The Price of Fear

Koch, Kant and Cant

Blessed be schools with endowments. They don't have to mouth propaganda.

When I worked in grad school as a teacher's assistant, I taught two semesters of Philosophy 101, a course every undergraduate was required to take. My students were freshmen in the nursing and business schools.

The course covered writers like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume and Kant, and gave the uneager students a taste for the three major periods of Western thought.

That was 40 years ago. Universities had dough and bell bottoms rocked.

Today, the University of Arizona offers another brand of Philosophy 101, thanks to a gift from billionaire libertarian Charles Koch.

Instead of mind, matter, meaning and morals, the course covers money, markets, margins and monopoly.

Students learn that reality is the free market; that evil's source is regulation; and that life's purpose is threefold: deal-making, tax-dodging and self-reward.

Writer and former philosophy professor David Johnson calls the course "a peculiar mixture of the utterly banal and the frighteningly ideological" and "propaganda, plain and simple."

I call it pure cant.

Things don't go better with Koch.

Lust for Life

I just spent an idyllic Sunday sketching outdoors at Kuerner Farm, the Pennsylvania dairy farm Andrew Wyeth visited repeatedly for seven decades, and the spot where he found the subjects of many of his most inspired paintings.

One of those is Trodden Weed, based on a 1951 drawing he did of himself traipsing one of the Kuerner family's fields.

Wyeth had encountered near-death the previous year, when he flatlined during a surgery to remove pieces of his infected lungs. Recuperation took months, during which time he spent many hours walking about his neighborhood for exercise. The idea for the self-portrait came to him during one of these outings. 

In a 1952 letter to Art News, Wyeth said, "The painting came to signify to me a close relationship between critical illness and the refusal to accept it—a kind of stalking away."

He later told an interviewer, "I suddenly got the idea that we all stupidly crush things underfoot and ruin them—without thinking. Like the weed here getting crushed. The black line is not merely a compositional device—it's the presence of death. Before my operation, I had been looking at Albrecht Dürer's works. During the operation they say my heart stopped once. At that moment, I could see Dürer standing there in black, and he started coming at me across the tile floor. When my heart started, he—Dürer—death—receded. So this painting is highly emotional—dangerous and looming. I like it."

Art critics have noted that Trodden Weed represents a turning point in Wyeth's work, a departure from sentimental subjects to fierce ones.

On that operating table, Wyeth became what Roman Krznaric calls a death gazer, a person "who decides to seize the day after coming face to face with death."

Psychologists have studied death gazers and label their response to oblivion "post-traumatic growth," Krznaric says.

A brush with the Grim Reaper propels some survivors to become caregivers or preachers. 

"But one of the most prevalent effects is that it induces a carpe diem zest for life," Krznaric says.

"People abandon their tedious jobs, embark on bonding travel adventures with their children, or dedicate themselves to taking chances and squeezing every ounce of experience out of being alive."

Or, like Wyeth, they become lifelong fans of the weeds underfoot.

Seize the day!

You Ain't No Forrest Gump

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

— Seneca

When it favored a ship coming into port, Ancient Romans would say the wind was ob portus.

The Latin phrase gives us our word opportunity.

We think of every opportunity as something a "good wind" blew our way.

But like Roman seafarers, you have to have the port in sight before you can gauge the wind.

Know where you're heading before you assess an opportunity.

You ain't no Forrest Gump.

Burning the Bridge

Bored by her job as a typist, Washington, DC, resident Lizzie Magie liked to indulge her creative side.

Whenever she got the chance, she'd stump on behalf of progressive political causes or moonlight as a freelance writer, comedic actor, and game designer.

She was particularly passionate about income inequality, and in 1905 published a board game she described as "a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing."

The Landlord's Game became an immediate hit on college campuses, and among leftist groups nationwide. Some Quakers in Atlantic City were so taken with it, they published a bootleg edition, renaming the landing spaces after the local streets.

Thirty years later, at the height of the Great Depression, Magie sold the rights to her invention for $500 to a Boston-based game publisher, Parker Brothers. The company repackaged the Quakers' version and renamed the game Monopoly.

One hundred and twelve years have passed since Magie released her "practical demonstration" and the subject of income inequality again tops progressives' agenda.

MIT economist Peter Temin, author of the new book The Vanishing Middle Class, says it has fractured American society.

We now live under a "two-track economy," Temin says, in which Wall Street and Silicon Valley workers enjoy steady gains while the rest—"subsistence workers"—suffer regular setbacks.

We arrived here after four decades, during which technology, globalization, the decline of unions, the treatment of minorities, and public policy all worked in tandem to disconnect wages from productivity.

Public education, he says, is the only bridge workers can take to cross from the subsistence to the growth economy.

But the bridge is being burned by the current party in power, whose officials openly detest educators and prize the uneducated—provided they keep to their side of the tracks. Which they will.

Sadly, few people outside academia will likely read Temin's 250-page book. Too bad he didn't create a video game, instead.

Lizzie Magie, where are you when we need you?