SPOILERS AHEAD!

Watchmen is about as complex as a tale of morality can get. Ethics are ambiguous, and the story isn't told just on a single scale, but on a scale that ranges from the life of a single individual to the lives of everyone on Earth.

Every character, to some degree, is disgusted by the depravity of human nature. Rorschach manifests his disgust as something of an alternate personality that seeks to dispense ultimate justice. The Comedian similarly understands human depravity, and his "joke" is that he chooses to ignore it and instead become a caricature of that depravity. Perhaps he thinks that his masquerade will make him immune to the horrors that people foist upon each other - and, indeed, that the Comedian eventually visits on plenty of other people. But toward what will soon be the end of his life, he realizes that the joke was on him: the universe doesn't care if he was being ironic or not. All that matters is himself, and he is driven to tears by the understanding that he was not a good person. Dr. Manhattan is disgusted not by the actions of mankind, but by its triviality. Since Dr. Manhattan can see and do things that ordinary humans can only dream of ("I have walked on the surface of the sun," he tells Ozymandias), the human race is a speck to him, no more important than a similar amount of dust. His attitude toward people is one of detached amusement; human depravity is interesting as an academic study, but that's it.

These "superheroes" hold the fate of mankind in their hands. One of Watchmen's big questions is whether or not we should entrust such power to mere mortals. Nietzsche's superman (or, more correctly, over-man) is apropos here, not the least because this is a story of supermen and women. The boundary between superhero and supervillain is often represented as a difference of vision. The superhero tries to create an altruistic utopia (one of the very, very few things that Joel Schumacher's abominable Batman and Robin gives us is this line from Alfred which sums up the mission of all superheroes: "For what is Batman if not an effort to master the chaos that sweeps our world? An attempt to control death itself"). The supervillain seeks narcissistic tyranny, attempting to re-make the world in his own image, or to destroy mankind, or to engage in a selfish, ignoble endeavor that will kill lots of people. Perhaps this is what made the original comic book so groundbreaking: in Watchmen, there are really no supervillains. Superheroes are trying for an altruistic utopia, but going about it in ways that remind us of supervillains. The literary critic Northrup Frye said that mythological stories were about protagonists who were greater than us both in kind and degree (meaning they are physically better human beings than we are, and morally better, as well). Watchmen is a mythological story about protagonists who are, for the most part, the same as us in kind (with the exception of Dr. Manhattan), but all of whom are the same as us in degree.

Watchmen returns us to the origin of the superhero, the over-man who is permitted to break society's rules (1) because he is morally superior to normal men (meaning he will not abuse the power he is given) and (2) because society's rules hinder his ability to create that altruistic utopia. To simplify, "you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs." Of course, when the eggs are human lives, that's where the issue of morality comes into play. It gets murkier once we discover that "supermen" are men; that is, human beings who are no more morally upstanding than anyone else. Even Dr. Manhattan, the only true superhero in that he is the only person with extra-natural powers, has his understanding of humanity limited by his apathy toward it. There are times when amorality is just as immoral as immorality. (When The Comedian shoots a Vietnamese woman, the mother of his child, in Vietnam, he rightly chastises Dr. Manhattan for not doing something to stop it, given that Dr. Manhattan can see the future and manipulate matter.) Is it is for this reason that one of the taglines of the film and comic book - "Who watches the watchmen?" - is so poignant. In the real world, why would we entrust our safety to a bunch of people who are accountable to no one but each other (and even then, they can't really stop each other from doing evil)? Comic books readily accept that entire cities or even nations surrender their security to vigilantes, without oversight. Though it was not intended as a criticism of the Bush administration, the situation is similar: don't trust your safety to someone whose idea of oversight is "Trust me." Given what Watchmen shows us about humanity, there's no reason we should trust anyone, even people who claim to have our best interests in mind. There is something inherently contradictory in the existence of a person who breaks the law so that he can enforce it. We like the superhero who enforces the law; we dislike the superhero who breaks it. Nevertheless, we knew the entire time that the superhero was operating outside the law, and that he could change his mind on a whim. A benevolent dictator is still a dictator nonetheless.

Morality is ambiguous because humans are flawed. In Watchmen, there are no fewer than three concurrent stories of morality. One is the overarching story of potential nuclear war and Ozymandias' attempt to stop it. A second is the rape (or not?) of the original Silk Spectre by the Comedian, resulting in the birth of Sally Jupiter. The third example is to be found only in the graphic novel. "Tales of the Black Freighter" is a story within the story, a pulp comic book that this week is spinning a tale of a shipwrecked man's desperate attempts to get back home before the pirates who shipwrecked him do. If you're familiar with "Appointment in Samarra," then you will be familiar with "Tales of the Black Freighter." In this last story of morality, the ends most vehemently do not justify the means. "Black Freighter" is about what happens when a man thinks he is a superman, but does everything wrong.

The antithesis of any superhero comic is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which a Nietzschean superman, Mr. Kurtz, goes crazy and becomes a tyrant in the darkest part of Africa. (If this all sounds familiar, it's because Apocalypse Now is based on Heart of Darkness.) Kurtz could have used his considerable power for good, but being that he was a human being, there was always a fifty-fifty chance that he would have used them for evil. If Anne Frank's motto was, "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart," Kurtz's motto was, "The horror! The horror!" Watchmen falls somewhere between Anne Frank's naïveté and Kurtz's desperation. Where Kurtz thought that loathing was the only solution for a doomed world inhabited by flawed people, Watchmen acknowledges that, as a population, people are generally good, but they must sometimes be goaded - or even forced - into that goodness.

After almost three hours, Watchmen - exactly like its source material - leaves us with an icky feeling. Audiences are used to stories in which there is a clear hero and a clear villain. Watchmen instead presents us with characters who are morally ambiguous, as all of us are. On the one hand, Ozymandias has succeeded in creating world peace. On the other hand, fifteen million people had to do die in order to get that peace. Do the ends justify the means? Can a Good outcome be derived from Evil actions? Alan Moore would have us think so.

In the abstract, Truth is Beauty by nature of it being Truth. But it can come in an ugly, and even inhibiting, form. At the end of Heart of Darkness, Marlow meets with Kurtz's widow back in the safety of London civilization. She asks Marlow what Kurtz's last words were. Marlow knows what they were - Kurtz's lament toward a self-destructive and hopeless species - but he lies, instead. Marlow tells her that his last word was her name. The end of the similarly morally-ambiguous The Dark Knight presents us with the same lie: that Harvey Dent was not Two-Face and did not kill a lot of people. Watchmen offers us a third lie: that Dr. Manhattan, not Ozymandias, killed fifteen million people. All three of these lies are ugly by virtue of their not being the truth. And yet, here in The Real World, far from philosophical abstraction (where Dr. Manhattan lives, incidentally), the truth would have taken a far uglier toll.

Perhaps fiction is so littered with Manichean stories of absolute good and absolute evil because we understand, deep down, that no such things exist. We don't want to read and watch stories of people who are like us; we want stories of people who are better than us, people who strive for ideals without compromise. Rorschach refuses to compromise and is vaporized for his trouble. He was unwilling or unable to admit that idealism, in the sense of implementing ideals without compromise, is not possible in a world filled with flawed beings. We would no more expect justice to be doled out by a robot than we would expect ideals to implemented without compromise. Rorschach is analogous to the Terminator in that he is free of remorse and will absolutely not stop until his mission, to rid the world of evil, is complete. But he ignores the fact that there are kinds and degrees of evil; is a lie that saves five billion people more or less evil as a truth that kills five billion people? It's easy to claim that Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth when you're reading it on a page. But when the Doomsday Clock is five minutes to midnight, all those aphorisms ring with only futility.

Posted by Mark at 2:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

He's finally gone! After eight years of desperately trying to destroy the country, George W. Bush is gone. It's especially fitting that Dick Cheney was wheeled to the inauguration looking like Lionel Barrymore in It's a Wonderful Life. He certainly is sick in his mind and sick in his soul.

So no more complaining about George W. Bush.

Now, it's time to fix everything he broke. Maybe we can start with attitudes about abortion. This is very funny: anti-abortion advocates roundly agree that women who have abortions should be punished -- but they are unwilling or unable to articulate what that punishment is. They agree that abortion is murder, and yet that are far from ready to suggest that women who have abortions should be sentenced to the same punishment as murderers.

Posted by Mark at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richard D. Erlich

The full bit, as I heard it from a "12-Step" person, was that you'd say to a member of a family in denial (of alcoholism in the family, or whatever), "Uh, about the hippopotamus in your living room ..." And the response would be, "There is no hippopotamus, and besides, it's only a small hippopotamus -- and we never talk about it outside the family," or, probably, at all.

The joke made an important point: families with problems obvious to outsiders often deny the problems, minimize them, and, when finally conscious of them, will still refuse to deal with them.

A country isn't a family, but -- about some hippopotamuses in America's living room ....

Three big ones are (1) our identity as a people, (2) population policy, and (3) drug policy.

In a recent column, Bill O'Reilly talks about the "deep divisions in the United States" that are in small part revealed in arguments over Christmas.

For once O'Reilly may understate.

Anthony Burgess somewhere calls America -- with disapproval -- "a secular, revolutionary republic." That's one possibility, an identity we celebrate on the Fourth of July. We may also be a nation or a Judeo-Christian nation or a plain old Christian nation; and a quick surf on the web will bring you to sites where we're a "White, Christian nation." Or we may be more ecumenically and less racistly a religious and family-oriented nation, a nation many celebrate on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Our view of ourselves makes a difference, certainly for me.

I'm not Christian, and to orthodox Klanners and neoNazis I'm not White. If the USA is a White and/or Christian nation, a lot of Americans are excluded: me for one, but also Catholics, according to a hardly-unique college student who said, "I used to be Catholic, but now I'm Christian."

If we're essentially a secular republic, born in an Enlightenment revolution, we can all be citizens, if we agree on the basic principles of the republic. Which is good and my position, but is rather cold and intellectual even for me: I don't celebrate Christmas, but I do like Thanksgiving; far more important, in emergencies, the emotional strength of nationhood is crucial.

Seeing ourselves as a nation can also ease decision-making on population policy and drug policy.

For population policy, "People are the riches of a nation," and a modern economy demands growth: "More people, more sales." And, of course, "In numbers there is strength": large nations can support powerful militaries and survive high casualties. So if we're a nation, we should continue encouraging bearing and raising lots of kids, providing public education, tax breaks, and other benefits even for couples with four or five children.

For drug policy, the rule for a nation is what William Bennett once said it is: the laws are the laws and what is crucial is obedience to those laws. A nation is "the family writ large" -- a patriarchal family -- and the kids are to follow Dad's rules, and that is that; indeed, a few weird rules are a good idea: sensible rules test mostly common sense; nonsensical ones train in obedience and -- each time obeyed -- reinforce parental authority.

But re-producing lots more Americans and people who want to live like Americans is a bad idea in a world of environmental degradation and declining resources. Continuing "The War On Drugs" warps public discourse -- a "drug-free America" would have to do without antibiotics, aspirin, and beer -- hurts Black and Hispanic communities and the young, and undercuts far more literal U.S. warfare in Afghanistan, while worsening problems in such neighbors as Mexico, Columbia, and Peru.

Nation vs. republic -- and there are other ways to see ourselves -- can't be resolved and probably shouldn't be. But we should be conscious of the conflict here and careful and civil in balancing claims on our identity. For population, drugs, or most other real-world issues, there are no neat, logically elegant solutions.

As with troubled families, some figurative hippos will stick around; we must, though, notice that they're in the living room, acknowledge the size of the problem, and talk seriously about some clean-up.

Richard D. Erlich retired from the English Department at Miami University, Oxford, OH, and now lives in a milder climate in California.

Posted by Mark at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Is this thing still here? I've neglected it for some time.

Anyway.

Presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain has said before that he is definitely opposed to attempts to de-privatize the health care industry. McCain, ever a Republican, believes that the market will sort things out. As I have opined before, this position makes no sense: the "invisible hand" trope invented by Adam Smith works only when the interests of business and the interests of the public are congruous. In the case of health care, the market cannot sort things out by design. The health care customer wants the most health care he can get. The health care company wants to provide the least health care possible. Why? Because the less health care a company provides, the greater its profits, and in a capitalist economic system, profit maximization is the name of the game. Therefore, it is impossible for the market to solve the problem of health care.

Health care is one of those things that the market may do "efficiently" in the sense that it maximizes marginal benefit and minimizes marginal cost. But this efficiency is averaged out over the entire health care industry. On average, Americans have good health care. But on the individual level, things are rotten. 18 million Americans are un-insured, and millions more are under-insured, meaning they can go to the doctor for a routine visit, but if a catastrophe were to happen -- a family member needed a heart transplant, for example -- they would be unable to afford the expense and would have to let that family member die, or go into massive debt. Contrary to what Bush & Co. would have you believe, the number one reason Americans go into debt is not unrestrained spending on Faberge eggs; it's health care spending, necessitated by aa health care system that provides a level of service equal with a person's ability to pay. Can you pay $1,000 a month? Great! You get top-tier care. Can you pay $300 a month? You'll get middling-level care.

And, truthfully, the market is not sorting things out. The markets sloughs off onto the government -- as it always does -- those people who cannot afford its products. If you can't afford health care, then you are shuffled to Medicaid, where taxpayers foot the bill because insurance companies don't want to. This is typical of the private market, and a trait that is frequently overlooked by Republicans who trumpet the superiority of the market. The "this" is this: the private firm reaps for itself the benefits of private spending, but passes its losses onto the government. For all the trumpeting of free enterprise that Republicans make, they are unwilling to let the market deal with the losses as well as the profits. This is why they routinely vote for corporate welfare: tax breaks, exemptions to regulations, absorption of debt by taxpayers, monopolization. This is what the housing industry is receiving right now: taxpayers will end up absorbing the losses generated by a mortgage industry that knowingly fooled consumers and made a boatload of money unsustainably. This is what happened in 2005 when Congress voted to take over United Airlines' pension plan after United decided it could no longer afford to pay out pension benefits.

Is this not the definiton of a double standard? Private individuals are expected to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps, to be unflinchingly self-reliant, and not expect the government to save them when they fall. Yet, a corporation is allowed to reap the benefits of an unfair, unsustainable, and possibly illegal practice, and yet, when that practice breaks down and starts costing the corporation money, individual Americans -- many of whom had nothing to do with the corporation -- are expected to pick up the check. How does this make sense?

Posted by Mark at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

July 4, 1776 was not the day America was founded. If anything, that honor belongs to Sept. 17, 1787, when the Constitution was introduced to the Constitutional Committee in Philadelphia. Or, perhaps it is Apr. 23, 1789, when George Washington was sworn in as the first president of the new United States of America. But July 4 is a red-letter date in American history only because the Declaration of Independence was introduced to the Second Continental Congress on that day.

The Declaration was authored by a committee consisting of Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Robert Livingston of New York, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, John Adams of Massachusetts, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut. The document was authored mostly by Jefferson, with the rest of the committee making changes here and there. The Declaration contains references to God, but that by no means indicates that the official religion of the United States was intended to be Christianity; indeed, the Declaration is not even legally binding. At its heart, it is a persuasive essay that declares, in no uncertain terms, that the American colonies intend to separate from England, and then enumerates the reasons why.

The colonists were unhappy with their treatment by their king, George III. Though technically British citizens, American colonists saw themselves as different from their countrymen on the other side of the Atlantic. The sheer expanse of time and distance that separated London from New York was enough to create in Americans the sense that they were at once Englishmen, but also not Englishmen. Couple this with their sense that they were being treated as second-class citizens: they paid taxes to the crown, and yet had no voice in Parliament. When the king began to punish them for their actions – with legislation like the Townsend Acts (a tax on various manufactured goods), the Tea Act (a tax on tea), and the Quartering Act (a requirement that American colonists house British soldiers in their private homes, and the reason for our Third Amendment) – some of the colonists revolted. Southerners more than Northerners wanted to make peace with England (the former had more economic ties to the mother country due to its huge agricultural economy) and initially refused to support any resolution declaring independence from England.

This essay, though, is about a different George who only acts as though he were a king. Of course, his name is George W. Bush – George II – and he fancies himself the be-all and end-all of government. On this July 4, the day we celebrate our fracture from England, how true do Jefferson’s accusations of abuse of power ring when they are applied to the 21st century King George?

The Declaration begins with a statement that overturns everything an 18th-century Englishman would have believed about the nature of government: first, “that all men are created equal,” and that man, through God – or, more appropriately for Jefferson, et al., by virtue of his being a reasoning being – has inherent or “inalienable” rights. Rather than go with the top-down formulation that had characterized government in the West since the Middle Ages, Jefferson instead starts government at the bottom, with the people themselves. Taking a page from social contract theory, the Declaration posits that it is regular people – not deities or kings – who create governments, and create them for particular ends. If a government no longer fulfills the needs of the people who created it (and herein lies an implicit acknowledgment that even the so-called Divine Right of Kings was a human endeavor), then “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government.”

