Blogito, Ergo Sum - 9 May 2009

So here I am reading Dick Cavett on coincidence...and I didn’t even know he was still alive, unless coincidentally he is another Dick Cavett:

A friend of mine was meeting his soon-to-be in-laws for the first time. They had driven from a faraway state. Their license plate, he saw, consisted of an unusual, arcane scientific term: something like “GENTFRETS.” Let’s call it that.

Nothing strange so far, except that the families had never met, and my friend’s father’s license plate, relating to his profession, also read: “GENTFRETS.”

That baffling phenomenon — coincidence — intrigues me more and more as instances spice up my own life with their mysterious improbability. I’ve had some doozies.

I’m told of, but haven’t yet found, a recent book on the subject that raises the question: are coincidences more than coincidence?

The idea that they are is akin, I suppose, to those who like to say, pointedly and accusingly about a significant and injurious mishap, “Freud says there are no accidents.”

My first “real” boss was an old guy who worked for the Forest Service, a few years from retirement, and he went by the books, as we used to say. He was rough and gruff and four of us were college kids who were very much intimidated. One of his points, which he pounded home over and over again to us teenagers, was that there weren’t any such thing as accidents. There always ALWAYS, if you traced back far enough, a point at which the incident could have been prevented. I thought this was a ridiculous notion and while I did not dare openly oppose him, he knew I did not agree. I, of course, was looking at everything from the position of it not being my fault, whereas he was looking from a position I could not yet see. It look a lot time for me to realize how right Frank Stone was, bless him.

Someone, somewhere, had the capability to prevent every accident that happens. It may be way, way upstream, even out of sight, but it’s there somewhere.

First of all, Freud never said it. Or, if he did, it has escaped the notice of at least two acquaintances of mine, well-read in the works of the man V. Nabokov enjoyed calling “the Viennese quack.” Both my sources for this are licensed, Harvard-educated practitioners of the shrink trade.

What Freud did say, they tell me, is that there is nothing in behavior that doesn’t have a cause. Obscure and difficult though it may be to discover. Maybe a less than perfect understanding of that concept is where the cherished “no accidents” idea comes from.

But still there are, my stubborn self argues to this day, real accidents. The meteor that rockets in from outer space on a million year voyage and plummets through your roof and into your brain pan is not something which reasonably can be avoided, thus a true accident. Unless, that is, God intended it for you, in which case...

The rest of what I learned from the Dick Cavett OpEd was...he’s getting paid for this and I’m not?

And we’ve lost the last DiMaggio with Dom. He retired the year I joined the Marine Corps. It’s a long time ago yet still like yesterday. I confess to being a Yankee fan and I didn’t really realize how good Dom was.

Gail Collins is such a mental lightweight that I seldom read her because Maureen Dowd is just as light, only funnier, but:

We just went through a whole election in which everybody wanted to be a maverick. And Arlen Specter had been a Democrat for only six days before he was on “Meet the Press” denying that he had ever told President Obama that he would be loyal.

“I did not say I would be a loyal Democrat. I did not say that,” Specter insisted. Just to make his lack of loyalty crystal-clear, he added: “And last week, after I said I was changing parties, I voted against the budget.”

This was only one of Specter’s introductory displays of independence, which also included voting against a plan to help homeowners in bankruptcy court that was greatly desired by the leaders of his new party, and telling The New York Times that he hopes Republican Norm Coleman wins the Minnesota Senate seat. This is the election that is still unresolved except for the part in which Democrat Al Franken got more votes.

The amusing part, assuming you can see politics as funny, is that Coleman ended the race with more votes but then they started recounting under the auspices of the Democrats in control of voting in Minnesota. And, lo and behold, after every subsequent recount they always find that Franken actually got more votes than Coleman. If they keep recounting long enough, Franken will have won by more registered voters than there are in the state to begin with.

This seems wrong. Bucking your party ought to mean accepting the risk of punishment. After all, you did sign up with the team, which is supposed to work together and get things done. Unfortunately, sometimes the team will go places where a man or woman of good conscience cannot follow. And then you will stand alone, a Profile in Courage. And we will cheer.

But the bravery part is all about facing up to the consequences. Lieberman was outraged when the Democratic voters in Connecticut responded to his principled stand in favor of the war in Iraq with their principled decision to find a new candidate for his seat.

Honk if you have ever seen Gail stand up and cheer for a principled profile in courage. Gail runs with the pack and wouldn’t know courage if she saw it. Was Lieberman outraged, for instance, and did the Democrats in Connecticut reject him on principle? Uh, no, it seems he wasn’t and they did not. What Lieberman stood up to was a power play by the Democrats, and Gail saw nothing in that which represented courage to her, she is far more likely to stoop and kiss the rings or whatever else is offered by those in power than she is to cheer the principled. What Lieberman did was to take it out of the hands of the Party apparatchik and let the people choose...and they did. They chose him. The Party is only waiting for revenge, believe me, and not on the basis of principle.

When it comes to the Democrat Party, as they say, the principle has left the building.

On Thursday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. revealed to a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that "some of the detainees will be released," that others would be "put on trial" and that "some are going to be detained on a fairly extended basis" without disclosing where or how any of this will happen.

That got the attention of Maryland's Democratic Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, one of Guantanamo's harshest critics. She admonished Mr. Holder that she "would be very concerned" if she and other lawmakers were not consulted before detainees were brought to the United States.

Harry Reid won’t let nuclear waste be stored in Nevada at one of the world’s most closely studied places, so what makes you think Mikulski...or anyone else...is going to take Barack’s releasees from Guantanamo?

One of Powell’s more famous utterances was his rationale, after the 1991 Gulf War, for declining to involve the U.S. military in the Balkans: “We do deserts, we don’t do mountains.” Actually, by that stage, the U.S. barely did deserts. The first President Bush’s decision, at Powell’s urging, not to topple Saddam but to halt the coalition forces at the gates of Baghdad sent the world a message about American purpose whose consequences we live with to this day. As for the Kurds and Shiites to whom it never occurred that the world’s superpower would assemble a mighty coalition for the purpose of fighting half a war to an inconclusive conclusion, Saddam quickly took a bloody revenge: That’s an interesting glimpse of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Colin Powell’s much-vaunted “moderation.”

I often look at myself and wonder at how naïve I have been and probably still am. I would have voted for Powell as a Republican for president when his time came, but now I am surely glad that it did not.

And even though I am nominally a Republican, I always thought GHWB’s decision about Iraq was fatally flawed. Stupid.

Wars should never be fought to truces or cease-fires, history teaches us that; only unconditional victories. All of the unconditional victories have stood the test of time. Not one cease-fire ever has.

Consider this cooing profile of Secretary Powell from Todd Purdum in the New York Times back in 2002: “Mr. Powell’s approach to almost all issues — foreign or domestic — is pragmatic and nonideological. He is internationalist, multilateralist and moderate. He has supported abortion rights and affirmative action.”

So supporting “internationalism,” “multilateralism,” abortion, and racial quotas means you’re “moderate” and “nonideological”? And anyone who feels differently is an extreme ideologue?

What I think, actually, is that we’re looking at a man who now realizes that he could have been the first black president and blew it either because his wife told him not to do it or else he chickened out on his own. Unable to acknowledge either one, he’s stuck here he is, a footnote to history. A man who could have.