I’m in the American Spectator Online again today:
I have very shrewdly tied this column in to my novel, Wolf Time.
Of death and life
Via James Lileks’ new Minneapolis blog, buzz.mn: Don Herbert, better known to my generation as “Mr. Wizard,” has passed away. I hadn’t realized he was a Minnesota native.
I don’t recall that I watched his show a lot. I have an idea I was never sure when it was on, or the station moved it around, or something. But I remember really liking the show when I did see it.
And that wasn’t because of my deep love for science (I possess no such alien commodity). As I remember it, I mostly liked the idea of a smart grownup with a lot of neat toys who never had anything more important to do than explain stuff to kids. There were precious few adults anything like that in my own world.
So now you’re asking, “Well, now that you’re a grownup yourself, are you like that?”
My answer would be to scream and run away at my personal best speed.
Middle-aged, single men are not advised to have anything to do with children if they can help it, in today’s world. This is no great sacrifice in my case, as I really don’t like children much, and can never think of anything to say to them anyway.
Come to think of it, I don’t think we ever saw Mrs. Wizard.
But I’m confident there was one.
Well, I didn’t see today coming.
And I mean that in a good way.
Last night I had one of my insomnia attacks. I lay awake, obsessing between dozes. That’s usually the prelude to a really Huxleyan, semi-comatose work day.
But somehow, when I got up, I felt that today would be different. Taking silent inventory of my thews, sinews and reflexes, I realized I felt pretty good. Somehow I knew that when I got to work I’d catch up on several projects I’d been dogging, and I wouldn’t slip on my diet, and I’d have a good evening walk.
And behold, it came to pass even as I foresaw. All day I felt as if I was looking at things from above, like a grownup, rather than from below, like a helpless kid.
I can think of two explanations.
One is that I’ve been sleeping too much. Maybe God designed me for five hours a night.
The other is that somebody’s been praying for me.
If it’s the second, and you’re the one, thanks.
Hey, Boy, You Want Danger?
Author Max Elliot Anderson is hoping the buzz over The Dangerous Book for Boys will stir up sales for his young adult novels. “Guys want to get right to the adventure and action,” he says in a press release today. He appears to publish his own books and blogs at Books for Boys.
100 Words What You Ought Know
Some dictionary people have a little book of words they say “Every High School Graduate Should Know.” Lenore Skenazy writes about it.
The thing about actual word books — and the whole “Boost Your Vocabulary” industry — is that however fascinating it is to study etymology (unless that’s the study of bugs), some words are just plain old obscure. While delightful in and of themselves, there is really no reason to program words like “perspicacious” into one’s personal database. And yet on just such words hinge the SAT scores (and possibly futures) of many young people.
No reason to learn words like “perspicacious?” How else would a career-minded young lad quote Thomas Hardy, as do all the nigh successful lads in Harvard Square, by referring to “the perspicacious reddleman” who would have “acted more wisely by appearing less unimpressionable?”
“We Need to Talk about Structural Things”
From a UK Times interview with Orange prize (fiction) winner, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
Perhaps because she is young, beautiful and internationally successful, [Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie] has almost a paradoxical relish in hailing from a global underdog: “When you come from Nigeria, which doesn’t have very much power, you can better examine the dynamics of raw power.”
Something she does not relish, however, is the overriding view of Africa as a doomed basket case: “There is a famous saying, ‘Africa is my brother, but he is my junior brother’, which comes from a 19th-century missionary in the Congo. It really sums up the way that people look at Africa today.
. . . Nobody helps Africa by adopting its children. We need to talk about structural things like loans and trade. I just wish I wasn’t from a continent about which everyone has to feel sorry.”
Adichie is indignant about the type of news coverage that Africa usually ends up with: “On TV you never see Africans involved in helping Africa. It’s always some kind westerner. If I got my information only from American TV, I would think Africans were a bunch of stupid idiots.”
Her novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, tells the story of two sisters living through a Nigerian civil war. (via Books, Inq.)
There They Go Again
The Literary Saloon discusses a NY Sun piece on how us bloggers are whining wannabes under the thumb of the major media. From the Sun article: “As anyone who reads literary blogs can attest, hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned. And the scorn is reciprocated: Professional writers usually assume that those who can, do, while those who can’t, blog.”
Being low on the food chain, I’ll refrain from comment.
Warning: Political opinions expressed
This is going to be a political post. I’ll say that up front, so that those of you not interested in my politics can surf on. And why should you be interested in my politics? I have a little bit of credibility when I post on writing and books. I have none at all when I talk about politics. (“Why then,” asks the perceptive reader, “do you write occasional columns for a political organ like The American Spectator Online?” The answer is that I write for them because they pay me. I’m a capitalist. At least I am now.)
20 years ago tomorrow, President Reagan made his famous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speech. That was 1987 (in case you were having trouble with the math), and it was just about then that I was going through my great political transformation.
I grew up a Democrat. Dad was a Democrat, heir to an old strain of Upper Midwest Scandinavian populism, embodied even today in the name of the Minnesota liberal party—the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party. Those pietistic Scandinavian pioneers I like to write about had been political radicals back in the old country, and they continued pro-worker and anti-corporation in their American politics. Back in those days, nobody saw any disconnect in William Jennings Bryan being a fiery, Bible-thumping evangelical even as he railed against the oppression of the bankers. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, chief force behind Prohibition, was the mother of every liberal world-fixing organization that’s come since, from the ACLU to PETA to NARAL.
But during the Reagan administration I began to re-think all this. All my fellow Democrats despised Reagan. They called him “Ronald Ray-gun,” and described him as a superannuated, has-been actor with polyurethaned hair. But he was growing on me. I don’t think I ever voted for him, but I couldn’t help noticing that he kept saying and doing things I just liked.
And I was more and more uncomfortable in my own party.
The first thing that began to distance me from the Democrats was a thought—a thought that started as a tiny little shoot in my mind (planted, I think, by an article on the new phenomenon of the neo-cons in Time Magazine) and grew tenaciously once it put out roots. This thought went like this—“When you look at another human being and say, ‘That poor fellow is not capable of looking after himself. He must be cared for all his life, or he will die,’ you are not investing that person with dignity. You are treating him as subhuman (indeed the defenders of slavery had made a very similar argument). Some people may indeed be incapable of caring for themselves, but that judgment does not give them dignity. To expect a man to work is to treat him as a man.”
On top of that, my party was changing. I remembered when there were lots of pro-life Democrats, and when support for traditional marriage was not only the majority position, it was the only position. But it was growing more and more clear that there was no place for those opinions in the party anymore.
So one day I looked around me, and I said, “I guess I’m a Republican.”
Essential Reenforcement on Our Letters
Still looking for the perfect Father’s Day gift? Well, these won’t come in time, but they may be right for you: English Eccentrics Mugs! Everyone needs the occasional reminder that D is actually Dalek. If you act now, you may still be able to pick up the Invisible Man Mugs from Penguin Classics–never popular, always in style.
Did you hear the one about the Norwegian and the Swede?
I had to sidle up to the banana bleachers at the grocery store tonight, because an elderly lady was front and center, working the entire display like a symphony conductor. She was selecting various bunches, pulling one banana off each, and placing them in her cart.
“I like to get a variety of expiration dates on my bananas,” she told me in confidence. “I hate it when they get too ripe.”
That’s what we Boomers have to look forward to, I thought to myself. Timing our bananas, like IEDs in Baghdad. Hello, retirement! On the other hand, by the time I retire they may have genetically altered bananas with little digital clocks on the stems.
In connection with Phil’s post about The Dangerous Book for Boys, here’s a fine article from today’s American Spectator Online, (link defunct) about contemporary childhood in England, by my friend Hal Colebatch. (Of course I realize I’m dropping names. I like dropping names. When I’m retired I’ll have leisure to drop names on a carefully timed schedule, like ripening bananas.)
Something I thought very weird (even eerie) happened on Saturday. As I drove to my favorite local Chinese place for lunch, I was listening (as I generally do) to the Northern Alliance Radio Network guys on our local talk radio station. They were doing live coverage of the dedication of a new World War II memorial at the Minnesota state capitol.
To fill time, they were talking about what else you could see on the grounds. They talked about two large statues in front of the capitol building, statues of prominent (now pretty much forgotten) politicians named Knute Nelson and John A. Johnson. One of the guys was reading information on the two men, probably from some kind of guide book.
So I get to the restaurant, sit down in my booth, and open the book I brought—Fifty Years In America by N. N. Rønning, a book I mentioned a couple days ago.
And what is right there, where I pick up my reading?
Character sketches of Knute Nelson and John A. Johnson.
(In case your wondering, Knute Nelson was, according to Rønning, “the first Norwegian[-American] politician who gained national recognition.” He was a Minnesota congressman, governor and U.S. senator. A Republican, though he broke with his party in not supporting protectionism.
John A. Johnson was a Swede and a Democrat. He hadn’t distinguished himself much before the 1904 Democratic state convention, but in a lackluster field he won the nomination for governor. As the campaign went on he began to find his voice as an orator, and started attracting popular support. His opponents uncovered a skeleton in his closet—his father had been a “drunkard.” After they published the story he responded with the greatest speech of his campaign. His opponents found that they had tarred their own image rather than his. The same year that the Republican Roosevelt won a landslide victory over William Jennings Bryan, Johnson was elected governor of Minnesota by 7,000 votes. He was reelected in 1906 and 1908. He was considered a serious presidential contender when he died unexpectedly in 1910.)
The coincidence of the radio program and my reading material shook me considerably. Although I theoretically believe in coincidences, it seemed too fortuitous to be mere chance.
On the other hand, what could it possibly mean?
I’m open to suggestions.
Crime and Punishment 2
Raskolnikov is back, and this time he’s not wasting his time philosophizing! In the long awaited sequel to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, terror strikes the heart of a sleepy Russian town . . . okay, I’m making that up, but there is a sequel to this novel, reviewed today in the Philly Inquirer.