The Beating Heart of Western Civilization

SLIDESHOWS | ALBUMS

Great visit to New York earlier this month. I love that city! For urban walking, it's the best. You can't walk 10 minutes without seeing something interesting, if not iconic. And the great subway system makes everything easily accessible.

Thanks so much to Ethel for letting me and Larry stay in her midtown apartment, the perfect home base from which to explore Manhattan. Ethel and my mother were friends in high school; she and her late husband Chuck stayed with my folks when mom was pregnant with me. Ethel is curator of comparative psychology (now emeritus) at the American Museum of Natural History, where she still has an office, just a few blocks from her home. I remember coming into Manhattan to visit her at her lab. She's worked with many different animals, but in my memory, it was rabbits.

When I was 11, I came into town on the subway with a friend. We went to AMNH, but we spent our subway money and had to walk down to Gimbels where my dad worked. A few months later, just when I was getting to be old enough to explore the city on my own, my parents moved me to the cultural backwater of Los Angeles. How could they? Oh, the humanity!

Not that LA has been bad to me. I had a great adolescence, I love access to the mountains, desert and coast, and we've got plenty of great museums and big cool buildings. And it's the capital of the third world...a real international hub, with the restaurants to prove it. But when I get back to New York City - and I'm really talking Manhattan - I feel that I'm inside the beating heart of western civilization.

THURSDAY - with Larry, Richard, Randy
Slideshow
Flight east, Broadway, Times Square, Greenwich Village, Chinatown, City Hall Park, 9/11 Memorial, Staten Island Ferry, Wall Street, High Line.

FRIDAY - with Larry and Richard
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American Museum of Natural History, Central Park (Pale Male!), Fifth Avenue, Museum of Modern Art (Diego Rivera).

SATURDAY - with Larry, Richard, Randy, Cindy, Heather, Nick, Cordelia, Floyd
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Fantastic walk: Downtown, across the Brooklyn Bridge, up to the Manhattan Bridge, over to Chinatown, up to Penn Station.

SUNDAY - with Larry, Richard, Stan
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Empire State Building, New York Public Library, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Grand Central Station, United Nations, Central Park.

MONDAY - with Larry, Ethel
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Hudson Riverwalk, George Washington Bridge, Grants Tomb, Riverside Church, lunch with Ethel.






The crowds of people doing a million interesting things...the world headquarters of major institutions that appear around every corner...the people and goods from every corner of the empire. Pulque! In Chinatown! Incredible.

But more...the parks, the monuments, the plaques, the inscriptions over building entrances. The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government. Wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times. Let us have peace.

Central Park itself, from the mid-19th century, is a beautiful tribute to our best social nature, as is the current project to provide pedestrian an bicycle paths around the entire perimeter of Manhattan.

Speaking of western civilization, check out the list of famous people, "our heroes," whose statues I photographed in four days walking around Manhattan: Daniel Webster, Theodore Roosevelt, Garibaldi, Sun Yat-sen, Horace Greeley,Washington, Hans Christian Andersen, Abraham Lincoln, Andy Warholz, William H. Seward,  Giuseppe Verde, Duke Ellington, William Tecumseh Sherman, William Cullen Bryant, Gertrude Stein.

I am not an unalloyed fan of western civ. Those poor suckers who traded away Manhattan to the Dutch India Company in 1622 didn't know what they were in for. Ask the Yemeni villagers who survived the latest US drone attacks what they think of so-called western civilization. Maybe they'll say, like Gandhi, "It would be a good idea."

The very iconography of the city speaks to the deep contradictions in the mythology. Until April 30, when the tower went up on One WTC, its tallest building was the Empire State Building. The Empire State. And the city is the imperial center of the most powerful empire in history, sucking the resources from across the globe and insisting on its moral right to control it all. The arrogance of empire...I can't embrace it.

But I am of it. I realize that, walking around in this great city, which, in its parks, its monuments, its museums, its vibrant democratic life, seems an expression of our highest ideals.

Thanks to my friends who came in to walk around with me! It was great to see you!

