RESUMPTION OF MY MEMOIRS

With this post, I continue my memoirs. Links to the first five chapters of volume One can be found in the post of June 28, 2009. Rather than write entire chapters which I then store on a UMass site, linking to them in my blog, I have decided to insert each segment directly into the blog as a daily post. To keep this all manageable, I shall make the daily segments reasonably short. Those of you who are actually as old as I am will recognize the reference when I say that this will be my version of The Perils of Pauline. We pick up the narrative in the early Fall of 1958, as I began my Instructorship in Philosophy and General education at Harvard. As I explain at the end of the previous chapter, I had been given the task of teaching the history of Europe from Caesar to Napoleon. For those of you who are wondering, No, I had no previous training in History.

During the time I spent as an Instructor in General Education and Philosophy at Harvard, I became an engaged, vocal, politically active critic of American society and governmental policy. I also matured into a scholar and philosopher ready to enter the Great Conversation as a full participant with my own distinctive voice. Though I did not realize it then, those three years worked a substantial transformation in me.

But first, I had to face thirty-three Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates. Soc. Sci. 5 met as a group each Monday at 10:00 a.m. in Burr Hall for a lecture given by one of the six of us who were co-teaching the course. On Wednesdays and Fridays, we broke up into sections. There were thirty lectures a year, so each of us would give a block of five. I drew the segment covering the rise of capitalism, the scientific revolution, and the French Revolution, which meant that I would not have to perform in front of my colleagues until well into the Spring semester.

In the '50s, as many as half of all Harvard undergraduates were products of elite private schools, where classical subjects were still given pride of place. It was a good bet that many of my students would know a great deal more about Roman history than I. Nothing daunted, I worked up some lecture notes and went along to my assigned room to meet my class.

After a few introductory remarks about reading assignments, required papers, my office hours and the like, I launched into the story of the Roman Empire. "We begin," I said, "with Caesar, who was camped outside Rome with his legions." A young man in the middle of the second row began to shake his head very slowly back and forth. I froze. This was the first day of my entire career, and I was already crashing and burning. I thought seriously of chucking the whole thing and returning to the Army, which, I was sure, would permit me to enlist for a full three year hitch. Giving it one more go, I pressed on. "Now, there was a law that no Roman general could bring his legions into the province of Rome itself." The young man very slowly nodded his head up and down. I breathed a sigh of relief, and never looked back.

My rule of thumb was to stay one century ahead of the students, which took some doing as we rushed past the Merovingians and the Carolingians, barely pausing for the investiture of Charlemagne on Christmas Day, 800 A. D. I even brought in some authentic medieval helmets, courtesy of Fogg Art Museum, which to my astonishment allowed me to remove these eight hundred year old artifacts for a few hours from their collections. As the months went by, and my folders of lecture notes grew thicker and thicker, I grew more confident. The preppies were not as big on the Middle Ages as they were on ancient times, and with two millennia to cover in thirty weeks, we did not linger.

There were some bad moments, of course. One day in the Spring a student asked me what the difference was between a Jacobite and a Jacobin. I had read about both, of course, during my manic survey of European history, but I could not quite call it to mind that a Jacobite was a seventeenth century supporter of James 1^st and a Jacobin was an eighteenth century French revolutionary. Still, Soc. Sci. 5 was supposed to be about ideas, and there I was in my element. I had no trouble fielding questions about scholastic metaphysics or the theory of the social contract.

My colleagues' Monday morning presentations were marvels of erudition. One of the odd quirks of the Harvard culture in those days was that even very senior professors, who gave short shrift to doctoral dissertation students or senior honors thesis writers, poured their hearts into the lectures they prepared for big undergraduate courses. Jim Billington led off with five lectures on the Roman Empire and the Constantine Conversion. Jim was an historian of pre-revolutionary Russia whose first scholarly work, The Icon and the Axe, would make his reputation. I thought he wore his religion rather too visibly on his sleeve, presenting the fourth and fifth centuries not as the decline and fall of a great empire but as the triumphant victory of Christianity.

Jim was followed by Arno Mayer, whose lectures covered the barbarian invasions and the Middle Ages. Arno was an odd choice for this segment, since his specialty was twentieth century diplomatic history. He was writing a book on the interaction between domestic politics and international policy in the major nations that participated in the Versailles Conference. It was from Arno that I learned my first lesson about what real historians do. I came across him one day in the stacks of Widener sitting at his carrel reading. On the desk in front of him was a row of enormous volumes stretching the entire width of the desk. "Hi, Arno," I said, "what are you doing?" "I am reading the proces verbal of the Versailles Conference," he replied. "All of it?" I blurted out, astonished. "Of course," he said, looking at me rather quizzically. I said a silent prayer of thanks that I was in philosophy, and moved on.

It was also Arno who unintentionally taught me a pedagogical lesson that has stood me in good stead for forty-five years. His first lecture dealt with the waves of invasions by Germanic tribes that brought the Roman Empire to its knees. Arno had the brilliant idea of relating these invasions to the major battles that had been fought by Germany and the Allies in World War II. The terrain was of course the same, and inasmuch as the rivers and valleys had not moved in the intervening fifteen hundred years, the two made a lovely fit. The five of us sat in the last row of the lecture hall and marveled at the brilliance of Arno's presentation. But when we next met our individual classes, we discovered to our dismay that the students had been massively underwhelmed. The problem was simple. It was nineteen fifty-eight, and our students were eighteen years old, which meant that they had been four when most of those battles were fought. The Second World War was ancient history to them, something their parents did. They had never heard of the Battle of the Bulge.

Sad to say, this experience has been repeated endlessly over the decades. The Freshmen I now encounter were born during the Clinton Administration and probably came to some degree of awareness of the larger world during George W. Bush's second term. Anything before that might as well be ancient Rome. For many years, I compensated for this absence of historical memory by extracting my philosophical examples from Star Trek, but even that draws blank stares now, and as I do not get HBO, I cannot substitute The Sopranos. There is nothing that makes you feel older faster than teaching undergraduates.

My own lectures were something less than masterful, although considering my lack of background, I consider it very creditable that I got through them at all. In the lecture on the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I thought it would be nifty to do a dramatic demonstration I had heard about, but never seen. A very big, heavy metal ball would be suspended from the ceiling of the lecture hall by a cable, and I would pull it all the way back until it was touching my forehead. I would then release it, allowing it to swing way out over the class. As it swung back, seemingly on course to crush my head, I would stand immobile until, obeying the laws of the conservation of momentum, it would stop just as it reached me. I fielded this idea at lunch one day, and a distinguished philosopher of science, Gerald Holton, told me in no uncertain terms not to try it. No matter how firm your belief in the laws of motion, he said, you will find it psychologically impossible to remain steadfast. He told the story of one young Physics Instructor who stood with his back up against a rack full of empty soda bottles, to prove that he was not moving. When the ball got close to him, he flinched and sent broken coke bottles all over the classroom. I settled for throwing nerf balls at the class to illustrate the arced trajectory predicted by Newton's Laws.

At lunch that day, I sat down with a young man who had been at the lecture. He was shy and diffident, but very brilliant and painfully honest. I had a special place for him in my heart because his father was one of the Communist teachers who had been fired from the New York City school system during a red scare in the forties. I asked him what he thought of the lecture. Very tentatively, looking down at his tray, he said, "Well, uh, you know, it wasn't very good." He was right, of course.

Several times each semester, the six of us would get together to make up suggested essay topics, to each of which would be appended several suggestions for additional reading. This was an occasion for these young prodigies to show off, by off-handedly mentioning the most recent and most recherché bits of scholarship. As each one pulled out another plum, the others nodded sagely and made some comment designed to show that they had just read it. I sat there with my game face on, frantically making surreptitious notes in an effort to remember some of the titles.

BOOK REPORT

During our recent trip to Paris, Susie and I visited l'Institut du Monde Arabe [The Institute of the Arab World], located in the 5th arrondissement, on the Seine, just where Quai de la Tournelle and Quai Saint Bernard meet. The Institute, which is one of our favorite spots on the Left Bank, consists of an eight or nine story building on the quai and a large one story exposition hall, flanking a large courtyard. The main building has a rooftop cafe with spectacular views of Notre Dame and old Paris. If you get to Paris, I recommend it.

