WINTER, DAD, THE BACK YARD, AND THE STARS

At this time of year, a favorite memory from my childhood always surfaces in me. It is the memory of my father and me going out into our suburban back yard, well after dark, deep into the cold of Long Island winter. Gloves on, my father held the flashlight, and I carried a book of the night sky. Together, for an hour or so, we would try to identify the constellations and name some of the individual stars. This was in the 1950s. This was how I learned to love Orion and Sirius and the two Dippers. Here's a series of seven little poems I've written about looking at the stars with my dad.

Astronomy 

I.

Stripped to antennas,

did the trees

sense us as some winter ambiguity,

all humid and complex,

all ribbed and knitted?

Did the January grass

learn some new night-impression,

all steam and dark footprints?

Just us, me and Dad,

out again to check the stars.

II.

The brittle, branchy silhouettes

of winter

defied our suburban kitchen

and the profuse, overbright options

of its motherly cabinets.

III.

Point by blue point,

notions grew

into the constellations

of my childhood evenings.

One by one by one,

specifics broke into sudden light

until the zodiac

defined the sky.

IV.

Among the cold backyard bushes—

a red-rimmed flashlight,

a book of blue circles,

binoculars.

Brilliant technician binoculars!

Astonishing positions of glass!

But even they

could not give shape

to the stars.

V.

And every time, it frightened me:

how the face of the moon,

without a whisper,

could be so deeply, deeply broken.

VI.

Or, in Kentucky summer,

way past my bedtime,

a sweet purple midnight snack of stars.

VII.

Lake and library,

the sky is still dead-distant

and full of fatherly reflections.

A RATHER STRANGE POETRY PROJECT

     You never know what kinds of things literary people will find interesting. This month, I am "Feature Artist of the Month" for the online magazine connotationpress.com. The magazine found my "$20 Haiku" project intriguing enough to feature it. To summarize the project:
     Over a period of 14 years, while living primarily in Memphis and Connecticut, I wrote haiku on the back of $20 bills, which I then spent. I'm offering $1,000 to anyone who returns one of those 170 original bills that have one of my haiku on the back. This is more an exercise in performance art than literature, I think. The essay I wrote about this project, and the haiku themselves, can be seen on connotationpress's site at this link. To read all 170 haiku, click on "Full Screen" at the end of my essay there. The caricature at the end is by my movie-actor friend Chris Ellis (My Cousin Vinny, Apollo 13, Days of Thunder, October Sky, et al.). Chris is very talented.
      Should you not care to go to the magazine's site, here's the caricature:

I fear it captures me all too well.
Here are some of the haiku I wrote. The code above each haiku is the serial number of the $20 bill on which the poem was written; the date is when the poem was written. In honor of the season, these are set in winter:

G85802267E (series 1988A)

(December 5, 1992)

 $35

And up. Live trees. Cut your own.

Open until ten. 

BG27350711D

(December 13, 2002)

Christmas tree unstrung,

Asymmetrical limbs spread:

Slant adoration.

BF44323027B

(December 27, 2002)

Driving Christmas night,

We met wet snow halfway home.

Time fell in slow flakes.

AG59344575D

(January 3, 2003)

The children on sleds,

leaving their parents behind,

glide into focus.

CB25335897C

(January 3, 2003)

The ducks sit on ice.

How strange for them, this hard stuff,

yesterday below.

AB37969679E

(February 11, 2003)

The snow is adept.

It arranges depth on slant 

And branch like slow death. 

BL26248257A

(February 28, 2003)

Young man stuck in snow:

“Just dickin’ around,” he grins,

still spinning his wheels.

If you find one of these $20 bills, I'll give you $1,000 for it. Seriously. 

 

 

 

THE CONFESSION OF AN UPTIGHT MAN: Why I refuse a medical procedure that could prolong my life

At age 64, I am, as I've said, in the vanguard of the Baby Boomer generation. This morning I did something that most Boomers—heck, most people of any age—will think is stupid and childish: I cancelled an elective colonoscopy I was scheduled to undergo next Monday.

