Remembrance

 

Americans have no sense of history.

— Howard Fast

Today marks the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, our parents' and grandparents' 9/11.

Occasions like today's are good reminders that tyrants have no fondness for America.

Ignoring tyrants doesn't help. 

Cozying up to them doesn't help.

Only vigilance does.

And vigilance requires remembrance.

Apologies

We are so busy winning we can't concede our mistakes.

— Aaron Lazare

To err is human.

But to apologize—?

“Never apologize, mister" John Wayne said. "It’s a sign of weakness.”

That seems to be the code of most men. (Women, on the other hand, "live lives of continual apology," as Germane Greer said.)

An apology, according to psychiatrist Aaron Lazare, is really a reparation: you've wronged someone, and you owe them your admission of guilt.

Apology is a 15th-century word borrowed from the Greek apologia, literally "sprung from divine speech" (apo + logia). An apology was the pronouncement of a god, channeled through an oracle. 

To the Ancient Greeks, an apology wasn't just manly; an apology was godly.  

The English word apology first meant a "defense" or "self-excuse." Samuel Johnson defined it as such in his dictionary, adding "Apology generally signifies excuse rather than vindication, and tends to extenuate the fault, rather than prove innocence."

It gradually came to mean an "an admission of error." In other words, a guilty plea.

Like John Wayne, a lot of Americans feel no urge to apologize.

And they're sick of other Americans apologizing: apologizing for genocide and slavery and imperialism; for witch trials and lynch mobs and McCarthyism; for redlining and segregation and the caging of immigrant children; for strip-mining and gas-guzzlers and deforestation.

Apologies aren't manly.

Apologies are for losers.

But one form of apology worth considering is the apologetic.

An apologetic was an early Christian's defense of his faith.

Apologetics—short essays—were published at a time when the Romans would execute a Christian merely for refusing to worship the pagan gods (a lot were executed, and often in grisly ways).

Of the hundreds of written apologetics, On the Testimony of the Soul, penned in 198 AD by Quintus Septimius Tertullian, stands out as an especially persuasive one (Tertullian was a lawyer).

In the apologetic, he argues that there's little difference between Christians and pagans, when you consider that both believe in God, demons and souls.

Both, Tertullian says, admit expressions like "God help us," "God bless you," and "God wills it." 

Both, moreover, admit that souls can become corrupt—that demons exist who can capture and bend souls to their will.

And both admit, finally, that souls experience an afterlife; some a pleasant one; some an unpleasant one.

Given these common beliefs, Tertullian says, it's easy to see that Christians and pagans are bound by their humanity, and that their differing faiths are inborn and don't derive from religious discourse, but from the "testimony of the soul."

"Every race has its own discourse, but the content is universal," Tertullian says.

"God is everywhere and the goodness of God is everywhere. The demons are everywhere and the curse of the demons is everywhere. The summons of God's judgment is everywhere. The awareness of death is everywhere and the testimony of the soul is everywhere."

The testimony of the soul provides the evidence clinching Tertullian's case: pagans shouldn't execute Christians; for, in doing so, they only snuff themselves.

We'd be wise to remember with Tertullian that we're all one people, united by the fact that we all have a soul; and that, sometimes, apologies are due.

"When you forgive, you free your soul," says the writer Donald Hicks. "But when you say 'I’m sorry,' you free two souls."

The Real Danger of Inflation

I filled my gas tank yesterday and realized it costs 33% more to do so than when I bought the car five years ago. 

A lot of the price increase has come recently.

I'm as wary of inflation as the next guy.

But the real danger of inflation isn't to our pocketbooks.

It's to our republic.

As columnist David Brooks observed this week, run-of-the-mill, white-shoe Republicans are in a lather over federal spending, and will vote for Trump simply to damper it.

They're unaware of the evil Trump and his followers embody.

To these naïfs, he's just a good Republican. 

If inflation becomes chronic, they'll rally to him.

You'll recall from your history books a troubled time in Germany after World War I. 

The government had been forced, by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, to pay war reparations to the Allies.

To fund that debt, the German government printed money—tons of it—sparking runaway inflation.

At one point, German housewives burned piles of Reichsmarks, because they were worth less than firewood.

The inflationary spiral gave rise to extremist political leaders and movements, in particular Hitler and the Nazis.

Burning money soon gave way to burning books and, eventually, to burning people.

Don't think for a minute it can't happen here.

It can.

Inflation—and pocketbook-issue voters—can return Trump to office.

Money is in the Air

Five of the six Catholics on the Supreme Court seem ready to chop up Roe v. Wade. But what do I know? I'm not a lawyer. I'm a painter.

So when it comes to current events, stories about paintings get my attention.

One such story concerns a Banksy that the owner is about to chop up.

A near-iconic image, Love is in the Air depicts a Palestinian peacenik. It first appeared in 2003 as a stencil on the West Bank wall.  

While many versions of the image exist—including paintings on cardboard and wood—the version in the news is a 2005 painting on canvas.

The owner, Loïc Gouzer, plans to chop it up, or, in his language, "fractionalize" it. 

He will resell the fractionalized painting in the form of 10,000 NFTs, which he calls "particles." 

Each particle will represent a section of the painting.

Once it's factionalized into NFTs, Gouzer will tour the original Love is in the Air nationwide. 

It's currently on display at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Gouzer paid $12.9 million for the painting; he'll sell the 10,000 particles next month for $1,500 each, yielding an immediate 16% profit. 

If the particles are later resold by their new owners, Gouzer will receive an automatic cut of the resale price. He'll pay no income tax on those profits—and he gets to keep the original painting.

Artful deal!

Gouzer claims he is "collectivizing" art, "because pure enjoyment of art is not complete until you feel you own it."

The entrepreneur in me agrees completely.

And so, in honor of Banksy, I'm making you the following offer:

Buy my original painting Judging Amy (above) and enjoy owning it; fractionalize it, if you want; or resell the whole piece. Whatever you do, I will donate 100% of my profit to the Repro Legal Defense Fund.

The Repro Fund covers bail and attorneys' fees for women targeted by police for ending their own pregnancies.

Above: Judging Amy. Oil on canvas board. 10 x 8 inches.

Living Large

I have had a life which, for variety and romance,
could hardly be exceeded.

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, retirees spend more of their time sleeping and watching TV than anything else.

How sad.

I recently attended a memorial gathering for a friend who died last year from Covid-19.

The people who gathered—mostly strangers to one another—were encouraged to share anecdotes about our departed friend and, though aware of his polymathy, were surprised to learn how wide in fact it ran.

In his eighty+ years, we learned, our departed friend had been a marine, a laborer, a spy, a sailor, an economist, a filmmaker, an amateur historian, a long-distance hiker, and a world traveler.

I admire people who live large.

Another of them was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best remembered as the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Irish-Catholic and Jesuit-educated, Doyle became a surgeon at the age of 22. While still in medical school, he published short detective stories that mimicked his favorite writer, Edgar Allan Poe; and seven years out of school, the first Sherlock Holmes adventure, A Study in Scarlet. 

While in med school, Doyle also took a post as ship's surgeon on a whaler that circled from England to the Arctic and back, a voyage that gave him a lifelong taste for exotic travel.

Although the Sherlock Holmes stories—60 in all—made him wealthy and famous, Doyle longed to be a "serious" writer, like Charles Dickens, and so wrote another 17 adventure, mystery, historical, and sci-fi novels during his lifetime, including The Lost World, the 1912 forerunner to Jurassic Park. (Jurassic Park was written 78 years later by another polymathic doctor-turned-author, Michael Crichton.)

At the same time, Doyle became a student and proponent of spiritualism, writing and lecturing on the topic worldwide. He also volunteered to serve as a surgeon in the Boer War; ran twice for political office; took up golf, hot-air ballooning, and body-building; and began to write and produce stage plays. When World War I erupted, he became a war correspondent.

Not to rest on his laurels, Doyle also took up the study of landscape photography, publishing 13 articles on the subject for the British Journal of Photography, designing and building a large-format camera, lens, and tripod, and organizing photo expeditions; and learned how to ski. His efforts to popularize skiing—previously unheard of outside Northern Europe—are credited with making the Alpine sport mainstream. 

Today, 110 million people in more than 80 countries ski, thanks to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Now that's living large!

NOTE: Sherlock Holmes was born on this day in 1887.