Reading Buttigieg in Commonweal

Professor Kloppenberg

Commonweal, a Catholic magazine of longstanding quality and reputation, published a piece three  weeks ago which I would never have seen but for the good offices of a neighbor who passed it along.

The piece was written by James T. Kloppenberg, who teaches humanities at Harvard and who taught Mr. Buttigieg in two classes.

I could not restrain myself from responding with a letter to the editor, but knowing it will never see the light of day, post it here for the consideration of the Phantom's vast audience of American intelligentsia and Russian trolls. 

Reading Professor Kloppenberg's remarks on his former student, I was struck by his comment that he did not give Mr. Buttigieg an "A" in his course. And, the professor tells us,  his course was described by the Harvard crimson as "the toughest humanities class at the College, combining soul-crushing dense and difficult material with a will-breaking workload."
The professor then lists the pantheon of American thinkers he explores with his students: John Dewey, Irving Kristol etc, etc, etc, and his own role in sending Buttigieg off to Oxford for his Rhodes scholarship, where Buttigieg would have to cope with the rigors of analytic logic, contemporary moral philosophy and neoclassical economics. These difficult will breaking courses will be necessary if the student is to be deemed worthy by the faculty to lead the free world.  Later the professor mentions Buttigieg emerged with a "coveted First from Oxford," thus validating Kloppenberg's recommendation: even though Buttigieg hadn't risen above "the middle of the pack" under his scrutiny at Harvard, Peter had enough intellectual firepower to excel at Oxford.

This is all in that mode of "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eaton."

Which is to say, what we do at Harvard, selecting out the creme de la creme and grooming them, is so very important to the destiny of the nation, as we train, hone and prepare the nation's best and brightest to lead us into destiny.

Hogwarts for the American ruling class. 

All this reminds me of the story about Abraham Lincoln (who did not go to Harvard or take a course in the American intellectual cannon, but somehow became the 19th century's greatest writer), who feared oblivion, feared living a life which did not matter. Signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln remarked he finally believed he might have made his mark.

A career in B.S. 

I suspect Dr. Kloppenberg (and possibly other Harvard faculty--including Henry Kissinger) secretly suffers the pangs of feeling their lives have not really mattered, not changed the course of history, as they sit in their offices and faculty clubs, telling themselves they have set the world in motion, groomed and chosen kings and great men and sent them off to make history with the skills and insights learned at the feet of the great faculty at Cambridge, MA. 

Mr. Trump, somehow, without reading any of the great thinkers examined by the professor, managed to capture history, at least temporarily. And then there are the cases of  Bill Gates, and after him, Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom spent one year at Harvard and concluded someday they would be very rich and very important people, but if they stayed at Harvard they would  be neither, and both decamped to locations as far away from Harvard as they could get.

The question is: does thinking and considering the works of the pantheon in the humanities really change the world? 

Or, put another way, has Harvard become a stairway to  oblivion?

Civil War Trash: Killing your Gods and Angels

The Phantom recently discovered the movie DVD section at the Hampton library and lit upon a promising item in the "G" section under "God."  

Popping the movie, "Gods and Generals" into his basement Blue Ray, he mounted his treadmill and prepared to trundle off into hours of Civil War action.

The opening credits raised expectations of glory to come with a montage of regimental flags, authentic, beautiful, colors gently undulating, stirring music in the background. 

All sorts of promise:  The movie is said to be based on Jeff Shaara's book which the Phantom has not read, but he has read "Killer Angels" which is a very good treatment of the war, and the pedigree of a director, Ron Maxwell, who did "Gettysburg" a movie which falls into the benign, suitable for the classroom, if windy and juiceless treatment of that great struggle. Made 10 years after Gettysburg, G&G uses the same actors to play Joshua Chamberlain and his brother. There is even a song specially written by Bob Dylan for the movie, "Cross the Green Mountain" so anticipation ran high.

 But then...

Faulkner once said the pain of good writing means you must often "kill your angels" and if you've ever tried writing, fiction especially, you know exactly what he means. When you find you're swept away and really flying as you sit at your desk or at your computer, the alarms ought to be going off...when you re write, you find the stuff you must kill is the stuff which so thrilled you but is really that white horse you should not ride into battle with your feather plume on your hat because it is death to your purpose and you will deserve the bullet of every marksman who sees you.

General Patton, in his dreams

Another clue: Ted Turner, who produced the movie gets to dress up as a Confederate officer, Patton (yes, a relative of that Patton) and die in Pickett's charge.

The movie opens with Robert E. Lee arriving to a chorus of angels singing in the choir, stepping out of his carriage resplendent in his spotless blue uniform with a colonel's epaulets and ushered into the pallor of Secretary Blair who offers him, in a mystifying Irish accented English, the command of the Union Army.  As the chorus swells behind him, General Lee, intones that Abraham Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers, to form an army to invade the South is the real offense, not the little matter of a Fort called Sumter, which Southern cannons have pounded into dust, killing American soldiers and over running its defenses in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina. 

Saint Robert E. Lee, slave driver

Besides, Lee notes, his own plantation is right across the Potomac River. He does not add, although the Phantom would have, had he been writing the script,   the Secretary could stick his head out the window of his office and see the 189 slaves working Lee's fields, slaves belonging to Lee's wife, but working for Lee, and slaves who Lee kept under control by ruthlessly pursuing them whenever two or three escaped, and after whipping them, "sold them South," a punishment feared worse than death, because those slave owners in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi knew how to really make life Hell for the chatell. 

Following this scene, we get Lee speaking to the Virginia legislature, again backed by a chorus of angels accompanied this time by piano, and we have tender scenes of a mother sending her two precious, fresh faced sons off to war from her Virginian home, and we see farmers and craftsmen putting up their plowshares and cleaning off their muskets and joining the throngs of volunteers, just as their ancestors had marched off with Washington to defend their homeland from invading British hordes.

But best of all, we have the first of many scenes of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, bringing his wife into his pallor and reciting a verse from the Bible which justifies making war and killing as only the Bible can do, and they recite it in unison as a prayer to the coming mayhem.  Later we have Jackson looking heavenward with a Bible in hand and reciting other verses, and rendering freestyle prayers before battle. 
And we get the point: This is a man called by God to defend Virginia, chattel slavery and aristocracy, not necessarily in that order.

There is some historical accuracy to this portrayal of Jackson as a Bible thumper--he was by all accounts a man who read and quoted the Bible relentlessly, a sort of 19th century Taliban who justified all sorts of murderous behavior by instruction from God. He even apologizes to God for preparing battle on the Sabbath, but as he remarks to his Heavenly Father, who can be just dimly seen in the clouds above Bull Run creek, listening attentively, if His will is for battle on Sunday, His will be done!


By the time we get to see Stonewall standing like one at Manassas, we understand who the good guys are, and all about the Lost Cause.

I Will Make Georgia Howl 

It's not until side B, after the intermission, we finally run into Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels, now 10 years old and 30 pounds fatter than when he played the role in "Gettysburg") with his brother, (who played the same role in "Gettysburg" but seems to have aged less perceptibly) discussing the Emancipation Proclamation, and reprising that line from the first movie, "Don't call me 'Lawrence' in front of the men," as if that were either the funniest or the most affectionate cinematic line ever written.

It seems the Emancipation Proclamation may pose problems for the Union officers because many of the Union soldiers did not sign up to free the "darkies"  as Chamberlain's brother notes. What exactly they did sign up for beyond the abstract notion of "union" is not clear, but Chamberlain-Daniels explains that the war may not have been about freeing the slaves in the beginning but "war changes things" and ending slavery is now the big casus belli.  Chamberlain also upbraids his brother from using the politically incorrect word "darkies" to describe "Negroes" in one of the first assertions of political correctness in American cinematic  history. 

Douglass

Frederick Douglass, the Phantom notes, is nowhere to be seen in "Gods and Angels" or at least in the parts the Phantom managed to choke his way through.

Nor is Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, in which he actually explains, carefully, objectively and systematically the way the war came to be about freeing slavery, and which, in the Phantom's humble opinion, is by far the best explanation ever offered and so the Phantom will show it now, humbly, for the reader's appraisal:

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it-- all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war-- seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came. One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other.

Having seen as much of this wreck of a movie as he could bare to watch before puking, the Phantom gathered up his dog and carried the DVD down to the Library and shoved it through the after hours slot for book and DVD returns, resisting the urge to throw it into the fireplace, which in the Phantom's case might cause an even worse conflagration, as it is a gas fire place. 

Would anyone out there like to see a Civil War film written from the perspective of "What Happened" from as many points of view as can be fit into a single movie--a sort of War and Peace of America, incorporating the bored New Hampshire farm boy looking for adventure, the Scarlet O'Hara princess of that radically white supremacist, Margaret Mitchell, Frederick Douglass, a failed leather tanner looking for advancement named Ulysess S. Grant, and all like that?

Is Trasnsgender Medicine the Lobotomy of the 21st Century?

Watching "The Lobotomist" on the "American Experience" series I was stunned by the parallels between what occurred in the 1930-1960 period with respect to the advent  and dissemination of lobotomy for "mental disorders" and what we are seeing now in "Transgender Medicine" clinics.

Film footage of mental institutions with horrifying images of patients who no doubt ranged from schizophrenic, to depressed, to severe developmental disorders to traumatic brain injuries,  lying naked against the fecal smeared walls in warehouses then called, "Insane Assylums" were enough to establish that desperate times called for desperate measures. 

Before the advent of drugs like Thorazine, which could sedate screaming, howling, hyperactive patients and prevent them from jumping out of windows or attacking fellow patients and staff, prefrontal lobotomy, in which an ice pick was rammed through the orbital bone above the eye and swished around like a windshield wiper, severing connections of the frontal lobe to brain structures posterior to it,lobotomy seemed like an answer to horrible suffering.

The problem with lobotomy was it was not systematically, i.e. scientifically evaluated for almost ten years after it came into widespread use.

Clearly, from the film, it was applied to a wide variety of disparate "mental disturbances" which included schizophrenia (where patients hear voices) to depression (where patients become inert or very anxious) to war veterans with traumatic brain injuries, to unruly children we might now  call hyperactive or attention deficit.  Predictably, it failed whole categories of patients, but it did make many patients more manageable: They no longer shrieked or ran away, but sat placidly and lumpish, and were now tractable.

Walter Freeman, MD

"The Lobotomist" introduces the purveyor of the lobotomy procedure not from the origins of the  procedure but from the point where the procedure had been discredited and it's main advocate, Walter Freeman, MD, was portrayed as a medical monster who reduced hundreds to thousands of patients to vegetables, hulking remnants of the human beings they had once been.  
The documentary then goes back to examine how Dr. Freeman came to advocate for such a procedure, now thought to be akin to medieval torture. 
How could he have come to this dreadful decision and advocated for this frightful procedure?
The failure to critically evaluate the risks as well as the benefits of lobotomy was not the failure of Dr. Freeman alone; the medical profession and the government failed to act decisively. When he presented his first results at a medical conference, there were plenty of physicians who were appalled and who demanded prospective, controlled studies, but the mechanism for such things were not in place in the first half of the 20th century.
Dr. Freeman was motivated by a desire to help patients and their families, but also clearly driven by another set of motivations, to succeed and to be celebrated.

Ultimately, when the harm caused by the procedure became more widely known, Dr. Freeman was chased from the medical community, and spent the remainder of his life traveling in search of former patients who he had lobotomized to see what had happened to them in the long run, seeking vindication in success stories. Of course, following carefully what became of these patients should have been baked into advocating for the procedure in the first place. This man was no scientist. 

One wonders whether the directors of "transgender clinics" may meet a similar fate.
And one wonders whether the story of the 21st century clinics will not be in days to come, seen as horrific as Dr. Freeman was ultimately viewed.

Anyone who has seen "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" knows the argument against lobotomy. The day may arrive when a version of Cuckoo's Nest may gain currency, portraying the Nurse Wratched's of the transgender clinics.

Today, we have another intractable problem: Patients with "gender dysphoria."  

The patients afflicted today with this new disease are not as disturbing in their suffering: These patients are nowhere nearly as wild and disruptive to others, and pose nothing like the social disruption of scale. 
They are treated with methods which, like lobotomy before, shock physicians who look at the treatments:  castration of testicles and penises, industrial doses of testosterone or estrogen with outcomes which are not systematically reported other than one: suicide rates, and that rate is not encouraging.

At a recent Endocrine Society meeting the Phantom heard an expert on a panel of heads of "Transgender Clinics" answer a question about the suicide rate in his clinic as, "Somewhere just above 40%" as if he were talking about the chance of rain that afternoon.

When Paul McHugh, who has now become a focus for attack by "transgender activists,"  assumed the chairmanship of the department of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, he was asked to cooperate with the transgender program being developed there. The clinic was run as an inter departmental effort by Psychiatry, Urology, Gynecology and Internal Medicine/ Endocrinology.  McHugh took his time, collecting data, but when he confirmed the suicide rate among clinic patients was just north of 30% he cancelled psychiatry's participation. Ultimately, the clinic closed, although it has recently re opened.

Paul McHugh, MD

The response from those in the transgender medicine trade is the suicide rate is not their fault, not the result of any failure on their part. Suicide, they argue is not a reasonable end point to evaluate the success or failure of a transgender clinic. Suicide is the result of the rejection of transgender patients by society, of the degradation and hostility faced by transgender patients.

Defining a transgender patient is not always easy. In general, it is defined as a person who feels he/she/they have been given the wrong gender assignment by parents, society. "I am a woman in a man's body." 

McHugh has argued that transgender patients are very much like patients with anorexia nervosa: they are obsessed with a single wrong idea. 
In the case of the patient with anorexia nervosa that wrong idea is they are too fat. They look in the mirror and see an 80 pound person who is 5'9" inches tall and they think, "If only I could lose weight, I would not hate myself so much."
Most people, physicians or not, can see this is a wrong idea. 

But in the case of people with gender dysphoria, not the same.
These patients  believe if only they can be transformed into a different gender, they will find happiness. But when the promise fails, when their testicles have been removed, and their penises removed, they are not happy, and in fact fall into despair and some commit suicide.

The campaign against Dr. McHugh; He cannot be wrong; he must be hateful

Then there are those patients who do not feel totally committed, who want to keep testes or penises and have sex with their penises but want a lot more estrogen to reduce male hair growth. Or there are XX individuals who want testosterone in industrial doses to lower their voices and grow hair on their lips, but they still have penis in vagina sex.

Transgenders are not in the same box as homosexuals. Both groups suffer humiliation, sometimes violence, mistreatment, intimidation because of who they are and in the case of homosexuality, clearly, this is not something the individual can change about himself or herself.  In the case of the transgender patient, there has been no effort to dissuade or change, only to accommodate to the demand of "change me." It's not clear if any amount of persuasion would be effective or even desirable. Any effort to dissuade a transgender is immediately placed in the same category as just another attempt by authority figures to "reprogram" patients as homosexuals were subjected to this travesty in the past. 

The problem, which never gets explored is the revenue stream "Transgender Clinics" represent for the centers which run them. Like Walter Freeman, whose motivations are explored in "The Lobotomist" the motivations of the doctors who have built careers and incomes on transgender medicine are relevant.

McHugh, much reviled by Johns Hopkins medical students who accuse him of acting out of hate rather than concern for patients with gender dysphoria, has retired. He says he lives with a clean conscience but he is not sure others who have pushed transgender medicine have clean consciences.

Alarm bells should go off whenever a condition requiring treatment by doctors, using drugs or surgery becomes a cause, activist driven, rather than dispassionately examined by doctors with no skin in the game, who are interested only in the academic questions.  When book royalties or jobs or TV appearances are involved, oh, we ought to have our antennae up high and they should be twitching.


Someday, the Phantom suspects, they'll be making documentaries about transgender medicine doctors which will look a lot like "The Lobotomist."

Trump Country, `a la Antonia Hitchens

"Nearby, the owner of an orange R.V. with a Confederate flag decal on its bumper explained the sticker's provenance: 'It started with the Civil War, or whatever. The North against the South. And then there was slavery involved. I don't know the exact whole story. They've turned it into a racist thing.'"

--Antonia Hitchens quoting a man at the Daytona 500 rally, deep in Trump Country.

"One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war."
--Abraham Lincoln, 2nd inaugural address

The February 10 New Yorker carries a sketch by Antonia Hitchens which is intriguing in several ways.
For one thing, Ms. Hitchens is not profiled under the "Contributors" section, which may be because she is officially part of the editorial staff, but Contributors are often listed as "staff writer." 
So that is odd.
Because Christopher Hitchens is one of my favorite authors, and I am currently reading Hitchens's book about Thomas Paine, I googled Antonia  and discovered she is his daughter. Her linked in page says she went to Columbia University and before that, Sidwell Friends School.

