Three Kinds of People: Sheep, Sheep Dogs, and Wolves

The movie "American Sniper" brought into popular culture and old view of people:  We are all sheep, sheep dogs, or wolves. It is easy to criticize this simplified view of humanity. For one thing, humans can change from sheep into wolves, sheep dogs into wolves, or wolves into sheep.  Real sheep stay sheep. Real wolves don't graze.

Recently, I was talking to my older son about leadership. I used this analogy, because he is starting both an internship and later a job in which leadership is the path to success. His employers, even if they would not use the label, are looking for a sheep dog.

We were laughing about just how much like a sheep dog he will need to be with a crowd of teenagers who needed to be herded to different activities--and who might wander off at any moment.

We also talked about my oldest daughter, both of us smiling because she seems to be born for the sheep dog role. On her high school basketball and soccer teams she played with boundless enthusiasm. She also embraced the role of team enforcer.  If a player on the other team made a bad hit or was abusing one of her teammates, my daughter was in her face, several times fouling out of games with her one-on-one coverage of the offender.  In her professional life she is a social worker, helping disabled veterans get the help they need.

The best sergeants I served with in the Army had this alert, game-face quality of both protecting their sheep and barking whenever needed.

In corporate life, unlike games and the military, leadership has subtleties that blend the sheep and sheep dogs and even the wolves together into an always strained unit that presents itself as a family, but with deep contradictions everyone feels.

In the corporate world, someone has to make money and deal with shareholders.  Wolves in suits lead the sales force and accounting.  Sheep with college degrees can be less than docile.  The sheep dogs in big companies, the middle managers, are the subject of bitching by the sheep and the wolves.

I listen to friends who are corporate managers caught between surly sheep and hungry wolves striving to "increase shareholder value" and their own bonuses. Every corporation I worked for kept score in money--the only real measure of  both short- and long-term success in the world of business.

The friends who played ball or are veterans are occasionally nostalgic for the vivid clarity of games and war.  They tell me how they are squeezed between bosses looking only for profit and staff who want affirmation.

My son is beginning where most of the sheep want to be part of the herd and he can protect his sheep from the wolves.

Just as an aside, many professions are admired and scorned based on members who choose the role of sheep dog or wolf.  The best lawyers use their considerable training to protect the poor and needy from government and corporate excess. The worst are wolves making fortunes covering crimes by the rich.

The difference between millionaire televangelists sucking money from their sheep to build and buy empires, and believer who becomes a doctor to minister in a refugee camp is beyond astronomical.

Inverting the Beatitudes

The Mount of Olives, Jerusalem

Sometimes when I want to know if I really understand an idea, I restate it. More rarely, I invert it.

As soon as Christians take power the Church dies.  The Medici Popes, The Crusades, America’s Jim Crow South, American preachers defending slavery, and now white Evangelicals backing Trump are just the latest version of hate wrapped in religious robes.  

Matthew Verses 3 – 11, inverted

3.  Cursed are the rich, for their Kingdom is this world.

4.  Cursed are those who live to amuse themselves, they will die alone in front of TVs.

5.  Cursed are the proud, for they will choose Hell over humility.

6  Cursed are the fat and full, for their appetites rule them.

7.  Cursed are the merciless, for they will receive no mercy.

8.  Cursed are the foul in heart, for they will never see God.

9.  Cursed are the bullies, for they will whine eternally.

10.  Cursed are those who are cheered for their lies, for they make the world as horrible as themselves.

11.  Cursed are those who insult and envy true and good people, for they will lock themselves in Hell forever.

For Jerry Falwell Jr. there is a “Dream President” in the White House. Trump is the fulfillment of Falwell’s power dreams, but judged by the most important words of Jesus himself, Jerry is not having Christian dream.  Nor are Franklin Graham, Paula White, Pat Robertson, Robert Jeffress and the Evangelical leaders who have taken their 30 pieces of silver from Trump to get power. 

