Three Institutions (Part I)

In 1967 I graduated from Harvard College (way easier to get into then); was inducted into the US Army (we had something called the draft) and joined the Democratic Party (I was a liberal). Almost half a century later I remain a Harvard alumnus, a veteran and a Democrat. As I consider these three enormous institutions, all much in the news, I sometimes think I have most affection for the one I most detested when I was in it. Perhaps that’s because the army isn’t always hounding me for money. Take the Democrats, from whom I get several emails a day. Such as:

“We’re about to LOSE. James, We’re on the brink of defeat. There’s no way to sugar-coat it. If we let $125 million worth of Koch Brothers-funded attack ads go unanswered, the 2014 Elections are over and the Tea Party wins again. Please chip in $10 before the midnight deadline.”

“James, In the couple of minutes it takes you to read this email, an attack ad funded by the Koch Brothers' network will run 27 times across the country. Please rush $10 by midnight.”

I loathe the Koch brothers’ politics more than most, but simply and constantly bashing them is a pretty pathetic political strategy. Pitting half the country against two old men, however rich and cunning, gives them a mythological power that is actually counterproductive. Money is a great evil in modern politics, primarily because it is crushing creative ideas, thoughtful platforms, and strong and independent candidates. Maybe we should start there.

Stick Your Head in the (Tar) Sand

As it promised to do in exchange for the withdrawal of a shareholder proposal on “stranded assets”, ExxonMobil has issued a report on its plans for managing the risks in the event that market and regulatory responses to climate change reduce the value of its oil and gas reserves. “The report, 'Managing the Risks'” according to Natasha Lamb of Arjuna Capital, which filed the original proposal, “forgot to address one thing: the risks.” Instead of offering a plan for dealing with a lower-carbon future, Exxon blithely dismissed its possibility. It’s too expensive, said the company, overstating the costs; the public won’t tolerate it, disregarding the growing concerns. Unlike members of Congress, Exxon doesn't deny the threat of climate change; it simply ignores it. And so, as T. Boone Pickens asserts, America continues its march into the future without any energy plan at all. Is Exxon simply deceitful, promising an honest report on a matter of importance to its owners (i.e., its shareholders) and delivering a whitewash, marked by bland generalities and forecasting a future consonant with its corporate fairytale? Or is it a dinosaur, unable to adjust its lumbering 20^th-century body to 21^st-century realities? Or is it just arrogant?

When members of the Harvard community demanded the university divest its Exxon stock, President Drew Faust responded that Harvard’s $32-billion endowment “is not an instrument to impel social or political change.” There may be a compelling reason to divest: under its current management, Exxon seems a lousy long-term investment.

A Pope and a Saint

“Maybe it is because he is from Argentina,” wrote my son Daniel, who spent a semester in Buenos Aires, “but I love Francis. The guy is also a skilled politician.” His note accompanied a news article about the pope’s visit to the Middle East, where Francis presented an image that was at once diplomatic and genuine. I haven’t had much nice to say of late about the Catholic Church, whose record of abuse and concealment is one of the most chilling stories of modern history. And while his public persona is necessarily ahead of substantive changes in the church, Francis offers a hopeful new direction. On his trip to Israel and Palestine he paid homage at two powerful walls – the Western Wall, holiest of Jewish sites, and the West Bank barrier some call the “apartheid wall.” He had travelled a long way not only from Rome but from his predecessor, Pius X (a man also known for his “simple origins”), who in 1903 rebuffed Theodor Herzl’s request for help in establishing a Jewish state, telling the founder of Zionism that all his followers should instead convert to Catholicism. That kind of dogmatic sectarianism remains a discordant force in a world in which people continue to slaughter each other over religious beliefs. Francis intentionally took the name of a saint who offered the church a truly revolutionary path, which it rejected. Eight centuries later a pope’s embrace of openness, tolerance and humility are a measure of his courage and our hope.

