The Lonely Sailor

Privilege implies exclusion from privilege.

— Robert Anton Wilson

Call me a libtard: I don't care much for unbridled privilege.

My closest encounter with it came in the National Gallery of Art on on a March evening in 1998, when I spotted a frantic Bill Gates.

It was Sunday, around 7 pm, and the building was officially closed to the art-viewing public. All the galleries were dark and cordoned off.

I was standing with a friend in the hallway in a long line for an after-hours chamber recital when Gates and his wife walked up alongside us.

They paused at the door of one of the galleries and Gates said, "That's it," pointing at a huge Winslow Homer seascape inside the darkened room. Without thought, he unhitched the velvet rope that blocked the door and shooed his wife in.

A young Black security guard appeared suddenly and said, "Sir, sir, the gallery's closed." "We just want to look at the painting," Gates snapped and stepped into the gallery. The guard repeated his warning to no avail, shrugged his shoulders, and wandered off for reinforcements. Gates and his wife spent five minutes inside the room examining the Homer, then left. The reinforcements never arrived.

The following morning, Gates' DC visit made the headlines of The Washington Post. He was in town to testify on Capitol Hill about Microsoft's monopoly over Internet access.

Two months later, Gates made the headlines again, this time for buying a Winslow Homer seascape for $36 million—in 1998, the greatest price ever paid for an American artist's painting.

Lost on the Grand Banks, the last major Homer seascape in private hands, was believed at the time to be destined for the National Gallery's permanent collection. But Gates got his hands on it first. (He still owns it today.)

I realized why he'd been so keen to examine Homer's seascape in the National Gallery that Sunday evening in March. 

He was planning to buy one of his own.

The thing that galled me (and still does) wasn't Gates' ability to buy a $36 million Winslow Homer, but the notion that he was entitled to let himself into an art gallery—the National Art Gallery—after hours, as if it were his living room.

But, to his mind, it is. After all, he's a man of privilege.

Privilege entered English in the 12th century, derived from the Latin privilegium.

According to the Laws of the Twelve Tables—the source of Ancient Roman law—a privilegium was a right conferred by the emperor on one man, a "law for an individual."

The Romans called the privilegium precisely for what it was: favoritism.

To have privilege today is to be favored, entitled, endowed, advantaged, exempt, immune, or just plain special.

You know, like Bill Gates.

Gates grew up in a privileged household, so his sense of entitlement was strong to begin with. But his runaway success in business no doubt supersized it.

Business success often goes to people's heads, you've probably noticed. Successful business leaders frequently feel they're superior—distinguished from others in their ability and willingness to do endless battle against chill winds and harsh seas. They, the lonely sailors, have singlehandedly brought the boats home. Everyone else is just ballast.

And so we like to say, "It's lonely at the top." One art critic, in fact, has suggested that Bill Gates had to acquire Lost on the Grand Banks because he feels so alone.

"In his bunkered isolation from the rest of us," the critic writes, "the image of the solo sailor is paramount."  

Above: Lost on the Grand Banks by Winslow Homer. 1885. Oil on canvas. 32 x 50 inches. Collection of Bill Gates.

Screwed. Again.

A team of eminent bean counters at the National Bureau of Economic Research has concluded 2020's $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was "highly regressive" and that Trump screwed middle- and working-class Americans.

A whopping 75% of the PPP funds went to the top 20% of US households. Most received cash they didn't need.

Only 25% of the funds went into the pockets of Americans who would have lost their jobs otherwise.

The PPP bailout exceeded by $100 billion that which followed the Great Recession, when Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac imploded.

Economists have since determined that the 2009 bailout—known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)—while failing to correct the causes underlying the financial system's collapse, made Wall Street executives richer than ever.

Ironically, the public's bitter memories of TARP's injustice propelled Trump into the White House in 2016.

Four years later, Trump sent billions of PPP dollars to people like Joe Farrrell, a billionaire developer and Trump fundraiser; Kanye West, wealthy rapper and Trump toady; Jeff Koons, a pop artist who holds the world record for the most expensive work ever sold by a living artist ($91.1 million); Tal Tsfany, CEO of the right-wing Ayn Rand Institute; Elaine Chao, Trump's billionaire Secretary of Transportation; and his vile and venal family members, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

And the little people?

We were screwed. Again.

Time's Unkind to the Harried Mind

Time is unkind to the harried mind, filling it each passing day with the detritus of the moment.

— Richard Seaver

Book reading by Americans has nosedived in the past five years, according to a new Gallup poll.

While, on average, Americans read 12 books in 2021, that's three fewer than in 2016.

Pollsters attribute the drop to the ready availability of other entertainments.

Poor education doesn't factor into the decline: the steepest falloff in book reading was among college graduates.

Age doesn't either: Americans 55 and older—traditionally the most voracious book readers—read the same number of books, on average, as all other Americans.

Whether you point the finger at Netflix, Nintendo, or Facebook, the trend should worry you.

The fewer books we read, the poorer our worlds become.

The fewer books we read, the shorter our attention spans grow.

And the fewer books we read, the more hidebound we're apt to be.

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies; the man who never reads lives only one," says fantasy novelist George R.R. Martin.

I get why TV, games and social media are crowding out books.

They're a fast-acting anesthesia.

Books, on the other hand, can burden you—especially if they're well written. They can tax your thought, shake your faith, wake you up, or give you nightmares.

And unlike the crap on this month's Netflix menu, there's no lack of good books to read.

Identifying good books is easy:

• Explore series. Great series abound. I love Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer, Robert B. Parker's Spenser, and Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander.
  
  
• Explore prize winners. I have never read a Pulitzer or Booker prize-winning book that wasn't great.
  
  
• Explore individual authors. Choose an exceptional author and read every book he or she has written. I've done that with William Faulkner, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Richard Ford, and am doing it now with Erik Larson. You won't be disappointed.
  
  
• Explore subgenres. Pick a genre (sci-fi or history or memoir, for example) and then a subgenre (dystopian sci-fi or historical westerns or celebrity memoirs) and read the most popular book by each of the subgenre's foremost authors.   

• Explore classics. They're classics for a reason, so find out why. Just for starters, read Dracula, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Oil!, The Scarlet Letter, Treasure Island, Bleak House, Martin Eden, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Secret Agent, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Breakfast at Tiffany's, A Farewell to Arms, The Long Goodbye, Eye of the Needle, The Time Machine, Outerbridge Reach, Moby Dick, Catch-22, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Trout Fishing in America, The Moviegoer, Worlds' Fair, From the Terrace, The Wonder Boys, Nausea, White Noise, Amsterdam, Deliverance, The Killer Angels, A Flash of Green, The Razor's Edge, The Confessions of Nat Turner, On the Road, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, A River Runs Through It, Crossing to Safety, Slaughterhouse-Five, War and Remembrance, or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 

And good books are handy and cheap. Use your local library and check out online seller Thriftbooks.com, if you don't believe me.

Make it your goal to read at least three books every month.

Do so, and you can boast to your friends and family that you read three times more than the average American!

Above: Jug & Book by Robert Francis James. Oil on canvas board. 8 x 10 inches.

The Way Some People Spell

I don't see any use in having a uniform way of spelling words.

— Mark Twain

Mark Twain thought that policing the way people spelled was a merry chase, like policing the way people dressed. Thorstein Veblen called it a "conspicuous waste," "archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective."

My grammar school teachers, on the other hand, taught me that spelling was like math: there was one, and only one, right answer.

Of course, that was the early 1960s. 

They also taught us that policemen were our friends, that beatniks were dirty, and that America was the greatest country on earth.

Critical Race Theorists would say they were abusing their authority in order to oppress us and make us conform to the "dominant identity;" but, actually, they were following the lead of a mild-mannered Connecticut teacher, Noah Webster, and teaching us to be Americans.

Frustrated by the outdated teaching materials on hand, Webster revised America's grammar school textbooks immediately after the Revolutionary War, to rid them of references to the king. He also wrote a famous dictionary to rid the new nation's language of Briticisms. In the process, Webster simplified the spelling of hundreds of words. Travelling, for example, became traveling; colour became color; and publick became public. 

Webster believed his spellings, being humbler than their British counterparts were "of vast political consequence" to the young republic. 

And perhaps they were.

But we're an old republic now, soon to become a dictatorship. 

Humble is passé.

We don't care whether you spell smoking as smocking or coffee as covfefe. Just as long as you don't mention white supremacy, marginalization, or dominant-determined identifies.

For my part, call me a dinosaur, but I like Webster's democratic way with words.

Mystery

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery.

— Sherlock Holmes

There are mysteries and there are mysteries.

Mystery (meaning a "puzzle") is a Middle English word derived from the Latin mysterium, meaning a "secret rite" or "initiation."

The medieval Catholic Church taught—and still teaches—that Jesus' life was an amalgam of mysteries, inexplicable to mortals, but worthy of contemplation. It used the Rosary to catalog these puzzles. A mystery meant an event in the life of Christ.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, mysteries was the term used to name the Seven Sacraments. So, for example, marriage was a mystery. (I can buy that.)

But mystery had a secular meaning, too, at the time.

A mystery meant an occupation, a trade, or a guild.

So, for example, the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, the guild for the retailers of fish in medieval London, were referred to as a "mystery."

Thanks to their royal charters, these mysteries were powerful monopolies, plying their might through arcane regulations.

They dictated who could sell fish in London and who couldn't; set all prices for their goods; and ran their own courts of law to settle disputes between sellers and suppliers.

The fishmongers, for example, fixed the prices for soles, turbots, herrings, oysters, and eels. They also forbid wholesalers from selling fish directly to the public; outlawed the selling of fish indoors; and prohibited the sale of any fish except salted ones after they were two days old.

The mysteries were also inordinately wealthy. They owned and ran their own apprentice programs, private schools, hospitals, poorhouses, and colonial plantations.

The mysteries' grip on commerce only ended with the rise of capitalism in the 19th century.

We echo the medieval mysteries' power today whenever we speak of guarding "trade secrets."