Posts from ‘Personal’

Apr
10

On this day four months ago my wife of many years, who I had been with for two thirds of my life, passed away. I have dealt with my grief many ways. I have stayed busy with chores, done those things which I avoided doing with her (like eat red meat, she couldn’t, eating shrimp, she was allergic), spent more time with my son and his family, cleaned the house, and did the things I normally do as well as those things I haven’t in a long time (e.g. cooking and going to the gym.) Many friends, colleagues and former students have reached out to console me and they have my sincere gratitude. Time and all of those things have dulled the edge of grief. As is my wont I think I’ll try thinking and writing about it too.

A long time ago I read something by C.S. Lewis to the effect that humans are the only ones who want to repeat a pleasure exactly. Not to just have another pleasure or another version of that pleasure, but to have that specific pleasure with all its feelings, smells, tastes, and sounds exactly the same. This is of course impossible, just as you can never step in the same stream twice. Time has gone on, circumstances have moved on, and that experience is now part of you thus changing you forever. I met my wife when I was 22 years old. I will never be 22 again. I am now entering the last stage of my life, older, more experienced and I hope wiser. More to the point I now have 45 years of experience living with someone else who was usually wiser than I, sometimes funnier than I, and always more practical than I. Those lessons and experiences now shape all that I do. They shape how I approach life now.

I made some gumbo the other day. I loved both the making and the eating of it. I am making it again today and following the same recipe. I have tweaked it a little; I have added some new ingredients (Hatch green chilies which are a great delicacy here in New Mexico) and left out a few (black pepper.) The gumbo I cook today will be different from the one I cooked last week. I will try to look at it not relatively (better or worse than last week’s) but as an entire new experience (a new pleasure I hope.) So will be my new life without her. I can no longer have the blush of first love nor the deepening experience of sharing one’s life with another for over 40 years. Of course that does not mean I cannot have an enjoyable, productive, and still meaningful life, nor that I will never smile or laugh again. I must admit I feel that way sometimes, but my granddaughter will do something surprising and a smile comes unbidden to my face.

So I will reorganize some cabinets,  rearrange the house, take care of the finances, and move on as she wanted me too. We always knew one of us was going to have to go on without the other. I didn’t think it would happen this soon nor that I would be the one. She would probably be better at it than me. I will do my best to build a new life, to cook a new gumbo with tweaked ingredients, but just as satisfying. I choose to believe she is somewhere saying “bon appetit.”

Mar
04

If you are lucky, and I mean really lucky, you have a friend you haven’t seen in a long time with whom you pick up where you left off as if it were just yesterday. One of my friends like that just visited me for a few days and little in our friendship had changed. Oh sure we had a few more pounds between us and our hair was grayer, retreating, or both, but the core of our friendship was as strong as ever. If you have spent time in the foxhole of undergraduate college together, supporting each other from the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” as old Will Shakespeare once said, you form a bond that time doesn’t break. Whenever you interact you slip into those old relationships like a comfortable, well worn shoe. My wife used to say she could always tell when I was talking on the phone with him because all the diction and polish would disappear and I sounded like that naive kid from New York again rather than the worldly professor I presented to others.

Sure, we reminisced and many sentences began with “remember the time we…” or “remember so and so or such and such,” but that wasn’t the totality of our conversation.  Memory being among the first casualties of old age many times we could not recall names or incidents that were seared into the memories of the other. We had progressed from the callow youths we were when we first met into grizzled old veterans of life with many experiences, places, people, and lessons along the way. We told stories of our travels, things we had done, people we had met. We talked about growing older, raising kids, (and now grand-kids,) things in hindsight we should have done differently, failures and successes and everything in between, situations we had been lucky to emerge from alive, scars we still bore. We spoke about current things too: difficulties we were facing, aches and pains, how the world is going to hell (a common topic among old folks,) losses we were facing or about to face, and plans for the future. We saw the film “Black Panther” together through the same sixties radical lens and were amazed by it as a film, but distressed a bit by its politics. In fact its director, Ryan Coogler, and my son were at the University of Southern California film school at the same time and I was reassured that at least one of them was now able to repay his student loans. We had excellent meals (2 of them prepared by my son who loves to cook and is very good at it) and at some of my favorite restaurants nearby. As I was dropping him off at the airport for his flight home I told him I was going to the gym right afterward he said “Well, you earned it.” We ate well.

