Flag Day and the Electronic World

Flag Day. A time to reflect on the adoption of the flag we honor, and what it symbolizes.  In the world of 1776, it is a nation committed to freedom in its purist form.  Oceans separated us from the rest of the world, difficult for an invading army to breach that defense. 

The Second Amendment, giving us the right to bear arms, was passed in 1791, a means of maintaining a civilian militia. ("A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.")  At the time the flintlock musket was the standard weapon. Count on being able to fire it maybe 2-3 times a minute. Arms have evolved to the point where a deranged individual can hoard a surfeit of automatic weapons, making that one person a veritable army.

And communications used to be dependent on the mail, then the telegraph, the telephone, and now electronic everything, marrying all methods of communication from the printed word to video.  The Internet has given rise to threats that could not even be imagined by the framers of the Constitution and the Fourth Amendment.

Maybe it is time for a public debate on the issue, but the data mining being done by the National Security Agency cannot be a surprise to anyone.  Edward Snowden's so called whistle blowing merely politicizes what most suspected. 

If anyone asked us the day after 9/11 whether the government should make use of private electronic communications with the sole objective of preventing any such future event, we would have merely said, where do we sign on?  How short everyone's memory is.  It is ironic that a liberal constitutional law professor -- Barack Obama -- now, as President, is carrying forth the NSA program which had been condoned by his predecessor.

The brave new electronic world exponentially enhances the weapons of guerrilla warfare, the preferred tactic of terrorist adversaries.  One does not fight this with the tactics of warfare when the Constitution was written, soldiers standing in straight lines right out in the open.  Clandestine electronic communications are fodder for equally clandestine data mining.  So, let the "debate" begin in Washington, but if it is anything like exchanges over the budget, it is liable to do more harm than good, unless there can be some consensus on an oversight mechanism that still preserves the intent of the program.

In this regard, I can't help but think of Aaron Sorkin's brilliant movie, A Few Good Men.  When Col. Nathan R. Jessup faces Lt. Daniel Kaffee on the stand, we are all rooting for Kaffee, recognizing the menace that Jessup represents.  But that was 1992.  With a little editing (my apologies to Mr. Sorkin), I can imagine how this might go today...

NSA to Snowden: Son, we live in a world of electronic communications, ones terrorists routinely use, and we have to be guarded by high tech surveillance. Who's gonna do it? You, Mr. Snowden? We have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for your loss of freedoms and you curse the NSA. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what we know, that some loss of privacy, while tragic, probably saved lives. And our existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don't want the truth, because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want us data mining. You need us on that job. We have neither the time nor the inclination to explain ourselves to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the security that we provide, and then questions the manner in which we provide it! I would rather you just said "thank you", and went on your way.

"It Saddens Me to Leave the Field"

I haven't written lately about baseball, my favorite sport, one I played constantly as a kid, pitching in sort of a combination Little League/Babe Ruth league (very informal and disorganized, more like pick-up games with uniforms) for the Highland Park Terriers, taking the old Jamaica Avenue El to get to the field in Highland Park.  I am a lefty and even though I could not crank up an intimidating fast ball, I compensated with breaking balls and placement.  I was constantly practicing with neighborhood kids, with dreams of big league ball, but high school and then college teams put those dreams to rest.  When I tried out for college baseball I found that most on the team were on an athletic scholarship and although I pitched some batting practice, the first baseman at the time -- forgot his name -- took one of my balls not only over the fence, but to an apartment building way beyond.  It was meager compensation to learn, well after I graduated, that he apparently made it to AAA ball.

Although those days are now long gone, there is something about having played the game, knowing its nuances, that still gives rise to fantasies of what might have been, had I been more physically gifted, or worked harder, or had more support from my parents (who pretty much ignored my quest, rarely attending my games).  No, mine was a solitary undertaking, getting on the El for practice and then games on Saturday mornings.  So to this day I watch baseball with a sense of awe, especially the mental contest between the batter and the pitcher. 

While I follow the team of my childhood, the NY Yankees (truly an over the hill gang this year), we enjoy going to our nearby Florida State "Advanced A" minor league games of the Jupiter Hammerheads or the Palm Beach Cardinals at Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, FL.  There we can watch the game almost right on the field, not like being exiled to some distant corner of Yankee Stadium at fifty times the price. 

So it is no wonder that when the highly praised The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach was published last year, it immediately went on my Amazon wish list, patiently waiting for a used copy to come on sale through one of their partners. (I usually wait it out until it's one cent plus shipping). 

Last time I checked my "wish list" the book was getting close to my price point and one day I was on the phone with one of my best friends, Ron, who, like me, shares a love of the game and he asked whether I had read the book.  No, and I explained why. He said, we'll I'm finished with my copy, I'll send it to you!  You don't want to keep it, I asked, and he said, no, you enjoy it and only a few days later, Jeff, my postman, handed me the package.  So, I put it early in the queue on my bookshelf.

As I started to read it I immediately began to think that if John Irving was a college baseball player instead of a wrestler, this is something he might have written.  It has so many Irvingesque features, particularly the quirky nature of the characters, the sexual overtones, not to mention the idiosyncratic names of most characters and places.  In fact, one major character, Owen Dunne, had me thinking of Irving's Owen in A Prayer for Owen Meany, who as a little-leaguer hits a ball that kills one of his best friend's mothers (Harbach's Owen is hit by a ball and almost dies and like Irving's Owen has a certain presence -- he is known as "Buddha" to his friends).

And that is not the only literary tip of the hat as the novel is set in the fictional Westish, on the shores of Lake Michigan, where in the novel Herman Melville once gave a lecture at Westish College.  Guert Affenlight who is now the president of the college had discovered this lecture and wrote his dissertation on it.  Hence, there is a Melville statue on the campus, and various references, both direct and implied to Melville's work.  Although the college is not exactly the good ship Pequod, it is the place where the lives of the five main characters are transformed through their interaction, Guert and his daughter Pella, and three students (all members of the college baseball team, aptly nicknamed the " Harpooners "), Owen, who is gay and Thoreauesque, and then the larger than life Mike Schwartz who is mentor (sometimes torturer) to the unrealized talents of the baseball prodigy, Henry Skrimshander (yes, you could make the correlation that Mike's project was like a Scrimshaw).  But, in the end, Henry takes on some of the characteristics of Bartleby from Melville's short story. 

The Art of Fielding begins with the premise and promise of Henry following in the cleats of his idol, the greatest shortstop ever to play baseball, the fictional Aparicio Rodriquez who had written what is more of a philosophical treatise than an instruction book on playing the position, with the fitting title, The Art of Fielding.  So, in a sense, Harbach's novel is thematically a "play within a play."

One of the nuggets for Henry to ponder from Aparicio's book is it always saddens me to leave the field.  Even fielding the final out to win the World Series, deep in the truest part of me, felt like death.  Harbach writes "There were admittedly, many sentences and statements in The Art that Henry did not yet understand.  The opaque parts of The Art  though, had always been his favorites...As frustrating as they could be, [they] gave Henry something to aspire to.  Someday, he dreamed, he would be enough of a ballplayer to crack them open and suck out their hidden wisdom: Death is the sanction of all that the athlete does."

As a young ballplayer, Henry was an artist, a lightly hitting but exceptionally gifted fielder who played his position with the grace of a ballerina, capturing the notice of Mike Schwartz when Henry was in high school. ("What [Henry] could do was field.  He spent his life studying the way the ball came off the bat, the angles and the spin, so that he knew in advance whether he should break right or left, whether the ball that came to him would be bound up high or skid low to the dirt.  He caught the ball cleanly, always, and made, always, a perfect throw.")  Mike recruits him for Westish College on which team Mike is the quintessential catcher, the team captain who plays in pain and on pain killers, a star player whose knees are already giving out. 

It is through Mike's quest to build a star out of Henry that some of Harbach's best lapidary baseball prose shines: 

The making of a ballplayer: the production of brute efficiency out of natural genius.

For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art; an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we're alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.

Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer-you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error. The scouts cared little for Henry's superhuman grace; insofar as they cared they were suckered-in aesthetes and shitty scouts. Can you perform on demand, like a car, a furnace, a gun? Can you make that throw one hundred times out of a hundred? If it can't be a hundred, it had better be ninety-nine.

And Harbach captures the uniqueness of the game.  It's one unlike any other:

Baseball, in its quiet way, was an extravagantly harrowing game. Football, basketball, hockey, lacrosse -- these were melee sports. You could make yourself useful by hustling and scrapping more than the other guy. You could redeem yourself through sheer desire.