Fair enough.

Her piece "Trump Country: Round and Round" is prototypic New Yorker: Simple selection of detail and telling quote, without comment. It's just there and the author is simply looking at you, deadpan. She doesn't have to say a thing. You know what she is thinking and she knows what you will think.

It's Joan Didion of the telling detail. And Joan Didion never did it better than Ms. Hitchens.

Of course, Ms. Hitchens finds the perfect details amid a welter of details which may not present the picture she sketches if they were presented in toto, with contradictory details modulating and muddying the picture of what Trumpies are all about.

There may have been anti Trumpies at Daytona. There may have been people more like the obsessive engineers of "Ford v Ferrari," or liberal movie stars who love to race cars. But this is a portrait, and the painter gets to chose the lighting and details: Fair enough.

Ms. Hitchens may have taken her children to Hippo Playground in Central Park the morning she went into the office and tapped out her story. She sees the world through lenses which were shaped at least in part at Columbia, and at Sidwell Friends School.

But she does get this picture perfectly tinted.

How much is wrong with the owner of that Confederate flag decal? How determinedly ignorant do you have to be to be that clueless about the Civil War?  Even if you dropped out of middle school, all you have to do is turn on TV to any of the thousand documentaries-- from Ken Burns to the History Channel.  How can you avoid knowing more about the Civil War than only what Fox News tells you?

"They've turned it into a racist thing." There it is. The "Lost Cause" story direct from Fox News. It's all about heritage and the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, only States Rights and the only slave owner at Appomattox was Grant, not Lee. 

But then we have the T shirt Ms. Hitchens has selected from among the presumably hundreds of T shirts being worn in the stands the day of her visit:  It is worn by the groom as his bachelor-party attendees surround him and drink themselves into oblivion.  His shirt reads: "Same Pussy Forever, It Had Better Be Good."

Selection is a powerful thing.

Ms. Hitchens may be accused of many things, of being unfair, but if that T shirt was there, and most especially if she quoted the Confederate accurately, you cannot escape the picture.

Pop Quiz: Which Flag did Robert E. Lee fly?

Of course, for fans of "The Wire":  the 5th Season character Scott Templeton, who gets perfect quotes from sources who cannot be checked,  springs to mind. "I wish I had said that," one man who was quoted said. "I wish I were that smart."

Some stories are just too good to allow facts to stand in the way. 

Lincoln was asked once about the remark he was quoted saying, about his most pugnacious and successful general, Ulysses S. Grant, who was dogged by rumors he drank incessantly and was under the influence of whiskey all too often:  "I wish I knew what whiskey it is he drinks," Lincoln was quoted as saying. "I'd send a bottle to all my generals."

Lincoln, when asked about this said, "I wish I had said that."

But, I would bet Ms. Hitchens was quoting accurately.

It just sounds right. 
I don't think a woman with an elite school education could have  made that up.

Success

Now if Mr Andrew Carnegie, or any other millionaire, had wished to invent a God to suit his ends, he could not have done better. Benjamin did it for him in the eighteenth century. God is the supreme servant of men who want to get on, to produce. Providence. The provider. The heavenly storekeeper. The everlasting Wanamaker. And this is all the God the grandsons of the Pilgrim Fathers had left. Aloft on a pillar of dollars.
--D.H. Lawrence on Benjamin Franklin

Hanging out at the Hippo Park just off Central Park West and 91st Street the Phantom was struck by the pseudo diversity of the folks who swarmed over the wondrous statues of hippopotomi, some partially submerged, some hippos standing fully on terra firma.  A babble of languages, from Central Europe to South America rang out, but the children were all dressed alike in their expensive, colorful clothes, Canada Goose jackets, Nordstrom play pants. Many were mixed race, and beautiful as mixed raced children often are.  

But their parents were cut from the same cloth: you could hear it in their occasional call outs to their children:
1. Success goes to the persistent!
2. Don't run with that stick! You are rushing into a  lawsuit !
3. Running up the slide? No, you slide down the slide. Oh, well, maybe not Harvard. We'll start thinking about Wesleyan. [Knowing laughter from scattered other parents]

Hippo Park, officially: Safari Playground

The fathers were American nerds or European high tech, at a glance. The mothers physically more attractive, and certainly well maintained and expensively done up, but from snipits of conversation, expensively educated:  Yale, Princeton, Stanford the names I heard over just a twenty minutes. 

Summertime in Safari Playground

Nothing wrong with any of them. They were polite, friendly, clearly accomplished, but their kids were not just there to frolic, but to be trained. 

Perhaps the Phantom is seeing what he wants to see. 

But it did make the Phantom remember a single incident from years ago, when his son came home dejected over a C- on a history paper, at the famous Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C.  And a C- was only the first phase of rebuke.

His assignment had been to write a biographical paper about a famous early American and he had, characteristically, procrastinated, and finally scoured the stacks of the school library and stumbled upon a slim volume which recommended itself by its size, a mere 50 pages, which meant it could be quickly consumed, but, better yet, it was immediately absorbing, as it was written in that breezy British style which amuses not just 15 year old boys but adults as well. 

It was D.H. Lawrence's subversive, lancinating piece on Benjamin Franklin, who was, the Phantom's son, quickly learned, a hypocrite of major dimensions, having made his mark with scads of little ditties on the virtuous life, all the while womanizing, conniving and violating most of the virtuous homilies he had espoused. 

D.H. Lawrence

Mark Twain, of course, had argued that any boy trying to follow Franklin's advice would lead a sorry, joyless life, never spending a penny for the sake of immediate pleasure and missing out on most of the pleasures Mr. Franklin had never denied himself. 

The Phantom's son was much taken with the Lawrence tract and promptly wrote up a report incorporating the ironic and needling wit to suggest this American hero had, in fact, clay feet.

His teacher, who had a degree from Columbia University's school of education, was scandalized, infuriated and appalled.  She could not bring herself to fail the boy--nobody fails at Sidwell; only the school fails the child, but she wrote a scalding note about how shamefully this unworthy student had denigrated one of the heroes of American history. This teacher had learned American history at Columbia and she did not get into and through Columbia by disrespecting anyone.

The Phantom, of course, read the teacher's comments before reading the paper,  but upon reading it, found himself laughing and enjoying it greatly, and learning things about Franklin he had never known, and went on to read more about Franklin.

If the Phantom had downgraded his son's effort it would have been because he had relied on only one source.  Franklin, it turns out, was ahead of his time with respect to racial theory.  He did own slaves, but returning from Europe, freed them all and became an abolitionist activist.  Before that, he condemned fellow colonists who, after an Indian insurrection, killed Indians indiscriminately, as if one Indian's transgression tainted all Indians. 

The Phantom told his son not to worry.  The son had just had his first experience with the dangers of rebellion and speaking unwelcomed truths to authority figures.

The Phantom well remembered his own insurrections with teachers in the public schools, who were every bit as  party line disciples as the Sidwell history teacher.  He had thought a private school would be populated with teachers who had been better educated, which, of course meant, more open minded, exposed to a broad variety of opinion.

But elite schools are not immune from narrow mindedness or constricted thinking. 
Horror at "blasphemy"  was alive and well in the elite system.  

This was the first time his son encountered punishment for speaking heresy but not the last.

In the 21st century, we see Zuckerberg and Gates as men who jettisoned the elite school (Harvard) for the freedom of the West Coast gold rush in IT.

But  now we also see the limitations of the thinking of these iconoclasts, bound not by concepts of institutionalized blasphemy, but by the limitations of their own educations, bound, as fate would have it, by the lack of a liberal arts education. 

So Mr. Zuckerberg cannot see the harm his Frankenstein monster has wrought, and cannot correct it.  And Mr. Gates, admirably wants to give away some part of his immense fortune, but he hasn't the foggiest idea of how to maximize the benefit such largesse might convey. Clean water in Africa, malaria vaccines are worthy goals, but there are far more potent and far reaching efforts which could meet needs closer to home, which would make a real difference, like backing the right changes in government efforts to address these problems. 

Houston, Boston Baseball Cheating Scandal: Say It Ain't So, Joe

Watching Mookie Betts and the Boston Red Sox power their way to a World Series championship was a thrill, not of vicarious victory, because I knew I did nothing to share in that astounding performance, but simply a bliss of wonder that players could perform so magically.

Now all that has gone to ashes. 

I am actually in a position to understand how exactly this form of cheating poisons the achievement, invalidates it, actually.

I played little league baseball, but never in high school nor college but as an adult I played for nearly 20 years and I was addicted to batting cages, still am, actually.

Most batting cages have an 85 mph fast ball cage and this I (or anyone really) can learn to hit and drive consistently. It's a challenge, but you can be trained.

But I once found a cage where you could program a 90 mph fastball and you could program 3, 90 mph fastballs, then an 80 mph curve then a 90 mph fastball, then a 75 mph slider and so on.

I found I could hit a 90 mph fast ball about half the time if I set up 10 in a row, but I could hit this only half the time, even when I knew it was coming and never hit it on the nose. What really killed me was seeing a 90 mph fastball after an 80 mph pitch. The 90 mph fast ball looked like 120 mph and I never could come close to even making contact.

This showed me the importance of "mixing speeds" and why older pitchers who could no longer throw 95 mph fastballs could still be successful by "keeping the batters off balance" which really means, by completely destroying the batter's timing and brain cells by mixing speeds.

So now the scandal: The Houston Astros got a software program which allowed them to steal the catchers' signals to the pitchers and teamates in the dugout could see these translated signals and hit a trash can: one for a fastball, two for off speed, and the batter in the batter's box then knew what was coming and had a huge advantage.

Of course, the batter still had to hit the ball, but as I discovered in my high tech cage, even an amateur stood a good change of laying bat on ball if  he knew it was a fastball coming.

It's been argued: Well, baseball players have been stealing signs since the game began, but no.
Everyone knew, when there was a runner who reached second base, he would look in to the catcher and see the signals and try to relay this to his teammate at the plate. But the thing is, the catcher and pitcher knew this was going to happen and changed up signals, and this was never a very effective play for the batter.

What Houston did, and it won a World Series doing this, was radically different and more successful and the performance of Houston batters was demonstrably so much better when they were cheating, there is no doubt the cheating made the difference between victory and defeat.

And then, apparently, Alex Cora took the system from Houston to Boston and lo and behold: Red Sox players like Mookie had hitting success light years better than what they had ever done before.
I think this is true. I'll have to  Google Mookie before and after Alex Cora arrived with the software. I'd love to believe  Mookie was great even without the software cheat.
But what I've seen so far suggests Mookie and all the Red Sox got suddenly, significantly better with the software.
So far all I've found is that in 2017 before the software arrived Mookie batted .264 and hit 24 home runs. The next year Alex brought the cheat, and Mookie batted .364 and hit 32 home runs. 

Unlike the fabled Chicago White Sox scandal, every Houston player and later, every Boston player was in on it--except for the Boston pitchers who did not bat, or even sit in the dugouts.

So Mookie's fabulous year was a cheat, a sort of lie.  Same for every other player.

Talk about conspiracy theories--here's an actual conspiracy which altered outcomes.

To baseball's credit, the powers that be investigated and publicly disclosed the crime.

But, really, I don't think I'll be able to watch major league baseball again.
At least not the Red Sox or the Astros.

It will be interesting to see if Mookie can hit as well in LA, without the cheat, as he did in Boston.

Collective Memory: When History Becomes New

Channel surfing through my Amazon Prime choices I finally, in desperation, alighted upon "The Long Shadow," a documentary series by David Reynolds, a Cambridge don who has done his work on the history of World War 1, which, as he repeatedly points out, happened before he was born. This is an important point: there is history we live through, history that happened while there are still those alive who remember it, and then there is the rest of history.

David Reynolds

He dwells for the entire opening episode about how the way Brits and Germans and Americans remember World War One was different right after that war and was different 20 years later and was different again 50 years later.  

History is seen differently in the memories of different peoples and it morphs in the minds of the same population, as time progresses.

Right after World War 1, in Britain, it was the glorious, sacred war of sacrifice for King and country.  But within 10 years, as soldiers returned and accounts were taken, it became a story of futility, of senseless, meaningless slaughter, wrought by stupendously stupid generals who were not themselves in the trenches and by self absorbed monarchs who had no personal skin in the game. 

Kaiser Wilhelm

Because of the way WW1 was perceived by 1935 in England--much the way Americans now remember the quagmire, the stupidity of Vietnam--Brits were loathe to rise to the challenge of Mussolini and Hitler. A pox on all their houses; we got suckered into a war once, not again. While Brits were not alienated enough to reject monarchy outright, and were not persuaded to become communists, they agreed with the basic Lenin argument about war: A bayonet is a weapon with a worker on either end.

