Civ VI

In the Heat of the Sun

Star Wars Rebels

Manuscript of Great Gatsby

Fightin' Bob La Follette

Robert Marion "Fighting Bob" La Follette Sr. (June 14, 1855 – June 18, 1925) was an American Republican (and later a Progressive) politician. He served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, was the Governor of Wisconsin, and was a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin from 1906 to 1925. He ran for President of the United States as the nominee of his own Progressive Party in 1924, carrying Wisconsin and winning 17% of the national popular vote.

His wife Belle Case La Follette, and his sons Robert M. La Follette Jr. and Philip La Follette led his political faction in Wisconsin into the 1940s. La Follette has been called "arguably the most important and recognized leader of the opposition to the growing dominance of corporations over the Government" and is one of the key figures pointed to in Wisconsin's long history of political liberalism.

He is best remembered as a proponent of progressivism and a vocal opponent of railroad trusts, bossism, World War I, and the League of Nations. In 1957, a Senate Committee selected La Follette as one of the five greatest U.S. Senators, along with Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and Robert A. Taft. A 1982 survey asking historians to rank the "ten greatest Senators in the nation's history" based on "accomplishments in office" and "long range impact on American history," placed La Follette first, tied with Henry Clay. Robert La Follette is one of five outstanding senators memorialized by portraits in the Senate reception room in US Capitol. The Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin is named for him.

AI War II

Baseball's Sad Lexicon

These are the saddest of possible words:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double –
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."

Dunt: a poem for a dried up river

Wallace Stevens

Lucas de Groot

Year of the Cubs (for real this time)

Under Western Eyes

Parking by Adam Savage

Mapping the Library of Babel

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/the-library-of-babel-again/

Didion on Newt

The Teachings of Speaker Gingrich

Joan Didion
AUGUST 10, 1995 ISSUE

1945
by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen
Baen Books/distributed by Simon and Schuster, 382 pp., $24.00

To Renew America
by Newt Gingrich
Harper Audio, 260 pp., $17.00 two cassettes (abridged, approximately three hours)
1.

Among the personalities and books and events that have “influenced” or “changed” or “left an indelible impression on” the thinking of the Hon. Newton Leroy Gingrich (R-Ga.), the current Speaker of the House of Representatives and the author of 1945 andTo Renew America, are, by his own accounts, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, Isaac Asimov, Alexis de Tocqueville, Tom Clancy, Allen Drury’sAdvise and Consent, Robert Walpole, William Gladstone, Gordon Wood, Peter Drucker, Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, the “Two Cultures” lectures of C.P. Snow (the lesson here for the Speaker was that “if you’re capable of being glib and verbal, the odds are you have no idea what you’re talking about but it sounds good, whereas if you know a great deal of what you’re saying the odds are you can’t get on a talk show because nobody can understand you”), Adam Smith, Zen and the Art of Archery, “the great leader of Coca-Cola for many years, Woodruff,” an Omaha entrepreneur named Herman Cain (“who’s the head of Godfather Pizza, he’s an African-American who was born in Atlanta and his father was Woodruff’s chauffeur”), Ray Kroc’s Grinding It Out, and Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages.Newt Gingrich; drawing by David Levine

There were also: Daryl Conner’s Managing at the Speed of Change, Sam Walton’s Made in America, Stephen R. Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, The 1913 Girl Scout Handbook, Alcoholics Anonymous’s One Day at a Time, Gore Vidal’s Lincoln (“even though I’m not a great fan of Vidal”), the Sidney Pollack/Robert Redford motion pictureJeremiah Johnson (“a great film and a useful introduction to a real authentic American”), commercial overbuilding in the sunbelt (“I was first struck by this American passion for avoiding the lessons of history when I watched the Atlanta real estate boom of the early 1970s”), the science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, the business consultant W. Edwards Deming (“Quality as Defined by Deming” is Pillar Five of Gingrich’s Five Pillars of American Civilization), and, famously, the Tofflers, Alvin and Heidi, “important commentators on the human condition” and “dear friends” as well.

It was these and other influences that gave Mr. Gingrich what Dick Williams, an Atlanta newspaperman and the author of Newt!, calls “an intellectual base that has been developing since he was in high school, collecting quotes and ideas on scraps of paper stored in shoeboxes.” It was in turn this collection of quotes and ideas on scraps of paper stored in shoeboxes (a classmate estimated that Mr. Gingrich had fifty such boxes, for use “in class and in politics”) that led in 1984 to Mr. Gingrich’s Window of Opportunity (described in its preface by Jerry Pournelle as “a detailed blueprint, a practical program that not only proves that we can all get rich, but shows how”); in 1993 to the televised “Renewing American Civilization” lectures that Mr. Gingrich now delivers from Reinhardt College in Waleska, Georgia; and most recently to his current1945 and To Renew America.

