A Siege of Constantinople, Ogier le Danois, 1499, from the Bridgeman Art Library. Yes, Constantinople looked exactly like that.

When I was in the fourth grade, we studied Alabama history from a textbook that would probably raise a few eyebrows, were it to reappear today.

Written in the middle of the twentieth century, the book presented the topics of race, politics and economics from a viewpoint that would have seemed perfectly familiar eighty years earlier: slavery was bad for the victims, yes, but they were better off than if they’d been left in Africa without underwear or Jesus; the Civil War was a conflict between the Northern industrial worldview and its Southern agricultural counterpart, with the former attempting to impose itself forcibly on the latter; the economic inferiority of the modern South had nothing to do with lack of education or the rampant inequality of wealth, but was rather due to the pernicious interference in Southern affairs by the Northern-dominated federal authorities.

Don’t get me wrong — not every insinuation was necessary without merit: Reconstruction was brutal, war is always political and cultural, and the terrible institution of slavery was originally brought to this country by the very men and women we revere as its founders, in both North and South. The view through the prism of resentment and isolation, however, was undeniably distorted, and the march of time everywhere else in the world had only made the peculiarities more noticeable.

Fast forward to today: I’m reading a history of Byzantium by Sir Charles William Chadwick Oman (published in 1892) that I downloaded to my Nook from Project Gutenberg. Compared to the 1,400 or so pages on the subject by John Julius Norwich that I already own, this book, at about 250 pages, is hardly more than a Cliffs Notes summary, but it’s a pretty interesting read if you’re into this sort of thing.

Apart from the varying scale of the two works, however, another significant difference jumps out very quickly. The three-volume Norwich history was written during the last two decades of the 20th century, while Oman published his contribution at the end of the 19th: whereas the Viscount Norwich makes some effort to provide an overview of the events of the thousand-year history of the Byzantine Empire without offering a moral or cultural interpretation, Sir Charles makes no bones about where his sympathies lie, every step of the way.

“[My] Researches are here set down to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements both of our own and of other peoples …”

Herodotus of Halicarnassus

 

“I write these things as they seem true to me; for the stories told by the Greeks are various and in my opinion absurd.”

Hecataeus of Miletus

The nineteenth century English-speaking world was one where geography, religion and morality were inextricably linked. In any conflict between Christians and non-Christians, the Christians wore the white hats. If the fighting was North versus South, the North was industrious and godly, while the South was decadent and demented by the heat. Asia began at Belgrade, and the further east one travelled, the more heathen and inscrutable the people became, and the more likely they were to be Bad Guys.  (The world being round, the furthest extreme of any West-to-East axis of evil was — naturally — Ireland.)

•   When the heretic barbarian Goths overcame the mainstream Christian Romans in Italy and the Balkans, it was only through some terrible lapse on the part of the defenders. The idea that the Goths may have simply been braver, or smarter, or more motivated on the battlefield just isn’t worth entertaining.

•  When the sinister fire-worshipping Persians trampled the God-fearing Byzantines in Antioch and Jerusalem, it was because of the weather, or plague, or treachery, but when the Westerners won, we know it was because they were superior people, from a superior culture.

•  Attila and his swarthy, slant-eyed hordes didn’t overrun Europe virtually unopposed because they were incredibly energetic and utterly fearless, united firmly behind a bold leader, it was because the Empire was tired and just needed to catch its breath. The superiority of the Europeans was a given, regardless of how badly they lost every contest.

All this this racial and religious prejudice seem very obvious to me now, more than a century later, but I have to wonder: does Norwich’s take on the same events seem so much more balanced and impartial because it really is, or does it look that way because he is of a time and place more akin to my own, so that whatever prejudices he brings to the work are my prejudices also, and therefore invisible to me?

I remember an issue of National Geographic from somewhere in the late sixties which featured an article on Iran — our faithful ally Iran, ruled by a fatherly and benevolent Shah, West-leaning, enlightened, a model for the Muslim world. It was all pretty uplifting, and made Tehran sound like a suburb of Philadelphia. In retrospect, we know that the Shah was a dictatorial and unpopular ruler, and that a great many Iranians clearly did not want to live in a suburb of Philadelphia. Films we saw in school about South Africa sang the praises of this Westernized nation, the economic powerhouse of Africa, while somehow failing to convey the fact that the driving energy of the machine was a vast army of non-European slave-laborers, isolated and repressed by a white minority. The picture of Iran and South Africa that we were seeing was wildly distorted, but at the same time deeply plausible: our own underlying prejudices made it easy for us to accept the distortions. We never looked for answers to questions it never occurred to us to ask.

In every era, people have looked at the old histories and marvelled at their ancestors’ skewed view of events. We laugh at the inconsistencies, we are horrified by the misconceptions — yes, we see farther because we stand on the shoulders of giants, but these are fairy-tale giants, hairy and uncouth. From our superior sophistication and insight we see their world as it really was, not the funhouse reflection that they themselves looked out upon.

You can see where this is going.

A hundred years from now, or fifty, or five hundred, how foolish will we look when our descendants read through our textbooks, or our newspapers — or this blog? No matter how dispassionate I believe myself to be, no matter how I strive for a clear-eyed and impartial view of my world, in the end I’m only looking in a mirror. The world I see is the world I am capable of seeing, nothing more. My personal limitations restrict just what I can see, and how far, and how deeply: my own reflection is always going to block part of the view.

That said, what’s to be done? Descartes reduced the universe to “I think, therefore I am”, but that’s hardly a basis on which to vote, choose which brand of milk to buy, or build a personal ethos. We have to make do with the vision we have, however impaired, and do our best to see and think as clearly as our minds and hearts will permit. Maybe the only rule should be “I think, therefore I can try my very best to be honest with myself.” We will fail, because the funhouse mirror will always be an imperfect vehicle for viewing the universe, but the very effort makes us better.

And whenever we slip up and forget, History (with a capital “H”) is there to remind us that the more absolutely right we think we are, the more appalled our great-grandchildren are going to be by just how amazingly wrong we were.

[Many thanks to Wikipedia for the quotes from Herodotus and Hecataeus.]

Icebergs? Bah! We’re not afraid of any silly icebergs!

I know Mr Jung and Mr Freud tell us that we can learn things from our dreams. Well, last night I learned that zeppelin crews on the Rio to Lisbon route steal shoes from the passengers’ staterooms when they get bored. (Brawls have broken out over a pair of Spongebob flip-flops.)

I learned further that if you lose your wallet during the trip you are handed over to my friend Judith Levine for safe keeping — although her response is usually just to throw up her hands, cry “Whatever!”, and sail out in a flurry of crêpe de Chine. The trip takes three days.

It was quite a dream, even for me.

