Oh, Arlen, what will happen to your vaunted conscience? If your recent actions are the guide, I am worried for you. Not to mention the country.
What does it mean that Arlen Specter has jumped ship from the Republicans to the Democrats? The obvious point is that when Minnesota’s Al Franken senator is finally sworn in, and he will be, the Democrats will have a filibuster proof majority (making it even less likely that Senator Coleman will give up his challenge to that seat). There are already lots of blogs out there on the subject, but my spin is, I hope (I always hope) a little different.
The thought of Democrats and liberals gleefully rejoicing that they can do almost anything they want with our lives in terms of legislation is as repugnant to me as – well, if the Republicans and conservatives had this opportunity. It is bad for the country and bad for us as individuals. It will allow ideologues on the left to throw aside any pretense at moderation, literally jam ruinous governmental control, extremely high taxation, particularly in the future, and unconstitutional laws down our collective throat.
Although I had others reasons, this is one of the principle reasons that I wanted John McCain in the White House (the other being a long history of decrying spending). If there is one thing worse than one party control of the government, it is one party control with a filibuster proof majority. The electorate has spoken and now we are all in for it.
In case any of the readers of this pseudo-intellectual blog don’t understand the mechanics of this filibuster thingamajig, here it is in short. We have two legislative houses in our federal government. The house of representatives is one and the senate is the other. The house’s internal rules allow it to be controlled by a simple majority. 51% wins. The senate’s rules, however, allow 41 senators to block any legislation simply by refusing to end the debate (which is called filibustering). The only way to end a filibuster is by a cloture motion. If 60 senators vote to close debate, the legislation goes to an up and down vote with the majority winning just like in the other house. When one party has 60 senators, this is not difficult to do, as membership in congress is not a prescription for courage, wisdom or independence. They tend to vote with their party, particularly on procedural votes like cloture.
Very often, political movement exposes both parties to fair charges of hypocrisy. In fact, one might define politics as the art of disguising hypocrisy as policy. A few years ago, when the Republicans were still in control of government (but did not have a filibuster proof majority) they railed against Democratic use of that tool. Now, it is the Democrats who sought to avoid it. A pox on both of your houses.
I am almost always a fan of politicians jumping ship to the other party, or, better, when they become independent. While their own party reviles them for doing so, as if it were an athletic competition, the other party cheers them on. For me, any slap in the face of a political party is usually well deserved. However, as Arlen Specter’s doing so now comes with the destruction of the minority voice’s power to block legislation at this time, I am disappointed and concerned about it. You have to read my posts about the direction we are heading for the last 6 months or so to understand fully why I find this particularly worrisome, but let me say the party in power’s predilection to spend all the money we have, had and will ever have, in the mad hope that it will stimulate the economy, is a black hole from which I believe, if unchecked, our country, perhaps the world, will spend decades climbing out of. The fact that the quarterly gdp today showed another huge tumble while Obama and co. tell us things are starting to look up, just reinforces my beliefs that we are not just heading in the wrong direction, we have our foot on the accelerator. I say this not because I am a trained economist, but because I am not. Therefore, common sense and history can still be a guide. While the Republicans in power destroyed any claim they have had to being for lower spending, the Democrats have used this crisis to do so in an unprecedented and frightening way. It is as if they are bailing water in reverse, hauling it from outside a sinking ship and sloshing onto the deck.
Specter has been one of my favorite Senators since he apologized for his behavior in threatening Anita Hill during Judge Thomas’ hearings in 1991 (and just as an aside, yes, I believe Thomas made a few off color jokes, but, it shouldn’t have mattered at all or been brought up). Spector is one of the more reasonable and fair legislators in either house in my mind, which is why he was liked by the other side and disliked by the more ideological members in his own party. Republicans have been doubtful of him for years, and, clearly, they had reason to be. I remember one day watching C-Span and seeing him take the floor to explain to anyone watching that the political rule being used, which allowed the chairman of a committee to cut off amendments simply by making one of his own, even if it was as little a change as taking away or adding a comma. In other words, it was a ridiculous and unfair rule and he wanted us to know it. Of course, it was C-Span, so almost no one was watching, but it endeared him to me further and I thank him for caring. I actually tried to email him my appreciation and learned that you can’t contact the senators or congresspersons unless you are in their constituency. Figures. If you can’t vote for them they could care less what you have to say.
I am not one of those who will castigate Specter for changing parties, but, I am afraid that I fully expect him to act with even greater hypocrisy now than we can usually expect from politicians, which is saying quite a bit. While he would usually (not always) vote lockstep with his Republican party on procedural issues, as almost everyone else does, he will now have to do the opposite - vote with the Democrats in lockstep fashion if he wants to maintain their favor, and clearly he does. That will mean selling out on many a position that he would have said just a couple of days ago he believes in.
Ironically, Specter will find that he has more power but less personal freedom as a Democrat than as a Republican. Here’s why. While he was a Republican they had to be concerned that he would leave the party and drain their power even further. Thus, while many Republicans wanted to take the chairmanship of the judiciary committee away from him while they were in power, they couldn’t, because of the fear that he might bolt the party. That gave him leverage.
Now, of course, the Democrats will not be so handcuffed. His entire political career will be dependent on their largesse. Without them, he will not get Democratic primary victory. Without them, he will not have control of a committee (I understand he wants appropriations, making him one of the most powerful men in government). Without them, he is almost certainly a lame duck senator without any power.
Thus, Arlen Specter must not displease his handlers. He claims that he will not be an automatic 60th vote, but will continue to vote his conscience. We will see. It is at least doubtful that he can do so with a highly partisan issue and continue to get Democratic support. They will turn on him as they did with Joe Lieberman before they recognized that they could lose him to the right if they didn’t play ball.
Politically, of course, it was the right move for Specter. He was almost certainly done in Pennsylvania’s Republican Party and has to run as a Democrat to survive. Even if the conservatives regain power, it is not likely that they could do so before 2014 at best. By then, Spector will likely be retired (or worse - he will be well into his 80s).
For your viewing pleasure, watch the partisan sniping. No doubt it is the ideological right who chased Arlen out of their party just as the ideological left chased Joe Lieberman out for a while (he’s an independent now, but still in the Democratic caucus). Many of those who sniped at and castigated Lieberman for his “betrayal” in leaving the Democrats, supporting McCain and the Iraqi War, will find it delightful that Specter has switched sides. Those who found Lieberman’s doing so a sign of his healthy conscience and patriotism, will find those same qualities lacking in Specter, and visa versa Like I said, the hypocrisy is rampant on both sides, as usual. We cannot not expect less from politicians, who are, after all, in some cases, almost human.
I would have been much happier had Specter become an independent. It would have been a sign that he would actually act independently and according to conscience, which is what a congressperson or senator should do. There is no doubt in my mind either, as much as I have liked Specter, that this is a purely cynical and political act. Specter says that he doesn’t want to put his lengthy political career in the hands of Pennsylvania’s Republican primary (where he probably can’t win because his party is against him), but, completely hypocritically, he is fine about putting it in the hands of the Democratic primary (where he probably can win with party help). His claim to be willing to take on all comers there is a little silly as it has already been reported that the powers that be in Pennsylvania’s Democratic world intend to clear the decks for him.
If you doubt this was a hypocritical act, you can recall that Specter said almost a decade ago, when Jim Jeffords jumped ship, that he had the right, but doing so was bad for the country. In Jeffords case, it effected the power structure in the senate, but it did not result in one party rule. Guess his conscience has changed since then.
A filibuster proof majority is not run of the mill. We have to go back to the 70s for the last one, and that was during a less ideological and partisan time where the members did not always vote in lockstep fashion. Thus, in the "average" American’s lifetime (about 25 years), no party has had so much power. That should be scary, but the average American really doesn't look at these things very deeply, and probably takes no notice. For those on the left who think this is a good thing, careful what you wish for. You may just find that disaster is looming.
Make no mistake about it, we now have one party rule, no different than in other countries we mock for their tyrannical laws. It’s not just that the country has voted Democratic. It’s that the rules of our legislative branch have been sculpted over the years to make the two parties paramount. Now it will soon be just one party by those same rules. While the press goes on and on about the arbitrary benchmark of Obama's first one hundred days in office, this switch is much more meaningful.
But, Democrats and liberals should not gloat too much. They need only remember a few years ago when Republicans had a virtual lock on government, and got to greedy, too fat and too full of themselves, leading us to this pleasant day - with one party opposition for the party their ballyhooers were calling all but dead.
Is there hope for us? There is always a hope or two, however unforeseen, and I still do not look to the end of America, even if we have shot ourselves in the foot. Specter might make me feel better by actually voting as he did before, that is, without obsessive catering to one party or the other, even if he leans in one direction. Seeing how he has explained his defection by the usual hypocritical means, I do not have a lot of confidence in his doing so, whatever he says now. We will see how he reacts when he gets his first equivalent of a dead fish from Rahm Emanuel.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Who said it?
Okay, history fans, the game for this week is - who said it? I give you the quote and you guess. To make it more interesting for me, each quote had to come from my own library, which I love with the passion of a teenager and the fidelity of Lassie. To make it more interesting for you, in most cases, it won’t be that easy to guess and are aimed to surprise.
Quotes
1) “If all these people are convicted there will be too many to be punished with death. My hope is that they will send me full statements of every man’s case, that the most guilty may be marked as examples, and the less suffer long imprisonment under reprieves from time to time.”
2) “Should we ever have gained our Revolution if we had bound our hands by manacles of law, not only in the beginning but in any part of the revolutionary conflict? There are extreme cases where the laws become inadequate even to their own preservation, and where the universal resource is a dictator or martial law.”
3) “I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races -- that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."
4) “I have always had a clear conscience.”
5) “It is really the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians."
6) "Tell him I long more than anything to learn how to do things wrong, how to create discrepancies, adaptations, changes to reality, so that it all becomes – well, lies if you like, but truer than literal truth.”
7) “The autocrat of Russia possesses more power than any other man in the earth; but he cannot stop a sneeze.”
8) “What I said, I said for fear of the fire. My voices have told me since that I did a very wicked thing in confessing that what I had done was not well done. They told that God, by Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, gave me to know the great pity of the treason that I consented to by making that abjuration and revocation to save my life, and that I was damning myself to save my life. If I should say that God had not sent me, I should damn myself. It is true that God has sent me.”
9) “The president was not a hero or a prophet. He was not even a philosopher; but a generously intentioned man, with many of the weaknesses of other human beings, and lacking that dominating intellectual equipment, which would have been necessary to cope with the subtle and dangerous spellbinders whom a tremendous clash of forces and personalities had brought to the top as triumphant masters in the swift game of give and take, face to face in council – a game of which he had no experience at all.”
10) “Horrible thoughts, you will say, to run in the mind of a virgin girl. I admit that; but do not forget that I have not invented these ideas, only exposed them.”
11) “A certain softness of fibre in civilized races, if it were to prove progressive, might mean the development of a cultured and refined people quite unable to hold it’s own in those conflicts through which any great race can ultimately march to victory.”
12) “What I saw would have been a dream if it hadn’t been a terrible reality. Rasputin, who half an hour before lay dying in the cellar, was running quickly across the snow-covered courtyard towards the iron gate which led to the street. . . . I couldn’t believe my eyes. But a harsh cry which broke the silence of the night persuaded me. ‘Felix! Felix! I will tell everything to the Empress!’ It was him, all right, Rasputin. In a few seconds, he would reach the iron gate. . . . I fired. The night echoed with the shot. I missed. I fired again. Again I missed. I raged at myself. Rasputin neared the gate. I bit with all my force the end of my left hand to force myself to concentrate and I fired a third time. The bullet hit him in the shoulders. He stopped. I fired a fourth time and hit him probably in the head. I ran up and kicked him as hard as I could with my boot in the temple. He fell into the snow, tried to rise, but he could only grind his teeth.
13) At this he fired and called me all the ill names, puppy etc., that he could think of. All I returned was I put him in mind of his passion, desired him to govern it, and keep his temper. This made his rage worse. . . .”
14) “That is part of the cursedness of a shotgun messenger’s life – the loneliness of it. He is like a sheep dog, feared by the flock and hated by the wolves. On the stage, he is a necessary evil. Passengers and driver alike regard him with aversion. Without him and his pestilential box their lives would be 90 per cent safer and they know it. The bad men, the rustlers—the stage robbers actual and potential – hate him. They hate him because he is a guardian of property, because he stands between them and their desires, because they will have to kill them to get their hands into the coveted box.”
15) “Long ago a very serious counselor called ‘Uncle Bill’ ordered me into boxing lessons at a New England summer camp called Robinson Crusoe. I was ten. I had good foot speed and my hand-to-eye coordination was sharp enough for me to play third base for the varsity baseball team. I was not afraid of baseballs thrown near my head, nor hard smashes cracked down to third. I’d played a few years of junior prep football and there I was swept end or ran hard off tackle without experiencing fright. I had scuffed a bit, as boys will scuff, but never before Uncle Bill and Robinson Crusoe had I boxed. As I was commanded into my first formal boxing match, dread abruptly dominated me. In a manner that never entered my play in other sports, I thought over and over: ‘Willickers. I can get seriously hurt.’”
16) “I am living here in a state of great anxiety and of the greatest physical fatigue. I have no friends of any sort and want none. I haven’t even time to eat as much as I should. So you must not bother me with additional worries, for I could not bear another thing.”
17) “Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. It is just when one must kill a mad dog.”
18) “Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.”
19) “Just as the particular will acts unceasingly against the general will, so does the government continually exert itself against the sovereign. And the more this exertion increases, the more the constitution becomes corrupt, and, as in this case there is no distinct corporate will to resist the will of the prince and so to balance it, sooner or later it is inevitable that the prince will oppress the sovereign and break the social treaty. This is the inherent and inescapable defect which, from the birth of the political body, tends relentlessly to destroy it, just as the old age and death destroy the body of a man.”
20) “What we call you to thirdly is to take an honest stance with yourselves – and I doubt you will do so – in order to discover that you are a nation without principles or manners, and that, to you, values and principles are something which you merely demand from others, not that which you yourself must adhere to.”
Answers
1) Thomas Jefferson. Was he talking about the death penalty for murderers? No. TJ wanted the death penalty for those violating economic restrictions. Whatever his virtues, he was our first and last tyrant.
2) Same guy. Same problem. Whether he was right or not that there are times a dictator might be called for, it wasn’t the right time and he certainly wasn’t the right guy. Okay, done with Jefferson. I promise.
3) Honest Abe Lincoln speaking his mind while campaigning. He hated slavery, and was personally kind to blacks, but his belief in the superiority of whites appeared to be genuine and certainly typical of his time.
4) Adolph Hitler. Good to know he could sleep nights.
5) Possibly the greatest and craziest chess player to ever live, Bobby Fischer, on his classic match up with Boris Spassky.
6) Vincent van Gogh. Makes sense if you think about his work.
7) One of my literary heroes, Mark Twain, who constantly surprises and inspires me.
8) Joan of Arc, recanting her confession. She had reason to fear the fire.
9) Maynard Keynes – possibly the most famous (not the best) economist of the 20th century, commenting on our overmatched President Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference.
10) Sigmund Freund. These days he is considered a relic, his therapy largely repudiated, but he was very important step in an uptight world trying to understand sexuality, and among his work and letters are many gems I believe will be mined for a long time.
11) Teddy Roosevelt. To read him nowadays, we are surprised by his ethnocentricity/racism, even though he was probably progressive for his time. But if you get beyond that, he was often quite prescient, very decent, and one of the most competent presidents. Nor was he stayed by ideology or party politics when something needed to be done. Thus, he is one of my very favorite presidents.
