Once is not enough

The weekend so far has been spent in a sleepwalking reverie of singing in the streets of Dublin, inspired by the independent film Once.

A few tidbits that won't give it away for those of you who haven't and absolutely must see it include

• The ever-pleasant, unplastic beauty of European film faces.
• The wonder of Dublin's bay.
• The ever-present bleakness of Ireland and the British Isles.

You have to like music -- and you will if you didn't -- to appreciate this mildly autobiographical short story put on film about a singular musical affinity between a man and a woman.

The trailer and publicity attempts to cast the movie as a romantic story, a chick-flick (a genre I happen to like), with the slug "How often do you find the right person?" The film's title is supposed to be the answer.

In my opinion, it isn't -- you'll have to see it to test my view against yours.

What I got was the intrinsic value of having something deeply in common with someone else, feeling attraction, enjoying certain things together, all without dwelling on matters such as making hot monkey love -- or the consequences thereof. I was reminded of intense friendships I have had with women whom I never even kissed.

Some were very lost souls. I tend to collect them.

I remember a weekend in Montreal with a fellow student who was temporarily homeless -- actually locked out. We went everywhere together until her housemates got back. I didn't have a girlfriend at the moment -- I was new in Montreal -- and there might have been an attraction but neither of us made that necessary move. We ran into each other in hallways and on the streets after that, but never reconnected.

Also in Montreal were the months I spent going to the movies and ice cream shops with a young woman who was very pregnant and staying in a home for unmarried mothers-to-be. I knew her brother incidentally but we clicked and went everywhere together with nothing more affectionate than a hug. Then she delivered, her boyfriend reappeared from AWOL and she went off with him into what I surmised would be an unhappy sunset.

Susan remains to me a blonde, very pregnant young woman with the sweetest of smiles on a face that stretched too-long and yet was too unfurrowed for her manifold problems.

It's the sort of thing that happens when you travel. On a ship, you dance with someone, even the slow dances, and back home she runs to her boyfriend. On a plane, your father has died and you hold hands for half the trip home with a total stranger you will never see again.

It happens when you're young and you go to coffeehouses where poetry is read. It happens when you try out a new religious movement. It happens when you visit family friends in London and the oldest daughter seems perfectly in synch with you for one great day that you remember for years, with even a song for it.

That's the other thing: get the music after you see the film. Listen to the lyrics and they will all ring true.

So, I confess, I couldn't stay away. I went to see the film Friday and went again Saturday. Because once is not enough.

Street Cents and Uncommon Sense

A wiry light-skinned African American man wearing tan pants, what looked like a pressed, clean shirt and a natty cap came up to me to sell me a newspaper, Street Sense. It's a newspaper written by and sold by homeless people in Washington, D.C.

The man explained the paper to me -- I had heard of it; in fact, someone I know had been a volunteer copy-editor of the paper for a while -- and I saw he had a picture ID badge hanging from his belt, just like every preppy congressional intern in town. The price is a dollar, "but anything else you can give, or even nothing at all, is appreciated." I gave him five bucks.

Then I kicked myself.

After decades of railing against the Protestant work ethic for the way it breeds anxiety, invidiousness and antipathy among peers, self-righteousness and unbridled materialism, I'd been easily won over by the image of someone presenting himself as performing the quintessential American sacrament: pulling himself up by his bootstraps. "A hand up, not a hand out."

It's the very idea I normally find detestable. How did I get suckered in?

I know full well that the sour fruits of the work ethic are the legacy of the Reformation. Pace Protestants: this is not a religious argument, but merely a restatement of historical context.

In the "dark" and benighted Middle Ages of Europe, as in antiquity, everyone pretty much worked as little as they could. In pre-Reformation Europe, the richest were not the most hard-working (not that they are today, either). Work, people believed, was an unavoidable consequence of the loss of Eden: "With labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life" (Gen. 3:17).

Work did not bestow status in the medieval social structure. Everyone worked as befitted their station in life and work rarely yielded social mobility. (Before we get too high and mighty about those backward medievals, ask the American working poor whether this doesn't happen here and now.)

Work was merely part of the curse of being a limited human with a life that was, as Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish and short.

Yet even Marx and Engels recognized that there existed a two-sided social compact prior to the industrial revolution (see vol. III of Das Kapital): the peasant worked, the monk prayed and copied books, the lord of the castle protected the community. Sure, it was better in some respects to be the lord, as always; but the lord had obligations and when he egregiously neglected them, the peasantry revolted.

With capitalism and industry and its Calvinist religious ideology (see Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), however, came the social notion that effort begot success, which in itself was a sign of divine favor. Those who were wage-slaves rather than investors had only themselves to blame, the conventional wisdom concluded; and all the more so those who didn't even have jobs.

This is precisely the view into which I was gently suckered by the Street Sense hawker.

More accurately, he and I have been subject to such a steady stream of social propaganda that we have given in. He and his associates have taken on the trappings of entrepreneurship -- the clothes, the badge, the pretense of selling a product. For my part, I could see myself in an imaginary Dickensian role: I'd toss him a copper smiling benignly, then utter in a kindly but smug tone, "Here you are, my good man."

After all, he looked so clean and honorable and hardworking.

What if he hadn't? What if he had smelled? What if he had been leprous? Would he be less worthy of a smile or a contribution or a moment of attention? (I've been told by people with some experience in this matter that most begging is an attempt to make human contact.)

Do we live to work or work to live? Do we work hard, because the work fulfills us or to have things that will make us feel more important, good, good-looking, better than others? Does all this striving give us joy? In the end, we have only one life (as far as I can tell, I won't get into a reincarnation argument). The life we know has limits. Is it to spend most of it acquiring things?

If we were, for an instant, to assume that poor or homeless people choose their lifestyles, romping happily through their slums and sleeping on grates in the enjoyment of bacchanalian freedom ... what would be so wrong about choosing not to work, not to live with a roof over one's head, not to follow social etiquette or fashion, not to bathe or live a middle class life?

I will provide grist for an answer with a story told to me by an old Italian.

One day there was a young man fishing by the pier. An old man sat next to him with his rod and his bait and shook his head.

"Ragazzo," the old man asked, "what are you doing here whittling your hours away?"

"What should I be doing instead, old man?"

The old man stroked his beard and replied, "Why, you should be in school."

"Whatever for?"

"So you could learn your lessons, graduate and get a job."

"Why would I want to do that?"

"So you could then get the hand of a beautiful young maiden, marry her and have many children."

The young man looked alarmed. "But why would I want that?"

"Well, then you could be sure that you would be cared for in old age."

"What for?"

"Ah, that's easy. So you could eventually be like me, retired and out fishing all day."

Then the young man smiled. "But, sir, that's what I have been doing all morning."

The Real 4th of July

George Bernard Shaw once said that "patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." In that debunking spirit, I would like to re-examine the Fourth of July.

First of all, it should really be the Second of July.

It was on July 2, 1776, that the Continental Congress approved a resolution "That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved." This is known as the Lee Resolution, approved July 2, which later formed a part of the larger declaration written by Thomas Jefferson between then and the 4th.

Second, even Jefferson's declaration is riddled with inconsistencies.

In speaking of "one people" dissolving bands with another, Jefferson was merely speaking of the very few represented in the Congress. Purportedly the aim was to form a society in which "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," borrowing the thinking of John Locke (see The Second Treatise of Civil Government, especially chapter IX). However, the consent of the governed was sorely lacking.

North American colonial society consisted in a variety of strata, starting from the bottom,

• Native so-called Indians, whose lands had been stolen and who were about to be pushed out further and further out west until they were decimated.
• Slaves imported from Africa, traded for molasses and ultimately rum, treated as chattel.
• English colonists who came without wealth or title and whose passage was paid for by indenture as quasi-slaves, subject to a similar range of abuses as slaves, albeit with the legal right to release from this state after a fixed number of years. (Early plantations were worked by white indentured servants, not African slaves.)
• Free women, whose right to property and economic independence of any kind, was severely limited.
• Craftsmen, farmers and small merchants, who were largely subsistence workers free to ply their own trades, but from the assets point of view, they owned little or no property.
• Large and wealthy merchants, ship-owners, bankers and landowners.

Only the very last stratum was represented in the Second Continental Congress, whose declaration Jefferson drafted. Its members were the only ones whose undisputed right to vote and to decide was respected from the beginning.

All men -- and the slave-owning and -mistressing Jefferson did mean only men -- may have been created equal, but thereafter quite a lot of inequality had seeped in and the august fathers of the so-called "revolution" were giving little thought to reversing the process.

To be fair to Jefferson, his own first draft of the declaration contained a denunciation of slavery, as follows: "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither." (In this he was also consistent with Locke, see chapter IV of the Treatise.)

His colleagues in the Continental Congress suppressed the anti-slavery clause.

Third, as to the grievances, these propertied muck-a-mucks were complete liars.

No other province of Great Britain had self-governing local parliaments. Every single one was expected to quarter soldiers for the common defense and they were expected to pay taxes for the same.

The charge that Britain had abolished freedoms in Quebec ("For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies") was utter nonsense. The British Parliament had in 1774 established a charter of rights guaranteeing, among other things, the practice of the Catholic faith in Quebec -- which was more freedom than was then available even in England, where Catholic worship remained illegal and Catholics were still denied the vote.

In citing Quebec's alleged loss of freedoms, along with which went the expansion of the borders of the province, what the Continental Congress was cleverly disguising was a justification for an American land-grab -- one which was attempted militarily and failed at Quebec City.

The land grab was again attempted in 1812. Laura Secord, the Massachusetts-born daughter of a loyalist, is widely remembered in Canada as one who warned the British of an imminent American attack. Every Canadian city has Laura Secord chocolate and ice cream shops to this day.

The class system in all the British provinces was as stratified as in North America. What these American upstarts, who were largely descendants of disinherited younger sons of the nobility, were really after was a peerage and realm of their own without interference from their elder brothers.

In sum, it was the blood bath of the Civil War and the struggles of the feminist and civil rights movements that have extended U.S. civil liberties, to some extent, to parties the so-called founding fathers never envisioned, or never explicitly took action to treat equally. Inasmuch as civil liberties were never extended, despite the struggles of unionists and other reformers, to democratize the economic relations and powers between citizens, Independence Day celebrates a travesty.

A group of slave-owners and investors too cheap to pay taxes to pay the soldiers who were defending them cooked up a rigged system that for more than a century gave them and their heirs untold privilege in the guise of liberty for all.

They are still at work today, in the likes of George W. Bush and many others who stand for white, male privilege in the guise of freedom; who defend profits for the predominantly rich, white, male company directors of interlocking corporate boards at the expense of the lives of poorer, younger, less privileged men and women suckered into volunteering in a reverse-jihad for oil; and who would rather pauperize and enslave the world than yield a single penny or cede a single inch of power.

That's the real story of the Fourth of July.

Better Talking Heads

Staying in Washington when Congress goes home provides those of us who regularly observe the process to see what is usually excluded from public discourse. A case in point were the July 1 editions of two of the canonical "talking head" shows on Sunday morning television, ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos and NBC's Meet the Press.

These influential interview and panel discussion shows are must-see TV for Washington wonks and wannabes. News of the following week often enough resonates with the echoes of denials and reactions to statements by administration and congressional figures on these forums. The panel discussions often shape the thinking of time-pressed policymakers.

For example, inside-the-Beltway watchers knew Thomas Eagleton's goose was cooked when -- despite George McGovern's "1,000 percent support" -- a Democratic National Committee member told reporters on the Meet the Press that the Missouri senator should resign from the 1972 presidential ticket.

Nonetheless, these shows are pretty staid affairs, replete with men in suits trading conventional phrases. The interviewees are pros at dissembling and spinning and the panelists on the discussion round tables are the same tired pundits of always.

Imagine my surprise, then, on a sleepy Fourth-of-July weekend, to find George Stephanopoulos fielding the first all-female discussion panel I can recall. (See the video here.)

Here we had a female power team:

• Cokie Roberts, NPR reporter, and as daughter of the late Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs and his wife Lindy, former Congresswoman and U.S. Ambassador, a hereditary Washington insider;
  
• Donna Brazile, the longtime Democratic Party presidential campaign operative who unmasked George H.W. Bush's affair with State Department bureaucrat Jennifer Fitzgerald, Bush's denial of which I have never believed;
  
• Ruth Marcus, the Washington Post's reporter covering the Supreme Court; and
  
• Bay Buchanan, sister and former campaign manager of Pat Buchanan.

Admittedly, Buchanan amounts to scraping the bottom of the right-wing pundit barrel, but what can one expect on a slow weekend? Besides, Buchanan acquitted herself reasonably well as the voice of hard- ... OK, fanatical ... right-wingers.

Certainly, she's several notches above Charles Krauthammer, a Uruguayan-born yet bizarrely anti-immigrant hard conservative columnist who never misses the chance for a shot below the belt at his political adversaries. Bay is also plausibly more consistent than George Will, a grand salon conservative infamous for his Greco-Roman quotation researchers.

This was not all. The all-woman team scored presciently well and offered breezily fresh ideas.

Meet the Press, the staider and original of this kind with a TV history reaching back to 1947, offered two views and faces rarely seen on mainstream television:

• David Brody, reporter for the Christian Broadcasting Network; and
  
• Tavis Smiley, Public Radio International's talk show host and recently the moderator of the Democratic presidential candidates' debate before an African-American audience.

Brody hinted at likely challenges from unnamed evangelical leaders at the Republican convention if Rudy Giuliani makes it -- something no one in the mainstream press has even whispered about.

In discussing the rivalry between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Smiley became the first commentator to address the elephant in the room: Clinton, if elected (hell, even if nominated), will be making history. As will, more obviously, Obama.

Tim Russert, who hosts the show, would not be moved from the conventional dime. To him, Clinton has an "advantage" as a woman in a field of men.

What if we always had a variety of pundits, instead of just the white, male, centrist or conservative suits? What if a real diversity of opinion were aired every week?

Then we would never get back to business as usual in Washington.

The Importance of Being Ernest

Oscar Wilde's comedy of manners, which punned on the name Ernest and the virtue of earnestness (the play was titled The Importance of Being Earnest), attempts in part to explore the significance of a man's name. Indeed, Anne has asked, does a name matter?

One can't explore this without passing through the Bible ("Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," Deut. 5:11) to Shakespeare ("What's in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet," Romeo and Juliet, Act 2 scene 2).

What's in a name? A lot. The right to bestow a name is an archetypal symbolic expression of seniority and power.

The biblical text has God according to Adam the right to name all the animals, which in the ancient world meant having power over the thing or being named. American Indians similarly spoke of naming evil spirits as a way of dissipating their power.

What you call something is still so powerful that the government routinely resorts to euphemisms for events the public might find distasteful. The name given to the victim of murder or mayhem in war is a "casualty," which sounds almost as if all that has happened is something no more serious than stubbing one's toe in a darkened bedroom.

As for Shakespeare, he wasn't arguing that names were irrelevant, but that love could overcome the chasm between someone named Montague and another named Capulet. Yet the names stood for an intense rivalry between competing clans.

The names we give ourselves and others are telling and influential. For example, the Chinese word for "Russia" means "land of hungry people," whereas the word for America means "beautiful country."

In the USA we don't call Italians and Greeks "Mediterraneans," but we call Japanese and Koreans "Asian," and Salvadorans and Chileans "Hispanic." Clearly, there's a matter of point of view. In the prevailing view, Europeans are distinguishable from one another, whereas non-Europeans come in continental globs. Moreover, forebears of Americans of European origin were all "immigrants," whereas non-Europeans are commonly called "aliens."

Who will argue that there is no difference between calling someone "Nigger" and "African-American"?

As to the word used to name the deity, there are entire volumes written about the Hebrew variants, with elaborate explanations of the meanings, ranging from the one who is to various attributions of might.

In English, the word is not devoid of meaning, either. "God" comes from the proto-Germanic "guthan" (in German, Gott), from the proto-Indo-European "ghut," meaning "that which is invoked." In Sanskrit, huta, meaning "invoked," was a nickname of the god Indra, the god of weather and war. Some trace it instead to "gheu," which means "to pour, pour a libation."

"Deus," the base in languages of Latin origin for Dieu, Deus, Dios, Dio (French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, respectively), the Greek genitive form of Zeus, the chief god from Mount Olympus. Zeus, for its part, traces back to the Sanskrit "deva pitar," meaning "father god." The root meaning of all these words is related to the word for "day," originally a reference to a bright, clear sky.

The biblical prohibition against the use of the deity's name was intended to prohibit human dominion over the deity, against the tendency of religious folk, then and now, to think they've got God in their pockets.

For my money, names and naming are hugely important.

42

This is a post about a post about a post. The circle will be completed when they post about this post, which is really about the ultimate answer to the great question of life, the universe, and everything. For a very long time -- since 1978 -- we have all known the answer is 42.

But this is not about the answer. Unlike Chani or perhaps Sober Briquette, I harbor profound doubts concerning that which we have called God, Allah, Deus, Theos, YHWH (go ahead, zap me for writing it!) and so on.

Instead, this is about what the answers to the question about God are really unlikely to be.

Like Sober, whose reference to "Veggietales" flies completely past my head, I have found Joan Osborne's "If God was One of Us" an intriguing song. I even found the TV show "Joan of Arcadia" reasonably charming. Both avoid crossing the line into preaching what we all "should" believe and instead offer some possibilities.

Karl Marx thought the word "god" and theism would disappear; a century later, Karl Rahner argued that the word would survive as a question, even if theism disappeared, because without it human beings could never face the whole of reality.

