Tom Glenn's Blog, page 77

Hunting is a Sport?

As readers of this blog are well aware, I oppose vehemently the proliferation of guns in the hands of U.S. citizens. At the risk of repeating myself: We now have more than 120 guns per hundred people. We have more guns than people in the U.S. And the ratio between those killed by gunfire and the number of guns in the hands of civilians is constant world wide—the more guns, the more killed.

An argument I hear repeatedly in favor of gun ownership is that we need firearms for hunting. That leads me to ask, why do we need to hunt? The answer I’m given is, hunting is a sport. Merriam-Webster defines “sport” as “a source of pleasant diversion, a pleasing or amusing pastime or activity.” The offered synonym is “recreation.” So I’m asked to believe that killing wild animals with firearms is something we do to relax and have fun.

There was a time in our frontier past when hunting was a necessity for people to eat. That time is long since gone. The only justification for hunting we have these days is recreation.

So I ask readers to join me in opposing hunting as a needless and cruel practice. It is time that we Americans join the rest of the civilized world by eliminating the barbarous practice of using guns to kill animals for fun.

My Music (4)

My ex-wife’s death came during the years that Susan and I were going to the dance performances at the Kennedy Center. In retrospect, I came to believe that the money Susan paid for my piano came from her share of the funds from the sale of the family home after my ex-wife’s death. I concluded that Susan used part of her share of the house’s value to buy me the piano as a way to make up for the unfairness of the divorce outcome.

Today the piano has its own room, which I call the piano room, two stories high with multiple floor-to-ceiling windows on the eastern side of my house looking out on an open field. The room fills with morning sunshine, and the acoustics are ideal for a piano.

So music still plays an important role in my life, all these years later. I still play the piano several times a week—not daily, not enough time—and enjoy it as much as ever. It turns out that making music at the keyboard is an ideal way of taking a break from writing.

My Music (3)

At the time Susan bought me the Steinway grand piano, that piano, new, sold for $85,000. I’m sure that, since the piano was used, my daughter didn’t pay that much, but the price was still multiple thousands of dollars. My daughter has never told me where the money came from, but I think I figured it out.

Her mother and I had separated and divorced many years before that. During the divorce proceedings, just as I took the witness stand to testify to my wife’s failures in the marriage, a neighbor came into the courtroom with one of my daughters and sat in the front row. My wife had arranged for one of my children to be present during my testimony, believing, correctly, that I would clam up rather than enumerate her sins in the presence of one of her children.

The result was that I lost heavily in the divorce. I ended up a pauper with my wife being awarded the house we had shared—that I went on playing the mortgage on—plus a hefty monthly alimony. I found myself living in a rented room, the best I could afford.

At the time of the divorce, one of my daughters sided with her mother. The other two daughters, including Susan, and my son either expressed no opinion or leaned toward supporting me. I always suspected that Susan, as the eldest child, felt that the outcome of the divorce, with her mother gaining and me losing, was unfair.

Over time, as I was promoted in my job, my finances improved as my income rose. I was finally able to afford a better place to live. One day, I got word that my ex-wife had died. I thought it improper for me to go to her funeral, but my four children all attended. They inherited what she left behind. As far as I know, all that she had was the house which she had owned free and clear. It was sold and the resulting sum was divided among the four children.

More next time.

Upcoming Autograph Session

I’ll be selling and autographing my books at the Hickory Ridge Flea Market from 8:00 a.m. until noon on Saturday, May 15. The event will be at the Hawthorne Center, 6175 Sunny Spring, in Columbia, Maryland.

Please stop by and say hello.

My Music (2)

The piano I played in the Kennedy Center lounge took my breath away. A six-foot Steinway grand, it had the most beautiful sound I had ever encountered in a piano. I played it each time we went to the center that season.

When we returned the next season, I couldn’t wait to play the piano again, but it was gone. Another Steinway grand was in its place, one that didn’t approach the beauty of the one I had played the season before. Crestfallen, I nevertheless played the replacement piano each time we visited the center.

Some years later, my daughter Susan’s husband telephoned me one day and told me that I needed to come to their house immediately. Worried, I didn’t take the time to change clothes from my tee shirt and jeans. I jumped in my car and drove there. When I arrived, Susan and her husband told me to get in their car. We set off. I asked where we were going, but they changed the subject. We drove into the District of Columbia, and I remarked that we were getting near the Kennedy Center. Sure enough, we left the car in the center’s parking garage, and my daughter and her husband led me to the stage door of the Eisenhower Theater. From there we went to the stage of the theater, now filled with grand pianos. It turned out the center was selling its used pianos to make room for new ones. Susan told me to try the pianos and pick out the one I liked best. I kept coming back to one of the dozen or so pianos because of the beauty of its sound. Suddenly, I realized, this was the piano I had played in the lounge years before.

To my amazement, my daughter proceeded to buy that piano for me and arranged to have it delivered to my home.

More next time.

My Music

I’ve reported several times in this blog that I knew by age six that I was born to write. I’ve also mentioned my various attempts to escape that fate. The most serious among those efforts was my foray into music.

I had shown a strong attraction for music from my earliest childhood. During grammar school, I taught myself to read music and to play the piano at school, using the pianos available there. I also dabbled in theater and considered being an actor. In fact, my first year at the University of California, Berkeley, was with theater as a major. But by my sophomore year, I was settled into music. I had decided I was a composer. Using money earned from part-time jobs, I bought my first piano, an ancient upright missing some keys.

Four years later, I took my BA in music. The study of languages consumed me for several years, but I kept up with music, playing the piano regularly and experimenting with composition.

Some years later, I tangled with church music. I established and ran two Catholic church folk groups made up of singers, guitars, flute, and clarinet for whom I did arrangements and composed folk hymns. That led to two masses I wrote for a combined force of musicians including choir, folk singers, guitars, organ, tympani, flute, and clarinet.

Both masses were very successful and were performed after I left the parish. For all I know, they may even be in use now.

Over time, my devotion to foreign languages and, most important, writing drew me away from music. But I always found time to play the piano and to listen to what soon became a vast collection of recordings. Then, some years ago, I subscribed with my oldest daughter to the dance season performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. We always arrived early enough to have an after-dinner drink in the cocktail lounge. Because it was so early in the evening, the piano player for the lounge had not yet arrived. I can’t resist pianos, so I had to try the grand piano provided to entertain the patrons.

More next time.

Make College Affordable (3)

Through it all, my thirst for learning never weakened. By careful scheduling, I was able to go to grad school. The George Washington University admitted me provisionally at first, due to my second-rate undergraduate grades. The fees, while more than what my undergrad schooling cost, were affordable. I was surprised to learn that I wasn’t dumb at all. I got straight A’s all the way through to the doctorate, of which I am irredeemably proud.

Back at NSA, I didn’t fit the mold. Working with the military in Vietnam had taught me early on to lead, not manage. Leading meant cultivating and supporting subordinates to help them achieve all they are capable of. Applying that approach to the civilian workforce proved uniquely effective. I was promoted rapidly, albeit begrudgingly, into the upper reaches of the executive service. That allowed me to retire as early as possible with enough income to write full time without having to worry about earning a living.

I’ve exploited that advantage to the max. I now have six books in print with two more in the works.

None of that would could have happened had it not been possible for a mediocre student from a poor family to attend one of the world’s greatest universities. But those opportunities no longer exist. The University of California in Berkeley in 2019-2020 charged $14,253 as a year’s tuition for student from within California and $44,007 for those from out of state. The university states that “We take pride in knowing that 38% of students pay nothing out of pocket for tuition due to grants and scholarships and that around two-thirds of students receive some form of financial aid.”

It’s commendable that U.C. helps deserving students with good grades, but what about kids like me with apparently mediocre ability?

I tell this story to illustrate the dilemma that the U.S now faces: the poor cannot afford to go to college. Were I starting out today, I’d be condemned to a blue-collar job with little opportunity for advancement.

President Biden’s moves to make community college free are the first step toward making a college education available to all, no matter their income. We need to join the rest of the democracies in the world in making college possible for all.

Make College Affordable (2)

Four years after I started college, I missed my gradation ceremony because I collapsed from exhaustion from working twenty hours a week and taking a full load of college course credits at the same time. I was in the university hospital and could hear the ceremony being conducted out of doors nearby. But I did graduate with a BA in music.

Meanwhile, since childhood, I had shown a distinct flare for languages. I taught myself French and Italian while still in grammar school, took four years of Latin in high school, and studied German in college. When I graduated from college, I knew I’d be drafted into the army within months, so I instead enlisted with the proviso that I’d go to Army Language School, later known as the Defense Language Institute, to study Chinese, a language that had always intrigued me. But the army, in its wisdom, decided not to teach me Chinese but to teach me Vietnamese instead. I was stuck, forced to learn a language I had never heard of—we didn’t call it Vietnam back then; we called that part of the world French Indochina.

It turned out I loved studying Vietnamese. Asian tonal languages are based on a way of thinking so different from western languages that I had to learn to think in a totally new way. The study was intensive. We spent six hours a day in class and were required to study two hours on our own each night. That was five days a week for a full year. When I graduated first in my class of ten, I was assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA), an organization I had never heard of. Being close to Washington, D.C., I enrolled at Georgetown to study Chinese. The fees were low enough that I could afford them on a soldier’s salary. So by the time I finished my enlistment, I was comfortable in Vietnamese, Chinese, and French, the three languages of Vietnam. NSA hired me and immediately sent me to Vietnam. Between 1962 and 1975, when Saigon fell and I escaped under fire, I spent more time in Vietnam than I did in the U.S.

My work after 1975 is still classified. I had demonstrated my willingness and ability to support friendly forces on the battlefield in combat, so I as assigned to similar work in different parts of the world. By then I was proficient in seven languages other than English. The reader is free to guess where I might have been assigned.

More next time.

Make College Affordable

When I graduated from high school, advisors discouraged me from going to college. My grade point average was poor, they pointed out, and they didn’t honestly think I was intelligent enough to make it in higher education. I didn’t dispute them. I didn’t believe that I was very smart. But I was determined to get a college education, no matter what.

I had had a rough childhood, My mother was an alcoholic, and my father was in and out of prison. As soon as I was able, I got part time jobs to be sure I’d have enough to eat and clothes to wear. Doing well in school was the least of my concerns, and I accepted the judgment that I wasn’t very intelligent.

My parents, despite their faults, were educated. My father was a lawyer, my mother a school teacher. I knew from their example and from watching other families with children my age that a college education made a major difference in how much one could earn and, more important, the quality of life.

Most important was that I had a thirst to learn. I had known since I was six that I was born to write, but there was a whole world of knowledge I needed to have to be able to have things to write about. College was simply a necessity.

I knew that writers never had any money. So I cast about for a profession and hit on music. I had a natural talent for music, and it didn’t require the kind of intelligence other professions did. So I majored in music in college.

The University of California, Berkeley, was only a short bus trip away from Oakland where I lived. And the tuition was only a little over fifty dollars a semester. My high school grades were just barely good enough for me to be admitted. I could work half time (twenty hours a week) and earn enough money to pay for tuition and books and keep myself fed and housed, albeit at a poverty level. I went for it.

More next time.

American Corporations that Pay No Tax

I was shocked to discover that, in the U.S., 55 major corporations paid nothing in federal taxes on their 2020 profits. My personal tax bill is in the thousands. The shielding of the wealthy from taxation comes largely from Trump’s 2017 push to reduce taxes for the rich.

Biden is now working to reverse that change. He’ll be successful only if the Republicans fail to thwart him. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have offered legislation that would impose a 3 percent total annual tax on wealth exceeding $1 billion and 2 percent total annual tax on wealth from $50 million to $1 billion.

None of these changes will go forward unless Democrats are able to unify all their members in support of the proposed legislation. If even one Democratic senator balks, the legislation will likely fail.

My sense is that we may have to wait until after the 2022 elections. I suspect that, thanks to Trump and his supporters, the Republicans will suffer an historic defeat. Then we can move ahead on creating fair taxation in the U.S.