Monthly Archives: September 2015

Reading ‘Sapians’ while watching the Tahoe Iron Man Race

Americana, Psychological Musings, Religion

Iron Man (1 of 1)[As] human societies grew ever larger and more complex,while the imagined constraints sustaining the social order also became more elaborate. Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to coöperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture’.
Sapiens A Brief History of Mankind by Yuval Noah Harari

We went to Michele’s family cabin at Squaw Valley over the weekend just to have a change of pace. When we got there, we realized it was the weekend of the second annual – they call it Second Annual but it is the third year as smoke from fires cancelled last year’s event – what is billed as IRONMAN LAKE TAHOE. On Sunday, after mistakenly not recording the Singapore Grand Prix – in which Hamilton DNF’ed – and not liking the start of a bad 49er game, we walked along part of the course to the finish area. It was a warm day, probably in the low 80°s, and the air had the familiar dry smell of the East Side, atleast until we got to the golf course. It was a perfect day for a walk

The Tahoe Ironman starts with a swim in Lake Tahoe of 2.4 miles, then a 112 mile bike ride – it’s not really a ride ride, the contestants are the peddlers – and ends with a marathon. (In my old, out-of-shape opinion, any section would require an Ironperson.) The first finishers started drifting in a little after four in the afternoon, after starting with a 6:45 AM swim!, and they looked to be in shockingly good shape. The winner had a time of nine hours and thirty nine minutes and he did a little jig as he crossed the finish line. Ironman (1 of 1)-2

The most memorable moments – and by moments, I mean sights in time – were not the guys at the front of the race but the guys at the end of the pack. The marathon is two laps from Squaw to almost Tahoe City, on the bike path by the Truckee River, so there are people going both ways for a large portion of the race. After watching at the finish line for a while, we started wandering back to the cabin, stopping to admire the high tech bikes, Ironman (1 of 1)and then walking back to the cabin along the race route. It was getting towards evening and we watched one guy – who looked to be in great shape – ride in on his bike. That meant that he still had a marathon to run and it was almost 6.

As we walked, I began to watch the runners. It was impossible to tell if they were on their first lap with about sixteen miles to go or on their last lap with one mile to go and in my imagination I thought about how discouraging it must be to be that far back. It was getting dark and the runners left were few, they looked beat. In my imagination, they were discouraged by how much longer it took than they expected. It got darker and as we walked by the lonely water girls, Ironman (1 of 1)-3

something amazing started happening. Runners started putting on headlamps. My imaginary runner disappeared, replaced by the real runner who knew, when she started, that she would be running in the dark, in the mountain cold, on an almost empty course, on an almost empty tank. That takes an amazing spirit, I think more than the guy who won.

But that spirit is not enough because people are not equal – they are not born with the same abilities or have jobs that allows for equal training time – and an amazing spirit is not enough to overcome that.

I have been reading Sapiens A Brief History of Mankind by Yuval Noah Harari and parts of it have rocked me. When Harari compares The Code of Hammurabi to the Declaration of Independence, by comparing If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye. If one break a man’s bone, they shall break his bone. If one destroy the eye of a freeman or break the bone of a freeman he shall pay one mana of silver. If one destroy the eye of a man’s slave or break a bone of a man’s slave he shall pay one-half his price to all men are created equal, and then says that both positions are equally valid from a biological or evolutionary point of view, I am rocked. When he says neither is more moral, I think, How can that be?.

Years ago, I did a little bit of volunteer work on several Spiritual retreats for shell shocked, body bashed, veterans and their equally shocked families. During a break, a guy I was working, another ex E-5 type, said something like There is no morality without God. I wasn’t particularly shocked even though the group leader was a Buddhist, but I was a little offended. My world view does not include a God who makes rules about morality – or chemistry for that matter – and passes them down to mankind. But if neither biology or evolution make rules on morality, if the only natural rules are what works to pass on DNA, where do I get my rules? (And, man! do I have rules.)  Where do those rules, that I believe in the core of my being, come from?

If they are only constructs and those constructs are no better than, say, a Afghan tribesman’s construct, let’s say a tribesman who is trying to sell his thirteen year old daughter who he owns, where does that leave me? It is hard to be morally superior if those morals are not morally better. Without God, where does that morality come from? It obviously isn’t self evident. If nature gives different individuals different abilities and different chances, who are we to say that people are equal and should thereby be treated equally? Where does the authority for the morality we know to be right in our very being – in our soul, if you believe in that sort of thing – come from? Surely it must be more than just culture.

