Alienated and Alone

 

"Yet in some curious way it was a visionary experience: it had hit her in the middle of the body. She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down over the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little, and the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white, solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone."

               --D.H. Lawrence, "Lady Chatterley's Lover"

Till Human voices wake us and we drown.

                 --T.S. Eliot, Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

Yesterday, it rained and snowed in mid April. Apart from walks through the town, Mad Dog, spent the day mostly alone. There was a brief visit to a post surgical neighbor, but mostly he was alone with his dog, who never says much. 

The neighbor had the TV going. Mad Dog has been struck, when phoning people in the middle of the day, how often he can hear the sound of the TV in the background.

Often the TV is playing FOX News.

Mad Dog spent most of the day reading, doing household chores. He did not play music, although he has tons in various formats. He was okay with silence and the snoring of his dog.

For one hour, he listened to "The PBS News Hour," where old friends, Judy Woodruff, David Brooks, and the same crew which has been on for years spoke their one way conversations to him.

He has become disappointed with Ms. Woodruff, who, as she has aged, has drifted into drippy maudlin reflexes, often following a story with, "How heartbreaking" or "We are so sorry about that," or some other expression of sympathy or regret at the news of the violent, tumultuous world she finds so regrettable.

She has also stopped challenging people about things Mad Dog wants her to challenge. David Brooks said Americans should not leave Afghanistan because when they did, the Taliban would take over and deny schools to girls and return women to the 13th century, forbid music and generally be nasty and violent. Ms. Woodruff clucked in sympathy, but never asked, "But why should American men and women die or spend years in that God forsaken place to protect Afghan women? If Afghanistan, why not Saudi Arabia, or all those parts of Africa where Boco Haram frequently attacks schools and carts off girls?"

The day before, Mad Dog had signed in to a zoom call among Democrats where a fired up Democrat mentioned a Republican bill in the state legislature which would require all New Hampshire university students to pass the same citizenship test which immigrants have to pass. This struck Mad Dog as an interesting idea, and he had just sparred with the Twitter crowd about the idea that new immigrants had to pass a test about the U.S. Constitution and other features of the United States government which some nameless bureaucrats had deemed essential knowledge for anyone who wants to call himself or herself a U.S. Citizen. Mad Dog had noted that test is waved if you are born in the U.S. with the consequence that some voters have no clue there are three branches to the government or what they do.

When Mad Dog challenged his fellow Democrat asking why she objected to such an educational standard she was clearly surprised to be challenged but she responded that there are lots of foreign students at UNH for whom a requirement to know the workings of the U.S. system are irrelevant. Okay, Mad Dog agreed, then exempt them.

But why not require such a test for all New Hampshire high school graduates? New York and Massachusetts require passing a test to graduate high school, although who knows what questions are on those tests? Likely Mad Dog would be appalled to learn what those questions which pose the hurdle to the rest of life would be. But for Mad Dog, any American high school graduate should know there are three branches of government on the federal level and should have some vague idea what those three branches do differently and what "checks and balances" means and why they exist. And, oh, yes, that there is a Constitution and a Bill of Rights and why and what these are.

The master of ceremonies interjected to calm the shocked woman who had inveighed against this Republican bill, who may have seen the bill as something akin to those Jim Crow travesties of "citizenship tests" which only Black voters had to pass, and nobody Black was ever allowed to pass, so their right to vote was denied in a cynical charade of only allowing "qualified" voters to vote. We have to say she "may have seen" because she never raised that objection. The master of ceremonies (stage manager) of our town Dem meeting assured the woman, "Oh, Mad Dog does that to people. Don't take it personally."

So there we have it, people who play well with others and the other type of person, the Mad Dog type, who is best left to silent solitude to contemplate whether interaction with people is a blessing or a curse. He does that to people. He challenges them, which in a fraternity, is not what is expected. We are all friends here, which means agreeing all the time, not arguing. 

One of Mad Dog's most important experiences as an eight year old was reading Robinson Crusoe, which got him imagining life alone on an island. The wonderful Tom Hanks movie, "Cast Away" addressed the same problem. Are people not social creatures, pack animals?

For Hanks, the solution was to create a person surrogate, which he fashioned using a coconut for a head. Anything, any image that looked halfway human helped with the sense of isolation.

Lady Chatterley, who found English society, at least the niche she occupied, so oppressive yearned for solitude, for isolation from the people who surrounded her. She felt isolated in the presence of people, something we call now "alienation."  For Sartre, "hell is other people" and Lady Chatterley would agree. But for the cast away, the absence of other people is hell.

Mad Dog concludes, tentatively, the solution is other people are necessary, but it may be necessary to limit their expression. For those folks who Mad Dog speaks with on the phone, those FOX News listeners, the images on a screen serve the same purpose as Hanks' coconut headed surrogate. It is after all "FOX and friends." Those people in the bright colors and bright smiles are surrogate friends, doesn't matter what they are saying, really, as long as they resemble something human. Human voices wake us. And in the case of FOX listeners, drown.

And maybe that's the real charm and utility of TV friends. They do not really interact with you; they are just filling a void. 

Polygamy

What does it matter to me whether my neighbor has one wife or five?

What does it matter to me whether my neighbor is married to someone of the same sex?

What does it matter to me whether my neighbors are married or simply living together?

Why does being married need to carry with it any legal status at all? Which is to say, why does the officiant at a marriage ceremony say, "And now by the powers invested in me by the state of New Hampshire, I pronounce you man and wife?

Why do we need marriage at all? 

At a wedding some years ago, in a large AME church, I listened as the pastor outlined a variety of circumstances in which the congregation, the community of faith should act as a policeman of vows: he exhorted his flock to step in when they were at a party and the groom remained behind to frolic as his wife departed to get home to the kids, "And you see his roving eye, step over there and tell him to go home to his wife!" 

So that was one function of the wedding ceremony: to enlist the community, the power of the group to enforce individual fealty and "good behavior."

In a recent NYT article on polygamy it was mentioned there are something like 181 legal rights, obligations and benefits of being legally married, including things having to do with what happens when a spouse gets sick, visitation at the hospital rights, rights having to do with inheritance of property, rights concerning access to children. Apparently, marriage is convenient for government: It confers official status and rights to spouses which otherwise would have to be defined.

Given the commercial basis of health insurance in the United States it also simplified who can be covered under a company's health insurance policy. If General Motors had to cover 5 wives or 5 girlfriends of a single employee, that might be a disadvantage to the bottom line. 

Polygamy has been attacked on the grounds that in some cults, young girls are forced, against their wills to marry older men, but that has to do not with polygamy but with the offenses of cults in controlling the lives of adherents.

The main argument against polygamy might be the burden it would put on the government to cover social security, welfare and Medicare for multiple wives, but the government covers the twelve children of Hassidic couples where the wife works but the husband spends all day in the temple studying the Torah and depends upon the state to support his family. Surely, if the government can tolerate that individual choice, it can tolerate the choice to have so many children among people who cannot afford them, unless it decides not to.

From a woman's point of view, I can see the advantages: A woman might like the idea she can be left alone at certain times and another woman can be called upon to serve her husband's needs. In many marriages, women provide more support in the day to day to the male than the male does to the woman, and this work can be shared. How often have I heard a woman refer to going to bed at night an having to face, "The last chore of the day?"

Reading the stories of families in the NYT piece it was striking that these families had certain characteristics:

1/ It was always a man and multiple wives, never a wife with multiple husbands.

2/ None of these families seemed to be composed of people with high income professions: You did not see a neurosurgeon with five wives; you did not see a movie star with four husbands; you did not see a CEO which two wives and two husbands. it was usually a construction company owner or manager who had two or three wives who also sometimes had jobs of their own.

Of course, one might ask why anyone would want one husband or one wife, let alone three, but that's just me asking. 

Nightmare in China: The Xinjiang Gulag

 There are usually two sides to every story, but reading Raffi Khatchadourian's "Ghost Walls" in the New Yorker (April 12, 2021) if only a small sliver of the truth is contained within this report, the story is beyond the worst nightmare of George Orwell, the most dystopian dreams of Rod Serling.

What Khatchadourian does is to present the case of a single woman from a province called Kuytun,  which borders Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Gobi desert and he juxtaposes her single life against the political decisions all the way up to the supreme leader of China, Xi Jinping, and he traces how Xi's perception of religious dissidents as "rats scurrying across the street" has been translated into a force which reverberates down the bureaucratic chain, executed by ambitious men trying to impress Xi and embracing efforts at control which are almost beyond imagining.

Katchadourian does reveal some startling things I had no idea about: In China mass attacks, with mass casualties are frequent. While the favored weapons may not be guns, random attacks on train stations, public gatherings, markets with explosives, knives, axes or even toxic sprays provide the rationale for imposing state control. 

Mr. Xi may well have an idea that by imposing the power of the state he is actually benefiting the Chinese people, but as Mr. Katchadourian builds his case, the horror wells up.

In America, of course, the 2nd amendment freaks have spun a great hobgoblin of "government coming to take your guns" but their imagination is embryonic compared to what government can actually do, if a state is completely in the control of an all powerful leader. All the guns in private hands in America would be swatted aside like so many fleas in Xi's China.

Xi manages, through his underlings, to turn an entire province into an open air prison, through the use of tens of thousands "assistant police officers" and a vast network of huge prisons, prison guards and enforcers. The whole province became a state controlled organ, and though that means millions of people, that's still only a small percentage of China's population of a thousand five hundred million citizens.

The description of the prison, the determination to establish thought control are excruciating and the snatches of official dogma, "Stability is about liberating man, standardizing man, development man," are all you need to know. The emphasis in that sentence is on "standardizing."

The woman we follow is Anar Sabit, who is sucked into the maw of the machine, and given so little information about what her offense has been that for the first months of her captivity the real agony emanates from not knowing why she has been swept up, what she has done, what or who she has offended. Her story makes Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" look like a school girl's tea party with Christopher Robin.

At one point she hears some guards say, "Her name is on the list...nobody can save her."

What makes the narrative especially wrenching is her description of her captors, many of whom are exhausted, almost as terrified as she is and thoroughly dehumanized, and they know it.

But where Xi out does Orwell is in the use of high tech: facial recognition, identity cards which are swiped through machines and we wait with breath held to see if an alarm will bring police and guards running. 

And the high tech control is not limited, in China, to just this one region, or to prisons. It is pervasive in a way which exceeds London's CTV cameras or the red light cameras in American intersections:

"At toilets in Beijing's Temple of Heaven Park, facial scans insured that users could take no more than seventy centimeters of toilet paper at a time."

                               

Along the way, in the various prisons Ms. Sabit passes, she meets old friends, the father of a school chum who knew her well, and he tries with facial expressions and a brief, furtive phrase to warn her what not to say or do.

Her guards are clearly as terrified as she, fearful if they allow her to sit down or walk across a yard, it will be their heads on the spike.

Her hopes are raised repeatedly--she will be freed, allowed to leave the prison, only to be crushed every time. She tells herself not to allow herself to believe what she has been told about her next date for release will ever happen, but she cannot resist.  The women prisoners are warned they must not cry when inspectors come, but must laugh and smile, which they can hardly manage. 

There is even the echo of enterprise in the prisons: Just as the Nazis culled gold teeth from the dead in their concentration camps, the Chinese cut the long hair of the women and sell it abroad.

This is a 21 page article, and each page is a struggle, but I was pulled along by the same sale espoir of the inmates--hoping there might be escape in the end.

China clearly is not content to control thought at home, but abroad, as Xi Jinping has threatened Western academics who criticize his regime: "They will have to pay a price for their ignorance and arrogance."

In a global economy, Americans have to deal with all sorts of people we do not understand, or sometimes, when we do understand them, we loathe them.

There are Afghanistan "allies," military officers who chain village boys to their beds in the barracks and rape them, because that is Afghan custom. 

There are Saudi princes who murder newspaper men and who do not allow women to venture outside the house without a male relative to chaperone.

There are Russians who poison their political opponents.

There are British prime ministers who refer to Black children as "picaninnies." 

There are African dictators who deny the existence of AIDS and who condone murder of homosexuals.

There are Iranian zealots who send suicide bombers to market places.

There is a Brazilian president who refuses to believe in COVID.

The world is filled with deranged and malevolent people who consider themselves virtuous.

Always has been.

And America has Jim Jordan, Mitch McConnell and the entire Republican party and Qanon. 

Having said all that, China is one place I am happy not to live. 

April 9, 1865

 "I think the Union Army may have had something to do with it."

Variously attributed to Gen. George Pickett, Captain Robert Bright and others, on how the South lost the Civil War.

One hundred and fifty six  years ago, Robert E. Lee arrived, in a spotless gray uniform, carrying a ceremonial sword,  at a house at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia owned by Wilmer McLean.  I'm not sure how much General Lee said to Mr. McLean on the occasion, but it is well known that Mr. McLean's farm was the site of the opening battle of the war at Manassas and he moved to be farther away from the war, but the war came to him, and his pallor was the site of the war's effective end.

Lee was on the run, his army starving and when he reached a railroad station where food and supplies were supposed to be waiting, he found the train had already left, apparently ordered on to Richmond to rescue Confederate documents belonging to the government, under orders of someone, perhaps Jefferson Davis. And the train took all the food for Lee's army with it. The classic bureaucratic SNAFU. Lee later blamed his defeat on that. Of course, his defeat was a long time in the making and that was just one more nail in the coffin.

