Things in Bloom

-- by Tom Phillips

A few years ago my pastor wife was visiting an old lady in hospice care, who posed a difficult question. She dreamed that she died, then woke up to find she apparently hadn't.

"How do you know when you're dead?" she asked.  The pastor couldn't answer.  According to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the most authoritative work on the subject, just as dreamers don't know they're dreaming, the dead don't know they're dead.

So let's take up an easier question.  How do you know when you're in your dotage?

Back in the 1960s, the respected art critic of the New York Times, John Canaday, was nearing the end of his long career.  One day, instead of an art review, he came up with a random article about his favorite Japanese restaurants.  He gave them funny awards, e.g. "Most Japanese Japanese Restaurant," and "Least Japanese Japanese Restaurant."   But my favorite was "Japanese Restaurant with Waitresses Most Resembling Flowers."  Ah, I thought, he's in his dotage.

And now, in mine, I can confirm that the symptoms include a fondness for Japanese restaurants with Japanese waitresses, and a benign obsession with flowers.

These days I take my smartphone/camera out for a morning walk, and click on the flowers that bloom in the spring.  In the category of "Flowers Most Resembling Japanese Waitresses," I would give the nod to magnolia blossoms.

What draws an old man to a spring blossom?

Both of us have but a short time to live.  And we like to live it in carefree beauty.  Jesus said, "Consider the lilies of the field.  They toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed like one of these."  Like the lilies of the field, we elderly ones have no gainful employment, we live off the land.  And yet, the Chinese say, there is nothing in the world so beautiful as a healthy, wise old man.

As for death, who knows?  We may be there already.  If we're dead, we're grateful for it.

If this is life, we can look at things in bloom.  As the poet said, "About the woodland I will go, to see the cherry hung with snow."

Copyright 2016 by Tom Phillips

My Hex on Exxon

by Tom Phillips

Sometime in the year 2000, I remember saying to my younger brother, “the world has improved.”  It was a spontaneous remark and it surprised me, considering that we'd been brought up in successive eras of doomsaying – World War Two, then the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation.  If that didn’t get us, there was always the “population bomb” that was going to make the planet uninhabitable. 

For a few years in the Reagan and Clinton eras, it seemed as though we had righted the ship. The Cold War was over, nuclear weapons were being mothballed and the threat of war was reduced to brush fires on the fringes of a New World Order.  Peace was paying dividends, and the national debt that was going to overwhelm us was actually shrinking.  For news, we had to make do with shark attacks and the president’s dallying with an intern. 

It was a window onto a future that looked brighter than we ever expected, but the window slammed down on September 11, 2001.  Since then we have been blundering our way through a Clash of Civilizations that is actually a mismatch, just as the Cold War was, and which will probably end, as the Cold War did, with a whimper and a default win for modern civilization. To some of us, the world seems to be on the verge of improving again.  

The Zen of Zero

-- By Tom Phillips

What is to be done?

On a busy shopping street in Japan last month, we passed a bank with a big sign in the window, advertising savings accounts -- with interest of one-tenth of one percent!  That's big money in Japan, where zero is the new normal.  And despite the best efforts of the Federal Reserve, it may be the new normal in the US.

Consider: the national rate of inflation in November was two-tenths of one percent per annum, entitling Social Security recipients to a cost-of-living adjustment of zero. The interest rate on my money market retirement account is actually negative, after fees -- the investment company raises it to .01 percent to avoiding "breaking the buck."

In the booming days of the 1950s and 60s, the Fed's job was to keep down the fires of inflation, which continued to rage through the 70s and up to the 1980s.  Then the Fed under Paul Volcker poured buckets of ice-cold water on the economy.  Inflation has never fully come back, and since the financial crisis of 2008, it's barely there.  Now the Fed's job is to fan the flames -- trying to generate a little heat -- up to what was previously the "normal" level of two to three percent.  But nothing works.  Even with trillions of dollars pumped into the money supply, inflation flat-lined in late 2015.

What's the matter?  Economists keep looking for things to return to normal --i.e. post-WW2 growth and inflation.  Apparently they can't see that there's something new under the sun, something so big that it weighs on economic growth like a millstone, getting heavier by the year.

I had to go to Japan to see it.  The problem is us -- the legions of us on the Road to Dotage.

Young Woman, Go North

by Tom Phillips

October in Siberia 

Flying from New York to Tokyo and back in late October, we looked down and saw endless stretches of uninhabited, frozen land – in northern Canada, Alaska, Siberia and Russia's Kamchatka peninsula. The topography was normal –  mountains and valleys, rivers of ice – but the weather was not suited to civilization.

Meanwhile we read in the New York Times that by the year 2100, the Persian Gulf may be too hot to support human life – that spending even a few hours outdoors would overtax our capacity to ventilate and hydrate our bodies.

What is to be done?  Amidst all the hand-wringing and doomsday scenarios, one notion keeps poking at my mind.    

Would it be wrong to suggest that as global warming increases, it will open up new areas for human habitation, even as it shuts down others?  It's too late to undo the effects of 150 years of industrialization. So we may have to do what humans have always done – migrate in search of greener pastures. Such pastures are already opening up – e.g. in Greenland, the ice-­capped continent that now has a growing season on its southern fringes.

Three of our daughters have already migrated to cooler climes – two to Seattle, one to the San Francisco Bay, where high ground and the natural air conditioning of the Pacific Ocean protect cities from excessive heats and flooding.

But why not go all the way? Twenty years ago, a fellow writer at CBS News announced she was quitting and taking off for Alaska.  Asked if she was looking for a job, Maureen Clark said -- No, I'm looking for an adventure.

A Google search reveals that she eventually got both – becoming a public affairs officer for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, writing and photographing the great outdoors of the biggest, most northern state.   

Commending such a step is not to minimize the damage and suffering that are inevitable from global warming, or to suggest that nothing needs to be done.  There is no easy solution for many people, particularly the poor in low-lying tropical countries.  But for the human race as a whole, we may have to move, or die.  

A hundred years from now, the Persian Gulf could be uninhabitable, and Florida will probably be under water.  So, why not beat the rush?  To paraphrase Horace Greeley, “Young Woman, Go North.” 

Or to quote Calvin and Hobbes:  Yukon Ho!

-- Copyright 2015 by Tom Phillips 

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Early-Morning Aristocracy

“An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”    H.D. Thoreau

“Tradesmen and domestics must use the freight elevator”   Sign in east-side apartment house

Morning Glories in Morningside Heights 

I get up early these days, partly because sleep is scarce in old age, but also because the hours around dawn are the best of the day, and I don’t want to miss anything.

From four to six, the city is as quiet as it ever is.  The breeze is fresh, the air is clean, a rare calm prevails.  And it's time to commune with the “early-morning aristocracy.” 

This little phrase occurred to me many years ago, riding the subway from the outer reaches of Brooklyn to a job in Manhattan that began at 5:30 a.m.  The subway car was full, but still quiet and calm.  All around me were sitting half-asleep, in various states of meditation, my fellow morning laborers: bakers, coffee-shop waitresses, horse-cab drivers, construction workers, nannies, food-cart vendors, garbage collectors, news writers, fishmongers, who knows what? They were up early so the city could get the running start it demands every day. 

Outdoors, other species predominate.  Pigeons have an early-morning dignity they lose when the sun rises higher.  Left to themselves, they strut and peck about the pavement, clearing the deck for the flood of pedestrians who will soon overrun it.  Dogs, wide awake, pull their walkers along.  The dominance is reversed after breakfast, when the dogs settle down for their long day’s nap, and the owners get about their affairs. 

Flowers preen as sunshine steals through the trees.  Morning glories climb the fence and open royal-hued reproductive organs.  Bees and butterflies oblige.

It’s all over by seven.  The coffee brewed, the pastries baked, the chairs set out, the news written, the ticker up and running, the garbage collected, the morning glories visited, the early-morning aristocracy yawns, and “dawn goes down to day.”   

