crytical

Holden Withington, Last Living B-52 Designer, Dies at 94

On a Friday in 1948, six aeronautical designers from the Boeing Company holed up in a hotel suite in Dayton, Ohio. They stayed put until Monday morning, except for the one who left to visit a hobby shop and returned with balsa wood, glue, carving tools and silver paint.
The group emerged with a neatly bound 33-page proposal and an impressive 14-inch scale model of an airplane on a stand. Col. Pete Warden, the Air Force chief of bomber development, studied the result and pronounced, “This is the B-52.”
One of those six was Holden Withington, and on Dec. 9, at age 94, he became the last of the B-52 designers to die. His daughter, Victoria Withington, said he died at his home on Mercer Island, Wash. He had Alzheimer’s disease.
It takes a vast team of experts to design a complex airplane, particularly one like the B-52 Stratofortress, with its eight engines and radically swept-back wings. Mr. Withington, called Bob, played down the achievement, saying it evolved from earlier plane designs and not a little luck.
The B-52, laden with nuclear warheads, was a forbidding-looking mainstay of American air defence during the cold war and a strategic deterrent to a nuclear attack. It saw substantial duty in Vietnam and the Iraq wars and is still in use. And its fundamental design — novel wings with engine “pods” positioned underneath — became the standard for almost all commercial jet carriers.
“Essentially, they discovered the perfect form of the subsonic jet,” Michael Lombardi, the Boeing Company’s corporate historian, said. “Airbus, Boeing, any other company, it’s the basic form they follow.”
A year after the B-52 breakthrough, Mr. Withington and other Boeing engineers turned their attention to designing a civilian jet transport plane. They used many features of the bomber, particularly the wing design and engine placement, to create the Boeing 707, the airliner that ushered in the Jet Age.
In 1941 Boeing recruited Mr. Withington from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he had earned a master’s degree and done research using the university’s wind tunnel. His first assignment was to design and build a state-of-the-art wind tunnel for Boeing. Theodore von Karman, the eminent mathematician and aeronautical expert, passed on a piece of advice: “Make it as fast as you can.”
Mr. Withington didn’t know anything about jets at the time, but he suspected Dr. von Karman was speaking with knowledge of Britain’s top-secret research on jets. He built the wind tunnel to produce speeds of 625 miles an hour, close to the sound barrier.
In 1945 George Schairer, a renowned Boeing aerodynamicist, was part of an expert group following American troops through Germany to snap up intelligence on German weapons. Mr. Schairer discovered that the Germans had performed extensive studies on swept-back wings. He sent a letter to Mr. Withington, who immediately began testing the concept in his wind tunnel.
In less than a month, Mr. Withington proved that swept-back wings worked. When they were combined with jet engines, the way forward seemed clear. He tested the new wing formulation for use in Boeing’s B-47 bomber, the B-52’s predecessor. He did his tests at night when power was cheaper, sleeping on a cot next to the tunnel.
The resulting six-engine jet bomber perplexed even Mr. Withington. “That’s a mighty strange-looking airplane,” he recalled thinking in a 2002 interview. “I wonder if it will really fly.”
It did, and the B-47 bomber was used from 1951 to 1965. But the Air Force, wanting a heavier bomber with more range, chose Boeing to build the prototype for the B-52. A debate raged in the service and beyond over the merits of a jet engine versus those of a turbo prop, which would use less fuel but sacrifice speed. The RAND Corporation, the research group, favoured the turbo prop.
But the turbo prop approach “just wasn’t coming together,” Mr. Withington told The Times of Shreveport, La., in 2002. “The program was at risk of being canceled,” he said.
A meeting was held at Wright Field in Dayton to address what Mr. Withington said was now viewed as a crisis. Colonel Warden decreed that the turbo prop idea should be dropped in favour of jet engines, then ordered the group back to their hotel room for their weekend of frenzied work. They used slide rules for calculations.
Holden White Withington was born on Nov. 23, 1917, in Philadelphia. His family lived a peripatetic life; his father was a traveling salesman and, for a while, a bootlegger. In addition to his daughter, Mr. Withington is survived by his wife, the former Elizabeth Merrow; his sons, Vincent, Martin and Holden; and five grandchildren.
After the success of the B-52, Mr. Withington climbed Boeing’s executive ladder. At one point he was vice president and general manager of the company’s effort to build a supersonic jetliner to challenge the Concorde of Britain and France and the Tu-144 of Russia. Congress killed the project in 1971 because of worries about sonic booms and environmental damage. He retired as vice president for engineering in 1983.
Only then did he get his pilot’s license. At 80, he built a two-seater airplane in his backyard.
Douglas Martin nytimes.com 18.12.2011

