Alone. Unread. And Ready to Die.

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.

— Kofi Annan

This week, CNBC reporter Donie O'Sullivan conducted a brief interview with a Trump supporter—and a true American nihilist. 

O'Sullivan asked if the man whether he planned to get vaccinated.

"Our days are numbered," he said. "It don't matter."

A cohort of killjoys like this man walks among us.

Perhaps Covid-19 is a divine instrument that will rid us of all the nihilists like him; I often wonder.

In any event, I place the blame for rampant nihilism in America today not on globalization, urbanization, or declining church attendance, but on the source of so many social woes: illiteracy.

When people read, they take hope—hope in progress, hope in their fellows, hope in their leaders, hope in themselves. They "read to know they're not alone," as writer William Nicholson says.

Today there's a hope gap among America's illiterate. 

They're alone, unread, and ready to die.

"It don't matter" is their worldview, and on that ground they can justify anything: shooting their enemies; trafficking in drugs; swindling their customers; trafficking in teenage girls; spreading Covid-19; you name it. 

"It don't matter."

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, one-fifth of the US population is functionally illiterate. And they're not all immigrant peasants, as conservatives insist. Among the 43 million illiterates in the US, 15.5 million are White (14.5 million are Latino; and 13 million are Black or "other").

Illiteracy affects our entire society:

• Illiterates are sickies. The Milken Institute reports that illiteracy results in $238 billion in excess healthcare costs every year, a dollar amount equaling the annual healthcare costs for 47 million Americans.
  
  
• Illiterates are sponges. The National Council for Adult Learning reports that illiteracy costs $225 billion in crime, joblessness, and loss of tax revenue due to joblessness, every year. Add that to the healthcare costs and we're wasting over half a trillion dollars annually on them.
  
  
• Illiterates are criminals. In addition, the US Department of Justice reports that 75% of prison inmates are illiterate. (Criminals can't read, so we throw the book at 'em.)

And then there's politics.

How many right-wing nihilists are nihilists because they're illiterate?

No study exists to answer the question. 

But studies do exist that show that right wing people are out of touch with factual reality:

• Four in 10 Republicans believe the flu is more deadly than Covid-19, although Covid-19 is over 11 times more deadly (Brookings).

• Six in 10 Republicans believe Biden "stole" the presidential election (Reuters).

• Three in 10 Republicans believe Qanon's conspiracy theories (Survey Center on American Life).

Are these right-wingers out of touch because they don't or won't or can't read? 

I think so. 

They're alone, unread and ready to die, because "it don't matter."

When people read, they find hope.

When they don't, they are hopeless—in both senses of the word.

NOTE: Embedded links in my posts lead to sources and other good stuff.

Winnie and Nancy

During the height of the Blitz, Winston Churchill finagled an invitation to spend weekends at Ditchley, the 300-year-old country house of Ronald Tree, a friend and fellow hater of Hitler, 75 miles outside London.

In requesting the open invitation, Churchill was bowing to his security people, who feared that Hitler would eventually target the prime minister for assassination if he spent every weekend at Chequers, his official country residence.

Tree, who invited Churchill to "use the house as your own," was a member of Parliament and richer than Croesus, having inherited a chunk of the $125 million estate of Chicago retailer Marshall Field. 

In addition, Tree had married his cousin's widow, Nancy Field, and so acquired his late cousin's chunk of the estate, as well.

Nancy was an American, Charlottesville-born and bred, and, like her former neighbor Thomas Jefferson, showed a knack for home décor. 

She had stuffed Ditchley with furniture, fabrics and art, all carefully arranged and orchestrated, and was thrilled on any weekend to showcase the house to Churchill and his family, guests, bodyguards, cronies, and staff.

Churchill was impressed, and for good cause. 

Nancy's touch, which emphasized color, comfort, and informality, ran to every nook and cranny of the place.

Her aesthetic—labeled by one designer "humble elegance and pleasing decay"—would become legendary throughout England and the very model for the "country home interior," still a prevalent motif today.

Churchill loved the "large and charming" house and its over-the-top rooms so much that Ditchley became his second home—and home office. 

He escaped to it from London throughout the Blitz, as described by Erik Larson in The Splendid and the Vile, staying for weekends which saw bouts of hard work interrupted by board games, dinners, garden strolls, and movies (the house had a home theater).

No slouch, Nancy leveraged her tastemaker's touch after the war, buying the London design firm Colefax & Fowler.

The firm specialized in country house décor, blending faded colors, chintzes and painted furniture and antiques in dreamy, romantic arrangements. Nancy turned it into a design powerhouse.

Referred to at her death in 1994 as the doyenne of interior decorators, Nancy was said to have "the finest taste of anyone in the world."

Above: Interior designer William Eubanks' English country manor-style home in Memphis.

How to Be a Bad Tourist in Croatia

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

— Herbert Simon

It's easy to grab attention on social media, hard to hold it. 

Attention-grabbing headlines (like the one for this post) assault us moment by moment.

But the vast majority of the posts attached to such headlines fail to pay off.

Like a damp Chinese rocket, they fizzle upon launch, leaving us vexed and perplexed. (I read the whole post about touring Croatia and still haven't a clue how to be a good tourist there.)

Most social posts disappoint readers because their authors aren't rewarded for legwork, but only for eyeballs.

All you find when you read these posts, at best, are vapid opinions, impressions, clichés, and half-truths. 

Hard research and data are absent.

Economist Herbert Simon blamed readers, not writers, for the failure.

Humanity has a habit, Simon believed, of coasting through life without seeking data; in fact, shunning it.

We make all of most important decisions—about ourselves, our families, our businesses, our habitats, our government, and our planet—based on half-assed data-gathering.

He called our method of decision-making satisficing (satisfying + sufficing).

To satisfice is to settle on a course of action that's acceptable—that suffices despite your lack of data about causes, conditions, and consequences.

Usually, that mans we choose the very first option that presents itself, and never the "optimal" option.

Simon believed we are fundamentally—perhaps genetically—allergic to data and that most serious problems we face are "computationally intractable."

Only artificial intelligence, he believed, could save mankind from its penchant for bad decision-making.

I'm sure if I asked a supercomputer to advise me about being a good tourist in Croatia, the machine would tell me to stay home and read journalist Slavenka Drakulić's 250-page Cafe Europa Revisted and maybe leave Croatia to itself.

Slap Happy

 

Best remembered for the "slap heard round the world," General George Patton was perhaps the least woke leader in the history of the US military.

Grandson of a Confederate, Patton paraded his contempt for minorities for the whole world to see.

Citing the general's saltiness, Donald Trump yesterday asked the crowd at a GOP rally in Alabama, "Do you think that General Patton was woke? I don’t think so. I don't think he was too woke."

Trump kicked off the rally by playing a six-minute clip from the opening of the 1970 movie Patton, in which actor George C. Scott gives "The Speech," an oration the real-life Patton delivered repeatedly throughout World War II.

Trump said the clip was appropriate, given his listeners' intelligence. 

Trump went on to give his own 90-minute speech, in which he lambasted “woke generals," blaming them for losing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We’re getting tired of the woke generals that we have, right?” Trump asked. "Do you think that General Patton was woke? I don’t think so. He was the exact opposite."

Patton most vividly displays the general's anti-woke urges in the soldier-slapping scene, when he shows no pity for a PTSD-afflicted private:

Patton: What's the matter with you?

Private: I guess I just can't take it, sir.

Patton: What did you say?

Private: It's my nerves, sir. I just can't stand the shelling anymore.

Patton: Your nerves? Hell, you're just a goddamn coward. [Slaps private. Turns to doctors.] I won't have a yellow bastard sitting here crying in front of these brave men who've been wounded in battle. [Slaps private again.] Shut up! [Turns to doctors.] Don't admit this yellow bastard. There's nothing wrong with him! I won't have sons of bitches who're afraid to fight stinking up this place of honor. [Turns to private.] You're going back to the front, my friend. You may get shot, you may get killed, but you're going up to the fighting. Either that or I'm going to stand you up in front of a firing squad. I ought to shoot you myself, you goddamn bastard! [Turns to doctors.] Get him out of here! Send him up to the front! You hear me? [Turns to private.] You goddamn coward! I won't have cowards in my army!

