It doesn’t much matter whether you know them or don’t. …. A roughly alphabetical listing.

Beethoven – So now I know genius is not usually a matter of mind but mainly of soul.
Marlon Brando, Charlie Chaplin – Showed me that the movies can be an art form.
Morris Dorsky – Taught me to respect the visual arts.
Ted Drange, Ed Erwin, Bob Hoffman – Intellectual companions for fifty years..and counting.
Ronald Dworkin, H.L.A. Hart, and Nelson Goodman – The best of 20th century philosophers.
Barry Fish – From him I learned friendship can endure through the ups and downs of love and hate.
Michael Flynn, Michael Giglione and Tom Paluchniak – Through thick and thin.
Sam Gendin - Showed me the quiet dignity of love and backbreaking hard work.
Sidney Hook – A paradigm of thought.
David Hume, John Stuart Mill and Plato – Kept my love of philosophy alive for fifty years.
Robert Ingersoll and Thomas Paine – Exemplars of rational atheism.
Sinclair Lewis – He taught me about American provincialism.
Robert Rosen – Taught me that philosophy was King.
Elmer Sprague – From mentor to friend.
Marcello Truzzi – In an intellectual desert called Eastern Michigan University he was there.
Emil Zatopek – Proved hero worship of athletes is not necessarily shameful.

***************
I believe I omitted at least a dozen worthies…but they won’t mind.

Shall make you what? Free? And then what? A wise man? An educated one? Valuable? Dangerous? Interesting? Or just a simple freak?

In my mid-teen years I knew the gold medal winners of every Olympic running event from 1896 through 1948. It wasn’t my fault, and certainly was not to my credit. I hadn’t memorized these bits of useless data and didn’t let people know because I would rightly have been regarded as little better than a freak. There are billions of information packets that might be cluttering our brains, and one wonders about the old chestnut that “We should always face up to the truth.” “Face up” suggests, of course, that we are hiding something, usually deep psychological facts about ourselves. Who knows? Perhaps it is a solid general rule that we should face up to these damnable truths. I will leave that to the professional psychologists to blunder their way through.

Many truths are just a damn nuisance one way or another. Scientists get paid millions of dollars (raised via taxes) to learn how much food can be stuffed into a tapeworm in order to blow it apart. This example does not even come close to challenging the most trivial of “scientific investigations.” Interest in some truths is an indication of a perverse imagination. I suspect one difference between men and women is that women wipe their behinds after defecating by reaching down between their legs whereas men reach around their backs. The very fact that I think about that surely marks me as a freak of some sort and if I were to do a serious investigation into the matter then so much the worse for me.

Many truths would be embarrassing if they were known. I think I speak for the majority of us when I say we don’t want to know the frequency with which most 14 to 15-year old boys have masturbatory fantasies of their own mother. It would be vile to press adult men to try to remember. Never mind the nonsense about the truth shall make them free.

Of course the best truths are the ones that bad people try to hide from us. Did you shoot Mr. X? Did you rob his store? Even better are the truths that governments hide from us. Why did we really invade Iraq? What sinister aims did George Bush have when he created the Guantanamo gulags in Cuba? These are truths we are better off not knowing, the power brokers tell us, because it is in the “national interest” to keep these as deep, dark secrets. In the interest of national security we cannot even know how many photos exist of JFK and his brother Bobby having ménage å trois encounters with Marilyn Monroe. This is a truth that would set national security back 50 years and, accordingly, won’t be made public for quite some time.

Bertrand Russell, a man who boasted of his passion for truth, lied about the reasons for the end of his affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell. He chose to put himself in a very good light but in her memoirs, Lady Ottoline let it all hang out. Bertie had unbearably bad breath, giving off a stench comparable to what dead bodies allowed to rot in the sun give off. It is a wonder she ever got back into bed with him after their first encounter.

Lying has a notoriously bad reputation, and it is undeserved. A philosopher of my acquaintance warned me that under no circumstance would he tolerate any lies from me. The effect of that declaration was to gag me, not to induce me to be more honest. Any person who eschews all lying either hasn’t thought the matter through or is a damn fool. In fact, it is impossible to say whether it is a pretty good general rule not to lie. This is because we have no typology of lies. Even supposing we could work one out, we’d still be left with the problem of counting how many lies there are per type. Even one type so simple as perjury leaves us confounded. We just don’t know the number of occasions on which people perjure themselves for good and wholesome reasons and the number of times they do it because they are bent on some evil path. We also must deal with so-called “white lies.” These are the trivial lies we tell to spare ourselves embarrassment or spare other people unnecessary pain. “Look at this photo of my grandson. Isn’t he just a darling?” You had better say “Yes” despite the fact that the child is uglier than Lena the Hyena, of L’il Abner fame. Persons who exclude white lies from their principle “Always tell the truth” are liars. It is the easy way out from devastating counterexamples. In fact, often enough people who perjure themselves are excused by the righteous lover of truth, and you can think of plenty of reasons why without my help.

It has been my experience that delicate truths are nasty things and even prudes often recommend agains revealing them. Ann Landers and her sister “Dear Abby” often advised women who were burning to tell their husbands about their age-old transgressions to shut up and let sleeping dogs lie. [The other kind of lie.] A basketball player who might want to correct a call of a referee by telling him that he touched the ball last before it went out of bounds has a death wish and his teammates would be happy to kill him if he spoke up. Here, truth far from being a virtue is regarded almost universally as disgusting and perverse.

“Before you jump to any conclusions, let me tell you some facts you may have overlooked in the matter of…” ABSOLUTELY NOT! If the facts didn’t come to light on first examination then there is a pretty good chance that they are better left submerged. I recall an episode of that wonderful TV show, The Constitution: That Delicate Balance. The murderer wants to return to the scene of his crime to remove some incriminating evidence of the crime. His lawyer says, “Don’t do that.” The murderer asks, “What if they find it?” Lawyer: “They won’t.” Murderer: “How do you know?” Lawyer: “They didn’t find it the first time, did they? They won’t find it this time either.” That was the voice of experience; the lawyer was the great criminal attorney Pat Perrino.

And when Billy Shakespeare (the other Billy, not the super great Notre Dame halfback of the 1930s), told us “…The good is oft interred with their bones,” did he append “often, but not usually, not if the good is clouded over with falsehoods”?

So, verily, I say unto thee: the truth will make you free SOME OF THE TIME. Choose wisely.

*********************************
The rock star USHER doesn’t much like truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-82blMxGXcs

On the other hand, MISS PEGGY LEE makes her confession: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgqLzrzrDiM

Before a packed audience, Donald Kagan gave his Retirement Address.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323789704578446614144636002.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

Leave me alone…please.

Since February 1, I have received eight private communications at my email address that comment on a few of my posts. I WILL NOT REPLY TO THESE LADIES AND GENTLEMEN IF I REMEMBER THAT RESOLUTION. Not that these comments are bad; in fact, most are pretty good. But the proper place to comment on my posts is in the comments sections appended to the posts themselves. COME OUT OF THE CLOSET! I am certain that dozens of others have something to say but they notice their shadow trails them and they worry that within that shadow looms mighty Gendin with devastating rejoinders or caustic insults. The worst they have to fear is that they may be right. Big deal. What of it? More likely, Gendin can’t think of a criticism; more likely, Gendin has only gratitude for knowing they have lively minds. So, as the great Nancy Reagan would say, “Just do it!”

By EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH — In the Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2013. There, the article is titled FIND A MAN TODAY, GRADUATE TOMORROW.

In 2008, when I was a college junior, I went home to New Jersey one weekend to visit my family—and almost immediately regretted it. My mother seemed more interested in my romantic life than my academic life: “Have you found a boyfriend yet?”

I rolled my eyes and said no. With a healthy dose of young-adult arrogance, I explained that I was too busy studying, working on the college review, and helping out at my sorority. No time for men. My mother nodded, acknowledging that there was a lot going on.

Then she said calmly but forcefully: “You’re in college. You’re at Dartmouth. There will never be a better time to meet someone. I’m sure there are many interesting boys around. If you don’t find one before you graduate, you might not find one at all—so start looking.”
Related Video

Best of the Web Today columnist James Taranto on why Princeton alumna Susan Patton was right to suggest that smart women should try to seek out husbands in college.

Fast forward to today. A woman named Susan Patton is being pilloried online and elsewhere for giving young women the same advice that my mother gave to me. Late last week, she wrote a letter to the Daily Princetonian newspaper advising the school’s female students: “You will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you. . . . Find a husband on campus before you graduate.”

Feminist attacks on Ms. Patton began immediately—the paper’s website was swamped with complaints, the Twitter crowd was livid, and writers lit into her at Slate, New York magazine and beyond.

To call Ms. Patton anti-feminist is misguided at best. She was the first woman in her family to attend college. In fact, she was in one of the first classes of women to graduate from Princeton after the school went coed in 1969, and she had to fight her parents to go. Her parents, who were Holocaust survivors, thought a woman’s place was in the home. Ms. Patton has spent the years since her 1977 graduation carving out a successful career in corporate America.

My mother, too, has blazed her own trails as a woman. Born in Iran to a middle-class family, she worked so hard in high school that she was one of only a handful of women admitted to the country’s most prestigious engineering university. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which drastically changed Iranian life, especially for women, she packed her bags and headed west—first to the United States, then to Canada, where one of her early jobs was flipping burgers.

She eventually started working as a chemical engineer and has, like Ms. Patton, enjoyed a successful career. My mom benefited enormously from the freedom and opportunities that feminism gave her—opportunities she would have been denied in Iran.

So have I. For my entire life, my parents have pushed me to work hard and be independent, to be capable of supporting myself emotionally and financially.

That is precisely why my mother’s advice five years ago stopped me in my tracks. If she, a strong, career-oriented feminist—who, with my dad, sacrificed a great deal for me to go to college—was telling me to pay more attention to my romantic life, then what did she know that I didn’t?

A lot. She knew what few, if any, feminists would tell young women today: There is far more to happiness than career success.

Before Susan Patton wrote the letter that went viral, she had attended a Princeton conference about women and leadership. In one of the conference sessions, Ms. Patton and her best friend since freshman year of college met with undergraduate women ostensibly to talk about their careers. As she explained in the letter, though, the undergrads were less interested in discussing jobs than relationships and other personal matters.

Ms. Patton wrote that one of the young women asked how she and her friend had sustained a friendship for 40 years: “You asked if we were ever jealous of each other. You asked about the value of our friendship, about our husbands and children. Clearly, you don’t want any more career advice. . . . You know that there are other things that you need that nobody is addressing. A lifelong friend is one of them. Finding the right man to marry is another.”

In a boardroom somewhere, Sheryl “Lean In” Sandberg’s heart is sinking.

Career success and relationships are both undoubtedly important to women’s happiness, but many young and ambitious women value their personal lives more than their career aspirations. And that feeling intensifies over time.

In a 2009 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, David Lubinski and his team at Vanderbilt found that in a sample of academically gifted young adults, women became less career-oriented than men over time. As they approached middle age, women also placed more value than men on spending time with family, community and friends. These differences became more pronounced with parenthood.

My mother’s advice—Susan Patton’s advice—may not be right for every woman, but it was right for me. In the fall of my senior year, I started dating a brilliant man and we’re still together. If I were unattached today, I’m not sure what I would do. The post-college dating scene can be rough: Getting to know someone often means shouting across a noisy bar or scrolling through Internet dating profiles. Finding a partner in college is easier.

Mom was right.

Ms. Smith is an associate editor of The New Criterion and editor of the blog Acculturated.

