Envy—one of the seven deadly sins—is irrational, imprudent, unseemly, vicious, and irredeemably wrong.
"Envy is pain at the good fortune of others," Aristotle said. It aims “to destroy the good fortune of another person,” Kant believed, and is "that passion which views with malignant dislike the superiority of those who are really entitled to all the superiority they possess," Adam Smith said.
Champions of wealth redistribution—those venal "socialists"—base their arguments for it on fairness. But libertarians will have none of it: socialists are simply craven and judgmental; and the people they want to help are just lazy bums and losers.
Nietzsche saw envy in the right light. He believed it was a good thing, because it signals, from deep down, what we really want in life. And we suppress it at our peril, because envy is powerful and will overwhelm us.
Philosopher John Rawls also warned that envy could overwhelm the envious—and society along with it.
When the economic differences between the haves and have-nots become so insuperable the disadvantaged lose heart, society will crumble.
At a Harvard symposium on John F. Kennedy last month, the school's president, historian Drew Faust, lamented today's war on expertise. "Kennedy's appeal for recognition of what he called the mutual dependence of the worlds of intellectuals and politicians, his call for a central role for learning and expertise, these are all too timely today," she said. I too miss a leader who relishes learning.
"Leadership and learning," JFK said, "are indispensable to each other."
Right now we're led by an inarticulate and unhinged narcissist who is bent on destroying all trust in science, economics, statesmanship, politics, rhetoric, reporting, truth-telling, governing, and the arts, and who has less sense of history than a crayfish.
Trump's world: no spot for happily-ever-altering. Honk if you miss JFK.
"P.O. Box 1142" was the code name Army intelligence gave a top-secret prison camp outside Washington during World War II; a site devoted throughout the war to interning 3,400 German, Japanese and Italian prisoners of war.
A sequestered section of Fort Hunt, in Alexandria, Virginia, P.O. Box 1142 remained top secret until 2006, when Brandon Bies, a ranger with the National Park Service, uncovered it.
Eyewitnesses—now mostly deceased—told Bies that P.O. Box 1142 was indeed a prison camp, and that the interrogators who worked there persuaded enemy POWs to reveal their governments' closest-held military secrets—including Nazi Germany's rocket and atomic bomb programs. Interrogators' notes, written reports and photographs, archived in the Pentagon, verified their stories.
Right after the war, P.O. Box 1142 was bulldozed, the records sealed, and the eyewitnesses sworn to secrecy.
But the Pentagon missed one: my mother.
She served during World War II as a Woman Marine in the Pentagon. When I was a kid, she told me a story about P.O. Box 1142.
She told me it was the Pentagon's habit to send Women Marines from her barracks at nearby Henderson Hall to guard POWs at P.O. Box 1142—until amore put a stop to it.
It seems some of the Women Marines fell in love with the enemy prisoners—the Italian ones, in particular; some pledged to marry them; some became pregnant by them.
I asked Brandon Bies if he could confirm my mother's story.
"Putting it in the larger context of what I've learned about 1142, I would put this in the tall-tale category," he said. "I have never heard any evidence of Women Marines being at P.O. Box 1142. We do have evidence of a handful of WACs who were stationed there in 1945, as well as a handful of civilian typists, who served officers late- and immediately post-war.
"Furthermore, while we don't have exact numbers, the number of Italian prisoners was likely very low—my guess is that they made up about 1-2 percent of the total prisoner population. Maybe a dozen or so over the course of the war.
"Finally, while 1142 did 'relax' the rules from time to time in order to get information out of a prisoner, it is very hard for me to believe that they would have allowed women to guard prisoners, let alone present them with opportunities to spend intimate time together."
Matt Virta, also with the National Park Service, told me he couldn't confirm the story, either. "I can find no information in the Fort Hunt records I have access to, nor can staff member Layesanna Rivera, regarding any female Marine guards at Fort Hunt and their potential links to Italian POWs," he said. So is my mother's story unfounded? Maybe not.
Tales of "POW coddling" in fact abounded during World War II, including tales of "too affectionate" Italians. When newspapers and magazines began to report them, Congress demanded a committee investigation.
While the Congressional committee found no evidence of coddling, you know what Italians say: Non c'รจ fumo senza arrosto. No smoke without fire. Maybe "POW cuddling" should have been investigated.
PS: Have a safe and pleasant Memorial Day—and take time to remember our fallen warriors.
Boosterism is taking a back seat to Puritanism as politicos in many states pass laws denying civil rights to women and LGBTQ citizens.
Legislators are passing anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ laws by the bucketful in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
The laws may seem godly, but those that permit overt discrimination are particularly scary to business executives, as customer-facing brands increasingly embrace corporate social responsibility. George W. Bush's former media advisor, Mark McKinnon, has called his state's anti-LGBTQ "bathroom bill," for example, "divisive, discriminatory, and unacceptable to Texas businesses." Lawmakers who pass such bills are beholden to backers whose religiosity outweighs their business sense. "During my 40 years in Texas, if you were a Republican, you were most certainly a pro-business politician," McKinnon says. "But today, many in the state's GOP leadership are moving away from, even ignoring, the business community. That is surely not their intention, but it surely will be the result." History shows "godly rule" usually has unintended consequences.
In 17th century England, following its victory in the Civil War, a Puritan elite tried to impose godly ideals on the rest of the country.
The Puritans restricted alcohol and coffee consumption, dancing, and the wearing of colored clothing and makeup. They outlawed travel on Sundays, closed down fairs and festivals, and shuttered all theaters. They criminalized cursing, and banned gambling, soccer, horse races, wresting matches, and erotic art. They made prostitution punishable by flogging and deportation, and adultery punishable by death (but only for women). They removed Easter from the calendars. They even abolished Christmas. But fun-loving aristocrats and commoners wouldn't have it. Parliament restored the monarchy after a decade of godly rule and scrapped the Puritans' laws. To close the loop, the king commanded that the body of the Puritans' leader, Oliver Cromwell, be removed from its crypt in Westminster Abbey and put on trial for treason and regicide. Cromwell's body was found guilty and hanged from the gallows. His head was cut off and put on display, and his body thrown into a trash heap to rot. Pushback is inevitable.
Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers?
— Jill Ker Conway
Memoirs fascinate because the best ones read like novels. We all want our lives to have a through-line, and memoirs provide one. They also confirm how unseemly and accidental our lives are. Things happen. Critics dislike memoirs' exhibitionist quality; but not me. I love them. I find reading a memoir much more rewarding than, say, sitting in a coffee shop and peeping at other people's laptops (the woman beside me is Googling "how to deal with a cheating husband") or eavesdropping on other people's phone calls (the guy behind me is going to quadruple his prices, but not tell customers). Soldiers', statesmen's and victims' memoirs I could care less for; but artists' memoirs I find irresistible. I recommend those of Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn, Ernest Borgnine, Sammy Davis, Jr., Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Anne Truitt, Carrie Fisher, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, Tina Fey, Graham Nash, Woody Allen and Martin Short. And then there are the memoirs of artisans: I recommend those of Alfred P. Sloan, Katherine Graham, David Ogilvy, Ed Catmull, Rick Gekoski, Maryalice Huggins, Terry McDonell and James Rebanks. If you like heady, try writers' memoirs: those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Elie Wiesel, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Herman Wouk, William Styron, Willie Morris, Philip Roth, Pete Hamill, Frank McCourt, James Lord, Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr, Richard Russo, Bill Bryson, Elizabeth Gilbert, Stephen King, A.E. Hotchner and Augusten Burroughs.
Ford said last week on The PBS News Hour the memoir's purpose is "to remind us that, in a world cloaked in supposition, in opinion, in misdirection, and often in outright untruth, things do actually happen." Indeed.
