MEMBER MONDAY

Surely no statute of limitations, legally-speaking or otherwise, should apply when it comes to the public's interest in certain matters. Some truths unfold only with the passage of time.

We'll set the table with two examples. It was not until many years thereafter that the public really understood the degree to which it had been (intentionally) misled in order to garner its initial support of that national hallucination known as Vietnam (MM 9/25/17, click Vietnam). Then, the so-called war on drugs, having become a classic cure-far-worse-than-the-disease, was itself born out of a cynical ploy to accomplish other ends (see the years-later deathbed confession of John Erlichman that the Nixon White House's drug war was a way to provide a cloak of legitimacy around its attacks on blacks and hippies, MM 9/26/16, click War On Drugs). The common elements: lack of transparency; undisclosed agenda; engineered public perception.

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Of all the phenomena upended by the still-unfolding pandemic experience, surely economics would have to appear near the top of the list. Economics has indeed been a Member Monday topic before -- three years ago we discussed the role of capitalism in the context of resource constraints, global interdependence, deepening income disparity, regulatory capture, and a distorted monetary system. Covid-19 has now launched us into an altogether new dimension.

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Tomorrow today will be yesterday. What we are facing now is history in the making. Journalists like to point out that news is history's first draft.

Such first drafts, often overloaded with detailed accounts of the then-present, eventually fade as events are put into greater context. It's been that way with all such events, small and large, just as it is now with Covid-19. The 1918 Spanish influenza is remembered mostly in terms of statistics, a few grainy pictures, and a smattering of stories about long-forgotten individuals. One imagines how historians a hundred years hence will likewise remember the events of today.

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Look upon this as an opportunity. What this forced quarantine offers each of us is the chance to turn off the background music and see our life movie, this time without the score: no more orchestral accompaniments to color our emotions; no more special effects to distract us from our essence.

There are no right answers. There are no judgments aside from those that bubble up from within. The opportunity lies with the elimination, or at least the dialing down, of the usual societal constructs. Such liberation. How we respond to this societal break may tell us something about who we are, even who we have always been. It's just us and the mirror.

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James Hatch doesn't do cynicism. His life has no room for the doomed romance and thwarted ideals that fed into F. Scott Fitzgerald's well-worn observation, "There are no second acts in American lives." Perhaps they do occur. Mr. Hatch is the purest manifestation of the stoic exercise to strip away the legend that encrusts them.

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Please note our Member Monday/Plague Mentality session, originally scheduled for tomorrow (3/16/20), will now take place the following Monday (3/23/20) as a remote event. You are undoubtedly aware of the circumstances driving this change i.e. avoidance of physical contact.

With challenge comes opportunity. The opportunity here is to upgrade the club to a new technological level -- in this case the ability to host events remotely. Member Monday will be the club's showcase event to implement this new capability. Dustin will provide updates on this exciting new feature over the next week.

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Lance Morrow's 1985 essay, "The Start of a Plague Mentality," captures the essence of the mindset in the opening paragraph:

"An epidemic of yellow fever struck Philadelphia in August 1793. Eyes glazed, flesh yellowed, minds went delirious. People died, not individually, here and there, but in clusters, in alarming patterns. A plague mentality set in. Friends recoiled from one another. If they met by chance, they did not shake hands but nodded distantly and hurried on. The very air felt diseased. People dodged to the windward of those they passed. They sealed themselves in their houses. The deaths went on, great ugly scythings. Many adopted a policy of savage self-preservation, all sentiment heaved overboard like ballast. Husbands deserted stricken wives, parents abandoned children.The corpses of even the wealthy were carted off unattended, to be shoveled under without ceremony or prayer. One-tenth of the population died before cold weather came in the fall and killed the mosquitoes."

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Affluent white women pay $2500 for an experience that'll be (almost) free for those participating in our next Member Monday session: the opportunity to be challenged on racism. The referenced experience is one in a series of private dinner parties hosted around the country (fifteen so far, including Denver) consisting of eight women "of privilege" as guests and two interrogators "of color" calling them out on their underlying racial biases (click: Race to Dinner ).

Men need not apply to these Race to Dinner events as they are deemed beyond hope; women, with their access to power and wealth and inherent good manners to not leave the table, are fair game. Confessions are revealed and underlying assumptions are surfaced (" . . . I have explored my need for validation . . . . I'm working through that . . ") between servings of Pasta Carbonara.

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Our discussion article suggests the whole idea of the nuclear family in America was a "mistake," or least an aberration (click HERE). That's quite a statement given the arrangement was pretty much what so many of us grew up knowing. Indeed, in the suburban world of the American fifties, the concept of the household containing married parents and their children was enveloped in a cherishing mythology. Our discussion topic is the examination of this narrative -- its origin, its reality, and its relevance going forward.

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Regard it more as a way of life than as a philosophy -- one that provides the steady gaze required especially in this chaotically-hyped age. In fact, most every age has been marked by change, including 3rd century BC Athens, where the movement originated. Stoicism is as simple as it is profound i.e. focus not on the illusion we can control external events but rather on how we choose to respond.

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The Greeks regarded it as a form of madness inflicted by means of mythological love darts. Fortunately, Gustave Flaubert was there to help clarify things in mid-nineteenth century with his novel Madame Bovary (1856) in which Emma Bovary escaped the banalities and emptiness of provincial life by reading "the refuse of old lending books" which were all about "love and lovers, damsels in distress swooning in lonely lodges . . troubles of the heart, vows, sobs, tears, kisses, rowing boats in the moonlight . . . gentlemen brave as lions and gentle as lambs too virtuous to be true, invariably well-dressed, and weeping like fountains." Hallmark has kept us up to date ever since.

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Can still recall that fleeting moment "back in the day": new to the state, first time hitting the Colorado slopes, picking my way down a splendid bump run when, out of nowhere, comes some dude shredding it and popping a perfect 360 aerial off a mogul not ten feet away. The first reaction was exhilaration. The second was envy, defined by Aristotle as the pain at the sight of another's good fortune stirred by "those who have what we ought to have."

The emotion comes in two flavors: the "good" kind, the one that acts as a positive motivational force; and the "bad" kind, a schadenfreude desire for the "hero" to fail. In this instance, the moment simply passed along with any ski bum fantasy, yet a slight twinge of that residual memory remains forty years later.

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See if you can spot the "aha" moment in Yuval Noah Harari's extraordinary TED talk on the looming threat to democracy posed by the application of artificial intelligence. It's not just in the fact his live stage presentation in Vancouver was accomplished by means of hologram imagery transmitted from Tel Aviv (for video click here; or see written transcript here).

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Our own Jia Gottlieb has spent some fifteen years thinking and writing about pleasure i.e. what it is, how to achieve it, what it means, and is now on the threshold of publishing a book on this very subject. An early draft of his Chapter One manuscript happened to be the focus of a Member Monday discussion over three years ago. We now take his soon-to-be-published Chapter One version of "aah . . The Pleasure Book" and discuss it through the lens of suffering and meaning.

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It's all right here. Don't bother invoking the supernatural or other-world transcendence for your philosophical and ethical stance, say the Humanists, focus on doing good and living well in the here and now.

While the history of  "modern" Humanism is perhaps just a couple of centuries old, the notion of a human-centered philosophy, rather than one based upon divine inspiration, goes back thousands of years. In India, Buddha is known to have expressed such skepticism as far back as the 6th century BCE. The Chinese philosophy of Confucius, a century later, likewise discounted mysticism, superstition, and the notion of an afterlife. The ancient Greeks, around the same time, tended to explain the world in terms of human reason rather than the supernatural. That led in the 3rd century BCE to the human-centered philosophy of Epicurus, a subject we previously explored (Chasing Epicurus, MM 10/2/17). The point here is that allowance for a non theistic stance is nothing new (for a splendid synopsis of Humanism's history, click: Humanism - Wikipedia).

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The subject covers such a wide spectrum ranging from tragic to philosophic. Suicide statistics -- 47,173 recorded in the U.S. for 2017 versus 42,773 in 2014 -- barely capture the story. One reason is the stigma surrounding suicide leads to its suspected underreporting. Widen the lens to capture so-called "deaths of despair" (primarily manifesting from alcohol and drug overdose) and the numbers soar. These phenomena, however categorized, together largely account for the longest (three-year) consecutive decline in the expected American lifespan since 1915-18 (WWI and Spanish Flu pandemic).

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There's no way he could have anticipated that his assertion would become the topic of a Member Monday discussion more than fifty years after the fact. The "he" is Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Polish-born American writer of fourteen novels, memoirs, short stories and essays in Yiddish, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. His assertion: reading fiction is a waste of time (Who Needs Literature?).

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Touchy, touchy. Some regard it as the first shot marking the end of friendly relations among generations, the equivalent of the n-word applied to ageism. "OK Boomer" first surfaced as the response to a video posting on TikTok of an older man spewing epithets at Generation Z and Millennials, you know, them Snowflakes (click: OK Boomer - The New York Times).

The catchphrase exploded at Internet speed and the meme has become a rallying cry for disaffected youth. It can be seen on stickers, shirts, posters, water bottles, greeting cards, and was even heard as the casual blow-off response of a 25-year-old New Zealand lawmaker to an older member of Parliament who interrupted her while she was giving a speech supporting a climate crisis bill. Such an elegant put-down: screw you, your mindset, and your condescension -- you who are responsible for where we find ourselves today. It's our world now.

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Story from sixty-some years ago: a stretch of road in Strafford (Pa.), including a portion running beneath the train tracks, was re-paved. The added street height meant a slightly reduced clearance at the underpass. Along came a large truck that, having previously negotiated the underpass without incident, was not so fortunate this time -- the top of the attached trailer struck the iron beams supporting the overhead tracks. The truck was wedged in place. A large tow-truck was called in to pull it out. It wouldn't budge. A second one was summoned to simultaneously push. Still no luck. A structural engineer came on the scene. But that's not the story.

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Some years ago a Defense Advisory Committee was tasked with articulating a strategic framework that would better advance America's security interests. Sun Tzu was invited. Then someone pointed out he's been dead for twenty-five centuries.

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