God, The Main True Thing

As I stepped off the bus this morning to walk to my office, I had what felt like an epiphany, an answer to a conundrum: The God Conundrum.
    I think it was provoked by the memory of an interchange I had over a period of months a few years ago with a devout Muslim named Maliha. For the last minute on the bus I had been regretting that I seemed to have cut myself off from Maliha by virtue of my having vigorously denied the truth of Islam.
    And I was likely thinking of being cut off because of just having read in Irvin D. Yalom's The Schopenhauer Cure how psychotherapy group member Philip has explicitly followed Schopenhauer in willing (like a porcupine) to cut himself off from others, but has been unsettled by recent interchanges into wondering whether he is right to follow Schopenhauer in this.
    Maliha had usually ended her emails by saying, "Take care of you." This reminded me that I care about Maliha too, as she seemed to care about me. She'd also a few times said that we were each of us on our own path to God, we had that in common. As I stepped off the bus, I must have been asking myself what was "God" that both a devout Muslim and an atheist could be on the path to it?

The answer came back at me so quickly and easily, it had that well-oiled feeling characteristic of epiphanies, the feeling that it's so clear and easy it has to be right. I'll try to express it, so you can judge for yourself.
    It came to me that God is The Main True Thing. Like Paul Tillich's "ultimate concern," which everyone has, "the main true thing" too is common to everyone; that is, to all "bipeds" (as Schopenhauer usually referred disdainfully to humans), to everyone with a human brain. We all want to (must) settle on what we regard as the main true thing.
    Many children just adopt as the main true thing whatever their parents have laid on them by virtue of the First Amendment, whether explicitly granted (as to U.S. citizens) or just assumed by cultural default (as in the Near East, if not in most countries). Others go on a quest for it, like Maliha and me; we're on a path, we don't think we're at the destination yet, we're still wending our way.

But there are two main branches of this path. Maliha has taken one, I the other. Her branch is roughly that there is a supernatural order that is more real (infinitely more real) than the natural order that we experience here on Earth during our eye-blink of a corporeal lifetime. And we can get in touch with this order, or at least align ourselves with it through moral and meditative practice. I understand that Maliha's path is to discipline herself in those practices.
    The other branch of The One True Thing path, the one that I have taken, is that there is no supernatural order, nothing "out there" or "above here" to get in touch with. Our eye-blink of a lifetime is all there is for each of us. Death is final. As Schopenhauer put it (from Epicurus apparently, according to Yalom in Staring at the Sun), "After our death we will be what we were before our birth." [quoted on p. 210 in Yalom's The Schopenhauer Cure]

Take care of you too, Maliha, on your path to The One True Thing. We are on it together, in our divergent senses of what The One True Thing is.

Auld lang sein

A supreme value of life is old friendships that don't die. One such that I treasure is that with Bill and Ishrut, who lived next-door to us when we moved into our house in Stoneridge, in Chapel Hill, on August 21, 1983. I still remember the date we moved to North Carolina, too: Bloomsday that same year¹. Our new house wasn't ready yet, so we lived in the Carolina Inn for one week, then the rest of the summer in a house in Falconbridge.
    Ishrut was my wife's best friend. Bill was about the most urbane, sociable man I'd ever met. His company was eminently enjoyable. Both of them were world-traveled and cosmopolitan (and still are). They'd met in Tehran and, I believe, gotten married there. Bill was there on assignment for the international company he worked for. I think his next assignment was in France, before they moved to Chapel Hill. And it was his next assignment, to São Paulo, Brazil, that took them away again, in 1986 or 87.
    As I recall, their return to the U.S. was to Connecticut, somewhere near Milford. I remember because that's where they moored their boat, and have continued to moor it the fifteen or more years they've lived in Princeton.
    After their annual seasonal letter arrived last year, with its news of their sailing, my daughter told me that her memory from our first years in North Carolina of Bill and Ishrut's being sailors had inspired her twenty years later to take up sailing. This year's letter arrived this week, and I replied with our news, including our daughter's plan to participate with her husband in the Pacific Cup Race to Hawaii next summer, aboard a 42-ft J-type craft. Bill wrote back:

With a J42 they are certainly racing the right boat. With a good set of sails (mostly spinnaker work—and it is down wind (sleigh ride) to the Islands from San Fran, well, actually from Los Angeles). A very serious racing sailor friend of mine participated in this race and was a member of the on-deck night crew—and commented that he pushed the boat very hard during the night—and groused that the day guys were more conservative with shortened sail etc.—which was the principal reason, of course, as to why they did not win the race, etc., etc. Lots of stories.

