RJ – Page 38 – Brimmings: up from the well

The UN Panel Report on Global Warming: Is anyone Listening?

If you’ve been keeping up with news about the environment, you’re perhaps aware of this week’s biggest news event, not the elusive search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, or the status quo of Ukraine, or the achieved pinnacle of 7 million enrollees under the Affordable Health Care Act, but the dismal impact studies just completed of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. At least this is as it should be, though you’d never know it, given the paucity of TV coverage of the Panel’s exhaustive findings (32 volumes summarized in 49 pages).

Turns out that yesterday’s coverage of the Panel’s released findings by news cable giants CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News was virtually absent, according to media monitoring service, TV Eyes, scanning Monday’s coverage between 6 a.m. and noon: CNN, 40 seconds; MSNBC, 20 seconds; and no surprise, Fox News’s total silence.

Only new comer Al Jazeera America zeroed in on the report, featuring an in depth analysis of the substantial effects of global warming on Bangladesh, which has been battling rising sea levels.

One of the Panel’s projections deals with emerging migrant hoards seeking refuge in other countries. I didn’t see Al Jazeera’s footage, but I’m aware that India is feverishly building a wall to stem the influx of Bangladesh refugees. (By the way, if you like your news unbiased, al Jazeera is your best bet.)

This sad scenario of media indifference mirrors the largely disturbing absence of the American public’s concern with the issue of global warming, humanity’s greatest threat to its survival since its inauguration into the nuclear age in 1945 and the subsequent threat of nuclear proliferation.

For many, it comes down to jobs vs. environment, or the prioritizing of entitlement interests when the fact is that poverty is likely to grow, not diminish, and affect even the richer nations as global warming’s exponential effects take hold in the guise of drought, record heat waves, forest fires, fierce storms, reduced food production, disease and social violence. Global warming’s incipient effects are already impacting plants and animals and acidifying the oceans with deadly consequences for marine life.

Humans are the primary instigators of global warming, with carbon emissions continuing to rise, and China, the U. S., and India leading the way. Here in my state of Kentucky with its coal slave mentality, the state government has just cut annual coal mine inspections down from 6 to 4. Sadly, I live in a state where many cars sport specialized plates, bearing “Friends of Coal,” and power companies wage incessant scare propaganda equating coal reduction with rising energy costs and job reduction instead of implementing focused research on clean coal technology. As I write, a Kentucky coal ash plant has been caught by hidden camera dumping coal ash into the Ohio River and is being sued by the Sierra Club and Land Justice.

Again, Kentucky isn’t alone, but part of a mind-sweep that embraces America. For example, initiatives to promote recycling by outlawing plastic bags are continually defeated even in more friendly environmental places like Seattle. (I have to confess I feel conspicuous, a seemingly rare upstart, when carrying my cloth bags into Krogers.)

In drought plagued California, swimming pools still adorn Malibu, ball parks sport well manicured grass, and golf courses like Pebble Beach and Cypress Point Club nurture their resplendent greens, even as farmers curtail their crops and California’s biggest cash crop of almond and walnut groves lie in dusty peril.

Golf interests say water consumption amounts to only 1% of California’s total, but omit a plethora of other environmental burdens like fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, which contribute to contamination of groundwater aquifers and surface waters.

This may seem off the subject, but there’s a new movie in town, Noah, that’s been drawing crowds, grossing $42 million in its initial weekend viewing. I bring it up because in my youthful days of religiosity I remember it took the biblical Noah a year to build the ark and round up the selected progeny of animals (although it escapes me as to what happened to the plants, since there’s no clear indication of their inclusion, though all the animals taken in were herbivores).

Anyway, the guy must have seemed some kind of crazy. After all, the earth, nourished by mist, hadn’t ever experienced rain before. The gospel of Luke (17:25-27, KJV) makes analogy to Noah and his time, saying

As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all.

Looks like Hollywood missed a golden opportunity of transforming an ancient saga of environmental survival into a film of contemporary relevance.

–rj

Susan Sarandon Gets It: Authentic Living

“I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I’ve been dreaming of my parents every day,” says Wang Zheng, a 31-year old engineer whose parents were aboard missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, now into its third week with still no positive yields as to its fate.

