Weak Fathers
Dobson prefers his electorate nauseated by the noxious fumes of the windbag. He's opined that homosexuality results from a weak father figure–who knew Dick Cheney was such a softy?–and that, if caught early, can be "cured." Dobson also endorses corporal punishment for children. "By learning to yield to the loving authority … of his parents," he writes, "a child learns to submit to the other forms of authority which will confront him later in life." In other words, hit ‘em while they're young and they'll suffer your sermons all life long.
[Brian Cook, "Lose the Faith", In These Times, 24 May 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Nancy Atherton (TTMA05)
I once went into a mystery bookstore of the rather snooty variety, and had a brief chat with the owner about Ms. Atherton and her Aunt Dimity series. "Oh," he sniffed, "she's so terribly sentimental and precious, don't you think?"
"Exactly," I said, "and she's very, very good at it, too."
Aunt Dimity is the very English aunt of the transplanted-from-America-to-England protagonist, Lori Shepherd, from whose viewpoint the books are written. They all take place in modern times, generally in a small, English village named Finch. As our protagonist goes through her life and encounters gossips, dark plots, and bodies, she's helped out on occasion by Aunt Dimity. Oh, and Aunt Dimity is dead by the way — has been for some time. Fortunately, we are spared any sort of ghostly apparitions: Aunt Dimity converses with Ms. Shepherd by writing in a diary, a charming conceit that adroitly sidesteps a whole catalog of ghostly silliness.
The series is uniformly good, and the characters progress through time as the series proceeds. These are English-style Cozies (yes, with a capital "C") but with modern characters with modern sensibilities. Indeed, as Mr. Snooty felt, the books are sentimental and precious; they're also very good, charming, and very engaging stories. Ms. Atherton convinces me that writing sentimental and precious is not nearly so easy as she makes it look, at least to do it so well as she does it.
The official website: aunt-dimity.com.
[This post is part of my Top Twenty Mystery Authors 2005 series.]
Acceptable Worlds
At virtually the same time that we heard the interesting news from South Korea about their ability to produce stem cells through cloning techniques, news teams rush to hear the president's predictable thoughts on the advance:
I worry about a world in which cloning becomes acceptable.
The fool pisses me off so much that I don't care about having an interesting discussion about ethical issues. This isn't about ethical issues with these people anymore, it's about slogans from cereal-box "religions" that pretend to have deep, spiritual roots. This much we know, certainly, although a few of us who haven't taken our mind-relaxing drugs today still stand in slack-jawed amazement at the respect that the majority of people will still afford these stupid slogans.
To be honest, I don't lie awake at nights worrying about a world in which cloning becomes acceptable. Instead
- I worry about a world in which routine torture of suspects becomes acceptable.
- I worry about a world in which CEO's making 700 times the wage of their workers becomes acceptable.
- I worry about a world in which hatred of other Americans as a way to raise campaign money becomes acceptable.
- I worry about a world in which a president can start a war without reason becomes acceptable.
- I worry about a world in which fixing social security by destroying it becomes acceptable.
- I worry about a world in which restricting women's reproductive rights becomes acceptable.
- I worry about a world in which condoms are kept from teenagers lest it encourage sexual activity becomes acceptable.
- I worry about a world in which liberty traded for pseudo-security becomes acceptable.
- I worry about a world in which the notion that American Christians are persecuted becomes acceptable.
- I worry about a world in which election fraud becomes acceptable.
- I worry about a world in which lying from our government becomes acceptable.
Clearly, my list is far shorter than it could be; let's just try to think of it as representative, the merest tip of the worrisome iceberg.
Regardless, it's more than enough to keep one awake at night, without even worrying about a world in which cloning becomes acceptable. Oddly enough, all these things that I worry about could easily be fixed, if people just had the vision and the collective will to put a stop to them.
Unfortunately, that all of these are acceptable has become acceptable, and I find that unacceptable.
Science & Mystery
Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: “Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.” Science mines ignorance. Mystery — that which we don’t yet know; that which we don’t yet understand — is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do.
Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or “intelligent design theory” (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name.
[Richard Dawkins, from "Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant", The Times [UK] Online, 21 May 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Speaking of Science
Exit is Not an Option
From a press conference by "Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheik Dr. Mohammed Sabah Al-Sabah, After Their Meeting, May 19, 2005, Washington, D.C.":
QUESTION: Madame Secretary, in the New York Times today, there's an article that senior military leaders, both at the Pentagon and in Iraq, are claiming that it is possible that the U.S. mission in Iraq could fail. […]
Do you have any comment or reaction to that, please?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, I'll only say that I believe the President has always said that his strategy is a strategy for success. He doesn't have an exit strategy; he has a success strategy. […]
Personally, I feel so much better knowing that the president eschews mere thoughts of "exit" to focus on "success". No Iraqi Left Behind and all that.