The Nature of Things

Review: THE SWERVE – How the World Became Modern

by Stephen Greenblatt

This is a wonderful book with a compelling narrative of the recovery, in 1417, of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, by an interesting book collector, Poggio Bracciolini. It is a story of the early Renaissance, with quarreling popes and princes and a corrupt clergy, but also with a tremendous enthusiasm for the late Roman Republic and a zeal for recovering, understanding and using the things that had made Rome great long ago.

Things like grammar, architecture, democracy. That classical stuff. Educated people – and there were a lot of them, because they were needed to run the vast papal bureaucracy as well as international commerce and finance – poured over Cicero and other Roman and Greek authors.

This was a generation before Gutenberg. Books were still incredibly labor-intensive hand copied affairs. Expensive, cherished. Much of the classical library had disappeared, neglected and ravaged by time. Some had been preserved, mostly by monks for whom reading Latin literature was a daily exercise, and copying texts was a monastic craft. In the Renaissance, some of those texts made it out of the monasteries and into the schools and living rooms of the educated elites. Others remained neglected and unused in the libraries of remote monasteries. In one of these, Poggio found Lucretius' masterpiece.

On the Nature of Things was written in 50 BCE, a year before Caesar crossed the Rubicon, in the last days of the Republic (a time somewhat like our own in that big money, with fortunes built on foreign expansion, was undermining republican institutions at home). Although the ideas it promoted were not widely accepted, the book was widely admired for the beauty of its language as well as the intellectually challenging content. It was praised. Poggio would have read ABOUT De rerum natura, but never seen it, because no copy was known to exist until he found one in some remote monastery in Germany. He returned the book to circulation and, Greenblatt argues, changed the world.

In Chapter Eight, in the middle of the book, Greenblatt summarizes some of the main themes in Lucretius:

• Everything is made of invisible particles.
• The elementary particles of matter...are eternal.
• The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size.
• All particles are in motion in an infinite void.
• The universe has no creator or designer.
• Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve.
• The swerve is the source of free will.
• Nature ceaselessly experiments.
• The universe was not created for or about humans.
• Humans are not unique.
• Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival.
• The soul dies.
• There is no afterlife.
• Death is nothing to us.
• All organized religions are superstitious delusions.
• Religions are invariably cruel.
• There are no angels, demons, or ghosts.
• The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.
• The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
• Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder.

That list, which he elaborates in the chapter, is Greenblatt's summary of Lucretius' philosophy, which is in turn and expression of the philosophy of Epicurus, 341-270 BCE. It wasn't widely accepted in Epicurus' day, in Lucretius' day, or in Poggio's. It's been parodied and pilloried. And yet, look at that list. Don't you see Galileo in it? Newton? Darwin? Einstein, Bohr? Jefferson? Jefferson had five copies of the book, and said he was an Epicurean. This is a modern view of the world; in fact, except for a few small points (I don't think elementary particles are infinite in number), it's largely my view of the nature of things. Going back to the time of Alexander the Great. Incredible!

Greenblatt explores these and other imprints of Lucretius' work in the modern world. But there's one he misses: John Lennon's Imagine is a beautiful expression of the Epicurean world view.

Just imagine!

Jim's Library

The two stacks just to the left of the building are "B Control," where Jim and I worked.

I worked with Jim for many years at Haynes Generating Station. We made electricity. We were part of Crew 4, one of the operating crews that manned the station around the clock. We worked rotating shits: Ten day shifts (6:30-2:30), four days off, 10 peaks (2:30-10:30), four days off, 10 graveyards (10:30-6:30). Except that after the last grave, if you stayed up all day, you could “cheat the company” and have a five-day weekend without using up any vacation time. There were about 14 of us on the crew, staffing three control rooms. Monday through Friday day shifts were all business, since the plant was busy with maintenance, administration, training. But the rest of the time, if nothing special was happening, we just had to keep an eye on things, with about two hours of actual duties. There was a lot of conversation, cooking and surreptitious reading. We got to know each other pretty well over the years.

Jim and I were probably the best-read guys on the crew, and we recommended books to each other and often discussed what we were reading. Occasionally he would join the hikes I put together after the last graveyard. A bunch of us would go out to breakfast, then drive up to the San Gabriels northeast of LA, instead of going home an getting some sleep. It was a little rough, but it smoothed the transition back to diurnalism.