For centuries, people blamed spicy food for exotic or unusual dreams: in 1904, Winsor McCay began a comic strip for the New Evening Telegram called “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend” in which the central characters’ bizarre dreams were caused by a late meal of “welsh rarebit“, a dish of toast with mustard-and-Worcestershire-seasoned cheese sauce. Giants romping through New York City, people experiencing their own funerals… It was a pretty kaleidoscopic experience, generally, and a lot to blame on a couple of pieces of cheese toast.

In 1905, Winsor McCay began the strip for which he is best known, “Little Nemo in Slumberland”, which, while certainly loopy, was a toned down considerably from its predecessor in order to appeal to a more general audience. He is also known for one of the earliest animated shorts, “Gertie the Dinosaur”, from 1914.

Little Nemo, romping through dreamland in his footie PJ’s.

 

My dinner last night centered around roasted brussels sprouts, a baked potato, and tuna steak, so I don’t think I can fall back on the welsh-rarebit defense.

Another highlight from last night’s extravaganza? I learned that my extensive study of Renaissance painting on biblical themes made me the only person on the zeppelin crew who could spell “Massacre of the Innocents” correctly for a sign we needed to create. (In their defence, many of the other crew members spoke primarily Portuguese, so perhaps there was a language issue.) I don’t recall that we were actually planning to massacre any innocents, but I have no memory as to the purpose for which the sign really was intended.

I’ve written about dreams in this blog before (last June, in “Dream a Little Dream“), but this morning I don’t think I’m quite up to a scholarly disquisition. I’m just giving you the particulars, and leaving you to draw your own conclusions.

The control room of this trans-Atlantic behemoth (it was an airborne cruise ship) looked a lot like a laundromat, as all of the zeppelin’s controls were housed in white boxes with knobs and dials, with the occasional large lever alongside — you know the kind, the one that sticks up three or four feet from the floor in spaceships from 1950′s science fiction movies, and never works when you need it to. Once over the ocean, there was little for the crew to do, so we spent much of our time devising ways to amuse ourselves, such as playing shuffleboard in the hallways and mixing up passengers’ laundry.

The “Infinite Monkey Theorem” of 1913-14 states that a monkey hammering away at a keyboard for an infinite length of time will, at some point, purely by accident, manage to place the right letters in the right sequence and recreate “Romeo and Juliet” in its entirety. I sometimes wonder if the human brain works in a similar way — if you tumble enough random bits and pieces around in there for long enough, perhaps it’s inevitable that you will one night produce a dream in which a zeppelin crewmember, while mopping the floor in an outside walkway, will stumble upon a Hello Kitty pocketbook filled with #8 finishing nails.

I should mention that I am prone to somewhat cinematic dreams, and I rather enjoy them. Like stumbling across a box in your mother’s attic, filled with artifacts of your childhood that you had forgotten existed, sometimes wild dreams help to stir up memory, and bring old knowledge into new focus, or throw everyday events into bizarre and unexpected juxtapositions, like the “chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella” of the Comte de Lautréamont, in his Chants de Maldoror.

Did you know that the if no one pays any attention to the large molded-plastic warning signs that hang above the debarkation escalator, the lettering gradually melts back into the surface and fades away? Yep. It happens on the Rio to Lisbon zeppelin. I saw it.

I don’t know what you’re going on about: I see Paul Krugman.

As I do just about every week, I stopped off on the way home from work last Friday to check a couple of books out of the Fayetteville Public Library. I usually read quite a bit, and I try to keep the beast supplied with a plenitude of reasonably nutritious fare — otherwise I start browsing things like the back of my cereal box or the ingredients list on my Twinkies, and there are some things we really weren’t meant to know.

As I was settling in to dinner later that evening I picked up one of the books to enjoy during my meal — I know: a habit frowned upon in all the nicer homes, but an essential part of my digestive process. I fumbled the book briefly as I was sitting down, and a folded rectangle of paper fluttered out onto my chair.

Down one side of the paper was written, in a tiny handwriting like the footprints of bees, a list:

“Luxeuil; wandering Irish bishops & saints; Boniface of Grediton; Fulda; suburbicarian; the great anarchy; Chronicle of St. Gall by Elekchard IV; Lindisfarne.”

Upon opening the piece of paper, I found that it was a receipt of the kind that public libraries often provide these days, generated by their computerized inventory system. Oddly enough, the receipt was not from the library in whose book I found it, but from the University of Arkansas’ Mullin Library. There were three books listed on the receipt:

“Love in the Ruins: the Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World”, by Walker Percy; “Troilus and Criseyde” by Geoffrey Chaucer; “The Making of Europe: an Introduction to the History of European Unity”, by Christopher Dawson.

Of those three books, the only one I’ve read is the first, “Love in the Ruins”,  which I read about a month ago — taking it out of the Fayetteville library during the same week as this mysterious other person was borrowing a copy from the University.

No doubt you’re thinking: “What the hell is the point of all this?”  Guess what? There isn’t one! Yep, you’ve been had.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

 

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

 

– From the Poem “Jabberwocky”, appearing in “Through the Looking Glass, and what Alice found there”, by Lewis Carroll

We are primates, underneath all the literature, and our history has left us blessed — or otherwise — with an amazing capacity to perceive patterns. We can look at a clump of shrubbery and spot the apple — or the snake — by the mere visual deviation of those objects from the general background of twigs and leaves. We see patterns, and we see things that interrupt those patterns. That perception kept our hungry ancestors from starving, and kept them out of the bellies of even hungrier predators.

For us, living in our modern world, these pattern recognition skills are still useful, but we’ve had to learn to analyze and interpret what our instinct picks out for us: we notice that one of the cars in the parking lot is moving relative to the others, so we don’t walk out in front of it; we see the fly in our soup, the typo in our term paper, the misplaced decimal in our income tax return, and we use our intelligence to decide how to interpret those things. At the same time, our animal awareness can cause us to force patterns that are not really there: faces in the clouds, writing on a seashell, the Virgin of Guadalupe on a grilled cheese sandwich. To be really useful all of this has to be filtered through the lifetimes of knowledge and insight that each of us has at his or her disposal, through education, through critical thinking, through personal experience.

There is an underlying logic to my mysterious list (“suburbicarian”? “the great anarchy”?) but I don’t know what it is. With a little study, I might come up with some reasonable guesses — I might be able to perceive a pattern — but I might just as likely end up trying to impose my own prejudices. Maybe it was a dyslexic’s grocery list. Maybe it was a secret communique from the Latverian Embassy to Doctor Doom’s covert agents in Northwest Arkansas.

And that, of course, it what art and poetry and almost any other human creative endeavor is all about. Read Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” and you’ll find yourself attaching images to the “borogoves” and the “slithy toves” even before Alice prevails upon Humpty Dumpty to explain what they are. Certainly every fortune teller since the days of Noah has understood that most human beings will create a narrative from the skimpiest fragments: A tall, dark stranger? What are the chances of running into one of those, purely by accident? Money changing hands? Rent’s due on Tuesday! How did she know?