    I shared this with my daughter, who wrote to Bill and Ishrut:

My husband and some guys sailed a Catalina 42 in the Pac Cup last year with an asymmetrical spinnaker and they moaned quite a bit about how slow it was and that it would not sail dead downwind or even particularly deep. We don't have that problem with the J42! It came with a carbon fiber pole and an asymmetrical spinnaker and our boat partner (the money in the partnership) has bought a new main, two new jibs, two symmetrical spinnakers, all new running rigging, etc. and we are yet to take the thing to another rigger for some more tweaks on the set up. The boat is currently at the yard and just got a new bottom, rudder repair (looks like we hit that shoal pretty hard back in the summer, LOL), etc. and the guys are taking it from there to another yard tomorrow to have the forward head made legal (holding tank installed). For the Pac Cup we will be running it as hard and fast as we can, considering it is set up for cruising (we will take out the microwave and leave the dinghy at home but we still have a huge stainless radar arch and dinghy davits integrated into the lifeline set up). I am the weakest driver of the six or seven going, but hopefully I will get in enough downwind (and night) practice it the next six months that I will not be completely petrified. <smile> I don't see us shortening sail or taking down the kite unless things get really hairy. We are hoping for wind and not the awful calm of my husband's aborted trip in 2000 where they had to turn around and come back due to running low on food and water!
    Ha ha, it is fun to write that to someone who can understand it! It certainly sounds like you are enjoying your lovely boat!

I of course don't understand all of this but am delighted that my daughter speaks sailor so fluently!

A special gift of this friendship is what Bill told me today about visiting this blog:

I truly admire and am a fan of your web site. Its content runs deep, but I do manage to glean “stuff”—just the prodigious nature of it amazes me. Anyway, the site resides in my favorites and periodically I call it up to see what’s new!

<blush>
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1. June 16, 1904, the day that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle. It is commemorated by Joyce as the day the events in his 1922 novel, Ulysses, take place. By the way, I didn't choose Bloomsday to leave California because it was Bloomsday; it was just the first day I could leave—the day after my last obligation to IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory ended.

A sad irony of the First Amendment

Irvin D. Yalom is one of my favorite authors. Not only have two of his collections of "tales of psychotherapy" richly rewarded my reading¹, but also two and now a recently started third of his three novels², The Schopenhauer Cure, with dozens of quotations from the works of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) sprinkled throughout.
    The theme of the book might be phrased, "how to face death," same as Yalom's most recent non-fiction book, which I read a few weeks ago: Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. In The Schopenhauer Cure, Yalom fictionalizes himself as of course also having to face death. Sounds grim? Well, know this: it's a compelling read for discriminating readers.

Anyway, what's this about the First Amendment? And just what is the First Amendment?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [emphasis mine]; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

    In both of Yalom's books cited above, religion is acknowledged as having a use for people in facing death—even though Yalom will have nothing to do with it personally. So, on the first page of Chapter 8, Yalom places this quotation from Schopenhauer:

Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection [emphasis mine], the highest dignity and eminence...and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas. [p. 55]

Therein lies the irony, that the United States Constitution, in protecting "religious freedom," practically denies religious freedom (including the ability to say "no" to religion) to children!
_______________

1. I have read these collections: Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (1989) and Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy (1999).
2. His other novels are: When Nietzsche Wept (1992) and Lying on the Couch (1996). The first has been made into a movie (2007), with Armand Assante in the title role.

All in a name

This morning at the office we had bagels and coffee for a colleague's eightieth birthday. It was a happy hour of reminiscing for us all. The celebrant told the story of a woman named Sexauer at the UNC campus he'd come to General Administration from. "It's a true story," he said.

Someone called the campus and asked for the dean.
    "He isn't available right now."
    "Could I speak to the associate dean, then?"
    "I'm afraid he's not available either."
    "Well, this is urgent. Isn't there anyone there I can talk to? Who is this?"
    "No, there's not. This is Sexauer."