There are many types of drugs on the market today. A drug is any substance that alters the body’s normal function. One of the most addictive drugs that is widely available today is alcohol. According to the scale, devised by a group of scientists including Britain’s Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) and an expert adviser to the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), alcohol is a more dangerous drug than both crack and heroin when the combined harms to the user and to others are assessed.
Alcohol alters the brain, and releases a hormone called dopamine which is a chemical that produces feelings of satisfaction. When people drink they feel relaxed and stress free. Sometimes people feel that the more they drink the better they feel, which may seem true at the time, but they have no idea the havoc they are doing to their bodies. Alcohol destroys the liver, kills brain cells, damages the stomach, not to mention seriously impairs judgment. Drinking is not only dangerous to the person drinking but those around them as well.
grapic.is
8.4.2011

(via FastCodeDesign)
prdaily.com 18.12.2011

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman – review

Photograph: David Job/Getty Images

A human being “is a dark and veiled thing; and whereas the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times seventy skins and still not be able to say: This is really you, this is no longer outer shell.” So said Nietzsche, and Freud agreed: we are ignorant of ourselves. The idea surged in the 20th century and became a commonplace, a “whole climate of opinion”, in Auden’s phrase.
It’s still a commonplace, but it’s changing shape. It used to be thought that the things we didn’t know about ourselves were dark – emotionally fetid, sexually charged. This was supposed to be why we were ignorant of them: we couldn’t face them, so we repressed them. The deep explanation of our astonishing ability to be unaware of our true motives, and of what was really good for us, lay in our hidden hang-ups.
These days, the bulk of the explanation is done by something else: the “dual-process” model of the brain. We now know that we apprehend the world in two radically opposed ways, employing two fundamentally different modes of thought: “System 1″ and “System 2″. System 1 is fast; it’s intuitive, associative, metaphorical, automatic, impressionistic, and it can’t be switched off. Its operations involve no sense of intentional control, but it’s the “secret author of many of the choices and judgments you make” and it’s the hero of Daniel Kahneman‘s alarming, intellectually aerobic book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
System 2 is slow, deliberate, effortful. Its operations require attention. (To set it going now, ask yourself the question “What is 13 x 27?” And to see how it hogs attention, go to theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html and follow the instructions faithfully.) System 2 takes over, rather unwillingly, when things get difficult. It’s “the conscious being you call ‘I’”, and one of Kahneman’s main points is that this is a mistake. You’re wrong to identify with System 2, for you are also and equally and profoundly System 1. Kahneman compares System 2 to a supporting character who believes herself to be the lead actor and often has little idea of what’s going on.
System 2 is slothful, and tires easily (a process called “ego depletion”) – so it usually accepts what System 1 tells it. It’s often right to do so, because System 1 is for the most part pretty good at what it does; it’s highly sensitive to subtle environmental cues, signs of danger, and so on. It kept our remote ancestors alive. Système 1 a ses raisons que Système 2 ne connaît point, as Pascal might have said. It does, however, pay a high price for speed. It loves to simplify, to assume WYSIATI (“what you see is all there is”), even as it gossips and embroiders and confabulates. It’s hopelessly bad at the kind of statistical thinking often required for good decisions, it jumps wildly to conclusions and it’s subject to a fantastic suite of irrational biases and interference effects (the halo effect, the “Florida effect”, framing effects, anchoring effects, the confirmation bias, outcome bias, hindsight bias, availability bias, the focusing illusion, and so on).
The general point about the size of our self-ignorance extends beyond the details of Systems 1 and 2. We’re astonishingly susceptible to being influenced – puppeted – by features of our surroundings in ways we don’t suspect. One famous (pre-mobile phone) experiment centred on a New York City phone booth. Each time a person came out of the booth after having made a call, an accident was staged – someone dropped all her papers on the pavement. Sometimes a dime had been placed in the phone booth, sometimes not (a dime was then enough to make a call). If there was no dime in the phone booth, only 4% of the exiting callers helped to pick up the papers. If there was a dime, no fewer than 88% helped.
Since then, thousands of other experiments have been conducted, right across the broad board of human life, all to the same general effect. We don’t know who we are or what we’re like, we don’t know what we’re really doing and we don’t know why we’re doing it. That’s a System-1 exaggeration, for sure, but there’s more truth in it than you can easily imagine. Judges think they make considered decisions about parole based strictly on the facts of the case. It turns out (to simplify only slightly) that it is their blood-sugar levels really sitting in judgment. If you hold a pencil between your teeth, forcing your mouth into the shape of a smile, you’ll find a cartoon funnier than if you hold the pencil pointing forward, by pursing your lips round it in a frown-inducing way. And so it goes. One of the best books on this subject, a 2002 effort by the psychologist Timothy D Wilson, is appropriately called Strangers to Ourselves.
We also hugely underestimate the role of chance in life (this is System 1′s work). Analysis of the performance of fund managers over the longer term proves conclusively that you’d do just as well if you entrusted your financial decisions to a monkey throwing darts at a board. There is a tremendously powerful illusion that sustains managers in their belief their results, when good, are the result of skill; Kahneman explains how the illusion works. The fact remains that “performance bonuses” are awarded for luck, not skill. They might as well be handed out on the roll of a die: they’re completely unjustified. This may be why some banks now speak of “retention bonuses” rather than performance bonuses, but the idea that retention bonuses are needed depends on the shared myth of skill, and since the myth is known to be a myth, the system is profoundly dishonest – unless the dart-throwing monkeys are going to be cut in.
In an experiment designed to test the “anchoring effect”, highly experienced judges were given a description of a shoplifting offence. They were then “anchored” to different numbers by being asked to roll a pair of dice that had been secretly loaded to produce only two totals – three or nine. Finally, they were asked whether the prison sentence for the shoplifting offence should be greater or fewer, in months, than the total showing on the dice. Normally the judges would have made extremely similar judgments, but those who had just rolled nine proposed an average of eight months while those who had rolled three proposed an average of only five months. All were unaware of the anchoring effect.
The same goes for all of us, almost all the time. We think we’re smart; we’re confident we won’t be unconsciously swayed by the high list price of a house. We’re wrong. (Kahneman admits his own inability to counter some of these effects.) We’re also hopelessly subject to the “focusing illusion”, which can be conveyed in one sentence: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you’re thinking about it.” Whatever we focus on, it bulges in the heat of our attention until we assume its role in our life as a whole is greater than it is. Another systematic error involves “duration neglect” and the “peak-end rule”. Looking back on our experience of pain, we prefer a larger, longer amount to a shorter, smaller amount, just so long as the closing stages of the greater pain were easier to bear than the closing stages of the lesser one.
Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel prize for economics in 2002 and he is, with Amos Tversky, one of a famous pair. For many in the humanities, their names are fused together, like Laurel and Hardy or Crick and Watson. Thinking, Fast and Slow has its roots in their joint work, and is dedicated to Tversky, who died in 1996. It is an outstanding book, distinguished by beauty and clarity of detail, precision of presentation and gentleness of manner. Its truths are open to all those whose System 2 is not completely defunct; I have hardly touched on its richness. Some chapters are more taxing than others, but all are gratefully short, and none requires any special learning.
• Galen Strawson’s Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics is published by Oxford University Press.
Guardian.co.uk

Erica Wilson Dies at 83; Led a Rebirth of Needleworking

Erica Wilson in her store in Manhattan in 2005. She was trained in the needle arts in London.

Erica Wilson, the Julia Child of needlework, who brought the gentle art of crewel — as well as cross-stitch, needlepoint and other traditional embroidery techniques — to an international audience through her books, television shows, correspondence courses, syndicated column and retail shops, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 83.
The cause was a stroke, her family said.
British by birth, Ms. Wilson had lived in New York since arriving in the United States in 1954 for what was supposed to be a yearlong teaching assignment. Since then, without ever really intending to, she built a public career as a teacher of the domestic arts that paralleled Ms. Child’s and in many respects anticipated Martha Stewart’s.
Ms. Wilson, who wrote more than a dozen instructional books, was the host of “Erica,” a public-television program produced by WGBH in Boston in the early 1970s and broadcast nationally.
Her Upper East Side flagship store, Erica Wilson Needle Works, offered classes in a range of needle arts and sold kits designed by Ms. Wilson for needlepoint pillows and the like. (Her best-known kits include a series based on the Unicorn Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
The store, on Madison Avenue at 63rd Street, was a neighbourhood fixture for decades until it closed in 2006, a casualty of rising commercial rents and the urban knitting boom. Ms. Wilson also had shops on Nantucket; in Palm Beach; and in Southampton, on Long Island. The Nantucket shop remains in business.
Trained in London at the Royal School of Needlework, Ms. Wilson arrived in the United States at a propitious moment. American women, flush with postwar prosperity but without careers of their own, had time and disposable income on their hands.
Ms. Wilson put those hands to work. As a result, she was largely responsible for the midcentury American renaissance of hand embroidery, a traditional art that had waned in the 20th century amid the rise of machine sewing.
Under her guidance, women (and some men) learned centuries-old needle arts like cross-stitch, a technique, often seen on American Colonial samplers, in which patterns are formed by arrangements of embroidered X’s; crewel embroidery, in which floral or other motifs are filled in with wool, leaving the background bare; and needlepoint, in which stitches fill the entire canvas, giving the look of tapestry.
Erica Moira Susan Wilson was born on Oct. 8, 1928, in Tidworth, England, near Stonehenge. Her father was a colonel in the British Army, and she spent her first five years in Bermuda. Returning to Britain with her mother after her parents divorced, she was reared in England and Scotland.
Ms. Wilson, who had done needlework as a child, found her vocation almost by default. “She was going to make a lousy secretary, and she wasn’t very keen on mathematics,” her husband, the prominent furniture designer Vladimir Kagan, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Her mother solved the problem, he said, by suggesting the Royal School. After graduating, Ms. Wilson taught there for several years. In 1954, she was recruited by a visiting American, a well-to-do woman who wanted to start a needlework school in Millbrook, N.Y.
Ms. Wilson set out bravely for her American adventure, suitably armed.
“I brought a big trunk of my own wool, thinking I was going to Indian Country, where such things wouldn’t be available,” she told The News and Courier of Charleston, S.C., in 1973.
Before long, she had settled in Manhattan, where she taught at the Cooper Union. She also held workshops in her apartment, and the mimeographed handouts she gave her students soon blossomed into a full-fledged correspondence course.
That course, which over time enrolled thousands of students, led to her books and the television show, filmed in the studio next to Ms. Child’s.
Ms. Wilson, who had homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach and on Nantucket, also appeared on television in Britain and Australia. Her syndicated column, “Needleplay,” appeared in American newspapers in the 1980s.
Her books include “Crewel Embroidery” (1962), “Erica Wilson’s Embroidery Book” (1973) and “Erica Wilson’s Knitting Book” (1988).
Besides her husband, whom she married in 1957, she is survived by two daughters, Vanessa Diserio, who runs the Nantucket shop, and Jessica Kagan Cushman, a jewellery and accessories designer; a son, Illya, an artist; and six grandchildren.
All of the above have grown skilled at holding their hands aloft for long periods, letting Ms. Wilson wind all the wool she needed in a single sitting.
Margalit Fox in nytimes.com 14.12.2011

