260. Conceptual Art

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Why can't I just be bored by conceptual artists and keep my mouth shut?  Because I'm offended by the compliments they get.

I look at a photo of a Renault automobile on its side and somebody near me says "deep."  I argue for the presence of flaws in a friend's concept of omnipotence and nobody around us ever calls us deep. We're just "picky."

With the car on its side I'm out of the circle if "cool" is all I can work myself up to.  This is conceptual photography.  See the concept?  See it?

Shift to me trying to see, or understand, my friend's concept of an all-powerful, or omnipotent, Being.  We agree that a Being who can create a separate being is more powerful than a Being who can't, and that unless that being is free he's not separate.  He's just an extension of the Supreme Being.  A free being can choose to do things that the Supreme Being doesn't want him to do, like eat forbidden fruit.  If the Supreme Being prevents him he's turned him back into an extension of himself.  So we've got an all-powerful Being who can't do certain things.  This concept needs some work.  At it we go.

Using words.  Words, words, they're what you work with if you're interested in concepts.  And it's hard work.  If you don't think so ask English majors trying to get "the dissociation of sensibility" straight. 

You conceptual artists, you just lay your thing out there and let somebody else do the work.  If they don't get it done it's not your fault.  Maybe they're not deep enough.

How different you are from my friend, who has to get it out there clearly, the whole thing, and explain, and defend, and find the right words, until he satisfies you. 

Surely artists in the past have found that they weren't working with the best material for the job.  We had a sculptor in my town who wanted to make wavy structures out of brick.  The results were new and striking and some of them, with their wide curves away from plumb, made you gasp at the dare to gravity.  But when he came to build fireplaces with chimneys I think he saw he had his medium wrong.  People around a fire are uncomfortable seeing bricks hanging over them; gases want to go up, straight up, and smoothly. 

Use paint or a camera to lay out a concept and you use the wrong material for the job.  Words are the right material. But alas, they are very hard to use.  You have to work with them and work with them.  You often fail.  That's why success in it is so satisfying and compliments so pleasing. 

Here's an example of the difficulty.  You artists used words when you called what you are doing "conceptual art."   I want to know what "art" is doing in that expression. Say you give me this thing you've produced.  Its appeal is supposed to be conceptual.  Suppose I feel the appeal.  "What a concept!"  Where has "art" gone?  There's nothing left for it to do for me, or to have done for me.

Ah, but suppose I don't feel the appeal.  Here's where "art" goes to work.  On the bored, or the exasperated.  "But this is art."  The word lays on an appeal the producer, by himself or herself, hasn't produced.  And by doing something to me it does something for him, handing him a compliment.

You, conceptual artists, don't want me, your reader, your picky reader, thinking that way.  In a moment we'll be calling you "thinkers on the cheap."  This concept of concepual art needs more work.  I'd advise you and your friends to go at it.

NOTE. From Museum notices, New York Times, 10-10-14:

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: 'CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS: THE PRODUCTIOON LINE OF HAPPINESS' (through Nov. 2)  This meticulously considered and assembled survey of one of the deepest thinkers of the Pictures Generation is as beautiful as it is demanding.  No aspect of photography — as art, craft, science or commerce — or of exhibition making, has been left unturned, leaving a show that is a big brainy work of art unto itself.  (Roberta Smith)

259. "Whack-a-mole" as Rhetoric and Strategy

Reflections after Reading Robert Gates' Memoirs

OK, you're at a meeting of the Security Council and the problem is terrorists.  You propose dealing with them one at a time, as they appear.  Somebody calls yours a "whack-a-mole" strategy.  Where does that put you?

In a game arcade, obviously.  Nob pops up out of one of the holes, whop with a mallet.  Faster, faster, whop, whop, whop, so many holes, everybody's laughing, you get all sweaty, and no matter how good you are you can't keep up.  Even if you win all you get is a stuffed panda.

Where are the guys who named your strategy?  At a lectern setting forth a "comprehensive plan," before a screen with a pointer, tracing worldwide contributions, or at a blackboard chalking in combined operations, ending with a Power Point listing of concomitant threats that must be removed.