1945 is a fairly primitive example of the kind of speculative fiction known as “alternate history,” the premise being that Hitler spent “several weeks in a coma” after a plane crash on December 6, 1941, and so did not declare war on the United States. Now, in 1945, fully recovered, Hitler is poised to launch Operation Arminius, a manifold effort to seize England (which in 1943 had “agreed to a remarkably lenient armistice” after the collapse of the Churchill government) and cripple the ability of the United States to respond by sinking its fleet and knocking out Oak Ridge, where the development of the atomic bomb is still underway. “Kill every scientist at this Oak Ridge and we kill their atomic program,” the German officer charged with the Oak Ridge infiltration and destruction declares. “That is why the Führer is willing to go to war to stop the Americans before they beat us to this truly ultimate weapon.” In the marginally less tedious To Renew America, the book for which HarperCollins originally offered $4.5 million, Mr. Gingrich recycles familiar themes from both Window of Opportunity and his “Renewing American Civilization” lectures as he endeavors to “restore our historic principles,” most recently evidenced, as he sees it, in “the certainty and convictions of World War II and the Cold War.”

To complain that Mr. Gingrich’s thinking is “schematic,” as some have, seems not exactly to describe the problem, which is that the “scheme,” as revealed in his writing and in his lectures, remains so largely occult. The videotaped “Renewing American Civilization” lecture in which Mr. Gingrich discusses “The Historic Lessons of American Civilization,” which is Pillar One of The Five Pillars of American Civilization, offers, for example, clips from several television movies and documentaries about the Civil War, but not much clue about why the lessons of American civilization might be “historic,” and no clue at all why the remaining four Pillars of American Civilization (“Personal Strength,” “Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise,” “The Spirit of Invention and Discovery,” and “Quality as Defined by Deming”) might not be more clearly seen as subsections of Pillar One, or lessons of civilization. Similarly, the attempt to track from one to five through Mr. Gingrich’s “Five Reasons for Studying American History” (“One: History is a collective memory”; “Two: American history is the history of our civilization”; “Three: There is an American exceptionalism that can best be understood through history”; “Four: History is a resource to be learned from and used”; and “Five: There are techniques that can help you learn problem-solving from historic experience”) leaves the tracker fretful, uneasy, uncertain just whose synapses are misfiring.




What has lent Mr. Gingrich’s written and spoken work, or, as he calls it, his “teaching,” the casual semblance of being based on some plain-spoken substance, some rough-hewn horse sense, is that most of what he says has reached us in outline form, with topic points capitalized (the capitalization has been restrained in the more conventionally edited To Renew America) and systematically, if inappositely, numbered. There were “Seven key aspects” and “Nine vision-level principles” of “Personal Strength” (Pillar Two of American Civilization), there were “Five core principles” of “Quality as Defined by Deming” (Pillar Five), there were “Three Big Concepts” of “Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise” (Pillar Three). There were also, still under Pillar Three, “Five Enemies of Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise” (“Bureaucracy,” “Credentialing,” “Taxation,” “Litigation,” and “Regulation”), which would have been identical to Pillar Four’s “Seven welfare state cripplers of progress” had the latter not folded in “Centralization,” “Anti-progress Cultural Attitude,” and “Ignorance.”

In Window of Opportunity, Mr. Gingrich advised us that “the great force changing our world is a synergism of essentially six parts,” and offered “five simple steps to a bold future.” On the health-care question, Mr. Gingrich posited “eight areas of necessary change.” On the issue of arms control, he saw “seven imperatives that will help the free world survive in the age of nuclear weapons.” Down a few paragraphs the seven imperatives gave way to “two initiatives,” then to “three broad strategic options for the next generation,” and finally, within the scan of the eye, to “six realistic goals which would increase our children’s chances of living in a world without nuclear war.”

“Outlining” or “listing” remains a favored analytical technique among the management and motivational professionals whose approach Mr. Gingrich has so messianically adopted (balancing the budget and “finding a way to truly replace the current welfare state with an opportunity society” could both be done by the year 2002, he advised the Congress on the occasion of his swearing-in as Speaker, “if we apply the principles of Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker”); yet few of his own “areas” and “imperatives” and “initiatives,” his “steps” and “options” and “goals,” actually advance, on examination, the discourse. The seventh of the seven steps necessary to solve the drug problem, as outlined in To Renew America, calls for the government to “intensify our intelligence efforts against drug lords across the planet and help foreign governments to trap them,” in other words exactly what both the Drug Enforcement Administration and the United States Southern Command have been doing for some years now. No piety can long escape inclusion in one or another of Mr. Gingrich’s five or four or eleven steps: another of the seven steps necessary to solve the drug problem calls for the “reinvigoration” of Mrs. Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign.

The first of the “eight areas of necessary change” in our health-care system calls for “focusing on preventive medicine and good health,” which meant, in Window of Opportunity, offering Medicare recipients $500 for not going to the doctor. To Renew America expands this notion to “employee insurance plans” that provide each employee with a $3,000 “Medisave” account to spend on medical care or receive as a year-end bonus, i.e., a way of phasing out the concept of medical insurance by calling the phaseout “Medisave.” Mr. Gingrich cites the “very large savings in medical expenses” achieved through Medisave accounts by the Golden Rule Insurance Company, the executives and employees of which happen to have put their savings to work, during the several years since Mr. Gingrich’s ascendance into the national eye, by donating $42,510 to his campaign committee, $117,076 to his GOPAC, an undisclosed amount to the foundation that sponsors his lectures, and $523,775 to the Republican Party. The Golden Rule Insurance Company also sponsors The Progress Report, the call-in show Mr. Gingrich co-hosts on National Empowerment Television. “Linking their contributions to performance,” Mr. Gingrich told us in Window of Opportunity, was “the first step for average Americans in learning to organize and systematize their new relationship with elected politicians.”

