"Domesticated"

 I admit to strong opinions about politics, our national debt, the purpose of our schools and universities, gender identity, woke culture and myriad other subjects. However, when overwrought, and my pen fails me, I take a few deep breaths and pick up something comic, like a Wodehouse novel or collection of his short stories. There are over a hundred to choose from, beginning with The Pothunters in 1902 (written at age 21) and ending with Sunset at Blandings, written in 1975 (at age 93), and published posthumously in 1977. But I also try my hand at more personal essays, such as this one which I hope will provide some cheer regardless of the weather or one’s political affiliation.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Domesticated”

March 29, 2025

 

“I’m not very good at being domesticated. I’ve tried. The domestic

life I find claustrophobic – the rituals and habits and patterns.”

                                                                                                Ralph Fiennes (1962-)

                                                                                                British actor – Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series

 

The other day, while folding my second load of laundry, with breakfast dishes still in the sink and the bed still unmade, I thought of how domesticated I have become since retiring and moving to Essex Meadows – domesticated in the sense of sharing daily chores. I don’t mean domesticated like a dog. I was house-trained before Caroline and I were married sixty-one years ago. For the first fifty years of our married life Caroline did the laundry, made the bed and cleaned up the kitchen. I assumed some of those responsibilities when we moved to our apartment in January of 2016

 

Domestication was not a primary consideration for my parents; both artists, they scorned traditional roles. My father did not grab his dinner pail or take his briefcase and go off for the day. And my mother did not put on an apron, clean the house and set out my father’s slippers and prepare his dinner. Nevertheless, they had rituals. After breakfast, with us on the school bus, they would head to the barn where my father milked the half-dozen goats and my mother looked after the horses. They had a small business, Red Shed Rubber Animals. My mother modeled animals out of clay and my father prepared the molds to produce a rubber animal. The house was left to care for itself, at least until my older sister turned fifteen and mastered the vacuum cleaner.

 

I did not inherit my parents’ artistic genes. Examples of my early talents can be seen in a falling-apart 1947 photo album in which I placed ads for Westinghouse, Mickey Mouse and Schlitz, and in a rubber dog with two legs that I had modeled in clay. It was of no surprise to my family that I became a stockbroker. 

 

As I have grown older, my hair has become unruly, but, having been domesticated, my life has become more – if there is such a word – ruly. Now, upon waking and with no office to go to, I check the mouse traps – placed after discovering a forlorn little mouse in our washing machine (I have found none since putting them out) – take my pills, prepare and eat breakfast, glance through the newspapers, consider ideas for essays, make the bed, do the laundry on every third day, and run the dishwasher when it fills up. 

 

Unlike Mr. Fiennes, I enjoy the regimen domestication brings, which still allows me time to use what creative skills I have in writing. While I did not exactly come from a “wild or natural state,” making beds and doing laundry were not my natural focus. First married, and in our one-bedroom second-floor apartment – where to reach the bathroom one had to crawl across the bed – Caroline took command. And I became blissfully oblivious of how the household worked – clothes placed in the hamper appeared, miraculously, a few days later in my bureau, dirty dishes were washed and back in the cupboard, floors and rugs cleaned. That has now changed.

 

Now, you must excuse me; I have to go. I am being told the heating vents need vacuuming.

"Communism, China & Senator Cotton's New Book"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Communism, China & Senator Cotton’s New Book”

March 28, 2025

 

“Last month, Senator Tom Cotton published what might

be the most important book of the 2020s on China.”

                                                                                                                Jimmy Quinn

                                                                                                                National Review, March 20, 2025

 

“I have seen the future, and it works” – words written by Lincoln Steffens following a visit to the newly formed Soviet Union in 1918. Last year, while in Shanghai for a store opening, Apple CEO Tim Cook was obsequious in his praise of China: “I think China is really opening up…it’s so vibrant and so dynamic.”

 

For more than a hundred years many, supposedly perceptive Western geopolitical analysts, journalists and business leaders, have chosen to ignore the evil that is Communism. In his 1919 book, Ten Days that Shook the World, American journalist John Reed, scion of a wealthy Oregon family, wrote sympathetically of the Russian Revolution that he had witnessed in Petrograd. Warren Beatty turned the book into a 1981 film, Reds, nominated for an Academy Award. In 1937, after spending months with Mao Tse Tung’s Red Army, American journalist Edgar Snow wrote Red Star Over China, a glowing portrait of life in Communist areas. He contrasted his experience with Mao and his Communist followers with his depiction of the gloom and corruption of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang’s government, which relocated to Taiwan in 1949.