A couple of thoughts after watching most of the world’s longest debate

Americana, Politics

Repub debate (1 of 1)My first impression of the Republican Debate last Wednesday is that the candidates live in a different world than I do. In their world, the economy was doing great until Obama became president, 9-11 apparently happened on Clinton’s watch after which Bush the Younger did keep us safe, and the possibility of making a deal with Iran will result in the end of the world as we know it. Trump even said that, if Israel goes to war against Iran, we will have to take Iran’s side.

Everybody expected the debate to revolve around Trump and he did get the more airtime than anybody else – to a great extent because the debate rules gave everybody the time to answer attacks and the other candidates were constantly attacking him – but I don’t think he was the center of the debate. Watching Trump, I was reminded of  the George Cohan quote, I don’t care what you say about me, as long as you say something about me, and as long as you spell my name right. I went into the debate thinking that Trump is an egomaniac and I was not disappointed but I also kept thinking Trump has hit a nerve and the Democrats keep thinking that there is no nerve there, I think that is a mistake.

At one point, Trump and Carly Fiorina tussled and I was surprised at how much Trump knew about Fiorina’s Hewlett Packard career  disastrous experience (I was also surprised that he knew the word persona). We live less than ten driving miles away from HP and Fiorina’s mistakes were big news here and I think Trump was pretty much right. About the time the smart money was realizing that computers were becoming a commodity in a saturated market, Fiorina forced a $19 billion merger with computer manufacturer Compaq that is still haunting the company. If I were going to vote for a business person for President – and I won’t because government and business are very different, business is a dictatorship designed to operate in secret to make money and government should be open and transparent, helping people; it is a stupid idea, just look at Chaney – I would vote for Trump over Fiorina.

As an aside, that is not to say that either Trump or Fiorina are stupid. They both know how to take care of themselves: Trump bankrupted four companies while making money for himself and Fiorina was fired and given a Twenty Million Dollar severance package to get her out of the trashed HP. End aside.

The three people I liked the best were Rand Paul,  Ben Carson, and John Kasich, the Governor of Ohio. Maybe I should say The three people who I started out liking best because each of them would start out saying something that make sense and then they would wander off into fantasyland. Like Rand Paul saying For every Kentuckian that has enrolled in Obamacare, 40 have been dropped from their coverage, or, from Ben Carson, A lot of people who go into prison straight, and when they come out they’re gay, or my fave from Rand Paul, again, saying The president is advocating a drone strike program in America. 

The three people I liked worst were Jeb! Bush who wants to put Margaret Thatcher on the ten dollar bill – WTF? – Mike Huckabee who wants to make the USA a theocracy, and Ted Cruz who wants to shut the government down.

It is a sobering thought that one of these guys will end up actually running for President.

Bernie Sanders, Jimmy Carter, and The Press

Americana, Current Affairs

Carter (1 of 1)Summer is for dating, fall is for mating. Tamara Keith on NPR is a reference to Bernie Sanders not being a viable candidate.

What most pisses me off this primary season, even as the Bernie Sander’s crowds get bigger, is hearing a pundit say, Of course he can’t win, or, even, get the nomination.  And the bigger the crowds, the louder they seem to say it.

As people – politicians, movie actors, athletes, even The Kardashians – move into the collective conscience, a sort of collective shorthand takes over. The press, but it is more than just the press, decide on one simple story and all the complexities are washed away. Now it is the craziness of Donald Trump, or the vague sleaziness of Hillary Clinton, it used to be the naiveté of Jimmy Carter.

My first and lasting impression of Jimmy Carter was that he is far from  naive. I first heard him talk in January of 1975, about 21 months before the 1976 Presidential election. I was driving across Nevada on my way to Sun Valley, and just after Lovelock, it started to lightly snow. I turned on the radio, hoping to get a local station with a weather report, and what I got was what I thought was a random southerner talking about US foreign policy. I kept driving and the snow kept lightly falling – heavy enough so that the countryside became magically covered and light enough so the highway was kept clear by traffic – and I kept listening. The speaker, who had been schooled in the Navy’s nuclear submarine program, was brilliant, thoughtful and knowledgeable. As I cleared  Winnemucca, still heading east, I started to lose the signal, so I pulled over and listened to the final minutes by the side of the road, heater running, anxiously hoping it wouldn’t keep snowing.  It was so bizarre – sitting in the car by the side of the road, in a snowstorm, in the middle of Nevada, listening to a talk on how to change our foreign policy – that I still remember it.  At the end, I learned that the random southerner was Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia, and I was smitten with him. I still am.

