A Place to Lie Down

-- By Tom Phillips

New York is a great place to make money, and art, friends, and trouble -- a place to write and talk, to compete in the marketplace of ideas.  For all these reasons, it's not a great place to die.  To die in New York -- this is my fantasy -- is to feel like a loser, a dropout, a runner falling by the wayside while others speed on.

Most of my working career was spent at the New York headquarters of CBS.  There, high-powered executives duked it out to become president of this or that division, and ultimately the whole company.  The game was to destroy your enemies and cultivate your allies, until the winner stood atop the mountain, the jewel they called the Tiffany Network.  There, of course, he became the target of vicious attacks until he too fell by the wayside.

Only two men ever survived at the top -- William Paley, the company founder, and the current kingpin, Sumner Redstone.  And the price of their survival was the delusion of immortality.  A biographer quoted Paley in his late eighties, in failing health, demanding of a nurse: "Why do I have to die?"

Redstone goes further.  According the The New York Times, this 93-year-old bare-knuckle billionaire -- though he can barely stand up or speak -- plans to live forever.  This is the premise of his fight to keep control of the company.

I was never president of anything bigger than our co-op apartment building, and while that job failed to kill me, it did not grant the illusion of immortality.  Life will end -- I just don't want to feel like a failure when it does.  So I'm looking for a place where dying is part of life.  Lest my friends despair or my enemies exult -- I'm not expecting to die, or even move, any time  soon.  Still, at 75, one needs a destination.

Ali and Me

--  By Tom Phillips

Muhammad Ali, 1942 - 2016

Muhammad Ali and I were born one day apart -- January 17 and 18, 1942 -- and I always felt a close kinship with him.

The difference, of course, is that he was the greatest, the champion of the world.  Not once but twice, he defied predictions by beating the supposedly invincible heavyweight king.  Both Sonny Liston and George Foreman had devastating knockout punches.  But both were slow of foot and hand.  Ali was a heavyweight who moved like a flyweight and boasted of his insect instincts:  "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

He was a vicious, slashing puncher  -- "I whup 'em so bad they call me cruel," he said --  who sacrificed his heavyweight title for peace.  "I ain't got nothing against them Viet Cong," was his protest when the US military tried to draft him during the Vietnam war.  And even in the ring, he showed that you can win a round without striking a blow.

I saw him in action twice, the first time training for his title defense against Zora Folley in 1967.   Sparring with Jimmy Ellis, a heavyweight contender, Ali dropped his hands to his sides, danced, ducked and dodged for a full three-minute round, flicking his head just enough to avoid a barrage of leather.  Ellis never touched him.  

He did the same against Ken Norton in 1976, at Yankee Stadium.  At age 34 he was fighting mostly flat-footed, but in the final, 15th round, he came out and danced for the full three minutes, jabbing and running, displaying his mastery of the ring.  The judges gave him a razor-close unanimous decision.  Norton thought he was robbed, left the ring cursing and crying.  But I agreed with the judges, and it was the fifteenth round that sealed the decision.

Some people thought of Ali as a great strategist, or gave the credit to his trainer Angelo Dundee.  But I always felt he was making it up as he went, looking to Allah for inspiration.

The rope-a-dope was his ultimate piece of defensive wizardry.  Dancing didn't work against heavyweight champ George Foreman in Zaire, in 1974.  Fighting in a cramped 19-foot ring, Foreman was advancing relentlessly, cutting off Ali's escape routes.  So he backed up against the ropes, laying out with his head out over the apron.  With Dundee screaming at him to get off the ropes, he covered up and let Foreman flail away, absorbing thunderous blows to the arms and ribs, taunting the champ:  "You disappoint me, George!"  Ali knocked out the exhausted Foreman in the eighth.  After the fight, he said "staying on the ropes is a beautiful place for a heavyweight.  When you make him shoot his best punches and he can't hurt you, you know you're going to win."

Of all Ali's spontaneous aphorisms, this is my favorite:  "On the ropes is a beautiful place for a heavyweight."  Boxing is a brutal sport, and probably should be banned.  But it never will be, because a boxing match is an incomparable piece of theater -- not an imitation of life, but life itself, with all its glory and disgrace.

-- Copyright 2016 by Tom Phillips

I Go Pogo

-- By Tom Phillips

It wasn't on my bucket list, but it should have been.  The Okefenokee Swamp was a part of my childhood -- I felt I knew the place, though I had only a dim idea of where it was, until we passed right by it last week, driving from Jacksonville to a small college in south Georgia, where a friend was running a writers' workshop.  By the side of US Highway One was a sign pointing to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.  So we had to go.

I knew it from my childhood because Okefenokee was the cartoon home of Pogo Possum, Albert the Alligator, a feather-brained pontificating Owl, a Porky-pine, and a turtle named Churchy la Femme, all characters in a comic strip that was politically over my head, but had humor enough for a smart 12-year-old.

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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