by Emrys Westacott

Recently, I was waiting to board an American Airlines flight from Boston to Rochester, when, along with ten of my fellow passengers, I was summoned to the desk in front of the boarding gate. There we learned, by listening intently to what the AA gate agent told the first passenger in line, that we were being bumped from the flight, that AA would try to find alternative flights for us, and that we would each receive a voucher worth $250, redeemable on AA bookings, valid for one year.

Of the eleven victims, reactions were mixed. Most of us chunteringly but passively accepted our fate. But two or three individuals kicked up nasty. One woman smacked her hand on the counter in front of the agent and declared loudly, “Listen. I’m not interested in your excuses. I am getting on that plane!” A tall man with an incredulous sneer fixed on his face continually informed both the AA agents and the rest of us for the next half hour that the reason they were giving for why we had to be bumped was “bullshit, pure bullshit.”

He seemed to have a point. The reason provided for why we were being bumped was that, given its required fuel load, this particular plane would be too heavy with us on board. I’m not sure how many passengers actually boarded the plane, but I would guess it was fewer than sixty; so the ratio of bumped to boarded seemed remarkably high. We all assumed that AA had simply overbooked the flight, as airlines regularly do in order to make more money, and the agents were following a script which involved feeding us a bogus justification. “Safety regulations require that…..” is always going to sound more acceptable than “Our concern to maximize profits has led us to….”

Asked how they chose whom to bump, the supervising agent said the selection was based on who had checked in last. This, too, seemed dubious since some of us had checked in online the night before. He didn’t mention the fact that bumpees were chosen exclusively from the cheap seats, although this is standard practice.

Still, every cloud, etc. Observing the behaviour of the outraged and vocal bumpees, provided an occasion for reflection on the ethics of dealing with bureaucracy when one feels one is being in some way wronged or treated badly.

First, we need to make a basic distinction between (a) a jobsworth, and (b) institutional bullshit. Read more »

Investment

every day I am
in vestment

it’s morning

I dress in
sunskin
cloudskin
earthskin
in the skin
of a universe

though I’ve hoped to slough
them off, to be unveiled
as they’re outgrown,

I’ll always be,
while I’m here, in
vestment

Jim Culleny
4/10/19

by Robert Fay

During the annus horribilis of 1968 when it became clear the U.S. would never “win” in Vietnam, John Wayne decided to star and direct in a propaganda film called The Green Berets. Wayne was a die-hard Orange County anti-communist who believed that the U.S. military was winning on the battlefield in South Vietnam, but losing in the media and public relations realm.

Rather shrewdly, Wayne centered his film on the U.S. Army Special Forces, a.k.a. the Green Berets, whose small 12-man A-Teams lived and trained with the anti-communist Montagnards, the indigenous peoples of Vietnam’s remote central highlands. The Green Berets in the 1960s were an all-volunteer, highly-selective outfit with both mystique and a bit of holdover, Kennedy-era glamour. These teams spoke the local languages and formed close and often lifelong bonds with their Montagnard peers. This mission profile remains to this day the classic Special Forces game; make contact with local populations and then fight alongside them against a common enemy.

If John Wayne had depicted the typical American military units in Vietnam, main-line U.S. Army or U.S. Marine Corps infantry troops trudging through rice fields—even with all the hilarious puffery of Hollywood special effects—he’d have had far-less glamour to work with. These units were often filled with draftees who went out on company-sized operations supported by massive amounts of artillery and air support, some of it indiscriminately unleashed upon the countryside. There were generally no Vietnamese speakers among the troops, and the cultural and historical knowledge (e.g., of the recent Indochina War between the Vietnamese and the French) was nil. Read more »

by Bill Murray

My wife and I live in the southern Appalachian mountains across a narrow valley from Georgia’s highest mountain. Most of our farm borders the United States Forest Service, pretty far up in the woods. If we don’t go out, we might not see anyone for a week.

It’s so far up in north Georgia that we shop in North Carolina, which is way more cosmopolitan. In Murphy (population 1638), they have a shop that sells different kinds of cooking oils.

Just 2-1/2 hours north of Atlanta, up in the mountains, isn’t like you might expect in the southern United States. It snows in winter and you usually can’t get a proper grip on spring until the middle of April. Like this year.

Our view to that mountain, called Brasstown Bald, is all natural.  From the farm to the peak there’s not a manmade thing to see. The Bald, at 4783 feet, makes its own weather, and ours, too. We wake to its lenticular top hats, revel in its autumn flamboyance and in summer, cower under its electric fury. That requires periodic replacement of our home electronics. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Holly Case

About 1,500 years ago, the Chinese literary critic Liu Hsieh wrote The Literary Mind. It includes a section on metaphor—hsing—which he describes as “response to a stimulus.”

[W]hen we respond to stimuli, we formulate our ideas according to the subtle influences we receive…. the hsing is an admonition expressed through an array of parables.

I first came upon The Literary Mind some months ago and was immediately fascinated by Hsieh’s elucidation of hsing, but will confess to having had no idea what he meant, even after studying his examples. It remained in the back of my mind.

Some time after discovering Hsieh, I was having a series of intense discussions with a group of students on the theme of apocalypse. Again and again, two of them mentioned a story by Ursula K. Le Guin from 1973 called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Omelas, Omelas, Omelas.

Some weeks later, the word “Omelas” occurring to me in flashes, I printed out a copy of the story and read it. You should read it. Omelas is a mythical city where the mood is festive and everything and everyone appear in good form and spirits. The narrator begins by describing and defending how Omelas functions as a great festival of summer unfolds in the background. “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy?” the narrator asks the reader. “No? Then let me describe one more thing.”

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window.… In the room a child is sitting.… The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes—the child has no understanding of time or interval—sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes.… It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually. They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.

Sometimes it happens that, after seeing the child, a person from Omelas sets out on a road that leads away from the city. And keeps walking. The story ends: “The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

The story troubles me. It’s the leaving. What does leaving do for the child locked in the cellar? Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

I was standing in Penn Station the other day waiting for a train and someone passed through begging for change. I’ve lived in New York City long enough that I don’t just start taking my wallet out and going through it in crowded public spaces, but beyond that, I don’t have change. I normally don’t carry cash. If I have cash on me its for one of two reasons, either someone has paid me back for something in cash (which in these days of Venmo is increasingly unlikely) or I have a hair or nail appointment where they like their tips in cash. So even if I have cash, it’s bigger bills and certainly no coins. And I’m sure I’m not unusual. I pay for things with credit cards. I pay other people using Apple Pay or Venmo. I mentioned this thought to someone who told me that they had seen someone begging in New York with details of their Venmo account. On the one hand, there seems to be a certain chutzpah to that, after all, if you have a bank account to receive the money in and some kind of smart phone to access it, is your situation as dire as you’re making out? On the other hand, it’s pretty smart. Of course, there are serious privacy issues involved in giving money to a random stranger through an app like Venmo, it’s not private, so I probably wouldn’t do that either, but it’s an interesting idea, if it could be made more anonymous and secure. Apparently, at least in China, the virtual beggar is a thing, “Even beggars have begun to accept wireless payments by offering QR codes…That’s mostly down to the proliferation of cheaper smartphones in China and the dominance of the WeChat and Alipay apps – which both support direct mobile payments.”

What this whole thing makes me think about though is that this is yet another way that modern digital life is exacerbating the divide between rich and poor. Read more »

Moonrise over a mountain called Plose. Photo from my balcony in October of 2016.

by Michael Liss

“Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.” —Henry David Thoreau

It has been a little over a week since the redacted Mueller Report was released, and so many words have been spilled that there could be a drought by summer if the umbrage reservoirs are not refilled. Can we just retire the word “closure”?

The legal verdict is in, and I don’t plan to re-litigate it here. Robert Mueller determined there was not enough to charge President Trump with collusion, and Attorney General William Barr decided that Trump did not obstruct justice. We all can look at the (unredacted) facts they based their judgments on, and question whether those judgments were correct, but this phase of it is almost certainly over. The President and his inner circle are not going to be indicted.

That certainly is life-affirming. What’s next? How do we read our fate, see what is before us, and walk on into futurity?

We might start with perhaps the most under-reported angle of the cycle: the practical implications of Mueller’s finding that the Trump Campaign’s scores of contacts with the Russians and WikiLeaks were not, per se, illegal. Despite diligent efforts, despite countless dots, Mueller could not find what he thought would have been determinative—a hard agreement that would have nailed down collusion. His team evaluated a lot of meetings, a lot of discussions, a lot of timing coincidences, but, in the absence of a specific exchange of quid pro quos, smoke, no fire.

I’m not critiquing Mueller’s thought process. I accept it. But it leaves us with a serious problem. Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Epictetus’ Enchiridion 52 is an exercise in metaphilosophy. It captures the double-vision students of Stoicism must have about their own progress. The core insight of E52 is that the tools of philosophical inquiry and progress toward insight can themselves become impediments to progress. E52 is the last entry of the Enchiridion in Epictetus’ own words (with E53 being inspirational quotations from Cleanthes, Euripides, and Plato), and in it, a decidedly practical program is endorsed. The key to this endorsement is the contrastive case Epictetus makes. Here is E52 in its entirety:

[1] The first and most necessary subject in philosophy is the application of philosophical principles, such as ‘Don’t be a fraud’. The second is that of proofs, such as why it is that we ought not to be frauds. The third subject is that which confirms and articulates these proofs, such as, how is this a proof? For, what is a proof? What is inference? What is contradiction? What is truth? What is falsehood?

