How You Learn

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Have you seen JoJo Rabbit, the current Oscar-nominated movie about the boy in the Hitler Youth? Two men I knew separately here in town were in the Youth, and so was my favorite business writer—luckily he left Germany before the war broke out.

Hello Reader,

Got an idea how you learn?

Prologue 

As faithful readers know: Of course I like being self-indulgent by writing a post about me or my blog, but only after I have filled up a full page of 25 weekly essay titles. Well, today marks another 25.

How You Learn

So, how are you managing your life? Are you becoming ever better, ever learning more about yourself and your business or hobby? Let’s not expect too much. My old telephone answering machine went, “If you know what you are doing, leave a message. If not, join the club.” Every caller, laughing, was already in the club.

Originally, the word “managing” meant “coping.” If today the meaning has shifted, if today we instinctively put the word “business” in front of “management” then it’s because my favorite business writer of all time quit his job during the middle of the Great Depression. There he was, a successful Wall Street analyst, when he asked himself: “Do I want to be the richest man in the cemetery?” In other words, was he living his values? That man was Peter Drucker. 

He went on to make the “practise of management” something that could be learned and taught, and caused universities to start up a faculty of Commerce, (business) because his observations and writings fell between the domains of Economics and Sociology—a new faculty was needed. Drucker’s first book was The End of Economic Man, with a forward by a German friend who wanted to “burn his bridges” against the Nazis. Drucker’s first famous book was The Concept of the Corporation where he interpreted General Motors, with it’s separate divisions, as being unlike historical companies such as, say, Ford. (Apparently Henry Ford didn’t want maximum independence and leadership in his managers, instead seeing them as his helpers) 

I have read everything by Drucker I can get my hands on, including his memoirs. 

(Wherein I found a smoking gun from his compatriot Henry Kissinger documenting that the U.S. government was secretly causing inflation)

We can’t all be a Peter Drucker, but just as he did, each of us can live, look and learn.

If for today’s post I write about styles of learning then it’s not for my ego, but because I have something interesting things to say… and because, according to Drucker, I am learning the way Sir Winston Churchill did—I’ll get back to Churchill.

But first: Right now the local bookstore is carrying On Managing Yourself, as part of a Harvard Business School series of books, each book with ten top articles on a given topic. Unsurprisingly, the first article in the book was by Drucker, called—such a classic title—“Managing Oneself.” Everybody knows that a manager or Chief Executive Officer has to be—to quote a cliche—“a lifelong learner.” Where Drucker surprised me was when he said that many people “don’t know how they learn.”  But they should.

President John F. Kennedy learned by reading. He would have his agents prepare written reports for him: Think of the brilliant writers in Camelot, and of John Kenneth Galbraith writing letters (now published) back from foreign embassies to educate JFK. 

President Harry S Truman learned by hearing: Think of his cronies playing poker in the White House as part of his “kitchen cabinet.” 

Drucker reports about a CEO who “… was in the habit of calling his entire senior staff into his office once a week and then talking at them for two or three hours…he simply needed an audience to hear himself talk. That’s how he learned.” A successful CEO, I might add.

Reading Drucker, years ago, I wondered: Am I a reader or a listener? I only found out when I was middle aged at university. Around that time, my company Vice President told me I was an “oral learner.” One day in class it was my turn, for my small group, to teach us a seminar:  There I was, just talking away about Thomas Paine, when suddenly a lady burst out: “(I just realized) You’re an oral learner! My LD kids talk like you!” (Learning Disability) A useful mirror, since I can’t see myself. 

No wonder I would study in the student bar by "talking" to myself, pretending I was explaining something. I guess I’m like Drucker’s CEO. And of course my speeches for Toastmasters are composed not at a desk but while walking along talking. (silently) As I explained in my essay about Hacking Together a Speech, archived November 2018.

As for essays and speeches, Paul Graham, like me, enjoys doing both. Unlike me, he is a famous web essayist and keynote speaker. Graham believes a grown up’s essay, unlike the ones schoolboys write, does NOT start out with a topic sentence to be proved, but as something flowing along where you don’t know everything yet. You write the essay to find out something new.

