Author: JenniferFitz

Asimov / Belloc follow-up

Finished reading The Shaping of France.  Pretty happy with it.  All my reservations stated below continued, and of course it was just dreadful to read such an agnostic account of Joan of Arc — what a spoilsport!  But as a nice clear, readable telling of the kings and battles of medieval France-in-progress, it did the trick.  Great introduction to military history for people who don’t really do military history, but want to understand some of the big picture.  For all its faults, I think reading this one is a good starting point, or re-freshing point, before diving deeper into any particular topic covering medieval France or England.  (For example: 1215.)

I’m not sure whether it makes Hillaire Belloc squirm or chuckle, but I think his  Characters of the Reformation is a natural follow-on to The Shaping of France. Similar type of work, though the author’s historical lense now switches from ardently-atheist-mode to ardently-catholic-mode.   Belloc’s character-by-character approach is a little more disjointed and difficult to follow, but in exchange you get a slightly more intense look at each individual.  Likewise, Asimov is the more goes-down-like-popcorn story-teller, but I think Belloc is selling meatier ideas.  (And it was very refreshing to read an account of the reformation from an unabashedly-catholic perspective.  Just because you never do.  No doubt a bit of bias in there, but bias worth discovering for change.)  As far as historical-documentation goes, they are twins.

My only regret on these two: I really wish I had read The Shaping of France before Characters of the Reformation, because the one really sets you up to understand the other.

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Next on my to-do list: Getting my notes done on my medieval-france honkin’ big pile of library books before they have to go back at the end of the week.   In between taking girls to the Nutcracker, cooking for Thanksgiving, attending Thanksgiving, hosting Thanksgiving, and maybe doing other fun stuff.  And then cleaning of my desk, haha.

 

Reading French History to Understand the English

I’m about a third of the way through Isaac Asimov’s The Shaping of France (Houghton Mifflin, 1972).  Not exactly a proper history book, since there are absolutely no citations or bibliography or anything else to back up his various claims, but more like a highly readable report written by an astonishingly good undergrad.   For all the man can’t seem to document, he can tell a mighty good story.

I picked up the book from the library wanting shore up my knowledge medieval french history, and certainly it’s been helpful for that.  But the surprise was this:  Suddenly the history of medieval England makes so much more sense.   Asimov’s telling of the Capetian kings’ efforts to build a stable (French) kingdom works like the denoument of a good mystery, where Father Brown or Miss Marple explain the motives of that one character you never really noticed before, but whose actions were driving all the strange comings and goings of the rest.  You need, of course, to already have the outline of English history in the back of your head, or else the final explanation won’t do you any good.

–> I’m don’t know that Asimov’s book is the best out there.  You could never use it for academic purposes without making your advisor chuckle (or cringe, or both).  And I’m only up to Philip VI, so this a PBR.  But if you need an easily-digestible history of the kings from Charlemagne forward, in a way you can actually pretty much remember and make sense of, Asimov is mighty handy in a pinch.   And just the trick for making sense of England.

 

RE: ‘climate change’

I’m a sorry linker, when it comes to WSJ articles .  But anyway, the other day* , after I posted about the beetles, the journal’s “The Numbers Guy” column was on climate models.  Long discussion about how these models are inaccurate, unreliable, not good for making policy, etc. But then there was this graph.  A very eye-catching graph.

–> Which showed, to my slightly-trained eye, that sure enough, over the past century the average global temperature (that’s got to be fun to measure) has been steadily increasing. Plenty of up-n-down blips, but the overall trend was mighty obvious.

Now what to do with that data another question entirely.  I’m not persuaded it’s a man-made phenomenon, though I can certainly see why someone might think so — industrial revolution, all that.  But as I think about Romans-to-Renaissance industrial ebb and flow, and then ponder the climate variations that went alongside, I just don’t see the connection.

