ParisTampaBlog

Two pictures, one taken from an Economist book review and the other from a Times news article sum up fairly well the “civilization” differences that separate far too many of the world’s peoples into opposing ideological camps, although you would probably never see the individuals depicted in these pictures actually going to war with one another.

The first, from an article in the Economist of October 28 , entitled, In the name of godlessness, is a review of Philipp Blom’s A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment.

The principal subject matter of the book, “Atheism and the Enlightenment,” today, some 200 years after the Enlightenment’s emergence in France and elsewhere Europe in the 18th. century, is felt, if not seen or understood, by hundreds of millions of true believers, and not only those of the Islamic persuasion, as being the modern world’s principal threat to their own culture and values.

The second appeared on the front page of the digital New York Times, of October 31, the first of a series of pictures accompanying the news article, Bombs Were Designed to Destroy Planes, U.S. Believes.

Students protested outside Sana University on Sunday, a day after a female student was detained by the police after being tracked down through a mobile number on a receipt for the explosives-filled packages that were found on jets in Britain and Dubai.

I could be at that table, with radical thinkers like myself, formulating the first complete or nearly complete listing of those individual rights and freedoms, as well as the basics of democratic governance, that would together become the primary stimulus for first the creation and then the strengthening of liberal democracies in Europe and America during the next 200 years.

And I know well that I could never be with those who cover themselves when in public with impenetrable walls of black clothing, allowing only mouth and eyes to show. It may be as they say, in order to shield their private selves from the view of others. In any case the public life, cherished in Athens and Rome, in 18th. century France and England, and now in America, they apparently totally reject.

And in fact we know nothing, see nothing of these people (I suppose women) in black burkas except when they are loudly protesting our ways and our laws and our justice and we see their accusatory words almost as they leave their mouths, and we see their eyes flashing before us.

And all too often we hear and read about those same burka clad women who choose to blow themselves up in horrible self-destructive acts, probably killing many more of their own people, people who share their beliefs, than those at whom their anger is really directed, us, the descendants of those enlightened but godless men seated about that table.

I’m a parent, and now a grand parent and I’ve certainly indulged in what seems to be a favorite, perhaps the most favorite pastime of parents, and to a much lesser extent grand parents (who after all have learned something about how little their words have influenced their children) — that of telling my children what to do.

Didn’t we always tell them to do the right things, while all the time not appearing to be insensitive to who they were and in particular to how they were different from us? But how many times did our words — do your homework, get home early, have safe sex (if we were of a more liberal persuasion) — how many times did our words significantly influence their behavior?

Actually parents telling their children, teachers their students, pastors members of their flock, editorial and op ed writers their readers, the country’s elected leaders their constituents, and many others telling others, all of them probably believe that their words can change people’s actions and consequently their lives for the better. And of course there is little or no evidence that their words have such power.

This sort of thing, believing that words can influence behavior, is now, and probably always has been, a national pastime. And in fact people do change, good things that should happen do happen, —women getting the right to vote, Blacks obtaining full civil rights, and right now gays and lesbians being about to be able to serve openly in the armed forces, but these good things don’t come about by our telling people to change, by our telling people what to do. **

In each one of the cases mentioned the people most affected forced by their actions the rest of us to make the appropriate changes, to do what we had to do. But as long as the particular rights sought were ours to give or withhold they were not accorded.

Now given our at present depressed economy accompanied by high unemployment not a day goes by that we don’t hear from people, and not only economists, about what our country needs to do to set things right. If they could at least agree on their prescriptions but they don’t.

Just this week, in a cover story in Time Magazine, Fareed Zakaria, joined the chorus of those telling us what we need to do if we would keep the American Dream alive. While admitting that his prescriptions would be difficult to apply he goes on to make than anyway:

“…cut some spending, pare down entitlements, open up immigration for knowledge workers, rationalize the tax code, make large investments in education and training, research and technology, innovation and infrastructure”

Zakaria places himself among the many who are telling us that the very survival of the middle class is seriously threatened. For manufacturing that provided the bulk of middle class jobs in the past is now a much smaller part of the economy, and even the little that is left here at home faces intense global competition.

And he says, again along with many others, that the only good jobs that will remain in the United States are directly related to knowledge and innovation. The information economy needs knowledge workers, so we tell our jobless to learn new skills. And we tell our leaders in Washington to invest in research and development in order to spur innovation and job creation.

What’s wrong with all this, with Zakaria’s highly reasonable and intelligent prescriptions? Well, it doesn’t work. Nothing happens. Again words, even the right ones, “do your homework, learn a new skill, be on time at the work place” don’t have the power to change people, let alone the entrenched ways and habits of a country.

What should be our response to the Time cover story? Should we laugh or cry? For we know, alas, that his prescriptions won’t be followed.

You who have been telling your son day after day to do his homework before texting or emailing, before downloading his music and films, before hanging out with his friends, what change have your words brought about? You know how difficult it is to change your child’s habits. Doesn’t Zakaria know how impossible it is to change the “bad” habits of a country of 300,000,000 people by words, prescriptions alone?

And yet to save the American Dream and the middle class that’s all that the magazine cover story can come up with. And again you wonder whether to laugh or cry.

Why is it so hard for us to accept that telling people what to do never works? Does Zakaria really believe that his prescriptions will be heard, let alone acted upon by readers, let alone our leaders? Has spending ever been cut (what spending is he referring to, by the way?) have entitlements ever been pared down?

Why, one could reasonably ask, would such prescriptions as, for example, downsizing a government entitlement or program, ever be undertaken willingly by a legislator when by doing so he or she would probably be voted out of office?

And even in regard to what seems a simple and reasonable prescription, “open up immigration for knowledge workers.” Aren’t the people who propose this aware of the tens of thousands of “knowledge workers” already here and already citizens, and now out of work?

By our allowing knowledge workers to come in what happens to those unemployed “knowledge workers” already here? Out of work a second time? And this may be what is happening. See this story in the Washington Post, Foreign-born workers gained jobs while native-born lost them, by Shankar Vedantam.

How might we change immigration policies? Unfortunately many of those most affected, not the least of which being the 11 million or so illegals, unlike the women, Blacks, gays and lesbians, don’t have a position in public from which they might speak. About this particular situation I would cry.

Or what could be more reasonable than Zakaria’s proposal to simplify the tax code? Many are with him on this one. I know I am. And the tax code probably is, pretty much as Zakaria describes it, “a monstrosity, cumbersome and inefficient, 16,000 pages long and riddled with exemptions and loopholes.”

But this monstrosity has entrenched within it, as Zakaria admits, thousands, tens of thousands of the special claims of special interests. Who thinks that the special interests are going to allow themselves to be pushed aside by the enlightened reformers, if there still are any of these left in Washington, who would simplify the code.

About all this, specifically our all too apparent inability to correct things that have gone wrong in our country, I guess here also I would cry.

For whereas we know what to do to solve most of our problems (Zakaria’s proposed corrections couldn’t be simpler and more reasonable) we are apparently powerless to do it, and instead continue to go bungling and stumbling on in the same but more and more intolerable conditions of our urban and suburban lives. (Perhaps way out in the country words still have real meaning.)

Are we waiting for something to happen? Perhaps an even more severe economic downturn, making it that the impoverished and the unemployed among us outnumber the rest of us, and thereby become major players and force radical change upon us?

The tragedy, or comedy is that while we seem to always know what to do, and certainly what to tell our children to do, we seem to know nothing about how to take the first step.

Perhaps the children have always seen this, that all our good words do little to make things better, and because of this they turn away from us, or at least don’t listen to us. And perhaps it’s because the people see what the politicians do, or rather what they don’t do, that they don’t pay attention to what these same politicians say.

Notes

Josée, my wife and companion of some 50 years, showed me a text I had written over 20 years ago, in the final years of our tenure as co-founders and co-directors of the Waring School. If I were to write about the same topic today, our school’s mission, I wouldn’t change a word of what I wrote then.

What does that mean? That I stopped growing, say at that point in my life? Or rather, and what I’d like to think, that we do reach in our lives some degree of constancy in our thinking. The result being that within us not everything changes, while without and all about us things are changing radically.

Here is that text from June 19, 1989:

Today we met with the new students and their parents.  A mother asked me to state the school’s mission.  You couldn’t say I wasn’t prepared for that request.  There is probably no single subject that I’ve talked or written more about during the past twenty years.  But familiarity breeds contempt and this time I responded a bit too quickly: “It is our mission,”  I said, “that our students become self-learners.”  The mother shot back, “What if my kid is already a self-learner?  Should he come to your school?”  Not to be undone I said, “No.”  But my answer didn’t satisfy me, and the audience, in particular a Waring student in the audience, helped me out by stating that this school was rich in learning resources, especially people, which even the self-learner would be in need of.

This school mission can probably not be reduced to a single statement, but if I were asked to do so again I would say the following: “It’s our mission to create an environment which contains  at least an inkling of life’s possibilities for each and every student in the school.”  What does this mean?  Well, for one, that the environment for learning is all important.  If repeated public school curriculum reforms have not significantly changed the quality of public school education, it is because throughout them all the learning environment—chairs in rows, in teacher-directed classes, long sterile corridors that oblige everyone to be part of the main stream, closed cliques of students, memorization and obedience valued over thought and originality—has remained pretty much the same.  The ennvironment, I believe, is more important than the teacher, more important than the program, more important—although as I say this it strikes me as heresy—than the student’s own efforts.  Brilliant teachers can work miracles, but they probably don’t change kids’ habits; the environment does.

The school environment should contain things that are more of less instrumental in helping children to discover who they are, what they are good at, what will ultimately be their greatest sources of satisfaction.  Good parents understand this instinctively and create a home environment rich in life’s possibilities.  Imagine environements without some life’s essential possibilities—the young Mozart growing up in an environment without music, Newton or Einstein as young boys having no introduction, in school or out, to the language of mathematics, Renoir somehow cut off from a knowledge of the possibilities of paints and canvas.  In all three instances these men would probably not have been heard from.  In each case the environment contained those things—music, symbolic language, art—that were essential to the growth and self-realization of these three not ordinary people.

A deprived up-bringing means not an absence of schools and teachers, but an environment poor in life’s possibilities.  That there simply be art, math, and music classes in school is, of course, not enough.  That the environment  “contain” these things means rather that the direct experience of each one of them be realized by one or more students in the school.  What the students are doing and saying, in the school and in their lives, not just in classroom, is the best measure of what the environment contains.   A rich learning environment—and to provide such is our principal mission—means that all students, of widely varying abilities and interests, find ample opportunities and means whitin that environment to realize their individual learning potentials

On the Nimble Theory Blog I read that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. I’m also reminded by the blogger of Brian Greene’s statement (from The Fabric of the Cosmos, p.49) that “the combined speed of any object’s motion through space and it’s motion though time is always precisely equal to the speed of light.”

I’m familiar with the fact that time slows down the closer you get to the speed of light. You all remember the story of the one twin going off to Alpha Centauri at something like light speed and coming back after 80,000 years having only aged 3 months since he left.

I read Greene’s words to mean that all of us, and you too, everything, your computer, the meal you’re about to eat, the books in your library, the tools in your shop, everything there is, everything all about you is traveling at the speed of light.

Why is this so? Because everything is traveling through something called, since Einstein, spacetime, consisting of (at least) three spatial dimensions plus time. It is the total movement through space and time that will always equal the speed of light —the result being that when you increase your speed through space you decrease your speed through time, and vice versa, not being able to ever reach a combined spacetime speed faster than light.

Light has a special place in all this. Light moves only through space and at light speed. There is no movement through time, with the result being that every photon that has ever “lived” is ageless. The universe ages, light does not.

Now if you’re still with me, let me share with you the following discussion, much of this I’ve taken from Andrew Fraknoi’s blog, The Universe in the Classroom. To begin Fraknoi asks how fast are you moving when you are sitting still?

For when we are sitting still, much of the time for most of us, as I am now, at my computer, and when I’m not on a fast train taking me to Aix en Provence, or on a cruise ship heading for Spain from Fort Lauderdale, or on a catamaran doing 9 knots between Les Marquesas and Hawaii, I am still moving, and moving much more and much faster than in any one of the situations I mention.

For while sitting, or while sailing or doing anything else, we are fully a part of the following motions:

1. With the earth that once a day turns on its axis, moving at close to 1000 miles per hour at a point near the equator, and slowing down somewhat as you move north.

2. With the earth again as it revolves around the Sun. We are approximately 93 million miles from the Sun, and at that distance it takes us one year to make the full circle, our path being close to 600 million miles, which means an orbital speed of 66,000 miles per hour, a speed that would take you from San Francisco to Washington DC in 3 minutes.

3. With the members of our local group including the Sun in the Milky Way Galaxy, a kind of “milling about” speed, but still moving at 43,000 mph, roughly in the direction of the bright star Vega in the constellation of Lyra.

4. And we move along with the entire Milky Way Galaxy itself as it spins, with us in it, like an enormous pinwheel. Now it takes our Sun, and therefore us along with it, approximately 225 million years to make the trip around our Galaxy. This is the “galactic year.” And since the Sun and the Earth first formed about 20 galactic years have passed, meaning that we have been around the Galaxy 20 times. On the other hand, throughout all of recorded human history, we have barely moved along this path.

How fast do we have to move to make it around the Milky Way in one galactic year? It’s a huge circle, and the speed with which the Sun has to move is an astounding 483,000 miles per hour and the earth, anchored to the Sun by gravity, follows along at that same fantastic speed.

5. Finally we are moving with the entire Galaxy through empty space. To understand this we will need to bring into our discussion the Big Bang, that enormous explosion that marked the beginning of space, time, and everything else, the entire universe.

As the early universe grew it expanded, that which was, and still is, a kind of stretching of space itself. And as space stretches, creating more distance between the galaxies, these are seen to be moving apart. How fast is our Milky Way Galaxy expanding? This speed turns out to be an astounding 1.3 million miles per hour!

Now all these motions, all motions that we are part of even while sitting in our favorite chair, — rotating on the earth’s axis (1000 mph), about the sun (66,000 mph), within our galaxy (43,000 mph), following the path of the galactic year (483,000 mph), and being a part of the expansion or stretching of the universe (1.3 million mph) — all these motions together do not come even close (much less than 2 million mph given the multiple directions of the motions) to the speed of light  which is tops at 670 million miles per hour.

So, what can we now say about Greene’s statement, that the combined speed of any object’s motion through space and it’s motion though time is always precisely equal to the speed of light?

Well it’s clear that our motion, while alive on this earth, is nearly 100% (perhaps 99.9) motion through time. We are time creatures. And it’s true that time for us is much more important than space.

While as Green points out we may be traveling at light speed, nearly all of this movement consists in our growing old, and, if you will have it that way, at the speed of light.

In a 2009 Forum article — Immigration & Immigration Reform in the United States: An Outsider’s View — Randall Hansen of the University of Toronto asks an important question, one that our country, and our President should also be asking:

Why is it that the United States “remains by far the most popular destination for immigrants worldwide?”

As Hansen tells it:

The United States is not only the world’s premier immigration country, it is also the world’s most successful integration machine. There are multiple indicators of this success. The U.S. has among the highest employment rates among immigrants. Whereas in many European countries, immigrants or ethnic minorities are unemployed at twice to five times the national average, the gap in the U.S. is zero. [Also the United States] has a unique capacity for populating itself with people who disagree on everything except one point: that they live in the greatest country in the world. The peculiarity – I am tempted to say glory – of the U.S. is that both a deeply conservative, anti-gay, Christian fundamentalist and a radically leftwing, loudly out, ‘leather queen’ can simultaneously believe that the U.S. is the only country in the world for them.

And isn’t this a good thing? Isn’t our being now, as in the past, “the most popular destination for immigrants worldwide,” a precious national treasure, one that we ought to vigorously preserve and protect? And if so why is it that the members of Congress can’t get behind a comprehensive immigration reform package that would encourage and support new waves of immigrants who, as the millions of their predecessors did before them, would bring with them the potential for new growth and prosperity, their own as well as that of their adopted country?

We could have gone the other way. Instead of providing classrooms and teachers and making attendance compulsory under the original “progressive” guidance of Horace Mann we could have from the beginning provided parents, at least those in need of help paying the tuition costs, with voucher monies that could have enabled the children to attend a school of their own choosing.

Milton Friedman as early as 1950, some one hundred years after Horace Mann’s Common School movement of the previous century (and with which we are still struggling so far in vain to make it work for all students) advocated for a universal school voucher program that would allow parents, all parents with school age children, to choose their preferred school environments.

So far, however, Friedman’s idea has not been tried, other than in bits and pieces, here and there, the largest “bit” and the largest “there” being the voucher experiment begun in 1990 and still going on in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin public schools, and being strictly and appropriately limited there to poor families.

Reformers and defenders of the public schools argue incessantly about the results of the few voucher experiments that have been tried so far, mostly arguing about whether vouchers work to significantly and substantially further educational goals. And there are two sides to this one argument.

But they needn’t bother. It is a non-issue. In fact, we ought never to have confused these paltry voucher trials with the kind of country wide, all inclusive system that Friedman was proposing. And on a Friedman fashioned universal voucher system the jury is still out because, as I repeat, it hasn’t yet been tried.

And primarily because we didn’t as a country go the Friedman way of educational choice, we have not created a thriving and responsive educational market place or school system where educational institutions, competing with one another for students (as do quite successfully our elite independent schools and colleges) would directly confront and, if they would survive, satisfy the wants and needs of their student and parent clientele, while all the time being no less subject to government regulation than private hospitals and banks (as well as “government” police and fire departments).

Instead we have created a public school system that is by and large responsive, not to the needs of the learners, nor to the needs of the country, but to the needs and wants of the adults in charge. These adults, the administrators and teachers, are assured a captive audience and they need pay little attention to attracting and holding onto that audience.

(There are those who would change the system by removing the privileges of some of those adults — Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, for example, who would make it easier to fire a teacher, but even that, as incisive as it may seem, would be nowhere near enough.)

