WILD SURMISE
September 1986 #8
AN ALMOST ANONYMOUS INFORMAL NOTE
BE STILL
Peace can be understood on a personal level, on an immediate social level and on a global political level. These different understandings of peace are so different that using the same word for all of them is really invoking a metaphor. Being built into the language, such a metaphor becomes deeply imbedded in our habits of thought. The time such casual thinking becomes dangerous is when it seems like a good idea to sacrifice one form of peace for the kinds of reasons one might sacrifice another form. It would be nice to be able to keep all of them.
Inner peace, the kind of peace one can keep in ones heart while the world flies to pieces around and about, is probably the rarest of all. That is a pity. For those of you who are Christian, inner peace is perhaps not easy to find, but the approach is at least direct. It is summed up in the words, "fle still, and know that I am God." The words come from the 46th psalm, among a series of images anything but serene. If you want an explanation of the quote, definition of terms and so forth, you are invited to read the entire King James Version, cover to cover.
of course if you are not Christian and your heritage is such that you are unable to becorne such, inner peace is still available, just as generous behavior, love of fellow human and self sacrifice are possible. But you are on your own for finding peace. Others have tried such things as sitting in cramped positions for long periods. eating inconvenient foods, wearing inconvenient clothes, reciting a good deal of nonsense, memorizing silly riddles, and persuading themselves of scientifically tenuous concepts like reincarnation over successive lives.
At best, such searches for inner peace are not direct. At worst, well, look: I can~t prove devils don~t exist, and you can't prove to me they do. If you can, they cease to be devils and start to be objects of scientific curiosity. Bacteria used to fulfill lots of the criteria of devils (invisible, ever present, totally without moral scruple, able to cause disease) and now have been promoted to real objects. Given that devils can neither be proven nor disproved, as far as science is concerned they drop from interest. This is a healthy attitude. But if you search for inner peace by placing your mind and feelings at the disposal of principles and powers you do not truly understand, watch out, for the non-existence of those devils is proven on the basis of clarity, simplicity and distinterest. In taking an interest in fundamentally murky things, you have already abandoned most of the intellectual basis for believing that non-existence.
Social peace, being at peace with those you come into immediate contact with, offers no direct path. There are some things you can do that might help. Most of them are negative.
Don't start any unnecessary fights. Don't have anything bad to say about anybody or to anybody. If you have to say something bad, say it only once and only to the person involved. If you have to say something bad, put it off as long as you can. If somebody else has something bad to say, don't pass it on. When you do pass it on, swear your listener to silence. Don't listen to anything anybody says if they first want to swear you to silence.
nernember peoples names. Make it a point to look people up and stay in contact. Ask about things you know worry them. And keep friends as long as you can. If you are fortunate and energetic enough, it you are smart and tough enough, to make a living without moving out of walking distance of your childhood home, and if your childhood neighborhood does not change in character as you mature, social peace will come more easily. Tiny little inbred communities may offer fairly restricted horizons, but they are said to have a mutual sense of affection and interdependence not found among the footloose.
Someone once described love as being like holding hands. The many fingers interlock. For everything two have in common, add two more fingers. For everything. they do not share, let go a pair. You cannot hold hands with only one finger each. The only stable position is to have every finger in play. Love is the perception in another of what one understands to be the best in oneself. True love is the perception in another of the best of everything in oneself.
Political peace is the form of peace that draws the most attention. In order for political peace to be stable, of course, it must take into account that it is peace among people.
Political peace will not be stable if it exists in conflict with personal peace and with social peace.
Politics and religion may be considered as scales or measures that lie at right angles to each other. Properly, neither should be aware of the other. I can suggest that from scripture. They asked Christ whether it was lawful to give tribute to Caesar. He said, Show me a penny. Whose Image and superscription hath it? They answered and said, Caesar's. And he said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar~s, and unto God the things which be God's.
On a chess board, the position of a piece is determined by its row and its column. The row does not determine column, nor column row. Indeed, not all moves are permitted, yet row and column are independent of each other; they are "invisible" to each other. So religion and politics are independent of each other. Indeed, not all moves are permitted, yet properly speaking there is no religiously justified political movement just as there is no proper state church. At least this is true if you are a Christian. If you are not a Christian, of course, you can say that the quote does not apply to you. I say just because you are not a Christian doesn't mean you aren't wrong.
In fact, the prophet Mohammed is also credited with saying, "In matters of religion, there is no coercion." Since politics just about amounts to coercion and nothing else, there is again the principle that the two are invisible to each other.
That is not to say that religious conviction has no politidal impact. The piece on the chess board cannot move from any position to just any position; possible moves are governed by many factors. But when a person makes a political move, he must do it in his own person as his own decision and remains responsible for whether it was a good idea or not. And if the law requires a person to commit a truly heinous act, it is still upon his own soul that the burden must lie.
while it has been obvious for thousands of years to religious thinkers that religion and politics are separate things, not just parallel but completely different, this has been realized from the political side only in the last few centuries. It was not until the 16 hundreds in Rhode Island that a government first established officially that it was tolerant of all religions, no matter what. Roger Williams, who was responsible for pushing the matter through, had been working on it for some years, but was not alone. The Flushing Remonstrance, earlier in that century, had included the principle, and others, notably New Jersey, were quick to follow in making religious toleration a matter of public policy.
One could define the Modern World as being those places and times in which political power has guaranteed religious freedom of conscience. It doesn't go back very far and, alas, it has never been universal. odd that the date it began is not better remembered.
In the search for peace, it has been recognized that one essential landmark is freedom of religion. It is less commonly realized that social peace is a similar landmark.
I hold it as self evident that no one is free until everyone is free, for the master must watch the slave with as much fear as the slave watches the master, and all who profit from slavery are in league with the master.
Self evident that no one is happy until everyone is happy, for the human heart cannot ignore the cry of another heart, and will reply with the same cry no matter how just the separation of those two hearts seems.
Self evident that no one is safe until everyone is safe, for those who live in fear will not hesitate to protect themselves at the expense of those who do not yet feel fear.
Self evident that no one has enough to eat until everyone has enough to eat.
No one is at peace until all are at peace.
In theory, peace could be accomplished by establishing a world government and a world culture, a single language, a single currency, no barriers to trade throughout, and no barriers to travel or to seeking employment. It would be called, The United States of the World. It could be accomplished by annexing other countries as states one by one as they became willing. It would mean fighting no wars, signing no difficult treaties. In fact it wouldn't even require a constitutional amendment. Nor are the distances too great. A trip from Georgia to New Zealand in 1986 is no more remarkable than a trip from Georgia to Massachusetts in 1786.
For years, as a little child, I had the nagging feeling when I looked at a newspaper that something was missing. It was that no one was talking about statehood for Canada. I assumed the U.S. was making overtures to all reasonable candidates for statehood on a regular basis, just for form's sake, if nothing else. It would be a nice way to say, "Hi, No war between us, hey?" But it seems that there was and is an overwhelming obstacle.
People don't want it.
Well, there it is. If people don't even want it enough to create lunatic fringe groups either here or abroad, there is just no way. Even WILD SURMISE actually happened, but not a paper called, "L.A.E." (Let's annex Europe.)
M's smarter younger brother once said, "There seems to be a basic need for every person to be able to see his life as a unified experience." By basic, he didn't mean simple. He meant organic. Marrow of the bone stuff. Base of the brain. AV node of the heart. Seat of the pants. Fundamental. The kind of thing a person may very suddenly, very quietly or very violently, die for. You don't force that kind of issue. People don't want a United States of the World. Too much of their lives is already tied up with the present, with their own countries the way they are now.
So for anyone the have peace, it is going to be necessary to accept people in all their variety, all their quirkiness, all their strangeness and all their different ways of doing.
Another corollary of that basic need is this: don't expect wars to stop. There is a concept in physics called hysteresis. That implies that the state of an object depends on its recent history. Take a two inch rubber band. Stretch it to three inches. It takes, say, two ounces to hold it there. Now stretch it out to four inches. Bring it back to three inches. It takes less than two ounces to hold it there. But the band has not been damaged. Take it to two inches and back up to three, and it takes about two ounces again.
Similarly, it you take a society at peace, compel it to start a war by imposing some condition, say starvation, and then remove that condition, you cannot expect the society to go back to peace. You know who signed the peace treaty with the Seminole Indians in Florida? Harry Truman. The war had involved no shooting for many many years, but it wasn't possible to sign a peace treaty until just about every Seminole who ever fought died of natural causes. Perhaps it is coincidence, but the terrible bouts of demoralization that have visited so many Indian tribes have spared the Seminole. The Seminole brave who lifted his hand against the white man saw himself as a warrior to the end of his days.
Peace comes many years after the fighting has stopped.
The shooting in the Vietnam war stopped ten years ago, but the weight of the evidence is that American veterans are still dying because of that war. As for what is happening to the Vietnamese, one can only guess and fear.
In order for a person to understand his life as a unified experience, he must live that life in a consistent society. If the basic values of that society change very rapidly, the person will suffer, and if he lives, others will probably suffer as well. If he moves into a different society, the same thing will happen.
The prudent thing to do is, so far as possible, to establish political lines along social lines. Times when people have failed to do this have resulted in endless conspicuous tragedies. The French Canadians are unhappy about being part of English speaking Canada. Basques in France and Spain cause trouble because they do not feel like part of the majority culture. Catholics in Northern Ireland have been persecuted to the point that Creat Britain feels obliged to maintain a constant military presence to protect them1 resulting in terrorist activities coming from the Republic of Ireland. Good old Belgium contains Walloons who are basically Dutch and Flemings who are basically French, and the two groups do not get on well at all. Remember how quickly the high and stately nation of Lebanon fell only a few years ago from being the showplace of Western wealth and culture in the Mid East to being a a land of lamentation, stinging with tears and stinking with the smoke of explosives. Cultural diversity rendered their social fabric so brittle that it shattered under a brief occupation by Tsrael, an occupation hardly worse than the German occupation of France in WW II.
This is not to say that cultural diversity in a nation leads invariably to war. Switzerland has components that are French, German, Italian and even an obscure Romanch province. In a little while, perhaps I will think of another country in which different language groups live in peace. Meanwhile remember that Switzerland is a mountainous region. Crossing from one part of Switzerland to another is far more difficult than crossing from Germany to the Netherlands. Perhaps nature provides the barriers that the political system neglects.
So it would seem to be a worthy undertaking, in the name of peace, to divide nations along cultural lines. In fact, in many countries an attempt is made to do just the opposite. It is called "gerrymandering." Suppose the land of Lilliput consists of Big-Endians 60% and Little-Endians 40%, and they are divided into ten provinces of equal size, each of which sends one representative to parliament. Suppose the Big-Endians and Little-Endians always vote for their own candidate for representative. Then, depending on how province lines are drawn, the parliament may be ten Big-Endians or three Big-Endians and seven tittle-Endians with a very fierce fight for that eighth seat. The result is that each group will want to distribute its people in such a way as to have 51% of the vote in as many provinces as possible. This is, of course, exactly the opposite of the kind of dividing along cultural lines that one would like to see.
Dividing nations along cultural lines has been attempted. Often it works out very badly. Thomas Jefferson thought it would be a nice thing to establish an Indian nation in the West, where the Indians could live in peace and not have to compete with the whites. It seemed like a good idea. certainly there was a lot of land out there, and there is no reason to suppose that the gesture was not initially made in good faith. But in the end, the Indians who agreed to settle on reservations seern to have suffered more than the less numerous Seminoles, who simply faded deeper and deeper into the swamp and fought all the way. It is hard to blame Jefferson; he must have believed that there was enough for all.
A more recent attempt was made in south Africa. The picture in that country is, as near as I can make out, this: There are about five million whites and their allies such as Asians and those of mixed race. These are dominated by a group of Dutch descent called Afrikaners. There are about 25 million blacks. The blacks, quite understandably, are getting tired of being ruled by the white and white-allied minority. The minority fears, quite understandably, that black rule will lead to instability, such as is seen in some other black African states. If you don't think that's a problem, talk to the large numbers of black African refugees that would dearly love to get INTO South Africa to get away from troubles at home.
The white minority made an attempt, and one can only trust it was made in good faith, to set up black homelands, where the blacks could have a democracy, but would not vote in matters that concern the whites, now a majority in their own homeland.
Well, it didn't work. I hear that one of them has done all right, but it doesn't look like peace has alighted. In fact, the government has declared a state of emergency. Again, assuming they are dealing in good faith, that means there is trouble.
You see, there weren~t jobs in the homelands. There were plenty of jobs in the white community. So everyone wanted to move back to where there was work. Obviously, peace-through-separation has its limits. One of the limits is that people need to be able to make a living.
The West has decided that it doesn't like the whole idea of separating people in the first place. It smacks of racial prejudice and racial persecution. And the West really doesn~t like the idea of riot squads, news blackouts, and political prisoners. One particularly effective black leader named Nelson Mandela has been in jail for years.
The United States now has trade sanctions against South Africa. I feel a little ill at ease in being part of that. How economic difficulty is supposed to produce a better government, I don't see. Lots of very poor countries have had very bad governments. It would seem that a sudden shock to their system could produce a civil war. J could imagine our refusal to trade with South Africa could be interpreted as saying, "There are only 5 million of you. We won t let you stay in power over 25 million blacks. 4, maybe, not 25." That would not be a message I would want to hear if I were one of the 21 excess million. It is almost inconceivable that our policy could do so much harm. It is also questionable how much good it does.
It is not beyond belief that we could do ourselves harm with sanctions against South Africa. Suppose we could manage to get our friends in the rest of the world to join us in a really stringent embargo of South Africa. That nation has substantial debts in the rest of the world. If she simply defaults on those debts, we have no recourse but to ban her from dealing with established international banks again. Perhaps that will foment a revolution there. But perhaps not. Perhaps she would get along all right for a while. Now there are a lot of third world nations who are in debt and suffering with it a lot more than South Africa. Suppose they also default, get banned by the international banking community, but strike up trade with South Africa. She, with her vast mineral wealth, is able to produce gold and diamonds that can be used as a basis for a currency. The other nations, freed of a massive debt burden, have the equivalent of an enormous gift of cash. And lo, there arises in the third world the kind of economic empire we always wished they had. Pity that it would also break the world bapking system and leave our own economy in shreds. Farming, mining and agriculture are already done well in the third world. what would they need us for?
Unlikely, but watch out. When it comes to trade, the Dutch are a power to be reckoned with. New York used to be a Dutch city.
So inventing countries to match pre-existing cultural distinctions is not a way to peace if it means restrictions on movements that keep people away from their jobs. Perhaps there is another way Perhaps we can escape from a geographical definition of nationality.
In English, we have two kinds of property. There is chattel, which means your bass boat or the baby shoes hanging from your rear view mirror, and there is real property, which is land, house, or anything attached. When you buy a mailbox at the hardware store, it is chattel. When you set it up by the driveway, it becomes real. When the neighbor boy drives over it, it becomes chattel until you set it up again.
If the distinction leaves you a bit cold, you are about alone. Property rights are a Big Deal. It was not always so. There were once little nations along the southern border of the Arabian peninsula of which it was said, "The interior border is not defined." They knew where the coast was, and they knew where the border was on either side, but toward the interior, no one really knew or cared. Those people, nomads, who had business out in that desert, went there, did what they had to, and came back. Even today, scientific expeditions in Antarctica pay little heed to the wedge shaped territories that their own home countries have claimed. Again, they just go out, do what they need to, and go back to their own camps.
The high seas used to be such a place, and right of passage is still insisted on by great powers. But more and more, even the sea is being divided into plots labeled, "Mine. All mine.
You may think that the United States is rather sloppy about national borders. Illegal aliens, criminal aliens and drug runners cross our borders with impunity. But consider Moneybags' home by the sea. Since it is in Florida, it constitutes an ice free port. Russia would dearly love to have an ice free port. Can Moneybags sell his house and land to the Russian government as Russian territory? I rather doubt he would get away with it.
So how could two countries share a piece of land? Or why should they want to? One place that comes to mind is Palestine.
You see, there used to be this country called Palestine. The name was spoken in a whisper in those days. For this was Holy Land, and everyone seemed to think it was a secret. The name conjured up images of mosques with minarets. Of decadent palaces and unthinkable squalor that had a special glow because this squalor was in a special place. A place trod by people whose names were more familiar than those of modern leaders, yet scarcely more to be believed in than dinosaurs or dragons than the Loch Ness monster or the trilobite. Frankly, the land to us who had never been and would never go there was more than sacred. It was maqic. Then in its place arose a nation that was young, that was strong, that made the desert bloom and occasionally run red.
If you read your Bible, you will learn that there was once a man called Abram. He had certain insights about God and received promises from cod, including the promise of some land, that would be for his heirs. He changed his name to Abraham. All this was thousands of years ago.
Abraham had a son Isaac, Isaac a son Jacob, also called Israel. Israel had twelve sons, each of whom had many descendants. These, then, were the twelve tribes of Israel. Famine soon drove them to Egypt, where they were later enslaved. The tribes escaped from Egypt and returned to their promised land. Some centuries later, the people grew weary of living as a loose federation of tribes and yearned for a king. Their prophet Samuel appointed a man named Saul to rule over them. when, at need, Saul called the fighting men of all the tribes of Israel to him for the first time, they numbered of the ten tribes of Israel 300,000 and of Judah, including apparently the small tribe of Benjamin, 30,000.
Thus from the beginning of the kingdom, there were three meanings of the word Israel. Israel meant the man Jacob. Israel meant all twelve tribes where were the descendants of Jacob. And Israel meant one of two nations, ruled over by King Saul. The other nation was Judah.
Saul ruled over both Israel and Judah. David, who came after him, ruled over both Israel and Judah. Solomon, his son, ruled over both nations. Solomon S rule was less tempestuous than that of Saul or David, but he did not unify the nations. Solomon's son, Rehoboam, tried to set himself up as king of Israel and Judah. The people of Judah accepted him, Rehoboam, as king, but the people of Israel, under the leadership of Jeroboam (don't let the names confuse you), begged that Rehoboam be less of a burden than his father had been. Rehoboarn defied them, and Israel did not accept him as their king. From that day on, for many generations, there were two kingdoms. Israel in the north and Judah in the south.
Israel was at last conquered by King Shalmaneser of Assyria, who carried the people of Israel into captivity and who settled people from other nations in the land. It is said that Israel vanished forever from history under captivity in Assyria, but it is not true. For the land would not have these new people, and lions came and devoured the strangers, until at the word of King Shalmaneser, Israel returned in the form of a single priest who dwelt in Bethel and taught the law of Israel, and the people kept that law, although impurely, along with their own vile idols.
Things were better in Judah. The Assyrians never overcame the southern kingdom. But the Babylonians, under King Nebuchadnezzar, finally defeated Judah and carried them into captivity as well. But Judah came back in force. Years later, they were released from captivity and returned to the land. They rebuilt the wall of Jerusalern and rebuilt the temple that Solomon had made. By the time of Christ the land of Judea included most of what had been Israel and Judah. Galilee lay to the north against Lebanon and Syria. They were all under Roman domination. Not many years later, in response to a revolt, Rome destroyed the temple and scattered the Jews across the earth.
And so it was until the middle of this century. Then they returned to what was now called Palestine. They built a modern nation, and they called it Israel. The inhabitants of the land fled in their millions, and the bulk of them live to this day in refugee camps, generations living out their lives in prison for no more reason than having been in the way of history. Palestine is no more.
If you exclude the biblical account, of course, it was an act of utter piracy. Time out of mind, the Palestinians had lived in that land. No government, no living person, no standing contract went back in time to when the Jews were driven from Judea. It would be unthinkable for a large American corporation to simply move in and take over some tiny third world power at gunpoint and in the name of profit, not in the broad light of day. Legally, it amounts to the same thing.
Except you take the biblical account seriously.
But why not take it seriously? If Iceland can have a parliament that goes back a thousand years, if the Scotch Irish can have a tradition that goes back forty thousand years, if the Australian aborigine can make the same claim, why not grant the Jews a much more well documented claim that goes back only four.
One tract of land, two groups claiming it. The Jews point to their ancient heritage, the Palestinians to a much more recent one. And to make matters worse, a large part of the Arab world has declared that there will be no peace as long as Israel stays a nation.
There is another claim. You see, Isaac had two sons. Jacob was one, but the elder son, and the one Isaac loved better, was Esau. And it is from Esau that the Arabs claim descent. From this, two things are evident. First, the Arabs are also children of Abraham, and it is to them that the promised land was secured as well as the children of Jacob. The second point is that, give or take a single generation, the distinction between the people of Judah and the people of Israel is as ancient as the distinction between Arab and Jew.
One last problern we shall consider. The Jewish birth rate in modern Israel is lower than that of the Arabs. There are 60,000 Arabs born each year and only 50,000 Jews. That is out of a population of 2.2 million and 3.5 million respectively. Outside Israel, the Jewish population of 9.5 million is expected to fall to 6 million by 2026, largely because of a 40% intermarriage rate. ~ime and again, the prophets of the Old Testament raised their voices in the name of Cod's wrath at exactly the same process. They were not heeded then. They are not heeded now.
