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.