Part of my smitteness is that I am a sucker for southern populists. I like Huey Long – Education and training for all children to be equal in opportunity in all schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions of training in the professions and vocations in life; to be regulated on the capacity of children to learn, and not on the ability of parents to pay the costs. Training for life’s work to be as much universal and thorough for all walks of life as has been the training in the arts of killing – even though I know a refined and educated person shouldn’t like somebody like Huey Long. I was and am a fan of Bear Bryant – If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it. That’s all it takes to get people to win football games for you. And, as might be expected, before I turned on him for Vietnam, I liked Lyndon Johnson over the Kennedys.

But I also remember that speech by Jimmy Carter because it was the most coherent speech on foreign policy that I have ever heard. Carter had been an officer aboard a nuclear submarine and he had obviously thought about foreign policy and about nuclear war with the total carnage it would bring. It seemed to me that Carter was a peacenik who had actually thought about the problem.  By the time I got back to the office a week or so later, I was telling everybody I knew that that Jimmy Carter should be our next president.

The most common reaction I got was laughter but Carter ran a brilliant, if sometimes very rough, campaign making enough converts to become president. Starting as an almost unknown outsider, a born-again Christian outsider from the deep South, Carter surprised the establishment press and I don’t think they ever forgave him for that. Today, partially because of the presses’ simplified picture of him, Carter is considered a mediocre president at best and his decency, as a human, is regarded as Jimmy Carter’s main legacy. But much of what people didn’t like in 1976 is now starting to seem like prophecy.

Even when we know better, much of what we were told and believe about the Carter presidency comes from the press that simplified a complex man. His honest and his openness – he was the first, and maybe the last, president to be interviewed in Playboy (and the first to wear jeans in the White House) – were painted as weaknesses. We want our politicians transparent, yet we want them powerful as well, and power, even in the best of circumstances, means the management of information Nathan Heller pointed out in The New Yorker, and telling the truth is not managing the information.

We are given cartoons of complex people and complex situations and all nuance is lost. Now we are told that Bernie Sanders is unelectable and, really, un-nominatable. That may be true but it may not be true and the press’ insistent dismissal is hurting Sanders by making him seem like a summer fling. That is too bad, because Sanders is a serious candidate.

 

Europe and the refugees

Psychological Musings
Photo from U.S. News & World Report
Photo from U.S. News & World Report

If Europe fails on the question of refugees, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for Angela  Merkel

It seems to me that the refugee crisis in Europe is the biggest existential crisis in Europe’s post World War II history. In Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 , Tony Judt makes the case that admitting complicity in the holocaust is what makes Europe Europe. This was not always the case, right after the war European anti-Semitism was still rampant, everybody was a victim and the few people responsible for the holocaust were dead and gone.

The Germans were the first to accept their part in the holocaust. It was the most obvious, the hardest to hide, and the hardest to pretend that the past wasn’t their past. The German mea culpas opened the gates – and hidden records – until everybody had to face their part in the most inhumane act of the twentieth century.

Everybody likes to identify with the victim but there is nothing to learn there. When Europe admitted they were the victimizers and started asking How did we do that? How do we make sure we don’t do that again? they agreed that the answer was Universal Human Rights. That belief that people have Rights because they are human is the center of European identity.

How Europe collectively deals with the huge influx of Syrians, Iraqis, North Africans, and random other scared, desperate, displaced people, will define what being European really means.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Americana

…that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.

That wisdom is not unique to our people but I think it has special meaning to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were carried off and divided up into policies and stocks. I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular,  specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feelings is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in a particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, who thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels in dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribed this love in its sacred texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, hold her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world – which is really the only world she can ever know – ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains – whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains. Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me.

I’m not sure what more to say about Between the World and Me except that this book is about how dangerous it is to grow up black in the United States, especially for boys becoming men. The conceit of the book is that it is a letter to Ta-Nehisi”s son on that son’s becoming a man but the book is really a polemic against the fiction of the American Dream. The book is an easy book to read even if it is uncomfortable at times. Do I think every thinking  white American should read Between The World and Me? Yes.