Emotional Support Animals: Snowflakes

 A fight broke out at a recent dinner party when I mentioned that "The Sound of Music" production by Ogunquit Playhouse at the Portsmouth Music Hall was marred by a sort of squeaking, howling coming from someone's "emotional support animal" in the audience, who seemed to want to sing along with various songs including "A Few of My Favorite Things," and "Do Re Me" and "Climb Every Mountain."

It was distracting, if not show stopping. When I declaimed that emotional support animals are a symptom of a snowflake society, and should be banned and their owners told to grow up and act their age,  I was roundly chastised as sounding like the host's father, which I was assured was not a compliment, and my wife added this was proof I am a bigot, harboring ill will toward the disabled. I became Public Enemy Number One.

But, of course, the animal had to be allowed to distract the 700 people in the Music Hall, because, Heaven Forfend, the owner might not have not been able to attend without that emotional support and security offered by that animal, which may have been a dog, or possibly a hamster with a robust baritone.

Not being smart enough to simply retreat into my non alcoholic beer, I added that some people are allowed to flaunt their fragility, their vulnerability, their need for their security blankets in public seems to me bad taste at best, and a sign of the impending collapse of Western Civilization at worst.

Why grown people, semi-adults, are allowed to drag around living security blankets, Pooh bears, or whatever is beyond me. I mean, suppose an adult woman carried around a stuffed bear and sucked her thumb in a theater or on a bus or an airplane? What would you say? But if that stuffed orangutan is in fact alive, a real animal, well then we should all smile and coo and say, "Well, isn't that sweet and wonderful?"

I cannot imagine Vladimir Putin would allow this.

Maybe that's the only argument for emotional support animals (ESA).

I don't need an ESA; I need a gun

But I doubt Volodymyr Zelensky would be very happy about any of that, given that he has an entire nation in need of emotional support, and the last thing they right now need is whimpering women, or men, who claim they have special needs above and beyond the ordinary, which entitles them to special consideration.

A turkey, not toilet trained, showed up for a United Airlines flight. What was its owner looking for? Attention? Fawning obeisance?

What if that passenger had brought along a tarantula to calm her nerves?

Everything from peacocks to tarantulas to geese have been claimed. In New Hampshire, you need a letter from a "licensed mental health practitioner," who, I would submit, should require a letter of his own to call himself that.

Who are these people who demand to be coddled and simpered over? 

And what do you think Donald Trump would do with this as a campaign issue?

Whale Talk: Interview with a Feral Pig

 

Watching the nocturnal slaughter of feral pigs by men in military camouflage, sporting night vision goggles,  who have loaded up their 50 caliber machine guns equipped with laser sites I could only imagine how  those men were imagining themselves. The pigs, for some reason, in a wild panic often ran right into the Humvee and bounced off in a cartwheel of the dead.

The military paraphernalia suggested they were not playing great white hunter, but they were engaged in  flesh and blood war games, where they were the heroes of some video war game brought to life. 

The really creepy thing is how every one of them was grinning, as if they really enjoyed the killing. It was like looking at those old photos of white townspeople grinning into a camera while black bodies hung limply by the neck at some Mississippi lynching. 

Not that shooting feral pigs is in any way the moral equivalent of hanging human beings but it was that incongruity of the pleasure these guys were taking in the taking of life.

Schadenfreude does not even begin to describe it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOt1HLXNRFE

That video was "Lord of the Flies" on steroids. The idea that is what human beings are and what they do, as if to say: we all came from a violent past, where all life on Earth was merciless, brutal and short. 

But human beings have industrialized all this. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXs3vJt129M

This is just another in a long line of slaughter, encompassing the American buffalo apocalypse of the 19th century, the whaling of the 19th and 20th centuries, where the slaughter of entire species was done not just for fun, but for profit, and, in the case of the buffalo, as part of a concerted effort to eliminate the plains Indians as a distinct group. Kill the buffalo and you kill the Indian, Philip Sheridan said. William Tecumseh Sherman--how ironic is that name?-- agreed, and the army cooperated with the buffalo butchers to sweep the prairies clean of the vast herds of buffalo that sometimes stretched to the horizon. 

During the famous whaling years of Moby Dick about 5,000 whales were killed a year; in the 1960's with the industrialization of seaborne whaling factories, 30,000 whales a year were "harvested."

In her New Yorker article, "Talk To Me," Elizabeth Kolbert describes the efforts to use artificial intelligence to breakthrough and speak to whales in their own click language.  

AI has been used to write a version of Moby Dick, written from the whale's point of view and it ends with this:

"I, the White Leviathan, could only wonder if there would ever come a day when  man and whale would understand each other, finding harmony in the vastness of the ocean's embrace."

That, creepily, was written by a machine.

A man from Sri Lanka, a Buddhist, visited my home and a mosquito landed on his arm, but rather than smash it with a lethal slap, he simply and gently brushed it off, so it flew off, (with me in hot pursuit to kill that insect vector) but as he explained, the mosquito was a living thing, part of the planet's family.

I have no compunction about killing insects or ticks which harbor encephalitis virus or Lyme Disease or anaplasmosis, but I did work in a laboratory at the National Institutes of Health one summer where we splayed out living white lab rats on  surgical platforms and operated on them without anesthesia, to catheterize their livers so we could learn a little more about the hepatic biochemistry, and I had nightmares about those poor rats. They squirmed and struggled to escape; they wanted to live. They were clearly terrified, as terrified as those feral pigs being blown apart in those Texas fields. 

And we were killing them.

Occasionally, that summer, I'd walk past a line of PETA protesters with their signs, "Why Cage Life?" and I would think, "Oh, you have no idea."

I suppose I would have been a failure as a farmer.

Farmers, of course, kill things all the time, without shedding a tear, unless of course they have to shoot their favorite horse or dog: Then they get all emotional.

But if those animals could talk or communicate with us, things might get a lot more complicated. 

About 15 years ago, I read Michael Pollan's book, Omnivore's Dilemma, and although he is no vegetarian, and ends his book with a wild boar hunt, and the dinner he made of his prey, I came away from that saying, "I can live without meat. Why bother eating animals?"

Eventually, I started back eating lobsters, who have no real face, and salmon, who are suicidal anyway, and then most fish. Once a year, I eat pork spare ribs. But mostly, I live on cereal, vegetables and stuff you grow in the soil, and haven't missed meat. It's a problem for my family, who is populated with superb cooks, but they have adjusted. I've had to formulate a rule so they know what they can cook if they want to include me: No barnyard animals.

I'm not opposed to eating deer, which are a classic example of populations without predators run amuck. But I haven't done it beyond tasting a venison horderve.

But certain stories have driven home the point about animals. Beryl Markham's stunning 1942 book, West With the Night,  tells of how she acted as a bush pilot, taking off in a small airplane in Kenya to find bull elephants with big tusks so rich Americans, like Teddy Roosevelt on safari could shoot them. She did that until she realized whenever she flew overhead, the elephants would quickly form a circle, all facing inward so the tusks were not visible from above.

"They are protecting their bulls, concealing those big tusks!" Markham said, "They know why I'm up here. They connect the airplane to the hunters who follow it!" she realized to her horror. She landed her plane and quit, refusing to take part in the murder of any animal that smart.

But does an animal have to be that smart for us to want to not kill it, gut it and turn its brain fluid into transmission oil, glue or lamplighter fluid? 

Are we unsympathetic to the dumb animals but willing to spare the smart ones?

They are all "sentient," aren't they?

Like those dumb lab rats, they want to live.

The Worm's Eye View

 

The soldier on the front line sees only his small part of the larger picture, and I saw only a small part on my "front line" as a house officer during medical training. But, still, there is something undeniably true about the instance, even if it does not allow for generalization.

Watching, "Band of Brothers" there is a story line about a disaster of an officer, Lieutenant Dike, who is described by the truest hero of the series, Richard Winters, as "another one of those jerks from Yale, who think they can be leaders."

Dike came to mind as I was talking with a colleague about the Harvard medical students he had dealt with, who were told to go home at 10 PM so they could study, because, after all, they were at medical school to learn, not to be sleep deprived and abused. 

House officers I had met who had gone to Harvard Medical School and who wound up on the wards of Cornell-New York Hospital,  shared one curious characteristic, which may have been one of those things which was possessed by all or most Harvard medical students, but it was certainly characteristic of these two: they fled the scene when things got frightening.

In the case of Lt. Dike, of "Band of Brothers" the narrator tells us he was a bad officer not because he made bad decisions; he was a bad officer because he made no decisions. But, what we see in the story goes beyond that--he disappears, or he freezes into inaction. 

The writers take great pains to show how it was helpful, even necessary, to get soldiers briefly off the front line, even just 50 yards to the rear, sometimes just for one hot meal to get them to return to full efficacy. But Dike was more often than not, simply absent. He was the classic empty suit--simply not there, physically or mentally.

In the case of my two fellow house officers, one was my intern when I was a junior resident, who I'll call Don, and the other was my own year, or rank, I'll call Jack.

Don was eager to begin research projects with the faculty members who drifted through our wards, which was fine, but the internship year was not about research. It was about learning how to keep the patients in front of you out of trouble and alive. But, oh, well, whatever floats your boat. If you want to dream about publishing papers from experience with patients on the ward, fine, as long as you do your job. And Don seemed to take that job seriously--he brought a portable typewriter to the wards, which he locked with a chain to the radiator, and you could actually read his notes, which given the handwriting of the average intern, was something better than usual.

"The Tower," the 15th floor of the hospital, was where private patients enjoyed large, single rooms, furnished with better furniture than you saw on the wards and there was an occasional actual objet d'art on the walls, and the windows offered spectacular views of Manhattan, but the patients were just as sick. The thing about the Tower was the halls were vast, and empty, and it was a long elevator ride away from the rest of the hospital, from cardiac code teams, from any kind of help; there were simply not the same number of nurses and interns and residents and other staff around. It felt more like a hotel than a hospital, which was pleasant but when things went wrong, help took a long time for help to show up.

One day, a patient's daughter ran up to me in the hall and pulled my arm, and dragged me down to her father's room, where the wife and  another sister surrounded his bed, and he was clearly in extremis. 

I can't remember now exactly what was wrong, but I think I opened up his IV line and used his bedside phone to call for help, and took his blood pressure a few times and lowered the head of his bed and raised the feet and slapped on an oxygen mask, and he began to pink up a little. 

And then I turned to the wife and said something to the effect that while he looked better now, we would likely transfer him down to the ICU for a day or so. 

And I'll never forget what she said: 

"Just as long as you do not leave this room!"

And, confused, I said, "I have no intention of leaving your husband's side. Why would you say that?"

"Because that other doctor who was in here just before you, he just stood a the door, and then ran out of here and left us."

Later, I learned it was Don who had taken two steps into the room, seen the patient looking some morbid shade of blue gray and fled.

When I confronted Don about this he said, "Yes, I realize I could have done better,"  sounding like a schoolboy who had flunked his spelling quiz. "But I learn from those mistakes."

"You can't learn," I remarked. "If you're not there."

I said nothing more because I had learned, even at that tender age, to my chagrin, that the things I found to criticize in others, I often have done myself, or  would later do myself, so I try not to cast stones too often.

But, actually, now, with the perspective of years, I do not think I ever simply fled the field. I was clearly not the smartest doctor in that hospital, nor the most skilled, but the one thing I could do was be present,  to stand fast, to help in whatever what I could. 

One thing you could say for Cornell, for all its faults, the faculty wanted you present, and if you were there, in the fray, they generally forgave a lot. They were pretty clear being at the bedside was also educational, even if it did not show up in exam scores.

