Humble Pie: Brother From Another Planet

In the days following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, most of my friends and I huddled around the TV, and I distinctly remember seeing a scruffy guy in a blue jean jacket and denim pants, introduced as a "new and exciting voice of his generation," as if to say the nation would move on, as the youth of today will carry us past this tragedy, and on comes this oddball, singing some song with a guitar and a harmonica strung below his jaw.  

I said, "Who is this creep? And why is he on TV?" 

It seemed like just another disorienting dislocation and this was wrought by one of the three national channels.

It was Bob Dylan, of course, and I don't remember the song-- "Blowing in the Wind" maybe. All I remember was the sense that this was just another manifestation of the world having gone berserk.

He was just so different, nothing like anyone I knew, or had even seen on TV or in the movies.

The next Spring, at a place I was not, Pete Seeger introduced Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, and the crowd sitting on the lawn listening to him looked a lot like me and my friends, cotton collared shirts, some madras, and khakis, white socks and they looked at Dylan uncomprehendingly, or maybe enraptured--hard to tell. 

Clearly, Seeger knew the quality of what he had on stage with him, but I wonder how many of those listening had any idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeP4FFr88SQ

He really was a brother from another planet, playing his harmonica--how did he do that and hit all the notes? And playing his guitar and singing those fantastically complicated, lyrical, evocative words of "Mr. Tambourine Man," and once again, it was light years away from the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, the Beatles, Pat Boone. It was simply a different universe, disorienting, thrilling, disturbing.

But now, looking at that tape, I am astonished that America could appreciate him at all, much less produce this unique brain, voice, phenomenon.

Occasionally, in some fever dream, I might imagine myself as being successful, worthy, special, and then I look at Dylan and I am brought back down to earth: This is a man who is so far above the rest of us and we are all just standing here on earth, looking up.

Journey Through The Coastal Slave States

 

David Mamet mentioned the book in the New York Times Book Review, as the last "great book" he had read.

Frederick Law Olmsted

I had never heard of it.

"Journey Through the Coastal Slave States."

I'd heard of the author: Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect, but who knew he had a career as a journalist in the 1850's and his letters from journeys in the slave holding South were avidly read back in New York and Boston?

I'm not sure it's for everyone, but if you've read as much about the American Civil War as I have, this one comes as a jaw dropping thunderbolt. You have to persist past the first few chapters. But you will be rewarded.

There are wonderful historians of the Civil War: the masterful James McPherson, the ardent Bruce Catton and even Shelby Foote (a Southern apologist) but these men were not alive during the Civil War. They have read the diaries, the primary sources, but when you read them, you read a second hand distillation, a point of view.

I have some volumes of newspaper and magazine articles from those years--Harper's and Vanity Fair, so I've read contemporary primary sources, but this book is astonishing on so many levels, it's hard to know where to begin.

For one thing, Olmsted marshals financial, economic numbers in such mass and detail it's hard to imagine how, in the pre computer age of America, 1850's, anyone could have done the work to measure acres under cultivation, dollar value of cotton, cedar shingles, farms, ships, but he seems to have all this at hand and he uses them to stunning effect.

What emerges, as he describes the huge variety of servitude, from slaves in the Great Dismal Swamp, who lived without overseers or, for that matter, any white supervision, returning to their owners only after nine months, to collect new clothes and provisions, to field hands who worked 14 hour days under the hot Virginia sun, to house slaves, the mind reels. 

Olmsted compares the lot of the Southern slave to that of the free white workers in New York City, often children, who are given starvation wages but no clothes, housing or food and, he makes a case that slave wages in the North may be worse than living in the master's slave quarters in the South, where at least you are clothed, fed and sheltered from the weather.  The downstream logic is pretty clear that the workers in the North would have benefited from a socialist revolution of their own, after the Southern slaves were freed. And this book examines the "they were better off as slaves" argument from every angle and you do not come away thinking, "Oh! Right!"

What comes up repeatedly is the great lengths slavers went to keep their slaves from ever developing intellectually, from learning to read.  Slaves were taught to do tasks which made money for the owners, but learning anything beyond that was forbidden.  In fact, Negro congregations could not meet on Sunday unless a white man was present at the religious service. You can guess why.

And there are those moments when Olmsted reveals what some Southerners, who, as he says, were among those who did not live like ostriches with heads buried, but who looked at the advantages of climate, water power, fertile soil, easily available resources like coal, iron and river transport, still managed to be poorer and less powerful than their Northern countrymen. Olmsted refers to the small, soil poor state of Massachusetts and the sparsely populated state of New York as disadvantaged, and yet, they are pushing ahead in wealth and prospects far beyond the South. And all this, Olmsted implies, is because in the North, intellectual property, the power of the mind, would drive advancement, prosperity and happiness.

One Southerner observes there are roughly 160,000 adolescent white boys in Virginia in 1853, and another 400,000 Black boys of that age and none of them have had a lick of education, and what a huge waste of economic potential--a mind is a terrible thing to waste, circa 1850, and this from a white planter! He goes on to say few books are published anywhere in the South and even fewer are read. "We are not a reading people." And he notes that a slave who had saved up enough (from side line wages!) to purchase his own freedom, planned to move to Liberia and the first thing he wanted to do when he got there was to learn to write so he could write his former master and tell him how he was doing.

One astonishing anecdote after another.

The picture you get from Olmsted is definitely not "12 Years a Slave" and nobody should forget for an instant the horrors of slavery. Nor is the image Margaret Mitchell's screed, where all the slaves are not just happy, loved and loving and loyal, but, well, slavish.  What Olmsted does is to display the wide variety of human experience, and broaden the mind. 

If you grew up in the South, you recognize something here. When I was a boy, there were still living Confederate army veterans having reunions not far from my home in Arlington, Virginia. And there were plenty of colored folk whose grandparents or even parents had been slaves of one sort or another. And this book stirred memories of these folks, and made me think anew.

It is true there is no such thing as a very fine Nazi.

Some evils are just so vile, there are no 'if's and's or but's." And slavery, but most importantly the racism undergirding it was just so vile. Which is not to say there were not, in the individual experiences of the individual slaves,  some mitigating circumstances that might help us today to understand what kept that peculiar institution going for so long. 

Making Harvard Great Again

 

To title a post "Make Harvard Great Again," assumes, at base, that Harvard was once great.

What could possibly justify that thought? 

Well, if the mission of an American university is to cultivate, select and nurture succeeding generations of the best minds and to foster the generation of new knowledge and insights, then Harvard has, arguably, done this over the past century. 

Granted, one might argue it has failed at that, and no greater examples would be the observation that the two men who had the greatest impact on America through innovative thinking and new knowledge in the early 21st century were two men who spent a single year at Harvard, leaving once they realized Harvard had nothing to offer them: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, the men who dreamed up the idea that in the future people would have a computer in every home and that social networks would transform communications, the media and political life.

Of course, Gates was only one actor among many, including Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs (a Reed College drop out) and others who accelerated the dream of a computer in every home to a computer in every pocket, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who pioneered Google which made the internet accessible and foundational to every day life.  And, not to forget Jeff Bezos (Princeton) who revolutionized shopping, commerce, media streaming and a variety of other stuff.

The century since the 1920's saw the president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, a steadfast proponent of segregation, embrace the "eugenics" movement which saw inter racial breeding as destructive to the superiority of the white race. While he allowed an honorary degree to Booker T. Washington, Negroes, and other non Wasps found no welcome at Harvard. As a "thought leader" Harvard's president led the nation to embrace a white supremacist ideology, and in that he found strong company with Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton, and failed President of the United States.

So, I'm not so sure Harvard was ever really so great.

But there was a time, after World War II, when the baby boom generation was rising the Harvard name provided an aspiration of the ultimate in the idea of meritocracy. The new religion of that generation was of excellence, achievement and success based on hard work and native brilliance. Parents of that generation had just succeeded in defeating what looked to be an unstoppable, indomitable foe, the Axis of Germany and Japan, through, among other things, sheer technical competence which allowed the United States, which had 4 aircraft carriers at the time of Pearl Harbor to having 400 within a year, which allowed for the development of the atomic bomb and then a vaccine for polio, and a host of other scientific achievements, including landing a man on the moon.

Halfway through the 20th century, the luster of sheer technical dominance wore thin, as America descended into the miasma of Vietnam, where bringing to bear an irresistible force of arms was defeated by the determination of an agrarian nation which had a greater core value system. "We can gain the world, but lose our soul," Martin Luther King said, and we surely looked like that was our fate in Vietnam.

And all the best and the brightest from schools including Harvard told us we could calculate how many tons of bombs would win the war. Harvard's Henry Kissinger was more stupid than the average conscript from Beaver Falls, PA, who knew you couldn't win that war with bombs. 

So, what could Harvard do to achieve the goal of identifying the best and the brightest (assuming there is such a thing) and then training them, inspiring them, equipping them to move the ball forward?

Modern universities have never been very professional about the "personnel" aspects of their job, i.e. figuring out what "good" is in aspiring applicants.

My father, who spent his life in "personnel," had very modest expectation about the possibilities of identifying talent. When I pointed out to him that the SAT exams (pioneered by Charles Eliot at Harvard) never did better than to predict who would flunk out after the first semester at college, my father responded, "Well, but that's a good test then! That's all you can really hope for. You don't want to accept a bunch of kids who won't last past the first semester."

By mid century, however, the SAT was widely viewed as not just an infallible intelligence test but as a predictor of future academic glory. It never was that. At the few schools which bothered to track the performance of high SAT students, there was virtually no correlation between scoring high on the test and those kids who made Phi Beta Kappa. (A Wesleyan University study.)

So, how do you identify students who, beyond not flunking out, will actually learn and then go beyond what their professors know to explore new realms?

I have no data. But I have some ideas.

One goes back to my experience as a 4th year American medical student on a stint at a London teaching hospital. Listening to my presentation of a case who had been admitted the previous night, the English professor of medicine got a dreamy look on his face and confided to me later, "Oh, how I'd love just a dozen students of the quality of you Americans."

This stunned me, because I had been impressed greatly by the English medical students, their powers of observation, their ability to "connect the dots" in unraveling diagnostic quandaries. But there were differences: For one thing, the Brits thought of themselves as middle class tradesmen. They would be rewarded with no more than a modest place in the community, sort of gentile poverty, so they cleared out to the pub at 5 o'clock, and the only students you saw laboring over charts and patients at nights were American. The attitude of the Brit medical students was, "We may not work very hard, but they won't pay us much, either."

But the biggest difference was the age of the Brits vs the American medical students. The Brits entered medical school directly from high school--they were 18-21 years old, where the American medical students were 22-26 years old. We were simply more mature.

Maybe that misspent youth in organic chemistry laboratories, classes in philosophy and ethical studies had benefited some of the American students, but, overall, we were just older.

After World War II, colleges were swamped with returning GI's who got to go to college on the "GI plan" where Uncle Sam paid the tuition. Like the GI plan for mortgages, the government played a huge role in investing in the generation which had won the war, and, by extension, their children. These college freshman, who had spent 2 years or more at war, brought a vastly different set of understandings to the classroom. I can only imagine how those professors dealt with them, although some of the professors may have also served.

I know, some of my own professors in college had been soldiers in the great war and they brought what they saw to what they found in Shakespeare. I'll never forget that line from Falstaff, looking at the bloated corpse of a soldier, saying, "There's honor for you." And my professor said he understood that entirely, as he described sweeping body parts off airplane wings when he served in the Army Air Force.

And how does any of this relate to making Harvard great again?

Well, if students did not matriculate at Harvard directly from high school, but were compelled to work in teaching hospitals for a year or two,  if they were interested in becoming pre medical students, or at law firms, or architectural firms or financial houses and banks, maybe Harvard would have a better basis for selecting its students and maybe its students would be better students when they arrived.

This, of course, is unlikely to ever be accepted by all those parents who are in the college acceptance sweepstakes, who seek bragging rights. It would also mean that some high school grads would not go on to college at all, once they saw the real world--like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerman. 

But the colleges would be, most likely, better places.

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