Into The Mystic

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

                                                      --Joni Mitchell

For the Phantom's parents, the 1930's were the formative years. For the Phantom, it was the 1960's, when people were trying to explore other worldliness and the Phantom was trying to figure out how to deal with this world.  But, as much as one might try to dig into the brown earth of the here and now, there are times when you have look up and see the blue above.

For the Phantom, there have been at least three instances which made him wonder, two occurred during "normal" sleep and one with a different kind of sleep.

As a nine year old,  the Phantom went to bed one night and dreamed he had died, but there was no ascent to Heaven; the next thing, in the dream, the Phantom found himself wailing as he was delivered as a new baby, in his brother's room, down the hall. Sitting up in bed the Phantom realized he was still alive, in his own body--it had only been a dream. But in the dream, he had been reborn as a new baby into his own family. Where that idea had come from, who knows? What persists to this day, decades later is the vividness of that dream, the sense of frustration that he'd have to start all over again, but, on balance it was better than being simply gone.

Then there was a recurrent dream, which occurred when the Phantom was in his eleventh year, of flying. It was a simple dream, running down the steep hill of Bannockburn Drive and flapping his arms like wings and simply lifting off. There was the feeling of not wanting to be seen, the sense of embarrassment of having to explain what he was doing flying above the trees, but most of all the sense of exhilaration of being able to soar above the branches and look down, and to travel so effortlessly, but there was also some fear of falling. The strangest part of the dream was the internal conversation: You are going to think this never happened--after all, flying! But remember this, remember you have flown and don't tell yourself later this never happened.  The Phantom was reminded of this dream watching Band of Brothers and scenes of falling to earth gently on a parachute and landing safely.

The last incident occurred when the Phantom was 38, and he awakened from general anesthesia, in the hospital, and suddenly the beautiful face of a nurse--a black woman who laughed at him when he said, "Oh, I'm back. You look so beautiful." But the important part was,  as the Phantom regained his bearings, there was the deep sense of wonder, dread, astonishment: Where had the Phantom been? It was just lights out, lights on. But where had consciousness vanished? And how had it simply reappeared, with all memories, feelings, thoughts intact?

Freud suggested dreams were a brain exercise in wish fulfillment, the emergence of repressed, socially unacceptable desires.  But that does not explain these particular dreams to the Phantom. He had not been, to memory, thinking about dying when he had fallen asleep, and never had never fantasized about flying. These dreams seemed to simply emerge from nowhere, like the Phantom awakening from anesthesia.

Of course, anesthesia is very different from sleep, at least the memory of it is. When you awaken from that REM sleep, you remember having had an experience, sensation, emotion, fear, delight, wonder. Coming out of anesthesia, you look back and there was nothing, or the closest thing to nothingness a living human being can have experienced, or not experienced, as one might argue.

Nothingness was not unpleasant. It was simply a void. No joy, but no sorrow or pain.

And that reminds the Phantom of a conversation he had with a woman who had manic depression, which we would now call "bipolar disorder."  She had done what people with that disorder do: shopped wildly, buying dozens of pairs of shoes, and dresses and stuff she could not even fit into her closets, making phone calls at all hours, not sleeping,  drinking, having sex with as many men as she could hook up with, driving her car around, running down the beach. But then came the crash, and she fell into a deep dark hole. 

And the Phantom asked her how it felt to be on lithium, which had righted her ship, and allowed her to sail on a placid sea.

"Well," she said. "I'm certainly grateful to be out of that black hole, the most dreadful, bleak place I've ever been. And it certainly is easy to be where I am now. Calm is better than that."  She looked around at the trees, leaves moving in the wind, and she cast her glance across the sun-lit,  green lawns of the Westchester psychiatric hospital, and then she looked back and met the Phantom's  eyes, and there was a smile playing around the edges, which only furtively stole down to raise the corners of her lips.  "But," she said, looking over her shoulder and back  again to the Phantom, as if she was delivering a very naughty secret, "I do miss the highs."

Chai Boys: America Saving the World One Brutality Case at a Time

On a recent visit to Helmand, UK Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said the "transition is proceeding very well - it is on track."

"The Afghans are developing capabilities faster than we expected and we have every reason to believe that they will be able to maintain security as the Isaf forces draw down," he added.

The outgoing commander of Nato forces, Gen John Allen, is even more ebullient: "Afghan forces are defending Afghan people and enabling the government of this country to serve its citizens. This is victory. This is what winning looks like, and we should not shrink from using these words."

--BBC News

This is what, in Baltimore, they would call, "Dope on the table," meaning a lot of garbage signifying the men with the stars on their shoulders know what politically correct means.

Ben Anderson, a BBC reporter tagged along with a company of U.S. Marine advisers who were supposed to be "training" Afghan police. 

The police had their own ideas of about policing:  Arrest everyone at a particular place and hold them until their families can come in and pay ransom for their release. 

The Marine Major who has to watch all this happen, Bill Stuber, sputters when he is asked to comment. "Everything from skimming ammunition off their supplies to skimming fuel off their shipments." Police sell ammunition and rocket propelled grenades at the local bazaar.  Police sold off the security walls as scrap metal rendering a patrol base unsafe to occupy. 