12) Rasputin’s murder, as told by one of the conspirators, describes an amazing story of Rasputin’s tremendous will to live. First they poisoned him, and when he wouldn’t die, they shot him and pronounced him dead. After he jumped up, attacked them and made to escape, they shot him again at least twice more, kicked him in the head and beat him with a club. To get rid of the body, they slid him in under the ice. Remarkably, when he was found, it turned out his lungs were filled up with water. That means he was still alive when he went under and drowned. This account reads like a novel.
13) Reverend John Flamsteed, Britain’s first Royal Astronomer, describing a run in with his nemesis, Sir Isaac Newton. Not the Newton of the apple tree, is it?
14) Wyatt Earp describing the lot of a Wells, Fargo shotgun messenger.
15) Jack Dempsey describes his introduction into the sport that made his life.
16) Michaelangelo working at the Vatican, vents his frustrations in a letter to his brother.
17) Martin Luther was revolutionary, but not known for his tolerance for those who rebelled from him.
18) General William Sherman. He’d know.
19) Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like all philosophers, sometimes he’s right and sometimes he’s nuts. But he had a great name, didn’t he? His words above are as true now in democracies as they were at the dawn of the revolutions.
20) I was going to let you guess, but you can Google almost anything these days. It’s a lecture from our friend, Osama bin Laden.
Quotes
1) “If all these people are convicted there will be too many to be punished with death. My hope is that they will send me full statements of every man’s case, that the most guilty may be marked as examples, and the less suffer long imprisonment under reprieves from time to time.”
2) “Should we ever have gained our Revolution if we had bound our hands by manacles of law, not only in the beginning but in any part of the revolutionary conflict? There are extreme cases where the laws become inadequate even to their own preservation, and where the universal resource is a dictator or martial law.”
3) “I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races -- that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."
4) “I have always had a clear conscience.”
5) “It is really the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians."
6) "Tell him I long more than anything to learn how to do things wrong, how to create discrepancies, adaptations, changes to reality, so that it all becomes – well, lies if you like, but truer than literal truth.”
7) “The autocrat of Russia possesses more power than any other man in the earth; but he cannot stop a sneeze.”
8) “What I said, I said for fear of the fire. My voices have told me since that I did a very wicked thing in confessing that what I had done was not well done. They told that God, by Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, gave me to know the great pity of the treason that I consented to by making that abjuration and revocation to save my life, and that I was damning myself to save my life. If I should say that God had not sent me, I should damn myself. It is true that God has sent me.”
9) “The president was not a hero or a prophet. He was not even a philosopher; but a generously intentioned man, with many of the weaknesses of other human beings, and lacking that dominating intellectual equipment, which would have been necessary to cope with the subtle and dangerous spellbinders whom a tremendous clash of forces and personalities had brought to the top as triumphant masters in the swift game of give and take, face to face in council – a game of which he had no experience at all.”
10) “Horrible thoughts, you will say, to run in the mind of a virgin girl. I admit that; but do not forget that I have not invented these ideas, only exposed them.”
11) “A certain softness of fibre in civilized races, if it were to prove progressive, might mean the development of a cultured and refined people quite unable to hold it’s own in those conflicts through which any great race can ultimately march to victory.”
12) “What I saw would have been a dream if it hadn’t been a terrible reality. Rasputin, who half an hour before lay dying in the cellar, was running quickly across the snow-covered courtyard towards the iron gate which led to the street. . . . I couldn’t believe my eyes. But a harsh cry which broke the silence of the night persuaded me. ‘Felix! Felix! I will tell everything to the Empress!’ It was him, all right, Rasputin. In a few seconds, he would reach the iron gate. . . . I fired. The night echoed with the shot. I missed. I fired again. Again I missed. I raged at myself. Rasputin neared the gate. I bit with all my force the end of my left hand to force myself to concentrate and I fired a third time. The bullet hit him in the shoulders. He stopped. I fired a fourth time and hit him probably in the head. I ran up and kicked him as hard as I could with my boot in the temple. He fell into the snow, tried to rise, but he could only grind his teeth.
13) At this he fired and called me all the ill names, puppy etc., that he could think of. All I returned was I put him in mind of his passion, desired him to govern it, and keep his temper. This made his rage worse. . . .”
14) “That is part of the cursedness of a shotgun messenger’s life – the loneliness of it. He is like a sheep dog, feared by the flock and hated by the wolves. On the stage, he is a necessary evil. Passengers and driver alike regard him with aversion. Without him and his pestilential box their lives would be 90 per cent safer and they know it. The bad men, the rustlers—the stage robbers actual and potential – hate him. They hate him because he is a guardian of property, because he stands between them and their desires, because they will have to kill them to get their hands into the coveted box.”
15) “Long ago a very serious counselor called ‘Uncle Bill’ ordered me into boxing lessons at a New England summer camp called Robinson Crusoe. I was ten. I had good foot speed and my hand-to-eye coordination was sharp enough for me to play third base for the varsity baseball team. I was not afraid of baseballs thrown near my head, nor hard smashes cracked down to third. I’d played a few years of junior prep football and there I was swept end or ran hard off tackle without experiencing fright. I had scuffed a bit, as boys will scuff, but never before Uncle Bill and Robinson Crusoe had I boxed. As I was commanded into my first formal boxing match, dread abruptly dominated me. In a manner that never entered my play in other sports, I thought over and over: ‘Willickers. I can get seriously hurt.’”
16) “I am living here in a state of great anxiety and of the greatest physical fatigue. I have no friends of any sort and want none. I haven’t even time to eat as much as I should. So you must not bother me with additional worries, for I could not bear another thing.”
17) “Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. It is just when one must kill a mad dog.”
18) “Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.”
19) “Just as the particular will acts unceasingly against the general will, so does the government continually exert itself against the sovereign. And the more this exertion increases, the more the constitution becomes corrupt, and, as in this case there is no distinct corporate will to resist the will of the prince and so to balance it, sooner or later it is inevitable that the prince will oppress the sovereign and break the social treaty. This is the inherent and inescapable defect which, from the birth of the political body, tends relentlessly to destroy it, just as the old age and death destroy the body of a man.”
20) “What we call you to thirdly is to take an honest stance with yourselves – and I doubt you will do so – in order to discover that you are a nation without principles or manners, and that, to you, values and principles are something which you merely demand from others, not that which you yourself must adhere to.”
Answers
1) Thomas Jefferson. Was he talking about the death penalty for murderers? No. TJ wanted the death penalty for those violating economic restrictions. Whatever his virtues, he was our first and last tyrant.
2) Same guy. Same problem. Whether he was right or not that there are times a dictator might be called for, it wasn’t the right time and he certainly wasn’t the right guy. Okay, done with Jefferson. I promise.
3) Honest Abe Lincoln speaking his mind while campaigning. He hated slavery, and was personally kind to blacks, but his belief in the superiority of whites appeared to be genuine and certainly typical of his time.
4) Adolph Hitler. Good to know he could sleep nights.
5) Possibly the greatest and craziest chess player to ever live, Bobby Fischer, on his classic match up with Boris Spassky.
6) Vincent van Gogh. Makes sense if you think about his work.
7) One of my literary heroes, Mark Twain, who constantly surprises and inspires me.
8) Joan of Arc, recanting her confession. She had reason to fear the fire.
9) Maynard Keynes – possibly the most famous (not the best) economist of the 20th century, commenting on our overmatched President Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference.
10) Sigmund Freund. These days he is considered a relic, his therapy largely repudiated, but he was very important step in an uptight world trying to understand sexuality, and among his work and letters are many gems I believe will be mined for a long time.
11) Teddy Roosevelt. To read him nowadays, we are surprised by his ethnocentricity/racism, even though he was probably progressive for his time. But if you get beyond that, he was often quite prescient, very decent, and one of the most competent presidents. Nor was he stayed by ideology or party politics when something needed to be done. Thus, he is one of my very favorite presidents.
12) Rasputin’s murder, as told by one of the conspirators, describes an amazing story of Rasputin’s tremendous will to live. First they poisoned him, and when he wouldn’t die, they shot him and pronounced him dead. After he jumped up, attacked them and made to escape, they shot him again at least twice more, kicked him in the head and beat him with a club. To get rid of the body, they slid him in under the ice. Remarkably, when he was found, it turned out his lungs were filled up with water. That means he was still alive when he went under and drowned. This account reads like a novel.
13) Reverend John Flamsteed, Britain’s first Royal Astronomer, describing a run in with his nemesis, Sir Isaac Newton. Not the Newton of the apple tree, is it?
14) Wyatt Earp describing the lot of a Wells, Fargo shotgun messenger.
15) Jack Dempsey describes his introduction into the sport that made his life.
16) Michaelangelo working at the Vatican, vents his frustrations in a letter to his brother.
17) Martin Luther was revolutionary, but not known for his tolerance for those who rebelled from him.
18) General William Sherman. He’d know.
19) Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like all philosophers, sometimes he’s right and sometimes he’s nuts. But he had a great name, didn’t he? His words above are as true now in democracies as they were at the dawn of the revolutions.
20) I was going to let you guess, but you can Google almost anything these days. It’s a lecture from our friend, Osama bin Laden.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Death to pirates
I was talking to a young girl who is a senior in college about the pirates killed in the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips and said I was glad it ended that way. She's a nice girl who is graduating college and, not surprisingly, thinks we can save everybody, even pirates. She asked me if I wasn't being too harsh. I said "no" and meant it.
Until the pirates believe their chances of getting killed are substantially higher than their getting a ransom, this out of control industry will keep booming. This isn't a domestic kidnapping, or a one of a kind criminal act by an out of control person. This kind of piracy is about as lawless as you can get, and that includes international law, which is about as vague as you can get and still call it law. Nor is this a case of colonization where the indigent people are fighting back. These are pirates motoring hundreds of miles from their home, kidnapping sailors and tourists at the point of powerful weapons, and holding them for ransom in Somalia, many in the same area.
Like with terrorists, we can't be soft with these people. Yes, if I was the kidnapped person or it was someone I was close to I would want a ransom to be paid. But that would be because I was emotional and irrational about it, as I should be in that situation.
The ransoms paid over the last year or so to the Somalia pirates have been the catalyst and the seed money for their industry. It has been reported as over $150,000,000 in ransoms for 2008. Although a number of nations have banded together to take on the pirates, it has not been very effective. A true international blockade is necessary. The pirates cannot be subject to years of criminal defense. Justice has to be swifter than normal, particularly when a hostage is killed, even in a rescue attempt and even by the rescuer.
Don't get worried. I won't suggest lynching them at sea or torturing them, though, they probably deserve it. I do believe they should be tried as quickly as possible, have quick appeals and the punishment carried out. If we hesitate, we can look forward to keeping it going for way too long, as with the Iraq War and The War on Terror.
Unfortunately, many of the countries who are partaking in this group defense are allergic to the death penalty. I am too, usually. Although I believe some people deserve to die, I just don't believe juries are very capable of rendering a very impartial decision in murder cases and too many innocent people get convicted. However, this is the type of thing that must be done regardless. I would limit the death penalty to those who are caught in the act and where a hostage dies or is "seriously injured" in the mind of the jury, or other factors that make it particularly heinous.
Captain Phillips was rescued by men from the USS Bainbridge, a ship named after William Bainbridge, an American navy man of the late 18th and early 10th century. He was the captain of the Philadelphia, which was in the Tripoli harbor in 1803 during the First Barbary War. We fought that war in order to put an end to the pirate tactics of several Ottoman Empire satellites on the North African Coast. The Philadelphia got stuck on a shoal in the harbor and Bainbridge felt the smartest thing to do was to surrender and spare his men. They were captured and the men enslaved and several died. The officers were allowed the freedom of the city but, of course, were not free to leave.
In order to prevent the Pasha from using the ship (actually, they didn't have the expertise and were going to sell it) Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, Jr., diguised himself and his men on a captured ship and then got permission to tie itself along the stranded vessel. Just as their disguise was uncovered, they dashed unboard (actually, Decatur tripped and thus, was not first aboard). They set the ship on fire. Just as Decatur's father was the Philadelphia's first captain, he was the last to leave the deck. Horatio Nelson called it "the most bold and daring act of the age.” The Pope said it was the most important blow struck for Christaindom in centuries. Decatur became a national hero and even Francis Scott Key wrote a song for him which years later became the basis of the Star Spangled Banner.
But, the Pope may have exaggerated. The mission neither freed the hostages (who were beaten because of it) nor ended the war. Finally, William Eaton, a remarkable former soldier, spy and diplomat, who spoke many of the regional languages, got permission from Jefferson to do what he could to rescue the hostages. He went back to the Mediterranean for the purpose of either throwing such a scare into the Pasha he would give up, or, if necessary attack and destroy him. He organized an international army, mostly Arabs and Berbers, but also European adventurers and a few American military men. he dubbed himself the general, crossed with his army hundreds of desert miles through adventures that are deserving of books and movies, captured Derna with the help of a navy bombardment, setting up the Pasha’s frightened and useless brother, Hamet, as de facto ruler. He held the city against counter-attack, acted as his ruler and intended, if the Pasha did not surrender to march on Tripoli itself and crown Hamet King. The Pasha was frightened at what occurred and probably would have capitulated had not we shot ourselves in the foot by - and here's the moral - PAID A RANSOM.
Without Eaton’s knowledge, Jefferson's peace officer named Tobias Lear (from whom we know Washington's last words and who was a friend of Jeffersona and Madison) agreed to that America would pay $60,000 for the release of the prisoners. America did not want to pay tribute anymore, which was humiliating, but somehow thought that paying ransom was better. With the hostages freed and a treaty signed it might have appeared that Lear acted wisely. But Eaton knew better. As one of Eaton’s very few biographers, Samuel Edwards, records in Barbary General, Eaton wrote the following in final report:
“What have we gained by the war? What benefit has accrued to the United States by the suffering of the Philadelphia’s officers and men, six of whom died in captivity? What benefit has accrued to the United States by the death of two members of the Marine Corps who accompanied the Bey Hamet on his march to Derna? These dead, and the noble Europeans and Africans who joined hands with us in a noble enterprise – and who lost their lives in that effort – cry out from their shallow graves for justice.”
Like Decatur, Eaton became a national hero. He probably already deserved it if the public had the public been aware of the things he had accomplished. However, he pressed his case that a terrible mistake had been made and that we would find we needed to fight there again. He was completely right. Decatur himself went back after the War of 1812 ended in 1815. This time he went with overwhelming force and gave the Bey of Algiers a few hours to sign a treaty (with very little negotiating allowed), or pay the penalty. The Bey caved as sood did the rulers of Tunis and Tripoli, also capitulated. They even paid the Americans for their troubles and released both American and European prisoners. Still, it is probably that a little bombardment would have been a good idea. The next year an Anglo-Dutch flotilla did just this, bombarding Algiers until they reconfirmed the treaties and gave up their pirating.
Only force works with some people, and pirates are among them. As Eaton and Decatur knew, pirates are rarely dissuaded from their tasks without either scaring them to death or actually doing the job. This may again be something that America has to do almost alone. I hope we figure this out (and for goodness sakes, Obama and Clinton, please don't blame us for it).
If you are interested in more on Eaton and Decatur, two now largely forgotten heroes, check out my October 2nd, 2008 and December 10th, 2008 posts.
Until the pirates believe their chances of getting killed are substantially higher than their getting a ransom, this out of control industry will keep booming. This isn't a domestic kidnapping, or a one of a kind criminal act by an out of control person. This kind of piracy is about as lawless as you can get, and that includes international law, which is about as vague as you can get and still call it law. Nor is this a case of colonization where the indigent people are fighting back. These are pirates motoring hundreds of miles from their home, kidnapping sailors and tourists at the point of powerful weapons, and holding them for ransom in Somalia, many in the same area.
Like with terrorists, we can't be soft with these people. Yes, if I was the kidnapped person or it was someone I was close to I would want a ransom to be paid. But that would be because I was emotional and irrational about it, as I should be in that situation.
The ransoms paid over the last year or so to the Somalia pirates have been the catalyst and the seed money for their industry. It has been reported as over $150,000,000 in ransoms for 2008. Although a number of nations have banded together to take on the pirates, it has not been very effective. A true international blockade is necessary. The pirates cannot be subject to years of criminal defense. Justice has to be swifter than normal, particularly when a hostage is killed, even in a rescue attempt and even by the rescuer.
Don't get worried. I won't suggest lynching them at sea or torturing them, though, they probably deserve it. I do believe they should be tried as quickly as possible, have quick appeals and the punishment carried out. If we hesitate, we can look forward to keeping it going for way too long, as with the Iraq War and The War on Terror.
Unfortunately, many of the countries who are partaking in this group defense are allergic to the death penalty. I am too, usually. Although I believe some people deserve to die, I just don't believe juries are very capable of rendering a very impartial decision in murder cases and too many innocent people get convicted. However, this is the type of thing that must be done regardless. I would limit the death penalty to those who are caught in the act and where a hostage dies or is "seriously injured" in the mind of the jury, or other factors that make it particularly heinous.
Captain Phillips was rescued by men from the USS Bainbridge, a ship named after William Bainbridge, an American navy man of the late 18th and early 10th century. He was the captain of the Philadelphia, which was in the Tripoli harbor in 1803 during the First Barbary War. We fought that war in order to put an end to the pirate tactics of several Ottoman Empire satellites on the North African Coast. The Philadelphia got stuck on a shoal in the harbor and Bainbridge felt the smartest thing to do was to surrender and spare his men. They were captured and the men enslaved and several died. The officers were allowed the freedom of the city but, of course, were not free to leave.
In order to prevent the Pasha from using the ship (actually, they didn't have the expertise and were going to sell it) Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, Jr., diguised himself and his men on a captured ship and then got permission to tie itself along the stranded vessel. Just as their disguise was uncovered, they dashed unboard (actually, Decatur tripped and thus, was not first aboard). They set the ship on fire. Just as Decatur's father was the Philadelphia's first captain, he was the last to leave the deck. Horatio Nelson called it "the most bold and daring act of the age.” The Pope said it was the most important blow struck for Christaindom in centuries. Decatur became a national hero and even Francis Scott Key wrote a song for him which years later became the basis of the Star Spangled Banner.
But, the Pope may have exaggerated. The mission neither freed the hostages (who were beaten because of it) nor ended the war. Finally, William Eaton, a remarkable former soldier, spy and diplomat, who spoke many of the regional languages, got permission from Jefferson to do what he could to rescue the hostages. He went back to the Mediterranean for the purpose of either throwing such a scare into the Pasha he would give up, or, if necessary attack and destroy him. He organized an international army, mostly Arabs and Berbers, but also European adventurers and a few American military men. he dubbed himself the general, crossed with his army hundreds of desert miles through adventures that are deserving of books and movies, captured Derna with the help of a navy bombardment, setting up the Pasha’s frightened and useless brother, Hamet, as de facto ruler. He held the city against counter-attack, acted as his ruler and intended, if the Pasha did not surrender to march on Tripoli itself and crown Hamet King. The Pasha was frightened at what occurred and probably would have capitulated had not we shot ourselves in the foot by - and here's the moral - PAID A RANSOM.
Without Eaton’s knowledge, Jefferson's peace officer named Tobias Lear (from whom we know Washington's last words and who was a friend of Jeffersona and Madison) agreed to that America would pay $60,000 for the release of the prisoners. America did not want to pay tribute anymore, which was humiliating, but somehow thought that paying ransom was better. With the hostages freed and a treaty signed it might have appeared that Lear acted wisely. But Eaton knew better. As one of Eaton’s very few biographers, Samuel Edwards, records in Barbary General, Eaton wrote the following in final report:
“What have we gained by the war? What benefit has accrued to the United States by the suffering of the Philadelphia’s officers and men, six of whom died in captivity? What benefit has accrued to the United States by the death of two members of the Marine Corps who accompanied the Bey Hamet on his march to Derna? These dead, and the noble Europeans and Africans who joined hands with us in a noble enterprise – and who lost their lives in that effort – cry out from their shallow graves for justice.”
Like Decatur, Eaton became a national hero. He probably already deserved it if the public had the public been aware of the things he had accomplished. However, he pressed his case that a terrible mistake had been made and that we would find we needed to fight there again. He was completely right. Decatur himself went back after the War of 1812 ended in 1815. This time he went with overwhelming force and gave the Bey of Algiers a few hours to sign a treaty (with very little negotiating allowed), or pay the penalty. The Bey caved as sood did the rulers of Tunis and Tripoli, also capitulated. They even paid the Americans for their troubles and released both American and European prisoners. Still, it is probably that a little bombardment would have been a good idea. The next year an Anglo-Dutch flotilla did just this, bombarding Algiers until they reconfirmed the treaties and gave up their pirating.
Only force works with some people, and pirates are among them. As Eaton and Decatur knew, pirates are rarely dissuaded from their tasks without either scaring them to death or actually doing the job. This may again be something that America has to do almost alone. I hope we figure this out (and for goodness sakes, Obama and Clinton, please don't blame us for it).
If you are interested in more on Eaton and Decatur, two now largely forgotten heroes, check out my October 2nd, 2008 and December 10th, 2008 posts.
Friday, April 10, 2009
The dumbest thing I've ever written about - women's sexuality
I’m going to do it, jump right into the frying pan. This may be the single biggest mistake I’ve ever made and that includes the time I got out of my car and shut the door while it was still in drive. This might ruin my chances to run for Senator ever. It might prove to any uptight politically correct man or woman who reads this that – I am a bona fide, Neanderthal like – MISOGYNIST. But what is this blog for if not to share with you my most unpopular beliefs.
Now, it’s not true to my lights, but I really do know a few people who think I am a misogynist. When I say a few, that’s only including friends and family. I know why. When the differences between men and women comes up, my opinions aren't always politically correct, that's all. Nevertheless, I actually like women a lot (although I'm told that's not the issue (?)) and don't think women are inferior to men at all (although I've been told that I actually do). I have almost always had roughly as many women friends as men friends, at least since I graduated college anyway; even very close ones. I know I sound like the white guy who says some of my best friends are black, but some of my best friends are (or used to be) women.
No doubt, the last ten years or so, the frequency of contact with my female friends has definitely decreased. I don't have to be a scientist to notice that it has a lot to do with their having kids. I wasn’t involved in their kid’s world and it made me something less than a priority, and on a few occasions, pretty much close to zero priotity. That's life and you can't take it personally. Now, when my male friends had kids, they became busier, but that didn’t really decrease our contact to the same degree it did with female friends. But, it does seem to be a difference between men and women, and that interests me.
The fact that men and women have differences should be obvious – I mean, even other than the really obvious ones. Nevertheless, the prevailing politically correct mindset tells us that we are not supposed to notice or believe in differences between women and men, unless the difference is favors women (like the myth that women are stronger than men because they go through childbirth; it's not a myth that men get sleepier than women after sex, but, would we laugh at every mention of it if the reverse was true -- I don't think so). But the differences are still there as in days of old. For example, I personally know substantially more women than men who believe in ghosts or, possibly, far more women who will admit to it publicly. I haven't researched it much to see if that carries out across a broad spectrum of Americans, but, the differences where I have lived are large enough that I'd be surprised if it wasn't true. The few surveys I have seen were so divergent that I have trouble believing them, however, the women questioned did have something of a higher belief than men. Then again, so did more educated people. Probably, the percentage of people who believe in ghosts is so high, it might not amount to much.
Anyway, you can see why some people have called me a misogynist (not always women). I have been told I stereotype, which I really think is what they mean when they say "misogynist". I agree with them. I also stereotype men if what you mean by "stereotype" is that I believe there is nothing wrong with noticing differences between men and women or finding that interesting. There is a basis for these generalizations in that strange place we call the “real world”.
It does not mean, however, that I think all men or women are alike. Often I find when someone doesn’t like an opinion, they first overstate what was said, and then say it is an over-generalizing. I believe it is one of the most standard forms of false arguments, and for me, it prevents a real discussion, although I'm sure, like everyone, I have been guilty of it sometimes too. In my biased opinion, that is what some of my critics do, but, of course, they could just say I'm over-generalizing that too.
Before we get to the sex stuff, because that's the most interesting part, here’s one fairly innocuous example. Most guys I knew in New York didn’t like to dance very much – at least, not nearly as much as many women did. Now that I live in Virginia, I notice that women like to dance down here more than men too. Now, I have expressed that opinion on occasion and actually been told – “That’s not true; some guys like to dance. You are just generalizing”. Well, besides your wondering why I get into these arguments, of course I know there are guys who like to dance. But most guys I know don’t. I know women who don't like to dance too, but not so many. Now, don’t try asking these questions like this in a mixed group because I am telling you that some men will lie (and then tell you later – sorry, you know, the wife/girlfriend was listening. I've had that happen more than a few times in my life, even by some of the most politically correct men I know).
Maybe it’s not true in Greece or Saudi Arabia or other places either. I don't know. But, for the American male, it seems pretty much true. Here’s an interesting anecdotal fact. The best male dancer I know - the one all the girls want to see dance at parties - who seems to really enjoy it – he told me he really doesn’t like to do it very much – he is just pleasing his wife. Nothing wrong with that.
Now, the part I don’t understand is why some people take my opinions as a slight to women. As if I think women are inferior because they like to dance more than men.
Here’s another one, but this one's about sex. It has come up in conversations (for some reason, quite a few times) that many women in my age group have told me that they have lost interest in sex. Either they don’t want to have it anymore at all, or, they don’t care so much about it. Some have said to me that they like it well enough when it happens, but if they never have it again, that’s just fine. Of course, it’s not true for every woman. But, if it is true in general, it’s not an over-generalization. Now, I have to say that in speaking with women about this issue I find that if I say it (as opposed to a woman saying it), I am sometimes called a sexist or a misogynist, just to mention the nicer names (yes, I've also been called a man who wants women to be raped, bled, murdered and tortured, but that was by a close relative, so why go there?)
Now, I admit that I am generalizing about this from a relatively small sample, but, I do not think I am over-generalizing. There is a lot of evidence supporting it. For one thing, polls, surveys and scientific studies all seem to support this proposition overwhelmingly. Hell, even Oprah had a show on it recently and if that isn't authoritative in America, what is (I'm kidding, you Oprah haters our there, but she did do a show on it)? When surveys ask people if they had an extra hour would they prefer sex or sleep (sometimes other things), more men choose sex and more women choose sleep. A Canadian poll reconfirmed that this past year. A few years ago a U.S. poll showed that men chose sex first in that situation but women listed it ninth. Again, to ward off the naysayers, it doesn’t mean that this is always the case or that there aren’t those for whom it isn't the opposite. However, I can't help but notice that some take this suggestion as an insult to women and some folks just won’t believe it.
Now, here's where the differences get really interesting to me. It has always seemed to me that young women I knew had more of an interest in lesbianism than men I knew did in homosexuality. I was not unaware, of course, that the social taboos might just mean more women were going to acknowledge it than men. However, scientific studies seem to show that that the things that turn on men and women are quite different, and I don’t just mean being interested in the opposite sex.
Here’s a strange fact I learned from a fascinating New York Times Magazine article (1/25/09 - Bergner) from which I culled much of the sexual research I'm discussing). Technological marvels like MRI’s and genital measuring devices called plethysmographs now allow scientists to tell what cues arouse men and women. Men seem to be attracted to very specific things – if they are straight, watching women exercising, masturbating, having heterosexual sex or lesbian sex is a turn on. Even gay men seem to react to the same type of thing except, obviously, in reverse, they are physiologically aroused by men, rather than women.
But, women seemed to be physiologically aroused by any sex they see. It didn’t seem to matter who was on screen – a man and woman, two women, and whether having sex, or masturbating or even exercising. And, I'm not making this up, even watching monkeys having sex. And it didn’t matter if they were straight or lesbian. If you want to look it up, the experiment was by Meredith Chivers of King’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Relax. She’s not suggesting that women secretly want to have sex with monkeys but she and other scientists are having trouble figuring it out why they get aroused. Even women sexologists admit that it is easy to understand male sexuality, but not women’s sexuality. I suppose that might be deemed insulting by some too, but you only have to read a little of this stuff to see it's the case. You can doubt Chivers’ finding, of course, but, according to her extensive review of the scientific literature, similar results have been found by other scientists over and over again.
Here’s another weird thing. In the same study, they also recorded the subjects own views of which scenes aroused them and compared them with their physiological reactions. Women seemed either to be lying or just didn’t know when they were being physiologically aroused. Chivers found that heterosexual women underreported their arousal during lesbian scenes, and even more so, homosexual scenes, and overreported when watching heterosexual sex. When lesbian women watched other lesbians they seemed to get it right, but they also underreported their arousal by watching heterosexual sex. Both women's groups severely underreported arousal while watching the monkeys. What’s going on? If you are a man reading this, you are probably just glad that women are turned on watching other women have sex, even if they won’t admit it. But monkeys? Frankly, wouldn't you have guessed it would have been the other way around on that one.
Now, I don't think the results are because women are more lustful than men. If anything, I think that the time period where they are about the same is a limited one, and otherwise men are more lustful, and there are studies which suggest that is the case. And it is definitely not because women are more "perverted" than men according to social mores. If women could read men's minds they would probably be really disgusted by us and no, I'm not just projecting.
A psychologist at CSU has also found an interesting result showing another sexual difference between men and women which relates to Chivers’ findings. It appears that the more highly sexed someone is (self reported), the more they follow the patterns Chivers found. That is, the more highly sexed a straight man is, the more he is aroused by women alone and the more highly sexed a gay man is, the more likely it is that he is focused on other men alone. However, the results for straight women show, the more highly sexed they were, the more they were aroused by men and other women too.
It seems possible that the differences in these studies were caused by cultural inhibitions. But, that theory might not pan out. Scientists have actually been able to locate the parts of the brain that are triggered by inhibition. A recent MRI study showed that those parts of the brain weren’t triggered when either men or women were aroused by pictures which were not socially acceptable. This would seem to go against the cultural explanation, although it is also possibly that the scientists just don't understand the brain chemistry well enough at this point.
Of course, sexologists have found other fascinating facts about the differences between men and woman, far too many to try to talk about here. Some of them seem obvious to me. It might not surprise you to learn that men seemed to get aroused just by increasing blood flow to their penis, like with Viagra, but women seem to need a psychological adjustment to get turned on. There is also some indication that increases in serotonin or anti-depression medication tends to increase female lust, but not male, which may show that the likelihood that women's arousal is more psychological than men's. Now, that would have been my guess in the first place (but, beware the political correctness police). However, testosterone treatments, primarily a male hormone, seems to work to increase either men or women's arousal, although cancer risks have limited the experimentation.
A study from a University in Wales recently confirmed that women actually find men in expensive cars more attractive than ones in less expensive cars. They found this by asking women to rate pictures of men in cars. Of course, they used the same guy in different cars in order to get their result. What's interesting is not just that they were more attracted to the nicer car, but actually thought the guy was nicer looking. They did not find the same results with men. The men cared about her face and figure. Women attracted to money and power and as shallow in their own way as men? Now, this should be obvious to people just by living in the world, and I'm glad to have this study on my side because I have been told that I'm out of my mind in believing it. Maybe people just like to argue.