But taking power and keeping power has nothing to do with The Sermon on the Mount:

Matthew Verses 3 – 11

³ Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

⁴ Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

⁵ Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

⁶ Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

⁷ Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

¹⁰ Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

¹¹ Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

Space-Time on My Bicycle

On the bike, space and time can be interchangeable

In Pennsylvania, Germany, Slovakia and many other places I have ridden, the distance between crests of rolling hills is often about a half mile.  At an 18mph average speed, that means the distance from hill crest to hill crest is three and a half minutes.  

I am re-reading the book "Time and the Art of Living" by Robert Grudin. The book is a meditation on time and the realities and paradoxes of life within time.  Grudin writes about the experience of runners on regular routes passing landmarks and knowing that passing a mailbox or an intersection is marker both of time and of distance.  

Twice every week for the past twenty years when I am in Lancaster, I ride a 35-mile route with a group of friends.  The route goes from Lancaster city through Millersville to Safe Harbor Park, up a long climb to Highville, a fast descent down Turkey Hill, then five miles of flat road along the Susquehanna River, then back through Millersville and home.  

From the time the ride leaves at 4 p.m. until the riders split up back in Millersville, I know the time and the distance I have travelled from riding the same route over and over.  The exact speed of the ride each day depends on which riders show up. I know that on a day Brad shows up we will descend Turkey Hill at just before 5 p.m. Without Brad, it might 5:04 that we roll down the longest descent.  

In addition to time and distance melding, deep emotion changes time perception. Joy erases time, making a single moment seem to stand still: filled to bursting with happiness, and then making hours disappear in joy. That joy makes a single moment spread into the future.

In the same way, pain can turn seconds into hours.  The agony of a broken bone has turned seconds into hours for me many times.  

When I learned to swim six years ago, the 25-yard pool at the Lancaster YMCA became a metronome for me. I found I could not count laps reliably, but I knew that three minutes was 100 yards so I could track distance on the clock.  I went from swimming a quarter mile, to a half mile to a mile and longer, tracking my distance with the clock on the wall.  

Since I did not have to think about distance, I could distract myself from the boredom of swimming in a poll by counting or doing squares in my head in other languages.  If I did the squares to 5000 in French it was twenty minutes, close to a half mile.  In Russian, it was 35 minutes, a kilometer or a little more.  Two squared, four. Three, nine. Four, sixteen. Nine, Eighty-one. Twenty, Four Hundred. Forty-four, 1,936.  In Russian:  два, четыре; три, дебять; сорок йетыре, один тыцяча девятсот тридцать шесть.  

Although I have traveled the equivalent of several trips around the world on the Amtrak Keystone train between Lancaster and Philadelphia, time and space do not merge on train trips. At least for me, the seven stops from Lancaster to Philadelphia are time markers, not distance.  Eleven minutes to Ardmore, 12 more to Paoli, five to Exton, seven to Downingtown, seven to Coatsville, five to Parksburg, then 18 more minutes to Lancaster--and vice versa.  The only distance I feel is Philadelphia to Lancaster or vice versa: on the train, off the train.

But after a decade of riding the train, I decided I could ride to work once in a while. I would ride from Lancaster to Philadelphia along route 30. Every station from Lancaster to Philadelphia except Parksburg is on the Route 30. When I rode, the train stations became time and distance markers on the trip. In the past dozen years I have made the trip maybe 50 times.  On the bike, those stations take on new significance.  

When I pass Coatsville station I am past the longest hill on the entire route. The rest is flat. At Downingtown, I am halfway. If I reach Downingtown in two hours, I will be in Philadelphia in four hours.  At Exton, I can get on the bike trail, add 10 miles to the trip and stay off the busiest roads.  Usually I just keep going on Route 30.  Paoli is the beginning of the heaviest traffic. Ardmore is close to the Philadelphia City line. Once I am in West Philadelphia the traffic is less, but the roads are terrible--trolley tracks and potholes.  

I am writing this on the train from Philadelphia to Lancaster.  The trip is 75 minutes to write or read. I am in a warm, metal cylinder on a cold night traveling a mile a minute. No distance. Just time. When I leave the train I will get on my single-speed bike and ride two very cold miles to my house. Nine minutes. I can picture every yard of that trip in my mind. 

3, 2, 1: Chance, Fate and Free Will

"Free Will" by Mark Balaguer: did I choose to buy it?

In the book “The Forgotten Soldier” Guy Sajer describes a moment when his rifle company is sheltering from Soviet artillery and guns in a concrete storage cellar. An order comes down to attack. The Top Sergeant tells the men to count off by threes. Sajer is a One.  The sergeant tells the Threes to get ready to attack.  In two minutes they run from the basement. In another ten minutes they are all dead or wounded.

The Twos are next. As they run into the hail of Soviet fire, Sajer thinks about what it means that the Threes went first.  Why them? Usually the Ones would go first and he would be dead.  His assault wave took the Soviet stronghold in the middle of the village.  After this brief victory, the Germans would continue the year-long retreat to Germany and utter defeat. 

Sajer survived that day and the war because he was a One on the day the Threes went first.  Not surprisingly, Sajer sees his life as dominated by fate rather than free will. As a soldier in a retreating Army, his life is a series of terrible moments. In another scene, he describes the relief of climbing into a truck after 20 miles of marching. The relief turns into terror when the convoy is attacked by Soviet fighter-bombers. Then there are all the horrors of his one leave to go home.

In the military, I have met more fatalists than in civilian life, or at least people who are more open about their belief.  The most usual expression of this belief was, “If a bullet has mine name on it, there’s nothing I can do about it.” I can understand this belief, but so much of the training we had was how to avoid the bullets, bombs and rockets that were aimed at us. 

For a year during my tour in West Germany in the 70s, I taught a monthly class in how to survive what are now called WMDs.  I shared the Army’s best advice on how to live if our position was hit with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.  If it is somehow possible to survive a nuke, can there really be just one bullet with NEIL on it? Or would it be my full name? When I was a tank commander, would it be an armor-piercing cannon shell with my name on it?

All my life, the question of Free Will versus Fate has been in the back of my mind. Early in my life, as well as I could understand the question, I would have said fate guided my life.  After I joined the military, life seemed to be a series of endless possibilities.  I went to college, picked a job I liked, had kids, became a late-life athlete, traveled to every inhabited continent, a paragon of choice.

Last year, I read a book titled “Free Will” by Mark Balaguer.  I bought the book in the MIT Bookstore when I was in Cambridge for the annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. I had an hour so I went to the bookstore and bought the book on a whim.  Was it a whim? It is a subject that interested me all my life. I went to a bookstore that had only academic books. Was fate lurking in my mind?

Whether picking the book was fate or free well, Balaguer, helped me to see that the gap between Sajer and I, between those who believe an invisible fate controls their life and those who believe everything is free, is not so great as I thought. 

Balaguer looks at both sides of the question from a philosophical viewpoint, and then from a practical viewpoint.  How many choices can one person actually make in a day-week-month-life?  Not that many.  The human condition, circumstances, lifespan, and every previous choice we have made, combine to constrain all of our future choices. So real choice is relatively rare. 

Each time I have made a big choice, I have accepted a thousand small restraints. When I decided to re-enlist in the Army National Guard, one weekend a month was outside of my control. Then two weeks in the summer. Then a year in Iraq.  A lot of choices I might have had, I no longer had. Certainly in Iraq, I had no choice in what to wear, where to live, when to eat, and so many other things. 

I don’t know if there is an answer to the question of fate or free will, except in very specific circumstances.  But it is a question I seem fated to keep thinking about.

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The Forgotten Soldier: "Surely the war must end soon."

The Forgotten Soldier, a memoir of World War II

In the middle of Guy Sajer's story of war on the Eastern Front in World War II, he writes of his one-and-only leave during four years of fighting. In the spring of 1943, he was given 14 days leave that does not start until the railway station at Posnan, 200 miles east of Berlin. That's important because his journey began in Kharkov, more than 1000 miles further east.

