tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-39618784772716049072023-11-15T05:50:34.054-08:00COMPLETELY OUT OF MY MINDIdiosyncratic personal intellectual diary for like-minded types.Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comBlogger131125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-31378954606164498352018-05-17T08:13:00.001-07:002018-05-17T14:44:59.733-07:00MONEY MONEY MONEYMay 17, 2018: MONEY MONEY MONEY<br />
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Christ threw the money changers out of the temple, and while I'm not a religious person and don't buy the myths, I can certainly understand the impulse. Right now we're caught--we being the American people--in a giant cage, forced to watch as businessmen take their natural rapacity and apply it, unrestrained by regulations, to American resources, to the media they own, to sports, to just about anything they can find that will make them money, and damn the consequences. A ripe example is in front of us now. My son is a reporter for a newspaper in Pennsylvania that actually makes money. It is owned by a hedge fund whose headquarters are in New York but whose home office is in Denver. This hedge fund has been systematically stripping staff from every newspaper it owns, most of them local, in order to increase their profits, which they plow back into a failing pharmaceutical company they also own. The Denver Post is its most recent, and most visible victim. The tragedy is that newspapers are essential to a democracy. Jefferson said that faced with a choice, he would rather have newspapers than government. Unless the public is informed, it is essentially helpless. You can't keep them informed without reporters. Th hatred of the media fostered by Trump and his fellow oligarchs is designed to keep us uninformed. Trump lives by lies. It is a newspaper, the Washington Post, that keeps track of them. More than 3,000, according to the Post, since his inauguration. The hedge fund that owns the paper my son works for will drain it dry and walk away. Newspapers were once run by families, like the Ochs family in New York, that saw reporting as not just a way to make money but as a community resource, a way of serving the public. But families die out, the tradition dies out with them, the papers are sold.Businessmen who think the truth is irrelevant take them over.<br />
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It's an old old story in this country. Streetcars, for example. We once had a viable system of streetcars, running on tracks for the most part with overhead wires supplying power. We had such a line in my home town, Westfield, New Jersey, and when my mother was as young as twelve she used to take it to Jersey City, by herself, fifteen or twenty miles away, to take piano lessons with one of her aunts. What happened to streetcars? They were an efficient and cheap way to get around; why did they fail? They didn't. Alfred P. Sloan, head of General Motors, maker of automobiles and the mogul behind planned obsolesence--the idea that the best way to sell new cars was to make sure the old ones went out of style or out of use--used his companies' profits to buy up the streetcar companies and shut them down.<br />
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We must not, as a people, forget these things as we watch businessmen, who hate the regulations that have forced them to pay at least token attention to the public interest, now take over the very agencies they once conspired against and tear regulations to shreds. Dump mine waste in rivers and poison the waters? Of course. Why not? Dump carbon dioxide and particulates into the atmostphere? What the hell. It's cheaper. "The business of America is business," said Calvin Coolidge most of a century ago. Trump gives special consideration to a Chinese telephone company, eliminating a tariff on its behalf. Shortly thereafter, the Chinese invest half a billion into one of his enterprises. He, personally, will reap millions out of this deal. Huge tax breaks for the rich, and only the rich. Coolidge presided over the last great decade of unbridled greed in America, the 1920s, the decade that led directly to the Great Depression and 20% of the population unemployed. That in turn led to the beginning of serious regulation of business in the country under Franklin Roosevelt; it led to the Food and Drug Administration, the FCC, the FAA, and countless other government agencies whose purpose was to control the carelessness and criminality of businessmen, and now women.<br />
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People, we need to disabuse ourselves of the idea that America is a special place, a version of utopia, innocent at heart. It is not. Slavery was at the heart of America at its founding--the first slaves came ashore in Virginia in 1609--and racism still thrives here. Greed was here, too, and still is, in abundance. It was greed that wiped out the Indians, greed for land, hatred for their otherness. William Bradford complained soon after the Pilgrims settled Plymouth that colonists were leaving the community to move west for better land. Indian land. Most of the English colonies in North America were founded by wealthy aristocrats who instructed the colonists not to settle and farm and build towns, but to look first for gold. American history is a cesspool, a nightmare of moral corruption, and our current president is a symbol of it. Early on, if you paid any attention at all, you could easily see what he was, a con artist, a sociopath, with no civic conscience whatsoever, nor any civic understanding. Any number of his own staff have branded him an idiot. It isn't just that he has faults. It's that he's empty of any semblance of the civic virtue necessary to serve a nation. He's all about himself. Trapped in our cage, we can only pay the price of the ignorance, the naivete, the outright stupidity that put him and his kind in office.<br />
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And more than half of us don't bother to vote. <br />
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<br />Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-38413217972124279622018-02-10T18:48:00.002-08:002018-02-10T18:48:51.845-08:00WEIRDNESSWEIRDNESS February 10, 2018<br />
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Deep in Venezuela, at a village called El Dorado, my wife and I ran into a film crew from the BBC who were about to climb, and film, among the <i>tepuis</i> to the south, those mysterious mesas rising from the jungle floor some 3,000 feet and forming little ecosystems of their own. After an evening in the local cabana with the film crew drinking Jamaican rum, my wife mentioned she only knew one person in London, a jazz photographer named--well, forget the name. Ah, said the producer, I used to date his secretary.<br />
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A few years ago my wife and I were in the village of Shrub Oak in upper Westchester County in New York where my daughter now lives and I used to live with my first wife. The house we lived in then was quite old and very beautiful, and I was curious about how it had fared since I left, so we drove over to the churchyard that it backed onto and tried to peer around the vegetation. At that point the owner came out to call his dog and my wife approached him and mentioned my connection and he invited us in to take a look. He hadn't done much to the house except take out the garden, and I told him what I knew about its history and the work I had done on it, and then we parted, but not before exchanging business cards. My name, of course, is Brandt. His name was Abrandt.<br />
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My first wife and I went to Nantucket for our honeymoon and stayed at a place called the Cliffside Inn, or something like that. My second wife and her first husband met in Nantucket and worked together at the Cliffside Inn as staff after they got married, but twelve years after we had been there. The Inn has since burned down.<br />
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My first wife and I and our children toured southern England in the late 1960s and wound up at a little place called Lynton overlooking the Welsh coast across the Bristol Channel, and it was a lovely place, English rural, and I sat a long time on a boulder just gazing at the water as the light faded in the late afternoon and into the evening. Back in London, we went to the Tate Gallery and found a watercolor of the scene. A little later I bought a copy of Henry James's <i>English Hours</i>, about his travels in England and his visit to the same hotel we stayed at, and how he sat on a boulder in the late afternoon and watched the light fade. At the time, Henry James was my favorite author. I wrote my senior thesis on him in college.<br />
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Nowadays the people who teach writing to would-be authors advise them to avoid basing plots on coincidences at all costs. But coincidences are not uncommon. They occur to us all. Schopenhauer thought that life was structured this way, on hidden connections, like the joists under the floor you don't see but walk over constantly, and that when these connections emerge into the open like those above they lend meaning to lives that otherwise seem in the daily welter of things organized only on chance. Dickens defended himself against critics who attacked him for relying on coincidences, knowing how common they are. Yet no one has ever attacked Sophocles for the coincidence Oedipus Rex is based on, when Oedipus, trying to escape the fate the oracle at Delphi foretold, that he would kill his father and marry his mother, heads to Thebes rather than home to Corinth, has an altercation with a man at the crossroads where "three roads meet," kills him, solves the riddle of the Sphinx belaboring Thebes at the time, comes into the city a hero, and marries the Queen, whose husband has recently been killed at a crossroads. He only learns when things turn really sour that he has inadvertently killed his own father and married his mother--all because they had tried to avoid the same prophecy by ordering their son to be exposed to the elements in the mountains. Their son, an infant, soon to be named Oedipus by his adoptive parents. One of the world's greatest plays, is it not? But think of it. Five minutes earlier or later--even thirty seconds--he would never have met his father at the crossroads.<br />
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Of course statisticians belittle all this. Citing the Law of Large Numbers, they argue that coincidences, even the strangest, are bound to happen, with millions of people doing billions of things all the time, coincidences are inevitable; it would be impossible that they not happen. Maybe they're right. But the night before I came to Sag Harbor for the first time I dreamt I would be staying in a house where I could not stand up straight because the ceiling would be too low. The next day I walked into the house where I would be staying and could not stand up straight. The house was very old, and the ceiling was only about six feet high. I was six two then, before I got old and began to shrink.<br />
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The statisticians can have their say. But there's a quiddity about these events, a feeling that they're intensely <i>personal</i>, that you can't shake. In the end, I prefer that my world remain weird. Because the world is weird, and we do not fully understand it.<br />
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<br />Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-4348642043697676112018-01-01T14:20:00.000-08:002018-01-01T14:20:14.143-08:00NEW YEAR, NEW SUBJECTS January 1, 2018: NEW YEAR, NEW MAN <br />
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Politics? People much more knowledgeable than me are covering the ground very well. I recommend anything my friend Lucian Truscott IV writes on the subject.<br />
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I won't give politics up entirely, but my life has changed. We bought a new house, sold the old. Now we live a mile east from our previous house, we back on a wooded preserve, oak trees cover our back yard and part of our front, we don't have a lawn, can't grow a garden, and it completely changed my life. For one thing, a muse has perched on my shoulder, apparently, and I'm writing poems again. Lots of them. In my old age. Who would have thought it? And they're good, too. A total surprise. The interior of our old house was furnished like an old house, with traditional things, a wing chair to read in, an old oak chair, a Morris chair, a library table, a kind of open cabinet for our vinyl records that I made myself, a large Spanish Renaissance style of dining room table, and six bookcases floor to ceiling. Plus a leather couch. We still have the couch, it's a Herman Miller, and the table for our vinyl records, and the Morris chair is now in my office, but everything else is new--and Midcentury Modern. A longtime dream of Lorraine's. Now she has it. My son has the library table, made about 1810. The wing chair went to Junk. So did the dining room table. We still have the bookcases, of course, but I sold and donated 1,000 of the books.<br />
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Wild turkeys come to our feeder. We have light in the house, a great deal, with skylights, very large windows, and a kind of spareness.<br />
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I'm reading more than I have in years. Borges. American history. "Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers." I'm reading more poetry. Ford's The Good Soldier, one of the great novels, last read in college. The metaphysical poets of the 17th century. A book about the role of gold in American history. TV becomes less and less interesting. Soon, the Letters of John Keats, which I have in the great Hyder Rollins edition, two volumes. All of this reminds me that I came out of a tradition, a long one, European and American civilization and its byways. I just bought David Ferry's translation of the Aeneid, which I've never read. David Ferry is the best translator of the classics in our time. These are my sources, my identity. These are the things that were revelations when I first came across them, these are the things that recognized who I was.<br />
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It feels like I've come home at last.<br />
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When I write this blog in the future, then, these are the kinds of things I'll be writing about. For the few who follow me, be warned. You can only score so many points against Donald Trump. Being so shallow a human being, so little and petty a person, there's only so much you can say about him before you exhaust the subject. He will be known as our worst and most destructive president, doing his best to destroy 80 years of progress, starting with Social Security, moving on to the basic institutions the nation has evolved since the Great Depression, and hugely diminishing our global role. The American dream is dead. It's time to wake up from it. Me, I'm going back to the future.Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-59479869768962599062017-03-29T09:00:00.001-07:002017-03-29T09:03:00.571-07:00HOW NOT TO RUN A COUNTRYHOW NOT TO RUN A COUNTRY<br />
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March 29, 2017:<br />
Blame everybody, anybody else for the huge mistakes you make<br />
Lie, lie, lie, and lie some more. You know it won't cost you anything because your followers, who are desperate, uneducated, ignorant, don't know enough not to believe you.<br />
Make promises you know you can't keep.<br />
Act on instinct. Indulge your own paranoid fantasies.<br />
Don't take advice from people who know subjects way better than you do.<br />
Advance pollution, people won't notice for a while.<br />
Follow the lead of Calvin Coolidge, author of that famous remark, "The business of America is business."<br />
In line with that, deregulate everything.<br />
Don't just ignore history. Make sure you don't know it, either.<br />
Don't trouble yourself with the complexities of situations. Let ideology be your guide.<br />
Never think about your responsibilities. Think only about your power.<br />
Belittle science. It's just a bunch of pointyheads with "theories."<br />
Divide the country into ethnic groups, religious groups, ideological groups, racial groups. Demonize all groups you don't happen to belong to.<br />
Persuade yourself that it's all about you. Everything is about you. Call yourself a winner, on all occasions, no matter what the evidence.<br />
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Does that about sum it up? Lorraine and<i> </i>I, and most of our friends, wake up to new horrors in the <i>New York Times </i>every day and breakfast gets more and more depressing. Each new Congressman who makes news turns out to be dumber than the last, less well-informed, more deeply locked into right-wing fantasy life. If you write history or even just know it, you can't help but think of the long-term damage being done every day. Today was the day to roll back all the efforts Obama instituted to control climate change. Climate change? Will they finally believe in it when the Atlantic Ocean starts climbing up lower Broadway into mid-Manhattan? When the Seychelles disappear entirely? When all the reefs have finally died? Inconvenient truths indeed. Greenland is melting faster and faster every year. When all its ice is gone, sea level in all the world's oceans will be twenty-two feet higher. When Lt. Edward Parry stood on the shores of Melville Island in 1820 and stared out over the Arctic Ocean he saw ten solid feet of ice everywhere he looked, and it was August. In some places the ice stood forty feet thick. That's a four story building. Now? Sea ice in the Arctic gets thinner and thinner every winter--it's now down to about three feet--and summers are largely free of it. This is not a theory. This is evidence, and there's endless amounts of evidence. ExxonMobil has been studying the effects of man-made climate change for many years now, which has not stopped them from steadfastly fighting against programs to do anything about it. One of many examples of the fundamental dishonesty of the business system, which has always been about profits above all, no matter what the human cost.<br />