Other problems, such as oil, internal strife among the Arabs, a baby boom in Egypt, trouble between Iraq and Iran, militant fundamentalism in the Moslem world, a general loosening of social stick-together-ness world wide, and the over arching tension between the U.S. and Russia complicate the scene. But the other problems would be easier to manage if the basic problem is solved:
who should live in palestine-Israel?
The answer is, all the children of Abraham who want to, Arab and Jew. All right, how?
Well to begin with, Israel will have to go. Not the people, the name. You see, the Jews, the dominant group now living there, have no right to that name. Let me say that again: modern Israel is not Israel, it is Judah or Judea, take your choice. The Jews are the tribe of Judah, not the ten tribes of Israel.
The claim could be made that the Jews are all that is left of the twelve tribes, and by that right they claim the name. That when Israel did not return from captivity, they ceased to exist as part of the people of Cod, so that Judah can now claim to be both Israel the tribes and Judah the nation.
But Israel did come back. A remnant was saved. And how small a remnant was that? A single man. We do not even know his name. He it was who was sent by the king of Assyria to teach the idolaters who now dwelt in the land the fear of the Lord. Israel yet lives.
And where are they? well they were last seen living in Samaria and Galilee, the Bible assures us, "unto this day." And that must be, if anybody, our old friends the Palestinians. If anybody has a claim to the name of Israel, it would be the Palestinians, or possibly the Syrians. Of course they are not the idolaters that the book of 2 Kings speaks of. The Prophet Mohammed cured them of that. (I will brook no insinuations regarding the Kaaba. Idols are fabricated by people. The Holy Stone of the ~oslem, whatever it is, is not artificial.) Just for the record, the Prophet also taught them the law of Moses and to accept Christ as a valid voice of cod. Infidels they may be called, but not heathen.
So the Palestinians have a valid objection to the existance of a nation called "Israel" if they do not choose to use the name themselves. The Jews have an equally valid claim to a homeland. There is no conflict between the two claims. But if the name Israel is to be given up, what is to be gained? Peace, I hope. And how is that peace to be gained?
The Palestinians must go back. It is their land, if not by recent possession, then by Abraham. If not by Abraham, then by the man sent frorn Shalmanezer. Jf not by shalmanezer, then by common decenc
One of the peculiarities of the modern age is the lamentation that there are no challenges for youth any more. Things aren't difficult enough. All the problems have been settled, or at least figured out. There are no adventures. Yet there in those camps are the Palestinians, the children of Israel, in their millions. waiting for someone to lead them into the promised land. Modern Israel would not reject them, indeed begged them not to leave, seeing them as assurance against a united~Arab attack. What could Modern Israel do? Shoot them down at the border? Their own people, not to mention world opinion, not to mention the United States, would not tolerate that. Besides, it would be in their own interest to take thern back. If one of the conditions of the return were to correct their name, it would be a change well worth making.
Leading the Palestinians back would not be a job the required much in the way of credentials. Moses didn't even have speaking ability. He had his brother do the talking. Being willing to learn Palestinian would be a help. But what it would really take would be the willingness to do it. To walk from camp to camp and tell the people, "It's all right. Your forty years in the wilderness are over. It's time to go home again." And then to lead them there.
When they arrived, the question would be how to live. Now this would call for the wisdorn of Solomon. No doubt as a young man, Solomon would have said, "Divide the land." Just as he offered once to divide a child between to women who claimed it. It seems hard to believe that this new Israel and Judah, or rather Palestine and Judea, would live together in peace.
As an old man, Solomon would have said, "Live together." Indeed, he had a large number of foreign wives himself. Predictabily, they turned his mind toward their foreign gods, so that God tore the kingdom in half. What is perhaps the same thing, he alienated ten of the tribes so thoroughly that the kingdoms divided.
Generally when two or more peoples unite, one of two things happens. Either they fight internally forever, as in Lebanon and just about every other country with minority groups, or they settle their differences. The Arabs were a bunch of little sparring tribes until Nohammed united them. Germany was a bunch of quarrelsome little principalities until Hitler united them. Modern Israel drew together people from many cultures. Russia, too, is a polyglot land. In every case, the unification precipitated a powerful military expansion. Perhaps the unification process brings out the best of both cultures, and the result is so energetic that expansion seems natural and easy. Perhaps unification is so demanding on the emotions of the individuals involved that their capacity for toleration is exhausted. Having opened their hearts to what had been their enemies, they now are unable to open them further, and regard all neighbors as vermin beneath contempt. They attack vengefully, disgusted by anyone who did not enter the new unity. Perhaps these are two ways of saying the same thing. In either case, we cannot afford it. It is not the way to peace.
That leaves one last way to live together. Two nations in one land. Two nations with the power to tax, to raise armies, to educate their young and to govern their society. These nations would have to have unusually close ties. They would have to have a treaty of non-aggression, both with regards to each other and with regards to anyone else. They would have to agree on passage back and forth without passport. They would have to agree on currency exchange by open market. They would have to arrange a civil and criminal code that would dovetail. And they would have to discourage intermarriage at a rate that would destroy either of the two cultures. (Marriage across religious or cultural lines may be hard on those who do it and on their children, but it is generally considered very much nobody else's business. If the hope is to arrange an enduring peace, however, everyone~s real feeling must be taken into account, not just feelings they ought to have.) Beyond that, any person would be the citizen of the country he chose. His home would be the territory of that country. He would vote in the elections of that country. But he could work anywhere he could find employment, buy from anyone who was willing to sell to him, sell to whom he chose and hire whom he pleased.
They might work out a formula that would be of benefit to much of the world. It would not be the first time a valuable formulation came from that intense and ancient land.
Unfortunately, that leaves a big problem for the Jews. They already have a problem: they are only a thin majority in the land.
If things continue as they are now, the day will soon come when they are a minority. If they continue to keep the power over an Arab majority, they are likely to lose the cordial support of the United States, if not actually face sanctions like South Africa. Even before that happens, they may lose American support as their numbers fall to the point where they are no longer a significant political voice in the United States.
If the Palestinians return, their numbers are such that the Jews would represent a quarter or less of the people in that land. Few doubt their ability to handle three-to-one odds in battle, but voting might be a different matter. Indeed, some division or double use of the land might help. But that arrangement would have to be voted on. Jews outside Modern Israel who really wished their brothers well would have to go there to help them. Indeed, that might speed the day when the interest of the United States waned, but once they had set of a home with the Palestinians1 they would no longer need the United States. The sudden availability of new hands and new minds, and the ending of the abiding tragedy of the Palestinian refugee camps would more than suffice.
Can we help?
In a larger sense, is it possible for any political system to work toward peace? 0 one can stockpile weapons and make treaties, but at some level any political activity it a system of coercions. And if there is no peace until nobody is under coercion, then a politically achieved peace is a contradiction in terms. War protests, for instance, can be very angry matters.
You can t force people to move. You can't force people to stay put. You can't tell them how to vote. You can't use a gun to keep them from using guns. About all you can really do as a government is to buy people off, and you can only do that so long as you have tax payers who will support you.
So how can you purchase peace? If you give someone money, about the only thing you can expect him to do is to try to get you to do the same thing again. That's fine if you are paying him to cut your grass. But if you are paying him to stop a war, he may be disposed to keep the war going so you don't stop the money.
