Visiting up here in The Big City, we get to see some movies. And we saw the movie “Evening” yesterday. A really good movie, well written and well acted. Interesting to see Meryl Streep and Vanessa Redgrave and their daughters working together. The movie is pretty much about love that is unfulfilled because of circumstances, being unreturned, failure to commit, etc. Not a sad and depressing story, just moving and a great ending, Definitely one to see.

That brought thoughts which have come to me often. So many great unrequited or lonely love songs. “Yesterday”, “He Stopped Loving Her Today”, “La Boheme”, do this also. So many. And my thought is how wonderful it is to have, and still have after fifty years, a really good love affair. How many times I have thanked my lucky stars, having grown up in the good old days, my parents, God, all those things which came together to make this come to pass and to continue. In my list of successes and failures, this and our family stand well at the tip of the very short successes side.

At a wedding back in the summer of ’58, a few weeks after my graduation from the Naval Academy, I was a sword at a local classmate’s wedding. At a rehearsal dinner at Army Navy Country Club, I looked up the stairs at one of the bridesmaids and it was truly love at first sight. My God, what a beauty she was and is. Three weeks and four days later, we were married (my ship was about to go to sea). How and why this came about is a mystery. All of it was really done in a fog and completely without any cerebral activity. Somebody was watching out for me. Of course, it helped that back then, if you wanted to “do it” with a nice girl, you got married. And how much I wanted her.

And it worked. Forty nine years later and five splendid children. Lots of love, hard work, prayer, everything it takes to make it come to pass. Not a great love story but certainly a good one. Not that it is an example of how this is the way things ought to be. But I am glad mine went the way it did. Most certainly something to be thankful for.

A couple of thoughts that came together today. I was reading the July issue of National Geographic. The cover story is on malaria. And what a terrifying disease it is. Everyone should read it. One half of all of the people who have ever lived died of malaria. In the Pacific war in World War II, there were more casualties from malaria than from combat. A million Union soldiers died of it in the Civil War. It killed Alexander and ended his empire. In Zambia today, the malaria rate in under five year olds is 135% - a lot of the kids get infected more than once. Unimagineable loss and suffering, not just in times past but in the 21st Century!.

With this plus all of the other onslaughts that Mother Nature has given us, it is a wonder we survived at all, much less had the energy and health to develop our modern civilization. One of my favorite books is Blood, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Read it a number of years ago and still think about it a lot. Something else every one should read. It is about the civilizations that thrived and spread and why. One of the main weapons Europeans had in their overthrow of the American civilizations was the diseases they brought, especially smallpox and measles. What a factor malaria must have been in shaping the directions that have ended up with the civilization we have today. Sometime I would like to read a good scientific and anthropological study of malaria and its impact on civilization. If we did not have to spend so much time, energy, so many lives given to malaria, where could we have been by 2007? And why is it not controlled in 2007? More than a million die of it each year A self defeating impasse in which the countries hit by it are are so debilitated that they can not develop the means to help themselves.

And why have we not evolved a better natural defense other than sickle cell? But wait, we have. It is called technology. We have just not evolved the common sense to put our time and effort into saving millions of lives.

Today is, en France, mais oui, Bastille Day. I have had my tricolor out front for a few days in commenoration. Not that I am in particular a francophile, but because I spent a few months teaching in Provence. So this is for the nice folks in Garbejaire, Sophia Antipolis, Antibbes. Also for Lafayette (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_du_Motier%2C_marquis_de_La_Fayette) and De Grasse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Joseph_Paul%2C_marquis_de_Grasetilly%2C_comte_de_Grasse). True, France helped us a lot in our Revolution – something to be very grateful for – but they did it for their own benefit, not out of the generosity of their souls.

Bastille Day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastille) should bring on many thoughts about democracy and the long hard road to it. Especially these days when Iraq and Russia are working out their versions of it.

Our Revolution brought about our Articles of Confederation. How close it was that those could have caused democracy to come crashing down in massive civil unrest or a military overthrow. Those great men who had the wisdom to set that fledgling nation on the right track and get us through to the Constitution. And the great men who got us through our War for States Rights, should that be the War to Restore the Articles of Confederation? Decades of conflict.

The British democracy definitely went through a lot of trauma and lives in the road from the 7th century Anglo-saxon Witenagemot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witenagemot), the Curia Regis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curia_Regis) that William brought with him in 1066 and Magna Carta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta) in 1215, through Parliament (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament) in 1295, 18th century prime ministers, to a 20th century consitutional monarchy. Centuries of conflict.
Russia's revolution in 1918 and the road to their still struggling democracy certainly set off decades of trauma and at a cost of millions of lives.

Bastille Day and the France's Revolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution) really redid the history of Europe. “These changes were accompanied by violent turmoil, including executions and repression during the Reign of Terror, and warfare involving every other European power. Subsequent events caused by the revolution include the Napoleonic Wars, the restoration of the monarchy, and two additional revolutions as modern France took shape. Over the next 75 years, France would be governed, variously, as a republic, a dictatorship, a constitutional monarchy, and two different empires before 1900.”

And now, in the 21st Century, a revolution in Iraq, caused by us, is supposed to establish a democracy in a few months. In a country with no culture to support the concept and built in civil unrest. Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. And this struggle for democracy has the ability to involve not just the region but us and much of the rest of the world.

I remember hearing somewhere that the two most astonishing physical things humans do is moving around on two legs and our ability at speech. No engineer would design anything as unstable as we are with a large weight balanced on such a small base. Of course, that instability is what gives us our agility.

Along with our being on two legs, it is speech that makes us what we are today. One thing that brought this to mind was a recent article on the gene associated with the ability to speak, FOXP2 (http://www.evolutionpages.com/FOXP2_language.htm , a fascinating account) which mutated between 10,000 and 100,000 years ago to give us this ability. In other words, it is not just the evolution of a voice box but also the neurological ability to use it the way we do. The early homo sapiens may have been physically able to speak but not wired for it. And every parent knows the significance of their child learning to speak.

The other thing that made me note this was watching a Netflix of Donizetti's “L'Elisir d'Amore” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Elisir_D%27Amore) with Kathleen Battle and Luciano Pavarotti. Ms. Battle's enunciation and intonation were so perfect and watching her do it so beautifully were such a study on what we can do with our voice. Wikipedia says of her (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Battle) “She is particularly known for her pure lyric soprano voice, musicianship, and ability to connect with her audience.” Of course, Pavarotti's voice and ability are just as good but you do not see it in action in that big face as with Ms. Battle. What a combination of so many muscles with such precision. There is no instrument as fine as the human voice. Kevin Spacey being Bobby Darin and singing exactly like him. Why don't I have his FOXP2?

That ability also extends to the connections speech has to the listener. Perhaps they will find a gene for understanding speech. It is not just the ability to understand all the complexities of spoken communication. It is that it touches the soul. Listening to Pavorotti sing “Una furtiva lagrima”, even if the subtitles are missing. Especially if the subtitles are missing. No one can wrench your heart like Luciano can. I know I have the gene for that. There is no instrument that we hear as deeply as we here the human voice.

There are a bunch of special and miraculous gifts we have been given. The ability to communicate so much with our voice and to understand all of it so completely are definitely right up there at the top.

What could follow George Washington, the father of our country? Why, John Paul Jones, the father of the American Navy, of course. Once again, thanks to the Encyclopedia Britanicca section of My Yahoo home page, a reminder of a significant event. Today is the anniversary of the birth of John Paul Jones in 1747 on the estate of Arbigland in the Stewarty of Kirkcudbright on the southern coast of Scotland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paul_Jones).

As a graduate of The Naval Academy, I well remember the crypt in the Chapel. Have been by to see it numerous times. Of course, “I have not yet begun to fight” is heard many times and the history of JPJ is one of the first things learned.

Just as Washington established so many firsts for our country, JPJ did so for the Navy. The first First Lieutenant (on the Alfred). The first to raise an American ensign, the Grand Union Flag (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Union_Flag), on a U.S. Navy vesel. The first captain and ship, Ranger, to be saluted by France. The first American Navy commander ever to claim victory of an enemy combatant, with the capture of HMS Drake, 20 guns, by the Ranger, 18 guns, JPJ showed that American ships could best the supposedly invincible British.

With the Bonhomme Richard, frigate, 42 guns - named for JPJ's good friend, Ben Franklin – and the battle with the fifth rate HMS Serapis, 44 guns, Jones earned his place in history. In a melee involving several American and British ships, the Serapis managed to rake Bonhomme Richard, dismasting and hulling her. The British captain asked Jones if he wished to surrender his dead-in-the-water and sinking ship. The response was, of course, “I have not yet begun to fight.” The Bonhomme Richard drew alongside the Serapis, boarded and captured her.

Unfortunately, American politics was not JPJ's forte. He went to be a rear admiral in Catherine the Great's Navy. Again, politics did not do him well. He retired to Paris, where he died in 1792, an unhappy and embiterred man. The rumor around the Naval Academy in 1958 was that he died of syphilus contracted from Catherine the Great.

His remains were found and returned to the United States in 1905 and interred in the Naval Academy.

The father of the American Navy.