We might not agree whether God exists, but we might reasonably agree on what God might not be like if She did. The scholastics called this sort of inquiry, the study of the attributes of God.

One need not hew to any particular philosophical school, however, to agree that if She existed, God would not be the sum of all things, immanent in everything. The essential problem with pantheism (Greek, pan = all; theos = god; "all is god") is that it amounts to something similar to italicizing everything.

Emphasize everything and you emphasize nothing.

Pantheism ultimately means that She does not exist except as some quality or entity so pervasive as not to be seen or heard or even be meaningful in any discernible way. I call that an atheist, which is fine insofar as I am concerned; just let's not pretend otherwise.

Similarly, I think it's very, very unlikely that She is more than one. Anyone who is the bestest and the mostest can't have peers. It's lonely at the top.

When you have a whole bunch of gods on Mount Olympus, you get to the point where everyone starts begetting demigods and sprites and heroes and who knows what and eventually Zeus has to come out, throw a thunderbolt and say "stop effing around, ch'all!" (Of course, he carefully writes an escape codicil for himself.)

She would not be a capricious bearded man on Mount Olympus. Not likely.

If God existed, She would be just your regular one-of-a-kind god next door. The Supreme! (Take that, Martha and the Vandellas!)

Oh, of course, She would not really be a she -- nor a he. I use She merely to offset some 20,000 years of masculine misattribution of a sex. (I'd say we've got about 19,965 years of saying She before we get into trouble.)

From my perspective, gynomorphizing God makes eminent sense. I have as much chance of understanding women as I do of ever understanding God. Even if I sometimes feel I "get" them.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The principle is that the really clear thing about God is that you can't really say too much about Her without falling into a serious logical rabbit hole.

God, in any case, is such a charged name. She would probably prefer being called 42.

Crisis

Genevieve's comment reminds me of a lesson I heard long ago, in a secondary school literature class that was often also a philosophy and history class.

Etymology may not be philosophy, but a word's origins often yield clues as to what we originally meant and why we use it the way we do. Crisis comes from the Greek krinein, to decide, to separate, to judge, also related to kritikos, critic, one who is skilled at judging; it is also related to the much touted, little encouraged contemporary faculty of critical thinking.

A crisis occurs in the opening lines of Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken, as follows:

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

When I first contemplated the idea of crisis I was where Longfellow placed young women that were my age at the time: "standing, with reluctant feet, where the brook and river meet." (Adolescence comes to boys, too.) What more crisis-filled years than those!

It wasn't just me. The world seemed to be in crisis: the Beatles revolutionized music, Cohn-Bendit and the French students revolted in the streets of Europe, there was an ideological "spring" in Prague and underneath all that two superpowers were threatening each other with arsenals said to be capable of destroying the planet 50 times over.

Ah, the good old days!

In midst of all that, Mr. Romero, my Spanish literature profesor (in my school all our teachers were profesores) uttered the words that stuck to me: "We are always in crisis."

Every age, historical or personal, involves crisis and is critical. At every stage we humans face a fork in the road of our lives. We face no choices only when we lie in our coffins -- insofar as I can tell, anyway.

King Philip II faced the crisis of the first European empire over which the sun never set, just as Lyndon Baines Johnson was, somewhere outside our classroom, facing Vietnam. We faced imminent demise when we asked a girl to dance, just as the Soviet Union for decades threatened to wipe out Washington, my home for so many years, from the face of the Earth.

Is it, then, overdramatization to see our moment, this moment, with that death-defying hangnail staring at us right in our face, as a crisis? Yes and no.

Entropy

For a variety of reasons, some of them beyond my ken, I begin the week with an awareness of what I have called, using a popular, unscientific understanding, "entropy." It is the idea better expressed by William Butler Yeats in the line "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."

Let a business proceed without expansion and it diminishes until it dies. Let a plant cease to grow and it shrivels. We humans grow and grow until we reach a peak, then we begin our decline to death.

Things fall apart. The natural tendency of everything is toward decay and demise. The one word I have heard used to describe this is "entropy," in a figurative sense.

Now Webster's tells us that entropy is "a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed thermodynamic system that is also usually considered to be a measure of the system's disorder and that is a property of the system's state and is related to it in such a manner that a reversible change in heat in the system produces a change in the measure which varies directly with the heat change and inversely with the absolute temperature at which the change takes place."

Take a deep breath. I didn't understand it either. I think what it means is that entropy in science is a measure of disorder in a physical or chemical system. The greater the disorder, the higher the degree of entropy.

The interesting thing, however, is that in scientific theory -- unlike in the philosophy of humanities-minded folks like me -- disorder may well be deemed the balanced state toward which all things tend.

The originator of the concept, Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius, was concerned with the question of the conservation of energy (put simply: where does expended energy go? what will eventually happen to the universe when all energy is expended?). In the 19th century the common belief was that all matter would eventually degrade, be consumed like coal in a steam engine and literally or figuratively go up in smoke.

In 1865, Clausius became famous by concluding, with the aid of mathematics you should get someone else to explain, that "the energy of the universe is constant" on one hand, and that "the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum," on the other.

Those of us who don't really understand e=mc² may take this as cause for relief or concern. On one hand, it's a relief that chaos is "normal." So, death, disease, decay, etc., are really OK. Moreover, the world doesn't end, somehow the energy recycles itself.

On the other hand, for those of us whose lives are built on a modicum of order -- such as is depended upon by so many things we take for granted -- it's slightly terrifying.

It seems as if I am in a canoe on a placid river, yet I keep hearing a distant and rising rumor that I fear is a Niagara or Iguazu just waiting to upset my little world. Yeats next lines were

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

This was the understandable verdict of a 19th century man at the end of the Great War, when all reason, all the gentlemanly nods of common understanding, all commonly held hopes for progress had been so bloodily dashed.

But isn't it also apt for our time and fears and delusions? Have not the muddled majority best lacked conviction in the face of both the passionately intense Cheney-inspired waterboarders and the Osama-sent suicide bombers?

Our time and our lives dim with fears that such a picture is frighteningly true. The center, our heart, cannot hold.

The Joy of Giving

Anne's comment to the post about tipping, prompted some thought about what's involved in giving and receiving. Our text today, campers, is: What a joy it is to give and how generous of those who receive!

Let's think about it. I have always felt good whenever I freely gave someone something. A present, money to a friend in need, time to someone who asked for it, a donation and even a tip.

Does anyone take pleasure in feeling somehow superior to the person receiving? Do you? Not that I have seen. Most people delight in the ability to have something that someone else might value.

Giving feels good. It is "blessed," or healthy, or just plain happy to give. Whatever you gave, if you had kept it, wouldn't it eventually have broken or become boring or useless or forgotten?

Does anyone really get pleasure in looking at the balance in their savings account? OK, so you feel secure for a moment, then you think about what it won't buy. How much money is enough, John D. Rockefeller was once asked. "Just a little bit more," he replied.

The deed of giving stays with you. It feels good. It's a memory you can always recall. It's a memory others will have of you. It doesn't cost anything, it doesn't wear out. It can always pick you up. ("I may feel terrible today, but look what I did for ... yesterday.")

Now about receiving, I have a little anecdote.

A number of years ago, shortly I was in the selection committee for the rector of the Episcopal parish I attended (long story, for another day), the priest we ended up choosing gave me a ride home one evening. I explained that I didn't have a car and the buses might be infrequent at the late hour, etc.

"How wonderful!" she said. "You go around giving others the chance to give you a ride and get to know you better."

I had never thought of it that way. I was always just the guy who had to ask for rides when it was late or I was in the burbs. Suddenly, I was the guy who gave other people the opportunity to give.

Receivers are heroic in ways large and small. Life deals them a need, yet here they stand and carry on, with dignity. They receive with a smile.

In a way, receivers give the joy of giving.

We'll go to a meeting and I never get to do a good post-mortem in the car with someone, as I often did. Nothing more empty and solitary than getting into your own combustion-engine bubble. I have a car now. I love giving people rides, although all too many people have their own cars.The car will need repairs. It will cause me to fret and worry. I'll eventually get rid of it.

But the conversations I had as a rider, many of those are forever. The people who gave me rides can also recall how good and neighborly they were. They can treasure that always, too. Thanks to me, who was there to receive.

In addition to the joy of giving, there's the generosity of receiving.

An Unbounced Echo

What a pleasure when one rescues meaning from melancholy prompted by a serendipitous and joyful confluence of experiences! Allow me to explain.

Tangential brushes with history or literary fame, which are endemic to my work and background, often cast me in the role of the proverbial fly on the wall. I am privileged to observe and record the momentous. Yet I remain unseen and hidden safely behind what a friend of mine jokes is the "cover" I rarely break.

This means, positively, that the news of which I often speak comes first hand. Of course, it also means a lifetime of missed connections with people with whom I sense intuitively a common ground and of encounters with people with whom I have little in common at all.

