Your Chance of Dying

          Of course, on any absolute scale, your chance of dying is 100%.  But that's not what I'm thinking  about.  No.  It's the rash of mass murders over the last couple of years that has given me pause--me and everyone else, if the wild popularity of presidential candidate Donald Trump, the Pied Piper of scared rats, is any gauge.   It's terrorists we're all terrified of, if you'll pardon the redundancy.  They strike everywhere with recent executions and bombings in Paris and California and Brussels cases in point.  (Paris, Nov. 15, 2015:  a series of attacks that killed 130 and left 368 injured; San Bernardino, California, Dec. 2, 2015:  14 killed, 22 seriously injured; Brussels, March 22, 2016:  34 killed, 190 wounded.) 

          Most of the attacks are by Muslim terrorists, but it's good to keep in mind that there are also Christian terrorists who open fire at Planned Parenthood clinics, racist terrorists who gun down blacks in churches, and various other berserk nationalists who shoot down foreign airplanes to send a message.  For thirty years or more at the end of the twentieth century, the Irish Republican Army waged a bloody reign of terror on the United Kingdom.  Add up the fatalities and you have plenty of reason to worry about dying in a terrorist attack.
          Or do you?

          Recent charts in the Tampa Bay Times and the New York Times suggest otherwise.  Your chance of dying of heart disease or cancer is 1 in 7, a truly sobering statistic that manages not to disturb many people.  (Go figure.)  Your chance of dying in a car crash is 1 in 112, while your chance of dying in a plane crash is 1 in 8,015--but we all knew that it's safer to fly than drive.  (It turns out it's a lot safer.)
          Guns kill people at the rate of 1 in 358.  That's the rate of "assault by firearm."  The rate is 1 in 6,700 for "firearms discharge," the difference apparently being that if you are assaulted by someone with a gun, you're a lot more likely to die than if a gun should mysteriously discharge while you happen to be in the vicinity.  And "sugary drinks," according to the New York Times on July 7, 2015, kill 184,000 people every year, 25,000 in the United States alone.
          It's hard to know where the truly oddball statistics come from or what they mean.  Coconuts, for example, are said to account for 150 deaths a year, champagne corks only 24; ladders cause 355 deaths, vending machines only two--and 450 people die every year falling out of bed.
          After that your chances of dying are sky high:  1 in 55,000 for death by stinging insect; 1 in 116,000 for death by dog bite; and 1 in 164,000 for death by lightning strike. 
          But you are two and a half times more likely to die of a lightning strike than from a terrorist on a shooting spree.  The odds against your dying that way are a staggering 1 in 700,000.
          What this proves is that terrorists aren't nearly as great a threat to you as sugary drinks, which really should carry a warning from the Surgeon General.

"Unprepossessing" and "Prepossessing"

     Most of us are unprepossessing.  It's a five-syllable word that doesn't enjoy much currency anymore, if it ever did, sort of a bulky word that stumbles coming out of the mouth.  Unattractive.  Which is good because that's exactly what the word means, unattractive.  In spades.  Online dictionaries say "unprepossessing" is the same as "unremarkable," "nondescript," "unpresentable," "unpleasant," "unappealing," "unsightly," and "uninviting."  Quite a chorus of negatives.

     It's opposite is "prepossessing," which enjoys even less currency, though it is a syllable shorter and a positive rather than a negative.  No one describes anyone who is pleasant and attractive as "prepossessing." No, the only way we know the word, and clearly very few do, is through its negative.  Which makes either or both words even less attractive.  Perfect.

     All of which is preface to my point:  when I look into the mirror, I don't see someone attractive, someone who makes a good first impression, someone who inspires confidence.  Not by a long shot.  I'm old now, and it hardly matters, but looking back on a lifetime of being unprepossessing, I've lost countless opportunities because of it.  It's maddening, of course, but I'm in good company, for most people walking the planet are just as unprepossessing as I am.

     That's a lot of unprepossessing people.   As of this moment, and you can look it up by going to www.worldometers.info/world-population, there are 7.382 billion people on the planet, and it's growing at the rate of 275 births per minute.  We lose only 115 per minute, a net growth of 160 people every single minute of every single day.  We'll hit 8 billion in 2024, a mere thirteen years after we hit 7 billion.

     And most of them will be just as unprepossessing as we are and will learn, as we have, how to overcome our disadvantage.  We work hard, for example, develop fortitude, and learn new skills, both on-the-job and inter-personal.  Of course, talent (always attractive if we happen to have any), makes up for a lot of it.  But even so, the way to the top is easier for the prepossessing people who can smile their way to the top--an unearned advantage if there ever was one.  The masters of the race, damn them, are the talented, determined, prepossessing people of the world, a minuscule minority of our 7.382 billion.  The world is their oyster.