I don’t know whether Winston Churchill composed his speeches by just flowing along the way I do. What I do know blows me away: According to Drucker, during his schoolboy days Winston got poor marks, as did others who shared his learning trait: Churchill learned in a way not recognized by the education system—not by reading, and not by listening in class. He learned by writing. And today? The boy who did so poorly in school now has his writing studied by students of composition. (I have yet to write as well as he)

Knowing this about Churchill sheds new light on some of my blog essays. For example, for my essay comparing Trust and Ugly Americans. (Archived September 2019) I didn’t realize how being an Ugly Americans meant not trusting the natives, (Such as Iraqis) nor truly understand the individual I wrote about, (even though I had worked with him) not until after I had left the job and then wrote my essay. How strange.

Epilogue: 

I see I have managed to work this essay around to me and my blog. How sweet.

During the next 25 weeks I’ll listen and read as always. And, if I truly want to learn, then I’ll also speak and write. At long last, after another 25 titles, I may be self indulgent by writing about me and my blog, reporting on what I’ve learned during those precious weeks.

Sean Crawford

Central London

February

2010

Note: 

My last meta-blog essay (following 25 posts) was Summer Blog Reflections, archived August 2019.

Reference:

On Managing Yourself, Harvard Business Review Press, Boston Massachusetts

The About the Contributors list has a line:

Peter Drucker was a professor of social science and management at Claremont Graduate University in California.

To my fellow writers: 

As a self-respecting adult, today I couldn’t bear to use a typical schoolboy “in conclusion” ending.

As for my seminar research about Thomas Paine, I repackaged it and sold it as a feature article to Falstaff's Table: We writers re-use everything we can. 

Paul Graham’s long list of essays includes three about writing essays.

The one I reference is Age of the Essay (link)

 (The other two are The list of n Things; Persuade xor Discover; plus one on Writing, briefly) 

For President Kennedy, his middle initial has a period because it stands for Fitzgerald.

For President Truman, his middle initial has no period because it doesn’t stand for anything.

I have copied a part of Churchill’s composition word for word, like an art student copying a master. Alas, I’m still a journeyman.

To my fellow readers:

I am so pleased to have collected various big volumes by Churchill from various antique stores. Not abridged! 

One of Churchill’s chapters is about his days among daring young men and their flying machines. Mechanical problems were common, forcing you to land at another aerodrome and motor your way back to the one where your young peers are wining and dining after their own harrowing flights. The best aviator of them all, one evening, wasn’t there. But there had been no reports of a crash on land. They waited, candles burned down, and at last they realized the truth… The abridged paperback ends: “He flew forever beyond mortal ken.”

Back-trail of Essays and Blogs

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Do you like broccoli? 

Here is an essay that, like the "broccoli movie" Ghandi, is "good for you."

Tis a nostalgia piece, a re-run, from back when blogs could be substantial like the articles in Sunday newspapers. Whatever happened to those days?

But first, a new headnote, from the blog of Seth Godin for October 26, 2019:

If we only forward the easy, short and funny things we read online, why are we surprised that our inbox is filled with nothing we’ll remember tomorrow?

What would happened if instead, we shared the most complex, useful and thoughtful things we discovered instead?

Here it is, my 75^th post. My astute readers will have noticed that for every 25 “postings” I do a piece explaining essays. I say “posting,” not “blog,” because hey, I’m not a blogger: I’m an essayist. But today I'll try to explain blogs too.

When telling people I have a hobby of writing, I merely say I write “nonacademic” essays, and leave it at that. I couldn’t begin to explain in just a sound bite how the essays school kids learn to write are—ahem!— for kids. In the wider world essays start out with different goals and functions, and of course follow different forms. Open any magazine and see: An adult essay never ends with “in conclusion;” it very seldom begins with a topic sentence as a thesis to be “proven.” Such writing would be “bad form.”

I’ve heard that essays in The New Yorker will begin by meandering along and then finally, at the bottom of the first page, announce the topic. This form allows busy New Yorkers, in their fast-paced city, a nice chance to stop rushing… and fix on something that rewards an adult attention span. I wish internet blogs were simularly aimed at adults.

It was a guy with a decent attention span, Paul Graham, who inspired me to do my own internet essays. Graham noted, in his Age of the Essay, that the internet had existed for a few years before people figured out they could use it for blogs. (web log or public diary, with people's comments) His hope was that soon people would figure out they could use it for essays too. This hasn’t happened yet, and I’m losing hope it ever will. So far, no one else writes wide ranging essays like Graham, while my number of bookmarked essayists I can count on the fingers of one hand—not including my thumb. 

I was at university when personal computers arrived for the public—but not for the university, not yet. Computers weren’t quite an everyday topic of conversation for people, not nearly as often as when color TVs or 10-speeds arrived, but still there was a trace of the old “left out” feeling if you didn’t have one. Naturally, among us starving students, only the nerds were motivated enough to get one. After all, a computer cost more than a used car.

I remember, back then, being at a seminar of people from Strategic Studies. Some one asked why armies still had those big expensive all-too-vulnerable tanks. I quipped, “Tanks are like personal computers: Everyone knows you should have them… but no one knows quite what to do with them.” As for computers, what we did with them was do household accounts, write letters, address envelopes and, uh… mostly guys resorted to playing computer games like Space Invaders.

At last came the World Wide Web. Meanwhile, at the university, at this time, there was a very long hallway, enclosed from the elements, running along the entire back length of the physical education building. I was probably the only one to notice that, on a campus of eager helpful opinionated young scholars, no one had posted anything at all. And of course no one posted “comment threads” of replies. 

Soon the nerds began “surfing” and their word entered our vocabulary. But many students still preferred to put their money on a car. At this time the student radio station magazine, Vox, ran a skeptical editorial. The editor noted that guys who wouldn’t be comfortable in a bathing suit were preaching the joy of surfing to find out, say, how to fix their bicycle. From his cozy music hangout amidst a crowded friendly campus the editor’s question was: Can’t I reach out to living people to ask how to fix a bike?

Today, when everyone knows computers are a Good Thing, the reply to that music-loving editor would be, “Yes but—…there’s so much stuff out there.” 

“Yes, I know I should get out and mingle with people, but…” 

“Yes, I know I have all the social skills of a zombie, but that’s why I honestly prefer to stay at the computer playing zombie wars.”

I have sympathy but no answers. I have no idea as to when the line is crossed: When does being in a cybernetic community of bloggers, with words on my cold backlit screen, become an escape from my real local community? I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s image of a dog stopping by a sidewalk vending machine so a cybernetic arm could come out and pet him. 

As for me, I too like to escape. Sometimes I escape away from reading stuff I will long remember, away from essays or that zombie book World War Z, (which I recommend) into reading fluffy forget-me-right-away blogs. “Yes, but— why do blogs seem to outnumber essays by a zillion to one?”

Because: Essays take more effort. I think of that long phys ed hallway. I guess it follows logically that people who wouldn’t make the effort to post with real paper onto a big hallway won’t make any effort for essays even when they finally have access to a computer. Contrawise, the non-college folks who wouldn’t normally write anything, the folks who, before telephone rates were de-regulated, (lowered) would rather make awfully expensive long-distance-phone-calls than write letters, will now write a blog.

* * *

I like young university students. At the same time, being middle-aged, and having been raised working class, I have an old blue-collar perspective. I’m aware that during the 1950’s the “slicks” were fast disappearing. These were the magazines with slick pages giving the world such things as True Romance and True Confessions. My waitress Sue, who reads pretty slowly when she reads aloud, would have liked them. She loves her Stephen King, but the other stuff? She can get it from television.

Yes, TV killed the slicks, and it killed the pulps too. Sue doesn’t blog herself, by the way, but it seems to me that a lot of her friends who type madly onto the blogosphere are literate but not readers. Not of books. They are typists, but not writers. Not for abstract thought. Naturally they wouldn’t care for essays.

I like Sue; I had her over to my housewarming party. She likes me too, yet obviously I would never expect her, let alone her friends, to read my essays. However, when it comes to ignoring my stuff, what is my excuse for any surfer with a university degree, let alone a degree in something considered extra smart like Computer Science? Of course I wouldn’t expect them to literally read my stuff, but I am surprised to find they don’t read anyone’s essays at all. 

Some of the computer “guys”—they don’t merit the honorific “nerds”—are like Sue: they seemingly can’t read or write. How bizarre. As it happens, I already knew there was such a thing as a university graduate who doesn’t read books. Now I am finding that some of them can barely even read a longer blog.

I say this after reading the comments on the blog of one of my four bookmarked essayists, Stevey, who writes for computer programmers. I like Stevey’s humor. For me, a nonprogrammer, half of his stuff I can tell is real good but it’s like trying to read The Jabberwocky. Happily, the other half I get. In Stevey’s post of January 7^th, 2008, Blogging Theory 201: Size Does Matter, he explains how he decides on his blog length. He looks at reading duration

“… and some folks like to read slowly. Heck, some don’t even read at all. It’s one of the amazing miracles of the internet: write-only people. They won’t read but they somehow find a way to write. You see them comment in all the time in my blogs: ‘I didn’t actually read your entry, but allow me to comment on it all the same…’ Lovely.”

I know what he means. I have read too many such comments for Stevey, complaints that his pieces (A) are too long or (B) … should be written as a sound bite. My reaction: “WTF?” They don’t get it that Stevey writes “long,” by their standards, to serve a purpose. Part of their problem is their expectations for “blogs” as being “short.” What’s a man to do… put up a headline “Essays by Stevey?” They’d still complain.

Never mind. All I can do is mutter that quote from Mark Twain. (~)

Expectations by readers are one thing. What are the expectations of the actual bloggers?

* * *

By “bloggers” I exclude the good folks of LiveJournal, as they seem to live in a nice sunny world of their own. Many other bloggers, though, seem to live in a grayer more competitive sphere… As a man from Tennessee says, “our grandparents lived in a troop of monkeys,” with a hierarchy, and therefore people tend to do a lot of comparing. In the real world some people genuinely believe in having a “mono-value,” a simplistic judgmental one-dimension criterion of “money.”

In the blog world a good many truly believe in the value of statistics: simplistically counting the “hits” on their site, or even hits on specific posts. I have even read where a few people were nasty and competitive for who has the best “stats.” Happily, I’ve also read many postings of generous advice on how to increase page hits. For some folks it might be healthier to ignore stats and simply see their blog as a chance for an ephemeral conversation. In other words, as being simply social.

But if a blogger, similar to an essayist, is striving for posts of lasting value, then I doubt the wisdom of choosing to have a mono-value of “stats.” Or, for that matter, having any mono-value in one's life. It’s too easy to be trapped. Graham once reported in an essay that after he received stock in his tech company he suddenly just couldn’t help evaluating his every action by “how it would affect the stock,” rather than “how it would affect the work.” And I once read on a U.S. waiter’s blog where every day, all day, he kept up a mental cost-benefit of how each customer was doing, value-wise, as a tipper. (In fairness, U.S. waiters are paid very little compared to waiters here)

It is money, I am sure, that is the root of some of the competitiveness, as certain bloggers desperately need to advertise their small business or generate funding from running advertisements on their blog. As for me, in my everyday job, as a “professional,” I am legally constrained from having a mono-value of money.

As a "blogger," I could simply type a one-sentence essay, “When you’re hot, you’re hot; when you’re not, you’re not.” After I gave it a catchy title, All I know about sex I could hit the “post” button and watch it get more hits than any other page I wrote. So much for stats.

Lately I’ve been following blogger Penelope Trunk (her pen name) who has a background as a business columnist. She writes on life and careers in a blog that includes lessons from her own life, even some awfully personal stuff. I should expect her blog to include archives. And I’m right, it does. I should also expect that she would write with pride, with substance, with a belief that her pieces have some lasting value. And I do. But her fans don’t. If they comment on a post that is any older than the food in my fridge, then they apologize. My reaction: WTF? I don’t expect a column post to be as lasting as an essay post, but still, I expect that Penelope put a modicum of tender loving care into her baby with hope for its future. And then to have people apologize…

When I am writing or public speaking I know I have made a connection when someone’s eyes light up and they say, “Yes! Let me tell you what happened to me!” In other words, when they feel moved to comment. So don’t apologize.

Of course many blogs, like those of Sue’s dear friends, are expected to be social, with easy social comments. As ephemeral as flowers, they are supposed to be for persons who are attention-span-challenged. Fine by me. I guess. Sure… but I admit I lose patience when I see this blog after blog … After blog. Perhaps this relates to the common wisdom that to be a “success,” as in have “successful” stats, you must blog several times per week, preferably daily. My reaction? (Besides WTF?): You can forget any lasting value.

Maybe that 20^th century Chicago columnist Johnny Deadline can be smart every day, but no one else can. As it happens, the competitive bloggers have proven, in black and white, based on their stats, that their readers will desert them in droves if their blog frequency falls off to (horrors!) once a week. My reaction: What the—! Who are these readers? And why would I “give a care” about them? So I can compete for stats? I’m no dog at a vending machine.

* * *

…What I find hard to wrap my head around is how people can leave a negative comment when they have only skimmed a piece, and have thereby badly misinterpreted things. If it is morally wrong to comment to censor a novel, without first carefully reading the novel, then it is also wrong to write in to censure a writer unless you first carefully read his piece.

This I believe: You have no right to injure the feelings of the writer, and to injure the community of readers, unless you are willing to take responsibility to read. To do otherwise is a vice. As you know, a “vice” is self-gratification at the expense of the community.

Essayist Scott Berkun takes a gentler view. Last week, for his June 16essay-blog on Why you are not an Artist he added to the comments: 

The fascinating thing so far in this post is how many people seem to have skimmed it. It’s very hard to defend myself against things I didn’t quite say : ) 

I see Scott added a smiley emoticon. Before I totally lose my sense of smiley face humor, tossing around words like vice, I had best leave today’s subject of fluffy Blogs to return to today’s other solid subject: Essays. Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to go from fluffy cotton candy to solid potatoes. Especially when I’m feeling uninterested in explaining essays these days. You see, I’ve recently overdosed on explanations. I discovered in a used bookstore, while passing through Kamloops, a decade’s worth of annuals of The Best American Essays. That’s a decade’s worth of introductions regarding: What is an Essay?

Here is a sentence by Joseph Epstein from his forward to the 1993 volume:

"I prefer it when the essay takes a small, very particular subject and, through the force of the essayist’s artistically controlled maunderings, touches on unpredictably large general matters, makes hitherto unexpected connections, tells me things I hadn’t hitherto known, or reminds me of other things I had already known but never thought to formulate so well as has the essayist I am reading at the moment."

After spitting the cotton candy out of my teeth for such solid food, I have nothing left to say.

Sean Crawford

In Cyberspace 

(Hello Lain!)

And in Calgary

June 2010,  February 2020

Footnotes
~A look at the blog world as of 2003 by writer John Scalzi
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2003/06/16/reader-request-2-life-online/ 

~Speaking of statistics, I am surprised that people are skipping from my home page to this page, but not my to my more recent Polite Blogs one. How strange.

Update: Comedian George Carlin changed his life and career when—lightbulb!—he stopped having laughter as his mono stat for the success of his stage comedy, as he explained in his autobiography.

~For my blog website I am the "administrators" of the site. I have a lined accountant's page, where page titles older than the food in my freezer can be seen at a glance. Any new comments there show up in vivid colored ink. 

Update: I can click on "comments" to read them all, listed in reverse order.

~Real writers, when it comes to old pieces, find satisfaction in (ongoing royalties and) comments.

~Mark Twain said, “A person who won’t read has no advantage over the person who can’t read.”

Knowing Sarah Connor

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

It was two years before my father was born that a few suffragettes got other women in Canada the vote. At the time it was hoped that women, on becoming part of democracy, might be a civilizing influence for world peace. But I guess there are not enough people like Sarah. 

Sean Crawford, excerpt from below

Hello Reader,

Remember Sarah?

In the wake of the third Terminator movie—the others don't count; it has sure been a long time since T2—I decided to re-run a post by my idealistic younger self from ten years ago.

But first:
Here's what full-time writer and former journalist John Scalzi said on his blog, Whatever, for November 3, 2019:

As I walked out of the film last night I posted a five word recommendation of this film: “It gets Sarah Connor right.” This actually matters because despite the name of films, the “Terminator” films are about Sarah Connor, and the arc of her life dealing with the terrible fate that life has dealt her: Victim to fighter to avenger. Sarah Connor is realistically (within the context of these films) damaged by this fate of hers; particularly in this film she’s a PTSD wreck. And, well, she would be, wouldn’t she. It’s important that the Terminator films show her this way. It’s for better or worse the grounding the films need to make every other absurd thing that happens in them function on the level of plausibility.

My old blog essay:
Having a hatred for war and a fondness for feminists, I have a soft spot for the tormented Sarah Connor in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Sarah is a single mother who knows that an atomic war is coming but instead of being paralyzed by her knowledge of Judgment Day she is determined to do whatever she can. One might assume that T2 is violent, (yes) action-filled (yes) and ... nonfeminist. (no) No, it is a moral movie: To see Sarah is to glimpse feminism. 

 For several years I was a nonvoting member of the University of Calgary Women's Collective and Resource Center. One of the other males at the center did that thing where a man dresses in spongy body armor head to toe, (cap-a-pie) and then the women are encouraged to hit him as hard as they can. The results may go beyond learning literal self-defense: On a metafilter web site a woman describes how from such practice she swiftly became empowered to react differently in so many aspects of her life. Feminists believe in empowerment.

 Were I to hit a man in such armor, my first blow would likely be at half strength, but then my next blow would probably land at mostly full strength. For a number of women, though, blow after blow is delivered at only a teeny fraction of what they are capable of: such is the power of social conditioning. Call it “learned helplessness.” In all fairness, those same women would strike desperately hard if their child was being threatened. I respect Sarah Connor for her self empowerment to strike hard: Not only does she learn to use various military weapons but even after she has a life sentence to the insane asylum-prison, even when her life is over —or at least into limbo— she is determined to stay as physically fit as she can. In that hopeless jail, if she has nice muscles, it has nothing to do with attracting men—she is trying to Be Ready. 

Of course feminists can attract boyfriends and have families and worry about their children. Sarah’s tribulations are during the cold war, when all children, worldwide, are at risk. Some day our grandchildren may be baffled at how we could learn to live with the horror of missile silos, but we did, the same way we could ignore how women didn’t have equal rights: Humans are good at denial. During those dread times we could choose to try our best to stave off Armageddon, or we could be passive.

In those strange days when most people would wimp out, be overwhelmed, throw up their hands in defeat...
if I felt like Crazy Eddie who, after being condemned by the king to death, got the king to commute his death sentence "for one year" so that he could "teach the king's horse to sing..."
 then, in those trying times, I could always depend on the Women's Movement to keep up with me, to keep slogging away at my side. Feminists believe in peace.

 When a man confronted Eddie for being crazy enough to think a horse could ever sing, Eddie answered gaily, "A lot can happen in a year. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might learn to sing."

As a boy I learned the lyrics to a spiritual: "...Joshua fit (fought) the battle of Jericho, and the wall come a-tumbling down." During those years when I was encouraging people to "hold on," to "never give up," because there might be a miracle, I never imagined that one day a horse over in Berlin would sing. Sarah never gives up. She can't: She can't forget the vision of herself in a gingham dress, which Sarah could never wear, in a park with her children, whom Sarah could never know. Who can forget seeing her other self and the children in that searing wind of death? Not Sarah. She won’t dial down her consciousness. Feminists are willing to know things.

 Given her obsessed lifestyle, with no chance to attend a weekly women’s consciousness raising group, it is unlikely Sarah would stop to think long enough to call herself a feminist. But she acts like one. Sarah is barren of sisterhood yet in her lonely way, she finds a philosophy.

In T2 she angrily confronts a scientist, Dr. Dyson, who will soon be largely responsible for triggering our Day of Judgment. Losing her temper she yells that people like him kill because they cannot create life, cannot feel a child growing. In the book version by Randall Frakes she goes on to point out that men's version of creating is to give their name to the guns that they create. Meanwhile, the Calgary Police Service has adopted a new service pistol and wouldn't you know, it is named after Mr. Glock.

 In my young adulthood I watched as a few "woman's libbers" got other women the freedom to have jobs as notary publics and judges, doctors and police officers. We take this for granted now, but not then. It was two years before my father was born that a few suffragettes got other women the vote. At the time it was hoped that women, on becoming part of democracy, might be a civilizing influence for world peace. But I guess there are not enough people like Sarah. 

 My own mother believed in peace, but I can't deny there are other cultures, equal to ours in the sight of Allah, but not the same as ours: There are places where mothers teach their children to hold on to a double standard for women, and for foreigners, to hold fast to their hatred, and, in the end, to value hatred over peace. “Oh well,” says Eddie and I, “at least in my father's lifetime no two democracies have ever declared war on each other, so perhaps as democracy spreads...?”

Democracy is where two heads are better than one. Sarah, unfortunately, has little access to the democratic give and take of free speech. Bereft of a circle of empowering sisters she is alone with her knowledge of the coming horror...

 Alone, Sarah almost destroys her soul but then she suffers a child to be her call unto sanity. As young John says to someone else, "Don't you get it? Haven't you learned anything? You can't go around killing people." And Sarah cries.

 Feminism, being for equality, includes men too. As my dictionary says, it means “political and social and economic equality to men.” I am picturing, from just before "women's liberation," a “power to the people” 1960’s male activist: As he feels confident and equal, as he feels truly empowered, then he will no longer need the silly crutch of having women make the coffee.

