Alexander and David

To enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art you walk across the David H. Koch Plaza to the museum’s entrance, which stirs questions about the relationships of art and money and power. Such questions resonate forcefully at the current Pergamon show, whose 264 works of art span the classical world from the reign of Alexander the Great (336-323 BC), whose empire stretched from India to Gibraltar, to the suicide of Cleopatra three centuries later.

Pergamon, once a major city in Asia Minor, known for its massive altar and a library that rivaled Alexandria’s, disappeared over a history of conquests and sackings until its buried remains were discovered and excavated in the late-19^th century. Some of the works of stone and metal are intact, but most are fragmented, the remnants of a civilization that vanished. The artworks exalt the deeds of the powerful – and enable their subjects to bask in the reflected glory. Later, as the growth of empire produced unprecedented wealth, the newly rich commissioned private pieces that, while wondrously crafted, seem devoid of meaning beyond the decorative.

I saw little hint of art as subversive of power – no Guernica to question the glory of the empire or reveal the suffering of ordinary people. And yet the monuments of Pergamon, with their the smashed noses and broken torsos, ultimately capture, not the immortality of the rulers but the evanescent ambitions of men.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792 - 1822

Phoenix Rising

With three children and one of my closest friends living there, I visit San Francisco often. Walking its steep streets is a cardio workout for an aging heart and a journey back to a time when the city was the capital of an alternative America, where I first heard the Grateful Dead in the summer of 1966. David Talbot’s Season of the Witch tells San Francisco's story from the aromatic innocence of 1967’s “Summer of Love” through the AIDS epidemic that infected over half the city's gay population 20 years later, but which, Talbot argues, “also had a strange power to heal [as] acts of human grace, in the midst of unspeakable anguish, began to help close San Francisco’s deepest wounds” – scars from its harrowing years of bombings, murders, kidnappings and hatred.

I had forgotten many events that had seemed so vivid then, and I hadn’t realized how interconnected the light and darkness had been – never knew, for example, that Jim Jones, who forced 909 followers to drink Kool Aid laced with cyanide in a Guyana jungle, had not long before been a major political force, delivering money, votes and other, more personal favors to the city’s most progressive leaders, including George Moscone, Willie Brown and Harvey Milk – and murdering Congressman Leo Ryan, the one politician who responded to the cult members’ growing cries for help.

It’s a story of how easily we fall victim to Utopian dreams and of what strength we can summon in the face of tragedy.

Beyond Appomattox

“There is nothing left for me to do,” said Robert E. Lee in the early morning of April 9, 1865, “but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths." A few hours later, Lee rode to Appomattox courthouse, where Ulysses S. Grant accepted the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, effectively ending the most murderous war in American history. It is an article of American exceptionalism’s faith that what happened at Appomattox 150 years ago yesterday was steeped in honor and mutual respect, Grant generous in victory, Lee noble in defeat. The war was over, the union preserved, the nation ready to heal. Except, writes, Elizabeth Varon in Appomattox, “The two men represented competing visions of the peace. For Grant, the Union victory was one of right over wrong.” For Lee it “was one of might over right,” won by massive firepower and human slaughter. Grant foresaw a better future; Lee sought the restoration of a mythic past.

Grant won the war. Lee won the peace. Grant became the brutal “butcher,” despite a casualty rate half that of the gentlemanly Lee. “The Lost Cause” exemplified the South’s pastoral alternative to the North’s soulless factories and urban slums. And Tara, Gone With the Wind’s dreamy plantation, captured America's popular imagination as the "slave camps" that, Edward Baptist writes, “inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed,” never could.

It’s time, I think, to change our narrative and accept our past.

The Pettus Bridge

Last night I went to see Selma, which opened with the bombing of Birmingham’s 16^th Street Baptist Church that took the lives of Carole Robertson (14), Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14) and Denise McNair (11), and ended with the Voting Rights Act two years later. One of the film’s main characters is Pettus Bridge, the steel arch that spans the Alabama River and the site of “Bloody Sunday,” where armed troopers beat peaceful  protesters without mercy. The bridge is named for Edmund Pettus (1821-1907), Confederate general, U.S. Senator and Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. The film’s power stems not only from its juxtaposition of violence and courage, but from its innocence. Black Americans put their lives on the line for things not much in vogue these days: the right to vote, something only 36.4% of Americans (and 41% of Alabamans) bothered to do in 2014; non-violence, in a country which today owns over 300 million guns; faith and community, where people of unimaginable courage turned to their churches for their strength.

