Sluggish

The New Neo Posted on by

This spring/summer so far has been unseasonably wet. Although ordinarily we’re not troubled too much by them, the other day while I was doing some gardening one of these lovelies crossed my path:


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The photo doesn’t really do it justice. There was the largeness of the thing, combined with its more-than-generous quotient of glistening slime, not to mention my surprise at seeing it sashaying around right out there in the open.

My immediate response was to want to kill it. I knew it was going to be feasting on plants I would rather it not eat. But since we don’t have that many slugs ordinarily here, I’d never gone about killing one before.

It quickly occurred to me that there seems to be a top limit on the size of the sort of thing I’m willing to squish with my foot, and that limit had definitely been reached long before we hit “slug” on the ladder of the animal kingdom. The same thing is true with flying creatures–I can do mosquitoes and flies, but I balk at those large moths.

My Japanese beetle routine, which involves plopping them into a jar of alcohol, didn’t feel adaptable to something this large, either. Pouring salt on it and watching it shrivel seemed like a bad prospect, too, as well as the trouble involved in the disposing of the corpse. So I watched it slink on by and did nothing.

Looking it up, I see that the suggested solutions are varied, but none seem ideal. Here is the best description I’ve found that explores the available recommended and non-recommended methods for offing a slug:

Now, how to kill the little buggers. The beer-in-the-tuna-can method has never been at all effective for me. The slugs hang over the edge and sip at the beer, but very few have ever fallen in. (They do seem quite partial to beer, however.) As for salt, some say it is extremely cruel, a feature that undoubtedly makes it more attractive to many. But the main disadvantage is this: if you salt or otherwise chemically attack slugs, they dump all their slime in their death throes–years’ worth at once! The stuff is ineradicable and you are stuck with a yard full of repulsive silvery slime globules.

I once entered the yard of a neighbor and found eight or ten slugs, impaled on a shish kebab skewer, writhing upright in her garden. “A deterrent,” she muttered darkly when I questioned her about this grisly spectacle.

Geese and skunks alone among members of the animal kingdom are said to eat slugs, and some keep them for this purpose. To my thinking, the spectacle is too revolting to endure.

My husband, to prove himself manly, has used the following method: he picks them up with his bare hands (geeklike behavior, in my opinion), and when they roll up in a ball (the burnt sienna-and-orange variety that plague my yard change shape from banana to papaya when attacked), he hurls them out into the street. Then he runs back and forth over them with the car. Charming behavior which I hope was not genetically transmitted to my children.

Perhaps I should just hope we return to our normal amount of rain.

Left vs. right: mistaken vs. evil?

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I want to recommend this post by Clive Davis. He quotes Roger Scruton as saying that those on the left consider those on the right to be evil, whereas the right considers those on the left to be merely mistaken.

I think that, as a generalization, this holds up fairly well. But there is no question that there are numerous exceptions. There is a vocal segment on the right that considers the left to be evil. Recall the group that thought Clinton had murdered Vince Foster, for example, and you need look no further.

Scruton writes that, ” if I can persuade [those on the left] that I’m not evil, I find it a very useful thing.” I recall a similar effort at persuasion on my part. It worked with some of my friends and relatives, but didn’t work with others. But I resent, and still resent, their idea that any supporter of a hawkish or conservative cause should automatically be regarded as “evil until proven not-evil.” This was a revelation to me, and not a pleasant one.

Davis’s post goes on to quote writer Nick Cohen as crediting (or blaming?) his own change of heart on certain topics to having read Paul Berman’s book Terror and Liberalism. (Hmm, perhaps that’s next on my list.) Here’s Cohen on the subject of changing one’s mind:

I didn’t see a blinding light or hear a thunder clap or cry ‘Eureka!’ If I was going to cry anything it would have been ‘Oh bloody hell!’ He convinced me I’d wasted a great deal of time looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I was going to have to turn it round and see the world afresh. The labour would involve reconsidering everything I’d written since 11 September, arguing with people I took to be friends and finding myself on the same side as people I took to be enemies.

I consider it highly ironic that, in his autobiography Radical Son, David Horowitz fingers none other than that very same Paul Berman as having been one of his most most vicious attackers when Horowitz underwent his own neocon conversion (I plan to say more about this topic in a subsequent post). Life is an interesting journey, is it not?

Report on the Fourth

The New Neo Posted on by

How was my Fourth of July? Just fine, thanks.

To begin with, the weather, which had been fairly vile for weeks, turned magnificent for the entire weekend. Unless your goal was to swim (which mine wasn’t), it was perfection itself. Of course, being a few degrees too cool for ideal swimming has never stopped most New Englanders from doing so–there were plenty of people at the local beaches.