Against the Odds

Since well before Thomas Jefferson, Americans have idealized small farmers. Distrustful of cities, they placed inordinate political power in rural districts until the Supreme Court upheld “one person, one vote” 50 years ago. Long before that, however, small farms had been in decline, the victims of public policy, mechanization and the power of corporate agriculture. To learn more about the state of the small farmer in New England, which is a tough place to farm, I visited Fred Dabney, a nurseryman in Westport, Massachusetts, with whom I squandered countless nights playing pool at college. Long active in state and local agriculture, Fred served as chairman of the Massachusetts Agricultural Board, until he was “booted” for publicly objecting to its politicization.

Threats to the sustainability of local farming come from the ever-expanding reach of federal regulations, which inundate small farmers with bureaucratic overload and compliance costs. They come also from Massachusetts’s famed political cronyism – “You’re supposed to do what they tell you to do,” Fred said of his firing, “and not ask any questions.”

But the biggest threats to the small farmer are (1) the corporate farmer, whose thousands of acres planted in a single crop, protected by Monsanto’s wondrous chemicals, massive machinery and Congressional committee rooms, long ago blurred the line between industry and agriculture; and (2) the real-estate developer who continues to devour prime farmland.

Yet against such odds, Massachusetts’ agriculture is growing, building on a steady campaign that locally produced food is tastier, healthier and safer than its corporate competitors.

Personal Resistances

In his column yesterday, “Four Words Going Bye-Bye”, The New York Times’ Tom Friedman wrote, “A lot of what drives today’s news derives from the fact that privacy is over, local is over, average is over and later is over.” We can’t expect privacy in a world of cell phones, cameras and YouTube; local in a “hyperconnected” world; average in an economy of cheap labor and snowballing automation; later in a world that humans are so radically altering. This, he declares, is inevitable. We must adjust. No thanks.

I think I’ll resist living in a world that chips away at my humanity. Technology cannot prevent me from having my own thoughts nor keep me from places of beauty, solitude and contemplation. Globalization can’t stop me from nurturing the friendships of a long life nor engaging in the life of my community. I will keep struggling to excel, but only in Lake Wobegon are all the children above average, and it does me no harm to be reminded that I am, in countless ways, very average indeed. After a lifetime of procrastination, I know well the dangers of “later”, but there is not enough “now” for all I still intend to see and do.

My little resistances are more than private refuges from an overbearing world. They are not a retreat, but an effort, however feeble, to assert my unique self, to make my voice heard among the cacophony. They are what make me – what make all of us – human.

Assumptions

A couple of you mentioned watching the Mountaintop-to-Tap video linked to Friday’s post. Three days before we set off on the trek, a man called me from Delhi, NY. He said he was a dairy farmer, had read about the project in the local paper and wanted to film it. With all the headaches trying to launch this thing, I thought, now a dairy farmer wants to film it. Kent Garrett said arthritis was driving him from farming, and he wanted to return to his career as a filmmaker. He also said he’d do the project for free. We agreed to meet at the Belleayre Ski Center in the Catskills. When I arrived, the only other person there was an African-American man. But, hey, I was in a ski resort looking for a dairy farmer. So I waited. When nobody else showed up, I went over. “I’m Kent Garrett,” he said.

He was not your typical dairy farmer. A 1963 graduate of Harvard, Kent had spent 30 years in television news and documentary films, winning two Emmy’s and a Peabody for his pioneering “Black Journal.” With no planning time, he and d.b. Roderick created an unforgettable record of the three-week trek. Kent’s current project is “The Last Negroes at Harvard”, the story of the 19 people of color, including himself, who entered the college in 1959. Five years after Brown v. Board of Education, that was the largest number in Harvard's history.

It’s amazing the people you meet on the other side of your assumptions.

Seeing Delight

A few years ago I organized a 3-week trek on which six high-school students from the inner city and six from an upstate region of woods and dairy farms hiked and rowed the 125-mile length of New York City’s water-supply system, from Mountaintop to Tap. We gave the students cameras and journals to record their experiences, and after our first night in the open, Sean, a 14-year-old Puerto Rican, wrote: “When I woke up this morning I kept thinking about the stars that I saw last night. I live in Brooklyn and at night you don’t really see stars. I mean you’ll probably see a couple here and there but last night I was like WOW! In Brooklyn we have street lights lighting up our streets while over here you have these beautiful stars lighting up your environment.” I don’t know where Sean is now. I have heard he joined the marines. I thought of him this week as I scanned endlessly depressing news headlines: 300 miners killed in Turkey; murder indictments for the drowned children in one Korea, nukes in the other; melting ice in Antarctica; 275 schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria; fires and drought in California. In the relentless roll of heartbreak it's easy to see a frightening, joyless world, without optimism or wonder. For most of Sean's 14 years, the borders of Brooklyn had been the contours of his existence. Then one night, lying in a sleeping bag in a wilderness a hundred miles from home, he looked up and he saw delight.

