Mar
31
Interview with David Sullivan (gbudavid on various social media sites)
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Note: Yes, I’m busy, still. David was gracious enough to provide me with this so I wouldn’t have to spend too much time putting together a blog entry. Many thanks to him for helping out.
David Sullivan is a US Navy Veteran living in Portland, Oregon, working as a truck driver. It’s neat hearing from him about baseball, the outdoors, beer, military issues, conservative politics, and kids & grandkids. I thought it might be nice to ask him a few questions and hear him speak at length about some things important to him:
What are the biggest differences between growing up now and growing up for you?
I grew up in Baker, Oregon. We had no TV until I was in fifth grade; drank milk straight from the cow. There were drive-in movie theaters. I never heard of McDonald’s. Your folks did not worry if you walked to school or the park by yourself.
The meals were breakfast, dinner and supper. There was no excuse for being late and justice was swift and painful.
If you got in trouble in school there was a spanking at the Principal’s Office and another when you got home.
The telephone was a big ugly thing with a Operator in it and there was a thing called a party line. That was a bunch of houses on a single line. Each house had its own ring code and you were the only one supposed to answer. Usually by the end of your conversation the Operator and all your neighbors knew all that you knew…
We went swimming, hunting and fishing without parents after fifth grade.
It wasn’t till 1959 and I was twelve when I remember Sputnik. I guess I was deprived: no TV, no video games, just movies and the library. The first movie that made an impression on me was Moby Dick. And Tom and Huck…
In your mind, when did the s**t hit the fan in the 60’s, and how did we get to that point?
I am not sure exactly when the brown stuff got in the rotor. I left high school at end of tenth grade, I went into the Navy August 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution happened while I was in boot camp. And I spent the next year in Kingsville, Texas.
When I left there in Nov. 1965 there were no hippies yet. I was in the Philippines Dec. 1965 till June 1967. There were hippies when I came back and it was a sight to see all that hair and stuff.
In July 1967 I went on an extended Western Pacific Cruise with stops in Hawaii, Philippines, Japan,Viet Nam, Hong Kong, Viet Nam, Taiwan, PI and Japan. In Jan. 1968 I was redeployed to Korea because the DPRK had taken the USS Pueblo.
By the time I got back in June the spitting on sailors and being called baby-killers was in full bloom.
What’s it like living in Portland?
I have never cared much for Portland: too liberal, and I don’t like the rain. It is, however, a good place to work out of.
What can every driver do to make the road safer, in your opinion? What can they do to make a truck driver’s day?
They can pull their head out of their backside. If they quit taking unnecessary chances, ie. talking on cell phones, putting on make up.
Actually they are pretty safe, but too much in a hurry.
What are some things you’d like to see change politically? What kind of future is reasonable for America, in your opinion?
I think that the USA should maintain its sovereignty. We should not worry what other nations think. We should get back toward the right of center. Take care of our sick, elderly and hungry before we go about the world trying to buy their respect. Respect is earned, not bought.
Mar
30
If I showed you the subscription numbers for this blog, you would break into open laughter. Hint: there are 20 people subscribed via Google Reader, and I know I’m one of them.
For 3 years of blogging, I should be somewhere around the 200 subscription mark by now, and instead I’m way, way less than a 100.
So if you wish, please do subscribe (given what I get paid for this, I probably should find a way of making subscribing mandatory), and if you have friends that are looking for something new to read, try to persuade them to subscribe. There’s a “get Rethink delivered to e-mail” option in the FAQ’s for those who don’t use feed readers.
Btw: an entry from a while ago, arguing that using a feed reader puts those of us who are bloggers on a more level playing field with mainstream media – An Introduction to Really Simple Syndication
Mar
30
Links, 3/30/09
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First three links, h/t aldaily.com; fourth link is from LGF:
- Parisians aren’t rude, but “impossibly polite:” fta – When my son was learning to write, his school report gave him marks for whether his boucles, or loops, of his joined-up letters respected to the millimetre the inter-line boundaries printed on the page. At the same time, he would bring back English exercise books filled with a chaotic caterpillar of mismatched letters. Why didn’t he use his neat handwriting in those books too, I asked him? He looked perplexed: “But that’s not how you write in English!”
- On Writing Well: his prose has an efficiency and clarity of which I’m envious, but his development as a teacher is what makes this article shine.
- Freeman Dyson: fta – Whether the topic is government work, string theory or climate change, Dyson seems opposed to science making enormous gestures. The physicist Douglas Eardley, who works with Dyson at Jason, says: “He’s always against the big monolithic projects, the Battlestar Galacticas. He prefers spunky little Mars rovers.”
- Michael Totten, “Baghdad in Fragments:” fta – Even if security were up to regional standards – and make no mistake, it is not – Baghdad still isn’t a place where most people would want to go on vacation. Its historic sites are a mess.
