Real Life Wisdom . . .
. . . the kind that’s born on the knife edge between love and fear, born of falling off that edge again and again, and struggling back up, has never been so beautifully expressed as in this post by Danny Miller, one of his most magnificent ever. It’s a real collaboration between him and life; look how gracefully he fields the long-ball cues life throws him! It’s only right at the heart of the matter that everything is charged with message and meaning like that. We’re there all the time, but only at the edges do we know it.
And look at his son Charlie!! Remember when he was small enough to fit in your hand and crawled all over by a parasitic kudzu of tubes, so fragile his intestine and his brain tore like water just at the touch of the air . . . look at him! Almost free of tubes, smiling, frowning, sucking his thumb, looking so much older and more aware than the newborn infant he would have been just about now . . .
“Similarly matched in strength, both straddling the same foundation of awestruck inquiry…”
That’s Anchoress’s beautiful description of the striving between science and religion. It’s all about wonder, as I also tried to say in my Hubble piece, currently hosted in a temporary safe place while Natural History changes servers (I know, most of you have read it, but I’m awfully fond of it, not least because I sweated blood for it in that way that only happens when a piece of writing matters to you, and then makes it matter more). Anchoress describes the long intimacy (and sometimes lovers’ quarrel) between science and religion in many of the greatest minds; in another NH blog post I described my realization that science actually started out as a branch of religion.
But I didn’t mean to make this a “me, me, me” — more of an excited “Me too, me too!” Please read and savor Anchoress’s post. What a marvelous, generous writer!
Credo
From the “New York Times” obituary of Polish dissident academic Leszek Kolakowski:
In a noted lecture in 1982, Kolakowski said the cultural role of philosophy was “never to let the inquisitive energy of mind go to sleep, never to stop questioning what appears to be obvious and definitive, always to defy the seemingly intact resources of common sense” and “never to forget that there are questions that lie beyond the legitimate horizon of science and are nonetheless crucially important to the survival of humanity as we know it.”
Which makes me wish more historians and journalists were philosophers — something I haven’t often wished. Read it for a glimpse of a 20th century life.
Truth, Reality and the Punks of South Street
Almost 20 years have passed since R.F. Laird (aka instapunk, man of controversy) published The Boomer Bible – a book best summarized by Glen Reynolds with characteristic brevity – “Ten thousand years from now, scholars will still be confused.”
But, heck, a lot of confusing books were published in the twentieth century, right? The difference is, or would appear to be, that Laird believes what he’s saying.
That is to say, the Boomer Bible is less an exercise in literary pyrotechnics (or literary marketing) than it is an attempt at a “total book,” a book self-consciously written (whether by the empirical R.F. Laird or by the punks of South Street) to diagnose the sickness of the twentieth century by penetrating the mystery of the whole. And he got it right. As he will tell you. Personally. With extreme prejudice.
Okay. So… (foot tapping) …. What’s the sickness of the twentieth century?
That brings me to the occasion of this post. Laird has, for whatever reason [edit: here’s the reason – as a service to his web community], suddenly seen fit to post several parts of the back story of The Boomer Bible that may or may not shed light on the meaning of The Boomer Bible. Here’s one, touching on the distinction between truth and reality, that stands pretty nicely on its own. Still, if you’re new to Laird’s punk mythos the first few paragraphs will seem obscure. But trust me, it’s worth a read.
Listen without Watching
For best results, close your eyes after clicking on this video. Best heard not viewed.
(Via Within the Crainium)
Walter Cronkite, Up Close and Personal
My friend Dalma Heyn interviewed Walter Cronkite in 1985, and has now posted the interview on her Love Goddess blog in two parts: Part I, Part II. Besides an unusual glimpse of his personal life, relationship with his wife, and sense of humor (the last two very much intertwined), the interview showcases Cronkite’s old-fashioned beliefs on the ethics and standards of television journalism, already being gnawed away by entertainment value and the scramble for ratings by the time they spoke. Lament it, snort with laughter at it, or both, it really is a glimpse of another eon.
DH: Why do you think you’re so trusted by Americans?
WC: I think because, in doing my job in the news business, I really have held just as firmly as I could to what I believe to be the ethics and prinkcples of good journalism. I have tried desperately, particularly in television, to hew to the middle of the road in the presentation of any given story—the pros and cons, allegations and denials—and to see that facts are well pinned down and secure. That is integrity in news presentation, and I guess that through the years that showed through. I was always annoyed when the presentation got in the way of the facts—and show business aspects. Whe graphics and pictures got in the way of telling the story, it was always a source of annoyance for me.
* * *
DH: What annoys you about television news today?
WC: I do not think they make the best use of the limited amount of time that’s available to them. I think there is too much editorialization; too much “featurizing.” There is so much of importance to communicate to a population that’s getting most of its news from television that we shouldn’t spend the time doing anything except cramming news down their throats.
Hey Walt, the customer is always right. You can’t cram anything down his or her throat. Isn’t that the liberal elitist attitude — we’ll give you what’s good for you whether you want it or not? People are maddeningly resistant to that approach. The trick is to entice them to want what’s good for them. How do you get large numbers of people to want honest, thoughtful, exhaustive reporting — and not just to think it would be nice, but to demand it and consume it?
. . . That’s what I thought.
The Space Program and Me
I was born in 1960, so you’d think it would be a big part of my life. And I guess it was. Tang, and all that. I do remember staying up for the historic moment.* I wanted to be an astronaut when I was 5. I wanted to be a firefighter, too, and by the time I was 7 I wanted to be a paleontologist.
It seeped into our play. But probably not in a way NASA would have applauded. For instance, out in the outer suburbs, my best friend Billy and I (age 7 or 8 then) used to pluck Japanese beetles from the flowers and fruit trees, embed them in fist-sized mudballs, and stand in the middle of the street and hurl them as high as we could. They came down with a splat that sprayed mud from one curb to the other. Sometimes, there was a stunned beetle in the center of it. If so, he was immediately sent up on another mission. One survived seven flights and re-entries, and we dubbed him “Viktor Viktory,” and let him go, which I guess now means the Russians still were winning at that point.
* Actually, the moonwalk was a hoax. Michael Jackson never did it. It was staged on a treadmill in a warehouse in Nevada.
Reading the Honduran Constitution . . .
. . . rather than reading our Constitution into the Honduran situation, reveals that it is actually that country’s Constitution that removed President Zelaya from office. The Honduran Supreme Court and Army were not merely reacting to a violation of Article 239, which imposes a one-term limit on all presidents; they were carrying out the provisions of that Article.
My friend Casselman wrote an op-ed, “Brave Little Honduras,” that ran in the Washington Examiner. When he posted it on his own website, a commenter challenged him with the common argument that while Zelaya had acted unconstitutionally by attempting to hold a plebiscite on his reelection, the Supreme Court and Army had also acted unconstitutionally by ousting him rather than impeaching him. Not true, Casselman posted today in an update [scroll to the end of the piece]. An excerpt:
This argument has been also used by Sres. Castro, Chavez, Morales AND our own President Obama to justify Zelaya to return and finish out his term, I have now read the Honduran constitution, andalthough it does have an impeachment process, its Article 239 states that no one may serve more than one term as president, and that anyone who tries to do so, OR TRIES TO CHANGE ARTICLE 239, automatically defaults his official position. Thus, Zelaya was actually removed from office by the Honduras constitution. The supreme court was only doing its job in formally declaring the obvious. . . .
Sr. Zelaya, who has been trying to bully his way back into Honduras, has now called for a revolution. Make no mistake, he means a Marxist revolution. President Obama is backing the wrong horse for the wrong reasons.
Ambiance 