Saturday, September 24, 2022

Family Signs

Life occasionally repeats itself. This happened recently when my daughter and her husband had to go to Europe. They asked me to be responsible for their three kids, aged fourteen, eleven and eight.

As part of my responsibilities, I showed up at the eight-year-old’s school office to inform them she had to leave school early that day for a dentist appointment. I wore a Giants cap to corral my unruly shoulder-length white hair and spoke clearly, trying to convey a sense that dementia has in my case not yet set in. 

Shortly, Daisy appeared and off we went for the trip a few miles north to the dentist’s office.

I’d left plenty of time, too much actually, and there was no traffic, so we arrived half an hour early. She sat patiently next to me in the waiting room for 50 minutes, which could not have been easy for her. Finally, a dental assistant called her name and she disappeared into the back.

I had told her that if she wanted me to go back to the examination room with her I would do so. Our signal if she wanted that was a thumb’s up, but the signal never came so I sat still while she got her X-rays and an exam.

One problem with being a grandfather is I’m never entirely sure I am hearing the kids properly. Daisy speaks softly, and much of the time I just nod in response. It gets tiring to always be saying “What was that?”

Plus it’s a cliche to do that and I hate being a cliche.

Meanwhile, the dental office filled up with patients and their partners. One elderly lady was upset and seemed to be overcome from the heat. She had to be attended to. An office assistant took her blood pressure, while her adult daughter waved a fan in her face. “Mommy are you all right?” she asked.

Eventually the elderly woman settled down and seemed recovered. I picked up her jacket and cane, which had fallen, and handed them to the daughter.

A silver-haired man about my age entered and stood in line to report in for his appointment. He made eye contact with me and eventually sat down next to me. “Been waiting long?” he asked me.

I said yes but asked when his appointment was scheduled for and reassured him his wait would not doubt be less than ours had been.

Other such events unfolded but finally my granddaughter re-appeared with a masked dentist who explained she should have a sealant applied to one molar as a preventative measure. So I made a future appointment for her to return and we headed out of the office for the drive home. The dentist told her not to eat or drink anything for 30 minutes after her appointment.

As we pulled into the driveway, she piped up: “Has it been 30 minutes yet, Grandpa?” 

I nodded. It had been about ten minutes. But it also occurred to me that the things that can vex a parent don’t really bother a grandparent.

Later on, I cooked dinner for the kids while they did their homework. It was pork chops, seasoned and spiced in mushroom cream sauce over quinoa with edamame. 

Daisy is my taster on such occasions. Our signal if she likes the way the sauce tastes is to give me a thumbs-up.

She smiled as she flashed it.

So since I am rambling here it’s back to how life repeats itself. If I could turn back the clock, say, 14 years, I remember a specific day when I took my youngest daughter to the dentist after school, then cooked dinner for three youngest kids (aged 14, 12, and 10 at the time) while they did their homework.

I think it was ‘grilled steak strips with mashed potatoes’ that night. My daughter Julia was my taster.

Our signal if she approved of it was a thumb’s up. She smiled as she flashed it.

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One of These Days

Emmylou Harris

Well, I won't have to chop no wood
I can be bad or I can be good
I can be any way that I feel
One of these days

Might be a woman that's dressed in black
Be a hobo by the railroad track
I'll be gone like the wayward wind
One of these days

One of these days, it will soon be all over, cut and dry
And I won't have this urge to go all bottled up inside
One of these days, I'll look back, and I'll say I left in time
'Cause somewhere for me I know there's peace of mind

I might someday walk across this land
Carrying the Lord's book in my hand
Goin' 'cross the country, singin' loud as I can
One of these days

But I won't have trouble on my back
Cuttin' like the devil with a choppin' axe
Got to shake it off of my back
One of these days

One of these days, it will soon be all over, cut and dry
And I won't have this urge to go all bottled up inside
One of these days, I'll look back, and I'll say I left in time
'Cause somewhere for me I know there's peace of mind
There's gonna be peace of mind for me, one of these days

Songwriter: E. Montgomery 

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Friday, September 23, 2022

A Journalist's Lament

(I first published a different version of this column in May 2006. It still feels relevant.)

There's an old story about Bob Woodward from his childhood. After his parents' divorce, he suspected that his step-siblings would receive more Christmas presents than he would, so he went downstairs early one Christmas morning and carefully counted them all before anyone else woke up. 

It's a familiar refrain to anyone who has ever worked as an investigative reporter. The way we pursue subjects is by following our hunches. Academics would call it chasing a hypothesis. Either way, the key to doing the work well is being able to adjust your hypothesis when the facts don't bear it out.

I was reminded of this recently while talking to a fellow investigative reporter of my vintage. We agreed that the best stories often come from surprises -- when we find out we were wrong about a key assumption, but the real story is even better.

These days, the tools at our disposal are more powerful than in the past. It has become easy to trace unlisted cell phone numbers, for example. Just the other day, I ran a check on one in another case and got a surprise result that directly challenged a hunch of mine. I'm still trying to assimilate this new information into my view of how things work in that particular case.

Underneath the investigator's urge is the desire to always know more. The hardest thing for us is to know when to back away. Sometimes, the appropriate next step is to stop. Not every story can be told right away, at least until more data is available.

And things don't always add up. Plus operating under a false set of assumptions is a sure way to convince yourself someone is guilty when they are not, or something is unjust when there's a more complex explanation hidden in the data.

Personally, I kind of like surprises in stories. I don't mind finding out I am wrong, since my worst fears or assumptions can be replaced with more innocent explanations. After all, the most likely explanation for how two events are connected is always a straight line -- i.e., the shortest distance -- between them.

Pattern recognition, whether you like the pattern or not, is the investigator's best friend.

Besides, sometimes your hunches will be spot-on. Back to that childhood story of Woodward’s —it turned out he was right, his step-siblings did get more presents that year than he did.

Later on, he would employ that same sense of skepticism to more weighty matters.

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Thursday, September 22, 2022

As the War Turns

This week seemed to mark a turning point in the Ukrainian War. Numerous reports indicate that Russia’s army is bogged down or on the run as Ukrainian forces reclaim territory and launch attacks inside Russia itself.

Behind the scenes, there is growing is evidence that the U.S. military and intelligence establishment is not simply arming Ukraine, but providing key advice as to when, where and how to use the advanced weaponry in the conflict.

In that sense, it really is a war between the U.S. and Russia, which may be why Putin is now panicking, because he cannot win that war. The U.S. has far more money, weaponry, technology and strategic intelligence than Russia, and that disparity is making all the difference in the outcome.

Putin apparently was counting on the U.S. and NATO staying out of the conflict much more than has proved to be the case.

Ukraine’s positive results against Russia send a clear message to China, which for months has been threatening to invade or at least encircle Taiwan. Biden has escalated the U.S. commitment to Taiwan — for the first time, he has stated that the U.S, would defend Taiwan during a Chinese invasion.

This is likely to have the desired effect, causing China to back down, because its leaders can see what invading Ukraine has wrought for Putin and do not want to risk a similar fate in the Far East.

For the present, U.S. superiority seems assured on the global stage.

Although the geopolitics of all this have been clarified by the results on the battlefield, grave dangers remain. Putin now has had to institute a draft, is facing domestic protests, and has resorted to desperate threats of nuclear blackmail.

As the rest of the world tries to sort out this mess, Beijing has distanced itself from Moscow and is watching, warily, to see what happens.

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Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Facts Inside Fiction (Questions About Memory)

(I first published a version of this essay on my personal blog in April 2006.)

Over recent years, I've been teaching memoir writing both at Stanford and at the downtown campus of San Francisco State. In the course of that work, I've been confronted by the confusing nature of memory -- how arbitrary and subjective it can be. What is particularly striking is how different two people's memories of a shared experience can be.

For my Stanford course, we considered the relationship between memoir and journalism. In reporting, of course, we frequently interview sources and ask them to tell us what they remember about events, people, experiences. We write down their words, and quote them. 

Of course, we do our best to verify quotes by cross-checking with other sources and documents, but we don’t have reliable ways of determining whether our sources have accurate memories, and for the most part we have to assume they are trying to be truthful.

Writing a personal memoir is even trickier. Here, we often have only our own memory to work with. We may have journals, letters, photos, news clippings, and other contemporaneous historical material to rely on, but it all starts with our memory. 

And in most cases, when trying to recreate an event from the past, we have to somehow transport ourselves back in time, to recreate the emotional state of that distant moment if we are to have any hope to conveying what it was like to actually be there then.

As I've worked with students to access their memories in these memoir classes, I've increasingly found myself dogged by my own doubts about my memories. I find myself questioning my own history -- or rather the history I've told myself up until now. 

Am I who I thought I was? How much is a life simply the sum of one's experiences? How is it that a sudden change, a loss, a trauma can shake up our memory stream so that it overruns its banks, and floods us with an overwhelming sense of no longer knowing what it is we thought we knew so well about ourselves?

What about when you discover you were mistaken about something?

How do we recover a past, the lines to which have somehow been blurred? Does an entirely new story now have to be constructed?

