tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25027781064356115322024-03-13T16:36:41.309-07:00Brandy WalkerBrandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comBlogger43125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-38893630270643885142023-08-18T09:01:00.005-07:002024-02-29T16:18:28.555-08:00Nolan's Sad Man Crush on Oppenheimer<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBMqkG3upLO721hGksqq7JWw7cXbqLkruc-5IhSpCeE-t5rZq0GKUQDKwLqW28rAxzC6UWBBosZuih_UEXBmzrgXhjxMGABDqTaN4Jnis5nDmpj_oiHU0wcAtEBwUkZIz-C59Oo-35QRaI5g3ENbgX-IW9mzPdvMZVOQuwA7So8J0pG9CQD2XaxGTb0LI/s3050/Hiroshima%20Nagasaki%20mushroom%20clouds.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Atomic Cloud over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right)" border="0" data-original-height="1903" data-original-width="3050" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBMqkG3upLO721hGksqq7JWw7cXbqLkruc-5IhSpCeE-t5rZq0GKUQDKwLqW28rAxzC6UWBBosZuih_UEXBmzrgXhjxMGABDqTaN4Jnis5nDmpj_oiHU0wcAtEBwUkZIz-C59Oo-35QRaI5g3ENbgX-IW9mzPdvMZVOQuwA7So8J0pG9CQD2XaxGTb0LI/w400-h250/Hiroshima%20Nagasaki%20mushroom%20clouds.jpeg" title="Atomic Clouds over Hiroshima Nagasaki" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Photos: Atomic Cloud over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right)</p><p>When I learned there was a movie about Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project directed by Christopher Nolan, I recalled a book I read many years ago—<i>The Making of the Atomic Bomb</i> by Richard Rhodes, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Rhodes' book had a profound impact on me, so I was very much looking forward to seeing <i>Oppenheimer</i> when it was released in July 2023. Boy, was I disappointed.</p><p><i>Oppenheimer</i> received rave reviews from most critics, but most people I know who saw it, like myself, felt it was overrated. Some couldn't quite put their finger on what exactly was wrong with it or why they didn't like it. I can't speak for them, but I can speak for myself. </p><p>The development of the atomic bomb has opened up a Pandora’s Box. Nuclear weapons are now owned or being developed by unstable governments, the types of regimes that could care less about disarmament agreements. The unease that the nuclear age has produced is only marginally alluded to in the movie. A large percentage of the three-hour movie is a maudlin devotion to Oppenheimer's “victimhood” for his leftist ties.</p><p>Nolan is clearly smitten with Oppenheimer as many people are. Nolan's movie is essentially a man-crush Valentine to Oppenheimer and his ilk. In an infatuated and doting fashion, Nolan romanticizes and glamorizes the Manhattan Project. In a token nod to the death and devastation this project ultimately wreaked, Oppenheimer is portrayed as a tragic figure. Oppenheimer was "naive" about the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer could learn a new language and speak it fluently in weeks, yet supposedly he was a clueless simpleton about the ramifications of nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer was also a womanizer who had affairs with wives of his friends almost as if he felt entitled to do so. It would be more accurate to say that Oppenheimer was very good at rationalizing as opposed to being naive. But to his fawning fans, he was "complex," basically a euphemism for "sleazy" or "dubious."</p><p>Oppenheimer did experience remorse after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as most people will after doing something they're not proud of, and spoke out against nuclear weapons. But this is a laughable, and some would say hypocritical, afterthought, too little too late. The disturbing genie is out of the bottle and can't be put back in.</p><p>The reason most often cited as justification for the creation of a nuclear weapon was that the Nazis were working on one. But evidence obtained towards the end of the war showed the Nazis weren’t even close to developing one—they had been sidetracked by going down a blind alley in their research.</p><p>Rhodes noted in his book: </p><p>"One of the mysteries of the Second World War was the lack of an early and dedicated American intelligence effort to discover the extent of German progress toward atomic bomb development. If, as the record repeatedly emphasizes, the United States was seriously worried that Germany might reverse the course of the war with such a surprise secret weapon, why did its intelligence organizations, or the Manhattan Project, not mount a major effort of espionage?"</p><p>And furthermore, Hitler and the Nazis were defeated before the bomb was ever completed. </p><p>The second most cited reason for developing and using the atomic bomb was that the Japanese would have never been defeated otherwise, and the bomb saved many American lives. When Americans became aware of the horrific aftermath of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman and his officials prompted Secretary of War Henry Stimson to put in writing that dropping both bombs prevented “over a million casualties, to American forces alone.” When Stimson's ghostwriter was later asked where he got that number, he replied, "Oh, we pulled it out of thin air."</p><p>The debate rages on to this day whether the use of atomic bombs was necessary. Even people who believe that they did save "over a million casualties" or at least brought a rapid close to a deadly war, concede two atomic bombs in three days on two cities was probably overkill, a gratuitous use of overwhelming force on innocent civilians. And never mind the long-term consequences of introducing nuclear weapons to the world.</p><p>But I’m not writing primarily to argue whether the development and use of the atomic bomb were justified but rather to point out the vanity and foolishness of idolizing people like Oppenheimer as many people do, including Nolan.</p><p>Let's call a spade a spade. Before the bombing of Japan, Oppenheimer was haughty, ruthlessly ambitious, single-minded, and obsessive in his focus, and some would say a self-important narcissist. The vainglory of being the first to develop the atomic bomb outweighed any logical reason or true moral conviction. And never mind how obviously intoxicating it is to be credited with that sort of power.</p><p>Albert Einstein, who sent the famous letter (drafted by Leo Szilard) to Roosevelt suggesting the U.S. conduct research and work on nuclear weapons as Germany was likely doing so, later stated, “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing for the bomb.”</p><p>Hindsight is always 20/20. In other words, he was stating it would have been better and wiser to have done nothing at all. Although a non-practicing Jew, he was Jewish nonetheless, and his sentiment lines up with timeless truth expressed in numerous scriptures in the Old Testament attesting to the futility of trusting in the cleverness of man and sophisticated entities like Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. It's worth noting the Jews and their culture and religion still thrive and exist, and these other kingdoms, who outnumbered and outclassed them in population, technology, and weaponry, are now obsolete.</p><p>Our technology-obsessed culture worships and whitewash people like Oppenheimer—so-called "wise" but morally bankrupt fools who wreak havoc on humanity with their intellectual “superiority” and "brilliance."</p><p>Maybe you think I'm too harsh? If so, I dare you to read the eyewitness accounts of the atomic bombings and their aftermath by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and imagine such an outcome for a city you live in or your loved ones live in, which is not out of the realm of possibility in this day and age.</p><p>The chapter titled "Tongues of Fire" in Rhodes' book gives plenty of detail. If you’re unable to buy or borrow this book, accounts of Hiroshima are told in the archived article: <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">"Hiroshima" by John Hersey published on August 23, 1946</span></a>.</p><p>Yes, Oppenheimer was a tragic figure, but not in the way Nolan melodramatically portrays. The classic definition of tragedy has nothing to do with naïveté but rather a fall and sorrowful circumstances resulting from a flaw, most notably hubris a.k.a. overweening pride. And Oppenheimer's tragedy has become our tragedy.</p>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-73305739770595014832022-12-12T08:26:00.013-08:002024-02-29T16:20:12.178-08:00Arabian Sands Revisited<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNWOnOLRkOAtN0AYP8hPlp3tGUKa4e4qmlQ-f52C-JKNwbHey0DmtHrjg7U8MgOmShtLaytz9BiUNyHeV2TNYP6FptMqhk2L83ZWImEsSUVBQbo-f8vVLe9j4KcQVWWyApQVlTBaMMxRJmsbodDa_6VM1N43o799OYRFyqymLAAXNntMSfA-fyaQx1/s2415/Arabian%20Sands%20by%20Wilfred%20Thesiger%20cropped%20cover.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2415" data-original-width="2406" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNWOnOLRkOAtN0AYP8hPlp3tGUKa4e4qmlQ-f52C-JKNwbHey0DmtHrjg7U8MgOmShtLaytz9BiUNyHeV2TNYP6FptMqhk2L83ZWImEsSUVBQbo-f8vVLe9j4KcQVWWyApQVlTBaMMxRJmsbodDa_6VM1N43o799OYRFyqymLAAXNntMSfA-fyaQx1/w399-h400/Arabian%20Sands%20by%20Wilfred%20Thesiger%20cropped%20cover.jpeg" width="399" /></a></div><br />In my sophomore year in high school, I had to research and write a history report on Thomas Edward Lawrence, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I developed a mad schoolgirl crush on him. I thought he was dashing, charismatic, and looked cool and chic in long robes. In my adolescent insanity, I would stare at his picture and have imaginary conversations with him.<p></p><p>Thankfully, I outgrew this. (Although I still think long robes are cool and chic. Sometimes I wish we could all wear long robes like they do in the Star Wars movies.) However, through my short-lived infatuation with Lawrence of Arabia, I did develop a fascination with the Arabian desert.</p><p>A large portion of my childhood and teen years were spent in Erie, Pennsylvania, one of a series of waterfront cities on Lake Erie including Cleveland and Buffalo. Derisively called the Rust Belt, this area is industrial, predominantly working class, depressing. Erie has the nickname Dreary Erie, and both Erie and Cleveland are referred to as “the mistake on the lake” by many of their residents. The winters are long and miserable. Months of monochrome monotony: the sky almost perpetually grey, leafless skeletal trees, layer upon layer of snow piled up, partially melting and refreezing into a dirty, dog-pee stained mess.</p><p>The landscape of Arabia—the blazing, cloudless blue and the searingly hot ocean of undulating sand dunes, some as high as 800 feet—was as foreign to me as an alien planet and I escaped into that world like some people will lose themselves in science fiction or fantasy novels.</p><p>My all-time favorite book in high school was <i>Arabian Sands</i> by Wilfred Thesiger. (U.S. first edition published by E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc. New York, 1959.)</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw7g787rsbQ1UKz86_DeAJzs3we9qY77_rDdZcJ3ZSQwsaccfaQUtXv7icvnEPXGxM4emvyHwJgyhTGFlF6woUzuc4bb4VJ8j4KvsLVUIBNsSNOc8cMLMCV8KzzuPOnwR-2Zf1fEfyawA9koSKTas6cmXnHCpRdVJpwJ48OECoPNoeBGIglR4dEFNY/s3463/Wilfred-Thesiger-with-camel.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Wilfred Thesiger with his camel" border="0" data-original-height="2894" data-original-width="3463" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw7g787rsbQ1UKz86_DeAJzs3we9qY77_rDdZcJ3ZSQwsaccfaQUtXv7icvnEPXGxM4emvyHwJgyhTGFlF6woUzuc4bb4VJ8j4KvsLVUIBNsSNOc8cMLMCV8KzzuPOnwR-2Zf1fEfyawA9koSKTas6cmXnHCpRdVJpwJ48OECoPNoeBGIglR4dEFNY/w400-h334/Wilfred-Thesiger-with-camel.JPG" title="photo Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wilfred Thesiger with his camel</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Thesiger was born in 1910, the son of a British Minister in Ethiopia, and educated at Eton and Oxford. He despised the comfortable hypocrisy of western civilization and the organized rigidity of man-made structures: cities laid out in predictable, straight-line grids; the exacting demands of train schedules; the phony formalities of society, exchanging cards and buttering up social prospects. And most of all, sitting at a desk in an office, a slave to a schedule and paperwork. And early on, he saw ahead to the problem of globalization: “All my life I had hated machines. I could remember how bitterly at school I had resented reading the news that someone had flown across the Atlantic or traveled through the Sahara in a car. I had realized even then that the speed and ease of mechanical transport must rob the world of all diversity.”<p></p><p>Thesiger questioned modernity and technological progress, and I suppose unconsciously I did too, living in the rotting, polluted remains of the Industrial Revolution on one of the most notoriously polluted Great Lakes.</p><p>There’s the romantic, Hollywood vision of progress: “We can live on the moon and send people to Mars!” And the day-to-day ugly reality. As far as I can tell, the practical end result of progress is to be transported in our driverless cars via GPS to big box stores or fast-food chains so that we can waddle in with our fat bottoms which are becoming ever more ample with ever-increasing time spent sitting and staring at a screen for work, entertainment, or social media scrolling. Obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and erratic mental health: these are the grotesque fruits of all of our so-called “progress”.</p><p>In Thesiger's time, modern western civilization had encroached on Arabia due to the world wars and oil exploration, but there were still vast unexplored regions. Thesiger received backing from the Middle East Ant-Locust Unit to travel through some of these regions to collect information on locust movements and possible breeding grounds. Thesiger had no real interest in locusts, but they had provided the opportunity to travel in areas that, at the time, were shut off to westerners, and which he was eager to explore: “I have seen some of the most magnificent scenery in the world… None of these places has moved me as did the deserts of Arabia.”</p><p>Later in life, I sailed through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea on a ship, and indeed, it was unlike any place I’d been to, and I’ve traveled all over the world. The stark emptiness of the desert landscape was hypnotic and there was a palpable sense of timeless mystery.</p><p>In Thesiger’s words in <i>Arabian Sands</i>:</p><p>“Damascus and Aleppo had been old before Rome was founded. Among the towns and villages, invasion after invasion had heaped ruin upon the ruin, and each new conquest had imposed new conquerors upon the last. But the desert had always been inviolate. There I lived among tribes who claimed descent from Ishmael, and listened to old men who spoke of events which had occurred a thousand years ago as if they had happened in their own youth. I went there with a belief in my own racial superiority, but in their tents I felt like an uncouth, inarticulate barbarian, an intruder from a shoddy and materialistic world.”</p><p>“For this was the real desert where differences of race and colour, of wealth and social standing, are almost meaningless; where coverings of pretence are stripped away and basic truths emerge.”</p><p>“In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance. I had found, too, a comradeship inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquillity was to be found there. I had learnt the satisfaction which comes from hardship and the pleasure which springs from abstinence: the contentment of a full belly; the richness of meat; the taste of clean water; the ecstasy of surrender when the craving for sleep becomes a torment; the warmth of a fire in the chill of dawn.”</p><p>“[In the desert] Time and space were one. Round us was a silence in which only the winds played, and a cleanness which was infinitely remote from the world of men.”</p><p>On a side note, in my rereading of <i>Arabian Sands</i>, I remembered that both Moses and Paul the Apostle spent time in Arabia.</p><p>Moses had lived a pampered life as a prince in Egypt in a lush court along the Nile River. After he killed an Egyptian who was abusing a Jewish slave, he fled to Midian in Arabia. Interestingly, he remained there for forty years, the same length of time as the Exodus journey, providing much-needed acclimation and maturing to fulfill his unique leadership role.</p><p>Before Paul became an apostle, he was the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus. After his conversion, he spent time in Arabia (which in that time extended beyond what we now consider Arabia.) What exactly he did there is not clear, but no doubt he was impacted by the desert and its people. Paul, self-described as "a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees,” had a high measure of respectability and self-righteousness which needed to be stripped off. He later endured severe difficulties in his missionary journeys and I believe his time in Arabia helped acclimate him to the rigors and extremes of his missionary life.</p><p>There are years that are unaccounted for in the life of Jesus. Some claim he went to India, but if he did in fact travel abroad, I’d put my money on Arabia.</p><p>This was, of course, a pre-Muslim Arabia, but the nomadic camel-breeding tribes of the Arabian desert have been there since the dawn of time. The desert guides and companions of Thesiger were such Arabs, which he was careful to distinguish from the Arabs who cultivate farms or live in towns and cities. These desert Arabs, which he called Bedu (more commonly known as Bedouin), had lived unchanged since ancient, biblical times and were considered “primitive” but had a refinement that “civilized” people didn’t have.</p><p>In the desert, there is more at reach a closeness to God difficult to achieve in the comfortable, distraction-addled life of the towns and cities. And the harshness of desert life will purge one of nearly everything that one takes for granted in civilized life. The traits most admired by these desert Arabs are long-suffering endurance and patience.</p><p>What a contrast to our lives dominated by the pleasure principle, where it is not unusual to see adults throw tantrums when they do not get their way. Where it is the norm to lead waste-ridden, self-centered lives surrounded by endless toys, knick-knacks, and gadgets that we thoughtlessly discard the second they bore us. In modern life, so much of what steals our attention and faith is detritus and pointless distraction, and we will export and import this detritus and distraction to and from the ends of the world. And we demand even more. Restless, we hop in our cars or planes and rush anywhere that promises amusement and novel experiences.</p><p>So much of modern, first-world academia paints life before modernity as undignified and barbaric, but a strong argument could be made the reverse is true.</p><p>Our crass, infantile sense of entitlement for instant gratification, convenience, and entertainment generally rules the day. “I want what I want, and I want it now!” I always laugh at the people who think more technology and/or more man-made laws are ultimately going to solve problems like global warming when it is this restlessness, dissatisfaction, and rot in our souls that’s the root problem.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7unIBYeEDEDJsFbCfZikM6K2YOx9G7fEZHs8u-VqEr5agqii_Kt7hWOnnqcIhOAK6IfqYUP6KAesCUt6DZPtdJ74vRKRa5BAF_82AbfhmQl6lXN6BT2P7I7B_wGuRXhPX5bjQfuWYS00V2YSqoBRNRhOkDPHAVTDTs1SMPdT_ICc2f1VAVnJ08uPF/s3666/Arabian%20Sands%20by%20Wilfred%20Thesiger.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger" border="0" data-original-height="3666" data-original-width="2497" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7unIBYeEDEDJsFbCfZikM6K2YOx9G7fEZHs8u-VqEr5agqii_Kt7hWOnnqcIhOAK6IfqYUP6KAesCUt6DZPtdJ74vRKRa5BAF_82AbfhmQl6lXN6BT2P7I7B_wGuRXhPX5bjQfuWYS00V2YSqoBRNRhOkDPHAVTDTs1SMPdT_ICc2f1VAVnJ08uPF/w273-h400/Arabian%20Sands%20by%20Wilfred%20Thesiger.jpeg" title="U.S. first edition published by E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc. New York, 1959" width="273" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cover of Arabian Sands, U.S. First Edition, Dutton, 1959</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibM8X41JM2Xes4FJKkLbTa1um-uafmKYarht8jAjn55vphl1fxA_KkifgHNRaLj57CTH0MWGUiLYdMoMlhJpF_thTkkRQEWZ7CJQEXyj5PasKT8UzeKpTkkT5UzilPONPSValFi_aGoEzMYw751HzzoZTgr-T6emipS3yP1GPVadl3DIQ1vQBypaDj/s3844/Arabian%20Sands%20Penguin%20edition.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Cover of Arabian Sands, Penguin Classics edition" border="0" data-original-height="3844" data-original-width="2453" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibM8X41JM2Xes4FJKkLbTa1um-uafmKYarht8jAjn55vphl1fxA_KkifgHNRaLj57CTH0MWGUiLYdMoMlhJpF_thTkkRQEWZ7CJQEXyj5PasKT8UzeKpTkkT5UzilPONPSValFi_aGoEzMYw751HzzoZTgr-T6emipS3yP1GPVadl3DIQ1vQBypaDj/w255-h400/Arabian%20Sands%20Penguin%20edition.JPG" title="Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger, Penguin Classics edition" width="255" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Penguin Classics Edition<br />(Sadly, it contains only a fraction of the photos and maps of the first edition)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p>(Posted 12/12/22) </p>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-31571832621297050222021-09-10T19:56:00.022-07:002023-06-30T12:12:17.678-07:009/11 Remembered, 20th Anniversary<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih5GX50-i2dhaBDjBSLdjGmqMCdIXcL7j3ClHmCy9Ug2kpcSJowXcweNly54twD04MshaGPfjUtuH0V1Fyvyw_cfw5TwqaHIQQBQz4aOZL0IiUggYodSFcxbkTJ-kzl_fpLSbstoekuxw/s3156/twin+towers+manhattan+skyline.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="997" data-original-width="3156" height="202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih5GX50-i2dhaBDjBSLdjGmqMCdIXcL7j3ClHmCy9Ug2kpcSJowXcweNly54twD04MshaGPfjUtuH0V1Fyvyw_cfw5TwqaHIQQBQz4aOZL0IiUggYodSFcxbkTJ-kzl_fpLSbstoekuxw/w640-h202/twin+towers+manhattan+skyline.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Joseph Sohm</td></tr></tbody></table><p>When the Sept. 11 attacks occurred, I was in California. In horror, I watched one of the towers collapse on live television. My family friends Don and Sue Jenner lived in Tribeca on Greenwich Street, walking distance to the World Trade Center. They also both worked at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College in lower Manhattan.</p><p>When I was attending college on Long Island, the Jenners were like an aunt and uncle to me and often invited me into the city. I was always so grateful for their warm hospitality which belied the stereotype of frosty, uppity New Yorkers and made NYC feel like a real home to me. When staying with them, we attended Trinity Church Wall Street, and everyone I met there was also so kind and friendly to me.</p><p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCYRn0yBKBmagZuu-KwNWN-nqRcS4cb9LouyuPx7BsaBhUvYyHmEdivXsZNq9cBYTnmIFtAAhMpXec5KI60DKjm7laVVpXDDxBdjjbeRrTX9rAkAyTRWsu_5HyivAzfNUhqMvpDxSIgbs/s2048/Jenner+Pic+1.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCYRn0yBKBmagZuu-KwNWN-nqRcS4cb9LouyuPx7BsaBhUvYyHmEdivXsZNq9cBYTnmIFtAAhMpXec5KI60DKjm7laVVpXDDxBdjjbeRrTX9rAkAyTRWsu_5HyivAzfNUhqMvpDxSIgbs/w400-h300/Jenner+Pic+1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Don and Sue Jenner at World Trade Center in front of Borders Books, 5 WTC, 1990s</td></tr></tbody></table><br />I was terrified for everyone. I felt a mixture of relief and a strange survivor guilt after learning my “aunt and uncle” and everyone I knew from the church fared better than many.<p></p><p>Sue was sleeping when the first plane hit. The Jenner’s apartment building was four blocks north of the World Trade Center complex. She said she heard the explosion and at the same time felt their building jump. The explosion was so loud and the movement so pronounced, she initially assumed there was an explosion on their roof. Their apartment windows did not face south, so they could not see what was going on unless they were on the ground level. Over the course of the morning, Sue said she saw 300-400 police officers rushing to the WTC. When one of the towers started collapsing, she was looking out the window of their apartment onto Greenwich St. and she said she saw wall-to-wall humans, arm-in-arm, a river of people running up Greenwich St. Don was standing on the ground level on Greenwich St. when the tower collapsed. He saw the debris cloud come up Greenwich St. and ducked into a nearby store just in time. </p><p>Visiting the site and neighborhood years later was profoundly emotional and unsettling. When visiting as a college student, I would stand in front of the Jenners' apartment complex and look up at the nearby towers and marvel at the sheer height and mass of them. At the time, they were such an iconic part of the New York skyline it was inconceivable that they could one day be gone.</p><p>Don moved into his Greenwich St. apartment in the mid-seventies not long after the Twin Towers were completed in 1973. When the World Trade Center was being designed and developed, some proclaimed it was the greatest building project since the pyramids, but it was also mired in controversy and public criticism. The uber-tall, boxy design of the Twin Towers, compared to the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building, was regarded by many as tasteless, a vulgar and arrogant intrusion into the New York skyline. </p><p>Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic for the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> and the <i>New York Times</i>, wrote of the World Trade Center in 1966, “Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know. The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale—and ultimately it is a gamble—demands an extraordinary payoff. The trade center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.”</p><p>After the World Trade Center was completed, much of the office space in the towers sat empty for years, proving right the people who argued that the extra office space in lower Manhattan was unwarranted. Regardless, the lights were put on every night to make it appear as if the buildings were occupied and a success. Critics of the Twin Towers clucked that the project was the perfect metaphor of wasteful hubris and empty achievement.</p><p>But in the heyday of the “greed is good” 1980s, the towers started to fill up and the controversy was forgotten. By the 1990s, the Twin Towers became profitable and the World Trade Center an indelible part of New York City, the capital of the world economy.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJGDyaU18Dn7HuGHsK4P99Uouv_7eJi2THR2I6CHhyphenhyphenCMhnn2sYymzBt5Zti3IWQE30RoHWAikoYFzdgeNtd1dGp3Ic6aEhkXGMdW1KTK4f82CRYZ3zL92jRBWUTQDCQfHURtw4CUDX_CU/s2048/1_brandy_w_sue_jenner+copy.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJGDyaU18Dn7HuGHsK4P99Uouv_7eJi2THR2I6CHhyphenhyphenCMhnn2sYymzBt5Zti3IWQE30RoHWAikoYFzdgeNtd1dGp3Ic6aEhkXGMdW1KTK4f82CRYZ3zL92jRBWUTQDCQfHURtw4CUDX_CU/w400-h300/1_brandy_w_sue_jenner+copy.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">With Sue Jenner in 2016</td></tr></tbody></table><br />The Twin Towers thrusting up from the skyline also became a symbol and target. A symbol of our ingenuity and ambition, of American power. Also a representation and monument of crass capitalism. Of money, power, and ego. Globalization and modernity.<p></p><p>From design inception to completion to destruction, the World Trade Center existed for about four decades at the most. In the infinite scheme of things, it was here and gone in a blink of an eye, so much like our lives.</p><p>On 9/11, every building in the World Trade Center was destroyed. The World Trade Center comprised seven buildings total including the Twin Towers. Sue watched building seven collapse from her neighbor's window. She and her neighbor noticed the windows on the upper floors bulging out just before the whole structure buckled to the ground. The only property to escape damage in that small square acreage was St. Paul’s Chapel, the oldest church building in Manhattan, right across the street from the World Trade Center. St. Paul’s chapel became a relief center where people came to get help and pray. Sue volunteered there passing out socks, water, and face masks.</p><p>That miracle became a clarification for me. Christ is more powerful than anything our proud civilization can come up with. In the end, it’s not grand achievements or worldly success that matter, but the kindness, love, and compassion we show one another in our brief time here.</p><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCzIxzSk14oEQBH7NGIasY51P4DceFq_0tyDyJzYGXQMEIgXTezY3aphXybM-ospPHXRJvtGqorR4cDWikQGuZseVuWMhaM8oanA8IAVhh1WVcDpDev1FMAM8LnqahRmWBlQaIIlejsWY/s1800/Ground+Zero+Cross+9_11.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1800" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCzIxzSk14oEQBH7NGIasY51P4DceFq_0tyDyJzYGXQMEIgXTezY3aphXybM-ospPHXRJvtGqorR4cDWikQGuZseVuWMhaM8oanA8IAVhh1WVcDpDev1FMAM8LnqahRmWBlQaIIlejsWY/w400-h266/Ground+Zero+Cross+9_11.jpeg" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ground Zero Cross<br />(Photo by Bill Gruber)</td></tr></tbody></table>(Posted 9/10/21)Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-10567378936053914622021-08-31T11:29:00.000-07:002021-10-07T11:31:35.227-07:00Anthony Bourdain was an Idolater?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk6B-v5As1kRIeLZPuBv-aDvNmsSfhlJ7oD-wpigeiH2pRDlRpmib1C8HzDOtieuHsGk-tasO8yO-Xp0j3FaPlU72A4aJY9nGBgrAWcH2hU29ucNnQpRtz4giPUFqoWvd5TdWsvyXMryA/s2048/Anthony+Bourdain+memorial+2018+Les+Halles.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk6B-v5As1kRIeLZPuBv-aDvNmsSfhlJ7oD-wpigeiH2pRDlRpmib1C8HzDOtieuHsGk-tasO8yO-Xp0j3FaPlU72A4aJY9nGBgrAWcH2hU29ucNnQpRtz4giPUFqoWvd5TdWsvyXMryA/w640-h426/Anthony+Bourdain+memorial+2018+Les+Halles.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anthony Bourdain memorial, Les Halles Restaurant in NYC, June 2018<br />(Photo by Donald Bowers Photography)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>“Sometimes the greatest meals on vacations are the ones you find when Plan A falls through.”</p><p>I love that quote by Anthony Bourdain.</p><p>As a former merchant sailor, I was fortunate to travel all over the world. I loved trying different foods, learning about other cultures, seeing the spectrum of humanity—what we had in common and what separated us. My favorite mode, when arriving in port, was to wander and explore without a plan. My best experiences were the happy accidents of hospitality from interesting strangers.</p><p>Anthony’s popular tv career, jump-started from a successful book about his years as a cook and chef, began as an exploration of world cuisine which morphed into shows that took him all over the world and depicted the romance of that wanderlust.</p><p>Anthony seemed to have the ideal life so his suicide in 2018 at the height of his career came as a big shock. Even three years after his death, the subject continues to be explored in articles and a recent documentary by Santa Barbara native Morgan Neville (Roadrunner, released July 16, 2021.)</p><p>I realize now that his shows had the illusion of that romantic, wandering travel that I had the fortune to experience. Anthony was with a camera crew at all times. While there wasn’t a script, there was usually a plan of how and where the shows would be shot.</p><p>I didn’t watch every episode but caught many. He visited places I’ve been to and loved, so it was like a walk down memory lane, and also places I’ve never been to, which gave a vicarious thrill.</p><p>His shows ran for years, and I noticed, over time, a growing weariness and tired air about him. His endearing irritability and sarcasm became more vulgar, and some of the show content was getting darker, so I stopped watching. I didn’t have a good feeling about any of it and thought something had to give. I assumed the show would be canceled or he would retire. I was shocked and not shocked when he committed suicide.</p><p>Anthony didn’t profess any religion or faith other than a restless, endless search for new experiences, a sort of “be true to yourself” hedonism and exploration that he pushed to the limit. While many saw him as having an enviable existence, he never seemed to find any stable contentment, peace, or lasting joy. He displayed admirable qualities such as devoting some of his show content to off-the-beaten-path human interest stories. And he claimed, in his words, that he tries “to emulate Christ in small ways everyday,” but his good intentions and goods deeds didn’t seem to have any real foundation in faith.</p><p>No one knows the full reason why he committed suicide and what was going on in his head—God only knows.</p><p>But I can speak for myself. I’ve lived both as a believer and an agnostic, wandering seeker. When you don’t believe in God, then by default, you end up believing in yourself and the things of the world. If all you believe in is yourself, then at some point, you will exhaust that self. And even if you gain the whole world exhausting that self, what good is that? Or to quote Jesus, “what good will it do a person if he gains the whole world, but forfeits his soul?” In his book ‘A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal’, Anthony made fun of television food celebrities but acknowledged he was no better, writing, “One sells one’s soul in increments, slowly, over time.”</p><p>If you put your faith in the things of the world, at some point, they will betray or disappoint you. The Judeo-Christian faith professes anything you value more than God is an idol. An idol can be something society sees as a good thing. The very nature of idols is that the more you put your faith in them, the more they become all-consuming, like an addiction. And idols inevitably topple, fall, self-destruct.</p><p>Anthony was weary and confessed to his creative partners, who were also his friends, that he wanted to quit the show. They were supportive of that choice. But he lacked the resolve to quit. And no one challenged or questioned the lack of resolve even though he was clearly burned out. Why should they? The show was phenomenally successful. It was easier to go with the current or blame his “addictive personality.” No one seemed very interested in delving into the deeper problem and lack of which addiction was merely a symptom.</p><p>Am I suggesting that Anthony was an idolater? Maybe, but more so that we’re the idolaters for romanticizing and idolizing him and putting such a huge demand and pressure on him to live vicariously through him.</p><p>(Posted 8/31/21)</p>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-14927986474348638732019-12-17T08:26:00.000-08:002020-01-16T18:24:16.863-08:00Julian Moody in Choice Magazine<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDzoV6OGhiQ8N0QjZf1CY9fXpKfnzc_GKdOLjlLrE_ReGSjEJS6Bsxb118GiBr0NkWhHtH3Df9ab5JJMLnbk0DfEzQpXdvnuOW2bzuARqbxHxozSmUKA4-68hQHy9y_ys4JWW1SKJ4rr4/s1600/choice_dec.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1229" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDzoV6OGhiQ8N0QjZf1CY9fXpKfnzc_GKdOLjlLrE_ReGSjEJS6Bsxb118GiBr0NkWhHtH3Df9ab5JJMLnbk0DfEzQpXdvnuOW2bzuARqbxHxozSmUKA4-68hQHy9y_ys4JWW1SKJ4rr4/s400/choice_dec.jpg" width="306" /></a></div>
My article titled “More Alike Than Different: Commonalities in Life, Leadership, Business and Executive Coaching from a Coaching Pioneer and Veteran” was published in the December (Winter 2019/2020) issue of <i><a href="https://choice-online.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">choice: the magazine of professional coaching</span></a></i>. (To purchase this issue and other issues, click: <a href="https://choice-online.com/issue-library/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Issue Library</span></a>. To subscribe, use my special coupon code, AUTHOR25, to receive a 25% discount off a print, digital, or combo subscription: <a href="http://www.choice-online.com/catalogue" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Subscription Catalogue</span></a>.)<br />
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This article summarizes my friend Julian’s experiences, observations, and insights which are contained in our project:<br />
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<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/on-life-business-education-and-other.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Dialogues with Julian Moody: On Life, Business, Sustainability, and Other Things</span></a><br />
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This project includes Julian's early life experiences, failures and difficulties, formative years of his career, and career breakthroughs. Anyone can view this complete project free of charge.<br />
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Now coaches all over the world will have access to Julian’s work and decades of experience.<br />
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Choice is the only magazine serving the national and international coaching communities. Choice is partnered with ICF (International Coach Federation) and a sponsor with IAC (International Association of Coaching).<br />
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(<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Click here for more information on Julian Moody and his list of clients served.</span></a>)<br />
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(Posted 12/17/19)<br />
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<br />Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-2847565452708647932019-10-01T10:34:00.002-07:002024-01-15T16:00:41.592-08:00El Faro Remembered<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYRLwhgnY5vzdE_KTAymmB5gn5_F8J8knUlBw9lolOj87YIcopHOZ6VDmH_OIT-oHpUJRRjkcCdewUa6z8afRz0koC1EgxhOvx0oOiNTqDen2JfPyEfPbiP97wbhb47oEd2cz4FDBRwVQ/s1600/El+Faro+NTSB+artist+rendering.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="El Faro wreck on ocean floor, artist's rendering" border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="799" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYRLwhgnY5vzdE_KTAymmB5gn5_F8J8knUlBw9lolOj87YIcopHOZ6VDmH_OIT-oHpUJRRjkcCdewUa6z8afRz0koC1EgxhOvx0oOiNTqDen2JfPyEfPbiP97wbhb47oEd2cz4FDBRwVQ/s640/El+Faro+NTSB+artist+rendering.jpg" title="El Faro wreck" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">NTSB artist's rendering of El Faro wreck on ocean floor.</td></tr>
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On October 1st, 2015, the U.S. merchant ship SS El Faro sank near Crooked Island, Bahamas in Hurricane Joaquin. The sinking is considered the greatest American merchant shipping disaster in decades.<br />
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Thirty-three lives were lost:<br />
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(In alphabetical order.)<br />
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Louis Champa — Palm Coast, Florida<br />
Roosevelt Clark — Jacksonville, Florida<br />
Sylvester Crawford Jr. — Lawrenceville, Georgia<br />
Michael Davidson — Windham, Maine<br />
Brookie Davis — Jacksonville, Florida<br />
Keith Griffin — Fort Myers, Florida<br />
Frank Hamm — Jacksonville, Florida<br />
Joe Hargrove — Orange Park, Florida<br />
Carey Hatch — Jacksonville, Florida<br />
Michael Holland — North Wilton, Maine<br />
Jack Jackson — Jacksonville, Florida<br />
Jackie Jones, Jr. — Jacksonville, Florida<br />
Lonnie Jordan — Jacksonville, Florida<br />
Piotr Krause — Poland<br />
Mitchell Kuflik — Brooklyn, New York<br />
Roan Lightfoot — Jacksonville Beach, Florida<br />
Jeffrey Mathias — Kingston, Massachusetts<br />
Dylan Meklin — Rockland, Maine<br />
Marcin Nita — Poland<br />
Jan Podgorski — Poland<br />
James Porter — Jacksonville, Florida<br />
Richard Pusatere — Virginia Beach, Virginia<br />
Theodore Quammie — Jacksonville, Florida<br />
Danielle Randolph — Rockland, Massachusetts<br />
Jeremie Riehm — Camden, Delaware<br />
Lashawn Rivera — Jacksonville, Florida<br />
Howard Schoenly — Cape Coral, Florida<br />
Steven Shultz — Roan Mountain, Tennessee<br />
German Solar-Cortes — Orlando, Florida<br />
Anthony Thomas — Jacksonville, Florida<br />
Andrzej Truszkowski — Poland<br />
Mariette Wright — St. Augustine, Florida<br />
Rafal Zdobych — Poland<br />
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Like many mariners and former mariners, I followed the joint National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and U.S. Coast Guard investigation closely, including reading the 510-page audio transcript of the ship’s final twenty-six hours. My heart ached for my salt-water brothers and sisters who lost their lives.<br />
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As someone who sailed third mate on an aging, decrepit roll on/roll off vessel (as was the El Faro), I was haunted and grieved by the sinking and also stunned by the behavior and decisions of the captain of the El Faro, Michael Davidson.<br />
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In reading the whole audio transcript, I was struck by how different Davidson was from the captain I sailed with. The captain I sailed with on the roll on/roll off vessel on the Atlantic ocean was a “hawsepiper” (maritime slang for an officer who began his career as an unlicensed seaman and came up through the ranks — “up the hawse pipe” — instead of attending a maritime academy.) He was humble and had good common sense seamanship. Keeping in mind the age and structural issues of our vessel, he gave wide berth to weather much less severe than a hurricane. If he caught any flak from the company, he never let on. My conviction was that he had the guts and spine to stand up against worldly pressures and concerns to make a moral choice — no unnecessary risk to life is worth a job, any job, no matter how coveted, or meeting a schedule, no matter how pressing. While no one really knows what was going on in the mind of Davidson, he clearly lacked the type of decisiveness I described.<br />
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His dubious behavior and failure of leadership were able to take root in the soil of poor management and nebulous accountability in the shipping company. TOTE, at the time of the disaster, had experienced corporate downsizing and management shuffling. In the investigation, it was unclear who was responsible for what or who was accountable to whom. TOTE, by all appearances, had become removed from the reality of life at sea. Deadly for a shipping company.<br />
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After completing the investigation in December 2017, the NTSB outlined ten preliminary safety recommendations and 53 additional recommendations and regulatory initiatives in their Marine Accident Report. The Coast Guard, in a separate investigation report, gave 31 safety recommendations and 4 administrative recommendations. Some of the recommendations became new regulations in the Maritime Safety Act of 2018.<br />
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On the four year anniversary of El Faro’s sinking, I remember the thirty-three people who died senselessly. I’m also very mindful and aware that I’m alive today because the captain I sailed with was, at his core, different than Captain Davidson.<br />
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Given my experience, my belief is that people tend to underestimate the importance of sound leadership and management and overemphasize the need for regulation to prevent such tragedy.<br />
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<a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3237729-El-Faro-VDR-Audio-Transcript-8510451-ver1-0" target="_blank">Transcript of El Faro Voyage Data Recorder</a><br />
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<a href="https://www.news.uscg.mil/News-by-Region/Headquarters/El-Faro-Marine-Board-of-Investigation/" target="_blank">El Faro Marine Board of Investigation transcripts</a><br />
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<a href="https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/MAR1701.pdf" target="_blank">Full NTSB Marine Accident Report on El Faro sinking</a><br />
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<a href="https://media.defense.gov/2017/Oct/01/2001820187/-1/-1/0/FINAL%20PDF%20ROI%2024%20SEP%2017.PDF" target="_blank">U.S. Coast Guard Report</a><br />
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(Posted 10/1/2019)<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-17905837212705930932019-01-18T10:50:00.003-08:002024-01-15T15:54:53.773-08:00Ken Mansfield answers questions about Philco<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0asNImP11Y4DxWU9TgrMkyD7RHtStDWGPM28TgAV2-r_djS59YIHYyJbQi8any0CFG8XtwqE9gxueaW4wiidOWwcIISp7hyphenhyphenoUyf-6ySRpKXNyIEqv-BYenWilm-3qHWJ3V5wPgbAHIE0/s1600/Philco_Ken_Mansfield.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Book cover of Philco by Ken Mansfield" border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="333" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0asNImP11Y4DxWU9TgrMkyD7RHtStDWGPM28TgAV2-r_djS59YIHYyJbQi8any0CFG8XtwqE9gxueaW4wiidOWwcIISp7hyphenhyphenoUyf-6ySRpKXNyIEqv-BYenWilm-3qHWJ3V5wPgbAHIE0/w266-h400/Philco_Ken_Mansfield.jpg" title="Philco by Ken Mansfield" width="266" /></a></div><div><br /></div>
“ONCE UPON ANOTHER TIME THERE USED TO BE this very nice place— America— a faraway place in time.” So begins <i>Philco</i> by Ken Mansfield. Ken explains in the book’s introduction, “I miss that place, a place that actually existed in my lifetime. It was a “let me help you with that tire ma’am,” “honest day’s work for an honest dollar” kind of place.”<br />
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The haunting and touching stories that make up <i>Philco</i> were inspired by Ken’s life experiences. “The people in these stories are real—I have wrapped their stories in the warm jacket of my imagination for the journey.”<br />
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Ken grew up in the northern Idaho Panhandle near the Nez Perce Indian reservations. After graduating from high school, he joined the Navy. Upon completing his service, he went to college and soon after graduating he became a highly ranked executive and producer in the music industry. His resume and bio are inseparable from the history of pop music and encompasses an impressive list of accomplishments including being asked by the Beatles to serve as the U.S. Manager of Apple Records. In the 1980’s, after experiencing an intense period of loss and difficulty, Ken found Christ and embarked on a new creative direction.<br />
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I first learned of Ken through his book <i>the Beatles the Bible and Bodega Bay</i>. (Ken’s book describing his time with the Beatles is the only book about the Beatles officially approved by them other than their own <i>Anthology</i>.) I loved that book so thought I would give <i>Philco</i> a try.<br />
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I was deeply moved and affected by the stories within, stories of friendship, heartache, loss, love, hope, redemption. These dream-like recollections combined with imagination are evocative of a different time. A time not without hardship, difficulty or conflict but a more innocent time. Some cynical people claim such a time didn’t exist, but I was privileged to have had a friendship with someone of the Greatest Generation, a World War II veteran, and I did get a tangible sense for a time and generation that was simpler, gentler and more imbued with values. Ken’s book definitely captures this and beautifully celebrates and affirms this without any of the angst and vitriol of politics that is so commonplace these days.<br />
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Ken was kind and generous to answer some questions I had about the book.<br />
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BRANDY W: <i>Philco</i> has a dream-like beauty and the poignant portrayals of friendships in <i>Philco</i> are especially touching since in our age much of “friendship” has become staring at social media on a device. Some of my favorites were the friendships with the Native American boy, the petty officer in the Navy, and the shoeshine man. <i>Philco</i> was based on your personal experiences.<br />
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KEN M: Yes<br />
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BW: What did you most enjoy about bringing the real people, experiences, and friendships to life in your book?<br />
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KM: These people and their stories always bring a quiet happiness to my being as I relive beautiful times in my life. It is like visiting old friends and treasured places through a filter where nothing but the good of the occasions remain. There was a youthful innocence to my recall and like going home after being away for a long time I always felt welcome with each return visit.<br />
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BW: What were some of the challenges in making real people and experiences into stories in a book? Was the process difficult?<br />
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KM: Actually the writing process was very liberating especially by becoming my alter author Philco I was free of some of the daily, earthly encumbrances that each of us carry around in some informal way. I was able to step back and view things as a creative entity and so “Philco” was able to see things more romantically and expand on what was seen to include the unseen elements in the stories. The stories opened up elements of seemingly everyday experiences to how much there really is to each of us at times and the moments that we thought were just passing by expand in valuable content as they live and grow in our remembrances. They become new events – they become teachings as they reach back and embellish the depths and nuances of moments past.<br />
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BW: The story about Garland, the homeless man, some might dismiss as too made-up or far-fetched, but it mirrored my experience as a school girl selling things door to door for fundraisers. In the more affluent neighborhoods, it was not unusual to get a “No, not interested,” or a no response when they peeked and saw who was at the door. Most of my support came from the low or middle class people. And the scripture Matthew 25: 35-36 which was the centerpiece of the story, was an important seed planted in me before I became a Christian. Because I had these personal experiences this “far-fetched” story rang very true for me. So I am curious about the process and inspiration that came into developing the story.<br />
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KM: Garland was a simple man and like the gardens he loved there was a fertile place of common mankind where a lot of flowers, fruit and sustenance grew from deep within the interior spaces of his heart. It was my most real story and most embellished story at the same time. Rick Warren used Garland’s story as part of his Easter story for over 30,000 people who attended that year’s service at Saddleback.<br />
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BW: It’s definitely a good teaching story that can be grasped and appreciated by people at all levels of society and of all different backgrounds. Did you start with the scripture or the characters?<br />
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KM: Actually when I was finished telling Garland’s story the scripture found me and reminded me about another story. I can imagine a reader such as yourself at some point in Garland’s story sensing the story in scripture - Matthew 25: 35-36 running along side of it in your mind.<br />
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BW: Can you give readers a glimpse into your creative process and how that connects with your faith?<br />
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KM: I began writing about a single event and a single person when a myriad of pieces of cohesive experiences entered into my telling and the experiencing of many observances melded together to portray (once again) how much there is to each of us and those we come in contact with everyday and pass us by without notice. I saw Jesus, the Holy Spirit and God’s hand touching the events that put this episode together. I was very much expressing my faith and beliefs here – faith in God to fulfill Roman’s 8:28 and belief in the beauty that can be found in the most unlikely places. I know of another Pastor in Indiana who used this chapter and the rest of the chapters for a Bible study.<br />
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BW: That doesn’t surprise me. The chapter about Garland is very lovely and also grounded in scripture. The chapters are very touching and also relevant to the Christian walk. When and how did you have the glimmer or sense that you wanted to or needed to write <i>Philco</i>? How did the original leading or inspiration come about?<br />
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KM: I had been writing <i>Philco</i> for almost 20 years developing a theme that I was unaware of until a point in our society was reached that felt to me had gone beyond all the disciplines and decencies that I had experienced growing up. Nothing felt sacred anymore and it seemed as if the beautiful things that made our land so great were being hauled away to the dump yard of obscenities on the backs of ravenous greed and immorality. I wanted younger readers to get a glimpse of what a nation under God looked and felt like. I wanted the elders of our country to have a chance to go back in their hearts and minds to that other place in time when a man’s word was his bond and also his most valuable asset. Because I did write it over two decades it isn’t aimed directly at any political point in the evolution of this loss of love of God and country. These are such troubled times that I had to escape for a while and wanted to take some readers with me.<br />
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BW: What do you hope people gain and learn from the book?<br />
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KM: If I ever have a flat tire somebody will stop and give me a hand!<br />
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<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Philco-Ken-Mansfield/dp/1682615707" target="_blank"><span style="color: #bf8b38;"><i>Philco</i> on Amazon</span></a><br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ken-Mansfield/e/B001JP7YXG/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_ebooks_1" target="_blank"><span style="color: #bf8b38;">Ken Mansfield’s Amazon author page</span></a><br />
<span style="color: #bf8b38;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Mansfield" target="_blank"><span style="color: #bf8b38;">Ken Mansfield on Wikipedia</span></a></span><div><br /></div><div>(Posted 1/18/2019)</div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-28284828008439407502018-12-12T11:15:00.001-08:002022-09-20T12:46:02.519-07:00Andrew Murray books I like (in free audio)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUSha-H54cXTMSZk9cEYkCB_T7-pribe67evrZbn0CRvSVO61G-1qom4QmpSUw8csYtY4-hFIxbi3MjKN9tXvBlQB5yGpYpDEzPfNPqu0BtRObd-f8bdp9zELm9mWf1dGQ7zQ4pCPhTK4/s1600/Andrew+Murray.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Andrew Murray seated in a chair reading." border="0" data-original-height="841" data-original-width="577" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUSha-H54cXTMSZk9cEYkCB_T7-pribe67evrZbn0CRvSVO61G-1qom4QmpSUw8csYtY4-hFIxbi3MjKN9tXvBlQB5yGpYpDEzPfNPqu0BtRObd-f8bdp9zELm9mWf1dGQ7zQ4pCPhTK4/w273-h400/Andrew+Murray.gif" title="Andrew Murray minister writer" width="273" /></a></div><div><br /></div>
Don't let the somber old photograph, dour appearance, time period, and/or his age prejudice you.<br />
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Pictured is Andrew Murray. He wrote some books on Christianity which I like very much. I recently learned audio versions of these books are available for free. (I’ve included links below.)<br />
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Yes, there is a winemaker and winery in Santa Barbara county also named Andrew Murray. I do not believe there is any relation, although Andrew the minister-writer does have a lot of references to viticulture and grapes in his writings. He spent most of his life in South Africa where quite a bit of viticulture and wine-making occurs.<br />
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Anyways, I appreciate these books very much. I hope you give him a chance!<br />
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These LibriVox links have multiple options to download audio or text, or listen online. (The M4B download works in iTunes.)<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQFu15w4-qa0UBDo_AlfYmhEs8H0qmpgXev1QlfpGuEhWADbzg1bfMYr765OetfoR1yIEcnhdfEZwaAiaHaGuqke1D0_gG8pc6umuzlrK-byD7FDto_YsDbP_50tiRHXgiGkJWf2aeiv8/s1600/Andrew+Murray.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Andrew Murray minister writer South Africa" border="0" data-original-height="602" data-original-width="450" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQFu15w4-qa0UBDo_AlfYmhEs8H0qmpgXev1QlfpGuEhWADbzg1bfMYr765OetfoR1yIEcnhdfEZwaAiaHaGuqke1D0_gG8pc6umuzlrK-byD7FDto_YsDbP_50tiRHXgiGkJWf2aeiv8/s320/Andrew+Murray.jpg" title="Andrew Murray" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Lora, serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start;">Andrew Murray</span></td></tr>
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<a href="https://librivox.org/absolute-surrender-by-andrew-murray/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;"><br />Absolute Surrender and Other Addresses</span><span style="color: #444444;"> (read by Joy Chan)</span></a><br />
Total Running Time: 3h 52min<br />
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<a href="https://librivox.org/humility-the-beauty-of-holiness/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Humility</span><span style="color: #444444;"> (poor recording quality but intact)</span></a><br />
Total Running Time: 2h 5min<br />
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<a href="https://librivox.org/the-true-vine-by-andrew-murray/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">The True Vine</span><span style="color: #444444;"> (read by Phil Snyder)</span></a><br />
Total Running Time: 2h 31min<br />
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(posted 12/12/18)</div>
Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-38694380417182729762018-09-07T15:59:00.000-07:002019-05-22T14:42:16.978-07:00The Great Good Thing by Klavan<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi45umEA6ue0CUZgeOL0_HEj2QQdZivpRBsWfAR-2re_BSrmoviGg33IYKfYDbKMG4qN-_uu7xJgQh8zX1NstPHCsp1ssgaoQ_B7n4olSmkJmOXwHM3AsgHnid65tu771W9xdz4EU6UBCU/s1600/The+Great+Good+Thing+by+Klavan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="book cover The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan" border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="328" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi45umEA6ue0CUZgeOL0_HEj2QQdZivpRBsWfAR-2re_BSrmoviGg33IYKfYDbKMG4qN-_uu7xJgQh8zX1NstPHCsp1ssgaoQ_B7n4olSmkJmOXwHM3AsgHnid65tu771W9xdz4EU6UBCU/s320/The+Great+Good+Thing+by+Klavan.jpg" title="The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan" width="209" /></a></div>
Over the summer, a friend mentioned Andrew Klavan and recommended his book <i>The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ</i>. Klavan lives in nearby Montecito and is best known for crime, suspense, and thriller novels, a couple of which have been turned into movies. I recognized the name and recalled that I heard him speak years ago at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. <i>The Great Good Thing</i> intrigued me, but at the time I was enjoying the ocean too much to bother reading it. Finally, over the Labor Day weekend, I dove into the book. I also discovered that I still had the notes I took during his talk at the conference. My notes are sparse and cryptic but I recalled clearly his discussion on suspense versus surprise in fiction and could flesh out the notes.<br />
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<i>In suspense, the audience is aware of a danger the character isn’t. In an obvious, well-known Hitchcock example, someone is taking a shower and is unaware a killer is approaching. </i><br />
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<i>A surprise is merely something that happens and is a surprise to both the audience and the character. There is no advance warning so a surprise doesn’t provide much dramatic drive. It’s best not to use surprise unless it’s in the form of an unexpected twist such as a surprise ending.</i><br />
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Another writer, whose name I can’t recall, noted the best ending is a complete surprise, but also has a sense and feeling of an inevitability to it, like there could be no other ending. A complete surprise but not a surprise.<br />
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Some Christians believe secular Jews are a lost cause, hopelessly hostile to the gospel. And they can find evidence to support their views. That a secular Jew would become Christian is a complete surprise, a shocking surprise to many.<br />
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Klavan was born a Jew and went through all the Jewish rites of passage, but both his parents didn’t believe in God. Most of his life he was agnostic. He believed in science, facts, analysis, reasonable explanations and thought of religion as primitive superstition and comforting delusion. Then over the years, in his words, came the “slow dawning of awareness that had solidified into the certainty that I was a Christian.” He was baptized at the age of 49. Klavan wrote, “No one could have been more surprised than I was.”<br />
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Like Klavan, I’m a Christian now but don’t come from a Christian family. I was raised to be an atheist or at least agnostic. There was even a time in my life in which I despised Christians, but much to my shock and surprise, I became a Christian. As with him, it was a slow process. Like him, I came to a belief in God before a belief in Christ. My journey to Christ was different, shorter by over a decade, but there were enough similarities and familiar elements in his journey to make <i>The Great Good Thing</i> a very fast, engaging read for me. I could relate to the strained relationship he had with his father, at times hilarious and also heart-breaking. My father was what I called an orthodox atheist (he was rigid and fundamentalist in his assertion that there is no God) and had a worldview I wanted nothing to do with. Although I wasn’t a believer, I was unable and unwilling to humor him, toe the line, and maintain the status quo. But l also had doubt and was afraid of him. To say our relationship was less than harmonious is a huge understatement. My anger toward my father stemmed from a number of things, and although my relationship with my father was different than Klavan’s, I could understand how Klavan seethed with resentment and created an impenetrable boundary to shield himself from his father. There are other vague familiarities.<br />
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Klavan grew up in Great Neck, New York an affluent Jewish enclave and suburb of NYC on Long Island. He hated school but managed to bluff his way through all of his classes with passing grades. He lived in a dream world of fantasy and stories. While I didn’t live in a fantasy world, I did share his love of reading and stories. <i>A Christmas Carol</i> by Dickens is a mutual favorite. Klavan knew he wanted to be a writer but for some years before attending Berkeley, he wanted experience more than education so he roamed all over the country more or less as a hobo. I knew I wanted to be a writer but disliked my English teachers in high school so I was determined not to get a liberal arts degree. Like him, I had wanderlust, liked adventure so I joined the merchant marine. The merchant marine academy I attended was in Kings Point, adjacent to Great Neck, and I rode my bike through the Great Neck neighborhoods he grew up in and described at length in his book. The content of the book felt familiar to me.<br />
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But there were big differences as well. My journey to Christ wasn’t as long or rambling or torturous as his. And this is understandable since conversion to Christianity is considered a huge betrayal by Jews. And this book helped me to understand and have more compassion for why that is.<br />
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I suspect some Christians would view his personal account in <i>The Great Good Thing</i> as too raw, too transparent, and his journey as too bizarre, too flawed, too circuitous, too slow, too questionable, or too (pick your adjective.) It’s aways easy to be disdainful of another person’s journey especially when it doesn’t look like yours or doesn’t look like what you think it should look like. My natural disposition is optimistic and positive, so his brooding, dark mental rumination and strange forays into his internal world didn’t make any sense to me. I don’t struggle with depression, so I didn’t understand the black moods that suddenly, without warning, overcame him. I personally don’t like psychiatry and I am disdainful of what I view to be the self-absorbed verbal vomit of therapy sessions that drag on for years, but he found a relief and healing in his relationship with his psychiatrist that helped him to ultimately come to Christ. Someone who has been a Christian for a long time or came to Christ relatively quickly may be exasperated, annoyed, or even threatened by the route his personal journey took. Some unbelievers can have messy, muddled, stumbling journeys to God and Christ that don’t fall inside the neat lines of cookie-cutter Christianity, but in the end they often make the best and strongest critics of the lies, half-truths, and misguided philosophies that ail our times. Klavan’s criticism of moral relativism and atheistic postmodernism is among the best I’ve seen.<br />
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What I most enjoyed and appreciated about <i>The Great Good Thing</i> is that the power of story is lovingly featured. The transformative effect of story played a big part in Klavan’s journey to Christ. Stories are very powerful. Story is a primary thought form designed by God and is one of the most powerful ways to communicate with people at all levels of society as is evidenced by the fact that Jesus taught in parables. God communicates through story. Jesus gave much of his teaching through story. On a basic, fundamental level people respond in a deep way to story and can be transformed by it. J.R.R. Tolkien helped to lead a formally atheist C.S. Lewis to faith through their discussions of story and myth, which they both loved. And as observed by missionary Don Richardson, folklore and stories throughout the world convey the truth of God and Christ.<br />
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Along with the power of story, the power of gratitude and the power of love through relationship played important roles in Klavan’s life. Klavan discovered simply acknowledging God with thankfulness can do wonders. And that God’s love is expressed through relationship.<br />
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God is a personal God and wants personal relationship. <i>The Great Good Thing</i> is a document of how God’s love broke through the messy, flawed life of one person through whatever means available in that person’s life. And He can do that for anyone.<br />
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That a secular Jew would become Christian is a complete surprise, a shocking surprise to many. But this is nothing new in the way God works. Saul of Tarsus who later became Paul the Apostle was a Jew who hated Christians and murdered them. He eventually became one of the primary writers of the New Testament. That’s bizarre and unbelievable, but it happened. It’s a shocking surprise. But not so surprising.<br />
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God is love and Jesus Christ is the expression of that love and this Great Good Thing will always prevail in the end.<br />
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(Posted 9/7/18)Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-47499465758517728792018-05-13T07:44:00.002-07:002022-03-08T13:09:15.592-08:00Columbo on Mother’s Day<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhIgSTzV9qmaTsa8T_hozXxTBAD_q-bS5j-BNMu3VyuKWh-MeEGezgtWKo_6j_bJKw2YvZBX4MDlGGUr9Jf7hErsu3fdSfpf-SsFD7jUi-Ai8GSFIlVDNm4ADwnzcSFXoiMrRCbwuMIDDlhpZwIi4xsIXC5AqydWviaJNf1Kb5pgywwNIh7_jRHIinK=s4032" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Casa Blanca Carpinteria, CA" border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhIgSTzV9qmaTsa8T_hozXxTBAD_q-bS5j-BNMu3VyuKWh-MeEGezgtWKo_6j_bJKw2YvZBX4MDlGGUr9Jf7hErsu3fdSfpf-SsFD7jUi-Ai8GSFIlVDNm4ADwnzcSFXoiMrRCbwuMIDDlhpZwIi4xsIXC5AqydWviaJNf1Kb5pgywwNIh7_jRHIinK=w320-h240" title="Casa Blanca in Carpinteria, CA" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Casa Blanca in Carpinteria, CA</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Many who live in southeastern Santa Barbara County are aware of a white Moorish-style oceanfront property complete with minarets and domes called Casa Blanca in the western end of Carpinteria. Anyone can see it from the beach during very low tides or catch glimpses of it behind Santa Claus Lane while driving down the 101. It looks so out of place, the style so incongruent with the area, I would often wonder what rich eccentric built it and why. I imagined that maybe in a romantic, Taj Mahal fashion it was designed and built for the love of someone’s life. Not so. <div><br /></div><div>Casa Blanca was built in the 1920s by a rich Gatsby-type party boy named Albert Keep Isham, who, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, was known for his drinking and unrestrained lifestyle. Casa Blanca became a happening spot for parties, housed a secret bar during Prohibition, and was a “rest stop” for the Hollywood jet-set on their way up to Hearst Castle. Isham didn’t enjoy his lifestyle for long. Due to his excessive drinking, he died at the age of 37 in 1931. After his death, Casa Blanca fell into disrepair and the main house was destroyed in a winter storm. After sitting abandoned for years, the property was eventually restored and converted into multiple luxury residences.<div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEibP-_BNu0J_HSjMYWIhZ4g73MP5Qr_C5LCYHPwi8Dq_VfhUm870u-swDiS9wxIaeB1vpNNhrnAPWJ87ehk5N3pjhA2eBDwu32pn334-PWJJaD38Cmcw7EUaHijPG6TE8B44vcBAmPKU75jgo1X8u86Sau8JSmokHwWsaFNM6b9U7iiS40wL3Hri7tE=s1000" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="659" data-original-width="1000" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEibP-_BNu0J_HSjMYWIhZ4g73MP5Qr_C5LCYHPwi8Dq_VfhUm870u-swDiS9wxIaeB1vpNNhrnAPWJ87ehk5N3pjhA2eBDwu32pn334-PWJJaD38Cmcw7EUaHijPG6TE8B44vcBAmPKU75jgo1X8u86Sau8JSmokHwWsaFNM6b9U7iiS40wL3Hri7tE=s320" width="320" /></a></div><div><br />Recently, while watching an old episode of <i>Columbo</i>, I could swear that the setting for the villain’s exclusive, high class fat farm (where chubby rich women went to “reduce”) looked just like Casa Blanca. Many of the external shots of coastline and roads looked familiar to me as well, so I did some research and sure enough, that episode, called “Lovely but Lethal“, was filmed in the Carpinteria and Ventura areas and the fat farm segment, including its pool scenes, was shot at Casa Blanca. Why was I watching <i>Columbo</i>? <i>Columbo</i> was my mother’s favorite TV show. (She passed away in 2002.) I didn’t like <i>Columbo</i> as much as she did, but now, because of this sentimental association, <i>Columbo</i> has become my favorite tv comfort food which I indulge in occasionally like some people will watch episodes of <i>I Love Lucy</i> or <i>Lassie</i> when feeling down or burned out.</div><div><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRpdxiWA0XF_EZMFebjIgOg_xSACQy7VqwdvJRPi1CAxfj4s_hbsNDflL543vqEHqadyvADzID8jo8p2ngxcdBH8T0Ae9ccHvTPxbzHB6FhjrXfhWriAQmAG0irGHoJMpC-LEfWw3cwtU/s1600/Columbo.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRpdxiWA0XF_EZMFebjIgOg_xSACQy7VqwdvJRPi1CAxfj4s_hbsNDflL543vqEHqadyvADzID8jo8p2ngxcdBH8T0Ae9ccHvTPxbzHB6FhjrXfhWriAQmAG0irGHoJMpC-LEfWw3cwtU/s1600/Columbo.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Peter Falk as Columbo</td></tr>
</tbody></table><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Columbo</i> first appeared on tv in 1968 as a pilot and had an unusually long run, from 1971 to 2003, on NBC and ABC. It was highly regarded in its time and many prominent actors, writers, and directors got their start on that show. Season 1, episode 1 in 1971 was directed by Steven Spielberg. Even Johnny Cash starred in an episode called “Swan Song” as an ex-con televangelist singer who is driven crazy by his corrupt, blackmailing wife and murders her.</div><div><br />I’m not a big fan of television so never thought about <i>Columbo</i> much, but once when dropping into a mystery workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference some years ago (I don’t write mystery but always enjoy hearing what writers say about their craft), the subject of tv detective shows came up. The instructor pointed out every episode of <i>Columbo</i> is a David versus Goliath type metaphor. The villain is always sophisticated and powerful in some way—whether rich, influential, a respected pillar of society, a CEO of a company, a genius in a Mensa-type organization, or a popular celebrity—they’re always a “giant” in some way. Meanwhile Columbo, a detective with the LAPD, is short, unimpressive-looking with a wall-eye, drives a jalopy, wears the same worn-out overcoat over and over again, and often seems clueless. In one episode, a nun in a soup kitchen mistook him for a homeless man and served him a bowl of soup which he casually accepted and ate. I think that was one of the things that appealed to my mother about him. His scruffy nonchalance. I didn’t understand why she liked him so much at the time, but now I do. Columbo often appears out of it or naive and asks a lot of stupid, annoying questions. He sort of reminds me of my friend <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a> and his work, although the context is different (or maybe not so different.) When questioned by Columbo, the villain is initially smug, confident as if they could never be brought down, especially by the likes of Columbo, but they increasingly become unsettled and eventually they are brought down, usually on some small detail. As my mother often remarked, “He always seems stupid, but he’ll get him (or her)!”</div><div><br />Even though you know Columbo will ALWAYS win in the end, it’s never boring to watch. I puzzled over that fact and then realized one of the reasons it’s gripping is because the viewer can simultaneously identify with both Columbo and the villain. While most of us aren’t literal murderers or criminals, we’ve all been prideful and selfish, we’ve all wished ill on others, and/or “lost it” in a fit of anger or arrogance and helped create an unpleasant scenario which we’re desperate to get out of (which of course is indicative of our fallen nature. Or in more unpopular terms, we’re all sinners. Some people deny this, but that’s like saying evil doesn’t exist.) At the same time, you root for Columbo as he works to solve the crime. As the instructor of the mystery workshop explained on the enduring appeal of the mystery and crime genre, when someone is killed, the moral fabric of society is torn, a violation and grave injustice has occurred. Regardless of belief or background, people long for justice when there is such a crime. They become obsessed with solving the murder and bringing the killer to justice. They want truth and justice to prevail. This earnest longing and enduring desire for justice means sin and evil are very real, and I think it’s also comforting evidence that we’re made in the image of God. There are many names for God in Hebrew, reflective of the many aspects and attributes of an awesome God, one of which is Elohim Mishpat, God of Justice, from Isaiah 30:18 “Therefore the Lord longs to be gracious to you, And therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you. For the Lord is a God of justice; How blessed are all those who long for Him.”</div><div><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ74dym4wS38ya7KgV_aLUCRfmdc-sl77qQnaSaNTOL3YrgzKHDf9KRH9A89ccVbnJZev4jshDTY_7ULgK3ahTKj8Kd6-OXOXIQ2udkzBrkeO7W-1IFXoA141SH2b7vAcVXgDQRnMKulg/s1600/Brandy_Walker_and_her_mom.jpeg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1076" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ74dym4wS38ya7KgV_aLUCRfmdc-sl77qQnaSaNTOL3YrgzKHDf9KRH9A89ccVbnJZev4jshDTY_7ULgK3ahTKj8Kd6-OXOXIQ2udkzBrkeO7W-1IFXoA141SH2b7vAcVXgDQRnMKulg/s400/Brandy_Walker_and_her_mom.jpeg" width="268" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Me and my Mom</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br /></div><div>Even though my mother watched many episodes of <i>Columbo</i>, which are more or less predictable, she never grew tired of him and I’m finding I don’t either. I think what she most loved about Columbo, and what I enjoy and appreciate, is his warmth, pleasant demeanor, and graciousness—you sense compassion in him. Even though Columbo senses or knows pretty early on who the murderer is, and although not pleased about the unfortunate choices this person has made (and not compromising justice), he is always friendly, gracious, and kind to the murderer.</div><div><br />So what’s the point of all this? Nothing other than I like quirky local history and Columbo and I love my mom and God and I want to enjoy all of that on Mother’s Day instead of missing her.<br />
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(Posted on Mother's Day 2018)</div></div></div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-63981154448037310682017-12-30T15:49:00.007-08:002022-09-19T11:06:29.981-07:00Pay Closer Attention to How You Spend Your Money<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2M8Z9juGdUcgD24dWFYCZ3R0dUIzBVe10diA3L3vGFCFSU_rKb24ANDBrYr3mzXquMhIK5O_MyzY1tsInq_tIrO4yw6lnhcfXdnVT5xec3TSjoBcM_JrT6a6XaC7RSqZhPHuzenz42aY/s2048/Hamilton+ten+dollar+bills.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="ten dollar bills Alexander Hamilton" border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2M8Z9juGdUcgD24dWFYCZ3R0dUIzBVe10diA3L3vGFCFSU_rKb24ANDBrYr3mzXquMhIK5O_MyzY1tsInq_tIrO4yw6lnhcfXdnVT5xec3TSjoBcM_JrT6a6XaC7RSqZhPHuzenz42aY/w400-h266/Hamilton+ten+dollar+bills.jpg" title="Pile of ten dollar bills" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Yuwarin</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>As we all know, the new tax bill passed in 2017 benefits corporations the most. (Randians would applaud this as something corporations are entitled to.) I know I’m not the only one disturbed by this. I think one of the most troubling legacies of this will be that globalization by default will benefit. (And no I’m not claiming all globalization is evil so don’t write me any nasty emails.) Globalization is a complex topic which I don’t intend to fully address here, but many Christians and I (as well as many non-Christians) believe the forces of globalization can have far reaching negative impact on other cultures. Christian scholar Miriam Adeney contributing to the highly regarded <i>Perspectives on the World Christian Movement</i> wisely observed that globalization tends to make everything including values into commodities and to cheapen human relationships. She also noted that globalization tends to homogenize the unique characteristics of ethnicity and culture that God designed to be unique. She and many other critics of globalization have also expressed deep concern that globalization can be corrosive and destructive to life-giving communities as well as the traditional arts, crafts, and trades that provide dignified, sustainable livelihoods. Not only that, globalization is distasteful in my view. As someone who has traveled a lot, I found it annoying to find “Any Mall USA” wherever I went—the same chain restaurants selling crappy food and the same chain stores selling crappy consumer items. To me they screamed, “Let’s make the whole world just like the American consumer!” And I know there’s many of you who believe that corporations already have too much money and power. The good news is that we as consumers can help affect change by examining and changing our buying habits. Some practical things we can do:<br />
<br />
—Support local (individual or family-owned) businesses as much as possible. Support local farmers as much as possible.<br />
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—Support Fair Trade. (Many don’t know this, but Fair Trade began as a grass roots movement by Christians who were seeking dignified work and fair income for people in impoverished countries and communities.)<br />
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—Support transparent, socially responsible businesses and corporations whenever possible. If transparency doesn’t exist, start to demand it. Pay closer attention to the business culture and practices of the corporations that you are supporting and/or investing in.<br />
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—Shop at charity thrift stores. Many can’t afford or don’t have access to Fair Trade items so shopping at charity thrift stores can be a decent alternative. At least you’re recycling and the money is going to charity (instead of a corporation.) Charity thrift stores support many needs in society. These include but are not limited to: veterans and people with disabilities, drug/alcohol rehabilitation, jobs/job training for people in the margins of society, assistance for people in poverty, shelters for battered women and abused children, animal shelters. And not only will you support a need in society, you’ll save money!!!<br />
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While some of this can be difficult and a sacrifice of time and money, any bit of effort is worth it. I personally would prefer to have my hard-earned income go to a family or charity instead of corporate expansion and/or a corporate culture of entitlement (e.g. outrageous CEO salaries, outrageous executive bonuses, a corporate resort vacation, a corporate jet, etc.) And obviously, no one in our present society/economy can do this for 100% of their purchases and investments, but any percentage is better than nothing. If everyone made a bit of effort in some of their purchases and investments, it would have impact. Since corporations are ultimately about the bottom line and dependent on the consumer, if enough consumers change, they will have to change.<br />
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There’s probably other good suggestions than the ones listed…<br />
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(On a side note, management consultant and executive coaching pioneer <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a> and I discuss some challenges of the corporate model, among other things, in the topic “<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/some-thoughts-on-longevity-and.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Some Thoughts on Longevity and Sustainability</span></a>.” We also discuss some aspects of his career and profession in the topic “<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/what-in-world-are-you.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">What in the World Are You?</span></a>” These topics are part of our project <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/on-life-business-education-and-other.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Dialogues with Julian Moody: On Life, Business, Sustainability, and Other Things</span></a>.)<br />
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<br /></div><div>(Posted 12/30/2017)</div>
</div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-58286010144097930992017-08-21T11:14:00.003-07:002022-06-21T13:55:58.807-07:00What’s Better Than The Best Wine?Some years before he passed away, I took a wine tasting class from former Navy pilot and beloved Santa Barbara resident <a href="http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/newspress/obituary.aspx?pid=167073370" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Cork Millner</span></a> (no joke, his name was Cork.) Cork was a respected wine aficionado and a writer who loved words as much as I do. From Cork I learned my name Brandy is derived from an old Dutch word <i>brandewijn</i> meaning “burned wine.” (Not a bad name but I prefer the Italian version Brandi which is derived from a Venice region surname meaning “sword” or “fiery beacon”—way more cool.) Cork definitely made me understand and appreciate wine in a way I never did before, but I’m not much of a wine drinker (my body chemistry doesn’t agree with alcohol which keeps me out of trouble), although on occasion, I will do a tasting if it is of exceptional quality or the opportunity falls into my lap. This year, I was blessed with the unusual coincidence of multiple opportunities to absorb top wine culture, which set me thinking about wine more than I normally do, both as a writer and as a Christian.<div><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxlhWHB2VsAtVsB9DaU1iw1vGo1ztMlyaofH1dUtkJ8n6RSp6dRWtSPElKcKBJNPgs5wqA1-WAk_LWhIrtj_j7mtwF4biLsuwXsBmFcT_D_szqXN9Lr6uLXIUV3KXkvYHfTzLjtsud1bk/s1600/Richard-Sanford-Alma-Rosa-Winery.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Richard Sanford, pinot pioneer of Santa Barbara county, talks about wine." border="0" data-original-height="961" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxlhWHB2VsAtVsB9DaU1iw1vGo1ztMlyaofH1dUtkJ8n6RSp6dRWtSPElKcKBJNPgs5wqA1-WAk_LWhIrtj_j7mtwF4biLsuwXsBmFcT_D_szqXN9Lr6uLXIUV3KXkvYHfTzLjtsud1bk/w400-h240/Richard-Sanford-Alma-Rosa-Winery.jpg" title="Richard Sanford at Sly’s in Carpinteria" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Richard Sanford at Sly’s in Carpinteria</td></tr>
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</div><br /></div><div>In late spring, a restaurant very near where I live featured a multi-course meal with all locally sourced seafood, meat, and produce and every course was paired with a wine from Alma Rosa winery. And Richard Sanford, founder of Sanford and Alma Rosa wineries in Santa Barbara county, was there in person to explain the wines. The price was much lower than I expected so I leaped at the opportunity. Sanford is the pioneer of Pinot Noir in Santa Barbara County and also the first vintner to be certified organic in the county. Sanford’s love affair with Pinot Noir began while serving as a Naval officer during the Vietnam war. A shipmate of his named Scott Wine (no joke) introduced him to a Pinot Noir from Volnay in Burgundy, France. He was completely captivated. Upon the completion of his Naval service and return to the U.S. in 1968 at the height of anti-war sentiment, Sanford was treated very poorly. Bewildered by the hostility directed towards him after serving his country, he decided to immerse himself in what was an unusual endeavor at the time—growing Pinot Noir grapes on the Central Coast of California. He was the first to plant Pinot in the western Santa Ynez valley—considered impossible at the time—and his pioneering footsteps helped pave the way for Santa Barbara to become a world-class winemaking region. At the time, Santa Barbara was considered a wine-making backwater compared to Napa and Sonoma. Sanford currently crafts wine at his Alma Rosa label. (The Sanford label was bought out in 2005 due to an unfortunate business partnership.) In spite of his accomplishments, Sanford is a very humble man. He shook hands and personally introduced himself to each person at the event and told everyone to ask him any question about wine or wine-making no matter how seemingly ignorant. In his presence, you sense his soulful integrity and his kind, down-to-earth friendliness made me think of my WWII veteran friend <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a>. It was such a blessing to meet Sanford and as if this wasn’t good enough, I also won a free pass to the Santa Barbara Vintners Festival. I didn’t know it at the time, but the first six people to sign up for the Sanford event won this pass. At the vintner’s festival, all the top wineries in the county were there and being a Santa Barbara event, it was very laid-back with the heads of wineries present and many of them serving the wine themselves. Like Sanford, they were easily approachable and happy to answer any question. And over the summer, I visited a friend in Sonoma county, the birthplace of the commercial wine industry in California, and soaked in the beautiful rolling hills of vineyards. All of this immersion in wine culture very enjoyable and educational…</div><div><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeTSkQSYAvjbqaApgvqwLfqgafMryk03I24rmOio_yHnxZDGgay7sm0ahxOjtjidp3hyNQMtEgDkTduqJ9X0GrMvm815o2Urom24dl0BXrMdWn1SL84lyPWk-G3SLdWm39OvmBKsg9CJo/s1600/sonoma_hill_grapevines.jpeg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Rolling hill of green grape vines in Sonoma County, blue sky, farm house." border="0" data-original-height="808" data-original-width="1600" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeTSkQSYAvjbqaApgvqwLfqgafMryk03I24rmOio_yHnxZDGgay7sm0ahxOjtjidp3hyNQMtEgDkTduqJ9X0GrMvm815o2Urom24dl0BXrMdWn1SL84lyPWk-G3SLdWm39OvmBKsg9CJo/w400-h201/sonoma_hill_grapevines.jpeg" title="Vineyard, Sonoma County" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vineyard, Sonoma County</td></tr>
