Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Silver Linings

[I] The Parties of Truth and Falsehood
   I promised myself and anybody listening to keep down comments about Trump, so don’t consider these remarks to be about the president.
   Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, was reported to have said that the media should keep their mouths shut, that they are the “opposition party.” Well, I think Bannon was right about the media—in what he said, though not in what he meant.
   I have been very pleased—an emotion not much felt these days—about how frankly, how in a very clear way the press have stated that Mr. Trump is lying—using that word. In more than one article the Times has been utterly explicit in stating that Trump is saying what is false while knowing that it is false. In my press reading it is unusual that a publication would be so blunt, so explicit, not to mention about the president of the United States. Hint, yes, suggest, but seldom actually accusing the president of being a liar.
   As I said, Mr. Bannon was correct with his opposition party accusation. That makes the media the party of truth, while Donald Trump and his hangers-on constitute the party of falsehood. I hope the press in its various guises will keep it up.
There are no expectations that the “establishment” will change as it is in power. Some people might be able to get used to that; I don’t think that I can.


[II] Healthy Reactions

      Everyone who pays some attention to the news knows by now that our president has taken a major step to act on the 1940s meaning of America First when that stood for isolationism and keeping the United States out of the coming war agains Hitler’s Germany. Now “America First” has tacitly taken on the meaning that America is essentially a Christian country: Muslims stay out.
   At least those who are not here already. Trump’s ill thought out order has created an untold amount of hardship and downright chaos, as the lives of a huge number of people have been affected—from merely inconvenienced to—much more frequently—stopped in their tracks, literally and suddenly, and forced into impossible situations. I’m not very good at succinctly summarizing the havoc that Trump’s action has caused, but the press and the internet are full of detailed accounts and descriptions—for the rare reader of these comments who is not already informed.
   The present remarks, however, want to draw your attention, if that is needed at all, to a silver lining. The reaction to Trump’s move has been fabulous. Not from the Republicans; most of them have to be hit over the head a few more times before they wake up. But many organizations, with  predictable examples and unexpected ones. These groups and individuals are not only making statements to the effect that immigrants have made and are making untold contributions to American society, but they are asserting in loud and clear voices that keeping out would-be Americans for their religion or for the places from where they comes Is Not What America Is, Is Not Who We Are.
   There are instances where there are grounds for being suspicious of patriotism. But these protestors are not shouting, my country right or wrong. They are demanding what is right.


Friday, January 27, 2017

Germany and Me

A Brief Account of my Encounters with Germany from Birth and Through the Years
-- I --
   I was born in Heidelberg on in February, 1927 to a business man, Jacob Weingärtner, originally from Flehingen, and his wife, my mother, Grete (Kahn), originally from Offenburg.  My parents were moderately observant Jews, somewhere between orthodox and “liberal,” as was the synagogue we faithfully attended every Sabbath and holiday.
  As a kid, I went to a Kindergarten and then, at the very beginning of the Hitlerzeit, to a public school in Neunheim, not far from our house on the Moltkestraße. That lasted into my third grade, having been taught by Fräulein Sonnenschein, known for the braids circling her head and then Herr Müller, known for his Tatzen with a long stick on the palm of a culprit.
   That lasted into sometime during my third grade when Jews were evicted from regular schools and a Jewish school was established, taught by Jewish teachers who had been dismissed from their posts. I recall only one actual elementary school teacher, Herr Durlacher; the others had been thrown out of their Gymnasium or Realschule posts and were not used to teaching little kids.
   The first locus of that Jewish school were some classrooms of a regular school in Rohrbach (where I was once tripped to fall downstairs) but somewhere in my third grade we were kicked out from there and moved into a building that had housed a Jewish organization on the Bunsenstraße. That lasted until Kristallnacht, November  9,1938, now sensibly renamed Progromnacht,. On my way home I saw the smoke from the burning synagogue as I got to the Neckar to bike across the Neue Brücke.
   It was suggested to my father that he take a long walk that day, but he  was too good a German to try to evade his fate. So he was at home when they came early in the evening to arrest him, very politely,. He was even told to put on warm clothes, since Dachau, where he was to be taken, was by then quite cold.
   He returned some time in January, much thinner, with a shorn scalp and some frostbites.

-- II –
      My father had been tipped off fairly early that the American consulate in Stuttgart was giving out numbers, in the manner of a busy bakery, to determine the order in which they were to appear to get visas. He had received the required affidavit from a relative who had gone to the US much earlier. To my knowledge, everything went smoothly there, later that January or early in February. (Most noteworthy for me was the fact that for the first time I saw someone writing with his left hand.)
   Not much later all of the furniture and household items that we wanted to take with us were loaded into two huge boxes called lifts. Every item had been listed and approved for export and was checked off  by a functionary as it was carried out to be loaded. It is often forgotten that before the actual holocaust there was a period when the German policy for Jews (the Judenfrage) was emigration, provided plenty was paid for the “privilege.”
   So we got out, actually traveling in style on the Queen Mary, since my father could buy tickets with money that he could not have gotten out of Germany. We arrived in New York on March 9, 1939, a month or so after my 12th birthday. That day was a Thursday; on the Monday after it, I was taken to a nearby elementary school to be in a sixth grade class that already housed a few other German Jewish refugees. I quickly became American. (At a speech test for some reason later on, it was noted that I had a slight New York accent.)
   Quite some time passed before I had anything further to do with Germany, except for the very important fact that I spoke German with my parents as long as they lived, into the eighties. That helped me maintain—if not improve—my German language skill to the point that when I came to write my doctoral dissertation (and first published book) on Georg Simmel, I had little difficulty basing it just about entirely on material written in German.

-- III --
   On graduating from Columbia College in 1950, my very close friend, Carl Hovde and I were each awarded a modest traveling fellowship that had hitherto mostly been used to "travel" across the street to graduate school. Carl and I surprised the associate dean when we told him we were actually going to travel. Which we did for a year on bicycle and by other means, with stops, the longest in Paris. That took me back to Germany. I was not comfortable there. In particular I very much resented the quite frequent expressions of envy that I had “gotten out” before the war. I had been “lucky” to avoid the war and its calorie-rationed aftermath. Lucky? Really! 
   That was in 1951. I did not set foot again into Germania for  another thirty years or so.  Then my German speaking wife (born in Danzig of Russian parents) and I made a trip there, speaking English whenever needed to make clear who we took ourselves to be. The trip was sightseeing plus.

--  IV --  
   There were other short trips to Germany. In   the late eighties, we went to hear the Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth. I was (am) a selective Wagner aficionado; my first  Ring was in 1942, distinguished by the fact that it was Lotte Lehmann’s last Sieglinde.
   I had a couple of visits to Berlin on different occasions and enjoyed my brief stays there. I was amused by the fact that what used to be the likes of Adolf Hitlerplatz or Göringstraße had turned into an enormous number of streets named after Jews.
  Like some other German cities, Heidelberg has instituted “reunions” of its ehemaligen jüdischen Einwohner. I went to the first three (about five years apart)—the first with my son Mark, the second with my daughter Eleanor, and the third with my grandchildren Max and Eva. With the latter, energetic youngsters, we were there for a couple of extra days and did a splendid job walking and riding all over the city and surroundings. We also did not miss out on a favorite meal of mine, consisting of super-fat white asparagus then in season.
   For each meeting, very varied programs had been planned, with many interesting sessions and some not so. The Heidelberger published a book, Erinnertes Leben, with all contributions translated into German if that was not the language in which the pieces were written. I have some pages in that volume, on one of reunion programs, among other things.
   I will conclude this account of Germany and me with a trivial effect I was able to have on Heidelberger officialdom that pleased me no end. A plaque mounted at the Altstadt end of the Alte Brücke stated that the bridge had been destroyed in World War II and rebuilt afterwards. 

   When I read that, I wrote a note to Heidelberg’s Bürgermeisterin with whom I had become friendly during our meetings, that the clear implication of that plaque was that the Americans had destroyed the bridge. But it had actually been the Germans who foolishly had blown up a medieval bridge that could not have held a tank of American pursuers, I am pleased to report that the plaque was replaced to make clear who did what to whom. I hope it is still there.