The surprise is the flood of insights that began with a rare escape into literary conversation. On Sunday I spent two delightful hours in a Spanish book club discussing a Peruvian novel about an imagined Trotskyist insurrection in the 1950s. It was the sort of thing I did in university, when I went to poetry readings and dreamed of writing publishable literary works.

In the reading group we shared our questions, our impressions of the background, our various puzzles until we came to the literary puzzle of a peculiar ending. Then, bits from one, bits from another, we hit upon the possibility that the final chapter, written like the rest of the novel in the voice of an explicitly self-conscious author/narrator, is about the protagonist developing independence from his creator, refusing to act in character.

(If anyone is interested, the book is "Historia de Mayta" by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated as "The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.")

Until Sunday, except for the literary update my older son and me give one another when he comes to town, the literary stirrings of yesteryear have been limited to a dim reflection, the author readings at a bookstore half a block away from my home. I posted, for example, the visit of Richard Dawkins.

Most recently, I missed the appearance of Michael Ondaatje, whom I would have seen in what for me would have been a significant second time.

Coming across the Sunday New York Times book review of the latest novel by Michael Ondaatje (you may recall his work The English Patient, made into a film), I found myself staring into his now grizzled face, perhaps a more hirsute version of my own, having one of the now ever more common fly in the wall flashbacks.

I had imagined going to his reading as a kind of reunion. Back when I was a student, Ondaatje, then a relatively obscure Canadian writer, came to my university for a poetry reading. He had recently published The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, a poetic visit to the bandit's life, which I had read listening to Aaron Copland's work, the symphonic suite Billy the Kid.

I wrote him a letter with a poem I composed about the reading, having to do with the feedback of a microphone.

Poem for a Poetry Reading

Sound-sound
of sound-sound
reverberates
just as Kennedy's oath
rang across from the Capitol
just as that voice,
sound-sound,
reverberates again
as Michael mentions a dog and America
and Ellen glances at me
and john echoes that glance
pointing their eyes at me
the American.

Sound-sound
again-again
Ondaatje's microphone
like the a's in his name
repeats his words
and the walls repeat them again.

And just once
a girl in the audience said
the echo was good.

Montreal, November 1972

Yes, I was influenced by Brautigan at the time, and aren't you glad that neither my poetry nor fiction have ever been published? Ondaatje wrote back a polite short note, saying that the particular reading I had attended had meant much to him and that someday "magically" we would meet again.

I showed the letter to my son a few years ago, when he came home from seeing the The English Patient movie and decided to get the book. My literary memento from a now-famous author.

Then I saw that Ondaatje was coming to read at the bookstore near home and I weighed going there. But what would I do, read my poem to him? Would he even remember? Wouldn't it be embarrassing for two grown men to recall the boyish fascination of one for another?

Besides, my social and work lives are pretty busy. It was on a Tuesday night. I was tired of work spent, precisely, writing and editing.

Sunday I came across the book review by Erica Wagner, which begins:

“I come from Divisadero Street,” Anna tells us in Michael Ondaatje’s fifth novel. “Divisadero, from the Spanish word for ‘division,’ the street that at one time was the dividing line between San Francisco and the fields of the Presidio. Or it might derive from the word divisar, meaning ‘to gaze at something from a distance.’ ”

It's the second. The meaning, I mean. I'm impressed that Ondaatje, a Dutch-surnamed native Sri Lankan and adoptive Canadian, would get the Spanish right. Then again, why wouldn't he?

That's another thing that's uncanny about Michael Ondaatje and me. We're both part of a much studied cultural subgroup known as Third Culture Kids or Global Nomads, defined as "someone who [as a child] has spent a significant period of time in one or more culture(s) other than his or her own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and their own birth culture, into a third culture."

So it's not really that I'm a lonely fly in the wall, but it is true that I rarely break cover. That's because I am a bit of an alien everywhere and belong only among those who, like Ondaatje and myself, can enjoy a good multilingual, cross-cultural joke -- and a good multi-directional insight.

Almsgiving or Tipping?

When I go to work and when I go home I always pass at least a half dozen beggars. If I take a cab or park my car I deal with people who are working hard, presumably for little payoff. Given that my wallet is not limitless, should I tip or give alms?

This is a relatively new American dilemma. Growing up I associated begging with Latin America and poor parts of Europe, where beggars were plentiful in the 1950s and 60s.

Today, pauperized Latin American begging in major cities has reached the then-shocking levels of Bogotá in 1958. You can't go anywhere without mewling children and formerly middle class jobless adults jostling for pennies, selling any trinket, even themselves.

Europe, thankfully, is no longer poor; except in the East. The Eastern immigrants are now changing the face of Western Europe; Britain, for example, has become a new majority-Catholic country thanks to Poles. Whatever the national racism-prone Europeans may think, these people are not begging on their streets.

Not so in Washington, D.C., capital of the present empire.

Moreover, having failed to install the vast systems of social insurance of Europe, the United States is economically sliding towards becoming Brazil -- particularly in the distribution of wealth. The 9th or 10th economy in the world, depending on the criteria, Brazil has a still smallish middle class, a concentration of wealth in the hands of the top 2 percent of the population.

The American economy is the largest for any country in the world in terms of gross domestic product, beat just barely only by the 27 nations of the European Union put together. We Americans work substantially more than Europeans do, in terms of average annual hours per worker, but economists argue whether it is that we are overworked or they who are lazy.

Our average wage has been virtually stagnant since 1973. A new book called Richistan describes in almost pornographic detail what Bookings economist Isabel Sawhill told me in a recent interview, "It's no longer a matter of the haves and the have-nots. A group at the very top is pulling away from everyone else. The have-mores are pulling away from the haves."

Seeing that this is the case, I wondering whether the working poor don't deserve preference over the beggars. Isn't an ounce of prevention much more effective than a pound of ultimately ineffective palliatives?

Rampant homelessness has two causes: first, the failure of society to deal with people so mentally ill as to be unemployable; secondly, and here comes the prevention, the failure to pay poor working people a livable wage.

Yes, Congress raised the federal minimum wage from the current $5.15 an hour to $5.85 in July and ultimately to $7.25 by 2009. Even the 2009 figure yields only $15,080 a year, still below the official poverty threshold for a household of two.

People who work should not be poor.

One can quibble over how rich anyone is entitled to be. But the federal poverty line is plenty austere. And the legal helps aren't enough. As a recent article in The Washington Post shows, when members of Congress tried to live on a food stamps budget, it was very hard.

We can all do something very practical to change things. Yes, by all mean join the living wage advocacy movements. But there's something easier and simpler.

Tipping.

Sure, in Cuba it's considered a sign of servile capitalist exploitation and thus forbidden. Even if Cuba were the paradise it quite isn't, shouldn't one have a revolution first?

So while we sit down to wait long and hard for a national socioeconomic change, there's always the humble tip to tide working people over.

The Nurturing Chain

Retaking the quest for "godless ethics," I am confronted on the morning of Father's Day with the Mosaic commandment to "Honour thy father and thy mother, that thou mayest be longlived." Why and whatever for?

Perhaps this is the problem with starting with the Mosaic decalogue. All the Judaeo-Christian sources I can lay my hands on begin with the presupposition that it must be done because God ordered it. To honor parents is to honor God: God made us, with our parents participation.

Now let's say that one is skeptical that there ever was a god, least of all at the time one's life began. What then? What is the purpose of this very widely held notion?

I write this at a time at which I stand to gain as a net beneficiary: I am a father and my parents are dead. Yet why should my sons live under ethical compulsion to honor me?

As with many of the other ancient commands, I find myself thinking of the economic, social and practical reasons such an encomium would have been cast in the form of a universal norm. The first to come to mind is that until Social Security, and the various forms of old age support in Europe and Japan, becoming old was a tragedy.

Do note that Social Security is not a forced savings plan: it is an intergenerational transfer from the working age generations to the one beyond that age.

So the idea that God, the all-purpose source of everything someone would, without bothering to rhyme or reason, wish to impose on another, declared that parents should be "honored" -- includes caring for them in old age -- makes some economic sense. To me. But why would it make sense to my sons?

The idea, I suppose, is the whole notion of parenthood as godlike. You give life. You clean diapers. You feed and clothe and house and educate for half a lifetime. In your prime years. Then they let go and that's it.

"Al olor de la flor se le olvida la flor" (the scent of the flower forgets the flower), sang Catalonian composer-singer Joan Manuel Serrat in the 1970s, in a song addressed to his girlfriend's mother.

Of course, there's another rendering of the story. You have sexual urges and, in love or in lust, you copulate. With no effort, often without the slightest intention, a sperm and an ovum (discovered only in the 19th century!) make a microscopic meeting in a flood of intermingled fluids. A new life begins.

Discovery of the life is greeted with chagrin or joy depending on the copulators' intent (see above). The actual life involves a lot of work that was not bargained for; the baby has a seemingly inexhaustible capacity to spew out excrement, tears and the most annoying noises in the universe.

