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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        Neil Gussman

        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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        Neil Gussman

        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]