An ode to joy (reposted)

(Note from the webmaster: Mr. Newhouse is on holiday, so here's an older post of his, originally published on July 22, 2012….)

Readers, forgive me. I had a tantrum in yesterday's post. Hope this makes up for it! (Crank up the volume!)

Well, we know there are evil winds—Joan Didion wrote her famous essay about the Santa Ana winds almost half a century ago. The Santa Ana starts on the leeward side of a mountain, she writes, and warms up and becomes drier as it moves down the mountain. By the time it hits Los Angeles, it is intensely hot, intensely dry and…

…intensely strong. Hurricane force, at times.

California burning? It’s almost always because of the Santa Ana winds.

But other things happen as well. Crime spikes, tempers fray, kids become unmanageable in the classroom.

Oh, and blood doesn’t clot as easily.

That’s when Didion inserts her famous phrase: “to surrender to the Santa Ana winds is to accept a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.”

(Or words to that effect—the damn Internet connection is still goofing off….)

Well, maybe that’s what’s needed—to accept a mechanistic view of human behavior.

It wasn’t, somehow, an easy weekend. I didn’t watch TV footage of the Aurora shooting—I’m smarter than that. But I read the accounts nearly compulsively (sometimes the same article, ostensibly to see if it had been updated). I thought about it. I wrote a post that was almost as incendiary as the Santa Ana winds.

Then I remembered—we’re being zapped by increased solar activity. Duluth reported blazing northern lights last week.

And I also remembered—the Santa Ana winds increase the ratio of positive to negative ions in the air.

Meaning a change in the electromagnetic field that constantly surrounds us.

It’s a subject that draws a lot of bunkum, and I almost hate to go there. Ghost hunters wander through houses at midnight, looking for dips in the electromagnetic fields. The UFO believers do similar things. 

But there is some scientific evidence. Solar flares occur normally three times a year. Investigators in Russia determined that suicides rise predictably in one extreme Northern Russian city with each period of flaring.

Aurora—which is seventeen miles from Columbine High School—is also a mile above sea level. Would they be more prone to the effect of changes in the electromagnetic system?

The advantage of thinking mechanistically is that it takes you away from things like “willpower” and “self-discipline.” Your drinking is out of control because of a change in genetic structure, for example, or proteins in the brain.

Might be true.

The disadvantage?

It leads straight to the Twinkie Defense. 'All that sugar made me kill Harvey Milk.'  

And my good friend Susan, I suspect, wouldn’t have it. “No woman suffering from the ravages of PMS has ever committed the massacres that men have.” 

Good point.

Whatever it was, it was intense. My mood was labile. Little things irritated me. And then, Pat sent me a link to the Beethoven clip above.

And I found myself flooded with tears in a coffee house in San Juan.

It’s something so moronic that I rarely admit to it, but here goes. I love orchestral performances because it’s one of the few occasions I can think of where one hundred people gather to do something beautiful.

And I loved this clip for the humor, the playfulness of it all. The musicians coming out of the bank (the Ode to Joy was a gift organized by a Catalonian bank to celebrate their 130^th anniversary). The people looking on, gathering, singing, filming, tapping their feet. The kids imitating the conductor.

The assassin in Aurora did more damage than the 12 / 71 he killed or maimed. But it’s also true that one person playing a musical instrument can…

…change the world?

No.

Yes.