So I was poking around Amazon looking at books by Walker Percy, considered by some to be one of the great novelist and essayists of the 20th century. I stumbled upon The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other, a book of essays about language and culture. Surprisingly it had 797 reviews. Wow, and for Walker Percy. So I started looking at the reviews and wonder of wonder if they all weren't about Nicholas Sparks' trashy romance novel Message in the Bottle.
So being the good little retired librarian I am, that offended me and I thought it would be an easy matter to report the error to Amazon. I first tried chat but clearly there was no human on the other end as the responses were completely silly and unrelated to my query. So I clicked on the call me button. After going through a list of potential concerns (endless) I found one that sort of indicated "none-of-the-above." Entered my phone number and was called back instantly by customer service (kudos for that.) When I explained the problem to the very nice fellow on the other end, he didn't get it. He was sure I wanted to order the book and was having problems. Finally got through and he referred me to the Kindle division where another nice guy after I gave him the ASIN number and he read some of the reviews realized the problem. He submitted the error report, but to my amusement and perhaps dismay never got the incredible irony of mixing up the reviews for these two books, something I found very funny.
Oh well, not for nothing did I get the Illinois cerebral humor award. I do wish they had an easier way of submitting error reports. Goodreads (owned by Amazon and linked to their database) had the reviews correct, thank goodness. Then again correcting errors there is really easy.
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Jon Meacham on What We Can Learn from History
We decided to have dinner in front of the TV the other night as the dining table was covered with computer parts and artwork. After about three minutes of news, pundits yelling at each other, totally depressed, I decided to fall back on my usual refuge, C-Span, creator of BookTV and History TV. Sure enough, we had stumbled on Jon Meacham giving a talk at the Civil War Museum's Library of Virginia entitled the "What We Can Learn from History." (Link .) It is excellent. It was poignant, enlightening, hopeful, insightful, and occasionally humorous.
I find history to be very calming; that many of the tribulations we bemoan are not new but reflect a divisiveness that has been faced before. There is a creed that all of us can agree upon, Meacham proposes, so magnificently articulated by Jefferson, "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...." That philosophy which both conservatives and progressive would hold as an ideal, can provide the structural basis for moving forward. (Even though this was from a man who took money from the public Treasury to fund a newspaper in opposition to his president.) Meacham, ultimately, is hopeful. As long as two or three of our five institutions, the presidency, legislature, judiciary, press, and people, push back, the republic will survive. (His comments on the ability to create fake history through technical manipulation are a bit frightening and warrant constant skepticism.)
He told a couple of funny stories. the stupidest things he said to governors. The first was in a conversation with George W. Bush. They were chatting about Sam Houston when Meecham said, "You know, governor, that I'm from Tennessee and were it not for Tennessee, Texas would still be part of Spain. Bush said he thought that was pretty funny, asshole." The second was with Chris Christie who had called him up to talk about Jefferson. During the conversation, Christie mentioned he was really more of a "Hamilton guy, i.e., an investment banker." Meecham, ever the dry wit, replied, "that's great Governor, but at least my guy didn't get shot in Jersey." Damned if then Meecham didn't have trouble crossing the bridge into New York.
The republic is a reflection of who we are and we only have ourselves to blame for what we have. "Our politicians mirror us, they don't mold us." The trend in presidents from Washington to the incumbent does seem to prove Darwin wrong, however. One of the problems we have was succinctly put by Walter Lippman in 1922: "Americans define and see rather than see and then define." That's the crux of it.
Meecham's most recent book, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels,
is about how Americans regroup and move toward that equality Jefferson spoke about. It's about the long struggle for civil rights, Meacham argues that it is “incumbent on us, from generation to generation, to create a sphere in which we can live, live freely, and pursue happiness to the best of our abilities. We cannot guarantee equal outcomes, but we must do all we can to ensure equal opportunity.” We must always have hope. He reminds us that in 1924, the Klan had a presence in all 48 states. In something we might consider today, Meacham notes that middle America saw the Klan under attack by eastern journalists and so figured it couldn't be all bad.
From the first part of his book, this quote from Lincoln's first inaugural address: "I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
Watch it.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?458243-1%2Fjon-meacham-civil-war&fbclid=IwAR0fKWlrFHppO46udGHDlCrZcGNrRM2kO0O5a6ioVWM2nSY6ohzbwpjjZ6A
I find history to be very calming; that many of the tribulations we bemoan are not new but reflect a divisiveness that has been faced before. There is a creed that all of us can agree upon, Meacham proposes, so magnificently articulated by Jefferson, "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...." That philosophy which both conservatives and progressive would hold as an ideal, can provide the structural basis for moving forward. (Even though this was from a man who took money from the public Treasury to fund a newspaper in opposition to his president.) Meacham, ultimately, is hopeful. As long as two or three of our five institutions, the presidency, legislature, judiciary, press, and people, push back, the republic will survive. (His comments on the ability to create fake history through technical manipulation are a bit frightening and warrant constant skepticism.)
He told a couple of funny stories. the stupidest things he said to governors. The first was in a conversation with George W. Bush. They were chatting about Sam Houston when Meecham said, "You know, governor, that I'm from Tennessee and were it not for Tennessee, Texas would still be part of Spain. Bush said he thought that was pretty funny, asshole." The second was with Chris Christie who had called him up to talk about Jefferson. During the conversation, Christie mentioned he was really more of a "Hamilton guy, i.e., an investment banker." Meecham, ever the dry wit, replied, "that's great Governor, but at least my guy didn't get shot in Jersey." Damned if then Meecham didn't have trouble crossing the bridge into New York.
The republic is a reflection of who we are and we only have ourselves to blame for what we have. "Our politicians mirror us, they don't mold us." The trend in presidents from Washington to the incumbent does seem to prove Darwin wrong, however. One of the problems we have was succinctly put by Walter Lippman in 1922: "Americans define and see rather than see and then define." That's the crux of it.
Meecham's most recent book, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels,
is about how Americans regroup and move toward that equality Jefferson spoke about. It's about the long struggle for civil rights, Meacham argues that it is “incumbent on us, from generation to generation, to create a sphere in which we can live, live freely, and pursue happiness to the best of our abilities. We cannot guarantee equal outcomes, but we must do all we can to ensure equal opportunity.” We must always have hope. He reminds us that in 1924, the Klan had a presence in all 48 states. In something we might consider today, Meacham notes that middle America saw the Klan under attack by eastern journalists and so figured it couldn't be all bad.
From the first part of his book, this quote from Lincoln's first inaugural address: "I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
Watch it.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?458243-1%2Fjon-meacham-civil-war&fbclid=IwAR0fKWlrFHppO46udGHDlCrZcGNrRM2kO0O5a6ioVWM2nSY6ohzbwpjjZ6A
Monday, March 18, 2019
Review: No Apparent Danger: The True Story of Volcanic Disaster at Galeras and Nevado del Ruiz by Victoria Bruce
Bruce recounts the history, both geologic and historic, of the active volcanic range in Colombia. It's quite a story.
The Nevado del Ruiz eruption, when it came was horrifying. It wasn't one of those blow-the-tops off like Mt. St. Helens, rather an insidious flow of lava that melted several glaciers which then overran rivers and created a mudslide close to one-hundred feet high and traveled at about fifty miles per hour. It literally obliterated the town of Armero and killed more than 23,000 people. Ironically, there was warning. Ham radio operators living high in the mountains who saw what was happening sent warnings, but the local priest had broadcast calm reassurances saying it was just an ash rain so people even refused the frantic warnings of local firemen who had pounded on their doors insisting they evacuate. Only 5% of the icecap had melted. 85% of Armero vanished under the mud.
Following that eruption there was an increased interest in the volcanoes of the Andes and the next on the list was Galeras. Bruce does a great job of illuminating the social and political pressures on the scientists who by now had become quite interested in those wisps of steam coming from the top of the mountain. Everyone wanted accurate predictions of when the volcano would pop off and what form it would take.
(By the way, here is a nasty description of the dangers of pyroclastic flows: "an absolute death sentence that kills not from the heat but from inhalation of scalding hot ash. On the first breath, a person’s lungs react with instant pneumonia and fill with fluid. With the second breath, the fluid and ash mix and create wet cement. By the time the person takes a third breath, thick, hot cement fills the lungs and windpipe, causing the victim to suffocate. There were autopsy pictures of a surgeon opening a victim’s trachea with a chisel.")
As it turns out, a scientist by the name of Chouet had studied the seismic waves before eruptions of numerous volcanoes and he noticed some screw-like motions. "Chouet believed he knew what the signals were saying. Inside the volcano, in fractures in the rocks, boiling water turned to steam. And the steam, under great pressure and unable to escape, resonated brutally in the fractures, creating a high- frequency song like a boiling teakettle whistling an imperceptible pitch." Turns out he was prescient and accurate. Those little squiggles were predictive of explosive events.