Does one suppose that "catastrophe" (as in "catostrophic success") is an essential early stage of a "strategy for success"? As part of the "No Iraqi Left Behind" approach, do we have a set of metrics to measure our success, or should we simply rely on indicators like how much money we're spending for success (slightly under $8 Million/hour)? Even if we don't plan to exit — a logical implication of having no "exit strategy", no? — how will we know when we've finished succeeding, and what will we do then when we don't exit?
If I was amazed before with Secretary Rice's intellectual prowess, I'm overwhelmed now.
Hate-Based Illiterates
Shakespeare's Sister ("Irritated by Ignorance: A Rant"), reading exposés of the activities of hate-based fundamentalists groups written by Deborah Levinson (who is apparently fearless enough to wade into that noxious swamp), presents us with some barely literate, dripping-with-hatred comments from Ms. Levinson's mailbag. The vitriol is astonishing and yet predictable; in other circumstances it might even be humorous.
S'sS comments
It’s truly amazing—whether reading the hate mail at a site like Deborah’s, dealing with trolls at a lefty blog, or reading Freeper comments, it’s all the same…one ignorant, uneducated idiot after another, who can barely string together a coherent sentence and is in desperate need of a second-grade spelling course. These are the same people who whine and moan about “liberal elites” and how we on the Left think we’re “so much better” than they are.
Well, you know what? We are meant to be literate. We are meant to be able to communicate using an agreed-upon set of grammar rules and spelling. Failure to learn the language beyond its most basic applications, leaving one barely capable of stuttering out a marginally understandable thought now and then, is ridiculous, and it does make one inferior to the vast swath of adults who are able to function at a level higher than that of a drooling moron.
Myself, I realized from reading this how surprising it is that the hate-based fundamentalists are so anti-intellectual and widely illiterate. Don't they take any hint from the fact that the word of their God is written? If He had wanted them to hate book learnin' so much, surely the Bible would have been done up as a graphic novel, or perhaps a picture book of stained-glass windows, purported to have been an earlier time's way of dealing with the problem when literacy was not such an easily available option. How can these people revere the language and poetry of the King James translation of their book of myths at the same time that they undertand it so little and don't bother to learn how to read and write themselves? Did they never learn what was the whole point of the Protestant Reformation?
From the letters that S'sS quotes, these were my favorite excerpts:
Why does men only have a penis and a anus instead of a penis, anus and vagina??
The logic is challenging, but apparently the author finds this an iron-clad argument against male-male partnerships. (It comes near an assertion about "Adam & Steve", making one wonder whether he realized he was quoting a black minister on that one? Liberty-loving homophobes are so often white supremacists as well — see the next entry — that I suspect he might be troubled to learn that.)
The other excerpt:
I don't have hate for you people, I have disgust and pity for you. Because believe certain morals and in preserving the white race I am labeled a racist.
I'm surprised, really, that this writer seems unhappy at the idea of being labeled a racist, since most modern-day white supremacists seem to rejoice in the label, which apparently marks them out as suitably anti-PC as well. ("We reserve the right to hate!") How odd that he claims the mental capacity to distinguish "hate" from "disgust".
"Just because I believe in the superiority of the white race doesn't mean I'm a racist" sounds so silly that this author is instantly remanded to the outer fringe of semi-literate haters.
And yet, it's a familiar argument that, when applied in a different context, causes people to stop and ponder the question as though it flows from the profound center of good Christian faith: "Just because I can't stand fuckin' fudgepackers don't mean I'm no homophobe. You know, like, hate the sin, love the sinner and all that shit."
Why does this version of the idiocy attract so much respect?
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
My Top 20 Mystery Authors: 2005
I started compiling and writing this list at the end of 2004. I didn't manage to finish it then, so I'm having a go now and giving it this year's number. Perhaps I can get through all twenty before the end of this year.
The list is written as though it is a compilation of lifetime favorites culled from all the mystery authors that I've read in the last 40 years or so, although I notice that the majority of them arrived on the list from my reading in just the past few years. Although it seems possible that those writing in the now richly varied and sophisticated genre have been getting that much better in recent years, it seems more likely to me that it may be a time-dependent function of my own tastes, and this it could easily change in future years. So, I fully expect to write a similar list every year, looking to see how my ideas and taste change. I'm well over 40 now, and don't deal well with absolutes any more.
These are mystery writers that I've enjoyed reading and who stand out (right now) in comparison to their colleagues, those whom I think are exceptional writers for one reason or another, so of course there's an element of personal taste involved. Also, I realize that the list would probably be different if I were making a list of exceptional books rather than exceptional authors. Perhaps another time.
I'm using "mystery" in the broad sense of "crime fiction", along the lines suggested by Otto Penzler (the series editor of the excellent "Best American Mysteries"): "mystery" or "crime fiction" is that in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is essential to the plot. I enjoy, sooner or later, most of the sub-genres — when they're written well, of course. What that means — well, another time, again.
I thought at first that this would be my Top-Ten List, until I went through my own recommended reading list. There were more favorites than I had remembered. However, since this is my list and serves no purpose I can imagine beyond suggesting to some friends some authors that I believe worth reading, there are twenty this time around. Another time, another number perhaps.
I was going to list the names in what I thought was best best to least best order, but I gave that up rather quickly. I could if I had to, but I don't have to. They are all outstanding writers, which means that each voice is unique and valuable, so ranking the list wouldn't really serve any useful purpose. However, I did decide to put the list is in reverse alphabetical order with Ruth Rendell at the top, using her alternym of Barbara Vine. Like I said: it's my list.
Here I list the names; then, as I get around to it, I'll write a brief commentary about each one. I hope I get it done before it's time for next year's list.
- Ruth Rendell / Barbara Vine
- Peter Robinson
- Ian Rankin
- Sharan Newman
- John Mortimer
- Henning Mankell
- Jane Langton
- P.D. James
- Michael Innes
- Reginald Hill
- Martha Grimes
- Frances Fyfield
- John Farrow
- Stephen Dobyns
- Michael Dibdin
- Michael Connelly
- Raymond Chandler
- Lawrence Block
- Jo Bannister
- Nancy Atherton
The Unimaginable Future
Science and the wondrous inventions and perils knowledge and creativity produce blaze around us with such profligacy that I sometimes just don’t notice. I forget how staggeringly lucky I am to live in this miraculous age – at this moment in history. I perhaps forget to laugh at the sheer dumbass irony of the fact that Aurora-Borealis-haired Fundy rodents who slicker the Great Wad (thanks Harlan) out of their sofa change by bashing modernity and intellectualism…
…do so through a network of satellites and cable-stations, cell-phones and Blackberrys, using wireless laptops to crunch their numbers and spam their flock while jetting hither and thither to drive home the message that Science is the Devil.
[From "We were once The Unimaginable Future", by driftglass, 15 May 2005.]
Queer Smells
My niece sent me a link to interesting news about a new study (it's always a new study, isn't it?):
WASHINGTON — Scientists trying to sniff out biological differences between gay and straight men have found new evidence – in scent.
It turns out that sniffing a chemical from testosterone, the male sex hormone, causes a response in the sexual area of gay men's brains, just as it does in the brains of straight women, but not in the brains of straight men.
"It is one more piece of evidence … that is showing that sexual orientation is not all learned," said Sandra Witelson, an expert on brain anatomy and sexual orientation at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.
Witelson, who was not part of the research team that conducted the study, said the findings show a biological involvement in sexual orientation.
The study, published in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was done by researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
["Study Finds Different Brain Response In Gay, Straight Men", 10 May 2005.]
I remain relatively disinterested in what some people feel is that burning question: is homosexuality a choice? I think the answer shouldn't matter, nor should it be a part of the political fight for equality. (One guy touches another guy's dick and civilization as we know it starts to crumble? Puhlease.)
However, I found the report interesting for a very non-scientific reason: it supports something that I've thought must be true about sexual attraction: that the sense of smell is intimately involved. Smells can be powerful reminders and aphrodesiacs, at least for me. This doesn't prove anything of course, but it makes me feel smarter.
Perhaps because of my own predisposition to believe it, it also seemed a rather easy conclusion to accept. Not so for everyone, it seems.
Steven Pinker ("a professor of cognitive science at Harvard"), writing in the New York Times ("Sniffing Out the Gay Gene"), evidently wasn't impressed, but I wasn't exactly bowled over by his Op/Ed piece myself.
Scientists and perfume marketers who believe that humans, like other mammals, respond sexually to chemical signals called pheromones were cheered by the news. But we are a long way from dogs in heat. The role of pheromones in our sexuality must be small at best. When people want to be titillated or to check out a prospective partner, most seek words or pictures, not dirty laundry.
"…a long way from dogs in heat"? Not usually the sort of rhetoric found in learned scientific discourse, it sounds more like unthinking Republican propaganda about homos. And such a facile dismissal with the dirty laundry example isn't going to convince me either: we may well find words and pictures stimulating, even more stimulating, or even more readily accessible than the dirty laundry of a suitable object de désire, but that says nothing about the role of smell in sexual attraction. I think Mr. Pinker is showing his prejudiced side more than his analytical side in that remark.
And yet, in his next breath (keyboard stroke?), he suggests that it's more likely that homosexuality is innate, but that this doesn't prove it. But then, one mustn't be too hasty:
Homosexuality is a puzzle for biology, not because homosexuality itself is evolutionarily maladaptive (though no more so than any other sexual act that does not result in conception), but because any genetic tendency to avoid heterosexual opportunities should have been selected out long ago.
He falls into the trap of believing that homosexuality is maladaptive just because no one has identified an adaptive reason for it, which also proves nothing. My contention anyway is that it is not selected against so long as it imposes no adaptive disadvantage. As Mr. Pinker observed earlier,
Gay men generally report that their homosexual attractions began as soon as they felt sexual stirrings before adolescence.
Often even earlier than sexual stirrings, many of us realized attractions of some sort towards members of the same gender. My sexual orientation feels as innate to me as anything I can think of. Of couse, that proves nothing.
More interesting to me in a political context is his observation:
Just as puzzling is the existence of homophobia. Why didn't evolution shape straight men to react to their gay fellows by thinking: "Great! More women for me!" Probably the answer lies in a cross-wiring between our senses of morality and disgust. People often confuse their own revulsion with objective sinfulness, as when they dehumanize people living in squalor or, in the other direction, engage in religious rituals of cleanliness and purification. An impulse to avoid homosexual contact may blur into an impulse to condemn homosexuality.
Is homophobia nature or nurture? I think his suggested reasons are on the silly side, although the observations are valid. It doesn't feel to me so much an impulse to avoid homosexuality as a conflict between societal disapprobation and personal longing. It's not just an old fag's tale that the most homophobic men are usually the biggest closet cases, which is about as far from an "impulse to avoid homosexual contact" as you can get: the most homophobic men are the ones who have developed the greatest revulsion for their own, intense homosexual longings.
Regardless of Pinker's somewhat confused message in this piece though, I won't complain about his concluding paragraph, with which I agree:
It may not be a coincidence that the new discovery came from researchers in Europe. In America, the biology of homosexuality is a politicized minefield that scares away scientists (and the universities and agencies that pay for their research). Which is a pity. Regardless of where homosexuality resides in the brain, the ethics of homosexuality is a no-brainer: what consenting adults do in private is nobody's business but their own. And the deterrents to research on homosexuality leave us in ignorance of one of the most fascinating sources of human diversity.
In: All, Splenetics, The Art of Conversation
To Scratch Naturally
Even more radically [referring to his athieism], [Jeremy] Bentham condemned laws against same-sex relations, commenting, "It is wonderful that nobody has ever yet fancied it to be sinful to scratch where it itches, and that it has never been determined that the only natural way of scratching is with such or such a finger and that it is unnatural to scratch with any other."
[Martha Nussbaum, "Epistemology of the Closet", The Nation, 19 May 2005.]
Microsoft Born Again — Ho Hum
I saved these excerpts weeks ago, from a letter that Microsoft President Steve Ballmer wrote to his employees, and released publically by Microsoft, about the debacle and outcry following the company's disastrous decision to withdraw support from gay-equality legislation in Washington. I thought I would have incisive commentary, but I've found that, even faster than I predicted it would happen, I've lost interest in cheering the evil giant now that they've awakened and re-decided to do the right thing.
I did like the exceptionally wordy way in which Ballmer translated "I really fucked up": "There was a lot of confusion and miscommunication, and we are taking steps to improve our processes going forward." Maybe he found the Anglo-Saxon just too earthy. Note, too, the clever reliance on the passive voice to suggest that other people had been "confused" and thus "miscommunicated".
Text of Steve Ballmer E-Mail to U.S. Microsoft Employees Regarding Public Policy Engagement
REDMOND, Wash. — May 6, 2005 — In response to widespread public interest in the company's position on anti-discrimination legislation, Microsoft Corp. today released the following text of an e-mail sent today from Steve Ballmer, CEO, to all Microsoft employees in the United States:
During the past two weeks I’ve heard from many of you with a wide range of views on the recent anti-discrimination bill in Washington State, and the larger issue of what is the appropriate role of a public corporation in public policy discussions. This input has reminded me again of what makes our company unique and why I care about it so much.One point really stood out in all the e-mails you sent me. Regardless of where people came down on the issues, everyone expressed strong support for the company’s commitment to diversity. To me, that’s so critical. Our success depends on having a workforce that is as diverse as our customers – and on working together in a way that taps all of that diversity.
I don’t want to rehash the events that resulted in Microsoft [sic*] taking a neutral position on the anti-discrimination bill in Washington State. There was a lot of confusion and miscommunication, and we are taking steps to improve our processes going forward.
[…]
After looking at the question from all sides, I’ve concluded that diversity in the workplace is such an important issue for our business that it should be included in our legislative agenda. […]Accordingly, Microsoft will continue to join other leading companies in supporting federal legislation that would prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation — adding sexual orientation to the existing law that already covers race, sex, national origin, religion, age and disability. Given the importance of diversity to our business, it is appropriate for the company to endorse legislation that prohibits employment discrimination on all of these grounds.
[…]
I’m adamant that we must do an even better job of pursuing diversity and mutual respect within Microsoft. I expect everyone at this company — particularly managers — to take a hard look at their personal commitment to diversity, and redouble that commitment. […]
———-
* Continuing on my "Support the Gerundive" crusade, what he really intended to say was "… the events that resulted in Microsoft's taking a neutral position …". Gerundives always take a possesive. Always.
Bill Moyers on … Important Stuff
Indulge me: this is Bill Moyers.
We’re seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.
[…]
Let me assure you that I take in stride attacks by the radical right-wingers who have not given up demonizing me although I retired over six months ago. They’ve been after me for years now and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don’t come back from the dead. I should remind them, however, that one of our boys pulled it off some two thousand years ago — after the Pharisees, Sadducees and Caesar’s surrogates thought they had shut him up for good. Of course I won’t be expecting that kind of miracle, but I should put my detractors on notice: They might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back into the anchor chair.Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil. I mean the people who turn faith based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.
That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s okay to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.
[…]
I decided long ago that this [letting politicians control what is news] wasn’t healthy for democracy. I came to see that “news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.” In my documentaries – whether on the Watergate scandals thirty years ago or the Iran Contra conspiracy twenty years ago or Bill Clinton’s fund raising scandals ten years ago or, five years ago, the chemical industry’s long and despicable cover up of its cynical and unspeakable withholding of critical data about its toxic products from its workers, I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies as well as the Big Lie of the people in power. In no way does this permit journalists to make accusations and allegations. It means, instead, making sure that your reporting and your conclusions can be nailed to the post with confirming evidence.
This is always hard to do, but it has never been harder than today. Without a trace of irony, the powers-that-be have appropriated the newspeak vernacular of George Orwell’s “1984.” They give us a program vowing “No Child Left Behind” while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged kids. They give us legislation cheerily calling for “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” that give us neither. And that’s just for starters.
[…]
An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy – or worse.I learned about this the hard way. I grew up in the South where the truth about slavery, race, and segregation had been driven from the pulpits, driven from the classrooms and driven from the newsrooms. It took a bloody Civil War to bring the truth home and then it took another hundred years for the truth to make us free.
Then I served in the Johnson administration. Imbued with cold war orthodoxy and confident that “might makes right,” we circled the wagons, listened only to each other, and pursued policies the evidence couldn’t carry. The results were devastating for Vietnamese and Americans.
[…]
I told our producers and correspondents that in our field reporting our job was to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth. This was all the more imperative in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. America could be entering a long war against an elusive and stateless enemy with no definable measure of victory and no limit to its duration, cost or foreboding fear. The rise of a homeland security state meant government could justify extraordinary measures in exchange for protecting citizens against unnamed, even unproven, threats.Furthermore, increased spending during a national emergency can produce a spectacle of corruption behind a smokescreen of secrecy. I reminded our team of the words of the news photographer in Tom Stoppard’s play who said, “People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse when everyone is kept in the dark.”
I also reminded them of how the correspondent and historian, Richard Reeves, answered a student who asked him to define real news. “Real news,” Reeves responded, “is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.”
[…]
The point of the story is something only a handful of our team, including my wife and partner Judith Davidson Moyers, and I knew at the time — that the success of NOW’s journalism was creating a backlash in Washington.The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican party became. That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.
This is the point of my story: Ideologues don’t want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right. They embrace a world view that can’t be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn’t, God forbid. Never mind that their own stars were getting a fair shake on NOW: Gigot, Viguerie, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth, and others. No, our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn’t the party line. It wasn’t that we were getting it wrong. Only three times in three years did we err factually, and in each case we corrected those errors as soon as we confirmed their inaccuracy. The problem was that we were getting it right, not right-wing — telling stories that partisans in power didn’t want told.
I’ve always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it’s no longer an eagle and it’s going to crash.
[…]
Someone has said recently that the great raucous mob that is democracy is rarely heard and that it’s not just the fault of the current residents of the White House and the capital. There’s too great a chasm between those of us in this business and those who depend on TV and radio as their window to the world. We treat them too much as an audience and not enough as citizens. They’re invited to look through the window but too infrequently to come through the door and to participate, to make public broadcasting truly public.
[…]
We’re big kids; we can handle controversy and diversity, whether it’s political or religious points of view or two loving lesbian moms and their kids, visited by a cartoon rabbit. We are not too fragile or insecure to see America and the world entire for all their magnificent and sometimes violent confusion. There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by,” John Steinbeck wrote. “It was called the people.”
[Excerpts from Bill Moyer's "Take Public Broadcasting Back", the closing address at the National Conference on Media Reform, St. Louis, Missouri, May 15, 2005.]
Public-Affairs Programming
Admittedly, being — shall we say — underemployed for most of the current President's time in office, it's rare that I suffer laughter, even a chuckle, in an unguarded moment. However, it does happen, and we might as well rejoice in the event and give credit where credit is due.
This time, it's thanks to Jesus' General. He writes, in "Owning the Message" very briefly about the GOP make-over at PBS (via the CPB), and shows us the new logo concept. Apparently the acronym will be changing to "GOPBS"!
(Bill Moyers also has recently made some choice remarks. If you run into Mr. Moyers, let him know that I want to have his children.)
The General also gives a tantalizing sneak peek at the new programming line up. I think my favorite by far (since I'm public-affairs minded, nudge-nudge wink-wink) is this one:
6pm The Newshour with Jeff Gannon
In depth reports on why Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid hates puppies, Hillary's trail of bloody corpses, and the proper amount to tip military escorts.
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Behold the Beech
We visited with friends last night, the sorts of friends with whom one has challenging factual discussion that often require the use of reference books, either to settle some contention or to illustrate some interesting if arcane bit of knowledge. Our discussion turned at one point to trees, and they produced a fascinating volume: The International Books of Trees, by Hugh Johnson (Mitchell Beazley Publishers Limited, 1973).
The name was familiar, because I have had for some years a general volume on gardening, written by the same Hugh Johnson, which I have considered a favorite from among several shelves of gardening books. He provides all the necessary information succintly and with remarkable grace and wit.
I was not disappointed by this tree book. On one page (p. 151) about the Beech family of trees, there was this paragraph, which tickled my fancy:
I am probably alone in thinking the weeping beech a monstrosity. But it comes near the bottom of my list of weeping trees; the ash and the elm both weep far more convincingly. The beech's are surely crocodile tears, or indeed — as Hillier's Manual perceptively suggests — elephant's. I quote: 'The enormous branches hang close to and perpendicular with the main stem like an elephant's trunk.' Nothing like as bad as a weeping sequoia, which looks like a boa-constrictor trying to take off. But still far from graceful.
Then, on the very same page was a picture of a remarkably distorted beech tree, with this caption:
Above The demented growth of the 'Tortuosa' beech. These rare trees occur in a line through Denamrk, Champagne, and Le Cosquer in Brittany. A radioactive meteor[*] centuries ago may have cause the malformation.
Now I will no doubt spend countless fruitless hours trying to figure out where the unusual notion of the radioactive meteorite's causing the malformation came from. I'll let you know if I find out; e-mail me if you happen to find out first.
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* Of course, he means meteorite and not meteor, since the former refers to those examples of the latter that actually manage to reach the Earth's surface before burning up.
In: All, Books, Common-Place Book
Presidential Memorials
Capo, writing at the Cleveland Park Men's Club (those of us living in or near Washington DC will recognize the geographic reference — oddly, there's a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt there, in the Washington National Cathedral), in a piece called "GWB Memorial: The Writing's on the Wall" (16 May 2005), begins by saying
A recent visit to the FDR memorial got me thinking. When did America stop making tough as nails leaders like this guy? And who the hell is President George W. Bush to compare himself to FDR? He wants to be like him so bad that he even went out and got himself the same kind of dog.
and then proceeds to offer a fascinating comparison between GWB and FDR.
Anyway, the title of his post got me thinking. Capo took his inspiration from a visit to the FDR memorial, which is built on the south side of the tidal basin in DC (not far from the Jefferson Memorial). It is structured as a garden, with fountains, arranged into "rooms" that correspond to FDR's terms in office. Sections of the rooms have statues and inscriptions on the granite walls: well-known and inspirational words from FDR's mouth. Its a nice place, and it's growing on me as a suitable memorial.
Anyway, it got me thinking. Someday, the inevitable will happen ("death and taxes" according to Mark Twain; although the "taxes" bit is questionable for Republicans, they haven't managed to repeal "death" yet) and some idiots will get all worked up about some suitable memorial for our current president.
What would a suitable memorial for W look like?
Tough question. If my blog had a huge readership, I'd probably consider sponsoring some sort of contest for a design, but it's asking a bit much of the three people who do read.
Anyway again, I have to give it more thought, but my first concept is along the lines of a very large (say, 10 feet of length for every person killed in Iraq) Claus-Oldenburg-style soft sculpture of an ostrich with its head buried in the ground.
But, like I say, it's just an initial concept.
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[18 May Update:] In case one of my three readers happens to miss the comments, Shakespeare's Sister has kindly taken on the design contest and put the question to her readership, so you might like to go there and join the fun.
Go Beavers!
My favorite moment in sci vs. fi history was when the JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory, operated by Caltech] launched the Cassini space probe of [sic*] Saturn in 1997. Soon after, the JPL phone rang; attorneys for clothes designer Oleg Cassini were demanding to know how JPL had the effrontery to name a space probe after the man who designed ensembles for Jackie Kennedy and almost married Grace Kelly – and not even ask his permission to do so? Ahem, said the JPL; the probe is named for an 18th-century astronomer named Jean Dominique Cassini.
Doh.
Can't we airdrop a seasoned strike force of [Caltech] Beavers into Kansas and Pennsylvania, where alarming outbreaks of the pestilence Cerebrus Doofus have just been reported? In Dover, Pennsylvania, two slates of school board candidates face off in Tuesday’s primary over a requirement to teach "intelligent design" in ninth-grade biology — "I.D." being a jumped-up and dressed-up version of creationism that deceives no one. And in Kansas, the whole state is dancing the anti-Darwin two-step again. Some state education officials are having a second go at embarrassing themselves on the world stage, hoping to change the very definition of science by not limiting it – wink, wink — to theories derived from natural explanations [ie, scientific principles and practices] and thus removing a "bias against religion." The very assumption that science is biased against anything except ignorance is itself a display of yawping ignorance. Maybe this is how Kansas intends to prove Darwin wrong, by practicing a resolute shrinkage of brainpower.
If we keep expelling science from schools, from public research and public policy and from politics, other countries will be glad to take up our slack. And Americans will wind up like the medieval rubes who were gob-smacked by the simplest science in Mark Twain’s "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,’’ believing a lightning rod and a farmer’s almanac to be the work of a magician, or a demon.