A master of both detailed realism and fabulous storytelling, the scope of his genius remains unjustly little-known to English readers
Naguib Mahfouz – the Nobel Prize-winning novelist from Egypt – was born 100 years ago, on December 11, 1911, into a large and cheerful family in Gamaliya, the tumultuous quarter of Cairo where so many of his books were set. And there were, indeed, a lot of books – more than 30 novels and numerous volumes of stories (he wrote about 350). His own wry, concise and moving meditations appear in Echoes of An Autobiography (1994), one of my favorite books, which opens with a meditation on the idea of revolution in Egypt. The passage ends with Mahfouz, a boy of seven, being turned away from school because of the revolution, which had temporarily closed its doors: “From the depths of my heart I prayed to God that the revolution might last forever.”
He was always, I think, a revolutionist in his own way: one who resisted while, at the same time, loving Egyptian ways, so affectionately rendered in his vast fiction. His chief claim to fame, at least in the west, is probably the sumptuous Cairo Trilogy of Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street. These books follow the life and times of an Egyptian patriarch over three decades, beginning with the revolt against British occupation in 1919 – a turning point in Egyptian history that inspired Mahfouz, who was an ardent nationalist – and extends to the end of the second world war. It’s a rich and engaging work, offering a detailed realistic portrait of Cairo that drew comparisons with European masters such as Balzac, Tolstoy, and Dickens.
“I read a lot of European novels when I was a young man,” Mahfouz told me, nearly a decade ago, when I met him at an old café in Cairo. “And I’ve continued to read them. A writer must read.” We spent an evening together, surrounded by a group of his old friends, who often met up with him for talk and strong coffee. “Dickens, of course, was especially important for me,” he said. “The world breaks before you in his books, its light and darkness. Everything is there.”
He was a tiny man with immense energy and a quick smile, despite the fact that in 1994 he had been attacked by a young Islamic fundamentalist who disapproved of his largely secular work. The attacker managed to sever a nerve that left his writing hand withered, thus complicating his last years, but he somehow continued to write.
Writing obsessed him from a young age. He married late, in his mid-40s, preferring to devote his energies to his writing, though he also worked as a civil servant for many decades, retiring in 1972 from a position in the ministry of culture. “I was always happiest at my writing desk,” he said to me, explaining that he wrote in the morning, ate in the afternoon, and spent the evenings with friends in a café.
While the Cairo Trilogy attracted a wide readership outside the Arab world, leading to his Nobel prize in 1988, a good deal of his work has never been translated into English. Mahfouz is more complicated and various a writer than most non-Arabic readers know, his work ranging from social realism to fabulous storytelling in the vein of the Arabian Nights: see, for instance, his Children of Gebelaawi – a wildly inventive piece of fiction that came out in 1959 and forms a kind of riff on Islamic and biblical history.
A fair portion of the meditations in Echoes of an Autobiography consists of conversations with a mythical seer, Sheikh Abd-Rabbith al-Ta’ith. In one of these, the interlocutor asks the wise fellow about the afterlife, and he replies: “If you have sincerely loved the world, the Afterlife will love you warmly.” From what I know of his books, Mahfouz loved the world with a depth rarely seen, and I have no doubt he now rests happily, over the rainbow.
guardian.co.uk 13.12.2011

The average global surface temperature of Earth has risen by .8 degrees Celsius since 1880, and is now increasing at a rate of about .1 degree Celsius per decade. This image shows how 2010 temperatures compare to average temperatures from a baseline period of 1951-1980, as analszed by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Credit: NASA GISS

