Benetton and the End of Communism and Cigarette Ads

 

At the beginning of the 1980s, the winning cars in Formula 1 racing were billboards for cigarettes and oil companies.  The Marlboro McLaren, John Players Special Lotus, the Gitanes Ligier, dominated the winners circle in Formula 1. 

Then in 1986, Luciano Benetton, a maker of Italian knitwear, bought a team and went to win a driver's title and two manufacturer's championships. 

Benetton also brought his clothing business to communist countries beginning with Hungary in the mid-1980s.  I read about Benetton and the decentralized clothing empire he created. His knitwear was made by women working as independent suppliers. Benetton would decide on the colors at the last minute and be sure his knitwear was in the color of the season.  

I was a fan of the Benetton team for the decade and a half they raced--1986 to 2001.  Benetton surprised the racing world. They were the first clothing maker to sponsor a Formula 1 team and they were a success from the first year: Gerhard Berger won the Mexican Grand Prix in a Benetton the first year the team was in operation. 

Benetton was the first team for Michael Schumacher, one of the greatest driver's of all time.  With success the team sought more sponsorship becoming billboards first for Camel and then for Japanese cigarette maker, Mild Seven.  The team won the driver's title and two manufacturer's titles in 1994 and 1995, but by 1996 Schumacher was at Ferrari and the team was in decline. Renault became the title sponsor for the last two years of Benetton ownership: 2000 and 2001. 

Cigarettes no longer sponsor the cars. The leading sponsors in 2023 are car makers Mercedes, Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin and Ferrari along with Red Bull and Alpha Tauri sports drinks. 

The posters above are in the upstairs hallway of my home along with a print of 1992 World Champion Nigel Mansell in a Williams Renault.  Nigel is the name of my youngest son. But Benetton is still my favorite team.

Pissing Contest: Real and Metaphorical

Between birth and enlisting in the U.S. Air Force, I had two addresses. Both in the town of Stoneham nine miles north of Boston. The first was 48 Hancock Street. The second was 41 Oak Street. My parents lived in the house at 41 Oak Street from 1957 until my mother sold the house in the 1990s more than a decade after my Dad passed away.

My first friend in the "new" neighborhood on Oak Street was a boy named Bobby. He lived two houses away at the corner of Oak Street and Victoria Lane. We were friends, and like most boys fighting is part of friendship.  

Many times in my life I have had metaphorical pissing contests with other kids, co-workers, and soldiers. But only once did I have an actual pissing contest.  Soon after we moved to Oak Street, Bobby and I were playing and something went wrong. Whatever the cause, Bobby and I did not have the side-by-side competition of who can piss farthest, longest, highest. 

We turned and faced each other for a battle of who could make the other smell worse. We both won, or lost, depending on how it was judged.   

Although my memory of my childhood is very limited, I have some memory of Bobby and I standing next to the tall hedges that separated his yard from the Bishop's house (Mr. and Mrs. Bishop, not a church official) and emptying our bladders toward each other.  

Our mothers were displeased at our need for a change of clothes. We were friends for years after, so the actual pissing contest was not fatal to our friendship. In later life, I found having a metaphorical pissing contest could end a relationship.  Best to avoid both.  

Nothing Ever Dies: Re-Reading a Haunting Book About War and it's Aftermath

I am re-reading the book Nothing Ever Dies because I first enlisted during the war in Vietnam 51 years ago and this book holds a mirror to my service during that war and all the wars I served in and during over the fifty years that followed. 

The notes below are thoughts from reading the first chapters.

Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen 

The opening chapter, “Just Memory” begins: “This is a book on war, memory, and identity. It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” 

Nguyen then tells us the war known as the Vietnam War in America is American War in Vietnam. This identity crisis is central to the war as perceived by those who lived through and after it in Vietnam and neighboring countries. 

It is one of the truisms of history that the winners write the history. But in the modern world history gets written by everyone with the means to tell their story. America was the clear loser of the wars in Southeast Asia from the mid 1960s to 1975. But America names the war and controls much of the narrative because America is the biggest producer of movies, books and other forms of bringing story to the world: all published in English. 

The stories from Vietnam can never have the distribution of American narrative, especially stories in the Vietnamese language. Language itself is a tool in the hands of those who want to shape war as it happens. Russia is “liberating” Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine. 

