A Healthy Culture Includes All of its History

The French flag waving in the Arc d'Triomphe de l'Etoile on November 11

Few great cultures have been more self critical than French culture.  When revolution swept France in 1789, they even threw out the seven-day per week calendar. They invented the guillotine in 1791 and used it on their king two years later.  The French people analyze and criticize all of their long history and celebrate the best of French history.

Last year, I was in Paris on November 11. I walked around as close as I could to the Arc d'Triomphe de l'Etoile. I saw French people from kids to people in their 80s watching the celebration of the victory of the France and their allies in World War I.  Napoleon commissioned the Arc in 1806. The design was completed the same year, but it would be three decades later in 1836 before it was completed.  

France has a long a long history of fighting wars at great cost in men and money.  The French celebrate their two millennia of history. The celebrate the great triumphs in World War I and many of Napoleons battles and other wars going back to the Roman Empire.  

The French, much better than America, accept all of their history. I worked for a French petrochemical company in the 1990s.  They thought American anguish over President Bill Clinton was amusing. No one in France is surprised when someone with the ego to stand in front of 300 million people and say "Elect me!" turns out to have some flaws.  

I am currently reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson along with the Federalist Papers.  I plan to read biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton later in the year.  The men who founded America were not perfect, but they were great, mostly very young men, who began a nation with liberty for some in the hope of liberty for all some day.  

Jefferson wrote that the American colonies should end of slavery in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In 1787, Hamilton wrote the Federalist Papers to persuade New York and New England to unite with the South, knowing it would mean a slavery compromise. They did the best they could in founding a new nation. 

We should honor our founders knowing they were not perfect, but strove to bring real equality and freedom into a world of monarchy and despotism.  

What they did began a new nation that would lead the free world for much of the 20th Century. Their ideas held until January 6, 2021, when a petulant monster attempted to steal the election and ended the 240-year tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.

I was in London just before November 11. I got a poppy in London and a blue cornflower in Paris. I wore both on November 11. These little commemorative flowers grew in the devastated landscape where the war was fought. 

France and the United States 200 Years Ago

France in the person of Marquis de Lafayette and the troops he brought to Yorktown are the reason there is an America.  Without the French, America would have been defeated in Virginia and lost the war.  Coming to the aid of America added to the crushing debt France already had. That debt and its effects was one of the major causes of the French Revolution less than a decade later. 

Alexis de Tocqueville came to America and wrote a thousand pages about what he saw, praising self-government and the American spirit while unsparing in his criticism of slavery and the way we treated Native Americans.  His book was a call for change in France as well as the single greatest book written about America.  

My Daughter's Book Featured in Lancaster Newspapers

 

My daughter Lauren's book "Amelia's Journey to Find Family" was featured in a review in the Lancaster Newspapers today.  

She published the book this summer after caring for a 14-year-old rescue Labrador Retriever named Amelia for the last year of her life.  I wrote about Lauren's book and her love for dogs in a post in June last year.

If you want a copy of the book, you can order it here. 

It's wonderful to see Lauren share her love of dogs in this way.  

Her Dad is very proud!

Book 3 of 2022: The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

The next American Civil War won't be like the last one--there will not be battle lines and armies.  The next civil war will be a slide into permanent conflict possibly followed by a regional break into two or more countries.  

That's the future of America according to the Canadian author Stephen Marche.  By some definitions, the level of violence and political dysfunction in America is already at a point we are close to a civil war.  

In the book Stephen Marche uses information he learned from military and political experts to make scenarios of how America could fall into civil war.   

The first scenario he calls "The Bridge." Federal inspectors close a bridge between two rural counties.  Protestors occupy the bridge, tear down the roadblocks, and defy the federal government to close the bridge. A sheriff in one of the counties becomes the spokesperson for the protesters.  Soon he is on Fox News every day giving updates from the frontlines. 

Eventually the Army moves in.  After months of delay, the military attacks the bridge. The sheriff is arrested and charged with treason and becomes a hero to Fox News.  

In the aftermath of the fight, the President comes to town for a "listening tour." An unemployed white kid living in mom's attic and dreaming of being a hero shoots the President when she makes a surprise visit to a Jamba Juice. He becomes a bigger hero than Kyle Rittenhouse.  

From there the local terrorist war becomes national. Attacks, counter attacks become daily life in America.  