I retired in 1998 at 51. The DWP had a harebrained scheme to save money by offering generous early retirement terms that I couldn't resist. Jim left that same year, forced out on a disability retirement after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

MS is a terrible and mysterious disease that eats away the myelin, which is like the insulation on the nerve cells. When it's gone, the nerve cells lose their ability to conduct messages. Since everything we do depends on these signals, you lose one function after another as the disease progresses. Jim used to jog and bike – and drive – until MS robbed him of his ability to balance and see. He used to play guitar, studying Bach transcriptions and Eric Clapton. Cleaning up his apartment, I've thrown away many handwritten play lists stuffed in every drawer. What Jim was practicing until the disease robbed him of that ability as well. And he used to read, before the myelin on his optic nerve deteriorated. He read a lot.

After he retired, Jim continued to live alone in his Long Beach apartment. We would get together every month or two, go out to eat, sometimes see a movie. Larry, another Crew 4 alumnus, would sometime join us. In recent years, Jim would call me when something he couldn't deal with came up, and I would help him out. His coffee maker, answering machine or tv stopped working, so I would pick up a new one for him and set it up in his apartment.

In December, he fell while making his way around the apartment. He tried to deal with the pain (mostly with aspirin and vodka), but after a couple of days he called and I took him to emergency. He had fractured a vertebra, and also developed pneumonia and esophageal bleeding. He was a wreck. He spent a week in the hospital, and a couple more in a hellish convalescent facility. It was clear he could not go back to his independent apartment living in the near future, and that realistically probably not at all. (He still doesn't agree with this, and hopes to resume living on his own. We'll see.) I found an assisted living facility, helped him move in, and I'm trying to get him moved out of his apartment so he won't have to pay rent for nothing.

The saddest and most interesting task has been to liquidate his library...boxes and boxes of books collected, saved and READ over many years.

Remember Episode 8 of the Twilight Zone, which first aired Nov. 20, 1959? I'll bet you do!

Time Enough at Last, in which Burgess Meredith gives a great performance as a bookish bank teller harassed by his employer and his wife for wasting too much time reading. While hiding in the bank vault to read, an h-bomb destroys the city. All that's left is him and the ruins of the public library. At last! Time enough to read to his heart's content. Then he trips over the rubble. His thick glasses fall and are shattered.

That's Jim.

Doris Lessing, Mark Twain, Richard Feynman, Kierkegaard, Merton.

One by one, I go through his boxes of books, long since stored away because he could no longer read them. A few titles I put aside for myself, even though I don't have any room for more books. The balance will go to the friends of the library for their book sale.

David Hume, Lao Tzu, Vonnegut, Crichton. The Portable Enlightenment Reader.

Every day he thinks of a new title he wants me to put aside in case he's able to get a device that will allow him to read again. Viking Portable Mark Twain, The Mathematical Handbook, Surely You Jest, Mr. Feynman!” So I go through the pile again, looking for his requests.

Tolstoy, Azimov, Sagan, Shaw, Wells, Fitzgerald. The Physics of Chance.

Selected Masterpieces for the Classical Guitar. Eric Clapton Unplugged, Chet Atkins Note-for-Note.

Dickens, Ibsen, Mann, Dillard, Gould, Thoreau.

The Good Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith.

The depth and breadth of the collection only underscores what a profound thing has been taken from this man by MS.

It breaks my heart.

Violence, Corruption and the Drug War

In a town in southern Veracruz, I spoke to a young man who ran a small business. I’ll call him X, because although I doubt if los Zetas or any of the local police will be reading my blog, I don’t want to risk getting him in trouble.

Los Z, he said, are like the American mafia of the 1920s, but with less ethics. Every business pays protection. Murder is rampant, prosecution non-existent. The only law enforcement agency free of corruption is the federal army, and its resources are totally inadequate. (Others disagree and cite numerous instances of corruption in the army, and, according to Wikipedia, the organization was formed in the late 90s by elite army personnel, possibly trained at the School of the Americas.)

X plays on a local fútbol team, and they met and beat a team from the city police department. Some gangsters started harassing the ref. X protested; the police said don’t worry, it’s nothing, but X persisted. Some time later, two carloads of gun-toting thugs came and beat him up.

X recovered, with no permanent harm. It’s a small incident, a mere anecdote, but it speaks to the widespread corruption and disfunctionality that plagues Mexico and has significantly worsened in the last decade. Pobre Mexico, he says. My poor country. And I remembered the old saying: Pobre Mexico, tan lejos de Dios, tan cerca de los Estados Unidos. Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.

It would be an over-simplification to blame Mexico’s problems on the US drug war, but it is a major factor. Just as alcohol prohibition was a major boom to the American mafia in the 20s, the drug trade is the indisputable source of the Zetas’ wealth and power. The US demand for illegal drugs, combined with the availability of arms in the US and their flow into Mexico, creates and sustains the culture of violence and corruption.

At the same time, the US offers an ideal and a solution. X spoke with admiration of the American justice system, and I am sure he is correct in this. Compared to Mexico, and for all its faults, we in the US can rely on our system and believe in it in a way that Mexicans cannot. If anything remotely like the soccer incident occurred in the US, we would expect protection from authorities and redress in the courts. Of course there are aberrations; they are the exception. When police or government officials are corrupt (and there will be corruption in any system), we expect that they will be found and prosecuted. Not so in Mexico.

Yet even in our country, the practice of justice falls too short of the ideal, as an important book published last year shows. In ORDINARY INJUSTICE, HOW AMERICA HOLDS COURT (http://www.ordinaryinjustice.com), writer and attorney Amy Bach shows in a number of examples from throughout the country how poor people, out of expediency rather than through malicious intent, are victimized by an overtaxed and under-resourced legal system with little regard for guilt or innocence.

In the US and in Mexico, and in many other places as well, the ideal of justice, so fundamental that experiments show that even little children and animals strive for it, is severely impacted by the misguided war on drugs. To be sure, drug prohibition, as alcohol prohibition in the past, has the positive effect of suppressing - however imperfectly - drug abuse, but at what cost?

In the US, the cost includes the drain of resources needed elsewhere to support the massive prison complex, choking the court system as described above, enabling gang structures that impact city life, and disrupting families and communities as petty drug violators are caught up in the criminal justice system. Not to mention the affront to the liberty of the millions of relatively responsible recreational drug users. Isn’t this a cure far worse than the disease?

In Mexico and many other countries, including Afghanistan, US drug prohibition enables and promotes powerful criminal organizations that intensify corruption and undermine the ability of governments to protect civil society.

I feel like a broken record. I know I’m not saying anything here that hasn’t been said a million times already. But after my conversation with X, I want to say it once more.

Americans have a lot to be proud of, but we should be ashamed of allowing this terrible, misguided, disruptive, unwinnable war on drugs to go on and on.

End drug prohibition now.

Language, reading and computers on the road

I was worried, flying into Mexico and making my way to Elissa’s on my own, that my poor Spanish would be inadequate, but I was fine. I was even able to have a conversation with the guy who helped me with my luggage, about our grandchildren (and his great-grandchildren) and with the cab driver about the nice weather and clear skies in Mexico City.

I’d say my Spanish, while crude, is better than I thought it was. I can make myself understood, and when someone is talking to me I can usually understand (I think!) Still, peor es nada...worse is nothing! And when people are talking among themselves, I really can’t follow the conversation. This can be disconcerting, and tiring, particularly when I really want to understand what is being said. Fortunately I have Xochi to help me.

It’s not an entirely negative experience. Without comprehension, the musical quality of speech seems more pronounced. Especially the fluid, lilting, unselfconscious sounds of the children can be really beautiful. And I just love the calls wafting up from the street...I’ll have to try to set them down or even record some: “Tamales, mole, ranchera...” Beautiful.

This seems curious: Elissa and Xochi speak English and Spanish to each other, mixed up, seemingly at random. Elissa says she doesn't think about it or in any way decide which language to use. I guess she thinks some things in one language and some in the other. I think for X, it's mostly Spanish unless she is talking to me or one of her other Norte Americano relatives.