      Last night, during several hours of productive sleeplessness (a Boomer specialty), I thought hard about whether to undergo the procedure, and by this morning I had decided not to. My reasons, I think, will resonate among the over-50 crowd, although even after I explain them, I suspect most will still think my decision foolish. That doesn’t matter to me. I’m comfortable with it.

      Most Baby Boomers know what a colonoscopy is. In case you don’t: It is a procedure whereby a flexible tube about 1/2 inch in diameter and up to six feet long is inserted into the patient’s rectum and funneled up into his or her large intestine (the colon). The tube contains fiberoptics which send pictures to a videoscreen, allowing a doctor to look for tumors and bumps, called “polyps,” which could be precancerous. If the polyps are discovered early enough, they can be removed and, theoretically, the cancer can be cut out or prevented. About 50,000 people die from colon or rectal cancer every year in the United States. Among cancers, only lung cancer kills more people.

      When he was president, Ronald Reagan had several colonoscopies, which did find polyps; in 1985 he had two feet of his colon removed because cancer was found. Former President George W. Bush had the procedure at least three times (in 1998, 1999 and 2002) and twice had polyps removed. TV personality Katie Couric lost her husband, Jay Monahan, to colon cancer when he was just 42; since then, she has been the most high-profile public advocate for colonoscopies. The American College of Gastroenterology says that colonoscopies are quick, safe, and painless. According to the American Cancer Society, early detection by colonoscopy is the best way to prevent colorectal cancer death, and everyone–male and female–over the age of 50 should have a colonoscopy every five to ten years.

       I was scheduled to undergo my first colonoscopy next Monday. Given all the facts above, why on earth did I cancel it? The reasons reach deep into my character and into my feelings about contemporary medicine. They also reflect my beliefs about life and death.

       My first reason for canceling my colonoscopy is the obvious one: I find it to be an ugly, intrusive, embarrassing procedure that violates everything I value about myself. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t have a lot of dignity to spare, so I’m loath to give up even a smidgeon of what little I have. My primary motive in life is to avoid embarrassment. (It’s the reason I won’t dance in public or sing karaoke or get drunk.) Avoiding embarrassment is not a particularly admirable motivation, but I’ve learned to accept it. I’m also the kind of person who doesn’t like someone else to mess with his body–I’ve never liked the playful jab or the tickle or the unprovoked hug. I am, to be honest, just a little uptight. In fact, the term “tightass” would not be inappropriate for me. Now take that term and weigh it against the description of a colonoscopy in the third paragraph, above. There is not, so to speak, a good fit here.

       My second reason for canceling my colonoscopy has to do with how it came to be scheduled in the first place. I have no symptoms that suggest colon cancer or any other intestinal disease. I have no family history of colorectal cancer. Yet at my most recent physical, last month, my new family physician told me I needed a colonoscopy. Why? Simply because I was over 50. Sheeplike, I agreed to undergo the procedure, purely electively. After all, this was a doctor speaking.

       My family doctor’s office then made arrangements with a gastroenterologist (GE) to perform the colonoscopy this month. I had never met the GE. I was told to go to his office a week before the procedure to pick up a “prep kit” telling me how to get ready for it. When I went to the GE’s office a couple of days ago, a nurse or an assistant–I never found out which–handed me 1) a prescription for a superlaxative and 2) a sheet telling me what not to eat in the week before the colonoscopy: no aspirin, nothing fried, nothing red, nothing with seeds, no apples, no oranges, no nuts, no raisins, no olives, no pepper, no popcorn, no pickles, and so on. The day before the procedure, the sheet said, I was to eat nothing at all except transparent stuff like (not red) Jell-0 and to drink only clear liquids. The evening before, I was to take the superlaxative. On Monday, the day of the procedure, I was not to eat or drink anything at all, although I wasn’t told exactly when on Monday I needed to be at the hospital. I was told that to find out when the procedure was to be done, I had to call the hospital on the Friday before.

