1. George Orwell once proposed that saints be assumed guilty until proven innocent, and if we apply this standard to Steve jobs, one thing becomes clear: he wasn’t always a good man.  In recent years, he’s given inspiring speeches.  When everyone was paying attention to him, he behaved.  In his early days, as James Altucher makes clear, Jobs behaved less admirably: Jobs denied paternity of his first child, paid his child support with welfare checks, and swindled Steve Wozniak, his first partner.  If character is what you do when nobody else is looking, Jobs may not have had much.  And even when in power, Jobs was mercurial, moody, and a holy terror to work for, as Walt Mossberg hinted at.
2. But Jobs was unquestionably a great man.  Does anybody remember 86-DOS, formerly the Quick-and-Dirty Operating System?  The thousands of lines of mind numbing code?  Jobs cleaned that up with icons.  Perhaps he ushered back a preliterate age, but icons are a godsend.  And he kept the inventions coming: Pixar, the iMac, iTunes, the iPhone, the iPad.  Jobs wasn’t as great an inventor as Thomas Edison, he wasn’t as great a manufacturer as Henry Ford, he wasn’t the great artist that Walt Disney was, but he might have been the most amazing combination of those three—inventor, manufacturer, artist—the world has ever seen.
3. His death has dominated both formal news, like NPR and Google, and informal news, like Facebook and Twitter.  We knew his time was short, but it was still a shock when he finally succumbed.  The mourning needs some explanation, though, since millions of people obviously didn’t know him, nor do they entirely grasp all he did (even the well educated can barely grasp all the changes Jobs made).  All of Jobs’s gifts to us—sleek lines and elegance and simplicity that clearly took lifetimes of hard work and hard thinking—have been mocked by brutal pancreatic cancer.
4. The symbol that Jobs chose for himself was an Apple.  He could have picked something grander, as tech companies like Oracle and Palantir did.  Or he could have made a gimmicky portmanteau like Verizon or Comcast.  For a Zen Buddhist to pick up this bit of Judeo-Christian iconography (icons again!) and give it an ironic twist was genius.  When the serpent gave Adam and Eve an apple, they were cast out of paradise; when Steve Jobs gave us Apple, he led us to the future.  He replaced gargantuan machines with Macbooks, clunky mobile phones with iPhones, and entire libraries with the iPad.  To the less technically inclined, it’s almost like turning water into wine.
5. Europe and America and Japan are mired in recession; China may well be on the verge of one; the Middle East and Africa are as unstable as they always are.  In short, people are not short on self pity right now.  They’re asking, “Does the future still happen here?”  Steve Jobs attempted all his life to lead us into the future.  He was a consummate salesman who encouraged us to see him and Apple as one and the same, and Apple was the future.  The people leaving flowers at Apple stores are mourning the death of the future.  This, too, shall pass.  There will never be another Steve Jobs, but his vision lives.  We can still be inspired: go, and think different.

If you’re so inclined, follow me on Twitter.

Still, he’s just canceled a range of speaking engagements due to esophageal cancer (H/T).  We aren’t sure if he’d appreciate prayers, but we’ll lift a glass to him and toast his good health tonight.

Hearing of his passing yesterday, my parents (as only parents can) not only remembered, but found an essay I wrote about him for a middle school assignment way back in in 1995.  I certainly won’t pass it off as any great feat of literature, but it does one thing surprisingly well.  Arnold had an amazing ability to instantly size-up another person — such as a little snot like me at 14 — and effortlessly bring the conversation to the highest level that person was capable of reaching.

Arnold, of course, could always sail higher.

Uncle Arnold? He’s Crazy!

When I was two years old (I don’t remember any of this) I went to my “Uncle” Arnold’s house in British Columbia. I spent the next week running around on beaches, building sand castles and listening to Arnold’s jokes.

Since then I have moved to Washington state and have seen him about five times (two since moving). Every time I see “Uncle” Arnold he looks older but acts younger. When my sister was three and was told that Arnold was coming to visit, she replied, “Uncle Arnold? He’s Crazy.”

Arnold Beichman is not my uncle, nor is he crazy. In fact, I have no blood relation to him at all. He’s just one of my dad’s friends, who happens to be my friend as well. He and my dad met about one year after I was born in Washington D.C. Arnold (who is eighty-something) is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in San Fransico. He is a scholar and a journalist, having published two articles in the Washington Times just last week.

Arnold is a rather heavy man with more hair on his chest than on his head. He speaks very loudly, usually complaining.

He acts rather childish at times and one wonders how he used to make a living, which he obviously has. He loves to tell jokes and knows a surprisingly large amount about everything.

The last time Arnold came out here, two months ago, he came with his wife Carol. They had never been to the islands and were toying with the idea of buying property here.

“So, Tommy, what’s your scientific outlook?”, he asked me loudly at the table the first night out here.

“Uh I don’t…have one yet,” I said, rather confused.

“Well, now you do”.

We began to talk about everything new in the scientific world, namely the Hubble Telescope. He told us some of his jokes, none of which I can remember, unfortunately, but know I laughed at.

Later that night I was playing a World War II flight simulator, fending off Germans from my bomber squadron. Half way through he walked in and asked,

“What are you flying?”

“P-51 Mustang,” I responded. Now, I could be a scholar on aircraft of the second World War. I have read many books on the subject and can recognize most on sight.

“What are you up against?”

“Two Focke Wulf 190s,” telling the name of the German planes I was dog-fighting with.

“You know how mustang pilots got Focke Wulfs?”, he said as I hit the PAUSE button to listen. “They would go on a straight power-dive hitting about 400 mph …”

I listened to him closely and for a long time thinking,”Wait a minute. I should be lecturing him.” But he obviously knew more on the subject than I did.

At first glance Arnold is a large, slightly childish old man. It also happens to be that he is a first-class scholar and an excellent journalist who can produce articles at a very high comprehension level. (I had to read them twice to understand them). Arnold shows that while first impressions are important, they may not tell the whole story about someone.

Rest in peace, old friend.

Roger Ebert can’t remember the last thing he ate. He can’t remember the last thing he drank, either, or the last thing he said. Of course, those things existed; those lasts happened. They just didn’t happen with enough warning for him to have bothered committing them to memory — it wasn’t as though he sat down, knowingly, to his last supper or last cup of coffee or to whisper a last word into Chaz’s ear. The doctors told him they were going to give him back his ability to eat, drink, and talk. But the doctors were wrong, weren’t they? On some morning or afternoon or evening, sometime in 2006, Ebert took his last bite and sip, and he spoke his last word.

Ebert’s lasts almost certainly took place in a hospital. That much he can guess. His last food was probably nothing special, except that it was: hot soup in a brown plastic bowl; maybe some oatmeal; perhaps a saltine or some canned peaches. His last drink? Water, most likely, but maybe juice, again slurped out of plastic with the tinfoil lid peeled back. The last thing he said? Ebert thinks about it for a few moments, and then his eyes go wide behind his glasses, and he looks out into space in case the answer is floating in the air somewhere. It isn’t. He looks surprised that he can’t remember. He knows the last words Studs Terkel’s wife, Ida, muttered when she was wheeled into the operating room (”Louis, what have you gotten me into now?”), but Ebert doesn’t know what his own last words were. He thinks he probably said goodbye to Chaz before one of his own trips into the operating room, perhaps when he had parts of his salivary glands taken out — but that can’t be right. He was back on TV after that operation. Whenever it was, the moment wasn’t cinematic. His last words weren’t recorded. There was just his voice, and then there wasn’t.

Now his hands do the talking. They are delicate, long-fingered, wrapped in skin as thin and translucent as silk. He wears his wedding ring on the middle finger of his left hand; he’s lost so much weight since he and Chaz were married in 1992 that it won’t stay where it belongs, especially now that his hands are so busy. There is almost always a pen in one and a spiral notebook or a pad of Post-it notes in the other — unless he’s at home, in which case his fingers are feverishly banging the keys of his MacBook Pro.

