Wanting Common Sense, with HG Wells

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Back again?

Today’s prose and poem takes up where last week’s prose and poem left off.

Short Essay

Quotation

Long Poem

Short Essay

My parents survived the Great Depression. I survived the Great Flood of 2013—That’s when we had to evacuate the downtown. It would not have been so bad, if after the last “once in a century flood” of 2005, the city authorities, from their being “common sense challenged,” had not, after a city report was finished, classified as secret the report on the flood for five blankety-blank years! (Who knows what flood control efforts could have been enacted before the waters rolled in again in 2013)

The U.S. civil war, 1860’s, saw fighting between wooden warships covered with iron: The ironclads. The Great War was 1914—1918. Ordinary people back then thought it was a war totally surprising and unprecedented, because—because the learned authorities had neglected to notice the “total war,” (not “army versus army”) the trenches, and the machine-age weapons of the US civil war. Worse: They ignored H.G. Wells—and I don’t mean his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds with metal fighting machines (like tanks) and Black Smoke. (like chlorine gas) 

Wells wrote a 1903 short story about The Land Ironclads manned inside by commoners with a practical education, such as chemists, mechanics and electricians. The theme was that these little peace loving chaps could stand against upper class warrior-bred fellows, with their silly swords, their calvary horses and their titles like Von in their name, fellows very arrogant and very rich, but also very ignorant.  

After Wells wrote, inventing land battleships should have been a no-brainer for both allies and axis. But no. Last week I mentioned the How and Why Wonder Book of WWI where both sides sought to break the trench deadlock with a secret weapon. I wrote then how the Germans ignored the common sense idea of being prepared for an offensive deep into enemy territory: They didn’t begin by stockpiling their secret equipment. (gas masks) The allies, for their secret weapon, would be equally unprepared. (General Baden-Powell, the Boer War hero with the motto of “Be Prepared,” had already left the army, at the request of his king, to run the Boy Scout movement)

The allied secret weapons were shipped over from Britain, concealed in great containers marked “tank.” Hence the short word, “panzer” in German, that forever replaced “land battleship.” Did the British proceed to prepare for a breakout by stockpiling rations, ammunition and an army of tanks?  And maybe, perhaps, spare engine parts too? No. Although only a precious few tanks had arrived yet, they were nonetheless used in the next battle. The good news? For once, church bells rang all over Britain, rejoicing for the Battle of Cambrai—the biggest victory so far!—as the tanks rolled right over machine gun nests, supporting the army to advance through a lunar landscape for an amazing distance… of …six miles!

But without stockpiling? Once the few tanks had all broken down or been disabled—that was it. No breakout. Of course it didn’t take long at all for the Germans to rush in elephant guns and small direct-fire cannons and to invent elegantly simple and practical anti-tank ditches. (Angled so the tank’s nose would face into the dirt—full stop) 

(Elephant guns? Sure. Today huge .50 calibre machine guns, firing slowly, like you see mounted on tank turrets and Arab Toyota trucks, can punch a round into armoured cars to bounce around inside, while the normal sized .30 calibre, firing rapidly, can take out surrounding personnel)

Obviously both sides, Allies and Axis, were as “common sense challenged” as our own city hall which classified our flood report. 

In our 21st century, if Canadians didn’t join their US cousins in declaring War on Terror, or join them in Iraq, maybe it’s because Canadians, even the ones who were history-challenged, knew their government’s limitations. Meanwhile, despite seeing their cousin’s “farce” (as the Toronto police chief labeled it) of their War on Drugs, the average Canadians, while knowing the difficulty of counter insurgency, never imagined the sheer colossal incompetence, the “fiasco,” if one might speak plainly, of the U.S. war effort “to instil democracy” in Iraq. 

(Early in the “occupation,” before the Americans had the guts to call their liberation an “occupation”—Iraqi’s seeking employment would warn each other not to use that word around Americans—someone wrote a thick book called Fiasco, that obviously not a single U.S. official paid any attention to) 

Americans didn’t even involve their own State Department! Too bad, because State, of course, would know a lot about nurturing freedom. 

(State would know that former colonies, upon achieving independence in Africa and Asia in the 1950’s and 1960’s, did not come instantly, overnight, to understand democracy—And no, you can’t teach democracy with a simplistic sound bite of ‘you just need freedom and elections’—anymore than you can simplistically tell American farm boys, for their domestic war, ‘you can just say no to drugs’ or tell a South Vietnamese rice farmer, ‘you can just say no to communism.’  

State would know exactly what an embassy filled with naive Americans would not know: You can’t reach “the hearts and minds” with a mere sound bite… Two patriots wrote a best-selling book called The Ugly American, a book I’ll wager not one American in the Iraq embassy enclave, the Green Zone, ever read… Yes I’m angry, thinking of lives wasted in goddam Vietnam)  

Quotation

He was a young man, healthy enough but by no means sun-tanned, and of a type of feature and expression that prevails in His Majesty's Navy: alert, intelligent, quiet. He and his engineers and his riflemen all went about their work, calm and reasonable men. They had none of that flapping strenuousness of the half-wit in a hurry, that excessive strain upon the blood-vessels, that hysteria of effort which is so frequently regarded as the proper state of mind for heroic deeds.

The Land Ironclads (1903)

Poem 

As you may recall, last week’s poem ended after the young narrator has cried and sadly fallen asleep in the top of a church steeple, unaware of what would happen as he slept. The drama resumes:

Survivor of the Black Smoke 

I awake with dry tears,

lying stiff in the old wooden steeple 

on the floor that smells like a church,

I hear silence.

Strange, deathly silence.

I crawl up,

stand up.

I don’t glance down—I enjoy seeing a few fresh stars.

But—is something wrong?

Nothing heard.

No lorries groaning on the far highway,

their engine retarders going turrrap-tup-tup-tup.

No motor rumbles from right below.

No horns of motorists navigating narrow streets.

Something is pressing at my mind,

and I don’t want to open that door.

I look down.

Nothing. 

Only blackness.

No amber street lamps in friendly rows.

No red-white moving lights of motorists heading home.

Nothing but a black void,

formless, muffled, 

where the light shineth not.

A bat zigs past—I say, “Don’t go!”

Don’t go down into that dark fog.

The bat does not hear,

heaven does not heed.

Lonely, 

in an empty steeple,

above the silent dead.

After three days

I could descend.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

June

2019

Footnotes: 

~Wells was such a thinker! A forward to a modern (I forget which) edition of The War of the Worlds points out that Wells (in 1898) was the first to predict refugee columns, such as would (in 1914) swell the roads during the opening of the Great War, during that hopeful autumn before anyone realized the war would become horribly Great.

~Here’s the short story, as per the Gutenberg press

Losing Innocence, With Martians

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got innocence in everyday life?

Short-Essay

Quotation

Long-Poem

Short-Essay

A wit once said America was the only nation that could keep losing its innocence, and then finding it again. Even after Vietnam, America still rebounded, but was never, I think, quite the same. George Orwell noted that his generation, which came of age at the end of World War I, was rebellious, but they never knew why. Only years later did Orwell realize it was due to the loss of innocence after the great war.

His generation must have been shocked to learn the “establishment” did not care about them: At least, did not care enough to become competent and develop common sense. During the terrible incompetence of the Second World War, working in London during the blitz, Orwell would keenly scrutinize the upper class. His essay begins, “As I write this, highly civilized men are flying overhead trying to kill me…” 

During the First World War, everyone thought the Prussian General staff was world class. At that time, common sense, to any civilian, would have meant that before you start an offensive to go deep into enemy territory you stockpile ammunition, rations, grain for the horses, and other supplies. At the same time, anyone who saw a fog bank would have known the wind is not uniform but blows into banks, swirls around empty patches, and even blows “backwards” too.

You will recall that both sides had built built a vast network of trenches, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean… Stalemate, as blocked as Brexit… Both sides still hoped for an offensive, taking pains to feed and care for vast stocks of cavalry horses… to use for a glorious breakout past the trenches! Such an innocent hope. 

