The audio-only version is available here: [podcast title="Ask the Professor, January 30"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2017/January/Ask_Professor_77.mp3[/podcast]

"Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die." Anonymous, variously attributed.

On January 30 of 1835 one Richard Lawrence staggered into the history books by becoming the first person to try to assassinate a sitting United States president. I trust it is clear that I do not think anyone should ever assassinate a U.S. president current or former, so I will not be misunderstood when I say that his choice of Andrew Jackson as his target was, from a narrowly practical point of view, extremely ill chosen.

Lawrence, described by acquaintances as a quiet if diligent house painter, seems to have gone insane in the early 1830s. As his behaviour spiraled out of control he became obsessed with the president, and on January 30 attempted to shoot Jackson as the latter was leaving the U.S. Capitol funeral of Congressman Warren R. Davis, using two pistols notorious for unreliability in the sort of damp weather Washington was then experiencing both of which misfired.

In response Jackson leaped at the would-be assassin and beat him severely with his cane before various Congressmen including Davey Crockett wrestled Lawrence into submission, after which he was put on trial with the prosecutor being Francis Scott Key, the author of "The Star-Spangled Banner". The jury found him "not guilty by reason of insanity" after a five-minute deliberation and he was confined to mental hospitals until his death in 1861.

Trying to murder Jackson at close range was certainly crazy in the colloquial as well as in this case the technical sense. The 7^th president of the United States and its first "border" or hillbilly chief executive was a man with a long history of physical courage, decisiveness and lack of regard for the niceties of social interaction. At 13 he became involved in the American Revolution as a courier, got captured, and when a British officer ordered him to clean his boots responded with a phrase so far from "Merry Christmas" that it earned him a permanent scar on his head and hand from a sabre. But Jackson did not clean the boots.

Later, as President, his closest Senate ally was Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who Jackson had both whipped and shot during a tavern brawl in 1813 in which Benton and his brother also shot and nearly killed Jackson. Jackson himself had earlier killed a man in a duel for insulting his wife Rachel, whom Jackson stole from her cruel husband including, allegedly, once chasing him into the tall grass with a knife.

Jackson was an odd character with a strange mix of impressive virtues and scary vices, a populist and a slaveowner, a cunning calculator with a manic temper. But just about everyone who ever met him would testify that on account of both his virtues and his vices he was about the last man on earth at whom to fire a non-fatal shot at close range. Even Richard Lawrence, in his more lucid post-1835 moments, I imagine.

[podcast title="News and Views with Rob Snow, Jan 27"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2017/January/RobSnow170127.mp3[/podcast]

On this date in history in 1886 one Karl Benz became a hero of entrepreneurship and then, I suppose, a massive ecological villain when he patented a gasoline-powered car. People like me have long praised the automobile as a classic private solution to a pressing public problem, the increasingly intolerable fouling of cities and destruction of forests by… the horse.

I know, it sounds a bit silly. But major cities were being buried in horse poop, drowned in horse pee, and afflicted with tens of thousands of dead horses a year. And more and more forest land was being cleared for pastures to grow the hay all these creatures consumed.

If government had taken charge of the problem, there is no telling what disaster would have ensued. Instead entrepreneurs created a new form of transportation, less picturesque in ways that make me genuinely sad but enormously more efficient and effective. You could not have cottages for the middle class if we all had to take horse carts to them, nor supermarkets or indeed almost any facet of modern life. You could also not have carts that play what was once quaintly called "high fidelity" music, heat your seat and protect you from the elements while a gentle push of your foot accelerates you to 100 km/h. And now that we have seen modernity in all its horror, maybe future waves of technology can allow us to decentralize, slow down, and get back in touch with nature external and internal while retaining some of the gains like, say, laptops that can edit video. Just to pick an example at random.

Of course today the reaction is likely to be that by inventing the gas-powered car Benz (yes, of Mercedes-Benz) played a major role in dooming the planet and its inhabitants to climate change that will drown, fry or otherwise exterminate us all. But even if one grants that he’s about as much of a benefactor to humanity as, say, Sauron, surely we can at least draw the lesson that if we want alternatives to current technology including fossil-fuel-dependent vehicles and power plants, we are far likely to get dynamic, unpredictable, astoundingly effective solutions from the private sector than from central planning.

In turn they may raise new dilemmas over time to replace the ones they solve. But it sure beats government intervention, which reliably creates new messes without fixing the old ones.

"Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot." Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Serendipity is a wonderful word. And we owe it to the eccentric Horace Walpole who coined it in a letter on January 28 of 1754. It is a hard word to translate, perhaps because it speaks to an unexpected and obscure but encouraging facet of reality.

Serendipity loosely means a fortunate discovery. Walpole himself, the reviver of Gothic architecture in his Strawberry Hill House and practitioner of Gothic writing in The Castle of Otranto, derived his neologism it from a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the heroes were, Walpole wrote, "always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of". But it doesn’t just mean blind luck.

It means that when people are engaged in a worthy quest, in a suitably hopeful frame of mind, they often come across something even better than they were seeking. It reminds me of a maxim I acquired from an in-law’s publisher (an example, I think, of serendipity in that I was not expecting to gain wisdom at the book launch where it happened) that in life you must be ready to be lucky.

It sounds silly, perhaps. But it depends on the important truth that, except at the extremes, the difference between lucky and unlucky people is far less the mix of good, bad and ugly that fate sends them but their alertness to the good things. "Unlucky" people often fail to notice breaks they aren’t expecting.

In my view serendipity goes further still. It speaks to a certain beneficial substructure to a universe that often seems on the surface to present precisely the paradoxical mix of indifference and hostility that H.P. Lovecraft devoted himself to depicting graphically. And it justifies a joke that comes from the unlikely and superficially undesirable source known as Woody Allen, that life is like two old ladies discussing the food in their retirement residence.

It’s awful, says one, bland, pasty, salty and lukewarm, really just horrible. Yes, sighs the other, and such small portions too.

There really is something good here, although to find it we often need that elusive and surprising quality given such an oddly fitting name by Walpole. Serendipity. It rolls off the tongue and, I hope, into your life.

"Nothing has been worse than the modern notion that a clever man can make a joke without taking part in it; without sharing in the general absurdity that such a situation creates. It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is undignified; that is why it is so good for one’s soul." G.K. Chesterton, "The Flat Freak," in Alarms and Discursions, quoted in Gilbert! Vol. 4 #7