We were there to see an exhibition of the exquisite products of the world famous Hermes firm, with a particular focus on the designs of Leila Menchari. [Susie has a silk Hermes scarf given to her by another Hermes designer, Julia Abadie, with whom we had dinner later in the week, but that is another story]. After looking at the exhibit, we spent some time in the bookstore, which contains an extraordinary array of books in Arabic, French, English, and many other languages, all devoted to the rich cultural, political, literary, economic, and religious life of the entire Middle Eastern Muslim world. I splurged a bit [books in France, what with the Euro and all, are very expensive] and bought a new work by an English scholar, David Waines, on the famous fourteenth century traveler and explorer Ibn Battuta. I had heard of Battuta, but had never actually read his account of his travels, nor did I know much more than that he was one of the small but important handful of travelers to the Far East who had left accounts of their experiences in the Middle Kingdom.

Ibn Battuta was born in Tangiers [and is referred to by the author -- I just love this -- as "the Tangerine."] Starting from the Western end of the Maghrib, he traveled for thirty years, going East along the Mediterranean coast, throughout what is now known as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and the fertile crescent, down the east coast of Africa as far as Mombasa, farther east to India, where he spent ten years, eventually to Sumatra and China, and, on a separate trip, through the Sahara south as far as Mali.

The book itself, despite its exotic subject matter, is rather slow going [one enormously long chapter is devoted entirely to the food Battuta ate, hospitality being a centerpiece of Arab culture.] Although we regularly refer to the fourteenth century as the Middle Ages, communicating thereby our sense that it lies between the glories of the Graeco-Roman period and their revival during the Renaissance, it was, of course, a high point of Arab culture. Art, philosophy, architecture, poetry, and design flourished during that time in the Muslim world. The eleventh to thirteenth centuries in the Arab speaking world occupy a special place in the hearts of philosophers because it was from Averroes, Avicenna, Al-Farabi, and the other Arabic language philosophers that the works of Plato and Aristotle, lost to the benighted regions north of the Mediterranean, were reintroduced into Europe and became the foundation of all subsequent European philosophical thought.

But it was something else about Ibn Battuta's travels that fascinated me, and it is this that today's blog post is really about. I apologize to those of you who look to this site for a bit of radical snarking at the passing political scene. From time to time, my mind does turn to other things.

Ibn Battuta was not plunging intrepidly into regions hitherto unfrequented by Arab or European explorers. He was simply attaching himself to groups of merchants who were following well established trade routes. What distinguishes him, in our eyes, is that whereas the merchants were concerned with trade and commerce, Ibn Battuta and a relatively small number of travelers in the tenth to fifteenth centuries were interested in recording what they saw, whom they met, and even what they ate. As Janet Abu-Lughod documents in her wonderful book, BEFORE EUROPEAN HEGEMONY: The World System of A. D. 1250-1350, there existed in what we call The Middle Ages an elaborate network of trade encompassing virtually the entire Eastern Hemisphere, save for Australia and New Zealand.

European historians have paid an enormous amount of attention to the fairs and markets that were held periodically outside the walls of cities in Burgundy, Normandy, Provence, Lombardy, and elsewhere in Northern Europe. It was from the seeds planted by these fairs in the faubourgs [which is to say, the areas outside the walls of the cities] that modern capitalism took root. But viewed from the larger perspective provided by Arab, Persian, Chinese, and other texts, these markets were merely the rather modest periphery of a rich, bustling, sophisticated trade network uniting China with Arabia, India with the Mediterranean, Northern England with West Africa.

These claims are not hyperbole. It is estimated that during the high Middle Ages, half of the gold circulating in Europe came from the mines in West Africa. Indeed, at one moment in time, the taste of West African rulers for a particularly fine woolen cloth sparked a mini-boom in Lancashire, England, where the sheep were tended that provided the wool. The wool was traded to English ports, carried to the fairs of Burgundy, thence via Genoa or Venice to North Africa, and finally by Arab merchants across the Sahara to West Africa.

Skilled Arab ship captains kept detailed charts of the trade winds that blew east for half the year across the Indian Ocean before reversing direction to carry them home again. Voyages were carefully planned to catch those winds, in order to avoid the danger of becoming becalmed in the Indian Ocean or farther east in the Bay of Bengal or the Straits of Malacca or the South China Sea.

The trade network, as one would expect, linked coastal settlements, for the most part. Goods from the interior were then brought or traded to the coast, where they were inserted into the international commercial routes. The most striking feature of the entire system, to a modern Euro-American eye, was its multi-polarity. No single city, or nation, or empire dominated the system. What is more, the rigors of travel and the length of time required for each leg made it more or less impossible for a single merchant or group of merchants, in any regular way, to traverse the entire network from Burgundy to Cathay, from Bombay to Mombasa. This is what distinguished travelers like Ibn Battuta, who tells us that it was his goal to meet all seven of those whom he considered the great rulers of the known world [he actually managed to meet five of the men he identified in this way.]