Monday, January 23, 2017

Dealing with an Addiction

Reading About Trump
   Help! I’m addicted to reading about the news and satisfy it primarily by spending a whacky amount of time on the website of the New York Times. Given that Donald Trump is now the president of the United States, that coaxes me to read an untold number of articles about—who else?—Donald Trump. But I’m also tired of this avalanche of words about Trump and recognize that pursuing them is really a compulsion.
   I’m sure I’m not the only one both smitten and repulsed. For me, it is the latest manifestation of a very long habit. I traveled daily in the subway, starting in the fall of 1941, on what was then called the GG train, from Roosevelt Avenue, near our house in Jackson Heights, to Fort Greene Place in Brooklyn, a short walk from Brooklyn Tech, my high school. My “entertainment” on those journeys was the New York Times, folded into a long half-page wide strip. For me, US politics was then an important text and has been ever since.
   There may well have been other players about whom as much was written as is now about Trump, but I can’t now recall them. Moreover, only a fraction of those Trump pieces are truly substantive, in that they are more than accounts of trivial actions, perhaps revealing something about the man’s character, but not much if anything of note about Trump’s impact on the world.
   So we addicts are confronted with a dilemma. Either we pursue all of Trumpiana or we risk missing some aspect that matters about what is going on in the political world. On the assumption that there are others like me—that is, reluctant addicts—I have  a proposal for the New York Times, one that might actually gain them readers.

   Let them assign one of their writers, probably changing them after a term of service, to do a column, daily or every few days, in which they briefly summarize Trump doings that do make a difference in the real world, giving references to articles in which that item is discussed—but leaving out Trump stuff that doesn’t really make any difference. Of course there will be differences of opinion about this, but I’m happy to got with an experienced Times reporter, recognizing that, like all mankind, she or he is fallible. For the next four years—one hopes not beyond then—that would perform a valuable service for Times readers. An unusual proposal? Yes, but then Trump is an unusual president. No?

Thursday, January 19, 2017

IV The Full Use of Both Hands

All that Hands Can Do

   This final installment on the hand could, in principle, be endless. The subject is the two hands (at the end of arms), the fingers of which are in any possible configuration, many with the same in both hands and an incalculable number with the two arrangements differing from each other. This discussion will be brief and will only hint at that profusion.
   Start with the use of hands in a symphony orchestra. Every instruments requires their use, though such as the woodwinds and brass, get their main impetus from the lungs, via the mouth. Still, not many instruments can do without hands. The bugle is one of them, if you ignore that hands have to hold the instrument.
   But playing musical instruments is but one of an indefinitely large number of occupations that have to be performed by hands. Moreover, most of these themselves require a multiplicity of configurations. Take cooking: that calls for anything from chopping onions to stirring a kettle full of soup—and much more.

   You can see why I made two apparently contradictory comments about this last discussion of the use of hands: that it might well be endless and that I will keep this final segment short. Short because readers don’t need me to tell them some of the very many things hands can do; and endless just because there are an uncountable number of such. Including scratching one’s head or behind, the mentioning of which has the special merit of acknowledging the existence of fingernails.

Monday, January 16, 2017

A Truly Literate President

I interrupt my series on the hand (which is probably boring you) to guide you to an interview with President Obama--about his reading and books more generally. There is no president since my day (voting for Truman in 1948 was my first) nor one that is likely in the foreseeable future who would have given or is likely to give such an interview. Does that make Obama a great president? No, there's much more to that than literacy. But it sure helps! Read it:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/books/obamas-secret-to-surviving-the-white-house-years-books.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Sunday, January 15, 2017

The Hand, III

Mostly Grasping
   We concluded the last installment with a short piece about fists. I suspect that fists play additional roles cultures about which I know nothing, but I will leave that research to others. Instead, I will now move on to consider the hand configured as unclenched, but not yet looked at as the possessor of five individual fingers. That does not quite say what I have in mind, since I want now to consider grasping that makes use of four fingers more or less in unison, with the “opposable” thumb playing its own special role. (I confess that I had never recognized the importance of the opposableness of that thumb to be as important as these reflections about the human hand have revealed.)
   As I see it, grasping is much the most important function of this configuration of the hand. To be sure, many forms of grasping, such as holding a knife and fork to eat, assign particlar roles to individual fingers other than the thumb, a configuration to be considered in the next segment in this series, but that takes nothing away from the importance of what is done by the contestants engaged in tug-o’-war, holding on the rope and pulling for dear life.
   To be sure, that form of play is a trivial example of a mode of action that, consciously or not, is an important instance of everyone’s daily activities. As is so often the case, the hand, holding on, is the tool, while the power is supplied by the arms, just as is the hammer, as earlier described, grasped by a hand and powerd by the arm. But many occasions of holding do not call for much oomph, such as two people holding hand while walking, whether two lovers or a parent and a child.
   Other instances of this configuration require even less exertion of strength (do you know another word of eight letters that has but a single vowel?), such as holding my head either in thought or because of a headache, or supporting it on my hand with the elbow on the table. Surely there are many other uses of the hand that do not separate out individualnfingers. Slapping is not the least of those.
     







