After More Than Two Centuries, Why Is This Still A Problem?

Years ago, I used to give my students the example of three men standing on the courthouse steps.  The first man is attempting to burn the American flag, the second is trying to stop the first man from burning the flag, and the third man is trying to stop the second man from preventing the first man from burning the flag.

“Now,” I would ask my class.  “Which man is defending the constitution?”

Thankfully, most of my students knew that the third man is the one defending the ideals of our constitution, as he is protecting the first man’s right to free speech.  While many of us might sympathize with the second man and deplore the act of burning our nation’s flag, the right of free speech is among the basic rights that our flag represents.  

If we are to have free speech, it means that even speech we find truly objectionable must also be protected.  We must allow even speech that we hate, if we are to have any right to express our opinions freely.

While most of us understand this, I have noticed among some of my more conservative friends some hesitation to equate flag burning with free speech.  I, too, feel uncomfortable with the idea.  It reminds me of that apocryphal tale of the priest who was asked to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the tragedy of infant mortality.  “Sometimes,” the priest answered.  “God must officially condone actions that he privately abhors.”  So it is with free speech.

Unfortunately, a few of my friends on the left have the same problem.

I remember going to a bookstore with a colleague and being somewhat amazed at her reaction to a display of popular history books written by a conservative television personality.  Clearly outraged, she placed other books in front of each of the editions, effectively hiding them.  This same person would have been horrified at a library’s banning books, she regularly lectured about Nazi book burning, and she would have been outraged at being compared with either group, but she was, nevertheless, personally preventing people from reading some books just because she disagreed with the opinions of the author.

Note.  Without going into too much detail, I will admit that the books were phenomenally poor history books.  At the request of a friend, I read one of the books and had returned it with so many corrections and explanations scribbled along the margins that it might have been easier to just have written my own edition.  The author had clearly done his research in such a manner as to only include the data that reinforced his preconceived and frequently erroneous opinions.  My friend should have hidden the books because they were crap, not because of the politics of the author.

Somehow, censorship has become acceptable as long as you are doing it for a “good cause”.  Social media bans or “fact checks” opinions “they” disagree with.  A friend of mine had a piece consisting entirely of a paragraph taken from Wikipedia fact-checked on Facebook—with a paragraph almost identical with the original post—because Facebook claimed the author was “punching down”.  

If you—like me—are unfamiliar with the phrase, Urban Dictionary defines it as “For someone of higher rank, power, status, and position to engage someone of much lesser and/or inferior rank, status, power, and position in debate and/or argument. Not limited to just status, power, position, and rank but can and often do include intellect, capability, competence, and acumen.”

Outrageously rude, but the speech of a boor still sounds like speech to me.

MailChimp, the service that handles marketing and mass mailings for organizations and companies, has started cancelling accounts if they don’t like what is being emailed through their service.  Though every piece of email they send out has a mandatory “unsubscribe” button, they are evidently reading everyone’s email and passing judgement on what meets their standards.  One of the groups that they have recently blocked specialized in political satire.  According to MailChimp, "Indeed, humor can be an effective mode of communicating hateful ideas."

MailChimp, Facebook, Twitter and the rest are private companies, and they can refuse to do business with people if they don’t want to, though I’m just not sure why they would feel any need or desire to do so.  I will admit that if I were the president of MailChimp and the KKK wanted to open an account, I would have to consider the proposition for a long time, but in the end, even hate speech is still speech.  

Brandeis University has a panel of twits that have come up with a long list of words they no longer want their students to use.  “Trigger warning” invokes a mental image of a gun, so Brandeis wants faculty and students to say “content note”.  The list of banned words also includes “victim, survivor, freshman, picnic”, and the phrase “Ladies and Gentlemen”.  “People of Color” is wrong, so you should instead use “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).  “Walk-In” is too “Ableist”, and these Speech Nazis suggest the substitution of “Drop-In”.  This insults me because it suggests that some people can fly and I can’t.

My favorite banned phrase on the list is “rule of thumb”.  According to Brandeis, this is because of the widely held belief that the phrase refers to an old English law that allowed a husband to beat his wife with a stick no larger than his thumb.  Brandeis worded this so carefully that they obviously know that no such law ever existed.  The true source of the phrase dates back to the 17th Century when brewers tested the temperature of beer by sticking their thumbs into the vat.

Using Google and searching through the last twelve years of this blog, I found that I have used well over half of the banned words.  I promise that, in the years to come, I will use the rest.

I don’t know when it became fashionable, or even acceptable, to censor the speech of others, but we need to stop.  As we restrict language, ban opinions, and cancel the thoughts of even the fringe, we water down the value of the remaining opinions.  After all, no one is punching down as much as the person who says “Shut up!”

Besides, if only one opinion is allowed, what makes you think it will be yours?

Suddenly, I’m an Art-ist

Well, it’s here!  Though I graduated a month ago, it took the university about six weeks to actually mail me my degree.  I was a little surprised to see that though I majored in Art History, the diploma simply says ‘Art’.  

I have a degree in Art.  Hilarious.

This diploma would astound my mother, who truly was an artist and though she certainly tried to teach me how to paint, eventually admitted that my talents (if indeed I had any) lay elsewhere.  Well, ‘lay’ was probably incorrect, ‘stampeding away’ might be a more accurate description.

From a very early age, I remember accompanying my mother as she set up her easel in a field and began to sketch the landscape.  That she could quickly produce brilliant drawings in charcoal and India ink of trees and barns was always an amazing feat that I envied, but could never reproduce.   The ability to draw is a skill that I have always wished to possess, but though I have worked and practiced at it, it has successfully eluded me.

Note.  My mother once predicted that I would never finish college.  In turns out that she was correct:  The university has just accepted my application to be readmitted.  In the fall, I will join many freshmen in pursuit of a degree in Economics.  

Having retired from the university, one of my retirement perks is the ability to take classes without having to pay tuition—a benefit that, evidently, few retired faculty members actually use.  I decided to study art history primarily because I thought it was about as far out of my usual wheelhouse as possible.  Frankly, I had no idea that art history would be so much fun.  The classes were enjoyable chiefly because of the great faculty who tolerated my relatively flat learning curve.  Professors Goehring, Marinas, Fitzsimmons, Salas, and Zarur:  thank you for tolerating my intrusion in your classes.

One of the requirements for a degree in Art History was a studio art class and I chose Drawing, which I took from Professor Tauna Dole, who showed infinite patience as she struggled to teach me the rudiments.  I really enjoyed this class, and actually did improve to the point where it is now possible for the viewer to usually be able to figure out what it is I am drawing badly.  

In my art history classes, I kept hearing about ‘brush strokes’ and other technical terms.  Many of these concepts were very confusing to me, so I bought art paper and a set of watercolors and began experimenting.  While this hands-on experience did help explain many of the art terms I found difficult, my “paintings” looked like the rejects from a parent’s refrigerator.  So far, they have all been safely curated into the backyard chimenea.   My rate of improving, if any, makes the progress of glaciers resemble a jackrabbit pursued by coyotes.  

Still, these experiments have been great fun.  My repeated failures remind me of a tiny booklet by Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime.  It is rather strange that this book is not more widely distributed.  I found a paperback first edition for $900, a $30 hardback copy on Amazon, or you can do what I did, read it for free at Project Gutenberg.  (I have no idea why anyone would pay $12 to Amazon for the Kindle edition when the Project Gutenberg version works perfectly on my Kindle.)

Churchill took up the hobby of painting after he resigned from the Admiralty in 1915, believing firmly that he must do something, and he wanted a change to keep his brain fresh.  As he said:

"To have reached the age of forty without ever handling a brush or fiddling with a pencil, to have regarded with mature eye the painting of pictures of any kind as a mystery, to have stood agape before the chalk of the pavement artist, and then suddenly to find oneself plunged in the middle of a new and intense form of interest and action with paints and palettes and canvases, and not to be discouraged by results, is an astonishing and enriching experience. I hope it may be shared by others. I should be glad if these lines induced others to try the experiment which I have tried, and if some at least were to find themselves dowered with an absorbing new amusement delightful to themselves, and at any rate not violently harmful to man or beast."

Churchill had a great many hobbies, besides painting:  he loved to make brick walls, even going to the extreme of joining the bricklayers’ union (though they canceled his membership when he rejoined the Conservative Party).  Churchill also raised butterflies and usually kept cats, dogs, and pigs as pets, saying that “cats look down on us and dogs look up to us, but pigs treat us as equals.”  Without a doubt, however, it was painting that gave him the most enjoyment.

During his life, Churchill created hundreds of paintings—some under his own name and others under the pseudonym Charles Marin.  He once gave a small hint why he used the pseudonym while commiserating with an artist whose work had been rejected from a show.  “Your work is very good, but unlike mine, is judged strictly on its merit.”

No one will ever mistake a work by the prime minister as a great masterpiece, but the majority of the hundred or so paintings that I was able to find online are not bad, and far better than anything I have achieved.  Still, Churchill planned on improving.  "When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject.”

In my case, it might take a tad longer.

Little Wars

There is a common party game in which you are challenged to list the books you would take to a desert island as your sole reading material for the rest of your life.  The number of books you can take with you varies from one book to ten books or a dozen.  The obvious answers—The U.S. Navy SEAL Survival Handbook or even Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe—are considered cheating.

If I could take only a single volume, it would have to be Three Men In a Boat, the masterpiece by Jerome K. Jerome.  Written more than a century ago, it is the single best repository of knowledge concerning the human condition.   Jerome’s best-known book not only quickly sold a million copies, but it was largely responsible for the Thames River becoming a tourist attraction.

Further down the list of books that have to go to the island with me—past several volumes of books by Mark Twain and a couple of works by Robert Heinlein—I would add War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.  This is a great book, even if Hollywood types keep using minute sections to make bad movies.  Perhaps someday a Hollywood director will read the entire novel before he starts filming.

I guess it is not terribly surprising that Jerome and Wells were good friends—both men seem to have known just about everyone in England at the time.  Jerome even wrote a sequel to Three Men in a Boat, titled Three Men on a Bummel.  The latter work describes a bicycle trip the men take through turn of the century Germany, with frighteningly accurate predictions of Germany two generations later.  Jerome was probably inspired to write the work after reading Wells’ own book on cycling, The Wheels of Chance.

That the two men knew each other and served as literary inspiration for each other’s writing is perfectly natural.  What is surprising is where the result of the two men’s friendship can still be seen today.

One day after lunch at Wells’ home, Jerome began idly playing….Well, let me let Wells tell it:

The present writer had been lunching with a friend—let me veil his identity under the initials J. K. J.—in a room littered with the irrepressible debris of a small boy's pleasures. On a table near our own stood four or five soldiers and one of these guns. Mr J. K. J., his more urgent needs satisfied and the coffee imminent, drew a chair to this little table, sat down, examined the gun discreetly, loaded it warily, aimed, and hit his man. Thereupon he boasted of the deed, and issued challenges that were accepted with avidity....

Naturally, it didn’t take long before the contest between the two men escalated as they played with the cast lead soldiers and the small spring-loaded cannon capable of throwing an inch-long wooden stick about three yards.  The little soldiers were set up repeatedly, and just as quickly knocked down by the toy cannon.  Before long, the two men began proposing alternative methods of play.  What if the soldiers could move between shots?  Could they capture the cannon?  The two men made up new rules, added conditions, and were really getting caught up in the spirit of the new game when calamity struck.  As Wells wrote:

Primitive attempts to realize the dream were interrupted by a great rustle and chattering of lady visitors. They regarded the objects upon the floor with the empty disdain of their sex for all imaginative things.

The sight of two grown men, respected in society, crawling around on the floor playing with the toys that belonged to Wells’ son evidently put a swift end to the project, but the next day, Wells continued to expand the possibilities of the game.  He added more lead soldiers, including men mounted on horseback.  Then he added crude barriers to create a “country”.  In the earliest experiments, the country consisted of volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica and blocks of wood.

The limitations of playing in the parlor led Wells to appropriate a better room: the household nursery.  Picked primarily because the cork floor was a better foundation than the parlor carpet for the toy soldiers, Wells discovered than the cork floor also allowed him to use chalk to draw in rivers, roads, and certain other geographical features.  (Obviously, Wells had an incredibly patient and tolerant wife.  In fact, even a casual reading of a biography of Wells reveals that last sentence to be a massive understatement.  By any measure, Wells was a friendly outgoing man with an incredible imagination.  He was also a poor husband and, using the parlance of the time, a constant Lothario.)

 

Before long, the books gave way to model houses fashioned from cardboard, and miniature trees were created by placing the ends of twigs and branches into holes drilled into blocks of wood.  Mountains were represented by repurposed garden rocks.  The game commenced with one player designing the country, placing models and rocks as he saw fit.  The other player then selected which side of the country he preferred.  Both players had an equal force of infantry, cavalry, and artillery to be placed within their territory.  

When play commenced, each side took turns either moving or firing their pieces.  Using precut pieces of string for measurement, an infantry unit could move one foot, a cavalry unit could move two feet, and a cannon accompanied by at least four infantry units could move one foot.  Each player had a limited time to move his pieces, then it was the other player’s turn.  

One impressive feature was that the outcome of combat was decided not by chance, but by calculating the relative strengths of the units involved, resulting in a game determined strictly by strategy instead of random chance.  There were no dice, no flipping of coins, and no shuffled deck of cards.

Obviously, the players needed a large country estate house without cats, small children, or overly fussy spouses—or as Wells put it, “the invasion of callers, alien souls, trampling skirt-swishers, chatterers, creatures unfavourably impressed by the spectacle of two middle-aged men playing with "toy soldiers" on the floor, and very heated and excited about it.”

It took several years to work out all the rules for the game, but eventually Wells published the rules in a book, Little Wars.  The game invented by Jerome K Jerome and H. G. Wells is the prototype of the tabletop war game played strictly for enjoyment.  It is the ancestor of not only most boxed war games, but served as a guide for the development of the game Dungeons and Dragons.

The book has been reprinted several times, and as you can imagine, to purchase a first edition would be a sizable investment.  You can, however, read it for free here.

Wells developed his game and held several tournaments at his house, Number 17 Church Row, Hampstead.  Years later, the house was owned by Peter Cook and the nursery was used by Cook and his comedic partner, Dudley Moore to work on material.  The dining room no longer hosted lunch for Jerome K. Jerome, but held cocktail parties for Keith Richards, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney.

Today, the house is still standing, and it would be nice to say that if you were to visit, the nursery floor would be laid out for one of the many games Wells played.  Unfortunately, all of his lead cast soldiers were confiscated from his son, the pacifist Anthony West, during World War II by the police who angrily considered such possessions unsuitable for someone opposed to war.

The year after Little Wars was published, World War I (or “The Great War) started.  Though both Jerome and Wells supported the war, perhaps we need one more excerpt from Wells’ book.  This is from Chapter IV of Little Wars:

“Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but—the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realization conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.”

Realizing this, it seems sad and counterproductive that Wells’ lead soldiers were “conscripted” to serve in the Great War so that they could no longer serve their educational role in the Little Wars.

Per Your Directive

Though I never really wanted to, I have run several bars.  As a teenager, I worked for a crazy woman who sold Mexican imports that she warehoused in the back of a motel in Cotulla, Texas.  My boss, an oil heiress from a family who had long stretched the confines of the definition of the word ‘eccentric’, owned the little motel/restaurant/bar in the small border town because her wildcatter father had seen one like it in Hawaii and decided he had to have a copy.

