A text message thread

Him (from a phone number in the 703 area code that I don’t recognize): Yo yo yo, question: how easy is it for you to get to boston?

Me: Not too hard, I guess.  Who are you?

Him: What?  How could you forget your favorite brothers phone number

Me: It’s easy.  Why, I don’t even remember having a brother.

Him: Ouch, i think you were nicer as a teenager.  I just wanted to say sorry for not calling on your bday before it got too tardy.  I want to make it up to

Him: you.  Hence the questions.

Me: Hmm… Really, it’s not my birthday, and I have no brother,

Me: So I think you have the wrong number.

Me: Plus, it’s been a long time since I was a teenager, and I’m much nicer now!

Him: Oh you’re right, wrong number.  Sorry, I thought you were my sister playing coy.

Me: No problem.  Wish her happy bday from me!

Him: Great to hear it.  I don’t doubt it for a minute.  Nice talking to you tonight!

Me: Bye.

———————–

And a note: I rather like the kind of random electronic encounters that modern technologies have brought us.  This one certainly gave Julie and me a few smiles tonight.

And Happy Birthday to my unknown correspondent’s sister, wherever she may be!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Argument with a bumper sticker

Seen on the back of a green Civic: SOCIALISM ISN’T COOL

You know, they’re right.  There’s nothing cool about a bunch of bureaucrats trying to solve complex social problems for the benefit of the general public.  I’d go so far as to say that the average government office is about as uncool a place as you’ll find anywhere in the world.

You know what’s cool?  Fascism is cool.  They’ve got those neat black leather uniforms with the chrome fittings, the sly “Do what I say or I’ll break your head” attitude, and all those snazzy rallies that often involve torches.  Of course, there’s the whole violent repression thing, not to mention the tendency to start unjust wars, but there’s even something cool about that.  After all, unjust wars features lots of explosions, and explosions are cool.

All of which is to say: maybe we shouldn’t pick our governmental approaches based on what’s cool.

———–

A note: I am not a socialist, haven’t been since high school.  (That was not long before I was a Randroid.  I went through a lot of different phases back then.)  But I could not help noticing that the woman with the bumper sticker was driving on the Capitol Beltway, part of the Interstate Highway System, which was a government creation that could fairly be labeled a socialist endeavor.

So while I believe that free enterprise has an important place, I can see the point to having an active government.  The proper limits of government involvement is an interesting and open question, but the answer will certainly not come down to what’s cool.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

A Lexington Monument

On the Lexington battlefield, there was a monument erected in 1799.  It included a plaque that had to be the most melodramatic historical marker I’ve ever read, including no less than eight exclamation points.  As an apt finish to the Massachusetts trip, I here include the text in its entirety:

Sacred to Liberty & the Rights of mankind!!!
The Freedom & Independence of America,
Sealed & defended with the blood of her sons.

This Monument is erected
By the inhabitants of Lexington,
Under the patronage & at the expense of
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts,
To the memory of their Fellow Citizens,
Ensign Robert Monroe, Mess. Jonas Parker,
Samuel Hadley, Jonathan Harrington Junr,
Isaac Murry, Caleb Harrington, and John Brown
Of Lexington & Asahel Porter of Woburn,
Who fell on this field, the first Victims to the
Sword of British Tyranny & Oppression,
On the morning of the ever memorable
Nineteenth of April, An. Dom. 1775.
The Die was cast!!!
The Blood of these Martyrs,
In the cause of God & their Country,
Was the Cement of the Union of these States, then
Colonies: & gave the spring to the spirit, Firmness
And resolution of their Fellow Citizens.
They rose as one man, to revenge their brethren’s
Blood and at the point of the sword to assert &
Defend their native Rights.
They nobly dar’d to be free!!
They contest was long, bloody, & affecting.
Righteous Heaven approved the solemn appeal:
Victory crowned their arms: and
The Peace, Liberty, & Independence of the United
States of America was their glorious Reward.

Built in the year 1799.

They don’t make ’em like that any more!

monument1

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Massachusetts wrap-up

Here’s the run-down of things that we did in Massachusetts:

Sunday, August 9: We picked up Andy at the train station in Alexandria at 9:30 and spent the next twelve hours or so driving north.  A long day, but at least we got to eat lots of yummy rest-stop food.

Monday: We spent the morning wandering around Gloucester, had lovely lobsters for lunch, and went to Salem for cheesy tourist stops.  See the last post for more details on that.

Tuesday: Hampton Beach was the destination beach of my childhood.  We went there often – that’s where I learned the joys of body surfing in the large cold waves.  Tuesday was my return to Hampton.  The waves were a lot lower than I remember – either it was a calm day, or my images are calibrated to a much shorter me.  And the water was awfully cold for those of us more accustomed to the Chesapeake – Diana dipped in one foot and decided it was not for her, and while Kate spent some time in the water with me, her skin was turning as blue as her bathing suit.

But the boardwalk was a lot of fun – Julie enjoyed searching every candy shop for the ultimate fudge (and ended up buying a pound in each of two shops: yummy!), Andy circumnavigated the boardwalk several times, and I just enjoyed looking at the various kitschy things with a bemused look.  A lovely day!

Wednesday: In the morning, the girls and I went with my mother on a whale watch.  We spent four hours out on a boat and ended up seeing four humpback whales, thus averaging a whale per hour.  Here’s some pictures:

whale11

whale31

Later in the day we went to my Aunt Joan’s house.  She held a big party where I got to see aunts, uncles, cousins, and their various families.  This turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the trip – it was great to spend time talking with everyone.

Here’s me with my adoring cousins, a lovely group of ladies with impeccable taste:

cousins11

Thursday: The kids were ready for a lazy day, so Julie and I went on a Revolutionary War binge.  We climbed the Bunker Hill Monument (275 stairs up, the same number down again – and our calves complained for the next two days), toured the USS Constitution (it’s still a part of the navy, so the tour guides are all navy personnel: it added a lot to hear them talk about what “we” did in battle on the ship – as active duty navy, they feel a part of the Constitution’s heritage), and Lexington and Concord (both remarkably small given the importance of what happened there – Lexington in particular looked postage-stamp sized after all the Civil War battlefields we’ve visited, but then only around 300 men fought there).

Friday: Andy and I went scuba diving off Rockport in the morning (lots of lobsters, several flounder, and a nice sized skate).  Then Julie, the girls, and I went into Boston to visit the Aquarium (a really nice one – very similar to Baltimore’s, which should come as no surprise as it was one of the major influences on the design of Baltimore’s aquarium) and the Museum of Fine Art (remarkable museum, with art from just about every period and place that you can imagine – we saw ancient Roman and Egyptian art, a special exhibit of work from Renaissance Venice, and Japanese art of several periods, including a fascinating exhibit of pieces from 1930’s Japan).

Saturday: A somewhat lazy day, we went to the Gloucester craft fair, then back to the Salem Willows where they were holding a jazz festival.  Finally it was dinner at Bertini’s (one of my mother’s Salem hangouts in her college days) with Joan and Chuck and two of their grandchildren.

Sunday: A long drive home…..

And that was my week in Massachusetts.  Pretty busy, no?

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Salem

We’re on vacation this week up in Massachusetts.  Salem, on the north shore, is my mother’s home town, though she hasn’t lived there in years.  I lived there myself for three years back in middle school.  So between family visits and memories of those days (ah, middle school – such a font of fond remembrances), I’ve got a lot of memories of Salem.

We’re not staying in Salem, but rather in nearby Gloucester.  In a beautiful and large house overlooking the water, we’re up here with all of my kids, my mother, and my sister and her family.  Gloucester is about half an hour’s drive north of Salem, fairly close to the northern edge of Massachusetts.  See your favorite mapping program if you really want more details.

Today, our first full day up here, Julie and I went with the kids to Salem.

Back in the day, Salem was a typical small city.  Lots of houses of various sorts with a suburban feel to them, an active downtown, and a few tourist attractions, which in Salem’s case included a mix of sites celebrating Salem’s history as a center of the China trade, the fact that Salem was the hometown of author Nathaniel Hawthorne (The House of the Seven Gables, one of his novels, is set in colonial Salem, and in fact you can still visit the house in question), and, of course, the witch trials.

Salem has always made a big deal of the witch trials.  The Witch City, they call it, and a witch on a broomstick is the symbol of the city.  Somewhat in poor taste, I’ve always thought: given what happened to those accused in that horrible summer of 1692 (and none of the twenty who were executed were in any way, shape, or form witches, though one of the women jailed for witchcraft and later released did try to cast a few charms (unsuccessfully, of course)), having Salem call itself the Witch City feels to me rather as if Auschwitz, Poland, called itself the Jew City.

When I lived here, there were a few tourist attractions related to the witch trials.  There was the Witch House, which was the house in which some of the judges lived during the trials – a real historical site with real historical artifacts.  There was the Witch Museum, a wax museum with several tableaux that accurately told the story of the witch trials (my favorite scene as a child was always the large wax Satan).  But that, really, was about it.  Oh, some of the history lived on in some of the names of parts of town.  Gallows Hill, for instance: the prominent hill where the executions took place was now the town’s high rent district.  But Salem, except for the witches painted on the side of every police car, was fairly decorous about its use of its past.

But then came the shopping malls and Walmarts.  They did to Salem’s downtown what they did to pretty much every small city’s downtown: they killed it dead.  None of the stores that I remember from my childhood – not Almy’s, not Daniel Lowes, none of the others – still exist in downtown Salem.  In modern America, you just don’t go to a small downtown to do your shopping.  Oh, the big cities still have thriving retail centers.  But outside of the big cities, you go to the malls or the giant discount stores that live in the edge cities, and the idea of a small town commercial center is a quaint little bit of American history.

So what is a town like Salem going to do?  What’s going to fill those retail establishments?  What kind of stores will thrive in that nicely bricked-over five blocks of downtown, a true town-center, not just a shopping mall by other name?

In Salem’s case, the downtown that died has risen from the grave and become a center of cheesy tourist traps.  Perhaps appropriately, the dead now walk the earth where Salem’s commercial heart used to beat.  Salem, from the costume shops to the month-long Halloween celebration every fall, is capitalizing on the darkest moments of its history.

Today we were in search of cheesy entertainment.  So it was off to downtown Salem.  We visited a couple of witchcraft stores (no eye of newt on sale, but plenty of witchy-costume pieces and a number of small bags of aromatic herbs sitting between a shelf of tarot decks and crystal balls and a rack of t-shirts).  Amusing, but we were out for more dramatic entertainments.  And so in a two hour period, and all within a short walk of the center of Salem, we visited:

* The Nightmare Factory, a haunted house complete with 3D glasses and special effects;
* Dracula’s Castle, a haunted house hosted by a guy wearing a black cape and oozing fake blood;
* The Witch Village, a wax museum focusing on the history of witches;
* Frankenstein’s Laboratory, yet another haunted house, can you guess the theme?
* The Witch Trials Memorial, a wax museum about the Salem witch trials;
* Count Orlok’s Nightmare Gallery, a wax museum of movie monsters (Julie, who grew up on the classic horror movies, really liked this one).

That’s got to be more cheesy tourist attractions than you can find in any other half-dozen small-towns in America.  And that’s not including the ones we skipped, such as the 40 Whacks Museum (a museum of Lizzie Borden, the OJ of her day, a 19th century Massachusetts woman who probably did kill her parents with that ax, though she was acquitted), the Witch History Museum (not to be confused with the Witch Museum that we also skipped), the Pirate Museum, and probably a bunch of others that I’m forgetting.

Oh, there’s many legitimate tourist attractions in Salem.  There’s Derby Wharf, where much of the trading was done.  There’s the House of the Seven Gables that I mentioned earlier.  There’s the Peabody Museum, a remarkable collection of things brought back by the China traders, there’s Pioneer Village, which shows how the original settlers lived (and Salem was settled just six years after Plymouth, so we’re talking early days for this country).  And there’s others.

But honestly, we had a grand time visiting all of the cheesy attractions.  If you enjoy cheesy wax museums, if you like wandering through a darkened labyrinth while guys in costume jump out and go Boo, then you probably can’t beat Salem.

But it is sad to see what has happened to the small American city.

A postscript: we finished our day in Salem at the Salem Willows.  The Willows has a small boardwalk and an even smaller beach, a couple of rides, three arcades, some pleasant paths over grassy hills, and rather excellent flavored popcorn bars and salt water taffy.  There’s also a bandstand where they hold the occasional summer concert.  If you want to go somewhere that feels a lot like small-town scenes from movies of the twenties and thirties, the Willows will suit you well.

So perhaps not everything about small town America is dead after all.

Post-postscript: I vaguely recall giving my Salem rant before, and even have diffuse memories of writing it down.  I may have blogged about it five years ago when we last visited here.  If so, it’s not surprising: I’ve had these thoughts for years.  But apologies for repeating myself.

And Salem has gotten cheesier in those five years.  While even then there were more wax museums per capita than anywhere else I’ve visited, the numbers have grown in the intervening years.

Posted in reviews, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

What I’ve been reading

The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789, by Robert Middlekauff.  A history of the American revolutionary period, from the end of the French and Indian Wars through the writing of the Constitution.  I picked this up when Julie and I were visiting Colonial Williamsburg a couple months back and I realized that I didn’t know enough about this era.  The book gets a little dry sometimes, but provides a good overview of the period, covering military, political, diplomatic, economic, and lifestyle history of this time.  It gave me what I wanted, which was a solid overview.  My biggest takeaway?  The crucial role that mob violence held in the founding of this nation.  America was born in a series of riots, and the first founding fathers were not shy about using threats to life, limb, and property in order to enflame the mob against British encroachments on their lives.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Graham-Smith.  Graham-Smith answers the question “What addition would improve the classic regency romance novel?”  His answer: zombie mayhem!  He takes Austen’s text and adds scenes here and there of zombies attacking, and of the warrior Bennett girls trained in the eastern arts of the warrior.  A really fun read for those who enjoy both Jane Austen and George Romero – come on, there must be a few more of you out there!

Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell.  A present from my son Andy, and an excellent one: I strongly recommend this book.  Gladwell is expert at putting together a collection of fascinating bits of data and using it to illustrate a broader point.  In this case, he looks at what makes a person successful and concludes that the myth of the astonishing natural talent who achieves great things due to native ability is just that – a myth.  Instead, to succeed you need a combination of hard work, the luck of being born at a time and place where you have the opportunity to succeed, and a cultural background that prepares you for the challenges you are likely to face in life.  A few of the many data points that he uses to illustrate this:

— Of the 75 richest people in history, 14 were born in one nine year span in the 19th century, putting them in a cohort that came of age at just the right time to become gilded era robber barons.  (The two richest men in history, John Jay Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, are among this 14.)

— In one conservatory class, musical ability correlates exactly with the amount of practice each student has done over his lifespan.  The virtuosos all have done 10,000 hours or more of practice over their lives, the talented-but-not-top-notch have done 8,000 hours, and the also-ran future middle-school music teachers have done 6,000 hours or less.  (To show how much practice this is, if you practice 40 hours a week for 50 weeks in a year (basically, a full-time job), you’ve put in 2000 hours for that year.  Do that for five years and you’ve got your 10,000 hours.)

— The rate of plane crashes correlates directly with the assertiveness level of the culture that the crew comes from.  This is due to the fact that copilots from non-assertive cultures are less likely to force pilots to pay attention when they see a problem occurring.

BUT, there’s good news, especially on this last front.  You can overcome your cultural biases when you are aware of them and take steps to address them.  The book talks about how Korean Air Lines (KAL) was one of the most dangerous airlines in the world around ten years ago, but after instituting an assertiveness class for its flight crews, accident rates dropped dramatically and it become one of the world’s safest airlines.

The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, edited by Roy Foster.  A survey of Irish history, with each period covered by a different author.  Julie and I are planning a trip to Ireland and I read this in partial preparation.  But I really can’t recommend it – it’s awfully dry and downplays some of the more dramatic elements of Irish history.  What’s worse for a survey, it assumes a lot of knowledge from the reader.  Often it mentions key figures in passing without explaining why they are important, or how they came by their reputation.  I had read another history of Ireland a few years back and so was not entirely lost, but if you come to this book cold, you’re asking for tedium and confusion.  If you are looking for an Irish history, look for that other one – Malachy McCourt’s History of Ireland.  McCourt is quite opinionated, and you won’t mistake his book for a scholarly history.  But you’ll learn a lot, and it’s a fun read.

Posted in books | Leave a comment

Opera!

I believe I’ve mentioned how I’ve formed a recent addiction to the Radiolab podcast. This is an NPR radio show about science, and I’ve found many of the episodes to be fascinating. I really haven’t been spending enough time with science over the past few years, and it’s been good to get my feet wet again.

A few months ago, I listened to a Radiolab episode that had nothing to do with science. Instead, this episode was about Wagner’s Ring cycle of operas – a trilogy of four hour operas, with a two hour prelude that occurs before the first, based on Norse mythology and covering the struggle between power and love, good and evil, and the end of the world.

I’ve never really gotten into opera, though I’ve seen a couple over the years. But of late, I’ve thought it might be something to pick up. Over-the-top passions, big classical music, larger-than-life stories – it all sounded like the thing for me.

And the Radiolab episode made Wagner’s Ring sound like the place to start. First off, it discussed the parallels between Wagner’s Ring trilogy and Tolkien’s – and I’ve been a serious Lord-of-the-Rings geek for years. Second, it was clear that there’s lots of Wagner geeks out there – this was something that generated a passionate following in its fans, and that sounded interesting. And third, it just sounded pretty cool.

So I decided to do my research. I started by reading The Nibelung’s Ring by Peter Bassett. Then I got a copy of the operas on both CD (the Georg Solti recording) and DVD (Daniel Barenboim). And over about a month, Julie and I watched the four operas on DVD. And enjoyed them far more than I had hoped to – it really is great stuff.

Finally, last Saturday Julie and I went to see “Siegfried,” the middle opera of the trilogy, and our favorite, at the Kennedy Center. And we were blown away. You have a teenage hero raised by an evil dwarf, a legendary treasure guarded by a dragon, and an enchanted princess surrounded by magic fire. It’s incredibly good, and the Kennedy Center performance was marvelous.

At the very end, Siegfried seduces the princess (“You say you’ve loved me always? Then love me now! You say you will love me forever? Then love me Now!”). And she, although aware that their love is fated to bring about the end of the world, finally gives in and falls into his arms, singing of glorious love and joyous death. All full of passion and romance that in scale is, well, operatic.

And there’s some pretty funny scenes too. At one point, Siegfried encounters Wotan, the king of the gods. Wotan wants Siegfried to succeed at his quest, but Siegfried manages to get Wotan so angry that he tries to stop Siegfried instead. (Truth be told, Siegfried is a bit of a brat: he makes his first entrance leading a bear into his cottage so he can terrorize Mime, the dwarf who is raising him.) (He’s not too bright either, but that’s another story.) Anyone who has raised teenagers can appreciate Wotan’s feelings: you try to be rational, and the next thing you know you’re threatening the kid with a spear.

Anyway, Julie and I are now big fans of Wagner’s Ring. Give the Radiolab episode a listen and see if it sounds good to you too.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

What I’ve been reading

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.  I’m not quite sure why I picked up this one, except that I heard it discussed on the radio one day and it caught my attention.  I found Hemingway’s emotional distance from his characters to be a bit off-putting – although it’s written in first-person, the narrator never really discusses his feelings about things, just the events themselves.  But that said, I did enjoy it overall.  Certainly well worth the time I spent on it.

The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol 3: From Red River to Appomattox, by Shelby Foote.  I wrote about volumes 1 and 2 of this, which I read last summer.  Volume 3 was also excellent, though some of the things in it did annoy me.  In particular, I am an admirer of Grant and his generalship.  I think that Foote, although not the fan of Grant that I am, did him justice in the previous volumes.  But in this one, when Grant squares off against Lee (whom Foote reveres more than I do Grant), I think he gave Grant short shrift.  A warning: Civil War geekery follows.

In particular, look at the discussion of Cold Harbor, admittedly not Grant’s finest moment.  But Foote particularly castigates Grant for not providing detailed planning for the assault, instead setting general goals and leaving it to his subordinates to work out the details.  But about two pages later, Foote discusses Meade and his actions at Cold Harbor.  Meade was the actual commander of the Army of the Potomac, serving under Grant, who was general-in-chief of all of the Union armies, though Grant was present with that army for almost all of 1864.  Foote tells how in the previous battles of the 1864 campaign, Meade had provided the detailed planning, but at Cold Harbor, annoyed at the lack of recognition that he was getting, Meade sat out the planning.

Now Foote does not put two and two together here.  Up until this point, Grant had provided general guidance while Meade provided detailed planning.  But at Cold Harbor, when no one provided detailed planning, Foote blames Grant.  To my mind, the blame here lies primarily on Meade.

