Beautiful Days, Ugly Tactics

Dear Ed,

The weather today and yesterday has been great. Walking both days was a delight. Tomorrow Jay promises increased heat and humidity and an increased chance of thunderstorms. So be it. That will be good too. Rain would be good. And serene heat and sunshine before that.

I'm watching The Key (1958), starring William Holden, Sophia Loren, and Trevor Howard. I recognized the music as being that of Malcolm Arnold. He composed the score for Bridge on the River Kwai. I like Arnold's Second Symphony, also his Dances (English, Irish, Scottish, Cornish). He has a lot of humor, some of it wacky. He ends one of the Scottish dances with the tune, "shave and a haircut, two bits." You may not know how that that tune goes, and you might not know what "two bits" means. You can't get a haircut for two bits any more, and you probably can't get a shave at all in a barber shop.

The Key takes place at sea, partly. Holden is apparently the skipper of a small merchant ship. Aha, it's December 7, 1941. Anybody know what happened then? Hint: the next day Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress saying that the previous day would "live in infamy" because of the "dastardly" deed of the Japanese air force at a place called Pearl Harbor, in what is now our fiftieth state.

Today was an especially good day for me. A vocational wish I've had for a good while is coming true--if I can believe it! I'll say more when I'm surer that it really is going to happen. For now, I can't believe my good luck. I am grateful, and at this point anxious.

My nephew was to go to college today, his first day at Indiana University. I recall a little of my first semester at college. It was the nearest to perfect autumn I can remember, day after day of dry, sunny days and crisp nights. I was planning on being an engineer of some sort and I took chemistry, math, German, and English. I liked the subject matter then, and I did pretty well--B's and C's, a 2.5 GPA. That was good for me. Looking back over nearly fifty years, I see that the most fitting course for me was English composition and my best teacher was a young woman who was the registrar as well as the teacher of the course. She taught me social conscience, logic, critical thinking, and how to recognize propaganda. I'd never had any experience with such elements of education up to then, or maybe it was just that I was aware of them for the first time.

The most popular form of propaganda today is argumentum ad hominem, argument "to the man," i.e. attacking the character, motives, associations, habits, etc. of a person rather than arguing a point on logical grounds. Your opponent says that she is grieving because her son died in a war you started, an unjustified war, and because of her son's death and nearly two thousand others, and your seeming indifference to all of this by going on vacation for a month, it is a great injustice to the the entire nation that you govern and it is time you put away your bicycle and chainsaw and get your ass back to your oval office and get to work on getting the soldiers home. Rather than apply yourself to the assertion the lady has made, your henchmen and mouthpieces get busy and start to Swiftboat the lady, slime her, trash her, say that she is unstable, she is in league with a fat, unkempt man (that he is fat and unkempt rather than that he has found you out is ad hominem) who has cast aspersions on you, she is really not sincere. The woman is the problem, not the injustice of your war. That's the ad hominem argument. Miss Duus taught it to me years ago. Nice to know what it is. Character assassination, sliming, and--a new term for it--swiftboating.

It used to be the folks on the other side of the pond that did the "dastardly" acts.

I long for people in high places with character, who argue a point on its merit, who are not smug and arrogant, who are humble, reflective, penitent, who are not liars.

Goodnight, dear, and amen. Here's hoping we meet now and then. It was great fun but it was just one of those things.

Old Blue Eyes