Tom Glenn's Blog, page 68

Review of Conquering Jerusalem

My review of Stephen Dando-Collins newest book, Conquering Jerusalem: The AD 66-73 Roman Campaign to Crush the Jewish Revolt, is now on the internet. You can read it at http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/conquering-jerusalem-the-ad-66-73-roman-campaign-to-crush-the-jewish-revolt

As I noted in my review, my reaction to the book was primarily one of horror. The casual killing of the conquered by the thousands shocked and surprised me. I hadn’t realized that such barbarity was commonplace in the first century AD.

Bear in mind that the man who was so shocked—me—is a veteran of many years of combat on the battlefield. Between 1962 and 1975, I spent more time in Vietnam than I did in the U.S. My job was providing signals intelligence support to troops fighting the war. I witnessed countless combat deaths, many of them so grisly that little was left to put in a body bag.

But neither we nor our enemies killed for the sake of killing. That, as I understand it, was what both the Romans and the Jews did during the Jewish revolt. My understanding made me realize how far the members of humanity have advanced in two millennia. The sacredness of human life and the common commitment to preserve it at all costs is, to my surprise, a modern concept broadly accepted at least in the western democracies.

I have learned anew that humanity has indeed grown in wisdom over the centuries. For all our flaws and errors, we are better today than we were two thousand years ago.

. . . But Keeping Fit

My post of yesterday describes the most important but not the only aspect of my daily life. Being an artist doesn’t absolve me of the need to keep my body working at its best so that I can do everything I need to do to create art and just to live day by day. To stay in shape, I follow a rigorous diet, described in an earlier blog post, assure that I get plenty of sleep, and work out every other day.

I only eat twice a day. My diet emphasizes vegetables and fruits. Despite the restrictions I impose upon myself, I have never before enjoyed food as much as I do now. Beyond raw vegetables and fruits, I limit myself to two different soups and beans served on rice. I allow myself small quantities of ground up meat for flavoring in the dishes I prepare, and every third day I eat eggs and meat as an entrée. I have refined the recipes for these dishes over time, adding onion, garlic, seasoning, and spices until I have achieved unparalleled savor. I don’t think of myself as a cook, but my experiments have resulted in wonderful tastes.

Equally important to my health is my workout routine. Every other day, I lift weights for two to three hours. I do three sets of at least twelve reps of thirteen different exercises including bench and military presses, rows, and a variety of curls. Most of my life, I have been a runner and a weight lifter, not for health reasons but because I enjoyed the exercise. I can’t run any more thanks to a botched knee replacement operation six years ago that left me with a slight limp. Nor can I do lower body workouts. So I emphasize what I can do with my upper body. To keep myself going while working out, I have music playing on my stereo, always classical, often Mozart and Bach.

Since my life work (writing and reading) is sedentary, staying physically active is critical to my health. I’m blessed that I enjoy working out, although, granted, not as much as I did when I was younger. Nevertheless, in many ways, I count myself as the most fortunate of men.

New Book Review

My most recent book review is now up on the internet. It’s about the Jewish revolt against Rome in the 1st century AD. You can read it at  http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/conquering-jerusalem-the-ad-66-73-roman-campaign-to-crush-the-jewish-revolt

Let me know what you think.

Being an Artist

I’m like few other people. I knew at age six that I had to write, but it wasn’t until much later than I understood that I was an artist. That meant that I had inborn sensitivity to beauty. It happened so often that I’d be awestruck by the beauty of a rainbow, a sunrise, a seascape which others seemed not to notice. The most common occurrence was my being taken by beautiful sounds like birds singing or the rolling of thunder. Even as a small child, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of music. I wore out my few 78 rpm records of the classics and taught myself to read music and play the piano at school since we were too poor to afford to buy a piano.

Despite my infatuation with music, I knew by age six that writing words was what I was destined to do. I read constantly and developed an appreciation for what worked when putting words together on paper. Moved by the beautiful writing of A. A. Milne whose Winnie the Pooh fascinated me, I learned that economy was a key ingredient to beautiful and effective prose. I went on to luxuriate in the work of Mark Twain. The King James Bible and Shakespeare required me to study the text to be able to understand it, but that inspired me anew.

