Clarifications

Reading Heschel this morning I realized I might have been harsh the other day in decrying the tech elite. Let me clarify.

The problem is surely not that they are all bad people. Far from it. The problem is that they work so much and earn so much and -- like everyone, are subject to the limitations of 24 and 7. That's why democracy and the public bourse are ultimately better ways to fund public goods, even as they are also imperfect. Mistakes are always being made, constantly. 

I also thought a bit more about Bill Gates and his problems with women, from hanging out with Epstein to allegedly misusing his position of power with both Microsoft and the Gates Foundation to have relationships with women.

I too was a skinny nerd and my self-image was formed in that crucible. While things got better for me through puberty and braces and sports, I was never able to entirely shed my negative self-image. So when I got to college and was apparently considered attractive on the marketplace of sexual partners, I never really quite believed it. I misbehaved, got punished, and punished myself. 

Let us recall that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg never finished college and never had an opportunity to grow through a life phase where they did a bunch of stupid shit and then realized they were assholes. They were off on the way to becoming billionaires before they had passed through puberty.

I have written before that I think the scene from Moonstruck where Olympia Dukakis says that men chase women because they fear death is the very apogee of cinematic insight. The correct solution to this problem is to figure out a way to fear death less, rather than to chase women. Philantropy instead of philandery seems like a good start.

Pilot flirting with grad student at JFK

At JFK yesterday I was blessed to observe and overhear a classic conversation. There was a UNC graduate student, 28-30ish tall, pretty, tattoo on her arm, Doc Maartens -- who was being chatted up by a pilot who was probably late 40s-early 50s. He was talking about 90% of the time, pretty excitedly. Having set the stage, I'll just convey a few snippets which should 

"If I had been smart enough to go to UNC graduate school in English..."

"How did you get to be such a good student?"

"...I fly an Airbus 320 for JetBlue."

And so on. You get the picture.

It took me back to the classic scene from Moonstruck (I have blogged about it before)-- which in memory still sits high in my pantheon of the greatest movies of all time, meaning I need to see it again. With her philandering husband out somewhere with his younger girlfrient, Olympia Dukakis dresses up nice and goes to a restaurant. A guy about her age who looks like but is not Buck Henry asks if he can join her. Turns out he's an NYU professor who has fucked up his life sleeping with students. So she asks him, "Why do men chase younger women?" After a brief pause, perhaps a hem or a haw, he responds "Becuase they fear death."

Bingo. Wiser words were never spoken. Which implies that the secret to a stable marriage is to participate in the cycle of life fully -- raising children, attending weddings and funerals, mentoring others, owning pets, reading history books, advocating for good governance -- so as to fear death less.

Admissions

Having trumpeted my excellent comeback against Adam a week or so back, it would feel dishonest not to mention that he destroyed me yesterday, 6-0, 6-4. Neither of us has bageled the other like that in a very long time. He was crushing the ball deep into the corners, coming in to the net, and volleying well. No excuses.

I keep being unable to get to bed earlier. Try as I might I cannot kick the habit of watching some TV, however mediocre, from 9-10, then following that up with sports highlights and (the worst) some short videos which I get served to me by Facebook. Natalie correctly asserts that this is basically TikTok and I have no counterargument. Why I need an adrenaline rush of danger -- skateboarding, parkour, skydiving, death diving, trampoline tricks, last night it was British rally racing -- that I can't tell you. A suspicious amount of the content which sucks me in is sponsored by Red Bull or Monster. It probably doesn't help me sleep to get this energy bolus just before I hit the pillow.

In fact, it's not hard to look at this thrill dependency as the nearly exact opposite of yesterday's post about accepting limits and learning to let go of things. Olympia Dukakis character's classic formulation from Moonstruck, that men chase women because they fear death (which I think I've posted before but here it is again for your delectation), comes to mind. Since experience earlier in life has taught me the dangers of chasing women, I watch crazy guy shit before bed and end up not getting the optimal amount of sleep. Which is admittedly more about fearing aging than fearing death, but they're pretty similar fears.

Testosterone autism

 "With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he's drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes."

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

This resonates with me, though I don't have the obsession with tools of WWII, I have gotten sucked into the biography thing and have had an ever harder time reading real novels, though I read more than a few and I do read a lot of mysteries. Somehow I think they don't count as novels. Case in point, I had trouble getting momentum in Tokarczuk's novel and even had to stop and read a mystery in the middle (Tana French's The Likeness). 

In the psychohistory of your average guy, I think this quote points to a condition somewhere between what I have characterized as Protruberance in earlier posts. That is, the tendency of young men to want to STAND OUT and insert themselves into situations, and the great scene from Moonstruck below, in which Olympia Dukakis asked why men chase women and John Mahoney says "because they fear death."

It's true. Men fear death. So we read about Historical Figures who have achieved Great Things and try to figure out how to get something similar done before we die. Squandering a chunk of little time it feels like we have left by ceding our attention to the consciousness of another person who doesn't even exist -- as we must when we read fiction -- takes discipline and an assuredness that we are OK as we are, without going out and doing Something Else, lest memory of us fade.

DSK, skirt-chasing, greatness, and death

The article about Dominic Strauss-Kahn and his whoring ways in the NY Times got me to thinking. First off, it took me back to the classic scene in Moonstruck where Olympia Dukakis (Rose) is out to dinner with the older guy who's courting her, while her husband is out to dinner with his floozie.

Rose: Why do men chase women?
Perry: Well, there’s a Bible story… God… God took a rib from Adam and made Eve. Now maybe men chase women to get the rib back. When God took the rib, he left a big hole there, where there used to be something. And the women have that. Now maybe, just maybe, a man isn’t complete as a man without a woman.
Rose: [frustrated] But why would a man need more than one woman?
Perry: I don’t know. Maybe because he fears death.
[Rose looks up, eyes wide, suspicions confirmed]
Rose: That’s it! That’s the reason!

This rings truer than most scenes in movies.  So it follows that "great men", from DSK to JFK to MLKJ to slick Willie to Tiger Woods, can't keep their dicks in their pants for exactly the same reasons that drive them to be "great":  they fear death in a big way, and are compelled to overcome it by projecting their egos onto both beacoup des femmes but also the great canvas of history.

The key to keeping your libido under control and your marriage intact, then, is to get over the fear of death. That would, in fact, be helpful in a lot of contexts.

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The writerly approach to this problem is, I think, better.  Here's Pushkin, who in turn riffs on Horace.  Dunno if this is the best translation. Gotta get the kids to the library, and thence to Flyfleaf Books, for which Natalie has a gift certificate burning a hole in her pocket.

I have erected a monument to myself
Not built by hands; the track of it, though trodden
By the people, shall not become overgrown,
And it stands higher than Alexander’s column.

I shall not wholly die. In my sacred lyre
My soul shall outlive my dust and escape corruption–
And I shall be famed so long as underneath
The moon a single poet remains alive.

I shall be noised abroad through all great Russia,
Her innumerable tongues shall speak my name:
The tongue of the Slavs’ proud grandson, the Finn, and now
The wild Tungus and Kalmyk, the steppes’ friend.

In centuries to come I shall be loved by the people
For having awakened noble thoughts with my lyre,
For having glorified freedom in my harsh age
And called for mercy towards the fallen.

Be attentive, Muse, to the commandments of God;
Fearing no insult, asking for no crown,
Receive with indifference both flattery and slander,
And do not argue with a fool.