Stranger From Abroad

Despite its straightlaced title and its rather difficult subject matter, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness is a very fine book. I picked it up at the library yesterday, and today I substitute it for Matterhorn as my current reading. (In fact, I haven't read the first paragraph of Matterhorn. I foolishly bought it for a lower price from a "Marketplace" seller on Amazon.com, and two full weeks have passed without its appearing in my mailbox. Sheez.)

Martin Heidegger was a German existentialist philosopher who celebrated the notion that life is "a clearing in dark woods; one comes out of darkness and recedes into darkness." Hannah Arendt was a young Jew  who became his student, his mistress, and his intellectual heir. That was in the 1920s. Heidegger went on to become a devoted Nazi, while Arendt became a philosopher of the Holocaust. An incredible journey of two great minds, wonderfully well told by Daniel Maier-Katkin of Florida State University. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The glass is two-fifths full

Peggy Noonan is always worth reading. This weekend she writes about what we might call the New Pessimism, or whatever happened to the American dream that the kids would always have it better than we did?

Parents now fear something has stopped. They think they lived through the great abundance, a time of historic growth in wealth and material enjoyment. They got it, and they enjoyed it, and their kids did, too.... But they look around, follow the political stories and debates, and deep down they think their children will live in a more limited country, that jobs won't be made at a great enough pace, that taxes—too many people in the cart, not enough pulling it—will dishearten them, that the effects of 30 years of a low, sad culture will leave the whole country messed up....

Optimists think that if we manage to turn a few things around, their kids may have it . . . almost as good. The country they inherit may be . . . almost as good. And it's kind of a shock to think like this; pessimism isn't in our DNA. But it isn't pessimism, really, it's a kind of tough knowingness, combined, in most cases, with a daily, personal commitment to keep plugging.

But do our political leaders have any sense of what people are feeling deep down? They don't act as if they do.

Sure, part of this is just growing old: the world doesn't look as bright at sixty as it did at thirty. (Ms. Noonan was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan.) But every once in a while I look at my red Irish passport and I think: I'm glad I've got that. Just in case!  And I'm glad that my granddaughters carry red passports (British, in their case) as well as the green ones. Americans didn't used to think that way. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

'It is without similiarity whatsoever'

The New York Times has done a great service in sussing out nearly a dozen more lawmakers (some now happily retired) who have set up memorials to themselves along the lines of Charles Rangel. Among them:

* The Daniel Inouye chair at the University of Hawaii, subsidized by a shipping line

* The James Clyburn program at South Carolina State University, subsidized by builders of nuclear power plants

* The Mitch McConnell fund at the University of Louisville, subsidized by a military contractor

The way this works: instead of soliciting a bribe, or even a campaign donation, I set up the Daniel Ford Institute of Warbird Studies at the University of New Hampshire, and watch the money roll in, as the NYT explains:

Education officials involved in creating these centers said they had been amazed at how quickly they had been able to raise money for programs named for a sitting member of Congress. At the University of Hawaii, $1.6 million was donated in the first month of fund-raising for the endowed chair honoring Mr. Inouye and his wife, a record for the university. More than 25 of the donors — government contractors, banks, insurance and telecommunications companies — gave at least $25,000, far more than would be permitted in a single year of campaign contributions. An aide to Mr. Inouye said the donations had no influence on his legislative positions.

Of course I will never let $100,000 from Boeing influence my vote on the acquisition of tankers for the U.S. Air Force, nosirree bob! As a spokesman for Mitch McConnell told the NYT: "It is without similarity whatsoever" to the Charlie Rangel situation.... Well, here's a clue for the next senator or congressman who wants to build an endowed monument to himself and is pondering the similarities: you aren't worth it. None of you are worth it. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Mosque at Ground Zero

Dorothy Rabinowitz, who ostensibly is a TV reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, is also one of the most brilliant writers on the follies of contemporary life. Yesterday she weighed in on The Mosque at Ground Zero.

Nine years after the Twin Towers fell into the street, and took three thousand people with them, we still don't have a replacement to fill that great hole in the ground. The political-legal process just can't handle it. (During the Great Depression, the Empire State Building went from ground breaking to first visitor in eleven months.) So it looks like the first new building to rise in the area, and to look down into that hole, will be--a thirteen-story mosque!

Read Ms. Rabinowitz's take on this. No summary of mine can do it justice. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Ecological catastro - oh, never mind!

When I look at the New York Times online this morning, I see the pretty photo above (taken yesterday off the Louisiana coast) side by side with an alarmist ad: an oiled bird with the headline Offshore drilling is dirty and dangerous. So which is it? More the former than the latter, evidently. The NYT story begins: 'The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.'

The story gets less cheery as you read on, but still, it's obvious that it was mostly hype and manufactured horror that we've been engorging on Good Morning America for the past three months. All that remains now is to finish plugging that hole, clean up the beaches--and send the bill to BP! Poor BP. Poor Tony Hayward. Do you think that in Russia they'll allow him to have his life back? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Um, make that $40,000,000,000!

BP's presidentially mandated $20 billion cleanup fund may be only the half of it. Now that a rough figure has been put on the oil spill--something approaching 5 million barrels--the New York Times is having fun calculating the fines that could be levied, anything from $4.5 billion to $21 billion, depending on whether the spill is defined as an accident or the result of negligence, and whether the company gets credit for the 800,000 barrels skimmed off before it could spread through the Gulf of Mexico.

BP's market value yesterday was $123 billion, though it will no doubt drop a bit today. Perhaps it would be easier just to let the White House run the company through Chapter 11, split it into Good BP and Bad BP, and give the stock in the former to the workers. Mr. Obama claims a great success in having applied that formula to GM. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Goodbye, Farmer Tuttle!

It is with some trepidation that I say this, because the media have been announcing the demise of the Tuttle Farm for thirty years or more. Invariably, it was the media outlet (Life magazine was a notable fatality) that went belly up, while the Tuttles kept on farming. But the Boston Globe, Foster's Dover Democrat, and CCN all agree: the Tuttle Farm is for sale after nearly four centuries. Eleven generations of Tuttles--man and wife, brother and sister--have farmed these gorgeous acres between the Spaulding Turnpike and the Piscataqua River in Dover, New Hampshire. The asking price is $3.5 million. And there's a catch: apparently there's a conservation easement on the place. No housing development or shopping mall need apply. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford