What Were They Thinking?

A scene from a movie ten years ago just sticks in my head, so I've got to pry it out and leave it here for you.

In "The Social Network," the film about the beginning of Facebook, this scene take place in the office of Harvard President Larry Summers.  The Winklevoss twins have an appointment to protest Mark Zuckerberg's takeover/theft of their idea, presenting it as an honor code violation.  The president has a visceral dislike of the twins, calling them "A-holes" later, and is instantly put off by their appearing dressed up in blazers and ties.  He accordingly dismisses their complaint, thus setting in motion legal battles and a lot of bad publicity. What has bothered me about this is that the president's decision not to look into the situation and deal with it seems to have been based on emotion and irritation, which is less than what we expect of someone in his position.  There are so many other examples of experienced, educated professionals in positions of power and authority who similarly disappoint, and I'm sure you have seen them personally. 

Rational thinking is derailed by ignorance, prejudices, borderline personality traits, beliefs and fear.  Damage is done which could have been avoided.  Recently I saw another story about an unthought-out decision:  a woman had graduated at the top of her law school class in Chicago in the mid 1920s, and had high hopes when applying for a position at law firms.  She was told coldly that they "did not hire women," and sent packing.  A conservative knee-jerk reaction instead of a little thought -- society was changing after World War I and the adoption of the 19th and 20th amendments, and there are opportunities in such times which are lost when ignored.  A top female lawyer in the firm could have brought in significant new business from female clients in need of estate planning, in business matters or those having marital problems.

Boxed-in thinking can have a much wider impact.  It seems CIA Director J.J. Angleton was obsessed with the idea of false Soviet defectors misleading his agency, acting as double agents.  Valuable information from these defectors was ignored, and one individual was even mistreated badly due to such suspicion (he was, it turns out, genuine). The ongoing hunt for a mole inside the intelligence community also caused much pointless damage.  Ordinary police work would have revealed that the mole was their own Aldrich Ames, who, along with his wife, clearly lived too lavish a lifestyle (home, cars, etc.) for his income and visited parks at night far too often (to make coded information dead drops, of course, not to feed the squirrels).  Pervasive fear and unfounded beliefs usually drive out common sense.

Clinging to an orthodoxy of belief usually precludes clear thinking.  Herbert Hoover, intelligent, capable and educated as he was, kept to his conservative principles and declined to intervene to the extent the emergency required when the stock market crash of 1929 could have been mitigated by bolder action.  The Irish starved and died during the Potato Famine of the 1840s while effective aid was denied by those in ruling England who believed it would upset the market.  A century and a half later, economists like Laffer and others blindly perpetrate the same misunderstandings of Adam Smith. to the applause of conservatives and the misfortune of millions.  In stark contrast to Hoover, Thomas Jefferson completely and brilliantly violated his small government principles to make the Louisiana Purchase.  He might have agreed with Emerson that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. 

      

An Ancient Student's Lament

Cuneiform, cuneiform
How'd that get to be the norm?
You Akkadians, Sumerians and Elamites, 
That's no way to write!

I say it's just a batch
Of silly chickenscratch!
Incising marks in clay is bad --
Have you never heard of a legal pad?

The Israelites across the sand
Put things down in a handsome hand.
But I can't help it, I'm just averse
To reading and writing in reverse!

I'll take a ship with sails unfurled
To Western lands, a whole new world!
Yes, I can only dream of it:
To finally write in Palmer script!

Here's To You

We went only to find an inexpensive bookcase for the basement, to give the homeless books in stacks and bags a more dignified place to be.  And we did find one, just the right size, and on half-price sale.  Then things aligned even better when there was a break in the awful weather to load it up and drive all of an entire block home.  This estate sale was right behind us!

I don't recall another estate sale previously in our neighborhood despite the fact that people are often moving in and out, more than half the time due to age.  Even without exterior maintenance to worry about, keeping up with a home and your other needs gets to be too much at some point.  We hear some have passed away after a stay in a retirement home; others we wonder about.  But in this case, we had never even seen the lady who lived there behind us or knew who she was -- for twenty years.  And in that block of four townhomes, we have never seen two of the others either.  It is somewhat eerie.

We asked the sale managers about whose bookcase we were hauling away, and they told us she was widowed in 2000, her husband was a pretty prominent local attorney, and she had children and grandchildren who apparently did not want much of the possessions of a long lifetime.  I surmised they had lived in a bigger home at one time and entertained regularly, based on the large amount of quality glassware and several complete sets of fine china.  You can't take much with you to the retirement home, but it must have been stressful to leave most everything behind.

It was sad to see the late husband's personalized Penn State mug, dated 1954, among the ceramic items. You would think one of the family would have taken it, at least, as a remembrance.  After seeing that, I paused, looked around further, and saw a set of four coupe glasses with green stems, in new condition.  I don't know what the sale managers do with everything that wouldn't sell, but I knew what would be done with them.  They were going to come home with us, to remember the elegant life of people we'd never met and never would.  Lives should not disappear and be forgotten so quickly.
           

Take It To The Limit?

"...the worst are full of passionate intensity"

--T. S. Eliot

Coincidental to this weekend's gun-nut riot in Virginia, I've been reading about, and the writings and sermons of, the 17th-century Puritans.  While trying to parse their reasoning so colorfully expressed with great unreasoning abandon, they still seem to me to be truly frightening.  And as we can today see, they may have exchanged their tall hats and wide white collars for baseball caps and t-shirts scrawled with crazy stuff, they're still with us.

Those Puritans were rightly outraged by their contemporary kings (James I & II, Charles I, and Louis XIV) claiming divine right to do whatever they wished to anyone.  But their furious reaction was about as useful to mankind as the Nazis' later face-off with the Reds.  For all the self-righteous noise and bloodshed, extremism is the wrecking ball of history.  But like an eternal pendulum, it swings from one extreme to another over the centuries, spending only a brief time in the calm middle.  

And extremist doctrines, which inspire such fanatical crowds and movements, are usually based on pretty much nothing.  Think of Ayn Rand's system of "Objectivism," which is nothing at all but a mirror image of the "collectivist," or communist, dogma it opposes.  Each far end of that pendulum's swing is just so, a false opposition, a big con, just a mirror image.  This is the foolishness of believing in ALL OR NOTHING.  So why is such a dangerous approach so attractive to so many?

I recently read a twelve-page summary of a paper presented at an academic conference.  It tried to explain people's responses to public stimuli in media and their behaviors.  But it was all statistics and groupings; I came away wondering why personality types were not considered.  Nature or nurture predominate in some people, but for most it's a mixture,  And we've found how much brain chemistry controls that nature.  So you inherit that and usually will believe and act like your family, group and community.  Even in cases where outwardly it looks like you do not.  That explains Reagan Democrats, for one example: a basically conservative nature from rural roots despite the urban work setting and union card.

So one thing is pretty constant in human nature, and that is: people go too far.  Some would say that's the spirit that leads people to explore and discover, but think about the bodies and trash on Mt. Everest and the destruction of the New World's population and forests.  Not that we all should stay home in our huts and do nothing, but don't do 85 in a pickup truck on an icy road, either. 

    

In Merrie Olde Westeros

With dashing knight Jon Snow

On our dragon like a sleigh

O'er the serfs we go

Scorching all that's in our way

At the Wall the forges ring

To make our swords shine bright

Past moon and stars we ride and sing

A slaying song tonight!

Pantsed!

I imagine a custom-tailored suit in a fine fabric can be quite comfortable.  Not so much with the usual off the rack stuff, and unless you are really into impressing strangers, you'll usually want to get out of one after the wedding or funeral you wore it to.  The usual cut of trousers, slacks or pants I have never found comfortable.  So it's blue jeans most of the time, as a default.  Recently, though, I found something new:  the Wrangler Outdoors pants made of mostly nylon with a fleece lining.  You can slide right into the car seat in them, and the lining makes quite a difference right now in December.  A little over $20, obtained on line or at a Vanity Fair outlet if you have one nearby.  Since I got two, the jeans have not been in use lately after being the staple for decades.  Students can wear them to school now and probably can't conceive that was grounds for being sent home back in the day (OK, way back).  But I probably would have had some baggy hand-me-downs then anyway, so it wasn't so much of a missed opportunity.

It's been much worse fashion- and comfort-wise in previous ages.  Take a look:

This ancient Celt should have had a mirror at home, don't you think:

I have a picture of my father having to wear boys' knickers, like these:

Sort of like wool cargo shorts.  Maybe not too bad.  But you probably couldn't wait to graduate to the big boy stuff.

And this style will always be remembered as au courant in the 1960s:

I still think they look good on the ladies.  Not so much on those of us on the other team.  And one more thing that almost always looks good on them and not us:

Speaking of not wearing shorts or jeans to school, for a little while back  in the early 1960s, the fad was a miniature belt with buckle on the top rear of the pants -- we called it "ivy league," but who knows why.

Jabberwacky

Have you been way out in the countryside recently?  Other than the observation that the corn fields have been cut, I'll bet the quiet made an impression.  Before the Industrial Age, there must have been a lot less noise all around.  In some environments -- public places, cities, big stores -- for the sake of your inner balance you can try to tune it out, but you do expect it in those environments.  Why then do people consciously add to the cacaphony  seek it out and, it seems, need it?

I'm thinking about two things:  voluntarily listening to an endless stream of chatter from media which one could turn off, and voluntarily using that portable phone 16 hours a week (on average).  It's said we endure 4,000 to 5,000 advertisements a day, also.  Wouldn't those three things, going on constantly or simultaneously, drive any normal person nuts?  Once, on a bus trip, I had to listen to a woman talk for the entire three hours at, not with, her seatmate.  I could not possibly think of enough to talk about for three hours straight.

That's irritating, but jabber has been getting dangerous:  cell phone use in vehicles leads to 1.6 million crashes a year.  Pedestrian deaths and injuries are up significantly also, and here's how that happens:

And believe it or not, texting and driving is six times more likely to cause an accident than drunk driving.  So, what's so important about jabbering back and forth that you'd risk it all for?  It's a mystery to me, except that it might just be another example of addiction in humans -- which of course makes no sense either, but it's deep and wide in our species for sure.  I ran into two teachers from Texas recently, and they said their students are so tied to their phones they have ceased to learn much of anything, have no context outside of their bubble, and don't seem to know how to actually do things.  That's scary.

         Your ears are soft and small
         and listen to an old man not at all...

                             -- John Crowe Ransom