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Why do we think so?
We think so because all other people think so;
Or because—or because, after all, we do think so;
Or because we were told so, and think we must think so;
Or because we once thought so, and think we still think so;
Or because, having thought so, we think we will think so…
Henry Sidgewick
Marriage of Convenience
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
― Kurt Vonnegut
The orderly rolled my gurney to a stop before an imposing double doorway. “Okay,” he said, “This is where you get your kiss.” I couldn’t tell if he was speaking to me or to my wife. In any case, my wife kissed me and laughed and cried all at once. Then I was rolling again.
I arrived in surgery and scooted over onto the operating table. I joked with the anesthesiologist. He found my vein on the first try. I recited Psalms to myself and wondered distantly why I wasn’t scared out of my wits.
They sliced me open, broke my sternum, compressed my lungs like empty sugar bags, and stopped my heart to patch the hole between its upper chambers with a piece of my pericardium while redirecting the blood that flowed through an anomalous vein.
I don’t remember that part.
I also don’t remember my hands clawing the air, straining against nylon straps, struggling to tear the ventilator mask from my face and the dressing from my chest. My wife stifled a cry when she saw me in recovery. Apart from the convolutions of my fingers, the pallor of my face starkly mirrored the countenance of death.
“He looks so good,” the nurse told her.
When I did regain consciousness the next day, numbed by morphine and dazed by the residue of anesthesia, I asked my cardiologist if he could release me that afternoon. “I have to catch a flight to Jacksonville this evening,” I said.
I was trying to be funny. He thought I was delirious.
EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED
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Lacking prescience, however, I had no excuse for the cavalier attitude with which I approached this whole business. No matter how distinguished my surgeon’s credentials, and no matter how casually he explained away the operation as routine (with the probability of success better than 99%), cardiac surgery remains as heart-stopping as it sounds: they carve open your chest and, during an extended period of clinical death, cut and paste around your most vital organ before sewing you back together.
Call it what you like; it hardly ranks among the more attractive forms of elective surgery.
Yet “elective surgery” was how the doctor had described it. After all, I had virtually no symptoms, and my condition might not advance for twenty years. Then again, deterioration could begin within months, or even weeks. And so, at my cardiologist’s insistence, I opted to exchange the distant prospect of lingering death for the immediate promise of physical pain followed by months-long recovery.
That was what I expected. Instead, from beginning to end, while my wife and children and parents were dealing with their respective emotional traumas, the greatest discomfort I suffered throughout the entire episode came not from the incision, not from anesthesia withdrawal, not even from the mild pneumonia I contracted during recovery, but from a persistent hangnail that nagged me from the day after surgery until I returned home and exorcised it with my cuticle clippers.
THERE IS A LESSON
The great tennis player Arthur Ashe, after contracting AIDS via blood transfusion, was reported to have said, “If I ask why this has happened to me, then I must also ask concerning all the good that I have had in my life.”
Indeed, Mister Ashe, may you rest in peace — you should have asked both questions, as should we all.
If life is all One Great Accident, then there is no why. But the exquisitely textured fabric of our universe, the elegant design of our world, and the transcendent nobility of Man when he listens to the calling of his soul — all these testify to the genius of an invisible Conductor who guides the symphony of Creation.
And if there is a plan behind the apparent chaos, then whatever happens for good or for bad should prompt us to ask, “Why?”
Click here to read the whole essay, from my column in the inaugural issue of The Wagon Magazine
Who we are not
So here we are again, contemplating a general election that will give us a choice between the lesser of two evils. And the likely options look to be more noxious than any we’ve ever had to face.
Everyone is asking the same question: how did we get here? And the bad news — which is old news — is that negative advertising works.
But why does it work? Everyone hates it, everyone complains about it, everyone laments the decline of civility, the widening of the political divide, and the incurable blight of ideological gridlock. So why do we continue to respond to the very thing we can’t stand in a way that makes it keep getting worse?
A new study may offer a glimmer of explanation.
Purim and the Jewish response to terror
After the horrific attacks in Brussels, especially coming as they did so close to the Festival of Purim, I’m revisiting these thoughts from 2005. Lest we forget.
Pogroms. Genocide. Jihad.
These are the devices our enemies have directed against us throughout the ages, for no other reason than because we are Jews. Yet for all that, the commitment to mercy and justice that defines us as a people and sets us apart from the other nations of the earth ensures that we would never seek the destruction of another people simply because of who they are.
Or wouldn’t we?
You shall erase the memory of Amolek from beneath the heavens. So the book of Deuteronomy commands us — a command renewed from generation to generation across the span of Jewish history — to strike down the nation of Amolek and obliterate its memory from the consciousness of mankind.
How is such a precept defensible? How can we claim the moral high ground over our enemies if we resort to the same tactics that they employ against us?
The decree against Amolek, however, is based upon neither racial hatred, ethnic struggle, religious ideology, nor even historical justification. Many nations have differed from the Jews in belief, practice, and culture, and many of these have waged war against us and sought our destruction. But only the nation of Amolek warrants such condemnation, not only that we seek out and destroy it, but that we never forget the reason why.
Remember what Amolek did to you on the way, as you departed from Egypt: How they fell upon you in the desert, when you were tired and weary, and cut down the weak who trailed behind you.
Why did Amolek attack us? Why did they descend upon us in the desert, unprovoked, and attempt to annihilate us?
At the time of the Jewish exodus from Egypt, 3328 years ago, the entire world witnessed an event both unprecedented and never to be repeated: The miraculous destruction of the most powerful nation on earth and the even more miraculous supremacy of a small and oppressed people. No one in the world doubted the involvement of the Divine Hand behind the upheaval, nor could anyone fail to recognize the significance of this fledgling nation: the rise of the Jewish nation introduced human civilization to such ideals as peace, collective conscience, social responsibility and, above all, a standard of moral values that would become the foundation of all ethics and human virtue.
Such ideals, previously unknown to human society, did not find immediate universal acceptance. Indeed, the values of Judaism have been rejected and discarded time after time throughout human history. But in the wake of the miraculous destruction of Egypt, every nation and every people recognized what the Jewish nation represented. And every nation stood in awe of them. Every nation except one.
The nation of Amolek despised the very concept of moral standards. They would accept no moral authority, would make every sacrifice to protect their moral autonomy, and would employ any tactic to strike out against the nation who, by teaching morality to the world, threatened to render them a pariah.
Why is it important that they cut down the weak who trailed behind you? What does it reveal that they chose the moment when an unsuspecting people were tired and weary to attack? What perverse strategy drove them to embark upon a hopeless campaign of violence that had no hope of success?
In short, Amolek introduced the world to the tactics of terrorism, launching a suicide campaign against the defenseless, against the tired and the weary, just as their ideological descendants would later blow themselves up to murder women and children, waging brutal physical and psychological war upon a civilian population — not for clearly defined political gain, but to spread chaos and the moral confusion of disorder.
In response, the Torah teaches us the only possible answer to terror: Not negotiation, not compromise, not appeasement, not even military conquest and domination — none of these will ever succeed against the terrorist who seeks nothing less than the obliteration of his enemies, the terrorist driven by such singular purpose that he will sacrifice everything to achieve it and will stop at nothing until he has attained it. He will use others’ desire for peace, their respect for human life, and their confidence in the ultimate goodness of mankind as weapons to destroy them; he will make any promise and offer any gesture of goodwill to gain the opportunity to take another life, to cripple another limb, to break the spirit of all who stand between him and moral anarchy.
In confronting terror, little has changed over the course of 33 centuries. Four centuries after Amolek’s attack upon the Jews in the desert, King Saul showed a moment’s mercy to the king of Amolek, thereby allowing both that nation and its ideology of terror to survive. Five centuries after that, when the Jews of Persia thought to appease Haman, a descendant of Amolek, they very nearly brought about their own destruction, saved only by the miracle of Purim. Similarly did the governments of Europe seek to appease the greatest criminal in modern times, empowering him to send millions to meaningless death in pointless battle and incinerate millions more in an incomprehensible Holocaust.
And today, Western governments and ideologues continue to promote negotiation with and concession to terror, even as more and more innocents are murdered and maimed. Like King Saul, they prove the talmudic dictum that one who shows mercy at a time for cruelty will show cruelty at a time of mercy. For all its insistence upon compassion, upon virtue, upon love for our fellow man, Judaism teaches the cold practicality of confrontation with terror, that there can be no peace with those committed to violence, that there can be no offer of good faith to those who renounce faithfulness, that there can be no respect for the lives of those who devote their lives to dealing out death.
For those who live and die for the sake of terror, only one course of action exists to preserve the society that makes peace and justice possible: to erase their memory from beneath the heavens.
Nothing left to say, nothing right to say
I’m going to make a greater effort to stay away from politics in general and Donald Trump in particular (although I’ve made that resolution before without much success). I’ve been baffled by the responses I’ve gotten from Trump supporters accusing me of dishonesty and spreading a message of hate.
It’s hard to imagine how individuals who claim sensitivity to lying and hate-mongering are able to overlook such an abundance of both in their own candidate’s rhetoric. But I’ve already addressed the proliferation of such double-standards and willful ignorance elsewhere.
So here is my parting shot (for now), excerpted from an article by the always-insightful Jonathan Rosenblum:
IF DONALD TRUMP SPEAKS to voters tired of being ignored and condescended to, he is nevertheless a disastrous representative of them. Nothing in his life until now has shown an iota of concern with those who now salute him, and he has not offered one serious policy prescription that would address their economic insecurities. All he offers is his boastful self-promotion and a call for the power to make America great again. However different in style he is to the polished and fluent Barack Obama, he offers the same promise of being some sort of miracle worker. (Remember when Obama pronounced his nomination as the day the oceans cease to rise.)
Trump is not the antidote to thought-stifling political correctness, as his supporters seem to think. Vulgarity and the lack of basic human decency are not the opposite of political correctness.
[Trump] has betrayed no understanding of the American system of checks and balances or three co-equal branches of government. Recently, he boasted that he would gut First Amendment protections of the press to make it easier for him to sue, in the manner of Turkey’s Erdogan, reporters and papers that get under his tissue-thin skin.
ONE OF THE WISEST OF THE FOUNDERS, Benjamin Franklin predicted, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” And, as David French argues, “Trump is running not for president of a constitutional republic but to be the strongman of a failing state.”
One by one, many at first inclined to hold their noses and vote for Trump (and there is an argument for doing so) have determined that they cannot, for he will further lower the standards of an already debased culture. For some it was his casual dismissal of the courage of John McCain during six years of torture in North Vietnamese captivity, which left McCain permanently disabled.
For Andrew McCarthy, the lead government prosecutor in the first World Trade Center bombing, it is Trump’s boast that he will order American troops to become war criminals and target the wives and children of ISIS fighters. For Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, it is the impossibility of explaining to his young children why someone would mock the physical disability of a crippled reporter. For the religious conservative David French, it is his pledge to keep funding Planned Parenthood to the tune of millions of dollars, so that it can continue killing hundreds of thousands of babies a year.
These thoughtful conservatives are shocked that Trump’s supporters rather than being appalled by his cruelty and malice are attracted by it. They see him as the artifact of a society from which the civic vitality catalogued by de Tocqueville has been lost and replaced by vitriol and demagoguery.
“Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people,” wrote John Adams. “It is wholly inadequate for the governance of any other.” (Hat tip again to David French.) If so, America is grave danger on the evidence of this election season.
Hat tip: Sylvia Poe
2016: The Last Year of the Weimar Republic
In this new era of surrealism, it’s ironic that we can find prophetic wisdom in as unlikely a source as Hollywood scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin. In his 1995 masterpiece The American President, we find this exchange between President Andrew Shepherd and his domestic policy advisor, Lewis Rothschild:
Lewis Rothschild: People want leadership, Mr. President. And in the absence of genuine leadership they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership; they’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water they’ll drink the sand.
President Shepherd: Lewis, people don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty; they drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.
The truth is that both are right. Deprive people of authentic leadership for long enough and they will certainly lose the ability to tell the difference between reality and illusion.
When we reflect upon the contrast between the elegant ideals set forth by revolutionary leaders two and a half centuries ago and the cartoonish ranting of the avenger seeking coronation today, there is ample reason for anxiety that has nothing to do with Nazi genocide.
What would your grandmother say, Mr. Cheeseburger?
Does the benefit of pointing out outrageous behavior outweigh the cost of rewarding outrageous behavior by pointing it out? It’s hard to know anymore.
Nevertheless, the recent report of a man in Britain who changed his name to Bacon Double Cheeseburger demands brief mention — not only for its idiocy but for its insidious banality.
Oh, I know what you’re thinking: that this kind of no-news-news isn’t worth the time it takes to read about it. But trivial symptoms can offer an early warning to life-threatening conditions; and, with our culture already in dire need of life-support, the passive acceptance of every “new normal” may soon lead us into the category of DNR — Do Not Resuscitate.
So, yes, the obvious question is, “who cares”? People do all kinds of dopey things and, if they aren’t violating any laws or committing immoral acts, we might as well just shrug our collective shoulders and get on with our collective lives — especially when we can’t stop them in any case. Compared with multiple body piercings and blanket-tattoos, adopting a silly name seems downright pedestrian.
But it’s worth asking ourselves this: why did it never occur to our grandparents to alter their appearances or their appellations?
Willful Ignorance: the new normal
Maybe we really are living in the Matrix.
Day by day, even hour hour by, the headlines become more surreal and the actions of our leaders become more incomprehensible. Who could have imagined that all the conspiracy theories of extraterrestrial mind-control and computer-generated mass-delusion would start to seem like the most reasonable explanations for where we are and how we got here.
The most recent administration scandal over the United States Central Command (CentCom) deleting military intelligence brings to a crescendo the chorus of claims of the White House stifling inconvenient truths about the Islamic State to avoid dealing with the real threat of terrorism. Last year, the Pentagon’s inspector general began investigating after CentCom analysts protested that their findings had been manipulated to whitewash their conclusions. Now it appears that files and emails were not only misrepresented but actually erased.
As we pass the 30th anniversary of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, it’s beyond mind-boggling that the culture of denial has grown worse than ever. Back then, NASA administrators ignored warnings that O rings lose resilience at low temperatures and might fail on takeoff — which is exactly what happened.
But as irresponsible as it seems to disregard objections as insubstantial or unfounded, by what conceivable logic does one erase information because it supports an undesirable conclusion? Can we make pneumonia vanish from a patient’s lungs by shredding x-ray images? Can we make a brain tumor disappear by dragging the MRI results across the desktop and into the trash file?
Come to think of it, maybe this was the original strategy intended to make Obamacare viable: destroying evidence of disease would certainly keep medical costs to a minimum.
WE HAVE SEEN THE ENEMY…
It’s not just the government. As a society, we have become increasingly disinterested in a pesky little problem once known as reality. Perhaps this is the inevitable result of fantasy movies and fantasy football, of virtual images and virtual messaging, of games that have become more compelling than reality, and of reality that has become more mind-bending than science fiction. All this aided and abetted by the undo and reset buttons that instantaneously restore our make-believe worlds to perfection when things go wrong.
The rejection of reality cuts across every major issue of our times and infects every corner of political and social ideology. Climate change advocates and skeptics alike exaggerate their claims and malign objectors. Pro-choice zealots dismiss the horrors of late-term abortions, while pro-life zealots often refuse to even consider the complex issues of rape and incest, and sometimes even the life of the mother. Supply-side Republicans continue to trumpet the effectiveness of a trickle-down tax structure despite the widening gap between rich and poor, while tax-and-spend Democrats cry out for fairness despite empirical and historical evidence that everyone loses.
In our information age, we are less concerned with facts than ever. With a single click of the mouse, anyone can find legions of pundits asserting preconceived half-truths and countless articles defending outright falsehoods. We are all adrift on a sea of misinformation, carried along by the winds of self-validation. Had Samuel Coleridge imagined this, he might have written, experts, experts, everywhere, nor anyone to think.
Unsurprisingly, in the field of politics it’s even worse. The most brazenly untruthful political figure in the history of the country calls for her opponents to take a lie-detector test, and a master of reality-television who has reversed himself on almost every substantive issue is winning hearts (if not minds) by branding himself as the candidate who “tells it like it is.”
If Laurence Fishburne appeared to offer us a choice between the red pill and the blue pill, which would we choose? Have we so lost our interest in reality that we would happily opt for a world of illusion, or are we still capable of recognizing that a life of illusion is no life at all?
And again, it’s even worse in the world of politics, where neither red nor blue is likely to offer us any escape from our waking nightmare.
THE CHOICE
But we really don’t need a pill at all.
King Solomon said, “The wise man’s eyes are in his head.” Closer to the brain than to the heart. Looking outward, seeing inward.
What we really need to do is ask ourselves a few hard questions, then follow them up with a few honest answers.
We need to ask ourselves why we no longer value our word the way our parents and our grandparents did. We need to ask why they felt more connected to one another corresponding through written letters than we do through face time. We need to ask why they were willing to sacrifice for higher values when we have forgotten what higher values are.
First we have to be willing to ask ourselves these questions. Then we might be ready to face the universal truths that are self-evident from the answers: that trusting others and being trustworthy go hand in hand; that relationships are only worth as much as the effort that we put into maintaining them; that commitment to something greater than ourselves is the only thing that makes life worth living.
True, the world seems to be spinning toward its own destruction. But even if we can’t save the world, we can stand strong and not allow the world to pull us down with it. Keeping our word, showing respect to those we disagree with, offering a kind word to a stranger or a smile to a passerby — these few faint beatings of a butterfly’s wings might be enough to stir the winds of change, blowing away the clouds of chaos to let the light of reason shine once again.
Behind the Hero on the Screen
In the aftermath of this weekend’s Academy Awards Ceremony, I’m revisiting these thoughts from 2009. If you didn’t follow the link when I posted it a few weeks ago, now you have another chance.
Which of the following quotes does not belong with the others:
It is not what I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.
With great power comes great responsibility.
It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done before.
Literary mavens will quickly identify the third quote as different from the first two for several reasons. First, it was written in the 19th century, where the others were written in the 21st. Second, it is a line from novel, where the others are lines from motion pictures. And third, it is the only one of the three not spoken by a Marvel Comic superhero.
On a more substantive level, however, all three have very much in common.
The first of the three is spoken by Bruce Wayne in his guise as Batman, explaining away his public playboy persona as a device to conceal his secret identity. The second is spoken by Peter Parker, aka Spiderman, explaining why he is walking away from the woman he loves in order to protect her from the enemies that would try to strike at him through the people closest to him.
The third quote is the closing line of Charles Dickens’s classic A Tale of Two Cities, in which the heretofore-undistinguished Sydney Carton expresses his love for Lucie Darnay by taking the place of her husband, Charles, and suffering death by guillotine so that Charles might live.
All three quotes issue from heroes who not only do great things at personal risk, but who sacrifice life, love, and reputation for a higher ideal. From a brooding moralizer like Dickens, we expect nothing less. From Hollywood scriptwriters and producers, however, we expect anything else.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
As the Oscar season descends upon us, its worth reflecting that Hollywood is known as Tinsel Town for good reason. Glitz, superficiality, and immediate gratification have become synonymous with the land responsible for most of today’s entertainment industry. Revolving door marriages and divorces, infidelity, and recreational drugs are only the most obvious symptoms of a culture that glorifies the pursuit of pleasure and the deification of personal autonomy.