None of this is particularly relevant to our analysis; however, it establishes that governments spring from the bottom up, and not the top down. As far as the Declaration of Independence is concerned, governments ought to be created to serve the people, not the other way around. This has been the basis of western political thought for over two hundred years.

And what of Jefferson’s laundry list of complaints? Here they are, in bullet point format:

1. He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
2. He has forbidden his Governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, has utterly neglected to attend to them.
3. He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
4. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
5. He had dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
6. He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
7. He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
8. He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
9. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices. And the amount and payment of their salaries.
10. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out of their substance.

This isn’t even the entire list of complaints against King George III. And yet, the list is not unfamiliar. Regarding item 1, George W. Bush has refused to assent to laws. He has repeatedly claimed that his powers as commander in chief allow him to ignore limitations placed upon him by Congress, most notably in the field of warrantless wiretapping, although he has also ignored the law in his signing statements and in his refusal to permit White House officials to testify before Congress.

Bush passes laws that are convenient. Recall last year, when the FISA expansion was about to expire, Bush – who claimed that such an expansion was absolutely necessary for the security of the United States – refused to sign a temporary extension of the law so that Democrats would be forced to either give him the limitless powers he asked for, without expiration; or face his public relations wrath as he berated them for not wanting to keep America safe.

Thankfully, item 3 is not possible in this country. Although, Bush has refused to pass legislation that would benefit large numbers of people, most famously SCHIP, which would have expanded government-sponsored health care for low-income children. Bush would rather that they use the private insurance system, which he thinks does a much better job at keeping people healthy.

Item 4 is also not possible in this country, since Congress is required to meet. However, in the early days of the Bush administration, the Republican-controlled Congress prevented investigations into malfeasance and corruption from going forward. Bush was also initially vehemently against the establishment of a commission to investigate the September 11 attacks. And then there’s the establishment of Camp X-Ray, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which was placed there because the administration’s legal eagles believed it was outside the reach of U.S. law. The Supreme Court nixed that notion in 2005.

Item 5 is definitely not within President Bush’s power.

Item 6 is reminiscent of the clamor about Michael Mukasey. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, concerned about Mukasey’s evasive comments regarding torture, did not want to confirm him. Bush challeneged them, saying that Mukasey was his nominee, and if the Senate didn’t want to confirm him, then there would be no attorney general. The Democrats did not call his bluff, and Mukasey – who doesn’t think that waterboarding is torture – is now in charge of enforcing the laws of the United States.

Item 7 is familiar to anyone who has tried to gain “legal” access to this country as an immigrant, or even as a vacationer. Homeland Security requires fingerprinting of every tourist or temporary visa-holder who enters this country. They’re currently trying to pass legislation to require fingerprinting when people leave, as well. And, with the latter plan, the administration wants the airlines to pay for it.

To people who say, “Well, why don’t they just come here legally?” it is clear that those people have never tried to come here legally. Without any well-placed business connections (and, yes, it is mostly business or other money-making connections that get you into the fast-track), an immigrant can expect to wait at least ten years before becoming a U.S. citizen. It can take half that time to become a permanent resident. The system is so confusing and bureaucratic as to render it unusable – to say nothing of the increased cost: almost $1000, up from $325 a few years ago. It’s no wonder that people come across the border illegally.

Regarding item 8, see item 1. Bush selectively enforces the laws he wants to enforce. When Harriet Miers and Josh Bolton didn’t respond to their subpoenas to testify before Congress, Congress ordered the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia to prosecute them for contempt. Bush, in turn, in his capacity as the chief executive, ordered the U.S. Attorney not to respond to the contempt request.

Item 9: refer to the U.S. attorney firing scandal. Yes, U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, but all evidence points to the attorneys being fired because they were not sufficiently enforcing the political machinations of the president, who has been in a state of “permanent campaign” since his inauguration in 2001.

And, finally, item 10: the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, warrantless wiretapping, the USA PATRIOT Act, the abuse of National Security Letters, and Orwellian projects like Total Information Awareness have eaten away at our right to privacy so much so that Americans no longer possess an expectation of privacy.

Here we are, 232 years after Jefferson penned the Declaration, and we are – where? In the same place! We face tyranny at the hands of a king named George, who believes that he alone has the power of the entire government at his fingertips. We face a government that seeks to erode the principle that governments serve the people. We face an executive who is uninhibited in his protestations that he is above the law. We face a system that, if it had its way, would be able to delve into the minds of all Americans and know what each one is thinking at any given time.

Jefferson’s best axiom is not contained in the Declaration, but around the inside of the rotunda in his monument in Washington, D.C. If I may be nostalgic, the first time I read this line as an eighth-grade student on a field trip, I felt inspiration tingle up my spine: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Whether you believe in God or not is immaterial: swear on whatever you want, but as Americans, each of us is obligated to declare our hostility against tyranny over one of the most important things that has ever appeared on planet Earth: the mind of man (and woman). The "inalienable rights" Jefferson wrote about are what keep that mind up and running; without them, there is no freedom of the mind, and thus no reason to exist.

This Independence Day, remember that an American’s political loyalty is to the Constitution – not the president, not the military, not a party. For it is that Constitution that keeps our worst dystopian fears from coming true and from rendering the words Jefferson wrote as nothing more than vacant poetry.

Posted by Mark at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richard D. Erlich

Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama is politically a Baby Boomer, and I'm among the throngs hoping the 2008 presidential election "turns the page" on the culture wars of the 1990s, which means getting beyond the Boomer clashes of the 1960s. Still, the underlying issues will remain, and a key one is good to think about around the Fourth of July: What is America?

From the ads on TV, you'd think we're just an economy, a conglomeration of consumers and hustlers. But we'll undoubtedly get an old-fashioned Fourth of July speech or two that remind us of the birth of the Great Experiment: the American Republic. That's one theory, and the one I like. But the Republic has competitors.

In a book in 1999, Patrick J. Buchanan argued that we're "A Republic, Not an Empire," so there's the imperial option, but that one is out of favor. For a while we won't be hearing about a benevolent American empire using our military to bring democracy and free-market civilization to Earth's lesser folk. Afghanistan, as a cynical observation has it, is where empires go to die, and Iraq and Afghanistan have exhausted for a long while any US fantasies of empire.

What competes with the Republic — in most Americans' vocabularies and subconscious minds, and as a subtext of conscious debate — is America as a nation.

I'm old enough to remember people for whom there was nothing subconscious or subtextual about it: people declaring America "a White Protestant Nation." We've progressed, and the "White" has mostly dropped out, and "Protestant" has been ambiguously expanded; so what you hear nowadays is "Christian nation" or sometimes "Judeo-Christian nation," or, most often, just "nation," with the listener free to supply any modifiers.

On the one side, then, there's the republic, perhaps "a secular revolutionary republic," in, if I recall correctly, Anthony Burgess's disapproving formulation.

Or we may be a nation: one people, with a shared history and descent, and maybe with one religion — or at least one monotheistic religious tradition.

How you usually see us has important implications.

To start with, a Christian nation includes just Christians and excludes a lot of American citizens, including Catholics if the nation is run by people who can say, as one of my students did, "I used to by Catholic, but now I'm a Christian."

A nation can have all sorts of governments, with the most "natural" one probably monarchy: nations are tribes "writ large," and tribes can be confederations of clans — and clans can be seen as big extended families. As the father is the natural head of the family, even so, the king is the natural head of the nation.

Trust me on this: I'm not old enough to have heard such arguments in church, but I've studied enough English history to have read the old homilies on obedience to rulers. Nowadays, most people would never make such arguments explicitly: we speak of ourselves as democrats, not mere republicans. Still, the old arguments for kingly prerogatives are implicit in arguments for unrestrained presidential power, or talking about the president as "commander-in-chief," even over civilians — reversing the theory of the president as chief executive but still a servant of the (capital "P") People.

A republic can have only one philosophy of government: republican, and you become a citizen of the American by loyalty to that doctrine. Implicitly or explicitly you agree to defend the Constitution of the United States, and, in theory, you're willing to risk your life for that Constitution and even put your children at risk, if need be, to defend it.

For the nation, you can pledge allegiance to the flag and throw in the Republic almost as an afterthought. And if the Constitution gets in the way of protecting the nation — most centrally its people and maybe its flag — then elements of the Constitution can go.

If America is the nation, national security and survival trumps all, and even national symbols become nearly sacred.

We're not going to get beyond this tension, and to some extent shouldn't. The republicans get the Glorious Fourth (of July) and get to wave the flag a bit on the Fourth and read the Declaration of Independence; the nationalists have the flag most other days, and patriotic songs and the possibility of celebrating the very neat holiday of a religious, family Thanksgiving.

But the tension is serious.

The question came up over printing the Pentagon Papers of how many Americans one might sacrifice for the First Amendment, and that question remains with protecting Americans against terrorism. I'm a republican, and I'm willing to put myself and other Americans at some risk to protect America: primarily the Constitution, the rights and liberties of Americans. So I'm a mild threat to the nation. And from a republican point of view, people willing to sacrifice key liberties for safety are among the "enemies foreign and domestic" against whom the Constitution must be protected.

We need "to turn the page"; but the political conflict will continue.

Richard D. Erlich is a professor emeritus in English at Miami University, Oxford, OH, currently living in Ventura County, California.

Posted by Mark at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richard D. Erlich

"Pronatalism" is a word we don't hear much any more, not for a generation or so, but it's an important word and needs to be recycled.

"Pronatalism" refers to social policies encouraging the production and successful raising of children. Often these policies have included conscious policies on population; maybe more often, pronatalism has been incorporated into religious beliefs and from there into law and custom.

It doesn't matter much where pronatalist practices come from. "Cultural evolution" is more than a figure of speech: customs that function to help cultures survive will tend to be retained the way useful genetic traits are retained — and pronatalism, by its nature, has been useful for survival.

Until recently. Until humankind's population went into the billions, and the unchecked reproduction of humans became a threat to human species-survival. Until some cultures became somewhat democratic and individualistic, and the press of population put stresses on democratic principles and individuality. It has always been difficult to argue that any individual human is special; the argument becomes almost impossible when there are over six billion other human individuals. "Freedom" has been defined informally as the right to swing your arms until you endanger someone else's nose; some place along the line, population density gets to where there's little room for figurative arm swinging.

Alternatively, an individual human has the same right as any other animal to urinate in the local stream; the people of a small village probably have the right to put their excrement in the river; towns and cities, however, have no right to dump in the river untreated sewage, poisoning decreasing supplies of water.

More of that later. For now keep in mind that surviving societies often have built in a strong degree of pronatalism.

You need to know this if you're to understand the underpinning of the sex laws and "mores" of the United States, including our rules on marriage and attitudes toward the wide range of sexual activities.

Start with obvious questions: Why would people care about occasional or even frequent masturbation in private? Why were there ever laws against oral or anal sex, or just about anything done between or among two or more consenting adults in private? The short and most basic answer, one that underlies both religious and secular, official and popular-culture prohibitions, is "pronatalism."

Humans are highly sexual animals, and across a significant population people will practice all sorts of sexuality. Cultures, though, can evolve ideologies and customs that tend to direct sexuality into practices that are reproductive and nurturing. Consciously or unconsciously, societies can try to limit sex to vaginal sexual intercourse between fertile couples who are likely to conceive, bear, and then raise babies.

Cultures can try to limit sex to "making babies" by people who'll stick around to raise babies: for a very important example, limiting approved sex to married heterosexual couples who have conception as a goal — and, hence, don't try to prevent conception and who avoid sex when the woman is menstruating.

Sound familiar? It should if you know the traditional rules for Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews.

Under a doctrine of pronatalism, such rules make sense, and pronatalism itself makes a lot of sense in military, nationalistic, and economic terms.

Pronatalism becomes a bad idea when it's a game many societies play and the human population rises rapidly, when the standard of living rises enough among many of those societies that they strain the environment.

Think of a billion or two Chinese and Indians starting to live like rich Americans.

Pronatalism in our time makes sense for individual countries that want to maintain their eminence; pronatalism makes sense for older generations who want to retire and be supported by lots of young workers.

For the human species, and for humans who like freedom, pronatalism is a problem.

"Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it" (Genesis 1.28) was good doctrine, and it may be the one commandment we humans have fulfilled; but it is fulfilled now, and it's time to cut back.

We — we humans generally — need to move rapidly toward zero growth in our population, which means rethinking the laws, policies, customs, and attitudes based in pronatalism.

People are going to have sex, but it doesn't have to be reproductive sex; and contraception can be very low-tech, inexpensive, and almost as effective as abstinence in preventing sexually-transmitted diseases. To start, we need a campaign to "Wrap that Willy," making condoms readily available and condom-use a manly thing to do, and a womanly thing to demand.

For other things to do, look at the pronatalist aspects of human cultures, and try to figure out practical ways to encourage reproductive restraint.

Richard D. Erlich is a professor emeritus in English at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), currently living in Ventura County, California.

Posted by Mark at 9:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Once again, Glenn Greenwald is my hero. Greenwald writes in Salon about the notion that "centrism" and "balance" make an opinion good or correct. He argues that the tendency in the so-called mainstream media (The New York Times, CNN, et al.) to demand what they deem objectivity is detrimental to the debate going on:

When there is grave imbalance in political power, corruption or extremism -- as there has been for the last eight years, at least -- then those who preach balance and demand a centrist critique of everything are the ones who are mindless, misleading partisans. They demand centrist equivalencies as an ideology, regardless of whether those equivalencies are real.

He then offers several examples of book reviews in which the authors are criticized not for being wrong, but for being too one-sided. As Greenwald notes, none of these critics ever addresses the issue of the authors' facts.

The street goes both ways. President Bush insisted that the the other side of the story needs to be addressed when it comes to global warming, even though no credible scientific sources suggest that humans are not causing global climate change. State governments that want students to hear both sides of the story when it comes to evolution insist that evolution and intelligent design (or its parent, creationism) don't understand -- or refuse to admit, or wish to be intentionally deceptive regarding the fact -- that there is no scientist who does not believe in evolution.

Greenwald is right: there are times when the "there are two sides to the story" trope is wrong. The Bush administration has consistently broken the law. Period. There is no way to give them the benefit of the doubt. There is no way to come at the adminstration from the other side. They are unilaterally wrong. The notion that humans are not causing climate change is wrong. The notion that evolution is not real is wrong. And, says Greenwald, people shouldn't be afraid to say that.

Posted by Mark at 8:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richard D. Erlich

US politics are getting explicitly generational again, so US media need to take much more care in how they discuss age groups; how the media frame the image of different groups is politically significant.

Case very much in point -- for over a century, people who should know better have established adolescence, and more recently, "late adolescence," as definite stages of human development, and then have generalized about the pathology of adolescence as a time of Sturm und Drang, impulsive violence, still-forming brains, raging hormones, and unique ignorance and stupidity.
In this context, consider two basically innocuous, useful, and well-written recent stories from The New York Times News Service.

An article by Sam Dillon tells us, as headlined in my local newspaper, that a "Survey finds teens are ignorant of history," and "On literature, the teenagers fared even worse. About half knew that in the Bible Job is known for his patience in suffering."

Uh, Job has become a by-word for patience amidst suffering because there have been some powerful adults with agendas and a whole lot more adults who have never read the Book of Job.

In the poem of Job, Job fairly spectacularly loses his patience and accuses God of injustice: "I am blameless; I regard not myself; / I loathe my life. / It is all one; therefore I say, / 'He [God] destroys both the blameless and the wicked'" (9.21-22, RSV, slightly re-punctuated).

Michael Males has suggested at some length that older U.S. teens are in most ways a normal adult U.S. population. I'll suggest that if older U.S. teens are more ignorant of history than their elders, it may be because a bit more of history is history for them, and not remembered current events. If they are ignorant in many areas of history and literature -- and they are -- it may be because they are indeed a normal adult U.S. population.

If they have forgotten or haven't read the Book of Job, they may be in company with a well-educated journalist, his editors, and the writers of a survey important enough to be reported by The New York Times News Service.

Unless they do something major about it, ignorant teens become ignorant grownups, and the ignorance or knowledgeability of American teenagers needs to be put into the context of Americans generally.

Context is also important in teen automobile driving, the background subject of a very interesting piece by Mary M. Chapman and Micheline Maynard on U.S. teens' delaying getting drivers licenses.

Chapman and Maynard remind us that "Overall, teenage drivers have the highest crash risk of any group. Car accidents account for one-third of all deaths of 16- to 18-year-olds. Also, more 16-year-old drivers die because of driver error than those from the ages 17 to 49."

Is the problem that teenagers have the highest number of new drivers of any age group, or is the problem that teenagers are teenagers? We get no information on how older new drivers do. Nor do we get any information about driver error among drivers 50-years old and up.

And the high percentage of deaths from car accidents for teens may be the downside of something very good: that teens don't often die any more from infectious diseases and are not prone to dropping dead from heart attacks or strokes.

The more interesting statistics on U.S. teens' delaying getting drivers licenses may be any that reflect U.S. teens' more generally delaying adulthood. And those statistics might be most useful if we asked if U.S. teens might make a rational choice in delaying adulthood.

Look, I spent thirty-five years teaching undergraduates and living in a neighborhood both rich in college students and an easy walk to a consolidated high school. I'm well aware that U.S. teens can be ignorant, stupid, loud, drunkenly obnoxious, rude, and/or ill-mannered.

Still, moving into an era of increased generational competition for resources, it would be best to assume that older US teenagers are young adults and deserve a fair share. Evidence to the contrary needs to be presented carefully as contextualized, comparative evidence.

Posted by Mark at 7:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the interest of using this blog for intellectual pursuits, I present the Gallery of Hotty McHottersons:

Posted by Mark at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From the Buffalo Beast, the 50 Most Loathsome People in America. This is unbearably hilarous. But in case you thought you were laughing with everyone, check out no. 9:

9. You

Charges: You believe in freedom of speech, until someone says something that offends you. You suddenly give a damn about border integrity, because the automated voice system at your pharmacy asked you to press 9 for Spanish. You cling to every scrap of bullshit you can find to support your ludicrous belief system, and reject all empirical evidence to the contrary. You know the difference between patriotism and nationalism -- it's nationalism when foreigners do it. You hate anyone who seems smarter than you. You care more about zygotes than actual people. You love to blame people for their misfortunes, even if it means screwing yourself over. You still think Republicans favor limited government. Your knowledge of politics and government are dwarfed by your concern for Britney Spears' children. You think buying Chinese goods stimulates our economy. You think you're going to get universal health care. You tolerate the phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques." You think the government is actually trying to improve education. You think watching CNN makes you smarter. You think two parties is enough. You can't spell. You think $9 trillion in debt is manageable. You believe in an afterlife for the sole reason that you don't want to die. You think lowering taxes raises revenue. You think the economy's doing well. You're an idiot.

Exhibit A: You couldn't get enough Anna Nicole Smith coverage.

Sentence: A gradual decline into abject poverty as you continue to vote against your own self-interest. Death by an easily treated disorder that your health insurance doesn't cover. You deserve it, chump.

Yes, You are largely responsible for the way the country is today, since You voted for George W. Bush twice!

[Via kottke.org.]

Posted by Mark at 6:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's the story: a wealthy, elderly single woman wants to sell her million-dollar luxury condo. She puts it on the market for a while, but since the housing market is going into the tank, she doesn't get what she wants for it. So she puts it on Craigslist -- or, more accurately, her realtor puts it on Craigslist -- in the hope that someone will rent it. Her plan is to rent it out for a year, then come back and sell it. From what we can tell, neither she nor the realtor has ever rented before. These are people with multiples of millions in the bank; why should they ever have experience renting a place? They own!

And in we step, into the Park Bellevue Tower, an exorbitant name for an equally exorbitant place. We found the place online and, as far as we can tell, we were the only people who called to inquire about it. The realtor -- who is the building's realtor -- didn't put any pictures on the Craigslist posting. To those who know how Craigslist works, this is a capital offense, as posts without pictures don't get looked at.

The Park Bellevue Tower (or PBT to those for whom living there constitutes normalcy) is a twenty-five story luxury condominium tower on the shore of Lake Merritt. Lake Merritt is a large-ish inland lake on the west side of Oakland (but it's not in West Oakland!). The lake is close to several neighborhoods that contain a lot of interesting things to see and do, and places to eat: Lake Merritt, which contains those things immediately around the north shore of the lake; Grand Lake, home of the Grand Lake Theatre; Lakeshore, where a new Trader Joe's just opened up; Park Ave., the location of another cool movie theatre, the Parkway Speakeasy; and Downtown, which is just what it sounds like it is. The good part about living where we live is that we are within walking distance of a lot of things. Emeryville just wasn't a walking town. Certainly it was possible to walk to places like Trader Joe's or Bay Street, but the city wasn't designed for it.

Our apartment is quite large, with marble-looking floors in the halls, kitchen, and bathrooms and hardwood floors in the bedrooms. Hardwood floors always sound like a draw when you're looking for a new home. They don't get as disgusting as carpet can, they look nice, and they're easy to clean. They're also easy to scratch. Living with hardwood floors requires that you cover with a rug the areas occupied by your furniture. After all, you wouldn't want to scratch those floors. By the time you're done covering everything up, you don't get to see your hardwood floors because they're covered with rugs. The hardwood floor then becomes no better than an Old Masters painting you keep locked up in a safe. It's a thing you have, not a thing you enjoy. It's hard to enjoy a hardwood floor, especially when people are constantly becoming anxious about scratches. Normally, I wouldn't worry about scratches (after all, it's a freaking floor, and scratches are going to happen -- you may as well become uptight about your luggage getting scratches), but this isn't our house, and the security deposit looms like a thundercloud over the hardwood floor.

Ultimately, I had qualms about living here. I still do. It's not the kind of place I would have looked at, nor is it the kind of place I would have moved into on my own. The "luxury condo tower" is not my kind of place. I don't like having to take an elevator eighteen floors up and down (even though we're on floor 19, there's no floor 13 out of superstition). I don't like being greeted by a friendly doorman every day. He makes it feel as though it's not my home. I would never have a doorman at my house. The whole place feels prefabricated and sterile. There's an exercise room and a pool on the sixth floor. Why would anyone ever leave? It's like a gated community, which I think some people would really like. I am not one of those people. I will take my chances with the outside world if only to have easy access to the outside world. I am not afraid of the outside world. There are some people who are, though, and for them this building is a boon.

Another of my friends lives in what used to be a small mansion on the other side of the lake. The mansion has since been divided up into four apartments, two on the second floor and two on the first. She lives in one of the apartments on the second floor and has a small living room, kitchen, and bedroom. She also has a set of stairs that leads to the attic, which is carpeted and has dormer windows looking to the outside. I love this apartment. I wish I lived there. I would make my room upstairs in the attic and turn the bedroom into an office. It's not so small that it is oppressive; nor is it so large that it feels empty. PBT feels empty. If I had millions more dollars, I would stuff it with as much stuff from Pier One or World Market as I could (which is what the previous occupant did) just to make it seem more cozy. But my friend's apartment comes cozy at no additional charge. That is the place where I want to live. The only thing missing is a porch where I can sit on warm summer nights or cool winter nights. It would be a place where I didn't have to walk past a doorman every day or take an elevator eighteen floors up.

I first nicknamed this place American Psycho tower because it's exactly the kind of place where Christian Bale's character from the film might have lived. It's a luxury condo that overlooks the lake. It's insulated from the dangers posed by the Real World. To live here means that You Have Arrived. But now that I've arrived, I'd much rather leave.

Posted by Mark at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"What do you think of black universities?" a friend asked me the other day.

"I think they're fine," I replied stupidly. I wasn't stupid for thinking they're fine; I was stupid because I didn't really think about the question and thus gave a very simple answer. I had never before thought about historically all-black universities, like Howard University.

The all-black university was created in a time when both de facto and institutional racism prevented African-Americans from going to "regular" universities, which were inevitably populated by white men. Black students, owing to their having been schooled in sub-par schools (which were, again, institutionally devised thanks to Plessy v. Ferguson), didn't have the credentials to get into white universities. They also didn't have the family standing to get into a white university. With perhaps a few exceptions, there were no black Rockefellers or Carnegies.

And take a look at where black universities are: the South! Naturally, if there were deep-seated institutional racism to be found, it would be there. Merely living in the south, with its atmosphere of discrimination, prevented a black student from attending a white university. Thus were born the black universities, designed to give the black student in the south a chance at the education that was denied him because of his skin color.

I've brought up the issue of affirmative action before: is it really necessary to give black students extra help merely because they're black? Do they face that much hardship that they need help? Why not make scholarship opportunities need-based instead of race-based? She cites the example of rural Ohio, where people are as poor as the poorest southern blacks, but are denied scholarships because they aren't black. We both know wealthy black students who received scholarships to Miami University not because they had a need, but because they were black. Does being black qualify as a "need" on par with being poor? Moreover, is it just as racist to discriminate based on race -- but instead, denying opportunities to white students because they're white and haven't endured the hardships of being black?

To begin our analysis, let's go to University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), the first Supreme Court case of so-called reverse discrimination. Respondent Bakke had applied to the UC Davis medical school and was twice rejected. In both years, however, "special applicants were admitted with significantly lower scores than respondent's." Bakke sued, claiming "reverse discrimination." Both the trial court and the California Supreme Court agreed with Bakke that Davis' system violated the Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court did not completely invalidate Davis' system: it said that Davis could take race into account in admissions, but it could not use a strict quota system.

At the end of the day, the purpose of affirmative action is to correct historical wrongs. For hundreds of years, blacks were systematically removed from the mainstream of American life, putting them in situations that continue to affect them today: poverty, for one; discrimination, for another (witness the noose-hanging that precipitated the "Jena 6" incident).

But do these systematic problems affect wealthy black people? Are our wealthy (or even middle-class) black friends at Miami University in as much need as a poor white person? In terms of getting into college, "probably not" is the answer. The purpose of affirmative action is to equalize the playing field, but what are the stakes in the playing field? For college admissions, it's money; therefore, scholarships should be doled out based not on race, but on income. This means that any person who can afford to go to college will go to college, and any person who cannot will still go to college.

Now back to the all-black university. Are all-black universities necessary anymore? Again, "probably not" is the answer. The explicit racism that kept black students out of "white" colleges is gone; no (accredited) university today would dare refuse to admit an applicant because of his race. And yet, the black university remains an historical oddity. Some opponents of affirmative action might argue that there are all-black universities, but no "all-white" universities. Obviously, no one would ever accept the existence of an "all-white" university, but it's difficult to compare these two things. Black universities were created out of a particular historical moment; at no time in the history of the United States have white people ever been marginalized to the degree that they needed their own universities. Someone who wanted to be particularly smarmy might point out that, for most of our country's history, non-black universities were all-white universities. That person would be smarmy, but he would also be correct.

While the all-black university may no longer be necessary, there are still some stepping-stones necessary to help those who remain marginalized; namely, the poor. In business, of course, and in housing, being a racial minority is still a barrier to entry in some parts of the country, but by and large, I don't believe that being a racial minority is still a barrier to entering higher education.

Posted by Mark at 8:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richard D. Erlich

Spam is not a victimless crime, and I immodestly propose below what I think is a suitable punishment. Before getting to that, however, I need to dispose of more moderate suggestions since it is indeed true that radical means should be adopted only if there are no other ways likely to reach important ends.

It has often been suggested, since spam first became a problem, that the obvious solution is to charge for e-mail.

A US penny per post is the usual price mentioned nowadays, but even if the cost were only a few mils --thousandths of a dollar -- the job could get done. The only reason it makes economic sense to broadcast to the world offers for sexual enhancers, fantastic mortgage deals, and the opportunity to aid notable Nigerians is that the cost of doing so is effectively nothing. Start charging for the service, and a .0001% (or whatever) rate of response won't bring any profit for the e-barrage.

However, for technical, philosophical, and political reasons, this ain't a-gonna happen any time soon; indeed it won't happen until the Internet is nearly swamped and brought to a standstill.

Nor will technological quick fixes do the trick: at least some spammers will always be ahead of their opponents.

So we need to support the geek police in the technological fight, but their efforts must be reinforced with something else, and I think I know what: what is called in the old play Gorboduc, "wholesome terror to posterity," and, more to the point, "wholesome terror" to the techno-evildoers working their evils now, and totally terminal termination of the evil-doing of several of them even more "now."

I'm philosophically against the death penalty, but I think we should apply it to spammers, and apply it in a manner that will make the point: the guillotine. I know some people will object: the guillotine is messy, and it's French, but it's quick and doesn't raise the ethical problems of needing a physician to assist, or even to certify death on the spot: any coroner's assistant can certify that someone without a head is definitely, indeed definitively, dead.

But that's a detail, and I'll hardly insist upon the method. What needs to be argued is justification.

• First, it's standard doctrine that a high probablity of punishment is a far more effective deterrent to crime than severity of punishment. Still, as the effectiveness of enforcement goes down, it is tempting to use severity to beef up deterrence. In the case of spammers, I recommend we vigorously succumb to that temptation.


• Second and far more important, it is just to execute people for spamming. And herein will consist the rest, and the heart, of my argument.

In a sense, all we have is time, and murderers take time away from us, more from the young than from the old.

Bit by bit, and byte by byte, spammers rob us of time, and those who send out millions of spam e-mails (aye, and junk snailmail and telemarketing "robocalls" as well)--well, when you add up those bits you get lives. And over the months and years you get many lives.

And when that time adds up to hundreds of lives, we must proclaim spammers mass murderers and punish them accordingly.

As they have stolen time from us, so we should limit their time.

Very firmly, very finally.

International authorities should add up the volume of spam and the seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years of people's lives shot to hell because of it, and each time it adds up to three-score and ten -- that's 70 years -- a spammer should be arrested, quickly tried, and executed.

This will not solve the problem of spam, but it should help to reduce the volume. In any event, "Though the heavens fall, let justice be done," and justice demands the ultimate punishment of those who'd suck away the life-time of millions.

Richard D. Erlich is a Professor Emeritus of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is a recent immigrant to the California Bear Flag Republic.

Posted by Mark at 6:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An article today from Psychology Today lists "Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature." Among them: "Most suicide bombers are Muslim." She goes on to say that the prevalence of polygny (men with multiple wives) in Muslim societies caused increased competition for mates and can cause some men who don't have mates to become despondent and resort to violence. Okay, that's fine. In fact, it makes some sense: domestic violence rates are so high among Appalachian men because their poverty causes helplessness and what they perceive to be a loss of masculinity (the man, without a good job, can't provide for his family and fulfill his traditional Christian role as head of the household, the breadwinner, etc.). They get over this loss of masculinity by beating their wives.

What isn't fine is one of the ways the author bolsters her point:

However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.

The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.

I'm so sick and tired of people repeating this "72 virgins" thing! This insistence that a Muslim who martyrs himself for Islam will receive 72 virgins in Paradise is what made me read the Qur'an in the first place. After a thorough reading, I concluded that it ain't in there! The Qur'an does promise believers that they will be rewarded with virgins in Paradise, but there's no set number, and there's no specific actions mentioned that will get you those virgins.

Years later, I read Terror in the Mind of God by Mark Jurgensmeyer. Deep in the back of the book, in his endnotes, is the reference to the original "72 virgins" statement. Guess where it comes from? A Hamas training manual from the mid-1990s.

For the last ten years, politicians, pundits, and even academics have been repeating that the Qur'an, or some nebulous doctrine of Islam, promises martyrs 72 virgins in heaven. The fact is that Hamas made this up to recruit suicide bombers and militants.

Posted by Mark at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the summer, McSweeney's had a contest in which entrants were to use one of thirteen writing prompts to generate a 1,000-word short story. Here's the prompt I used: "Write a story that ends with the following sentence: Debra brushed the sand from her blouse, took a last, wistful look at the now putrefying horse, and stepped into the hot-air balloon."

As it turns out, I didn't win. But, here is my story, anyway.

The Clown and the Librarian

As a boy, Leon had often imagined what it would have been like to be a professional clown. When he was seven years old, he told his parents – investment bankers both – about his aspirations. When they stopped sobbing, they asked him if that he was certain about his dreams. He emphatically nodded “yes.” They took him out of Lawrence Q. DeLaney’s School for the Unusually Wealthy and enrolled him in New Jersey State Clown Academy (“Where boys are made into men, and then those men are made into clowns”). For the next ten years of his life, he ate, slept, drank, and breathed clowns. He was first in his class in juggling, and at his graduation, he received the school’s highest honor – the Golden Rubber Nose with Distinction – for his one-man pantomime performance of Antigone while riding a unicycle over a tightrope. The headmaster commented afterward that it would have made Sophocles himself weep.

But the New Jersey State Clown Academy was only the beginning. Leon managed to secure a scholarship that sent him to Great Britain’s Royal Jestering College (for, you see, “clowning” is called “jestering” over there), where he excelled in such fields as designing comically oversized shoes and fitting several people at once into a tiny car. After four years, he emerged a changed man. He decided he would best be able to use his jestering abilities for the good of mankind (rather than for evil, as some clowns had done in the past, but they were always stopped by the good clowns) and joined a circus back in the United States.

His sordid love affair with Debra would become the stuff of pulp biographies. She was not a clown, but the clown’s sworn enemy: a librarian. Who is to say what drew the clown and the librarian together? His love of honking horns and her love of peace and quiet should have split them immediately, but no: there was a magic between them, the kind of magic that existed only once every few hundred years. There was magic between Antony and Cleopatra, between Abelard and Heloise, between Napoleon and Josephine.

After a brief period of courting in which Leon gave Debra one of those never-ending handkerchief things, and Debra gave Leon his very own pair of glasses to wear on the end of his nose, the two were engaged to be married. The marriage would take place on a beach, under a circus tent. Leon would invite his parents and his circus colleagues; Debra would invite her parents (retired rock musicians) and her colleagues from the library.

On the appointed day, they went down to the beach – careful to avoid the trash and syringes – and prepared to get married. On the groom’s side, the fire-breather, the lion-tamer, and the snake-charmer. On the bride’s side, several neat and uniform rows of men and women wearing more or less the same colors, sitting quietly with their hands folded on their laps, looking straight ahead and paying attention. And in the back, Debra’s parents, screaming, “Dude! Righteous wedding!” and holding up their lighters.

They were married by the ringmaster. Both the bride and groom looked marvelous, she in her beige wedding gown and he in his striped tuxedo, comically oversized patent leather shoes, and his diamond-studded dress nose.

After the ceremony, they had a reception on the beach in which everyone ate mounds of wedding cake. “Debra,” said Leon, “After spending so much time with you, I know that you have a fondness for romance novels in which women are swept off their feet by long-haired European men with chests like tanks. In my small way, I would like to make that dream come true.” He left the reception and went behind the tent, bringing with him a beautiful new horse. “Once I start working out and growing my hair long, I’m going to ride up to you on this horse and sweep you away to parts unknown. I’m also going to take lessons from a dialogue coach so I have an Italian accent.”

“Oh, Leon!” said Debra. “I have a surprise for you! Knowing you as well as I do, I discovered your fondness for random assortments of colored fabric sewn together. So I did the only thing I could think of to do.” She went off to the other side of the tent and brought back a hot-air balloon that she had sewn together herself.

Everyone was so happy to see the new couple offer each other these wonderful gifts of love. Leon’s parents clapped quietly, while Debra’s parents hollered and held up their lighters.

In this was the mistake.

The fire-breather, so full from wedding cake, let out an enormous belch. His breath, laden with gasoline, ignited the flame from Debra’s parents’ lighters and created an enormous fireball that hit the horse head-on. The horse was so shocked at being hit by a fireball that it fell over, dead and on fire. The force of the flame threw everyone to the ground.

The guests could only stare at the horse as it burned on the beach. They looked from the fire-breather to Debra’s parents and back to the horse. Debra didn’t move. Leon did the only thing he could think of: he jumped into the hot-air balloon and started the gas.

“Debra, come on! We must get away from this tragedy! Oh, what folly there is in the circus! I should have been an investment banker! Debra! We must leave this place and never return! We’ll start a new life in the jungle, as missionaries!”

Debra brushed the sand from her blouse, took a last, wistful look at the now putrefying horse, and stepped into the hot-air balloon.

Posted by Mark at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Air travel is a funny thing. Every element of air transportation is dependent upon the element that came before it. If there's bad weather in Chicago, then the plane that is supposed to leave Chicago is late departing. This means that the next flight that that plane makes from, say, San Francisco is late. And so on down the line.

For the past three days, San Francisco has had horrendous, terrible weather. By this I mean that it's been raining. The people of the Bay Area don't know how to deal with forty-degree temperatures, much less rain. When it's forty-five degrees outside, they put on winter coats and scarves. Jared and I walk around with our sleeves rolled up. When there's rain, everyone is late, because no one knows how to handle driving in rain. If it rained in Los Angeles, everyone would die.

As Gilda Radner's Saturday Night Live character Rosanne Rosannadanna used to say, "It's always something." Last year, you'll recall that my Christmas travel was delayed thanks to a snowstorm in Cleveland and a shortage of de-icing fluid at Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport (CLE). This year, I thankfully have to wait only an hour instead of twelve hours.

The "bad weather conditions" (i.e. rain) in San Francisco has made the incoming flight late, which means that I'll leave at 12:35 instead of 11:40. The only forseeable problem here is that I might not make my connection at Chicago-O'Hare (ORD). There's a line of people in front of me -- a very long line -- all of whom are trying to work their connections out with the SFO agent, even though there's very little a SFO gate agent can do for connections at ORD.

Moments after I wrote the last paragraph, my name got called. They rounded up the half-dozen people on the flight who had tight connections in Chicago and sent them to another gate. So it looks like I won't be late to anywhere; I'll be just on time.

On this flight to Chicago, I was reminded what midwestern girls look like. Midwestern girls have skin that's too tan (because they go to tanning salons) and bleached-blonde hair. This in and of itself isn't unusual, but it's the middle of winter. They desperately want to look like their idols, girls from Beverly Hills. (Note, of course, that not all midwestern girls look like this; it's just a hurtful stereotype.)

It's actually cold in Chicago. Not California cold, but real cold. The kind that requires a real coat. After waiting for an hour in Chicago, I got on a plane to Cleveland, where it is about ten degrees. I'm home!

Posted by Mark at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that Mark has allowed me back on the venerable sedhe train, I am going to update all you greedy readers, i.e. matt and maybe scott, on a fascinating and surprisingly undocumented topic, ME. Since Mark won’t tell you about his life, I will tell you about mine, at least briefly. Mostly because I am really really really bored at work right now. Also cuz you care. And I renounce sedhe protocol and refuse to use correct grammarness and capitol letters (sic).

so what does a day in the life of a confused little hippy look like? well, it can be surprisingly mundane. i get up circa 8 (aka 8:40, or 4 hittings-of-the-alarm) and get a small shock as i get my first glimpse of a frail corpse lying next to me in bed. then i realize it’s mark and…i still get a small shock (what does this wonderful intelligent good friend man see in little ol’ me?!). i drive about fifteen minutes from my run down rental house on a park at the foot of the berkeley hills to my work in emeryville, or, as we affectionately know it, pixar-ville (home of pixar, it is also home to chiron). my work days are either 1) spent at the office doing myriad non-job things like writing for y’all and checking out rock climbing info or 2) cruising for hours in a little isuzu truck with a genuine vintage hippy who regales me with his years of labor organizing, blunt comments, and insight into reality that he has gained with the help of… um… various… herbal, fungal, chemical aids. i’ve often entertained the idea of quitting because of days type 1, also the low pay, but stay because of days type 2 and the utter lack of supervision i enjoy. sometime between 3 and 6, i get fed up with work and leave whenever i feel like it. on days type 1, the office days, i am gone to 1-1.5ish hours eating fast food on the shores of the bay, which is minutes away, while listening to, inevitably, air america radio, your show for progessive talk. currently, it being dec 14 so understandably cold and all, it’s in the low 60s, not a cloud in the sky so i see a picnic in the near future, i.e. when i am done writing.

about twice a week, i try to make it rock climbing in the huge berkeley climbing gym. i recently got my own shoes off of craigslist and am now searching for a harness. climbing makes me feel all strong and muscular-y, even if it’s a false since of muscular-y-ness, and i like it almost as much as my other common recreational activity, i.e. smoking, although i find the two mutually exclusive because it’s hard to climb when you have smoky lungs and i certainly don’t feel like climbing after i smoke. once, i climbed this huge rock without any ropes a few months back and smoked at the top. man, getting down was NOT FUN and certainly not safe, so… no more of that. mark joins me in most of the climbing/smoking ventures here mentioned, so the company’s been wonderful since he’s moved (and not updated you about his life, which is going well, i hear).

on thursday nights, we go to needle exchange, mark having jumped on the community work bandwagon, much to my delight (he’s a wonderful person, that mark, btw, also rather cute). and mark and i just started what we hope will become a weekly tradition. after needle exchange, we head to the albatross, one of the coolest bars ever, where there is 25 cent bottomless popcorn bowls and one dollar unlimited darts.

on the weekends, i mostly travel and have gone from local backpacking trips, santa cruz, and the rocky marin beaches to places such as the lost coast, the redwood forests, oregon, olympic national park, seattle, vancouver, big sur, los angeles, and the previously described whirlwind tour o’ the west. sometimes i stick around the bay area and hike or go to the ocean, usually under the influence of something interesting. on my week nights, mon-wed, i go to lots of restaurants, eating my way around the world, as there is everything from ethiopian to nepalese in berkeley, but only one fast food place. i also see lots of "films," i.e. sh1t you can’t see in ohio.

i agonize about whether or not to take the MCATs again. the rebel side of me says NO WAY. the rational side of me realizes that there are only two schools in this area where i want to stay, ucsf and stanford, ranked 1 and 6 respectively, so i better have my sh1t together if i wanna chance at those two. hmmmm.

but mostly i agonize about when i will see the cherubic faces of you, my dear readers. will scott make it here before feb and shipping off to parts unknown??? what’s this i hear about a certain mr. smith weaseling his way out here on the company dime circa jan??? these are the great mysteries in my life.

Posted by Ed at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So I went in this morning to interview for an office manager position with a non-profit organization called the California Housing Partnership Corporation, which helps other non-profit organizations make affordable, low-income housing available.

While they appear not to be interested in me for full-time office manager skills (although that is apparently still being decided), they hired me immediately as sort of a contract worker for technical support. They want a dependable, dedicated technical support person and were very interested in my IT background. At the end of the interview, they asked if I could start immediately ... as in, would you like to see what IT problems we need to be fixed, and what can you do about it right now? So, instead of being back home at 3:30 PM PST, I'm still at CHPC's office in downtown San Francisco, updating an old iBook and an old eMac to Mac OS 10.4. Later today, I'm going to the Apple Store near Union Square to get a battery for a Titanium PowerBook. They've essentially told me that I just have to submit an invoice to them for the hours I work, and I'll get paid. They threw out $25 an hour as an hourly wage. Of course, I'm still looking for full-time work. But they'll certainly let me take time off around Christmas. My schedule is pretty flexible.

This, however, was the strangest interview I've ever been to; I walk in, and they put me to work immediately! And I got free lunch out of it.

More updates later. The Comcast guy is coming tomorrow to activate us for the Internet, so hopefully once I have an Internet connection I'll be able to put up more information, as well as pictures from Ed's Whirlwind Tour of the West.

Oh, and to Elizabeth and Brian: I'll get your accounts fixed.

Posted by Mark at 4:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So, apparently people care about what I've been doing? Well, if I haven't replied to your calls, emails, etc. for the last week, don't despair; it's because I've been looking for more permanent housing and a job. I've found the housing, but now I'm working on the job.

Posted by Mark at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Originally, I was going to travel to San Francisco via I-80, an interstate that goes through Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California before stopping in Berkeley. The trip was going to take two days, with one stop in Nevada, but that would be okay: it would be efficient.

Elizabeth said that she wanted to come out to Denver to accompany me back with her, so she spent her own money on a plane ticket, flew out to Denver on Wednesday, and left with me on Friday morning. We had Thanksgiving at my house. For the past week, Elizabeth had been nervous about something. She claimed that she had something in store for me that she hoped I would like. Then I became nervous.

Friday morning, at 12:30 AM, we set out into the vast, unknown west. We took I-70, which is a lot more scenic than I-80. It goes right through the Front Range in Colorado and there are dozens of little mountain towns/ski resorts (Vail, Breckenridge) along the way. When we stopped for gas in Silverthorne, Co., the temperature was 3 degrees! It reached only 2 degrees on our trip through the mountains, but we hoped it would get down to 0 sometime.

After Colorado came Utah. Elizabeth's idea was for us to go to Arches National Park on the way back to Berkeley, so about an hour into Utah, we got off of I-70 and traveled south to Moab. It was 7:30 AM when we got into Arches.

There are a lot of arches in Arches. Some of them are free-standing, others are in the hills. The arches there formed because of a salt lake that was in the area millions of years ago. Over time, the lake flooded and receded about 29 times, leaving different layers of sediment and salt behind. The salt in the rock expanded horizontally, forcing the rock to expand vertically. This rock then began to erode from the ground up, leaving a hollow -- the arch that everyone knows and loves today.

Arches is good if you like arches. Turns out I don't like them a lot, but I was also kind of cranky, since I hadn't slept in seven hours. But after some Wendy's, I felt better.

Elizabeth also decided that we should visit Canyonlands National Park and Dead Horse Point State Park, since they were both in Moab. Dead Horse Point State Park is very small and its centerpiece is a large piece of rock that juts into the Colorado River. I thought it was spectacular: the river is 2,000 feet below you and you can see for miles in any direction. There's lots of canyons, which I liked. Canyonlands National Park was even more chock-full of canyons. Again, it's 2,000 feet up, and you can see for miles. There's even canyons in the canyons. We watched the sun set there and then drove off to our next destination.

But where would that be? I had no idea.

Elizabeth drove through Utah while I slept. Sometime in the night, she told me that she was lost and that we'd have to just stop at a motel for the night. I was tired and agreeable. But let me fill you in on some facts. Prior to the trip, Elizabeth told me she had booked two hotel rooms, one with a fireplace. She also told me that she'd be doing a lot of lying on this trip so as to conceal the surprises that were in store for me. Was this a lie? I thought. Were we really lost?

Turns out not. We arrived at exactly the motel we were supposed to, a Best Western that included one room with a fireplace! It was totally awesome. Guess what was more awesome? We were a few miles from Bryce Canyon National Park! I had told Elizabeth that I visited Bryce Canyon National Park many years ago as a kid. She was heartened when I said that I liked canyons, because apparently her anxiety for a week before was due to the fact that she wasn't sure if I would like the trip she had planned. She also told me we would be visiting Zion National Park, since it was very close to Bryce Canyon. Awesome!

Bryce Canyon National Park was amazing. Each bunch of canyons has its own unique thing. Bryce Canyon's unique thing is that it was a lot of orange-and-pink rock layers, as well as tall rock towers called "hoodoos." It snowed a little the night before, which should give you an idea of how cold it was. The temperature was about 30 degrees and the wind was a-blowin'. Walking around the rim of the Bryce Canyon Amphitheatre, their largest canyon, was bone-chilling. Nevertheless, we drove around the park, looking at all the different sites to see. The views are amazing and sometimes terrifying, especially when a vista point is located on a narrow rock bridge that juts into the canyon, with only a short metal fence to keep you from careening into the canyon.

At about noon, we left Bryce (it's pretty small) and drove to Zion National Park. Zion is different from the other parks; it's primarily a driving tour. You drive down into the canyon and see the different sites. Of course, there are lots of trails to hike, but we only had until sunset that day, and besides, you could spend a week at any one of these parks if you wanted to. We only had a few days to see all of them. Zion has a lot of interesting natural rock formations, but again, its rock stuff is different from the rock stuff in any other national park. There was a really cool waterfall -- more like a water trickle -- that came from mud that filtered through the sandstone.

We left Zion at sunset and I wondered where we would go next. Elizabeth said that her plan was for us to go around the Grand Canyon at night and head to a mystery location, which I would see in the morning. How intriguing!

At about 11:00 that night, Elizabeth announced, "Oh no, I've lost us again. We're at the Grand Canyon." The saucy minx had lied again! The Grand Canyon was our mystery destination! We stayed at a hotel in Tusayan which is more the gateway to the Grand Canyon than Williams, Az., which claims to be the "Gateway to the Grand Canyon®." (And, yes, they've trademarked that phrase.) Tusayan is two miles from the south rim entrance to the Grand Canyon; Williams is about an hour away. Many a foreign tourist has booked a hotel in Williams, thinking that it was really close, but was horrified and annoyed to find that it wasn't.

The Grand Canyon is amazing. It's so big that it's more like an omnibus canyon -- a giant canyon made out of little canyons. It's about a mile deep, which makes Canyonlands, with its 2,000-foot depth, look like a ditch. It's also ten miles across and over two hundred miles long. That's a big freaking canyon. It was carved over the course of millions of years by the Colorado River. Looking a mile down into the canyon, you can see the river, and it's mind-boggling to think that something so tiny carved a canyon so monstrously huge. We took a little shuttle around the scenic points on the South Rim, the more developed side of the canyon. After a stop at Hermit's Rest, a little shop on the South Rim (that's on the South Rim -- as in, twenty feet from the rim), we headed back.

And that was Ed's Whirlwind Tour of the West. For the next several hours, we drove back to Berkeley, finally getting there at 6 AM on Nov. 28. All of Elizabeth's friends said she was crazy to attempt such a tour of five of the nation's national parks in three days. Elizabeth was terrified that I'd hate it. But you know what? We did it. And I loved it. It was a hundred thousand times better than just driving to Berkeley along I-80. And she figured, hey, we'll be in the area, why don't we visit these places? And that's the truth. Don't do things hurriedly and efficiently if you don't have to; instead, stop and look at nature along the way. It make take a few more days, but you'll be glad you did it. And I'm glad I got to see the nation's canyons on my way to my new home.

Posted by Mark at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Details to follow. The trip here was awesome. There will be pictures.

Posted by Mark at 4:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You heard me.

Posted by Mark at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(1) Verizon Wireless

I'm better off using tin cans and string. I can't talk for four minutes before I'm disconnected! And I'm standing still! Not doing anything! This is no way to run a cellular phone company. In Europe, the technology is light-years head of what we have here. Why can't the most powerful country in the world have cell phone service that doesn't crap out every five minutes?

(2) Intelligent design advocates

Who are they kidding? It's just creationism in disguise. They failed in the '80s when they tried to get creation into science classrooms, as the Supreme Court said, "No dice." Then they regrouped and came up with a new plan: intelligent design, which is as much science as Alf is President of Uganda. It's nothing more than a marketing scheme: sow some seeds of doubt amongst the people, take advantage of the fact that the gum-chewing public knows nothing about how science actually works, and pretend that there's some sort of "controversy" within the scientific community about evolution. Yeah, and there's controversy about whether or not gravity is real or the Lord Jesus Christ just affixed double-sided tape to our feet. The jury's still out on that one!

(3) Traffic in Denver

Everyone here drives like an old lady! In a 55 mph zone, I guarantee you that half the people are doing 45. There's no excuse for this! Plus, there's always traffic. From 3 PM to 7 PM, it's rush hour. For four hours! So if I want to go anywhere, it will take me twice as long than it would any other time of day.

(4) Commercials before movies

I didn't pay six bucks to learn about how great Coca-Cola is, or how much I need a new SUV. I like the movie trailers because they're something I haven't seen before. I know what commercials look like, and I hate them. I don't need to see them again on a twenty-five-foot screen (well, golly, if they're bigger, then they must be better!).

(5) Companies that use DRM

Look, buddy; it's my music. I bought it. So don't tell me how to use it. Copyright law doesn't give you the authority to tell me when, where, and how I can watch or listen to the content that I bought. The more DRM you pack onto a CD or an MP3, the more I'm going to avoid your content like the plague.

(6) Neo-cons

They finally did it: they got middle America to vote themselves into the poorhouse. Under the guise of religion, the Neo-con party (formerly the Republican Party) has usurped everyone in the United States. If you're the CEO of a giant, multinational corporation, then you vote Republican because you know that the Republicans will help your company out, since you donated thirty million dollars to the RNC. If you're a Democrat, but you're a Christian, then the neo-cons will use the fear of gays or abortion to get you to side with them. "If you vote Democrat, the queers will pass a law requiring you to be sodomized by RuPaul every night of the week!" Or, "If you vote Democrat, the godless communist abortionists will mandate that everyone must have abortions. And godless anal sex will be the law of the land!" So, the God-fearing Democrats voted Republican, and in the process, voted to screw themselves over. The rich get richer, the middle class shrinks, and the poor get poorer. And Karl Rove goes home at night and supplicates himself before the altar of Satan while Ann Coulter dresses up in bondage gear and whips Sean Hannity unconscious (but that's okay, because he likes it). Has America gone stupid? Don't Americans know what's going on?

(7) George W. Bush

Okay, this is an extension of (6), but he deserves his own category. First, the guy is a moron. He brags about how he doesn't read very much. He has people summarize important issues for him because he either can't be bothered to learn about an issue for himself or because he's too stupid to learn about an issue for himself. Then he proceeds to appoint people to important positions for which those people are extremely unqualified. Now, every administration has experienced cronyism, but the cronies are usually in unimportant positions, like Ambassador to Micronesia or Deputy Assistant Undersecretary for Housing and Urban Affairs. But Michael Brown? Harriet Miers? These are people who were (or will be) in important positions, and they were (or are) incredibly unqualified for the job. Oh, and George W. Bush was chosen by Karl Rove to be the next president not because he was smart, but because Karl Rove could meld him into a candidate that appeared good. And George W. Bush looks like a monkey, the way he furls his brow sometimes as he desperately tries to remember a talking point that someone told him to mention during a Q&A session.

(8) People who drive SUVs but have no reason for doing so

If you have thirty-seven kids to haul around, then go buy an SUV. Arnold Schwarzenegger owns eight Hummers. That's profane. Just because he's a killer cyborg from the future doesn't mean he shouldn't respect the environment of our own time period. Seriously, folks, the world's natural resources are becoming depleted, and with China an up-and-coming industrial superpower, the oil is going to run out a lot faster. It's time for Detroit to get with the program.

Is there something you hate? Something you want to complain about? Add a comment. We must all gripe together, or must assuredly, we shall gripe separately.

Posted by Mark at 8:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a public service announcement:

For your health and well-being, the United States of Me kindly requests that you shut the f*ck up about my work with needle exchange.

That proclamation is to serve as a slightly comedic, mostly serious introduction to today’s topic – Needle Exchange: Preventing HIV vs. Enabling Heroin Addicts.

First, allow me to introduce the topic to those of you unfamiliar with it. Needle Exchange Emergency Distribution (NEED) is the large needle exchange program (NEP) in the Bay Area. NEPs are based on the health care model of harm reduction. They are usually established in the face of skyrocketing AIDS rates. In this area, San Francisco and other counties declared a state of emergency due to AIDS a few years ago. AIDS rates of IV drug users (IDUs) can range from 25-60% in different areas.

IDUs contract HIV due to the sharing of needles. It is illegal in most areas to possess needles without a prescription (for example, given to diabetics needing to inject insulin). Opiate withdrawal does not merely suck sweaty ass, it kills, sometimes, especially if the cold turkey method is used outside of the naloxone-dispensing expensive rehab centers. When IDUs need to inject, they really, physically, need to inject. Opiate addiction is one of the most physical of all possible addictions. In the absence of clean needles, they will use old ones, even ones on the street or in abandoned housing. Once HIV penetrated this community, it is easy to see how it would naturally spread like wildfire.

NEPs were developed in response to the alarming levels of HIV transmission due to dirty needles. They claim not to advocate drug use but rather to provide individuals with the healthiest possible choices within a decision that they have already made. Opponents claim that they are enabling drug use, diverting candidates from rehab, and encouraging initiates to use because of the facility of attaining all but the main ingredient through the NEP.

Admittedly, certainly, there is logical reasoning to the argument of those that believe NEPs are the work of misguided enablers. Not only do NEPs provide individuals who might have been hesitant to use because of HIV risk with clean and sterile alternatives, they also provide a venue through which to connect with experienced users who can provide further assistance to them in their path to full-blown addiction.

The founders of NEPs are not idiots. They recognized this possibility. So, we had a hypothesis. The hypothesis was that NEPs enable heroin use. And what better to do with a hypothesis than to test it? Surely, you’re not going to take it out to lunch, as it doesn’t have a stomach, and inviting it to do so might hurt its feelings. No, it seems like testing it is the best idea.

Let the scientific mountain of support begin to accumulate. Some of the most extensive studies to date have been completed by UCSF AIDS Institute, one of the best, if not THE best, AIDS research facilities in the world. They studied 52 cities throughout the world, mostly in Europe. The cities with NEPs experienced an overall 6% decrease in AIDS whereas the cities without NEPs experienced an overall 6% increase in AIDS. No rise in heroin use was reported in any NEP city. In fact, candidates for rehab were often reached through NEPs that would refer them if, and only if, they asked for such assistance.

Once NEPs were legalized in 2000 (at least in this area), the fight for federal funding began. Previously, NEED here in Berkeley was an underground operation, activist hippies passing needles out from a baby carriage, sometimes being arrested once discovered. In 2000, significant research mandated the legalization of the programs. However, in the current federal political environment, funding for the projects is banned. The government put together a research panel to recommend whether federal funding should be used for NEPs. Out of eight participating institutions, eight found NEPs to be effective AIDS prevention policy, six of them going on to recommend funding and two of them abstaining from recommending or not. Despite this, the federal government refused to lift the ban as the results did not come out as they wished. NEPs have been supported by the former head of the Department of Health, the former head of the NIH, and the former Secretary General.

Why, though, do NEPs NOT increase drug use? Opiate use is a complex psychological and physical process that is independent of facility of obtaining supplies. If supplies are there or drugs are there, people will find them. Unfortunately, often what they find are low-quality or dirty supplies and drugs, increasing not just their risk for HIV, but also their risk of overdose and death.

But some people don’t care about the IDUs. They did it to themselves, they claim. If that is your stance, though I disagree with you, I would still urge you to consider the innocent people that are also at risk for HIV transmission due to the behavior of IDUs, particularly the sexual partners and even children of users. How do you look at a baby with HIV from its mother’s drug use and not have NEPs in the back of your mind, wondering if they could have saved these two lives?

Unfortunately, police officers often target IDUs coming to NEPs, waiting across the corner to arrest them with drug paraphernalia charges. This causes fear that I have personally seen in participants, many of whom come for their friends, even their parents. Some of the people who pick up supplies are not IDUs but they know their father is and want to protect him. Meanwhile, NEP volunteers face criticism and misunderstanding from the local communities, people screaming about how we are helping “dope fiends�? and bringing them into the neighborhood.

Right now, one of my friends refuses to talk to me because of “what I am doing.�? I hope that we will come to a more enlightened conclusion, based on the substantial scientific evidence, for the good of the world community that is facing a raging AIDS epidemic.

Posted by Ed at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While listening to an NPR discussion this morning about Karen Hughes's "listening trip" through Saudi Arabia, an interesting thought occurred to me after one comment that the appropriately named commentator made. I had much time to mull this over, what with sitting suspended hundreds of feet above a large body of water motionless (read: stuck in traffic due to yet another broken down SUV in the friggin' middle of the Bay Bridge). A paraphrase:

The Muslim women are telling Hughes, "Your values are not our values. Issues that would be problematic for American women are not problems to us. We are happy. We are content." The problem is not with values being shared or not between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia; the problem is with foreign policy. Hughes will have a very, very difficult job improving the image amongst Muslims abroad because she has no jurisdiction over the policy that is at issue.

To pull from that comment one seemingly smaller issue in the whole foreign policy vs. values at issue deal, I started thinking about feminism.

We, being open-minded forward-thinking college-educated foot soldiers in the army of the intellectual elite, know that feminism is A Good Thing. Obviously. I, myself, am a self-proclaimed feminist who hopes to tear down the pejorative connotation that has adhered itself to the term like an unfortunate fly on fly paper. We, being enlightened, realize that women are equal and should demand equal rights. If any of our "oppressed sisters" at home or abroad seek to overthrow the patriarchal construction crews' building bulletproof glass ceilings, then we should aid them, intellectually or literally. Feminism should be spread throughout the world. But what happens when women don't want
it?

Now, my far leftist conspiracy-theory-esque side (which is like the Sahara compared to a grain of sand when compared to my neo-conservative blind faith side), informs me that such women do want it; they just don't know that they want it ... yet. If they could only see the benefits that we U.S. women reaped after the women's right movement. If they only understood how their culture has been keeping them from realizing their full potential as thinkers and doers.

So, how can we make them realize what they're missing? How do we tell them, "No, you really do want to be a feminist, to be equal." We educate them. But how? First, how many of your local feminist friends do you know that speak Arabic? So, to educate en masse as we would need to do, we would probably have to conduct outreach in English. So they will have to learn in English. At best, we could hope for a few feminist Arab-Americans or a handful of die-hards who learn a choppy Arabic to attempt to get the message out to women in their native tongue.

Second, the cultural logistics. In some countries, a feminist American woman would cringe at the restrictions placed upon her, especially in areas such as travel and clothing. We should reject the covering and the male accompaniment as devices of the patriarchy. But then, how do we travel? The men are not likely to be convinced to ease up on these rules. So, we would have to force the men in power to accept the values and conduct of the American feminist. Perhaps we could place economic sanctions against them or start a preemptive war based on intelligence that the government will not be friendly to American feminist foreign policy.

Imperialism, anyone?

Or, to emulate the expansive vocabulary and historical references characteristic of my colleague Mr. Marcus Aurelius Wilson, cultural hegemony, friends, Ro(wo)mans, country(wo)men?

And then there are the women. That just don't know that they are secretly dying to be liberated. How do we free them? If a position of inferiority for women is an integral part of a religious and cultural tradition, how do we end that component without imposing our culture and diluting theirs?

We, the youthful thinkers of tomorrow, face a dilemma. We hold to be self-evident two truths that appear irreconcilable:

Truth #1: Women should be equal. Feminism is not a theory but the just pursuit of equality.

Truth #2: Cultural diversity should be preserved. Ethnocentrism ruins ancient traditions in danger of extinction, particularly as a result of Americanization.

How do we bring rights to women without Americanizing them? Are there (eek! squirm uncomfortably) positive facets to imperialism? Let's look, shall we, at the Roman Empire, a bunch of imperialists if there ever were any (it's even in the name!). They wreaked all sorts of havoc of the necessary and unnecessary sorts, wiping local cultures and values aside like gadflies. And what was the end result? Order, relative peace, a lingua franca that improved communications and diplomacy, roads that defined effective transportation, ingenious engineering feats like mortar-less aqueducts, universities with scholars mulling over questions like the one I mull over here, forward-thinking and sophistication, the arts. In fact, the quality of life, the standard of living of the average individual, had
undoubtedly improved.

Hmmm, is that famed token imperialist of Bishop Hall, Drew M---, onto something after all?

My hippie peace-loving chillness says no, but ...

Posted by Ed at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Do you know what the stated purpose of the SAT is? The stated purpose of the SAT is to predict a student's first-year college grades. Unfortunately, it fails in this regard. For example, men outperform women on the SATs, but women outperform men in first-year college grades. You'd think that a test that absolutely doesn't do what it says it does would be dismissed as invalid. But the SAT has a stranglehold on the college admission process. It provides a wonderful little number that admissions people at gigantic universities like Ohio State University -- population 50,000 -- can use to screen applicants.

But the SAT is only the tip of the iceberg. The SAT, SAT II, PSAT/NMSQT, CLEP, and AP tests are administered by an organization called The College Board. That's a lot of tests. But the College Board is only one branch of a larger organization called ETS, Electronic Testing Service. ETS also administers the GMAT (business school) and the GRE (graduate school), as well as a dozen other tests.

But then there's the LSAT and the MCAT. The LSAT is administered by the Law School Admission Council (LSAC), and the MCAT is administered by the Association of American Medical Colleges. Both of these organizations exist so that you must pay them in order to get into law school or medical school. You must pay $115 to take the LSAT. Then you must pay $100 more for the "Law School Data Assembly Service," in which LSAC compiles transcripts, letters of recommendation, and LSAT scores and sends them to law schools to which you apply. This is not optional. You're being forced into doing this if you want to go to an accredited law school, and unless you want to spend the rest of your life as a FEMA director[1] or an intelligent design advocate[2], you need to get a degree from an accredited law school.

But it's too bad these tests don't mean anything, either. The LSAT is merely a test of logical reasoning skills. It has nothing to do with law school, beyond the necessity of having reasoning skills, but being able to do logic puzzles doesn't mean you'll succeed at law school. There's a writing portion, but it's unscored and is sent along with your scores to the schools that you apply to.

Did I mention that it's a stupid baby test? Standardized tests don't reflect anything except your ability to take a test. This is because the tests can be "cracked," and there are half a dozen national organizations -- The Princeton Review and Kaplan are the two big ones -- who make a ton of money teaching students how to exploit the flaws and recurring patterns of the test.

[1] Michael Brown, former director of FEMA, got his J.D. (Juris Doctorate) from Oklahoma City University School of Law in 1981. Daily Kos reports that, until 2003, this institution wasn't accredited by the Association of American Law Schools. The problem with this is that "[m]ost prospective law students won't even consider applying to a non-AALS law school unless they have no other option, because many employers have a policy of not considering graduates of non-AALS institutions."

[2] Intelligent design advocate Dr. Kent Hovind received his Ph.D. in Christian Education in 1991 from Patriot Bible University, an un-accredited Bible college in Colorado Springs which was, at the time Hovind received his degree, "a ministry of Hilltop Baptist Church." Patriot University, like Bob Jones University, maintains that accreditation is mostly for show and doesn't mean anything. Hovind has claimed to have a Ph.D., not a J.D., but I include him here anyway because I don't like him.

Posted by Mark at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I remember where I was on September 11. I was asleep.

I decided I shouldn't take Jeanie Hey's world politics class, since it might be too much work for me. What a great excuse that was for me in that first year: "I'm too busy." I was never too busy! In any case, that meant that I slept in that morning. But I set my alarm for some amount of time, maybe nine o'clock.

My alarm clock was set to turn on the radio when it went off, and I set it to whatever station happened to come in. Apparently I hit on a talk radio station, because when the radio woke me, I heard something on the radio about the World Trade Center towers having collapsed. In my grogginess, I thought that this was either a dream or a bad joke. Radio stations put their jerkiest disc jockies on in the morning; these "shock jocks" are usually crude and tasteless, and so I figured this is what was going on. World Trade Center towers fallen down? Don't be ridiculous.

So I woke up. Then I went downstairs to visit either Ashli or Jessica Jewell. I can't remember which. But when I saw the TV, I knew that the radio wasn't joking. The World Trade Center towers were on fire, both of them, apparently hit by airplanes in what appeared to be a terrorist attack. I don't remember if the towers had fallen by that time, or if just one of them had fallen. All I know is that I was fixated on the TV, wondering how this had happened, trying to comprehend that it had happened at all.

I remember watching one of the towers fall and not quite believing that it had happened. Lots of people's reactions were that it was like watching a movie. That's because buildings falling down like that isn't something that happens in real life. It's something so unreal that it can only be imagined in a Michael Bay film. If airplanes hitting the World Trade Center was impossible, then the towers falling down was unimaginable.

My friends and I sat, fixed on the TV, learning all we could about what had happened. Again and again we watched video footage of the towers being hit, of the towers falling, of people screaming in the streets, and then running to escape the huge, billowing cloud of dust that completely enveloped lower Manhattan. Apparently a million tons of steel, glass, aluminum, and concrete generate a lot of dust. On CNBC, one of the financial news anchors visited the morning show, completely covered from head to toe with a layer of brown-gray dust. We spent the day watching television, and wondering if Peter Jennings would ever get to sleep.

Many professors canceled classes that day. Miami University declared Friday a holiday, allowing students to spend a three-day weekend at home with their families. Like most of my other friends, I stayed in Oxford.

To this day, whenever I see footage of the towers falling, I can't believe it's real. It's hard to separate that image from a thousand other images of destruction that all came from the movies. It was so sudden: the top of the building just started falling, and the rest of the building followed suit. Of course, whenver a plane hits a building, the first thing in everyone's mind must be, "Is it going to fall down?" Even though the thought occurred to us, we dismissed it as impossible.

Watching all of these September 11 retrospectives takes me back to four years ago. I was just a freshman in college then, and what a thing to be hit with in the first three weeks of class. For the most part, I think we overcame it, but it will always be part of our college experience.

Posted by Mark at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This past Monday, students at Miami University went back to class. If I were becoming a senior this year, I too would be going back to class. I can remember the beginning of last year. Scott and I arrived a week early so that we could help with freshman move-in. Unlike the previous year, last year, we had techs posted at all of the freshman dorms. I remember that I was posted to Peabody Hall. This was a problem because the Ethernet jacks we were supposed to use didn't work. Fortunately, Peabody had a wireless network in the building, so we were able to use that to access the call-tracking database.

Like the year before, Matt's girlfriend lived off-campus, so he moved into our on-campus room a little bit at a time but stayed at his girlfriend's apartment to avoid the crazy charges. I probably went to a party later that evening. I went to lots of parties the week before class started and the first week of class.

And then, on Monday, I went to class. I went first to my religion class, and later that day to my Spanish class. I was pleased to see that Ashli and I were in the same Spanish class. And that was the end of that day.

But no more.

Class, for me, did not begin on Monday. There was no celebratory uptown walk to Mac and Joe's. Never again will I be able to play Bases Loaded on the Nintendo. Never again will I be able to walk over to Scott's room and both him, or go visit Ashli, Jess, or Elizabeth upstairs. Katie Spurrier doesn't live downstairs anymore.

One by one, our friends left. During our sophomore year, everyone lived in Bishop Hall -- except Scott, who practically lived in Bishop Hall. Then Drew, Cole, Emily, and Dree moved away. The next year, Katy Gonzales moved away and Carman never returned to Miami University. The dynamics changed, often resulting in us having to go off-campus for our parties, but all of our friends were there.

Mark doesn't live here anymore. He lives in Centennial, Colorado, which is more or less where Katy used to live. His room is inhabited by Brad "Rasputin." Matt doesn't live here anymore. He lives in Reynoldsburg, Ohio. Scott lives in Pickerington. Ashli lives in Kazakhstan. Katy and Mike live in Cincinnati. Elizabeth lives in San Francisco. Jess lives in Timberlake, Ohio. Katie Spurrier lives in Hamilton. She has one more year left at Miami. So does Sarah Tilton, who's moved out of the house on Main Street in which she spent three years. Now she lives in a dorm. Carman lives in South Carolina. Drew goes to OSU's law school, which is pretty close to Scott and Matt. Andrew lives far away from everyone; he's at New York University.

Here's a map of where we live now:

Minus Ashli, though. This is where Ashli lives relative to the rest of us:

All things are transient. People come and people go. But we have our memories. We have memories of the greatest days we spent together, and the worst. We can think upon them fondly or angrily whenever we want. But we mustn't let memories rule our lives. We're forging new memories right now, and when we meet again -- which I know we will -- we'll have new memories to share.

Kids, take heed: college is the best time of your life. You'll hate it when it starts and long for it when it's gone. It's a place where you'll make some of your best friends and have your greatest experiences. It's like a transitory period between childhood and adulthood, a place where you can do things that you will never be able to do again. Live down the hall from your friends? Go to parties every weekend? Never again. Enjoy the experiences while they happen. Don't ignore anything. And remember so that, one day, in a moment when you're reading a book, you'll suddenly be reminded of the time that Cole got drunk and decided he would go shave in the bathtub.

Posted by Mark at 1:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

You're probably aware that Mormons exist, and they probably live down the street from you. You may also think that they have crazy beliefs. Or maybe you're not quite sure what they believe, but you've heard that it's crazy. Utilizing a variety of sources, let's talk about the Mormons.

Joseph Smith is the founder of the Mormon religion, the actual, full name of which is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, usually abbreviated "LDS." Smith was born in 1805 and grew up in upstate New York. He claimed to have visions that told him of nebulous secret records, but the visions never told him what the records said or where they were located. Finally, sometime between 1820 and 1824, an angel named Moroni appeared to Smith and told him that there were records of Christ's followers in America buried nearby. The records were written on golden plates in an ancient Egyptian-like language that Smith translated with the help of seer stones that he possessed.

How did Smith translate these plates? South Park episode 07x12, "All About the Mormons," depicts him as placing the plates and the seer stones into a hat and then reading the suddenly illuminated English text that appeared on the plates. Actually, that's pretty much how it happened, according to early LDS church documents:

Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine. A piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and on that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English. Brother Joseph would read off the English to Oliver Cowdery, who was his principal scribe, and when it was written down and repeated to Brother Joseph to see if it was correct, then it would disappear, and another character with the interpretation would appear. Thus the Book of Mormon was translated by the gift and power of God, and not by any power of man.

Martin Harris, the man who transcribed Smith's translation of the first plate, the Book of Lehi, took the 116-page manuscript with him to his home in New York. Smith, who was living in Harmony, Pennsylvania, hadn't heard from Harris for two weeks, so he decided to go see him. When Smith finally got to Harris, Harris broke down and admitted that he had lost the manuscript. At this point, notes this webpage, Smith made the transition from translator to prophet. Before Harris lost the manuscript, Smith was merely translating others' work into English. Now, he was receiving communication directly from God. In this instance, God refused to tell Smith where the golden plates were. In a later revelation, Smith was commanded not to re-translate the Book of Lehi, but to translate from the Book of Nephi, located on another plate. It just so happened that both plates recounted the same story, but since they were written by different authors, the translations would be slightly different.

God later commanded Joseph Smith and his followers to move to Kirtland, Ohio. I used to live in Mentor, a scant five minutes from Kirtland. I also did volunteer work at the Lake County Historical Society, where they have a whole archival box labeled "Mormons." The Mormons still have a presence in Kirtland. They recently bought a lot of land near the temple there and turned the area into a sort of pioneer village. (The Mormons love the "pioneer" image.) The life of the Mormons in Kirtland was somewhat tumultuous. Smith, together with right-hand man Sidney Rigdon, raised money from the locals for the construction of a temple in Kirtland. As Lake County Historical Society curator Karon Tomlinson told me once, the locals really didn't care about Smith messing with their religion, so they loaned him money. Key word here: loaned. Well, Smith built his Mormon temple, but he was unable to pay back his investors. The locals may not have cared about Smith messing with their religion, but they did care about him messing with their pocketbooks. Curiously, at about this time, Smith received a revelation that the Mormons should move to Nauvoo, Illinois.

That was probably a bad idea, for it was in Nauvoo that Joseph Smith was killed by angry townspeople. Brigham Young took over leadership of the Mormons, and he instructed them to move to the Great Salt Lake in Utah. And there they live to this day.

But what do they believe? For one, they believe in genealogy, the study of one's ancestors. They believe in it so much that the genealogy library in Salt Lake City, located in Temple Square along with the central temple (the tallest building in Salt Lake City), is the world's largest and most sophisticated genealogy library. So what's with this obsession with family history?

Turns out it's not just a simple hobby. In Mormon belief, a dead person's descendants can perform all the same Mormon rituals on that dead person, effectively making him a Mormon posthumously. The person can be baptized as a Mormon posthumously and the person can be endowed (the marriage ceremony) posthumously. The Mormons can then count these dead people as part of their membership. So, even if the relatives were atheists, Catholics, Muslims, whatever, they can be re-baptized as Mormons. And this is why Mormons are obsessed with genealogy: they want to find out who their ancestors are, not as a hobby, but so those ancestors can become Mormons, too.

For another, they're not conventional Christians. They're actually quite heretical in their belief in the Book of Mormon, subtitled "Another Testament of Jesus Christ," because the New Testament was canonized in 375 A.D. Most Christians believe that this is a "closed canon" -- nothing more can be added to the Bible; it is authoritative as-is. Mormons have added three books to the canon: The Book of Mormon, which tells the story of two ancient tribes from Jerusalem that came to America; Doctrine and Covenants; and The Pearl of Great Price. These three books are the center of Mormon scripture.

What else do Mormons believe? For one, that God used to be a human being, and even though he is now an omnipotent being, he still has a "body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s." God was appointed the supreme being of Earth by a counsel of other gods. Human beings, too, can become gods, through holy living and good deeds, and may someday become gods of their own planets.

As for heaven, there are three of them in Mormon theology: The Celestial Kingdom, the Terrestrial Kingdom, the Telestial Kingdom, and the outer darkness, in descending order of desirability. The Celestial Kingdom is the goal of all Mormons, attainable only if you have atoned for all your sins in this lifetime. The Terrestrial Kingdom is for people who do not believe all the teachings of Mormonism, but are otherwise good. The Telestial Kingdom is for people who have lived unclean lives. The outer darkness is for a small handful of people who cannot be saved. Until 1978, the Mormons taught that "Black people are black because of their misdeeds in the pre-existence." Also, "The Negro is an unfortunate man. He has been given a black skin. But that is nothing compared with that greater handicap. He is not permitted to receive the priesthood and the ordinances of the temple, necessary to prepare men and women to enter into and enjoy a fullness of glory in the Celestial Kingdom." It's not surprising that there aren't that many African-Americans in the LDS Church, since they couldn't enter the priesthood until 1978.

It may be easy to dismiss Mormonism as something as crazy as Scientology (which also deals with other planets, but hey, at least its founder was a science-fiction writer), but when your annual revenue is about $20 billion, you're eccentric, not crazy (it helps that church members are required to tithe 10% of their annual income). Unfortunately, the LDS Church uses a significant portion of this revenue to push its political agendas, such as sponsoring legislators and interest groups in order to defeat gay rights legislation. In its push for traditional "family values," which includes perpetuating the "traditional" role of women as homemakers and mothers and attempting to mold young Mormon women to be traditional women, the church is being left behind as the rest of American culture changes. Of course, this could easily be said of other Christian denominations, but few other denominations are as socially restrictive as the LDS Church; Mormons aren't even allowed to date until they're 16.

So, yes, Mormonism is weird, and it's probably weirder than you think, at least in terms of other kinds of Christianity. But it's not to be marginalized: the LDS Church is very powerful, especially in Utah, where 70% of the population is Mormon, and its members are, by and large, wealthy. They have the money to push their own agendas, and they use it. Their penchant for "family values" is appealing, but if you read the horror stories, the social indoctrination can become stifling, especially for people whose opinions or sexuality aren't "traditional."

And that "baptize the dead" thing is pretty weird, too.

Sources

http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/Cults/mormon.htm#Return%20to%20%233%20Text
http://www.gotquestions.org/Mormons.html
http://www.i4m.com/think/
http://www.bartleby.com/65/sm/Smith-Js.html

Posted by Mark at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a very good article that de-bunks anti-porn myths. Turns out that porn isn't as bad as Jerry Falwell wants us to believe. And it's not confined to perverts. As the author points out, "With 800 million videos being sold and rented in North America each year either porn is loved by everyone, or everyone’s a pervert. Paul Fishbein (founder of AVN magazine) said that anti-porn protestors want us to believe that the porn industry serves 800 guys who each rent a million movies a year. He’s right." Also, "Porn is worth $10B a year in the US alone. If the moral standards of our society say porn is wrong where’s the money coming from?" The belief that porn is bad comes from a morality that says sex is bad. The only reason Pat Robertson condones sex at all is because it's sort of necessary for the continued existence of humanity. Also because the Bible says it's okay, but only for reproduction! And Pat Robertson would never contradict what the Bible says. But he would embellish things, inventing crazy interpretations of things that are already in there. Which is better, though: a society that relieves its sexual frustrations through pornography, or a society that represses its sexual frustrations and then lets them out in inappropriate ways at inappropriate times? A lot of Christians -- not just Evangelicals -- would like to pretend that sexuality doesn't exist, that if you repress it, it goes away. Turns out that it's not like that at all! But some Christians with an axe to grind will invent bogus think-tanks and "scientific" research institutions to perpetuate the lie that pornography leads to moral degredation which, using a trope that dates back to the earliest Greek dramatists, leads to physical degredation.

This is a very good article that explains how the current "War on Terror" began with Ronald Reagan. Who do you think gave Saddam Hussein all those weapons? He sure as heck didn't invent them. They were given to him by the Reagan Administration, which really didn't like the Iranians because of that whole hostage thing. And the fact that Ayatollah Kohmeini was a crazy Islamic dictator that we couldn't control, unlike the Shah, who was a crazy secular dictator that we could control. So, in the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted for most of the 1980s, Reagan supplied Iraq with weapons that it could use to fight Iran. Supporters of the invasion of Iraq say that Saddam gassed the Kurds back in the '80s. Guess who gave him that gas? The same guy who starred in Bedtime for Bonzo. It's quite convenient that supporters of the war in Iraq can block out all memory of a time when we supported Saddam, who was obviously a crazy, cruel dictator back then, but it was perfectly acceptable in the 1980s, because he was on "our side" then. Him and a half a million other crazy dictators who despised "freedom," "liberty" (and the other empty words that the Bush Administration spews from Scott McClellan every other day) but at least supported us against the Soviet Union. People who support the Iraq War need to read a book and understand why we really went to Iraq. And they're not allowed to use the words "freedom," "liberty," or "terror(ism)." Why? Because those words have nothing to do with the reason we went to Iraq.

Meta-blogs are fine, but too many of them get irritating. Whenever I link to another interesting article online, I try to comment on it a little bit so that this place doesn't turn into Fark. I also think my Photoshop skills are better than Fark's. Then again, a blind monkey with no hands can win a Fark Photoshop contest, so I don't think I need to worry. All the monkey needs to do is know how to poorly paste and stretch a pixelated image of Admiral Akbar or a Domo-kun or any other character from the latest lame Internet in-joke, and it wins a million points.

Both of these major stories came from Metafilter. Neo-cons make me sick.

Posted by Mark at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Maybe I should have studied some queer theory before I wrote that SpongeBob piece. Queer theory comes from the 1980s and is an offshoot of feminist theory. Where feminist theory said that gender was a social construction, queer theory goes a step further and says sexuality is a social construction. Human sexuality is not informed by "biology" or anything scientific, since

human sexuality looks very little like animal sexuality in any regard. We are (I think, and correct me if I'm wrong) the only species that can copulate more or less at will, without regard to fertility or hormonal cycles, and that alone separates sexual behavior from reproduction for human beings. We also have an enormous repertoire of sexual behaviors and activities, only some of which are linked to reproduction, which further separates the two categories. And--most importantly--human sexual behavior is about pleasure, and about pleasure mediated by all kinds of cultural categories.

We used to insist that gender was informed by science, that male and female roles were immutable. Dad went to work. Mom stayed home. Rinse, repeat. Feminist theorists, in the 1970s, challenged the assertion that women "should" act a particular way and men "should" act a particular way. Gender, then, "was a social construct, something designed and implemented and perpetuated by social organizations and structures, rather than something merely 'true,' something innate to the ways bodies worked on a biological level." When we speak of "gender," we speak of gender roles and the signs that go along with them.

Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was a French linguist and the founder of semiotics. His text, Course in General Linguistics, was published posthumously by his students, but it nonetheless made him the Founding Father of literary and cultural theory in the twentieth century. Every literary theory to develop after World War I is informed by Saussure, either as a support or a critique. Other fields, like feminist theory, use Saussure's notion of the sign.

Saussure saw language as the most important institution for human beings. Language (langue) was divided into signs. Signs represent abstract ideas, concepts, or things in a language. A sign is made of two components: the signifier (the sound pattern used to describe the concept) and the signified (the concepts being described). Thus the word "table" is composed of the pattern of sounds composing the word "table" and the concept of "table." Something to notice is that a sign is a level removed from the thing it describes. It is not the thing it describes. Saussure understood this gap of meaning between the sign and the signified, but never really addressed it, since we couldn't do anything about it. It is an inherent flaw of language.

On to queer theory!

Queer theory looks at, and studies, and has a political critique of, anything that falls into normative and deviant categories, particularly sexual activities and identities. The word "queer", as it appears in the dictionary, has a primary meaning of "odd," "peculiar," "out of the ordinary." Queer theory concerns itself with any and all forms of sexuality that are "queer" in this sense--and then, by extension, with the normative behaviors and identities which define what is "queer" (by being their binary opposites). Thus queer theory expands the scope of its analysis to all kinds of behaviors, including those which are gender-bending as well as those which involve "queer" non-normative forms of sexuality. Queer theory insists that all sexual behaviors, all concepts linking sexual behaviors to sexual identities, and all categories of normative and deviant sexualities, are social constructs, sets of signifiers which create certain types of social meaning. Queer theory follows feminist theory and gay/lesbian studies in rejecting the idea that sexuality is an essentialist category, something determined by biology or judged by eternal standards of morality and truth. For queer theorists, sexuality is a complex array of social codes and forces, forms of individual activity and institutional power, which interact to shape the ideas of what is normative and what is deviant at any particular moment, and which then operate under the rubric of what is "natural," "essential," "biological," or "god-given."

Our culture uses language as shorthand to describe behaviors as well as physical characteristics. The word "male" signifies not only male genitalia, but also a male role. The word "female" signifies a female role and female genitalia. Feminist theory called into question the first part of those signs, but not the second part. Queer theory suggests that our genitalia do not determine our gender. Our culture assigns us a gender based upon those genitalia, but that may not be how we feel about that gender.

Sexuality, though, is not a social construction. Our sexuality -- homosexual, heterosexual, or in-between -- is biological. The concepts of these sexualities, however, are socially constructed in that we give signifiers to different sexual orientations.

It's back to the drawing board on the SpongeBob theory.

(Source: Mary Klages, "Queer Theory," U of Colorado at Boulder, 29 October 1997 .)

Posted by Mark at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Ned writes:

Sexuality is socially constructed? The moustache parade is going to be after you.

I can hear it now: Gay Person: "How dare you. One is born gay; one does not become gay. Everything in life is socially constructed except for sexuality. Duh, Mark."

What I meant in saying that sexuality is socially constructed is that we assign sexuality to others based on socially-constructed ideas of gender. A person's sexuality -- that is, who he wants to have sex with -- is genetic. A person does not choose to be homosexual or heterosexual. However, the very ideas of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are themselves socially constructed. Other cultures have different concepts of sexuality beyond the binary sexuality (homosexual/heterosexual) with which we are most (un)comfortable.

Posted by Mark at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Woo hoo! Entry number 200!

Conservative Christians are up in arms (as they always are) about SpongeBob Squarepants, the lovable children’s cartoon character who may or may not be gay. In January, songwriter Nile Rodgers created a video featuring several children’s cartoon characters singing “We Are Family” in a message of tolerance. Conservative Christians are fine with tolerance – as long as they don’t have to tolerate people that are different from them. The tolerance pledge on Rodgers’ website includes a reference to sexual tolerance, and there’s nothing more that Conservative Christians hate than dirty sodomites. SpongeBob Squarepants was one of the cartoon characters featured in the video, adding credence to some claims that he is gay. (Read all about this at CNN.com.) Stephen Hillenburg, SpongeBob’s creator, says that he thinks of all the characters on the show as asexual.

Of course this is true. Children have no concept of sex. The concept of gender and sex is wholly foreign to them. Sex is defined as what kind of genitals you have. You can be male, female, or hermaphroditic (if you have the genitals of both sexes). Your sex is wholly natural. It is not determined by you, your parents, your government, your customs, or anyone else. Gender, on the other hand, is determined by one or more of those things. A person’s gender is the social role he plays according to the genitals he has. Someone with a penis we call a man (or male), and someone with a vagina we call a woman (or female). These social roles – created by a culture based on a person’s genitalia – can be occupational, as in, “I’m a woman; therefore, I cannot be a firefighter,” or they can refer to social habits, as in, “I’m a woman; therefore, I must wear a dress.” Gender affects every aspect of our culture.

Children have no concept of gender until it is taught to them. Billy has a penis; therefore, he can be a firefighter and Sally cannot. Sally has a vagina; therefore, she must wear a dress and Billy cannot. If Freud were still in vogue (and you can thank your lucky stars that he isn’t), we would say that gender – for the male – is assigned when the father “threatens the male child’s Oedipal desire for the mother with the punishment of ‘castration.’ The repression of desire makes it possible for the male child to identify with the place of the father and with a ‘masculine’ role” (Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 3rd ed. [Lexington, Ky.: UP of Kentucky, 1993], 138). The gendering of the female is more convoluted and has been heavily criticized.

In any case, no one believes Freud anymore. Jacques Lacan provides a better explanation without the rampant misogyny. According to Lacan, the child enters into a world ruled by a language system, and eventually, he begins to understand this language. The child only truly develops a sense of “self” in what Lacan calls the “mirror stage”: when a child looks into a mirror and sees himself as a separate entity from his mother. Through this system of language, we also begin to learn that we are either “female” or “male” according to our genitals, and we become conditioned to be either “male” or “female.”

There are times, though, when gender is not based on sex. Gender can be assigned based on perceived physical characteristics which correlate with particular genitalia. Or they can be assigned completely arbitrarily, as in the case of SpongeBob. We use male pronouns with SpongeBob because, for one, his name is SpongeBob. “Bob” is a male name, assigned to people with male genitalia. Second, we use male pronouns for SpongeBob because, within the cartoon (the text), he is referred to in a male way. The text tells us that SpongeBob is male. Why is this so? Could it be because SpongeBob has male genitalia? The text also tells us that SpongeBob does not have any genitalia. Cartoon characters are neuter. They cannot have sex with each other because they have no genitalia. Therefore, sex is unimportant. Gender, on the other hand, is important, since the world of cartoons mimics our own world. We see people every day without seeing what’s inside their pants; we assume that the gender we assign to them matches their sex, and for the most part, we’re right. We have learned to match particular physical characteristics to sexualities that correspond to those characteristics. Therefore, we can bypass the genitals – and sex – altogether in determining gender. We do this with SpongeBob and other cartoons. Minnie Mouse has a bow in her hair; therefore, she is female.

What does this have to do with SpongeBob? Well, he has no sex and neither do other cartoon characters because children have no concept of sex. They have genitalia, to be sure, but they have no idea what it’s for. “During the earliest phases of infanthood the libidinal drives have no definite sexual object but play around the various erotogenic zones of the body (oral, anal, ‘phallic’),” says Selden. “Before gender or identity are established there is only the rule of the ‘pleasure principle’” (138). By the time they are old enough to watch SpongeBob, children understand gender, but they don’t necessarily understand sex. They understand that SpongeBob is male, his friend Patrick is male, and his friend Sandy is female. But they don’t understand why.

Sexuality is about who you want to have sex with. It is also socially constructed, but with good reason, which I will explain momentarily. A person who wants to have sex with someone who has different genitals is heterosexual. A person who wants to have sex with someone who has the same genitals is homosexual. Bisexual people “swing either way”; they will have sex with persons who have genitals that are similar and different to their own. While sexuality is socially constructed based on genitalia, it is done so with good reason: a homosexual society would die out after the first generation, as homosexuals cannot procreate! Thus while gendering may not serve a prosaic purpose, sexualizing serves to allow procreation of the species.

Since SpongeBob has no genitals, he has no sex. Since he has no sex, he can have no sexuality. Elizabeth offered as evidence for his homosexuality an episode where he dresses like a woman and plays wife to Patrick, who acts as his husband. SpongeBob’s cross-dressing, cross-dressing though it may be, is not tantamount to homosexuality. Being effeminate is not tantamount to homosexuality. SpongeBob has no sexuality; therefore, he cannot be heterosexual or homosexual. The text and its author simply do not care about who SpongeBob wants to have sex with. It’s not important, and any attempt to make it important must necessarily result in a misreading of the text. There is no support for the claim that SpongeBob is a homosexual.

As I was writing this, Matt asked me about Pepe Le Peu, the famous French skunk. Clearly, Pepe Le Peu likes female skunks (although in every episode, he ends up chasing a black cat who, through some accident, has ended up with a white stripe down her back). What happens when cartoon characters have attractions to other cartoon characters? Well, since sexuality is culturally assigned, and children bypass the genitals when determining gender, children can only surmise that people who look like men have feelings for (the word "sex" isn't part of a child's vocabulary) people who look like women. Dad looks like a man and he has some relationship with Mom, who looks like a woman. Pepe Le Peu is gendered male; thus, according to a child, he must be attracted to female skunks. As long as cartoon characters don't actually engage in sex, they have no sexuality, and everything about their relationships with other cartoon characters rides on a culturally-assigned level.

Posted by Mark at 9:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's a question I hear whenever I talk to mere mortals about my studies in college. I tell them that I'm majoring in history and English literature, and they say, "What are you going to do with that?" or some variant thereof. The second-most-popular response is, "Are you going to teach?" I feel like I'm being patronized, as the person pats me on the head and says, "Of course your degree is useful."

It's only in the last forty years that college has become an expensive vocational school. The rise of the business degree has turned some institutions into business mills, churning out half-prepared business students who wait eagerly to enter the echelons of middle management. Miami University is such an institution, with Miami graduate, billionaire, and founder of the company Cintas sitting on the Board of Trustees. His name is Richard T. Farmer, and they've named the School of Business after him. None of our other colleges are named after people. You might think that even Miami's most famous graduate, William Holmes McGuffey, author of McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, might have the school of education named after him. Nope. He's too old and too dead. Give him a building and a street.

Only in the last forty years have students gone to college hoping to get an education that trained them for the "real world." Students in the humanities have dropped as students in business have climbed. The United States is an economic society based on money. What better guarantor for making money than getting a degree in which you're taught how to make money?

But what are you getting? I like to joke that business majors at Miami University go to King Library to use the study rooms to do their group marketing projects. I wonder how much of that is true. White boards in the lobby tell people from various groups that they are to meet in such-and-such a room. The group names begin with "ACC," "FIN," or "MKT," which stand for "Accounting," "Finance," and "Marketing." One day I want to do an informal survey of the abbreviations on the white board and see what percentage of students in study rooms are business students. The thing about the group projects is true, though: business students don't write papers and they don't take tests. They do group projects. Good for them, I say as I pat them on the head.

But what about learning? It used to be that learning for learning's sake was enough. You didn't go to college to necessarily do something with your degree. You got a degree and then studied your subject. There will always be doctors and teachers; those fields are prosaic enough. But philosophy? History? Literature? What does one do with such things? How does one make money?

Well, a person studies such things, of course. History is probably the most utilitarian of all of the liberal arts. An historian looks up new information in archives, or goes around the world, digging up artifacts that tell us more about times long past. The historian writes books about these things to let us know what happened in the past. I don't mean, of course, the obligatory biographies of founding fathers that appear every other year. That's intellectual chump change. A book about Benjamin Franklin contains no newer information about him than the last book that was written five years ago. People are suckers for biographies, for some reason.

The philosopher thinks about the nature of the universe and deals with the tough questions about our existence that we either don't want to deal with, don't care about dealing with, or are too dumb to know exist. "What is reality?" is pretty heady stuff. It's also a valid question that some of us don't care about. Answering the question "What is reality?" may not net you a job as CEO of Cintas, but it will make you a better person for knowing the nature of the aether in which you float every day.

Matthew Arnold was a nineteenth-century British essayist who foresaw a coming war between knowledge for itself (what he called "culture") and knowledge for utility (what he called "anarchy"). Fittingly enough, the work which dealt with this culture war is called Culture and Anarchy.

Culture and Anarchy came about because of a speech made by Mr. Frederic Harrison, a member of Parliament who suggested that

the man of culture is in politics one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too unreal, no end is too unpractical for him. But the active exercise of politics requires common sense, sympathy, trust, resolution and enthusiasm, qualities which your man of culture has carefully rooted up, lest they damage the delicacy of his critical olfactories.

First of all, cultural is impractical. Second, culture has no place in politics, a practical trade which demands common sense, something which Harrison suggests that people of culture lack. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold mounts his defense of culture.

Arnold distinguishes good culture from bad culture, the latter being a "culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin" in the denigrating words of John Bright, another member of parliament who had nothing but contempt for intellectuals. "Bad culture" is "a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance, or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it."

"Good culture" is "the desire to augment the excellence of our nature, and to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent." Culture also concerns itself with "the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it."

In Arnold's time, as in ours, there was an obsession with the accumulation of wealth. Wealth, he says, is not an end unto itself, but "machinery" used to acheive some end:

the commonest of commonplaces tells us how men are always apt to regard wealth as a precious end in itself; and certainly they have never been so apt thus to regard it as they are in England at the present time. Never did people believe anything more firmly, than nine Englishmen out of ten at the present day believe that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being so very rich. Now, the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so.

Freedom is the same. Freedom is not an end unto itself, but "machinery" that we use to acheive some end. In talking about freedom, Parliament has cleverly disguised the purpose of freedom: freedom for the aristocracy and the middle class, and that's about it. The aristocracy and middle class design a state structure that serves their own interests, and their own interests only:

Our leading class is an aristocracy, and no aristocracy likes the notion of a State-authority greater than itself, with a stringent administrative machinery superseding the decorative inutilities of lord-lieutenancy, deputy-lieutenancy, and the not in print version posse comitatis, which are all in its own hands. Our middle-class, the great representative of trade and not in print version Dissent, with its maxims of every man for himself in business, every man for himself in religion, dreads a powerful administration which might somehow interfere with it; and besides, it has its own decorative inutilities of vestrymanship and guardianship, which are to this class what lord-lieutenancy and the county magistracy are to the aristocratic class, and a stringent administration might either take these functions out of its hands, or prevent its exercising them in its own comfortable, independent manner, as at present.

But above all, culture -- rather than politics -- is most suited to solve problems, since it constantly strives for perfection. Culture "enables us to look at the ins and the outs of things in this way, without hatred and without partiality, and with a disposition to see the good in everybody all round."

Posted by Mark at 7:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, it's finally happened. iPods are our undisputed lords and masters. Like some sort of parasite or alien baby, they have latched onto normal human beings and turned them into zombies.

But why do people have iPods? Because it's fashionable? Certainly. The little white ear buds and the white cord immediately send the signal, "Look at my iPod. Look how trendy I am!" Especially since our favorite movie heroes use iPods.

Let it be known: I had an iPod before it was cool to have one. I got an iPod for Christmas two years ago because I was looking for a good MP3 player. And what do you know? The iPod was the best MP3 player on the market. It didn't play "brain-damaged DRM" formats (to use Cory Doctrow's phrase) like Real's MP3 player or Sony's old MP3 player. It used iTunes, which is a superb music management program, and it's also useful as a regular old hard drive, unlike MP3 players which operate using memory sticks. It's stylish and well-built, and for your money, there's no better MP3 player on the market. That's why I have an iPod.

This is what it must have felt like for the runners who wore New Balance shoes because they were excellent shoes. Now everyone has New Balance shoes, not because they need good shoes, but because it's hip to be seen wearing New Balance shoes.

I suppose it's best for high quality to be trendy.

Posted by Mark at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Another year, another day older. But another chance to do right what went wrong last year. What do I want to see in 2005?

• The FCC decides that it no longer wants to be the Parents Television Council's lap-dog and tells them to go take a hike. It goes back to the way it used to be before Janet Jackson's boob was suggested during the Super Bowl.
• Spyware manufacturers decide that their business model isn't making them money and it's harming millions of computer users. They all jump off a bridge. Or get hit by a bus. The downside to that is that I'll be bored with no spyware to remove.
• George W. Bush either 1) resigns or 2) wises up, stops operating the country based on evangelical Christian beliefs, decides he doesn't want to be a neo-con anymore, and spontaneously gets about 30 more I.Q. points. We abandon our War on an Abstract Idea and decide to work together with the rest of the world instead of in opposition to it. How many Civilization 3 players actually like the Mongols or the Zulu?
• The MPAA and RIAA give up their persecution of file-sharing networks (their latest tactic is placing enticing spyware-infected files on peer-to-peer networks). They also decide that the consumer should decide what he wants to do with the content he has purchased. The Ghost of Jack Valenti is finally exorcised from the MPAA and content is produced that is DRM-free or has DRM installed that protects consumers' rights as well as the artists' (read: publishers').
• Finally, the terrorists conclude that blowing people up doesn't endear them to anyone. They talk to governments, and governments listen. ETA and Madrid respectfully agree to disagree, atavistic Muslim clerics get with the times, and the new leader of the Palestinian Authority condemns terrorism and works to stop it. Oh, and Ariel Sharon stops taking those crazy pills and actually works with the Palestinians instead of trying to kill them all.

And because I can, here's the inspiration for the title of this entry: Steve Martin's "Five Wishes for Christmas" monologue.

Posted by Mark at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

What lessons are we to learn from Charles Dickens' classic story "A Christmas Carol"? Obviously the most important lesson is that it is better to give than to receive: Scrooge's life of being miserly has left him devoid of family and friends and, as he sees, will ultimately land him a lonely death.

Dickens tells us explicitly that Scrooge is a terrible human being. He is "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner." He is cold, unfeeling, and, interestingly, does not respond to external stimuli: "No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him." Not only can he not feel emotionally, he cannot feel physically, as though he has some sort of organic nerve malfunction which causes his bitter condition.

Scrooge has other odd characteristics. When the ghost of Jacob Marley visits him on Christmas Eve, Scrooge refuses to acknowledge his existence. "Why do you doubt your senses?" asks Marley. Scrooge replies, "Because [...] a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!" He is a man without epistemology. He appears to have no faith in anything, meaning he does not believe in things for which there is no empirical support. The above quotation implies that he has no belief in reason, either: he does not believe the empirical data provided by his senses. He believes whatever is convenient for him at the time. If it does not suit him to believe in the ghost of Jacob Marley, then he does not believe in it. After a while, though, Scrooge cannot ignore the reality of Jacob Marley and so decides that he "must" believe in him.

Marley tells Scrooge that, for his failure to engage in "charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence," he will be punished. Marley himself was punished by being forced to wear "the chain [he] forged in life" and walk the Earth for eternity. This Christmas, Marley's ghost feels compelled to come to Scrooge and warn him of his impending fate. Like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Frankenstein, "A Christmas Carol" is a didactic story: a character who has had some terrible fate befall him has come to warn another character who is on the path to the same fate. If the latter character can somehow change his habits, he may avoid that same fate. It is a typical Christian thing to do and something that the Bible commands Christians to do: to go out and attempt to save the souls of their fellow-men by getting them to believe in Christ as their savior. In this case, salvation comes not from Christ but from charity and concern for one's fellow-man.

Over the course of an evening, the three ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future show Scrooge that, at one point, he did have concern for others; he should continue to have concern for others; and if he does not, he will die lonely and forgotten and will indirectly cause the death of Tiny Tim. Scrooge's change occurred when he got his own counting-house and began to concern himself with money rather than human beings. His girlfriend left him after she realized that he was more concerned with accumulating wealth than with loving her.

The Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge that there are still people who care for him, specifically his nephew, Dick. Dick is the epitome of Christ's suggestion to "turn the other cheek." Dick is abused by Scrooge (only verbally, when he comes calling on Christmas) but still asks him every year to come to his Christmas party. Where others would have given up on Scrooge long ago, Dick still holds out hope for him. So, too, does Bob Cratchit, Scrooge's long-suffering clerk. Cratchit even toasts Scrooge at his family's meager Christmas meal, much to his wife's discontent. Here, Scrooge displays genuine concern and "an interest he had never felt before" for Tiny Tim, who, the Spirit tells him, could die "if these shadows remain unaltered by the Future."

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is the most fearsome ghost yet. It is here, within the stave concerning the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, that some ambiguity steps in. Is Scrooge genuinely repentant, or is merely scared into repentance? Certainly cynics would like to believe that Scrooge was frightened into good behavior with the threat of death, but the text does not support this assumption. Scrooge displayed genuine concern for Tiny Tim before meeting the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. The job of the Ghost of Christmas Past was to remind Scrooge that he was once a feeling person and to remind him also that he was once happy and could have been happier in the present if only he hadn't become engrossed in greed. The Ghost of Christmas Present allows Scrooge an outlet to express his newly-rediscovered concern for others. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is certainly there to scare Scrooge, but only to scare him into a climax that will result in a catharsis later on. By the end of the story, Scrooge is genuinely repentant. He comes to realize that he has little time in which to enjoy his new-found empathy and happiness and becomes afraid that he will not have much time in which to enjoy it. His catharsis comes from the knowledge that he will not die and that he will remain alive sufficiently to enjoy his newfound knowledge.

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come utilizes that age-old satirical trick, reducto ad infinitum -- reduction to the infinite. The Ghost creates a dystopic future based on the events of the present. "If these shadows remain unaltered" -- if things continue in the same vein -- then the future that Scrooge sees will be a real future. What we are reading is a dystopia in action: a present problem is projected into the future, providing the present with enough time to change the course of events. Scrooge, ultimately, changes the course of events, which will ultimately (hopefully) result in a different future in which he does not die alone in his bed and where Tiny Tim continues to live.

Certainly Dickens could have done a better job letting his readers know that Scrooge is genuinely repentant, but if read closely, his text assures us that the Ghosts have aroused genuine feelings within him, not merely a fear of death that prompts him to behave. He is not good because he fears punishment, but he becomes good because he realizes that virtue is good in and of itself. He cares about his fellow-men and seeks to enjoy life -- and not just on Christmas, but "all the year." The hope of salvation is there for everyone, and even when it seems to late, it is possible to obtain it. A good Christmas story for people who are stressed out and have forgotten that Christmas means Christ and Christ means "charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence."

Posted by Mark at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Wisdom, specifically, from Wet, Hot American Summer, a sleeper film from 2001 which parodies those "coming-of-age-at-summer-camp" movies:

Listen, Coop. Last night was really great. You were incredibly romantic and heroic, no doubt about it. And that's great. But I've thought about it, and my thing is this: Andy is really hot. And don't get me wrong, you're cute too, but Andy is like, cut. From marble. He's gorgeous. He has this beautiful face and this incredible body, and I genuinely don't care that he's kind of lame. I don't even care that he cheats on me. And I like you more than I like Andy, Coop, but I'm sixteen. And maybe it'll be a different story when I'm ready to get married, but right now, I am entirely about sex. I just wanna get laid. I just wanna take him and grab him and fuck his brains out, you know? So that's where my priorities are right now. Sex. Specifically with Andy and not with you.

Kristi really was right. This is a great movie. Please visit Ladder Theory for more information on this film's wisdom.

Posted by Mark at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Alex had a problem with my interpretation of zombie films as dystopian. She didn't think it worked. You be the judge.

We'll start by defining "utopia" and "dystopia," just for the uninitiated. A "utopia" is a perfect world where there are no problems of any kind. The word "dystopia" means exactly the opposite. It is a world where everything is as bad as it could possibly be. The most common examples of dystopias in literature are 1984, Brave New World, or Fahrenheit 451.

Dystopias are, more often than not, a form of social criticism. The author of dystopic fiction recognizes a social problem in his own time and hypothesizes what would happen if this problem grew and grew, taking it to its logical conclusion. Dystopic fiction is often over-the-top, featuring outrageous scenarios that we could never imagine happening (1984's scenario of worldwide brainwashing and near-total control of dissidents seems pretty unlikely). But this why dystopias are often classified as satire: in making sure that no one misses the criticism, the social problems and their end results are exaggerated.

The point of the dystopia, then, is to point out a problem. Something has gone wrong with society and a dystopia is the end result of that problem. Now take a look at zombies. What are zombies? First, they're definitely not alive, but they're not quite dead, either. They have no proper classification; they're an aberration, something unnatural. Second, zombies have no feelings and no thoughts. Only rarely do they ever have the power to speak. Zombies are no better than animals. They're driven onward by their desire for brains. In an interesting twist, even though they consume brains -- the seat of human consciousness and reason, the thing that makes humans better than animals -- they only get a basic, caloric value from the brains. They don't get any smarter and they don't gain the capacity to reason. This is why zombie societies would never become artistic centers: zombies have no ability to produce art.

Imagine if you were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, or John Locke. You worship human reason. Becoming a zombie -- human, but without that key ability to reason -- would be the worst thing in the world for you.

Now we get to the social criticism part. As I explained previously, old-school zombie films (of the George A. Romero variety, like the original Night of the Living Dead) are morality plays. There is no explanation for why people turn into zombies. It just happens that people do. Herein lies the social criticism: human beings have become base, immoral creatures. If left unchecked, humanity's lack of morality will degenerate from an intellectual baseness to a physical baseness in the form of being a zombie. Ostensibly, it is some higher being that has placed this curse on mankind, a punishment for their immoral thoughts and deeds. The only people who 1) are not zombiefied and 2) survive are a small band of ethical human beings. These old-school zombie films are allegories of the Biblical story of Lot (Genesis 19; God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah but allows Lot to leave, warning him not to look back. His wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt). Lot is allowed to leave by virtue of his ... well, virtue. His wife is, too. Nonetheless, she disobeys God's commandment not to look back and is punished. This happens in zombie films, also, when the people we thought were safe from zombies get attacked and turned into zombies themselves. Apparently they weren't as virtuous as we thought they were.

Contemporary zombie films (this means post-1980s) are not moral plays, but criticisms of science. Return of the Living Dead introduces us to a rational explanation for zombiefication: the military has developed a chemical that re-animates the dead. The first issue that gets raised here is "why do we need to re-animate the dead?" The short answer is "because we can." This idea of science for science's sake (that is, an experiment whose results could yield no conceivable benefit to mankind as a whole) goes all the way back to Shelley's Frankenstein (arguably the first novel dealing with zombies), Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The modern cinema has not only made all of those books into movies, but has added to the genre, most notably with Jurassic Park (recall Ian Malcolm's line, "Your scientists were so busy seeing whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should." Also, a good portion of Michael Crichton's work deals with science that turns against its creators). Our fear of "science" comes into play whenever science does something we view as unnatural -- like re-animating the dead, putting parts of animals together to get new animals, or genetically engineering once-extinct animals. In Return of the Living Dead, the fear is that science -- in the wrong hands and with "unnatural" intent -- could cause us to become not better humans, but worse humans. Again, the worst kind of human you could be is a zombie, a human without humanity.

28 Days Later is probably the seminal modern zombie film. All of the people whom we think "deserve" to die end up dead (all of those people at that compound, for example, are morally decrepit and it's only a matter of time before they get what's coming to them in the form of zombiefication) and all of the people whom we think "deserve" to live end up living. We don't like watching a movie or reading a book where morally upstanding characters meet the fate of the morally corrupt. The morally upstanding characters, we think, should survive because of their values. In 28 Days Later, they do. This film combines both the scientific dystopia (for the zombies are created by way of a virus of some sort -- there's science again, making some sort of mistake) and the moral one (the "good" characters survive, remaining human rather than turning into zombies).

Thus zombie films can be interpreted as social criticism, which allows us to classify them as dystopian. While Alex asserted that zombies can't exist in a society because they aren't rational, I would argue that zombies do live in a society, and their society is the remnants of the old human society they once lived in. It is a corrupt society, but a society nonetheless. There's anarchy for sure, but the zombies exist together all the same. The zombie genre is another attempt at social criticism, one that simultaneously taps into our fear of mortality and our fear of brutality, for the zombie is both a brute and (un)dead. He has neither a soul nor a capacity for reason, making him an outsider to both God and man. And that's really scary.

Posted by Mark at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Sure, Ayn Rand hates babies and poor people, but that doesn't mean she's all bad. Her philosophy, Objectivism, is pretty cohesive, and it deals with every aspect of life, including love. It's hard to believe that a nature-hating übercapitalist like Ayn Rand could love anybody, but it's true.

Her biggest novel, Atlas Shrugged, deals with love a lot. Like everything else, she sees love in economic terms: love is a transaction between two people. It sounds cold and heartless, but it's the truth. Here's what one of her characters, Francisco D'Anconia (an Objectivist) has to say about love:

Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his value of himself. No matter what corruption he's taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive other than his own enjoyment -- just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! -- an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire.

Ayn Rand thinks selfishness is a virtue. "Look out for number one" is her motto. How can you worry about other people and ignore yourself? She thinks that's ludicrous. And love is no exception. Would you love someone out of pity? Of course not; you would love someone whom you wanted to love. You would never love someone just for the other person's sake; you would need to be getting something out of it, too.

Francisco continues:

He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience -- or to fake -- a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer -- because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut.

Ignoring Rand's chauvinism for a while, the first sentence in the above quote is the most important: a man will be drawn to a woman who reflects him. This makes sense. A man wouldn't be attracte to a woman who doesn't share some of the same values or tastes as he does. What would they even talk about? How would they get along?

I see love as being a transaction between two people. Both partners in a relationship need to get something out of that relationship, whether it's spiritual, physical, or philosophical fulfillment. I date you because there is something about you that fulfills some need I have. Maybe you're an excellent singer, or a skilled orator, or you can make houses of playing cards. There is something you have that I want, and vice-versa. You reflect some sort of ideal that I aspire to. A pretty face does not a girlfriend make. There needs to be substance, and substance such that I feel that I'm missing out on something by not being with you.

Love is selfish. And there's nothing wrong with that. I wouldn't waste my time with someone just for the sake of the other person's feelings (or whatever the reason) if I knew that I wouldn't get anything out of the relationship. My time is valuable, too, and charity has no place in relationships. In fact, to me, my own time is the most valuable and I want to be damn sure that I'm getting the most I can out of that time.

You can also put relationships in economic terms. In economics, you're making an economic profit if the value of the next-best thing you could be doing is less than the value of what you're doing right now. The value of the next-best thing is called the "opportunity cost" (for example, the opportunity cost of being at college is equal to the money I could be making working in the real world instead of being here). If I'm not making an economic profit -- that is, if I could be making more money doing something else -- then I go do something else.

A relationship is this way, as well. If I feel like I'm making what could be called "emotional profit" from a relationship, then I stay in that relationship. The alternative is dating someone else, or not dating at all. If my girlfriend is abusive and bastardy, then the emotional profit is negative and it's time to find someone else.

A relationship is also like an investment, say, the stock market. When you invest money, the only reason you give that money to someone else is because you expect all of it back and then some. In a relationship, you're turning over your emotions to someone else. The risk is that your heart will be broken (in the stock market, the risk is that you'll lose some or all of your money). But if you think that the chances of the relationship working out and your emotions getting better (i.e. more happiness) are greater than the chances of your emotions being injured, then you stay in the relationship (or you get into one in the first place). Warren Buffett is the CEO of BerkshireHathaway, and he makes a lot of money because he's good at making lots of money. He plays the stock market, but his motto is that the stock market should be a long-term investment. Sure, this month or this year, the stock market may be down, but the long-term trend is always up. You can't let a small dip in the stock market scare you into taking your money out, because you know that you plan on making money years down the road, not months. Not even one year. Lots of years. The same goes for a relationship. Though you may hit hard times, if you think there's more emotional payoff down the road, it's better to work through the problems than to simply end the relationship.

And then there was a vampire (for those of you who were bored by economics).

Posted by Mark at 8:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rush or Sean Hannity always complains about his "right" to own an SUV. But what if an SUV is so bad for the environment it should be illegal? It happened with leaded gasoline. Cars must meet minimum environmental standards because Sean or Rush isn't the only person who lives on planet Earth. The folks at Car Talk have come up with a list of reasons why no one needs to own an SUV. Like their radio show, it is highly hilarious. And this comes from the point of view of Tom and Ray as expert car mechanics, not them as crazy hippies.

Posted by Mark at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, the free-market economy extols the values of individualism? It refuses to lock people into groups. Dr. Jean-Louis Caccomo, writing for The Yorktown Patriot, talks about the failures of so-called social justice, which seeks to equalize injustices by favoring one group of people over another. "In fact, those who reason in terms of class, caste, and ethnicity are those who incite class, gender, and race warfare. They do not admit and can not even conceive of the autonomy of the individual and turn the State into the instrument of the power of some so­cial groups. To borrow from Marxist logic, the State becomes an instrument for the dic­tatorship of the proletariat." When decrying "social injustice" and placing individualism on a pedestal, it is very important that we use the M-word, which is, of course, very charged with meaning (Marxist?! That means Communist!).

This author is very good at employing extreme examples and making them sound as though they are the norm. Railing against unions, he says:

One other outcome is a kind of "social terrorism" that consists of the extension of "union rights" in such a manner that they conflict with the respect of fundamental individual rights: freedom of movement, freedom of thought, private property. French citizens are frequently held hostage in such situations as the Bov � case, when truck drivers blockade roads or when workers threaten to pollute the environment with dangerous chemical substances so as to influence negotiations in their firms.

Let's be reasonable. The French are further to the left than the United States. They have enacted laws there that would never be enacted in the United States. (Currently, French law limits working hours for everyone to thirty per week. The U.S. has already dealt with this; in the early part of the 20th century, the Supreme Court struck down a law limiting working hours for bakers, emphasizing that the state has no business limiting how much a laborer can sell his labor.)

It would be nice to think that, in this example, workers and owners have an equal amount of power, but that's not the case. Owners have the power of the purse. When faced with doing what an owner says and keeping his job, or not doing that and leaving his job, a worker will most often do the former. Unions are vital in protecting the interests of workers, giving them some leverage against owners. Remember when unions used to be illegal? Or strikes were broken by hired goons? If you don't, read The Disinherited by Jack Conroy or The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck for more details. (Dr. Caccomo would no doubt dismiss both of these people as "socialists," which they were; nevertheless, they were there, on the farms and in the factories, watching as owners abused their power over workers to make some extra bucks.)

Certainly individualism is a great ideal. It would be wonderful if we could look at anyone solely on the basis of that person's merit as an individual person. But we can't. There ten million negative stereotypes floating through the minds of every person in this country that no one is regarded as "an individual." Dr. Caccomo would do well to not merely look at how the state views the individual, but how other people view individuals. Invariably, if the individual can be classified as the member of some stigmatized group, that person is not seen on his own with individual merit, but as another member of a particular group (e.g. "those blacks are all the same, those women are all the same").

Posted by Mark at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)