Before, during and after the leave. People around Sajer from Russia to Berlin say, "Surely the war must end soon." "Surely the war can't go on like this." Of course, the war does go on, and on, until finally Nazi Germany is crushed between two massive Allied armies.

Sajer spends his first months of war in a transport unit trying to bring supplies to Stalingrad. The city fell before the snowbound trucks of Sajer's unit could reach Stalingrad.  In the way of all armies since the Roman Empire and before, the front line troops blamed the supply troops for their defeat.

Sajer volunteers to be a front-line infantryman with an elite division. Part of the offer by the officers asking for volunteers is a fourteen-day leave.  Sajer volunteers and gets his leave.

His goal is to go home and visit his family in Alsace, France, 500 miles west of Berlin. The train he is on west of Berlin is stopped when the town ahead of them is bombed by the allies. Sajer and everyone else on the train helps to clear the tracks. When they get to the station, Sajer is told his destination is too far from his unit and he has to go back.

He decides to return to Berlin. He visits the family of his best friend who was killed on the road to Stalingrad. While he is waiting to see his friend's parents, he meets Paula and falls deeply in love with her. They spend every moment they can together during the rest of Sajer's leave.

The most intense moments they share are during bombing raids. In a night raid that hits the neighborhood they are in, they hide in a shelter, then help to care for the wounded when the all-clear sirens sound. In the shelter, terrified mothers say,
"Surely the war must end soon."

Later they are near Templehof Airport on a lovely spring day, when the airport itself is the target of a daylight bombing raid. There are no shelters nearby and they hide in a fold in the ground as Eighth Air Force bombers reduce Templehof to rubble.  As they help the wounded after they raid, they tell each other, "Surely the war must end soon."

It doesn't. The war drags on and on until crippled Berlin is fully destroyed and the Nazi army retreats all the way from Russia back to Germany. Sajer goes back to his unit. The lovers write to each other, but never see each other again.

Sajer records all of the deep emotion he feels, and the reaction when the older soldiers in his unit find out he fell in love on leave.  They needle him and tell him he has a thousand miles to travel back to the front lines and he can fall in love on the way. 

Sajer conveys very well the hope that wells up inside people who have suffered. "Surely we have suffered enough," They say. "Surely this will end." But it does not. The suffering of individual men and women and children is never a priority of the leaders who want victory.  A year later, after a victory in which they hold the advancing Soviet Armies, young soldiers like Sajer--he is then 19--start to talk about how the war must end soon and they will all go home.

I read all this book 42 years ago as a 24-year-old tank commander in Germany on the East-West Border. I did not remember the leave from forty years ago. I remembered much of the book, but not the leave.  This time reading, mid-tour leave was part of my experience, part of my year in Iraq.  It struck me how different it was to come home to a completely peaceful country.

The other deep irony of the leave was the way that Paula's parents and the people Sajer stayed with were worried the young couple was moving too quickly.  They were worried about the young couple doing the "right thing."

By the time of the leave in 1943, Nazi armies had already deported and slaughtered millions of Jews. They had killed millions more civilians in pitiless air raids on civilian targets and armored warfare.

It is painful for me to read how people could be concerned with moral questions while German soldiers and German policemen drafted into military service had already shot more than two million Jews and thrown them into pits and were sending others to death camps for slaughter on an industrial scale.

But tradition has always blinded people in this very way. So the Berliners could be concerned about what a Good German would do at the same time German soldiers were machine gunning children.

In America, the people who owned slaves went to Church and told their children to behave even while they, just like the Nazis, believed people who lived among them were less than human and could be tortured and denied freedom for their entire lives, and the lives of their children.  The American segregation in the Jim Crow South that followed the end of slavery was Hitler's model of making an underclass of Jews. Hitler started that segregation immediately, and quickly went past oppression to slavery and murder.