‘It seems very pretty,’ she said when she had finished it, ‘but it’s rather hard to understand!’ (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) ‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!’

- from Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll

I love patterns that emerge from chaos, like a painting — which is, after all, nothing but dabs of paint on a flat surface — coalescing to show me a princess, or a steak dinner, or a racehorse, each with its own story, its own message, its own meanings to impart.  At the same time, I recognize that perceived patterns aren’t always real patterns, or that there may be legitimate patterns in a body of information, but not those that are immediately apparent. Economic statistics, election-year polling, charts and graphs of all kinds, they are all clouds or trees or oil-on-water rainbows. They can mean something, or nothing, or many things at once, depending on how you parse it out. As with a Monet painting of a haystack at at dawn or a parable from the Book of Matthew, we have to use both our instincts and our intellect to read the message.

I believe in the human role in global climate change; not because someone told me to, but because there is a vast body of data available today in which I can see certain patterns, informed by what I know personally and by the insights of people whose experience and expertise I trust. Other people may look at that same data and see cow farts, or volcanoes, or Elvis, or nothing at all. Within a generation or so, we’ll probably know whose interpretation was correct. On the other hand, I don’t think the alignment of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh and the wording of the Declaration of Independence are related through a common link to visiting aliens from Canopus.

But I could be wrong about climate change, and the Declaration could contain hidden instructions for how to build a warp drive, written in Canopian karbooble ink. We shall see.

We all observe — or very assiduously ignore — the stirring in the bushes, that’s part of our evolutionary birthright: what makes us human is our ability to think about it, to reason and analyze and decide for ourselves whether what’s in front of us is the apple or the snake.

If Big Government had its way, he’d have to go outdoors to get that tan, instead of to a salon in Westchester that can airbrush the wrinkles while they’re at it.

We can start with my parents, who, as members of the United States Air Force, were living off the taxpayers when they met. They courted and were married (by a Justice of the Peace, no less; yet another piglet sucking at the taxpayer teat) and in the fullness of time my brother, sister and I all came along — clutched firmly in the arms of Big Government, as my mother gave birth to each of us in Air Force hospitals built, staffed and run at taxpayer expense.

Like many military families, we moved around a lot, every couple of years packing our belongings into our baby-blue ’55 Ford Fairlane and hitting the road — highways built with yet more money extorted from the hapless working man in the form of taxes. During that time we kids were spared the living death of polio because the heavy hand of that socialist system in DC, always alert for ways to rob the honest American and steal his freedoms, had required that millions of American children be vaccinated, at taxpayer expense. When we did get sick, we were trundled off to the infirmary doctors — paid by the government — to have our broken limbs set, our gashes stitched and our fevers looked after.

After my father finished his twenty-odd years in that welfare system known as the US Air Force (currently employing — again, at taxpayer expense — more than 704,000 people directly), we moved back to his home town in Alabama, to a house that was lit and heated by electricity from — you guessed it! — another Big Government scam, the Tennessee Valley Authority, where we cooked and did our homework on the backs of honest working men and women who should have been spared the burden of providing electricity to hundreds of thousands of people who were too stupid or too lazy to live in the parts of the country that already had electricity (presumably put in place by the Iroquois at their own expense as a gift to the Founding Fathers.)

Still not content, my parents educated themselves on the G.I. Bill, yet another drain on the American pocketbook, and went to work, meanwhile putting their children into public schools, that notorious scheme by the Communists in Washington to get their hands on the money of the Joe the Plumber and brainwash his kids at the same time.

Because — as is often the case with the lazy and the shiftless — the cost of a higher education was beyond our means, I got through college with the aid of scholarships and grants and multiple part-time jobs — it’s always the moochers and the deadbeats who get the breaks, isn’t it? — while my sister worked her way through a Bachelor’s degree, then a Master’s by attending classes whenever she could, after spending eight hours a day behind a sewing machine in a factory that made blue jeans, until she finally got her own seat on the Big Government gravy train by becoming an elementary school teacher, indoctrinating generations of otherwise innocent children in the same pernicious principles of hard work and independence that had guided her life.

After twenty years working at our local bank, my father retired for the second time (people like us can’t stick with anything, that’s why we have to rely on the Trumps and the Kochs of the world to show us how it’s done) only to discover within a few years that he had developed a degenerative brain condition (a side-effect of Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, while he was still sucking down that Big Government paycheck every month to send home to his greedy wife and kids) which eventually required him to move into a facility in Huntsville, Alabama (a veritable hotbed of Big Government welfare, what with the Marshall Space Flight Center, Redstone Arsenal, and other such Bolshevik institutions) — where doctors and nurses could use him as an excuse to suck still more money from the taxpayer by taking care of him and other veterans like him, who seemed to think that the country somehow owed them something for their troubles.

Even after his death, my father managed to be a burden on the taxpayer — a military honor guard was sent from Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, three hours away, to serve as pallbearers and provide a final salute: a clear case of government spending spiraling out of control.

My mother (who turns eighty next year) is not content to have been a mere passenger on the Big Government Welfare Bus, but recently had knee surgery, paid for at least in part by Medicare. Having worked full-time until she was seventy, she seems to think that she’s somehow entitled to live an independent life for a few years longer. Of course, you do wonder why, at eighty years of age, she needs to be able to get out and about at all — well, I’m afraid you can blame those pesky public schools again, as they invite her several times a year to come out and talk to children about her experiences as a survivor of the the bombing of Pearl Harbor, indoctrinating still more of our youngsters in the insidious values of honor, patriotism, and duty, which are generally Socialist code — as we all know — for sitting around on your ass making a target of yourself in foreign places at taxpayer expense (Who isn’t aware that Hawaii is not part of the United States, but actually a province of Kenya?) when you should be at home managing your investments or washing the Lexus — or as Dick Cheney so ably demonstrated, working on the sixth year of your bachelor’s degree.

I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve continued the family tradition: I get up in the morning and shower in water brought to me by a municipal water system constructed by those Tax-and-Spend devils in the government, breathing air kept clean by bureaucracies whose only function is to crush the spirits of honest American industrialists just trying to make enough to pay for that well-deserved fifth vacation home, and driving to work on a road that was paid for with someone else’s hard earned cash; knowing that I’m stealing all of these benefits from the pockets of people who are thereby forced to do without the things they deserve in places like West Palm Beach, Malibu, Vail, and Grand Cayman Island.

Fiscal cliff? Hell, no! It’s a golden opportunity to get this country back on track! Think of the millions of Americans serving in the military, in government, on municipal road crews, in air-traffic control towers, in police stations and firehouses, in national laboratories and public universities who can finally be forced to give up living off the taxpayer and go to work like everybody else! Why should the man who earns a measly half-million a year be forced to buy a used Beamer instead of the second Mercedes that he deserves just to support those thousands of deadbeats who work at defense contractors General Electric or Lockheed Martin, or at the National Institutes of Health — or, for that matter, at the local public library — soaking up those taxpayer dollars that could otherwise be used to buy a bigger boat, or a bigger pool, or speculate in the Hong Kong securities market? Maybe we need that wake-up call, before we all start singing the Internationale and demanding an improvement in the current infant mortality rate!