But the part that really got to Major Stuber was the "chai boys." These boys are held by the police as sex workers. Some who have tried to escape the police station have been shot. Confronting the local police commander about these boys, the Major was stunned by how the commander shrugged it off. The boys enjoy giving their bodies to the police, he assured Major Stuber: "The kids want to stay at the patrol bases and give their bodies at night."

Major Stuber remarked, in what must be a milestone of understatement, even for the Marine Corps: "Working with child molesters, working with people who are robbing people, murdering them. It wears on you after a while."

I'll bet.

So now, tell us again, what exactly is our mission in Afghanistan?

Does this sound familiar yet?  America and its "allies" have arrived to lay a little "democracy" and "freedom" on an agrarian people, living somewhere in the 15th century, and forge an alliance with the "government" of the people we are there to "defend."  

Who was it, who said, "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it?"

Mamma Don't Let Your Daughter Grow Up to Be A Veterinarian

Today's New York Sunday Times has an article about the Vet Debt Trap, which is one of the saddest articles the Phantom has read in years.

There are 92 thousand veterinarians in the USA, far more, apparently than there is work for. Dog and  especially cat ownership has fallen for decades, and numbers of horses has declined, for reasons unstated (The drought in the West? Europeans eating them in fast food restaurants?)

Vet school at a state university runs about $30 thousand dollars a year, and for those who cannot get into these schools, which have roughly one place for every ten applicants, there is always the offshore, Caribbean Ross school of veterinary medicine, a for profit, but accredited school which runs $63 thousand a year.

All this for a job which pays $45-60 thousand a year. Graduates of veterinary colleges can look forward to $300,000 of debt coming due about 20 years from now, just as their children are looking to go to college.

Why, you might ask, would anyone doing this calculus even think of a career in veterinary medicine? 

The answer lies in the dreams of little girls. For girls who are wild about animals, who have had pets of their own and taken them to the local vet, this is a job which they know about from childhood, and it melds their love of animals with an answer to the question of "What do you want to be, when you grow up?"

In a sense, this article is about something more important and more universal than a story about the quandary of veterinarians. It is really about how we groom each generation for the working lives they need to live. The clear answer is, we do not do a very good jobs. One reason the children of doctors tend to want to be doctors, (if their parents don't discourage them) is that is what they know. They have some idea of what that job, the work is like. They cannot imagine being an engineer or a plant manager because they have no idea what those jobs are about.

Many pre medical students are thrust into taking organic chemistry because their parents wanted them to be doctors and they had no idea what else they might want to do. Most college students have visited a doctor and have some idea what that job is, or at least they think they have some idea from watching television.  Since the advent of "ER" they probably have at least some idea of what being a doctor is all about.

But, for the most part, the working lives of adults are hidden from children, and that is a major problem for the United States of America.

Our "free" market economy is, of course, not free. Mobility in this country where any boy or girl can grow up to be President is, in fact, among the worst in the industrialized "first world" countries. We cling to our fanatasies, here in the US of A. It can be nice to have stars in your eyes, but not if that sets you on a path to life long debt and financial distress. 

The Phantom does not know what the solution is to guiding America's youth into satisfactory careers, but he suspects until this aimlessness, no, cluelessness is seen as a real problem, many lives will be lived unhappily and our economy will be the worse for it.

Truth, History, Memory and Movies

Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman

Lincoln Colorized

Lyndon Johnson

Among the movies nominated for Academy Awards are three which depict actual historical events: Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty and Argo. 
 Lincoln, based on a history by Doris Kearns Goodwin, has been criticized for getting the vote by the Connecticut delegation wrong; Argo largely omitted the crucial role of one of the true heroes of the rescue of American diplomats, a Canadian diplomat, Kenneth C. Taylor, and Zero Dark Thirty has been criticized for spending a good part of the movie on torture scenes which suggested by their very length torture was as important as diligent field work and observation, in tracking down Osama Bin Laden.

Of the three, the objections to Lincoln seem trivial.  The most objectionable scene in the Phantom's eyes was not the voting in Congress, but the opening scene, which the viewer is not expected to believe as having actually happened, where two Black union soldiers recite, all starry eyed, the Gettysburg address back to Lincoln. This condescending, maudlin, gratuitous scene is a trademark of Steven Spielberg, who has never been able to make a movie without inserting a boo hoo attempt at tear jerking, almost always having the opposite effect.  (Even Band of Brothers, based on Stephen Ambrose's history of E company and its intrepid hero, Richard Winters, which was so well done, had the requisite Spielberg grease stain--a long phony episode in which Winters shoots a young German soldier in the field and then feels all gooey guilty about having shot so young and innocent a boy.  Winters remarked, "Through that entire war, I never regretted killing a single enemy soldier."  Winters, always careful to limit his remarks, was moved to comment out of what was clearly at least annoyance and more likely disgust.)

The temptation to change a story for the sake of intensifying the emotional impact, or to glorify a man who might seem like an unfeeling killer were he not shown grieving over those he has killed is strong.  In The Wire, there is a brilliant, intricate pas de deux story line about a reporter who writes heart rending  stories about the suffering underclass of Baltimore, which are just too good to be true, and of course they are, but they help win the paper a Pulitzer Prize, which is all the editor-in-chief cares about. At the same time, a policeman, McNulty, fabricates a heart rending story about homeless men nobody cares about being murdered by a serial killer.  Having seen the game, McNulty, the policeman, gleefully feeds the lying reporter  the nobody-cares-about these- homeless-men story. That indifference becomes the story,and the newspapers and politicians run wild with it. To McNulty the truth or lack of it is a pointless distinction in a world where standard operating procedure is a lie, where police stage "drugs on the table" photo ops as if they actually mean anything in the "war on drugs" which is itself a lie. Politicians lies. Newspapers lie. What difference does it make if police lie?

In the case of the newspaper, the viewer can see the harm done by the Spielberg-ing of a story. But in the case of movies, there is a suspension of disbelief, and we are supposed to know what we are seeing is not real. On the other hand, if our only images of a world betray the truth, then that lie becomes our perception of reality. The Phantom knows some fictional characters better than he knows most people, and they acquire a certain life, a certain reality in the mind. 

History is in large part about memory, and there have been enough studies by psychologists which clearly demonstrate how people can have very clear memories of events which simply never happened. Memory is a construct and rife with inaccuracy.

Just recently, the Phantom remembered an exchange he heard on the Lyndon Johnson tapes, between Johnson and his good friend Senator Richard Russell, in which Russell answered the President's question about what to do about Vietnam and the chances for success against an inscrutable enemy, and the Phantom clearly remembered Russell saying, "You know we are going to have to leave eventually," and Johnson says, "Yep. I know." And Russell says, "Well, they[the  Vietnamese] know that too."

It was such a terse, succinct and dramatic way of telling LBJ what to do without telling him directly what to do, the conversation was burned into the Phantom's memory and Phantom was eager to use it. The trouble is, that exchange never happened. Going back to listen to the tapes again, and reading the transcripts, the Phantom discovered while that was the essence of what Russell said, it was not what he said. He did tell Johnson the war was a lost cause, but not nearly so poetically.  So the Phantom decided not to use that, at least not as a depiction of what was actually said. The Phantom, writing his blog, had to "kill his darling," as Faulkner famously said about writing.

This is not to say movies and novels should not depict history. Exodus, many Mitchner novels, like South Pacific, were mainly history with a story attached. And   the reader understood what part  was fiction, and what was history, and Mitchner served history and the modern reader well. Gone with the Wind, was wonderful in providing an insight into how slave owners could live with that monstrous evil and call it good.

But distortions which change today's minds into thinking torture works or which depict paratroopers as sensitive souls all conflicted about the tragedy of having to kill those who were mercilessly killing them do not serve anyone well, except perhaps the  Mr. Spielberg's bankers.

Soap opera depictions of how physicians function, think, and feel created a distorted image of what rendering medical care is all about.  "ER" was the first  television show to depict the bitterness, in-the-trenches mentality of hospital doctors and its success showed you could be hard boiled about doctors without losing an audience.  

The idea for "ER"  emerged from obscure hard boiled medical novels like  MD and from the satiric novels M*A*S*H and House of God. Those novels were floating around Hollywood, and M*A*S*H was a successful movie and televison show, and House of God followed that script pretty closely.  The noir MD  was published and optioned to Hollywood before "ER" got launched, exploring the socially unacceptable notions that doctors spent a lot of time angry, resentful and frustrated; MD's hero was McNulty,  in a hospital whites. 

These novels got at a truth which non fiction could not approach because they made you feel what the doctors were feeling. They took you inside the head of the doctors in ways which had been previously unavailable to non physicians. It was an internal life which did not have to be foot noted. Doctors would not have admitted to thinking the thoughts and feeling the feelings depicted in the bleak and dark world of MD. Catch-22, the novel of the air war in Europe, got around the problem of telling socially unacceptable truths by couching its truth in satire, and it was devastatingly effective. 

The only problem with the satiric approach is it lacks the sting and the staying power of the dark film noir  approach of an MD. You can put down Catch-22 or House of God, and go out to dinner, unaffected. But you read One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, The Stranger, or MD, and it ruins your appetite. It stays with you and roils your gut like an unmedicated ulcer. Noir packs a wallop satire lacks.

"ER" got at a truth that non fiction reporting like Hopkins 24/7 could not. Freed from the restraints of reporting, the story could be told more effectively and reach a wider audience. People who would be deterred by the gore were sucked in by the romance, and the hard experience got conveyed. Most importantly, "ER" told stories told from the inside out, where documentaries are told from the outside, looking in.

Hemingway was a reporter for the Toronto Star, and reading his dispatches from Europe you know you are reading something which is very telling. But non of his non fiction stuff approaches the power of A Farewell To Arms. That was fiction because he said it was, but it was truth telling, from memory and from the long dark tea time of Hemingway's soul.  That's a sort and depth of truth only fiction can achieve.

There is a parallel in the colorization of the classic black and white photos of Lincoln, Sherman and others from the Civil war. In a way, adding color actually adds a dose of reality. Black and white photos are, in a sense, more artsty, more distant, and adding color actually brings these icons down to flesh and blood. The Phantom has been fascinated by the effect, and thinks it adds something, as long as it is not accepted without some thought. The emotional impact is worthwhile, but has its own traps, as emotion usually does.