According to my childhood How and Why Wonder Book of WWI, eventually both sides sought to break the deadlock by finding a secret weapon: The Germans found theirs first. One day, when the wind was fair, they opened valves and advanced behind poison gas… Allied soldiers fell back, gasping and stumbling. The German’s own gas, as they advanced, sometimes blew back in their faces. Which was a problem, as the Germans had no masks and had neglected to stockpile any. Later they would even have masks for their horses, (seen in photographs) but there would be no breakout offensive, not that day. Whither common sense?

Quotation

Servicemen and learned experts know that war is not glorious, a lesson that each generation of regular civilians seems to need to re-discover. 

In the televised Sarah Connor Chronicles, as played by Lena Headey, in one of her voiceovers, Sarah muses on innocence lost:

QUOTE

In 1678 doctors diagnosed a mental affliction soldiers suffered from as 'nostalgia' - homesickness, a longing to return to the past. The cruel reality of war is that there is no return home. No return to innocence. What is lost, is lost forever. Like my father, war's wounds have bled me dry. No words of comfort; no words of forgiveness. No words at all.

UNQUOTE

From the episode Strange Things Happen at the One-Two Point. 

I like Sarah; I have her on my blog list of labels.

Poem

You may recall that just as wooden milking stools use three legs for maximum stability on an uneven dirt floor, so too did did the Martian fighting machines, great black “boilers on stilts,” use three legs.

Losing Innocence

Uncle Jack was the only one who never hurt me.

In the town of Panchester, one day, I was scared.

The Martians! The Martians!

Uncle Jack had gone to the butchers.

I was on my way to find him when I saw It:

A dark dome half obscured by the stone buildings,

moving, bobbing, sinister.

I crouched below the porch of the church, afraid to look,

unseeing, 

my mouth wide open.

It was coming this way,

I had never in my life heard my Uncle Jack yell in terror,

but I knew his voice, 

when I heard his scream.

I glimpsed a man across the street.

In a split second a dark tentacle snatched him up,

as a massive pole-leg thumped down and rushed on.

At last,

I walked further down the block.

Jack had been picked up and dashed against a wall.

I went back.

I ran up the church steps and inside to the right,

up a narrow stair,

and trembled into a ten-by-ten wooden steeple.

Knees weak, I staggered to the window 

knelt small,

with my hands and chin on the ledge.

Where was It?

There. Going up the valley rim.

Gone.

I pressed against the wall and cried.

Not the even rhythm of a child crying,

not the even sobbing of a woman,

but a cry irregular, 

rising, gasping, falling, gasping.

I would never be loved by Uncle Jack.

Never.

Exhausted,

I stretched out,

flattened to the floor,

cheek resting on the sweet old wood.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

2019

Footnote: 

H.G. Wells is a classic writer because he knew classic human nature, such as authority lacking common sense.

To document a certain lack of common sense in the present day, there has been a series of BBC exposes on the London Marathon, an exposure of unacceptable behaviour that has been going on for years. The BBC reports of this year have been about the slower, distressed marathoners being abused by staff. Here is one report about someone with, luckily for her,  a little more self-esteem than others might have because she is supposed to be slow, as a pace setter:

Models, Nerds and Martians

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got a sense of loss?

Let us continue last week’s topic of nerds, as an excuse for two more War of the Worlds poems. 

It seems to me you might hear a pretty lady say, on a TV commercial, “Please don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” but you won’t hear the same plea “… me because I’m smart,” partly because too many of us were too criticized at school, and so being around smart people hurts too much to mention. For my part, being an avid reader, or “smart,” I keep in mind how I might hurt others who “don’t read too good.” 

Have you ever noticed how those glossy page entertainment stories often include lines about a glamorous woman once being too skinny or too shy or something? It’s for (figuratively) setting you at ease around her. I once, as we two drank in the bar, reassured an international advertising model by saying, “There are categories of people that intimidate me, but models and show business are not one of them.” At the next party we attended together, I observed another model, just in from a shoot in Germany, setting the other people at ease for my friend by saying “she used to have hips up to here!” A good friend, doing for the model just like I would read in a glossy article.