But we are going to have to spend money. There is too big a difference in the way money is distributed and the way babies are distributed. People will simply not stand by and watch each other starve.
Just this week the paper showed a picture of tracks carrying hay from the Midwest to aid the drought stricken Carolinas. It has been the biggest drought of a century. That is not a circumstance where you sit and think. You send help and then wonder why later.
Indeed, there are people who will let others starve. The greatest famine in history occurred in China in the 1950's, at a time when the U.S. was piling up mountains of surplus food. The famine was kept a secret by somebody.
I wish I could say that people will simply not have children and watch them starve, but that seems counter to experience. It is really quite simple, people should not have children until they can afford them. That means feed, clothe and house them for the duration of the parents' lives. It's nice if a child can find work and strike out on his own, but one cannot demand it. It was the parent and not the child who made the assessment that this was a world into which to bring a child.
The principle of not having children until they can be afforded kept the population of Britain just about constant for several centuries. It could work again. Given it, famine would vanish. There would be short term instabilities during which people would have to be fed from other places, but in the long run, any society's population would not exceed its means. In seeking to encourage such a practice, once again, gun point will not do. You must find some way so that each person 5 self esteem is at stake.
Then, there is one more limitation. You cannot, in general, expect people to be willing to spend more than they are spending at any one time. You cannot raise taxes.
As the first step, you must seal the borders. The army estimates it would take five divisions. That is money that must be spent anyway. In the first place, permitting significant uncontrolled access to a desirable land is a profound betrayal of the interest of the citizens of the land. I should be stronger. Permitting immigration is treason. It is far more destructive than selling military secrets or technology or evefl losing a government; those can be replaced. Controlled immigration may be permitted by a country under the direst. of need. There are many cases of dire need in the world, as we will mention later, but the U.S. is not one of them. Uncontrolled immigration will destroy any nation. Nice things may be said for the new nation that arises, but the old nation will have been destroyed. If you doubt it, talk to the American Indians, to the Palestinians.
If you cannot accept that, consider what the drug trade is doing to the United States. There is a new form of cocaine called, "Crack." A dose costs $5. It is addicting within 24 hours. It is coming into our country at an enormous rate. Not only is it impractical to stop it at its source, it is quite immoral. Cocaine is a superb cash crop for them. Our market is so rich that they are compelled to sell to us or make terrible sacrifices. I do not see how in good conscience, we can as a people kill and jail them for doing what we, as a people, are willing to pay them so much for. That is an inherently evil arrangement. Nor can we stop it once it is within the country; the means of distribution is just too complex. Breaking it up could not be done without destroying our civil liberties. A drug education campaign is probably worth trying. But the simple obvious step is to seal the borders. It's something we ought to do anyway.
And besides, what sense does it make to even debate building a missile defense system, when a nuclear device can be put in a suitcase and spirited ashore, to be hid in any population center in the land? As long as we think there might be anybody at all in the rest of the world who might hate us, we are obliged to keep a close watch on everything that crosses our borders.
So assume the borders sealed. Next, establish some absolute minimum that a citizen should have in the course of the year. Some level of support that he will be given if all else fails. The number should be close to what the facts already are. I understand that in the United States the Social Security Administration found 2,846 illegal aliens who were about to draw more than $17 million in benefits this year. So let us say that citizens deserves $3,000 a year just for being citizens. Let us say that is the birthright of every citizen, and let us expend that to every resident alien as well, legal or not. That may be the wrong amount of money, but just consider it.
Suppose we establish the proposition that an American resident not making at lest 3,000 a year gets the rest made up to him. That is not very much to live off. In fact, you might call it meager. So we will do this person one favor. we will let him live where that money will do him the most good.
Bear in mind that there is a difference between cost of living in a place and standard of living. Just to say that in some country, the average income is half what it is here does not say that a dollar will go twice as far there. Still, there are places in the world where the cost of living is cheaper. There are environments where that three thousand would seem rather handsome. In Haiti, where the average income is $300, one could at least afford a small army of servants for $3,000 a year.
There are some more things to be done. First one has to find places for people to go. That's easy: anywhere they want to, except that they must be able to establish some reasonable basis for expecting that they will fit in. A person of three quarters French descent could arguably claim he would be as much at home in France as here. A Filipino might have trouble claiming Nepal as his ancestral home. Deciding whether a person from Honduras would be a good person to go to Costa Rica would require more knowledge of those places than I have.
Second, one has to set up some regular way of paying the money, to be sure that it didn't fall into the wrong hands.
trhird, some arrangement would have to be made with the host country to protect the people. You could not permit the governrnent there just to slap a $3,000 a head tax on all American expatriates. One would do better just to pay that government directly, not always the way to put the money where it will do the most good.
Last, the arrangement would have to be permanent. These people would be selling their citizenship. If they are not citizens, if they are resident aliens, then they would be selling their residency. Otherwise, it would be treated simply as a pleasant tourist jaunt.
What would be the effect of this on the United States? Well, it would cost some money, and more seriously, it would cost some citizens. We could obviously endure the first. The second we could probably get along with too. Those who were the most successful here, obviously, would be uninterested. Those who were fiercely loyal to the United States would be uninterested as well. And those who felt that the freedoms and rights they enjoy in the United States are momentous issues would not budge. Many others, however, might be tempted by a life of permanent leisure and relative luxury.
And what would be the effect on the recipient nation. First, and least, they would be getting a direct infusion of cash, significant amounts of cash if they are able to attract enough expatriates. Even though the cash would be going directly to individuals, that cash would be spent and that itself would improve their balance of trade.
Second, and directly related, the presence of a significant number of regularly paid people would encourage the development of whatever shops and services those people needed. These would not be peasants, living just to eat. These would be Consumers, with a disposable income worth maneuvering for.
Third, the government would be under some pressure to clean up its act in how it dealt with people. If El Salvador is not a safe place to live for simple citizens, flat nobody is going to go there. If American expatriates are a significant potential source of income, any government that hopes to survive will try to lure them. The process of luring our citizens should improve the lot of their own.
Fourth, the presence of a significant group of people with something to lose should have a stabilizing effect on the local government. These people are not going to be rebels. They will be Middle Class in temperament, indisposed to rock the boat.
Fifth, the pressure on such people, living on a fixed income, will be to restrict the number of their children. That $3,000 gets smaller as it gets split. The presence of a privileged class that restricts its fecundity just might be infectious. It might reduce the extent to which others in the community equate large numbers of children with high sense of self esteem.
I don't think there is any question that the earth has a fixed carrying power, a fixed number of people it can support at any level of technology. Ideally, the number of people should never be greater than the number that could survive even given a very primitive society. At present there are far more people than could survive without a highly advanced technology. In other words, if it ever looks as if technology is going to collapse, there will be a major panic and mass deaths as people scramble for the bits that will support life. This could precipitate a collapse that might not have happened otherwise.
Given that there are already too many people for safety, rudimentary prudence calls for at least stabilizing the number. We may not have the opportunity to solve the problem. If the AIDS virus is spreading in the world at large as rapidly and implacably as it is in the United States, overpopulation may be a condition those of us who survive will recall with nostalgia.
