Writing and Reading as Balm

  I beg your indulgence for this posting, for in it I bare my soul more than is my wont.  It may be more than you want to hear.   

  Some friends have asked me to write about myself more, as I did in my second posting, when I told of my religious upbringing, the failure of religion and God to succor me when my wife Helen died, and my eventual transition to atheism.  At first I resisted further self-revelation, because I am by nature very private.  Blogging has dragged me into the 21^st century, though: everyone immediately seems to know where everyone else is and what they are doing and thinking.  So I'll open myself up more, with trepidation.  

   Religion and God did fail me when Helen died.  Writing and reading didn't.  To help me assuage my grief, I started writing about my feelings.  It was like confiding in a diary.  Over a period of two years I found writing so therapeutic that my diary had grown into a full-blown memoir about Helen and me, starting with our births and progressing to the time of her death. The memoir is far too personal even for my new extroverted self to broadcast; there are only three copies, one for each of my children and one for me.  Yet I believe some thoughts in it are worth sharing more broadly.  I have done so with friends who were similarly bereaved, and they seemed to gain a measure of relief just by knowing that they were not alone.

  
   While writing, I too sought to know that my pain wasn't unique, that I was part of the human condition, that others had felt as I did.  I found relief from that sense of aloneness in literature, mostly poetry.  There were always passages that expressed what I was thinking, but so much more beautifully than I could; so I used them as introductions to chapters and sections of the memoir.  Perhaps their balm will soothe others as it did me. 

   Actually, I wrote the memoir's last chapter, "Facing Chaos," first, and I draw from that chapter today.  When I wrote it, I was still deeply grieving.  I began the chapter with a couplet that ever so succinctly captures how much at the mercy of chaos one feels at a loss of this magnitude.

I haven't shaken grief's rattle, yet it clatters.

I haven't rung sorrow's bell, though it tolls.

                                      Ho Xuan Huong

                                     18th century Vietnamese poet

   More than anything, I found my sense of justice outraged. I could not rationalize what had befallen me, nor explain to myself why a good person like Helen had been taken so early, at only sixty-three.  We were both heir, I felt, to all the caprice the universe could summon, in a way totally disconnected from how we had conducted ourselves as persons.  Two prose passages written by a Roman Catholic priest examine these emotions.

The roots of grief arise from a wound deeper than the psychological or the cultural.  It is at that level in ourselves where we decide what we can or cannot expect of life, what is just or unjust, what is the purpose and value of our existence.

Grief is a crying of the heart, and the human heart will resist being soothed by ideas and abstractions.

                                        

                                      Lorenzo Albacete (1941- )

   The second of these passages was particularly revealing to me, because at the nadir of my grief, when I was searching for understanding, my rabbi had tried to make intelligible to me her understanding of the twin aspects of God: The Creator Elohim, the amoral Deity of what is; and Adonai, the Lord of the world as it should be, of hope, compassion, ideals and forgiveness. We revere the first, we pray to the second.  Adonai transforms the chaos of Elohim's creation into order and sanity.   My heart resisted being soothed by such an abstraction.  My brain thought these twin aspects of God to be so distinct as to be polytheistic, contradicting Judaism's very core tenet: God is One.

   

      One of my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, asks whether we can overcome our sense of injustice simply by resignation to chaos.  She says no.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in
      the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of
     mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. 

                                        Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

   I have always been a loner, not naturally gregarious.  I'd fallen in love with Helen in part just because she so complemented my own introversion with her genuine love for and interest in people.   But now, after 35 years with Helen, I was really alone and frightened.  I needed reassurance that I could survive again as a loner.

Why should we faint and fear to live alone,

Since all alone, so Heaven has willed, we die?

Nor even the tenderest heart, and next our own,

Knows half the reasons why we smile and sigh.

   John Keble (1792-1866)

    Like others bereaved, I slowly moved through the stages of grief.  Intense anguish fades.  Still, for a long time I felt that  I was  surrounded  by ghosts of Helen,   for I seemed to see her  when- ever  I  visited familiar places we had frequented, and the anguish returned like a stab.

Your eyes and the valley are memories.

Your eyes fire and the valley a bowl.

It was here a moonrise crept over the timberline.

It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down.

And your eyes and the moon swept the valley.

 Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

   Fourteen years have passed since Helen died.  Time has worked its magic.  I will never stop missing her, occasionally spiraling down into depression when thinking of her, but most of the time my memories of our life together are more joyful than sad.  I am with Tennyson:

What use to brood? This life of mingled pains
       And joys to me,
Despite of every Faith and Creed, remains
         The Mystery.

 Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

    I am resigned to the chaos of Elohim, forgoing Adonai, the God of what should be. Writing and reading continue to act as a balm, soothing me when the chaos I perceive threatens to overwhelm me. They often bring me the only equanimity that I can summon.

Intuition and Expertise

Originally published March 21, 2012: 

  Today I challenge Nobelist Daniel Kahneman on his own ground.  Wait!  Let me have my say before you cry chutzpah!  Then you can decide for yourself whether I'm bonkers or not.

  In a recent book for the lay reader, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman summarizes his life's work: understanding how we make decisions.  He postulates that we use two mental mechanisms for this purpose.  One is fast and intuitive ("System 1"), the other slower and more analytic ("System 2").  System 1, the focus of the book, probably developed evolutionarily so that we could reflexively act when we sensed the presence of a saber-toothed tiger.  We still use it to jump out of the way of a speeding car.

  But Kahneman asserts that System 1 also makes snap intuitive decisions in non-emergency situations.  These are more likely than not to be wrong, he says, because we are led astray by factors irrelevant to the problem at hand.  We are influenced by special insights we think we have and biases we do have. We may unwittingly replace a hard problem we are trying to solve with an easier problem we know how to solve.  Or we simply may be dyspeptic from a meal we just ate.  Kahneman lists many such extraneous factors, of which we are generally unaware, and demonstrates their deleterious effects by presenting data from numerous sociometric and psychometric experiments. 

  I have no quibble with him so far.  I agree that our distant ancestors, in learning to leap away from saber-toothed tigers, made it all too easy for us to leap to conclusions.  But Kahneman has given intuition an unwarrantedly bad name.  The thrust of his work has been to show that we largely act through irrational, error-ridden intuitive impulses.  He therefore gives short shrift to a huge domain where the intuitive impulse is rational and reliable: expertise-driven intuition, or expert intuition for short.

  Kahneman has relegated this domain to a tiny sliver of his book, only one of 38 chapters, where he describes his extended "adversarial collaboration" with Gary Klein, a defender of expert intuition.  In other chapters, Kahneman harps monotonously on examples of "experts" being derailed as readily as non-experts by extraneous factors.  Alas! the poor man has spent much of his life--and most of this book--studying "experts" like stock market analysts, CEOs and pundits.  Not my kind of expert or expertise, nor Klein's.

  As I use the term, expert intuition involves the years-long migration of expertise developed by System 2 into System 1.  Even Kahneman notes that while a chess novice might spend minutes or hours slowly thinking through the likely results of any move (System 2), a grandmaster can intuit the same results from a glance at the board (System 1).  Klein has studied how experienced firefighters can intuit from subliminal sensory cues when a building is about to collapse, without knowing quite how they do it, and act instantly on that intuition. 

  Kahneman and Klein did come to some agreement, among them conditions under which the intuition of experts can be valid, namely an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable, and an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice.  Those conditions apply to problem solving in engineering, so it is a good platform from which to launch my paean to intuition.

  I was fortunate to have been taught by a grandmaster of engineering intuition: MIT Professor Ernst Guillemin.  I still smile almost 65 years later, remembering how his gnome-like body would practically dance across the front of the classroom, showing us how he thought an electron would think and act in trying to make its way through a circuit he had drawn on the board.  "You have to think like an electron to understand this circuit!" he would exclaim. 

  Many years later my daughter Abby, then a pre-architecture student taking a structures course, was given the problem of constructing a truss from a given amount of poster board.  The function of the truss was to support the greatest amount of weight when suspended between two table edges separated by a given distance.  I told her, "You have to think like the truss!  Imagine yourself suspended face down with hands on one table, feet on the other, a weight tied to your midriff.  Where would you hurt most?  Use your limited resources to reinforce the truss in those places."  I am proud to say that her truss supported more weight than any of her classmates', even more than her professor's.