 

For Americans, Communism has never approached the revulsion felt for Nazism, yet the similarities are far greater than their differences. In the February 5, 2018 issue of The New York Review of Books, Ian Johnson responded to an earlier article by Timothy Snyder, “Who Killed More, Hitler or Stalin?” Johnson wrote that the question was slightly off: “…it should have included a third tyrant of the 20^th Century, Chairman Mao. And not just that, but that Mao should have been the hands-down winner, with his ledger easily trumping the European dictators’.” According to his research, Stalin killed somewhere between 6 and 9 million people, Hitler between 11 and 12 million, and Mao between 35 and 45 million, most during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Nazism and Communism both practice(d) genocide, are (were) authoritarian, and have (had) no regard for individual rights or human life.

 

Repression and intimidation in China did not end with Mao’s death in 1976. While accurate numbers are not available, estimates of those killed in 1989’s uprising in Tiananmen Square range from a few hundred to several thousand. Since Xi Jinping became President of the People’s Republic of China in 2013 more than a million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang Province have been placed in internment camps. No one claims to know how many have died. The province has a population of 24 million, half of whom are Uyghurs, so almost one in ten Uyghurs have been confined. The BBC has reported that Uyghur women have been sterilized, and former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has called what has happened in the province “genocide and crimes against humanity.” In a review of Emily Feng’s book Let Only Red Flowers Bloom, Maura Elizabeth Cunningham wrote in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal: “Under Mr. Xi, the definition of what makes a person ‘Chinese’ has become increasingly narrow: someone who exclusively speaks Mandarin, marries Chinese and has two or three children, respects the leadership of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), accepts censorship and surveillance and recalibrates in accordance with each new political campaign…” In the Introduction to his new book, Voice for the Voiceless, the Dalai Lama wrote about Communism and Tibet, which he was forced to leave in 1959: “The issue is not about the matter of economic development…The issue is about a people’s need and right to exist with their distinct language, culture, and religious heritage.” An impossible dream for Tibetan Buddhists in China today.

 

China has a population of about 1.4 billion, of whom about 100 million (or 7%) are members of the Communist Party, the second largest political party in the world (in a one-party state!), but one not open to all. Officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) are members, but most enlisted soldiers are not. While China, according to official statistics, has the world’s second largest economy, as measured by GDP ($18.8 trillion versus the U.S. at $28.2 trillion, its GDP per capita is $13,400 versus the U.S. at $83,000. Indicative of its concentration of wealth, China has, according to the Hunan Global Rich List, 814 billionaires, more than the U.S. That number, according to the Washington Times, includes Xi Jinping, who has never worked in the private sector. Mr. Xi has been hailed for eradicating poverty in China, but, as Bitter Winter (a European magazine that focuses on religious liberty and human rights) has stated: “Xi Jinping is a master in the Orwellian art to redefine the meaning of words to suit his propaganda.” In 2021, he put poverty at below $2.30 per day. The issue of how many Chinese fall below the poverty line was raised before Xi Jinping’s presidency, in Will the Boat Sink the Water? by Chen Guidi’s and Wu Chuntao, published in 2004. 

 

China represents a clear and present risk to Western liberalism – economically, militarily and culturally. 150 countries, representing three quarters of the world’s population and over half of the world’s GDP have signed Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China’s banks – backed by the CCP – have funded projects, including railroads, ports and gas pipelines in countries in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Latin America. Sean Thomas, in the April edition of The Spectator, wrote: “China is now the biggest trading partner for virtually every South American nation, supplanting the U.S. in the last decade.” While their military budget is less than ours (assuming we can believe their numbers), their standing army is twice ours – the largest army in the world. China has constructed artificial islands and military installations in the South China Sea, through which travel one third of all global maritime trade. In the 2022-2023 academic year, American universities enrolled almost 290,000 Chinese students, while 800 Americans studied at Chinese universities.

 

It is with that background, and at the suggestion of an old skiing buddy, that I picked up and read Senator Tom Cotton’s short but information-packed book, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China. Reading it convinced me of what I long suspected – China is an evil empire and the U.S. needs to be prepared. In seven concise chapters, covering 170 pages, Senator Cotton instructs the reader on how China is preparing for war, how they wage economic war, how they infiltrate society and are coming for our kids, and how they might actually win. In a telling example, and quoting PEW Research Center, he relates that in 2020 9% of young American adults got their news from Chinese-owned TikTok; today, 39% do. He starts off chapter VII, “China Could Win:” “Most of us take American global dominance for granted, without thinking much about it; since at least World War I, that’s just the way it’s been.” Complacency has become nemesis.   