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So what will future historians make of people like Paul Ryan, or Pence Climate-Change-Is-Only-a-Theory, or Trump the Unlearned, or all the other enablers for whom truth itself is, well, inconvenient? These people are profoundly irresponsible, and history will call them that, and future historians will spend a lot of time analyzing what on earth went wrong with America. Because America is unlikely still to exist. Backward looking, anti-intellectual, living too long off its reputation, which is now in steep decline, banking on the kind of military power that is becoming increasingly useless in its many wars, failing to educate its children, its citizens, riven with internal contradictions--all this is now expressed in its leadership, which aimed for the bottom, for a "Southern strategy" and a hate-the-immigrant strategy, or anything else, no matter how divisive, that would bring them to power. Where they now reside, clueless, inept, mistaken, and totally out of touch with reality. As Trump himself might way in one of his inane tweets, "So sad." Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-54923441945750194252017-02-12T10:02:00.000-08:002017-02-12T10:02:11.714-08:00TRUTHFebruary 12, 2017: TRUTH<br />
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"We hold these truths to be self-evident...."<br />
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To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, isn't it pretty to think so.<br />
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This morning on George Stephanopolus's show, I heard some government spokesman yelling about voter fraud, and how prevalent it is, and how millions of voters last November voted twice or more, with busloads of Massachusetts voters being driven to New Hampshire to cast votes, obviously for Hilary Clinton. When asked to provide evidence he replied, with the same loud determination, that he <i>knew </i>it was true, everybody knew it was true. George wasn't buying it. Neither did I. But you can bet many of the people who voted for Trump will. Because, you know, the media lies, the media is corrupt, facts are not facts, there are alternative facts. And those of us who are educated, who understand basic things like the necessity of evidence to prove a case, in law and in life, sigh in despair. Because there is no evidence for these claims at all. This never happened. <br />
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The actual truth in this case? What is actually happening and has been happening for years now is that people on the right have been taking over state legislatures and gerrymandering election districts to ensure that they are way more likely to win political control over both state and Federal legislatures, and in the process attack voting rights to make it as difficult as possible for minorities to vote. It's a clever strategy, well-organized in its execution, and it has worked. With the connivance of the Supreme Court decision that it was no longer necessary for the Federal Gov't to oversee voting procedures in the South, which has spent the 150 years since the Civil War making sure blacks never got to vote. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ...."<br />
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And what is this about? White power. This country belongs to white people, and by God they're going to keep it that way. Voter fraud? This is the actual voter fraud. All the rest is demagoguery. Fake news. In short, lies.<br />
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The lies, the amateur foreign policy mistakes, the outright stupidity of the current administration come so fast and are so dangerous that I find myself reeling, reluctant to read the news it is so disheartening. I find it hard to work. Hard to pay attention. And "alternative facts"--as if there really were such things. Facts are facts. The truth is the truth. Yet the right denies it; worst of all, it denies the biggest and most frightening truth of our time, that the ice caps are melting, storms are becoming more frequent and more violent because of the amount of moisture in the air, glaciers are retreating all over the world, in Antarctica the Larsen Ice Shelf is breaking up, Greenland is melting far faster than anyone anticipated, and folks, we are in deep shit. Not just America. The whole world. Yet alone in the civilized world the American right denies that global warming is speeding up and is busy now deregulating the fossil fuel burners. Because global warming is only a "theory."<br />
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When in fact, in fact, in fact, it is supported by mountains of scientific evidence, 97% of the world's climate scientists accept it, and every year the world's average temperature breaks the record set the previous year. This is the true Armageddon. The true Apocalypse. Close to 50% of the world's population lives on seacoasts. Here in the Hamptons, everyone wants a water view--preferably as close to the water as possible. <br />
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It is truth itself that I mourn for. A President denies photographic evidence, as plain as day, that shows incontrovertibly that his inauguration crowd was way smaller than President Obama's. He says that when he began to speak it stopped raining, when in fact it started. Alas. We mourn. The search for truth is one of the sacred tasks of humankind. It is enshrined in the legal system, it is what scientists live for, it is the project of all our lives, to find the truth. Even if it is hard to face. It often is. What human beings are doing to our planet, the only one we have, is definitely a hard truth. But when the official leader of our country tells us that global warming is a Chinese plot, then we know. We are in deep shit. Our only option is to resist, to organize, to make every possible effort to take our country back from the brink of chaos and ignorance. <br />
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Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-22742307205365428852017-01-01T14:14:00.000-08:002017-01-01T14:14:15.135-08:00MANAGING THE PASTJanuary 1, 2017; MANAGING THE PAST<br />
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A new year, and we're supposed to look forward, but it's hard to do when you are constantly wrestling with your past. I'll be leaving a whole lot of words behind me, essays, books, feature articles, book reviews, hundreds of those, two whole books still looking for publishers (one a memoir, talk about wrestling with the past), and now a book of poems, self-published because I never wanted a career as a poet, and I'll be giving a reading at the end of January, and it will be out of the past. Words words words. Occasionally I read some of the things I've written and pronounce them good, or not so good, and I think, does this make a whole? Is there a definitive person behind them? Was this a good way to lead a life?<br />
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Well I can't stop. I look at the 5,000 books in my personal library, I reread old notebooks, I remember all the ideas I've had that could have been books or magazine pieces, and the same itch is there, the need to know, to tell stories about the present or the past, or to voice opinions about politics, about human beings, about experience and its consequences. I once ran down Mt. Rainier. Served as a quality control inspector for a hotel chain in South America. Scuba dove to 85 feet in Belize. Kayaked in the Queen Charlotte Islands. Interviewed adults who had been sexually abused, by their own parents, as children. Stood for a day beside a concierge in a fancy hotel and watched him work. Spent eleven days in a mental hospital. Had lunch with Robert Lehman in his private dining room. The list is long. A full life, one would say, a rich life, but not atypical for a free-lance writer.<br />
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What's it all about, Alfie? In a way, it's a stupid question. Nobody really knows what it's all about. To a degree it was all choices I made, from another angle it had little to do with choice. So many things just happen to a person, they appear as roadblocks or disasters you could not have foreseen, could not have prevented. Or wonderful strokes of luck. You don't get what you want, you get what you need. You try to sort it out, decide what you're responsible for, what you're not. Either way, guilt is built into the equation.<br />
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I walk around the house sometimes scanning the bookshelves and wondering what's inside all those books. I'll pick one off a shelf, take it to bed with me to read after the TV gets shut off, read it over a period of a week or two, sometimes longer. I still want to know, I'm curious about all kinds of things. Maybe forty years ago I wrote a piece for the old Psychology Today, now vanished, called "Selves," about the slipperiness of that concept, the difficulty of pinning down what's going on inside our hearts and minds and what that means about who we are. The longest piece that magazine ever ran. But here's the thing--I still have some of the books I read for that piece. I may need them again someday.<br />
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You wind up with doubt, or, if your heart is particularly flexible, with what Keats called "negative capability," which is the ability to hold two opposed concepts in your mind at the same time without feeling the need to decide between them. You keep your options open. You accept the fact that mostly you don't know whether you're doing the wrong thing or the right with your life, and what the consequences will be. You tell yourself, you tell other people, you always wanted to live in the real world. But you can't promise that you reached that point, because the real world is a very complicated and unpredictable place, and you may be wrong. So your life could be like the lives of some scholars, who spend their lives chasing a subject, a dream, an insight down a blind alley. A waste.<br />
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That takes courage. You hope you have it when you need it.Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-12494932072036881932016-11-29T09:58:00.000-08:002016-11-29T09:58:58.424-08:00REALITY POLICE: November 29, 2016REALITY POLICE: November 29, 2016<br />
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The story continued....<br />
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This is basically a story from the annals of writing, and for all those who think being a writer is a really cool way to live. I had told my editor that I would do what I did, spend some time in a mental hospital as a patient and report on the experience in the book that was to come out of my investigation, and he thought that meant I would do it more than once, in different parts of the country. But once was enough. I did indeed go to different areas of the country to visit mental hospitals, talk to psychiatrists about the systems they ran, check out what was at the time the take people out of mental hospitals and put them into community mental health centers, and otherwise do the thorough job that needed to be done on a subject that was then, and remains, almost universally ignored. I even went to Esalen, in California, new age mecca, to speak with a psychologist there about new ideas in mental health care. That was interesting; you walked onto the grounds and scattered around were people doing yoga in the nude. But at bottom it was what I should have expected--at a remove from the gritty intractable reality of the lives of the mad. I drove across country in an old Ford Econoline van with the engine mounted between the van's two front seats. I slept in the back. Research on the cheap. America on the cheap. A story for another time.<br />
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And on the way I stopped in Kansas for a few days, camping in a state park near Topeka populated mostly by mosquitoes. I have nothing good to say about Kansas. There Topeka State Hospital had set up a series of interviews for me, among them one with a Dr. Rinsley, who ran their children's unit. He was a queer bird, fixated on his theory about childhood schizophrenia; he had, in fact, diagnosed every child who entered his unit as being schizophrenic,regardless of their symptoms, and it was his opinion that his job was to take each child apart and rebuild him or her in a healthier manner. To put it another way, he was playing God with every child on his unit. At one point during the interview, I remember, he looked at me and said, you've looked into the abyss, haven't you. Well what do you say to that? Deny it, and you seem shallow. Affirm it, and you'd have to explain. In fact, as I said in the first part of the story, I was quite sane, and always had been. As it says over the entrance to the oracle's cave at Delphi, know thyself. And I did.<br />
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Anyway, I went on, finished the research, wrote the book, it was published, the publisher did its job and got me on various TV shows, I testified before a Senate subcommittee chaired by Birch Bayh about drugs in institutions, the nightly news showed a clip, I thought I would make some money from this book. I was a hero to mental patients for exposing the evils and insufficiencies of a system designed, like most institutions, not to serve its clients, but itself. But I neglected to foresee the obvious--that mental patients can't afford, for the most part, to buy books. As for the reading public generally, the whole subject is a downer. They don't want to know about it. The publisher printed 7,000 copies, sold 3,500. Lesson No. 1. When it went into bookstores as a remainder, at $0.49 a copy, I was too broke to buy more than one.<br />
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Lesson No. 2. A year later a stranger knocked on the door of my apartment in Ossining, New York, asked me if I was Anthony Brandt, and when I said yes handed me a piece of paper. Dr. Rinsley was suing me and my publisher for invasion of privacy, libel, and other things, asking $3,750,000 in damages. How about that. At the time I was going through a rancorous divorce from my first wife, living on credit cards, still driving that old van around, my father had recently died, my mother was settling into the early stages of Alzheimer's. I remember taking one of those stress tests that showed up in magazines once in a while in those days and scoring at a level where you were supposed to have heart attacks and breakdowns and a host of other ills, but as I said, I'm sane, none of those things happened. What happened instead was that my publishers asked me into their offices and told me that I should get my own lawyer, and they would get theirs. They were abandoning me. As it turned out, they hired a local lawyer in Topeka who had never tried a libel case. Through a friend, I hired the libel lawyer for the Kansas City Star. He carried the case, not the publisher's lawyer.<br />
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I had indeed written about Dr. Rinsley. Shortly before I finished the book, I got a call from Kansas that I had to come back. A child had died on Rinsley's unit, thanks to what appeared to be a misdiagnosis that was particularly egregious. She was a little girl, eleven years old, and skin and bones at the time. She died tied down to a crib, alone, being tube fed, choking to death on her food. When she was very young she was diagnosed as having cerebral palsy, one symptom of which was tongue thrust, where the tongue pushes food out of the mouth involuntarily instead of swallowing it. She never really got better, even on medication, and at some point doctors at a state hospital decided she was being uncooperative, and they took custody away from the parents, who were fundamentalist Christians, and who said they were going to take her home and pray for her. After that she wound up on Rinsley's unit. I went back to Kansas, talked to the parents, talked to some other people (including a Holocaust survivor out of Bergen Belsen) about Rinsley and his theories, and added this story to the book. Rinsley had decided in this case that the little girl could swallow her food but was defiant and refused to swallow her food. At the time of her death her parents were allowed to see her only half an hour a week, in a supervised visit. It was a particularly striking example of unregulated psychiatric power to play with people's lives. And I was definitely outspoken about it. "How many more children must die before men like Rinsley are stopped?" Rhetorically, I've always had a tendency to go over the top.<br />
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It took nearly eight years to resolve this case, with something the courts laughably call summary judgement. That means that it never went to trial. After depositions, document searches and all the other stuff that goes on, it was clear that I had made only one small mistake of fact in the body of the book, which I had corrected in a footnote, and that everything else was factually true. My lawyer moved for summary judgment and won--that took maybe two years--and Rinsley appealed. The case then went to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. Another five or six years. In the end the three-man court ruled unanimously that Rinsley had no case. He was both a public official and a public figure and had to prove actual malice, all the facts were true except for the one, and that had been corrected. He just didn't like being criticized. I still have a copy of the judgment.<br />
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And me? I'm still sane, but the whole episode came close to wrecking my career, such as it was. When it was over I owed my lawyer $45,000. It soured me on writing books for a long time, and I turned to magazines to make a living. I can't really complain. I had a great success in magazines, and I still write for them in a small way, made smaller all the time as magazines disappear. But when you talk about the romance of writing, don't talk to me.<br />
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I found out later, by the way, that my publisher had never given the book a libel reading. It was a muckraking book, it needed a libel reading, I assumed it would get one. But my editor had decided on his own, without telling me, that he didn't want to limit his authors' abilities to express their views. Maybe I'll forgive him in hell. As for Dr. Rinsley, he's already there. And yes, Dr., I have looked into the abyss. That little girl weighted 29 lbs. when she died on your watch.<br />
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Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-82385077278764098532016-11-28T13:56:00.001-08:002016-11-28T13:56:12.860-08:00ELEVEN DAYS IN THE LOONY BINNovember 28, 2016: ELEVEN DAYS IN THE LOONY BIN<br />
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People always look at me a little strangely when I mention that I spent eleven days in the state mental hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York. I hasten to explain to them that I was doing research for a book I wrote on the mental health system, that I wasn't a real patient but had faked my way in with the help of a friend, and had barely escaped the locked ward where they keep the violent people but had been sent instead to a ward where they let you out in the morning and left the door open all day. I used to walk over to the store on the grounds in the morning, buy a Times, and do the crossword puzzle on a bench just to get out of the ward. Which turned out, naturally, to be full of unbalanced people.<br />
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Adventures in writing. Anything for a story. This came to mind today when I was thinking about my career, all the things I've covered for magazines and the places I've been, and the loony bin was a highlight of sorts, possibly the most dangerous story I did, since they might well have tried to keep me there against my will if I had in their presence actually done something crazy. I was careful not to. Except for not having a job since I was 35 and living by my wits, I'm quite sane.<br />
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But I think about that place once in a while. The people. They were a motley bunch, all of them on drugs of one sort or another, mostly thorazine, which I also took--you had to, they gave it to you, you put it in your mouth and swallowed it, and then they looked in your mouth to make sure you had--that were supposed to keep you passive and quiet, and indeed they were not violent in any way. One I remember, a young man who complained that his parents had committed him because he'd taken his stuff out to the garage to lay it out on the floor and arrange it. He was manic depressive, had a portable cassette player he took everywhere with a bunch of tapes, and he would jam a tape in, play it for thirty seconds, then jam another one in and drive the entire ward crazy with the noise. He was restless. He also had his own room, where he brought women in off the female wards at night, paying the attendants off for the privilege. Plus he had access to other drugs, the illegal kind. A resourceful young man, in a manic phase.<br />
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Others gave little impression of being insane, but only pathetic. Unable to handle everyday life; they were taken every day to a nearby IBM plant where they put cardboard boxes together, in a program designed to make them useful to society, and thereby to themselves. I remember at lunchtime, which was served on a cafeteria basis, one man would go up to the table and take ten or eleven pieces of bread, and nothing else. Another was catatonic, did not speak, walked around in a trance. I saw him one day drop a turd from under his hospital gown, reach down to the floor, pick it up, and try to put it into his mouth. The whole ward groaned at that, and the attendant rushed over and prevented him from completing this grossness. Yes, there were people there who were quite seriously mad.<br />
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I learned a lot in those eleven days. For one, madness is not literary. You do not find characters out of Dostoevsky, say, or Baudelaire, passionate to the point of unreason, in mental hospitals. It is also for the most part not violent. The culture characterizes the insane as killers, but they actually commit less violence, statistically, than the general population. Mostly it is their ineptness that impresses you. They have not mastered the simple art of living. Something going on in their heads prevents them for focusing on the ordinary.<br />
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After a week it started to get to me. The ward had a large TV set and it went 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that the place was always full of noise. I don't do noise well. The food, not surprisingly, was execrable. They put me in a therapy group and that was a joke. And being surrounded all day and all night by people who were seriously troubled was difficult. We slept in dormitories at night, on beds that had rubber sheets under the cotton ones. My first night I was given a shot of Thorazine, which made me thirsty, but when I tried to get to the water fountain I could barely walk, had to hold onto the wall to get anywhere. I had it all planned, knew the law, and went through the formalities of leaving, which entailed writing a letter announcing my intention of leaving. They had three days to commit me against my will, but didn't bother. My wife drove out and picked me up--I had checked in with a story about our separation, and hearing her voice over the radio when it was turned off--and drove me home. I lay down in the back seat and cried, not for myself but for all those people who couldn't leave so easily. It was so sad. I'll never forget the really bad cases, patients with tardive dyskinesia, which is a permanent side-effect of taking drugs like Thorazine. It affects the brain in such a way that their tongues, their faces, their limbs move uncontrollably, their tongues in and out of their mouths, their faces in constant distortion, their limbs jerkily, in every direction. Thorazine tames the hallucinations, but it also destroys the life.<br />
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I'm told, by the way, by people whose experience of the mental health system is way more recent than mine--the book, Reality Police, came out forty years ago--and have read the book that very little has changed. The mental health system still relies almost exclusively on drugs to control the behavior of the people it serves, and psychiatrists are really no closer to understanding what mental illness is or where it originates. For some people, life is tragic every day.Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-78880906164662479392016-11-09T11:15:00.000-08:002016-11-09T11:15:27.441-08:00BEGINNING ALL OVER AGAINNOVEMBER 9, 2016. BEGINNING ALL OVER AGAIN<br />
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Trump won, against all expectations, and those who thought he was as bad a candidate as the country has ever seen are upset and baffled. The American people ignored the criminality, the narcississm, the sexism, the racism, the frauds, the abuses, indeed embraced it all, as if it were nothing to them, as apparently it was. In favor of what? Climate change? Coziness with Russia? Reckless foreign policy? Who can understand this?<br />
Those at the bottom, apparently. Not the desperate poor at the very bottom who gave up hoping for anything better a long time ago. Not the disenfranchised, the immigrants, the refugees, blacks, Moslems, the chronically ill, the old, and all the other people stuck in the glue of killing defeat. I'm speaking of the adult whites who have lost not just jobs but futures to globalization, automation, and all the other economic forces that beset us, who are watching their lives drift away on the unfavorable tide of history. These are the people, apparently, who turned to Trump to save them, with his border wall and his promise to deport all illegal immigrants, all eleven million of them, and to keep Moslems out of the country, and to bring back American jobs. And in the processs of making those promises he ignored all the Constitutional protections that individuals enjoy in the United States and all the institutional traditions that have proven as well to protect the orderly processes of government, plus he ignored the impossibility of bringing back what has been lost. There was never any mention of how he was going to do these things, never a program, a plan, a strategy. Jobs have in fact been lost to macro-economic forces that nobody has the power to stop. Some of the Constititional protections he said he would destroy, others he simply acted as if he would ignore--in short laying an authoritarian hand over government as if it belonged to him. But it has never belonged to any President, however strong. There are fundamental checks and balances built in, and traditional ways of working in government as well, that are designed to keep situations, and governments, under control. It remains to be seen whether this system will continue to work.<br />
But given the man's record, I'm quite nervous. Not only does he have no actual policy positions, no programs, only bankruptcies and bad behavior behind him, nobody knows what will happen next. His closest advisors are fools and buffoons like Gingrich and Giuliani. His own wife is an illegal immigrant. And this is the "people's choice."<br />
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So if this is what the people preferred, it's time to look at the people. Hillary Clinton called them, half of them anyway, a "basket of deplorables." It's a general rule that people get the governments they deserve. The Founders understood this; when Franklin was asked when he walked out of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 what kind of government they were making, he famously replied, "A republic, Madam, if you can keep it."<br />
<i>If you can keep it.</i><br />
<i> </i>And Jefferson saw the import of that, he understood that to be a citizen at all required a level of attention and knowledge on the part of the individual that went well beyond the ordinary, that people needed to be informed, and understand how government worked and to an extent how the world itself worked, in order to be responsible citizens. That citizenship came with responsibilities. That a citizen needed to be involved not only in his professional life, his working life, but in the life of the community and the country, that his opinions had to be as versed in the complexities of issues, in the pros and cons of different courses of action, as time would allow. Jefferson was superbly informed himself; he went out of his way to educate his own family, he founded a University to educate his state, Virgihnia<i>.</i><br />
<i> </i>That's the ideal, that's what makes a republic work, makes it viable. An informed citizenry. But we have failed, miserably, to make this happen. Our public educational systems no longer require courses in civics that explain the mechanics of government, how laws are passed and the like. Newspapers, even the best, continue to shrink and shrink and lose readership. Other sources of news have lost their sense of public responsibility, of public mission; and news increasingly passes over into entertainment. One consequence is that the whole public realm weakens, a sense of unity, of being part of one people, dissipates, and what divides us does so more and more strongly, more permanently, and we no longer feel like we have one purpose, one identity. As citizens of a particular place and a particular country.<br />
When that goes, we get what we got yesterday. A demagogue for a President.<br />
Republics, to put it another way, are hard work. To keep them going takes a cerrtain amount of wisdom, and that in turn takes an education, it takes knowledge, and not just in school. It takes keeping up with events and their meamings, it means reading about events and their meanings, not just in the papers but in news magazines and even books. It means developing your curiosity. It means in the end getting involved. Especially at the local level, where it's possible to be unusually effective.<br />
For starters, we would have to go back to teaching civics. To teaching history, political history, diplomatic history, all the old-fashioned kinds of history, which educated people like Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and most of the modern Presidents as well. This is what Lincoln read, picking up his education when he could. Now srtudents take something called Social Studies, an umbrella term for intellectual volleyball; toss it, teach the classics. When the country was being created it was reading Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Diderot--the Enlightenment philosophers, and their thoughts thread through the Constitution. It was Voltaire who said, "If you believe absurdities, you will commit atrocities." Right now our own citizens believe the most amazing absurdities, because they don't have the knowledge or even just the information to know better. Thus Donald Trump. He is no better just because he's been elected President. He's only more dangerous.<br />
The idea should be not to dumb down, but to smarten up. The whole culture has to bend its efforts to make this happen, or we are permanently lost. Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-19906338340176110412016-09-01T11:21:00.000-07:002016-09-01T11:21:20.620-07:00ALL POLITICS IS LOCALSeptember 1, 2016: ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL<br />
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I've always liked Tip O'Neill's famous dictum--all politics is local--because of the paradox inherent in it. Who doesn't like paradox? No, all politics is clearly not local. World wars are not local, vast global struggles for power and influence are not local, statewide Senate races are not local, and so on. And yet something like the opposite prevails as well. The global so often emerges from the particular, the struggle for power is pretty much the same no matter what level it takes place at, global is local on a grand scale--and so on once more. I remember Graham Robb writing in his wonderful book THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE about a village on one side of a river in rural France that had been at odds for generations with a village on the other side of the river, and how they would periodically gather, each on its own side of the river, and shout oaths and imprecations at each other. In different languages. The universal use of French in France, it turns out, is a recent phenomenon, imposed by French kings in the 17th century. Or there was the rebellion in the Vendee at the time of the French revolution, where this relatively remote province conducted a revolution against the Revolution, based on its loyalty to the Catholic Church and its hatred of government officials imposed from above conscripting local men for the national army. Thousands of people died in this conflict. People were tied to rafts and the rafts were then deliberately sunk. The local definitely went global in that case.<br />
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And now here I am, immersed in local politics. I have not run for office since I was asked to run for president of my high school class by various teachers, because they needed somebody to run against a boy they didn't approve of, who was majoring in shop. I lost big time. But I have been appointed, twice now in thirty years, to chair a regulatory board in Sag Harbor, and it's a hot seat right now: the Board of Historic Preservation and Architectural Review. Sag Harbor is a beautiful old village dating from Colonial days, it is full of historic houses in all kinds of architectural styles, and it relies on its appeal to the tourist industry, to retirees, and to second home owners for its economic health. And that appeal is so great that it has attracted way too many overly wealthy people. The average house size in Sag Harbor is about 1500 sq. ft. It's all very charming, and the wealthy people want to own a piece of it. But they're wealthy, wealthy people don't live in small houses, so they want to take these little houses and double or triple their size, thereby destroying the historical value of the house, and, if that happens often enough, ultimately the village. We have a fairly strict zoning code, and it's our job as a regulatory Board to enforce it. And nothing, it would seem, makes a hedge fund manager worth hundreds of millions of dollars angrier than being told he can't do, or get, what he wants.<br />