Marche then speculates on how the US will break into pieces since we are ungovernable.  One part will be Texas, by itself. Another part will be the Pacific Coast.  Then the northeast and midwest will be the land still called the USA. The South and the West will form a nation with the most land area, no abortions at all anywhere, unlimited gun rights, and an economy that will crater immediately without all the tax money they get from the rich states.  South Carolina, for example, gets $7.50 from the federal government for every dollar it pays in taxes.  

Marche says he has some hope at the end, but he sounds like a manager who who talks for about 20 minutes about her worst employee then says, "I know she's a good person inside."  The message of the rest of the book: move to a blue state or live in Gilead.

Book 2 of 2022: Marie Curie--a graphic novel biography in middle-school-level French

(In past years I have written an essay about the books I read in the previous year.  As my list of books gets longer and my memory shorter, I decided to write about the books as I read them rather than 2000+ words at the end of the year.)

 

In November I visited the Institute Curie near the Sorbonne in Paris.  This book was on the shelf in the tiny bookstore inside the small museum.  I read kids books in French to keep some level of reading comprehension.  This graphic novel gave me a chance to practice French and to remember what I learned about the life of this remarkable scientist.  

I learned a lot about Marie Sklodowska-Curie's life because more than half the book is about her childhood in Poland and struggles to get to France to study physics.  When I read about her previously, it was about her research and life-saving work in World War One.  

After I finished the book, I looked up how many people have won Nobel Prizes:  962 laureates earning a total of 603 prizes (as of 2020).  Just 59 laureates are women and Marie Curie is the first.  

Just four laureates have received two Nobel Prizes:  

Linus Pauling won a chemistry prize and a peace prize.

John Bardeen won the Nobel twice in physics.

Frederick Sanger won two chemistry prizes.

Marie Sklodowska-Curie won the Nobel Prize in physics and in chemistry: the only person to be awarded to Nobel Prizes in two different fields.  She is extraordinary, even among the short list of multiple Nobel laureates.  

If you read French at all, the book is fun to read and not difficult.  

The summary on Goodreads:

Cette biographie de Marie Curie (1867-1934) retrace les principales étapes de son existence : son enfance en Pologne, sa scolarité studieuse et ses études supérieures, son arrivée à Paris, sa rencontre avec Pierre Curie, ses recherches sur le radium et ses découvertes sur les rayons X, l'obtention de ses prix Nobel en 1903 et 1911 et son engagement pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

Love Makes Sense: The Four Loves by CS Lewis

 

On Friday, I hope to join the monthly discussion of the New York CS Lewis Society.  The topic is The Four Loves.  I love this book and am hoping to participate, but even retirees have schedule conflicts and I will be on the way to Minneapolis to see two of my six kids.  

I have read and re-read this book since the mid-1980s.  From then to now, the four loves are and have been the frame through which I see relationships, my own and those around me.  To begin where Lewis did, there are four words for love in Greek. Most languages have just one. In French and Hebrew and many other languages, like and love are the same word.  In popular usage, like and love are hard to tell apart in English.  

In Greek: 

Storge στοργη, means affection, the love in families.

Philia φιλια, is friendship, not just acquaintance.

Eros εροϲ is romantic love.

Agape aγαπη is charity.

I used the grid (above) in a talk I gave in a Russian literature class about how the characters in a novel related to each other--both good and bad. 

From my first reading of The Four Loves, I was interested in the relationship of the loves to each other. If you look across the grid, the top row are the "natural" loves, those shared with animals. The bottom row are "spiritual" loves, shared with spirits (for those who believe in a spiritual world) and people who are spiritual.  

The natural loves are always best when embodied.  We can maintain a family relationship at a distance, but a happy family wants to be together.  There are too many jokes for me to repeat about the difference between romance in person and on line.  

In the columns, the loves are merited, and unmerited.  Storge and Agape are alike in that they do not (or should not) depend on how good or bad the loved person is.  Parents love children whether they are beautiful, or not.  When Mother Teresa went to Calcutta, she helped those considered the worst: those of the lowest caste with leprosy.  

But we choose our friends and lovers based on merit.  The lover is dazzled by the beloved. The friend finds another who shares the same deep interest and says, "What! You too?" Romance and friendship can continue through hardship and grief, but they begin with merit. 