It could be that my memory is poor — it’s not like I’ve got 2,000 years of ecomic and weather data neatly filed here at my  hand.  I’m just going off of bits and pieces pasted together from various reading over the years.  So if someone has a nice readable [short, if we could] article fitting that slightly longer-term data into the current climate-change theory, do post.  I really am not at all decided one way or another.

 

*That’s a technical citation, meaning “it is in my mulch box, no longer in the living room”.  Which is how we date newspaper articles here.

Pine Beetles and Climate Change

Listened to Marketplace last night on NPR.  I almost never listen to the radio anymore, as it is difficult to hear an entire story with small children present, and I don’t think the part where I yell at the kids not to interrupt is all that healthy.  So mostly I read.

But last night I happened to catch (most) of an article about how pine trees were dying in Montana due to global warming.  I was stunned — are temperatures really getting so high that pine trees are perishing in the heat??  Maybe I should take this problem more seriously.

No no, it’s that pine beetles are eating them.

Ah.  So, er, what do pine beetles have to do with global warming?  Well, our reporters contend that the 1.something degree rise in global temperature over the past fifty years has suddenly made the pine beetles not get killed off by winter freezes, and hence the attack.

Now if I lived in Montana, I might buy this.  But as it happens, I’m rather familiar with the *southern* pine beetle, which has been on a feeding frenzy for quite awhile now.  (Note to Montana: Start chopping.  Do not leave those dead trees standing there.)  And the thing is, the southeastern US hasn’t had a Montana-style winter in quite a while.  [Thousands of years? Millions? Some geologist please quick speak up.]  So apparently *our* pine beetles are much slower on the uptake than Montana’s . . .  Or else no one is blaming our beetles on global warming, and it’s just a coincidence that Montana gets climate-change beetles, while ours are extra hungry for some other reason.

My reaction?  Linking the pine beetle infestation to global warming is lousy science.  We may or may not be experiencing some kind of human-induced climate-warming.  Or maybe human activity is causing wider swings in weather patterns than in the past (hence, warming and cooling both.)  I’m doubtful, but it could be — I won’t dismiss the possibility out of hand.   But claiming anything and everything just must be due to global warming is silly, and ruins the credibility both of the scientists who make these claims, and the journalists who report on them.

That said, as I mentioned, I live with small children, and there’s a chance I missed some pivotal moment in the report when the Marketplace journalists displayed their healthy skepticism.  In which case, good for them.

Depression & Creativity

Essay in the Journal this morning, in the weekend section, about the connection between mental illness and creative genius.  I try not to pay too much attention to the WSJ’s Saturday essays, and my mental health is the better for it.  But I thought today’s page W3 piece by Jeannette Winterson (“In Praise of the Crack-Up”) wanted a little reply.

[For a very thorough, sometimes too thorough, exploration of this topic, see Peter D. Kramer’s Against Depression.  But my thoughts, different from his, are what follows.]

No one extols the virtues of depressed Pizza Guys. Read an essay like Winterson’s, you’d get the idea that writers and artists were the only moody people out there.  Perhaps artsy people don’t have a very wide circle of acquaintance.  So let me assure you: mental illness, including but not limited to depression, knows no professional barriers.  Accountants, Wal-Mart Managers, Engineering Professors — keep an ear out and you’ll quickly discover these people, too, can suffer mood disorders.

The difference being, of course, that your average laboratory technician doesn’t get asked to write an op-ed about the experience.  And no one pores through the details of the billing-clerk’s private life, in order to write a riveting biography about the “real story” behind that face we know so well.  Thus we never ask ourselves, “But what would interstate commerce come to, if we didn’t have depressed truck drivers??”  [Who would cover those long-haul routes without the work of those who long for solitude?  Mmn, I suppose the guys who are so fond of CB radios, and, these days, cellphones.]

But in fairness, the nature of literature and art does mislead.  I was struck the other month reading through a collection medieval poetry: it’s 98% about love, death, and combinations of love-n-death.  And pretty  much that seems to hold true through the centuries.   As much as *I* like to write about exciting topics like doing the dishes, or changing diapers, apparently themes with a little more drama tend to be more enduring.

–> So whereas the janitor has little to gain, professionally, by letting his personal agony shine through in his work, a writer or painter can use the depths of despair or psychosis as raw material for a riveting masterpiece.   Of course ordinary grief and heartbreak are plenty dark for those purposes, and most of us will get to enjoy a fair bit of both by the time we’re old enough to write decently;  but sure, if you happen to have episodes of mental illness to draw on, that works too.

And it *is* consoling for other suffering readers to know they are not alone in their experiences. So not such a bad contribution to the art, if you go in for that type of reading.

Which leads to a final point: Writing about difficult experiences is helpful to the writer. Or painting for the painter, and so on, I imagine.  (The other arts are beyond my skill, so I can’t be sure.)   Though honestly, most of us, when we work through our feelings this way, end up with a piece that is dreadfully boring — ‘maddening’ you might say; it takes true genius to be able to write about the experience of  mental illness without causing it to become contagious.   For the average depressed person, best to keep those feelings in the personal journal, far, far, from an editor’s desk.

But none of that makes it necessary to keep around the assorted mental illnesses just for literature’s sake.  Any more than we need to keep around cancer because it has produced so many great works of art (I like this one), or encourage warfare in the Mediterranean that we might get another Iliad in the process.   Given effective, no-obnoxious-side-effects cures for mental illness, there will still be plenty to write about.

Health Care and the Living Wage

So when I started writing about the Just Wages, I intentionally left health care out of the picture.  Why?  Because health care is a virtually unlimited need.

I have no qualms about telling you that a person only truly needs so much living space, this much food, that much clothing, and so on.  It is important that we not make an impossible wreck of a straightforward moral teaching, by trying to tack on burdensome ‘extras’, as if love of neighbor were synonymous with ‘upper-middle class 21st century American’.

But how much health care does a just wage pay for?  Not so easy to define.   Set aside all the debates about which care is most helpful, and which is not helpful at all — those are medical debates.  Pretend you know what the useful stuff is, and focus on just the question of ‘how much’.

It can’t be nothing, we are certain of that.  But does the requirement extend to providing every care that might possibly help the worker-patient?  We have an arsenal of extraordinarily expensive tests, procedures and medicines that will extend life a few months or a few years; we have treatments that, in the event they work, will give back the recipient a nearly-normal lifespan, but for which the probability of sucess is quite low.

Those rescued months and years, those chances of success, are absolutely priceless.  I am easily persuaded that, as a society, we should value the medical progress that cutting-edge technology offers.  We should choose legal structures that encourage both doing the research, and making new forms of care more widely available.

But should every business owner consider it a normal cost of business, to provide wages that will cover high-cost-low-expected-return medical treatments?

I think that we need to fall back on the same pragmatic approach used for discerning just wages in other areas:

1) Remedy gross injustices. Keeping in mind that, say, access to a safe water supply remains a significant health problem for many workers around the world.  Employers should begin there.  I’m reminded of my friend Jenn Labit, whose factory in Egypt includes such basic amenities as a safe way to store lunches.  Sounds self-evident, but it was not the standard local business practice.

2) Use the love-neighbor-as-self standard. If senior management and members of the board are willing to accept a given level of health care, it is reasonable to assume the company is making an honest effort at providing a just wage for health care.

Beyond that?  We want to set up laws and regulations that make it possible for employers to efficiently provide a good health-care wage to workers.   We can disagree over the details — I’m not convinced the current legislation coming out of Congress is going to be an efficient and effective fix.   On the other hand, I’m entirely in love with my local water company, and do think that providing clean water is an appropriate use of community — read: local government — power.   Assuming it is done well, as it is where I live.

