The Confucius Temple & Imperial College

Last weekend I went to a nearby site and while I will write a few of my own observations, The Lonely Planet managed to offer such a good description that I thought I would repeat it here with attribution:

An incense stick's toss away from the Lama Temple, the desiccated Confucius Temple had a pre-Olympics spruce up that failed to shift its indelible sense of otherworldly detachment. Like all Confucian shrines, China's second-largest Confucian temple feels rather like a mausoleum, so expect peace and quiet. Some of Běijīng's last remaining páilóu bravely survive in the hútòng outside (Guozijian Jie) while antediluvian bìxì (tortoise-like dragons) glare inscrutably from repainted pavilions. Lumpy and ossified ancient cypresses claw stiffly at the sky while at the rear a numbing forest of 190 stelae (stones or slabs etched with figures or inscriptions) records the 13 Confucian classics in 630,000 Chinese characters. 

A ghastly footnote lies unrecorded behind the tourist blurb. Běijīng writer Lao She was dragged here in August 1966, forced to his knees in front of a bonfire of Běijīng opera costumes to confess his 'antirevolutionary crimes', and beaten. The much-loved writer drowned himself the next day in Taiping Lake. 

West of the Confucius Temple is the Imperial College (国子监; Guózǐjiàn), where the emperor expounded the Confucian classics to an audience of thousands of kneeling students, professors and court officials – an annual rite. Built by the grandson of Kublai Khan in 1306, the former college was the supreme academy during the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. On the site is a marvellous [sic] glazed, three-gate, single-eaved decorative archway. The Bìyōng Hall beyond is a twin-roofed structure with yellow tiles surrounded by a moat and topped with a shimmering gold knob.

I did not know about Lao She's trial here, but beyond this interesting tidbit, I found the appraisal accurate and the language vivid.

The first statue of Confucius that one sees upon entering the shrine.

Halberds at the gate to the temple. 

Caption in the museum reads, "According to the records, Confucius was nine chi and six cun tall and was called 'a tall fellow' by other people. Considering that one chi is equivalent to twenty centimeters, Confucius would be a strong man of 1.92 cm." This was only the tip of the iceberg in his glorification.

This is one of the hundreds of 190 stelae that the Emperor Qianlong, who reigned during

the time of the American Revolution, had inscribed with 13 classic books. I liked the 

stone of this one, with its mottled, China-like surface. 

Just before I took this beautiful picture, I had a wonderful conversation with a blustery German fellow and his Chinese wife, who were tourists from the Vancouver area, but there were not a ton of people around so it was much like Lonely Planet describes--a place where you can "expect peace and quiet."

Another statue of the great sage, Kongzi (孔子), fenced in with the red-ribbons of good wishes

A couple of large mythical beasts seem ready to devour the HVAC system, perhaps to preserve the blue-sky days. 

The lovely second story of a hutong (alleyway) home that has a straight view of the temple's grounds. 

"What? You did not do your homework?!"

 

The dorms of the scholars seemingly used a system of movable boards to transform their cells from beds into study chambers or an eating table.

The azure heavens with the celadon and golden ceramics that adorn the tomato soup red stone gate made for a gorgeous picture. "Gnarled cypress trees outside the gate create thick shade from the sun. On each side of the gate stands a huge marble stele inscribed in Mandarin and Mongolian ordering all horse riders, even the emperor, to dismount. The glazed yellow tiles on the roof reveal the temple’s past dignity." (from CITS)

My New Crest

This is a new crest that I have designed for myself:

Lightning bolt (upper left, outside): Benjamin Franklin, who was author of an essay on farting, is also quite famous for his kite experiment involving lightning. He is the polymath and polyglot who I hold in highest regard. I was deeply affected by lightning near Lake Monsan in Quebec in 1996 so this strikes me as a fitting symbol to add to my emblem replete with its arrowhead-shaped tip associated with Greek mythology.

Clothespin (upper right, outside): Hundreds of patents exist as mankind has sought to perfect something of such grace and practicality that is quite nearly perfect already, like the Holy Grail. It represents a paradox: it shall never attain the level of utility which its tinkerers seek for it unless employed more widely in all households. 

The clothes peg, in British parlance, is a symbol of frugality and operates as an obvious badge of my life work with Project Laundry List.

Shield: The shapely shield used in the crest is bodacious and elegant, combining the noble with the proletarian.

Inscribed Cross: The Cross is a Christian symbol and, accordingly, for me it is a fitting way to divide the field. 

The engraved Simplified Chinese characters, meaning "The Middle Way" or in latin via media, are 中间道路. I chose Simplified Chinese over the more elaborate Traditional script because this convention, along with the adoption of pinyin, allowed a very high rate of literacy to be achieved in China. As a nod to the ancient, I have employed the vertical presentation of characters. I like that it is four characters in length

"The Middle Way" was a term John Henry Newman of the Oxford Movement defended in a famous series of lectures when he was an Anglican (Episcopalian), but which he rejected later, claiming, 

For a mere sentence, the words of Saint Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before... 'Securus judicat orbis terrarum!' ["the verdict of the world is conclusive"] By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theology of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized. (Apologia, part 5)

The crest speaks to the fallibility of human knowledge juxtaposed against God's infallible Way. 

The creation of this crest in the wake of the public unveiling of the Oxford Consensus this week does imbue the calligraphy with a current, powerful meaning. Furthermore, as an Episcopalian who was confirmed Catholic at age 22, I attribute my conversion to Newman, in part, and partially to the powerful writings of the Cistercian friar Thomas Merton, a Catholic convert from Anglicanism who pioneered dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual figures, including the Dalai Lama, the Japanese writer D.T. Suzuki, and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. 

N.B. In this day and age, the Chinese characters meaning The Middle Way (中间道路) are exploited by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, for political purposes. I am not in the habit of publicly pulverizing others beliefs, though that could be done with some alacrity, nor am I in a geographical position to opine on this topic so I wish to distance myself from those who might thus read into their inclusion. 

Canada Lynx (upper right, inside): Born in the Chinese Zodiac Year of the Tiger, I chose instead a North American predator (Lynx canadensis) known for its ferocity and beauty. I have regarded this animal in highest esteem among felines for many years. As with the wolverine, I hope to observe one safely in the wild someday. It stands for my hopes. 

N.B. It is my pet peeve that some people refer to the Canada goose as a Canadian goose. I regard the mislabeling of this cat in like manner as an equally egregious solecism.

Another disclaimer is owing: I should not be confused with another Alex, who seemed ignorant of the species that thrives when "bunnies" have sex.

Common Loon, Cattails and Lotus (upper left, inside): The Common Loon (Gavia immer) is my totem. Its eerie, lonely cry carry me to a place of tranquility. This image also incorporates cattails and a lotus flower. 

My initial confusion coupled with ignorance allowed me to wonder if the Ark of the Covenant was like Noah's Ark, a question I posed to my more Harrison Ford-savvy trippers on the day that I was both reading about these arks and was struck by lightning while photographing a presumably non-Covenantial rainbow. Some time later, I jumbled the cat o' nine tails used for punishment in the Royal Navy with the pervasive swampland reed, sometimes called catninetail. My first cousin once-removed and the son of a favorite great aunt was the youngest man ever made captain in the Royal Navy. As a descendant of the Mayflower passenger Stephen Hopkins, believed by some historians to have also been the mutineer in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Hopkins is said to have shipwrecked in Bermuda in 1607 and the play to have come out of this tragedy. It seemed like a motif that would encapsulate maternal and paternal family history, as well as the predilection to subversion that seems to run deep in my blood. It is meant to remind the observer of the way that language evolves and is sometimes misunderstood. 

The lotus flower (Nelumbo lutea) which grows in the North American habitat of the Common Loon has roots anchored in the mud, but leaves and flowers that emerge above the water's surface. It is beautiful and its tuber, a food source. It is here, in part, as a representation of my knowledge of New England and Canadian edible wild plants.

Twinflower (bottom left, inside): I am a fraternal twin, so that is one apparent reason for the inclusion of this delicate specimen in my crest. The perennial stems of the twinflower are slender, pubescent, and prostrate; the flowers are paired, pendulous, with a five-lobed, pale pink corolla.  The twinflower gets its eponymous Latin name, Linnaeus borealis, from the Swedish botanist Carl Linnæus who named it as his favorite. He created the system of binomial nomenclature, a scheme that organizes nature in a somewhat orderly fashion. I teach it to my students and regard the "Prince of Botany" with nearly as much esteem as the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once did, when he wrote: "Tell him I know no greater man on earth."

Bike wheel & crossed paddles (bottom right, inside): The bike wheel is a symbol of simplicity, like the token clothespin previously discussed. It is a rejection of the automobile but, with its sophisticated hub, shows I am not a Luddite. It becomes, like the Wheel of Samsara or the Dharma Wheel, a symbol of modern enlightenment, not to mention healthy living. It apprehends health in a corporate and individual sense. It should remind those who look upon this crest of Bill McKibben's admonition that if the Chinese could do one thing for the environment it would be to remount their bicycles and abandon the personal automobile. The Presta valve is oriented at three o'clock because the Trinity is immanent and transcendent and three is my favorite number.

The wooden paddles are a nod to the indigenous people of North America, particularly the Cree among whom I have mingled. They are a visual reminder of the summers that I dedicated to learning about James Bay and its threatened rivers, while at play in the fields of the Almighty.   

Greek Motto: As a convert to Catholicism and a student of the classics, these two Greek words, speude bradeos, which translate into the Latin as festina lente and English as "hurry slowly," adopt a connotation as powerful as their denotative meaning. Nobody more thoroughly or in a more elegiacal manner has offered a treatment of this phase on par with Desiderius Erasmu's Adagia II, 1, 1: Festina Lente. Overall, Erasmus' piety and humility combined with his sense of humor present an inimitable guide to the faithful so it is fitting to contain the penultimate nod to him at the foundation of this contemporary regalia.

Note: The artwork is all taken without permission. I apologize, but will make no pecuniary gain from this tremendous waste-of-time.

"to the bottom of seeeeeeeeeeeeea...It was sad when the great ship went down."

When I was a boy of seven, my twin sister and I were packed off to summer camp, where I would wet the bed and be a source of ridicule for my uncool clothes ("your mother dresses you funny")...but I still loved it, the hiking and canoeing, the camping and skinny dipping, the singing and orienteering, blueberry picking and washing with Dr. Bronners in Loon Lake.

We were allowed to jump off bridges into rivers (the nasty Saco), because it was the permissive post-1970s, and my favorite time, especially as I grew older, was singing at The Playhouse almost every night. Men who loom epic in my mind would strum Grateful Dead and all manner of Peter, Paul and Mary and Kingston Trio songs for an hour or so before we were paraded out to do taps and herded to cabins from which, as we grew older (and full of hormones), we would sneak out at night.

In that playhouse, we also learned a song, at age seven, "Got drunk last night, got drunk the night before, gunna get drunk tonight like I ne'er got drunk before..." Today, sadly, there would be editorials in the newspaper and social workers would be sent in to shut down the camp if such a song were taught and children were allowed to jump from bridges. We turned out all right--not perfect, but no more pot-smoking or hard-drinking or unhinged than the next guy or gal, I suspect.

There was another song, though, about the Titanic, which we sang that I must say was terrible. It was about the sinking of the great ship. "The Titanic" was made popular by Paul Newman and Brandon de Wilde acting in the 1963 film Hud. Our version ended with, "The moral of the story, as you can plainly see,/Is to wear a life-preserver when you go out to sea." (Before we called them PFDs, which would have fit better in the song.) It was to the tune of "Nearer Thy God to Thee" and was really a class warfare song in keeping with much of the rest of the American folk tradition that is the staple of my music chest still more than thirty years on.

This is all by way of introduction to the main topic of this post: Ships that sink. Deborah and I watched Bob Ballard, the undersea explorer who discovered the remains of the Titanic, in a gripping National Geographic special, called The Alien Deep. Last night, the episode called Ocean's Fury was full of tales of lost ships. Here is the official synopsis of the program:

Dr. Ballard thinks that rogue waves – and all waves – are getting larger and more frequent on the seas. In Ocean's Fury, Ballard travels the world in search of the forces behind the motion of the ocean, meeting with scientists and practitioners along the way. He talks to oceanographers, climatologists, river boat pilots, surfers, fishers, and more – all to prove a single point: the ocean is growing more dangerous by the day.

The most stunning theory proposed for how sea water moves in its 1,000 year cycle around the planet was that fish and other sea creatures, like squirt-propelled jellyfish, create ripples that eventually compound into "rogue waves." It was unbelievable until I woke up and saw my friend Valerie's Facebook post of this fish:

Oct. 13, 2013: The crew of sailing school vessel Tole Mour and Catalina Island Marine Institute instructors hold an 18-foot-long oarfish that was found in the waters of Toyon Bay on Santa Catalina Island, Calif. (AP/CATALINA ISLAND MARINE INSTITUTE)

Ballard reported that, on average, one very large container ship sinks every month in addition to hundreds of smaller ones. We got a helicopter tour of the "Graveyard of the Pacific" where the Columbia rolls on to the deep. "The Columbia River Bar is a stretch of water in the US's Pacific Northwest where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean. The Bar is also known as the Graveyard of the Pacific having taken roughly 2000 ships and 700 lives in recorded history." It was a tremendous amount of factual information, mixed with forceful editorializing about the importance of curbing anthropogenic sources of climate change.

This morning, the China Daily news clippings included a frightful picture of a Panama-registered, but Chinese ship sinking off the coast of South Korea. The title of the article: 1 Chinese dead, 18 missing as ship sinks off ROK.
 

The cargo ship CHENGLU15 is seen amid a storm in Yingri Harbor of Pohang in South Korea on Tuesday. [Photo/Xinhua]

It is time for us to get real about climate change.

Water Caltrop, Yam Beans, and "Asparagus"

Always intrigued by new cuisines and new ingredients, we stopped to buy some vegetables that I have not knowingly eaten prior to now. Outside of the Buddhist temple that abuts Nanguan Park, which is a stone's throw from where we live, a man was selling these interesting-looking vegetables.

Water Caltrops for Sale                                       Photo credit: Deborah Zhang (c) 2013

Wikipedia says of these:

The water caltrop, water chestnut, buffalo nut, bat nut, devil pod, Singhara (Hindi: सिंघाडा)سنگھارا (Urdu) or Pani-fol (Hindi: पानीफल) is any of three extant species of the genus Trapa: Trapa natans, T. bicornis and the endangered Trapa rossica. The species are floating annual aquatic plants, growing in slow-moving water up to 5 meters deep, native to warm temperate parts of Eurasia and Africa. They bear ornately shaped fruits, which in the case of T. bicornis resemble the head of a bull, each fruit containing a single very large starchy seed. T. natans and T. bicornis have been cultivated in China and India for at least 3,000 years for the edible seeds.

While I have eaten water chestnuts previously--mostly in American Chinese food--I have never seen anything like these. They are beautiful and as the Wikipedia entry states, positively bovine in their appearance with a hint of orchidness. Georgia O'Keefe would have had a field day painting them!

I just cooked four of them as a sample. They are delicious, but nearly impenetrable. Chef-A-Gogo describes his experience with these popular tidbits when he was introduced to them in Phuket, Thailand. He explains that they are not crunchy like a water-chestnut, but much more like an actual chestnut--you know, the kind that December's carolers sing about roasting on an open fire.

Chinese Nutpick with Mother-of-pearl handle

As we do not have a nutpick, we are using our tea awl to dig out the meat.

Wikipedia continues,

Water caltrop has been an important food for worship as prayer offerings since the Chinese Zhou Dynasty. The Rites of Zhou (2nd century BC) mentioned that a worshipper "should use a bamboo basket containing dried water caltrops, the seeds of Euryale ferox and chestnuts" (加籩之實，菱芡栗脯). The Chinese Herbal Medicine Summary (本草備要 published in 1694, written by Wang Ang 汪昂) indicates that water caltrop can help fever and drunkenness.

As you can see from the first picture above, our street vendor was also selling chestnuts, which are for sale everywhere in the streets of Beijing, much as sweet potatoes are, as well. He was not selling the water lily seeds of Eurayle ferox, though. These, I am quite sure, I have never seen.

"Chestnuts Roasted on an..."  Photo credit: http://perceptivetravel.com/blog/2013/02/08/wangfujing-snack-street-beijing/

Photo credit: http://www.changdashanyao.com/

I bought a ¥10 bag of the mountain yam bean. It weighs about 2 kg and will do nicely for a couple of yummy dinners. Now I must set about how to prepare them. It is not easy sometimes to find recipes.

On Sunday morning, we had brunch at a spicy fish hot-pot place with an old colleague of mine from the High School Attached to Northeast Normal University and she and her husband ordered something which the Chinese-English dictionary calls "asparagus", but is really bamboo shoots. NPR has a wonderful story about the kind of "asparagus" that I am trying to identify for you.

Photo credit: Laura McCandlish for NPR

Surname, Given Name

A suggestion for Google and others

This is a silly and short blog post, but one of the things that irritates me most in this era of the smartphone is that there are no obvious protocols for the data entry of Chinese names. Google Contacts allows me to enter the phonetic first name and phonetic last name, but in China, "the last shall be first and the first shall be last."

Would it not be smarter to say surname and given name? Is there some culture, readers, where this convention would not solve my problem? It is rather embarrassing to call Wu Zhang when I meant to call Zhang Wu (names changed to protect the innocent).

If you are more interested in this topic, there are a plethora of interesting articles available on the most popular names in Chinese. Li (or, as we spell it out West: Lee) is the fourth most popular. As usual, Wikipedia is a good place to start.

Beijing Botanical Gardens

Photo credit: Deborah Zhang

Yesterday morning I rousted Deborah and said we needed to be on the train by 8:30 AM. Our destination, not Bangor, Maine, but the Beijing Botanical Gardens. It took precisely an hour and a half to get there.

The Conservatory or Beijing Botanical Garden Public Greenhouse. Photo credit: You Are Not From Around Here

One of the points-of-interest is the Conservatory. As the Confucius Institute say, in typical Chinglish:

Beijing Botanical Garden Public Greenhouse, designed by Beijing Institute of Architect, is located in the western part of Central Axis Road of Beijing Botanical Garden which is at the foot of the Fragrant Hills...Beijing Government invested nearly 260 million Yuan to construct the world’s largest single exhibition greenhouse taking an area of 9800 square meters and a floor space of 5.5 hectares. Its space is as twice as the greenhouse in Kunming World Expo, making it one of the big events in China’s architectural history.

I did not go inside, but will go back in a month when the hills are bathed in vermilion (Beijing's peak foliage season is a month later than Vermont's peak by my guesstimate).

We paid the ten yuan entrance fee and then an additional two yuan fare to see the bonsai exhibit, which had more cool stones than funky little trees, but was nonetheless delightful. It was a bit rushed so we swirled through the bonsai garden in order to allow Deborah to make a 2 PM appointment, which she learned about at 9:20 AM while we were en route.

The roses were in full bloom and were, florally-speaking, the highlight. There was also a tribute to Cao Xuexin, the author A Dream of Red Mansions--one of the four great classic novels. I have read half of it, as earlier posts have indicated.

"Making Honey" Photo credit: Deborah Zhang

A bit fuzzy, my photo of an old printing press of Dream of Red Mansions.

A neat little insect enjoying the sunshine and clean air in the shadow of the Fragrant Hills.

A group of children played delightedly in the vicinity of this detailed sculpture.

Very cool lily pads within the confines of the Bonsai Garden's inner-sanctum. 

On our way out, we bought a plant from the same vendor that was pedaling this pitcher plant. The plant will sit on our coffee table, which we call a cha ji (tea table). It is customary and proper to have a plant on your tea table to remind those sipping tea (pin cha) of nature, because tea ought really to be consumed out of doors in the verandas of Cao Xuexin's great novels or even high in the Fragrant Hills.

Concerning the Black Stones that are Dug in Cathay, and Are Burnt for Fuel

It is a fact that all over the country of Cathay [China] there is a kind of black stones existing in beds in the mountains, which they dig out and burn like firewood. If you supply the fire with them at night, and see that they are well kindled, you will find them still alight in the morning; and they make such capital fuel that no other is used throughout the country. It is true that they have plenty of wood also, but they do not burn it, because those stones burn better and cost less.

-Travels of Marco Polo, Book II, Chapter XXX (circa 1300 A.D.)

Coal for domestic use being transported by use of a tricycle. Is this saving or adding to emissions? (Wikipedia, Brian Kelley from Auggen, Germany )

They Burn Better and Cost Less

As the Line 10 subway train chugged through the station called Yuanmingyuan, which is the site of the old summer palace plundered during the Boxer Rebellion (the Chinese call it the Invasion of the Eight Power Alliance, for good reason), I tugged on Deborah's sleeve, pointing to the footnote from my edition of Polo's Travels, in which my new Kindle has allowed me to become enmeshed. It says, in relevant part, "Near the capital coal is mined at Yuen-ming-yuen, and in a variety of isolated deposits among the hills in the direction of the Kalgan road, and in the district round Siuen-hwa-fu.  (Sindachu of Polo, ante ch. lix.)"

It then continues:

But the most important coal-fields in relation to the future are those of Shan-tung, Hu-nan, Ho-nan, and Shan-si [known in the pinyin as Shandong, Hunan, Henan, and Shanxi]. The last is eminently the coal and iron province of China, and its coal-field, as described by Baron Richthofen, combines, in an extraordinary manner, all the advantages that can enhance the value of such a field except (at present) that of facile export; whilst the quantity available is so great that from Southern Shan-si alone he estimates the whole world could be supplied, at the present rate of consumption, for several thousand years. "Adits, miles in length, could be driven within the body of the coal.... These extraordinary conditions ... will eventually give rise to some curious features in mining... if a railroad should ever be built from the plain to this region ... branches of it will be constructed within the body of one or other of these beds of anthracite." Baron Richthofen, in the paper which we quote from, indicates the revolution in the deposit of the world's wealth and power, to which such facts, combined with other characteristics of China, point as probable; a revolution so vast that its contemplation seems like that of a planetary catastrophe. [my emphasis]

I am struck by the prescience of the two observations of the Baron Ferdinand Richtofen to which I have drawn attention. [The baron was the uncle of the more famous "Red Baron," a successful flying ace known to the post-WWI generation for his daring feats and to the post-Charles Schulz generation because of Snoopy.]

The Baron of whom we are currently speaking was born in 1833 in Prussian Silesia. He traveled extensively and had a mountain named for him in China; there is still an eponymous peak, the tallest in the Rocky Mountain National Park's Never Summer Mountains. He is also said to have played a role in identifying gold fields in the decade following the American Civil War.

It took him some time to visit China after his initial intrigue was drawn there, as the Middle Kingdom was, at that time, immersed in the Taiping Rebellion, which continues to be the single bloodiest war in history by some accounts, possibly claiming 100 million lives. When he did get there, his notes were voluminous. The 1911 version of the Encyclopedia Britannica records,

In a remarkable series of seven journeys he penetrated into almost every part of the Chinese Empire. He returned home in 1872, and a work comprising three large volumes and an atlas, which, however, did not cover the entire field or complete the author's plan, appeared at Berlin in 1877-85 under the title of China; Ergebnisse eigner Reisen und darauf gegründeter Studien. In this standard work the author deals not only with geology but with every subject necessary to a general geographical treatise. Notably he paid close attention to the economic resources of the country he traversed; he wrote a valuable series of letters to the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce, and first drew attention to the importance of the coalfields of Shantung, and of Kiaochow as a port. [my emphasis]

It is in this second passage that I find a curious disconnect. If he thought that stripping China of its many resources was tantamount to a "planetary catastrophe," why then was he writing letters to the men he knew would be first in line to exploit them? This topic is explored in an interesting paper by Ghassan Moazzin, a graduate student at Cambridge on the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. His conclusion is simple, "It was only when he started to employ imperialism in order to develop his career and finance his work that he gradually grew more dependent on it. Simultaneously the closer his relationship to imperialism became the more his work was influenced by it." This certainly seems like a plausible explanation, unless the venerable Henri Cordier, who offered the meticulous notes on Polo's Travels, was himself making loose with Richtofen's characterization.

Anyway, these are the encouraging numbers from the government today. China is serious about climate change...or, at least, about reducing air-borne pollutants for its increasingly outspoken populous. When will the United States get down to business?



N.B. The word adits in the footnote of Cordier means the horizontal mouth of a mine, but does not appear in Bill Gates' MicrosoftWord dictionary.

Wendell Berry on His Hopes for Humanity

On Opium and Boxers

Why Edwin Meese the Third is Like William Jardine

As you may know, it is fairly easy to watch or listen to anything you want here--TV shows, documentaries, films, etc. Intellectual property rules are mooshi like pork. Last night, I settled down fairly late, in my den and dressed only in my boxers, to watch Episode 2 (Opium), having not seen Episode 1 (Sugar), of a BBC series called Addicted to Pleasure; it was supposedly view-able only in Scotland. The other two episodes deal with whisky and tobacco--two other scourges of the British Empire in which Scotsmen played a leading role.

