Free Will?

    “Your particles are just obeying their quantum-mechanical marching orders,” theoretical physicist Brian Greene

Denying the existence of free will, Columbia University scholar Brian Greene (above), author of “The Elegant Universe,” asserted: “You have no ability to intercede in that quantum-mechanical unfolding.  None whatsoever.”  In a Time  interview Greene added: “How wondrous is it that I am able to have this conscious experience, and it’s nothing more than stuff, but that stuff can produce Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Mona Lisa, Romeo and Juliet?  Holy smokes, that’s wondrous.”  Greene’s research field is string theory, in particular quantum gravity.  With Tracy Day Greene in 2008 launched an annual World Science Festival whose purpose is to cultivate a general public informed by science.

Protestant Reformation theologist John Calvin (1509-1564) rejected the Catholic doctrine of free will and embraced the concept of predestination, arguing that due to God’s omniscience, the fate of individuals must be preordained.  Others rejecting Roman Catholicism were not so rigid, accepting what came to be known as the paradox of free will, the seemingly irrational belief that while God orders all things somehow human freedom is preserved.  Religious skeptic that I am, but less dogmatic than Brian Greene, as much as I respect him, I maintain that I am responsible for my actions.  Somewhat of an existentialist, I agree with Hoosier humorist Kurt Vonnegut that “There is no order in the world around us; we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.” In “Slaughterhouse Five,” Vonnegut’s most important novel, the author utilizes protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s experiences to address the issue of  free will. Throughout his life, Billy is forced to be part of things against his free will. In his childhood his father throws him in the water to teach him how to swim. He was unwillingly drafted into the war, taken prisoner, and miraculously escapes the firebombing of Dresden. Later, he is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians, who believe that all moments occur and reoccur simultaneously: they have already happened and no one can change fate.

Hearing Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is (some things will never change)” on WXRT’s Saturday morning show devoted to the year 1986 reminded me that things sometimes are beyond one’s control. Maryland basketball star Len Bias died that year of a cocaine overdose just two days after the Boston Celtics took him as the second pick in the NBA draft.  In the year of Halley’s Comet’s return, a Soviet nuclear reactor exploded at Chernobyl, wreaking havoc across much of Europe, and the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after takeoff, killing the seven crew members. An deadly earthquake in San Salvador and volcano in Cameroon each killed over 1,500 people.  In 1986 Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was murdered and Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (Lady Gaga) was born in a Manhattan hospital – hard to believe their fates were predetermined.

Lady Gaga in 2016

One of my favorite songs of 1986 was REM’s “I Am Superman (I Can Do Anything” – an assertion of free will, perhaps.  Dave’s high school band LINT performed “I Am Superman” acapella.  LINT also did a rousing version of the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right to Party.”  Other top hits that year included Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” “Papa Don’t Preach” by Madonna, and Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name.”  On the Ramones album “Animal Boy” were “Somebody Put Something in my Drink,” “Apeman Hop,” “Love Kills,” and “My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg),” a rare political statement by the New York punkers criticizing Ronald Reagan’s visit to a German cemetery where Nazi storm troopers lay buried.

protesting Reagan's Bitburg visit

Connie and Brian Barnes hosted monthly bridge night.  Beforehand, we dined at Red Lobster, first time since Toni and I went there on Valentine’s Day for her birthday years ago and got rushed out ahead of the evening crowds.  Our entrees arrived almost simultaneously with the drinks and salad. Saturday, even though our group arrived at 3:30, it was already crowded, but we only had a ten-minute wait, the food delicious, and the service fine.  For an appetizer I had four tasty scallops and Toni the lobster bisque; we both then ordered fish and chips and had enough left over for Sunday.  As always, Brian had Stella in the fridge for me and red wine for Toni.  Brian had recently completed Glenn Frankel’s “High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic” (2017), which Ron Cohen will report on for our July history book club meeting. Beforehand, we’ll show the 1952 Western classic starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly.

Historian Jon Meachem (above), who has called Trump “the most vivid manifestation of our worst instincts,” and whose most recent book is “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels,” compared 2020 Presidential frontrunners Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to 1948 candidates Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond.  The big difference: the latter were third party candidates, former Vice President Wallace, who disagreed with President Harry Truman’s bellicose Cold War policies, heading the Progressive Party and Thurmond, a segregationist opposed to the Democratic Party’s commitment to civil rights, atop the States Rights (or Dixiecrat) ticket.  Republican nominee, New York governor Thomas Dewey, was a moderate who lost in an upset to Truman.  Compared to 1948, political parties today are toothless.  On the one hand, Trump had never been a Republican prior to acting on his Presidential ambitions, while Sanders and Mayor Mike Bloomberg were not Democrats. I fear that if either became the Democratic nominee, it would spell disaster for the party.  If they wished to compete for President, they should run as Independents or, in Bernie case, as a Socialist.  

 Bernie Sanders in Soviet Union, 1988

Bernie’s rivals are taking aim at him but in a heavy-handed way, slamming him for praising the Sandinistas (at a time the U.S. was secretly supplying murderous Contras with deadly weapons), for declaring that the Cuban government under Fidel Castro increased literacy and health care for the poor (true, indeed), and for honeymooning in the Soviet Union in 1988 (a time of glasnost initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, Time’swell-deserved person-of-the-decade).  On CNN’s presidential town hall Sanders recently said: “I have been extremely consistent and critical of all authoritarian regimes all over the world, including Cuba, including Nicaragua, including Saudi Arabia, including China, including Russia. I happen to believe in democracy, not authoritarianism.” The same, sadly, cannot be said of most officeholders, especially Trump, currently in India praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he is attempting to strip Muslims of their civil rights. I want Democratic candidates to go after Bernie but without using tactics akin to Red-baiting.

Speaking at Art in Focus was musician Joe Rauen, who fashions unique instruments from unlikely objects such as canes, pipes, tennis rackets, suitcases, and hockey sticks. For example, he played a guitar with a shovel as its base.  Rauen was quite at ease, personable, and very talented, making use of a loop that enabled him to lay down a track from one instrument and have it play back while he played another  of his concoctions.  Afterwards, director Micah Bornstein said that if Dave is unable to accompany me for my appearance in two weeks, he’d be happy to play YouTube selections of 1960 Rock and Roll songs (I’ll send him a list of 25, and he’ll have them all ready to go).  While at Munster Center, I noticed that Henry Farag was putting on an Ultimate Doo Woo show in April headlining the Marvelettes (“Please, Mr. Postman”) and Edsels (“Rama Lama Ding Dong”).  I’ll plug it during my talk.

We celebrated my 78th birthday at Craft House with Dave, Angie, Becca, and the Wades, who brought two inflated balloons, one a belated “Happy Birthday” to Toni. Dave brought me a case of Yuengling and promised to burn me an Of Monsters and Men compilation CD.  He’s scheduled to participate in an East Chicago Central “Dancing with the Stars” fundraiser and will be playing guitar with three students performing Johnny B. Goode at a Black History Month assembly (he’s invited me as a special guest).  I received birthday calls from Michigan Lanes and one from my brother in California. Facebook announced my birthday to my “friends” and who knows how many others, and I got over 50 likes and a dozen responses, including “Feliz cumpleaños” from Roy Dominguez, and later, in person, at bridge and bowling.

IUN sociologist Jack Bloom, still teaching although well past his 78th birthday, asked me for book titles covering Progressivism.  He was already familiar with classics by Richard Hofstadter and Robert Wiebe, so I suggested “A Fierce Discontent” by Michael McGerr (2003) and Murray N. Rothbard’s “The Progressive Era” (2017) as well as John Dos Passos’s 1920s classic  U.S.A. trilogy.  Nicole Anslover invited me to her class on the Scopes “Monkey” trial.  I may quote Dos Passos’s take on the “Great Commoner,” whose reputation was tarnished by his participation as an attorney for the prosecution.  Here is an excerpt from Dos Passos:

    It was in the Chicago Convention in ’96 that the prizewinning boy orator, the minister’s son whose lips had never touched liquor, let out his silver voice so that it filled the gigantic hall, filled the ears of the plain people:

his voice charmed the mortgage-ridden farmers of the great plains, rang through weather-boarded schoolhouses in the Missouri Valley, was sweet in the ears of small storekeepers hungry for easy credit, melted men’s innards like the song of a thrush or a mocking bird in the gray quiet before sunup, or a sudden soar in winter wheat or a bugler playing taps and the flag flying;

    Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: 

    You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

    They roared their lungs out (crown of thorns and cross of gold)

carried him round the hall on their shoulders, hugged him, loved him, named their children after him, nominated him for President,

silver tongue of the plain people;

    Bryan grew gray in the hot air Chautauqua tents, in the applause, the handshakes, the back-pattings, the cigar-smoky air of committee-rooms at Democratic conventions, a silver tongue in a big mouth.

    In Dayton he dreamed of turning the trick again, of setting back the clocks for the plain people, branding, flaying, making a big joke of Darwinism and the unbelieving outlook of city folks, scientists, foreigners with beards and monkey morals.

Instead Clarence Darrow made a fool of him.

Valor

   “Some folks inherit star-spangled eyes

They send you down to war

And when you ask them, ‘How much should we give?’

They only answer, more, more, more.”

            Clarence Clearwater Revival, “Fortunate Son”

A huge throng attended the Concert for Valor: Saluting America’s Veterans on the National Mall in D.C., which HBO carried live.  Particularly awesome were David Grohl and Bruce Springsteen joining the Zac Brown Band, which opened the show, for a gutty rendition of Clarence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son.”  Springsteen later performed an acoustic version of “Born in the U.S.A.” that sounded more like a dirge than a celebratory anthem.  The Black Keys were tremendous, but the servicemen in the crowd seemed most excited when the heavy metal band Metallica, introduced by Jack Black, came on.  They did not perform “One,” the moving tale of a wounded vet (“Landmine has taken my sight, taken my speech, taken my hearing, taken my arms, taken my legs, taken my soul, left me with life in hell”) – just as well - but their numbers had plenty of references to the scourge of war and the folly of blind patriotism.  They opened with these lines from “For Whom The Bell Tolls:” 

“Make his fight on the hill in the early day

Constant chill deep inside

Shouting gun, on they run through the endless grey

On they fight, for the right, yes but who's to say?

For a hill men would kill why? They do not know

Stiffened wounds test their pride

Men of five, still alive through the raging glow

Gone insane from this pain that they surely know.”

In “Master of Puppets” they sang:

“Master of Puppets I'm pulling your strings

Twisting your mind and smashing your dreams

Blinded by me, you can't see a thing

Just call my name, 'cause I'll hear you scream.”

As military head-bangers came on stage, James Hetfield exclaimed, “We finally get to play for our heroes,” then launched into “Enter Sandman,” with lyrics about dreams of war, dreams of liars, dreams of dragon’s fire and of things that will bite.”  The crowd went wild.  I wish Jay Keck were alive to enjoy it.  Bringing out Rihanna and Eminem to close the show was anti-climactic, and Eminem’s multi-use of the “F-bomb” was pointless.

 

 Linda Keck sent me a couple more poems his late husband Jay wrote, as well as an anonymous one he admired entitled, “Bury Me with Marines.”  Here’s how it concludes – RIP, Jay, Semper Fi:

“The Marines I knew were commonplace

They didn't want the war;

They fought because their fathers and

Their fathers had before.

They cursed and killed and wept...

God knows they're easy to deride...

But bury me with men like these;

They faced the guns and died.

It's funny when you think of it,

The way we got along.

We'd come from different worlds

To live in one where no one belongs,

I didn't even like them all;

I'm sure they'd all agree.

Yet I would give my life for them,

I know some did for me.

So bury me with Marines, please,

Though much maligned they be.

Yes, bury me with Marines, for

I miss their company.

We'll not soon see their likes again;

We've had our fill of war.

But bury me with men like them

Till someone else does more.”

Bill Carey passed on a “Veterans for Peace” photo from Cathy Browning and a profile about Medgar Evers from Zinn Education Project, adding: “Purdue University Mitch Daniels doesn’t think you should read this.  Go ahead anyway”:

  “On this Veterans Day we remember Medgar Evers who returned from active duty in WWII to be turned away from the polls when he tried to vote. He dedicated himself to fighting for voting rights; investigating race-based murders of African Americans including Emmett Till, Rev. George W. Lee, and more as NAACP field secretary; organizing NAACP Youth Councils; supporting James Meredith's right to attend Ole Miss; and more until he was murdered in June of 1963, leaving behind his wife and three young children.”

In his autobiography, entitled “Valor,” Roy Dominguez wrote that his dad served in Germany at the end of World War II, as did his uncle, David Dominguez, who was like a brother to his dad.  After the war, to supplement his income, David joined the army reserves.  When the Korean War started, he was called back to active duty and died near Koilli, South Korea, in March of 1951.  Roy wrote: “My dad for the res of his life never forgot the day David left to report for duty.  The discussion about David always brought on a surge of emotional pain and watery eyes.”

David had off from school due to it being Veterans Day, so we played board games.  Shut out, I blew an opportunity to win Acquire but made BLTs on toast.

Chancellor William Lowe announced that Vice Chancellor David Malik will be leaving IUN in less than a year to return to IUPUI. Among his accomplishments was restructuring the centers for Urban and Regional Campus Excellence (CURE) and Innovation and Scholarship in Teaching and Learning (CISTL).  Under the leadership of Ellen Szarleta CURE is involved in numerous community outreach projects.  Among other things, CISTL, directed by Chris Young, holds workshops to train faculty how to teach online courses.  I wrote Malik, who came in January 2009, when IUN desperately needed a strong academic leader:

Dear David,

I am sorry you are leaving IUN.  You arrived at a time when the university was rudderless in terms of academic direction and provided transformational leadership, including mentoring younger colleagues who will be able to carry on after you leave.  Thanks for asking me to participate in an oral history of FACET, a project that brought me into contact with the talented Aaron Pigors and enabled me to use my talents in a worthy project and interview a variety of innovative teachers, including you.  Thank you also for strategizing with me on ways to make Steel Shavings magazine sustainable; to that end I intend to donate $10,000 annually to insure its survival and continue to edit an annual issue until I can find a successor to replace me. I also appreciate that you recommended Anne Balay for promotion and tenure, recognizing that her value to the university outweighed the questionable objections of her chair and dean.

Three of your distinguished predecessors left significant academic legacies.  William Neil, realizing that the liberal arts were the heart and soul of the university, built up strong English and History departments that at their peak had twice the number of full-time faculty as today.  Among Lloyd Rowe’s many accomplishments was participation in launching on our campus the School of Public and Environment Affairs.  Similarly, Kwesi Aggrey helped bring about a master’s degree program in Liberal Studies.  In the time left to you, perhaps you might consider ways to add to your legacy, such as reviving IUN’s campus summer program (gutted by online offerings) or creating an endowed chair (in Chemistry, perhaps) or a fellowship (like Harvard Fellows) that would bring distinguished scholars with an interest in Northwest Indiana to IUN for a year.  No matter what problems you tackle, I know your final months on campus will be worthwhile and, hopefully, fulfilling to you personally.

In short, thanks for six exciting years.  You will be missed.

In my letter I could have included Mary Russell, second in command under the much-maligned Hilda Richards.  Russell believed strongly in the mission of the Calumet Regional Archives and matched an offer that Steve McShane received from another university.  A couple years ago, David Malik offered Steve an administrative position at a significantly higher salary, but he turned it down because he couldn’t get assurances that the Archives would get a full-time replacement.  Like Ron Cohen and I, Steve regards the Archives as his most important academic legacy.

Larissa Dragu (above) and Jackie Walorski

Northwest News reported that senior Larissa Dragu was an administrative assistant to Indiana’s Second District Congresswoman Jackie Walorski, who succeeded Joe Donnelly when he ran successfully for the Senate.  Between 2000 and 2004 Walorski lived in Romania and with her husband founded Impact International to provide medical supplies to children.  Born in Romania, Larissa may have heard of their work.

Here are a few of Times columnist Al Hamnik’s analogies about the pitiful Chicago Bears:

  “The Bears are a stinky dumpster fire.

  If the Bears’ leaky secondary were a dam, they’d evacuate the town.

  [Defensive] players can’t stop a sneeze with Kleenex.

  The Tin Man has more heart.”

For Nicole Anslover’s class I reread Hoosier Ernie Pyle’s most famous wartime column, “The Death of Captain Waskow,” filed from the front lines in Italy in January of 1944.  Waskow’s body returned to camp lashed onto the back of a mule.  Pyle wrote:

“One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, ‘God damn it.’ That’s all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, ‘God damn it to hell anyway.’ He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.

Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: ‘I’m sorry, old man.’

Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said: ‘I sure am sorry, sir.’

Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.”

Correspondent Edgar Jones reported 13 months later from Iwo Jima, a volcanic island where 20,000 Japanese died.  Of the 25,000 American casualties, nearly 7,000 lost their lives. On D Day plus eight Jones came upon a section of the beach designated to serve as an American cemetery.  He wrote:

  “The chaplains were endeavoring to identify each body and hold a brief, individual service for each man to be buried in the black sands of the barren island.  Naturally the chaplains and the burial parties were far behind in their work.  The dead were brought in faster than they could be buried.

On the afternoon I walked by, there was half an acre of dead Marines stretched out so closely together they blanketed the beach for two hundred yards.  The stench was overpowering.  There, in mangled lots, not laid in neat rows, was part of the price paid for Iwo.

  Whether Iwo will have any lasting military significance is something which men out here argue about. . . .  I cannot evaluate the battle for Iwo objectively.  The Marines fought with courage and determination seemingly beyond human capabilities.  They died the hard way.” 

Iowa’s Senator-elect Joni Ernst brags about growing up castrating hogs on her family’s farm and promised that when she got to Washington, she’d make the big spenders squeal.  Angry that Democrats ran away from Obama, Bill Maher joked that if Ernst went looking for Democrats’ balls, she’d have trouble finding any.  One of Maher’s guests was New Hampshire Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist who predicted that, now more than ever, corporate interests will dictate the agenda of the new Congress.  Let’s hope Obama stands up to them.

The European Space Agency has landed a robot probe satellite on a comet named 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.  It bounced twice before setting down on the side of a crater that might inhibit its batteries being recharged by solar power.  Still, it’s an impressive achievement, demonstrating the value of international cooperation.  That’s the way the space program should have been organized from the very beginning. 

I pinned a photo of Anne Balay speaking about “Steel Closets,” to the bulletin board of IUN’s Robin Hass Birky Memorial Women’s Studies Room in Savannah Center, where she gave a talk last spring.  On the plaque outside the room was the Geoffrey Chaucer quote, “And gladly [s]he would learn and gladly teach” – doubly appropriate because Robin taught “The Canterbury Tales.”  I thought of putting Anne’s photo on the English Department bulletin board but figured it wouldn’t last long.  Anne is on her way to Puerto Rico to accept an award from the National Women’s Studies Association. The keynote speaker at the conference is bell hooks, who wrote in “Feminism Is For Everybody: Passionate Politics”:

            “Whenever domination is present love is lacking. Loving parents, be they single or coupled, gay or straight, headed by females or males, are more likely to raise healthy, happy children with sound self-esteem. In future feminist movement we need to work harder to show parents the ways ending sexism positively changes family life. Feminist movement is pro-family. Ending patriarchal domination of children, by men or women, is the only way to make the family a place where children can be safe, where they can be free, where they can know love.”

After two mediocre games I bowled a 178, but Valpo Muffler, whose leadoff man, Denny rolled a 733, swept us despite Rob, Dick, Mel, and I all finishing about our averages.  Our only chance came in the second game, but we needed John to double, and he left a seven-ten split.   Bob McCann (whose wife Shannon rolled her ankle getting up when her leg was half-asleep and was limping) announced that it was Ed St. Jean’s 76th birthday; a guy nearby said, “I hope I’m still alive at that age.”  I second that emotion.  Ed, who bears a resemblance to longtime East Chicago mayor Robert “Hollywood Bob” Pastrick, left a bunch of ten-pins (“my friend all night,” he lamented) but finished strong with four strikes in a row.  When I congratulated Denny on his series, he replied: “It was a long time coming.”