But there are rewards. What parent does not revel in the moment this creature suddenly ... smiles! The love of one's children and the love of one's parents is clearly a matter of brain chemicals to ensure the nurturing of young humans.

Is that practical good an ethical good? I'd start to answer from the universal imperative to survive, enunciated three years ago here, which runs as follows:

All behavior that enhances my survival is good and desirable, whatever detracts from it is bad and to be avoided. My survival is linked to the survival of all humanity.

Seen from that perspective, the Mosaic principle, based on the idea of human survival rather than a god, needs to be amplified to apply to all who are in the nurturing chain.

We need to honor parents, grandparents and children, but also cousins and uncles and aunts, and also greengrocers and farmers, cobblers and tailors, and carpenters and masons. We need, indeed, to honor the other species of plants and animals that sustain us, the rocks and waters that shelter and refresh us.

We are children of the universe, its stewards, and in a biological relay race, we are also its mother and, yes, its father. Happy Father's Day everyone!

A New Adolescence

In my continuing ruminations about people roughly my age, the Boomers, I have come to the conclusion that many of us are in the throes of a new adolescence.

Just a few days ago I qualified for the Bureau of Labor Statistics' label "older worker," yet I feel sometimes that I have just turned 17. It's better than four or five years ago, when the collapse of a marriage had rendered me 11 years old: technically capable of taking care of myself, but sorely lacking in the common sense needed to do it well.

I remember well that first dance at which I mingled with the "boys," afraid once again of what would happened if I asked a "girl" to dance. Then I discovered the bar and recalled how much "courage" came from its concoctions.

Or that first date, I think we went to a concert, walked around some parks and tentatively held hands. Just like when I was 16 and my girlfriend, the first I ever kissed, was 14.

Or even my first car accident on a highway, a fender-bender really, due to a very peculiar driving history, which I'll save for another post.

Adolescence. The sense that one is alive, everything is very confusing, no one really prepared you for this, you'll live forever but you'll die of unrequited love, you'll try out new feelings and if people don't like the results let them look away. Freedom. Zest.

I can't help thinking that I'm in an adolescence in reverse. I go to book clubs, group discussions, dances, barbecues. Flirt, laugh, talk. Then retreat to my cave to ruminate.

In this new stage I started out adult, organized (or repressed), subject to obligations and routines; eventually I'll come out childless, unconnected to anyone in particular, retired, perennially out of school, seeking a sandbox in which to lose myself in another childhood, until I'm unborn back into the darkness whence I came.

A Marshall Plan for the World

After this latest misadventure, it's time perhaps to reassess what has gone wrong since the end of the Cold War. Part of it is that the USA forgot about postwar reconstruction.

Sure, the Cold War did not have definable fronts -- although Korea, Hungary, Cuba, Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, the horn of Africa, Nicaragua and El Salvador might reasonably pass for battlefields. At the end of the Cold War, which -- pay attention, conservatives -- did not occur on Ronald Reagan's watch, all that was left was a gulf between the wealthy capitalist First World and everyone else.

In an impoverished Russia and Eastern Europe the joke went: "What's worse than Communism? Post-Communism." And an impoverished Third World, a variety of would-be leaders -- including one Osama bin Laden -- observed how local elites were enriching themselves through the sale to the First World of non-renewable resources, which are the patrimony of entire societies.

If 9/11 had not existed, someone would have invented it.

Why? Because we won the war and forgot to win the peace as well, as the USA did after World War II.

Osama and Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez and others have in common that they are irate that the First World continues to wage economic war on their people.

Sixty years ago, this past June 5, Secretary of State George C. Marshall delivered the commencement address at Harvard and in his speech outlined the need for an economic recovery plan to lift Europe out of the ruins of World War II. "It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace," Marshall said.

By the time the European Recovery Program (the official name of the Marshall Plan) began to wind down in 1951, the United States had sent $12 billion to 17 countries and Europe was beginning to recover. In 2006 dollars, that sum would amount to $119.7 billion, or about an average $29 billion a year -- about a third of a year's cost of U.S. military occupation of Iraq.

Our present development assistance does not exceed $13 billion a year and almost half goes to Israel and a quarter more to Egypt. Meanwhile, Africa has become a basket case, disparities are growing in Latin America and in fast-developing, resource hungry Asia the life of each individual continues to be far too cheap.

Moreover, now we have the means and the technology to eradicate the most serious depredations on human dignity, such as hunger. We may not know exactly how to turn every nation into Ohio -- not necessarily a worthy goal -- but the most abject forms of poverty need not exist.

The benefits of doing so are manifold. Greater prosperity brings liberalization of governance and greater public participation in peaceful, constructive ways. Prosperous nations cooperate with one another.

Is there any reason why we should not launch a new Marshall Plan, this time for the world?

Portrait of the Blogger

... as a very, very young man, 55 years ago, today.

Lesson of Vietnam and Iraq

There are two Ss in the lesson of Iraq and Vietnam and both of them stand for what has been sorely lacking in the American foreign policy establishment for at least two generations: subtlety.

The dictionary phrases that I have in mind for defining subtlety are "acuteness or penetration of mind" and "delicacy of discrimination." We Americans are not famous for either one.

We can come up with something remarkably big, such as the notion of and resources for constructing a harbor so we can invade a France beach, then bring the port for supplies along with us. This was done 63 years ago this month.

We can push each other hard -- often too hard -- creating a dynamism of sweat and anxiety that keeps us all going at a pace unmatched elsewhere. Hence U.S. dominance in terms of average annual work hours over all OECD nations, our socioeconomic peers -- the declining quality (and more recently quantity) of output be damned.

We really believe in our beloved Constitution -- except when we don't or don't even know it (go read it here).

We really want to trust people enough to leave our doors open, although we haven't now for some time.

We were really at our best in the world when we were lumbering hulks handing out Hershey bars to scrawny European children in bombed out cities. Ours is the only empire whose most decisive war did not result in territorial expansion, enslavement of others, plunder -- even if, in neo-colonial terms, some version of all those things took place under U.S. aegis.

The fundamental fact of the American era is that our country has been so remarkably necessary to the world economically, militarily and even politically, for so long, that there has been little need for the traditional historical harshness of empires.

Why goose-step, purge your satellites or enslave vassals when you can seduce them with Coca-Cola, Marlboros and blue jeans (at a profit)?

This is what makes Vietnam and Iraq such crass errors on the part of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. We had the wind on our backs at the beginning of each of these misadventures.

Ngo Dihn Diem, the Vietnamese president the CIA helped assassinate just 20 days before our own president was killed in Dallas, was a nationalist, an aristocrat, a traditional Catholic (his brother was an archbishop) and somewhat of an autocrat.

He was not a saint, by any means; a politician in serious conflict with an important segment of his population (Buddhists). No Jefferson, but certainly no Castro.

"I can scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid," Ho Chi Minh is reported to have said upon learning of the assassination.

There is absolutely no question in my mind that had Diem lived, had South Vietnam been allowed to evolve on its own terms, without a U.S. occupation, today it might be comparable to South Korea: corrupt for many years but slowly democratizing as a byproduct of prosperity.

Much the same is true of Iraq. For all the propaganda, now taken on blind faith, that Saddam Hussein was a monster, he was really a relatively pedestrian Third World dictator.

Hussein was a classic modernizer of the type who believes in breaking a few eggs to make omelette. He won UNESCO prizes in the 1970s for programs to raise the literacy of his country. The Baathists were mildly left-leaning secularizers who believed in technology and learning to develop their country.

Had Hussein been left to live and die in power, Iraq might have found its own way to a modern future with some facsimile of a democracy; again, as a byproduct of prosperity. The foundations had been laid by Hussein himself.

I've lived in dictatorships, I've known people who died in them. I'm no friend of dictatorship. But I understand the distinction that Reagan U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, no darling of mine, was trying to make when she compared dictatorships with totalitarian regimes.

The problem is she used the wrong terms. The opposite of dictatorship is not totalitarianism, as Kirkpatrick put it, but tyranny.

A dictator, Latin for "one who issues commands," was in ancient republican Rome a figure chosen by the Senate to take all powers needed to overcome an emergency. When the crisis was over, the Roman principle went (although not always the history), the dictator stepped down and the Senate, the gathering of the senex or elderly (and supposedly wise) men, retook the reins of State.

In the limited Roman sense, both Presidents Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt could be seen as American dictators. Both assumed extraordinary powers at times of grave national crises; although both died in office, there is little question that they would have handed their powers back to the polity, had they lived.

In contrast, a tyrant (from the Greek tyrannos, meaning "lord, master, sovereign, absolute ruler"), is a despotic ruler, often harsh and cruel, who serves only his own interests or those of a small oligarchy, and most often seizes power by force or deceit.

Greece's Thirty Tyrants were a pro-Spartan clique that installed itself to rule Athens; among other things, they condemned Socrates to death. Stalin, Hitler and Cromwell were tyrants.

Hussein was edging toward tyranny when the world rightly showed him the cost of acting bigger than his britches by invading Kuwait. Diem was thought to be headed in that direction, too, but his society had enough corrective institutions without U.S. intervention.

This is what the U.S. foreign policymakers have refused to understand for about two generations.

The world's not ours to play with; our country has not been chosen to act godlike with national histories and societies much older and more complex than our own. Sometimes it is better to leave things that are not perfect to work themselves out by themselves -- without the 500-pound gorilla of the CIA and the U.S. military.

The lesson of Vietnam and Iraq comes from ancient Greece.

The Gordian Knot, according to legend the one that fastened the cart of King Midas to a post, was so complex that he who untied it was destined to be king of Asia. Alexander the Great, in the year 333 BCE, cut the knot with his sword. In the next decade, Alexander built an empire that stretched all the way to India, then he died suddenly and the empire collapsed.

Cutting, while expedient, is far less effective than untying.

On Misanthropy and Friendship

One learns who is a friend in times of trial, but also who is not. Few people are friends and even friends have their own agendas. This is not about heroes and villains, but about how friendship, and the gratitude one feels toward friends, manages to dull the sharp truth that the more one knows humanity, more one loves one's (imaginary) dog.

My paternal grandfather was very fond of the latter saying, which I recall him voicing one morning while walking his dog. He attributed it to a Latin aphorist I have failed to come across. At the time my grandfather said it, I was a child in the quest for an answer to the question, "Are people mostly good or mostly bad?"

My mother pushed aside my grandfather's cynicism, deeming it perhaps a little too early for me to be soured on life and people. Thus steeped in an invincible optimism regarding the ever reformable character of all human beings, I have crashed repeatedly against the shoals of hearts so stone cold as to be chilling. This is so with those individuals who, deep down, are simply too painfully twisted to be able to cry out their own humanity.

To be sure, I myself carry within me my share of glacial cruelty and sorrow turned into pathology -- woe betide those who become exposed to the dark side of my moon, the lunatic I manage to talk into behaving in public ... most of the time. To an extent all of us are a bit like this: if people only knew who we really were!

Thankfully, people don't. Most people don't care enough to find out who we really are; they are busy enough with their own demons.

You learn this when a mishap strikes. You lose your job. Your marriage breaks up. Someone very dear to you dies.

People say trite meaningless things. They avoid you. (Or worse, in breakups some space cadets will call you for your former partner's new number.) You get the merest cold and it feels as if it is cancerous AIDS, because you are without a friend.

Your mailbox is empty of anything but bills and promotions. People want your money. Eventually some people want your sex. Or your humor. Or some quality that's on their shopping list.

Carry these minor toothaches to a grander scale and you have famines and genocides and the general unrelenting injustice of nearly everything in life -- especially that which makes you privileged enough to be within reach of air-conditioning, a computer, running water and enough money to inspire the funniest of Nigerian e-mail scams.

Let's face it: we humans stink. This is why I feel -- at least in the past few days -- as if I have come across a dandelion sticking out of a crack in a sidewalk.

No surprise that no one will ever love the netherman I hide in the innards of my soul. Yet what a delight that some people mildly like the man who clothes his mind in genteel language!

It happened like this. For some time now, I have been sending e-mail notifications of posts to my (mostly low-tech) acquaintances. The first paragraph and the permanent link. Then the blog got so heated that it vexed some people. The only solution was to end the notifications or turn to the opt-in method.

Predictably, I have not heard from the miscreants. Only from some who "live for your posts" or ask to "keep 'em coming."

My friends. The few and hardy ones who asked to be notified by e-mail whenever I post. One I have known since childhood, several I have only cybermet, most are somewhere in between.

For decades now, those who know me know, my guide on friendship has been Aristotle. The summer of my junior year in college I decided to go to take a few philosophy courses at a university near my father's house. I had not taken philosophy for several years, when I had thought I would become a priest.

Nixon was on the verge of impeachment. My girlfriend at the time took a trip to France. I think she was trying to decide how to break up. And none of this mattered in the long and meandering bus ride I had chosen to take, in the spirit of simplicity, from home to the campus and back every day.

Instead, I heard in the voice of Alexander the Great's childhood tutor (Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 8, ch. 3) the following words:

Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves. Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of own nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good-and goodness is an enduring thing. And each is good without qualification and to his friend, for the good are both good without qualification and useful to each other. So too they are pleasant; for the good are pleasant both without qualification and to each other, since to each his own activities and others like them are pleasurable, and the actions of the good are the same or like. And such a friendship is as might be expected permanent, since there meet in it all the qualities that friends should have. For all friendship is for the sake of good or of pleasure-good or pleasure either in the abstract or such as will be enjoyed by him who has the friendly feeling-and is based on a certain resemblance; and to a friendship of good men all the qualities we have named belong in virtue of the nature of the friends themselves; for in the case of this kind of friendship the other qualities also are alike in both friends, and that which is good without qualification is also without qualification pleasant, and these are the most lovable qualities. Love and friendship therefore are found most and in their best form between such men.

Not to worry. I am old enough now to know not to test friendships. In my heart of hearts, however, this is what I hoped for with that girlfriend who went to France.

These days, any semblance of that, over coffee or sherry, in a cafe, a pub or in someone's home, even a shadow of it in an e-mail, a phone call, a letter, is icing on the cake.

Too Menny

The San Antonio Express reports the story of a woman who, depressed and struggling to raise four small children, hanged herself and her children in a mobile home closet. Poignantly, the story adds, "An infant was rescued from a makeshift noose."

The detail is worthy of Thomas Hardy. His 1895 novel Jude the Obscure, which shocked Victorian sensibilities none too soon with the reality of the industrial revolution, contains precisely such a scene.

Without involving ourselves in the novel's entire plot, allow me to paint the scene in question. An impoverished tradesman and his common law wife return to their rooms from a fair, an oasis of happiness, only to find that their precocious older son has murdered his three siblings and hung himself, leaving the note in childish script, "Done because we were too menny" [sic].

It is a child's misunderstanding of his parents' misfortunes, in part stemming from Victorian hypocrisy, in part rooted in the sheer cruelty with which the rural poor of England were expelled from the land and thrown into hovels for the gritty work of the industrial revolution.

A century and more since Hardy's imagined events and the real ones that inspired them were cast into words, the richest society in history seems to be reliving tragedies seemingly long past buried. How can this be?

Such developments cast my mind back to a classic analysis I read decades ago, The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, a study of the Speenhamland Law that sets on its head the notion popular among conservatives and their acolytes that markets evolved naturally. "Laissez-faire was planned," Polanyi argues in his nearly encyclopedic treatment of the transformation of England from agricultural and cottage industry to the factory system and the famously "satanic" mills.

Our grandchildren will one day learn that the vast impoverishment in our midst today is planned, executed with the economic levers of government, by individuals hellbent on enshrining what to their minds is the sacred right to exploit others, just as it existed in 1907.

Needed: New Nuremberg Trials

The fourth prisoner suicide at the Guantánamo concentration camp, which occurred a few days ago while this blog was engaged in belly-button gazing, raises inevitably the matter of bringing to justice the U.S. officials responsible for kidnapping, torture and detention without trial of as yet unknown numbers of individuals worldwide.

Just writing down what has been systematically done with my taxes and in my name brings to mind the disappearances, the desaparecidos, of Argentina in 1976-83, the military regimes of the neighboring South American southern cone between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, the system of repression under South African Apartheid, the Gulag of the Soviet Union and, yes, the Konzentrationslager of Hitlerian Germany.

An often forgotten point concerning the International Military Tribunal that tried the 24 top leaders of Nazi Germany, along with 200 others concerning crimes against humanity, is that this was necessary because the Germans had neither the rules nor the practice of punishing their own for egregious wrongdoing.

This has unfortunately become the case concerning the political and military leadership of the United States.

In a small snippet in Harper's called to my attention by my older son, Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani airs these views concerning instructions to U.S. interrogators: "I would tell the people who had to do the interrogation to use every method they can think of." Fellow candidate Mitt Romney says he is "glad" detainees are in Guantanamo, where no legal protection is forthcoming.

Even former CIA chief George Tenet, who by his own admission supervised the use of "waterboarding," justifies torture on grounds of fear of another 9/11.

Let's make this clear: waterboarding is a method of torture involving the use of water in such a way as to simulate drowning, produce a gag reflex and induce in the subject the very strong impression that death is imminent.

As tortures go, it is an American classic -- like marketing and Coca-Cola. It is all show. It is psychological. It leaves no physical trace.

Waterboarding is also illegal under U.S. law (18 USC sec. 2340) and the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, signed in 1984 and ratified by the U.S. Senate. Nonetheless, Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney has declared the practice "a no-brainer" in interrogating accused members of Al-Qaeda.

To be sure, the purported justification for waterboarding and much more, Al-Qaeda, is no mere Islamic reading club. However, they're the ones who define themselves as "warriors." Civilized nations recognize that they are only a new instance of organized crime.