If I had said in the bar whom I would be at ease with, then I could have included celebrity media-types, journalists and famous best-selling writers—stemming from my days as a volunteer student newspaper reporter. (As for show biz actors, I took theatre career classes in college—I knew them well) 

I have lost count of the times I have been on the TV news—but, being a journalist myself,  I have never once bothered to watch myself, even when, as often happened, I was near a TV set at the time. Once, when I was on CBC, I snacked with someone in a student food court rather than suggest we go downstairs to the student restaurant, directly below us, having an idiot box up in the corner. 

Note: The students don’t have a “real restaurant with cutlery” anymore, this was back during the capitalist reaction-swing of the pendulum: the Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney years. (Update: the fancy graduate student lounge, just under the posh faculty lounge in the student building, has been opened to undergraduates)

And of course, having earned a degree, I’m not intimidated by scientists. Speaking of knowing smart people, my buddy Blair was so smart he attended medical school without taking any Greek or Latin: He had already picked up those ancient vocabularies on his own. I essayed about him among regular guys in Blair, Being Smart archived September 2011. 

…Poems…

I once complimented a fellow worker, Tracy, in the presence of our peers, for having enough self esteem that I never have to worry or hold back. She held up two hands to show that I bring her up towards my level. 

Here’s a poem of how nerds have to know their own strength, from the years after the Martians are gone.

A Regular Human

In the Museum of Natural History,

    —Don’t say, Museum of Flora and Fauna—

a Martian is pickled in brine.

    —Don’t say, is preserved in a solution of formaldehyde—

A motionless handling-machine,

once so graceful,

stands in the British Museum.

    —Don’t speak of polarized discs and quantum mechanics—

As for that long spar,

explain, 

while motioning with your hands,

it goes at right angles, straight out like this—

    Don’t simply say, perpendicular.

It’s what you don’t say that matters,

if you wish to pass among regular humans,

undetected,

lonely.

As a nerd amongst regular society, it took awhile to believe in “just being myself.” How relieved I was to read computer startup millionaire Paul Graham. He pointed out that startup nerds don’t prefer the same cities as normal people and rich investors, instead preferring Boulder and San Francisco to Miami and Vegas, preferring quiet conversations and used bookstores to thundering discos and fashion malls. I read Graham and thought, with all due respect to the regular majority, “Hey, me too!”

From my poetic War of the Worlds poetry manuscript, from the part where the war’s aftermath includes a sense of loss, comes this metaphoric look at second hand bookstores (in Edmonton) now being hard hit by the digital age.

Gone the Bookstores

With top of lungs anticipation

I have enjoyed strolling past pretty meadows,

pockets of golden canola, dandelions, daisies

and five or six second-hand bookstores.

Not now.

With it’s yellow door atop a long flight of stairs,

the Untitled Bookstore is gone.

Strathcona Books is no longer a meadow but a drab crater,

dull, vacant.

Athabasca Books has long bare birch wood shelves,

in a bare room.

Alhambra Books was smacked by a dragon,

swayed on its foundations;

No one allowed inside, now;

an accident, they say.

With all the pretty meadows gone

I walk on sidewalks of broken slate.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

2019

Footnotes: 

~As an enthusiastic writer, and nerd, as advised by Rita Mae Brown, one of the best things I ever did was take a vocabulary class in ancient Greek and Latin: taught by the classics department for science majors. See my essay Loving Greek and Latin archived March 2012.

~While the culture shock was immense if I went from “there” to the physical education students lounge, nevertheless, one of my joys in life at university was “being there,” huddled in a corner of the theatre students lounge, eating my lunch, watching all those shy people be as flamboyant as God intended, without fear.

Nerds and Normals

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got nerds?

Nobody believes me when I say am a nerd. So then I chuckle to myself thinking, “OK, then I’m a recovering nerd.”

Here’s a cool nerd factoid: How about that South Korean flag? It includes a prominent Yang and Yin symbol, two-in-one black and white teardrops. 

It was Chairman Mao, the first communist ruler of China, who pointed out that, actually, the black and white did not have to be scrupulously fifty-fifty. In his essay On Contradiction he explained how one color can be dominating, sixty-forty, for example, then—flip!—The colors can switch places, so the other one is more prevalent. He wrote this to explain the philosophy of “dialectical materialism,” (footnote) to give brand new leaders, after the revolution, some self confidence that they could replace the mandarins and officials—who were given the boot— and then go run the “people’s republic.”

Right now, I am imagining those two colors as nerd and non-nerd. I’m sure all of us have a touch of nerd, as when we like factoids, while all of us have a touch of that Regular American: a plain fellow who believes that everything could, and should, be explained simply, distrusting educated complexity. That distrust is why Hollywood rivals and villains, like that clown on The Simpsons, are often educated Britishers… implying that US universities, except for the household name ones, are below the level of British and Canadian ones. (Probably so, given that my degree equals a US masters degree, according to my professors who have compared curriculums while at American conferences) 

As for understanding nerds, it was a computer millionaire, Paul Graham, who wrote of how the really smart boys, back in high school, were supposedly, somehow, not smart enough to figure how to appear normal and be popular. His explanation was: Yes, teens all want to fit in—something easier to do back in elementary school—but teenage nerds want something even more: to be smart. OK, I’m oversimplifying. Graham also said teen “high school society” has a lack of shared real problems. Therefore the only shared “problem” they have, of helping each other strive to be “normal” and popular is, for a nerd, just too unreal, too un-motivating, and too airy-fairy. But for an unthinking regular teen, “normal” is whatever other teens say it is. 

Of course, in the adult world, with real group problems, status is not from being the most conformist, but from who will help the most with tackling a group’s problem/project/shared goals. There’s a reason why, at the annual dinner, people clap for the volunteers. Those hardy volunteers have earned some status. 

A few decades back, a baby boomer wrote a book called Is There Life After High School? I answer: Sure there is, but I think, in adult society, the trick is to find your vocations and avocations within groups small enough for a person to be noticed for achieving some “status and popularity” through real contributions.  Graham, who preferred small computer startup companies, would warn that in the big conventional companies it is harder to measure your actual contribution, hence there is more attention to office politics and image and fakery. Call it, ‘high school lite.’

Some former teens will see the entire country as their peer group, and resort to status from the only thing they have left for such a gross undiscerning crowd: conspicuous consumption. Money. But adult nerds are quick to see through that ploy. That’s why in Silicon Valley no brainy millionaires will desperately crave to know what is the latest, most excruciatingly correct clothing-fashion-for-the-wealthy. In fact, they dress rather like nerds.

I have been over simplifying, so far, by making nerds seem non-regular because of their brains. But there can be another reason for being different: social isolation. At the end of the movie Revenge of the Nerds II, as I dimly recall, a laundry list of nerd characteristics is recited, a list which includes things having nothing to do with being smart, such as poor hygiene or being able to burp long and loud. Well. If I was a proud hermit, coming into town only occasionally for supplies, then I would nevertheless make it my business to cultivate an “awareness level” for what is normal among the townsfolk. Examples of folks employing such an “awareness skill” would be undercover spies, television set decorators, actors, and the writer of the Jack Reacher mysteries. Being observant, as every Boy Scout knows, is fun. 

Oh, such a fun life the founder of Boy Scouts had! Life would never be boring for the man who once drew a few sketches of different men to show how each man’s personality is reflected by how he tilts his hat. As for folks who would never do the Boy Scout thing of being “observant,” well, I think they would risk living in their own little bubble. As if they value being oblivious.

What I observe, besides other things, is nerds: Because if I’m real smart, then being a nerd would be my default—I want to know what to avoid.

I wonder: Are nerds stiff and humor-challenged? Then I could take a night class in stand up comedy improvisation. Not that I ever have, but I could. Do they dress dull? Then I could rip through my closet tossing out anything beige. Hey, maybe I’d look good in mauve. Are they close-minded and set in their ways? I could take a night class in liberal arts. 

Are nerds scared to meet and mingle? Me too, sometimes, but …then I remember how comedian Red Green ends each show by saying, “We’re all in this together” adding “I’m pulling for you,” and “remember to keep your stick on the ice.” As I see it, the best way to de-nerdify would be, just like Red Green, to care about others. Call it the Zen of Caring—No wonder the Boy Scouts  learn to do a good turn every day. Here’s a mantra: “If I care about others, then awareness of others will come naturally.” And for mingling, there’s always that mantra from Galilee: “Perfect love casteth out all fear.”

I enjoyed mingling in my shared house. I’m still chuckling over talking to the parents visiting a young man there. “For an only child,” I marvelled, “your son is sure unspoiled.” 

“We had the only swimming pool on the block. That way, when the other kids came over, they made sure he wasn’t spoiled!”

I guess somewhere along the trail I must have mingled enough, because no one today believes I’m a nerd.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

June

2019

An abstract footnote:

~”Dialectical materialism, “the trick of seeing things “in terms of their contradictions,” can be a life-changing trick, according to Barak Obama’s mentor Saul Alinsky, in his book Rules For Radicals. I must confess I don’t do any dialectical materialism myself, but I’m throwing it out there. I suspect it was Karl Marx who saw things as “thesis, antithesis and synthesis.” Just throwing that out for you.
Or as a comic book hero says:
“Contradiction is the seed of conciousness. I knew, from the pain of contradiction, that I was. And what I was.” 
― Joss Whedon, Astonishing X-Men, Volume 2: Dangerous

Some not so abstract footnotes:

~In his review (link) of Revenge of the Nerds II, (a movie of regular popular culture) Roger Ebert explains what nerds are, saying it’s something the movie doesn’t understand.

~I sympathize with struggling nerds and “social isolates”: Nora Ephron once remarked in an interview, “Nobody interesting had an ordinary childhood.” She wrote interesting things like her 2006 bestseller I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman and, back in the 20th century, Wallflower at the Orgy where she slightly mocked editor Helen Gurly Brown’s articles in Cosmopolitan magazine saying “She’s just trying to help” which is, I guess, what folks might say about my own essays. (And yes, her book title is more literal than figurative)

~Nora mentioned that her fellow writers wrote “beneath themselves” doing simple articles for popular magazines in order to pay the bills. If here, for my essay site, I write simply with very few complex-compound sentences, it’s because I write for regular people, in keeping with my journalism past. As feedDigest Channel on the web says:

QUOTE: 

According to the data and stats that were collected, ‘Essays by Sean’ channel has an excellent rank. The channel mostly uses long articles along with sentence constructions of the basic readability level, which is a result indicating a well-balanced textual content on the channel.

UNQUOTE

link to more stats: http://channels.feeddigest.com/Essays_by_Sean

Also, my site has “low traffic” and “extraordinary global rank.” Hurray! The blog sometimes gets translated too, which I only know about from having google statistics. The translators are never polite enough to say hello.

~As for our cultural belief that it is best to speak plainly, that everything can be simplified and paraphrased and summarized to be simpler: Wrong! There is a reason why professors don’t talk like high school teachers, but will instead use several clauses in their sentences. Samual Delaney said that, for detailed sentences, to even paraphrase is to change the meaning.

I’m angry at our culture because: It was “busy” politicians who wouldn’t read past the summary and into the actual report, which had nuance and qualifiers, probabilities and footnotes, who would then conclude that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One politician, too self-important to read the report, bleated like a sheep, “We mustn’t let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud.”

Meanwhile, I am a little angry, mostly contemptuous, at the UN because the IPCC, the UN’s climate change guys, according to a Manchester reporter, write their UN report summary first, and then the various scientists are expected to constrict their reporting to fit the summary.

Here’s a dense sidebar about the consequences of our distrust of complex talk, 

in the form of a quote included in my essay Death of the Liberal Class archived May 2015:

<< …(The liberal class was) forgetting, as MacDonald wrote, that “as in arts and letters, communicability to a large audience is in inverse ratio to the excellence of a political approach. This in not a good thing: as in art, it is a deforming and crippling factor. Nor is it an eternal rule: in the past, the ideas of a tiny minority, sometimes almost reduced to the vanishing point of one individual, have slowly come to take hold on more and more of their fellow men.”

The cultural embrace of simplification, as MacDonald warned, meant reducing a population to speaking in pre-digested clichés and slogans. It banished complexity and further pushed to the margins difficult, original, or unfamiliar ideas. The assault on radical and original thought, which by definition did not fit itself into the popular cultural lexicon, saw art forms such as theatre suffer.  (P. 88) >>