While the two of us are relaxing in our respective living room chairs, I spy an interesting item in the newspaper:

SG: Listen to this. “Boy sets world record for balancing a volleyball on his nose, shattering the old record by 15 seconds.”
JV: That’s nice.
Five minutes later, SG says: “Here’s the list of 20 people with the highest IQs ever recorded.
JV: Good for them.
SG: Wow., this is amazing. A team of 4 runners went from Gnome Alaska to the southern most tip of South America carrying an unbroken case of a dozen eggs. At least one person was running throughout the trip. They seem to have set a record.
JV: I’m glad for them.
SG: Some college basketball won its 75th game in a row. None of its opponents came within 25 points of them. That shattered the old record of 57 consecutive wins.
JV: I’m sure they were quite wonderful.
SG (with growing irritation): Here’s a list of 25 actors each married for 25 years.
JV: Let me see that.
SG: Ah, hah!. Got your interest now. Of course, I just made that up.
JV: Let’s stop with your list of superlatives, please. I just want to read.

Two days later, SG and JV are driving through a downtrodden part of Detroit when JV says, “Stop the car. Look!” SG stops the car but does not know what to look at.
JV: See. There are 4 kids sitting on that stoop, singing happily.
SG: What about it?
JV: That’s the sort of thing that matters.

After a pause, SG says, You’re right. I”ll go around the city tomorrow and construct a list of kids who sit happily on a stoop. I’ll rank them on a scale of apparent happiness.
JV: You are hopeless.

Senator Rob Portman, Republican schmuck from Ohio, has seen the light. Now that he knows his son is gay, he will no longer oppose gay marriage. Honestly, I would rather see a shipload of gay people drown in the sea because of a law forbidding rescue of gays than have this imbecile announce his change of heart.

Is anything worse than reading about people who have seen the light? When I was about 13 years old, I heard about atheists switching sides because of freaky events such as a brother falling from an airplane and surviving without a scratch. I thought even then it was a great pity that these brothers survived. I had it right then, I have it right today. Who needs these disgusting freaks? I like those Tareyton smokers who say “I’d rather fight than switch.” Believe me, if I were a God-lover, I would not want switchers on my side. [And remember the old saying, "No one is a theist after creeping out of a foxhole, intact without a scratch."]

Nobody loves a good prayer answered like a professional prize fighter. After an undeserved victory, a fighter always gives thanks to God, from whom all blessings flow. I look forward to the day when I will hear some prize fighter say “I am very grateful there is no God because who can be sure the putz-face wouldn’t have guaranteed my loss? As it is, I owe nobody this victory; I won this fight all by own hard work.”

Movie stars have epiphanies by the dozens and so do waiters who come to realize out of the blue that a sandwich well delivered is every bit as heroic as winning an Oscar. My last God-inspired epiphany occurred when I was 8 years old. Until then, I had no conception of the explosive power of an orgasm. Life changed for me. For the next 14 years, my appreciation of God’s greatness was never open to challenge. Only then, in 1956, when an idiot in an Eisenhower jacket crept out of his hospital bed to resume his career as a part-time golfer and sometime President of the United States did I wonder about the meaning OF IT ALL. Indeed, one can say that this, too, was an epiphany and it has defined the rest of my life.

“Blog” is a portmanteau word combining “web” and “log.” The blogger keeps a journal of exchangeable ideas, and that distinguishes his work from a diary, which is a purely personal thing. The blogger wants to share his thoughts with others and wants them to comment on his. The diarist is simply recording his ideas and feelings. People who read another person’s diary are voyeurs. This need not be bad since diarists often want to be caught in the act and sometimes want their diaries to be read for all eternity. Nevertheless, its essence is personal.

If the blog is not to degenerate into a CHAT ROOM then standards must be maintained, and the blogger-in-chief is entitled to exercise editorial control over comments submitted to him. In a chat room, anything goes:
“Hey, Joe, what do you know?”
“Not much, Jack. Just sittin’ around.”
Jack: “Nice chatting with you. See ya later.”
Joe: “You betcha.”

