Cry Baby

At a farewell ceremony at Los Alamos, physicist Robert Oppenheimer handed every member of his lab a silver pin stamped "A BOMB."

"If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world," he told the team, "the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima."

A week later, Oppenheimer visited the White House, where he told Harry Truman, "Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands." Truman flew into a rage and ushered the "cry baby scientist" from the Oval Office.

Truman had missed Oppenheimer's point: he felt guilt not for Hiroshima, but some future nuclear genocide he imagined.

But other members of Oppenheimer's team weren't so imaginative. They saw the hard evidence of the effects of the the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and it horrified them.

Fellow physicist Mark Oliphant, considering that evidence, would later lament, "During the war I worked on nuclear weapons, so I, too, am a war criminal."

The Perfect Icebreaker

I’ll give you justice, I’ll fatten your purse, 

Show me your moral virtues first.

— Bob Dylan

A meeting I attend—online, of course—begins every week with an insufferable icebreaker, a long round of introductions the point of which is to clarify everyone's pronouns of choice.

Tell me, who was first responsible for virtue-signalling via pronouns? Because I'd like to murder him. Or her. Or them.

Want the perfect meeting icebreaker? "Everyone please tell us in four or five words what value you add."

Virtue-signalling via "inclusive" pronouns, I can assure, adds no value; in fact, it destroys value. My time's limited. Please don't waste it with pronouns, when you should be telling me how you justify your existence. I don't care that you might be "gender fluid." And I care less you're a hero of the "wokeing class." I just want to know why are you here?

Recall some grammar: personal pronouns substitute for a specific person or persons. The personal pronouns are: I, we, you, he, she, and they. 

Simple.

Recall also, there are indefinite personal pronouns; they substitute for no person specifically. The indefinite personal pronouns are: all, another, anybody, anyone, each, everybody, everyone, few, many, nobody, none, one, several, some, somebody, and someone.

Again, simple.

Virtue-signalling via pronouns—let's call them "PC pronouns"—screws with grammar—and your head. 

Worse yet, it promotes what philosopher Martin Heidegger called the "dictatorship of the they" (Diktatur des Man).

Heidegger believed that, when you use indefinite personal pronouns, you unconsciously surrender to what's socially acceptable—to what's PC.

When you refer to yourself as, say, "everybody" ("Everybody knows TikTock is stupid") you are surrendering your authentic self—your individuality—and submitting to an invisible authority, to the "dictatorship of the they." 

According to Heidegger, indefinite personal pronouns secretly control the masses.

PC pronouns do, too.

I'm not just my genitals. And I'm not just he or she or they or X. 

I'm Bob. The name is Bob. Bob James.

Who the hell are you?

Bad Penny

A bad penny always turns up.

— 18th Century Proverb

On assignment for Colliers in November 1942, photographer Robert Capa snapped the crew of the B-17 "Bad Penny" as they gathered before a daylight bombing raid on a U-boat pen in Germany.

Capa recalled the pilot, Captain Jack Bruce, saying, "After this is over, the longest trip I’ll ever take will be from my house to the nearest river, on my bicycle with my fishing gear on my back.”

Bruce would be dead before month's end.

During another raid—only its sixth—on November 28, "Bad Penny" crossed paths with the German ace Toni Hafner, who shot the bomber down. It crashed in the Mediterranean.

The pilot Bruce died, as did his co-pilot Bob Earl, bombardier Chuck Tannehill, navigator Chuck Knop, top turret gunner Hank Hughes, radio operator Len McGriff, ball turret gunner Al Backus, waist gunner Sam Scott, and tail gunner Merle Gilger.

No remains were recovered. The deaths were recorded in Missing Air Crew Report Number 16197.

Capa's photo, scheduled for the cover of Colliers that week, was yanked when the editor realized it revealed more of the B-17 than the Defense Department would approve.

Starving Artist

Creativity is not something we think a person should go “all in” on. Because, odds are, you’ll starve.

― Jeff Goins

Effective today, I'm going on a diet, to rid myself of the "Quarantine 15." 

It's hardly the first time I've fasted, and likely won't be the last. 

So I'm officially―and literally―becoming today a "starving artist."

That's because, in addition to the start of my diet, today marks the launch of my new website: Robert Francis James

If you like the paintings you see, buy one; help keep me from continuing as a starving artist.

The prices are affordable and include framing. 

The best thing you can do during a lockdown is decorate your space. 

And original art makes fine decoration.

Painting "Challah" by Robert Francis James

Surface Notation

An artist is making something exist by observing it.

― William S. Burroughs

The Independent on Sunday once asked John Updike to describe a writer that affected him.

He responded by naming Proust, the writer who opened Updike's eyes to style―to "prose not as the colorless tool of mimesis but as a gaudy agent dynamic in itself, peeling back dead skins of lazy surface notation, going deeper into reality much as science does with its accumulating formulations."

[Note to English teachers: point out how Updike's use of mathematicians' terms ("agent dynamic," "surface notation") bolsters his comparison between observant writing and science.]

Learning to paint has revealed how irresistible "lazy surface notation" can be.

I'm in a continual―losing―battle with my painting teachers, God Bless 'Em, over surrendering to the temptation to describe only the surfaces of objects, and never the atmosphere in which they dwell; what you might call the deeper reality of their "dance in space."

It's a temptation worse than sugary snacks.

The good news? 

Everyone struggles with lazy surface notation.

Paul Gaugin once wrote in his journal, "I made a promise to keep a watch over myself, to remain master of myself, so that I might become a sure observer."

Promise to watch over myself. 

That's about the best I can do.

Painting "Social Distancing" by Robert Francis James