Cappadocian Alterity

As we were planning our Turkish trip, we knew that the offerings were so rich that we would have to make a list of priorities; and we quickly agreed on a few destinations that we regarded as musts.  The first of these was Cappadocia, though in retrospect I realize I didn’t know the half of it.  I wanted to see the ancient Christian remains there.  The three great “Cappadocian fathers” of the fourth century (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa) are famous figures in late antique intellectual history, and each played an important role in the efflorescence of monasticism.  I wanted to see where they hung out.  With the help of some of Joan’s splendid photographs, and one or two others, you can see too.

            For one of the central subjects of my life’s work as a scholar is the cultural significance of Christian asceticism in pre-Reformation Christendom.  For something like a thousand years monks and nuns had a near monopoly on the means of literary and artistic production.  For example, there is but one writer of Anglo-Saxon whom we can name who was not a monk, and that one, King Alfred, was the lavish patron of monks and monasteries.  The monastic vision naturally left a spiritual imprint on all they did.  Medieval women in particular would have practically no artistic history were it not for the religious houses that, in confining them, gave them a protected arena for the exercise of their talents.

            Monastic life in the ancient Near East was rigorous, dramatic, and to the later European imagination lurid.  The Egyptian anchorite Anthony, whose biography remained a bestseller for several centuries, inspired generations of desert-dwellers (the meaning of the word hermits) who competed with each other in physical austerities, living among the rocks, in caves, in the abandoned lairs of wild animals, atop the pillars of ruined temples.  Hundreds, thousands followed his example.  The old monks had a motto: The desert a city!  That was not a bad description of the Thebaid in Egypt, of parts of the Palestinian desert, or of Cappadocia.  There is in the Uffizi in Florence a charming painting by Gerardo di Jacopo Starnina (ca. 1400) imagining the busy desert of the Thebaid.

The desert a city (Starnina's "Thebaid")

             We like to see our world in terms of sharp distinctions and differences.  So-and-so, we hear said “must be living on a different planet.”  In fact, from a historical-cultural point of view the differences between Rush Limbaugh and Paul Krugman are minute and those between Barak Obama and Mitt Romney nonexistent.  Historians and anthropologists have had to shape a technical term to talk about real cultural difference.  It is alterity (differentness), based in the Latin alter, something really other, so other that it’s hard to imagine: the religious troglodytes of ancient Cappadocia, perhaps.

            The ancient monks thought of their enterprise as a quest for moral perfection, but so other was their way of thinking that the great nineteenth-century historian W. E. H. Lecky (high on my list of Victorian sages) could write thus concerning Antonine eremitism in his History of European Morals:

There is, perhaps, no phase in the moral history of mankind, of a deeper or more painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates or Cato. For about two centuries, the hideous maceration of the body was regarded as the highest proof of excellence. St. Jerome declares, with a thrill of admiration, how he had seen a monk, who for thirty years had lived exclusively on a small portion of barley bread and of muddy water; another, who lived in a hole and never eat more than five figs for his daily repast; a third, who cut his hair only on Easter Sunday, who never washed his clothes, who never changed his tunic till it fell to pieces, who starved himself till his eyes grew dim, and his skin "like a pumice stone," and whose merits, shown by these austerities, Homer himself would be unable to recount.

What Homer cannot recount it would be unwise of Fleming to attempt.  But I can tell you that in my experience internal Turkish air travel is inexpensive and efficient.  The flight from Izmir to Kayseri, where we arrived in the dusk, was brief but pleasurable.  Kayseri (ex-Caesarea, Basil’s hometown) is from what I could see in the gathering dark a large, dingy, modern city.  We were met by a driver, who immediately took off for Göreme, the “cave” city that is the tourist heart of Cappadocia.  It’s called a “cave” city because it is set among about a thousand caves carved out in ancient times from the geologically weird pinnacles and pillars that give the place its lunar appearance.  Everything in this place is cave-like.  There are “cave houses,” “cave restaurants,” and “cave hotels”.   Some of these actually once were, at least partially, caves; others were the products of cave-envy.  This proved problematical, since we were theoretically booked in something called the “Göreme Cave House Hotel”. The driver could not find it, because it did not exist.  There was a “Göreme Cave” Hotel, and there was a “Cave House” Hotel.  After quite a bit of increasingly spooky driving around inthe dark we found the “Göreme House Hotel” where the proprietor, having been rousted by loud bells, cheerfully explained that (a) we were indeed expected, and (b) only a fool would confuse his handsome Ottoman mansion with a cave.

 Bloguiste caving

            The village of Göreme is practically overwhelmed by its touristic vocation.  There is a superfluity of souvenir shops, travel agencies, balloon agents (I’ll explain in a minute), Internet cafés, restauranteurs, and rug salesmen.  The latter two categories are pretty aggressive, though mere pikers by Istanbul standards.  The streets are clogged with backpacking youth and rented motorcycles.  It nonetheless was not without its charm, and the hotel breakfasts were to die for—probably literally, could I have stayed longer.  But the great thing about Göreme is its situation, at the center of the surrounding cave churches and monastic remains.  The place is rightly a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  At the “Open Air Museum”—a short walk from the town, though everybody seems to travel by minivan—one can visualize what the motto “the desert a city” really meant.

 Karanlik Church: Give 'em a fish, or teach 'em to fish?

            Many of the churches have preserved at least some of their wall paintings--the guides invariably call them “frescoes,” which some indeed seem to be--and in a couple they are spectacular.  In general I was surprised by evidence of the comparative moderation of Muslim vandalism in the post-Christian centuries.  Yet more interesting for me than the ecclesiastic art was the evidence of the intimacy of the “domestic” and the “sacred” parts of the desert city, an intimacy so marked as in essence to negate the distinction.  How long this treasure can be preserved is anybody’s guess.  The crowds are huge and oppressive—a kind of “national parks syndrome” in an acute form.  I may be generalizing on the basis of insufficient evidence, but I did get the impression wherever we went that the Turkish government was more interested in the maximization of the tourist revenue stream than in protection and preservation of the monuments.  The “Open Air Museum” is gradually being worn away by its admirers.

           

      In a brief blog essay I can barely touch upon the cultural richness of the place, or give an account of our truly heroic hike, at risk to septuagenarian life and limb, through some volcanic wilderness; but I must mention one other highlight.  I earlier alluded to “balloon agents”.  In fact ballooning is another great tourist activity in Cappadocia.  On our final full day there, a Saturday, we got up at the crack of dawn to join many dozens of other enthusiasts in a great balloon flotilla that sailed out at rooftop height over the strange “chimneys” of the Göreme plain.  For about an hour we enjoyed a perspective on the old desert city that its original inhabitants never could have had.  The balloons are so large and sturdy that my normal fear of heights was easily contained.  Each gondola held sixteen people, four in each of four separate compartments.  Our travel companions were a couple of young Bulgarians who seemed less into monastic rubbernecking than necking of the more conventional, adolescent sort, but to each his own.  I found myself thinking with renewed admiration of old Saint Basil, and a scriptural verse from the Basilian liturgy: “They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”  Poor old Lecky, for all his brilliance and erudition, missed that part.

Some Sounds of Sirince

 Sirince Village as seen from our breakfast nook and...

the nook itself

We were in Turkey for less than three weeks, and I shall not be so preposterous as to suggest that such a brief experience left me with any reliable understanding of the place.  It left, instead, very vivid impressions; and vivid impressions may be the better stuff of blog entries.  I, at least, tire of reading essays by people who “understand” things.  Our time was divided, more or less equally, among four of the more prominent tourist areas: the archaeological sites around Kusadasi on the Aegean, Cappadocia, Antalya (roughly the Turkish Riviera), and Istanbul.  With the help of some of Joan’s splendid photographs I’ll try to touch on each of them over the next few weeks.

            The classical remains in Turkey are opulent, but the jewel in the crown must surely be Ephesus, an archaeological site nearly overwhelming in its size, variety, and impressiveness.  But there are many more in Ionia alone, including Priene, Miletus, and Didyma.  We wanted to see them all, but so did several thousand other people; under these circumstances we wanted a relatively quiet and unfrequented “home base” from which we could strike out each day, and to which we could retreat in the evenings.  We found it in Sirince village, up a winding mountain road for Selçuk (the modern version of Ephesus).

             Library of Ephesus

Visiting Scholar at Library

The term “ethnic cleansing” became malodorous in the 1990s, but in earlier times it was regarded as an admirable ideal by such high-minded outfits as the Presidium of the USSR, the British Empire, and the League of Nations.  Following the horrors of the Great War, the League promulgated a famous “Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations”.  There were large numbers of Orthodox Christians living in Turkey, and large numbers of Muslims living in Greece.  “Oil and water,” said the League of Nations.  “A powderkeg waiting for a lighted match.”  So they took some preventive care.

            The first article of the Convention reads as follows: “As from the 1st May, 1923, there shall take place a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Moslem religion established in Greek territory.  These persons shall not return to live in Turkey or Greece respectively without the authorization of the Turkish Government or of the Greek Government respectively.”

Some Franciscans and Others at the Virgin Mary's House (suburban Ephesus)

            In 1923 the entire population of Sirince, an agricultural village with a substantial number of houses and a big Orthodox church, was forced to remove to European Greece.  There were many such, including, of course, Turkish villages in Greece.  That was Sirince’s past.  Its present can probably be summed up in the single word “tourism.”  And a lovely tourist spot it is.

            Wherever we traveled in Turkey, the place exercised the senses.  The exercise was usually pleasant, though if you are still using a drainage system put in place in the Hellenistic Age you may have to tolerate a whiff or two of Antiquity from time to time.   The countryside—whether in the green luxuriance of the western coastal hills or the strange, arid concavities of Cappadocia—is visually vivid and arresting.  You have probably already heard a good deal about the subtle succulence of the Turkish cuisine, which achieves the improbable trifecta of being exotic, scrumptious, and healthy.  But my most lasting sensory impression of beautiful Sirince concerned the place’s sounds.

            The overnight flight from New York to Istanbul requires the better part of ten sleepless hours.  At Istanbul airport we had to hustle to buy our visas (an efficient and fairly inoffensive shakedown) before catching a connecting flight to Izmir (ancient Smyrna).  By the end of the day I was ready for the sack, and might have stayed in it longer than usual had I not been summoned to sentience about four in the morning, by the very loud, but also very beautiful Arabic chanting emanating from the nearby mosque.  This was a recording.  There have to be some real-life muezzins somewhere, but we never encountered one.  They cannot all be in a recording studio in Mecca, can they?  The theory seems to be that if you can have some Enrico Caruso tapes and a powerful amplifier, why bother with local talent.  There are five daily calls to prayer, and they are so engrained in the social fabric as literally to have become background noise.  The only people who seem actually to hear them are tourists—sort of like the police and ambulance sirens in New York, which only non-New Yorkers hear.

            Later in the morning—if five a.m. can be called “late”—began a pleasing symphony of animal noises.  They bray of a donkey is not a sound soon forgotten.  The last time I had heard one was probably forty years ago.  Well, it turns out that donkeys still exist, and they still bray.  We have a pretty fair “dawn chorus” even here in suburban New Jersey, but Sirince had a huge avian choral society in which the domestic rooster vied to a standoff with the twotteromg rooftop sparrows and quacking ducks.  Dogs barked.  Goat-bells tinkled.  Soon it would be time for breakfast—and what a breakfast!

Home again!

 the old: Aspendos  aqueduct

East, West, home’s best.  That’s what I was taught in my childhood and am still inclined to believe, even if the belief is less certain than it once was in my schooldays, when we had to memorize Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Collosus”, the poem now adorning the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor: 

           

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"                                   

            I know a good deal more about “Greek fame” than I did when I set out three weeks ago.  The archaeological sites of Anatolia are stupendous.  In fact I found Turkey so remarkable in so many ways that it will take some serious rumination before I would ever attempt to write anything very serious about it.  But I do have a few reflections concerning the homecoming itself.

            There was a certain amount of grumbling among the Delta SkyMiles Medallion Program members (Gold, Platinum, and now even a Diamond division) jockeying for position around the gate for Flight 25 (Istanbul’s Atatürk to New York’s JFK) when the first passengers allowed to board were a gaggle of swarthy nondescripts, including several startled-looking children who seemed unlikely to be so much as Pewter-Card holders.  The word “allowed” is actually inappropriate.  These people were being herded.  They were, we were told, “an immigration group,” none of whom had ever before been on an airplane and as a consequence needed a brief introduction to seat belts, tray-tables, and seat backs in their original upright position.

            Most of the rest of us were returning after sun-drenched days or weeks among Turkish delights—cultural, topographic, gastronomic, commercial, or sybaritic.  I very much hope that those bright-eyed strangers will find a light held high beside the golden door.  However, finding a door of any kind at the Delta terminal at JFK is no easy thing.  The place is under construction, though the affect is much more of a place under siege.  Large signs promise wonders beginning in May, 2013.  At the moment you have to be bused about a quarter of a mile just to get to the entrance of the plywood tunnels that debouch into what might be a large air-raid shelter or abandoned bowling alley.  The terminal looks more ruinous than many of the fantastic archaeological sites we visited in Turkey—only far less evocative and romantic.  Passport control is expeditious enough, at least for those in the American citizens line—I lost sight of the “immigration group”.  Baggage claim, on the other hand, is nightmarish for all.  Is there any other country in the world where it costs five dollars to get a luggage trolley?  The little carts are held captive by a mechanical device that yields only to cold cash.  They actually have a coin slot on the wretched thing, apparently assuming that arriving visitors will have their twenty quarters at the ready.

            The Lares and Penates of your wretched refuse may be so meager as to render irrelevant any question of baggage trolleys, but your average native-born or naturalized septuagenarian, even when traveling light, might legitimately hope for some fixed-axle relief after a ten-hour flight.  Never mind.  There was one customs agent, tacitly encouraged by three uniformed but neutral onlookers, to “examine” the baggage of a couple of hundred passengers.  He demonstrated that it is perfectly possible to be perfunctory without in any way compromising ponderousness.

            Yet despite such ambiguities, we were soon enough at our daughter’s Greenwich Village apartment hanging out with our delightful granddaughters.  Thus refreshed, your bloguiste proposes to return to his regular pattern of postings next week.

and the new: Delta terminal at JFK
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Tooting a Golden Horn

I have noticed in the national press that the temporary suspension of a newspaper column is generally announced with the chaste editorial note that “Benjamin Blogger is on vacation.”  But what if the editor was on vacation too?

            On the second of June in the year of grace one thousand, nine hundred, and sixty-two, in the Lady Chapel of Trinity Church in Princeton, New Jersey, your bloguiste married Joan Elizabeth Newman.  Though even at the time it seemed a momentous event, I realize in retrospect that I had but the vaguest idea of just how momentous.  To be sure we have been a little casual about celebrating our anniversaries.  On more than one occasion, if truth must out, we both forgot the date altogether.  We forgive ourselves according to the possibly spurious principle that it is more important to live life than to memorialize it.  But things got better before too long, as our children reached the age of sentience and began reminding us out of self-imposed filial duty.

            A fiftieth wedding anniversary, however, is an event of sufficient solemnity to command our undivided attention.  We decided some time ago that we would celebrate it by making it the occasion of a trip to some attractive place we had never been but always wanted to go.  We swiftly agreed on the most desirable venue.  On Friday Joan and I are flying to Istanbul.  We shall spend the better part of three weeks in Turkey, visiting especially classical and early Christian archaeological sites, but allowing for plenty of time simply to wander about the countryside—and the cityscape of Constantine’s ancient capital, now a treasury of beautiful Ottoman mosques.           

            We are hoping to travel light.  In particular this is not the kind of journey likely to be enhanced by schlepping around my customary impedimenta: a pile of ungraded papers, proofsheets, manuscripts edited or unedited, or even the most portable of portable computers.  So in its continuing pursuit of a more perfect union, “Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche” grants its readers a temporary remission until the first week of June, when bloguiste and editor may very well return to take up a fifty-first year of collaboration.

"The Golden Horn" by Alice Schille (1869–1955).

Bright Twilight of the Elders

 Rhine Maidens on a slippery slope

Only during the brief period of heedless youth, when most people unconsciously assume an attitude of immortality, do we really think we are likely to achieve all our “goals.”  As serious age advances the realization of life’s impossibilities becomes articulate and acute.  That is one of the several not so nice things about aging.  It is all the more wonderful to discover, therefore, that among all the things you hoped to do but never will there turn out to be a fair number of delightful experiences for which you never before had the time, money, or opportunity to explore.  One such, which I will touch upon next week, will interrupt the thus-far reasonably disciplined schedule of this blog.  A second will provide this week’s subject: Richard Wagner's Ring of the Niebelung.

            As I write we are half way through it.  The Rheingold was on Saturday.  Last night’s performance of The Valkyries (part two of the four of the whole work) has three acts, each a mini-opera of its own.  The Metropolitan’s production began at 6:30.  We were still applauding the singers at twenty minutes before midnight.  If you can imagine an experience that combines the leg pain of a tourist class flight to Heathrow and the tachycardia of a long Alpine ski slope with the ethical exaltation of Paradise Lost—well, if you can do that, you can do more than I can do.  I have a day to recover before Siegfried (tonight) and then, on Saturday, the marathon finale of The Twilight of the Gods.

            You almost certainly know more about Wagner’s Ring cycle than I do, and if you don’t, I could never offer even my infant appreciation in a few hundred words.  It has to be among the most audacious artistic creations the human spirit has yet attempted.  The excess is staggering.  The length is daunting.  It calls for dramaturgical resources unavailable in Wagner’s day.  It requires a vocal range and stamina that surely only a few singers in any generation can command.  Its narrative vehicle is an arcane phantasmagoria of early Germanic mythology and heroic legend.  Most grand opera goes over the top at cardinal moments.  The Ring begins there and hardly descends, except when the Valkyries came galloping, as over the crest of the globe, on their equine planks.

The Valkyries ride the rails

            The old theology, though prehistoric, is almost post-modern.  The gods have created the human race; but the destiny of divinity is to be supplanted by its creature.  The ethic—far from being Hitlerian or Nietzschean as I have been endlessly told by cultural historians—is classical, humanistic, indeed Christian.  It is a plea for the superiority of the spiritual over the material.

            Chaucer’s Pardoner preached always on a single biblical text: Radix malorum est cupiditas.  That’s the one translated in the Authorized Version as “The love of money is the root of all evil.”  An inordinate lust for the golden ring of the Niebelung, and by extension for the power the possession of gold wields, animates the hugeness of the entire tragedy.  Whether beneath the waters of the Rhine, as in Wagner, or beneath the earth’s surface, as in the Boethian tradition, gold is naturally hellish.

            “Let none admire [writes Milton in Paradise Lost]

            That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best

            Deserve the precious bane”

That is a great old English word, bane.  It means a thing or person that kills.  Radix malorum est cupiditas.

            Naturally I was generally familiar with the Ring as an item of cultural literacy, but its concentrated viewing is something else.  The current Met production is directed by Robert Lepage, the founder of Ex Machina, a production company made up chiefly of Quebecois cybergeniuses who specialize in transforming the proscenium arch into a computer game field.  I thought it was fabulous, but it is evident that controversy swirls about Wagnerian opera when presented with the production values of Star Wars.  Traditionalists groan.  Our own tickets became available for purchase only because some friends of friends who had them by subscription were preemptively disgusted by the very idea.  Yet however numerous, the naysayers, having voted with their feet, left the field to the majoritarian enthusiasts.  In the half hour before the curtain rises the large plaza in front of the Met rather resembles the pit of the Stock Exchange, as musical junkies, gesticulating like bond brokers, desperately search for a seller among the surging throng.  I saw no takers and, within the hall, no empty seats.

            But I myself must eschew an excess of Arnoldian high seriousness of my own.  The Ring Cycle may be a masterpiece of musical high thinking, but it would appear no less to be the Rocky Horror Picture Show of the aesthetic classes.  This is an opera with fans.  Our own excellent friend Susan, through whom we got our tickets, was seeing the cycle for the fifth time.  Opera is exhibition, and over-the-top opera enthusiasts at times do not stop short of exhibitionism.There were around us in the dress circle a few hard-core fans who had complemented their glitzy attire of tuxedo or ball gown with those horned helmets that since the nineteenth century have become the headgear de rigueur for most imaginary medieval warriors north of the Olive Oil Line.*  The idea that a man in his mid-seventies can come upon this for the first time with the freshness of a child is rather thrilling.

                                


                                                                   A genius larger than life...

*On this topic I recommend the indispensable article of my learned friend Professor Roberta Frank, “The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet”.

Past and Present

Though in retirement I have left behind many of the professional activities of my old professional life, I have been surprised to find that one feature of that life—invitations to give lectures, informal talks, or after dinner speeches—has not gone away.  And since I enjoy talking to people, I accept whenever possible.  Thus it was that I found myself last Friday evening offering informal remarks to the annual dinner of something called the New Jersey Society of the Cincinnati.  My supposed topic was “The Uses of History” or some such, but it was I who received tuition on that topic.