Copyright 2015 by Tom Phillips

The Spoils of War

Recently I was a guest in a college journalism class where students were reading my book, "A Beginner's Life."  Among their questions was this:  "Did you ever get shot at?"  Well, sort of, I replied, but it's not in the book.  I was chagrined.  So I told them, very briefly, my story of the first Persian Gulf War, which I covered for the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.  Years ago I had written a chapter about it, but it wound up in the wastebasket.  It seemed just a bunch of typical "war stories," an excuse to brag that I was there.  Now I was kicking myself for trashing it.  So I went back and re-imagined it, and rewrote it, as follows: 

There is nothing in life so exhilarating, said Sir Winston Churchill, “than to be shot at, without result.”  

I couldn’t see that in my twenties, when I was of draft age and the Vietnam War was escalating.  I avoided the draft by accident – by the time it was reinstated in 1965, I was married and had a baby.  But I wanted no part of Vietnam.  When someone at CBS suggested I volunteer for the Saigon bureau, I wasn’t tempted.  I didn’t want to risk my 23-year-old life, or leave my fledgling family behind.

Twenty-six years later in 1991, the US was rushing troops into Saudi Arabia, following Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait.  Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was massing troops near the border of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and could easily resume his march of conquest, sweeping down through the nearly unpopulated, lightly defended desert kingdom.  The US was preparing to drive him back – out of Kuwait, away from Saudi Arabia and its huge American oil operations.  

By then I had a new family, and six children altogether, two of them under six.  But this time, I felt the urge.  I had survived nearly half a century, and was willing to risk the balance of my life on a good bet that I would come home safe, and war would be an incomparable adventure.   I’d be cautious, and not take any stupid risks. I just wanted to see.

As a journalist, I wanted to witness the kind of destructive power that shapes the world we live in.  There is nothing like a war to alter the course of history.  Developments that would happen over decades in peacetime, or never happen at all, happen within days or hours in a war.  War is history speeded up, news that breaks faster than you can write it.
        

As an egoist, I wanted the badge of honor that goes with being a war correspondent, the badge my father never earned.  In my mind at least, it’s what separates the real journalists from those who would prefer to write about the world from the safety of their desks.  I also had a morbid curiosity about the death, destruction, and danger of wartime.  I’d seen the aftermath in London as a child, and I’d been on the edge of violence in Tiananmen Square, but had never been in an actual war zone.  I wanted to feel the frisson of mortal fear.            

   
As a father, my feelings were mixed.  I didn’t want my family to worry about me, though I knew they would.  At the same time, I wanted my children to have a father they could look up to, not one they felt sorry for.  I felt sorry for my father because he felt sorry for himself.  He never did the things he really wanted to do, never became the journalist he wanted to be, largely because of his own timidity. I had inherited some of that timidity, but I wasn’t going to let it rule my life.  I didn't consult my wife beforehand, or ask permission.  One day I just screwed up my courage, walked into Tom Bettag’s office, and said: “I’d like to volunteer for duty in the war zone.”

A family man himself, Bettag would go anywhere for a story, but he never would have sent me into a war zone on his own.  He warned me on the spot that we might wind up in Baghdad with bombs falling around us.  I gulped when he said that, but the die was cast.  I stuck with my offer, and he accepted.

There Goes the Neighborhood

By Tom Phillips

When one has lived a long time in one place, any kind of change is worrisome.  Home is ideally the most stable part of your world, but all around, other people are messing with it, never asking your permission.  Morningside Heights, where our family has lived for 35 years, is in a continual process of change, and nothing new happens without a frisson of fear.  Even the plunge in the crime rate, which began in the 1990s and continues today, is cause for concern -- it's one of the factors that have driven real estate prices to astronomical heights, and brought in a whole new demographic and life-style.

Some day, we'll reach the tipping point where the old neighborhood is no longer recognizable.  And it may be just around the corner.  A block and a half from our house is rising an ultra-luxurious rental residence, a colossus of conspicuous consumption.  And it's rising on the very grounds of our most hallowed neighborhood institution, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.  They call it the Enclave.