If only your friend could have gotten in first with a different characterization.  Say "drill-a-lion" strategy.  You're in a weedy blind, with a 30-06.  The menacing beast leaves his lair, shows a flank, pow!  The gun bearer stands by with a reload, in case bwana needs it.  Meanwhile the other guys, with their shotguns, are blamming away at the whole savannah, with lines of trucks to keep the ammo coming.

No, nobody's going to pick up on "drill-a-lion."  They like the picture of you running around your yard with a spade, whacking  rodents.  Can you turn the tables?  "You guys want to tear up the whole yard.  With a lot of expensive machinery."  That won't fly, not until they discover that moles can move to another yard, which will also have to be torn up.

So the better strategy is rejected because, at the tipping point of the discussion, an effectively belittling expression is introduced by advocates of the worse strategy.

258. Tribal Loyalty and the English Language

 
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Linguistic clarity may be essential to moral clarity, as a subhead on yesterday's (9-6-14) Times' OpEd reminds us, but it's so hard, so hard, to maintain it.  As soon as you leave your neutral academic classroom and join (or admit that you are already a member of) a tribe you feel the muck sticking to your words.

I think I felt it when I recognized my membership in the Israeli tribe, through my attachment to the Judeo-Christian tribe of Western history (Post 225).  As soon as the Egyptian generals overthrew the democratically elected Egyptian government I began to fear clarity in describing their deed.  Why?  Because the generals would, in a pinch, help Israel and not her enemies.  (As, when the pinch came in Gaza they did, shutting off tunnels that the elected Brotherhoood president, I feel sure, would not have shut off..)

So, anticipating that, what do I want of the words describing what the generals have done.  Certainly not clarity.  This is the world, where words serve purposes.  Here the purpose, Israel's security, demands obfuscation.  So I, the lord of accuracy in my Composition classroom, wince at the accurate use of the word "coup" for the action that put the generals where they are.  "Couldn't we have a little muck on this one?"

If there were a tribal membership that Chrystia Freeland, author of the OpEd piece, might discover in herself it would be, through her mother, the tribe of liberal Ukrainians, with clan connections to the tribe of her father, the Liberal Party of Canada, through which Freeland has now become a member of the Canadian Parliament.

Freeland's voice in the beginning of her piece could be that of a colleague speaking in the next classroom.  She speaks up strongly for clear language, and exposure of obfuscation.  She reproaches Western leaders and journalists for their reluctance to use plain terms.  Russia's actions clearly constitute "an invasion," the term Ukraine's cyberactivists use, and are not "an incursion," the term favored by President Obama and accepted by journalists.  She appeals, as we all do, to George Orwell's faulting of slovenly language: "that it makes it easier to have foolish thoughts."

But what would we hear from that classroom if the rest of her piece were before it?  Here's the central paragraph:

We may decide we lack the will to stop this [invasion] or to more forcefully help Ukrainians to stop it, but in making that decision we need to be clear about what is going on.  The distinction between lies and truth matter here because this conflict started with the Ukrainian people's revolt against authoritarianism and in favor of the liberal rights and responsibilities Ukrainians call European values.  In the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, moral clarity is essential, but to get there we need linguistic clarity, too: Ukrainians decided to build a democracy at home and make a trade deal with Europe; Russia invaded.

Well-instructed students will go to the central statement that "Ukrainians decided to build a democracy" and the implication that Russians interrupted that building.  How does it fit what's being described?  A little research will show the student that Ukraine had a democracy.  Their president was voted into office by a majority of the Ukrainian people in an election the international community found to be well within "democratic standards."  What else is democracy, neutrally defined?  And that president was removed by action in the streets.  The word "interruption" fits that, and Russia had nothing to do with it.  What Russia is interrupting now is an interruption of democracy.

I don't know what other academics will make of this.  I suspect that, from the hum I hear, over in political philosophy they're retheorizing faith in the common man.  How can you trust the common man when in the Ukraine he overwhelmingly elects a mug like Yanukovich and then so overwhelmingly rejects him that he, the common man, can't hold himself back long enough to vote him out in the next election?  Same challenge in Egypt.  Give the common man a decent election, finally, and the winners are a bunch of fanatics.

I have no doubt that Chrystia Freedland would make a good Composition teacher.  Her heart, like mine, is in the right place.  She wants words to connect accurately with the world as it is.  But she is as much a tribe member as I am, and you can see it in her words about the Ukraine.