So what if 48 countries provide their babies with a better chance at surviving until age 5 than we do? That still means that we’re kicking the asses of  174 other countries,  without raising taxes! What kind of life is it, anyway, if you have to live in Cuba (#40) or Belgium (#30) or France, God help us, (#11), where they have Socialized Medicine and tax all capital gains? We should be proud to stand alongside New Caledonia (#46), Belarus (#51) and Serbia (#53) with low, low tax rates and virtually no tax enforcement on investment incomes parked overseas! Isn’t that what freedom’s all about?  [Figures are drawn from the 2012 estimates provided by the CIA World Factbook -- yes the CIA, another bunch of idlers on the government dole.]

 

I realize that none of this has been all that funny, and I guess it wasn’t really meant to be.

Yes, there is vast waste and corruption in our system of governance, but I fear that we’ve become a nation of people who constantly peer over our neighbor’s fence to decry his excesses, while ignoring our own, and who will cheerfully deny a stranger the basic necessities that we take so completely for granted. We gnaw endlessly at the tired bone of Big Government, fretting over every dime, while we overlook just how much of that meat we ourselves have consumed, every day, in a million different ways. I am safer because of the work my tax dollars (and yours) do; I am healthier, I am more affluent, I am more secure. There are places in Afghanistan or Somalia or the Central African Republic where government plays no role whatsoever in the life of the people and nobody pays any taxes at all. Are things better there? I would venture to say that they are not.

Is there a happy medium? More than likely, but we’re not going to find it by beating each other over the head with “fiscal cliffs” and “nuclear options”. Reason is a gift that we humans get, free of charge, just for being human. Failing to use it seems… well, a bit wasteful.

Dada artist Hannah Hoch might have provided a model for Doctor Hannah, although I don’t personally recognize anyone in this image.

(Personally, I would have thought the job would have required more than a single psychiatric professional — we were always a bit more like the Simpsons than the Cleavers — but I suppose my dream-insurance didn’t cover that.)

In the middle of a room full of people there was a table covered with documents: books, letters, pictures, and so on; all the odds and ends that a family accumulates over time. One large photo album had pictures of my immediate family in a variety of situations — around the table, in front of the Christmas Tree, at a barbeque — all quite normal, except that the faces were from different photos, sometimes from different ages, cut out in little squares and glued on over the existing versions: the correct faces on each body, simply taken from the other pictures. When I started flipping through the album, Doctor Hannah come over and took it from me, informing me that these materials were only for the family.

When I pointed out that I was, in fact, a member of the family, she backed off — but reluctantly, clearly suspicious, not entirely convinced.

As is often the case with dreams, other things happened that seemed significant in the context of the dream, but confusing.  There were conversations, interactions, such as meeting a little boy who was both a distant cousin and a friend from my own childhood (apparently un-aged), and being rudely snubbed by an angry dark woman who looked like Maria Callas.

Toward the end of the dream, I found myself in conversation with the doctor, and she asked me if I was afraid of ghosts. I told her that I was not afraid, that ghosts were my friends. She then observed that this was perhaps because I was, myself, “the family ghost”.

I woke up about this time, but, needless to say, the dream stayed with me.

.  .  .

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung — who, with Sigmund Freud, co-founded the subset of psychiatry they called psychoanalysis — believed that there were layers of images and ideas within us all that represent basic human principles, themes that we all hold in common, regardless of culture or experience, simply by virtue of our shared biology. He called these concepts “archetypes”.

Early in his career Sigmund Freud was fortunate enough to meet the woman of his dreams: she was beautiful, she was intelligent, she was fascinated by his theories, she was clearly destined to be his soul mate. What did he do? He married her dumpy and intellectually-challenged sister, and then just made everyone’s lives miserable. He and Jung parted ways over Freud’s obsession with sex as the root of all human emotion — he felt so strongly about it that when Jung contradicted his theories he would burst into tears, and sometimes faint dead away. A carpenter might find the perfect opportunity to polish his skills by living in a really old house that is in constant need of repair: perhaps the same principle applies.

Whereas Freud traced everything back to some rather gruesome principles of childhood psycho-sexual development, Jung interpreted the behavior of human beings as the expression of our relationships to the internal archetypes. He was fascinated by frameworks such as alchemy and the Tarot, in which experience and interaction are formulated into a complex, but internally consistent, symbolic language, representing our innermost feelings and impulses through highly developed images. Both Freud and Jung saw great value in dreams as a means for the “unconscious” to express itself without being edited or suppressed by our conscious selves, and both organized elaborate systems of interpretation — Freud, typically, relating everything to sex, and Jung searching the dream imagery for evidence of the archetypes, hoping to use these symbols as guides to the underlying mind of the dreamer.

Today, many of those who study such things believe that there is, in fact, no structure to dreaming; that only upon waking do we attempt to drag the tattered bits and pieces of meaningless imagery that may have haunted our sleep into some kind of recognizable narrative. Others believe that dreaming is simply a way for our minds to sort and prioritize the vast accumulation of images and feelings that we experience during our waking hours, filing away important concepts in a sort of underground memory, a river of experience that bubbles up to provide our moments of déjà vu or inspiration, allowing our waking selves to reach beyond the daylight world for the ideas and connections that separate us from cats and cattle and coyotes.

Me, I’ll go with the middle ground: Like everyone else, I’ve found myself in the embarrassing position of telling some story about a past experience — completely sure of my facts — only to be contradicted by someone else who was also present at the time. Memory, clearly, is flawed, even when we’re wide awake: how much more unreliable might it be when we attempt to bridge the gap between waking and sleep?

On the other hand, if I had the conscious ability to assemble the sort of scenarios that I wake up from two or three times a week I’d be in Hollywood, and Johnny Depp would be camped out on my doorstep waiting for a chance at the next screenplay. Something is going on in my skull while I’m snoring into my pillows.

I like dreams: even nightmares can seem like a window into another world, a place where many of the same people live and work and play, but where the rules are different: a stairway can go up or down forever; a room can become larger or smaller from one moment to the next; a ventriloquists’ dummy can chase you down the hallway and out into the front yard, gibbering wildly from that creepy little hinged jaw and waving its disgusting little arms. (Those things should be outlawed. I mean, really.) In our dreams we have the opportunity to live in two different realities, and sometimes we get to take a little something from one to the other.

When I was a boy I dreamed about pirates and giant ants and the Blob. Now I’m thinking I ought to write a movie about the family ghost. Tonight I’m putting a notebook next to my bed: Tim Burton, get out of my way.

