Bid Them Sell My Bones

The End of the Best Friend

The tag-line of this New York Times article reads: School officials intent on discouraging any exclusivity are seeking to sever traditional best-friend bonds.

The more normal something is, the more it must be destroyed by the modern liberal managerial complex. “Educators” and other people entrusted with the day-to-day care of children (the role that used to be filled by, you know, mothers) have spied an excellent opportunity to begin artificially managing a segment of reality previously untouched by their ideology: friendship.

In recent years Timber Lake Camp, a co-ed sleep-away camp in Phoenicia, N.Y., has started employing “friendship coaches” to work with campers to help every child become friends with everyone else. If two children seem to be too focused on each other, the camp will make sure to put them on different sports teams, seat them at different ends of the dining table or, perhaps, have a counselor invite one of them to participate in an activity with another child whom they haven’t yet gotten to know.

The writer, Hilary Stout, senses that this idea will seem outrageous to readers, even readers of the New York Times. So she quotes sympathetically some people who oppose these friendship-managing programs. But note carefully the reason it’s objectionable:

Many psychologists believe that close childhood friendships not only increase a child’s self-esteem and confidence, but also help children develop the skills for healthy adult relationships — everything from empathy, the ability to listen and console, to the process of arguing and making up.

When building the optimally functioning little social cog-bot, one must take care to develop the proper “skills” and “self-esteem.” There’s no mention that friendship is good in and of itself, that it’s one of the joys that makes life worth living for children and for adults. No, goodness is a foreign concept. There is only utility for these people. Once that’s your only criteria, then it’s easy to see how there could be a debate about whether or not authorities should manage a child’s friendships.

They acknowledge that a particular managerial action may have desirable or undesirable consequences, but they never once question their right — their duty — to govern and transmute the most basic forms of human existence:

Still, school officials admit they watch close friendships carefully for adverse effects. “When two children discover a special bond between them, we honor that bond, provided that neither child overtly or covertly excludes or rejects others,” said Jan Mooney, a psychologist at the Town School, a nursery through eighth grade private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “However, the bottom line is that if we find a best friend pairing to be destructive to either child, or to others in the classroom, we will not hesitate to separate children and to work with the children and their parents to ensure healthier relationships in the future.”

The Brian DePalma movie, The Untouchables, is a story of knighthood. It’s an old-fashioned story of good and evil that you don’t see much anymore. Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner) is loved by his wife and daughter; and he will stop at nothing to protect them. But he creates their protection himself, with his own weapons and his own orders and actions. Because he is a man of the law, and a man who upholds the law, his actions through the law are good.

The movie acknowledges that the Federal laws of prohibition are problematic. But it uncontestably sets up who is good and who is evil, by showing the little girl destroyed by a bomb in the second scene of the movie, and later showing the girl’s mother coming to talk to Ness. This movie is sophisticated, but not post-modern. Sophistication means that it shows the world to be an ambiguous place, difficult to navigate (Prohibition laws are questioned). Not post-modern, classical, means that good and evil are real principles, and the principled man can tell them apart. That we see the great man Mallone (Sean Connery) taking a secret drink, that Ness’s final line is “I believe I’ll have a drink,” shows us their human foibles. But they are always true to their stated principles, especially the crusading Ness. And he is a Crusader — the movie repeatedly shows the press using this term to describe him. Today that term is dirty… but it once meant something noble. Crusaders strike fear into people today because they are strong, and “untouchable.” They cannot be corrupted. This terrifies the devil. And the devil’s main response, as always, is to sneer. Ness and Mallone are not great because they are perfect; they are great because they are upright and true.

Mallone’s golden chain of St. Jude represents his faith. The faith passes to Ness after his death. Ness puts the chain in his pocket, and takes off his gun. For Ness, the war is over; faith will protect him now. But then he sees the loyal lieutenant, George Stone (Andy Garcia). He realizes Stone will need the protection now, as he continues to fight the next battle. He passes the golden charm to Stone, in a handshake of brotherhood. And he says he is “going home.” Home to his wife and daughter. Home to the place where “picking kitchen colors still matters”: to the hearth, which he has done his part to protect and defend.

Near the beginning, when the four knights Ness, Mallone, Stone, and Wallace, conduct their first successful raid, they are the only four men in the city who dare to stand up to the corruption. They strap on their swords and walk, brothers-in-arms, directly into the cave of the dragon. Their strength is not in numbers, or in allies. It is in their hearts, their faith, and their belief in the Good.

What matters is not the ambiguity of the temporal world. A smart man must recognize it, and take it into account. But it is not what truly matters. What truly matters is faith in the Good, and loyalty to one’s own. The discursive, post-modern mind will immediately suggest that if all are loyal to their own, then there is a logical contradiction: After all, they can’t all be right about their principles, can they? But that’s the devil’s argument. They can, and among those that are true, they are. The superior sneer of the one without principles — the one who feels to wise to have true principles — is the real enemy of the True Knight. The True Knight must sometimes fight the True Knight of another clan, and when this is so, Faith recognizes Faith, and honorable battle may be done. And when honorable combat is done, the two True Knights often find they are brothers after all, and their clans can intermarry in joy. No, the steadfast opponent is not the real enemy. The real enemy is the Sneering Japer, the one who claims that there are no true principles, there is no true faith. For that one seduces, and mocks, and sneaks. This is the true enemy of the True Knight.

Al Capone in the movie (Robert DeNiro), is not a True Opponent Knight. He is a sneering japer. He lies unguently to the press, charming with his devil’s ways. He cries at the opera then, when informed of Mallone’s murder, we see a sickly, gloating smile creep over his face, even as he keeps up the outward appearance of artistic pathos. It is the very picture of the devil. This is the true opponent of the White Knight, Ness. The man with no principles, and loyalty only to himself. This is the Enemy. The White Knight fights for hearth and home, for truth and faith and friends, and for the Good.

The typical Ancient Egyptian presumably had a very high carbohydrate diet. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia — as far as we can tell — were the very beginning of widespread, organized agriculture, and hence the very beginning of the diseases of carbohydrate-eating.

But here’s an intriguing hint that even though the Egyptians needed the carbs for pure calorie value, they also knew that such a diet was leading to all kinds of disease.

Will Durant (in the Story of Civilization, Volume I), reports that Diodorus Siculus observed of the Egyptians:

In order to prevent sicknesses they look after the health of their body by means of drenches, fastings and emetics, sometimes every day, and sometimes of intervals of three or four days. For they say that the larger part of the food taken into the body is superfluous, and that it is from this superfluous part that diseases are engendered.

And Herodotus records, “they suppose that all diseases to which men are subject proceed from the food they use,” and that the Egyptians were, “next to the Libyans, the healthiest people in the world.”

What seems more superfluous to you, a bite of meat or a spoonful of wheat gruel? One is the essence of life, the other is mere filler. We can presume that by “superfluous food,” the Egyptians and their Greek observers were referring to bowls of porridge and loaves of bread.

Perhaps, as the first lasting civilization to arise from the wilds of the hunter/gatherer past of humanity, the Egyptians retained a sense of just how unnatural a grain-based diet really is. These days we don’t need to eat mass-produced grains just to stay alive, but we do it anyway.

Here’s an entertaining blog that covers the problems with eating carbohydrates.