In this segment on opium, though, Brian Cox does a brilliant job of jogging our memories about two-hundred years of history...except, as he notes, he is not jogging our memories at all, because, as in America, the Scottish textbooks are markedly devoid of mentioning the two major opium wars (First Opium War from 1839 to 1842 and Second Opium War from 1856 to 1860) or much at all about the trading of opium with China, which began in the 1630s.  On the other hand, as well-dressed, Chinese-born Professor Yangwen Chen from the University of Manchester proclaims into the camera with a righteously accusatory edge in her voice:

[In China] textbooks from elementary school to middle school to high school to university highlights [sic] the wrong-doings of the so-called imperialists. Students would be led to the site where the opium war took place. It has become part of what they call the patriotic education program to educate Chinese youth like me so that we remember what you have done to us.

In fact, the Battle of Peking in 1900 and the invasion of the Eight-power Allied Forces is also a small entry in most history texts, usually under the pseudonym "The Boxer Rebellion." The British & World English Dictionary still defines Boxer as, "a member of a fiercely nationalistic Chinese secret society that flourished in the 19th century. In 1899 the society led a Chinese uprising (the Boxer Rebellion) against Western domination that was eventually crushed by a combined European force, aided by Japan and the US."

Anyway, of the opium-focused episode that I watched, BBC's short review states:

Scotland is plagued with over 50,000 drug addicts and one of the roots of this addiction is the opium poppy. In this second episode, actor Brian Cox travels to China to discover how the seeds of this modern-day addiction were planted during the height of Britain's trading empire. Since then opium has fuelled the world's largest drug-smuggling operation, earned vast fortunes, triggered war with China and inspired medical breakthroughs. Brian Cox reveals how Britain unleashed the most dangerous of addictions on the world, and how the consequences still haunt us today.

This tells you only a little bit, though. The illustrative tales that Mr. Cox brings to life are, as he notes with a nervous laugh, exceedingly cruel and pervasive. In the days of yore, missionaries brought "Jesus pills" of heroin and morphine to cure people of their addiction to opium, which was smoked, drunk, and otherwise imbibed until the invention of the hypodermic needle. More than 13 million Chinese were addicted to opium at one point. The Canton System gave rise to nine factories in Guangzhou (aka Canton) that were raided by an angry Qing emperor. Fighting broke out and the future barons and Members of Parliament William Jardine and James Matheson, two trading partners who controlled a major proportion of the opium trade, won their place in British history. The junior Matheson was sent slinking home by his business partner, Jardine, to convince Parliament to send ships.

William Jardine

Jardine, Matheson Co. (now Jardine Matheson Group) is still a going concern with a towering office complex in Hong Kong that employs more people in its conglomerate than any entity but the government. Its website innocuously states, "Since its foundation Jardines has been one of Asia's most dynamic trading companies, often having to reinvent itself in order to survive and prosper. Reflective of the times in which it traded, the Group has led the way in many businesses and has helped bring prosperity to the region."

They do not mention the word opium once in the three segments of their company's timeline that stretch from 1830 to 1939. Still, there is little debate about what happened. I suppose certain past leaders of Iran could pretend that it never happened, much like The Holocaust, but historians mostly agree: Jardine and Matheson led England to war. Actually, they marshaled the Royal Navy for a wholesale slaughter in Britain's most ignominious war.

This is decidedly on point today, because when historians write the history of our times, they will need to tell the story of how the government shutdown was orchestrated by angry billionaires. Edwin Meese III is one unpatriotic, despotic, sick old man. I remember him from 1986 when I did my very first research paper for Mr. Green on Meese's messy role in the Iran-Contra Affair. Meese resigned in the wake of the Wedtech Scandal just a bit later. He is the William Jardine of today. Out of incredible self-interest, he is prodding our nation's "leadership" to do things that will be judged immoral and outrageous by future generations.

Acupressure Slippers and other Indulgences

Recently, I have been rather self-indulgent.

I have bought a Kindle paperwhite, which is already transforming me into an avid commuter-reader stumbling along the underpasses between subway stops buried in Faust and The Odyssey. I have subscribed again to The Atlantic. I have already read a book on Basho by the poetess Jane Hirshfield--more of an essay than a book, I suppose, and am several chapters into Marco Polo's Travels.

I have also bought a bicycle and will momentarily bike across the city, despite the fact that the air has deteriorated again. After a few horrible days, we had some positively wonderful days and now it is back in the "unhealthy" range again. I will go from Dongzhimen to Weigongcun, should any of you wish to Google Map the route.

Finally, I got myself a new pair of slippers. According to one source, these are the key features of my new slippers:

• Rich LeKang natural pebbles massage with tai chi magnet
• Artificial selection of grinding natural pebbles and agate stones, according to plantar acupoint scientific arrangement through pebbles natural arc to massage foot reflection zone, stimulate foot points there by relaxing tendons, relieve fatigue, promote blood circulation to reconcile reins and the function of balancing Yin and Yang

Functions and role:

• Smooth, promote blood circulation and reduce fatigue
• Expel toxin accumulation and keep healthy
• Improve endocrine balance, nice shaping
• Strengthen metabolism and keeps youth
• Restoring degraded organ function and prevent illness
• Stimulate cells to produce energy and prevent aging

This picture came on the box!

"Go ahead, call me a Communist"

The Freshness and Fragrance of the Political Discourse Has Fallen Like a House of Cards

We have to find a new balance, otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.                                                                                                            -Pope Francis

I have perused your late mathematical Prize Question, proposed in lieu of one in Natural Philosophy, for the ensuing year...Permit me then humbly to propose one of that sort for your consideration, and through you, if you approve it, for the serious Enquiry of learned Physicians, Chemists, &c. of this enlightened Age. It is universally well known, that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind. That the permitting this air to escape and mix with the atmosphere, is usually offensive to the company, from the fetid smell that accompanies it. That all well-bred people therefore, to avoid giving such offence, forcibly restrain the efforts of nature to discharge that wind.                             -Benjamin Franklin

All National Parks in MA closed. Patch File Photos

Well, it seems that the "freshness and fragrance" of this story is ripe for the telling: On a recent trip to Massachusetts, I shocked a firearms expert and period-costumed National Park Service employee at Minute Man National Park by recounting how Benj. Franklin had written a little-known treatise on farting (see epigraph, above). My mother would have been mortified that I related such a tale, but it is a masterful lesson on hot air of the kind that has enveloped our body politic. [Some of you may remember a colorful, if disjointed speech I gave at the NH Democratic Convention a few years ago citing this same article of flatulence. I was adorned in a T-shirt, just after Biden gaffe #986, that said, "Methane is a big fucking deal."]