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</div><br /></div><div>Wine has been with humans since the beginning—the history of wine is inseparable from human history. One of the earliest cultures to cultivate wine, the Phoenicians and the Greeks, passed on viticulture and wine-making to the Romans who planted vineyards all over Europe. When the Roman Empire became Christian through the conversion of Constantine, wine was made part of the sacrament and many of the vineyards the Romans planted became the domain of monasteries. The monks, in a structured life of contemplation and no commercial pressure, improved in the craft, art, and science of wine-making, Dom Pérignon being one famous example of a monk who helped develop wine-making to sophisticated levels.* Meanwhile, wine and wine-making spread across Europe and to the new world, Africa, and Australia via conquistadors, missionaries, and colonists. (*For an amusing look at some of the craziness of high end wine culture, check out the the documentary <i>Somm</i> which played at the Santa Barbara Film Festival in 2013. <i>Somm</i> features Brian McClintic and Eric Railsback who opened Les Marchands on Anacapa St. in Santa Barbara and Dustin Wilson who with Brian McClintic started the Vallim wine label in Santa Barbara.)</div><div><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2Yl4qmy1NRCdv1MqrnLBOyoIZsrECfyAiwqlTQI8skR0b9GUqQpNdgfxB3XlNOfNxLQKECqtJptkAHHVO9nKHgYm8Cl4UX4GLTxRY8fB2pH0IygXv_RrsuBpcd2vuMWcPOXlSdzV4xxc/s1600/babcock_slice_of_heaven_wine.jpeg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Bottle of pinot noir, Slice of Heaven, on auction table at SB Vintners Festival" border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1590" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2Yl4qmy1NRCdv1MqrnLBOyoIZsrECfyAiwqlTQI8skR0b9GUqQpNdgfxB3XlNOfNxLQKECqtJptkAHHVO9nKHgYm8Cl4UX4GLTxRY8fB2pH0IygXv_RrsuBpcd2vuMWcPOXlSdzV4xxc/w398-h400/babcock_slice_of_heaven_wine.jpeg" title="Slice of Heaven Pinot Noir by Babcock" width="398" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Slice of Heaven Pinot Noir by Babcock</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br /></div><div>As someone who appreciates story and myth, I am also aware of the symbolism of wine. In ancient times, wine was a means of purifying water so early on viewed as life-giving. In Greek myth, wine was a gift to man from the god Dionysos, a gift meant to impart happiness and relaxation, as well as peace and freedom—most especially the peace and freedom that comes from loss of self-consciousness and freeing from the strain of social identity and position. (Some interesting similarities exist between Dionysos and Jesus Christ which I discuss <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/exekias.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">here</span></a>.) And as a Christian I am very familiar with the many references to wine in the Bible, wine in its full spectrum of beneficial use and abuse: as a blessing from God that gladdens the heart and aids in celebration, to a medicinal aid, to an intoxicant that can deceive and inflame tempers, to a metaphor for the maddening effect of idolatry. And references to wine and viticulture abound in the gospels. Turning water into wine at a wedding is the first miracle Jesus performs. And wine is used by Christ at the Last Supper as he spells out the new covenant. In Matthew 26, Jesus takes the cup and says to the disciples, “Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Wine symbolizes the blood of Christ, His sacrifice and the gospel of salvation and the complete rest and freedom we have in that—complete freedom in Christ—the good news of that. In communion, we take the bread and wine—we remember the sacrifice of Christ and what His blood represents. The taking of bread and wine reminds us we have intimate communion with Him. He is in us. The kingdom of God is within.</div><div><br />And finally in Revelation—wine and the winepress represent the wrath of God and the execution of His justice. A common misunderstanding of people who don’t know the Bible very well is that the God of the Bible is a very angry, vengeful God. Anyone who has spent significant time sincerely studying the Bible knows that the God of the Bible is merciful, slow to anger, full of compassion and kindness. The anger expressed is not simplistic moral retribution but a disappointed response towards the refusal of the love and grace that is so freely available and a continued persistence in darkness, idolatry, and sin. And this disappointed response is after much patient endurance, correction, and repeated chances and opportunities of redemption. The people who refuse to receive this love and grace, refuse to repent and change, have to face the tough love consequences of that choice. Maybe all of this is an irrelevant distinction in the minds of some (especially to those who refuse to believe in God), but really a huge difference that means all the difference in the world—a difference between life and death.</div><div><br />There’s always a choice—the choice between light or darkness. One can choose to abide in Him or not. Jesus used the analogy of the grape vine to show what life or abiding in Him looks like, as well as His abiding in us in John 15. “Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned.”</div><div><br />The grape vine in its natural state, as I learned from Cork, is unruly, wild, prolific in its growth, easily spreading and growing to over a hundred feet in length, and it will climb anything in its path. It’s no coincidence that the informal communications network through which gossip and juicy news of scandal travels quickly is called the grapevine. In cultivating grapes, the vine needs to be trained on a trellis and the vine needs to be pruned. And as I learned from Sanford and other winemakers, pruning results in much higher quality grapes and a stronger root stock. The quality of wine is dependent on the quality of fruit and the quality of fruit is proportional to suffering. The most sought after wines in the world are made by Frenchman Henri Jayer—a single bottle of his wine can cost as much as a car or a house. Jayer explained, “To produce great wines, the vine has to suffer and dig deep for resources…”</div><div><br />To truly walk as a Christian is not an easy thing—following His commands is essentially dying to self everyday. Dying to self and selfishness, crucifying the ego, can be excruciating, especially in an “it’s all about me” culture that worships comfort and convenience, and in which narcissism and toxic striving almost passes for normal. I get that some people thrive on achievement, “being the best of the best,” and competition, but any compulsive attempts for self-created worth contain the seeds of their own destruction which is evidenced in the self-destructive lives of many “successful” people, whose best efforts ultimately end up being branches burned up in the fire, so to speak. If not abiding in the true vine, then they’re probably drinking the wine of Babylon. Following Christ is not easy, but fruitfulness comes from fully abiding in His love. And when abiding in His love, then we have something authentic to give to others (and not a performance) in the form of the fruit of the spirit. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22-23)</div><div><br />I heard or read somewhere that alcoholics are ultimately seeking in the physical consumption of wine or any other “spirit” is the spirit— what they long for or lack in the spiritual—the feeling of being at ease, at peace, freedom from anxiety and worry, and in some cases, an attempt to blot out shame and guilt. Addiction often starts off innocently or casually as an attitude of: “Drink and be merry because time is short,” or some heathen variation of “There is really no meaning in life, no morality at least for the duration of the drunken revelry, so why not completely lose yourself and give yourself full license to this experience?” But then the hangover and nasty, icky feeling follows, and for the alcoholic the degrading compulsion and downward spiral of an addiction. Which begs the question, is it possible to have all the positives without any of the negatives?</div><div><br />It is, if only one fully accepts it. (And for the alcoholic or addict, if one makes the full and determined commitment to healing.) Dying to self is no fun, but the walk with Christ is intimacy with Christ. Dying to self, suffering, as with the grape vine, forces us to dig deep for resources, dig deep into God, and this abiding will allow for a deep abiding in the love of Christ, to be rooted and established in His love as Paul wrote in Ephesians 3:16-19: “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”</div><div><br />The fullness of God—the love, rest, peace, joy and freedom we have in Christ—amazingly all of this is freely available. All one has to do is partake, fully receive it, accept it, and believe it. And it’s sad that something so freely available can be completely ignored. Which reminds me of when Jesus was staying with Martha and Mary in Luke 10. Jesus noted, “Mary has chosen the better.” Mary sat basking at His feet, enjoying His presence. Meanwhile, anxiety-ridden Martha fretted about everything that needed to be done, completely oblivious to the divinity in her presence. Which goes to show you how two people in the same company and in the same situation can choose to have completely different experiences. Martha failed to appreciate that Jesus Himself was in her midst, while Mary truly “got it” and sat soaking in, abiding in, and enjoying His presence. Which brings to my mind John at the Last Supper. John reclined on “Jesus' bosom” (as the King James and NASB versions word it.) And this disciple is also described in the same line of scripture as the one “whom Jesus loved.” I had read that passage many times and without thinking about it too much, just assumed he was allowed to rest on Jesus’ chest because he was the “one loved.” It never occurred to me until I was writing this that maybe he was the “one loved,” a favorite, because he <i>chose</i> to rest on Jesus’ bosom, <i>chose</i> to rest in Him. Like John “got it” like Mary “got it” and his reposing on the bosom of Jesus is a simple picture of how we are supposed to fully rest in and enjoy that love. To repose on the bosom of Jesus—I imagine that must have felt so wonderful—so sweet, warm, and comforting (even knowing his earthly ministry was coming to a close or maybe more so because of it.) And so blissful and peaceful, like the blissful, peaceful, relaxed feeling you associate with drinking the best of the best spirits, only way better, with of course, none of the negatives. To fully abide in and enjoy the fullness of God—most especially the rest and peace we have in Christ—and to be rooted and established in love, the true vine, is better than the best wine and more.<br />
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<br /></div><div>(Posted 8/21/2017)</div>
</div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-5873309288621584252016-12-31T16:01:00.004-08:002022-09-19T11:03:34.726-07:00Gatsby, My Lost City, and The Crack-Up: The American Dream, An Illusion Part IVMy friend Don Jenner off and on would suggest I read <i>The Great Gatsby</i>, or at least see the movie. The novel is set in a part of Long Island where he grew up and I attended the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. While attending the academy, I had heard people mention the area was the setting for <i>The Great Gatsby</i>, but even then I had no desire to read it. In my mind, <i>The Great Gatsby</i> was an overrated literary romance novel they shove down your throat in a high school English class which I somehow happily managed to escape. But this year, I finally caved and read it along with some other writings of Fitzgerald’s. I visited the academy in the fall for a reunion along with New York City and my friend Don. NYC and the location of the academy is intimately familiar to me and close to my heart and Don had mentioned the book again, so I thought what the heck, why not read a novel set in the area and learn more about Fitzgerald?<div><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq2pUgCyoO3IClAhWw50Ior4gpAyN4jOTzDdB-d_VS2AbAPO6IKLbCkbuic0lJ3E5hDrH3bpu6fSBVgpHT7GyQRkpLSG4A43-KrkjL0gJH45a0PgYp_fFFfR-3E556-4a7Nau-Scwikcc/s1600/Wiley_Hall.JPG" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Exterior of Wiley Hall facing Long Island Sound in Kings Point, NY" border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq2pUgCyoO3IClAhWw50Ior4gpAyN4jOTzDdB-d_VS2AbAPO6IKLbCkbuic0lJ3E5hDrH3bpu6fSBVgpHT7GyQRkpLSG4A43-KrkjL0gJH45a0PgYp_fFFfR-3E556-4a7Nau-Scwikcc/w400-h300/Wiley_Hall.JPG" title="Wiley Hall, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wiley Hall</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br /></div><div>“East Egg” and “West Egg”, along with Manhattan, figure prominently in the novel. East Egg is a fictional name given to the northern promontory of Long Island comprising of Sands Point and Port Washington (where Don grew up for part of his childhood. He later lived in Manhattan for over forty years.) Across a bay to the west is West Egg comprising of the village of Kings Point (location of USMMA) a short distance outside of NYC, with the skyline of Manhattan visible across the sound. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in Great Neck, adjacent to Kings Point, for part of his career and was very familiar with this north shore section of Long Island known as the Gold Coast and went to Gatsby-type parties in the area. East Egg is the more established of the two, home to estates of New York “old” money such as the Vanderbilts and Guggenheims, and West Egg the enclave of newer money. A number of the buildings that comprise the academy were once private homes of wealthy West Egg residents. Wiley Hall, the main administrative building of the academy, was once the summer estate of Walter P. Chrysler. The academy grounds is not far from where Gatsby stood to look at the green light across the bay on East Egg.</div><div><br /><i>The Great Gatsby</i> was not what I expected, definitely not a romance novel but a haunting, melancholy rumination on the American Dream and one of the most depressing books I’ve read in a long time even though the story concerns a successful millionaire. For my last post, I read about the Auschwitz concentration camp which was depressing but the predominant emotions I felt were more along the lines of horror, shock, and indignant anger. <i>The Great Gatsby</i> is a very short book, a novella more than a novel, but I found it very hard to get through. A minor reason—Fitzgerald’s writing style is not my cup of tea. The main reason—the book is very dense. Not much seems to be happening as far as plot, but the book feels very heavy and thick with the melancholy I mentioned. The main character Jay Gatsby epitomized romantic ideas of American success in the post World War I era, but also cut a pathetic figure who wistfully stared at a green light on a dock across the bay on East Egg where Daisy lived. Daisy was of course the unattainable object of his love and everything elusive she represented. Gatsby had countless superficial “friends” that clamored to attend his parties at his West Egg estate, but none of them showed up at his funeral. Written in 1925, <i>The Great Gatsby</i> gives a faithful depiction of the roaring twenties, which Fitzgerald memorably termed the Jazz Age, with its undercurrent of anxiety and foreboding. The book also, in a way, portends Fitzgerald’s own doomed life. (I know many have read the book so don’t want to repeat too many details of the story or spoil it for the people who want to read it. I can’t recommend the movie adaptations—I felt they didn’t quite capture the poignancy of the book.)</div><div><br />Fitzgerald grew up in Buffalo, New York and St. Paul, Minnesota. His family was not wealthy, just reasonably well-off but, in St. Paul, lived in the wealthiest neighborhood in the city. Being in proximity to wealth but not part of it, he highly romanticized wealth and felt becoming wealthy to be the answer to many things, most especially alleviating his sense of not belonging. This was compounded by his falling in love with Zelda Sayre, a spoiled southern belle from a respectable Alabama family. After moving to NYC, Fitzgerald had a fairly successful career in advertising and also as a writer of stories for magazines, but Zelda didn’t believe he made enough money so broke off their engagement. Undeterred, he poured all of his efforts into his first novel, <i>This Side of Paradise</i>, which was picked up by a respected New York publisher and soon became a bestseller. Huge success came quickly for him (which in a way was his greatest misfortune and undoing) and solved the objective of getting Zelda. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his now wife Zelda became the glitterati of New York and were the precursors to the modern celebrity who live large and are continually chronicled—they were the most photographed celebrities of that era—their partying and exploits, such as drunken car rides on NYC streets and expulsions from Manhattan hotels, covered ad nauseum in newspaper and magazine gossip columns. Their lifestyle mirrored the reckless abandon and self-indulgence of the 1920s. And just as the unrestrained decade eventually crashed with the stock market in 1929, the Fitzgeralds’ lives hit rock bottom along with it. Fitzgerald wrote of the times in his essay “My Lost City”:<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“…many of our friends had grown wealthy. But the restlessness of New York in 1927 approached hysteria. The parties were bigger…the buildings were higher, the morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper but all these benefits did not really minister to much delight. Young people wore out early—they were hard and languid at twenty-one…Many people who were not naturally alcoholics were lit up four days out of seven, and frayed nerves were strewn everywhere; groups were held together by a generic nervousness and the hangover became a part of the day… Most of my friends drank too much—the more they were in tune with the times the more they drank. And as effort per se had no dignity against the mere bounty of those days in New York, a depreciatory word was found for it: a successful program became a “racket”—I was in the “literary racket.””</div><div><br />Works he completed after <i>This Side of Paradise</i> never matched the bestseller’s sales, and due to the Fitzgeralds’ extravagant lifestyle, they always had financial difficulty. This increased pressure to produce another hit on the scale of his first book which he was never able to do in spite of working very hard and as he described his efforts, “a burning of the candle at both ends; a call upon physical resources that I did not command, like a man overdrawing at his bank.” <i>The Great Gatsby</i> was not a commercial success, its sales a huge disappointment to Fitzgerald. As the twenties came to a close and the country sank into the Great Depression, Fitzgerald slid into his own personal combination of burn-out and depression. His wife suffered a nervous breakdown. Fitzgerald, like many of his friends, drank heavily. Observations of him during this time described him as given to alcoholic binges, sometimes drunk 24/7 for stretches and his friends described his behavior as increasingly erratic. And his writing in "The Crack-Up"—a series of essays he wrote for Esquire sometime during this period—reflects this. The essays were coolly received and criticized, and understandably so—the writing is muddled, barely coherent in stretches—but maybe readers also resented Fitzgerald exposing a darker, more honest side especially since much of what he wrote for magazines in the past were light, romantic stories about New York society. "The Crack-Up" is a frank revelation of failure, disappointment, and hitting bottom. He also writes eloquently on the flip side of the American Dream and the thin line he walked between the pursuit of happiness and self-delusion. “My own happiness in the past often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distill into little lines in books—and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception. It was not the natural thing but the unnatural—unnatural as the Boom; and my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the Boom was over.”</div><div><br />Fitzgerald’s essays, as well as the melancholy that permeates <i>The Great Gatsby</i>, made me think of a psychiatrist’s observation I read somewhere on the epidemic of depression in modern times. He practiced in the New York area and while he didn’t dispute there can be biological causes of depression, in his practice he didn’t immediately jump to prescribing medications like some doctors do, but took some time getting to know the patients and the circumstances surrounding the depression. In his many years of practice, he noted that quite a number of his patients each had their own version of: “I will work very hard and jump through this hoop and that hoop and then this ____ (fill in the blank) will come true.” This “fill in the blank” was some dream, and the dreams varied, but all the dreams had one underlying thing in common—a belief, either conscious or unconscious, that once the dream was achieved, they would get the approval and/or security that they longed for or felt entitled to. When this “fill in the blank” never arrived, didn’t come true or didn’t bring the expected results, especially after many years of this pursuit, instead of experiencing disappointment (which can be recovered from with time), these patients sank into a deep depression. What was so crushing to them was the realization that all these years they had been living under an illusion. And they also found themselves completely depleted. They had believed, in one way or the other, as Fitzgerald described in "The Crack-Up", “Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both.” and as Fitzgerald noted in his own efforts just before his “crack-up” and depression, “my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.” The doctor asked one patient why he had wasted so much time and energy on his particular pursuit since it seemed obvious to him that it wasn’t going to bear fruit like he imagined, to which the patient replied that he didn’t have any choice—life was essentially meaningless and meaning only came through how hard one worked. And much to his shock as a secular, medically-trained doctor of no religious background, he found himself spontaneously saying to his patient, “You need to have more faith.” This shocked me as much as it did him. Even as a Christian, I found it kind of harsh and inappropriate for a doctor to say that to his patient. As a Christian, if another Christian had said that to me while I was feeling depressed, it would have felt like an insulting slap in the face. But at the same time, something about this doctor’s observations rang of something true and stuck with me and I recalled it as I read Fitzgerald’s writings.</div><div><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>To the doctor’s depressed patients, the “fill in the blank” was each patient’s own version of the green light and Daisy on the other shore. To Gatsby, Daisy represented everything that seemed promised by wealth—social approval, a reaching of some place of security, a protection from the harsh realities and difficulties of life. But these materialistic hopes and assumptions, as Gatsby and the depressed patients learned, so often don’t bring the expected results but instead turn to “ashes in one’s mouth” a common expression of biblical origin. “He feeds on ashes; a deceived heart has turned him aside. And he cannot deliver himself, nor say, "Is there not a lie in my right hand?”” (Isaiah 44:20) When I think of “a lie in my right hand,” I think of a “Sodom apple” or “Dead Sea fruit” which at one time were popular idioms meaning, “Fair to the eye, but nauseous to the taste; full of promise, but without reality.” According to medieval legend, Sodom apples turned to smoke and ash when picked. For Fitzgerald, his “fill in the blank” or Sodom apple was “fantastic success and eternal youth” which he believed he could achieve through sheer force of will in the Big Apple, but in Fitzgerald’s words, “One by one my great dreams of New York became tainted.” And ironically, the quest for fantastic success and eternal youth merely resulted in premature death—the combination of overwork, stress, and abuse of his body with alcohol killed him. Fitzgerald was dead at the age of 44 from a heart-attack. So in the end, it was about limits—from seemingly limitless dreams to the humility and humiliation of limits. As Fitzgerald wrote in "My Lost City" in the midst of the Great Depression five years before his untimely death:</div><div><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMLGZsnOWoydnD-GjK0mUIB-jqTlPey_ozpPpuJ95FBr8JcPxUuHIxHONeDNDEfUAnrr86cR8eW_-CrKDvvcBnj3bnhteQzS-eExx_SMFPxq90DI7Bo8O4uxs8LXW78tyYl51e3WVT4ts/s1600/Manhattan_from_EmpireState.JPG" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="View of Manhattan from top of Empire State Building looking toward Freedom tower." border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMLGZsnOWoydnD-GjK0mUIB-jqTlPey_ozpPpuJ95FBr8JcPxUuHIxHONeDNDEfUAnrr86cR8eW_-CrKDvvcBnj3bnhteQzS-eExx_SMFPxq90DI7Bo8O4uxs8LXW78tyYl51e3WVT4ts/w400-h300/Manhattan_from_EmpireState.JPG" title="Looking downtown from Empire State Building" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Looking downtown from Empire State Building</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br /></div><div>
“From the ruins rose the Empire State Building, lonely and inexplicable as the Sphinx, and, just as it had been a tradition of mind to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as the eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood—everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora’s box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed her and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground… Thus I take leave of my lost city. Seen from the ferry boat in the early morning it no longer whispers of fantastic success and eternal youth… For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage…”</div><div><br />My experience of NYC was completely different than Fitzgerald’s. It was definitely mundane and even-keeled compared to Fitzgerald’s dramatic highs and lows (fortunately.) I never had “great dreams of New York” or put any hope in it. NYC just felt like home to me. Because of the kindness and hospitality of my New Yorker friends Don and Sue Jenner and Scott Rodolitz, NYC felt homey and cozy in a way the academy didn’t. Tragically, Fitzgerald had no real friends in NYC so it was a lonely place. But while our experience of the city was completely different, our disenchantment with displays of wealth on Long Island was definitely similar.</div><div><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYo1JcA_X0OUKKDJp6Eh4p0256IDi7pV5I0VW7VLnRDSpiBma1GeJGW5lU2CA_qsuv6hGjpSjPJKgH82aQl_fSdUNk3rmgoBRcVVZjQCLSnv0NvxGyikRACcfXWfS5ysYsXX-Akhy6J4g/s1600/Barstow+room.JPG" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Lavish room with chandelier, fireplace, polished wood floors in Barstow House" border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYo1JcA_X0OUKKDJp6Eh4p0256IDi7pV5I0VW7VLnRDSpiBma1GeJGW5lU2CA_qsuv6hGjpSjPJKgH82aQl_fSdUNk3rmgoBRcVVZjQCLSnv0NvxGyikRACcfXWfS5ysYsXX-Akhy6J4g/w400-h300/Barstow+room.JPG" title="Barstow House, interior" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Barstow House interior</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br /></div><div>My senior year at the academy I worked at the American Merchant Marine Museum which is on the northeastern end of the academy grounds just a couple miles from where Gatsby stared across the bay to the green light on East Egg. The museum is in a mansion once owned by William Slocum Barstow, a peer and friend of Thomas Edison and a major player in electric utilities (the Barstow House was the first private residence in the U.S. to have an electric elevator and also has a movie theater in the basement which is now used for storage.) When first working there, I relished the grandeur and spectacle of the house, then over time I became used to it and indifferent to it, then progressively the mansion started to feel more and more cavernous, lonely, and depressing. Especially on cold, overcast winter days I would walk around the many large rooms that could never be heated fully or comfortably, look at the gray sound with a forlorn-looking Throgs Neck Bridge and Manhattan skyline beyond it, and wonder how rich people could stand to live in such enormous, mostly empty houses. According to the old gentleman who ran the museum at the time there was a ghost living there. Whether this was true or not I have no idea. All I know is that once in a while I would have to go down to the basement to the movie theater to get something from storage and I would bolt in and bolt out completely creeped out, the tragedy and comedy masks on the proscenium arch staring down at me. Before working there, I would have never guessed such a lavish setting could come to feel so hopelessly eerie and sad (and maybe this reversal of feeling is what everyone experiences with anything worldly.) And Fitzgerald certainly was tuned into this downward progression of mood and sentiment since he captures it so keenly in <i>The Great Gatsby</i>.</div><div><br /><i>The Great Gatsby</i> was a commercial failure in Fitzgerald’s time but is now considered by many to be the greatest American novel of the modern era. It sells more copies each year than sold in Fitzgerald’s entire lifetime, even though it has a completely unAmerican, unHollywood, unhappy ending. Why this appeal? Many would attribute it to its faithful depiction of the roaring twenties which is probably true. Others would note the appeal of the character Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is mythical yet true-to-life, he’s a self-made man in the most American sense of the expression—he rose from abject poverty to riches, although his fortune is made of easy money. This overnight millionaire has mysterious, shadowy New York connections lurking in the background—he’s mixed up in organized crime of some kind. Even though his wealth obviously smacks of something dishonest—a racket—you can’t help but like him. Maybe Gatsby, for his time, was a sneak preview of the American enthrallment with New York gangsters—even though they’re technically scumbags, people have an affectionate fascination with them and find them oddly endearing. So Gatsby as a main character intrigues. But there’s something bigger—something about the novel’s truthful depiction of the American Dream resonates.</div><div><br />The American Dream is never mentioned by name in the novel but its expansive optimism is lovingly expressed by the novel’s narrator Nick Carraway, "I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."</div><div><br />Unlike other American colonies started by Protestants fleeing religious persecution and looking to express God’s Kingdom on earth, New York began as New Amsterdam, a Dutch colony started by traders who had no such motives. Eventually taken over by the equally enterprising British bent on the creation of their Empire, New York was all business from day one, lit up not by spiritual fervor but more the striving gleam-in-the eye of the likes of merchants, bankers, and the criminal element that inevitably came alongside it. New York became a glittering and hypnotic city, a source of massive wealth, but with an inevitable flip and shadow side for many, as expressed in the lives of Gatsby and Fitzgerald, their highs and lows an eerie reflection of the boom-bust highs and lows of the American and world economy which has its heartbeat in NYC.</div><div><br />Gatsby seems to have gotten his big piece of the American Dream, seems so close to getting Daisy, but in a strange and unfortunate set of circumstances loses his life. Getting everything you dream of or trying to get everything you dream of can become your own undoing and even death. As Americans, we love the positive aspect of the American Dream and don’t like to admit this truth, but deep down we know it’s the truth. The American Dream—simultaneously so full of hope and optimism (of the worldly kind) and so full of disappointment and disillusionment—both contradictory aspects are achingly expressed in <i>The Great Gatsby</i> like no other American novel.</div><div><br />Gatsby is a pathetic figure, but every American can identify with him in some way. Every American can understand and relate to him, can admire his dreaming and hopefulness. Just about every American probably has their own version of the green light or Daisy, always on the other shore, just out of reach, so close and yet so far away—if only this or if only that, then I will have “arrived” and it will all be ok. Even Christians, who like to believe they are above idolatry, are often deceived by this siren song and mirage, this elusive, capricious, empty god that promises and withholds so much, and like the depressed patients who “need to have more faith” can painfully discover one day that for all these years they had been living under an illusion.<br />