Our government does not torture members of the Mafia, even though their drugs, gambling, prostitution and other "rackets" have wrought a toll on our society just as fearsome as Al-Qaeda's. Is it perhaps because too many government officials are bribed by the Mafia?

If so, how long before Osama gets the idea and pours the billions of oil money to the purpose of corruption? Oh, I forgot, that's already been done.

The state of things being what they are, is there any question, then, that at some nearing time, in which the various mirages of war are dissipated, there will be a need for a tribunal to judge Cheney, his boss, and the several thousand top minions who transmitted the orders, or even the winks and nods, to kidnap, torture and detain what we now know are at least 558 men without trial?

Is there little doubt that U.S. justice is not up to the task? It is time to begin thinking about Nuremberg Trials.

This would mean finding an impartial mechanism, no easy task.

The United Nations is too full of nations that, freed of a U.S. veto, would like nothing more than to humiliate the United States, which may be well-deserved but would not accomplice justice as Nuremberg did. (Besides, our leaders have already humiliated us beyond what any foreigner ever could.) For similar reasons, it is difficult to imagine impartiality at the International Court at the Hague.

The internal models available, however, are dicy.

Assassination in exile, as in the 1980 case of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the Nicaraguan Bush, would not be justice.

Argentina tried and convicted all the generals (prosecutors managed to prove in one instance more than 8,000 individual cases of oral transmission of orders from the very top to the very bottom). But a military revolt in the late 1980s forced an ignominious amnesty; only now are the lower ranks, the officers who actually commanded and executed the misdeeds, being brought to trial.

South Africa tried a different approach. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission exchanged confession of misdeeds for pardon. Victims of State violence could come forward and be heard, while perpetrators of State violence could also give testimony and request amnesty.

Critics of the TRC process have pointed out that justice was not achieved. One former prime minister apologized for his part, but another refused to comply with the subpoena, was fined yet ultimately prevailed on appeal. Black South Africa still perceives that the process was tilted in favor of the white criminals.

So the search continues. Can a new Nuremberg Tribunal be convened that brings to justice the Bush regime?

Predatory Men, Predatory Women

Chani's use of the phrase "predatory sex," referring to propositions of admittedly questionable taste, brought to mind recent comments in a post-marriage support group in which I serve as a discussion facilitator.

We were talking about dating and three women told of similar approaches by men. "I have never been asked for a date [since the marriage breakup]," said the one who expressed it best, "but I have been asked for sex several times."

What I found most appalling about this was the manner in which the approach was made. One man told the woman he was approaching that she was "so hot" he was already masturbating about her!

In what barn have these guys learned their etiquette?

Of course, men and women alike are drawn to sex with one another. Both fantasize about it and now and then do something about fantasies privately. (See here if you don't believe that, yes, Virginia, women do, too.) But there's an invisible boundary between what is private and public.

Many American men have given the rest of us a bad name by stepping over that line.

Similarly, less talked about because ... I don't know why, women are perfectly capable of stepping over boundaries in ways that are predatory, sometimes even over the felony line. Trust me on this.

Granted, most women do not mix up violence with sex, most women derive power more surreptitiously than men (millennia on the slave side of the master-slave relationship, Hegel might have said), but just like men, women can objectify, exploit, use and abuse other people in relation to sex.

The same three women who complained about being asked for sex, for example, did not think it even necessary to offer to pay half for dinner (even though refusal is almost certainly guaranteed). They assumed that -- by virtue of what, other than their sex? --they had an automatic entry to a man's wallet. Yet all of them would have assumed that they had the right to decide if and when they would kiss the man.

Let's take this off the table so there is no confusion: I am not proposing for an instant that a dinner buys sex (kissing to whatever).

However, anyone who thinks that the mere act of dressing up tantalizingly and putting on cosmetics (many purchased for their romantically suggestive brand names) deserves a free meal needs to think about what kind of reasoning would justify such a conclusion. It looks to me like sex buying dinner, although I'm open to alternatives.

The point is that both men and women are predatory in that we search for mates like hawks.

Traditionally, men have taken the active part of the hunt and women have tried to draw circles and arrows around themselves to be "found." The distinction between active and passive roles does not erase the mutual desire to find one another and mate.

Of course, there remain boundaries that neither one should cross. Some of these boundaries are clear and spelled out in codes of law, others are unwritten (yet not immutable) social norms.

Less explicit customary limits attach to groups within society (caste, class, ethnicity, etc.). In a society with such a large variety of subgroups and such ease of travel from one to the other, inevitably some misunderstandings will arise.

If the people of the opposite sex you encounter are all crossing your boundaries, I would suggest that you are simply in the wrong circles.

Sex as a Language

In the last half century or so, it seems, our society has swung from utter abandon in pursuit of sex of every tawdry, extreme and bizarre form, to outright rejection of sex, either with tablets of law from a mountain top or in expressions of sexual indigestion.

Chani, aka Thailand Gal, had this to say in response to my post yesterday:

I am incapable of being a slave to other people's needs, especially someone's sexual needs.

By all means, give up being a slave to someone's sexual needs. But must we forget that sex is a language -- like Thai or English or French?

A better analogy might be a special purpose computer language. Xbase. (I'm not really a techie, I just can do a reasonable imitation.) Few people still program in Xbase, although it's very sturdy and useful to handle databases.

Theoretically, you could write a compiler (a program to make programs) in Xbase and you could create a computer game. But why would you want to?

Xbase, originally dBase later Clipper and other variants, was invented in 1978 to go directly and intimately to the core of the information in a database, to build relations between sets of data, to link up what is often not obvious or easy in a deceptively simple way.

Like sex.

Technically, you could have sex with goats or design a robot to fulfill your every fantasy, but why would you want to?

Sex is a special purpose language that involves seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. (And, let's not forget, that off chance of reproduction.)

The combination of thought, word, mime and physical contact meld into a whole new dimension of contact with the core of another person. At the same time, we shed the layers of our selves. Then, at a powerful ego-barrier-destroying instant we all associate with intense pleasure, we have an exchange of being occurring that defies logical comprehension or comparison.

Sex is the language of love between two peers.

How to speak such a powerful language? In window shopping for love, look but don't touch, wrote Snoskred a few days ago. Touch and listen to the soul, responded Genevieve.

Chani reminded me that I've already expressed my dislike the idea of shopping for love (here), when I attempted to speak about love as an absolute value.

Yet my original question a week or so ago was whether love occurred one at a time, whether two or more might be touched by love. All in light of the idea that "The One" is largely a chimera (on this Chani's observations seem to match mine, although I have not quite abandoned the possibility).

One answer is to keep a certain distance. Another is to take a little nibble, as of a canape.

Yet another is the approach Leonard Cohen expressed in an interview aeons ago, in which he compared sex to a form of communication. Might we not be able to have several sexual conversations going? This would not be window shopping at all.

One is not intending to "buy" anything, but to share something of oneself and to receive from another, to practice the phrases, the verbs, the syntax of the complex language of love. If all of us could experience an all-connecting orgasm together, wouldn't wars cease, dog-eat-dog competition end, hatred dissipate?

This is not an invitation to a worldwide orgy. (Although ... what are you doing next Saturday?) No, seriously.

I repeat: Sex is the language of love between peers. We are not all peers. Sex should be an expression of equality, of similarity or complementary polarity, of abandonment and trust in another. It is often an instrument of oppression, a stand-in for power, a soft-touch leash.

In the end, sex between everyone and everyone else is not appropriate. But neither is no sex between anyone.

Slouching Toward Craziness

Why is it that when you begin to slouch toward partnering things get crazy and all you want to do is head for the hills?

OK, I almost saw myself on "Sex in the City" typing on Sarah Jessica Parker's laptop. (Except I'm a guy who can't stop wondering why she uses a Mac, fer cryin' out loud.)

I'm told this is obvious and true and inevitable. Why am I the only person in the universe who doesn't know this? And don't tell me RTFM. This wasn't in the manual!

Why is it that even when you get along with someone, have great sex, enjoy similar movies, generally "get" one another, you still have rip-roaring arguments of the type you've had before with someone else who can't possibly live with you?

Why do people drive each other crazy? Why did I feel impelled to comment at the wedding I attended "If they think the wedding is difficult, wait till they get to the divorce part"? (Note: I did not say this to the couple.)

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

Oh, and did I say "why"?

When a Door is not a Door

You remember the grade school riddle: When is a door not a door? When it's ajar. The same could be said about the immigration bill now on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Crafted as a compromise, the bill would

• legalize foreigners who entered the USA without authorization prior to Jan. 1, 2007;
• increase border barriers;
• alter the family unification visa system to favor those with skills or assets.

Some people say this is too generous, as 12 million people would be legalized. Other people point out that each person has to come up with a $1,500 processing fee and a $5,000 fine, which for a family of four would mean $26,000.