The Church in Germany, like the Church in America, was complicit in the terrible plans. The American Church twisted the Bible into saying Black people were less than human.  The German Church, Evangelical and Catholic, expelled Jewish convert pastors and then Jewish Church members within the first two years of Hitler taking power. The German Church, like the slavery Evangelical Church in the South, supported the racism of their governments.

This time re-reading Guy Sajer, the most painful passages are not about the war, but about what was happening "back home." 

Boston Traffic: Rules Made Up on the Spot

My Home Town, Boston

Boston traffic is now the worst in the nation, maybe worst in the world according to a new survey.  It's not simply the volume of traffic. It's the roads: the diabolical design of the roads that makes chaos that sometimes can only be unravelled by making up rules on the spot.

My father was a truck driver and a warehouse worker. Born before World War I, he liked to say he began as a Teamster shoveling shit when Beantown still used horse-drawn wagons.  The cobblestone roads only slowly gave way to pavement, so by the time I was a kid in the late 50s and early 60s many key road junctions were still paved for horses.

My Dad worked at a grocery warehouse next to the former Hood Milk plant in what is now Bunker Hill Community College in Charlestown. To drive a truck north from the warehouse meant driving around the cobblestone rotary at Sullivan Square. To go south meant passing through cobbled City Square rotary then turning a tractor-trailer into an alley that was the only access to the bridge to the Southeast Expressway.

One Friday in the summer of 1961, my Dad had to take a refrigerated load south to Taunton.  His company had just upgraded from 32-foot to 40-foot refrigerated trailers.  I had gone to work with my Dad, so when he got the assignment, I got to ride in the cab.  Ahhh, the days before liability lawyers decided everything.

We rumbled around the cobblestone rotary at 5 mph.  When Dad turned into the alley, he misjudged the new trailer. It was his first time pulling a 40-footer.  He clipped the rear fender of a new Chevy Belair parked illegally right on the corner and pushed the shiny, blue sedan into an iron street lamp pole.  The car was crunched at both ends.

My Dad got down from the cab. A thousand horns honked at the brightly painted tractor trailer blocking the alley.  As my Dad wrote his information on a piece of paper, an enormous, red-faced Boston Cop strode through the stalled traffic yelling at my Dad to get moving.

My Dad started to protest that the car was illegally parked. I hung out the window wondering if my Dad would be arrested.  The Big Cop grabbed the paper and tore it up.  "Get moving. Get out of here," he yelled. "That drunk son-of-a-bitch parks there every Friday and fucks everything up. Fuck him. Get going."

My Dad thanked him, swung into the cab and with one more move, rumbled down the alley toward Taunton.

Whoever decided it was a good idea to funnel the major route from the north side of Boston through a cobblestone rotary and an alley is just one of the idiots who made driving in Boston such an adventure when I was a kid.

I have no doubt Boston traffic is currently the worst in the world. I wonder who else ever held the title.

Soldiers Under Any Flag Can Be Great Warriors: The Forgotten Soldier

 A 17-Year-Old draftee 

on the Eastern Front

for the entire war. 

I just started re-reading "The Forgotten Soldier." First published in English in 1971, the book is a memoir by a 17-year-old French boy drafted into the German Army in 1942.  The book is 600 pages of wrenching details about the life of a German soldier on the Eastern Front for nearly the entire war.

Though he had no choice about serving, Guy Sajer was scorned when he tried to go home after the war.  He suffered cold and every sort of misery and finally defeat, then came home to rejection by family and friends.  At the end of World War II, Guy Sajer was just 21 years old and a veteran of nearly four years of continuous combat with a losing army. He was on his way to the front when news reached his convoy of the Russian victory over the German 6th Army at Stalingrad.

I read this book in 1977 when I was a 24-year-old tank commander in West Germany, waiting for a million-man Soviet Army to invade Western Europe starting in Fulda and leaving me and and everyone in 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division dead on the field just west of the Fulda Gap.

