Report on Possible Communist Activities at the Altar

Lately, I've noticed something that may be communistical that I would like to report. Before some of the members of my congregation take communion, they stop before ascending to the altar, and cross themselves. I don't remember this specific set of signals being sent to God by adults as a child. Is this something that the readers of this blog do? How important is it? Moreover, what does it mean? Is this something that is extra, is it adiaphoristical, or is it something that gets you to the front of the line in terms of getting into heaven? I don't know what it is, or how to do it, or quite what it means. I'm also afraid to ask, so I just bow my head before ascending to take communion. I try to bend over so that no one can quite see what I am doing with my hands, so that those behind me can't tell whether I am crossing myself or not. During communion, I notice that some people bow their heads and cross themselves AGAIN! What the? Then, some people tinct, as I do (dip the wafer into the wine) while others drink directly from the cup. Am I showing that I don't really believe, when I tinct? I do believe, but I also think this world exists, and in this world, sharing a cup is ill-advised during flu season.

I think the pastor does cross himself, but not as ostentatiously as some members of the congregation. So it is still not clear to me just how important it is to cross yourself, or just what it means. No one has ever pulled me aside to tell me about this.

Are there some things that you notice others doing during church that either mystify or annoy you, or that you believe are ill-advised? Some people do gossip during communion, and one individual actually discusses his golf game. I think some people sing loudly, and others barely whisper, but out of key.

None of these things bother me like this crossing-yourself business. I suspect that it is not true Lutheran doctrine to do this, and it is part of either a Catholic or a communist conspiracy. Or should I just get with it? If I don't do it, does it mean I am basically clueless, and will go directly to Hell without passing Go?

Who among the readers of this blog do it, and how many times during a mass? If you do the crossing thing, exactly how is it done, and what do you say to yourself and think to yourself as you are doing it? Are there other secret things that you do which you believe God prefers that you do, but which you notice that others in your congregation don't do? Are you trying to get in special with God by doing these things? Are these gestures or signs important, and if you do them without fully believing in God, do they still count? I admit to some suspicions. Also, how much do you put into the tray each week, and how much do you believe you should put in?

LOGIC INTRO

I'm reading one of those tiny books that purports to be an introduction but gets you very far into a topic. Logic: A Very Short Introduction, by Graham Priest, (Oxford UP 2000). Priest is a professor of philosophy at the University of Queensland in Australia.

One of the things that the author asks is whether logic is universal and hard-wired. He tries to distinguish between cases that are true in every case, and cases that are conditional.

"Perhaps the most influential of modern linguists, Noam Chomsky, suggested that we can do this [make grammatical sentences] because the infinite collections are encapsulated in a finite set of rules that are hard-wired into us; that evolution has programmed us with an innate grammar. Could logic be the same? Are the rules of logic hard-wired into us in the same way" (6)?

So I tried to think of something that was always the case. If you go to a barber, and emerge with your hair cut, is it not always shorter?

Yes, but only on first glance. What if the haircut took six months, my friend Gary Mayer just popped in bringing the girls home from a movie and asks? And there were only a few tiny snips, my wife suggests out of the bathroom, while combing her hair after a shower? This absolutely certain case suddenly went back into the conditional category (conditioners optional thanks to the shampoo Gary and wife provided to wash out the tangles).

Can we think of ANY case that is ALWAYS the case?

Alas, I feel a lot less logical as I read this book.

Is there anything anyone can say that is always the case? Even something that is true by definition -- that a marriage is between a man and a woman, is now under attack.

Is it true that a dog is not a cat? There is some kind of Barbie movie out that my daughter watches every morning with a very catty dog, or a doggish cat, and there's something unique about this, it is implied, but there is also an implication that more dogs and more cats should be like this, as it's the direction of evolutionary progress.

I can't think of anything that is always the case. Perhaps all definition, by definition, is suspended on faith. And without that, the whole world of definitions starts to move, and become a radical anomian postmodern giggle blast.

The next two chapters are going to attack time and identity. I can't wait.

Trilliums

Attended a talk by Greg McGee, from the Suny College of Environmental Science and Forestry, yesterday, in Evenden Tower 302. It was about the absence of trilliums in New York state forests. This state was once farmed at a much greater rate than it is today. After the Industrial Revolution many went to work in factories and left their farms. 8 million acres of forest have returned (about the size of Adirondack Park).

One can see evidence of this right here on our campus which still has stone walls up in the wooded areas where farmers once cleared fields.

Land recovered from farming is often very smooth and even, McGee said, and the undergrowth is not as dense. Wildflowers in particular don't exist in a new forest, he said. Even after 100 years, the sugar maples, beech, and oak have returned, but not the wildflowers.

He listed several vascular plants that don't return to once-plowed land:

Liverleaf
Trout lily
Wild ginger
Red and white trillium

(I asked what a vascular plant is, and he told me, but I forget what he said. I think a vascular system is like a circulation system as in a tree or a dandelion, that circulates green stuff. Is it similar to a circulation system in a human being?) McGee's hypothesis is that the SPORES don't travel very far from the original plant. About ten feet per century is all you're likely to find. He wants to carry the spores by hand (a spore is like a seed, I think he said). It is partially because the spores need moist decayed wood, and in plowed land, there is no moist decayed wood. In lands that had been left to pasture, there is some of this, so the flowers recover more easily.

It was also stated during the Q & A that deer are destroying our forests. There are too many of them, especially in New Jersey. Much of Massachusetts was once farmed, but now much of it has been recovered as forest, but the wildflowers haven't returned. McGee thinks if you can get the wildflowers back, then opposums, skunks, and other animals might come back, too, since they may have lived on the wildflowers. I wanted to mention helicopter gunships with regard to deer and to mention that this would also help with Lyme Disease, but I showed restraint!

He recommended two books for those like me who would like to be able to read the woods better. One is called Reading the Forest. The other is called Forests in Time. I didn't get an author, but assume that using the title I could find these in Amazon.com. I need to find a book that has some humor and some grace in the writing or I generally can't finish it. I stopped reading Neil Shubin's Inner Fish because by about p. 100 all the humor was gone, and all he was doing was giving dry recitals of very technical DNA theory. Boring.

Overall, a good talk! Some soil is acid-based, and some has limestone foundation. It made me think about the denser older cities of Europe, and how the new world cities are less dense, but perhaps not as filled with lovely trillium, or the urban equivalent -- interesting niche shops as opposed to Wal-Marts.

THANKSGIVING POETRY CONTEST

Poems up to 30 lines having to do with thanksgiving for the existence of America. (Possible subjects: conflict between Puritans and Indians at the first T-day, football watching on T-day, animal rights and T-day, beauty of T-day, family strains on T-day, T-day and American government [two chickens in every pot, as Hoover put it], buckles on hats, cranberry sauce, new dishes suggested for T-day, where America came from and where it's going, Obama and T-day versus Washington or Pierce in the White House on T-day, stuffing and its joys, stuffing yourself with stuffing on T-day, and how good that is, compared to starving in Biafra on T-day, etc.)

All poets who enter are invited to choose a winner (1 vote per entrant) by Thanksgiving midnight (night of the 26th, or 12:01 AM of the 27th).

