All posts by Steve Stern

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.

The trouble with The Trouble With Trump

Americana
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Brendan McDermid/Reuters

They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.Donald Trump

I’ve been reading comments, from all my friends on facebook, that the people who like Donald Trump are stupid and I don’t agree. In a New Yorker article, about a week or two ago, they described a typical Trump follower, She worked at a furniture company, she said. “But the industry went down the tubes.” Her husband, Charlie, used to build household electricity meters at a General Electric plant, until the job moved to Mexico. Now he parks cars at a hospital. They weren’t exactly living the American Dream, but they had good jobs and now they don’t.

These are the kind of people who – 25 to 50 years ago – could have reasonably expected their kids to go to a good state college and move up to a white-collar job. Now they get paid way less and that once inexpensive college costs way more. These are the kind of people who could have reasonably expected to have a decent retirement from their company pension and are now worried about being homeless. They have voted for Democrats and Republicans and it doesn’t make much difference, their lives just keep getting worse. They played by the rules and they got poorer while the rich – who seem to have a different set of rules – just get richer.

Now, Donald Trump comes along, and he doesn’t fit any stereotype, he is that rare bird, a Republican populist. Somehow, that gives hope to alot of people. They think that in influx of Mexicans who are willing to work cheap has lowered their wages and they think that the various trade deals have made the rich richer but left them poorer and they are – at least partially – right.

It doesn’t mean that they are stupid, it just means that they don’t think the usual suspects give a damn about them.

 

 

Finding the elusive Pagani in a world of excess at the Monterey Car Week

Around home, Cars

Pagani (1 of 1)Standing on a platform, overlooking Carmel beach and the Pacific Ocean, at about 6 o’clock a week ago last Wednesday, I felt like the proud father of a kid that had just sung a solo at her third grade graduation. The temperature was in the low eighties and there was not a breath of air with the Pacific as placid as a millpond. Standing there, listening to the babble of voices and laughter from all over the world – mostly Chinese and French, it seemed – I felt, totally irrationally, that California was putting on a great show just for the out-of-town visitors and I was, somehow, partially responsible.

Later, driving away from the beach on Ocean Avenue, with the top down on Michele’s car, all the better to feel the soft air and see the supercars parked around town, like Toyotas at Costco, we both yelled, There’s a Pagani. It was our first sighting in the wild. We circled the block, found a place to park and walked back. Pagani (1 of 1)-2Pagani (1 of 1)-3Pagani (1 of 1)-4Looking at it parked in a standard parking place, the Pagani looks small. It is only a little longer than the Miata in front of it and not any taller. Somehow however, it has a presence that is way out of proportion to its actual size; it is  about as unobtrusive as Sofia Vergara at that third grader’s pool party.

I do read that the Huayra is easy and pleasant to drive which is not always a feature of a hypercar. Of course, I will never find out, and therein lies the paradox – to misquote the Bard – cars are meant to be driven and while the overwhelming majority of us are only able to ogle, how they drive – how fast they are –  is part of their allure. The Pagani has plenty of allure with a six liter, twin-Turbo, AMG V-12 Mercedes engine that puts out 730 horsepower giving it a 0 to 60 time of about 3.2 seconds and a top speed of about 230 mph.

As an aside, Horacio Pagani made his fortune making carbon fiber and the Pagani Huayra is a legacy of that. Carbon fiber is cloth woven from threads – thinner than a human hair – made from carbon atoms bonded together to form a long chain. These are then woven into a very thin cloth. According to howstufworks.com, it’s five times as strong as steel, two times as stiff, yet weighs about two-thirds less. What they don’t say is that it is way, way, more expensive. The Pagani Huayra’s basic body is made from four layers of carbon fiber, each about one millimeter thick. Because the carbon fiber has a weave and it takes more to match the seams – like making the pocket weave match on a nice shirt – in the least expensive versions of the car, the carbon fiber covered by paint. End aside.

I want to say that, in the Pagani’s case, the exquisite details are what give it the most kick, but that really isn’t the case. Everything just adds to its show stopping presence and I think that is because Pagani is the creation of one person. Most cars, most for-sale designed things, are compromises with what people supposedly want. When a designed object gets too far from the mainstream, it risks being ostracized. No matter how good it is (think Raymond Loewy’s Studebakers which, looking back, are much better looking than anyone gave them credit for). The result is that most car designs are watered down, but not the Pagani. Often, I will rave over a car and Michele will be lukewarm saying Yeah, it’s OK but it is too masculine for me. That is not the case with the Pagani, it is soft and luscious and very feminine.  Pagani (1 of 1)-5 Pagani (1 of 1)-6Even the mirrors are supposed to evoke a woman’s eyes (although who besides Sophia Loren, I have no idea).Pagani (1 of 1) Still, for me, the best part is the heavily chromed steampunk interior which contrasts with the chromeless exterior. Pagani (1 of 1)-2Of course Ferrari wants to remain the premier Italian car so, to take on Pagani, they have come out with the 1.5 million dollar Ferrari LaFerrari. It is drop dead gorgeous, in a very studied way, and the contrast to Pagani is striking. Michele described it as The Pagani is a young rich man’s car and the LaFerrai is an old rich man’s car. Pagani (1 of 1)-3Of course, the Huayra and the LaFerrari were not the only treats. Everywhere we turned, there were memorable cars. This year, there were lots of Cunninghams – an American supercar from the 50’s – a wonderful 1931 Alfa Grand Sport with a body by Touring, and one of my favorites, a Cadillac built for Rita Hayworth with a body by Ghia. Pagani (1 of 1)-4 Pagani (1 of 1)-5Pagani (1 of 1)-7Pagani (1 of 1)-8 Pagani (1 of 1)-6I can hardly wait for next year.

(Post updated 8/29/15 to reflect credit for Pagani mirror back photo by Michele.)

 

Bloodsport

Cars

Wilson (1 of 1)Last year at the Japanese Grand Prix, Jules Bianchi, crashed into a recovery vehicle while racing in a torrential rain storm. Last month, after being in a coma for nine months, he died.

Last weekend, Justin Wilson drove into the exploding debris field from another car in an IndyCar race at Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania. He was hit in the head, by part of the nose of another car, while going over 200 hundred miles per hour. He died on Sunday. Over the last ten years, while watching racing, I have seen probably an hundred cars go off the track. Maybe twenty of those resulted in accidents and probably about ten we serious accidents. In every case except Bianchi and Wilson, the driver walked away.

It made racing seem safe, but it isn’t, auto racing is a bloodsport. The Marquis of Portago, who was killed in a race in 1957, said that there are only three real sports, mountain climbing, bull fighting, and auto racing, all the others are just games. I’m not sure about that, but the possibility of injury or death is part of the sport and is part of what makes it exciting…until somebody actually dies. Then the sport seems stupid and, even, ghoulish; then it is tragedy and we want to look away.

Both Bianchi and Wilson were well liked guys and they will be missed.  But the drivers will still drive and the spectators will still watch. I guess that is good, but it doesn’t seem as good as it did two months ago.