Honor: Shakespeare's Falstaff, Trump's Vocabulary

Well, ’tis no matter. Honor pricks me on.

Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on?

 How then? Can honor set to a leg? no. Or an arm? no.

Or take away the grief of a wound?

No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No.

What is honor? A word. What is in that word “honor”?

— Falstaff, before the Battle of Shrewsbury, 1 Henry IV 5.1.129-33

            In "The Pretty Complete Shakespeare Guide to Donald Trump," I list among the parallels to Trump Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff. I don't quote the line, but the primary parallel was summed up in Falstaff's reflection "Lord, lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!" (ˆ2 Henry IV 3.2.301-2) and how in both cases the "lies are like their father that begets them; gross as a mountain, open, palpable" (1 Henry IV 2.4.212-14).

            A more subtle parallel came up around 4 and 5 May of 2017: dates I remember since the 4^th of May is the anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University in 1970, and 5 May is Cinco de Mayo, with a capital "C": a holiday in my part of the US as well as Battle of Puebla Day in Mexico. When asked about meeting with Kim Jong Un, dictator of North Korea, Mr. Trump responded, CNN reported, "If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely, I would be honored to do it."

            I have no complaints with the idea of the President of the United States calling the long-standing bluff of the North Koreans and arranging a full-scale peace conference to end the Korean War, with some of the groundwork laid in a quick, properly chaperoned, private meeting between the US President and the supreme leader of the PRK. My interest here is Mr. Trump saying he'd be honored.

            I quote as a headnote Falstaff's self-"catechism" asking himself if he should risk life and limb in battle for "honor." He does fight, sort of, but not for honor; and some people might not like the conclusion that "honor" is just a word: air, breath, a symbol like a scutcheon — a coat of arms ("escutcheon") displayed at a funeral. Honor, at least for Falstaff, at least of the military variety, is what makes living men dead soldiers.

            Note, though, that in the Henry plays and elsewhere people, especially men-type people, act for honor, but only Falstaff asks what the word means. It's a good question. "Honor" can imply mere reputation or even more crassly the sort of "honor" one gets on the Monarch's "Honour's List" as it was back in the day of, say, Macbeth, when an "honor" could imply a title, plus land, money, and power. That's behind the exchange when Macbeth before the murder of King Duncan so very carefully sounds out Banquo's willingness to support … something, at some time. Neither Macbeth nor Shakespeare had the phrase "plausible deniability," but they understood the concept.  

MACBETHIf you shall cleave to my consent, when 'tis,It shall make honour for you.

BANQUO                                                 So I lose noneIn seeking to augment it, but still keepMy bosom franchised and allegiance clear,I shall be counsell'd. (Macbeth 2.1.25-29)

Macbeth suggests there'll be "honour" as in profit for Banquo if he goes along with some action by Macbeth in the future. Banquo responds with a reference to a more refined honor when he puts a condition on his cooperation. He'll cooperate so long as doing so would be honorable, with "honorable" as in ethical and patriotic.

            Falstaff is the philosopher of 1 Henry IV, and a great comedian, a master of words.

            "Honor," Falstaff says, pricks him on — as in pricking with a goad for cattle (cf. to "goad someone [on]). But what if honor figuratively pricks him off — checks him off the list of the living — when he "comes on," i.e., presses forward into battle. There's a joke here, and it's a tribute to Falstaff's verbal brilliance that it's on us, his audience. Nowadays, to dirty-minded adolescent boys and some girls, "prick me off" and "come on" sound … suggestive. Same suggestions back in Shakespeare's day, with "prick," which has and had the slang meaning of "penis" and "come," which has possibilities. The joke is that this isn't dirty, and a good actor could look at the audience and get across, "Oh, you nasty-minded people!"

*

            Like Falstaff, the theoretically Honorable Donald J. Trump bends reality — as he perceives it — to his will with words; unlike Sir John, Trump is careless with words and possibly often ignorant.

            Since Kim Jong Un commands a military with several thousand artillery tubes that can be brought to bear on Seoul, South Korea, it is well for American presidents to avoid insulting him. Such prudence, however, does not require sucking up, which would be the case if Mr. Trump really expressed his feelings in indicated he'd feel honored to meet with Kim.

            Significant here, for me anyway, is that Mr. Trump doesn't much care what the word "honored" means and that most of his supporters apparently don't care that he doesn't care.

            We are seeing I think a temporary culmination of a long-running trend.

            Back when I was teaching, every few semesters I'd return essays and write on the chalkboard in large letters, Words mean. And one semester I got some pushback on that assertion. A moderately cute couple of my students branded me a Literalist and one or other of the pair wrote and submitted a satiric attack on The Literalist as a type. This was in a course in expository writing (i.e., essays), and I'm pretty sure it was during the period I was starting out our work with examining "Sayings and Such": sayings, proverbs, coachly clichés — that sort of stuff. The first one was, "A stich in time saves nine," and I asked the students to explain what that meant and what you had to do to figure it out (finish the thought for one thing: "A stich in time saves nine stiches"). And then we'd move on to meatier matters like "No Pain, / No Gain." Is that true for weight training"? (I was taught "No"; my students were taught "Yes"; and a lot depends on what one means by "pain.") And for coached team sports, Pain for whom? Gain for whom? (I received a hell of an essay on that one from a student who finished a high school football game with his knees shot up with a cortisone and Xylocaine cocktail. At the end of the term, I confirmed with the student that the "I" of the essay was he and asked how he was doing. He replied, "I can walk, but I'm not playing football." His father punched out the coach, but the coach and trainer were otherwise unpunished.)

            Or what does it mean when a coach or principal or boss asks you to devote "110%" to the team or school or job? Obviously, the statement is figurative since s/he can't demand 110%, not with percentages only going up to 100. What percent are we talking about here — and why don't players and students or teachers or workers ask just what percentage is being demanded? My last question is mostly rhetorical. Part of the answer, though, is that they'd get in trouble for pointing out that an authority figure was bullshitting and/or demanding a blank check; and another part is that people don't even notice the bullshit or care much. People could say, "Okay, I realize that "110%" is a figure of speech, but what do you literally have in mind? Personally, I have other demands on me — legitimate demands — so I can give the team (school, job) maybe 20%."

            Few people say such things 'cause they want to avoid trouble, and over hundreds and thousands of unresisted utterances of such bullshit, it gets normalized and becomes unremarkable.

            More innocent is the sort of carelessness encapsulated in one of my oldest school memories. The pedantic old woman who taught my fourth grade class — fourth grade or thereabouts — complained about people's saying they "love ice cream." They wouldn't run back into a burning building to save Ice Cream, and they don't have a personal relationship with it, so she wondered why we couldn't just say we like ice cream. She was pedantic, overly fastidious, and right.

            Over hundreds and thousands of casual sloppy utterances, an important word like "love" gets a little trivialized and moves toward a heart-shape on Facebook.

*

            Other aspects of the hyperbole subset of bullshit were a problem for me writing recommendations. The Director of Film Studies told me I was screwing over students in saying that they were "competent, diligent, reliable, and bright." That was damning with faint praise. The graduate programs and grants and transfers our students applied for demanded brilliance and unique qualifications. I noted to the Director that if the applicants were as good as the screening committees apparently demanded, what the hell were they doing in our program much less why would they go to programs little better than ours? Applicants as good as the programs seemed to be demanding would do better than those programs.

            What I ended up doing was using my old terms but explaining them and, on occasion, giving where I was coming from.

                        Item 1: In response to something I said, the Chair of my department looked at me and replied, "Oh, come on, Rich; you've got a second-rate mind." To which I replied, "Yes, but I'm at a third-rate school." He didn't argue the point. If Cambridge and Chicago in their glory days, and Harvard and Stanford were or are first-rate; if the Big Ten school my boss and I attended was second-rate — then a school like Miami University at Oxford (Ohio) was third-rate.