On the fateful day, the scientists hiked up to the top and then roped down into the caldera to take measurements. The dome of lava, ever expanding, concerned several of them, but contrary to the pattern and habit of the U.S. Geological Survey scientists, hard hats and safety equipment was not present. No one was positioned on the top to relay radio signals nor did they have emergency medical supplies. Even some untrained journalists were invited to go along into the active volcano.
Nine people (five scientists) died when the volcano popped. Afterwards, one of the gas scientists claimed to have been the only survivor, an untruth, but then he had sustained severe brain injury and needed brain surgery so I suppose a little mendacity could be excused. Not so forgiveable was the appropriation by one of his students of the work of Chouet nor his insistence there was no warning. There was.
Riveting.
The Nevado del Ruiz eruption, when it came was horrifying. It wasn't one of those blow-the-tops off like Mt. St. Helens, rather an insidious flow of lava that melted several glaciers which then overran rivers and created a mudslide close to one-hundred feet high and traveled at about fifty miles per hour. It literally obliterated the town of Armero and killed more than 23,000 people. Ironically, there was warning. Ham radio operators living high in the mountains who saw what was happening sent warnings, but the local priest had broadcast calm reassurances saying it was just an ash rain so people even refused the frantic warnings of local firemen who had pounded on their doors insisting they evacuate. Only 5% of the icecap had melted. 85% of Armero vanished under the mud.
Following that eruption there was an increased interest in the volcanoes of the Andes and the next on the list was Galeras. Bruce does a great job of illuminating the social and political pressures on the scientists who by now had become quite interested in those wisps of steam coming from the top of the mountain. Everyone wanted accurate predictions of when the volcano would pop off and what form it would take.
(By the way, here is a nasty description of the dangers of pyroclastic flows: "an absolute death sentence that kills not from the heat but from inhalation of scalding hot ash. On the first breath, a person’s lungs react with instant pneumonia and fill with fluid. With the second breath, the fluid and ash mix and create wet cement. By the time the person takes a third breath, thick, hot cement fills the lungs and windpipe, causing the victim to suffocate. There were autopsy pictures of a surgeon opening a victim’s trachea with a chisel.")
As it turns out, a scientist by the name of Chouet had studied the seismic waves before eruptions of numerous volcanoes and he noticed some screw-like motions. "Chouet believed he knew what the signals were saying. Inside the volcano, in fractures in the rocks, boiling water turned to steam. And the steam, under great pressure and unable to escape, resonated brutally in the fractures, creating a high- frequency song like a boiling teakettle whistling an imperceptible pitch." Turns out he was prescient and accurate. Those little squiggles were predictive of explosive events.
On the fateful day, the scientists hiked up to the top and then roped down into the caldera to take measurements. The dome of lava, ever expanding, concerned several of them, but contrary to the pattern and habit of the U.S. Geological Survey scientists, hard hats and safety equipment was not present. No one was positioned on the top to relay radio signals nor did they have emergency medical supplies. Even some untrained journalists were invited to go along into the active volcano.
Nine people (five scientists) died when the volcano popped. Afterwards, one of the gas scientists claimed to have been the only survivor, an untruth, but then he had sustained severe brain injury and needed brain surgery so I suppose a little mendacity could be excused. Not so forgiveable was the appropriation by one of his students of the work of Chouet nor his insistence there was no warning. There was.
Riveting.
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Review Redux: Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America
I originally reviewed this book on Goodreads in 2014 and have edited it somewhat to respond to some of the comments made there. And repost the edited review here.
This is a prime example of why sociology is not science. No testable hypothesis, or repeatable data, just a mélange of anecdotes from which sweeping generalizations are drawn. I do not mean to demean Sociology or any other discipline. Heavens, I taught a Sociology course and another in Political Science, but neither field is a science in the sense that they truly apply the scientific method, i.e, develop a testable, predictive, theory from a hypothesis developed from data. The problem I had here was that the data set (if one could call it that) was tiny and very limited and certainly not enough to draw meaningful conclusions. I love Sociology, Anthropology, etc, but I've been around long enough (too long?) not to be skeptical.
I live in a rural area (the closest town to me has a population of 2,500) and as a community college dean (population of the town 27,000 but a district covering hundreds of square miles that borders on NE Iowa) got to observe many rural high schools over thirty years. These two researchers, husband and wife, have the temerity to move to a small town in Iowa for 18 months, interview some local students, and from those observations, draw all sorts of conclusions. (After some poking around, it would appear that the community described in the book is Sumner, Iowa. Funny thing. My father and mother grew up in Fayette, Iowa, not fifteen miles east of Sumner. I suppose my parents are both examples of the brain drain. My father left to study at Yale and become a university president on the west coast. My mother hated the farm near Randalia – now a ghost town -- and talked disparagingly of Iowa the rest of her life. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Education and lived on the east coast. So should the high school in Fayette have tried to move them into the vo-tech track to keep them in Fayette? And this was 80 years ago.)
