"He's Got No Damn Common Sense" said Sergeants of Soldiers, But It's True of All of Us

By the time Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense in 1775, 

the idea of common sense was already disappearing. 

"He's got no damn common sense," is a lament I heard all through my Cold War military career in the 1970s and 80s.  Frustrated sergeants, including me, lamented dealing with soldiers who knew nothing about wrenches or lieutenants who got lost on every field exercise.  

In Germany in 1977, I got a new replacement crewman named Brian. Every new tank crewman starts as a driver, which presumes some mechanical ability.  Brian had never owned a car and never used wrenches before joining my crew.  He became a legend (in the worst way) when I had to show him how to use an open-end wrench in a tight space.  

The head of an open-end wrench is slightly offset. You turn turn a bolt a few degrees, turn the wrench over and turn a few more.  It's slow, but you can remove or tighten a bolt in a tight or covered space by flipping the wrench.  This process mystified Brian.  He got it eventually, but his fellow crew members made merciless fun of him for not knowing how an open-end wrench worked.  

Knowing or catching on quickly to this kind of process is referred to as having common sense.  At the time, I was sure Brian lacked common sense.  

But in her most important philosophical book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt says that by the time Brian was accused of lacking common sense, the whole culture had lost what was common sense across the world.  

Arendt says that the rise of modern science, beginning with Galileo's invention of the telescope, showed we could no longer trust our senses.  

Common Sense took the experience of our five senses and gave them a unified frame of interpretation.  But Galileo showed us that what our senses can be completely wrong even when we simply look at the night sky.  In her book Being Wrong Kathryn Schulz explains how thoroughly wrong we can be when all of our senses tell us we are right. 

"Step outside...in someplace truly dark: the Himalayas, say, or Patagonia, or the north rim of the Grand Canyon. If you look up in such a place, you will observe the sky above you is vast and vaulted, its darkness pulled taut from horizon to horizon and perforated by innumerable stars.  Stand there long enough and you'll see this whole vault turning overhead, like the slowest of the tumblers in the most mysterious of locks. Stand there even longer and it will dawn on you that your own position in the spectacle is curiously central. The apex of the heavens is directly above you. And the land you are standing on--land that unlike the firmament is quite flat, and unlike the stars is quite stationary--stretches out in all directions from a midpoint that is you. 

"It is, of course, an illusion: almost everything we see and feel out there on our imaginary Patagonia porch is misleading.  The sky is neither vaulted nor revolving around us, the land is neither flat nor stationary, and, sad to say, we ourselves are not the center of the cosmos. Not only are these things wrong, they are canonically wrong. They are to the intellect what the Titanic is to the ego: a permanent puncture wound, a reminder of the sheer scope at which we can err. What is strange, and not a little disconcerting, is that we can commit such fundamental mistakes by simply stepping outside and looking up."

Arendt says that when we cannot trust the most obvious perception of our sense, we eventually lose the common sense that still is valued in its absence a half millennia later. If physics on a cosmic scale says we are wrong when we perceive the sun circling east to west every day, it's worse at the atomic level.  Who can really believe an oak table is as much empty space as the night sky.  The solid hardwood of every oak plank at the atomic level protons, neutrons and electrons and a whole bunch of nothing. And those atoms are strung together held by charge with mostly empty space in every direction.  

Poor Brian could blame every physicist from Galileo Gallilei to Albert Einstein to Richard Feynman to Roger Penrose for proving that nothing that his senses experience is as it appears. 

The Cold War sergeants' lament that "none of my soldiers has a lick of common sense" was more true than he knew.  The sad thing is, that old sergeant did not have much common sense in the traditional sense either. 

Resiliency Training Looks So Different in 2021 Compared to 2015

 

Howard Lloyd, me and Mike Pavasco

Two of the people I talked with at the welcome home for the 28th Combat Aviation Brigade were Howard Lloyd and Mike Pavasco. Lloyd was the commander of the brigade during the deployment. Mike was one of the sergeants who kept the brigade network in operation.  

Both were in the unit when I left five years ago.  Colonel Lloyd was the executive officer of the brigade.  Pavasco kept the network in operation.

In 2014 or 2015, Mike Pavasco was also in charge of resiliency training for the company we were in. He is a very upbeat guy.  He asked me to be one of the presenters for the training.  I turned him down.  I had no other choice at the time, I did not believe the training would do any good.

I left the Army the following year in 2016.  When I met up with Mike at the party, it occurred to me I could not only be one of the resiliency training sergeants now, I really have come to believe in the program.

It's almost crazy to think how far I have come in changing my view of meditation, yoga and balance in life. In 2014 I had just finished an Ironman Triathlon and was an advocate for an out-of-balance life focused on athletic goals.

While I was training for the Ironman, when I had an injury and a physical therapist said, "Listen to your body" I would think, 'My body is a whiny little bitch. I'm not listening.'

Now when a PT says "Listen to your body" I listen to her and do (or not) what my body says.

 The pandemic interrupted my yoga practice, when I returned last month I injured my knee--the one that is still me, not metal.  But I have meditated every day for more than three years--even days of injury and surgery and recovery.  

Resiliency also involves spiritual practice. The path to peace for most of us is spiritual, even for those who have no religious practice.  

Along with adding meditation and yoga to my life, I had a huge spiritual upheaval in my life that led to peace.  The winner of the 2016 Presidential election turned my spiritual world upside down.  Christians across America first supported and then worshipped a man who bragged about breaking commandments, who is the inverse of the Beatitudes.  Conservative Catholics and Evangelicals decided a vain liar was their man. They even made up stories about how he was a modern-day King Cyrus.

Every white supremacist, militia member and Nazi wannabe in America celebrated. Steve Bannon--the head of the white nationalist website Breitbart--got an office in the White House.  The following summer I visited Auschwitz and Yad Vashem and came home to Nazis marching in Charlottesville chanting "Jews will not replace us."

I joined a synagogue a few months later.  During World War II, 400 million self-described Christians lived between the Pyrenees and Ural mountains. About one in a thousand helped Jews, 999 of a thousand looked the other way or joined in the looting, dispossession and murder of the Holocaust.  Nazis were now "fine people" in America.  

I thought things would get much worse than they have.  But whatever happens, I have peace knowing the Synagogue is the place I should be.

Resiliency training makes sense to me now.  It touches every dimension of life and can really help in a difficult world. 

Formosa Betrayed--A Chronicle of a Cold War Failure

Formosa Betrayed by George H. Kerr

 The book Formosa Betrayed, George Kerr, traces the history of the island nation that has been in dispute among nations vying for control of the South China Sea for more than a century. Taiwan came under Japanese control in 1895. At the end of World War II, Taiwan was neglected and betrayed by America and other allied governments. 

I am barely a tenth of the way through the book but already feeling the same deep sadness I felt when an utterly corrupt American President sold out the Kurds to the Turks to protect his hotel in Istanbul. Just after the betrayal, I heard an Israeli Rabbi saying, “Trump could betray us just as quickly.” 

As a Jew, I already felt connected to the struggle of Taiwan to maintain identity and independence when vastly outnumbered. In an echo of current politics, the U.S. ambassador to China near the end of World War II was forced out by an arrogant, incompetent Republican general who used his military rank and connections to circumvent the state department. 

The rogue general Patrick Hurley was eventually pushed out, but Republicans backed by Christian missionary organizations started lobbying to give power over Taiwan to General Chiang. Chiang was corrupt and a timid military leader but was favorable to the missionary groups. So, a cabal of Republicans and Christians worked against the best interests of Taiwan and its people.  Soong Mei-ling, the wife of General Chiang, spoke fluent English and was educated in Methodist schools. She used her Christian connections to hide the rampant corruption of her husband.

The ugly effects of conservative Republicans and conservative Christians working together is something that seems to crop up everywhere on the underside of American domestic and foreign policy.

I'll be writing more as I learn more.

Reunion at a Welcome Home for Task Force Anvil

Dale Shade and I at the Welcome Home for Task Force Anvil

Dale and I in 2009 with Matt (next to me) and Andy

Today I began what will be a very Army weekend by going to a Welcome Home Party for Task Force Anvil.  The unit I went to Iraq with in 2009-10 went back to the Middle East last year, returning a few weeks ago. 

Shortly after I arrived, Dale Shade said hello and asked me to have a seat with him at the bar.  He was the sergeant in charge of public affairs on the last deployment. For the last four months of the deployment, I worked in the same office as Dale and Matt.  The deployment was not going well, the staff officers in brigade headquarters were at each other's throats. Dale had to listen to complaints from frustrated officers who needed someone to blame or just to bitch at. He was the lightning rod that kept the rest of us from getting hit with the thunderbolts from the hastily built headquarters we called the plywood palace.   

I had not seen Dale since I left the Army five years ago. It was fun to catch up.  And strange to see a former sergeant with shoulder-length hair.  

The original post about the public affairs detachment in Iraq is here.

Are Your Kids Religious?

 

A friend who is amused by my own wandering spiritual path in the last half decade asked about the faith/religion/spirituality of my six kids.  

My response was a smirk that turned into a laugh.  

"Six kids, six spiritual paths.  That's for sure."

Right now (things could change as I am writing this) five of my kids are some flavor of Christianity and one is an agnostic, possibly agnostic about being an agnostic. In age order here is what I know as of now.

My oldest daughter is a fairly conservative Presbyterian who attends a Church near her home where the pastor is her Godfather.  My friend Stanley Morton and I both were Evangelicals in the 80s and became Presbyterians in the early 2000s. Stanley went on to become a Presbyterian pastor. Stanley is the Godfather of both of my birth daughters and my youngest son.

(Both of birth daughters attended various churches with me as kids and very occasionally went to the Unitarian Universalist Church. Their mom described herself as a lapsed Unitarian and did not often exercise her right in the divorce decree to take the girls to her church.)

My stepdaughter is tolerant and accepting of people of religious faith, but does not believe in God herself and is also the calmest of my six kids. I don't know if there is correlation or causation. When the girls were all in high school, my daughters were insanely competitive.  My stepdaughter was between them in age and sometimes between them in fact, the calming influence that kept them from killing each other.

My younger daughter was baptized into the Catholic Church last weekend.  My youngest son and I flew out to see the ceremony.  The Church in which the ceremony took place is theologically conservative. She is the only one of my six kids to go on a Birthright trip or do anything Jewish.  She also was deeper into Eastern mysticism than the other kids and at one point seemed convinced of biological determinism--we have no free will, our genes determine our actions. She now attends mass three times per week.

My adopted daughter grew up Catholic, attending a Catholic school and Church.  She is currently a conservative Evangelical as is her husband.  

My older adopted son could be described as the most religious of the kids in the sense that he has been baptized and converted three times.  He has religious moments and hours, but then returns to living the "chill" life he prefers.  

My youngest son attends Church when he is with any of his siblings who attend Church but does not when he is on his own.  He likes his Godfather Stanley's Church the best and attends there when he is in Richmond. 

But wait! There's more!

Having said six kids, I realized even the number is not definite.  In addition to the three birth kids and three adopted kids, we had a host daughter who lived with us for almost two years on a break between college and medical school. She had arrived at Franklin and Marshall College as a freshman not a believer. By graduation, she was the head of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at the college. Her family was not pleased.  But they were reconciled and she went to medical school. This week she begins a three-year residency in Georgia and considers medicine her ministry.

Voting While I Still Can

 

I voted yesterday. I dropped off my mail-in ballot at the Lancaster City offices. Two police officers on duty at the entrance watched me drop my ballot in the box.

Since 2016 I have wondered if the next election I vote in will be the last free and fair election.  

Russians did not know in 1991 that the presidential election would be the first, last and only free election they would ever have.  

Germans voted in 1932 and did not vote again until after their country was in ruins and under the control of the countries that defeated Naziism. For East Germany, they would wait until after the collapse of the Soviet Union to vote again.

I believe the 2022 elections will be as corrupt as the Republicans can get away with, but they will do their authoritarian worst in 2024.  

Last week I was talking to a group of friends who are mostly independents. I was defending my loyalty to the Democratic Party. I tried to stay numerical. The most recent numbers say 40% of Americans identify as independent vs. 26% R and 31% D. And yet those 40% of people vote almost entirely with one party or another and have no political power as a bloc. 

Being an independent means having no power. Being a party member evokes that memorable line from "The Wire" when the retired mayor explains to the hopeful candidate what the mayor's job is like: 

"Every morning I sit at my desk. They bring in a big, steaming bowl of shit and I have to eat every bite." 

For a former military, fiscally conservative, pro-Israel voter like me, I find something to disagree with every day in being a Democrat. But the alternative is the orange-god-king worshipping racists who want to burn democracy and rule from the Redneck Versailles in Florida. 

So I will be happily loyal to the Democratic Party and support everything I can and hope national debt does not become a multiple of the our GDP.

"Klara and the Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro, a Review

Spoiler Alert!! 

I am going to talk about the end of the novel. If you haven’t read it, I don’t want to ruin the read for you. 

Klara and the Sun, the new novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, is sad, beautiful and haunting, as are all of his eight novels. Each of the eight novels are different in setting and characters and time period. His main character can be an English butler, a single mom in post-war Nagasaki, a teenager raised to be an organ donor, an old couple in medieval England losing their memories as they wander in search of their son, or an aging Japanese painter remembering his life after World War II. 

In Klara and the Sun, the protagonist is an “Artificial Friend” always referred to as an AF*. She is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) robot companion for a teenage girl named Josie. At the beginning of the novel, we see Klara in the store that sells AFs and other household items. She is very curious about her world, more curious than other AFs, even the new B3 AFs that have recently been added to the store’s inventory. 

We see the world through Klara’s eyes from within the store until she is purchased by Josie’s mom. Through most of the novel Josie’s health is in decline and only Klara maintains hope that Josie will get better. Klara’s hope is based on her deep and serious, almost primal, worship of the Sun. AFs were designed in a way that required solar power. Klara observed this and spoke often of “the sun’s nourishment.” Not just for herself, but for humans and animals. 

Klara believes the sun goes into the ground at night. She twice goes to a barn to address the sun on Klara’s behalf and finally make a deal with the sun to heal Josie. Then, at the worst of Josie’s decline, her bedroom is suddenly flooded with sunlight and her rapid recovery begins. But this story is Ishiguro, not Disney. 

As Josie recovers, both Klara and Josie's neighbor/boyfriend Rick become less and less important. At the end of the novel, Klara is confined in some kind of junkyard, still conscious, but no longer humanoid. Like someone who loses the use of their body, but keeps her memories, Klara can review the events of her life while she waits for the slow decline to nothing that seems to be the lifecycle of AFs. 

The story is not as wrenching as Never Let Me Go—the story of young people bred and raised to be organ donors. It is not quite as ironic as The Remains of the Day and the mountain of regrets that haunt the late life of an English butler. Nor is it quite as odd as The Buried Giant and its quest through medieval England to find a son who may or may not exist. But Klara and the Sun is thoroughly sad, especially if Klara, the AF with the truly sunny disposition, is telling her story from a junkyard. 

We get hints of rebellion against AFs and AI from the people in the city so we don’t know why Klara is in the scrapyard. As with the end of other Ishiguro novels, the protagonist is in a terrible place with little hope, but there is still life: whether it is the aging butler who knows that his world has passed away and love has passed him by, or the organ donor barely alive and one operation of from certain death, or the old couple lost in the mists of memory loss, or Klara still exploring her world with the senses she has left. 

I have read all of Ishiguro’s novels and re-read Remains of the Day. I may re-read that again. I might also re-read Klara and the Sun to look more closely at how Ishiguro portrays misplaced faith and deep misunderstandings. The future of AI looks hopeful for the rich and privileged and bleak for everyone else. Klara and the Sun captures that perfectly. 

Here is a review of three of Ishiguro’s novels related to war and its aftermath.

Here is a contrast of Ishiguro and Mark Helprin, my favorite living authors.

Here is a look at the similarities between and army Sergeant’s Major and an English butler.

*It took me about 50 pages to get used to the AF acronym. I am an Air Force veteran so AF wants to be Air Force in my head. Also, some of my friends, including younger Army friends, use AF as an emphatic suffix: Shamrocks are lucky AF (for As Fuck). Einstein is smart AF. An Artificial friend in the Air Force would be AF AF AF!