–> The imperative to pay a just wage works both ways.  On the one hand, it is up to local governments to set up community structures in a way that makes it affordable for businesses to pay a fair wage.  Think: utilities, transportation, policing, insurance regulations, medical safety standards.  On the other hand, the requirement to pay a just wage ought to spur businesses to use their importance in the community to push for change when the local government has fallen short of its mandate.

Well as you can imagine, every time I read something about the health care package about to emerge, my head gets that much closer to exploding. Said by a person who thinks our health care system does need some serious attention.   Just mostly not the kind that is coming out of Congress lately.

But I promise the relative quiet here is not me storming off sulkily.  I suppose my absence is healthcare-related though — we’ve a perky little GI virus hopping about the family.  Not a bad little guy, mild, short-lived, even agrees to appear in the early hours, before interested siblings are up and about and interfering with clean-up and quarantine efforts.  No complaints here.

Meanwhile, registration is open for the Catholic Writer’s Conference.  Highly recommended: It is free, and there are helpful people who will work with you regardless of your skill-level.   You can participate as much or as little as you want, and then purchase the transcript of the proceedings so that you can sit-in on missed classes at your leisure.    SuperHusband insists I go, even though I’ve done virtually no writing since I left off on my project from last year’s conference.  So I will.  A wife doesn’t argue about these things.

An MS suicide, and the cost of accomodations

William Peace has two posts up that fit together eerily well.

An MS suicide.  MS can be a discouraging, depressing illness.  And depression & discouragement can lead to suicidal thoughts much more easily than many people realize.   But when someone steps up to the ledge of a building, what kind of monster stands beside and gives advice on the best way to jump?

And why are disabling illnesses so discouraging?  In part because we all know that our society just isn’t all that concerned about accessibility.

The noise about cost is, in my opinion, a pretty weak excuse.  You’ve got to put a door on the building, it really isn’t that much more expensive to have slightly more door and slightly less wall.   There’s nothing magical about stairs that makes them so dramatically cheaper to build than a ramp.  And most buildings that require an elevator for wheelchair access really won’t function efficiently unless you have an elevator for freight & furniture access.

Visited our local county historical museum with the homeschooling group the other day.  Was appalled by the complete lack of wheelchair access to any of the buildings.  (Well, except this one barn.)  Outdoors was okay, if you can do gently sloping grassy terrain.

Now there are often good reasons historic buildings are inaccessible.  For example, sometimes the only way to improve access to a building would be to make significant architectural alterations to a building that is being preserved precisely for its architecture.  But I assure you, though the buildings we visited were authentically old, a well-placed ramp or lift would not have marred the educational and aesthetic value of these particular buildings.  Nor were the curators especially concerned about that problem, seeing as they didn’t mind putting a honking big HVAC unit outside one of the buildings, in a visible-to-visitors location.

Which is the second point: Cost was not the concern.  No one had any worries about the cost (let alone authenticity) of putting modern HVAC, plumbing, and electrical wiring into these historic buildings.  Even though, being historic buildings that had been steadily used for over a century prior to the availability of those conveniences, they were actually designed to function quite well without modern amenities.

–> What it comes down to, is that people are perfectly willing to spend and accommodate for items that provide comfort and convenience for “ordinary” visitors and workers.  But somehow, taking the time and energy to plan an installation so that it is workable for those-other-people-not-like-us* just isn’t a priority.

Which of course makes the prospect of future disability so dreadful, because you know that wider society has been built in a way that excludes your disabled self.

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*This particular museum, which I will not name, apparently specializes in ‘those-people-not-like-us’.  Witness the way we were all assumed to be able to imagine ourselves as white 19th century southern farm-owners, but when a bit of Native American technology was mentioned, it was “those people”.  Not an intentional slight — I expect the volunteer-docent meant no harm, and was probably unaware of the shift in his point of view.  But it was cringe-worthy all the same.  [In double fairness, my guess is that our docent actually grew up on just the kind of farm, with just the kind of ethnic heritage, that he was presenting as the assumed “us”.  So for him, us-v.-them might have been more accurate than not.  But for the rest of us, not so.]