                                                American psychiatrist

Fear is an elemental emotion. It can have positive attributes. In combat, fear is a governor on impulse. Fear of wild animals and other tribes was a factor in early man’s forming of communities. It is ubiquitous. We have fears of darkness and loneliness, of failure or rejection, of making wrong decisions. We fear becoming ill or being a burden to loved ones. Fear, we were told by Bertrand Russell, is the main source of superstition. Fear of sorcery was behind the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, which saw fourteen women and five men hung. It descends from ignorance, which wrote Herman Melville in Moby Dick, “is the parent of fear.” Unwarranted fear prevents us from expanding our horizons and improving our lives.  

Unscrupulous politicians use fear to seek and hold power. Tyrant-like, they tell us what cannot be done. Classical liberals, like the Founding Fathers, tell us what rights we have – what can be done. With COVID-19, fear has been used for political gain. By the end of 2019, President Trump’s policies had accelerated economic growth. They had provided the lowest unemployment on record, including Black unemployment. Increases in wages for low-income workers outpaced pay rises for upper-income workers. Amir Taheri, the Iranian-born, Europe-based author, wrote: “Prior to the coronavirus crisis, his [Trump’s] administration had one of the best records in job creation and the reduction of poverty among black Americans.” Since the economy is the single most important aspect in a Presidential election, Mr. Trump’s glidepath to re-election, while by no means assured, appeared to have few – and manageable – obstacles.

The arrival of COVID-19 and the resulting shut-down of schools, colleges and the economy changed election dynamics. There is no question that COVID-19 was (and is) a serious health concern, particularly for the elderly and especially for those with comorbidities. Nevertheless, fear was the instrument employed by politicians of both parties. While younger people could (and do) contact the disease, and potentially contaminate riskier segments of the population, the risk to their health was not much worse than that of a bad case of the flu. We will never know what death counts would have been had there been no early shutdowns, but we do know the death tolls from the flu pandemics of 1917-19, 1957-58 and 1968, when there was no shuttering of the economy or schools. Adjusted for changes in population, death rates, with the exception of 1917-1919, were worse during the previous pandemics. In fact, in speaking to friends with whom I was at school in 1957-58 not one had any memory of the flu that year. Yet it killed 116,000 Americans when the population was about one half of what it is today.

In an on-line lecture for Hillsdale College, Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute said that the spread of coronavirus infections “…require what Japan calls the three Cs: confined spaces, crowded places and close contact.” The job of public health officials and politicians should be to limit those venues, to protect the vulnerable, and to urge the public to rely on common sensical behavior as it pertains to personal hygiene, distancing and mask-wearing. Masks, as we all know, should be worn indoors when around others. But, as we also know, they reduce the available oxygen and increase the amount of carbon dioxide we inhale. Edward Cline, in a recent essay for his Rule of Reason blog, noted that the “Occupational Safety and Health Agencies around the world confirm the minimum level of oxygen in the air we breathe should be 19.5%, while carbon dioxide should be around 400 parts per million.” Masks lower the first number and raise the second, so care should be taken when wearing one. Healthcare workers must wear them, and there is no question that they help slow the spread of the virus when one is in close contact with other people. Yet fear has made them pervasive in outdoor settings, to the extent that friends tell me they wear masks while driving alone in their cars, for the virtue-signaling message that doing so sends to others, the less virtuous (like me).

While epidemiologists have responsibility for risks from the virus, politicians have responsibility for both the health and economic well-being of the people, and the media has a responsibility to accurately report news, both that which supports their biases and that which does not. Politicians and media types, none of whom had jobs at risk, placed priority on stopping the pandemic above concerns for the economy. Yet a survey last year conducted by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling found that 45% of U.S. households (fifty-one million) have no savings and 70% have less than a $1000.00. Shutting down the economy caused 40 million Americans, a quarter of the workforce, to lose their jobs, at least temporarily. Congress alleviated economic fears by passing expensive relief packages – a necessary measure – but in doing so raised fears among those who worry about a build-up of debt that must be repaid. No government can survive long on printing presses. All governments tax the productivity of workers. A growing economy, and a concomitant expansion of government services, requires rule of law, protection of private property and an environment that encourages capital investment, all necessary for economic growth.

That fear has become pervasive in this election year can be seen in a media hellbent on defeating President Trump. One example: In last Sunday’s New York Times, a top-right two-column headline, with undisguised bias: “Passing Off Virus Burden, White House Fueled Crisis.” Just below the fold, another editorialized front-page headline covering four columns: “Rising Mistrust of ‘Warp-Speed’ Vaccine May Prolong Pandemic.” If that weren’t enough, and to ensure that readers remain comatose, the front page of The New York Times Magazine: “Why We’re Losing the Battle With COVID-19.” There is no question that the Times deliberately scares people about the virus – I am sure they would say it is for their own good – but the corollary is that economic fear is the progeny of fear of COVID-19. Thus, things worsen.

“The enemy is fear,” said Gandhi. “We think it is hate, but it is fear.” In George Lucas’ movie “Star Wars,” the Jedi master Yoda says, “Fear is the path to darkness. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” While fear has been used by tyrants forever, its use by democracies is rarer and thus more insidious. Governors have used fear of COVID-19 to rule by executive decree rather than relying on the legislative process. What they don’t acknowledge is that that fear creates psychological problems – anxiety and depression, especially for the elderly living alone. It damages our ability to control our emotions. No matter how serious has been COVID-19 as a pandemic, fear has made the problem worse.