Five Feet High and Rising

Forty years ago I went to visit an old man on Prince Edward Island who had built an ark in his back yard. He had started it after Jesus had appeared to him one night on top of an apple tree. Crazy stuff, I know, and yet the old man wove a captivating tale of his visions, his beliefs, his carpentry and craftsmanship. He didn’t know when the flood was coming. He just knew it was coming. The day the news of the irreversible melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet made headlines, the Dow Jones average closed up 112 points. So, should we believe the rising markets or the rising oceans? Have stock prices already discounted the effects of climate change? Are only climate skeptics with snorkels left on Wall Street? More likely, though, as Andrew Revkin noted, the shrugging off of climate change has to do with basic differences in our use of language and our understanding of time. The language of science does not translate well into news headlines (and appears to be completely beyond the grasp of Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma); and geologic time isn’t much use for quarterly forecasts. We don't know when the flood is coming. But the science is clear: climate change is real and it is accelerating, and the real lunacy in this story is the refusal of Congress to confront it.

One of these days I might take a ride back to Prince Edward Island and see if that ark is still there.

Just Wondering

The growing chorus about the evils of government can be very confusing: If rich people use their money to support government programs, is that a good thing because it isn’t government money or a bad thing because it reinforces government policies? For example, when John and Leigh Middleton, who made $2.9 billion from cigars, donated $30 million to help Philadelphia’s homeless, were they addressing a vital human need or promoting dependency. They gave their money to Project HOME (Housing. Opportunities. Medical. Education), an organization run by a nun, whose mantra – “None of us are home until all of us are home” – has that old community-organizing ring, and indeed, HOME works aggressively “to impact public policies, educate elected officials, maximize resources for housing and services, and advocate for human and civil rights for persons who are poor, homeless, and/or disabled.” It seeks to improve public welfare not replace it.

Likewise, should people be able to use their private wealth to effect public policy? Take Roxanne Quimby, who made a fortune in lip balm (Burt's Bees) and has spent most of it buying large chunks of land – over 100,000 acres – in Maine’s north woods. She wants to create a national park, an idea that has put property-rights advocates in a quandary. The Quimbys “can do whatever they want with that land,” said the leader of a group opposing the national park. “It’s their land.” Well, everything except give the federal government “a toehold in the northern Maine woods.” That would ruin the neighborhood.

Open Season

This just in. The people of Georgia, speaking through their elected officials, have voluntarily limited their right to carry guns in public. In a law signed by Gov. Nathan Deal, Georgians may not carry weapons past metal detectors in airports and public buildings. And they need permission from their pastor to pack in church. These concessions were part of an overhaul of the state’s archaic gun laws – and yet more evidence of the National Rifle Association’s willingness to compromise in the aftermath of the Sand Hook Elementary School tragedy 17 months ago. In exchange, the Safe Carry Protection Act of 2014 – or the “guns everywhere bill” – allows people to carry their firearms into bars, school zones, public buildings, libraries, really just about anywhere they want, including elementary schools with permission, and right up to the security gate in airports. The legislators did prohibit guns from the state Capitol, which some have suggested is hypocritical. Still, said GeorgiaCarry’s Jerry Henry, “If you are one who likes to protect yourself, you have a whole lot more places to protect yourself.” While Atlanta’s Episcopal bishop told his parishioners, “The prince of peace isn’t spelled P-I-E-C-E. It’s P-E-A-C-E,” past-and-future GOP presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, told “Face the Nation, “I think a well-armed family is a safe family. A well-armed America is a safer America.”

So now we can take our guns to church and open public meetings with sectarian prayer. Not so long ago we seemed to be going in the other direction.

Assessing Obama

Barack Obama is taking a beating these days, from “America the Shrunken” to a president who “doesn't seem excited about all the possibilities for America.” And his “you hit singles” remark brought people back 35 years to Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. Carter actually never used the world “malaise” in his speech that asked us “to join hands [and] commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit.” But his call for unified sacrifice didn’t go over any better in 1979 than Obama’s description of a diplomacy that seeks to “steadily advance the interests of the American people and our partnership with folks around the world." Such comments are deflating for those who prefer exceptionalism to alliances and robust bellicosity to quiet diplomacy.

While the president’s foes have defied him at every turn, his disappointed friends now give him too little credit for his accomplishments. I admit I miss the Obama who captivated a nation in 2008 by helping us imagine a country in which our economic wellbeing didn’t depend on destroying our environment, our values didn’t countenance torture, and our political discourse actually included dialogue – the Obama who literally embodied a nation ready to transcend black and white.

I wonder sometimes if I mistook his biography for vision, his oratory for leadership, the image for the man? I haven’t given up on Obama. But my belief in his – or anyone's – ability to transform Washington's culture is diminished, and so I will look elsewhere for the possibility of real change.

A Lost Generation

The scene in the courtroom was almost as harrowing as the incident on the street. As four men were bound over for last month’s vicious beating of Steve Utash, their supporters laughed and jeered obscenely, while Utash remained hospitalized in critical condition. He had been driving through a Detroit neighborhood when his truck hit a young boy who had run into the street. When Utash stopped to help, he was attacked and would now be dead but for the intervention of Deborah Hughes, a retired nurse who has seen two of her own children die in the city. Utash is white. His attackers are black. This is the Detroit I know primarily through the eyes of my friend Charity Hicks, who talks despondently of a generation of young men so marginalized that they put little value on human life. With rates of poverty and unemployment far higher than during the Great Depression, much of Detroit has become a wasteland of alcohol, drugs and violence. And no one knows what to do.

• Build more prisons? We already have the world’s highest incarceration rate, which has more than tripled in 40 years.

• Stop coddling the poor? We already pay less for food stamps than prisons and more for prisons than schools.

• Hope they stay in the inner city, killing themselves and each other? Then, as Steve Utash showed, we’d better not go there.

• Launch a New Deal-like jobs program? We have a Congress that won’t authorize a dime for such things.

So we turn our backs, lock our communities and create a system of apartheid that is an American tragedy.

But if you go into these cities, into these neighborhoods, you see signs of hope trying to bloom, signs I'll explore in future posts.

Redemption

Last month the Colorado River crossed the Mexican border for the first time in years. It is on its way to the Gulf of California amid hopes that it will revive its delta, which Aldo Leopold described in 1922 as an ecological paradise but which is now a barren, saline desert. In the midst of the worst drought in the region’s history, prolonged negotiations between the U.S. and Mexico – spurred by scientists and environmentalists – have brought water back to the southern Colorado, and there is hope that the once-grand river, destroyed by economic forces bent on extracting every drop of its water, will flow again to the sea. For the past 13 years, John Trotter has been documenting that story in his photographs. He first went to the Colorado after the attempted-murder conviction of a street gang leader, who had orchestrated a beating so severe that John was “left for dead in a pool of blood.” He had been taking pictures of children playing for the Sacramento Bee.

Still traumatized, he sought relief in something “bigger than my own experience.” He started at the bottom, in the delta where the river is only a dry bed, and he found a landscape as damaged as he was, its people eking a living out of dead land. He empathized. He taught himself Spanish. He kept returning. He watched people working for years to bring water to the delta. It had become, for the Colorado and for his own life, “a redemption story.”

A Short History of Drugs

For some reason, this story, reproduced in its entirety, caught my attention last week: “The Australian Michael Rogers can race again after cycling’s governing body accepted that meat he ate in China probably caused his positive doping test.

“Rogers, 34, an Olympic bronze medalist, raced last October in China, where clenbuterol is widely administered to livestock. He tested positive days later at the Japan Cup.”

I’d never heard of Michael Rogers or clenbuterol and have little interest in professional bicycling. Yet the 51-word article, oddly complete in itself, seemed a parable for the modern world, with its randomly connected elements of big-time athletics, widespread drug use and Chinese food production.

