How Come One Is Famous While the Other One Isn't?

I couldn't just absorb the moment, though I wanted to sit there and do just that. I had to think quickly, and gratefully, I did. But the reason I had to do so is still pretty astonishing.

Luckily for someone who loves books, I live one block from probably the best and most attended independent bookstore in all of Milwaukee--Boswell Books. Like so many other businesses, it had to crawl through Covid, another ship tottering without help on the horizon. But it stayed afloat.

One of the surest signs of this is that, after months of online presentations, it has gotten back to the habit of inviting authors for live conversations about their work. Another one of those arrived the other night, when a Japanese-born professor, Shigehiro Oishi, came to hawk his work Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life. As far along in life as I now am, I've been through enough experiences to deep questions to myself: What makes a 'good' life? What constitutes 'happiness'? Is that even worth pursuing? Or is it something else that should spur us on?

Oishi is a professor of social psychology at the University of Chicago, one of those credentials that leaves you with one thought: Hooooo. Pretty sharp cookie. What he explored in his work, apparently, was what he called a "psychologically rich life"--one in which curiosity, a variety of experiences, and a sense of doing good for others keep one actively involved in the business of enjoyable living.

He has found, for instance, that the 19th Century Webster's Dictionary did not define "happiness" in terms of material success or the need to achieve something. That shading of definition has morphed into that direction in the next century, the one from which we've emerged. If you keep that in the front of your mind, he says, you find yourself in a trap from which you may not escape: the need to make more money and be more famous, regardless of how you may have already 'succeeded.'

What I thought, and still think he was trying to do, is to tell folks to keep it all in perspective--that other things, like helping people and maintaining a positive influence on them, are far better things to try to live for (which is a large part of what teaching as a calling and profession has always been about, whether paid for it or not). Such thinking isn't all that new, but perhaps his research is; I have to read the work now and discover what "evidence" he's developed.

All of this was kind of fun to listen to him extrapolate. His Japanese accent was evident, but not overwhelming; I kept thinking that a lecture from him might be fascinating to listen to. No doubt, either, that he must still be giving lectures; he didn't look much over 40. I got immersed into the discussion when a question occurred to me. I was the last one to be recognized before we broke up and allowed him to sell and autograph his book.

I wanted to know, in a way that might probably expose an obvious (slightly politically charged, too) answer, so I raised my hand and asked: Who had (has) the more fulfilling life--Elon Musk, or Albert Schweitzer? An admired humanitarian and religious philosopher, Schweitzer never seemed to focus on personal fame or profit, and helped thousands of west Africans through various diseases in the period between the world wars. Everyone knew who he was, I thought. That's why I used his name.

But Oishi thought he heard Schweitzer's name wrong, that I was referring to someone else. I repeated it. He gazed at the crowd and his wife in confusion. I thought it was an amazing moment: A professor at the University of Chicago, a social scientist to boot, didn't know who Albert Schweitzer was.

I gave him a path out of embarrassment. I quickly changed the comparison to Mohandas Gandhi, and he recovered. But you can't unring a bell. I wasn't trying to ambush him; I thought it was a softball question, something he was driving at all along. And, in fact, he riffed on how Musk is probably already caught in the success 'trap,' and someday that will occur to him.

That was fine, but--Wait a minute...I had indirectly brought up a new but tangentially applicable question: What makes people 'famous'? This very learned person had no clue about Albert Schweitzer and immediately knew Mohandas Gandhi, who lived roughly at the same time and had hopes for humanity, much like the (apparently) lesser-known but well-regarded Schweitzer. In fact, Schweitzer won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 (You can look that up). Given that award, Schweitzer should be more highly regarded, right? Gandhi was nominated for the Peace Prize five times (which I bet is a record), but never won it (amazingly).

Was it because Schweitzer lived 90 years and died a natural death, while Gandhi was assassinated and lionized in literature and film? Was it because that, while Schweitzer was a controversial religious philosopher at one point, much like Gandhi, he didn't try to merge two intense religious sects together? Is that what makes the best example of active living? Is that what makes people more memorable?

Or, in a sendup of the future, is Schweitzer doomed to the shoebox of lesser-knowns, even though he doesn't deserve such a fate? Is that because he did his work on the perpetually forgotten continent, Africa, the wealth and vibrance of which has never been sufficiently recognized here because it prompts the follow-up question: Then how come we enslaved so many of its inhabitants and had to fight a bloody war to free them?

Should we give Oishi a break, though, seeing as how he understandably has a greater residence of memory in Japan? If you became a professor in Tokyo, wouldn't you forget about, or never be informed about, others who gained significant fame because Schweitzer had little to do with the U.S.? But Mohandas Gandhi had little to do with the U.S., either.

As we move through time, certain names resonate while others just as deserving somehow fade. Some are occasionally resurrected, and the rush to remember surges for a while. We build statues to them. We also leave statues up when they should be torn down. What is recognized as shining history is often the function of who is in a power position to voice that shining, or how well it is done. That is why, for instance, the 1619 Project has never really gotten off the ground, because some racial chauvinists insist on making a 1776 Project to obscure it. The overly dramatized "lost cause" of the Confederacy flicks at emotional attachment that is attractive to encourage perpetual victimization, yet not deserved. Some statues of Robert E. Lee remain up, while others come down.

We are somehow still confused by treason, attended to by those determined to shape memory. Perhaps a statue devoted to the rioters of January 6 (a date which no longer needs a specific year to underline its importance, like September 11) will also go up at Mar-A-Lago. Many of us cringe at that possibility, but its leader was elected president twice. He has already made it a point to direct schools not to include the teaching of diversity, equality, and inclusivity in their history courses. 

Is it ridiculous to imagine a world that forgot that? It's possible in a world that has forgotten Albert Schweitzer.

Be well. Be careful. Resist, regardless of how futile it seems. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

I Read All That. For What?

I looked at my considerable library the other day and sighed. The following books--nearly all of which I read cover-to-cover-- are there on the shelves (in alphabetical order of the authors):

• Twilight of Democracy--Anne Applebaum
• Oath of Honor--Liz Cheney
• Disloyal--Michael Cohen
• Border Wars--Julie Hirshfield Davis and Michael D. Shear
• Betrayal--Jonathan Karl
• I Alone Can Fix It--Carol Leonnig and Phillip Rucker
• The Fifth Risk--Michael Lewis
• Unthinkable--Jamie Raskin (actually, I gave this one away after reading)
• A Very Stable Genius--Rucker and Leonnig
• Midnight in Washington--Adam Schiff
• Fear--Bob Woodward
• Peril--Woodward and Robert Costa

I don't publish this list to tell you that I'm smart or smarter than most. I write this to say that I made a thorough investment in absorbing relevant facts. All are evocative, in some way, of the horrors of not only 45-47's mismanagement of government, his ugly stupidity, and his endless lies, but also the potentialities of another term. We are there now. These works' expositions have been all too predictive, and we are just two weeks into four years of onrushing hell.

I thought the idea of reading works like this is to be more informed and forewarned, so at the very least, should the opportunity present itself, one can cast a logical, rational vote in favor of someone else offering an alternative that simply makes more sense--or, in this past case, some sense, which is a lot better than the sense 45-47 projected, which is none. This is how democracy's supposed to work, I thought. I didn't exactly run out and become the first on my block to buy these books--I prefer to read reviews first--but I did spend a considerable amount of money purchasing them.

It all circles back, though, to a single question: For what? These all attack 45-47 in some way. None of them stuck with the general public; they bounced back and forth in the same echo chamber. They created rage, yes, but also numbness.

The authors of these works, too, must be asking themselves this question, too: If a more informed public cannot become a more enlightened public to a degree in which efficacy occurs, does the First Amendment even matter anymore? Does education? Does conversation?

How the hell did this monster win more individual votes? The inefficiency of the Electoral College in 2016 was enough of a misnomer--or what we thought was a misnomer. But this time, he won.

He. Won. All that information revealed above, all that verifiable truth-telling, couldn't amount to success at the ballot box. I haven't read anything from anyone discussing it, and I get the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as MSNBC online. Nobody has touched this. Doesn't this bother anybody?

It brings me to another quandary: What do I do with these books now? Do I go on eBay and sell them as a set of futility? Do I keep them as an example of how incredibly stupid a fraction more than half the nation is and has been? Do these represent a decent archive of what we were supposed to do, but didn't?

Did I overinvest? It would suggest so. By the time I came to the most recently published book, the chaos, the depraved behavior, the idiocy had been well documented both daily and in these kinds of works--to the point at which I, like many have now, gave up because everything represented a reprint, more or less, of what had come before it. 

The dead horse had been beaten. I knew who to be disgusted with. I knew what laws had been skirted. I knew that the game had been fixed by people who should have known better or had been consumed by unrealistic fears or inspirations or quasi-religious obsessions. And even though the daily record revealed this implicitly but the books had not--I knew about those who were supposed to be on the side of justice for all had either dragged their feet, didn't step up when they were needed, or overlooked what was right in front of them.

But I digress. Do I keep all these works to skim over them again when the day comes that it becomes finally obvious to even 45-47's supporters that they've been hornswoggled? That they'll be inflationized into oblivion, with no relief in sight? Or will they believe, once again, conjured chimeras invented by those ready for all excuses, any excuses, to avoid responsibility?

Well. Edward Gibbon's The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire is still out there and can be purchased for, perhaps, comparable reading, since our empire is about to collapse into nothing more than empty rhetoric. And there's always Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly, which describes in clear and decisive tones how people with all kinds of advantages squandered them because they valued the wrong things and couldn't get beyond their own myopathy. Seeing as how we are about to be engulfed with blind, ridiculous Christian nationalism--and we are--maybe some of the more daring scholars left will begin work on how religion was used as a weapon turned out unsuccessfully, as it always has and always will be.

Then we will have another set of books to buy, read and collect. They will sell like hotcakes in the first three or four months, then fade away to something else. All of which suggests that there are no universal truths--or there may in fact be, but we can't get ourselves to pay attention much past staring down at our noses.

Sorry this is so dismal. When I get cause to write something more positive, it'll appear here. Give it a minute, okay? Or four years?

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

They Wouldn't Print It, So I Will

After all, this is what I have a blog for--

Every year, my congregation has a booklet that it puts out, filled with missives on the season written by its members, spanning about 300 words. It's strictly volunteer, but many people, like me, pretty much do it yearly. The church leadership gives us a biblically-based theme, and we expand on it.

In past years, I've heard good things about my entries. But in those years, there was reason to note that Christmas was a time for peace and joy and hope--which were pretty much the themes suggested this year, too.

Except I don't feel that way this year. If you read below, you'll see why. I don't think it's absurd or otherwise subversive; it's just where I am and will be for some time. The original shock of the election results has led to a depth of attitude that I find, and feel to be, uniquely devastating.

So I wrote about it in this year's contribution. And got it sent back to me. The leadership of the congregation, which I joined because it pretty much dovetails with my personal feelings on religion and its purposes (and still does), won't run it. They get it, I was told, they understand, but to publish anything this despondent would give them a reputation that might put it in jeopardy with other congregations they have combined forces with. So here, too, is a place where political considerations hold sway, where being politically correct has to take precedent.

Not here. Not in this blog, where I've been anything but. I have much more to say on this topic, but we'll settle for this right now. I was asked to modify my attitudes, but I refused. "I can't fake this," I replied, and I won't.

I don't want to waste the effort, so I'll run it here. I'll leave it up to you. Would you run it as an example of how people might be potentially feeling, or dismiss it as the attitudes of one? Is this such an awful thing to say as representative of one person belonging to one congregation and thus should be left to him to speak for himself?

If so, okay. Again: This is what I have a blog for--

For Christmas Booklet, 2024

This isn’t writer’s block. I’ve had that.

Nope. Not it. Writer’s block means the words are inside but just won’t emerge right now. They strain without coherence. They arrive, though. They always do. They just need a minute.

This is different. I’m without words. Not sure I’ve ever been here before.

Is this the definition of hopelessness? Where there’s no possible way to describe how you’re feeling? Where you could never imagine depths into which you still feel yourself falling?

I’m there. Which is to say, nowhere.

Not counting on that angel to show up and say, “Do not be afraid.” Uh-uh. Wouldn’t matter anyhow. We’d have to argue about the meaning of that, too, about someone born of migrants, who will soon be hunted down by a vicious ruler, using the power of government to assure dominance.

This is fundamental. This is a direct threat, allowed by those who should have known better. Who have found simple logic wanting.

Who define being human in ways I cannot fathom, with condescension and superiority. Who allowed thought to be eclipsed by raw emotion and an anti-reality.

And, in immense self-delusion, actually believe that God wills this. They have allowed themselves to be led about as far away from The Mount as can be.

I taught some of them, too, in subjects in which they should have connected with their civic responsibilities, their human obligations. I feel responsible, though I certainly didn’t lead them there. But nobody could have anticipated abrogation of thinking wrapped around Christian nationalism.

I am afraid. There’s no getting around it. I am afraid for my country. I am afraid for myself. I am afraid for humanity.

It’s the only thing left when you’re backed into a corner with no way out and no defense. When you don’t know what’s coming but you can guarantee that it’ll hurt a lot.

Zechariah was struck into silence by Gabriel when he doubted his good fortune and had every right to believe he was being blocked from it. I’m there now.

I’m done talking. All that writing I’ve done, all that reading, all that fleshing out of ridiculousness, has resulted in an empty return. 

When I see hope, I mean the real thing, I’ll say something to somebody about it. It’s not on the horizon right now.

I can’t. The words aren’t there.

Talk later. I hope.

I don't want to unnecessarily embarrass the powers that be that stood in the way of publishing, but after all, I did want to make it public, and this is really the only way I still can. I wonder, now that they think about it, whether they regret the decision to 'spike' it or not.

It reflects what's going on all over--that people are retreating for reasons that are taken out of context or mostly imagined. I find that astonishing. What is freedom of expression, after all, if you can't say something that someone, anyone (maybe even everyone) might have an issue with? Otherwise, it's empty.

Yet, I must remember my own context. Church publications normally don't want to stir up controversies and disagreements. Better to play it safe. Doing otherwise would be highly unusual.

But these times are, themselves, highly unusual--in which certain things had better get said before we dull ourselves to accepting the unacceptable. Which is, based on the acquiescence of high-level media entities, just around the corner.

So there it is. I print it because someone prevented me from doing so, and--far more importantly--not one word of it needs to be changed or deleted because my feelings have been somehow reduced. If anything, that volume has grown.

Enjoy. Or ruminate.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

A Bag That Wouldn't Open

Those of us who travel a little have favorite bags that we insist we take with us. They may be roomier or more attractive or more convenient or be part of a matching set we wouldn't do without.

I have a leather duffel bag that I simply love. It looks classy and has inside pockets that allow for extra storage. It has a handy strap that makes it easy to fling over one's shoulder. I think it's perfect.

But trouble arose the other day when I tried to open it. The zipper wouldn't go all the way across the top, as it usually does. It got stuck.

Being a guy, and having been in this situation before, I tried to force the zipper where it was supposed to go. Sometimes that really does work. The teeth on the zipper just aren't aligned quite well enough, and straightening them out and giving it a good yank solves the problem.

Most times. Not this one. You could see it, too. Faulty zippers hide nothing. It shall not pass.

It opened more than halfway, though, so I managed to stuff an appreciable amount of clothes into it. I wasn't flying, thankfully, so my trunk and back seat handled the rest.

When I returned home, though, the issue remained before me: Where do I get such things repaired? Or was it time to throw this, too, into the trash?