257. Toward a New Great Game. With Great Women Players?

 

The reason I get so worked up about male competitiveness is that it's what ruined my century.  Men around a table in London playing the Great Game in Africa, bristling when men around a table in Berlin tried to horn in.  Men so touchy about their honor and prestige that they send warships when one of their flags is insulted (China), or when one citizen's house, just one, is invaded during a riot (Greece).  Let no one think the British are lesser men than the Romans, who, by God, protected their citizens.  And the other Great Powers were just as bad, or, if they had the power and balls, would have been just as bad. 

And where did it all end?  With them going at each other in The Great War, which, causing so many deaths (20 million), pumped the winners with such a desire for revenge that they lost their heads and made such a stupid, vindictive peace that they couldn't (hell, wouldn't; when they got their senses back they knew it) enforce it and guaranteed a renewal of the war that would break all records for deaths (60 million) and horrors.  And when people look at my tombstone they will say, "Gee, this guy lived through the century that damn near ruined the human race.  Poor guy."

"And you would rather have them say, 'Gee, this guy lived through that century where God shut off the male hormone.  Merciful God.  Lucky guy.' ? You're talking about testosterone, my friend, and let me tell you something.  Even God, by now, this late in his creation, is not going to be able to shut it off.   There's too much of it, it's too hot, it comes from down too deep."

Alas.

"No.  No alas.  Alas shows that you don't understand testosterone, or whatever you want to call it.  It surges into many channels, and if you could shut it off at the source you'd have a lot of dried up ground, all around you.  Literature, art, architecture.  Why is it that conquering, warlike people, winners in a Great Game, produce, as ancient Athens produced, so much in so many fields?  Just contenders in the Game do, as in Europe when Britain and France were leading the competition, and had been leading it through all the period of European ascendancy (1750-1914), sciences and the arts advancing in so many European countries at such breakneck speed, taking over the world, taking over the calendar, the navigation, the mapping, the measurement of time (from Jesus' birth) and place (from a spot outside London), as they took over territory.  Territory from which, I might mention, now stream thousands of the once oppressed, or less endowed, to gain the benefits — wealth, medical treatment, science, technology — of their overflowing testosterone, their competition."

So the World Wars were just the climactic result of a burst of male energy that gave us all these good things.  And male energy is just what I saw so much of in Robert Gates' memoirs, all those Cold Warriors searching for the right grip on the balls.  Only thing, the brains at the other end had developed weapons that could blow up the whole arena.  Squeeze too hard and there we are.

"It's the old problem of testosterone management, the one you saw Elizabeth I solving so well (Post 157).  But I think Plato was way ahead of you.  According to Mark Edmundson (NYT 8-15) his word for the 'fundamental aspect of the human psyche' we are dealing with here was 'thymos,' and that takes us a lot deeper, to something we don't have a word for in English.  Edmundson thinks we come closest with 'spiritedness,' as in 'a spirited competitor.'  Anyway it, according to Plato, 'is a marvelous quality that needs to be developed and strengthened, especially in those who represent the community as soldiers.'

"But here's something that Plato also knew: that thymos can be dangerous. The spirited part of the soul can take control and turn what would have been an admirable man or woman into a beast. At one point in The Republic Plato imagines a state in which the ruling value is spiritedness. He calls it a timocracy, and he is fully alert to its dangers: constant battles for first place and ongoing war.  Edmundson believes that 'in paying close attention to both the promise and the peril of thymos, Plato learned something that we apparently have forgotten.'"

Well, when we think about what it is to be human now,I;d say that we too rarely take thymos into account. I know of no influential mode of modern psychology that takes up the Greek wisdom and treats spiritedness and the education of the spirited part of the soul as central aspects of human development."

"No, no book of psychology now, maybe no book at all now.  But once there was a book by an Italian, Baldassare Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, that taught Renaissance males how to be spirited, with humanity and learning and, above all, grace, grace which (while it attracted females) eased the relationship between males.  Il Cortegiano was translated into nearly every European language, coming out in England (where it produced Sir Philip Sidney) as The Book of the Courtier.  There ought to be enough copies around now for it to give us a start."