So the Phantom cheers the historical movies.  If American schools use these as a basis for discussion, so the distortions, the "poetic license" is examined, everyone would benefit. For that matter, Band of Brothers, The Wire ought to be taught, alongside selections from the Johnson tapes. 

Let's just hope that most lame of all excuses for getting it wrong, "Oh, well, it's just entertainment" is firmly rejected.  If you use a clip from a real telephone conversation, or if you use the image of Lincoln, you are using the real to authenticate your fiction and you have a responsibility not to put a dagger in Lincoln's hands or a rack in Mr. Obama's basement. 

That old, "Well, it's just entertainment" really means, "Well, it made me more money to do it that way."

What Is History? Afghanistan and Vietnam

"That's what war is, you know. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we got to fight."
--Slim Charles to Avon Barksdale, The Wire.



One strange thing about aging is things you remember are now being taught as history; your kids come home with history books from school which have chapters on the Vietnam War, as if it is some distant thing, like the battle of Bunker Hill. 

Of course, remembering Lyndon Johnson and the nightly news from Vietnam and the stories of men coming home from Vietnam, you think you "remember" that war. The thing about history and the past, as some wag said is:  It isn't even past, which is to say, as long as you remember it, it is walking around alive.

But what do you remember?  I remember Johnson as that obtuse, clueless Southerner, with his down home accent, and his lofty generalizations about fighting Communism and bringing freedom to the Vietnamese which sounded so transparently phony it was astonishing he or anyone bothered repeating that tripe. 

It was very clear then, as it is now, we were fighting in Vietnam, not because a Communist Vietnam posed any threat to the United States, not because we cared about the Vietnamese--as if they were some new girlfriend the USA had fallen head over heels in love with--but we were in Vietnam because we had stumbled into this domestic brawl and we had taken a few punches and thrown more than a few, and now we could not figure out a way of backing out because we were afraid somebody might call us cowards.

So it was all stupid pride. Johnson said he was not going to be the first United States President to lose a war, damn it. So for that, 18 year old kids from Osh Kosh, Brooklyn, Tuscaloosa, Oakland, Detroit, Watts and Baltimore had to have their legs blow off, had to kill and had to be shipped home in body bags.

That's what I remember about 1965-1975.  

But now I can see and learn more, through the magic of the information age, and the commendable openness of American society. 

Listen to the Johnson tapes, readily available on the internet, and you hear Johnson wrestling with the decision about whether or not to get in deeper into the war. He speaks with Richard Russell on the phone. If you have listened enough to Johnson as he speaks with other people, you can immediately hear the difference when he talks to his ol' buddy Russell. Russell, from Georgia, speaks in a slow, down home drawl, deep enough to make Johnson's own accent sound positively patrician.  Russell tells Johnson, "If you were to tell me that I was authorized to settle as I saw fit, I would respectfully decline to undertake it. It's the damn worse mess that I ever saw...I just don't see it."

For my money, listening to Presidential tapes is by far superior to reading any history presented by any historian. There is no intermediary; you can draw your own conclusions. You can hear how clueless Johnson really is. He can understand the details of how many bridges across the river to Hanoi have to be bombed and how many troops are scheduled to arrive in country on what dates, but he simply does not understand the nature of his adversary. He keeps listening to McNamara, Dean Rusk and all the Best and the Brightest crowd who think they are fighting the last war, against the German Wehrmacht, against people who think like Westerners.

Johnson, like President Obama, keeps talking about "the mission," as if we actually had objectives, like capturing the flag, rolling into a capital city and declaring victory. But there was no real mission in Vietnam, just as there is no mission in Afghanistan; there is only a peasant population which just wants to be left alone in the 15th century.

George Carlin had a riff about Vietnam. "You know why we're there...[long pause, much laughter from the audience because everyone knows nobody had a clue about why we were really there, then...] Oh! That's right. We are there to whip a little freedom on them!"

One thing listening to actual history as it is happening on the tapes  has taught me is what made Johnson so effective as an executive. He actually does have command of the details, and he is very emphatic about reminding people who they have to call and what they are to say. 
Johnson has the administrative details under control. 

What he fails is to see the big picture: No war fought by a democracy should be about the ego of one man. No war fought by a free people who can ask questions can be successful if the premise for that war is a lie, or if it is patently absurd.

In the case of Afghanistan, it is to "deny sanctuaries" to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. In the case of Vietnam it was to keep Communism from toppling one country after another like dominoes. Both were and are absurdities.  Al Qaeda needs no Afghanistan for staging and launching its operations. They launched 911 from an apartment in Berlin and a motel in Florida. 

I'm not sure Mr. Obama has any ego tied up in Afghanistan, but he clearly is worried about withdrawing our troops quickly, and that comes down to the same worry Johnson had--he would look bad.

I am imaging Mr. Obama on the telephone, asking for advice from the Phantom:

Mr. Obama:  What do you think about this idea of getting the troops out now, like as fast as we can put them on the planes?

The Phantom:  I think it's a good idea. Why should another kid loose a leg or an arm or his life, now that we've decided to get out? You wait six more months, how many more arms and legs we going to lose? How many more amputees in the petting zoo at Walter Reed?

Mr. Obama: But, if we run out, it will look like we are dropping our weapons and running from the field of battle.