Reading this book helped me to understand how the southern men I served with could venerate soldiers who fought to keep other men enslaved.  It was clear from this memoir, that a soldier can be a hero in a bad cause.

In 2017 when I visited the German Military Cemetery at Normandy, I thought of Guy Sajer--a kid drafted into a losing cause who serves with honor and heroism until the end.  I honor him as a man while knowing the flag that he served under is a symbol of hatred.

After the war, Sajer became a comics artist, creating comics under his own name and pen names.  He is 94 years old and lives in Paris.

I will be writing more about specific parts of the book.  Anyone interested in the life of a soldier in combat, especially the life of a soldier in a losing cause, this book is a haunting reminder of how terrible war is.

“What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is difficult even to even to try to remember moments during which nothing is considered, foreseen, or understood, when there is nothing under a steel helmet but an astonishingly empty head and a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions, more or less distant, more or less violent, and the cries of madmen, to be classified later, according to the outcome of the battle, as the cries of heroes or of murderers. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle before everybody else, who run in any and every direction, howling like banshees. There are the tragic, unbelievable visions, which carry from one moment of nausea to another: guts splattered across the rubble and sprayed from one dying man to another; tightly riveted machines ripped like the belly of a cow which has just been sliced open, flaming and groaning; trees broken into tiny fragments; gaping windows pouring out torrents of billowing dust, dispersing into oblivion all that remains of a comfortable parlor...” 
― Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier

And about how war can tear up our souls:

“Abandoned by a God in whom many of us believed, we lay prostrate and dazed in our demi-tomb. From time to time, one of us would look over the parapet to stare across the dusty plain into the east, from which death might bear down on us at any moment. We felt like lost souls, who had forgotten that men are made for something else, that time exists, and hope, and sentiments other than anguish; that friendship can be more than ephemeral, that love can sometimes occur, that the earth can be productive, and used for something other than burying the dead.”
― Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier

Basic Training to Combat Deployment: Just 37 Years!

C-130 Hercules: I flew on one of these on my first military 

flight in 1972 and in Iraq 37 years later.

All my life I have been late doing things:

• Nine years after high school gradation, I went to college. 
• Many kids learn to swim shortly after learning to walk. I learned to swim when I was 59 years old.  
• Ten years ago today, February 1, 2009, I was flying to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, on my way to Iraq. It had not occurred to me before that I was leaving for my first combat deployment 37 years after I started basic training on February 1, 1972.  

I enlisted during the Vietnam War, but the war ended and I never went to that one.  In 1976, I went to West Germany and served on the border in the Cold War, but thankfully, that war never happened.  I left the Army in 1980 to go to college.

Then in 2007, I re-enlisted in the Army National Guard and ten years ago today was on my  way to Iraq.

I connected the two dates because basic training and the trip to Iraq both began with saying goodbye to my family and flying away.

The very first flight in my life was the flight from Boston to San Antonio for Basic Training.  That first flight gave me a love for flying that led me to travel every chance I could on military flights.  For $10 I could fly across the nation or across an ocean.

But it was funny to think that the gap between starting Basic Training and serving in a war was 37 years.  I went to Basic at 18 years old and to Iraq at 55.

Most people had long retired at the age where my career hit one of its big milestones.

By the time I went to Iraq, I had three college degrees, but learning to swim was still four years in my future.  And it's only in the past year that I started to meditate and practice Yoga.

Who knows what I'll learn or do this year?

Happy February 1! It's a big day for me.

Ten Years Ago I Was Writing My Name on My Underwear--and Everything Else

The faded laundry mark from January 2009 

after a few hundred machine washings.

Ten years ago there were piles of Army uniforms and clothes and gear of all kinds on my living room floor.  I was sitting on the floor with my wife and occasionally one of the kids.  I was writing my name on every piece of gear I was carrying in duffel bags to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and then to Camp Adder, Iraq.

