All Six, Every Year

 In Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary, Anthony Kenny writes of Gilbert Ryle that he once was challenged by a woman to say whether he ever read a novel. Ryle replied that he read all six, every year. I was interested to see that early in Ryle's The Concept of Mind, in the chapter "Knowing How and Knowing That", he refers to one of the six:

Now the higher-grade dispositions of people with which this inquiry is largely concerned are, in general, not single-track dispositions, but dispositions the exercises of which are indefinitely heterogeneous. When Jane Austen wished to show the kind of pride which characterised the heroine of 'Pride and Prejudice', she had to represent her actions, words, thoughts and feelings in a thousand different situations. There is no one type of action or reaction such that Jane Austen could say  'My heroine's kind of pride was just the tendency to do this, whenever a situation of that sort arose'.

Daniel Dennett's introduction to the 2002 edition also remarks that Ryle read and reread Austen's novels. 

Ships

 The president thinks that the US Navy should move the islands (the superstructures) on aircraft carriers farther back, apparently so that they would look better to him. It seems to me unlikely that this will happen.

Robert Lowell's father was an officer of the US Navy, as were assorted family connections. Not all, perhaps, had the keenest judgment. One of the senior Lowell's Annapolis classmates said of a Lowell cousin that he

was really plotting to put aircraft carriers in square sails to stem the tide of our declining Yankee seamanship

("31 Revere Street", collected in Life Studies.)  One doubts the cousin had any such notion. In any case he never reached a position that would have required the Navy to pay attention to his ideas.

The president is also a fan of battleships and would like to see more of them built. During the Twentieth Century, US battleships bore the names of states, but apparently the new series would bear the names of presidents, starting with the incumbent. The fondness for battleships, long after their prime tactical years, is not unusual, it is true, but the fondness used to exhaust itself in finding new armaments and tasks for the Iowa-class battleships. There was some considerable cost involved, but nothing compared to the building of new ships. I do not believe that these will ever be built. 

An Obsolete Offence

 At my high school, a couple of old two-story buildings in white brick survived from the days when an orphanage had occupied the property. The ground floor of the building to the north was called "the freshman lounge". I don't remember spending much time there as a freshman. My only memory of it, was that it had at least one soft-drink machine.

One day, all the freshmen were assembled to be told off by Brother Benedict, FSC. Someone had gone to collect the take from a soft-drink machine, and found many filed-down pennies where dimes should have been. Brother Benedict let us know that this was conduct unbecoming. He must have issued threats, but what they were I have long forgotten. Those of us--the great majority of us--who had not filed down pennies resented this.

Back then there were no Dremels. If you wished to file down a penny, you needed a vice and a file. By then the minimum wage was $1.60 per hour. To earn that by filing down pennies to dime-size, you would have had to file down sixteen pennies each hour, roughly one every three and a half minutes. Never having put file to penny, I don't know whether the rate was possible or sustainable.

The Best and the Brightest

 A Little Free Library around the corner yielded a paperback of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. I was interested to find it in a "quality" paperback format; fifty years ago I saw it in mass-market format, more or less cubical, with a badly curved spine and the pages tending to fan out, worn at the edges--a housemate's copy, I suppose. I was not surprised that a couple of young acquaintances who came along had never heard of it. But in the 1970s it was much talked of.

Halberstam gives his account of the way that the Kennedy and then the Johnson Administrations found their involvement in Vietnam increasing, helped along the way by the stars that Kennedy had recruited to his administration, the "best and the brightest". Most had good to excellent credentials: McGeorge Bundy was Dean of Harvard College, Robert McNamara the head of the Ford Motor Company; Maxwell Taylor had been Army Chief of Staff during the Eisenhower Administration, and so on. Yet somehow events controlled them, and they oversaw an increase in military commitment, from advisers, to bombing, to the commitment of US ground forces.

The book is very readable, but very long: 665 pages to the end matter in this printing. The biographical sketches, though interesting, might have been spared or at least pared: Dean Rusk's childhood in Georgia and education at Davidson College; the schooling of innumerable (well, five or six) men at Groton; William Westmoreland's time at the Citadel and West Point. A bit of trimming there might have shortened the book by thirty pages.

I wonder about some of the interpretations. The Kuomintang forces that faced the Red Army in 1948 had been through a very hard ten years. Did they lose because they were a feudal army, or because the best of their divisions had been chewed up by the Japanese? Would the portrayal of the People's Republic of China have been as neutral ten years later, when the effects of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, etc., was known? Is Stilwell's reputation still what it was in the 1970s?

I also wonder about the author's confidence, expressed in a foreword for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, that his book had been not just purchased but read, "did not just sit on coffee tables." It is, as I say, a very long book, and the likely audience consisted largely of very busy people (students perhaps apart). When Michael Kinsley was editor of The New Republic, he developed a skepticism about the extent to which the most talked-of books were in fact read, and he would slip into bookstore copies notes redeemable for $20 at The New Republic office. He never had to pay up.