Realism and Policy

By Michael F. Duggan

I was reading the news this week and thought to myself: with what character from a dystopian novel or film do I most identify? For me it’s Solomon Roth, the Edward G. Robinson character, from the 1973 movie, Soylent Green.

When I first saw the film (now dated, with some epic overacting by Charlton Heston) as a young person, it struck me as plausibly prophetic: an overcrowded, overheating world quite literarily devouring itself, with a small, insular, elite at the top. It is set in 2022. Prophecy indeed.

But then there is Sol Roth, the old guy (65) in a black beret, who remembers what was good about the old days, before everything went wrong. The younger Charleston Heston character rolls his eyes at him and his old-school gentility and what he suspects is the older man’s sentimentality and nostalgia. That is, until he (Sol) checks out via a spectacular, customized, multimedia show (at the all-too sanitized and accommodating Soylent factory) amid scenes of natural beauty set to “light classical” music (“guaranteed” to satisfy and to last 20 minutes). It is then that the younger man–the man of new age–realizes what has been lost, as he learns that “Soylent Green is people!”

According to the film, Roth is born in 1957, making him about six years older than me, and although I have no plans to visit the Soylent Green factory any time soon, our respective ages are in the same ballpark.

The scene in which Sol dies is especially poignant because this was Robinson’s final role. He died 84 days after shooting wrapped.

By Michael F. Duggan

One hundred thirty six years ago last week (January 3, 1889), the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, collapsed in a street in Turin. He had been acting in an increasingly erratic manner for a few weeks. The most commonly told version of the story is that, in a scene reminiscent of one in Crime and Punishment, Nietzsche bolted across the Piazza Carlo Alberto, and then, in tears, threw his arms around the neck of a horse that was being beaten by its master. If true, his last sane (or first insane) act, was one of compassion.

He was taken home in a state of unconsciousness, and when he awoke, he was never the same, other than in a few fleeting moments of lucidity and memory. For a number of days he was delusional and manic, singing, dancing, and loudly playing the piano in the house of his landlord. Leading up to his collapse, he he had written a series of letters (including ones to Cosima Wagner and Otto von Bismarck as well as to a number of friends), famously signing them “Dionysus” and “The Crucified.”

Franz Overbeck, a friend who had received one of the letters, took him (and likely saved him from legal trouble) to a sanatorium in Basel. His breakdown was diagnosed as “paralysis progressiva.” Today it would probably be called a psychotic breakdown. He was moved from Basel to a facility in Jena, closer to his mother and sister. His condition reached an intensified state of incoherence and hallucinations before, as Julian Young notes, lapsing into “catatonic withdrawal degenerating, [and] eventually, into a vegetative state.”

As Nietzsche biographer, R.J. Hollingdale observes:

“He took eleven years to die, and in that time he became a figure of legend: living, yet dead, existing in a world beyond human reach, he excited to a dangerous degree the myth-making powers of a nation increasingly addicted to fantasy and irrationalism. The Nietzsche for whom the Nazis built a museum at Weimar was, in all strictness, a madman: the Nietzsche of the last eleven years, transformed from a rational philosopher and writer of genius into a man without qualities upon whom any characteristics might be put.”

Over the course of 1888—the year leading up to his collapse–he had written five lucid, but increasingly excited (Dionysian) books. The man who had begun his career writing as a rational (Apollonian) and fairly dry academic, had become a drunken poet.

At the same time, he was working on what he characterized as his master work, The Will to Power (faithful selections of which were published in English as Writings from the Late Notebooks, 1885-1888 in 2003). Unfortunately Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Förster-Nietzsche, his sister and a vulgar proto-fascist, got hold of these, and after one of the most infamous hatchet jobs in literary history published them in unrecognizable form, grotesquely misrepresenting her stricken brother’s ideas. And so the advocate of aristocratic individualism became a patron saint of the Nazis (even though he hated German nationalism, mass movements, grandstanding thugs, and had called antisemitism “scabies of the heart”).

But even with the historical record largely corrected over the past 80 years, we have to be careful about Nietzsche. He is as dangerous as he is interesting. He was a sick man for most of his life, and at the end, he was mentally ill before becoming vegetative. Still his ideas should be read and evaluated on their merits rather than psychologized on the basis of his descent into madness..

To introduce him even into informed conversation is to risk a fight or outright dismissal by people who have only glimpsed his oeuvre or have internalized the lingering rumors (there is a New Yorker cartoon from the 1950s in which a man tells a bartender “At my first mention of Nietzsche, stop serving me”). But the fascination about him has also persisted. He is like a figure out of romantic fiction: one of the greatest minds of the 19th century and one of the most strikingly original thinkers of all time who was also the living embodiment of the mad philosopher (a title he shares with Diogenes of Sinope). For some people he is the embodiment of the insane genius, and if often blamed as a font of the chaos of the 20th century (Bertrand Russell lumps Nietzsche among the “angry men” of the 1890s, along with Ibsen and Strindberg, even though he spend the entire decade in a vegetative state).

Nietzsche fails as the basis for a political or programmatic thinker. As Thomas Hardy writes (with a fair amount of reduction), Nietzsche “insanely regarded life as a thing improvable by force to immaculate gloriousness, when all the time life’s inseparable conditions allow only for clumsy opportunities for amelioration by plodding compromises and contrivances.” Okay, but that is only a part of him, and there is more to life than “plodding compromises and contrivances,” malicious irony, and “the intrinsic crookedness of things.”

Like many idealists who take their ideas to logical absurdity, Nietzsche has something to offer in terms of prescribing a basis for living in a world without intrinsic values or meaning. A liberal-minded reading of his ideas is that we should seek to be our best selves–actualize our intrinsic qualities as best as possible in a fleeting life–and live as nobly as possible amidst life’s imperfections. Even if the eternal recurrence of the universe is not literally true, the past still exists in a certain, perhaps literal, sense, and therefore, insofar as it is in our power to do so, we should strive to make our lives monuments for eternity.

By Michael F. Duggan

Five years ago yesterday, the World Health Organization noticed a large pneumonia cluster in and around the Chinese city of Wuhan. The end, when it comes, may be a big event, like the crises of the environment or a nuclear war. Or it may begin as an obscure occurrence in places remote from us, a small thing mostly unnoticed.

By Michael F. Duggan

In late September 2021, I put in my 90-day notice at work. My dad died late the next night. I was scheduled to retire on December 31, but tested positive for COVID on Christmas Eve, and missed my last week of work. Retirement was beginning to look like a John Irving novel (or a bad ’70s cop show where the retiring veteran gets shot on his last day). This first run in with COVID–essentially a minor head cold–lasted around 72 hours, and during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve ’21, I began walking every day.

Two friends who had retired before me, gave conflicting pieces of advice. The first said to take some time–a month, three months, six months, a year–to figure out who you are in retirement and then to go from there. The other was: because you know what you want to do, just jump in with both feet and become the person you want to be. Successful retirement means becoming a good version of your real self. I wanted write and to get in reasonable shape, to walk. Life is too short. I chose the latter.

I usually (90-95% of the time) walk a route in a nearby regional park that is 2.7-3.0 miles (around 48-60 minutes, depending). I walk in all weather and actually prefer rain and frozen precipitation. It makes you feel like you’re doing something. I love the woods in all seasons, but they are most beautiful as an austere snowscape, when I can semi-plausibly carry an ice axe instead of a walking stick without alarming other walkers.

Droughts are the hardest to take–they’re like watching the world die in slow motion, and this fall we set a record for the longest period without rain in the area. The resiliency of nature is inspiring.

In 2022 I walked 355 or 356 days (missing 9 or 10 days due to travel). ’23, was a perfect 365. As of today, so was 2024. If I am sick, or if family duties call, I may walk as little as .5 to 2.5 miles. Even on bad days, and there were some this year, I try to do the full route. It is good to force yourself to take an hour out of your day, until it becomes routine. I walked daily through a second bout of COVID in December 2023 and bronchitis this past March. No matter how bad, a day can be improved by a short walk (it’s kind of like golf without the perpetual frustration and thrown clubs).

Walking is one of the few exercises, in my experience, that stimulates thought, and has been endorsed by thinkers from the PreSocratics, to Aristotle, to Darwin, Nietzsche, John Kaag, and most blues musicians. If you carry a small pad and pencil, you can plan your whole week or write a short article on a single walk (and if you don’t write down a line or idea when you think of it, it may not be there later, unless you keep repeating it in your head until you get back to the car). After walking, if there is nothing more pressing on my list, I go home for lunch and to write.

The biodiversity of the park is impressive–a veritable oasis in the ever-expanding human monoculture desert (a new beaver dam appeared on the creek over the past few weeks, the first in perhaps two years). I have counted around 60 species of birds (more, if I could distinguish between kinds of sparrows and hawks), around a dozen species of snakes, and saw a magnificent marbled salamander in September ’22. There is a thriving population of box turtles and apparently some (transient?) coyotes that I have only seen twice and are quite beautiful. Foxes and deer abound. A short stretch of trail runs alongside an Interstate highway, where the sounds of the cars and truck are like the cries and trumpeting of mammoths and mastodons.

There is a small valley on my route, a valley of ferns, moss, and laurel, with a vernal pool–an intermittent pond (or large puddle)–that is a stop-over point for a pair of wood ducks in the fall. The pool occupies a depression that was likely an old channel of the creek. In rainy seasons, it is shaped like an exclamation point. As it dries, it becomes a question mark and then the number 7 before disappearing completely.

I get bored or impatient when I run or walk on a treadmill or through my neighborhood (where I start involuntarily calculating the number of houses until the end), but never in nature, where the same path is never the same one twice (take that, Heraclitus). It is the evolving, endlessly interesting answer to the Myth of Sisyphus (or its modern analogs in Camus and “Groundhog Day”). You also come to be able to read the seasons by the month via natural signs, almost down to the week of the month (okay, maybe not for a month or two in the dead of winter). I always notice the first ice on the creek in late fall and the first bloodroots and Indian pipes of spring.

As on the water, people are friendlier on trails. Most people will say hi, and you start recognizing the regulars and their dogs (and they recognize me with my coffee and blackthorn walking stick, a prop more than necessity). In spite of the damage they do, mountain bikers are friendly and polite, more so than some of the street bicyclists I have come across. The best walks are where you don’t see anyone–rainy Monday mornings are pure gold.

The park is not without its pathos. On Christmas 2023, a fox was hit by a car on the road at the trailhead where I begin. This summer I saw two spider versus wasp fights in which the wasp wins better than 99% of the time. There are events in nature that make a bar fight look like a debutante’s ball by comparison.

When I walk, I also pick up the discarded plastic I come across. It is shocking how much there is out there, even in relatively clean places like a regional park. The creek can be especially bad. I picked up at least one, and usually several pieces of plastic on the trail every day in 2024 (once, in ’22, I filled two large garbage bags). It has become a kind of obsession with me.

More broadly, I am trying to affect a separate peace, a personal Hippocratic Oath with nature (to mix metaphors), to do no harm and to remediate wherever possible. I am far from perfect–I drive a car and am more wasteful than I would like to be–but I can approximate stewardship in the woods.

I hope to continue this resolution for the New Year and beyond–for as long as I am able. It is one of the very few I have been able to keep for an extended period.

I hope to continue this resolution for the New Year and beyond–for as long as I am able. It is one of the few I have been able to keep for an extended period. Happy New Year.

By Michael F. Duggan

110 years ago tonight, British soldiers manning their trenches in Belgium and northern France noticed lights along and behind the German lines. It appeared that the enemy was planning a Christmas Eve attack, and some of the British units went to a posture of “stand to” as a light snow fell.

It soon became apparent that the lights were from ad hoc Christmas trees that the Germans had put up in their own trenches. Germans and Brits exchanged carols and eventually some of the bolder men on both sides stuck their heads above the parapets. Eventually large numbers of men from both sides emerged and ventured into No Man’s Land to exchange greetings, tobacco, and drink, and to bury the dead.

The British General Headquarters (GHQ) and German Supreme Army Command (Oberste Heeresleitung) made sure that the event was never repeated, but it is telling that if it had been up to the men in the trenches, the war would have ended that day. It was still early in the war and many of the men who participated in the truce would not survive the war. That entire generation is gone now, but one can imagine them yet, the men of 1914, in a Yuletide Valhalla in the narrow, blighted strip between the lines.

In Jay Winter’s 1996 documentary, The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, critic and historian, Paul Fussell, observes that the Christmas Truce of 1914, was perhaps the “last twitch of the 19th century”–a final public moment when the assumption was that people, even one’s enemies, were essentially good. Of course the English and Germans of 1914 were culturally similar, and it is difficult to imagine this kind of spontaneous event happening, say, in the South Pacific during WWII.

The 1969 film, Oh! What a Lovely War, has a scene that captures this event in miniature. It was also the subject of Stanley Weintraub’s book, Silent Night (2001), and the movies, Joyeux Noel (2005), and Christmas 1914 (2014). There was also a bittersweet children’s book published in 1993, titled War Game, about the truce including a soccer match played in No Man’s Land between British soldiers and some of the Germans they faced.

Whenever I find myself getting too hardbitten in my realism about human nature and the world, I remember this true (if somewhat mythologized) story of Christmas on the Western Front. In these troubled times, it is good to remember historical episodes like this one. But we should also not forget the five months that preceded it, and the nearly four years of hell that followed.

By Michael F. Duggan

By December 1944, it looked as if the Germans were on their heels, although the Battles of Aachen and the Hürtgen Forest that fall suggested otherwise.

On December 16, 1944-, eighty years ago this coming Monday, 30 German divisions with around 410,000 men, 1,400 armored vehicles, and 2,600 artillery pieces, broke through the Allied lines in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium, northern France, and Luxembourg, in an effort to make a beeline to take the port of Antwerp. It had been a quiet sector (who would think of attacking through the thick forests of the Ardennes, as the Germans had done in 1940?), and the U.S. First Army under General Courtney Hodges, was caught off guard. The Germans advance quickly and established a 60-mile deep salient, or “bulge,” in the Allied lines.

The 101st Airborne “Screaming Eagles” Division was surrounded in the crossroads town of Bastogne (and were know afterward as the “Battered Bastards of Bastogne”). When asked to surrender by the German general, the American acting division commander, Anthony McAuliffe, replied with a singe word: “Nuts!” The siege of Bastogne was relieved by Patton’s Third Army the day after Christmas, 1944. The paratroopers of the 101st said that they had not needed to be rescued, that they were surrounded and therefore had the Germans just where they wanted them.

Initially, bad weather prevented the Allies from capitalizing on their considerable air superiority and precluded air resupply drops. US soldiers were poorly equipped for winter combat, and it wasn’t until January 25, 1945 that the Battle of the Bulge finally ended.

With roughly 81,000 casualties, including 19,000 dead, The Bulge was the bloodiest battle the U.S. would fight in Europe in WWII (keep in mind that the USSR lost an average of between 14,000 and 17,500 solders every day between 1941 and 1945, so the entire Ardennes Campaign would have been a bad Saturday on the Eastern Front).

In retrospect, the German Ardennes Offensive was a desperate, last ditch effort by the Wehrmacht in the west (and, also in retrospect, it would have been in Germany’s interest to let the Americans and British in before the Soviets). To the U.S. soldiers in Bastogne and Malmedy, it was a frozen hell.

By Michael F. Duggan

I have a love/hate relationship with boxing. On the one hand, it is one of the most subtle of sports. On the other hand, it is assault and is bad for its participants (this is to say nothing about the corruption it has frequently attracted). There is also a kind of grace and beauty to traditional boxing that is so conspicuously missing in extreme fighting and mixed martial arts. To me these bouts look more like something along the lines of a bar fight: throw a lot of leather while exhibiting minimal defensive skills, affect a takedown and then choke or beat into submission. Ah, art.

Having not seen a heavyweight match in a while, I went to a local sports bar to watch the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul “Fight of the [yawn] Century.” I got to the place early to get a good seat. I then sat through three preliminary cards (along with a fair amount of hype that rounded out the four hours leading up to the main event). All of the initial fights were decent. The Taylor-Serrano fight was especially furious, but I didn’t like Katie Taylor’s head-butting. Serrano showed real heart and kept coming back.

But the Tyson-Paul bout? Well, now, that was a lackluster fight–quite possibly the most widely-watched waste of time in streaming history. On the one hand, it was impressive to see a 58 year-old man go toe-to-toe with someone 31 years younger. On the other hand, Tyson in his prime would have destroyed this guy in under a minute.

I’ll admit it, I wanted to see the old Tyson. I reasoned that if anybody in the foothills of 60 could make a comeback, it was Tyson (or Foreman): power is the last thing a fighter loses. Speed is the first. Like so many people, I was quietly hoping that he would not get hurt. But back in the late ’80s, the man was a juggernaut

I think that Ali, in his prime would have frustrated Tyson. Liston, Foreman, and Shavers might have thrown individual punches as hard or harder than Iron Mike, but nobody ever threw combinations of hard punches like him. He’d walk up to his opponent, leading with both hands, get inside and throw a flurry of 5 or 6 punches–uppercuts and hooks, any one of which could knock out most fighters, even if landed as a body blows–and in most cases, it was “good night sweet prince.”

The guys who did the best against Tyson, were big, powerful men with a long reach, who could keep him on the outside and frustrate him (Buster Douglas, Lennox Lewis). Of course, during the early years, Tyson defeated most of his opponents before they even stepped in the ring.

So what about this fight? At first Tyson seemed to be punching with some of his old power. But the speed wasn’t there. Soon he was sucking wind and punching air. Without speed, he couldn’t get inside (Tyson was the ultimate inside fighter and was not much good when kept out with his 71-inch reach relative to Paul’s 76). He only landed 18 out of 97 punches, as Paul sniped from the outside. And so one of the greats of yesterday suffered the indignity of losing on points to an Internet “influencer” for an impressive payday.

I offer Mr. Paul my congratulations on his victory over Mike Tyson and the suggestion that, for his next “Fight of the Century” spectacle, he take on the ghost of Jack Johnson.

By Michael F. Duggan

Have you noticed the proliferation of horribly contrived commerce-related sales and spending days after Thanksgiving in recent years?

Years ago people noticed the panicked rush of millions of Americans to stores the day after Thanksgiving.  This phenomenon was the result of the day-after-Thanksgiving Day sales—i.e. marketing—the fact that many people are off from work on the day after the holiday, and the unsettling reality that Christmas was only four weeks away.  It may have also may have been the unintended result and unforeseen side effect of the massive amounts of tryptophan ingested the day before. It was a kind of temporary insanity triggered by a turkey hangover. 

On “Back Friday,” Americans were entertained with news stories showing crazed citizens storming into stores when they opened in the early morning darkness, trampling the weak or slow before them. We were treated to the rare spectacle of women punching or tackling each other in order to obtain the last mass-produced item of a particularly trendy kind in the store.

With the rise of the Internet and online shopping, the Monday after Thanksgiving became “Cyber Monday.”  Whether this was a complete gimmick or a “real thing”—a naturalistic trend—is unclear, but the term was supposedly devised by the National Retail Federation in 2005.

Following in suit, we saw the creation of Small Business Saturday in 2010, allegedly the brainchild of Jessica Ling, a corporate type at American Express. Although I like and support small and medium-sized businesses and companies—and believe that an economy based on them would be far superior to one of monster banks and mega corporations—the completely contrived nature of this “day,” and the blind obedience of people to embrace it, rubs me the wrong way.

Given all of this Holiday manipulation and spending going on, it is only natural that charities would want to get in on the action. In 2012, the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan and the United Nations Foundation, declared the arrival of “GivingTuesday” (the day after “Cyber Monday,” although not limited to one day). If all this hype is going to happen anyway, I am not cynical about charities wanting to cash in on the action/hysteria.

All the same, please be sure to take off hump day this week in celebration of “A Fool and His Money Wednesday,” in anticipation of the day in January when your credit card bill arrives.

My knowledge of the latest military hardware is second hand. I am a historian, not an insider, and my observations here are based on the accounts of former military and intelligence officers that are publicly available.

The world has apparently entered a new era of aerial warfare, of military history. The idea of hypersonic ballistic missiles has been around since the 1930s, but the first use of hypersonic, intermediate-range, ballistic missiles in combat was last Thursday (November 21, 2024) against a Ukrainian weapons facility in Dnipropetrovsk.¹ This was in response to the use of ATACMS missiles against targets in the Bryansk Oblast in western Russia two days before (November 19, 2024). The new Russian weapon, the Oreshnik Intermediate-Range Ballistic missile, flies at mach 11, and there is no effective countermeasure in Western arsenals.

According to one source, these missiles fly so fast and their conventional payloads hits so hard, that they can approximate the advantages of a small tactical nuclear weapon without the drawbacks (i.e. radioactive contamination and fallout). Complicating things further, each missile can carry up to 6 multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), each carrying 6 smaller warheads. The Oreshnik can also carry nuclear payloads.

On August 6, 1914, barely a week into the First World War, Liege became the first target of aerial bombs in wartime. Exactly thirty-one years later, Hiroshima was the first of two targets of an atomic bombing. Dnipro now shares the distinction of being the target of the latest kind of attack from above.

Russia has said that it is putting the missile into mass production.

Note
1. Russia used the hypersonic 3M22 Zircon cruise missile against Kiev on February 7, 2024.

By Michael F. Duggan

On the evening of November 8, 2016, I started watching the election returns. It was early and all of the pundits on the cable propaganda stations for both sides were charged and upbeat. After a half hour, I decided to watch a movie, so I put a DVD in the player. It was the 1995 Robert Downey, Jr. historical comedy-drama, Restoration. I would stop the film and check on the election coverage every half hour to 45 minutes.

After 10:00 (I don’t remember the exact time), some of the experts observed that things were not going the Democrats’ way in a couple of key states. I read a lot of Marcus Aurelius, and know that most things are out of my hands, and so I went to bed. The night was darker and quieter than usual, and during the few times I woke up overnight, I sensed what had happened.

Then I had this crazy idea: perhaps if I did not listen to the news, perhaps the election would remain in a state of superposition, like Schrodinger’s cat–both dead and alive–in quantum mechanics, and that if I turned on the radio in the morning, it would decohere into a fixed outcome (it was kind of like an infant who believes that the world disappears when he closes his eyes in a game of peekaboo). When I got up, I did not turn on the radio. I left the house to go to work, and drove to the train station in silence, but I knew. That was eight years ago.

Last night I tried to watch a movie again (an old American Experience documentary about Alexander Hamilton), but grew edgy and went upstairs early to read (some Marcus Aurelius, but also a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and a little from the new biography of Jimmy Breslin). Around 10:30 I went downstairs and saw that the PBS coverage was calling North Carolina for the GOP. I had seen this movie before. I went back upstairs and read for a couple more hours and went to bed.

Again, the night was unusually dark and quiet. Again I had this crazy idea that if I didn’t check the news, that events would be suspended indefinitely in superposition, an election neither won nor lost. I got up and did not turn on the radio. I checked my Facebook account and the second thing I saw was a friend who posted, “I guess this is who we really are.” Once again events had de-cohered. In a conversation a week or more ago not specifically on politics, a friend of mine who knows more than I do about Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, told me that the only real dignity in life is to accept the parts of the world that we cannot change as they are without complaint.

And for the record, I know that elections aren’t like particle physics.