What can we do when we are besieged by a pandemic, offspring reluctant to visit, political chaos, advancing old age, and weather that no longer permits porch luncheons in a toasty sun?

Bertram “Bertie” Wooster, the English gentleman hero of many of P. G. Wodehouse’s novels about life in England many years back, had the answer: Try “the early dinner, the restful spell with a good book or the crossword puzzle, and so to bed”.

Off I went to the Lyme Library, shoving all my serious stuff under the bed. As Mr. Wooster notes in this novel, “ . . . like all village lending libraries, this one had not bothered much about keeping itself up to date,” so I went back to this Wodehouse tale from 1974. Lyme’s Library is far better endowed!

In Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen Bertie is enticed to visit an older aunt in an English village, when he becomes hopelessly enmeshed with an ex-girlfriend, her gentleman friend, her antiquated father, a cast of outrageous characters, plus, of course, a black cat!

And trying to unravel all this mess is Jeeves, Bertie’s “man”, the calmest and most highly-read person in this ménage.

When Bertie says something outrageous, Jeeves responds, “Indeed, Sir?”

When Bertie stumbles on a valid insight, Jeeves says “Precisely, Sir, Rem acu tetegisti. (Latin for “you have hit the nail on the head” – yes, I had to Google that one!). Bertie’s open-mouth reply to Jeeves’ erudition: ‘Eh?”

What comes out of each character’s mouth seldom corresponds to what is in that mind, creating a steady stream of hilarity. Here are some Bertie-isms from just two pages:

“ . . . managing to free my tongue from the uvula with which it had become entangled, I found speech, as I dare say those Darien fellows did eventually.”

“She uttered a sound rather like an elephant taking its foot out of a mud hole in a Burmese teak forest.”

“My impulse was to tell her Tolstoy was off his onion.”

“She disappeared like an eel into the mud.”

“I was reft of speech!”

“the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as someone called them.”

To Bertie, three in the afternoon is “three pip emma.”

My escape from reality ended too quickly.

I may seek what other Wodehouse books Teresa might be hiding in Lyme . . .

Editor’s Note: ‘Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen’ by P. G. Wodehouse was published by Barkie-Jenkins, London 1974.

About the Author: Felix Kloman is a sailor, rower, husband, father, grandfather, retired management consultant and, above all, a curious reader and writer. He’s explored how we as human beings and organizations respond to ever-present uncertainty in two books, ‘Mumpsimus Revisited’ (2005) and ‘The Fantods of Risk’ (2008).
A 20-year resident of Lyme, Conn., he now writes book reviews, mostly of non-fiction, a subject which explores our minds, our behavior, our politics and our history. But he does throw in a novel here and there.
For more than 50 years, he’s put together the 17 syllables that comprise haiku, the traditional Japanese poetry, and now serves as the self-appointed “poet laureate” of Ashlawn Farm Coffee, where he may be seen on Friday mornings.
His late wife, Ann, was also a writer, but of mystery novels, all of which begin in a village in midcoast Maine, strangely reminiscent of the town she and her husband visited every summer.

Are ants far more important than we humans?

Probably!

That’s my conclusion after reading the latest from this illustrious Professor Emeritus of Harvard with some 33 books to his credit, many of which relate his life-long interest in these creatures

Ants, or the study of myrmecology using the proper scientific terminology, have existed on this earth for some 150 million years, 10 times longer than Homo sapiens. They are survivors of ice ages and hot spells. They operate on this globe in both extreme heat and cold.

Significantly for these times, they are not disease carriers.

They create societies in which females are in complete control (“benevolent matriarchies.”) Males are second-class citizens, primed to exist for one act of reproduction and then depart this life. Ouch!

And, like us, they have traveled from Africa to almost every other spot on earth. They are also “virtuosos of chemical communication,” working together soundlessly. To top it off, they will probably outlive our species by another 50 million years, or at least as this earth exists.

“Ant colonies possess superb resiliency,” suggests Professor Wilson, arguing that we humans should study them more seriously. Compared to the bulk of a human body, an ant is tiny but “ … all the living ants weigh about the same as all we living humans. We don’t go to war against ants, nor do they war against us.”

To Wilson, this proves “an important principle of parasite biology … that the most successful parasite is the one that causes the least damage.” But they are vicious warriors among themselves … very similar to human beings.

Yes, they do travel: ants are great navigators. They manage to move about, “by direct light of the sun and dead reckoning (“dead”  product of “deduced” reckoning) by the spatial gradients of polarized light, spectral composition of light, and the radiant intensity that form cover across the entire vault of the sky.” I do wish I had those capabilities when I navigated my U. S. Navy refrigerator ship across the Pacific some 60-plus years ago!

Can studying ants give us some ideas about the future of human beings? Females in total control — but the “queen” is effectively a slave of the entire colony? Incessant warfare with other colonies? But ultimately, ants are survivors, outlasting us by millions of years.

Read Professor Wilson for some challenging questions.

Editor’s Note: “Tales From the Ant World” by E. O. Wilson was published 2020

Felix Kloman

About the Author: Felix Kloman is a sailor, rower, husband, father, grandfather, retired management consultant and, above all, a curious reader and writer. He’s explored how we as human beings and organizations respond to ever-present uncertainty in two books, ‘Mumpsimus Revisited’ (2005) and ‘The Fantods of Risk’ (2008).

A 20-year resident of Lyme, Conn., he now writes book reviews, mostly of non-fiction, a subject which explores our minds, our behavior, our politics and our history. But he does throw in a novel here and there.

For more than 50 years, he’s put together the 17 syllables that comprise haiku, the traditional Japanese poetry, and now serves as the self-appointed “poet laureate” of Ashlawn Farm Coffee, where he may be seen on Friday mornings. His late wife, Ann, was also a writer, but of mystery novels, all of which begin in a village in midcoast Maine, strangely reminiscent of the town she and her husband visited every summer.

What happens when you see blatant corruption first-hand?

Is this the world we now inhabit?

Sarah Chayes, a former NPR correspondent, entrepreneur and foreign policy specialist, now with the Carnegie Foundation, has seen it all and has fought it, not always successfully.

She describes her personal experiences in Afghanistan, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Uzbekistan and Nigeria, with further stories from Europe, England and the United States.

Corruptions (including shakedowns, extortions, favors, subsidies, graft, “lubricities,” and those famous “services” of Don Corleone) are the stimulants of inevitable upheavals. Yet many warned us against its practice: Machiavelli, William of Pagula, and Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, among others, but we never listen.

Others write that “corruption” is an inherent, genetic inclination of our human brains. Francis Fukuyama, in Political Order and Political Decay, suggests “reciprocal altruism” enabled our species to work together for growth and progress.

Yet that “altruism” is easily subverted into “patronage, clientelism, and the creation and extraction of rents.” So Chayes concludes: “acute government corruption may in fact lie at the root of some of the world’s most dangerous and disruptive security challenges.” The anger at blatantly corrupt “systems” often leads to radicalizing young people.

Revolutions result.

She describes three levels of corruption:

1. functional (“small-scale palm greasing”)
2. higher-level (at middle and top levels of government), and
3. predatory (practiced by police and the military).

The latter may be the most insidious.

A uniform often “removes a person’s individuality; its wearer becomes a faceless member of a mass movement . . . “ easily led by other lemmings. That is why “military-to-military relationships” are so potentially corruptible.

Have we inadvertently drifted into this problem here in the U. S.? Are we being “bulldozed by an over-weaning military?”

Chayes notes our “almost instinctive reflex to lead with the military in moments of international crisis.” Government may be both the cause and the solution to corruption. The Founding Fathers warned against a standing national army, yet that is exactly what we have now.

The religious connection is also present: “the link between kleptocracy and violent religious extremism wasn’t just an Afghanistan thing. It was (is – my italics) a global phenomenon.”

And the visibility of corruption stimulates an inevitable response: “the visible daily contrast between ordinary people’s privations and the ostentatious display of lavish wealth corruptly siphoned off by ruling cliques from what was broadly understood to be public resources.”

But Ms. Chayes’ suggested “remedies,” at the conclusion of her polemic, fall short.

Charters, laws, and an independent judiciary, all of which may have worked in the past, can be co-opted “by some tight-knit network, intent on its own enrichment.”

She lists 10 “tools” we can use (anti-corruption policies, independent regimes for dispensing funds abroad, new laws, cost-benefit analyses, cautious military aid, and flat refusals to pay bribes overseas), but too many of these have already proven susceptible to gaming.

The best, I think, continues to be complete transparency: the access of an independent press and an open Internet. In the end transparency may be our best tool to “forestall extremism that is born of desperation,” a desperation and frustration at the corruption, which is a part of our human nature.

Editor’s Note: ‘Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security’ by Sarah Chayes is published by W. W. Norton, New York 2015.

Felix Kloman

About the Author: Felix Kloman is a sailor, rower, husband, father, grandfather, retired management consultant and, above all, a curious reader and writer. He’s explored how we as human beings and organizations respond to ever-present uncertainty in two books, ‘Mumpsimus Revisited’ (2005) and ‘The Fantods of Risk’ (2008).

A 20-year resident of Lyme, Conn., he now writes book reviews, mostly of non-fiction, a subject which explores our minds, our behavior, our politics and our history. But he does throw in a novel here and there.

For more than 50 years, he’s put together the 17 syllables that comprise haiku, the traditional Japanese poetry, and now serves as the self-appointed “poet laureate” of Ashlawn Farm Coffee, where he may be seen on Friday mornings. His late wife, Ann, was also a writer, but of mystery novels, all of which begin in a village in midcoast Maine, strangely reminiscent of the town she and her husband visited every summer.