July 2015

Eisenhower and History

2016-12-28T21:37:54+00:00July 15th, 2015|Gold|

Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell My Friends, 1967

My first reading love was ancient history. At an early age, I developed an interest in the human record and I became particularly fond of Greek and Roman accounts. These subjects were so engrossing that I frequently was guilty of neglecting all others. My mother’s annoyance at this indifference to the mundane life of chores and assigned homework grew until, despite her reverence for books, she took my volumes of history away and locked them in a closet.

This had the desired effect for a while. I suppose I gave a little more attention to arithmetic, spelling, and geography. But one day I found the key to that closet. Whenever Mother went to town to shop or was out working in her flower garden I would sneak out the books.

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May 2015

The Nature of the Business, So Easy To Forget

2015-05-08T00:57:12+00:00May 8th, 2015|Gold|

From Franz-Stefan Gady, “The One Thing Geeky Defense Analysts Never Talk About,” The Diplomat:

The one thing defense analysts never talk about is violent death. While they are capable of superbly analyzing weapon systems, military doctrines, organizational structures and dissecting intricate details of what the future of war may look like, they rarely mention that the elephant in the livingroom of all their analyses is the violent killing of human beings.

The simple purpose of any military is to be an effective and expeditious killing machine—cloaked in the justifying mantle of national defense and as permitted by the “laws of war.” All the discussions about strategy, tactics, logistics, training, and procurement serve the single aim of killing  men— and collaterally, or even intentionally, women and children—when elicited by the rationale or whim of state sponsored aggression.

Perhaps defense analysts do not discuss violent killing because it is all too obvious. Also, perhaps they do not fully assess or comprehend the implications of their analyses and commentaries. Or perhaps they willingly embrace doublethink euphemisms in which killing is replaced by value neutral terms which sanitize slaughter and normalize the polite punditry of bellicose hellfire.

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All of this is true. It is on my mind often.

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March 2015

When Your Grandfather Fought on the Wrong Side

2015-03-25T04:18:53+00:00March 25th, 2015|Gold|

From Marcus Finster, Quora, “Should Germans today take a more sympathetic view of German soldiers who fought in WWII?“

I was born in 1976. I remember when I was growing up, I’d see many old women. Fewer old men. Many of the old men missed an arm or a leg.

I was lucky in the sense to have two grandfathers, both on my mother’s and my father’s side.

My mother’s father had been a Russian POW at the end and spent a few years in Siberia. He was barely able to walk when he was finally released in the 50s.

He’d remain frightened of the chance to starve to death until he died

He told some stories about the war. He’d show us pictures of him in his Wehrmacht uniform. When we were old enough to ask, he’d tell us about only doing his duty and keeping clear of “the others”. It took me a while to understand what the others were – the SS and the Einsatzgruppen.

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February 2015

So Long, Jon

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00February 11th, 2015|Culture|

Who is the twenty-first century’s Edward Murrow? Walter Cronkite?

It’s probably not Brian Williams. Nor Dan Rather. Nor Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw or Katie Couric, although they were and have been influential in their own right. The fact is that broadcast news has been mostly toothless (or plain wrong) for over a decade now, essentially a regurgitation of online headlines and government press conferences and g-rated YouTube clips. If you’ve wanted what broadcast news used to be—original, incisive, and fairly principled—you’ve had to look to the Daily Show and Jon Stewart.

And now he’s leaving. Let’s talk about that.

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December 2014

Partying with Shakespeare

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00December 17th, 2014|Life|

Wayne Bailey passed away December 17, 2014.

“I have borne a charm’d life with you,” the Bard said. “Your counsel hath guided my every footstep; driven me to dare and gamble and seize the day; taught me temperance and delivered me wisdom where too often I had none. But why not tarry longer? Why go thither; why go now?“

The pair stood in the grand old Globe, the ground about the stage still littered after a particularly raucous show of “Much Adoe.” One man, the Bard, furrowed his brow in worry. The other, the traveler Wayne (once a barrister by trade, but always a teacher at heart) smiled serenely, one hand resting on the device that would whisk him away to parts unknown.

Over the years, Wayne had skipped in and out of the Bard’s life often, a friend and mentor who always seemed to emerge at the right place and time. It was Wayne who had first suggested, with a twinkle in his eye, that the Bard try his hand at plays. It was Wayne who had laid the Globe’s cornerstone into place. It was even Wayne who had stayed up long nights with the Bard, splitting tankards and rewriting and reciting the sonnets of Othello and Puck and Macbeth until they sang. And now he was leaving.

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April 2014

De Amicitia

2016-12-28T21:37:56+00:00April 6th, 2014|Gold|

From roberto, via The Listserve, April 1, 2014

Over the course of my life, I have had a handful of deep friendships that came suddenly and surprisingly and without any warning.  They have been with people of different nationalities, ages, and backgrounds.  Three are with men, and two with women.  In each case, I was meeting with someone for the first time, usually for accidental or inconsequential reasons, sometimes standing in for a colleague.  Each meeting I expected to be short and businesslike but each morphed quickly instead into a deep conversation between the two of us.  Bertrand Russell described a similar experience in his first meeting with Joseph Conrad:

“At our very first meeting, we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire. It was an experience unlike any other that I have known. We looked into each other’s eyes half appalled and half intoxicated to find ourselves together in such a region. The emotion was as intense as passionate love, and at the same time all-embracing. I came away bewildered, and hardly able to find my way among ordinary affairs.” (“Autobiography.” Routledge, 2009.)

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March 2014

The Philosopher vs. The Priest

2016-12-28T21:37:56+00:00March 6th, 2014|Gold|

From Prof. Daniel N. Robinson’s “Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition” (The Great Courses Series)

Something momentous takes places when a culture takes the position that the problem of knowledge is essentially a religious problem and invests its credulity in a denominated group of official interpreters whose judgments on matters of this kind are taken to be incorrigible.

…

Once one confers on a select and denominated group ultimate epistemological authority on core questions arising from the problem of knowledge, the near inevitable result is philosophical paralysis.

What is more likely to happen is that positions will become quite hardened and the only thing left for scholarship is to interpret the words of the wise. So the entire debate now is not about the nature of truth, but about how a text or holy maxim is to be understood.

What the leaders of thought in the ancient Greek world might be inclined to say is, “This may be the best way to get to heaven – but surely not to the moon.”

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September 2013

M. Aurelius 5.1

2015-01-23T00:32:06+00:00September 3rd, 2013|Gold|

Originally published September 3, 2013. From Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.

Whenever in the morning you rise unwillingly, let this thought be with you: “I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if am about to do the things for which I was brought into the world? Or was I made to lie under the bedclothes and keep myself warm?”

“But that is more pleasant,” you say.

Do you live then to take your pleasure, and not at all for action and exertion? Do you not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees, working together to set in order their several parts of the universe? And are you unwilling to do the work of a human being, not eager to do what belongs to your nature?

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