New Year's Resolutions

One of the great pleasures in life is to be able to take a week or two off at the end of a year to make some new year's resolutions. It's a privilege to be able to do this, to have the time and space. I see it as immensely practical, too.

Deciding what is worth doing, before thinking of how to do it, has always seemed to me to an underrated, under-appreciated, work. So it's always a delight to see a young person who is seriously asking this fundamental question, – What is worth doing? - taking his or her time to explore it rather than having to go to immediately into a job or career to make a living. I can well understand parents, who have all they can do to survive and to pay the bills, feeling frustration and anxiety about young people going through this work. “We will be glad when you get all this searching out of your system and settle down.” But it is surely better to think through what is worth doing when young, although it can take a lot of time.

William James wrote and excellent piece on it, What Makes Life Significant, following a earlier excellent piece written by Leo Tolstoy in his A Confession. Both James and Tolstoy wrote those in their fifties, after a whole lot of worldly experience, which may sometimes be necessary in order to work out an individually satisfying answer to the question.

There is the young Thoreau writing at the beginning of Walden; 

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." 

Thoreau often got criticized for not leading a more conventional life, but I think one of the great values of Walden was that he earnestly took on the question and legitimized it. He said in this connection, for example:

“For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it. ”

So I am in a position to report to you today that there are light snowflakes falling gently, drifting down in front of my windows here in Dayton as I write.

Another reason for taking some time to sort out some resolutions for the new year is to help to protect oneself from the distractions and deceptions that are constantly presented to us, like TV, the latest bubble or confidence game, and such. Life is so short, particularly when you are seventy-three, that you don't want to miss the truly good and to waste what little life remains on something stupid.

Rudolf Steiner wrote somewhere that if you make a resolution, it is best for your spiritual development that you do it, that you follow through on it. I'm sure there are situations in which he is correct, but I think there clearly are also situations when you uncover new realities in your experience that mean you should re-evaluate where you are going, change your mind, abolish the old resolution and set out a new one.

Hope for the Pope

There is a new Pope, Time's “Person of The Year,” who gives us hope.

Pope Francis  - Guardian UK Photo

Radical Republicans are worried by the depth of his concern for poor people and what they see as his “ideology.”

Radical Democrats worry that he will disappoint their hopes because of some personal limitation or because of his position as the head of a group, an institution, that has its own perspective on problems which is often quite contrary to what most human beings need to do or think is right.

A very close friend of mine has a basic criticism of Democrats, saying that they have no principles, and I have another friend whose criticism of Republicans is that they have principles. I see the former as saying that Democrats will just not stand up for what they believe, and the latter as saying that Republicans consider their ideological principles more important than people having food and health care. My own feeling is there is probably some large perspective, with appropriate sophistication, that can accommodate them both. It is fascinating to think that Pope Francis might be able to achieve that large perspective.

He is in an extremely complicated and seemingly impossible situation in which he must coordinate his actions with millions of people, many of whom believe that he is evil itself and would assassinate immediately if they could. He must have personal flaws as we all have personal flaws, and there will  always be many opportunities for him to fail.

I heard someone recently call him “Frankie,” not in disrespect, but in enthusiasm for his humanity. I myself think this is a more healthy approach that calling him “His Holiness.”

We construct a self image by taking outside viewpoints, getting outside and seeing through others' eyes, and thus becoming objective about our selves. All else is solipsism.

So I wonder what it does to him to have everyone going around calling him “Your Holiness” instead of “Frankie.” I wonder what it would do to me if people went around constantly calling me “Your Holiness.” What does it do to a person to be called “Your Majesty” or “Your Honor” or “Sir” or something like that all the time? It seems to me that most such people accept such views as being valid, rarely contradict them and even insist upon them.

I used to enjoy some of  that honorifics play, one particular memory of it being my hearing the mayor of Montreal addressing, with passionate rhetoric, the city council as “Défenseurs de la Foi,” among other titles. It was fun, particularly in its tone and presentment and civility. I loved the historicity of it. Also, we all have the job of getting ourselves through a murderous world, and if a little bit of this helps at the right time and place, so be it.

However, it seems good to me that it has slowly been diminishing over several centuries now, even during my own 71-year lifetime.

Santa Claus through the Chimney

That tale about a fat guy, dressed in red with white trim, living at the top of the world, brought here by flying reindeer, coming down the chimney into the house of every child in the world on one night, carrying an enormous sack of gifts, is way too remote from current definitions of reality to be told without misgivings by parents.

And children, being as bright as they are and picking up everything, must have feelings at some level of being betrayed and deceived.

The imagery of the tale, however, is absolutely brilliant, and valid, on what I will call a spiritual or psychic or mythic or dream level. If you know the “forgotten language” of dreams, for example, the tale and all its imagery present no problems to either adult or child.