S5/#12, an EO episode of "Grey's Anatomy"

Episode Twelve of Season Five of Shonda Rhimes's "Grey's Anatomy" was so good that I have to review it. I of course love the show anyway (more than my wife, who has come to think of it as a soap opera, but who did happen to watch Episode Twelve with me). When I say "was," I'm referring to night before last, when we watched it on DVD borrowed from our local branch of the Alamance County Libraries.
    Like many a fine story, there's lots going on in any episode of "Grey's Anatomy." In this episode, for example, a 5'-5" guy ends up in Seattle Grace Hospital with severe infections in both legs owing to having had surgery in Thailand to lengthen his legs by two inches. His main complaint seems to have been that he could never get a second date from any girl he dated. Being short just sucked. Unfortunately, in Seattle he lost not only the two inches gained in Thailand but also another quarter-inch due to the surgeon's having to shave the ends of the reconnected bones. The guy is even more dejected now. His brother, there to offer moral support, but quite exasperated by now, asks, "Five-three, five-five, what's the difference anyway?" His brother acknowledges, "Not much, but at least you can actually say you're five-five; anything shorter than that, you can't."
    This wasn't just a nice joke. In the course of the conversation of which the "joke" was a part, the guy's brother has let him know how much his obsession with being short has disrupted the brother's life. In paraphrase, the brother says, "I'm five-ten, but I didn't play basketball because you'd moan about being too short to play. Girls didn't not want to date you because you're short, but because you're always complaining about being short." The beauty of the scene, for me, was the sense (from the brilliant writing, acting, and directing) that the guy got it and might now be able to move on.

But the story line in Episode Twelve that figuratively made me jump up and shout bravo was the one with guest actor Eric Stoltz in the role of a PDR (prisoner on death row) who is brought in to Seattle Grace to have multiple stab wounds tended to. An X-ray reveals that there's a sharp object about three inches long sticking through one of his vertebrae. (It's a broken-off toothbrush handle that was filed down and sharpened for use as a shiv.)
    The PDR's presence in the hospital surfaces significant differences in moral response from the doctors....
    I just realized that it could take more words than I think a post (even one of mine) should have to clearly recount the plot lines of Episode Twelve. I'm thinking of Dr. Mark Sloan in the previous episode's having gone to bed with "Little Grey" even though he'd promised "Big Grey's" boyfriend (and his long-time friend), Dr. Derek Shepherd, that he wouldn't; so what's going to happen with this? And Derek's mother (who was practically a mother to Mark too) is coming to visit and meet "Big Grey," who is being coached by Dr. Izzy Stevens how to impress a potential mother-in-law. Derek's father (we learn in this episode) was murdered in a store robbery, so Derek has no sympathy for the PDR, and his mother might be expected to have none either. And there's a little boy in the hospital, at death's door and desperately needing a new intestine and liver, whose blood type and antibodies just happen to be matched by the corresponding organs in the PDR....
    Indeed, in the hands of a lesser writer than Shonda Rhimes and her staff, of a lesser director and lesser actors, this could be soap opera of a laughable kind. But the writing and all are so perfect (I might mention the editing too) that it's just ExtraOrdinary!
    I recommend that you see it for yourself, and not just this episode, but the preceding eleven episodes of the season, if not the preceding however many episodes of four seasons! Nearly a hundred, I guess. Do I need to get a life, or what?

The "right spouse"?

A sentence from Ian McEwan's short story about Michael Beard's courtship of Maisie Farmer deflates both the romance of that "poetic" courtship and the romantic assumption of Friday's post on how we know we chose "the right spouse":

He [Michael] was to count that misty, sunny November afternoon, along the Cherwell river by the Rainbow Bridge, as the point at which the first of his marriages began. [Emphasis mine] [from "The Use of Poetry," in today's issue of The New Yorker]

    E. B. White might have married someone other than Katherine Angell and, with luck, have found as good an indicator that that was the right one as "tooth twine" had been that it was Katherine. And I....
    And you.

McEwan's story of Michael Beard's first courtship is too good to be Beard's whole story. One hopes that "The Use of Poetry" is the opening chapter of "his novel Solar," which The New Yorker's notes on contributors promise "is due out in the spring."
    A clue that it might be is that the Michael Beard character is interested in photons (a basic unit of light) and decades later will win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Just the sort of delicious story that Ian McEwan has been setting before us for three decades.