Those arguments in To Renew America not immediately suggestive of ethical conflict tend to speed headlong into another kind of collision. We have, according to Mr. Gingrich, “an absolute obligation to minimize damage to the natural world,” a “moral obligation to take care of the ecosystem,” but since this collides with his wish to lift the “ridiculous burden” of “environmental regulations hatched in Washington,” the fulfillment of our moral obligation to take care of the ecosystem is left to a constituent in Mr. Gingrich’s district, Linda Bavaro, who turns two-liter Coca-Cola bottles into T-shirts, which she sells at Disney World. “Linda,” Mr. Gingrich notes, “has a good chance of doing well financially by doing good environmentally. That is how a healthy free market in a free country ought to work.”

Even Mr. Gingrich’s most unexceptionable arguments can take these unpredictable detours. The “Third Wave Information Age” offers “potential for enormous improvement in the lifestyle choices of most Americans,” opportunities for “continuous, lifelong learning” that can enable the displaced or downsized to operate “outside corporate structures and hierarchies in the nooks and crannies that the Information Revolution creates” (so far so good), but here is the particular cranny of the Information Revolution into which Mr. Gingrich skids:


Say you want to learn batik because a new craft shop has opened at the mall and the owner has told you she will sell some of your work. First, you check in at the “batik station” on the Internet, which gives you a list of recommendations. … You may get a list of recommended video or audio tapes that can be delivered to your door the next day by Federal Express. You may prefer a more personal learning system and seek an apprenticeship with the nearest batik master. … In less than twenty-four hours, you have launched yourself on a new profession.

Similarly, what begins in To Renew America as a rational if predictable discussion of “New Frontiers in Science, Space, and the Oceans” takes this sudden turn: “Why not aspire to build a real Jurassic Park? … Wouldn’t that be one of the most spectacular accomplishments of human history? What if we could bring back extinct species?” A few pages further into “New Frontiers in Science, Space, and the Oceans,” we are careering into “honeymoons in space” (“imagine weightlessness and its effects and you will understand some of the attractions”), a notion first floated in Window of Opportunity, in that instance as an illustration of how entrepreneurial enterprise could lead to job creation in one’s own district: “One reason I am convinced space travel will be a growth industry is because I represent the Atlanta airport, which provides 35,000 aviation-related jobs in the Atlanta area.”

The packaging of space honeymoons and recycled two-liter Coca-Cola bottles is the kind of specific that actually engages Mr. Gingrich: absent an idea that can be sold at Disney World, he has tended to lose interest. Asked, during an appearance this summer at the 92nd Street YMHA in New York, what he would have done early on about Bosnia, Mr. Gingrich essayed “creating a Balkan-wide development zone.” The somewhat anticlimactic ninth of his nine Principles of Self-Government for an Opportunity Society was this: “Finally, try, try again. Self-government is an arduous, demanding task on which the survival of freedom depends.” Many of the proposals inWindow of Opportunity and To Renew America fritter out this way, dwindle into the perfunctory, as if the proposer’s attention had already hopped on. Mr. Gingrich, we are told by Dick Williams, manages his day in fifteen-minute increments, a lesson learned from Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive. Mr. Gingrich, he himself tells us, believes in dedicating as many as possible of those fifteen-minute increments to reading, particularly to the reading of biography, which is seen to offer direct personal benefit: “I don’t care what you want to be. If you want to get rich, read the biographies of people who got rich. If you want to be a famous entertainer, read the biographies of people who got to be famous entertainers.”

Reading can provide not only this kind of intravenous inspiration but also “quotes,” what Forbes used to call “Thoughts on the Business of Life,” rhetorical backup to be plucked from the shoebox and deployed. “I was very struck this morning by something Bill Emerson used,” Mr. Gingrich noted at his swearing-in as Speaker. “It’s a fairly famous quote of Benjamin Franklin.” Mr. Gingrich tends to weigh whatever he does on this scale of strategic applicability and immediate usefulness: note that the fourth and fifth, or clinching, Reasons for Studying American History are “History is a resource to be learned from and used” and “There are techniques that can help you learn problem-solving from historic experience.”

A considerable amount of what Mr. Gingrich says has never borne extended study. There was the dispiriting view of the future as a kind of extended Delta hub, where “each news magazine would have a section devoted to the week’s news from space” and from which we would “flow out to the Hiltons and Marriotts of the solar system, and mankind will have permanently broken free of the planet.” There were the doubtful tales offered in evidence of the point at hand, the “personalization” (a key Gingrich concept) that did not quite add up. Mr. Gingrich learned that America was “in transition from one type of economy and lifestyle to another” from reading Peter Drucker’s The Age of Discontinuity and John Naisbett’s Megatrends, but the truth of this came home when he was “shocked to discover” that he could telephone his oldest daughter on her junior year abroad (the fact that his oldest daughter was born in 1963 would seem to place this discovery in 1982 or 1983) “by first dialing the 001 code for the international telephone computer, then the code for France, then the area code for the region near Paris, and finally the code for my daughter’s telephone.”

This was not a mind that could be productively engaged on its own terms. There was the casual relationship to accuracy, the spellings and names and ideas seized, in the irresistible momentum of Mr. Gingrich’s outlining, in mid-flight. In Window of Opportunity and in the lectures, Peter Drucker’s The Age of Discontinuity became The Age of Discontinuities. Garry Wills’s Inventing America became “Gary Will’sDiscovering America,” Gordon Wood became Gordon Woods. To Renew Americashows evidence of professional copy editing, but it also defines what it calls “situational ethics” and “deconstructionism” as interchangeable terms for “the belief that there are no general rules of behavior.” Alexis de Tocqueville is seen as a kind of visiting booster, whose privilege it was to “inform the world that ‘Democracy in America’ worked,” and also, even more peculiarly, as an exemplar of American culture: “From the Jamestown colony and the Pilgrims, through de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, up to the Norman Rockwell paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, there was a clear sense of what it meant to be an American.”

There was and is still the flirtation with the millennial, the almost astral insistence on the significance of specific but intrinsically meaningless dates and numbers. The “discontinuity” in American history (Peter Drucker again) lasted, according to Mr. Gingrich, from exactly 1965 to exactly 1994: “And what’s been happening is that from 1965 to 1994, that America went off on the wrong track. Now that’s an important distinction.” “A year which ends in three zeroes is a rare thing indeed,” he declared inWindow of Opportunity. “We’re starting the 104th Congress,” he said at his swearing-in last January. “I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about the concept: 208 years.”

This inclination toward the pointlessly specific (we have here a man who once estimated the odds on the survival of his second marriage at “53 to 47”) is coupled with a tic to inflate what is actually specific into a general principle, a big concept. The cherry blossoms in Washington, he advised his constituents in 1984, remind us that “there’s a rhythm and cycle to life. Winter goes and spring comes.” Forrest Gumpbecame for Mr. Gingrich “a reaffirmation that the counterculture destroys human beings and basic values.” That Star Wars made more money than The Right Stuffinstructs us that “we have allowed bureaucracies to dominate too many of our scientific adventures.” In the absence of anything specific to either seize or inflate, he tends to spin perilously out of syntactical orbit:


…I think if you will consider for a second—and this is part of why I wanted to pick up on the concept of “virtualness”—if you think about the notion that the great challenge of our lifetime is first to imagine a future that is worth spending our lives getting to, then because of the technologies and the capabilities we have today to get it up to sort of a virtual state, whether that’s done in terms of actual levels of sophistication or whether it’s just done in your mind, most studies of leadership argue that leaders actually are acting out past decisions, that part of the reason you get certainty in great leaders is that they have already thoroughly envisioned the achievement and now it’s just a matter of implementation. And so it’s very different. So in a sense, virtuality at the mental level is something I think you’d find in most leadership over historical periods.
2.

The real substance of Mr. Gingrich’s political presence derives from his skill at massaging exhaustively researched voter preferences and prejudices into matters of lonely principle. The positions he takes are acutely tuned to the unexamined fears and resentments of large numbers of Americans, yet he stands, in his rhetoric, alone, opposed by “the system,” by “Washington,” by “the liberal elite,” by “the East Coast elite” (not by accident does a mention of Harvard in 1945 provoke the sympathetic President’s antipathy to “East Coast snobbery and intellectual hauteur”), or simply by an unspecified “they.” “I kind of live on the edge,” Mr. Gingrich told Dick Williams. “I push the system.” When, in a famous GOPAC memo, Mr. Gingrich advised Republican candidates to characterize Democrats with the words “decay,” “sick,” “pathetic,” “stagnation,” “corrupt,” “waste,” and “traitors,” and Republicans with the words “share,” “change,” “truth,” “moral,” “courage,” “family,” “peace,” and “duty,” each word had been tested and oiled in focus groups to function in what the memo called “Language, a Key Mechanism of Control.”

The 1994 Contract with America was packaged as, and to a defeating extent accepted even by its opponents as, a “bold agenda” (opponents said too bold, and argued only to split the difference), a “vision for America’s future” (opponents rushed to share the vision, and argued only the means), yet each of its ten items derived from and was later refined in focus groups run by Frank Luntz, who did the 1992 campaign polling first for Pat Buchanan and then for Ross Perot. “The Contract with America was specifically designed to appeal to the swing Perot voter who hates partisan politics,” Mr. Gingrich said this summer during his YMHA appearance. “The ten points basically selected themselves as deeply felt desires of the American people,” is his somewhat cryptic version of this process in To Renew America. “It can literally be said that the Contract with America grew out of our conversations with the American people and out of our basic conservative values.”

The preferences and attitudes discovered through opinion research tend to be, no matter who is paying for the research, fairly consistent. A majority of American voters are displeased with the current welfare system, believe that affirmative action has been carried too far, are opposed to crime and in favor of “opportunity.” They say this to researchers working for Republican candidates and they also say it to researchers working for Democratic candidates. Which was why, of course, anyone who knew how to count, anyone whose own researcher happened to be having identical conversations with the American people, was left, up against the Contract with America, with nowhere to stand. “Now what you’ve got in this city is a simple principle,” Mr. Gingrich told the Republican National Committee in January. “I am a genuine revolutionary; they are the genuine reactionaries. We are going to change their world; they will do anything to stop us. They will use any tool—there is no grotesquerie, no distortion, no dishonesty too great for them to come after us.” He described himself to Fred Barnes as “the leading revolutionary in the country. I’m trying to replace the welfare state and the counterculture and the old establishment with a system of opportunity and entrepreneurship and classic American civilization.”

What seems grandiose melts down, on the floor, to business as usual. “Replacing the welfare state” turned out to mean, with the passage in the House of the Personal Responsibility and Senior Citizens Fairness Acts, phasing out a $16 billion welfare program for the poor (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) in order to expand, by lifting the level of its earnings test, what was already a $335 billion welfare program for the middle class, Social Security. The unfairness (Frank Luntz has isolated “fairness” and “unfairness” as hot words) of applying any earnings test at all to Social Security benefits was an issue seized early by Mr. Gingrich, who illustrated it in Window of Opportunity with another doubtful tale, this one featuring “Warren, a retiree” who “wanted to do something to keep his mind and body busy and to contribute to the community and world he loves” but was forced to give up selling his contribution of choice, which happened to be scrimshaw, when the Social Security Administration threatened to reduce, or, in Mr. Gingrich’s telling, “cut off,” his benefits. “Politics,” Mr. Gingrich instructed Dan Balz and Charles R. Babcock of The Washington Post when they suggested that this preference for what the speaker calls “sixty-five percent issues” could be construed as pandering to public opinion, “is about public opinion and gathering public support. It’s like saying, isn’t it pandering for Wal-Mart to stock everything people want to buy.”
3.

“I teach a course which is an outline of my thoughts at 51 years of age, based on everything I’ve experienced, which is, frankly, rather more than most tenured faculty,” Mr. Gingrich told The New York Times in January. “I’m not credentialed as a bureaucratic academic. I haven’t written 22 books that are meaningless.” What details we have about the formative experience of the current speaker, who was born Newton Leroy McPherson and took the surname of his mother’s second husband, describe a familiar postwar history, one not dissimilar from that of the current President, who was born William Jefferson Blythe and took the surname of his mother’s second husband. Each was the adored first-born son of a mother left largely, in the economic and social dislocations that transformed provincial America during and immediately after World War II, to her own devices. Each was farmed out to relatives while the mother earned a living. Each appears to have reached adolescence firm in the conviction that these were the make-or-break years, that the point of the exercise was to assert, win over, overcome.

The two relied on different means to this end, but the instinctive technique of each derived from the literature of personal improvement, effective self-presentation, salesmanship, five simple steps. Mr. Clinton, with his considerable personal magnetism, kept extensive lists of people he had met and, when the time arrived, on whom he could call. In the case of Mr. Gingrich, who after his mother remarried was repeatedly uprooted and moved from one army post to another, Kansas to France to Germany to Georgia, such social skills remained undeveloped, forcing him back on his reading, his self-education, his shoe-boxes. He recalled being given an article when he was young. “It was about Lincoln’s five defeats. I carried it in my wallet for years.” At sixteen, en route from Stuttgart to Fort Benning, he concluded “that there was no moral choice except to immerse myself in the process of learning how to lead and how to be effective.” His stepfather gave him a set of the Encyclopedia Americana, and he read it every night. At Baker High School near Fort Benning he yielded to the Southern pressure to play sports, but was sidelined by headaches. His Democratic opponent in 1994 referred to him as a “wuss,” and as “the guy who won the science project.”

“I think I was very lonely and very driven,” Mr. Gingrich told Dick Williams. “If you decide in your freshman year of high school that your job is to spend your lifetime trying to change the future of your people, you’re probably fairly weird.” The defense he adopted was the persona of “class brain” (his classmates voted him “Most Intellectual”), the one with the pens and slide rule in his shirt pocket, the one who could spark the debating society, tie for highest score in the county on the National Merit Scholarship test, make a strategic detour around his lack of aptitude for high-school cool by tutoring the school beauty queen and not-quite-secretly dating the geometry teacher. As a freshman at Emory he married the geometry teacher and co-founded the Emory Young Republican Club. As a graduate student at Tulane he organized a week-long protest against administration censorship of the college paper, discovered Alvin Toffler, and taught a non-credit class on The Year 2000.

He took for himself, in other words, the ritualized role of breaker of new ground, marcher to a different drummer, which happens to be the cast of mind in which speculative fiction finds its most tenacious hold. What if one or another event had not occurred, what if one or another historical figure had remained unborn, languished in obscurity, taken another turn: the contemplation of such questions has reliably occupied the different drummers of American secondary education. The impulse is anti-theological, which translates, for these readers, into thrilling iconoclasm: in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, according to Mr. Gingrich, “the Catholic Church’s role in maintaining civilized knowledge through the Dark and Middle Ages is played by a secular group of intellectuals called ‘The Foundation.’ ” The tendency is to see history as random, accidental, the sum of its own events and personalities: Isaac Asimov, Mr. Gingrich notes, “did not believe in a mechanistic world. Instead, to Asimov, human beings always hold their fate in their own hands.”

It was this high-school reading of Isaac Asimov, Mr. Gingrich tells us in To Renew America, that first “focused my attention on the fate of civilizations. I came to realize that, while most people were immersed in day-to-day activities, daily behavior actually takes place within a much larger context of constantly changing global forces.” Mr. Gingrich is frequently and often deprecatingly described as a “futurist,” but even as he talks about those “constantly changing global forces,” about a transformation “so large and historic that it can be compared with only two other great eras of human history—the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution,” his view of the future is a view of 1955, factory-loaded with Year 2000 extras. To Renew America asks us to “imagine a morning in just a decade or so”:


You wake up to a wall-size, high-definition television showing surf off Maui. (This is my favorite island—you can pick your own scene.) You walk or jog or do Stairmaster while catching up on the morning news and beginning to review your day’s schedule. Your home office is filled with communications devices, so you can ignore rush-hour traffic. … When you are sick, you sit in your diagnostic chair and communicate with the local health clinic. Sensors take your blood pressure, analyze a blood sample, or do throat cultures. The results are quickly relayed to health aides, who make recommendations and prescribe medicine. … If you need a specialist, a databank at your fingertips gives you a wide range of choices based on cost, reputation, and outcome patterns. You can choose knowledgeably which risk you want to take and what price you want to pay.

The “diagnostic chair,” or “personalized health chair,” which could also be programmed to “monitor your diet over time and change recipes to minimize boredom while achieving the desired nutritional effect,” appeared first in Window of Opportunity, which outlined a future in which we or our descendants would also use computer technology to correct golf swings, provide tax and IRA advice, and provide data on “literally thousands of vacation, recreation, and education opportunities,” for example the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds Park in Macon, Georgia, with its “splendid natural walk area, a beautiful collection of ancient Indian ceremonial mounds, and fine museum on the history of the area from 900 AD to the present.” For any among us whose view of the future might have been somewhat more forbidding or interesting (no Maui, no Macon, the IRAs all gone bust), Mr. Gingrich would recommend first the reading of science fiction, since “a generation that learns its magic from Tom Swift or Jules Verne has a much more optimistic outlook than one that is constantly being told that the planet is dying and that everything humanity is doing is wrong.”

If wishes were horses, as they said in the generation that learned its magic from Tom Swift or Jules Verne. We hear in this the drone of the small-town autodidact, the garrulous bore in the courthouse square: to know that large numbers of Americans are concerned about getting adequate medical care is one thing; to give them the willies by talking about their “health chairs” is altogether another. There is about these dismal reductions something disarming and poignant, a solitary neediness, a dogged determination to shine in public that leads Mr. Gingrich to reveal to us, again and again, what his own interests dictate that we should not see. He concludes To Renew Americawith a “personalization” of his concern for voter concerns, an account of how he and his second wife, Marianne, spent the Christmas before he became Speaker in Leetonia. Ohio, “a wonderful small town that is like a scene from a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover.”

For much of this account Mr. Gingrich remains well within the secured territory of the Taking Back Our Streets and American Dream Restoration Acts. He expresses concern for Marianne’s eighty-year-old mother, who “worked and saved all her life” but now worries about “the reports that Medicare will go bankrupt by 2002.” He worries that his eight-year-old nephew, Sean, “cannot walk around Youngstown the way I once wandered the streets of Harrisburg.” He wonders how Marianne’s sister and her husband will manage putting their boys, Jon and Mark, through college.

Then, midway through this tuned and calculated Christmas reverie, Mr. Gingrich drops, abruptly and inexplicably, through the ice, off message: “At heart,” he dismayingly confides, “I am still a happy four-year-old who gets up every morning hoping to find a cookie that friends or relatives may have left for me somewhere.” This cookie is worrisome: Was it forgotten? Hidden? Why would they hide it? Where are they? Are they asleep, out, absentee friends, deadbeat relatives? The cookie was the treat and leaving is the trick? What we get from these problematic detours and revelations, from the cookies and the health chairs and the high-resolution views of Maui, from the Ten Steps and the Five Pillars and the thirty gigabytes to an improved golf swing, is a shadow of something unexplained, a scent of failure, which remains one reason why, in a country made even more uncomfortable by losers than Mr. Gingrich claims to be, personal popularity among large numbers of voters may continue to elude him.

Baba Yetu

AREOPAGITICA: A SPEECH OF Mr. JOHN MILTON For the Liberty of UNLICENC'D PRINTING, To the PARLAMENT of ENGLAND.

his is true Liberty when free born men
Having to advise the public may speak free,
Which he who can, and will, deserv's high praise,
Who neither can nor will, may hold his peace;
What can be juster in a State then this?


Eurip. Hicetid.



For the Liberty of unlicenc'd Printing.

They who to States and Governours of the Commonwealth direct their Speech, High Court of Parlament, or wanting such accesse in a private condition, write that which they foresee may advance the publick good; I suppose them as at the beginning of no meane endeavour, not a little alter'd and mov'd inwardly in their mindes: Some with doubt of what will be thesuccesse, others with fear of what will be the censure; some with hope, others with confidence of what they have to speake. And me perhaps each of these dispositions, as the subject was whereon I enter'd, may have at other times variously affected; and likely might in these formost expressions now also disclose which of them sway'd most, but that the very attempt of this addresse thus made, and the thought of whom it hath recourse to, hath got the power within me to a passion, farre more welcome then incidentall to a Preface. Which though I stay not to confesse ere any aske, I shall be blamelesse, if it be no other, then the joy and gratulation which it brings to all who wish and promote their Countries liberty; whereof this whole Discourse propos'd will be a certaine testimony, if not a Trophey. For this is not the liberty which wee can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the Commonwealth, that let no man in this World expect; but when complaints are freely heard, deeply consider'd and speedily reform'd, then is the utmost bound of civill liberty attain'd, that wise men looke for. To which if I now manifest by the very sound of this which I shall utter, that wee are already in good part arriv'd, and yet from such a steepe disadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into our principles as was beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery, it will bee attributed first, as is most due, to the strong assistance of God our deliverer, next to your faithfull guidance and undaunted Wisdome, Lords and Commons of England. Neither is it in Gods esteeme the diminution of his glory, when honourable things are spoken of good men and worthy Magistrates; which if I now first should begin to doe, after so fair a progresse of your laudable deeds, and such a long obligement upon the wholeRealme to your indefatigable virtues, I might be justly reckn'd among the tardiest, and the unwillingest of them that praise yee. Nevertheless there being three principall things, without which all praising is but Courtship and flattery, First, when that only is prais'd which is solidly worth praise: next, when greatest likelihoods are brought that such things are truly and really in those persons to whom they are ascrib'd, the other, when he who praises, by shewing that such his actuall perswasion is of whom he writes, can demonstrate that he flatters not; the former two of these I have heretofore endeavour'd, rescuing the employment from him who went about to impaire your merits with a triviall and malignant Encomium; the latter as belonging chiefly to mine owne acquittall, that whom I so extoll'd I did not flatter, hath been reserv'd opportunely to this occasion. For he who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears not to declare as freely what might be done better, gives ye the best cov'nant of his fidelity; and that his loyalest affection and his hope waits on your proceedings. His highest praising is not flattery, and his plainest advice is a kinde of praising; for though I should affirme and hold by argument, that it would fare better with truth, with learning, and the Commonwealth, if one of your publisht Orders which I should name, were call'd in, yet at the same time it could not but much redound to the lustre of yourmilde and equall Government, when as private persons are hereby animated to thinke ye better pleas'd with publick advice, then other statists have been delighted heretofore withpublicke flattery. And men will then see what difference there is between the magnanimity of a trienniall Parlament, and that jealous hautinesse of Prelates and cabin Counsellours thatusurpt of late, when as they shall observe yee in the midd'st of your Victories and successes more gently brooking writt'n exceptions against a voted Order, then other Courts, which had produc't nothing worth memory but the weake ostentation of wealth, would have endur'd the least signifi'd dislike at any sudden Proclamation. If I should thus farre presume upon the meek demeanour of your civill and gentle greatnesse, Lords and Commons, as what your publisht Order hath directly said, that to gainsay, I might defend my selfe with ease, if any should accuse me of being new or insolent, did they but know how much better I find ye esteem it to imitate the old and elegant humanity of Greece, then the barbarick pride of aHunnish and Norwegian statelines. And out of those ages, to whose polite wisdom and letters we ow that we are not yet Gothes and Jutlanders, I could name him who from his private house wrote that discourse to the Parlament of Athens, that perswades them to change the forme of Democraty which was then establisht. Such honour was done in those dayes to men who profest the study of wisdome and eloquence, not only in their own Country, but in other Lands, that Cities and Siniories heard them gladly, and with great respect, if they had aught in publick to admonish the State. Thus did Dion Prusæus, a stranger and a privat Orator counsell the Rhodians against a former Edict: and I abound with other like examples, which to set heer would be superfluous. But if from the industry of a life wholly dedicated to studious labours, and those naturall endowments haply not the worst for two and fifty degrees of northern latitude, so much must be derogated, as to count me not equall to any of those who had this priviledge, I would obtain to be thought not so inferior, as your selves are superior to the most of them who receiv'd their counsell: and how farre you excell them, be assur'd, Lords and Commons, there can no greater testimony appear, then when your prudent spirit acknowledges and obeyes the voice of reason from what quarter soever it be heard speaking; and renders ye as willing to repeal any Act of your own setting forth, as any set forth by your Predecessors.

Secret Agent (aka Danger Man)

365 reasons to get drunk - October

October


1 The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson and world-class drunkard Ed McMahon debuted (1962).Hi-yooooo! Bourbon in a coffee cup.


2 Groucho Marx’s Birthday (1890). “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.” Country Club Malt Liquor.


3 St. Dionysus Day. The drunk monk, not the wine god.Chimay Ale.


4 Vodka Day. “Vodka is our enemy, so we must utterly consume it!”—Russian idiom in response to Soviet anti-vodka campaign. The enemy.


5 Monty Python’s Flying Circus debuts (1969). “American Beer is a lot like making love in a row boat—it’s fucking close to water.” —Eric Idle. Holy Grail Ale.


6 National German-American Day. Their beer tastes so much better when they’re not shooting at us. Bourbon and schnapps.


7 The Budweiser (Czech version) brewery begins operations (1895). You guys wanna trade? Czech Budweiser.


8 Anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire (1871). Started by a sober cow. White Russian.


9 St. Denis’ Day. Patron saint against frenzies and headaches, in that order. Hair of the dog that mauled you.


10 Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor remarried (1975).Reuniting the century’s finest husband/wife drinking team. Flat champagne.


11 Vinalia (Roman). The biggest Roman wine shindig of the year.Flagons of wine.


12 Columbus Day. Explore new bars and libations. Cutty Sark.


13 Sammy Hagar’s Birthday (1947). “Once I tasted really good tequila I became a new man.” Cabo Wabo Tequila.


14 Mega Kenka Matsui (Japan). Rough-house festival in which shrine palanquins jostle one another. Yes! Sapporo Beer.


15 UB40’s Red Red Wine reached top of U.S. charts (1988). Suddenly drinking vino seemed kind of cool. Red, red wine.


16 Oscar Wilde’s Birthday (1854). “Work is the curse of the drinking classes.” Absinthe.


17 Anniversary of the First Oktoberfest (1810). Over a million gallons of beer were guzzled at Prince Ludwig’s wedding. Beck’s .


