You want fries with that?

A triple whammy in today’s NYT....

A feature story on page 1 reports on how today’s kids are so besotted with technology – addicted to texting, video games, etc. – that they don’t pay any attention to their studies. It’s no wonder our international standing in education is slipping, and our jobs are going overseas....

Meanwhile, Tom Friedman’s column, with no acknowledgement of the news story, talks about the very hole we’ve dug for ourselves in education....

But the capper comes in the adjacent column by Frank Rich about the popularity of Sarah Palin as both political and media figure. Because what he observes is that “it’s anti-elitism that most defines angry populism in this moment, and, as David Frum, another Bush alumnus (and Palin critic), has pointed out, populist rage on the right is aimed at the educated, not the wealthy.”

Swell. Not only are we getting more stupid, we have a grassroots movement spreading the word that it’s “in” to be stupid. I’d say we were a nation of sheep, except that would be an insult to sheep. At least they’re productive. But how many kids today know that’s where wool comes from? (Or even what wool is?)

So who’s going to rescue the next generation? Not the fundamentalists; they want the Word of God to be swallowed unquestioningly. Not the Republicans; they want to cut funding to education. Not the teabaggers; they equate good grades with elitism. And don’t expect the kids to bootstrap themselves; they’re too hooked in to their iPhones to give a shit.

I once had a doctor whose examination room was decorated with photos of bums with cigarettes, bearing captions like “Smoking is Debonair.” So let’s expose kids to pictures of middle-agers flipping burgers with the message “Texting beats studying any day.” But I guess if we expect them to notice, we’d better send it to their phones.

Atheists Unite! (or not...)

I wasn’t entirely surprised by the article in today’s NYT about freethinkers advertising their [lack of] beliefs. I’d already been aware of the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s campaign putting up billboards in major metropolitan areas with messages like “Imagine No Religion” and “Sleep In On Sundays.” Now it seems that other groups like the American Humanist Association and American Atheists are joining the competition for “market share” among disbelievers, now that our numbers have grown.

As an agnostic (and decidedly not an atheist – I find the Tao far too unfathomable to presume to make any claims about it, yea or nay), I’ve been somewhat wary of confrontation. Even though I’m totally opposed to the intrusion of religion in public life, I don’t think in-your-face messages do much except preach to the choir and antagonize believers. So when I got a mailing a couple of years ago asking me to donate to the FfRF, I gave it some thought, had them send me a sample newsletter, and decided I didn’t really relate to their agenda. I just didn’t see billboards as a sensible use of donors’ money. Instead, I chose to support Americans United for Separation of Church and State and their mission to maintain a level playing field through lobbying and the courts.

But this new campaign of the AHA has made me prick up my ears, because what they’re doing is pointing out religious texts that “advocate fear, intolerance, hate and ignorance.” And that’s a good thing, because it’s more potentially constructive to make believers realize how misguided their belief system is than to simply throw razzberries at them. I look at it as judicious blend of FfRF’s confrontationalism with AU’s rational approach. (BTW, I’ve often wondered why neither FfRF or AU is listed as a member of the umbrella organization Secular Coalition for America; maybe they’re too jealous of market share.)

So sure, I still take the position “whatever gets you through the night” when it comes to not hassling believers too much, just as long as they don’t try to inflict their nightmare on me. But if I were a better human being – a humanist, perhaps – maybe I’d give some thought to pointing out to them how what they believe is truly disruptive. Because if people would only shed their misguided beliefs, maybe we’d all get a better night’s sleep

S&M, Republican Style

You have to hand it to the Republicans, they know how to work a crowd.

This had already been pointed out by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas? And you’d think that once people had this explained to them they might slap their foreheads and say “How could we have been so gullible!”

But one should never underestimate the stupidity of the American electorate. The GOP didn’t need to use social issues to get what they wanted in the midterm elections. As ever, “it’s the economy, stupid.”

Forget the smoke and mirrors; it’s all done with rhetoric. The Republicans want to shoot down health insurance reform, so they cry “big government!” and “socialism!” – despite the fact that most Americans would never want to give up Social Security or Medicare. When their target is spending, they cry “deficit!” – despite the fact that entitlements and defense carry the load, and that the GAO estimates that Obamacare will actually reduce it. When the issue is taxes, their battle charge is “cut!” – despite the fact that extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans will only add to the deficit. The trick is to raise only one issue at a time so as not to reveal how one argument shoots down the other, which is appropriate for the average voter’s attention span. And as Charles Pierce points out in Idiot America, if something is repeated often enough and with sufficient gravitas, it’s accepted as truth.

The bottom line is, this agenda doesn’t serve “the American people” that the GOP constantly invokes. It benefits big business and the wealthy. Just like it’s always been.

Come to think of it, it is all smoke and mirrors. Wielded so deftly that most people don’t even know it. Except that, as with most s&m, the victim is saying “don’t stop, hurt me more.”

Freshness Guaranteed!

”There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, 

and it has a longer shelf life.”
– Frank Zappa

Christine O’Donnell certainly proves the point. As does Sharron Angle. As does Jim DeMint. As does, and did, and continuously will, Sarah Palin. Moonbats may show poor sense on a lot of occasions, but why do wingnuts seem to be so uniformly, certifiably stupid? Maybe it’s all that fluoride in the water that their Bircher forebears tried to warn us about.

The recent survey showing atheists in America are more knowledgeable about religion conversely shows just how ignorant many religious Americans are. I was startled (but really wasn’t) to read about Gary Bauer addressing the recent Value Voters Summit (which also hosted O’Donnell) in which he derided Islam, pointing out that the “Creator” is mentioned in the Declaration of Independence and that “That’s not Allah.” What does it take to educate someone that different cultures have different names for the same [alleged] deity? And, while we’re at it, that deities are no better or worse than how we define them?

But stupidity is not selective. Atheists and humanists recently gathered to decide how in-your-face to be toward religious America, with “accommodationists” and “confrontationalists” throwing brickbats at one another. As disunited as Democrats – I guess there’s something to be said for a lack of lock-step thinking. Digging in heels instead of making an effort to work together doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. That of course describes the last two years in Washington, which seems to have been ground-zero for a stupidity bomb.

Frank was right. It’s super-prevalent and it has a lo-o-o-o-o-ng shelf life. Rest assured that the stupidity we witness today will still be just as fresh when the 2012 elections roll around. And still just as hard to swallow.
 

Everything but why...

Watching a wasp cruise by while I was sitting on the deck first made me grateful that we hadn’t had as many this year, then made me think as always about the line from Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, in which he remarks upon receiving a book that tells him “everything about the wasp but why.”

The same holds for scientific explanations of reality. We can conjecture concerning the mechanics of the Big Bang and come close to explaining how; we just can’t put our fingers on why.

Is the Universe here because Someone or -thing wanted it here? Does existence boil down to a volitional whim? If so, where did that whimsical entity come from? How did It amuse itself before touching off the BB? And where did It get Its sense of humor?

This is of course the hardest thing of all to wrap one’s mind around. Next to second-guessing death, it’s why we have churches. And considered too long, to the point where wrapping becomes unwrapped, it’s why we have loony bins.

So when it comes to contemplating the Universe, especially while gazing up at the night sky when it’s hard not to, it becomes a little crazy-making to ask why.

Better perhaps we should content ourselves with asking why not.

The Worst Thing

In a novel I’m reading, a character poses the question “What’s the worst thing that ever happened?” The answer is “The Holocaust.” And since I’ve just come off watching the “World At War” series on dvd, I find that’s not an inappropriate reply. The fact that a madman was able to sell an entire country on his racist agenda and undertake the cold-blooded extermination of six million Jews – more than 11 million people in all if you count Hitler’s other “undesirables” – undoubtedly qualifies as the most horrendous event in human history. And while there have been other genocides, none have been pursued to such extremes. Stir in the fact that the perpetrators were supposedly civilized twentieth-century Europeans from a country that had made significant contributions to Western culture, hardly “barbarians” like Pol Pot, and it’s even more grisly.

But is it the worst thing that ever happened?

Genocides are events, set pieces in history. 9/11 is another – pretty horrendous, but still overshadowed by what the Nazis did. What had been the worst thing before the Holocaust? The senseless slaughter in the trenches of WWI? It’s all a matter of perspective; maybe Asians or South Americans would point to something else.

But “worst things” can be turning points instead of events. Think of things with less horror but longer lasting repercussions: the invention of the internal combustion engine and the double whammy of its effect on the atmosphere and demand for oil ... the decision of the Roman Catholic Church to forbid birth control and its impact on overpopulation in the third world ... the introduction of the slave trade to North America and its consequences for American history and society ... the creation of the atomic bomb, with immediate horror to be sure and producing years of anxiety for those of us who were taught to “duck and cover,” but whose worst implications may even lie ahead....  (Readers, feel free to submit other suggestions.)

So a horrendous occurrence may be shocking, but the impact of a decision or invention can be just as harmful in the long run. And we may not even know how devastating they are until it’s too late. But lack of decision can also have an impact – and with that in mind, I would like to nominate for “worst thing in the world” the fact that human beings haven’t yet outgrown the fairy tale of “God.” There’s no specific event, no turning point. But the fact that we still lead countries in His name, kill in His name, even hate fags in His name, and then wonder why He doesn’t intervene in wars and genocides makes us not much more enlightened than our “uncivilized” ancestors.

Be Very Afraid: The Truth(iness) is Out There

The prevailing political winds seem to be blowing nothing but fear. You take it in through your lungs and it goes straight to your brain. Wingnuts are afraid that Obama is a closet Muslim and will lead the country down the road to socialism, while lefties like me are afraid that Republicans are practically pissing themselves for the chance to trash social security and Roe v. Wade. (The difference of course being that liberal fears are totally legitimate.) Everyone’s going ape-shit over fearful speculation, imaginations are running berserk. If there were a stock market for fear futures, that would be where to put your money because it’s going to keep going up. Just the mere concept of Stephen Colbert’s “March to Keep Fear Alive” is as close to truthiness as you can get.

About the only good thing you can say about fear is that it doesn’t discriminate. It infects left and right, rich and poor. Is there any American out there who isn’t afraid, who’s truly fearless? Just send them a piece of mail with “Internal Revenue Service” in the return address and see what happens: a puddle. And I’m not talking about around the feet. Because as FDR famously said, we have nothing to fear but fear itself...and the boogeyman. Death, taxes, and now, of course, jihadists.

This invites a tangential thought: are jihadists fearless? Think also of Japan’s kamikaze pilots in WWII; each undertakes a suicide mission seemingly without fear. Why? Because the individuality I talked about last time has been subjugated to a higher cause. So why are we Americans so full of fear? Maybe because as confirmed individualists we have more self at stake. Not to mention more stuff. (That stuff’ll get ya every time...)

In a world fraught with uncertainty, this much is dead certain: if the Republicans retake the government, their agenda will be to restore the (sub)standard operating procedures of the Bush-Cheney era. And just like the WMDs in Iraq, truth and reason will become figments of the imagination. But not fear. Under that regime we’ll always be able to count on the certainty of fear.

Is this what Americans pine for?

His Mysterious Ways

The Gallup poll I recently cited revealed the religiosity of various nations, including the fact that less affluent nations are more religious, more affluent less so. One exception to the rule is the United States; another is the Persian Gulf states. Funny thing about that.

Consider that the word Islam itself means “submission to the will of God,” and a popular adage in Christianity is “not my will but Thine be done.” Among the devout, individuality is suppressed – also a hallmark of Buddhism, a significantly less bellicose faith – and rightly so. I’d go so far as to say this is what distinguishes a religious from a secular society, except that the US fiercely defends individualism while brandishing its religiosity like the sword of an avenging angel.

So are Americans hypocrites, or is our particular brand of Calvinist Christianity to blame? Maybe it’s a matter of psychological projection whereby we assign our desires to God and take that as justification for our actions. God wanted us to wipe out the Indians and expand our borders, to destroy [godless] Communism, to take a stand against socialized medicine, to hold fast to our firearms. And now He probably wants us to bomb Iran. In the meantime, we credit Him with our affluence and assume we must be doing His will to have achieved this kind of success.

(And why should it be any surprise that atheists in America are more knowledgeable about religion? To open one’s eyes, one first needs to be able to see.)

We’re not alone, of course, as it would appear that some residents of the similarly affluent oil-rich PG states, birthplace of al Qaeda, feel they have an inside track on the will of Allah. Maybe they see His having put all that crude under their feet as their own justification for translating their will into His and back again.

So in the end, it’s not Thy will but mine be done. That ol’ God sure works in mysterious ways.

Message at the Bottom of the Cup

In an excellent NYT op-ed piece entitled “The Founding Fathers Versus the Tea Party,” Ron Chernow lays out a compelling assessment of how teabaggers have glamorized our forebears to the extent of ignoring the contentiousness that prevailed when America was born. Aside from his refresher course in history, what struck me most was this comment:

The Tea Party Movement has further sought to spruce up its historical bona fides by laying claim to the United States Constitution. Many Tea Party members subscribe to a literal reading of the national charter as a way of bolstering their opposition to deficit spending, bank bailouts, and President Obama’s health care plan.

As I began to read this, the first thought that leapt to mind was that they “lay claim to the Constitution” the same way that they wrap themselves in the flag. But when I got to the part about “a literal reading,” I couldn’t help but compare that to the tendency of many (perhaps most?) conservatives to be fundamentalist Christians.

Each of these proclivities reflects the same shortcoming: an unwillingness – or inability – to think things through. Why assess a situation when appealing to patriotism should be enough? Why question anything if it’s there in black and white?

Granted, the U.S. Constitution at only [sic] 200+ years old is a bit more relevant than the Bible. But it still reflects an 18th-century state of affairs that couldn’t have anticipated today’s, any more than early belief in the Bible could have anticipated advances in understanding that blow creation myths and miracles out of the water.
 
Sacred writings are not sacrosanct. And if they’re looking for a reflection of reality, today’s Founders-invoking patriots could just as well be reading tea leaves.

Why do Republicans wear red suspenders?

Imagine your house is burning down and, in a market-driven economy, there are two competing fire companies. You suspect that fire company #1 may even have started the fire, so you call #2 and they come and do their best to put it out. Only it’s still smoldering after months, so you’re a bit miffed. Not to mention choking on the smoke. You’d like #2 to come back and finish the job you called on them to do, except that #1 – the one that may have started it – is blocking the road so that #2’s trucks can’t get through and is insisting they can do the job better. (And they assure you that their crews don’t include any illegal immigrants or gays, either.) And since from your perspective #2 ain’t doin’ squat, why should you throw them your business again?

And so when the Republican leadership held a press conference in their shirtsleeves to present their “Pledge to America,” I couldn’t help but question their choice of costumes. I would have found it a lot more credible if they had come out dressed as firemen.

You know, the kind from Fahrenheit 451: the book-burning, truth-denying, repressive thugs who start the fires to begin with.

In search of friendly skies...

I’m in the midst of planning some air travel, so if you’ll excuse me I need to rant about how much I hate US Airways.

Nearly all of my travel is to visit family near Philly. And for the 30+ years I’ve lived in Arizona, the hassle-free options have been Southwest and the-airline-formerly-known-as-America West. When I lived in Tucson, I either flew AW to Phoenix or Vegas to connect to a nonstop, or SW to Vegas for same (since SW doesn’t have the Tucson-Phoenix route), or a ground shuttle to Phoenix for either. With either, there was no need for sweating connections halfway across the country (although I had at least one AW plane fail to make it to Phoenix). These days I have to take a ground shuttle from Prescott to Phoenix, but those two airlines still offer the only direct flights.

I came to love America West once I got over hating them. They used to have such a lock on the Tucson market that they didn’t care if they treated their passengers like shit. One of my memorable experiences involved my flight from Philly arriving in Phoenix late and me running to make my Tucson connection only to see it pulling away from the gate and stranding me and half a dozen other people. I had thought there was some kind of rule that if your flight had landed they’d hold a connection, but AW apparently didn’t care. Then came one black day 20 or so years ago when Beth & I flew off for a vacation to the Northwest when it seemed that AW’s entire system crashed, flights canceled willy-nilly, and we ended up rescued by Air Alaska and finally going to bed in Bellingham without clean underwear for the next day.

But after that debacle things bounced back. When I called to book a flight (this being before such action was penalized with a surcharge), a friendly agent was always on the line, sometimes even waiving the fee if I had to change my plans. Whenever I called from back east to confirm a return flight, I enjoyed a brief chat over how the weather was in Arizona. Nine years ago when I had to push an itinerary up due to a family emergency, they bent over backward to accommodate me. The AW staff was uniformly friendly, as opposed to the robotic voices you always got on other airlines. And even though I didn’t fly all that much, one year they rewarded me with elite status anyway, and I admit to having been spoiled by those first-class upgrades. America West had won my allegiance.

Then came the merger with USAir. No more chatty agents based in Tempe or Vegas – instead it was offshore support from people whose first language was not English (this for “US” Airways), and whenever I attempted to trade miles for an upgrade it was like talking to a brick wall. A brick wall that spoke another language and pretended to not understand what it was I wanted. If they were going to take away my reward for flying with them, why should I continue to favor them with my patronage? Even the flight attendants were becoming surly, as borne out by news reports of post-merger labor squabbles, and one who’d come from the AW side and whose jump seat was across from me on a flight admitted that things weren’t what they used to be.

And so I migrated to Southwest with its super-friendly agents and crews. Sure, standing in line for a good shot at a seat got a little old before they revised their boarding system, but at least you had a shot. And today they still hand out snacks and bevvies while US is belt-tightening and selling munchies (at least they were shamed into backing off from selling water). But it’s that lack of assigned seating that I assume gives SW their biggest advantage: if you change your flight, there’s no penalty. Sure, you’ll revert to the prevailing fare, that’s to be expected, but there’s no punitive hundred bucks tacked on.

But hard times have hit the airlines, and while US still offers a number of non-stops between PHX and PHL, SW cut back to one each way. Six months ago I flew back to Philly on SW (with a stop in Pittsburgh but no plane change) and booked a return flight on each airline, preferring US’s schedule but deciding to book the SW one-stop as an alternate – because I knew that if I didn’t use it I could bank the fare for a later flight. And since I also knew I’d lose the money I’d spent on the US flight, I went ahead and took it.

Boy, was that ever a mistake.

Several years ago, AW touted a scientifically designed, more efficient boarding system that let people with window seats on earlier so that people in aisle seats didn’t slow things down by having to constantly get up to let them in. Why hadn’t anybody thought of that before? For my return from Philly I had chosen a window seat with that in mind, but I didn’t know that US had thrown science out the window since I’d flown them last. Turns out I was in the next-to-last group to board, which shouldn’t’ve meant any more than having to get past the guy I was surprised to see in my row’s aisle seat (mercifully the middle hadn’t filled...yet); but because US now charged for every piece of checked luggage, the overheads were already jammed with the steamer trunks that laughingly exceeded the dimensions of the test frame at the gate and to which the agents always seemed to turn a blind eye, and I was lucky to squeeze mine into what appeared to be the last available nook. And the whole luggage situation meant that the boarding process was utter chaos and guaranteed that departure from the gate would be delayed. (Once airborne, they also had the flight attendants hawking airline credit cards and discounts for Sky Mall in addition to food, which I suppose was meant to serve as entertainment since they no longer show movies on domestic flights, the thought of which visual distraction on a five-hour flight had been one of my considerations for flying them again.)

So now I’m planning another trip. The first thing I did was book my return flight on SW using the funds from the old unused ticket in order to lock in a fare and schedule. But when I got around to looking at outbound flights, I was irresistibly drawn to the attractiveness of the schedule and fare for one of US’s non-stops, since SW’s non-stop didn’t get in until late at night and the fare for the one-stop direct flight was surprisingly high (probably due to its being heavily booked by people who wanted to get to Philly without flying on US). And so I proceeded to fill in the blanks for a reservation.

But I just couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger.

I kept thinking about the overstuffed overheads. And the chaotic boarding. And the surly crews. And the now-empty video screens. And the $6 snack box that didn’t have much more in it than SW gave you for free. And the filled-in seating maps that were already relegating me to the back of the plane more than a month ahead of the flight. And the fact that if I had any need to change my plans, I could kiss most of my money goodbye.

So when I reviewed my options again – including a super-cheapo fare on American that involved a connection at O’Hare, on planes that Seat Guru says have been reconfigured by reducing seat pitch in order to squeeze in two more rows, to even consider which shows you how I feel about US – I came to the conclusion that it was worth the extra money and the brief stop in Pittsburgh to fly Southwest’s friendlier skies.

And as soon as I came to that conclusion, my teeth-gnashing anxieties over flying US Airways totally dissipated.

This concludes my airline rant. Cultural-political-religious postings will resume shortly. If my blood pressure has to go up, it ought to at least be over something beyond my control.

[Don't] Picture This

Some Muslims get bent out of shape over depictions of Mohammed, and non-believers make such images at their own peril. Ditto with some Christians when they think their religion is being ridiculed, such as in this ice cream ad from England (albeit without the death threats). And of course let’s not forget the ever-popular depiction of the Virgin Mary covered with elephant dung. (What, you thought I was going to post cartoons of Mohammed? I’ll risk the papal goon squads instead, thanks.)

Nobody wants to see their beliefs held up to ridicule. When you consider the fracas that results, one would be tempted to include acts of “sacrilege” with knee-jerk advocacy of rights that has no regard for their social impact. People should play nice (as if “should” always prevailed – besides, sez who?). But I think there’s a difference.

Defending the right to bear arms or to publish provocative material against efforts to curtail those rights purports to place the interests of individuals above those of society. Debates over these rights have to do with the regulation of action and the consequences of non-regulation, whether it be nutjobs going postal or kids emulating the violence of video games. It’s up to the people in a democracy to decide which they value more, individual rights or social tranquility.

On the surface, censoring religious (or anti-religious) expression seems to present the same dilemma: defending the right to the action of individual expression vs. promoting social cohesion. The difference is, this issue isn’t really about protecting individual action; it’s about protecting beliefs themselves from disparagement.

Making a declaration of belief or a challenge to that belief is an action that the individual is free to take. But do ideas themselves deserve protection from other ideas? Isn’t what’s going on just a form of natural selection, where only the fittest intellectual constructs survive? It would appear that less fit ideas – religious ones most prominently – are determined to not go down without a fight from their adherents. But do they need to have secular law in their corner, as seems to be the case in Britain? (Ironically, a recent Gallup poll showed that only 27% of Brits say that religion is an important part of their daily lives – as compared to 65% of Americans.)

It’s horrendous that a cartoonist now has to live in fear because she dared to confront an idea – today’s version of bear baiting. One envisions jihadist assassins in hot pursuit, and this scenario is likely to be repeated as long as people cling to beliefs and a rapidly contracting world makes such confrontations unavoidable. But as with the schism within America, never the twain shall meet. And nothing’s going to change until education wipes out ignorance for good.

Predestination Revisited

When I clean out my spam folder in Gmail, just to make sure nothing real has ended up there, I end up, as I’ve noted before, with a link to a recipe for something on the order of spam fajitas or spam veggie pita pockets. But when I re-clicked on Inbox the other day, the link it left me with was for “Online Pastor Degrees.” WTF?

The “About these ads” link informs me that “Gmail can now instantaneously serve ads based on another recent message on the same page of your inbox, helping make the ads more relevant to you.” As it happens, I had recently exchanged some email with my mother’s pastor regarding a problem he’d been helping her with. Nothing in the message had anything to do with the church, and Gmail assures me that “no humans read your email in order to target advertisements or related information.” Nevertheless, it obviously glommed onto his church-based email address and leapt to its own conclusions regarding what might interest me: a whole page devoted to the pursuit of online religion degrees.

Boy, is Gmail ever barking up the wrong tree.

Forty years ago I gave some serious thought to entering the ministry, but I finally had to admit to myself that it was as much a potential draft dodge as anything. Considering how my head changed since then, I can see that it would have been a mistake – unless of course switching sides is acceptable. Do churches make trades like ball clubs? If so, I could have gone from Presbyterian to Unitarian and hidden out there as a Taoist agnostic.

Nowadays I tell people that I was raised in the Presbyterian Church but was predestined to leave it. (Okay, it’s an in-joke.) Only a dyed-in-the-Scottish-wool Calvinist would say my leaving the fold was “preordained”; I prefer to think of it as “awakening.” But what about that link popping up on my Gmail page? A message from God that it’s not too late? A toss of the digital I Ching? A spin of some cyber-prayer wheel? No, it’s all just cause and effect – and a good indication of how predestination works these days.

Ho-down!

Billy Joel once put it best: don’t call rap music “music” because it ain’t. It has no melody.

Okay, I’ll confess to hating it. It goes with being an old white guy. But when I was already in my 40s and walking the mile to my university office past student rentals, I would hear Hendrix and Clapton blaring from the windows and smile with the satisfaction that rock would never die and that I had something in common with people twenty years younger than me. That all changed when cars with booming basses, driven by geeky white kids with caps turned around, started pulling up next to me at stop lights.

But this post is not a diatribe against rap, just an observation that occurred to me recently: rap, I believe, is totally analogous to country & western.

Think about it. Each reflects a racial demographic. Performers in each genre dress the part (bling or Stetsons). Each also targets a social demographic (urban vs. rural) as reflected in the content of lyrics (songs about homeboys and ho’s vs. ones about good ol’ boys and their longsuffering women). Each is instantly recognizable through vocal affectation (shout vs. drawl) and instrumentation (scratch vs. pedal steel). Each celebrates dubious activity (street crime vs. alcohol abuse) and under-education. And neither exactly thrives on musical virtuosity (IMHO). The bottom line: each sustains a stereotype. And while I recognize that the same can be said for any number of genres, rap and c&w also have this in common: each annoys the hell out of me.

I’d like to think it safe to say that never the twain shall meet, but I once witnessed a bizarre congruence right here in Prescott (a.k.a. “Everybody’s Hometown”). There was an event on the courthouse square that included square dancing – a live caller with a karaoke machine. And I swear that for at least one number he was doing rap. The dancers didn’t seem to mind. Maybe they thought it was a “ho-down.”

After a brief deer-in-the-headlights moment, I got away from there as fast as I could. Now whenever a booming bass pulls up next to me, I’m afraid to look. Cowboy hats turned around are not a pretty sight.

On not wanting to be a pirate...

The unwanted phone calls I posted about a few days ago are bad enough, but they’re just the tip of the proverbial (and now melting) iceberg. Threats to privacy abound, especially on the Internet. When a financial institution warns me about phishing, how do I know this warning isn’t itself a phishing expedition? Meanwhile, Amazon clutters its home page with what I recently browsed. Google now knows what I’m looking for before I finish typing it in. And from what I understand, Facebook is a minefield all its own.

I haven’t joined, although I admit to lurking on Beth’s page just to see what mutual friends have to say. So when Facebook sent me a message that an old friend wanted to friend me, I was taken aback. Said friend had just signed up and, I guess, supplied to Facebook emails of anyone likely to be interested. So let me say, friend, should you read what I’m now writing, it’s not that I’m disinterested in your postings; I just revert to Jerry Seinfeld’s whiny response when Kramer tried to coax him into wearing the puffy shirt by suggesting it would make him look like a pirate: “But I don’t wanna be a pirate!”

Facebook can also say a lot by what’s not there. While browsing its members I found some people I used to work with 35 years ago who back then were all tight with one another; today none of them are “friends.” Friends come and go, and faces fall out of recognition – so much so that I had to look twice at a couple of those former colleagues to be sure it wasn’t somebody else with the same name.

Part of my reluctance to join up has to do with being a bit leery of public exposure, which is why I recently adopted a more anonymous identity for this blog (which used to show my name as ID). I figured that if I were to post something outrageous enough that a stranger stumbled upon it and took offense and wanted to invade my privacy, I was as vulnerable as the old Beatles song put it: “You know my name, look up the number.” So now I’m nothing more than just another opinionated geezer with a cat on his head.

But if by chance you ended up at this blog after googling on me (which perhaps led you to the blog profile despite its no longer bearing my full name – a testament to the tenacity of cyberspace), you might recognize below the cat (which covers dermal expanse where once was hair) someone that you formerly knew. Who despite everything still doesn’t want to be a pirate.

Shoot the messenger

The outrage isn’t that the nutjob in Florida intends to burn copies of the Koran. The outrage is that the press is busily churning out the publicity he wants.

So now that the whole Muslim world knows about his proposed stunt they’re all in a snit, just like we get when foreigners burn American flags. (Are we used to that by now? Or do we only get pissy when our own citizens do it?) It never ceases to amaze me how people can get bent out of shape when their symbols are attacked. Flags, books, effigies, and let’s not forget crucifixes in urine ... they’re only things, for cryin’ out loud. And if you protest “but it’s what the thing represents,” you’re still hung up on the thing. Are we all so stupid? And the answer, of course, is “yes.”

Let’s face it, the guy has the right to do this just like the Nazis did to march through Skokie or the Muslims do to build an Islamic center near Ground Zero or Hollywood producers do to release slasher movies. We can wish that people would behave more responsibly, but in this country that would amount to a helluva lot of horses.

Think how fitting it would be if this asshole got what he really deserved: for everybody to just ignore him. But of course the media are totally incapable of that. If it bleeds, it leads, and if it burns, it churns.

So don’t blame this idiot. He can burn all of the Islamic paraphernalia he wants in the privacy of his own church. Blame the messenger, because we don’t have to pay him any attention.

Beliefs @ Face Value

The problem with holy books is that people too often tend to take them at face value. If they want to believe them, they do, no questions asked. This is apparent with fundamentalist schools of any religion, as is seen with some of today’s Christians and Muslims (although I admit to no knowledge of the extent to which Islamic fundamentalists base their actions on a literal reading of the Koran, except maybe when it comes to stoning people to death – or is it even in there?). Then there’s the fundamentalist strain of Buddhism I wrote about a few days ago.

But as the man says, “Wait, there’s more....” Consider the willingness of Krishna freaks to embrace the Hindu pantheon without really sorting folklore from reality. Consider the readiness of modern European-Americans to accept the validity of Native American beliefs, regardless (or perhaps because?) of their own folkloric aspects, just because they strike them as more attuned to nature. And consider also the willingness of some occidental minds to find truth in the oracular sayings of the I Ching (the “Book of Changes”). Here we have an ancient book wherein meaning is ascribed to patterns of lines. Its advice is cryptic and variable. How its meanings were arrived at is shrouded in the mists of antiquity. Yet its judgments are taken as truth centuries later.

My skepticism regarding the I Ching necessarily casts a shadow, albeit faint, on my predilection for the Tao Te Ching. The former predates the latter but both represent the same cultural tradition. But while the I Ching originated as a fortune-telling text, the TTC was a “manual” for a later philosophical school. And over the years I’ve often wondered whether to take it at face value or not.

Unlike the Bible, whose myths and miracles are so outrageous that they’re best taken with a grain of salt, the TTC is a tougher nut to crack. Its metaphors are open to interpretation. Its advice is often blunt or cryptic. And its intended readership is vague – some would say it’s intended for everyman, others for sages or rulers.

The problem with taking it at face value lies in reading things into it that aren’t necessarily there; that’s why so many modern “translations” seem to represent little more than what the translator wants it to say. They’re personal interpretations passing themselves off as accurate renderings. That’s why I’ve tended to rely on editions like Ellen Chen’s that at least explain translation decisions and word choice.

But I learned that face value isn’t enough with the TTC when I came across an edition entitled The Tao of the Tao Te Ching by Michael LaFargue, published by the folks at SUNY Press (who have produced probably the best list of scholarly studies of Taoism I’ve seen). Most serious commentators on the text recognize that the TTC wasn’t the work of a single person; LaFargue takes this a further step by applying hermeneutics in order to show how the text was assembled as a collage of sayings from oral tradition. Some lines are shown to be popular adages, others to be comments on them. It puts the book in a whole new light and clears up a lot of the more cryptic passages.

What I’ve learned from LaFargue is that it’s fine to take the TTC at face value if that’s what you want to do. But doing so poses as many dangers as any other holy book. Religion is enough of a minefield; it would help if the maps were as understandable as scholars like LaFargue make them.

In Purfuit of Privacy

We usually ignore phone calls when caller ID shows an unfamiliar number. If the caller won’t leave a message, fine. But when the same number calls back night after night it can get a little old.

I’ll generally google on an unknown number and find comments at sites like whocalled.us where posters report on a caller’s identity. And so when I looked up the number  (703) 656-9940, which was showing up repeatedly, I was a little startled to discover it was the NRA.

I make no bones about it: I think the National Rifle Association is scum. A blight on the American political landscape that has taken defense of the 2nd Amendment to new lows and pours money into elections as if theirs was the only issue that mattered.

The 2nd Amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Never mind the punctuation (which apparently was corrected in the copies sent to the states for ratification), that’s just a fluke of eighteenth-century penmanship, same as writing a cursive “s” so that it looks to us today like an “f” (resulting in “purfuit of happineff”). It’s become part of the American tradition to second-guess the Framers, but I’ll stick to this interpretation: if they had meant for the right to bear arms to be carte blanche, they wouldn’t have included those first thirteen words. So when the NRA justifies free access to assault rifles and tells us to not worry our silly heads about events like Columbine or people going postal but to instead arm ourselves against nutcases, I clench my teeth. But no matter, I’ve ranted about this before.

A couple of nights ago when the 703 number showed up again, I switched on the phone but said nothing. After about 20 seconds a woman asked for me and I asked who was calling. When she said it was the NRA, I told her I wasn’t interested in the NRA and asked her not to call again. I considered this to be admirable restraint on my part, but I sometimes find it difficult to articulate through clenched teeth.

A few years ago I had to stop calls from the ACLU, a group that I once supported until they started harassing me by phone. Too bad that these organizations that want to protect my rights don’t have any regard for my right to privacy.

Dial Tone (or: Pissing with Buddhists)

I’ve long thought of myself as a Taoist (even “Belief-O-Matic” confirmed this!) but in many ways I consider myself a closet Buddhist. The Buddhist perspective on mental processes makes tremendous sense to me; it’s the religious trappings that keep me from fully aligning myself with that system of belief.

Even before I came across Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism without Beliefs, I had pared down the extent to which I accepted many of the tenets – especially reincarnation and karma. Just as Christianity sprang from Judaism and carried forward a lot of its premises, Buddhism emerged from the Indian Brahmanic tradition and carried forward its belief in rebirth. Which does not necessarily make it an accurate portrayal of reality.

All religion boils down to an attempt to second-guess death – to find solace in a belief in what comes after and live one’s life with an eye toward some reward. Gautama took his culture’s view of reincarnation and turned it on its head, promising escape from the cycle. But that doesn’t mean that there is a cycle from which to escape. And I’m not saying there isn’t. But to be a full-fledged Buddhist, one really needs to buy into that belief system, just like being a Christian requires accepting the whole package of sin, atonement, and how your alleged soul is going to spend eternity.

Then there’s the first of the Four Noble Truths: “life is suffering.” This may have been a no-brainer a couple millennia ago, but I think it’s relative. Humanity has the ability to reduce suffering, so the ravages of disease or poverty can be dealt with – today we have the know-how, it’s just a matter of getting it done. (Batchelor prefers to render suffering as “anguish” to better capture the psychological component, but I can’t get away from the back-story that what Siddhartha saw in the world was physical suffering, pure and simple.)

The other aspects of Buddhism that have always made me keep it at arm’s length are its propensity toward trappings, such as prayer wheels and robes, and the fact that it has its own pope in the person of the Dalai Lama. (Okay, so it’s for Tibetan Buddhism like the Pope is for Roman Catholicism, but you get my drift.) He may be an admirable guy in his own right, a swell guest at any party (undoubtedly more so than Benedict XVI), and someone who recognizes the good in all religions. But the whole issue of lineage just doesn’t sit well with me (especially with its reincarnation angle), any more than does the papacy. Taoism doesn’t have any kind of head honcho, and I see no reason why Buddhism really needs one. And finally regarding trappings there’s the tendency of American Buddhists to adopt oriental guises, from shaving heads to taking on new names to eating pickled radishes at retreats. Trappings trap – talk about attachment.

What does appeal to me about Buddhism, though, is its recognition that attachment and desire lie at the root of human angst, and that the mental shutdown process – something that can range from meditation to getting lost in an activity – provides a way of breaking free of these shackles. That for me is the essence of Buddhism, as much as loving one’s neighbor is of Christianity. (And when Buddhists talk about “Buddha nature,” isn’t it really the same as te?) Everything else about either religion is totally superfluous as far as I’m concerned.

And so even though I sometimes think of myself as a “basic Buddhist,” I rarely make that claim if only to avoid getting into pissing contests with full-blown adherents. (And if you don’t think this happens, check out the 1-star comments posted on Amazon for Batchelor’s book.) If anyone objects to my calling myself a kind of Buddhist when what I’m primarily interested in is the bit about mindlessness, maybe I should just call myself a “no-brainer.”

Some people seem more concerned with means than ends, and I can’t help but wonder whether Gautama would think very highly of how his message came down through the ages any more than would Jesus. It’s like religion is just a version of the telephone game on a grander scale. For believers of either faith, it’s time to hang up and wait for another call. Me, I’m content to get lost in the dial tone.

Right This Way to the Ministry of Love

As long as I’m on a roll with contrary-to-liberal views (“I’m liberal but to a degree” –Bob Dylan), let me take a stab [sic] at the wonderful world of hate crimes.

A big news story of the past few days has to do with a guy in NYC who took a knife to a cabbie for being Muslim. Granted, the perp was drunk, but that’s no excuse (just “social lubricant,” right?). It’s no different from crimes against blacks fifty years ago, but today we have hate crime laws that get called into play when the victim is of a particular religious, racial, or sexual group. And while it’s been made explicit that such laws do not abridge the right to free speech or association, they do provide for enhanced sentencing and federal involvement.

What nags at me is the idea that you can be prosecuted not only for a criminal act but also for your underlying motive. It’s not enough that the guy knifed somebody; the reason he did it makes it worse? But how can it? Is the cut any deeper? And as some have pointed out, hate crime has been construed almost exclusively as being committed by, well, let’s face it: rednecks. Gay-, black-, Muslim-, outsider-bashing rednecks.

I’m not sticking up for rednecks and their prejudices. The kind of people who commit atrocities such as those against Matthew Shepard and James Byrd deserve no leniency whatsoever. I don’t care if they had deprived childhoods, bring back medieval torture devices for the likes of these animals. Make them feel the kind of pain they meted out. But criminalizing state-of-mind is as slippery a slope as there ever was. Aren’t Islamic jihadists also guilty of hate crime? (They so much as admit it.) What about Christians who murder abortionists? (Is this an act of love?) Or minority crooks who choose to prey on more affluent whites? (Remember Alvy’s father in Annie Hall regarding the thieving cleaning woman: “She's a colored woman, from Harlem! She has no money! She's got a right to steal from us! After all, who is she gonna steal from if not us?”) Love of money may be the root of all evil, but I suspect hatred is the root of most crime.

The fact that the Wikipedia article informed me that James Dobson was a major opponent of hate crime laws made me squirm, but lefties shouldn’t take wingnut opposition as justification for support. This is about thought crime pure and simple. And if it takes burrowing into your private life to ascertain a “hateful” motive, aren’t we setting ourselves up for the thought police? (Even before prosecution of hate crimes became p.c., I harbored similar doubts about “conspiracy.” If the cops nab a couple of crooks robbing a bank, they can also be prosecuted for planning to do so. Outrageous!) How far in our future is rehabilitation in the Ministry of Love? Transform that hatred into love for Big Brother.

So I’m tipping my hand here: my pet peeve #3 is political correctness in any guise – and the campaign against “hate crime” is but one of them. If you get to the root of any crime, you’re going to find bitterness or resentment, so we might as well launch a dual prosecution for every offense. But our judicial system shouldn’t be running some kind of Spanish Inquisition (which of course nobody expects). The bottom line is, it’s the crime that needs to be punished.

Mohammed wears army boots ;-D

Some might think that, in siding with Laura Schlesinger and against the Islamic center advocates, I’ve gone over to the dark side. That my three-month lay-off involved a brain transplant or, worse, deciding that maybe Glenn Beck has a point or two. ;-D

But I assure you, such is not the case. ;-D

Doing anything with a wink is okay these days. Irony rules. Pass a black man on the street and call out “How it hangin’, nigga?” and when he sees you smiling he’ll smile right back and flash you one of those special hand signs usually reserved for “brothers.” Try it yourself and see! ;-D

Now that emoticons have permeated the culture, it’s become possible to say whatever you want but then give it a semiotic twist that says “Hey, I was only kidding.” If I were to write “all illegal aliens ought to be lined up against the wall and shot,” you might think I’ve been living in Arizona too long. But if I were to follow that statement with “;-D” then you’d know I was just indulging in a bit of ironic mischief. Right? ;-D

So if I were to come out with some insult like “Mohammed wears army boots” but followed it with the appropriate wink, that makes it cool. Just like the Florida minister the NYT reported on who wants to stage a public burning of copies of the Koran. What a fun-loving guy! When he says “Islam is of the devil,” you know he’s gotta be smiling devilishly inside. (In fact, in that picture he’s actually standing in front of the last sign that bears the “;-D” emoticon. (Actually it’s next-to-last; the last says “Burma Shave.”)) The article gives the guy’s age as 58, so he’s probably thinking back to when he was an impressionable young teen and burned his Beatles records at the urging of the [predominately southern] clergymen who regarded John Lennon’s statement that his group was more popular than Jesus as some kind of sacrilege. It probably even motivated him to enter the ministry. A burning desire, you might say, maintaining a tradition of smiling righteousness that stretches back to when his forebears incinerated heretics and witches. Why can’t the people protesting the NY Islamic center be as lighthearted? ;-D

As long as America continues to produce people with such a finely tuned sense of humor, world peace can’t be far away. :-þ

Deconstruction Zone

A recent article in Huffington Post gave a shout-out to “the 17 most innovative university presses,” and I’m proud to have had long-standing ties to two of them. Huzzah!! But I have to give a smack-down to the author for in one breath extolling books “of the moment” in subject areas like politics and border studies, and in the next praising four presses for their publications in literary criticism.

To my mind, if there’s one field of scholarship that’s totally useless, it’s literary criticism. According to a not-too-old joke, the college science major goes out into the world to ask, “Why is this happening?”; the engineering major asks, “How can I make this work?”; the English major asks, “You want fries with that?” Unless you can find something socially useful to do with an English degree, producing lit crit seems to be the alternative to ending up in the service sector. Only it’s not half as useful.

I can’t remember why I became an English major; back then, it was simply the mark of a general liberal education – nobody told me it would seriously limit my job prospects. But in all my literature courses, I was never really aware of criticism; we just read the damn stuff and then the prof lectured about it. Turns out that my time in academia, the late ’60s, coincided with the end of book-centered study before “literary theory” took over, so for me it was a narrow escape.

I know that my advisor was disappointed that I didn’t go to grad school – that I wasn’t propagating the species – but I just couldn’t bear the thought of doing useless research on topics like the impact of Shakespeare’s hangnail on the writing of Coriolanus. I spent a few years in the textbook biz thinking I was helping to disseminate knowledge until I realized it was just repackaging information. It wasn’t until I embarked upon my career in university press publishing (our collective motto: “Keeping the world safe for pedantry”) that I found my niche – and became aware of lit crit. My own press did mercifully little of it, but enough to let me know it wasn’t natural. When I started a freelance business writing catalog copy for other presses, I discovered just how insidious it is.

The problem with lit crit is that it’s such an insiders’ game. Political theory, e.g., can have real-world applications (for better or worse) when it percolates in think tanks and seeps its way into government bureaucracy. Books about the U.S.-Mexico border can help us confront one of America’s most pressing issues. Revisionism in history can show thoughtful people how to consider the past from new perspectives (yes, there’s more to it than Holocaust denial). But literary criticism and theory are pretty much scholarly circle jerks: Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art  (“how the themes of race, tormented love, and addiction that permeated his fiction had their origins in his three defining relationships”); The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (“recasts the genre’s rise as part of a burgeoning vernacular cosmopolitanism”); A New Theory for American Poetry (“how today’s consumerist and conformist culture subverts the imagination of a free people”); Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration (“the first book to examine the fascinating exchange between the work and literary spheres for laboring women in the rapidly industrializing America of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”). And these examples from the four presses cited in HuffPo don’t even scratch the surface.

My own theory of literature is simply that it should be enjoyed, not over-analyzed. Classroom discussions and reading groups are all well and good, but books in lit crit aren’t intended for outsiders despite the claims of the HuffPo author (or of descriptive copy – take it from someone who’s written it); their only purpose is to help the authors get tenure. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – but it’s a helluva way to make a living.

And it begs a more serious question: “Cheese on that burger?”

Brouhaha at (or maybe somewhere near) Ground Zero

Several years ago, I got into a debate with a libertarian friend about the effects of media violence on the real world. I maintained that the people who produced violent movies and video games were in some way responsible for the actions of young people trying to emulate what they saw. My friend mistook my opinion for an advocacy of censorship and stuck up for the producers’ First Amendment rights, but this wasn’t the case; I was merely lamenting the fact that the producers weren’t behaving responsibly, in the interest of society. Sure, they have the right to produce whatever they want, it’s just a shame they don’t consider the consequences of their actions. It’s a no-win situation, and as a result we all suffer.

The same thing has been going on for years regarding guns. The right to bear arms has overshadowed any consideration of where the fault lies whenever somebody goes postal. Then of course there’s the supposed right to talk on your cell phone while driving. Hey, this is America! – we’ll claim all the rights we can.

We have a similar situation with the proposed Islamic center in New York. Sure, the Muslim community has a right to exercise their religious freedom in building their center at the site they’ve chosen. But they’re not thinking through the consequences of their actions, i.e. the animosity it will create among short-sighted citizens and the harm it could do to Muslim-Christian relations. The problem isn’t that they’re being disrespectful as some claim but, rather, disruptive.

It’s easy for liberals to come down on the side of the Islamic center simply because conservatives are so jingoistically lockstep against it. What once had been a sleeping dog is now up and snarling, so I would have to ask the Muslim community: with relations between the two major faiths already near the boiling point, why would you want to kick a snarling dog when it has the potential to get the whole pack riled up? You made the choice to put the center only a couple of blocks from GZ, and to my mind that’s not a whole lot different from Rockstar Games making the decision to release Grand Theft Auto III or the NRA defending private ownership of assault weapons. Exercising your rights is all well and good, but at what cost?

It’s a slippery slope, admittedly. Other American cities, without any such “hallowed ground,” have seen protests against the construction of mosques, so some might extend the above argument to discourage exercising rights whenever any segment of the public gets upset. Well, let’s face it, there’s always going to be somebody upset about something. Some folks in Murfreesboro TN may not cotton to the idea of a mosque in their town, but they don’t exactly have a ground-zero argument to fall back on – just ignorance. And I suspect that if something had been built at GZ in NY by now, an Islamic center in its shadow would be no big deal; it’s the heel-dragging that keeps the wound open and the tempers hot.

It’s that never-the-twain situation again, putting self-interest ahead of social concerns, and it looks like it doesn’t apply only to white folks. If those behind the Islamic center assumed a little responsibility and moved their project to a less sensitive location, it would go a long way toward defusing a no-win situation.

Nigga say what?

I don’t usually stick up for conservative pundits, but Laura Schlesinger had a valid point when she talked about the use of the word “nigger.”

Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger.... I don’t get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it’s a horrible thing; but when black people say it, it’s affectionate.

It’s true; context is everything. Blacks also use “motherfucker” to arbitrarily indicate another individual: you hear it in street talk, it peppers Miles Davis’s autobiography, and in a book I once read documenting prison life, the glossary even defines it as “a person; not necessarily pejorative.” But I suspect it’ll be a while before it makes it to broadcast TV, just because it’s “vulgar” (not because it’s racist).

Anyway, Laura isn’t alone in not getting it (although I suspect she’s clueless about a lot of things). But I think political correctness goes too far when it decrees that not only can this epithet never be spoken, it can’t even be referenced except as “the n-word” (just like “the f-bomb”), as if the reader or listener should not under any circumstances be exposed to it. It’s kinda like when something is said that you think you’re not supposed to hear and you stick your fingers in your ears and go “la-la-la-la-la.” Even stories in the press about the Schlesinger brouhaha take pains to not spell it out; they relate how she “used the n-word” or “said ‘n*gger’” as if actually printing the succession of six letters would cause the sky to fall. It’s America’s version of not depicting the prophet Mohammed.

You-tube doesn’t have Lenny Bruce’s classic take on this, so we’ll have to settle for Dustin Hoffman’s re-creation in the biopic. I think it says it all:



So sure, we can criticize white people who call black people “niggers” (and continue to titter uneasily when blacks employ it freely). It really isn’t very nice and we ought not to use it. But pussyfooting around objectionable words strikes me as even more objectionable than using them, because it helps give them more power than they deserve.

Never the Twain

As most of my faithful readers will recognize, I have two pet peeves. One is people who talk on cell phones while driving in busy traffic. The other is people who try to inflict on the rest of the public their belief that the book of Genesis contains a factual account of the origin of Earth and its life forms.

For me, what these pet peeves have in common is stupidity (a common tag running through this blog), so along those lines one might assume that I believe teabaggers run a close third. But while I don’t have a very high opinion of these folks, I can understand their frustration and recognize the extent to which they’ve been manipulated. “Only a pawn in their game,” as Dylan once put it. It’s a sad state of affairs.

What’s saddest is the extent to which this country is divided. And while I can’t say I told you so (since probably no one except Beth heard me say it), I did see the potential for it when Obama decided to run for president. He had divisiveness written all over him from jump street, and now the pendulum has swung from a president despised by the left to one despised by the right as Fox pundits pounce on his every word.

Isn’t there anyone who can bring us together?

The irreconcilability of left and right is staggering, and I’ve tried for a long time to wrap my head around whether there’s some underlying cause that explains it. Did it all start in the sixties? Before that it was the Eisenhower era, and the only dissidents were beatniks in Greenwich Village and commies in the woodpile. Then social consciousness arose with the struggle for civil rights and protests against the war in Vietnam, and more and more people began to question the prevailing order. Nothing’s been the same ever since. Now the South votes Republican and the protesters are old white people.

But for all of the political realignments, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s as simple as this: people of the right want what benefits or safeguards themselves and their families, while people of the left want what benefits society.

The health care debate says it all. Liberals want to help their fellow citizens, while conservatives don’t think they should have to pay for strangers. But it extends to other issues as well:

• taxes: conservatives don’t want the government taking their money away; liberals are willing to give up some of their personal wealth to benefit society
• immigration: conservatives feel threatened by outsiders; liberals want to help them
• abortion: conservatives want to safeguard the family by extending protection to the unborn; liberals put a woman’s rights first
• gay rights: conservatives seek to define the family by emulating Adam and Eve; liberals seek equal rights for all
• capital punishment: conservatives fall back on Old Testament morality by calling for an eye for an eye; liberals are...well, more liberal
• guns: conservatives want to protect themselves (especially from those who want to take away their right to protect themselves!); liberals want to make society safer
• foreign wars: conservatives are concerned with protection from global threats; liberals would divert money to domestic agendas
• terrorism: conservatives’ protectionism rears up again; liberals seek to understand enemies’ points of view in pursuit of international accord
• religion in public life: conservatives want their family values to have validation; liberals want to protect non-believers from proselytizing
• evolution: conservatives fear the challenge to their core beliefs; liberals see it as just another brick in the wall of understanding
• climate change: conservatives dispute the need to make sacrifices; liberals are willing to sacrifice for the broader good

The GOP of course exploits these attitudes to advance their pro-business agenda; and since business interests are often at odds with societal interests, it’s only natural for these anti-societal factions to unite. (The “what’s the matter with Kansas” scenario isn’t as much of a mystery seen from this perspective: agrarian heartlanders are by nature more family-oriented, without the diverse societal interactions of city folk.) And it goes a long way toward explaining why the twain shall never meet.

To make matters worse, many people on the right believe there is a liberal elite that looks down their nose at them. And while it’s probably true that the majority of teabaggers are comparatively under-educated, they don’t help matters any: they get their information fed to them by an agenda-driven Fox News; they subscribe to superstitions like creationism; they respond to appeals to their innate jingoism; they hunker down with what they know best, their sense of self-preservation.

(Why are they under-educated? Maybe they did poorly in school because they received no encouragement from under-educated parents. Maybe they couldn’t afford to go to college. Maybe they couldn’t even afford to finish high school because they had to go out and work - because they live in a society not known for fairness, where business interests call the shots and keep the working class at a disadvantage. The same of course could be said for ethnic groups traditionally associated with the left - to be sure, all that keeps family-oriented minorities from joining the fold is that they’re also concerned with overcoming discrimination - but teabaggers think of themselves as real Americans to whom this unfairness has been meted out. And if life isn’t fair to them, why should they be expected to show fairness to gays or immigrants or Muslims?)

So it’s become to the advantage of the Republicans to cultivate this segment of the electorate, to convince them that the Democrats want to chip away at the defenses they’ve erected against everyone they think is out to get them, to win votes by promising to uphold “family values” so that once elected they can pursue their real goal of protecting business interests. As long as this segment of the electorate remains under-educated, they’re not going to know any better and continue to be suckered into supporting the party that supports the interests that help keep them down. And as long as they identify an educated liberal elite as their enemy, they’re going to take pride in their own under-education and resign their children to the same fate.

We read reports all the time about how American education is lagging behind the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Texas subjects its schoolchildren to right-wing distortions of reality and Arizona bans “ethnic studies” and Christians everywhere support home-schooling to guarantee their children’s indoctrination. Is it any wonder that the dichotomy in this country exists? Is there any reason to hope it will heal?

There have been studies that suggest liberal and conservative leanings have a genetic basis, and I suspect this may be true. The protectionist attitude that runs through most conservative policy stances seems like an animal instinct (and Sarah Palin now likens herself to a mama grizzly) while the liberal attitude reflects a recessive gene for cooperation (found in critters less worthy of emulation like bugs and birds). If that’s the case, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for reconciliation, at least not in our lifetime – and my hunch is that natural selection will work in favor of the protectionists. The outcome? Most likely some form of annihilation, after which the whole evolutionary cycle can start all over again. (And I suspect that, above the bacterial level, only those nasty but cooperative bugs will have survived.)

Stupidity like phoning while driving shows lack of common sense; confront people with the empirical evidence of accidents and maybe (a big maybe) they’ll see how dangerous it is and change their behavior, if only in the interest of self-preservation. Stupidity like creationism reflects a shackled mind that’s been discouraged from questioning established beliefs; educate people to weigh the evidence and draw their own conclusions and maybe they’ll recognize folklore for what it is. But behavior is easier to change than belief, especially if that belief is the very foundation of your instincts for self-preservation.

As long as the under-educated segment of society watchdogs the education process, nothing will change. Just as a country like North Korea, where education is controlled from the top, teaches its children to adore their leader and view all outsiders with suspicion, America, where school districts call the shots and are subject to takeover by anyone who wants to control young minds, inculcates its own brand of blind obedience and paranoia. Meanwhile, countries in western Europe, where education is probably left to actual educators, have societies far less religious than ours. Our own democratic approach to schooling is undermining our children and our future. (But that’s just my liberal-elite p.o.v. Others no doubt applaud the propagation of American values in the face of threats from all fronts.)

And so I’m forced once more to conclude that, when considering America’s political circus of red versus blue, never the twain shall meet. And no politician will arise to unite us, because on these many issues we cannot be united. Not because of what we’ve become; just because of what we are.

Thoughts on re-reading the Tao Te Ching

It had been a while since I sat down and read the Tao Te Ching straight through, it being the kind of book more conducive to sampling arbitrary passages like the Bible’s psalms or proverbs. It sat on my side table for several months while I picked it up intermittently, and I’ve recently finished.

One of the things that struck me was that the book repeatedly talked about the emergence of consciousness in human history: the speculation that man once lived as a natural being in tune with the Tao but that our predisposition to form value judgments led us astray. It’s probably safe to say that our pre-human ancestors lacked our cognitive powers and discriminatory functions, but for the ancient Chinese mind to recognize that there was such a jump is startling. This is so much in tune with the Eden legend that it’s uncanny, and one has to wonder how such fables originated. Each culture points to the emergence of the “knowledge of good and evil” as man’s downfall, Christianity branding the event a sin against God while Taoism sees it as turning away from Nature. But the bottom line is the same: once upon a time, man was ignorantly and obliviously part of the natural world; then he got smart (or so he thought) and it’s been downhill ever since. Has it ever.

Another surprise was that this re-reading led me to reconsider the interpretation of te. This word has usually been rendered in English as virtue or power (as in the title of Waley’s edition, The Way and Its Power); but Ellen Chen allows it to stand untranslated, so that by the 63rd chapter we find the line “Repay injury with te.” How striking, I thought, to come across this seemingly Christian notion, until I read her commentary:

“For a proper understanding of this line we must understand that, in the Tao Te Ching, te does not mean virtue. Te is the pristine condition of nature unburdened with distinctions between good and evil. Within the moral sphere distinguishing good from evil there can be no resolution of the problem of evil. Only when humans transcend virtue to the level of nature prior to the distinctions between good and evil can they be free from evil. Injury is unavoidable in the moral sphere; moral evil is the price paid for moral distinctions.
      “To ‘repay injury with te’ means to return injury the way nature returns injury. Nature is not conscious of goodness, nor does it design retaliation. . . . Armed with the distinction between right and wrong humans bear rancor against injuries, but nature bears no rancor. Nature accepts and suffers injury; it also heals injury such that there is no trace of injury left.

      “This must be what Jesus means when he commands us to forgive our enemies. The Christian is called to rise above ordinary morality, which bears rancor to imitate the perfection of the Father in heaven. To become as perfect as the Father we must forgive and forget that there has been injury at all.”

Advocating that a response to offense be “natural” rather than moral does make a difference. And the fact that this interpretation ties in with the pre-consciousness human condition is especially enlightening. Through our propensity to make value judgments we have lost touch with te. But although it’s absurd to think that civilization could realistically retreat to a “natural” state, te may not lie outside our grasp: when we engage in any meditative practice, what we’re doing is turning off our discriminatory function and just being. (And by the way, it’s not unreasonable to call the meditative state “vegetative”; plants simply are, and emulating them seems entirely appropriate to cultivating te.)

A third surprise was coming across Lao Tzu’s “three treasures” in chapter 67, because it had been so long that I’d read through the book that I had completely forgotten about this passage. (While the “three treasures” may once have been a touchstone for me, I eventually came to favor chapter 20.) These virtues – motherly [i.e. nurturing] love (rendered in many translations as “compassion”), frugality, and “daring not be at the world’s front” – made an impression on me when I first encountered them. Forty years ago, I found it convincing that compassion and frugality were the marks of an enlightened being, but I was somewhat shaken by the third concept – alternately worded as “daring not to be first in the world” and sometimes rendered simply as “humility” – that one doesn’t have to strive for fame or success (as un-American a notion as there ever was); living in harmony with Tao is what matters. In fact, it’s all that matters. It’s what enables the te response to whatever life hands you.

What I realized after this re-reading is that for all these years I’ve looked to the TTC for an explanation of reality by focusing on Tao as another way of envisioning what others call God or Ground or First Cause. “Becoming one with Tao” became a key phrase for living. But I sense now that I’ve given short shrift to the fact that te is the critical element in that endeavor.

As I’ve noted previously, what’s especially reassuring about the Chen translation is the care that she takes to explain her word choices. It’s all well and good to have someone filter the TTC through their own sensibility, but the result might be no better than taking wisdom from fortune cookies or greeting cards. If you want to know what an ancient text in another language really said, you need to seriously grapple with it, not blindly accept the rendition of someone attempting to appeal to contemporaneous readers. (Consider the hole that the Catholic Church dug for itself by adopting a translation of the Bible that called Mary a “virgin” rather than a “maiden.”) It says what it says, it’s up to you to decide if it speaks to you. And as chapter 70 asserts, “My words are very easy to understand . . . But no one under heaven can understand them.”

The Tao Te Ching has spoken to me for most of my adult life – which is not to say I’ve always paid attention. This blog certainly attests to the fact that I’m as opinionated as anybody, ready to expound about what’s right or wrong, good or bad (IMHO, of course). Lately, though, I’ve felt like I’ve overdosed on the constant barrage of on-line opinion, so much so that I can’t even bring myself to read my fellow citizens’ comments anymore. As Wordsworth put it, the world is too much with us. And let’s not forget Thoreau’s observation that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation – that is, until they gain an on-line sounding board. So as all too many contemporary commentators have summarized, “What the fuck.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and try to cultivate my te. . . .

WTF?

No, I’m not referring to Pope-gate. I mean, that’s definitely a WTF situation, but as I said before, I’m not going to go there. Let Catholics wrestle with their own embarrassments, I’ll try to be amused. Or even bondage-gate or whatever they’re calling it – definite amusement quotient there, but no commentary required.

What I’m talking about is Confederate History Month, because the brouhaha over celebrating rebel heritage is a real mind-blower. There are a helluva lot of Civil War buffs out there and probably even more Southerners who’ve been brought up to never forgive or forget the War of Northern Aggression. Meanwhile, everyone turns a blind eye to slavery as casus belli.

But wait a minute. We have in this country all these people living in the past to the extent of re-enacting it, but can you imagine Germans similarly celebrating the Third Reich? What makes the American experience so different? How come rednecks get to be sore losers when krauts don’t?

There’s no escaping the fact that Third Reich and the Confederacy were both established to uphold racism. Yet today the former is vilified but the latter continues to be celebrated. WTF? There seems to be a subtle difference between national shame and regional indignation. Germany wasn’t conquered per se, just defeated; and after the war, Germans woke up to the fact that they had murdered people who used to be their friends and neighbors and felt really shitty about it. The South, on the other hand, was brought to heel, reabsorbed back into a Union they wanted no part of; and its citizens were informed that they couldn’t have free labor from their darkies anymore and resented the hell out of it. Germans read Gunter Grass and wondered what had come over them. Southerners never accepted guilt, and they retaliated with the KKK and Jim Crow.

Doesn’t it all come down to education? Passing on indignation as part of the curriculum. Immediately after the war, Germans were taught about the evil men who had seized their country; but for generations, it would seem that Southern children have been urged to honor their forebears as heroes of states’ rights while glossing what was once euphemized as their “peculiar institution” – an inconvenient truth if ever there was one.

Today Germany is a paragon of democracy and decency (Joseph Ratzinger notwithstanding) where swastikas are outlawed. The South... I’m not so sure. As long as you still see the Confederate flag proudly displayed, it’s fair to wonder if the concept of liberty and justice for all will ever really take hold.

What do liberals have against tea?

A letter to the editor in the Flagstaff Daily Sun asks, “Why are liberals so opposed to the Tea Party movement? From what I see, the Tea Party stands for self-reliance, small government, less taxes, reduce the national debt and less interference on the part of the federal government in our daily lives. How can any sane person be opposed to these views? Do you liberals want high taxes? Do you want the government controlling every aspect of your lives? Are you afraid to stand on your own? Do you need the government to take care of you? Do you really believe you are entitled to what I have worked for? I hope you folks of the liberal persuasion think about what the current government is doing to our nation. If you have any common sense at all, you will agree with what the Tea Party is trying to do, which is get our country back on the road to be the nation we once were.”

Like Ronnie Raygun once said, “There you go again....” I hoped to have gotten my disdain for the TP movement out of my system, but since they’re likely to play a major role in this year’s elections – and since I even have friends who are sympathetic to the cause – I can’t help but rise to the bait of this letter.

Confining one’s arguments to these talking points is a have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife proposition. It’s true; taken separately, no sane person would contest them. But I’m not opposed to the ideas that you represent as much as to the collective impression that your movement makes. (1) It’s the height of hypocrisy to lambaste Obama for power-grabbing and bemoan escalating debt after the ravages of the previous administration – suggesting it’s just a poor-loser stance. (2) You take your marching orders from demagogues on a one-sided “news” outlet that laughingly calls itself “fair and balanced.” (3) You lionize a manipulatively homespun political personality who would be more clueless than W was (could that be possible?) if she ever became president. (4) Many of your fellow travelers are so preoccupied with issues like non-existent efforts to curb gun ownership or Obama’s birth certificate that it’s hard to take any of you seriously. (5) You would have to go some to convince me, given the kinds of people your movement attracts, that your belief that government should stay out of private lives extends to sexual and reproductive choice and to the decriminalization of marijuana.

Maybe the bottom line is, those of us of the liberal persuasion are more inclined to see government as a mechanism for solving problems, not as the enemy. It may very well require some tweaking along the lines you suggest – but that’s what representative government is supposed to be about, so let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. You’d rather starve it into submission than change it, but the small government/low taxes mantra just doesn’t fly anymore in a nation as large and complex as ours. Which version of “the nation we once were” did you have in mind? The fifties? Prohibition? The Jacksonian era? Or just any time when white male protestants called the shots?

All of this suggests: (6) Much like the participants in another Tea Party, you’re detached from reality. It’s time you tuned in to the big picture. The world is changing – physically, demographically, technologically – and we can’t turn back the clock to Happy Days.