In the fifteenth century, Spain and Portugal began the voyages of imperial conquest that destroyed this system and inititated five centuries of what Abu-Lughod calls European Hegemony. What we are seeing today is the reinstatement of a multi-polar world economy, in which at least four great centers of influence and power [Europe, The United States, Japan, and China], and potentially more are taking the place of the Euro-American hegemony of the twentieth century. The United States, by spending perhaps forty trillion dollars [in constant dollars] over the past fifty years on war and military preparations, has postponed the time when it must give up its pretensions to imperial hegemony, though in doing so, it has quite possibly beggared itself in such a manner as to weaken its ability to maintain its current position in the new multi-polar world. The Arab world, despite the accident of its vast oil reserves, seems bent upon guaranteeing its subordinate status by its obsession with fundamentalist religiosity.

I found reading about Ibn Battuta's fourteenth century travels a useful corrective to the blinkered view of the world that dominates our public discourse. I hope you found it useful as well.

MORE INSIGHT INTO THE RIGHT WING CRAZIES

Last Sunday, from Paris, I posted a comment on the psychodynamics of the Tea Party crazies triggered by my on-line reading of Frank Rich's fine Sunday NY TIMES column. When I got home and collected the heaps of mail waiting for us, in among the bills and the catalogs and the supermarket flyers [no one ever writes real letters any more], I found several copies of THE NATION. Now, honesty compels me to admit that I read THE NATION mostly for the puzzle at the end, even though they are now recycling puzzles from the 60's that some of us are old enough to have tried once already. [The clues and answers are somewhat dated. "Legal argument pushed by many?" is "barrow" -- i.e., bar - row -- but who today remembers that pushcart peddlers used to wheel barrows?] The April 12 issue has a cover story on Glen Beck and friends, which I found to be a very important confirmation of the hypothesis I had floated in my blog post about the motivations of the current right wing hysteria.

Briefly, Beck is now pushing the bizarro claim that Obama and his socialist-communist-fascist plotters are just following a blueprint for the takeover of America articulated forty years ago by Frances Piven and Richard Cloward. According to the Cloward-Piven Strategy [which now figures prominently in the WALL STREET JOURNAL and other fora once considered to be marginally sane], radicals intent on destroying America as we know it are deliberately overloading the Federal Government with entitlement claims designed to destroy the economy and open the way to a SOCIALIST TAKEOVER. [full disclosure -- thirty-seven years ago, I edited a collection of original essays on American politics, entitled 1984 REVISITED, that included an essay I persuaded France Piven to write. I still recall the lunch at which we talked about it, the only time I have ever had the pleasure of meeting her.] Piven and Cloward were, and Piven still is [Cloward has passed away], advocates for the poor. They proposed signing up all folks actually eligible for welfare support, in an attempt to overload the system and force a reform and improvement of it. Those were still times when one could hope that the prospect of an overloaded welfare system would prompt lawmakers to improve it rather than eliminate it, by the way.

According to the NATION article, which is by Richard Kim, this paranoid conspiracy theory encompasses a great deal more than health care reform. The P-C Strategy lies behind Acorn's plot to persuade the poor to take on unmanageable sub-prime mortgages [you didn't know it was Acorn? You probably thought the banks had something to do with it. How easily you are brainwashed.] The same strategy lies behind the push for immigration reform, and heaven knows what else.

I was, I confess, utterly unaware of the currency of this fantasy about a Piven-Cloward Strategy [which just shows that I do not spend nearly enough time in the right blogosphere]. There are two things about it that fascinate me and lend conformation to my explanation of the roots of the current right wing hysteria. First of all, the fantasy antedates the push for health care reform, and the present financial and economic crisis. It even antedates Obama's candidacy in the 2008 presidential election. And second, it includes fantasies about immigration and submerging of Whites in a sea of unWhite faces and bodies. All of this confirms my guess that what is really motivating the adherants to this congeries of conspiracy theories is the deep-rooted sense that the world as they have come to know it is slipping away, and there is nothing that they can do about it.

Now, this belief of theirs is true. America is changing. Indeed, it has been changing for the past two hundred twenty-nine years, and every major change has triggered just this sort of irrational hysterical reaction, complete with conspiracy theories and religious overtones. That is, in fact, the dominant characteristic of American public history. To be sure, it has not always been the case that one of the two major political parties has embraced the hysteria as its own, although that too is rather less uncommon than some might imagine. Nor is it likely that the hysteria will die down any time soon. The changes underlying the reaction are irreversible [demographic, cultural] and they will, if anything, accelerate in the coming decades. The violence associated with the hysteria is also a familiar phenomenon in American politics, and it will not surprise me to see many more incidents.

The good news is that, as old-line marxists used to say, history is on our side. The changes are permanent and will, over the next two decades, transform the political landscape. [In the perhaps foolish hope that I can actually live to see this happen, I have signed up, at my doctor's recommendation, for a fullscale colonoscopy next Wednesday, a perfectly awful procedure that he said he would only recommend for a seventy-six year old who looked to be around for a while. How could I refuse?]

A PUZZLEMENT

Here is another one of those things I think about as I take my morning walk. How can an airplane fly upside down? Having studied Physics sixty years ago, I am a little rusty, but we all remember Bernoulli's Principle [same guy -- Daniel Bernoulli -- who solved the St. Petersburg Paradox and gave rise to modern utility theory. There were giants in the earth in those days. Genesis 6:4] You know, flow of air over a wing whose upper side is curved, producing differential pressure below and above the wing, known as the "lift." The faster the plane goes, the more the lift. Hence planes always take off and land into the wind, increasing the airspeed [which is all that matters] over the ground speed. So, when you roll a plane over, as we have all seen done in the movies, if not in real life, how does the plane fly? Why don't the same forces drive it into the ground?

Well, I googled the question, and found what looks like a very plausible answer. I also checked Wikipedia, and found a monstrously complicated discussion of the general subject that makes it clear that it is not at all obvious exactly why airplanes fly. The simple answer is that although flying upside down does indeed put downward pressure on the airplane, one can, by tilting the plane up [which is accomplished, upside down, by pushing the joystick down, of course], create an angle between the wing and the air that results in the onrushing air pushing the airplane up. If you balance things just right -- which the author of this answer, an Air Force pilot, says one can do -- the result is that you can fly upside down horizontally.

I am glad I thought to look this up after getting home from Europe! I do not want to have to count on US Airways to understand these things.

I SWORE I WOULD NEVER DO THIS

I am going to do something I swore I would never do: quote Thomas Friedman favorably. Feel free to heap abuse on my head.

All of us have watched the unedifying spectacle of Karzai delivering an anti-American rant, and then, when called on it by Hillary Clinton, saying that he was misinterpreted and only criticizing Western media. This is the man to whom Obama has mortgaged his presidency. I have already, long since, said what I think about that decision.

Anyway, a propos something else, Friedman said [I paraphrase], With regard to leaders in the Middle East, pay no attention to what they say to you in English. All that matters is what they will say to their own people in their own language.

Give the twerp his due. When he is right, he is right. Karzai said those things to Afghans in their language. What he says to Clinton or Obama in English is irrelevant. I do hope, for once, that the White House is listening to Friedman.

INTERIOR DIALOGUE -- FIRST TRY

Several days ago, as I was checking the usual blogs, I came across a story on Andrew Sullivan's blog [The Daily Dish] about the disparity between the earnings of men and women in comparable jobs. He referenced a 2006 article by Warren Farrell, described as a member of the Board of Directors of NOW in the 70's, based on his book, Why Men Earn More. Farrel's thesis, to put it briefly, is that men and women in the work world make a series of decisions [he identifies twenty-five] that shape the trajectories of their careers -- such things as whether to have children, whether to work eighty hours a week, whether to accept new job assignments regardless of where they are, and so forth. As he puts it in the article, "Men make decisions that result in their making more money. On the other hand, women make decisions that earn them better lives (e.g., more family and friend time.)" Indeed, Farrell, reports, when women make the same decisions men make, they actually end up earning more. Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that the article appeared in FORBES Magazine.

The Sullivan post triggered in me yesterday an interior dialogue, which I engaged in as I was doing my 7 a.m. four mile power walk. In my mind, I was talking to an upscale thirty-something couple who have opted out of the baby thing, and resent the notion that they ought, through tax policy and government subvention, to subsidize the family expenses of couples who, in their view, have simply made a different series of personal choices. They begin the dialogue.