I did the classic things: went to the family party of some friends of mine (pool, barbecued chicken, homemade apple and strawberry-rhubarb pies, all ages from the very elderly through one-year-olds). I brought along my ninety-one-year-old mother, and I wish I’d brought a camera, too, to photograph her extremely red-white-and-blue outfit. At night, I watched a half-hour long show of fireworks over the ocean with a crowd of onlookers including other friends of mine, their grown children, and their two absolutely adorable grandkids, who were delighted to hold a series of small sparklers in their careful little hands.

How about you?

Comet Wars

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know about you, but this story fired my imagination. It is the stuff of which science fiction movies are made.

My first reaction was sheer awe. But my second reaction was, “Hmmm, I guess Star Wars wasn’t such a completely ridiculous idea after all.” And in this case, I’m not talking about the movie.

Before I get a million, “You’ve got to be kidding, you idiot!” comments, let me just say that I Googled “Star Wars Reagan” and came up with about a million hits, the first twenty of which I checked out, and all were totally negative about the program. The technical and financial problems seem, to say the least, formidable (although I wouldn’t consider Frances Fitzgerald to be an objective judge of this particular situation).

The purpose of this post is merely to state that I wonder whether the comet probe success has any relevance to the task of missile interception.

Already, though, Star Wars hasn’t been a total loss. See this for the story. Since the BBC said it, you know it must be true; they wouldn’t be giving the program credit for anything if it hadn’t been fully earned.

Liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

[The following is a post I wrote back in April, but it seems appropriate for the Fourth, too, so I’m repeating it.]

I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.

When you approach the Promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is New York.

And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.

I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.

All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a prepoderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.

The garden is more advanced from what it must be at my house, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyachinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees I don’t know the names of.

In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.

As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in 1965, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on every visit. So, what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth, restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.

I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.

The sight is intensely familiar to me–I used to see it almost every day when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.

The New Yorker wishes us a very happy Fourth of July

The New Neo Posted on by

In my recent “change” post I mentioned in passing that I still read the New Yorker, despite my disagreement with almost everything political in it.

I wrestle with the fact that I continue to support them by subscribing, but I can’t seem to break away (am I an enabler?). Every time I think it’s all over between us, they come up with something wonderful like Adam Gopnik’s “Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli” (no link on the Web, unfortunately) or this article about Bronson Alcott, by Geraldine Brooks.

I’ve just begun reading my latest issue, and already I’m angry. The date of the magazine is July 4, and the cover is entitled, “Party of One,” featuring a very glum and lonely Uncle Sam, sitting at a party table in front of a “Happy Birthday” cake festooned with candles. Ah, yes, back to the old “unilateralism” meme–although in this case Uncle Sam seems more shunned than shunning. He appears to have invited some guests–after all, there are place-settings on the table–but they are all no-shows. At any rate, for whatever reason, he’s all alone, and on his birthday, too.

But inside the issue there are far bigger problems than on the outside, although I’ve only gotten as far as the very first piece, the initial “The Talk of the Town” article. It’s written by editor-in-chief David Remnick, and in it he criticizes Edward Klein’s execrable gossip-mongering hatchet job on Hilary Clinton, “The Truth About Hilary,” a book which appears to consist mainly of rumors that she knows lesbians and is sexually cold.

My disagreement is not with Remnick’s critique of Klein’s book. The difficulty comes later. First, there is this passage, which is fine:

In better times, in a better world, the shoddiness of [Klein’s book’s] reporting and the vulgarity of its writing would place it safely beyond discussion. In our own time and place, though, such books are not only published but sell in the hundreds of thousands, and their toxicity has a habit of further poisoning the political groundwater.

“Such books;” indeed–for example, the recent abomination on the Bush family, written by Kitty Kelley. Remnick, to his credit, and despite his own Bush-hatred, does manage to make very brief mention of Kelley’s book, calling it a “trash biography.”

There are certainly many others of the genre from which to choose, including–it turns out–that of the New Yorker’s very own Seymour Hersh, who wrote the trash biography The Dark Side of Camelot back in 1997. It’s a good parallel to the Klein book, because of its concentration on the sex life of its subject, and its heavy use of anonymous sources (something of a trademark for Mr. Hersh).

But no, Remnick doesn’t mention it–although I can’t say I actually expected Remnick to critique the trash written by one of his own writers.

But what book does Mr. Remnick see fit to mention right after the above quote, as a parallel to “The Truth About Hillary?” Let’s see:

…further poisoning the political groundwater. In the last election cycle, the Kerry campaign was slow to recognize the importance of the Swift Boat slander, and, by the time it did, the damage could not be undone.

