A Facebook Post About Friendship--with all the comments

Cliff and I eating sushi in Poland--and joking about eating local cuisine.

[I posted this essay on facebook and got such good comments I decided to post it here with the comments.]

A few hours ago I left a weekend with my best friend Cliff Almes. We were roommates in the Army in the 70s. He stayed in Germany and is Bruder Timotheus at a Lutheran Monastery in Darmstadt. Modern life is obsessed with leadership. But leaders without friends are crippled. 

On the way to Germany I listened to a talk from a guy I disagree with on most things, but I agree with him on Friendship: Yesterday I was listening to a podcast from a recent conference in Aspen. The speaker was Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska. He was talking about problems in our culture now and in the future created by the digital revolution. 

But the last problem he mentioned predates the internet by a lot, by centuries to at least the beginning of modernity. Sasse said 29% of American women and 61% of men say their spouse or significant other is their best friend. Sasse said this means women are at least twice as good at making and keeping solid, deep friendships as men. At least. 

I can't speak for women, but a man who has no male friends is crippled in life's journey. I have known many men in business and in the Army who have made some public profession that their wife is their best friend and very privately told me of their "best friend" was going to make them choose between their marriage and the Army. 

Friendship is one of the Four Loves CS Lewis explains in his wonderful book of the same title. It is equal to romance, family love and charity. But a half century ago, Lewis said it was rare and becoming more so among modern professional men. Less so among women. Could you tell your best friend of the rush you felt when you confronted another man in public and he backed off? I could. 

My best friends are a firefighter and a monk, both veterans. They are also men and understand the rush of a fight. Men and women are very different in so many ways and those ways become prominent at moments of stress. 

To believe in the power of love seems crazy in the midst of our fractured world. 

But true, deep friendship, built over years and years proves just how love works. We choose our friends, and they choose us. All four loves are what makes a great life.

The comments from Facebook:

• • • Pete Lang

      I have been meeting with a group of men every week to talk about life for decades. They know me better than my wife ever will. I am not so good at the confrontation, but I understand the rush of when I offer my wisdom to another and you can see the light come in their eyes as they finally get “it”

      

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    • Shea IL

      I would add another category that I think essential. I think I first heard the expression from my kids - friend group. I think having a community of some sort is equally important. This is why bowling leagues, social clubs, etc evolved. Sometimes th… 

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        Neil Gussman

        Shea IL oh of course. A group of friends is another dimension of friendship. Just as important.

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      • David Pertuz

        Shea IL agree with this. I have a group of friends that I’ve been with for twenty years now - we go on vacations together, etc. - and they’re priceless.

        

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    • Suzanne Shelley

      Neil Gussman ~ This may be one of your best posts ever. I’d say you hit the nail on the head but there are so many nails mentioned in this thoughtful observation. So glad you got back to Darmstadt to see your best friend ~ seems you have been able to m… 

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        Neil Gussman

        Suzanne Shelley Thanks Suzanne.

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      • Suzanne Shelley

        Neil Gussman Pursuant to your post (capturing a terrific moment of coincidence), my brother just sent me this skit from SNL this weekend 

        https://youtu.be/9XOt2Vh0T8w

        

        YOUTUBE.COM

        Man Park - SNL

        Man Park - SNL

        

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    • Sarah Lenora Gingrich

      Agreed. When we lived in Chile my husband would sometimes, for lack of fellow English-speakers, begin to talk with me about Nascar or football. Though seemingly innocuous, I know how very desperate that showed his situation to be, since I am not an e… 

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        Sarah Lenora Gingrich and if Dustin could see the light of true Motorsport in Formula 1 he could have even more friends!!!!!

        

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      • David Pertuz

        Neil Gussman Truth!!

        

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    • Meredith Hainsworth

      I’ve never understood having your spouse as your best friend. I have such a different relationship with Jeff than I do with my bestie. Both incredibly important people to me, but both relationships are so different. I think the strength in my relations… 

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        Neil Gussman

        And we are embodied spirits in some form. We express ourselves in physical ways. In talking about Friendship in The Four Loves, CS Lewis says men and women can be friends, but when friendship "turns into" love, the phrase itself describes what happens. The characteristic posture of friendship is side-by-side moving toward a goal, working together, etc. The posture of Romantic Love is face-to-face.

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        Meredith Hainsworth when men share hardship and danger those who are capable of friendship bond. It’s no accident my best friends are soldiers and racers.

        

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        Meredith Hainsworth When I did not recover full use of my left (dominant) arm last year, I realized I would never again throw a punch. I told a few friends. My wife would not share my moment of mourning.

        

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        Meredith Hainsworth I know. To say a spouse is one’s best friend says nothing about the sincerity of the speaker, but it says for sure that person does not understand friendship and most likely has no real friends.

        

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      • Colleen Stameshkin

        I could not disagree more. Husbands can be the best of friends, just as a person can have other wonderful close friends of the opposite sex. And also siblings as close friends, even if that often is far from the case. What matters in all these cases is the particulars of your relationships, which are different in every case, so to reason from only your own experience or that of your acquaintances can at best give you unreliable generalizations.

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      • Meredith Hainsworth

        Neil Gussman and I do think that there’s a major problem in our society of men not being encouraged to feel emotion or be vulnerable or whatever and therefore turning to their wives to meet that need. Which is so sad

        

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    • Leif Dolan

      I can't say that my wife is on the list of being a good and close friend. Sometimes she is a foe. We live together and have great love for one another.

      Friendship with other people is not clearly defined for me. I am friendly with my Rabbi, but would… 

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        Neil Gussman

        Leif Dolan as I said to Meredith when men share hardship and danger those who are capable of friendship bond. It’s no accident my best friends are soldiers and racers. Same for you it seems. It's also a matter of sharing lots of time. The Army gives people plenty of time to be stuck doing nothing and able to talk. I used to ride motorcycles. As with bicycles, the difference between those who race and those who ride is huge. My bicyclist friends are racers. Tourist bicyclists (like Harley riders) do not bond the same way.

        

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    • Michal Meyer

      The post and responses make for great reading.

      

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    • Colleen Stameshkin

      Maybe the disagreement here relates to what people mean by "best friend." I have had best friends in the past, by which I mean I could easily state that this particular friend was the person I liked best, wanted to spend the most time with, and truly l… 

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        Neil Gussman

        Colleen Stameshkin Men are so different and male friendship expresses that difference. In the Army, and on loading docks where I worked, one way men point out their friends is by saying horrible things to and about each other in front of a group. It sounds like they hate each other but they are saying "I can say this to Tom, but if you say the same thing, Tom and I will kick your ass." Men also easily form groups and follow an alpha. Anyone who has coached both men and women knows how different men and women are in this way. It made the Army even more difficult for young women. With six kids, I was in a buzzing hive of sibling rivalry. I know siblings can bond, but competitive kids define themselves in opposition to siblings. Best friends in childhood seem to be a refuge from the tensions of family.

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Tragic Accident on a Beautiful Night in Paris

Iron poles along Paris streets prevent parking on the sidewalk. 

A human body flying into one of these poles from a scooter is instantly  broken.

Last night, walking in Paris, I happened on a scene of agony I found terribly familiar. A motor scooter was lying on its side, bent and broken, several feet from the road on the sidewalk. The rider was a dozen feet away, also on the sidewalk. The passenger was against the curb, in the street, partly underneath a parked truck. 

A few feet from the battered scooter, a Honda Civic with a dent and scrape on its left front fender was parked on the sidewalk, its emergency flashing lights adding orange bursts to the red and blue lights from the two ambulances already on the scene. A half dozen medics worked to move the rider and the passenger onto stretchers and into the ambulance. They moved the rider first. I could hear the deep pain in his moans as three medics moved him onto the backboard, then onto a gurney. 

 Last year I yelled and groaned in that same agony when a medic named Mohammed lifted me onto the backboard after warning me how much it would hurt. A woman on the medic team was talking into the ear of the woman under the front of the truck. The scooter passenger was partly covered with a blanket, but I could the white sneaker on her right leg twisted at an impossible angle. 

I did not want to remain among the gawkers longer, and a moment later a policemen pointed and told me to move. I left. From what I could gather watching the witnesses, the car and the scooter were both driving downhill from the Pantheon toward the traffic light opposite Luxembourg Garden. The car made a legal, but possibly unexpected left turn toward an underground parking garage. 

The scooter, I am guessing by the dent on the car, was passing the car on the left, on the wrong side of the road, thinking the left turn signal was for the upcoming intersection rather than the garage entrance thirty feet before the intersection. Scooters often swerve around cars briefly to get to the front at traffic lights. In all of my motorcycle and bicycle accidents 

I have had the amazing good fortune not to hit anything solid: no cars, no curbstones, no iron poles along the edge of the sidewalk that prevent parking on the sidewalk in Paris. The unfortunate riders hit all of these. Worse, I did not see a helmet anywhere. 

As I walked away, a third ambulance pulled up. I think it was a fire department rescue team. Extracting that poor, broken woman from under the truck was going to be awful. 

I continued to walk on a beautiful night in the City of Light hoping the scooter riders would survive the night.

 

A Cathedral and a Holocaust Memorial Share the East End of an Island in Paris

The most famous Cathedral in Paris, Notre Dame, sits the east end of the most famous island in the Seine River, il de la cite. 

The grand cathedral is currently in the midst of a many millions of Euros makeover. It will be closed for years.  

Behind the soaring cathedral on the very eastern tip of the island is the Holocaust Deportation Memorial. The entire memorial to the 200,000 Jews deported to death camps is underground. 

The entrance is a steep stone staircase down to an open area with a barred opening looking east along the Seine.  East is, of course, the direction of transport the victims took to their death.

For me, the beautiful view of the Seine through iron bars is what deportation would look like--passing through a beautiful countryside in a cage.