The sovereign country of Ukraine is a territory when defined by Russia. Those who are with Russia, like the Christian Nationalist propagandist Tucker Carlson, sided so openly with Russia that his shows were a regular part of Russian state news programming. 

The people of Ukraine describe what happened as an invasion. They describe war crimes committed by Russia. They want freedom. They want peace. They have a compelling message, but Russia is bigger. Someday, the war will end and the two narratives will compete in the world of ideas. 

Before the opening chapter is a short prologue. The first sentence of the Prologue: “I was born in Vietnam but made in America. I count myself among those Vietnamese dismayed by America’s deeds but tempted to believe in its words.” Like so many Americans who lived during the war, I “mistake Vietnam with the war named in its honor.” 

When I enlisted in 1972 near the end of the Vietnam War, I signed up for the education that I did not care about when I graduated just the previous spring. But education, career, learning beckoned after several months of loading trucks and looking at the men beside me doing the same thing I was as at triple my age. 

For me the war meant a chance to get away from home, from the small world of Stoneham to a world I could not imagine. I had not been south of Erie, Pennsylvania, west of Cleveland, Ohio, or ever flown on an airplane. I cannot remember any dread in connection with the Vietnam War. It was a route to freedom. 

The war I saw on TV news was no different than the war movies and serial dramas, showing endless American heroism and victory. The world looks so different now. I served in the military four times, each time getting out I was sure I was done. Then three times, I re-enlisted. During those four enlistments, I served in or during four different wars. 

Until 24 February 2022, I thought I served during three losses, one win. Now the one win, the Cold War, needs an asterisk. The peace we thought would follow the end of the Soviet empire cracked immediately in the Balkans and broke in Ukraine. We watched as oligarchy followed empire in Russia. 

Beginning in 2014 and with open fury in 2022, The Empire Struck Back. 

Reading Nothing Ever Dies it was clear from the first pages that more than four wars shaped the psyche of the kid who so happily signed up in 1972. My Dad was a veteran of World War II. For good and ill, those were the best years of his life—it was clear every time he told and retold his stories from the war. 

My uncle Jack served in the Air Force from 1958 to 1978. He had three full tours flying over southeast Asia in a tanker plane then and F4 Phantom II fighter plane. To say I worshipped them shows how shallow my actual religious practice has been in my life. My regard for them in uniform had none of the skepticism I always felt toward God Himself. Which means in addition to the wars I was in or around, I was haunted by wars before I was alive, wars that happened between my last two enlistments (The Gulf War, Grenada, Somalia, The Balkans) and the wars that formed the backbone of the history of America, Europe, and Israel. 

Nguyen says, “…the most important reason for Americans to remember what they call the Vietnam War, the fact that it was one conflict in a long line of horrific wars that came before it and after it. The war’s identity—and, indeed, any war’s identity—cannot be extricated from the identity of war itself. … because war is not just about the shooting but about the people who make the bullets and deliver the bullets and, perhaps most importantly, pay for the bullets, the distracted citizenry complicit in what [Martin Luther] King calls the “brutal solidarity” of white brother and black.”

The Spark in the Machine: A fascinating book about the science behind acupuncture

 

I am more than halfway through reading The Spark in the Machine: How the Science of Acupuncture Explains the Mysteries of Western Medicine. A good friend is in a graduate medical program learning to be an acupuncturist. When she talked about the electrical basis of how acupuncture works, I became interested. 

The book describes how acupuncture works in the spaces between organs and even cells inside the body and uses tiny charges to promote healings. Right away I found myself more interested than I expected.  The beginning of the book talks a lot about fascia, the tissue that wraps around organs in the body and divides different zones of the body.  Fascia is made from cartilage which also makes up bone and ligaments.  

The author says cartilage is a semiconductor. It can carry a charge along its triple helix structure, but like many crystal structures, it can also generate micro charges when bent or compressed.  

When DNA does its many jobs in our bodies, the signals move up and down the double helix.  Charge carries information among genes. So it made sense that cartilage could carry and generate charges.  Also, a crystal that can generate electricity when compressed can be moved when a charge is applied.  I am looking forward to seeing how this effect works in acupuncture.

I have not yet had acupuncture, but the book is opening some fascinating views of the body and how it works.  

At one point the author was talking about how tough fascia is. In my mind I went to my worst injuries from missile explosions and high-speed crashes and thought, 'Fascia kept my insides inside!'

If you are interested in acupuncture and how it works. This book is really good.

Three Score and Ten: Second Life Begins This Year

In the first Canto of the Divine Comedy Dante Aligheri tells us he is 35 years old because he is "In the middle of life's journey."  Life's journey is three score and ten years, seventy years, which I will reach and pass in ten days.

Dante never reached three score and ten. He died in 1321 in exile from his beloved Florence at the age of 56. The belief that 70 years is the lifespan of a human being is a quote from the Book of Psalms, 90:10  

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Seventy is a major life milestone, so it has me thinking about what I will do with the next decade. 

The previous seven years have been "the best of times and the worst of times" of my life.  Living has been wonderful. My family is healthy, I have been healthy except for a few smashed bones, but the major illusions of life got crushed since 2015.  

It seems crazy in retrospect, but I really, really believed America was getting better.  All of my life from 1964 (The Civil Rights Act) to 2015 (Gay Marriage) more people got more rights and more freedom than ever before.  The Jim Crow South became illegal in 1964. By the 1970s women had many more rights, including the the right to choose their own health care options.  

In 2004 George W. Bush won re-election with a dirty, Karl-Rove-run campaign against gay rights.  By 2015, gay marriage was legal across America.  I not only believed more people would get more rights, but I thought the racist rednecks would die out.  A Black man was elected President in 2008!  

But in 2016, it was clear that the gains of women, Blacks, gay people and other minorities were fragile.  The rednecks I thought were going to fade away were cheering their flaccid hero at hate-filled rallies across America. The hater-in-chief promptly put neo-Nazis in the White House.  Every action by Trump from then to now is to reverse freedom and end democracy. His fake Christian base loves and supports him and will give up all of their freedom for the white "Christian" nationalist nation he wants to rule as king.

Which leads me to my goals for the future.  

• Preserve democracy in the US and abroad--in Ukraine and Taiwan particularly as the front lines of democracy in Europe and Asia.
• To support candidates and protesters here and abroad who want to preserve democracy and fight tyranny.
• To do what I can to keep Israel from falling into illiberal democracy or outright religious tyranny.
• To fight for women's rights and gay rights and minority rights alongside those who are attacked Republicans who want to reverse all rights--except for themselves.
• To enjoy the wonderful life I have that allows me to see friends in America and around the world and support what they are doing.  

Three Score and Ten is just the beginning.

Men and Women Under 23 are 80% of the US Military: Many Do Great Things, Some Screw Up

Me at 23: The Oldest I Ever Felt*

The news is full of the 21-year-old airman Jack Teixeira, the intelligence specialist who is behind the most recent major leak of classified information.  Many of the comments I have heard question how someone so young can get access to so much classified information.  As if his age was the problem.

In all of military history, young people, much younger people than Teixeira, have had enormous life and death responsibilities. As a former sergeant and leader in the Army, I believe the problem in this case was supervisory. I have friends who are leaders in hospitals, museums, and in small and corporate businesses. Anyone hiring people with access to sensitive information check the social media profiles of their prospective and current employees.  Teixeira's leaders failed him; he is still guilty of treason. 

Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress Bomber

In World War II, the Eight Air Force, the bomber command, lost more men than the Marines lost in the entire war in the Pacific. The men in the bombers that flew over German territory had a 50% chance of being alive at the end of 25 missions. That 50/50 chance of being alive is how the Army Air Force set 25 as the number of missions for bomber crews.

Each plane had six enlisted men and four officers. The average age of the enlisted men was 19. The four officers averaged 22 years of age, led by the pilot who was a first lieutenant or captain either side of 25 years old. Whatever age these men began their 25 missions, half of them would be killed, wounded, or captured before they had another birthday.  

Each of the ten men in the crew had life-and-death responsibility for the rest of the crew and for other airmen in the planes in their squadron. Most of them were the around the same age as Teixeira when they flew. Half of them were the same age as Teixeira when they died.  

The military puts great responsibility in the hands of men and women who are 21 years old. They should review security procedures, but the military has to trust young people.

-----

*By the time I was 21 years old, I was blinded in a missile explosion and recovering my eyesight. The next year I went to armor training and was a tank commander before my 23rd birthday.  

A few months after my 23rd birthday, I was in Colorado packing to go to the East-West border in Germany with 1st Battalion-70th Armor. I read a story in the "Army Times" newspaper that said 80 percent of the Army was less than 23 years old. In 1976 I thought, 'I am older than dirt. Most of the Army is younger than me.'   

Even now as I approach my 70th birthday, that day in September 1976 was the oldest I ever felt.

When the Flight Goes Wrong, Data is All That Matters

 

Since 2017 I have flown overseas every year to every continent except Australia: almost 20 trips total. I have flown many airlines. In addition to the trans-Atlantic flights, I have flown short, regional trips within the Americas, Europe and Asia.  

My main criteria for picking flights is price.  But after I get a list of cheap fares, I eliminate the airlines that have a weak or non-existent back office.  In the 1990s when e-commerce was new, many companies had a "sneaker net."  They had several systems that were not integrated and had to pass paper or messages between ticketing, scheduling, etc. 

This is how to pick an airline.

I have heard people complain that airlines are annoying when they send regular texts reminding you about seat choice or luggage limits or baggage rules. But those same people are ready to sing Hallelujah! when their flight is delayed, changed or cancelled and they get instant notification with options for rescheduling.  

For me, United Airlines is the best in this regard. I have flown American and Delta and they also have excellent apps and notifications. When a United flight got cancelled, my phone lit up with options. I flew TAP, the Portuguese national airlines,  for the last time last fall when I had a flight cancelled.  The long story about dealing with an airline that has a sneaker net is here. 

Since I travel with no checked luggage, I can check in on line for  most flights and walk straight to security. I also have TSA PreCheck and Global Entry, so there is no security reason to keep me from automated check in even for overseas flights.  With United, I have checked in on line for flights in the US, Brazil and Europe. 

I recently flew Norse Atlantic airlines. They have no app; their website seems to  allow check in, but then tells me I can't check in on line; they are not integrated with TSA Pre; they have no automated check in at major airports in America or Europe, so travelers like me with no checked luggage stand for an hour in line with people who have five suitcases on baggage carts.

On a recent Norse flight, I got in contact with a customer service rep on email. I told her how long I had been waiting, that I got to the airport three hours early and I did not want to miss my flight. She suggested going ahead of others in the line.  I told her I would not do that and suggested they send more people to check in to take care of customers. She could do nothing because they did not have the systems in place. 

All Americans saw what happens to an airline with outdated computer systems in the 21st century when a huge winter storm cancelled thousands of flights.  All airlines had some flights cancelled. Southwest had half the cancellations of all the airlines combined. Every Wednesday morning I have breakfast with a retired air traffic controller. He knew the Southwest disaster was data management.

I worked for two multi-national companies in the 1990s that switched from paper to fully integrated electronic systems. The switch was long, painful and expensive, but the difference was profound for customers and managers. From manufacturing to delivery there was real time information for every step.  

For all the traveling I do, I do not find travel easy even when everything goes well.  So while price is my main criteria for picking a flight, I will not fly with an airline that has a lame app and any problems with data management. 

I recently flew with Spirit Airlines. I loved it for the old-fashioned reasons of nice people, on-time performance and easy boarding. But if anything had gone wrong, they had an app that would have me on my way as soon as possible.  And all for $74 round-trip. 

 

 

Gordon Moore: The Chemist at the Center of the High Tech Revolution Dies at 94.

 

In 1965 when I was twelve years old, I learned basic electronics from a 600-page book published by the Amateur Radio Relay League--the ham radio operators.  The big book taught me both vacuum tube circuits and transistor circuits. Integrated circuits were not part of my basic course.  

Transistors were invented in 1948. The integrated circuit--transistors and diodes on a single silicon chip--was patented in 1959.  In 1964, the number of components on a single chip had risen to 120. The following year, while I pondered the mysteries of triode and pentode tubes along with NPN and PNP transistors, Gordon Moore published the bold prediction that the number of components on a microchip would double roughly every 18 months: Moore's Law. 

He was largely correct. I could not even count the quibbles about Moore's Law, but a single microchip can currently include billions of components.  Starting at 120 per chip in 1965, billions is a lot of doubling. 

In 1968, Gordon Moore was a co-founder of Intel Corporation. He was very much a part of making his own law come true decade after decade.  

I met Moore briefly in 2004 and again in 2005. I worked for the Science History Institute, which at the time was very much a museum and library of the history of Chemistry.  Moore was there because he was trained as a chemist and saw the high tech revolution very much as a chemical revolution.  

In 2005, Moore held the conference celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Moore's Law at the Science History Institute. Most of the speakers flew in from the other coast to Philadelphia.  Moore wanted the celebration to be connected to chemistry.  

But Moore's 2004 visit to the Institute is a story I have told and retold. At the time our library wanted to acquire the Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library: 6,000 rare science books dating back almost to the invention of printing held privately by Neville. The founder and President of the Institute, Arnold Thackray, asked Moore to donate the money to acquire the books.  Because there was a competitive bid and not much time to close the deal, Moore wrote a personal check for $10 million in Thackray's office.

Not many people could write a check for $10 million, but Moore could and did and we got the collection.

During the 2005 Moore's Law Conference, Moore spoke about the early days of the high tech revolution and how microchips were everywhere in just 40 years.  His remarks gave credit to many people and was full of thanks for great colleagues.  

Flying Spirit was Delightful: Nothing like their emails

 

Last month I flew Spirit Airlines for the second time ever, and the first time in a decade. Like most cut-rate airlines they charge for everything. Their emails warned me that if my bag was an inch larger than their maximum size in any dimension they would charge a big fee. 

Every seat, even a middle seat cost extra. All food and drinks cost extra. Everything cost extra. And the tone, especially about the bags, is confrontational compared with the big airlines.  

And yet. 

The full flight to Indianapolis had few open seats. The flight attendant, Lee, in the center of the plane said the empty exit row seats would be open when they shut the cabin doors.  So I did not have to sit in my assigned window seat. I sat in an exit row.

During the flight I got up to stretch and talked to Lee again. We had talked earlier about meditation and exercise, she said one of the flight attendants was an avid bicyclist. So I went to the galley and talked to Joseph. Yes, he was a cyclist. For fifteen years before he retired in 2015, he was a professional Ironman Triathlon competitor. 

That is an avid cyclist.The kind that can swim 2.4 miles in open water then ride 112 miles in 4.5 hours--his average time. And then run a marathon in under 3 hours. He said the bike was his worst event. Wow!

On the way back the plane was empty. The flight attendants let us move within the zone we were assigned a seat. So again, I was in an aisle and again hand a pleasant uneventful flight. 

The round trip air fare was $74, so I had a good reason to fly Spirit. But the flight itself was really good--so much better than I would have predicted from the emails. 

 

Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum

Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum has a collection of dozens of winning cars and a selection of second place cars.  I walked around the museum looking at the cars and remembering the races.  In the 80s and 90s I watched all of the races. When split between Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) and Indy happened in the mid 1990s, I became less interested and watched only the highlights.  Some of the best drivers and teams stayed away from Indy for several years. It was a sad time for the race.

The series and the race were great from the 1960s when I could see only highlights, but read about the races in Car and Driver magazine. After the Offenhausers dominated in the post-war era, the 1960s saw great innovation and change beginning with Jim Clark's win in a rear-engine Lotus-Ford.  After Clark's win, rear-engine quickly became the only winning design.  

Aerodynamics and wings were the center of innovation in the 1970s.  Great drivers crossed back and forth from Indy to Formula 1 to sports cars and stock cars.  Jim Clark was the Formula 1 World Champion in 1963 and 1965 and won Indy in 1965. 

Jim Clark's Lotus Ford

Mario Andretti is a winner across every kind of motor sports. He won Indy in 1969, the NASCAR Daytona 500 in 1967, the Formula 1 World Championship in 1978 and won the 12 Hours of Sebring sports car race three times, along with many other titles and championships.

Mario Andretti's Brawner-Hawk Indy Car

Al Unser Sr. won Indy four times. 

He won in this car in 1978, the third of four wins.

The Unser family has nine Indy 500 wins among three drivers between 1968 and 1994.  Al Unser Sr. has four wins: 1970, 71, 78 and 87.  Older brother Bobby has three in 1968, 75 and 81.  Al Unser Jr. has two wins in 1992 and 94.  With all those wins over nearly three decades, none of the Unsers has a second place finish at Indy. Al Unser Jr. won by 0.043 seconds in 1992 for the closest finish in Indy 500 history.  

Bobby Rahal won the Indy 500 in 1986

Bobby Rahal won both the Indy 500 and his first of three CART championships in 1986. He made a dramatic pass with two laps to go in the Indy 500 and was the first driver to complete the 500 miles in under three hours: an average of 134mph including pit stops.  

1960 Winner Jim Rathman's Offenhauser-powered Indy Car

In the 1950s and the early 60s, Offenhauser-powered, front-engined cars dominated the Indy 500. Jim Clark's 1965 win in a rear-engined Lotus caused a complete changed in the winning formula and the "Offy" engines were gone. As a kid, I built several plastic models of the Offenhauser Indy racer. 

A.J. Foyt won the 1977 Indy 500--his record-setting fourth win

The first driver to win the Indy 500 four times is also among the best drivers in American history. A.J. "Super Tex" Foyt is the only driver to win Indy, the Daytona 500, the 24-hour races at LeMans and Daytona and the 12 hours of Sebring. 

1993 CART Champion Nigel Mansell at Indy, bad luck ended his chance to win

Heartbreak is part of the world of racing. Over the 100-plus years of the Indy 500 just as many drivers have finished second as finished first and all of those drivers, in racing parlance, are the "first loser." Tragedy has haunted the race in both injuries and death. 

A sad moment for me was the otherwise magical year of 1993 when my  favorite Formula 1 driver--1992 Formula 1 World Champion Nigel Mansell--went across the Atlantic in 1993 and took the CART Championship as a "rookie" driver. He had four wins, but a freak accident caused by a real rookie in the pit lane took the possibility of Indy victory away from Mansell.

Heartbreak is part of Indy and I was heartbroken watching that race.  In 2000 I named my youngest son Nigel. I am that kind of fan. 

Friend Gets Top Job: He Now Knows He Is An HMFIC

 

Mike McCoy, Interim Editor-in-Chief

Chemical and Engineering News

Today I ran into a friend I have known and worked with since the 1990s at a conference in Indianapolis.  As we talked I found out he had recently been named Editor-in-Chief of Chemical and Engineering News magazine.  In his self-effacing way he told me that his promotion was because so many other high-level editors left recently. But he is and always has been a leader able to manage and get great results from a staff of creative people--one of the more difficult management gigs there is.

I first met Mike when he was named the managing editor of Chemical Market Reporter in the late 1990s. That magazine was, at the time, one of five global weekly chemical news magazines. It began as the Oil, Paint & Drug Reporter in the 1870s. Mike managed 20 columnists who covered various markets when many chemical companies still had offices in or around New York City.  

Mike was young and his staff was younger, mostly recent grads of journalism school. They wanted a journalism job in New York. Many of them worked for a year, wrote 50 columns and moved on the other magazines in the chemical news area or business press.  Mike and I talked about staff turn over and management. Half the staff went to new jobs in an average year, but Mike could remain calm dealing with constantly hiring and anticipating the loss of his best writers. His magazine had the lowest pay in the chemical industry, so he knew he was training writers for better-paying jobs.

Years later he moved to C&EN managing the business office located then in New Jersey, now in NYC.  He managed a very stable staff of writers there for more than a decade. Now he has the top job in the Washington-based magazine, at least for a while.  

Mike and his staff gave me a going away party when I went to Iraq 2009. I brought Army field rations so some of the food could be real Army cuisine.  

Since I have known Mike for so long and only in leadership jobs, I was surprised that I told him only today with this new job that he is an HMFIC (Head MF In Charge, the Army generic term for anyone in charge at any level.)

Congratulations Mike--Interim Editor-in-Chief and lifelong HMFIC.

A Visit to the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library

In the middle of Indianapolis is a lovely little museum devoted to the life and works of a brilliant and crazy author of more than a dozen novels and a dozen more works of non-fiction, plays and short-story collections: The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.

Among the displays in the museum is a shelf of books with Vonnegut novels published in many, many languages around the globe.  With novels set all over the world including a million years in the future (Galapagos), Vonnegut is very much a man from Indiana. He loved Indiana and expressed that love all of his long life. 

And this darkly funny man could also include his Indiana roots in messages from a coming Armageddon.

The third floor of the museum is devoted to Vonnegut's most famous work, Slaughterhouse Five.

This strange novel is in part the story of Vonnegut's survival of one of the terrible fire bombings during World War II. He was a prisoner of war in an underground slaughterhouse in Dresden which is how he survived a five-day raid in which 150,000 people died. 

Vonnegut was captured in December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge.

Later in life his face became well-known as one of America's great artists.

For me, Vonnegut is one of the great examples of people who transformed the pain of war into art.  

At the end of his life he admired Jesus deeply and openly at the same time he was a noted atheist. He said that being kind was the greatest thing a person could do with their lives.  

Contradiction?  Life has a lot of contradictions. I am so glad Kurt Vonnegut shared his contradictions with the world. 

