Nathaniel’s Blog

This was a new, never even imagined experience for me: I was walking along the sidewalk, minding my business, when a 40ish woman sheltered, walking towards me under a red umbrella, made a sign of the cross, quite distinct and official, top of chest to stomach, then side to side.  I didn’t catch her eye and couldn’t see what she had been looking at.

Nothing special was happening around us, no evident crimes occurring, no black cats in sight — I was going through this reasoning as she walked on by me and continued on her way — so I had to presume that the object of her exorcism was myself.

She could have been coming from the April 15 anti-tax rally at the Court House corner.  Did she know that I was walking back from the post office, having put 5 tax-related envelopes in the mail?  If she had divine enlightenment, though, she would have known that today I actually paid a total of only $11 — an average of only $2 per envelope, hardly a cause for such radical countermeasures, I would think, though it’s true I already overpaid by mistake and deserve a refund, so in that sense I’ve been complicit (every year,actually) in the government overspending that dates back to the 1980’s.

The anti-tax rally included the usual elements; among the “Taxation = Robbery” and “No Spending Surge signs, I noted “Support the Troops” and “Commander-in-Thief” signs. Let’s see: “Support the Troops” would be pro-Obama, I guess, since he is now in charge of those (quite costly, if we reflect on it) troops; but “Commander-in-Thief” must be anti-Obama, even though Congress controls the budget.  I looked myself over for telltale signs of guilt.  Ah, there it must be: a somewhat fading, 2-inch round Obama sticker that has adhered to my jacket since early fall 2008.

Obama, Obama… now here’s another possibility: my exorcizer was also coming from the direction of St. Agnes Church: could it be that my little old Obama sticker — really quite worn now after more than 6 months — had somehow offended against her faith, prompting her to make the sign for “Satan, get thee behind me”?  I reflected on a person of my acquaintance who, when (non-Catholic) missionaries at the door asked whom she worshiped, replied “Seitan” (which she was cooking at the time; in case you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a fermented form of tofu).  That proved an effective way to end that conversation!

Now surely my offense wasn’t as damnable as supporting John Kerry, who as a Catholic was (and may still be, for all I know) on the receiving end of a move to deny him communion.  But here’s the point: Obama, I remembered as I turned the corner back toward the anti-tax rally, is now under, as it were, fire for being pro-choice, and forces are working to deny the president his scheduled graduation speech at Notre Dame or at least, in a Solomonic proposal I read in the Inquirer the other day, to tell him that in the name of free speech he is welcome to come and talk to the graduates but isn’t worthy of receiving an honorary degree.

Could my hypothesis be right?  Is this how our society dialogues these days: the sign of Obama on one side, the sign of the cross on the other?  Really, I’d much rather be picked on, this April 15, for having a big “I Love Taxes” (which of course I don’t) sign stamped on my forehead.

“We must never back off from what we believe” — Howard Dean.

Why not?  Isn’t it just about time to withdraw from active life and cultivate our garden?

Jean-Paul Sartre compared life to being in a lightless room: by bumping into and touching others we figure out where and who we are.

Who we are is largely what we believe; why is that important to know?  Socrates thought so, when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Suppose a child is trying to figure out her beliefs, where she is going to position herself in that darkened room of life. Continue Reading »

John Updike is such a familiar figure to readers of novels, art criticism, and other genres (people don’t even seem to remember that he was a very skilled and observant poet), that I bet millions of people have the impression—as they do about successful political leaders like Barack Obama—of having met him personally.

Actually, I did.  Franklin & Marshall College, where I worked for 20 years, invited him to spend a couple of days and speak on campus, no doubt for some massive sum.  Since he was to have breakfast with the talented group of students whose advising and programming I was responsible for, I was selected to pick him up at his hotel a few miles away and bring him to campus the morning after his well-attended reading from his works. Continue Reading »

Sometimes following the news just involves good old reading and comparison, as when the soon-to-be-ex-President and the soon-to-be-ex-Secretary of the Treasury kept saying “The fundamentals of the economy are strong” and everyone else knew differently.

Of course, if we (and especially practitioners of the dismal science, as economics is known) could accurately assess which predictions are true and which aren’t, we would be a lot wiser as a society than we are.  Here’s a case in point.

First, the handy AP summary, from 11/24/08:

The mortgage meltdown started in the United States in the summer of 2007 and rapidly spread to other countries, as well as to other types of lending, affecting even more creditworthy customers. The problems with risky, subprime mortgages touched off what many call the worst financial crisis to hit the world since the 1930s.

Here’s what Fed chief Bernanke was thinking in the first 8 months of 2007, according to John Cassidy’s New Yorker piece entitled “Anatomy of a Meltdown: Ben Bernanke and the financial crisis” (in the Dec. 1 issue, but available online 11/23):

On February 28, 2007, Bernanke told the House budget committee that he didn’t consider the housing downturn “as being a broad financial concern or a major factor in assessing the state of the economy.” Continue Reading »

I recently read The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell’s 1973 novel about a motley British garrison resisting, often with tragi-comic undertones, a “native” siege in 1857 India. In the ensuing power consolidation, the British Raj (”reign” in Sanskrit) was founded in 1858, leading to Britain’s Indian Empire, ultimately undone by World War II and Mahatma Gandhi. I’m not the only one to think the novel is brilliant, since it won the Man Booker prize.

