If I’ve written anything in the past two weeks that offended you, I have a good excuse.

I had knee replacement surgery on June 22. The operation was successful. It was performed by a surgeon who happened to go to the same middle school as did Number Three Son. If you are anywhere near my age, you know someone who has had knee replacement surgery (if you haven’t had it yourself). For my younger readers, you should know that although the surgery itself has a history of good results, the post-operative recovery can be a bitch. During the first two weeks especially, the pain can be agonizing.

(Before you say it – I admit I have no authority to use this metaphor. But it felt very much like I was giving birth to a small, angry child through my knee.)

Which is to say, when painkillers were offered, I took them. Initially, I was eating 5 mg of oxycodone every four hours, day and night.

The effectiveness of painkillers varies from person to person. For some, they work instantly and completely. For others, they hardly work at all. Regardless of their success reducing pain, they almost invariably produce side effects. The two most common are physical fatigue and brain fog. (My friend AC’s theory is that they aren’t even intended to stop the pain. Instead, they make your brain so stupid that you don’t notice it!)

I’m experiencing both of these side effects. And it’s frustrating, to say the least. A walk that took 30 seconds when I was able-bodied takes me three minutes now. A paragraph that took five minutes to write when I was able-brained takes me half an hour. That means my productivity meter (which I check every day) is down about 70%.

And I almost forgot! The memory! That’s almost completely gone. I swear, a half-hour after I’ve done something or said something or had someone say something to me, it disappears from my memory banks. Like bubbles on Champagne. I mean, really. Gone. As in, “No recollection.” As in, “Nada.” As in, “You don’t remember saying you wanted mustard on your sandwich 15 seconds ago?”

So, that’s what’s been going on with yours truly. Pain. Brain fog. Fatigue. Now you know.

The good news is that the knee is getting noticeably better every day. As for the brain? I’m not so sure about that. But I’m not particularly concerned about it. I’ve always been what they used to call “absent minded,” and that never seemed like a bad thing to me. Yes, I’ve missed a lot of what was going on right in front of my eyes, but I was using that time to regurgitate information that happened to slip into the folds sometime in the past.

I don’t like severe pain. Physical or psychological. And as I get older and become more familiar with it, I want to think that there will always be some sort of drug nearby to put me out of my misery. But I don’t have that feeling about going senile that so many people my age seem to have. I always tell my kids, “Look into my eyes. If I’m not in pain, I’m fine. Let me and my absent mind be.” Of course, if it gets to the point where I’m fouling my pants, take me out. That indignity I would not want to endure, let alone impose on my children.

Happy Independence Day!

We honor our country’s founders with a day of celebration each year that includes flags, marching bands, and fireworks. And we celebrate our homosexual, nonbinary, and trans communities with a full month of those sorts of things on steroids.

Now that I think about it, I must have been out of the country when these honorariums were put into the Congressional Record. I wonder how they pulled it off. I think that, whatever one thinks of old White men, one has to acknowledge they should be given a month, too!

Speaking of Independence Day, did you know that…

The Declaration of Independence wasn’t signed on July 4, 1776?

And one of the signers later recanted?

Click here for seven more bits of July 4 trivia that might come in handy today.

Rising Above the Book-Banning Debate:

The 100 Best Children’s Books of All Time

Well-managed intellectual propaganda begins with the curation of children’s books. Educators understand that ideas formed in childhood, and especially ideas about how the world is and how it should be, tend to last forever, even if they are subjugated or sublimated by later education and experience.

So, when the BBC recently announced that they had polled 177 experts from 56 countries to find “the 100 greatest children’s books ever,” I was curious to see what they had been up to. (After all, I have five grandkids that are or will be learning to read.)

Introducing the project, the BBC said the following:

“Recently… there’s been the furor over the rewriting of Roald Dahl’s novels for modern sensibilities – and more generally, the widespread concern over the growing movement in the US towards banning children’s books, including many dealing with racial and LGBTQ+ themes. All in all, then, it felt like the right time to do our bit to both give children’s literature its due and consider what has made and continues to make great children’s writing. And so, in order to do that, we have decided to ask many experts a very simple question: What is the greatest children’s book of all time?”

I looked at the list they came up with, and was pleased to see that 80% of the books were written before 1950 and none of them seemed to have a particularly political agenda. Click here to see the list.