Some say the border barriers will make the country more secure. Others point out that the open border, Canada, has been the gateway for would-be terrorists, whereas the patrolled border with Mexico has not coughed up one single such operative.

Some say that it's high time we stopped (other people's) family chain migrations. Other point out that changes will separate families.

Still, the politics being what they are, this is probably the best bet -- unless the Senate amends it beyond recognition.

The problem in this country are the millions of hypocritical and downright mean people who love to make life difficult for others and evade responsibilities themselves. They are easily recognizable as conservatives and Republicans.

They shout about "family values" but get caught with affairs and multiple, messy divorces -- some even with minors. They tut-tut about abortion, but they only impede the choice for poor women, who don't vote Republican if they vote at all, while leaving the possibility open for middle class and wealthy women, some of whom do vote Republican.

That's the hypocrisy part. Now comes the meanness part.

It is amply clear that the immigrants unauthorized to work hold jobs employers are happy to hire them for and that the loss of these people would be an economic setback. See, for example, this study for a snapshot of the situation in California that is representative of the national picture.

Despite the popular misconception, immigrants do not steal jobs from native workers. See here.

Yet nonetheless, there are burgeoning groups of chauvinist nativists who harass immigrants with vigilante tactics and are the backbone of the anti-immigrant movement.

There's no rhyme or reason here. It's just pure meanness. (Mixed with a generous dose of racism, which is also plain mean.)

Solutions that occur to me -- expelling the South from the Union or deporting nativists back to their beloved white, European homelands -- are either impractical or unworkable for the present.

The only solution is to give the irrational segment of our society, which unfortunately is much too large for a nation that stakes a claim to lead the world, some emotional satisfaction in exchange for a saner immigration policy.

That's what Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass) and John Kyl (R-Ariz) did last Thursday when they cobbled the present bill before the Senate.

It's time to move this nation toward a more reasonable and open policy, as open to the immigrants we will increasingly need in the future, as we were in the past to those who came before.

The One?

A correspondent asks whether it is possible to love two people at once. My response is to wonder whether it is possible to love just one, famously "The One."

Let's set aside the various kinds of love: for family, for friends, erotic or romantic, and altruistic or self-giving -- in Greek: storge, philia, eros, and agape. I wrote about this here.

Defining love, classifying it, moralizing about it, are all distractions.

We all know what love is, most prominently we notice its absence from our lives, our communities, our world. The question about loving two need not be circumscribed to romantic love, although it most often is.

Still, I wonder whether it is possible to love just one person.

Might there not be one person with whom it is a joy to discourse about the economy, politics, literature? Another with whom a shared meal, perhaps cooking for or being cooked for by that person, is a sheer delight? Could not another offer a storybook home, replete with children? Yet another share an interest in tennis or boardgames?

Why must these affinities and shared pleasures lead to the bed, or merely the sofa, or skinny dipping, in only one instance?

All right, we carry the Judaeo-Christian monkey on our backs. Adultery is wrong because ... it muddied up paternity for the purposes of inheritance during the period in which property was almost exclusively held by men. That's not what God allegedly told Moses, nor what the rabbis and priests want you to take home with you after you've helped fill the collection plate.

But it happens to be the best explanation for a moral imperative so widely contravened.

Yes, surely, there's also pregnancy and disease, but there's also birth control, safe sex and medicine. Besides, didn't I just finish pointing to the sofa (or the back seat of a Dodge), the quintessential locale for making out of a non-penetrational nature?

Must every expression of intimacy, desire, pleasure in another necessarily end up with an exchange of genital fluids? Isn't kissing and embracing just as necessary for the sanity of mammals?

Might there not, then, be two or three bed partners, five or six sofa partners and ten or eleven merely hugging and hand-holding partners, each with a different set of emotional, intellectual and activity affinities?

Admittedly, this is a question more often raised by a man. Just as my correspondent's question is most often raised by a woman.

Yet even the most Puritan of women experience a range of physical intimacy -- from sex to kissing, embracing and even just touching -- with a very large set of concentric circles of people. In contrast, the serially monogamous male usually is physically intimate with one adult at a time, perhaps a few children.

Women will often admit that they wished they could be lesbian, as they share so much with other women, even though for sex they desire a man, preferably one man. Why couldn't a community of women sexually share a man? Or why couldn't a community of women share a community of men?

Why couldn't a community of men share a woman? The woman would be too lonely; a community of men is an unsentimental, competitive, relatively Spartan environment.

With the divorce rate what it is, with relationships in general so ephemeral, with the reality that it is unlikely that one person -- The One -- will amply satisfy another emotionally, intellectually, physically and so forth, shouldn't we rethink the couple paradigm?

Yes, Virginia, it is possible to love two people at once, intensely, honorably, lovingly. Indeed, I doubt that it is possible to love just one, happily ever after.

Look Who Won the War

The offloading of red-ink bleeding Chrysler by Mercedes-Benz automaker Daimler at a gigantic loss, on the heels of Toyota's displacement of General Motors as the top auto seller in the USA, is an odd outcome for an industry that was once indisputably American-led. Did Germany and Japan ultimately win World War II?

Halting my own German-made car at a stop light, I count the vehicles around me by provenance and it's not hard to reach that conclusion.

The least mysterious element is how this situation came to be. It could not be expected that Europe and Japan would wallow in ruins for generations, nor that American-made cars would continue to make up 69 percent of all autos made worldwide -- as was true in 1968 -- forever.

The underpinnings of the lifestyle that permitted someone who did no more than apply bolts to a machine all day to send children to the very expensive higher education in the United States was bound to end. Indeed, American automakers went from making the best cars to making the cars most predictably doomed to fall apart.

"Planned obsolescence" was popularized starting in 1954 by American industrial designer Brook Stevens, the idea being that goods could be made in such a way that they would need to be replaced within a certain span of time, thus forcing the consumer to buy it again and again. The idea came from British economist Bernard London, who in 1932 proposed that planned obsolescence would be a way to stimulate consumption and end the Great Depression, which devastated the UK as much as the USA.

Planned obsolescence works best with a monopoly (Microsoft and its treatment of users with what it deems to be "old" software). It also works with an oligopoly, a market or industry dominated by a few sellers.

The oligopoly was the prevailing structure of American industry from the 1950s to the 1980s, when the Reagan Administration deregulated everything. Autos? Chrysler, Ford, GM. TV? ABC, NBC, CBS. Cereals? Kellogg, General Foods, Post. And so on ...

Are we better off having to buy our own telephones from companies that obfuscate the options, having to choose between competing local and long distance companies? Wasn't there a certain stability and certainty in knowing that when we moved the phone would be there before the furniture?

What's next: brands of oxygen? I was going to say water, but that is now sold, expensively and anti-ecologically.

And what about Germany and Japan? They have oligopolies, too. Autos? Bundes Motor Werke (BMW), Daimler and Volkswagen. (Himself rode in Benzes and VW bugs, just check the pictures from the 1930s.) Or Toyota, Mitsubishi and Nissan.

The Germans and Japanese had two comparative advantages. Both stem from what Leon Trotsky called, in another context, the relative advantage of underdevelopment. First, their industrial base was wiped out by 1945 so that for the past half-century, they've been working in plants that are 30 or 40 years newer than ours. Secondly, and this is truer of the Japan than Germany, their small internal market meant focusing outward -- and, until Europe fully unifies or China emerges, there is no larger single internal market than that of the United States.

They set out to conquer by listening to consumer demand, while American auto executives turned a deaf ear to the market. All German and Japanese businessmen learned to speak English, not just in translation, but the American cultural idiom. You would be hard-pressed to find Japanese-speaking U.S. executives and few speak even German.

American companies export products with the Americanizing idea. Blue-jeans sell youths U.S. hipness in France. Toyota does the reverse. They Americanized to suit the market. They even put plants here.

That's how German and Japanese automakers beat American competitors, both in timeliness and intensity of response, when Americans switched from the showboats with fins to low-gas-mileage compacts. Today, even the South Koreans (KIA) are first in the U.S. market with hybrids and high-mileage cars.

Buying an American car today is a singular act of stupidity. In a couple of years it will need huge repairs, in four or five it will need to be discarded.

I have a 17-year-old German car that may well last another 17; yet it draws oohs and ahhs from men and women alike. Although I really purchased it for its sturdiness and solid engineering. Could you say the same for anything coming out of Detroit?

Yet even German carmakers are Americanizing. The most recent model Mercedes will display, alongside the oil pressure gauge, the song a plugged-in iPod is playing. From what I hear on e-mail lists, all these electronics are making Benzes subject to the sort of recurrent breakdowns that plague American cars.

Are the Japanese next?

I suspect redemption, or at least an entirely new paradigm, will come with the next great global battle: against the effects of industrial depredation of the environment. Collective survival will force redesign of the combustion engine and a massive shift to a cleaner, probably still unknown, fuel.

Are we Americans capable of rising to the challenge? Or have we, like the Romans once had, become too comfortable to be able to change?