READING IS ONE of the pleasures of travel. At home, with my endless NPR, computer, and TV inputs, I just can’t seem to make as much time for books as I would like. This trip, I’ve already read two and part of a third, and they were all excellent.

First, I read A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES by Janna Levin, a physicist who has written a novel about two prominent 20th century mathematicians, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Gödel, a highly disturbed man throughout his life, who eventually starved himself to death because he didn’t trust the food, proved – against established wisdom - that mathematics was incomplete, and that even in arithmetic, not everything could be proved. It was revolutionary, like the more famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that showed that on the quantum level at least it is just not possible to know everything. Turing basically invented the computer to help decode intercepted German communications in WWII and was instrumental in the Allied war effort. Later, convicted of homosexual activity and forced to undergo chemical castration, he committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple. Excellent book.

Next I read CROSSING by Jan Yoors. I bought his classic, THE GYPSIES, as a present for Elissa. Yoors is not, in my opinion, a great writer, but what he writes about is fascinating. As a 12-year-old in Belgium in the 30s, he ran off and joined a band of traveling Gypsies. His Bohemian parents did not interfere. He would come back to visit every year, and spend a little time in school, but most of his adolescence was spent with his adopted family. He writes about them with insight and compassion. CROSSING is the story of his experiences in WWII. As the specter of Nazi domination spread through Europe, Yoors left his Gypsy family, rejecting an arranged marriage that would have sealed his membership in the community, drawn by the wider world of which he was still a part. He tried to get to Britain to join the war, but before he could get there he was contacted and asked to recruit Gypsies to work with the Resistance. It’s a harrowing and compelling story.

Another present for Elissa, which I carried for her mother (the mail is slow and unreliable), was Patti Smith’s JUST KIDS. Unlike Yoors, who is adequate, Smith is a terrific writer, and her account of her life with Robert Mapplethorpe as young artists in New York in the 60s is compelling. I read a third of it before Elissa took it, but she is almost done and I’m sure I’ll finish it before I leave.

Next, Darwin’s ORIGIN OF SPECIES, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time. And for the trip home, I’m saving INSPECTOR CADAVER, a 1944 mystery by George Simenon.

THE COMPUTER THING is more interesting than I thought it would be. Elissa’s internet connection has been down since I got here. She keeps calling them and they keep not fixing it. Yesterday the person she was talking to said that it looked to her it was working and then (probably inadvertently) hung up. So to get on the internet I’ve been going to her office, or downstairs to the computer place where you can use their internet-connected computers by the hour (very reasonable). Each computer is interesting in its own way. E’s MS Office is mostly Spanish, although spell check and certain other functions seem to be in English. I’m a keyboard shortcut guy, especially Ctrl S (save) and Ctrl A (select all), but those don’t work. Instead, you have to use Ctrl G (guardia) and Ctrl E (seleccionar todo). Not a problem; hard to get used to.

The other computers are totally in Spanish, and using the Spanish-English dictionary is not always enough to figure out how to do normal things. And the keyboards, which are designed to accommodate the accented characters of the Spanish alphabet, really take some getting used to. A lot of the punctuation marks are in different places. Yesterday at the internet place I had to ask the guy how to access my flash drive to upload some pix to Facebook (I think it was under Equipo). In general, finding normal functions is a challenge.

I can only imagine what it would be like if I were in China!

And this is weird...editing this blogpost, the computer thinks I should be writing in Spanish on some paragraphs only...every word is underlined as if it's misspelled. Other paragraphs it thinks are fine.

Expatriate for a Day

Home alone in Elissa’s third-floor shotgun apartment on Calle Moctezuma, a narrow two-block cobblestone street named, E says, not for the Aztec ruler but for the beer that was made here and is still made in Orizaba. I didn’t go with Jose to take Xochi to school, or walk with Elissa to her office as I have the past three days. Just staying home alone, working on my pix, thinking about what I’ll write for my blog, and indulging for a few hours in one of my favorite life-long fantasies: The expatriate writer in a foreign city, bathed in foreign sights and sounds, free of habitual assumptions, free of daily interests, commitments and concerns, free of NPR, free of the familiar.

