Ethnic Enclaves and the Half-Life of Diversity

AnnArbor.com is reporting on the Michigan Islamic Academy’s plans to move into a bigger school. The Academy seeks to build a facility large enough for 350 students near Ellsworth and Golfside. The neighborhood is resisting with familiar objections, including “what about the traffic.” This is usually a red herring, a cover for NIMBY, though perhaps not in this case—planning commissions usually don’t take that bait, and the Pittsfield commission nevertheless recorded unanimous opposition to the proposal.

Of course, there is also the usual resistance to the resistance, of the “take it from an enlightened individual, you’re a bigot” kind. It is a familiar drama.

In this and similar cases, it is the schools themselves that interest me. Academies like this one are understandable efforts by parents to pass on their way of life. MIA’s mission includes preserving the “the religion and cultural identity of our children as reflected in their Islamic beliefs and values” and providing “basic knowledge to pass on the Islamic heritage to our children.” All immigrants to America fear seeing their offspring become strangers to them as the children are remade by the dominant culture. American liberty can look like license, and America offers many ways of living that parents would not choose for their children.

So it is understandable, but doomed. The great and wonderful American melting pot will work its magic, incompletely on the children, but completely on the grandchildren. It is the grandparents who become the strangers, barely recognizable to their decedents. “Dude, your grandfather is strange.” “I know, I know.”

This process is inexorable and can be the source of much conflict and resentment within families. The situation is worst when the way of life is defined solely or mostly by a religion. The parents will fight like hell to keep their children out of Hell. But the thing about religion is that it either makes sense to you or it doesn’t. Religious belief is formulated so as to be untestable, so when religion is the source of conflict there is no end to it except to agree to disagree. Very religious parents can never go there, so there is no end to it.

America permits the kind of self-segregation represented by these academies. Here we believe in freedom of religion and the right of parents to judge what is best for their children. But the forces of the melting pot in time dissolve the walls of enclaves, replacing self-isolation with integration, welcoming the children and abetting their escape.

Consider Gary Locke. He’s a Baptist and an Eagle Scout, the former Governor of Washington State and now Barack Obama’s Secretary of Commerce. His other name is Luo Jiahui and he’s the grandson of Chinese immigrants. Luo Jiahui’s life and Bobby Jindal’s illustrate not diversity but the half-life of diversity — how it happens that your grandchildren and mine are more alike than either is like you or me. This is the beauty of America and the actual source of our strength.

The incoherence of modern environmentalism

It’s clear that a changing climate will change the environment.  But why is a changed environment a harmed environment?  Environmentalism gives conflicting and ultimately incoherent answers.

When asked this question, the typical person who calls himself an environmentalist answers that change will drown the Maldivians and bring on monster hurricanes to ravage the coastal cities, drought leading to famine, sifts in the Earth’s fertile regions leading to war.

Agree with him that a changed environment is a harmed environment if people are harmed, and he recoils.  He knows that true environmentalism, sometimes called deep ecology, rejects and resents the notion that it is concerned with the welfare of mankind, calling that way of thinking “superficial.”  Deep ecology holds that the environment is a thing unto itself, with its own moral standing that we must honor.

Deep ecology goes nowhere, however, because it rests on an assumption that is clearly silly: the way things are now are the way they are supposed to be. Because the supposition is absurd, no one acknowledges it, but, without it, deep ecology cannot explain why a changed environment is a harmed environment. 

Unless we imagine that the Earth has a correct temperature, sea level, size of ice cap, concentration of gases in the atmosphere, degree of forestation and complement of plants and animals, and unless Iowa is the natural corn capital of the world, not Saskatchewan, and if effects adverse to people do not count, a change in any of these variables does no damage.  Change is only harm if there is a way things are supposed to be.

Beyond the logical necessity of the above argument, there is evidence that true environmentalists make the assumption I ascribe to them.

Scientists speculate about how long it will take to stop global warming and then roll back.  Roll back?  Once the Earth has stabilized at a higher temperature, the biosphere will be adapted to those conditions.  Rolling things back will not resurrect the species lost along the way and will harm the plants and animals at home in the new conditions.  Why would we instigate another period of rapid climate change?  Only one reason: the way things are now are the way they are supposed to be.