Enhancement to my movie listing

Today I decided to include with my movie ratings a link to the movie's Internet Movie Database entry. I usually consult the IMDb anyway for director's name or release year.
    The first movie for which I provide the link is "Laurel Canyon," which we viewed last night. Directed by Lisa Cholodenko, released in 2002, starring Frances McDormand, Christian Bale, Kate Beckinsale, Natascha McElhone, and Alessandro Nivola. All of that information and much more can be found at imdb.com.
    What a fine atmosphere of danger Cholodenko manages—real-life danger, not Hollywood-manufactured for the movies. I know which of the two women I hope the Christian Bale character goes to....

I am grateful to my neighbors Bill and Pamela, for lending us "Laurel Canyon" from their vast personal library of movies. About the only thing from my own scant library that I was able to lend them was "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover." Incredibly, Bill and Pamela had never even heard of Peter Greenaway. And Bill and I have read so many of the same books! For example, Uncommon Therapy (about the psychiatrist Milton Erickson) by Jay Haley and The Structure of Magic and other books about neuro-linquistic programming by psychologist Richard Bandler and linguist John Grinder. (We got to talking about NLP yesterday because Bill, who's NLP-certified, commented that the way I phrased something sounded as though I was familiar with NLP myself.)

To find my movie listing, first click on "[SIDEBAR TABLE OF CONTENTS]," in the masthead, then click on "Movies," in the right column.

About those dead cats

It's cold and dreary in Mebane. There's even a possibility of snow (our always-reliable and hardly-ever-wrong weather forecasters tell us). What better sort of day for reading Gail Collins, who is even more reliable and right than our weather forecasters? I recommend her op-ed piece, "The Lost Weekend," in today's New York Times. Excerpts:

The Senate is going to be in session all weekend, debating the big health care bill and arguing about which direction the cost-curve is heading. This is a positive development on two counts. It keeps senators off the streets while providing much-needed employment in the chart-making sector of our economy.
    ...
    Is that perfectly clear? Good. Now we will return to our regularly scheduled conversation. Did you see that hot reality show “Hoarders” on A&E the other night? What about that lady who hoarded her dead cats? If “Hoarders” gets superpopular, do you think lots of people will start putting dead cats in their living room just so they can get on TV and be famous? Maybe somebody will try to bring dead cats to a state dinner at the White House! Does the Secret Service have a plan to avert this?
    Sorry. I’ll behave. Back to the health care bill.
    ...
    In fact, G.O.P. senators appear to have amendments aimed at wiping out virtually all the cost-cutting the Democrats have put in the bill, including productivity adjustments and incentives for innovation in health care delivery.
    If they can’t kill the bill completely, Republicans who are not from Maine seem intent on raising its price tag....
    There is no sane explanation for all this other than crass political calculation....
    Now, about those dead cats.

Enjoy today's weather.
    Or, as my friend Fred says:

McCain's not crazy. He's just performing stunts that he thinks will help him get re-elected. Unfortunately, there are no end of people (they're called politicians) who are quite willing to screw up the country as long as they can continue to enjoy the spotlight and perks of public office.

How you know you chose the right spouse

In Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, I learned this morning how E. B. White (1899-1985) knew he had chosen the right woman to marry:

White married Katharine Angell in 1929 after what he later described as a "stormy" romance (when they first met, she was in a failing marriage and had two children). White later wrote, "I soon realized I had made no mistake in my choice of a wife. I was helping her pack an overnight bag one afternoon when she said, 'Put in some tooth twine.' I knew then that a girl who called dental floss tooth twine was the girl for me." [p. 32]

How did I choose?

Well, it wasn't hard. My wife of almost forty-four years was good-looking and intellectual. How could I resist someone who appeared in our very first conversation to be enthusiastically interested in what I was telling her about a book I was then reading [Gestalt Psychology, by Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967)]? We were wed six weeks later.
    My wife is the only person I know who has read the whole of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and while I may be the one of us interested in modernism and the modern Irish writers (I have read most of literary critic Hugh Kenner's books and Ellmann's biography of James Joyce), she's the one of us who has actually finished reading Ulysses.
    Mention of my wife reminds me of one of her memorable observations. It was a speculation about why someone we know had chosen his wife. "It couldn't have been her face, but it might have been her fetching rear end."

How did you choose?

Please tell us in a comment how you know you chose the right one....

Remembering our evening at Ernie's

Looking forward to some possibly fine dining on New Year's Eve (and our daughter's fortieth birthday), I had occasion today to remember that forty-one years ago my wife and I dined at one of San Francisco's (and the world's) most elegant restaurants, Ernie's, which I believe closed in 1995. We chose Ernie's on the advice of Dr. Patrick McClung, a colleague at IBM's joint Total Operations Processing System (TOPS) Project with the Southern Pacific Railroad. Pat was well-known on the project for his savoir-faire and cosmopolitanism.
    The occasion was to celebrate my winning a TOPS dinner-for-two award. Pat recommended that I send one of the secretaries over to pick up a menu for me to study beforehand. "And she should say it's for Doctor Dean and his wife," he advised. "That'll set a better tone for your arrival."
    I suppose that Pat could send one of our secretaries over (and yes, they were all female), but I wasn't about to impose. I walked to Ernie's myself and asked to borrow a menu—leather-bound, I was pleasantly surprised to learn. (I don't think I knew until that moment just what class of restaurant Pat was sending us to.)
    My wife and I looked everything up in Larousse Gastronomique, and we knew before we entered Ernie's just what we were going to have. I can even remember what we ate and what the waiter who served us looked like ("a Russian hussar," as I said in my memo the following Monday to the project manager, subject "Gourmandizing at Ernie's"). It's understandable, if somewhat incredible, that I still remember, we made such a to-do about it.
    Pat made some particular recommendations for the evening. "While you're waiting in the bar to be seated, order a glass of Pedro Domecq La Ina sherry." We did, and, wow!, I imagine that I can still remember how fine it was.
    Pat suggested a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet to drink with our aperitifs, and a bottle of Hospices de Beaune with our entrées. We did, and (as incredible as anything else about the occasion) we drank both bottles and still managed to get home in one piece to dismiss the baby-sitter, whose fee was also covered by the dinner-for-two award.
    While I can't claim to be utterly certain at this point, I think that these are the items we had:

Aperitifs: Turtle soup, caviar, pâté de foie gras.
Salads: Kentucky limestone lettuce for my wife, hearts of palm for me.
Entrées: Lamb chops for my wife, medallions of beef for me.
Desserts: I had to consult my wife, who remembers that we both had chocolate mousse.

By the way, we really, really blew the budget the project manager had set aside for the award, and future recipients were limited to a specified reimbursable amount (one of my fondest IBM memories). But in 1968, the restaurant bill for all of the above mentioned was only about $100 for the both of us.

Moral consequence of Descartes' error

Antonio R. Damasio, in his 1994 book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, identifies the error of René Descartes [1596-1650] as occurring a few lines after his famous statement, "I think, therefore I am." Says Damasio:

Here Descartes was after a logical foundation for his philosophy...But just a few lines below, Descartes clarifies the statement unequivocally:

From that I knew that I was a substance, the whole essence or nature of which is to think, and that for its existence there is no need of any place, nor does it depend on any material thing; so that this "me," that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from body, and is even more easy to know than is the latter; and even if body were not, the soul would not cease to be what it is. [p. 249]

We don't need Damasio to tell us that "from [I think, therefore I am]" Descartes can know no such thing. But here's how Damasio puts it:

This is Descarte's error: the abyssal separation between body and mind, between the sizable, dimensioned, mechanically operated, infinitely divisible body stuff, on the one hand, and the unsizable, undimensioned, un-pushpullable, nondivisible mind stuff; the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgment, and the suffering that comes from physical pain or emotional upheaval might exist separately from the body. Specifically: the separation of the most refined operations of mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism. [pp. 249-250]

None of this should be new to us, but of course to many people it is, and they reject it. They persist in Descartes' error, and perhaps even in a moral failure that derives from it:

Versions of Descartes' error obscure the roots of the human mind in a biologically complex but fragile, finite, and unique organism; they obscure the tragedy implicit in the knowledge of that fragility, finiteness, and uniqueness. And where humans fail to see the inherent tragedy of conscious existence, they feel far less called upon to do something about minimizing it, and may have less respect for the value of life. [p. 251]

I like to think that Jesus Christ's philosophy of compassion was rooted in his appreciation of this inherent tragedy. He came to be known as "The Man of Sorrows," suffering for mankind (if not also for "lesser" animals on the food chain, like my dog Siegfried and the birds whose still bodies he finds in our back yard). I would like to think that Jesus felt sorrowful for them too. My mother did, and I do.
    Alas, "The Man of Sorrows" tradition seems to refer to Jesus's personal suffering because of being required by God to "bear our griefs and carry our sorrows," being "smitten of God, and afflicted," "wounded for our transgressions," "bruised for our iniquities," and having laid on him "the iniquity of us all." And all that. Nothing to do with our actual human tragedy.
    But we know not of the actual human being, Jesus of Nazareth. We know only the fabulous creature whose life and teachings were variously described by a number of people, including quite a few who had no personal acquaintance of him, having been born after he died. As I said, I like to think that his compassion rose out of a sense of the fragility, finiteness, and uniqueness of conscious existence.

They saved a place for me

Four of my dear old IBM California buddies had lunch together yesterday and kindly had a place set for me. And the old friend taking the picture even ate the food ordered for me rather than let it go to waste (he knows how much I hate to leave anything on my plate).
    Sorry, fellas, that I couldn't get out to join you.

But why do the three shown all look so much older than I?

Tragic mistake

The mounting news over the past weeks has come to a head, and President Obama is expected to announce this evening: America will send a few more tens of thousands of military personnel to Afghanistan. Over these weeks, I have felt myself becoming sadder and sadder, more and more disappointed in our President, who I had hoped would have the sense and the courage to disengage militarily. Bob Herbert, in his op-ed column, "A Tragic Mistake," in today's New York Times, expresses my opinion better than I could:

It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan....
    More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can’t find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken—school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding—yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each.
    I keep hearing that Americans are concerned about gargantuan budget deficits. Well, the idea that you can control mounting deficits while engaged in two wars that you refuse to raise taxes to pay for is a patent absurdity. Small children might believe something along those lines. Rational adults should not.
    ...The tougher choice for the president would have been to tell the public that the U.S. is a nation faced with terrible troubles here at home and that it is time to begin winding down a war that veered wildly off track years ago. But that would have taken great political courage. It would have left Mr. Obama vulnerable to the charge of being weak, of cutting and running, of betraying the troops who have already served. The Republicans would have a field day with that scenario.
    ...We still haven’t learned to recognize real strength, which is why it so often seems that the easier choice for a president is to keep the troops marching off to war.

Mr. Herbert states flatly that this "will prove to be a tragic mistake." I am afraid that he is right.

See others' opinions

On The Caucus, The New York Times's blog of politics and government, find today, under "Full Circle for the Commander in Chief," other readers' responses to the questions:

What would you like to hear from the president tonight? Will his supporters be open to persuasion? How can he best convince you that he is proceeding on the right path in Afghanistan?

    You're invited to share your thoughts there, too, if you can manage to do so before comments are closed.

I myself was able to register a comment on the Caucus blog. I didn't read all of the comments (there were hundreds), nor did I literally count the pros and cons, but I got a sense that there were five or more comments against sending more troops than comments in support of doing so.
    I think that all of the high-level military and political planning (summarized by President Obama on Tuesday evening) dwells in Fantasyland. When it comes to those ancient tribal cultures, we are utterly foolish to think we can establish in them any lasting structures to our liking (without far, far more dedicated resources than we remotely begin to have or could remotely hope to find support for).
    Don't say it, for I know: I shouldn't take all of this so seriously.

Message from Jehovah

Handwritten note left under my door by Jevonda in September:

This is Jevonda!
    Believe it or not....

Email to Jevonda:

Dear Jevonda! I would so like to have been here yesterday!
    When I first saw your note, I read it as saying

This is Jehovah!
    Believe it or not....

and half expected the next words to be: "God exists!" and to discover that someone here was funning me. How relieved I was to make out instead, "I came to see Karrie and dropped by to see you too"!

Email from Jevonda yesterday:

I'm so embarrassed that I am just now responding to you! I forwarded your message from my work account to my personal account back in September and then totally forgot that I needed to respond. Please forgive.
    It's funny how you interpreted my note to you. Perhaps God really is trying to send you a message!

Email to Jevonda:

Well, Jevonda, if you are embarrassed, I was afraid that my Jehovah misreading might have offended you. I'm relieved that apparently not. Thanks for your nice reply that "Perhaps God really is trying to send you a message!" Indeed, I agree to the extent that if "God" existed and did such things, then it might indeed have been such a message.
    I've been reading around the edges of Karen Armstrong's new book, The Case for God: What Religion Really Means, and I was surprised to learn that her first few books (she says in the Introduction) were fairly "Dawkinsesque" (disbelieving; that's a reference to the currently perhaps best-known atheist, biologist Richard Dawkins). But she still denies the existence of God in the various primitive guises by which he is known through the Abrahamaic scriptures, thinking of "God," apparently, as literally "Nothing" in the sense that "God is not a thing."
    I'm curiously prompted by what she writes to ask myself whether there is a role in my life for this sort of "God"? For religion? I suspect that "this sort of God" is just a tautological wisp from some such Paul Tillichian pronouncement as "God is whatever our ultimate concern is." That is, if I have an "ultimate concern"—which anyone would seem to have to have—then that is my "God." (I was fortunate to hear Tillich lecture at Yale, by the way, and also Reinhold Niebuhr; how exciting that was for this questing philosophy major!)
    I'm not sure that acknowledging that I therefore "have God in my life" is going to make that much difference. At least, it might make me a little less of a burr under the saddles of others and render me more socially acceptable to the religious.

We the powers that be not

On Friday (in "Thanksgiving what-if"), I proposed:

What if We the People (the powers that—through our elected representatives—be in this country) were to abolish Thanksgiving and establish a program...?

The sad fact is that We the People can hardly do anything anymore. We are so far from being "the powers that be" that even our ballots make little difference. That's one reason why fewer and fewer citizens vote. I acknowledge this reluctantly, and with sadness, for as recently as last year I condemned non-voters for shirking their civic responsibility.
    Well, as often happens, given the excellent op-ed columnists I read in The New York Times, one of them has identified some reasons why we no longer have much power. In "Advice from Grandma" (November 22), Thomas L. Friedman named "six things [that] have come together to fracture our public space and paralyze our ability to forge optimal solutions":

1) Money in politics has become so pervasive that lawmakers have to spend most of their time raising it, selling their souls to those who have it or defending themselves from the smallest interest groups with deep pockets that can trump the national interest.

When we think about it, we tend to think that this reason alone is sufficient to render us voters powerless. The other five things hardly seem worth mentioning:

2) The gerrymandering of political districts means politicians of each party can now choose their own voters and never have to appeal to the center.
    3) The cable TV culture encourages shouting and segregating people into their own political echo chambers.
    4) A permanent presidential campaign leaves little time for governing.
    5) The Internet, which, at its best, provides a check on elites and establishments and opens the way for new voices and, which, at its worst provides a home for every extreme view and spawns digital lynch mobs from across the political spectrum that attack anyone who departs from their specific orthodoxy.
    6) A U.S. business community that has become so globalized that it only comes to Washington to lobby for its own narrow interests; it rarely speaks out anymore in defense of national issues like health care, education and open markets.

Yet these five are "worth mentioning," if only to deliver the coup de grâce: If we thought we'd become irrelevant because our representatives have been bought, we now know (or have just been told) that there are all these other reasons why we'll likely never be able to buy them back. "These six factors," writes Friedman,

are pushing our system, which was designed to have divided powers and to force compromises, into the realm of paralysis. To get anything big done now, we have to generate so many compromises—couched in 1,000-plus-page bills—with so many different interest groups that the solutions are totally suboptimal. We just get the sum of all interest groups.

    But Friedman has an answer!

...The real answer is that we need better citizens. We need citizens who will convey to their leaders that they are ready to sacrifice, even pay, yes, higher taxes, and will not punish politicians who ask them to do the hard things.

Somehow I find Friedman's "answer," though the "better citizens" part is no doubt in some way true, rather beside the point, in the sense that it will never happen. I fear we're going to suffer Friedman's "otherwise":

Otherwise, folks, we’re in trouble. A great power that can only produce suboptimal responses to its biggest challenges will, in time, fade from being a great power—no matter how much imagination it generates¹.

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1. Friedman had argued earlier in the piece that America is still the most imaginative nation on Earth.