To one who has entered this state of intellectual and emotional ambiguity, there is a recurring fear: Will our past come back? What story do we tell ourselves now?

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Tuesday, September 20, 2022

State of Fear (Afghan Conversation 42)

(This is the latest in an ongoing series of confidential conversations I am having with a friend in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, about life there since the Taliban took power in August 2021.)

Dear David:

A few days ago, when my brother and his girlfriend left the house at 9 am, three men robbed them at gunpoint. They took their phones and their money. Although there were many people about, no one came to their defense or intervened in any way. 

Since the Taliban came to power, such crimes happen every day. Especially those of us who are members of ethnic minorities have no security in our lives – no financial security, no job security, and no emotional security. There also are no authorities we can go to for help.

The Taliban treat the rest of us as if they hold no value for human life, that no individual human life or death holds any significance. For example, on September 10th, an explosion in the west of Kabul, where most Hazara live, left 15 dead or injured.

Amnesty International reported that on September 16th the Taliban killed six Hazara people including a 12-year-old girl in a deliberate attack in Afghanistan’s Ghor province. Hasht-E-Subh, an Afghan publication, reported that on September 17th the Taliban captured more than 70 guerrilla fighters of the resistance front and civilians in Panjshir province and summarily executed them all. 

These are but a few examples of what is happening all the time here. 

No one can relax. Fear and worry are all we know. Fear that we might die in an explosion, or that we might be arrested and tortured on the suspicion of being an opponent of the Taliban. Worried that we might lose a member of our family in an explosion, or lose our job, and starve. Fear that our family will starve. 

According to a report released by the UN, Afghanistan ranked dead last among 149 countries in happiness in 2022. If anything, that is an understatement. Our local publications report one or two suicides in each town each week. I am certain from my own knowledge that at least twice as many suicides happen outside of any media coverage whatsoever.

***

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Monday, September 19, 2022

Old Leaders

There was a moment on Sunday in London when the media pool camera was trained on President Joe Biden as he signed a Book of Condolences for Queen Elizabeth II. The rest of us could listen in via an open mic. 

There was precious little to hear until he finished, when he rose from the chair, looked at his wife Jill who was standing attentively nearby and asked “Where do we go now?”

She indicated the direction and off he they went, probably to view the casket containing the queen’s remains.

It was just a simple moment and meant nothing.

But as an unprecedented number of world leaders gathered in London for the queen’s funeral, I couldn’t help but notice how many of them are older people. For starters, Joe Biden will be 80 in a few months, just a few days after King Charles turns 74.

Biden was the oldest person in U.S. history to take the office of president, by abut a year. Ronald Reagan was almost 78 when he was inaugurated and served eight years.

Without doubt, the older demographic has important things to offer. Some of the temptations of youth can be less powerful by the 70s, presumably, plus it is difficult to sustain those harmful myths of invincibility or immortality that so many younger leaders are afflicted with.

For those reasons alone, older people can potentially make better leaders. But certainly not always. It’s also possible for them to become outdated socially and culturally, and to be so stuck in the past so much they can’t see their way forward.

Or to harden into incorrigible narcissists who are power mad.

But the best members of the aging population can theoretically put self-interest aside to pursue our collective goals and policies as leaders.

There are signs Biden is doing that, particularly lately. His string of political victories is improving life in this country for millions of people and he is speaking out in defense of democracy at a time when it is under true peril.

Of course, the strains of holding powerful jobs are well-documented and it would be a tragedy for a president to die in office.

Roughly five percent of men Biden’s age will die each year, which is a very high death rate, but the positive side of that is 95 percent won’t die that particular year.

Cognitive decline is another issue, however. There were indications this afflicted Reagan in his second term. But as long as that is not happening, an older leader should be judged by his policies, not by his age.

Asking his wife where he was to go next was not a sign of cognitive decline in Biden. But it’s worth noting that at his age, that’s a legitimate topic to consider.

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Sunday, September 18, 2022

Rain From Heaven

In the Bay Area we woke up Sunday morning to a light rain. Storm clouds had moved into the region Saturday evening as the first of hopefully many storms this rainy season blew in from the Pacific.

Climate change is global, of course, and scientists believe most of the effects will be disastrous, but some of the early changes in some areas may instead be pleasant. As the temporary residents of earth we are, we can’t help thinking selfishly about right now, right here…me.

“Live in the moment.”

Much of the psychological advice we get to better ourselves and our lives counters the collective advice we need to hear to save our species. Clearly, we need to be thinking unselfishly about everybody on the planet.

But for now, just this moment, this rain feels heavenly…

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