16 Blank Slate Media Newspapers, Friday, April 7, 2017
A LOOK ON THE LIGHTER SIDE
Cheaters never win, but sometimes finish
I
t happened at the worst possible time — a new friend’s book group. “So, Judy, what did you think of the novel?” she asked me. “About how it turned out? ” “Um….” I stalled for time. “I thought it was very, ah, interesting.” I had no idea what I thought. I had barely gotten through the first thirty pages. “Let me see,” I murmured, reaching for her copy, to sneak a peek at the ending.“Ah, yes. Well, I thought it was very well done.” That would have to do. If I uttered a criticism, someone might ask for my reasons, and I would have none! When will I learn? Friends keep inviting me to book groups, but I turn them down: “I have something already that night,” I say, or “I’m just so busy,” or even “I didn’t like that book.” They’re all lies, made up because I’m more ashamed of the real reason: I am a slow reader. And I’m tired of trying to hide it. Even without a book group, I sometimes cheat and skip to the end.
“You just couldn’t wait, could you?” That was my husband, about something else I was reading. “You skipped ahead to find out the killer?” “These authors take so darned long to get to the point! But how would you know if I’ve cheated?” “Because I left you a note between some pages, before the end…and you never found it!” “Maybe I did.” “I don’t think so…because I ended up with the chocolate bar all to myself.” “Darn! How many other books did you leave notes in?” I eyed the sizable stack of un-read books near my bed. “You’ll never know,” he said, licking his fingers. “I hate this! I can’t help my reading speed! It reminds me of college!” “Really? What happened in college?” “Give me that chocolate bar and I’ll tell you.” He broke me off a piece. “It’s just that every professor piled on the work as if they were your only class. There was no
JUDY EPSTEIN A Look on the Lighter Side way to read it all! You just had to learn to peek at the end, and write your paper, and hope you’d guessed right about everything in the middle.” “And did it work?” “Not in French class!” I gave a little shudder. “Somehow, I ended up in way too advanced a class, in French Lit. We were reading ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ by Marcel Proust (in French, of course). So when we each had to report on a chapter, I picked Chapter One.” “Very clever. You got it over
with.” “Yes, I thought so …until the final exam That’s when I realized I was done for. We had to write a character sketch of someone in the novel; a plot analysis; or a short story of our own, ‘in the style of Proust.’ “Uh oh.” “And I had read nothing beyond Chapter One! Plot analysis was out. Likewise a character sketch.; the only “character” I had met, in my chapter, was a piece of cake.” “You mean, it was easy?” My husband was puzzled. “No, I mean literally, a little cake! The Narrator dips it into his tea and triggers a lifetime of flashbacks, forming a whole seven-book saga.. of which I knew nothing. “Oh. Bummer.” “Indeed. That left me writing a short story. Luckily, I had noticed one thing about Proust —he wrote a lot about water. So I scribbled a cheery little scene of farm boys playing at a watering hole, and handed it in. ‘When I got the booklet back, it was completely covered in
red ink. The only words I could make out were a sentence in French which meant, ‘See Me.’” It turns out that, besides a lot of spelling and grammar errors, I had made one crucial mistake. Instead of the verb “nager,” which means “to swim,” I had used “noyer,” which means “to drown.” “At first,” said my professor, “I thought perhaps it was your frightful handwriting. But you have these poor little boys drowning in the river…then laughing and playing…and drowning some more…and then they race each other, drowning all the way across the river, and all the way back. “Mademoiselle, I am forced to conclude: (his voice shook with his distress): You have learned nothing from my class, nothing of Proust, and nothing about French!” I ended up rewriting that paper three more times for him before he would let me have a passing grade. I did learn one thing, though: It would probably have been easier just to read the book.
PULSE OF THE PENINSULA
One man can save or destroy world
Y
es, it is possible for one person to hold the fate of the entire world in his hands. This is not a philosophical question, but should resonate today with erratic autocratic manchild leaders having the ability to set off a nuclear holocaust in an instant, or on an impulse. But it happened. And in that instant when the button could have been pushed – should have been pushed — on Sept 26,1983 — Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defense Forces and the duty officer that night in the Serpukhov-15 bunker outside Moscow, which housed the command center of the Soviet early warning satellite system, watched as one, then two, three, four, then five nuclear missiles were flying toward the Soviet Union from the United States, capable of killing 100 million Russians in a flash. With only 90 seconds until strike, then 60, then 30 seconds, protocol demanded he launch his missiles back at the United States. But he did not. And when they didn’t go off, the false alarm was confirmed. The incident had been a clas-
sified secret for 25 years, on pain of death or being sent to a gulag, but decades later, in revealing interviews documented in a movie, “The Man who Saved the World,” he revealed that in that moment, even if the missiles had turned out to be real, he could not bring himself to unleash a holocaust on 100 million Americans and not saved the 100 million Russians, inviting a retaliatory strike that would have killed 1 billion more and rendered planet Earth uninhabitable. nd the thing is, he wasn’t even supposed to be on duty that night. Another soldier, more mindlessly devoted to protocol, would have launched the missiles at the U.S.. As it was, Petrov paid the price: rather than being hailed a hero, he was chastised, left the military, lost his wife to cancer, and became a cantankerous drunk. I have never felt so terrified at the real possibility of extinction by out-of-control morons who have no business having such ultimate power. We no longer have President Obama, who made nuclear disarmament a mission, particularly controlling the loose nukes in the
KAREN RUBIN Pulse of the Peninsula Ukraine that could easily be acquired by terrorists (and who had to twist Republican arms to get the Senate to approve a New Start Treaty). Instead, the man in command is Donald Trump who has been cavalier about the notion of a nuclear missile striking Europe, who did not know what the nuclear triad or the Start Treaty are, who said he wants to beef up America’s nuclear arsenal (to the tippy top) rather than reduce it, and that other countries including Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia should have their own nuclear
weapons. His campaign benefactor, billionaire Robert Mercer (at whose bequest Trump installed Steve Bannon, KellyAnne Conway, Michael Flynn) believes that nuclear weapons do not pose a health or existential risk and that “outside of the immediate blast zones [of Hiroshima and Nagasaki], the radiation actually made Japanese citizens healthier,” writes Jane Mayer in “The Reclusive HedgeFund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency,” in the New Yorker. (http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2017/03/27/the-reclusive-hedge-fund-tycoon-behindthe-trump-presidency). Trump has actually acknowledged that he is more than willing to restart a nuclear arms race — and shift America’s resources away from such things as Meals on Wheels and school lunch toward that effort, as his budget “outline” evidences. Trump has done nothing to address Russia’s violation of a 30-year-old treaty that bans intermediate-range missiles based on land that has unnerved European allies. “An American decision to
withdraw from the treaty, known as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or I.N.F., would be disastrous,” stated the New York Times in an editorial . This is why it is so vitally important to get to the root of the collusion between Trump’s campaign and inner circle advisers with Russian state actors — not just to win the presidency but in his domestic and foreign policies which serve Putin’s, not America’s, interests. Trump, an autocratic narcissist, willfully ignorant man-child is pitted against an equally moronic, narcissist, man-child who also controls a nuclear arsenal and has said he is more than willing to use it, in North Korea’s tyrant, Kim Jongun. Trump’s so-called Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson has already thrown down a gauntlet, saying the U.S. won’t bother with China intervening and “all options are on the table.” Trump is spoiling for an epic fight — bigger than Pearl Harbor, bigger than 9/11 — because, like all autocrats, he thinks it will give him that ultimate power and control. One man, indeed, can save the world. One man can destroy it.