I pace the hall from the kitchen to the open door and the tiny balcony. Across the street, a woman hangs her wash on the roof. Behind her house, a block over, is a small hill covered with dense housing. Concrete, brick and adobe. Balconies. Water tanks. Laundry hung to dry on the rooves. And at the top, partially obscured by a tile roof, a Mexican flag waves in the breeze, and I remember when I landed in Mexico City a few days ago, the title of a song came to mind, “Mexico Linda y ...” only I couldn’t remember the last word. I asked the woman sitting next to me. “Mexico Linda y Querido.” She smiled, glanced out the window, and clasped her hands over her heart. Mexico, beautiful and loved.

The walk to Elissa’s office is down one of the main city streets, Xalapenos Illustres. Narrow, busy with vehicles and pedestrians, small shops, offices and apartments butted up against each other, two or three floors high. It leads past the old church, a cultural center, a rec center and in half a mile or so gets to the colonial state capital, across the street from the colonial cathedral, but Elissa cuts up and over to avoid the center and has another half mile or so down a more narrow but still busy street, Juarez. Between the architecture, the people, the businesses, the occasional dog and some crazy signs (one had the E with the slash for no parking, and underneath it said “se ponchan llantas” - tires will be punctured), there is something interesting every few steps.

The other day, looking south at an intersection, there was a great view of Pico Orizaba, a beautiful classic snow-covered volcano.

THE MARKET is just a few blocks away, behind a large colonial church. I walked over Tuesday for lunch, and today, market day, I went back for some fruit and cheese. I have a serious problem with farmers’ markets at home, and it was the same here...I buy too much! And pesos are so much easier to spend then dollars! Soon my two shopping bags were full, and I had to lug them home. The cheese is fantastic...a kind of string cheese. I ordered a kilo (momentarily forgetting that a kilo is more than two pounds. The vendor unwound it from a big ball. And I brought some strange red flowers I’d never seen before, called here gasparitos, although apparently they are known by other names in other parts. Gathered, not farmed. The vendor explained how you fry them with eggs. Elissa was familiar with them and cooked them up this morning. Muy bien sabrosa!

Trip to Xalapa, Veracruz

Sunday, Mar. 21 - Plane from LA to Phoenix. Another to Mexico City. Taxi to Tapo station. Bus to Xalapa. All connections smooth as silk. No rushing and no waiting. The bus is really incredible, with plush, roomy seats, airplane-style bathroom, no stops. Four and a half hours on a smooth, modern toll road, for just $24. You go through a security check, then as you board you are given a complimentary water or soda, and the makings for tea or coffee, hot water and cups available at the back of the bus. Movies and music, which I didn’t take advantage of.

We head east. To the south, great view of Iztaccihuatl and Popocatépetl, the magnificent snow-covered volcanoes, Popo recently active, part of the ring of mountains surrounding the Valley of Mexico. Between them, the Paseo de Cortes, where the conquistadors marched on their way to conquer Mexico in 1519.

Huge auto factories – VW, Mercedes Benz and others – surrounded by half-finished, half-decayed concrete towns where the worker live. Occasionally, far off in the midst of this concrete mishmash, the unmistakable towers of a colonial era church. Then miles of irrigated fields that could be in California’s San Joaquin Valley, except for the occasional horse-drawn wagons and (I think) plows. Some smaller farms, in the hills, with fields no more than 100 yards across, separated by rows of agave, source of pulque, the ancient beverage which was still the popular beverage of the Mexican peasantry as recently as 1950, now almost gone. After I discovered Mexico in 1991, and started making frequent trips to many parts, I tried to drink pulque every trip. Sometimes it was quite a project to find some. I wonder if I’ll come across any this trip.

Then it is dark. There’s a Wal-Mart. I’m in Xalapa, capital of the State of Veracruz and home of the Universidad Veracruzano, where my daughter has a faculty position. A two-dollar cab ride brings me to her apartment. It’s the first chance I’ve had to visit her in the three years she’s been here.