The Para-Rigger

The near crash of Air Astana Flight 1388

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/flying-the-unflyable-the-near-crash-of-air-astana-flight-1388-88878e2eb3c4

On October 17th, technicians completed the replacement of the cables with carbon steel versions. Following proper procedure, they replaced each cable one at a time, ensuring that the existing configuration was maintained — only, that configuration was wrong, and nobody noticed.

Unaware that their aircraft was dangerously unairworthy, the pilots taxied to the runway and took off normally at 13:31, climbing away into the dense rainclouds which blanketed the airport. They had no idea that they were about to be thrust into one of the most dramatic and lengthy in-flight emergencies in recent memory.

The Transformations of John Donne

Today's selection -- from Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell. John Donne (1572 – 1631) was a celebrated English metaphysical poet who served as a soldier and as dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, where he was known for his sermons. He lived a life often filled with horror:

"Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne is incapable of being just one thing. He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over: he was a poet, lover, essayist, lawyer, pirate, recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the King, dean of the finest cathedral London. It's traditional to imagine two Donnes -- Jack Donne, the youthful rake, and Dr Donne, the older, wiser priest, a split Donne himself imagined in a letter to a friend -- but he was infinitely more various and unpredictable than that.

"Donne loved the trans- prefix: it's scattered everywhere across his writing -- 'transpose', 'translate', 'transport', 'transubstantiate'. In this Latin preposition -- 'across, to the other side of, over, beyond' -- he saw both the chaos and potential of us. We are, he believed, creatures born transformable. He knew of transformation into misery: 'But O, self-traitor, I do bring/The spider love, which transubstaniates all/And can convert manna to gall' -- but also the transformation achieved by beautiful women: 'Us she informed, but transubstantiates you'.

Donne, painted by Isaac Oliver

"And then there was the transformation of himself: from failure and penury, to recognition within his lifetime as one of the finest minds of his age; one whose work, if allowed under your skin, can offer joy so violent it kicks the metal but of your knees, and sorrow large enough to eat you. Because amid all Donne's reinventions, there was a constant running through his life and work: he remained steadfast in his belief that we, humans, are at once a catastrophe and a miracle.

"There are few writers of his time who faced greater horror. Donne's family history was one of blood and fire; a great-uncle was arrested in an anti-Catholic raid and executed: another was locked inside the Tower of London, where as a small schoolboy Donne visited him, venturing fearfully in among the men convicted to death. As a student, a young priest whom his brother had tried to shelter was captured, hanged, drawn and quartered. His brother was taken by the priest hunters at the same time, tortured and locked in a plague-ridden jail. At sea, Donne watched in horror and fascination as dozens of sailors burned to death. He married a young woman, Anne More, clandestine and hurried by love, and as a result found himself thrown in prison, spending dismayed ice-cold winter months first in a disease-ridden cell and then under house arrest. Once married, they were often poor, and at the mercy of richer friends and relations; he knew what it was to be jealous and thwarted and bitter. He was racked, over and over again, by life-threatening illnesses, with dozens of bouts of fever, aching throat, vomiting; at least three times it was believed he was dying. He lost, over the course of his life, six children: Francis at seven, Lucy at nineteen, Mary at three, an unnamed stillborn baby, Nicholas as an infant, another stillborn child. He lost Anne, at the age of thirty-three, her body destroyed by bearing twelve children. He thought often of sin, and miserable failure, and suicide. He believed us unique in our capacity to ruin ourselves: 'Nothing but man, of all envenomed things/Doth work upon itself with inborn sting'. He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute.

"But there are also few writers of his time who insisted so doggedly and determinedly on awe. His poetry is wildly delighted and captivated by the body -- though broken, though doomed to decay -- and by the ways in which thinking fast and hard were a sensual joy akin to sex. He kicked aside the Petrarchan traditions of idealised, sanitised desire: he joyfully brought the body to collide with the soul. He wrote: 'one might almost say her body thought.' In his sermons, he reckoned us a disaster, but the most spectacular disaster that has ever been. As he got older he grew richer, harsher, sterner and drier, yet he still asserted: 'it is too little to call Man a little world; except God, man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world doth, nay, than the world is.' He believed our minds could be forged into citadels against the world's chaos: he wrote in a verse letter, 'be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.' Tap a human, he believed, and they ring with the sound of infinity.

"Joy and squalor: both Donne's life and work tell that it is fundamentally impossible to have one without taking up the other. You could try, but you would be so coated in the unacknowledged fear of being forced to look, that what purchase could you get on the world? Donne saw, analysed, lived alongside, even saluted corruption and death. He was often hopeless, often despairing, and yet still he insisted at the very end: it is an astonishment to be alive, and it behoves you to be astonished."

author: Katherine Rundell

title: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

page(s): 5-8

The Port Huron Statement - After The Ivory Tower Falls

From After the Ivory Tower Falls by Will Bunch. The Port Huron Statement was a political manifesto of the American student activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) written in 1962:

"The movement that came to be called The New Left united many of the vague stirrings caused by the psychic whipsaw of Cold War anxiety and the comfort-craving materialism of the 1950s. 'The government lied to people and this image that we were fed in school -- our great forefathers and this great democracy and we're the greatest country in the world, blah blah -- when you're confronted with other things,' said [Free Speech Movement activist Lynne] Hollander, referring to segregation and McCarthyism. 'Plus the insecurity of feeling that nuclear war might break out at any time, and these crazy people thinking you could duck under your desk. All of these things came together.'