[Patt Morrison, "Creationism v. Evolution — Leave it to the Beavers", The Huffington Post, 16 May 2005.]
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* The Huffington Post has some nice writing by some interesting writers, but it is in desperate need of a firm hand in copy editing. Can't someone please check these posts and eliminate all those silly errors that run rampant, suggesting that all these writers can't write?
It's no longer there, having been corrected since, but my favorite so far was in Robert Evans' "Strictly Taboo", where he had originally written ménage a trios for ménage a trois. I was hoping it was a clever, bilingual pun, but it seems it was a typo.
In: All, Common-Place Book, Speaking of Science
Philip Morrison, 1915–2005
Philip Morrison, physicist and public educator of science, died on 22 April 2005 at the age of 89. He was, among other things, Professor Emeritus at MIT. I've been thinking about this for a couple of weeks now — I wanted to say something, because Morrison topped my short list of scientists who understood how science works, something that not terribly many working scientists think much about, let alone try to explain.
The notice linked above reminds me of Morrison's long association with Scientific American as their book reviewer, which I knew about but hadn't remembered. Most of what I knew about Morrison really came from two sources: a book and a television series.
The book, which he wrote with his wife and collaborator Phylis, was Powers of Ten. It was a fascinating and readily comprehensible presentation dealing with orders of magnitude: the relative sizes of things. They had a picture of people enjoying a picnic on a lawn, and imagined zooming in by factors of 10 until they could see atomic structures, and zooming out by factors of 10 until they were looking at things of galactic proportions. The concept thrilled me.
He influenced me most through his 1987, six-part series on PBS, "The Ring of Truth". There is also the companion book, written with Phylis: The Ring of Truth: How We Know What We Know. The topic, broadly, was Scientific Truth, what it meas to be "true" in science and how we come to recognize scientific truth. I thought it was brilliant, and he addressed questions that I was only starting to think about. Since then, these questions have taken an ever larger place in my own thinking and trying to understand the world.
It's a shame that many more people, people who have taken on so much political power in our country today, evidently didn't watch and absorb the message from that series; it may still be the best bulwark against the swelling tide of anti-scientific, anti-rational, and anti-intellectual fundamentalism that seems so widespread today.
My exposure was brief, but it was easy to recognize Philip Morrison as a model of my scientific ideal: a thirst for exploration, unshakable intellectual integrity, and a deeply held imperative to share what he discovered.
The Gay, Gay Right
What adds a peculiar dynamic to this anti-gay juggernaut is the continued emergence of gay people within its ranks. Allen Drury would have been incredulous if gay-baiters hounding his Utah senator [in his novel Advice and Consent] had turned out to be gay themselves, but this has been a consistent pattern throughout the 30-year war. Terry Dolan, a closeted gay man, ran the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which as far back as 1980 was putting out fund-raising letters that said, "Our nation's moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement and the fanatical E.R.A. pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are lesbians)." (Dolan recanted and endorsed gay rights before he died of AIDS in 1986.) The latest boldface name to marry his same-sex partner in Massachusetts is Arthur Finkelstein, the political operative behind the electoral success of Jesse Helms, a senator so homophobic he voted in the minority of the 97-to-3 reauthorization of the Ryan White act for AIDS funding and treatment in 1995.
But surely the most arresting recent case is James E. West, the powerful Republican mayor of Spokane, Wash., whose double life has just been exposed by the local paper, The Spokesman-Review. Mr. West's long, successful political career has been distinguished by his attempts to ban gay men and lesbians from schools and day care centers, to fire gay state employees, to deny City Hall benefits to domestic partners and to stifle AIDS-prevention education. The Spokesman-Review caught him trolling gay Web sites for young men and trying to lure them with gifts and favors. (He has denied accusations of abusing boys when he was a Boy Scout leader some 25 years ago.) Not unlike the Roy Cohn of "Angels in America" – who describes himself as "a heterosexual man" who has sex "with guys" – Mr. West has said he had "relations with adult men" but doesn't "characterize" himself as gay. This is more than hypocrisy – it's pathology.
ALLEN Drury might not have known what to make of Mr. West or of another odd tic in the 30-year war, the recurrent emergence of gay-baiting ideologues with openly gay children (Phyllis Schlafly, Randall Terry, Alan Keyes). According to Mr. Johnson's fresh scholarship in "The Lavender Scare," a likely inspiration for the gay plot line in Drury's "Advise and Consent" was the real-life story of a Wyoming Democrat, Lester Hunt, who shot himself in his Senate office in 1954 after the Republican Campaign Committee threatened to make an issue of his gay son's arrest in Lafayette Park on "morals charges." Those were the dark ages, but it isn't entirely progress that we now have a wider war on gay people, thinly disguised as a debate over the filibuster, cloaked in religion, and counting among its shock troops politicians as utterly bereft of moral bearings as James West. Check out the good old days in "Advise and Consent," not to mention Charles Laughton's valedictory performance as a Bible Belt senator who ultimately puts patriotism over partisanship, and weep.
[Frank Rich, "Just How Gay Is The Right?", New York Times, 15 May 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Splenetics
W: The Original Countermajoritarian
This brings us to the filibuster. The primary objection to the filibuster is that it is countermajoritarian. That is, it enables a minority of senators (41 in the current Senate) to block proposed legislation and nominations. But there is nothing odd about that. In a government determined to avoid "capture" by any faction and designed to protect minority as well as majority interests, our entire government's structure of checks and balances is deliberately premised on countermajoritarian procedures.
Consider the Electoral College. George W. Bush won the 2000 election even though he received 500,000 fewer popular votes than his opponent. What could be more countermajoritarian than that? Indeed, the Senate itself was quite consciously designed to be countermajoritarian, with two senators from each state, regardless of population. As a consequence, although the Republicans currently have 55 senators, they represent well under half the people in the United States. Countermajoritarian processes are fundamental to the American system because they protect substantial minority interests against the bullying of marginal and transitory majorities.
The Senate filibuster is a classic example of such a procedure. The filibuster has been recognized by the Senate at least since 1790. Although it has been used most often to force compromise on proposed legislation, it has also been used to encourage compromise on executive and judicial nominations. The filibuster was first used to block a judicial nominee in 1881, when it was invoked against Rutherford B. Hayes' nomination of Stanley Matthews to the U.S. Supreme Court. (Matthews was eventually confirmed.) From 1950 to 2000, the filibuster was used at least 17 times in the context of judicial nominations, most famously in the successful effort of Republicans to derail President Lyndon B. Johnson's nomination of Abe Fortas as chief justice in 1968.
[Geoffrey R. Stone, "The Nuclear Option", The Huffington Post, 15 May 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Splenetics
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
[Update 28 October 2005: Now that we top the charts at Google for this phrase, it seems appropriate that we provide the original lyrics to the theme song from MisterRogers' Neighborhood — see below.]
I had a moment earlier when I was a bit gloomy and reflecting on how uncivilized Americans and American politics seems to be these days. Part of it, no doubt, is that I am easily comfirmed to be an old fart, and old farts always think that civility has declined and civilization as we know it is going to hell in a handbasket.* (Actually, civilization isn't doing all that badly so far as I can tell, but it's a particularly dark moment with all the christian fascists trying to run things.)
It seems like every other day for the last six weeks we've seen announcement that "Frist may Go Nuclear as Early as Next Week", but we note that he's managed not to for many weeks. What's that all about?
It seems to be another manifestation of the political terrorism embodied in the ever colorful DHS color-coded terrorism alert system. You may remember that. There was never anything we were supposed to do about it, but occasionally (generally driven by how much cover the administration needed because some other policy was going badly) the color would move redder, just to keep us on our toes and feeling good about maybe being threatened.
Much like Frist's continuing threat to "go nuclear". Once he's done it, there's not much left. All the anticipation will have been actualized and the Senate will be back to having to appear to accomplish something for a change. Like good sex, the "nuclear option" is all about anticipation. There's no more mileage to be gotten out of the threat once it's exercised.
But whither the civility of public discourse? It's much too facile if I decided just to blame it on the Republicans' capturing all the political majorities in the government and being bad winners. I think it's something bigger that makes them more a consequence than a cause, an indicator, an irritating red-state litmus strip of evil forces that, once held in check, have been released.
I read some off-hand remark today that set my train of thought in motion and led me to the following startling conclusion:
America's greatest period of peace and social and economic prosperity was caused by Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
"Mister Roger's Neighborhood" was first broadcast on what would become PBS in 1968. Sure, the effect wasn't immediate, but the calming influence set in very quickly. It took time to work through Vietnam, Nixon, inflation, gas crises, etc., but the turmoil of the 60s began settling down right from the beginning.
Things were finally going quite well, and then, unfortunately, Fred Rogers died in 2003 at the age of 74. Things just haven't been the same since, and are only getting worse.
Do we now all have to sing "It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood…", or can we find a way to return to the orignal lyrics?#
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* "…to hell in a handbasket" is a fascinating phrase, and I haven't been able to guess yet at it's origins. It seems obvious that it's a corruption of some nearby sounding phrase (what do handbaskets have to do with hell?), and I've conjectured that "handbasket" is a corruption of "handcar" (as used in coal mining), but I'd really like to hear something more definite.
# "Won't you be my Neighbor" was written by Fred McFeely Rogers in 1967; these are the original lyrics:
It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood,
A beautiful day for a neighbor,
Would you be mine? Could you be mine?It’s a neighborly day in this beautywood,
A neighborly day for a beauty,
Would you be mine? Could you be mine?I have always wanted to have a neighbor just like you,
I’ve always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you.So let’s make the most of this beautiful day,
Since we’re together, we might as well say,
Would you be mine? Could you be mine?
Won’t you be my neighbor?Won’t you please, won’t you please,
Please won’t you be my neighbor?