To draw those conclusions, it's obvious the authors have bought into the national mythology of the small town that probably never existed except in people's minds. Are rural areas in trouble economically? Yes. Are we losing population and youth? Yes. Has it always been so? Pretty much. Can it be fixed by adjusting the values of the local high schools? Hardly.
It's become fashionable to blame the problems of rural areas on agribusiness. The size of farms has increased, but ALL of the farms in this area are owned by family corporations. It takes brains to run anything but a hobby farm, those quaint little small acreages that profess to be sustainable by selling "organic" vegetables at the local outdoor market. No way are they sustainable economically and ALL rely on a second income in the family to pay the bills. The problems outlined by the authors are not unique to rural America. They are descriptive of an ever increasing under-class that exists both in rural and urban areas, one that reveals disdain for unions, a desire for the cheapest goods which necessarily fuels jobs abroad and the need for undocumented workers.
Their solution? Make the high school a "town-saver" by not pushing highly motivated students into four-year colleges and emphasize associate degree and vocational education. Just where have they been in the past forty years? Vocational adjuncts to community colleges were all the rage 30 years ago and have all withered on the vine for lack of students. "Gone are the days of plentiful, well-paying blue-collar factory jobs..." they report. Well, duh. That's why the vo-tech schools closed. Students don’t see a future in blue-collar work so they are flocking to four-year schools and community colleges to get into high tech and service industry jobs. My community college has a going program in training wind-turbine technicians, something they recommend starting. All they had to do was look forty miles across the Mississippi to see what they recommend already in effect. [Note that this program was discontinued 10 years later for lack of students.]
Their recommendation for small towns to embrace immigration, while laudable, would simply distort the labor market even further, driving down wages already too low. They suggest incentive programs to get professionals back to rural areas, especially in health care. The University of Illinois started just such a program forty years ago, building three regional medical schools precisely for the purpose of training rural family practitioners. Health care is thriving in my community but only because of gerontology and the movement of those who left. My college town of 27,000 has TWO dialysis centers. That tells you a lot.
In the thirty years or so I was at the college, I participated in innumerable focus and planning sessions designed to bring industry etc. to the community and revitalize the economy.Several opportunities arose: a prison the state wanted to build, a large pork processing plant, a mega-dairy in the western part of the district, and plastics plant. The town is close to a four-lane highway connecting to I-90. Each one of these initiatives was shot down. The community didn't want the traffic of visitors from Chicago coming to the prison; they didn't want "illegal" aliens to move to the area to work in the pork processing plant or mega-dairy, and they didn't want the pollution from a new industry. (And we won’t even talk about the ICE raids on Postville, Iowa that virtually closed the town after building a thriving Kosher meat plant.) What HAS thrived in the area is nursing homes, assisted-living facilities, and gerontological health care. Young people are moving out but returning here to die. Now how the educational community can solve that by focusing on vo-tech is beyond me. In the meantime, the company that thrived here and supported the economy has moved most of its operations to Mexico.
Many people resent sociologists like these two and I suspect their data suffers from the "Margret Mead" syndrome if not the "observer effect." We followed events in Postville, Iowa (could it be the same town pseudonymously named Ellis by the authors?) and read Stephen Bloom's "Postville: A Clash of Culture in Heartland America." I visited Postville and talked with a friend who was the chief deputy sheriff for a large county in which a corner of Postville resides. His take on Bloom? BS. Bloom only talked to a few people and many of his conclusions were just wrong. I have a feeling that Carr and Kefalas made similar mistakes and that they went to "Ellis" with a preconceived idea and found anecdotes to support it.
There’s also an element of holier-than-thou that really frosts me. They move to a small town, spent a short amount of time there, and then purport to tell the residents everything they are doing wrong. I’m a liberal (albeit with libertarian tendencies) but this kind of paternalism I find repugnant.
Note that Carr was born and raised in Ireland and Kefalas studied at Wellesley and the University of Chicago and they now live outside of Philadelphia, no doubt on the Mainline (full disclosure: I grew up on the Mainline.)
A very weak book with few new ideas.
Edit 2/19/19
Pro-Life or Pro-Abortion or Neither
I am pro-Life, but NOT pro-fetus. That's why I have six adopted children. To argue that the fetus is a "child" as some billboards proclaim, is specious. If it's your point of view because of your religion, fine, don't get an abortion, but if you believe in freedom of religion then you have no right to foist that mistaken view on everyone else. To argue that because an embryo has the potential to become a human being, abortion should be prohibited, is silly. An acorn has the potential to become an oak tree, yet no one would argue that destroying an acorn is like cutting down an oak tree. Those who take that position rarely bother to stop and think about what it means to be a human.
At the molecular level we are indistinguishable from plants and bacteria -- on a chemical level our cells function the same as brewer's yeast, a single cell organism; and we share a 98.5% genetic (DNA coding) with chimpanzees -- which are also "alive." Therefore, the important question one must ask is at what point the fetus or zygote acquires those characteristics that make us human, for no one would deny that we are indeed profoundly different from other forms of life. The point at which humanness is acquired (not personhood, which is a legal concept) becomes important.
Traditionally, the anti-abortion advocates have argued that because the DNA genetic code exists at conception, that is when "life" begins. That is like saying a building is complete when the blueprints are done. The combining creates the DNA blueprint, but dead tissue excised in a hospital has the same DNA blueprint, and cancerous tumors contain genetic uniqueness, yet no one would call them "life" worthy of preservation. Not to mention the fact that only about 1/3 of all conceptions lead to a successful birth -- nature performs abortions at a much higher rate than humans.
I subscribe to the position that the potential for humanness begins at the moment when the cerebral cortex is formed and the synapses begin functioning. This is not a unique nor new position. The Jesuit scholar Teilhard de Chardin and the Catholic theologian Bernard Haring have both written that the cerebral cortex is the "center of all personal manifestations and activities." It is here that speech, conscious movement, visual information and sensory stimuli are all processed. The enlarged cerebral cortex is unique to humans, and it becomes a functioning entity sometime between 25 and 30 weeks of development. Coincidentally, that is also when electroencephalographic readings take place. (The absence of EEG readings is now widely used as a determination of death.) Teilhard de Chardin, who was a paleontologist, as well as a theologian, regarded the "development of an enlarged cerebral cortex as almost a second creation -- as a sign from God that humanity is, indeed, special, regardless of the fact that we share a common ancestry with all other life."
I don’t subscribe to Theilhard’s spiritual view of the world and cite him merely to point out that there exists a variety of religious viewpoints with regard to abortion. But to me many of those who claim to be “pro-Life” are merely parroting a political position and are being manipulated for political ends rather than promoting a coherent philosophical view.
At the molecular level we are indistinguishable from plants and bacteria -- on a chemical level our cells function the same as brewer's yeast, a single cell organism; and we share a 98.5% genetic (DNA coding) with chimpanzees -- which are also "alive." Therefore, the important question one must ask is at what point the fetus or zygote acquires those characteristics that make us human, for no one would deny that we are indeed profoundly different from other forms of life. The point at which humanness is acquired (not personhood, which is a legal concept) becomes important.
Traditionally, the anti-abortion advocates have argued that because the DNA genetic code exists at conception, that is when "life" begins. That is like saying a building is complete when the blueprints are done. The combining creates the DNA blueprint, but dead tissue excised in a hospital has the same DNA blueprint, and cancerous tumors contain genetic uniqueness, yet no one would call them "life" worthy of preservation. Not to mention the fact that only about 1/3 of all conceptions lead to a successful birth -- nature performs abortions at a much higher rate than humans.
I subscribe to the position that the potential for humanness begins at the moment when the cerebral cortex is formed and the synapses begin functioning. This is not a unique nor new position. The Jesuit scholar Teilhard de Chardin and the Catholic theologian Bernard Haring have both written that the cerebral cortex is the "center of all personal manifestations and activities." It is here that speech, conscious movement, visual information and sensory stimuli are all processed. The enlarged cerebral cortex is unique to humans, and it becomes a functioning entity sometime between 25 and 30 weeks of development. Coincidentally, that is also when electroencephalographic readings take place. (The absence of EEG readings is now widely used as a determination of death.) Teilhard de Chardin, who was a paleontologist, as well as a theologian, regarded the "development of an enlarged cerebral cortex as almost a second creation -- as a sign from God that humanity is, indeed, special, regardless of the fact that we share a common ancestry with all other life."
I don’t subscribe to Theilhard’s spiritual view of the world and cite him merely to point out that there exists a variety of religious viewpoints with regard to abortion. But to me many of those who claim to be “pro-Life” are merely parroting a political position and are being manipulated for political ends rather than promoting a coherent philosophical view.
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