Tag Archives: corona

Goodbye, Corona*

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A few days ago someone asked me whether our children will ever be able to imagine a world without corona virus. In response, I told him about an American lady who has two children. One nine, the other eight. Neither of them is able to remember the pre-corona world. For them, as for as many as a billion others of similar age, life with the “pandemic” is normal.

Being almost 76 years old, I can remember some things many others have forgotten—if, indeed, they knew them in the first place. Back in 1980 I spent two months in Washington, DC, where I lived not far from Capitol Hill. Entering the Library of Congress, which I did almost every day, security was practically nonexistent. They checked your briefcase on the way out—you might have stolen a couple of books. But never, never, on the way in. Nor was there any question of having to put your things away in some locker, etc.

The same applied to other buildings. Right next to the Library is the House of Congress. Being a dedicated jogger, I used to run the stairs up and down almost every afternoon. Right at the top were the doors—which yes, you guessed it, were completely unguarded. No previous appointment with a Congressman (or staff member) needed. No telephone numbers to be called, IDs to be presented. No one to frisk you or check your bag. Believe it or not, all this even applied to the Pentagon where, at that time, I was a fairly frequent visitor. Four decades later I am no longer certain just how it worked. I do, however, remember that you could enter the building on your own without either going through a magnetometer—that only came some years later—or being assigned an escort.

Fast forward to the present. The Library of Congress is not a terrorist’s priority target, or so I would think. As to the other abovementioned buildings, though, anyone trying to enter them without following the proper procedures first would be quickly arrested at best and shot dead at worst. The same is true at airports and countless other public buildings across the country, which have been turned into veritable fortresses. In many cases even schools and clinics are not exempt. And yet we live with this kind of security. Not only do we live with it but, having long forgotten its origin, we take it for granted. So much so that, should it be suddenly lifted, some of us might feel surprised, annoyed, or even frightened.

Now let’s look at it from the other end of the question. Sooner or later this pandemic—which, by the way, so far has killed fewer than 1 in 1,000 of the planet’s human population, hardly enough to make a real demographic difference—will go away just as all previous ones did. Whether due to natural circumstances or changing habits or medical advances or some combination of all three, who can say? To be sure, some of the changes it did bring about will stay, at least for a time. Fewer and smaller crowded indoor meetings, perhaps. More people working from home and, as a result, a rise in the prices of large houses and apartments as opposed to those of smaller ones; that extra bedroom is going to come in just handy. More online, as opposed to ordinary, shopping. A little less traffic, commuter traffic in particular, leading to less crowded roads and a modest decline in gasoline prices. Less air pollution, especially in the cities. More parents who prefer homeschooling for their offspring. More—even more—government interference in people’s lives, including their right, or lack of it, to do with their bodies as they please. An increase in the size, power, and, not least, cost of the medical establishment.

However, the spread and eventual decline of corona is only one out of a vast number of processes that shape social life. As time passes, telling them apart so as to determine the impact of each one will become increasingly difficult, indeed impossible. As time passes, too, memories of the old normal will fade. If only because more and more people will experience the new normal as normal, normalcy will return.

Albeit that it will not be the same.

* Thanks to Prof. Sofia Simitzi, from the University of Ioannina, whose email, coming out of nowhere, inspired this post.

The General in General

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I’ve just learnt that the new German government is preparing to put a former Bundeswehr general (he used to command a tank brigade) in charge of the country’s COVID-19 Crisis Staff. As a fairly well known military historian, it has been my good (or bad?) fortune to meet quite some generals in many of the world’s countries where I was invited to speak. Germany included. So when my editor, Andreas Rosenfelder, asked me to do a short article about generals—a sort of Jungian analysis of the architype, I suppose—I jumped at the opportunity.
Some members of the species I met were polite, thoughtful, soft-spoken and possessed of a fine sense of humor. As, for example, the late Colin Powell, who during the first Gulf War served as Chief of the Joint Chief of Staffs and later became President Bush Jr.’s secretary of state, did. Others, who in this essay will remain unnamed, were unpleasant and even offensive. At least one was a real bastard. Perhaps that was because, at the time we met, he had just been told that, contrary to his expectations, the post he was then holding would be his last. Too much of a roughneck, not sufficiently good as a diplomat, people said. Understandably, he was in a bad mood.
To generalize from this, on day X you are a great man. With thousands and even tens of thousands of soldiers obeying your orders and a staff that laughs at every joke you make. One general told me that, before he was promoted, he did not know what a good sense of humor he had. If you live on base, on day X+1 everyone can watch you as, having retired, you are evicted from your nice government-owned quarters. Trailed by your wife, you find yourself carrying your belongings to a waiting van. Some onlookers, especially those who took your place, enjoy the spectacle. But for you it is not fun.
Generals I met tended to have several things in common. First, they had big egos—they have to. Second, many of them look down on their civilian opposite numbers. In Germany in the bad old days before 1945, General Staff officers sometimes referred to the foreign ministry as The Idiot House. Not always without reason, I should add. One former Israeli general, a bona fide genius in fields such as math, computers and operations research, told me more or less the same about the Knesset of which, following his retirement, he was briefly a member. Only to run for his life as soon as he could.
Third, though there are exceptions (with, at their head, Helmut von Moltke Sr.) very few generals are scholarly types. I even suspect that the reason why some of them embarked on a military career was precisely because they thought, often mistakenly, that it would not involve them in much reading and writing. Some went so far as to express their contempt for scribblers such as myself. But not all. I vividly remember an evening I spent at Camberley, England, the base where the British Army’s Staff College was located. It being dark and foggy, like some figure out of a Brothers Grimm tale I lost my way. Blindly, I wandered about the base until I saw a light. I went up, and knocked at the door. It opened and I found myself standing in front of the commander of the Army’s officer education system, General Sir Charles Waters.
It was winter and, instead of shoes, he was wearing white socks. He recognized me and asked me to come in. He sat me down, gave me a glass of sherry, and pointed to the eight books he was reading at the same time—if memory serves me right, most of them about nonmilitary subjects. Then he told me that his next job would be that of commander in chief, British Army, Northern Ireland (I think this was in 1989, and the struggle with the IRA terrorists was still ongoing). In this post, he said, he would try to make sure that as few people as possible would die. On both sides. I thought then, and think now, that it was a very sensible approach indeed. As became clear some years later when, during the watch of another British general I knew, Sir Rupert Smith, a peace agreement was signed.
Fourth, given how rapidly complex modern technology changes, generals are used—as they have to be–to dealing with things they do not understand. Is that the reason why Germany’s new government is considering General Carsten Breuer for the job? Makes you wonder.
There is only one specific drawback of the disorder and the pill, which is that one, cannot really get over the problem completely from their life by the use of uk cialis . This is downtownsault.org levitra online sales true about everything, including driving. Eight of his twenty years, he served as the San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs’ Association President; bettering work related conditions in the Sheriff’s Department, representing deputies in work related incidents, contract negotiating, changing the employee status in the levitra generic cheap charter and elevating deputy sheriff’s status in the community. Adolescence to Age best price on viagra 40 When you are young or an old adult, all men need sexual stamina and libido. Fifth, my favorite generals are Brits. They tend to be more relaxed and more civilized than either American or Israeli ones. German generals are also OK—except that, as one of them once said, they and the army in which they serve are part of “a broken nation.” Wrong if they do, and wrong if they don’t. No wonder the Bundeswehr smells like a mixture of bureaucracy and political correctness. Please excuse me for existing, is what they say. The higher one gets, the more true that is.
There are also a few female generals. A close friend of mine, himself a former general, prefers them to male ones. Why? Because some of them have nice legs. Much better than beer bellies, he says
Here are some other considerations that people may find interesting.
First, generals are used to move from one job to another (starting with Napoleon, in all modern armies, officers, to gain promotion, are rotated between commanding units, staff work, and training).
Second, they tend to be good organizers. As, for example, Leslie Groves, the general who ran the Manhattan Project, was.
Third, they tend to be very hard workers. As a rule modern armies, with the American one at their head, do not tolerate layabouts. If there is no work to be done, sure as hell they will create it. Neither Kutusov, who commanded the Tsar’s armies against Napoleon in 1812, nor “Pere” Joffre, who saved France from the 1914 German invasion, would have made it today.
Fourth generals, assigned to a civilian job, may do very well. As, for example, Dwight Eisenhower did. Or take two of my own country’s generals, Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon. Rabin played a crucial part in the great Israeli victory of June 1967; later he became a good prime minister. Sharon was perhaps the greatest warrior Israel ever produced, and he too turned out to be a good and courageous prime minister. By contrast Ehud Barak, a protégé of Rabin’s and a superb soldier (special forces), made a less than mediocre one.
Finally, never forget that generals have the hardest job of all. To wit, sending men to their death. America’s general George Patton was not exactly known for his delicate feelings. Yet on one occasion, visiting the wounded in hospital, he broke down and said that, if only he had been a better general, these poor people would not have been where they were. Even if the story is fake, which it may well be, still it shows what being a general is really like.
Briefly, generals are a tribe of their own. There is no saying what a general may do; in that respect they are much like the rest of us. To repeat, I do not know why the German Government chose General Breuer for the job. So all I can say is, good luck.