According to Wikipedia:

“The book manages to suggest with great subtlety and restraint the problems for the British of ruling a community they do not understand: for example in Chapter 30, Fleury thinks: ‘What a lot of Indian life was unavailable to the Englishman who came equipped with his own religion and habits.’”

I am reminded of a particularly telling comment by a frustrated American negotiator in the Middle East (I believe it was Joseph Cisco, under president Nixon): “If only the Jews and Muslims would treat each other more like Christians.” Continue Reading »

Sire,

Setting, as requested, pen to parchment, I have prepared for your Grace’s scrutiny the below points, in consideration of assuring you a long and successfull reign.

1st.  It was said by your opponent’s supporters that the recent electoral campaign was “about character not issues.”  Whether or not it was true then, it is now.  Your oft-disappointed and deceived Subjects desire nothing more than that their Ruler’s character, behavior, advisers, and family should be exemplary.  How many now alive can recall such a conjunction?

2nd.  For your Senate and Congress to chip away, as my inspired compatriate Leonardo hews a block of marble, at the prior Prince’s disastrous legacy will take years — as many as it took for that Prince’s misguided handlers and incompetent men and women of state to erect their knavish monument to greed and your Subjects’ long-term non-interest.

Your ailing People need to hold a good opinion of themselves in order to advance the change that you embody.  You have become the chief medical attendant at their bedside: your Subjects need to trust again, to become honest with themselves, to listen to each other, and to transfer their aspirations onto your own person, in order to regain the will and the ability to heal themselves now as in the past.  Continue Reading »

When I’m at rest I can’t help think of war,
which claws at those who aim to sit in peace:
the catbirds chatter at the morning sun
that moves the humid air to fan the wings
of butterflies that swarm upon the bush—
and yet the thinking reed knows all’s not well.

Peace needs the circled focus of a well
against the force of the high horse of war;
good thoughts are caught within a thorny bush
such that the so long longed-for bird of peace
cannot, as do these mute swans, spread bright wings
above a quiet land lit by the sun.

The mother of a small daughter and son
against all tides and winds protects them well;
a few years pass in play and then the wings
of roaring planes call them to come to war:
when all could work to grow the fruits of peace,
young life ebbs out upon a bloodied bush—

unloving, thick, impenetrable bush.
An ancient man of sense said that the son
buries the father when the land’s at peace,
but fathers bury sons in wartime — well,
just read the morning papers, count the war-
torn corpses death bears off its pale wings.

Is there a farther point where wings of peace
in wellness whir where no beast in a bush
brings war to mother, father, daughter, son?

Or: Why should we spend our valuable time worrying about them?

One of my uncles, though an educator like my father and his 5 siblings, made a point of being something of a cynic, albeit with a sense of humor. It seems, he often recounted, that the Prime Minister, alarmed by loud angry crowds gathering in front of the palace, ran to the King in his bedchamber, threw himself on his knees, and announced: “Sire, Sire, the people are revolting!” The cynical King replied: “I’ve known that for years!”

Often, sad to say, it is hard to deny that “the people” (and that includes, of course, anyone who would be reading this, even Mr. McCain when he learns how to use the Internet) can be revolting at times: we can be loud, greedy, classist, bullying, violent, given to unneeded stimulants and depressants, unaware of the world and of our own constitutional rights (make your own list). And not just individually but also collectively; as Franklin, de Tocqueville, Mencken, or someone else first said: “Every people gets the government it deserves.” Unfortunately, we got it and we still have it.

The King could have rephrased his question as “Are the people able to save themselves?” Continue Reading »

“Savoring Bargains at the American Pump,” by Bill Marsh in the NYTimes, 6/29, p. WK3, contains an interesting chart showing the price of gas in 27 countries. According to the article and chart, gas prices at the pump are lowest in oil-producing countries and highest in non-producing countries that levy substantial gas taxes. In sum, it says, “Gasoline in the United States is cheap!”

I’ve always been intrigued by the relatively low ranking of the U.S. in quality of life indexes, including factors like longevity, infant mortality, crime, education, health care, and the hard-to-measure “happiness.” Is there a connection to gas prices?
One such ranking is The Human Development Index (HDI), which, “published annually by the UN, ranks nations according to their citizens’ quality of life rather than strictly by a nation’s traditional economic figures. The criteria for calculating rankings include life expectancy, educational attainment, and adjusted real income. The 2007 index is based on 2005 figures.”

I thought it could be instructive to compare the two rankings, so I inserted gas price rankings where included in the Times article, from low price to high price, after the country names onto this particular “livability” index: Continue Reading »

In the Knoxville Museum of Art (placed strategically close to the US government nuclear research facility at Oak Ridge), I recently saw an unusual temporary photo installation, “A Hundred Suns,” by Michael Light–aptly named, since all the photos are of intense light emanating from open-air nuclear explosions.

The tests were in a period when the government, though it should have known better, was posting soldiers within 2 miles of a nuclear explosion to “harden” them and then sending in to “invade” the bombed area, simulating an attack on an enemy city, to see how they withstood the radiation.  Not very well, it turns out.

It was also the period when the government, when it really did know better, was saying above-ground tests wouldn’t hurt anyone.  Actually, among other victims, they wiped out thousands of sheep, a whole town in Utah, and John Wayne. Continue Reading »