Studies of rape fantasies might make you cringe a little. If you really want to infuriate the politically correct, discuss these scientific studies at a mixed party. Apparently, at least a third if not over half of women seemed to have had rape fantasies (from an article in The Journal of Sex Research), and about ten percent fairly frequently. However, and this is the tricky part, there is also evidence that suggests that some women not only get aroused when actually being sexually assaulted, and in rare cases, actually have had an orgasm during the assault. Rape fantasies are far from unknown, of course, but women who have them say they would not want to be raped and I believe it. However, sometimes physiological reactions trump psychological ones even when it makes us feel uncomfortable.
I feel safe to say that many, if not most men I know well, would not be offended if it was suggested that if they were powerless to stop a sexual assault by someone they were attracted to, they might become aroused. I feel just as safe to say most of the women I know would not be pleased by the idea. Some would be outraged. In fact, I really don’t recommend you discussing this at all with a women who doesn’t bring it up herself and, really, how often is that going to happen? If you are a woman and you are reading this I FEEL MY PERSONAL SAFETY REQUIRES ME TO REPEAT THAT I AM NOT SAYING THAT SOME WOMEN ACTUALLY WANT TO BE RAPED AND PLEASE DON’T HATE (OR INJURE) ME. Focus your wrath on the sexologists who do these studies.
The Archives of Sexual Behaviors is a treasure trove of completely politically unacceptable studies such as suggesting that women are more turned on by sex with strangers; that their desire is connected by their narcissistic desire to be wanted; that while looking at pornography straight men study women’s faces and bodies, but straight women study men’s faces and the women’s bodies; men are coercive about sex to feel power and control, but when women are, it's in order to feel a psychological connection and out of control at the same time. You can read abstracts and short previews of the articles in the Archives online. The Journal of Sex Research cannot be read online although you can view the contents there and order them. Am I crazy or is this stuff fun? When I was a psych major we studied rats. Interesting, but not so interesting.
Of course, because I would rather not bore you, I left out all the mundane and overly intellectual stuff you can read about in these journals too. But, there’s lots of titillating stuff there too. Have fun, but my advice, if you are a male, particularly a married one, keep the stuff you read there to yourself in mixed company. Leave the politically incorrect stuff to us bachelors, because husbands having to occasionally sleep on couches is not a myth either.
Now, it’s not true to my lights, but I really do know a few people who think I am a misogynist. When I say a few, that’s only including friends and family. I know why. When the differences between men and women comes up, my opinions aren't always politically correct, that's all. Nevertheless, I actually like women a lot (although I'm told that's not the issue (?)) and don't think women are inferior to men at all (although I've been told that I actually do). I have almost always had roughly as many women friends as men friends, at least since I graduated college anyway; even very close ones. I know I sound like the white guy who says some of my best friends are black, but some of my best friends are (or used to be) women.
No doubt, the last ten years or so, the frequency of contact with my female friends has definitely decreased. I don't have to be a scientist to notice that it has a lot to do with their having kids. I wasn’t involved in their kid’s world and it made me something less than a priority, and on a few occasions, pretty much close to zero priotity. That's life and you can't take it personally. Now, when my male friends had kids, they became busier, but that didn’t really decrease our contact to the same degree it did with female friends. But, it does seem to be a difference between men and women, and that interests me.
The fact that men and women have differences should be obvious – I mean, even other than the really obvious ones. Nevertheless, the prevailing politically correct mindset tells us that we are not supposed to notice or believe in differences between women and men, unless the difference is favors women (like the myth that women are stronger than men because they go through childbirth; it's not a myth that men get sleepier than women after sex, but, would we laugh at every mention of it if the reverse was true -- I don't think so). But the differences are still there as in days of old. For example, I personally know substantially more women than men who believe in ghosts or, possibly, far more women who will admit to it publicly. I haven't researched it much to see if that carries out across a broad spectrum of Americans, but, the differences where I have lived are large enough that I'd be surprised if it wasn't true. The few surveys I have seen were so divergent that I have trouble believing them, however, the women questioned did have something of a higher belief than men. Then again, so did more educated people. Probably, the percentage of people who believe in ghosts is so high, it might not amount to much.
Anyway, you can see why some people have called me a misogynist (not always women). I have been told I stereotype, which I really think is what they mean when they say "misogynist". I agree with them. I also stereotype men if what you mean by "stereotype" is that I believe there is nothing wrong with noticing differences between men and women or finding that interesting. There is a basis for these generalizations in that strange place we call the “real world”.
It does not mean, however, that I think all men or women are alike. Often I find when someone doesn’t like an opinion, they first overstate what was said, and then say it is an over-generalizing. I believe it is one of the most standard forms of false arguments, and for me, it prevents a real discussion, although I'm sure, like everyone, I have been guilty of it sometimes too. In my biased opinion, that is what some of my critics do, but, of course, they could just say I'm over-generalizing that too.
Before we get to the sex stuff, because that's the most interesting part, here’s one fairly innocuous example. Most guys I knew in New York didn’t like to dance very much – at least, not nearly as much as many women did. Now that I live in Virginia, I notice that women like to dance down here more than men too. Now, I have expressed that opinion on occasion and actually been told – “That’s not true; some guys like to dance. You are just generalizing”. Well, besides your wondering why I get into these arguments, of course I know there are guys who like to dance. But most guys I know don’t. I know women who don't like to dance too, but not so many. Now, don’t try asking these questions like this in a mixed group because I am telling you that some men will lie (and then tell you later – sorry, you know, the wife/girlfriend was listening. I've had that happen more than a few times in my life, even by some of the most politically correct men I know).
Maybe it’s not true in Greece or Saudi Arabia or other places either. I don't know. But, for the American male, it seems pretty much true. Here’s an interesting anecdotal fact. The best male dancer I know - the one all the girls want to see dance at parties - who seems to really enjoy it – he told me he really doesn’t like to do it very much – he is just pleasing his wife. Nothing wrong with that.
Now, the part I don’t understand is why some people take my opinions as a slight to women. As if I think women are inferior because they like to dance more than men.
Here’s another one, but this one's about sex. It has come up in conversations (for some reason, quite a few times) that many women in my age group have told me that they have lost interest in sex. Either they don’t want to have it anymore at all, or, they don’t care so much about it. Some have said to me that they like it well enough when it happens, but if they never have it again, that’s just fine. Of course, it’s not true for every woman. But, if it is true in general, it’s not an over-generalization. Now, I have to say that in speaking with women about this issue I find that if I say it (as opposed to a woman saying it), I am sometimes called a sexist or a misogynist, just to mention the nicer names (yes, I've also been called a man who wants women to be raped, bled, murdered and tortured, but that was by a close relative, so why go there?)
Now, I admit that I am generalizing about this from a relatively small sample, but, I do not think I am over-generalizing. There is a lot of evidence supporting it. For one thing, polls, surveys and scientific studies all seem to support this proposition overwhelmingly. Hell, even Oprah had a show on it recently and if that isn't authoritative in America, what is (I'm kidding, you Oprah haters our there, but she did do a show on it)? When surveys ask people if they had an extra hour would they prefer sex or sleep (sometimes other things), more men choose sex and more women choose sleep. A Canadian poll reconfirmed that this past year. A few years ago a U.S. poll showed that men chose sex first in that situation but women listed it ninth. Again, to ward off the naysayers, it doesn’t mean that this is always the case or that there aren’t those for whom it isn't the opposite. However, I can't help but notice that some take this suggestion as an insult to women and some folks just won’t believe it.
Now, here's where the differences get really interesting to me. It has always seemed to me that young women I knew had more of an interest in lesbianism than men I knew did in homosexuality. I was not unaware, of course, that the social taboos might just mean more women were going to acknowledge it than men. However, scientific studies seem to show that that the things that turn on men and women are quite different, and I don’t just mean being interested in the opposite sex.
Here’s a strange fact I learned from a fascinating New York Times Magazine article (1/25/09 - Bergner) from which I culled much of the sexual research I'm discussing). Technological marvels like MRI’s and genital measuring devices called plethysmographs now allow scientists to tell what cues arouse men and women. Men seem to be attracted to very specific things – if they are straight, watching women exercising, masturbating, having heterosexual sex or lesbian sex is a turn on. Even gay men seem to react to the same type of thing except, obviously, in reverse, they are physiologically aroused by men, rather than women.
But, women seemed to be physiologically aroused by any sex they see. It didn’t seem to matter who was on screen – a man and woman, two women, and whether having sex, or masturbating or even exercising. And, I'm not making this up, even watching monkeys having sex. And it didn’t matter if they were straight or lesbian. If you want to look it up, the experiment was by Meredith Chivers of King’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Relax. She’s not suggesting that women secretly want to have sex with monkeys but she and other scientists are having trouble figuring it out why they get aroused. Even women sexologists admit that it is easy to understand male sexuality, but not women’s sexuality. I suppose that might be deemed insulting by some too, but you only have to read a little of this stuff to see it's the case. You can doubt Chivers’ finding, of course, but, according to her extensive review of the scientific literature, similar results have been found by other scientists over and over again.
Here’s another weird thing. In the same study, they also recorded the subjects own views of which scenes aroused them and compared them with their physiological reactions. Women seemed either to be lying or just didn’t know when they were being physiologically aroused. Chivers found that heterosexual women underreported their arousal during lesbian scenes, and even more so, homosexual scenes, and overreported when watching heterosexual sex. When lesbian women watched other lesbians they seemed to get it right, but they also underreported their arousal by watching heterosexual sex. Both women's groups severely underreported arousal while watching the monkeys. What’s going on? If you are a man reading this, you are probably just glad that women are turned on watching other women have sex, even if they won’t admit it. But monkeys? Frankly, wouldn't you have guessed it would have been the other way around on that one.
Now, I don't think the results are because women are more lustful than men. If anything, I think that the time period where they are about the same is a limited one, and otherwise men are more lustful, and there are studies which suggest that is the case. And it is definitely not because women are more "perverted" than men according to social mores. If women could read men's minds they would probably be really disgusted by us and no, I'm not just projecting.
A psychologist at CSU has also found an interesting result showing another sexual difference between men and women which relates to Chivers’ findings. It appears that the more highly sexed someone is (self reported), the more they follow the patterns Chivers found. That is, the more highly sexed a straight man is, the more he is aroused by women alone and the more highly sexed a gay man is, the more likely it is that he is focused on other men alone. However, the results for straight women show, the more highly sexed they were, the more they were aroused by men and other women too.
It seems possible that the differences in these studies were caused by cultural inhibitions. But, that theory might not pan out. Scientists have actually been able to locate the parts of the brain that are triggered by inhibition. A recent MRI study showed that those parts of the brain weren’t triggered when either men or women were aroused by pictures which were not socially acceptable. This would seem to go against the cultural explanation, although it is also possibly that the scientists just don't understand the brain chemistry well enough at this point.
Of course, sexologists have found other fascinating facts about the differences between men and woman, far too many to try to talk about here. Some of them seem obvious to me. It might not surprise you to learn that men seemed to get aroused just by increasing blood flow to their penis, like with Viagra, but women seem to need a psychological adjustment to get turned on. There is also some indication that increases in serotonin or anti-depression medication tends to increase female lust, but not male, which may show that the likelihood that women's arousal is more psychological than men's. Now, that would have been my guess in the first place (but, beware the political correctness police). However, testosterone treatments, primarily a male hormone, seems to work to increase either men or women's arousal, although cancer risks have limited the experimentation.
A study from a University in Wales recently confirmed that women actually find men in expensive cars more attractive than ones in less expensive cars. They found this by asking women to rate pictures of men in cars. Of course, they used the same guy in different cars in order to get their result. What's interesting is not just that they were more attracted to the nicer car, but actually thought the guy was nicer looking. They did not find the same results with men. The men cared about her face and figure. Women attracted to money and power and as shallow in their own way as men? Now, this should be obvious to people just by living in the world, and I'm glad to have this study on my side because I have been told that I'm out of my mind in believing it. Maybe people just like to argue.
Studies of rape fantasies might make you cringe a little. If you really want to infuriate the politically correct, discuss these scientific studies at a mixed party. Apparently, at least a third if not over half of women seemed to have had rape fantasies (from an article in The Journal of Sex Research), and about ten percent fairly frequently. However, and this is the tricky part, there is also evidence that suggests that some women not only get aroused when actually being sexually assaulted, and in rare cases, actually have had an orgasm during the assault. Rape fantasies are far from unknown, of course, but women who have them say they would not want to be raped and I believe it. However, sometimes physiological reactions trump psychological ones even when it makes us feel uncomfortable.
I feel safe to say that many, if not most men I know well, would not be offended if it was suggested that if they were powerless to stop a sexual assault by someone they were attracted to, they might become aroused. I feel just as safe to say most of the women I know would not be pleased by the idea. Some would be outraged. In fact, I really don’t recommend you discussing this at all with a women who doesn’t bring it up herself and, really, how often is that going to happen? If you are a woman and you are reading this I FEEL MY PERSONAL SAFETY REQUIRES ME TO REPEAT THAT I AM NOT SAYING THAT SOME WOMEN ACTUALLY WANT TO BE RAPED AND PLEASE DON’T HATE (OR INJURE) ME. Focus your wrath on the sexologists who do these studies.
The Archives of Sexual Behaviors is a treasure trove of completely politically unacceptable studies such as suggesting that women are more turned on by sex with strangers; that their desire is connected by their narcissistic desire to be wanted; that while looking at pornography straight men study women’s faces and bodies, but straight women study men’s faces and the women’s bodies; men are coercive about sex to feel power and control, but when women are, it's in order to feel a psychological connection and out of control at the same time. You can read abstracts and short previews of the articles in the Archives online. The Journal of Sex Research cannot be read online although you can view the contents there and order them. Am I crazy or is this stuff fun? When I was a psych major we studied rats. Interesting, but not so interesting.
Of course, because I would rather not bore you, I left out all the mundane and overly intellectual stuff you can read about in these journals too. But, there’s lots of titillating stuff there too. Have fun, but my advice, if you are a male, particularly a married one, keep the stuff you read there to yourself in mixed company. Leave the politically incorrect stuff to us bachelors, because husbands having to occasionally sleep on couches is not a myth either.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Political update for April, 2009
Oh, God, no (says the reader), not another philippic about how our glorious leaders are screwing up our economy for the foreseeable future. Well, if they would just stop I’d shut up. I refuse to believe that we are so unsophisticated as a nation that we cannot have a critical analysis of what we are doing, as if the entire populous will panic if the government says – we really aren’t sure if we are doing this right and maybe we should slow down. In fact, Joe Biden said 30% possibility of failure in a speech, attributing it to Obama (who gritted his teeth later and pretty much said, heh, heh, that's just Joe)and I don’t recall panic.
To be honest, there exists no political will to do anything much different. Though I believe a history exists which justifies my believing a McCain administration would have been considerably less egregious in spending, he would have probably taken the same general approach – the same one the Republicans took when Bush was in Power and they controlled congress – spend, spend, spend. It appears that the country, if you can believe the polls and not your own ears, is much in favor of these spending policies.
As always, the trouble is that the two ideologies, conservatism and liberalism, and their political fronts, the Democrats and the Republicans, have a lock on American politics to the degree that our citizenry now act as if these two paranoid (because the other side is usually motivated by evil) schizophrenic (because they both switch positions whenever it suits their purposes) actually own as property holders, all political positions and deserve all the power. When one party controls the administration and congress they become drunk with power and lose control of any sense of conscientiousness they might have had when they took power.