     But as for the rest of us, I have three words:  get over it.  Make whatever mark you can on the history of the species.  Don't be content until you do.  Be proud of yourself and proud to make whatever contribution you can.  Today.  Make a difference.  Force yourself not to be satisfied.  Work.  That's what prepossessing looks like, not the image in your mirror.  

"Every day in every way, I'm getting better and better."

     That's the self-help mantra coined by the French psychologist Emile Coue (1857-1926), the one that caught on in the 1920s, the era of Flappers and Banana Oil.  People recited it like the prayer Coue meant it to be--he advocated its ritualized repetition at least twenty times a day, especially in the morning and evening.  He wanted the message to seep down into the unconscious mind, which would eventually accept the premise as real.  Fake it till you make it.
     The "power of positive thinking" is how the minister Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993) described the same idea, a career-making slogan that he preached and audiences paid to hear--and readers paid to read. It was a good living.  And people did buy the idea and tried to keep a positive attitude that would rub off on every aspect of their lives.  Visualize good things.  Think good thoughts.  Improve.
     Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers spoke about the "perfectibility of man," the same idea, really, but as it represented a shift to man-centered thinking (and away from seventeenth-century God-centeredness), it became a controversial concept, but one that has always had great appeal.  For me at least.
     That's what I've always seen, all my life, self-improvement.  Growth.  Development.  Education.  Moving past limitations.  Becoming better.  Every day in every way.  Nothing sounds so hollow to me as the familiar line by fatalists that people never change.  Not really, they say.  "You can't teach an old dog new tricks.  You are who you are, and that will never change."
     Hogwash.
     People are changing all the time, in fundamental ways.  They grow in taste, in understanding, in decency, in courage, in knowledge--and more.  Every way you can imagine.  We aren't destined to make the same mistakes all our lives; we learn from them, aspire to be better, push ahead.  Yes indeed, every day in every way, I'm getting better and better.
    It's too bad Coue's message was couched in a two-bit cliche--but it's the packaging that's all wrong, not the goal.
   
    

Henry David Thoreau, "Pond Scum"

     Rarely are myths exploded with as much unapologetic, joyful fury as Kathryn Schulz displays in a  New Yorker piece that methodically dismantles Henry David Thoreau, "Pond Scum" (Oct. 16, 2015).  In her hands, Thoreau is reduced to a self-righteous, insufferable, anti-social hypocrite.  It's a thrill to read.
     Thoreau was canonized, Schulz explains, by generations of Walden readers who either read Walden too selectively, separating out all the well-known passages about living "deliberately" and building "castles in the air," or rhapsodizing over individual passages, like the one on black and red ants.  And we also read him when we are young enough to value appealing half-truths.   "It is true," she concedes, "that Thoreau was an excellent naturalist and an eloquent and prescient voice for the preservation of wild places."  And she also acknowledges his courage as "an outspoken abolitionist" who embraced John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. 
     But that isn't what Walden is about.  It is, in fact, according to Schulz, "less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn:  a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people."
     Thoreau, we learn, was "self-obsessed," by which Schulz means that he was "narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself."  Walden at root reveals a "comprehensive arrogance," especially when it came to recommending a spartan "life in the woods," the book's subtitle.
     Walden Pond, for one thing, was hardly isolated, with a commuter train line running along one side, picnickers overrunning the place in summer, and ice skaters playing on it in the winter.  His family home was a mere twenty-minute walk from his cabin, and he took that walk "several times a week, lured by his mother's cookies or the chance to dine with friends."  And when he wasn't walking home, his mother or sisters would bring him his dinner.  It was hardly as spartan as he made out.
     Does this matter, Schulz asks?  "Begin with false premises and you risk reaching false conclusions.  Begin with falsified premises and you forfeit your authority."  The biggest failing in the book, she says is that it purports to be about how to live, but it says nothing about living with other people:  "Worse than Thoreau's radical self-denial, is his denial of others."
     In all, he was sanctimonious, dour, unbearable, and self-absorbed, not so much deep as "fundamentally adolescent."
      Amen to that.

Words of Wisdom

On the meaning of life (in 25 words):   Man’s biological imperative is to produce sperm.  It’s what he does, 24/7, all his life.  A  woman's biological imperative is to coax it out of him.       

    

On the Golden Rule:  It's all about sex:  Do unto others what you’d like them to do unto you.

On trusting your preparations:  Enjoy the process.

On taking a breath:  Don’t be afraid. 