Here's a chunk from Corso's Spontaneous Requiem for the American Indian:

"Pilgrim blunderbuss, buckles, high hat, Dutch, English, pat-
ent leather shoes, Bible, pray, snow, careful, careful, o but
feast, turkey, corn, pumpkin, sweet confused happy hosty
guests, Iriquois, Mohawk, Oneida, Onandaga, Thanksgiving!
O joy! o angels! o peace! o land! land land land" (Mind Field 138).

Anecdote of the Car

Barack Obama and Sarah Palin were in a car that was being driven through Death Valley. Obama was driving, but Palin wanted to be in the driver's seat, as she thought that Obama kept taking wrong turns. The car had been going in circles for hours, as he had no real sense of direction. He didn't like maps, and leaned instead on hope. Suddenly the car came to a stop.

Barack Obama said, "All we need to do is have empathy, and the car will go again."

When the car wouldn't go again, he said, "Racist car!" and wanted a new car, calling the one he had a clunker.

Sarah Palin opened the car's hood, and replaced the serpentine belt, which had come off as they went round and round in the dusty desert, kicking dust and grit up under the hood.

"The desert is so much like Alaska!" She said. "Except there's no moose. Have you seen a moose, Barry?"

"You mean Meese?" Asked Obama. "I see Edwin Meese everywhere. But he was Reagan's geographer. I couldn't use him to help me find my way. He's from the other party. Besides, he's gagged and bound in the trunk. I'm going to dump him out here."

"Why, you Chicago gangster!" Sarah Palin said, with hands on hips.

She let Meese out of the trunk and dusted him off, and said, "I'm sorry sir, I didn't know."

"I'm going to drive," said Palin. And off they went swiftly and surely toward the noon business meeting at American Enterprises, where Meese (a good Lutheran) helped to reorient the country.

FLU SHOTS/ Church Gossip

I got my flu shots this week. They were 15 dollars, given out by the campus health clinic. They hurt. Last year, I couldn't even feel it as the needle went in. This year I got one in both arms, and they hurt, very much. Was it amateurish nurses, or were the needles thicker than usual?

My kids got mist up the nose, and giggled, because they had been crying for an hour before the event in anticipation of arm pain.

My wife says that some people online claim that the flu shots have mercury. At work a biologist told me that there's more mercury in a tuna sandwich.

At church this morning an elderly woman who sits in the pew behind me whispered that she was considered "expendable" by the CDC, because they wouldn't let her have a swine flu shot. She's about 85.

She blamed the CDC. I don't know who paid for all the free swine flu shots. Was it the CDC? This is something else I have to track down. Are they spending too much money on something else, so that they have to have death panels, and decide anyone over 65 is expendable (along with Lyme Disease children)?

At work, someone said that her father got Barre Guillaume disease which simulates a stroke. I can't remember the name of the disease. It came from a flu shot!

I felt a pain shoot down my leg, but my fingers still work.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has an article that says that the new guidelines that suggest that women over 40 but under 50 talk with their doctors before getting screened. If however the guidelines suggest there's no need, chances are that this will no longer be a free service.

What other services will be trimmed under ObamaCare?

"The American Cancer Society, which came out against the new guidelines on breast cancer screening," (WSJ, p. A3, Sunday November 22,2009), has someone named Debbie Saslow, director of breast cancer at the American Cancer Society, say, "Breast cancer grows fast, and screening for it is about detection" (A3). It apparently grows much faster in younger women, but the cost-benefit analysis may have yielded the determination that it will be worth the higher mortality rate in terms of overall savings.

Also at church a guy said that up in the 23rd district they have at least 500 votes that came out of nowhere. He's the Republican electoral commissioner for Delaware County. He said that when it happened he and the Democratic commissioner rolled their eyes. It wouldn't have happened in this county, he said. In Minnesota, hundreds and hundreds of votes for Al Franken came out of nowhere after the election closed.

The sermon was about how Jesus spoke to Pilate as truth to power, and lost. I thought of how power often drowns out truth. Stalin managed it (but then came Aino Kuusinen and Vasily Grossman and A. Solzhenitsyn). Ceausescu managed it (but then came Andei Codrescu and Richard Wurmbrand). The current leaders of Burma have done it (almost, if it weren't for Suu Kyi and Amy Tan). The Duke Group of 88 tried to lynch the lacrosse players, but it didn't work out. Obamatons now try desperately to knock out Fox News and Sarah Palin. They want to speak power to truth, too.

Is not truth a light that illuminates the dark face of power?

John 18:36-37: "For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."

Sarah Palin?

Is Sarah Palin the Moses, or the Howard Dean, of the Republican Party?

FISHY

About 375 million years ago, whatever line of animality we belong to got out of the streams and started to try to get up on dry land. I'm reading a funny biology book called Your Inner Fish, by Neil Shubin (Random House 2008). Shubin says the reason is that there were all kinds of predators in the water -- some 16-feet in length.

"Tiktaalik is seven feet long and has a head as wide as a basketball. The teeth are barbs the size of railroad spikes. Would you want to swim in these ancient streams? It is no exaggeration to say that this was a fish-eat-fish world. The strategies to succeed in this setting were pretty obvious: get big, get armor, or get out of the water. It looks as if our distant ancestors avoided the fight" (41).

While fish have fins, the animals that got out of the water needed to develop wrist bones.

"Bend your wrist back and forth. When you do this, you are using joints that first appeared in the fins of fish like Tiktaalik. Earlier, these joints did not exist. Later, we find them in limbs" (41).

It occurred to me while reading this that when people are acting in a violent or suspicious way, we say that they are acting FISHY.

Perhaps this is some kind of distant memory of violent fish from 375 million years back. There are probably other ways to explain it, but I prefer this way.

T.S. Eliot's Remark

I finished reading Charles Molesworth's Marianne Moore biography for the second time a few days ago. Toward the end, there was a remarkable statement made by T.S. Eliot. He was dining with Moore in England, and Eliot said, "Wensleydale is the Mozart of cheeses."

I didn't know what Wensleydale is, but it's a dry crumbly cheese first made by Cistercian monks in France and brought over to England after 1066. It's somewhat like a Stilton (blue).

I thought it was an odd way to describe the cheese: as a kind of spritely classical music. I thought I would open this thread to attempts to top it. Describe a car as a kind of wine.

"The Dodge Caravan is the Boone's Farm Apple Wine of automobiles."

Or try to define a city:

"Los Angeles is the Paris Hilton of cities."

Describe a poet in terms of a fragrance, or describe a city in terms of a species of bird, or a particular fruit.

See if you can top or even approximate T.S. Eliot's remark. Note that Eliot and Moore liked a poetry of praise (he's praising the Wensleydale, while I am criticizing the Dodge Caravan and Los Angeles). It's probably easier to critique, at least for me. Try a comparison of praise. It's difficult to do this! Also, try some Wensleydale for yourself, and play some Mozart, and see if the comparison is apt.

What would be the Beethoven of cheese, what would be the Sibelius of cheeses? What would be the James Brown of cheeses? What poet or mathematician or cineaste most approximates fudge?

Castro Banned Christmas in 1959

When Castro became Grinch of Cuba in 1959, one of his first actions was to ban the celebration of Christmas. The ban persisted until 1999, when Pope Paul II visited the island. The Pope's speech softened Castro's perception of Christians. Among other things, the Pope came out against neo-liberalism "which subordinates the human person to blind market forces," and "places unbearable burdens upon less favored countries" (94).

Castro dug that, apparently, and later visited the Vatican.

In 1999, Castro allowed the celebration of Christ's birth.

The Pope on the one hand knocked pure capitalism, but he also knocked pure communism. He cited Jose Marti, "An irreligious people will die, because nothing in it encourages virtue" (97).

The speech that Pope Paul II gave is called "The State Must Allow Religious Freedom" and can be found in Human Rights, edited by Laura Hitt (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2002)92-97.

At the end of the speech Pope Paul closes in Latin because he says that after all, he is in Latin America. "Spiritus spirat ubi vult et vult Cubam"!

I think this means long live the Holy Ghost and long live Cuba! But wouldn't mind an accurate translation.

The Pope is against pure capitalism. He's also against godless government. He thinks government should have a spiritual component. This isn't exactly two kingdoms. He sums up what he wants in a sentence:

"For many of the political and economic systems operative today the greatest challenge is still that of combining freedom and social justice, freedom and solidarity, so that no one is relegated to a position of inferiority" (96).

Lutheran Surrealism is down with the Pope, and up with the children of Cuba, who deserve to celebrate Christmas like everyone else. Where Christmas is celebrated, there is peace and happiness. Where it is outlawed, there is terror and darkness. Imagine Christmas morning in Pyongyang, in the capital of Myanmar (have they renamed Rangoon?), in Ho Chi Minh City, or anywhere that the spirit of Christ has not been accepted. It is the darkest day of the year, instead of the merriest.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP

Irving's The World According to Garp opens with a rape -- a nurse assaults an airforce veteran who's had his brain shot to bits. He'd been sitting in the bubble at the bottom of a B-52 when anti-aircraft fire scrambled his brain. All he can say is Garp. And the nurse wants a baby but not a man, so she sexually assaults the man, and calls the kid Garp.

This opening shot in the war against the sexes ricochets throughout the book. A serial child rapist in the middle of the book gets off on a legal technicality. Garp himself commits statutory rape with a babysitter. The wife has sex with her gradual student. Garp's mother is shot by a Christian for bragging about her sexual assault in a best-selling feminist book.

Through the book are the Ellen Jamesians -- girls who've ripped out their tongues in solidarity with another girl who's had her tongue ripped out by a rapist.

Somehow the novel is a comedy, and its argument is that comedy is necessary and sufficient. (I think comedy is necessary but not sufficient.)

We now have many different kinds of domestic terrorist: we have those who shoot abortion doctors. We have those who shoot black political leaders. We have leftists who shoot presidents. We have kooks who kill women, and kooks who kill men. We have kooks who kill kids. The NYT screams, These are not terrorists, but psychos. How do we distinguish between a terrorist and a psycho again?

In Irving's Garp (which is his only good book insofar as I have been able to determine having read nine others), all these and more are present. But Irving makes what I consider to be a fatal blunder, fatal to the left at least. He says that we should not be "intolerant of the intolerant" (556). This is liberalism at its worst (multiculturalism).

Garp at one point decides to go after the Ellen Jamesians in print and mocks them for chopping out their tongues, and for being so one-sided in their view of men. In return he gets death threats from the Jamesians. He tries to apologise, but it is too late. His death is already slated.

"Of course, apologies are rarely acceptable to true believers -- or to anyone who believes in pure good, or in pure evil. The Ellen Jamesians who responded, in print, all said that Garp was obviously afraid for his own life; they said he obviously feared an endless line of hit men (or 'hit persons') whom the Ellen Jamesians would send after him until they got him. They said that along with being a male swine, and a bully of women, T.S. Garp was clearly 'a yellow chickenshit coward with no balls'" (562).

After Garp had attacked the Jamesians in print, he narrowly survived an attempt to run him down with a feminist car. He would not survive a feminist bullet put directly into his heart. If you believe you are absolutely right, and God is on your side, then you are capable of murder. This is Irving's point. But on his side, he has nothing to believe in. His wife commits adultery and the narrator calls this a "trivial indiscretion" (380).

What we have are one side that has no true moral coordinates, and another side (actually two sides -- communists to the left, and Calvinists to the right), who believe that they know God's will. Both of these are destructive to art, Irving believes.

Toward the end of the novel Irving bemoans the destruction of literature by sociology (525).

But he's not just attacked by the left. He receives a letter toward the beginning of the book by a Mrs. Poole from a small town (Findlay) in Ohio. She takes him to task for not believing in anything.

"Look at the world, shithead -- it is a bed of pain, people suffering and nobody believing in God or bringing their children up right. You shithead, you don't have any problems so you can make fun of poor people who do!" Yours sincerely, Mrs. I.B. Poole, Findlay, Ohio.

Garp shoots back, "Laughter is my religion, Mrs. Poole" (233).

This is Irving's most successful, and funniest book, by far. The early novels had something going on with serial adultery, and they were funny at points. The later novels had Irving turn into a sociological gasbag. A Prayer for Owen Meany brought Calvinism and Communist together, and he gassed on for 600 pages about both, unable to get more than a line of humor in between these oppressive systems, as he wrung his hands about the Vietnam War, and about the rights of children.

But in Garp he gets it all just right but showed his Achilles heel: he wants to be tolerant toward the intolerant. This is the Achilles heel of American liberalism especially as it has morphed into multiculturalism. This is why they try to understand terrorists of different kinds. They think there is some way to understand them, and find peace with them. I find this laughable, but I do have an answer. Locke. He says that any government that doesn't allow for life, liberty, health, and property, is evil. Any person who doesn't, should also be considered evil. We should not be tolerant of evil.

I don't think we should bounce EVIL from the lexicon but to do so we need to accept universalism over relativism. Locke has a very good universal grip on the term. The world according to Locke, therefore, is a safer and smarter world than The World According to Garp.

REVOLUTION AND APPEASEMENT

My wife went to listen to classical piano music with her friend Irma in Stamford, NY. The concert will be Schubert and Mendelsohn, by Michael Cannon.

I'm home with two children under 6. Once they saw their mother go out the door they turned on me with a vengeance and said,

"Let us eat cake!"

They are having one slice of cake each.

The F. Word

Many people have said to me, your blog appears to have many themes. What would you say you are doing?

I'm interested in how things function. Well, not so much things, but values. I'm interested in values in action.

Many of my colleagues in English are Marxists. The chairman of my Ph.D. committee was Steven Shaviro. He's a Marxist. Shaviro is part of a growing network of very powerful people in English who are Marxist. Michael Berube would be another high-placed example. They take their cue from folks such as Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, from the Frankfurt School, and from Italian Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci and Antonio Negri, as well as British theorists along the lines of Raymond Williams. There are probably 600,000 such thinkers in the academy at present. (Based on 6000 colleges with about 100 such people in every institution -- a lowball estimate.)