But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric -- not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn't storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football. You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?

And, so, Henry becomes Mike's project.  It is a symbiotic relationship.  Mike (AKA "artzy") needs to exhort and Henry wants to become the perfect ballplayer.

All he'd ever wanted was for nothing to ever change. Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever.  It sounded crazy when you said it like that, but that was what baseball had promised him, what Westish College had promised him, what 'artzy had promised him. The dream of every day the same. Every day was like the day before but a little better....Hitches, bad habits, useless thoughts - whatever you didn't need slowly fell away. Whatever was simple and useful remained. You improved little by little till the day it all became perfect and stayed that way. Forever.

He knew it sounded crazy when you put it like that. To want to be perfect. To want everything to be perfect. But now it felt like that was all he'd ever craved since he'd been born. Maybe it wasn't even baseball he loved but only this idea of perfection, a perfectly simple life in which every move had meaning, and baseball was just the medium through which he could make that happen. Could have made that happen. It sounded crazy, sure. But what did it mean if your deepest hope, the premise on which you'd based your whole life, sounded crazy as soon as you put it in words? It meant you were crazy.

And so, armed with his glove "Zero" (named so as when his mother asked if he made any errors in a game, he was always able to say "zero!"), Henry becomes a Westish Harpooner, and while Owen, Pella, Mike and Henry are essentially in the same age group and naturally their interactions are the substance of the novel, so is Guert's involvement with his daughter and with Owen.  This is a character driven story, one that is hard to put down, particularly if you love the game, and even though the ending seemed to me to be a little contrived ("low and away" in baseball-speak), Harbach is on my permanent radar for future work as a promising young American writer.  This is an exceptional first effort.

Two Cultures Redux

C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures reflected upon the great divide between science and the humanities, and criticized educational systems for rewarding the study of the humanities at the expense of science.  This was the late 1950's and in the Sputnik era it widely resonated.  Fast forward to today.  Could Snow have imagined cars that drive themselves, and tiny, powerful computers that also serve as phones, cameras, GPS systems, radar enhanced weather reports, and Facebook, Twitter and email on the go?

More significant than this amazing hardware and software, is we've become a culture of scientism and algorithms, sliding down the slippery slope of relinquishing our actions and moral judgments.   Two recent articles address these issues, well worth reading, and pondering. The first by Leon Wieseltier, "Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture" A Defense of the Humanities, is actually the commencement address to Brandeis University graduates.  Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic and he addressed the graduates as "fellow humanists." He makes so many interesting points; here are just some of the salient ones:

      The machines to which we have become enslaved, all of them quite astonishing, represent the greatest assault on human attention ever devised: they are engines of mental and spiritual dispersal, which make us wider only by making us less deep

     And the devices that we carry like addicts in our hands are disfiguring our mental lives also in other ways: for example, they generate a hitherto unimaginable number of numbers, numbers about everything under the sun, and so they are transforming us into a culture of data, into a cult of data, in which no human activity and no human expression is immune to quantification, in which happiness is a fit subject for economists,  in which the ordeals of the human heart are inappropriately translated into mathematical expressions, leaving us with new illusions of clarity and new illusions of control. 

    Our glittering age of technologism is also a glittering age of scientism. Scientism is not the same thing as science. Science is a blessing, but scientism is a curse. Science, I mean what practicing scientists actually do, is acutely and admirably aware of its limits, and humbly admits to the provisional character of its conclusions; but scientism is dogmatic, and peddles  certainties. It is always at the ready with the solution to every problem, because it believes that the solution to every problem is a scientific one, and so it gives scientific answers to non-scientific questions. But even the question of the place of science in human existence is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical, which is to say, a humanistic

Steven Poole's Slaves to the Algorithm in Aeon Magazine addresses the question of whether there is still a place for human judgment as computers make choices on our behalf.  He paints a dystopian picture of where things are going, culture itself being impacted as "we erect algorithms as our ultimate judges and arbiters."

     What lies behind our current rush to automate everything we can imagine? Perhaps it is an idea that has leaked out into the general culture from cognitive science and psychology over the past half-century — that our brains are imperfect computers. If so, surely replacing them with actual computers can have nothing but benefits. Yet even in fields where the algorithm’s job is a relatively pure exercise in number- crunching, things can go alarmingly wrong.

The Other Side of Memorial Day

Previous Memorial Day entries have been about what the "holiday" really means to me, and it still does --  what our service men and women sacrificed to make this country great (in spite of our problems).  It makes me think of my father who fought in WW II, and friends, Ray, Ron, Bruce, who served in Vietnam.  I've always abhorred the other side of the day, the commercial part of it, but it does signal the "start" of the summer season and I suppose one has to accept that along with the true meaning.  So contrary to my other entries, this is mostly a photo album of a trip we took yesterday around Peanut Island, which has become a party island during the Memorial Day weekend. 

There seem to be two groups of boaters there, young families and then large groups of young people who are there to "seriously" party.  Ironically, Palm Beach County has an new ordinance that makes drinking on the island itself a misdemeanor, so that is the safe place where the families can congregate.  But it is legal to drink "off the island" so hundreds and hundreds of boats are anchored, beached, rafted around the island -- mostly party hardy types -- downing booze like there is no tomorrow.  No Memorial Day thoughts there and amazing, these same people get in their boats and go back to wherever they came from that same day.  So it's not OK to drink on the island, but OK to pilot your boat home drunk (there are marine police about, but how many boats can they check on their way out?).

The partiers look at us, two old folk in a boat, as a relic species, a societal vestigial organ, and perhaps we are, although when we were that age, we might have thought the aged eccentric, but always treated them with respect.  Perhaps that is a word (respect) that has become extinct in our society in many ways. 

Is it any wonder that a study by the Yale School of Public Health of entries in Facebook by individuals in the 20-29 age range found:

     74 percent berated older individuals

     41 percent mentioned physical debilitation

     27 percent treated the elderly as children, and

     37 percent advocated banning them from public activities such as driving and shopping.

One group even advocated facing a firing squad when one turns 69. Guess my time is up!

So, with that in mind, we planned a trip to reconnoiter the scene, choosing to leave our home during the noon hour, knowing that we would be returning well before the worst of the mayhem. (In fact, this year some fights broke out while "under the influence.")

Even though we left early, the boat traffic was already heavy and some Florida boaters don't seem to be aware that even in "speed zones" such as Lake Worth, they are responsible their own wake.  Entering the Lake, immediately south of the PGA bridge I try to time my run so I am either well behind or well ahead of the big sportfishes and yachts that run the Lake as if they own the water and everyone else be damned. This still puts us at the mercy of these large vessels approaching us, the greatest danger being when we are between two markers and can't run outside of them.  I'm amazed that these boats don't slow down to give a smaller boat a safer passageway, but most don't.  I had a 41' Hatteras approach us at full bore which left six foot wakes, tightly spaced and with curlers on top, ones I had to take on my port quarter.  Although we took these off of plane, there were a few anxious moments.  We knew the Lake would be rough and I knew our boat could take it, but the boat seems to take it better than our backs.  Unfortunately, between piloting our boat and hanging on, it is impossible to get photos of these inconsiderate, dangerous boats or their wakes. 

But, thankfully, it is slow speed all around Peanut Island and although we had boats on both sides, and ones approaching from all angles, it is fairly easy to navigate, although, again, many Florida boaters seem to lack knowledge of the rules of the road and what it means for the burdened vessel to give way or for the privileged vessel to maintain course and speed.

So here are a few photos of our trip.  First, leaving the placid waters just south of the PGA bridge..

Entering Lake Worth, traffic coming at us, going south...

After passing under the Blue Heron bridge, one beholds Peanut Island on the North Side....

Looking east, rafting on the northern sandbar of Peanut....

 

This is what the rafting looked like on the Northwest side of Peanut...

Heading south along Peanut's west side....

Tent colony on Peanut's west side (overnight tenting is permitted in designated areas and they are immune from the law that does not permit drinking on the island...go figure)

On the south side of the island, the old Coast Guard station and the West Palm ferry...

Larger boats on the northeast side of Peanut....

Passing Sailfish Marina which is to the east of Peanut -- home to some large sportfishes...

And the rafting goes on and on -- here on the northeastern sand bar right near the narrow channel...

There are some derelict boats near the Island, but this one is someone's home...

Finally, home, and our safely boat in its lift, a paddler surfboarder goes by with a doggie on the bow (wow!)...