"They came together in one of the most remarkable documents of the twentieth century: the Port Huron Statement. It was the foundational work of a new group called the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, which ironically arose from the ashes of a leftist youth group backed by the powerful United Auto Workers Union, only to reject the labor-driven brand of liberalism that had defined the Industrial Revolution. The first leader of the SDS was the University of Michigan's [Tom] Hayden. In June 1962, he and his fellow founders of the SDS gathered for a retreat at a UAW summer camp in Port Huron, Michigan, north of Detroit, where they drafted a statement that shunned the old fights over communism in favor of a new politics that rejected both middleclass conformity and Cold War angst. Most significantly, it identified American college campuses as the nexus of a new political and social revolution.

"'We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit,' the Hayden-drafted Port Huron Statement begins famously. 'When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world; the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world.' Their childhood bred complacency, the statement argues, which would be shattered by growing awareness of the destructive power of the atom bomb and the moral indefensibility of racism, especially segregation.

"The 25,700-word statement embraces a newish concept that it labeled 'participatory democracy,' which would give individuals more of a say, in politics and over their own lives. It was a 'New Left' because in pursuit of progressive goals, it rejected the collective action of worker-based early-twentieth-century leftist movements for a kind of personal freedom, made possible -- ironically -- by the liberation of union-aided postwar affluence, and boosted by the free thought of liberal education. It would have been impossible to predict from a 1962 perspective how the desires for personal freedom might someday metastasize -- steered by the generations coming up right behind them -- into things like open-carry gun ownership or refusing to wear a mask during a pandemic. At the peak of JFK's soon-to-be-shattered 'Camelot,' participatory democracy instead was seen as the vehicle that would finally bring about goals like integration, peaceful use of atomic energy, and an end to overseas imperialism.

"In other ways, the Port Huron Statement is a kind of a yin to the yang of [Clark] Kerr's Uses of the University lectures. While the University of California president saw his modern 'multiversity' as the humming factory of a knowledge economy that was making the United States the essential world superpower, Hayden and the SDS saw the university as the last place where a democratic America could be saved -- if students and faculty were allowed to convert their knowledge into political power.

"With labor unions compromised by the Cold War and other key groups such as southern Blacks struggling on the margins, the statement argued that the nation's booming universities were now the last best hope for progressivism as 'the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint.' College campuses, it continued, could be incubators of democracy, exactly as the New Deal technocrats of the Truman Commission era had imagined -- but a true version of democracy, not the corrupted Cold War model. The Port Huron Statement urged that both students and faculty 'wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy' and integrate more real-world issues into the curriculum -- the 1950s notion of college as 'general education,' but on steroids. Students could use the new American way of college as 'a base for their assault upon the loci of power.'

"This was a radical notion. In the short term, this key argument of the Port Huron Statement set the stage for a decade of youthful political energy and revolutionary ideas unlike anything that America has seen before ... or since. Needless to say, the so-called Establishment had no idea what was coming. The newspapers of 1962 didn't bother to dismiss the statement as the sophomoric ramblings of idealistically naive youth, because the newspapers didn't even think this was news. Only when the seeds that were planted near the shores of Lake Huron began to bloom on campuses from Berkeley to Columbia would the postwar Establishment begin to wonder whether its great experiment in taxpayer-subsidized liberal education and free thought had run amok and created a monster. The coming battles that would be waged from the streets of Chicago to Woodstock Nation were only the first shots of a war that has lasted until today. The youth power of the student movement sparked by groups like SNCC and the SDS gave rise to a powerful opposing force -- the backlash that gave voice to Ronald Reagan, then Rush Limbaugh, then Donald Trump."

author: Will Bunch

title: After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics -- and How to Fix It

publisher: William Morrow

page(s): 74-77

In fifty-one they tried to ground the noble DC-3
And some lawyers brought the case before the C.A.B.
The board examined all the facts behind their great oak portal
And pronounced these simple words “The Gooney Bird’s Immortal”

The Army toast their Sky Train in lousy scotch and soda
The Tommies raise their glasses high to cheer their old Dakota
Some claim the C-47’s best, or the gallant R4D
Forget that claim, they’re all the same, they’re the noble DC-3.

Douglas built the ship to last, but nobody expected
This crazy heap would fly and fly, no matter how they wrecked it
While nations fall and men retire, and jets go obsolete
The Gooney Bird flies on and on at eleven thousand feet.

No matter what they do to her the Gooney Bird still flies
One crippled plane was fitted out with one wing half the size
She hunched her shoulders then took off (I know this makes you laugh)
One wing askew, and yet she flew, the DC-3 Two-And-A-Half.

She had her faults, but after all, who’s perfect in every sphere?
Her heating system was a gem; we loved her for her gear.
Of course the windows leaked a bit when the rain came pouring down
She’d keep you warm, but in a storm, it’s possible you’d drown.

Well now she flies the feeder lines and carries all the freight
She’s just an airborne office, a flying twelve ton crate
The patched her up with masking tape, with paper clips and strings
And still she flies, she never dies, Methuselah with wings.