       The nurse (assistant?) sent me home with all this information. I never spoke with the gastroenterologist who was going to do the procedure. He didn’t even know what I looked like, much less anything about my personality or my family history or my general health. I didn’t know what he looked like, whether he seemed bright or dim, whether his hands shook or not. No one said anything about, or handed me any information about, the discomfort and risks involved in a colonoscopy. No one told me that the superlaxative would give me fairly violent diarrhea. No one said there was about a 1% chance that I would be allergic to the anesthesia (no one even told me what level of anesthesia would be required—local? general?). No one informed me that I could develop problems at the site the anesthetic was administered or that during the procedure the colonoscope could perforate the wall of my colon, requiring real surgery, or that I might start hemmorhaging. No one told me that air would be pumped into my colon to help the procedure or that the resultant “bloating” could cause “discomfort” or that I might experience some other kinds of  “discomfort” for days after. 

     Looking back, I realize that no one–not my own doctor, not the gastroenterologist’s assistant, and certainly not the invisible GE himself–ever even told me what exactly a colonoscopy was designed to look for, what colorectal cancer was, or how serious a problem it could be. No, all that information I had to seek out for myself. Nearly everything you’ve read about colonoscopy and colorectal cancer in this article I found on the Internet. I’m sure when I arrived at the hospital on Monday, I would have been given a sheet to read telling me some of this. I know I would have been given a disclaimer to sign.

      This is the nature of modern medicine, and it says much about the relationship between doctor and patient in the 21^st Century: If a doctor tells you to do something, you are expected to do it, no questions asked. Well, I have some questions, a lot of questions. For example:

• On average, how much longer does a person who has a colonoscopy live than one who doesn’t?
• What percentage of people with no symptoms and with no family history of colorectal problems are discovered by colonoscopy to have colon cancer?
• What large, longterm studies suggest that colonoscopies are actually effective in prolonging life?
• If I have the colonoscopy and they discover cancer or precancerous polyps, what will my quality of life be after they cut them—and some of my healthy insides—out?
  

       The nurse in the gastroenterologist’s office told me I could call if I had any questions, but I didn’t call. I’m pretty sure she couldn’t have answered any of these questions, and I didn’t want to embarrass her. I couldn’t even find the answers to these questions on the Internet. My second reason for canceling my colonoscopy, then, was that I resented the way I was led to it by the medical establishment–in darkness and ignorance and under a fog of condescension–and I had been given no compelling reason to submit to such an invasive, uncomfortable and potentially dangerous procedure.

       Finally, there is the matter of life and death, and the few choices one gets to make in such matters. To explain my feelings about that, let me tell about two friends:

       My friend Lee was a tennis teaching pro who worked out regularly. He had a family history of cancer, so he took special care to be on the lookout for cancer signs, and he smeared himself liberally with sunblock to prevent skin cancer. He died of a massive heart attack at age 53.

       A few years later, my friend Tom, another tennis player (and the father of the famous tennis player James Blake), also died. He had a family history of heart disease, so he kept himself in wonderful aerobic condition and ate a vegetarian diet. His cholesterol was well in the safety zone. He died of stomach cancer at age 57.

       As valuable as organizations like the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society are, they have a rather narrow view of the world. The American Heart Association would consider Tom a success story: he didn’t die of a heart attack. The American Cancer Society would consider Lee a success story: he didn’t die of cancer.

       But both Lee and Tom are dead, and I miss them. They did what they were supposed to do (for all I know, they even had colonoscopies), and they’re still dead.

       When I tell people I canceled my colonoscopy, I know what they will say—because it is what Katie Couric says and what the American Cancer Society says. They will say, “But it could save your life!” Well, they’re wrong. It couldn’t save my life. In the end, my life is not savable, because I’m human, and someday I’m going to die–of something. If it’s not cancer, it will be a heart attack. If it’s not a heart attack, it will be a stroke. If it’s not a stroke, it will be a drunk driver. I remember reading a few years back that if you spend the rest of your life eating all the right foods to keep your cholesterol down, you will definitely lower your risk of a heart attack–but you will add only three months to your life span. Because you’ll still die. Of something.

      Thank you, I’ll have the steak.

      Consider Ronald Reagan. In 1985, he had a colonoscopy that found precancerous polyps. The consequent surgery added perhaps 10 years to his life. Now look at the last ten years of Ronald Reagan’s life, during which he plummeted into the bleak chaos of Alzheimer’s disease. If it had been me, I would have taken my chances with colon cancer. Likewise, if it comes to a choice  between colon cancer and a stroke that knocks out my speaking ability, for example, I’ll choose the cancer. And if the cancer is awful enough . . . well, I have no philosophical objection to suicide.

       The fact is, of course, that we can’t choose our diseases. I may get colon cancer. If I do, I’m sure that I will for a time beat myself up for not having had the colonoscopy (after laughing at the irony of it all). But I’ll also recall Tom and Lee and President Reagan. They did what the American Heart Association said, and what the American Cancer Society said, and what the American College of Gastroenterology said. And still they died.

       No, we can’t choose our diseases–but we can choose our cures. Short of suicide, we can’t choose how we’ll die–but we must choose how we’ll live. And as in any choice, the decision about how we care for ourselves should reflect who we are and what we believe. Next Monday, then, I will choose to play tennis.

(An earlier version of this article originally appeared in the online version of The Memphis Flyer in 2008.)

AS LONG AS WE BOTH SHALL LOVE: The institution of marriage is under attack? That’s fine with me.

         I live with a woman who is not my wife. Her name is Gail. We share the same bed, and occasionally we make love to each other. We have been doing this for 18 years. At least once a week, Gail and I look at each other, shake our heads, reach out to hold hands, smile and say how lucky we are to be living such a pleasant life. Honestly. We do. You can ask her.

         People use different terms for the way Gail and I live: cohabitation, living in sin, fornication. I call it simply “living together,” because that’s what it is, and the phrase has a kind of understated poetry: We live, and we get to do it together. According to the 2010 census, there are about 15 million other Americans living together as we do. The Census Bureau says we are “Persons of the opposite sex sharing living quarters”--POSSLQs, for short. But POSSLQ doesn’t quite capture the poetry of it.

         Last week, for the five hundredth time, a friend asked me, good-naturedly, “When are you two finally going to get married?”

         I gave him the answer I always give to that question: “Never.”

         Sometimes I’m asked the question differently: “So why don’t you two get married?”

         Again I always answer the same way: “Why should we? There’s absolutely nothing marriage can add to our life together that would make it any better.”

         I was married once, for six years, long ago, to a good woman who was a fine wife and a wonderful mother to our son. The marriage license did nothing to change the fact that we were not right for each other. It did nothing but keep us together longer than we should have stayed together and make us a little unhappier for longer than we should have been. We were, for each other, clothing we had both outgrown, and the law did everything in its power to keep us buttoned tight and strangling.

          It’s popular in some circles (you know which circles they are) to say that today the “sacred institution” of marriage is under attack or threatened--by Hollywood movies, by rap lyrics, by the gay rights movement.

       Personally, I think that if marriage is under attack, that’s a good thing. If the institution of marriage were ended tomorrow, I think the world would be a happier place. “Marriage is an institution,” goes the old joke, “and I’m not ready to be institutionalized yet.” If we keep the institution, I think people should have to live together for years and pass all kinds of written and psychological tests before they are allowed to get married, and I think divorce should be easy. This sounds very Counterculture Sixties, I know, but on this issue I think the Counterculture was right.

         For centuries, of course, marriage laws were a way for the church or the state to control the distribution and accumulation of wealth and land, and to keep the powerful in power. To protect his family legacy, a father made sure that his son married a woman of equal or greater property value, preferably a woman who came with many fields and farms, plus a castle or two; legally joining the wealth of two powerful families helped keep them both powerful. To protect the elite in other ways, certain castes were not allowed to marry other castes, lest they pollute the upper classes; and certain colors were not allowed to marry other colors, lest they dilute the color scheme that kept the dominant color dominant; and certain creeds could marry only within their own creed, lest the church lose its force. Marriage, in other words, was a way to legally assure that like bred with like, so the status quo could be maintained.

         Marriage was also a way to institutionalize the repression of women and to protect the power of men; once married, a wife was legally subject to her husband, and all she owned became his--but not vice versa. Marriage was moreover a way for women to acquire, in exchange for sex and child-bearing, the small measure of economic security legally required of their husbands. And marriage in America has always been a way for the Puritan power structure to suppress the fun of sex. In fact, for nearly all of its history, marriage has had almost nothing to do with love and everything to do with power and control.

           Are things different today? Not much, despite the propaganda to the contrary. But I’ll grant that more men and women than ever before now marry “for love.” Marriage, they say, is a way to demonstrate their lifelong commitment to each other. What I don’t understand is this: What kind of commitment is it that requires a license, a wedding cake, and a thousand laws to ratify it?

           I can honestly say that I don’t comprehend why marriage is so “sacred” to the general population, unless it’s to sustain the economic voltage of those publishing powerhouses, the bridal magazines. There is no need for marriage anymore, if there ever was a need for it. Making sure that fathers provide for the children they sire used to be a respectable reason to encourage people to marry when they had kids, I suppose. But it’s easy enough to put laws on the books that require fathers to support their children, even if the kids are born outside of marriage, and in fact such laws already exist.

          The problem is, love may die, but the law lives on. It’s hard to tell in many marriages where love ends and the law begins. Marriages are not made in heaven, they’re made in licensing offices. They’re not blessed by God, they’re blessed by bureaucrats. There is love in many marriages, but it is love under the umbrella of the law, where the wind and rain and sun that both test and nourish other relationships can’t reach until it’s too late. In many marriages, a single strong gust--a fight over money, a lustful glance at someone else--can blow such a relationship away, because its roots are too shallow, having been sheltered too long by the law.

            It’s not just that marriage is unnecessary, I believe, it’s that it’s actually harmful. It replaces choice with compulsion. It makes that which should be voluntary, compulsory. If I am faithful to my partner because I am legally bound to be faithful, that is no more emotionally meaningful than stopping at red lights. If I live in the same house as my partner only because the law makes it massively inconvenient for me not to, we are no longer living together, we are simply moving toward death together. If statutes are the only thing driving me to provide for my children, then I am a father by statute only.  Marriage replaces affection with the law.

            But love does not flourish under the sheriff’s gun. If I were to marry the person I care for, and the weight of the government can be felt behind my every act of caring, how do I then prove my personal commitment to my spouse? In marriage, every caress becomes an act of public will, not purely personal affection. In marriage, every hug can be seen as a hug of convenience, every kiss a kiss from a court of law. The marriage bonds get all tangled up with the simplest ties of affection.

            Things are clearer for Gail and me, and for others who live together. We know why we’re there on Sunday afternoon, reading the paper on the sofa, looking at each other occasionally and smiling. It has nothing to do with covenants and courts. We’re there because we like each other best. And we’ll be there as long as we both shall love.

__________________________________________

For more on this subject, check out the web site www.unmarried.org. I’m also told that the book Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, by Stephanie Coontz, is an excellent  history of marriage, though I haven’t read it yet myself. This column originally appeared in the online version of The Memphis Flyer in 2004.

           

ON THE ONGOING WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

One of the few things I disagree with President Obama about--but it's a big thing--is his continuation and, indeed, escalation of the war in Afghanistan. The president has had difficult decisions to make about the war. His current strategy in Afghanistan is justifiable; I just happen to think it's wrong and counterproductive. 

Rather than spout my own opinions about the war, let me instead quote from an interview Bill Moyers had with Professor Andrew Bacevich on public television last spring. Bacevich graduated from West Point, was in the army for 23 years, served in Vietnam, got a PhD from Princeton, and is now a highly regarded professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His son was killed in the Iraq war. When Bacevich speaks about the war in Afghanistan, he is much better informed, both intellectually and emotionally, than I could ever be. Below is a small excerpt from what he said last spring. He speaks for me. (Here's the link to the full interview.)




ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, we don't learn from history. And there is this persistent, and I think almost inexplicable belief that the use of military force in some godforsaken country on the far side of the planet will not only yield some kind of purposeful result, but by extension, will produce significant benefits for the United States. I mean, one of the obvious things about the Afghanistan war that is so striking and yet so frequently overlooked is that we're now in the ninth year of this war.

It is the longest war in American history. And it is a war for which there is no end in sight. And to my mind, it is a war that is utterly devoid of strategic purpose. And the fact that that gets so little attention from our political leaders, from the press or from our fellow citizens, I think is simply appalling, especially when you consider the amount of money we're spending over there and the lives that are being lost whether American or Afghan.

BILL MOYERS: But President Obama says, our purpose is to prevent the Taliban from creating another rogue state from which the jihadists can attack the United States, as happened on 9/11. Isn't that a strategic purpose?

ANDREW BACEVICH: I mean, if we could wave a magic wand tomorrow and achieve in Afghanistan all the purposes that General McChrystal [since replaced by Gen. Petraeus) would like us to achieve, would the Jihadist threat be substantially reduced as a consequence? And does anybody think that somehow, Jihadism is centered or headquartered in Afghanistan? When you think about it for three seconds, you say, "Well, of course, it's not. It is a transnational movement."

BILL MOYERS: They can come from Yemen. They can come from—

ANDREW BACEVICH: They can come from Brooklyn. So the notion that somehow, because the 9/11 attacks were concocted in this place, as indeed they were, the notion that therefore, the transformation of Afghanistan will provide some guarantee that there won't be another 9/11 is patently absurd. Quite frankly, the notion that we can prevent another 9/11 by invading and occupying and transforming countries is absurd.

BILL MOYERS: In this context, then, what do we do about what is a real threat, from people who want to kill us, the Jihadists. What do we do about that?

ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, we need to assess the threat realistically. Osama bin Laden is not Adolf Hitler. Al-Qaeda is not Nazi Germany. Al-Qaeda poses a threat. It does not pose an existential threat. We should view Al-Qaeda as the equivalent of an international criminal conspiracy. Sort of a mafia that in some way or another draws its energy or legitimacy from a distorted understanding of a particular religious tradition.

And as with any other international criminal conspiracy, the proper response is a police effort. I mean, a ruthless, sustained, international police effort to identify the thugs, root out the networks and destroy it. Something that would take a long period of time and would no more succeed fully in eliminating the threat than the NYPD is able to fully eliminate criminality in New York City.

FIT TO BE YULETIDE: The way I look at Christmas

Every year since I was old enough to appreciate the rich, rococo rites of Christmas, the holiday season has bestowed on me an especially personal, intimate gift: a head cold. Come Christmas morn and, as predictably as the solstice itself, I kneel beneath the tree with a runny nose, a raw throat, and the sweaty upper lip of a mild fever.

     When I was a child, this seemed only right and just: after all, one couldn’t expect all those ecstasies—electric trains, pine needles, “Silent Night”—without the world making one suffer somehow at the same time, to sort of even things out. It got to the point that the sicker I felt, the better the Christmas I knew I was having.

     I’m more sophisticated now, of course. I know that a runny nose is really the product of germy crowds in overheated department stores to which one hikes across the frozen wastes of mile-wide parking lots at this stress-filled time of year. Somehow I don’t think I’m better off for that kind of knowledge.

     Perhaps it’s because I’ve always seen Christmas through the rosy haze of a mild delirium that my views of it are what they are. For example:

• I don’t think Christmas is Too Commercialized. I don’t think it can be too commercialized, despite all the earnest pleadings of thousands of freshman compositions. I’ve been in love with the whole idea of Christmas shopping since as a kid I spent hours—days—happily biking from store to store to spend my paper-route money on a cardigan sweater for Dad and furry pink slippers for Mom—or, in alternate years, slippers for Dad and a furry pink cardigan sweater for Mom. (At one time I actually believed that furry pink animals gave up their lives for those sweaters.) I have always believed that Christmas is simply the time when we trade the tired, the old, and the abstract for the fresh, the new, and the concrete—when our longest-worn, most threadbare affections are magically transformed into Dad’s uncreased slippers, Mom’s unpilled sweater, and brother George’s unscuffed basketball. The whole idea of somebody wearing or, better still, dribbling a bright new manifestation of my love still strikes me as almost painfully beautiful.
• It doesn’t bother me in the least that Christmas advertising starts way back when jack-o’-lanterns are still on the stoop, or that somebody is making money off the whole deal. Money and advertising are simply vehicles for smoothing the process of turning old affections into new basketballs.
• When it comes to Christmas, the mall the merrier. The ideal place to celebrate Christmas is the shopping mall, which puts the hum in humanity and the masses in Christmas. I foresee the day when 20,000 New Englanders—whole Connecticut townships—will gather on the morning of December 25 at the regional shopping mall, all 3 1/2 million square feet of it, there to exchange gifts and sing carols and wander joyously among the ever-green department-store treasures of a culture hung heavy with shiny new things to buy. Periodically there will be reports of whole counties experiencing a kind of mass elation, going on giant Christmas Day shopping sprees, everybody buying everything for everybody else in a kind of giving frenzy—the transcendent human counterpoise to the sharks’ feeding frenzies. I can imagine all of New England wearing brand-new fuzzy pink sweaters.

• If not shopping malls, then hardware stores. A good old neighborhood hardware store, ecumenically managed, is a wonderful place to Christmas shop. What better Christmas present than a brand-spanking-new shovel. Or a rake. Or a wrench. Oh, to find, lying in the cotton snow beneath a Scotch pine on Christmas morning, an open-ended adjustable big enough to handle the kitchen pipes!

• I believe children should be given everything you can possibly afford to buy them for Christmas. They should not be subjected to righteous sermonizing about how it’s better to give than to receive, or how it’s the thought that counts. Children know better. The great human urge for something new and something more should not be damped. It is what brought the babe and the wise men together in the manger, and it is what will someday have us shaking hands with the natives of Rigel 6.
• Christmas morning should, by public ordinance, be cold and darkly cloudy with, yes, a hint of snow. (Do I cliché myself? Very well then, I cliché myself.) The Canadian Clipper should bring Arctic air even to Southern California and Miami, and the houses should glow from within. The brightest lights in the world should be those on the Christmas trees, whatever their size, shape, or tensile strength. Our tree this year is a little Fraser fir, barely five feet tall, with a few strings of unreliable lights. On certain evenings, it is known to blind me.
• Outdoor Christmas lights (preferably of gaudy colors, not some kind of chic white) should not be taken down before Valentine’s Day. The reasons for this are so obvious that I refuse to go into them. Someday, some Columbus of the soul in a New York suburb will actually turn his Christmas lights on during a dreary rush hour in February, and every citizen in every corner of the state will light up into an incandescent smile, not even knowing why.
• After decades of pondering the question, I now understand that there is no choosing between Chanukah and Christmas. One is eight delicious mini-Christmases; the other, one gorgeous orgy of a morning.
• The proper attire for Christmas morning is pajamas and a bathrobe. Period.

• The platitude “Let’s put Christ back in Christmas” strikes me as a suggestion whose piousness would offend the personage in question himself. I can’t believe he would see anything wrong in my wanting to transform my love for my small son into a baseball glove, some high-powered horseshoe magnets, a penlight, a gyroscope, and a five-dollar pocket watch that I rescue from the bottom of a glass counter in the neighborhood hardware store, where it has lain for twenty years. I say, Let’s put the fuzzy pink sweaters and the magnets back in Christmas. As for that bright little baby on that fresh straw in that old manger of a tired world, he’ll always remain the perfect symbol of the need for a new start that Christmas is all about. He’ll never be out of Christmas.

End of sermon. I feel a sore throat coming on. It’s going to be a good one.

(An earlier version of this essay first appeared in Memphis magazine and was syndicated in several other publications in December 1982.)