While the adults in these schools will usually know what and how they want to teach they will too often know little about their students, how these will best learn, what interests them, what motivates them. How long would a business stay in business if it did not constantly seek to meet and satisfy the wants and needs of its customers? Yet schools go on forever with little or no knowledge of who their students are.

One thinks again of that old Soviet joke, the one that says: “They Pretend To Pay Us, and We Pretend To Work.” Well what is it that most goes on in our public schools, those schools that the kids have not chosen to attend, no more than did the Soviet citizen choose to live and “work” in the Soviet state? Well isn’t it just that, “They pretend to teach us, and we pretend to learn?”

Teach for a day in a public school classroom. Put yourself, perhaps as many as five times during the day, in front of some 15 to 25 individuals that have only two things in common, their age and their compulsory attendance in your room. Then at the end of the day ask yourself whether the best summation of your experience isn’t that you pretended to teach them and that they, on their best behavior, pretended to learn.

If it ever were to happen, that schools were selected by their student-clients, then the schools would have to be most of all concerned with the effectiveness of their program, with whether their students were in fact learning, because otherwise they would lose them. And rightly so.

This is not the case, of course, at present when students almost no matter what they do or don’t do in school, are never lost by the schools. Whatever the results of their attending school, whatever the evidence or their not having acquired important skills and knowledge, the students keep coming back (except of course for the three out of ten who start school and drop out before graduating from high school).

If we didn’t learn it from the experience of the Soviet Union we ought to have learned it from our own public schools. For there is little evidence to the contrary, that people, when given things without their having to do something for them in exchange, will use those things well, or even profit from them for their own purposes.

And there is a lot of evidence that what they are given, in this case what the schools provide, will be wasted. Think language laboratories, libraries, science laboratory equipment, and such, not to mention the new one or more million dollar classrooms and school buildings.

What’s missing now most of all is the sense of personal responsibility. Who is responsible? Who is making sure that learning does take place? No one. Remember the “you pretend, I pretend.”

Friedman’s vouchers would begin the process of making the learners responsible for their own learning. For more and more of them would want their voucher monies to be well spent. How many are now concerned about how well our tax dollars are being used?

These are not idle thoughts, the usual nothings that make up the content of my Blog. The words below, not all mine, convey experiences that I don’t want to lose, and digital media does seem, at the moment, to be the best strong box around in which to keep them for future readers and viewers. Perhaps.

In a nutshell (actually a catamaran) the experience is the ocean adventure of our son, N, with two friends, the Captain T and J, who are at this moment sailing from Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas to Hawaii. They promised to stay in touch with us and so we’ve received emailed trip notes from the three of them, T, J, and most recently our son, N. Included below is also my emailed response to J ‘s trip notes.

We hear first from Captain T:

Hi all,

We’ll it’s official, the Three Musketeers have departed for their big voyage to Hawaii.(Captain T, J, N and the ship’s mascot, Ria, in any order.)

This particular passage of roughly 2000 nautical miles has been made for thousands of years, but gotten progressively more comfortable since the original Polynesians made it in outrigger canoes.  Apparently there were no flush toilets, microwaves or chart plotters on those primitive craft.  On the other hand, they did benefit from human sacrifices, granting them the blessing of the god Tane, who remains the grand poobah in these waters.

(In Māori mythology, Tāne (also Tāne Mahuta) is the god of forests and birds)

Since none of our crew are too keen on being sacrificed, we’re trying to negotiate better terms.

My buddies Nat and Jeremy arrived in Nuku Hiva on October 5th, and Veronique barely waited the requisite 24 hours before jumping ship (she’s now off to DC to do some real work).  Ria doesn’t know what to make of three eligible bachelors on board all at once: so much attention, so many beds to sleep in, so many suckers to cajole food from.

We spent yesterday anchored in a stunning and secluded bay that Veronique and I had just visited, and went over boat systems.   Nat knows a good deal about sailing, while Jeremy is obsessed with the workings of the life raft. We perfected the art of male bonding by cleaning the hulls together, and this morning the boys hiked up to a beautiful waterfall with a local buddy of ours.  Our final act was to pillage every piece of fruit available from the gracious locals.

With our two large stalks of bananas alone, I’d guess we can now make over 100 loaves of banana bread.

We raised anchor around 2 pm and found a nice breeze as soon as we cleared Nuku Hiva.  Apart from a closer encounter with a freighter (he finally gave way after hearing Ria’s vicious bark over VHF), it seemed that we were off to a promising start.

Unfortunately though, we just discovered a serious problem that could compromise our whole trip, and force us to turn back.  It seems that some malicious virus has infected all electronic systems on board, causing untold damage.  The first manifestations of this occurred when random reminder messages started popping up simultaneously on our various computer systems on board.   Here is a sample message that mysteriously popped up, and which we immediately forwarded to MacAfee virus protection for analysis:

“After Ria’s last walk on land, rinse and bathe her with the doggie shampoo (it’s under the sink near water tank levers). Wet her, put on shampoo, rub in thoroughly, let stand for 5 minutes or a little more, then rinse thoroughly. Very important to rinse all the shampoo off. Dry her. Put shampoo back under sink. Put towel in her bed so she doesn’t wet it. Tomorrow, remove the towel and hang it outside. Put another towel in its place.”

Best to all,
Team JeRiNaTe

Then these notes from J:

To you old sea hands some of what I say here won’t be news at all. I’m no old sea hand and neither are the people I’m sending this to, so please bear with.

Old Sea Hands

First, particular news:  We’re making fabulous time averaging close to eight knots. At this rate we’d be in Hawaii in 11 days, not that we expect to maintain this rate.

1 KNOT is 1.15 MILES, 1 NAUTICAL MILE IS 1.15 MILES , so 8 KNOTS PER HOUR IS 9.2 MPH

Ria, our dog is doing well but misses her mother. We had expected the wind to come more from the south than it has.  It’s more due easterly and northeasterly. We’re shooting straight up from the Maquessa islands until past the equator when we turn Northwest toward Hawaii.  So far the sailing is perfect for a tyro like me.  We steer toward zero degrees, the winds on the side are about ideal for goosing us up toward the northern hemisphere.

The newly mended mainsail is behaving itself. Nathaniel and I have had mild endurable nausea, just enough to put us off eating temporarily, me more than him. Yesterday in a misguided effort at over-caution I ran a thin sheet (rope) triple ply through the jaws on our main winch. It quickly turned into quadruple and maybe even quintuple ply doing minor damage to the jaw’s gripping power which is not something welcome on the main winch. Ted says not to worry and that it’s easy enough to work around.  A more unflappable captain I couldn’t wish for.  His unflappability thankfully does not translate into flipness.  He is alert, competent and bent on getting us all to Hawaii safely.  He is the Obama of sea captains.

“the Obama of sea captains”

Though we were expecting doldrums and a chance to drop sail and swim at the convergence region between Northern and Southern hemisphere weather just above the equator, forecasts now show storm patches. How we’ll cross them is a decision we have to leave until we get closer and the forecasts are less speculative.

As we enter the middle of  nowhere life assumes a surreal quality. No geographical reference points, and yet all the conveniences of home from microwave to board games; no contact with others yet each other’s easy constant company; seamless days yet the rigors of night watch–transoceanic sailing is full of bizarre contrasts.

Alice when falling through the rabbit hole speculates to herself that after such a fall as this she’ll think nothing of falling off the roof.

Alice when falling through the rabbit hole

Sometimes the yacht tosses like a roller coaster. Walking close to the boat’s edge can feel like tottering atop skyscraper.  The walls and floor grumble creak and growl startlingly all day and night. We ride it as though it’s normal. This evening during a quiet dinner Ted paused to toss some wayward flying fish back out to sea. I hope to bring home some fresh new unflappability learned at sea. This trip reminds me just how effete I can get in the reliable comforts of home.

If any of us three are formulating opinions of each other’s shortcomings we’re not sharing them. We’ve not run out of things to talk about, and even Ted, the quietest of us three has ventured opinions and comments. Kidding aside the conversations are nicely balanced. We’re getting around to everything and having a good time of it.

J

And my reply to  J:

Thanks for the “notes” Jeremy.  I’m not an old sea hand so most of what you said was news. You pushed me (as Nathaniel had earlier) to go to Google Earth to follow your sea journey, and yes, on the map it does look like you’re in the “middle of nowhere.” Probably good in that you won’t run into any pirates who evidently don’t do their pirating so far from the mainland. In fact as you zoom in and out on Google’s Earth you have to be careful to not lose the beginning and end points of the sail you’re trying to visualize.  Well not so much in regard to Hawaii, that’s clearly visible on most magnifications, but the Marquesas, it took me awhile to find them. Which one of the latter islands did you leave from? Anyway I now know more about French Polynesia and, what’s the ocean that you’re navigating called, Oceania, than I ever did before? And as they say in my wife’s language, Cela me fait une belle jambe.
Wind “due easterly and northeasterly,” isn’t your direction northwest, according to my Google aided searches, about 30 degrees north and 20 degrees west. So is a wind blowing northeast a good wind for you? In my nautical ignorance I’d assume that wind would take you northeast, into an even more desolate ocean region of the globe, heading for where, Mexico, (which you definitely don’t want to do, given the war going on between the government and the cartels)? I know I’m missing something here. By the way, what do you mean that you “steer toward zero degrees,” toward the equator? I guess you have to cross the equator. Ask Nathaniel to tell us about the differences between an ocean equator crossing experience, and the ones he has experienced in Brazil and Africa. I haven’t been to either one myself, but if you three keep this up maybe I’ll get closer to a land equator when you decide not to break up and take the Verité and Ria, and Veronique, there with you.
One question about your reference to Alice—  “Alice when falling through the rabbit hole speculates to herself that after such a fall as this she’ll think nothing of falling off the roof.” I love the image. And I’m trying to understand its meaning in your circumstances. Did you mean to imply that now you’d feel more at home when walking “atop a skyscraper”? Have you ever done that? I think of the Mohawk Indians who do that for a living, but I’ve never done it myself. Although I’m sure that the experience you describe of the shaking boat, of the walls and floor grumbling, creaking and growling and then, during a quiet dinner, Ted getting up and tossing a lost flying fish back into the water (were you eating out on the deck, and by the way, how’s Nathaniel’s cooking and are you eating now yourself?), I’m sure all that would make anyone less flappable.
And I’d love to hear what the three of you talk about, during those long hours when you can let the boat sail itself. Your “getting around to talking about everything and having a good time doing it” implies that maybe you won’t stop, but will continue to sail onto a new destination. There are times in this life, times that I’ve experienced, and not all that rarely, that you want just to keep going. I think of one, the bus that used to take us from Avignon to our village in la Haute Provence, Forcalquier. I really didn’t want to get there, just wanted to stay in the bus….
Best, And keep writing.
Philip (I’m happy that someone put me on your mailing list, probably my son.)

And lastly, N’s trip notes, timed with their crossing of the Equator.

Dear All:

We are quite well settled onto our passage routine.  Constant backgrounds are the noise of rushing water, the slap/bang of hull on waves and the consistent pitching, rolling, careening, sometimes violent motion of our home.  Dominating themes are long stays at the Navigation station inside, looking at wind speed and angle, and noting with satisfaction Speed Over the Ground;

The Pacific Ocean

late mornings thru nightfall when we are all three mostly up, chatting, arranging, snacking, reading with the occasional dip below for naps; lunch which is emerging as our central meal of the day; post lunch intense conversations; afternoon live music sessions with Jeremy adding some live bass guitar to some of my House Music; late afternoon movie time (so far we have watched The World is Not Enough, Michael Clayton, and Up); time with Ria as she is equally cuddly with all of us during the day; morning stints at the outdoor Nav Station before the Equatorial sun is too high; and night time solo shifts of three hours.

Like most things that we do that are quite different from our normal routine the perception of time changes.  The first one to two days were new and distinct.  Now into (is it day 4 or day 5???) life has shrunk to the moment.  I think that we are all pretty relaxed.  Certainly I am, and Jeremy has commented on his sense of calm as well.  As Ted has been at this considerably longer and is in charge of all on board maybe his perception is different.

However, already when I look back to the beginning of our voyage a few days ago there have been memorable moments.  I will list a few.

After we left our beautiful bay we motored West to clear the Southern side of the island of Nuka Hiva. When we rounded the island we set sail and headed North, still protected from the wind and swell of the Pacific Ocean by the lee side of the island.  The four of us sat on the bench on Verite’s bow.  I eagerly scanned the distant coast of Nuka Hiva knowing it was the last time we would see land until Hawaii.

Nuka Hiva, Les Marquesas

We spoke about the coming journey.  Ted went back and reappeared with a surprise.  A husked coconut with three straws sticking out of it.

He had added Malibu to the coconut and we passed the coconut around taking eager sips.  When we were done we recycled the straws and I tossed the coconut overboard.  It quickly receded.  We sailed due North, with many degrees to cross.  It was the last time we sat up there.  Maybe we will sit there again in the doldrums (convergence of Easterly winds in the South with more Northerly winds farther North) when the waters will be much calmer.

The Doldrums

My first night when I did the 3 to 6 am shift and watched the sunrise.  I’ve seen many, many sunrises all over the planet, many on board a sailing vessel.  This one was not especially beautiful.  What made this one different was that for the first time I could not tell the difference between the sunrise and the sunset.  I think that this is partly because of our proximity to the Equator.  As  I looked East towards the rising sun my thoughts were not of a coming new day but of being a part of this spherical planet where one man’s dawn is another man’s dusk.  A few days later after we watched Pixar Media’s Up  Ted commented that our boat skipping and tossing its way across the Pacific was very much like the house in the movie floating away carried by many balloons towards Paradise Falls.  That’s how I felt, free to skim across the ocean.

Darwin Crossing the Line

And yesterday we crossed the Equator.  I had read about the tradition of the British seamen to shave the first time crossers in addition to some other ‘hazing’.  I wasn’t keen to follow that tradition too closely as I am beginning to like my long hair, now not cut since early September, 2009.  Ted would not have to cut his 18 month locks as he first crossed the Equator on the Atlantic.  And Jeremy has short hair.  Ted calculated that we would cross the Equator at about 1230pm so we decided to prepare a nice lunch and dine together and at the moment of crossing present each an offering to Neptune.  We tossed overboard a fresh coconut, Jeremy’s boxers and a coin from Tahiti.  Ria barked appreciatively.  The moment became memorable as it marked an accomplishment.

It is now Noon, winds are blowing at about 15 to 18 knots, our speed is good at close to 7 knots, our course is a few degrees West of North.  Skirt steak is thawing in the sink.  We are all hungry and looking forward to lunch.  I get veto over this afternoon’s movie choice.  And I am going to close up this computer and join Jeremy and Ted in a new conversation.

Maruru! (soon Aloha)

PS.  Our current GPS position: 02.53.6N; 141.28.4W

During all the discussions about school choice* very little is said, when there is a choice of schools available, about what those choices are. While it may very well be that much more important than having the right to choose one’s school are the number and quality and variety of schools there are to choose from.

Cédric Villani, a 37 year old mathematics professor from Lyon in France, while teaching at Princeton most certainly encountered few if any limitations on his freedom of movement, or his freedom of choice in regard to his living arrangements or his (our) cherished freedoms in regard to most anything else. But, as he noted,** what did all this freedom amount to when, in the town of Princeton, NJ, in the way of good cheeses there was little if anything to choose from?

For what is the value of choice when only look and taste alike cheddars, row after row of pasteurized supermarket brand cheeses, and La vache qui rit are your choices?

For a poor family living in Newark (or even Princeton for that matter) what are the available choices of schooling for their children? There are the district schools including maybe a charter school or two, perhaps a few parochial schools, and certainly in Princeton, but perhaps not in Newark, several private, independent schools.

The parochial school may be out in terms of available places, the private school, when scholarships are no longer available, will be much too expensive, the charter school will have a long wait list, and the district school, with plenty of available places, may very well be a publicly recognized failure in regard to its student test scores and other achievement measures.

This is the precious “choice” that so many write about who write about our schools? This is worse than the no cheeses of Cédric Villani.

If school choice is ever going to become real it has to start with an expansion of available choices. And how to do this is what the reformers should be talking about. Otherwise the whole exercise is futile, like choosing between two or three brands of super market cheddar cheeses.

* Just today, first Ross Douthat in an op ed piece, Grading School Choice,  and a major discussion of School Choice appearing in the current National Affairs, Does School Choice Work?, by Frederick Hess.

** “It was Cédric Villani, a 37-year-old professor at Lyon who won the 2010 Fields Medal, who gave the most spirited reply to France’s critics. Calling himself ‘a pure product of the French system,’ Mr. Villani, a Normalien who has often taught in the United States, said that while American academic salaries were higher ‘and it’s easier to make big projects,’ France also has particular strengths: ‘Our tradition, our quality of life, our social cohesion. My big problem in Princeton was finding a place to buy a decent cheese.’” (Follow this link: France Wrestles With Its 2 Tiers of Higher Education)

Will it happen, can it happen? Well it’s happening in Britain, perhaps for the first time ever. The Tory-Liberal coalition government is reducing welfare payments. The message sent, one that will surely be read in the developed welfare states of Europe as well as in America, is that unchecked, universal welfare benefits cannot continue indefinitely.

Up until now while it is generally agreed that huge government deficits could only be reduced in one way,  by reducing entitlements, in effect by coming back from the generosity of past administrations, no one believed that such would or could ever happen.

For not only are entitlements where the money is, they also represent the votes that return the holders to office, for there are few who vote who are not themselves benefit recipients.

In this country the present  shouting match is between those who would keep entitlements as they are, that which is not possible given the size of the budget deficits, and those who would reduce the deficits, also keeping the entitlements as they are, that which is also not possible.

Will others follow Britain’s lead? Is this an example of that in our time most rare virtue, courage? In Britain some 1.5 million middle class families with incomes in excess of $70,000 will no longer receive the weekly child benefit payments.

And that has to be only the first shoe dropping, representing an amount less than one percent of the budget deficit. What will the second shoe bring?

To take something away, a privilege or benefit that has been given but for which the money is not longer available, seems to be the only way out of our present indebtedness. Yet almost no one in our country, other than perhaps the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, is proposing to do so.

And on him the votes have not been cast.