But I will say that aside from this, Foote is consistently readable.  I particularly enjoyed his discussion of the gradual collapse of the Confederacy – there was a real sense of poignancy in the abandonment of Richmond, the gradual surrender of the armies in the field, and the sight of the soldiers making their way home as best they could.  (And it was clear Foote would treat this as something special when I realized that I still had 300 pages to go in the book and there was only a month left to the war.)

If you want to read 3000 pages on the Civil War that focuses primarily on the military campaigns, Foote is hard to beat.  (If you want a shorter read that does a better job of covering the entire period, including a more detailed description of how we ended up in the war, I’d recommend James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom instead.)

The Nibelung’s Ring by Peter Bassett.  I’ve been spending a lot of time listening to the radio show Radiolab lately, and have mentioned it here previously.  One episode that I caught up to on the podcast was about Richard Wagner’s opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.  I’ve been toying with the idea of trying to pick up opera lately, and this show made Wagner sound extremely attractive.

But Wagner’s opera cycle is a huge work of art – four operas spread over 15 hours in a language that I don’t know.  I figured that I’d need to do a little homework before diving into it.  The Nibelung’s Ring was my homework.  It’s an overview of the operas, covering the musical elements, the plot, and the history of their writing.  Overall, I found it to be a bit fluffy – I did not need to hear about Wagner’s genius quite as much as I did, or how sublime this or that moment is.  But it gave me a basic grounding, and Julie and I have started watching the operas themselves.  So far, we’ve watched “Das Rheingold,” the first opera, and enjoyed it far more than I hoped.  So I suppose I got what I wanted from this book.

– A special bonus movie recommendation: Julie and I went to see “Duplicity” last night.  A great caper flick built around a solid romance in which Clive Owens and Julia Roberts play former spies now working in corporate espionage.  I strongly recommend it – in particular, it makes a great date movie.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

How I became a Randroid (I got better)

There’s been some talk in the news lately of the disgruntled wealthy, upset about Obama’s intention to raise taxes on the well-to-do to levels a bit lower than existed during the presidency of Saint Ronald, going on strike.  In this, they follow the pattern set out in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, in which the industrial leaders of the nation all decide to go on strike, resulting in a collapse of the economy and government.  And while I do not intend to argue about the correctness of their action (though I would hope that a discerning reader could, on examination of the tone of this paragraph, deduce what my opinion on the issue might be), this does remind me of my days as a Randroid, or obsessive follower of the teachings of Ayn Rand, lo these many years ago.  And of the tale of the grand romantic quest that led me to this state.

Flash back to the year 1980.  I was a senior in high school, and carrying a torch for a girl who had recently departed for college.  I had dated this girl off and on for much of the previous year, and she was a good match for me.  Smart, beautiful, with a vast reserve of self-composure, and, perhaps most importantly, almost as geeky as I was: I had met her at a game of Dungeons and Dragons, and we had spent much time playing that and other roleplaying games over the past year.

In one of those games, this girl played a dwarf named Dagny Taggart.  I had picked up a hint that the name had some special significance to her, but I never could get her to tell me what it was.  (Did I mention that, in addition to being smart, beautiful, composed, and geeky, this girl could also be terribly mysterious and stubborn?)  But that didn’t matter, because I decided that I was going to find out who this Dagny Taggart was, if for no other reason then because it would give me another hint about what went on behind those beautiful blue eyes that seemed so far away.

Now youngens, let me tell you of an age long ago, an age before they had an Internet.  Today, finding Dagny Taggart would be no problem – after all, she has her own Wikipedia page, which is just one of Google’s 31,900 results from querying on her name.  Finding the meaning of Dagny Taggart would be the matter of a five second websearch, not the cause of a grand romantic quest.  (It makes one wonder how other famous stories would turn out had Google been around.  “Rosebud?  Well, querying ‘Charles Foster Kane rosebud’ returns this post from his mom’s blog about how little Charlie is out playing with his sled.”)

Back then, though, we were in the information dark ages, and the best resource for those looking for answers was something called a Library.  So I went there, intending to find Dagny Taggart, to unlock a little part of my beloved’s heart.

The Encyclopedia Britannica, being much less comprehensive than Wikipedia, was no use.  And the librarian, no substitute for Google, did not help either.

But I was not daunted.  In fact, I was starting to get obsessed.  I had gotten into the habit of closing my letters to this fair damsel with the phrase “Who is Dagny Taggart?”  I was even writing it on the outside of the envelopes.