Of course I googled it. And found an old ally, one on whom I'd relied before, who'd fixed other bags I thought were lost. It's a you-break-we-fix kind of place with handy people who solve unsolvable problems. When I lived in the area, it was a go-to place for me some 30 years ago. Back then, it had advertised as strictly a handyman's paradise, located in a strip mall tucked off a major street. Now, it had moved, along with other businesses, to another strip mall slightly north. It was now primarily a shipping business, with its original name, listed in diminished lettering, a kind of yeah-we-still-do-that.

Not that the proprietor was particularly cordial back then. I learned he was from Uzbekistan. His accent was thick, his manner gruff: "What do you want?" was his hello. He always seemed to have a two-day beard.

But his skills were nonpareil. He could fix anything. It got so that his face softened when he saw me--not enough to grin, but without his normal, more combatant look: You again? I was thrilled to know that the business was still there. I have no idea exactly what the name--with three initials that represent something of an acronym, I would guess--stands for, but for me, it stood for a solution for my problem. The rest of it wasn't worth quibbling about.

The grizzly-faced one wasn't there, though. His son was. I remembered him, too; larger, friendlier, accent not nearly as thick, but born over there for sure.

He took one look at the bag, almost with a same-old, same-old demeanor. All I wanted to know was one, could he fix it; and two, when I could have it back. He didn't bother with that. "I'll be right back," he said, and disappeared behind a curtain.

In a moment, he came back with a pliers. "Just make sure you don't get the teeth on top like that," he said, in advising me how never to return with this issue. He moved maybe three of them back into place. Then he brought the zipper over. Fixed.

"What do you want for that?" I said, taking out some money, and I meant it. The 'job' had taken, maybe, a minute. For me, its value could last years.

"Nah, no problem," he said. I stared at him. Such a valuable act. He could have charged me twenty bucks, even more. I would have paid it in a heartbeat. This is America, after all.

I wonder what a native-born American, one who sounded pretty much like you or me, would have charged. Would he/she have been so nice?

Never to return? Not so. It had been at least 15 years since I'd been there. Would it be 15 more, I'd make a beeline. If he, and I, were still there.

I wonder if he'd filed for citizenship. Or, not. If the latter, he could, if the incoming thugs were cruel enough, be deported.

Criminal? Yeah, right. Drug dealer? Silly. See one, seen them all? Ridiculous. You never know, though, true? He could be hiding a cache' of drugs. But then, I might be using that classy bag for exactly that reason. Would anybody be searching it? Ever?

Business leaders are already nervous. Why send all the papers-less immigrants away? They fit a perfect role--doing jobs that white citizens won't, or ones they consider beneath them. Will the whites take them when they're vacant? We've already seen by the fallout from Covid: Don't count on it.

For a while, an insipid while, though, we will have to watch it unravel. This is the "mandate" that the incoming president thinks he's received. It isn't. What he really got told was in the response to his overwrought, overhyped scream that the country is getting overrun by gays and trans-people--which, of course, is absurd. People just don't want to hear about that. They don't want a government that prioritizes them.

They wouldn't have had one in any event. But he fooled lots of voters into thinking so, and the Democrats, in an amazing piece of inertia, refused to respond. Thus is the detritus of elections.

But now the cabal is saddled with deciding the scope of the simply overwhelming job it has promised it would do--never mind the damage to our economy and national vitality, which it wrongly believes will revitalize. Beyond the recession it will cause, it will be depressing, debilitating, dejecting. It will deny our very identity.

A year from now, I want he who fixed my bag to be there. I want him to try to fix something else I'm sure I'll wreck. He's the expert, every bit as much as Elon Musk believes himself to be an expert on electric cars, spaceships, and damn near everything else. 

But this expert matters. He helps people. Not Musk, who helps only himself. Like someone else we know.

The Uzbekian has nothing to prove, of course. All I want to know is if the purge has or hasn't found him. Word is that it will start soon with a raid on Chicago (NYT). That will tell a few things, either way, about how stupid, how tragic, all this is.

God bless the America I used to know. It's leaving for a while. Dreadfully, something else will replace it. It begins Monday at 11 a.m. Central Time. It'll be up to someone else to fix that massive damage, to the country, to its image, to its posterity. It won't be so simple as twisting a pliers.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark