Ron's View

Samuel Beer died. The Boston Globe had an obituary last week and the New York Times posted one at their website today.

Beer was a professor at Harvard, famous among undergraduates for years because of his course Soc. Sci. 2. Here’s how the Globe opens its obit:

Pumping his fist for emphasis as he paced at the front of a Harvard classroom, his thick reddish-brown hair and mustache a focal point for any student not already enraptured by the lecture, Samuel Beer offered undergraduates compelling arguments on both sides of thorny political issues as he taught a course known by its catalog abbreviation Soc. Sci. 2.

“Sam’s lectures were remarkable for their objectivity,” Melvin Richter, then a professor of political science at Hunter College at City University of New York, said in 2001 during a 90th birthday gathering at Harvard for Professor Beer. “Often students were completely convinced by the first set of views, only to find the second set equally persuasive.”

Professor Beer could be very persuasive, whether the audience was a student, a politician, or a historian in England. A professor emeritus at Harvard, where he taught for more than 35 years, Professor Beer died April 7 at his home in Washington, D.C., after his health failed swiftly in the past few weeks. He was 97 and divided his time between residences in Cambridge and Washington.

With Soc. Sci. 2, he influenced scores of political thinkers and policy makers, and counted among his teaching assistants Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger. Professor Beer also was well known for Western Thought and Institutions, a course he taught at Harvard for three decades that melded elements of political theory and comparative government, and which acolytes recalled as serving up history and political science in equal measures.

“He was larger than life, an extraordinary personality,” said Stanley Hoffman, the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser university professor at Harvard. “He had many lives. He had the life of a scholar and he had the life of a politician. He also was a sportsman, and one of his sports consisted of parachuting from planes, and he did that for a very long time. He didn’t give it up until one time, when he was not exactly a youngster, he twisted his ankle upon landing.”

Valued for his sharp intellect and discerning editing eye for graduate papers, Professor Beer had a presence that made him a force beyond the walls of Harvard. He formerly served as chairman of the political organization Americans For Democratic Action, and was an early vocal supporter in academia for the first US Senate campaign of Edward M. Kennedy.

I took Soc. Sci. 2 in my junior year. Read more…

Gary Sheffield hitting his 500th home run

Gary Sheffield hit his 498th and 499th career home runs last September 26th as a Detroit Tiger, but just before the start of the 2009 season a few weeks ago, the Tigers dropped him. The Mets signed him soon thereafter, and on Friday night he hit his 500th home run, becoming the 25th member of the 500 club. It’s still a fairly exclusive club, but everyone knows it ain’t what it used to be, and many blame steroids. Perhaps one should simply blame the passage of time.

In recent years, as each new member has entered the club, I’ve recalled how I once thought it would always be limited to a handful of players. I used to know every member and his home run total. Indeed, what I remember is when there were exactly four members. I thought of their home run totals as iconic, as fixed points in the universe. Ruth 714, Foxx 534, Williams 521, Ott 511. That’s it. No room for more. No need for more. I didn’t understand how the present becomes the past, or how quickly it becomes the past. But here we are, nearly 50 years later, and I don’t even try to remember the new iconic numbers. I did for a while. I can’t do it anymore. Read more…

Three weeks ago I had a post on the February 2007 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross to the CIA on “the Treatment of Fourteen ‘High Value Detainees’ in CIA Custody.” In the post, I linked to and quoted from Mark Danner’s article about the report in the April 9 New York Review of Books. A week ago I began to see references to Danner’s follow-up article, but I preferred to read it in the print edition of the New York Review rather than online, so I waited until my copy finally came, two days ago. I’ve not finished the article yet, but let me once again provide a link, this to Danner’s second article, in the April 30 issue. And the New York Review has posted the report itself, here.

As we await tomorrow’s decision by the Obama administration on how much to make public from three 2005 Justice Department memoranda providing legal guidance on CIA interrogations, I’ll quote just one excerpt from the second Danner article.

It is a testament as much to the peculiarities of the American press—to its “stenographic function” and its institutional unwillingness to report as fact anything disputed, however implausibly, by a high official—that the former vice-president’s insistence that these interrogations were undertaken “legally” and “in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles” continues to be reported without contradiction, and that President Bush’s oft-repeated assertion that “the United States does not torture” is still respectfully quoted and, in many quarters, taken seriously. That they are so reported is a political fact, and a powerful one. It makes it possible to contend that, however adamant the arguments of the lawyers “on either side,” the very fact of their disagreement makes the legality of these procedures a matter of partisan political allegiance, not of law.

I hope Obama and Attorney General Holder release the memos in full, without redaction.

