Why Did the Economy Collapse?

I think it's because no one knows who Barack Obama is, or what he really wants.

The most confused of all perhaps? Barack Obama.

When people saw him coming down the road toward the presidency they thought: let's wait and see who he is. Obama's strategy is to be all things to all people. This worked but we all wanted to know who he was and what he stood for, in order to position ourselves accordingly.

He's given us vague laws that are too vague to understand.

Vague phrases that don't actually stir us toward any specific action.

Barack Obama isn't anybody at all. So we will have to wait until someone who is really someone in office for the economy to move again.

It's like having a coach with an identity problem.

With Bush everyone at least knew he was.

He knew who he was.

Obama doesn't know.

Imagine a class in which the teacher sets out vague goals and doesn't define what's going to count as a good grade.

People wait to figure out how to act. But the teacher never clarifies his goals, or clarifies what's going to count. Or clarifies what he deeply cares about.

He's waiting in fact for the students to lead. And the students are waiting for the teacher. And nothing happens. Nobody knows who the teacher is. Someone in the back says I'm taking over from this goof. So the teacher sues them. He claims he has the right to lead, or not.

The whole world is waiting. The economy is collapsing. Barack Obama doesn't know who he is. He is everything. He is nothing. He doesn't have any principles. He will have yours if you press them on him strongly enough. Too strong and he'll sue you for it.

Why Did the Economy Collapse?

The Wire Donkey, by Charlie Dickinson

The Wire Donkey is an advance copy of a self-published novel that I received from Charlie Dickinson, a writer who lives in Portland, Oregon. He had read my novel Temping (I don't know how he found it) and liked it (he reviewed it here):

http://www.hackwriters.com/temping.htm

I didn't have high expectations for Dickinson's novel, and worried when it came in. I thought Charlie Dickinson was quite a young man, so I let it sit in a pile of books until about two weeks ago when I opened it, and read the first chapter. The first chapter had a young idealist male named Ocean who is dumped by his Asian-American girlfriend (she's forty).

I wasn't hooked, but was intrigued. I had really enjoyed the chapter. It put me in a good mood. So I kept reading.

Ocean goes back to his job at Planet Foods where he is fired in favor of a Hispanic. His job was stacking vegetables but he can't do it right.

He takes his wire donkey (Hungarian for bicycle) everywhere around Portland (I like Portland and it's fun to visit the town again especially via bicycle).

The prose is fresh, and captures something that I can't put my finger on about the northwest. Young people in the NW have a curiosity about Asian religions, natural foods, surfing, and good deeds.

"Planet Foods was the pits. When I showed up for work, Dennison introduced me to this Latino dude, Jaime, who was hired to work the same hours as me, to get the benefit of my training, so Dennison said. It wasn't as if we needed another produce guy during my hours, so my paranoid brain immediately seized on the idea I might be training my replacement. Jaime's English was, for sure, limited..." (31).

Ocean gets fired and goes to see his parents in Eugene (a couple hours south of Portland). Ocean's mom is a hippy in Eugene. She has recently left his dad, and is now shacked up with a guy who smokes too much weed. Ocean can't stand him. His mom is worn out. She waitresses to keep a roof over their head, but is so stoned out, she can barely remember when her son would visit. Ocean's next job is selling cellphones door to door, and he's fairly successful but has to hang out with the boss' son, a creep who takes him to sex shows by the airport. As an idealist, Ocean can't stand this, and the descriptions bring out the sad ways in which such scenes drive people apart. The stripper strips Ocean of his glasses:

"She gives me a wicked smile. And she plunges, really, I'm not joking, she plunges the glasses straight down, flat into her snatch, I mean it's down there, behind that cloth triangle fronting her thong bottom. I collapse back on the chair, feeling had. Guffaws, yucks, whistles, table-pounding. Then she arches backwards, her hands go up, leaving behind the glasses whose unmistakable outline asserts itself beneath her purple silk triangle. Laughter in abundance, like the glasses are getting an eyeful now. I could get on hands and knees, crawl out of here, right now" (86).