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Other American Dream posts:<br />
<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/2011/09/american-dream-illusion.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">The American Dream - An Illusion</span></a><br />
<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/2011/10/american-dream-illusion-part-ii.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">The American Dream - An Illusion, Part II</span></a><br />
<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/2012/02/death-of-salesman-revisited-american.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Death of a Salesman Revisited: The American Dream, An Illusion Part III</span></a></div><div><br /></div><div>(Posted 12/31/2016)</div>
</div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-43698598889972026082016-05-04T12:56:00.002-07:002022-09-19T10:59:31.811-07:00Holocaust Remembrance DayYom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day, as it is observed in Israel, this year begins on the evening of May 4th and ends on the evening of May 5th. I’m not Jewish, but I am choosing to commemorate it on my site this year because it’s always good to be reminded of history and how easy it is to flirt with darkness and get drawn in, especially considering the troubling public infatuation with Trump as a presidential candidate and the mob mentality at his rallies. For me, World War II is not a remote history lesson, something I learned sitting in school or watching the History channel, but a gritty, visceral reality—I spent countless hours with <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a>, a real World War II veteran, as he shared his experiences and showed me the many photographs he took during his service. I could see that Julian was deeply affected by the war and it was still with him after many decades. The word he used often to describe it was “epic” and I definitely had the sense of huge forces of world history playing themselves out on a grand scale, and his participation in this was not something to take lightly. No, we may never have a literal Holocaust of the type in World War II in America, but the root of evil can take many forms—the hatred, fear, and intolerance that lurks beneath the veneer of any civilization along with any sociopathic tendencies in a leader can quickly metastasize into senseless chaos and destruction that is hard to stop once it is fed by public hysteria and gains momentum, as was painfully learned in World War II.<div><br /><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigaPxfiRJx6DhSnoW_Lgvg_31tlqczZxoQuUdnUvJJi1BOAX86qI9uSLm5bAqRAuc7yrsvMW7ulb-8zgy7QBBfCn7WSOvcLOjLJgpCIWqpR1lx_XdNZBF2GdthC_NX04iJbxljkyWe2t4/s1600/DiaryManDespair.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Book cover Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigaPxfiRJx6DhSnoW_Lgvg_31tlqczZxoQuUdnUvJJi1BOAX86qI9uSLm5bAqRAuc7yrsvMW7ulb-8zgy7QBBfCn7WSOvcLOjLJgpCIWqpR1lx_XdNZBF2GdthC_NX04iJbxljkyWe2t4/s320/DiaryManDespair.jpeg" title="Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck" width="205" /></a></div><br />I have been blessed to come across two striking first person, nonfiction accounts of that era: <i>Diary of a Man in Despair</i> by Friedrich Reck and <i>The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II</i> by Denis Avey. I would recommend the books to anyone interested in learning more about that dark period in our history. I read the books last year since 2015 marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and even though that was many months ago, I thought back to the books often. The quality of writing in both books is especially notable, and the insights gleaned also serve as a warning on the current political climate.<br />
<div><br /></div><i>Diary of a Man in Despair</i> by Friedrich Reck is an unusual document, unlike anything I’ve read in a long time. Reck was a non-Jewish German man who moved in higher social circles and could have belonged to the Nazi party but was repelled by it. His <i>Diary</i> is not a literal diary of dated daily entries, but rather thoughts, reflections, and observations written in the years 1936 to 1944 as he watched his country fall into the abyss. His writing was very critical of Germany and the Nazi regime so he wrote at tremendous risk to himself. In spite of warnings by friends (an acquaintance of theirs was raided by the Gestapo) he persisted in his writing, hiding the pages in a tin box which he buried in the woods on his extensive property. Only in the final weeks of the war, were the pages removed from their hiding place. They were first published in Germany in 1947 by a publisher who soon went out of business, but reprinted in 1964 and 1966, with an excellent English translation in 1970 by Paul Rubens. At the time <i>Diary</i> was first published it received little attention and Reck was (and still is) misunderstood and dismissed by some as an annoying aristocrat whining endlessly about the cow-like stupidity of “mass-man,” which is unfortunate. <i>Diary</i> is full of keen insights, along with unique, close-up observations of Hitler since they ran in the same social circles. Reck’s description of his first close up encounters with Hitler who was not yet a major political figure runs as follows:</div><div><br /></div><div>
“Eventually, he managed to launch into a speech. He talked on and on, endlessly. He preached. He went on at us like a division chaplain in the Army. We did not in the least contradict him, or venture to differ in any way, but he began to bellow at us. The servants thought we were being attacked, and rushed in to defend us.<br />
When he had gone, we sat silently confused and not at all amused. There was a feeling of dismay, as when on a train you suddenly find you are sharing a compartment with a psychotic. We sat a long time and no one spoke. Finally, Clé stood up, opened one of the huge windows, and let the spring air, warm with the föhn, into the room. It was not that our grim guest had been unclean, and had fouled the room in the way that so often happens in a Bavarian village. But the fresh air helped to dispel the feeling of oppression. It was not that an unclean body had been in the room, but something else: the unclean essence of a monstrosity.<br />
I used to ride at the Munich armoury, after which I liked to eat at the Löwenbräkeller: that was the second meeting. He did not need to worry now that he might be put out, and so he did not have to smack his boots continually with his riding whip, as he had done at Franckenstein’s. At first glance, the tightly clenched insecurity seemed to be gone—which allowed him to launch at once into one of his tirades. I had ridden hard, and was tremendously hungry, and wanted just to be let alone to eat in peace. Instead I had poured out over me every one of the political platitudes in his book. I know you will appreciate my sparing you, future reader, all the dogma. It was that little-man Machiavellianism by which German foreign policy became a series of legalised burglaries and the activity of its leaders a succession of embezzlements, forgeries, and treaty breaches, all designed to make him appeal to the assortment of schoolteachers, bureaucrats, and stenographers who have since become the true support and bastion of his regime . . .as a fabulous fellow, a real political Genghis Khan.<br />
With his oily hair falling into his face as he ranted, he had the look of a man trying to seduce the cook. I got the impression of basic stupidity, the same kind of stupidity as that of his crony, Papen—the kind of stupidity which equates statesmanship with cheating at a horse trade.”</div><div><br />Much later, at a public rally, in examining Hitler’s face through a pair of binoculars, Reck noted, “the face bore the stigma of sexual inadequacy, of the rancour of a half-man who had turned his fury at his impotence into brutalising others.” which is remarkable considering in recent years there has been some speculation, based on a doctor’s report, on Hitler suffering from a genital deformity. In reflecting on his impressions of Hitler over the years, Reck writes, “Notwithstanding his meteoric rise, there is absolutely nothing that has happened in the twenty years since I first saw him to make me change my first view of him. The fact remains that he was, and is, without the slightest self-awareness and pleasure in himself, that he basically hates himself, and that his opportunism, his immeasurable need for recognition, and his now-apocalyptic vanity are all based on one thing—a consuming drive to drown out the pain in his psyche, the trauma of a monstrosity.”</div><div><br />Reck also gives cutting observations on the social and economic forces in Germany that gave rise to Hitler and the Nazi war machinery. Hitler’s self-hatred and monomaniacal need for power coincided with a turbulent political and economic situation that had roots in previous regimes as well as the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression. Add to this mix the German government’s increasing collusion with corporations and the relentless drive towards industrialization. Reck viewed the German fixation with mercantilism, industrialization, and technology as vulgar and barbaric, the mindset and mentality epitomized in what he derisively termed “mass-man”. Reck saw “mass-man” as spiritually bankrupt and ultimately spawned from the shadow side of the French Revolution which famously made Reason into a cult and germinated the concept and fervent hysteria of Nationalism “which puts an aura of heroism around mercantilism and the bourgeois drive for power…” In writing of this mass mentality that had become entrenched in Germany, Reck writes, “It was possible only at a time of generalised atheism, and purposelessness, and brute force. Of course, I.G. Farben welcomed Hitler—he provided their poison factory with the aura of a philosophy!” As if to validate the popular adage that Satan most successfully deceives by making people believe he (and God) doesn’t exist, in despair Reck writes, “My life is loneliness, and the growing awareness that it must be so—loneliness among a people whom Satan has overcome, and the awareness that only by suffering can the future be changed…” Reck further notes that Germany, in such a spiritually bankrupt atmosphere, gave license to its worst side: “every nation normally puts its demons, its delusions, its impossible desires away into the cellars and vaults and underground prisons of its unconscious; the Germans have reversed the process, and have let them loose.” As we all know, all these forces and elements plaguing German society came together as in a perfect storm culminating in the Nazi military industrial complex and a military campaign bent on taking over all of Europe as well as its most evil manifestation—industrialized murder.</div><div><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYA8AId4fqtea8-rx4xigMa2s7EMO4GPnfHLBGTRdp7SUrEKb9U5hQJ0lYa3PaU1IHY0T3fxK6KJZHUbwEm1DlRDARMNe1bfpCoQkvOyIiPbitnnWnC5sIx2R1MJPZ7P1nNdCCripVrnY/s1600/ManWhoBrokeIntoAuschwitz.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Book cover The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz by Denis Avey" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYA8AId4fqtea8-rx4xigMa2s7EMO4GPnfHLBGTRdp7SUrEKb9U5hQJ0lYa3PaU1IHY0T3fxK6KJZHUbwEm1DlRDARMNe1bfpCoQkvOyIiPbitnnWnC5sIx2R1MJPZ7P1nNdCCripVrnY/s320/ManWhoBrokeIntoAuschwitz.jpeg" title="The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz by Denis Avey" width="211" /></a></div><div><br /></div><i>The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz</i>, written by Denis Avey (with Rob Broomby), gives an excellent account of World War II from someone who served as a British soldier. Avey was just one year and four months younger than my American veteran friend Julian, so it was interesting to get a different and British perspective of the same war from someone around the same age as Julian. Avey was born on January 11, 1919 and grew up in the village of North Weald in Essex, England. He didn’t join the military for any noble reason, but rather adventure. A naturally feisty personality and fiery temperament made him daring but also got him into trouble. He fought in the deserts of Egypt and Libya against the Italians and Rommel’s Africa Korps and was eventually captured by the Germans and became a prisoner of war. Avey, undeterred, made several desperate escape attempts, including a harrowing escape from a torpedoed ship that was transporting prisoners, only to be caught again. Avey was ultimately imprisoned long-term at the E715 POW camp at the IG Farben Buna-Werke complex which was also the location of the Auschwitz III-Monowitz concentration camp. The POW camp and Auschwitz III-Monowitz were so close together that their entrances were only 800 meters apart. In Avey’s words: “It was hell on earth…There was no grass, no greenery of any sort, just mud in winter, dust in summer.” During the day, the POWs, who were fed and treated better than the Jewish prisoners, were often forced to work alongside the Jews who were too weak to handle the heavy work that went on continually at the IG Farben complex.</div><div><br />As my friend Julian once told me, “war takes you totally out of everything. In a war, everything is turned upside down, nothing is the same anymore. Life is totally different. That’s why it haunts you and stays with you your whole life.” Avey gives his account with complete honesty. He shamefully recalls when Les, his friend and fellow soldier, was blown up next to him in the middle of a battle at Sidi Rezegh in Libya, his first thought was, “Thank God it wasn’t me.” He reveals all of his experiences in a transparent manner as well as his later struggle with post traumatic stress disorder and how it negatively affected his first marriage.</div><div><br />Who knows what each one of us would think or do in the same desperate circumstances that Avey experienced or in similar war conditions. The tragedy and indignity of war is such that, just to survive all the horrors, people are forced into shutting off emotionally and often reverting to the most primal state of self-preservation, which later thaws into post-traumatic stress disorder and crippling guilt. PTSD was even less acknowledged or understood than it is now. It was given the anemic term “combat fatigue” and generally swept under the rug as just another unfortunate consequence of war. In order to shield himself, Avey shut off emotionally and retreated deeply inward. For many years, he struggled alone with an especially severe case of PTSD. In his time, there were no adequate resources and he mainly dealt with it by not talking about it at all, because in his generation and culture, you just didn’t talk about experiences like that. It was only later in life, in speaking about and writing about his experiences, that he was able to experience some healing.</div><div><br />A number of times through his book, Avey, in describing how he handled himself in war conditions, states something along the lines of, “I had to think of number one,” or “I was just looking out for number one,” which I don’t feel is accurate. He was doing his best to survive some dismal and extreme circumstances, yet at the same time, he made a number of sacrifices and took risks where most people wouldn’t. There was little that was truly selfish on his part. This distortion and guilt is typical of people and veterans who survive extreme trauma and unspeakable horrors. Avey is obviously very hard on himself. Given what he witnessed, he probably feels he could and should have done more and was selfish, but the truth is, he was very courageous and self-sacrificing. He made a number of risks and effort when none was asked of him. He showed up for duty when he didn’t have to—he was given a plum assignment in South Africa and could have stayed there and lived the good life, but chose instead to go back to the deserts of North Africa to fight—which ultimately led to him being captured by the Germans. While imprisoned and working at the I.G. Farben complex, with the help of a civilian worker and using his engineering knowledge, he always made an effort to engage in some form of surreptitious sabotage in the complex. He also lost an eye after confronting an SS officer for beating a Jewish boy. And he did his best to give food to the jewish prisoners and make sure a jewish prisoner had extra cigarettes which were used like currency in the prison to obtain privileges and favors. These are just some examples of personal risk and sacrifice on the part of Avey. And finally the act that inspired the title of the book. The title makes it sound like he kicked down a door or snuck in through a window or something along those lines, but it was more like an “exchange” between Avey and a Jewish prisoner after he had developed a relationship of trust with him. I don’t want to be a spoiler and give too much away, so sorry, no more details—you’ll just have to buy the book.</div><div><br />There has been some controversy over whether Avey actually did enter Auschwitz. It is documented that he was a POW at the E715 POW camp, but no proof that he actually entered the Auschwitz camp, so there has been some speculation that in his old age, while not deliberately making up the story but through some form of wishful thinking, Avey had imagined this occurred, incorporating information about Auschwitz he gleaned over the years from other sources. Whether this is the case or not, isn’t that relevant to me. I don’t doubt he is doing his best to tell the truth. I spent countless hours with a World War II veteran, so sense when someone is telling the truth in regards to war. Avey’s descriptions of his experiences fighting in the desert campaigns of North Africa, as a prisoner, and as a fugitive on the run ring true. Even in the chance that he did “elaborate” on the Auschwitz portion, any mental confusion on his part would be something I would easily forgive, given his especially severe case of untreated PTSD. Besides that, for me, the quality of writing supersedes the controversy—it is a beautifully written book which in sections reads like a good thriller and worth a read just for that. A well-written book is always a pleasure to read.</div><div><br />Best of all, <i>The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz</i> has a thrilling surprise and message of hope at the end, complete with witnesses and proof. While it may have appeared to Avey that, in his words, “The Great Architect had turned his back on Auschwitz,” (I don’t agree with all of Avey’s thoughts and views, but that doesn’t mean I can’t like his book), the outcome of his story proves that there is hope even when things appear hopeless. I don’t want to give anything away, so I will make my point by just summarizing. Avey wrote some letters while a prisoner requesting something—this seemingly small and insignificant gesture bore fruit in an unexpected way that stretched across decades. When the BBC video taped Avey telling his story, they purposely placed him in front of a picture window with a view of Hope Valley in Derbyshire which immediately brought to my mind the Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekial 37 where the dry bones unexpectedly came to life. God breathed life into the valley full of dry bones and promised, “O my people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them: I will bring you back to the land of Israel.” What appeared to be completely dead, abandoned, and hopeless, there was still life in it. Even as flawed, muddled human beings, seemingly weak and powerless against overwhelming, dark forces, taking a risk—even in the form of a small act, a small gesture—can be like a breath of life and hope, as Avey proved with his actions.</div><div><br />When an Auschwitz survivor who was assisted by Avey was asked after telling his story what advice he would give future generations, he said: “For evil to succeed all that was needed was for the righteous to do nothing.” Both books make that important point, that we can’t be silent or passive. Reck, despite warnings from friends and Germany unleashing all of its demons, persisted in his writings. “Driven as I am by my own inner necessity,” he wrote, “I must ignore the warning and continue these notes.” If only more people would be driven by such an inner necessity—as Avey pointed out, the evil that came to full bloom and resulted in World War II can happen anywhere, at any time. In his words, “It could happen here. It could indeed happen anywhere where the veneer of civilization is allowed to wear off, or is torn off by ill will and destructive urges.”<br />
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(Posted 5/4/16)</div>
</div></div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-91077580004373530742015-12-22T17:45:00.003-08:002022-09-17T17:49:28.379-07:00Terror or Love: It Takes a Community to End Terrorism<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi-UIeW9SygiAKsGDNASdHamjf0nvwlTHO4xWjmnhrPose6em8QH1Unoxn49bqqC-ApKkIyuyHkTCej3SlDD4WMIw28i6MUkymKqcu-hT0ugLb7A-3I5K5I3LTeQLnPJ1kX5Trrty9ePRIWzY0QJLJyxIbIHewuwtEP3uIhxWe6A4h5yU7Y0vJ9xwqL=s3636" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3636" data-original-width="2375" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi-UIeW9SygiAKsGDNASdHamjf0nvwlTHO4xWjmnhrPose6em8QH1Unoxn49bqqC-ApKkIyuyHkTCej3SlDD4WMIw28i6MUkymKqcu-hT0ugLb7A-3I5K5I3LTeQLnPJ1kX5Trrty9ePRIWzY0QJLJyxIbIHewuwtEP3uIhxWe6A4h5yU7Y0vJ9xwqL=w261-h400" width="261" /></a></div><br />“…for myself, it was only the fear of love from which one flees into absolute violence,” wrote Michael Baumann a.k.a. Bommi Baumann in his 1975 book <i>Terror or Love?</i> (originally titled Wie Alles Anfing in German.) Baumann was part of a now barely-remembered domestic terrorist organization in Germany with ties to terrorists in the Middle East. Inspired by the student unrest of the 1960s, this “militant kernel of Berlin’s counter-culture” began as a group called the “Central Committee of the Roaming Hash Rebels.” Becoming increasingly violent, they eventually sent members to Jordon to receive training from Palestinians on terrorist tactics such as use of arms and bomb-making. Nicknamed the Hash Brothers (which eventually became the June 2nd Movement), they went on a rampage of bombs and violence in the neighborhoods of Berlin which made headlines in its day. In my random browsing, I came across Baumann's obscure book chronicling his misadventures as a terrorist and his eventual abandonment of the movement and his provocative comment stuck with me. In spite of large differences in context and seemingly far removed from current events and radical Islam—Baumann was a far left, dope-smoking hippie who happened to prefer bombs to peace—I felt there was a commonality and insight to be learned. (Bear with me, this is going to be a long thread.)<div><br />Record numbers of young westerners are choosing to join radical extremist groups such as ISIS and people are scratching their heads over why. There is no single profile. Former recruiters and recruits reveal a range of reasons that include but are not limited to: dissatisfaction with their lives; lack of healthy family; racism; a sense of injustice; a desire for belonging; disenchantment with the typical lifestyle of a westerner; a desire for meaning and purpose; a desire to belong to a cause; outrage over the hypocrisy of the west; a belief that the west is against Islam. When ISIS began to make headlines, Defense Secretary Hagel and General Martin Dempsey acknowledged the need for military action of some kind, but that there is no military-alone solution to ISIS. Radical Islam ultimately won’t or can’t be eradicated by military force because it is an ideology and mindset.</div><div><br />So where did the roots of this ideology and mindset originate? The mind of the man considered to be godfather of modern Jihadism, Sayyid Qutb. Qutb was a literary critic, author, and educator turned Islamic theologian most known for his notorious Islamist tract <i>Milestones</i>. Qutb’s work was cited as a primary source of influence on bin Laden by the 9/11 Commission Report, and although now ISIS and al Qaeda are at odds, ISIS, in their own propaganda, traces its origins to bin Laden.</div><div><br />Qutb spent two years in the United States, from 1948 to 1950, on a scholarship to study the educational system. He visited major cities such as New York and Washington D.C. and also spent time in Greeley, Colorado. He recorded his observations in a small book titled, <i>The America I Have Seen</i>. Depending on what mood you are in when reading it, this strange document can seem annoying, insightful, sophomoric, or hilarious. He displays a cultural snobbery (e.g. his mocking complaints over the unfamiliar use of salt and sugar and haircuts lacking “elegance”) and there are some amusing factual errors (he claims the first immigrants to North America were adventure seekers and British prisoners.) And while Greeley in the late 1940s would be considered very conservative by today’s standards, based on Qutb’s description of a church dance while there along with his impression of the American female, you would have thought that he visited a disco and a strip club. He obviously exaggerates, seizing on the most negative and presents a picture of America in the ugliest, most unflattering angle and light possible, but some of his observations admittedly are astute, incisive, and cut to the core of a spiritual and moral bankruptcy that exists in America, a country that gives God a lot of lip service but frankly in daily practice seems to put more faith in applied science. When grasping for reasons as to why radical Islamists hate the west so much, we often state, “They hate our freedom and democracy,” as if it were just a petty matter of envy and resentment. But unfortunately, it’s much more complicated than that. What we Americans (and westerners in general) smugly and complacently see as progress, Qutb viewed as a regression into a more primitive state and that our fixation with technology is actually barbaric akin to a caveman eyeing his tools with vulgar fascination over what more powers he could wield if he could only dream up more tools. In Qutb’s words:<br />
<br />
“As for the invention of tools, the wielding of powers, or the making of objects, these things are in and of themselves weightless in the scale of human values.”<br />
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“It appears that all American ingenuity is concentrated in the field of work and production, so much so that no ability remains to advance in the field of human values. America’s productivity is unmatched by any other nation. It has miraculously elevated life to levels that cannot be believed. But man cannot maintain his balance before the machine and risks becoming a machine himself. He is unable to shoulder the burden of exhausting work and forge ahead on the path of humanity, he unleashes the animal within.”<br />
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“It is the case of a people who have reached the peak of growth and elevation in the world of science and productivity, while remaining abysmally primitive in the world of the senses, feelings, and behavior.”<br />
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“But humanity makes the gravest of errors and risks losing its account of morals, if it makes America its example in feelings and manners.”<br />
<br />Qutb found America’s achievements to be unquestionably astonishing, but that our modernity masked a degeneration. He believed our extraordinary advancement wasn’t making us more civilized but more like desensitized animals living more on impulse than on values.</div><div><br />Qutb would have no trouble finding evidence to support his views in contemporary American and western culture. Much of our entertainment and advertisement caters to the basest of human desires and the lowest common denominator. Especially in entertainment anything goes, and the boundaries are continually pushed into increasingly edgy and more disturbing content that is vulgar, violent, and graphic (in the wild west of the internet, it gets much worse) and this is viewed as “freedom.” We’ll argue until we’re blue in the face that our media has zero influence on our behavior, but at the same time Madison Avenue rakes in billions of dollars to create advertising. Why? Because advertising in the media works. Yet this obvious contradiction is never noticed and doesn’t concerns us. Rampant and record rates of addiction to everything from shopping to food to substances to sex shows America has a serious problem with impulse control and maintaining balance. America’s insatiable appetite for drugs enables cartels to be just as lucrative if not more lucrative than Fortune 500 companies. And general violence and shooting rampages have become a regular occurrence. Qutb especially noted the superficial quality of relationships, that they tended to be utilitarian serving base needs versus forming real community. Many would concede that these days, opportunistic friendships and shallow hookups often replace real intimacy. Qutb quotes a female university student he met in 1949: “The matter of sex is not a moral matter at all. It is but a question of biology, and when we look at it from this angle it becomes clear that the use of words like moral and immoral, good and bad, are irrelevant.” Which just confirmed for Qutb that the so-called “progress” and “advancement” of modernity was just a reversion into the law of the jungle and a more primitive state. (On an interesting side-note, one of the main reasons the Amish distrust technology is that they believe technology tends to erode and destroy community. Incorporation of any new technology in their culture goes through a rigorous evaluation of how it will positively or negatively impact community over the long-term.)</div><div><br />What Qutb found so repugnant was the godless, amoral state of our modernity. Modernity places faith in technological progress and the belief that humans can create an ideal world through their mastery of the sciences and technology. Central to modernity is a belief in a material universe with physical laws that can be manipulated for various forms of gain, as well as a general rejection of tradition and disdain for agrarian societies, and a movement towards industrialization, capitalistic enterprise, and the market economy, the legacy of which we’re living out today. Our current practice of capitalism and finance stems directly from the Industrial Revolution. For example, Wall Street banks originally rose to prominence and gained previously unheard of fortunes in the funding of large industrial enterprises. As much as you may support or believe in capitalism you can’t deny that in our most common practice of it, there is a shadow side. In a pure capitalistic system it’s believed self-interest <i>always</i> produces good. And people are only as valuable as how productive they are and how much they consume in the most materialistic sense of the word. In short, the bottom line is all that matters, whatever generates cash flow is right, and the dog-eat-dog market is infallible. And like it or not, you’re just a cog in this survival-of-the-fittest machinery.</div><div><br />In short, Qutb believed there was little that was truly enlightened about the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment, the culmination of which is the modern industrial age which has been in a steady creeping growth and taking over the whole world. A couple examples: the westernization of Asia and the replacement of old world imperialism with the corporate imperialism of globalization.</div><div><br />While technology itself isn’t bad, a misplaced faith in it is. I personally don’t believe the answer is about going back to the past or recreating the past. New forms and models of how we think about and use technology and how we practice capitalism are needed. Unfortunately, Qutb was of the camp that believed violent revolution was the only solution.</div><div><br />Qutb believed modernity to be merely Jahiliyyah, the state of godless ignorance, and he formulated a political ideology based on the view that only the law of Mohammed can save, redeem, and correct this savage state. He believed that most modern Muslims are hopelessly hypnotized and corrupted by the modernity or Jahiliyyah of the west and he implored all true Muslims to Holy War or jihad against the west and most especially America the most powerful representative and practitioner of modernity. Unfortunately, Qutb also viewed this modernity (which is essentially an atheistic worldview) as Christian and this has morphed into the view that the Christian west is against Islam.</div><div><br />Qutb’s writings are distorted—he shamelessly exaggerates, gets many facts wrong, and his theology is tragically flawed. At the same time, they do contain a kernel of truth that has a convicting sting to it. This same kernel of truth resonates with the likes of bin Laden and countless people who feel alienated by and disenchanted with modern society. Qutb’s rabid political ideology via the conduit of bin Laden went on to be further amended and refined by other extremist groups such as ISIS into an emphasis on a caliphate. (Bin Laden believed his work as a jihadist to be a precursor to a caliphate.) To potential recruits the caliphate is presented as a utopia—Islamic State offers complete care including health care to all members regardless of contribution. The caliphate is romanticized as the ideal Islamic community and a vehicle or means of salvation under the presumption that if like-minded Muslims follow the law of Mohammed perfectly then this utopia will be created. Many of you can already see that this is doomed to failure. Anyone who makes the slightest mistake can only be dealt with most severely, and since no one can follow the law perfectly at all times, inevitably an oppressive police state and blood bath will ensue. As General Dempsey noted, ISIS is a death cult hiding under the cloak of religious legitimacy.</div><div><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6CRn2-7BNXeFyBQvWvF0JUT2-rPN22QB6siFAqdu49Layn0LO4Rfc6z3uqZQJ0Pb0tIuDx2O8dmw92qoygRwxIkxahHx_qIGOhopCCyK9AWqScp8GYh6Lx5OZkOn2zXfKjgi42F6Gu-o/s1600/Radical_Nawaz.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Book cover Radical by Maajid Nawaz, My Journey out of Islamist Extremism" border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6CRn2-7BNXeFyBQvWvF0JUT2-rPN22QB6siFAqdu49Layn0LO4Rfc6z3uqZQJ0Pb0tIuDx2O8dmw92qoygRwxIkxahHx_qIGOhopCCyK9AWqScp8GYh6Lx5OZkOn2zXfKjgi42F6Gu-o/w273-h400/Radical_Nawaz.jpg" title="Radical by Maajid Nawaz" width="273" /></a></div><div><br /></div>Tragic that a man with legitimate indignation but with a half-baked understanding of God festered in a prison. Qutb, while serving a sentence in Mazrah Tora in Alexandria, Egypt, wrote his most influential work <i>Milestones</i> for which he was executed. Qutb’s execution had the unintended effect of turning him into a martyr and consequently <i>Milestones</i>, a brief but powerful tract, set off a virulent chain reaction of violence which reaches to today. Interestingly, it was in this very same prison that Qutb solidified and gave words to his beliefs, that radical Islamist Maajid Nawaz, experienced the beginnings of a complete disintegration of his radicalism. Nawaz grew up in England, the son of Pakistani immigrants. His flight into terror was in fear and a sense of injustice—he experienced racism growing up and at the height of the Neo-Nazi movement in Europe in the early 90’s. He entered the ranks of a radical Muslim group called Hizb al-Tahrir (HT) which believes in joining all Muslim-majority countries under the rule of a caliphate or Islamic state. With exposure to propaganda, he came to believe in the narrative that the Christian west is against Islam. His involvement in HT eventually landed him in Mazrah Tora in Alexandria where he had plenty of time to kill. Thanks to the British Consul, he was able to revisit the English literature of his youth. He reread Orwell’s <i>Animal Farm</i> and Golding’s <i>Lord of the Flies</i>—the themes and storylines mirrored his already budding disillusionment with those in authority in HT. He had observed how power hungry they are and that they would abuse whatever power they had, that creating an Islamic state and implementing shari’ah law would result in the same dark tyranny depicted in the stories. He also read Tolkien’s <i>Lord of the Rings</i> trilogy two times—the irony and moral complexity of the ending fascinated him. (Incidentally, Tolkien was also disdainful of technological “progress” and the Industrial Revolution which inspired his creation of Middle-earth.) Especially fortuitous was the involvement of Amnesty International. Amnesty member John Cornwall wrote Nawaz a letter of friendship and insisted Amnesty International adopt Nawaz and his fellow HT prisoners as prisoners of conscience. Nawaz was deeply appreciative of the support of Cornwall and describes him as “a frail Christian man in his eighties, [who] campaigned for us with a passion not seen in most twenty-year olds.” Also fortuitous were the friendships he encountered after he got out of prison. Various friends from different backgrounds took the time to talk with him and speak against what was misguided about his beliefs. In short, it wasn’t one thing or one person that was responsible—the disintegration of his radicalism didn’t happen overnight or instantaneously—but rather it was the input and help of a whole group of different people, essentially a community, that melted his rigid stance and unraveled his radical ideology and mindset. Interesting to note, Nawaz was most deeply moved and affected by the unconditional support of Amnesty who would have never taken his case were it not for Cornwall who was just doing his best to reflect the unconditional love of Christ and be faithful to Hebrews 13:3 “Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.”</div><div><br />So what does all this have to do with Baumann, the counter-culture, hippie terrorist in Germany? His puzzling comment, “…for myself, it was only the fear of love from which one flees into absolute violence,” reveals a strange irony. The violent movement he was a part of started with the best of intentions. As Baumann explains in his book <i>Terror or Love?</i>, “For me, the whole time it was a question of creating human values which did not exist in capitalism, in all of Europe, in all of Western culture—they’d been cleared away by the machine.” The Hash Brothers railed against “the dehumanized system of monopoly capitalism” and set about in earnest to create a new and better society, but Baumann noted with dismay, in their terrorist attempt for change and revolution, they just became more and more like the machine they were seeking to destroy. In reflecting on how the movement fell apart, he writes: “…there’s no more sensibility in the group. Only rigid continuation, total pressure to achieve, and it keeps going, always gets worse.” “…so you pull these people along into an absolute stream of violence.” Baumann found himself to be increasingly surrounded by death and more death which climaxed in the gunning down of his best friend Georg von Rauch at his side. Other members collapsed from the pressure and betrayed the movement and the rest who tried to stick it out like Baumann became weary fugitives and he noted, “you only have contacts with other people as objects” [to serve immediate needs.] “…because the new quality cannot be maintained, and as the opposition, you become just like the apparatus itself.” “At the end it’s caught up with you—you become like the apparatus you fight against.”</div><div><br />Overall, <i>Terror or Love?</i> is rambling, obviously written in haste not long after Baumann abandoned the movement and went into hiding, and it shows a mental snapshot of a very confused person who had just wreaked havoc on society with his confusion, but with glimmers of insight just starting to break through. Ironically, he feared and fled from the very love that would heal the dehumanized system and machine that his movement railed against. The very thing he needed most and the cure was what he was running away from. Without fully grasping why, Baumann also writes, “…fear of love, and fear of freedom—really have to be taken into account, and have to be worked at.” He noted that some members of the movement, at the anxiety and uncertainty over the complete freedom of the counter-culture and not knowing what to do, retreated back to working in the factories again, the very thing they wanted to fight against. Out of fear there seems to be a tendency to retreat into the security of rigid structure, of being told what to do, and slavish obedience—anything from a factory assembly-line or the imperatives of a revolutionary movement or legalistic adherence to religious law. While providing a form of security, all are dehumanizing, devoid of love.</div><div><br />Baumann acknowledges that what he tried was a failure and by the close of his book, seems to hint that he realizes real revolution has something to do with an inner transformation. Without an inner transformation any external revolution would just result in more of the same. While remaining ignorant of what exactly this transformation is at the time of writing, he seems to grasp there is this glimmer of hope.</div><div><br />In spite of coming from completely different ends of the spectrum—Baumann from the far left counter-culture and Qutb from conservative religious extremism—both are tied by a genuine indignation and grieved by the same empty materialism and lack of love, values, community, and real relationships in modern society. And unfortunately, Qutb and Baumann both had their part in misguided solutions that are essentially rooted in ignorance and a backwards theology—that doing presupposes receiving. Especially in Qutb’s solution, at the core is a belief that God’s peace and love is going to be earned by doing in the form of following the law perfectly. But that’s backwards. The peace and love of God is something you have to receive first, it’s not something you earn. And only in the receiving of this love does real transformation occur. And God works and shows this love through people in the form of community. Baumann fled from and was ignorant of this agape love of God which Nawaz was fortunate to experience in time in reflected form from the likes of John Cornwall and others who cared about him.<br />
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<i>For general information on ISIS, the article "<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">What ISIS Really Wants</span></a>" is one of the better pieces I’ve seen (although I don’t agree with all of the author’s views.)</i><br />
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(Posted 12/22/15)</div>
</div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-38538690298115566762015-05-29T16:19:00.005-07:002022-09-17T17:47:02.651-07:00Wall Street: Face Reality and Work Honestly<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiua5gtlRqUMmUAMomBaFrqrExEHeZ3OhXMxBIdjNnPI8N1tBHPFe9PgHCOxacEQ02CZVpKRUfGK3CZG6ArjtlJxXGCf3cBZSTr9oFdzs_4f6aVcF6rzM1KNRz33r4yoY7TC1LRNILgWaI/s1600/Trinity_1920s.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Looking down Wall Street to Trinity Church" border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiua5gtlRqUMmUAMomBaFrqrExEHeZ3OhXMxBIdjNnPI8N1tBHPFe9PgHCOxacEQ02CZVpKRUfGK3CZG6ArjtlJxXGCf3cBZSTr9oFdzs_4f6aVcF6rzM1KNRz33r4yoY7TC1LRNILgWaI/w309-h400/Trinity_1920s.jpg" title="Wall Street and Trinity Church" width="309" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wall Street facing Trinity in the 1920s</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br /><div>Off and on, in the past year or so, I’ve been reading about Wall Street and a couple times came across images of the gothic cathedral at the head of Wall Street on Broadway, a half a block from the New York Stock Exchange. The captions read, “Trinity Wall Street” and I thought, “That’s a beautiful church—I wonder if it’s connected in any way to the Trinity I went to with Don and Sue on a regular basis when I was attending the academy? Maybe they’re part of the same diocese?” I attended the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York from 1987 to 1991. I had no family in the immediate area, so I often visited Don and Sue Jenner (a friend of my mom’s when Sue lived in Erie, Pennsylvania) who were like a kindly uncle and aunt. I didn’t care much for being at the academy—I managed to escape to various places on the east coast with the sailing team on some weekends, but my favorite time was in New York with the Jenners. It was about a half hour train ride from Kings Point to Penn Station and from there a brief subway ride downtown to Tribeca where they lived.</div><div><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcDz_9IEkGfeShnZgPd8_kMIK6mtos8rrGsD9AR5IqJPLLLfw8iqnDmlYiIJ_ofltGpr61IvTyamxg49ScP3JWtv6-p5foQN5w3woL6o29X62gmOjr96rSeLHipHPQx5qFUU7ypq8wLOI/s1600/Trinity_Wall_Street1.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Front of Trinity Church viewed down Wall Street" border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcDz_9IEkGfeShnZgPd8_kMIK6mtos8rrGsD9AR5IqJPLLLfw8iqnDmlYiIJ_ofltGpr61IvTyamxg49ScP3JWtv6-p5foQN5w3woL6o29X62gmOjr96rSeLHipHPQx5qFUU7ypq8wLOI/w328-h400/Trinity_Wall_Street1.jpg" title="Trinity Church Wall Street" width="328" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">More recently (NYSE on right)</td></tr>
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<span id="goog_250173994"></span><br /></div><div>In the new year, when chatting with Don on the phone, I mentioned the photographs of Trinity and asked, “Was that Trinity connected to the church we went to?” Don then informed me, incredulously, “That is the church we went to.” Then it was explained—we never approached it from Wall Street or entered from Broadway. We walked down Greenwich Street, cut across to Trinity Place and entered from a rear entrance, so I never saw it from the angle that it is most often photographed. And those photographs tend to cut off large portions of adjoining areas and buildings that I associate with Trinity, so from my viewpoint, it looked completely different. I do have a dim memory of standing outside the church once and looking up and seeing a street sign that read “Wall Street” and thinking, “We’re on Wall Street?” but I’m sure that thought was soon replaced by a vision of dim sum. It was not unusual for us to eat in Chinatown after church which I always looked forward to when zoning out during the service. I was not a Christian at the time so hardly considered my time there real church attendance. I was basically a jellyfish floating along in the current of Don and Sue’s Sunday routine. I did enjoy my time in church—or rather I enjoyed the theater of it—the choir, pipe organ, candles, stained glass, clouds of incense blown about by people in robes waving censers—your basic Anglican high church experience which in my mind, was more relaxing than being at the academy.</div><div><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj42fddCC1mHG2FhzbbL5d8r-Xp1KdG6Co-DlXLjIEjT3OkamwKszsuS2yrTR1I8N0yt1Zj3U5s-T7rh6KUQw8MrKfhxrM3fWvxMw_VWPt-p6kFkVJD1YrGxkfZa-B1biftjPX-SO4oGG4/s1600/BRANDY_WALKER.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Brandy Walker in the Jenner's apartment (about 1992)" border="0" data-original-height="650" data-original-width="932" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj42fddCC1mHG2FhzbbL5d8r-Xp1KdG6Co-DlXLjIEjT3OkamwKszsuS2yrTR1I8N0yt1Zj3U5s-T7rh6KUQw8MrKfhxrM3fWvxMw_VWPt-p6kFkVJD1YrGxkfZa-B1biftjPX-SO4oGG4/w400-h279/BRANDY_WALKER.jpg" title="Brandy Walker" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Me in the Jenner's apartment (about 1992)</td></tr>
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</div><br /></div><div>I very much appreciated the time we had together in New York. It was always a pleasure to spend time with Don and Sue and in hindsight, I am especially grateful to Don for giving me my first real introduction to Christianity. On our frequent outings in lower Manhattan, we walked everywhere or took the subway. (Like most people who live in New York, they didn’t own a car—Don taught management and business ethics among other things at CUNY-Borough of Manhattan Community College which was just footsteps away from their apartment.) Wherever we went, if we passed a homeless person who asked for something, Don gave that person something, even if all he had was some change. I was pretty broke at the time so wasn’t inclined to give usually so once I said to him, “That’s really nice you give like that,” to which he replied casually something along the lines of, “You never know if you’re giving to or feeding Christ himself.” That comment blew my mind. Don was of course being faithful to Matthew 25:37-40. “‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You something to drink? And when did we see You a stranger, and invite You in, or naked, and clothe You? When did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’” I did not know this scripture at the time but intuitively grasped the meaning from Don’s comment and behavior. Until then, it never occurred to me that Christianity could be radically different from what I thought it was. Six years of unpleasant Catholic school and an atheist father had prejudiced me completely to “organized religion.” It would be a number of years before I actually converted to Christianity, but I now recognize that experience with Don and his comment as an important early seed.</div><div><br />It was only in the past few months in finishing up transcribing and editing my project with <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a> that I have been musing and reflecting on all this. I met Julian in 2007 in Santa Barbara and our friendship grew through the course of the financial meltdown in 2008. Born in 1917, he had lived through the Great Depression. With him I had discussed both financial crises of 1929 and 2008—the truly miserable worldwide consequences of reckless activity on Wall Street. Now it seems strange and funny to think that both financial meltdowns had occurred just down the street from where I was sitting in church. And ground zero of the economic meltdowns is just blocks from ground zero of 9/11. I remember when arriving at the Jenner’s apartment building for the first time, I gasped at the sheer mass and scale of the 110-story World Trade Center which stood six to seven blocks away from their apartment. Sometimes when a ship I was on as a midshipman was docked at Port Newark or Elizabeth in New Jersey, I would visit the Jenners. The train station I got off at was at World Trade Center, in the bowels just below the twin towers and then I walked up to their apartment sometimes against a tidal wave of business suits during rush hour. I’ve also eaten with the Jenners and Rev. Lloyd Casson of Trinity in the cafeteria off the 44th floor sky lobby in South Tower. The sky lobby was gorgeous with stunning views of the city. To think that is all gone now, destroyed by Muslim jihadists angered by what’s vaguely referred to as our “freedom,” but perhaps also rightfully enraged by the crass materialism and lack of morals of our times and culture (but obviously expressing their anger in a completely misguided and immoral way.) I never really thought about it much since 9/11. I spent quite a bit of time in lower Manhattan during those important formative years, and off and on I would think of that time in my life but never dwelled on it too much, but lately it has been on my mind and heart a lot. Crossing an ocean on a ship, the world seems so huge, but yet it is also so small and interconnected.</div><div><br />In our recent reminiscence regarding Trinity Wall Street, Don spoke of the historic pipe organ being permanently damaged by the dust cloud fallout of the tower collapses. He also mentioned that the main entrance of Trinity used to face the Hudson River instead of Wall Street. Trinity, which is older than the United States, has had three churches on that site since 1697 when first granted a charter by the British monarchy. The first church burned down in the great fire of 1776. It sat in ruins for some years and when rebuilt (it was completed in 1790), the entrance was mysteriously changed to face Wall Street, the reason never documented so we can only speculate why. The roof of the second church collapsed after an especially severe snow storm in 1838-39, forcing another rebuild. The church as it now stands was completed in 1846.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdz543TtI_3Lu4S4KDQK383bClyOnNTVqnzheT7Lzc8ShZAC3RTFcZz8E3vi33DVr5vx_2sCmqmlNjCiqVP0EnZ9FFZVCEu0yzUHkEUBhzINN5yyFKnb-aPcig9BzBHWOphM7AysogsqlAJXHcU6DK8nUCfcqYw51e_lmuq3InyG1N2Vyq68Cf2Y74/s994/washington_inauguration_trinity_church.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="572" data-original-width="994" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdz543TtI_3Lu4S4KDQK383bClyOnNTVqnzheT7Lzc8ShZAC3RTFcZz8E3vi33DVr5vx_2sCmqmlNjCiqVP0EnZ9FFZVCEu0yzUHkEUBhzINN5yyFKnb-aPcig9BzBHWOphM7AysogsqlAJXHcU6DK8nUCfcqYw51e_lmuq3InyG1N2Vyq68Cf2Y74/w400-h230/washington_inauguration_trinity_church.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Washington's inauguration in 1789, Trinity Church in background with scaffolding.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>The coincidence of attending Trinity with Don and Sue, my friendship with Julian, and recently reading about Wall Street had set me musing much about the financial crises of 2008 and 1929. The main culprit of the 2008 meltdown were derivatives known as credit default swaps (or CDS.) Ironically, CDS were created to make loan instruments safer and thereby the financial system safer. In a CDS, the risk is separated from loans and viewed and sold as a commodity (in the form of an unregulated insurance policy against loan default) with the hope that the risk is now somehow eliminated or at least reduced. But as former derivatives trader and author Satyajit Das points out, the reality is that the risk is never eliminated, it is just being moved around in a complex shell game in an interconnected global financial system. Firms believed they were unloading the risk associated with bad loans to other firms in other countries, only to unwittingly buy them back via credit derivatives so complex they are barely understood by the people trading and dealing in them. And more troubling, irresponsible and predatory lending became more prevalent after the creation of CDS with the belief that the risk was now avoided. This fueled an epidemic of bad loans whose risk had now, through the proliferation of CDS, become systemic, infecting the entire financial system. This sickly house of cards collapsed, beginning with the Bear Stearns collapse in 2008, leading to a severe global recession and also prompting government bailout of banks to prevent a worldwide financial crisis akin to another Great Depression.</div><div><br />The traditional view of mental illness is a split or break from reality. The well-meaning attempt to split out and eliminate risk via credit default swaps has turned out to be a sad delusion. And the lie and cancer at the center of this delusion, the belief that you can get rid of risk, in other words, consequences. We would all love to believe that there is no such thing as consequences (especially in regard to our own poor choices) but, just as you can’t avoid gravity, the consequences come. And consequences to poor choices was at the heart of the 1929 financial crisis. The 1920’s was one big party based on fast wealth, and the era in which consumer credit was first conceived and practiced on a mass scale. “Buy now, pay later” and buying stock on margin became the norm, and everyone believed, “The sky’s the limit.” This materialistic delusion reached its heady heights as the decade progressed and then came crashing down to hard reality in the stock market crash of 1929.</div><div><br />My friend Julian, who credits his mother for his family’s survival through the Great Depression, described his mother as stalwart, a kind woman with a very high sense of responsibility. He said his mother taught him to “face reality and work honestly.” How I wish she were still alive to say this to some who are working on Wall Street. But as Satyajit Das pointed out, Wall Street has the power that it has because we now believe that finance drives everything. In his words, “In the modern age our god is finance except it’s turned out to be a very cruel and destructive god.” And I would add the adjective “insane” to describe this god.</div><div><br />When Trinity’s main entrance was changed to face Wall Street instead of the Hudson River, by then, Wall Street was already a center of financial activity. The real reason for the change in orientation is lost in time so we can only surmise. Maybe some would cynically say the entrance was strategically placed to draw in the cash flow. But perhaps the planners, builders, and clergy (or at least some of them) sincerely hoped to entice the people on Wall Street to enter the church and worship Christ instead of the cruel, insane god of finance. And to also come to know Christ and God’s concern for the poor, marginalized “nobodies” and “the little man on the street” (who may be Christ without one even realizing it.) Proverbs 14:31 “Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him.” How funny that Christ can be so close and yet so far away. And this is a choice we make all the time, just as the choice to face reality and work honestly is a choice we make all the time. But many of us, along with Wall Street, if we’re really honest with ourselves, care more about money and materialism than Christ and the things that concern God. As Jesus said, "You cannot serve God and money at the same time.” It seems we’re repeatedly and collectively learning the consequences of this truth the hard way.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiijN47Y4Cu0xFA3ehfES3o_E4m1yBfI0IP0Z1msQidPzctCuplgIoF7ICJJem5kbsOmsz7YOaDFQ03ytlSNRsdbtUskbjKWHksTAWD-3aJNFDUhrXvlbIZ4UVhNRGgZkceyVVWop-GL7lDAV6MBIUggBZMRuPbyBvJhvIwUS613sZnU00d6zFT3qn/s1024/statue%20washington%20trinity%20church%201.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="523" data-original-width="1024" height="326" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiijN47Y4Cu0xFA3ehfES3o_E4m1yBfI0IP0Z1msQidPzctCuplgIoF7ICJJem5kbsOmsz7YOaDFQ03ytlSNRsdbtUskbjKWHksTAWD-3aJNFDUhrXvlbIZ4UVhNRGgZkceyVVWop-GL7lDAV6MBIUggBZMRuPbyBvJhvIwUS613sZnU00d6zFT3qn/w640-h326/statue%20washington%20trinity%20church%201.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Washington's statue and Trinity Church from Wall Street, c1928</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>(On a side note, management consultant and executive coaching pioneer <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a> and I discuss <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/greed.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Greed</span></a>, <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/ego.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Ego</span></a>, and <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/some-thoughts-on-longevity-and.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Sustainability</span></a>. These topics are part of our project <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/on-life-business-education-and-other.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Dialogues with Julian Moody: On Life, Business, Sustainability, and Other Things</span></a>.)<br /><div>
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(Posted 5/29/15)</div>
</div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-76107953142282862232014-12-31T12:31:00.005-08:002022-09-17T17:44:26.947-07:00Robin Williams and Brittany Maynard<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">2014 was full of big news items (Isis, Ebola, Ferguson, etc.) that received a lot of coverage for obvious reasons, but the suicides of Robin Williams and Brittany Maynard stand out in my mind as reflective of issues that perhaps aren’t examined as much as they should be.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM1kRcJTvRp3pf1M6eKfthiIRL6ou57Z-NoN1C_if0v1ETGbm7saqWEkZwvnxW1lQbGJajTjwGjedQcBy-qOqIXLDuYJXvlICMg0zP-9EK8ZIpM2hzc5ChjRrrx9w6Z6Ak13vPsUaoz2M/s1600/Robin-Williams.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Robin Williams with a sad expression on his face" border="0" data-original-height="416" data-original-width="560" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM1kRcJTvRp3pf1M6eKfthiIRL6ou57Z-NoN1C_if0v1ETGbm7saqWEkZwvnxW1lQbGJajTjwGjedQcBy-qOqIXLDuYJXvlICMg0zP-9EK8ZIpM2hzc5ChjRrrx9w6Z6Ak13vPsUaoz2M/w400-h296/Robin-Williams.jpg" title="Robin Williams" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>Like many, I liked Robin Williams. I grew up with <i>Mork and Mindy</i> and thought he was a good actor and comedian. And I knew someone who had met and spent some time with Robin (through Robin’s lifelong friend Jonathan Winters who frequented the Coffee Grinder, a coffee shop that existed for years in Carpinteria, California where I live.) And this person observed that it was impossible to truly connect with Robin in an authentic way, not due to any conceit or snobbery on Robin’s part, but because Robin seemed to have a compulsive need to be always “on” and performing. When he told me this, I remembered an interview with Robin I had read. The interviewer had asked about his earliest memories of performing and Robin explained that his mother was the unhappy wife of an auto company executive and as her only child, he constantly entertained her to try to make her happy (and presumably get her attention and love.) Those two pieces of information always stuck with me over the years. So when I learned of his suicide, which occurred on August 11, 2014, I was very saddened, but it also came as no surprise to me.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">After his death, keeping in mind what I knew about Robin, I looked for news items that touched on or explored why this man, in spite of all of his obvious blessings in life, was so deeply despondent. There was no shortage of tributes to his career, accolades over what he achieved, his career highlights, and mentions of his philanthropic work. There was some speculation as to why he committed suicide. Possible reasons cited included: despondency over diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, diffuse Lewy body dementia,<span style="color: #252525;"> </span>recent heart surgery, side-effects of medications, and depression (of medical origin.) Little else was mentioned of his obvious despair and unhappiness, or its possible roots in his life or past experiences, even though there were clues (i.e. the interview that I read.) Just a string of possible medical reasons were given. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0j8o6o8v5GUr70UXquR5Jf8QUTWVzJbk4zWAU-5xcAsaKO8okiTDvDQxBBzr1AClojft9IjVwJDjkMY6IYT1AVFV5ub-aWp_AUoUxnOm-qlAVTNrHswerNWP9Gqa96RfZ9DKpXJr3ns0/s1600/brittany_maynard.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Brittany Maynard in an interview" border="0" data-original-height="534" data-original-width="619" height="345" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0j8o6o8v5GUr70UXquR5Jf8QUTWVzJbk4zWAU-5xcAsaKO8okiTDvDQxBBzr1AClojft9IjVwJDjkMY6IYT1AVFV5ub-aWp_AUoUxnOm-qlAVTNrHswerNWP9Gqa96RfZ9DKpXJr3ns0/w400-h345/brittany_maynard.jpg" title="Brittany Maynard" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>News of Robin’s suicide was soon followed by the controversy surrounding Brittany Maynard, the twenty-nine year old woman diagnosed with a rare, terminal brain cancer who became a spokesperson for assisted suicide and the “right to die” movement. On Nov. 1 2014, Brittany chose to end her own life. Among her reasons: extreme pain, the grim prognosis and most of all, she emphasized the concern she had for her family. She did not want them to see her deterioration and suffering. She presented her argument in a poignant and even logical manner. But I was puzzled and disturbed. I have personally known people who were diagnosed with various ailments ranging from irritating to serious, and despite the unfavorable statistics and doctors’ prognoses, they either healed or things didn’t turn out as badly as predicted—some would say due to God, others would say due to good luck or good genes or a good change in diet. The point I am trying to make—the diagnosis or the prognosis by the expert never panned out. Meaning the experts don’t know everything regardless of how smart or educated they may be. So I was horrified to learn that a twenty-nine year old put her complete faith in the faulty and imperfect wisdom of men and ended her own life. And this was all eloquently framed as a “human rights issue.” (Just so there is no confusion, this piece is not meant to address the plight of barely functioning people kept alive by medical gadgetry. That’s a whole other topic and issue.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Brittany defended her “personal choice” and “right” and presented her argument in a convincing manner. But so did Maggie Karner, a woman who is diagnosed with the same brain cancer with the same prognosis, and is choosing not to end her own life. Maggie was also deeply troubled by Brittany’s decision and expressed concern that this decision was in many ways just a reflection of our instant gratification culture. Maggie pointed out that increasingly in our culture, there seems to be a tendency to instantly try to medicate away or numb out anything negative. These days, anyone experiencing anything negative (whether a bad mood or a rough patch in life or anything in between) will often immediately try to numb it, with either a pill, entertainment, food, or addiction of some kind. She wisely observed that it is often through our negative experiences in life that we learn and grow into deeper, richer human beings.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Maggie, along with other critics of Brittany’s decision, have suggested that for people in Brittany’s predicament, the emphasis should be on compassionate, dignified hospice care with good pain management. High quality, professional hospice care is readily available in many parts of this country, and where it isn’t, the need for such care should be emphasized rather than an option such as assisted suicide. The modern hospice movement was started in 1967 by Dame Cicely Saunders, an Anglican nurse, who opened St. Christopher’s Hospice in London. Saunders recognized the needs of dying patients and devised principles for alleviating suffering in the process of dying which include pain relief, dignified treatment, and compassionately honoring the psychological and spiritual aspects of death. And <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/research-shows-patients-may-live-longer-with-hospice-and-palliative-care-101075304.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">latest studies</span></a> indicate hospice patients live longer than those not receiving hospice care.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">But we don’t like anything difficult, messy, complicated, and forget time-consuming. Our consumer-driven mindset wants convenience. More and more we seem to hold the view that all suffering is wrong. The gods of Convenience and Economics increasingly hold sway (with the never-spoken, but ever present sentiment—it’s too expensive and a drain on resources to let a really sick or disabled person live. Never mind the horrible inconvenience to the living who have busy lives.) Forget the messier, complicated aspects of life, the things that make us deep and strong in character. As Maggie pointed out, it is our difficult experiences that make us richer human beings. I have to say that it was through my struggles in life that I grew the most in character and in spirituality. I grew closer to God in my dark times, not necessarily when things were going well, like a bit of deep earth under intense pressure turning into a diamond—that was when my character and faith grew strong. But denial of any type of negative experience is becoming more and more pervasive with a compulsive emphasis on entertainment, amusement, fun, comfort, diversion, and the avoidance of suffering at any cost.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">And now suicide is sugarcoated and presented as a “human right” and a “personal decision.” On the surface, “right to die with dignity” sounds so noble, well-meaning, even compassionate, but the troubling flip side to all of this, behind the noble-sounding words, death is being presented as the ideal solution to a problem. Unfortunately, the thought process can go something like this: “Don’t even try to stick it out. Don’t even consider the possibility that the “experts” might not know everything. Don’t even consider a spiritual side to all of this. What’s the point? Life and most of all death, sickness, the process of dying, disease—it’s too ugly, complicated, messy, inconvenient. All the living people around the sick and dying person has to look at the reality of this—how awful, how gross. What a bummer. Why make them go through all that when you can just go to a doctor and get a prescription and end it all? You’re going to die anyways—might as well speed it up. Just get a prescription and end it. Don’t even consider that something good may come out of suffering. That someone might learn something, or grow through it, or develop a deeper relationship that transcends the material.” Or if you want this in an even smaller soundbite, the underlying message is essentially: “When things get too hard, the best thing you can do is end it. If you’re having a really, really tough time and feel it’s unbearable, the best thing you can do is just end your own life. Death is a good, convenient solution to a very difficult or messy problem.”</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">In Robin’s suicide, his reason was never explicitly stated, but there clearly seems to be that underlying sentiment, “What’s the point? It’s easier to end it.” His string of medical reasons may have contributed to the act—psychiatric drugs in particular are notorious for side-effects that include suicidal thoughts and actions. But what was he trying to blot out or numb out with those drugs (along with the illegal drugs and alcohol he abused in the past)? What pain was he trying to numb out that he ultimately blotted out with his suicide? There was little talk of his depression other than it was a condition that needed to be medicated as if it were an ailment like high blood pressure. There was no talk of a depression that may have had roots in unresolved childhood grief and never mind the obvious fact of his deep human despair and spiritual emptiness. (Yes, a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease is unpleasant, but many don't commit suicide over it.) Medical reasons for depression seem to be always the preferred explanation. Forget the messy business of human emotion, human despair, human needs, the sloppiness of grief. Anything messy, dirty, inconvenient, including any uncomfortable truths from the past, sweep it under the rug. Get rid of it. Run to a doctor, get a prescription. Forget truth. Don’t focus on or bring attention to Robin’s deep human despair (which probably taps into our own feelings of despair.) Don’t question, don’t examine the truth of why he could be so unhappy, or ask why he had such a hole—a deep sadness and a spiritual emptiness that was never filled or relieved with fame, riches, and adulation. That would point to a troubling truth we don’t want to confront ourselves—that much of what we strive for, the beliefs we run on are actually very shaky. Many of the things we are frantically chasing, all of our frantic performance to the point of exhaustion will never give us the love and security that we desperately crave (only God can), but rather than consider that possibility, we take Robin’s human despair, slam it into the convenient little pigeon-hole of a medical diagnosis and quickly forget it with the thought, “He didn’t get the right pill when he needed it.” Brittany spoke in glowing terms of her stockpile of pills—she said having it gave her a great peace of mind knowing that she can end it at any time, in case things get too unpleasant or difficult.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sadly, this is all presented now as the “enlightened,” even “compassionate” view. It’s common to frame everything in terms of “rights” now—pumping a fist in the air with a chant, “If I want to die, that’s my right! I don’t want anyone making that choice for me!” It’s easy to get swept up in that language and perspective and not even consider that there is another way of looking at it. That this could be a sick reflection of our superficial, selfish, instant gratification culture of convenience that is increasingly indifferent and hostile to anything that poses trouble or difficulty. “If it’s not convenient for me, then I’m not going to deal with it, and that’s my right!” As if nothing could be gained through struggle. As if no one could learn anything through difficulty about the transiency of life and the strength of the spirit. As hospice founder Dame Saunders observed, as the body grows weaker, the spirit grows stronger. There is a strong cultural current that insists more and more on a purely materialistic view and a denial of spiritual reality. Material goals and entertainment take precedence over most other goals and if you can’t numb your difficulties with entertainment, shopping, substance abuse, or work then grab a pharmaceutical from big pharma. As some would insist, we’re just biological machines—there is no spiritual basis to our existence, there is no God, and our best bet is to put our faith in “experts” playing God, in the name of good. Since that isn’t foolproof, now death is presented as an ideal option. As if the love of Christ never even existed. When you comment that we live in a culture with strong antichrist tendencies, people laugh at you, but is that far from the truth?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;">(On a completely irrelevant side note, three new topics were added to my </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;">project </span><a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/on-life-business-education-and-other.html" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Dialogues with Julian Moody: On Life, Business, Sustainability, and Other Things</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;">. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;">Management consultant and executive coaching pioneer </span><a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;"> and I discuss </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;">the background and beginnings of his career in the topics: </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;">"</span><a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/customer-service-at-four-winds-nursery.html" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Customer Service at Four Winds Nursery</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;">" ;</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;"> "</span><a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/bad-at-school-but-good-at-learning-and.html" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Bad at School But Good at Learning and Teaching</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;">" ; </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;"> "</span><a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/the-early-days-and-first-big-break.html" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">The Early Days and the First Big Break</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;">") </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;">(Posted 12/31/14)</span></span></div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-54683781511424667412014-09-24T09:19:00.010-07:002024-01-15T15:56:12.950-08:00Atlas Struck Out<div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL6nxH8qa8G8ByTUsemDIAo9HZSOSLADjZESnh6o_tVF1bFBwfZ9x_XtbLIlfqSKzLxki62hoSI56w-3iDgtMIkvmoTQ_i0ASO-hNU0zyReOUyBjp88kkHfHEZWt92an_7hxjz13r8dc5N-jvGh8rp2qEjCdVXDcs833Mbs_ah6JQRZ7z4efruPlUo/s617/Atlas_god_serpent.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="617" data-original-width="488" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL6nxH8qa8G8ByTUsemDIAo9HZSOSLADjZESnh6o_tVF1bFBwfZ9x_XtbLIlfqSKzLxki62hoSI56w-3iDgtMIkvmoTQ_i0ASO-hNU0zyReOUyBjp88kkHfHEZWt92an_7hxjz13r8dc5N-jvGh8rp2qEjCdVXDcs833Mbs_ah6JQRZ7z4efruPlUo/w316-h400/Atlas_god_serpent.jpeg" width="316" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Atlas’ back obviously aches from the load and he is accompanied by a serpent. Complete image below.</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">As a Christian, I often wonder about the popularity of Ayn Rand with people claiming to be conservative. Her best-selling novel </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Atlas Shrugged</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, regarded by some conservatives as a bible on capitalism, is notorious for popularizing a philosophy that insists selfishness is a virtue. Rand is not Christian (in fact, she attacks Christianity in her novel) and unapologetically atheist, proof that many “conservative” Randians don’t bother to seriously examine or perhaps even bother to read the novel which runs over a thousand pages.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fortunately for people who don’t like to read, the three part novel was turned into three movies by a Randian producer. (Part I was released in 2011, Part II in 2012, and Part III in 2014.) Strangely, considering Randians espouse excellent achievement, the productions resemble a made-for-tv movie series for a second rate cable channel. If you don’t believe me, try to watch them. (Note: none of the principal actors in Parts I, II, and III remain the same which might confuse you.) The movies were a flop with critics and most audiences, but the hype and controversy surrounding their releases has helped fuel more sales of the novel, which has been selling well since its publication in 1957 and was voted the second most influential book in America after the Bible in 1991. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhip50IsopPORFCip2hI7QT_iqkv7m5ckzB8WRy5F86809k_8rI3RZuADtiktMPTYHNYmENQHfj7FQSXaP4dgCnH6PK96xz-vM-IDlWIQ5FCBkt1z2qF_lr0PHO64-m7h90PgXZiYNcn1JHiARDQQ5yHPrVPE456Ul3KDNWJF96q6c702cPocPnTP65/s1756/Laconic%20Kylix%20Vatican%20Museums%20copy.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Atlas and Prometheus Laconian Kylix, 560-550 B.C." border="0" data-original-height="1491" data-original-width="1756" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhip50IsopPORFCip2hI7QT_iqkv7m5ckzB8WRy5F86809k_8rI3RZuADtiktMPTYHNYmENQHfj7FQSXaP4dgCnH6PK96xz-vM-IDlWIQ5FCBkt1z2qF_lr0PHO64-m7h90PgXZiYNcn1JHiARDQQ5yHPrVPE456Ul3KDNWJF96q6c702cPocPnTP65/w320-h272/Laconic%20Kylix%20Vatican%20Museums%20copy.png" title="Atlas and Prometheus, Laconian Black Figure Pottery" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Laconian Kylix, 560-550 B.C., Vatican Museums. One of the earliest known images of Atlas and Prometheus. Atlas holds up the world and Prometheus is punished for giving fire to man.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">This disturbing fact begs the question—why is Rand regarded as an authority on business and capitalism? Apart from one unfortunate incident in her childhood of the Bolsheviks appropriating her father’s business, she has little to no practical experience in the area of business. I was blessed to be friends with <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a>, a veteran who fought and risked his life in World War II to defeat just the sort of tyranny that Rand, from a safe distance, pompously railed against. This kind, humble, selfless man was also an executive coach and management consultant for over fifty years and worked with many companies both large and small throughout the United States. He also volunteered countless hours as a mentor and coach for individuals, nonprofits, and businesses in Santa Barbara where he lived since 1965. I was fortunate to spend many hours talking with Julian who patiently answered my many questions about his work. His experience in business was completely contrary to what Rand professes in her work and philosophy. Central to business and trade are relationships and the quality of those relationships, and the things Rand glorified, like ego and selfishness, are extremely toxic and destructive to those relationships, often undermining the enterprises and endeavors in the long run. Most people with real experience in business have learned this truth the hard way. Great minds with great ideas without a team and network of supportive people to help make those ideas a reality are dead in the water. And selfish people with big egos, even when surrounded by yes-men, tend to create unnecessary conflict and draining drama more often than anything useful.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">But the plot of <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> turns all of that on its head and becomes the vehicle through which Rand demonstrates and expounds on her philosophy. The good guys are the selfish egoists who are always without fault and epitomize a philosophy which Rand calls “Objectivism.” These super people are brilliant and physically attractive with tasteful fashion sense who stride around with excellent posture and purpose, always on the move to be doing and producing. The bad guys are the low-life leeches, parasites, the incompetent, the do-nothings of society—essentially anyone who doesn’t or can’t embody her philosophy of “Objectivism”—and these she collectively refers to as “the looters.” These people are generally frumpy with various character or physical defects such as baldness or ugliness and they often slouch at their desks. Government ranks consist solely of this degenerate type. The selfish egoists are the strong who only want life and to be productive, so therefore are good. The looters are weak and can’t be great or strong, so out of resentment and envy, have to destroy the strong. The weak only want death so are bad. This “morality” (really just glorified Social Darwinism, which is never mentioned by name, but you can smell it all through the novel) forms the basis of what she calls “ethical egoism.” The strong are actually the ones who are oppressed since they have been saddled with the burden of helping the weak. All forms of altruism are actually false, evil systems that bind the strong, out of senseless guilt and obligation, to the weak. According to Rand, the strong have no obligation to help the weak and all religions (Christianity being the worst offender in her eyes) and systems claiming otherwise are evil delusions. So the casting off of this burden forms the premise of the plot—the good guys go on strike. (The Atlases of the world collectively shrug.) This strike is led by John Galt, the ideal superman, alpha-male embodiment of Rand’s Objectivist philosophy who has made good on his promise to stop the “motor of the world.” There is even a pirate, a Robin Hood in reverse, who steals from the weak (who have been stealing from the strong all along) to give back to the strong, who clearly always deserve to be rich. The strikers abandon the world causing chaos, death, and society to fall apart. Then in what is supposed to be a stunning climactic speech, John Galt reveals who he is, the philosophy he represents, and just what is this “motor of the world.” He reveals that it is the human mind, reason, ingenuity, ego—these are what make everything happen, everything possible. It is the selfish egoists and their productive ability who hold up the world with their greatness. These egoists are our true gods that we can’t live without, if we would only wake up out of our religious fog and realize it. To add a visual touch to his point, at the end of the story, John Galt traces in the air the sign of the dollar, in lieu of the sign of the cross, over the earth (which is now a wasteland.) Meanwhile, the strikers have been hiding out in a secret utopia commune of high achieving egoists called Atlantis—a modern-day version of the exalted mythical civilization that was named after the Greek god Atlas—where they are living happily and in blissful harmony with each other as they set about creating an ideal and better world. (Some of you are trying hard not to laugh, especially those of you who have witnessed the meltdown, tantrum, or pointless power trip of an egoist.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Some insist it is the sheer stupidity of her story and philosophy (often jokingly referred to as “Nietzsche for Dummies”) that accounts for the popularity of <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> which may be true, but I would argue that it is also the seductive mixture of truth and lies. That’s what makes her work so insidious—there’s just enough truth that a sloppy, undiscerning mind will swallow her whole philosophy hook, line, and sinker and believe it’s the whole truth. She takes truths we’ve all observed and paints them in the extremes of a two-dimensional plot and comic book caste system of good guys and bad guys, and then weaves in her twisted assertion that selfishness is the true good. We’ve all had accomplishments that were resented by others and likewise were envious of others’ success. Yes, talented, creative entrepreneurs with their ingenuity and hard work provide jobs and opportunities, and there are also lazy do-nothings and parasites who take advantage of handouts, government positions, and programs. And who hasn’t been manipulated with guilt by someone claiming to mean well? And she uses a trick known by any fiction writer with a knowledge of craft—identification with a character, especially a character we wish we were. Who doesn’t want to believe that they’re special, superior, a little god or rock star of their own little world, and that this world can’t exist without you? And all of the people who dislike you, criticize you, or find you annoying are just envious of how awesome you are? How wonderful to have a philosophy with a name like “Objectivism” that supports our most narcissistic view of ourselves. Incidentally, exaltation of self is one of the principle attributes of Satan, and it is also a characteristic of Satan to deceive and appear as an agent of light. Rand, through her characters, keeps insisting she is just advocating “reason” (she uses the word “reason” over and over again) and that to be selfish and to be concerned only with selfish gain is the most logical and rational good. She calls this “philosophy” and she embellishes it with a smokescreen and whitewash of terms like “hero in your soul,” “rational self-interest,” “pursuit of happiness,” “the principles that this country was founded on,” “freedom,” along with her petulant whining, “I’m not against charity. I’m just against giving to anyone who hasn’t earned anything.” And if you don’t agree with her philosophy, then you just don’t want to understand how things really are. The only true morality is her brand of morality since it smacks of something backed by science (survival of the fittest), an uncomfortable truth you’re too afraid to accept. Combine that with her atheism—there is no God, so we may as well exalt ourselves and everything we create through our efforts—making for a nice, heady, satanic cocktail.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">If you’re of a secular orientation and want to get drunk on this poison and insist it’s a gospel on capitalism, that’s your problem, but those conservatives calling themselves Christians should know better. A Christian, at the very least, should recognize that this book and her philosophy is idolatry in its sickest form—the worship of self and human effort. She takes good things that our culture rightfully respects, and in her perverse reasoning, elevates them above the living God. Things such as: the entrepreneurial spirit, initiative, creativity, reason, imagination, risk, hard work, free enterprise, etc. And if we can’t manage to exemplify these attributes and be the super-achieving humans—the little gods of our society—then the captains of enterprise become the golden calves that we are supposed to worship (which she euphemistically refers to as “hero worship”) whose authority we can never question because they’re the ones giving us jobs and signing our paychecks. According to Rand, because of their inherent superiority and our dependence on them, they should be given complete license to do whatever they want.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">But the philosopher who in 1957 declared herself to be “the most creative thinker alive” doesn’t have the humility to see that the capacity for corruption exists in every one of us. In her hubris and overeagerness to identify with the super people in her novel—which is her Achilles heel—she becomes blind to the unfortunate fact that humans have historically shown time and time again that they can’t handle power, hence the old adage, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In her childish view, only the likes of government and religion abuse power. Naively, she fails to realize a corporation or business elite could lose sight of integrity and accountability and become just as tyrannical and corrupt as the socialist government that confiscated her father’s business, or that sociopathy can exist in the sheep’s clothing of free enterprise (think Enron.) So sadly, her novel becomes more of the same. In spite of descriptions of beautiful characters living in wealth and elegance, there is a cold, repellent emptiness, and by far, the most strange, remarkable thing about the novel, for an author who claims to love individuality and freedom, is that all of the great, brilliant characters sound the same, like clones spouting propaganda. You read page after page thinking, there’s so many words and pages, why does all of this sound and feel the same? The story could have been easily covered in less than half the number of pages, but there is one tireless talking head after another (the John Galt speech runs about 70 pages to give you an idea) covering essentially the same territory over and over again, as if by the brute force of repetition, like a fist pounding a podium, the sheer mass of words will make her philosophy deeper and more intelligent than it really is. In her verbiage, she tosses around words and expressions like “freedom,” “freedom to think,” and “free minds,” but there is no real sense of freedom in her work. All you become aware of is the autocratic tone that’s just as dreary, humorless, and oppressive as the communist country she escaped, as well as the absence of any real love or joy. Instead, there is just, in her words, the “arrogant pleasure” of narcissists achieving and admiring each other.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">As Whittaker Chambers sagely observed in his 1957 review of the book titled, “<a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2005/01/big-sister-watching-you-whittaker-chambers/amp/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Big Sister Is Watching You</span></a>,” in the conservative <i>National Review</i>, Rand has too much in common with the communists and socialists she condemns—her primitive, atheistic materialism is eerily like Marx’s—in other words, the same ugly creature in a different costume and waving a different flag. Chambers also noted in his review the unfortunate tendency of materialistic philosophies (no matter how stupid and awful), in his words, to “keep coming down to earth,” and if they seem to provide answers, to “translate quickly into political realities.” In the present political climate, conservative skepticism and disdain of leftist government, in some circles, becomes a rabid, knee-jerk hatred of ANY government and a blind, naive faith in anything pretending to be noble free enterprise.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rand argues over and over that it is the ingenuity of man in the form of unbridled and unrestricted capitalism that creates prosperity, but if those capitalists are as stupidly arrogant as she is, often that wealth will be the cheap, second-rate type of prosperity with a nasty set of terms in the fine print. As Julian, my dear friend and life-long management consultant observed, “We create messes in trying to be little gods.” Ten years of my childhood were spent in Erie, Pennsylvania, a small city on the shores of Lake Erie, about 120 miles north of Pittsburg where industrialists of the type Rand would admire reigned during the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. During this period, this region became a hub of heavy industry and manufacturing, and Lake Erie became the most notoriously polluted of the Great Lakes. A combination of industrial effluent, sewage, and agricultural runoff (and its resultant algal blooms) choked the life out of the lake, helping to destroy a once thriving fishing industry. Lake Erie was famously declared dead by the 1970’s and became the subject of many jokes during that time. Only after decades has it been able to eek out a modest comeback, but still struggles with algal blooms as evidenced by the recent Toledo water ban. The history of Lake Erie is unfortunately reminiscent of the rampant pollution of early industrial England and this scenario is tragically being repeated today in China.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rand insists that if we would just give up our faith in God and religions like Christianity and put our faith in her type of capitalist and believe in the sign of the dollar instead of the sign of the cross, our lives would be so awesome. But we’ve already experimented with that. <i>National Review</i> founder William F. Buckley Jr. (who also despised Rand as much as Chambers) in Rand’s obituary declared her philosophy “stillborn,” (and the end fruit of her philosophy has shown that it is a stillborn delivery of death) which brings us back to the bizarre and embarrassing fact of her popularity with many conservatives. This is unfortunately sad proof that few are actually reading or examining her work or perhaps, I hate to say it, sad proof that they aren’t even reading or studying the Bible. To what extent this pathetic and troubling ignorance will continue to run its course, I can only guess. Rand fanatics were hoping the movie adaptation would majestically convince a wider audience of the truth of her philosophy, but the production just makes us painfully aware that it is just “Nietzsche for Dummies.” You can hide stupidity in a novel of over a thousand pages, but unfortunately it becomes too apparent in a stripped down movie script. The three movies certainly struck out with me. As well as the miserable mental marathon of reading her novel just to try to give these misguided conservatives the benefit of the doubt.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Over and over again, I kept going back to the premise of the story—the strike of these great people we supposedly can’t live without. I kept wondering, what if all of these self-congratulating, arrogant, self-consumed movers and shakers of the world with all of their insufferable pride and twisted morality went on strike? Maybe, just maybe, we would have some semblance of an Eden or Paradise on earth. Scripture says, “God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble,” and in Christ’s words, “Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.” Watching the movies and reading Rand’s novel also just made me relieved to know that on our money it reads, “In God We Trust.”</span></div><div><br /></div><div>(Posted 9/24/2014)</div>
Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-90902738052270931162014-05-30T17:21:00.003-07:002022-09-17T17:00:21.937-07:00Happiness and Work<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzwhyphenhyphen7sxlxsG-54fLsBriN_SRtgUHo7iyTpQNeOmaEcdq0XdqXlFRRBzieZqYaVy75GVtDW0jUEkqtvx9_LWP-82vm7tDTU1jQFRrDxbY3l4SBdH0wqT3U7fAYBEhLk6oHm6yXovn53vs/s1600/Happiness+and+work+vintage+advertisement.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Vintage advertising, woman at desk, "Glamour job? Baloney!"" border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="446" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzwhyphenhyphen7sxlxsG-54fLsBriN_SRtgUHo7iyTpQNeOmaEcdq0XdqXlFRRBzieZqYaVy75GVtDW0jUEkqtvx9_LWP-82vm7tDTU1jQFRrDxbY3l4SBdH0wqT3U7fAYBEhLk6oHm6yXovn53vs/w446-h640/Happiness+and+work+vintage+advertisement.jpg" title="Vintage magazine advertising" width="446" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vintage magazine advertising</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Most of us spend more waking time at work than we do in any other place. And our place of work presumably becomes the main playing ground in which we exercise the pursuit of happiness, an unalienable right written in the Declaration of Independence. But are we truly motivated by the pursuit of happiness, especially in the context of work? Management consultant and executive coaching pioneer <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a> and I discuss happiness in the workplace in the topic: "<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/happy-peoplewhat-we-can-learn-from-them.html" style="color: blue;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Happy People – What We Can Learn from Them</span></a>." This topic is part of our project <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/on-life-business-education-and-other.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Dialogues with Julian Moody: On Life, Business, Sustainability, and Other Things</span></a>.</span><div><br /></div><div>(Posted 5/30/2014)</div>
</div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-27788539124870502602013-12-09T13:54:00.005-08:002022-09-17T16:54:52.029-07:00Constructive Capitalism and Dr. Bronner<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu24V6bIQ8OnvNAKydzAtJtgrZYH-mvm2jjPieZ79ZrBcloifr_-9EAR1HpDnh58QA-2xxKrxbBr27GQLP2DvXrfQ8IKq10IhVGJgHunBl33Qb9QUfw24PLEtP2nPBPvkG5L7AVNZeCkI/s1600/Dr-Bronner.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Dr. Emanuel Bronner holding a bottle of his soap" border="0" data-original-height="343" data-original-width="250" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu24V6bIQ8OnvNAKydzAtJtgrZYH-mvm2jjPieZ79ZrBcloifr_-9EAR1HpDnh58QA-2xxKrxbBr27GQLP2DvXrfQ8IKq10IhVGJgHunBl33Qb9QUfw24PLEtP2nPBPvkG5L7AVNZeCkI/w291-h400/Dr-Bronner.jpg" title="Dr. Emanuel Bronner 1908 - 1997" width="291" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dr. Emanuel Bronner 1908 - 1997</td></tr>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
</div><b><i><br />
</i></b><div><b><i>UPDATE: This post was originally written and posted in 2013. In Dec. 2019, the Dr. Bronner company publicly endorsed psychedelic therapy and decriminalization of psychedelics. Brandy Walker does not agree with or condone psychedelic therapy, and she does not endorse the decriminalization of psychedelics. She does not believe anxiety and depression can be fully or ultimately healed through the use of any drugs.</i></b><div><br /><div>I can't remember the first place where I came across Dr. Bronner's liquid soap (you know, the one with the peculiarly verbose label with references to Spaceship Earth, Halley's Comet and All One God Faith!) - it was many years ago - but I do remember my reaction. I thought, "Wow, this guy is a wacko," but I bought the soap anyways. I figured if he was honest enough to rant like a lunatic on his label, then his soap must be honest and pure as stated in the simple ingredients list. Sure enough, the soap was very good.<br />
<br />Dr. Bronner was a third generation soap maker descended from Orthodox Jewish soap manufacturers in Germany. The first part of his life was marked by tragedy - his parents were killed in the Holocaust, and later, he was committed to an insane asylum where he endured barbaric electroshock treatments for his bizarre (but at least peaceful) views. He managed to escape from the institution to California where he founded his soap company in 1948. Fortunately, his latter days were marked by blessing. He reconciled with his abandoned children (so committed was he to his cause of uniting Spaceship Earth, they spent much of their childhood in foster homes) who in turn helped run the company. In spite of a sadly complicated and imperfect past, Dr. Bronner, in his geriatric years, enjoyed helming a successful family enterprise as well as an Eden-like existence of nude sunbathing and eating fresh guacamole, his favorite health food, on a regular basis.<br />
<br />His soap continues in the same excellent tradition despite Dr. Bronner having passed away in 1997. The company is run by his relatives who hold to the same purity standards espoused by Dr. Bronner and have taken them to another level. The company's product is completely organic and fair trade certified, and they're especially proud of an organic, fair trade olive oil project in the Holy Land. The company has always donated a percentage of their net profits to charity. In recent years, the percentage donated has increased to over 70% of net profits. The relatives have also capped their salaries so that they are never grotesquely out of proportion to the lowest paid employees in the company. And they give generous bonuses to all of their employees, not just the top management. (As anyone knows, this is so unfortunately not true in many American companies and corporations where a sense of entitlement prevails in upper management to the long-term detriment of the companys' morale and financial health.)<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5W1g3zAcLjFPZYQwuSPyZ0qPmqa6dAHZLriVs0U5Ln4GpaHvizWAHLEvmAmVdNKdvf1_C2z9bGX2RRSqk6gbygXZ5oFchUzyeDdrLVwMvIVI69aXWYqTGWYjCOpXSLZ5zaNKo9rByvz0/s1600/Dr-Bronner%2527s+soap.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Several bottles and bars of Dr. Bronner's soap" border="0" data-original-height="302" data-original-width="302" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5W1g3zAcLjFPZYQwuSPyZ0qPmqa6dAHZLriVs0U5Ln4GpaHvizWAHLEvmAmVdNKdvf1_C2z9bGX2RRSqk6gbygXZ5oFchUzyeDdrLVwMvIVI69aXWYqTGWYjCOpXSLZ5zaNKo9rByvz0/s320/Dr-Bronner%2527s+soap.jpg" title="Dr. Bronner's line of soaps" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dr. Bronner's line of soaps</td></tr>
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<div style="text-align: right;">
</div><br /></div><div>More and more business people are considering the sustainable and socially responsible business model just as more and more people have jumped on the organic and fair trade bandwagon. Some claim that a business that creates an excellent product, reimburses all workers fairly, is socially and environmentally responsible, gives generously, and is also economically viable all at the same time is not possible. Dr. Bronner's company is a practical example of how this "constructive capitalism" is in fact very possible.<br />
<br />Many people are unaware that it was Dr. Bronner who first conceived and used the term "constructive capitalism." Increasingly, financial and economic pundits are trying to take credit for the term. Dr. Bronner was truly a pioneer, well ahead of his time, and his work has helped pave the way for contemporary offshoots such as "conscious capitalism" (the Whole Foods business model before being acquired by Amazon in 2017.) While generosity is nothing new in American capitalism - industrialists Rockefeller and Carnegie, in their twilight years, were big givers from their, some argue, ill-gotten wealth - Dr. Bronner's business was one of the first to marry the concept of social responsibility with profit in a very practical way.<br />
<br />I have been a consumer of Dr. Bronner's soap for years - it's great for everything, including stinky, dander-infested pets. (Caution must be exercised in using the peppermint soap on private areas since the high quality peppermint has a surprising "zing" to it.) Over time, the kooky labels with excessive exclamation points have become more and more endearing, like the rantings of a favorite, eccentric, old fart relative. Apparently, Dr. Bronner's family feels likewise. Even though a number of Dr. Bronner's relatives are born-again Christians and don't quite agree with everything on the labels (e.g. the Halley's Comet connection to the Messiah), they have left them unchanged out of respect for their founding patriarch. The family states on each label, "No one agrees with everything on the label, but everyone finds something which inspires and touches them." So true. The labels contain a random assortment of original quotes by Dr. Bronner from his "moral ABC" and quotes by famous people. Here is a sampling:<br />
<br />
"To love, to live!<br />
to see to it that I give and grow<br />
and give and give!"<br />
<i>Dr. Bronner</i><br />
<br />
"God must have loved the common people of the earth...he made so many of them."<br />
<i>Abraham Lincoln</i><br />
<br />
"Our technology has outstripped our humanity!"<br />
<i>Albert Einstein</i><br />
<br />
"We're ALL-ONE or NONE!"<br />
<i>Dr. Bronner</i><br />
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<br /></div>And did I mention that Dr. Bronner was blind? His ever diminishing eyesight, which he attributed to the early electroshock treatments, eclipsed into total blindness by his old age, but he had more vision and foresight than most people with perfect eyesight. And perhaps his most radical, daring, and for many people, annoying practice - he brings up the subject of God in a place where no one else would dare to for fear of losing customers: the marketplace. His soap labels are peppered with references to God. You may find his theology to be strange or flawed, but you have to at least admire his brazenness for giving homage to God in a place where the term "God" is practically a dirty word. On something as ordinary and mundane as a soap bottle sitting on a store shelf, of all places. The nerve of that Dr. Bronner!<br />
<br />
(Management consultant and executive coaching pioneer <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a> and I touch on the subject of God in the topic "<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/god.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">God</span></a>" which is part of our project <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/on-life-business-education-and-other.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">Dialogues with Julian Moody: On Life, Business, Sustainability, and Other Things</span></a>.)<div><br /></div><div>(Posted 12/9/2013)</div></div></div></div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-24769417286922245972013-10-01T19:21:00.005-07:002022-09-17T16:45:53.532-07:00The Problem? of Emotions<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7KOkTnc8E99wngUlPEsRRjjZDbFIyHfmS16Pg_fuRHjQSiZUEw6c3SKeIGdafuVWx4jEigsPYedOMMBkIhGFU9_QYB0ysi3TtvL4SU0f_ma90AbHhunrUa3ckXL-2t9M7LMtOGm3PPsY/s2568/theater+masks+emotions.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="theater masks human emotions" border="0" data-original-height="1224" data-original-width="2568" height="191" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7KOkTnc8E99wngUlPEsRRjjZDbFIyHfmS16Pg_fuRHjQSiZUEw6c3SKeIGdafuVWx4jEigsPYedOMMBkIhGFU9_QYB0ysi3TtvL4SU0f_ma90AbHhunrUa3ckXL-2t9M7LMtOGm3PPsY/w400-h191/theater+masks+emotions.jpeg" title="theatrical masks showing human emotions" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Vladimir Nikitin</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>The master actor and storyteller Charlie Chaplin once observed: the mark of an idiot is all feeling and no intellect, and the mark of an arch-criminal (or sociopath) is all intellect and no feeling.</div><div><br />The two extremes - all feeling or no feeling - present problems, no one can argue. Some balance of emotions is needed along with emotions themselves - life (and for that matter storytelling) would fall flat without them. So why are emotions so often judged and feared? And have we become increasingly numbed and deadened to feeling? Some argue that one of the reasons actors, storytellers, and especially moviemakers are so highly paid and respected in our society today (people in the dramatic arts used to be considered low-lifes) is because of their skill in conveying and creating emotional response. The argument essentially goes - we have become so deadened and deprived of emotional expression in the grind, rat race, and busyness of modern times, that the only time we feel alive is when we watch movies. Whether you agree with this or not, it's certainly something to think about.</div><div><br />So are emotions (or a lack of emotions) a problem in modern times?<br />
<br />
(Management consultant and executive coaching pioneer <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a> and I discuss the issue of emotions in the business world in the topics: "<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/the-mystery-of-automobile-company-widget.html" style="color: blue;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">The Mystery of the Automobile Company Widget</span></a>" and "<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/the-engineer-who-claimed-there-is-no.html" style="color: blue;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">The Engineer Who Claimed, 'There is no such thing as emotions'</span></a>." These topics are part of our project <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/on-life-business-education-and-other.html"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Dialogues with Julian Moody: On Life, Business, Sustainability, and Other Things</span></a>.)<div><br /></div><div>(Posted 10/1/2013)</div></div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-14404644955046922262013-08-31T16:23:00.007-07:002022-09-17T16:43:24.446-07:00Symptoms Versus Causes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEPux20KUeexNQJYZWNFAGwYjtk8_j6FH04pgG8JFAX_qO4avjPOGLs6xzMNwOIiGJkwT2uxmUpzzsTGMPlZvQ-_V15KMMpo2QeGIx7CZh6B8szj2XfyJnmWC6KEr7F9FcEvZ2_vzDKXo/s2048/tree+with+roots.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Tree roots wholeness" border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1550" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEPux20KUeexNQJYZWNFAGwYjtk8_j6FH04pgG8JFAX_qO4avjPOGLs6xzMNwOIiGJkwT2uxmUpzzsTGMPlZvQ-_V15KMMpo2QeGIx7CZh6B8szj2XfyJnmWC6KEr7F9FcEvZ2_vzDKXo/w303-h400/tree+with+roots.jpg" title="Healthy tree with roots" width="303" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image by Creative-Touch</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>The word <i>heal</i> in English comes from an old Saxon word which means "to make whole." The words <i>wholesome</i> and <i>holistic</i> come from the same root, and the definition of <i>holistic</i> describes nature as a unity, made up of wholes which are more than a mere sum of its disparate parts. (Interestingly, the English word <i>holy</i> comes from the same base that is seen in <i>heal</i> and <i>health - </i>'hail', 'halig', and 'hali' which means "whole, entire, unimpaired" and in a religious context, "unsullied.")</div><div><br />Terms such as <i>whole</i> and <i>holistic</i> are in vogue now, maybe in response to one of the most unfortunate ironies of our times - in spite of all of our progress, a lack of wholeness predominates. Dysfunction, disease, and ailments continue to hold sway and cancer is epidemic. Modern medicine is impressive in its advancements but often criticized for its lack of understanding of whole systems especially in the area of preventive health care. And the main emphasis seems to be on the elimination of symptoms rather than the healing of root causes. Symptoms are treated as problems in and of themselves - pharmaceutical drugs are readily prescribed and purchased, and often the connection of symptoms to causes is not thoroughly examined or even made.</div><div><br />In spite of all of our accumulation of knowledge in the information age and our so-called advancements, we remain blind or seem to become more blind to the whole truth of how things are caused or connected. In the industrial age, specialization and compartmentalization is the norm, and the ability and desire to see the whole picture, regard things holistically, is considered kooky.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px;">
(This blindness is also prevalent in the mundane day-to-day operations of the business world. Management consultant and executive coaching pioneer <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a> and I discuss this in the topic "<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/symptoms-versus-causes.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">Symptoms Versus Causes</span></a>" which is part of our project <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/on-life-business-education-and-other.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">Dialogues with Julian Moody: On Life, Business, Sustainability, and Other Things</span></a>.)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px;"><br /></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px;">(Posted 8/31/2013)</div></div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-10390616367785638712013-07-15T13:24:00.002-07:002022-09-17T16:36:25.543-07:00Are We Truly Productive?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRqDokugbVn-DymHB_7eq2mtJAJC5hWKVL9iTBWc01e6Ida6qiAlvSWNL4erxCvK2JsggJxu1M3VNEKvptbfvz5MkuTrvNQ9pYzOLkCNC3expw0a3MTbsM_KSuPxK-2Yhrqu-YY6apyOA/s1600/modern-times-charlie-chaplin.gif" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Charlie Chaplin working on assembly line in Modern Times" border="0" data-original-height="362" data-original-width="641" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRqDokugbVn-DymHB_7eq2mtJAJC5hWKVL9iTBWc01e6Ida6qiAlvSWNL4erxCvK2JsggJxu1M3VNEKvptbfvz5MkuTrvNQ9pYzOLkCNC3expw0a3MTbsM_KSuPxK-2Yhrqu-YY6apyOA/s320/modern-times-charlie-chaplin.gif" title="Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div><div><br /></div><div>"Beware the barrenness of a busy life," quipped Socrates over 2,400 years ago, but sadly, barren busyness seems to be the norm of our times. In our industrial, technological age, we idolize productivity and we're in a constant state of doing and busyness, but are we truly productive? Or are we living wasteful lives full of unquestioned habit and routine (an observation of many old people when they reflect on their lives)? Business people are especially lauded for being practical and productive, but are they any better? Management consultant and executive coaching pioneer <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a> personally worked with hundreds of managers, top executives, and presidents over a course of fifty years. In his long career, he found otherwise. Julian and I discuss this in the topic "<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/no-concept-of-priorities.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">No Concept of Priorities</span></a>" which is part of our project <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/on-life-business-education-and-other.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">Dialogues with Julian Moody: On Life, Business, Sustainability, and Other Things</span></a>.</div>
<div><br /></div><div>(Posted 7/15/2013)</div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-46211040771330267742013-06-08T13:28:00.003-07:002022-09-17T16:34:01.188-07:00What is the Essence of Leadership?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKmw09E1UTA5_4t_Wpcro7ZEMZFUvFanlbR0ar6B83c1h8Qq6iIDOJ1A5zxYiSPwG_ato1ngJobMn00SvJzofkX74eCHGEh7NrrM5nTpROfaE3u5nTvHAdLvHvlvYBXBLN2Yl1_oiuDqg/s1600/squad-leader-army.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Bronze statue of army squad leader" border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1000" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKmw09E1UTA5_4t_Wpcro7ZEMZFUvFanlbR0ar6B83c1h8Qq6iIDOJ1A5zxYiSPwG_ato1ngJobMn00SvJzofkX74eCHGEh7NrrM5nTpROfaE3u5nTvHAdLvHvlvYBXBLN2Yl1_oiuDqg/w400-h400/squad-leader-army.jpg" title="Army Squad Leader" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bronze depiction of army squad leader</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br /><div>Upward mobility, the American Dream, and ambition in the form of seeking the highest title and position are taken for granted in our culture. Given this, the meaning of leadership has become muddled, tainted, and confused. A common assumption is that leadership is something that one strives for and achieves, but is leadership about advancement and a position? Is it about various agendas for promotion? Or is it something altogether different? And what distinguishes a great leader from a good leader?</div><div><br />Management consultant and executive coaching pioneer <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a> personally worked with hundreds of managers, top executives, and presidents. Julian and I discuss leadership in the topic "<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/what-is-essence-of-leadership.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">What is the Essence of Leadership?</span></a>" as part of our project <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/on-life-business-education-and-other.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">Dialogues with Julian Moody: On Life, Business, Sustainability, and Other Things</span></a>.<br />
<div><br /></div><div>(Posted 6/8/2013)</div></div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2502778106435611532.post-56353720260207659992013-05-03T17:54:00.004-07:002022-09-17T16:23:06.664-07:00Ugly Face, Beautiful Mind<div class="separator"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF65SMIyWp5L1xpM7vroTXHDZIw6l-dE3SN1h4JngYoDos06fxU2SxoqrOAOthuAXW5tQ9QYm2m5MlHlik80A0mFzqcBFa5w4VQw4Xw9Noong5HUEkPB82yYQK-S2Jcp1SOHAwl287nAI/s1600/socrates1.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Bas-relief of Socrates" border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF65SMIyWp5L1xpM7vroTXHDZIw6l-dE3SN1h4JngYoDos06fxU2SxoqrOAOthuAXW5tQ9QYm2m5MlHlik80A0mFzqcBFa5w4VQw4Xw9Noong5HUEkPB82yYQK-S2Jcp1SOHAwl287nAI/w336-h400/socrates1.jpeg" title="Socrates" width="336" /></a></div><div><br /></div>In Lord Byron's play <i>The Deformed Transformed</i>, two characters immortalize Socrates:<br />
<br />
ARNOLD: What! that low, swarthy, short-nosed, round-eyed satyr,<br />
With the wide nostrils and Silenus' aspect,<br />
The splay feet and low stature! I had better<br />
Remain that which I am.<br />
<br />
STRANGER: And yet he was<br />
The earth's perfection of all mental beauty,<br />
And personification of all virtue.<br />
<br />Socrates also has the unusual privilege of being one of the few figures in history, flawed and human as he was, to be often likened to or mentioned in the same context as Jesus. Percy Bysshe Shelley refers to Socrates as the Jesus Christ of Greece and John Keats, in writing on the heroic spirit, wrote "I can remember but two - Jesus and Socrates." Benjamin Franklin, who famously compiled a list of virtues to aspire to, wrote, "Imitate Jesus and Socrates," for the virtue of humility.<div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>Socrates didn't write anything himself so to get a completely accurate and definitive handle on him and his methods is difficult - even his contemporaries disagreed and argued on who he truly was. But despite this impossibility to neatly pin him down, the legacy of his powerful personality and unique mind remains mysteriously far-reaching to this day.<br />
<br />Consider just a few of his many sayings:<br />
<br />
"Beware the barrenness of a busy life."<br />
<br />
"The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow." (This quote is often attributed to one of the ancient Greek playwrights or Shakespeare.)<br />
<br />And more famously:<br />
<br />
"An unexamined life is not worth living."<br />
<br />
"And as for me, all I know is that I know nothing."<br />
<br />What is known for certain is that he mixed with people at all levels of society - high class, low class, educated, uneducated, male, female, military, civil, slave, and free - and engaged with anyone in the process of inquiry. Anyone was worthy of a sincere search for the truth which he was careful to distinguish from mere accumulation of knowledge. And he tended to humiliate the self-satisfied and self-congratulating experts and intelligentsia of Greek society which eventually helped get him into serious trouble with the state. (He was ultimately executed for "corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens" and "not believing in the gods of the state.") An oracle proclaimed that Socrates was the wisest of all men. Socrates clarified that he was wiser than all men only because he professed ignorance, while others claimed to have knowledge. Perhaps this is best put in his words: "but the truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and in this oracle he means to say that the wisdom of men is little or nothing."</div><div><br />Curiously, one of the titans of the information age, Steve Jobs, once remarked,<br />
<br />
"I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."<br />
<br />
(Socrates was a huge influence in the work of management consultant and executive coaching pioneer <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/julian-moody.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">Julian Moody</span></a>. Julian reflects on this in "<a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/a-dumb-truck-driver-reads-socratic.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">A “Dumb” Truck Driver Reads the Socratic Dialogues</span></a>." This topic is part of our project <a href="http://www.brandywalker.com/p/on-life-business-education-and-other.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">Dialogues with Julian Moody: On Life, Business, Sustainability, and Other Things</span></a>.)</div><div><br /></div><div>(Posted 5/3/2013)</div>Brandy Walkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12173573642502906209noreply@blogger.com