So, a book containing not a single sexual innuendo or anonymous source is compared with one composed of nothing but. A book that is written by a group of men who served heroically in Vietnam, all of whom go on the record to make their allegations up front and have plenty of documentation to back up their claims, is compared to a shadowy bunch of sexual insinuations. I strongly suspect that Remnick has not even read Unfit for Command, a tightly reasoned book that actually reads a great deal like a legal affidavit.

Maybe the Fourth of July isn’t the best time to read the New Yorker.

The lesser of two evils: responsibility

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments section of my Reagan post, an interesting question came up. How responsible are politicians (or, as they used to be called, statesmen–now we’d have to say “statespeople” instead) for the consequences of their actions? Are they responsible for all of them? Should they be able to have foreseen everything?

Of course not–but how much foresight is it reasonable to require of them? How much is humanly possible? And do we understand that there are no actions one can take in the political realm that don’t have some negative consequences?

Commenter “Huan” had the following excellent point to make: people are responsible for their actions, but “the lines of guilt only go so far”–otherwise the arguments will resemble “butterfly wing flutter causing a hurricane bizarro world” absurdities.

That’s a pretty good description of some of the arguments I’ve heard from the left that attribute every evil on earth to the actions of the United States. Although the entire science of ethics is an attempt to make the best and most moral decisions knowing that, in the real world, a perfect decision is not possible, sometimes it seems to me as though the left is dedicated to ignoring that obvious fact (except, of course, on the not-so-rare occasions when they themselves have been the ones making the decisions with the terrible consequences).

(Huan’s “butterfly wing flutter” is a reference, by the way, to chaos theory, which states that there are always unpredictable results to any event.)

I read a story a while back that brought the point home to me that no one can know the ultimate effects of their (or anyone’s) actions. I read it so long ago that I don’t remember the book, so I can’t offer a link, but the author was talking about an incident in Hitler’s early adulthood:

During Hitler’s “struggling artist” days he went through a period in which he was down and out. He wanted desperately to be a painter, but was twice refused entrance by the Academy of Arts in Vienna. He even stayed for a time in a shelter for the homeless. At one point, he became desperately ill and was in fact near death, but was found by a kindly couple who took him in and nursed him back to health.

So here we have three acts that might have changed the course of history. If only the Academy had thought better of his art, he might have finished out his life as a journeyman painter. If the homeless shelter hadn’t fed and housed him, would he have survived? And of course that kindly Good Samaritan couple, the protagonists of the story that grabbed my attention–did they later have reason to regret their well-intentioned act? In one version, I think the couple even may have been Jewish–which makes me think the story was apocryphal. But no matter–true or not, it illustrates a point.

Obviously, these acts are somewhat different than the decisions a politician faces when deciding whether to support the lesser of two evils. Feeding the homeless, nursing the ill–surely, these are unambiguously good acts, and we would never want people to stop performing them. But, like the flutter of those butterfly wings, we can’t ignore the fact that even unequivocably moral acts can have terrible consequences. However, we cannot hold the people committing those acts responsible for all those consequences–even though, if they were to learn of those consequences, they themselves might feel terribly guilty.

Politicians make decisions constantly, and must bear the consequences. But, in judging the degree of their responsibility, we need to be cognizant of what they knew at the time, what could have been reasonably predicted as consequences–and, most especially, what were the available alternatives, and what were the likely consequences of not acting.

That’s an awful lot to chew on. It’s far easier to make facile criticisms that assume the 20/20 perfection of hindsight.

One of the best writers on the scene–and yes, a neocon, although certainly not a neo-neocon–is Charles Krauthammer. He recently wrote a highly recommended article (hat tip: Dr. Sanity). It features, among many other things, an excellent discussion of the “lesser of two evils” dilemma. If you have a moment, please take a look.

From military draft to all-volunteer force: some history

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently came across an article on the history of the all-volunteer military. I found it fascinating, and so I thought I’d call your attention to it.

Prior to reading it, if you’d asked me to sketch the history of how the draft ended and the volunteer military began, I would have said something like this, “The antiwar sentiment that grew during the Vietnam War fed a growing anger and discontent in the American public about the draft. With the policy of Vietnamization, the US profile in Vietnam was much reduced, so that by 1973 Nixon and Congress were able to do the popular thing and end the draft.”

I would still imagine that this scenario played some role in the draft’s end, although the article doesn’t go into it. And, as part of the Nixon library website, there’s no doubt that the piece is inclined to put Nixon in the best light possible.

One of the most interesting points the article makes is that proposals for an all-volunteer military were floated seriously way back in the Fifties:

…the end of the draft was proposed by Adlai Stevenson during his campaign for President in 1956. President Eisenhower earlier had called for universal military service as a substitute for haphazard conscription. Neither approach drew strong support.

But the calls for the end of the draft were not a Democratic monopoly; both sides got into the act. As a matter of fact, it appears that support for the all-volunteer Army was somewhat more a Republican than a Democratic thing (a fact which is open to different interpretations, depending on what one thinks of the Republican Party). Barry Goldwater made it part of his campaign in 1964, something I certainly don’t recall.

Other names that are very familiar come up in connection with this story: …Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan veered from the field of economics to argue support for the end of the draft.

And look at this: A very vocal volunteer force supporter was a young congressman from Illinois, Don Rumsfeld. Now, there’s consistency for you.

Rumsfeld’s anti-draft activities occurred at the beginning of Nixon’s first term. I was surprised to learn that Nixon had made the all-volunteer Army proposal a part of his 1968 Presidential campaign. It makes me wonder why more of the young men subject to the draft didn’t vote for Nixon as a result; perhaps they thought that Dick was just being Tricky. But Nixon continued to pursue the idea quite early in his Presidency, and was consistent in supporting it strongly, sometimes against quite a bit of opposition–including opposition from the Pentagon and many Republicans.

There is evidence that if Watergate had come any earlier, the legislation to end the draft might have fallen by the wayside:

Even with major public debate and a strong White House lobbying and public relations campaign, it took until mid-1973,almost eight months after Nixon’s 1972 reelection, for Congress to end selective service. With Watergate looming more and more on the scene and Nixon’s strength with congress diminishing, the draft might still be in effect had it not been approved at that time.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Reagan and me

The New Neo Posted on by

In yesterday’s “change” post, commenter “someone” asked what I thought of Reagan at the time of his Presidency.

I had thought to go into that topic in the body of the “change” post, but it was already so long I decided to skip it. But, on second thought, it might be interesting to describe my reaction to Reagan during those years, because I think there may be a few clues there as to my later “conversion.”

In the comments section, TmjUtah wrote:

“If Neo was getting her external political input from TV, the NY Times, and the New Yorker, just what kind of perceptions could she have had of Reagan?

Amiable, homophobic, trigger happy, washed up actor managed by dark cabals of corporate masters and Jesus freaks might come pretty close to the mark – but I may be presuming too much here.

Well, actually, TmjUtah is at least half right. I definitely believed (and still believe, to tell you the truth) the “amiable” and “washed-up actor” part. As for the rest, my reaction was more complex.

Reagan’s first term occurred during the years when my son was very small, and I was, quite simply put, intensely sleep-deprived. He was a wonderful kid (my son, not Reagan), but he was a terrible, terrible sleeper. So my already-depleted store of energy for politics was practically nil at the time–I was in a sort of survival mode. I could pay considerably more attention during Reagan’s second term, although not as much attention as I should have.

I can tell you, though, that even then, I formed my own opinions rather than march in lockstep with the Times or the other publications. However, as TmjUtah rightly points out, those press organs were the conduits by which I received my information, and the information was therefore dominated by some fairly intense criticism of Reagan. But there were some facts in there, too, and I mulled those over as best I could. In addition, I had my own personal perceptions of Reagan from the few speeches (or excerpts of speeches) and press conferences I managed to see.

I felt, on a personal level, that Reagan was extremely opaque–that is, I couldn’t read him. His speeches seemed to me to be very polished performances, but I couldn’t decide whether he was sincere, or whether the avuncular actor was the person I was seeing. I felt (rightly or wrongly) that it was the latter. But I wasn’t sure.

The same with his intelligence. As with my later perception of George W. Bush (I’ll get to that in a subsequent “change” post), Reagan didn’t seem stupid to me. He was coherent, for example. I felt I couldn’t tell whether he actually was stupid, as so many asserted, and was being fed lines that he was reading with a certain corniness component, or whether he was actually quite bright. Remember the old Saturday Night Live sketch that presented Reagan as a doddering old fool in public, and then, once the press and visitors were away, he turned into a sharp-as-a-tack taskmaster to his staff, quick and on-target with every utterance? It was a joke, all right, and I laughed uproariously, but one of the reasons I laughed so hard was that I wondered whether it was true.

In terms of Reagan’s actual policies–again, I wasn’t paying strict attention, but I certainly got the general idea. And here’s where it gets really interesting. I mainly kept my mouth shut about it in polite company, but I didn’t see what was so awful about Reagan’s foreign policy. What was perceived by others as his bellicosity and simplisme didn’t seem so out of place to me. After all, the Soviet Union had been guilty of many crimes, disarmament wasn’t going to be achieved in a world that still had conflicts, and so on and so forth. I kept my mouth shut partly because I didn’t have the courage of my convictions–they were barely even “convictions,” but more like hazy perceptions. I figured I wasn’t really knowledgeable, like those journalists and other experts who were saying he was a doofus and in particular that his foreign policy was going to lead to this or that terrible event (remember, this was before the fall of the Soviet Union, so the “experts” were still expert to me).

Something in my gut didn’t buy what they were saying. But I figured maybe I just didn’t know enough. I still self-identified as a liberal Democrat, and in the elections of 1984 and 1988 I voted for the Democratic candidates without a moment’s hesitation. One reason was that I wasn’t keen on Reagan’s domestic policies, especially his economic ones. I was not on firm ground here, either (those of you who read this blog regularly are familiar with my extreme shakiness on economics), but I was with George Bush Senior on characterizing trickle-down economics as voodoo economics. More to the point, I personally perceived the gap between the rich and the poor, or even the middle-class (where I found myself) growing by leaps and bounds. Many of my own friends pulled away from the pack and became super-rich during this decade, while just as many (who hadn’t had financial problems previously) started to struggle economically. I also didn’t agree with his conservative judicial appointments.

Was I enthusiastic about Mondale or Dukakis? Who could be? Perhaps their wives; certainly not me! But, lukewarm though I might be about their inspirational qualities, they were the Democratic candidates, I was a Democrat, and I thought they would be better than Reagan and then Bush senior. Did I think deeply about it? No, for the aforementioned reasons. If you had suggested to me at the time that I might have, or should have, voted for the Republican candidates, I would have thought you were stark raving mad.

So, perhaps I was already somewhat of a neocon after all, and didn’t know it: socially and domestically liberal, more hawkish in the foreign arena. I’d never even heard the term “neocon” at the time, although I did know there were “Reagan Democrats.” But I was not one of them.

I think I am an example of the strength of party affiliation. Most people need a much greater jolt than I received during the 80s, and much more time and energy to reflect on the situation than I was able to give to it, to actually abandon their party affiliation, if it had been strong previously. And mine had been very strong indeed.

9/11 provided that much much greater jolt and motivation. I also had more time and more energy, as well as (and this is especially important) new and different sources of information that were easily accessibile to me.

But that’s the story I will tell in subsequent installments of my “change” series. Please tune in.

A mind is a difficult thing to change: Part 5 (The quiet years: tanks vs. pears)

The New Neo Posted on by

[For links to earlier posts in this series, please see the right sidebar under the heading, “A mind is a difficult thing to change.”]

INTRODUCTION

I thought this post would be relatively easy to write. After all, the years between 1975 and September 10, 2001 were fairly quiet for me, at least politically speaking, especially compared to the bitter and personal struggles of the Vietnam era. But strangely, it’s that very quietness that has made this post harder to write than I ever thought it would be–in fact, far harder than the previous ones–because of the absence of such drama.

I don’t want to bore you all to tears. I could summarize the whole era by saying I was otherwise engaged. But, in the end, that would be too simplistic. After all, I’m writing this to try to understand and explain what was going on for me, and for others, in the psychological/political sense: what led to change, or failed to lead to change.

So, exactly what was I thinking about, politically, during those years? Was I even thinking at all, or was I more or less on automatic? And was my experience idiosyncratic, or was it typical, representing a general trend of the times?

In other words: was I like Karel’s mother? (And who, you might ask, is Karel’s mother?)

I confess that I have been an inveterate New Yorker reader for the last thirty-five years or so. I’ve even kept my subscription in the face of my neocon conversion and the resultant fact that I can no longer stomach their political articles. I recall that the New Yorker published excerpts from expatriate Czech author Milan Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting shortly before the book came out in 1978. All I had to do was read the very first paragraph of the work and I knew I was in the presence of something extraordinary. I read with mounting excitement and total concentration, and when the book was available I immediately bought it and read it from cover to cover. It merged the political with the personal in a free-form style like no other–gripping, entertaining, profound, and totally idiosyncratic.

Certain images in that book made a deep impression on me. I’ve already discussed one of them here, in my post “Dancing in a ring.” The image of the circle dance was memorable, although it was only many years later that I even began to understand what Kundera was saying.

But the story of Karel’s elderly mother and the pears–that, I understood from the start. Here it is:

One night, for example, the tanks of a huge neighboring country came and occupied their country [a reference to the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia]. The shock was so great, so terrible, that for a long time no one could think about anything else. It was August, and the pears in their garden were nearly ripe. The week before, Mother had invited the local pharmacist to come and pick them. He never came, never even apologized. The fact that Mother refused to forgive him drove Karel and Marketa crazy. Everybody’s thinking about tanks, and all you can think about is pears, they yelled. And when shortly afterwards they moved away, they took the memory of her pettiness with them.

But are tanks really more important than pears? As time passed, Karel realized that the answer was not so obvious as he had once thought, and he began sympathizing secretly with Mother’s perspective–a big pear in the foreground and somewhere off in the distance a tank, tiny as a ladybug, ready at any moment to take wing and disappear from sight. So Mother was right after all: tanks are mortal, pears eternal.

That’s an exaggerated version of what seemed to happen to me (and others) during those years: the tanks didn’t disappear, but they receded into the distant background; and the pears loomed, large and ripe, in the foreground. And who wouldn’t want that to happen? Who would choose to focus on tanks when they could think about pears instead? Most people seemed only too happy to throw themselves into life itself, and to leave the interminable political discussions to the politicians and the policy wonks.

LATE SEVENTIES

The military draft had ended in 1973, and Saigon had fallen in 1975. The men of my generation no longer had to face the possibility of putting their lives on the line in that difficult and ultimately tragic cause. The news from that part of the world no longer screamed in blaring headlines, but drifted in on the tide, like the boat people fleeing the Communist regime that had taken over South Vietnam. The news was not at all good. But it no longer had the personal immediacy it had had during the late 60s and early 70s, when the draft had forced us to confront it up close and very very personal. Terrible, wasn’t it, what was happening in Cambodia; and awful about the poor boat people, but what could you do at this point? The tragedies in Southeast Asia began to recede into the generalized din of human suffering all over the globe. It seemed it could not be helped; it was the human condition.

There was a general retreat from political activism. Of course, this was not true of everyone, but it certainly was true of a sizeable portion of the generation that had been so activist just a few short years before. Remember the catch-phrase “the ‘Me’ decade,” to refer to the 70s? There seems to have been a certain truth to it. With a sigh of relief, people concentrated on good times and on the self, not unlike the Roaring Twenties which had followed the horrors of World War I and the influenza pandemic that took so many lives at that war’s end.

I was only too happy to pull back from thinking about politics. I got married in the mid-1970s, and my husband and I were concerned with starting out in jobs and finding a place to live, making new friends and adjusting to life beyond college and graduate school. I remember the oil crisis mostly because it happened around the time of a trip I had planned, making it hard for me to travel by car. It was both a nuisance and a warning bell, but I was driving a small foreign car anyway, and the financial pinch wasn’t too hard, and then it was over almost as soon as it had begun. I remember the sickening feeling of watching the 444-day Iran hostage crisis, but my perception was filtered through the fact that I was very late in my first pregnancy when it began, and the mother of a barely-walking one-year old when it ended.

Starting a marriage and a family is an all-consuming period of life for most people, and it certainly was so for me, along with many of my friends. I was a stay-at-home mother for many years, devoted to the care of my child, and exhausted much of the time. I still managed to read the Boston Globe most days, and the New Yorker most weeks, and watched some TV news (I recall that Nightline got its start covering the hostage crisis). I had a vague sense that events in Iran boded no good, and watching the Iranian women don their chadors I wondered why they would be so eager to go back to what seemed to be medievalism. But what did it matter to me if they wanted to wear black robes and have a cleric for their leader? It seemed to be their choice; was it any of my business?

I could go into detail writing about this or that event, and my reaction or non-reaction (or mild reaction) to it. But more important than all of that was the fact that I had come to accept a certain level of turmoil in the world. I felt bad about it, but I no longer thought there was much I could do about it, except give money to a cause such as Save the Children or Amnesty International (which I joined over twenty years ago, back when it actually did appear to be devoted to the cause of helping political prisoners around the world). It seemed as though human misery was in a sort of steady-state mode: about the same level existed from year to year, with a dramatic surge here and there in one third-world place or another, but the overall amount seemed stable.

Part of this attitude of mine (and so many others) was the phenomenon of growing older and seeing that problems were not going to be solved overnight, if at all. Part of it was the aforementioned attention deficit: for many years, the pressing demands of family left me little time for the leisurely study of world events, and when I did have a spare moment, I wanted to relax and enjoy myself. In this I think I was probably quite typical of everyone except political junkies.

This situation fostered maintaining the status quo. If I (and others) had little time to study events in any depth or detail, there was no way my political opinions and/or my interpretation of those events were likely to undergo any changes. How could they? As I moved through my thirties and forties, I considered my political opinions to be fully formed, anyway. It never occurred to me that they might change or might need to change, any more than the color of my eyes might change at that point. They were part of who I was. I was no child or teenager in a state of searching, no young adult solidifying my sense of self; I was middle-aged, and although I didn’t think I was stagnant, I was certainly set.