Yet as I sat through the violence, the bloodshed, the humiliations, I suddenly and unexpectedly felt proud to be an American. African-Americans led the Civil Rights movement; the vast preponderance of its victims were black; the oppression they fought is older than the nation itself. But as I watched people hold America accountable for its own ideals, I realized that this was not just Black history. This was my history. And all the people who walked across that bridge were our greatest generation.

Nora Webster

When I finished Colm Toibin’s celebrated novel, Nora Webster, I had the humbling epiphany that I didn’t understand it. I sensed this coming when I felt the novel running out of pages before the author had made his point. Yet the book mesmerized me, and the realization I didn’t get it made me feel kind of dumb. So I read some reviews, figuring they would at least give me a coherent explanation of the plot. But I discovered that the reviewers didn’t understand Nora Webster any better than I did. They, however, were not about to admit it – and instead unapologetically explained for me a novel I had not read.

Nora Webster is a book in which nothing happens – nothing, that is, except life. Set in Ireland during the early years of “the troubles,” it is a story about ordinary people trying to cope with their lives. They are unheroic and inconsistent, often impenetrable. And Toibin doesn’t try to explain them for us – indeed, we end up knowing little about them, about their motivations or their inner feelings or even whether we like them or not.

This, perhaps, is the point I had missed. Toibin is not a sociologist. He is a storyteller. He doesn’t want to make his characters comprehensible. He wants to make them human. And as we are absorbed into the story of Nora’s life, we come to know her as we know everyone else, which is to say, hardly at all.

Good Friday

On Good Friday 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head. The assassination came five days after the surrender at Appomattox and the effective collapse of Southern resistance, and the two events have ever since shaped the narrative of American history. In her fascinating new book, Appomattox, Elizabeth Varon disputes the long-held myth that “Grant’s magnanimity” and “Lee’s stoic resignation” initiated “a process of national healing,” arguing instead that the two men interpreted the peace totally differently. For Grant the victory was one of “right over wrong,” and he looked forward to a transformed and prosperous nation. For Lee the defeat was one of “might over right,” and he sought a restoration, without slavery, of the old patrician order. Tragically, Lincoln’s murder helped ensure that Lee’s vision prevailed. We see it in depictions of Grant, “the butcher,” and of Sherman sowing carnage from Atlanta to the sea; of the “Birth of a Nation’s” ruthless Reconstruction when the Klan arose to restore honor and order to a lawless South; of greedy carpetbaggers deflowering a helpless land; of an age of gentility “Gone With the Wind.” And so, despite the Union’s overwhelming victory and the generous terms of the peace, the restoration of the old order – also known as Jim Crow – brutally repressed those whom the war had just emancipated. It took another century for the Civil Rights and Voting acts to address those wrongs – and 50 years more for the Roberts Court to roll them back.

Lords of the Lash

Last Friday evening, finding myself in want of entertainment, I decided to go to the movies. I went to see Twelve Years a Slave – and entertaining is not the word I would use to describe the most unflinchingly brutal film I have ever seen. Scene after scene of beatings, whippings, lynching and rape build on each other without respite and with no counterpoint of goodness. Almost more unbearable to watch than the vicious beatings and lacerated backs of hopeless slaves is the degradation that comes to almost everyone involved. The movie depicts a system of complete dehumanization, whose point, Stanley Fish wrote, is “to withhold from the audience an outlet for either its hope or its sympathy.” This is Schindler’s List without Schindler. Some want to see in the film an allegory of modern life, whose aim is to make viewers recognize parallels between the ante-bellum South and 21^st-century America. But history is not a morality play; it is the ever-unfolding autobiography of a culture, a complex effort to make sense of the complicated, many-sided and evolving portrait of who we are and how we came be so. Twelve Years a Slave is painful to watch and yet needs to be seen. We forced Germany and Japan to confront their pasts, but here, in “the land of the free”, we still gloss over our own two genocides. For our self-image to transcend hypocrisy, for our country to live her ideals, we must take ownership of our past.

