Olympic bid, the Obamas’ marriage.

This is one of many tender moments Chris Andersen describes in Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a last minute development, President Barack Obama decided to join his wife Michelle and the rest of the Chicago delegation on their trip to Copenhagen to bring the 2016 Olympic Games to Chicago.

Chris Andersen’s Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage is a breezy and mostly recycled look at the First Couple’s roots, courtship and marriage.

Yom Kippur, Rabbi Shoni Labowitz’s Miraculous Living.

Rabbi Shoni Labowitz's book helped guide our reflections on Yom Kippur

 

Yesterday was Yom Kippur, and, for me, it was a meaningful day.

Dunreith and I fasted, spending the day in a combination of restful reflection, walking and talking about our ideas about ourselves, our family and our future.

Rabbi Shoni Labowitz’s Miraculous Living: A Guided Journey in Kabbalah Through the Ten Gates of the Tree of Life was part of our conversation.

We read different amounts of the book, which takes the reader from the Gate of Intention, through the gates of wisdom and understanding before moving onto gates of compassion and strength and finishing with gates of success, glory, creativity and nobility.

Labowitz writes in the introduction about her own spiritual journey.  Raised in an observant house, she concluded that not agreeing with all that she had been taught meant that she could not fit into the traditional way in which she had grown up.

So she left.

This period of departure ended only when she met a rabbi who later became her husband.

During her period of self-imposed absence, Labowitz became familiar with Eastern religions like Taoism and Buddhism. Her book is an effort to show the common elements in Eastern and Western religious traditions.  The temple she and her husband head have the initials T-A-O, in fact!  In addition, nearly all the chapters within the 10 sections has epigraphs from the Jewish tradition and an accompanying and matching thought by Buddha, Lao-Tzu, or some other figure.

In her section about intention, for instance, Labowitz talks about the importance of returning to empty, noting that this is a practice that she and others in her office hold each other to when they become stressed.  Each of the 10 gates also has a specific meditation which she recommends people perform before reading one of the smaller vignettes.

The influence of the Jewish Renewal movement can also be seen throughout the book, which is peppered with anecdotes from rabbis and thinkers and people Labowitz met in her own life. She writes movingly in one section about doing hospice work and having a profound and memorable connection with a dying woman.

One of the book’s major themes in the later section is to take responsibility for one’s life, even as it is helpful not to be attached to the outcome.  Of course, reading books is not the same as living,  and she even includes a few quotes in which a rabbi reprimands a novice for living a patchwork, rather than a whole, life and in which Lao-Tzu is encouraging people not to grasp for truth.   She also has clear thinking about the limits of searching for ego fulfillment and the need at some point to engage in selfless service. 

That said, Miraculous Living was a helpful tool on a day of reflection as well as a reminder of how to stay reflective, mindful and purposeful throughout one’s days and life.

Bill Wasik tells us how to go viral.

 

Bill Wasik's And Then There's This helps us understand how outburst like Joe Wilson's "You lie!" go viral.

 

It’s every blogger’s dream.

A post is written.  Friends look at it on Facebook.  People start to Digg and Stumble Upon it.  Retweeting kicks in.  The page views climb.

Then, something happens.  Like an airplane taking off, the connection between the ground and the air stops and the post starts to lift off into the blogosphere.  Page views climb dramatically, and then furiously, like the pages of a calendar in old black and white moves that used to indicate the passage of time.  

And then, just as suddenly, it stops.  The page views shut off almost instantly, like a water faucet being turned off.  

Harper’s editor Bill Wasik has helped create and sought to understand the viral trajectory, and he shares his findings in And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Dive in Viral Culture. 

And Then There’s This covers a wide range of topics, from the Mob meetups Wasik convened in New York City to an indie band whose popularity had peaked even before its first album had been released to psychologist Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience and conformity to trendy economists Steven Levitt and Nicholas Nassim Taleb.  

Unsurprisingly for a book about trends, Malcolm Gladwell gets some Wasik love in the form of  a mention, although Wasik has an intriguing box in which he compares Gladwell’s messages about trends in The Tipping Point to George Orwell’s 1984.  

The irony, of course, in reading this or any book about viral marketing is that Wasik’s point about the half life of stories being remarkably and increasingly short these days could easily be applied to the points that he makes in And Then There’s This.  He notes in the book while writing about the phenomenon of Politico that the online worlds of politics of 2004 and 2008 were closer to light than four years apart. 

In part because of my love of books and my previous ignorance on the topic, I stuck with Wasik’s breezy tome.  

In an interview with Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.Net, Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine addresses the reason behind going for a conventionally produced book-it aims for the masses, he says-and other viral topics. 

For those looking for more recent fare, Liz Shannon Miller of newteevee.com writes about two outbursts that are among the most recent to go viral-Joe Wilson’s yelling “You lie!” during President Obama’s health care speech to Congress and Kanye West’s interrupting Taylor Swift’s receiving a VMA award.

Cuban Missile Crisis Anniversary, Jonathan Glover reckons with the 20th Century.

Jonathan Glover takes on the horrors of the 20th century in this thought provoking book.

Next month will mark 47 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

For 15 tense days, the world waited to see how the potentially nuclear showdown between the United States, led by the youthful John F. Kennedy, and the Soviet Union, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, would end.

Eventually, the Soviet leader turned his subs around, leaving the American seemingly with a clear victory and the world intact.

The truth, according to ethicist and philosopher Jonathan Glover, is more complicated, and could hold the key to resolving some of the many other bloody conflicts around the globe.

Glover reckons with the past century’s disturbingly violent history in Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, an engaging and thought provoking, if inexhaustive book.

Glover opens the work by talking about philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and how leaders and their followers have taken and applied certain elements of his philosophy with destructive results.

The book surveys much, but far from all, of the brutal carnage that accrued due to human action during the past century.  He includes discussions of trench warfare, the Nazis, the bombing and starving of civilians during World Wars I and II, the genocide in Rwanda, the slaughter in Bosnia, and the regimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, among others.

Humanity, in short, is not a book for the proverbial faint of heart. 

The book is replete with stomach-turning, sleep disturbing details of people’s inhumanity to each other.  I found the description of the terror induced in the former Soviet Union during the Stalin era particularly chilling, particularly in its erosion of objective truth and the search for it, and each reader can make her own judgment there.

Glover is not a historian, and readers looking for either ground breaking revelations about the events during each of these historical moments or a comprehensive list of atrocities are likely to be disappointed.  The book’s strength lies in its discussion of moral resources, a sense of human connection to each other, and how these elements are either fostered or broken by the various regimes.

In addition to his discussion of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he contrasts with the behavior of European leaders at the onset of World War I, Glover also talks about painfully small moments in which a “Live and let live” philosophy prevailed. 

One such example is during the famous Christmases truces of the First World War, during the first of which German and British troops left their trenches and played soccer against each other.  This kicked off a few days of comity before the destruction resumed. 

Glover also talks about how Kennedy left Khrushchev with an opening, heeding one of his adviser’s citation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, while the Soviet leader, toward the crisis’ highest point, wrote in more conciliatory language about the devastating effects of war.

His discussion of hawks and doves during this period is particularly intriguing.  Glover notes that many of the hawks overestimated the Soviets’ rational behavior, and instead proposes a model of ordinary and flawed people trying to use their emotions, information and judgment to make decisions of almost unimaginable import and impact. 

The model may not be uplifting, and it may be an accurate description of what we have.   Beyond this, Glover suggests trying to cultivate moral responses and retain human connection through political measures, but to work on a psychological level, too. 

A positive outcome is far from certain, and certainly plenty of conflicts continue, with the possibility of others never far away.  Still, the combination of erudition and the spirit behind the Zulu word, ‘ubuntu,’  or interdependence, radiates throughout Glover’s work, leaving this reader with plenty to ponder and a sense of faint, but possible hope.

Oprah and Michelle’s Excellent Denmark Adventure, Angela Davis on Women, Race and Class

 

Angela Davis' essay collection provides useful background information to consider Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey's places in American society.

 

Billionaire talk show host, reading guru and cultural force Oprah Winfrey and First Lady Michelle Obama will travel to Copenhagen as part of Chicago’s official delegation in a last-minute effort to sway the International Olympic Committee to grant the 2016 games to the Windy City. 

In some ways, what is most remarkable about the two black women’s presence is how unremarkable it is at all.  

While there has been conversation about whether Michelle’s husband should leave his efforts to get health care reform passed or what Oprah’s presence will mean to the city’s bid, none of it that I have seen has focused on either woman’s race.

