Saturday
Hmmm. I slept in my office above
the garage this morning. I have gotten into the evil habit of
getting up in the middle of the night, reading some upsetting book
about Hitler, and then finding that I am too anxious to fall back
asleep in my usual bed in my bedroom. The book I am reading now is
as good a book of European history as I have ever read. It is
Hitler’s Central European Empire by Jean Sedlar. The
author, who died recently, was the mother of my dear friend Eric
Sedlar, who was married to my other dear friend Tatyana, who died
this summer. Too much dying. The book is super smartly written—more
than that, supremely brilliantly written, magnificently
researched—but tells such sad truths about humans that it disturbs
my rest. We humans are made of crooked, hating, hurting wood.
“Flawed” is putting it mildly.
Plus, on a more micro level, my usual bed is a total mess. It
has stacks of bills, many CDs still unopened, waiting to be played
in my ancient compact disc player, many books about how to deal
with anxiety, many Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and a big dog.
I found I needed a neater bed at five in the morning, so I
packed up my dog and my fat old self, and I walked downstairs,
through the dining room, the breakfast room, the kitchen, the
laundry room, and then outside along a small (very small) pathway
to the stairs to what we call the “Garage Mahal”—my office above
the garage.
This all gives the impression that we live in an enormous house.
We don’t. It is a normal home and it does not take long to traverse
it.
When I get to my office, I am invariably happy. I like being in
a room that is NOT littered with my own mess. I put my Mozart piano
concertos on my ancient, barely working Discman and go right back
to sleep. Usually, I awaken fairly happy.
This morning though, I awakened and started to measure what we
as a nation have lost in recent years.
We have lost the freedom to speak in a candid and truthful way.
This has happened largely over matters of race. We as a nation are
totally right to want to avoid offending men and women because of
their race. To use evil names to race-bait our fellow Americans is
just an outrage.
But we don’t do anyone a favor if we pretend that all the races
in this country are each the same as the others. Yes, of course we
all have equal rights under law. That’s mandatory. But it’s a fact
that black Americans are in deep trouble in terms of education,
unemployment, work experience, family cohesiveness, drug use, and
health. We do not do anyone favors by pretending that things are
hunky-dory in the black community. They are not, and if we could
honestly say that many of the problems of our schools, our prisons,
our neighborhoods are closely tied to race, we might be able to at
least start to think about them more clearly. It is just plain
foolish to ignore people and say we do them a favor by ignoring
them.
We really must examine what works for poor black people, in
terms of making them more productive citizens, and do more of that.
I notice, for example, that the military, by expecting high
standards of behavior from people of color, usually gets it. No
excuses. Just do it. I wish we could respect all races enough to
tell the truth about what we need to do to help them have great
lives.
Black people cannot just be swept under the rug. They are people
and have feelings and needs and hopes and fears just like everyone
else. They deserve respect, especially from the president, who does
not give it to them.
I was also thinking about how we cannot tell the truth about
science. We all admire study and discipline and the accretion of
knowledge. But to pretend that science has all the answers about
where life came from or where the laws of physics or motion come
from is just fantasy.
We are all supposed to bow down and worship science, even though
science changes, can be used for wicked purposes, and is often just
plain fraudulent.
The Germans under Hitler were rated as great scientists by many,
yet they insisted that science demanded that whole races be
exterminated to better mankind. “Science” as practiced by the
native peoples of this hemisphere often required human sacrifice.
What do we think about that? For decades, science said that babies
in the womb were basically the same as bowls of gelatin. Therefore
they could be ground up like horse meat and no one would be worse
off. Now, we know that babies in the womb can feel pain, enjoy
music, behave almost exactly like babies outside the womb. When we
kill them, we are killing babies just like the ones so many of us
love in our own homes.
If we say that, we are called terrible names. But how far is it
from human sacrifice?
Well, I thought about that for a while. Then I went back to
sleep yet again. Then I did a few chores, decided it was too cold
to swim, and then had some breakfast instead: a toasted bagel.
I really cannot get over that I can just open the fridge, take
out a bag, get a fresh, delicious bagel, put it in a little shiny
box and a minute later it comes out all toasty and brown. Then I
can open the fridge again, get out perfectly fresh butter, apply it
to the bagel, and enjoy it.
When I think of the work that the farmer has to do to get the
wheat, that the utility has to do to get the electricity, that the
coal company has to do to get the fuel to run the generators—it’s
all a miracle.
This analysis does not even include where the steel comes from,
where the eggs come from, where the tile on the counter comes
from—or where I come from.
Then, there’s the real miracle: that at any moment, my big wifey
will smell the bagel and come downstairs wanting one. Then, I get
to spend part of the day with God’s greatest gift, big wifey, with
her beautiful face, her smile, her perfect voice, and her
charm.
Just the most modest breakfast is filled with miracles.
Lunch later in the day with “M,” a dear pal of many decades who
recently lost his wife to natural causes at about age 63. He is
permanently depressed and I can see why. He rarely told his wife
how much he loved her and now hates himself for it. It is vitally
important that you stop doing whatever you were doing just before
you picked this up and go to or call up those close to you and tell
them how much you love them. That is a matter of life or death.
I do almost everything else in my life wrong, but I do
constantly tell the people in my life that I love them and how
crucial they are to me.
I did get that little part right.
Now, I have to rest. I am VERY tired. If I do not wake up from
this rest, please take my word for it that I love you, too,
Spectator readers.
Sunday
Once again, here I am in my Garage
Mahal. I am happy because I have my dog, Julie Good Girl, next to
me. She does not like having her picture taken, but imagine a
white- and brown-spotted German Shorthaired Pointer of perfect
dimensions, and that’s Julie. I really cannot believe my blessings
at having this dog next to me, in a big, bright room, in peacetime,
with the temperature just right and the air just right in terms of
a small breeze, and my computer across the room.
It is PERFECT.
When I think of how the great masses of mankind have suffered
and lived in extreme poverty and misery over man’s span on
earth—and then I get to live like this—not in extreme luxury, not
on a yacht, but better than that: next to my Julie Good Girl….
that is a blessing.
What shall I do today? I have to prepare for my trip east to the
Richard Nixon Centenary Dinner at the Mayflower Hotel. That’s the
day after tomorrow. I am looking forward to seeing Julie and David
Eisenhower, Tricia and David Cox, Aram Bakshian, the DeMuth
brothers, Wlady and Joanna. It will be swell.
I have to gather notes for a speech I plan to give to some GOP
House members about the deficit. They won’t like what I have to
say: We need a lot more taxes and we need fearless aggressiveness
in cutting spending. But, as I say, as I have said a million times,
we are racing toward default otherwise. We are soon going to have a
$20 trillion national debt.
This doesn’t count the debt owed to ourselves for Social
Security and Medicare. It counts in some ways the debt we owe to
foreign nations because we run such an immense trade deficit. If
you add in all of our debts, it’s a bleak picture indeed.
I think I will just stay in bed here in the Garage Mahal with
Julie until I expire. Outside, life is too frightening.
But outside, there is also Sandpoint, Idaho, and Lake Pend
Oreille, and I am already itching to get back there and zoom around
on my boat. I am also itching to walk around town and cruise around
on my bicycle and say hello to all of my friends.
Maybe this is the way it is when world situations are
collapsing: People just stay in their own little corners and hide
with their Julie Good Girls.
Maybe tonight I will go see Skyfall again. I have seen
it at least nine times now and know every word, look, and gesture.
It is by far my favorite action movie. It is clear to my wife and
me by now that Judi Dench, who plays the British spymistress, “M,”
is really the villain (not the same “M” I had lunch with
yesterday). Javier Bardem is no hero, but he is a very impressive
character. The movie really is about relations between and among
mothers and sons. Did you know that Ian Fleming, who wrote the
original James Bond books, called his mother “M”? He did. It
explains a lot.
Wlady told me long ago that possibly the only thing that lasts
is old crushes. And who is the original crush?
As I mosey back to bed, I never forget, not for a moment, that
my sleep, my rest, my dog, my liberty are all protected by men and
women in uniform, by military, by police, by firefighters, and some
not in uniform, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and by the teachers,
too, and prosecutors and prison guards (I guess they are in
uniform) and by parents and nurses and doctors and probation
officers. I don’t just get to lie here with Julie by fate. Someone
is making it happen.
I am grateful.