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And the conflict inherent in this situation and makes this job so challenging has gone, if not global, then national. The New York Times has reported on it. Vanity Fair wrote a piece about it just recently in which I'm quoted and my picture appears. Wow. Famous for fifteen seconds. I've been in all the local papers. But what's interesting about it is the degree of local involvement. Letters to the editor. Phone calls from supporters. Stand firm. Hold fast. And we're trying. And I think, this is a classic case--public interest against private property; and the whole village is involved, so are people who live nearby but not in the village. This is democracy at work. And it's clean. Nobody has offered me a bribe, or any of the other four members of my Board. We do our very best to decide cases on their merits alone. This is democracy the way it's supposed to be, don't you think?<br />
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But then shit happens. Some people, usually but not always the wealthy, ignore the code and overbuild anyway, willing to pay the paltry fines we're allowed to impose to get what they want. Repeatedly applicants appear before our Board, and no doubt other Boards, and lie to us. "I need an extra bedroom, or two or three, for my grandchildren," they tell us, when in fact they're developers hoping to maximize their profits. One man made that argument before a board at the same time his proposed large house (on a small lot) was listed for sale on a real estate web site. This becomes routine, and as a board member you come to the point where you really don't believe anyone who wants something from you. You turn cynical. <br />
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The parallel between the local and the national should be obvious. What other wealthy person presents his case to the public and lies, regularly, repeatedly, and demonstrably? Who else goes ahead and does what the law, the rules, disallow, and figures he can get away with it? Who else is indifferent to public policy, to public values; who only wants to game the system to his own ends? These are rhetorical questions. We all know the answer. And I ask myself two related questions, here in my little upstairs office, crowded with books--can Sag Harbor survive this onslaught of wealth? And can the nation survive Donald Trump? <br />
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<br />Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-10599489108689314982016-07-25T18:28:00.003-07:002016-07-25T18:28:57.593-07:00CHAOTIC NOWTHE CHAOTIC NOW. Monday, July 25, 2016.<br />
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Overhead, a thunderstorm. On the television, speeches and chaos at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Bernie supporters screaming at the speakers. The DNC chair resigning. Last week it was the Republicans, this week the Democrats. The center does not hold. Some rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born. Constant killings on the news, unarmed black people being shot, policemen being shot in a blind retaliation, terrorism worldwide, suicide killers, the Russians meddling in a U. S. national election, fraud rampant, and bad feelings. A whole lot of bad feelings and mistrust. An astrologer friend tells me that the stars are in a position similar to the time of the French Revolution. And we know what that entailed. The Terror. Populism taken to its logical conclusion. And then Napoleon.<br />
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History does not repeat itself, said Mark Twain, but it rhymes.<br />
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Here is what I believe. I do not believe in populism either on the left or the right. Populism attracts demagogues, it likes simple, and simple-minded solutions to complex problems, it likes to blame others, groups, establishments, blacks maybe or immigrants or whatever they fix on for intractable problems that have a long history of their own and cannot be solved, if they can be solved at all, with simple answers.<br />
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I do not believe in organized religion. Before he died my brother told me he thought that religion was the cause of most of the world's problems. I could only agree. This is true all through history. Christianity made Galileo deny what he perfectly well knew, that the heavens are in motion. Christianity sacked Jerusalem in the First Crusade, sacked Rome in 1527, killing 10,000 people the first day; a crude version of conservatism calling itself Christian hates gays and lesbians and God knows who else. A group of Muslims of unknown size wants to live in the 7th century and beheads people who do not share their religion. These are monstrous things. Anyone of any sense knows that if there is a God he or she or it would not sanction this kind of insanity. Organized religion led to the sexual abuse of countless numbers of children in the Catholic Church. Is this not sick? Does it not disgust you? It disgusts me. I wrote a piece once on child sexual abuse, interviewed a few of its victims as adults. Their lives had been permanently ruined. Listening to them was like watching people bleed and not being able to stitch them up. This is Christianity?<br />
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Alexander Hamilton said that the real problem was democracy. The Founders feared mob rule, as well they should. Winston Churchill said that democracy was a terrible way to govern, but the other ways were worse. The founders created a republic, not a democracy. But we have devolved. Our legislatures nationwide are a sad joke, and Congress is criminally irresponsible, interested only in power, money, and certainly not in the national interest. So I do not believe all that much in democracy. But at the same time I must. There is no alternative. I also believe in our constitution, but it desperately needs to be rewritten. The second amendment has been twisted out of all meaning, and the mob is now armed, as if we were all living in Tombstone. It's a ridiculous situation, preserved and prolonged by a corrupt Congress.<br />
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I believe that it will take centuries to undo America's original sin, which is slavery, and that extensive intermarriage among the races is the only way it will disappear. I only recently found out something of the extensive use of Native American slaves in the colonies, and the slave trade in that group of people. Really, is there no limit to the horrors people perpetrate on each other? As a writer of military history, I say the answer is no. There is no limit.<br />
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I believe in history. I believe it should be compulsory reading for anyone entering politics. Why? Because it saddens you. It teaches you about the law of unintended consequences, and what happens when people in power do not think through all the reactions that a particular action--like invading Iraq--might create. It teaches humility, and caution. And thoughtfulness.<br />
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Let me end it here. Paul Simon is about to sing Bridge Over Troubled Waters, a song that always makes me cry. I could easily cry. Cry for my country most of all. We are in the process of going mad, losing our reason, our restraint, chasing chimeras off the stage. My wife tells me the crowd has calmed down. Let us hope so.<br />
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Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-85394433171587160282016-06-12T09:22:00.000-07:002016-06-12T09:22:58.803-07:00AMERICA THE STUPIDJune 12, 2016: AMERICA THE STUPID<br />
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When Jefferson left France in 1789 to return to the United States after his five years there as the American minister plenipotentiary, he sent ahead of him boxes of books to friends. One was a box containing six cubic feet of books to James Madison. These included the famous <i>Encyclopedie, </i>Diderot's compendium of current knowledge, one of the great projects of the European Enlightenment, along with various editions of the Greek and Roman classics, in their original languages, plus the works of Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and many other Enlightenment figures. Books were hard to obtain in America. In Paris and London they were plentiful.<br />
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He sent books to his nephews as well. Jefferson had no white son, only daughters, and his ideas about their education were typical of their time--to wit, what was the point of educating women? He told his daughter Martha that she should become adept with the sewing needle, and otherwise master the social arts. For his nephews he developed a carefully thought out program of reading of the classics, studies in science, geography, and modern languages, and the law. The classics were to be read in their original languages. Other than that, he believed in walking. He himself used to walk six miles a day around Paris, no matter what the weather. "It's only water," he said of rain and snow.<br />
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And then, years later, after his presidency came to an end, he founded the University of Virginia and did much to establish its curriculum, based on the same principles he wrote to his nephews about, the same books he sent to them and to Madison and James Monroe and other friends. He had in mind a classical education, and a preparation for political service in the government of the United States. For which a familiarity with Thucydides and Polybius and Cicero was as important as a familiarity with the U. S. Constitution.<br />
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This was the sort of education that most of the founding fathers had. One exception was George Washington, and he felt the lack of it, but did what he could to catch up. When Jefferson sold his library to the government to help found the Library of Congress, and to pay a portion of his many debts, he owned more than 6,000 books. Washington had a few hundred. So this sort of education was not, strictly speaking, an absolute necessity to govern well. But it was a huge help. It gave the founders the mental equipment, and the common background, of an Enlightenment education in the theory and practice of government. To read Thucydides is to learn a great deal about what was essentially civil war, Athens vs. Sparta, from a writer who participated in it. To read Polybius is to discover how a small city in central Italy, Rome, could become the master of the whole Mediterranean. And Hume? Hume's words and thoughts can be found in the Declaration of Independence. Montesquieu explained how republics worked, and we live in a republic. Only small ones survive, Montesquieu argued. The U. S. was small then. Now it is very large.<br />
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A wiser time. And how do people prepare today for governing? Does anyone get this kind of education any more? I certainly didn't. In public school I remember a course in civics where the process of proposing and passing legislation was taught, but dully. And I was one of two juniors in high school who were sent to Boys State for a couple of weeks one summer, where we went through the process of running for office and electing mock legislators and a mock governor, who at the end gave a speech. It was run by the American Legion and I wonder whether it still exists. For personal reasons I was miserable the whole time and got nothing out of it. As far as the classics go, no course in them was available. Not until I got to college did I read anything of the Greeks, and then it was Greek tragedy and Greek philosophy. What I know of political life and government I know by educating myself, and by practicing it in the village where I live.<br />
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We all know the consequences of the abandonment of political education in this country. People like Donald Trump, who flaunts his ignorance of issues, an avowed racist, bankrupt both morally and intellectually. People who serve in Congress, make laws, control committees, and have an approval rating, collectively, of 9%. People who serve in state governments, where corruption is an everyday occurrence. And the people themselves, who not only don't read the classics but don't even read newspapers any more, a people so generally ignorant that comparisons of the ability to do math or read or write consistently place us in the middle to low range with respect to other first world countries. How many people can name their state representative, their state senator? How many can name the three branches of the Federal government, and explain what they do? How many still believe that the sun orbits the earth? Or that the earth is four thousand years old? Or that global warming doesn't exist? America has become stupid.<br />
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In a republic, life is inescapably political. You have to educate people to politics, to understand it if not participate in it. Jefferson saw that clearly, and founded a university to accomplish it. He rejoiced when a Pennsylvania farmer invented a new and more efficient way to make wagon wheels, based upon a reading of Homer-- in the original Greek. It's a big and complicated country, with innumerable interest groups, many different factions, and it takes educated people to run it, indeed to do such an elemental thing as vote. But education is the first thing to get cut, the last thing most state legislatures respect.<br />
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So we sink deeper into ignorance, deeper into dysfunction, deeper into paranoia. The coming election is, more than anything, a test of American intelligence. And it's an open question whether we'll pass. <br />
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Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-45701710813254573832016-05-05T10:49:00.000-07:002016-05-05T10:49:59.403-07:00REPUBLICANS I HAVE KNOWNMay 5, 2016: REPUBLICANS I HAVE KNOWN<br />
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I grew up in a Republican household, it was middle-class, my father commuted to New York City every morning and worked in railroad insurance, he had met my mother in the office when they were both young, and she was the boss's daughter and his secretary. She could type 120 words a minute. All these people were Republicans. We lived in a solidly Republican town, Westfield, N. J., an old suburb. My older brother, my only sibling, went to Cornell, took chemical engineering, worked for a couple of years at an oil refinery in Perth Amboy, then enrolled in law school nights and ultimately became Westfield's town attorney, holding the job for twenty-three years, a state record. He was Republican through and through. When my wife and I went to see him late in life you could not walk into the house without finding Fox News going on the TV. All hours of the day and evening.<br />
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I was seven when FDR died. I had been hearing all my little life that Roosevelt was a "traitor to his class," so I grabbed a pot out of the kitchen, took a large spoon, and started walking around the outside of our house beating on the pot and crying, "Roosevelt is dead, Roosevelt is dead," and that lasted until my mother rushed outside and grabbed me and took me back inside. You get the picture.<br />
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So--quite a long life I've had, long enough that I voted my first time around for JFK. I've voted Democrat ever since. Princeton did this to me, deepened my knowledge of history, explained issues to me, got me interested in politics and what the two parties stood for. One of my roommates one year was the son of a Democratis kingmaker in Hartford, Connecticut. He subscribed to the New York Times. There was political talk in our rooms, and I listened. And began to follow the news. And abandoned my family's politics, which wasn't very strong anyway. Their politics were a small element in their overall character. They were respectable, conventional people with a great sense of humor, loving to their children, determined to give us every opportunity. Solid. You could rely on them completely. Cornell, Princeton--they made large sacrifices to send us there. They were great parents, and what I came to think of as classic Republicans, business oriented, traditional, relatively tolerant, patriotic, family centered.<br />
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What happened? How did a party into whose hands you could put the country without fearing for its life become the party of people like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump--people so inherently evil or so stupid and ignorant as to make the U. S. the laughing stock of the world, and/or a source of bafflement and panic internationally? Look back. Wendell Wilkie was a one-worlder along the lines of Woodrow Wilson. Dwight Eisenhower was boring but quietly effective, and wise. Thomas Dewey would have made a decent President. The only joke on the scene was Harold Stassen, and he never had a chance in any of the many elections he threw his hat into. No one took him seriously. The Republican Party was an educated party then, it was the party of business and always opposed regulation, but it was not irresponsible. Was it Nixon?<br />
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Yes, no doubt that was part of it. He was a strange bird, quite intelligent, deeply paranoid, never sure how to behave with people. You can cite his famous "Southern strategy," liberating the racism inherent not only in the South but also lurking in shallow burials all over the American landscape, and thereby turning the Republicans, the party of Lincoln, racist. But it took a long time after that for the party to become completely mindless, to give it over to know-nothings like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, to tolerate people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and let them become the party's voice. Nixon wasn't the whole story. Much more had to happen for the U. S. to become an outlier among the civilized, developed nations of the world.<br />
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Shall we call it the failure of the Establishment? No doubt that's another element, but then we have to define exactly what the Establishment consists of, and that's not easy. I'm pretty sure that if I had chosen another line of work I could have become a member of the Establishment. My mother saw me becoming a college president. In a large and extremely diverse country like ours, I think an Establishment is pretty much a necessity. A kind of semi-permanent government, the top edge of a permanent bureaucracy, it develops a sophistication about government that is often cynical but seldom reckless. We can all think right away of the many mistakes made by establishments, but you don't do away with them because they make mistakes. Or because they're intertwined with business interests. Business interests are part of the foundation of America. Alexander Hamilton understood that, and, as a friend of mine says, we're all Hamiltonians now. We deplore business lobbies and their power, but there are environmental lobbies and artist lobbies and PBS lobbies as well and wealthy people are necessary to support them.<br />
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I could go on and on citing reasons. They're no doubt endless; we could cite a perfect storm of reasons for the decline of the Republican Party. But they add up to a major tragedy. As a home for people like my parents, my brother, it has simply vanished. Now all in Republican World is illogic and rage, a profound stupidity, anti-educational, anti-science, anti-factual, hypocritical, overtly racist. It no longer has a moral compass, a sense of noblesse oblige, a sense of responsibility, and these are things that an opposition requires to have a real place in the country's sense of itself. There is no longer any intelligence in it, or anything but a kind of inept calculation. We can no longer trust it. Once we could. And this is tragic. It is doing the country permanent damage.Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-72468225084654128932016-04-10T09:40:00.000-07:002016-04-10T10:02:17.698-07:00BERNIE OR HILLARY IIApril 10, 2016: BERNIE OR HILLARY II<br />
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Last time I considered this question--a month ago? six weeks?--I left room for changing my mind. Barring unforeseen circumstances, my mind is now made up. I am 100% for Hillary.<br />
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And it is Bernie himself who killed the small chance he had with me. The more I learned, the more I disliked and distrusted. One of the key things was finding out on FB that in the ranking of our 100 Senators on a scale of willingness, or ability, to compromise, he came near the bottom, 98th out of 100. Who was number 99? Ted Cruz. That told me a lot. Politics is all about compromise. In the real world no one gets everything he or she wants. Every engineer designing cars or airplanes or ear plugs knows that if you want one feature, you have to give up another. Every politicians knows that to get anything done, you have to make deals with people you may not like whose views you abhor. You have to compromise. Bernie, at no. 98, clearly has not been willing to compromise. He stands on principle. Well, that's nice, but it's also a killer in terms of accomplishment. Bernie does not have his name on major bills. He is known if at all for attaching amendments to bills. Bernie is, in short, an ideologue.<br />
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Standing on principle. Spare me. My redoubtable wife, Lorraine Dusky, has been trying for years to get the closed adoption laws in the State of New York, indeed in states all over America, changed, so that adoptees can find out who their biological parents are, and therefore who they are. Change has been blocked often by adoptive parents who happen to hold office in State Legislatures and have done everything in their power to block change. And they have. This has gone on in states all over the country. It persists. It is a major injustice. In states where the laws have changed, they have often had attached to them a proviso that a biological mother can if she wishes veto its application to her. They can choose to remain anonymous. Well, there are other campaigners in this process who find this veto proviso unacceptable, and campaign against the passage of laws that don't give them the whole shebang, total change, total surrender from the other side. All or nothing. They wind up with nothing. But they stand on principle. They're ideologues.<br />
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A free college education for everyone, at least in the public colleges? Wow! A direct appeal to the young, saddled with crushing debt from their own college educations. I quote Ernest Hemingway--"Isn't it pretty to think so." The how of things seems to escape Bernie at every stage. The 50 states all have some sort of public education, which those states pay for with the college tuition they charge, as well as general funding from taxes, and in may states right now this funding is shrinking, partly on Republican grounds, namely 'why should we do anything for our people?' and partly on good old American anti-intellectualism and its pride in native ignorance. So how is this going to happen? Is Bernie going to tax the rich? Great. Now in the states controlled by Republicans, and the majority of them are, how is the Republican love for the rich going to transform suddenly into its opposite? The Republicans in these states are not going to disappear. They are not going to change their minds. It seems obvious this year that a lot of Republicans at the national level are going to lose their offices, but at the state level? Is the gerrymandering that favors Republicans going to disappear without floor fights that will go on for years? Bernie is not giving us the how. Bernie promises to get rid of the big banks, but when pinned down he can't say how.<br />
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But there's going to be a revolution, he says. Really? Where are the signs of that? I don't see any. This is not a revolutionary country; the people who take arms against a sea of troubles already have the arms. and they're pointing their muzzles in the other direction--against change; against minorities and liberalism and government control of Western lands and the like. When it comes time to vote for true liberals like Gene Macarthy or Walter Mondale or Hubert Humphrey, they don't. It's not a liberal country, and the many liberals among my friends don't seem to understand that they live in a bubble, that out there in Oklahoma and Idaho and the South it's very different. Very different indeed.<br />
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And Hillary? She gets it. She doesn't engage in magical thinking. She campaigns, as Gail Collins pointed out yesterday, in the places where people live and work and she listens. She finds out what they care about. She knows that Wall Street is immortal and it's a good thing to get to know people who control hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs. They are not necessarily the enemy. It's a complicated world. Wall Street, like any business, needs to be regulated, but it's not all evil and greed. Nothing is. Wall Street fulfills essential functions. So does mining, so does agribusiness, so do so many of the big bad wolves of American liberalism. These entities are not the enemy. You regulate them. Regulation has powerful enemies in Congress. You have to work through Congress to get major things done. Hillary will compromise. Bernie doesn't compromise. He stands on principle.<br />
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Hillary lives in the real world. She knows you don't get everything you want, and you don't get anything in politics all at once. You have to work for it, and real change, deep change, takes years. How long has it been since we won the Civil War? One hundred and fifty years. And where is racism now? All gone? I used to say it would take as long to give out as slavery lasted--more than 300 years. Now I'm thinking, maybe longer. She knows that as President, you have to be president of all the people, not just the liberals. You lose as often as you win, and are happy to make small gains. If you can't reform the system, which is entrenched, you try to manipulate it to your advantage. You make friends with the press if you can. You keep your friends close, your enemies closer. She is one of the most experienced politicians in America, as everybody knows, and she's down on foreign policy; indeed, she has a foreign policy, and it's not clear that Bernie does, or what it might be when he's faced with the enormous problems it constantly presents. In the now famous Daily News interview he couldn't figure out how to balance the American role in Israel with his native distaste for Israeli injustice toward the Palestinians. Come on, Bernie. You're running, as John Oliver would say, for fucking President of the United States. You have ISIS to deal with along with North Korea and China and the woefully neglected South American countries, along with the terrible conditions in Central America that drive immigrants into our arms. How are you going to deal with it? What's your policy? Do you have a policy? Or is it all and only about income inequality, which is another major problem nobody knows how to solve?<br />
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Hillary does not have charisma but I like her more and more. I like strong women and married one. She keeps me alert. She has her causes but she's not ideological. She can change her mind. But her heart is always in the right place. And she is no ideologue. She understands what's possible, what isn't; she fights for her cause but can compromise. So do I, in my small role running a regulatory board here in Sag Harbor. I don't stand on principle, I stand on practical, doable. I am mostly liberal, but not always. The arc of history moves toward justice, said Martin Luther King, but slowly. Very slowly. That is a wise thing to say. Bernie has yet to say a wise thing. We all know economic inequality is a plague, a blight upon the idea of America. But he promises impossible things. Thanks for bringing it up, Bernie, but it's time to let the people who live in the real world manage change. And by the way, you really look bad when it comes to gun control.Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-60626092760622806792016-03-23T13:26:00.000-07:002016-03-23T13:26:20.276-07:00THE COWBOYSMarch 23, 2016: THE COWBOYS<br />
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We gave a brunch last month for some old and new friends and I was sitting next to someone on our couch that I've known for 35 years, let's call him David, and he leaned over to me and said something about Iraq, to the effect of, what if we had left Saddam Hussein in power?<br />
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Amen to that, brother.<br />
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And then this week I read the very long piece in the current Atlantic about Obama's foreign policy, and my admiration for that policy was confirmed. Obama is cautious. Prudent. He believes in diplomacy, not war. He understand the complexity of the world and its interconnections. He gets it about tribalism in the Middle East. He knows something of the history of the region. He is trying to point America in the direction of the Pacific, as the coming region, a region where we might do more good than in the snake pit of the Near East..<br />
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Most of all, he understands that America is not the savior of the world. It cannot impose democratic systems on societies that do not want them, have no experience with them, and are not ready, and may never be ready, for them.<br />
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So naturally Thomas Friedman, writing today in the New York Times, devoted his column to critiziaing Obama's views as expressed in the Atlantic. To be brief about it, I have long despised Friedman's views on foreign policy. He was one of the principal hawks promoting American intervention in Iraq in 2001, one of the idiots who drank the Kool-Aid, believing in the carefully calculated lies of whichever Chalabi (sp?) it was, who convinced the Neo-Cons that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction even though the international experts--I'm thinking primarily of Hans Blix--knew there weren't, having actually been in Iraq looking for them and found none.<br />
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Has anyone noticed we are still there? Still involved? Is the situation better than it was? As Obama points out, Iraq presented no serious threat to the security of the United States at the time. Is the situation in Afghanistan better than it was? I wrote a piece about the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and read a book about the British experience in Afghanistan and it all still applies. The Soviet intervention, ten years worth, was an utter disaster. Afterwards a Soviet ambassador to the U. S. warned someone at the State Dept. not to make the mistake they had made. Wasted words. The English in the nineteenth century tried to impose, by force, a tribal leader on the Afghans who would rule the country, and wound up losing an entire army, every single man killed. Nothing has changed. There's an excellent movie out now, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, with Tina Fey, that graphically depicts how things currently fare in Afghanistan, and only the technology has changed. More helicopters. More IEDs.<br />
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I blame Woodrow Wilson for much of this. Make the World Safe for Democracy. Right, Woody, you naive fool. American intervention stems from this doctrine, although, to be sure, there was plenty of infantile talk in the nineteenth century about America being the Redeemer Nation, showing the world how to live free, and this talk went on even while we were exterminating the Indians, another tribal culture, and buying and selling black human beings, breaking up families, treating human beings like cattle. WE did this. Holier than thou Americans, smug, lucky in their isolation between two oceans, and consequently stupid.<br />
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It's a cowboy dumbness. It believes in myths, Shane, really fast with a gun, quick on the trigger, defending the innocent family, killing Jack Palance, then riding into the sunset. And all those who followed, Clint Eastwoods riding into town, killing the bad guys, almost always all by themselves, then riding on. That's who we are, we Americans, heroes bringing law and order to chaotic places. The appalling thing is to see this mentality at the very top, among people who actually run things and have serious power, and seeing how they persist at these levels no matter how many terrible mistakes they make. Caution? Prudence? Not for them.<br />
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Serving in the military, actually firing weapons at other people, and being fired at? Not for them.<br />
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Not until this country faces the truth about itself and so much of its past will it ever crawl out from under its own arrogance. But I don't have a whole lot of hope. Myths are extremely difficult to kill. In a country that seldom pays attention to its own history, its own moral failures, myths can only flourish. <br />
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Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-86981692398339781282016-03-01T09:42:00.000-08:002016-03-01T09:42:04.472-08:00AMERICA ALASAMERICA ALAS<br />
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March 1, 2016<br />
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Every weekday morning I sit in Starbuck's and spend too much for a cup of tea--in Starbuck's tea costs more than coffee--and read the NY Times and brood. This morning it was an op ed page piece telling us that in Europe Donald Trump awakens memories of Benito Mussolini. As well he should. He has the Republican establishment in a panic, although they created him. He makes me distinctly nervous. He makes the Europeans nervous, as well he should. He is a demagogue, indifferent to policies or the political process, bent on power no one knows how he will wield, an obvious narcissist, racist, blowhard, willing to accept the endorsements of the KKK, a man with no discernible moral standards, with a history of failure, a man who offers no ideas or positions or point of view, who does not argue but wins the crowd with ad hominem insults, and turns every crowd into a mob.<br />