What I take from the experience of this visit is that we are never truly alone. There are people in the world who just “get us” even if we are not in constant contact with them. In times of loss and when despair threatens we should never lose sight of that fact. I hope you all have such friends because they are what allows us to get through this thorny world.

Jun
27

Back in the 1960’s I remember seeing a cartoon by Jules Feiffer in which a black hipster said “I dug jazz then whitey picked up on it…” then repeated it in the next few panels with some other thing that whites had appropriated (to use contemporary language.) The cartoon’s last panel said “Then I dug freedom…and finally lost him.” This comes to mind whenever I read about some black folk complaining that this white person has adopted a black style or black music or hairdo.

The discussions about appropriation I read about today usually revolve around three issues. First, white artists are making money, sometimes a lot of money, by adapting black music which then becomes popular to white and black audiences. Black artists usually don’t have this reach and don’t make as much money. Sometimes there are blatant ripoff’s like Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” stealing of Marvin Gaye’s music. Other times it is just perhaps well meaning people like Justin Timberlake for example. The second argument is about inauthenticity. The white person born and bred in the suburbs is claiming to express the same feelings of those born in lesser circumstances. They are claiming the benefits of black artistry born in oppression without experiencing the conditions which brought it about. They have not earned the right to use black culture and they are not entitled to it. The third argument I hear boils down to they are stealing something from me, something which is very important to me: my identity. Their use of language, hairstyles, music is taking something which was marking me as a member of a unique ethnicity. Even when they have stolen my humanity there was something I could cling to, something esoteric that was uniquely mine. Now they are taking that too.

I must admit that at first I felt this way too. Back in the sixties I wouldn’t buy music (particularly jazz) by a white artist. I reasoned that the whites in the music market would provide enough financial support for that artist. I was going to put my few dollars to support black artists. For so many white artists their music lacked creativity, soul, true emotion, or cutting edge innovation. Years later I offered a history class on jazz. It was a class of about fifty and there was an elderly white gentleman auditor who didn’t talk but avidly listened to what was going down. One day I played a song by Paul Whiteman (a more appropriately named person I have never known) who was a white bandleader popular in the 1930’s and 40’s. I played the cut and then asked a general question of the class, “What do you think of that?” There was awkward silence that stretched on into several minutes. Finally from the back of the room the elderly auditor said, “Sounded pretty good at the time.” With the ice broken we could talk about how Whiteman’s music differed from say Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington or Count Basie.

Nowadays I don’t think of appropriation the same way. White musical artists have been covering and adapting black music for generations so getting upset about it serves no purpose. One could argue that there would be no white American popular music without it. Downbeat magazine ( a jazz magazine) had an annual critics poll that had a category “Talent Deserving Wider Recognition.” Wags used to argue that they should also have a category “Recognition deserving Wider Talent.” Regardless of who makes it there is good music and bad music, period.

I don’t care that Rachel Dolezal wears braids or has adopted an African name. To be truthful I don’t care about Ms. Dolezal at all.  What others claim takes nothing from me. As long as I go on presenting the identity I have honestly, doing the things I do openly, and saying the things I believe, let the chips fall where they may. At this point in my life I don’t have the time or inclination to do otherwise. Some folks will accept it and some won’t. Life goes on. Just as I have the right to project what I think of as my identity, so do other people. I am free to accept or reject their claims. I reject Ms. Dolezal’s claim of transraciality. I reject the claim that a Trump supporter is not racist. I reject that Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” is good music. I accept Dave Brubeck’s claim that he is a jazz artist. I accept Eminem’s claims that he is a rap artist, I accept Bruno Mars as a winner of BET awards because all make some good music.