Grace isn't the problem.  William J. Casey had plenty of grace.  Grace and courtesy are just cover-ups for balls.  It's the balls you've got to change.

"Like maybe the way Jesus tried to change them? By holding out blessing?  Be poor in spirit, be meek. Get reborn.  All I can say is, lots of luck."

 I can't confirm any of your pessimism in books but in my own responses I certainly can.  There I am in the Gates book admiring the clever competitor, the good grip on the balls.  There I am in Katherine Graham's book at one of her dinner parties with "Hear, hear" when a smart Democratic-Party hawk speaks. "Good move."  Me, an ardent admirer of Obama's patience.  What am I going to do at such a dinner? Raise my glass and say, "Here's to a program of watchful waiting"?   What do I think the Soviet Union is, an enlarged prostate?  No, I'm "Go, Rusk. Go Bundy." 

"And if anybody wanted to know how to go, I, the resource person, would refer them to Machiavelli.  'Put down your Castiglione.'  I'm afraid I'm with you in the cheering section.  And I should have known I'd be, that all men would be.  I've read Housman, haven't I?  He knows where the lads are going, to death on distant fields.  But he also knows that when he hears the fifes and the bugle calling he will be helpless.  'Woman bore me, I will rise.'"

OK.  I see we're not going to change it.  And I see the only course of action left: We've got to give testosterone something else to do. 

"Like sports?  I know what you're thinking.  And my advice is: forget it.  You're on another hunt for the moral equivalent of war, and history says you're not going to find it.  Can you imagine Palmerston going back to his Harrow soccer field, satisfied, even when he's booting game-winners?  Can you picture our Casey, CIA Casey, tipping his hat to a few thousand in Mudville, and going home content?"

I was thinking of something much bigger, something never tried before: the whole world organized into different leagues, a pyramid of leagues in every sport, where you knew where each nation stood, and inside each nation where each town stood, and inside each team where (if the game were like baseball) each player stood.  With today's technology you could set such a thing up, and with today's communications you'd know instantly where each player, team, town, and nation stood.  A few morning minutes on the net and you could run around with your notebook in the air: "We're number 756! We're number 756!"

"What a laugh."

No, not a laugh.  Not a laugh if the rival you hate is 761.  Not a laugh if, having an average of your position in all leagues, your nation has the best.  You're cock of the walk!  That's where you have to put Palmerston's winning goal: it gains the point that puts England at the top.  Above Russia!  You think, in similar circumstances, Casey is going to underestimate his last of the ninth homer that sinks the Soviet Union?

"Fine, but only if the world is all jocks.  Some of us are nerds, you know.  Intellectuals.  And we design and use some pretty destructive weapons.  That's part of your modern world."

Your imagination isn't keeping up.  There will be a chess league.  New Yorkers spreading homeland dirt for Bobby Fischer to walk on as he approaches the payoff match in Reykjavík.  For the middle brains there'll be checkers, and cribbage.  The national colors on thousands of backs, at hundreds of tables, on scores of fields, doing or dying for their country.  And, since markets depend on them. every morning on Bloomberg and in the Wall Street Journal the most complete set of statistics and standings the world has ever seen, with condensed versions everywhere else.  And every year a great conference at the UN assigning weights to each sport, giving debaters, politicians, and diplomats their chance for glory.  "He got curling's weight lifted to .068.  What a man!"  It will be a super, super, super Olympics.

"Will you be offended if I ask for a Plan B?"

No, because I have a Hope B.  It's that when men can't manage this, women will take over.  Women haven't been in positions of power long enough for us to be confident of how it will go, but I'm hoping that a change, by removing the testosterone factor, will do something to remove that damn game board.  The one on which men have made so many dumb mistakes.

"You think women rulers haven't made dumb mistakes?  You think removing the male board will end game-playing?"

I don't know.  I just think that 'Don't do dumb things' is a great strategy, and just the one for our time.  And I think a woman could be a great player, heading the CIA, or calling the shots from the White House.   Maybe I think that for personal reasons.   Maybe it's because the women I have known have done fewer dumb things than the men I have known.  Maybe it's because in history I read Elizabeth I as a genius at not doing dumb things.  And Angela Merkel as a knockout.  Anyway, that's my fallback hope, labeled B.