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The Republican Party created their own monster, and now he rages about the countryside raising havoc. The Republican Party created Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, both lying machines, and Glenn Beck and any number of others of their kind, and let them deliberately misdirect the public and play to their prejudices and resentments and buried hatreds. Now we all pay the price. The media love it because it's such good theater, and the mob loves it because it gives voice to their hatreds. Their racism. Their bitterness at their own struggle to make ends meet, which they blame, rightly, on forces beyond their control. And the manifest injustice of seeing the CEO of the corporations they work for making 400 or 500 times what they make, and flying around in their private planes. How ironic that the leader of this mob flies around in his own private plane.<br />
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At some point in the future a clever writer will untangle this disaster and tell us why it happened, although by then it may be too late; we may have, or have had, a President Trump, and the country will be lost. I certainly hope not. But even if the country is not lost this time around, it will remain in trouble, because the fundamental flaws will remain. Let me list them.<br />
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The survival of a republic requires an educated public. Our educational levels are steadily sinking in relation to the rest of the world. If education is adequately funded at all, it is only for the STEM disciplines, science, technology, math, which are thought to be useful, while all the rest are, in the mind even of our own highly educated President, evidently, merely an indulgence. This is an ongoing tragedy. The founding fathers we revere so much were all educated in the classics. Read Jefferson's letters to his nephews about this. He tells them what to read, and it is the classics, and the Enlightenment political philosophers; and it is this that created the Constitution. This is what made Washington, Jefferson, and Madison and Hamilton and James Monroe such wise leaders politically. Now our political leaders are mostly lawyers. Jefferson's reading lists are truly formidable. But he fully expected his nephews to grow into political leaders themselves. That was their duty. That remains the duty of every voter in a republic--to educate himself about politics, to lose his innocence and plunge into it, to study it and to serve. To be a citizen is to take on responsibility for government, to get involved, to follow it closely. And to vote. Fewer than half the eligible population votes in the typical American election now. And that's criminally shameful, and one of the primary reasons the republic is unlikely to survive.<br />
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What else? Money in politics. This is so obvious it hardly needs comment. Every thinking citizen I know believes the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United was essentially corrupt, based on a disastrous nineteenth century precedent that corporations have the legal status of a person and designed to give free rein to the rich to control the politics of the country. A decision, significantly, engineered by the former corporate lawyers on the Court. "The business of America is business," said Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s.. As anyone can see, business bought Congress a long time ago. The lobbying industry is huge in this country; lobbyists write legislation, spend money taking legislators on junkets to golf clubs, all the machinery of corruption firmly in place. Only legislation can change this fact, and what are the chances of that? What are the chances of an amendment to the Constitution destroying Citizens United?<br />
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And then? Ideological rigidity. A few years ago I wrote a piece in this space on why I am a Democrat, which has been lifelong with me, and it has to do with human nature and my understanding of the nature of human society in America. I think most political ideologies are based on just such views, which seem to emerge from particular personality types. More authoritarian types turn Republican. Less authoritarian turn Democrat. It sometimes puzzles me that I'm a Democrat, since I come from a Republican family. In any case, these are deep-seated differences, built into us, which means they are probably, in whatever names, Republican, Democrat, Whig, Tory, Copperheads, Know-Nothing they appear in history, permanent. Which means that the practice of politics will always require compromise. It was just that that Barack Obama tried to practice when he first entered office. The refusal to compromise is what is now coming home to roost on the Republican right. Their inflexibility, their rigidity is doing them in. And it was <i>planned</i>. That's the most remarkable thing. Nothing this President proposed was ever going to get enacted as long as the Republicans held power in Congress, and this was deliberate. Now it's an issue with the Supreme Court, and the egregious Scalia's replacement. They won't even shake hands with Obama's nominee. This is a version of treason. It brings government to a standstill, and it is one source of the mob mentality that engulfs the country. It embodies the smugness, the contempt for the political process, that people instinctively hate about what politics has become in this country. Normally, no politician can afford to be ideologically pure. To his public he must pretend to be if he wants to get elected, but in practice he must work with the other side, make concessions, make deals, tit for tat, in order to get a step closer to what he wants. It takes time and it takes a certain level of prevarication, but that's how it works. In office you serve all the people, not just your side. Purity has no place in politics. But one side has closed its doors. Which is what totalitarian governments do.<br />
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I could go on, and probably will before too long. I am deep in Sag Harbor politics, chair of one of the village's regulatory boards, dealing with the public every two weeks at our meetings, and it's not easy. We have been sued already, will probably be sued again. Hot issues surround us. <i>Vanity Fair</i> will be publishing a piece on these issues in just a month or two. I get paid nothing for this. It's my duty as a citizen. If we don't do it, our village will die. Think globally, act locally. Don't get me wrong, I'm no hero. I just take citizenship seriously. So must we all, if our country is to survive.Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-79599076317690715072016-02-05T09:06:00.002-08:002016-02-05T09:06:59.997-08:00HILLARY OR BERNIE?February 5, 2016: HILLARY OR BERNIE?<br />
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What does a President do first thing every morning when he, or possibly she, wakes up in the White House? Let's call him a he, for the time being. He has breakfast, or maybe just coffee, walks into the Oval Office, and gets his daily intelligence briefing. He wakes up to the daily crisis. He gets his daily instruction in the real world.<br />
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I've often wondered what that must be like, what it does to a person to be reminded, day after day, how complex most situations are, how difficult, even impossible the choices are one faces in dealing with them, and how far away solutions are. Consider the situation in Syria, and our unfortunate involvement in it. Everything in Syria is a horror--the dictator, Assad, willing to do anything to maintain his control; the rebels, wielding different ideologies of their own, united only in hating Assad; ISIS, filling the vacuum created by these separate horrors with their own extraordinary levels of violence, their own spectacular horror, and all of this affecting the entire surrounding Middle East. So what do WE do in this situation. What do WE do about the refugees, streaming toward Europe to escape the madness, to add another dimension to the five or six already at work. I have no answer. We're already bombing and strafing ISIS, throwing out own violence into the picture, but is that an answer? A lot of collateral damage enters the scene. We are responsible for it. And now some idiot on the right proposes we carpet bomb the entire country, maybe bomb the entire Middle <br />East, and an equally idiotic right wing thinks that's a grand idea. It cannot be fun to be President of the United States. It's hard enough, complicated enough, to be the chairman of Sag Harbor's Board of Historic Preservation and Architectural Review, which I currently am.<br />
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I am also currently an historian, writing American and military history and working on a second edition of my version of the Journals of Lewis and Clark. History is an education in reality, and what it taught me early on is that most Americans do not live in the real world, but in a fantasy world, a dream world in which, in one version, everybody is self-reliant, or can be if they stop being lazy, government is a con job, and freedom is the only value. That's the right's version of the dream. On the left, the dream is that we can ultimately conquer corruption, self-interest, and Wall Street, and regulate our way to a utopian society in which everyone has a guaranteed income, college is free for all, and all of us will finally be men and women of good will--what one of my nephews calls the nanny state. Both dreams are very old, the current ones being modern incarnations of ideas that date to the beginnings of Western civilization. They have cropped up repeatedly in American history. Thomas Jefferson distrusted government even while he ran it, while at the same time dreaming of a happy agricultural republic where farmers read Homer in the original Greek. His dear friend James Madison was far more realistic. "If men were angels," he wrote in Federalist #51, "government would not be necessary." But men are not angels. Government is necessary. Left to themselves, people would descend into a Hobbesian universe of all against all. Into the dystopian anarchy of the apocalypse, where we all die.<br />
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Hillary or Bernie? I remember telling a teacher many years ago that I wanted to live in the real world, and have tried to do so. In truth, I am not enthusiastic about either candidate. Hillary has been with us for a long time, she makes mistakes in judgment, she has ties to Wall Street. On the other hand she also has close ties to minorities, she has been a fierce advocate for women, for human rights generally, and she has the kind of international experience and relationships that are crucial for America's role in the world. Bernie is clearly a decent man, progressive to his fingertips, and righteous. He talks the talk progressives and young people rally around. And it's appealing. But his on the other hands are that he's never gotten anything important through Congress, he obviously cannot and will not be able to finance his proposals, and he's too far on the utopian side for my taste.<br />
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But there are miles to go. And people are unpredictable. I thought Barak Obama a poor choice in 2008 for his lack of experience and the fact that he seemed too large a target for some fanatic's rifle, but he has proved to be an excellent President caught in awful circumstances. The fact that he's black brought back out of the twilight a recrudescence of the racism that Americans have harbored for 400 years, and that was unfortunate. However, it opened our eyes to the depth of the racism that afflicts us, to the depth of our own particular horror. Politics remains what it has always been, the art of the possible, an impossible job of maneuvering among the dream worlds of this interest and the other, trying to keep one's own balance, and the nation's, while dealing with what's real. I think Hillary will be better at this than Bernie, who's an ideologue, and that she will accomplish more. But we'll see. When we reach November, I'm not sure now who I will vote for then, except that it will be the Democratic candidate. As usual, everything depends. Time will tell.<br />
Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-6153896352405202592016-01-14T10:10:00.001-08:002016-01-14T10:10:56.433-08:00LIBERTY IN OREGONJanuary 14, 1916 LIBERTY IN OREGON<br />
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Armed militia taking over a Federal facility--really? Are they serious?<br />
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I suspect they are. Serious and stupid at the same time. But it's not as if it's new. Portions of the United States are always looking for ways to separate themeselves from the Federal Gov't., most famously in the Civil War, and somehow it's always in the name of liberty, or freedom, or get out of my backyard. I know the impulse from writing about the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania in the 1790s, shortly after there first was a United States under the Constitution. Farmers there were growing corn and converting it to whiskey in order to have a product that was much cheaper and easier to ship west down the rivers to New Orleans than it was to harvest the corn and ship it east to markets in the cities there. Corn in bulk is a lot more expensive to ship anywhere on farm wagons and with multiple mules than corn condensed into whiskey, for which there's always a demand. The tax on spirits, which was levied at the source, was one of the very first taxes the Fed. government enacted, and western Pennsylvania farmers responded with an armed rebellion. It didn't come to an end until George Washington himself called up the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York militias and sent them into the Pittsburgh area, himself leading the way. It took about fifteen minutes, once Washington's army came close, for the rebellion to disappear.<br />
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So it has always been in the U. S. We're free, right? Doesn't that mean that we can do whatever we want? If we're living here, isn't this basically our land? Why should there be Federal land at all? Benedict Anderson called nations "imagined communities." Most of us don't live in eastern Oregon, can't personally know these people, the local communities they belong to are alien to us, who live in totally other communities with different styles of life and differing experiences and different relationships to our physical environments. So what makes us one "nation"? Where do our true allegiances belong? In Europe the allegiances center on their long histories, their differing languages, their defining literatures, their relative homogeneity. We have the one language, though with different accents, but most everything else seems unreal. How many of us can imagine having common ground with a cattle rancher? In effect, that's what being a nation on some level requires. Just that level of imagination, albeit in the abstract. We have to commit to the same idea of the nation, the same image in our mind of what it means, and those images, as our politics so plainly reveal, are not the same.<br />
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I've written about these matters before in this blog, and I'll no doubt do it again. As the populace gets further removed from its original Enlightenment principles--who asks James Madison any more what the liberty of a citizen actually means?--as more and more people come here or are born here, as the diversity in the world and all the conflicts it generates grow more and more intense, the centrifuge that is our "nation" will only speed up, and what holds us together--I'm still trying to figure out exactly what that is--will come to seem more remote. We have had these regional differences from the start. As Obama's brilliant presidency reveals, the racism hasn't gone away. The military supposedly represents the nation at its best, but in fact we treat them like shit. As differences escalate and harden, people grow more selfish. Compromise vanishes. Mutual understanding is not to be found.<br />
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I've quoted Benjamin Franklin before, too. Let me repeat. As he emerged for the last time from the hall in Philadelphia where the Constitution was written, a woman asked him what sort of government they had conceived. And he famously said, "A republic, ma'am. If you can keep it."<br />
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If <i>you</i> can keep it. It must be kept, that is, from inside the hearts and mind of a people dedicated to the task. As the President said in his final State of the Union address the other night, it's a hard task. It takes dedication, and, most of all, it takes service.<br />
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But as a study at Princeton concluded recently, we have already lost it. We do not live, it claimed, in either a republic or a democracy any more. We live in an oligarchy.Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-18736476862993566262015-12-18T07:48:00.000-08:002015-12-18T07:48:18.653-08:00INTO THE AMERICAN WILDERNESSDecember 18, 2015: INTO THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS<br />