This week, Deborah and I have started to watch "House of Cards." I am transfixed when Kevin Spacey deftly turns his head, like Magnum PI, and talks directly to me in the dulcet tones one imagines would belong to Machiavelli, had he been from the American South. Spacey's use of apostrophe is delicious; his hard-nosed, single-handed walking of Russo (no Jean-Jacques Rousseau or even Lloyd Bentsen) down the path to redemption makes me shudder. Can't you imagine Billary smoking cigarettes in the upstairs window? And don't you wake up wondering if Zoe Barnes is your greatest nightmare or wettest dream? House of cards, indeed! His bold, if predictably salacious, made-for-Netflix mini-series is probably the most interesting thing happening in politics right now, but, sadly, not the most important. Life imitates art, but still no binge TV show will ever be more important than the utterances of the real Congressmen as they unravel our national trust.

The absurdity of the public discourse has crescendo-ed to a new and tedious plateau.

In an increasingly shrill barrage of emails issuing from Democracy for America (Howard Dean's group), I have been asked to be furious that Bill O'Reilly would call Robert Reich, the old Clinton-era Secretary of the Labor Movement, a "Communist," but then be unwilling to debate him on a widely-watched national TV program called...yup, The O'Reilly Factor. These pleas for support for Mr. Reich are mostly manufactured by Reich himself, which makes me care even less for his plight. I am, unapologetically, not angry about this. I cannot marshal any indignation at these indignities. The epithet itself is empty to me since I live in the mind-boggling epicenter of capitalism (Beijing) touted as "communism with Chinese characteristics" and I really don't remember the Vietnam War. (Some of the miscreants who dictate our national conversation would probably label me a Pinko just for deigning to live in China for a few years or for criticizing my country from abroad. I say, let them eat smelly tofu.)

Photo by Steve Jurvetson

What does make me angry is that semi-respectable demi-men, like Reich, want to appear on that show to talk about serious issues facing our country. For thirty years, the Democrats have talked yearningly about the inimitable infrastructure of the Republicans with their vast network of academic institutes of crooked thinking and their popular, diabolical radio shows. Well, maybe, these gentleman should just walk away from the nonsense and have their own conversation. Have they enough sense and humility not to name their revolution the Fourth Reich?

People who like healthcare, National Parks, and other nice things that our government provides for us will join the new party and desert the prattling pranksters of The Wrong. I am for a new elitism that encourages Dean and his band of merry men to ignore the ignorant. Are these champions of the 99%--mostly from the ivory tower or collared in white--afraid that nobody will listen to them if they do not pander to the loony listeners of Limbaugh and odious oodles of O'Reilly oglers?  The nation would be better off if we sent the climate deniers and the panels of Darwin Award nominees (who are dictating Texas textbook tenets!) to continue their masturbatory exercises in an undisclosed location.

Abraham Alfonse Albert Gallatin (January 29, 1761 –
August 12, 1849) was a Swiss-American ethnologist,
linguist, politician, diplomat, congressman, and the
longest-serving United States Secretary of the Treasury.

Can you imagine Alexander Hamilton or Henry Knox squealing that William Duane, Albert Gallatin, John J. Beckley, Thomas Cooper, and Thomas Jefferson himself would not allow them to say their piece in the Democratic-Republican Party rags and pamphlets of that earlier time? It seems to me that there was a time when--pardon the implicit sexism and ageism in my phraseology--"men were men and boys were boys." There appears, now, to be a moldering sense of manhood in the political class. Mine eyes have seen it firsthand, which is probably why I like Spacey's project as much as I do.

Gone are the days of Benjamin Franklin, who used his withering tongue to great effect, but also schemed ways to bury the hatchet and make a great peace. "He that has once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged," counselled the Sage of Philly. Is Reich hoping O'Reilly will lend him a book? What is the end-game even if Reich can make O'Reilly eat his own lunch? Furthermore, we should wonder: does O'Reilly even read rare books?

Set is the sun on a day when Winston Churchill could, with a Cheshire Cat's grin and a puff on his Karshian cigar, rip his opponent to ribbons, yet dawning is an age of endless, unhappy, purposeless drivel out from which nothing comes. The acerbic tongue is not a newcomer to the political mire. For me, one of the most enjoyable books of recent years was "Infamous Scribblers" which indulged readers with all sorts of bombast traded between our nation's founding fathers and the burgeoning Fourth Estate of the nascent nation. Jonathan Swift was not even the first to delightfully skewer with satire while roasting the prigs of his era. Still, most of these people seemed to have had a purpose to their cutting remarks. Now, we are just left with Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert (my second favorite Catholic), and less central Bill Maher, for whom the fodder is an endless menu of Weiners and Spitzers and Edwardsian tails [sic]. While I laugh grimly with the rest of you, where is it getting us?

I left New Hampshire, partly in boredom and partly in frustration with the sort of meaningless nonsense that the Party Chairman there pedals to papers in the Granite State. He has trained a whole generation in his vapid tactics. Mountains are made of molehills. Men with unseemly weddings get national attention as the nipple-dragging charlatan generates his newest flash in the pan. It is masterful and empty. When the conversation should be about taxes, it is about sex. In fact, the only institutions more obsessed with sex than the Catholic Church seem to be the two dominant parties with their incessant focus on the hookers of Bookers, as well as overly broad pronouncements about the complicated and deeply personal issues of abortion and gay marriage.

I was too amused the other day when a friend, who will have to pardon me for recounting this, sent out a backhanded email for her At-Large City Council campaign. It said, and I quote, "Some of my opponents don’t share the same civic-minded principals that C--- resident’s value. If elected, my opponents will seek to radically change C-----, injecting ideology and politics into every corner of municipal government." (I will not focus on the genitive apostrophe appended to a single resident, nor the misspelling of principles, as I did in my glib, pithy back-and-forth with her.) No, look at the message itself! Caesar himself was no more adept at the use of rhetoric. She claims the non-ideological, unpolitical high ground for herself with a message that overtly transforms the municipal race into one charged with the sort of nastiness from which she seeks to distance herself.

I am praying for a change. I just hope nobody calls me the Anti-Christ. That is something up with which I should not put.

Alexander Lee teaches critical thinking, history, spelling, and punctuation in China.