On working for a living:  Being an employee is a heavy burden, but you never realize quite how heavy it is until you put it behind you.

On being on time and knowing what fork to use:  The only middle-class virtue more highly over-rated than good table manners is punctuality. 

On self-control:  You’re only as strong as the last thing you said no to.

On child rearing:  The line between giving children just the right amount of healthy self-esteem and stopping short of making them insufferable egotists is razor thin.

On obsessing over weight control:  “I’m the same weight I was in high school.”  If that’s the best you can say about yourself after thirty years, you’ve wasted your life in gyms.

On the competitive spirit run amok:  There is a disconnect between “winning is everything,” which we admire in our sports heroes, and being in life a self-absorbed maniac who has to beat everyone at everything.

On taking your sweet time:  Thou shalt not rush.  (Also known as the eleventh commandment.)

On Jesus and Columbus:  I feel about Columbus the same way I feel about Jesus:  I can’t believe in either of them anymore, but it’s hard to give them up. 

"Wait for it. . . ."

     I've noticed over the past several years how often people telling stories pause at the end, just before the punch line, and say "wait for it. . . ."  As though the wait will be paid off in spades.  Which it rarely is.  The irony of course is that in real life, no one likes waiting for anything.  If you're driving and make someone behind you wait, even for a slight pause, you'll likely be beeped, fingered, and glared at--at best.  At worst, you may find yourself right in the middle of full-blown road rage.  Patience is not our national strong suit.
     Not so long ago, I was in a hurry at the supermarket when an agitated woman got in line behind me.  She didn't have much in her cart, so I stepped aside and said that as she seemed to be in a great hurry, why didn't she just go ahead of me?  She looked at me strangely, squeezed past me, said thanks, and quizzically asked why I'd done that.  I told her that for me, exercising patience, especially when it was difficult to do, was character building.  She raised an eyebrow but seemed to like the idea--and though I can't be entirely sure I was being honest, it was close enough to the truth.  A little waiting is good for all of us.

When Does One Plus One Not Equal Two?

     I know I'm not actually schizophrenic or bipolar, but I do have two sides that don't add up.  Outwardly, in my relationship with the world-at-large, I try to be amusing and friendly, which too often, I think, gets distorted into a series of compulsively "clever" remarks--or even smart-alecky ones.  The impulse comes from some deep drive to make the perfectly-timed and pitched bon mot, but when it fails, it looks and sounds clownish and sometimes churlish.  And it's embarrassing.  But I do it anyway, because when it works, and it usually does, I like being me.
     At the same time, I've spent my entire life being serious.  I wasn't always a serious student, though I wanted to be, and gradually did become one.  I early on subscribed to the idea that education is a lifelong process, and I've always valued the quotation attributed to Michelangelo toward the end of his long life:   "I am still learning."  Through the years I've thought as deeply as my mind would allow, managed to write down a great deal of what I thought about, and been fortunate enough to have a fair amount of it published.  I've smiled here and there in my writing, but as a matter of principle, I kept humor out.  I wouldn't allow it to compromise my seriousness.   
     Exactly how these two sides coexist within me, I don't know.  But they do.  And on balance, despite being embarrassed now and then by the failed witticism or the over-serious paragraph, essay, or book, I'm content to be represented in this world by my polar opposites.  Consistency is highly overrated.   
     

Three Hundred Million Golf Balls

     In July of 2013 I read an article by John McPhee called "The Orange Trapper" in The New Yorker.  Anything written by John McPhee gets my attention--and if it's in The New Yorker, still one of the meatiest, most literate publications in America, so much the better.
     You can never tell what McPhee will write about, and the unpredictability is part of what makes wandering around with him so much fun.  You just never know what's going to get a share of his attention, which then claims a share of yours.  He's written famously about Princeton basketball star Bill Bradley long before he became Senator Bill Bradley.  He's written about the Jersey pine barrens, cattle rustling, Alaska--all New Yorker pieces that worked themselves into twenty-eight books to date.  One of them in 1999, Annals of the Former World (on geology), won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. And he's been teaching a course that has evolved into Creative Nonfiction at Princeton since 1975.  
     "The Orange Trapper" turned out to be about lost golf balls.  The title is actually the name of a ball retriever golfers use to fish their balls out of ponds and lakes--or perhaps to reach balls resting beyond a fence and just sitting there waiting for someone to rescue them.  McPhee is 85 now and gave up the game of golf sixty-one years ago, when he was 24, though more recently he began stopping by fences separating golf courses from public roads in order to pick up abandoned balls.  Thus his need for an orange trapper.
     I am a duffer and play golf just to get out from behind my desk for a few hours a week.  Sometimes I surprise myself with well-struck balls and accurate putts, but mostly I just like being on golf courses.  I'm happy there, grateful that the game is in my life.
     McPhee's essay taught me two things.  First, that there is a program called First Tee that has taught the game of golf to more than seven million mostly inner-city kids--who need golf balls.  Second, that golfers lose their balls at the rate of three hundred million a year.  (At one hole surrounded by water at TPC Sawgrass in Jacksonville, Florida, golfers put nearly three hundred balls a day into the water.)  To keep up with the demand, Titleist, the manufacturer of what McPhee calls "the Prada golf ball," makes about a million balls a day.
     And so for the past two years, I've been rescuing golf balls around my home course, Scotland Yards  in Dade City, Florida, and giving them to the First Tee kids--over five thousand so far.  And counting.  Happily, I've already worn out two orange trappers. 

The Long and Short of It

     It isn't easy being short in America.  Not for a man anyway.  The country loves tall men.  Women love tall men.  "Tall, dark, and handsome."  We "look up" to people we admire--and "look down" on people we disapprove of.  A singer named Randy Newman had a hit song in 1977 with "Short People" who "got no reason / to live" and "nobody / to love."  The Atlantic magazine published an article in May 2015 that said four or five inches in height can be worth an increase of up to fifteen percent in salary, which translates into tall people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars more than short people over their work years.  No, it isn't easy--and that doesn't even take into account the smug smirks of tall people as they look down and shrug you off as a defective specimen.
     And yet there are long and impressive lists of short world leaders through history--Alexander the Great (5-6), Napoleon (5-6), Gandhi (5-3), James Madison (5-4), Josef Stalin (5-6), among many others.  The lists of short athletes, musicians, painters, writers, movie stars, and so on are similarly impressive, like Yogi Berra and Floyd Mayweather; Beethoven and Mozart; Picasso and Stravinsky; Martin Scorsese and Tom Cruise; Charlie Chaplin and Harry Houdini.  My personal favorites are recent NBA stars Muggsy Bogues (5-3) and Spud Webb (5-6), who barely made it to the waists of seven-foot, two-inch, wide-body centers.
     Lists like these, even abbreviated ones like mine, can be impressively long and may suggest that things aren't so bad for short people after all--but short men in America know better.  There is a silent, persistent prejudice against us built into our national mindset.  It's a discrimination hardwired into our common psyche, into our very hearts, into the language we use every day.  Call it a shortcoming. 

Update:  From the Tampa Bay Times, March 11,2018:  There is a "mountain of evidence that we really look up to men of physical stature.  Americans tend to see taller men as more competent and intelligent.  We're more willing to hire and promote them than we are shorter men, and more likely to elect them to high office.  We like them more."

    

Post Obama

     The nation will have a new president in January 2017, which means the election will be in November 2016, some thirteen months off.  The political season these days actually stretches through the whole calendar year, or so it seems, with no time off for candidates or voters to catch their breath.  It's exhausting for everyone.  The more so if you happen to watch television news featuring talking heads screaming at one another.  Partisan politics has become a full-contact blood sport, not for the faint of heart, either those running and serving or those voting and hoping for the best.
      The energy-sapping futility of it all is suggested by a set of statistics published recently, most notably that five billion dollars is about to be spent to sway ten percent of the voters in a handful of "swing states."  That's astounding.  Think of all that energy about to be spent.  And the frantic spending.  And the media feeding-frenzy.  It's not going to be pretty--though in all honesty, if you can keep your head, it may be very entertaining.
     There are other crazy numbers.  As for example that no matter who runs and no matter what platforms they run on, forty-five percent of the people will vote straight Democrat and forty-five percent will vote straight Republican.  What's left is the ten percent of undecided voters in the so-called "swing states" who are up for grabs. And as only little more than fifty percent of the total voting age population actually voted in the last presidential election, all that time and money will be spent on five percent of the voters in the swing states--and they tend to be located in a handful of counties and often along a stretch of interstate connecting major cities, like the I 4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando..
     Maybe we should just hold the national presidential election in those swing counties in the eight or nine swing states.  None of the rest of us seem to matter.  And we wouldn't have to put up with the unfolding political circus over the next full year.  And maybe we could use four and a half of the five billion dollars on things that really matter.  Fill in the blank with your favorite charity.
     

Zoroaster, Heaven, and Hell

     I'm no expert on any of these things, but recently I read a book by Harold Bloom called Omens of Millennium (New York, 1996) that claimed Zoroaster, the Iranian prophet who may go back as far as 1500 BCE, "invented the resurrection of the dead."  Before him, says Bloom, most of the dead passed to an unpleasant underground existence, except for a few chosen by the gods for something better.
     Zoroaster apparently refined this notion by inventing heaven and hell, as we think of them today, with true believers going to the "skies" and unbelievers being punished in an underground after-life.  The prophet believed in a "divine fire" that was expected in his own lifetime to change "nature" into "eternity."  Thus far, this sounds like the same theological hogwash we're all so familiar with.
     But I do like how this concludes, for Zoroaster prophesied a savior, Saoshyant, who "will prevail against all evil forces, and who will resurrect the dead."  It's hard to know what to make of this, but one thing seems clear enough:  the Christian invention of Jesus as the savior who could resurrect the dead wasn't even an original thought. 

A National Disgrace

Updated March 2017

When twenty-one-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof opened fire at the downtown Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, 2015, in Charleston, SC, he was, as he confessed after his arrest, trying to incite a race war.  He had stashed a handgun in his fanny pack before getting to the church’s Wednesday night Bible Study class, and when everyone had his head bowed in prayer, Roof pulled his gun and shot and killed six women and three men, including the pastor.  The three oldest victims were 70, 74, and 87, the youngest 26, 41, and 45.  As he shot the defenseless Bible Study Christians, Roof said, according to news reports, “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country—you have to go!”

           Pictures of Roof draped in the Confederate flag and spouting venom from his so-called Manifesto began appearing online and in newspapers.  He’d been motivated by George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida in February 2012.  Zimmerman was on patrol for a local Neighborhood Watch group when he spotted Martin, an unarmed black seventeen-year-old walking on a street near the house of his father, who lived in the neighborhood.  Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder charges a year later, citing Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” defense.  Roof took heart:  it was open season on blacks. 

          Roof, however, was wrong.  He was convicted of thirty-three federal hate crimes in December 2016, and condemned to death in January 2017.  His killings were so heinous that Confederate flags, symbols of the South rising once again, emblems of slavery and the brutal subjugation of blacks, have begun to be removed all over the South, including the statehouse in Columbia, S.C.

Roof’s massacre and the ensuing conversations about the Confederate flag have turned the spotlight onto traditional rationalizations of Southerners to absolve themselves of their region's slave-owning sins—like for example, the maliciously twisted logic that led them to maintain that slavery was good for everyone, including the slaves themselves, who were “protected” from birth to grave.  Their most pernicious rationalization was the redirection of the argument from human rights to political semantics as they tried to forgive their cruelties by claiming the authority of states’ rights.  They had the right to buy and sell black people, lash and torture them, kill them, break up their families—practice, in short, inhumanity on the grandest and most despicable scale—all in the name of a slippery right guaranteed them by the Constitution. 

           To gain the right perspective on slavery and slave owners, read David Reynolds' John Brown:  Abolitionist (Knopf, 2005).  It isn’t a perfect book, Reynolds being a typical, over-moralizing baby boomer, but his defense of Brown is nevertheless moving and convincing.  It took the violence of the Civil War, and here Reynolds is on strong moral ground, to wash the country clean of slavery, which was always the real issue, not a bloodless, gentlemanly, academic reflection over the fine points of political philosophy.

           There should be no place in modern America for romanticized notions of a bygone Southern way of life symbolized by the Confederate flag.  That flag is nothing more than a symbol of hatred and barbarity.  Every single one should be taken down from public buildings and confined to museums where they can be viewed as the national disgrace they are. 

Related story:  On Friday, May 19, 2017, under the watch of New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, the city removed the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from its position in the center of Lee Circle.  It was the last of four statues honoring Confederate leaders to be removed, but Lee's position at the head of the gallery of Southern "heroes" makes his removal most significant--and courageous.

Mayor Landrieu, according to the Tampa Bay Times (May 24, 2017), "marked the occasion with a blunt speech":

                     The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity.  It                                  sought  to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to 
           slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should 
           never again put on a pedestal to be revered.  As a community, we must 
           recognize the significance of removing New Orleans' Confederate 
           monuments.  It is our acknowledgement that now is the time to take
           stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history.

Also:  Eric Foner, "The Making and Breaking of Robert E. Lee" (NYTBR, Sept. 17, 2017):  "Lee has always occupied a unique place in the national imagination.  The ups and downs of his reputation reflect changes in key elements of Americans' historical consciousness. . . . Lee's 'legend' needs to be retired.  And whatever the fate of his statues and memorials, so long as the legacy of slavery continues to bedevil American society, it seems unlikely that historians will return Lee, metaphorically speaking , to his pedestal."