256. Come on U.S. presidents, listen to my civics teacher.

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Most of us believe by now that a market economy will outperform a planned economy hands down.  Communist states just fall behind in supplying material goods.  And that's where we measure success in the East-West competition, isn't it, in material satisfaction of the workers?  The American Dream is a dream of money, ability to buy things; the Marxist dream is a dream of satisfied needs, material needs (it's dialectical materialism, isn't it?).  Show Krushchev those rows of middle-class houses in Detroit, tell him they belong to workers, and we can see points going up on the board.

So why did we need to do all those dirty tricks to communist countries, and send advisers to coach resisters, and agents to funnel arms to opponents, and technicians to help the arms-handlers, and do all those covert things Robert M. Gates, Cold War insider, tells about in his book, From the Shadows? 

"Because sometimes, when something had to be done, you could do it more effectively and safely covertly than you could by doing it in the open."

But why did we have to go so far?  Like mining a harbor and blowing up a Soviet ship.  Real in-your-face challenges.  I remember those Cold War anxieties.  We knew what kind of eager warriors we had in Washington.  Smart, but oh my. They could so easily miscalculate.  Trigger too much pride, impose too much humiliation, underestimate a paranoia, and we could find ourselves under an approaching missile.  Or stuck in a postcolonial swamp.  Along with the dictator we backed.

"I know the answer to why we went so far.  Because I've studied some history.  It's that if we hadn't gone far enough we simply would have lost."

Lost what?  Our lives?  Our way of life?

"No.  The game.  It's the game, stupid.  The Great Game, the game played by Britain against Russia for a hundred years in Asia, the game played by Palmerston in his morning coat and Disraeli in his spats, sending an emissary here, a regiment there, the game we're continuing to play against Russia now.  But it's really the game played by any country that wants to be a Great Power (to take over the capital letters awarded to those countries who succeeded in the nineteenth century).  Slip a little and you lose your title."

That's a tough game, I know, but if you're up against communists you don't have to play it.  If what my high-school civics teacher told me about both systems is true we can just sit back and wait for their system to wither.

"Yes.  If your civics teacher is right about communist systems that's what our legislators can vote for.   And if voters really believe what they say about communism, they'll be behind them.  So instead of a Cold War with all its expense and crises we'll have peace and prosperity and saved lives and built-up capital and everything civilized human beings might want. Oh yes, and love will be a thing that can never go wrong, and (to finish Dorothy Parker's way) you'll be Marie of Romania.  The unreality of your logically sound conclusion must be apparent to you. "

 Well, with Gates’ help it's becoming so.  I must admit that it's hard to see any of those five presidents he worked under — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush — saying, "Well, we're going to sit back and wait for things to go our way on this one."  Even harder when you see Obama getting plastered every time he goes an extra second on his chair.

 "And that's just pressure from the voters.  Think of presidential cabinets and staffs, the best and the brightest, the most eager.  Even the most progressive, those most alert to human suffering, with the most humane instincts, even they are going to want action.  Action.  Get a picture of them at home during the Cold War (as in Katherine Graham's autobiography) and what do you see?  Hawks, hawks, and more hawks.  Democratic, humane, Goldwater-deploring, Nixon-fighting, future warriors on poverty.  There they are in Graham's dining room, sorting out moves against the Soviets.  To the last guest!"

And yet, if my teacher is right about communism and I'm right about a passive stand-down in the face of it, what they're going against is peace and prosperity and saved lives and built-up capital and everything civilized human beings might want.  Who goes against such things?  Barbarians.  Are Cold Warriors barbarians?

"It's a reasonable question, and, as you can see in Gates' book, one our presidents most frequently had to ask about CIA people, who often took the operational lead, or stood nearby pushing their favorite operations.  But pushed in such a gentlemanly way.  None more gentlemanly, more civilized appearing, than CIA Director William J. Casey,   "He dressed expensively and formally.  Even on weekends, when he would come into the office, he almost always wore a jacket and tie." He'd have been right at home, sartorially, among the players of the first Great Game, those in the Palmerston cabinet, planning moves against the Russians. 

"And he'd have a lot in common with that other group of well-dressed males around a table in St. Petersburg, planning opposing moves.  I'm with you here.  They're all one.  They're all having the time of their lives.  'Man, is this ever a great game.'  All their hormones are engaged. Male life lived all the way up.  If the Brits weren't having so much fun why would they call it a game?"

That's a terrible thing to picture when you can see where the low-level players of their game wound up. There they are, the poet reminds us, "East and west on fields forgotten....Lovely lads and dead and rotten."  To the soldiers it wasn't such a great game.

"That eats at me me.  And all the more in the light of the history I've read.  I know that what put those lads on those fields, dead, were moves planned by gentlemen, educated, highly civilized gentlemen, England's brightest and best.  As our brightest and best put our lads, dead, on the fields of Viet Nam."

It eats at me too.  And it leads me to believe that I, for all my upward-gazing awe, and you, for all your sophistication in history, still have a naive view of gentlemen.  All those players of the Great Game, old and new, whatever their dress, or manners, or education, or state of civilization, were playing for a very primitive satisfaction: to get the best of another male. What we have to see in those morning coats, essentially, is what I saw on my big city grammar-school playground: competitors in a contest over who would be "cock of the walk," as my uncle from the farm called the winner.  Unsatisfied testosterone.  New on the playground, old in the cabinet meeting.  Inside that morning coat or blazer there's still an unspayed tomcat.  There may be signs of a successful operation, but it hasn't worked.

"That's certainly hard for me to dispute when I look at the CIA described in all the other books about it.  Oh, it's got variety, and thought, and humanity, but you know what its default position is?  You really want to know?  It's a grip on the balls.  The CIA's most vigorous people, the people that gravitate to it, still love Teddy Roosevelt, his manliness, his realistic manliness: 'When you've got 'em by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.'  So shut up, peaceniks, about hearts and minds.  On with the Great Game.  The Ur-Game was Greek wrestling, with no holds barred."

How it must grind those types now when they read of Jimmy Carter, that wimp, doing more with his talk of human rights to break down the Soviet Union than they ever did.  Carter, leveraging the idealistic language Ford had gotten the Soviets to agree to in the Helsinki Accords, and with the help of the new pope (still with no army divisions), started the fires in Poland and Czechoslovakia and the rest of Eastern Europe that would burn down the whole communist house.  And Gates, noting how he and Ford were belittled for their naive idealism by "those who considered themselves as hardheaded realists in foreign policy," gives him full credit for it (pages 89-96).

Did Carter understand power, the power of ideas, their appeal to hearts and minds, better than they did?  His behavior encourages doubt but to me it looks like it.  The central fact about those CIA realpoliticians, those confident justifiers of the dirty trick, the talking point when you want to take their money (and their reputation in history) away, is that they simply did not understand power.

"And, you know, every time a dirty trick was exposed they had a chance to understand it.  The indignation before the world's TV sets, the disappointment in our allies' faces, the regret in the hearts of our young. They could have learned something from that."

Well, they certainly got their come-uppance from the grieving young in the sixties.   "Covert action?  That might be uncovered?  Christ, can't do that any more.  Not with all these students ready to flood the streets."

"The realpoliticians couldn't do anything any more. Kissinger at the table with the North Vietnamese starts one of his old moves and then, in mid-gesture, realizes that the students wouldn't put up with it."

Ah, those sickened hearts and minds of the young.  But back to the education of the vigorous old.  Only if they had taken their high-school civics course — the course the grieving young were so much closer to — only if they had taken that course seriously, would they have learned something.  Take "democracy" and "the rule of law" as mere words and you're uneducable.  You're free, in your ignorance, to mine another nation's harbors, and overthrow its elected presidents, and deceive your own legislators about the whole thing.  You're free to undermine, and dismiss as naive, the very power that can win the battle you're fighting, the power of an idea.

So, I conclude, my high-school civics teacher had the secret to power, the key to the kingdom, all along.  She have could given it to these presidents play by play.  I'll make her National Security Adviser and let her speak:  "Trust your system.  Trust democracy.  Trust free enterprise.  Trust the ideals of the Founding Fathers.  Trust their strength.  In the battle for hearts and minds, the battle where the war is won, they will win out.  The world will see you conserving lives and treasure, prospering, confirming the practicality of your nation's ideals.  And there's only one person who can keep those ideals from winning out.  You.  You can screw them up.  If by your behavior and the behavior you allow your subordinates you show that you don't trust them, you will screw them up.  The world will hear the once-powerful words and say, 'Yeah, yeah.'  There goes your strength and you'll be back to the no-holds-barred game, which you have no better chance of winning than the other dirty players have."