Them: This is all just a matter of individual preference. Some couples choose to spend a good deal of their income on children, and they even sacrifice income opportunities to raise and educate the children. That is fine for them. They enjoy it, they find it rewarding, and I am sure their children will be a comfort to them in the old age. We prefer to work hard, and spend our income on European travel, fine wines, expensive restaurants, and -- if we are ever able to manage it -- a Caribbean condo. Our tastes and preferences are no better or worse than theirs, and we certainly do not think society ought to underwrite our taste for luxury, but we cannot for the life of us see why anyone should expect us to underwrite their taste for parenting.

Me: I assume that as prudent, far-sighted, educated folks, you are making adequate provisions for your eventual retirement.

Them: Of course. We have established an extensive savings plan.

Me: So you are carefully freeze-drying food, stockpiling clothing, setting aside medications in climate-controlled storage bins, and the like?

Them: What on earth are you talking about? We have 401k's and a stock portfolio. Freeze dried food! Are you mad?

Me: You are both in your early thirties. So you can anticipate retiring roughly thirty-five years from now. As I understand it, your plan is to take money out of your savings accounts after you retire, and use that money to buy food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and the like. Tell me. Where will you get the food?

Them: At Whole Foods, if it still exists, or else at whatever environmentally friendly supermarket has taken its place.

Me: And where will Whole Foods, or its replacement, get the fresh produce it will sell you?

Them: From farms, of course, though by then they may be flying even more of their produce in from around the world.

Me: Now, I want you to think very carefully about what you have just said. Thirty-five years from now, you are going to buy produce grown on farms and rushed to the store to preserve its freshness. Who is going to raise and process that food? Not the folks doing it now, by and large, because they will all be thirty-five years older than they are now, and any of them who are much older than you will themselves certainly be retired. Let us suppose that the people raising your food thirty-five years from now will at that time be somewhere between forty and fifty years old. Now, in this complex and uncertain world, there is one thing of which we can be absolutely sure. Anyone who is between forty and fifty years old thirty five years from now is between five and fifteen years old right now. In short, they are children. These children, whom you see all around you today, are going to be the farmers, builders, doctors, writers, airline pilots, and clothing designers when you retire. Each of them is someone's son or daughter, and if those parents do not feed and clothe them, educate them and care for them now, they will not be there thirty-five years from now to feed and clothe you and care for you when you are aging. Your personal choices will, if they are widely enough emulated, leave you starving and unclothed and medically abandoned, regardless of how much money you have in your savings accounts. The truth is that you are parasites, relying on others to prepare for your old age [and, needless to say, for your middle age as well.]

Them: But that is totally unfair. By saving our money now, we are providing the investment capital that society will use for its productive purposes in decades to come. Without our savings, their children won't have jobs.

Me: Well, something like that is partially true, given that we live in a capitalist society. But there are many alternative ways of amassing the investment capital needed for productive enterprises. A new generation of young people, educated, fed, clothed, and looked after while they are children, will manage to find ways to put their energies and abilities to productive use. [Little mental footnote to David Schweickart's wonderful old book, Capitalism or Worker Control, in which he demolishes that argument.] Absent the next generation of workers, however, society will grind to a halt, and we will all starve to death. The men and women who "choose", as you put it, to have children are in fact saving us all from ruin. Society ought to treat their parenting as the most important component of collective social health, not as their purely personal alternative to European vacations and fine wines. By protesting the taxes that are levied on you to help support child-rearing, you are perpetuating the myth that there is no connection between the public sphere of the market and the private sphere of the family. [Mental nod to Ann Davis, for whom this is an especially important point]

--------------------

At this point, I had reached the top of the long hill on Highway 54, and was ready to turn around and walk home.

HOME AGAIN

After yet another US Air foul-up that had me dashing fruitlessly through the Philadelphia airport pushing Susie in a wheelchair, we arrived home Tuesday evening from our Paris trip. I am still somewhat jet lagged, but I hope to resume blogging either today or tomorrow. I have been thinking of inaugurating a new feature -- "Interior Dialogues." I spend a good deal of my life in my mind, daydreaming. A significant component of that interior life is imaginary conversations in which I unfold an argument, explain a difficult concept, or debate some ideological thesis. It is because I spend so much of time in that way that I can write very quickly when the time comes to put arguments on paper. While I am working on the extension of my memoirs, as promised, and commenting on the passing political scene, I will also, from time to time, record one of those interior dialogues. I hope you will find it interesting.