One thing Reynolds points out, which I had not realized somehow, that while Wilson's windy phrase, "We must make the world safe for democracy" was empty in many ways, it was a very essential message and truth in another sense.  
It's true Wilson's idea of democracy was a representative government for those who deserved to be represented, namely white males, preferably with a Princeton education, but we he went to Britain and was feted at Buckingham Palace with all the princes and dukes of British royalty in their elaborate costumes, Wilson arrived to dinner in a plain black suit, and, as Professor Reynolds remarks, "He must have brought to mind, 'Oh, here is Oliver Cromwell.'" 
I had to Google Cromwell, but I knew he was an anti monarchist, and in fact, he signed the death warrant for the execution of the king and he reigned over a parliament which replaced king with a representative body, of sorts.
Wilson, of course, was a Virginia aristocrat, a spiritual descendant of the Lost Cause, who rooted Blacks out of the federal government, disdained the idea of women voting, and was as close to Jefferson Davis in the White House as we have ever got (until, perhaps, Donald Trump) but he was no friend of the idea of monarchy and empire, and in this way he was something of a shock to the Brits.

No Blacks nor Women Need Apply

As Reynolds points out,  WW1 did change things in Europe. The disillusion with military governments ruled by monarchs was so deep and pervasive nine new republics emerged, one in Germany, briefly. But France, and much of the rest of Europe got parliaments and kings no longer could start wars over matters of offended royal pride.  

In England, after WW1, a new parliament was voted in by legions of newly enfranchised voters from the lower and middle classes, who could now vote and also by women, or at least women over the age of 30. (Why a 29 year old woman was denied the vote is not explained.)

So the memory of WW1 in England went from glory, to revulsion at the cupidity and stupidity and selfishness of the ruling class. And that meant England allowed Hitler to rise without challenging him before his particular version of spider wasp was able to eat Germany out from the inside. 

Archduke Ferdinand

Hitler, it must be remembered was not of the aristocratic German nobility, but was elected to office, albeit with a small plurality.

As much as I've recently read about WW1 lately, I had not seen it the way Reynolds, who is a man with a mind capable of seeing the same thing, but in a different way and he emphasizes how memory is plastic and molded to the current purpose but also how the stubborn facts of what really happened do matter.

Wilfred Owen

He points out that when WW1 was taught in schools by the mid 20th century, it was taught using the poems of the famous war poets, but one of the most famous, Wilfred Owen, is remembered in an edited form.  Owen, wrote of the cost, the horror the slaughter and his poems had all that, but they also had the thrill of battle and the idea that war might mean something. In fact, Owen chose to return to the trenches, although he did not have to go back, and he was killed there. When his brother, who managed his memory and his literary legacy published his poems, the brother edited out the pro war passages and made sure only the anti war stuff remained.  Another famous soldier poet, Siegfried Sassoon, met with Owen while Owen was weighing whether or not to go back to the trenches and implored him to stay home, away from the senseless carnage, but for Owen the carnage made sense.

Siegfried Sassoon

Owen and Sassoon's poems became part of a narrative of war as anything but glorious. Their work joined work from the other side--Eric Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front," from the German side, all of which suggested the masses, who died in waves of charges against machine guns and artillery had been duped into dying for a corrupt cause.

Revulsion against this notion ran deep in Britain--even to "Lady Chatterley's Lover" where a woman who was left behind safe at home had to deal with her crippled but imperious husband who returned from the war, paralyzed from the waist down, and Constance sees the mockery of those aristocratic British "values" as a hideous lie.

Paul kills Frenchman All Quiet on the Western Front

Listening to Reynold's description of Mussolini, who most Americans, if they know anything about him at all, remember as a clownish figure of strutting impotence, it is stunning how closely Mussolini resembles Donald Trump--they even look like products of the same litter.

History, as Reynolds presents it is a living thing, something which has shaped the lenses through which we see our world today. 

The Lost Cause (Slavery and Gone With the Wind)

Reynolds' argument is a twist on Faulkner's famous line, "The past is not dead. It is not even past."

But, in Faulkner's mind, the past is immutable, ever present, a living ghost standing right behind us; What Reynolds knows is that the past is like the rest of life: It is what we make it today.