Art, a Man, and Intuition

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got art and intuition?

Art

I hate to sound like I was once a sick puppy, but yes, as faithful readers know, I have a past. And so I was already middle aged, over 35, before I took an excellent lengthy aptitude test as part of my undergraduate class. My dominant job aspect? “Artistic.” I said, “Oh.” Me? Really? Of course I’m not prejudiced anymore against fancy artists but… it took a while to sink in. Apparently I would make a good executive on Mad Men.

Happily, I have since been privileged to go with others to periodically visit an artist, my sensei, Sheri-D Wilson, in her living room as part of making my War of the Worlds poetry manuscript. In mid-winter once, after supper at the Wainwright Hotel, I walked through the starlit snow to see Sheri-D perform at the Canmore Opera House. (A wonderful log building) So I know a little about artists. In fact, during a weekend poetry workshop by Sheri-D, I said I was only now learning to feel right saying “we artists.” A lady then began crying, saying she too was learning to say “we.”

A man

I suppose having an artistic streak explains best-selling writer Michael Korda. I found his book about T.E. Lawrence to be, as a blurb writer wrote, “unputdownable.” I started over halfway in, beginning with Lawrence of Arabia’s postwar year, and read through to the end. Took three hours. 

Besides his amazing originality in warfare and statecraft, Lawrence also went on to bring in reforms including (“but not limited to” says my Yankee lawyer) eliminating the taken-for-granted ankle puttees and Prussian collars for the RAF. While working with RAF speed boats, for rescuing planes downed in the water, he innovated a hull design that would be used by the U.S. Patrol Torpedo boats. His small motorboat manual, according to Korda, was excellent in having concision, and being comprehensive, and including extra things such as how to manage during storms. Lawrence’s reforms were quietly accomplished through people he knew of high rank, with no limelight for Lawrence. His own postwar rank? ( Enlisted) Airman second class. (Yes, nearly everybody on base knew who he was)

Apparently Lawrence had an artist’s disregard for conformity. He began the war as a young army lieutenant, and ended as a young lieutenant-colonel. Before the war, of course, he was an archeologist and graduate of Oxford university. Postwar, in his thirties, he translated Homer’s poetry epic, the Odyssey. But not as a poem, as a prose novel: How strange, how delightful. Also strange is how the man who was too poor to afford a boarding school such as Eton ended up a friend to frightfully rich, famous, original people such as George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill. For his friendships, and for his life in general, Lawrence had complete disregard for “fame, rank and fortune.”

So was Lawrence socially, then, an artist among artists? Obviously Shaw was one, but not the others I know of, although of course the British education system at the time stressed being well rounded. Churchill, as it happened, not only painted as a hobby but wrote a book on the subject. 

(By the way, I have seen one of Churchill’s paintings hanging in the stairwell of the Lieutenant-Governor’s house, back when she lived off Jasper avenue across the asphalt plain from the old provincial museum, the one that has since moved downtown to just off Churchill Square. May I boast? I once held the door open for the lieutenant-governor to enter the museum. I didn’t know I was supposed to let her royal Canadian mountie do that, until she laughingly told me so.)

I wonder: Was Lawrence artistic? I don’t think so: Because I have no knowledge of him using art for self-expression, although maybe his entire unconventional life was a work of art. Perhaps his postwar life as a clerk, and as a mechanic, fulfilled a creative streak in him that I don’t know about.. The main reason that I don’t suppose he was “artistic” is I can scarcely imagine a good artist achieving such exceptional success in war. (Incidentally, Napoleon said a general was no good unless he could look dry eyed at a silent body-strewn battlefield)

Perhaps, then, his amazing originality came not so much from an “artist’s creativity” as from feeling “unfettered by society.” Willing to fearlessly think and see. Like young Patton and Eisenhower scandalizing the military establishment by working on newfangled battle tanks together. 

(Patton had to scramble to recover his reputation by writing magazine articles on horse cavalry tactics) 

You can achieve a lot if you haven’t had a lifetime of self-training in automatic conformity. 