Most climate change models have us moving toward an average worldwide temperature 10 degrees warmer than 1000 years ago.  If, coming out of the ice ages, the atmosphere had stabilized at that temperature instead of where it did, who can doubt that we would now call that temperature “correct” (despite the non-existence of polar bears), and that we would fear a decrease to the temperature we are currently so desperate to preserve? 

By denying its underpinnings, environmentalism renders itself incoherent.  Its adherents could save it by admitting that those underpinnings are value judgments and defend them as such.  But this is not going to happen because people like to think that their deepest beliefs arise not from value judgments but from an apprehension of objective truth.

For the rest us, it is high time we stopped granting that environmentalists occupy the moral high ground.  On the contrary, I assert that effects adverse to people do count, that it is about people, that the alleviation of human suffering and support of human aspirations must be our prime concern.  We should stop investing inanimate objects such as water and air with moral significance, and return to calling the environment by its former name: natural resources.

For our own sakes, can we stop climate change?  Who knows.  Can we adapt to it?  We better.  Will there be extinctions? Yes, like the 30 billon that have already occurred.  Is extinction tragic?  I suppose, in the way that everything about life is tragic, embedded as it is in our indifferent universe. 

The extinction of humans would be tragic beyond measure, however, because the human mind is the only known locus of meaning; without it, the universe would be not merely indifferent but pointless.  The fate of this miraculous creature called Man is the question of overriding interest.  That is my value judgment.

Victory In Afghanistan Defined: Girls go to school

America always needs two reasons to go to war.

The first is hardcore, geo-political, realpolitik, if you will.  This justification appeals to those who require that our national interests be served when we send our citizens into battle.  The second reason is humanitarian.; it is for those who require that something more than our national interests be served.

The answer to the oft-repeated question, “What is the definition of victory?” depends on which war-making justification interests you.

With regard to what will constitute success in the current Afghan war, I can give you my definition.  It is an Afghanistan in which girls go to school.  That would be emblematic of what I hope will be the outcome of our sacrifice there.

I am not uninterested in the national-interest aspects.  It  is obvious to me that stable democracies, or even pseudo-democracies, around the world are in our national interest.  Such countries tend not to harbor extremists committed to harming us.

In the case of Afghan/Pakistan, the Taliban’s reneging on its deal with the Pakistani government to rule just the Swat valley reveals that their goals are not limited to self-government, but include spreading an oppressive world-view at the point of a gun.  This puts nuclear Pakistan in danger, a thing very detrimental to our national interest.

These things are troubling, but it is the aforementioned world-view that really frightens me—not for my own sake, because it is unlikely that I will fall under its sway.  But I’m drawn to protecting those poor souls whose lives will very likely be ended or cast into desolation  by a return to power of the Taliban.

If we can believe the reporting out of Afghanistan during the Taliban’s regime , their rule was intensely oppressive.  It featured public executions for religious offenses, the blowing up of ancient statues of deities from other faiths, the banning of music, indeed, the banning of all of modernity, the extreme circumspection of women’s lives, including the ending of education for girls at a young age.

Given this, it is incredible to me how prominent feminists (e.g., Katrina vanden Heuvel and Arianna Huffington) can countenance the resumption of Taliban rule.  They must understand that the adoption of their advice—the immediate end to our military efforts in Afghanistan—could possibly lead to such an outcome.  Vanden Heuvel rationalizes that a NATO military occupation will be no better for Afghan women than a return of the Taliban; all this so she won’t have to admit that America can be—is—a force for good in the world.

Many of us had doubts about the WMD justification for the offensive into Iraq, but nonetheless supported “Operation Iraqi Freedom” because we believed that the Iraqis welcomed the invasion.  Some clearly did.  Our soldiers were greeted as liberators in many places.  A New York Times correspondent, present at the toppling of Saddam’s statue, quoted an elderly, weeping, Iraqi:  “Touch me, touch me, tell me that it is real, tell me that the nightmare is over.”  I believed then, and still do, that solidarity with the Iraqi people required support of the war, not opposition to it.

Following liberation, of course, the Iraqis embarked on a civil war.  We could have walked away, but we stayed, and sacrificed, to keep a lid on it.  In hindsight, the violence was not surprising when you recall that in the years following the liberation of France in 1944, 10,000 former Nazi collaborators were murdered by other Frenchmen.