The Phantom (heavy on the Down East accent): The thing is, Mr. President, you know you are going to have to bring those young men and women home, eventually.

Mr. Obama:  That's right.

The Phantom: Well, the thing is the Taliban, and the villagers we are supposed to be protecting, they know that, too.

Mr. Obama: But we've said we want to give time for the Afghan forces to step up and take our places.

The Phantom: But you need an Afghan government to have Afghan forces, and you don't rightly have that in Afghanistan.

John Irving Olympic Wrestling and the Value of Mastery

John Irving writes in the New York Times today about the demise of wrestling as an Olympic sport. He examines the role played in this failure by the sport's governing bodies. But the termites have eaten away at the structure of the sport for years, and the collapse of the top tiers of the structure were a long time coming, from within.

The Phantom is not shedding tears for the sport of Olympic wrestling, but there is reason to mourn the loss of the wrestling experience in the lives of American males. If the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, then what future battles America will lose because there are no more wrestling programs can only be imagined.

When the Phantom was in high school he justified the time he spent on the wrestling team to his parents as something which might help him get into college. Even as a high school student, he was dubious his wrestling would play much of a role in his getting into an Ivy League college, but the argument seemed to play with his parents.

Of course, what the most elite institutions were looking for was a person who had achieved mastery in some arena, a state champion, a national science fair winner, something that gave their folder some pop, some tag line to identify the applicant: Oh,  the captain of the wrestling team. The Phantom knew he would never be captain of the wrestling team. He had enough of a struggle to simply make it past the wrestle offs to get to step out on the mat representing his school each week.

The Phantom lettered in wrestling, but it was only later he discovered how little he knew about wrestling. The coach of the wrestling team was the Driver's Education teacher, a kindly, clueless  man whose greatest achievement was having almost, but not quite making it into the  National Football League. He had been anointed wrestling coach because the head of the physical education department thought this Goliath could keep control over the unruly types who wanted to join a wrestling team, and none of the adults on the faculty knew anything at all about wrestling. They needed a coach and the would be NFL tight end was close enough.

The Phantom had an unreasonably successful career as a wrestler, based almost entirely on athleticism built on swimming and running,  and sandlot football.  He had one advantage; his brother had wrestled on his high school team and taught the Phantom enough to make a difference. But as soon as the Phantom came across a wrestler who had actually been taught by a real wrestling coach, the Phantom was toast.

The coach realized he could not teach his wrestlers more than the basics, but he did believe in the power of conditioning. The experience of suffering through the hellfire of wrestling team work outs did bond the Phantom to his team mates. The Phantom was moderately afraid of heights, yet he learned to pull himself up a rope suspended thirty feet  up, from the field house ceiling, and you had to haul yourself up there using only your hands and arms (no legs allowed) and those who made it through were bound by their common suffering just as Marines are bound by the experience of Paris Island. 

Years later, the Phantom's son, age 7,  was recruited for a wrestling team and the Phantom said no. The risk of neck and head injury seemed too high, and the intensity of the sport seemed inappropriate to a child of that age. As usual, the Phantom was over ruled by his wife, and his son started wrestling.

But the son was taught by real wrestling coaches, who had mastered the science of wrestling . By age 11, the Phantom's son was far advanced beyond anything the Phantom had ever seen in his own wrestling career. There were wrestling clubs and real coaches by that time, and the boys who arrived at high school had already wrestled for 8 years and were learned in the sport.  By the time the son was 16, he was pleading to be driven halfway across the state to be coached by a coach of national reputation. By his senior year in high school, the son achieved a mastery which astonished his entire family.  Coaching, persistence, discipline, competitiveness, a sport which helped define his own sense of himself, had made a huge difference in the formation of the son's personality. 

His older brother, watching his brother wrestle, observed with perfect objectivity and characteristic humility: "He is, right now, at age 10 better at something than I will ever be at anything."  The older brother was wrong about that, but he was observing the astonishment shared by parents who witnessed what their sons could be taught and how they could use what they had learned under extreme duress.

The son was recruited by Princeton, the University of Chicago and other fine colleges.  The coach as Duke had been indifferent, until the son reached the final match for the National Prep School championship. After the match, the Duke coach offered the son a place on the Duke team, on the spot. 

The son declined, having decided to go to a college which had no wrestling team.  The son had done as much as he could ever hope to do in wrestling that last championship round at National Preps, and he turned his compass elsewhere.

The fact is, the Phantom disliked watching wrestling. Weekends spent in smelly gyms with dysfunctional bathrooms, run by dim witted adults who were running tournaments for themselves rather than for the kids involved, were a huge turn off. Wrestling eventually reformed the child club programs by the exercise of simple intelligence--bringing the light weight, young kids in to the gym in the morning and getting their matches done and bringing the older kids in during the afternoon, so the kids and the parents could have a half day for other things on Saturday and Sunday, a solution so simple it angered parents who asked why it had not been done before. 

The answer was obvious: The sport was run for the pleasure and benefit of the adult volunteers who would be in the gym all day both days and saw now reason to relinquish control of their captive audience.  So wrestling's organizations bred resentment among those who might have become wrestling's greatest advocates. It was a kid and parent unfriendly sport.

There were adults who liked hearing themselves speak over maximal volume amplified public address systems, adults who liked staging matches as if they were the Olympics, adults who coached kids as if they were horses they were bragging about, adults of every variety of pathology, delusion and misanthropy who crawled out of whatever holes they lived in during the week,  to be very important people in the gym on weekends. 

There were parents who told themselves and other parents wrestling would get their kids into good colleges, and justified the huge expense of time and energy by saying this was all for the ultimate punching of the college ticket, which in fact happened for so few kids you could name them each and count them on the fingers of both hands, and that from thousands of wrestlers in the various leagues and schools.

Colleges were cutting out wrestling programs, not recruiting wrestling stars of tomorrow. Title Nine did many good things, but one thing it did was to eliminate expendable all male teams--wrestling the most expendable-- because once you had an all male sport like football, with 80 students, you need to look for other all male sports to eliminate, to balance the need for an equal number of spots for female athletes.

In the end, a sport which ought to be a natural audience pleaser shot itself in the knees with poor management but part of it's demise was a force beyond its control. 

The rules alluded to by John Irving in his article in the New York Times piece today are symptomatic of a larger picture of stupidity on an international level,  which has hamstrung the sport. But the sport has eaten itself alive from the inside, from the earliest stages of childhood development, squandered the allegiance of  its natural champions--the parents of the kids involved. Had wrestling had anything like the infrastructure of say, ballet, or swimming or soccer or even horseback riding, it would be on national television competing with basketball for audience share, and likely beating hockey handily.

Mr. Irving's picture is on the wall of the gym at Phillips Exeter Academy, just a few miles down the road from the Phantom's house. Obviously, the experience of wrestling was important to Mr. Irving, just as it was to the Phantom's son, and to the Phantom.

The intensity of the sport, the essential ability to endure defeat and humiliation and frustration, to continue to believe you can succeed, despite early failure, to persevere and have faith in the power of what more knowledgeable people can bring you, all those are inimical to the sport. 

The Phantom has, for years, snorted in derision at those old chestnuts about sport building character, about carrying the lessons of the playing field to the classroom and beyond. But with the dementia of years, the Phantom can see there may be some nugget of truth in that old stuff. The Phantom does not believe sport inculcates toughness, perseverance and resilience  so much as it selects for it. The boys who fight through the adversity simply demonstrate what they already have inside them.

One of the most searing memories of watching his son was a session in a practice room, where the son was schooled, ruthlessly and relentlessly by a wrestler who had made the same leap the son was making, from an introductory league to a high level traveling league. It was one of the greatest leaps he ever had to make, more than going from high school to college. He had been a star in his first league, but he was barely surviving in the big league. Slowly, by fits and starts, he made the transition, but it was not easy. Wrestling demanded something from deep inside him, and he responded with a ferocity and tenacity no one, certainly not his parents could have predicted.

If wrestling disappears from the American landscape, then it will be, at least partly, because the powers that be in wrestling have squandered the gift they were given. 

That's a loss for everyone.

Mysteries of the Blogosphere

Mad Dog admits to being woefully ignorant about the technical aspects of blog world.

He has learned to look at the number of views of his blogs, which google blogger tracks, and is gratified to see at least some readers seem to be clicking on the site, whether or not they actually read it, or think it worthwhile. But he has been curious about why so few ever actually type out a comment. 

Even more perplexing is finding reams of comments in his gmail inbox which never appear in  the blog comment section to which others can respond--it's as if readers are replying for Mad Dog's eyes only.  Many of these comments include an address which sounds like a porn site or some commercial site.

What is really curious is to see from where the readers come--you are given a map of where on the planet people are reading your blog. Most, as one would expect, are in the United States, but apparently Australians, Russians and even some Asians read American blogs. Why, Mad Dog can only imagine. Hard to fathom. But there they are, on the map, little green shaded areas in Indonesia or Korea or Estonia. What are people doing out there, reading about the very American topics in Mad Dog's mind? Who are they? What kind of lives do they lead? And why do they silently read some emanation from someone in New Hampshire, America.

It's much like sending out one of those missiles into space, with a recording of the Beatles and Louis Armstrong, traveling deeper and deeper into dark space, in hope or maybe not even hope, on the chance someone out there might be interested.  Makes you think, there may be intelligent life out there which may not care, but may be curious. Makes Mad Dog feel better about his place in the universe.

What an astonishing world we live in. 

Mad Dog once asked his father in what time he would most liked to have lived. Mad Dog had considered 1860, so he could see America at that critical time, so he could travel to Washington, and possibly meet Abraham Lincoln, or to Amherst, Massachusetts where he could hang out with Emily Dickinson.  Or,  maybe 1775, Mad Dog could go to Philadelphia, as Ben Franklin and Jefferson et al were thinking out their experiment.

But Mad Dog's father did not even hesitate: Why the current time, of course. This is the best time to be alive.

Mad Dog objected: We have nuclear missiles aimed at us. We could go up in a mushroom cloud at any instant.  And, he replied, in 1775 or 1860 you could be stricken with small pox, malaria, typhoid, strep or pneumonia and die the next day. No, he assured Mad Dog, these times are the most exciting and wonderful times in the history of humankind.  And he died before the internet got into full swing. 

Wouldn't he be amazed by today?

The Women of Loi, Vietnam

Captives in Their Own Land

Dr. Alexandre Yersin

Nguyen Thi Nhan

After the war, he can begin to be bitter. Those who point at and degrade his bitterness, those who declare it's all a part of war and that this is a job which must be done--to all those patriots I will recommend a postwar vacation to this land, where they can swim in the sea, lounge under a fine sun, stroll in the quaint countryside, wife and son in hand. Certainly, there will be a mine or two still in the earth. Alpha Company did not detonate them all.
--Tim O'Brien,  If I Die in a Combat Zone

In Today's New York Times a reporter, Julie Cohn, has committed an  act of journalism, with an article about the women of a small village in Loi, Vietnam, who chose to have children without benefit of marriage.

Of course, in 21st century America, women having children as single mothers is commonplace, but Vietnam is an old culture, with old values. There, women should only have children within the confines of marriage. 

But during the American war,  women were joining platoons, fighting in the rice paddies and by the time the war was over and they returned to life in peacetime, they were in their 20's, beyond the age of marriage. Women in Vietnam married at age 15 or 16.  By 20 you were over the hill, no longer a desirable mate. They were called "qua lua," spinsters. 

The Times story tells of women who returned from the war, looked at their lives, their prospects and said, "To hell with all that," and they went out and asked a man to father a child, without asking for any support or any kind of ongoing relationship.

For these women, there was the practical consideration that in Vietnam you need a child to support you in your old age, because there is no government, no community, no other structure to support you. But, the article implies, there was also the personal calculus by each of these women, independently, that those old rules do not work for me. I served. I was a hero and now you tell me I will be shunned because I'm too old for marriage?

What all this made The Phantom realize is how myopic, how one sided his view of the war has been. When The Phantom was in his 20's, and prime draft bait, he never thought of Vietnamese men or women as having to make the same conscious decision about whether or not to serve that the Phantom and all the boys of his generation had to make. The Vietnamese, as far as he could see,  were either all fanatics, who enthusiastically marched off to war, or were simply minding their own business, when the Americans dropped war upon them.

 But now it's clear there were clearly Vietnamese, men and women, who made a decision to participate,  and paid a price.

Now these people, born on the other side of the planet, are entering their 60's just as the Phantom's generation of American kids who were 20 then are 60 now, and living with the underground ordinance of that war.

If there were any Americans who had a positive effect on that unfortunate people, the Phantom cannot think of who they might be.  Were there any members of the Wehrmacht (the German army) who brought anything but misery to the countries they invaded or to the Jews they delivered up to the Gestapo?

Westerners, as a rule raped, pillaged or exploited Indochina/ Vietnam for centuries. But, like Schindler, there were exceptions, the occasional man who, in the midst of evil  tried to do a virtuous act.  Alexandre Yersin, a German speaking Swiss, who had been educated in Paris by none other than Louis Pasteur, voyaged to Vietnam in the late 19th century and was captivated by the place. Pasteur and his French colleagues implored him to return to the laboratory in Paris, but  he slept in his room  in Vietnam and he heard tigers roaring in the night forests. He was hooked.

 When bubonic plague broke out in Hong Kong, he popped over there long enough to identify the causative organism, to make anti serum to it and he had enough on hand to treat Vietnamese villagers for plague when it arrived a few years later--the first people in the history of the world to be treated and saved by an effective medical therapy for plague.

The Vietnamese, understandably, still revere Yersin.  What they think of Americans,  we can only imagine. We did not come to save them from the black plague, or to lift their standard of living with trade and economic development. We came to murder and destroy, and we were clumsy but effective.  

And now, years later, in a very personal and profound way, we see what damage we did which cannot be measured in body counts or tonnage of bombs dropped or buildings destroyed or forests denuded.  There were victims we did not count, who also suffered, beneath our notice.

Whenever we talk about American troops bringing peace, freedom, prosperity, and the American way of life to other peoples, living in other cultures, whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq or Vietnam, stories like this one ought to be told.

Good works of man do not follow armies. The may follow doctors and medicine and pumps which harvest clean water for a village, but not armies. 

How They Do: The Rich Stay Rich

A good friend told me a story I've never been able to shake. It was like looking through a window into a whore house. 

He had been given a seat on the board of directors of a company which made products with which he was very familiar and he was the chairman of an academic department of one of the nations most prestigious universities. He had no illusions about why this publicly trade company wanted his name on their masthead: They were basking in his reflected respectability, in his glory.

At his first meeting the CFO outlined the bleak performance of the company, the costs of research and development, the competition the company faced, the difficulties finding and recruiting talented employees, the faltering economy.  Good friend listened with growing disquietude, thinking, I thought they wanted me for my insight; then I thought they just wanted the name of my university, but now I wonder if they really want an expert in resuscitation.

After the CFO finished speaking the next item on the agenda was voting bonuses for the CEO, the CFO and all the members of the board.

"I don't understand," Good Friend finally stammered, after the pause during which everyone in the room considered whether or not their bonuses were sufficient. "From what I've just heard, this company is in peril for its very life. How can you vote for bonuses when the company has lost over a million dollars over the past two years?"

"Oh," the CEO smiled indulgently, and he spoke very slowly, as if instructing a very dim child. "That doesn't matter."

Good Friend resigned from that board. It had been his first venture outside the academy and into the world of boards of directors, business, finance and all that. 

What really stunned him was the brazen amorality of that group. We have the power to take the money. We will take the money. Whether that is justifiable does not matter. It is legal and that is all that matters. There is money on the table, ready for the taking. This is why we are on the board.

This is one, if not the central, element of corruption in corporate, capitalistic America. 

The rich get richer not because they are deserving, but because they have worked their way into positions to exploit a very flawed system.

Members of corporate boards have found a way to turn knowing people, acquiring titles of authority, using academic positions, using connections to past government positions,  to cash in. The damage done to employees, consumers, investors is irrelevant, not even on the agenda for discussion. All that matters is greed.

House of Cards

Downton Abbey is a guilty pleasure. 
The Wire is not.

Downton Abbey is buttered popcorn, or, at best chocolate covered raisins, perhaps just a whiff of iron but mostly sugar and substantially bereft of a lack of substance, beyond the presentation of a clear picture of what makes the British less vital and less competitive--that insufferable disposition to cleave to values which are not based in reality, the things they call "standards" like placing trust in someone because he has been anointed as an honored and accomplished knight of medicine or law rather than basing judgment on what you can see and measure yourself. Thus, the obstetrician who is knighted is to be trusted where the local G.P., who knows the patient well is not, because, well, he is not ranked as high on the pecking order. 

The Wire is difficult to watch because it is written by people who know of what  they speak and they present it without sugar coating it. It is what makes Hemingway readable: You know he's been there. You know you are reading truth. It may be fiction, but it gets closer to the truth than any non fiction can because it doesn't have to worry about lawsuits or nitpicking critics, it just lays out what the author knows, and the author does not have to footnote or prove or fact check. His facts are pre checked. 

House of Cards, the American version is so vastly superior to the unwatchable British version it is not worth comparing them, other than to note the difference.

One of the things which makes HOC so enthralling is the language.  The narrator, Francis Underwood, speaks in that sly Southern way which only Southerners can, understated, full of vivid imagery and metaphors, which would sound affected if it were not spoken with that accent, full of blarney and acid, delivered with a mild smile and sense of irony which assumes you understand.

When Francis looks at you, as he peers into the camera and tells you about his people, when he says you can manipulate his people only by appealing to their demand for humility, he is not denigrating his people; he is simply stating a fact, a fact which somehow endears them to him, but which he finds useful, if not a little bit peculiar, and which he knows you will find risible. But he's not laughing. He respects his people, even if he has shown you a side of them he knows you will not respect.

What makes HOC so remarkable is you know this is not written the way The Wire was, by men who lived the story.  HOC is written by people who, at most, talked with a lot of people who lived the Washington story, or maybe by people who observed from two steps removed, but they did not live it. Despite that, the writer of the episode which sends Francis Underwood back to his district in South Carolina on a mission prompted by that absurd American sense of having been wronged when the injured person was not wronged by anyone, was injured by her own foolishness, is brilliant in a way which really good fiction can be good: This episode and it's key scenes advance so many ideas on so many levels simultaneously it leaves you breathless.

There is the idea that a girl who is driving 60 miles an hour, texting about a water tower that looks like a scrotum( or something vaguely genital) and loses control of her car and dies, can be the source of a law suit by her parents, claiming the people who erected (pun intended) the tower were responsible for fatally distracting their daughter. That this is wrong does not enter the equation. Underwood returns to his district to work out a solution, without judging right or wrong. He is only interested in what works.

He is the focus of undeserved resentment and blame, but he does not complain: He simply defuses it by addressing the deep, underlying source of the blame, the agony of loss. He does this by framing it as a part of religious experience and redemption. He delivers a sermon of extraordinary power and insight. It is a sermon of double entendre, which clearly says, "You are angry at me, but you are really angry at God. You cannot allow yourself to be angry at God, so you are looking for somebody it's okay to be angry at.  I will do, and I accept the blame, in God's behalf."
 And he follows up in a meeting with the parents in a masterpiece of understanding of the psychology of loss and healing.

And he does all this while managing, long distance, a terrifically tense meeting about the most important bill of his Congressional career, and the other ball he keeps in the air is a text message flirtation with a female reporter.

And while doing all this, he literally takes time to smell the flowers, to gather his "rosebuds" while he may--actually they are tulips--and to deliver them in an astonishingly effective way to his wife, all the while thinking about initiating a sexual adventure with the young woman he has been manipulating.

And when he makes his overture to the young woman, he begins with a warning and as honest a disclaimer as any man has ever made in the process of seduction.

He is a character of depth, enormous talent, who you have to like, admire, enjoy and yet you are repelled even as you are drawn into his web. He asks for no forgiveness. He is a sinner, and he smiles at that, knowing that all men are sinners and that is simply a part of being human, so he accepts this about himself, without rancor, agony or apology.  He has told you he adores his wife, but he need not tell you why he may stray now and again. He assumes you'll know. 

This is way better than anything, including Homeland, which has come our way for years.  So add this to Games of Thrones, Treme, Downton, Newsroom.

We have been seeing now, for some years, the best fiction not between covers of a book, or in e books, not in feature length cinema, but in long form television series. 

What an age we live in.