 

If you believe, as I do, that most people, regardless of heritage or cultural background, prefer liberty to dependency, this is a book you should read. The West, led by the United States, is an advocate for the former, while China exemplifies the latter. In the U.S., we command our fortunes, and we control our futures. The vast majority of Chinese, living under the tyranny of a dictatorship, control neither their fortunes nor their futures. We cannot let them win.

 

In the March 16, 2025 issue of The Telegraph, senior foreign correspondent Roland Oliphant wrote: “China, not Russia, is the only country on the planet capable of challenging the United States’ military, economic and political hegemony.” Caveat emptor should apply when dealing with Communist China.

"The Anxious Generation," Jonathan Haidt - A Review

While Jonathan Heidt writes of Zoomers, the enticement of social media affects us all. Reading an article by Amelia Butler-Gallie in The Spectator on the 100^th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, I was reminded of this. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock symbolized Gatsby’s hopes and dreams – the unattainable. We see that same lure in today’s social media. Ms. Butler-Gallie wrote: “…the digital glow of our smartphones, beckoning us toward the ever-elusive ideal that, if we only keep scrolling, we will find what we were always searching for.”

 

Social media is not going away nor will its powers of seduction; so it becomes incumbent on each of us to make it our servant, not our master. For young and old, I believe you will find this book important.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt

March 22, 2025

 

“There is no one right way to be a parent; 

there is no blueprint for building a perfect child.”

                                                                                                                The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt

 

Professor Haidt’s book speaks to Generation Z (Zoomers), those born between 1997 and 2012, a grouping that includes our ten grandchildren. For a grandparent of Zoomers, Haidt’s findings are sobering; for a parent they must be alarming. Since 2010, depression among boys and girls is up 161% and 145% respectively. Mental illness among college students has surged, has have emergency room visits for self-inflicted harm and suicide rates for younger adolescents.

 

Since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, children have grown up in worlds foreign to their parents. They have access to goods and services unknown to their parents at the same age. My parents grew up with the telephone, automobiles and planes, all unknown to their parents at the same age. My generation grew up with the radio, television, talking movies and parkways. Our children grew up with space exploration, hand-held calculators, cassettes, and cordless electric games. However, the technologies available to generation Z are more dramatic. They have come of age with violent video games and “smart” phones. The iPhone was introduced in 2007, the App store in 2008 and, most concerning to Professor Haidt because of its consequences for young girls, the iPhone 4 with its front-facing camera. Facebook was launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, WhatsApp in 2009, Instagram in 2010, and TikTok in 2014. 

 

As a father of two children of the “anxious generation,” Professor Haidt seeks answers, knowing that, as he writes in the epigraph, no one has all the answers. He writes easily and well, and supports his arguments with graphs, tables and figures, and concludes: “…we have vastly and needlessly overprotected our children in the real world. At the same time, we have underprotected our children in the virtual world…”

 

It is the virtual world that has overtaken the real world, in terms of time consumed: For preteens, it is close to 40 hours per week – an adult’s average work week.  “For teens aged 13 to 18, it’s closer to 50 hours per week.” He does not see the internet as harmful. “We need,” he writes, “to develop a more nuanced mental map of the digital landscape…I’m not saying that 11-year-olds should be kept off the internet. I’m saying that the Great Rewiring of Childhood, in which phone-based childhood replaced play-based childhood, is the major cause of the international epidemic of adolescent mental illness.”  

 

Professor Haidt concludes his book with suggestions for parents: less screen time – turn off phones during meal time and remove them from bedrooms an hour or so before bedtime – and provide more play time. He admits that he and his wife used the TV show Teletubbies to “mesmerize and calm our children from infancy through the toddler years.” He adds, however: “But if we had to do it over again, we’d do less of it.” He believes schools should increase recess times with lighter supervision, and parents should not micromanage their children; they should encourage sleepovers and after school free play.

 

His statistics are alarming, but there is wisdom in his recommendations. The primary purpose of parenting is to raise a child to become a productive and happy adult. This book helps illuminate that passage, a passage that should be joyous, but one that has become difficult to navigate.