At Harvard, students passed all their standardized exams.  And it could be argued simply spending long hours on the ward, where often nothing much is happening, could be seen as a waste of time and energy.  

At Cornell, at least in those bygone days,  it was always, "You learn the most medicine at the bedside. The wards are often hours of boredom, punctuated by instants of berserk action. Get the patient through his crisis. Be there."

My other Harvard Medical School friend and I were walking back to our apartment building through the tunnel from the hospital one day, when two young men barreled past us, bent at the waist, running like a running back and his blocker, right by us. 

As we approached the underground Citibank branch--yes, amazingly, they had a branch in the tunnel--we could see through the glass wall, everyone was on the floor, and when I stepped through the glass door, they all ducked back down. Those two kids had just robbed the bank, pulled out big guns,  and one had bludgeoned the sixty something bank guard over the head, and he was unconscious on the floor. 

So, I went over to him, tried to feel a pulse in his neck and do some poor excuse of an exam, and looked up to tell Jack to get on the phone to the ER to send over a team for the guard. But Jack was frozen at the door, looking, to my eye at least, terrified. 

Some bank clerk called the ER, after I shouted out the telephone number, and they arrived about 10 minutes later. 

Jack was nowhere to be seen.

When I asked him about that later, he snorted and smirked,  and he said, "Well, you were playing the calvary riding to the rescue;  I thought there were enough heroes for one small bank."

So remaining with an unconscious patient was just me showing off.

I never could see Jack the same way again. He was, as a  girlfriend told me, "Your most interesting friend. The only one who is really classy." He had a wry sense of humor, a sort of aristocratic manner of speaking--he was Mainline, Philadelphia, everyone of his brothers were Yale College/Harvard Medical School--but after that, for me, he was just another Harvard jerk who did not stand fast when things got rocky.

At least, that was my take then. 

No Arguing Taste: VanGogh, Bob Dylan and the Unsung

There is a story so perfect, it must be apocryphal, and I have been unable to confirm it with Professor Google, but it is about Bob Dylan's first visit to his idol, Woody Guthrie. I've had a longstanding rule that you should never let the truth get in the way of a good story: The story goes that Dylan hikes up the path to Woody, who is in a hospital, dying of Huntington's Disease and he plays a few songs for Woody, some of Woody's and some of his own and after Dylan has safely departed, Woody turns to his companion and says, 'Well, the kid can't write songs for shit, but what an amazing voice!"

Of course, people always laugh at that for obvious reasons, but part of it is that most people thought Dylan had a terrible voice, and it's true, when he was smoking, it was not its best, but all along, it is an amazing voice, at least as I hear it, and it was especially rich when he stopped smoking and recorded "Nashville Skyline."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S4B6zxIOTE

But it all goes to show, there's no arguing taste.

During his lifetime, Vincent Van Gogh had few to no fans. His brother managed to sell one or two of his paintings, but the powers that ruled the French art scene at the time could not see in his paintings what generations of people all over the world have thrilled to ever since.

Having stood in front of Van Gogh's work in places from Manchester, New Hampshire to Amsterdam to London to New York and Boston, wherever I see them, I'm stunned. And, again, you marvel: how could those French academy of art connoisseurs not have seen and been moved by what I can so clearly see today?

And who is working in song or paint or print today who I am not seeing because the men who control music on the airways or internet, those who curate art for the museums or who select work for publishing houses simply do not see what I could see as wonderful?

The internet, you will argue, should help alleviate this problem: The gatekeepers of public taste should now be vanquished as anyone can post a painting on line or a poem or even a novel or a song.

But the sheer flood of all these works makes gatekeepers  or "influencers" as they are now known, even more important.  Greatness may be out there, but it is lost in a jungle of other works. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOWfCVQBixs

A Sacred Effort: Lincoln's Second Inaugural Addresss

 

Youtube has a worthwhile piece "deconstructing" (analyzing) what makes Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address amazing and qualifies as the best thing he ever wrote--which, in Lincoln's case, is saying something.

It took me some years to appreciate it, for reasons which will become apparent--but once I did appreciate it, I understood why Frederick Douglass described it as "a sacred effort."

It always bothers me that there was no voice amplification in 1865, and looking at photos of the vast sea of humanity stretching out from the Capitol building, I wonder how many could even hear his words. 

Of course, his speech was published in literally thousands of newspapers afterwards so it reached a mass audience. Not surprisingly, many newspaper editors failed to appreciate it, and one can only imagine the reasons for that, but among them, certainly, must be the reason that many newspapermen were not all that bright or well educated.

Lincoln begins by explaining why he will not say more about how he came to this place, this time, and he modestly suggests that to report on the progress of the war with Grant currently closing his stranglehold on Lee in northern Virginia would be unnecessary because the American public knew all that already from the newspapers.

"Fellow countrymen: at this second appearing to take the oath of presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends is as well known to the public as to myself and is I trust reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future no prediction in regard to it is ventured."

Lincoln, who wrote with great economy of style for the 19th century, nevertheless writes with more words than we would today. "No prediction in regard to it is ventured," today would be "military reports are today most encouraging, but predictions in this war have always proved risky."

Then he orients us with a very cogent summary of what led to the war and to the moment he faces on this day:

"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."

So, again, lapsing into a passive voice rather than saying, "Even as I took the oath and gave the last inaugural address, agents of the Confederacy were just around the corner trying to dissolve the Union. They were willing to go to war to do it. I did not want war but I had no choice, to save the Union."

But that "And the war came," could not be more dramatic or effective. The first real indication that there was a force of nature or of history or of Providence that was irresistible.

Then he speaks to history, and for me this is one of the most remarkable parts of the speech: he gives us a demographic description of what must have been obvious and universally known to his audience, but needed to be said:

"One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the Union but localized in the southern part of it."

This sets the stage for what is to come:

"These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war."

Odious Slaver

Even today, I encounter "Lost Cause" acolytes who tell me, with great certainty that slavery was not the cause of the civil war--it was all about economics and the industrial North trying to put the screws to the agrarian South. They have been singing this song since 50 years after the war, by which time most Americans, at least outside the South and even some in the South accepted that slaves were not happy imbeciles and that slavery was an evil.  

So, what I always say to this canard is: "Look, neither you nor I were alive during the Civil War, so neither of us can testify authoritatively. But I'll take it from someone who was alive then, Lincoln, who likely knew as well as anyone what caused the war and he said in his Second Inaugural it was slavery."

Well, it was slavery and the racism that sustained slavery, but that's another topic. But Lincoln went on record and that record sustains us even today.

"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 mor than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it."

Which is to say, the Confederacy was unreasonable. They could have kept their slaves, but when they tried to expand their system, we could not stand for that.

"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 should cease."

What he is saying is that in some ways both sides sleep walked into the war and even after slavery collapsed under the crush of the Union army's march through Georgia and the Carolina's the war did not end because by that time the Union army had another purpose: the destroy the Confederate army and the Southern resistance to Union.

"Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding."

Lincoln would have allowed the South to keep its peculiar institution, just not to expand it. The South thought it could separate and continue to sell its cotton to the North as a friendly neighbor

"Each read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other."

This is Lincoln at his most sly: He is well aware he has been called godless, that Confederates sustain the righteousness of their cause from the pulpits and that the South was even then the Bible Belt. But he is saying, as Christopher Hitchens might say, well, but OUR God tells us to fight you. So how ordained can this fight be?

Then, an even more cunning swipe:

"It may seem strange that any men should dare ask God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces but let us judge not that we not be judged."

This is the most startling image of the address. It's actually somewhat repulsive--the idea of eating the product of a sweaty face, but it is an economical way of displaying the repulsiveness of slavery. 

And then there is the phrase that surely brought a smile to the faces of those who could hear it, and I wonder if Lincoln smiled as he said it: Let us not be too smug about our own righteousness. After all, we are all sinners.

He did not need to say this. He did not need to allow the Southern people this respect, i.e. "we disagree with you, but we are not going to claim we are superior or more righteous than you." 

Presumably, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" played before and after this address, "We are trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored."

But this all launches us into an unexpected direction. Lincoln will not vilify the vanquished South. He is big enough, magnanimous enough to say indirectly that the North once participated in the slave trade and that right up to the war, it bought Southern slave cotton, so if God looked down upon America, He would find fault on both sides.

"The prayers of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes."

What he is saying is for all those who claim to know the mind of God, forget it. Nobody knows the mind of God. He has his own purposes.

Then Lincoln quotes scripture and tries to explain how, if the North was right and righteous, why it, too, should have suffered such heavy losses smiting the evil foe. And he gets right to the idea of shared guilt:

"If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him."

This is the most dense, incomprehensible passage, for me. "must needs come" and all that sort of Biblical language, which Lincoln--and his audience knew well--makes my head spin. But clearly, Lincoln is attempting to answer the "why" question. He has been confidently describing the answers to the "what" happened questions, but he is now speaking to the mothers who have lost sons, to the cosmic question of the meaning of the war. Why, if we have been doing God's work, have we suffered such unbearable losses?

"Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that his mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

Whew! The man knows his history. Slavery was present in America before there even was a United States of America. It was enshrined in the Constitution. It was not some lapse, some crime committed in 1850. And blood drawn by the lash repaid by blood drawn by the sword is now the recompense for a dark American past, for which our current generation is paying the price.

All of this sets up why Lincoln does not demand punishment for the South, or vengeance on the odious slavers. We are all guilty, in some measure, for this calamity of war.

"With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right."

Again, the reminder we do not and cannot know God's mind.

"Let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Talk about a stunning finish. 

Beginning and Endings

 For anyone who has ever tried to write a novel, the struggle over how to begin and how to end is well known.

One thing that separates a writer with command of his writing is the ability to open and close.

I'm not sure if this is the case with music, or with poetry or with life, but it surely is with writing.

To wit, I offer up two openings and one ending which evoke wonder, at least for me. How did these folks achieve the effect they were looking for? How much work went into these lines? Or did they just sort of flow out, like conversation over a beer?

The first is from "A Farewell to Arms," Ernest Hemingway:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightening, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.

What Hemingway has done here is to set up the story he intends to tell with a sense of foreboding and beauty. He talks about something which may not interest you, a house overlooking a vista, but then slides into the river bed and for anyone who has every looked at water flowing between rocks, that shock of recognition--"Oh, I've noticed that! I didn't know others had." 

And then, out of this nature study the mention of troops. What? What troops? Soldiers? They spoil the lovely landscape. Who are they? And then the spoilage by dust from the marching, and the suggestion the soldiers, their war spoiled it all, but it pulls you along. Soldiers? What kind of story is this? And then more on the war, but mixed again with nature: artillery, no more to worry about than lightening, and the return to the sensuous beauty of cool nights, but then "a storm coming."

I'm sorry, but if that does not totally hook you into this story, there is something wrong with you. Or, maybe, it's just me.

But, the thing is, it sets up the story so perfectly. Jake Barnes is in the army, meets Catherine Barkley, and against the background of the war, the mangled wounded of their hospital, they decide that love is more important than war, and they try to escape. The natural beauty of love and its product is wrecked by the war. They can flee, but they cannot escape its effects on them.

Then there is the purple prose of the neglected, derided Grace Metalious:

"Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, an unchartered season which lives until Winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged edged winds of winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard eyed cynicism. But the young wait anxiously, scanning the the chill autumn skies for a sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgement, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenward to seek the first traces of a false softening."

Again, the trees, the natural elements, and the effects of the elements on the human spirit.

And, again, this opening sets up the story perfectly: This is a story about the old and young, the hot passions of youth, and the ebbing of youthful passion and the defeat of love by human venality and violence. And it is often the old against the young--in this case the rape of a child by her stepfather.

And then there are the endings. 

Of all the endings in literature, none is more often mentioned than F. Scott Fitzgerald's wonderful line:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Again, the perfect summary of what his story was all about--how the past's stranglehold on the present destroyed Gatsby. 

Of course, for my taste, Gatsby was a bit of a silly story about a silly man. But reading biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, who lived his life during the period described by Fitzgerald, the first part of the 20th century--the same time Hemingway was writing about in Farewell to Arms--the poisonous grip of romanticism was what destroyed so many lives. Gatsby was silly but so was Theodore Roosevelt and the whole respectable society which spawned him. Romantic love, the idea of the one and only, the inability to allow for free ranging libidos, the idea of honor, the grip of money and class, all that stuff that made those times nasty and sad, was the operative value system.

Metalious was dealing with all that, but she was more hard boiled and saw the strictures of her small town life clear eyed. She looked at it all with "winter eyes." The fact she addressed sexual desire so openly, so luridly, consigned her book to the trashbin of "potboiler." But she knew better. And so, I suspect, did the reading public. The powers that be dismissed her as a bodice ripper novelist, but she could write and she could connect.

"Only here do I realize the littleness of things that can touch me."

Not a bad line, from a pulp fiction writer.

Losing the Faith

 

Last week I spoke with a man who had COVID a year ago. He's 64 years old and he and his girlfriend had refused vaccines and they were both admitted to hospital and he wound up in the ICU and she died. I asked him if he was feeling fully recovered from the COVID and he said, "Well, I had pneumonia and I'm over that."

And I said, "Well, but that was COVID pneumonia."

"Well, that's what they said."

"But your COVID test was positive."

"Well, that's what the hospital said. They make more money that way."

So there you have it. This man refused to believe in vaccines and even when he got COVID he refused to believe it. He and his girlfriend just happened to get pneumonia for the first time in their lives in the middle of a pandemic but it wasn't COVID.

Those authorities, they just lie all the time, you know. For their own financial gain, don't you know?

This is a man who, for whatever reasons, has embraced a belief system.

Today, I opened my New Yorker magazine which is part of my own belief system: The New Yorker writes the truth and in an elegant way. 

But the first article, the "Talk of the Town" spun into a discussion of the Canadian wild fires which are causing havoc in American cities with smoke. I was told "in some states wildfires in recent years have reversed about half of the air-quality gains that resulted from the Clean Air Act,"-- without specifying which Clean Air Act. 

And that left me wondering, how do you measure "air-quality gains?" And for how long is this reversal going to last? But before I could settle on more questions I was told, "Smoke now accounts for as much pollution as fossil fuels do, if not more." And I wondered: How do they know that?

Is it possible to distinguish smoke particles from fires from pollution from cars and power plants? 

Maybe there's some technology which can do that.

Smoke "can be tens times a toxic as other forms of pollution, including car exhaust." Apparently, they can measure fine particulate matter called PM2.5, and they know these inhaled particles become blood borne and go to brain. I can imagine some technology might be able to do this--after all they can find fetal cells in the maternal circulation, so science is wonderful. 

But then, "When the air quality is poor, studies have shown, that crime goes up, test scores go down, umpires make more bad calls and investors make more mistakes."

Wow! Those must be some special studies!

How could you connect "test scores" in some classroom to air quality? Try to imagine designing a study that could do that, something which could sort out all the variables. Correlation not being causation does not even begin to state that problem.

Then we get the "linked to" thing: "Exposure to air pollution has been linked to asthma and emphysema"--well, that sounds reasonable" but then,  "Alzheimer's and Parkinson's; cancer and strokes; depression and suicide; miscarriages, premature births, and infant mortality. Each year, air pollution contributes to as many as ten million deaths around the world."

Which evoked The Phantom's Law of Large Numbers, to wit, "When you see a really large number quoted, you can be 90% sure the guy using it has no clue what he's talking about."

