The Morning Walk

We were up just as dawn was breaking to walk on the trail alongside one of the lakes. We heard the first birdsong and there was a beautiful golden sunrise to reward us on the way back. There is a lot of beauty in The Natural State, as they call Arkansas. Judy reminded me that when we lived in Northern California we used to drive off weekends in search of it; usually north in the direction of Point Reyes. Its beauty is more spectacular; great waves roll in from Japan to pound the white beach. But it is always cold and a strong wind blows. The beauty here seems older and more restful. The Oauchita Mountains are eroded; the best soil washed away long ago.. The flowering trees are in bloom and the azeleas -- there are around a hundred kind -- are in blossom.

The news as usual is bad. The Polish president and other high-ranking officials and their families died in a plane crash. It was pilot error. He tried to land in heavy fog despite advice from the ground. Why is the news always bad? For the same reason history mostly concentrates on wars, the violent rise and fall of empires, and other troubles. Good people and quiet times -- when rarely they come -- lack what it takes to interest others. There is no drama, no crises, no high stakes to be won or lost. History was supposed to be over when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Instead, the Cold War was seen to have merely been a temporary interruption of the much older struggle of Islam against the West and the rest of the world.

We gave up watching TV news long ago; me for its left wing bias. The robust health of FOX compared to the anemic performance of the rest of the news organizations shows I'm not the only one who thinks so (Judy is uninterested in the news, period). The market is so small in Arkansas the local news shows have a low-rent look. The anchors are young and generally unattractive and don't dress with the stylishness you see in the big cities. The news itself is small bore as befits a place where not much of general interest happens. Radio is even worse. Unless you can stomach NPR -- Nancy Pelosi Radio as conservatives call it -- and its smug liberal take on developments, you are left with ABC news bulletins on AM stations where radio time is so cheap you can go from one end of the dial to the other hearing nothing but commercials. Car salesmen seem to think their message is more effective if delivered fast and loud. I am usually on to the next station before they get a third word out. "Blowout sale at . . ."

The wren in the pot

I grew sage in two pots last summer. They are an attractive plant, but one was killed by winter. The other began putting out some green at just about the same time we discovered a wren had created a nest there. What to do? It seems these wrens will nest anywhere. I left a sack of potting soil out for a couple of days two or three years ago and a wren built a nest there. It was in the way, so I couldn't let that stand and it was early enough that another could be built. Another year, one constructed a nest in a hanging plant on our front deck, so we watched the family develop and then fly away. The nest in the pot is cleverly made and even has a roof. Every time I watered the plant, the wren fled with an extraordinary rapidity; not taking flight, but running into nearby bushes. When she was gone, I looked closer and caught a glimpse of an egg, and I assume there are others. Watering the plant can't be good for the eggs, and I don't like to frighten her. So I've decided the sage plant must die for the wren family.

Toilet paper

My wife asked me tonight if I'd noticed how cheesy the paper towels have become. As it happened, I was thinking earlier in the day that our toilet paper rolls were thinner than they used to be. It is in small homely details like this that you notice how the quality of life and the sheer abundance we once enjoyed is slowly being cut back. Is it the Green movement, Wall Street's rapacious appetites for profits or some bureaucratic decision made in Washington? Bit by bit our lifestyles will be trimmed back as the global standard of living is evened out. The privileged life of America is coming to an end. I feel sorry for our children and grandchildren. They'll have to make do with less than we had.

The Times Are A-Changin'

Someone wrote the other day that despite what you read and hear the world has never been safer. It's just that the 24-hour news cycle magnifies each event and blows it out of proportion before it moves to the next one where the same thing happens. Having lived through WWII, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and various others misfortunes, I suppose this is true. Islamic fanatics who want to return the world to the 14th century occasional pull off a minor atrocity now and then, or more often fail, but they don't amount to much in the big scheme of things. But they say it is just a matter of time before a suitcase nuclear weapon is detonated in one of our big cities. As interdependent as the electronic age has made us, that would be extremely serious. Worse would be one exploded above us that would fry our electrical grid and knock out every computer in the country. That would put us back in the 19th Century without the skills to survive in such a primitive state. But why borrow trouble, as the wise say. Live for the day and try to get as much simple enjoyment out of it as you can. Yesterday is gone and you can't be certain tomorrow will arrive.

The war in the Pacific

My uncle George York fought in the Pacific and in Alaska. The latter campaign to retake a couple of islands of snow and ice is little remembered these days, but it was just as savage as any of the other battles with the Japanese. It ended with a final banzai charge, a frequent occurrence when the Japanese had no hope of winning but honor must be satisfied. He later fought in the jungles of the South Pacific, a horrible place whose hardships can scarcely be imagined today. The climate and terrain were as much an enemy as the emperor's soldiers. When rain fell -- it fell every day -- it was like standing under a waterfall. The roar was deafening and the torrents turned the ground into a thick gumbo. Even tracked vehicles bogged down in it. Not there was much room in those claustrophobic jungles for them to move around. Feet rotted in that climate and nearly everyone got malaria. Like many WWII vets, my uncle, who returned yellow and suffered relapses for several years, was silent about his experiences. But I did see one terse letter that someone kept. "People are no damned good," he wrote. A single sentence paragraph that laid out his life experience and the philosophy he derived from it as well as a thick volume.

I wonder if misanthrophy runs in my family. My mother was reclusive, my younger brother is a hermit. My older brother certainly has nothing good to say about anybody, and my wife remarks on my sourness at times. There are Scots in our background, a mean and miserable people. On the other hand, if you don't set your expectations too high about other people you are less likely to be disappointed by their behavior. Human nature never changes, one explanation for the bloody past. The butchery that breaks out ever now and then shows that barbarism hasn't gone away; it just bides its time. Africa proves it and it wasn't that long ago that even "civilized" Europeans were slaughtering people in Bosnia. Genetic engineering shows promise for altering human behavior, but only an optimist would bet we won't find a way to screw that up.

HBO has a new series about the Pacific War that I was tempted to boycott because Tom Hanks, an executive on the production, said in interviews there was little moral difference between Americans and Japanese in that war. I'm used to historical and other forms of ignorance by Hollywood actors, but projecting political correctness backward like that is revolting. Anyone who has read any history of the era knows the Japanese behaved like beasts toward anyone who got in their way, particularly the Chinese. The cruelties described in contemporary accounts and in books like The Rape of Nanking are so sickening it is hard to read them. People nailed to walls, buried to their necks and then trampled over by horses or around to jelly by tanks, fetuses bayoneted from wombs, beheading contests between officers. The Japanese took the position that anyone who surrendered in battle were less than human. Other races were subhuman anyhow, according to the Japanese, and this made them even more subhuman. They refused to surrender even when their situation was hopeless. They were ordered to lure enemies close enough to kill under the guise they were giving up. So Allied soldiers learned pretty quickly to take no prisoners. Japanese soldiers and sailors were taught that they would become demigods if they died for the emperor. Even Hirohito was compelled to go along with the belief that he was divine even though he knew it was nonsense.

The reviews of the HBO series have been pretty good, so I might relent in the end and watch the series when it is available from Netflix. Hollywood has an admiration for the war in Europe, as evidenced by Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. I think the absence of a Jewish holocaust in the Pacific may make them more likely to demonize Americans who served there. Anti-Americanism is the default position in Hollywood.

What I read

My son enters graduate school in the fall hoping to earn an MFA in creative writing. It is a three-year course, and he hopes to teach in college one day. He would make a marvelous teacher. He has a deep interest in writing and writers and has the rare ability to communicate this with an enthusiasm that draws you in. His problem is he is a white male, and the academy is a hostile environment for them.

He is impatient with my reading habits, which incline toward history and the rare biography. The modern novelists have little interest for me, with a few exceptions like William Boyd, who I gather is regarded by the cognoscenti as "old fashioned." That must be why I like him. Literature goes through fashions although by now it must be clear that there are reasons the old styles have been so enduring. The linear tale seems to suit us in some way that probably has to do with the way the brain is wired. Life happens in a linear manner, or at least seems so. That's the way we like our stories.

I read fewer biographies than was once the case because I have talked to enough of their authors to realize they are just a footnoted form of fiction. Recognizing this, many public figures in the past ordered all their private papers burned. At the end, their lives belong as much to the biographer as to them. If they have written an autobiography, they are automatically assumed to be self serving or mendacious. Those who live long enough to read their biographies are invariably dismayed or outraged. There are factual errors or misinterpretations. Many biographers end up disliking their subjects after spending years working on the books. This very often is reflected in what they write. The "authorized" biographies are hagiographies, the originals of which were the lives of the saints. Their behavior, obviously, was always saintly.

There was a story out of Portland today about a march organized in which women went topless to protest the differing view that society takes toward shirtless men and women. This sort of stuff goes on every few years or so. The organizers said they plan in future marches to suppress the objectionable "ogling" that occurred at yesterday's march. The worst thing about political correctness is it tries to impose its view on reality. Men should not stare at female breasts because women don't like it. Therefore, steps must be taken. It is hard to see what short of blinding men will remedy this situation.

The GM plant

Last week they closed the huge GM assembly plant in Fremont just being built alongside the freeway when I was starting out as a journalist. I took a tour wearing a hard hat and took many 35mm photos. It was a marvel of American manufacturing technology, which hardly exists today. All of those jobs have been shifted overseas, mainly to China. I was what was known as a combo-man, someone who both reported and took pictures. I sent the copy and film in by Greyhound bus. As a copy boy, I had walked to the depot to pick up these packages from the various bureaus along with the more urbane San Francisco newspapers so the editors could see what they had that we didn't. The union was was trying to get rid of the combo-man category to create more jobs, and I believe finally succeeded. The plant was state of the art, miles and miles of assembly line. It was updated as the years went by, but the cars it turned out fell out of favor. Part of the reason was they cost about $1600 more to make because of higher salaries and benefits. Detroit made up for the built-in imbalance with foreign-built cars by making cheaper, less durable and trustworthy ones. It took years, but the consumer caught and switched allegiances. Now GM is virtually owned by the federal government. It is seeking to level the playing field to protect its friends in Big Labor with a campaign to denigrate the reliability of Toyota, the leading and non-union brand. The more I see of the Obama crowd the worse they seem. He is being increasingly described as the first post-modern and post-American president, neither of which I can quarrel with. A very good essay by Victor Hanson today:

"Given thirty years of postmodern relativism in our universities, we were bound to get a postmodern president at some point.

Postmodernism is a fancy word — in terms of culture, nihilist; in terms of politics, an equality of result and the ends justifying the means — that a lot of people throw around to describe the present world of presumed wisdom that evolved in the last part of the 20th century.

“After modernism” or “beyond modernism” can mean almost anything — nihilistic art that goes well beyond modern art (think a crucifix in urine rather than the splashes of modernist Jackson Pollock). Or think of the current English Department doggerel that is declared “poetry” (no transcendent references, echoes of classicism, no cadence, rhyme, meter, particular poetic language, theme, structure, etc.) versus Eliot’s or Pound’s non-traditional modern poetry of the 1920s and 1930. In politics, there is something of the absurd. The modern age saw life and death civil rights marches and the commemoration of resistance to venomous racial oppression; the postmodern civil rights marches are staged events at the DC tea party rally, as elites troll in search of a slur, or Prof. Gates’s offer to donate his “cuffs” to the Smithsonian as proof of his racial “ordeal.”

Genres, rules, and protocols in art, music, or in much of anything vanish as the unnecessary obstructions they are deemed to be — constructed by those with privilege to perpetuate their own entrenched received authority and power. The courage, sacrifice, and suffering of past American generations that account for our present bounty are simply constructs, significant only to the degree that we use the past to deconstruct the race, class, and gender power machinations that pervade contemporary American exploitive society. History is melodrama, a morality tale, not tragedy.

Relativism Everywhere

But the chief characteristic of postmodern thinking is the notion of relativism and the primacy of language over reality. What we signify and brand as “real,” in essence, is no more valid than another’s “truth,” even if we retreat to specious claims of “evidence”— especially if our aim is to perpetuate the nation state, or the primacy of the white male capitalist Westerner who long ago manufactured norms in his own interests.

“Alternate” realities instead reflect those without power speaking a “truth,” one just as valid as the so-called empirical tradition that hinged on inherited privilege.

The New National Creed

OK, so how does this affect Obama?

He was schooled in the postmodern university and operates on hand-me-down principles from postmodernism. One does not need to read Foucault or Derrida, or to be acquainted with Heidegger, to see how relativism enhances contemporary multiculturalism. Keep that in mind and everything else makes sense.

Try health care. By traditional standards, Obama prevaricates on most of the main issues revolving health care reform — from the fundamental about its costs and effects, to the more superficial such as airing the entire process on C-SPAN or promising not to push through a major bill like this on narrow majoritism. And recall the blatant bribes for votes to politicians from Nebraska to Louisiana. Look also at the enormous borrowing and cuts from Medicare that will be involved.

Well, those were not misstatements or misdeeds at all. You, children of privilege, only think they are, since you use antiquated norms like “abstract” truth to adjudicate the discomforting efforts of a progressive president.

He, on the other hand, is trying to force the privileged at last to account for their past oppressions (insurance companies that gouge, surgeons that lop off legs or tear out tonsils for profit, investors who private jet to the Super Bowl, or the lesser but equally selfish Joe the Plumber types who do not wish to “spread the wealth”) by extending care to the underprivileged. Your “Truth” about his past statements is something reactionaries evoke to thwart such progressive change; in fact, the constructed truth of Obama’s is that a child will now have regular check-ups. All the other “gotcha” games about abstract truth and falsehood are just semantics."

Hanson is one of the most measured commentators on the right today; Mark Steyn is another. Both are deeply concerned at trends today. They are right to be. I have never seen such polarization between right and left. Neither side understands the other or even wants to any more. Epistemology seems to be the problem, how we know what we know. Liberals don't read or view what conservatives do and vice versa. Victory is the only thing, the more crushing the better. It is beginning to remind me of Europe in the 'Thirties when both sides battled in the streets. The left has control of the instruments of state coercion, so there is no doubt how it would turn out today if some "incident" occurred.






the gm plant. barney peterson. reading about east prussia. our son and breakfast in little rock. how hateful the present political climate is -- but was it ever such? My tiff with Judy over blogging. bob dying. tim's friend. birney's motorcycle. preparing for easter dinner. keeping lamb warm. the old pastor's wife dying. frank's invitation to little rock.