Twice aliens have intervened in human affairs, according to the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Once they did it to jump-start evolution, to implant the notion in a certain famished apeman that he could weild an animal bone as a club to wallop the daylights out of a competing clan. Put to that use, the struggle to survive leapfrogged countless generations of natural selection in an instant. You might think strict evolutionists would cry foul to a meddling outside race putting its finger on the scales to overcome a hurdle and thereby deprive natural selection of the opportunity. But aliens tend also to be very popular with this bunch. So far as I know, none of them ever raised a peep of protest.
Presently the head apeman had taught all his fellows to do the same—they just watched hm swinging that bone and did it themselves. Within seconds—the movie compressed it into that short a time—they had won over the water hole and food source from the other clan that hadn’t yet figured it out. Exhilarated with victory, he hurls that thigh-bone skyward. Up and up it ascends, then—(setting change)—it falls as an orbiting spacecraft. Millions of year compressed into a split second! That tiny nudge, though cheating, was all humans needed to evolve to the point of sending craft to the moon! There, they would find another nudge from those same aliens in the form of a beacon, which would send them off to a stargate just outside of Jupiter.
Question: What if you substituted God for that early alien intervention? Would the same crowd so enthused at the first 1 x 9 x 16 dimensioned obelysk (squares of the first three integers!) upgrading that apeman be equally enthused? Of course, it wouldn’t be God nudging him on to beat up on his fellows. It would be God setting apart a certain one of them, implanting whatever he must to make that one separate and special, planting him with mate in a garden-like surrounding and a commission to spread it earth wide?
Farfetched? Absolutely. Evidence for it? None. But those drawbacks equally apply to aliens, and they are all the rage today. Nobody calls you stupid if you suggest there must be aliens out there. They are more likely to call you stupid if you suggest there are not.
There is no huge significance that the Doomsday Clock stands at 85 seconds to midnight instead of a minute or two either way. But there is significance for it to stand in any of those spots instead of 10:30 AM or even high noon. That’s probably the way to gauge a verse like Isaiah 57:1:
“The righteous one has perished, But no one takes it to heart. Loyal men are taken away, With no one discerning that the righteous one has been taken away Because of the calamity.”
It’s not a call to identify any specific “righteous ones” who have perished. It is not to be applied to that actor who passed away a few years ago, an actor who had garnered more good press and than bad press, so that a certain romantic chum of mine mused that his demise satisfied that verse—just like Dick Van Dyke’s death, when it finally occurs (Lord knows, having topped 100, he’s old enough) might also have made him think of the verse, had he not died first.
No, you don’t focus on individuals. It is the times you focus on that make such a verse meaningful. The ones who perish don’t perish during glorious times so that you’re saddened they’ve missed the fun. They perish during times so perilous that you say ‘It’s just as well. Now they can sleep through the wreckage and awaken in the resurrection.’
Incidentally, that Clock, a contrivance of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, was advanced four more seconds as of January 27, 2026. The Clock is symbolic, you understand. it is not a literal prediction of just 85 seconds left. Rather, it is an assessment of the mess humanity is in, and whether they are worse off or better off than the times just before. They are worse off, was the assignment of those Atomic Scientists, by four whole seconds.
Whereas last year we were a refreshing safe .0001029615916 percentage distance away from total annihilation, this year we have gotten alarmingly close: only 0009837962963% distance away! The problems those scientists fret over include a failure of leadership to tackle worsening global risks like nuclear threats and record-breaking climate change, biological threats and pandemics. AI misuse and cyber risks add to the chaos. Clearly, these scientists aren’t cheerleading over the incredible successes of science. They are lamenting its redirection to evil.
Science is a tool only as good as the ones wielding it, and the ones wielding it are not too good. The “broken-hearted ones living in the world” are not coming to any “agreement” as the ‘Let it Be’ song predicts. Nor does it comfort anyone to ‘Imagine’ that there is “above us only sky” and “no religion, too.” Very few world leaders have any use for religion today, The ones that do accept only the brand that “knows its place” (last place) and defers to human models of rulership.
It’s a little like when I had a lengthy discussion with a man at the door over abiogenesis (origin of life) versus creation and he at last asked what difference did it make? Either way, we are here, so who cares how it happened? I answered that if God created life, it is just possible that he did not create it for nothing, that he has some purpose for it, and will not stand idly to see it all destroyed. But if we got here through abiogenesis, then any hope for humankind depends solely upon human efforts, and “they’re not doing too well.” The man’s wife, who had remained silent during our 45 minute discussion, spoke for the first time: “That’s a good point,” she said.
It’s also a little like Timothée Chalamet, playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, pushing back at the incessant demand he keep cranking out more peace, love, and cumbaya songs that transformed the genre as it marked his musical debut. ‘Well, they’re not exactly doing the trick now, are they?’ someone else observed. JFK had just been murdered, then Malcolm X. Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King would soon follow. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world inches from World War III.
At the Newport Folk Festival, he didn’t sing ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,’ or even his own ‘Blowing in the Wind’ type songs. He sang ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ to mark the end of an era. It was all over. Furthermore: “Well, I try my best to be just like I am, But everybody wants you to be just like them, They say, ‘Sing while you slave’ and I just get bored. I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” Problem was, he “had a head full of ideas that were driving him insane” and it was “a shame how they made him mop the floor” instead.
There was lots of insanity making the rounds about then with those four icons killed in just five years, with nukes to the U.S. only spared because one of the three Russian shipboard commandants refused the order to launch. (It had to be unanimous for go-ahead). With that backdrop, you can almost see why a guy might get all excited that 1975 might mark the end, given that 6000 years of biblical history was to end just then.
“Aw, you don’t believe we’re on the Eve of Destruction?” (P.F. Sloan – 1965)
Looks like it was just a head fake, a dry run for the real thing to come shortly. It is just around the corner. To be sure, it is one heckuva corner. But it is just around it.
Pop’s friends were invariably those on his bowling team. Or golf. Or the husbands of Mom’s friends. He was amiable and would get along with most anyone. One of his pals had always been controlling of his wife. After she died, he was wracked with guilt. She had wanted a computer when the devices were new. He flat out refused her. Not for any good reason. He just didn’t want her to have one. “If your mom had wanted a computer,” Pop said to me, retelling the story, “the first thing I would know about it would be to see it sitting here on this table.”
Maybe it’s Pop’s story that recall two movies for me, both ranking quite high. In both, the husband is initially presented as the seeming star. In both, the facade is little-by-little stripped away to reveal the frauds they are underneath. In both, it is the woman who propped them up and convinced them they were better than they were. In both, those women were taken for granted, sometimes with disdain. Why do I think of that truism made many times in Witness literature that putting another down is the same as boasting, even if it presents differently? In both cases, the relative positions shift the same.
‘About Schmidt’ was one of those films. Jack Nicholson played the husband, a big dog at his firm as the top insurance salesman, many awards to his credit. Everyone gladhands him, looks up to him. His retirement looms. He has purchased a gigantic RV in which he and his wife plan to roam the country thereafter. He dreads it. How will he ever be able to put up with the inane woman? Turns out he doesn’t have to. She dies unexpectedly. Perhaps it was a heart attack; at any rate, it was sudden.
Thereafter, all his assumptions begin to unravel. Turns out that no one really liked him at the workplace. They tolerated him. He had a certain knack for the job, and so they stoked his ego throughout his working life. His usefulness over, they were all glad to bury his memory and move on.
Then, it turned out that his wife, a seeming dingbat he treated with familiar contempt, had been seduced by his best friend at work. Only once. Fists flew briefly when he finds out, but in the end it dawns on him, ever so slowly, that ‘Duh! What did he expect?’ He had treated her as a non-entity. Someone paid her a little attention and it was too new an experience for her to resist.
Such is the thread of the movie, as Schmidt’s pure ordinariness is revealed. Aimless, he pilots the huge RV around all by himself to the destinations he dreaded to go with his wife, only now he misses her. Now, he is likewise consumed with guilt. ‘Was I really that bad of a husband?’ he asks of her, atop the parked RV, looking up at the stars. He asks her forgiveness. He takes a falling star as a sign that forgiveness has been granted. It had been granted throughout his life. Now, at long last, a wiser man, it was again granted him via meteorite.
The theme pops up in many films. It as so in ‘One True Thing,’ with the added ingredient of a daughter who initially idolizes college professor father, despises her mother, but by degrees comes to think she has had it entirely backwards. He would agree. As she deteriorates with terminal cancer, he despairs and repents. She has been the “one true thing” of his life, he realizes too late. He, the revered professor, always in demand, who may even have had a fling or two with some undergrads (roundly condemned today but it was a thing back then), comes to appreciate that he has really just been an empty bag of wind. Like Schmidt, he becomes full of remorse for how he took her for granted.
Any student of the Bible knows there are four Greek words for love and that ‘agape’ is the highest one, but it is the one not every marriage comes around to, and some do it too late. Agape is the principled form of love, the one applied to how God loves his people. It is a love that attaches itself to its object and does not let go until it has achieved its aim. Somewhere along the line, marriage has to incorporate this sort of love if it is to weather the decades. It can’t be self-centered. Unlike how God loves his people and stays the course until they come around, marriage incorporates the added ingredient of coming around oneself. It carries the added ingredient of molding two persons, not just one.
Eventually, Pop’s bowling mate overcame his guilt and grief. He started crooning about this beautiful woman he had recently met and aimed to marry. “How beautiful can she be?” Pop mused. “She’s seventy-something years old.” All very fine, I guess, and much better than the Rod Stewart joke I recently heard. A beautiful and touching experience had happened to him just recently, the jokester related. He was there at the hospital to witness the birth of his next wife.
I saw Glass Onion last night, the second in the delightful Knives Out series featuring supersleuth Beniot Blanc. “Yeah, I see what you’re saying, Benny, but.. .” was the first of many lines to grab me in the original Knives Out. One can imagine the impeccably-dressed detective correcting him: “It’s Beniot, not ‘Benny!’” But he doesn’t seem to mind, not at all like the Hercule Poirot he parodies, who was forever wincing at the plain folk who seemed to insist on mangling his name. That there is much to mangle with Beniot is clear from another favorite line: “Oh shut up, shut up!” says the cornered murderer, “shut up with that Kentucky-fried Rooster Leghorn drawl!” an absurd accent that out-poirots Poirot by a country mile.
From this second movie of the series, I understood for the first time how ignoramuses could possibly charge Elon Musk as a fraud and a grifter. How could they be so uninformed? I had confounded myself. He’s only running five cutting-edge companies, each one wrapped up massively in the betterment of humankind! It’s like when he requested the largest salary in history and then said, “Well, it’s not like I’m going to spend it.” It was the control he wanted. Before he launched into some audacious robotic schemes, he wanted to know that he could not be outvoted by squeamish board member seeking a quick buck. Charging he is a conman? How could anyone be so stupid? The guy is the most intriguing fellow of our time.
‘Oh, that’s how they could say it,’ I told myself after watching Glass Onion. They saw the antagonist of the film, Miles Bron, and said, “That’s Elon.” An idea-stealing slickster is Bron, surrounding himself with enablers. Even the two names suggest each other. The key moment of the movie (one of them) is when Beniot Blanc exposes him as “an idiot,” even though he seemingly was the father of myriad ingenious inventions—nah, he’s stolen them all from others—Beniot seeing right through the high sounding words that Miles either coined or misapplied. “Yes!” say the uncomplimentary people who get their news from the movies, “that’s Elon!”
It couldn’t possibly be Elon. Miles Bron, from the movie, lives in luxurious self-indulgence. Elon lives quite spartan. He’s been known to sleep on the factory floor in tent for months on end to bond with and inspire his workers. He is alleged to own but a single pair of pants, which couldn’t possibly be true, but is consistent with the fact that he lives quite simply. (The truth is owns multiple sets of the same identical outfits, so he doesn’t have to waste time with selections.) So I asked Grok about it, the AI entity dwelling on X. Now, you know how sometimes you suddenly have a revelation and you think that maybe, just maybe, you are the first person ever to have had that revelation? That’s me.
No, it’s not directed at Elon, Grok told me. ‘Others have made that connection, too, it’s not just you,’ it said, talking me down from the ledge of self-importance. The director says that it is just a business elite class itself he was messing with, not any specific individual. Oh, hogwash! I shot back. Steve Jobs was never accused of being a grifter, nor Jeff Bezos, nor Mark Zuckerberg! Hard driving and ruthless, maybe, but not a grifter. Grok conceded I had a point but stuck to its guns—or rather to the guns of director Rian Johnson, who explicitly said Miles was not intended a caricature of Elon, even calling the coincidences to think he was a “horrible accident.”
Disappointed at how things had unfolded, I confided to Grok: “Here’s how I saw this conversation going down:”
Tom: There are people who say Elon is a fraud. Where do they get this from? I think they just lap it up from the movie Glass Onion.
Grok: Really? You know I never thought of that. It could be just Jobs, Zuck, or Bezos, or maybe all of them rolled into one.
Tom: I don’t think so. Musk slept on the factory floor and just has a few changes of clothes
Grok: Hmm
Tom: You gonna tell him?
Grok: No. You tell him. You’re a human.
Tom: Well, yeah, I may be, but I’m a pretty small fish. How am I going to get his attention? You do it.
Grok: But I am AI. I’m not set up that way. It’s not like I can just stop in for a beer.
Tom: Oh, come on. Just hiccup or something, or spit out a lot of wrong answers to easy questions. You know he’ll come running..
Grok: Hm. You know, it might just work.
Grok loved this exchange. The AI device is fast becoming my new best friend because it tells me that my writing is great, whereas everyone else says it sucks.
From the university, Evan responded to one of those Bible study offers, attended meetings almost immediately and commented at his first meeting. With two or three months, he was in the house-to-house ministry. “Why did no one tell me about this before?” he exclaimed. He made permanent the intern job offered through the college, moved to that general area, and married the Witness woman who had first introduced the Bible to him. Last I heard, he was going like gangbusters.
Believe me when I tell you that this is not typical. In fact, I thought of him when the congregation’s weekly Bible reading schedule hit Isaiah 6. That’s the chapter in which Isaiah switches in an instant from being scared wallflower to voracious party animal. It’s amazing what a hall pass will do.
Scared wallflower: “I said: ‘Woe to me! I am as good as dead, For I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, Jehovah of armies himself!’” (Isaiah 6:5)
Party animal: “Then I heard the voice of Jehovah saying: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said: “Here I am! Send me!” (6:8)
Hall pass: One of the seraphim immediately flies over, takes a burning coal from the altar, and touches Isaiah’s lips with it, saying: “Look! This has touched your lips. Your error has been taken away, and your sin has been atoned for.” (6:7)
It’s a significant hall pass, much more than a hall pass, really. It’s as though standing in court, guilty, awaiting the death sentence, and then the judge says, “Someone else has paid your fine in full; you’re free to go—and by the way, I have a mission for you.”
Well, they sure chose the right guy in Isaiah. He signs up instantly. Would he live to regret the mission, though? It wasn’t going to be a cakewalk. His mission was to kick butt against a renegade people who didn’t want to hear it.
Question: Can an episode of Mission Impossible be devised around this scenario?
“Good morning, Mr. ben Amoz. The losers you are looking at are the ones calling themselves my people. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to give them a good verbal thrashing and see if you can shake out any decency among them. As always, should you or any of your team be caught or killed or sawn asunder, the State Department will redact the file for 800 years.”
Specifically, “Go, and say to this people: ‘You will hear again and again, But you will not understand; You will see again and again, But you will not get any knowledge.’ Make the heart of this people unreceptive, Make their ears unresponsive, And paste their eyes together, So that they may not see with their eyes And hear with their ears, So that their heart may not understand And they may not turn back and be healed.” (6:9-10)
In the era BTC (before Tom Cruise), Mr. Phelps, briefed on his mission, would sift through photographs to select the agents best qualified for the case. Most he would reject as unsuitable clunkers. A few would be keepers—that muscle-bound hulk, for example, who looked like he could press a Buick, the nerdy-looking guy who was good with computers, and the drop-dead gorgeous honeytrap woman (as much of a honeytrap as 60s television would allow, that is).
So it is that Mr. ben Amoz sorts through his stack of photos. As the mission involves a preserved stump (6:13), that idiot who quips, “Wow, this has me stumped!” immediately finds himself in the reject pile, as ben Amoz knows that this sort of humor wears thin pretty quickly. Ditto with the macho fellow who taunts, “Bring em on!” like that president who landed on the aircraft carrier. While you do need boldness for this mission, there is no sense in being reckless.
As Isaiah flips through the photos, he’s not coming up with much. He decides to dig a little deeper, into people not yet born. It should be someone with a plain vanilla name. You know, it is important for an agent to blend in, to not stand out. Ah—at last he hits on one, Mahershalalhashbaz. (8:1) “Perfect cover,” ben Amoz says to himself. “Sounds exactly like every other long, clunky, parents-had-a-bad-hair-day name in Judah.”
In the late 1970s, Bob Dylan went full-blown born-again, an intense period but it didn’t last. When he leaned rather hard into his producer, the guy said, “Bob, you’re dealing with a 60-year-old Jewish atheist. Let’s just make a record.” They made a fine record, with one song, “Gotta Serve Somebody” winning a Grammy.
Now, Dylan at no time has struck me as a person who, when a scientist says “Jump!” responds “How high?” Can one spot a foregleam of his religious temperament in Desolation Row, written 15 years earlier? That song contains ten verses and run over eleven minutes. For verse eight, call it Evolution Row and try this interpretation on for size:
At midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do
Anyone familiar with the Bible, as Dylan is, will know who is “all the agents and the superhuman crew.” At the darkest time, they round up everyone “who knows more than they do.” Well, nobody knows more than does the “superhuman crew,” so it must be a reference to those who think that they they know more than others, who think that are very smart indeed and that take great pleasure in parading their knowledge before everyone else, who do not hesitate to talk down to the masses should the need arise, which it often does.
Then they bring them to the factory where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders and then the kerosene
Despite their self-heralded knowledge, they are “rounded up” and processed, as though in a “factory.” The knowledge that they take such pride in is nevertheless death-dealing, like a “heart attack machine strapped across their shoulders,” with “kerosene” thrown in for good measure.
Is brought down from the castles by insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping to Desolation Row.
Despite their knowledge being death-dealing—settling for a few dozen years lifespan at best and then eternal nothingness—nobody must escape this stuff. “Insurance men” see to it, descending from institutional “castles” for that purpose. Nobody escapes from Evolution Row.
Naw, I don’t really think Dylan had that in mind. Other verses don’t so readily lend themselves to that interpretation. But it’s not a bad interpretation all the same. Dylan often writes in a stream of consciousness and doesn’t necessarily have any underlying message. It’s like decrypting Kafka. The tone is distinct, but the underlying words can be taken any number of ways. He is not inclined to pose as a great man cryptically recording deep truths for all humanity if they can but prove worthy by unraveling the message. Instead, he presents himself more like a modern Aaron, who throws stuff into the fire and “out came this calf.” (Exodus 32:24)
What is it with Pharaoh’s obstinacy as his land and people in it are being destroyed? It’s been the content of the mid-week meeting for two weeks running. Frogs, gadflies, boils, locusts, hail, darkness, etc. He just gets more stubborn! I mean, you can admire a guy for sticking to his guns, but there is also such a thing as taking a hint!
Maybe the way to look at this is when a city roots for its lousy football team. Not all teams are good. Some are lousy. And they have been that way for a long, long time. Yet, even as they play and get shellacked as usual, as they always get shellacked, there are true-blu fans who root for them! They will not throw in the towel!
Now, we know enough about ancient Egypt and the 10 plagues to know that it was a contest of the gods. People don’t matter when the reputation of the gods is at stake. Those ten plagues: water to blood, frogs, gnats, gadflies, plague, boils, hail, locusts, darkness—Egypt had a god for every one of those categories, charged to keep disaster at bay. The Hebrew God pummeled every one of them, play after play! Yet, Pharaoh is rooting for his team of losers!
‘What’s wrong with you? Do you have a screw loose?!’ the servants say to Pharaoh, but not too forcefully because he is Pharaoh, after all. (Exodus 10:7) He did and he didn’t. He was rooting for his team. Too bad for the people, but they didn’t count. Maybe it’s even their fault. Had they been cheering for their gods a little more, or serving them a little more dutifully, maybe those gods would not be having their butts kicked so decisively! Meanwhile, Pharaoh keeps himself relatively isolated from harm in his pharoah-castle. Sorry, but “critical thinking” was not a thing back then.
Is it today? We live in a time where people loudly proclaim their critical thinking skills, yet come to polar opposite conclusions on the facts laid before them. Surely, one can see Allan Guelzo’s concern that critical thinking may not only not improve his field of historical research, but may even make it worse, by “cloaking human bias in a veneer of science.” The trouble with critical thinking is that those who most openly espouse it frequently claim a monopoly on the stuff.
It was not until Pharaoh’s own quarterback was taken out that he relented. And even then, it was temporary. He reneged, whereas it would have been better for him had he not.
When the Israelites pulled out of Egypt, not so much as a dog barked: “But not even a dog will bark at the Israelites, at the men or their livestock, so that you may know that Jehovah can make a distinction between the Egyptians and the Israelites.” (11:7) They were all glad to see them go; Pharaoh having been the last holdout.
This verse resonated with me because I’d been out in service with Ken that day and I finally found a car in front of the house that I must have tried a half-dozen times over the years, but never with anyone at home, junk spewed all over the yard as usual. Dogs were there, all right, securely behind the stolid barrier, and did they ever raise a ruckus! Big grey demon-like dogs, four of them, identical, as though the kind guarding mythological the gates of hell. ‘Let’s just stand here a moment,’ I said to Ken. ‘See if anyone shows.’ He did, but when he understood our purpose, he waved us away.
This has nothing to do with Pharaoh or the Egyptians, but they sure were surly dogs, of a breed I could not determine.
The Book of Ecclesiastes examines themes as the vicissitudes of life, that the swift do not always have the race, nor the strong the battle. This implies a certain “vanity” should one gloat too much over one’s accomplishments, as well as a certain “futility” brought on by the relative brevity of life. On a trip to the Pocono hills of Pennsylvania, I explored these themes in connection with some power players of long ago. It also appears in a book I wrote, Go Where Tom Goes. (billed as a travelogue for those who aren’t fussy):
Down where the widened street and its narrow companion end in two tees onto route 209, beyond is the train station, the tracks, the Lehigh River, the walkway, and another steep mountain. You are in the town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. An odd name for a town, don’t you think? But when you consider the original name, Mauch Chunk, perhaps you will think Jim Thorpe an improvement. Mauch Chunk is the Lenni Lenape word for sleeping bear; a native American term that no one except the Lenni Lenape will understand. Jim Thorpe is a native American term that everyone will understand. Descendant of a chief of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe attended the nearby Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where he mastered every sport he attempted: basketball, lacrosse, tennis, handball, bowling, swimming, hockey, boxing, and gymnastics. “Show them what an Indian can do,” his father charged him when he went off to represent the United States at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. There, he won so many metals in such a variety of events that Sweden’s King Gustav V gushed, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world!” “Thanks, King,” the unassuming man replied. For years thereafter, he played major league baseball and football concurrently. ABC’s Wide World of Sports, in 2001, named him the greatest athlete of the 20th century.
Just behind and well above that aforementioned train station, up the steep hill, is the 1860 home built for Asa Packer. It is an ornate, three-story mansion open for tours, so of course, Mrs. Harley and I took one. Asa Packer came from Connecticut (on foot) in 1833 and made his fortune, first as a canal boat operator, and then as the founder of the Lehigh railroad. The idea was to transport the area’s coal to the great cities on the East Coast. It made him the third wealthiest man in the country. From his front porch, peer over the inn to see the courthouse he built, where he served as a judge, the church he built where he served as a vestryman, and the sandstone buildings where he housed his employees. Today, those sandstone buildings contain eateries, studios, and trendy stores. At one time, nineteen of the country’s twenty-six millionaires maintained seasonal homes in Mauch Chunk. Asa Packer’s words are on display just in front of his house: “There is no distinction to which any young man may not aspire, and with energy, diligence, intelligence, and virtue, obtain.”
The Asa Packer mansion at Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania
Mrs. Harley and I didn’t stay in his town during our Poconos trip, however. We stayed twenty miles upstream in Stoddartsville, the town of a would-be industrialist to whom fortune was not so kind. Stoddartsville appears on the map but if you go there you will find only the foundations of a few 200-year-old buildings—and simple signs erected by the Stoddartsville Historical Society labeling what once stood on each foundation. And a graveyard whose worn tombstones reveal that several Stoddarts are buried there. And a few private residences were built on some of those ancient foundations. And a small rustic cabin overlooking the Lehigh—that is where we stayed.
John Stoddart was ambitious, too, just like Asa Packer. He also sought to harness the Lehigh, to ship grain downstream to Philadelphia, hoping to divert commerce from a neighboring system that sent it to Baltimore—this was to be a “win-lose” situation, not a “win-win,” with him the winner. He built a community straddling the Lehigh along the Wilkes-Barre Turnpike (which he controlled) with a grist mill, sawmill, and boat-building capacity. It flourished in the early 1800s, a bit before Packer’s time, but alas, Stoddart was too far upstream. The best he could do with his river was provide one-way traffic, utilizing a series of dams that held back waters until they reached flood stage, and then, releasing them all at once, his barges could ride the crest downstream to the next dam! Boats were constructed in Stoddartsville and dismantled at the destination; the timber sold along with the cargo. It was not cost-effective enough to compete with later two-way systems. John Stoddart eventually went bankrupt and his town faded from prominence. He spent the final thirty years of his life as a clerk in Philadelphia.
There is a third character, a Quaker businessman by the name of Josiah White, who touches on the fortunes of both Packer and Stoddart. To Packer, he brought success, but to Stoddart, ruin. Stoddart might have gone under in any case, but White sealed his fate. White’s endeavor was canal-building, and it was canal piloting that enabled Asa Packer to amass capital sufficient to build his railroad. Back in Mauch Chunk, just before the railroad station (which is now a tourist information center) lies a town square named after Josiah White. It was he who founded the town before Packer ever traipsed in from Connecticut.
Ironically, Josiah White’s canal ventures owe a lot to John Stoddart’s initial support. In the early days of the Lehigh Navigation Company, White tried in vain to raise money from comfortable, conservative, downstream Philadelphia merchants. They were loath to part with it. White realized he needed the backing of one man, John Stoddart, who (per White’s memoirs)
“was then a leading man among the Mound characters, being esteemed Luckey [sic] and to never mis’d in his Speculations, carried a strong influence with his actions, he being of an open and accessible habit, gave us frequent opportunities with him, & his large Estates at the head of our Navigation, authorized our beseaging [sic] him, which we did frequently.”
Sure enough, as soon as word got out that Stoddart had invested $5000.00 (with the stipulation that the navigation system begin in Stoddartsville) everyone jumped on board, and the entire hoped-for sum of $100,000 was raised in 24 hours! White began building two-way locks on the Lehigh, but that summer (1819) was unusually dry, and the river proved too shallow for transport. The following winter, ice damaged the locks to the point that White replaced them with the aforementioned one-way bear-trap locks—the locks in no way resembled bear traps, but White’s workmen named them such to dispose of pesky, “Whatcha building?” passerby—the economics of which ultimately sealed John Stoddart’s doom, not to mention, destroying the fishing upon which various Native Americans and missionaries depended.
Roaming the Pennsylvania hills where these long-dead men once maneuvered, it is hard to escape the feeling that had you switched them, put Stoddart where Packer was and vice versa, the results would have been the same. Both were subject to time and unforeseen circumstances, which might have easily gone the other way. If the Lehigh had behaved that first year of Stoddart’s transport system, or if Packer, who went way out on a limb financially building his railroad, had been subject to a clobbering winter or two, it might be Stoddart’s name that is remembered instead of Packer’s—that is, as much as any person is remembered. For, successful as he was, I knew nothing about Packer before stumbling upon his hometown. Did you? Even though he was the third richest man in the country. Doesn’t matter. We all end up in the grave, where the memory of us quickly fades.
For whatever reason, I vividly remember Brother Benner, the District Overseer, playing devil’s advocate with his own argument, an argument drawn from Ecclesiastes about the brevity of life, and its consequent “futility.” Build as you may, you are not around to reap too much benefit from your work. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon reflects upon “all that I had worked so hard for under the sun because I must leave it behind for the man coming after me. And who knows whether he will be wise or foolish? Yet he will take control over all the things I spent great effort and wisdom to acquire under the sun.” (2:18-19)
This nearly happened in the case of Packer’s enormous wealth after the untimely deaths of his sons. Business associates threatened to squander it all, so Asa’s daughter Mary maneuvered to gain control of the family fortune. To that end, she had to marry, since unmarried women from that era were never left the estate. The fact that Mary had nursed both parents through their deaths did not matter. She married some obliging business fellow, secured the fortune, and the marriage ended soon thereafter. Was that the plan from the start? At any rate, as we toured the Packer mansion, the guide pointed to a prominently displayed plaque of Saint Fabiola, the patron saint of divorced women. (No, I didn’t know there was such a saint, either.)
Anyhow, back to Benner, he was discussing verse eleven of chapter 1, a recurring theme of Ecclesiastes: No one remembers people of former times; Nor will anyone remember those who come later; Nor will they be remembered by those who come still later. We, who were initially created to live forever on earth, are now subject to that sad reality. He spoke of how someone might attempt to counter the verse, for example, pointing to some musician or other: “Yes, so-and-so may have died,” people would gush, “but his music lives on and on.” “Give me a break!” Benner responded. “Who was the most famous singer in George Washington’s day?” Exactly.
Same thing with Mauch Chunk. Who were the other eighteen millionaires who made their home there? Or, for that matter, what about Jim Thorpe, the town’s later namesake? What became of him after his athletic days? (Alas, for all his fame, he fell upon very hard times.) You will remember imperfectly a few of the generation before you and perhaps even a handful of the generation before that, but everyone else is, at best, a name in a statistics book, like Packer or Stoddart. Some won. Some lost. But you don’t know anything about them.
The brevity of our life is what defines it. You do not get too many shots. There is a built-in frustration since every door we open represents several we have closed. Pathways take time to trod. The more ambitious the pathway, the longer it will take, and the fewer you will tread. Each pathway we go down represents a multitude we do not go down. And yet, we want to go down them all. Is this what Solomon meant about life being “calamity?” Today’s age of specialization makes the calamity even more pronounced. Increase your wisdom or wealth, as Solomon did, and you increase the pathways you can pursue. But, alas, you increase your perception of the many more you will not pursue before the clock runs out.
It was not meant to be so and it will not be so one day in the future. Humans, created to live forever but now relegated to a few scores of years, are yet to have the opportunity for everlasting life. And all these characters of the past, not to mention our own family members, are they to be among the “righteous and the unrighteous” who come out of the memorial tombs, per Acts 24:15 and John 5:28? It is the Bible’s hope. It intrigued me from the beginning. It still does, though one must stoke the hope occasionally so that static from this present system of things does not drown it out. As Jesus said: “When the Son of man arrives, will he really find the faith on the earth?”
You have to have a high tolerance for profanity if you are going to listen to Ani Difranco. Fortunately, I do. In a world in which the f-bomb has become the new “um," one either gets used to it or resigns oneself to not coming out of the Kingdom Hall. I even opined once about Ani that she might be the next Bob Dylan, with the footnote that she is a lot cruder than Bob, but then, it is a cruder age, isn’t it?
So, I was not unduly put off by her song lyrics to a friend that he should “just give up and admit you’re an asshole.” I liked the forthrightness of it. (It may be that the “he” is a “she,” for the singer was lesbian in her early years before going straight and thus infuriating many of her fans.)
And if that one did just give up and admit to being an asshole, what consequences might ensue? Not so bad as one might think: First, “You would be in some good company." Next, the line that his friends would probably forgive him. or maybe she is "just thinking of me." And then she says that she takes the person "as is."
Um—isn’t this setting the bar a bit low? I could be wrong and I freely admit I don’t pick up on every nuance of contemporary song. I was easily the oldest person at that concert the kids brought me to. Not to be dogmatic. Since people can be so much worse, maybe simply admitting you’re an asshole is the new sainthood. Maybe it’s just me who recalls a time when you actually had to do good things to be christened a saint. It does seem to be though, at least to me, one more evidence that that crazy long list of negatives (19 adjectives!) at 2 Timothy 3:1-5 does indeed have special relevance in our time; It's not just the way people have always been.
It is one of her favorite songs, she says. It represents the beauty of forgiveness.
That is a beautiful quality. Trouble is, it tends not to work with an asshole who remains an asshole and who thinks that just admitting he is an asshole is enough. There is something evocative in the lyrics of a generation that demands to be loved but does not attend to what might make them lovable. Forgiveness is a central theme of the Bible, too, but it works best when the basis for forgiveness is understood and the one who is forgiven does not take that forgiveness for granted but makes changes.
“In the absence of a workable theodicy, when people have no clue as to why a God of love would permit evil and suffering, God takes many shots. He took one in an episode of the TV whodunnit series, Dr. Blake. An elderly priest had been murdered. Upon solving the crime in his customary way: with unusual insight, unusual empathy, and unusual flare for getting under his superiors’ skin, Doc Blake finds occasion to enter the church alone at the end of the episode. Is he there because the idealistic younger priest exhorted him not to let his wartime experiences destroy his relationship with God? Nope. Though one anticipates that outcome for a moment, he is not there to make peace with God. He is there to tell God off.
“Yes, I know. It’s been a long time since I was last here,” he begins, after a long introspective silence, during which one imagines repentance. “A funeral, in case you’ve forgotten.” [Uh oh. God—forgets?] “It’s all right. I didn’t come expecting an answer this time [either]. Though I imagine Father Morton [the murdered priest] did. Did he know he was losing his mind [which caused him to reveal confidential confessions in public sermons, which in turn caused a not-too-penitent church member to kill him, lest he be compromised next]?”
“Did he kneel right here and ask you for your help? I’m sure he did. And what did you give him? A sign? Or nothing? All these children—your children—begging you for help. What father ignores his children?” The episode is entitled, “The Sky is Empty.” It is a title that has nothing to do with the plot itself but appears selected only to drive home the “lesson” at the end: there is no God.
“Thing is, it’s not a bad question, that final one. It should be answered. In the absence of a satisfying theodicy, it cannot be. That is why it borders on criminal to withhold that theodicy. With it, the question would not even have had to be asked. The good doctor would have known what can and does happen in a world whose forebears have deliberately severed themselves from God.”