So what then is appropriate appropriation? First, the appropriator has to acknowledge the source of the appropriation and try to share the financial success that comes with it. With the English blues wave of the sixties blues artists like Eric Clapton also brought legendary blues performers like Muddy Waters on tour with him so Muddy could get a little taste of Clapton’s financial success. Second, the appropriation must not denigrate, belittle or stereotype the culture from which it is taken. Whites in blackface or wearing sombreros I’m talking about you. I have seen such “celebrations” in South Africa and the Netherlands too. Such appropriations are an abuse of power and a naked display of white privilege. Just don’t do it. If you really thought about it you would ask how does it make people of that culture or ethnicity feel? Finally, does the appropriation exalt the culture or simply copy it?  Having just returned from Mexico I have tasted the difference between a street taco made fresh and expensive restaurants offering  “fancified” versions of Mexican cuisine. Some street tacos were cheap, simple, delicious, and way better than some restaurants that offered expensive “copies.” A few restaurants however offered interesting twists on the taco formula that raised the bar for my appreciation of Mexican food. Here I offer the same critique I do of artists covering songs. If you can’t add something of your own that makes it different and your own, brings out something we didn’t know was there, or makes it good in a new way, then you shouldn’t do it unless it is an homage to the original.

May
06

The narrow approval of the House of Representatives to repeal the ACA and replace it with a new health care act that will ultimately leave millions without health insurance, is an act so callous and cruel that I struggle to understand why the congresspeople did it. A New York Times editorial savages it: (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/opinion/obamacare-house-vote.html?smid=tw-share ) Yes there is a large money saving element to it and it will probably pay for a tax cut that will benefit the wealthy most. However that is not all there is to it. The conservative argument is based on the idea that health care is a private good like all others and should be allowed to follow the rules of the free market. Let those who need the most of it (the old, sick and infirm) pay more and those who need little of it (the young, healthy and active) pay less. Other supporters have expressed the view that one’s health is the result of a choice of lifestyles. Why should I pay for the poor choices e.g. smoking, drug use,lack of exercise etc. of others that result in poor health. Others came on board because the health care act leaves each state free to decide many of the rules it wants to follow. This has led to ignorant quotes like “There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.”( https://thinkprogress.org/roger-marshall-poor-people-do-not-want-health-care-obamacare-repeal-b49325664fd9).  In other words there are deserving and undeserving sick.

I would argue that health care is not like the other private goods that the free market is supposed to regulate, that health is not just the result of life choices, and that it calls for a national rather than state by state approach because it is a public good not a private one. Think about national defense for just a minute. No one would argue that it is something that should be left to the states rather than something the country as a whole should address. That is because “defense of the homeland” is thought of as a public good. We should think of health care the same way. Not just a Center for Disease Control to stop “invading” illness like Ebola, but also to stop the spread of diseases like cancer or to prevent birth defects. These diseases “attack” the country  because they limit the country’s productivity, shorten lifetimes of people who could be contributing to society,  and in the case of communicable diseases threaten our citizens. Even if the one percent may try to segregate themselves from the ill they are not immune. They should want excellent health care for people who care for their children, work in their homes, are employed by their businesses, and serve in their country clubs. How many of the ill are because they worked in mines or other dangerous businesses owned by the 1%? How about veterans who are suffering illness caused by their service or even people who just lived near where nuclear weapons or waste was stored?

I will not try to argue that some diseases are not the result of lifestyle choices. My father died of heart disease at 58, my mother of lung cancer at 69, my only sister of a stroke at 53 and all were heavy smokers. I do believe that smoking contributed to shortening their too short lives. We can argue how much of their smoking was individual choice and how much was insidious advertising, the corporate greed of Big Tobacco, governmental support of the industry, and outright lies about the safety of smoking. My point here is that rather than condemn them for their choices or point fingers at who is responsible, they would have been better served by the health industry working to extend their lives to make them longer-lived contributors to society. Although they all died too young, each of their lives was extended for a few years by medical care. Imagine a health industry that got from the federal government even a tenth of what we are spending on the military. Imagine a health care industry actually devoted to preventing disease as much as treating it. Imagine a health care system devoted to delivering health care to all rather than one priced so only the wealthy can get adequate health care or that is priced higher for those who need it most. All of these would be the result of changing our thinking about health care to considering it a public good rather than a private one. This health care “nirvana” is not beyond our resources or capabilities; at this point it is only beyond our will.

 

Nov
21

I am neither a fountain of wisdom nor a paragon of virtue. I am just an old man who has tried to pay attention as he went along. In no particular order these are some things I have learned.

  1. Never start a do it yourself project when the nearest hardware stores are closed.
  2. Always buy the best tools you can afford. They make the job so much easier.
  3. Always live up to your principles but don’t expect others to live up to them too.
  4. Being right doesn’t win arguments.
  5. Never underestimate your opponent.
  6. If someone disagrees with you they are probably basing their opinion on different evidence, information, premises (e.g. beliefs, assumptions, biases), experiences, or logic.
  7. Never decide whether to go to the gym while laying in bed.
  8. Projects always take at least the estimated time multiplied by pi (3.1459).
  9. The hardest part of a project is starting. After that the hardest part is finishing.
  10. Success doesn’t go to the best, smartest,  strongest, or most skilled. It goes to the most relentless.
  11. Always be kind. It confuses the hell out of them.
  12. Plan and prepare as best you can then “wing it.” The one who can adjust quickest to changes usually wins.
  13. The measure of a life is not the things you have done nor what you have accumulated. It is how many lives you have had a positive effect on.
  14. Procrastination, worry, dread, and swearing do not make the job go away or get done.
  15. Everybody needs help at some time.
  16. Every kindness towards you is a choice someone has made and a gift you have been given. Be grateful and say thank you.

I don’t offer these things as a prescription for living, but as a a footnote for where I am in my life.

Dec
31

As one ages New Year’s Eve rituals get more and more constricted.  At first you get tired of spending your New Year’s Eve in public places among strangers so you restrict yourself to private parties with friends. Eventually you wind up spending it at home among family and eventually just in front of the television. You end up realizing that time zones are artificial inventions so you don’t have to stay up until midnight. Whenever you go to bed it has become a new year somewhere and upon awaking you will find it has become one for you. This is not an inevitable straight line progression; everyone goes through it in their own unique way. I bet however that everyone has gone through each stage at some point in his or her life. At one point in my teens I even went to Times Square to watch the ball drop.  This was neither as memorable nor as enjoyable as it was cracked up to be. For the last few years I have restricted myself to television watching and early bed times.  This brings me to the real subject of this essay: televised New Year’s Eve shows. When I was a kid the only thing on New Year’s Eve was Guy Lombardo. A mummified man who came out once a year to play music that was decades out of date with an orchestra that was stunningly un-hip. He was eventually replaced by the perpetually young looking Dick Clark whose “Rockin’ New Years Eve” promised to be a music show for the rest of us. It proved to be about ten years out of date but an accurate barometer of how youth culture was mis-perceived by mainstream culture. It has since become as much of an institution as Guy Lombardo and has fossilized as well. The transfer of the institution to Ryan Seacrest and the pale imitators like Carson Daly are just signs of this fossilzation. The institution has become a recap of what became popular in pop music culture that year.

For the last few years I have satisfied my longing for a counter cultural New Year’s Eve television experience by watching CNN. That’s right I said CNN. It is hosted by Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper in a morality play whose depths go on and on. In this play Griffin portrays the forces of chaos being barely contained by the uptight Cooper. Now think about that for a moment. The establishment is being represented by a gay Vanderbilt heir while the counter culture is being represented by a straight white woman who is an icon in the gay community. She has built a career out of taking down popular cultural figures in the Joan Rivers’ “Can we talk?” confessional mode. He has built a career not by denying his sexuality but by ignoring that it makes a difference. Talk about an inversion of roles.  It is all an act of course.  She is not really an agent of chaos but a skilled performer who knows exactly how far to push and what lines not to cross. He is not as establishment as he could be and she taunts, cajoles and brings out the sides of him that he works so hard to suppress. The moments of his laughter, embarrassment, and discomfort offer glimpses into the man behind the straitlaced persona.

I could go on about this morality play, but that is not all the program offers. CNN doesn’t have much money to put into the show and it does not try to compete by providing performances like the others.  It is however  broadcasting from the same spot so it can show you far off shots of the Ryan Seacrest and other network shows. Some of the guest on those other shows occasionally come over for interviews before or after their performances. Griffin uses those interviews and long shots to offer meta-criticism of the other shows which highlights both their artificiality and how much more money the networks have to spend. What CNN has used its money for is to have its correspondents report from locations they feel have interesting (read unusual) New Year’s Eve celebrations. These celebrations have ranged from odd local ones to a Miami one in which a drag queen is lowered at midnight in a giant high heeled slipper to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” which has become a stereotyped anthem of the gay community.

Let’s face it mainstream New Year’s Eve television programming will never really be counter cultural. We won’t see indie bands, hard core hip hop or political stuff. Even an ironic hipster viewing of the Ryan Seacrest ilk is not enough. At least on the CNN broadcast we can see how the mainstream can change if only to misrepresent the margins.

Oct
22

When looked at objectively sports fandom is a silly thing. One allows one’s emotions to be ruled not by your own accomplishments or actions, but by those of millionaires running around in funny clothes playing children’s games. They are doing nothing significant like curing cancer, ending hunger, or fighting injustice.  They are playing a game with arbitrary rules in a confined space for a prescribed time. Yet those accomplishments of others can become the way stations to measure your journey through life.  I suspect it has been this way for others. So it has been with me and the New York Mets.

For me sports fandom was an addiction perpetrated on an unsuspecting 12 year old boy in 1962. It was in that year that a new National League team called the Mets started playing baseball.  As a first time sports fan it seemed appropriate that my interest in baseball and the new team began at the same time. I watched that team win only 40 games and set a mark for losing and breaking my heart that stands until today. The ace of the pitching staff, Al Jackson, lost 20 games. Their manager Casey Stengel is purported to have said “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Through the next few years I suffered defeat after defeat with my heroes, so much so that defeats in my real life became easier to bear. Then came that magical year and a half that began in January 1969.  I had expanded my fandom to other New York ball clubs including the Jets in football and the Knicks in basketball. The greatest year and a half in New York sports history began with the Jets winning the Super Bowl behind Joe Namath’s guarantee, continued with the Miracle Mets winning the World Series in October, 1969 and ended with the New York Knicks winning the NBA championship for the 1969-70 season. Other New York sports teams have won championships in other years but for me as a fan of those teams this was the pinnacle of success: championships in three different sports. More to the point it made me optimistic about life. As B.F. Skinner was to argue later intermittent reinforcement was a powerful thing.  It meant that even in the darkest of times one would hold onto hope. The rise of the Mets from perennial doormats to world champions proved to me that anything was possible.

The second trip of the Mets to the World Series came in 1973.  I had just moved to go to grad school with my new bride.  When we left New York in August the Mets were mired in a morass in the National League east division.  With so much change in my life I must admit that from August on I gave them scant attention.  When I finally looked at the sports pages in October lo and behold the Mets were going to the World Series.  I did not know how this had happened and it was totally unexpected. Moreover they were playing the Oakland A’s who were a local team in my new northern California environs. It was therefore splashed all over the local news and newspapers. I was now in enemy territory and my rooting for the Mets had to be somewhat circumspect.  I had to endure the ravings of many Oakland fans.  I had not been around for Tug McGaw’s “Ya gotta believe,” exhortation but the Mets pitching staff of Seaver, Koosman, and Matlack revived my hope. As it turned out that hope was in vain and the long trek into the desert of despair began.

