Why I like Natalie Portman

 

I confess to being a fan of Natalie Portman, Academy Award winner for her performance in Black Swan. Let me count the reasons why:

She’s a very good actress:  At age 13, she starred in the French film, Leon.  In 1997,  she played Anne Frank in the Broadway rendition.  In 2005, she won a Golden Globe Award  and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Closer. This present year has seen spectacular successes:  a Golden Globes Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, BAFTA Award, and Academy Award for her stellar role in Black Swan.

I admire her intelligence:  After all, we’re talking about a Harvard graduate in psychology.  I like how she put it in a New York Post interview:  “I’d rather be smart than a movie star.”  She been a guest lecturer at Columbia. A lover of languages, she’s fluent  in English, French and Hebrew and has also studied Arabic, Japanese and German.  She’s taken graduate courses at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  She’s also published professional articles in leading science journals.

I like her political beliefs:  She is a Democrat who campaigned for John Kerry in 2004, for Hillary Clinton in the New York primary, and Obama in 2008. 

I admire her social activism:  She’s devoted herself to helping eliminate poverty, traveling to Africa and Latin America to advocate micro-lending, a program to assist women in financing their own businesses.  She’s also spoken for this cause at several leading American universities.

I identify with her religious views:  In an interview with Rolling Stone (2006), She commented on whether there’s an afterlife, “I don’t believe in that. I believe this is it, and I believe it’s the best way to live.”  Although committed to her Jewish heritage (she’s a dual citizen of the U. S. and Israel), she thinks that good character and partnership are the primary staples in a love relationship.

I’m enthusiastic about her views on animals and vegetarianism:  Since childhood, she’s been committed to vegetarianism and became a vegan in 2009 after reading Safran Foer’s classic, Eating Animals.  She doesn’t wear furs, feathers or leather.  In 2007, she started her own  franchise for vegan footwear and in the same year participated in the filming of the documentary, Gorillas on the Brink in Rwanda.

She’s just plain nice to look at:  Need I say more?

A people set apart

“What doesn’t kill makes one stronger.”

--Japanese proverb

For two weeks now we’ve watched horrendous news footage on TV of  Japanese suffering following the 9.0 earthquake and its tsunami aftermath of 30 foot water swirling into Sendai streets, bursting over banks, uprooting houses from their foundations, turning ships upside down, drowning everything within its mindless path; even then, in Job-like fashion, venues of more calamity and angst with the loss of electrical power necessary to cooling the six reactors of the nearby Fukushima nuclear plant and daily heroic efforts to limit radiation fallout and, worse case scenario, prevent meltdown. 

But nightly we’ve also seen the Japanese people up close in their dignity and discipline.  While sorrow abounds and mounts—at present count, 6700 dead and thousands more missing, whole towns and villages swamped by the sea, their inhabitants presumably dead__there isn’t any panic or looting.  Soldiers are here to rescue, not impose order.  In personal interviews the tenor is the same:  a stoic acceptance of life’s engrained insecurity; the solace of being alive; the sense of dependency on each other.  I shudder to think what might be the situation in our own country were we to experience a calamity on the scale of what’s befallen the Japanese.

I’m not surprised by their equanimity, orderly and quiet resolve, absence of rancor at the failure of government to react quickly and sufficiently, and refusal to politicize calamity by pointing fingers.  (I think of our BP disaster in the Gulf last year, high in economic consequences, but low in fatalities.)

I first met the Japanese as a 17-year old serviceman enroute to Korea.  Dakota Air Base outside Tokyo was my initial touch-down.  Their cleanliness, kindness, and ubiquitous honesty lent a lasting impression.  Leave something behind in a restaurant or train station, rest assured, they’ll keep the item for you.  Theft, like most crime, is generally rare in Japan.  Travel books abound with the good news that Japan’s a place where you don’t have to look over your shoulder.  When I think of Japan, I associate several prominent characteristics unique to the country that help us see their present response in cultural perspective:

1. collective identity:  The Japanese value the group more than the individual. They think as one.   It’s not what’s in it for me, but how will it affect others—nation, family, friends.   Westerners sometimes disparage this, finding it regimentation or group sanctioned inhibition of self-identity.  But I think this a shallow view prejudiced by contrary cultural values.  We have personal freedom to do pretty much what we like in the West, but at what cost?  I lament our greatest loss and primary source of our national and personal fractiousness: the erosion of the communal ethic.  That ethic remains salient in Japanese culture, particularly with regard to the primacy of family.  Japanese find it difficult to fathom that parents might live 3,000 miles from their children or that children might seldom visit an aging parent.  The Japanese language itself reflects the culture’s guardianship of the interiority of the family and its special intimacy and potential solace in a wider, impersonal world pursuing material values. There are separate vocabularies designating family members:  one for family and one for outsiders.

2. Discipline:  Perhaps it derives from Buddhism, reflected in Zen, that you have this sense of integration, or self-mastery, the ability to delay gratification, a sense of the goal and the patience to pursue it.  Discipline was at the heart of the samurai warrior code and is embedded in today’s Japanese schools that are centered in more than the academic as repositories teaching pragmatic values:  social etiquette, obeying the law, esteeming the nation.  In the home, parents reenforce these values as well.  Japanese children are well-behaved. Through self-discipline, the Japanese are often better able to master deprivation and pain.  I’ve watched with fascination their patient queuing in line, accepting their beverage and bread stick in the crowded shelters.   

3. Courtesy:  related to discipline, it’s a fine art in Japan and another aspect of the primacy of the social fabric.  When we think of Japan, we often notice the extended politeness on saying hello in its accompanying ritual of bowing. The lower you bow, the more respect you convey.  Humorously, this ritual is so engrained that often you’ll see Japanese bowing as they converse on their cell phones.  Rites of etiquette extend seemingly everywhere.  There are conventions for entering and leaving trains, getting on and off an escalator.  I remember my GI delight visiting a department store in Fukuoka (Kyushu) and being taken on and off escalators by the white gloved hands of dimpled, smiling Japanese girls. 

4. artistry:  I can’t think of any place I’ve been where the creative is so much a staple of daily life from flower arranging to public  gardens and tea rituals.  Westerners sometimes say that Japanese art is imitative rather than creative.  This simply isn’t so; in fact, we’re more apt to imitate them as seen in our own penchant for Japanese gardens. One of Japan’s contemporary artistic legacies is its  sophisticated anime and comic book genres, along with video games.  We’re still catching-up.

5. Simplicity:  There exists an understated elegance to Japanese culture in its advocacy of minimalism, whether in gardening, the haiku and tanka poetry genres, or its cuisine, a simplicity that seeks not to use, but reflect nature.  Living on a crowded archipelago of  islands, the Japanese are nonetheless able to bring nature into their very living rooms with bonsai renditions of pine and cypress..  Traditional Japanese homes are furnished lightly, tables and chairs low to the floor, beds that are futons folded and stored each morning in keeping with a spatial emphasis allowing, reconfiguration.  Materials in a Japanese home are drawn directly from nature: fine woods, bamboo, silk, rice straw mats, and paper.  Colors are always subdued, light diffused.   I experienced all of this first hand when I stayed briefly in a mountain inn, or ryokan,  in the vicinity of the Shinto shrine city of Nikko in northern Honshu, wearing the kimono, eating Japanese food, largely fresh from the sea, sleeping on the floor  

It isn’t a perfect society.  In recent years the economy has struggled as other Asian nations, principally China, compete with Japanese exports in the global market; women have yet to gain full equality; the population is aging, with 1 out of 4 Japanese over 65; vestiges of an ugly nationalism is on the increase; and there exists a defensive hostility towards other ethnicities (Japan remains a homogeneous society).  While all nations have their freckles, the virtues of the Japanese nevertheless far exceed their blemishes, underscoring their likeliness to right themselves.

In its long history, Japan has faced many crises and always transcended. 1n 1730, an earthquake killed 130,000; nearly a century later, a tsunami killed 27,000; then, in 1923, in Japan’s greatest natural disaster, an earthquake striking the Kanto plain near Tokyo and subsequent fire took up to 200,000 lives.  More recently (1995), an earthquake struck the Osaka area, taking 6,000 lives. The Japanese are a resilient people who will rebuild just as they have always done.  They did it after WWII.  If character is fate, then surely the Japanese are a people set apart.

I want it now!