I wonder how Patton might have reacted had he encountered the then 22-year-old Donald Trump at the draft board in 1968:

Patton: What's the matter with you?

Trump: I guess it's my heel, sir.

Patton: What did you say?

Trump: It's my heel, sir. I have a bone spur.

Patton: This is the fifth time you've used that bullshit excuse! Hell, you're just a goddamn coward. [Turns to doctors.] Admit this yellow bastard. Nothing wrong with him. [Turns to Trump.] You're going to Vietnam, my friend. You may get shot, you may get killed, but you're going to Vietnam. Either that or I'll stand you up in front of a firing squad. I ought to shoot you myself, you bastard! 

Trump: But I have a note from my doctor!

Patton: Shut up! [Slaps Trump.] What do you take me for, you gutless, malingering goddamn sissy? One of those woke generals?

Trump: You woke? I don't think so.

Patton: [Slaps Trump again.] Shut up!

December Golf

Golf is a game of letting go.

— John Updike

Among the countless magazines where John Updike placed articles—pieces that earned him ten cents a word or less—Golf Digest may seem the oddest, until you realize the writer had a lifelong love for the game.

That love is on full display in "December Golf," a 1,000-word essay that ran in the December 1989 issue.

Its title alone signals Updike's theme—finales—and its opening two paragraphs make clear you're not in for run-of-the-mill sports writing.

You're in for an elegy. 

Through most of the piece, indeed, Updike lingers over closings (the clubhouse, pro shop and regular greens, for instance), the "savor of last things," and the abundant reminders that the golf season is at its bittersweet end.

Just as a day may come at sunset into its most glorious hour, or a life toward the gray-bearded end enter a halcyon happiness, December golf, as long as it lasts, can seem the sweetest golf of the year. 

The sweetest, Updike says, because in December "golf feels, on the frost-stiffened fairways, reduced to its austere and innocent essence."

There are no tee markers, no starting times, no scorecards, no gasoline carts—just golf-mad men and women, wearing wool hats and two sweaters each, moving on their feet. The season’s handicap computer has been disconnected, so the sole spur to good play is rudimentary human competition—a simple best-ball Nassau or 50-cent game of skins, its running tally carried in the head of the accountant or retired banker in the group. You seem to be, in December golf, reinventing the game, in some rough realm predating 15th-century Scotland.

In December golf, Updike says, excuses abound and rules are forgotten, freeing the players at last to compete on equal footing.

John Updike

Excuses abound, in short, for not playing very well, and the well-struck shot has a heightened luster as it climbs through the heavy air and loses itself in the dazzle of the low winter sun. Winter rules, of course, legitimize generous relocations on the fairway, and with the grass all dead and matted, who can say where the fairway ends? It possibly extends, in some circumstances, even into the bunkers, where the puddling weather, lack of sand rakes and foraging raccoons have created conditions any reasonable golfer must take it upon himself to adjust with his foot. A lovely leniency, in short, prevails in December golf, as a reward for our being out there at all.

That leniency compensates for the havoc the untended course and chilly air wreak on Updike's swing, a gnawing irritant both to him and his partner.

It is with a great effort of imagination—a long reach back into the airy warmth of summer—that I remind myself that golf is a game of letting go, of a motion that is big and free. “Throw your hands at the hole,” I tell myself. But by then the Nassau has been decided, and dusk has crept out of the woods into the fairways. 

As early night falls, the December golfers are ready to call it quits, for the day, for the season. And why not? They've discovered how to let go—the secret to the game.

Time to pack it in. The radio calls for snow tomorrow. “Throw your hands at the hole.” The last swing feels effortless, and the ball vanishes dead ahead, gray lost in the gray, right where the 18th flag would be. The secret of golf has been found at last, after eight months of futilely chasing it. Now, the trick is to hold it in mind, all the indoor months ahead, without its melting away.

You can read more of Updike's reflections on golf here.