WEALTH, INFORMATION, AND THE LAWS OF DIFFUSION

Before he unveiled his theories of Special and then General Relativity, Einstein had already made a name for himself in the world of physics, largely because of some papers he wrote before 1905, his so-called “Miracle Year.” One of those early papers was his PhD dissertation, which was about Brownian motion. This, you may recall from 10th-grade physics, is the bouncing and jiggling movement of particles in a liquid or gas. It is related to the concept of diffusion, which is the gradual spreading of particles throughout a liquid or gas, due largely to Brownian motion.

    We’ve all witnessed diffusion. Drop a pinch of salt into a tank of water, and soon you can taste salt molecules that have spread pretty much evenly throughout the water. (Stirring and heating help but aren’t necessary, given time.) Open a perfume jar in one corner of a room, and, rather quickly, you can smell it in the far corner, because perfume molecules have spread that far, that fast. That’s diffusion. Einstein provided equations to explain how that happens under different conditions. His papers helped prove the existence of atoms. Here’s a nice web page about Brownian motion and diffusion.

     Starting in the 1950s, social scientists began scientifically examining the idea of “diffusion of ideas”—i.e., how ideas, innovations, news, information, customs, symbols, and even changes in language spread throughout societies. Think of how the use of the single-word sentence “Whatever,” or the fashion of the backward baseball cap, or the addiction to Harry Potter spread throughout the society of American youth: Some kids somewhere began each fad, and then it spread--like salt in water or perfume in air.

     I’ve been thinking about diffusion lately in light of the recent tax-cut fight in Congress and the WikiLeaks classified-document leaks. In a sense, they’re both about diffusion.

     Though it probably won’t make me as famous as Einstein, here’s my theory:

     Wealth and information, like salt and perfume, try to spread themselves evenly throughout the world. They want to diffuse. To prevent this spread, rich people and governments create containers or try to freeze the liquid. This is like turning a single gallon of water into four quart containers; now when you put salt in one, it cannot spread to the others. Or like turning the water to ice; the salt cannot diffuse. It’s also like sealing off the room where you opened the perfume.

      But the law of diffusion is powerful. There are natural forces trying to move wealth from the rich to the poor, and information from the those in the know to the ignorant. It takes powerful container walls or freezing temperatures to prevent this from happening. Whole legal systems, for example, are designed to keep wealth from diffusing to the poor (laws banning theft, for example, and protecting inheritances); physical structures like bank vaults and gated communities have the same effect, and so do social codes that, for example, shame the poor into thinking that they must not even ask the rich to share their wealth. Similar walls have been built to contain information: laws that classify government documents, for example, or that censor books and websites, or that close off schoolrooms and colleges and university libraries to some people while letting others (usually those already “in the know”) in.

      The thicker the liquid, the slower diffusion takes place. It happens much faster in gases. (It even happens in solids, but not so’s you’d notice.) My sense of the world today is this: When it comes to information, the world is turning to gas. When it comes to wealth, it’s still liquid, and pretty thick, at that.

      Thanks to the internet, ideas fly through the ether (that imaginary gas that constitutes the digital universe) faster than ever. Actual studies have been done to show that a single idea, such as “sustainable growth” or “global warming,” now moves through the world far more quickly than it did 10 years ago, and the speed at which such ideas diffuse is increasing exponentially. WikiLeaks has merely opened the perfume bottle.

      Rarer are the instances when some of the barriers to wealth diffusion have come down: The New Deal, for example, and the War on Poverty, and the 50-year period when the IRS imposed a 50-91% tax rate on the super-rich. Even today, some politicians would like to warm and stir the water and help the salt to spread.

      But not most politicians.

      Mostly, the barriers to the diffusion of wealth remain up. In the recent debate over tax cuts in Washington, some politicians clearly would prefer that diffusion not take place, that the liquid of American life be made colder and more viscous, or even frozen altogether, so the salt moves through it slowly, if at all. They want the wealth to stay where it is, contained, cold, locked in place. They would even, if they could, make life a solid.

       These politicians can’t turn the digital ether into amber, however, so we know what they’re up to. There is a smell coming from Washington today that is as pervasive as perfume, though not so sweet, and it’s reaching us at the speed of scent.