18 Persons Day (Canada). Celebrates the day women were recognized as “persons.” Pink Lady.


19 Reptile Awareness Day. Hold your heads up high, lounge lizards. Rum and Coke.


20 National Brandied Fruit Day. In a pinch, you can mix brandy with a can of fruit cocktail. You heard me.


21 Anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). Grog guzzlers trounce the wine snobs. Navy Rum neat.


22 National Nut Day. You know who you are. Nut Brown Ale.


23 Hungarian Independence Day. So long vodka; hello sweet, sweet freedom.

The Mad Hungarian
4oz shots Rum
12 oz Root beer
Pour rum over ice in a beer mug. Top with root beer.


24 United Nations Day. Unite the liquors of the world into one body—yours. Long Island Ice Tea.


25 Anniversary of the Charge of the Light Brigade (1854). “Their’s not to reason why, their’s but to do and die.” Light beer.


26 Anniversary of the Gunfight at the OK Corral (1881). Doc Holliday’s last words while drinking a glass of whiskey: “This is funny.” Whiskey (but not funny whiskey).


27 Dylan Thomas’ Birthday (1914). “An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.” White Horse Scotch.


28 St. Jude’s Day. Patron saint of hopeless causes. Tequiza.


29 Hermit Day. Stay home and drink all by your lonesome. Yukon Jack.


30 Feast of the Dead Children (Toltec). Oh, those creepy, creepy Toltecs. Mescal.


31 Halloween. Suit up as a historical drunk. Zombie.

I am the very model of a modern Major-General

I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical

I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse

With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotepotenuse

I'm very good at integral and differential calculus
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral
I am the very model of a modern Major-General

In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral
He is the very model of a modern Major-General

I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's
I answer hard acrostics, I've a pretty taste for paradox
I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus
In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous

I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies
I know the croaking chorus from the Frogs of Aristophanes
Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore
And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore

And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore
And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore
And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinapinafore

Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform
And tell you ev'ry detail of Caractacus's uniform
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral
I am the very model of a modern Major-General

In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral
He is the very model of a modern Major-General

In fact, when I know what is meant by "mamelon" and "ravelin"
When I can tell at sight a Mauser rifle from a javelin
When such affairs as sorties and surprises I'm more wary at
And when I know precisely what is meant by "commissariat"

When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery
When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery
In short, when I've a smattering of elemental strategy
You'll say a better Major-General had never sat a gee

You'll say a better Major-General had never sat a gee
You'll say a better Major-General had never sat a gee
You'll say a better Major-General had never sat a sat a gee

For my military knowledge, though I'm plucky and adventury
Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century
But still, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral
I am the very model of a modern Major-General

But still, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral
He is the very model of a modern Major-General

Perfect Loop

Hua Guofeng

bell hooks

http://www.bellhooksinstitute.com/

The Sydney Review of Books

http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/



The Sydney Review of Books is an online journal devoted to long-form literary criticism. We publish essays on books and literary culture by some of the best critics and writers in Australia.

In-depth analysis and robust critical discussion are crucial to the development of Australia’s literary culture. Our focus is Australian writing, but we also consider the work of significant overseas authors.

Concerns about the reduced space for serious cultural criticism in the mainstream media prompted the establishment of the Sydney Review of Books by the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney in 2013. We intend the Sydney Review of Books to be a venue in which Australian writers and critics can engage with books at length, a venue in which to rediscover the intimate connection between the art of criticism and the art of the essay.

We publish new reviews and essays each week. It costs nothing to subscribe to the Sydney Review of Books weekly newsletter.

The Orange by Wendy Cope

Japan In The 1980s

Scythe

Essays of EB White

Rilke Archive

http://www.picture-poems.com/rilke/rilkelinks.html

The Ninth Elegy - Rainer Maria Rilke

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human–and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate? . . .


Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too. . . . .

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,
trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,
in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.
Trying to become it.–Whom can we give it to? We would
hold on to it all, forever . . . Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the art of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,
and the long experience of love,– just what is wholly
unsayable. But later, among the stars,
what good is it–they are better as they are: unsayable.
For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,
he bings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead
some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue
gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window–
at most: column, tower. . . . But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing. Isn’t the secret intent
of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,
that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy?
Threshold: what it means for two lovers
to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door–
they too, after the many who came before them
and before those to come. . . . ., lightly.

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever
the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.
An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as
the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.
Between the hammers our heart
endures, just as the tongue does
between the teeth and, despite that,
still is able to praise.

Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood
by the ropemaker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.
Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,
serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully
escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
within–oh endlessly–within us! Whoever we may be at last.

Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,
invisible? Isn’t it your dream
to be wholly invisible someday?–O Earth: invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?
Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer
need your springtimes to win me over–one of them,
ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.
Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.
You were always right, and your holiest inspiration
is our intimate companion, Death.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows any smaller . . . . . Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.

translated by Stephen Mitchell

The October Country