255. The Sex Business

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In The Economist's leader this week on the sex business only two kinds of people are mentioned as being opposed to prostitution: puritans, "who think that women selling sex are sinners," and do-gooders, "who think they are victims."  I would add a third category: teachers, who think that prostitutes are children.  In the sense that they are under-educated.

You understand that I regard anybody who doesn't know the literature his civilization has produced, as under-educated.  A student who has taken only science and engineering courses is under-educated.

What those students are missing by not taking those humanities courses, and what literature courses will best give them, is what prostitutes most need: a dramatized view of life as a whole.

Drama.  How do you get drama that gives you a sense of the whole of life?  By looking at death.  The end.  While you're right in the middle of life.

Oh, did the poets I taught ever do that!  First in the middle, the joy.  "There it is, oh golden, golden, there it is, seize it, seize it," and then "Gone, gone, gone forever, as it will all go."  Carpe diem, then ubi sunt, in the terms given us by the Roman poets.

But poets in any period do that, arousing you to the intensity of physical love and then sticking you with finality of physical death.  If you don't seize the love, the joy, when you're able to, you'll lose your chance.  At the end you'll die deprived, and in between time, if Milton is right, you'll suffer the little deaths of a deprived (he would say "depraved") mechanism, an inability to seize, seize all that's there, together.  Because you (I'm including the client now) wasted your abilities on a part, in a childish seizure, "loveless, joyless, unindeared." 

So, children, know the whole, glimpse the human future, and you'll be less likely to lie with the "cold-hearted witch,/ And after, drained dry,/ Come to the chamber where/ Lies one long sought with despair."   Yeats knows that, for most of us, there will be a period when we can't help looking back.

That looking back.  Is there a way to make it less regretful?  Yes, if you have produced children, a family, grandchildren, the "large posterity" that Spenser saw possessing the earth, all the product of the "wedded love" that Milton saw driving "adulterous lust" to range "among the bestial herds."  Physical love viewed in the fullest context.

Awareness of that context, however dim, must be what makes Christmas the saddest day of the whorehouse year.  Family, family, reminders everywhere.  Polly Adler's book, A House is Not a Home, told us about it.

There were more victims then, the forced, to whom none of this applies.  Now, with prostitutes able to charge $250 an hour (recently $350) there are fewer.

It's the people with the choice who need the drama.  Some, of course, have the imagination to provide it on their own.  But they won't get it from the True Romance magazines that, Adler says, litter the whores' private quarters.

However you get the drama, though, you can easily lose it, lose your sense that something important in human life is at stake. How, reader responsive to literature and art, do you lose that?  By becoming a scientist (you think), a clinician, a Kinsey, or an aloof Economist writer too cool to see prostitutes as anything but "workers."

254. The Hawk in Us, the Dove in Us.

 
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Men are 76% hawk and 24% dove.  Women are 68% dove and 32% hawk.  Seventy-five years of watching human beings consider war have given me those figures.

My mother gave me an explanation of the difference: "If men had to give birth they wouldn't be so quick to kill each other."

"Hawk" and "dove" have no permanent value.  Sometimes you want the hawk in man's nature to kick in and sometimes the dove.  It all depends on what analysis of the always-complicated particulars has shown.

If the analysis comes out with a "can't win" or "can't win without prohibitive cost" or "can't win without shame," you want to release your dove enzyme.  You are a citizen in a democracy and, since war or peace will depend on the number of individual enzyme triumphs, your squirt, one way or the other, is going to count.

Can enzyme squirts be controlled?  Enough to matter, I think.  We control that enzyme that makes us lust, whatever it is.  We put off looking at dirty pictures.  We, if we are in the priesthood, take cold showers.  When it's the hawk enzyme we're trying to stay on top of we can avoid looking at displays of atrocities, newsreels full of goose-steppers, leaders' faces made to suggest Stalin or Hitler.  Those are dirty pictures.

If analysis goes the other way, go ahead and look.  You'll need that testosterone.  Your country's leaders will need it.  Say we're attacked.  "Release the testosterone!" says the President, coming out of a cabinet meeting, and his people go to work on the pictures.  In a good cause.  Properly done.  We all do our best to control the dove enzyme.

No enzyme release, dove or hawk, is proper without analysis.  What The Economist released with its editorial on Putin's vices (along with putting his grey face in a web on its cover, that dirty picture) is improper.  Putin's vices, internally practiced, are no more appropriate in an analysis of international power than the Pope's virtues.  The question is, How many divisions does he have?  And where?

And the answers here are (1), "more than enough to take over the Ukraine any time he wants to" and (2) "right there on the border, or nearby" — in any case, a lot nearer than any we can muster.  Russian military forces have come a long way since 1993, when Yeltsin settled on an internally focused National Guard of about 100,000.

If that doesn't tighten your ducts there remain the nuclear weapons.  In November, 2012, "the Federation of American Scientists estimated that Russia has approximately 1,499 deployed strategic warheads, and another 1,022 nondeployed strategic warheads and approximately 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads."

So put away those dirty pictures, Economist.  Take a cold shower.  You can do it.  Determined Christians, Christians brought up reading Dante and Milton, have done it for centuries.  It's called "reason governing the passions."

Would you like to have an example of a man governing his passions in our day, and in the face of these very temptations?  Malcolm Fraser, former prime minister of Australia, provides it in a piece he wrote for the Guardian on March 2, advising everybody to quiet down over Russia's incursion into Crimea.

Nobody can say Fraser lacks balls.  He's the Secretary of the Army who, against rising cries, managed and stuck to the program to conscript Australian youth and send them to fight in Viet Nam.  He's the Minister of Defence who brought a government down because the prime minister was interfering with his work.

So he was sitting on top of something when Putin threatened to intervene in Ukraine. And he kept on top of it long enough to consider why Putin was threatening.  A big reason was that he thought that the U.S. had promised his predecessor, Gorbachev, that if Russia agreed to the joining of then-communist East Germany to West Germany, and make it part of the West (membership in NATO), then NATO (the West) would not "move one foot East" — into "an area of traditional Russian influence."

Fraser counts on us to fill in his hints for the main reason that Russia is concerned about its sphere of influence.  It's not that it presides over an evil empire that it longs to see grow; it's that twice it's been invaded so appallingly from the West, first by Napoleon, then by Hitler.  We Americans easily blow away sphere-of-influence thinking as obsolete in a globalized family of nations, but we live safely with oceans all around us.  As does this Australian, Fraser.

But Fraser is analyzing now, and trying to see a problem "from the other fellow's point of view" (as the principal of my elementary school put his advice to us playground fighters).  That effort leads him to see NATO, which many thought "had done its job," move eastward "to the borders of Russia."  Right where Napoleon and Hitler had started from.

Fraser concludes that the move east "was provocative, unwise and a very clear signal to Russia: we are not willing to make you a co-operative partner in the management of European or world affairs; we will exercise the power available to us and you will have to put up with it."

In other words, playground belligerence.  That "belligerence" is the right word we confirm when we see President Bush trying to put elements of the anti-ballistic missile system into Poland and the Czech Republic, claiming that they're aimed at Iran. What other word would we use if Russia tried to put missiles into Nicaragua?  (Fraser didn't ask that; a little of my own enzyme is getting mixed in here.)

Even without my additions, though, Fraser makes a strong enough case to get a good dove surge, and it might have been even stronger if he had ignored the close studies showing that the U. S. did not, in fact, make that promise to Gorbachev. Enough people believe he did, enough to give him the necessary surge.  But no, he admits that Gorbachev "almost certainly" was mistaken.  And there goes Fraser's chance to produce an orgasm for peace, and get the big credit.  But so be it.  An analysis that comes out 75-25, rather than 90-10, still calls for the right enzyme.

What an exciting fallback Fraser makes!  It makes me so glad I chose him as my example of a man governing his passions in our day. Reason, demanding fairness and accuracy, was clearly in control.

hawks and dovesMalcolm FraserPutintestosterone managementUkraine crisiswar and peace