No matter how good you are, sometimes it’s just hard to get people to pay attention.

Usually the process is straightforward: the client tells me what he or she needs, I put together a proposal and send it along, the client approves the proposal, and I start work.

Making the client happy is what it’s all about, because then I’m happy: I’m like that first-grader running home with an art project from school, dancing around in front of the refrigerator door as Mother tapes up the masterpiece with my name on it, right there for everybody to see. I live for positive reinforcement.

Within a week or two I have a functional first draft of the site in place. I send the address to the client so he or she can give the site a test-drive and provide feedback.

I call and leave a message, I send an email, alerting the client to the opportunity to view the project, hopping from one foot to the other in front of the (figurative) refrigerator door all the while, pointing at the masterpiece I’ve just taped up. If all goes well, the client gets back to me, I make whatever changes or improvements are needed, and a few days later, a new website is born.

If all goes well …

Sometimes, however, all does not go well, and the process begins to break down at about this point. The client doesn’t return my call, or respond to my email. A day passes. Two, three, a week. The site languishes un-critiqued, un-viewed, unloved.

Ten days. Excitement turns to anxiety. Did I miss something? Are there grammatical errors in the text? Did I use the wrong background color? I go back through my notes, I re-read the emails, and I start fiddling, tweaking, looking for issues, things that might be improved. I call — I get voicemail. I email — no response.

I show the project to other people: “Beautiful!”, “Looks great!”, “Fabulous work!” I’m reassured, but still …

Two weeks. Three. Anxiety becomes depression. Is the thing just so awful that the client simply can’t find the words to express his or her dismay in a way that doesn’t violate the most fundamental precepts of civilized behavior? Four weeks.

Six weeks. I keep leaving messages, sending emails, hearing nothing in return. I fiddle some more. I start making major changes, hoping to stimulate a response, like a neurosurgeon poking electrodes into a patient’s brain trying to make him twitch, or smell bread baking, or see Paris. Seven weeks.

Two months. Three. The client is silent, but my mortgage bank is not. The utility bills are starting to arrive in envelopes of ever more interesting — and alarming — colors.

By now I have months invested in a thousand-dollar job, and we still haven’t progressed beyond the first draft. Depression becomes anger. My emails get more rigidly businesslike, my voicemail messages more shrill. I don’t understand what I could possibly have done to deserve to be treated this way. I take it out on myself, on my friends.

(Let me stress that most of my customers are actually very organized, very responsive, and a dream to work with, and I appreciate that more than I can say.)

I am very fortunate in having people around me who look after me, who look out for me, who see to it that my head doesn’t explode or that I don’t start eating the cats. Without them — and without those many customers who have always treated me with the same kind of respect that I imagine they expect for themselves — I would never have lasted this long.

That said, I’ve decided that freelancing is a great sideline, but no way to make a living. Next week I begin a full-time job, a “real” job, as my father might have called it, and freelance work will be moved to evenings and weekends. Hopefully the colors of the material arriving in the mailbox every morning will begin to calm back down to the whites and creams of solvency, and pasta can go back to being a side dish. I’ll still be working as a graphic designer, but I’ll be taping up the work on someone else’s refrigerator.

I can’t say that I’m not a little disappointed, obviously. On some level I always feel that my skill as a designer is of a quality that will motivate the clients as much as it motivates me; nobody likes to feel that the work they do is that easy to simply ignore. On the other hand, this new job is going present new challenges, new learning opportunities, and a new audience to win over, and that’s exciting, so I don’t think I’m going to spend too much time sitting around grinding my teeth over the changes.

Time to reboot the machine, prime a new canvas, move on to the next chapter!

.  .  .

To my existing customers: Fear not! I will continue to provide the same services I always have, and I thank you for being there for me! I hope to return the favor for years to come.

To customers with projects still under construction: Nothing will change for you — I will honor all obligations and timetables as they stand.

To potential new customers: Bring it on! I will be avoiding work that presents a conflict of interest with my new employers, but otherwise, I will be taking on new projects as they come my way. Variety is, after all, the spice of life.

Not good for the environment, but possibly an interesting way to meet people. http://cargocollective.com/seis/One-Disposable-Camera-Fourteen-Helium-Balloons

Then, as now, I thought the idea was a singularly bad one, mainly for environmental reasons: the balloons were almost certainly going to end up choking a sea turtle or an albatross when they blew out to sea and came to rest somewhere in the Atlantic.

On the other hand, there was a certain charm about it all. Everyone loves the idea of some Robinson Crusoe tucking a message into a bottle and flinging it into the surf in the one-in-a-million chance that someone will stumble over it on a distant beach and start a search-and-rescue operation.

Writing a blog is much like that. You put together a message, and you send it out into cyberspace, where it jostles and drifts with the millions of other messages floating around out there, until — you hope — it comes to rest on some laptop or iPad or tablet in London or Carson City or Biloxi, and you get a chuckle, maybe, or a sympathetic nod, from somebody, somewhere. You may never know whose toe is getting stubbed tripping over the bottle half-buried in the sand, but you do it anyway, in the faith that sooner or later it will wash up, and it will be noticed, and a connection will be made.

For Memorial Day this year, I posted an article that my mother had written about her experiences as a child living on Hickam Field — Pearl Harbor — at the time of the bombing by Japanese planes that brought the United States into the Second World War. The response from friends and acquaintances was gratifying.

More surprising, however, was the email I received a couple of days later from Hawaii, from a volunteer who was helping to archive and coordinate the personal histories of the people who were there in that place, on that day. She had read the post, and had information about my mother’s family that she wanted to share. I put her in touch with my mother, and sparks have been flying ever since. She knew things about my grandfather that even my mother didn’t know, and had photos and ship’s manifests and other personal memorabilia of enormous value, both in the broader historical context, and for my family specifically.

This sort of thing does happen in life, but not often enough. I wonder if these connections, these “bolts out of the blue”, are so rare simply because we so rarely take the time to send up our balloons, or to toss our bottles into the surf; we’re so convinced that there’s really no one out there, that the best we can hope for is not an answer to our hail, but just a hollow echo.

According to Wikipedia, there were 156 million blogs in existence.by February of 2011. A survey by Technorati indicated that the average blogger updates his or her site two to three times per week. Conservatively that means that there are around three hundred million blog posts per week, worldwide. It’s safe to say that there’s a lot of hot air going up in those balloons, but with those numbers there’s also a pretty fair chance that some legitimate communication is also taking place. Even at a crowded and noisy party, it’s sometimes possible to have a really good conversation.

The decades since that war have seen a proliferation of information technology — we are all connected, at least potentially, to so many other people, in so many ways. Even so, there is a consensus that the quality of the communication has declined even as the quantity has grown: we’re doing a lot more talking, but saying a lot less in the process.

Is this true? Who can really say? The value of human communication can only be measured in subjective terms, and only on the basis of one conversation at a time. Broad generalizations may reflect statistical truths, but may also mask very real relationships between people and places, relationships that might never have existed in the days when communication, while more substantive, was also more difficult.

In my mother’s case, the connection that she’s made with her new friend in Hawaii is a relationship that extends not only over distance, but also across time, connecting her more intimately with her own past, providing context and new levels of detail for memories that have become faded and worn with more than seventy years of handling. For me, it’s a reassurance that, although this blog is only one of many millions, out of so much background noise can still emerge a coherent and meaningful conversation.

Thanks to a total stranger living several thousand miles away, my family and our awareness of our own place in history have been enlarged and enriched.

So, I sit here — squinting in one eye because of a too-long day spent in front of computer screens and behind the wheel of a car, dog-tired  – pecking away at this keyboard long enough to do this one last chore before bed.

Is what I’m doing important? Against the backdrop of events taking place right now in Syria, in China, in Egypt — even in Wisconsin — the answer would have to be no.

Is it worth doing? I think that’s a more complicated question. Every conversation connects at least two people along some common thread, providing an alternative to conflict, to loneliness, to misunderstanding, to isolation. People fight when they can’t communicate, but a conversation, however trivial, at least opens a channel through which empathy can flow, given the opportunity.

So, even though I realize that I’m just adding to the pollution of a cybersphere already cluttered beyond belief, I’m going to keep on doing it anyway; you just never know when someone is going to pick up that bottle, take out the message, and smile.

Today, the lower forty — tomorrow, the world.

“There was an old lady who swallowed a fly
I don’t know why she swallowed a fly -
perhaps she’ll die!

There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,
That wriggled and wiggled and tiggled inside her;
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don’t know why she swallowed a fly -
Perhaps she’ll die!”

Etc., etc.
(From a song with music by Alan Mills and lyrics by Rose Bonne.)

In the heat and humidity of places like Montgomery, Alabama, or Tupelo, Mississippi, kudzu will grow at a rate of 12 inches per day. A lawnmower left unattended will disappear in a week; a parked car in ten days; a small house will vanish in two months.

Kudzu (several species of the genus Pueraria) wasn’t always the enemy: native to eastern Asia, it was brought to Philadelphia in 1876 as a fast-growing ornamental vine. Limited by the cold winters of the Northeast, the plant seemed harmless, even useful, providing a lush canopy of green shade for arbors and porches in a fraction of the time required by wisteria or grapes. In the South it helped stabilize slopes and replenish soil nitrogen. During the Great Depression the Soil Erosion Service of the USDA distributed 85 million seedlings to be grown for erosion control and livestock feed. Kudzu was our friend.

Then, suddenly, another out-of-town guest appeared, jumping the Texas border in the late 1800′s, and exploding into infamy in the 1920′s: Anthonomus grandis, the boll weevil. Cotton farmers throughout the Deep South were driven off their land as their crops were ravaged beyond salvage. Selling out and moving into the cities, they abandoned homesteads and farms — leaving behind plantings of kudzu that had shaded porches or anchored hillsides from Shreveport to Savannah. By 1953 the USDA had begun to grow uneasy about the ever-enlarging mounds of vegetation, and removed kudzu from its list of recommended ground covers. By 1970, there was nothing left to do but move the women and children to high ground and start praying.

.  .  .

It’s small, it’s ugly, and it smells really bad. Can it save the South?

Fast-forward to the end of the first decade of the 21st Century: another (yes, another) insect has appeared on the local scene, this time from China and India: Megacopta cribraria, the Bean Plataspid, the Lablab Bug, or, more commonly, the kudzu bug. Kudzu bugs are tiny round insects that suck the vital juices from beans, wisteria, soy, and — the silver lining? — kudzu. Kudzu bugs love white surfaces, for some reason, and have spread throughout much of the Southeastern US riding on white cars and trucks. They are more effective at controlling kudzu than herbicides, less labor-intensive than mowing and cutting — and, perhaps most convincing of all, they are already here.

Unfortunately, soybeans are a major crop in many parts of the South, and soybean farmers don’t view the kudzu bug in such a positive light. Debate rages between farmers facing yet another insect threat to their crops and suburbanites who can’t locate their garages from May to November about whether to encourage the spread of the kudzu bug as a possible means to fight back against the green invader.

The argument is probably academic, of course, since the creature is here, and probably won’t just get bored and leave any time soon. We’ve swallowed the spider to catch the fly, and there is no going back.

.  .  .

Horses originally evolved in North America from small, rabbity ancestors that appeared after the demise of the great dinosaurs. They spread and diversified for millions of years, finally developing into the beasts that we know today, the genus Equus, about three and a half million years ago, spreading from North America into Asia, then onward to Africa. Approximately 12,000 years ago, however, the horse completely disappeared from North America, the land of its birth, driven to extinction by factors such as climate change, as the advancing ice turned grasslands and prairies into tundra, and the arrival from Asia of human hunters.

 

Then, in 1538, Hernán Cortés brought sixteen horses to Florida, the first of many introduced by the Spanish explorers, and equine hooves once again pounded North American prairies, brought back by the very same predator that had contributed to their disappearance all those millennia before.

Underneath our settled veneer, humans are nomads: there have always been those who travel, seeking trade or adventure or fleeing from persecution or punishment. We look for something new, something better, something different — all the while bringing with us the comfortable, the trusted, and the familiar. The Mongols and Turks brought garlic and tulips from their barren, windswept homes in Central Asia to the riverbanks and villages of Europe. Pigs and rats came with the trading ships to Mauritius and promptly wiped out the dodo. Honeysuckle and privet have long since come to be synonymous with summer in the Deep South, even though both plants are, like kudzu, imports from Asia. Smallpox came to North America from Europe and wiped out entire populations, while syphilis was sent back to return the favor.

Raphus cucullatus: First, it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then, it just wasn’t anywhere at all.

Even without humans in the equation, few ecosystems are completely closed; ocean breezes blow pollen, seeds, and insects from one island to another; storms carry birds off course; drought or floods drive animals from familiar pastures into new territories. Humans have simply taken the process a step further, intentionally carrying our food animals and plants from place to place, unintentionally bringing our pests and parasites along for the ride.

This inevitability does not absolve us of responsibility for the systems we disrupt, nor does it protect us from the crises we bring upon ourselves. We are a source for diversity and devastation, forcing native populations to adapt to new threats, and protecting threatened populations from change too rapid to accommodate. Roughly one-fourth of all plant and animal species are facing extinction today, in a majority of cases due either directly or indirectly to human activity. There have been several previous extinction episodes in Earth’s history, some more severe, some less, but none have operated on such an accelerated timescale: changes to climate and to plant or animal species that in the past took from tens of thousands of years to tens of millions, are occurring today in a span of decades; these changes are happening too fast for plants and animals to adapt, to migrate, or to acclimate themselves. Instead, like the aurochs — the wild ox of the Bible — and the passenger pigeon — the most common bird in North America when the Declaration of Independence was signed — more and more organisms are simply dying out, leaving behind bleeding wounds in ecosystems that are already under stress.