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In the American wilderness it rains a lot, four days straight in our case. We crossed the Mackinac Bridge, five miles long, in a strong wind. Apparently there's always a strong wind in the Straits there, and trucks follow a guide vehicle at 25 or 30 miles an hour in order not to be blown off the bridge. We were driving to Marquette, on the shores of Lake Superior, to attend Lorraine's granddaughter's graduation from Northern Michigan University. Smart girl. She graduated magna cum laude.<br />
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At the end of the bridge, we turned west on US 2, and drove fifty or sixty miles--distance doesn't seem to matter in the American wilderness--into the heart of the heart of the country, steady drizzle all around us, and fog, and the cedars and bogs that make this place wild. We saw not a single animal coming or going. There were no deer carcasses along the side of the road. We caught occasional glimpses of the northern shore of Lake Michigan. Then we turned north, drove another twenty miles, and turned west again toward Marquette. Here it was truly bleak, a road without a single bend or curve in it for 25 miles, then, after a right turn, more of the same. A few tiny, pathetic communities along its route, then more bogs, more cedars, the bogs brown with winter, the shrubs leafless, the millions upon millions of cedars identical, indistinguishable. In the distance you could see an occasional car approaching in the opposite lane, see it from miles away, and then in the blink of an eye it was past you. If you ran out of gas in the American wilderness you faced probably a thirty-mile walk to a gas station, or would have to depend on the ambiguous kindness of strangers. During our four days, or was it three, we saw not a single police car. But ceaseless drizzle.<br />
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Marquette is a long strip mall, with a small town at the end, on the shore of Lake Superior. I had a drink with someone I know at a sports bar on a side street. We struggled to find words. We attended the graduation ceremonies, where the commencement speaker was a retired colonel. He told us that the American Dream was not dead after all.<br />
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In the Middle West, people are fat. Short women, thick bodies, like Eskimos, for whom fat is a survival technique. Here I think it represents a kind of solace. Food is a pleasure that never fails, when there are no other reliable pleasures. You cannot get a decent newspaper in the American wilderness. The Sunday New York Times could be had at Starbuck's, but it wasn't there when we stopped to buy one. But it didn't matter, because the lighting in American motels is always so dim that you don't have enough light to read by anyway. It was daytime TV, or nothing.<br />
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We made it all the way back to Saginaw in one day, in pouring rain, at 80 miles an hour. There we stayed not in a motel, but in a large old inn, once a mansion, where we were the only guests. Our room was the size of a rather grand New York apartment, perfectly preserved with its original furnishings, its original silks, paintings on the walls, books filling the bookcases, most of them Reader's Digest Condensed Books, and windows you couldn't open. It was difficult to find a restaurant in Saginaw. Saginaw is bleak in an entirely different way from northern Michigan--a downtown abandoned, no people on the streets, old mansions in ruins, America after a nuclear exchange. Another kind of wilderness. Saginaw was bleak and ugly.<br />
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The Upper Peninsula was bleak and oddly beautiful, even in winter. Nick Adams went there to be alone after returning from the devastation of the World War I trenches. Bleakness so relentless has a kind of grandeur to it. It diminishes you with its extent. It seems to come from God. It is not about you.<br />
<br />Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-76142449939900667492015-10-08T09:59:00.000-07:002015-10-08T09:59:11.668-07:00AMERICA LOVES GUNS, YES IT DOESAMERICA LOVES GUNS, YES IT DOES October 8, 2015<br />
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This is hardly news. But it doesn't make the news very often. Instead we hear mostly about the mass shootings, the power of the National Rifle Association, the Second Amendment, regulation and the lack of it, mental illness and guns, the little children who shoot each other, accidentally or not, etc. etc. All that familiar stuff. But the fact of the matter is, we love guns. Love 'em to death. Any culture that has , what is it? 350 million firearms floating around? loves guns. They don't all belong to nutcases. And it has nothing to do with a "well-regulated militia." There's nothing regulated about all these gun owners, who obviously number in the millions. It's ordinary people who love guns, who fantasize about defending their homes, their persons, about cowing the burglars who break in at night, who think guns are a kind of insurance policy against violence. Who think it's about Deadwood, and the guys in the white hats who have an amazing proficiency with pistols fighting it out with their fast draws on that mythical street where these battles happen. The hidden dream life of the American citizen.<br />
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And the culture panders to it relentlessly. Starting with Westerns, then gangster movies, all the way up to space epics, it's always about gunfights, or large explosions filling the screen with fire, the excitement of seeing people killed. And the indifference to it. I don't go to these kinds of movies any more. I find them too disturbing; they don't let me sleep. I know something about guns from firing howitzers during my artillery training, and believe me, they're fun to fire. You can stand directly behind a howitzer, toss off a shell, and watch it ascend to its apogee before losing sight of it. It's beautiful. As a rifleman firing M-1s in training, I reached just below "expert" status, where the challenge is to reach an unnatural level of stillness inside and out to lay down accurate fire. Like anything challenging, it's satisfying to be good at it. It's definitely fun to shoot skeet, where the target is moving clay pigeons, and I've shot animals, too. In my first marriage we had skunks living in a crawl space under our house and I killed them with a .22, six of them, one by one, as they emerged into the yard, then dumped the bodies in the woods. The stink penetrated the house, my business suits, my wife's clothes. I had no regrets, no pangs of conscience about it. My two nephews own guns and one hunts, they're both highly responsible men, and I have no objections to hunting. The one eats what he kills; the other owns a gun for safety, or used to. Hunting and gathering is an ancient human way of staying alive.<br />
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More than that, I write military history for a magazine of the same name, and there's a whole lot of gunfire in military history. So are we going to do away with war because people die, a considerable number of them unarmed civilians? To borrow a line from Hemingway, isn't it pretty to think so.<br />
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It's a savage world. But America is peculiarly savage, more than most other civilized countries, and it's not going to stop until we stop loving guns so much. To do that you have to start with young men. You have to educate the testosterone, admittedly not an easy task. Testosterone is built in. Just as the violence is built into our history. Cortes won Mexico with Toledo steel and horses; we won North America with superior weaponry, too. The West was won with guns, beginning with Massachusetts and Virginia and up and down the East Coast and steadily moving west. The result was a genocide we rarely acknowledge, millions of native peoples wiped from the face of the Earth. That would be another beginning, to acknowledge that primal crime, along with the slavery that politicians wooing the South still try to downplay, to wipe from the history books. This is who we are, this is what we stand for. Good guys against bad guys, as we'd like to believe. That's bullshit. It was murder.<br />
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Another starting place would be training. If you own guns, you should have to go through a regulating process at least as stringent as driving and owning a car, which involves training young people how to use them. Cars are recognized as potentially deadly weapons; so should guns be. In the same way fathers train their sons how to drive, they should be required to teach their sons at least the same level of responsibility in the use of guns. I don't own a gun, but the Army trained me how to handle one, how to take one apart and put it back together again, and how to shoot it. I was good at it and I enjoyed the training. Military people respect guns, respect the dangers involved with them, and are very careful with them.<br />
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We're not going to get guns out of our system. We're not going to be Sweden or Great Britain or France, where gun violence is so small. Recognizing that, maybe we would have a chance of becoming sensible and realistic about the fact and do the obvious necessary things to train people to use them properly, to regulate their use and who uses them, and reduce the level of violence. We need to demystify them. And bring a sense of real human responsibility into our political life, and into American culture.Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-2895451363386072502015-09-21T09:14:00.000-07:002015-09-21T09:14:08.223-07:00AMERICAN "NATION"September 21, 2015: AMERICAN "NATION"<br />
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I'm currently working on a piece for Military History magazine on the Greek war of independence, which took place over the ten years between 1821-1831, and it has inevitably led me to wonder about America now. Not that we face a war for our own independence, but some of the same issues that we cannot resolve, and have never fully resolved, faced the Greeks. As in:<br />
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After 400 years of occupation and control by the Ottoman Empire, Christian Greeks under Muslim Turks, Greek society was hardly a unified thing. Parts of the country were under the effective control of mountain warlords, Greeks, yes, but far more loyal to their own regions than to any idea of a Greek "nation." They no longer had any experience of being a nation. The cities, or better to describe them as large towns, had mixed groups of Greek and Turkish merchants running things, under sometimes nominal, sometimes firm Turkish control. Many of the more learned Greeks served in the Ottoman government; others served the Tsar of Russia. The majority of the country consisted of a peasantry that chafed under Ottoman taxes and arbitrary Ottoman rule; the peasantry nurtured the hatreds necessary for revolution but not the means. The revolution began not in Greece but in Ottoman provinces on the Danube. Eventually they achieved independence, but they never put together a modern countrywide army in the process and received a great deal of outside help, from France, Britain, and Russia in particular, without which they would have failed. As it was two civil wars followed this victory. In the end they needed a king, who was chosen by the great powers that had led them to independence. Was Greece a "nation," then?<br />
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Is America? <br />
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In <i>Imagined Communities</i>, his brilliant book on the subject, Benedict Anderson argues that it takes common experience, and common beliefs, to make up a nation, and that it also takes shared historical experience over time. We can point to a lot of that: a Revolution, a Civil War; our Constitution, two World Wars, both of which drew on citizens from all over the country and threw them together under extreme pressure in deadly circumstances, which, precisely because of the threats, does create bonds. And there are other things that tend to form a national bond, ceremonies like the Super Bowl, Fourth of July parades, the Oscars, national holidays; shared anxieties, like Red Scares; and so on. But there have always been fault lines in American society, and they persist. Racism is one, and the election of President Obama has turned it into a zombie, back from the dead, not reducing it but intensifying it. There are long-standing ideological differences that go back to the beginning. An intense regionalism persists. And the ideological differences have only become more passionate, less reasoned. We have always debated what America was about, what it meant, what its purpose was. Now the debate has grown hysterical, and the voice of reason has died away. We have had two major political parties from the 1790s on; until the Civil War, they managed to govern, even when they were at odds.<br />
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Now? One has opted out. One has become dangerously unreasonable and backward looking, intent on undoing what cannot be undone--the history of the twentieth century. This has only intensified the deep regional differences in the country. Texas seems to think it wants to secede. The Bible Belt and its acolytes in Washington conducts open warfare on the rights of women and minorities. I don't have to cite chapter and verse; newspapers report this news every day.<br />
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Where does this leave us? On a downward slope toward incoherence and chaos. To be a nation, a people must adhere to its own principles, its historic identity, its common values. But we are a people which increasingly does not know its history, which cannot agree on its values, and thinks of themselves more as Texans, or New Yorkers or Floridians than as Americans, and whose standing armed forces are not composed of a citizenry required to serve their nation but of expendables hired out of the labor pool. Increasingly we look like a banana republic; increasingly we ignore our radical decline in the standings of civilized industrialized countries in relation to educational levels, health care, upward mobility and a host of other measures. Our foreign policy is an embarrassment, our ignorance a tragedy. Are we a "nation"?<br />
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Not yet. Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-19903240263890809392015-08-15T12:34:00.001-07:002015-08-15T12:34:58.741-07:00 A PALTRY THINGAugust 15, 2015: A PALTRY THING<br />
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An aged man is but a paltry thing,<br />
A ragged coat upon a stick, unless<br />
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing<br />
For every tatter in its mortal dress.<br />
Famous lines from Yeats. I'm aged, and I feel that way sometimes. Then why am I so mortally busy? It's been that way this whole summer. I have just last week, or was it this week, finished a book I've been writing off and on since 1997. A book about Rome. A <i>short </i>book about Rome. (There's a long story about that.) I have volunteered once more to be the Chairman of the Board of Historic Preservation and Architectural Review here in Sag Harbor. An onerous job, requires lots of time. But now I'm planning the next book. I've taken to just writing the damned things. Getting a contract before you write them, the traditional method, is getting harder and harder to do. So what's left of my life is all mapped out for me. Writers don't retire. In cases like mine, they can't. You're driven, and you're broke, too. But I know wealthy writers who keep on working when they don't need to. It gets in the blood. It's what you do, how you live.<br />
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But the village thing is something else. I was the Chairman of this Board when it was founded, helped found it, spent four years as Chairman. This is citizenship. This is the idea that if you live someplace, and care for it, you have a responsibility to get involved, to serve. "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." I was talking about this the other evening to a woman, aged like myself, who grew up in a prominent political family, and she felt the same way--it's about serving. You belong, you serve. It's that simple. I've written about this before on this blog, that a national service program of some sort, not necessarily military, should be mandatory for people in their early twenties. It is in other countries. Military service is mandatory in Israel. I did my own military service via ROTC after I graduated from college. Learned a great deal about this country. Service is an obligation. Political involvement is an obligation. That's what citizenship is all about. You don't get the privileges without the obligation. Not if you take it seriously.<br />