I Will Make Georgia Howl--O. Youngblood 

Lee had consulted with his most trusted general, Longstreet, who had not thought their situation hopeless just days earlier, but when the relief train disappeared, Lee got reports about massive desertions and decided to surrender.

It had taken Abraham Lincoln over 2 years to find generals good enough to defeat the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. but eventually, he got Ulysses S. Grant, who devised the strategy of maximal pressure on the Confederate armed forces. He pounded Lee without respite and he send William Tecumseh Sherman to punish the Confederates from the West, through Tennessee down through Georgia, so there could be no shuttling of Southern armies between fronts. And Grant found Phillip Sheridan and George Armstrong Custer who pursued Lee's Army of Northern Virginia like hounds to the fox.

The fact is, Lee was outgeneraled by Grant, and by Grant's predecessor, George Meade, who took control of the high ground at Gettysburg and laid waste to Lee's army when he launched Pickett's charge.

But Meade was too timid to follow Lee, to close in for the kill, and Lincoln replaced him with Grant, who was not timid. 

After the war, not immediately after, but 50 to 70 years later, when most of the veterans were aging and dying off, the usual excuses of the defeated began to consolidate in the myth of "The Lost Cause" which promulgated the lie that the Confederate armies were never beaten on the battlefield but simply overwhelmed by the numbers of Union troops, by the industrial might of the Northern industries.

While it was true that by Appomattox the Army of Northern Virginia was literally starving and when Lee asked Gant if he could feed Lee's 20,000 starving troops, Grant said yes, of course. He could do that because he had insured his own supply lines, unlike Lee.

Grant

The idea of Southern armies fighting against huge odds, outnumbered but fighting the Union armies to a standstill, has been examined by many historians and found to be mostly false, most effectively by William Marvell ("Lee's Last Retreat") who examined army records from both sides and found that for the most part the armies had equal numbers of men on the battlefield.

And there were clear routs of the Confederate army, against all odds, as happened at Lookout Mountain, when Union soldiers simply did not stop climbing the mountain to attack the entrenched Confederates at its summit and ran the Rebels off the field. The boys in blue astonished even their officers and Grant, watching it happened, was amazed.

So the gallant Southern gentlemen were ground down, killed and defeated by an army of even more determined men.

Sheridan

And what was really remarkable about these two sides was that the Southern army should have been more motivated: The Union army was invading the South, was marching through their own homeland. After three years of mostly defeats, the Union army got a chance to vote itself out of the war and nobody would have been surprised if they had. But in November of 1964, they voted to continue the war by voting in large proportions for Lincoln. They had suffered so much and they did not want to give up.

On a visit to Fort Sumter a few years ago, I joined a group gathered around a man in Park Ranger gray and green wearing a Smoky Bear hat. That's the way tours are given at the fort--you get off the ferry and break up into groups of 20 or 30 visitors and listen to the Park Rangers who guide you around the grounds. My group's docent was not a Park Ranger, it turns out. He wore no badge. He was a volunteer docent and he started in on the saintly Robert E. Lee until I could take it no longer and finally, as politely as I could, interjected: "You know, history is one long argument, I know. But Robert E. Lee was as vicious a slaver as existed in those times. And that war was about slavery, not state's rights. As Lincoln said when introduced to Harriett Beecher Stowe: 'So this is the little lady, who wrote the book that started the great big war.' And Lincoln said in this 2nd inaugural address, 'Everyone knew that this peculiar interest [slavery] was the cause of the war.' He was there. Neither you nor I were."

The docent skulked off to lick his wounds but later called out to me, from a safe distance of twenty yards: "There was only one slave owner at Appomattox and he wasn't wearing gray."

Custer

Which is one of those half lies upon which disinformation is so often built.

First of all, technically, the house in which the surrender was signed belonged to a slave owner, Mr. McLean.

Secondly, it is true Grant owned a slave--his wife's family  had owned slaves--but Grant got one and could not abide the idea and freed him in under a year.

Lee, it might be argued did not own slaves. His wife did, though, 189 of them, who Lee managed. In fact, on the death of his wife's father, those slaves were supposed to be freed, as was stipulated in the will, but Lee refused to free them and three slaves, feeling betrayed, having been promised their freedom, escaped. When Lee recaptured them, he had them stripped and lashed and then "sold them South" to plantations where life was far less comfortable.

A vicious slaver, Lee.

So, at Appomattox, yes, technically you might twist reality enough to claim Grant owned the slave and Saint Robert did not, but, no, that's just a lie when you get right down to it.

