Category Archives: Uncategorized

Population and Executive Greatness

By Michael F. Duggan

I know that exceptional national leadership is an exception rather than the rule. Without necessarily embracing monarchy, one could argue that there were more great leaders among the 41 kings and queens of England since 1066 than the 45 U.S. presidents since 1790 (although I am not sure how you compare a medieval warrior king like Richard the Lionhearted to a modern social democrat like Franklin Roosevelt). Britain is a small nation and its monarchy has been drawn from a few regal families. The United States is a sprawling land empire, whose system is increasingly open to all comers. Its political history is the history of the expansion of the franchise.

I would not go as far as Henry Adams, who saw the succession of U.S. chief executives as essentially disproving Darwin’s theory. Rather, there seems to be something counterintuitive at work suggesting that a larger pool of potential leaders does not guarantee good, great, or even better leaders.

Consider: The entire generation of the Founders and Framers (actually three generations, stretching from Franklin, who was born in 1706, to Hamilton, who was born in 1757) was drawn from a population of between 2 and 3 million (far fewer if we only count the white male elite population that was eligible to hold office). Lincoln was drawn from a population of around 31.4 million, and FDR from a population of around 125 million. The current U.S. population is around a third of a billion people, perhaps considerably higher, and the best we can do is Biden and Trump?

It seems that we have effectively fine-tuned our system to eliminate or scare off the best potential leaders among us. Either that or the brightest people today are either too greedy or cowardly (or both) to run for high office.

“Gulf Stream”

By Michael F. Duggan

My favorite nineteenth-century American painter is Winslow Homer.  Perhaps more than any other artist, he marks the arrival of a mature and distinctive American aesthetic after a protracted and derivative adolescence.  His seascapes are especially powerfully—nobody captures the amoral fury of the sea like Homer.

            There is one painting of his however, that I had not cared for but which I now see as a powerful metaphor, a metaphor for a future Homer could have not have foreseen.  This is his The Gulf Stream from 1899.  To me it always seemed too busy, an overly dramatic piling-on of threatening elements—like the drawing of a child trying to include too much into one scene.  The painting is of a black man stripped to the waist reclining on the deck of a de-masted, heavily listing sloop, apparently resigned to his fate.  

Recently I saw the painting again, and it spoke to me powerfully realized as a metaphor, a prophecy come true for the current human predicament: the man’s artificial environment—the derelict vessel—is a barely floating wreck, subject to the chaos and caprice, the whims of the ocean. It is a temporal speck of flotsam, of human artifice about to be reclaimed and assimilated back into nature (as with all of the human extended phenotype, the boat is not “artifice” but “human-altered nature”).  Nature threatens in other ways ways: circling sharks in the foreground, attracted to blood in the water.  On the horizon is a waterspout.  And then there is the encroaching sea itself.  The title of the painting provides another element: the Gulf Stream, a current—a river in the ocean—that is controlling the course of the sinking sloop, further denying humankind agency over its own fate.   

Also in the distance is a faint and fleeting chance of salvation by human hands, a fully-rigged sailing ship on the far horizon heading past the unseen boat and apparently toward the storm, as the man on the boat looks unaware or uncaringly away in the opposite direction. This is where we stand, or recline, today. 

            Of course the metaphor is not a perfect one—no metaphor is—nature is not depicted as degraded or altered, as it is in our time, only primal and threatening, and unlike the man in the painting, so many of us today are either unaware or in denial of our predicament.  Where the man looks away from the possibility of salvation—we look away from the threat itself either in ignorance or apathy rather than in hopelessness of our situation.  By contrast, much of civilization superficially seems to be going strong, whereas the boat is little more than a hulk awash in the brine. 

The relevant questions framed by the painting are: are things too far gone for the man and his situation, and are things too far gone for us and ours?  Is there still hope for us and our world?     