This is not by any means to suggest that racism and sexism have been eradicated in American society, but rather to note that, at least in the case of these two women, some positive change has occurred.

The degree to which Oprah and Michelle Obama can be said in any way to be representative of their millions of fellow black women is of course up for discussion, and Angela Davis‘ wide ranging and informative essay collection, Women, Race & Class, can help inform that conversation.

Perhaps most well known for her trial and subsequent acquittal for her role in the abduction and murder of Judge Harold Haley, Davis is a thoughtful and radical historian.  

The essays in this collection begin with slavery and move forward in time, essentially arriving at the period the book was published in the final two entries, which focus on reproductive rights and the obsolescence of housework, respectively.  While nearly all the selections focus on black women, Davis does also have a chapter about communist women covers many white women she deems to be political stalwarts. 

Davis does not shy away from taking on some of the most hallowed names in American history, with Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells and Margaret Sanger only some of the most famous people on the list. 

Women, Race & Class is not a polemic, although Davis’ call in one of the later essays to socialize child care might you to leave believe otherwise.  Published in 1983, the work is an attempt both to insert the experience of black women into mainstream historical discourse and to talk about the many hardships black women have endured, including those from their avowed allies.  

In addition to having chapters about slavery, the book includes three chapters about the women’s movement, which repeatedly privileged white women’s advancement over the franchise for all women.   In a similar vein, anti-lynching efforts did not gain widespread support from white people one would have expected to be supportive, she says, because of their accepting of the myth of black men as savage rapists.

The book is neither a litany of victimization nor an endless series of pot shots.  Davis writes at several points in the book with admiration of the actions taken and writing done by the Grimke sisters, and also has much good to say about Wells, Mary Church Terrell and Douglass, among others. 

Beyond this lauding of individuals, Women, Race & Class is based in a profound respect for, and sense of solidarity with, black women who have done the proverbial way paving for Davis and others in her generation.

Davis has continued that tradition, and to some degree Winfrey and Obama are beneficiaries of her efforts.  Whether you find her political actions reprehensible or not, I still recommend reading this collection before following Oprah and Michelle on their excellent adventure to push Chicago past the Olympic finishing line.

Kasparov and Karpov resume their battles, White King and Red Queen.

Chess masters Gary Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov shake hands before an earlier match. The two masters are playing a 12-game exhibition series on the 25th anniversary of their first contest.

They’re at it again.

A quarter century after they waged the first of their epic battles that spanned six years and saw the beginning of the downfall of the Soviet Union and its empire, Anatoly Karpov and Gary Kasparov are back at the chess board.

The stakes are lower than when they met to decide the identity of the world champion-Kasparov is now an outspoken governmental opponent, while Karpov recently was ranked among the world’s top 100 chess players, but has not been a major factor for close to 20 years-but that does not mean that they are taking the contest any less seriously than they did in 1984.

In all, Kasparov had a minor edge over Karpov in games won, 21 to 19, with more than 100 games ending in a draw.

This time, Kasparov has bolted out to a 2-0 lead in a timed format that appears to have worked to his advantage.

People wishing to learn more about these two warriors and the different parts of the Soviet Union would be well advised to read Daniel Johnson’s White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard. 

I wrote about this book, which friend and reader Evan Kaplan kindly gave to me, in March.   Johnson traces the rise of chess and the gradual emergence of a series of Soviet champions.  As the title suggests, the games on the board had heightened meaning in the post World War II period, when the Cold War raged between the world’s two superpowers.

While much of the book’s focus is on the famous 1972 contest between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, each of whom represented their own countries, Johnson does have extensive material about Karpov, the ultimate product of the Soviet chess system, and Kasparov, a half-Jewish, half-Armenian and full outsider. 

In addition to this entertaining material, Johnson also writes about Vladimir Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defence, which I have not yet read, and Stefan Zweig’s collection of short stories, The Royal Game.

The exhibition between Kasparov and Karpov is slated to be a best of 12 game series.  Whether you read White King and Red Queen before or after their battle is over, it is definitely worth the time and energy.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz explain The Power of Full Engagement.

Ivan Lendl applied many of the ideas endorsed by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.

We’ve all done it at some point or another.

Waking up after a fitful night of sleep, we’ve pumped ourselves full of caffeine and sugar to get through the day.  Despite our efforts, we remain on the verge of exhaustion, struggling to concentrate on any topic for more than about 12 seconds. 