“Clen”, it turns out, has a lot of uses. It relieves asthma, makes horses run faster and cows grow quicker, gives athletes bigger muscles and celebrities smaller waistlines. It was made famous by Kirk Radomiski, the NY Mets felonious batboy and Major League steroid supplier, and by the anorexic look of Victoria Beckham, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. It is discussed ad nauseum on bodybuilding web forums and provides one more way for China to poison its people in its relentless push for economic growth.

Remember when we took drugs to take us out of our bodies, instead of because we were obsessed with how those bodies looked? It seems a long arc of history from a bunch of stoned hippies trying to levitate the Pentagon to a man eating a steak in China and testing positively for anabolic steroids in Japan.

Welfare in Black and White

Surprise. Surprise. Cliven Bundy is a racist. Who knew?

Certainly not the Republican politicians and Fox News pundits frantically trying to reel in their words of support after the pot-bellied Nevada rancher's recent pronouncements on “the Negro." Bundy, who knows a thing or two about welfare from decades of feeding his cattle at the public trough, boned up on African-American culture driving past a public housing project in north Vegas. “And one more thing I know about the Negro: they abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton.”

You’d think they’d get it after years of nominating Neanderthals to carry their banner. But Republicans still get all indignant when Todd (“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down”) Akin turns out to be a misogynist. Or Christine (teaching evolution is big government “imposing beliefs on local schools”) O’Donnell an idiot. Or Michele (“It isn’t that some gay will get some rights. It’s that everyone else in our state will lose rights”) Bachmann a homophobe.

Now American-flag-waving patriot Cliven (“I don’t recognize the American government as even existing”) Bundy wonders, “are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?”

Hmmm, Cliven, good question. In your case, I’m going with government subsidy.

But as all those Germans said in the 1930s, “We had no idea.”

Patriots and Immigrants

On Monday, Patriots Day, a year after the terror bombings, an American won the Boston Marathon for the first time since 1983. His name is Meb Keflezighi. Meb Keflezghi? Was I the only person to do a double take? Does he sound American to you? So I did some digging: birth certificate (long form), called Ed Snowden in Moscow, Wikipedia. His full name is Mebrahtom Keflezighi, and it’s pronounced: mebrāhtōm kifl'igzī. Seriously. I’m surprised they let him within 26 miles of Boston, where they still call John A. Kelley, who ran 61 marathons, won two and has a statue on the course, an “Irishman.”

The last “Bostonian” I remember running Boston was my determined friend John Mason, Justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court and a direct descendant of John Adams. When I couldn’t find his name in the next day’s Boston Globe, I accused him of not finishing. I should have known better. He just didn’t cross the line until after all the reporters had gone home. That’s Boston – and that was John, who fared less well in his race with cancer 10 years ago.

Meb Keflezghi was born in Asmara, Eritrea, from which his family fled in 1987. He was an All-American at UCLA and became an American citizen after graduation. In these times, when defining an American is so contentious, it’s inspiring that a man named Meb Keflezighi won America's oldest race. And I know no one is cheering more loudly than John Mason, who believed passionately in both America and the American Dream.

Gas Man Fights "Unbearable" Erection in North Texas Town

Rex Tillerson and his wife, Renda, of Bartonville joined suit with neighbors to demand the demolition of a 160-foot water tower near their North Texas ranch. The plaintiffs claim the tower is illegal and unsightly, and they oppose Cross Timbers Water Supply Corp’s plan to sell “water to oil and gas explorers for fracking,” arguing the tower compromises their right to live in an “upscale community free of . . . structures that might . . . adversely impact the rural lifestyle they sought to enjoy.” Rex and Renda have joined a growing movement of families, across all walks of life, who are fighting back against corporate intrusions into their back-to-the-land dreams. Indeed, their concerns about “big water” echo those expressed last month by Dune Lankard on the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez fiasco: “It was more than just an oil spill,” Lankard, a member of the Eyak Alaska Eagle clan, told NPR. “We had an Alaskan dream, and that dream was intact for several thousands of years. And our relationship was with that land and sea and all of those animals . . . And so when that was disrupted, that fabric of our way of life and our Alaskan dream was also stolen from us.”