Swift, Not Brilliant

By Michael F. Duggan

Okay, so I am not a part of Taylor Swift’s target audience, and I would be surprised if I have listened to more than a dozen of her songs. But like her or not, pop music’s billion-dollar woman is impossible to ignore.

I have noting against Swift. She is clearly talented and protects energy and a positive image for her legions (armies, really) of young fans, or Swifties. The fact that she has tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of enthusiastic followers who are willing to shell-out big bucks for albums and sold-out concerts corroborates this. They, and in some cases their parents, love her and her music, and there is no reason to think that they are faking it. But does she warrant such acclaim and pecuniary reward?

Right after Swift’s Eras tour broke the billion-dollar mark, a friend of mine called me and asked me what I thought of her. In truth I think about her fairly little, other than during the occasional news story. Of her relationship with what’s-his-name, the football player, I couldn’t care less. To be fair, at 34, she is now a veteran in a cutthroat business that makes extreme demands on touring musicians, and her first album, released in 2006, is now older than many of her fans.

Bur my friend’s point was that, taken on her artistic merits, she seems to be a kind of patron saint for the mediocrity that characterizes so much of the music of our time. I listened to some of her songs and they struck me as unobjectionable, if unexceptional, and possessing verve and confidence. Her lyrics occasionally rose to the level of moderate (if unexceptional) inspiration. She also has a nice voice. But is the whole package worthy of a clean billion for a single (albeit long) tour? I suppose a free trader would argue that anybody who can make that kind of money legally in a free market deserves it. Perhaps. But as regards aesthetics, I would have to disagree.

It is pointless to argue over taste and preferences, but I think that we can make meaningful qualitative statements about art and entertainment. For instance, do Swift’s songs, which speak so powerfully to her fans, rise to the level of the nearly universal appeal of the better songs by the Gershwins, Hoagy Carmichael, Lennon and McCartney, Cole Porter, Rogers and Hart/Hammerstein, Schubert, Simon and Garfunkel, or Fats Waller? Are her lyrics as fresh and original as those of Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and the better acts of the British Invasion during the early and mid 1960s? Does her musical virtuosity push the limits to the same degree as the young Louis Armstrong, Big Beiderbecke, Sidney Bechet, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Jimi Hendrix, Stanley Jordan, Anita O’Day, Charlie Parker, Django Reinhardt, or The Who? Does her voice, although good, carry the depth of feeling of a Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, Otis Redding, or Hank Williams? Is her voice as fine as Sarah Vaughn or Ella Fitzgerald, as distinctive as Sinatra’s or Crosby’s, or as big as those of Aretha Franklin or Linda Ronstadt?

From what I have heard so far, she does not rise to the level of any of these apples and oranges in these respective categories, and yet none of them ever made anything like a billion dollars in a single tour. During their first U.S. tour, The Beatles made an impressive minimum of $50,000 per concert (a little under half a million dollars when adjusted for inflation). By contrast, Swift makes between $10 and $13 million per concert. Is she really 20-26 times better than all four Beatles?

My friend believes that where entertainment is powerful and singular, art is more subtle and multifarious, leading to innumerable interpretations and reactions. There is of course a huge grey zone between the two. Using this distinction, it seems to me that Taylor Swift has both feet in the entertainment category as a runaway pop sensation, although possibly not as an entertainer (much less and artist) for the ages. Time will tell, and I may be wrong. But then, even all these years later, I still don’t understand the unwaning appeal of Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Britney Spears among their fans.

Grief by any Name

By Michael F. Duggan

In Washington, D.C., a city crowded with monuments, the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, is my favorite.

We all know of the historian and writer, Henry Adams, but less well-know is his wife, Marian Hooper “Clover” Adams, a pioneering photographer who took her own life in 1885. Henry would commission the sculpture that would mark her grave, now his grave too. The sculptor is Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who called it The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding. Although heavy, it is prossibly my favorite American sculpture as well.

It was Eleanor Roosevelt’s special place in the city, and she would go there to sit and think. Twain liked it too and is supposed to have given it the informal title of Grief, the name by which I first knew it (it has also been called Despair). Adams opposed and resisted all of the names bestowed on the sculpture.

Of the androgynous, draped figure in bronze, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—who was friends with the Adamses and who once sat for a photographic portrait by Clover—wrote: “I should not call it despair any more than hope. It is simply the end and silence. The universe escapes epithets. It is enough if you find it beautiful and awful.”

Like Mrs. Roosevelt, I see the figure as female. Unlike Justice Holmes, I see in it a depth of human emotion confronted with loss.

Policy Meditation Day

By Michael F. Duggan

Americans love a parade and they love a military hero. I know, my father was one. Forty-five U.S. presidents were veterans and 12 were generals became Commander in Chief. Until fairly recently, military service was virtually a requirement for national elective office.

Years ago, a friend of mine who worked at a veterans memorial, was asked by some visitors what they could do to contribute (meaning volunteering in a conspicuous way at a symbolic site). He asked them if they had ever considered volunteering at a V.A. hospital. It wasn’t the answer they wanted to hear. Americans love yellow ribbons and bumperstickers supporting the troops, but we frequently lose interest after the parade.

We celebrate our veterans on Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Veterans Day. We celebrate their service and sacrifice. But if we really appreciated the cost of war to veterans, their families, and the country, wouldn’t there be a day set side to reflect on the causes of war and the reasons why we mortgage the lives of young American men and women? If you wish to celebrate the sacrifice of American servicemen and service women, take one day off every year, and quietly reflect on the reasons why in recent years the country has gone to war. Whenever you hear or read about U.S. servicemen or servicewomen killed abroad, ask yourself about the wisdom that put them in harm’s way and if it is worth such sacrifice.

Such meditation might also provide a basis for precluding bad policies. And it is the very least a citizen can do to honor our soldiers, sailors, airmen/women, and marines.

New Article: The Progress of a Plague Species, a Theory of History

Please check out my new article in the European journal Symposion at: http://symposion.acadiasi.ro/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/2023.10.2.3.duggan-1.pdf

Errata: The parenthetical in the sentence “The mild eleven-thousand year summer – the Holocene (alternatively, Eremozoic) – that permitted and nurtured human civilization and allowed our numbers to grow will likely be done-in by our species in the not-too-distant future,” at the bottom of page 216, is incorrect and should be stricken.  Eremozoic is not a synonym for Holocene, but may be used as an alternative for Anthropocene. The terms Eremozoic and Anthropocene are accurately characterized in footnote 5 at the bottom of page 217.

Diplomacy in Black and White

By Michael F. Duggan

The first thing you have to realize is that the giant panda is an absurdity of natural selection.1 It is a carnivore reverse-engineered into a clawed-and-fanged herbivore with a dietary niche limited to bamboo, a staple so nutritionally desolate, that the creature is reduced to spending its days on its back, stripping and eating leaves.

But the panda has one overwhelming advantage over so many other endangered animals: it is what is called a “charismatic” species. In other words, it is a fluffy, photogenic, teddybear-like animal that appeals—panders (sorry)—to a deeply-rooted human instinct for cute things. To be fair, with 1,500 to 3,000 individuals in the wild, the giant panda is not a robust species, and is listed as “vulnerable.” Because of habitat destruction, its range is limited to the bamboo mountain forests of the Chinese provinces of Gansu, Shaanxi, and Sichuan. They are a precious rarity (they are so valuable, that whenever there was a public relations “panda naming” contest, I favored the moniker “Cha-Ching”). It’s just a shame that the Yangtze dolphin and turtle, now both likely extinct, were apparently not charismatic enough to be diplomatically valuable species, the former falling victim to, among other things, the Three Gorges Dam.2 So much for bio-altruism.

But back to the Chinese teddybears. All of this, the rarity of the panda, its universally-acknowledged adorability, and its uniqueness to China, all made it a natural for zoological diplomacy. The original exchange pandas were brought to the United States in 1972, just as U.S.-China relations were thawing. Although the returning of Mei Xiang, Tian Tian, and Xiao Qi Ji  to China is due to the expiration of the exchange lease, what can we infer from it more generally in diplomatic terms? And what does panda diplomacy hold for the future?

Notes
1. See Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb.
2. https://news.mongabay.com/2007/08/extinction-of-the-yangtze-river-dolphin-is-confirmed/

The Gaza Window

By Michael F. Duggan

Who would have thought that Hezbollah would the voice of reason in the Middle East? For while Hassan Nasrallah threw out a lot of predictable red meat to the crowd today, he did not call for a wider war.

Beyond the bluster, and reading between the lines, Nasrallah is giving Israel, the United States, and the world a chance to pull back from the brink. It was a warning, but it is also a window, an expression of restraint that should be met with an equal measure of sanity and realism. It is a signal from the other side, like Khrushchev’s message of October 26, 1962 to Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. By not calling for an expanded war against Israel, a war that would set the Middle East and the rest of the world on fire, Nasrallah has provided an opportunity for deescalation.

I suspect that nobody in the Israeli government reads this blog. But if they did, I would advise them to look at the bigger picture, the long game, and to stop taking the bait. There is no plausible military solution to this crisis, and the killing of civilians in Gaza and sending IDF troops into this Stalingrad on the Mediterranean is exactly what Hamas wants Israel to do.

Jessica Savitch

By Michael F. Duggan

Forty years ago, at little past 7:00 on the rainy evening of October 23, 1983, Jessica Savitch left the Chez Odette restaurant in New Hope, Pennsylvania, with Martin Fischbein, vice president of the New York Post. Fischbein was driving and exited the wrong way out of the parking lot and down the towpath of the Pennsylvania Canal on the Delaware River. There were no guardrails along the canal and the car flipped over the edge, falling 15 feet upside-down into four or five feet of water. Sinking in the mud, the car doors of were effectively sealed. Unable to get out, Fischbein (who was knocked unconscious), Savitch, and her Siberian husky, Chewy, drowned.

Savitch had been NBC’s “Golden Girl”—the gold standard for the female broadcast news reporter of the late 1970s and early eighties and one of the first women to anchor a nightly network news program. On the air, she projected charm, competence, and confidence and was unflappable. But stories abounded of a private life in turmoil, including a failed marriage, drug use, and the suicide of her second husband, Dr. Ronald Payne. There were also stories that she was a perfectionist who was difficult to work with. In spite of the stories of substance abuse, the autopsies showed that Fishbein and Savitch had had no more than a single glass of wine between them at dinner.

During a live 60-second top-of-the-hour news update on October 3, 1983, she slurred her words and was clearly off her game. This led to speculation that her career was in crisis and perhaps over at NBC (even though she had supposedly signed a contract for another year at the network and was also hosting the new PBS news magazine Frontline). She would do a flawless news spot later than night and then over the coming days and weeks.

There is something especially somber about people now long gone but who live in memory as living memory recedes. It is as if they will be soon forever lost even there. Perhaps this is the natural course of things. Eventually we will all be forgotten. Except for a couple of tell-all books and a movie based on one of them, Savitch seems mostly forgotten these days. The killing of 241 Marines in Beirut on the same day, followed by the invasion of Grenada, all but wiped the news of her death off of the headlines. Rather than sympathy, the tragedy and sorrow of her life became ammunition for resentful stories.

I couldn’t care less about the gossip, rumors, or even the truth about Savitch’s private life and personal problems. Insofar as memory persists, she deserves to be remembered as a pioneer of a generation of women reporters, now retired or late into their careers, that include Linda Ellerbee and Judy Woodruff.

Savitch and Chewy were cremated together and their ashes were scattered into the ocean at Atlantic City. She has no headstone.