In the nineteenth century whalers and traders brought rats to the Pacific island of Guam, where the rodents proceeded to decimate the local ecology. Eventually, in an effort to control the rats, someone brought snakes to the island. The snakes devoured the rats, bringing down their numbers, but proliferated wildly in the process; when the rats began to thin out, the snakes turned to the native birds for food. Today, mongooses are being brought in from India in an effort to control the snakes.

We can’t put the genie back into the bottle, the toothpaste back into the tube — once we’ve swallowed the fly we have to move forward, we have to decide what we’re going to do, how we’re going to address the situation. Ideology, in the end, is irrelevant. We can only try to look ahead at the outcomes of our actions before we take them, and make those considerations part of the process. We will do what we feel we have to do — or what we feel we’re entitled to do — but there will always be consequences. Pretending otherwise is not only foolish, it can be fatal.

The little old lady who swallowed the fly never really solves her problem. In the end, after a long series of ever more unlikely and desperate efforts to regain control of the situation, she dies. She might have better off being more careful in the first place.

.   .   .

Jackie Holcomb: My Pearl Harbor/Hickam Story

The USS Arizona, destroyed during the bombing.

It has been over 70 years since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hickam Field, and all of the other military bases on Oahu (Wheeler Field, Schofield Barracks, Ewa Marine Base, Bellows Field and Kaneohe Naval Air Station). The youngest soldiers and sailors who survived that event are now in their late 80’s and dying at the rate of 1,000 a day. Soon there will be no more veterans of Dec 7, 1941, to tell their stories. Even those of us who were children are old and will soon be gone. I was 8 years old and I remember it very clearly. I saw it, heard it,  felt it — I lived it.

Note from Dave: Prior to and during the Second World War what we now know as the US Air Force was a part of the Army, becoming a separate and equal branch of the military only with the National Security Act of 1947. The elevation of the air services to that status was a reflection of the dramatically increased importance of air power in modern warfare, from the initial attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese to the carpet bombing of Dresden and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the first time in history, nations could extend the reach of military action across distances that would have been impossible only a few decades earlier.

The Boeing B-17 “Flying Fortress”

I was born on Fort Totten, an Army post in New York City, and spent the first six years of my life on Mitchel Field, Long Island, right outside of New York City. Mitchel was a very important Army Air Base with both fighter planes and bombers.

In the fall of 1939 my father received orders to transfer to Hickam Field, Hawaii, an Army Air base that was home to B-17 bombers. Hickam was a new base, built in 1935, and fully operational in 1938. There were eight members of our family: my parents, five girls, one little boy. We boarded an ocean liner, the USS Republic, in New York Harbor and sailed down the east coast of the United States, through the Caribbean Sea, the Panama Canal, and half-way across the Pacific Ocean to Honolulu, Hawaii. It took 30 days on the high seas to make this voyage. My parents were seasick and stayed in the cabin with the two babies, ages 2 and 3, and my oldest sister, age 7, who was also seasick. My other 7-year-old sister (they were twins), my 5 year-old brother, and I, age 6, were not seasick and had the run of the ship. It was a glorious time for us, if not so much for the ones in the cabin.

We had been living in Hawaii for a little over two years when the Japanese bombed us. It was a beautiful Sunday morning and we were supposed to be getting ready for Sunday School (but we were actually having a pillow fight) when we heard an loud noise that rattled the house. We went into the living room to ask our mother what the noise was. She was sitting on a window seat looking out the window. She pointed up into the sky and told us that the Japanese were bombing us. I pictured the Japanese wearing kimonos with embroidered dragons, bridges, pagodas, peacocks, etc, on them. Although I was born and raised on bases and all the men around me wore uniforms, it did not occur to me that the Japanese would also wear uniforms. This memory is fixed in my mind, so later when I learned that it took the top brass in the Army and the Navy some time each to realize that the other was not conducting war games, I marveled at my mother’s knowing right away that it was the Japanese. While the bombs were dropping all around us, she told us about the Germans on the other side of the world at war with most of Europe. What it had to do with us and the Japanese, I am sure I did not know.

Where was my Dad while all this was going on? I have no idea. I am guessing he had to report to his duty station. I wish I had asked him. My mother decided that she should feed us because she didn’t know when we would get a chance to eat later. She herded us into the kitchen and sat us down at the table while she cooked oatmeal. While we were eating, a bomb landed in the street nearby and shattered all the windows on the side of the house that we were in. My mother decided that we needed to get away from the windows, so she took us into the hallway, went into a bedroom and dragged a mattress off a bed and put us all on it and then got another mattress and put it on top of us.

After the bombing had ended, a GI came by in an open Jeep and evacuated us. We always went barefoot in Hawaii and our feet were tough as nails. We walked on broken glass out to the Jeep. While driving off the base, we passed the chapel where we went to Sunday School. It was just a block or two from our quarters. One of the few all-wooden buildings on the base, it was totally engulfed in flames. If the Japanese had bombed an hour or so later, we would have been in the chapel and been killed.

The soldier took us to to a housing development next to the base where servicemen who didn’t qualify for base housing lived, where we had friends. When my mother noticed that the front door was open she told the soldier that he could drop us off and go back to Hickam. We went through the house and out the open back door, but found no one. We had another friend who lived nearby on the highway, so we ran down and banged on the friend’s door, but there was no answer. A man in the duplex next door took us in and gave us corn flakes.

To this day I do not like oatmeal or corn flakes.

Later, we went into Honolulu to stay with Hawaiian friends there. Everyone was getting paranoid by now: we were warned to be very careful what we said because there were thousands of Japanese around and they could be spies.  We spent several days in Honolulu before we were allowed back on base, since our quarters had to be fixed up, broken windows replaced, blackout shades installed, bomb shelters built.

Life did not return to normal. Martial law had been declared. Soldiers and sailors were shooting at practically anything that moved. (Anti-aircraft guns actually shot down several of our own fighter planes flying in from the carrier, Enterprise.) There were 40 explosions in Honolulu and only one of them was caused by the enemy. The rest were caused by our own anti-aircraft guns. Air raid shelters were hastily dug; gas masks were issued to everyone. There were frequent air raid drills. For years afterward, I went weak every time I heard a siren of any kind. There was no school. All public buildings on the base and even off-base were commandeered for headquarters and other essential offices.

Note from Dave: The fragment from the exploded bomb was a family heirloom for forty years, until my mother’s oldest sister decided that she, as oldest, should have it. She promptly lost it, and it has never been found.

If a plane is flying too low when it drops the bomb, the bomb may not have time to activate; or may not land right; or may simply be a dud. For several months, unexploded bombs were discovered and brought to designated demolition pits to be blown up.

