The Right to Bear Arms is the Right to Be Free

When I say "The right to bear arms is the right to be free," I am paraphrasing a line from The Weapon Shops of Isher by Canadian science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt.  He wrote, "The right to buy weapons is the right to be free".   I think the Weapon Shops is the best book written by van Vogt.

This is a great story, but the line, "the right to buy weapons is the right to be free," is absolutely true.

I will also mention his science fiction novel Slan.  I enjoyed that when I was a kid, but it seemed juvenile when I read it as an adult.

Robert

Letters of Dr. Harry Lee Canright, China Missionary

Here are the letters of Dr. Harry Lee Canright, China missionary, as they appeared in The Medical Missionary, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, January 1914, a publication of the American Medical Missionary Association (115 Washington Ave., N. Battle Creek, Michigan).

I am not going to take the time now to transcribe the text.  Instead, I have 5 snapshots of the letters.
Here is snapshot 1.  Click on the image and it will become larger and more readable.

Here is snapshot 2. It has a photo of the rear of the hospital at Chengtu.

Here is snapshot 3.

 Here is snapshot 4.  It has a photo of the front of the hospital.

Here is snapshot 5.  The Canright letter is just the one paragraph at the top left.

Here is a snapshot of the publication cover page.

Notice the subscription in 1914 was 50 cents a year for a monthly periodical mailed to your home.  That is about the cost of a single stamp today.  A postage stamp back then was 2 cents. Here is  webpage showing the increasing cost of a 1st class stamp.  This is one measure of inflation:
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/other/postage.html

Robert Canright

PS: there are a number of Robert Canrights.  We are all related.

Remembering Drueke Company Chess Sets

Today I was thinking about how I learned chess by using a compact peg set from the Drueke Company (pronounced droo-key).  Here is a photo of my set.  I bought it in a Piggly Wiggly store on Canal Street in New Orleans.  What a surprise to find a nice chess set in a grocery store, but then Mr. Drueke was a salesman.

The chess set has a lid with a hinge and latch.  There are groves deep enough to store the captured pieces.  The set is 6" x 4.5" x 1.5".  The 6" dimension is the distance between the two players.  The 1.5" dimension is with the set closed.  I used my peg set mostly to study chess in conjunction with chess books.  Here is a photo of a Drueke peg set off the internet.

I also use a magnetic set to study chess because the pieces are bigger, yet the set is still small enough to use for study.  Here is a photo of the magnetic set:

You can still buy this fine magnetic set!
https://www.chesshouse.com/products/8-drueke-gift-magnetic-chess-set



Finally, I will mention the "Player's Choice" tournament chess set.  It is plastic, but very handsome and heavily weighted.  It is a pleasure to play with the "Player's Choice".  Here is a photo from the internet:

I found a nice video describing Drueke chess sets at this website:
http://blog.chesshouse.com/drueke-chess-games/
Here is a PDF of a very nice 12 page long history of the Drueke Company:
http://www.peterspioneers.com/druekepohlarticle.pdf

Drueke was a positive influence in my life.

Robert

Dr. Harry Canright, China Missionary

Dr. Harry Lee Canright, born 26 Oct 1864, died 29 May 1959, was a missionary to China.  He wrote a book titled Steps to the Kingdom.  I found this text in The Michigan Alumnus, Volume 45 (1938/1939):

Harry Lee Canright, 1889 m, A.M. (Hon.) 1921, was the only child whose parents gave up their farm in the sacrifice to aid in his education.  Years later their son handed them the money to buy back their home.  For thirty years a medical missionary in China, he had been mad a prisoner during the Cheng Tu Riots and the money was his indemnity paid by the Chinese government.  That time he saw the work o several years destroyed in a few hours but he saved his Bible and his medical diploma and retreated to Japan until the trouble was over.  It was only one of scores of exciting experiences in the land where Dr. Canright says he and his wife spent "the heart of a lifetime."  When they returned to Cheng Tu he developed a modern hospital.  There he treated an average of 125 patients a day for long years and gave a million treatments during this period.  Then he accepted an appointment to teach at the West China Union University.  He was there for five years and when he returned to the United States was Dean of the Medical Faculty and was teaching anatomy, physiology, hygiene, obstetrics and "a few minor subjects," all in Chinese.  During each of his furloughs Dr. Canright had taken postgraduate work at Michigan studying anatomy.  This was the year the University gave him his honorary degree.  Dr. Canright had intended to return to China. Instead he traveled for the Missionary Society for seven years, giving lectures, and after that he taught medical subjects for six years in Chicago.  Now retired, he spends his winters in Florida and his summers in Michigan.

Here is a photo from 1914 of Dr. Harry Lee Canright, M.D.

Here is a photo from 1938 of Dr. Harry Lee Canright, M.D.

What an inspiration.  I hope to publish more about him on another day.

Robert

Hegel in Winds of War

The historical novel Winds of War by Herman Wouk has a character named General von Roon.  The general is used to portray the German mentality of Nazi Germany.  In chapter 44, Barbarossa, the general makes some comments about Hegel.  I am going to recount the general's words about Hegel because I think Hegel is where the German Enlightenment went off the rails.  Each nation had its own manifestation of the Enlightenment.  There was an English Enlightenment, a Scottish Enlightenment, a French Enlightenment, and a German Enlightenment.  Each had slightly different traits.  But if we want to consider all factions as one conglomerate Enlightenment, it is my contention that the Enlightenment had a high point with the American Constitution and the Federalist Papers and a low point with Nietzsche and Marx.   I believe the Enlightenment became unstable with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it went off the road with Hegel, it crashed with Marx and Engels, and then Nietzsche blew it up.  Marx and Engels were students of Hegel.

The fictional character General von Roon said this on pages 601 and 602 (ISBN 0316955000).

Hitler's world view was Hegelian.  Nations, empires, cultures, all have their season in history, the great Hegel taught us.  They come, and they go.  Not one is permanent, but in each age one dominates and gives the theme.  In this succession of world dominions, we recognize the evolving will of the God of history, the World Spirit.  God therefore expresses and reveals himself in the will of those world-historical individuals like Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon, who led their states to world empire.  Conventional morality cannot apply to the deeds of such men, for it is they who create the new modes and themes of morality in each age.

This Hegelian world view is, of course, at the other pole from the petit bourgeois morality which expects great nations to behave like well-brought-up young ladies in a finishing school and would hold a mighty armed people no different, in the rules applicable to its content, than some pale shoe clerk.

We could call this contempt for conventional morality Nietzschean.  Although Friedrich Nietzsche did not study under Hegel, he did read Hegel.  The enlightenment had a bright side and a dark side.  Alexander Hamilton and James Madison are in the bright side of the Enlightenment.  We need to recognize that Hitler, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin are the dark side of the Enlightenment, and Hegel was the starting point for Marx.

With General von Roon, Herman Wouk gave a voice to the worst of Hegel's legacy.

Robert

Slote's Rant in Winds of War

Leslie Slote was a state department employee in Herman Wouk's novel The Winds of War.  There is a point in the novel where he insists that German philosophy did influence the course of events that led to Hitler.  On page 515 (ISBN 0316955000) Slote says, "German  Romanticism is a terribly important and powerful critique of the way the West lives."  The historical novel depicts Europe and America from Hitler's rise to power to the very beginning of America's entry into the war.  It's sequel, War and Remembrance, continues the story.

Leslie Slote goes on with an emphatic rant that is supposed to be a quote from the German poet Heinrich Heine.  Wikipedia says about Heine, "His radical political views led to many of his works being banned by German authorities."  Here is the rant (page 516).  I think Herman Wouk was right to bring these words to our attention, and we need to take heed.  The violence of the thoughts and the references to revolution alarmed me. 

The German Revolution will not prove any milder or gentler because it was preceded by the Critique of Kant, by the Transcendental Idealism of Fichte.  These doctrines served to develop revolutionary forces  that only await their time to break forth.  Christianity subdued the brutal warrior passion of the Germans, but it could not quench it. When the Cross, that restraining talisman, falls to pieces, then  will break forth again the frantic Berserker rage.  The old stone gods will then arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries.  Thor with his giant hammer will arise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals.  

Smile not at the dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and the other philosophers.  Smile not at the fantasy of one who foresees in the region of reality the same outburst of revolution that has taken place in the region of intellect.  The thought precedes the deed as the lightening the thunder.  German thunder is of true German character.  It is not very nimble but rumbles along somewhat slowly.  But come it will. And when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then know that at last the German thunderbolt has fallen.

The Leslie Slote character then says Heinrich Heine wrote these words 106 years before Hitler. This article does confirm that these are the concluding words of Heine's 1834 book, Religion and Philosophy in Germany.

What really caught my eye was this sentence: "The thought precedes the deed as the lightening the thunder. "

So many people I know pay no attention to philosophy, but in my opinion Karl Marx (Das Kapital) was more a philosopher than an economist. I have heard the death count from his Marxist Communism has exceeded 100 million dead.  I would say the philosophy of Marx has brought thunder and lightening to this world.

We certainly need to spot a bad philosophy when we see one!

Robert

Yeats on TV and in Music

The television show House has an episode where a boy named Lucas Palmeiro reads poetry to his mother Lucy Palmeiro to calm her down.  The poem was intriguing.  I discovered that the book used in the show was an out of print and expensive copy of The Wild Swans at Coole.  I bought two different inexpensive copies of this collection and they were amateurish compilations with errors.  The best way to get The Wild Swans at Coole is to get a book like The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (ISBN 0020556500) which has his poems grouped by book.  Then you can read through all the poems in The Wild Swans at Coole and know there are no typos.  I own this copy and recommend it.

The poem that got my attention in this episode of House was Her Praise.  The Lucas Palmeiro character only read a fragment of the poem, the concluding lines, which were these:
     "If there be rags enough he will know her name
     And be well pleased remembering it, for in the old days,
     Though she had young men's praise and old men's blame,
     Among the poor both old and young gave her praise."
The poem on the whole is silly, so do not be disappointed if you read it.  Yet there was something about the concluding lines that caught my ear and made me want to learn more.  Perhaps that is the essense of poetry, that it captures your imagination.

There are music CDs where musicians have set some of Yeats poetry to music:
An Appointment With Mr. Yeats by The Waterboys Format: Audio CD
Now & In Time to Be A Musical Celebration Of The Works Of W.B. Yeats  by various artists
Both collections have these poems in common:
     Lake Isle Of Innisfree
     An Irish Airman Forsees His Death
     The Song of Wandering Aengus
     Politics
     Before the World Was Made
I will make a point to read all of these since they are popular with the musicians.

You can hear Yeats read his poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree
on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLlcvQg9i6c
and follow along with the words here
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43281/the-lake-isle-of-innisfree
It seems to me that his love of the country life is very British, and very human.

I think the script writer for this episode of House was John Mankiewicz.  Think of all the pleasure I got from reading Yeats because of this one episode of House!

Robert

The House episode was season 1, episode 6,  The Socratic Method (2004)