Good women were not supposed to like sex, only bad women enjoyed it; good women only suffered through it. So, men got married to a bourgeoise who had children and they had mistresses for the fun of it. This not only explains La Belle Époque and the can-can dancers with open drawers (drawers unlike the abundant lace panties that you see in the movies), but a lot of the early 20th century architecture. Paris is full of bachelors’ pads of the period, with just one large front room, a small bath and a kitchen relegated at the end of a long hallway, so the servants could respect your privacy. Those were the apartments where you kept your girlfriends.
I do not mean that married women of the early 1900s did not enjoy sex, just that they were not supposed or expected to: the culture was so pervasive all over the Western world that several of the old women I knew were convinced that female cats were always raped (only the male cat enjoyed sex!)
So what is the meaning of what Mrs. Roosevelt told her daughter? It means that she was born in the 1880s.
Similarly, all the discussions about lesbians in the 19th-early 20th century have to be taken with caution. A woman who writes to another woman nowadays that she wants to sleep in her arms is probably a lesbian. One century ago, the same letter does not mean a thing: maybe yes (I am longing for you), maybe no (like: sister, I wish we were peacefully together). What people write reflects their culture and their personality, you cannot infer who they are from what they write out of both contexts.
I seriously doubt that Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) was an active pedophile for the same reasons. When I was a kid, there were photos of nude infants, generally playing on a sheepskin rug, in every house I went to. It was still the style of the day. The days before puberty were a symbol of innocence and purity.
Above all: why would you care about other people’s sex life?
Inventions
Inventions that changed my life since the 1940s
What changed our life? The answer is probably different for every person, because we have different needs. Cell phones, for instance are not on my list. I think that they are a nuisance in the US but helpful in underdeveloped countries. Here is my list.
Because they saved my life:
1. Antibiotics
2. Fiber-optic technology. Among many applications, I am especially grateful for the medical ones.
Because they ameliorate social conditions
3. The pill or not the pill: freedom to organize one’s life. More than that. knowledge that you can organize your own life.
4. New vegetables. New species of flowers. I still got the gardening guide of my grandmother: it is incredibly poor, compared to what is available today. I am less convinced by “modified” meat generally made to satisfy greed, rather than the customer.
Because I lived alone most of my life:
5. Good quality paint, especially latex paint.
6. The invention of home improvement stores which gave women access to DIY.
7. Television (like many Europeans, we got our first TV to see the moon landing).
Because I used to be an oceanographer:
8. Weather and positioning satellites: it changed everybody’s lives not only life at sea.
9. Numerical weather predictions: climate models save countless lives every day.
Because I am curious:
10. Computers, the Internet, blogging.
11. Finding black holes at the center of galaxies. That gives more sense to the universe.
12. Access to time. Dating the age of the earth, of artifacts, of climate changes: it is all possible through our understanding of nuclear reactions. Come to think of it, my grandparents did not understand the sun.
13. The structure of DNA: a first access to the great secrets of life.
14. A better knowledge of the brain. I have much hope that some day it will become useful.
Plumbing
… and Plumbers
I read the announcement that the “Space station’s new urine recycler has glitches” with glee.
I am not surprised. In close to three quarters of a century, I have never seen decent plumbing anywhere. I am left to admire what the Romans did over 2000 years ago. It is frustrating that we made such progress in quantum physics, in the understanding of the universe, with the new world communication, and I still can’t find a competent plumber.
Well, it is not quite true. Years ago, I was waiting for a colleague at Orly airport and the plane was late, so I got to talk with a guy who was waiting for the same plane. I was expecting to meet another chemist, he was expecting to meet another plumber.
“We just finished a new bathroom for a sheik,” the man said. I was horrified.
“Are you telling me that we export French plumbing?” I asked somewhat bluntly.
“We are the best in the world,” the man said, “nobody equals us in solid gold plumbing.”
One learns something new every day.
***
Here is Savannah, the visit of a plumber is a bizarre ritual.
Suppose you live here in Savannah, GA and need a plumber, which is likely, as this certainly is the city with the worst plumbing in the whole universe, except for the Space station.
For individual workers in Savannah, there is a tradition of a 2-times operation. The plumber will first show on your doorstep for a visit, see what kind of person you are, what has to be done, indulge in a bit of conversation. Then he will leave and come back a few days later to do the work, if he shows up at all. There is no way you can speed up the process, because it corresponds to their need for politeness, and politeness starts with the art of conversation. Courtesy is in high esteem in Savannah. Who cares about the leak? Rude people like me.
If a plumber shows up and starts tackling your problem immediately, he probably is from Chicago.
Nixon
During Watergate, I misjudged what happened because I candidly believed what the White House was saying. It did not come to my mind that the President of the United States would tell blatant lies. Since I retired, I had the time to read over 15 books on Watergate, and then I bought the tapes. You got to listen to the original tapes, though they are very difficult to understand, because listening to a “reading” by an actor gives you a very different take of what was said.
For what it is worth, here is what I think about Watergate:
1. Republicans who say that Nixon was a victim because “everybody else does it” never listened to the tapes. It is as ridiculous as if you were saying nowadays that everybody is a Blagojevich: only fascists would say that. Not that I would ever think of comparing the two men: President Nixon was highly intelligent and won the respect of all the people working for him.
2. President Nixon often sounds very uncertain, seeking advice: he lowers his voice, leaves his sentences unfinished and sounds rather pitiful. His “advisers” never have the guts to give him any advice at all. It is painful to listen to. The president was often in anguish and nobody helped. I do know that Nixon did not like to be contradicted, so this may be a catastrophe of his own making, but at times President Nixon sounds unbearably lonely and surrounded by cowards. There is a lot of Richard III in Nixon, from the paranoia to Despair and die!
3. The tapes are extremely difficult to listen to, and instead of attacking Stanley Kutler for errors and omissions in his transcription of the tapes, one should just publish corrections and be thankful to the man. But of course it is less conductive to publicity than to attack him.
4. Howard Dean comes out as the worst lawyer in the history of mankind. And not a very decent person to boot.
5. The one I feel pity for in the whole saga is Haldeman. I understand what it is to do wrong with the best of intentions. I have done that. What I have never done, I think, is ignore the facts. There are remarkable parallels between Haldeman and McNamara. It was in Haldeman’s make-up to “submerge himself totally to the cause,” and both President Nixon and him paid the price for it.
Business
&nbs
p; “The alpha and omega of business life has become keeping up the share price. Innovation and investment can go hang,” said Will Hutton in the UK Guardian. Yes business has changed a lot in the last decades. Paternalism has disappeared. Instead as fighting to keep competence around, every business tries to get rid of you when you reach fifty because you are too expensive. Computers have allowed the quasi disappearance of inventories, to the great dam of drivers who wait too long for auto parts. A lot of consumers have become incidental. For instance, if you need to move, the contract goes to the closest truck company, so the movers have no incentive to treat you well. When I was still working as an oceanographer, our complaints about movers rose by a factor of five before I understood the reason.
Globalization has become more than a word. It bothers me, what are we going to do in the next war? Everything we need is made up in three or five different countries. It makes us so vulnerable, it is unhealthy.
And some of the morality of companies has disappeared somewhere between 1980 and today. In 1980, big companies did not call you and immediately lie to you. Most banks do that nowadays; it starts with a person calling from India and giving you some American surname. I never received in 1980 letters pretending to come from the government and coming instead from a private insurance company.
The need to please shareholders has become the law of the field, resulting into some damning decisions of CEOs, such as covering for child labor abroad. Nike pledged to have better standards in 1998, when it realized his reputation suffered. The sweatshops abroad are still not up to snuff for many other industrialists.
Businesses are the image of America abroad, but they do not care about our national image, they care about the price of the shares. It used to be, during the cold war, that businesses would easily give a hand to the US government, now they lost the incentive.
This has been the era of “greed is good,” but it is already changing.
Lent
Right here, in the Great South, two ladies came to my door to invite me to celebrate Jesus’ death. I was shocked and I told them it was not for me. I would celebrate a resurrection, but there is no way I’ll celebrate anybody’s death.
One lady looked at me sternly and said: “The Bible says Jesus died for our sins.”
I answered: “You want to celebrate that?”
YES THEY DO.
You would think that they are a little bit ashamed that somebody died for them, or worried that they may not be worth it, or try to be better persons to avoid Christ some suffering. But no, mainstream theology, specially in the South, says that the sacrifice of Christ is sufficient, you do not need to do anything, just accept it, rejoice in it and that is what they do. “Thank you Lord, I repent and I am washed of all sins.”
Early theologians did not talk to the sophisticated narcissistic crowds we deal with today.
As a result, we got in Georgia a staggering number of people “in the system, “ meaning in jail or in prison, or on parole. It is hard to find neighbors who never got to jail around here.
And in the USA, the best country in the world, there is close to one million kids abused or neglected every year.
A.D. of course. Now thank Jesus for dying.
Terrorism
Terrorism and Tacit Consent
Some years ago, I was convinced that my neighbor was a drug dealer, because I saw dealers going in and out of her apartment all day long. I was wrong: she would never deal because she was a very Christian person, but she sheltered the dealers. It was a totally new concept to me. Why did she do it? Because, she said, they were kids with no hope of getting a job. These dealers were hard to eradicate: they had been on our street for decades, but when that neighbor moved away, the dealers on the corner of my street moved too. It convinced me that dealing is the kind of crime that most often comes with a support group.
It reminded me of another Christian I had met in Ireland. He would never commit an act of terrorism, but he would always hide a terrorist. The idea of calling the police seemed to him equivalent to a betrayal.
Similarly, I knew of a very pacifist Palestinian who would never commit an act of terrorism himself, but he understood and would have protected terrorists. Why? He understood what they were fighting for, agreed with the ends if not with the means. And of course he was constantly subjected to propaganda. For instance he told me that the proof that “the Jews own America” is that the star of David is on the US dollar; I guess he meant the 13 stars from the 13 first states.
I do not understand tacit consent: to me, it is like shooting yourself in the foot; but it is a force that we ignore too often.
Health Care
Two Cents of it
As soon as people hear my foreign accent, they ask me about health care in Europe. Is it true that you can wait a whole year for an operation? Is it true that public health care is horrible?
No, it is not true.
All these rumors were created by people paid by insurance companies or by extreme right people who have so much political passion that they have become anti-Americans (look at the way they applauded when we did not get the Olympic games!)
I lived 30 years in France and one year in various British Isles and many years in Belgium. The most I ever waited for an operation was about 6 weeks. And then I was treated competently. The most I paid for an operation was about 300 dollars.
Is medicine in Europe perfect? Of course not. For instance, if you are a fifty years old woman, it is hard to find a doctor who would not answer your complaints with: “it is just menopause, do not worry about it.”
When I was fifty and in trouble is the only time I really wished I had an interesting prostate. But I am sure it does not happen here, in the paradise of private medicine.
Health Care in Jails
The only thing that makes sense to me in the prison system is that we pay, in the US, 3 billion dollars a year for the healthcare of incarcerated people. Yes, we do not want them to suffer cruel and unusual punishment, but mainly, we do not want them to contaminate us. Same thing with illegal immigrants: tuberculosis, hepatitis and AIDS do not ask people if they behave well or if they are here legally: diseases spread around, it does not matter what kind of person you are, so we got to treat whoever is around us. No real choice.
You know, it is pretty much like pollution: there is no pollution that stops at any border, be it river-borne or airborne.
Marriage
Many a wife is left wondering how come she never saw that her husband was a fake. Of course, more that one man wakes up next to a trophy wife instead of the partner he wanted. How often do we meet, in bed or in politics, the imitation of life?
Economy
A simple economic view
On one hand, we get called names for using too much credit, and that killed our economy. On the other hand, we are supposed to spend more to support the economy because we do not spend enough and that kills the economy.
It does not make sense. Ah, wait a minute! The US Gross Domestic Product is about 14 trillion dollars a year, about the same as the European Union and twice as much as China. But most of it is made of services (79% compared to 19.8 for industry and 1.2 for agriculture). What is “services”? Everything not included in the two other categories: transport, health care, finance, retailers, etc). It means that over three quarters of the economy is built on our capacity to spend: buy or rent houses, buy clothes and books and go to the movies and end up in a restaurant. It has been decades now that businesses look for more stuff to put in our hands, from hula hoops to cell phones. They calculate a shorter and shorter lifetime for everything we buy to force us to buy the same thing again, be it a house, a computer, a car or a refrigerator, then of course we need credit to buy the stuff. And businesses outsource and import to make more profit. So our industrial capacity disappears.
Unhappily, the more there is unemployed people and poor retirees like me, the less we spend and the economy shrinks. This US economy, the one that is more bu
ilt on spending than on building.
So the real solution is not for the government to throw trillions dollars around, it should be to get more industry in the US. Let us get back to a 30% industry and agriculture: that is the real wealth of a country. Creating before spending.
Laugh
Don’t laugh and drive
Imagine that your zeugmatic muscles hurt, your lung volume diminishes suddenly, your airways are compressed, your diaphragm becomes rigid and your toes curl up of pleasure, instead of quietly apply pressure on the brake pedal. Is it dangerous to laugh and drive? Certainly.
Yet, I cant find statistics of accidents caused by laughing, which indicates that more people take drugs, drink and use their cell phone while driving than actually have a good laugh.
Lucky them, I am risking my laugh, sorry my life, daily. Yesterday I almost bumped into a bus: it had an ad for a local lawyer: “a real lawyer” said the ad.
The world is full of idiots.
***
Novels
On Pets and Men
This is a series of ultra short stories about ... mainly pets and a few men. It is a tender book about all the creatures I love, including spiders who like music, orphan birds, miniature rabbits, wise crows and a very stupid dog.
Vague Souvenir
This is a historical fiction book. I wanted to describe the smells, the conversations, the dresses, the cooking of my parents’ time during World War 2. Some characters are intense at surviving and some are hoping to change the world. Many people I have known figure in the book. As an oceanographer, I have traveled extensively. My heroes travel to places where I have been and often worked, from France to Spain, to Portugal, to London, to the United States. A whole year of research went into finding what was there during the period I describe: the restaurants in Lille, the food in London, the music played in Lisbon, etc. A whole year of research went into this.
Biography
I had three lives, one in Belgium where I was born and became a Pastor and Civil Rights activist (1940-1971), one in France as a scientist (1971-1998) and one in the United States as a happy mom re-united with her children and sweetly retired. I published in French a novel, 50 short stories for children and a political book beautifully illustrated by Virginia Leirens (a companion of Chagall and the mother of his talented son David McNeill).