*The image of the chimney usually has it as being made of many rectangular red bricks, placed on top and beside each other, interlocking, as is appropriate to the spiritual path.

*Smoke rises up through it as if it were a prayer or other non-substantial communication rising up to heaven, or like the smoke from censers in a church.

*The fireplace is the focus, as it is named in ancient Latin, and is the central image in Alchemy where lead is refined into Gold. This also brings to mind those words of Plutarch that I love to quote, “...the Mind is a fire to be kindled...”

*This coming and going via the chimney like smoke is like the way heaven and earth communicate on Christmas night while we are “asleep.”

* Then there is also this fantastic matter of there being flying reindeer with these antlers branching upwards from their heads like mythic trees. If you see an elk, or a deer, with such antlers in a dream, you are surely seeing a symbol of spiritual development.

*A house itself may well be the most commonly occurring image in our dreams: the “upstairs” indicating thought, the ground floor indicating life at the ground level, the basement indicating the foundation and what it's all built upon.

But the hard everyday reality we experience in this era of returned social darwinism and materialistic science goes more like this:

“None of this fits the real world in which you're going to have to live. It won't get you a job or a marriage or enable you to support a family. Dreams and fairy tales and the spirit will not pay your bills. It's all superstitious humbug. If you don't listen to me, you're going to be poor, alone, and on the street with nothing. Just forget it. Grow up, get tough, and live in the real world.”

Diane Ravitch, “Reign of Error”

Diane Ravitch's new book, “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools,” is formidable. She takes on the rich, well-connected “corporate reformers” like Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, test scores, students as commodities, “accountability,” educational “crisis” mongers, charter schools, and vouchers.

The following passage is from her next-to-last chapter, “Privatization of Public Education is Wrong,” p. 301. A highly successful businessman (an ice cream maker) had given a lecture to some teachers on why and how they should operate their school like a business, saying things like “If I ran my business the way you people operate your schools, I wouldn't be in business for long.” The lecture was not well received and one of the teachers asked him what he does when he receives a shipment of inferior blueberries for his ice cream:

“I send them back.”

She jumped to her feet. “That's right!” She barked, “and we can never send back our blueberries. We take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. We take them with ADHD, junior rheumatoid arthritis and English as their second language. We take them all! Every one! And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it's not a business. It's a school.”

The businessman recalls realizing when the teacher said that, “I was dead meat.”

Ravitch proposes eleven “solutions,” devoting one chapter for each. Her first, and I think most important, solution is in the chapter entitled “Begin at the Beginning:”

     "SOLUTION NO. 1 Provide good prenatal care for every pregnant woman."

She is also a wise and thorough critic of an immense amount of erroneous assumption and flawed experiment. She doesn't deal with one of the major questions I have, which is whether or not USA children are truly loved in themselves rather than considered to be impedimenta or ornaments, but neither does any educator that I have read “go there.”

I recognize the inconceivably large body of writing, research, assertion, and argument on the subject of education but I always come back to Plutarch's sentence in his essay “On Listening.” It is compatible with what Ravitch writes. It seems simple but it also seems to be so basic that you can evaluate any theory of educational method by its compatibility with this statement:

“For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting — no more — and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth.”

What I Will Be Doing During My Last Moments

There is a memorable scene in The Death of Artemio Cruz in which he realizes that he is now dying, and that this is the time and place and way it will end. He had wondered where and when he would die, and here it is.

I just loved the description because I think of dying, well, all the time. My first summer job, when I was sixteen and seventeen years old, was working in a Massachusetts hospital and involved a lot of time alone in the autopsy room. The pathologist would dissect the body as he found necessary then I would do the cleanup – remove and dispose of the guts, organs, brain, blood; wash the body and sew it back up; wrap it up in a shroud and roll it into a bag; call the undertaker to take it away; wash the tools and bench; and then turn out the lights.

Various well-meaning friends, co-workers, and my boss felt that maybe I was too young to see so much death so closely. I thought a lot about that possibility at the time but it was all just truth and reverence to me. I have felt during the sixty or so years since then that the experience had no adverse effect on me or even any noticeable effect at all.

Caution! This could be deeply upsetting or offensive but you too can see what goes on in an autopsy room by going to this link, although actually being there and smelling death is different from just seeing these photos.

But sometimes now I reflect that perhaps the experience had much more effect on me than I have understood. I think the source of my error has been that I have not realized that others just don't think about it as much as I do. To me, the thought of death enters into everything I say, think, or do. But when I talk to others now or really get inside their shoes or see through their eyes, I believe that, relatively speaking, they rarely think of it.

I find myself thinking: You say you need more love, more money, more accomplishment, more stuff, more recognition, but don't you realize you're going to die any moment now? Do you think you're going to live forever? And what's this cruelty thing, this wish to get ahead of others, this wish to diminish others? And what is this ambition thing, this idea that you are going to “make your mark on the world?”

There are just so many things that I have not understood, because death was so real to me. “Competition,” for instance. It has seemed that almost everyone I knew or heard of thought that “competition” was somehow a good thing. Me, the very idea of competition leaves me cold. You want to get ahead of me, pass me on the highway even at risk of your life? Fine. Be my guest. Drive just as fast as you can and get ahead of me. “Winning is the only thing” or even a good thing was a widely-held belief, although it seemed as false, contemptible or insane as anything could be. The idea of trying to be “better than” someone else was as strange to me as the birds in the garden.

In fact, I still don't get it. I just don't get how being better than, or getting ahead of, someone else could be such a widespread wish. Just thinking of it makes me feel unclean.

Another effect that a high level of Personal Death Awareness, “PDA,” as I've recently heard it called, seems to be an almost constant questioning of what is worth doing and what is not worth doing. “Life is too short for this” or “This is the only thing that really matters” or "This may be the last time I ever get to see this person whom I love so very much" seem to go through my mind more often than I think is usual.

There is an ancient belief that there is a “life review” that happens at the time of our death. It is commonly a part of near-death reports (See Life Review and the Near-Death Experience). One of the most intriguing elements of those reports is that often the things which are seen in the clarity of that review to have been “little” are actually quite big. And what had once seemed to be a big deal is actually quite empty.

My best guess as to what I will be doing during my last moments is that I will be thinking of the people I love.

Robert Frost on the Big Joke

It takes a lot more time for us to deal with the fundamental questions than is at first apparent.

We have to take this long, circular, difficult, dangerous, humbling, strenuous, extraordinarily complicated, route to find out where we were at the beginning! It seems simple, and there are glimpses and hints of the resolution along the way, but it takes most of a lifetime.

There is a wonderful little poem by Robert Frost that always comes to my mind whenever I reflect on that ridiculous state of affairs:

Robert Frost

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,

And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.

Orr Has Scored for Canada

Bobby Orr wrote this in his recent book, Orr: My Story, p. 127:

I have won a few trophies over the years, and I never really liked individual honors, because they seem to miss the point. No one guy can accept the praise for the statistics he puts up, because it takes all kinds of unacknowledged help to get there. All the coaches in minor hockey and in Oshawa. All the friends and volunteers, teachers and billets. The neighbors who lent a hand at some point, and the teammates' parents who drove me to the rink. There is really no such thing as individual accomplishment.

That is actually quite astonishing - “There is really no such thing as individual accomplishment” - especially coming from the highest scoring defenseman ever, a very much individualized person if ever there was one.

He gets right to the heart of the current political knot with that, dealing with the crazy idea that if you're not selfish, you're a communist; the whole “you're on your own” fallacy. It also happens to get to the fundamental problem of sociology: How is social order possible?

He wrote further on, p. 235, “I was never particularly fond of school and couldn't imagine having to sit through four years to get a university degree.”

I just love it because Bobby Orr is, and always has been, known for being a decent human being, the real thing, aside from his professional prowess. It has been a long time battle for me against my academic colleagues to recognize that being a decent human being is a prerequisite to arriving at an accurate understanding of how society works!

One more thing: Orr and his book are exemplary of Canada. I have spent several years in Canada, travelled widely in Canada, read everything I can about it, and just plain old think about it a lot. There are certain events in Canadian history that represent or exemplify Canada which are useful to me whenever I try to articulate to anyone what is special about Canada and why I love it so much. The battle of Vimy Ridge and “the Henderson goal” are often cited in this respect. If you are interested in Canadian identity and history you have to listen to Foster Hewitt saying “Henderson has scored for Canada” -

I submit that Orr's book, and life, are similarly expressive of what it means to be Canadian and of Canada's gift.

Finally, here is a video containing some of his time on the ice and some interviews with people who know him well. There are many clips on YouTube of Orr on the ice that I have watched but I think this is one of the best.

Sending Children to Prison for Profit

There is a documentary film showing today at a New York film festival called “Kids for Cash” which will be generally available on February 5th next year. It is about two judges and assorted collaborators in Luzerne County (which includes Pittston, Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton), Pennsylvania, who profited by cruel and arbitrary sending of children to for-profit prisons.

William Ecenbarger wrote a detailed, readable, excellent book on the crime, entitled Kids for Cash:Two Judges, Thousands of Children and a $2.8 Million Kickback Scheme. The book came in the mail at about 5:00 PM last night and I couldn't put the damned thing down until I finished it at 5:00 AM this morning. I didn't want to read the book but I felt I had to read it, because this particular crime exemplified for me the whole Reagan era turn to selfishness, opportunism, the belief that social order derives ultimately from The Fist rather than love, that there is no such thing as society, and that money is a good measure of success and value.

Judge Mark A. Ciavarella

The Juvenile Court judge, Mark Ciavarella, had a friend build a juvenile prison, “PA Child Care,” in Pittston and another one in western PA, and then sent a steady stream of kids to keep those prisons full and immensely profitable for six years. The kids were arrested on ridiculous charges and given an average of four minutes hearing, during which most kids, who did not have lawyer representation, said only a couple words and often just cried, then were handcuffed, shackled, and taken off to prison. We are talking here about several thousand girls and boys under the age of sixteen over a period of six years.

It would be just monstrous for me to choose some quote from Ecenbarger's book to try to convey what it was like for, say, a ten-year-old to be taken away from his home for three to twelve months or more on some transparently dishonest charge and incarcerated in a harsh situation.

Rather, here is just one quote from the book (p. 240) which gets at another aspect. Basil G. Russin, who had been chief Public Defender for Luzerne County for twenty-six years, said the following to a commission of inquiry in justification of his own, and his staff's, silence, passivity, compliance and irresponsibility (p.240):

“Because everybody loved it. Everybody loved it. The schools absolutely loved it. They got rid of every bad kid in their school. When I was in school if you threw a spitball, maybe you went to the principal's office and sat for a couple periods. Last couple years if you threw a spitball, they got the police, and you ended up in juvenile court and got sent away. Schools got rid of all their problems. Parents, parents who had problems with the kid at home. They called the police. Police said, you want us to take him away? Sure. I can't control the kid anymore. Away the kid would go. Parents loved it. Police loved it. They knew every arrest they made the kid would get sent away. And despite what you heard this morning, the DA loved it because they were getting convictions. They were never losing cases.”

Feedlots

One of the big memories I hold from the years when I had my own big truck travelling all over the US and Canada is the memory of the beef cattle feedlot farms in Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Colorado especially, but in other places as well. 

  
The first thing you find out about them is that God-awful stink. You can pick it up for a couple miles away. I remember a place I used to go just west of Amarillo where you could smell it from three miles away. You come up over this little rise and there it is, a giant feedlot full of cattle as far as the eye can see. It doesn't have a single blade of grass in it and the ground is sheer black muck, a lot of it stuck to the sides and legs of the cattle.

I've seen these even in Vermont and there is one right in the middle of a beautiful little town in central Ohio. You come out from St. Johnsbury heading south and there is this big, stinking feedlot, backdropped by the majestic mountains. You come into this little idyllic Ohio town I tell you about and you wonder how the townspeople tolerate having this right in the center of town.

These feedlots are sometimes called “confined animal feeding operations” or “factory farms.” They are fed, among other things, 60% of all the anti-biotics used in the US and several hormones three of which are synthetic. These drugs get into the local ecosystems as well as into the meat and from there into our own bodies.

There's nothing new in my speaking of this. Everybody knows. What makes the difference, what turns you off from eating meat ever after is the actual, physical, seeing and smelling of these feedlots. You can read about them, hear about them, think about them, but actually to see and to smell them is another thing.

I am incapable of addressing the “humanity issue” with regard to non-humans, and can only respect my own personal feelings.

But I often slept in the parking lots of truck stops where there were cattle- and pig-hauling trucks overnight right beside my truck. You could hear the cattle stomping around during the night, bellowing, stinking. I remember some pigs being transferred from one trailer to another at one of these truck stops. The pigs were actually screaming. They sounded to me like humans screaming even though they weren't humans. I remember getting up one morning from my bunk, looking out my window at a stinking cattle trailer parked right next to me, and there was this great, big, terrified eye of a steer looking out through an oval opening on the side of the trailer. That did it for me. I have eaten meat a couple times since that morning ten years ago, but never enjoyed it again. It was the feeling of simple, very deep, personal revulsion that did it rather than some intellectual consideration.

There are all kinds of intellectual considerations, however, worth reading. The latest issue of Popular Science, for example, has a fascinating article on dietary substitutes for meat entitled “Can Artificial Meat Save the World?” Here's a sample:

80 percent of the world's farmland is used to support the meat and poultry industries...a single pound of cooked beef...requires 298 square feet of land, 27 pounds of feed, and 211 gallons of water...That same pound of hamburger requires more than 4,000 BTU's of fossil fuel energy to get to the dinner table...That process, along with the methane the cows belch throughout their lives, contributes as much as 51 percent of all greenhouse gases produced in the world.

I'm sure that it is possible to dispute such studies and statistics because the reality is so complicated. What about the incalculable medical costs of putting those anti-biotics and hormones into our own bodies through meat or the costs to our own feelings of well-being? It's so complicated that I think we are left with having to rely on our feeling, our intuition, our inner sense. That's what I got from the feedlots like the one near Amarillo: I felt “This can't be right.”

Here's Banksy's "Sirens of the Lambs:"

The Sophisticated Symbolism of Feathers

The idea that truth can be symbolized by a feather is exciting to me because it seems that, usually, a lot more goes into human truth than what one sees at first glance.

The ancient Egyptians were onto this symbolism, as you can see from the weighing of a feather against one's soul in the scales at the time of death. The symbol of the feather often appears in their hieroglyphics as Ma'at and as the head of Thoth.

One of the reasons it appeals to me so much is, I think, because I see now as an old person how very long it takes to understand all that goes into a true statement about human realities. Last night, for example, I happened to see a film version of Frankenstein and saw so much more in it than I had ever seen before. I am able to see so much more in the classics now than I could fifty years ago.

A feather is like that. It is composed of small, almost insubstantial elements. These elements accumulate in large numbers and you get a feather, and enough feathers give you a wing, and a couple wings enable you to soar.

The feather symbol thus is an apt symbol for the accumulated acts, no matter how small, that are true and built into consciousness.

The Native American Indians sometimes would have

just a single feather on their heads and sometimes would have a very large headdress full of them. The elaborate ostrich feathers of the Cavaliers' hats indicates their traditional status. You often see even today a small feather in the hat band of a fedora, on the left hand side, indicating a certain worldly sophistication.

Feathered ear rings must have some connection to thoughts. I notice, too, that devils and dragons usually have wings that are not made of feathers, like bats' wings, although that is not always the case. There is more to this than I have understood.

Salinger Assassins

I just finished reading this new biography, Salinger, by Shields and Salerno. The book took ten years to write, has 699 pages with no index, a movie tie-in, and costs $37.50.

The book is so bad that I can hardly believe what I am seeing. It’s that bad. It’s almost as if some demon inhabited the authors and made them write the most violating and untruthful book that could be conceived.

I myself can not find words to describe it but here are a few from Amazon.com reviewers:

creepy, shallow, banal, mean-spirited, disappointing, parasitic, repetitious mess, ludicrous, peevish, vampiritic, phony, sloppy, shameful, wrought by carnival barkers, utterly awful, horrific, innuendo, ‘distortions, untruths and speculations.’

Just take Chapter 18, “Assassins.” The authors try to make the case that The Catcher in the Rye had agency in the assassination of John Lennon, and the near assassination of Ronald Reagan and George Wallace. There is a picture on p.478 of Lennon’s assassin with the caption: “Courtroom Sketch of Mark David Chapman, who stated that his defense can be found in The Catcher in the Rye.” Then there is a photo on p.481 of John Hinckley with the caption: “John Hinckley, who under the influence of The Catcher in the Rye, attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan.” There is a photo on p.484 with this caption: “Robert Bardo, who, under the influence of The Catcher in the Rye, killed the actress Rebecca Shaeffer.”

And did you know this about the would-be assassin of George Wallace?!!! “A copy of The Catcher in the Rye was found in Bremer’s Milwaukee apartment after the shooting.” P.486.

I wonder if they found a Bible.

I think now of Salinger’s For Esmé – With Love and Squalor. Priceless, eternal Esmé. I’ll not forget you, or Salinger.

WalMart

If you go into the local WalMart now, as we are

getting near the end of the month, you notice right away that there are very few customers. People around here are poor and usually don't have any money until the first of each month.

The grocery stores are empty of people at this time, too. You go into Sears and there are not even sales clerks, never mind customers. These businesses are already getting subsidies in the form of tax breaks and food stamps for their Chinese-wage-level workers, so you wonder how much longer they can stay in business.

I am in WalMart yesterday with a friend and she says to me, “Everybody hates Walmart – the people who work here and the people who shop here and the people who don't shop here.” I engage the cashier on the way out and she definitely hates the place. “They're always criticizing me... I'm out of here in two weeks... Definitely,” all said in anger.

Many explanations have been given as to why WalMart failed in Europe but their US-style pay and treatment of employees was surely the biggest. It became a laughing stock as well as hated. It now looks to Latin America for expansion, thinking it should be able to get away with it there.

I spoke a couple years ago with an executive of a US company that outsources its manufacturing to China, and told him that there will come a point when most people in the US are not going to be able to buy your stuff from China, because they won't have adequate jobs and money. He was silent, didn't respond to me, but I know from other conversations with him that he still thinks it is a problem that doesn't concern him. He outsources his manufacturing to China because, he says, his competitors would put him out of business if he didn't.

But my question is still valid and perhaps more relevant than ever: How can the US businesses prosper if most people don't have any money?

