Nuclear terrorism

Book Review

On Nuclear Terrorism by Michael Levi

Good news

It’s harder for the terrorists than you think. And there is a lot we can do to make it harder still.

Bad news

We’re not doing those things.

Which fact impresses you more

E=mc²
There is a lot of power in physical stuff. The amount of energy released by the Hiroshima bomb was the equivalent of about a half a gram of matter. (There were a dozen or so kilograms of uranium in the bomb, but only a tiny fraction was converted to energy.)

The human brain
The human brain is about 4kg or the equivalent of 8,000 Hiroshima bombs if you converted it to energy. That is a puny and inefficient use compared to the power of the brain when it’s thinking. That same eight pounds of jelly can conceive and build atom bombs without limit, take control of its own evolution, and create new life in a test tube.

Four years

Today is the fourth anniversary of Becky’s death.

Usually I think staying in the house and not moving was the right decision at the time for me. But I’m sitting as I type this on the exact spot where she died in her home hospice hospital bed and today I don’t feel so sure.

I was sitting just to the right, holding her hand, the nurse had been on the left timing her last breaths but had left me alone with her after the breathing stopped and she pronounced her dead. There was no change in her that I could detect other than that. It was a perfectly continuous slide into death. Over the next hour the body grew cold and rigid and blood came out of the mouth, but the official declaration of death seemed to me perfectly arbitrary. A minute sooner, a minute later would have made no difference. I have never believed in any supernatural component to life and nothing in watching her die suggested to me that there is such a thing. There was no moment of transition, no ascension of the soul, no moment where a life force was felt followed by one where it disappeared. I’m pretty sure I would have been happy to have detected something of the sort. I don’t think I was biased not to see it by my previous disbelief because at such a moment one very much would prefer a comforting interpretation even one that you might reject later.

I went up and brought down our dog Veronica to say goodbye. She jumped on the bed and nuzzled her trying to get a reaction. I took her away after a minute. I am one of those dog owners who talks to my dog in baby talk all the time explaining the world and what is going on at that level. “Mommy’s gone to Puppy Heaven and one day you’ll go there and play with her again.” Veronica generally sleeps in bed with me, or rather being a 65 lb. standard poodle she leaves a small corner of the bed for me to use. When it’s time to go to sleep I tell her “Puppy Dreamland time. In Puppy Dreamland you can be with Mommy in Puppy Heaven. Now go to sleep.”

I don’t go to the grave often. Not because it makes me sad, but rather because it feels empty. When I’m there I remember the funeral, I remember making the arrangements for the stone, picking the design and the inscription, wondering what date someone will chisel in on my half, but those things all happened after she died and she never knew about them. I don’t feel her presence there. It’s usually cold and windy in February. I don’t feel like she’s there for me to talk to. I don’t feel like she’s anywhere else either. I think she ceased to exist that day in 2005. Of course I have memories and of course we all live in a world that would be unimaginably different had she not lived. Even for those of you who never knew her and never met her. But it is only a poetic metaphor to say she continues to exist in that sense.

In the last hour or so she could no longer speak or even communicate with blinks and hand squeezes. So I don’t know what her last thoughts were, but I do know those were her last thoughts.

It’s good that Veronica never has to know.

Why I am not a christian

Book review

Why I Am Not A Christian and other Essays by Bertrand Russell

There has never been any chance of my being a Christian. So why is a book about why Bertrand Russell isn’t one either one of my favorites?

It is really a book about the case for the scientific, atheist, humanist, rationalist philosophy of life. Russell uses the word agnostic on occasion, but this is a distinction without a difference, I think largely to not scare away readers. Religious people see agnostics as possible converts and atheists as hopeless.

In no way does Russell really believe in any supernatural being(s) but simply in the logical truth that a negative proposition cannot be proven. So the term agnostic is technically precise. He is similarly an agnostic about whether a giant teacup is in orbit around the planet Mars. One can’t prove it’s not, but there is no reason to think there is such a thing. Ditto God.

What impressed me about the book was not so much the undermining of the usual proofs of religion (First Cause, Necessary Being, etc.) but rather his dissection of the atrocious ethics of the Old and New Testaments. The contrast of Jesus with Socrates, demonstrating Russell’s preference for the latter’s ethics, was quite eye-opening to me when I first read this around age twelve.

The book is dated in many ways. There are many more ways of looking at these timeless issues now, particularly the psychological and neurological, but the clarity of Russell’s arguments is still beautiful.

WWII on the eastern front

Book Review
No Simple Victory by Norman Davies

Davies here makes the case for the centrality of the Eastern Front in WWII in Europe and thus for the Soviet Union being the victor with the US, UK, and others playing a minor role.

This ahistorical and gross exaggeration is a useful corrective to the similar distorted view in the West that the US and UK were the decisive players and that the Soviet Union would never have been able to stand up to the Germans without them.

There are no certainties in alternative history so we can’t know how WWII might have turned out had anything been different. If the Soviets had collapsed would the West have defeated Hitler? We’ll never know, however sure we may think we can guess.

That polemic aside, Davies does an excellent job of examining the war from many different perspectives — different countries, military, economic, political, social, etc. As someone who has read many histories of WWII over a lifetime, that is both welcome and rare.

Davies is also accused of minimizing the Holocaust by looking at it in the context of other atrocities during the war. I think that is unfair to him. As I read his book, I don’t see that at all. I see him showing how the Holocaust was the ultimate realization of historical forces that also expressed themselves in other ways during the same time period. I don’t see that he equates them or minimizes some and exaggerates others.

Davies is an historian of Poland, not just WWII, and the relations between Poles and Jews over the centuries are complex particularly after WWI and especially during the Nazi genocide. I think his critics are on his case more for his Polish perspective on Polish history than any statements in this book on WWII. He doesn’t excuse Polish collaboration with the Germans nor does he demonize all Poles and all of Polish history because of it either.

I do have a bone to pick with Davies in his assertion that US forces were almost never a match for the Germans in equal numbers without air cover and only prevailed because of airpower. First, even if that were true, it would simply mean that our generals were smarter than the Germans for recognizing that airpower would be decisive and building the capability. It’s not a weakness of an army to figure out your own way to win and not to play the enemy’s game. Second, it’s just not true.

Patton’s drive across France was not based on overwhelming numbers and his men outfought and outmaneuvered the Germans on most occasions without huge odds in their favor. Nor during the Battle of the Bulge were the paratroops in Bastogne or Army troops in St. Vith protected from the air in the first decisive days while they defeated the Germans who had a huge superiority in armor and infantry at the point of contact.

Davies would say that these were small battles compared with the battles in the East that involved much larger numbers of troops and tanks. So what? The US and UK armies went from Normandy to occupy Germany and accept their surrender and they did it far faster and more effectively than the Soviets. They suffered far fewer casualties for each one inflicted on the enemy than did the Soviets. The Soviet losses of millions were due more to their own ineptitude than to the skill of the Germans. The same Germans were not nearly as effective fighting us.

Using Davies’ logic Fredricksburg would be a key battle of the Civil War because of the large casualties, even though it was strategically meaningless, while the taking of Forts Henry and Donelson which was one of the decisive events of the war would be unimportant because there were very few casualties. Nonsense.

Also, Davies being an historian specializing in Central and Eastern Europe is blind to the importance of naval power since the countries in that part of the world are not effective at naval warfare. The German inability to invade Britain in the summer of 1940, to interfere in any meaningful way with the transport of American men and materiel to the UK and the Soviet Union, as well as their inability to prevent any of the Allied amphibious assaults — Africa, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, Normandy, Southern France might well have had something to do with their losing the war.

So don’t let Davies convince you that the Soviet Union saved the world in WWII all by itself. But do read his book to see what their part of the war was all about.

Thoughts on mortgages

The government plan to subsidize mortgages in foreclosure and on properties that are upside-down is immoral and repellent. It rewards the foolish and penalizes the prudent. This is too high a price to pay to help the deserving who were sensible but caught up in the recession and not enough to restart the economy anyway. It undermines faith in government and is wrong. A measure of the contempt I feel is expressed by the traders in this video.

I have a counter-proposal. The government should pay off a fixed amount of principal on everyone’s mortgage. This does not discriminate in favor of the imprudent and provides an equal reward to the prudent. So social justice is served. If this is unaffordable than the government should only pay towards the smallest mortgages in the country, thus helping the poorest people first. To a bank holding mortgages it doesn’t matter if they get an extra, say $20,000, from me or my neighbor. They get the $20,000. There is no reason that the government should favor the person behind on their payments.

Most economists argue that the core economic problem which generates all the others in the US today is the decline in value of homeowner equity. My proposal directly attacks this by providing a huge transfer payment to increase homeowner equity which provides the greatest percentage help to those at the bottom who need it most, those with negative or zero equity. But it is not only given to them, which would be an outrage.

The math.
The 40,000,000 smallest mortgages at $20,000 each is $800 billion, or the same as the original TARP, and here the money is going directly to the problem, not indirectly through some Rube Goldberg machine of bank lending causing consumer and business spending. That is pushing on a string.

The politics.
It helps out in every Congressional district and makes payments for millions of voters. It does tax renters to subsidize homeowners, but we do that all the time through the mortgage interest deduction and apparently the public doesn’t penalize Congress for it so I think renters would swallow this too. I would repeal that deduction in normal times and move the Government away from subsidizing housing, but not during this crisis. It also helps all the banks, including those who did not get themselves into trouble and are now having to compete with banks that did backed by Government funding.

It’s not necessary to give me credit for this idea. If you can claim it as your own and get it passed I freely allow you to do so for the good of my country.

Writing and my dad

My father was the frustrated writer in the family. He never wrote professionally. He inherited a music shop from his father and that was how he made his living. But he often spoke of his days on the student newspaper at the U. of Chicago, The Chicago Maroon, as the happiest in his life. Had he not had family obligations and a timid nature, I know he would have loved to have been a writer.

He likes to play with words and tell jokes, especially puns. He writes rarely, usually toasts and speeches for family occasions, letters to family, and letters to the editors of the local newspapers. He doesn’t read much besides the papers and a few magazines, but his language, both spoken and written, is unusually articulate.

I remember a few iconic examples. At summer camp one year I took to wearing a felt Tyrolean hat with a feather. My mother asked him why I wore the hat and he answered, “It gives him a jaunty air.” At the time I was more irritated with my Mother’s usual cluelessness and the fact that they were talking about me, in front of me, like I wasn’t there. Now I focus more on the precision and concision of that description. It’s good English.

Another time he wrote a parody of the Gettysburg address which he delivered as a pre-carving Thanksgiving speech at the family meal. I don’t remember all of it but the key phrase for me was the line replacing Lincoln’s statement of the War’s purpose “testing whether this nation or any nation” with our purpose for that day “that this Turkey we might fress”, fress being Yiddish for “scarf down like an animal.”

There is weakness in my father’s writing as well. His main coping strategy in life is denial and suppression of emotion. So he took as his writing ideal a newspaper reporter’s objective point of view and never uses his writing to deal with personal subjects that are uncomfortable for him. In his 70’s he finally wrote his WWII memoir and it is striking in its lack of insight. All the difficulties in his life that I know about – attempted suicides of his wife and daughter, his friend’s greater worldly success, his sexual immaturity, his lifelong fear of old age — are there only by omission. He speaks of his successes in school and the Army and never deals with setbacks, fears, or failures. My first wife (may her name be erased) on reading the memoir said, “At first I thought this was really well written and interesting but as I went on I realized he couldn’t face up to anything in his life.”

His expressed reason for writing the memoir was to leave a legacy to future generations of the family. I think he did himself and them a disservice by avoiding all conflict and disappointment in his life. It must be that the thought of someone reading about a failing of his, even after his death, is unbearable to him. When I tried to tell him that leaving out the material is more unflattering to him than would be revealing how he behaved in the incidents he is afraid to write about, he didn’t argue, he just didn’t understand. For him, when he chooses to forget about something, it never happened. As a writer he has unrealized talent, but as a practitioner of denial as a life strategy he is a grand master.

In his memoir my father repeats a story I heard many times growing up. An American colonel says to him after a battle as they are standing in view of several German dead, “That’s the way I like to see ‘em Private!” To this day I have no idea what my father felt about those corpses and I’m sure he doesn’t either because I’ve asked him and he is unable to respond. He is equally unforthcoming about his visit to the Wobbelin concentration camp, just after liberation by our army. He says:

All GIs and a lot of townspeople were taken to see the camp. Only the living had been taken away. We walked through the barracks wth the last day’s dead still lying in the crude, filthy bunks. Outside one building was a pile of corpses — piled up like cordwood. The bodies were emaciated and bruised. No museum can convey the horror nor would it want to simulate the stench.

The civilians from the nearby towns, most of whom must have either worked in the camp, or delivered supplies or simply passed it by regularly, tried to express surprise at that they saw.

A good voice-over for a documentary, but not a word about how he feels. Is he angry, does he have any special thoughts being Jewish, does it change how he feels about the war, about Humanity? How does he feel about the German civilians feigning surprise? Should they be punished, did he feel like taking revenge? I know him a lot better than you do and I have no idea.

I have repeated my father’s history in not taking professional risks to write seriously pursuing instead a career in business. I am being especially vigilant to not follow him in avoiding showing my own pains and failures now that I am writing.

Unlike him, when I write things down I experience life in 3D. Without the writing I am more like him, living in Flatland. This essay illustrates that. What I’ve just written about my father is hard information I’ve had available to me for many years. Yet, while I’ve often thought in general about getting my sense of humor and love of a good phrase from him, I hadn’t thought about what writing meant to him and compared it with what it means to me until I wrote this. Nor had I thought about my desire to confront conflict in my writing as related to his avoidance of it.

I don’t want to exaggerate. I have often worried about inheriting my father’s weaknesses and repeating his mistakes. But not in the precise way I am now as I write these words. Presbyotics will understand. My life without writing is like the blurry but still readable image you have in the early stages holding the menu out at arm’s length. Writing makes things crisp and sharp like reading glasses.

Nation of cowards

Eric Holder, the new US Attorney General, says:

. . .in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards. . .

While I think of Holder as a political stooge for his craven assistance to Clinton with his inexcusable last minute pardons, on this subject I agree with him entirely. Of course, the Justice Dept. is a terribly PC organization and I doubt very much that any discussion of race in the workplace that was not PC would be tolerated even with Holder in charge. Nevertheless, this statement of his is a step in the right direction.

Full Story

I had a longer discussion on this topic in my review of Clint Eastwood’s movie Gran Torino.

Inconvenience

We all want to live
we all one day die
nobody likes it
denial all try

If life unworthy
by death are we blest
afflicted no hope
the long goodbye best

If life after death
or reborn each time
no need to worry
we don’t really die

Another way out
art, children, or fame
vicariously
just leave a good name

Tech true believers
by freezing their forms
trust that tomorrow
in thawing reborn

Take one dying brain
pickled in a jar
hook up some speakers
Steven Hawking now

The aged we shun
amnesia and drool
identities lost
in faith they retool

First verse said it all
cowardice the rest
we’re born and we die
that’s our universe

Gran Torino

Political correctness is a type of bullying to which we are all subjected every day of our lives. Prevented from thinking and expressing ourselves clearly on a continual basis, to be honest with each other and ourselves, we forget just how much of our freedom has been sacrificed. Clint Eastwood has managed to show us this in a film at two levels – the film itself and our awareness that even that screenplay had to be written in a politically correct manner.

On the first level, in this film, Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, an 80 year old Korean War vet, retired Ford assembly line worker, recently widowed, whose speech and attitudes are a caricature of Midwestern, Catholic, white working class people who came of age in the 1950’s and became Reagan Democrats in the 1980’s. He speaks of slopes and zipperheads, thinks of all Asians in terms of the Korean enemy he fought and is similarly old fashioned in his prejudices about Jews, women, and most other subjects. On the second level, the dialog contains no nigger, kike, queer, or cunt, these words presumably being too hot to handle while gook, wop, guinea, and polack are not. We see that Clint Eastwood, for all his clout and position as Hollywood legend, director, producer, and star of a film on the subject of prejudice must still keep the screenplay politically correct.

We know this because it is ludicrous to think that Walt would not have used the harsher words and not have had prejudices of those sorts and it cannot be an accident that they are left out of the screenplay. Imagine making a movie about the US Army in which no one ever uses the words shit or fuck. This glaring omission keeps us aware of just how universal PC censorship has become in our culture and Eastwood is quite clever in turning PC against itself in this way — the main character is not PC but the script is very PC — to show us how it is killing us spiritually.

Walt is dying physically and spiritually having been blinded by prejudices that prevented him from facing the emotional traumas of the war and being a father. Now with his wife’s passing and his own time running out he gets a chance at redemption by becoming involved in the lives of his Hmong immigrant neighbors and overcoming these limitations. At first glance this is very PC. Prejudice hurts the hater not just the victim and by letting it go you become a better person. But slowly Eastwood introduces complexity.

The film explains that the Hmong immigrants are here in the US because they supported us in the Vietnam War and then we abandoned them when we skedaddled and left them to face genocidal extermination by the Laotian and Vietnamese Communists. Some of them we did accept here as refugees, doing little to nothing to help them escape, and then we left them to fend for themselves in our society where they are doing poorly with high rates of social pathology. Since the PC take on the Vietnam war is “Americans bad, North Vietnamese good” there is no place for these facts in our culture. Walt, who presumably does not agree that the Vietnam War was an American crime, does not have to ignore the Hmong tragedy to preserve a certain view of that war.

The main villains in the movie are gangs, Mexican and Hmong, who bully the good people in the community, much like the bad guys terrorize a town in a Western, or as I argue here, we are bullied by the PC thought police. Again, there is a PC view of the world in which gang members are victims of our evil society and are driven to join gangs to survive in that hostile environment. Then there is this movie’s view showing them as having opportunity to succeed, that most people in their own community are trying to succeed, and that the gang members are a small minority who prey on the hard-working people because of their personal demons. Anyone who has spent any time in a high school knows this to be accurate but it is another one of those truths that are blasphemous to the PC code and thus almost never spoken in public. Believe me, as a former high school teacher, it is absolutely forbidden to every suggest that a violent student is responsible for his actions. Eastwood will have none of this, takes on this shibboleth directly, and offers no excuses for the gang members.

One thing you notice in the theater is that people are laughing out loud at Walt’s old fashioned, very non-PC, ethnic jokes. They aren’t wincing or tsk-tsk’ing, and certainly not walking out indignantly. Of course they are in the dark and not under observation as they would be in a classroom or on the job where they would have to feign PC feelings. They can be free for one hour and fifty-six minutes.

When I lived in France, people laughed at me when I talked about freedom of speech in the United States. They said we were more controlling than most dictatorships, not just in the mass media, but in schools, workplaces, and in personal interactions. At the time I would argue with them. Now I know, and Eastwood knows, that they are right. We have traded freedom of speech for some mythical virtue of “not giving offense”.

Eastwood is not making the case that Walt is a good man for hanging on to all these old prejudices, nor am I defending them. On the contrary, the movie makes it unmistakably clear that Walt is wasting his life and that his chance encounter with the Hmong and overcoming of some of his prejudices are his last chance at redemption.

Eastwood is making the case that living in a PC society and following its rules does not result in a meaningful life either. Walt’s family is clueless about his redemption and prejudiced against the Hmong although they would never admit it or say it out loud. They, who are the real “us” in the movie, are far worse than Walt is. They never say gook or slope, they have forgiven the Japanese for WWII, but they hate and fear people different from themselves every bit as much as Walt did but are never going to grow and redeem themselves as he does because they can’t face that truth about themselves. Why? Because they have no vocabulary or rhetoric to do so. PC has stolen that from them, that is, from all of us.

Walt can be honest with himself in the end. We live in a world where that is forbidden.

Buy Gran Torino.

Last refuge of a scoundrel

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
– Samuel Johnson

South Side of Chicago, 12 February 1954

I often flashback to the morning when I shivered with patriotism for the first time.

Five in the morning and I was the first one up. I wore a yellow, one-piece flannel pajama suit with white, vinyl-soled feet. I could run and slide a little across a linoleum floor on those soles. That’s how I crossed from my attic bedroom at the front of the house to the stairs at the center leading down to the dining room. It was cold as my father had the thermostat at a frugal setting.

The staircase had been like an obstacle course for me. At first, it was closed off by a scissors gate. Then I learned to crawl up and later to crawl down, backwards. The landing, three steps from the bottom was a welcome, intermediate stop. Like Iwo Jima for the B-29 pilots. The staircase had an oak banister I really liked. Even when I outgrew my reliance on the banister for balance, I still felt a fondness for it. I knew every line in the oak grain, every rough spot in the varnish. I could measure my speed and progress with my eyes closed by running my hand along it as I descended.

Once in the dining room I walked by the radiator that sat under the windows on the side of the house facing our neighbors to the North, the Fisks. It was covered with a thin metal box as company might visit in the dining room and an exposed radiator would not do. The box was perforated with diamonds and squares. I dragged my pinky across the uneven surface feeling the vibration and listening to the sound.

I crossed the dining room to the living room and continued to the windows at the front of the house. Peeking under a window shade, I could see the snow, icicles on the ledge, and feel the cold coming through despite the storm window. In the corner stood the 12-inch, black and white TV with click knobs for channels and volume. I turned it on but kept the sound low so I wouldn’t wake up the house. My brother Joel and my Uncle ET (short for Itamar, not extra-terrestrial) slept upstairs. My parents, Buddy and Orah (Jews, not rednecks) slept downstairs just off the dining room.

At first there was a test pattern on the TV with a lot of numbers, bars of various widths, and an Indian chief’s head, Blackhawk I think, in the center. There was a low buzz.

Then it happened.

The test pattern went away, an announcer said, “We now begin our broadcast day with the playing of our national anthem.” I stood with my hand on my heart as the Star-Spangled Banner accompanied the film of soldiers and sailors, ships and planes. My back and shoulders stiffened as the song went on. At the land of the free and the home of the brave I had a chaste, full-body orgasm. All my muscles clenched, I got goose bumps, my face flushed. I knew when the time came I would stand up to the Commies like those men. I was one of the free and the brave. I was an American.

All those physical sensations come back to me now as I write this and every time I hear the national anthem, see the flag, or am exposed to even the most obscure patriotic song or symbol. But the first time is always special. By comparison, my first sexual encounter, with a prostitute in Caracas, was unsatisfying. I did learn to enjoy sex later, and sometimes it is thrilling, but it is iffy. There are times when, despite every physical and mental effort, I just can’t get in the mood. But I can go into the shower in any condition – ill, depressed, frightened, wracked with guilt and shame – and just by humming a few bars of Anchors Aweigh my body tingles all over and I feel better.

Nothing since – not My Lai, not the banality of our culture, not an educated and rational mind – nothing has changed that conditioned response.

South Side of Chicago, 5 August 1964

I woke up angry on my fifteenth birthday.

The night before President Johnson had made his speech about the attack in the Tonkin Gulf and his orders to bomb North Vietnam in response. I was positive he was lying. It made no sense for the North Vietnamese to launch an unprovoked attack on the US Navy. I was sure that either there had been no attack, or that we had done something to provoke it that was being kept secret.

I thought of Gleiwitz, a German town near the Polish border where on 31 August 1939 the Germans faked a Polish attack on the radio station to provide an excuse for the invasion of Poland the next day. The parallel just kept coming to mind and I couldn’t make it go away.

Johnson wanted to show that he could stand up to the Soviets and Chinese in a proxy battle of the Cold War. I’d read enough history about the Viet Minh and the war with the French to know that this was a civil war, we were on the losing side, and that there was no way I was going to join in and kill people.

I could not delegate my responsibility for killing to the Congress, the President, or anyone else. For me to kill, even in war, there must be just cause. There was none for America in Vietnam.

I was aware of previous peccadilloes by the United States, for example, exterminating the Indians. But I was born just when we had finished saving the world from the Germans and Japanese. My Dad fought in Patton’s Third Army. Now I had to revise my core beliefs about my country and where my duty lay and that is no way to enjoy your fifteenth birthday.

University of Chicago, 1 December 1969

Louis, John, and I were watching the draft lottery at our apartment on 54th and Greenwood. They sat up close to the TV. I was further back in an armchair with my Marlboros and a bottle of George Dickel No. 8 Tennessee Whisky. Joints circulated. The announcer called out birthdays drawn by lot. We knew that the military would be drafting the first 100-150 birthdays drawn and that the rest were safe. My number was 54 so I stepped up my drinking. I didn’t say anything. John and Louis were not called until near the end and whooped and hollered for what seemed like a minute. Then Louis turned away from the TV, nudged John, pointed to me and said,

–What’s the matter with Gill?
–What’s the matter with me? I’m 54. I’m going to be drafted!
–Well, what are you so upset about? Now you don’t have to worry about finals.

I laughed too. Later I felt sick and thought frigid air would help. I wobbled up and went outside, slipped on the ice, and then got into my green Pontiac Firebird, with the 2-barrel, 356-cubic inch engine. I opened the windows, turned the radio to WLS Top-Forty, and sat and listened for a while. Following my father’s advice to always take off your glasses before you throw up, I placed them on the dash, opened the door, leaned over the curb and heaved. I went back to the apartment and smoked some more. I passed out early in the morning, and woke up hung over. No one was home, so I dragged myself out to buy some aspirin. I hadn’t washed, brushed my teeth, nor changed my clothes from the night before. I got to the grocery, picked up aspirin, and went to pay.

–Gillie, what are you doing here? It was my Aunt Goldene.
–Shopping for a few things.
–Are you sick?
–I blushed and tried to smile. “A little. Nothing serious. Nice seeing you, but I better hurry home and get better.”
-Yes, that’s probably best.

I saw only compassion in her grin.

Downtown Chicago, 15 August 1971

The Armed Forces Medical Evaluation Facility in Chicago was in a skid row neighborhood. I drove around a little until I found a parking spot that seemed safe. Hurrying from the car while looking over my shoulder, I reached the building. It looked like a warehouse. No windows, gray walls.

I followed the green line on the floor to the classroom. Just as I was considering ways to fail the written tests, the Sergeant announced that there were five more tests, each easier than the last, and that you would stay overnight until you passed one. That, and my MBA which they knew about, told me to rely on Plan B.

In the locker room undressing for the physical exam, I found all my enemies from high school. I made small talk; that was not a problem. It was the thought of being in the Army with them, in a shooting war, for years. This was exactly the kind of nightmare I’d had in high school after a bullying incident, now become real. I was in The Twilight Zone.

After much poking, prodding, turning, and coughing, we lined up to talk to a doctor about any medical condition not uncovered in the routine physical we had just had. The doctor, an Air Force Lieutenant, sat behind a half partition with a shelf between us, like the checkout line at the supermarket. I gave him the envelope with my x-rays showing my three kidneys and the letter from Dr. Rosenfeld about the damaged one. He looked them over and then pulled down the book of regulations. I tried to look nonchalant, but I had visions of refugees at border crossings and concentration camp selections. The doctor took my card, wrote “4C6T” on it, then handed it back.

-What does it mean?
-Next!

I gave the card to the desk clerk on the way out.

-Sarge, what does it mean?
-You’re “4F”, medically exempt.
-Thanks, Sarge.

I danced down the stairs humming The Marine Corps Hymn, tingling all over.

Joints I really enjoyed #1

“Where can we buy some sheet?”
ma petite amie Anne
asked a stranger on the street in Amsterdam

Speaking in English she was so cute
I forgot, we were to meet later
with my boss and his wife at the theáter

We found a place with THC on the menu
I warmed up with some coffee and a Marlboro
watching her tamp and roll, all very thorough

“Au hasard, c’est très fort”
But I didn’t listen particularly
after all two score ago in college, never a difficulty

Sixty seconds later came the explosion
paralysis physical, clarity mystical
and Anne indeed was my anima, beyond a doubt reasonable

It must have been a full ten minutes of bliss
before the sirens went off in my head
how can we stay cool with Marijke and Ned?

Turns out we couldn’t, all grinning and spaced
but they saw it as Love, and like all good parents
they indulged us our silliness, and didn’t berate us

Back to their house, we dropped all discretion
making love creamy, steamy, and soft
for once her pits furry turned me on, not off

Anne and I didn’t make it; we broke up soon after
for longer than most I felt the dearth,
but that day in Holland, we got our ten guilders worth.

Pilots matter

Capt. Sullenberger, the hero of US Airways Flight 1549, speaking to Katy Couric.

I don’t know a single professional pilot who would recommend that their children follow in their footsteps

I have to believe the following:

• Sully knows what he’s talking about
• The next generation of pilots will not be as skilled as this one as it is becoming a less desirable job
• Improvements in avionics cannot close that gap
• Inevitably people will die who would not if the pilots were still of Sully’s caliber
• As a society, we are not behaving wisely to let this happen

Full Story

Dr. Fitch

If you think sex education in school
is controversial now
come back with me to 1961

Not in school, not co-ed
just lads and dads
at the Y with Dr. Fitch

It almost went another way
Mom yelling for all to hear
Honey talk to him about sex tonight!

Thank god for Dr. Fitch
spared me a one on one with Dad
and the hanging judge review with Mom

You are there in the Chevy Impala
fins, chrome, three tailights per side
red tit, white tit, red tit

With my friend Todd and me
together in back while Dad drives
and speaks to us thus

You boys have a new weapon now
the weapon of sex, of rape
and you’ll need to control it always

Masturbation won’t help
it only relieves the pressure
but ruins you for the real thing

You can have the best reputation
but just reach out once and
tweak a breast, you lose it all

(You’re thinking, What the fuck?
That’s what we thought too.)