The Global Frontier

Years ago I drove my son Daniel to play ice hockey in Toms River, New Jersey. It was there I first encountered the famous “hockey parent” – grown-ups clanging cowbells and unleashing barrages of epithets at the other team. By the second period both sets of parents were howling insults across the rink. Daniel was eleven. Dan Fagin presents the town in a different light. Toms River, A Story of Science and Salvation is a parable of big industry running roughshod over a small American community. In 1949 Ciba, the giant Swiss chemical company, bought 1350 acres of forest and farmland in Toms River and built a dye manufacturing plant. “Dye manufacture had always been a waste-intensive business,” writes Fagin, noting that “the dye would leave Toms River, but the waste would stay.” At first Ciba buried its waste on the property, which became an early Superfund site. Later the company dumped directly into the river, and when that was thoroughly polluted, Ciba built a pipeline from the plant straight to the ocean. When parents raised alarms about a childhood cancer cluster, the company strong-armed local officials, threatened to relocate its jobs, claimed its chemicals were trade secrets, and emitted black smoke only at night.

Eventually, the company left New Jersey for the lower wages and more relaxed regulations in the South, and ultimately for Asia, where China “is now the largest producer and consumer of the world’s most heavily used toxic chemicals.” The dye, the jobs, the pollution had left, but the waste stayed in Toms River.

My Blog and Us

This is my 302^nd post on a blog I began on January 2, 2012. It seems a good time to take stock and to look ahead. I started with eleven readers and now have 197 “registered subscribers,” so it’s fair to say I have not become a virtual rock star. But that's not my goal now, even if maybe it was when I began. In fact, if I had had a clue about branding and marketing, I probably wouldn’t be as proud of what “Perspectives” is . . . and what it might yet become. Nor would I would feel the same connection to its readers. My goals are (1) to use my own experiences to connect our personal lives to larger issues and (2) to offer some small thought that might make you look at the world a little differently, or even just to laugh, with me or at me. The blog is neither a journal nor an editorial; it is simply a shared reflection. Now I want to take it out into the world more, to explore new places and listen to other voices, and to share them with you.

My plan is to write two or three posts a week instead of five. Don’t worry, they will be just as short and shallow as ever. There just won't be as many, for I do know that the main virtue of this blog is its brevity. I love this journey. I have learned so much, and I am grateful for your companionship.

Dorian Gray

It turns out that jellyfish may hold the secret of eternal youth. I had thought it was mirrors. Each morning, when I look in the mirror, I see . . . me. The face staring back is the same one I have encountered for years. The daily changes are imperceptible and, of course, mirrors don’t lie. Aging pretty well, I smugly think.

Actually, mirrors do lie. But passport photos don’t, as I discovered yesterday when I got pictures for my trip next year to Burma and Vietnam. When the clerk handed me the 2”x2” portraits, I looked into an almost unrecognizable face – with the lines of an old man, yellowing teeth and gray hair that my passport swears is brown. This face looked nothing like the one I hard earlier seen in the mirror. No wonder strangers call me “sir.”

“You know what the Brits say,” said my friend David, who had had a similar experience, “’When you resemble your passport photograph, you are in need of the journey.’”

Enter Turritopsis dohrnii, the “immortal jellyfish” featured in the Times Magazine. This tiny invertebrate lives a circular life: it grows and then ages in reverse, returning to its earliest stage of life, from which it sets off again.  Jellyfish are more genetically similar to us than we might want to admit, which bodes well for stem-cell research. But the real excitement is the immortality bit.

Shin Kubota, a Japanese scientist who has studied Turritopsis for 40 years, believes we can learn its secret. But “before we achieve immortality,” he warns, “we must evolve first. The heart is not good.”

Beyond the 99 Percent

Today’s post is an almost-inadvertent addendum to yesterday’s. In the interim I read a review of The Price of Inequality, in which Joseph Stiglitz describes the consequences of the vast inequalities of wealth that now define America, perhaps more than any other nation on Earth. Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, argues that our two-tiered society has arisen, not primarily because of either the survival of the fittest or the impact of globalization, but because the rich have become increasingly able to control the political system: “While there may be underlying economic forces at play, politics have shaped the market, and shaped it in ways that advantage the top at the expense of the rest.” The result, he says, goes beyond unfairness; it undercuts the virtues of a free market system by promoting inefficiencies, reducing the educated labor pool and not investing in the infrastructure capitalism requires. (Yes, Barack Obama was absolutely right to point out that we don’t do it alone.) My concern is that the focus on a two-tiered society obscures what is happening. This entire political campaign cycle now involves rebuking or vindicating the one percent and toadying up to the mythical middle class, which is everybody else – the 99 percent. Once again, the poor, whose lives are as removed from the middle class as they are from the rich, have become invisible – none more so than the urban poor, who are locked in ghettos from which there is little escape. This is a moral calamity. It is also a tinderbox . . . and every time we reduce essential public services, we add fuel for the flames.

Getting the Words Right

In her review of a new edition of A Farewell to Arms, Julie Bosman writes of the 1958 interview in “Paris Review,” in which Ernest Hemingway told George Plimpton that he had written 39 endings to the novel before he got it right. Many of the early endings, which are in the book’s appendix, were simple and beautiful, and Plimpton asked what the stumbling block had been.

“Getting the words right,” said Hemingway.

Writing is an art form in which each word is as important to the whole as a brush stroke on a canvas or a note in a symphony. And yet we live in a world which seems to have little respect for the beauty of words.

We learn to write with a thesaurus, as if words were interchangeable parts without any particular meaning in themselves.

We mistake $20 words for erudition.

We use words to obfuscate our meaning, to hide our own lack of clarity, to dazzle our audiences.

In political campaigns, candidates are drilled relentlessly to stay “on message,” which means, not to choose the right words in response to a question, but to repeat the same words robotically over and over again.

In doing so, we rob language of its beauty . . . but not of its power, for we become vulnerable to those who manipulate it for their own uses. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty told Alice, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

The difference between the art of writing and propaganda is the truth of the words themselves. It is getting the words right.

Play the Game

I am reading Adam Hochschild’s riveting story of World War I, To End All Wars. Born into a family that made a huge fortune in mining in the late 19^th century, Hochschild became a civil rights and anti-war activist early in life and co-founded Mother Jones magazine in the mid-1970s. As such, he is in a prime position to write about the war’s loyalists and dissenters, groups with wonderfully arcane British twists – such as the fact that Sir John French, the first commander of British forces, and Charlotte Despard, anti-war activist, future communist and IRA sympathizer, were brother and sister. Hochschild writes insightfully about the British penchant to see war as a game, to equate fighting with competition, and to honor sportsmanship on both the playing field and the battlefield. In particular, he notes the impact of Sir Henry Newbolt’s “Vitaï Lampada” (“The Torch of Life”) – a poem I still sometimes hear declaimed by grown men in school ties – which compares war to cricket and urges its young heroes on both fields to “Play up! Play up! And play the game!”

This was a creed that made the British general staff exceptionally unsuited to the devastation of industrial warfare, the ugly reality of the trenches and the mind-boggling casualties – military and civilian – of World War I.

In an unrelated matter, I lost at squash yesterday, and I’m still pissed.

Unrelated? Well, maybe it’s better to think of a game as war, rather than of war as a game.

Seekers

I spent the last few days at a remote ranch not far above California’s huge Central Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. Being there made me think about people’s relationship to the land, a subject that was fed by weekend conversations with old friends and reading Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture, “It All Turns on Affection,” and Isabel Wilkerson’s book, The Warmth of Other Suns. Berry is the poet of the simple rural life in which people are connected to the land. He is heir to both Jefferson and Thoreau, and the student of Wallace Stegner, who taught him that Americans can be divided into “boomers,” who “pillage and run,” and “stickers,” who have “such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.” Wilkerson traces the Great Migration of 1915-1970, when six million people left the Jim Crow South for the urban north – and in so doing, transformed both the landscape and the history of America.

Berry long ago came home to the Kentucky hills – where his family has farmed since before the Civil War – to live the values he espouses. It’s a story I want to embrace – but Wilkerson reminds me that this is the same rural South from which millions of Black sharecroppers fled an unimaginable system of oppression that bound them to the land.

