The Seed of My Love of Reading

By Joseph Kellard

Go ahead, you can say it. The image accompanying this blog post looks like a book that’s been through a war. Well, not quite.

I salvaged Four Stars from the World of Sports from a flood in my apartment, due to a Calcutta-like downpour a few years ago. I had to keep this book from my childhood. I realized, even if not explicitly until now, that it held a certain significance to me. I believe it is the first sports book, and perhaps the first “real” book after a diet of Green Eggs and Ham and others like Charlotte’s Web, that I had read on my own.

I recall my mother buying it for me at my elementary school, P.S. 21 in Flushing. I think I was in third grade and I bought it at a book fair there. It featured some of the great athletes of the day from the four major sports, baseball’s Henry Aaron, football’s Roger Staubach, basketball’s Kareem Abdul Jabbar and hockey’s Bobby Orr.

Leafing through its time- and weather-beaten brown pages now, I remember some of its photos and illustrations, but I remember little, if anything, about the stories. One of my problems as a young boy was that I didn’t read very well, and had particular trouble with comprehension. But I do recall enjoying the book and learning about the lives of these sports idols.

One of my earliest memories of watching sports was rushing home one summer night to the living room in my parents’ second-floor apartment on 26^th Avenue, as I watched on television Henry Aaron hit his historic 715 home run that broke Babe Ruth’s career record.

On that same set (probably a Zenith), I vaguely recall watching Joe Namath play football. I had already heard enough about the legendary quarterback to realize I was watching someone special. I remember vaguely that earlier that year I watched my first Super Bowl, when the Miami Dolphins defeated the Minnesota Vikings. That’s when I became a Dolphins' fan.

Since I didn’t read well as a young boy, so I didn’t read much. At that time, my interest in watching sports was in its fledgling state, so I don’t recall reading many or any other sports books after Four Stars. Maybe I did; maybe I didn’t—and if I did they didn’t make enough of an impression on me to save them. Four Stars did. Maybe because it was the first book I read in which I was offered (real-life) heroes.

My parents thought my reading problems had something to do with poor eyesight, so they bought me reading glasses. I thought this was totally senseless. There was nothing wrong with my eyes. At about that time, my parents brought me to a reading specialist, and she said I had dyslexia. I ditched the eyeglass, but mainly because wearing them wasn’t cool.

When I reflect back on this now, I realized my troubles could be traced and reduced to one main issue: motivation. Sure, when reading, I definitely mixed up letters and words, and that certainly made it a struggle; but it actually wasn’t until a few years later, when my parents observed my already intense interest in sports, that they got the bright idea to buy me a subscription to Sports Illustrated.

Their thinking was this: why not have him read about a subject that interests him? I remember the days of my mother working with me, having me read story after story in Reader’s Digest. I enjoyed some of the stories, especially one about a captain of a boat who remained calm through a storm that threatened to capsize the vessel and navigated through the squall. But it wasn’t until I started to read about sports that I read consistently and often, and my problems with reading just faded away.

That’s really the genesis of my love of reading that has endured to this day. I believe that seed was planted with this one book, Four Stars.

Steve Jobs Interview for The Smithsonian

By Joseph Kellard
Did you know Steve Jobs thought our government-run public schools were terrible union-driven bureaucracies, not meritocracies (to use his words)? It’s one of the best slices of this interview he did for an Smithsonian Oral History project that was conduced by the Computerworld Information Technology Awards Program in 1995.

Jobs offers his thoughts on a host of issues —from the artistry he believed was integ...ral to making computers, how Apple was coasting and steadily declining while he was out of the company, to hiring A-class producers and firing lesser employees, to Pixar and digitally animated films such as Toy Story, to so-called “social responsibilities.”

In answer to a question about the latter (near the end of the interview), Job’s took issue with the faith that he had any such responsibilities. Instead, he said, “We’re all going to be dead soon. That’s my point of view. Someone once told me: ‘Live each day as if it will be your last, and one day you’ll certainly be right.’ And I do that … I think you have a responsibility to do really good stuff and get it out there for people to use and let them build on the shoulders of it and keep making better stuff.”

In hindsight, after experiencing all the great products that Jobs came to produced in the computer, film, communications and music industries, it’s safe to say he lived by his words that put his love of his work above all else.

While you can, as I did, take issue with some of his views, particularly on monopolies, the government’s roll to protect the Internet as a “public trust,” and Silicon Valley’s innovations as primarily the product of the so-called 1960’s counterculture, there’s a lot to enjoy in this interview. Most of all, he comes across as a thoughtful, articulate, impassioned innovator.

Photo by Joseph Kellard

Photos: Rockefeller Center at Christmas

“The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only ‘commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.” ~ Ayn Rand

Photos by Joseph Kellard

Why I'm an Early Bird

By Joseph Kellard
People ask me how I do it. I get out of bed to start my day at 5 a.m. I've been doing this for many years, and the root of my answer lies in the Olympics.