The third Mets’ appearance in the World Series was in 1986. I was by then teaching in a small New England liberal arts school deep in Boston Red Sox country and surrounded by Red Sox fans. I had spent the early eighties there.  This was before the internet made it easy to listen to even far away ball games.  I would climb up to the highest point inside my house and if atmospheric conditions were just right I could  barely hear the dulcet tones of Bob Murphy as my radio picked up the Mets broadcast network from somewhere. I could not always hear it but each time I could there was the comforting feel of home as I listened to the voice and the team of my youth. The success of the 1986 team did not come to me as much of a surprise as the 1973 team. However I was once again behind enemy lines. In public places on campus the newfangled large screen televisions played the games watched by hordes of adoring and equally long suffering Red Sox fans. Given that most of my students were such fans I had to appear impartial and again be circumspect with my own allegiance. At home at least I could be myself and watch the games on my own small television. It was there that I could jump for joy as Mookie’s grounder rolled through Buckner’s legs and the tide was finally turned. I spent the next two days commiserating with my students on the outside yet whooping with joy on the inside.

The Mets’ fourth appearance in the World Series found me far away in South Africa.  I had gone there  in July to teach in my college’s study abroad program. With the inversions of seasons their semester was from July through November so I missed the last half of the American baseball season. It was also so far away that baseball was a foreign concept to them.  You could see and hear more than enough about rugby, cricket and soccer.  If you wanted to talk sports it had to be about one of those. South African whites knew more about American golf than American baseball and hardly anyone black or white had played or even seen the game. Again the Mets’ appearance in the championship came as a complete surprise to me. That it was against the hated Yankees and a true “subway series” only magnified how far away from home I was. The vast time difference even made it hard to follow the scores as most game were played  in what were the pre-dawn mornings in South Africa. As it turned out this was fortunate as the Yankees won the series in five games.

It is now fifteen years later and I am retired. I have been retired for enough years to have followed the Mets from the euphoria and the despair of the 2006 season (Adam Wainwright’s final curve ball to Beltran plays over and over in my head) to the Sandy Alderson’s rebuilding efforts of the last five years. The internet has made it easier to follow the team and watch games.  Email has made it easier to commiserate and keep in touch with fellow Mets fans. The town where I live has a minor league team that is in the same league as the Mets triple A team, so I have even been able to see some of their youngsters on the way up. Even so I didn’t think this team as constituted in April would make it to the World Series.  As late as July I still didn’t think so. The tinkering at the trade deadline, the return from injury of key players, and the influx of rookies like Syndergaard and Conforto have transformed this team. Since August they have played with a self-confidence, a belief in each other, and a penchant for making the right play at the right time, that has me beaming. Their post season victories over the league’s top pitchers (Kershaw, Greinke, Lester and Arrieta) and the performance of both their starting pitchers and their relief corps has me optimistic again. Still when you are a Mets fan disappointment and despair is never far away. They may win or they may lose. However I am not in enemy territory and surrounded by fans whose every scream of joy or look of despair inspires just the opposite in me. I no longer have to appear impartial or circumspect in my fandom. I am therefore going to sit back and enjoy this one.  I’ve earned it.

Aug
24

I have long ago accepted that the advances in technology, particularly computer technology, have outstripped my ability to understand them. Still, I see myself as a reasonably intelligent person who tries his best to keep up.  With this in mind recently I have tried to upgrade to Windows 10. I am not usually in a hurry to upgrade my operating systems.  I like to wait until there is enough feedback from real users to justify it. I had a bad experience with Windows Vista in the past and so I avoided Windows 8 like the plague. Both the reviews and the hype promised Windows 10 was a system with promisingly new capabilities.  The cherry on top was that the upgrade would be free since I was a loyal Windows 7 user.  In due course my free upgrade was made available to me and I have spent the last two weeks trying to install it.