Two bits are always mentioned about Grant when Appomattox comes up:

1. He wore a private's shirt with shoulder straps bearing 3 stars and was muddy and worn down.

2. He had a crushing sick migraine which instantly stopped when he got Lee's letter asking for surrender. 

This makes the case for Grant, a humble man in the face of the imperious Lee and Grant burdened greatly by the pressure of command.

All that is likely, in essence, true. 

Grant was no Lincoln. He issued the infamous Order #11 expelling Jews from the department under his command when he heard Jewish merchants were black marketing cotton sales. Lincoln quickly countermanded this order, because Lincoln, a lawyer, knew you cannot vilify a person for being a member of a class of people.

But Grant was a good judge of men, as he once observed when Lincoln looked at the diminutive Sheridan and wondered where Sheridan was big enough to be an effective commander, "He'll be big enough for the purpose, when the fighting begins."

That was true of Sheridan and it was true of Grant.

Pardon My Pronouns

 I love the New Yorker, really I do.

It has been a bastion of intelligence and critical thinking through some dark times.

Now,  of course, I have John Oliver and Stephen Colbert to watch on youtube, but some of my old friends are disintegrating before my eyes: Judy Wooldruff is drifting off into maudlin-ville, commenting at the end of reports from her reporters "So heartbreaking" as if we need to be instructed how to feel about what we've just seen. Would Walter Cronkite have felt the need, after film from Vietnam, showing wounded and dying American soldiers, "So, sad"?  And then Judy hosts a gallery of photos of a selection of people who have died from COVID with piano music in the background and a monologue about how "Shirley loved her garden and her excursions to Walmart and her grandchildren. And her family says she never missed an episode of 'As the World Turns."

Gwen Ifiil, she is not.

I do like Jonathan Capehart, who replaced Mark Shields not a moment too soon.

Even in the New Yorker, however, we have editorial decisions which leave one gasping.

Take this one from an otherwise riveting story about polygamy in America. The author drifts off into a polygamous arrangement among some folks who are "gender fluid" or "trans" or something:

"Andy  goes by the pronoun "they" and described themself as "gender ambivalent." A lawyer in their early thirties, they spoke in long, hyperactive paragraphs, their eyes wide with passionate focus. Their pronoun preference, however, is mild. 'If you're saying a sentence about me, you can use whatever pronoun you want,' they said. 'They're all manifestation of the incomplete power of language to translate human experience into sound. We're all genderqueer."

--And so it goes. How much is wrong with this paragraph?

Let me count the ways:

#1 Since when does the right of a transgender or fluid gender soul to not be offended by insensitivity regarding his/her gender transcend and over ride my right to speak the Queen's English the way I learned and have spoken it since age 2. Why should I have to re circuit all the neurons in the speech center of my brain for fear of offending a person who was born a he but now prefers to be a she or a they? Surely, that person can understand the difficulty this poses for others. Why should everyone else have to change?

#2 Getting singular vs plural right was so embedded in my infant bring  the "they" referring to a singular person just sounds wrong. Can you imagine someone trying to translate this into French?

#3 What exactly do eyes wide with passionate focus look like? Are they different than eyes wide with horror at the idea of calling a single person a "they"?

#4 Translating human experience into sound through language is not impossible. In fact, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Truman Capote--I could go on--occasionally succeeded in doing just that. 

I understand, as Howard Cossell (born Cohen) said of Muhammed Ali (born Cassius Clay) a man (or woman) should have the right to be called by the name he or she wishes to to be known by.

I understand some people grew up calling Negros or African Americans "Nigger" and those people should learn to call colored people something less offensive, but that does not require a rewiring of mental circuits, synapses or brains and trying to negotiate paragraphs with he/she/they combinations which do not fit plural/singular constructions.

I must draw the line at "they."

And it annoys me to see the pronoun choice appear next to pictures or profiles on the internet, in special deference to this practice. 

Does the world really need to stop because you have special preferences?

Watching the Ken Burns/Lynn Novak  thing on Hemingway last night, I was struck by some of the film clips from Paris 1924, where women were sitting at sidewalk cafe tables smoking cigars, drinking wine with men and laughing. They were rebelling against the strictures of Victorian scruples. Hemingway's father had scolded him for mentioning in a short story that a man had got gonorrhea from his lover saying, "Gentlemen do no mention venereal disease outside the doctor's office." THAT was the world of sex in the first decades of the 20th century. 

Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, we have she/he/they. 

Those women in Paris were happy to lead their liberated lives, and needed nobody to consensualy validate their choices. 

Now, we must all buy into it.

Fie on that.