Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and Breaking Barriers in American Journalism by Nita Wiggins. Book 21 of 2022

Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and 

Breaking Barriers in American Journalism by Nita Wiggins

Nita Wiggins was born in Georgia just at the time People of Color in America became truly equal under the law--the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Her book Civil Rights Baby is the story of her life in an America that took a big step closer to fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence of equality for all. 

Throughout her childhood, Nita is an earnest high-achieving student with a goal of becoming a journalist, specifically reporting on sports in Dallas and about the Dallas Cowboys.  Her path to Dallas through Georgia and West Virginia was not easy, but Wiggins tells a tale of achievement and growth, until her dream is realized in 1999 and she arrives at KDFW in Dallas--a reporter and weekend anchor covering the Dallas Cowboys.

At this point in the book, the trouble begins and the villains become vivid.  The latter half of the book is her fight against bosses and colleagues who undermine her and throw obstacles in her path.  

But in the end, her story takes a turn that I could not imagine in an American TV sports reporter. As part of her work in Dallas, she covers Texas-native Lance Armstrong during the years he dominated the Tour de France. Wiggins falls in love with France and Paris and becomes proficient in French. When KDFW ends her contract, Wiggins went to Paris, applied for and landed a job as a professor of journalism at  l'Ecole Superieure de Journalisme de Paris.

Since 2009 she has been teaching journalism in Paris and doing other consulting work.

The book is full of stories of her interviewing luminaries of the sporting world, including Muhammed Ali, Evander Holyfield, stars of Dallas Cowboys from her era and from the past, some of the greats of NASCAR, and many others.  

Early in her career, Wiggins interviewed Rosa Parks. The book ends with a lovely play on words that a city needs parks to be peaceful. Paris has enough parks, Wiggins says, Dallas does not have enough: "Dallas also need Parks--enough people with the tenacity to change the system as Rosa Parks had done." 

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Two previous posts about meeting Nita at my favorite bookstore in Paris, the Red Wheelbarrow,  and talking NASCAR at lunch.

First twenty books of 2022:

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Ukrainian in Paris Talks About Her Family

 

I walked around a corner onto Boulevard St. Germain and saw a sign saying that the little park behind the fence had been part of a refugee for Ukrainians since 1937.  The official name is Square Tarass Chevtchenko (see below) it is also called "L'angle" or "the corner." 

The sign on fence (above) says

The corner of Blvd. Saint-Germain and and rue des Saints-Peres is known by its proximite to the Greco-Catholic Ukrainian cathedral and Tarass Chevtchenko Square has become since the second half of the 20th Century a place of important ,meetings in the immigration of Ukrainians to France. Dispossessed of the rights, their identities, their land by foreign powers, the Ukrainians emigrated to France in dozens of thousands where their work has created and incontestable heritage of their social, cultural, economic and political history.

Inside the park, I talked to a woman with her son waiting to go into the Church next door.  She told me that she had moved to France more than a decade ago with her son. She was from Bucha. Two months ago she was able to get her mother to Paris, but her father is still in Bucha.  She is hoping to get her father out of Ukraine. I am not using her name because she wants to remain anonymous for the safety of her father.

Statue of Tarass Chevtchenko

Entrance of the Cathedral

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Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (Ukrainian: Тарас Григорович Шевченко; 9 March 1814 – 10 March 1861), also known as Kobzar Taras, or simply Kobzar (a kobzar is a bard in Ukrainian culture), was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist and ethnographer. His literary heritage is regarded to be the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature and, to a large extent, the modern Ukrainian language though it is different from the language of his poems. Shevchenko is also known for his many masterpieces as a painter and an illustrator.

He was a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts. Though he had never been the member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in 1847 Shevchenko was politically convicted for explicitly promoting the independence of Ukraine, writing poems in the Ukrainian language, and ridiculing members of the Russian Imperial House. Contrary to the members of the society who did not understand that their activity led to the idea of the independent Ukraine, according to the secret police, he was the champion of independence.

Rome-ing The World, from Kansas, to Iraq, to Kosovo, to the Eternal City

 

Melanie Sanders Meier

The last time I saw Melanie Sanders Meier in person was in 2009 when we were both deployed to Camp Adder, Iraq.  She was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Kansas Army National Guard and was working as an Inspector General on the sprawling air base in southern Iraq.  