  In 1976, I wrote an article, "In Praise of Intuition," for a student engineering magazine.  I tried to define intuition as applied to engineering problem-solving and to show how it can be developed.  A precise definition of engineering intuition still eludes me, but, as then, I think it consists of at least the following abilities, successively refined over a long time:

  -- To know how to approach the problem without quite being sure how you know.

  -- To recognize what is peripheral and what is central, without having fully understood the problem.

  -- To perceive in advance the general nature of the solution.

  -- To instantly connect a problem in one field to analogous problems in other fields and import the analogous knowledge into the problem at hand.

  -- To sense when a solution must be right, just because "it feels right," and to suspect a solution that feels wrong and continue to gnaw at it.

  I suspect that Kahneman would vigorously argue against at least the last ability, calling it an "illusion of validity" likely to be biased by overconfidence.  But I hold my ground.  For engineering problems, and likely much more broadly, I think it is indeed possible to learn the abilities I listed above, including the last, through inculcation of certain habits of mind.  Among these habits are:

  Systematically fashioning knowledge and experience into an integrated whole.  Like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, a new idea snaps into place more easily as you amalgamate your knowledge into a coherent pattern and as you gain experience at fitting pieces into that pattern. And the more complete the overall pattern, the more easily you sense what is missing.  This pattern of knowledge embeds itself into your intuitive thinking.

  Persevering in understanding.  Studiously avoid shrugging off the mysterious as beyond your ken.  What is novel and counter-intuitive on first exposure can become part of your intuition after repeated, usually laborious re-examinations.

  Looking at a problem and tentative results from multiple viewpoints.  If you are a mechanical engineer examining an electrical circuit, think of its mechanical analog, which you are more likely to understand.

  Projecting the general from the particular and checking the particular against the general.  Like Archimedes in the bathtub with his famed Eureka!moment, if you find that 3+9=9+3 and 4+2=2+4, immediately conjecture that x+y=y+x.  Conversely, if someone asserts that x+y=y+x, immediately make sure that 3+9=9+3 and 4+2=2+4.

  Focusing on the core of a problem without initially getting bogged down with matters of peripheral importance.  If your car's engine isn't running, forget for now about waxing it.

  Perhaps hardest, not fearing mistakes.  Don't be frozen into indecisiveness because "all the facts aren't in yet."  You will never have all the data you need, but you can still make a decision based on your expert intuition, knowing that you might be wrong.  The hard trick is to know when to act.  I believe that comes from learning the boundary between when a solution feels right and when it still feels wrong and needs more gnawing.

  I don't think expert intuition can be taught in a straightforward manner, beyond championing the rules above and demonstrating them in practice, as Professor Guillemin did for me.  If anything, teaching expert intuition is a process like the Zen Buddhist use of koans: that is, teaching intuition intuitively.  But even if not easily teachable, expert intuition can nonetheless be learned, by inculcating these habits of mind over tens of thousands of hours of practice. The discipline of doing so, Kahneman's pessimism notwithstanding, can inure one to many of the destructive influences he cites.  And there's a bonus: That discipline will apply beyond the field in which one spent all of those hours.  The habits of mind themselves will migrate into System 1, available for more general problem solving.

What the Ancients Knew

Originally published March 14, 2012: 
 

  In my last posting, I marveled at the understanding of the cosmos we have achieved in the 21^st century.  I hope you did too.  But before we get too swollen-headed, I suggest that we look into what the ancients knew about the subject.  Let's start with a brief excursion into history.

  Our first stop is the year 54 BCE, where we encounter the Epicurian poet Titus Lucretius Carus, who has just finished the 7400-line poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things).  In it, largely following the ideas of Epicurus and his predecessors, Lucretius sums up an understanding of the physical world held by many of the cognoscenti of his time, and gives advice on how to live in that world.  The poem is well received by such contemporary lights as Cicero and Virgil.

  Our next stop is 1417 CE.  By this date, De Rerum Natura has been missing for about a thousand years, known only through references to it in other ancient literature.  Poggio Bracciolini, a papal official with a hobby of searching for classical books long "lost" in monasteries and elsewhere, stumbles across the only surviving copy of the work. Despite the poem's dramatically un-Christian philosophy and world view, bibliophile/humanist Bracciolini makes sure that it is copied and recopied, and widely distributed.

   Now we return to 2011, when Stephen Greenblatt publishes The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, a fascinating book about the rediscovery of De Rerum Natura and its effect on thinkers in the 15^th century and later.  The eighth of its eleven chapters discusses in great detail the model of the world Lucretius propounded.  That chapter is my subject today.  
        

  A 4300-word review of The Swerve in the New York Review of Books derisively dismissed this lone chapter in seven words: "a disappointingly dry series of bullet points."  That dismays me, for to me the chapter is the very crux of Greenblatt's book.  The rest is an excellent historical read, but nothing like the page turner I found in Chapter 8.

  To back up this assertion, I can do no better than to quote at length from Greenblatt's "dry bullet points," but still in very abridged form.  See if you agree with me that Lucretius' model of the world is so close to ours that it takes your breath away.

     --Everything is made of invisible particles.  Immutable, indivisible, invisible, and infinite in number, they are constantly in motion, clashing with one another, coming together to form new shapes, coming apart, recombining again, enduring.

  --The elementary particles of matter . . .  are eternal.  Time is not limited--a discrete substance with a beginning and an end--but infinite.  The invisible particles from which the entire universe is made, from the stars to the lowliest insect, are indestructible and immortal, though any particular object in the universe is transitory.

  --The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size.  They are like the letters in an alphabet, a discrete set capable of being combined in an infinite number of sentences.  . . .  As not all letters or all words can be coherently combined, so too not all particles can combine with all other particles in every possible manner.  Some . . .  easily hook onto others; some repel and resist one another.

    --All particles are in motion in an infinite void.  Space, like time, is unbounded. There are no fixed points, no beginnings, middles or ends, and no limits.  Matter is not packed together in a solid mass.  There is a void in things, allowing the constitutive particles to move, collide, combine and move apart.

  --The universe has no creator or designer.  The particles themselves have not been made and cannot be destroyed.  The patterns of order and disorder in the world are not the product of any divine scheme.

   --Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve.  [T]he particles do not move in lockstep in a preordained single direction.  Instead, "at absolutely unpredictable times and places they deflect slightly from their straight course . . ."  The position of the elementary particles is thus indeterminate.

--The swerve is the source of free will.  In the lives of all sentient creatures, human  and animal alike, the random swerve of elementary particles is responsible for the existence of free will.

  --Nature ceaselessly experiments.  There is no single moment of origin, no mythic scene of creation.  All living beings, from plants and insects to higher mammals and man, have evolved through a long, complex process of trial and error.  The process involves many false starts and dead ends, monsters, prodigies, mistakes, creatures that were not endowed with all the features that they needed to compete for resources and to create offspring.  Creatures . . .  enable[d] to adapt and reproduce will succeed . . . until changing circumstances make it impossible for them any longer to survive. The successful adaptations, like the failures, are the result of a fantastic number of combinations that are constantly being generated (and reproduced or discarded) over an unlimited expanse of time.

  --The universe was not created for or about humans.  . . .  The fate of the entire species . . .  is not the pole around which everything revolves.  Indeed, there is no reason to believe that human beings as a species will last forever.

  --Humans are not unique.  They are part of a much larger material process that links them not only to all other life forms but to inorganic matter as well.  . . . We are made of the same stuff that everything else is made of.

  --Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but a primitive battle for survival.  . . .  [T]he ability to form bonds and live in communities governed by settled customs developed slowly.  . . .  The arts of civilization [were] not given to man by some divine lawmaker but painstakingly fashioned by the shared talents and mental power of the species  . . .

  I omit the remaining bullet points not because they are unimportant but because they are not so much about the physical world.  They deal with the nature of the soul; with death; with religion, which Lucretius calls delusive and cruel; and with the pursuit of happiness as the highest goal of life. (Greenblatt claims that "pursuit of happiness" entered the Declaration of Independence via Jefferson's readings of Lucretius.)

  Returning to the bullet points that I did summarize: don't you agree that the similarity of Lucretius' model of the physical world to ours is astounding?  We all know that the ancient world descended into the Dark Ages, from which it took a millennium to start recovering.  But I for one had no inkling that, despite the many remarkable results of the ensuing scientific revolution, we have returned so nearly to a model described in antiquity!

  Some critics [1, 2] have taken Greenblatt to task for, they say, overemphasizing the effect that the rediscovery of De Rerum Natura had on the Renaissance, as expressed in the subtitle How the World Became Modern.  One of them [2] has caviled about what he sees as Greenblatt's adherence to an "old humanist myth" about the Renaissance, that it was a sudden upwelling of ancient knowledge.  (Greenblatt is a renowned scholar of the English Renaissance and of Shakespeare's place in it.)  I think this is absurd quibbling.  Greenblatt wasn't writing for scholars, but for lay readers like me.  His book deservedly won the National Book Award and hit the New York Times best-seller list.

Musings on God and Cosmology

Originally published March 6, 2012

  This is a tale of the birth of an atheist, with cosmology as midwife.

  I was raised in a moderately observant Jewish family. My maternal grandfather, a great influence on my life, set the religious tone for us.  He was trained as a rabbi in the old country but left after seeing one pogrom too many.  Arriving in America in 1896, he found that rabbis were a dime a dozen, became a successful businessman, but remained an observant Jew. He was liberal in his Judaism, never imposing his way of practicing on his children or grandchildren.  I remember once asking him whether I should fast on Yom Kippur.  His reply: "That's between you and God."

  God as a presence just came along with my upbringing. I received about the same amount of religious training as was usual for boys in the same milieu in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It culminated in my bar mitzvah in 1943.  I suppose you could say that I was a God-fearing child, fearing the anthropomorphic and often-malevolent Yahweh of the Old Testament.

  As I aged in a secular society, doubts crept in of course.  I was learning about the universe, just then being understood to have more than only our Galaxy; we gradually found out that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars.  As a budding scientist/engineer, I couldn't help asking myself whether, as theists would have it, a Creator could be bothered with this speck of dust we call Earth.

  By my twenties I had adopted an Einsteinian view, that God is Order-in-the-Universe. Einstein couldn't abide by the idea that the universe contains the probabilistic maelstrom then being propounded by a new generation of quantum physicists. As he famously said, "God does not play dice with the universe."

  There matters stood with me as I pursued my career and raised a family.  When my children asked whether I believed in God, whether in fact there is a God, I would agnostically hedge by saying that I didn't know.  I asserted that acting in a godly manner would lead to a better life for them.  So I gave them religious training, much attenuated from my own, justifying it by telling them that the cradle of religion would serve them well, especially when they encountered the inevitable crises in their lives.  Even as my agnosticism grew, I continued my own observance, sometimes on Shabbat, always on Yom Kippur, both to set an example for them and because such observance within a community brought some sense of cosmic order and belonging to my own life.

  This pleasant existence was shattered when I hit my own life's worse crisis: my wife Helen was diagnosed with cancer fifteen years ago and died of it a year and a half later; she was only sixty-three.  The comforting structure of religion that I assumed would be the bedrock on which I could stand turned out to be quicksand. Shortly after Helen's death, while attending Yom Kippur services, I looked at the Ark in which God's presence is supposed to dwell and found myself engulfed in the rage of one who has been deceived, or has deceived himself.  Far from being comforted, I was plunged deeper into despair.

  When I emerged from my grieving, I had the time and need to consider more seriously my history of belief and then agnosticism. I felt I had to face the question that has puzzled millennia of humans: where did it all come from?  A standard argument against a Creator as prime cause has been the retort, "Then what was the Creator's cause?"  But cosmology seemed to have no better answer, for one had to ask what was the cause of the Big Bang.  Recent cosmological speculation is beginning to answer that latter question.

  I recently watched a splendid video lecture, then read an equally splendid book, by cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss, both entitled A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. I'm not sure that I get it all, but here's what I take from the book and the video, roughly and in very abridged form. (You should watch the video and/or read the book to get the fuller story.)

  There is a convincing case to be made that our universe is just one in a multiverse, which extends infinitely in time and space. This multiverse is seemingly mostly empty, but actually is filled on the quantum level with a theoretically indicated and experimentally verified quantum froth. In this froth, particle-antiparticle pairs constantly and spontaneously appear and then quickly annihilate each other.  (Einstein was wrong about non-randomness on the quantum scale; quantum phenomena are probabilistic.) 

  In this frothy multiverse, it is likely—in fact certain over a long-enough period of time—that there will be places and times where and when enough particle-antiparticle pairs simultaneously pop into existence that a new universe is born in a big bang such as that which engendered ours. These big bangs are unstable, undergoing the exponential inflation characterizing our own universe in its very early times, with most of the antiparticles (or in other cases possibly most of the particles) being annihilated, leaving a universe of only particles (or antiparticles). 

  Given the infinite extent of space and time in the multiverse, it therefore contains a huge number (even an infinity) of distinct universes. They are all beyond the light horizon from each other--i.e., unable to see each other--because during their inflation their spaces expand, as ours did, more rapidly than the speed of light. (This is allowed by general relativity for the fabric of space, although not for matter and energy.)  

  Krauss differentiates this very strange cosmology from equally strange sorts of theism by making two assertions: (1) so far every scientific measurement and observation we have made in our own universe allows--even points to--this cosmology, (2) no scientific measurements support the possibility of or need for a prime-mover God that started our universe at the time of our Big Bang 13.72 billion years ago (much less the Biblical 6000+ years ago). 

  
  In effect, Krauss answers the questions of when and from what it all started by the mind-blowing statements "never" and "from nothing." The multiverse has always been around, and every once in a while a universe such as ours pops out of the quantum froth.  As Alice might have said, "curiouser and curiouser." 

  But for me this very curious conclusion, or something like it, is much more comforting and coherent than requiring that a Creator or the Big Bang started it all at some initial time.  "It has always been and will always be" appeals more to my sense of order.

  Here's a final irony.  This past Yom Kippur, that solemn day of repentance and forgiveness, I was finally able to forgive God for having taken Helen so early.  After all, in his non-existence he could scarcely have been responsible.  So I was able to attend High Holiday services without animus, after a thirteen-year hiatus rejoining the community to which my grandfather belonged.

A Campaign Song for Mitt Romney

Originally published February 29, 2012: 

                About a month ago, for my 82^nd birthday, my son David gave me a strange gift: a web site (actually, not this free Blogger site, but a site he purchased in the UK, from which I subsequently moved). What am I going to do with it, I thought; I don't even speak html.  (That's an embarrassing admission for one who was for almost thirty years a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley.  But give me a break--I retired from UCB before the Web was more than an academic toy.)

Maybe my son was gingerly trying to ease me into the era of social networking.  Fair enough.  Perhaps, I thought, I'll write a diary.  But not the type of my youth, books with lock and key that said, "These are my thoughts!  Hands off!"  Nowadays, one lets it all hang out.  And what better opportunity than today, Leap Day, to make the leap--well, not actually into a Facebook-type letting it all hang out, but at least into the blogosphere.  So I pinch my nose and jump.

A blog should have a name, and I've taken The Berkeley Write as a double entendre, the other half being the anomaly of being a Jeffersonian liberal in Berkeley, where I've lived for over fifty years.  I've been a left-wing Democrat all of my adult life. That makes me comfortably centrist in Berkeley, even a bit to the right. (Indeed, Berkeley as a whole has moved a bit to the right in the last decade or so; there may even be some Republicans amongst us now.)

 But I am a radical (read "socialist") in much of the rest of the country.  In the sixties, when the true Berkeley left consisted of Maoists, nihilists and anarchists, I was regarded with great suspicion elsewhere just because I was a Berkeleyan.  Now, perhaps because my age makes me seem unthreatening, I am considered merely an anachronism; and perhaps I am.

This detour into my politics brings me to my theme of the day: a suggestion for a campaign song for Mitt Romney, who--following his primary victories in Arizona and Michigan yesterday--looks to be the next Republican nominee for president.

Jean Paul Schweitzer, the janitor at my tennis club, is a French intellectual with whom I discuss many things, but mostly politics.  He has more difficulty than I in understanding the average American politico, who, I think, verges on being illiterate and innumerate, and certainly is a scientific know-nothing.  (I sometimes, in an excess of defensive patriotism, point to Jean Paul Le Pen for comparison.)

Yesterday we were discussing how none of the current would-be Republican candidates has difficulty in looking straight at the camera and uttering the most incredible howlers.  That reminded me of a quatrain from a song written by David, a professional musician now in London, who performs under the stage name Emit Bloch:

They say the truth is beautiful, but they obviously haven't heard me lie.

They say the truth is beautiful, but they obviously haven't heard me lie.

Oh, I can tell a beauty

Simultaneously looking you in the eye.

The complete song, "Disabled by Good Looks," which I think describes Romney perfectly, is given in this track David performed several years ago at a London nightclub: