9/11 Remembered

I have told this story before, but I was in the Pentagon at the time of the attack. As it happens, I was far enough away from the site of the crash that I couldn't say for sure that I actually heard or felt anything at the moment of impact. A few minutes earlier, although there wasn't a television set or radio handy, rumors of the attack at the World Trade Center were already circulating throughout the building and we were trying to get more information through the internet.

What I did finally hear and pay attention to only moments later was the sound of other people rushing down the corridor, heading for the nearest exit. I still didn't know what had happened, but if they all thought leaving the building was a good idea, well, you know. I joined the crowd and literally less than two minutes I was out in the South Parking lot, walking rapidly away from the building.

The South Parking side of the Pentagon is to the south of the Heliport side where the airplane hit. I couldn't see anything over there except a huge and rapidly growing plume of jet black smoke. The most likely inference at that point was a helicopter crash causing a fire, which was what I assumed. As people continued to pour out of the Pentagon, however, it also became clear that it would probably take at least an hour or two before the "all clear" signal was given and the crowd of some 25,000 people could re-enter the building. My car was parked not far away, so I simply kept walking to it and then drove off.

It was only when I turned on the car radio as I pulled out of the parking lot that I discovered what had happened. In fact, as I took the ramp exit to I 395 South / Washington Blvd., I could finally see the burning crater in the side of the Pentagon where the airplane hit. I could hear sirens approaching from every direction as I drove away in the opposite direction.

Not that it would have done me any good, but I didn't have a cell phone on September 11, 2001. (I own one now, at my wife's insistence, and that is frankly one more thing I hold against the terrorists, trivial as that is.) I drove to my wife's office and we decided, since we had no idea how extensive the attacks were or whether there would be more, to pull our children from school and then determine from there whether to leave the immediate Washington, D.C. vicinity. As it happened, we remained at home glued to the television. I would do exactly the same thing if the same situation were to occur again.

Obviously, the situation at the World Trade Centers was vastly worse. Still, I went back to the Pentagon the next day and entered long enough to witness the incredible smoke damage even as far away from the point of attack as I had been the previous morning. While none of the victims were personal friends, a number were people with whom I had done business over the years.

Mine isn't, therefore, a particularly dramatic, let alone tragic story. More like a brush with history, actually. It's worth remembering, though, how much the U.S. has changed since and because of 9/11. Normal is whatever you grow up with or grow used to. America's continuing psychological sense of siege in what increasingly seems not only to be a long but a perpetual war against terrorism feels more and more "normal" all the time. Surely, that is a far greater harm than even the terrible death and destruction of seven years ago.

Avast, Ye Lubbers! And A Happy 4th To Ye! Yarrrr!

No 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door. But 'tis enough. 'Twill serve. -- Mercutio, Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene 1.

Today, as my little way of celebrating Independence Day and my impending 57th birthday two days from now, I marched bravely (well, semi-bravely) into a Claire’s at the local mall and paid a young woman $20 to pierce my left ear. This admittedly trivial bit of fashion news -- news in the sense that when word gets out that geezers like me are getting their ears pierced now, piercing and earring sales will soon plummet -- requires a bit of background information.

On The Road Again

The Atlantic recently posted a fascinating article by John Staddon entitled “Distracting Miss Daisy.” Staddon, who grew up in Great Britain, argues that the seemingly ubiquitous presence of stop signs and speed limits on U.S. roads actually distracts drivers’ attention, conditions them into relying more on compliance than concentrating on actual road conditions and leads, as a result, to more accidents.

These are the sorts of arguments that warm the cockles of a libertarian’s heart assuming, of course, that libertarian hearts have cockles. Staddon reminded me also of the perfectly obvious point – obvious once made, that is – that because seat belts and air bags reduce the “cost” of unsafe driving, drivers will on average be more reckless as a result. This is called “risk compensation,” but it is really just another example of the notion that, in general, the quantity demanded of any good will rise as the price of that good decreases. Lowering the driver’s odds of injury in case of an accident makes the prospect of such accidents that much more “affordable.” (Volvo drivers excepted, perhaps. I am convinced that Volvo’s much touted safety history is as significantly the result of safety-obsessed owners and drivers as it is of the car’s engineering. Compare the likely Volvo buyer with the likely Porsche buyer. I rest my case.)

Staddon also makes the passing comment (no pun intended) that the use of stop signs at practically every secondary street intersection and our inexplicably popular 4-way stop intersections, however egalitarian they may be, waste a great deal of energy. I have no idea whether there are any studies out there to demonstrate our increased fuel consumption as a result, but anything that might cause a policy war between environmentalists and traffic safety fanatics (MADD springs to mind here) should certainly be explored.

The article is well worth a read, but I’m a bit dubious about the extent to which Staddon’s argument springs from anecdotal evidence of his experiences driving in the U.S. and in Britain. I don’t know what the actual accident rate comparisons would be, but my anecdotal experience of driving in the U.K. [insert lame joke about driving on wrong side of the road here] is that the British drive far more slowly than Americans do and that, outside London and its other major cities, there is far less traffic in Great Britain in the first place.

Moreover, driving behavior is at least partially influenced by culture. I lived in Italy for several years and can testify to the fact that neither the presence nor the absence of traffic signs has anything more than an aesthetic effect on Italian roads and highways. Whatever their intended purpose, they certainly don't influence Italian drivers in the slightest. In Germany, where I also lived, there are only two driving speeds throughout the entire nation: too damned fast and too damned slow. Germans are also indifferent to whether traffic signs are posted or not, having had the rules of the road drilled into them with a ruthless efficiency as part of the drivers’ licensing process. Besides, there’s very little crime in Germany, anyway, because ... wait for it ... it’s against the law.

I will pick one semi-major nit with Staddon’s article. He begins with an example from, of all places, my home town, as follows:

There is a stretch of North Glebe Road, in Arlington, Virginia, that epitomizes the American approach to road safety. It’s a sloping curve, beginning on a four-lane divided highway and running down to Chain Bridge, on the Potomac River. Most drivers, absent a speed limit, would probably take the curve at 30 or 35 mph in good weather. But it has a 25-mph speed limit, vigorously enforced. As you approach the curve, a sign with flashing lights suggests slowing further, to 15 mph. A little later, another sign makes the same suggestion. Great! the neighborhood’s more cautious residents might think.

Later in the article he continues:

Which brings me back to North Glebe Road in Arlington. It turns out that the speed signs do perform an important safety function: in wet weather, many drivers had taken the curve too fast; traffic authorities have substantially reduced accidents on the curve by adding the 15-mph warning sign, and they would be foolish to remove it, absent larger changes in American traffic policy.

Now, in the first place, I’ve been taking that curve at closer to 50 mph all my life. More to the point, I’ve spent the bulk of my life residing in the People’s Republic of Arlington. I guarantee that, whatever dubious and quite possibly cooked statistics Arlington’s bureaucratic weasels traffic authorities may have dished up, the fact is that those speed limits are set as they are because the “more cautious residents” in one of Arlington’s most affluent neighborhoods simply wanted to dissuade teenage drivers from racing near their million dollar plus homes. Not that Arlington’s totalitarian nanny state Democrats aren’t safety fanatics, mind you. If just two more speed bumps were added to the typical neighborhood street it would become perfectly flat again.

But I digress. Further proof, I suppose, that I shouldn’t drive and type on my laptop at the same time.

Father & Son

At the risk (more like the certainty, actually) of embarrassing him, I write today on the occasion of my older son’s twenty-first birthday.

On June 11, 1987 his mother and I lived in Leesburg, Virginia but, for what now seem obscure reasons, the obstetrics practice my wife was using was at Alexandria Hospital, nearly 50 miles away. My wife, an impatient woman who in her ninth month had taken to skipping up and down the streets of Leesburg to hasten our child’s arrival, woke me shortly before dawn exactly 21 years ago, saying “I think it’s time.”

My response, “Wake me again when you’re sure,” was not well received and I was not permitted to return to sleep. We trundled into the car and made our way to the hospital, my wife obstinately insisting that I, though still quite groggy, do the driving. Once under way, I remember toying with the idea of driving just a bit recklessly: speeding, driving on the shoulder to pass the growing rush hour traffic, that sort of thing.

My plan, born of similar TV and movie scenes, was to yell out to any cop who tried to pull me over, “My wife’s getting ready to deliver, Officer!” He would then, of course, yell back “Follow me,” turn on his siren and escort us to the hospital. Alas, as my wife pointed out, while a policeman might actually provide such escort to the nearest hospital, a 50 mile, high speed escort was pretty much out of the question.

We arrived at the hospital somewhere around 7 a.m. to what they called the “birthing suite.” It was, far and away, the nicest hospital room I’d ever seen and, but for all the medical gear tucked away here and there, it could have passed for a decent room at the Hilton. It cost roughly the same, assuming the Hilton in question was in Tahiti and air fare was included. At this point all sorts of hospital personnel, all women, began to come and go from the room, not talking of Michaelangelo but introducing themselves to my wife, arranging things, hooking up monitors, taking vital signs, rearranging things and pretending that I was not only welcome but somehow useful.

We had, after all, taken the Lamaze classes where I learned that breathing was very important even during childbirth and that I should encourage my wife to continue breathing just in case, in all the excitement, she should forget. There was even a special sort of breathing (in and out, I think) that was supposed to facilitate delivery and minimize labor pains. My wife had, of course, opted for “natural childbirth,” meaning she wanted none of the pain relieving drugs I wished someone there would have offered me.

An hour later, I noticed that among the cadre of scrubs-clad health care providers who traipsed in and out of the room the one sort that had not made an appearance was an obstetrician or, indeed, anyone with an M.D. after her name. If the doctor didn’t think her presence was necessary yet, I wasn’t sure mine was either, especially given the fact that my wife’s labor pains had increased. All that Lamaze nonsense was quickly abandoned and her preferred method of distracting herself from the pain focused on, for example, questioning my parents’ marital status. Worse yet, the staff seemed unanimous in their attitude that I was only getting what was coming to me, after all, and that I should remain in the room as the target of my wife’s increasingly vociferous scorn. This, apparently, was my usefulness.

Shortly before 10 a.m., nature took its course – yes, easy for me to say – and as our son’s head crowned the obstetrician magically appeared, nodded general approval at the state of affairs and, beckoning me to join her, squatted before my wife like a baseball catcher. Only a few moments later, Edward Townsend Ridgely first saw the light of day.

Many of our friends had no idea my wife was even pregnant and were nonplussed at the announcement of Edward’s birth. As mentioned, we were living some 50 miles from where many of our friends lived inside the Capital Beltway. It is hardly our fault more of them didn’t come to visit us more often and we were not hiding the fact so much as simply not sharing it with them. This for a reason requiring a brief digression.

Several years earlier we were all at a large house party. We had been to dozens if not hundreds of such parties before, but something was suddenly very different. As the men gathered in groups to discuss politics and sports and tell embarrassing stories about each other, all the women were talking about children: being pregnant, wanting to be pregnant, having a child, wanting to have a child. It was eerie. It was, I swear to you, the biological equivalent of Pink Floyd’s “Time” resounding throughout the entire distaff half of the gathering.

Flash back now to the spring of 1987. We have removed to Leesburg while many in our cohort have begun to raise a family and, as a result, to spend far less time socializing with old friends. This became a matter of great irritation to a friend who shall remain nameless but whose name rhymes with “con all daily,” which would, as it happens, make a pretty amusing nickname for a journalist. Oblivious to the fairly apparent fact that my spouse was already in her third trimester, he looked at us both and exclaimed “At least you two aren’t spawning!” At that point, of course, it became a game. Several months later, when we presented our son as a fait accompli to him and others, many of them at first refused to believe he was not adopted.

We have a picture of Edward taken only moments after birth. No one looking at that photo would infer he was happy. If anything, he resembled a very, very old man with a very, very bad case of constipation. The latter, I soon discovered, was not far from the truth, but the more important truth was that he was, indeed, a grumpy and willful baby from the moment of his birth. We have often told our second son, seven years younger and the most placid baby imaginable, that we’d have had him much sooner had we known he was going to be so little like his brother. As an infant, Edward almost never took naps and cried himself to sleep nearly ever night. He viewed his crib and any playpen (understandably, to be sure) as a cage to be escaped. For a while there we thought we’d given birth to the reincarnation of Steve McQueen and I had visions of Edward astride his Big Wheels sailing over the child gate, making a break for freedom.

I won’t embarrass him with any more childhood stories. I will say that the ensuing 21 years have been, on balance, richly rewarding. His mother and I love him dearly – which, of course, one is obligated to say and then further obligated to add “as we do all our other children as well!” – but we are also inordinately proud of him. Inordinately in the slightly misused sense of unjustifiably, and unjustifiably in the sense that we can take little credit. Make no mistake, parents are capable of doing great harm to their children, but their ability to improve them is far smaller than they would like to believe. In the perennial nature versus nurture debate, parents of multiple children know that nature often thwarts their best efforts.

Even so, the whole point of civilization is to defeat the uglier aspects of nature and the whole point of parenthood is to civilize; that is, to make one’s children ready to live in civil society. Even though our son does show a disquietingly abysmal lack of practical knowledge, he’ll be fine.

Children really are the only people on earth you genuinely want to do better in life than yourself. Then again, what counts as good, better or best varies more that a little from person to person. When I was, myself, still shy of 21 someone asked me, oddly enough, if I was proud of my father. The question had never occurred to me before.

My father never finished 4th grade and worked at various poorly paying manual and low skill jobs most of his life. We were on the poor side of our working class neighborhood and there were few luxuries of any sort in my childhood. Dad loved my mother without qualification, but she died of cancer when I was fourteen and he was left to raise me alone.

Which he did, remaining in the old neighborhood five more years so I could finish school there and then selling my childhood home (which, unlike almost all of our neighbors, he owned mortgage free) for money to send me to college. I never saw him read a book but I also never saw him break his word, and when he died in his eighties he not only left money in the bank but dozens of people (especially women!) who genuinely loved him and mourned his passing. Yes, I was and am and will always be enormously proud of my father.

The parent / child relationship is asymmetrical: you cannot understand what it is to be a parent merely by having been a child. I want all my children to be healthy and happy and harmless people who are loved and share love freely. Beyond that I am mostly indifferent about the particulars of how they choose to spend their lives and even less concerned about how they make a living.

Not so my suddenly adult son. Aside from rejoicing that he is today old enough to drink and buy firearms, always a salubriously combination, I fear he is too captivated by a prodigious but unfocused ambition. There are worse fates than Alexander the Great’s, but there are better ones, too. Not the least of which is to realize that even if you do manage to win the rat race, all that makes you is the lead rat. Life is not a business.

My father understood that. The very day after I graduated from high school he boarded a jet for Florida and, living on a small disability pension, spent the next twenty years as a widower in a sea of widows who vied for his company. He was a very, very happy man and his name was Edward.

Happy Birthday, Son.

Oh, There He Is Over There!

Sigh....

In yet another example of ego triumphing over prudence, I have accepted a kind invitation from Jason Kuznicki to join him and his colleagues over at Positive Liberty. Accordingly, I expect to post one or two pieces a week there until either (1) I find even that schedule too demanding or (2) more likely, my newfound colleagues decide to un-invite me.

In any case, gluttons for punishment my loyal readers -- rumored to number well into the low double digits -- are similarly invited to join us.

Fourth of July Memories

Some twenty-five years ago my wife and I and a couple dozen friends, mostly from college, met every 4th of July down at the National Mall to make a day of the festivities. In those days glass bottles were prohibited but cans were permitted and one could still take coolers filled with beer (oh, and food) and stake out some territory by the Washington Monument for a perfect overhead view of the fireworks.

We were all in our 20's or early 30's at most, in the final days of the first stage of our adult lives, still mostly childless and still early in our careers, mostly as doctors or lawyers -- lots of lawyers! -- with an odd journalist or bureaucrat or two as well. After all, we are talking about Washington, D.C. here. People played Frisbee and shot off illegal bottle rockets and ate and drank and burned in the hot July sun. Even then, the most casual look at the tens of thousands of people who had gathered on the Mall made it obvious beyond question that we are both a nation of immigrants and a single people.

These were the early days of the Reagan Administration, and in 1981 and 1982 that most quintessentially American band, the Beach Boys, played their most quintessentially innocent and joyful music at the big concert stage down by the Monument. The National Symphony also played pop and light classical music at the Capitol steps, but that was at the other end of the Mall and, besides, even today I'd opt for "Fun, Fun, Fun" over Tchaikovsky in a heartbeat.

But 1983 was far and away my favorite year, for it was then that Interior Secretary James Watt decided the Beach Boys were, well, attracting the wrong element to the Mall and booked Wayne Newton instead. Perhaps Watt was a secret fan of Lenny Bruce, who once observed that there was no place in America more American than Las Vegas. In any case, Wayne brought all the trappings of his Vegas act with him, complete with dozens of feather-headdress wearing, scantily clad but sequin festooned showgirls. It doesn't get any more American than that, except perhaps at the Folies-Bergere in Paris.

Getting close to the stage was much harder than when the Beach Boys played because it was already heavily surrounded by a mosh pit of silver-blue haired women. Fortunately, their average height was only around 5'4", so I didn't have to elbow my way through little old ladies to see the stage clearly. It was, to put it mildly, quite a show. Newton sang his hits as the showgirls shook their, well, you know, and concluded appropriately enough with "America the Beautiful." But then he came back to do a Vegas style encore, probably "Danke Schoen" though I don't recall exactly, and it was at that exact moment that I grasped the genius of Watt's decision. Alas, Nancy Reagan liked the Beach Boys better and they were back the next year, another government program that, once started, refused to go away.

The fate of the United States, indeed, of the Earth was still very much in jeopardy in those days from the Cold War's Mutually Assured Destruction. Thank God, it never happened, but we lived with that terrible risk as we now seem incapable of living with the risk of a small number of fanatical enemies who, even in our most nightmarish scenarios, don't pose a tenth of a percent of that decades-long threatened nuclear holocaust. Our biggest complaints about air travel were that it was uncomfortable, boring, expensive and too often delayed. We were spending a vast fortune on defense, but at least we were defending ourselves against a credible threat. Accusations of an imperial presidency focused more on Nancy's White House china patterns than on jackbooted thugs hauling U.S. citizens off to prison without so much as a hint of due process.

Of course, both the world and America have changed in many ways for the better in the past quarter-century. Many, but not all. I have no idea what sort of controlled environment or enhanced security the National Park Service is imposing on the crowds today down at the Mall, but I know I want no part of it. And I'm not at all nostalgic for the 1980s, however much this comes across that way. Sure, I'd like my youth back, but that doesn't mean I'd like to be living in 1983 again.

I merely note, like Joni Mitchell, that the passage of time involves loss as well as gain. Some things, like youth, we cannot help but lose. Whether we lose other things, like the courage to demand free lives and accountable government, is up to us, as is our relationship with the rest of the world. I, for one, would prefer the world to think of us as a people willing to risk a bottle rocket or two with a can of beer in our hands singing along to "Fun, Fun, Fun," than for the nationalistic bombast of the 1812 Overture, especially when you consider how the Battle of Borodino turned out.

What's In A Name?

The naming of things, especially things like people, is an awesome power. Adam got to name all the animals (Genesis 2:19-20), no doubt to the eternal chagrin of the duck-billed platypus. The Gospel of John, the most philosophically informed of the New Testament books, likens Christ with the "Word," in Greek, Logos, a term far richer in content than a mere linguistic sign or signifier (and, btw, first used by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus). Fast forward to the opening part of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations where he takes issue with Augustine's account of how language is learned as a child by the naming of things, a process Wittgenstein contended could be done as Augustine described only by someone who was already a fairly advanced user of language.

Some of us give inanimate objects names (my first guitar was named Maggie), but most of us beyond a certain age confine such doings to the naming of pets and, of course, of our children. As Robin Williams once noted that cocaine is God's way of telling you you have too much money, the baby naming business that has emerged in recent years is God's way of telling you you have far too much time (and money) on your hands.

Denise McCombie, 37, a California mother of two who's expecting a daughter this fall, spent $475 to have a numerologist test her favorite name, Leah Marie, to see if it had positive associations. (It did.) This March, one nervous mom-to-be from Illinois listed her 16 favorite names on a tournament bracket and asked friends, family and people she met at baby showers to fill it out. The winner: Anna Irene.

Sean and Dawn Mistretta from Charlotte, N.C., tossed around possibilities for five months before they hired a pair of consultants -- baby-name book authors who draw up lists of suggestions for $50. During a 30-minute conference call with Mrs. Mistretta, 34, a lawyer, and Mr. Mistretta, 35, a securities trader, the consultants discussed names based on their phonetic elements, popularity, and ethnic and linguistic origins -- then sent a 15-page list of possibilities. When their daughter was born in April, the Mistrettas settled on one of the consultants' suggestions -- Ava -- but only after taking one final straw poll of doctors and nurses at the hospital. While her family complimented the choice, Mrs. Mistretta says, "they think we're a little neurotic."

Karen Markovics, 36, who works for the planning department in Orange County, N.C., spent months reading baby books and scouring Web sites before settling on Nicole Josephine. But now, four years later, Mrs. Markovics says she wishes she'd chosen something less trendy -- and has even considered legally changing her daughter's name to Josephine Marie. "I'm having namer's remorse," she says.

Namer's remorse, indeed!

Names do, after all, signify quite a bit, if not about us at least about our parents and sometimes about our ancestors, too. Charles and John are very popular given names in the Ridgely family tree, the former at least because of a couple of prominent (read: rich) Charles's down at its colonial trunk and, for all I know, a few more along its English roots as well. Years ago, a Jewish friend was surprised to learn we named our first child after my still living father, apparently considered bad luck by Jewish tradition. Anglos would never think of naming their baby boys Jesus, a very popular choice in Latino cultures. I like to think of our Bible-Belt, Mexican border wall builders laboring to keep Jesus out of America. A white stand-up comic working before a black audience quipped "I wish I was black so I could name my baby any damned thing I wanted!" In fact, or so I am told, considerable thought and effort goes into finding unique and pleasing names for African American children these days. Apparently, they're not the only ones.

Celebrities, of course, are a factor here. Once upon a time it was de rigeur for Hollywood studios to rename their actors. Hence, Marion Morrison became John Wayne, Leonard Slye became Roy Rogers, Frances Ethel Gumm became Judy Garland and Archibald Leach became Cary Grant. (Michael Keaton also had to change his name, there already being a Michael Douglas in the business.)

Now, by contrast, actors keep their given names and indulge themselves with colorful (read: tasteless) names for their many out-of-wedlock offspring. Back in the 1960s and 70s, long before odd celebrity child names became so trendy, I looked forward to the day when Frank Zappa's daughter Moon Unit and Grace Slick's son god tied the knot. Surely god and Moon Unit Zappa-Slick would have been a couple for the millennium. Of course, back then George Foreman was still a heavyweight boxer and foe of Muhammad Ali (nee Cassius Clay) and not today's multi-millionaire grill-meister and father to George Foreman, George Foreman, George Foreman, George Foreman, George Foreman and, let us not forget, George Foreman. (There is no truth to the rumor his daughters are all named Georgia, though it was probably on his mind.)

Then, too, there are names to be avoided. Germans still shy away from naming their son's Adolf (I'm not sure the same holds in Argentina), and there are any number of old-fashioned names like Bertha, Myrtle and so forth that parents in hopes of grandchildren would probably not opt to give their daughters. Before the rise of the Governator, Arnold was the sort of name destining its bearer to a childhood of playground beatings. Sure, there was golfing legend Arnold Palmer, but Arnold Stang was the better known Arnold of my childhood.

Names are magical, but only because we believe they are. A primitive tribe might worship the Morning Star but curse the Evening Star, unaware that both are Venus. So, too, the thought that the lives of our children are much affected by the names we give them isn't far removed from the notion that, among their other possible perlocutionary functions, words used as names can bless or curse their bearers. Our fate, of course, lies not in our stars or in our names, but, these lyrics aside, in ourselves.

Anamnesis

Although May 30th is its historical date, chosen specifically because it was not the date of any significant Civil War battle, we officially celebrate Memorial Day today. Unlike President Bush, I think it better not to use the occasion to argue politics.

My father was a World War II veteran, a sailor serving in the Aleutian Islands. My Uncle Ed was a soldier “over there” in France during World War I. He once showed me a box of decorations his grandfather had received for service as a Union soldier during the Civil War. A cousin by marriage was a Korean War POW and spent the rest of his life in a deep alcoholic depression. They are all dead now, though none died in military service.

My father’s family dates back to the 1600s in Maryland and the genealogical records show family service in the Revolutionary War and probably every military conflict thereafter. My mother’s family records were lost over time or destroyed during the Civil War, but suffice it to say there have been Smiths in Virginia for a very long time and they were all a scrappy lot. Of course, I never knew any of those men and thus I have no memories of them.

The war of my generation was Viet Nam. When I turned eighteen, I first had a student deferment from the draft and then a high lottery number, and then the war was over and so was the draft. Although I worked for several decades for the Army, Navy and Air Force, I never served in uniform and it is hardly the same thing. As for my cohort, there isn’t a single name on the Viet Nam Memorial of someone I knew. The few early deaths among friends in my generation were caused by diseases, accidents and drug overdoses. There is one ironic and tragic exception. One member of my high school graduating class joined the Marines, served in Viet Nam and returned safely only to be shot to death a short time later in his own home in a dispute with a family member.

Of the men of my generation who did serve in Viet Nam and came home safely, by the time an ungrateful nation stopped spitting at them and calling them baby killers they no longer felt inclined to share their experiences in that war except perhaps among each other. Too often, it seems, not even then. If there really are such things as lessons from Viet Nam, I don’t know what they are.

Memorial Day having started as Decorations Day in tribute specifically to fallen Union soldiers of the Civil War, it was met at first with resistance in the South and accepted there only after more wars and more war dead to which, as in the Civil War itself, the southern states contributed their share to the vast charnel houses of war. In the South of my childhood generally and in our family particularly, Memorial Day became a day of remembrance for all the dead, and I would drive with my father on Memorial Day to a cemetery in D.C. where he and I would tidy up the grave of my paternal grandmother, Ida.

Although my father was eligible for burial in Arlington Cemetery, my parents chose to buy adjoining cemetery plots not far from my childhood home. They are buried there together now for many years, though I have visited less than a half dozen times since my father’s death nearly twenty years ago. I know exactly where their graves are and exactly what their marker looks like. I see it in my mind as I write these words. Am I a disloyal or disrespectful son for not going there more often to actually witness once again the site of their mortal remains? I don’t know. I know only that I don’t go and that, for whatever reason, I sometimes feel guilty as a result, but my memory of my parents does not require that I be there.

As for the official purpose of Memorial Day, remembering those who died in military service to the nation, the point I was making implicitly above is that, unlike my memory of my parents, I have no actual memories at all of any such people. I can honor them, but I cannot literally remember them. You cannot remember someone you never knew, and I have never known anyone who died in military service.

That might strike the reader as a sort of fustian way of being dismissive of Memorial Day or of its purpose, but I don’t mean it as such. I note it because it simply will not do to pretend that my relationship with those men and women is at all the same as that of those who really knew and loved them. I am incapable, as it were, of anamnesis.

Anamnesis, like its better known cousin amnesia, derives from ancient Greek and translates roughly as memory or remembrance. It finds its first significant usage in Plato’s epistemology, his notion that knowledge derives from recollected memory of the forms or ideals; but it is also a critical concept in Christian theology and it is that sense I mean here. It is the sort of memory distinguished from the act of remembering obscure names or dates or facts of any sort but the memory instead that washes over us every time we see or think of someone we could never forget; a parent or child or spouse or lifelong friend.

It is that deeper, richer sense of memory and not merely the sense of remembering, say, that I once owned a blue 1966 Karmann Ghia or the lyrics to “Yesterday” or even the name of the girl I had a crush on in elementary school (Patty) that Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, “Do this in remembrance of me” is meant to covey. We can honor those we have never known with rites and rituals or decorations and parades and monuments. We can understand the significance of their sacrifices and be appropriately grateful. But we cannot remember strangers as others can or once could, and we should remember that, too.

Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Bulldogs of War!

I think people should start thinking about other people rather than trying to feel sorry for themselves and thinking that the administration is trying to thwart their creativity.... They're not using their own intelligence.... We have to think of the people who might be affected by seeing real-life weapons.

So said Yale's Dean of Student Affairs, Betty Trachtenberg, whose opinions regarding deference to the religious or sexual sensibilities of the theater-going public I would be most interested to learn.

Still, in a reversal of Trachtenberg's earlier outright ban on realistic looking stage weapons, Yale decided instead merely to institute a "policy of announcing the use of stage weapons in advance will hold for all future campus productions." The world's once more the student thespians' oyster, which they with sword can open. Or something like that.

Speaking of how people might be affected by seeing realistic looking stage prop weapons, I worked as a stagehand one season many years ago at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. Aside from the fact that I was paid rather less than a migrant farm worker, it was a great experience, the highlight of which occurred during the first (and, I have good reason to suspect, only) American theatrical production of an Australian play that shall remain nameless in deference to maintaining good American / Australian relationships. In any case, in one scene one of the actors was supposed to pull out a revolver and brandish it wildly. Unfortunately, one night he waved it about a bit too wildly and it flew from his hand, landing some ten or twelve rows into the darkened house.