The other day a perfect example of the problem of the two party system came out. The Democrats let it be known that they were considering using a perfectly proper congressional tactic so that they could avoid the filibuster problem, the one way a minority in the senate can put the brakes on, by requiring only a majoriy as in the house of representatives to move legislation forward. The Republicans are apoplectic about it and the Democrats gleeful. The problem with this - unadulterated pure hypocrisy! When the Republican controlled both houses and the presidency they used precisely this tactic and the Democrats railed against it.
Yet, we are so used to this nauseating hypocrisy, we, as a people, are used to it, and don't require a change.
We get what we deserve. Less powerful politicians line up behind their cowardly hypocritical leaders on both sides and act with group think and with blind devotion. The few who try and break away from their team are attacked and ridiculed like Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Arlen Spector, etc., not only by those in power but by their followers in the real world, who actually identify with the extremists.
Take this part of a message I received about Joe Lieberman via email after last years' election from a self described “progressive," even though he and Lieberman probably agree on over 90 percent of political issues. “Joe Lieberman does nothing out of conscience. He is a sneaky, unprincipled, self serving, ugly old man. He should be ridiculed. And I’m pissed off at him.”
I wonder if his anger had anything to do with Lieberman's decision to back his good friend, John McCain, or his beating the Democrats by running as an independent when they refused him their nomination. Y' think?
In congress, even if you are an independent, you must caucus with one side or the other. The chairmen and women use their power to all but silence, in terms of substance, the other side. Instead of the guaranteed Republic of States we deserve, we are subservient to a congress of parties.
The most powerful tool to maintain party power is the use House of Representatives “Rules” committee which makes the “rules” for each piece of legislation. By this avenue, laws may be proposed open or closed – that is, open or closed to amendments. They can be partially open too, which doesn't do much more. Open on any controversial issue is rare. Usually, they are partially open or completely closed – freezing out the other side. Constitutionally, congress can make its own rules. But there are limits. It can't violate other sections of the constitution with impunity.
It seems like everyday there is another step towards what can only be described as a command economy. A few days ago it became public knowledge that Obama “fired” the CEO of GM. I’m sure “fired” is just a metaphor for it being let known to the CEO that he should leave asap. We’ll find out, of course, what kind of package he got for leaving. I guess it’s a secret that everyone can act shocked about when it becomes public knowledge. Then, today, we learn that congress is fixing to try to let Mr. Geithner determine any compensation he wants for companies that take TARP money (even if they were solvent and compelled to do so).
You don’t think that smacks of a command economy?
Timothy Geithner’s new plan, government control of corporations, is just grist for the mill in our leap forward to a command economy. Because people are so sensitized to pejorative terms like communist, we don’t use it so much– I don’t use it when I am arguing with someone. Even “socialism” causes hackles to rise. But that is precisely what is being put into effect now. By any label - it is government control of the means of production (and that is the definition of socialism – shhh).
But many act as if these new power grabs – government seizure and control of the policy decisions of private companies, are just fine or necessary. That we need regulation and we have to do this because we can’t trust the people in the businesses. Of course, we can’t trust them – that’s why we have anti-fraud laws, however poorly they can be enforced. And we do need regulation – but only the kind that doesn’t stomp on fair competition. That should not be an ideological statement, but it has been made so.
We are well past the point where government investment in business is a de minimis encroachment. Barney Frank should never have had the opportunity to say that we own 80% of AIG and they have to do what we say? That approach is a far greater problem than AIG's decision to honor its committments for bonuses to its employees. There are better approaches. Like letting AIG fail. Like letting other companies buy up the solvent parts of the company and letting the other parts fail. The recent outrage over a solvent bank which was forced to take TARP money by the government because they were doing business as usual and throwing a big party for clients, is another.
But you think you can trust people in government to be honest more than businessmen? Trust them not to be corrupt? Trust them not to make sweetheart deals with businessmen? Trust them not to do the revolving door thing as lobbyists? Trust them to what – predict the future and know better than people in an industry what choices that business should make?
One of my favorite lines from a movie (and I can’t find the exact quote online) was in Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson’s Shanghai Knights when Jackie locks his hands together for Owen to use as a springboard to make a tremendous leap upwards. Owen looks at Jackie and says something like “What in our experience together makes you think I can do something like that?”
I have the same question for the public. What in our experience with government makes you think that it (they) will be honest, fair and competent? If they couldn’t predict what the TARP beneficiaries would do with their money, or whether they wouldn’t tell us what they did with it, or that they would give big bonuses as planned, etc., what makes you think they can predict anything else.
So, it will be okay for Geithner or his replacement (my guess is he will not survive the 4 year term) to tell the corporate boards how much their CEO’s and other officers should be paid, but not okay to tell Lebron James how much he should make?
What’s next – telling companies how much to charge for their products or services. Don’t think so? Then you need to read up on the “New Deal,” the administration's blue print for what they were doing, where we actually did that, causing havoc?
The sad example of Jack Magid, a tailor during the 1930s has recently been resurrected of late with glee by opponents of government intervention. Magid was convicted under the National Recovery Act for selling his service for 35 cents a pair of pants instead of the 40 cents mandated by the “Tailors Code”. Magid, who barely spoke English was befuddled that the government could tell him how much to charge in America. He charged 35 cents because he did not have a great location and his competitive angle was to charge less. Of course, as consumers, you’d think this was a good thing. But his wife and children had to fend for themselves without him while he served time because the government thought it should tell him how to run his business.
Constitutional? Of course not and it was eventually ruled so, but not before people were fined, even jailed, because they were trying to run their business in the real world, not the world of averages and political expediency in which government operates.
No, I don’t want people like Bernie Madoff ripping people off – but let’s not pretend that it was not due to government incompetency instead of too little regulation. Government had all the power it needed and all the warning it needed to stop him years ago. His mistake. He didn't steal enough. Were he as big as AIG, the government might have given him money to make him solvent as he would be too big to fail. You think I'm joking, don't you?
I’m not sure where this is all headed. I’d like to think that we are not going to become completely socialistic, but no doubt we are heading in that direction right now. It is ironic that although many of us were alive during the Cold War, many people still believe that government control of industry will not result in more, not less, corruption and fraud.
The same self described progressive I mentioned earlier frequently tells me that he is happy in Obama that we have a president who can conceive a plan and carry it out. And I keep telling him that this is what frightens me. The idea that “smart” people can predict the future and make sure economic problems never happe again is utopianism and magical thinking. Does anyone notice that whether it’s Bush’s people or Obama’s or Congress – they can’t get it right? That’s because they can’t predict the future and should stop trying.
My own plan, you ask? Can we just try to increase tax benefits for things like capital improvements and business investment, and give tax breaks across the board, before spending trillions of dollars? Instead of reducing tax benefits for charitable giving (are they serious?), try increasing it? Why not?
I like this guy
You-tube made a world champion out of a British backbencher when he stripped the hide off of Prime Minister Gordon Brown when he made this speech at the European Union parliament in front of the prime minister. It was nothing new for Hannan, who is a relatively unknown but outspoken British politician and writer, but it was for the world. Hannan gets it and calling out the PM – unvarnished by political niceties – in front of his his peers with perfect British snarkiness is why he is an internet phenomena right now. Watch it on you-tube if you want to be entertained but here’s the text I pulled off of www.anorak.co.uk:
Prime Minister, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of this Parliament – that being to say one thing in this chamber, and a very different thing to your home electorate. You’ve spoken here about free trade, and amen to that; who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, and that you have subsidised - where you have not nationalised outright - swathes of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks.
Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this house if your actions matched your words. Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not going into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country.
The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.
Now once again today you tried to spread the blame around, you spoke about an international recession; an international crisis. Well, it is true that we are all sailing together into the squall – but not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear up their rigging – in other words, to pay off debt – but you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line, under the accumulated weight of your debt. We are now running a deficit that touches almost 10% of GDP – an unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan, more than Hungary – countries where the IMF has already been called in.
Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising - like everyone else, I’ve long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things - it’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening the situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year, in the last twelve months, 125,000 private sector jobs have been lost – and yet you’ve created 30,000 public sector jobs. Prime Minister you cannot go on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorging of the unproductive bit.
You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re well place to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era Apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is the worst placed to go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by 30% – and soon the voters, too, will get their chance to say so.
They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are a devalued Prime Minister, of a devalued Government.
Why can this independent (although he has also run as a conservative) from Britain get it and our congressmen and women can't? Why do so many people in this country believe that when you are in tremendous debt you should crush yourself under more debt or spending without having a way to pay for it? Here are our choices in the future – continuing borrowing, if possible, merely putting off the problem; create more dollars and thereby rampant inflation, or tax the hell out of people. It looks like they will go under the theory that if you have three bad choices, go with all three. Economic growth would be nice but it’s not going to happen under these conditions.
Of course, maybe we could get lucky and have the equivalent of WWII again. That got the ball rolling the last time.
Holy reprehensible, Batman
Some acts of public corruption are just so vile, such a gross violation of an office, such a perverse example of immoratily that it transcends all politics and just makes you sick.
That's how I feel about these animals in Pennsylvania, Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan. Trusted with a position enabling him to subject kids to incarceration, they took money from the juvenile detention halls as sentenced many children to government custody. It numbered in the hundreds. One of the custodial sentences was for stealing a $4 item. Another was for creating a satirical internet page mocking his teacher. The first kid should have got grounded for a week by his parents and working off ten times the money. The second kid should have had to face his teacher and gotten a tongue lashing.
They did it for money. Lots of money. 2.6 million dollars. There must be a lot of money in juvenile detention centers if the owner could afford that as a kick back. I hope that is a warning signal to municipalities around the globe to check and see what is going on in their jurisdictions.
Both Ciavarella and Conahan pled guilty. My understanding is that they face only seven years in prison. At the least, they should add up the time they gave to these kids and serve that without chance of parole. Seven years? Not enough.
I don't even care if most of those kids needed to go to a detention center. The public corruption outweighs whatever they did and if they unjustly benefit, so much the better. Another judge, Arthur Grim, has freed them in mass as they were not given the beneifit of knowing they had a right to a lawyer.
I'm not in favor of locking somebody up in bonds in the middle of the town commons, but if they ever come back with that, these two should head the list of penitents.
No charges have been made against the juvenile center or its owners. One of the owners claims that he was a victim of extortion. I guess they believe him. I hope at least they threatened his or his families life, because I don't know what else would justify his going along with this instead of going to the D.A.
Maddoff will spend his afterlife in Hell one ring higher than you two. May I say in conclusion, yccchh.
A word in defense of and in encouragement of our president
President Obama may indeed turn out to be a far worse president than Bush, but, as I spend so much time bashing him on the economy and for his $900 million gift to Hamas, I'd like a few in praise.
Your understanding, probably guided by military and your universally liked secretary of defense, Robert Gates, is superior to Bush's ruinous policies. I agree with your Iraq policy. It is responsible. We should get out and turn it over to the Iraqis with due care. I have no doubt if something occurs to speed up or slow down the process you will act on it. We can't stay there indefinitely because a few idiots occassionally blow themselves and others up. If the government can't maintain the peace, so costly bought, we can only go so far. Remember, our constitution guarantees us a republican form of government, not the Iraqis. However, if Iraq blows up, we should not abandon the Kurds and help arm the side we believe is in our best interest (although, we've screwed that up before).
You also seem to get Afghanistan. We need more there, not less. During Bush's terms the right was correct that we could not just abandon Iraqis now that we had gone that far. However, their ridicule of the left that Iraq was the center of the battle of international terrorism was, clearly, incorrect and political. Al Qaeda was there because we were there, not visa versa. My concern is that you will not send enough troops. Wrong. You want to spend. Spend there. Spend political capital too to get more NATO help there. We should not bear it alone. If they will not help, let's see how tough you are (you told us you were during the election).
We also need to learn to politically and/or militarilly engage with a new group - Pushtans, Pashtos, Pathans, etc., whatever you want to call them. The word comes from a Iranian language group and tribe, many of whom barely recognize, if at all, the Afghanistan/Pakistan border as a barrier. I do not mean to tar with one brush. I have no doubt that they have the same variation of beliefs and philosophies as other groups, but there is also no doubt that this ethnic group comprised of many tribes and clans will be largely responsible for returning Afghanistan to the Taliban (which is primarily a Pashtun group) if we let them, and that they are already succoring our other mortal enemy, Al Qaeda, as well. However much we have succeeded in damaging the Taliban and Al Quaeda, they are still our most desperate enemies and the ones who seem best placed to damage us in the future with a major terrorist act. As of right now, we cannot deal with this group directly, because they are not a government like Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet, if we don't recognize that our inability to engage with them is allowing a grave threat to us to continue, we are going to likely suffer the consequences.
I also think that you have at least some handle on Mexico although I'm not sure you recognize how serious it might become. I would rather taking that $900 million for Gaza and give it to the Mexican government under tight controls to eradicate the gains these murderous thugs have made. Mexico is a lot closer to us than Palestine. The danger to Palestinians of angry Israelis and visa versa is not as great as the danger to Mexico and us of these narco-killers. Thousands are dying in the cross-fire of gang warfare, many on the border of our own country.
But, while I'm on Mexico, you should have a word with your secretary of state. I understand your general policy - Bush did show an arrogance towards the world and we do need them, whatever my conservative friends think. That doesn't mean we should have to take the blame for everything bad in the world. It is idiotic to think that because we have a drug and gun market in this country that we are responsible for the actions of murderous Mexican gangs. Try and stem the control of guns south, no doubt, but do not blame us as a whole because of the irresponsibility or afflictions of some of us. Is it U.S. government policy to send guns to Mexican gangs or to allow them to sell drugs here. Obviously not. Do you blame Mexico as a whole because some of them are murderous thugs? No. Why do you then apply that standard to us then?
To be honest, there exists no political will to do anything much different. Though I believe a history exists which justifies my believing a McCain administration would have been considerably less egregious in spending, he would have probably taken the same general approach – the same one the Republicans took when Bush was in Power and they controlled congress – spend, spend, spend. It appears that the country, if you can believe the polls and not your own ears, is much in favor of these spending policies.
As always, the trouble is that the two ideologies, conservatism and liberalism, and their political fronts, the Democrats and the Republicans, have a lock on American politics to the degree that our citizenry now act as if these two paranoid (because the other side is usually motivated by evil) schizophrenic (because they both switch positions whenever it suits their purposes) actually own as property holders, all political positions and deserve all the power. When one party controls the administration and congress they become drunk with power and lose control of any sense of conscientiousness they might have had when they took power.
The other day a perfect example of the problem of the two party system came out. The Democrats let it be known that they were considering using a perfectly proper congressional tactic so that they could avoid the filibuster problem, the one way a minority in the senate can put the brakes on, by requiring only a majoriy as in the house of representatives to move legislation forward. The Republicans are apoplectic about it and the Democrats gleeful. The problem with this - unadulterated pure hypocrisy! When the Republican controlled both houses and the presidency they used precisely this tactic and the Democrats railed against it.
Yet, we are so used to this nauseating hypocrisy, we, as a people, are used to it, and don't require a change.
We get what we deserve. Less powerful politicians line up behind their cowardly hypocritical leaders on both sides and act with group think and with blind devotion. The few who try and break away from their team are attacked and ridiculed like Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Arlen Spector, etc., not only by those in power but by their followers in the real world, who actually identify with the extremists.
Take this part of a message I received about Joe Lieberman via email after last years' election from a self described “progressive," even though he and Lieberman probably agree on over 90 percent of political issues. “Joe Lieberman does nothing out of conscience. He is a sneaky, unprincipled, self serving, ugly old man. He should be ridiculed. And I’m pissed off at him.”
I wonder if his anger had anything to do with Lieberman's decision to back his good friend, John McCain, or his beating the Democrats by running as an independent when they refused him their nomination. Y' think?
In congress, even if you are an independent, you must caucus with one side or the other. The chairmen and women use their power to all but silence, in terms of substance, the other side. Instead of the guaranteed Republic of States we deserve, we are subservient to a congress of parties.
The most powerful tool to maintain party power is the use House of Representatives “Rules” committee which makes the “rules” for each piece of legislation. By this avenue, laws may be proposed open or closed – that is, open or closed to amendments. They can be partially open too, which doesn't do much more. Open on any controversial issue is rare. Usually, they are partially open or completely closed – freezing out the other side. Constitutionally, congress can make its own rules. But there are limits. It can't violate other sections of the constitution with impunity.
It seems like everyday there is another step towards what can only be described as a command economy. A few days ago it became public knowledge that Obama “fired” the CEO of GM. I’m sure “fired” is just a metaphor for it being let known to the CEO that he should leave asap. We’ll find out, of course, what kind of package he got for leaving. I guess it’s a secret that everyone can act shocked about when it becomes public knowledge. Then, today, we learn that congress is fixing to try to let Mr. Geithner determine any compensation he wants for companies that take TARP money (even if they were solvent and compelled to do so).
You don’t think that smacks of a command economy?
Timothy Geithner’s new plan, government control of corporations, is just grist for the mill in our leap forward to a command economy. Because people are so sensitized to pejorative terms like communist, we don’t use it so much– I don’t use it when I am arguing with someone. Even “socialism” causes hackles to rise. But that is precisely what is being put into effect now. By any label - it is government control of the means of production (and that is the definition of socialism – shhh).
But many act as if these new power grabs – government seizure and control of the policy decisions of private companies, are just fine or necessary. That we need regulation and we have to do this because we can’t trust the people in the businesses. Of course, we can’t trust them – that’s why we have anti-fraud laws, however poorly they can be enforced. And we do need regulation – but only the kind that doesn’t stomp on fair competition. That should not be an ideological statement, but it has been made so.
We are well past the point where government investment in business is a de minimis encroachment. Barney Frank should never have had the opportunity to say that we own 80% of AIG and they have to do what we say? That approach is a far greater problem than AIG's decision to honor its committments for bonuses to its employees. There are better approaches. Like letting AIG fail. Like letting other companies buy up the solvent parts of the company and letting the other parts fail. The recent outrage over a solvent bank which was forced to take TARP money by the government because they were doing business as usual and throwing a big party for clients, is another.
But you think you can trust people in government to be honest more than businessmen? Trust them not to be corrupt? Trust them not to make sweetheart deals with businessmen? Trust them not to do the revolving door thing as lobbyists? Trust them to what – predict the future and know better than people in an industry what choices that business should make?
One of my favorite lines from a movie (and I can’t find the exact quote online) was in Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson’s Shanghai Knights when Jackie locks his hands together for Owen to use as a springboard to make a tremendous leap upwards. Owen looks at Jackie and says something like “What in our experience together makes you think I can do something like that?”
I have the same question for the public. What in our experience with government makes you think that it (they) will be honest, fair and competent? If they couldn’t predict what the TARP beneficiaries would do with their money, or whether they wouldn’t tell us what they did with it, or that they would give big bonuses as planned, etc., what makes you think they can predict anything else.
So, it will be okay for Geithner or his replacement (my guess is he will not survive the 4 year term) to tell the corporate boards how much their CEO’s and other officers should be paid, but not okay to tell Lebron James how much he should make?
What’s next – telling companies how much to charge for their products or services. Don’t think so? Then you need to read up on the “New Deal,” the administration's blue print for what they were doing, where we actually did that, causing havoc?
The sad example of Jack Magid, a tailor during the 1930s has recently been resurrected of late with glee by opponents of government intervention. Magid was convicted under the National Recovery Act for selling his service for 35 cents a pair of pants instead of the 40 cents mandated by the “Tailors Code”. Magid, who barely spoke English was befuddled that the government could tell him how much to charge in America. He charged 35 cents because he did not have a great location and his competitive angle was to charge less. Of course, as consumers, you’d think this was a good thing. But his wife and children had to fend for themselves without him while he served time because the government thought it should tell him how to run his business.
Constitutional? Of course not and it was eventually ruled so, but not before people were fined, even jailed, because they were trying to run their business in the real world, not the world of averages and political expediency in which government operates.
No, I don’t want people like Bernie Madoff ripping people off – but let’s not pretend that it was not due to government incompetency instead of too little regulation. Government had all the power it needed and all the warning it needed to stop him years ago. His mistake. He didn't steal enough. Were he as big as AIG, the government might have given him money to make him solvent as he would be too big to fail. You think I'm joking, don't you?
I’m not sure where this is all headed. I’d like to think that we are not going to become completely socialistic, but no doubt we are heading in that direction right now. It is ironic that although many of us were alive during the Cold War, many people still believe that government control of industry will not result in more, not less, corruption and fraud.
The same self described progressive I mentioned earlier frequently tells me that he is happy in Obama that we have a president who can conceive a plan and carry it out. And I keep telling him that this is what frightens me. The idea that “smart” people can predict the future and make sure economic problems never happe again is utopianism and magical thinking. Does anyone notice that whether it’s Bush’s people or Obama’s or Congress – they can’t get it right? That’s because they can’t predict the future and should stop trying.
My own plan, you ask? Can we just try to increase tax benefits for things like capital improvements and business investment, and give tax breaks across the board, before spending trillions of dollars? Instead of reducing tax benefits for charitable giving (are they serious?), try increasing it? Why not?
I like this guy
You-tube made a world champion out of a British backbencher when he stripped the hide off of Prime Minister Gordon Brown when he made this speech at the European Union parliament in front of the prime minister. It was nothing new for Hannan, who is a relatively unknown but outspoken British politician and writer, but it was for the world. Hannan gets it and calling out the PM – unvarnished by political niceties – in front of his his peers with perfect British snarkiness is why he is an internet phenomena right now. Watch it on you-tube if you want to be entertained but here’s the text I pulled off of www.anorak.co.uk:
Prime Minister, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of this Parliament – that being to say one thing in this chamber, and a very different thing to your home electorate. You’ve spoken here about free trade, and amen to that; who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, and that you have subsidised - where you have not nationalised outright - swathes of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks.
Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this house if your actions matched your words. Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not going into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country.
The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.
Now once again today you tried to spread the blame around, you spoke about an international recession; an international crisis. Well, it is true that we are all sailing together into the squall – but not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear up their rigging – in other words, to pay off debt – but you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line, under the accumulated weight of your debt. We are now running a deficit that touches almost 10% of GDP – an unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan, more than Hungary – countries where the IMF has already been called in.
Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising - like everyone else, I’ve long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things - it’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening the situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year, in the last twelve months, 125,000 private sector jobs have been lost – and yet you’ve created 30,000 public sector jobs. Prime Minister you cannot go on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorging of the unproductive bit.
You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re well place to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era Apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is the worst placed to go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by 30% – and soon the voters, too, will get their chance to say so.
They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are a devalued Prime Minister, of a devalued Government.
Why can this independent (although he has also run as a conservative) from Britain get it and our congressmen and women can't? Why do so many people in this country believe that when you are in tremendous debt you should crush yourself under more debt or spending without having a way to pay for it? Here are our choices in the future – continuing borrowing, if possible, merely putting off the problem; create more dollars and thereby rampant inflation, or tax the hell out of people. It looks like they will go under the theory that if you have three bad choices, go with all three. Economic growth would be nice but it’s not going to happen under these conditions.
Of course, maybe we could get lucky and have the equivalent of WWII again. That got the ball rolling the last time.
Holy reprehensible, Batman
Some acts of public corruption are just so vile, such a gross violation of an office, such a perverse example of immoratily that it transcends all politics and just makes you sick.
That's how I feel about these animals in Pennsylvania, Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan. Trusted with a position enabling him to subject kids to incarceration, they took money from the juvenile detention halls as sentenced many children to government custody. It numbered in the hundreds. One of the custodial sentences was for stealing a $4 item. Another was for creating a satirical internet page mocking his teacher. The first kid should have got grounded for a week by his parents and working off ten times the money. The second kid should have had to face his teacher and gotten a tongue lashing.
They did it for money. Lots of money. 2.6 million dollars. There must be a lot of money in juvenile detention centers if the owner could afford that as a kick back. I hope that is a warning signal to municipalities around the globe to check and see what is going on in their jurisdictions.
Both Ciavarella and Conahan pled guilty. My understanding is that they face only seven years in prison. At the least, they should add up the time they gave to these kids and serve that without chance of parole. Seven years? Not enough.
I don't even care if most of those kids needed to go to a detention center. The public corruption outweighs whatever they did and if they unjustly benefit, so much the better. Another judge, Arthur Grim, has freed them in mass as they were not given the beneifit of knowing they had a right to a lawyer.
I'm not in favor of locking somebody up in bonds in the middle of the town commons, but if they ever come back with that, these two should head the list of penitents.
No charges have been made against the juvenile center or its owners. One of the owners claims that he was a victim of extortion. I guess they believe him. I hope at least they threatened his or his families life, because I don't know what else would justify his going along with this instead of going to the D.A.
Maddoff will spend his afterlife in Hell one ring higher than you two. May I say in conclusion, yccchh.
A word in defense of and in encouragement of our president
President Obama may indeed turn out to be a far worse president than Bush, but, as I spend so much time bashing him on the economy and for his $900 million gift to Hamas, I'd like a few in praise.
Your understanding, probably guided by military and your universally liked secretary of defense, Robert Gates, is superior to Bush's ruinous policies. I agree with your Iraq policy. It is responsible. We should get out and turn it over to the Iraqis with due care. I have no doubt if something occurs to speed up or slow down the process you will act on it. We can't stay there indefinitely because a few idiots occassionally blow themselves and others up. If the government can't maintain the peace, so costly bought, we can only go so far. Remember, our constitution guarantees us a republican form of government, not the Iraqis. However, if Iraq blows up, we should not abandon the Kurds and help arm the side we believe is in our best interest (although, we've screwed that up before).
You also seem to get Afghanistan. We need more there, not less. During Bush's terms the right was correct that we could not just abandon Iraqis now that we had gone that far. However, their ridicule of the left that Iraq was the center of the battle of international terrorism was, clearly, incorrect and political. Al Qaeda was there because we were there, not visa versa. My concern is that you will not send enough troops. Wrong. You want to spend. Spend there. Spend political capital too to get more NATO help there. We should not bear it alone. If they will not help, let's see how tough you are (you told us you were during the election).
We also need to learn to politically and/or militarilly engage with a new group - Pushtans, Pashtos, Pathans, etc., whatever you want to call them. The word comes from a Iranian language group and tribe, many of whom barely recognize, if at all, the Afghanistan/Pakistan border as a barrier. I do not mean to tar with one brush. I have no doubt that they have the same variation of beliefs and philosophies as other groups, but there is also no doubt that this ethnic group comprised of many tribes and clans will be largely responsible for returning Afghanistan to the Taliban (which is primarily a Pashtun group) if we let them, and that they are already succoring our other mortal enemy, Al Qaeda, as well. However much we have succeeded in damaging the Taliban and Al Quaeda, they are still our most desperate enemies and the ones who seem best placed to damage us in the future with a major terrorist act. As of right now, we cannot deal with this group directly, because they are not a government like Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet, if we don't recognize that our inability to engage with them is allowing a grave threat to us to continue, we are going to likely suffer the consequences.
I also think that you have at least some handle on Mexico although I'm not sure you recognize how serious it might become. I would rather taking that $900 million for Gaza and give it to the Mexican government under tight controls to eradicate the gains these murderous thugs have made. Mexico is a lot closer to us than Palestine. The danger to Palestinians of angry Israelis and visa versa is not as great as the danger to Mexico and us of these narco-killers. Thousands are dying in the cross-fire of gang warfare, many on the border of our own country.
But, while I'm on Mexico, you should have a word with your secretary of state. I understand your general policy - Bush did show an arrogance towards the world and we do need them, whatever my conservative friends think. That doesn't mean we should have to take the blame for everything bad in the world. It is idiotic to think that because we have a drug and gun market in this country that we are responsible for the actions of murderous Mexican gangs. Try and stem the control of guns south, no doubt, but do not blame us as a whole because of the irresponsibility or afflictions of some of us. Is it U.S. government policy to send guns to Mexican gangs or to allow them to sell drugs here. Obviously not. Do you blame Mexico as a whole because some of them are murderous thugs? No. Why do you then apply that standard to us then?
So ease up just a little on the humility pedal. You know, it's not enough that you try and emulate Lincoln by bringing Biden and Clinton into your inner circle. You need the strength to be the boss too.
Does it bother anyone that -
while AIG was self destructing AIG's executives contributed over $630,000 to political parties and candidates?
That a substantial amount, at least $120,000 was contributed after they received $85 billion in government money?
That Obama recieved $130,000 from AIG in 2008, while McCain nearly $60,000?
Shouldn't politicians at least say how much they have received from companies that are getting millions or billions of dollars?
I'm not saying Obama has done anything wrong, necessarily, or that McCain would have done anything different just because he got less, just that it is very hard to tell the difference when there is a quid pro quo, and that is part of the problem with our political system. I am thankful though, that the internet has made this information available to all of us. Otherwise, we'd have to wait for a tell all book years after it happened.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Natasha Richardson and the culture of fear
Here we go again. A famous person dies from something and all of our lives must change.
I didn’t know much about Natasha Richardson. She looks beautiful and people seem to think she was a good actress. Her death, as sad as any other, is perplexing. Perhaps there are those who worked on her before her death who have an idea of why what seemed like a minor fall caused such severe trauma to her head leading to her death. It seems to me based on anecdotal evidence only, that people suspect that there was a problem before her fall and it was just waiting to happen. But, in this media mad world, she has become a part of the culture of fear.
Like most people, I’ve taken some blows to the head. When I was a child I fell maybe 6 feet when a tree branch cracked while I was swinging upside down. It hurt, but nothing much happened to me. In high school, an idiot slugged me in the back of the head for no reason whatsoever. It hurt for a few minutes and then felt better. Wrestling around with friends occasionally led to accidental blows to the skull, but never with any grave result. Those times, we were the idiots.
I even had a bizarre ski accident when I was gliding in for the day and was struck from the rear by another idiot. My arm flew in front of me as I tumbled forward and my pole stuck into the ground vertically. My forehead followed suite, smashing into the end of the firmly planted pole. I wasn’t knocked unconscious but was laid out. I crawled off the slope and slowly walked to my car where I sat for a half hour before driving home. That was the biggest blow I ever took but it had no lasting effect. It had no lasting effect. It had no lasting effect. No lasting effect. No lasting effect. No . . .
At least not that I know about.
The question comes up, of course, in this situation, is whether and to what extent the government will decide that we can’t make decisions for ourselves and they will require us to wear head gear. This is only part of a larger argument, of course, as to how much the government should be protecting us in the first place.
Let’s be clear. It is axiomatic that the states have the power to make us do what they want when it comes to our safety under what is sometimes called the police power. Due to the huge expansion of the meaning of the commerce clause in the constitution, the federal government has extraordinary power to do so also as long as they claim it has something to do with interstate commerce.
But even though that ship has long sailed, we can still talk about whether it should be that way. Start with motorcycles. Some states require motorcycle riders to wear helmets and they also specify the qualities of those helmets. For example, in New York, those ornamental biker gang helmets that look like Sergeant Shultz should be wearing it, are no good.
I once researched the probability of getting injured on a motorcycle as compared to when in an automobile. It’s harder than it looks as real good statistics for it are difficult to find. It suffices to say that your odds are far worse on the motorcycle than in a car. As far as I could tell there was roughly sixteen times more likelihood of injury and four times the likelihood of death, or thereabouts. That there is a huge difference is of course, obvious (although the otherwise intelligent motorcycle rider I was arguing with it about didn’t think so).
Personally, I think you would have to be crazy not to wear a motorcycle helmet. But once we accept that it is okay for the government to tell us we must wear one, and agree on how dangerous it is not to do so, it should not be surprising when some legislator asks why they are allowed to ride a motorcycle at all? I’m not advocating that – I’m looking at the future of our increasingly over-regulated world where choices are routinely taken away from us.
Think about it this way. In a car, we are all required to wear seatbelts in the front seat. We are required to have kids under 14 (NY) wear them in the back seats. Additionally, the automobile manufacturers must follow strict guidelines as to the crashworthiness of the vehicle itself, on the front and sides. We also have in new cars – air bags. You would not be allowed to ride down the road without a windshield with safety glass and bumpers that could withstand at least a minor bump.
Now, take motorcycles. You are riding down the street without the protection of a car around you, or a strong windshield. There is no seatbelt at all. Moreover, you are on two wheels, which means you can easily slip and crash, unlike riding in a car which is quite difficult to turn over. A minor accident won't cause whiplash; it will have you flying dozens of feet or more through the air onto a hard pavement or into other vehicles. This, of course, is the reason that insurance companies don’t have to give no-fault coverage to motorcycles and why we know so many people who have been seriously injured on one or even fatally injured. Actually, I don't think motorcycles riders should be allowed to sue for personal injuries in most cases because they are voluntarily increasing their risk.
Motorcycles have been around as since the 1800s, so it will be difficult for the pols to get rid of them, but we’ve only started doing things like banning cigarettes in restaurants recently. It is growing. One day, some politician is going to look at the obvious danger of motorcycles and they will ban them for kids, say those under 18. Of course, once they ban motorcycles for kids, everyone will notice how much their death rate goes down. And then they will make it for those under 25. After all, the insurance companies know how bad drivers are under 25 (or, in my case, under 75). And then, possibly they will ban them for everyone. If you haven’t noticed the government has no problem with telling you that you aren’t allowed to risk your life when they don’t want you to. First they made restaurants have smoke free rooms or ventilation systems before they started outright banning them in public indoor spots. So, if it seems farfetched now, wait a few years.
But, once the government makes us all safer by getting rid of motorcycles (I think there would be an armed rebellion right now; they need a few more years to keep regulating the freedom out of us) they might up the ante with cars. Believe it.
For example, it is also an undeniable fact that the death rate for cars goes up dramatically as you add teenage boys to the car. When you put four teenage boys in a car you are taking tremendous risks. As a former teenage boy who went with a fairly reasonable bunch of friends, I can tell you that we drove like morons, sometimes racing around in traffic, even on ice. Would a law forbidding new male drivers to have other young men as passengers surprise anyone in a world where little kids are suspended from school for hugging or kissing a friend.
How about helmets for kids in cars? If kids need them on skis and the risk is so low, why not cars? Despite the ridiculous fear mongering of the media,the serious head trauma from car accidents dwarfs those from skiing accidents. Don't think it's going to happen, huh?
Take these statistics from a website – www.caregiver.org - which I’ve summarized below:
There are two million head injuries of all types (including skull and facial fractures) every year (U. S.), 1.5 million are nonfatal traumatic brain injuries, not requiring hospitalization. About the same number sustain a brain injury with loss of consciousness but not severe enough to result in long-term institutionalization. Another 300,000 require hospitalization, with 99,000 suffering a lasting disability. About 56,000 people die each year from traumatic brain injury (“TMI”). TMI accounts for roughly 34% of all injury deaths in the United States. It affects males at twice the rate of females. Men are also more likely to suffer severe injuries. Kids 15 to 24 are the biggest risks, but it starts increasing again for those over 60. Brain injuries from motor vehicle accidents have actually been substantially reduced since the 80s (down 25%), no doubt due to increased seat belt use and increased vigilance against drunk or impaired driving. Firearm related TMI has dramatically increased in the same period of time (down 13%). About 5% to 10% of skiing accidents result in head injuries.
I can’t help but notice that the website changed its way to describe the statistics when it came to skiing. Instead of saying what percentage of TMI was related to an activity, it said what percentage of skiing accidents resulted in head injury (but not traumatic brain injury). This was a little disingenuous and made ski accidents seem more dangerous than they deserve. For example, where about 56,000 people are dying from TMI over the course of a year, ski deaths from all reasons average about 39 every year – in other words an infintissmal percentage. And that includes deaths from avalanches and people skiing off the slopes.
Moreover, although helmet use has greatly increased, it has not been shown to have lowered deaths. Even advocates of helmet use recognize that it reduces minor injuries, not major ones, and that it almost certainly increases reckless skiing.
That won’t stop the media from writing articles suggesting that mandatory helmet wearing is coming for skiiers. I hope it won’t. I also hope that they won’t start requiring kids to wear helmets in cars, although it will clearly save many lives. Some things should just remain our choice.
When my daughter was growing up, I made the choice that she did not have to ski with a helmet or ride a bike with one (unless a friend was over and they had to wear one). No doubt many parents (let me risk the usual charge of sexism and say more mothers than fathers) will say that was irresponsible. These are the same parents who told me the other day it was irresponsible when I let my daughter take care of herself at 16 when I went on vacation (she had her mother around and friends families nearby – I have my limits too) or told me shouldn’t be allowed to walk to a nearby friend’s house at night even though we lived in one of the safest areas in the whole country.
Peer pressure is powerful, and even though I often bucked the trend as much as I could, I hoped to my kid’s benefit in developing resourcefulness, self sufficiency and real self-esteem (not the self-esteem educators and parents seem to think come to your kid by constantly telling them they are wonderful and always win), I admit that I sometimes limited her based on other parents and cultural fears. It’s not that I think all these people are bad parents, but I do believe that our culture has taken a very wrong turn in the freedom we deny our kids out of fear.
The future will likely increase our fear of injuries the way 24 hour cable coverage of every little white girl who gets kidnapped has convinced parents that there are predators everywhere even though non-family kidnappings are pretty much as rare as they ever were. They can now put a chip in your dog with GPS, so that you can find it when they are lost. How soon before we do that with babies? How soon before other parents tell you that you are irresponsible if you implant GPS in your kid, or before the state or federal government tells us that you must?
That much predictive ability I can’t claim. Maybe our grandkids, maybe their kids. But, it’s going to happen. Every day someone else surprises me with how laissez faire people are about government control. But, step by step . . . .
Soon I'll be wearing an aluminum foil hat and checking the skies for helicopters with men in black suits.
I didn’t know much about Natasha Richardson. She looks beautiful and people seem to think she was a good actress. Her death, as sad as any other, is perplexing. Perhaps there are those who worked on her before her death who have an idea of why what seemed like a minor fall caused such severe trauma to her head leading to her death. It seems to me based on anecdotal evidence only, that people suspect that there was a problem before her fall and it was just waiting to happen. But, in this media mad world, she has become a part of the culture of fear.
Like most people, I’ve taken some blows to the head. When I was a child I fell maybe 6 feet when a tree branch cracked while I was swinging upside down. It hurt, but nothing much happened to me. In high school, an idiot slugged me in the back of the head for no reason whatsoever. It hurt for a few minutes and then felt better. Wrestling around with friends occasionally led to accidental blows to the skull, but never with any grave result. Those times, we were the idiots.
I even had a bizarre ski accident when I was gliding in for the day and was struck from the rear by another idiot. My arm flew in front of me as I tumbled forward and my pole stuck into the ground vertically. My forehead followed suite, smashing into the end of the firmly planted pole. I wasn’t knocked unconscious but was laid out. I crawled off the slope and slowly walked to my car where I sat for a half hour before driving home. That was the biggest blow I ever took but it had no lasting effect. It had no lasting effect. It had no lasting effect. No lasting effect. No lasting effect. No . . .
At least not that I know about.
The question comes up, of course, in this situation, is whether and to what extent the government will decide that we can’t make decisions for ourselves and they will require us to wear head gear. This is only part of a larger argument, of course, as to how much the government should be protecting us in the first place.
Let’s be clear. It is axiomatic that the states have the power to make us do what they want when it comes to our safety under what is sometimes called the police power. Due to the huge expansion of the meaning of the commerce clause in the constitution, the federal government has extraordinary power to do so also as long as they claim it has something to do with interstate commerce.
But even though that ship has long sailed, we can still talk about whether it should be that way. Start with motorcycles. Some states require motorcycle riders to wear helmets and they also specify the qualities of those helmets. For example, in New York, those ornamental biker gang helmets that look like Sergeant Shultz should be wearing it, are no good.
I once researched the probability of getting injured on a motorcycle as compared to when in an automobile. It’s harder than it looks as real good statistics for it are difficult to find. It suffices to say that your odds are far worse on the motorcycle than in a car. As far as I could tell there was roughly sixteen times more likelihood of injury and four times the likelihood of death, or thereabouts. That there is a huge difference is of course, obvious (although the otherwise intelligent motorcycle rider I was arguing with it about didn’t think so).
Personally, I think you would have to be crazy not to wear a motorcycle helmet. But once we accept that it is okay for the government to tell us we must wear one, and agree on how dangerous it is not to do so, it should not be surprising when some legislator asks why they are allowed to ride a motorcycle at all? I’m not advocating that – I’m looking at the future of our increasingly over-regulated world where choices are routinely taken away from us.
Think about it this way. In a car, we are all required to wear seatbelts in the front seat. We are required to have kids under 14 (NY) wear them in the back seats. Additionally, the automobile manufacturers must follow strict guidelines as to the crashworthiness of the vehicle itself, on the front and sides. We also have in new cars – air bags. You would not be allowed to ride down the road without a windshield with safety glass and bumpers that could withstand at least a minor bump.
Now, take motorcycles. You are riding down the street without the protection of a car around you, or a strong windshield. There is no seatbelt at all. Moreover, you are on two wheels, which means you can easily slip and crash, unlike riding in a car which is quite difficult to turn over. A minor accident won't cause whiplash; it will have you flying dozens of feet or more through the air onto a hard pavement or into other vehicles. This, of course, is the reason that insurance companies don’t have to give no-fault coverage to motorcycles and why we know so many people who have been seriously injured on one or even fatally injured. Actually, I don't think motorcycles riders should be allowed to sue for personal injuries in most cases because they are voluntarily increasing their risk.
Motorcycles have been around as since the 1800s, so it will be difficult for the pols to get rid of them, but we’ve only started doing things like banning cigarettes in restaurants recently. It is growing. One day, some politician is going to look at the obvious danger of motorcycles and they will ban them for kids, say those under 18. Of course, once they ban motorcycles for kids, everyone will notice how much their death rate goes down. And then they will make it for those under 25. After all, the insurance companies know how bad drivers are under 25 (or, in my case, under 75). And then, possibly they will ban them for everyone. If you haven’t noticed the government has no problem with telling you that you aren’t allowed to risk your life when they don’t want you to. First they made restaurants have smoke free rooms or ventilation systems before they started outright banning them in public indoor spots. So, if it seems farfetched now, wait a few years.
But, once the government makes us all safer by getting rid of motorcycles (I think there would be an armed rebellion right now; they need a few more years to keep regulating the freedom out of us) they might up the ante with cars. Believe it.
For example, it is also an undeniable fact that the death rate for cars goes up dramatically as you add teenage boys to the car. When you put four teenage boys in a car you are taking tremendous risks. As a former teenage boy who went with a fairly reasonable bunch of friends, I can tell you that we drove like morons, sometimes racing around in traffic, even on ice. Would a law forbidding new male drivers to have other young men as passengers surprise anyone in a world where little kids are suspended from school for hugging or kissing a friend.
How about helmets for kids in cars? If kids need them on skis and the risk is so low, why not cars? Despite the ridiculous fear mongering of the media,the serious head trauma from car accidents dwarfs those from skiing accidents. Don't think it's going to happen, huh?
Take these statistics from a website – www.caregiver.org - which I’ve summarized below:
There are two million head injuries of all types (including skull and facial fractures) every year (U. S.), 1.5 million are nonfatal traumatic brain injuries, not requiring hospitalization. About the same number sustain a brain injury with loss of consciousness but not severe enough to result in long-term institutionalization. Another 300,000 require hospitalization, with 99,000 suffering a lasting disability. About 56,000 people die each year from traumatic brain injury (“TMI”). TMI accounts for roughly 34% of all injury deaths in the United States. It affects males at twice the rate of females. Men are also more likely to suffer severe injuries. Kids 15 to 24 are the biggest risks, but it starts increasing again for those over 60. Brain injuries from motor vehicle accidents have actually been substantially reduced since the 80s (down 25%), no doubt due to increased seat belt use and increased vigilance against drunk or impaired driving. Firearm related TMI has dramatically increased in the same period of time (down 13%). About 5% to 10% of skiing accidents result in head injuries.
I can’t help but notice that the website changed its way to describe the statistics when it came to skiing. Instead of saying what percentage of TMI was related to an activity, it said what percentage of skiing accidents resulted in head injury (but not traumatic brain injury). This was a little disingenuous and made ski accidents seem more dangerous than they deserve. For example, where about 56,000 people are dying from TMI over the course of a year, ski deaths from all reasons average about 39 every year – in other words an infintissmal percentage. And that includes deaths from avalanches and people skiing off the slopes.
Moreover, although helmet use has greatly increased, it has not been shown to have lowered deaths. Even advocates of helmet use recognize that it reduces minor injuries, not major ones, and that it almost certainly increases reckless skiing.
That won’t stop the media from writing articles suggesting that mandatory helmet wearing is coming for skiiers. I hope it won’t. I also hope that they won’t start requiring kids to wear helmets in cars, although it will clearly save many lives. Some things should just remain our choice.
When my daughter was growing up, I made the choice that she did not have to ski with a helmet or ride a bike with one (unless a friend was over and they had to wear one). No doubt many parents (let me risk the usual charge of sexism and say more mothers than fathers) will say that was irresponsible. These are the same parents who told me the other day it was irresponsible when I let my daughter take care of herself at 16 when I went on vacation (she had her mother around and friends families nearby – I have my limits too) or told me shouldn’t be allowed to walk to a nearby friend’s house at night even though we lived in one of the safest areas in the whole country.
Peer pressure is powerful, and even though I often bucked the trend as much as I could, I hoped to my kid’s benefit in developing resourcefulness, self sufficiency and real self-esteem (not the self-esteem educators and parents seem to think come to your kid by constantly telling them they are wonderful and always win), I admit that I sometimes limited her based on other parents and cultural fears. It’s not that I think all these people are bad parents, but I do believe that our culture has taken a very wrong turn in the freedom we deny our kids out of fear.
The future will likely increase our fear of injuries the way 24 hour cable coverage of every little white girl who gets kidnapped has convinced parents that there are predators everywhere even though non-family kidnappings are pretty much as rare as they ever were. They can now put a chip in your dog with GPS, so that you can find it when they are lost. How soon before we do that with babies? How soon before other parents tell you that you are irresponsible if you implant GPS in your kid, or before the state or federal government tells us that you must?
That much predictive ability I can’t claim. Maybe our grandkids, maybe their kids. But, it’s going to happen. Every day someone else surprises me with how laissez faire people are about government control. But, step by step . . . .
Soon I'll be wearing an aluminum foil hat and checking the skies for helicopters with men in black suits.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Channeling Longfellow
I can write a story. I can write an essay. But I can’t write a poem. Never could.
In high school a teacher asked if he could publish the one poem I wrote during his creative writing class. It was barely a poem at all. It was, though, completely atheistic, which I guess he found edgy. So, he published it after I had forgotten all about it. It pissed off some other students and even teachers. I started receiving reports that I was going to get beaten up - the old beat God into him theory. I really didn’t think anyone was going to do it, and, I think I recall being a little flattered at the attention, although I certainly didn't wanted my ass kicked. The next day I walked past one of the kids who was supposedly going to beat me up and we just said hello. So, perhaps it was mere talk and it was forgotten about pretty quickly. There must be a point to all that, but, I think it just shows that not only can I not write poetry, but I probably shouldn’t.
Truth be told, as much as I love beautiful prose, I really don’t like most poetry that much. More than a few lines and my eyes start to wander. Why can't they just say what they want to say? Some poets I really hate – T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, to name two.
Now, there are some poems I do like, even love, just like there are actually some rap songs I like (Momma said knock you out, for one), but more poems than rap songs. Perhaps not all of them would be considered great poetry by others, but there are few things more subjective.
All I know is that these poems either inspired me to try to be a certain way or I was attracted to them because of who I aspired to be - I'm not sure it is possible to tell the difference. I am not counting poetry in other languages (e.g., Homer - how can we judge another language?) or beautiful prose (why some of John Donne’s work is called prose and not poetry I have no idea) and speeches like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or Second Inauguration text. I leave aside Shakespeare’s plays as unique and deserving of a category of their own. I have never enjoyed his sonnets although I have given them some attention.
I’ll start with poetry from my youth.
If called by a panther
don’t anther.
My mother owned a book of poetry by Ogden Nash, who wrote short and very silly rhyming poems such as the above. As with most people, I like rhyming. I have trouble reading poetry that doesn’t rhyme unless it has a very strong rhythm. Freestyle poetry is so often just prose without the grammar.
Here’s another gem from Nash:
Senescence begins
And middle age ends
The day your descendents
Outnumber your friends.
And
The Lord in His wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why.
So distinctive was Nash's style, that some of his most famous poems weren’t actually his. That is, they sound so much like his, he got the credit. You can even find them attributed to him in books and online. Here are two I know about:
Fleas
Adam
Had’em
That’s by Strickland Gillian, who I never heard of other than to know this little fact, but, I think he is well known among poets and poetry lovers. Another Nash-alike is this:
A wonderful bird is a pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week;
But I'm damned if I see how the helican.
That one was by Dixon Lanire Meredith, who I also never heard of before. I’m not even sure if Dixon is a he or she. In the age of Wikipedia, it takes but a few clicks to find out, but I’ll leave it to you (I don’t care that much and I've indulged in way too much useless trivia).
Anyway, I am not limited to the totally unsophisticated. That would bring us to Edgar Allan Poe who wrote what is for me a long poem, but so full of rhythm and ambience, I am hoping that it is still on grade school curriculums:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore -
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
'Tis some visitor', I muttered, 'tapping at my chamber door:
Only this and nothing more'.
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor,
Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Nameless here for evermore.
Poe was a unique talent who arguably invented the modern detective story, and I can't think of any literary genre more successful than that. The whole poem is too long for here but not too long to read and enjoy.
A little more sophisticated than Poe perhaps and just as good to my mind is Robert Frost, whose The Road Not Taken has been used by so many people as a metaphor for life that the title has become iconic. Here's an interesting tidbit. Of the first 24 books that popped up on Amazon.com when I checked under that title, 14 of them had nothing to do with the poem or Frost, they just used The Road Not Taken it or a variation, probably because of the recognizability of the metaphor.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Now there'a a man who knew how long poems should be. Almost as well loved as The Road Not Taken, but a little longer and denser is Mending Wall which ends with “Good fences make good neighbors.” He didn’t invent the phrase (Wolfgang Mieder has a wonderful article on who did at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2386/ is_2_114/ai_106981965/pg_2?tag=content;col1, but once you’ve read the poem it is hard to hear it without thinking of Frost.
From Frost, I pop over to a poem that I deem the most romantic and sad at the same time. It’s called Maud Muller and it was written by John Greenleaf Whittier. It’s about a ‘love not taken’ because of class differences. The immortal line is this:
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
I tried this line on a few women in my time in an effort at seduction with the results being on the negative side. It got a couple of “Aws,” but never worked. Maybe I should have tried Odgen Nash.
Then there was the one my mother liked to quote from Whittier – a line or so anyway from Barbara Frietchie, of which I only add a few more lines – but the best ones:
Up the street came the rebel tread,
Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.
Under his slouched hat left and right
He glanced; the old flag met his sight.
'Halt!' - the dust-brown ranks stood fast.
'Fire!' - out blazed the rifle-blast.
It shivered the window, pane and sash;
It rent the banner with seam and gash.
Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf.
She leaned far out on the window-sill,
And shook it forth with a royal will.
'Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country's flag,' she said.
We come now to my favorites. The first of these is from one of the immortals, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I liked him when young because I loved the woods and so did he. I tried to read him and did better than I had with most poetry. I believe he is the only pure poet in my library. The truth was, I only really enjoyed a few of his poems. I wasn’t all that crazy about Evangeline, A Tale of Arcadie, too long for one thing, but I identified with the beginning:
THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
But much more so, I love this next Longfellow poem, also quite long, but so perfect to my ear, I’ve read it several times in my life, even a few years ago. He borrowed the meter from a Finnish national epic, The Kalevala. There is only room here for the beginning to The Song of Hiawatha:
Should you ask me, whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odors of the forest
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,
With the rushing of great rivers,
With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations
As of thunder in the mountains?
I should answer, I should tell you,
"From the forests and the prairies,
From the great lakes of the Northland,
From the land of the Ojibways,
From the land of the Dacotahs,
From the mountains, moors, and fen-lands
Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,
Feeds among the reeds and rushes.
I repeat them as I heard them
From the lips of Nawadaha,
The musician, the sweet singer."
Should you ask where Nawadaha
Found these songs so wild and wayward,
Found these legends and traditions,
I should answer, I should tell you,
"In the bird's-nests of the forest,
In the lodges of the beaver,
In the hoofprint of the bison,
In the eyry of the eagle!"
It was as enchanting to my forest laden mind as Peter Pan. If it is even possible anymore for you to take a hike into the woods one day and sit by yourself without your cell phone and PDA, without having to rush home to watch something on tv, or do some work, or run an errand (this is a good question to ask yourself anyway), I could not recommend taking anything with you than The Song of Hiawatha, unless it is something by Thoreau.
Yet even Hiawatha must fall in a line behind two other poems, the first of which is quite short and comes in the words of a good hearted elephant named Horton, penned by the greatest children’s author of all time:
I meant what I said
And I said what I meant . . . ,
An elephant’s faithful
One hundred per cent.
Why do I love that so? I don’t know, but I think of it all the time. The thought of loveable Horton, emphatic in doing just as he promised regardless of the consequences, and knowing that Lazy Mayzie was off enjoying herself somewhere, not doing her duty, is a beacon for our faithless times and I quote it often (perhaps obnoxiously, but even so). Even when we fail, Horton reminds us that we should try.
But the award for my number one favorite poem goes to the one with the shortest title I know, and damn if it doesn't rhyme either. Go figure. I have quoted it in these digital pages before, perhaps more than once. Ten times wouldn’t be too much. It is the most inspirational poem, at least for me, and I've made sure my daughter has read it too, even if Rudyard Kipling wrote it for his son. Times have changed.
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
As I cannot choose better, I will stop here.
In high school a teacher asked if he could publish the one poem I wrote during his creative writing class. It was barely a poem at all. It was, though, completely atheistic, which I guess he found edgy. So, he published it after I had forgotten all about it. It pissed off some other students and even teachers. I started receiving reports that I was going to get beaten up - the old beat God into him theory. I really didn’t think anyone was going to do it, and, I think I recall being a little flattered at the attention, although I certainly didn't wanted my ass kicked. The next day I walked past one of the kids who was supposedly going to beat me up and we just said hello. So, perhaps it was mere talk and it was forgotten about pretty quickly. There must be a point to all that, but, I think it just shows that not only can I not write poetry, but I probably shouldn’t.
Truth be told, as much as I love beautiful prose, I really don’t like most poetry that much. More than a few lines and my eyes start to wander. Why can't they just say what they want to say? Some poets I really hate – T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, to name two.
Now, there are some poems I do like, even love, just like there are actually some rap songs I like (Momma said knock you out, for one), but more poems than rap songs. Perhaps not all of them would be considered great poetry by others, but there are few things more subjective.
All I know is that these poems either inspired me to try to be a certain way or I was attracted to them because of who I aspired to be - I'm not sure it is possible to tell the difference. I am not counting poetry in other languages (e.g., Homer - how can we judge another language?) or beautiful prose (why some of John Donne’s work is called prose and not poetry I have no idea) and speeches like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or Second Inauguration text. I leave aside Shakespeare’s plays as unique and deserving of a category of their own. I have never enjoyed his sonnets although I have given them some attention.
I’ll start with poetry from my youth.
If called by a panther
don’t anther.
My mother owned a book of poetry by Ogden Nash, who wrote short and very silly rhyming poems such as the above. As with most people, I like rhyming. I have trouble reading poetry that doesn’t rhyme unless it has a very strong rhythm. Freestyle poetry is so often just prose without the grammar.
Here’s another gem from Nash:
Senescence begins
And middle age ends
The day your descendents
Outnumber your friends.
And
The Lord in His wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why.
So distinctive was Nash's style, that some of his most famous poems weren’t actually his. That is, they sound so much like his, he got the credit. You can even find them attributed to him in books and online. Here are two I know about:
Fleas
Adam
Had’em
That’s by Strickland Gillian, who I never heard of other than to know this little fact, but, I think he is well known among poets and poetry lovers. Another Nash-alike is this:
A wonderful bird is a pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week;
But I'm damned if I see how the helican.
That one was by Dixon Lanire Meredith, who I also never heard of before. I’m not even sure if Dixon is a he or she. In the age of Wikipedia, it takes but a few clicks to find out, but I’ll leave it to you (I don’t care that much and I've indulged in way too much useless trivia).
Anyway, I am not limited to the totally unsophisticated. That would bring us to Edgar Allan Poe who wrote what is for me a long poem, but so full of rhythm and ambience, I am hoping that it is still on grade school curriculums:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore -
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
'Tis some visitor', I muttered, 'tapping at my chamber door:
Only this and nothing more'.
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor,
Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Nameless here for evermore.
Poe was a unique talent who arguably invented the modern detective story, and I can't think of any literary genre more successful than that. The whole poem is too long for here but not too long to read and enjoy.
A little more sophisticated than Poe perhaps and just as good to my mind is Robert Frost, whose The Road Not Taken has been used by so many people as a metaphor for life that the title has become iconic. Here's an interesting tidbit. Of the first 24 books that popped up on Amazon.com when I checked under that title, 14 of them had nothing to do with the poem or Frost, they just used The Road Not Taken it or a variation, probably because of the recognizability of the metaphor.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Now there'a a man who knew how long poems should be. Almost as well loved as The Road Not Taken, but a little longer and denser is Mending Wall which ends with “Good fences make good neighbors.” He didn’t invent the phrase (Wolfgang Mieder has a wonderful article on who did at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2386/ is_2_114/ai_106981965/pg_2?tag=content;col1, but once you’ve read the poem it is hard to hear it without thinking of Frost.
From Frost, I pop over to a poem that I deem the most romantic and sad at the same time. It’s called Maud Muller and it was written by John Greenleaf Whittier. It’s about a ‘love not taken’ because of class differences. The immortal line is this:
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
I tried this line on a few women in my time in an effort at seduction with the results being on the negative side. It got a couple of “Aws,” but never worked. Maybe I should have tried Odgen Nash.
Then there was the one my mother liked to quote from Whittier – a line or so anyway from Barbara Frietchie, of which I only add a few more lines – but the best ones:
Up the street came the rebel tread,
Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.
Under his slouched hat left and right
He glanced; the old flag met his sight.
'Halt!' - the dust-brown ranks stood fast.
'Fire!' - out blazed the rifle-blast.
It shivered the window, pane and sash;
It rent the banner with seam and gash.
Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf.
She leaned far out on the window-sill,
And shook it forth with a royal will.
'Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country's flag,' she said.
We come now to my favorites. The first of these is from one of the immortals, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I liked him when young because I loved the woods and so did he. I tried to read him and did better than I had with most poetry. I believe he is the only pure poet in my library. The truth was, I only really enjoyed a few of his poems. I wasn’t all that crazy about Evangeline, A Tale of Arcadie, too long for one thing, but I identified with the beginning:
THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
But much more so, I love this next Longfellow poem, also quite long, but so perfect to my ear, I’ve read it several times in my life, even a few years ago. He borrowed the meter from a Finnish national epic, The Kalevala. There is only room here for the beginning to The Song of Hiawatha:
Should you ask me, whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odors of the forest
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,
With the rushing of great rivers,
With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations
As of thunder in the mountains?
I should answer, I should tell you,
"From the forests and the prairies,
From the great lakes of the Northland,
From the land of the Ojibways,
From the land of the Dacotahs,
From the mountains, moors, and fen-lands
Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,
Feeds among the reeds and rushes.
I repeat them as I heard them
From the lips of Nawadaha,
The musician, the sweet singer."
Should you ask where Nawadaha
Found these songs so wild and wayward,
Found these legends and traditions,
I should answer, I should tell you,
"In the bird's-nests of the forest,
In the lodges of the beaver,
In the hoofprint of the bison,
In the eyry of the eagle!"
It was as enchanting to my forest laden mind as Peter Pan. If it is even possible anymore for you to take a hike into the woods one day and sit by yourself without your cell phone and PDA, without having to rush home to watch something on tv, or do some work, or run an errand (this is a good question to ask yourself anyway), I could not recommend taking anything with you than The Song of Hiawatha, unless it is something by Thoreau.
Yet even Hiawatha must fall in a line behind two other poems, the first of which is quite short and comes in the words of a good hearted elephant named Horton, penned by the greatest children’s author of all time:
I meant what I said
And I said what I meant . . . ,
An elephant’s faithful
One hundred per cent.
Why do I love that so? I don’t know, but I think of it all the time. The thought of loveable Horton, emphatic in doing just as he promised regardless of the consequences, and knowing that Lazy Mayzie was off enjoying herself somewhere, not doing her duty, is a beacon for our faithless times and I quote it often (perhaps obnoxiously, but even so). Even when we fail, Horton reminds us that we should try.
But the award for my number one favorite poem goes to the one with the shortest title I know, and damn if it doesn't rhyme either. Go figure. I have quoted it in these digital pages before, perhaps more than once. Ten times wouldn’t be too much. It is the most inspirational poem, at least for me, and I've made sure my daughter has read it too, even if Rudyard Kipling wrote it for his son. Times have changed.
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
As I cannot choose better, I will stop here.
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About Me
- David
- I started this blog in September, 2006. Mostly, it is where I can talk about things that interest me, which I otherwise don't get to do all that much, about some remarkable people who should not be forgotten, philosophy and theories (like Don Foster's on who wrote A Visit From St. Nicholas and my own on whether Santa is mostly derived from a Norse god) and analysis of issues that concern me. Often it is about books. I try to quote accurately and to say when I am paraphrasing (more and more). Sometimes I blow the first name of even very famous people, often entertainers. I'm much better at history, but once in a while I see I have written something I later learned was not true. Sometimes I fix them, sometimes not. My worst mistake was writing that Beethoven went blind, when he actually went deaf. Feel free to point out an error. I either leave in the mistake, or, if I clean it up, the comment pointing it out. From time to time I do clean up grammar in old posts as, over time I have become more conventional in my grammar, and I very often write these when I am falling asleep and just make dumb mistakes. It be nice to have an editor, but . . . .