[2] Therefore, the third subject is necessary because of the second, and the second is necessary because of the first. But the most necessary and the one where we must linger is the first. Yet we do it backwards, because we devote time to the third subject and entirely busy ourselves with it, while we completely neglect the first. Consequently, we’re frauds, but we’re ready to prove that we ought not to be frauds.

The problem, of course, is the last sentence: though we have proofs we should not be frauds, we nevertheless are frauds. How, given the Stoic program of philosophical training – that we have the proofs precisely in order to remind ourselves not to be frauds – does this result come about? And more importantly, how, with these tools, can we prevent it? Read more »

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, 1922- April 20, 2019. In Memoriam.

From the exhibition titled Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014, at the Guggenheim, NY, 2015.

More here, here, and here.

With a special note of solidarity to Zara Houshmand.

by Brooks Riley

The attic of Notre Dame cathedral, with its tangled, centuries-old dark wooden beams, was affectionately known as the ‘forest’. The fire that originated up there last week made me think of an early Anselm Kiefer painting Quaternity, (1973), three small fires burning on the floor of a wooden attic and a snake writhing toward them, vestiges of the artist’s Catholic upbringing in the form of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost and the Devil. Metaphor meets reality in the sacred attics of stored mythologies.

‘Our stories begin in the forest,’ Kiefer has said. He means this both literally and figuratively. A man whose name means ‘pine tree’, born in the Black Forest region, comes from a people who inhabited the forests in ancient times. When they left those forests behind, they took the wood with them to build, among other things, their attics and their cathedrals, both shareholders of enduring legacies.

Quaternity is one of the few paintings that addresses a lapsed religion now stored away in Kiefer’s mind, his attic—an attic he once lived in as a student, and one he has revived in other paintings. It is only one of his many recurring motifs that serve as conduits for his multiple concerns and thought processes. Myths of all kinds are stored in that iconic space, along with the first- and second-hand memories of history, philosophy, poetry, metaphysics, astrophysics, mysticism and alchemy. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Jonathan Kujawa

Last time we found ourselves discussing the topic of writing numbers in different bases. We happen to like base 10 thanks to our ten figures and ten toes, but base 2 (binary), base 16 (hexidecimal), and base 60 (sexagesimal: thanks, Babylonians!) are also often used. But those are human preferences. Math don’t care. If you’ve got twelve Honey badgers, it doesn’t matter if you write it as 12, 1100, c, or as an eye looking at two trees, you’ve got the same number of problems in your life. There may be philosophical quandaries about what exactly is the number “twelve”, or if it exists in its own right or not. But it isn’t controversial to say how you choose to write twelve has little to nothing to do with twelveness.

It’s rather like changing fonts. Not many would say a change of font will make a parking ticket sting less (although Comic Sans might make it sting more). As endless internet discussions rage about the meaning and content of the Mueller report, altogether too few dissect Robert Mueller’s choice of fonts [1].

But mathematicians leave no stone unturned. Even if nearly every rock is just a rock, every so often you find a geode. One thing math teaches us is the value of persistent questioning. After all, when we talked about the Exploding Dots we found if you turn bases this way and that, you discover you can also use 2/3 and other fractions as bases! This time we’ll find ourselves studying knots before we know it. Read more »

by Adele A. Wilby

A brief scan across global politics generates concerns as to what is actually going on in the politics of many states. Authoritarian regimes have always been with us, and will probably be with us for some time to come. Of greater concern is the emergence of political leaders in liberal democracies who espouse a politics which resonates with the past: a politics of nationalism, and nativism, and the inward-looking thinking that is associated with those ideologies. This trend, in what I would call a ‘regressive politics’, is in opposition to the process of globalisation.

The ascendency of regressive political tendencies has surfaced and gained force in the states of the two global leaders of liberal democracies: the United States and the United Kingdom from 2015 onwards.  Since then we have witnessed a time where the ‘progressive’ in the ‘liberalism’ that is associated with the two states has come under considerable strain.

Glimpses of a beginning of a period of regressive politics in the UK became evident with the publication of the Conservative Party Manifesto of 2015. David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, faced a major political challenge from the political right both inside and outside the Conservative party. On one hand, the incessant grumbling and whining from English nationalists and Euro-sceptics over the ‘sovereignty’ and ‘independence’ of the UK was a persistent source of discontent and division within the Conservative party.  The far right anti-European Union political party, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) was a growing political threat. Read more »