Friendship and romance, while similar in being based on merit, have opposite expression because one is spiritual and the other natural.  The posture of friendship is side by side sharing an activity or idea.  Lovers are face to face. They want each other. English idiom says this best.  If two friends become lovers, we say the friendship "turned into" love. 

The book is full of example, detail and clear explanation of the best and the worst of each kind of love.  I could (and have) recommend this book to anyone except a cave dwelling hermit--and maybe seeing what she is missing this book would lure her out of the cave.  

In a world so suffused with hate and manipulation it can be difficult to believe love is at the center of life, the universe and everything.  But reading this book, seeing how love is part of everything that is good in our lives, The Four Loves might be the most hopeful book I ever read.  

By the way, a decade ago, I wrote about a fellow soldier choosing between Eros and Philia.

First Book of 2022: Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

My first book of 2022 was in the category graphic novel. But the book in question is not a novel. It is a philosophy book that is written with words and drawings.  

But graphic novel is the category according to Wikipedia, so I will go with it:

A graphic novel is a book made up of comics content. Although the word "novel" normally refers to long fictional works, the term "graphic novel" is applied broadly and includes fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work. It is, at least in the United States, typically distinct from the term "comic book", which is generally used for comics periodicals and trade paperbacks.

Before I read Unflattening, I heard Nick Sousanis talk about how his book came to be and what he was trying to do with his use of graphics.  I loved hearing him talk about how our eyes follow images and graphical cues and how he used that knowledge to create the book.

I liked this review by comicsgrid.com

Over eight chapters, Unflattening follows an anonymous, sleepwalking figure as they step out of a regimented life and take flight to explore new worlds. Sousanis draws the imagery of these worlds from TV, movies, the classical canon of art, and scientific diagrams. Unflattening embraces visual references from Paleolithic cave prints to James Bond films, and verbal ones from Bruno Latour to Wallace Stevens. The protagonist bears at one time Hermes’ sandals and at others wings of its own; it is incarnated as a Pinocchio-like puppet confounded by a centipede’s existential challenge, ‘Who are you?’, before finally being reborn as a child reminiscent of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The comic’s final image is of that newborn’s eye opening to see the world as if for the first time.

In the course of this journey, Sousanis dethrones the primacy of the word in a kind of Copernican revolution. He argues that image is not mere illustration, subordinate to words, but an equal partner and component in thinking. He explores stereoscopic vision and the principles of astronomical observation as metaphors in order to define ‘unflattening’ as ‘a simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing.’ (Sousanis 2015: 32).

An extended sequence takes us through the world of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, in which two-dimensional ‘A. Square’ encounters a three-dimensional sphere who exposes him to previously unimagined perspectives. We need each other’s points of view, Sousanis tells us, to avoid become constrained in set modes of thinking and blinkered perspectives, just as A. Square must be enlightened by his encounter with the sphere. Words and images together free us from the limitations presented by either the purely visual or purely verbal. 

And here are a few pages.  

I hesitated to read the book for a long time, but now I am reading two other graphic novels (both biographies of scientists).  Unflattening will take your mind places it has never been before.

Enjoy!

My books of 2021:

Fiction

Non fiction 

Favorite

Books of 2022

January 6, 2021, the End of Democracy in America

 

Trump horde ending democracy in America

From the beginning of my military service nearly 50 years ago, until the last my last day in the Army in May 2016, I attended dozens of change of command ceremonies. After the flag is passed the new and out-going commanders often make a speech.  Probably one in three of those speeches made a sincere nod to the American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.  

For the mostly conservative officers taking or relinquishing authority, they linked themselves to a 200-plus year American tradition--a hallmark of American exceptionalism.  

But that ended one year ago today when the 45th President sent a mob to overturn the election he just lost.  The coup d'etat was mere minutes from success.  Hundreds of Trump supporters were screaming to kill Mike Pence.  If they had managed to stop the vote, the election could have been thrown into the House of Representatives. That is the last possible place in which a disputed election can be decided according to the Constitution.  

With one vote per state, Trump would have taken the election.  

All of my adult life I had an implicit belief in progress in America: more rights for more people.  The racist rednecks would recede, I believed.  

With Trump's nomination and election, my belief cracked.  After Charlottesville it was shattered. With January 6, it was gone. The end of democracy was only a matter of when.  