Silence. More silence. The actors on stage stood frozen in a tableau, there being no proscenium curtain to drop, and tried valiantly not to join in the titters of laughter as the audience slowly realized what had happened. Finally, some fifteen or thirty seconds later, the stage lights were lowered, the house lights were raised and the stage manager sent another stagehand into the house and announced through the PA system, "Would whoever has our gun please return it so we can continue the play?"

Ah, the magic of live theater!

Adorable Kitty Prostitutes?

This blogging business continues to intrigue. I say business, of course, not in the sense of profitable enterprise, at least not in my case, but in the sense of cultural phenomenon. This site, for example, in existence less than a month so far (twelve days, in fact), has already attracted visitors from domains as far away as Ireland, Australia and Thailand, though I honestly can’t imagine why. Unless, that is, titles with words and phrases like “prostitute” and "rape fantasies" popped up in those viewers’ searches. Not to be too cynical, but that seems more likely than being led here by a Google search for “reductionism.”

Installation of a hit counter has helped assuage my curiosity to some extent about such matters, and I’m pleased to announce that readership is rapidly approaching triple digits. (How about them apples, Huffington Post and Michelle Malkin!) A few days ago, Memeorandum had begun to link an occasional post here again, as it had been linking a fair number of my posts previously at Inactivist; but then that seemed suddenly to stop, perhaps because I got boring, perhaps because I jokingly told former co-blogger Mona in a comment that it saddened me that she’d noticed a post here only via Memeorandum? Who knows. C’est la vie. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, no man but a fool ever wrote except to be read; but I really haven’t a clue how web traffic works or why, and there is only so much pandering to the masses I can bring myself to do. I am, however, shamelessly planning on a special Shoes! article in the near future to lure former reader Susan W-G back to the fold.

Constant Viewer, my modest homage to Dorothy Parker’s far wittier reviews of yesteryear, has been disappointingly idle of late, there being damned little on the big screen worth seeing. In fact, my last such venture to the cinema house was to accompany my twelve year old son to watch TMNT, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" for the over-thirty crowd, but I’m afraid a review of same would have to focus on the quality of the popcorn. (Not enough salt.) Perhaps the current drought will lead me to an occasional review of older films -- I hear that Citizen Kane flick is pretty good.

My intent was and remains to blog about the passing scene from a less than rabidly ideological libertarian perspective -- no, I don’t think children under twelve should be permitted to own nuclear weapons -- at least as opposed to what I call the “My Adorable Kitties” web-log alternatives. However, I think it’s already fairly obvious that my interests are as eclectic as my knowledge of many such matters is, or so I’m told, highly doubtful. One reader, not even here but over at Jim Henley’s shop, thought not only that my opinions regarding digital audio files were “absolutely full of sh*t” but that I, personally, was, as well. I quote: “You’re saying things that sound like they might be sensible, but are in fact completely crazy.” Sadly, he is not the first person to arrive at such a conclusion, nor will he likely be the last. What the hell, he may even be right.

And so it goes. Purely political blogs bore me almost as much as adorable kitties. I have lived most of my life inside or at least right next to Washington’s culture of political obsessives, and I have grown weary of self-important people espousing their self-important opinions, more often than not for mostly self-serving reasons. Yeah, I’m one of those people, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the fact or can’t occasionally resist my own self-important and self-serving inclinations, however briefly.

So this is the result so far. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, maybe a dog’s breakfast at the end of the day, but at least it’s fun in the making. Sure, blogging is largely an exercise in ego gratification. Who the hell am I, anyway? But when it comes down to it, what isn’t? And more to the point, will that guy from Thailand be back?

A Tale Of Two or Three Childhoods

Dad didn’t read. Oh, he could read. Well enough, at least, when need be. And he subscribed to the local newspaper and liked to look over the sports section in the morning with his coffee. There were ten or twelve books in the house, mostly tucked away in a bookcase in the corner and, like the other bric-a-brac my mother regularly dusted every week, they were there only for display. They were, as I vaguely recall, Readers Digest condensed versions of then popular novels; but I never saw either of my parents open any of them or, for that matter, not counting the Bible my mother read from once in a great while, saw them read any book at all.

I take that back. Mother read frequently. To me. Children’s books, of course, though not what anyone would call children’s literature. Mostly, they were Little Golden Books, thin cardboard bound illustrated books sold at grocery stores for twenty-five cents apiece, the titles ranging from fairy tales to Disney stories. She read them to me every night until, by an early age, I had memorized the texts and somehow thereby taught myself to read. I entered first grade reading at the third grade level. By third grade I was reading at a high school level. Reading came easy to me, but there were still few books at home by the time I left for college.

But this isn’t about what a bright fellow I am, let alone how different my subsequent relationship with books has been from that of my parents. My mother managed to complete only elementary school and my father dropped out permanently from fourth grade, but those were different times and different circumstances. No, what this is about, at least in part, is my memory of my father extolling the one novel he remembered ever having read, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

“Now that was some story!” I remember him saying on more than one occasion. I never did discover, probably never even thought to ask, why he read it or when, perhaps as a child, himself.

Truth to tell, I’m not a great Dickens fan, nor would I recommend that particular novel to anyone who hadn’t read him before. I have a good friend whose admiration for Dickens is probably exceeded only by her admiration for Jane Austen and who occasionally teaches classes in both at Georgetown, and we have discussed Dickens’ merits and weaknesses on any number of occasions, my view being that the latter outweigh the former. He does adapt wonderfully, however, especially in a mini-series, a number of which the BBC has produced brilliantly. Anyway, this really isn’t about Dickens, either.

Except that today my younger son, age twelve, began reading A Tale of Two Cities today. He also reads well above grade level, but his attitude toward novels, like his attitude toward any object not requiring electricity and including a viewing screen (and, preferably, a game controller), is not especially keen. But the book is a reading assignment from school -- usually, at least in my remembered school experience, the kiss of death. Still, I found a copy from our library and he took it up, grudgingly, and opened it. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of....” Well, you know.

An hour or so passed and he had made his way to Chapter Four. That was this afternoon. It is nearly ten o’clock now and he is reading more or, more precisely, having more read to him by his mother. By request.

Perhaps someday I’ll tell him how his newfound enthusiasm for A Tale of Two Cities this day oddly mirrored his grandfather’s so many, many years ago. Maybe not, though. The parallel, such as it is, is no more than a bridge from my own now often hazy memories of childhood to the present delight of watching a son of mine fall in love with a book. But his grandparents would be delighted, too.

"... I'm a man of wealth and taste."

If by "wealth" one means something a bit better than abject penury and by "taste" one means strong opinions, that is. Still, to complete the title quote from "the philosopher Jagger," however dyslexically, please allow me to introduce myself or, more to the point, this blog.

I've been stringing words together and pulling them apart for a living for longer than I care to remember, primarily as a lawyer (and if there's one thing the world needs more than another blogger it's another lawyer, right?) but also, long ago, as a writer of the freelance variety. Having recently forsaken the full-time lawyering racket for the putatively full-time writing racket, this blog is intended both to facilitate and to impede that transition. That is, on the one hand, herewith is Ridgely the citizen-pundit offering to a largely (and appropriately) indifferent world criticism, analysis and commentary from a largely pragmatic libertarian and decidedly ante-post-modern perspective. If those labels, juxtaposed as they are, seem a bit confusing, stick around and perhaps I'll be able to elucidate them for you.

On the other hand, at least for the foreseeable future, the extent to which I labor to fill this virtual space is inversely proportional to the extent I write anything in return for which I might ever see, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, "the necessary." Even so, the state of things being what they are, to quote one of Plum's fellow Dulwich College alums, "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." Okay, so maybe a little tarnished, worried just a tad and occasionally a wee bit mean.

I came to become a participant in the blogosphere several years ago, having had my appetite whetted by becoming a (too) frequent commenter on a now unfortunately defunct group blog called Left2Right, where I played, if not the Devil himself, at least the Devil's Advocate. I was subsequently recruited to participate in another group blog, of a more libertarian flavor, called Inactivist. For various reasons, the prime mover(s) behind Inactivist have largely moved on after the site crashed some months ago, taking with it a fairly substantial body of my published musings into the nether regions of net space, quite possibly never to be seen again.

Now, I'm no more egotistical than the next blogger (how's that for damning with faint praise?), but that experience finally convinced me that if I was going to bother to do "this thing that we do" at all, maybe I should do it with a bit more control over the process. Being (1) cheap, and (2) a cyber-naif, I've settled for the time being here under the auspices of Blogger, a free service of Google (Motto: "Do no harm that doesn't cut into profits") under the assumption that any company with a market value rapidly approaching its misspelled name is probably a safe haven. We'll see.

Anyway, back to the apologia. I know just enough about law, economics and philosophy to be dangerous, mostly to myself, so one way or another these are the most likely perspectives, however tenuously connected to a given topic, you'll find here. On the other hand, a steady diet of nothing but steak, however salivation inducing it may be at first, gets old really fast. So I reserve the right to blog on just about anything else, especially including films, odd news and adorable kitties non-political news and current events.

Finally, a few words on comments and the ethics of cyberspace. I encourage comments and I'm fairly tolerant when it comes to such matters. However, I reserve the right to delete comments I unilaterally deem to be beyond the pale and to ban any commenter I deem to be too much of an *sshole. Note the asterisk. Yeah, I used "dirty words" from time to time and you can, too; but let's not get carried away. As the newspapers say, this is supposed to be a more or less "family friendly" site. Also, my understanding of the blogging ethos is that, once published, a blog entry should remain as is unless the author informs the reader of any editing or updating. I will follow that rule as far as the substance of my comments goes. However, having no editor, I reserve the right to fix spelling, grammatical and similar errors and occasionally to change a word or phrase here or there if it significantly improves my original intended meaning in my posts without notice. This last may not be strictly kosher by blogging standards, but I intend to do it only rarely and even then only fairly soon (say, within the first 24 hours) after the original post.

This is a work in progress. Much tweaking will need to be done and I haven't a clue how it may evolve. Suggestions and criticism, constructive or otherwise, are welcome. Meanwhile, on with the show!