Underwear is not easy to write on, even with a marker. It was a long process to put my last name or my laundry mark (Last Initial, Last four of the Social Security Number) on t-shirts, shorts, belts, pants, shirts, hats, ammo pouches, boots, gloves and backpacks.

But write I did. Because when there is only one laundry service and everyone has sand-colored underwear, the best way to keep your stuff is to mark it.

Marking my clothes made the deployment seem oddly real.  Although we knew the deployment was coming since November of 2007, and we had several two or three-week training sessions, marking my gear meant I was really leaving.  Although I had been in and out of the military since 1972, the last time I went overseas with the Army was in the mid 70s.

As I marked my clothes, it seemed more real than before that I was leaving for an entire year.

Right now, ten years later, it is still strange to think that Fort Sill and Camp Adder are in the list of places I have lived, not just visited.

War Between Science and Religion? The Real Enemy was Catholic Immigrants

Hating immigrants is nothing new in America

The anti-immigrant tradition in America is old and deep in America.  People accepted now as "white" people were hated and reviled more than 100 years ago, none more than Catholics.

In the 1870s two acclaimed American academics each published blockbuster books about the "War Between Science and Religion."  They were both brilliant men in their disciplines.  John William Draper was one of the first presidents of the American Chemical Society and was a pioneer in photographic chemistry. Andrew Dickinson White was the first president of Cornell University.

It is an old truism that being brilliant in your own area of expertise makes one libel to spout off with idiocy in an area where one has no training.

But fame and publishing best-selling books in the 19th Century turned to derision in the 20th Century.  Draper and White today are known today as the chief promoters of the discredited "Conflict Thesis" describing a two millenia war between science and religion.  The thesis is simply anti-immigrant bullshit.

Larry Principe, a professor of the history of science at Johns Hopkins University, teaches a course in which he uses Draper's book as an example of how not do history.  If you are interested in the field, Principe's lectures on "The Great Courses" are brilliant.

But the smell lingers.  Wretched writers like Dan Brown use the lies and half-truths in Draper and White to write trash thrillers like The "DaVinci Code."

So why did Draper and White trash the history of the Church?  Their target was not all religion, but the Catholic faith. Draper and White were rabidly anti-Catholic and were writing propaganda, not history.  In the 19th Century, anti-immigrant people tried to take control of the political system through secret groups.  The Whig Party fell apart in 1856 and was replaced by the Republicans in part because of internal divisions over slavery and immigrants.

Draper and White, for example, popularized the myth that the Church taught the earth was flat and Columbus proved otherwise.  That the earth is round and has a diameter of roughly 8,000 miles was known to every educated person since about 300 B.C. Anyone reading the Divine Comedy, written in the late 1,200s is quite aware of the earth as a sphere.

But like any propagandists, Draper and White began with a message and massaged all their facts to fit the message. So in order to prove the Catholic Church is anti-science they twisted facts to fit their message.

A secondary effect of their campaign against Catholics was to make add another layer of anti-intellectualism to a country already prone to making lunacy into policy.

Although they were both men intellectuals in their own fields, their real legacy in America putting stupidity in power.  The anti-vaxx movement, the John Birch Society, the Young Earth Creationists, the climate change deniers, birthers, and every kind of anti-immigrant movement can look back to Draper and White and see inspiration.

Last Child to College—Snow Problem!

The view for much of the 500-mile round trip

On Saturday, I rented a Nissan Rogue SUV to drive my youngest son to college in Johnstown, Pa. We filled the silver 4-wheel-drive with clothes and luggage and drove west, leaving at Noon. The forecast said snow from mid-afternoon to the following morning.  Right on time, the snow started about 30 minutes before we arrived in Johnstown.

My plan was to drop my son off, get him settled in the room, go to Pittsburgh, then return in the morning and check how things were going at school before I returned to Lancaster. 