While hardly an expert there are many people less technological  than I am and those who wonder at even my low level of technological prowess. As a Renaissance scholar once said “in the land of the blind the one eye man is king.” My experience with computers has taught me that if something works the first time it is an anomaly that should be accepted and not questioned.  It is not a verification of your expertise, but a fortunate coincidence that should be quietly understood as a gift from the computer gods who were apparently too busy to mess with you that day. So with some trepidation I proceeded to try the upgrade. The first installation attempt of course failed.  After looking up online the failures of others I erased files, unplugged various USB accessories and tried a few more times.  I got a little further in the installation each time before it crashed thus fueling further attempts. As B.F. Skinner the behavioral psychologist found intermittent reinforcement keeps the behavior going. Quite helpfully the installation program kept returning me to my old operating system so I could keep on going.

I have some sympathy for Microsoft.  Unlike Apple which controls the hardware on which its software runs Microsoft has to write software that will work on may thousands (if not millions) of different hardware configurations. I use a PC custom built by my son that Microsoft is hard-pressed to anticipate. So some difficulty with the installation was to be expected. Eventually my repeated attempts to install and my erasure of files that might be potentially blocking the installation, broke Windows update on my machine and my free copy of Windows 10 evaporated. I could still go online and I found a few people in the Microsoft community discussion group who were having the same problems as I. Unfortunately they didn’t have a fix either.

At the end of my tether I finally called in my own IT staff, that is, my son, to help. Arthur C. Clarke the science fiction writer famously wrote  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I realize that he meant “to the uninitiated” and that the esoteric priesthood of the technologically savvy abhors this characterization of what they do as magic. My son is only a lower level of the priesthood, but knows enough to know that all computer problems have some technological solution and your job is just to find it. With his command line voodoo, his poking around on the internet,  and his “failure is not an option” relentlessness we finally got that “upgrade” installed. I had to buy a new hard drive (by the way the price of storage has fallen dramatically) so that we could do what is know as a clean install. We put my old Windows 7 (for which I still had the installation disks from 2009) on it, then installed gigabytes of upgrades (much changes in 6 years), found a hacker’s way of installing Windows 10, and finally installed the sucker with only minor bumps along the way.

The new Windows 10 is beautiful however and although the web has concerns about its privacy issues it has published ways of getting around them as much as possible. I continue to explore its functionalities but I am happy so far. I will keep you posted if the honeymoon ends.

 

Dec
28

If one drills down below the frenzy of materialism that is Christmas in this late capitalism world, you find sentiments of a thankfulness for family. I have often thought when some pundit extols  the wonders of family values, “Hasn’t that person ever had one?” Families are messy things. They are bundles of neuroses, quirks, chance, selfishness, unselfishness, secrets, denied longings, self confidence building, confidence destroyers, love, and arguments. In short they are humanity in a nutshell. All families seem to be loving in their own ways although we wouldn’t call some such. Most are hotbeds of unconditional love although some are hotbeds of indifference at best. I was one of the lucky ones growing up in a family that loved me fiercely, taught me I could do anything, constantly encouraged me, and kept the quirks and neuroses down to a minimum that I could easily deal with.

The older I get the more I realize that not all had grown up that way. It is more than whether one had one or two parents, more than if the gender of your parents was the same or different. Not all families or family values are positive things and even when they are positive  they are not unmitigated “good things.” They can do us irreparable harm as well as incalculable good. Given they way our neural networks are set up, the variety in the circumstances we face, and the unlooked for people we encounter along the way, it could hardly be otherwise. Families are the cocoons in which we develop, the first places where we learn about the world as well as ourselves. We learn from our families not only from the things they say but even more from the things they do. We are probably hard wired to do so. If the things we learn are about hatred of others for whatever reasons, they are not good things. If our cocoon gives us a false idea of the world outside and our role in it, it is not a good thing. If it teaches us we are intrinsically better or worse than other people, it is not a good thing. If it teaches us to think only about ourselves and not to give of ourselves to other people, it is not a good thing. If it teaches us that the only good people in the world are ones who look or speak like us, it is not a good thing. If it teaches us that the world is all good or all bad, it is not a good thing.

Families are part of the minefield of growing up, but they can be part of the ways of finding your way through the world long after you reach adulthood. Siblings can become best friends or at least “frenemies.” Parents can become role models or guides at each stage of your life as can aunts, uncles, cousins, or even fictive kin.   I am just saying that they didn’t have to be.  Good family relationships are based on love, goodwill, selflessness, hard work, and an element of chance. They are not the absolutely affirmative or constructive relationships  that politicians preach and there are certainly more positive configurations of family than the one way conservatives posit. However, they have the potential to be enormously fulfilling and I feel the work I have done as a parent is probably the best thing I have done. I hope your family relations are indeed positive and if they are please don’t take them for granted.  It didn’t have to be that way so appreciate and count your blessings.

Oct
01

A long time ago I read something in a John Barth novel, that has always stayed with me.  It is the idea that nothing has an intrinsic value.  All value is assigned by us who chose a moral aesthetic, that is a system of good and bad, then cloak it in a belief system that supports that aesthetic or the other way around: we choose a belief system and accept the moral aesthetic that goes with it.  Either way Barth’s “nothing has an  intrinsic value” is a place to start that has some advantages.  For one it points out the inherent and massive indifference that the universe has about what seem to us moral choices. On the one hand it is nihilistic and means that Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” is merely wishful thinking. On the other hand it means that we create value and meaning so we are not condemned to follow a moral system created for us by the universe. It is a humanistic philosophy that puts humans at the center. This is not moral relativism of the “I’m okay, you,re okay” variety. Once you have adopted a moral aesthetic it allows you to judge other ones. If for example you place the highest positive value on expanding human knowledge of the universe, then belief systems that tend to censorship, hinder the development of new ideas, and lead to close-mindedness, become poor ones to you no matter how widely spread, tightly held, or fervently preached they are. As an alternate example if you believe that the most valuable thing is to create a religious state on earth be it Christian, Muslim or something else, then things that prevent that, whether capitalist materialism, secular authority, or propagation of alternative faiths, become morally “bad” things.

How does one establish such a moral aesthetic? One way is to adopt an ideology or religion which in the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz creates, “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men [read humans] by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” He argues that, “these sacred symbols function to synthesize a people’s ethos – the tone, character and quality of their life it’s moral and aesthetic style and mood – and their world view – the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order. In religious [here I would add ideological as well] belief and practice a group’s ethos is rendered intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to the actual state of affairs the world view describes, while the world view is rendered emotionally convincing by being presented as an image of an actual state of affairs peculiarly well-arranged to accommodate such a way of life.” If you are within any such system Geertz’s ideas are heresy in contrast to the simple truth expressed by your ideology.

If we understand such ideologies rather they be conservative talk show ones, ISIL in Syria ones, evangelical Christian ones, or even progressive political doctrines, we can see why there would be difficulty communicating with others outside your belief system. If you believe that your world view represents the way things in sheer actuality are, non believers become evil, fools, idiots or at best the misguided or uninformed. Each system has its own signs and symbols, its own things people accept on faith alone, its own rituals.  There is plenty middle ground between a closed belief system which says my way or there is no purpose in even talking to you, and a loose moral relativism that says all belief systems are valid.  Can one say I don’t really know how things in sheer actuality are, but I have chosen to be behave as if this were true and for these reasons? Might we have a belief system that is somewhere between unchangeable and inconstant? Can we believe in something but then alter our view as events and circumstances change or we grow? I am not talking about not having any fixed stars or beliefs by which to navigate. I am saying that differences in religion or ideology are differences in choices and that creates the possibility that change can occur or that conversation can take place. We can choose sides but let’s not make our choices rigid.