                        Item 2: Probably in response to a self-deprecating remark I'd made, and quite likely after a couple or more gin-and-tonics, the great scholar of Medieval literature, Robert Kaske said to me, "No Rich; you're bright. (beat) Not brilliant, but bright." Kaske was brilliant; I was and generally still am, bright. I was and am also competent, professional, diligent, and dependable, and when I call an applicant those things it's significant praise. Brilliant is nice, but brilliant people aren't always diligent and dependable — or loyal to the people who gave them a break or their first job. Brilliant people can do better.

            With one candidate I really wanted to praise, I wrote that the person "is one of the most intelligent people I've met. He is not as bright as, say, Susan Sontag, Octavia Butler, Michael Harrington, Ursula K. Le Guin, or Senator Paul Douglas, but [s/he] is in their league and is among the brightest of the people who were my instructors, students, colleagues, and/or superiors in the hierarchies at the University of Illinois, Michael Reese Medical Center, Cornell University, and Miami University."

* *

We can be more careful with language, and one good thing Mr. Trump may accomplish is showing how important such care can be. Now that lesson may be taught if he makes some horrible verbal error and Kim Jong Un orders the bombardment of Seoul — but short of that, he can teach some valuable lessons on what not to do.

            "What is honor?" Well, it's not a meeting with a two-bit dictator.

Heroes, Hubris, & Honor: Job & Tamburlaine (2 March 2014)

            I am a great admirer of Job of the Biblical Poem of Job: not so much the pious sufferer from the Prolog or the rewarded .000001-Percenter of the Epilog but the wounded lover and tragic hero of the middle of the Book.

            You can complain if you like that Job wimps out in the end, but his final lines to God are

I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees You;
therefore I despise myself,
                and repent in dust and ashes. (42.5-6)

 Not while hearing sanctimonious lies from his "Comforters," not one instant before Job sees God does he repent, and in his repentance he uses that key word of human logic, therefore.

            Job gets the Beatific Vision and sees God in the whirlwind and, within human limitations, sees the real reality of things and, in terms of that expanded vision, repents. Or, if you like, Job sees God as a putz of infinite power and "therefore" wimps out in the face of infinite intimidation.

            Still — if you've ever knuckled under to a spouse or parent or boss or drill instructor or teacher, show some respect for Job standing up as long as he does to the God he's heard about and whose power to fuck over an individual human being he has excruciatingly felt.

            Job holds fast to his integrity, and for that we should admire him greatly.

            Integrity, though, has its limitations.

            The Book of Job is ultimately a kind of divine comedy — Job is restored: happy ending — if a comedy with a significant body count and unhappy endings for Job's extended family. Still, Richard B. Sewell knew what he was doing in using Job's story to begin his study of The Vision of Tragedy and having Job a theological variation on the theme of the tragic hero.

            Tragic heroes frequently have integrity up the whazoo, and moralist drama critics have accused them of Pride as a "tragic flaw."

            Maybe.

            In The Poetics, Aristotle has tragic heroes with hamartia, but that probably means a "tragic," as in really bad, mistake. But in a nicely coherent drama that mistake should flow from the protagonist's character, and that character always and necessarily takes himself or herself — Antigone, Juliet, Cleopatra — very seriously. Tragic characters' integrity, viewed theologically, is the sort of Pride of which God accuses Job: what the Catholic Church calls Superbia, the sin of Satan, numero uno of the Seven Deadly sins and root of all evils: Radix malorum superbia est.

            From a god-like point of view, such Pride is ludicrous, and it doesn't take much to push superbia, the sin that goeth before a fall, and The Fall, into dumb-ass chutzpah: the pride that goeth before a pratfall, falling on your ass, while your friends point and laugh.

            Necessarily, tragic protagonists take themselves and their lives seriously enough to be guilty of hubris: in any realistic view of things, humans are not significant. That's humans, as in our species, to say nothing of any of us individually. To paraphrase the God of Paddy Chayefsky's Gideon (1961): Hey, you weren't here ten million years ago; you won't be here ten million years from now; what's the big deal with your dying now?

            Outside of "The Vision of Tragedy," tragic protagonists are guilty of sinful superbia or comic chutzpah; if the tragedy is working, though, we identify with the tragic protagonist and feel his — usually his — hubris as central to human dignity or self respect, while at the same time keeping our distance and viewing the character somewhat objectively. That is an actor up there on stage, the object of our vision and hearing, plus we know not to identify too much: in most tragedies there's going to be blood on the stage pretty soon — gore brings in the crowds — and a fair amount of that blood will probably come from the protagonist.

            But not always: and one hulking exception leads me into a problem with integrity as demonstrated by the first superstar, superhero of the English Renaissance stage — Ta Da! — Tamburlaine the Great, as depicted by that most excellent of English playwrights ca. 1590, Christopher Marlowe. Or, as the title page of the 1590 printing of Tamburlaine ("Deuided into two Tragicall Di∫cour∫es") put it

Tamburlaine

the Great.

Who, from a Scythian Shephearde,

by his rare and woonderfull Conqueƒts,

became a most puissant and migh-

tye Monarque,

And (for his tyranny, and terrour in

Warre) was tearmed,

The Scourge of God.

Actually, Tamburlaine is only one "Tragicall Discourse," and maybe not even one. Part II is a sequel following the commercial success of Part I, and Part II does end with Tamburlaine's death, so it's sort of "tragical." But just sort of: Tamburlaine dies at the height of his conquests, fairly old for his time and profession (full-time warrior) — and dies very quickly of natural causes. Now it would have been prudent to console Tamburlaine's family with a reference to "their tragic loss," or something like that, but — come on! — his death isn't even all that sad.

            Still, the rule is "kill 'em off or marry them off" and on the Elizabethan stage plays usually moved toward an "exeunt" with a funeral march (tragedy) or pairing off to dance away — sometimes literally — to a wedding (comedy). So Part II is, that, far, tragic: It begins with a funeral and ends with a funeral. Part I, though, is, like the full Book of Job, technically a comedy, in the case of Tamburlaine 1, a romantic comedy, ending with a new and … different world, one more purely noble and promising peace, finally coalescing around a central heterosexual and fertile couple exiting to get married.

            Significant here is that the new world of most comedies is marked as more flexible than the old world: minimally, a romantic comedy is flexible enough to allow one or more formerly "blocked" couples to pair off and marry. Marlowe's Tamburlaine is minutely more flexible at the end of Tamburlaine, Part 1, but only minutely: flexibility isn't in his character; integrity is: being true to himself, true to his sense of honor.

            This is important because Tamburlaine says of himself, in what we might call «the third-person Narcissistic» that, "His honour […] consists in shedding blood / When men presume to manage arms with him" (see 5.2.407-15). Except not just men, and not necessarily armed men. Shortly before this comment on his "honour," we have seen Tamburlaine order the murders of a delegation of girls from the City of Damascus who've come out to plead with him for the city — and then order the massacre of everyone in Damascus, relenting only to spare his near-future father-in-law. And in Part II we will see Tamburlaine's first on-stage, do-it-yourself atrocity in killing his own son, Calyphas, for being AWOL from a battle (Part II, 4.2.36-54).

            Hey, martial law is martial law, and if Tamburlaine's kid could skip a battle, then everyone might skip a battle, except that in the world of Marlowe's Tamburlaine just about every male except Calyphas and a relatively minor ruler is bloodthirsty.

            More important than martial law and tradition, though, is Tamburlaine's honor as integrity and sticking to his rules. If a city submits to him on the first day he and his troops set down before it, he's satisfied "with spoil," and "refuseth blood," i.e., he just robs everybody without killing them. If they hold out to the second day, when he takes the city — and Tamburlaine always wins — "Then must his kindled wrath be quenched with blood, / Not sparing any that can manage arms"; and if the enemy hold out into the third day, "Without respect of sex, degree, or age, / He razeth all his foes with fire and sword": i.e., he kills every human in town: men, women, and children (end of 4.1).

            Tamburlaine is a test case, or a reduction to the grotesque, of one vision of tragedy, and an important one. In "Tragedy and the Common Man" (1949), Arthur Miller says, "In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and examination."

            The fine Shakespeare scholar Lawrence Lerner once asked if a couple hundred years in the future some author might apply Miller's idea and write a tragedy of Adolf Hitler.

            Marlowe was writing in the 1580s; the historical Timur Lang did his thing 1370-1405, and the historical Timur ranks #9 on Matthew White's "[…] One Hundred Deadliest Multicides" in world history, with a body count of some 17 million, putting Timur just behind the Mideast slave trade, 7^th-19^th centuries, but ahead, of the Atlantic slave trade, 1452-1807. In thirty-five years, in a rampage less than two centuries before Marlowe's time, the historical Timur made himself competitive, atrocity-wise, with two of the worst, long-running crimes in human history.

            But Tamburlaine has integrity — at least in Marlowe's version — and follows his idea of honor and pursues a major ideal of honor in his time, and for much of human history: He is, after all "Tamburlaine the Great."

            His most trusted officers beg Tamburlaine not to kill his own son; Tamburlaine kills the kid before our eyes. Tamburlaine declines to rape Zenocrate, the captured daughter of a Sultan, and honorably woos her and pledges himself to her — but he won't go against his customs and spare her city in spite of her pleas. He spares her father, finally, and ends Part I with a promise of peace and fertility, but the incredible climax of that play, not all that long before the conclusion, is the death in battle of Zenocrate's now-former fiancé and the massacre of the inhabitants of Damascus.

            Desiring to teach two works I really like, and perhaps too fond of alliteration, I taught together Tamburlaine and The Terminator (1984) for their examination of focus of purpose and just how we should define heroism and "manly men doing manly things." In Terminator, the ultimate macho-man turns out not to be not a man at all but a machine; Marlowe's Tamburlaine, at least in Part I, starts out and remains — our hero is nothing if not consistent — and increasingly reveals himself as a superman. Tamburlaine whups the asses of, as in kills, all the competing Alpha-, Beta-, and Gamma-males, and, since he's anachronistically a Renaissance superman, he's also a lover.

            The climax of Part I features that Massacre at Damascus, but the slaughter is off-stage. What is on-stage is Tamburlaine's first soliloquy, his "apostrophe" — here, a hymn of praise — to his beloved "divine Zenocrate."

            I used to ask my students what, if anything, they'd use for "noises off" while Tamburlaine was pronouncing his arguably fulsome praise of Zenocrate in what was, unarguably, some of the most impressive poetry in English up to that moment. Some blood-chilling screams from the dying, raped, and/or maimed might undermine Tamburlaine's eloquence here, but the speech doesn't have to be played that way, and it's highly unlikely that it was.

                  Tamburlaine said his "customs are as peremptory / As wrathful planets, death, or destiny" (5.2.64-65). If "A lie is worse than murder," as the Gentleman's Code used to teach, then wouldn't Tamburlaine be right to murder rather than break his word? Including murder every living thing — future father-in-law excepted — in Damascus? Tamburlaine is a modern, complete hero so a fighter and a lover, but in case of a conflict between the two roles — no contest: the implacable fighter wins.

            Tamburlaine Part I was enough of a hit to justify a sequel, as was The Terminator; and it is instructive that it was Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 that went into US pop culture and made Schwarzenegger a star, not Michael Biehn's human, humane, and humanistic Kyle Reese. (Remember Michael Biehn? He's still getting work, and he's rumored to have made good money; Arnold Schwarzenegger went on to marry a Kennedy, become governor of the State of California, and made a shitload of money.) In spite of the obvious intentions of James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, T-800 steals the show in The Terminator, and the T-800 "Macho Creed" version of heroism and perversion of integrity is the take-away message from the film for a fair number of viewers, at least those of the seriously-dense, immature male persuasion.

            At least in Part I, I'm sure Christopher Marlowe wants us to admire Tamburlaine, and there is something admirable about the spirit of Tamburlaine in Part II when he defies the god — or God — he thinks is striking him down.

            Tamburlaine is admirable, sort of, in not going gently into death, but he's delusional in thinking his death is some sort of cosmic event. All men are mortal; Tamburlaine is a man — deal with it, "T".

            I am a great admirer of Job and the principle of integrity: of consistency and honesty, being true to oneself and possessing a keen sense of honor. But a lie is not worse than murder; Kyle Reese and (more so) Sarah Connor are the heroes and proper humans of Terminator; and Tamburlaine is a macho asshole on a world-historical scale, but still a macho asshole. In his integrity and honor Tamburlaine can be wondered at, even admired — but admired the way I admire a great white shark. Except that even the shark that rips me apart is innocent and relatively harmless; the Timur Lang of history was phenomenally dangerous and, after his fashion, Marlowe's Tamburlaine is dangerous and, finally, by the end of Part II, ridiculous.


======================
Update (from a post by the BBC):

          Since independence in 1991 Uzbekistan has been restoring the legacy of its great 14th Century conqueror Tamerlane the Great - Amir Timur.
The current Uzbek leadership has eradicated most of the traces of the former Soviet Union's domination.
          Invoking the Timurid spirit in a televised address to the nation earlier this year, President Islam Karimov said: "You are descendants of a great people - you have in your hands the might of Tamerlane".

The Mongolian leadership has been rehabilitating Temujin, "The Great Khan" (1206-27), Timur's model. Matthew White estimates Genghis Khan's body count at 40 million, tying him with Mao Zedong (1949-76) for the second biggest mass slaughter in human history, exceeded only by World War II (66 million). Given the relative populations, Genghis Khan is likely the greatest mass killer in recorded human history, and Tamburlaine the Great competitive for number 2. To repeat a kind of cliché of English Renaissance political thought — you can find it in Shakespeare's Richard II — "Great" is different from "good."

Altruism: I'm Sort of Against It (25 Jan. 2015)

[N]othing is so soon corrupted by power-seeking as altruism."

— Odo "The Day Before the Revolution"

"Since when was altruism an Odonian virtue?”

"I am no altruist!" — Shevek in

The Dispossessed (chs. 8, 11)

            Odo and Shevek are characters created by Ursula K. Le Guin in the early 1970s, characters who "theorize," inspire, and initiate (Odo) and then help renew (Shevek) a revolution toward a just and good society based in communist anarchism. That's "communist anarchism" with the communism of the small "c" variety and "communist" acting as a modifier of the main word of the phrase: you-bet-your-ass anarchism.
            Odo may misspeak in her reservations about altruism (it turns out she's dying and may be confused), and Shevek is the hero of The Dispossessed but definitely fallible. Still, as Dan Sabia points out in a fine passage on altruism in "Individual and Community in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed" (pp. 119-20 [pdf 147-48]) — and I argued about the same time — the upshot is that Le Guin's Odonianism isn't keen on altruism, and Le Guin herself is at least skeptical.
            That may surprise people who sensibly assume any communal society requires a good deal of altruism and that an anarchy (pure society: no State, no government) would require a great deal of altruism. That may be the case, but Le Guin presents a thought-experiment where an anarchistic culture, society, and economy work with normal humans: a species — well, genus in these stories — that's clearly social but whose members are not reliably altruistic.
            I liked the doubts on altruism when I came across them in Le Guin's work, in large part for the good human reason that even in my early 30's when I encountered the stories, I had long shared such doubts.
            A relatively quick story.
            Arguably, I'm about as pathetic as Al Bundy on Married … With Children insofar as I pretty well peaked at age 17. I wasn't some Bundy-esque high school jock, but, about 1960, at age 17 or so, I became president of The Merton Davis Memorial Foundation for Crippling Diseases of Children. Relevant here is the election meeting and, so to speak, my inaugural address to our executive committee.
            I was later told that the outgoing officers who'd engineered my selection had been somewhat worried about me. I'd been a good soldier under their command — hard-working, obedient, and respectful and all — but the obedience and respect part, and some perceived excess of idealism, had them a little concerned: they thought I'd be too diffident to lead.
            My little speech dispelled that belief. I'd been a good soldier and carried out orders, and I wanted people to do that for me now that I was in charge.
            I also wanted my executive committee to work hard and explained that idealism and altruism probably wouldn't be enough for the necessary level of work.
            I served the organization is part out of youthful idealism but only a small part. My major motivation was that I'd had Legg-Perthes disease as a child and had only fully recovered from it a couple years earlier. By coincidence, just as in a matter of chance, my father had also had Legg-Perthes disease at the age I got it, possibly triggered in each case by the same sort of accident (he'd fallen while climbing a tree; I'd fallen off a swing set while trying to walk across the top bar of the swing set). The difference in our experience was that my father had been put into a cast and traction and had a year pretty well cut out of his life; my parents, on the other hand had been lucky enough — and maybe my father had been insistent enough — to find an orthopedist who was trying a "First, do no harm" approach and just kept watch on the disintegration of my left (or maybe right) hip joint. Basically I was told to "Let pain be your guide" and led a normal life, except insofar as I got most of my serious exercise swimming rather than on land.
            The passive medical approach took some chutzpah on the part of the orthopedist; the X-rays looked really scary, and, of course, hotshot physicians in the Cold War Era were (and remain to this day) supposed to DO SOMETHING!! about scary diseases.
            Anyway, the ball and socket on my hip grew back so well I'm not sure which hip was affected, and the only serious concern is if there were any ill effects from a decade of hip X-rays at 1940s-50s standards for exposure to radiation, X-rays that necessarily passed through my genitals. (Only in my last set of X-rays did the lab tech get around to putting a shield over my testicles.)
            My father and I had both been mildly diddled by the Goddess Fortune — I've linked to at least one image that will help you picture Her with a suitable Wheel — in getting a rare disease at all, but compared my father, I had seriously lucked out.
            So I owed. And serving The Merton Davis Memorial Foundation for Crippling Diseases of Children went a long way toward paying the debt.
            That part of my motivation had to do with my sense of self, my integrity, my honor: which, in themselves, have nothing to do with altruism since I didn't have to give a rat's ass about crippled kids; I had dues to pay.
            Actually,I could identify with and did care about crippled kids, but more important was that Pride thing in my not wanting to owe nobody nuthin', plus whatever standard weird psychodynamics were going on with my relationship with my father. And there was the Pride thing big time in being president of a charitable foundation at 17.
            I told my executive committee I wanted them to have similar motivations: some idealism, a touch of altruism, but enough of the down-and-dirty basic human motivations of being on the executive committee of a charitable foundation while still in one's teens and being pretty hot shit, as we used to say, in the world of Chicago North Side (mostly Jewish) high school fraternities and sororities.
            By junior/senior year of high school, I'd observed enough human behavior to know that altruism exists and is a beautiful thing, but I'd learned that altruism isn't to be depended upon for the long haul, or even a year's service running a charity.
            Self-interest, preferably — not necessarily — enlightened self-interest, provides a more solid basis for human action, including doing good.
            At least in the world Le Guin created for The Dispossessed and "The Day Before the Revolution," communist anarchism could work because it served most people's self interest well, and in any event better than capital "C" State Communism and Capitalism.
            You don't have to accept Odo's ideas or Le Guin's or mine on how to move toward The Good Society, not here anyway. The point here is on motivating people and that offering rewards for people doing what you think is right is better — more effective to start with, but also better — than appeals to altruism or, I'll now add, to guilt.
            This is part of what ticks me off about too much stress on victimization of women, African-Americans, Native Americans, Jews, et al.
            Consider the following literally pragmatic argument (what respectable thinkers would call vulgar pragmatism, to which I'll cheerfully admit).
            If the more militant analyses of US culture by the most radical women and Blacks of the 1970s were correct — and there is much to be said for those analyses — then White privilege and patriarchy operate to direct most wealth to White males and leave everyone else relatively poor and pretty much powerless. Okay, but if that is the case, action by White males would be necessary for any significant changes since a revolution from below would be doomed — see that bit about powerlessness — and the only motivation to help would be either an overpowering sense of guilt or altruism.
            So long as radical women and Blacks could plausibly threaten disruption and even property damage, there was the possibility of more centrist sorts wringing concessions out of the power elite (those old White men).
            There's only so long that militant enthusiasm can operate, however, and a time limit on how long mass movements can move: people leave the streets; the power elite and their bureaucrats stay; and we see "Backlash" (under Richard M. Nixon) and then "Rollback" (Ronald Reagan through today).
            You end up better off then you started — "Two steps forward, 1.7 steps back" — but there is only rarely radical change: change from the roots up.
            Most of the time that's just as well with radical ideas and mass movements since, to recycle one of George F. Wills's correct ideas, most new ideas are wrong, and mass movements do tend to get nasty. The goals of the Movement of the mid-20^th c. however, were right, and they were important.
            It is necessary to vent gripes and publicize past and continuing wrongs. And it's necessary to do so frequently since the American people are chronically amnesiac, and American media have the attention span of beagle puppies. After that, and while doing that, however, to implement necessary changes one needs nuanced analysis, and building of coalitions.
            Some basics for those projects:
                        * "The White Man" and "The Man" are abstractions. Actually-existing Whites and men (or whatever) share privilege and power very unequally, as it is becoming fashionable to point out.
                        * White privilege and patriarchy are ways to bring together groups of people who can feel privileged because they/we are — relative to the nearest sets of "wogs," including women. These abstract mass groupings (these binary opposites) however, are a thin overlay over a much more significant social model of the power-and-economic pyramid. At the top of the pyramid are those who have, and nowadays again have big; while further down is everybody else.
            Indeed we are not beyond racial and sexual divisions; but it is time to get back to that old time Leftism that notes that White guys with a little bit of power and privilege — guys with a decent union, say — have only a little bit of power and privilege and might have more with more equitable distribution of wealth.
            Or would locally: things get more complex if one wants "All men" and women "created equal" and living somewhat equally, and want to bring into the equation, say, most Africans or most humans generally.
            At least in terms of American politics, we could use less slathering on of guilt and implicit reliance on altruism and more appeals to Pride-based honor and self-interest. "Guilt isn't inherited, but the loot is"; and we non-African-American Americans can be reminded that we've got a debt of honor to pay Blacks and that the serious issue is how best to go about paying it down a bit. Meanwhile we White guys should be dealing with reparations and other issues of fairness and wealth-distribution not out of altruism, and not only as a matter of honor, but also from self-interest.
            Maybe not 99% of us, but most of us will be better off in a world that is fairer, more just, more equal.
            Altruism exists, and it's a beautiful thing. Holiness also exits, though I found it as upsetting as beautiful, but I've encountered holiness exactly once. You should count on altruism only slightly more than actual holiness for politics.
            As a practical matter, activists must count on coalitions, and the technique of building them starts with getting your grievances out there quickly and then talking to ordinary people, who always have near the core of our basic motivations that crucial question, "What's in it for me?" The question isn't just nearly inevitable; it's also legitimate, and people who want major social changes need good answers.