One such bomb landed in our house while we were in it! We didn’t know it was there until my parents were packing to go in late February, 1942. My father went in to a storage closet in the hallway to get something and saw a hole in the roof; he reached up to the shelf and found a bomb. He took it to the demolition pit and when it was blown up, he kept a piece of it for a souvenir.

The naval ordnance used in the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor

During this time, access to the military bases was restricted. Since we lived on one, we were allowed on it, but I don’t think we left it at all until we were evacuated back to the states in late February or early March 1942. There was no Christmas: we had no Christmas tree, no presents.

All kinds of sailing vessels were put into use to evacuate the dependents of servicemen. Some returned to the States on ocean liners or cruise ships, while others returned on Navy ships. We were among those who returned on a Navy ship. Ours was a minesweeper from the First World War. My father could not come with us, so my mother had to travel alone with six children, ages 4 through 9. We sailed for eleven days from Honolulu to San Francisco, through waters haunted by Japanese submarines: we had to wear life jackets the entire time we were aboard the ship, and we had frequent air raid drills. We slept in the crew’s quarters in bunk beds that were three tiers high.

Upon arriving in San Francisco, we were processed, and put on a train to Boston, my mother’s hometown, a four-day journey. My mother’s family met us in Boston, and we stayed there until my father returned home in May, having been transferred to Grenier Field, in Manchester, New Hampshire.  I spent most of the rest of my childhood in my father’s home town of Rollinsford, New Hampshire. During my senior year in high school, the tenth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, we were shown a film of the attack. That was the first time I had seen anything about it since experiencing it in person. I remember feeling light-headed and faint. I also saw something that was missing from my memory of that fateful day: smoke, lots of smoke. In my memory, in spite of the fact that there were buildings and ships and planes on fire and surely lots of smoke, my mind blocked out the smoke and I saw everything against clear blue skies.

( I should note that Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field were adjacent to each other. They were separated by a chain link fence. We used to crawl under the fence to watch the ships come and go. That fence is now gone and the two bases are now one: Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. We could see the destruction of the ships as well as the destruction of our planes. The Japanese hit our Army air bases first before they hit the ships in Pearl Harbor.)

My father, Chief Warrant Officer George T. Lord, Sr, served in the Army Air Corp/United States Air Force for 34 years, retiring in 1950. Three of his daughters followed in his footsteps and served in the USAF, including me. My husband (Dave’s father) was in the Air Force for over 20 years and served in Vietnam.

A generation of teenage boys seemed to feel that this was the height of feminine appeal. (Of course many of them probably did not have many opportunities for comparison.)

It’s odd, really. The drawings that these folks are so anxious to create, or to help others create, are nothing more than slavish reproductions of photographs, publicity shots that we’ve all seen a thousand times. Wouldn’t it be just as satisfying to simply print out the photo and pin that up somewhere? If I had just spent four hours drawing each and every little hair on Justin Bieber’s fluffy little head, I think I would want to keep that accomplishment to myself — in fact, I imagine I would go to some trouble to conceal it — not offer a step-by-step tutorial on YouTube.

Imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, but what exactly is being imitated here? Rarely does anyone copy the photos of the stars from the cover of the National Enquirer. It’s always the intensely glamorized images, with perfect hair, perfect makeup, perfect lighting, that turn up again and again. It’s that perfection beyond reality that arouses such interest, not the real person whose flesh and bone provided the scaffolding that the image was built upon.

.  .  .

In times past a person who wanted to become an artist spent a considerable amount of time in museums, copying the great masters. Those gentlemen whose works hung in the Prado and the Louvre had answered all the questions, solved all the problems; your success as an artist was going to be measured by the extent to which your work duplicated theirs. Any deviation meant that you were wandering into territory that was not deemed appropriate for an respectable sculptor or painter — inappropriate expressly because these giants had not gone there first.

For centuries the great statues and architectural works of classical Greece were assumed to have been designed as we see them today: stark, white and austere. That “classical” purity was the model for everything that followed, from Roman emperors to the Lincoln Memorial: the substance of the stone itself was the only acceptable surface for such works.

We just assumed the ancient Greeks had a more subdued fashion sense. (Photo from Stiftung Archaeology)

Art historians have come to realize, however, that the ancient sculptors actually painted their statues in vivid colors: great public centers like the Parthenon and the Temple of Olympian Zeus were, by modern standards, garish, dizzying, rambunctious; the images were intended to appear, not as remote stone effigies, but as living, breathing beings, with skin the color of human skin, and clothing and jewelry in all the colors that the Greeks of the day admired and wore themselves.

What does this new information say about all those bare white statues decorating capitol rotundas and civic monuments and great museums all over the world? Perhaps it says less about the works themselves than it does about how we respond to — and use — a fashion, an ideal, a style. The stark whiteness of the Greek statues, as we imagined them, became a symbol of purity and strength that we imitated over and over in our own art and public expressions. Even now, knowing that the model we were emulating was a mistake, our attachment to that style is unchanged: we are not prepared to give up that “classical” look that bears such a freight of meaning for us. We don’t want our heroes to look too real, to be too human. We like depicting Abraham Lincoln fifteen feet tall and ghost-white from head to toe, because it makes him more impressive, more godlike; unlike the Greeks who built the temples of the Acropolis, we don’t want our deities to be too much like us, we don’t want them to have human foibles and weaknesses, and we don’t want them wearing red striped ties and blue socks.

Our unrealistic expectations reach far beyond appearances: we expect politicians to resist temptations to which a pop star is almost required to succumb on a weekly basis to sustain his “cred”. While a college professor who marries four times in four years is highly suspect, an actress who remains happily married for twenty-five is even more so. Human behavior, human excellence, human failings: all are viewed through a different prism when the individual being judged is larger than we are, more prominent, more visible, and the expectations are tailored not just to fame itself, but to the specific role that the famous individual is playing in our society.

Roman Emperor Julius Caesar divorced his wife Pompeia not because of any fault of her own, but because she had been the victim of a stalker, and the Emperor felt that the gossip attendant on the case was a political liability for him. Pompeia had committed no crime, but a love-sick young man had splashed color on the snowy whiteness of her public image, and this was just too much for her husband’s constituency to bear.

(Today, on the other hand, a female in the public eye who never suffers the attentions of a stalker is almost seen as deficient in some way, inadequate.)

We cleave to these idealized images of our leaders and thinkers, our stars and our heroes, because those are images of a perfection beyond our own ability to achieve. We need feel no responsibility to become more than we are, to strive for the same kind of stature, because our idols are so patently more than human; their achievements are so clearly beyond anything we can hope to emulate, that we can absolve ourselves of the need to do and be and become more than we already are.

We worship these pale, inhuman idols because they are inhuman, and therefore present no challenge to our complacency. We reject the garish gods of Greece because they are mirrors, and a mirror doesn’t show perfection, it only shows the truth.