Ironically, new reports of possible debris 1500 miles off the coast of Western Australia aren’t offering the languishing families and friends the solace they seek–that their loved ones may still be alive, despite its sheer unlikelihood. As humans, hope is often all we can muster up against life’s irrational swells that confront, often adversely, randomly, and without closure, our daily quest for denominated happiness via health, work, food on our tables, and loved ones to share our good luck with on our return at day’s end.

Emily Dickinson said it well about the fervency of hope in her typically simple, yet elegant, observance,

Hope is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops at all.

Of course, it’s good to have hope in life, since without it we’d find each other mutually insufferable, depressed cranks weighed down by hurt, anger, and resentment. I’m thinking just now of the biblical Job whose troubles were only made worse by his judgmental friends, devoid of empathy, callous to his personal suffering.

What prolongs our suffering, however, comes from our need to impose control, especially when it comes to life’s volatility, and thus hope may not really be what we need to shore us up. All of life is laced with the temporal, or ending, a serial repertoire of good-byes. In the vast aeons of Nature, even the mountains are born and die, our own existence as a species hardly a wink up against’s Nature’s several billion year legacy of genesis, maturation and decline. For most of us, coming to terms with our own mortality is our ultimate existential dilemma. and the stuff of poetry, say like Keats (e.g., “When I have fears that I may cease to be”).

The Buddha had it right: “All suffering is born of desire.” Our primary desire is often for permanence when the truth is that impermanence embraces everything. Again, we don’t like to say good bye. I knew this first hand as a child, preferring to make myself scarce rather than seeing loved ones off.

We spare ourselves considerable grief when we grasp this fundamental truth, an observation shared in universal creeds and philosophic rumination, affirmed by science. We can’t retain our youth; we forfeit our friends, sometimes our mates; we change our jobs and often our locales; we lose our parents; we see our children move out and sometimes far away; and, of course, we always must contend with that random press on human intent and happiness via cosmic intervention such as accident or natural disaster.

In all of this, it’s our human disposition to wander between past and future and thus miss out on what we do have–life in the Now–and living mindfully in its effulgence rather than hedonistically, which inevitably comes up short.

I was just reading about Susan Sarandon, whom I’ve long admired for not only her film achievement, but her compassion for those denied social justice. In her personal life, she mirrors the wisdom of seizing the day, or maximizing our present. Asked why she dissolved her 23-year relationship with Tim Robbins, with whom she had two children, she said that it came after performing in Ionesco’s Exit the King on Broadway, which deals with confronting mortality: “You can’t do a meditation on death and stay in a situation that’s not authentic” (Meg Grant, AARP Magazine, Feb/Mar 2014).

I also like her punchline simple formula for everyday happiness: “It’s the simple things. Good food. Good friends. Sunsets and sunrises. With age, you gain maybe not wisdom, but at least a bigger picture” (Grant).

Me, I call that wisdom: authentic living in the present. After all, the Now is all we really have, given the ephemerality of life’s myriad textures. Living it meaningfully–which is to say, mindfully–enables us to find freedom over circumstance and, with it, greater happiness

–rj

The Black Box of the Human Heart: Reflections on Missing Flight MH370

I ask myself, how does a sleek, technologically sophisticated airliner equipped with all the latest fallback security devices vanish suddenly without a trace? After a week of wasted mass resources and time, the Malaysian government has finally owned up to a willful human act on the part of someone knowledgeable about aircraft, perhaps one of the Boeing craft’s two pilots.

The anomaly is that no terrorist entity has claimed responsibility. Suicide may loom as the cause and it has precedent in two previous incidents. What we do know is that someone turned off the transponder which signals the craft’s location to radar just an hour into flight.

Additionally, a portion of the Boeing’s 777 Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) was turned off. The transmitting portion of the ACARS, however, still functioned. Most pilots wouldn’t know how to turn it off, as it requires access to the electronic bay below the cockpit. Thus the plane continued to transmit blips picked up by Inmarsit satellite for several hours. Though not conveying data, these blips can assist in identifying the flight’s general region.

We know, too, that someone was guiding the plane, deliberately flying an alternate aerial pathway, initially traceable by Malaysian military.

From the very beginning (March 8), the mystery of Flight MH370’s disappearance has been compounded by confusion, with a plethora of false sightings, contrary statements, and denials. Unfortunately, other nations with more sophisticated technology such as the United States were denied access to the raw data from the outset, perhaps due to national pride.

It’s also painful to learn that airport security in Kuala Lumpur didn’t bother to check Interpol’s database listing of missing passports. Subsequently, we learned of two passengers on the flight with stolen passports. Though seemingly unconnected with the flight’s demise, their boarding of the Malaysia Airlines fight is disconcerting. I would think twice about booking a flight with this airline, even if they gave me a gratis ticket. This makes me curious about how the Airline is faring. Its legal problems are surely just beginning.

We all feel for the families involved–the confusion, the scuttled hopes, the Airline’s reported insensitivity in conveying prompt and frequent updates. And then, the terrible final moments of the passengers. Were they conscious or did the pilot ultimately provoke decompression by flying higher after setting a course on automatic pilot for the Indian Ocean known for its huge depths? This would explain the absence of cell phone messages. Given this challenge and the sheer vastness of the area being searched, I doubt we’ll ever find the plane’s impact scene and the black box unraveling this flight’s mystery.

The horror of a mind that can work such evil is something I’ve never been able to bend my mind around, though history witnesses to its frequent occurrence. For all our seeming sophistication, Conrad and Stevenson had it right when they wrote of “the heart of darkness” and the Dr. Jekyll and Hyde complex lurking within Man. Jung called it the Shadow; Freud, the Id, those subterranean depths of self-regarding human consciousness that on occasion explode into visibility with a lava of cruelty and hate.

–rj

Putin: Better Think Again!

In a recent interview with Fox’s Chris Wallace, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said Crimea can be written off as a Ukrainian entity, with the possibility of still further Russian intervention in Ukraine until Putin gets a government to his liking. I’ve always respected Gates, one of the best defense secretaries ever.

The problem with Putin is that escalating our threats just won’t work. He has options too. Just recently there’s been a rumbling that if the West plays rough, then Russia will no longer allow inspections of its nuclear arsenal. In short, we’d be virtually back to the Cold War. And if Europe does take meaningful measures–highly unlikely–it can easily limit natural gas supplies Europe depends on.

Tough talk may even provoke Putin to order troops into Kiev to depose its interim government, which he argues resulted from an illegal coup. We take it for granted we’re dealing with a rational leader, not a Kim Jong Un, but don’t bet on it. We do know that he served 16-years with The KGB, or secret police, much of it in East Germany with its Stasi repression. In a post-Soviet era, his thinking is a throwback to Communist conspiracy.

Asked recently what he considered Russia’s greatest catastrophe, he replied, “the break-up of the Soviet Union,” which goes a long way to explaining his designs on Ukraine and desire to reconsolidate its former vast territorial domain under the guise of the Eurasian Customs Union, slated to go into effect next year. (See my earlier post, February 28, 2014: Russia Likely to Intervene in Ukraine.)

Certainly, world criticism never bothered the Soviets when they invaded Hungary in 1956; nor the Putin regime when it invaded Georgia in 2008, occupying two breakaway provinces where they still remain. It’s bare-chested, black belt Putin fully on display, true to the narcissistic personality disorder with its broad symptoms of enhanced self-regard, arrogance, absence of sympathy for others, and readiness to exploit. We’ve seen it all before in the Hitler and Mussolini demagogues of modern history.

I don’t think for a moment our president impresses the Kremlin leader, certainly not after turning his back on a cruise missile strike. So far the White House response has been one of rhetoric rather than any substance. While I don’t agree with Republican hawks advocating revival of a missile defense system for eastern Europe, I do think this isn’t the time for reducing our troop numbers. I’d settle for booting Russia out of the G8 rather than just canceling its upcoming June meeting. As in most things, the bottom line is money. We must make Putin’s Ukraine strategy costly.

Russia’s economy, by the way, for all the show time glitter of robust health in its $40 billion outlay for the winter olympics at Sochi, continues in disarray, with present growth forecast at just 1%. Much of Russia’s financial resources depend on gas and oil exports, or as much as 80% by most financial analysts.

For Russia to cut supplies to Europe is a no-starter. Russia’s future, in fact, looks ominous, with America on a fast track to energy independence and with potential capacity to supply Europe. Ironically, securing the Ukraine, a nation $35 billion in the red, is surely the albatross around the neck that should give Putin pause.

Russia ought to worry instead about shoring up its deplorable infrastructure. When I traveled by bus several years ago from Moscow to Tula, a distance of about 120 miles, I wished I’d had a kidney belt, what with our wheels tumbling in yard wide holes all the way to the nearby Tolstoy homestead (Yasnaya Polyana).

Its oil and gas infrastructure is declining as well and will entail Russia laying out billions to modernize, compounded by worldwide demand for technical prowess at competitive prices.

Putin has seemingly forgotten his Russian comrades–all 144 million. Just a few days ago, Russia underwent the biggest stock sell off in 5-years, with the ruble tumbing to a record low, requiring the central bank to raise interest rates.

As is, Russia is fast losing its talented young people with emigration increasing 22% in 2012, and with them, its future. In the last ten years, nearly two million from the middle class have left Russia. Ukraine, understandably, wants no part of a dismal future with the Russian Federation.

The pity of Russia with its vast resources is that, like many third world nations, its economy is dominated by a kleptomaniac oligarchy lining its pockets at the expense of a long suffering people. No wonder the exodus.

Will the last one out please get the lights!

–rj

Sequel to Russian Incursion: Ukraine’s Likely Fate

What we’re seeing in Ukraine we’ve seen before; namely, Russia’s incursion into Georgia in 2008 when that government attempted to wrest back its secessionist breakaway territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. We did nothing then. We will do little now, simply because we lack leverage.

The Crimea itself, now fully occupied by Russian troops, poses a strategic necessity for Russia that goes back 240 years. Adjacent to the Black Sea, it provides Russia with warm water naval outreach to the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Russia is unlikely to hand it back to a belligerent regime.

The scenario could get even worse for Ukraine, since Russian incursion may not stop with seizing the Crimea. After all, a large swath of Eastern Ukraine is also Russian speaking. One incident and Putin is likely to seize upon it as pretext for moving troops into this area as well. Just yesterday, there was a bloody exchange between rival factions in the region. In short, the dismemberment of Ukraine may already be underway.

But the situation could prove even more sinister: Russia may decide to depose the Ukraine’s interim government and install a puppet regime loyal to its interests. It tried to do this in Afghanistan in the 1980s, propping up a Marxist government. What this would mean for Ukrainians is painful to contemplate–perhaps civil war between the factions or an incipient resistance movement.

I find it ironic, to say the least, that Russia has waged two conflicts to keep Chechnya within the Mother Land, yet has abetted secession efforts in Georgia and, currently, Ukraine.

In all of this, our hands are sadly tied, exacerbated by our own confusion. The G8 nations of which Russia is a member, could refuse to attend this June’s trade summit scheduled in Sochi. Acting more bravely–don’t hold your breath–it could expel Russia. This would sting.

But doing so could hurt our own interests as well. We need Russian cooperation on Syria and Iran, say critics. I would argue, however, that this is moot discussion, since it assumes Russian cooperation as a verity. The truth is that Russia continues its efforts to support a ruthless Syrian regime and remains a potential menace to our efforts to curtail Iranian access to nuclear weaponry. It’s quite evident that Russia, deeply jealous of the West and, especially the U. S., suffers from an immense insecurity complex reflected in a historic penchant for destabilizing Western aims.

Meanwhile, the UN can muster the Security Council, but to what end, since Russia will employ its veto yet again.

In all of this, Russia ironically doesn’t need to invoke troops, since its ultimate weapon to keep Ukraine in line is natural gas, which it enjoys in abundance. Ukraine needs that gas desperately and presently owes Russian billions in deferred payment. Putin, additionally, was already supplying the country with natural gas at sharply reduced rates.

As for the EU, it’s a given that it knows the potential seismic effects of a reduced gas supply from Russia to power its own economies, several of which are already floundering.

In all of this, I would draw a parallel with what happened in 1956 in Hungry, when the Soviets invaded to overthrow an insurgent rebel government. 2000 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers died; 13,000 Hungarians were imprisoned; hundreds executed; and 200,000 refugees fled to the West. Then, as now, the invaders blamed the revolt on western instigation and facist-nazi reactionaries.

The more the free-world protested, the more things stayed the same. The Russians vetoed the Security Council’s mandate to withdraw and ignored the General Assembly’s majority vote. Then, as now, the Kremlin called the West’s bluffs. A few months later, both East and West were working trade deals.

And this is the way things will end for the brave people of Ukraine, despite Western protests and threatened sanctions. Human rights didn’t keep the world from swarming to Sochi for the Winter Olympics.

The heavy truth is that politics has always operated in a context of power, not morality. Right now, Russia enjoys the upper hand.

–rj

Russia Likely to Intervene in Ukraine

Last week, Ukrainian protestors in Kiev’s Maidan (its central square) were mowed down by security forces of the hated Yanukovych regime. Undeterred, they advanced into the fusillade. What is life without freedom?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Ukraine, no doubt heightened by media coverage of the continuing unrest in that nation of 46 million. But it’s more than the headlines. When I was a young boy growing up in Massachusetts, I played with a friend who had recently arrived in the U.S. from Ukraine with his mother and siblings. Though young, he had seen vestiges of World War II’s carnage. While I can’t recall the details, they left me with an impression of a people that had endured considerable suffering.

In Lexington, Kentucky, there exists a vibrant, growing Ukrainian community. We’ve had a lot of renovation done at our house and one of the primary workers is a Ukrainian affectionately dubbed “Slav” by his fellow workers. We’ve talked about Ukraine on occasion. On one occasion I accepted his invite to a bake sale at his Ukrainian church. The church is doing well and is an anchor in providing a social network for newly arrived Ukrainians, which include many young people. The other day, I was walking back to my car after grocery shopping at Meijer’s, when a car honked. It was Slav. He had just returned from the Ukraine.

Just maybe Lexington’s best roofing enterprise happens to be Ukrainian. My physician is from the Ukraine. How can I not think about them?

It’s estimated that some 7 million Ukrainians perished from famine following Stalin’s collectivization of Ukraine’s peasant owned farmlands in 1932-33. Another 10-million perished in World War II. What most historians miss is that Ukraine bore the biggest brunt of the Nazi invasion, being a total battleground between German and Soviet armies. Only 5% of Russian territory was occupied.

Following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine announced its independence. There was little Russia could do, since the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal was on Ukrainian soil. In 2009, an agreement was worked out between the negotiating parties, which included the United States. One of Ukraine’s demands was a guarantee of its sovereignty. The U. S. granted Ukraine the same assurances guaranteed to non-nuclear signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the signatories of the Final Helsinki Act (1975).

As I write, paramilitary forces in Russian dominated Crimea have seized the local parliament buildings and its airports and Putin has put 150,000 troops on alert. The Crimea had been added to the Russian Empire under Catherine II. In 1954, it was restored to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev, an ethnic Ukrainian.

Despite Secretary of State Kerry’s warning to Russia not to interfere, it’s not going to mean much in a way of any meaningful U.S. response, especially with an indecisive president in office who runs from confrontation; has failed to support moderate rebels in Syria, allowing extremist sectarian factions to enter into the fray; has never really signed on to supporting our troops in Iraq or Afghanistan; and is now bent on unilaterally reducing our army to pre-World War II levels. No one wants war. But it’s doubtful the EU or U.S. will invoke economic or trade measures either.

What seems a given is that Putin isn’t going to allow Ukraine to cozy-up with the West, culminating in joining the EU and becoming a NATO member. Putin dreams of reestablishing a political and trade confederation of the former constituencies of the Soviet Union under the auspices of the Eurasian Customs Union (ECU). Slated to go into full effect in 2015, its prototype presently includes Russia, Belarus, and Kazakstan, with Kyrgyzstan to join soon. This grand scheme ultimately includes Ukraine, which can only be accomplished by Russian economic pressure and/or military intervention. Putin’s scheme is to return Russia to its past preeminence, a world competitor on equal footing with the EU, USA, and China. It’s what Sochi was all about.

Right now, the situation in Ukraine is ominous, given the large Russian majority population in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Historians may remember that Hitler used the pretext of a mistreated German minority to invade Poland.

It will only take a spark for history to repeat itself.

–rj

Trans Pacific Partnership: Corporate Mayhem Alive and Well

Despite President Obama’s spirited pledge to reduce the growing gap between rich and poor, his administration has been covertly involved in negotiating a Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement whose potential fallout would only exacerbate, not lessen, the economic divide, consolidating what is essentially an oligarchy of Wall Street interests.

You may be unfamiliar with the TPP, as it’s not played up in the media, unless you’re a rare aficionado of the marketplace. Briefly, 14 nations bordering the Pacific, controlling 40% of the world’s GDP and 26% of its trade, have been at work for more than a year, hammering out the final details of a complex agreement that would eliminate tariffs on goods and services. Composed of 29 chapters, its scope would include not only the area of finance, or banking, but telecommunications (i.e., the Internet), and even food services. It would have devastating consequences for those of us committed to environmental concerns that include global warming.

Ominously, it includes proposals that would curtail consumer protection across a wide spectrum. According to Republican Reports, leaked TPP negotiation documents reveal the Obama administration’s attempts to stymie other governments from implementing financial regulations, believing they could mitigate another bank collapse.

These leaked documents (see citizen.org) indicate proposals allowing corporations to sue governments under the auspices of “foreign tribunals,” thus circumventing domestic courts and local laws. Corporations could even demand financial compensation for “tobacco, prescription, and environment protections” that undermine their profits.

As Senator Elizabeth Warren–I like her more everyday–warns, such provisions allow “a chance for these banks to get something done quietly out of sight that they could not accomplish in a public place without the cameras rolling and the lights on.”

Alarmingly, even without the TPP, over $3 billion has already been paid out to foreign investors under current U.S. trade and investment agreements, with another $14 billion pending, “primarily targeting environmental, energy, and public health policies” (citizen.org).

Representing the U.S. in the negotiations is Obama appointee Stefan Selig, a former Bank of America investment banker nominated to become Under Secretary for International Trade at the Department of Commerce. Since his nomination, he’s received $9 million in bonuses. (He had received $5.1 million incentive pay the previous year.)

Slated to join him in the negotiations, pending Congress’ approval, is Michael Froman, presently U.S. Trade Representative. He received $4 million from CitiGroup as an exit payment in addition to $2 million in connection with his holdings in several investment funds.

This practice of banks lining the pockets of their former cohorts upon joining government is pervasive in the banking industry, pocket money for establishing influence in contexts affecting public financial policy.

Unfortunately, for all the pretty rhetoric coming out of the White House, the oligarchy of the one percent remains entrenched, and even abetted, while the TPP, added to its already formidable arsenal of financial peddling, poses a potent means to intimidating the common citizenry, here and abroad, opposed to its hegemony of privilege.

It certainly doesn’t contribute to economic parity. According to a study by the Center for Economic Policy and Research, as reported in the Washington Post, the economic gains would largely accrue to the wealthy.

–rj

Virgin Balzac Reader: First Impressions

I’ve been meaning for a long time to read the 19th century French writer Honoré Balzac (1799-1850), just maybe the first really modern writer of novels in his realistic depiction of people, particularly as to what motivates them, with keen observations of places, trends, and social discourse. I’m actually embarrassed to say I haven’t tried him out before, as I earned my bread for some forty years teaching literature at the college level. While it’s true that my specialty was 19th century British literature, I often taught some of the great French masters like Voltaire, Flaubert, Proust, Camus and Gide.

Balzac I somehow missed, maybe because my own profs had themselves passed him by, though considerable talents like Henry James, Flaubert, Zola and Proust modeled much of their work on his methods: long sentences weighted in details; psychological probing focused on characters, both major and minor, fraught with ambiguities amplified by an acutely observant omniscient narrator acquaintance. Hard to believe they could do this, when you ultimately discover he’s widely thought of as one of our preeminent writers of fiction.

I came upon Balzac finally via The New York Review of Books, which recently published a collection of his short stories as part of its Classic Books series. It seemed a good place to start with this prolific writer who penned some 85 novels and novellas under the canopy of The Human Comedy in the short space of 20-years, the first modern writer to make a living by his pen. (Dickens got the message, obviously.) Some say Balzac worked himself to an early death, writing to pay off his many debts.

Every human type is plainly exhibited in The Human Comedy, which in some ways, makes it analogous to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with the frequent use of a frame device in which a narrator employs a particular circumstance–locale/event–as foreground for story telling. Unlike Chaucer, a narrator may himself serve as a frame device, setting up minor and highly divergent sub-narrators spinning their own versions of people and events. What’s more, you don’t have Chaucer’s naive narrator, who often, comically, misses the truth left for readers to discern. Balzac’s narrators are deeply serious about divulging the truth behind the vagaries of human guises.

My first impressions of Balzac have been mixed. He’s certainly your acute observer of every palate of human experience, whether of fashion, politics, religion, historical figures and events, even–and surprisingly, coming so early–repressed libido urges within his characters. There is also a fluidity, or speed, to his sentences, however long they may be, which, unlike James, avoids a tangled syntax. Frequently, however, he digresses, leaving off finishing one story before indulging in another, followed by still others, as if imitating the desultory nature of most of our conversations. In a very real sense, Balzac is all about story telling, or the verbal interplay between people. He could probably have achieved success in drama, and actually did write several plays.

At the moment, I find myself, however, drowning in detail, sprawling sentences sometimes running two pages held together by semicolons and, as I’ve hinted, numerous digressions to the point I lose track of whom and what. If Balzac is about rendering conversation, surely he misses the mark, for none of us dialogs this way, or the way of essay.

But everything in Balzac, by the same token, has a way of taking on a life of its own, places as well as people, particularly Paris. You are there, on a street, in a room, an invisible witness to every nuance of quotidian humanity, encyclopedic, exhaustive in minutiae, often disturbing, but always revelatory.

To get at Balzac better and reach a more informed impression I, of course, need to go on to some of his masterpieces like Eugenie Grandet, Père Goriot, and Lost Illusions. Otherwise, it’s like visiting France and omitting Paris.

–rj

Artemis Cooper’s Fermor Biography: A Great Read

artemiscooper I just finished Artemis Cooper’s splendid biography (Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure).

Fermor, who died in 2011 at age 96, is widely regarded as the foremost travel writer of the last century–ever observant, never boring, blessed with diligent recall, and unexcelled with metaphor. When you read Fermor, you’re getting not only description, but history and art amid the first stirrings of fascism in pre-World War II Europe.

The apex of his writing is, of course, his recounting of his three year walk (1933-35) across Europe, or from Rotterdam to Istanbul in two volumes: A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. Sadly, it’s a Europe that’s largely vanished with its post Great War vestiges of Hapsburg resplendence; of unfettered freedom-loving peasants; of an untamed Danube not yet shackled by dams, bounded by bird-saturated wetlands; of fulsome traditions and extant vernaculars; of a redolent human goodness replete in hospitality transcending class or wealth; of a Europe not yet initiated into the apocalyptic horrors of fascism and the aftermath of Soviet hegemony across Eastern Europe.

Gifted with an ebullient personality along with many a youth’s folly, he made friends easily and treasured these friendships across the years. They included every day people–shopkeepers, peasants, gypsies, monks–along with luminaries like Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connally, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Toynbee. He was especially close to Lawrence Durrell and Ian Fleming.

Here let me confess I prefer biography to autobiography because I think it’s in the former you’re more likely to find honesty than among the raconteurs of the latter, often promoting themselves or embroidering their narrative through boasts or claims difficult to confirm.

Fortunately, we have one surviving Fermor journal that records his journey, assuring us it happened. Even so, any perusal of it tells us what we surmised–that despite his prodigious talents for memory and detail, no 18-year old could possess the salient knowledge Fermor displays forty years later in his layered recall.

In short, Fermor added details across the years, embellishing his journals through vast, omnivorous reading–often in their original languages (he was fluent in six of them)–in a laboring akin to fashioning a mosaic. At times, he confessed to steeping his writing in imaginative touches like riding horseback across the Hungarian steppes. At heart, Fermor was an ardent Romantic who sometimes linked himself with Byron, who like himself had a fondness for Greece and fought for its freedom. I wasn’t surprised then that like his hero, he swam the Hellespont. What shocked me was that he was 69.

Like, Byron, he also had many lady loves, despite his long relationship and later marriage to Joan Raynor, whose mother was heiress to a fortune made in woolens manufacturing. (Be warned that when you learn of Fermor’s women friends you’re probably right to assume they were loves.) What enabled Joan and Paddy’s marriage to survive these amours was their foreswearing of sexual jealousy. In fact, Joan was observed providing Paddy with money on one occasion, should he need a woman in his travels. His early love affair–before Joan– with the Rumanian princess, Balasha Cantacuzine, sixteen years older than himself, is certainly moving in its ultimate tragedy of ensuing separation with the onset of war and later Communism.

I know I risk understatement when I say Fermor had an intensity about him when it came to life. Passionate, he wanted to know the full palette of human experience and verbally paint its textures. A consummate intellectual, he never put on airs with his encyclopedic command of many disciplines, whether music, art, history, literature or languages.