Amazing—please read it all.

For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

There seems to be a real story of this, so to speak, in the New York Times (H/T).  Dana Jennings is fighting prostate cancer, and he has become Real:

Right now, I’m not quite what you’d call “a catch.” I wear man-pads for intermittent incontinence, I’m a bazaar of scars, and haven’t had a full erection in seven months. Most nights, I’m in bed by 10. The Lupron hormone shots, which suppress the testosterone that can fuel prostate cancer, have sent my sex drive lower than the stock market, shrunken my testicles, and given me hot flashes so fierce that I sweat outdoors when it’s 20 degrees and snowing.

Even so, Deb has taught me that love is in the details. Humid professions of undying love and tear-stained sonnets are all well and good, but they can’t compete with the earthy love of Deb helping me change and drain my catheter pouches each day when I first came home from the hospital.

Yes, in the details. She measured my urine, peered into places I couldn’t (literally and figuratively), and strategically and liberally applied baby powder, ice and Aquaphor to my raw and aching body. She battled our intractable insurer, networked, tracked down the right doctors — and took thorough notes all the while.

I was wounded. She protected me. She chose to do these things.

Read it all, especially Mr. Jennings’s conclusion.

What are you working on at the moment?
A book about aging: enjoy it, you might as well. And it’s not all bad. I can say what I want, and I don’t get punished for it.

Such as?
Such as I sometimes think God is a s**t—and he wouldn’t be worth it otherwise. He’s much more interesting when he’s a s**t.

So to you, faith is not a comfort?
Good heavens, no. It’s a challenge: I dare you to believe in God. I dare you to think [our existence] wasn’t an accident.

Many people see faith as anti-intellectual.
Then they’re not very bright. It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity.

Food for thought, so please read it all.

My crime, and later my sentence, stood at the center of all my examinations. Slowly I came to understand my need for redemption and true atonement. I realized that nothing could atone for what I’d become better than simply turning away from it with my whole being, and this is what I did. I repented in action. I changed. This decision opened up a new turn in my search for truth. I began to look outward again, to re-examine the world around me, but now I looked from this new place within myself.

It sounds as if these are two different pursuits—looking in and looking out—but really they’re not. Understanding community and my role in it was simply the next step in my own healing.

I wanted to know if the origins of my insanity were completely within myself or was I, at least in part, a product of a sick culture. Having confronted myself thoroughly I could now ask that question objectively, not looking for excuses or trying to diminish my own accountability, but simply and sincerely, looking for the truth.

I looked at my fellow prisoners, the insane things they’d done to get here. I looked at the prison itself, our “solution” to violence, and saw it to be just more of the same thing it was designed to respond to. I looked at the growing insanity outside prison, the despair, rage, addiction, denial, lies, and deceit.

And I knew that I couldn’t maintain the integrity of my search without admitting that while something had definitely gone wrong in me, something was also very wrong in our culture. To deny or overlook this would be like finding hundreds of three-eyed toads in a pond and never thinking to check the pond for its contribution to the phenomenon. The individuals who are going spiritually insane in droves in our culture are not coming out of a void. As I began to wake up I found myself concerned for these individuals and for us as a whole. I was developing social consciousness, which soon turned into social activism.

Was Mr. Chapman insane when he killed Scott Chandler?  From Chapman’s Commutation Request Package a single sentence jumped out at me:

I didn’t go into the bar with the intention of taking a life but my general disregard for others is what led to this result.

The peculiar passive voice brought to mind a great if older essay from Theodore Dalrymple:

It might be objected by psychologists, of course, that the deeds of these men were so heinous that it was a natural and perhaps even necessary psychic defense for them to ascribe the deaths of their victims to forces beyond their control: too swift an acknowledgment of responsibility would result in a total collapse of their morale and, possibly, in suicide. But the evasion in their own minds of the responsibility for their deeds was in no way different from that exhibited by lesser criminals: offenders against property or, more accurately, against the owners of property.

A few examples will suffice. A prisoner, recently convicted for the umpteenth time, came to me to complain that he had been depressed ever since his trouble came on him again. And what, I asked, was this trouble which came on him periodically? It was breaking and entering churches, stealing their valuables, and burning them down to destroy the evidence.

And why churches? Was it that he had been dragged as a child to tedious services by hypocritical parents and wished to be revenged upon religion, perhaps? Not at all; it was because in general churches were poorly secured, easy to break into, and contained valuable objects in silver.

Oddly enough, he did not deduce from this pragmatic, reasonable, and honest explanation of his choice of ecclesiastical burglary as a career that he was himself responsible for the trouble which mysteriously overtook him every time he was released from prison: he blamed the church authorities for the laxness of their security, which first caused and then reinforced his compulsion to steal from them. Echoing the police, who increasingly blame theft on the owners of property—for failing to take the proper precautions against its misappropriation—rather than on those who actually carry out the theft, the ecclesiastical burglar said that the church authorities should have known of his proclivities and taken the necessary measures to prevent him from acting upon them.

Tellingly, the church burglar blames the churches for being insecure; Chapman blames society for being unhealthy.  Dalrymple later explains this psychology behind the passive voice:

At the very heart of all this passivity and refusal of responsibility is a deep dishonesty—what Sartre would have called bad faith. For however vehemently criminals try to blame others, and whatever appearance of sincerity they manage to convey while they do so, they know at least some of the time that what they say is untrue.

[snip]
That their outlook is dishonest and self-serving is apparent in their attitude to those whom they believe to have done them wrong. For example, they do not say of the policemen who they allege (often plausibly) have beaten them up, “Poor cops! They were brought up in authoritarian homes and now project the anger that is really directed at their bullying fathers onto me. They need counseling. They need their heads sorted out.” On the contrary, they say, with force and explosive emotion, “The bastards!” They assume that the police act out of free, if malevolent, will.

Chapman’s claims that insanity made him kill Scott Chandler are also reminiscent of an exchange between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling in the novel (but not the movie) The Silence of the Lambs.  Starling has given Lecter a survey to fill out about serial killers, and he derides this attempt at psychoanalysis [emphasis in original]:

Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling.  I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences.  You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling.  You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants—nothing is ever anybody’s fault.  Look at me, Officer Starling.  Can you stand to say I’m evil?  Am I evil, Officer Starling?

Based on his previous work, it looks like Chapman has missed the issue.  He murdered a man not because his head wasn’t right, but because his heart was wrong. There was no insanity, but free, if malevolent, will.
Yet on Sunday, Troy Chapman had a commentary on NPR’s This I Believe that gave me hope.  Discussing a stray cat that wandered into the prison yard, Chapman explained how the prisoners fed and cleaned and cared for it.  He concluded [emphasis added]:

There’s a lot of talk about what’s wrong with prisons in America. We need more programs; we need more psychologists or treatment of various kinds. Some even talk about making prisons more kind, but I think what we really need is a chance to practice kindness ourselves. Not receive it, but give it.

After more than two decades here, I know that kindness is not a value that’s encouraged. It’s often seen as weakness. Instead the culture encourages keeping your head down, minding your own business and never letting yourself be vulnerable.

For a few days a raggedy cat disrupted this code of prison culture. They’ve taken him away now, hopefully to a decent home — but it did my heart good to see the effect he had on me and the men here. He didn’t have a Ph.D., he wasn’t a criminologist or a psychologist, but by simply saying, “I need some help here,” he did something important for us. He needed us — and we need to be needed. I believe we all do.

Chapman did something evil, but he’s on to something true when he speaks about kindness.  It might be that he’s a better seer than a guide.  If Chapman start helping people be kind, commutation could be good.

Two more quotes for an already quote heavy blog post.  Eric Hoffer:

It is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives.  Kindness can become its own motive.  We are made kind by being kind.

Oscar Wilde:

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

May there be kindness in Chapman’s future.

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