My own observation, being poor myself as well as all my neighbors being poor, is that there are additional, unspoken, reasons why my question is not addressed by wealthy people like my above-mentioned executive friend.

One is that people who have money don't really believe that the poor do not have money. They think you're not telling them the truth when you say “I don't have any money.” They don't really believe it. I've seen it many times. It feels like they are thinking, well, if you don't have any money, why don't you go to the bank and get some? That blindness or denial is very clear and familiar to anyone who doesn't have any money.

Another unspoken reason for not answering the question is that wealth seems to be a relative thing. A couple, with no dependents and a million in assets, can feel that they desperately need more money even though their combined annual income is well over a quarter of a million dollars. They don't feel wealthy at all. They feel they need more, that no amount is enough, that there is not enough to go around, and that all that they have can be gone overnight. They feel a need to take all they can get. In fact, and I'm not the first to observe this, but one of our most remarkable cultural phenomena is that the rich now believe, not only that they are not given the respect and love due them, but believe themselves to be victims. This relative nature of wealth may also account for their animus toward poor people, that desire to prevent them from having health care and even food – if you can push someone else further down then you are relatively better off.

Reagan and the Working out of Old Assumptions

I recently ran across an “obituary” written about Ronald Reagan at the time he died. You can follow this link to the full article, but here is the essence of it:

Even at age twelve I could tell that Jimmy Carter was an honest man trying to address complicated issues and Ronald Reagan was a brilcreemed salesman telling people what they wanted to hear. I secretly wept on the stairs the night he was elected President, because I understood that the kind of shitheads I had to listen to in the cafeteria grew up to become voters, and won. I spent the eight years he was in office living in one of those science-fiction movies where everyone is taken over by aliens—I was appalled by how stupid and mean-spirited and repulsive the world was becoming while everyone else in America seemed to agree that things were finally exactly as they should be. The Washington Press corps was so enamored of his down-to-earth charm that they never checked his facts, but if you watched his face when it was at rest, when he wasn’t performing for anyone, you could see him for what he really was—a black-eyed, slit-mouthed, lizard-faced old son-of-a-bitch. He was a bad actor, an informer for McCarthy, and a hired front man for a gang of Texas oilmen, fundamentalist dingbats, and right-wing psychotics out of Dr. Strangelove. He put a genial face on chauvinism, callousness, and greed, and made people feel good about being bigots again. He likened Central American death squads to our founding fathers and called the Taliban “freedom fighters.” His legacy includes the dismantling of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the final dirty win of Management over Labor, the outsourcing of America’s manufacturing base, the embezzlement of almost all the country's wealth by 1% of its citizens, the scapegoating of the poor and black, the War on Drugs, the eviction of schizophrenics into the streets, AIDS, acid rain, Iran-Contra, and, let’s not forget, the corpses of two hundred forty United States Marines. He moved the center of political discourse in this country to somewhere in between Richard Nixon and Augusto Pinochet. He believed in astrology and Armageddon and didn't know the difference between history and movies; his stories were lies and his jokes were scripted. He was the triumph of image over truth, paving the way for even more vapid spokes-models like George W. Bush. He was, as everyone agrees, exactly what he appeared to be—nothing. He made me ashamed to be an American. If there was any justice in this world his Presidential Library would contain nothing but boys' adventure books and bad cowboy movies, and the only things named after him would be shopping malls and Potter's Fields. Let the earth where he is buried be seeded with salt.

The main thing I took away from this, despite its articulate harshness toward a particular dead person, Ronald Reagan – sometimes really good insults are fun and have their literary place! - was that I have been making a mistake for the last forty years in thinking that the USA took a selfish turn somewhere in the mid 1970's. It had seemed to me that the Reagan-Thatcher era was a turn away from social justice, civil rights, concern with poverty and the well-being of other people to a conscious, programmatic, greedy, unashamed, selfishness.

I think it was the very vehemence of this obituary that made me feel that, no, it wasn't just Reagan. It was about the country that voted for him. It now seems likely to me that the USA did not suddenly make a deep change around 1975, plus or minus a couple years. It just doesn't fit, because a society's culture, like an individual's culture, is very old, I would even go so far as to say that it's probably true that the more one thinks one is new, independent, different, the more one is just taking for granted the traditional assumptions, unshakably and grotesquely because unconsciously.

The problem is old, but what is perhaps new, if anything, is that it is now becoming more stark than ever, with more direct discussion of it, more articulation of the consequences and nature and meaning of it. Current, astonishing, articulate and well-funded efforts, such as to have guns in classrooms and in churches, or to let people who don't have money die on the street, or to destroy public libraries and schools, sound new, crazy, murderous, monstrous, ultimately self-destructive. But they are just the working out of the consequences of very old assumptions.

The Public Library

One of the things in the USA for which I am most grateful is the local public library system. The main location that I use in downtown Dayton has this “new book shelf” that sometimes seems to me to be the best connection I have to the world.

Dayton Municipal Library

A public library is a socialist arrangement and yet the “there's-no-such-thing-as-society” and the “you're-on-your-own” people here clearly feel uncomfortable in trying to destroy it. There was a $187 million bond issue to improve and expand the downtown library on the ballot recently that was approved 2 to 1, despite tight-lipped, articulate arguments as to how people who don't borrow books shouldn't have to pay and those that do borrow should pay the whole cost.

I happened to be living in the U.K. at the time of Maggie Thatcher's flourishing and fall, when many public libraries were starved and drowned in the bathtub, as the phrase has it. I remember there was almost the smell of death around my little local library in southeast London when it shut down and there was actually dancing in the corridors of the school where I was working when Thatcher was finally ousted.

It is obvious that our whole literary heritage, as well as our language itself, is a gift to us from people in the past who created it, worked it out with others before and around them. The “you're-on-your-own” “there's-no-such-thing-as-society” approach clearly does not correspond to how the world works. It also feels so sad and selfish. There are times, yes, when love is abused by the selfish, but that it no way means that we should become the very thing we hate. That is a basic component of what happened during the Reagan-Thatcher years.

The Evening Star

The sound of your own footsteps on the snow on bitterly cold winter days in Montreal is a special music. It’s like a singing sound.

Earth's moon and the Evening Star

I often remember walking on a winter's evening down West Sherbrooke Street when I was a young and devastated student, that crunch, crunch, crunch, sound coming from beneath my boots on the frozen snow, and that Evening Star in the western sky, bright and clear.

Earth and Venus

The star hung out there and even though I had no conscious knowledge of its many meanings, I felt the solace and joy of it. If you can look at yourself from the point of view of the Evening Star, you realize that, far from being cold and alone, you are related to countless billions of people who have done the exact same thing, and who will do the same thing in the future.

Yes, I know it’s not a star, that it’s actually the planet Venus but we are talking here about something infinitely greater than astronomy, great as that may be. The stars have had immense meaning in the lives of people well before history.

The Evening Star in particular has received a lot of attention, being one of the brightest objects in our skies, and I find myself often thinking of how much it has meant to me and so many other people.

The literature, art, music, mythology, and unrecorded thought…too much…but right now come to mind Thoreau’s remark, “The stars are the apices of what triangles!” and the lines, “The stars in the sky looked down where he lay” and “Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by” in some old Christmas carols and Wagner’s “O du, mein holder Abendstern,” usually translated as “Hymn to the Evening Star” and “Romance à l'étoile du soir” and “O tu bell'astro incantator.”

Nicolas, - inspirer, music maker, bringer of happiness - showed me the Evening Star when he was only four years old and pointed out to me that it is a “wishing star.”

I think it even had a part in my decision to buy my last and best big truck, a Western Star. I often see that truck in my dreams as a symbol of the vehicle by which I can deliver whatever it is that is given to me to deliver.

There are many renditions of Wagner's song but here is one, composed by Liszt, that appeals to me right now, preceded by a translation of the lyrics into English.

Like a premonition of death, darkness covers the land,
and envelops the valley in its sombre shroud;
the soul that longs for the highest grounds,
is fearful of the darkness before it takes flight.
There you are, oh loveliest star,
your soft light you send into the distance;
your beam pierces the gloomy shroud
and you show the way out of the valley.

Oh, my gracious evening star,
I always greet you like happily:
with my heart that she never betrayed
take to her as she drifts past you,
when she soars from this earthly vale,
to transform into blessed angel!

Charles Rycroft on Dreams but Not Love

There are two paragraphs buried in Charles Rycroft's book,”The Innocence of Dreams,” that I think are worthy of reading at least a couple times every year. They summarize a fundamental problem facing us in our widely-accepted assumptions and illustrate their ultimate poverty and dead end.

Charles Rycroft (1914-1998)

Rycroft wrote clearly in the best British tradition, was a moderate, sensible psychoanalyst who even worked for a while with R. D. Laing, and was widely influential in the last half of the twentieth century. This particular book, “The Innocence of Dreams,” was not particularly valuable to me and seemed to be rather derivative, except perhaps in its opposition to hardcore Freudian dream interpretation. But here is a bit that I think is just a gem (pp. 68-69):

One of the obstacles to conceiving of dreams as having meaning and to recognizing that the images appearing in them are our own thoughts and not pseudo-perceptions is that, if they do have meaning, they must present the self to the self as its own object – an idea which seems puzzling and mysterious, since our usual tendency is to think of one's self as being the subject of consciousness, and whatever we are conscious of as being the object, and as being not-self just because it is the object not the subject of consciousness. Even when we look directly at a part of our own body or attempt to introspect some particular thought or feeling we have had, we seem to do so by dissociating that restricted aspect of our self from our self as subject and regarding it as temporary not-self. It becomes 'me' not 'I.' And to do anything else would seem as impossible as to see the back of one's head without using a mirror.

