There weren’t books in my house growing up. There was reading material, however. Two newspapers were delivered daily, and a third came once a week. There were magazines. I think the parents subscribed to Reader’s Digest. I read some of its articles, but mostly I went to the anecdotes and jokes. There were many other magazines that came from friends of my mother’s who passed them on to her when they were through with them—Life, Look, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal. And I exaggerate when I say no books were in the house. There was an encyclopedia and a few textbooks that seemed as if they came from my father’s high school days, but there were not the kind of books a second grader who discovered he liked reading wanted.

I soon found the public library. It may have been a mile from the house, but in those days, a mile was nothing. A two-story building with the adult section on the entrance floor and the youth books upstairs. I fell in love with two series: Freddy the Pig books and what I thought of as orange biographies. I don’t remember much about the Freddy tales, but the biographies were so labeled in my mind because they all had orange covers. Of appropriate length for a third grader, they were hero books with an emphasis on the childhoods of Thomas Edison or Andrew Jackson, but they also contained enough about the subject’s adulthoods for me to learn much about history. I believe that these books have stayed with me, forming much of my background knowledge about various personages and historical eras.

Perhaps because I was shy, I read constantly, even while walking to and from school. It was not long before I felt I had exhausted the offerings of the children’s section of the local public library.  Luck befell me in the person of Miss Dahlberg, my sixth-grade teacher. She recognized my dilemma and went with me to the public library. I don’t remember at what age one qualified to take books out of the adult section, but it certainly was not the sixth grade. Miss Dahlberg talked with library directors, and then some higher-up  library directors. She knew how to hold her ground. (None of us kids would have been surprised. We all knew she had been a WAC during WWII and had even parachuted out of a plane!) What had been rigid rules for the library were no match for her, and I walked out with a library card that granted me adult privileges.  (Actually, inked on it was “Adult Priviledges.” Miss Dahlberg knew how to be gracious in victory. She noted the misspelling and told me that it would not matter, and we left the library.)

This golden card allowed me to enter a new stage in my reading. There was no one to tell me what were good books or what books they had enjoyed. I certainly did not then read book reviews. Instead, I would walk the stacks, read jacket copy, read a few paragraphs or pages and then used gut intuition to take out books. Thus, the reading at this stage was random. Only years later did I gain direction and would perhaps read one Hemingway or Fitzgerald after the other.  Well, there was one direction that came before that. I was soon at the age where there was an interest in male-female relationships, and I would spend many hours skimming books back in the shelves looking for some sort of sex scene, but I seldom checked such books out.

I remember little of what I read from these directionless days except, perhaps, for The Mouse that Roared, and its sequels, by Leonard Wibberley. The Cold War satire was a delight, a precursor in my mind to Dr. Strangelove, but like that movie, it also hit my emerging views that the powerful– whether the military, political, corporate, or social–were to be distrusted. If I had then talked about books with others, I would have insisted that all read it.

The other book I remember from that period was different in that I did not stumble across it—From Here to Eternity by James Jones. I am not sure how I became aware of the book; even if I had read about books, I would have been too young when the book was published, or even when the movie of it came out, for it to have registered with me. But somehow a half dozen years or so after its publication, I decided I wanted to read it, and I went looking for it on the shelves of the Mead Public Library. I did not find it, and then I learned that in that staid period the book was too explosive or controversial to be allowed on the shelves. A potential reader had to ask for it at the front desk. I did, and this caused consternation. No one apparently wanted to be the one responsible for corrupting this youth by giving him this book, but I insisted that the library had granted me “adult priviledges.” After much discussion behind closed doors, the book was produced, and I was allowed to check it out. Perhaps the library staff did not want to take on Miss Dahlberg again.

This was the first adult book that mesmerized me. The beach scene famous from the movie was not the real draw. The sprawling narrative was captivating, but it was the character of Robert E. Lee Prewitt that totally grabbed me—a Hamlet, a Tony Zale, a Miles Davis, a Kierkegaardian zen figure, a lover, a friend, an anti-authoritarian, a patriot. Of course I was not alone in these reactions, but I did feel that the character talked especially to me.

Life moved on, and I went off to college. Now a library was different. It was a research institution, not a place for browsing to find material to fill up my idle hours. I said good-bye to the kind of library that had helped form me. Now I did what had once been a radical act for me; I bought books and rather than checking them out of libraries.

That pattern remained for decades. It only got altered when I started spending summers in the Poconos and finally became a regular patron of the Barrett Friendly Library. It is smaller than my hometown one, but it has a similar feel. Of course, libraries have changed since my youth. Many still go to that library for its books, but now many also come to use the computers,  but even this latter group really come to the library for the reasons I did. I didn’t have books at home, and they do not have books and computers at their home.  Recently I read about a county out West that had slashed its already low taxes more and as a result was closing its public library. I felt a despair for the place and a grief for all the kids there who did not have access to books and computers.

Owning computers, I am one who goes to the library for the books, and the library has brought back some of my old browsing ways. I don’t wander the general fiction and nonfiction shelves as I would have in olden days. Instead, I browse the bookcases of “new releases,” an often generous ascription in this small library because a volume can remain “new” for over a year. At the beginning of summer, I concentrate on the nonfiction and biography sections. While on occasion I spot a title that I have heard about from elsewhere, most of the books are previously unknown to me. I just look for topics that I might find interesting, and since the collections are diverse, this has led to varied subjects. Last year from the library I read about class and poverty in America, a North Korean pilot who defected, the CIA, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the connection between corporate America and a form of Christianity, surfing, modern China, and a Jesuit traveling in the Holy Land.

I feel like this library has returned me full circle to reading habits I had when still in Wisconsin public schools, but more important, it has reminded me of how important the library was in my formation and how important it must still be for the many who are raised in homes without the resources that too many of us just take for granted. A long time ago I had vowed that if I ever published a book, I would make a donation to my childhood library, and both events eventually happened. Now the wife and I have given money to the Friendly Library, and of course, I urge you to support a local library—volunteer or donate money, or both.

“When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night.” The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

“There was once a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always.” Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth.

“Some good cooks frankly admit that they have never baked a really successful loaf of yeast bread.” Editors of Sunset Magazine, Sunset Cook Book of Breads. “

“When I was young, my mother read me a story about a wicked little girl.” Mary Gaitskell, Veronica.

“I was asleep when he died.” Patti Smith, Just Kids.

“I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground.

“The blood is still rolling off my flak jacket from the hole in my shoulder and there are bullets cracking into the sand all around me.” Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July.

“So the theory has it that the universe expanded exponentially from a point, a singular space/time point, a moment/thing, some original particular event or quantum substantive happenstance, to an extent that the word explosion is inadequate, though the theory is known as the Big Bang.” E.L. Doctorow, City of God.

“Among the historically most satisfying complexities of baseball is this: The form of the playing area is both in principle indeterminate and in actuality frequently subject to deformation by external constraints.” Philip Bess, Preface to Philip J. Lowry, Green Cathedrals.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in superlative degrees of comparison only.” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

“Westward along the high Eurasian Steppe, from the border of China across Turkestan and beyond it, there flowed through it continuous centuries of nomad peoples.” Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empires.

“In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.” Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

We have heard much over the last year about the proper handling of classified information—think Hillary Clinton—and the disclosure of government secrets—think President Trump’s complaining tweets. During this time, much has been said about government secrets, but much of importance does not get discussed. The recent arrest of Reality Lee Winner is a case in point.

Winner has been charged with leaking classified information to a news source. The leaked information indicates that last year Russian military intelligence cyberattacked an American voting software supplier.  What has generally followed her arrest are the expected expressions of shock that government secrets have been released. But there also should be some other, fundamental questions. Should the fact that Russian intelligence attacked an American company be secret? We do not treat it as a secret if Russia attacks Crimea. We should not treat it as a secret if Russia dropped a bomb on Anchorage. We did not treat it as a secret when burglars tried to break in to Democratic offices in the Watergate in 1972.  It should not be a secret when a foreign government attacks an American citizen. Why is this different?

I am guessing that the answer is that disclosing the cyberattack will inform the Russians of how our intelligence agencies learned about the attack, which the Russians presumably meant to be kept secret, and this disclosure will make it easier for Russia to evade our intelligence efforts in the future. I can see why “sources and methods” of the intelligence community might need to be confidential. On the other hand, a foreign attack on an American company, a foreign attack on our voting system are not facts that by themselves harm our national security. Instead, this is information we should know.

Democracy, the functioning of our economy, and the proper operation of our government depend upon open information. Government secrecy, while sometimes necessary, conflicts with that, and we should be having regular conversations about how our secrecy system works and how well it actually serves us.  We should be asking: Who determines what is secret? How is secrecy determined? What are the procedures for determining when the need for secrecy is no longer necessary, and how well do those procedures work? How often does the unauthorized disclosure of what the government claims should be secret harm our national security? Certainly with Winner the question should be raised whether she disclosed what should remain secret or material that should be public. Instead, the assumption just seems to be that if it was classified it is a horror that it was disclosed. Perhaps we ought to question our government more than that.

The Reality Winner situation, as did Edward Snowden’s, however, raises other issues than just the ones when a government employee discloses classified information. Winner and Snowden were not government employees. They worked for private entities that had been contracted by government security agencies to do intelligence work.

Private companies have always worked for the government, but “privatization” seems to be increasing. Businesses with names like Blackhawk or Blackstone or Blackhole or Blackballs seem to have been everywhere in all our recent Mideast wars, incursion, actions, or whatever they are called, and in some places historic government functions like operating prisons, turnpikes, and parking meters have been ceded to private enterprises. There should be more analysis of privatization in general. What are the data that show when companies can do functions better than the government, or does privatization primarily result just from unexamined ideology and campaign contributions? (When private companies are involved with turnpikes or parking meters, for example, do they do it more efficiently causing tolls and fees to decrease?)

With the Winner situation, however, the privatization discussion should go well beyond the issues of whether a private company or the Army can better run a mess hall. Isn’t there a whole lot of difference between privatizing food service and privatizing national security information? After all, if you believe in our free enterprise system, these private intelligence companies should seek to do a good job for the government in order to earn their fees and to get new contracts when available, but their first loyalty is not to the United States. Instead, as it is for any private company in our system, the company’s primary goal is to make a profit; to maximize shareholder wealth; to serve the owners of the entity—however you want to phrase it. That first loyalty may not matter or matter much when the company builds a highway or operates a trash service, but does it matter when the product is national security intelligence? Am I the only one who thinks this ought to be discussed?

I don’t remember telling any, but I would not be surprised if I had. Surely I heard gay jokes, although back then they might have been homo, or possibly fag or pansy jokes.  I do remember being with a group yelling what I am sure many thought were witty remarks at an effeminate boy in our high school. I was mute. If they would have been anti-Semitic or racial comments, I might have objected, but I did not try to stop the not-completely-understood homophobic remarks.

Mostly, however, in my childhood and beyond, as far as I knew, gays did not exist. George radically changed this.

George was my office mate when I was twenty-nine years old. We got friendly by talking across our desks about cases, defendants, prosecutors, judges, and our colleagues. Comfortable with each other, we became friends outside the office. For several Thanksgivings we went to his mother’s house. There was a lot of scotch and new traditions. George was Lebanese-American. We did have turkey, but only after many Middle-Eastern dishes. The most memorable was beautiful raw lamb drizzled with olive oil.  This took me back to my childhood.  We had no idea what steak tartare was, but a regular treat growing up was what we un-euphemistically called raw hamburger.  I loved it on rye bread, topped with raw onion and much black pepper.  And I found that I loved raw, ground lamb, too.

After a couple years of friendship, George told me that he was gay.  Back then, this was a huge deal.  George, who was nearing forty, said that I was the first straight person that he had come out to, and he was the first person I knew who acknowledged being gay other than some clients whose sexuality sometimes mattered in their cases.

We joined George again at his mother’s for Thanksgiving a few weeks later. He picked that time to tell his mother and brother about his sexuality.  The tension was incredible that holiday.  His mother eventually came to some sort of acceptance, but not his brother. I am not sure that he eve talked to George again.

Through George, I got a glimpse into a certain gay culture.  I hung out with him at various Greenwich Village gay spots, which early in the evening were like any neighborhood restaurant or bars. Later at night, however, sexual images that made me uncomfortable and drugs were prevalent. (Once or twice, the spouse went to these spots, too.  She found the slide shows of good looking men sucking each other’s dicks of much more interest than I did.)

I had a fair number of dinners with his gay friends. They were perfectly nice, but It was all somewhat sad.  George was not part of a chic or sophisticated gay life. The talk was basically about drugs and who was hot (which required being young), but still a fear came through. Even the fifty-year-olds were scared that their parents might find out about their lives.

George, I was convinced, wanted something more. He also wished to talk about politics or baseball or TV or movies or anything other than always sex and drugs. But that was not his group, and he was trapped in it. He had no way of finding new gay friends in a world where few could openly acknowledge that they were gay.

When I left the job, I did not see George regularly. He was the kind of friend that needed the shared stimulus of work for the friendship to continue. When I did see him then, I entered a darker world.  The AIDS epidemic had hit. As we walked down the Village streets, he would see someone and say, “His lover died last month.” “His lover died six months ago.”  George had been to about 30 funerals in the last year.  He told me about the AIDS death of former colleagues of ours, people whose sexuality I had never thought about.

And then George got the disease.  We had dinners a few times after that.  He was quite accepting even though he knew he was dying and knew from the bedsides he had attended how awful the death from AIDS was. He almost seemed grateful for what awaited him. He accepted that he was gay, but growing up when he did, he also seemed to accept a certain self-hatred because he was gay. But he wanted that self-hatred over. As death approached, George’s one true concern was that he had had unprotected sex with someone, and he kept trying to convince himself that it had happened before he had been diagnosed.

I hope that today, George’s story would not happen, but, while the world has become more understanding, I do believe that it still has a long way to go. I just wish that George had had the chance to experience the better parts of today’s world.

At the beginning of the second act of a performance by a Swedish circus, an acrobat asked the audience members to stand up, put their feet together, and close their eyes. She then said that whenever she does this she feels her body moving. “To be still, you have to move.” She was right.

“I learned from my mother, the retired beauty queen, that how well a woman speaks with her eyes is what separates the amateurs from the pros.” Patricia Engel, Vida.

It was a typical Brooklyn supermarket—narrow aisles with small shopping carts and a limited selection. I was surprised to see ping pong balls. Brooklyn homes don’t have basement rec rooms or other places for table tennis. When I mentioned this to the daughter, she gave me an interesting look and said only a bit condescendingly, “The balls aren’t for ping pong. They are for beer pong.” Yet another time for me to feel my ignorance.

I was twenty-five before I realized stockings were sexy.” Don DeLillo, The Names.

A giraffe died in an Allentown, Pennsylvania, zoo after sustaining a neck injury. Makeup your own jokes.

“In that moment, silently, we agreed that we were indeed in the presence of an exceptionally delusional white man—which is, of course, one of the most dangerous things in the world.” Mat Jonson, Pym.

I don’t think our president ever sang along on the car radio with Buddy Holly, the Rascals, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, the Stones, or any other performers from his youth. If so, isn’t that sad?

“Racism is pervasive. The pretense that it belongs solely to poor people who talk slow lets the rest of us off the hook.” Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.

The man with the clipboard and distinctive vest approached me and said, “Do you like puppies?” Already late for an appointment and not wanting to be trapped by another fundraiser, I shook my head, kept moving and then, to my surprise, said, “I hate ‘em.” As I went by the clipboard man, he said, “You would be perfect for this.” I kept walking out of the subway.

“He also said that no creature in nature jogs.” Jim Harrison, The English Major.

The wife was working in the college textbook division of a major publishing house. As an incredibly smart woman armed only with liberal arts degrees, the business did what it did with most women back then. She was a secretary. Oh, they may have called her an administrative assistant, but she was a secretary.

She sought more and after a while said that she wanted a starting editorial position. She was told that she could not have that. “Why not?” The reply was that beginning editors were promoted out of the ranks of travelers. Travelers were akin to salesmen who went to college bookstores to assess not only what was selling but what books might be needed in the future. Thus, the traveler could gain the knowledge valuable to an editor as to what manuscripts should be acquired and what books developed.

Fine, the wife said. “I’d like to be a traveler.” “You can’t be,” came the reply. “Why not?” “We could never, as we do with travelers, send a young woman on the road all alone.” In case you needed any more reasons to understand why Ctach-22 had become such a big book.

The persistent wife, taken aback, then pointed out that her boss was an editor, and he had never been a traveler. “John,” the reply came, “has a master’s in English from Harvard.” “But,” came the wife’s surrebuttal, “I have a master’s in English from the University of Chicago,” then on the forefront of literary criticism. To which no reply came. And no editorial job. In case you needed any more reasons for why there was a feminist movement.

This situation would flash through my mind decades later when a young woman in one of my classes would start a comment, “I am not a feminist, but . . .” Often I would interrupt. I might simply point that she was training to be an advocate, and it was seldom good advocacy to start your position with a negative. And seldom did it matter for the woman’s point whether or not she was a feminist.

Sometimes, however, I might go further and ask her if she thought women should get paid the same as men for doing the same job, or whether women should have the same chance at getting a job as a man. The answer was always yes. Sometimes I might go on and ask whether good childcare should be more readily available, but then I generally just saw complete confusion because few of these women yet understood the difficulties of combining a career with motherhood. Finally, I might ask what it meant to be a feminist, and I seldom got a coherent answer.  It was more on the lines of, “Oh come on, you know.” This kind of discussion was a digression to the subject matter of the class, and I would move on. But it was clear that on some level important to these young, educated women, they wanted to separate themselves from the group of people called “feminists.”

I once thought I had a reasonable understanding of what “feminism” meant, but now I am baffled.  What does it mean to the young woman who identifies as a feminist? To the young woman who is not a feminist? To the young men of today?

We had ignored the invitation from the mainland Chinese mission to the UN. It was Spring 1989, and the Dean of the law school and I had gone to other dinners at the Chinese mission. They were large affairs with steam-tray food and had not been particularly enjoyable. We assumed that the latest invitation was to another similar open house and did not respond. Then an urgent message came from my student. He was a translator for the Chinese diplomats at the UN, and because of his urging, the law school was planning to put on a program with the Chinese mission. The translator told us the day before the scheduled dinner that the dinner was a private one because of our joint program, and it would be a huge insult if we did not go (and perhaps a blow to the translator’s career). The Dean and I started scrambling to get sufficient attendees.

I implored the spouse to go. She mentioned this to her associate, a Chinese citizen with an American green card, trained in China as a medical doctor, now helping the spouse to do biological research. He was one of those forced into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, an experience about which he did not want to speak. Chinese students were at the time holding Tiananmen Square, and no one knew what was going to happen there. The spouse’s associate quietly said that we should not go to the Chinese mission because it would be an act of support for a regime that did not deserve support. But we did.

It was a memorable evening on many fronts.  We had our images of Chinese officials spouting a party line, but the diplomats were professionals, not political appointees.  The ambassador and his wife got into an argument about her work for women’s rights at the UN.  A number of the diplomats talked quietly against their government.  One of them had a son who was in Tiananmen Square. That father had not had contact with his son for days and was clearly scared. I realized that my views of Chinese government officials were simplistic.

And then there was the food.   It was unlike anything I had eaten before or since.  This was not a Chinese restaurant meal.  It was prepared by the ambassador’s personal chef, and it was dish after dish of exquisite things presented at a round table where we were served lazy-susan style.  One course consisted of only a single, hard-boiled quail egg.  The spouse was proud that she got the slippery little morsel into her mouth with chopsticks, while the Chinese diplomat next to her failed.

A few days later the slaughter in the square occurred. The translator came to me almost crying and asked that we call off our program.  The program was to be about how China was operating under the norms of international commercial law and was entitled something like “China under Law.”  The translator choked out that we could not have a program like that because we had all seen that China was a lawless place.  (We did eventually have the program.) Tiananmen Square was not mentioned, and we never learned what happened to the diplomat’s son.

“It was 27 June 1930 that Chief Inspector Maigret had his first encounter with the dead man, who was destined to be a most intimate and disturbing feature of his life for weeks on end.”  Georges Simenon, Stonewalled.

“Among all the home businesses touted these days, I can think of none that is easier to get into, cheaper to start, or offers more potential for recognition, respect, and reward than nonfiction book writing.” Marc McCutcheon, Damn! Why Didn’t I Write That? How Ordinary People ore Raking in $100,000 . . . or more Writing Nonfiction Books & How You Can Too!

“The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.” Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates.

“No one in the tiny Ozark town of Mill Springs, Missouri, was likely to have been surprised when William McFadden decided to drink himself blind one day in 1873.” Mark Adams, Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr MacFadden Transformed the Nation through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet.

“Various are the pleas and arguments which men of corrupt minds frequently urge against the yielding obedience to the just and holy commands of God.”  George Whitefield, The Sermons of George Whitefield.

“It is our good fortune to live in an age when philosophy is thought to be a harmless affair.” Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World.

“Both sides in the American Civil War professed to be fighting for freedom.”  James M. McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.

“Not all the gallantry of General Lee can redeem, quite, his foolhardiness at Gettysburg.” Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America.

“If Samuel had known his mother was leaving, he might have paid more attention.” Nathan Hill, The Nix.

“Just as the German Reformation was largely the work of a single individual, Martin Luther, so the Scottish Reformation was the achievement of one man of heroic will and tireless energy: John Knox.” Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything In It.

“The air still smelled of charcoal when I arrived in Venice three days after the fire.” John Berendt, The City of Falling Angels.

“Thirst is deadlier than hunger.”  Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses.

“When Europeans began imagining Africa beyond the Sahara, the continent they pictured was a dreamscape, a site for fantasies of the ferocious and the supernatural.”  Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa.

“The American Academy of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves.”  David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays.

Awhile back I read Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right by Adam Clymer. The book did not get much play as far as I know, but it had some important themes that have stuck with me.

Clymer maintained that the fight over the Panama Canal Treaties helped fuel the rise of the modern Right.  The two treaties were signed in 1977.  One treaty gave the United States the right to use force to assure that the canal would remain open to ships of all nations.  The second treaty gave Panama, starting in 2000, control over the canal.

The treaties, of course, had to be ratified, and after Panama did so in a plebiscite, a political battle ensued in the United States Senate over their ratifications.  According to Clymer, this led to the emergence of Richard Viguerie, a founder of modern conservatism, the use of direct-mail marketing, and the rise of single-issue PACs to raise money and defeat moderate Republicans.

Although it was President Jimmy Carter who signed the treaties, the negotiations had started under President Nixon.  The treaties were thought desirable because they gave America the right to make sure that the canal remained neutral and they removed a flashpoint for much of Latin America, and Panama in particular,  by giving Panama control over the canal.  Those supporting the treaties maintained that the treaties would increase the security of the canal by helping to remove the threats of guerrilla attacks, which were almost impossible to defend against.

The treaties were backed by some prominent conservatives, including Henry Kissinger and William Buckley, but the treaties were also attacked by other conservatives in near-hysterical terms.  This was a surrender of American sovereignty, and furthermore, the military leader of Panama was pro-Communist.  Communists would control the canal and Panama, and the harm to the US as a result would be tremendous.

What is surprising to a modern surveyor of the political scene is that a number of Senators supported the treaty simply because they thought it was right even though they knew that their ratification votes would harm them politically.   The single-issue PACs targeted some of these Senators and through direct-mail marketing, inflamed a cadre of voters. A number of the moderate Republicans who supported the treaties were defeated when they stood for reelection.  Ronald Reagan opposed the Treaty, and some, including Bill Buckley, maintained that the treaty controversy helped make Reagan president.

This was an issue that is now largely forgotten even though its aftermath still affects the United States. A lesson from the controversy has been absorbed, even if that lesson’s source is not remembered.  Republican politicians are in fear that if they don’t toe some single-issue lines, a portion of conservatives will target them and defeat them in the primaries.  The result is that the politicians cannot develop nuanced positions; compromises are verboten.  There must be complete acceptance of the NRA’s positions.  Abortions are absolute evil.  Tax cuts are always absolutely essential.  All government spending, except on defense, is bad.  Back in 1978, some Senators studied a complex situation and decided that a ratification vote was in the best interests of the country even though their decision would harm them politically.  What is remembered is not that their position was right, but that they were harmed politically. What was learned is not try to figure out what is best for the country, but only to take actions that will not produce personal political harm.

This history is also striking because the opponents have been proven wrong. The Canal functions just fine. Panama is not a hotbed of anti-American Communism. Those who were wrong, however, did not pay a price for their belief. They continued in office. And most of us have forgotten the debate.

The daughter and I just visited Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca. Can you say ”Lake Titicaca” without smiling? I can’t.

Non-trivia: What is America’s longest war?

On the recent trip, I learned that Bolivia once had access to the ocean, but lost it in a nineteenth century war. Maybe you already knew that.

I know of females named “Tiffany,” but I have never heard of one called “Cartier” or “Bulgari.”

The sign in Peru said “Joylong.” I was told that it was a Chinese car company. But I thought that it had something to do with sex.

President Trump, according to recent articles, does not believe that exercise is good for the body. Instead, he believes that, like a battery, a person is born with a finite amount of energy, and exercise needlessly dissipates it. In his view, those who don’t exercise are in better health than those who do. Perhaps with the proposed Trumpcare, insurance companies will be required to offer lower premiums to those who just watch television and read tweets. Certainly, at least, we can all sleep better knowing that our future healthcare system is in the hands of such a sound thinker.

I expect the President to be proclaiming, “Preserve your body’s finite energy.”  This reminds me  of General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Jack D. Ripper believed that there was a communist plot to sap and pollute American’s “precious bodily fluids” through the fluoridation of our drinking water. (Back in the 1940s and 1950s and probably beyond, conservatives did maintain that fluoridation was a commie plot against America. Is this the only thing conservatives have been wrong about?) Jack D. Ripper hesitantly admits that he gained this knowledge during the “physical act of love” which left him profoundly fatigued followed by an empty feeling. “Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.” Ripper reassures his listener that he does not shun women. “Women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women. . . . But I . . . I do deny them my essence.”

So my question, “Does General Jack D. Ripper help explain Donald J. Trump?”

All citizens of Peru have to vote. The mandate is enforced by a heavy fine. How would it affect this country if all citizens were required to vote?

Ancient cultures always seemed to have many more memorials to death than to birth. Discuss.

The daughter and I ate alpaca in Peru. Quite tasty. The daughter also ate guinea pig. Not so tasty.

“Question: Why are there plenty of televangelists in America, but not a single tele-ecologist?” Lawrence Millman, At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic.

A portion of a museum had erotic ceramics from cultures that predated the Incas in Peru. I wondered: “Surely they did not refer to it as the missionary position.  What did they call it?”