New research into the Earth’s paleoclimate history by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies director James E. Hansen suggests the potential for rapid climate changes this century, including multiple meters of sea level rise, if global warming is not abated.
By looking at how the Earth’s climate responded to past natural changes, Hansen sought insight into a fundamental question raised by ongoing human-caused climate change: “What is the dangerous level of global warming?” Some international leaders have suggested a goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times in order to avert catastrophic change. But Hansen said at a press briefing at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on Tues, Dec. 6, that warming of 2 degrees Celsius would lead to drastic changes, such as significant ice sheet loss in Greenland and Antarctica.
Based on Hansen’s temperature analysis work at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the Earth’s average global surface temperature has already risen .8 degrees Celsius since 1880, and is now warming at a rate of more than .1 degree Celsius every decade. This warming is largely driven by increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide, emitted by the burning of fossil fuels at power plants, in cars and in industry. At the current rate of fossil fuel burning, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will have doubled from pre-industrial times by the middle of this century. A doubling of carbon dioxide would cause an eventual warming of several degrees, Hansen said.
In recent research, Hansen and co-author Makiko Sato, also of Goddard Institute for Space Studies, compared the climate of today, the Holocene, with previous similar “interglacial” epochs – periods when polar ice caps existed but the world was not dominated by glaciers. In studying cores drilled from both ice sheets and deep ocean sediments, Hansen found that global mean temperatures during the Eemian period, which began about 130,000 years ago and lasted about 15,000 years, were less than 1 degree Celsius warmer than today. If temperatures were to rise 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times, global mean temperature would far exceed that of the Eemian, when sea level was four to six meters higher than today, Hansen said.
“The paleoclimate record reveals a more sensitive climate than thought, even as of a few years ago. Limiting human-caused warming to 2 degrees is not sufficient,” Hansen said. “It would be a prescription for disaster.”
Hansen focused much of his new work on how the polar regions and in particular the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland will react to a warming world.
Two degrees Celsius of warming would make Earth much warmer than during the Eemian, and would move Earth closer to Pliocene-like conditions, when sea level was in the range of 25 meters higher than today, Hansen said. In using Earth’s climate history to learn more about the level of sensitivity that governs our planet’s response to warming today, Hansen said the paleoclimate record suggests that every degree Celsius of global temperature rise will ultimately equate to 20 meters of sea level rise. However, that sea level increase due to ice sheet loss would be expected to occur over centuries, and large uncertainties remain in predicting how that ice loss would unfold.
Hansen notes that ice sheet disintegration will not be a linear process. This non-linear deterioration has already been seen in vulnerable places such as Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica, where the rate of ice mass loss has continued accelerating over the past decade. Data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite is already consistent with a rate of ice sheet mass loss in Greenland and West Antarctica that doubles every ten years. The GRACE record is too short to confirm this with great certainty; however, the trend in the past few years does not rule it out, Hansen said. This continued rate of ice loss could cause multiple meters of sea level rise by 2100, Hansen said.
Ice and ocean sediment cores from the polar regions indicate that temperatures at the poles during previous epochs – when sea level was tens of meters higher – is not too far removed from the temperatures Earth could reach this century on a “business as usual” trajectory.
“We don’t have a substantial cushion between today’s climate and dangerous warming,” Hansen said. “Earth is poised to experience strong amplifying feedbacks in response to moderate additional global warming.”
Detailed considerations of a new warming target and how to get there are beyond the scope of this research, Hansen said. But this research is consistent with Hansen’s earlier findings that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would need to be rolled back from about 390 parts per million in the atmosphere today to 350 parts per million in order to stabilise the climate in the long term. While leaders continue to discuss a framework for reducing emissions, global carbon dioxide emissions have remained stable or increased in recent years.
Hansen and others noted that while the paleoclimate evidence paints a clear picture of what Earth’s earlier climate looked like, but that using it to predict precisely how the climate might change on much smaller timescales in response to human-induced rather than natural climate change remains difficult. But, Hansen noted, the Earth system is already showing signs of responding, even in the cases of “slow feedbacks” such as ice sheet changes.
The human-caused release of increased carbon dioxide into the atmosphere also presents climate scientists with something they’ve never seen in the 65 million year record of carbon dioxide levels – a drastic rate of increase that makes it difficult to predict how rapidly the Earth will respond. In periods when carbon dioxide has increased due to natural causes, the rate of increase averaged about .0001 parts per million per year – in other words, one hundred parts per million every million years. Fossil fuel burning is now causing carbon dioxide concentrations to increase at two parts per million per year.
“Humans have overwhelmed the natural, slow changes that occur on geologic timescales,” Hansen said.
By Patrick Lynch
NASA’s Earth Science News Team
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
nasa.gov 8.12.2011

by Charles Simic

Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos A stuffed animal and an old man sitting on a bench in Central Park, 1983
I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day.
My own inordinate interest in what the lunatics are up to in every corner of our planet has to do with my childhood. When I was three years old in Belgrade, German bombs started falling on my head. By the time I was seven, I was accustomed to seeing dead people lying in the street, or hung from telephone poles, or thrown into ditches with their throats cut. Like any child growing up in an occupied city during wartime, I didn’t think much about it. I was as serene then as I will ever be, sitting among the ruins smoking my first cigarette, riding on a Russian tank with a friend, or watching our school janitor hang the portraits of Marx, Stalin and Marshal Tito in our classroom after the liberation.
Becoming a displaced person after that, one among millions, ending up in country after country, learning one foreign language after another, mispronouncing its words in school or when asking direction in the street, struggling to read and make sense of the history of the place, worrying about some war being declared and even bigger bombs falling on my head, and later, when I was older, fretting about being inducted into the army and sent half-way across the world to die for a cause that made no sense to me or to a great many other humans being capable of thinking—all this contributed to my need to know what plans are being hatched behind our backs.
I mustn’t forget, either, that I was surrounded by political exiles in my youth, many of whom, after having lived either under Stalin or Hitler, or in some cases both, never lost their vigilance. Even after twenty or thirty years in the United States, they gave the impression of keeping a suitcase packed under their beds, ready to flee at a moment’s notice should hippies or some variety of American fascists come power.
Lucky for them, they are all long dead, so they can’t read some opinion piece or hear a congressman or a senator today clamour for the very same police state measures they barely escaped from. Watching the government of the country they grew to love curtailing liberties, spying on its citizens, militarising its police forces, imprisoning both foreigners and Americans indefinitely without having to prove their guilt, and coming to admire the mindset of authoritarian regimes it used to despise, would have been both terrifying and depressing. They could not help but note that some of their fellow Americans who cheer for the death penalty and for torture, and call the people demonstrating against Wall Street lice-infested misfits and degenerates, are no better than the ones they knew back home and are as eager to persecute, imprison, and even commit murder should they be called upon (I think people who clap for death, love war without end, and adore guns are perfectly capable of it). My mother, who never recalled anything but trouble, and was sure the worst was yet to come, would be saying, I told you so, all day long.
Her generation at least didn’t have the Internet to torment themselves with. This morning, for example, reading around on the web, I discovered that our top political commentators are in complete agreement that the so-called “Grand Bargain” that the two parties failed to agree on last summer and again in November, must be enacted sooner or later. Either geezers like me tighten their belts, stop heating their homes in winter, forget about the cost of living and future social security increases, don’t run to the doctor every time something hurts them and allow their teeth to rot and fall out, or the United States won’t have enough money to fight wars and bail out the big banks.
To anyone who has been paying attention and knew that our political system has long been incapable of solving any of our country’s real problems, none of this comes as a surprise. I remember overhearing an inebriated elderly businessman in a restaurant back in the 1970s telling a lady companion, “The American worker is too expensive and has no future. I can make more money in Asia than in Pittsburgh.” However, I never realised that our ruling classes would be in such a hurry to give up on the rest of us, and not just the workers and the old, but the young people as well, and without a twinge of conscience. My only hope nowadays is that in my dotage I’ve got all of this wrong, and that in President Obama’s second term, or with Mitt Romney’s or Newt Gingrich’s first, we’ll see everything in this country change for the better.
Till then, Happy Holidays!
December 5, 2011, 2:53 p.m.
nybooks.com