Mar
29
Reading too much into risk: On Dickinson’s “We like a Hairbreadth ’scape…” (1175)
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“We like a Hairbreadth ’scape…” (1175)
Emily Dickinson
We like a Hairbreadth ’scape
It tingles in the Mind
Far after Act or Accident
Like paragraphs of Wind
If we had ventured less
The Breeze were not so fine
That reaches to our utmost Hair
Its Tentacles divine.
Comment:
The narrator speaks about risk and the “lesson” learned. In the first stanza, she invokes an experience all of us have, nearly escaping death or some grotesque mishap that might cost us a limb or organ, but she doesn’t dwell on the combination of exhilaration and fear. That is saved for the second stanza, where “ventured” implies the former and “Tentacles” the latter. But the second stanza begins with “If,” as if to say the volatile combination of a near-death/near-disfiguring experience is our imagining. This is perilously close to saying death is imagined.
We have to go back and see how Dickinson’s narrator is playing with an idea that itself is a “Hairbreadth ’scape” from another one. The first thing we notice is “like” in the first stanza – maybe we didn’t escape after all. The “act” (deliberate) or “accident” (product of chance) is still tingling in the mind. “Act” and “accident” are philosophical terms: we know accident to be a “property,” something predicated that is non-essential. “Act,” then, is more than deliberate – it may be constitutive. Let’s say we were doing something dumb like about to put our arm near some farm equipment that would grab it and rip it off. Perhaps Dickinson wants us to focus less on the machine ripping our arm off – it isn’t really a property of the machine to do that, nor a deliberative act – but rather how we, rational animals that we are, put ourselves in a situation where we were less than competent.
So of course we try to read into the situation, “like paragraphs of Wind.” There must be something about our true nature in there, right? I mean, all those people looking at us as klutzy for other things can’t be wrong. But again, “like” shows up. The two similes frame the reality. There was an “act” or “accident,” “it tingles in the mind.”
What the similes do is force us to make a choice: we can make up a narrative (“paragraphs of Wind”), we can focus on what didn’t happen (“Hairbreadth ’scape”), or we can sit and have a tingling sensation. Our narrator doesn’t like any of these options individually: the second stanza encompasses all these ideas, within a counterfactual. She focuses on what didn’t happen, but in a way different from the “Hairbreadth’s ’scape” – that is too pointedly linked to death.
She’s interested in life. “Ventured less” recalls “far after” in the first stanza: motion supplants rest. “The Breeze were not so fine” alone links all three images of the first stanza: the tingling feeling is now that of exhilaration; the Wind is not empty, but in a particular form is enjoyed by the speaker; inasmuch it moves her hair, it has moved her to thought. It is because of the “If” statement and the intended consequence that there is a perhaps unintended consequence.
That same Breeze is not passive; it is a force we brought into play. “Reaches to our utmost Hair” makes this breeze sound like it is coming from within. “Tentacles divine” means it grasps because we grasped. Our speaker may think herself immortal, but that is what Medusa was before Perseus chopped her head off. The joke, again, is that we didn’t escape: we ventured forth based on our thoughtlessness, and now we are expecting rationality when we are merely rationalizing. I don’t think it’s a coincidence “It” turned to “Its” when we moved from one stanza to another.
For more:
…the Spartan survivors of the fighting on Sphacteria surrendered to the Athenians and their allies; the captors could not believe that their captives were of the same kind as the Spartans who had fallen [cf. "300," Thermopylae, etc.]; one of the Athenian allies therefore asked one of the captives out of spite if the slain were perfect gentlemen; the Spartan replied that a spindle (meaning an arrow), i.e. a woman’s tool, would be worth much if it could distinguish between true men and others, thus indicating that it was a matter of chance who had been hit by a missile and who had not (Thucydides, “The Pelopennesian War” IV 40).
- Strauss, “Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War,” p. 218 of “The City and Man”
Mar
26
Links, 3/26/09
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I know, I know. I have work to do, I’m behind. Still, real fast:
- Brad DeLong presents the Geithner Plan FAQ. (h/t marginalrevolution.com) It’s actually pretty clear, a few of you have voiced concerns about how this would fail: “What if businesses don’t need the credit to expand right now anyway?” I haven’t really found anything I trust making that argument, although Jason Zola did point me in the direction of one Richard Koo, who has a book (“The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics”) blurbed by Larry Summers arguing that’s what did the Japanese in.
- This is from a while ago, and may not be true, but seriously: if only directed at the poor, the poor have every right to conduct a revolution in whatever manner they see fit. If directed at everyone in society, the government should be shown the door promptly. If you can’t feed people properly, that violates the right of every single individual for self-preservation. Of course a gov’t can’t feed everyone, but this is a different issue, and yeah, India has money to buy food, and decent food at that.
- Scientists are increasingly coerced by prosecution teams to ignore their own professional opinion and just stick to the job of getting people thrown in jail. Take a look at Radley Balko’s other dispatches – it looks like investigative journalism the way it ought to be, and it is thankless work I’m sure.