(Another note to the young: “letters” were what we used to call email, and envelopes were their packaging.  Rather quaint, I know, but you could put messages on the envelopes in ways that you can’t really put them in the email headers (unless you’re particularly geeky, that is, and even then they probably would never get read), so the old ways did have their charms.)

Finally, I reached the last resort, the one thing that no self-respecting teenage boy would ever do, certainly not as a solution to a romantic quest.  I asked my mother.  She, a former English teacher, did not immediately recognize the name.  But it did sound familiar.  After a little thought, she said that Dagny Taggart might be a character from a novel she had heard of back in college, something called The Fountainhead. And so it was back to the library for me.

I did not find Dagny Taggart in The Fountainhead. But I did find something almost as good – I found a high school diploma.  And not just any high school diploma, but the diploma of my romantic idol’s twin sister.  (Did I mention that she had a twin?  No, I suppose I left that part out.)

Don’t get the wrong image here: I did not find a full-sized diploma, all wrapped and sealed, sitting lodged in the binding of the novel.  Ayn Rand’s books aren’t quite that big.  But our high school, in addition to the full scroll, gave graduating seniors a identity-card sized diploma, which I suppose would serve if said graduate wanted to keep a constant reminder of the old alma mater available for constant review in the wallet.  This was that wallet-sized diploma, wedged between two pages of the library’s copy of The Fountainhead.

(I later returned it to my girlfriend’s sister with the words, “The next time you spend four years working to get a bookmark, you might want to be more careful where you leave it.”  She, less charmed by my sense of humor than was her sister, did not appreciate the point.)

With this evidence that I was hot on the trail, it did not take long for me to find that Dagny Taggart, while not a character in Ayn Rand’s 800-page The Fountainhead, was in fact the protagonist of her even longer novel Atlas Shrugged.  I read it, and while I was not at first overly impressed, under the influence of bright blue eyes, I was quickly convinced.

One side note: Atlas Shrugged is in part a mystery story, driven by Dagny Taggart’s quest to find out why the nation’s industrial leaders are disappearing.  In the course of her quest, she finds her one true love, John Galt – featured in the novel’s catchphrase “Who is John Galt?” – and comes to accept his philosophy.  In other words, there are great parallels between the novel and the process through which I discovered it, something that seemed fraught with meaning to my teenage mind and added to the blue-eye factor in my conversion.

And so I became a Randroid, a philosophy that had particular appeal for your average intellectually arrogant teen, which aptly described my then state.  Over the next few years, I re-read both Fountainhead and Shrugged several times, even making it through the “This is John Galt” chapter in Atlas Shrugged, a hundred-page essay dropped in near the end of the novel for those who somehow missed Rand’s point of view in the preceding 800 pages.  But eventually, after a few years of education broadened my mind, I managed to shake loose my devotion to Rand’s views.

I never did manage to shake loose my devotion to the girl who led me to them, however.  This August, we will celebrate our 25th anniversary.  And I am happy to report that she is just as smart, beautiful, composed, and geeky as she was when she launched me on my grand quest.  And often just as stubborn and mysterious too.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Imaginary Prosperty

If you have ever bought a house, you probably have experienced what I think of as imaginary prosperity.

You get the mortgage, you sign all the papers, and you realize that you have just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars.  And suddenly, lesser expenses seem like nothing.  So you happily buy a new couch, carpeting, major appliances, and various other additions to the house, secure in the knowledge that while you are spending thousands on all of these things, that money is nothing compared to what you’ve just shelled out for the house itself.  You spend money that you might not spend under other circumstances, and all because you are already spending so much anyway.

That’s a dangerous financial place to be in.  After all, you don’t really have all that extra money.  Quite the contrary!  But still you spend, and all because you figure hey, what’s another thousand or two when you’re already spending hundreds of thousands anyway.

And that’s where the US government is right now.  We’ve put $700 billion into the financial bailout.  We’re getting ready to pass an $800 billion stimulus bill.  And right now, in the midst of an economic crisis, we are deeply mired in imaginary prosperity.  After all, what’s another couple hundred billion dollars, what with all the other money pouring out of the treasury?

Now don’t get me wrong.  I think we need the stimulus, and I think we needed the bailout.

But I am worried about how we’re going to find fiscal discipline again.  Because we’re going to have to.

Posted in politics | Leave a comment