At the Y we listened to Dr Fitch
lecture with only the plastic vagina
forty years to PowerPoint

Humor was a way to deal with
new feelings, especially the visible shame
of erections inconvenient

Jerry was exotic and crude
shoulder to shoulder lined up naked
with a razor wire stretched against our groins

the SS beauty begins her strip tease
pitting our willpower
against the cutting edge

Mark was everyday
Miss Griffin saw you in English staring at her tits
rubbing your pud against the desk

Teenage boys aren’t very PC and
puberty is teething by Freud
but we come up OK in the end

Except when we don’t
like my Dad

Black and white are colors, not ideas

Bernard Henri-Levi wrote a book about traveling in America.

Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame reviewed it negatively in the NYT.

Christopher Hitchens gave it a positive review in Slate and blasted Garrison for his review.

I like all three of these guys and after reading the two reviews, excerpts from the book, and hearing BHL in his book tour interviews, I think they all are right in what they say.

Huh?

Good ideas are like that. Living in a culture largely of propaganda and rarely of ideas, it is easy to forget that good ideas can be complementary, not contradictory.

Shelley Ann

She first dropped acid
My sister told me
In the rubber room
On suicide watch

I saw her next at
The Ha-Ha Hotel
I could not listen
She could not explain

Thirty-five years on
She calls herself Ann
Reps for Mary Kay
We all sell something

Went and had four kids
A control-freak Mom
Living on Paxil
Shelley Ann long gone

Leviathan 2007

Science grows in every Garden
Thrives on Evil just as Good
Two examples, each one modern

SS Saturns splash the moon
Apartheid fission bombs atomic
QED, which was to prove

World Wide Web, DNA, Moore’s Law
Fulcrum, lever, a standing place
Move the Earth with a single paw

Anthrax, VX, even the pox
Soon will be brewed
By troubled post-docs

No more Euro trains to ride
Where showers steam
Cyanic insecticide

Today the Mail delivers the spores
Directly to you
Door-to-door

Denial keeps us unsafe and insane
Upon the inevitable,
Whom will we blame?

Police state methods unconstitutional
Won’t levee loathings
Rising effluvial

All our lives, standing on gallows
Hostage to every
Degreed, demented fellow

Carriers, subs, nukes galore
If we only had a target
We could settle the score

We thought our land as imagined by Locke
Hobbes got it wrong
So we were taught

Science now hath all that abort
Life of man, solitary, poor,
Nasty, brutish, and short.

Visit Home 1972

It was good to see you Gillie
you’re on your way living in NY
working at Citibank

Maybe we should just go to O’Hare
you know how Mom is when she’s upset.
Can’t you be nicer to her and not fight?

OK, I’ll wait here while you
go in to say goodbye.
We have plenty of time

Dad, get in here!
Wha… I don’t understand.
Why are you slapping your Mother?

Go in the bathroom and see what pills she took,
then call the Fire Department,
they’ll come and get her to the hospital.

Pills. . . hospital. . . fire department. . .
uh, can’t we, uh, take her in the car ourselves
just you and me?

I mean, you know, the neighbors. . .

The Writing Game

Class Notes

Four score and seven
degrees and humidity;
UT-OU game

“Writing every day”
red Vicki, thousand-ship face
weekend seminar

Mauve painted toes, rings,
dangling peacock-feathered ears
Suzanne, program head

Elle wiggles on by
sun-kissed melanoma skin
teased black rooted blonde

Twelve stanzas a day!
suspended animation;
resuscitation

Write what you enjoy
it rarely pays. Have a plan
know why you do it

Make useful habits
based on your writing heroes
break them as needed

Procrastination
is your bane. Put it off to
mañana. Repeat.

Unclutter your life
delegate all else
only you can write

Writing in full drafts
or chunking and revising
your mileage may vary

Unpublished means not
yet. Published means start over.
Good news, never bored

A writer only
when writing. Rest of your life
just a wannabee

Lutz Goerner Sendungen

For lovers of poetry and particularly fans of Harry Heine like me, these broadcasts of Lutz Goerner are gems.