"Scalia/Ginsburg," an Opera in One Act--So Much Fun

 

Today I went to the Gardner theater at Lancaster Country Day School, the K-12 school of two of my six kids, and saw the one-act opera "Scalia/Ginsburg." 

Since my daughters are in their 30s, I have not been to the school in a while. The new theater is really beautiful.  

I thought it would be fun to see what an opera about the friendship between the opera lovers Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia would be.  The opera is a delight, both funny and reverent.  It begins with rapid borrowings from familiar songs as Scalia sings about why he is completely right in his conservative views and the liberals are wrong.

Next the Commentator (Judge of Judges) enters to the music of "Don Giovanni" suggesting a very bad end for Scalia. Ginsburg enters, declares herself Scalia's friend, and stands with Scalia in his trial. Their friendship is their defense.  We find out the entire opera is set in the moment Scalia has his fatal heart attack. Scalia is acquitted and goes to Heaven, and after a delay, Ginsburg follows.  

Derrick Wang wrote and created the opera using the words of Scalia and Ginsburg. His website has videos of past performances.  It also has links to a fully annotated libretto if you are curious about the words he used and the operas that inspired his work. 

Prisoners of Geography, Published in 2015, Relevant Right Now! Book 11 of 2022

 

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics  by Tim Marshall.

Sometimes a book title promises a lot more than it can deliver.  The 16-word title, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics  by Tim Marshall is too modest by half. Published in 2015, this book explains the Good, the Bad and the Ugly in global politics right now.   

The author, Tim Marshall, a former war correspondent for Sky News, lives in London and continues the book on his website and Facebook Page, The What and the Why. 

The ten chapters are ten maps of ten regions followed by 20-30 pages of history and current geopolitics.  The first chapter is "Russia."  The first line of the introduction is about the current President and wannabe Tsar of Russia:

"Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man, a great supporter of the Russian Orthodox church. If so, he may well go to bed each night, say his prayers, and ask God: 'Why didn't you put some mountains in Ukraine?' 

(Using this same quote, I recently wrote about bad religion that kills good people. Putin is now the Poster Boy of this sort of murder, but all the priests pandering to him will certainly share his circle of Hell.)

In the next paragraph Marshall says "As it is, Putin has no choice: he must at least attempt to control the flat lands to the west."  In the first chapter on Russia, Marshall explains the geography and history that will compel the Russian leader to get control of Ukraine.  As I write this, Putin is in the midst of a massive invasion of Ukraine with the object of taking over the free country of 44 million people.  Marshall says Moldova is also on Putin's must-conquer list, where he will use the excuse of the Russian-speaking area of Transnistria to trigger that invasion.   

When I read this chapter two weeks ago, the invasion had not yet begun, but 150,000 Russian troops surrounded the country of Ukraine to the north and east on the ground and to the south on the Black Sea and in the recently seized territory of Crimea. Marshall explains the thousand-year history of Russia that led the world to the current conflict as well as the recent history.  Putin was President during the second war in Chechnya almost twenty years ago. He reduced the Chechen capital Grozny to rubble with thermobaric bombs. They are already rumored to be in use in Ukraine.

After prescient predictions about Russia, chapter two is "China." Again, current crimes have a geopolitical imperative.  Marshall explains why the oppression of the Uighurs in northeastern China will not end until China is fully in control.  The land where the Uighurs live is critical to China's control of agriculture within the country and its domination of Tibet and Mongolia. The good news is that China has enough to do within its current borders that subjugating Taiwan is not the top of Xi's geopolitical hit list.  

The next chapter is the "United States."  After the ominous first two chapters, this one is a geographic celebration.  No question that the best place to be born and to live in the 20th and 21st Centuries is the United States.  The Russia and China chapters and every other chapter is, in part, about complex borders and tensions between bordering countries.  The United States has long, peaceful borders to the north and south and vast oceans to the east and west.  The US economy is still the strongest in the world, the climate is varied, the both coasts have lots of good harbors, and the Mississippi River is the most navigable inland waterway on the planet.  

Reading the United States chapter reminded me that the book was written before Trump and COVID-19.  Despite the plague and pandemic they brought, the United States still has the strongest economy in the world and Russia's invasion of Ukraine is even giving the US a glimmer of national unity.