"According to a 2020 report, the original legislation [The Clean Air Act] still produces 3.8 trillion dollars in economic benefits, and saves nearly four hundred thousand American lives each year." 

Now, you usually hear a stream of numbers like this brewed into a long stream of declarative sentences, so fast and so thoroughly mixed in you don't have time to think about where each number came from, or the sort of study you'd need to design to derive such a conclusion, but if it's in print, you can go back and start teasing out statements.

How would you ever figure out if a piece of legislation which was designed to improve air quality worked, and that if it did work to improve air quality, that its effect was 3.8 trillion dollars?  And how could you know this Act resulted in the saving of 400,000 lives? 

During the pandemic, when they were trying to figure out the number of deaths caused by a relatively discrete cause--a new virus--they still had to resort to "excess death" studies, i.e. how many more people were dying in nursing homes than usually died during a given November. And even then nobody could be sure.

When you are in the hospital with a desperately ill patient it's tough enough to know whether what you did for him actually saved his life--he might have survived even without what you did for him--but to know that for 400,000 lives? Well, that must be quite  study!

And then, from that bedrock of fantasy numbers comes the political/ideological use of such phantoms: "The air quality benefits alone are enough to pay for the energy transition." That is, abandoning fossil fuels will pay for itself in just air quality downstream benefits. 

Now, I'm all for wind, solar and renewal "clean" energy but saying the benefits will pay for the transition neglects that the guys who make and distribute and promote fossil fuels are not going to get paid. They don't believe windfarms and solar panels will benefit them personally, and maybe they have a point.

But, then we are told about more studies: "After a gas-leak scare near Los Angeles, the city school district installed air filters in classrooms and the students' math and English scores shot up, the magnitude roughly on a par with cutting class sizes by a third."

Yowser! Forget those teaching plans--just install air filters!

And, after that, paint the classroom walls bright green and I'll bet you'll see those scores go right through the roof.

Then, at the end of a couple of pages of numbers and definitive statements we get the message: "For much of history, that battle has been waged against microbes, mutations, and the ravages of old age. Increasingly, however, we find ourselves contending with the planet itself--a consequence of the damage that we've inflicted upon it."

Wait! Where did that come from? Okay, I get the fossil fuel thing as part of mankind's disservice to the planet, but we started off with wildfires, which are mostly the result not of mankind, but of lightning strikes. You can't pin all that on mankind.

Well, maybe you can. We played a role but preventing wildfires from getting too close to homes and other property and now we've got the problem of underbrush fed fires, but really, is mankind on the hook for every environmental problem?

Ronald Reagan dismissed efforts at clean air by saying that after years of laws restricting car emissions, a single volcano or a fire season in the West pumped more pollution into the air than all man's depredations. And, he was probably half right. But, the famous LA smog was largely ameliorated after car emission standards were imposed, and there may have been some cause and effect there. 

But what's the harm in an article like this in the New Yorker? The likelihood is, energy from wind and solar are likely better for the planet.

But each solution presents its own problems: Hydroelectric power was thought to be environmentally pure--just use the power of the river or the water to generate electricity: How could that be bad? Well, if you're a salmon trying to get upstream, you may not like the dam much.

Adding corn alcohol to gasoline would displace gas for renewable corn and mean saving burning a million gallons of gas. But, then you have to remember that growing the corn takes oil driven tractors and water and soil and none of that has zero environmental impact.

Even the idea of planting trees, which seems so obviously good, may not be.

Before Europeans arrived in America and cleared the New England forests, the East Coast was covered with trees, breathing in all that CO2 and breathing out oxygen and keeping the planet cool.

But no, it turns out dark green forests are like black asphalt in the sense they absorb sun and heat large parts of the globe. 

It's never simple in biology or earth studies.

The fact is, that guy who refused to believe he had COVID, when his COVID test was positive and he wound up in the ICU he simply refused to believe the stuff authorities told him... when you look at all the stuff thrown at us which fails scrutiny, it's not quite so hard to understand why.