The Bell tolls for McCain

Recently John McCain confessed to a reporter that his favorite book – his guiding light – is Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. A great book, but the insight it provides into McCain’s character ain’t so great.

In a surface reading of the book, it’s easy to assume that Robert Jordan sacrifices himself at the end in a hyper-romantic bid to help his newfound lover Maria escape, and/or from his anti-fascist principles. There is much to admire about Jordan's bravery and commitment to the anti-fascist cause, but it is his sacrifice at the end that is the defining moment and no doubt is what attracts McCain to the book. But there's a darkness in his decision that I'm not sure McCain can see.

Jordan makes a conscious decision to put himself in harm’s way, not to advance the cause or aid Maria, but because he’s just damn dead tired of fighting and wondering why. The fateful decision to cross the road under cannon fire at intervals rather than all together was certain to give the fascists time to zero in on the last rider – Jordan. If they had all gone at once, they would have been away before the tank gunner could get the range.

Hemingway gave us the key to Jordon’s decision in a conversation with the partisan leader Pablo:

"I am tired of being hunted. Here we are all right. Now if you blow a bridge here, we will be hunted. If they know we are here and hunt for us with planes, they will find us. If they send Moors to hunt us out, they will find us and we must go. I am tired of all this. You hear?"

Pablo’s fear and ambivalence ultimately seep into Jordan’s heart and fuel his fateful decision - perhaps the only decision that would make sense to someone who could not live with his romanticism, but didn't know how to give it up.

Personal bravery and a willingness to put the country's cause first are admirable in any case, and we have seen much of that from our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have just suffered through eight years of a romantic commander in chief. I’m ready for some realism an I'm ready for a president who can tell the difference.

Two turntables and a microphone

I went to the opening of the Obama office in Madison Sunday. Wall to wall crowd standing in the sweatbox heat and everyone having a good time. It was actually a cross section. There were the usual pols and the usual fresh faced and earnest student coordinators, but the vast majority were middle age, middle class homeowner types who didn't need to be there on a Sunday afternoon. Actually Gov. Jim Doyle called it just right when he said this is the election we have all been waiting for, possibly the most exciting moment in politics since Kennedy. That seemed to be the motivation for many in the throng.

Doyle, incidentally, has come a long way from his stiff and stumbling speaking style of 6 or 7 years ago. Sunday he was relaxed and funny and hit just the right notes. And the cool part was the music was provided by a DJ spinning disks. Jazz, techno, whatever. He had a microphone but didn't use it; probably just as well. But the music was good and the thought was even better.

It's enough to give a guy some hope.

Mislead by philosophy

Darwin wasn't just concerned with the physical world, but in the tradition of philosophy going back to Plato, his real theme was the nature of reality. Countless "philosophers" had gone around and around on the nature of God, exhausting not only themselves and the limits of "reason", but thousands of bleary eyed readers who probably came away shaking their heads and wondering if they were too stupid or if all that reasoning just didn't add up. Unfortunately, many of them decided it was their own failing that they didn't understand.

So Darwin asked the philosophical question, "does it make sense that God would have individually created and destroyed all these species, or is it more rational that God allowed them to be created and destroyed by some secondary cause?" His choice of "secondary cause" is at the root of the dispute about evolution vs creation.

As if anyone could figure out the mind of God by means of reason. Such an arrogant creature is man.

In illustration, I will close with this story from James McGrath's blog exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com. I always find something of interest there.

A man finds himself before the pearly gates of heaven, having just died quite suddenly and unexpectedly. St. Peter meets him. "Welcome, friend!" he says, "Would you like to come in?" The man says that he doesn't yet feel any different, and asks what will change when he goes through the gates. St. Peter explains to him, "You'll be given a fresh start. Since your past would inevitably influence your ongoing existence in countless negative ways, we will erase all your memories. Since the form in which you existed as a human being was frail and fallible, your body will be replaced by a glorious one incapable of sin or error."

The man looked at St. Peter puzzled. "If you do all that to me," he asked, "in what sense will I still me me?"

"Good question," answered St. Peter. "This new self will still have your name and will incorporate those few elements in your prior existence that were in no way, shape or form entangled with the sin, suffering, and other miseries of human existence."

"You know what," the man replied, looking around at the clouds and seeing that there were other people who were outside the pearly gates, "I think I'll pass. What you are offering would negate the value of everything I've ever learned, everything I've suffered, everything I've done - in short, everything I am!" And at that, he walked away.

St. Peter watched the man until he was out of sight. Then he looked up and said to God "Still no takers."

"They make me so proud of them, sometimes," came the cheerful booming voice of God from above.
St. Peter then went away too, to watch Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind...

Do unto others?

The Justice Dept hiring scandal revealed in the past week of course comes as no shock. We all knew that was going on, didn’t we? It was only the so-called shrill, liberal mainstream media who maintained their silence all these years until the tide finally went out so far on the Bush Admin that even a beaten dog could find the courage to howl just a little. But that’s not the point.

The question is what are “we” going to do about it? In sports, if you play with an ineligible player, you forfeit the game. But there’s no commish in this game. No instant replay.

So when the Obamans come marching in next winter, the question is will “we” behave the same way and load up those same positions with our people? Or will we allow the Bush team to keep the gains they made with 12 men on the field? The former makes all of the change rhetoric sound suspiciously like a lie. The latter makes us just a bunch of chumps waiting to be taken advantage of by the self-righteous chest-thumpers on the extreme right who actually doesn’t see that they did anything wrong.

Call me a wimp, but I'm hoping we can have the courage to follow the latter course.

Gas is 1.3 minutes cheaper this week.

Two numbers converged last week have been the subject of outrage in different quarters. The price of gasoline finally started coming down. I saw $3.89 this weekend. Nationally the price fell below $4. It will be interesting to see whether that's the new benchmark for outrage and whether we will now be content to pay anything below $4. Incidentally, I'm betting on $5 by next Memorial Day.

The second number was the federal minimum wage, which reached the height of $6.55 per hour (incidentally eclipsing Wisconsin's $6.50). There were the usual stories about what a terrible burden that will be on small businesses. Of course, any minimum wage or child labor law is a burden on small business and you would be surprised how many people would like to see both of those impositions repealed.

But for now it's worth contemplating that it only takes 35.6 minutes of work at the minimum wage to pay for a gallon of gas this week versus 36.9 minutes last week. I guess that's what passes for progress these days.

If you drive a gas hog, you actually have to work longer at the minimum wage to buy a gallon of gas than it takes to burn it. My truck gets 15 mpg. At 55 mph, it would take a bit more than 16 minutes to burn a gallon of gas. A gas miser is better, but doesn't give much satisfaction. My Passat averages 33 mpg, which means I could drive for 36 minutes at 55 mph, just a few second more than the time it would take to pay for the gas at $6.55 per hour.

And you wonder why Americans seem depressed these days.

Deep thoughts

Do you ever come across a thought that makes you go hmmmmm? This is from Human Goodness by Yi-Fu Tuan.

"We rarely consider the good things that come our way as unjust."

Sense and sensibility

Tenzin Gyatso. the 14th Dalai Lama, tends to present his “advice for living” not as a religious precept, but as common sense, or more often science. He made much of the fact that humans are “social animals” and are therefore dependent on others for their happiness.

All true as far as that goes, but when we came home we noticed that Kid, the older of the two colts, had a big lump on his back – no doubt from being bitten. Susan surmises the culprit was Waldo the pony and the casus belli was jealousy. Whatever the cause, it’s not the only time Kid has taken a knock, or the only time any of the horses has turned up with hoof rash or worse.

That got me thinking about social animals like herd animals, pack animals etc. Stuff goes on out in the pasture that would end up in the police report if they were humans.

But whether domesticated or not, all animals have a code of conduct and a way of resolving conflicts that is understood in the group, and which admits to change, testing and sometimes outright violation. It’s universal and it’s innate. So the Dalai Lama is smart to talk about right behavior being a matter of sense and science, not received wisdom. Unless someday we find the Book of Equus in an earthen jar in the desert somewhere. Then we’ll have to reconsider.