Doug White and the King Air 200

The last three Septembers, we have flown from Boston to Nantucket on Cape Air’s Cessna 402s. They are twin propeller aircraft with a single pilot and a single cabin. The passengers are distributed according to weight, with one passenger getting to sit next to the pilot in the co-pilot position. Gail did that three falls ago. I have flown in the seat just behind the co-pilot twice, affording an excellent view of the control panel and all the actions the pilot takes. It’s kind of fun, but I have yet to make the flight without thinking about what would happen if the pilot had some kind of attack in mid-flight and could no longer fly the plane.

Well, as you may have read, something just like this happened on Sunday, but in a private airplane. Doug White and his family were returning from Marco Island, Florida to Monroe Louisiana aboard a King Air 200 after attending his brother’s funeral. Like the Cessna, the King Air 200 has two engines. White was in the co-pilot’s seat, with the family behind, when the pilot suddenly died a few minutes after takeoff. Fortunately, White had some flight experience, all in a single-engine Cessna, mostly years earlier, but he had resumed flying in January. You can read more about what happened next at the Airplane Owners and Pilots Association website. Better yet, when you have some free time, listen to the audio recording of White’s conversation with the air traffic controller. (You’ll find a link to the audio at the bottom of the webpage linked to above.) White is simply amazing to listen to. I started listening yesterday afternoon and couldn’t stop. While I was at it, I opened a new tab in my browser so I could go to google maps and get a map of the Fort Myers, Florida region, including the airport. This allowed me to follow (or guess at) White’s position as he talks to the controller.

The best reason to fly United Airlines is channel 9 on their audio, on which one can listen to the air traffic control conversations. I love it. And I always root for our pilot. The best parts are when he or she talks or is given a command by the controller. What’s so stunning about White is that he sounds just like the veteran United pilots. Completely in control.

See also yesterday’s blog post by the Atlantic’s James Fallows, which is where I learned about this recording, and a follow-up Fallows post just a few minutes ago. I couldn’t say it better than Fallows in concluding the second post: “If Tom Wolfe were re-writing the intro to The Right Stuff, which so memorably begins with evocation of the slow, confident drawl of airline pilots who can’t be ruffled by anything, he could do worse than to recreate this recording of a man landing an airplane he had never flown before, while returning from his brother’s funeral, with his loved ones aboard.”

Dave Schulz, Philadelphia Flyers, 1974-75

I’m trying to remember every morning to turn to the Wall Street Journal’s new sports page so I can see what their daily feature article is about. I remembered today. It’s about hockey fights, how they used to be an essential tool for winning teams, but how in recent years, thanks in part to rule changes, the Detroit Red Wings have achieved success without fighting.

This isn’t exactly news. But what got my attention was the writer’s strange way of describing hockey years. This is a confusing matter, since hockey seasons start in October and run into May or June. To be accurate one must speak of the 2008-2009 season, or the 1974-1975 season. Reed Albergotti wrote, “Fights have always broken out during physical hockey games, but in the 1960s it became a strategy. The Boston Bruins and Philadelphia Flyers used intimidation to win Stanley Cups between 1969 and 1975.” At first I thought he was confused or failed to do his research. After all, neither team won the Stanley Cup in 1969.

I was a close follower of hockey in those years, a Rangers fan from childhood through the 1972-1973, and then a converted Bruins fan over the course of the 1973-1974 season. This is the same time that I also converted from fanatical Knicks fan to Celtics fan. For the four years that I lived in Cambridge as an undergraduate, 1969 to 1973, I remained an ardent New York fan. But in September 1973, I remained in Cambridge, started graduate school, moved from university housing to an apartment, and began to feel like a local resident. I started reading the Boston Globe, started watching local sports coverage on the evening news, and realized that the hated Celtics John Havlicek were interesting guys, as were the equally hated Bruins Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito. In fact, though I chose to deny it for years, Bobby Orr really was the greatest player in hockey history, and my bull-headed devotion to the Rangers got in the way of my appreciating greatness in my midst. This is one of the great regrets of my life. My sports fan life anyway.

The Bruins won the Stanley Cup in 1970, at the end of the 1969-1970 season, and again in 1972. And in 1974, now that I was finally a Bruins fan, I was confident they would win it again. But they didn’t. Something odd happened. The Flyers of Bobby Clarke and Bernie Parent, the Broad Street Bullies, got in the way and beat them. This bordered on the unimaginable, not unlike the Jets’ Super Bowl victory over the Colts a few years earlier. An original-six hockey team had never lost a Stanley Cup final to one of the expansion teams. But it happened. And to show it was no fluke, the Flyers won again in 1975. Okay, so how does one describe that? I would have thought one might say that the Bruins and Flyers won Stanley Cups between 1970 and 1975, not 1969 and 1975. On first reading, I found Albergotti’s wording jarring. But before I ran to my computer to send an email, I realized he might have started with 1969 since that’s when the season started that culminated with the Bruins’ 1970 Stanley Cup. I decided to let it go.

Until I came to this sentence near the end: “The 2007 Ducks … won the Stanley Cup in 2007 with a league-high 71 fights.” Huh? Why aren’t they the 2006-2007 Ducks? And in what other year would the 2007 Ducks have won the Stanley Cup? Yet again one must wonder what happened to copy editing.

Restaurant version, that is. It’s a rare Wednesday when the restaurant reviewed by the New York Times gets zero stars. Today was such a Wednesday, so Frank Bruni’s review of the new restaurant Charles in Greenwich Village is worth a look. Apparently, Charles takes hard-to-get to a new level. The review is written in a cutesy way as a letter from a fan of hard-to-get restaurants to Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair editor and part owner of the Waverly Inn, another hard-to-get restaurant. The following passage describes some of Charles’ innovations.

And it was all so enigmatic: the nonsensical name (it’s not on Charles, or owned by a Charles), the lack of any sign out front.

Actually, there was and is a sign, but it’s for the fusty French artifact that used to have the space, Les Deux Gamins. How genius is that? When I went the other night, two people who’d apparently been fans of that restaurant were walking out the door looking exasperated, and they were muttering: “It’s some totally different place now. Who knew?”

… While Waverly doesn’t answer its phone, Charles doesn’t even have one, at least not one that’s published. To get a table I would send an e-mail message, and some unseen, unknown, disembodied reservations deity would write back. It was like I was in a “Bourne” movie, arranging a secret meet. I was the Joan Allen character, but with a better colorist.

I haven’t yet told you the wildest part, which is the restaurant’s windows — so Salinger, so Garbo. They’re covered in old newspapers and blue tape, as if the space is under construction or even condemned, and they’ve been that way for so long that when I paused on the sidewalk the other night to read the fine print, I learned that Sarah Palin had resuscitated the McCain candidacy.

See the photo above for a sense of how elusive the restaurant is, and see also the slide show that accompanies the review. As for the food, here’s more from the review: “The lamb kebabs should be called tartare. That’s how close to raw they were. The salmon, supposedly pan-seared, was more like pan-spurned, by which I mean it was nearly raw, too. Charles is as stingy with heat as it is with light. Maybe it’s saving on utilities.”

Angel Cabrera, 2009 Masters Champion

Three nights ago, following the third round of the Masters golf tournament, I wrote a post with the title Kenny Perry’s Masters? In the post, I described seeing Kenny close up at the 2002 US Open. I also mentioned how various events like Easter dinners have gotten in the way of my watching the final round in recent years. I was going to leave it at that, but now I realize maybe I should answer the question. The answer is in the title. Nope. It wasn’t.

Do I have to say more or can I leave it at that?

I found the closing minutes of the Masters almost unbearably painful. This isn’t unusual. The flip side of watching the most exciting Masters victories is experiencing somebody’s pain. We can go back to 1998 for instance, when Mark O’Meara’s stirring putt to win on 18 came at the expense of David Duval and Fred Couples. Duval had a three-stroke lead just a few holes earlier and was about to make good on his status as the best young American, a year after Tiger’s magnificent first Masters victory. And Freddie also looked like the winner at one point, adding to his 1992 victory. But no, Mark O’Meara won and broke their hearts. That’s how it often is. When I hear the famous CBS Masters theme music, I feel heartbreak. I associate the music with the best televised sporting event of the year, but also with the blue mood I’m in when the music closes out the broadcast every April, late on a Sunday afternoon. Someone won. Greatness achieved. And others had it slip from their grasps.

Here’s what I wrote a couple of hours ago to a friend who wondered what “elegiac prose [I] would pen about its dramatic finish.”

I was too depressed to come up with any prose at all. My habit in recent years during the major championships has been to watch the Golf Channel coverage each evening on Live from the Masters [or US Open or whatever], with all the post-round interviews of key players, analysis by Golf Channel experts, etc. Their conversations are of the highest quality. But I couldn’t bear it Sunday. I didn’t even watch the giving of the green jacket in the Butler Cabin. This may also have had something to do with my having already ignored our Easter guests all afternoon, and my brother-in-law’s presumptuous changing of the channel from golf to the Mariner game the moment Cabrera won, but even if I were home alone, I don’t think I could have watched. I did write a post on my blog Saturday night about Kenny Perry, but I haven’t returned to the subject.

I thought they were overdoing the Woods/Mickelson thing for a while, but by the time Phil got his 6th birdie on the front nine, I thought maybe this really was the story. And then there was that moment when Tiger and Phil were on 15 staring at eagle putts that would have tied Phil for the lead and put Tiger one back. It was amazing how that story disappeared entirely by the time the original leading three came down the stretch, reasserting their positions as the ones to fight it out. A day to remember, if I didn’t feel so bad. And it’s not just that I wanted Perry to win. If Cabrera beat him with birdies, so be it. I just hated how Perry lost. Bogey bogey finish, then the crazy bad luck (for Perry) on the first playoff hole, when Cabrera should have had a bogey or worse, in which case Perry would have won, then another bogey.

Well, it’s hardly news that the golf gods are cruel. We see it every year. That’s what makes the majors so great and painful to watch, as players’ careers are defined in front of our eyes, and theirs. Now Perry has two majors that will torture him forever.

I have long believed that when including a list of nouns in a sentence — planes, trains, and automobiles for example — one should separate them by commas, as I just did. I know there is no agreement on this, nor need there be. And I am reminded of this daily by the New York Times, since their style manual insists that the comma before the word ‘and’ be omitted. My preference for inserting the comma derives from the application of two principles. The first is that sometimes the lack of a comma creates ambiguity, ambiguity that can be resolved by the simple insertion of the comma. Now, one could argue that an appropriate style is to omit the comma except when the possibility of ambiguity arises, in which case the comma can be inserted. This is where my second principle comes in, one that I am no longer as wedded to as I used to be. This is the principle of consistency. Given a stylistic choice, decide on one and stick to it, at least within a given document. The combination of these two principles leads one to insert the comma always, no matter what. Yet, as I say, I have begun to soften on the application of the consistency principle, largely because it can conflict with another worthy principle, the principle of minimalism. In this case, minimalism would dictate that if you don’t need something for clarity, omit it.

With this as prologue, I turn to a post by Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log last week. It gives the most wonderful illustration of the dangers of comma omission. In the example he describes, from the Economist, two different comma omissions occur in the same sentence. One is of the type I just described. The other, well, I’ll let Professor Pullum describe it:

When I write a clause that begins with a clause-containing adjunct, I generally put a comma after the adjunct. The comma in that first sentence illustrates my practice. Some writers studiously avoid such a comma (sometimes my style is known as “heavy” punctuation and the other style as “light”). I also like the so-called “Oxford comma”: I write Oregon and Washington, but I don’t write California, Oregon and Washington. I use an extra comma and write California, Oregon, and Washington.

I couldn’t wish for a better illustration of why I like my own policies than the following sentence, which I saw in The Economist last week (April 4, p. 11). It goes the other way on both of my policies, and it’s disastrously misunderstandable in my opinion:

“Traders and fund managers got huge rewards for speculating with other people’s money, but when they failed the parent company, the client and ultimately the taxpayer had to pay the bill.”

Let’s strip it down to the bare essentials for discussion, reducing the part I’m concerned with to this:

When they failed the parent company, the client and the taxpayer had to pay.

The problem is that I found myself reading the parent company as the direct object of failed (wrong; what was intended was that I should read failed as intransitive), and then that left the client and the taxpayer to be the subject of had to pay (wrong again; the intention was to have the parent company, the client and the taxpayer in that role).

Under the tutelage of Professor Pullum and his colleagues at Language Log, I have become less of a prescriptivist than I once was. But as Pullum notes in concluding his post, sometimes prescribing is a good thing: Read more…

Cherry tree in our backyard

It’s Sunday evening. Easter Sunday. The final day of the Masters. We had a dozen people at the house this afternoon for dinner. Had the weather cooperated, we would have sat outside, but it rained heavily through the afternoon, so we sat inside, which meant there was no attraction competing with the golf. And so I was able to watch the Masters final round more or less continuously. This would have been a good thing if it weren’t so depressing in the end. I didn’t really think Kenny Perry would win, but there he was, two up with two holes to go, and I allowed myself to believe. Had Cabrera finished with two birdies and then another birdie in the playoff to win, that would have been special. But to see Kenny bogey the last two holes instead and then stumble on the second playoff hole was painful. Instead of spending the evening watching the Golf Channel analysis and the press interviews, as I normally would after a major, I just walked away, had dessert, and haven’t looked back.

The rain stopped a while ago. The sun came out, though now it’s setting. Our cherry tree is at its peak. The magnolia is just about there. Flowers are blooming. And so, despite the fading light, I took some photos. An example is above, with three more below.

View toward 9th tee from just outside backyard

Emma with her catnip, back patio

Master balcony, through cherry tree

I’m talking college hockey. NCAA national championship, earlier this evening, number one ranked Boston University versus Miami University in the championship game. A painful, dramatic, beautiful game. And a game whose live broadcast we had to miss. I already noted a few posts ago that we missed today’s Masters golf third-round coverage because we attended a wedding. We left it early, after the ceremony but before the party, because we had a memorial service to attend back up here in Seattle. We had just enough time to stop at home and watch the final pair putt out on the golf course, then switch to the hockey game in its second minute before leaving for the memorial. As it turns out, we left the memorial and got to our car exactly as the game ended. But we did record it.

Why do I care? A brief explanation.
Read more…