  

Big Conspiracy Theories in a Small Town

 

I was in Myerstown, Pennsylvania, today. A small town north of Lancaster. I wanted coffee and saw there were three coffee shops near the center of town. I went to Café 58 which my son Nigel suggested by looking at Google maps. 

Within a few minutes the name would change in my mind to Café [Area] 51. It was raining when I walked to the cafe. A sticker on the door said Veteran Owned business. In mid-state Pennsylvania, that was most likely to mean an Iraq/Afghanistan veteran who thinks Fox News is too liberal. 

Inside, the cafe was dark paneled, dimly lit and there was only one customer.  The owner was in his 50s. His customer at the bar was in his early 60s. I waited while they watched a video together. From several feet away, I could only tell that the video had a talking dog and a lot of yelling. 

After they watched the video, they took turns bemoaning the need for more laughter in the world; the owner turned toward me asked what I would like. I said a latte to go. He asked what flavor I wanted. I said none. He said, “Well, you want a cappuccino. A latte with no flavor is a cappuccino. I make such a good cappuccino you’ll think you are in Italy.” He said this with the air of a man of vast experience talking to a rube.

For a moment I thought about saying I spent a week in Rome last summer, so I can make the comparison, but decided against speaking. The owner and the customer started talking about someone famous they both knew. I did not catch the name, but it was a conservative activist. Then they said something about 9-11 conspiracies.  

They were laughing. But it turns out they were not laughing at 9-11 conspiracies. I should have taken my better-than-Italy-cappuccino and left, but I said, "A lot of people believe 9-11 conspiracies."

Then I told them about seeing a report on CNN on the 5th anniversary of 9-11 that said 28% of Americans believe 9-11 was an inside job. After seeing the report, I went to a local coffee shop, repeated what I heard on TV and the owner of the shop said, “Yes. It was an inside job.” 

The customer at the bar now turned on his bar stool and was facing me, feet on the floor, leaning forward. Intent. The owner said that the corner of College and Main where his shop is located is a wormhole to alternate dimensions. Going along with the joke, but knowing this was going somewhere weird, I said one of my sons lives down the street and that’s why he moved here. 

Then the owner asked me if I remembered seeing Donald Rumsfeld on the TV the night before 9-11 saying 63 trillion dollars was missing from the U.S. treasury. Then he said that on 9-11 Building 7 collapsed just like the twin towers, but no airplane crashed into it. Building 7 was where all the records were stored of the missing 63 trillion dollars. (In 2019, the entire GDP of the US was 21 trillion dollars; 63 trillion is pretty much the GDP of the whole world.) 

After that, I found myself edging backward toward the door. The owner continued saying that the reason for 9-11 was to put the Patriot Act into law and take away our rights. He said 3,000 civilians being killed was a small price for that. After all, 50,000 soldiers died in the Vietnam War to expand government control over its citizens. 

I left at that point. I sipped the cappuccino. It wasn’t very good. I decided if I finished it, I would come under some kind of mind control, so I threw it away and went to one of the other coffee shops in Myerstown. 

----

At some point in the conversation, I don’t remember at what point, the owner interjected that the Pentagon is five-sided and that makes it a pentagram. He said it with the intensity of someone who has the Truth.  

Sonnets by William Shakespeare

Last year I read C.S. Lewis' English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama and decided to re-read the Sonnets. In his history of 16th Century literature, Lewis says Shakespeare's Sonnets are the best sonnets ever and among the best poetry of a century that ended with great English poetry. 

This time I read every sonnet aloud. It meant I would read a few sonnets and put the book down for a week. Last week I finished re-reading.  The best of the sonnets are wonderful, but they are not all great. In the last twenty, I found none worth remembering.  

Here are some I liked best. If you have read them all you will certainly have a different list, but the best are so good I fully agreed with Lewis by the end of the book. 

The sonnet most familiar, certainly in the English-speaking world, is 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

And Sonnet 29, the last two lines are a brilliant end to the first ten:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Sonnet 55:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Sonnet 24, love as art:

Mine eye hath play’d the painter and hath stell’d
Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein ’tis held,
And perspective it is the painter’s art.
For through the painter must you see his skill,
To find where your true image pictured lies;
Which in my bosom’s shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes.
Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done:
Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me
Are windows to my breast, where-through the sun
Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee;
Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art;
They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

Sonnet 1 is a beautiful beginning:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.