This morning we had coffee together in Trastavere, Rome, where she has been a college student since 2015. She messaged me on Facebook on yesterday to say she lived in Rome. It turned out to be not far from where I was staying.  

I knew that after she returned from Iraq (her second deployment) she ran for the Kansas state legislature where she served until 2014.  She then left politics and deployed again, this time to the staff of K4, the peacekeeping force in Kosovo.  She was assigned to be second assistant to the commander who was Italian. In fact, all of the twenty people working in her section were Italian except her.  She loved working with the Italian command staff.

At the end of the deployment, she found that she could use the GI Bill benefits she earned from post-9/11 deployments to go to college in Trastevere.  With the housing benefit from the GI Bill and low tuition, she was able to live comfortably in Rome. Next month she will finally complete the communication degree she has been working on since 2015 at the American University in Rome, and in no rush to finish.  

It will be a bachelors degree which she can add to another bachelors degree and two masters degrees. Melanie attended the Command and General Staff College and completed a masters degree in Strategic Studies at the US Army War College in 2015. She worked on the courses at night in Kosovo. 

She may stay in Rome. Melanie has considered Tunisia among possible places to live; she has never lived in Africa. We talked about Spain as a place many American and British expats live. America is not on the list of places where she wants to live. 

Melanie plans to travel Europe after graduation.  It's what college kids do.......

Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt: Book 20 of 2022

This book is on my list because it was the subject of the Virtual Reading Group at the Hannah Arendt Center for politics and Humanities at Bard College.  I had tried reading Kant's philosophy and made the 200-year-old joke, "I just Kant......."

But Hannah Arendt writing about Kant is a lot more interesting, at least to me, than the writings of the reclusive German philosopher himself.  This book is a sort of stand in for what should have been Book 3 of The Life of the Mind, which the VRG read earlier this year. 

Arendt wrote Book 1, Thinking, and Book 2, Willing, in the years preceding her death on Thursday, 4 December 1975. On the preceding Sunday, 30 November, she put a sheet of paper in her typewriter and wrote Judging. She also wrote two epigraphs.  

The Life of the Mind was published posthumously in 1977. Since her death, Arendt scholars have wondered what would be in the final book.  Judging was clearly very important to Arendt, especially in the context of politics.  I would love to have read Book 3. The things she wrote about judging were lucid and delightful.  In a 1971 lecture she discussed the difference between thinking and judging: 

The faculty of judging particulars (as Kant discovered it), the ability to say, "this is wrong," "this is beautiful," etc.,is not the same as the faculty of thinking. Thinking deals with invisibles, with representations of things that are absent; judging always concerns particulars and things close at hand. But the two are interrelated in a way similar to the way consciousness and conscience are interconnected.  If thinking, the two-in-one soundless dialogue, actualizes the difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby results in conscience as its by-product, then judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances, where I am never alone and always much too busy to be able to think.  the manifestation of the wind of thought is no knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And indeed this may prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments when the chips are down.

The third book of The Life of the Mind would have been brilliant.

First nineteen books of 2022:

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree: Book 19 of 2022

For more than a year, I have read this little book a page or two at a time.  It is a review of Ancient Greek grammar for Francophone students.  Each page I read had me looking up a dozen words in French.  The Greek was easier because every grammar in every language uses common words with regular declensions as examples.   

So it was easy to puzzle out the noun being declined or the verb being conjugated.  

I occasionally read books like this because if I read a French Grammar or an Ancient Greek Grammar written in English, I would be thinking in English.  Reading about Greek in French keeps me from reverting to English meanings.  I can look at French in terms of Greek and vice versa.  

Is this method effective?  I don't know.  But it presents me with linguistic puzzles I would not see any other way.  

First eighteen books of 2022:

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

A Veteran Talks About His Family at the Dick Winters Leadership Memorial

Dick Winters Leadership Memorial, Ephrata, Pennsylvania

On Memorial Day I visit the grave and the memorial statue of Major Dick Winters who commanded Easy Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, from D-Day to the end of World War II.  I wear my Army Dress Blue Uniform, one of two days each year I wear it--the other is Veterans Day.

This year, a couple about my age were walking by and took a picture of me in front of the statue. We talked for a while about the draft, national service, and  what an amazing guy Dick Winters was.  As we spoke another veteran showed up. He wore a hat indicating he served in Korea during the Cold War.  As it turned out from 1962-64.  When the couple left, the veteran, Don Kitchen, said he wanted to tell me a story, but he needed to sit.  

Donald Kitchen

There are commemorative bricks in front of the statue. Don pointed at the row of bricks near where I was standing.  Four were men with the name Kitchen:

Don talked briefly about his Dad the WWI veteran and a little more about his brothers who fought in WWII. One was a paratrooper, the other flew 35 missions in a B-24 Liberator bomber.

But he really wanted to tell me about going to the 50th anniversary of the landing at Normandy on June 6.  He went as a member of the Pocket Testament League, a group based in Lititz, Pa., that distributes the Gospel of John and other Bible books to soldiers and students and others around the world.  

As he talked about the ceremony, he mentioned the many world leaders were at the ceremony, including the American President at the time, whom he referred to only as "Clinton." 

In 1994, a chorus of Conservatives and Evangelicals said President Clinton was unfit for office. Character was all that mattered and Bill Clinton was a draft dodger and had paramours.  The Falwells, the Grahams, Dobson, Robertson and lesser lights of Christendom condemned Clinton incessantly. 

The Perfect Moral Relativist

In 1994, the conservatives, Don Kitchen among them, were right about character. When Edmund Burke defined conservatism the character of the leader was at the center of what was necessary for a well-run city, state or country.  

So I asked Don about Trump and utter lack of character he demonstrated by cheating in business, paying off porn stars, saying on camera he was entitled to grab women wherever and whenever he wanted to, and then he bragged on TV about dodging the draft: according to Trump, Don and I and all who served during the draft were idiots. 

Don responded that Trump did "have some problems" (the same problems as Clinton, plus more, with the amplifier turned up to 11), "but his policies are pure gold."

Fifty years ago, I heard from Evangelicals I served with that Moral Relativism was the poison that caused the wars in Europe, the rise of the Nazis and the Commies, and that those who follow the Gospel believed in an absolute standard of righteousness.  

My first roommate on active duty, Don Brandt, told me that.  I would have sworn on a stack of his Bibles that he believed what he said.  But like Don Kitchen, when we talked in 2020, Don Brandt supported Trump completely. His immorality was not an issue. 

The moral relativism that was the greatest danger to America in the last century according to conservative Christians, is the public position of Trump-worshipping Americans who call themselves Christians. 

The Netanyahus: A Funny Novel About A Job Interview Gone Very Wrong. Book 18 of 2022

 A couple of weeks ago, I listened to an interview of American novelist  Joshua Cohen on the Ha'aretz Weekly podcast. Host Allison Kaplan Sommer talked to Cohen about receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Ficton for his novel, and learning about the award while he was in Israel.  

Of that coincidence, Cohen said, “If I thought that I was going to win the Pulitzer for a book called ‘The Netanyahus’ I would have to be crazy to want to be in Israel when that happened.” The interview occurred shortly after Cohen arrived in Israel for the Jerusalem International Book Forum and Writers Festival. 

Cohen said he was still in shock that he had won the biggest literary prize in the United States for a novel “that has characters in it that most Americans can't pronounce their names.”  

Its main character is the brilliant but embittered Professor Benzion Netanyahu, best-known today as the father of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Benzion Netanyahu in the book (and in life) was a demanding, pushy, malcontent.  Cohen said that as he was writing he “kept on thinking of the line in ‘The Big Lebowski’ where the Dude says to Walter: ‘You’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole.’ And that was Benzion Netanyahu."

The other main character, Bezion's opposite and foil, is Ruben Blum, the only Jewish faculty member in the fictional college in upstate New York where Netanyahu comes for a job talk.  Blum is a too-willing-to-please stereotype of a Jewish professor. Cohen insists Blum is in no way based on the brilliant Harold Bloom whom Cohen was able to spend a lot of time with before he died in 2019. But it was Bloom's meeting Benzion and his family in the late 1950s that inspired the book.