I discovered poetry early on in nursery rhymes, but I was never as attracted to that art as I was to beautiful prose writing. The rhythm and rhyme struck me as tacky. It wasn’t until I approached adulthood that I discovered free verse poetry. I studied the tools of that art to adapt to my own prose writing. Meanwhile, I submerged myself in writers like Dickens and Milton to learn how to create beauty with words. These days, I am a fulltime writer who reads constantly to learn more about how to craft beauty with text.

I have long since become reconciled to perceiving beauty where others see nothing. That make me something of an oddball. But I gladly accept that fate as the price for a sensitivity that brings me great joy.

The Third Curse

Irony is not a human trait. It exists in nature. Only yesterday I wrote about humanity’s three curses, the third being global warming. And this morning the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its landmark Climate Report, the most comprehensive assessment yet on global warming. As the report makes clear, all of us, every living human being, will be affected by the heating of the earth that we have brought upon ourselves.

According to the report, we will confront more record-breaking heat (as in the Pacific Northwest in July and southern Europe last week); more frequent floods (as in India, Germany, and China); more frequent droughts (as in the U.S. west); and rising sea levels that will threaten coastal cities (like Miami) as Artic and Antarctic ice melts. Wildfires like those engulfing the U.S. northwest will become commonplace.

This morning’s Los Angeles Times says that, according to the Climate Report, earth’s climate is getting so hot that temperatures in about a decade will probably blow past a level of warming that world leaders have sought to prevent. Human life everywhere will be threatened.

Maybe the authority of the UN will finally move us Americans to change our ways, but I doubt it. We have politicized climate change. Trump and the Republicans have denied that it exists. They see no need to change the way we do business, just as they deny the very real danger of the coronavirus.

Big trouble lies ahead.

Three Curses

The last several years have seen the coincidence of three scourges on the U.S. and on humanity in general.

The first was the presidency of Donald Trump who inflicted great damage on the world and especially on the U.S. He did everything he could do to turn our democracy into an autocracy and undid much of the good that had come from the administration of his predecessor, Barrack Obama. Trump ended his reign by inciting mobs to storm the U.S. Capitol and prevent Congress from confirming the election of his opponent, Joe Biden, to the presidency. He will long be remembered as the worst president the U.S. was ever cursed with.

The second coincident tribulation was the onset of the covid-19 pandemic which killed multiple millions worldwide. In the U.S. alone, it accounted for 35 million cases and 612,000 deaths. It disrupted commerce, both national and international, and inflicted economic damage not yet calculated.

And third, the predicted affliction of global warming has started to arrive. Droughts, floods, unprecedented heat, all-consuming fires, and the consequent famine are destroying life all over the planet.

The irony is that each of these tribulations made the others worse. Trump’s refusal to recognize the threat of the pandemic and take action to combat it made the results far more injurious. His administration pretended that global warming was fake and took no action to thwart it. The pandemic, meanwhile, delayed international efforts to tackle climate change. And the inclement weather damage hindered efforts to control the pandemic.

It’s probably too early to calculate the permanent changes to life on the planet that these three curses will bring. Trump’s malign presidency will eventually result in new laws that will prevent such an administration from ever being elected again. The national and international economy will be altered as a result of the pandemic. The only permanent change I can detect so far is that far more people will work from home in the future. The effect on commerce and the hospitality industry is so far undetermined. And as Biden has already made clear, we will hasten our efforts to reduce carbon emissions to slow down the disasters already occurring worldwide.

In sum, we will suffer permanent damage from all three scourges, but we have learned from our experience and will work together to improve.

The Electoral College

The Electoral College, like the filibuster, is a remnant of a racist past that needs to be abolished. According to Wikipedia, “The United States Electoral College is the group of presidential electors required by the Constitution to form every four years for the sole purpose of electing the president and vice president. Each state appoints electors according to its legislature, equal in number to its congressional delegation (senators and representatives). Federal office holders cannot be electors. Of the current 538 electors, an absolute majority of 270 or more electoral votes is required to elect the president and vice president. If no candidate achieves an absolute majority there, a contingent election is held by the United States House of Representatives to elect the president, and by the United States Senate to elect the vice president.”