No criticism of this is sensible. Chat is what it is and not another thing. Chats have neither merit nor demerit. Blogs are intended to have merit, and sometimes they do. I want more from my blog than chat. I am not usually lucky. This has been proved to me many times over — and it is very depressing. The miracle is that I hang in. That I want more should not make anyone mad at me.

In the last six months, (and most recently, yesterday), three or four people have pompously announced they are through with my blog. Apparently they expect that whatever they send is worthy of publication. I say to them, “Good riddance.” They are jackasses. I refuse to publish “comments” that are not comments but little else than gabby responses inspired by my posts. I am not demanding too much. In the last forty years, I have submitted over a dozen letters to the NY Times and not one of them has ever seen the black of printer’s ink. Should I be insulted? Of course. Should I hostilely threaten the Times by canceling my subscription? Naturally not. One marches broodily on.

The vilest of my communicants cannot let well enough alone. He has to tell me, “I am through with you, Gendin. Don’t send me notices of your posts.” Such notices to me are DISGUSTING. The proper way to deal with my posts is just not to read them. When an email note arrives, saying I have produced a post, it is easy enough to delete it. I won’t know and I won’t care. It will take the defector about half a second to be rid of it. Grand announcements take longer and serve no purpose but to upset me. Ironically, they don’t work. They simply provide me with the opportunity to take note of a JERK.

The new 2013 Toyota Avalon is a truly great car — for people who don’t have a comfortable sofa to sit upon (in?) and who hate music and reading. The review I just read of it makes it seem like the best thing since the invention of pay toilets. Of course, I don’t like pay toilets, either. My wife hasn’t installed one in our bathroom, and for that I am deeply grateful.

The reviewer offers a thousand details that make owners of the Avalon the envy of all who still possess 1957 Volkswagen Beetles. I don’t understand any of the so-called “specs” so it would be silly for me to report them. I don’t even know what the author means by writing that the model he drove “had a MSRP of $35,500.” Whatever else he had in mind, I think he was stumbling and stammering to say “had an MSRP of $35,500.”

I happen to own a 2003 Avalon and I am banging along in it at a rate of 3500 miles per year, thanks mainly to long trips I sometimes take to NY and Florida. I think it will outlive me and I am glad of that because I am destined for incineration when I die and I don’t want it to go into the cremation tube with me. What a stink that would be. Some people might think I am an old fuddy-duddy because the thought of whizzing around sharp turns at 75 MPH is not exhilarating but frightening. In my defense, I can only ask, “Was I an old fuddy-duddy when I was nineteen years old and stepped into an auto for the first time in my life?” P.S. Not in the driver’s seat.

Pollsters do not directly ask responders who Joe Biden is but the best estimate on the basis of various questions is that roughly 50% know he is Vice President. That’s not so bad. Fewer have a clue about John Kerry or Chuck Hagel. Hagel is probably known by about 20-25%. Compared to these chaps, Hillary Clinton is a rock star. I’ll go out on a limb and guess she is as well known as her husband. That means she is identifiable by more than 2/3 the public. The kingfish of celebrity in politics is surely Barack Obama. He can be identified by at least 90% of Americans. Right up there with George Washington and Abe Lincoln. Of course, celebrity is different from fame. Celebrity is temporary and fame permanent. For example, because of a rash of movies about James Bond, plenty of people know the name but will he be as famous as Sherlock Holmes 50 years from now? If so, his celebrity will have been converted to fame. In 100 years, who will be better known, Obama or William Henry Harrison? Your guess is as good as mine, maybe better because I am prejudiced in favor of Harrison. Harrison died after 32 days in office. He lay in bed for most of that time and, thus, did less damage to the presidency than anybody else before or after. He ranks as our #1 President of all time. Billy Boy also has the distinction of being the last person to be President who was not born an American citizen. He was grandfathered in because he was born before American independence.

So if anybody tells you a person must be born an American citizen to be President, tell him he wrong. If your guy can trot out a birth certificate that shows he was born prior to 1776 and was a Kenyan back then but became a citizen in, say, 1789, he as eligible as Barack Obama.