What’s more, I don’t think I had ever personally known anyone whose political opinions had changed after the age of thirty or so. My parents, and the parents of most of those around me, had reached adulthood during the Depression and the Presidency of FDR. They were liberal Democrats and proud of it, and nothing in the intervening years had caused even a glimmer of a change in their points of view. Nor did I see changes in my friends–not that we ever talked about politics much, because we did not.

THE EIGHTIES

Nevertheless, in retrospect, I felt certain stirrings. Maybe “stirrings” isn’t the right word, since it indicates too much motion and awareness. They were more like glimmerings, moments of slight dislocation and questioning so mild that they only disrupted the smooth surface of my thoughts for a short while. But they did occur every now and then when an event made a deep emotional impression on me, and especially when there was some sort of cognitive difficulty on my part in understanding the meaning and/or the cause of that event.

The greatest of these dislocations occurred with the fall of the Soviet Union. The USSR had been a constant for my entire life, and had loomed particularly large in my childhood. When I was born, the Soviet Union had already been in existence for over forty years, making it seem to me at the time as though it were as ancient and enduring as Greece or Egypt. Since WWII, it had been the principle threat to the US around the world.

When the Soviet system collapsed, it seemed to me that the end came very suddenly. Oh, there were rumbles during Gorbachev’s tenure– something was indeed happening–but in 1989 it seemed as though the entire Iron Curtain came down so precipitously you could almost say it evaporated.

My question was: how can an Iron Curtain evaporate? And, even more to the point, why didn’t any of the ‘experts” see it coming?

The latter question plagued me at the time. Perhaps I was able to give it more attention because the events were so very dramatic, and involved an issue that had been a constant for all of my life. Perhaps the fact that my child was older now and his needs not so labor- intensive gave me enough energy to actually do some thinking about it. I knew that I hadn’t paid proper attention to the news in recent years, so for a while I wondered whether I had missed something. But when I tried to read more about it, I couldn’t find anything that made sense to me; when I tried to ask other people whether anyone had seen this coming, I was met with resounding silence, indifference, shrugs.

Perhaps somewhere there had been some excellent analyses of the situation, even some that had predicted the events with some accuracy. Perhaps these brilliant and prescient articles had been published in a journal such as Foreign Affairs, or something of the sort. But I wasn’t reading journals then, nor were most of the electorate. The mainstream media (I didn’t know that term at the time) hadn’t demonstrated any foresight about these developments, nor even much of a grasp of why they might be occurring at this point. All they seemed to be able to do was to describe the events of the moment.

Surely, I asked friends and family, the Soviet experts at the NY Times or even in the State Department or at Harvard, surely they had seen this coming, right? If not, then why not?

It would be an overstatement to say I became obsessed with this question. But it certainly was the world event that engaged my interest more than anything since Vietnam, and my puzzlement about it was profound. If the experts–academic, governmental, and media–had been unable to foresee this, then how could I trust them to guide me in the future? In retrospect, it was probably the first time I began to distrust my usual sources of information, although I certainly didn’t see them as lying–I saw them as incompetent, really no better than bad fortunetellers.

What they seemed to lack was an overview, a sense of history and pattern. Newspapers could report on events, but those events seemed disconnected from each other: first this happened, then that happened, then the other thing happened, and then the next, and so on and so forth. In the titanic decades-long battle between the US and the USSR, there had been a certain underlying narrative (yes, sometimes that word is appropriate) that involved the threat of Armageddon, and the necessity to avoid it at almost all costs, while stopping the spread of Communism. Although T.S. Eliot had said the world would end “not with a bang but a whimper,” who ever thought the Soviet Union would end in such a whimpery way, and especially without much forewarning? It seemed preposterous, something like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy throws the bucket of water on the Wicked Witch, who dissolves into a steaming heap of clothing, crying “I’m melting, melting.”

But if the Soviet Union was the Wicked Witch, who was Dorothy? Reagan? The media acted as though he’d been as clueless as Dorothy had been when she threw that bucket, and at the time I knew of no reason to think otherwise.

At any rate, I was happy about the fall of the Soviet empire, very happy. I watched the joyous scenes of Eastern Europeans celebrating, and even bought a (supposedly authentic) chunk of the Berlin Wall. Was this indeed the end of history? In a way, yes; it felt as though the big questions had been settled; all that was left was ironing out the details. Some of the darkest forces of the 20th century seemed to have run their course, and what was left to think about, politically, were humanitarian concerns around the world, possible future energy and fuel shortages, the environment, and domestic policies such as health care, welfare, and taxes.