The flaws in the system are multiple. The worst aspect is that it allows the election of a president who did not win the popular vote. That happened in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. The most recent example was Donald Trump, unquestionably the worst president the U.S. has ever had. He lost the 2016 popular election to Hillary Clinton by 2.86 million votes but was elected by the Electoral College.

That outcome obviously violated the one person-one vote dictum that requires equal power for each voter. And if we learn nothing else from the disastrous reign of Trump, let’s fix our voting system by eliminating the Electoral College in hopes that it never happens again.

The Value of Education

In the U.S., people with a college degree make considerably more money than those whose education ended with high school. At the median, career earnings for a bachelor’s degree graduate are more than twice as high as for someone with only a high school diploma. According to a study at Northeastern University, the expected annual income for people with a doctorate is $97,916; those with a bachelor’s degree will earn $64,896; and those with only a high school degree $38,792. College graduates can expect to earn an average of a million dollars more than high school graduates over their lifetime.

Moreover, high school graduates are at least twice as likely as college graduates to be unemployed. When, for example, unemployment reached its peak in 2010, recent college graduates experienced an unemployment rate of 6.9 percent, compared with a jobless rate of 15.8 percent for all young workers.

All that said, the most important reason for a college education is not increased income. It is learning to think. Each scholarly discipline offers a unique mode of thought. The reasoning at the core of mathematics is radically different from that of the study of English. The thinking patterns in languages other than English, especially Asian and African languages, offer the student ways of thinking not available anywhere else. Engineering, medicine, music, and literature all require learning to think in modes not applicable to other disciplines.

I am persuaded by my own experience that learning to think in multiple modes is the best way to harness the mind and, in effect, increase one’s intelligence. That’s the gift of education. And it’s worth far more than an increase in income.

Rich Republicans

In the U.S., there are more Democrats than Republicans. So why don’t Democrats win more elections? Because the Republicans have much more money and are willing and able to pay to arrange elections so that Democrats’ voting is nullified.

What this amounts to buying elections. It is the wealthy invalidating the votes of those with less money. In addition, data from the internet show that Republican candidates gain a significantly higher percentage of votes from individuals with incomes over $50,000 per year, and the advantage increases along with the income level, to a height of 63 percent of individuals earning $200,000 or more a year supporting Republicans. This level is the direct inverse of individuals earning.

Put differently, an individual’s likelihood of being a Democrat decreases with every additional dollar earned. Democrats have a huge advantage (63 percent) with voters earning less than $15,000 per year. This advantage carries forward for individuals earning up to $50,000 per year, and then turns in the Republicans’ favor—with just 36 percent of individuals earning more than $200,000 per year supporting Democrats.

Meanwhile, Republicans are fighting hard to reduce the number of Democratic votes. More than 400 bills with provisions that restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states in the 2021 legislative sessions. These bills are almost invariably motivated by false and often racist allegations about voter fraud. In addition, Republicans in at least eight states have also introduced bills that would give lawmakers greater power over election administration so that they could overturn election results that didn’t please them.

It’s time for the democrats (small d) among us to fight against restriction of voting. My sense is that things are moving in that direction already. Let’s all push harder.

My Food (2)

Despite my self-discipline in diet, I have never before enjoyed food as much as I do now. Over recent years I have perfected my recipes so that the meals I prepare for myself are as delicious as I can imagine. The only food I miss is ice cream sundaes with an abundance of chocolate sauce, nuts, and whipped cream. Several times a year, I allow myself a sundae but eat nothing else at that meal. That results in a slight increase in weight, usually gone within a day.

I count myself as more than fortunate. Even though as I age, I find that I am not as sure on my feet as I was as a youth, I feel like I am health incarnate, and I am regularly assumed to be much younger than I am. Who could ask for more?