All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Awake, ye West Winds, through the lonely dale,
And Fancy, to thy fairy bower betake;
Even now, with balmy freshness breathes the gale,
Dimpling with downy wing the stilly lake;
Through the pale willows faltering whispers wake,
And Evening comes with locks bodropp’d with dew;
On Desmond’s mouldering turrets slowly shake
The trembling rye-grass and the harehell blue,
And ever and anon fair Mulla’s plaints renew.
William Julius Mickle
Every day I hear about all the latest nonsense out of Washington, New York and Hollywood and think, “How will we ever fix all this stuff?” And I read the price on the gas pump and listen to Camera Girl’s lament over the cost of chicken or vegetables or pumpernickel bagels and I think, “How the hell are we supposed to keep up with this inflation?”
Then I think, “But the story’s not over yet.” I remember when I was just twenty-three in 1980 and Camera Girl and I were living in our first apartment. We were poor as church mice and Jimmy Carter had managed to get mortgages up to 18% and inflation was at 13% and even the incredibly cheap company that I was working for in my first job gave us a once in a lifetime bonus just to keep us all from starving to death. And back then plenty of people were saying that the good days for America were over and we had to accept that prosperity was over. And I thought, “How are going to do this?”
But people rejected that defeatism and when Reagan took over things got better; eventually, a lot better. And slowly over time we got a few breaks and we managed to live happily ever after (we hope!) And so, there were kids and grandkids and maybe I’m starting to hear the first signs that another generation will be in the offing. And what else is there to hope for anyway?
Sure, Joe Biden has decided to follow the Barack Obama playbook and destroy America. I think they may have overplayed their hand. They have done such a truly awful job of running the country that even their supposedly bought and paid for constituencies are screaming over the results. It seems to me that it’s only a matter of time before most everyone is going to demand someone competent put a stop to the destruction and drastically change course.
And until that time, I think it’s my job to lend whatever and however much support I can to those currently paying the bills for those who can’t yet. And that most definitely includes moral support. We’re all liable to shout about the doom and gloom that we see all around us. Well, sure. That’s what I do every day. But remember that the young have to keep going after we’re gone, so make sure that the things you say are actionable in a positive way. Saying it’s all over or things will never be as good as they were is just defeatism. We don’t know that. Lots of people have smartened up in the last ten years and a lot of the old traps that we fell in before won’t work anymore. The days of the neo-cons sounding the charge for us to sign up for the next forever war are over for most of us.
There are signs here and there that leaders are beginning to provide some hope for Americans in several areas of the country. If any of them are at all smart they’ll begin to coordinate their actions and try to build up a movement. That’s what we should see beginning to happen and in very small ways I think I can see some of that happening.
So, I’m not asking for unbridled exuberance over the immediate future. We are sunk in a morass of debt and hog tied by administrative policy that strips us of our constitutional rights but I don’t believe that the situation is hopeless. The story isn’t over yet. Be part of the solution. Try to keep that in mind.
The best of parents blest my younger days;
What others teach with frowns, they taught with praise.
William Julius Mickle
I finally got around to watching this movie. This won’t be a full review because I don’t think I can be completely fair to the movie. Christopher Nolan has been a big-time director for a good long while. His Batman trilogy earned gazillions of dollars and was actually very good. Now this movie is a very different animal. I don’t think it is supposed to be entertainment in the same way. It’s a biopic and a historical recreation of a very important event, the Manhattan Project; the invention of the atomic bomb.
As the story of the Manhattan Project, it is fascinating and compelling. The biopic is a combination of experiences. Oppenheimer himself is very odd duck. From his own admission he was not a great physicist like Fermi, Einstein or Bohr. He was a dilettante who found himself surrounded by the generation that invented quantum mechanics and became their interpreter and project manager in shepherding all the pieces needed to allow the US military to get the a-bomb in 1945.
And we hear his history as a retrospective because the movie is really the story of how Oppenheimer; this critical individual in the ushering in of the nuclear era, loses his US government security clearance due to his former association with communists and other less reputable individuals in his circle of friends. We are also led through the less than honorable path of his love life. And we see how his concerns about the dangers of nuclear weapons seem somewhat inconsistent depending upon where his role in producing the bomb stands. While ensconced in the project he seems not at all conflicted. But once he and his colleagues have handed over the bombs to the Army and the spotlight is no longer on him, his qualms grow exponentially. As a viewer of the story, this seems clear.
The movie is populated with famous names and faces, some of them very hard to recognize. Robert Downey Jr. is Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s implacable foe who hounds him out of the government circle of influence. Emily Blunt is Kitty Oppenheimer, his wife. Matt Damon is Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project. Josh Hartnett is Ernest Lawrence, a Nobel-winning nuclear physicist. Kenneth Branagh is the brilliant physicist Niels Bohr. Tom Conti is Albert Einstein and weirdest of all Gary Oldman is Harry S. Truman.
And there’s all kinds of good acting. I especially enjoyed the “physicists seemingly engrossed in the endless details of making a weapon out of their incomprehensible mathematical equations. There is a critical scene where Edward Teller, the father of the H-Bomb stops the project when his calculations seem to indicate that there is a very high probability that setting off a fission bomb could ignite the whole atmosphere of Earth and end all life on the planet. That is a pivotal scene where eventually even Einstein is consulted.
And the climactic Trinity test scene in the desert is very effective.
But it’s a three-hour movie and that means we see quite a bit of J. Robert Oppenheimer and I have to admit I didn’t find him the most sympathetic character to follow for that three-hours. It’s a good movie. But I ended it wishing it had been more about Matt Damon’s character and that’s an odd feeling for me.
The moon, full-orbed, forsakes her watery cave,
And lifts her lovely head above the wave;
The snowy splendours of her modest ray
Stream o’er the glistening waves, and quivering play;
Around her, glittering on the heaven’s arched brow,
Unnumbered stars, enclosed in azure, glow,
Thick as the dew-drops of the April dawn,
Or May-flowers crowding o’er the daisy lawn;
The canvas whitens in the silvery beam,
And with a mild pale-red the pendants gleam;
The masts’ tall shadows tremble o’er the deep;
The peaceful winds a holy silence keep;
The watchman’s carol, echoed from the prows,
Alone, at times, awakes the still repose.
William Julius Mickle
Today I was thinking about normalcy. I looked through my archives and I have at least six posts that have the word “normal” in their titles. So I read through some of them. One of them was a celebration of life coming back to normal after the COVID lockdowns. But the others were about defying the culture’s attacks on normalcy. Things like celebrating sexual dysfunction and deviancy, especially with respect to indoctrinating children.
And so, it got me thinking about normalcy as a greater good. And even averageness as opposed to either depravity or perfection. Certainly, when compared to the ugly and even deformed there’s nothing wrong with pointing at perfect beauty as its polar opposite. But most people aren’t perfect. They’re ordinary. And in the psychotic world of social media like TikTok, the only acceptable identities are either girls with faultless synthetic beauty (“TikTok face”) or the various mutants celebrating their separation from human normalcy with body positivity (morbid obesity), individuality (face piercings and blue hair) and gender affirmation (amputations and hormone therapy).
Averageness is a hidden strength in the world. Disdaining normalcy is a disease. Even those who actually encompass some extraordinary perfection in either appearance or other characteristic like strength or intelligence rarely find greater happiness in their lives than people who just get on with the ordinary business of earning their bread and feeding their families. Take as an example Bruce Jenner. An Olympic decathlon champion who had immense athletic ability, good looks, fame and fortune. Now he’s a celebrated eunuch who pretends to be an old woman. And his children and step-children are carnies hawking depravity as a product. A more miserable ending for an extraordinary talent I can’t imagine.
Convincing children, especially teenage girls that unless they’re flawlessly beautiful that maybe there is something wrong with them; maybe they’re even transgender, is an example of how the perfect can be the enemy of the good. What we should be telling kids to consider is how they can best utiilize the gifts they have and how lucky they are to be healthy and normal. After all, average and normal leave plenty of room for kids to grow up happy and healthy.
What we should be celebrating are people living their lives in the real world without anyone capturing it for clicks on social media and without anyone caring whether it’s photogenic enough for TikTok. Real life has nothing at all to do with the internet except maybe for the ease of finding a YouTube video on how to replace the battery in your laptop or how to program your camera to shoot on two memory cards. For that stuff it’s actually useful. It shouldn’t be there to tell kids what they need to look like or act like or sound like. That’s how you end up with these idiots on campus with openly gay boys in keffiyehs extolling the virtues of Hamas, an organization that would throw them off of buildings if they happened to fall under their jurisdiction.
And the only way to embrace normalcy is to live normally. And that means in the real world. You need to do things in real life and specifically you need to get out of your house and spend time with people. And that is what all smart parents should be doing with their kids. Get them out of the house and force them to put their phones away and do actual things with actual people. And the best thing they can do is work. Because work is the basis of human life. And work that forces them to come in contact with people is invaluable. Even the most introverted intellectual must learn how to interact with his fellow man. I mean, if you’re Albert Einstein you can end up as a genius in an ivory tower. But even Einstein began as a clerk in a patent office. And he was probably a better man for having done it.
So average looks, average intelligence, average salary. But if you work hard and learn how to live in the real world, then probably you can have a good life. So, forget about Harvard, see if you can get a job fixing dishwashers or troubleshooting a network. Leave TikTok to the beautiful people and the insane.
None but a poet can translate a poet.
William Julius Mickle