In 1998, a U. S. president is impeached by the House of Representatives for sexual impropriety in the White House.  In 2008, a New York governor and former state attorney general resigns in the wake of public censure for his involvement in a prostitution ring.  The same year, banker greed unhinges the global economy. In  2009, a gifted golfer forfeits his marriage, perhaps his game, because of an ability to curb his sexual appetite and a Wall Street  investment counselor pleads guilty to eleven federal felony charges, costing his clients billions.  This year, 2011, an Italian prime minister faces trial for sexual and financial improprieties.  In Egypt, a nation of impoverished millions, a ruler for nearly thirty years, is ousted by his people for misrule.  Defining his nonchalance, he liked $25,000 suits with his name imprinted to form pinstripes.
 

For some thirty-five years as a university English prof, I taught courses several times a year called Western Classics I and II.  I found it a privilege to teach these courses, even though their subject matter was more often outside the pale of  traditional English literature:  Homer, Sophocles, Vergil, Dante, Quixote, Voltaire. While I was enthusiastic about all these works, the one I liked best was Vergil’s The Aeneid.  If I measure a book by its utilitarian value, then The Aeneid exceeds the norm.
 
Like epics generally, it’s an extended narrative poem, this one in Latin, consisting of twelve books.  In the 19th century, school boys in the prep schools of Britain and America toiled with translating it.  It’s seldom taught now, and when it is, largely as anthologized selections.  In my enthusiasm, I required students read the poem in its entirety. Imagine their joy.
 

Vergil was an interesting chap, to say the least, living in a turbulent political era which saw the assassination of Julius Caesar.  Ultimately, his nephew Octavian (Augustus) would succeed after a protracted civil war.  Many historians regard him as the greatest ruler the world has known.  Vergil penned this work as a member of his coterie.  In it, he offered his idea of the sound ruler by way of the poem’s protagonist, Aeneas, who’s modeled on Octavian.  It might well have been written today, given its keen observations that still jell with contemporary life.  For me, I also found it acutely practical at the personal level.
 

Central to its message is the concept of pietas, or balance.  As such, it resembles the Greek notion of arête, often translated as “virtue.”  The good leader avoids excess, not only in state matters, but more importantly, with regard to masterly over himself.  The bad leader is characterized by furor, or imbalance.  Pietas also connotes the idea of order or discipline.  On the other hand, its opposite, furor, connotes disorder or lack of discipline.  In The Aeneid, Dido, the Carthaginian queen, represents furor.  In her passionate self-indulgence, she imperils Carthage and poses a temptation for Aeneas. While the poem surely is multi-faceted in its themes, it’s ultimately about having self-control.
 

I think about this work often, even after nearly six years in retirement.  I suppose I’m fond of it because it expresses many of the issues I’ve faced in my own wrestlings to get a headlock on the meaningful life; it also confirms, for good or bad, character dimensions in myself and others, even friends; and, of course, it helps define much of what we observe in our public world.  While the ancient world often emphasized the role of Fate in human affairs, it also held the individual responsible as a free agent of Reason to soften its consequences.  As Aristotle argued in Poetics “character is fate.”  In agreement, I would extend Aristotle’s insight to humans generally: what primarily ails us is precisely our frequent inability to master ourselves.  I might even proffer that, in great measure, history is a legacy of excess.
 

Lately we’ve been reading and hearing a lot about the imbroglio between the Wisconsin Republican governor, Walter Scott, and public sector unions.  While very few of us want to see collective bargaining abolished, neither do we admire union greed that increasingly threatens the welfare of all of us, mirrored in exponential budget deficits.  Near where I live, Lexington, KY, the new mayor warns the city cannot adequately invest public employment pension funding.  Layoffs are highly likely.  (39% of firefighters have retired early on disability; police have worked excessive overtime.)  What’s happening in Wisconsin and locally in Kentucky aren’t isolated scenarios. They are occurring in most states and even many countries.
 

Contributing to the financial morass nationally is the exponential cost of medical treatment, currently at the rate of 10% a year, far outstripping the cost-of-living index.  Kentucky is now looking at cutting its Medicaid aid to the poor and reducing funding for education.  How do doctors and hospitals justify such increases?  Even the newly legislated Health Reform Bill will not help, since it lacks a mechanism for controlling costs.
 

In sports, entertainment,  the media, and on Wall Street, we’re witnessing the continuing erosion of the middle class as oligarchy siphons money in enormous amounts for themselves.  Does a news anchor warrant a 120 million dollar contract or a Yankees athlete 200 million?  Movie stars often garner16 million or more for one film.  Banking CEO’s, many of them arbiters of the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, aren’t prosecuted and are even bailed out.  Their mind-boggling salaries and perks continue, even as they’re quick to foreclose on mortgages of those they’ve lured into financial jeopardy.
 

Nationally, our federal debt exceeds 14 trillion dollars.  Net interest (2011) on that debt runs to 202 billion.  Current federal spending stands at 3 ½ trillion, 1½ billion of that deficit spending. 
 

At the state level, it doesn’t get any better.  Consider these sobering figures:  California’s deficit is now 25.4 billion; Illinois, 15 billion; Texas, 123 billion. In what should serve as a sobering warning to other states, California’s liability on unfunded public sector pensions stands at a staggering 240 billion dollar shortfall.  See U.S. Debt Clock
 

What’s happening nationally reflects us as individuals.  We simply find it difficult to distinguish between wishes and needs.  More to the point, we’re unable to delay gratification.  We want the single marshmallow now, not the hazy promise of two marshmallows if we simply wait a bit.  Our appetites imperil us.  Sadly, studies indicate we have something in common with criminals in this respect.  Recent research abundantly indicates that most criminals are urge-driven.
 

Even our children increasingly reflect this syndrome, made all too easy by a pethora of technological distractions such as cellphones, videos, media games, and TV.  Why do homework?  The consequences, of course, are significant.   As renowned researcher of self-control, Walter Mischel, inventor of the marshmallow test measuring self-discipline, confirms, there’s a huge gap in SAT performance between those children who can wait and those who can’t (Akst, We Have Met the Enemy, Kindle edition, 1662).
 

An inability to delay gratification can affect weight, with children who are able to delay gratification consistently thinner.  Daniel Akst reports researchers have “found that self-discipline was correlated with school attendance, grades, standardized achievement test scores, and eventual admission to a competitive high school… School discipline turned out to be a vastly better predictor of grades than was IQ” (Kindle Edition, 1691).  Just maybe the crux of our difficulties with our schools lies not with teacher incompetence and inadequate funding, but with the students themselves, comatosed by a culture of indulgence, often fostered by parents dulled to indifference in their own pursuit of the good life.
 

Individually, the consequences of our inability to cage our desires, the furor Aeneas talks about, are enormous.  Lives shattered by financial excess, addiction to alcohol and drugs, poor health regimen by eating too much and wrong foods, smoking, lack of exercise, diminished futures in school dropout, quality goals unaccessed through wasted time.  The list is endless.   For the pleasure of the moment we forfeit the promise of tomorrow.

Spring cleaning

After a long winter, even for Kentucky, it feels good to awake to early eastern skies of long-fingered pink, harbinger of Spring’s seductive balms of  radiant, yet gentle warmth, arousing the earth to new dress in verdant green,  With nature’s facelift, browns and grays transmute into daffodil and tulip riot.  My mind swirls excitedly as I anticipate grabbing a shovel, turning the yielding earth over, planting  azaleas and rhododendrons, restoring pathways, adding mulch, pruning roses. I leap out of bed.

I wonder how many poems have been written about spring.  Here’s a passage from a child’s poem that, simple as it is, resonates spring’s melancholic capacity to remind us of its temporal nature like all things in life and, by extension, our need to live in the Now.

    “If spring lasted forever

    I’d never have to say good-bye

    to when summer ended

    or when the fall leaves died.”

                             (James Meaney)

Yet despite the temporal nature of the seasons, the arrival of   spring reassures us of  a permanence amidst  change or as   Hal Borland reminds us:  “No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.”  It’s one of the few assurances we have in life.

I think I like spring best for its ability to suggest we can redeem what’s been lost or made a mess of through cosmic caprice or our finite limitations.  In this way, it represents the end of winter’s hiatus and rebirth of  resolve to do better.  While the traditional New Year on January 1 is  synonymous with resolutions,  ancient calendars often began the new year with the coming of spring, or season of rebirth.  This makes sense to me.  This archetypal notion of spring as an opportunity for a fresh start is embedded in our own language when we speak of “spring cleaning,”  an undeclared domestic rite when we often toss relics of the past.

I Iike that kind of spring cleaningI