"Western Europe" is the fourth chapter.  Marshall explains the geopolitical history that kept Europe in conflict every generation from the Roman Empire until 1945. The unprecedented 77 years without a land war that followed ended with the Russia's invasion of Ukraine.  But the unity in Europe that followed is a bright ray of hope.  NATO and the European Union really are united in opposing Putin.  Even to the point that Germany is re-arming and Sweden, Switzerland and Finland are ending their neutrality.  

"Africa" is the next chapter. The enormous continent of 54 countries and two billion people has few navigable rivers and is divided by deserts, mountains and jungles.  And then there are all the conflicts stemming from badly drawn colonial borders and murderous colonial policies. Geography imprisons many inhabitants of Africa in difficult circumstances. 

Swinging north and east of Africa, Marshall's next chapter is the "Middle East." If religion is part of every regional conflict, it is central to the mess that is the Middle East.  As with Africa, badly drawn borders inflame smoldering conflicts.  The Jewish state of Israel is surrounded by a dozen countries with combined populations twenty times that of Israel where children in school are taught to hate and kill Jews.  

The arid geography of most of the Middle East means there would be conflicts over water and arable land even if the states were not openly hostile.  The region was and is the site of several recent and current wars.  Geography made Iraq easy to invade, and it makes Afghanistan impossible to conquer. The American withdrawal last year follows the Russian defeat in 1989 and British defeats in the 1840s and 1880s.  Geography keeps Iran isolated and relatively safe from attack and make Lebanon a terrorist playground. 

"India and Pakistan" are locked in permanent conflict that limits the ability of both countries to grow and prosper.  While geography keeps India safely separate from invasion by China, the border with Pakistan is the scene of endless disputes. Marshall describes the complexity of Pakistan's relationship with neighboring Afghanistan and why it is mired in America's war with the Taliban.  At the writing of the book, NATO had left Afghanistan and America had a small force there.  A new phase of the border war began in August with America's withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

"Korea and Japan" are a chapter to themselves. As with India and Pakistan, the two countries have a centuries long history of conflict. Some of the worst of that conflict was the Japanese occupation of Korea during World War II.  Sadly, that was followed by the Korean War in 1950. Japan emerged from the war as a leading world economy and a unified nation. Korea is divided into the prosperous south and the most oppressive dictatorship in the world in the north.  The border area is among the most tense in the world.  

The ninth chapter is Latin America, from the Rio Grande Valley to Tierra del Fuego. So many aspects of geography put Latin America at a great disadvantage compared to North America.  There is bonanza of harbors in the north compared with cliffs and straight, narrow coastal areas. Africa has the same plight, thousands of miles of coast useless for shipping.  Aside from the Rio del Plata, the rivers are not navigable.  The Andes are the longest mountain chain and a barrier to all trade between the Pacific Coast and the rest of the continent. 

The final chapter is the "Arctic." It is a full circle back to Russia.  Whether he discusses trade routes, oil and gas drilling, mining, or relations among the countries bordering the arctic region, Russia is acting in bad faith and cheating on agreements.  As  the polar ice diminishes, countries around the region will have more opportunities for trade and business, and more points of conflict with Russia.  

The Conclusion is much sunnier than the book itself. Marshall sees reasons for hope.  Possibly because the book was written before the first land war in Europe in 77 years, or the plagues of Trump and COVID. In any case, the book is a fascinating look at our world as it was, is, and will be.  The real world written in the reality of land, sea and air.   

First ten books of 2022:

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Bad Religion Kills Good People

The book "Prisoners of Geography" by Tim Marshall begins, "Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man, a great supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church."  

Vladimir Putin with Orthodox Christian Priests

And yet, Putin, a self-declared Christian has just invaded a neighboring country.  Rather than turn the other cheek, Putin is killing and maiming his neighbors. 

But Putin is certainly not alone when it comes hating and killing for Jesus.  Ever since the Church took secular power in the late 400s AD, killing and conquering in the name of the Prince of Peace has stained every century for the past millennia. It's worth noting for those who rationalize armed Christianity, Jesus was a penniless Jew who told his followers not to love or even care about this world, even to hate their father and mother and pursue the Kingdom of God.  

The worst of murderous Christianity in America was certainly when eleven states rebelled with the express purpose of keeping men and women in chains for life.  Sometimes the slavers even told those they oppressed about Jesus: as strong a declaration as could ever be made that their victims deserved love and were handed hate.   

A victim of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Every organized patriarchal religion with power uses that power to advance its own beliefs.  For some religions, killing heretics, invading neighbors and other expressions of secular power can be reconciled with the traditions of the faith.  Jews can defend Israel.  Muslims have a mandate to create a caliphate. 

I have read every word of the New Testament in several translations and a lot of it in the Greek in which it was written.  There is no way to twist the words of Jesus into an invasion or a Crusade.  A Buddhist government has the same flat contradiction. I have read a lot about the Buddha and his beliefs and life. No one created a Buddhist army reading Buddha.

Every day the world hears about how the "Christian" Vladimir Putin bombs, blasts and murders the mostly Christian people of Ukraine.  Right now, the bad religion of Vladimir Putin, his twisted version of Christianity, is killing innocent people in Ukraine.  

Flying with No ID

 

Today my son Nigel was flying to the east coast and had an ID that said "Not for use as Federal Identification." I had not gotten him a RealID.  I had not gotten one for myself either. I was going to get one in 2020, then COVID put it out of my mind. 

I was worried he would not be able to board the plane.  It turns out it is possible to board a plane without ID. People lose their wallets, passports and other necessary ID and still fly.  

My daughter Lisa said it would be Okay.  And it was. Nigel's ID scanned and he boarded the plane.  Lisa assured me that if he had no ID he would have been questioned, but would still have boarded.  She said, "I have the kind of friends who lose their ID. Trust me."

Then I realized that in the fifty years from my first flight to basic training January 31, 1972, to now I have always had whatever was the proper ID.  Passport, drivers license, military ID.  

It's nice to know if I forget, lose, or otherwise end up without and ID, I can still get home.  Nigel and I will be visiting the DMV next week to get RealIDs, just in case. 

War and Wooden Shoes

Sabot is one of the names for the wooden shoe that in the Lexicon of War.

One of the reports I heard about the Invasion of Ukraine talked about Russian saboteurs sneaking into the capital Kyiv.

The word saboteur is French using a Dutch word for wooden shoes.  The sabot was a wooden shoe worn by Dutch workers, either the single piece of wood as in the photo above or a wooden sole with various materials forming the upper part of the shoe.  

Sometimes angry workers would throw these wooden shoes into machines and stop work at factories.  One who breaks a machine by throwing a wooden shoe into the mechanism is a saboteur.  

Long before I learned the source of saboteur, I learned about the Sabot armor-piercing cannon shell fired by all tanks in all armies to defeat enemy tanks.  I was at Fort Knox in 1975 and was surprised to learn that the main round we would fire at enemy (Soviet) tanks was not explosive.  The Sabot round travleed a mile-per-second to target and destroyed enemy tanks with impact, not explosion. 

The way sabot came to be used as a name for armor-piercing cannon shells is that the wooden shoes were very easy to slip off. This characteristic led to calling a small armor-piercing round fired a big gun a Sabot round. Since the military always uses a long name reduced to an acronym, the technical description was Armor Piercing Discarding Sabot (APDS) round. 

BEFORE: 25mm (1-inch) projectile wrapped in 120mm cylinder

 

AFTER: 120mm cylinder breaks away at the gun muzzle, 25mm projectile flies to target at 1 mile per second.

The simple, deadly design of Sabot rounds fires a 25mm projectile from a 120mm gun.  With the full force of a five-inch cannon pushing a 1-inch projectile, the tungsten carbide round travels more than a mile a second to target.  There is no explosive charge, the impact of a 5,700-foot-per-second round can punch through more than a foot of armor plate and destroy a tank.  

The humble Dutch workers shoe has become a metaphor for very destructive weapons of war.  Language can be so strange. 

Waterloo: A Visit to the Museum and Battlefield

 

On a cold, clear, windy afternoon earlier this month I visited the museum and battlefield of Waterloo, Belgium: the scene of the final defeat of the Napoleon and his army in 1815.

When I visit the scenes of great battles, I try to imagine myself as the 20-year-old I was when I first made sergeant, leading a squad of men in the face of thousands of enemy soldiers. Chances of me reaching my 21st birthday look very dim in those moments.

The fields of Waterloo are open, flat and a horrible place to be a soldier.  At Gettysburg, I knew I wanted to be in the United States Army. To be in the rebel army, especially in Pickett's Charge, was to have run uphill into artillery behind stone walls.  

At Waterloo, everyone was on rolling open ground, the difference was timing and maneuver. The French were out-flanked, out-maneuvered and finally defeated.  Napoleon Bonaparte was neither the first nor the last general defeated in part by his own arrogance. 

The museum is beautiful and is all underground:

There is a delightful collection of contemporary propaganda:

A huge diorama places all of the armies on the field.  A fixed model can only capture a moment, not the complex maneuvering that led to Napoleon's defeat, but it is nice to be able to look at the model then go out and scan the field.

And in the gift shop, there is a Napoleonic War chess set and the t-shirt I came home with:

1776 by David McCullough: Book 9 of 2022

 

I bought this book more than a year ago. A friend who teaches literature said he has read this book every couple of years for more than a decade.  He has read several books by David McCullough and 1776 is his favorite.  

I just finished a biography of Thomas Jefferson and decided now was the time to read about the most fateful year in American history.  The book is even better than my friend Ray led me to believe.  The story is riveting from end to end, and the end is the best. The drama of the battles for Trenton and Princeton kept me reading intently right to the final paragraph.  

The events of the year provide an arc that would make a good movie script.  The first battle of 1776 is the highest moment for America. The long seige of Boston ends when Washington puts a battery of cannon atop Dorchester Heights in one night without the British knowing what was happening.  In the evening the Heights are empty, in the morning nearly two dozen guns are emplaced behind revetments dragged up the hill by two thousand men.  

Within days the British are on the way to Halifax in defeat.

The triumph is followed by a long string of defeats in late summer in New York ending with the loss of Fort Washington with nearly 3,000 Americans captured. Several times in those campaigns, the British stopped just short of wiping out the American Army. As the year ended the bedraggled Americans were at a small fraction of the strength they started the year with. Lord Howe, the British commander decided to end the campaign and finish Washington off in the spring. 

The year almost ends with the Americans in total defeat. Then the night after Christmas, Washington personally led an attack in a blizzard across the Delaware River. The Americans defeated the 1,500 Hessians in Trenton, killing or capturing a thousand with five hundred fleeing. 

Along with the great drama of the story, is real insight into the character of the leaders, particularly George Washington.  The man who would become the first American President did not do everything right, be he carried himself with dignity in every situation. He was tireless and showed confidence in the worst situations.  And at the very worst times, as in the attack on Trenton, Washington was at the front of the attack and the perilous river crossing.  

The heroes of the story were young men. Washington was the old man of the Army at 44 years old.  Thomas Jefferson was 33 when the Declaration of Independence he wrote was read across the new nation.  Nathaniel Greene, one of Washington's best field commanders was also 33.  Colonel Henry Knox, the hero of the victory in Boston, was 25 when the British fled his guns.  One of his battery captains was Alexander Hamilton who was either 19 or 21 depending on when he was actually born, there is some doubt.  James Madison was 25 in 1776. John Adams who kept the Continental Congress focused on supporting the war had just turned 40.  

The founders of America were young men of great physical courage who fought for an ideal that has become a beacon of democracy to the world.   

In two years, I will re-read this book along with my friend Ray.

First eight books of 2022:

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Red Baron Memorial in France

 

Beside a narrow road Vaux-sur-Somme, France, is a modest memorial to the most well-known fighter pilot in history: Baron Manfred Friedrich Freiherr von Richtofen, the Red Baron.

Richtofen scored 80 victories in air-to-air combat before being killed in his last dogfight over France. Even in his last moments, fatally wounded, he landed his plane before dying in his cockpit of a chest wound on April 21, 1918. The previous April, von Richtofen scored 22 victories in air-to-air combat.

The single-engine, three-winged plane had a top speed of just over 100 mph. It was built on a steel-tube frame covered with canvas.  

The memorial is a series of four monochrome metal panels at reveal the image above only when the viewer stands directly in front of them.

The Ace of Aces of World War I was born on May 2, 1892. We share a birthdate. His remains were finally interred in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1975, a year before I began a three-year tour in that Germany city with the American Army.  I was 26 years old when I left Germany in 1979.  The Red Baron was 26 years old when he died in his Fokker Dr1 fighter plane in France.  

There are only 365 days in a year, so I know that coincidences are simply what happens when one lives a lot of years, but I love coincidences anyway. 

 Posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.

A Visit to Chartres Cathedral

 

On the was back from visiting the Circuit de Sarthe, the race course of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, I stopped at Chartres Cathedral. It is one of not the greatest example of French Gothic architecture. The cathedrals at Reims and Amiens also have a claim to French Gothic supremacy.

