Apuleius Books

I’m no fan of graffiti art, most of which is banal at best. Having said that, I find today’s AP images of Bansky’s work interesting. My chief objection to much of what passes for art these days is that the painter needn’t “qualify;” ie, make a masterpiece in the original sense of the term, demonstrating his mastery of his craft. It seems to me that Bansky has mastered his craft. It is visually correct. For example his Nazi catches the commonality of a man when separated from his Nazi stuff. His tiger looks like a tiger even though he must have done it quickly, and it says something. What I’m not sure; but it does stimulate thought in the way that a haiku does. The multimillion-dollar piece of “art” that was auctioned off a couple of months ago does neither. It was simply a vertical line on a contrasting base color. Duh!
We seem to have lost the distinction between fine and decorative art. In Italy I was as impressed by the marble and iron work in churches as by the oil paintings and frescoes. But that does not mean that the decorative artist had mastered all the details of portraiture, perspective, symbolism, etc. He considered himself to be a simple craftsman, albeit an excellent one. What he had done was master the materials of his craft and a sense of the appropriate. I like to cite Jackson Pollock with his famous drip paintings. He asked his wife if it were painting. I would argue that it wasn’t. It was decorative and showed a fine mastery of his materials; but his later paintings were unexciting, and his preceding a pale imitation of Picasso.

I am not a pacifist. That said, I am concerned that warfare, or at least weapons, are again being glorified (TV’s gunny, Ronald Lee Emey.) Weapons are not high tech toys, they are a sad necessity. Once again the old myth that we can win wars with little human loss is being promoted despite the so-called bad guys’ ability to circumvent our expensive technology. TV shows glorify heroes for “taking out” “bad guys.” with super accurate specialized rifles. I was too young to serve in WWII or Korea but remember them. At that time although everyone including the USA used snipers, we only talked about enemy snipers – and ours didn’t use special sniper rifles, they used WWI Springfield 30/03s. No matter how much it had to be ignored in practice and how many other unethical things needed to be done to win a war that had been forced upon the USA, the ethics were that it was unchristian to single out an individual for death. That was naive and impractical, of course, but a noble thought that was violated out of military necessity, not because sniping was some sort of fun game.

When Francis says that the Church is too focused on abortion, gays, and birth control instead of problems like poverty he is doing more than it seems. Birth control is settled for most Catholics. Homosexuality has never in itself been a problem, the issue being between objective sin and personal responsibility. But abortion is another matter. If abortion at any stage is murder than the bishops were right in forcefully opposing it. To downplay abortion now means that he is willing that somewhere down the road the entire question should be reexamined sans the current sloganeering. The church likes to quote Aquinas when it suits its notions but he did not consider abortion murder. He postulated three souls: the vegetative, animal, and immortal human. He did not think a foetus was human until near birth even though it resembled an infant earlier. His problem with early abortion was that it was a form of birth control and since to him life is better than nonlife birth control was frustrating God’s plan to make lots of people. That is a poor argument in today’s overpopulated world for the commandment to increase vand multiple has clearly been fulfilled. Francis doesn’t want his church saying that it is better that children be born in disease and starvation than not be born at all. He has opened a back door to reexamine the issue as not always being one of murder, and in so doing gotten the Church out of the box that it has put itself into. This conversation may not start for awhile but he has made it possible by downplaying the sin issue here in favor of more immediate sin issues like poverty and effective slavery, and all the inhuman treatment that follows from them.

A quick search of the internet confirms what we all know. The Do Not Call Registry is a failure but, having passed the original bill, congress pretends that it has done its job and ignores the continuing problem. There are more holes in the present system than in a Swiss cheese and the government web sites only give instruction on how to report illegal calls. Of course most of the robocalls are perfectly legal, just annoying. The government sites just ignore this far larger problem as though the elephant doesn’t exist. Some non-governmental sites do give information on how to block individual callers but why not improve the law? Are our politicians reluctant to lose their “right” to invade the privacy of our homes when the next election comes around? Or don’t they want to offend the “research” and other “this is not a sales call” business interests?
There is a solution. It is prohibited to use an automatic dialer to call cell phone numbers, why not land lines too?

I was a bit of a bastardized Unipresser. In 1961 I was hired by the NY bureau manager for UPI-Movietonews, the late Marvin Lorber. I started as a copyboy, became a script writer, and finally a failed reporter. When in 1963 UPI severed its partnership with Movietone, we became UPI-Newsfilm for a few years before joining with ITN in Britain to form Worldwide Television News (WTN). In these incarnations I was the archivist – Library manager until we were absorbed into ABC News in the 1990s. Although our section was sort of the ugly duckling of UPI I have always considered myself first and always a Unipresser. It was there that I learned journalism, although that elitist term was taboo. I value my days with UPI over all my other years. There I learned to love and respect my comrades: Marv Lorber, Bill Higgenbottom (our god), Paul Sisco in DC, Jackie Aamodt on “the desk,” and Skippy our teletypist. Jackie always insisted that we write Jacqueline for the president’s wife because she was the only Jackie in that office. Skippy had been assigned to the relatively less demanding duties at UPI-Movietone because he had multiple sclerosis. It was Skippy who patiently taught me and others how to write an English sentence and spell it correctly. So much for a college education. Marvin once told me that had I been a journalism major he’d not have hired me.
No one was fired in those days. I screwed up in a major way. So that he would not have to bring it up himself, I said to Marvin that I assumed he would fire me. To this day I remember his answer. With a sour face he simply said: “No, when you’re on here, you’re on.” Those were the days. At UPI-Movietonews, during the Cuban missile crisis, I remember staying awake all night because I hoped to be needed. UPI-Newsfilm had only been functioning a month when Bob Hewett, our chief editor, came into the library to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot. I was on my knees looking through film cans but I could read in his face that he wasn’t kidding. It was time to get to work. It wasn’t until much later that night, while riding the subway home, that I could allow myself to be overwhelmed.

Although I suffered through Latin, probably being the worst language student ever to have lived, I encouraged both my kids to study it. Aside from the usual excuses made for taking it, the study is a rite of passage into a shared academic life as opposed to a technical need. One’s college studies should be more than training for a job. College should be about Latin and 2:00 AM bull sessions about Kant. Academic fun, not just stuff one “needs.” Anyone who asks: “What do you need it for?” is missing out on a lot more than Latin. I’m a bit fanatical about this. I’d have done some Greek too if I’d not been the worst language student who ever lived.
From the Adams family of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the Roosevelts, to the Kennedys, and to innumerable hard working US ambassadors, the fruits of a liberal or humanist education are obvious. College education should not be centered on job placement but on producing a broadly educated leadership – leave training to the two bookends of High School and Graduate studies. But today’s education is focused on job preparation and that is a disaster. Even our colleges are now foregoing a core curriculum in the humanities for lack of time to squeeze in career driven course work. Yet these arts are worthy of study for their own sake, in college and throughout life. Talk with the leaders of business or banking and one will find men and women with a wide knowledge of history, music, literature, and even the classics of Greece and Rome who are distressed by the inability of their middle managers to write anything more than an email. I find it unfortunate that today’s universities see themselves as high end trade schools. Students may live in better quarters than their parents do and dine on a tastefully arranged and varied diet, and that may be preparation for life in a macmansion society but hardly for leadership in any field . When I was in college over fifty years ago I shared a double room and bunk bed and the high point of the week was barbecued beef on a bun. Our professors never spoke of it but they had endured the Great Depression and the World War. They worried where the world was going in the Atomic Age. That one was learning to think abstractly and lead by character rather than some formula taught in a management course was assumed.
Not everyone wants a humanist education – or for that matter, much education at all. For these there are the trade schools masked as community colleges that are necessary because of the poor preparation for life given by our “high” schools. For this I blame parents as well as educators. How often do we hear parents say that little Johnny doesn’t like some subject, forgetting that he has perhaps eighty years of life ahead of him, and cannot know as a teen what is good for him or what he will want to know ten years hence. The educators are more interested in abstract theories of education than telling kids the hard facts of life, well understood in the third world: that they aren’t in school to enjoy learning but to learn.
But I digress. If a young person just wants to know technology, fine. That is now available on-line and it can lead to a good job as a technician (using that word broadly.) A brick and mortar college is no longer necessary just to acquire technical knowledge – just as it wasn’t at the beginning of the industrial age. What four year colleges are needed for is to prepare future leaders. This is done in those 2:00 AM bull sessions, over shared coffee in the student union; by underpaid professors who actually care about their subjects and their students more than about publishing; by extramural and intramural sports that don’t exist for themselves but to provide all the students – not just a few jocks – with a valuable life experience. (I am reminded of Wellington’s comment about winning the battle of Waterloo on the playing fields of Eton. He played at Eton but he didn’t spend his life playing at ball; the same can be said of T E Lawrence.)

Istanbul is two cities. In the north is the wealthy business sector with modern hotels, conference centers, and girls in miniskirts. To the south is poor old Constantinople, the tourist destination where many women still wear black and sometimes cover their faces and where men try to entice tourists into restaurants and shops to earn a small and irregular income with which to feed their families. Since the time of Ataturk the country has officially been secularized but what has been ignored in the West is that the bulk of the poorly educated Turkish people, both in the old city and in the countryside, would prefer a more Islamic state – perhaps not an “Islamic Republic” as in Iran – but one with no clear distinction between public policy and religion. The action of the Prime Minister to build a shopping center in imitation of Ottoman designs speaks to his admiration for this ideal – an ideal supported by the peasantry though clearly not supported by the secularized businessmen in the profitable northern city. How little we understand that his sultan-like indifference to the complaints from the north is completely in accordance with the wishes of the masses.
One might like to read the NY Times article linked below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/opinion/yu-in-china-power-is-arrogant.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130509
What I find interesting about the Times article is how little whole peoples change – and other people’s stereotypes of them. I’ve seen similar stories as this coming out of China all my life. Very often they are presented as the norm when in fact they either are exceptional or are misunderstandings of the culture. Then too, young reporters are inclined to see every “unamerican” event and scandal as something new and blame it on whatever form of government happens to be in power rather than seeing it as an element of the culture. They don’t compare the graft in the near east with Tammany Hall in 19th century New York, for instance, or recognize it as the victor’s way of distributing spoils to clansmen or supporters.
I know more of Japan than China so I’ll cite two Japanese examples of willful blindness and ignorance by our press.: The common American report (at least until a few years ago) that Scotch whiskey costs $100.00 a shot there. That was never normal. What was true was that (A) For many years foreign whiskey was taxed at too high a rate to be common. as Japan protected its own brand, Suntory. (B) Japanese culture frowned on buying imports. (C) It was, and still is, a part of Japanese business culture to show off one’s success by entertaining at extravagantly high-end nightclubs which are seen as prestigious if they overcharge – but that is a business, not a personal, expense. (These are all male outings by the way – sort of the modern equivalent of geisha parties.)
As for misunderstandings: Every time the USA set off an above ground nuclear test in the “50s, the US tabloids would show some Japanese with a dust mask – the racist implication being that Japanese were either ignorant or silly or both. In fact it is fairly common in Japan to wear a surgical mask if one has a cold or other infection, not to protect one’s own self but to prevent your giving the infection to others.
All this I find both amusing and annoying. Before The USA opened diplomatic relations with Communist China, all we got were reports from “China watchers” in Hong Kong. These were usually wrong, the work of Americans who seemed to never get out of the Hong Kong bars. Though why our media did not forward reports coming out of other countries which did have relations can only be explained by willful ignorance in support of US policy. (On the other side, the so-called secret bombing of Cambodia was a secret only in this country. And there was no reason to be secretive. The pro American Cambodian government authorized the bombing of the Ho Chi Ming trail which was no more in “Cambodia,” than the southern Mississippi River was in the USA when it was a part of the Confederacy, an argument that with some modification can be made for our violation of Pakistan’s northern frontier lands.)
I worked in the news business in those years. I recall reading some China watcher’s forecast of the reception that Nixon would get – all celebratory and appreciation of a visit from the great US president – cheering crowds with little American flags – something wonderful like the fall of the Berlin wall would actually be a few years later. Hell no, I said at the time. The Chinese attitude is that Peking is the center of the world. It doesn’t that much care what is happening far from its borders. China (at that time at least) was the only nation on earth that didn’t need anyone else. Under Mao, China may have been poor and authoritarian but it was self sufficient and better off than it had been before the revolution. I accurately predicted that the reception for Nixon would be “correct” but not overly warm. If he wanted to, Nixon could come to Beijing and admit to his past sins against China. However, after Nixon met Mao, then, with the Son Of Heaven’s blessing, things would warm up. They did. The China watchers were wrong. I write all this not to crow – well, maybe a little – but to warn against taking too seriously reports that come out of Asia (or elsewhere) when they look silly or extreme. Many times the writers do not take local culture into sufficient account. For example they were so upset by the Tienanmen Square slaughter that they missed the fact that the revolutionaries’ demand for western style democracy and individualism was not supported by most Chinese, to whom it was quite alien and unwelcome. Confucian thinking was still alive in China and the good of the group was more important there than the will of an individual (our so-called “freedom.”) The rebels were displaying our Declaration of Independence; how would most Americans react if for weeks a crowd were demanding communism and waving Mao’s little red book in Times Square? I’m hardly supporting the Chinese government’s massacre of its liberals but what surprised me at the time was how long it took before they reacted.
Oh well, here I go off on a tangent again. Sorry if I bore you.

Obama’s speech last Thursday should and probably will be as important as Ike’s military industrial complex speech though CNN seems to have missed that. As he is preparing to exit the executive himself, he is now trying to wind down Chaney’s open ended war on terrorism which maximized executive authority, and the CIA that answers to the executive. The CIA has once again been getting beyond intelligence gathering and he wants to reign it in, just as it had to be stopped from assassinating anti US government leaders in the seventies. Excess executive power is something that Obama as a constitutional lawyer must worry about. We saw something similar in the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which gave Johnson a free hand to extend involvement in Vietnam without further congressional authority until it was finally revoked because Vietnam had been such a disaster. Of course the danger is not only the executive and the intelligence services and “security” fanatics but the weapons industry which would love an endless and unrestrained but vague war on terrorism. The same goes for Obama’s promise to close Guantanamo.I have no problem with targeting a traitorous citizen who calls for jihad against his own country but I do have a problem with denying trial to someone taken alive. The right to trial has been one of the major things that separates the “Free World” from that of dictators, even those that we like. History doesn’t exactly repeat itself but the tendency to centralize authority does, as does blind support of those who cloak themselves in the flag forgetting what it stands for. Ben Franklin warned that a people who are willing to sacrifice a little freedom for a little security will end up with neither. He was right. After 9/11 the American people were expecting and prepared for continuing attacks and loss of life and we are prepared to wage war on Al Qaeda and those who would give it cover, but later somehow were shocked by the Boston marathon attack. Just as Johnson promised both guns and butter, we’ve been lulled into an endless war on terror which, however, would not involve losses at home, merely forever cost money in the name of seeking some perfect security technology. Obama is right; there will be terrorism for a long time if not forever, but targeting specific individuals and groups need not mean unrestrained executive action without some sort of judicial authority as well.

CNN ran a story today on cancer frauds which puts me in mind of one of my favorite complaints. The misuse of the death penalty. I’m not necessarily against it but have two serious reservations: first that it punishes the innocent. I’m thinking of some convict who’d mother spends ten or twelve years agonizing over him and trying, not to overturn the verdict, but simply to keep him alive in prison. If there is to be a death penalty the appeals process should be fast tracked to not more than two or three years at most. But that is not my issue here. It is that the penalty is misapplied. A murderer who faces death has offended only against the family of the person(s) that he kills. Bad enough, but what about the con man who takes money that people intend be used to help children dying of cancer, or who defrauds hundreds of old folks of their retirement savings, or the mugger who may cause lifelong physical injury and almost certainly causes lifelong psychological trauma to a person he hits. What of the bankers in their expensive suits who caused financially unsophisticated people to lose their homes by mortgaging them a house more expensive than they could actually afford when the economy downturned? What of the guy who thinks it is fun to create computer viruses that, besides costing business billions, forces me to buy security programs for my PC? Or what of the bandit who uses a gun in the commission of a crime – we have the right to assume that he would be willing to use it. None of these scum face the death penalty. Not that killing them would discourage others, but it would eliminate them. I have always found it absurd that convicts have rights. Unlike the one-off murderer, people like these have decided to make a career out of preying on society. But by definition a society is a grouping whose purpose is to promote the common welfare and defend against their enemies. It is a logical absurdity that one who preys on a society so defined can also be a member of it. In natural law, once convicted he is not entitled to the rights of membership, unlike the man or woman who just kills his or her mate. The Byzantines actually had a better punishment. For serious crime they might blind or otherwise maim the culprit allowing him to live out his days considering his wickedness and hopefully repenting before having to meet the Divine Judge. Regrettably, in our day few people have a faith and fear of the Lord that would permit such a penalty to work. Nor should this issue be taken out of context. Mistakes are and would continue to be made. But people die from curable disease and accidents, or from drugs supplied by pushers who likewise do not face the death penalty. Our youth die in questionable wars, as do the children of these wars who are quickly forgotten as mere collateral casualties. Oh, I know that this is an extreme position that even I would not defend if actually implemented; but anyone determining these things should keep in mind that the death penalty is what could reasonably be demanded if our society were to want it. In the grand scheme these crimes are more hurtful to the whole society than an occasional murder. We need a better balance.