Yes, war is as bad as everyone says, as bad as General Sherman said.   Tragically, friendly fire accounts for perhaps 20 percent of casualties in all wars:  US aircraft bombed and killed 100 GIs in Normandy on the night of June 6^th, 1944.  Tragically, lives are lost in training mishaps: seven hundred soldiers and sailors died on the shores of southern England in a dress rehearsal for the D-Day landings; an army buddy of my own died in training when he led his squad up the wrong hill and was killed by motor fire from another part of his own outfit.

Perhaps worst of all, civilian casualties will always outnumber those of combatants.  To pick one battle, at least 150,000 Okinawan civilians died in the struggle for their island, a total well exceeding that of military KIAs (and, incidentally, approaching the combined total of victims of Little Boy and Fat Man a month later).

And yet we fight.  We fight because Man is a “cracked vessel,” to borrow a term from George Kennan, the legendary diplomat and shaper of early American cold war policy.  “Modern man [is] not his own creator.”  He is as passionate as he is rational and schizophrenically pits his Hyde against his Jekyll.  Alas, he cannot change who he is, he “can only make the best of it” and therein “lies most of the drama, the tragedy and the glory of civilized life.”

So don’t look for a world without war anytime soon.  At the moment, civilization and barbarism are contending whether girls will go to school.  I say they will.  Others, with guns, say they won’t.

Misgivings about healthcare reform

Last week Diane Rehm devoted an hour of her show on NPR to discussing whether opposition to healthcare reform is the result of confusion sowed by lobbyists for health insurance companies.  Repeatedly she invited her guests to pronounce that it is.  I half expected her to paraphrase Sartre and say that every anti-reformist is a dog.

Well, arf!  I am an anti-reformist until I know exactly what form the reform will take.  Until then we can discuss only what might be the features of a new healthcare system.  So let’s do that.

I realize that nobody is asking for nationalized medicine in the sense that the British have it, that is, a healthcare system that is in essence a branch of the government.  Undoubtedly, however, there are some who think they want that and hope to get there by small steps.  So I will present my objections to nationalized medicine preemptively, then take up the more limited proposals reformers think they can actually enact.

For the same reasons that I would oppose the government taking responsibility for the production and delivery of food,  I oppose it’s control of healthcare.  Those things are too important to come from a single source.  In short, my demurral stems from fear of monopolies, and the recognition of government as the mother of all monopolies.  I don’t know that government-run medicine would be bad (what do you think?) but if it were bad there would be no alternative.  I’m not egalitarian enough to be comforted by the knowledge that it will be equally bad for everyone.

Also not currently on the table (but hoped for by many) is a single-payer system, like Canada’s.  In this arrangement, there are competing healthcare providers, but they are all paid by the government.  My misgivings?  He who pays the piper, calls the tune.  Hoping to control costs,  the government will decide what is fair compensation for providers of care and which measures are justified in which circumstances.  This can only reduce the availability of treatment.

Worse, the money will come with strings attached, and the strings will change depending on who is in power.  When those paying the bills stipulate that abortion is just another procedure, morally uncomplicated, doctors and nurses with different convictions will have to act contrary to their consciences or be deprived of their livelihoods.  In our current system that includes Medicare, some doctors get some of their income from the government, but under single-payer, the entire livelyhood of every doctor will come from the goverment.

So, what of the things that are actually being considered?  I have concerns about the so-called “public option” and the “individual mandate.”  Also the inability, on both sides, to acknowledge the cause of precipitously rising healthcare costs worries me.

In the simplest terms, my objection to the public option (in which the government offers its own insurance plan as a way of keeping private insurers honest) is that it will lead to single-payer.  I am certain that is the hope of those who now insist upon it (I don’t believe them when they deny it) and I don’t want that camel’s nose in the tent.

The individual mandate refers to provisions in proposed legislation that would impose an extra tax upon people who do not get insurance from their employers, and do not buy it for themselves even though the government calculates they could afford it.  You can think of it as a fine.

Why is this necessary?  Because the same legislation will require insurance plans to cover pre-existing conditions.  If pre-existing conditions must be covered, who will buy insurance until he needs it?  Not many.  The answer: force everyone to have insurance.  But, surely, the degree of coverage must not be left up to the individual or his employer; that also must be mandated, and much else.  Too much mandating for my taste.

Neither side in this debate is being honest about why healthcare costs are rising so fast.  It is because most people making decisions to partake of treatment have no incentive not to consume it, because they do not bear the cost of it.  Their insurance companies do, and the relationship between the consumption and the eventual increase in the cost of health insurance is too indirect.  So the normal governor on consumption—the feedback of price upon demand—is broken.  Hence people act as if the supply is infinite, and because it is not, the cost must rise without bound.

Any valuable, finite resource must be rationed.  Currently we ration healthcare through ability to pay.  Combining a supposed right to health care with the need to contain costs can only lead to massive rationing by a bureaucracy, somehow imagined by reformers as empathetic and efficient.  To me, the thought of finding treatment unaffordable is scary; terrifying is the prospect of being able to afford it but having it denied, or finding it non-existent because there are too few practitioners of a vocation made unprofitable by coercive measures to control costs and rendered unrewarding by stultifying bureacracy.

America is populated by Americans

Critics of the United States like to compare it to the world’s other developed countries.  They do this in order to find America antediluvian by contrast.  After all, Europeans have universal health care, free college, safety nets—they’re modern.

These critics seem not to comprehend that America is as it is because it is populated by Americans.

What does that mean?  It means everything that follows from this fact:  The central feature of the American character is self-reliance.  All the iconic American figures—the cowboy, mountain man, Mississippi riverboat pilot, pioneer—are of the romantic school, which defines independence and self-sufficiency as heroic.  Only a people with this self-image can grant itself the degree of individual liberty that Americans expect.

Thus we expect people to take care of themselves.  As an American you are “on your own,” but not in the sarcastic way Barack Obama suggested in his nomination acceptance speech.  You are expected to get it done, make it happen, hold up your end.  Rightly or wrongly, failing to provide for yourself is shameful.   Even when repelled by this thought, and willing to cut others some slack, we believe it is true for ourselves.

Obviously, not everyone who ends up needing help is to blame.  Some start life at severe disadvantage.  Others suffer setbacks that are not at all of their making.  But it is often hard to tell whether or not it is a person’s own decisions, inability to delay gratification, and failure to learn from mistakes that are to blame for the bad that comes to him.

For those who are blameless, a European-style safety net would be great.  The difficulty is that any safety net can be used as a hammock and the denser its weave and the higher it is slung, the more people in the end it will support.  If you don’t believe me, you have never run a business.

French-style, virtually-free, higher education would also be great.  Except that if I lived in France, I would not now be an engineer.  I was a C-student in junior high and high school and in France this would have sent me down the vocational path.  Higher education in France may be free, but only for people selected by the bureaucracy based on the results of tests taken by students around age 15.  It has to be this way, of course.  Any finite resource, in this case a seat in the classrooms of a university, must be rationed in one way or another. 

So take your pick: direct rationing through bureaucracy or indirect rationing by ability to pay.  Under a system of bureaucratic rationing my junior high self would have determined the course of my life.  But as an American, whose priorities were reordered by time in the Army, I decided that I would go to college and I made it happen.

Healthcare is another finite resource that must be rationed.  Either the market or the bureaucracy will dispose. But there is something even greater to worry about in nationalized healthcare:  loss of freedom to make personal choices that may affect one’s health.

Think about it.  If John alone suffers the consequences of his smoking, drinking, and eating, John can insist that he be left alone and his choices are no one else’s business.  But if the rest of us have a duty to pay the costs of his healthcare, we can demand control of his behavior: no more Big Macs for you, buddy, and here’s your ration card for one glass of wine per day.  A system of individual liberty with nationalized consequences is not really available to us, however appealing it might appear.

These observations illuminate a conflict inherent in all democracies: the rivalry between freedom (understood as individual liberty) and equality.  As early as the 1830s, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville identified this tension in his famous critique of the nascent United States, Democracy in America.  Joseph Epstein provides a summary in his biography of Tocqueville: “Whatever arrangements are made to ensure equality, they can be made only at the price of withdrawing some degree of liberty…One would like to think there is some middle way between liberty and equality, and sometimes there is, but just as often the two are in unresolvable conflict; presented with a clear fork in the road—equality this way, liberty that—no society can take both simultaneously.”

The best example of this principle I can think of comes from the realm of health insurance.  Insurance companies would like to sell coverage at a special—lower—premium to young, healthy people.  The lower premium is justified by the likelihood that that pool of people will not consume a lot of health care.  The young and healthy jump at the offer.  Because everyone is a willing participant, a free society permits it.