On hegemony

One of my new tasks at the new job is to write original mock-TOEFL academic reading scripts. Earlier today, I used the word hegemony in writing about the British empire in 1865 so I found it kind of creepy when the main headline in the collected news stories displayed on QQ International, a Chinese chat program that is ubiquitous here, used the same word:

China won't seek hegemony, FM tells UN

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi emphasized China's development strategies and foreign policies on pressing international issues on Friday. UN's Syria resolution on point

Why creepy? Because when I visited Amazon.cn, it blared an advert at me for the Kindle Paperwhite because it already knew for what I would be searching. Is China Daily reading my New Oriental TOEFL scripts before anybody else in my office...or was it just a coincidence? OK, I am kidding, but read the rest of the headlines and I am not that far off from the brave new world we have created.

The rest of the headlines impressed on me just how broken the current day hegemonic empire has become--you know, the land of the free and the home of the brave(s). The healthcare debacle, spying on our own people, Detroit's bailout and bankruptcy. Yikes!  

US House votes to delay ObamacareUS spy agency mapped people's behavior -NYT
Shanghai Free Trade Zone begins operationMiss Philippines crowned Miss World 2013Home schooling popular with Chinese parentsXi to attend APEC summit in IndonesiaBankrupt Detroit gets $300 million in aidChinese student killed in USFM urges early resumption of six-party talks

We certainly need to get our act together before we are enslaved by the Tea Party. "No taxation even with representation" is not a way to run the country. Diminishing the Constitution has becoming a national pastime or, as Daniel Ellsberg put it in The Guardian a few months back:

Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended.

Finally, let me say, I had the task of looking over some old SSAT prep materials last week. One of the articles, on gentrification's pluses and minuses, cited Detroit as a success and SoHo as a failure. I coached my colleagues that presenting students with such a reading is, at best, anachronistic, and more likely tasteless. It would be like having students read an article from 2007 about how great the building boom in Chengdu and the rest of Sichuan was or having students read an article about the wonderful policies of Bo Xilai as mayor of, first, Dalian and, then, Chongqing. Not wrong, just kind of eerie given the Sichuan earthquake and China's "trial of the decade."

As I watch Michael Bloomberg sing the praises of the rich and what they have done for New York's schools and safety, I am a bit apoplectic about his elitism; however, SoHo is the success story, despite the fact that the best minds of our generation are no longer dragging themselves through these negro streets looking for an angry fix (yes, I know Ginsberg was from San Francisco, which just lost out to Seattle as the most LGBT-friendly city in the nation, but you get my point). Detroit is the failure. Suburbs and nearby urbs are the new ghettoes in Detroit, but less so in metro-NYC.

I am genuinely worried that if people don't start paying attention to Howard Dean, who has unwisely tied his reputation to Robert Reich's over the last few weeks, we are going to be in for a whole lot more hurt. China may not seek hegemony, but its rising star may eclipse our own.

Grains of Wisdom about The Millet 3

Coming soon to the proletariat near you...

Coming soon to the proletariat near you...
The Gleaners, (1865) by John Vincent Millet

Generally, for reasons that we needn't explore in this post, I avoid wheat, barley, and rye--the trinity of grains said to have gluten. Alternatives exist. A Chinese novel turned me on to sorghum a few months ago, and now a technology product is reminding me of millet. The latter was something I first tasted while adventuring as a teenager in the Alaskan or Canadian bush. It is no wonder that a Chinese technology company found this name attractive, though its tastiness really has little to do with why the founders of XiaoMi (pinyin for millet) settled on that name for their smartphone startup company. Neither was it because millet is "particularly high in the minerals iron, magnesium, phosphorous and potassium" like, I would imagine, most of their product line is, as well.  In fact, according to its CEO, it was named for a "Chinese idiom that calls on fighters to have millet and a rifle on hand to be ready to fight." 

Well, I am ready to pick up my rifle and harvest my grain! That is to say, I want to put my hard-earned dollars in this revolutionary company. I anticipate getting the Mi3 next month when it debuts for the proletariat.

I had a chuckle the other day, because my father got late retribution for the only other time that I have sought to invest in a company. As Google prepared to issue its IPO in 2004, I said, "Invest!" In what is surely the most regrettable lapse in his post-professional career as an investment adviser, he counseled, "Twill be a flash in the pan, son." Could he ever have been more wrong!? We have laughed ourselves to the proverbial poorhouse in the intervening years.

Well, what goes around, comes around. This week with the hiring of a top Google hand by XiaoMi, I sent him an email saying, "Invest!" He wrote back, "They are not a public company!" I must be such an embarrassment to him...still in my pre-professional financial illiteracy years. (Prior to writing him, I had actually sought to find the listing or three-letter code, but had come up empty, ignorant of how to check.)

Part of my enthusiasm for XiaoMi now is the lovers' quarrel (or long-time employment discussion) that has landed Hugo Barra as the new head of global for the Chinese company. A bold hiring move, one hopes that he can execute a global roll-out that will not make my intended purchase of a phone that is now sold, marketed, and presumably serviced only in China, as infuriating for a repatriated American as attempting to fix an iPhone was for an expatriated one. 

It is not just the phone, but their customizable Android system on steroids that has caught my attention. I needn't detail its features. The companies own website does a good job in the King's English, which is to say they seem to have invested in avoiding a Chinglish website or marketing materials.

My greatest concerns stem from nasty, largely unsubstantiated rumors that it is like nearly every other large Chinese, North American, and Korean technology giant. In other words, some feel they have built their mystique and their company on the pilfered intellectual property of others. Somewhat enamored and starry-eyed, perhaps, and guilty of cognitive dissonance, I cry out in their defense, "Who cares!?" It is a dog-eat-dog, brave new world out there and if they can take a chunk out of the rotten apple, I will be sitting in the skybox watching as the Chinese company that pretends to be American gets shredded by an upstart from the real China.

The intellectual property wars will not resolve any time soon, but what must happen in this sector is an end to the disgusting planned proliferation strategy of King Apple and its competitors. That scourge of a company has marketed-to-death and bludgeoned a willing public into getting an iThis and an iThat of every shape and description when most of us regular folks--the proletariat, the opiated masses who stare blindly into their screens on the subway--would be best served owning just one product. The price point and professed business model of XiaoMi makes me think that planned proliferation is not their ultimate goal. The landfills (and I) will be grateful if that is true.

A wide range of glowing articles and reviews are encouraging me to go down this road. I just hope I get a chance to invest. 

Beijing Bike Program

Much ink has been spilled over the new New York City Bike Share program, but Beijing has had a program since June of 2012. This weekend--ever the earnest environmentalist--I decided to "register."

First, we called the phone number and were told that for foreign nationals to participate, we needed to bring my Temporary Residency Permit and Passport along with a Beijing Municipal Administration & Communication card (subway card) to one of the five registration offices to activate said card.