The migrants’ story is unique; their message is  universal. As Berry writes, “land and people have suffered together, as invariably they must.” To me, those courageous enough to leave were neither boomers nor stickers. They were, like so many of us, seekers.

Back to Brock

In earlier posts, I wrote about Woody Brock’s book American Gridlock – his characterization of the current political debate as a “dialogue of the deaf,” his thoughts on the deficit, and his solution to the entitlements problem. In my ongoing discussion of the book, which I urge you to read, I will look for stories that demonstrate one of the issues Brock raises: (1) the public economic crisis that threatens to make this a “lost decade;” (2) the entitlements crisis; (3) preventing perfect financial storms; (4) China and bargaining theory; and (5) distributive justice.

This morning’s news is dominated by the catastrophe hovering over Europe. This is hardly a new story, as we have been reading for months about the potential collapse of Greece, the recession in Spain, the Irish debt, Italy’s financial crisis, etc. While the doctrine of austerity may seem a rational intellectual solution to these problems in national treasury offices and newspaper editorial pages, it doesn’t work so well when people are injected into the equation.

Brock’s distinction between sound public investment in a nation’s infrastructure as opposed to deficit spending for short-term stimulation offers a way forward. A sound investment creates things we need – new bridges, better education systems, public transportation – and guarantees a return. It’s not easy to implement – “shovel ready,” for example, is not the right criterion – but it is the only way to get beyond the current impasse. It will put people to work building things we desperately need that will pay for themselves over time. And it will require people to work together, which is the antidote to the hardening economic and ethnic divisions that are Europe’s biggest threat.

Dr. Brock

I have known Woody Brock since we were six years old, and he has recently published a thoughtful book, American Gridlock, Commonsense 101 Solutions to the Economic Crisis. Since he is neither bashful about his cognitive abilities nor modest in his ambition, he has subtitled his book, “Why the Right and the Left are Both Wrong.” In line with that aspiration, he takes on five of the most contentious and important issues of the day – issues, he argues, that now seem intractable because (1) the public conversation has become a “dialogue of the deaf” and (2) unbending ideologues “cherry pick” data which they use to fortify their intellectual redoubts. “Gotcha,” he writes, “has become the game of our times.”

Brock calls for a return to a rigorous logic in which win-win solutions are deduced from first premises. A discussion of this method is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. Over the next couple of posts I will briefly present each of the issues raised in Brock’s book.

The Deficit. Brock, a serious mathematician, engages in simple math to distinguish between “good” and “bad” deficits. There is a huge difference, he argues, between spending and investing: a government’s negative cash flow is not a deficit if the borrowed money is invested in human capital and infrastructure improvements that will earn a positive return in the future.

“We eclipse all other nations,” he writes, “spending a whopping 71% of GDP on consumption.” In doing so we have created what John Kenneth Galbraith predicted over 50 years ago: an Affluent Society of “private splendor and public squalor.”

Next up: Entitlements; Preventing Perfect Financial Storms; China and Bargaining Theory; Distributive Justice.

Shrinking Commons

In Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo, writes, “Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way. . . .While independent India had been founded by high-born well-educated men, by the 21^st century few such types stood for elections or voted in them, since the wealthy had extra-democratic means of securing their social and economic interests. Across India, the poor people were the ones who took the vote seriously. It was the only real power they had" (pp 216-7). But in Boo’s portrait of the lives of the poor, living in a fetid slum by Mumbai’s gleaming airport, the vote brings no secure power. It brings promises and celebrations at election time; it offers the possibility of individual access to the system through the corrupt political machines that exchange petty patronage for loyalty and eschew any change that might undermine their inconsequential power. The real power lies with the police, courts and government bureaucracy that set the poor against each other and supply “justice” for bribes.

The privatization of public space extends across the economic spectrum in India, just as it does in the rest of a world increasingly characterized by gated communities, private security guards, the dismantling of public education, the shredding of the social safety net, and proxy armies fighting off-budget wars.

The solution to the tragedy of the commons is not to privatize it, as Garrett Hardin suggested in his 1968 essay. It is to reclaim it for the common good.