            Like many Americans, I have become rather casual, if not actually cynical, concerning the greatness of our nation’s founders, beginning with George Washington.  Yet to examine almost any aspect of Washington is to reveal greatness of a kind sadly unimaginable in our current political leaders and aspirants.  His role as first General President of the Societies of the Cincinnati is but one small feather in a lavishly plumed cap.

            The eighteenth-century squirearchy loved reading classical literature, and imitated classical history whenever possible.  Thomas Jefferson for a time tried to use Virgil’s Georgics as a practical handbook of animal husbandry.  The great seal of the State of Virginia bears the motto Sic semper tyrannis—words supposedly uttered by Brutus as he stabbed Julius Cæsar and actually uttered by John Wilkes Booth as he shot Lincoln.  (Instances of the bad uses of history greatly outnumber the good.)

            Among the heroes of legendary Roman history was the farmer Cincinnatus.  He was plowing a field when a delegation of importunate citizens arrived to beg him to assume the dictatorship of the infant city, then threatened by hostile neighbors.  Though he much preferred his agrarian life, he submitted to duty’s demands, left his farm, assumed the leadership of the city, organized its defense, and defeated its enemies.  But the biographical punch line is what he did next—resigned the dictatorship, went back to his farm, and continued plowing.

Coming to terms with term limits

            For the American revolutionaries Cincinnatus was the perfect historical model for so much of the officer corps of the Continental Army, and most obviously for its supreme general officer, Washington.  For modern Washington—the city as metonymy for the congressional body and its whirling satellites—Cincinnatus is an historical indictment of career politicians.  The Society of the Cincinnati, founded in 1783, was a group of former army officers committed to the “immutable principles” of the fellowship that had given the Society birth.   Needless to say these do not include the one immutable principle of our contemporary political class—the acquisition and retention of political office by any means possible.

            There are actually fourteen affiliated societies—one for each of the original states, and one for France.  These were the allies who had prevailed against a great—perhaps the greatest—European military power.   New Jersey was not then a ganglion of superhighways, but the battlefield of such decisive action as that at Trenton, Princeton, and Monmouth.  The founding of the Society was contemporaneous with the establishment of a promising settlement on the Ohio River, which was given its name by a proud veteran.  Membership now is by lineal descent, and is parsimoniously granted. 

Washington’s personal decoration of the Cincinnati went after his death to General Lafayette in France.  In 2011 Lafayette’s distant heirs succumbed to Mammon and consigned the relic to a Sotheby’s auction, thus vindicating Burke: “The age of chivalry is gone.  That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe  is extinguished forever.”  It fetched $5,300,000.
 

            I knew none of this when I agreed to give my little talk.  On the same day I gave it, a squabble broke out in our capital city concerning bragging rights for assassinating Osama bin Laden.  This episode began in unseemliness, and has not become more salubrious as days have passed.  I expect soon to hear from one of the candidates not only that he did or certainly would have done it, but that it would have been a good idea to attach Osama’s body to a Chevy Volt and drag it seven times around CIA headquarters.

            They built in marble; we continue in cinder block.  Everybody knows that.  For that first crucial decade of our Republic we survived not only without an FCC or a Securities and Exchange Commission, we survived without an army or a police force!  What protected us in our extraordinary vulnerabilities were certain ideas about citizenship, not yet turned to irony, inhabiting the hearts and minds of certain idealists.

            As we enter a presidential campaign likely to excite discouragement and perhaps even revulsion in the minds of thoughtful citizens, we can perhaps turn again to antique history and classical myth in hopes of finding at least aesthetic comfort.  Various ancient authorities report the existence of a monstrous race called the Pygmaei, a tribe of very little people who lived—and here the authorities vary—either in little subterranean burrows or in houses made of eggshells.  The Pygmies lived in the back of beyond, on the edge of nowhere.  Periodically they did battle with their ancestral enemies, a race of birds of approximately their own stature, usually identified as storks.  The dubious battle betwixt Pygmies and Storks is a not infrequent subject in classical art.  The grotesquerie of it all must have been considered diverting.  Indeed it does seems a more amusing pairing than donkeys and elephants.

George and Me--and Ann Marie

            I spent my entire professional life among Ivy League adolescents in transition to young adulthood, and I know a thing or two about the mores of today’s fast-paced, hard-driving, no nonsense young professional class.  When they communicate, they communicate.  Thus, when the message at the very top of my e-pile yesterday morning addressed me briskly with the solid, no-frills, naked monosyllable of my Christian name, I sat up and took notice.

            I am of an older generation.  I also happen to have a Christian name that denotes (a) a toilet, and (b) a prostitute’s customer.  Under these circumstances I must confess to preferring something a little more formal and traditional:  “Dear Doctor Fleming,” for example, or maybe something along the lines of “Egregio Professore,” “Your Serene Highness,” or “Stupor Mundi”.  But beggars can’t be choosers.  When it’s coming from the White House, you’re lucky to be getting anything at all.  Here was a message with a banner headline: “Obama, Clooney, and You”.

John -- I have some advice for the two people who will be selected to go to a party for the President at George Clooney's house: Choose your guest wisely. Whoever you pick to join you is going to owe you big time. Think about it -- and chip in $75 or whatever you can today to be automatically entered: https://donate.barackobama.com/Obama-Clooney-and-You - Ann Marie Wow!  Only seventy-five bucks?  Why you can spend that on half a shopping cart-load of house brand groceries.  “Ann Marie” puzzled me for a moment.  I do have an eminent colleague and friend named Ann Marie, who is probably an Obama supporter.  But I didn’t know she was a movie fan.  Then there is Ann Marie, sister of one of my kids’ friends in Middle School.  She’s been living in California for the last thirty years, and California is a blue state.  Also, Hollywood is in California.  Still—little Ann Marie from next door?...I read further. It soon turned out that Ann Marie, with whom I was not previously on first-name terms, actually, is a certain Ann Marie Habershaw, the COO of “Obama for America”.  So we now have one presidential candidate who declares corporations to be persons squaring off against an incumbent person who declares himself to be a corporation.  It’s all somewhat confusing. I do readily admit, though, that Ann Marie Habershaw is one classy name, right up there with Julianna Smoot, my other penpal in the Obama campaign—along with Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, and occasionally the President himself.  Most days of the week I get an email from one of these people, but this is the first one to invite me to dinner at George Clooney’s house.  Sort of. There was some small print.  The invitation was not actually an invitation to dinner.  It was an invitation to buy a sweepstakes ticket.  In order to be eligible to go to George Clooney’s party I had to be at least eighteen (“or of majority under applicable law”).  I had to be a legal resident of the United States.  I passed that test with flying colors, but there was still a hitch: “Odds of winning depend on number of entries received”.  I hadn’t considered that.  So there was more to Ann Marie’s letter than met the eye!  Not only must I, in selecting an escort to George’s party, choose wisely—I must construct, and on the basis of a crucial unknown, an algorithm to assess the odds of actually being invited in the first place.  My instinct probably would be to invite my wife to go with me.  Same old same old.  But where had I heard that phrase—choose wisely—where had I heard it before?  It came to me in a flash: Indiana Jones, last Crusade, Holy Grail!   Well, we no longer live in an Age of Faith.  Dinner with George Clooney is probably about as close to the Holy Grail as it gets.  I must choose wisely. But first, apparently, I had to help George Clooney figure out where he lives.  Ann Marie was offering a “party for the President at George Clooney’s house.”  But the small print promises only “round-trip tickets for winner and a guest from within the fifty U.S. States, DC, or Puerto Rico to a destination to be determined by the Sponsor (approximate retail value of all prizes $3,200).” Remember, John, choose wisely.  There are imponderables here.  You have no idea of the scope of the competition.  Furthermore, the location of Mr. Clooney’s house may not yet have been determined by the Sponsor—and note the sinister capital letter on that word Sponsor.  Hmmm.  Choose wisely.  The only solid clues are the numbers with the dollar signs.  You cannot determine the odds of winning, but you can calculate, and calculate precisely, the potential return on investment—investment being one of the President’s favorite terms of art.  Now if you divide 3,200  by 75—well, do the math.  What you will get is forty-two followed by a decimal trail of six-six-six!  It’s the Habershaw Code! P.S.  When I went to my Google account to mount this post, I find that I have yet another message, this one from the President himself.  Its subject line reads “Clooney and Me”.  Dare I open it?  I must choose wisely.