Unfortunately, this leaves the old and unhealthy in a pool by themselves.  Their premiums must be higher because the risk they represent is not diluted by the inclusion of the young and healthy.  A society that chooses the path of equality does not permit this.  It forces some of its citizens to forego an advantageous, non-coercive business relationship in order to subsidize healthcare for others.

A century ago, Europe chose the road to equality.  The American frontier closed at about the same time and today many of us no longer regard the pioneer virtues—independence, competence, ingenuity, courage, self-sufficiency—as quintessentially American.  In order to be like the other industrialized democracies we may decide to change our self-image. America will remain America, however, only as long as our view of ourselves keeps us on the path of individual liberty.

The change McCain offers is bi-partisanship

September, 2008

 

News flash:  Every election is about “change.”  I’ll bet you can find an “I’m-the-candidate-of-change” button from every campaign back to the founding of the Republic. 

 

People are always dissatisfied with government.  Congress has probably never enjoyed a moment of favorable public opinion. 

 

Presidents may experience sporadic spikes in popularity when wars go well, but usually they’re despised by most people for one thing or another.  George Bush 41 lost reelection within a year of posting 90% approval ratings.  Winston Churchill, who in a way won WWII almost single-handedly, was booted from office once victory was assured, in favor of a Labour government that promised relief from wartime privations. 

 

Thus, “change” is a perennial campaign theme.  Every four years we are treated to soaring oratory from an attractive individual promising us change, and, while he’s at it, “hope” and Camelot.   When candidates are not that different policy-wise (as was the case with Obama and Clinton), the race is, like, “I’m change,” “no I’m change,” “but I’m hope and change,” “but I’m hopeful change…”

 

Hope is good of course, but to base a campaign on the chimera of change, and especially to promise it, is demagoguery.  Why?  Because our political system—a balance of jealousies—is designed so as not to permit rapid, fundamental change.& nbsp; Even the stunning reallocation of congressional power to Democrats in the last midterms did not alter American foreign policy, a thing so dispiriting that it drove peace-activist Cindy Sheehan temporarily from public life.  All the candidates understand this, so their change-mantra is disingenuous.  Protracted disingenuousness in pursuit of political office is demagoguery. 

 

Now, there is a sense in which things can change.  I suspect that for many the desire for it comes out of frustration with the rancorous and paralyzing partisanship that has dominated politics for some time.   It is possible that this may change, for a while.  We have known periods in which a much greater spirit of bipartisanship existed.  Those periods may not be the norm, but they do occur.   Earl Warren was twice simultaneously nominated by both parties to be governor of California.

 

Of course, if the recovery of bipartisanship is your hope, then your candidate is John McCain.  He is the only one in this race who can credibly promise to appoint members of the opposing party to his cabinet.  McCain is famously unpopular with the conservative base of his own party precisely because he has so often answered the call of Senate leadership to champion principled compromise.

 

Conversely, Barack Obama consistently resists such calls, steering clear of all deals with the devil across the aisle.  He has, I understand, a perfect record of liberal voting in the Senate.  Apparently he never engages in compromise.  This would not seem to recommend him as the candidate best suited to dissolve partisanship and heal the nation.

 

Another indication that McCain can shake things up is his choice of total-outsider, purported reformer, corruption-fighter Sarah Pal in, Governor of Alaska, as his running mate.  Yes, she has no foreign-policy experience, but what governor does?  And she’s running for vice-president of a country that often elects governors president (Bush 43, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, FDR…)  At least the Republicans can argue that the inexperienced half of their ticket is the bottom half.     

 

Something that has changed in the last year-and-a-half is the outlook for a Democratic victory in November.   Coming out of the last midterm elections, in which the only issue was the situation in pre-surge Iraq, Democrats appeared certain to ride an irresistible tide into the White House.  Now things are more interesting.

   

Most significant in the alteration of prospects for the two parties is the improvement on the ground in Iraq.  John McCain’s was the most prominent voice in support of the surge when this was extremely unpopular.  He was instrumental in winning a chance for it.

 

While McCain did this, Democrats insisted that a new military strategy wouldn’t work.  They swore it couldn’t work.  We had already lost in Iraq, they said.  As Democratic Senator20Joe Lieberman observed, his party locked itself into a narrative of defeat for America, one in which Democrats succeed if America fails.  Not a winning tactic, it would seem.