I first heard of this cathedral from Professor Theodora Graham in one of my first college classes at Penn State.  She explained the architecture and the devotion of those who built it, many of whom would not see it completed.  

The cathedral sits atop a steep hill in a little town that is 80 kilometers southwest of Paris. The narrow roads and remote location keep the tourist traffic to a tiny fraction of the millions who swarm Notre Dame Cathedral in the center of Paris. 

Forty years after I first heard of Chartres and saw images from a slide projector, I finally got to walk around the cathedral on a sunny afternoon. I spent most of the time looking up, which is what the designers intended.

Posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.

Cars in a Corner of Underground Garage Near Versailles

 

1970 Ford Mustang Mach I 351 with original paint in a Paris Garage

A few days ago I drove from Paris to Le Mans to visit the museum and track of the annual 24-hour race.  On the way back I stopped at Chartres Cathedral then got a hotel near Versailles.  In the far corner of the second lower level of the underground garage was a 1970 Ford Mustang Mach I with original paint and a Florida license plate.  

It was a delightful surprise to see a vintage American Muscle Car in a French parking garage.  Of the forty cars, trucks and motorcycles I owned during my 52 years of driving, Ford Muscle Cars were some of the best.  I owned a 1969 Torino Cobra, 428CID, Hurst shifter, Holley carburetor and functional ram air. Then I owned a 1972 Mustang Cobra Jet, 351 with a Carter Thermoquad.  Seeing that Mustang after visiting Le Mans was a real moment of nostalgia. 

Also along the back wall of the garage was an Aston Martin DB9 under a cover (marked with Aston Martin and DB9).  

Between the Mach I and the DB9 was a Peugeot RCZ, a lightweight (1404kg) powerful (250hp) little two-seat French missile.

In the far corner of the garage was a mid-1990s Jaguar XJ convertible.  

One of the oddities of the 1970 Mach I was louvres on the back window. By 1972 Ford dispensed with the sun-blocking slats, I wished they had not. My Mustang CJ had a back window so near horizontal that it was useless whenever the sun shined on it.  

Posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.

50th Anniversary of My First Enlistment is This Month

 

Twas the night before Basic, and I drank way too much. 

I have no photos from my Air Force enlistment.

Fifty years ago today I arrived at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio. I was hung over with shoulder-length hair and at the beginning of an on-again off-again relationship with the United States military that would finally end 44 years later in May 2016.  The story of that first haircut is here. 

Since my first of my four different service branches was the Air Force, basic training was mostly marching and learning military culture.  We had one afternoon on the rifle range, one hike, and one meal outdoors--at picnic tables.  In the nearly three years of my Air Force enlistment I never saw C-Rations let alone tasted them.  Decades later I did a comparison of C-Rations and the current MRE meals that got 100,000+ views on YouTube. Here is the video.

When I left my home in Stoneham, Massachusetts, the Beatles were still together, Elvis was still alive, the Vietnam War was still raging, the Cold War was heating up, the draft was in its last full year, the Muscle Car boom of the 1960s was nearly over, and Donny Osmond had two songs in the top ten singles of 1971.  

Speaking of music, while my shoulder-length hair was shorn from my head in the Air Force barber shop, Merle Haggard's "Okie From Muskogee" played in the background. The only country songs I heard up to that point in my life were some Johnny Cash breakthrough hits that ended up on Top 40 radio, like "A Boy Named Sue." In one of the ironies of military life, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, was the place I trained to deploy to Iraq 37 years later in 2009. In one of the many coincidences of dates in my life, my basic training and pre-deployment training both began on February 1. 

In 1972, phones had wires and were often attached to walls. Every Sunday at basic training we lined up at phone booths to call home.  Cameras had film. Barracks had liars.  Extravagant liars.  My basic training flight was forty men either 18 or 19 years old, from more than twenty states across the nation, living in one big room.  Before lights out, we would shine our shoes in groups and talk.  Some conversations were about training or life in the barracks, or the food we ate, but when the subject was home, the lies swelled to the size of a Goodyear Blimp.  I wrote about those lies and how Facebook killed the barracks liar.  

When we marched we sang songs about killing the enemy, Viet Cong mostly, occasionally a Russian, we sang about our nearly infinite appetites for sex and alcohol, and we sang about Jody--the guy who was back home sleeping with our wife/girlfriend, driving our car, emptying our meager bank account, and in its best country version, alienating the affections of a favorite hunting dog.  

At my last military training school in 2013, we were not allowed to sing any of those songs.  All five military services were in our marching formations, and none of them were allowed to sing any marching song that could be considered sexist. And even though we were in two active wars, we could not sing about an enemy. Jody was off limits.  I wrote about the change in the songs for the New York Times At War blog.

The world in which I enlisted is gone.  I am writing this in a cafe in Paris on a computer with more processing power than the computers that put a man on the moon in 1969.  The flight from home to basic training fifty years ago was the first time I had been west of Cleveland or south of Pennsylvania.  It was my first flight on an airplane.  Earlier this month, my flight to Paris was the beginning of what may be my seventieth trip to another continent either on business, pleasure or a military mission.   

I have a love/hate relationship with the military. Three times, I got out, and said I was done: in 1974, 1979 and 1985.  Three times, I re-enlisted: in 1975, 1982 and 2007.  I finally left the Army National Guard in 2016.  Now I am far too old to change my mind again.  And I am happy with that.  I spent some of the best years of my life in the military, but even if I were not too old, I am happy to let the men and women born in this century defend the country.

 

Fathers, the Army and Career Paths in America and France: A Delightful Conversation at Lunch

Professor Christian Amatore of the Ecole Normal Superieure

At an award lunch at a history of science event in Paris, I was seated with Christian Amatore, a professor emeritus of electrochemistry at the Ecole Normal Superieure (ENS). Christian is a bright, funny and out-going man who smiles easily.  He said he lived in America for two years early in his career in Bloomington, Indiana.  

We talked about how much we liked visiting each other's country then turned to the differences in growing up in America and France in the middle of the last century.  Christian had a straight career path that began at ten years old, when a teacher identified him as having potential for a science career.  

Christian was born in Algeria in 1951 and spent his early years on French Army bases.  His father emigrated from Italy after World War II, his mother from Sweden.  Service in the Foreign Legion was a rapid path to citizenship for his family.  Christian's father was a career sergeant who told his son to get an education and be one of the leaders, "or you will be a nobody."  

In 1970, he started college at ENS, beginning his PhD program in 1974 and completing it in 1979.  He was a professor after completing the PhD and three years later began two years of research and teaching at the University of Indiana.  

As we talked about his linear career path I told him of the twists and turns of mine. Christian never served in the military. His father looked back on the Army as something he did to have a better life for his family.  During the years Christian was completing his PhD I was 600 kilometers east of Paris in a tank on the east-west border. I started college in America in 1980 when he beginning his first professorship.

For my father, world War II was the best years of his life.  He went in the Army on the eve of the war in his mid-30s with an eighth grade education.  When the war began, the Army sent Dad to Officer Candidate School. He was commissioned, commanded a several small units and ended the war a captain, commandant of a Prisoner of War Camp for 600 German Afrika Korps prisoners. My father loved to tell stories and loved to tell war stories most of all. From the end of the war to his retirement, he worked in a warehouse.

Talking about our fathers and the Army led us to talk of Napoleon, who talented in mathematics and had a high regard for science.  We talked of how math was the basis of his success as an artillery officer.  Napoleon restored many of the academic institutions leveled during the Revolution. On Christmas Day in 1797 he was elected in the seat of Lazare Carnot in the Institute de France. 

Talking about war led us to talk about the peace in Europe during our entire lives. "During my entire lifetime there has not been a land war in Europe," Christian said. "That is unprecedented in European history."  We talked of Putin and the threats from Russia.  It was comforting to hear Christian discuss President Biden. He was simply talking about the decisions of the American President.  During the Trump presidency, no one I spoke with in Europe could quite believe what kind of person America elected.

Amatore in his habit vert of the Institute de France

Near the end of lunch, Christian gave me his email, writing it in my notebook. Neither of us had business cards, really showing we are fully retired people.  I said I would look at his work on the internet.  When he wrote his name he said, "If you look me up on Google, use my full name. If you Google Amatore, you might get a porn site."  Amatore is Italian for Lover.

We already exchanged email messages.  I was fascinated with electrochemistry a couple of decades ago when I worked for Atofina Chemicals so I will look up some of his research.  Christian has published more than 500 papers in electrochemistry and related fields, so there is a lot to look at.  

When I am in Paris, I often have lunch or coffee with friends. I hope to catch up with Christian on a future visit to Paris. 

Posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.