Fortunately, there’s lots of help.

Stephen Covey’s phenomenally successful  The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Covey and Roger Merrill’s First Things First are just two of the many avalable time management books and seminars.

Performance psychologist Jim Loehr and Donald Trump memoir co-author Tony Schwartz take a different approach.

The key, they say, to high performance on the job and in one’s personal life is not time management, but energy management.

They make their case in their intriguing and informative book, The Power of Full Engagement, which I brother from my brother Jon. 

The authors maintain that the realms of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy are interrelated and need to be observed and managed attentively in order to perform consistently at high levels.

Having worked with many world class athletes, Loehr and his co-author advance a Corporate Athlete Training System for people to achieve their goals.

A major part of the program is based on the idea of rituals and recovery.  In addition to providing a time for renewal and reflection, rituals, the authors say, are more anchored in an oscillating, rather than linear, sense of time.  They also form the basis for how people respond in times of crisis, or, at the least, high pressure. 

Recovery is critical, too.  

Loehr and Schwartz say that building in recovery time-an extended Jack Nicklaus quote in which he discusses winding up his intensity before each stroke and releasing it in between-is vital in having sufficient levels of energy throughout an activity.

Although there are examples of athletes like Nicklaus and Ivan Lendl, who willed himself through a series of precise rituals to tennis greatness, the main focus is on ordinary corporate workers who may feel much more familiar.  The authors use these workers to exemplify different tendencies and possible corrective actions they can take.

The Power of Full Performance is divided broadly into an explanation of the authors’ vision and an explanation of the Corporate Athlete Training System.  Like many of this ilk, this involves a period of diagnosis and assessment followed by an application of the prescriptions the authors recommend.

Some many say that many of these self-help/time/energy management books sound the same.  

Readers  of The Power of Full Engagement will not be shocked to learn that eating well, exercising and going to sleep at the same time each day after having wound down and getting seven to eight hours are better practices than the opposite.   People familiar with Martin Seligman’s research on optimism can breeze through the part of the book that recaps his work.   The book, like many others, calls for a mission statement.

Still, the authors sprinkle in helpful information with which I was not familiar and look forward to pursuing; a couple of references to the five stages of the creative process caught my attention, for example.  And the broader point about energy, rather than time, being the unit of currency was eye opening for me. as was the emphasis on intervals. 

So even if you don’t use the Corporate Athlete Personal Development Plan,  I do recommend giving this quick book a read.  At the very least, it could supply another way to understand and alter the highly stressed way in which many of us live our lives.

More Pearls from Dany Fleming

Here’s another thoughtful, honest and insightful comment from Dany Fleming.  I’ve just written him that I love his comments and I hope that he starts his own blog!

Thanks for posting this, Jeff. Interestingly, Jimmy Carter was in our little city last night to receive an award and give a speech on the Middle East. He kept to his preplanned script and refrained from anything about race.

The local newspaper’s article on his speech, however, was certainly filled with anti-Carter vitriol. Incidentally, Obama visited here about a week before the elections. Harrisonburg is becoming quite a fertile microcosm for debate in the heart of the Bible-belt.

My wife, from Boston and then Chicago, has certainly been surprised by the hold the Civil War has on much of the South. The 250-year history of this area is dominated by the 5 years of 1860-1865. Here’s some of what you’ll find in this area.

R.E. Lee High School, Turner Ashby H.S., Stonewall Jackson H.S. – 3 of 7 area HS named after Confederate generals.

Until 2005, MLK Day was officially Lee-Jackson-King Day (Really! As approved by the Virginia legislator under the first Black state Gov.)

Multiple annual Civil War re-enactments attended by thousands.

The city’s newest history museum is dedicated to documenting the Union Army’s crop destruction that happened here as part of the Union’s effort to cut Confederate food supplies.

Part of this fixation can certainly be attributed to the fact that this area is home to some of the most devastating violence and war fought on U.S. soil. However, that’s not at the root of all the division.

Unlike any other war I know of, the “victor” left the area and allowed the “vanquished” to write (and re-write) the history, as well as to govern. I certainly learned about the “Time of the Great Separation” and the great Jefferson Davis in HS; not about the Civil War.

So, understanding the perverse, long-standing and complex psychology of Southern racism is difficult. It’s often hidden behind that most “American” of ideals – individual and state’s rights.

Stephen Biko’s movement, as noted in some of your blog posts, worked to help South African’s “decolonize their minds” from apartheid. It was a smart, thoughtful and effective strategy. It’s also an enlightening idea for what’s needed here. Bludgeoning folks on their stupid, racist notions is hard to resist (I probably do that too regularly here). Convincing them that they’re better than their hate is hard.

The beginning of the AIDS Epidemic: Randy Shilts’ And The Band Played On

Randy Shilts' account of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic is a jarring and haunting read.

Reading some books is like feeling a cool breeze wash over you on a sun-dappled beach as waves gently lap nearby.

The whole effect is soothing, restorative, healing.

But then there are other books which grab you with an urgency the way your mother’s voice called you by your full name when you were in trouble.  Forcing you to read them, these books and their unsettling contents stay with you far after the reading ends, churning and knocking you off-balance.

The late Randy Shilts’ And The Band Played On is an example of the latter type.

Shilts’ account of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, the Reagan administration’s callous indifference to the deaths of gay men, the medical community’s internecine competition, and the gay community’s failure to grasp the magnitude of what was happening and alter their sexual behavior accordingly alternately chills, haunts and inspires.

It’s been more than 20 years since the book was first published, and, unfortunately, the disease has spread beyond what then seemed almost unimaginable proportions.

Shilts breaks the work into quick chapters into he weaves a near dizzying array of characters through the 600-page work.

Some of the book’s more memorable people include Gaetan Dugas, a handsome and extremely promiscuous French-Canadian flight attendant who for years was considered by some researchers to be “Patient Zero” of the epidemic, the cantankerous and combative Larry Kramer, noble congressional aide and AIDS activist Bill Kraus, and Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler, whose personal understanding of the disease’s possible impact is not matched by a forceful push for funding.

The book veers from Africa, when a Danish researcher appears to catch and die from the virus, to the United States to France, where a frenzied quest to discover the virus is wage, and back.  At times, And The Band Played On reads like a series of dispatches issued from all over the globe and linked by all being tied to the ever growing epidemic. 

The constantly growing number of people infected with, and dieing from, the virus is a metronome-like presence in the book that can leave the reader numb at the rapidly increasing and spreading toll.

While Shilts focuses directly on governmental inaction, the book is not an anti-government screed.  Rather he discusses directly the bathhouse scene in San Francisco in which emotional connection was absent amid intense physical intimacy.   San Francisco Public Health Director Mervyn Silverman’s halting decision to shut the houses and the visceral reaction it elicited point to a community that did not fully accept or deal with the implications of what was happening. 

Medical researchers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean seem more concerned with personal glory than with collaborating to stop the disease, while keepers of the nation’s donated blood supply do not bathe themselves in honor, either.  The mainstream press fares poorly, too. 

In short, a host of people and institutions failed the gay community and the people in it, and the disease has spread rapidly from being considered a gay white man’s disease to in fact being more common among people of color, many of whom are women.

Shilts quotes liberally  at the beginning of sections from Albert Camus’ The Plague, which was conceived and written in part in the small French Huguenot mountain village of Le Chambon Sur Lignon. 

More than two decades after And The Band Played On, it is unclear whether Camus’ assessment that plagues are not eradicated, but merely subdued, is correct.    But it is abundantly clear that Shilts’ book is a powerful marker in the sand, reminding us of the  ruinous consequences of policy paths not taken.

Dany Fleming on Joe Wilson

 

Dany Fleming and his family. Dany returned to his native Virginia a couple of years ago and has been working for greater levels of racial harmony.

 

I received a great comment from friend, fellow hoopster and seeker of social justice Dany Fleming in response to my recent Joe Wilson post that I thought merited its own post:

Subject: a little bit o’ of the south

I thought this was relevant to your Joe Wilson blog. It’s an article in our local newspaper about a confederate flag incident at a local rural HS. It’s an incident that’s generally repeated every year at one local school or another.

The article has generated more online comments than any other story over the past several months. They’re telling and honest comments. Some of your bloggers might find it an interesting (and possibly disturbing) view into Southern reality. 

BTW – the newspaper is part of a chain of about 6-7 small papers along the western side of VA. They’re all owned by the Byrd family and they have no local competition. The editorials are exclusively written by the Byrd’s and are like Fox news in print. This type of monopoly on local news and editorializing is rampant throughout the South and it’s a significant and under-appreciated force.

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