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Well, my soapbox. This fall I'll be preparing a second edition of the Lewis and Clark Journals I did for the National Geographic Society some years ago. HBO is doing a series on L & C. It's all in the timing. I feel rushed, even as I write this blog. And I'm old. I'm tired. I need a nap every day. But the challenge of writing if you're born to it never leaves you. It's what Eliot wrote about, the struggle with language, the wanting to know what you actually think about things, and follow through to see what that might mean. So the next book calls, and the next, plus the magazine articles. I can't believe it--torn cartilage in my knee, a slowing brain, iffy hearing: the shadow of the inevitable. A ragged coat indeed. But it's not over 'til it's over, said the immortal Yogi. And it ain't over yet.Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-76991651017756093752015-05-31T10:29:00.001-07:002015-05-31T10:29:28.670-07:00THE ADOPTION TRAGEDYMay 31, 2015: The Adoption Tragedy<br />
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Lorraine, my wife, is within a day or two of signing off on the last corrections to her new book, HOLE IN MY HEART, and very soon thereafter Amazon will be publishing it, making it available via Kindle or as a bound book, selling for a price yet to be determined, but probably around $12.00. What a long road it has been--five years, as many versions, always refining it and making it better. I'm proud to have traveled this road with her and done the little I could do to encourage and help her. The book is, as most of my readers will know, about giving up her daughter for adoption, reuniting with her years later, Lorraine's campaign to open adoption records, and her sometimes troubled, sometimes happy relationship with her daughter. <br />
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From very long ago I have known that adoption was an iffy business at best. When I was eleven my cousin Joan came to live with us. She was sixteen and pregnant, and we were her safe haven, my mother hiding her in our small house, taking her out to the doctor only in big loose coats to prevent the neighbors knowing her condition, and Joan with the red eyes, the crying fits, and all the rest involved in such a profound loss as giving a child away entails. She never had a choice. Worse, the father of the child, a boy she loved, was told by his parents to spread the word that Joan had slept with a bunch of other kids as well as him, so how could they be sure--and help pay the costs--that their son was responsible? Joan, and Joan's life, was never the same. Her own mother was an alcoholic, and she used to tell me that my mother was the only real mother she had ever had. But my mother presided over the private adoption, arranged through the family doctor, that took her child from her.<br />
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So I was not shocked or surprised when I met Lorraine and she told me her story--young woman, married man, the mess that is an affair and the sometimes terrible consequences. Shit happens. Happens all the time. People make mistakes, especially when they're young, and sometimes they suffer the consequences the rest of their lives. I already knew from Joan's experience something about the void the loss of a child creates in a woman's life, and while I also knew that adoption was sometimes the only solution for people, I knew it was a desperate solution, a tragic solution.<br />
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That's largely because of the secrecy involved. And here, I realized when I started to think about it, was the crux of it. And the crime of it. According to the laws that dominate adoption in the United States, the mother who gives birth and whom circumstances force to give up her child is never to know what happened to him or her. While the adopted child is never to know who his actual parents are. You don't think this haunts them both? It certainly haunted Lorraine, as her book amply demonstrates. It also haunted her daughter, as her daughter's testimony in the book also amply demonstrates. For the adoptee, it means that she has no natural identity, and no right to it. She or he can never know whether she's of Irish heritage, or English, or Spanish, whether her or his grandmother also had red hair and big ears, who their flair for dancing or mathematics came from. On my mother's side I am descended from Rebecca Nurse, who was hanged at Salem for witchcraft in 1692. On my father's I am entirely Swedish, which accounts for my height, my square head, my quietness, and something of my natural calm. Quite apart from all the writing I've done in my life, my accomplishments, such as they are, and my relationships with other people, these things are a major part of my identity.<br />
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And one's identity is a natural right. Fundamental to being human. What gives a government the right to mess with it? Nothing. The laws on adoption are an aberration, a disgrace, designed only to protect the adoptive parents from the loss of their illusion that they are the real and only parents, and the knowledge that their gain--some other woman's child--is that woman's tragedy. The United States was founded on natural law, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the right to one's own identity is without question part of that heritage. I cannot imagine myself without my own identity. As Lorraine's daughter testifies eloquently in Lorraine's book, adoptees walk around fantasizing about being the children of princesses, or somebody famous, or prostitutes; they make up scenarios; or they improvise identities. But they never really know. The right to know who you are has been taken away before they have any say whatever in the matter. They walk the earth always with this feeling of incompleteness, of missing something essential--who they really are--and always with this question--why was I given up? What's wrong with me?<br />
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Lorraine has spent much of her adult life trying to get the laws changed. She reunited with her daughter, with my encouragement and that of friends, by paying a searcher many years ago. The story she tells in her book is poignant, sad, compelling. I cannot read parts of it without crying; I was there. Other parts make me laugh. It has the feel, the substance, of lived lives, in all their complexity; and it is all true. She and I, like all married couples, have our differences, but they vanish here, in our joint belief that adoption in America needs to be rethought and reconfigured, that a quiet but fundamental injustice has to be corrected. To that end, she has written one hell of a fine book. The kind you'll remember. It should be available in a week or so.Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-73161404773099705572015-04-15T08:59:00.000-07:002015-04-16T07:02:37.317-07:00RUSSIAN INTERVENTIONApril 15, 2015<br />
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I have a piece out right now in Military History about the American intervention in the Russian Revolution in 1918 and '19, at the end of the First World War. I was thinking about it this morning reading the NYTimes after seeing a letter by someone talking about the weakness of Obama's foreign policy, which seems to be a mantra these days. Actually I rather like Obama's foreign policy. He's cautious. Woodrow Wilson was cautious, too. He's famous for wanting to make the world "safe for democracy," but what he's less famous for is not wanting to interfere with other nations' right to self-determination.<br />
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Obama will be known historically for being realistic about the ability of the United States to affect the course of events internationally, and not wanting to start yet another stupid war in the Middle East. Maybe he's read history, knows that Afghanistan has always been at war with itself, has always resisted or ridden out foreign invasions, from Alexander the Great on, that's its citizens are all armed, that Afghan culture is divided into tribes, and two languages, and that warfare is part of their tradition. Maybe he has read enough to know that Iraq is a made-up country, a creature of the arbitrary "nation making" of the French and British at the end of the First World War, that it has no national history, little national feeling, and is radically and deeply divided on religious and tribal grounds, with the Sunni and Shia sects carrying on, incessantly, their mutual hatreds, which will extend far into the future. Democracy? The Middle East is theocratic, even Israel. The so-called nations there do best--i.e., do not stir up trouble with their neighbors--when under the control of dictators. I know, we don't want to think about that, but the wiser of the American politicians of the '40s and '50s, men like George Kennan or Dean Acheson, understood it well. <br />
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Kennan has to be the guide to the American intervention in Russia in 1918, too. He wrote a two-volume study of it, the second volume of which I've read. It began when in 1917 Russia ended their participation in the war, made a separate peace with Germany, ceding the Germans an enormous amount of territory in the process, and freed up 40 German divisions to go fight in the West. The Allies were desperate to persuade, or force, the new Communist government to reopen the eastern front. The Allies were exhausted by the war, were running out of manpower, and knew the renewed strength on the German side might bring about their defeat. The Americans at the time were in the war but not ready to fight. So Churchill mounted a relentless effort to persuade Wilson to send American troops to both Murmansk and Archangel, in the west, and Vladivostok in the east. Wilson was extremely reluctant to do this. He felt it was up to the Russians to decide their own fate. He delayed for months. But ultimately Churchill got to him, he felt he no longer had a choice, and in the summer of 1918, even as American troops were beginning to make the difference on the Western Front, he sent troops, under British commanders (most of them incompetent), to fight the Bolsheviks in Russia.<br />
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Machinations. Churchill wanted to revive the Eastern Front, yes, but he also wanted to do whatever he could to stop Communism while he thought it was possible. Churchill was arrogant, ambitious, aggressive. This was one of his many mistakes, nearly as big as Gallipoli. Wilson had no such intentions, he was only trying to please an ally. We can forgive him for this one, but we cannot forget. George Kennan makes the point that the Russians have certainly never forgotten, that their enmity to the United States begins in Murmansk, and that we lost, by this bungle, any opportunity we might have had to find some reasonable way to develop a mutually tolerant relationship with each other. The intervention itself was a disaster. Russia is huge. No one seemed to remember what happened to Napoleon when he invaded Russia. American soldiers died in the snow and swamps for nothing. When we left in 1919, all we had done is make a permanent enemy.<br />
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Since the piece appeared I've heard from a couple of readers that, hey, if we'd only sent enough troops, we could have killed Communism in the cradle. Hawkish and unwise. Look at the history, check out the circumstances, and anyone can see it wasn't possible. Now we have yet more of the unwise, noisier than ever, trying to kill Obama's effort to reverse 50 years of hatred and distrust between the U. S. and Iran, which stem from equally hawkish and unwise actions on the part of the CIA when they managed to depose Mossadegh.<br />
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We are not as strong as we think we are, and we are definitely not smart. Our nation is in decline by any number of standards. Yet all the hawks can think of is shock and awe. While our President, who seems to know the history, see the limitations, and understand the law of unintended consequences, pulls back from foolish threats and aggressive policies. There's a time for everything, but this is certainly not the time to pull us deeper into the rabbit hole that is the Middle East, and I have no confidence whatsoever that any of the Republican candidates has the wisdom to be cautious.Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3961878477271604907.post-1276560109110455412015-03-11T08:27:00.000-07:002015-03-11T08:27:18.066-07:00ACID TRIPMarch 11, 2015:<br />
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I read a back issue of the New Yorker at Starbuck's yesterday morning and came upon a piece by Michael Pollan called "The Trip Treatment," about using psychedelic drugs to help cancer patients cope with their condition. It is a powerful piece about a powerful drug, psilocybin, the difficulties involved in doing research with it, especially in designing scientific experiments, since the results are all self-reported, and public attitudes about psychedelics. But what affected me the most was remembering my own experiment with a psychedelic, LSD, which I conducted on November 4, 1972, in a little cabin in the western Catskills near a village named Downsville.<br />
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It was indeed an experiment. I had recently received a contract for what would be my first published book, the one I discussed last time in this space, Reality Police, about the mental health system. I knew that LSD was said to mimic a psychotic episode and I wanted to know what that was like before I actually checked myself into a mental hospital. So, with a couple of friends, one of whom had some LSD, we drove to Downsville, borrowed the cabin, and I and the friend who had the LSD took tabs, while the other friend kept tabs on us. It was a misty, cloudy day. The flies in the cabin, just warming up with our arrival, buzzed at the windows. Somebody put some music on. And it began.<br />
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It was intense at first. Perceptions changed quickly. The flies, for example--the buzzing of the flies slowed down, organized itself, and became a kind of music, and the music was, in a way I cannot describe, beautiful. When I breathed, the room breathed with me. While my perceptions slowed down, my train of thought sped up. Long meditations on subjects like the order of things, the question of whether our lives are fated or chosen, and other subjects that seemed to go on for an hour, each of them, had taken, when I looked at my watch, a few minutes at most. In the midst of this I could sense, even caught a glimpse of, other presences in the room, three of them, and realized that each of us had a guardian with us, they floated about two feet off the floor, and they were talking about us among themselves. They made me feel safe, and I was never afraid during this entire experience. And it continued to build. I thought about who I was and how I had gotten there, and came to marvel at the immensely long train of events that creates each one of us, the apparent infinity of accidents that point one forebear down this road rather than that to meet the woman or man he or she will marry, only to create this other forebear, rather than someone else entirely. And how precise this process is, and yet at the same time how fluid, and how fixed fate and loose freedom intermingle and work together and fill the universe with this splendid dance of life.<br />
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We had been listening to baroque music, Bach, Haydn and the like, but I found it too slow and not very interesting, so somebody put on Ravi Shankar, the great Indian sitarist, and I realized at once that this was the true music of the gods, and a kind of ecstasy flowed into my mind. It was like wisdom pouring into me. Presuppositions, limits in the mind were melting away. By this time I was lying on the cabin's one bed and beginning to tremble and the friend who had not taken acid came over to see if I was OK, and she said out loud exactly what I was thinking--whatever I'm experiencing, this is how things are; this is the way the world really works. And that sense of being let into the actual, into reality, at its deepest level, has stayed with me ever since, for more than fifty years. She gave me thorazine to bring me down, but it only brought me down partway. I remember walking out of the cabin into the dull November light and looking at the surrounding hills and thinking that there was nothing beyond them, that we had to go out and create the world at every minute, that the universe is empty except we fill it up. That it's all far, far stranger than we think.<br />
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I've never taken acid again, but I would like to have it available if I know I'm dying. The cancer patients they're experimenting with at a few selected hospitals do know they're dying, and they pretty much all say the same thing after they've taken psilocybin. They achieve a level of calm, of acceptance, even of happiness that no one could have predicted. When I read this, I started to cry, very quietly, because this was Starbuck's, but real tears nevertheless. For what, I'm not sure. Myself and my own mortality? Out of compassion for those patients? Because we die without knowing essential things about life and death, and usually in fear? Because I will never get over my mother's Alzheimer's and the seven years she spent in a nursing home, not dying but wasting to nothing? We all seek the peace that passes understanding. So few of us attain it. But I had it for that day, and it has never entirely left me.Anthony Brandthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17323857455504431913noreply@blogger.com