THE NINETIES

The Gulf War of early 1991 seemed to mark some sort of return to ‘history,” although I thought (and hoped) that perhaps it was an anomaly. But by that time certain other events had taken over in my life (as they so often do in people’s lives), that once again made it very difficult for me to pay much attention to anything except the general outline of events.

In December of 1990 I had sustained a series of nerve injuries that caused severe and unremitting pain. (For anyone who might still be concerned about me now, I’m tremendously better.) Neuropathic pain is of a type that is difficult to describe. Suffice to say that, for quite a long while, I could barely concentrate on anything–not my beloved books, not even television; each minute was very difficult to get through, and I was severely sleep-deprived. It was at this point that the Gulf War began.

I watched the bombing on TV, pacing and fretting, unable to get comfortable for a moment. The thought of the suffering I knew must be occurring as a result of those bombs seemed to intensify my own suffering. I could hardly look. I understood the rationale for the war, and the necessity of it, but watching it and thinking about it seemed more than I could bear.

Although the details of my situation were particular to me, I think the general principle is a universal one. Many people move from crisis to crisis in their lives–survival, whether it be financial, emotional, or physical, then takes the lead and shuts out other considerations to a great degree.

The next year, I was improved enough to begin part-time study for my Master’s Degree in Marriage and Family Therapy. With my family obligations and the substantial demands of coursework and seeing clients, my attention was well occupied, and politics took a small role–although as a Democrat, I was happy that finally, for the first time in sixteen years, “my guy” had been elected (although, interestingly enough, I was never a Clinton fan–I voted for Paul Tsongas in the 1992 primaries).

But there were other distant warning bells sounding. Some were not so distant at all. The first World Trade Center bombing certainly grabbed my attention in 1993. It “only” killed six people, but it was different from previous Islamic terrorist attacks in two ways. The first was that it occurred on American soil and targeted civilians; the second was the scope of its ambition. I read about the attack in some depth, perhaps because it moved me as a native New Yorker who remembered the building of the Towers. I was stunned to discover that the intent of the bombers had been to topple the building and kill many thousands, and that it was only through chance and incompetence that they had failed to achieved their goals.

This sobered and frightened me–as did another article (again, I no longer recollect the periodical in which I read it, or the exact time of its publication), about a bunch of Middle Eastern terrorists (Osama?) whose stated aims were to launch a series of devastating attacks against the United States.

And these were not the only disturbing rumblings from the Middle East. I remember reading about changes in the Palestinian educational system after the implementation of the Oslo Accords (again, I recall that this article appeared in the New Yorker, of all places, although I’ve had some difficulty tracing it). I had originally thought that the Oslo Accords, of which I had only a glancing knowledge, were a hopeful sign. It seemed that now even the Palestinians and Israelis were starting down a path that would end up with, if not reconciliation, then a certain tolerance, a relatively benign and peaceful coexistence.

But this article chilled my blood when I read it. It detailed, for the first time as far as I knew, the intense and vicious hatred that was being inculcated in young Palestinians towards Israelis and even towards Jews in general. I did the calculations–the generation being carefully nurtured in this destructive propaganda were in the early primary grades now. They were due to come to maturity around the time of the millenium, and I felt a tremendous sense of foreboding. But what could be done about it? I couldn’t think of a thing, and the article had no suggestions, either.

What did I do with these fearful thoughts? I put them away, as I had so many years earlier tried to put away the fear of an impeding nuclear holocaust from my childhood mind. I had learned that most of the things I worried about never happened, and that much of what I read in the paper seemed exaggerated and calculated to alarm.

2000-2001

And so time passed. When the millenium came, people seemed much more worried about the threat of the millenium bug than the millenium bomber who was caught before he could carry out his plans to blow up LAX.

A big pear in the foreground and somewhere off in the distance a tank, tiny as a ladybug, ready at any moment to take wing and disappear from sight.

Except in this case, instead of taking wing, the tank crept towards us silently and stealthily, getting closer and closer, until its guns were pointed at our backs.

And then it fired.

[ADDENDUM: For the next post in the series, Part 6A, go here.]

Beat the heat (a politics-free zone)

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s summer. I would bet that, right now, the vast majority of you are living in places that are quite warm, not to say hot.

I don’t know about you, but although I love summer–glorious flowers, lazy hazy crazy days (my goodness, those lyrics are abominable!), daylight until 8:30 PM, and outdoor ice cream stands finally open–I hate the heat. Absolutely hate it, and it only gets worse as I get older. And, although New England is probably considerably cooler than the rest of the country, it still often gets really, really hot here.

So I thought it would be a good time for this. Click on some of the links, too. Enjoy.