"Puttin' on my top hat"

For men, sartorial good taste can be reduced to one rule: If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don't wear it.
--George F. Will

George F. Will is the conservative columnist even liberals enjoy -- in small doses. He's intellectual, he's often funny, and he has idiosyncrasies that readers of all political persuasions can appreciate. He is also a Chicago Cubs fan, that sine qua non of polite company.

He also can be a bit of a prig.

In today's syndicated column, he takes on blue jeans. He deplores them. He hates seeing a grown man in an airport with his 10-year-old son, both wearing jeans, t-shirt, and running shoes. These casually dressed adults represent to Will the "leveling" trend so apparent today -- leveling between income groups and leveling between ages -- a trend that is so offensive to him, and, somehow, so related to voting Democratic. Today's dress code can be summed up, in Will's opinion, by a loathsome rule of thumb: "Thou shalt not dress better than society's most slovenly."

How one presents himself to the world, he argues, is important. From your dress, others make inferences about your maturity and self-respect.

He sounds like all our grandmothers.

One of Will's saving graces is a sense of self-irony. But it is frequently difficult to determine when he is, in fact, being ironic. The tone of today's column does trigger a low-grade response from my irony meter. But Will is also expressing a very real, underlying unhappiness about today's society. Blue jeans -- his code for being "slovenly" in general -- are only a symptom of a more dread disease.

How one dresses does influence how others view you. But what Will overlooks is that there is no Platonic form of "proper masculine attire" brooding above us, somewhere up there in the sky. Fashions do change. ("Change" -- a word so abhorrent to Will!) Spats in the 1920's indicated affluence and probity; they would suggest a buffoon if anyone wore them today.

Jeans are not proper attire on all occasions, even in today's world. A business suit is the correct costume for many occasions, including job interviews, funerals, and certain restaurants. But in today's society, jeans are considered proper attire in many informal situations -- including air travel and shopping malls -- locations where Will finds them appalling.

"[I]t is a straight line from the fall of the Bastille to the rise of denim," Will observes darkly. Ah! Now he tips his hand! Not only a sartorial curmudgeon is our Will, but more fundamentally a political reactionary. Most of us consider the fall of the Bastille to have been, on the whole, a rather good thing.

George F. Will's views on proper dress, however twinkling his eye while expressing them, suggest why I take both those views and his political views with more than one grain of salt. Both sartorially and politically, he recalls the old saying that the "Republican party had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century." I won't be "puttin' on my top hat" anytime soon. Nor will I be voting Republican.

Railways for the future

Admittedly, I'm a train nut. There, I've stated my bias. Although rapid transit is coming along nicely in many American cities, passenger railways still remain -- for the most part --more tourist novelty than a serious travel option.

I spent 42 hours traveling by Amtrak from Seattle to Los Angeles at Christmas. Even subtracting seven hours that snow conditions added to the normally scheduled 35, a trip of that length is analogous to an ocean cruise, not to air travel. Fun, but not an option when you're in a hurry.

But for shorter distances -- for example San Francisco to Los Angeles -- rail travel should be competitive with the airlines. Trains travel from city center to city center. All the time wasted getting to and from airports and finding parking once there, is eliminated. Furthermore, because trains remain grounded solidly on terra firma, security measures can be far less intense and intrusive than for the airlines.

The key to a successful passenger rail system is construction of dedicated rails between major cities -- tracks built exclusively for high speed trains, with no competing freight or commuter traffic and with no grade crossings. For distances up to about 500 miles, most passengers would prefer such trains to air travel, based on factors of both speed and comfort. The Eurostar train from London to Paris, passing under the English Channel, makes its journey in 2 ¼ hours. It has drawn away a significant portion of the airline traffic between those cities.

President Obama indicated today that he plans to actively promote development of high speed passenger rail travel in this country. His stimulus package, enacted in February, already contains $8 billion in initial seed money. As commentators have scoffed, this amount is only a drop in the bucket relative to the amounts that eventually will be required. But every journey begins with a single step. Our highway system has taken nearly a century to develop -- it was not all contemplated and funded in one dazzling moment of inspiration.

A 2 ½ hour rail journey between San Francisco and Los Angeles will be cheaper, more comfortable, and far less polluting than a flight from SFO to LAX. Initial funding for this line has already been approved by California voters. Closer to home, the corridor from Eugene, through Portland and Seattle, to Vancouver, is another prime candidate for high speed rail. Seattle is already served through this corridor by five trains a day in each direction, a rail service supported in part by state governments. High speed rail would greatly increase passenger traffic on a route that already thrives despite aging and crowded tracks.

The president faces many crises, and is actively supporting many new programs. I hope that passenger rail service does not fall off the administration's radar as his first term progresses. It should be one major component of the infrastructure of the future for which he campaigned. It will also put to good use the technology and talents of American engineers and workers.

Discovering Mustang

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Last night, Peter Athans, sponsored by the National Geographic Society, spoke to a full house at Benaroya Hall about his experiences in the "forbidden kingdom" of Mustang. Mustang is a region just north of Annapurna in northern Nepal. Travel by Westerners to the remote region was forbidden until 1991, and is still strictly regulated.

Athans is a Seattle-area mountaineer with seven summits of Everest under his belt. Besides being an outstanding climber, whose efforts to save other climbers were recognized by Jon Krakauer in his book Into Thin Air, he is engaged in on-going humanitarian activities in Nepal.

Speaking without notes, pacing back and forth across the stage, he began his illustrated lecture by reciting Shelley's sonnet, Ozymandias, illustrating the Buddhist concept of the impermanence of all earthly endeavors, which he then reminded us is always balanced against the unchanging nature of nirvana, of eternity. Athans has spent years conversing with Tibetan Buddhist lamas and philosophers, and appears to have integrated many Buddhist principles into his own view of life.

The photos and film clips he showed of his expedition's work in 2007-08, climbing to and exploring cave dwellings cut deeply into the dangerously friable sandstone cliffs of Mustang, were dazzling in their beauty. He described how thousands of years ago the area was occupied by a pre-Buddhist society, a society that later Buddhist missionaries labeled as "uncivilized" and dominated by black magic. Buddhism ultimately prevailed, and tried to eradicate the teachings of the earlier society. (Mounds of dumped manuscripts from those days were discovered in one cave, and are being restored and protected by local workers.) Athans disputes the Buddhists' traditionally dismissive characterization of the older society. The wall paintings found in the labyrinthine caverns he explored show the close relationship between the religious civilizations that existed both before and after the Buddhist victory.

The lecture was exciting to me, as I plan to trek through a region on the other (southern) side of Annapurna in October. The two regions are quite different in climate. The area I will be visiting, like the Khumbu region of Everest, receives sufficient precipitation to be forested and rather lush in vegetation in the lower altitudes. The Mustang area, on the northern side of the Himalayas, is dry desert, like parts of the Southwest in the U.S., and very much like the Ladakh area of India -- also north of the Himalayas -- through which I trekked in 2005. Both regions, however, share -- as does the Everest region -- an intense Tibetan Buddhist culture and religion, in contrast to the Hindu culture of much of Nepal.

Peter Athans reminds us how much there is to learn about any area on the face of the earth, if only we have the time and the willingness to make the effort. This point is especially true in long-settled areas, such as Nepal, where civilizations are layered, one upon another, each leaving artifacts and other clues -- both physical and as traces in the present day society that superseded them --of their daily lives and aspirations.

All human endeavors are impermanent, as Buddhism and Ozymandias, remind us. But we can find eternal truths in studying the traces that they leave behind.

Dr. Obama

Barack Obama, President of the United States, Commander in Chief of the American Armed Forces, Leader of the Free World, and God Figure to the Nation's First Dog "Bo," will deliver a commencement address next month to graduates at Arizona State University in Tempe. However, the school will not award him an honorary degree.

The school has announced that, because Obama has been newly elected, he has not yet produced a "body of work" sufficient to justify receipt of an honorary degree. Unlike the illustrious recipients of past ASU honorary degrees, q.v..

For now, at least until the president has accomplished something worth talking about, he will have to be satisfied with his undergraduate degree from Columbia and his law degree from Harvard. The hoped-for glories of recognition from the scholars of Tempe still shimmer in his future.

It's just as well. Honorary degrees are a bizarre American phenomenon. They are often given, seemingly, as a quid pro quo for a speaker's agreement to speak at commencement. The nation is full of characters of somewhat dubious accomplishment who go through life calling themselves "Dr. John Doe," merely because they long ago accepted an invitation to speak before some undistinguished college.

There are better ways to honor a speaker than awarding him or her a faux-degree. ASU may have blundered into such a solution when it finally announced -- after much embarrassing publicity -- that, in lieu of awarding Obama an honorary degree, the school would rename one of its major scholarship programs in his honor. That recognition is more meaningful, less potentially deceptive, and may, as an added benefit to the university itself, encourage additional alumni contributions to the fund.

President Obama's prestige, as he represents America to the world, probably won't be substantially impaired by the Sun Devils' failure to give him some additional initials to tack on to the end of his name.

Good Friday

I had a brain MRI today! Just a precaution after I fell on my face a few weeks ago, while I was out running. The results were completely normal, as expected -- insofar as my brain could ever be considered "normal" -- but the process itself was interesting.

After lying immobile for about a half hour, enclosed in a long tube and surrounded on all sides by machinery making god-awful noises, I visited the neurologist who showed me the results on his computer monitor.

There, on the screen, was my brain. Big as life. The doctor and I viewed it from the top, from the sides. We viewed slices of my brain from top to bottom, from side to side. My brain was revealed to me as though I were a pathologist doing an autopsy after my own death.

It's small, you know. Your skull itself, the part not devoted to your mouth, nose and ears, is small, and the brain within the skull is even smaller. It looks pretty simple when imaged, although of course you can't view the complex electrical currents running through it. To tell you the truth, the sight is humbling.

Somehow, that small lump of body tissue encompasses all my memories, all my emotions, my curiosity, my sense of humor, my compassion, my irritability, my likes and dislikes. Buried somewhere within it are my fearful first day of kindergarten, my pride at being my class's best reader in elementary school, my first shy crush, the highs and lows of my high school experiences, my departure for college. The awe I experience in a Gothic cathedral, the excitement of climbing a mountain, the joy at hearing a Bach fugue. The sense of God's presence. My wonder at the infinite expanse of space. Of eternity.

My brain reeled at seeing visions of itself. A brain attempting to understand its own construction and function -- like a computer trying to figure out how it's been hard-wired and programmed. A brain that's accustomed to thinking of itself as "me," a "me" with all the lofty thoughts and emotions noted above, now finding itself confronted with the harsh reality that "me" is nothing more than two or three pounds of meat -- meat that can be studied on a computer screen.

My brain watched itself being digitally sliced and diced for a few more minutes, and then the neurologist saw me -- "me" -- out the door. My body escorted my now seriously-humbled brain out of the building, out onto the Seattle streets.

The trees in Seattle this week are flowering pink and white, and their perfume is intoxicating. The air felt fresh and recently washed. Schools are out for Easter break, and clusters of liberated kids were laughing and joking on the sidewalks. Skies were mostly cloudy, but bursts of sun broke through at times, warming my bare arms.

The realities I'd observed in the doctor's office began to fade from memory. Or rather, I remembered them only as interesting games for my intellect. Reality exists on many levels. To a neurologist, we may be nothing more than clumps of gray matter, a brain ordering our body to transport it about. But a boy and girl, walking hand in hand, self-absorbed and laughing in the spring sunlight, represent a different plane of reality altogether. A reality not inconsistent with that experienced by the neurologist, but, as we sense intuitively, a reality far transcending anything that can be seen on a monitor.

My brain relaxed. It was no longer just "my brain," something akin to what you might buy at your supermarket's meat counter. It was "me." "Me" strolled down the street. I watched with pleasure the people around me. I listened to the birds. I was alive to the world. I transcended my biological self.

I might even have done a little jig while I walked. (But of course I didn't.)