Sixth, and probably most important, these people would be natural entrepreneurs. Seeing the local culture from a new perspective, freed by their income from having to seek steady work, in a position to save a little money and risk it on a new venture, these people might be able to export the free enterprise spirit, the small business mentality and the economic aggressiveness that the United States has a disproportionate share of. It is said that immigrants make the best entrepreneuts. If so, they are most needed in poor countries, not in the richest countries.
If South Africa could make her '1hornelands1 for her own citizens attractive enough to draw citizens from this country, we would feel better disposed toward her. If El Salvador could make her land safe for her people, it would be a step toward world peace. If Modern Israel is in sudden need of her brothers in America, we could at least help.
Consider Nicaragua. Suppose you do not like the way things are going there. Before undertaking to make any change from a distance, consider that 70% of the population is mestizo, zawbo or mulatto, thus ringing the changes of mixtures of American Indian, European and black ancestry. It is unlikely that one person can understand the needs of all those groups. If you support a revolution, you are creating a group of fighters that will very likely expect just to keep right on fighting. Rather stop the fighting. Offer sanctuary to the people you have been supporting, and then hammer out a deal with their government. Add a bonus above the base $3,000 or whatever for whomever will go there to live, always assuming there is a population there that can absorb that person. It won~t take many to have a significant impact: there are only 2 million of them there now.
And what does this mean with respect to the tension between the United States and Russia? If the past forty years is any example, the contest will not be one of arms, but one of charm. It will continue to be an attempt to win the favor of other countries.
Perhaps we can do that by sending them our own people to live with them, work with them and help them, not as a temporary exercise, but as a lifetime commitment~ And perhaps the day will come when great Russia herself makes overtures to us to let her sons return under the same conditions It might help if she would make life more pleasant for her citizens, but even now a full half of Russians who defect decide, upon reflection, to return. Let them return well paid for the risk they took in trying us out. Let them carry back just a bit more of America.
Booty
Editor's note:
WILD SURMISE is an occasional newsletter on speculative matter. Next month Booty will try to design an airplane. The following month, he says he is going to write a little play on the life of King Saul. Once again thanks for the many kind donations and for the virtually universal cooperation in keeping us anonymous. One pleasant development has been the small but growing number of anonymous subscribers.
It was a thought filled and initially sober crowd that gathered on Old Moneybags' deck behind his house to celebrate the news. Both the Veterans Administration and the Center for Disease Control have undertaken studies to determine the long term effect that combat in Southeast Asia has had on the health of those who survived it. (See "Missing as Home.) It is what we had been wanting all these months. At last it is being done.
In a manner of speaking this is extremely good news. The mortality rate, from what we can tell, will be far less than what we had feared. That is very heartening; In another manner, of course, the results are not yet in, and we all remain braced to see what the conclusions will be. And in another sense, no study of mortality rates is a happy occasion, nor study of the ravages of war a time of joy.
While it is not "good news" as such, it is deeply gratifying that the studies are being done. So it was an odd victory celebration in that there was no vanquished enemy. Rather we sat around the pool and inly ruminated over the news, each wondering what the final outcome would be as well as what effect this news would have on the future of our team.
There was a touch of fall in the air, which put the beautiful official WILD SUPMJSE laboratory assistant into a good mood. She jumped in and dog paddled around doing her imitation of a proud Afghan hound keeping its ears dry.
At length Old Moneybags announced that the occasion called for some kind of commemoration and asked Booty to invent something fitting. Booty meditated a bit and then announced the ye-eb butter (cordeauxia edulis) and kiwi fruit jelly sandwich on ararnanth bread(aramanthus cruentus). Moneybags started screaming, foaming at the mouth, bleeding at the eyes and leaping up and down. In short he had a minor hissy. So the rest of us asked n to invent something a tad less exotic.
So M and his sister-in-law invented a drink consisting of vodka and Tabasco sauce served scalding hot. They called it 'Tchernoble Glow." This time Moneybags had a major hissy.
So Cooter and the sweet spirited laboratory assistant went into Moneybags' kitchen and invented a drink consisting of 1 teaspoon of cherry juice, 1 drop of blue food coloring, 1 tablespoon of cane sugar and a tablespoon on lime juice. It was stirred until the sugar dissolved. Then it took a cup of carbonated water, two ounces of tequila and two scoops of vanilla ice cream. They called the resulting grey and white thing 'TTequila Nockingbird."
"Not too bad," said M.
"As long as you just eat the ice cream."
Ed
copyright September, 1986, WILD SURMISE
THE EALBOA AWARD
WILD SURMISE is, of course, a speculative publication. We are not in a position to do professional quality research on the subjects we deal with. But from time to time, someone does investigate something that we have talked about. Since the whole point of speculation is to encourage serious work, we are instituting the WILD SURMISE BALBOA AWARD. This will be given to people who have answered a question we have thought was important.
This month, the BALBOA AWARD goes to Robert Schultz and Amar Sinqh as representatives of the Veterans Administration, which is currently conducting a Vietnam Veterans Mortality Study in which noncombatant deaths of veterans who served in Southeast Asia will be compared with deaths of veterans who did not serve there.
We may be a little premature, since their answers are not in yet, but the matter is so important that in this case we are making the award just for their having got started.
Congratulations.
THE WHOLE WILD STAFF
Fast Flying Photons
In March 1986, we published an article on time. There it was suggested that time was running backwards. Instead of living in a universe that is expanding, having started with a Big flang, we are in a universe that is collapsing. Had the universe started very small, it would have been a black hole and nothing would have escaped. It looks like it is expanding, so time must be running backwards.
As the universe becomes larger as we usually look at time, there is more room in it, so the number of possible arrangements of matter in it increases. Since the number of possible arrangements is increasing, one arrangement cannot determine any subsequent arrangement. You cannot describe Tuesday, however much you know about Monday.
In reverse time, the universe is getting smaller, packing itself into tighter space with higher and higher degrees of order. This process is absolutely determined. If you. know Tuesday, you know Monday.
Testing the proposition, of course, is a problem. You can in imagination go outside of the universe and look at it, but that is not really a test. If you could find an authentic "black hole" into which matter was falling (in the usual sense of time) then you would disprove the idea of reversed time. If you found a source of matter and energy that was dumping these things into the universe from a point source, you would call it a "white hole." This would simply be a black hole in reversed time. Jt would come close to proving we live in reversed time. Such an object might exist at the center of the earth or sun, but if so could only be seen indirectly.
There may be a feasible laboratory test that can distinguish between a universe with time as we have always known it and one in which time is running backwards.
In the March article, we recalled that in measuring an electron, it is possible to measure it as a particle or as a wave. Same is true of light. You can measure it as a particle or as a wave but not as both at the same time.
We described an experiment in which light from a source A went through a slit H in a first screen, where it scattered. It then went through two slits, C and 0 in a second screen, being scattered again. Then it made a pattern on a third screen. The pattern was of interference lines on the third screen. If the slit at D was closed, the pattern vanished. The question that we could not answer last March was, "How long after slit D is closed does that pattern vanish?
Diagram
In the June issue of Science 86, on pages 4 and 5, there is a report of work at the University of Maryland by Carroll Alley, Oleg Jakubowicz and William Wickes. They ran much the same experiment (rather more sophisticated, using half-silvered beam splitters rather than slits) and came up with the answer: 'You can close slit D after the photon has already passed slit B, and you will still block the interference pattern. Or you can open slit D after the photon has left slit B and you will get the pattern." In other words, even though the photon should already have "made up its mind" whether to travel to just slit C or to C and D both, you can still measure it as if it were going either way. According to Alley, quantum mechanics makes nonsense of the notion that photons are discrete entities that travel defined paths.
Perhaps. But it seems less of a problem if you look at it in reversed time. The photon leaving the third screen travels toward one slit, if it is in line with one slit, and toward two slits if it is in line with two. So i~ goes through slit C only or slit C and slit D depending on whether D is opened or closed. It doesn't matter to the photon if you close D after the photon has already passed. There is no paradox at all. And there is no problem of the photon not knowing whether D will be open when the photon gets there; Jn reverse time the future is completely determined. The photon reaches the second screen when the universe is smaller than when the photon left the third screen. 'rhe smaller universe is completely determined by the larger.
Well, it's all very nice to try to explain somebody else's work after one already knows the results. But if a theory is really a theory, it must describe results in a different way from another theory. In tact, it ought to describe those results and that difference accurately before the experiment is actually done. (Usual meaning of time.) So here goes.
Between slit B and slit 0, insert a series of mirrors, so that the path of the light from B to C to third screen is far shorter than the path B to D to third screen- Put a filter between B and C so that the intensity of each of the two beams as they arrive at the third screen is equal.
Now a photon leaving source A must arrive at the third screen at a different time depending On which path it took. Imagine that slit C is only opened for an instant, and that only rarely. Slit D is also opened for an instant each time slit C is opened. The question is, "When must D be opened compared to C in order for the pattern to appear on the third screen?"
I propose that using any ordinary sensing of time, slit D must be opened at a time so that the arriving parts of the photon reach the third screen simultaneously. In other words, slit D must open when slit C does. That would be true for any gross physical wave, such as sound or ripples in a pond.
But looking at time backwards, you get a different result. The whole point of what the universe is doing as it runs backwards is to increase order. Punning backwards, two departure times of the photon from the third screen is less orderly than one arrival time at source A. That is proper. But one departure time from the third screen is more orderly than two arrival times at the source.
That is not to be expected. The universe must always become more orderly as at gets smaller.
In other words, using usual time sensing, slit n must open at the same time as slit C in order for the pattern to appear. In reverse time, the opening of slit D must be delayed.
At all events, the photon cannot both leave simultaneously and arrive simultaneously over different length routes, unless it is prepared to travel at different speeds over those routes. If it does that, we can all go back to scratching our heads. And if the mechnism of emission of the photon is different from the mechanism of absorption, it is also a head scratcher.
So there it is. It would not constitute absolute proof or disproof, but it would certainly place the weight of the evidence either for or against reversed time until more evidence is found. I hope the experiment is done soon.
There is another experiment that could be done. One of the watchwords of quantum theory is, "It doesnrt exist until it is measured." For instance, if a photon has gone through slits at B, then through stilts C and D and is now producing a diffraction pattern on the third screen, you can't tell whether that photon actually went through C or through D. If you put a measuring device at C or P, the presence of the device will destroy the diffraction pattern. Ah, but if a gate at slit B was opened and closed, so you know when the photon started, and if the distance along path B, D screen three is different from the distance B, C, screen three, and if you know when the photon arrives at the screen three, then you know which path it took.
Time for a prediction. with normal time sensing, one would expect that photons should travel both directions. Thus some should arrive at the third screen after a time appropriate to the path through slit C and some after a time appropriate to the path through slit P. After all, randomness is what quantum theory is all about. In reversed time, (and I confess I feel less secure about this one) each and every photon in the diffraction experiment leaves screen three at two distinct moments and arrives at the source A at a single moment. The moment the first portion of the photon leaves is the moment the signal is recorded. The photon says, as it were, "I see my path~~source, give me the energy give me the energy ... NOW."
At the signal, the photon is recorded, (or UNrecorded, rather) half of it starts out on the longer route, and the other half hovers in a state of potential existence, secure in the knowledge that the screen will not be disturbed until it is time for the photon fragment to start going back to the source. If the screen were going to move, then the first fragment would not have started out. Thus the time measured from source to third screen is always the longer possible travel time.
So there you have two counter-intuitive predictions, one predicting what will happen with gates at slit C and slit P and another with a gate at slit fl. Neither prediction makes the slightest sense if time is assumed to be moving forward. Both experiments are within the reach of modern technique. Together, they would constitute a reasonable test of the direction of time,at least until it became feasible to find a black hole and observe it directly.
Booty
Ode to a Potential Reader
You're obviously intelligent,
Bright and fair of face...
There's a certain flair about you -
A consummate grace.
I think you've traveled far afield-
Made qreat decisions without haste,
Definitely are worldly-wise,
With infinite good taste.
And yet there's still a gleam
Of dreamer in your eyes;
You'd truly be the perfect one,
To cherish 'wild Surmise."
Mary Ann Philips
MILD SURPRISE
The moment included three things at once. There was a little boy's yearning, there was a father's affection, and there was the power and majesty of trains. Great big coal fired steam engines.
I used to wonder where they went to, those great iron stallions. I learned in Lund. There is a land called Skane, Scania in English I think. Rhymes with mania. When the Dane was the scourge of the north, Skane dominated Denmark. Now part of Sweden, just across The Sound from Copenhagen, Skane dominates Sweden. Rich, flat, fertile, dotted with ancient graves and rune stones, it is the true home of the Viking. The people warm, gentle, ebullient, musical, loyal, whimsical. Alas that the great old trees that used to punctuate the landscape are no more. In the center of Skane is Lund, set back far enough from The Sound to be safe from a surprise raid from the sea. The king of Denmark, when he founded Lund, named it after one of his favorite if rather unpromising vassal towns called "London." The cobbled streets and half timbered shops of the town could have come from any time since Beowuif. In the town is a cathedral, whose twin towers can be seen from almost anywhere in Skane. There is also a university, mind twistingly old. Steeped in tradition. In the early spring they still celebrate the Feast of Luprical.
On the way from the foreign students dorm to the campus, there is an old steam engine called sLoki.11 toki the locomotive, named after the ancient Norse god who, when tormented by the venom of a snake, writhes, and it is his writhings that cause the earthquakes we fear. He is one of the more harmless of the Norse gods.
In the university that year was a Hungarian. We foreigners got to know each other rather well. He was a big man, round of figure and broad of grin, who spoke with warm word of America. He remembered his own father. when we was a small child, his father had come home ashen and trembling. He told the family, "Hungary declared war on the United States today."
By his story, the Hungarian ambassador went to the white House to present the articles of war to president Roosevelt. The president was busy with serious matters and couldn't see the ambassador at that time, but a friendly secretary took the articles of war and promised to bring them to the attention of the president at the earliest opportunity. The ambassador went home and wired his own government and said the secretary had promised to get the articles of war to the president very soon.
All Hungary sat and trembled for a few days, waiting for the United States to reply. Then war came, in the form of a squadron of Flying Fortresses. The big planes drowned out traffic and darkened the sky. Then they blew out every bridge in Hungary. Hungary, you see, is a mountainous land, cleft by deep ravines. The only way you can get in, out, or around, is across bridges. With the bridges gone, Hungary was out of the war.
After the war, under the Truman administration, an attempt was made to rebuild Europe. It was called, I think, the Marshall plan. To Hungary, where the bridges were eventually rebuilt, they sent the old coal burning locomotives. The people were delighted to have those fine old engines. They called them "Trumans." My friend said that one of his favorite childhood memories was the sound of the old Trumans pounding down the mountain valleys or charging out over the rebuilt trestles.
Father loved them too, those great old coal burners. His knowledge of them seemed to have no end, from what went on in the caboose to what the controls were in the engine cab. He could tell you why iron rods run through the fire box and into the boiler. Could tell you what the levers were and where the dead-man switch was and how it worked.
If some movie showed a wood burning engine, with that characteristic high smoke stack making the characteristic 'chuff' of a coal burner with its steam forced draft, he was not above a snicker, not above pointing out the anachronism.
And he had stories as well. My favorite was Bill the Coyote. Bill was a coyote who lived "out west." At night, Bill would run to the top of a hill and howl, and everyone for rniles around would hear him and snuggle down under the covers and feel warm and good-Then one day a man was going to build a train. He had to decide what kind of whistle to put on the train. He happened to be traveling out west and heard Bill the Coyote. So he said, "That's it. That's the kind of whistle I'm going to put on my train." So he did. And for years after that, when people heard the train whistle at night, they would snuggle down under the covers and feel warm and good.
Not much sex and violence by modern standards. But it was my favorite story.
He drove a car as if it were a train. Everything was by schedule. Over heavily traveled two lane roads, he could tell you hours ahead when we would get to any given town. He would generally hit it within five minutes. The odometer never turned over a thousand miles but he would have spotted it ahead of time and have all the children looking at it while all the zeroes came up together. If there was a gas station that sold for a penny a gallon less, he would remember it, and arrange to arrive there on the next trip with a near empty tank.
Not that he ever filled a tank. There was always room for at least a dollar's worth in the tank, so if the sudden need ever arose to stop at a filling station, he could gracefully buy a little gas as the reason for stopping.
He always knew where each wheel of the car was. Once when the family was driving into Baltimore, a rat ran out into the street. Now this was a first rate big ugly dirty rat. You could almost see plague dusting from its black hairs. Mother, who had done social work in that city, and who had no love for the urban rodents said, "Get it."
Traffic was light, althouqh there were other cars in sight. It was an uneven brick street, very wide, with low curbs and big deserted looking industrial buildings on either side with angles sky lights but no windows. As I remember, the buildings were brick red. There were some tufts of grass along the curb and sometimes old tracks running down the center of the road, occasionally turning aside to slide under one of the great closed doors.
Well the old Studebaker lurched out of its lane, crossed a lane going the other way, caught the doomed and fleeing rat and finally put a tire where it would do the job with a satisfying crunch. we children were delighted. Mother was delighted too, although she kept her dignity better.
The matter of control extended to things that were not purely mechanical. Take the fine old game of cow poker. The car divides into two teams, one for each side of the road. Each cow counted counts a point. A goat counts fifteen. A grey mule twenty and, out of deference to Mother, a baby counts fifty. If you pass a graveyard, it kills all your cows and you start over at zero. The garne ends when the losing side gets too discouraged to go on.
Perhaps Father did not always win. But he always won when I was in the car. He said, "You have to be able to control the cows." And I have seen cows by the score on one side and never a cow on the other. I have seen cows crossing the road in front of the car to get to Father's side. I have seen graveyards where there could not possibly have been graveyards. And then there was the day of the billy goats. All goats were billy goats to Father. There were the goats. The game had been fairly close, in fact our side (I was on the side opposing Father that time) was a few points ahead. Father announced four goats beside a little shed. That made sixty points, which put us in a bad situation. Alas, I challenged him.
Well, nothing would do, but we must go back and look. I honestly hadn't seen anything like a goat. When we got there, there were not four goats but almost twenty. Most of them had been concealed from the road by the shed. We were ruined.
No matter how closely the trip was controlled, there was always time for a diversion. A stop to count billy goats. A chance to dig at a ruby mine on a rainy day. In the dead of night on an empty country road, we might slow down to two miles an hour to pick out spiders by the blue reflections of their eyes. On a hot surmer afternoon, we might divert our course to look at an old shot tower and be told how it was used.
And then one day, as we picked our way through a withering old eastern industrial city, younger brother announced, "I want to see trains."
He was no more than four, if that. Little boys are drawn to trucks the way little girls are drawn td dolls.
Perhaps it is the power of the truck they like. But I think it is more than that. It is the purposefulness. It is the primordial urgency. It is the implacable headlongness. The little boy sees himself in that truck. And quite rightly so. For already at that age, there is stirring within his body the chemistry that will make him a man. He senses it, the need, the drive, and it puzzles him.
He knows he is small. He knows he is weak compared to the adults around him. He knows that his attention span is limited.
nut he is also quite sure of his ability to accomplish a purpose if he ever puts his mind to it. A heavy frame, maturity, perhaps Opportunity, these will come in time. What he has is the will or the ability to develop the will that shall sweep all before hiw, resolute and indomitable as the heavy truck going its way, only invigorated in the defying of the distance and the load.
Early on, his heart will leap at the sight of a truck. But with experience he will learn that, alas, the truck is not really designed for the long haul. A few years, a decade or two at the outside and it is fit for scrap. The boy learns that the only thing that rolls past the decades and is not destroyed is the human spirit, that few things indeed are worthy of that spirit, few things respond to the investment of time and care the spirit is capable of. Salient among those things is the task of having a family, a healthy happy one. Easy to have many children; strenuous to care for them, few or many, for many many years.
Given time, and grown to manhood, the boy may discover that the part of the world that echoes the drive in his heart is the heart of a woman who arrived at the same purpose by a different route, playing with dolls instead of trucks, or in the case of over-sexed and over-intelligent younger brother, choo choo trains.
So the two males were at different points in the same process. There really were not so many years separating them. Younger brother sensing the first stirrings of it, Father with a mature man~s love, thoroughly involved.
The old Studebaker left the main road and bounded around a corner is if in pursuit of the biggest rat since Poe wrote about them. Forsaken shops and vacant alleys slid by. I looked around at Older Brother, with the question, "Where are we going?" hovering over my head.
Older Brother said, "He's following the tracks."
Sure enough, a couple blocks away, and running parallel with us was a railroad track. But choo choo trains were a myth, a legend. They didn't exist. Steam had gone out a generation before. It was already the age of the diesel-electric. Nobody still used
And then we reached the roundhouse at the end of the track. It was an enormous circular building with a section of track on a turntable in the center, so engines could be shunted into any of many cavernous bays. And there were pufferbillys. Great big iron ones hissing steam. Smokestacks loomed. Cowcatchers jutted. Whistles and lanterns gleamed. Pistons bulged like powerful forearms. Somewhere metal clanged. Some of the steam engines were being serviced. Some being repaired. Some stored. At least one was extensively dismantled with the front plate of its boiler removed so you could look down into the heart of the boiler itself. One was making smoke. 'rhere were more steam engines than I had ever dreamed of, each staring out of its own lair.
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