 

Yet such is the sense among Democrats of the inevitability of victory in 2008, that the opposite outcome could be deeply demoralizing.  Especially young, idealistic people may look up and say, “Wha’ happened?”  Many will conclude that the system is irredeemably broken or corrupt.  On the upside, those youngsters may then sit out a few elections until they are beyond the reach of rhetoric about hope and change.

 

For those first-time voters, to ensure that you are not disenfranchised,  let me inform you of the voting procedure for this November: Republicans vote on Tuesday and Democrats vote on Wednesday.

Frank Sinatra

May, 2008

 

Frank Sinatra died ten years ago this month.  I still remember my reaction to the news:  If Sinatra can die, what hope is there for the rest of us?

 

Frank Sinatra was the greatest entertainer of the 20^th century.  He bestrode show business like no other, before or since.  If it wasn’t his fellow stars who gave him the title “Chairman of the Board,” they certainly thought it belong to him.

 

A key to understanding the Sinatra phenomenon comes from Pete Hamill, New York newspaper columnist and one-time Sinatra pal.   In his book, Why Sinatra Matters, Hamill observes that at the beginning of his career Frank’s admirers were mostly women (girls, actually); by the end, his fans were primarily men.  This transformation is the story of Frank Sinatra.

 

To my ear, the early Frank was indistinguishable from the other big-band boy singers of the era, with all the round vowels, affected phrasing and exaggerated sweetness.  Although he was technically a baritone, the combination of these features in Frank’s voice made him effectively a tenor.  And the women went wild for it. 

 

A generation before American girls were screaming for Elvis and swooning for the Beatles, their mothers were hysterical for “The Voice.”  With his modest origins and unthreatening, aw-shucks manner, he sang to them about polka dots and moonbeams. This painfully skinny boy was obviously in need of the care and feeding of a good woman in a cottage filled with lilacs and laughter, and they were lining up.  

 

That was 1939.  In a few years these women would marry the men who returned from the Second World War and begin the baby boom.  So his fans grew up and moved on, and those who didn’t, he drove away.  The press depicted him as connected to the Mob.   Then he began feuding with the press, even punching out a columnist.  Finally, Frank, a married man with three children, began a public affair with Eva Gardener. 

 

Frank had not yet begun singing to men, and men remembered that he had sat out the war.  So with his female fans gone, the slide began.   On the way down he would lose his movie contract, radio show, recording contract, his agents.  For a time, he even lost his voice.

 

For two years he struggled, drinking heavily, alienating the people who might help him.

That could have been the end, but it wasn’t.  Frank got up.  In the course of the next decade he recovered it all and more.   He won an Oscar, had his own TV show, sold millions of records and almost single-handedly created the modern Las Vegas.  (Buckingham Palace flies the Union Jack while the Queen is in residence; the marquee at Caesar’s Palace read, simply, “He’s Here” whenever Sinatra was on the bill.)

 

It was the Fall and the Comeback that made the Sinatra myth.  It won for Frank the attention of men who wait to see what a man does when he is down.

 

Sinatra brought all of this experience to his material, but it was his choice of material that brought him the male audience.  Hamill again:  “As an artist, Sinatra had only one basic subject: loneliness.”  Yes, and the protagonist of his ballads is lonely for one of two reasons.  The cause is either restlessness that drives away or leaves behind the people who enter his life,  or his refusal to change or be other than what he is.   The singer seems to recognize his predicament as the price a man pays for these prototypical masculine characteristics, and this makes it bearable—sad but unavoidable.

 

So there it is:  Frank Sinatra was a man.  He sang for and to men, in our ring-a-ding-ding moments, but mostly in our moments of reflection and reminiscence, of regret and self-doubt, colored by a not unpleasant, melancholy acceptance of our burden as men.  

 

Sinatra’s career peaked in the mid-1960’s, I want to say.  His voice was still a deep, rich, powerful baritone, still under the command of its owner. There were Grammy awards and number-one singles in 1966 and 1967.   But the pinnacle, for me, is the album “September of my Years,” released in 1965 when Frank was 50 years old.  Every song is from the perspective of a middle-aged man looking back on his life, satisfied that it was not a wasted life, and, anyway, could not have been different given the man he is.

 

Very occasionally—once or twice in a lifetime—a man has to override the counsel of his friends, of his woman, and do what a man’s gotta do.  When he does this with justification, he is, in a small way, Frank Sinatra.