Author: Peter Freilinger

So tomorrow (today? I’m not sure when I’ll finish this) is Father’s Day in the United States, a completely idiotic holiday which we refer to locally as a “Hallmark holiday”, which is to say that it has no real organic origin but was invented to sell greeting cards. Mother’s Day, for instance, is a maudlin holiday invented by Republican PR specialists to remember and honour the mothers of those killed in the Civil War (and, specifically, those killed for the Union side), and thus really is not a Hallmark holiday. Father’s Day, on the other hand, evolved over time to encourage middle class families to spend more on gin, cigars, neckties, and prime ribeye steaks in mid June, roughly a month after post-Civil War guilt inspired the same middle class families to buy excessive bouquets, an early start to summer vacations, and to risk it all on bets for the Kentucky Derby for mothers.

All this means is that, while there might be some legitimate reason for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day is basically a special from the boys in marketing, realising cynically that fathers will take what they can get, and that retailers will reward PR guys with a piece of the vig of whatever they create. And given that both the retailers and the wholesalers of cigars, gin, neckties, and bad cologne, have surprisingly large profit margins, they are reliable supporters of a Sunday in June dedicated to the sale and distribution of their products, even if really it’s just a vaguely disguised guilt trip for mothers, who had their day in May, but now are being forced – in the way that only a deeply engaged patriarchical process can – to feel guilty that their role in giving birth to the cannon fodder of a constitutional war built around the elimination of human bondage entails. I mean, no real guilt should entail, but if you’re shilling prime ribeyes, Cuban cigars, and golf equipment, hell, just run with it.

All of this makes me feel like ignoring Father’s Day except for the fact that it’s the same weekend as the USGA Open Championship in golf, or the US Open. I’ll note the US Open and its position on the calendar predates the Hallmark cult of Father’s Day, so it’s now just kind of a quaint coincidence – the third Sunday in June is the last day of the US Open but it also just happens to celebrate fathers, especially middle to upper middle class fathers who play golf as a means of frantically meeting societal class expectations, mostly, and not because they actually enjoy the outdoors or punching a small hard ball around in the outdoors, because most of them hate doing so, and would rather watch other young adult males playing sports instead of demonstrating their own failure at being able to play sports any more, and while this is a run-on sentence, I think it’s an important one, because Father’s Day is in fact that most interesting of modern phenomenons, a socially agreed upon event which only references social norms which don’t, really, have to exist, and in fact are rooted in things no one wants to perpetuate. Thanksgiving – US or Canadian – involves a falsehood of First Nations / colonial mutual love which, while false, is perfectly wholesome; Father’s Day involves a falsehood of fatherly concern for various material and sporting things which are completely, entirely divorced from the wholesome love of men for their children, and indeed, which material and sporting things are non-wholesome, embarrassingly commercialised distractions from the wholesome love of men for their children.

Which brings me to my day today.

I want to start by apologising to my son. I’m pretty sure all he wanted to do today was do online computer stuff (and by referring to such stuff as “stuff” and not “shit,” I officially earn a George Carlin “family empathy” badge and a well-mixed Beefeater’s Gibson, double, neat) – something involving an online chat service called Discord and its ability to enable simultaneous play in a Minecraft realm (the prior sentence had no meaning 20 years ago, and in 20 years, I have no doubt our ability to parse its historical meaning will have been as lost to the species as our ability to parse the Mayan temple ruins of Yucatan). His good friend came over – another child of a divorce, said divorce being differently messy than what the boy has had to deal with but let’s face it, every divorce sucks to an involved child. His friend is having a rough patch with parental transfers, and moreover, one of his classmates in fifth grade was about to move to Florida with his family. The young man wanted to spend Father’s Day – today or tomorrow, again depending on when I finish writing this – with the friend about to move away, which would mean two things. First, obviously, it would mean not spending the day doing artificially constructed “Father’s Day Approved” activities, most likely a lot of bowling or forcing divorced Dad to make barbecue hot dogs or or forcing Dad to teach a stereotyped male activity like woodworking or five-card stud or gapping spark plugs. And second, it would mean spending Father’s Day night at his divorced mom’s house, instead of spending it at divorced dad’s house, thirty miles away and thus hard to manage while still giving his friend about to move to Florida a proper sending off.

My son’s friend has picked up long ago that divorces, either selfishly, or unconsciously, or simply implicitly, involves scorekeeping, a constant battle to determine on the part of each child which parent is “doing better” or “cares more for the divorced child”. In my experience, this scorekeeping is inevitable within the parents and children for a certain period, but can be overcome with good intentions and lots of conversation. The trouble is, the broader community of any divorce – the friends, the extended families, the new friends who come after the fact at school or work or day care or running for town council – that broader community just wants a celebrity meltdown story. And so the children and the parents – even when they try their damndest to get it right – are constantly navigating a social landscape which wants to assign winners and losers (“your dad is a much shittier parent than your mom” / “your mom is a much more loving parent than your dad”).

I’m going to pause here and point out that both parents of the boy’s friend seem to be acting in an exemplary fashion. Most people – and certainly most trollers of internet things – assume that divorced parents basically default to doing the Worst Possible Thing For Their Child. While I have to admit, in dealing with divorced parents, I’ve seen a decent amount of that, let me state (fully aware of the self-serving nature of what I’m about to say) that it’s not actually true. Parents do a lot of the Worst Possible Thing For Their Child, but interestingly, divorced parents do quite a bit less of it, because the very nature of their divorce – “Hey, I’ve done the Worst Possible Thing For Our Marriage!” – means they no longer have any credibility to be viewed as a reasonable practitioner of “I’m Focused On the Best Possible Thing For The Family I’ve Constructed”. Married parents get to do the Worst Possible Thing for Their Child because hell, they’re married parents – the law and society (except if there’s race or drug use involved) never peel back the curtain. But because divorced parents are already publicly viewed as being incompetent – by everyone except only occasionally their children, who desperately want to think of their parents as being Always Great, just like all kids, but at least divorced kids have that illusion shattered earlier – they can only beg their children to think of them as being halfway decent human beings. But in this case, of the boy’s parents, both of them are truly doing a great job.

What was tough was witnessing how hard the boy’s friend was trying to personally reconcile being both a good friend – to the boy who was moving to Florida in 48 hours and may possibly never be seen again, which to a fifth grader is a trauma equivalent to the unspeakable – while being a great son to a very human and flawed father, while knowing that the actions that would make him be a good friend would possibly be seen by both the father and the mother as a kind of favoritism – of rejecting divorced dad to stay an extra night with divorced mom. For reasons I don’t fully understand, the boy’s friend seems comfortable talking about these quandaries with us – or rather, around us; my son usually zones out, which I completely understand. His divorced parent experience is almost impossible to translate into his friend’s divorced parent experience, because as Tolstoy told us at the beginning of Anna Karenina, family tragedies are all unique; only family pleasantness is similar enough to be able to be translated, and thus also is similar enough to be of no interest to the novelist or, really, even to the individual trying to understand the human experience.

As I say, though, the boy’s friend opens up to us all the time about his challenges navigating his family situation, but pace Tolstoy, the boy and I can only make conversation. Today I talked to him about how the love your parents feel for you – if they’re good people, and I truly believe his parents are good people – has nothing to do with the time of day of the third Sunday in June – either a father demanding sole focus, or a mother lording over the fact that a son chooses her over the father, on a lame Hallmark holiday. The love exists outside of time, outside of space, because that’s what love is. So over the course of a Monopoly game (which I clearly was winning despite constant rule violations and cheating between the two boys to prevent the inevitable), and the course of a lunch at Subway, and the course of a long car ride, I ended up trying to explain my theory of love, which is a theory of total surrender, of where a parent lets a child being selfish because that’s what love is but also a child lets a parent be selfish because that’s what love is the other way, and both see that selfishness over time and atone for their human inability to demonstrate the perfection of love to one another but also pledge – not to the other, but to themselves in honour of the other, to try to be less imperfect, and in so doing, everyone creates the love required to love others even more.

Which isn’t really what you want to do with an eleven year old boy and one’s ten year old son when both are also drinking sugary drinks and while the dog is bouncing around and randomly setting off the seat warmer button.

Eventually I think I convinced the boy’s friend to simply talk to his parents about the quandry: not to tell his father that he wanted to skip out on the pathetic Hallmark third Sunday of June holiday but that he wanted to be a good friend, to tell his mom that he wasn’t choosing her over his day but that he was really choosing to be a great friend and was, actually, using his mom’s house as a convenient base of operations, and that he loved both mom and dad and just wanted their advice and counsel on what the right thing to do was. And he talked to his mom, who talked to his dad, and he’ll spend the day with the friend who is moving to Florida, and his dad will pick him up late after dinner, and the mom will be extra up front about timing and logistics.

My son zoned out on all of this.

Which is okay. I think it’s actually both rational on his part, and the right incentivising behaviour as well. Rational because really, the boy is 10 years old: listening and reflecting on a conversation his 11 year old friend seems to need to have with me, the boy’s dad, is a lot of emotional heavy lifting. The rational thing for him to do is to actually focus on the Van Hagar-era 80s rock coming from the car radio, from 100,000 watts of WBLM POWER! broadcast from the LA Basin (that’s Lewiston-Auburn for you hard rock newbies). He has to process his own divorced parent bullshit every minute of every day, and he and his friend talk about that a lot – but if his friend wants to download to me, one half of the boy’s divorced parent bullshit factory, it’s completely understandable that the boy himself would decide to not listen.

It’s incentivising behaviour, though, in the sense that if the boy’s friend engages me in “what should I do, Mr. Freilinger?” queries, my son probably is listening at least partially to figure out if I’m feeding his friend a line of fatherly bullshit that I clearly don’t deliver to my actual son. I do my best to be a good father, but of course, I suck at it – but when his friend asks for fatherly advice, my son has a chance to compare my intellectually and rhetorically refined fatherly bullshit delivered to his friend, to my actual delivery of parental behaviour in reality. So my son, by letting me dig my own rhetorical grave, is gaining ever more future intellectual ammunition to show me that, despite my best intentions, I was a crap father who didn’t live up to even my own expectations. And, therefore, depending on his maturity level at a given point in time, he deserves a Nintendo Switch, or he deserves getting me to bail him out of jail after he was busted selling eight-balls at the senior prom.

My goal, clearly, is that he won’t simply want material goods for fulfilment, and that he won’t realise that selling drugs to idiots is actually an effective way of making a living as long as you don’t get caught (or, for that matter, ending up too much of an idiot and just inspiring the next Scarface). My goal as a parent is that he’s a moral, good, wonderful individual, with the social skills and ambition and curiosity to make a living in a sustainable way on a planet which is not simply here to fulfil human whims. And oddly, I hope that’s the goal of his friend’s parents, but even if it’s not, my goal for his friend needs to be the same.

Hopefully, my son is holding me to account as a I talk to his friend, and my own self-reflection is making me better as a father than I would be if I weren’t asked to give fatherly advice to another. Hopefully, my advice is helping my son’s friend work his own way through a divorced parent situation which is harder than a “normal” family situation which doesn’t have to navigate the open wounds of post-divorce relationships. And hopefully, my son and his friend both are seeing me as doing my best as an adult – which isn’t to say I’m going it perfectly or even well, just that I’m doing my best, and that if they do their best in an unselfish way – knowing that they’ll still be jerks every now and again – they will be fathers in the future that are good and decent. Not perfect, not even “really good” – just good, just decent.

And tomorrow – it will be tomorrow; I’m going to finish writing this before midnight – it doesn’t matter if the boy is with me or with his mom, or if his friend is with his dad or his mom. If both boys are talking to their parents – and even better, if both have learned that it’s okay to trust good adults, and that they get good adults to help them navigate who aren’t just parents – then it will all be fine. It’ll be fine tomorrow: I have no idea what Monday will hold. But all I’m asking for is for two boys to enjoy a great Father’s Day, and for their parents to breathe more easily knowing that it’s happened.

Monday will be another day. We’ll face that on its own terms.

I went the the Boston Museum of Fine Arts today to view a new exhibit of JMW Turner – “Turner’s Modern World” – and frankly didn’t enjoy it. In the moment it really bothered me, because while I’ve always thought of Turner as the most modern of pre-Impressionist painters, and have loved seeing him in the Tate and elsewhere in London, today I just didn’t enjoy the exhibit at all. It frustrated me: how can I love an artist and his (or her) work, but reject an exhibition of that work and that artist?

What I thought about on the drive back to Scarborough – it’s a good two hours depending on traffic, and despite it being a Saturday, for reasons I couldn’t figure out the traffic was lousy – listening to a mix tape I had put together but had not figured out whether to send or not, and then when that was done listening to CBC’s Saturday afternoon line up of The Debaters and Under the Influence and of course Because News, was this dichotomy. It reminded me of a previous John Singer Sargent exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago that I had been to – but it was different. The Sargent exhibit was fantastic, even though it made me question just how great a painter I thought Sargent was. The Turner exhibit today didn’t change my view of Turner, but it made me think “wow, I really wasted my time today.” Which was even worse: I love looking at beautiful art, paintings in particular. To think that my time had been wasted, that I could have been doing other things (namely, reading the next book club selection) that I’d have enjoyed that much more, but instead drove a total of four hours, spent $20 on parking, and the only thing on the plus side of the equation was a delicious omelette and a starter course of escargot at a Boston bistro, really bothered me.

The answer, of course, is all about curation. The easy answer was that there was just a ridiculous explosion of too much Turner: they should have broken it up somewhat, they should have stretched it out, let each piece live on its own, had fewer total pieces. But that’s ridiculous, and actually as the curatorial notes alluded to, would have sort of been a betrayal of JMW Turner himself. He thought rather highly of himself, was a bit of a showman, and was constantly pushing for the Royal Academy back in his day to grant him exclusive shows, even though even back then there was an awareness that too much Turner in one place was a bad idea, like eating too many fried clams on the beach in summer time. Yes, delicious; but taken to extremes, your entire being just rejects it, and ultimately you risk destroying your enjoyment of fried seafood (or the preview of Impressionism and Expressionism that Turner represents, to bring us out of the clam shack analogy) in the future.

The curatorial choices were, in that regard, actually good ones: this was designed to be a surfeit of Turner, it was built to be over the top. The lighting choices were – until the final room – chosen with an eye towards what JMW would have been showing in back in the 1840s; the stacking of paintings in line with what a Royal Academy annual would have done had they granted a wall to him without breaking it up with a Gainsborough or a generic set of Derby horseflesh in oil or a boring but well-executed and celebrity-friendly group portrait of the Regent and his birthday entourage. That solid wall of explosive colour, so modern and imaginative and ruthlessly out of keeping with Congress of Vienna era norms, though, would have never been granted Turner back then because he was so odd; had he been, it would have been a kind of violation, and probably even his fans back then like Ruskin would have said “too much”. They surely knew – intuitively if not consciously – that he could only have his genius come to the surface by comparing it to the tired sea battle scenes and portraiture and landscapes, however competently painted, of his contemporaries.

I think part of the problem was that I visited my favourite MFA gallery to kill the half hour before my timed entry ticket kicked in, the gallery with the Copleys and the Wests and the “American” portraits of the late 18th century, so precise and glossy and realistic, portraiture predecessors of the hyperrealism of Chuck Close and Richard Estes, only with powdered wigs and knit stockings which, of course, represent fantasy to us today and thus allow us to break the notion of “hyperrealism” that the painting technique implies. The MFA has an almost comical Benjamin West group portrait of the Hope family – a banking family from Boston who oddly made their money in the Netherlands – which looks strikingly like the montage portrait that freezes at the end of the intro to Soap, a totally age-inappropriate situation comedy that my grandmother loved watching with me and probably warped me for life. The Hope family portrait is stunning in a way that has nothing whatsoever to do with Turner, even though it was painted roughly at the same time as Turner’s first major works. But rather than either seeming anachronistic, thought of together, they seem as relevant and perfectly capable of juxtaposition as what one might imagine as the 20th century equivalent, a Wayne Theibaud California realist cityscape against Georgia O’Keefe’s clouds above New Mexico.

The other piece that bothered me, though, was a missing work – Turner’s famous painting of early rail, Rail, Steam and Speed, which I’ve seen in the National Gallery in London regularly, often, and just always blows me away. This isn’t fair to the curators, but given the strength of the MFA collection – they have a collection which rivals that of any museum in North America with the possible exception of the New York Met and the Chicago Art Institute – they should have been able to secure it for what was proposed as a comprehensive Turner modern world representative exhibit. As it was, the only “steam” on display came in maybe a half dozen steam ships, but nothing of the power and expression of fear of the modern acceleration that marks Turner’s paintings of rail. The absence of that element of his work – and the sorry replacement of it that the MFA’s curators attempted with lesser watercolours of mine entrances and forges, or his famously indistinct seascapes with early fully-rigged steamships – was not successful.

Turner – more than any French painter of the age, more than any American painter of the age – saw that what was characteristic of his world was change. Not dynamism per se, although he is rivalled in my mind only by Winslow Homer in his ability to show the power and action of the sea, exceeding any Dutch master in his understanding of storm clouds, approached and only occasionally exceeded by the designist precision of Rockwell Kent in his understanding of the purity of the colour of sky / sea / earth in one place. But more than any of them and only really inherited by future generations by rare instances, by Ray Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns who saw the impact of media in the same way he understood the impact of speed and connection, Turner was a master. The MFA exhibit, though, missed the point. Turner saw that the world was changing, but the exhibit was less about that understanding than it was about explosions.

Maybe in a time where movies have lost their focus on ambience and dialogue and focus instead on comic book narratives and colour, and in a time where in political dialogue we ignore the potential for collaboration because its simpler to live in echo chambers of self-reinforcing violence, the MFA exhibit makes sense. But it ignores what makes Turner great.

Thinking about it a little more, part of that greatness is his prescience, which was alluded to (ironically) in a quote from a security guard that was at the end of the exhibit. The MFA, in its final gallery which had no paintings, had a wall of pictures of MFA staff, and how they’ve reacted to Turner’s work in their careers. The security guard had a posting in the room with Turners The Slave Ship; the guard is African-American, and he insightfully pointed out that the picture was painted well after the Atlantic slave trade was over: such ships no longer plied the seas. He understood that Turner was seeing a deeper, more lasting injustice that still existed, and that the muscle memory of being chattel was something with a much longer fuse than simply Wilberforce’s campaign to end the trade could put out.

Turner was, really, a prophet, whose communication was in paint. He saw over the horizon what other artists – Hopper, Kent, Dali – would have to contend with in the full force of lived reality, but he recognised it even in its birth in Birmingham and Liverpool and on the Great Western Railway viaduct. He was to visual arts what McLuhan or Walter Benjamin were to our understanding of media. And despite that, despite the name of their exhibit, the MFA just liked throwing up lots of pictures of waves and fog and ships.

On the plus side, lunch was truly special. If you’re in Boston in the near future, I highly recommend Aquitaine, on Tremont Street. And if you’re heading north to Maine, seriously, it might seem convoluted, but take I-93 North to Route 128 – the Tobin Bridge route that gets you up through Danvers always seems shorter on paper, but just don’t do it.

Back when I was in seventh grade, we had to do “science projects”. I put the term in quotes because frankly, they were barely science at all, but they were assigned as part of Science class and the projects purported to engage us in the scientific method. I’ve come to realize that the scientific method is actually kind of a facade, a way of using some vaguely Baconian concepts to justify funding from the people who approve grants at universities, foundations, pharmaceutical companies, and governments, but in 1987 in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, the idea that we’d propose a hypothesis and then test it seemed like a good way to consume a few weeks of time and maybe engage the twenty odd kids in the class to do something other than pretend they’d read about meiosis or the carbon cycle.

My topic was “is it possible for an average American to build a workable fission device”. My hypothesis – this was a science project, ostensibly – was “yes”. My rigorous testing demonstrated that, at least in 1987, it was feasible to build a Little Boy-style U-235 gun mechanism fission device, but probably not feasible to build a Fat Man-style Pu-239 implosion device, owing not so much to the construction of the implosion shell but due to the difficulties of legally obtaining enough shaped explosives to successfully build the staging device. I then showed what I believed the likely maximum theoretical yield to be of said Average American atomic weapon, and its damage zones as superimposed on two maps, one a tourist map of Manhattan, and the other a nautical chart of Casco Bay.

I got an A-minus, which is the ideal grade in any class: the headline demonstrates you’re smart, and the by-line indicates the wisdom which made sure you only put in the bare effort to achieve the lower tier of the headline grade. Also, I think I got extra points for my presentation: seventh graders in Reagan’s America, oddly, liked thinking about nuclear war, because we had to think about it a lot for civil defense drills, and actually having some applied knowledge as to why we’d need to duck and cover when a 150 kiloton Soviet MIRV warhead hit the naval station in Brunswick helped put things in perspective.

Before you critique the project on procedural grounds, let me do the work for you. No, I never defined what an “average American” was. And I also didn’t explore at all the fact that my question wasn’t scientific at all: it was an exploration of culture and economics, with just a bare reporting of the best modelled understanding of the explosive, radioactivity, and fallout impacts of weapons as applied to US urban and (in the case of Maine) barely semi-urban centres. But I put together four really good looking large posterboard displays, ordered a small quantity of U-238 from a scientific supply catalog and displayed it with a small working model of a gun-design device, and my teacher, Mr. Plummer, thought it all well done enough. I didn’t tell my parents about it as I thought they might view my fascination with nuclear weapons to be, well, morbid. It wasn’t; I was really just fascinated with the Bohrian model of the atom and how it implied a force model I couldn’t really comprehend yet – but also I was a child of the Reagan era so yeah, I thought a lot about nuclear weapons

We were – excuse the pun – bombarded with nuclear weapons knowledge when I was a child in the 80s. This was the era of intense arms reductions talks – SALT, START, START II – and of course the steady drumbeat of missile technologies: Pershing, Pershing II, Minuteman, MX; SS-18, SS-20. Maine has always been a shipbuilding centre so of course we learned about the ships and submarines, and because I was always a bit precocious, I learned about the Deltas and Typhoons and Ohios, the submarines that made up the “third leg” of the nuclear deterrant triad. We had B-52s stationed out of northern Maine, out of Loring Air Force Base, famous for its three mile long runway that was constructed of a solid slab of concrete fifteen feet deep to be able to withstand both Maine winter potholing and Soviet ground burst attacks, so we were deeply familiar with the first leg of the triad just by going to sports and speech meets up to Aroostock county every winter. And my uncle had served in the second leg of the triad as a missile launch control officer in North Dakota, service which would eventually sterilise him and give him cancer from sitting next to poorly shielded 1.5 megaton plutonium core weapons for ten years. The Cold War ran deep and pure in my viens, and it wasn’t anything to be particularly unhappy or shameful about – indeed, it was kind of cool, hence my selection of a seventh grade science project.

This isn’t to say it wasn’t occasionally scary. I watched enough avant garde movies and television to be aware of the fact that nuclear war was both (a) unfortunately quite likely to occur in my lifetime and (b) very, very, very bad. There used to be bad gallows humour jokes about how bad it would be, and then for good measure, you’d be shown an aftermath of Hiroshima filmstrip in social studies class, or unexpectedly there would be a bad miniseries like “The Day After” when you were really just hoping to watch “Dallas” and see if JR was dead yet, and despite you being 11 or 12 years old, you’d have the full force of just how dramatically bad CBS could demonstrate nuclear war could be would be in your face. You wouldn’t sleep for a few days, but then eventually you’d recover, and go back to reassuring yourself that the combination of advanced early warning detection arrays in northern Canada and failsafe point circling B-52s would make sure that the Soviets would never hit the button first.

And you were reasonably sure that even if Ron did think that launching a first strike was the thing to do tonight, either Nancy would give him some warm milk and put him to bed early, or else George Bush (the older one) was smart enough to hide the football.

All of this came back to me the other night when, thinking a bit nervously, I checked the current deployment status of the Russian nuclear forces. I used to know it cold – I could tell you just how many of their (at the time) roughly 12,000 warheads were on active deployment and on which leg of the triad they were placed. They got down to about 5,000 warheads at some point but since the early 2000s and since Putin came into power for the second time, it’s been creeping up, back to about 9,000 at best estimates today, although that’s the best estimates of available cores, not deployed and active weapons.

The Russian nuclear triad, as the Soviet triad before, always relied slightly more on a smaller but potent first strike capability focused on both mobile and fixed ICBMs scattered through Eurasia; they never had the scale of the US for submarine based deterrant forces, and most of their subs also required coming to the surface to launch weapons, which they still do, making them more suited to second strike weapons or even third or reserve forces. Their main second strike weapons are their large, heavy, slow bomber forces, dispersed again throughout Russia but like the US B-52 forces, at least a quarter of them are designed to be airborne and circling at failsafe points when strategic threats reach a certain level. Being airborne, they would survive the first and response strikes from missile forces, and would then rumble over the pole and bomb cities and targets from above given the likely destruction of ground-based air defences.

Isn’t this fun? There’s a great book, On Thermonuclear War, by Herman Kahn – he’s the model for Dr. Strangelove in Kubrick’s masterpiece – that I bought from a used bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in high school, and I still have the copy. Nuclear warfare strategy is fascinating as long as you don’t think about it.

Anyhoo, the Russians would be assumed to launch ground-based rocket forces first, and would then be assumed to have their bomber forces launch the second wave, roughly two to four hours after the first wave. The first wave, mind you, would be expected to destroy most of Western civilisation, but not all of it, and since the West would have destroyed most of Soviet – er, sorry, Russian, and probably Chinese – civilisation, the mop-up second wave would be vital for determining who would win the post-apocalyptic peace. But since that wouldn’t be enough either, the Russians would keep their third leg of the triad in reserve, to eliminate any last traces of humanity outside of the Eurasian steppes; the West, meanwhile, would still likely have its submarines as well, to exchange one final volley with the hated but, at that point, largely cellular enemy.

Ah, those old memories. I’d wait every month for the new issue of The Journal of Atomic Scientists, with their ticking clock getting ever closer to an armageddon midnight, and their accurate reporting on updates to warhead designs in both blocs. That was high school; things were already getting weird, with Gorbachev and Reagan agreeing to eliminate intermediate range weapons, with the clock ticking backward, with “Amerika” on ABC seeming trite and silly immediately upon release. By the time I graduated from high school, the Czechs had revolted, and the Wall was down, and Trabants could be had for a song.

Ah, those were the days.

But as I mentioned, the other night, I looked up the current Russian nuclear force deployment status, flexing memories and tactical knowledge that had lain dormant for three decades in my mind. I quickly tallied their submarine forces – 2400 active warheads at the upper range, or about 360 megatons assuming the typical warhead in a MIRV with 150 kiloton yield, enough to hit every military, command and control, and significant civilian target in the West on a first strike. Let’s assume they still bulk up their force, though, in first strike ground launched ICBMs, which would tend towards higher yields – say 400 kilotons on average, arrayed between higher yield air burst warheads for civilian and industrial targets and slightly lower yield but dirtier weapons to attack embedded military and command targets – say probably 3600 warheads, maybe 1500 megatons. And then whatever’s left in the bombers, higher yield simple gravity and medium range air-to-surface cruise missiles, maybe 1500 weapons, probably higher blockbuster yields for shock-and-terror effects, maybe 750 to 1000 megatons.

And then there’s the US and allied forces – the UK Trident deterrent force, the French weapons – and whatever the Israelis and the Chinese and the rest have. The West has fewer weapons but more of them are likely working; their yield is more targeted and has fewer targets. Let’s assume if the Russians have around 2500 to 3000 megatons of deployment capability, the West has around 2000 megatons, maybe a bit more. Enough.

Trolling the internet was a lot more efficient than what I did as an 11 year old; back then, I spent hours and hours in the government document repository in Portland, poring through declassified records, reading research books from the RAND Corporation and from university presses, months of effort obsessing over the likelihood of vaporisation given my home in southern Maine. On Monday night, it took me a few hours – I’ve learned Boolean search optimisation long ago; finding the source materials on Google and DuckDuckGo took very little time – and since I’d learned the strategy and tactics in my formational years, I really only needed to update data, not learn anything fundamentally new.

Except: I reminded myself that the Soviet Union is gone, replaced by a one-man dictatorship. Except to remind myself that the Cold War strategic consensus has vanished, replaced by bitter civil discord about whether it even makes sense to view authoritarians as enemies. That does change the calculus, doesn’t it.

New data, new frameworks, same old weapons of mass destruction.

I miss the first time around, when I was eleven, and when my confidence that I’d live to middle age was more or less unchallenged. Was this what my parents felt like, looking at their eleven year old son, and watching the nightly news, and wondering?

It’s bad déja vu in any event. Good night, and good luck.

The passports have gone missing; in fact they’ve been gone long enough that I filled out the “permanent loss” form with the State Department. Not that it much matters just yet: flying internationally remains a bureaucratic nightmare constrained in particular by the lack of PCR tests available. So for winter break, the boy and I are doing yet another of our cross-country rail trips. We left Saturday early morning, with a car service to Boston South Station, then boarded Amtrak and headed towards New Orleans.

Quite a few readers of this blog probably will not have gone through the US in this way – a mixture of slow and fast, caught behind Norfolk Southern freight trains and then shooting along at 110 mph and then waiting for no reason for an hour at a station. But I must tempt you with the idea, especially if you can get off and explore every now and again. With that in mind, I thought I’d mention some of the hotspots.

Boston

Boston is popular with international tourists, because it feels vaguely like a midsized European provincial capital – Lyon, say, or maybe Antwerp. It has good museums and a lot of college students from around the world, giving it a cosmopolitan flair. The food is barely edible and you should pack sandwiches – in fact, stock up at Pret in Heathrow for the first few days, until you can get the concierge at your hotel to get you an actual good restaurant. People will tell you there are good burgers in Cambridge; they are lying. And the people who recommend pizza in Boston are about as trustworthy as futon salesmen. Move on.

Providence, Rhode Island

Providence’s downtown is a bleak wasteland of late 80s corporate architecture, intermixed with some 1920s art deco that no one really bothers to maintain. The presence of Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design make for a good couple of days of art, and surprisingly after visiting Boston, the seafood is edible. The train station is grim at all times of the year – they seem to have designed it to either be a sauna in the summer, or a wind tunnel in all other parts of the year. Get out quickly.

New Haven, Connecticut

I sincerely hope you didn’t eat in Boston, because New Haven has the best pizza in North America. It’s worth starving yourself for a couple days, spending a night, and ordering three or four pies and a couple bottles of red. Thin crust, coal fired ovens – delish. Check out Google and most of the places within a half dozen blocks of the Amtrak station are phenomenal. Avoid Friday and Saturday nights as Yale people will be there and they are best avoided, and weekdays between 5:45pm and 7:00pm because commuters from Manhattan – even in these endemic viral days – are on their way home and they loaded up on booze at Penn Station and may be gropey.

New York City

It’s still New York. God I miss going there regularly, and I can’t wait until the boy is old enough to go to museums and, maybe, the opera or a show. For now, though, even he likes the sushi and the pizza (not New Haven, but it’s a different theory, so what can you do) and the steakhouses and the hotels with room service. Pro tip: lots of hotels haven’t returned to room service yet. You can’t stay in New York and not do room service – unless you’re trying to capture some H.T. Hsiang starving communist author vibe, and I’m pretty sure he’d have done room service too, he just would have skipped on the tab in the morning out the service entrance. So make sure your hotel does room service, get the eggs benedict and bottle of champagne, and possibly a half of grapefruit.

Newark, New Jersey

For years, Newark smelled like vomit and coal smoke, but riding the train through this weekend, it now smells like cupcakes, I shit you not. Other people on the train, including the sleeping car attendant, were sort of marvelling at it as well. I’m going to assume it’s a trap laid by either the North Jersey Italian mob or the Jamaicans: just keep going.

Trenton, New Jersey

Trenton still smells like vomit and coal smoke.

Philadelphia

Philly deserves a good couple of days – there’s the Philadelphia Institute of Art, where yes, Rocky climbed the stairs and did that arms raised “top of the world” thing but their art collection is also top-notch, and if you like history, take a gander at where the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were hacked together and signed twelve or so years apart. I’ve not yet had a decent hotel stay here, and actually had my worst and most bizarre AirBnB stay ever in Philly. But the food is worth it – some of the best Italian food, both Italian Italian and Italian “red sauce” American you’ll ever eat; the sandwiches, not just the Philly Cheesesteaks but also the Italian pork; shockingly good vegan places – and since most places are BYOB, you save 50-100% on the wine markup you’d otherwise pay, which if you bring a few friends will pay for your shitty hotel room. It’s one of the least pleasant cities to walk around in anywhere (except Trenton, see above), so do yourself a favor and do Uber or Lyft. Also the subway system smells like vomit and ozone, so don’t use that.

Wilimington, Delaware

I’ve written at length in this space about the nature of human existence, and how most of it is now derived in a pure self-referential space. That is to say, the vast majority of us do not experience the world of physical, lived reality except as entirely intermediated by human constructions. And then there are the parts of that human intermediation which are themselves wholly self-referential: the law (laws exist only for human beings; they have literally no meaning whatsoever to anything other than us); money (it’s our exchange of value, and that value is completely foreign to every other species, geological feature, organic molecule, and quantum instance that we can ascertain); and culture and media.

I don’t know of any place that exists solely on that triuumvirate; almost every place that comes close then screws things up and actually does stuff with stuff, like manufactures stuff or ships it or wholesales it. But Wilmington exists solely for one reason: a very flexible set of business and finance laws, and the convenient location of the most active bankruptcy court in the world. No culture, mind you – I dare anyone to provide an example – but the movement of goods and services in the city exists solely to support the lawyers, bankers, and operations and administrative staff who operate that purely intangible, purely humanistic space.

I almost wish they ran a daily tour, where you could watch an hour or two of a Chapter 11 proceeding, then go to a law firm and, behind a one-way mirror and after signing a bunch of NDAs, watch a business arbitration hearing, then see the after-lunch sitting of the Chancery Court, and then sit in on one of the 75,000 or so consumer finance workers as they try to collect from a delinquent credit card borrower. It would be the purest expression of the modern world imaginable, all within an eight block walk of the train station.

The food isn’t remarkable in Wilmington, but my son tells me he saw an episode of “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives” where Guy Fieri went to a pretty good looking sandwich joint, so maybe there’s something.

Baltimore

I have a soft spot in my heart for Baltimore. When I was an undergrad at Georgetown, I had an internship on Capitol Hill, and my degenerate undergraduate internship friends and I would take the train to Baltimore to watch baseball and buy really bad weed. The city produced H.L. Mencken, along with Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain the inventor of American cynical gonzo satire. It brought us “The Wire” and thus apprenticed all of us in the art of removing copper piping from derelict housing while smacked out on black tar. If you can avoid getting mugged or shot, there are great crab places and one of the best aquariums on earth, if you like looking at seafood in addition to eating it. The traffic is awful in a way that only burned out white-flight American cities can pull off, with urban renewal clear-out expressways ending suddenly (due to funding being cutoff when Ford tried to “whip inflation now”) and forcing you to meander through bad neighborhoods before crossing an imaginary line and finding yourself in an upscale college area. Incidentally, this is also part of the charm in New Haven and Bridgeport, Connecticut; Newark and Trenton; and Wilmington – apologies for not mentioning it earlier.

I used to mark my progress on the Acela along the east coast as I left Baltimore station; on the left, there was about a quarter mile square area that was slowly being shot into Beirut status, and passing it to the south meant you had successfully finished travelling through the North East Corridor’s no-man’s land: a stretch from Bridgeport, Connecticut to the Baltimore slum which was an almost unbroken three and a half hour stretch of burned out and abandoned factories, industrial waste and litter, mixed with stretches of row houses that would have made Dickens weep. But this time, probably six years since I’d last taken the train by here and noticed – a lot of those houses and factories had been torn down; the ones that hadn’t were being renovated and had organic neighborhood farms plots in the back; and luxury condos, complete with a Five Guys and sushi and pet grooming at the retail level, were popping up.

Throw some money Baltimore’s way. Keep the car doors locked. Oh, and the train station is a shithole.

Washington DC

Even if you’ve never been here, you have an opinion. I went to school here for two years, and I’ve flown in and out a few dozen times over the intervening 30 years. It’s still a transient town; the ones who stick around are dodgy for a whole host of reasons, but the hardcore criminals seem to have migrated to Trenton. The Metro runs irregularly at best since Covid shut down government offices. Like hegemonic capitals everywhere other than London, the main boulevards and avenues are so far wider than human scale that it feels just idiotic to walk, but if you get off those paths of arrogant giants, Washington’s layout is Southern Antebellum, like Charleston or Savannah without the ocean breezes. Avoid it in summer.

Oh, the food is ridiculously good. You can thank the largest diplomatic corps of any city on earth for that.

Charlotte, North Carolina

NASCAR! And bankers!

Move on. If your train gets stuck here, maybe have Doordash deliver barbecue (in the Carolinas its pork and the sauce is vinegar based) to the station. But seriously, get out.

Greenville, South Carolina

Why this eclectic mix? Because we’ve been tracing the Cresent, one of the oldest continuously running long distance passenger lines in the US, the crown jewel of the Southern Railroad back in the day. Greenville is a nothing town now, but it used to be a junction point, a maintenance station, and regional center for manufacturing. All of this makes for something dreary and inland south now. Take a look around and breathe it in.

Atlanta, Georgia

I know Amtrak is a 70s relic, but come on people – come on Atlanta – spruce up the goddamn train station a bit. Squeezed in a glorified culvert next to where a 14 lane freeway divides into three, with a rotting flatbed car in a siding, a concrete low-level platform, and for our train at least, a 300 yard walk to a station whose architecture seemed to copy a local Social Security registration office, it makes you wonder whether Atlanta wants a train station at all – but apparently its people do, because half the train got off and was replaced almost person for person by new passengers.

There are things I love about Atlanta – Piedmont Park is one of the finest urban park spaces in North America; the people are ridiculously friendly; it’s diverse in a way that no other “diverse” city has ever struck me. To that point: it’s not cosmopolitan. It’s just diverse. People from around the world and the US move to Atlanta – of all races, religions, nationalities – and they all end up drinking too much Coca-Cola, tailgating for one of the many annoying local college sports teams, and eventually ending up with Type 2 Diabetes. Rural Blacks from Alabama, Muslim refugees from Afghanistan and Somalia, white frat boys from Clemson and Ohio State and Stanford, beautiful women, ugly old guys, you name it – and in five to seven years, they all need to check their A1C levels twice a day.

Don’t stay long.

Addiston, Alabama

The town has been losing population since the KKK tried to burn a bus filled with civil rights activists seeking to register Black voters in 1961. To its credit, in 1963, the town was the first in Alabama in which an all-white jury convicted a white man for killing a Black man. The town is melancholy in the extreme, but as the train pulled out to the west, the next town over is called Wellborn, and seems to be prosperous and happy. And all the people in the church parking lots, and at the ballfield, and in the grocery store parking lot as the train edged through town, were white. Obviously I can’t prove, on the basis of a quick socioeconomic comparison on what is not much more than drive-by research, that this was an example of flight and abandonment of civic responsibility by white people who feel a mix of guilt at racial violence and a core love of being racist, but I can certainly suggest that it’s almost certainly the case and accept, that in the unlikely event if I’m proven wrong, some sort of an apology would be in order.

Also, Addiston is home to the world’s second largest office chair.

Birmingham, Alabama

As the boy reminds me, this is named after Birmingham, England. It’s a carbon copy of Columbus, Ohio; Lexington, Kentucky; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and a dozen other low-wage, high productivity manufacturing cities across the dustier bits of the Sunbelt. If you like Wal-Mart and very cheap poorly made cocktails, by all means, spend a few. Otherwise stay on the train.

Amtrak Crescent

Every Amtrak route is a little different, but the Crescent is capturing my heart. The guy who runs the bar car has an impenetrable Louisiana accent, but after I tipped him a few bucks every time I bought a hot dog for the boy, he brought me an extra bloody mary for free. The sleeping car attendant, Tiffany, is an absolute sweetheart, and arranged the two teddy bears and the stuffed dog on the beds in our roomette in a tasteful and thoughtful way – she even put one on my bunk. The bar car assistant is helpful, especially since he is able to translate what his boss the Cajun dude is saying. The conductor has the most perfect Southern Black voice: a deep tenor but not a baritone, and not so much a Southern accent as a lilt. Hearing him announce “Next stop is Tuscaloosa, and we do apologize for the delay” was like a cool drink on a warm day.

We’ve got a few hours left before we arrive in New Orleans – hopefully not too late, as I can tell the boy is getting tired. Not bored, mind you – he loves the train rides, the tidy quarters, the food, the train people, and the chance to have a lot more iPad game time than I’d ever allow at home. But he’s looking forward to a nice bed and a shower tonight, and actually, so am I. Especially since he’s a bit gassy from all the hot dogs.

It’s New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2021 – I never know whether that makes it New Year’s Eve 2022, it being the day before the New Year of 2022, or New Year’s Eve 2021, being the last day of 2021. In any event, New Year’s Eve has some particular meaning for me for: seven years ago I shared probably the best kiss of my life with a woman who remains a kind of paramour, even though she lives on only now in the fog of memory. But I’m still going to enjoy a bottle of Pol Roger and a large tin of good caviar, in the front room, while the boy, alas, watches “Nashville’s Big Bash: New Year’s Eve Live” on CBS. We control almost nothing on this earth, but the most painful things which elude even our influence are the musical tastes of our progeny. I will sigh, and pour myself another glass of very good French champagne.

I shared my son’s musical proclivities with the oral historian, whose daughter – much younger – has at least better taste in music than “modern country sound.” She sent me a track that her daughter likes called Wifey, by Qveen Herby (in the waning days of 2021, I don’t take any of this too seriously), which is so much better than Carrie Underwood and Jason Aldean puking melodramatic country-pop that I can’t begin to describe it. Don’t get me wrong, Wifey is pretty awful too, even worse when you think that a five year old girl in rural Maine likes it, but it’s at least got an edge. But only in the way that sophomore songs have an edge. That’s okay for five years olds, but oddly, that’s not the target market for sophomore songs.

Sophomore songs were a kind of pre-meme meme when I was an undergraduate in the early 1990s. Freshman came to school burdened with the musical tastes of their home towns – for me, that meant 70s art rock and funk; for the Jersey kids at Georgetown that meant a lot of early white boy rap and a solid dose of metal; the black kids had that great era of transition street music between early rap and the 90s explosion; hipsters had the post-REM alterno-rock golden years; and the girls had Madonna and to a lesser extent the Bangles and the like. We all came to mixed co-ed dorms, oddly constructed freshman mixers, a lot more alcohol and recreational drug access than most of us were used to, and graduate students who owned the college radio playlists.

As a result, pretty much everyone (except the hardcore Rush fans) went through a kind of transformation: our musical tastes got discombobulated. I was a non-hardcore Rush fan and suddenly I was listening to Belly and Morphine and the Breeders. My Iowa friend across the hallway was now totally into the Beastie Boys. The Iranian rich kid kept trying to get us into Euro disco trash (along with coke) but eventually buckled down and got down with Phish. The girls, though, somehow mystically got into what I could only figure out was sophomore rock. It was the soundtrack to “Friends” and “Dawson’s Creek” and “Beverly Hills 90210” – sugar candy pop that spent a lot of time talking about friendships that didn’t work out, boyfriends who weren’t that cool, unrequited love, anything but good things, but with a good solid Hollywood pop beat and white people singing everything and with a chord progression which somehow promised a future of reasonably but not perfectly happy marriage and family life.

At the same time, we all came to university – this was 1991 mind you – with a quite different attitude about philosophy. Georgetown was not an arts school: it was a Jesuit-run – and still deeply Jesuit-instilled – liberal arts college, where even the clods in the business school had a four semester requirement in theology and philosophy (although under pressure from the alumni, a sequence of remedial classes were open to those business school students who really just wanted to get their accounting degree and join PwC’s local practice in Philadelphia). Most of the kids – not me – had been to either Catholic high schools or Protestant tradition boarding schools, and they came with a philosophy ready baked. The philosophy sequence was, with rare exceptions, designed to reinforce a roughly pre-Enlightenment didactic worldview that would have gotten you thrown out of Thatcher’s Conservative Party but would have gotten you (and did, for several of my roughly co-aged Georgetown colleagues) elevated to the federal appeals or even Supreme Court by the Trump administration.

For those of us who either came from a critical thinking tradition – listen and debate and compare everything, but assume everything is wrong in its way – or from a non-tradition where no notion of intellectual truth had bubbled up through the miasma of post-boomer-age education, we were faced with a challenge, which as I look on the last couple centuries of undergraduate education is really the norm. Once you get past high school – secondary school – where you were taught mostly by rote, and you are suddenly exposed to primary texts and a modicum of questioning, you are dangerously at risk of falling in love, much as undergraduates are dangerously at risk of falling in love with one another and, much more perilously, are dangerously at risk of falling in love with Phish. You are given access to the full bore of Western and Eastern thought, and usually, are given access to it by educators who are so human that they are actually trying to do anything except help you navigate it all.

A lot of us, alas, end up as sophomores.

In music, it means we end up in 1991 with a lot of Spin Doctors CDs, and need to throw them out in a dumpster behind a Burger King in 1997. In film, it leads to a lifelong obsession with “Sex in the City” and “Seinfeld”, unspoken perhaps but more likely celebrated with others of the same persuasion with binge nights involving similarly bad wine choices as those made when you had to have the one person in the quad apartment with a decent fake ID buy a few bottles of Carlo Rossi. In literature you end up with a lot of unread James Joyce and all-too-much-read Philip Roth and Martin Amis and Susan Sontag. In art you have way too many posters of French apologist photography of the late 1940s and a similar surfeit of Klimpt prints – oh, and bad origami. It even infects our diet: we eat less fast food crap and more vegetarian crap, basically staying price-point neutral and taste-neutral as well. We replace light lager with cheap red wine or, if we’re devoted to the sophomoric pursuit of alcoholism, off-brand vodka or Jack Daniels.

In philosophy, though, it means we end up with a bad love affair with Neitzsche, or Ayn Rand, or Nikolai Krapotkin, or Chez Guevara. We end up with the people who tell us what to think, tell us what not to think, tell us what everyone before us did wrong, tell us how we are capable of being better and “they” aren’t. They aren’t totally discredited by losing a war like that idiot Hitler, who took things too far and besides wasn’t anything more than a failed-out Austrian corporal in the wrong army; they aren’t totally discredited by actually having ever assumed power like Mao, who everyone kind of admired but because his own country rejected him lost a good deal of credibility. Philosophically, sophomores gravitated to the people who never actually did anything, but did write a lot, and ideally wrote a lot during times where they weren’t popular enough to be fully rejected by critical thinkers.

It took a lot back then to be a critical thinker. The sorting mechanism that is undergraduate life was heavily biased towards the kids and their enablers who came in already fully engaged in a mainstream philosophy – whether at Georgetown it was Catholicism mixed with libertarian republicanism, or at Oxbridge it was milquetoast Marxism mixed with analytical philosopy, or on the West Coast it was libertarian anarchism, or in Canada it was multicultural communitarianism. If you entered with that – from a Jesuit high school, from Eton or Winchester or an appropriate grammar school, or from Palo Alto High, or from an Anglo Montreal prep school – you were in good shape. But if you weren’t, then you had another path that could sail you through: you either rebelled against your foundations or you gravitated independently towards the sophomore philosophers.

It struck me this weekend, watching some historical documentaries with my son, that this was really the lure of Hitler back in the late 20s with Mein Kampf, perhaps the only sophomoric piece of philosophy that can compete with Nietzsche or Ayn Rand in terms of being basically mental cotton candy – simple sugars practically designed to hit the pleasure centres of the brain. America’s great simpish popularisers – Williams Jennings Bryant, Father Coughlin, Barry Goldwater – all made the mistake of trying to appear rational and normal. Rand, Neitzsche, and Hitler all realised that the transformative impact comes from sweeping away any attempt at decency or quality – just like the sophomoric artists that pull in second year college students ignore the same in creating 25 minutes of improv rock which requires a careful balance of THC, MDMA, and Everclear to appreciate, just like Damian Hirst, in a cocaine haze, realized that the more crass and ugly he made his sculptures, up to and including their suggested retail sale price, the more it would appeal to the sophomores, maybe past college in their careers in banking or art curation but still stuck in their zones of self-terror, that zone where they don’t know what they like but are terrified to admit it.

Because that is, really, the space of the sophomores in any space. The freshman, the plebes, everyone knows they don’t know – and there’s no shame in them not knowing either. The upperclassmen, on the other hand, in theory have knowledge, but they also have to assume a position of knowledge: they’ve chosen their course of study and thus their course in life. They now have to fake it to make it, as the current phraseology describes. By the time they are allowed to graduate, they have to project some kind of confidence in their choices or else they’ll not even be allowed to become fully fledged adults.

Sophomores are the suckers. They are caught in the middle – between being allowed to be caught in the snares of youth and not being allowed to escape the tendrils of adult society – and thus they are most vulnerable. You don’t find many adults who take Krapotkin seriously, and when you do, they are laughable. You find more Ayn Rand fans – dear lord, take a look at the non-Trump Republican party – but they are laughable in their way as well, just as the Democrats who cling to their notions of Guevara or Robert Kennedy are similarly embarrassing to those of us who just want to figure out how to pass an infrastructure bill.

Sophomores do form the weird foam upon which our modern society sits. Most of us, of course, are indoctrinated early – we are “left” or “right” wing, and feel comfortable within the truths given to us long before we actually had a range of choice to challenge our notions of right and wrong. Some of us also end up in a happy zone of full choice: our parents and teachers gave us the safety and nudging and encouragement and gentle ridicule which inured us to the simplistic effects of bombast and fiery rhetoric. It may have left us in a place where we’re still – even in our late 40s- questioning what the right choice should be on centralized versus localized political structures, over coercive versus collaborative legal forms, but it’s still better than being rigid. But so many people try to stay open but are hijacked in their thinking by sugary sweet rhetoric, by false dichotomies in argument, by Mein Kampf or by qAnon or by the non-linguistic side of Chomsky or by Senator Warren from Masschusetts.

Thirty years ago, on December 31, 1991, I was a freshman. I’m still not a senior by any means. But I hope that the philosophical obstacle course I’ve run in the last three decades will set up my son to avoid the sophomore trap. He’ll probably show up as a freshman loving country music – but hopefully he’ll never think the Spin Doctors are anything other than crap. That will be a moral victory – and even better, if he thinks Ayn Rand and Nikolai Krapotkin are no better than “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong”, he’ll also be right. Fingers crossed.