Predictably, the film industry can be counted on to turn out major motion pictures that are thinly veiled propaganda pieces. Such unmemorable productions as Brokeback Mountain, Lions for Lambs, and The Good Shepherd may have curried favor with Hollywood politicos eager to promote alternative lifestyles or government conspiracy theories, but the movie-going public has shown considerably more enthusiasm for traditional good versus-evil-stories in which good triumphs in the end. (For the record, haven’t seen either Brokeback Mountain or Lions for Lambs.)
If box office receipts are any indication, there can be no doubt that audiences will choose classic heroism every time. The musings of a couple of culturally conflicted cowboys on the open plain can hardly compete with such memorable moments as the President of the United States (played by Harrison Ford) throwing an international terrorist out the cargo hold of his plane in Air Force One or Kevin Kline’s presidential impersonator cutting government pork at a cabinet meeting to save funding for an orphanage in Dave.
That Hollywood did in fact release such movies as Batman Begins, Spiderman, and Air Force One, however, reveals an insight into Left Coast Culture that is at once obvious and surprising.
What is obvious is that money trumps ideology. When all is said and done, filmmakers would rather see increased revenues than the spread of counter-culture ideology. Fair enough. But what is truly remarkable is how well they understand the nobility, the selflessness, and the heroism of personal sacrifice that are so often at the heart of successful moviemaking.
MANKIND’S INNER HERO
Once upon a time, heroism in Hollywood was the norm. But we don’t have to go all the way back to Humphrey Bogart’s “the problems of three little people don’t add up to hill of beans” speech in Casablanca when he gives up Ingrid Bergman. When Helen Hunt refused to abandon her family for Tom Hanks in Cast Away, when Kelly McGillis refused to abandon her Amish community for Harrison Ford in Witness, when Robert Redford emptied out of his life’s savings to rescue Brad Pitt in Spy Games, the positive resolution of their inner conflicts provided some of the most powerful emotional climaxes in modern cinema. And let’s not forget this year’s biggest hit, The Dark Knight, in which Batman takes the blame for murder to allow Gotham City to keep its illusion of hope.
Perhaps the culture of make-believe that turns out movies of heroism is incapable of believing in either real heroism or the values that turn ordinary people into heroes. Why else would they persist in churning out so many ideological flops in between traditionalist blockbusters? One almost feels sorry for the creative geniuses that can portray such compelling drama on the screen but seem incapable of applying it to the reality of their lives.
The classical philosopher Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato describes the human condition thus:
And so [man] finds himself truly in the midst of a raging battle, in which all the matters of the material world, whether good or evil, serve as trials for man. Poverty confronts him on the one side and wealth on the other… comfort on the one side, and suffering on the other, until he faces a battlefront before him and behind. But if he will be valiant and prevail against his adversaries on every side, then he will become a Complete Man.
Movies can remind us of the moral battles we face constantly in our own lives between what we know and what we feel, between what is right and what is pleasing, between rising to each new challenge or abdicating struggle for the line of least resistance. We rejoice when silver screen heroes emerge triumphant from their inner struggles, for they remind us that we too can emerge triumphant. But we despair when they fail, for they remind us how easily we too can fall prey to our inner demons.
It’s ironic that Hollywood filmmakers can describe the human condition so vividly with so little understanding of it. Perhaps they should watch their own movies – the ones that audiences go to see.
Christopher Hitchens: Almost a Hero
It’s remarkable how we can develop a deep fascination, sometimes to the point of fixation, toward people we despise.
This is not particularly healthy: we gain much more by studying those who are worthy of our admiration and reverence, both as models for the refinement of our own behavior and as sources of inspiration that demonstrate the heights to which human nobility can soar.
But human nature produces an incessant magnetism toward the negative, no matter how much we may know better. So I couldn’t resist clicking on Daniel Oppenheimer’s recent retrospective* on Christopher Hitchens, one of my least favorite intellectuals.
I’m glad I did.
Yonason Goldson 