If my speculation is correct, then Lawrence’s social circle was not other artists, but other “originals,” folks who were themselves unfettered. I wonder if they formed a secret club of those who conformed in dress, speech and thought only out of politeness, who would then fondly enjoy relaxing in private with likeminded friends. 

Like how if you and I were transported to the 1950’s we would naturally gravitate to relaxing among individuals who believed in equal respect for women and nonwhite races, and enjoying drinks among folks who believed it was OK for males to be verbally skilled and cultured, instead of “strong and silent.” Maybe if I went to live in the year the twin towers fell, I would be dining among those who share our 2020 A.D. belief in the appropriateness of homosexuality, and of gender transitioning, for schoolchildren. Or maybe not.

It was a countryman of Lawrence, the Nobel prize winner and philosopher Bertrand Russell, a man born in the Victorian age, who said you could achieve the freedom of a “licensed lunatic” if only you “made it clear, even to the stupidest, that (in being original) you were not criticizing them.” I can relate, having a life-time of self-training in being nice and polite. Truly, no one angrily says, “Who does he think he is?” Except maybe the very stupidest.

Everyone knows I’m a thinker; no one calls me a nerd,. As for thinking, my new insight on T.E. Lawrence being not an artist but an original has “made my day.” That, and being amused at the idea of a secret club. 

Last month in London, I socialized with a chap from Oxford who was born rich middle class, now a multi-millionaire. And even though “I’m just a poor boy, from a poor family” I swear we both felt perfectly normal around each other. Call us club members.

Intuition

As for what club my poetry teacher would belong to, I have no idea. She is certainly intuitive. By this I don’t mean the usual definition that might, maybe, possibly, be “explained” by having a subconscious like a super-computer, putting together teeny tiny unnoticed clues. I suppose a lifetime of being willing to see would aide the inner computer. 

No, what I mean is Sheri-D Wilson had access to “an extra perception.” You’re on your own with that one, as I can’t begin to explain her various examples. One thing my sensei could (rarely) do is like what was documented by Robert Masters, a British officer stationed in India, who could speak both Gurkha and English. He once overheard a British Tommy and a Gurkha soldier, each speaking only their own language, having a sensible conversation.

There are things beyond us, oh Horatio.

I’m artistic myself, yet I don’t know if that explains my having a “weird intuition” three times last month while I was in Central London. 

(By the way, I just barely beat the virus by flying home February 28, started coughing five days later… but it was only a cold. Praise the Lord.)

In a Bloomsbury used book store I asked a handsome, plainly dressed staff, “Are you a linguistics guy?” We talked. He was from Italy, and yes, he had minored in linguistics. 

(I wanted to know why foreign languages have so many syllables; his answer jived with my essay where Doctor Who pronounces “Vincent Van Goff”, archived as Anglicizing, June 2018) 

In a diner near my hotel I asked a young lady with an original hairstyle, “Are you a poet?” We talked. (Besides putting poems fortnightly onto my blog, I attend a weekly poetry cafe) Not only was she an active poet, she was just learning to write sestinas. (poems with the hardest rules, harder than a sonnet) 

In a Van Gogh exhibit on loan from Holland, in a huge special tent, I found a pretty teenage girl on a bench in the lobby, waiting for her father. I asked, “Are you a Doctor Who fan?” She was excited to answer “Yes!” and told me that part of the TV episode with Vincent Van Gogh was included near the end of the tour. We talked. I told her and her dad about the Who Store being only 30 minutes by tube east of Central London, and about a fan’s “Doctor-and-Vincent” music video on Youtube. I play it often. The dad knew of the band ,Athlete, although I didn’t. Here’s the link.

By “weird intuition,” I mean: Who in the world would suddenly blurt out speculations about perfect strangers—and be right every time?

Sean Crawford 

East of Banff, 

March, 

2020

Footnotes: 

~I usually forget that I can figuratively “open my third eye” for about ten seconds at a time. No more, because it blinds me. Some knowledge is too much. Like how a social work student can do the in-class exercise “What I hear you saying is…” and then refuse to do so in the student union building—because who wants to know how very seldom we “get it right” in real life?

~Speaking of smart people, I had a friend who, although from remote Saskatchewan, knew foreign languages, and attended medical school without needing to take the Latin course. 

In my essay Blair, Being Smart, archived September 2011, I wrote of how Blair coped with being so brainy.

~In my essay Loving Greek and Latin archived March 2012, while feeling a gentle breeze from Oxford, I wrote of learning among future physicians and biologists.

Idealists Among Us as Cream in Our Coffee

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Head note

Michael Moore, in an interview November 1 2002 said:

“I’m a citizen in a democracy. To call me an activist would be redundant. It’s not a spectator sport. If we all become nonparticipants, it no longer works.”

Preface: Trundling Towards a Hypothesis

You may have seen a bumper sticker saying our M.I.A. P.O.Ws (missing in action, prisoners of war) are not forgotten. And rightly so.

Question: Are our boys, our M.I.A.s, still being held in secret communist Vietnam prison camps? 
Answer: No point in arguing.

No, because, as a veteran says to Jodie, a daughter of a fellow veteran named Leon, 

“…Leon’s the conclusive argument. Your old man, and people just like him. I know those people. Brave, honourable people, Jodie. They fought there, and then they rose to power and prominence later. The Pentagon is stuffed full of a—s, I know that as well as anybody, but there were always enough people like Leon around to keep them honest. You answer me a question: If Leon had known there were still prisoners kept back in ‘Nam, what would he have done?”

(p 286) Tripwire by Lee Child, copyright 1999. (Note: If Major Jack Reacher was not idealistic about “getting involved” then we would not want to read a series about him)

Hypothesis: Every healthy armed forces needs its Leons, and every healthy civil population needs its Michael Moores, as roast beef needs salt. Good citizens. Idealistic.

Of course, any society could eventually lose its health, … as did first ancient Greece, then Rome. 

Introduction: I wonder what my dad would have thought, young, freshly back from World War II, if he had been told that in the 21st century Americans would declare war, but then not be participants, nor even spectators, nor even be sending a Congressional committee over to report back on whether the occupation was proceeding to fulfill the goal of instilling democracy. Maybe Dad would say such civilians don’t deserve the honorific of “citizen.”

Hello Reader,

Got idealism?

The Personal

The National

The Political

The Personal

I was thinking: Folk music is for idealistic people. It was a Nobel prize winning folkie, Bob Dylan, who sang “You’ve got to serve someone.” An idealist, to me, is anyone who serves abstract values to a “greater” degree… “not like some.” 

Take driving. I learned something years ago when my City of Calgary was thinking of spending more than a million dollars to replace all our speed signs, to give us new, improved lower residential speeds. We decided the money would be wasted. Why? Turns out most people don’t constantly glance at their speedometer to compare their speed to the posted limit, not like we all did at driving school. Instead, most people drive by what “feels right.”

“Oh,” I thought. “And here I was trying to serve the abstraction of “proper driving school standards.” But I don’t feel badly at driving as primly as a police constable. (By the way, someone told me you can spot police operating in plainclothes because they drive properly with their hands on the wheel at 10 and 2 o’clock) 

I am fine knowing, as Edward Llewelyn noted in his novel Word Bringer, that society needs a sprinkling of “proper” drivers to keep the rest of us from driving like swine. (A measure of prigs to prevent pigs) Oh, and in case you ask me: Yes, I “speed” to match the traffic flow, and yes I use the passing lane for passing, not for “slowly” cruising. I figure that’s only proper.

Recently I learned something new about idealists. One of my favorite bloggers, Penelope Trunk, often refers to her “Meyers-Briggs personality test.”  What I learned was that, according to Ms Trunk and her tests, many idealists take it for granted that other people all have ideals too, not realizing some others don’t live their lives serving ideals. 

The National

As for me, I can unapologetically be “bi-cultural,” meaning: I can be an idealist myself, while being aware of non-idealists. So on my blog, in the “about me” part, I have recently put that I am “an idealist” feeling nostalgia for the republics of Greece and Rome. The implication, of course, being that I would only say so because I don’t expect others to be idealistic. We can’t all be like George Washington, George Orwell and the heroes played by George Clooney.

As for the national level: I don’t think ideals should replace truth, but I do think we can teach ideals alongside truth. As I suppose the noble Greeks and Romans did, when they would say “everybody should leave their city-state a little better than they found it.” Those same Greeks, with their famously well-rounded schools, would say to their children and each other, “Not life, but a good life, is expected of every citizen.” 

Here in America, we can be talking to our children about how we value being free and brave, even as by our actions we are disabling these values: Yes, we are. Let’s face it: Everybody knows we are drastically increasing security at the expense of liberty. At long last, maybe, the idealists are too much outnumbered by the craven sort who crave safety. After all, Homeland Security, (H.S.) and the patriot act too, should have been scrutinized and reformed long before now, perhaps by a congressional investigative committee.  

This month I read how a senator was reduced to using the only power he had left: sarcasm. He asked sarcastic questions to H.S. This was regarding border guards no longer needing just cause or reasonable suspicion for going into cell phones and tablets. The honorable senator had no power. To me, the “smoking gun” to prove H.S. has gross, arrogant, unbelievable incompetence was when the head of H.S. claimed publicly, long after 9/11, that some of the 9/11 killers had crossed in from Canada. 

The Political

If all wars, including the one my dad fought against fascism in the Pacific and Europe, have lots of drum beating and flag waving, then surely that’s partly to bring us all up to the level of the idealists. Just as how waving pom poms with a peppy “rah-rah” for recycling brings us all up to a green level… 

With some idealists among us, like sugar in our coffee, we can drink the medicine before us—and then go recycle, and go drive on safe roads, too. You don’t have to involve the idealists among us, but for goodness sake… If you aren’t going to beat the drum, then don’t declare war. 

In other words: Leaving a War to the civil servants and armed forces is unworthy of any democracy. … 

If (judging by how apathy on the home front caused the mission to Iraq to be a fiasco) common people like us are passive, craving freedom from responsibility… valuing comfort over citizenship… valuing our private couches over our national War Effort then no wonder the senators would stay on their couches too. Yes, everybody did. Americans wouldn’t send an investigative committee over to Iraq to keep the United States accountable to their stated national mission, a mission so important that instead of withdrawing from a sovereign nation within six months of toppling the dictator, the U.S., instead, lingered to occupy Iraq: To Instil Democracy… Maybe, congress is like how the senators of Rome, in a shining city previously famous for bravery and virtue, at last came to choose their personal safety over keeping Caesar accountable.

Part of the reason the shining noble Roman republic declined into becoming a big dark spreading empire was this: By the time they surrendered to Caesar, the Romans had lost practically all their idealists. People like Cicero, “a pillar of iron,” became too few, too few.

“Only the good die young.” Well. Even today, as I have earned my white hair, I am still able to surround myself with music loving friends who are equally elderly and equally believe in ideals. That’s a comfort.

Sean Crawford

In the foothills of the Rocky Mountains

April, 2018

Nonfiction Footnote, regarding Iraq: 

Cue Hollywood movie trailer voice: “But they didn’t count on one man!”  A “homely American” who escaped the Green Zone and mingled with the locals, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, exposed his country in Green Zone subtitled Imperial Life in the Emerald City. 

(Basis for the Matt Damon movie)

Fiction Footnote, regarding a future society: 

I like how Robert Heinlein’s character Friday is so intent on being “professional.” This even though she is raised by cynical staff in a cold orphanage. In a future society lacking the ideals of “citizenship,” she ignores the losers around her to create ideals of her own, ideals of “professionalism.” I can relate.

Essay Footnote, regarding this blog: To reduce length, a big part of this essay is gone: It was cut and pasted into my essay Pre Patriot Day before September eleventh of 2018 (See archives)

Two Youtube Footnotes:

~ “Only the good die young” has me thinking of a childhood folk song. 

I remember our old radio set, a set with no shell, just naked vacuum tubes and the speaker, with a fuzzy wire strung up the wall then along the cupboard to serve as an arial. One day, as a new folk song played, my haggard mother, in her plain cotton dress, whispered aloud each last name of each of the four idealists. This would have been very soon after the murder of Robert “Bobby” Kennedy. If only he had lived, and been elected president, then I just know… he would have promptly got us out of Vietnam…

For her version of the song, Mahalia Jackson, the “queen of gospel” added the last names. Here she is on Youtube. (link)

~Like art? Like Speeches? There is a public art sculpture of two deceased public speakers, idealists, reaching across ignorance towards each other. It is shown at the end of this public speech video, with added music, of Bobby on the night Martin died. (link) 

Schools within Society within Citizenship

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

...He (Ayama) believed a mistake of historical proportions may have been made as Japan prepared to deal with its future. The nation, he suggested, was producing workers rather than full citizens, and he once told me in passing, almost as a throwaway, that it was a great deal easier to produce a good car than it was to produce a good human being.

The Next Century, 126 hardcover pages, by David Halberstam, referenced in my essay archived June 2015

Hello Reader,

Notice how things are embedded in society?

Utah passed a law recently stating that children are allowed to play outside alone as well as walk or bike to school without parental supervision. It is the first law in the US of its kind. And the fact that it’s even needed in the first place kind of freaks me out.

From Mark Manson in his only 2018 April blog essay for non-subscribers. (link)

How grim. Manson goes on to explain that baby boomers, as part of their bizarre entitlement, see their kids as trophies to be shown off. Part of this means having their children well rounded and sent to enriching activities, even if this happens too much, even if natural “child’s play” must be “scheduled.” As must “play dates,” too. 

My formative years were of the 1950’s. A time when an “only child” was unusual. Our vocabulary did not include “play dates” or “helicopter parents.”

Back in my day children all attended their neighborhood school together. Maybe a city would have one vocationally oriented school, a school that would then usually turn out to surprise the teachers by garnering a bad reputation for having troubled youth. That was then. 

Now, in my own city, we have evolved a spaghetti snarl of bus routes as so many kids are crisscrossing the city going to special classes. This in perhaps the biggest city, by square miles, in the whole country. (And the fourth largest by population) The school bus costs are proving to be unsustainable for the taxpayers. The experts have no solutions.

…Easy for me to say it’s hopeless to give schools any thought; hard for me to think around the subject from an angle of ancient history. But I feel I have to try…

Meanwhile, over in sunny Greece, everybody knew that well rounded schools were the way to go. The children would be outside dancing and tumbling, reciting poetry, running relay races, singing, learning to strum the lyre, tackling geometry and rhetoric. The ancient Greeks had no problem doing all of this and the three R’s too: Reading, “Riting” and “‘Rithmatic”. Of course, our knowledge of Greek society comes from idealistic writing. 

Maybe, off the page, Greeks shared with each other ignoble, petty reasons for having their well rounded schools, like the reasons Mark Manson notes of our baby boomers; just as Americans, without saying the word hubris, had verbal reasons for keeping troops in the Republic of South Vietnam that didn’t get into history books. (Americans wrote of reasons such as honoring their word, saving the world from the spread of evil Godless communism and believing in South Vietnamese self determination)

I said “maybe.” In the end, if we want to be inspired by our Greco-Roman heritage (as well as our other two heritages, Christian and Hebrew) then we would do well to take the Greeks at their word. Greek parents would have been influenced by what adults told each other: “Not life, but a good life, is expected of every citizen.” As for that alien idea of having schools do nothing but specialize all day, every day, in the three Rs, Greek slogans included “moderation in all things” and “nothing in excess.”

As I see it, the Greeks understood in their very bones that the best way to maintain their freedom was with democracy, and the best way to maintain democracy was with good schools producing good human capital. The mighty Persian Empire, so close by, would have been instructive. Mighty, with a huge armed forces, but also with a vast unschooled public unused to freedom, unused to thinking for themselves. If once conquered, the downtrodden Persians would never rise up again. As Alexander the Great easily proved. Persians were like a giant chessboard where, if the king became resigned to his fate, all the pawns would surrender. Not like checkers. Not like in Greece, where every “citizen,” by definition, felt himself a king. For every new Greek generation the land would have to be re-conquered, or at least “occupied”—a word NOT in the (non-democratic) ancient world’s vocabulary.

Today Persia (Iran) and the adjoining Arab nations are rich in oil but very poor in people. Partly because their society has only a timid connection between merit and success—because of corruption and entitlement. A Canadian in the British army reports, in his recent memoirs, of being on manoeuvres with Arab soldiers. He looked over at an Arab mortar crew: The arabs didn’t even know how to aim their weapon properly… This makes sense: How could it possibly be otherwise? Armed forces are always embedded in the surrounding civil society.

I grew up poor and working class. Many years ago, back when I still thought university students knew a lot, and dreamed of being one myself, I stood outside the door of a classroom in the physical education building. I lost my innocence about white collar students when I heard a professor asking her class, like a mother talking to her simple children, “Why do you think the Spartan girls were encouraged to run to school?” Sparta, of course, fielded the best warriors of all the Greek city-states, being organized as the only "warrior-state" in Greece. She asked again. As I recall, with no answers forthcoming, at last she had to spell it out for her students: The women were to be strong, to raise strong warriors… Again the concept of the army reflecting the surrounding society.

So why, today, do certain Arabs and Muslims believe a girl should not even attend school? To me, one of the reasons is obvious: Surely so she won’t learn to think, and therefore won’t set an example in thinking for her children. So she won’t raise boys and girls who will question the king or dictator or ayatollah. 

From 1983, during the first decade of suicide bombers, is Memoir From the Women’s Prison (translated by Marilyn Booth) by Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian Muslim medical doctor and writer. She was politically imprisoned. On page 124, a guard is talking with a prisoner:

“I don’t know anything,” she said in a loud voice. “Not even how to read and write.”

“Why do you cover your face with a veil?” he asked.

“Because God commanded me to do so in his Noble Book.”

“How did you find that out? Have you read God’s book?”

She was silent for a moment. “I don’t read, but I heard it on the radio over at the neighbours….and I heard the Shaykh say that God has commanded all women to cover their faces.” 

On the cover of her book, old white haired Saadawi poses with an uncovered head.

To an Arab or Pakistani Muslim extremist it makes sense: Better to shoot an uppity fifteen year old schoolgirl in the head, like they did poor Malala, than to risk someday having a Greek-style entire generation of housewives who could think over new ideas and, say, ponder head coverings. The lands of Islam are fine already, say the gunmen, especially if we can return to older, purer Islam, so there’s no need to for Islamic people to take any chances of maybe, eventually, getting the separation of church and state, let alone (spits on the ground) democracy!

As I type this, dear reader, I feel a tad foolish, pointing out the obvious. But it’s not obvious to our Muslim teenagers who claim that Islam is under attack worldwide, or who would run off to join the Arab bombers and be-headers in their dark caliphate. And I won’t forget those university students needing to be mothered: Things aren’t obvious to them, either.

Our pioneer ancestors would take a day off from farming to raise a neigbor’s barn, or erect a community school. As our ancestors in Africa might say: It takes a village to raise a child, a society to raise a school. 

Schools: Not off in a bubble, not magically hopeless. We built them. We staff them. Surely we can open their windows to the light. 

Needless to say, no matter how many schools we have in our sad sorry world, there will always, for every time and space, be extremists. When my dad was much younger than I am now, he fought an army in which were embedded Hitler Youth. Because his army was “first in, first out,” Dad didn’t have to stick around for the occupation of Germany. But if he had, he could have told the Germans: “Whatever schools you choose to have, will mean the citizens you deserve.”

Sean Crawford

Calgary,

North of Utah

June

2018

Postscript: 

“I am starting to think. Thank you.” A student

Considering my opening quote from Ayama, on producing good human beings, and then seeking for proof that schooling could be effective, I found a standing-ovation Ted Talk by a man from Microsoft. 

Without using the word citizen, he represents the ideal of responsibility beyond oneself. He cofounded a postsecondary school that effectively trains the leaders (that is, the nation’s educated) to look beyond themselves, to feel less entitled and more responsible. (Link)

Footnote: For schools today, for a criticism of the newest new math, espoused by people who don't know why there was an older "new math," see my essay archived March 2014.

Literary Musings: I have been thinking of the young adult science fiction novels from the 1950’s of Robert Heinlein. 

In one, a beggar suddenly surprises his son by showing that he can juggle. The son, who as a member of the beggar class will never need algebra, gets tutored in math by his father, and discovers that algebra is worthwhile for it’s own sake.

In another, a mid-west high school boy takes extra classes to get into engineering school, including taking Latin. (Which comes in handy when he meets a time traveling legionary) In another, an old asteroid belt prospector complains to two brothers about uneducated kids these days: “Quote a bit of Latin at them, and they look at you like you’re funny in the head.”

I think Heinlein and his generation must have been raised to be aware of the ancient Greeks believing in well-rounded schools, and well rounded citizens.

Citizenship and Aeroplanes

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Citizen,

got aircraft?

Unfortunately for my health, I am not a frequent flyer. This year, I’ve only flown to Arizona once. (Mainly for a music festival) Last year, only once to Arizona and London. (Mainly for the British Museum) 

Just now I am very tired, all day everyday, wearing extra layers, while my throat is sore: side glands tender, hard to swallow. I’ve been like this for ten days, and I expect another ten or twenty more days.

What happened? you ask. Easy: I was sitting in my seat, by the window, (because flying is still new and exciting for me) feeling cold for over half an hour before I noticed I just wasn’t warming up, and finally asked myself what was wrong. I looked up. That stupid nozzle that delivers air to my individual seat had been left on, full blast. Blasting cold molecules from the other passengers straight at my eyes and nose. 

You might hope an aircraft could carry enough air, compressed into tanks, to supply air for the entire flight. No. Some aircraft of the 1930’s did, but it’s not practical on a large scale. You might think a modern jet’s turbo fans could bring in complete fresh air during the entire flight. Yes, indeed some aircraft do. In fact, I read a news article where a man had memorized the few remaining passenger planes that did so, in order to avoid all the other planes: He wasn’t going to take any chances with his health. But most of us can’t do that, because most aircraft, although “pressurized” are also using a big percentage of recycled air. It saves money. Hence the airborne pathogens.

Now, I don’t expect most passengers to remember before they disembark to turn off their individual seat overhead reading light. But please-please-please turn off that stupid air nozzle! Sure, you might claim you expect frequent flyers to check their nozzle when they first sit down, as a matter of course. My response: There are new babies being born every day that are not yet frequent flyers. Me neither.

How has air travel changed citizenship?

To answer, I must first look to the classical ideals of citizenship, even if we no longer live by such ideals. It’s like what Peter Drucker advised a business board: First know what’s Right, before you start to compromise. You may think of this essay as being a continuation of Citizenship and Belonging, from April of 2018, complete with references to writer Robert Heinlein. 

Classical citizenship used to be taught on our continent; for example, each of the 1930’s high school textbooks I grew up with made a point of saying the apostle Paul had to travel slowly, by sea, all the way to Rome, for his trial for the crime of being a Christian. That was his right as a Roman citizen. A nation of less-than-Romans could not try him.  “Less than?” I’m no anthropologist, but I guess a certain sense of city-state superiority was very useful in an age when people might go to war against innocent humans, or go imperialize, or march off to a nearby city-state for a quick slave raid. 

(Note: Becoming enslaved, in classical times, was a sign of bad luck, not racial inferiority. No one, for example, said the Trojans were racially inferior, while every Greek was pleased to have them as slaves after the fall of Troy)

Back when the Europeans were competing with each other, up until the mid-century world war, “race” could mean which side of a European river you grew up on. (According to old books in the university library) Now that they have a European Union, I guess they don’t need to divide into races. Since the end of the war, and the ending of the European colonies (India became free in the late 1940’s) and the ever increasing aircraft and international trade, racism has dwindled alongside the decline of imperialism… Wow, imagine the things my father must have seen in his lifetime: After the ten year winter of the Great Depression, he came back from the war and watched a marvellously growing world! 

I grew up in a postwar suburb. One of our old school textbooks was Lands of Europe and Asia, where we learned that Australia had a “whites only” immigration policy. But once trade with Asia boomed…er, well… Today the visible make up of Australia is like the Pacific coast city of Vancouver, Canada, or so I was told back in the 1970’s by a traveler. I had asked him after a young pretty Chinese lady named Pien had called me “Shone” with her pretty Australian accent. (Or was it a New Zealand accent? The world is so close together now)

If the Greek city-states each so highly valued their citizenship then it was not for trade, imperialism or, say, to stiffen their backbone as they stood in fearful line of battle for national defence, however super-critical such defence might be. No. “Citizenship” was for the bedrock purpose of democracy and freedom. By valuing their citizenship, people valued participating in a government of the people. 

There is a scene in a 1950’s novel where a teacher in a high school civics class pins a First Place blue ribbon, for a track race, on a boy. In Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers the student responds angrily, forgetting to respect his teacher: “You know darn well I came in third!” The scene is to illustrate, I think, that in Greco-Roman times citizenship was valued not because it was a label pasted on by accident of birth, but earned through actions “of the people and by the people,” on an ongoing basis, throughout each person’s lifetime, for the goal of maintaining democracy. Earned like a blue ribbon. Like the military title of private, the proud title of citizen was earned and re-earned on a daily basis.

Unless maybe your parents grew up during the Great Depression, or you’ve seen those old closet-less tiny houses in Boston, it may be hard to remember how non-affluent the colonists were. Some one told me a rich and famous founding father’s entire wardrobe could fit on a single row of pegs. Despite their lack of affluence, all the colonists, even dirt poor frontier tree line farmers, would have known a little about classical democracy. 

It was part of their cultural heritage: Farmers had their New Testament, of course. Poems back then had classical references and symbolism. The constellations were Greek, the very planets had Greco-Roman names. 

The lack of affluence was stark: People, in those non-affluent days, arrived in the colonies on a one-way ticket. Benjamin Franklin later left America to become ambassador to France, but I don’t know of any founding father who could afford to cross the Ocean Blue just for fun. 

People from Scotland sang once a year, to remember their left-behind, “Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind…” Truly a ticket was only one-way, across a vast sea of time…

—Forgive me, dear reader, but I feel I must stop here. For reasons of length. Not to insult your attention span, but because, despite my writerly enthusiasm, I don’t want to bore myself if I chance upon this piece a year from now. That, and go, “Oh dear, did I inflict all this at once on my poor readers?”

So Part Two can wait, wherein I will carry these old concepts on into the modern day, and see how they fit.

Sean Crawford,

lately out of Sky Harbor,

April

2018

Footnote: In her book Starting From Scratch, Rita Mae Brown points out that until the horrors of the First World War, our western heritage drew from three great streams: Christian, Hebrew and Greco-Roman. Then we foolishly dropped the latter, and now we have only two streams. Such a dreadful pity. A lot of cultural shorthand symbols have been lost.