From The Wall Street Journal:

The story begins in 1979, when (Mikel) Jollett is 5 and living on a farm-like compound in Northern California with other children and a few female caretakers. Every person Mr. Jollett ever sees has been shorn of hair. A woman with a shaved head who cries a lot visits occasionally. “I’ve been told this woman’s name is ‘Mom,’ ” Mr. Jollett writes, in an opening chapter that attempts to capture his childhood perspective. “I know the word is supposed to have some kind of special meaning.”

One night, this woman spirits him and his older brother, Tony, away from the compound. Mr. Jollett later learns that the place is a cult called Synanon, where former alcoholics and drug addicts (including, at one point, Mr. Jollett’s father) came to get clean and to try to create a utopia.

The price is those you love: Parents must give up children; husbands and wives must divorce; and no one can be more important than dear leader, in this case a false prophet with a penchant for violence. Some who leave the cult, the author reports, find their dogs hanging from trees. Others disappear and are presumed murdered. Mr. Jollett reports witnessing an escaped Synanon member being beaten by cult thugs. This would be a horrific scene for anyone to see, let alone a young child. Mom’s solution is to tell Mr. Jollett he never saw it and is thus not entitled to feel fear or anguish. “Do feelings exist if no one sees them?” Mr. Jollett wonders.

The boys are moved to Salem, Ore. They grow up hungry, dirty, cold. Mom has them raise rabbits so they can eat; by age 6, Mr. Jollett is required to defrost the creatures’ water bowls before dawn, and to learn to kill them. He receives guidance from a lover of his mother’s, a gentle alcoholic who teaches him to fish and engenders in him a love of running. One day, with no proof, she tells the boys he’s dead. The boys never see him again, leaving Mr. Jollett racked with sadness.

Meanwhile, Dad has been clean for years and is managing a mechanic shop. He lives in Southern California with a fellow ex-Synanon member—a woman who cared for Mr. Jollett at Synanon, a woman the author loved and still does. By the time he is 7, Mr. Jollett and his brother are spending summers in SoCal—where, Mr. Jollett says, “We fight less. We eat more. We lie with eyes closed in the sun thinking of precisely nothing.” He recalls going to the beach and standing in “the soft waves as they pour over us and Dad, shirtless and tan in the sun, standing still like an anchor in the water.” They go to horse races at Hollywood Park, where, feeling Dad’s hand on his shoulder, Mr. Jollett is overwhelmed by what it is “to be a son, to have a father, to be out at the track, with the men all trying their luck.”

Then it’s back to Oregon, to “moldy bread and four-day-old rabbit”; to Mom telling Mr. Jollett he’s fat and figuratively scratching off whatever healing has occurred when he’s away from her. Teachers tell her that Mr. Jollett, a straight-A student, should skip a grade; Mom won’t have it, and by age 10, Mr. Jollett understands why. “I know it’s my job to take care of Mom and that all boys are supposed to take care of their mothers because that was the reason they were born,” he writes.

As he gets older, Mr. Jollett tries to thrash his way out. He ditches school and crashes a Honda XR80 motorcycle. He becomes obsessed with David Bowie, picks up a broken guitar and beats on it. He takes up track in high school and earns a full-ride scholarship to Stanford, where he wins Pac-10 honors and runs the third fastest 10,000-meter time in the nation. It should be sunshine from here on out, but the damage inflicted by Mom has Mr. Jollett pushing women he loves away and occasionally wondering whether he should stick around this world at all.

It can sound airy to say, “Music saved my life.” In Mr. Jollett’s case, it seems also to be true. In his early 20s, living in L.A. and writing for a music magazine, he finds himself interviewing his hero Bowie. He gets up the gumption to ask, how does Bowie write songs? Mr. Jollett confesses that he’s written a few hundred; that his “deepest wish” is to perform for an audience. But the interviewer admits to the rock star: “So many things I thought were good, including parts of myself, turned out to be more complicated, more broken. And I can barely remember having a thought where love is just love, where there is peace and I feel like I deserve it, before all this contradiction in me came about.”

“Write about the contradiction then,” Bowie says.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

From Foreign Policy:

In a 2019 survey, Japan dropped to 53rd in global English proficiency, squarely in the “low proficiency” band. Japan ranks near the bottom of Asian and developed countries alike despite constant reshuffling and refinement of the English educational curriculum in schools and the frequent assertions, acknowledged by Japan’s Ministry of Education, that English-language skills are needed to compete in the modern economy.

The failure to adopt English is particularly unexpected given that the English language—and the whiteness associated with it—signifies privilege in Japan. Countless advertisements flaunt white foreigners on TV and use English aptitude as the basis for selling products. Top companies such as Rakuten, an e-commerce website and the Japanese competitor to Amazon, place immense weight on English proficiency, whether or not English is needed for an employee’s role. Eikaiwa (English conversation) programs run daily on TV, and accounts featuring videos of Japanese American children speaking English cultivate tens of thousands of Instagram followers.

. . . .

At the same time, essays and books about the supposed uniqueness of Japanese language, culture, and identity—a genre known as nihonjinron—are in every bookstore, next to shelves of English-learning books. They overflow with complaints about young people’s poor Japanese and instructions on how to speak polite and beautiful Japanese.

Today, Japanese are caught between a belief in the importance of Japanese language and culture and the need to exist in a globalized world in which English carries economic privileges and status associations. A plummeting population and an inevitable future influx of foreign workers collide with a proud national identity, structural and cultural obstacles to English learning, and enough economic independence to resist what might otherwise seem an inevitable future: an English-speaking Japan.

For years, multinational companies have been mandating English as the common corporate language. “In East Asia, many parents, professionals, and students themselves see English as a prerequisite for attaining the best jobs on the market,” said Minh Tran, the executive director of academic affairs at Education First, a Swiss language-education company that offers classes in Japan.

Yet the spread of English has left behind a “trail of dead”: mangled languages, literatures, and identities. As countries around the world scramble for widespread English, there’s a fear of losing their own traditions, cultures, and even names.

English became a tool of the Japanese elite throughout Meiji era Japan’s relentless race to catch up technologically with the West. And while Japan was never a colony of a Western country, the U.S. occupation after World War II lasted for seven years—enough time for the U.S. military to implement widespread political and economic changes throughout the country. In the Cold War, Japan came under the U.S. nuclear umbrella of protection from the Soviet Union, further cementing America’s image as a symbolic protector.

This presence of American soldiers at this time exposed the general Japanese public to spoken English. “America [was] idealized in Japan at the time as a symbol of freedom and democracy, partly as a result of the success of the American occupation,” writes Takako Yoshida, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Lleida. English accordingly became associated with freedom, power, and status.

Link to the rest at Foreign Policy

During the occupation, Japan was governed (or ruled) by General Douglas MacArthur. At the end of the war, about 450,000 US military personnel together with other Allied soldiers were stationed in the country. Those members of the military who had fought in the war were mustered out as quickly as feasible and replaced with occupation troops from America, Britain, Australia, India and New Zealand.

Whatever his shortcomings, no one ever accused MacArthur of being indecisive. (Well, General George S. Patton did on at least one occasion, but Patton always had to be the most decisive military commander who had ever lived.) One biographer dubbed MacArthur as the American Caesar. (PG’s favorite bio of MacArthur)

The General effectively ordered Hirohito to remain as the emperor of Japan, staving off a potential suicide, which would have caused a great deal of societal disruption. Acting by fiat, MacArthur established a parliamentary democracy and, under his direction (although he was a politically-conservative Republican), the Japanese government introduced sweeping social reforms and implemented economic reforms similar to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s.

Major land reforms resulted in millions of acres of farmland (nearly 40% of Japan’s arable land) being purchased from landlords by the Japanese government, then resold at very low prices, to the tenant-farmers. Under these reforms, about three million peasants became owners of the land they had worked, sometimes for generations.

The Occupation ended in 1951 and Japan became a fully-sovereign nation in 1952.

According to Cultures of War,

Discipline, moral legitimacy, well-defined and well-articulated objectives, a clear chain of command, tolerance and flexibility in policy formulation and implementation, confidence in the ability of the state to act constructively, the ability to operate abroad free of partisan politics back home, and the existence of a stable, resilient, sophisticated civil society on the receiving end of occupation policies – these political and civic virtues helped make it possible to move decisively during the brief window of a few years when defeated Japan itself was in flux and most receptive to radical change.

From The Wall Street Journal:

In recent years, surveys have shown that a large percentage of Americans feel lonely or socially isolated. (One such survey, published in January, put the figure at 61%.) The restrictions prompted by Covid-19 have surely triggered even more such feelings. At a time when technology supposedly fosters new levels of interpersonal connectivity, how did we get to this place? What are the broader effects? What should we do?

Those are some of the questions that Vivek Murthy, a doctor of internal medicine and a former surgeon general (2014-17), addresses in “Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.” Though written before “coronavirus” entered our lexicon, the book is a timely and well-reported meditation on a critical aspect of the American mind.

Dr. Murthy begins by highlighting research showing that isolation is not our natural state: We evolved as social beings. “Humans have survived as a species,” he writes, “not because we have physical advantages like size, strength, or speed, but because of our ability to connect in social groups. We exchange ideas. We coordinate goals. We share information and emotions.”

It follows that when we’re not routinely socializing, we feel that something is amiss. Researchers have found three “dimensions” of loneliness, Dr. Murthy reports: “intimate” (wanting a spouse or confidant), “relational” (seeking close friendships) and “collective” (desiring a community with common interests). To thrive, we need to find the right approach to each of them, and loneliness can result if even one is left unfulfilled.

Dr. Murthy draws a distinction between loneliness and solitude. While solitude “is a state of peaceful aloneness or voluntary isolation,” loneliness is “burdened with shame.” He describes his own battle with loneliness as a child, saying that he didn’t want to tell his parents about it because doing so would have conveyed more than an absence of friends: “It would feel like admitting I wasn’t likable or worthy of being loved.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

From The Los Angeles Review of Books:

FOR EVERY ACTION, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s Third Law deals with physical objects, but does it also have something to teach us about human behavior and the clash of forces in our fraught and turbulent society?

When it comes to the volatile issues of race, sex, identity, privilege, rights, and freedom, well-intentioned actions to redress genuine injuries can conflict with equally important societal values, such as freedom of speech and the open exchange of ideas. Are there unintended and adverse consequences that flow from the energetic vindication of cherished rights in our society? Consequences that have been ignored and deserve serious examination? Is there still any legitimate place for dissent and disagreement on these fundamental issues?

In The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies, Robert Boyers, professor of English at Skidmore College, author of 10 books, and editor of the literary journal Salmagundi, is alarmed by the “irrationality and anti-intellectuality” on college campuses and in the wider cultural environment that was “unleashed by many of the most vocal proponents of the new fundamentalism” to “silence or intimidate opponents.” He is deeply concerned that

concepts with some genuine merit — like “privilege,” “appropriation,” and even “microaggression” — were very rapidly weaponized, and well-intentional discussions of “identity,” “inequality,” and “disability” became the leading edge of new efforts to label and separate the saved and the damned, the “woke” and the benighted, the victim and the oppressor.

He regrets that “people who are with you on most things — on the obligation to move the world as it is closer to the world as it should be — are increasingly suspicious of dissent.”

Boyers is asking whether in our zeal to address the consequences of racism, misogyny, sexual violence, bigotry, and intolerance in America, are we spreading a new intolerance, undermining cherished values of free and open discussion?

. . . .

As Boyers sees it, tendencies that alarmed him and others on the liberal left 25 or 30 years ago have grown more disturbing.

Intolerance among young people and their academic sponsors in the university is more entrenched than it was before, and both administrators and a large proportion of the liberal professoriate are running scared, fearful that they will be accused of thought crimes if they speak out against even the most obvious abuses and absurdities.

Boyers offers a startling example.

An Ivy League college senior in Boyers’s July 2018 New York State Summer Writers Institute — a young white man — told Boyers he was denounced in a seminar by several other students for writing poems based on his experience as a volunteer in Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama. “How dare he write poems about lynching and the travails of oppressed people when it was obvious that he has no legitimate claim to that material?” Boyers sarcastically asks, echoing the all-too-sincere accusations leveled at the student. “Was it not obvious,” Boyers continues, “that a ‘privileged’ white male, who could afford to take off a year of college to work as a volunteer, really had no access to the suffering of the people he hoped to study and evoke?”

Boyers expands this example beyond the college setting by recounting another controversy that unfolded in July 2018, when objections (which Boyers calls “predictably nasty and belligerent”) were lodged against The Nation magazine for publishing a short poem by a young white poet in which he used black vernacular language. Within a few days the poetry editors who had reviewed and approved the poem issued what Nation columnist Katha Pollitt called a “craven apology” that read “like a letter from a re-education camp.” In The Atlantic, the scholar of black English John McWhorter called the language in the poem “true and ordinary black speech” and a “spot-on depiction of the dialect in use.” He also noted the irony that, at a time when whites are encouraged “to understand […] the black experience,” white artists who seek “to empathize […] as artists” are told to cease and desist.

Link to the rest at The Los Angeles Review of Books

For PG, freedom of expression qualifies as the premier virtue of a free and civilized society.

With it, the polity has the possibility of fixing things that are broken, righting the wrongs that are, unfortunately, inevitable in any collection of diverse human beings.

Without it, not so much.

Close behind freedom of expression is tolerance for the opinions others with whom we disagree.

PG is reminded of how his biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, illustrated Voltaire’s beliefs:

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

From The Wall Street Journal:

More than anything else during this lockdown, I’ve missed restaurants. What wouldn’t I give right now to be sitting with friends in a cheerful bistro, nursing a glass of wine and looking over the day’s menu? Instead, tucked under the bedcovers, I’m reading about dishes I might have ordered had I been so lucky. You can almost taste the food in Bill Buford’s “Dirt,” an engrossing, beautifully written memoir about his life as a cook in France.

“Dirt” refers to the soil that gives food its taste, the goût du terroir to which the French famously attribute the complexities inherent in wine. The book is a sequel to “Heat” (2006), Mr. Buford’s account of how he quit his job as an editor for the New Yorker to work in Italian restaurant kitchens. He was a man obsessed, determined to prove his worth among professionals, earning the requisite badges of honor: knife cuts, singed hair, burns and blisters. Former editor of the literary magazine Granta and author of “Among the Thugs” (1990), a hair-raising account of British soccer hooliganism, Mr. Buford seeks out extreme experiences. He finds plenty when he gets to Lyon.

The city, about 250 miles south of Paris, is the capital of French gastronomy and has been home to the finest chefs, including Daniel Boulud, who is from there, and the great Paul Bocuse. Mr. Buford intends to stay for three months, but he ends up living in the town for five years.

. . . .

During that time he works for a baker, attends a top cooking school and, finally, toils on the line in one of Lyon’s most famous restaurants.

Mr. Buford brings a novelistic approach to his story; he is both observer and participant. He’s an entertaining, often comical, raconteur. “The women were beautiful, as you would expect—it was France,” he observes upon arrival in Lyon. “It was the men who were unexpected. Their look was almost uniform: blunt, short-cropped hair, unshaven, sometimes a cheek scar, thuggish—ugly: forthrightly so. These were not New York faces. They were not Parisian. They were more English than French, an aging-lad look. I thought: I know these people. They are not fancy or fussy, and they unexpectedly put me at ease.”

. . . .

In his neighborhood bistro, a diner complains to Mr. Buford’s wife: “Do you really need to smile so much?” A taxi driver hits his 3-year-old boy for putting his legs on the seat. “I searched for words, while securing my children on the sidewalk, and put my head back into the car to tell the driver, in my best possible French, that he must never (jamais!), ever touch (toucher) my child (mon fils) or I would rip the eyeballs out of his fat sockets and eat them. Actually I have no idea what I said.” Mr. Buford had yet to master the French language.

. . . .

His descriptions of his new city are vivid and evocative. “In Lyon, the rivers make everything built near them—bridges, quais, pastel-painted sixteenth-century homes, random Roman ruins—into performances of light and darkness and reflection. But Lyon is also a throwback city—wiseguys, corrupt cops, unbathed operators working a chance, the women, mainly Eastern European, working their trade. Friday nights are rough: The after-hours clubs across the Saône from our home open at 11:00 p.m. and close whenever . . . Saturday nights, remarkably, are rougher than Fridays. You wake on Sunday and there is a drunk guy leaning against your door. A vehicle that had been parked in front of the apartment has been torched. Farmers arrive early at the market to hose away vomit.”

But early in the morning the enticing smell of bread wafts across the street from a bakery opposite his apartment. He befriends the owner, Bob, a large, jowly man, permanently bedecked with flour. After a month unable to find work in a restaurant, Mr. Buford becomes his apprentice.

The job is a stopgap. He leaves Bob when he is accepted at the prestigious culinary institute named for Paul Bocuse. The course is hard and, as in “Heat,” Mr. Buford is humorously self-deprecating. “My life had been a happy one, not quite knowing what a fricassee was.” At the school he learns, among other things, the three principles of a French plate: color, volume and texture. Then, at last, he finds a restaurant willing to take him on.

The kitchen in Mathieu Viannay’s Michelin-starred La Mère Brazier was run the old-fashioned French way. It was hierarchical and tense, with 15-hour days. 

. . . .

“The French kitchen was about rules: that there was always one way and only one way (like trimming the gnarly ends off your beans—with your fingertips, never a knife).” There was even a rule about popping peas. Split the pod, drop the peas quickly into boiling water, drain and ice; the pea’s membrane will slide off with a gentle squeeze. He imagines the belly-wobbling laughs this idea would provoke in his Italian colleagues. “In the long history of Italian cuisine, you will not discover a single popped pea.”

But he has another goal besides training in a French kitchen: to investigate the history and origins of that country’s cooking and its links to Italian cuisine. Food historians have debunked the long-held myth that Catherine de’ Medici taught the French how to cook.

. . . .

This attitude towards food prevails even at the local school where Mr. Buford’s twins are enrolled. For lunch, the children are served three-course meals, no menu ever repeated during the year, ending with cheese, fruit, dessert or yogurt.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)