Carpe Diem

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Carpe diem, my grandmother (1894-1986) used to say. With corona making life hard for hundreds of millions if not billions around the world, I thought it would be appropriate to concentrate on a few of the good things by which I, and hopefully a great many others, are surrounded. Such as have always existed and, let’s hope, will return in full force once this nightmare is over. As, either because of medical advances or because we will get used to it, sooner or later it will be.

1. A good meal with family and friends. I am no gourmet. I dislike the kind of people who boast of being able to distinguish between fifty kinds of wine, and I do not particularly like restaurants. After a few days, even the best ones—not seldom, particularly the best ones—get on my nerves. Especially Israeli ones, which tend to play loud music, making it impossible to hear oneself and others think. Fortunately Dvora is as good a cook as they come. She also keeps experimenting, meaning that the food is never boring. Imagine a sunny winter morning or a cool summer evening here near Jerusalem, some 2,200 feet above sea level. Imagine a balcony looking out over a small but carefully kept and beautiful garden. A small group of family and friends, perhaps accompanied by some children, gathers. A bottle of wine is passed around, making everyone feel slightly—but only slightly—tipsy. As Herman Melville is supposed to have said, anyone who has that can feel like an emperor.

2. Music. When I was six or seven years old my mother tried to teach me to play the piano. I did not want to learn and she desisted, but not before telling me I would be sorry. In this she was right. Following my father, my tastes in music are mostly Western and classical, running from Church music (both Gregorian and Eastern Orthodox) through the Renaissance (Monteverdi and Palestrina; as sweet as honey, both of them) through the Baroque (Bach, Handel, Vivaldi) and the nineteenth century (Beethoven, Schubert. Wagner) to the years around 1900 (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov). But occasionally I also enjoy listening to Chinese music, Arabic music, and popular Israeli music. Two favorites that do not really fit into any of these categories are the Carmina Burana and the Misa Criolla.

To conclude this section, two additional comments. First, my son, Eldad, gave me a set of good speakers for my computer: they are one of the best presents I ever got. Let me take this opportunity to say, once again, thank you, Eldad. Second, our next door neighbor, a lady in her early sixties, has decided to take up the piano and is plinking away. I cannot say it, but hats off nevertheless. 

3. Art. Not everyone can be a Michelangelo, a Bach, or a Sophocles. Creating beauty, the kind of beauty that wills survive for centuries, is something reserved for the very few. One in ten million who tried, I’d say. Such being the case, all that is left to me is to enjoy the art of others; particularly painting, sculpture, architecture, and design. My tastes run form the ancient Greeks to the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century (de Hooch, Cuyp, Vermeer, Rembrandt) all the way through Biedermeier—for me, a recent discovery I made during a brief visit to Warsaw a few years ago—the German Romantics and the Impressionists to Picasso and Fernando Botero. Nor will I miss a good show of Chinse, or, Indian, or Islamic, art. Flea markets are a joy to attend. Old posters, based on the history of the period in which they were created, are often wonderful. However, over the years I have come to dislike abstract art. Judging by the number of visitors I meet in the galleries, I am not the only one.

Normally I visit museums with Dvora, who herself is an accomplished painter. For those of you who do not know, looking at pictures in the company of a painter is a unique experience. Most people, including myself, tend to focus on what they see; the sea, say, as Painted by Turner, or the human body as presented by Rodin. Dvora, on the other hand, asks how the artists achieved the effect he did. To do so she comes so close to the painting that her nose is practically in it. How many times did she not alert the guard who came running!

4. Sport. Truth to say, I, was not born with the sportsman’s talents. In fact so bad was I that the coach who, sixty years ago, taught me to play tennis, a very nice man incidentally, later told me that, on seeing how clumsy I was, he had considered recommending that I take up another sport! Later I spent thirty-five years of my life long distance running up and down the hills surrounding Jerusalem. Rugged terrain, I can tell you. The kind that teaches you what determination is all about. Feeling one’s body go on automatic, so to speak. Floating in the air, as it were, and one’s thoughts freely fluttering about—there is nothing like it. Unfortunately my knees have long forced me to stop running. That was over twenty years ago, and I still miss it. But I do enjoy walking. And swimming in lakes, of course.

Even though these are not scientifically proven, they definitely deserve an honorable mention: Stress Food allergies Hormone changes (like menopause, for example) Genetics Many cases develop after gastroenteritis (stomach flu) Poor diet (processed, high sugar foods) As you can see, many of these Irritable Bowel Syndrome causes constipation symptoms but also alternates with diarrhea. cipla viagra online Apart from tablets, a patient can use the simplest cheap viagra from india form of genuine drug if getting issues to swallow a pill. It is a biologically active to the most gram-positive and gram-negative infections including Staphylococcus aureus and viagra without prescription canada Streptococcuspyogenes, and also other kinds of streptococci. This helps to generic levitra online ensure that the most important concepts are driven home and that your teen learns all of the safe and effective driving techniques the course is designed to teach. 5. Scholarship. For as long as I can remember myself I have always been a bookworm. If I had a great aim in life, it was Rerum causas cognoscere, to understand the causes of things. Probably not with success; looking back, I often think that I know and understand fewer things now than I did at the time I first gained consciousness of myself. I do not think I have made any great discoveries.

How these things work in the natural sciences I do not claim to know at first hand. In the humanities and the social sciences, though, practically everything has been said before by someone at some time at some place; with the result that making such discoveries is, in one sense, next to impossible. But the subjective feeling of having understood, or feeling one has understood, something one had never thought about before—that is an experience the quest for which is worth spending a lifetime at.

6. Nature. The expanse of a field, reaching far away into the horizon. A forest, dark and mysterious. A lofty mountain, enveloped in the kind of silence you only get where there are no people around. A lake, shimmering in the sun. The sea. The eternally changing, all-powerful, sea. It is enough to make you want to weep.

7. Love. It has been defined countless times by countless different people. My own favorite definition is as follows: love is when one’s beloved shortcomings make one laugh. As, for instance happens whenever Dvora sees me with my shirt buttoned the wrong way, smiles, and starts making fun of me. Another definition is that love is trust so great that one never has to say sorry. Not because one never hurts one’s beloved; only angels can do that, and they tend to be rather boring. But because he or she knows that it is not done on purpose.

Anyhow. Love, accompanied where appropriate by the kind of sex that makes the body and mind of both partners radiate with happiness, is the most wonderful thing life has to offer. Pity those, and the older I grow the more of them I think I see, who have not found it.

8. Last not least, a heartfelt email thanking me for one of my posts, such as I sometimes get.

 

Reaching for Immortality

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As anyone who has ever watched a cockroach or spider running for its life knows, all creatures, swimming, crawling, walking, running, leaping, and flying fear death as only death can be feared. However, as far as we know at present or are likely to know in the future, we are the only species whose members, once they have achieved a certain maturity, are aware that their own death is both inevitable and coming closer. Such being the case, and given the sapientia, (Latin: understanding, knowledge, wisdom) on which we pride ourselves so much, we are in a position to develop strategies to deal with it; or try to deal with it; or persuade ourselves that we are dealing with it. In these days when the dangers of corona are raising concern among billions of people around the world, I thought that outlining some of the strategies that have been or are being used for the purpose might be of some interest to my readers.

  1. Fame, power and wealth have always been interchangeable. However, of the three the first is the only one that can outlast death. Presumably that is why, as far back into history as we look and right down to the present day, people have sought it quite as eagerly as they did the second and the third. Some built pyramids, which considering that they have now lasted for forty-five centuries was not a bad investment. Some set out to conquer the world, as Alexander, Genghis Khan, and any number of lesser men did. Entire hosts of others ought immortality by means of literary, artistic, religious, philosophical and scientific achievement; as Thucydides, Horace and John Milton (all of whom explicitly said so), Phidias, the Buddha, Plato, and Newton did.
  2. Mummification. Famously, this is the method the ancient Egyptians, and by no means the Egyptians only, used. Some societies, especially in southeast Africa and parts of Indonesia, keep using it right down to the present day. The bodies, or should I say cadavers, are stripped. They are then cut open to remove the internal organs, specifically including the intestines and the brain (which, using a hook, is extracted by way of the nostrils). The body is then immersed in a special solution meant to extract its moisture—hence, its dried-up, wrinkled appearance—and stuffed so as to preserve its outline. Finally, it is wrapped in copious amounts of linen. The entire rather unwieldy thing may then be put into a coffin or several coffins that fit inside each other. Some mummies are accompanied by food, drink, household utensils, money, furniture, and the like. In China at any rate they were also attended by male and female personnel killed especially for the purpose; later statutes or statuettes, made of terra cotta or wood respectively, were substituted. Here it is not out of place to add that mummification is not limited to the ancient world but was also carried out on modern leaders such a Lenin, Stalin and Mao. In all three cases, with very mixed results.
  3. Reincarnation. The underlying idea of reincarnation is that, while the body may die, at least parts of the soul, or spirit (psyche, in Greek, anima, in Latin) do not. Instead, having left the body, it enters into another; though just how it does so and how much time elapses until it does is not very clear. In particular, Hindis and Buddhists believe that the souls of the deceased may enter not just into the bodies of men and women but into those of creatures of any kind. The soul of a person who has transgressed against religion, or perhaps one should say the proper way of life, may find himself in the body of a grasshopper. That of a person who has behaved himself, e.g by giving alms to monks or by contributing money towards the construction of a pagoda, in that of a higher-ranking man or woman. Reincarnation need not be a one-time affair. Instead, like the Energizer, will go on and on and on until Nirvanna, meaning either perfection and/or total oblivion, is achieved.
  4. Resurrection. At the heart of reincarnation is the idea that some part of the spirit remains alive even after death and that, doing so, it passes from one body to the next. Not so in the case of resurrection, at the core of which is the belief that people do in fact die but will be resurrected at some time thereafter. The role of resurrection in the Old Testament is fairly minor. Not so in the new one, where the reappearance of Jesus three days after he had been taken down from the cross and buried became an important, if not the most important, proof that he was indeed God’s son and appointed messenger. As Christianity solidified and spread during the coming centuries and millennia belief in resurrection became very widespread. In particular, two questions kept being debated and, at times, fought over. One was just when the end of days would arrive, an issue to which even the great Isaac Newton devoted much attention. The other, precisely who would be resurrected, on the strength of what (faith, good deeds, or predestination), what would happen to him or her after being resurrected (go to hell? partake of the leviathan? shelter in the bosom of Abraham?) and so on.
  5. Cryonics. A modern form of mummification is represented by a science, or perhaps it would be better to call it a pseudoscience, known as cryonics. The fact that extreme cold can greatly slow down or halt the pace at which the body disintegrates (rots away) after death has been known for a long, long time. Francis Bacon, the early seventeenth-century English lawyer, philosopher and experimentalist, died of bronchytis after trying to do just that by stuffing a dead chicken with snow. Now that the climate is warming up, repeatedly the frozen bodies of people and animals who died thousands of years ago are being found in places such as the Alps and Siberia. Routinely for several decades past eggs and sperms, both human and animal, have been frozen and stored for future use. More and more often stem cells are being treated in the same way, the idea being that they might one day be used to grow new organs in place of such as have been lost. Just as, in the past, one could pay monks to say masses for the soul of the deceased “in perpetuity,” so now there are quite some companies which, for a fee, will preserve a deceased person’s corpse by cooling it to minus 130 degrees Celsius. Having done so, they promise to keep it in its frozen state until, at some time in the future, technology will have advanced sufficiently for the person in question to be defrozen and reanimated.

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  6. Uploading. The most recent method for avoiding death is uploading. On one hand, brain scientists claim, there is little doubt that thought and emotion are, at bottom, nothing but electronic pulses which are passed by almost 100 billion cells, which are interlinked by at least 100 trillion connections. On the other, advances in computer science for the first time have resulted in hardware that may one day make it possible for computers to be provided with direct links to our brains. Not only might the contents—all the memories, all the thoughts, all the feelings, all the emotions—of each brain be put on a hard disk, or cloud, or some similar device, but we could preserve it for as long, and make as many copies of it as, we like. In this way what used to be known as our soul and is presently known as our personality would be preserved; whereas the rest of our bodies could be dispensed with.
  7. Replication/reassembly. As assorted gurus never stop saying, we live in the age of information. Meaning that, if only we could get to know the precise structure and characteristics of every single cell, molecule, and atom in our body, complete with the links between each of them and all the rest, we should be able to either replicate it—make exact copies—or reassemble it ex nihilo. Perhaps by using nanotechnology and/or some super-sophisticated three-dimensional printer?

Each of these approaches has its problems. Those surrounding the first were perhaps best described by Woody Allen. As he once said, “I do not want to live in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live in my apartment.” The second, mummification, may go a tiny little bit towards preserving the body’s outline. However, it cannot do anything at all to ensure the survival of the spirit; no mummy has ever moved, felt, thought, or spoken. The third, reincarnation, is based on pure belief and, since the soul is invisible, can never be proved to have taken place. How do you know that the fly buzzing around your desk has the soul that once belonged to your late grandfather, or that the grandfather you love so much used to be a horse in his previous life? The same applies to the fourth, resurrection; in this case proof, if it is possible at all, will have to wait until the Day of Judgment. The fifth, cryonics, the sixth, uploading, and the seventh replication/reassembly, are beset by all sorts of technical problems that make it more than doubtful whether they can ever succeed in their purpose.

My own conclusion from all this? Though good evidence is lacking, attempts to draw death’s sting probably got under way almost as soon as homo sapiens made his appearance 100-200,000 years ago. Probably the most successful one has been the first. As for the rest, not one of them has come even close to success, at least not the kind of experimentally-verifiable success that modern science would recognize as such; and chances are that none of them are going to do so anytime soon either.

Such being the case, we might as well return to the advice of Ecclesiastics:

Have a life with the woman you love all the days of your fleeting life, which has been given to you under the sun, all your fleeting days. For that is your portion in life and in your struggle under the sun.