I proceeded to the window at Dongzhimen Station and talked to the smiley attendant behind the prison-barred window, whose slats were so close together only the most petite hand could properly execute a signature through them. She told us that the program requires a down payment of 200 RMB usually, but foreigners without the proper paperwork must pay 400 RMB (or the cost of a pretty decent "cheap" bicycle). We asked what the paperwork was and she said that she did not know. "No foreigner has ever had the right paperwork." I could have had a prolonged, Kafkaesque exchange about how she could know this if she did not know what paperwork was required, but I was feeling flush so I laid out the additional $32.69 (200RMB) and filled out a lengthy form that required my Passport Number and an address for the passport even though passports don't have addresses, they only have an issuing state or province. There was a separate slot for my Beijing address.

I emerged some while later with a bit of a queue formed behind me and crossed the street to one of the 120 drop-off points. It took me a while with the Chinese-language only machine, but I managed to free a bicycle whose kickstand was, to the bemusement of a helpful-ish older gentleman watching my struggle, beyond my ken. After he helped me "get it up," I mounted the bike and was ready to pedal off to Church, but this, the first of only two bicycles in the dispensary, was broken.

In my frustration, I returned to the window and asked for a refund, which they could not give even though the bicycle had been properly re-inserted and was locked back into the dispensary, because my subway card showed that it was still checked out. I re-crossed the street and some new people were removing the bike and discovering that it did not work. I put my card on the kiosk and magically, it appeared to be checked-in. I returned to the window and got my refund. This was a whole lot of wasted effort.

At dinner, my girlfriend, who was very helpful though not very patient throughout this whole episode, said to me, "It is like educating a f&#king son." My jaw dropped, but I suppose that I was a bit foolish.

Allergic to exercise, she had told me that she would not bother with the program and expected that I would intuit that such a program was likely to be fraught with problems. Wide-eyed and naive since my Middlebury College days when we tried to get a bike share program started there, I was bent on participating. Maybe I will yet, but for now I am taking my $65 and buying a cheap, new bike.

Where were you...when the lights went out?

I am not politically correct when it comes to 911. In China, it is always the day after Teacher's Day, the major September 10 holiday that every schoolchild observes. People are aware of the American day of horror here in some part because the date matches our emergency services dialing digits, but it is no more memorialized here than May 12, 2008 or The Mukden Incident is in the West.

September Eleventh is, for sure, a day that changed everything for everybody everywhere, but outside of the extraordinarily beautiful new building that is arising in downtown New York, I am not really on board with its glorification as Patriot Day (we already have a Patriots' Day in Massachusetts on April 19, which honors another guerrilla action whose actual events were clouded with smoke from muskets, albeit not powdered buildings and airborne secured transactions or financial instruments of destruction). Nobody knows who fired the "shot heard round the world" just like nobody knows who dropped those buildings or quite how. Reasonable people--the type who think theories of evolution and anthropogenic climate change are highly likely--probably can agree that freedom-hating psychopaths--nineteen pathetic men, some of whom were likely prone to un-Islamic behavior*--played an instrumental role.

I have friends who were personally affected by the tragedies of 2001. The brother-in-law of one old friend was among those for whom the bells toll. Last month, I was still deeply moved, as anybody else would be, by the pieces of fire engine door that I saw on display at a one-engine fire hall in Manhattan. Still, I refuse to join the noise around this macabre "holiday"...except with this ornery post.

September Eleventh is really the day that America joined the rest of the world in realizing that organized acts of sedition and terror can happen anywhere, that you can never be safe from bat-shit crazy mofos or fundamentalists. If the stock exchange was in Oklahoma City, we might have collectively awoken to this reality at least a few years sooner.

It was eerie in 1999 to emerge on a beautiful day from a Parisian subway station to see gendarmes with serious firepower protecting the citizenry from who knows what, but this had already been a reality in much of Europe for decades. We were lucky to be late to the party. It was sad to see the same display of force outside (and inside) Penn Station on August 29, 2013. Twas just downright unnerving to ask a paramilitary policewoman with a semi-automatic rifle how to find the little boys' room.

As somebody whose foreign national girlfriend accidentally "smuggled" Cutter Sark Chardonnay onto a trans-continental flight, I am skeptical of how much TSA; the PATRIOT Act; and all the other expensive, freedom-robbing projects of our government have made the world a better place to live...or safer. My friend Roger snarked it best on Facebook today, "ABQ -> BWI -> MHT. Light-medium grope, no supervisor watching. I could have snuck a handgun through that screen at least three different ways. Feeling safer now?"

Selfishly, perhaps I just hate that five days after my birthday in the best weather month of the year has turned into our nation's new JFK assassination moment on steroids. (I also know where I was when I heard that Jerry Garcia died, man, and I bet I am not alone.)

Another rip in the azure canvas wins my nomination for a national day of remembrance. I prefer to focus on The Challenger explosion as the seminal event for my generation of Americans. Aside from most recently being from Concord, NH, which was home to Christa Macauliffe and now a primary school named in her honor, I see this 1986 disaster as equally symbolic of the fallibility of our military-industrial complex (and humans, generally), but also of some more powerful and positive aspects of our national demeanor that are in need of glorification: curiosity, pursuit of knowledge, and selfless service. Failure of the O-rings, while not universally accepted, is rather less disputable than why the buildings fell the way they did. With The Challenger event we avoid the falderal of whodunnit and how, which allows us to focus more precisely on the more important question: How do we make sure it does not happen again? Of course the answer is we cannot. My hyper-rational conclusion is that we cannot avoid tragic accidents or purposeful acts entirely so we ought to just love each other as best we know how and enjoy life.

I challenge you to join me on miserably cold January 28--"Challenger Day"--to honor the seven astronauts and remember the shattered dreams of millions of schoolchildren who watched that mesmerizing explosion again and again. If we need this kind of psychic holiday to memorialize tragedy that was, albeit, met by an "E. pluribus unum" coming together of fellow countrymen and women, this is the date I would set aside for a speech if I were the "Leader of the Free World." This is Obama's schedule today: President's Schedule. This was his schedule last January 28: President's Schedule. This is not a poor reflection on him or his schedulers, but on our warped national priorities and devolving national story. Let's take it back!



* A cottage industry has arisen around 911 myth busting (and rumor-mongering).

N.B. "Where Were You When the Lights Went Out" is a reference to the 1965 New York City blackout and was the name of a subsequent film starring Doris Day.