America no longer has a tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.  I voted for Joe Biden and hoped normal order could be restored in America.  One year later, the democratic party is fighting about infrastructure and social programs and has done nothing to fix the electoral count act or secure voting.  The Republicans are running MAGA candidates all over the country to get control of election counting.  How much does voting really matter if the Republicans are in charge of counting.  

In 2016, 63 million Americans voted for a failed casino owner who played a business man on a game show.  In 2020, 74 million Americans watched a lying buffoon for four years and said they would like four more.  The people who claim most publicly to be followers of Jesus (Love your neighbor; Love your enemies; turn the other cheek) worship Trump much more fervently than they follow anything Christ ever said or did. I have read and re-read the New Testament. Few people who have ever lived are less like Jesus than Donald Trump.

January 6, 2021, was a dress rehearsal.  The command performance is three years away. In 2025, there will be no need for a mob to attack.  The criminals will be in the building. They will use the power entrusted to them by the Constitution to end democracy. 

The Roman poet Horace fought to preserve the Republic during the Civil War after Julius Caesar took power and was murdered.  The Republicans lost. Horace was wounded and lost everything.  When he recovered, he knew the Republic was gone, so he made peace with his circumstances and became a poet, living the best life he could. 

I hope to be like Horace, to do my best to preserve the Republic, and when that fails, to protect my family and live as well as possible. 

Books of 2022: The Big Picture of What I Hope to Read in the Year Ahead

 

Here is a picture of 61 books I hope to read, have already started reading, or plan to re-read in the year ahead.  

Some are already in progress:

Game of Thrones Book 5.

Jon Meacham's biography of Thomas Jefferson.

Civilization by Niall Ferguson.

The Decameron.

And at least three books by Hannah Arendt.

Happy New Year!

Books of 2021: Fiction

In 2021 I read fourteen books under the vast category of fiction. The oldest of the books was written in the 14th Century.  The newest were published this year.  The authors as close as my own family and as far away as Russia. The setting of one novel is more than two thousand years ago, another is in the near future.  

In an earlier post I listed the non-fiction books I read in 2021.

In another post I said that my favorite book of 2021 was a work of fiction I did not finish: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. But having a favorite does not mean there were any books on the list I did not like. They are so different. But The Decameron was very much in my mind in our pandemic world.

Amelia's Journey to Find Family by Lauren Auster-Gussman.

My oldest daughter Lauren wrote this about a rescue dog she adopted and cared for in the last year of her life.  It's a lovely children's book both in the sense of a nice story and that her co-author made lovely illustrations for the story.

La Veritable Histoire de Trois Cochons by Erik Blegvad. I read children's books in French to practice that lovely language. This book is a traditional and gruesome retelling of the story fo the three pigs.

The Quick and the Dead and What Dark Days Seen by Alison Joseph. I met Alison Joseph in 2018 and read three of her mystery novels. She wrote a new one this year set in the pandemic reviving her Sister Agnes character. I read the new novel and the first Sister Agnes novel this year and plan to read more of Sister Agnes in 2022.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. I read and re-read everything Kazuo Ishiguro has written. The new novel is a chilling story of a future world in which Artificial Intelligence develops to the point that kids can have AFs, Artificial Friends. 

Untraceable by Sergei Lebedev. This very darkly funny novel imagines a Russia in which political dissidents would be poisoned by incompetent government secret agents. The attacks would be ordered by a former spy who became the President for Life of the Russian Federation and who wants the old Soviet Union back!  Crazy right?! 

Till We Have Faces Lewis by C.S. Lewis. I re-read this wonderful book for a discussion with the New York CS Lewis Society.  It is a re-telling of the Cupid and Psyche myth (which means it is also a retelling of Cinderella) from the perspective of the oldest stepsister.  The book is her complaint against the gods and her side of the story.  I read this book aloud to my daughters when they were in middle school as an example of a tough woman who becomes a great leader. The queen wears a mask her whole life as queen, so there's that connection to our world right now. The difference between appearance and reality is the best I have read in any novel.

The Mandrake by Niccolo Machiavelli. A very funny short play by a guy with a reputation for political advice. 

A Game of Thrones, A Feast for Crows, #4 and A Game of Thrones, A Storm of Swords, #3 by George R. R. Martin.  I watched the entire series on HBO. It was wonderful except for the ending.  The books are better.  I am currently reading book five and hoping the author lives to finish book 6!

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht. An strange and mysterious story set vaguely in the former Yugoslavia.  A fascinating story.  

Selections from Canzonieri and Other Works by Francesco Petrarch. I started reading Petrarch to round out my reading of the Three Crowns of Florence:  Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.  The Decameron became my book of the year. Petrarch's sonnets led me to put more poetry in my reading, although this book is the only one I finished in 2021.

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. I had never read Stoppard. This play is full of twists and fun and playful language and is a wonderful story.  I will read more or him in 2022. 

Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin. I love this book.  I read it in 2016 and re-read it this year.  Set in the late 1,400s in Russia and across the world. 

Books of 2021: Non-Fiction

Non-fiction books of 2021

Just the list for now.  The highlighted links connect to my reviews of the book. 

My Favorite:

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman.

My least favorite:

Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age by Richard Beck

Biography, Memoir:

Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel by Francine Klagsburn.

Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne by David Starkey.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.

Faith:

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristen Du Mez

Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times by Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

The Neglected C.S. Lewis by Mark Neal and Jerry Root.

History:

Red Sea Spies: The True Story of the Mossad's Fake Holiday Resort by Raffi Berg

The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan

The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton

The Roman Way by by Edith Hamilton

A Higher Call: An incredible story of chivalry in the skies above war-torn Europe by Adam Makos.

Spearhead: An American Tank Gunner, His Enemy, and a Collision of Lives in World War II by Adam Makos.

The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Burnham.

Philosophy:

Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt.

The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt.

The Promise of Politics by Hannah Arendt.

Paradox by Margaret Cuonzo.

Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus by Karl Jaspers.

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill.

Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper.

Technopoly by Neil Postman.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

Social Science:

Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

Science:

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Maphead by Ken Jennings

Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA by Neil Shubin

Books of 2021: First, My Favorite Book

 

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, 

translated by Wayne Rebhorn

In 2021, I read fifty books. But the first and best book of the year for me is the book I have not yet finished. It's a book I first read in 2015 and went back to last year: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Also known as The Human Comedy in contrast to Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy, The Decameron inspired Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales among hundreds of other writers and their works over the past eight hundred yers.  

For me and many others, these tales written and published during the worst years of the Black Death in Florence have been a source of fun and inspiration during the current pandemic.  

I have loved the Divine Comedy for decades, but had not read Boccaccio nor Francesco Petrarch.  The lives of these three Florentines overlapped in the early thirteen hundreds.  Dante died in 1321 when Petrarch was 17 years old and Boccaccio was eight.  The two younger poets became friends after Boccaccio published The Decameron in 1352.  Together the three poets are known as The Three Crowns of Florence.  

After reading and re-reading Dante for 35 years, I read Boccaccio and Petrarch in 2015 in class on Medieval Italian Literature taught by Chelsea Pomponio at Franklin and Marshall College.  I was delighted by Boccaccio, less so by Petrarch. In 2020 as the pandemic sent the world into crisis, I went back to Boccaccio and to the sonnets of Petrarch.  Now I read both regularly, thinking about how they survived the terrible plague of their time and created stories and poems that inspired and delighted people ever since.  

My favorite book of 2021 is the book I have not yet finished: The Decameron.

In 2013, Joan Acocella reviewed the translation of The Decameron by Wayne A. Rebhorn in a long review in the New Yorker. It's a good review and gives a lot of background on the book. Here is the link.

Civilization by Niall Ferguson

Civilization: The West and the Rest is the 10th of the 15 books 

Niall Ferguson has written between 1995 and 2021

 I love one-volume histories of great spans of time.  Historians who step out of the competitive academic environment and say, in effect, "This is how the world we live in came to be" are books I read and re-read with delight.  

My top three in this category are (in publication order)

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. He says geography is the reason western culture came to dominate the world in the past half millennium.  

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, who charts the history of the species Sapiens including highs like civilization and medicine and lows like all the misery that ensued when we left hunter gatherer lives to settle down and become the servants of wheat. 

These Truths by Jill Lepore traces the history of America from its discovery to the present with a focus on women and minorities. Her stories of the lives of slaves and native Americans and the first abolitionists are amazing.