In other news:

• FoxBusiness reported last week that Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson’s 2013 compensation fell to $28.1 million.

• The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Tillersons have dropped out of the lawsuit.

• Exxon has pledged to report in September on the environmental impact of fracking.

• Tomorrow is Earth Day.

Note: I have a memory of a variation on the headline from 50 years ago, but extensive research (i.e. googling) produced no source to credit.

Good Friday

On Good Friday 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head. The assassination came five days after the surrender at Appomattox and the effective collapse of Southern resistance, and the two events have ever since shaped the narrative of American history. In her fascinating new book, Appomattox, Elizabeth Varon disputes the long-held myth that “Grant’s magnanimity” and “Lee’s stoic resignation” initiated “a process of national healing,” arguing instead that the two men interpreted the peace totally differently. For Grant the victory was one of “right over wrong,” and he looked forward to a transformed and prosperous nation. For Lee the defeat was one of “might over right,” and he sought a restoration, without slavery, of the old patrician order. Tragically, Lincoln’s murder helped ensure that Lee’s vision prevailed. We see it in depictions of Grant, “the butcher,” and of Sherman sowing carnage from Atlanta to the sea; of the “Birth of a Nation’s” ruthless Reconstruction when the Klan arose to restore honor and order to a lawless South; of greedy carpetbaggers deflowering a helpless land; of an age of gentility “Gone With the Wind.” And so, despite the Union’s overwhelming victory and the generous terms of the peace, the restoration of the old order – also known as Jim Crow – brutally repressed those whom the war had just emancipated. It took another century for the Civil Rights and Voting acts to address those wrongs – and 50 years more for the Roberts Court to roll them back.

Leading from the Rear

Following its decision to report on its stranded assets,” two weeks ago, ExxonMobil has agreed to disclose its research on the risks of fracking. Both decisions, long resisted by Exxon, came because of shareholder pressure. Enter Harvard University in response to pressure from its shareholders – students and faculty – to divest its portfolio of fossil-fuel corporations. “Climate change poses a serious threat to our future – and increasingly to our present,” wrote university president Drew Faust. “Harvard has a vital leadership role to play [and] a special obligation and accountability to the future.” It will do so in three areas: “supporting innovative research focused on climate change solutions, reducing our own carbon footprint, advancing our commitments as a long-term investor.”

While the last includes laudable and long-overdue initiatives – joining other organizations to develop best-practice guidelines and drive corporate disclosure – it specifically rejects divestment.

I have no problem with that, but Faust seems to suggest that Harvard cannot use its vast fortune in support of its core values. The endowment, Faust wrote, “is not an instrument to impel social or political change,” but a sacrosanct fund that must be above politics. Harvard is a voracious fundraiser, and in building its $32-billion endowment, it made plenty of political decisions.

Small investors are increasingly taking responsibility for their investments. If Harvard is truly committed as an institution to tackling climate change, how can it refuse to put its money where its mouth is? Don't they teach ethics in Cambridge anymore?

The Souls of His Shoes

On our last day in Sicily, we climbed on Mt. Etna, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, whose snow-covered summit rises 11,000 feet above the Mediterranean Sea. Walking on hardened lava left from an enormous eruption in 2002, we came to an ominous hole in the mountain floor. Our guide explained that the source of Etna’s magma is – incredibly – beneath the African continent across the Mediterranean, and then he casually tossed in a rock. “It is a very, very deep hole,” he said. “Listen for the sound of the bottom.” We listened . . . and listened, but there was no sound. It was beyond eerie, and we all immediately stepped back from the rim. I envisioned people walking around China with stones embedded in their heads. I was, for some reason, reminded of George Bush’s remark on first meeting Vladimir Putin in 2001: “I looked into his eyes and saw his soul.” In a career filled with loony utterances, none has proved more delusional. The Decider touted his ability to “read people” and make decisions with “his gut,” but maybe this wasn’t the best way to make policy. The Russians have long built Potemkin villages, and unimaginative men rarely see past the façade. As events unfold in Ukraine and Russia, and we watch Putin metamorphose into Stalin with a pretty face, it’s hard to find much evidence of a soul. I think of Bush bedazzled, and wonder when he looked in Putin’s eyes, whether he saw only the soles of his feet.