As Kant says somewhere, 'It is altogether beyond our powers to explain how it should be possible that “I,” the thinking subject, can be the object of perception to myself, able to distinguish myself from myself,' Yet this is what we seem to be able to do while dreaming.

…

According to Coleridge the function of imagination is precisely that of being able to convert the self into an object. 'The province (of the imagination) is to give consciousness to the subject by presenting to it its conceptions objectively.'

Now Val, you might ask, what is there about this “gem” that gets you so excited every time you read it? What is so earth-shaking about the idea that we are able to get outside ourselves and see our selves from distant viewpoints? Isn't that basically, simply, just good old common love – putting yourself in the place of an other, seeing and feeling what the other sees and feels?

Yes, yes, but it is entirely absent - “beyond our powers,” as Kant put it – from the dominant empirical and idealistic traditions.

Joe Cocker, So Beautiful

I suspect sometimes that everything I see is mythic, meaning-laden far beyond the glimpse I am getting.

That's the feeling I have right now as I watch Joe Cocker doing this song. It seems like sheer genius that he and his musicians could do this, and yet I know that there is a long history of countless people behind his being able to do it, being in a position to do it.

How to Find a Superb Dentist in Mexico

How do you find a superb dentist in Mexico?
 

The short answer is that you call Doctor Ma. de Lourdes Sánchez Carranza in Mexico City, (011 from the USA) +52 55 5662 9033, or 011+52 55 6552 4915.

Dra. Lourdes  Sánchez

Other contact details are:

Dra. Ma de Lourdes Sánchez Carranza
Manuel M. Ponce 255-101
Col. Guadalupe Inn
01020 México D.F.
México

She gave me comprehensive dental care in Mexico City during the last three weeks and was by far the best dentist I have ever experienced in my 71 years in the US and Canada. I had two root canals, four crowns, five fillings and a cleaning for about $3,500 US Dollars all included, which is one third of what the work would have cost me in the US. Her father was a prominent dentist before her and her son is continuing their tradition. People make return visits even from France to have her do their implants. She uses the best materials and explains everything.

The long answer to the question of how you find a superb dentist in Mexico is that you must do a lot of homework and research. It's very much like a sociologist doing social research.

I was very lucky in that I have a sister who has lived in Mexico for thirty-five years, a sister who is deeply embedded in a network of intelligent, observant, experienced friends who knew Dra. Sánchez and her work. They had no second thoughts about saying that she is the best.

There are many places on the Internet where you can get information about dentists, dentistry, and “dental tourism” in Mexico, such as www.dentaldepartures.co and www.holidaydental.ca and by simply Google-searching some phrase like “dentists mexico.” But you can't rely on those Internet sources and reviews because they may be written by people who have atypical experiences or who are not astute, critical observers.

The quality of the observer is often mistakenly less considered than the N, the number of observations, and less considered than the sampling procedure. I once had a critic roughly describe this principle thus: “I have never laid an egg but I can tell you more about it than a thousand chickens can.” It's clear that if you really want to know the truth of what's going on, you need to get a small number of highly skeptical, intelligent, acute observers around the dinner table.

It goes without saying that you can't trust the advertizing of the dentists themselves or even the recommendations of dentists themselves. One of the characteristics of any profession is the tenet that all of its members are competent, and thus it is “unprofessional” to speak negatively of any other of its members.

US medicine in general, including dentistry, is a little bit arrogant as well as overpaid. The US ranks below about thirty-six other countries in the major health indicators despite all the arrogance and high cost. I have heard in the US many comments in this and other contexts that “You get what you pay for.” It's like an old folk saying or something. It is sometimes true, yes, but it is probably less often true than false in this era in the USA, particularly in medicine and dentistry and Wall Street.

Lodging: I was lucky in being able to stay with my sister, but in a city of nine million people like Mexico City, it only takes a little searching to find some reasonable place to stay. I notice that some Recreational Vehicle enthusiasts go to Mexico during the cold weather and get their dental work done then. And there is the additional benefit of seeing this old, historic, city and country.

The People: Every country has its different strengths and weaknesses, good dentists and bad dentists, and so on. But I submit that one of Mexico's strengths is the humanity of its people. The bottom-line-money religion, the hard-edge but hidden greed, the unspoken social darwinism, that was so characteristic of my last four US dentists was exactly the opposite of Dra. Sánchez's open-hearted helpfulness and kindness. Kindness is surely ultimately not separated from competence.