Tuesday, January 10, 2017

About the Hand, II: The Fist

From Hand to Fist
   Since we are all owners, just about everyone knows what hands are like; I have had two of them throughout a very long life. But that doesn’t make it easy to give an account of their structure. Which is complicated, with lips and tongue the most complicated human body-part, at least of the visible part of the body.
   Let me start out by noting that a hand has a front and a back. (It is both much more difficult but also revealing to provide descriptions without using pictures.) The palm, here just called “the front,” is the hand’s working surface; just about all of the hand’s actions revolve around that palm. The thumb has two joints working in the palm’s direction, while the other four fingers have three each. When all sixteen of these joints are as bent as much as they can be, the hand becomes a fist.
   If we consider the fact that hands are attached to arms, three additional joints must be accounted for to describe what has happened to the front legs of our answers. From the bottom up, they are the wrist, a most complicated joint, by which the hand is attached to the arm, then the elbow which more or less bisects the arm and moves only in one direction and finally, that portion of the shoulder, directionally very versatile, by which the arm is attached to the body.
   In these three short paragraphs we have fully described one of the most important pieces of physical equipment that distinguishes us as human beings. In the next sections I want to begin giving an overview of what hands-at-the-end-of arms can do. But will close this one with some comments about the stage when this apparatus is least a hand, namely when all the joints of the fingers are pressed into the palm. When that is done, the hand is made into a fist. (The literature refers to clenched fists; though I confess that I don’t know what a fist would be that is not clenched.
   Boxing, fair or foul, is the fist’s best known function. The oomph is produced by the arms and the fist is essentially passive, as is a hammer that is used to drive in a nail. Arms, in both cases, do the work. Fists are thus surely important, but their repertory is certainly limited. Banging on a door to be heard, using a fist to open something or shut it and more such. Fists, as agents of percussion, play a role in music, if only a marginal one.
   But there are significant symbolic functions of the fist—from the raised fist of the communist salute to that of the fist more extensively raised and thereby denoting Black Power. There is much on the internet on this symbolic subject, always identified as clenched fists. OK, although I note again, unclenched fists are not fists at all. So now I return to the subject of hands.





Thursday, January 5, 2017

Introducing the Hand, the First of a Series

   What follows is a series of pieces on the human hand, none after this first one as yet written (and hence uncounted). The underlying assumption is the claim that hands, at the end of arms, to be sure, are in the same league as speech and language in defining what makes a human being. There is an assumption, of course, that all these body parts, hands, like mouths and vocal chords, are controlled by minds, the mysterious products of human brains.

The Handshake
  Là ci darem la mano. Reich’ mir die Hand mein Leben. The hand, here, as it has been through the ages, is the reliable agent of the person to whom it belongs. The history of humans does not turn up another representative of an entire person that can compete with the hand. If we shake hands, persons are to varying degrees bonded: two bodies, two minds, two souls. The handshake performs a significant and complex function.    
  “So what,” is a reasonable response. Do you expect people to kick each other, instead, thus “elevating” the foot? Or, much more plausibly, do you see that meaningful function performed by means of an embrace, a widespread practice in Mexico, among other regions. But even this much more elaborate practice does not do without a role of the hand, since one set mostly includes a clasping between the bodies of the momentary partners, while the others gently pad the backs of the greeters.
   While there are other modes of greeting and symbolizing friendship, such as nodding or bowing at the formal end and the vastly more intimate practice of kissing, the role of hands is surely the most prevalent, with reasons not far to seek. By touching each other in a handshake, the two greeters engage in a moment of intimacy, while by virtue of the fact that hands are located at the end of arms that are able to be extended away from the body, that intimacy does not need to be close.

    Evolution has indeed conferred a huge benefit on human beings converting, in multiple stages, two of our ancestors’ legs into arms and ultimately refining their feet into the much more complex extremities of hands. We have thus reached the subject I here want to talk about: human hands, located as they are, at the end of arms.

Sunday, January 1, 2017

President Obama Again

   The piece below was written (and posted)  in November 2015, just after the last election. Now I don’t think it was strong enough in declaring my admiration for Obama, the outgoing president. Who, indeed, was a more stable liberal head of our country, between FDR and 2016?
   Trump will surely aim to erase Obama’s accomplishments and in the short run he is likely to be successful. But future historians—and we won’t have to wait for them too long—will see Obama to be what he was, a remarkably successful rational and liberal bastion who fended off powerful reactionary forces of his era. I much admire him and wish him and Michelle a great future.

President Obama 
   The election is over. In my view, the good guys lost, though unlike what the winner would have claimed had he lost, I don’t think that the election was rigged. But it was skewed by the fact that so many states run by Republicans have instituted practices that reduce the number of putatively liberal, that is, Democratic, voters. I’ll let those who follow discussions of polls more assiduously than I do to figure out just how these measures affected the outcome of Trump vs. Clinton.                      
   What’s for sure is that the constitutionally mandated creation of the electoral college can lead to a divergence between the actual number of US voters and the number of delegates to the electoral college, as it did this time around. So, live with it, buddy.
   But Barack Obama successfully went against the system and was elected. There was nothing obvious about that first victory. He was the first one in quite some time to show up on that top-level scene who was articulate, indeed, eloquent, and obviously brainy. Give American voters credit for propelling that kind of person to the country’s highest office. Not to mention that he was African American!
  And now, in not many weeks, he will step down and return to civilian life. He accomplished a lot, considering that he was none-stop combating an establishment that was not ready to accept a president the color of whose skin was not white. (My pessimistic prediction is that racial prejudice will not disappear in any foreseeable future.) Considering the odds stacked against him, he did very well, indeed. It’s always mostly a guess as to what future historians might say, but mine is that they will list him among the better president.
   He might “rate” higher if he had been more successful in persuading other politicians, in the House and the Senate, to push his goals, prodding in the style of Lyndon Johnson. That would have taken more than eloquent speechifying. Rather, more arm-President Obama 

   The election is over. In my view, the good guys lost, though unlike what the winner would have claimed had he lost, I don’t think that the election was rigged. But it was skewed by the fact that so many states run by Republicans have instituted practices that reduce the number of putatively liberal, that is, Democratic, voters. I’ll let those who follow discussions of polls more assiduously than I do to figure out just how these measures affected the outcome of Trump vs. Clinton.                      
   What’s for sure is that the constitutionally mandated creation of the electoral college can lead to a divergence between the actual number of US voters and the number of delegates to the electoral college, as it did this time around. So, live with it, buddy.
   But Barack Obama successfully went against the system and was elected. There was nothing obvious about that first victory. He was the first one in quite some time to show up on that top-level scene who was articulate, indeed, eloquent, and obviously brainy. Give American voters credit for propelling that kind of person to the country’s highest office. Not to mention that he was African American!
  And now, in not many weeks, he will step down and return to civilian life. He accomplished a lot, considering that he was none-stop combating an establishment that was not ready to accept a president the color of whose skin was not white. (My pessimistic prediction is that racial prejudice will not disappear in any foreseeable future.) Considering the odds stacked against him, he did very well, indeed. It’s always mostly a guess as to what future historians might say, but mine is that they will list him among the better president.
   He might “rate” higher if he had been more successful in persuading other politicians, in the House and the Senate, to push his goals, prodding in the style of Lyndon Johnson. That would have taken more than eloquent speechifying. Rather, more arm-twisting and pressure tactics not excluding blackmail. For that, Obama was too professorial, to blame my  own genre.
   As for the real world, Obama accomplished a lot, though too many of the good things he brought into existence are not protected from future wiping out by his successor. But before Obama disappears into history—and into a job, I hope, with an income greater than he has ever had, I want to salute him as one of the better US president, if not of the very top layer. By way of brief PS, I don’t know that conditions (weasel word) are such that at this time it is at all possible for someone to rise to the level of a Lincoln or an FDR.

   With strong feelings about the past eight years, I say, “well done” under very tough circumstances and best wishes for you and your wife’s future. Barack Obama has been a scholar and a gentleman. Now a rare characterization of a politician.