In Lehmann's Terms

Freddy Nietzsche's Summer Camp

I never went to summer camp as a kid. In fact, no one I knew at the time had ever been to summer camp.

I was vaguely aware of their existence, given how many movies and television shows ruminated on the experience, but growing up in Newark, such things just weren't a part of our universe. Visiting our cousins in the suburbs, who actually had GRASS in front of their homes, was the closest most of us ever came to interacting directly with anything that could vaguely be called "nature." (Such it is that I remember being shocked to learn, when writing a fourth grade paper on clouds, that they did not -- as I'd always assumed -- come from smokestacks.)

But I digress. The reason for writing this is to convey the joy I felt upon learning, from this article in the Chicago Tribune on the proliferation of niche specialties in the summer camp industry, that some enterprising entrepreneur has created Camp Quest -- the summer camp for atheist children.

Here's the relevant section:

A DECIDEDLY DIFFERENT experience awaits those who enroll at Camp Quest, started in 1996 for the children of "atheists, freethinkers, humanists and brights."

Last summer, the common theme at the camp's six locations was "Beyond Belief."

"We don't teach the kids that there is no God," says August E. Brunsman IV, director of the camp's site in southwestern Ohio.

"We try to promote values of secular humanism, though not everybody at camp wants to call them that. Enlightenment values. A focus on logic and reason and how to learn about the world."

Besides taking the traditional archery and swim lessons, campers spend a week trying to prove that two invisible unicorns said to be on the campgrounds do not exist. The winner is awarded a "God-less dollar bill."

Nobody has ever won.

Camp Quest allows kids to fit in without being judged for their religion or lack of it, Brunsman says.

He recalls the time a boy who had been raised Catholic attended camp at the urging of his grandfather, an atheist.

"As far as I know, he was still Catholic at the end of the week," Brunsman says.

Libertarian Showtunes

Russ Roberts is on the hunt for free-market folk songs, and is having difficulty finding any. Bryan Caplan, meanwhile, takes up the call by pointing to some excellent punk rock for classical liberals.

Let me, then, swing this discussion toward a third, unlikely source of inspiration -- libertarian showtunes.In particular, I'm thinking of one of the most criminally overlooked Broadway productions of the 1970s -- Shenandoah. The story of a Virginia family set against the backdrop of the early days of the Civil War, the show propounds a combination of libertarian themes that you don't see too often in Civil War stories. It was anti-war, anti-interventionist, anti-slavery, but also PRO-secession. It is, in a nutshell, the story of a man who decides he'd rather secede from any country at all than have his six sons conscripted to fight for a cause none of them believe in.

Shenandoah wasn't ground-breaking and revolutionary, like Sondheim's shows of the time. It didn't have the show-stopping dance numbers of A Chorus Line or Bob Fosse's best work. It wasn't gaudy and over-the-top like Andrew Lloyd Weber's Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita.

But one thing this show did have going for it were some powerful themes of individualism. Adapted from the equally libertarian Jimmy Stewart movie and starring John Cullum (best known for his later television work, and particularly his turn as Holling Vencour on Northern Exposure,) Shenandoah's original cast recording was a major formative influence on me as a kid, and it remains one of my favorite guilty pleasures to this day.

To begin with, you have the show’s best known song, "Freedom," which is, admittedly, more than a bit hokey, but whose lyrics would function perfectly well as a summary of Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World:

Freedom ain't a state like Maine or Virginia
Freedom ain't across some county line
Freedom is a flame that burns within ya
Freedom's in the state of mind

(Chorus) Freedom, freedom,
Freedom, freedom
Freedom is a flame that burns within ya
Freedom's in the state of mind

Freedom ain't a boat that's leaving without ya
Freedom ain't a place ya float to find
Freedom's in the how ya think about ya
Freedom's in the state of mind

(Chorus)

You can't get to freedom by riding on a train
The only way to freedom is right on through your brain

Freedom is a notion sweeping the nation
Freedom is the right of all mankind
Freedom is a body's imagination
Freedom is a state of mind

Freedom, freedom
Freedom, freedom
Freedom is a notion sweeping the nation
Freedom is a body's imagination
Freedom is a full-time occupation
Freedom's in the state of mind

Then there’s the powerful anti-war polemic, "I've Heard It All Before," which really gives Cullum the chance to show off his operatic range over cascading piano fills:

Stand and show your colors
Let's all go to war
The Lord will surely bless us
I've heard it all before

I’ve heard it all a hundred times
I’ve heard it all before
They’ve always got some holy cause
To march you off to war

Tyranny or justice, anarchy or law
We must defend our honor
I’ve heard it all before

I’ve heard it all a hundred times
I’ve heard it all before
They’ve always got a holy cause
That’s worth the dying for

Someone writes a slogan
Raises up a flag
Someone finds an enemy to blame
The trumpet sounds, the call to arms
To leave the cities and the farms
And always, the ending is the same
The same,
The SAME!
The same…

The dream has turned to ashes
The wheat has turned to straw
And someone asks the question
“What was the dying for?”
The living can’t remember
The dead no longer care
But next time it won’t happen
Upon my soul, I swear

I’ve heard it all a hundred times
I’ve heard it all before
Don’t tell me it’s different now!
I’ve heard it all
I’ve heard it all
I've heard it all before

But, finally, the piece de resistance, is the "Meditation." Half a song, and half a monologue, it closes out the show's first half with Cullum talking to his late wife's headstone, reminiscing on how the family got to be where it is, before ultimately closing with a declaration that comes damn close to being an anarcho-capitalist anthem:

You know, Martha
It's getting harder and harder
to find someone to talk to
Virginia's gone crazy, Martha
Everybody's screaming 'States rights!'
...and war....
And the family, well,
We're trying awful hard to stay out of it

But sooner or later
They'll be calling me a traitor
Your friends, Martha, and mine
But they'll never take our sons
to face those Yankee guns
and be targets in a long grey line

They'll say we made life here in Virginia
and we owe the Commonwealth a thing or two
Well, if anyone here
owes anyone here
Virginia should be owing me and you

Remember how it used to be
when it was only you and me, Martha?
Remember when we didn't know
how to make potatoes grow
back a hundred years ago, Martha?

Well, we settled in a corner
of the Shenandoah Valley
and we started on a penny and crumb
You were sweet as clover
and I was green all over
Everywhere except in my thumb
I think of how it used to be
The way we struggled, Martha
You and me

Well, I took an axe and I chopped us a clearing
Hung up a door on a maple frame
Raised up a roof and got us out of the weather
And then came Jacob and James

Jacob and James
and April rains
and frost and snow
and growing pains

You brought me drink and I planted an acre
Sowed us the seeds we were counting on
And it seems we could grow more than beans by the acre
Welcome Nathan and John

Jacob and James,
Nathan and John,
Blessed are those
Heaven smiles upon

Root out the weeds, the stumps and rocks,
Put out the mule and the plow
Got a Jenny and Henry Anderson now
An apple tree with a fruited bough
A loving wife with child again
And I'm thinking I should sleep with the cow, Martha
Yonder in the barn with the cow

Now, send for the Doc
Vicar West'll bring him
Pour me a drink and I'll drink for joy
Pad up the bedroom,
Roll up the gingham
Name him Robert, he's a boy

Jacob and James
Nathan and John
Jenny and Henry
and Robert
and then,
...you were gone, Martha

And me?
I got 28 years in this farm
My blood, my sweat and my tears in this farm
And no one's gonna come along and say
That I owe any part
Not the TINIEST part
to anyone in any single way

This farm don't belong to Virginia
My sons bleed,
but not for the South
This land here
...is Andersonland!
By the strength of my hand
and the sweat of my brow
for as long
as the Lord
will allow

Three decades of commercial software

Today marks the 30th anniversary of a seminal moment in the history of computing and, well, modern human culture -- the then-20-year-old Billy Gates' letter to the Homebrew Computer Club whinging that, by copying software and not paying for it, those goddamn hobbyists were funkin' with his flow, as they say in the modern parlance.