I had just turned 18 and had graduated a little early from high school when my boss sent me to Cotulla to temporarily manage the place until she could find a replacement for the manager who had died suddenly from a heart attack.  As it turned out, I ran that fandango in hell for months and eventually fully understood what had killed my predecessor.  

Chief among my management problems was how to run a bar I wasn’t legally old enough to enter during operating hours.  Texas liquor laws back in those days were a nightmare maze of contradictory laws written, amended, repealed and rewritten by drunken Baptists who prayed each Sunday to close the bars and private clubs they had enthusiastically patronized the night before.  Technically, the state was semi-dry and public drinking was only legal in private clubs, not bars.  I quickly learned that one of my management duties was to liberally scatter “Guest Membership” cards along the sidewalk in front of the “club” every night.

Let’s just say it was a learning experience, and among the hard-earned lessons was that bartenders frequently stole so much that breaking even was almost impossible.  Bartenders drink, and with each drink consumed, the house rules become increasingly irrelevant.

Over the next decade, I worked in a lot of hotel (after all, I had great management experience, at least on paper).  As part of running a hotel, I ran a variety of bars:  small intimate bars with jazz music, a country western bar with a mechanical bull, and even a few nice quiet bars with  decent wine lists.  About all these bars had in common was that hiring a good bartender was really difficult, and that even the best of them were going to drink as much free liquor as they wanted.  The best bartender I ever employed, judging solely by the number of customers he brought in and the profits the bar made, told me the day I hired him that he was going to drink a bottle of Christian Brothers Brandy every night that he worked.   About that, at least, he was perfectly honest.

Rules—and even laws—can’t change human nature.  This has been common knowledge for centuries, but politicians and bureaucrats persist in trying to change it.  You can look at Adam Smith’s writing about the folly of governments’ passing “sin taxes” on whiskey some 270 years ago for confirmation.  

This was a lesson in human nature that I have seen reinforced many, many times.  At one point in my early college days, I remember a sergeant patiently explaining to a group of wanna-be future lieutenants that as leaders, we should never tell our men to do something we knew for a fact that they would never do because issuing orders that would never be followed always erodes respect and authority.  

While at Enema U, I saw legions of administrators who never understood this simple lesson.  There was such a perpetual deluge of memoranda, directives, and policy changes that if total compliance ever actually occurred, it was probably accidental.  I remember one newly-appointed department head bemoaning over one such impossible to fulfill mandate.

“What are we going to do?  They expect us to do this enthusiastically.”

An older and more experienced faculty member sighed and answered, “Relax.  Enthusiasm can be reported.”

One of the best examples of altering a policy to fit the realities of human nature was sent to me by one of my better students.  During World War II, the very existence of the refined uranium needed to build the atomic bomb was top secret.  When some of the precious material was sent to machine shops to be milled and shaped into the appropriate shapes, a warning was sent with the material:

“We can’t tell you anything about this material, but it’s vital to the war effort that ALL of it including all swarf be returned to us.”

Swarf is the residue or chips and filings produced by the machining operation.  Despite the warnings, however, the folks at the Manhattan Project could determine that the amount of material returned to the authorities was less than projected.  Alarmed at the possibility of espionage, an extensive investigation was conducted to determine the cause of the loss.  Investigators were sent to talk to the shop foremen and the machinists.

The machinists who had worked with the uranium had noticed that when machined, the metal threw a bright spark, and since wartime rationing restrictions made securing flints for cigarette lighters impossible, the machinists had ignored the official guidelines and diverted what they considered to be trifling amounts of the strange material to be used in their cigarette lighters.

The people that ran the Manhattan Project were obviously very smart, and knew that human nature couldn’t be changed by fiat.  Accordingly, the officials used the special status of the Project and issued highest priority requisitions so that the personnel of the machine shops be furnished cigarette lighter flints.

We should all be so wise.