The Data Port

11th Hour, 11th Day, 11th Month

It was the “War to End War” and it was the war to “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” It ended at eleven o’clock in the morning on the eleventh day of November in 1918.

Until wars to come transformed Armistice Day into Veterans Day, Americans across the nation stopped whatever they were doing—in businesses, or stores, or schools—at eleven o’clock and observed a minute of silence. I remember one Armistice day when I was in Chicago’s Marshall Fields department store with my mother. A bell rang and the whole great building hushed and was still.

I have always thought that moment of silence was a fitting way to honor sacrifice and express a devotion to peace. Our parades and celebrations are certainly fitting and proper… but wouldn’t it be wonderful if once again at eleven o’clock in the morning that great and reverential quiet could roll across the country.

Winning The Lottery

It’s a game we all play: What would you do if you won the lottery? Won big, won so big that you could frame your life any way you chose?

Except in the  way I am about to tell you I don’t believe my life would change too significantly…or say, rather, that I would not initiate great changes. I like my home and think I would keep living in it. I enjoy household chores, fixing things, and working on the bikes. Oh, I might hire the occasional handyman or housecleaner, but apart from that I can imagine my life grinding on pretty much as it does now.

I might buy another motorcycle, but we have two already and motorcycles can only be enjoyed one at a time.

Whenever the what-would-you-do-if-you-won-the-lottery question is asked I think of my father’s friend Harvey Hayes. When my father was a young actor Harvey was an old one. He lived in a bed-sitter in Chicago’s South Shore Country Club. My father took me to visit Mr. Hayes once (I sat quietly while they rehearsed a scene together) and I can remember being fascinated by the fact that he didn’t have a kitchen.

He had a sort of pantry with a small sink and a fridge, but he clearly never cooked. I asked him what he did for meals…his situation was now riveting…and he replied, “Well, young Arthur, I go to restaurants. I’m an actor, not a cook.”

That answer had a more profound effect on me than I suspected at the time.

If I won the lottery I would never cook again. I simply loathe cooking. I know it’s supposed to be creative and satisfying and all that, but I simply hate it. I dislike having to prepare a dinner for guests and getting all the courses to come out at the right time. I hate scrubbing up afterwards.

I would much rather treat my guests to a nice meal at an excellent restaurant. I could afford it if I had won the lottery.

Oh, I might have a small pantry kitchen like Mr. Hayes, where I could keep some bread and peanut butter or a box of orange juice… something I could eat at the sink when I got peckish… but for the most part I would eat all my meals out.

At my favorite places I would be well known. As a regular I could ask for special service…”I’m not very hungry tonight, do you suppose the chef could do a plate of sliced tomatoes and romaine, with some nicely buttered sourdough toast?” Well of course…because I was a regular who had won the lottery and always tipped well.

And I would never cook again.

A Rite of Passage

There was a time…at least so it was in Chicago…that going to the fights was as much a rite of passage as getting laid, or being able to smoke without hiding your cigarettes.

A father would come home and tell mom that he and a couple of the boys were going to the fights that night and he thought he’d take the kid, if he wanted to go. Did the kid want to go? You bet. This was an invitation into man’s estate. Tonight he wouldn’t be a kid, he’d be one of the boys.

These were usually club fights, held in smoky social halls or neighborhood auditoriums, with fighters on their way up or their way down. There weren’t many women at these fights, at least not “nice” women. No one’s mother, no one’s sheltered sister, went to the fights.

Your father’s friends might offer you a cigarette, or a seegar and a beer, and your father would look the other way and you’d try to smoke the one and drink the other without disgracing yourself.

That sort of thing made you a boxing fan for life.

Twilight of The American Empire

If anything can be said to characterize this period in the history of the American Empire it is the faint sweet smell of decay, the aroma of something barely nosed out behind the curtains of our public and private lives. It is the way an Empire in decline begins to smell.

As a people we have become spiritually feverish and anxious, only dimly aware (if at all) that we are sick yet, somehow, responding to that half-sensed odor by questing after distraction and emotional excitation. Thus we hide ourselves from the truth.

Americans have never been a particularly introspective people; our thought has always been directed outward, toward the world. We have been engineers, pragmatists. According to the the myths we employ to understand others it is the French to whom we attribute the inward turning of thought: Think Descartes.

When I look about today I can’t help but think of Rome: Bread…circuses… and Caesar’s royal circlet sold to the highest bidder; political destinies sold to the corn merchants.

Some weeks a go a friend looked up from his coffee and after a pause in our conversation said, “There is no honor any more.” Then just a few nights ago someone looked up and asked, “Don’t we care about facts anymore?”

If there is a public life without honor, then action in public life is without limits; and in a public discussion in which facts are less important than emotions, anything you say with conviction becomes true—and chaos ensues.

Homer

There is more to getting an education than job training, although nowadays the two seem to be considered pretty much the same thing. An education  continues to be a source of pleasure and delight long after your collegiate job training is hopelessly out of date. In support of this claim I offer the following.

Fifty years ago or more I studied ancient Greek in college. I was a dreadful student. Our teacher, Dr. Ryan, was an easy going Irishman with an Irishman’s love of language, talking and song; a teacher who managed to inspire even the least of us with some understanding of, and passion for, the  glories of the language and the literature it framed.

Normally in beginning classes like ours if you translated anything it was pokey elegiac couplets by Theognis or passages from  Xenophon’s  “Anabasis,”  a direct and soldierly account of the march of  ten thousand Greek mercenaries, escaping from a lost cause in Persia, as they fought their way toward the Black Sea and home.

But on special occasions  Ryan would present us with short passages from the Iliad to translate. We would sit around a great seminar table and hammer with our dictionaries at the little slips of paper  on which the day’s challenge was written, trying to coax some sort of meaning from a Greek that was well beyond  our ability to translate.

Ryan circled the table, leaning over our shoulders and looking over our confusions, hand-holding us through our translations. Finally he’d take mercy on us and let us close our dictionaries. He would tell us his own translation and then in a chocolate-rich baritone he would “sing” the passage in Greek.

The meter of the Iliad isn’t jingley, it doesn’t go bumpety, bumpety, bump. The rhythm of its verse, the way it rushes and plunges, shouts,  or speaks with stately deliberation, is due to the length of its syllables and where the speaker’s breaths fall; not to a drumming emphasis on every second or third sound.

The verse is a kind of music. The Greek words echo, sound like, the clangor of Apollo’s silver bow, and the vibrating twang of the bow string; the hiss of waves as they retreat from the shore, or the terrible metallic ringing of a pitched battle between men heavily armed in bronze.

If nothing else, the Iliad is a whacking good war story, a  piece of military history dreadful in its detailed accounts  of  battle wounds that dropped a man to his knees , “screaming shrill as the world went black before him—clutched his bowels to his body, hunched and sank.”

What makes the Iliad more than a battle tale is its  rich  individual  characterizations and psychological subtlety. What fed the Trojan War was not simply a runaway wife but the jealousies, vanities, rage and over weaning pride of its players, both Gods and men.

And on re-reading it this is what surprises and delights about the Iliad. Hector and  Achilles, Paris and Helen, Agamemnon and Menelaus, Zeus and Hera are not the cardboard cutout figures we are likely to remember from some distant humanities course. They are human, all too human.

For all that I forgot, or never learned, I always remembered that the Iliad was, or was supposed to be, wonderful. I just never read it all. Okay, I had hardly read  any of it. The trouble was that I never did learn to read Greek and  no translation  sent the shivers up and down my back the way Dr. Ryan’s readings and translations did, or captured what I knew the Iliad was.

Fifty years later I rediscovered all that when a friend sent me a talking book version  of the Iliad recorded  by the English actor Derek Jacobi. I was bowled over by the reading and hunted up the translation

The translator is  Robert Fagles, who won The Academy of American Poets 1991 London Translation Award for his work. There is a very nice paperback version published by Penguin in 1991, and again in 1998. A long introduction gives an account of the history of the text and an excellent set of notes and pronunciation guides.

This translation is the Iliad I remembered  taking so much pleasure in. I have no idea how technically accurate it  is and I don’t much care…it’s enough that it justifies the memory.

So there, in the end, you have it. A fifty year old education and a completely “impractical” course continue to pay benefits long after the  job training manuals have been recycled.

In an Arizona Daily Star guest editorial dated August 4th, former Tucson mayor George Miller said it’s time to add two more wards to the city.

If the city is successfully  forced by the state legislature to go to non-partisan, ward-only elections, now would be an ideal time, according to Miller, to bring a large chunk of the Foothills into the city.

The new wards would be north of River Road between Campbell and Sabino Canyon Road. The Foothills have long resisted annexation, but Miller thinks that the promise of their own Council reps would overcome Foothills resistance.

Miller continues:  “As an annexation bonus, a big chunk of money, as much as $40 million, could come to Tucson in the form of state-shared revenue funds. Unincorporated areas do not receive these funds. Incorporated areas do, and that money could come to the city of Tucson.”

I’d love to be annexed but the chances of that are nil, despite what the annexation folks in the city may think. I’m happy with ward-only elections, too, but the idiots in the legislature crafted (possibly the wrong word) the impending change without specifying that their law would take effect in 2010. Right now it’s scheduled to become law after this year’s primaries ( under the old rules) and before the general election (under the new rules.)

It’s a legal jungle. Ain’t going to happen this year; maybe never…but if it ever does there’s a chance that the new wards would be Democratic.

While no one was paying attention Democratic and Independent registrations in that section of the Foothills drew even (or possibly surpassed) Republican registrations.