Armchair Travel
Thursday, April 23, 2009
  The Face of Jesus


Rev. Dr. Richard Killough of the Sunderland Congregational Church told an interesting story in a sermon he gave last fall about forgiveness. It came to mind recently for reasons I'd rather not go into.
Leonardo da Vinci, the story goes, was painting the Last Supper, and he wanted to settle an old score with some guy by using the guy's face for the face of Judas. Let's face it, that's pretty funny.
But then when Leonardo came to paint the face of Jesus -- a rather important feature of the painting -- he couldn't get it right. He tried and tried -- and he was Leonardo da Vinci -- but he couldn't get it right.
It wasn't until he changed the face of Judas that he was able to paint the face of Jesus. And by all accounts he did a pretty good job.
I think this shows how nursing a personal beef impairs your creative abilities. It silences your child/genius and stifles joy. Most of the smart people I've read say to forgive everything, short of being a sap.
I think nursing a legitimate beef is something different; I don't think it eats you up in the same way; tho where the line is I'm sure I cannot say. I guess it would involve justice and other principles larger than one's own personal beefs, but that's as far as I'm willing to go without a license to preachify.
 
Sunday, April 19, 2009
  The Breath of All Angels
It is a neverending source of amazement to me that my friend Bob Hay, whose personal views on anything and everything can only be described as stodgy, is able in so many areas of art to produce materpieces that are so brilliantly whimsical.

For example, his collage of lingerie models and supreme court justices. For another example, his sketch of a standing ashtray on my porch. For a third, his drawing of a chicken eviscerator-roasting hook in common use during the colonial period.

I quoted one of his poems in a previous entry, Here's another:

The breath of all angels, sweet and clear,
Cannot quite say what I feel
When your eyes smile at me that way
So dear
 
Thursday, April 16, 2009
  The End of American Exceptionalism

I had a chance to see Andrew Bacevich deliver a lecture to the students of Deerfield Academy the other night. There was a notice in the paper, but I think I was the only member of the general public to attend.

Maybe it's one of these old-guy things, but all the students seemed to be enormous. I'm five eleven and a half and even the sixth graders were taller than me. And of course they were all very healthy and well behaved.

Dr. Bacevich began his lecture by describing the view of American history that his students at Boston University bring to his classes -- the city on the hill, birthplace of Liberty, spreading freedom around the world.

Then he took it apart in a few well chosen words, describing instead a policy of unbridled expansionism and more recently imperialism. We've heard all this for years from hippies in ponytails, but Bacevich is a conservative from a military family who served in Vietnam and lost a son in Iraq.

I'm a big fan of all his books. I give them to my daughter.

His message is we cannot and should not try to impose our values on the world and we should stop thinking about freedom in terms of acquiring stuff cheap. He says expansionism worked astonishingly well for 200 years, but it's not working anymore.

He says, if I may paraphrase, that we should own up to the fact that we are a debtor nation with an inflated sense of self-importance.

He gave a short synopsis of his new book Limits to Power and took a lot of questions. Often he asked the questioners, "What do you think?"

One student, probably the resident righty, cited the reduced casualties in Iraq as a result of "the surge" as evidence US policy was "working." Bacevich dusted him politely, saying of course he was glad that fewer soldiers were dying. But he said he would be happier if the number were zero.

Then he said the thousands of lives lost in Iraq have been "squandered," which is strong language, but entirely appropriate to the situation.

At the end I was sorely tempted to ask a question about the conflict in Palestine, but I decided not to. Deerfield Academy is the one school in the country where students understand the situation there, since King Abdullah of Jordan is an alumnus.

I did get to approach Dr. Bacevich at the end. I asked if he had seen an article in the Atlantic Monthly by Roman Skaskiw, an infanty officer in Iraq and Afghanistan who has written some great articles for GoNOMAD. He hadn't.

I gave him my card with Roman's name on the back and the name of the article and he said he would check it out.

In his Atlantic article, Email From Afghanistan, Roman writes, "Just because an endeavor is sprinkled with the blood of good people, that doesn’t make it just, or noble, or even worthwhile."

Andrew Bacevich and Roman Skaskiw are just what this country needs: a faceful of truth.

Then I asked Dr. Bacevich to sign my book, and to inscribe it to my daughter. I didn't think about it at the time, but I guess that was a good way of showing how much I admire his work.
 
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
  The David Ruggles Education Center

I've been doing some research on the Underground Railroad, and I agree with the many, many writers who say that most of the stories of heroism and courage from this episode in American history will never be told, but I'm finding that there are many fine stories that have been left to us, and as historians piece the bits together, I believe they will be told.

And they are really great stories that will, I believe, capture the popular imagination and give us a new paradigm of American greatness, based on Americans who actually were great.

One of the wonderful things about history is that we're learning so much more about it every day. Building on the work of scholars like the late John Hope Franklin, historians all over the country, and even the world, are piecing together the bits we know from court records and letters and census data.

Franklin's book Runaway Slaves doesn't tell any one story from beginning to end. Instead he shows us glimpses from thousands of different stories, and from this mosaic, a pattern emerges.

I've been reading as many slave narratives as I can lay my hands on, and it's not easy. A lot of well-meaning people, myself included, have trouble reading slave narratives. It's hard. You have to imagine your own child being brutalized by someone else, and then imagine your child being sold.

But what I find most amazing about these accounts is that the characters who appear in them demonstrate, in a split second, what kind of people they are.

In 1835 John P. Parker, then 14, was being chased by slave catchers and found a woman in the cotton fields who hid him in her basket.

But the overseer saw the whole thing and came running over and tipped over the basket. The woman tackled the overseer and allowed Parker to get away. She would certainly be whipped viciously, but she showed then and there what kind of person she was.

David Ruggles, for many years the station master in New York, showed what kind of person he was again and again, discounting his personal safety, helping hundreds and hundreds of runaway slaves, including Frederick Douglass, escape to freedom.

Blind and in bad health from his time in jail, he moved to Florence, Massachusetts, where he was treated with what was then known as the 'water cure.' He regained his health and partly regained his sight and became a highly successful practitioner of the water cure.

William Lloyd Garrison was one of his patients, and he said it was the real deal.

Last Saturday I went on a walking tour of Florence and to my delight I discovered that scholars like Steve Strimer are creating a David Ruggles Education Center in the house where he lived, where people can learn more about this courageous man.

John P. Parker, once he gained his freedom, became another heroic stationmaster in Ripley, Ohio, and his house is a national landmark. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, his granddaughter went to Mt. Holyoke College.
 
Sunday, April 05, 2009
  Back on Bullwinkle - Life is Good
It's great to get back on my bike, Bullwinkle, after a winter on the stationary bike at the gym. Thankfully I'm not having all the flats I had last year. Knock wood. I've found that if I take a nice long bike ride, life is good.

Bullwinkle is set up with extenders going straight up from the handlebars. I used to have two sets, which looked like antlers, hence the name, but I found one set is enough. The idea is to be able to sit up straight. Everyone tells you you have to be hunched over, but if you're not comfortable, you're not going to ride.

Sitting up straight means I'm not going to go very fast into the wind, especially given my aerodynamic profile, but I don't care about going fast. In fact I get a better workout than I would get hunched over.

Climbing hills I can shift into a "stair-climber" mode and apply my full body weight on the pedals.

It also allows me to use a tractor-style seat which supports the "sit bones" without any padding between them. It's much more comfortable. I'm surprised they're so hard to find.

I used to ride a lot with a couple of old farts like myself, and I remember talking about all the little adjustments that can make a big difference.

Seat height, for one thing. Too low and you'll wear out your knees because they'll be out in front of you and you won't be able to put your weight into the stroke. Too high and you have to extend the front of your foot at the bottom of the stroke and increase pressure on your crotch. A quarter inch one way or the other actually does make a big difference.

Ideally your foot should be level throughout the stroke, although you can always raise or lower the heel to apply different muscle sets.

Bullwinkle also has lateral extenders on the pedals moving them out an additional nine sixteenths of an inch from the frame. Like Senator Larry Craig, I have a wide stance, and on most bikes my legs would be bowed inward, increasing stress on the joints and reducing the amount of force I could apply to the pedal.

I kept noticing that by the end of the ride my feet would be on the outside half of the pedals, so I asked Norm Flye the bike guy and he got me the extenders. "Just a hair over half an inch on each side," I said. And he said that's how they come, nine sixteenths. I guess there are a lot of stocky Saxons out there.

I got a great Sigma headlight, too. On the high setting, you can find your contact lense, and on the low setting you can ride for more than an hour.

As soon as Spring arrives I'll put the milk crate on the back to hold my bathing suit and a towel and my fishing gear and it's off to Puffer's Pond.
 
Friday, April 03, 2009
  The Truth With Less Trouble
When I first started blogging four years ago, I wrote entries the length of a traditional newspaper column, which nobody probably ended up reading, and writing them put an unsustainable drain on my limited intellectual resources, so I learned to try for entries that are easier to write and easier to read.

I still love all those old entries like 'Benedict Arnold Saves the Day Twice - Continued,' but I'm tending more toward 'A Poor Competitor,' a shorter punchy entry that links to a longer one, in this case Kennan's 'Sad Appreciations,' for anyone who's interested in the long version.

So here's another microquote from 'Ben Franklin's Religion':

[In a letter to Yale College President Ezra Stiles, reprinted in American Heritage, December, 1955]

"I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we render him is doing good to his other Children."

"As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble."

When he wrote this letter, Franklin was, in his words, "in my eighty-fifth year, and very infirm."

"I see no harm, however in its being believed," Franklin continues, "if that Belief has the good Consequence, as probably it has, of making his Doctrines more respected and better observed; especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss by distinguishing the Unbelievers in his Government of the World with any peculiar Mark of his Displeasure."
 
Literary gadfly Stephen Hartshorne writes about books that he finds at flea markets and rummage sales.

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Stephen Hartshorne worked in newspapers and magazines around New England for many years and served as Information Officer in the New Hampshire Senate under Senate President Vesta Roy. He worked as a material handler for nine years at the Yankee Candle Company until the company was taken over by corporate weasels. He is currently the associate editor of GoNOMAD.com, an alternative travel website, which gives him the opportunity to correspond with writers and photographers all over the world. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts, with his daughter Sarah, a student at Drew University, and their cat, Dwight D. Eisenmeower. This blog is dedicated to his mom, who made him bookish.

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