A hundred children’s books is probably too many to aim for in your home library – in most home libraries. But 20 is a good starting number. So, to help you cull the list, here – also from the BBC – are short summaries of their top 20.

Memories of Maiduguri

“Never shall I forget his deep-throated laughter as he told me that ‘the rascals’ would kill him.” – Taki 

DZ wanted to travel to Maiduguri in Nigeria, where his father was a visiting scholar at the university. I agreed to go with him, knowing nothing about Maiduguri and very little about Nigeria, except that it was an English-speaking country, not a Francophone country like Chad, where we were stationed as Peace Corps volunteers.

The first leg of the journey was by bush taxi – a smallish van with benches bolted on either side of the cabin. The big advantage of bush taxis was the price. Fares were less than a dollar each, which made them the usual choice for Chadians and Peace Corps volunteers.

To eke out a profit, bush taxis did not operate by a schedule, but idled at the station for as long as it took to fill the cabin.

Chadian-full was different from Fort Lauderdale-full, or even New York City-full. Bush-taxi-full was 20 humans, each with boxes and bags, plus at least a dozen chickens and one or two goats. And that was just the contents of the cabin. Tied to the roof rack, there was likely to be a six-foot-high mountain of bed frames and firewood and farm tools and motors and bags of grain… and who knows what else!

DZ and I had woken up at the crack of dawn and were at the station by about 6:00 a.m. By 8:00, the van was full. The driver put the transmission into gear, and the van began coughing, sputtering, and finally hobbling and clanking down the dirt road.

Moments later, we heard shouting outside in some tribal language. The driver stopped the van, and his assistant went to the back and opened the door. There was an elderly couple that wanted to get in. The assistant yelled at us all in yet another language, in response to which our fellow passengers began shuffling themselves around in an effort to make room for the additional passengers. But even after another battery of verbal abuse from the assistant, there was, at best, only six inches of bench space available to accommodate them.

The assistant shook his head in disappointment and yelled something to the driver, who then put the transmission back in gear. “Finally,” I thought to myself. “We are on our way.”

The driver floored the gas pedal and the van bolted forward. A second later, he slammed on the brakes, hurling us violently backward and crushed up against one another, but freeing up the bench space the assistant needed. He shoved the old couple on board and shut the door behind them.

That was “Part I of Our Adventure to Maiduguri.” The rest of the trip was more exciting and even stranger, which I will save that for another time. I’m telling you this now because I happen to have read this morning a reminiscence from one of my favorite reminiscers, Theodore Dalrymple (of Taki’s Magazine), whom I’ve recommended to you before.

Dalrymple’s essay is about some of his memories of this very same city of Maiduguri in the early 1980s, just a few years after DZ and I traveled there.

Africa is a continent unlike any other. Its landscapes, varied as they are, do not remind me of anyplace else I’ve ever been. That’s also true of its peoples and their cultures. They are not like any others in the world. And it (sub-Saharan Africa, that is) has changed very little since I was first there 40 years ago. It exists in its own time capsule. It still feels undiscovered to me.

Chad was not an easy place to live in – especially for a 25-year-old American who had never traveled overseas. It was not just different. Everything, from brushing your teeth to giving a lecture at the local university, felt like it had to be reinvented from square one. I managed well enough, but many others didn’t. A fair percentage of the Peace Corps volunteers that went to Chad while I was there returned to the States before their tour was up.

And I’ll bet that, apart from a handful of large, relatively wealthy cities like Marrakesh, Algiers, and Cairo in the north or Johannesburg and Cape Town in the south, that strangeness and difficulty is still true for 90% of sub-Saharan Africa today.

Notwithstanding the uncomfortable differences, there are some things I remember about Africa that made the experience of living there worthwhile. One of those things was a depth of intimacy among male friends that did not exist in the States. Another thing that impressed me deeply, which Dalrymple writes about in the linked-to essay below, was the capacity of Africans to joke about the vicissitudes of life… punctuated by their huge, bellowing, and contagious laughter.

Click here to enjoy Dalrymple doing his thing!

Cormac McCarthy, RIP

Cormac McCarthy is gone. Sad. I didn’t know him personally. I never even heard him speak Unlike most bestselling authors, McCarthy didn’t do book signings or media interviews to promote his books. He was a very solitary person.

But he was a very good writer. He told emotionally compelling stories. He created characters that were unforgettable. His range was both vertical and horizontal. His dialogue was on a par with Twain’s. And in terms of American prose style, he was probably the most important novelist since Hemingway.

I remember the first time I read his writing. It was the opening pages of All the Pretty Horses.

Here it is:

“The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked. Under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forebearers only dimly down to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm wax pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed mustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.”

As you can see, McCarthy was a writer’s writer. Like Melville and Faulkner, two of the three novelists he admitted to admiring (the third was Dostoevsky), he crafted poetic sentences expressing complex and subtle ideas with beauty and grace. He was also, like Dostoevsky, a philosophical writer willing to write about difficult truths.

He was famously private. He kept to himself, rarely left his home, and turned down 99 interview requests for every one he granted. In that way – and now that I think of it, in several ways – he was the opposite of Hemingway, who was immensely social and sought out attention, almost any sort of attention, wherever he went.

McCarthy, or Cormac, as we Mules called him, was one of our favorite authors. (We permit ourselves to have first-name relationships with writers we believe would like to be part of our club.) We probably did four or five of his books, which is more than any other novelist, including Hemingway.

The fact is, Cormac McCarthy was the kind of writer that, if you were a serious reader or a committed writer, could not be ignored. We found, in the books we reviewed, bits and pieces here and there that we were able to criticize. But the criticisms were mostly nitpicking. And they were very few. It was much more common for us to read his sentences aloud and/or listen to them in awe.

Anyway, he’s gone now. And one thing that means is that he will have now less control over his celebrity than he did when he was living. He won’t be giving interviews, but neither will he be able to prevent people from writing about him based on anecdotal or even imagined information. My prediction is that, like Hemingway, McCarthy will not fade from recognition, notwithstanding his penchant for anonymity. It would not surprise me if, one day, he became as famous as Hemingway. And, ironically (which he would enjoy), he would have accomplished that considerable achievement by having lived a life as small and private as Hemingway’s was big and public.

Rules: Who Needs Them?

A fair amount of what interests me these days has to do with the experience of aging. So today, I wanted to write about how my thinking about liberty and bureaucracy has changed over the years.

In getting my thoughts together, this quotation, often incorrectly attributed to Winston Churchill, popped into my mind:

“If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.”

And then, of course, that sentimental biblical phrase (Corinthians 13:11) came to mind:

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”

Never mind.

When my partners and I began developing Rancho Santana 25 years ago, we imagined we were creating a sort of Libertarian Eden, a retreat from the encroaching big-government bureaucracy and petty tyranny of North America. Thus, when it came to creating rules for our fledgling community, our stance was: “The fewer the better.”

That policy worked for a while. We allowed lot owners to do whatever they wanted to do with their lots. They could regrade them, deforest them, drill wells in them, erect cell towers and windmills on them. Anything.

This worked until it didn’t. We discovered that many of our Libertarian-minded settlers didn’t always appreciate the amount of freedom the community afforded. A windmill can be an admirable idea. But when it’s blocking your neighbor’s view of the ocean, and sounding like a jet plane taking off, it becomes an invasion of and an assault on his liberty.

So, complaint by complaint, and despite our reservations, we were forced to establish more and more regulations and restrictions. I was reminded me of this when, at a recent meeting of the resort’s board, we found ourselves dealing with yet another complaint. In this case, it had to do with a new resident that had bought a house that had some pest problems. “You guys should have building codes that have the same standards as we have back in California,” he said.

“Oh, boy,” I thought. “This will never stop until we’ve made our haven as bureaucratic as any and all of the towns and cities we fled from in the States.”

And we are not the only example of this. A friend of ours, a bestselling author, developed his own version of our residential community in Argentina about ten years after we started Rancho Santana. When it comes to Libertarianism, he’s about as hardcore as it gets. And yet, the last time I visited his resort, their book of homeowner association bylaws looked to be even thicker than ours!

What’s the point?

The point: It’s easy to be a Libertarian or a Marxist or an anarchist when you are young and unburdened with responsibility. But as you grow older and take on the responsibilities of adulthood, those glittering ideologies become impossible to keep.

Except, of course, if you are a hypocrite — i.e., you make your living as a university professor, a politician, or a book and essay writer (like me)!