I think it's bad because Marxism is one-party system that denies freedom of religion, has no feedback system via voting (there is only one party), it denies freedom of the press, and does not brook separate institutions, or free markets, or even free speech.

And yet even within the church one sees the influence of Marxism via liberation theology. Our president spent decades listening to a liberation theology-based pastor, a man named Reverend Wright.

In poetry, the LANGUAGE group has imported many of the communist circles' ideas into poetry. This group includes figures like Ron Silliman (former editor of the Socialist Review), as well as Marxists like Charles Bernstein. Not everyone in poetry is Marxist, by any means, but many poets are apolitical, or only interested in being unique, and so those who are intensively political have an influence beyond their numbers.

Marxism doesn't work, and yet it's making an enormous comeback, especially in the literary discipline. Against this, I assert that Adam Smith and John Locke were functional. I like to look at actually existing Marxism via its literary dissidents such as Aino Kuusinen.

Marxist systems have given us many dissidents. Andrei Codrescu out of Romania, Vaclav Havel out of Czechoslovakia, and figures such as Miklos Haraszti out of Hungary. Solzhenitsyn in Russia. Marxism is a disaster in the making. But we still have few dissidents out of Vietnam, or out of Myanmar. I don't think I can convince hardcare Marxists that they are wrong, or that they are nonfunctional. But I can begin to open questions, especially among religious people, who remain the only true counterforce available within world culture.

I am interested in the f. word. What is the f. word?

FUNCTIONALITY.

American Indians didn't function.
Islam doesn't function.
Modernism didn't function (analyze the lives of all of its participants and we will see that none of them functioned).
Postmodernism didn't function.

Shakespeare functioned. He was probably only a Catholic, but he functioned.

Catholicism functions, although generally not as well as Protestantism.

Lutheranism functions the best of all, but some branches of it are beginning to no longer function (the ELCA is falling apart).

Does it work is a question we ask about cars. Cars are vehicles. They either get you somewhere, or they don't. Ideologies are public conveyances. Either they get you somewhere or else they don't.

We should ask of churches and governments: is this getting you somewhere?

Marriage used to be a vehicle for getting somewhere. It helped get children insured, and into life. Now it is breaking down. Divorce is becoming the norm. Over 50% of kids now live in broken homes.

Health insurance is a vehicle.

Obama's programs and pogroms: none of it seems to function. Nine months in and noone seems to know which end is up. Are we in Afghanistan to win, or not? Do we intend to help the women of Afghanistan remain literate, or not? No one seems to know. Obama dithers. I don't think he knows.

Are terrorists terrorists, or are they people with post-traumatic stress? I don't think the New York Times knows.

All the definitions are becoming unclear. Our newspapers are falling apart, they don't ask hard questions any longer. They parrot what the leader wants.

Logic vanishes into guesswork, and suppositions that aren't clear. Vague terms that don't really get anyone anywhere: hope, change, are supposed to substitute for concrete sentences with valid subjects and clear predicates, and discrete objectives.

A certain kind of amorphous vagueness hovers over the White House. It doesn't seem to function. Bills are clouded in secrecy, and hidden from the population. America as a public conveyance seems to be crowded with people who have no right to be here, and not much interest in the history of the country or its continuation. They want to hijack it. People from useless religions and useless countries stream in here and want to bring their crummy ideas with them, and make them into law. In NYC there are daily protests that we should have Sharia Law. In the interests of multiculturalism, many people believe this to be the case. In England, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said that Muslims should have their own separate laws.

The Anglophone world today is a disaster in the making.

I am putting my shoulder to the wheel and asking if we can get some traction, get out of the muck, by going back to its Protestant formations, and making an alliance with other people of faith: orthodox Catholics and Jews, in particular. And going back to what made the country work in the first place: Adam Smith, John Locke, and empirical traditions, away from the continental abstractions of Hegel and Marx.

I'm curious as to why some actions lead to the cemetery. I want to know why the CDC funds one disease for perverse adults, and not another that primarily affects children.

I think the country should be about the maintenance of children.

I think if we get the structure of the country right, it will become a perpetual motion machine again, and go by itself.

But the key is the f. word that seems to be more and more a taboo that one doesn't dare to utter: Functionality. Parts should fit together and mesh, and make the machine go, reproducing itself, producing prosperity and peace. If not, we need to analyze what's wrong, and fix it. Although I'm using a machinic analogy, I'm not interested in a machinic answer. I'm interested in values in action. The Amish do not have much along the lines of new machines, but their values are ok, and so are they.

They function.

Thanksgiving Poetry Contest!

Poems up to 30 lines having to do with thanksgiving for the existence of America. (Possible subjects: conflict between Puritans and Indians at the first T-day, football watching on T-day, animal rights and T-day, beauty of T-day, family strains on T-day, T-day and American government [two chickens in every pot, as Hoover put it], buckles on hats, cranberry sauce, new dishes suggested for T-day, where America came from and where it's going, Obama and T-day versus Washington or Pierce in the White House on T-day, stuffing and its joys, stuffing yourself with stuffing on T-day, andhow good that is, compared to starving in Biafra on T-day, etc.)

All poets who enter are invited to choose a winner (1 vote per entrant) by Thanksgiving midnight (night of the 26th, or 12:01 AM of the 27th).

GAYNESS and POVERTY: INBORN OR CONSTRUCTED?

If you think that homosexuality is inborn, there is no choice but to accept it. If, however, you think it is socially constructed as a choice, you might think it's possible to change it.

I think that all those who believe it is immutable, accept it. Of those who think it's socially constructed, or that it's a lifestyle choice, they often will not accept it. So which is it?

If it's true that gay men ordinarily hate women (they might get along with them but deep down find them disgusting and if they had a button to push and could eviscerate all the women they might), if gay women would do likewise, then it is

a. socially constructed or
b. a lifestyle choice based on a traumatic event

I don't know which one it is. My mind is open to either of these. I don't think anyone knows for certain which one it is. How would you go about proving it was one or the other?

The country is divided on about a 50-50 basis, just as they are between Democrat and Republican. Democrats are also more likely to believe that poverty is something that has happened to you, and that you can't change. Republicans, I think, believe that anyone can change their circumstances with a bit of elbow grease.

On the one hand the Democrats largely believe that people are what they are, so we should help them out. Republicans believe that people make lifestyle choices, and that if they make their bed, they should lie in it.

I'm with the Republicans on the poverty issue, but I don't think there is enough information yet about the gay issue. Can it be resolved scientifically? Are all people really genetically homosexual, but decide they can't stand the other sex for some reason in childhood?

Are there people who are completely homosexual?

Is there such a thing as a completely poor person?

Are Republicans made at birth, or are they created by Fox News? Are Democrats created at the moment of conception, or are they made by communist university professors, posing as liberals, as they craftily reshape the zeitgeist from sea to shining sea?

New Comment Moderation Notice

J. continues to post aggressive posts that demand immediate gratification. I have attempted dialogue with him in the past, but he does not want dialogue. He just wants to harass me, and every time I respond he gets more aggressive.

As a result, I have had to adopt a comment moderation device that means that all posts must go through me first.

This will slow down debate, and create a slower news day. However, I read all the comments any way. Anyone can still comment, but I will probably only post them about twice a day. The good side of this is that I will no longer allow through comments that I deem to be mere attempts to flame others.

This means that we will not have as many comments. But I also intend to leave posts up for a few more days before adding a new one, so if it looks like there's going to be in-depth conversation, I will leave it going. I will probably send through the new posts once in the morning, and once at about 6 pm, since that's when I'm generally free -- before my work day begins, and again at the end.

I deeply apologize for this unfortunate situation. I have no other method at present to keep J. from taking over my blog with his syndrome. As soon as I post anything, he attacks, apparently having nothing better to do but watch for posts and then to willfully misread them. Thank you for your tolerance of this situation. I am sorry to make everyone suffer because of the behavior of one Lancaster, Californian. It may be that ultimately I will be able to allow members to post. I need an email for each of you in order to do this, but for now, I think I will go to a comments moderation device, in order to slow comments down, but to ensure their quality. I want to avoid flaming, as I think it can wreck a person's whole day, especially if it was calculated to be unfair, or was unwritten in stupid mood.

More and more I understand Fra Silliman as my numbers have begun to approximate his.

Again, my apologies. I am at my wit's end. And happy Veteran's Day to those of you who have served. My hat goes off to you, in deepest and most sincere thanks for your service to our country.

P.S. Don't forget to vote on best poem by tomorrow at midnight. All participants entitled to one vote.

Enthusiasm, Against

After reading the Aino Kuusinen book I asked myself why is it that the communists never captured any Lutheran countries. Why is it that revolutionary fervor never capsized a Lutheran government?

I think it is basically because Lutherans are against enthusiasm.

We distrust it, and feel that it is devilish already always. To go to war and enjoy it is certainly devilish. When Lutherans go to war the whole enterprise should make us morally sick from beginning to end. It is at best a lesser evil. But it is still evil. And when we do something we do our best to remain bored, and wary. Because almost everything that can be done is evil.

The Beatles sang,

There is nothing you can do that can't be done.
There is nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
All you need is love, doop de doop de doo...
It's EASY! All you need is LOVE,... blah blah blah blah blah

For Lutherans, nothing is easy. We are always walking a tight rope between the moral abyss of doing too much, and doing too little.

As I'm reading Kuusinen, I am reminded of her strangely detached mood wrt the crazy Russians around her rushing into judgements and shooting strangers on the tundra for crimes no one had even articulated. No Lutheran would carry out such orders.

Basically because we lack enthusiasm.

All orgiastic actions of violence or sexual idiocy require a certain kind of enthusiasm. Materialists have enthusiasm. Lutherans have to deal with a noumenal realm of intuition before they can act. We mistrust what is before us, whether they be orders or an actual person. This is one way in which we are quite different from surrealists, too. Surrealists enjoyed mistresses, the black arts, spontaneous composition: these are not the Lutheran way.

In government we are to do God's will. Carefully.

In family and church, likewise.

We don't have wild pictures on the walls of our churches. And our churches themselves are not sumptuous as Eastern Orthodox or Catholic churches can be. We like our churches to be functional. Perhaps there are a few postcards around the vestry from former members of the congregation which say things like, "It sure is warmer in Florida than in the Catskills!" A too beautiful church would lead us into idolatry.

Perhaps a child has drawn Jesus on the blackboard with cross-eyes. That will be immediately erased, young lady!

Many movements work on whim. The surrealists seemed to court enthusiasm. Green anarchists work, too, on whim. Whim wham, free the foxes. Suddenly a nail is whipped out and is scraping the paint on an SUV. This sort of spontaneous combustion is almost always the work of the devil.

At Lutheran Christmas parties we might get a twinkle in the eye, and perhaps venture a mumbled witticism. But no one would actually laugh. At most there would be other twinkles in the eye, after a pause of about 14 seconds, to be sure that everyone got the joke...

Because we are against enthusiasm, and don't appreciate it much in others.

Aino Kuusinen, Completed

I finished the Aino Kuusinen book The Rings of Destiny: Inside Soviet Russia from Lenin to Brezhnev (Morrow, 1974) last evening at midnight, reading the entire book in a 24-hour period, something I rarely do. I tend to get sidetracked. Yesterday, the coast was clear, and I wanted to get through to the end, and aside from playing a few games with the kids, raking leaves off the lawn, and typing up several short stories, used the remaining two hours to finish the autobiography.

After her separation from Otto Kuusinen, the Finnish communist who ended up as Stalin's right-hand man for thirty years, Aino was thrown into prisons and spent 15 years in them. For seven years she was in and out of solitary confinement in Moscow Prisons. Although she was never tortured, others were tortured around her. One night a man who was purportedly her husband was beaten to death in the cell next to hers. While he was beaten, her interrogator asked her repeatedly if her husband was a British spy. Although she was separated from her husband for many years, she said no. In the morning, they showed Aino a dead body so badly misshapen she couldn't recognize the face.

After her arrest, Kuusinen was never given a trial. Show trials were reserved for top people. Few others received these. For everyone else, there was no due process. Few were even charged with anything, or if they were, they didn't know the charge. Most were simply arrested, and generally, shot. Kuusinen had nursing skills so she was shipped north of the Arctic Circle and was permitted to work, a skill that probably saved her life, as she kept the slave force there in working condition.

"I had been sentenced without a trial or judicial proceeding of any sort, and in the years that followed I was at no time brought to trial, nor did I see a lawyer. There was nothing exceptional in this: apart from the show trials of well-known figures like Zinoviev or Bukharin, political prisoners were executed or sent to labour camps without any process of law. It is true that press reports and decrees of the Soviet government always mention the Ministry of Justice, and indeed there is such a ministry and it has a large staff, but very few of its members ever come into contact with a political prisoner" (149).

Kuusinen was forced through 90-hour interrogations. When she was first arrested she was already 50 years of age, and by the time she was done, she was 65. A two-hour interrogation can seem like a long time (I was in a trial only once, and was not among the accused, but was grilled by a lawyer for three hours, and cried through the whole proceeding), but Kuusinen had a sharp tough mind and she wore out her interlocuters. She never cracked or told on anyone in spite of being shown metal files that they would use to grind down toes. Probably for fear of her husband (who remained top brass), these files were never used on her.

One of her interrogators told her that in the west, "the prosecutor has to prove that the accused is guilty, but under our system the accused has to prove that he is innocent" (134).

The problem was that there was no process for establishing innocence. If you survived long enough, the regime would change, and that was your only hope. In 1955, Stalin died, and most of the politicals were released. Kuusinen was able to get an apartment in Moscow and in 1964 when her husband died, she was able to attend his funeral. After this, she was permitted to return to Finland.

Even animals were kept as political prisoners. A German horse used in World War II was kept at the prison in Potma.

"Remarkable as it may sound, there was a four-legged prisoner at Potma -- a large, ugly, one-eyed horse, a broken-down veteran that had been captured from the Germans. He was used for hauling water, and reminded me of a celebrated horse in Seven Brothers by the Finnish writer Aleksis Kivi. The peculiarity of the one at Potsma was that it would neigh joyfully if it heard so much as a word in German, but reacted to no other language. The German women in camp loved this compatriot of theirs, gave him bread out of their meagre rations and told him their sorrows, and doubtless the horse was moved by their attention" (204).

The horse later died and turned into soup.

Men and women who died were thrown on the tundra where they were picked apart by scavengers.

One of the problems in Marxism is that along with private property's suspension, there is a suspension of law. The upper crust loses all its rights, but in the process, rights for everyone are lost. Once one class loses its rights, a precedent is established, and it applies to all. And thus tyranny is formed. In Marx's work, there is no legal foundation, as there is in so-called capitalist societies, in which a giant network of laws protects private property from housing to banking.

Does Marx discuss law? I don't believe so. He is only interested in capital, and how it flows, but never in the rights or laws of private property. Many of us think that if it's only the top 2% whose property is attacked by the president, it will have no effect on the rest of us. But it sets a dangerous precedent.

Those who joyfully stole the goods of Russia's upper crust, also set such a precedent that later destroyed their own rights. They thought the Party would protect them. When it was too late they realized a despotism had been set into place in which no one was safe. First the aristocrats were shot, and then the kulaks, and finally everyone willy nilly, including those at the highest ranks. Even Stalin himself did not feel safe.

Kuusinen argues that conditions were far better under the Tsars.

"The chief difference is that under the Tsars people were not condemned without cause: they usually had a public trial and an opportunity to defend themselves. There were no prison camps: death sentences were rare, and when they did occur were discussed by the press and public" (178).

After someone disappeared, it was hard to find a record. It could take decades to find out what happened to a brother. Aino's brother Vaino disappeared in 1937, and it wasn't until 1960 that she discovered when and where he was shot. Even today hundreds of thousands remain missing. Scanty records were kept. People were shot in the millions. Finnish families invited to come to Finland with their tools were summarily shot as spies, their tools confiscated, and their children shipped out to orphanages. Records were rarely kept.

Compare this to justice under the Tsars:

"A typical case is that of Lenin's exile in 1898-1900, at Shushenskoye near Minusinsk in central Siberia. He invited his fiancee to join him, and they were married there. His comrades frequently visited him for companionship and consultation. He went out shooting game, and could move about the vicinity as he chose. He corresponded with friends abroad, and in this exile wrote his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia. When he returned, he was granted a passport for foreign travel" (178).

Kuusinen went to Russia in the 1920s to marry her fiance, Otto. It would be forty years before she got out. It was so hard to get a passport. The last sentence of the book reads,

"On the evening of the day on which I received my passport I boarded the train for Leningrad, and on 28 February 1965 I crossed the frontier into Finland" (233).

Aino Kuusinen's Journey through Stalinism

I was over on the Ann Althouse blog the other day and as usual we were grousing about Obama and the coming dark ages of communism. Someone (I forget who) mentioned a memoir by Aino Kuusinen entitled the Rings of Destiny: Inside Soviet Russia from Lenin to Brezhnev (Morrow 1974), about her time first in the highest echelons of Stalin's government and then in Stalin's labor camps. I had never heard of Aino Kuusinen, but recognized the name as Finnish so looked in Amazon.com, and found her book The Rings of Destiny for 1 cent. Since it's arrived yesterday I've been reading it at every spare moment and it's hilarious.

She was a beautiful Finn whose family happened to take in a red general on the run from the whites in the Finnish civil war.

She fell in love with the man, who later fled to Russia and ended up as Stalin's right-hand-man for decades.

She married him, and divorced him in 1936 (the divorce wasn't settled because he wouldn't permit it, but she left then and never spoke to him again). She loses respect for her husband because she sees that his only stake in life is that he wants to go back to Finland at the head of the Red Army. She upbraids him for this. Shortly thereafter she spends 15 years in labor camps.

But I'm only on p. 120. So far I've been treated to the flabbergasting reality of the Soviet Union. While the People are starving in the streets of Moscow, and dying of hunger in the Ukraine, the party elite dance and promote themselves and jockey with one another for posts to places like Japan and America. Aino Kuusinen spends several years in both places, but with growing doubts as to the decency of the government she represents.

Most of the people she knew in Russia died in the purges a few years later.

Stalin had the opinion that American blacks would rise up and attack the state, but Aino Kuusinen is sent to check and reports that the situation for blacks in the late 1920s was not as bad as the Russians had hoped. She reports to her husband Otto Kuusinen that the situation was hopeless (as far as communism was concerned).

"He was astonished to hear that the blacks in Harlem had their own clubs and restaurants, owned cars and were well dressed. To his evident disappointment, I added that, while I knew nothing of Negroes in the south, their living conditions in and around New York were by no means as bad as the Comintern had imagined" (102).

Although the tiny Communist party of the USA did throw its support to Roosevelt (who in turn recognized the Soviet state in 1932), they never stood a chance of overthrowing the USA. They never had more than a few tiny cells in America, and when they came from Russia, they didn't want to go back. Moreover, many of the communists were just comical gangsters. They would entrust money to couriers, and the couriers would disappear in transit. At one point a large portion of the treasury of the State Bank is stolen by someone named Scheinmann to whom it had been entrusted.

"Scheinmann had taken all the foreign assets that he could lay his hands on, and Otto told me in strict confidence that he made off with a substantial part of the Bank's funds. ... Scheinmann had shrewdly calculated that the viability of the Bolshevik regime was not rated very high in Western financial circles, and that Soviet trade would suffer a rude blow if the extent of his depradations were to leak out. Consequently there was no hope of either laying him by the heels or recovering his stolen money" (73).

Stalin apparently strangled his wife, but no one dared to talk about it openly. Kuusinen hears this from a female doctor who had been called in to verify the death as stemming from an illness, and from neighbors, and from others who had been there, but no one is able to discuss it. But the bruised neck of the wife made it clear to all that she had met a violent end. Shades of Louis Althusser!

"Most people thought he had attacked his wife in a fit of anger because of her reproaches over the policy of enforced collectivization, which had meant misery and starvation for millions of peasants. The rumour was corroborated by the fact that after Ndezhda's death her closest relations began to disappear mysteriously. It was of course extremely risky to breathe a word about the matter, and it remained taboo for at least six years afterwards" (92).

For a while Aino Kuusinen (although the name sounds exotic it's as normal as Anne Smith in this country to be called Aino Kuusinen in Finland) rides high. But when she breaks her marriage with Otto Kuusinen all bets are off. While she's in bed with her husband, her relatives get important positions, and she can have any food she likes. Her brother is appointed "director of the agricultural college of Petrozavodsk, the capital of Soviet Karelia, where he married a Finnish girl" (33) although he knows nothing at all about agriculture.

Later her brother disappears in the purges, along with almost everyone else she knows in the Soviet Union. Millions die. Stalin won't even go outside, and if you see him you are in trouble. Aino is herself about to be thrown into fifteen years in hard conditions. So far the book has been somewhat gay and defiant, filled with adventure. I have only 125 pages left. It's one of those amazing books that you find once in a while that you never want to leave. I have no idea why it's not better known. I suppose an expose of communism is about as relevant as an expose about Lyme disease. People would not read it, as there are more important things like the problems of American capitalism and how to spend more money on STDs.

When Aino meets Stalin in the 1930s he got drunk "and began to dance. It was a gruesome sight, and the more he drank the more fearful he looked. The whole performance seemed like a bad dream. He bellowed with laughter, staggering and stomping round the cabin completely out of time with the lovely music. The general impression was not only coarse and vulgar, but so bizarre that it seemed like a kind of sinister threat. The most frightening thing of all was that, despite his drunkenness, he still seemed sober enough to observe my reaction to his conduct. We spent the whole day on the Black Sea with the drunken dictator, who seemed to me more and more like some dreadful monster" (30).

I no longer remember who recommended this book on Althouse's blog, but it's one revelation after another. The Stalinists come off as being like the Three Stooges, only they aren't just poking one another in the eye. They are using pickaxes.

And now I am about to be treated for a trip through the Gulags from Aino's point of view. I've already been through them with Solzhenitsyn. But this time I'm going through with a witty Finnish woman who survives, but whose testimony is almost unknown.

I don't expect to awaken a renaissance of interest in Aino Kuusinen, but I'm enjoying her book. I hope that one day someone inside of Obama's government will write a similar book about the depradations and secret discussions about how to blitzkrieg America with healthcare, take over the banks, and wipe out resistance. Perhaps someone will one day link Obama's stepfather Frank Marshall Davis with the stepson's or mentor's destiny in the country, and show that in fact Stalinism did finally make an impact in America, some decades after it was launched in Moscow. Let's hope, in the meanwhile, that Obama either changes his mind, and gives industries back to the private sector where they belong, or that he decides capitalism is the way things should be.

Competition is good, rather than the refs trying to fix the game in advance and decide that everyone gets a red star.

Ft. Hood

I canvassed the regulars at LS and asked if anyone wanted to keep J. around. No one said they did -- no one vouched for him, and I think we gave him enough of a chance to show that he had some taste and/or decency. Stu did not respond, but he did say that he's very sick, and is down and out for a few days. J's's not wanted, and to my knowledge has contributed nothing but a kind of scribbling of indecencies that are getting worse and worse in tone, and more and more puerile in content. Why does he keep coming here? I politely ask him to leave. If Stu and he wish to be in further contact, they both have their own blogs, where they can talk about logic or whatever else they desire.

So we politely ask J. to go back to his kennel and foul his own blog with anti-semitism, misogyny, and other racist drivel, using his own particularly cruddy language while reading whatever paperbacks he likes, without bothering us any longer. I will continue to delete his comments, and if necessary we will have to move to a monitoring system so that they can no longer appear. Meanwhile, I can give those who like to come here a pass so that they can always comment if it comes to that juncture. Unlike Stu, I see a limit to neighborliness. He believes that he can heal J. and bring him back to the church as some kind of pastoral cause. However, I think people must feel called, and if they are called to something else, it's important to give up, and let them go. The last time J. was here I lost two regular female commentators because they complained to me that he was cyberstalking them. I don't want to lose the community I've built here. Meanwhile, I'm always looking for more decent people who can at least occasionally think about beauty, and have a sense of humor, and can allow for difference in thinking without getting ugly.

Meanwhile, it is interesting that so far as I have seen, no one has mentioned that at least five of those shot yesterday at Fort Hood were women. Was he deliberately trying to shoot as many women as possible, or was it just that there were just as many women present as there were men? Cobbled from different sources:

One victim was Kimberly Munley, the civilian police officer that brought down the attacker. She was injured, but in stable condition.

Francheska Velez, another 21 year old soldier that just returned from Iraq was also a victim. She was pregnant.

Amber Bahr a 19 year old was shot in the stomach, but is in stable condition.

Keara Bono was shot in the back, and is still alive. She arrived at Fort Hood only one day before the Fort Hood shooting, and was set to deploy to Iraq on December 7.

Amy Krueger was also unofficially named as a Fort Hood shooting victim.

It seems that almost every day now we are getting larger doses of violence. Why was this violence seemingly so targeted at women, who make up a far less percentage of the military than the number gunned down yesterday? It is terrible to think of all the families of these soldiers. I hope that God will help to heal those who are only injured, and may all the others rest in peace, and find solace with the God who loves them. It feels that America is coming apart. May we find some way to heal our divisions, so that this country can rediscover its unity, and endure forever.

Poetry Contest: New Diseases! Unmourned Pain!

This poetry contest should celebrate or mourn or somehow document diseases not of a sexual nature (non-sexually transmitted). Many poems have been written about AIDS and chlamydia, as well as herpes and Hepatitus C as aspects of the Sexual Revolution, and the concomitant casualties among its ardent soldiers. But what about other diseases? What about Lyme, and the swine flu, and the whooping cough, as well as Lou Gehrig's? Poems featuring stressed joints such as Carpal Tunnel, or knee pain, dental misery, will also be considered.

Autobiographical or absurd, trenchant or sorrowful, amusing or tragic, historical and contemporary, all poems are accepted. The contest will end on November 11th of next week, which is Veterans Day. Everyone is entitled to two submissions.

All those who enter the contest are entitled to vote, but you can't vote for your own poem or poems. You have to vote for someone else's (voting is not obligatory -- it is a right that you can choose to forego). Winner receives a subscription to the Center for Disease Control's monthly electric newsletter: a Howl for our times, for sure.

Is Bob Ewell My Neighbor?

This novel (To Kill a Mockingbird) scapegoats Bob Ewell as the essence of evil while making a claim that most people are quite good. This is reaffirmed at the end of the novel when Atticus Finch tells his two brats as much.

Boo Radley, who had frightened the children throughout the novel, ends up committing vigilante justice against Bob Ewell. The police officer Heck Tate decides to file a false report which will spare Boo Radley the publicity for what he has done. Boo Radley is conscious enough to understand how he is now taken in as part of the new elite. He is now a neighbor, because he has joined in the scapegoating of Bob Ewell.

"His lips parted into a timid smile, and our neighbor’s image blurred with my sudden tears."

Justice itself is slowly undermined throughout the book. It is shown that Tom Robinson has been killed by a mob, after he is railroaded by a jury. By the end of the novel, there is no belief that justice can be administered by anyone but a supposed madman like Boo, in the thicket of the bushes on Halloween night.

The novel implicitly supports vigilante justice, and argues that this is what we need to counter the vigilante justice of the other side.

When a mob gathers outside of the Courthouse and is about to attack Atticus Finch, the only thing that saves him is his daughter who points out that one of the men's kids often comes to their house for lunch and dinner.

So nepotism saves Atticus. The southern masses are incapable of understanding anything higher than their own very specific material prospects in any given encounter. They cannot understand the finer points of the law. Therefore, they are to be dealt with in the middle of the night with a long knife.

People are partial and twisted throughout the novel. And yet, at the end, there is a sentimental assertion that people are basically good. That is, Atticus and his family, and the justice system that they run against the nightmare of the mindless poor whites who surround them (and live on next to nothing), is good. If they could only destroy these people and get someone like Tom Robinson elected as president, why, then there would be no more aggression and tension in America. It would be the end of history.

And yet the whole novel shows us that people are basically bad. So the message of the novel is at odds with the actual failings of the people throughout the book, and the novelist seems to assert at the end that vigilante justice may be bad wrt Tom Robinson's death (because he was innocent), but it's just fine in the case of Bob Ewell's death (because he was not innocent).

Competition for resources is blandly assumed on the part of Atticus Finch and his relatives, who live on a beautiful tree-lined street. They can afford to be neighborly, and are, and dote on this fact about themselves. But they never come to see the Ewells as their neighbors. Not much is explained about the Ewells. They are white trash, living on the bottom (it's never clear how the Ewell economic system works -- but whatever it is that they're squeaking by on is bad, as they have no real right to live at all), and the implication is that all the racism of the south is in their hands, and if we could just kill'em, all racism would be a thing of the past. We have no idea what happens to the Ewell children after their father is murdered by Boo Radley, but who cares? They're white trash, and live like pigs. So to hell with them. Let them eat whatever scraps they can find until we find a reason to murder'em outright.

But the southern cause of the Civil War was run by the Atticus Finches, not by the Bob Ewells. Slavery was something the Episcopalian upper class practiced. They continue to have a black maid who does most of the work around the house. But geez, they treat her so well it's just loveliness itself, ain't it? She's lucky to get a day off here and there to see her own children, and yet somehow the arrangement is just ducky for one and all. The poor dirt farmers and ne'er do-wells like Mr. Ewell fought and died for the South in a misguided belief that there was something romantic about helping their upper-class neighbors hold on to their slaves, but most of the ownership of slaves was done by the upper-class, who in this book are almost perfect people. It's them poor people that are the bad ones! Kill em, and there's no more problems.

Bob Ewell, who is totally uneducated and doesn't understand how to defend himself verbally (any more than his daughter understands her desires, and who also has no ability to defend herself verbally) is totally outclassed by Atticus Finch and his viciously scapegoating daughter (she's only six, so how could she not be totally innocent, and without any aggression?). Ewell is positioned as the locus of all aggression who -- once he is removed -- is positioned as the one terrible source of all true fear. The climax of the novel ocurs on a Halloween night. Scout is dressed up as a ham, part of a pig, and perhaps this is an unconscious symbol of what she really is throughout the book. But in the climax, she's helpless, and totally innocent. It's not her that deserves a knife stuck in her, it's Bob Ewell! Now that he's gone, peace and prosperity will result, since there is certainly no aggression in the Finches! The Finches are birdbrains, who are also the mockingbirds in the story. They are just so perfect it's hard to believe it! So innocent! So perfect! Must not hurt them! All they do is help people, even the people who are after them, because they're so dad-blamed decent!

But the deeper pattern reveals that they are shifting their guilt on to Bob Ewell, and they don't even want to give him a trial. They don't want to hear his side of the story. We never do hear it. He never gets a trial, which is how it should be, because all he does is lie and lie and lie, and the truth is not in him, it's only in us, the good white educated upper-crust.

Ewell is like the white trash talking on Fox News. Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly: how dare such people speak? Don't they know that they are the new Nazis, and should shut up and accept their death before the Nuremburg Trials? They never had a viewpoint, and if they did, it was a bad one. And doesn't anyone who's anyone know that whoever asks for them to be considered, too, will be conveniently shuttled into place as brownshirts? Isn't it clear that anyone who listens to them at all is a brownshirt at best, and a monster?

Race, gender, and class can organize competition and even go outside the law as ACORN has, but it's ok, because for the left to organize their networks and throw elections to good people like Al Franken is just how it should be since the left has no aggression, and are just organizing in total decency against the aberrant aggression of the right. For the right to organize, for conservatives to organize, and to try to defend the very notion of fair competition, especially for those who are the poorest of whites -- lower southern white Appalachian trash -- why, they deserve a knife in the ribs in the middle of the night. The left doesn't want to hear their story, any more than they want to hear about the millions of children they murder every year. They can kill all the children they want. We don't care about their story, and to raise the story at all is rude. The unborn are not our neighbors.

Because the left is made up of good people, who have no failings, and treat everyone the same. It's just that the left drinks wine and is rational, while the rest of us drink Mountain Dew, and make no sense at all.

For the left, everyone is a neighbor.

Everyone except Bob Ewell and his family, that is. Kill them, and it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

Archimedes and the Door of Science

I read a short biography of the scientist Archimedes, by Jeanne Bendick yesterday. It doesn't say the age for which it was intended, but I originally bought it for my 8-year old, and I think he might be able to read it. It's about 125 pages long.

I'm not terribly good at math, but I can do it. I like it when I'm doing it, but it's not my natural language. I avoid it, in fact, much as I avoid the flu that's going around. Negative numbers bother me quite a bit. Multiplyng decimals and watching the numbers shrink is curious. But I'm particularly interested in the practical applications of numbers.

One of the stories that I always liked about Archimedes was the one in which he built a system of mirrors that allowed the Syracuse army to blow up Roman ships in the harbor by focusing sunlight. There's a show on TV called Myth Busters and a few years ago they busted that myth. They did their best, and all they could get was a burnt mark on wood at about 160 feet. Not very practical. On the other hand, someone in Greece about ten years back built 70 mirrors and did blow up a wooden ship into flames. (Friday night I watched the show Numb3rs, which featured a flying device that could hit people on the ground using a lightning strike by somehow creating a line through which positive and negative ions could flow, forcing a straight line of lightning down a pathway, and blowing something up on the ground, which seemed like a far-fetched version of the Archimedean solar ray-blast.)

Some of Archimedes' remaining volumes include:

The Cattle Problem
Conoids and Spheroids
The Sand Reckoner
On Floating Bodies

A book that has been lost is called simply Data.

I used to have a big book of Archimedes' writings when I was a kid. I looked at the drawings but couldn't understand what was being said in them. My dad taught math at a local college, but we never talked about math. He was far more interested in sports. We never once had a conversation about math. We did, however, play and watch sports together. The spiral of a football as it arcs down a field into the outstretched hands of a wide receiver would have interested Archimedes. Also, the way in which a breaking ball is thrown in the World Series would have been of interest. The precise point at which a ball is clocked by a middle-sized man like Werth and knocked into the stands owes no little something to physics.

These things were my dad's specialty. His breakthrough in his field was in terms of using a computer to calculate the optimum golf swing from a kinesiological viewpoint. His few published writings try to bring to bear force and strength in optimum badminton swings. He was the chair of a Kinesiology department.

The application of mathematical formula to sports would have been his interest. Archimedes doesn't insofar as I know touch upon those things, but my dad did, and through my dad -- I am interested in the poetry of sports. As I watch the World Series now -- my dad is still with me (he was a big Phillies fan). The arc of a pop-up, the force of a throw, the angle at which a grounder jumps off a muddy infield, and of course the geometry of the infield. The timing of a double-play. They are all a bit outside my ken, but I often wonder about them, and wish I had somehow gotten my dad to talk about them. He was immensely private, and didn't talk about anything much. When I did pry, I could occasionally get something out of him, but it clearly bothered him so much that I would wait for years before I tried again. And now all the years are gone.