Freddie the Beetle

Speaking of Ted, on my way to his asbestos symposium at AEI today, I met Fred Barnes in the elevator, and actually had a decent little conversation about his new book on the way up. Yes, it's perhaps not the most starlicious encounter one could have, and no, I'm not generally one to be terribly star-struck to begin with (Well, I must admit I was quite jelly-kneed when I met Angelina Jolie at a hotel in Georgetown last April, but that's a whole 'nuther story -- even stars are star-struck by Angelina Jolie...I'm sure there are times when even Brad Pitt takes a moment mid-coitus to think to himself "holy shit, that's Angelina Jolie!")

But I digress. As I was saying, it's not that Fred Barnes is a big star, or even that I'm such a tremendous fan of his work. I'm not. It's just that it brought me back for a moment, in my head, to being the 12 year old geek who'd actually get excited about waking up Sunday mornings so I could A) nosh on some bagels and B) watch the McLaughlin Group. I remember seeing those faces every week -- Fred's included -- with their bona fides listed at the bottom of the screen (Jack Germond - Baltimore Sun) and having the first germinations of the thought that maybe I'd like to be a journalist someday.

So flash forward 20 years, and here I am, riding in an elevator, exchanging business cards with Fred Barnes. If nothing else, it is an interesting life, from time to time. I think I'll keep it.

The Gospel According to Ferris

This is to comedies what Gone with the Wind is to epics. It will never die, because it responds to and calls forth such human emotions. It isn’t dirty. There’s nothing mean-spirited about it. There’s nothing sneering or sniggering about it. It’s just wholesome. We want to be free. We want to have a good time. We know we’re not going to be able to all our lives. We know we’re going to have to buckle down and work. We know we’re going to have to eventually become family men and women, and have responsibilities and pay our bills. But just give us a couple of good days that we can look back on.

I think when John Hughes wrote, produced and directed Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, he was writing about a human need as basic as the human need that Jefferson wrote about in the Declaration of Independence: the need to be free, and to pursue happiness. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – very basic stuff. And I don’t know that there’s ever been a happier movie.  It’s a movie that you cannot watch without feeling really, really great.

…Everyone wants to be Ferris, and what an amazing guy Ferris was. He didn’t do a single thing to hurt anyone during the course of the movie. Maybe he sort of made the principal back down, but other than that, he didn’t hurt anyone else. It’s sort of like, if I may use this very extreme analogy, the New Testament. In the New Testament, Jesus Christ does not hurt anyone. In the Old Testament, there’s a lot of battles where people are killed, but in the New Testament, Jesus doesn’t hurt anyone. Ferris did not hurt anyone. He just freed the people he was around. 

Here I am, I'm 60 years old. I'm an old guy at this point. And even now, when I walk down the street in Georgetown...on a summer night, when all the college kids are there to be summer interns, every few steps, someone says "Bueller...Bueller...anyone...anyone..." I love it. Because, you see, Ferris Bueller liberated me, too.

-- Ben Stein, excerpted from an interview segment on the new Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: Bueller…Bueller…Edition DVD

In Liberty, R.W. Bradford

While the news that Richard Pryor and former Sen. Eugene McCarthy both died today will certainly get far more ink, those in this-movement-of-ours lament the unfortunate passing of R.W. "Bill" Bradford, the founder and publisher of Liberty magazine.

Though always modest in circulation, and even more humble in its production values, for nearly two decades Liberty served as the only reliable source for the "inside baseball" view of the libertarian movement. It was the first explicitly libertarian publication that I ever subscribed to, and at one point, I came within a hair's length of deciding to up and move to Port Townsend, Wash. (a couple hours north of Olympia, on the edge of Olympic National Park) to serve as its assistant editor.

Here's a sampling of some of those remembering him:

• Chris Matthew Sciabarra
• Jesse Walker
• Brian Doherty
• Stephen Gordon
• Thomas L. Knapp
• Wendy McElroy
• Anthony Gregory

And a link to Bill's essay on "How We Started Liberty"

Yesterday's vision of tomorrow

Or, more accurately, a relatively distant yesterday's vision of a more recent yesterday.

Trolling around eBay recently trying to find ideas for Christmas gifts, I ran across a bargain that I couldn't pass up for myself -- a stack of 30 issues of Penthouse founder Bob Guccione's Omni magazine (which ranks behind only Spy among defunct titles whose loss I most lament) dating from the late 1970s and early 1980s, all for only $3.

Betwixt and between the hilariously dated ads for the Apple II, Intellivision ("Intelligent Television!") and Sony's very first Walkman, as well as some classic short fiction from the likes of William Gibson, Frank Herbert, and Harlan Ellison, I found this fascinating little nugget from the March 1979 issue -- a sampling of survey results submitted by 20,000 readers offering predictions on when certain scientific and social milestones would be reached.

So with the benefit of hindsight, how did they do? On the whole, I guess…not so well. But in at least a few cases, the results were better than you might expect.

Predictions Shared By More Than 50% of Omni Readers

• PREDICTION: We're in for a female president in 1992
• OUTCOME: Well, no, it didn’t happen, but I would note that they did manage to virtually pick the date of the notorious "Year of the Woman,"  which featured not only the Senate wins of Dianne Feinstein, Carol Mosely-Braun, Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray, but also the coronation of co-Counsels Bill & Hill....so that's got to count for something.

• PREDICTION: 1992 will also see a man landing on Mars.
• OUTCOME: Not even close. It would still be five more years before even the first successful rover mission would touch down on the Red Planet. But it's easy to see how this overly optimistic estimation could have been made from the standpoint of 1979. The Soviets had already landed two rovers on Mars a full eight years before the survey was taken. It turned out that neither of them worked, but that was generally seen as a problem with the rovers themselves, not with the impossibility of the trip. Who could have foreseen then that it would take another 17 years before the U.S. would even attempt a rover mission of its own?

• PREDICTION: By the late 1980s, cloned human beings will become a reality.
• OUTCOME: They clearly didn't hit the mark, but how far off they were is tough to judge. If you count embryos as humans, then Advanced Cell Technologies claimed to have done it in 2001 and Hwang Woo-Suk definitely did it in 2004, making them off by a decade and a half. If the claim is for a truly viable, post-embryonic human, then I guess it depends on what you think of the claims made by Panagiotis Zavos and Severino Antinori, or those of the Raelians.

• PREDICTION: By the late 1990s, commercial flights on orbiting spacecraft will be possible.
• OUTCOME: MirCorp. launched its commercial service by flying Dennis Tito to the International Space Station on April 28, 2001, which is awfully close to the target. If you count Japanese reporter Toyohiro Akiyama’s 1990 flight aboard the Soyuz TM-11 – for which his employer, the Tokyo Broadcast System, paid $28 million – then space tourism is even older than that. Granted, Omni’s readers were likely envisioning a far more robust market than what we now have, but a hit is a hit.

• PREDICTION: Gas prices will top $1-a-gallon by 1982.
• OUTCOME: The one prediction readers were likely hoping wouldn’t come true, and it actually arrived two years early…at least, in California, which is the only market for which I have data. The average nominal price of gasoline jumped from $0.89 in 1979 ($1.98 in today’s dollars) to $1.23 in 1980 ($2.49) before going on to hit a peak price of $1.66 ($3.08) in 1981.

Predictions Shared By More Than 90% of Omni Readers

• PREDICTION: Extra-sensory perception will be shown to be fact, rather than fiction.
• OUTCOME: A big fat swing and a miss. Actually, one of the more remarkable things in reading through all of the Omni back issues is noticing just how popular the concept of ESP was in the 70s, and how completely it has disappeared from the culture ever since. We still have more than our share of cranks and charlatans, but no longer do those claiming special abilities cast them in the SciFi glow of ESP. They’ve switched genres and gone occult, dubbing themselves “mediums.” I would have to ascribe this shift to the fact that ESP’s adherents actually made claims (telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, remote viewing) that could be tested (and falsified) in a laboratory setting. Dead men, on the other hand, tell no tales. Except, of course, to James van Pragh, Sylvia Browne, and John Edward.

• PREDICTION: A computer will win the world chess championship in 1985.
• OUTCOME: They were off by a dozen years. Belle became a master in 1983, and Deep Thought defeated a grandmaster in 1989, but a computer did not defeat a reigning world champion in a full match until the new and improved Deep(er) Blue took its rematch from Gary Kasporov in May 1997. Of course, in this case, the genius of Kasporov might have been the more difficult anomaly to predict than the growth rate of computing power.

• PREDICTION: Life expectancy will reach 100 by the year 1998
• OUTCOME: Here, Omni’s readers were furthest off in their prognosticating, highlighted by yesterday’s bulletin from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention touting that U.S. life expectancy hit a new record of 77.6 years -- disappointing, by the prognosticators' standards. This particular prediction underscores the old adage that it’s best to be cautious when extrapolating recent trends into the future, particularly the distant future. After rising 5.7% in the 70s, life expectancy more or less plateaued in the 80s, rising only 1.3% over the decade. We've since returned to a steadier growth trend, rising 3.5% since 1990, but nothing like the advances seen during the Me Decade.

So, all in all, not too shabby. Just think what they might have been able to forsee if they actually had some money on the line!

Did you read the news today? Oh boy

So how did my employer commemorate the quarter-century anniversary of John Lennon's assassination? By assigning a negative outlook to a Barbados-based reinsurer called....wait for it....Imagine Insurance Co. Ltd.

How's that for freaky coincidences?

***

To participate in the obligatory "where were you when...," I was a week shy of my seventh birthday, and my bedtime then was 9 o'clock, so I didn't actually hear about it the night that he died. When I learned the news at school the next day, it hit me quite hard. In part, because my family's Beatles records were a very big part of my earliest musical education, and also because it marked probably the first time in my life that I can remember pondering the fact that someone I was aware of and familiar with...was now dead.

I have a distinct memory of the subject coming up in the context of a conversation that began on the playground -- but would proceed to dominate much of the day -- focusing on whether or not John would go to Heaven. Because this was a Catholic school, and because my little crew of mates were an unusually precocious lot, there were a number of moral theories forwarded that, in retrospect, seem pretty advanced for our years.

For instance, I remember one kid, who came from a family of police and fireman (and who is now a cop himself) saying he didn't think John went to heaven because "he was on the drugs." We kicked this one around a bit, and ultimately decided it didn't hold water. Drugs made your life bad, but God wouldn't punish you for doing them, because that prohibition wasn't included in the Ten Commandments. I do naturally have to wonder whether we would have had that same bias had we been fledgling evangelicals, rather than Catholics-in-training.

A separate line of inquiry regarded whether he was a "holy" person. In some photos, he looked quite a bit like Jesus, which seemed to us a point in his favor. There was also the song "All You Need Is Love," which we actually had been taught in our music class, and which sounded an awful lot like a whole host of other hippie-dippy quasi-psalms that had come in vogue in certain Christian circles at the time (the puerile "Friends Are Like Flowers (In The Garden of Life)" immediately comes to mind.) It's interesting to ponder that, to kids who didn't know any better, hippies really did seem to have a reasonable claim to being Christ-like.

But an appeal to our pastor, a cranky old German named Father Miller (a man who would, a few years later, be relieved of his post by the Archdiocese for making headlines when he offered to baptize Cabbage Patch Dolls --- though, in retrospect, I suppose there are far worse things he could have been doing with them) put the kibosh on that line of thought. He told us that John Lennon "rejected Jesus," and so he could never go to Heaven. I'm not certain what evidence the good Father was using as the basis of his charge (perhaps it was the proto-Marxist lyrics of "Imagine," but more likely a holdover grudge from the "bigger than Jesus" hubbub of the 60s) but since his word on the matter was, to us, about as authoritative as they came, we decided that the issue was settled. John wasn't going to Heaven. I spent the rest of the day in what I can only conclude was my very first experience with depression.

So, that's where I was when John Lennon died.

***

And just one last piece on this theme. Over at Reason's Hit and Run, responding to Matt Welch's assertion that "the 25th anniversary of Lennon's death is as good an opportunity as any to to close the apple-shaped circle of revisionist history -- he really was the best Beatle, people," I offer a theory that I'll just cross-post here:

Paul was a musical genius. John was not. John was a musical visionary. Paul was not.

Paul had (still has, when he really puts his mind to it) an innate, once-in-a-generation gift for composition, melody and arrangement that really has no other parallel in the rock era. To find his peers, you have to look to the likes of George Gerschwin and Richard Rogers. But for all of that, Paul often didn't know what to do with his gifts, leading him to craft an awful lot of technically masterful schlock.

John had the opposite problem. He had lots of big ideas, but didn't have the chops to execute them. In some cases, he was just rewriting "Three Blind Mice" over and over again. His best songs are "atmospheric" pieces -- "Strawberry Fields Forever," "Instant Karma," "Norwegian Wood" -- that play to his strengths by layering unusual instrumentation on top of relatively simple and straightforward (some would say monotonous) compositions.

Paul at his worst was saccharine, and John at his worst was self-indulgent. They needed each other, both as complements (the idea man and the master of execution) and to smooth over each other's rough edges. John would ridicule Paul when he got too sappy, and Paul would slap the shit out of John when he got too pretentious.

They're a beast with two backs. There is no "best" Beatle, because when you split the two of them apart, neither would have been able to produce what they did together.

Who's house? T's house

T pity the fool what don't respect his momma.  Link courtesy of the Mighty, Mighty C.K.

For T-related nostalgia of slightly more recent vintage (but nonetheless rapidly fading into the nether regions of collective memory), I offer the original gold standard in sites about human testicle consumption.

Groovie Ghoulies

In honor of Halloween, I offer a half-dozen rental recommendations from the decade that marked the pinnacle for literate, but skin-crawlingly creepy horror movies...the 1970s:

Black Christmas (1974) -- I've long been fascinated by the amazingly eclectic career of Canadian director Bob Clark. Probably most remembered for inventing 80s teenage sexsploitation with Porky's and Porky's II, he went straight from pure raunch into pure sentimentality with the beloved A Christmas Story, then made a series of completely forgetable, mostly straight-to-video releases before coming back with one of the absolute turkeys of all time in 1999's Baby Geniuses. And yet, long before any of that, he was a pioneering horror auteur, with the Vietnam-era monkey's paw tale Dead of Night and this underrated gem, which more or less sets the blueprint for sorority house slasher tales.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971) -- While certainly not the best horror film of the decade, this might be the one that best evokes the era, for good and ill. The hipster dialogue and cheesy synthesizer score practically define the word "dated," and modern horror fans probably couldn't abide the methodical pacing, but the filmmakers' here manage to conjure a sense of dread from beginning to end that is just utterly lacking in the genre today.

The Sentinel (1977) -- This one is sort of like Dario Argento's Suspiria meets Tod Browning's Freaks. It was most noteworthy at the time for using actual physical oddities to play the roles of deformed characters who man the gates of hell. It is most noteworthy now for having one of the longest cameo lists of any film this side of the Cannonball Run. Before all is said and done, Tom Berenger, John Carradine, Beverly D'Angelo, Jose Ferrer, Ava Gardner, Jeff Goldblum, Burgess Meredith, Jerry Orbach, Chris Sarandon, Christopher Walken, and Eli Wallach all make appearances.

The House of Exorcism (1973) -- Also known by its American title, Lisa and the Devil, this one is another that explores the "Gates of Hell" theme to great effect, as Italian auteur Mario Bava confirms what many of us had long suspected -- that Kojak is the Prince of Darkness.

Don't Look Now (1973) -- M. Night Shymalan fans should enjoy this one particularly, as its influence clearly echoes through all his films. Director Nicholas Roeg, who also gave us Mick Jagger in Performance and David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, here manages to turn Venice into a terrifying place, full of creepy little midgets, ominous black waters, and con artist nuns -- all the while mining some fairly deep psychological terrain on the nature of trust between parents and children, and husbands and wives. Stephen Soderbergh would also later ape the film's best scene -- which intercuts Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie making love with them dressing for dinner later that night -- by having George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez reverse the chronology in Out of Sight.

The Wicker Man (1973) -- The Citizen Kane of 70s horror, this one actually first opened Stateside as a double bill with Don't Look Now, which was also produced by British Lion  (a tragically short-lived studio that sought to pick up where the immortal Hammer left off.) Sadly, the original print is now lost to the ages and only a heavily edited version survives intact. The 2000 DVD release reincorporates some of the lost footage, but those sections are clearly the worse for wear. No matter -- in any version, this one is a must see. Not  does it contain the greatest performance of Christopher Lee's career, it also functions as a musical! How many movies can you say that about?