In the summer when the setting sun is north of west the shadow of the cathedral falls on the Holocaust memorial, not for long, just minutes.  I was overcome with sadness the first time I visited this memorial in 2017. I was in Paris in late June and early July and saw the shadow fall on the memorial after 9pm near sunset. During the Nazi era, 400 million Christian labeled people were either participants, complicit in or ignored the Holocaust. 

Inside the memorial is a map with the number of  Jews from each department deported to death camps.

The death camps are listed in blood red.

The barred opening seen from the north bank of the river is just a dark rectangle on a gray wall.

Another map shows all the Nazi camps to which people were sent to die.

IN the midst of the memorial is a flame of remembrance.

The view to the east up the Seine River is lovely.

The open courtyard of the memorial feels very vertical and forbidding.

Inside is a long tunnel with names of the victims.

Each time I visit Paris I visit the memorial to those deported. Usually there are just a few people inside.  

A few hundred meters away thousands are usually visiting Notre Dame.  Even now dozens of people were looking at the posters on the walls enclosing the cathedral during its restoration.  

 

Hypersonic Missiles -- FGFD: Field Guide to Flying Death

 

Hypersonic missiles recently exploded into the news when China tested their own version of the WMD du jour.

Speed is just one of many ways to classify missiles: from the subsonic Tomahawk cruise missile flying 500mph to the ICBMs breaking free of earth's gravity at more than 15,000 mph.   Hypersonic missiles fall in between at fives times the speed of sound around 4,000mph.  

As with aircraft, speed is not the only measure of missiles. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) are very fast, but since ballistic means without power, they follow a very predictable parabolic flight/glide path to target.  They accelerate to 15,000 mph to break free of the atmosphere, then coast over the the north pole to their final destination. The intercept path is very predictable.  

At the other end of the scale, a Tomahawk (or other) subsonic cruise missile flies about the same speed as an airliner at around 500mph. They are very small, very light aircraft that are flown to their target. They can evade, maneuver and fly just feet above the ground and hit a target so accurately they can be flown into a particular car in parking lot.  

Hypersonic missiles fly five times the speed of sound, in the range of 4,000 mph, in powered flight. They can fly high, low, maneuver, and evade just like a subsonic cruise missile, but fly from New York to Los Angeles in 45 minutes.  Planes are very hard to shoot down. A hypersonic missile flies almost twice as fast as the Sidewinder air-to-air missile.  It flies faster than the bullets from every US Army rifle and machine gun, faster than 30mm cannon rounds from the gatling gun on the A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack fighter.  

If China has operational hypersonic missiles, as recent news reports suggest, they could threaten other nations, including us, with dangerous, nuclear capable missiles.  

If Taiwan becomes Crimea Part II, hypersonic missiles may be the threat that keeps America from defending a nation that has been very loyal to us.  President Obama did nothing to stop Putin from seizing Crimea or invading eastern Ukraine.  President Trump sold out the Kurds in Syria after one phone call from the Turkish President.  Hypersonic missiles might seal the deal that puts Taiwan on the same path as Hong Kong.  

Other entires in Field Guide to Flying Death:

Cruise Missiles

Artillery 

Apache Helicopter 

Mutually Assured Destruction 

Gunships 

Armor piercing ammo 

And then there's the Sam Fender song, Hypersonic Missile

Why Doesn't He Care About His Legacy? Why Rush Limbaugh Lied with his (literal) dying breaths

Rush Limbaugh, 1951-2021 

Some very smart people I listen to wondered aloud in the past year why Rush Limbaugh did not care about his legacy? Why did he keep on lying for Trump with his dying breath. Hannah Arendt has an answer. 

Most of what is good in public life in our world we inherited from the the Ancient Greece and Rome.  In both of those cultures, reputation and legacy and honor were what elevated people.  We think of character as something within ourselves.  The Greeks saw character as the imprint of the culture on a person. Courage imprinted Heracles--as if Heracles were the coin and courage was the stamp that identified it.  

The Greeks and Romans lived in worlds where exile was a punishment as bad as death because true existence was in community. It is from Rome we get the compliment that someone is "A man among men."

In an age of faith, a scoundrel might repent when he knew death was near.  That repentance could be true and sincere because the spiritual world was real to everyone in the culture--even those who mostly ignored it.

But we live in an age of the Will.  We do not live for reputation, but live to control the future, to impose our desires on the future.  In an age such as ours, Hannah Arendt writing about the Will in her book Life of the Mind says:

"...old age consists in a shrinkage of the future dimension, and man's death signifies less his disappearance from the world of appearances than his final loss of a future."  

Limbaugh saw his future shrinking and became more desperate to control what time he had left. He wanted to remain relevant to the end.  I have known other rich old men who used what time and strength they had left in their 80s or 90s to remain relevant in the places they once had power.  

People who live for reputation and contemplation put their lives in order, to use an old phrase, when they know the end is near. Those who lived with a will to power go to death grasping and ignoring every form of goodness.  

If C.S. Lewis is right and the doors of Hell lock from the inside, Rush Limbaugh slammed and bolted that door--as an act of Will.

Machiavelli on the Problem of Monotheism

 

This week I listened to a talk by Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield.  You can watch it here or listen to the podcast. One thing that came up which I had never considered before is how important it is that the Church (and the Temple and the Mosque) be separated from the state to have an effective government.

Machiavelli, like no political philosopher before him, squarely faced the problem of leading a government in a culture with a monotheistic religion. The Greek democracy and the Roman republic were not subject to absolute gods. Both fell to tyranny, but not to priests with power.

Monotheistic religions, especially at their extremes, see the entire universe as subject to their One God. Whether they are right or wrong in theology, we know what happens when priests control politics: Cruelty.

Eventually the heretics will be defined by prophets, condemned by priests and killed by mobs.

The brilliant, brave leaders who founded America knew this well. They wanted religion in the populace, but not in politics.

A priest, a Rabbi and an Imam can walk into a bar anytime they want to. But I never want them in charge of government.

----

I re-read The Prince every four years in a Presidential election year to remind myself how politics works.

I have written about Machiavelli on Leadership, about re-reading The Prince under Trump, and comparing Trump and President Obama using The Prince.

How Many Books are You Reading Now? A Lot.

Every few weeks I get a version of the question, "How many books are you reading now?"  On some online book groups, the question might be, "Do you read more than one book at a time?"  

Right now the count is ten physical books, pictured above, two books on Kindle and two on Audible.  

If reading multiple books at one time seems weird to you, think about how you interact with friends and family especially during the recent pandemic.  

My six kids live in three different states (not to mention six very different states of mind). I see and speak with them mostly on the phone and occasionally see the local kids in person.  

I have friends on four continents around the world that I am in touch with once in a while.  I have friends from the west coast of America to central Europe I am in touch with regularly. I talk to them, write to them, text them, and keep the relationship we share separate from every other relationship I have. 

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Some daily, some every few days or weekly, some less often. Again, no trouble keeping "The Jewish Story" podcast completely separate in my mind from "The Eastern Border" podcast or "The Bulwark" podcast.

A few years ago, I got a formal diagnosis that said I am ADHD, but this pile of books was really all I needed to say I have a mind that bounces from one thing to another.   

In fact, when I started college in my late 20s after the Army, I never had a problem with multiple classes and different books for every class.  

I am not just randomly reading books from my own shelf or from recommendations.  I am part of several book groups and read books with friends.  So there is more order to my reading than it my appear.

The List:  

--I listen to a podcast called "Honestly" by Bari Weiss and am reading her book "How to Fight Anti-Semitism."

--The weekly Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center is reading "The Life of the Mind by Arendt. We read and discuss about 30 pages per week.

--The Evolution Round Table at Franklin and Marshall College is reading "From Darwin to Derrida" this semester, a chapter or two per week.

--"Maphead" is a book about people who are obsessed with maps, including the author. I am clearly a maphead.

--I read Leonard Cohen's "Book of Mercy" a book of poetry while I am on the train. Sometimes I write after reading him. Even his prose is lyrical. 

--I am reading "To the End of the Land" with a friend who loves David Grossman's writing. I have never read him, but had heard a lot about him.

--With another friend, I am listening to all five books of the "Game of Thrones." I am currently at the beginning of book five. I am hoping the 70-year-old author of the series, George RR Martin, remains healthy long enough to finish the final novels--a total of seven.

--The other book on Audible is "The Greek Way" by Edith Hamilton. Published in 1930, this book summarizes Greek culture in a lovely review of art, history, politics, drama, comedy, philosophy and how they all fit together.

--"The Quick and the Dead" by Alison Joseph is one of the books I am reading on Kindle. I read her pandemic book "What Dark Days Seen" last week and am reading this one because it is the first book with the main character, Sister Agnes.

--The other book on Kindle is "Critique of Pure Reason" by Immanuel Kant. Along with it I am reading "Kant" by Karl Jaspers. These books are part of a weekly Karl Jaspers group related to the Hannah Arendt group. We read a chapter or two per week from either or both books.

--"Understanding Beliefs" is part of the delightful MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series as is "Irony and Sarcasm." I read occasionally from both. 

--Finally, I took "QED" off my shelf and started reading a few pages at a time because I want to know as much as I can about light and quantum electrodynamics.

Do I confuse the books? Do they collide in my head?  Sure. But I have friends and relatives who are very different people and keep them all separate, mostly.  The books I read have vastly different character and subjects so they are as distinct as friends.  

QED.....[quod erat demonstrandum] 

 

Colin Powell, an Arduous Road to Great Success

 

In 1958, when Colin Powell was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the US Army, the former slave states still had Jim Crow laws in effect and the rest of the states had other discriminatory laws. Just a decade before in 1948, President Harry S. Truman desegregated the Army. Truman opened the path of leadership to Black soldiers, but that path was not easy.

In World War II and before, Black soldiers were in segregated units, nearly always with white officers.  My Dad was one of those officers during World War II, commander of a Black supply company at a supply base in Shenango Township, Pennsylvania.  His next assignment was Jewish commandant of a Prisoner of War Camp for soldiers of the German Afrika Korps.

While desegregation was law in the Army nearly two-thirds of the soldiers in the Army were (and are) from the South and the West.  Black officers had to lead soldiers who did not believe they should be officers.  

Four years ago I went to a promotion ceremony for Myles B. Caggins, III. He was a major when we served together in Iraq in 2009 and was being promoted to Colonel.  His father, retired Colonel Myles B. Caggins, Jr., was there to see his son wear eagles on his shoulders.  

Like Colin Powell, Caggins, Jr., served in the Army before and after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Both Powell and Caggins served in the Vietnam War, leading soldiers in battle.  Leadership is always difficult, the road Powell and Caggins walked was grueling. 

I have already seen criticisms of Colin Powell.  

None of those critics have ever overcome the obstacles the Powell surmounted, and none have achieved what he achieved.  May Colin Powell be as blessed in the next life as he was brave in this life.

Field Guide to Flying Death: With Gunships, Slower is Better

 

AC130 Gunship in the air and on the ground 

Air support for troops in the Vietnam War began with the latest and fastest jets of the 1960s. Whether they we land-based or carrier based, these jets could swoop in with bombs, missiles and guns. But then they were gone.  High performance jets can't hang around. And they are not made to go slow. 

F4 Phantoms would lower their landing gear on close-support missions to get their weapons on target.  

The first solution to the problem was to go retro:  The Douglas A4 Skyraider.

Developed during World War II, the Skyraider first flew in March 1945. The war ended before it could be deployed in significant numbers.  By 1967 the design was far out date in the jet world, but the A4 could fly for more than six hours with its basic fuel load. 

The single-engine propellor-driven aircraft carried four 20mm cannons with 200 rounds of ammo for each gun and could carry 8,000 pounds of bombs, rockets and any other ordnance that could be hung on its wide wings.  In a ground support role, the Skyraider could attack a target and wait in the area to see and respond to the enemy's next move.  

In the same way, the C130 Hercules can stay over the target area carrying tons of ammo for miniguns and cannons up to and including a 105mm howitzer.  The newest model reported in Task and Purpose now has a laser capable of disabling trucks.  

This four-engine tortoise in a world of supersonic hares can loiter of hours over a battle supporting the troops on the ground long after jets have sped away.  

 

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel: The Book and the Musical

 

Two weeks ago I saw the musical "Fun Home" an adaptation of a memoir of the same name by Alison Bechdel.  A week later, I started reading the graphic memoir which the musical is based on.  I finished it this morning.  

This sad, compelling story presents the pain and mystery of the suicide, or maybe not, of Bruce Allen Bechdel, Alison's father.  Bruce was gay. Alison finds out her father was gay only when she discovers she is a lesbian while at college.  Bruce's suicide or accidental death happens soon after Alison comes out to her family.  

Though presented in a musical and graphic format, the memoir is serious and deeply revealing.  I felt the love Alison had for her father, the tension between her parents, the confusion Alison felt throughout her childhood about herself and her family, and the isolation each member of the family lived in.  

In the graphic book, Alison uses maps to show the small area in which her father lived his life: a circle of a few miles covers his birth, life, work and death.  Alison notices on recordings of her father's voice she heard after his death that he had a local accent.  And yet, he aspired to the world: loving beautiful things and teaching great literature.  

Alison is 20 when her father dies.  She goes on to become as notably out as her father was closeted.  She created the comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For" which is where she introduced the Bechdel Test: a measure of the representation of women in fiction. It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added.

I have read many memoirs. They are among my most and least favorite books.  Truth, unvarnished truth, must be at the center of memoir, because we readers will sense when we are being served the public relations story rather than reality. This memoir is among my favorites. The struggle of Alison finding who she is had me from the first act and the first page.  

Thinking and Feeling: The Inside, Outside Difference

 

The past and the future are infinite and meet at the moment we are thinking. 

Our thinking can reach into infinity.

A friend recently posted a question asking about the difference between thinking and feeling.  The French poet Paul Valery said:

"Sometimes I think and sometimes I am."

[Tantot je pense et tantot je suis]

When we think, we leave the world of feeling.  Valery says we leave the world altogether.  We engage in a dialogue within ourselves. In this inner conversation we examine an idea, weigh it, try to find its worth, but all of this is done within our minds.  

When external reality intrudes we stop thinking and return to living in the present, to sensing or feeling the world around us.  When we feel we take our world through our  five senses and act or react. We can take in that information and react immediately, or we can, as the expression goes, stop and think.  

Modern English usage hardly makes a difference between the words think and feel, but they are different to the point of being opposites in how they inhabit our lives.  

From the outside, the difference is just as big.  A person who is feeling, who is reacting to the world, will show that reaction.  We see a friend and smile: see an enemy and frown.  When we think, especially when we are deep in thought, we look like someone in a daze, or half awake.  We say a person is "lost in thought." The metaphor is right. The person lost in thought is not fully present in this world.  

When I think, I may sit and stare and not notice someone entering the room.  When I ride in traffic in Philadelphia, I am looking, listening in every way sensing my environment and reacting to multiple inputs every second.  

The graph above of thinking is especially evident in those who create. Whether art or science, thinking remains hidden within the thinker until the painting, or story, or building, or equation, or breakthrough formula expresses the thoughts hidden inside the mind.  

For more on thinking, The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt is fascinating.

The Taliban are not Medieval

 

Chartres Cathedral

During the flurry of worry as we abandoned an ally to barbarism, many commentators and social media "experts" said the Taliban is Medieval.  

This is America and we are, as a country, as dumb as a sack of lug nuts when it comes to history, so I was not surprised to hear the Taliban to be labelled as Medieval, but they emphatically are not.  

The Taliban are not Medieval. They are ignorant, despicable thugs who hate civilization, freedom, light and love.  The Medieval era brought beauty to the entire world. It celebrated knowledge and learning. Eventually the Renaissance and the Reformation sprung from its problems.  

The Taliban, like all fundamentalists, look backward and express their faith in death and demolition.  

There is nothing Medieval about the Taliban.  They are Westboro Baptist Church with a national flag. 

As with every attempt to label eras of history, the period roughly between 1000 and 1500 could be called the Medieval period, though some put the start date almost at the end of the Roman Empire in 472.  Either way the term Medieval only applies to parts of Western Europe under the influence of the Catholic Church and of the Holy Roman Empire. 

In some ways, the Medieval period the zenith of culture in the west.  Chartres Cathedral was a work of centuries by people who had an eternal vision and expressed their beliefs in stone--most knowing they would never live to see the final result of their life's work.  

Chartres Cathedral inside and outside

The popular image of the Medieval Europe is dominated by The Plague, the corrupt Catholic Church, and the Inquisition, but this Monty Python view ignores the beginning of the modern university and the beginning of Romantic Love as equal to other loves. The Divine Comedy and the Arthurian Legends brought Romantic Love to the center of western culture. 

Dante's Divine Comedy, the entire universe, 

physical and spiritual, in 14,000 lines of poetry

Literature left the confines of the Latin language in the Three Crowns of Florence:  Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch.  They wrote in vernacular Italian. And the world followed their lead.

Everybody Hates Jews

Honestly by Bari Weiss, a new podcast

 One of my favorite new podcasts is Honestly by Bari Weiss.  She was a columnist at the New York Times  until she resigned last year saying woke culture had taken over the Times and created a hostile work environment. She is a conservative, but against Trump populism.

She was Bat Mitzvah at the synagogue in Pittsburgh where eleven Jews were murdered by a gunman shouting that he wanted all Jews to die. 

On her podcast, she interviews guests covering a gamut of American culture and its dysfunction.  

Her second episode was interview with Mark Cuban on money and hard questions on the ill effects of billionaires on society.

In her most recent episode, Weiss interviewed Dr. Vinay Prasad about strategies to overcome vaccine hesitancy. She ended the interview by asking Prasad how he lives his life in and out of the hospital where he works in San Francisco.  Prasad said a vaccinated person wearing a mask outside is completely unnecessary, but he lives in a very blue city so he sometimes wears a mask outside just to be part of his community.

She interviewed Professor Peter Boghossian about why he left Portland State over an oppressive woke culture dominating the campus.

Lt. Gen. HR McMaster discussed his career and tenure in the Trump administration in an interview I found fascinating. 

She interviewed the head of Apple News in Hong Kong about the formerly independent city state falling under direct control of China.

And for something completely different, listen to the episode on America's Sex Recession.  

Weiss also has a substack. The latest article titled Everybody Hates Jews is brilliant in showing the danger of Jew hatred from the left and the right:  

In an era in which the past is mined by offense-archaeologists for the most minor of microaggressions, the very real macroaggressions taking place right now against Jews go ignored. Assaults on Hasidic Jews on the streets of Brooklyn, which have become a regular feature of life there, are overlooked or, sometimes, justified by the very activists who go to the mat over the “cultural appropriation” of a taco. It is why corporations issue passionate press releases and pledge tens of millions of dollars to other minorities when they are under siege, but almost never do the same for Jews. 

Here is the full article.

I listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts. 

Hunting Magic Eels and the Search for Spiritual Reality

Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age

by Richard Beck

 In one of my book groups, the one where we read and discuss books of all kinds, we are in the midst of discussing:  Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age by Richard Beck.  

This book reminds me why I love book discussions so much.  Each reader brings his or her own life to the book.  The discussion brings those perspectives together to clash or harmonize, reinforce or raze, and otherwise share the wonder each person brought to the book.  

The premise of the book is that the world has become disenchanted. The author tells how we became disenchanted, then tells how he, and we, could become re-enchanted. 

I liked the beginning of the book, particularly connecting our disenchantment with the reformation.  He makes a good case for the unintended consequences of blasting the foundations of Catholicism.  In Beck's analysis, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution are more layers of the disenchantment cake Luther and Calvin baked.  

For me, the Scientific Revolution and the wonder of the Enlightenment re-enchant the world of faux spirituality that grows in a world of religion plus ignorance, but I know that makes me very marginal among believers.  

I have a favorite author among those who explain relativity physics.  I wrote him 25 years ago to tell him I love his book.  In that book, Spacetime and Special Relativity, M. David Mermin writes a long aside explaining why fundamentalists are wrong.  I also told Mermin that I am a believer and found the fact that light was the speed limit of the universe made my faith more vivid.  He wrote back and told me he was working on a sequel that dropped the criticism of belief.  A few year later It's About Time was published with even better illustrations of the inextricable relations of space, time and special relativity.  

To return to Beck, after he makes the case for disenchantment, I found his case for re-enchantment difficult.  Not what he did, but the context in which he writes.  He teaches in Texas.  The book was written after 80% of Evangelicals and nearly as many conservative Catholics voted for a game show host who believes himself entitled to sex with anyone he wants and has no need of forgiveness.  And Beck returned to spiritual health in the company of charismatic believers.  They may, as Beck says, have a grip on the reality of the ministry of the Holy Spirit that other Churches lack, but the charismatic Churches are also the source and propagators of the horrendous prophecies declaring Trump a modern day Cyrus, chosen by God to rescue the Church, and after the 2020 election, charismatic groups more than any other promote the lie that Trump won the election and will be returned to office by God.  The false prophet of Revelation is clearly legion.

Can re-sacralizing spaces help re-enchant the world? It can't hurt.  But I wonder what would have helped the German Christians expelled from Churches in 1935 if they had one Jewish grandparent.  In this world, all spiritual practice exists in a political reality.  Among the first martyrs were those who refused to worship Caesar.  If a Church is enthusiastic about worship and also believes every lie from Trump's mouth (only worship does that) is it a Church.  Reading about the expulsion of the Jewish believers in Holy Week 1935, I wondered if that building and congregation was a Church the following week.  The definition of love that leads to that end is utterly Orwellian.

So here's my letter to Beck.  No answer so far:

Richard,

I am reading your book Hunting Magic Eels at the prompting of a Orthodox Christian friend. We will be discussing it September 9 with a small group that formed beginning with ESL volunteers.  Our first book "Laurus" followed the (imagined) life of a Russian monk and Holy Fool in the 15th Century. We read that book in 2016.  The core of the group is parents with six kids.

That year, I felt increasing dread as the election approached.  I am half Jewish (my father) from a non-religious home.  I became a believer after being blinded by shrapnel in a missile explosion in 1973.  But the Church, the anti-intellectual American Church, has always been difficult for me. The next year, after Charlottesville, the Church became impossible for me.  I left and joined a synagogue.  If Nazis can march in America chanting "Jews will not replace us" and be "fine people" according to the President.   

As I read your book, I am pulled back to Holocaust narratives.  As you can imagine, I was drawn to the stories of Jewish converts expelled from German Churches in 1935. Most were dead by 1945.  There were 400 million people with the label Christian who lived between the Pyrenees and the Urals during the era of the Nazis.  Fewer than one in a thousand actively helped Jews.  

For me, a Christian who cheers Trump echoes Nuremberg.  I was in Europe last month for three weeks visiting death camps.  I have visited ten since 2017.  

If you will allow me the cliche, is re-enchantment of our lives and personal spaces just arranging deck chairs on the Titanic? 

I like your book but cannot shake the larger context of wondering what those German Jewish believers, some going back three generations, would say about re-enchanting their lives when their last days were in death camps.

If the coup had succeeded on January 6, or if the next attempt succeeds in 2024 we will be living in an authoritarian nation. And once tyranny begins, Jews are in trouble.

Neil

My Top 61 Books -- Giving me delight is all they have in common.

 

As a member of several book groups, I occasionally see a list of the top 10, 25, 50, 100 books of all time or some time or recent time.  On nearly every list are books I love and books I loathe. 

So I decided to make my own list. It was supposed to be a top 25, but it got longer.  I stopped at 61.  This list presumes no expertise other than that of an avid reader who found these books especially delightful and therefore memorable.  

What's Your list?

My Top 61 

1. Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro 

2. Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro 

3. Master and Commander (21 novels), Patrick O’Brian 

4. Game of Thrones (5 novels), George RR Martin 

5. The Lord of the Rings (3 volumes), JRR Tolkien 

6. Prince, Machiavelli 

7. Divine Comedy, Dante 

8. Decameron, Boccaccio 

9. August 1914, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 

10. Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman 

11. Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy 

12. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy 

13. Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas 

14. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo 

15. Great Divorce, CS Lewis 

16. Till We Have Faces, CS Lewis 

17. Four Loves, CS Lewis 

18. Aeneid, Virgil 

19. Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt 

20. On Revolution, Hannah Arendt 

21. Human Condition, Hannah Arendt 

22. Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch 

23. Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Than Nguyen 

24. Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari 

25. Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond 

26. Winters Tale, Mark Helprin 

27. Paris in the Present Tense, Mark Helprin 

28. Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer 29.

These Truths, Jill Lepore 

30. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Timothy Snyder 

31. Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi 

32. Identity, Milan Kundera 

33. Genius of Judaism, Bernard Henri-Levy 

34. Not in God’s Name, Jonathan Sacks 

35. A Canticle for Liebowitz, Arthur Miller Jr. 

36. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut 

37. Spacetime in Special Relativity, N. David Mermin 

38. Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville 

39. Stuff, Ivan Amato 

40. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 

41. Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy 

42. Time and the Art of Being, Robert Grudin 

43. Hamlet, William Shakespeare 

44. Richard III, William Shakespeare 

45. Laurus, Eugene Vodolazkin 

46. Six Days of War, Michael Oren 

47. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (4 novels) Douglas Adams 

48. Essays, George Orwell 

49. Animal Farm, George Orwell 

50. Iliad, Homer 

51. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman 

52. Free Will, Mark Balaguer 

53. Marlborough: His Life and Times, Winston Churchill 

54. Dune, Frank Herbert 

55. Noble Gases, Isaac Asimov 

56. Arthurian Romances, Chretien de Troyes 

57. Song of Roland 58. Intelligencer, Leslie Silbert 

59. Plot Against America, Philip Roth

60. Medea, Euripedes

61. Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius

Veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan to Retire on September 11

 

Master Sgt.Pamela Bleuel (left) in Afghanistan

In July 2009 I was pushing my bike toward a gap in the blast wall on Camp Adder, Iraq.  I lived in a trailer on the other side of that wall. A soldier wearing a bandana over her nose and mouth walked toward me and asked why the hell anyone would ride a bike in wind like this.  

I don't remember my answer, but Pamela Bleuel and I started talking about being old soldiers who enlisted late and had three college-age daughters back home.  She was 43 at the time, I was 56.  

Now she's 56, a master sergeant, and retiring on Saturday, September 11.  She enlisted in the year 2000 at age 35 to pay off her student loans.  She is a math teacher.  She liked the army a lot more than she expected, became a drill sergeant and when I met her was training troops in convoy security on Camp Adder.  She wanted to be convoy security but the rules at the time did not let her. She stayed in Iraq for two tours, then was in Afghanistan five years later. 

I visited Pam in her home in Kentucky in 2010 and 2014 and was thinking I would be visiting again this year, but plans changed. Maybe next year. I wrote about Pam when I was in Iraq in 2009.  Here's the story:

"I'd rather be digging a damn ditch than sitting on my ass in an air-conditioned office pushing FRAGOs (Fragmentary Orders)." That was one of the first things Staff Sergeant Pamela Allen Bleuel said to me when I met her walking across on open area in a sandstorm. She is a cheerful, imposing, funny woman of 43 who joined the Army Reserves on a whim just before 9/11 and now has an intense love-hate relationship with life in camouflage.

Until last month SSG Bleuel was the sergeant in charge of the convoy training school here on Camp Adder. She taught troops how to drive and fight in convoys and how to best use the ungainly MRAP fighting vehicles that are now the standard troop carrier across Iraq. She loved convoy training and did not mind when her tour was extended. When she did the unit she went to decided her training as a military police officer would be best used processing FRAGOs--the daily changes to orders that bubble through the military system day and night.

Bleuel loves being outside, moving troops, and has no desire to sit in air conditioning, but she will do the job as well as she can until the end of her extended tour. 

She joined the reserves in 2000 at age 35 with no prior military experience at all, because she saw two soldiers hanging up a sign in the small town in Kentucky where she lives. The sign said the Army would repay student loans for reserve soldiers. She had three daughters between 8 and 13 years old at the time, taught math at the local high school and had $30,000 in student loans. She signed up. She went off to basic at the end of the school year, trying to fit basic and advanced training into the summer break. Training did not quite fit her school schedule and she was just about done with training when the 9-11 attacks hit.

At that point she just wanted to serve and was jealous of the regular Army soldiers who were whisked away to airborne schools and other assignments. She served as an MP until 2004 when she trained to be a drill sergeant. Every summer after that she would "push troops" through Fort Knox, Kentucky, during the 11-week summer break at her school district. Her experience as a drill sergeant and an MP lead her to convoy training here in Iraq.

 
Now she is ready to go back to being a drill sergeant part time and a full time teacher. "Each year it gets easier to go back to pushing troops and harder to teach school," she said. "It's not the kids. It's the damn parents." She then gave her version of the teacher's lament that parents call her, email her, come to school to say their little child is special. "In the Army you don't deal with that. Mom doesn't call basic training," she said.

 
She also likes the structure and clarity of Army life, at least in training. "We have a goal; get the trainees ready to be soldiers." She also likes the deference of soldiers when compared to civilians. "When I get back from Knox and I am in a crowd at Wal-Mart, I wish I could yell 'Make a hole' and have everybody get out of my way."

 
Bleuel's wall is covered with pictures of her three children. She is very proud of them--even the one who, "Is a liberal and wants to save the whole damn world. She voted for Obama. We don't talk about politics." Bleuel is somewhere to the right of Oliver North politically and hates everything about France, which is a double layer of irony given her name.

 At age 43 she has eight years of service and will have to decide soon whether she will make the Army a career or not. I'm guessing she will. The look she has in her eyes when she talks about basic training and convoy ops is not there when she talks about Algebra 2.