By 4:30 pm, I was on the road to Pittsburgh in steady but light snow. I was immediately glad I was in an SUV and not our 2001 Toyota Prius. When I got to Pittsburgh, I planned to stay in the Liberty area and go again to the Tree of Life Synagogue, two miles away on top of one of the hills of Pittsburgh. I drove to the Squirrel Hill neighborhood and stopped near the Synagogue, walked around and remembered the victims. 

Then I drove down Wilkins Avenue from Tree of Life Synagogue. Google maps told me to turn right on South Negley Street.  I followed the map and climbed a short, steep grade to the crest at Fair Oaks Street.  I started downhill toward Fifth Avenue and was immediately feeling the brake pedal pulse back as the Nissan slid down the steep, icy grade. I was slowing, but not enough for me to stop at the red traffic light at the bottom of the hill. The curbs are low on Negley, so I slid the Nissan to the right so the right-side tires were rubbing the curb.

I stopped.  I went the last block to Fifth Avenue at about 3mph pumping the brake. On the far side of the intersection three cars had slid together.  I turned right and went to Liberty.  By now it was close to 9pm.  I got a call from home that my wife was not feeling well.  So instead of staying the night, I got back on the road.  I was wearing an Army workout jacket that was a great fashion choice.

Just as I was turning to the on-ramp for I-376, I saw flashing lights in my mirror. It turns out this fully automatic car turns on its own headlights, but not the taillights.  The officer told me I had no taillights. I told him it was a rental. I spun the turn-signal handle and the lights came on. He still checked my license.

When he came back, he asked my what kind of motorcycle I rode. I have a motorcycle endorsement on my license. We talked bikes and Army for a few minutes, and then I was on my way on a snowy 250-mile drive that would last until 2:30 a.m.

For the first hundred miles, the snow was steady. The turnpike was wet, clear and empty.  After the tunnels the temperature was colder and the road got icy. I slowed down, and then got a lot slower behind a wall of snowplows. After ten miles of 20 mph, I pulled off at I-81 and started on the route to Harrisburg.

Ten miles after leaving the Turnpike, I was behind another wall of plows on I-81. So I changed to Route 581. The roads got better on the east shore and I finally got home at 2:30 a.m.  I was exhausted, but also really happy. Driving can often be dull, but a night that causes a four-wheel-drive to slide made the drive a real challenge.

I called him at 9:30 a.m. and said I was already home. He said he was fine and glad to hear Mom was okay.

Instead of driving, I can take the Amtrak Pennsylvanian train from Lancaster to Johnstown. There are also cheap flights from Lancaster to Pittsburgh. If there is snow the next time I visit my son, I will take a train or a plane, no automobiles. 

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First Book of 2019: The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

The first book I read this year is “The Plot Against America”by Philip Roth.  It is a counter-factual history of America that has FDR losing the Presidential election in 1940 to Charles A. Lindbergh, the Republican candidate, but really, the “America First” candidate.

This fast-paced book is told from the perspective of a Jewish boy living in Newark, New Jersey. He is the younger of two boys over a working class family who are the children of immigrants to America. 

As the book unfolds, America seems to inexorably drawn into World War II in support of the allies who are in headlong retreat from the Nazis and Imperial Japan. The forces against war are united by the slogan “America First.” Charles Lindbergh really was a leader in this movement and really did want America to stay out of the war, but in the book, Lindbergh improbably becomes the nominee of the Republican Party by showing up at a deadlocked convention and winning in a 3 a.m.  ballot. 

Then the book gets eerie. Lindbergh crisscrosses America flying himself from city to farm town holding rallies.  At these rallies he stays with his anti-war and pro-Nazi message and wins the election in a landslide (not by 80,000 votes).

With his election, anti-Semitic policies begin, first with youth programs, then forced relocation and America becomes more and more an ally of the Nazis. The end of the Lindbergh Presidency is very quick. I won’t give spoilers. But the compromises and lies that lead the nation to the brink of a Jewish pogrom are told in a way that seems all too plausible. 

Having the whole story narrated by a young boy allows Roth to use hysterical narration and remain completely plausible. 

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