Two of my favorite chapters are the letters Blum receives about Benzion Netanyahu.  One is glowing to the point of radiance. The other is from an Israeli colleague and is the scathing letter we have all fantasized writing about a thoroughly terrible colleague.

The ending is lovely--the comedy reaches its slapstick peak, then the novel ends. The afterword explains the genesis of the novel and talks about the lives of all of the Netanyahus.  

I read the novel in a few days. It is so much fun.

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By the way, the long title of the novel has an 18th Century length and feel:

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. (20 words) 

An actual title of an18th Century novel:  

Love And Madness. A Story Too True. In A Series Of Letters Between Parties Whose Names Would Perhaps Be Mentioned Were They Less Well Known Or Less Lamented. (27 words)

First seventeen books of 2022:

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis: Book 17 of 2022

I loved Perelandra by C.S. Lewis when I first read it almost forty years ago. I re-read it in the 90s, but have not re-read it in this century till now.  It certainly confirmed for me that one of the delights of re-reading in late life is finding so much of the book new and surprising.  From the moment the hero confronts the villain, all the action was new to me. 

The occasion for re-reading the book was the publication of a new book by my friend Jim Como about Perelandra titled:

Mystical Perelandra: My Lifelong Reading of C.S. Lewis and His Favorite Book. 

As the subtitle asserts, Perelandra was Lewis' favorite book among the 39 published during his lifetime--several more were published posthumously.  

My friend Cliff and I are driving from Darmstadt, Germany, to Copenhagen next month and plan to read Jim's book on the trip. We also agreed to re-read Perelandra before the trip.

In the book, Lewis imagines Venus as a beautiful world of floating islands.  The hero of the novel is Elwin Ransom, a philologist. He is sent to the world by angels to save the world, but not exactly knowing what to do.  For much of the beginning of the novel, Ransom swims the towering seas of Perelandra, then eats the beautiful and wildly varied fruit on the floating islands.

It is a world that is just beginning with its own green-skinned Adam and Eve.  At the opening of the novel there is no sin in the world.  Sin appears in the form of the physicist Edwin Rolles Weston. He invents a spaceship capable of interplanetary travel and flies to the unspoiled world with his soul already taken over by Satan.  By the middle of the novel the soul Weston is mostly gone from his body. Ransom starts referring to Weston as the Un-man. 

The end of the novel is a fist fight on land and in the sea that ends in an underground cavern with a bottomless pit of fire! It is a fun story that finally ends with the crowning of the King and Queen of the new world. After fifty pages of fast-paced fights and action, the final scene is stillness and formality.  

Although Perelandra  is a re-telling of the temptation story from the first book of the Hebrew Bible, the book is definitely not a Jewish story.  All of its theology is deeply and explicitly Christian.  

If you Google search Perelandra, the first and third links have nothing to do with the book.  The first is Perelandra Natural Food Center in Brooklyn, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge. The third is the Perelandra Center for Nature Research, Ltd. The unspoiled world of floating islands makes a much more vivid picture of natural perfection than the vague description in Genesis.  I emailed the store in Brooklyn to ask about the name and got the following reply:

Hi Neil,

Yes it is! The founder of the store was a big fan of that book.

Best,

Allison

First sixteen books of 2022:

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Flying to Kyiv from New York on February 24--The Flight Ended in Warsaw

Today at #RazomforUkriane, I worked with a Nikita.  He is a 36-year-old project manager for a U.S.-based utility company. As we assembled IFAKs (Individual First Aid Kits) he told me that on February 24 (The day the Russian Army invaded Ukraine) he was on a flight from New York to Kyiv. As the plane neared Ukraine it was diverted and landed in Warsaw.

"I was going to Kiev on Feb 24 to see Louis CK stand up concert which was supposed to be on February 25," he said. "I also do stand up comedy when I get a chance in my personal life and since war started we had a charity concert to raise funds which we sent to Ukraine." He has I also donated funds directly to people I know in Ukraine and other organizations.

Nikita spent the next week in Poland helping the refugees who began crossing the border into Poland within hours of the start of the war.  At one point he rented a car and drove refugees from the border to where they knew someone or wherever they wanted to go.  He helped with food and supplies, then returned to America and his job. 

He is 36 years old.  He emigrated to America from the Russian Federation in 2000 with his family when he was 14. "I am from Russia, but my heart is with Ukraine," he said.  "I have lots of friends in Ukraine and I love that country with all my heart and I don't support Russia in any way and I am 100% with the Ukraine."

Nikita makes Instagram videos in English and in Russian under the name: forced2disagree.  

"The videos are titled "Less is More" and are they are about people around the world," he said. "I tell a short story about a person that I personally met or know. And I can't wait to go to Ukraine and document many stories there and help in other ways as well."

 

Talking Musicals, Radio, War Movies and Tanks at #RazomforUkraine

 

I arrived late for my shift at Razom today. PA Route 222 stopped for miles outside of Ephrata.  I slithered off the highway in the breakdown lane and got to the PA Turnpike by a half-dozen back roads I know.  

Today was a small group, just eight of us in the afternoon.  Together with the morning crew we made many hundreds of Individual First Aid Kits (IFAKs). 

I spent most of the afternoon stuffing Halo chest seals into the kit at the beginning of the line. It's sad to think of the need for these bandages, but good to be able to help get them where they are needed.  

Toward the end of the day, I worked opposite Joey (in the foreground of the lower picture).  He works in radio doing voice overs and running several radio-related businesses.  We talked about working in radio, then in theater, then he told me he had performed at the Fulton Theater in Lancaster when he was going to Temple University.  

We joked a lot about "Footloose." I said it was one of the worst movies I had ever seen, but with the best soundtrack.  Joey had been to an annual festival in Payson, Utah, the town where the movie was filmed. The town is called Bomont in the movie. I told Joey I had seen the musical version of "Footloose" in the Fulton Theater and really liked it--the musical was much better than the movie and the songs were even better live.

We then talked about war movies, which ones we liked and which ones we didn't.  We are both fans of the HBO Series "Band of Brothers"and "The Pacific."   

Several of us will be back tomorrow. Part of a larger crew.  The biggest crew is always on Saturday.  

The Federalist Papers: Book 16 of 2022

 

During the past year and a few months I have been reading The Federalist Papers, 85 essays by Alexander Hamilton (51 essays), James Madison (29) and John Jay (5). They were published in the state of New York under the pseudonym Publius in 1787-88 to convince New Yorkers and the rest of the United States to adopt the Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation.

The work was successful. The Constitution was adopted. George Washington became

the first American President. Convincing people an executive branch was necessary was at the center of the argument of the Federalist.

“Those politicians and statesmen who have been the most celebrated for the soundness of their principles and for the justice of their views, have declared in favor of a single Executive and a numerous legislature. They have … considered energy as the most necessary qualification of the former, and … the latter as best adapted to deliberation and wisdom….” (Hamilton, #70) 

Restraining the power of the executive was built into the Constitution:

“[A]ccumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” (Madison, #47)

“Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” (Madison, #10) 

The rationale for the Constitution and central government is in Federalist 51:

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” (Madison, #51) 

“[W]hatever fine declarations may be inserted in any constitution respecting it, must altogether depend on public opinion, and on the general spirit of the people and of the government.” (Hamilton, # 84) 

“The house of representatives .. can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as the great mass of society. This has always been deemed one of the strongest bonds by which human policy can connect the rulers and the people together … but without which every government degenerates into tyranny.” (Madison, #57) 

Government by the people is part of the argument:

”The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid bases of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority.” (Hamilton, #22; his emphasis) 

“The danger from legislative usurpations, which, by assembling all power in the same hands, must lead to the same tyranny as is threatened by executive usurpations.” (Madison, #48) 

”We have heard of the impious doctrine in the old world, that the people were made for kings, not kings for the people. Is the same doctrine to be revived in the new, in another shape…? (Madison, #45) 

”An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy so that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.” (Madison, #58) 

And the reason our Constitution is relatively brief:

“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.” (Madison, #62) 

“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those that are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” (Madison, #45) 

And the need for a national army is part of the argument:

“The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.” (Madison, #46) 

“A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral.” (Hamilton, #11) (Does the world view our present foreign policy as robust?) 

“[The] danger will be evidently greater where the whole legislative trust is lodged in the hands of one body of men…” (Madison, #63)

During the time I was reading this book, I also read a biography of Thomas Jefferson, the book 1776 about that fateful year in American history, Prisoners of Geography about the incredible blessings of the America's place on the globe, and Civilization which describes America's path to becoming a superpower from its founding. Links to these books are below.

Learning about Hamilton and Madison as I read The Federalist changed my view of the essays in the book.  Hamilton had strong royalist tendencies.  During most of Washington's Presidency, Hamilton was involved in intrigues against Jefferson.  Hamilton wanted a strong connection between America and the English and also wanted the American nation to have a monarchial elite.  Jefferson fought against Hamilton. 

The matter was decided in fact when Washington refused to run for a third term and refused all the trappings of monarchy.  Since Washington's Presidency was followed by John Adams, Jefferson and Madison, there was no way monarchy could take hold. And then Hamilton was killed by Aaron Burr, ending the royalist faction.  

It is also strange to think that at its founding, America was a place where dense and logical argument would affect public opinion. 

First fifteen books of 2022:

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Making Jokes While Packing Medical Supplies for Ukraine

 

Four days last week, I was working in a warehouse in New Jersey, part of a team of #RazomforUkraine volunteers assembling Individual First Aid Kits (IFAKs). In total we packed more than 8,000 IFAKs last week for shipment to Ukraine during the week. We work hard filling the small packs with medical supplies, but we also have fun while we work.

On Wednesday last week, I was refilling boxes with a dozen different kinds of medical supplies while ten people assembled IFAKs.  A new volunteer noticed me grabbing boxes of supplies from different places and said, "Do you have x-ray vision or something?  How do you know what is in all these boxes?"  

I laughed and said I was there enough to know where everything is.  Which led to a the question, "What superpower would you want?  Pick one."

We then got into a discussion of the social downside of having super powers: other people get envious; you lose friends; your family starts to wonder why you are so special....

On Friday at the end of the day we were setting up three lines for assembling IFAKs.  As we lined up the supplies and boxes on the pallets, we started talking about the lines competing about who is fastest.  I was telling one of the guys that if this were the Army, the lines would definitely compete with each other and start insulting each other--saying their line was the best.  We started making up things the lines would say to each other.

On Saturday, one of the volunteers who I have worked with for weeks saw me opening boxes of cloth tape and asked if I was qualified for that job.  I told him that in the 1970s when the Army first got Photocopiers, I had to attend a three-hour class to be a qualified photocopier operator.  Once I had done that, I was definitely qualified to open rolls of tape.

Each day I volunteer, I leave the warehouse tired and happy to be part of doing to help Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invaders.  And most days, I am smiling about how much fun it is to be part of a team with a mission doing good.

Victory Day, May 9, Is Also the Day I Broke 13 of 40 Bones

May 9 is the date Russia and several former Soviet countries celebrate victory over the Nazis.  Nazi Germany unconditionally surrendered very late on May 8 which was May 9 in Moscow, which is why the rest of the Allied nations celebrate VE Day (Victory in Europe) on May 8.  

Which meant May 9 was both very good--defeated Nazis are the best Nazis--and also very bad, because May 9 is the date of my two worst bicycle accidents.  

On May 9, 2007, I broke ten bones in a 50mph crash and flown to the hospital by MEDEVAC. The story is here. On May 9, 2020, I splintered my left elbow in a low-speed crash. The surgeon had to break my lower arm to fix my upper arm.  So a third of the forty bones I have broken, I broke on May 9 on a bicycle.  

I broke four other bones in four other bicycle crashes for a total of 17.  Cars, motorcycles, football, fights and missile explosions add up 23 for a total 40 broken bones in 69 years--fewer than one per year.

Before publishing this post, I had to listen to the news from Ukraine today.  I was worried I would hear about Russia marking the anniversary with some new atrocity.  Russian President Vladimir Putin made a speech saying the war he started against Ukraine is to defend Russia.  

The Russians staged the annual parade in Moscow to showoff their military prowess. The big display always had a hollow ring, but this year with the string of defeats Ukraine inflicted on the Russian army, this year's parade sound like a defeated boxer saying "He didn't knock me out."

If I were a superstitious guy, I would stay home and watch movies today. But I will ride with my friends. There are only 365 days in a year, and more than 25,000 days in a life as long as mine. Dates are going to repeat.