He was also a brave and ingenious man, serving in World War II as a naval officer assigned to the Intelligence Corps and dropped into Crete as a liaison to the Cretan resistance against the occupying Germans. Ultimately, in one of the war’s greatest exploits, he would mastermind the capture of the commanding German general on Crete. Cooper is very thorough in presenting the many facets of this endeavor and the narrow escape of Fermor and his fellow partisans from German reinforcements in search of their general.

Cooper unflinchingly gives us full portraiture of Fermor. Not everyone liked his tendency to dominate a conversation, for example. Politically, he was conservative and despised the Communists who created havoc in civil war Spain, opposed resistance efforts in Crete, and contributed to considerable violence in post-war Greece. He had also killed a fellow member of his Cretan guerrilla unit in an accidental shooting incident he could easily have avoided with more diligence to gun safety. As for his writing, some critics argue his long sentences, weighted with details, may trip up readers and frequent digressions provoke their annoyance. We learn, too, that he smoked as many as seventy cigarettes a day.

Cooper knew Fermor firsthand as the granddaughter of Lady Diana Cooper, who found Fermor captivating and remained a lifelong friend and correspondent:

He could illuminate any subject under the sun, and had a memory that had retained most of the thousands of books he had read over the years. He knew all her favourite passages from Browning, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Meredith and Keats by heart–and much more besides….

As for Paddy, he worshipped Diana, not just for her indestructible beauty, but for the original cast of her mind, the flourish of her phrases, and the blind eye she turned to convention.

The New York Times has recently listed her book as one of the year’s (2013) most notable biographies; likewise the prestigious New York Review of Books, which had already proven its fondness for Fermor by printing several of his works as “Classics.

Having recently read A Time of Gifts, I found the biography an exceptional read in translating an extraordinary life into an effulgence of candor, scholarship and artistry. I can’t think of a better memorial.

–rj

Governor Cuomo: “They have no place in the state of New York.”

As New York governor Andrew Cuomo sees it, pro-life activists, anti-gay activists and Second Amendment supporters aren’t welcome in his state:

Their problem (GOP) is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

Later, in an open letter to the New York Post, he claimed his remarks had been distorted. Here, I’ll take him at his word–that he meant that the New York electorate won’t tolerate such views. Judging by recent elections, he’s right.

Still, the genie is out of the bottle and his phrasing unfortunate, if not symptomatic, of an increasingly trenchant political milieu, though I admit that politics hasn’t ever been a safe place to venture, even at the private level.

I’m further dismayed that much of the current incivility comes from the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party, intolerant of those who disagree with them, subjecting them to highly charged labeling, caricature, and derision.

It didn’t help matters when Mylan Denerstein, counsel to the governor, later published a backtracking piece on the governor’s website, using the phrase, “extremist agenda” for those with such views.

Ironically, with one verbal swoop, the governor sloughs off the sincerity of millions of Roman Catholics and evangelicals who believe abortion to be a termination of a human being or that homosexuality isn’t biologically a genetic component, or gun advocates who believe the Second Amendment supports their viewpoint.

Let me make clear I don’t subscribe to their beliefs, but I do advocate strongly their right to their beliefs in keeping with the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech….”

It’s time for all of us to quit throwing rocks at each other. It solves nothing except to underscore an underlying insecurity about our views, spilling over into angry backlash rather than testing our beliefs in the arena of public debate.

Cuomo assumes this conservative element is both extreme and a minority viewpoint. Does this mean that you judge the worth of an idea or belief by how many hold it, or the weight of public opinion? As that “saint of rationalism, John Stuart Mill, cogently warned us in On Liberty (1859), majorities can ultimately consummate themselves as tyrannies repressing minority opinion even in a democratic context.

Minorities come not just in colors or ethnicities, but in beliefs as well. thus they also fall under the canopy of civil rights and need to be assertively protected. Only one boundary should exist:

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it (Mill).

Unfortunately, we’ve seen our liberty for divergent opinion increasingly eroded, ironically, often lurking within the bastions of academe and not just government or media. Ideas, no matter how repugnant we may view them, deserve their exposure in public debate.

I think Jonathan Rauch, political commentator and Brooking Institute member, summarizes it quite well in his Kind Inquisitor: The New Attack on Free Thought, Expanded Edition (Univ. of Chicago, 2013):

A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism; it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will.

Are you listening, Governor Cuomo?

–rj

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