Yes, my biorhythms are also to blame. Since my youth I've been a deep sleeper, and that certainly plays into why I’m an early riser. When I was younger I used to need, at most, about eight hours of sleep a night, and most of my adult life I've been able to get by on six hours, and sometimes less.

I set my alarm at 4:20 a.m., and occasionally I wake up before the alarm sounds. I have it set to sports talk radio, and I often hit snooze intermittently throughout. Otherwise, I'll either catch more z's or run what I call “word salads” — word association-like, stream-of-consciousness-type sentences — thorough my head, with the sole purpose of seeing what words and phrases I can summon from my vocabulary bank. Once I toss the covers off me, though, I routinely head to my work desk to write or read on my MacBook, after which I drive to the gym, three to four days a week.

I started my early morning activities back during my early 20-something years, when I worked out with weights in my garage in the dark of morning. I was drawn to do this because it made me feel productive while most of America was still sleeping.

My inspiration came years earlier, when I was a kid watching the Olympics on television, specifically the features on athletes — the cross-country skiers, skaters or gymnasts who awoke before dawn to trek to the hills, ice rink or gym to train before heading to school or work. I found this incredibly inspiring.

I knew some night owls, with friends and relatives among them. They were the kind who never appeared to get sleepy while most of us watched late-night television with our eyes half shut from our couches. But they typically slept late the next morning, and that’s why being a night owl never appealed to me. Getting up earl always seemed to me like an accomplishment, something that required a certain effort, whereas staying up late just didn’t.

When I used to live with others, including night owls who watched TV late, getting up early in the morning was always the only opportunity to take advantage of some quiet in the house, which was a tremendous value when I needed to think, write or read. Today I live alone in a studio apartment in a home that almost seems hermetically sealed to sound. It’s too good to be true.

I continue covet the serenity of early morning, especially its contrast to the hustle and bustle of where I live in the suburbs of New York City, the city that never sleeps. And I make sure to wake up early each morning to capture it.

Conspiracy Theories and Freedom Don't Mix

By Joseph Kellard
A recent commentary piece in The New York Times taps into the corrupted mentality — the faith-based conspiracy mindset — that pervades Egypt and explains why that Muslim nation, as well as the wider Islam-dominated Middle East, will not establish freedom anytime soon.

When dictator Hosni Mubarak was forced from power earlier this year, a major development of the so-called Arab Spring, it was widely pronounced that Egyptians were now “free,” or had won their “freedom.” Actually, they were merely freed temporarily from the force imposed by their latest dictator. Political freedom, in fact, depends on each individual’s freedom from government coercion, or, to put it positively and more fundamentally, freedom depends on the establishment of a government that upholds individual rights, including the right to free thought and speech — that is, the freedom to adopt whatever philosophy or religion one chooses and to voice its teachings.

Such a government cannot and will not take root in Egypt when the interim government there indiscriminately guns down non-Muslims on the streets of Cairo, nor when the next elected government is likely to be dominated by Muslims that will force their religion on others.

In his Times’ commentary on Nov. 20, "After Egypt’s Revolution, Christians Are Living in Fear," Andre Aciman, an Egyptian-born Jew who is a literature professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, writes that Egypt's interim government failed to take responsibility for its massacre of Christians as they demonstrated in Cairo after their church was burned to the ground. Aciman writes that confusion and conflicting accounts ensued over who instigated the incident, and that the interim prime minister blamed the massacre on “hidden hands.” Aciman explains:

Sadly, the phrase “hidden hands” remains a part of Egypt’s political rhetoric more than 50 years later — an invitation for every Egyptian to write in the name of his or her favorite bugaboo. Rather than see things for what they are, Egyptians, from their leaders on down, have always preferred the blame game — and with good reason. Blaming some insidious clandestine villain for anything invariably works in a country where hearsay passes for truth and paranoia for knowledge.

Sometimes those hidden hands are called Langley, or the West, or, all else failing, of course, the Mossad. Sometimes “hidden hands” stands for any number of foreign or local conspiracies carried out by corrupt or disgruntled apparatchiks of one stripe or another who are forever eager to tarnish and discredit the public trust.

The problem with Egypt is that there is no public trust. There is no trust, period. False rumor, which is the opiate of the Egyptian masses and the bread and butter of political discourse in the Arab world, trumps clarity, reason and the will to tolerate a different opinion, let alone a different religion or the spirit of open discourse.

In short, a nation cannot establish freedom when, by and large, its people fundamentally gather what they believe is knowledge and truth based on hearsay, paranoia, false rumor and conspiracy theories at the expense of reason. Reason is man's only means of knowledge, and it is the basis of the only free or semi-free nations in history, all of them Western products of the pro-reason Enlightenment. When reason is the first to go in dealing with other men, so goes freedom.

When freedom is at stake and people yearn to possess it, conspiracy theories, particularly those based on faith, won't cut it. Yet they are a product of the Islamic world's basic mental modus operandi: religious faith. As Elan Jurno, author of Winning the Unwinnable War, explains in his essay “Exposing Anti-Mulsim ‘Conspiracies,” published in the Spring 2006 issue of The Objective Standard:

“...[T]hough it is unsupported by facts or logic, the conspirator steadfastly clings to his belief. The source of his belief is faith — the blind acceptance of some idea sustained by feeling in the absence or defiance of evidence. This epistemology, or philosophy of knowledge, is a fundamental tenant of Islam, as it is of all religions. And this is the key to understanding the conspiracy mentality.”

It also is the key to understanding why freedom will continue to elude Egypt and the Middle East.

America Attacked For Its Values

By Joseph Kellard

One day as I drove down Lexington Avenue, I understood the reverence author-philosopher Ayn Rand had for New York City.

From an incline along that avenue, a vantage point from which I'd never seen Manhattan, I was awed by the many tall, stately buildings that lined the perfectly straight street for miles. Finally I had grasped how this view that resembled a canyon, along with the entire metropolis, sprang not from nature, but from the human mind.

I was reminded of a passage from Miss Rand's novel The Fountainhead: "I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?"

On Sept. 11, 2001, after I'd watched Islamic terrorists destroy the Twin Towers and the innocents within them, I was reminded of what Miss Rand wrote about evil:

"They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed; they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence ... You who've never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as 'misguided idealists,’ they are the essence of evil."

This passage from Atlas Shrugged serves to answer people who are bewildered over how human beings can act so savagely. At root, terrorists are motivated by nihilism, the desire to destroy values and existence.

These terrorists understood that the skyscraper is uniquely American.

Because of our nation's unprecedented liberty, Americans were free to form independent judgments and act on them. This atmosphere spawned the Industrial Revolution, which saw great technological advances and laborsaving devices, such as the steel girders and elevators that made skyscrapers possible. The Twin Towers specifically embodied capitalism and its foundation: the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which spawned America's unsurpassed prosperity.

Those gleaming, soaring, stately towers were a proud boast of all these sublime human achievements and values. And this is why the nihilists twice targeted them. They hated them because of their source: the liberated human mind. They don't want America's freedom, its industriousness, its technological advances, its high standard of living — or its skyscrapers.

They only want us to lose them through their destructive acts.

This upcoming war is between America and religious fundamentalism (of any kind). In essence, Americans use reason to choose their values and actions; the fundamentalists have blind faith in God's dogma. We value freedom; they value theocratic totalitarianism. We value the individual; they sacrifice the individual to supernatural entities (e.g., God and heaven). We pursue and achieve happiness here on earth; they damn this earth and martyr themselves for an afterworld.

At root, we want life and they want death. The United States should give the murderous Islamic fundamentalists what they want, in part, as an act of justice for we Americans who want to live.

* This column was mildly edited from its original version that was published in the Oceanside/Island Park Herald in September 2001.

* The painting, The Sun Also Rises, by Frank O’Conner (Ayn Rand’s husband), appeared on the 25th anniversary editon of The Fountainhead.

9/11 Vignette: Joseph Kellard

Every patriotic American suffered when Islamic terrorists killed nearly 3,000 innocent people on Sept. 11, 2001. I was a reporter then for the Oceanside/Island Park Herald. Although I was deeply outraged and dispirited by this atrocity, the aftermath provided me with invaluable experiences.

While I didn’t lose a loved one that day, through my many talks with 9/11 families I came to empathize more intensely with those who did.

I can still hear the chilling, soulful cries of Amy Haviland, an Oceanside mother of two young children who on 9/11 lost both her husband, Timothy, a vice president at Marsh & McLennan, and her brother, FDNY firefighter Robert Spear.

I remember visiting the Freeport home of Lauraine Marchese after her daughter Laura’s remains at Ground Zero were identified months later, and how this news shattered her mother’s last, desperate hope that somehow, some way she was still alive somewhere.

I learned that it’s horrible enough for a loved one to, say, be murdered by a common street criminal, but to have him perish in a mass slaughter splashed across television screens and newspapers worldwide magnifies the horror dramatically.

As a journalist, I feel honored and privileged that these families willingly shared their raw thoughts, anger and anguish with me. Sometimes their pain brought me to tears. Their suffering further grounded the horror and evil of the terrorist attacks — and thereby solidified my intense conviction that the jihadists and their supporters must be brought to justice.

Unfortunately, over the past decade this sense of justice has faded in many Americans. But thankfully it endured with me, in part because of the vivid memories I have covering the families most directly impacted by that horrific day. They will never forget the wrongs done them. Neither must we.