HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

Last night, Susie and I arrived back in Chapel Hill after a long flight from London Heathrow.  We had followed our new practice of taking the Eurostar from Gard du Nord to St. Pancras, staying over night at a Heathrow hotel [the Sheraton this time], and then catching the direct non-stop American Airlines flight to Raleigh Durham.  At our age, this is a tiring trip no matter how we arrange it, but the Eurostar portion is lovely, and the hotel stay breaks up the trip nicely.  Exactly one year ago, faithful readers will recall, I came home, got terribly sick, was told I had terminal lung cancer, underwent every test known to medical science, discovered that no one had a clue what was wrong with me, took some Ibuprofen, and got better. 

In two days, I shall be seventy-nine, which means that I shall be entering upon my eightieth year.  Being eighty, I have decided, means never having to say you are sorry.  Of course, I have not been saying I am sorry since I was about seven, but now I am justified in giving a finger to the world.

Getting up at four this morning [ten Paris time -- it takes me a while to adjust], I launched into an extensive search for my copy of Charles Mills' paper on Tolkein.  Since I never throw anything out, I was sure I could find it, but so far it has not surfaced.  What I did stumble on is a seventeen page paper called "The Indexing Problem" that I delivered to the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association on March 22, 1985.  I had totally forgotten that I had written it, let alone delivered it.  I re-read it [old age, I find, is mostly re-reading things you wrote four decades ago], and found that it has some rather interesting things to say about Rawls and Gerald Cohen, among others.  If I can manage to scan it onto my computer, I think I will post it in several installments on this blog.  There may be some folks out there still interested in Rawls and Cohen [and Sears Roebuck, but you will have to read the paper to find out what that is about.]

A LITTLE INSIDE BASEBALL

I am going to take just a moment to explain something that every single public political commentator knows, and that millions of non-bloviating Americans know, but that somehow never ever makes it into the discussions now going on about tax rates.  As everyone knows who has ever labored through Form 1040 of the Federal Income Tax filing system, you are taxed not on the amount of money you earn from all sources during the year, which is called your Gross Taxable Income [although even this is actually a misnomer for reasons I shall not bore you with], but rather on a quite different amount of money called your Net Taxable Income.  You arrive at your Net Taxable Income by taking the sum of all your sources of income [this is on page one of Form 1040], and then on page 2 subtracting from that sum all manner of amounts of money that are called either deductions or exemptions.  You get to deduct all or most of the interest you pay on a home mortgage, all or most of the money you pay in state and local taxes, all or most of the money you give to charitable organizations, all the money over a fraction of your Gross Taxable Income that you pay for medical insurance, services, and equipment, along with lot of other amounts of money that some people at least can claim as deductions.  In addition, you get to claim a sizable amount of money for yourself and your spouse [if you are married and filing a joint return] and any dependent children you may have.  This last is called an Exemption.  When all is said and done, many people, especially people who used to be called rich when I was young [but are now called middle-class], end up deducting tens or scores of thousands of dollars from their Gross Taxable Income before they arrive at the Net Taxable Income on which their tax is actually calculated. 

Now, all the talk about raising the rates on "people making more than $250,000 a year" conceals the fact that what is actually being contemplated is raising the top rate paid by people whose Net Taxable Income is $250,000 or more, and those are people who, in all likelihood, have Gross Taxable Incomes well in excess of $300,000.  Furthermore, the higher rate being argued over will of course be paid only on that portion of their Net Taxable Income that is over $250,000.  All of their Net Taxable Income below $250,000 will be taxed at the lower rates that came into effect when George Bush was President.

Can we please stop talking about this as a debate about "middle class tax rates?"

LOCAL NOTE

The appalling speech by Wayne LaPierre of the NRA is getting very considerable television coverage here in France.  As we sat in our local cafe having some onion soup and staying out of the heavy rain, LaPierre's face kept appearing on the cable news channel to which the cafe TV set was tuned.  I would like to believe that he has done his cause a grave disservice, but that may be giving Americans more credit than they deserve.

AN AUGUST CRIME WAVE

Lincoln Steffens [1886-1936], the great New York muckraking reporter, told the story in his autobiography of a slow August when no news worth reporting was coming into the City Desk.  Steffens and his colleagues, as a lark, decided to create a crime wave, which they did, to the horror of the newspaper reading public, by simply reporting every crime, large and small, on the police daily blotter.  Normally newspapers ignore most of these crimes, everything from purse snatchings to murders, unless some element of the story catches the eye and seems newsworthy, but in a great city like New York there are always plenty of crimes to report, if one wants to bother.  After several days, during which public hysteria grew and calls for action echoed in City Hall, the reporters got bored and stopped reporting the contents of the police blotter.  Miraculously, the crime wave subsided, and order was restored to the streets of Gotham.

The Huffington Post, to its great credit, has taken a leaf from Steffens' notebook.  Their top headline, screaming in large type, lists murder after murder committed in the past twenty-four hours somewhere in the United States.  The point, of course, is to gin up support for gun control legislation, now that the horror in Newtown has caught the fickle attention of the public.  I have no idea whether The Huffington Post's gimmick will have any measurable effect, but full marks to them for trying.

PARIS EPHEMERA

One of the truly remarkable features of Google maps is that if you zoom in to the maximum, the map switches to a picture of the street or house you are searching for.  In some cases, there is even a line down the middle of the street that you can follow with the wheel on your mouse, producing a moving picture of an entire neighborhood.  If you Google the address of our Paris apartment, 17 rue Maitre Albert, you eventually get a picture of the street, and on that street is a little man with a mustache, wearing a cap, walking along the street.  That little man is a local whom I see almost every day.  We have now progressed to the point that when we meet, we shake hands, and ritually ask, “Ca va bien?”  If Susie is there, he doffs his cap and inquires after “Madame.”  I know nothing about him beyond that, and my conversational French could not support a real chat, even if he had a mind to it.  The waitress in the local café greets us with handshakes, and the proprietor of the notions shop, “Bazaar des Ecoles,” recognizes us when we come in for a battery or a coffee pot gasket or even, on one occasion, a new rolling suitcase. Being greeted this way makes me feel that I am truly a resident of this quartier.

Having circumnavigated the fifth arrondissement on one of my morning walks, I tried a new route, along the quais, up to Place de la Bastille, then west past Place des Voges along rue des Franc Bourgeois, which is the boundary between the fourth and the third arrondissements, past la musee de Pompidou, to Boulevard de Sebastopol, which is the continuation north of the Seine of Boulevard St. Michel, and home past Notre Dame.  The fourth being smaller than the fifth, this circumnavigation of the fourth is a shorter walk, but it was fun to see an entirely different part of old Paris.

Under the reign of Louis Napoleon [see Marx’s great tract, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon] and with the direction of Baron Haussmann, Paris was totally reconfigured.  One of the many changes was the creation of a pair of intersecting streets, one running east-west, the other north-south, to facilitate getting around in Paris.  What we now know as rue de Rivoli did not exist.  A mare’s nest of tiny streets and buildings interrupted east-west traffic.  Haussmann tore down buildings and pushed aside neighborhoods to create a thoroughfare along which carriages could drive.  The north-south axis became Boulevard St. Michel on the left bank and Boulevard de Sebastopol, then Boulevard de Strasbourg, on the right bank.  Boulevard St. Germain, which now runs from the point across the river from Place de la Concorde through our own Place Maubert to the Institut du Monde Arabe, did not exist either.  As I write these words, I sit under a framed map of Paris, dated 1789.  Our little street, Maitre Albert, is identifiable by its distinctive hooked shape, but it was then called “rue Perdu”  [the lost street.]

Try as I do, I cannot muster the same sentiment for our planned community in Chapel Hill.

WITH A HEAVY HEART

I have hesitated to say anything about the Newtown massacre because the reality trivializes commentary.  The refusal of Obama to throw all of his considerable power behind a push for significant gun control is shameful.  I fully understand that such an effort, quite possibly doomed to failure, might cost scarce political capital that is needed for large scale and far reaching efforts to address America’s economic inequality and budgetary problems, and I can easily imagine that a careful utilitarian calculation might yield the conclusion that more good is to be achieved by once again taking a pass on gun control.  But at some point, honor takes precedence over even the best intentioned calculation.  The young John Kerry achieved instant fame by asking a Congressional committee, “What do you say to the last soldier to die in Viet Nam?”  Can Barack Obama  look into the faces of those dead children and say, “I needed for you to die so that I could raise taxes on the rich?”  As for the Republicans, they are unspeakable, and worthy only of contempt, not conversation.

NARCOLEPSY

I have been reading Hallucinations, a new book by Oliver Sacks.  The astonishing range of the visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, cognitive and other hallucinations described by Sacks through the recounting of hundreds of case studies and clinical observations has on me the effect of making me wonder whether perhaps everybody suffers from these bizarre experiences.  Sacks himself, who did some pretty serious drugs at an earlier time in his life [both for research and for recreation], tells a great many stories about his own encounters with hallucinations.

The only example he gives that connects with my own experience – and a pretty tame one at that – is the people who, after a long hard night drive on a highway, lie down to sleep and see the road in their mind’s eye, as though it were still really there.  Hardly worth mentioning in the same breath with some of Sacks’ really dramatic examples.

But there is one experience I have had repeatedly that I have always found very strange.  It fits nicely into Sacks’ chapter on “Narcolepsy and Night Hags.”  I suffer from what is apparently a mild case of narcolepsy.  Quite often, when I am playing a card game on my computer, such as FreeCell or Spider Solitaire [and I play thousands upon thousands of both!], just at the point where the game is won and I have only two or three moves left, I will fall asleep for a few moments.  When I wake up, I am looking at the computer screen, and I complete the game, making the last moves.  Oddly, I never fall asleep in the middle of a game, only at the penultimate moves. 

I find it very difficult, if not impossible, to read steadily for long periods of time.  My eyelids grow heavy and I nod off for a few moments, the book still in my lap or on my desk.  I have sometimes wondered whether that is why I have never in fact read a great deal, carefully selecting the books I do read because something tells me that I must read them, that the reading of them will change my life.  Thus, for example, even though I am a Kant scholar of some reputation, there are great swaths of Kant’s writings that I have never read.  I simply know that they have nothing to tell me.

Once in my life this narcolepsy, if that is the right name for it, came close to killing me.  Driving from UMass Amherst to my home in Belmont, Massachusetts along Route 2 inside the Route 128 perimeter, where the road has a wide median strip dividing the east and west traffic, I fell asleep at the wheel and woke up careening across the grass median at fifty miles an hour or faster.  I was able to regain control of the car and simply drive back onto the road.  Terrified, I took myself to the Sleep Clinic at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.  They wired me up for EEGs and had me spend the entire night sleeping while they filmed me. 

The diagnosis?  It seems that the facial and bodily twitches with which I have been afflicted since the age of five were jolting me to less deep levels of sleep [not waking me up, just disturbing my deep sleep] so that I was not getting enough REM sleep [rapid eye movement sleep, which Sacks reports was discovered by two University if Chicago doctors in 1954.]   The doctor handling my case told me to stop drinking caffeinated coffee, which at that point I as consuming in large amounts.  I managed to do that over a three week period, and for the past thirty years have drunk only decaf. 

The odd thing about this phenomenon is that it seems to have no connection with being tired, at least not in any ordinary sense of that term.  I can drive for long periods of time when I am tired without the telltale heaviness of the eyelids, which feels as though I have been drugged.  And that narcoleptic sleepiness can come on even though I feel quite alert and rested.  But I have learned that if I am driving when the feeling comes on, I must drive off at the next exit and just sit for a few moments with my eyes shut, nodding off if I can.  Then it is safe to get back on the road.