A feminist visiting Sarah's asylum would ask if the patients, men and women, are being empowered to be all they can be, by growing as much as they can, by making as many decisions as they can. Democracy in America, as the French observer De Tocqueville once explained in his 1835 classic, is where a free people make little decisions, often, so they will grow fit for making big decisions, occasionally, at the voting booth. Perhaps democracy, then, is a prerequisite for people to be motivated to even care to know what growth is, let alone care, Allah willing, for the growth of women.

 When I first saw Sarah she was a simple girl. An emissary from the future warned her: She was going to find strength she never knew she had, grow in ways she never thought possible. And grow she did. 

 Sarah reminds me of my own world. It wasn't very long ago that editors would not publish Andrew Vasche's mysteries about an ex-con, Burke, who fights child pornography rings, because nobody could believe such rings of men and women existed. Now we believe. Feminists, at first feeling alone, and being told they were crazy, have helped us to know that such horror exists.

If Judgment Day is a moral movie then it must have karma. It's only right that a shrink who messed with Sarah's mind has his own mind blown, such is the shrink’s karma, but what of Doctor Dyson? How could a husband and father have a rendezvous with death? Easy: Because of Cyberdine Industries.

 That's where a suspended pteradactal alludes to nuclear winter, where their secret vault requires two keys, turned simultaneously, to open up. When I was a child during the cold war hearing the sad air raid sirens being tested, “sorrrrrryy,” we all knew that if the man in Washington ever “pressed the button” it took two keys to empty out the silos. In that vault at Cyberdine was the “button." There rested the preposterous robot hand and the impossibly advanced chip. 

Dyson saw. He was a scientist and citizen who knew that science and democracy requires questions and transparency, knowing that if an invention requiring a previous series of steps suddenly appears, then either the steps have been kept secret or the device has been stolen; he was a scholar who knew how to search the science literature and scrutinize the newspaper files, those files which would have led him to Sarah Connor's story; he was a man of planet Earth who knew we all must be alert to question strange new paths of death, from factories putting mercury down pipes into the sushi of Tokyo bay, to pesticide sprays killing the higher animals, to fluorocarbons rising up to blast the ozone; … and so when Dyson was ordered, "don't ask!" and when he agreed not to question that button in the vault, when he passed along those orders, when he silenced an idealistic young long haired scientist, then, like a good Muslim German, he failed in his duty as a scientist, citizen, scholar and moral human being. Dyson failed.

 "The future is not set," said the emissary to Sarah Connor. "There is no fate but what we make." I agree. I believe devoutly, “Our greatest enemy is despair.”

 So hurray for Sarah! For me it is almost worth the price of admission just to see, for one second, my hero do a victory hop and skip in the prison hallway. In that second I see a human being go from victim to survivor, from shuffling peasant to purposeful citizen. In that moment I see our lady of holy fire: Sarah will always create her own empowerment.

Sean Crawford
Still traveling through time,

at one second per second,
November
Calgary
2019

footnotes:

~For more on karma and morality, see my essay Morality, Boys and Hollywood, originally entitled Terminators and Boys, of July 2013.

~I still get homesick reading the pre-feminist 1940's Martian Chronicles. We had thought the future was set, that we were fated to more gadgets but no social change.

~Roll call:  Alexander Kalishnikov, (AK-47), Heckler and Koch, (HK33), Mills bombs, (British grenades) Maxim, Vickers, Samual Colt, Henry Derringer, Gatling, Winchester, Browning,  Beretta, Martini-Henry (Kipling's troops) Lee-Enfield (my dad's rife) Ross (the infamous dysfunctional rifle) Gerber (the commando knife) ... and others too, down a long line.

~The biggest surprise ovation I will ever receive was at a weekly (for ten weeks) peace meeting.

The meetings were so big that a huge lecture theater proved inadequate for the first meeting; (people were sitting in the aisles) we subsequently had to use a music recital hall. Most of us were from off campus.

After someone complained about the futility of declaring the campus a "nuclear free zone" I said that yesterday I felt the same, but here, today, I was trying to be positive, for such declarations are not an end but a means to an end, a way of moving us further along the road to a solution that we cannot conceive of yet. 

Without mentioning Crazy Eddie I reminded them of other unpredictable miracles such as Alcoholics Anonymous and stopping the White (A-bomb) Train, miracles that offered a way out from a hopeless terminal condition.

I said building peace is like everyone working together on a giant mural while you can only see the one little leaf that you are painting so painstakingly. You don't just quit. Instead you have a blurred vision of this big world that we are all working towards... And then, starting from off on the right, everyone in the hall applauded long and loud in solidarity.

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.