I am currently becoming a fan of Niall Ferguson. He was a guest on the "Honestly" podcast by Bari Weiss. The discussion was centered on Ferguson's latest book Doom but ranged across his long ouevre. I picked Civilization because it has a half millennial timeline form 1,500AD to the present, tracing the way western civilization came to dominate the world and why. 

The chapters are the reasons why the west dominated the rest. At the beginning of the second chapter, Science, Ferguson quotes Jesus saying "Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and give to God the things that are God's." Ferguson said the separation of Church and state is fundamental to Christian faith. 

It took the Reformation and the Renaissance to break the hold of the Catholic Church on western culture and allow science to flourish freely. Ferguson then lists 29 great innovations in science between 1530 and 1789 that happened after two millennia of relative stagnation.  

He also charts in detail the reasons China and the Ottoman Empire, both much stronger than Europe in the 1,400s, fell under European dominance by the 19th Century.  Tyrants who allowed the suppression of science and innovation are the reason both empires went from dominance to decline.  

I am barely into the second chapter and love the book.  If I get obsessed there are 14 more to go!

Thomas Jefferson and the First Draft of History

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

There is only one actual version of the past, but there are endless interpretations of events that already happened.  

In the past year, when Thomas Jefferson was getting attacked for what he did wrong, and not celebrated for what he did right, I  told myself I had to learn more about the writer of the Declaration of Independence.  

Recently I read about the protesters in Prague reading Jefferson aloud in 1989 as they protested communism.  So I started reading both Jon Meacham's biography of Jefferson and The Federalist Papers. Alexander Hamilton wrote most of the weekly articles that comprise the case for the Constitution. But I thought it important to read them together to see what Hamilton thought so important about keeping the slave states in the union that he did not propose two Americas in 1787. 

I knew that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at just 32 years old. What I did not know was that the first statesman to make a public declaration for the abolition of slavery was Thomas Jefferson in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.  

Jefferson wrote the first draft of that document, but it had to be approved by the Continental Congress. It was largely approved but about a quarter was struck out, including the anti-slavery passage. The original text is here.  

Before the Declaration of Independence, the divine right of kings was taken for granted. The Declaration of Independence said America would not follow the track nearly all of humanity followed for all of previous history.  

The freedom that Christianity promised and fucked up so badly in state churches began to become real in 1776.  It took nearly 200 years to extend freedom to all even in law, but unless the Trump Republicans throw away democracy and end what Jefferson began, America will continue to be the place the world looks for freedom. 

Without America and the people who risked their lives to found America, freedom would never have become a dream and a goal and a reality for large parts of the world.   

From 1776 to 2016, the trend in America was toward more freedom for more people.  Every other country in the world that in the same period was ruled, at oleast some of the time, by a monarch or a tyrant or totalitarian horror.  America had a peaceful transfer of power from Washington to Obama until the Trump broke the tradition.  No other country has ever done that.  

Jefferson started the 240-year march to more freedom for more people here in America and around the world.  

The Loving Resistance Fighter

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

Nearly three decades, more than a decade before Facebook was a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg's eye, Neil Postman wrote Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Postman wrote more than 20 books about education and technology.  

His most famous, a book I have read and re-read, is Amusing Ourselves to Death. That book covered the rise in communications technology in our lives and how it corroded our ability to think. It was published in 1985, before the internet rotted our brains more than ever.  Before social media, Postman was worried about a divided nation. 

His advice was to resist the worst of Technolopoly, but with a goal of preserving what is good about America.  At the end of Technopoly, Postman tells his readers to become "Loving Resistance Fighters."  

(I am transcribing a very long passage because it is so good.)

Postman says, "I can, however, offer a Talmudic principle that seems to me an effective guide for those who wish to defend themselves against the worst effects of American Technolpoly. It is this: You must try to become a loving resistance fighter. That is the doctrine, as Hillel might say. Here is the commentary: By "loving" I mean that in spite of the confusion, errors and stupidities you see around you, you must always keep close to your heart the narratives and symbols that once made the United States the hope of the world and that may yet have enough vitality to do so again. You may find it helpful to remember that, when the Chinese students in Tianamen Square gave expression to their impulse to democracy, they fashioned a papier-mache model, for the whole world to see, of the Statue of Liberty. Not a statue of Karl Marx, not the Eiffel Tower, not Buckingham Palace. The Statue of Liberty. It is impossible to say how moved Americans were by this event. But if one is compelled to ask, Is there an American soul so shrouded in cynicism and malaise created by Technopoly's emptiness that it failed to be stirred by the students reading aloud from the works of Thomas Jefferson in the streets of Prague in 1989? Americans may forget, but others do not, that dissent and protest during the Vietnam War may be the only case in history where public opinion forced a government to change its foreign policy. Americans may forget, but others do not, that Americans invented the idea of public education for all citizens and have never abandoned it. And everyone knows, including Americans, that each day, to this hour, immigrants still come to America in hopes of finding relief from one kind of deprivation or another." 

When I finished reading Technopoly a couple of weeks ago, I began reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson and reading the Federalist Papers.  Jefferson was 32 years old in 1776 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.  Alexander Hamilton was either 30 or 32 years old (his birth date is either January 11, 1755 or 1757) when he wrote most of the Federalist Papers. The brilliant young men who led America in the greatest and one of the only successful revolutions in history gave us something worth preserving. 

I want to be a Loving Resistance Fighter. 

Air Speed Versus Ground Speed on a Bicycle

 

Riding around the airstrip at Camp Adder, Iraq

One afternoon in Iraq in 2009, I decided to ride to supper from the motor pool on a day with a howling wind out of the west. I rode two miles in a crosswind then had to make a left and ride a half mile straight into that 30-mph wind.  Ten feet after the intersection I stopped.  I could not make my single-speed bike move another foot.  

A couple of Special Forces soldiers in an SUV saw me. They gave me and the bike a ride to the mess hall.  I assured them the ride back would be a "breeze."  I thanked them and went to dinner.  That sandstorm was the only time the wind completely stopped my ride.  

In the last week I was paying attention to air speed versus ground speed on my bike.  The group that I ride with has not gotten together because of rain and detours on the route.  I did my usual 25-mile solo ride that is 12.5 miles south ending in a 3-mile uphill, followed by 12.5 miles north beginning with a series of downhills covering three miles.  

The second of the four hills is the steepest.  Last Saturday Strava my top speed (ground speed) was 49mph.  Sunday it was 52mph. Today it was 48mph. As I was riding home today, I was thinking about my air speed.  

On Saturday, the wind was out of the northwest at 10 mph.  The north component of the wind was 7mph so my air speed was 56mph.  On Sunday the air was calm.  Ground and air speed equal.  Today the wind was 5mph out of the north northeast. That put the headwind a 4mph and my air speed at 52mph.  So Saturday was clearly the fastest ride down the 12 percent grade on Route 272 North.  

 Air is always apparent on a bike.

Talking About Mysteries and the Pandemic with a Writer of a Pandemic Mystery

Alison Joseph

At the beginning my recent trip to Europe I had lunch with the mystery writer Alison Joseph and her husband Tim Boon, head of research and public policy at Science Museum, London.  I met them at a science history event in 2018 and immediately became of fan of Alison's novels.  She has published more than ten.  

In 2018 I read two mysteries in which Agatha Christie is a character:  Murder Will Out and Hiddens Sins. I also read the mystery centered around Alison's fascination with the Higgs Boson and particle physics: Dying to Know.  At that point I had not read the Sister Agnes series of mysteries that began her career as a mystery writer in the 1990s.  By 2000 there were six Sister Agnes novels.  

This year I saw Sister Agnes was back in a pandemic mystery What Dark Days Seen.  It was fascinating to see a mystery solved by a person dealing with all the pandemic restrictions. Since the pandemic began I was re-reading stories from The Decameron and Love in the Time of Cholera.  Once I read the pandemic mystery I went back and The Quick and the Dead one of the early Sister Agnes novels and am now reading The Darkening Sky which is influenced by Alison's love of the Divine Comedy. 

In The Quick and the Dead Sister Agnes has a deep crisis of faith.  It is a very good mystery. I had no idea "Who done it" until the murderer was revealed. But the spiritual crisis of Sister Agnes is beautifully done. I would recommend the book even to those who are not fans of the mystery genre.  More than twenty years ago, I read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries written by Dorothy Sayers.  The mysteries were fun, but the character of Lord Peter Wimsey kept me reading until the series was finished.  

I was very glad to return to London. And it seems I picked a window between the Delta and Omicron variants that still allowed easy travel between the UK and Paris. It was my first trip on the Eurostar train through the Chunnel.  

For avid readers of mysteries, I would suggest beginning with the Agatha Christie homage books. It's fun to see Agatha herself in the story.  Anyone who has experienced a crisis of faith or wants to read about faith facing tragedy, The Quick and the Dead is fantastic.  

   

Lunch in Paris Talking NASCAR!!

Nita Wiggins, author of Civil Rights Baby and I 

at the Red Wheelbarrow bookstore in Paris

In July of this year, I met professor Nita Wiggins at the Red Wheelbarrow bookstore in Paris.  We both arrived at the store just before it opened.  She was there to sign copies of her new book Civil Rights Baby.  She was born the year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law.  

A lot of the book is about her rise through the crazy world of sports journalism in America, particularly broadcast sports journalism.  She spent several much of the first decade of this century as an on-air reporter for Fox News.  

Then in 2009 she decided to leave journalism and all of the struggles a woman of color faces in that career and move to Paris.  She currently teaches journalism at the Institut Supérieur de Formation au Journalisme in Paris, France CELSA Sorbonne in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.  She has also taught at the American University in Paris since 2009.

Earlier this month I was in Paris again so we met for lunch at a cafe near Red Wheelbarrow bookstore opposite Luxembourg Gardens.  We talked about Paris and America and living abroad and how much Nita was looking forward to seeing her parents for the Christmas Holidays after all the COVID travel restrictions.  

Then we talked about NASCAR.  Nita covered stock car racing early in the 2000s. She talked about interviewing Richard Childress, Roger Penske and other NASCAR luminaries and legends in the years she covered racing.  It was fun to hear Nita talk about covering NASCAR while it was in transition from a regional southern sport to a national sport.  I told her about being a NASCAR fan from age eight until about the time she started covering racing. The changes NASCAR was making were not for me. 

And I was quite sure we were the only people in that crowded cafe talking about American stock car racing.  

This post has links to Nita's website and info about her book.

Nita Wiggins in the Red Wheelbarrow bookstore.

September 11, 1944 in Darmstadt Brandnacht or "Fire Night"

 

A series of signs in the center of Darmstadt describe Brandnacht translated "Fire Night." On that night thousands died and more than half the city became homeless.

Fifty-seven years before terrorists attacked America on September 11, 2001, the 11th day of the 8th month was among the worst days in the long history of the city of Darmstadt.  On that night Royal Air Force Bomber Group Five attacked the city with 226, four-engined, Lancaster bombers and 14 twin-engined Mosquito bombers. They hit the medieval city center where houses there were mainly built of wood. 

DeHavilland Mosquito Bomber

Avro Lancaster Bobmber

The raid used a new technique. Instead of bombers flying along a single path across the target, the bombers would bomb along a fan of paths over the city. The intention was to spread the fire bombs for maximum effect. The attack started a fierce fire in the center and in the districts immediately to the south and east. The destruction of dwellings in this area was almost complete.

Of the population of 110,000, more than 60,000 were homeless after the attack and thousands died.  

A week later American bombers would strike the technical university in Darmstadt where research was on-going to develop V-2 rockets used to attack England.  I wrote about that previously when I wrote about my friend Cliff Almes and his family's history with Darmstadt.

Darmstadt was a notoriously pro-Nazi city almost from the moment Hitler rose to power.  It was one of the first cities in Germany to boast of being Judenrein or Jew Free.  

A Holocaust Memorial in Darmstadt Attacked Twice and Still Standing

Near the central station of Darmstadt, Germany, there is a memorial to the deportation of Jews and Gypsys (Roma) during 1942 and 1943. This memorial is located on the corner of Bismarckstrasse and Kirschenallee. 

The monument was designed in 2004 by the artist couple Ritula Fränkel and Nicholas Morris. It represents a glass cube filled with shards of glass, on which 450 names are engraved. These names represent 3400 persons from Darmstadt and the surrounding area who were deported to various concentration camps.

Three sides of the glass cube were destroyed by vandals on the night of July 9-10, 2006. In 2014 the damage was repaired but six weeks later it was destroyed again. The monument will not be removed but will remain in this historic place.

This memorial was the last place I visited before boarding a train to return to Paris and then home.  My friend Cliff said this memorial was the other end of the tracks that lead to the rail sidings in Auschwitz we visited in July.  Darmstadt was a well-known as being very Nazi as soon as Hitler rose to power.