Ocean wants to get people to donate organ parts to medicine, and signs them up at Rose Festivals and at Saturday market with his friend Brianna (who isn't interested in him). Ocean is basically a loser trying to get a decent job (he has an application at something called Americorps -- I googled and it's some kind of program for new college grads put together by the Clintons. You have to want to help people of all things, and some of them are down on the coast now helping with the oil glut on the Gulf beaches). In addition to ethical work, Ocean wants a decent girlfriend. He loves Asian girls, and Asian religion. I think Buddhism is a horrible idea, or set of ideas, and turns everything into dreck, killing everything it touches, since it has no philosophy of history, but only offers meaninglessness on the grand scale, and a theory of special moments (be here now), but it comes off very nice in the book. He meets a nearly forty-year old surf babe, who takes him for a ride in her van out to the Eastern Oregon desert, and is kind to him, and tells him about her 6 months in Japan searching for a religious understanding of the universe. They eat rice together, and have green tea, and there's nudity, but nothing happens, and it doesn't last. She drops him off, and he's back to his Hawthorne area apartment.

Summer changes to winter and Ocean's riding his bike around town, the snow lights up in the moonlight, and he has moments of satori. Is this enough? For Ocean, and for many young people, it is. They seemingly need no greater structure of meaning than that which such beautiful perfect moments provide. And maybe that's all there is.

This is a very special book that is in a class of its own in northwest fiction. It encapsulates an era. It is a joy to read. It is something like Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn, and something like my own novel, Temping. It has an outsider feel, and is quite special. What's neat is that Dickinson has created a character who is not himself (Brautigan is always somewhat the author AND the narrator in his books, and in Temping, I am somewhat the same as the narrator to an alarming degree).

The narrator of the book (Ocean) is twenty. The actual writer, a man named Charlie Dickinson, is 65. It's neat that an older writer can still reach into the idealism of his youth and create a compelling gentle narrative, filled with minor misadventures, and insightful detail. Sadly, few people will ever read this book. It's self-published and will probably not have a big retail market. But it's a book that many twenty-somethings could relate to, and would be a huge success (perhaps even become a generational landmark as The Catcher in the Rye was, or as Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America became).

Charlie Dickinson is someone who had writing talent as a youth but never the time or the inclination to develop it, he told me in an email. He did take a course with Joan Didion who told him he had talent. This first novel is indication of what Didion sensed. I might be the only person to ever read this novel because of the ways in which circulation is cut off unless you have a giant corporation behind you. If word of mouth is something, however, I counsel everyone who comes here (especially Brett, maybe Wendy) to find this book and give yourself a ride across Rose City.

WORDS: Shirley Sherrod

I'm often amused by words. Lukewarm makes me laugh. Where does "luke" come from? The etymology isn't clear.

Pants and shorts are always plural, presumably because of the two legs. But shirt is never plural, even though it has two arms.

I love to listen to the way people talk. Shirley Sherrod said she didn't want to help a white farmer because she thought of all the black farmers who needed help. So she took the white farmer to a white lawyer, and the white lawyer wouldn't help. This surprised her. She thought all white people took care of all white people. She thought that was their job. It dawned on her that money is the real problem, not race. The lawyer wouldn't help the white farmer because he didn't have any money to pay for the lawyer's help, so she decided that it is class, and not race, that determines who will help whom.

Beck and Limbaugh have said Sherrod thinks like a Marxist, like a Maoist. She shifted her thinking from race as the root of all evil to class as the root of all evil. Beck and Limbaugh got it right, but they didn't go far enough.

In fact, it was her job to help the farmer. It wasn't the lawyer's job. Every person has a task that is assigned to them in the description of their position. They have to do that job. They don't have to do another job.

A lawyer gets paid to help people who have legal problems.

The farmer's problem wasn't legal.

Exactly what his problem was is never defined in the video.

At first Sherrod thinks it's a problem she shouldn't have to solve because she had made a pact with God that she would help only black people.

Then she makes a new pact or covenant that she should only help poor people.

She shifts from race to class. She considers herself a moral genius for making this paradigm shift, and attempts to share it with the NAACP group before whom she is speaking.

And because the lightbulb has come back on (class, not race) she is welcomed back into the Obama Administration with open arms. Obama sees the problems of America as basically one of redistribution of wealth. If he can achieve this, he can achieve justice. Sherrod is now on the same page as Obama, so she can continue in her job.

I think that Sherrod's task should have been to help all farmers (what exactly is her job description, and if it says, help all POOR farmers, irregardless of race, then how is POOR defined?). At first she said she would only help black farmers. Then it dawned on her that she should help all poor farmers. Is that correct? Wasn't it her job to help all farmers irregardless of race or class?

What exactly was her job description? It's odd that no one has tracked that down and presented it on the news.

Descriptions of what people are supposed to do often amaze me. I once worked at a college where the top administrator told me that as a professor I should be like a parent to every one of my students. I thought about the unworkability of this description. I suddenly had 150 children. I presumably had to wake them up, make sure they were fed, make sure they ate their breakfast, (would you like butter on your toast?), help them get dressed, pay for their textbooks, and help them with their homework, listen to their heartaches, and be a personal butler to each and every one. Isn't that what a parent does?

I perhaps have too strong a definition for fatherhood. A father is a personal valet to each of his children. Some people describe fathering a child as merely siring a child. So in a sense every child has a father. But I see a father as a kind of mentor-valet-coach. I teach language arts, math (ok, I do what I can in this area, and am increasingly stressed as my kids go toward middle school), and of course I am also a nutritionist. On weekends I hit baseballs to my kids, and play soccer with them, and take them swimming. I talk with them, and joke with them, and try to keep their spirits up.

I am supposed to do all this with 150 college students suddenly? Is that possible?

Meanwhile, the immigration law is going before a federal judge today (Susan Bolton). She is going to decide whether in lieu of the Obama Administration's total lack of support for tracking down illegal immigrants, whether the state of Arizona can do the job that the Federal government won't.

One side says it is "racist" to go after illegal immigrants. Therefore, illegal is legal, or at least better than being "racist."

The other side says this shows disregard for the "law" which makes the Feds criminals in that they are helping illegals to resist their own law.

What is the law supposed to do? What are the people who carry out the law supposed to do?

What is the job of the Federal Government? Can anyone provide a clear explanation?

From the smallest words like pants and shirt to bigger words, words that resolve questions of law and order, we depend on documents such as the U.S. Constitution and on the American Heritage dictionary. Words help us to understand our role, and define and delimit our actions.

I often wish people could be more clear. When I listen to BO, I never get any sense of clarity from him. I read his autobiography and just felt he was a genius at obfuscation. I read the letters he sends to my wife (who is a big fan of BO), and wonder at the language. The only thing I understand is that he wants our money, and that she sends it to him.

My wife believes in Obama!

I think he's a Marxist, who thinks through the race, gender, and class lens. He can't do anything else. He sat in Reverend Wright's church for twenty years. What else could he possibly know but what he learned there? Wright is a liberation theologist, which is heavily dependent on Marxism. However, Marxism never defined clear universal laws. They outlawed wealth. They tracked down and destroyed private wealth, and gobbled it up with the intent of redistributing it. In most cases they redistributed the wealth to themselves. Kim Jong-Il owns North Korea at this point. No one else owns anything.

Without the ability to articulate clear universal laws that protect private property, our nation is at risk of constantly going before lawyers and judges who will use the triumph of the will to define boundaries and to arrogate all wealth to themselves and theirs. Few judges believe any longer in a transcendent or universal truth or the notion of universal human rights. Now "will to power" is left to make decisions. If I'm on one side, and not the other, like Shirley Sherrod, I help my side, and neglect the other. A Democratic judge is a partisan now, many of whom do not apply the law, but want to make new precedents, and set the law, as Shirley Sherrod not only wanted to do her job, but do it with a twist, helping those she perceived as her in-group, throwing the others to white lawyers who she presumed would help them but who were in fact sharks waiting in the water to make a killing.

We need people who can think clearly and without bias when it comes to doing their job whether it's teacher or judge. We need people who can think clearly about Arizona's immigration law SB1070 which will be decided today in the Sandra Day O'Connor Federal Courthouse in Phoenix. We need to reinvent the term "American," and think about what it means, and who it will contain. Some think it contains anyone who wants to be an American. I don't think this can possibly be so.

Do we really want the whole world to move into America, simply because we have (had) good laws that protect human rights such as private property, life, liberty, and health? I don't, and I am aghast at the idiots who do.

I want tighter definitions. I still don't know why I am wearing "shorts," and a "shirt" but I hope to find out.

In what way are legs multiple, and arms singular? When we walk, legs move automatically as one. When we use our arms, perhaps, the arms have a much greater sense of autonomy -- I can do separate things with my arms, and with my hands, such as the typing I am doing now can operate the two hands not as one, but as two independent entities, as fingers reach asymmetrically for letters -- 120 words a minute.

Some Lutherans think our job is to help everyone, all day long, while others have a "focus on the family," and believe that our primary responsibility is at home. I'm always for the tighter definition. The tighter the definition the more functional. Loose definitions or overbroad definitions aren't functional, and so are almost worse than no definition.

QUALITATIVE ASSESSMENT

Quality is a quality.

It is a quality of a quality.

Quality is not equality.

Quality is hierarchical, and is a matter of opinion, insofar as it is value-laden.

We have all known good people.

This doesn't mean they are good teachers, good mechanics, good cooks, or good at cutting hair.

It means that they follow the ten commandments.

What is a good teacher? At the elementary school level this is a teacher who cares enough about each student to bring out their best, and inspire them to learn, and to have confidence in themselves. Their punishments are not stringent, and generally not necessary. I had very few good teachers in elementary school. In high school I didn't have any. In college, I had several. In graduate school, almost everyone was an excellent teacher.

What is a good doctor?

What is a good healthcare system? (Let's separate ethics of access from the actual ability to keep people healthy.)

What is a good neighborhood?

What is a good parent?

What is a good book?

Is quality always linked to the good?

If so, is goodness situational, and about the function of a specific thing or person in a specific place and time, or is it a general quality, that can be abstracted?

Are we always fair in judging what's good, and what's bad? Do we do an adequate job assessing quality, or can we be spun?

What is a good president?

What is a good blog comment?

How can we determine the quality of a religion?

Because Pirsig is somewhat Buddhist in orientation, I refuse his values, because I saw Buddhism as a failure at every higher level.

Societies that are largely Buddhist are failed societies: Tibet, Myanmar, Vietnam, Sri Lanka. I see nothing to emulate.

Communist societies are even worse: North Korea, Red China, Zimbabwe, the Soviet Union under Stalin, Romania under Ceausescu. I see nothing to emulate.

Islamic societies are even worse: Somalia, the Gambia, Afghanistan under the Taliban.
I see nothing to emulate.

Lutheran societies are the best: Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark. I think the world should drop all its other notions, and study these five nations exclusively, and model themselves on them.

Catholic societies are not as good: Italy, Austria, Spain, South and Central America. Something is wrong with Catholic societies. They produce gangs that prey on others. Why do they do this?

We need to think more about the good, and its relationship to quality. What is a good t-shirt? What is a good boyfriend? What is a good car?

Perhaps these are not static indicators but rather they are notions that are in process, and in continual flux. A good hitter in baseball may have slumps. But overall they have a high batting average. This means they produce what we want them to produce, and are generally satisfied with them.

Perhaps industry has a better sense of quality assessment than we have in the humanities. In the humanities we have moved away from quality assessment. Now, we want social and political engagement in a text. We want texts to radicalize students, so that they are no longer Protestants, but Marxists.

I resist this, because I think Marxism is challenged in terms of the quality of society, the quality of goods, and the quality of morals.

I would prefer a return to a Protestant education in which work ethic, high quality outcome, and a sense of concern for others was paramount. We are increasingly besieged by a left that wants to bury Protestantism under a deluge of poor ideas stemming from Marxism. The last Protestant has been taken off the Supreme Court and replaced with gender benders and angry inclusion-mavens. Quality has been replaced by equality. The notion of the individual has been replaced by class. Love has been replaced by gender and power. Humor has been replaced by cynicism.

These are all obvious mistakes to all good Protestants and are considered icky. Communists are icky. They produce ickiness.

Protestants are nifty. They aren't necessarily any better than other people, but there is something in their philosophy that produces good societies overall from top to bottom. What is this quality?

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Saturday night I took my first-grader to see The Sorcerer's Apprentice. It's handy to have kids around when you want to see a film like this, as it looks like you're doing it for them.

Last summer Donna Maloney (assistant costume designer) invited me to watch the filming of Sorcerer's Apprentice, and my friend Paul and I went to the set near Battery Park in Manhattan to watch Nick Cage and Alfred Molina throw lightning balls at one another. I was friends with Maloney in high school. She was a star on the field hockey team and in other sports and was also a cheerleader. She liked to sew, and wear clothes, and always had style, and now does costume designs for many major films. One of her spectacular jobs in this film was to outfit an entire screen full of Chinese costumes in one of the opening scenes set during a Chinatown festival. Fantastic satiny yellows and reds, and a giant dragon who turns real!

Cage is the last of the good sorcerers representing the force of love and romance while Molina represents the last of the bad sorcerers representing the force of evil and exploitation (which is the weaker force in physics terms?).

Cage is looking for the Prime Merlinian, as he's the only one who can permanently destroy all the dead sorcerers that Molina is about to awaken, and finds the Merlinian in a kid played by Jay Baruchel, who in turn seems to channel Christian Slater's wise-acre character from Heathers (1989?). If you know Slater in Heathers, please compare his role with the squeaky voice and wiser-than-years-would-suggest persona of David, in S's Apprentice. Some drippy blond (Teresa Palmer, from Australia) plays Baruchel's love interest. Her only role in the film is apparently to admire Baruchel, as she isn't good at physics, but does apparently disrupt a laser beam later in the movie. This action is briefly referred to, but doesn't seem to be a key to the outcome (lots of editing in the film, and some key plot connecters were cut?). You'd think the writers would have given a woman more to do in this day and age.

Bad sorcerer Molina gets a blonde man who seems to come from some drippy Depeche Mode to be his sidekick (he's Baruchel's parallel), but Molinas mistreats him.

The plots borrows a bit from here and there. The Prime Merlinian is more or less taken from the notion of the Harry Potter series in which a young man from a suburb ends up as the greatest force for good in the known universe. Suburban kids can identify! I could! Cage does a good job being a wizened mentor for the Prime Merlinian (a science student at NYU). Cage's own love interest has been trapped in a Chinese doll for a thousand years.

There are good chase scenes, and lots of sword fighting and fireball throwing, and electrical displays, and good nighttime scenes of Manhattan. It was great fun. Cage tells Baruchel that a young wizard has to "believe in yourself" (good advice for everyone), and love and Bohemian nerdy romance of course triumph over the will to power displayed by the slightly aristocratic (stiff, and abusive) Molina with his Spanish moustache.

The six-year-old loved the film, and I did, too. My friend Paul was visiting, and he liked it, too. Love is an overlooked force that allows everyone to live together. But this doesn't mean that you have to love the bad Spanish-guy with the moustache, or accept his exploitation. (No turning the other cheek to illegal behavior.) The values of Anglophone fair play are what made our civilization better than the Spanish one. Fairness is good for business, and makes values that are understood all over the world as universal. Three and a half stars (half taken off because the female character played by Palmer was such a snooze and not worth all the action undertaken on her behalf).

BP Spill Contained

It appears that the BP Deepwater Horizon is finally contained. However, my blog, which is similar to that disaster in that I continue to pump hundreds of millions of gallons of Lutheran Surrealist ink into the blogosphere and there seems no likelihood of capping the monster -- is still going.

The BP disaster will still be felt by the grandchildren of our grandchildren.

Will this blog continue to poison minds with its strange mixture of the avant-garde and religious faith?

Many think those two are like oil and water. I say they are the same thing, and that Jesus was the first and greatest member of the avant-garde, the avatar of avatars for all contemporary avant-garde thought. He is also the avatar of avatars for all contemporary conservative thought. The extreme conservatives as in conservationist, and the extreme avant-garde as in progressive, come together in Lutheran Surrealism to form a one-two punch that no one understands, and yet, is there, like Christ, more or less permanently.

While the BP spill was therefore a passing phenomenon, Lutheran surrealism is not really of any one time, or any one place. It is everywhere and nowhere.

It is something and nothing.

I didn't get enough sleep last night.

WORLD CUP & LUTHERAN ECONOMICS

1.

The World Cup Final yesterday was a legalistic nightmare in which the refs gave yellow cards for every hard tackle, ruining the flow of the game. The Spanish team capitalized on the refs' gullibility and began falling and claiming their knees were hurt. It became a competition of thespian exaggeration. Late in the second half, the Spanish convinced the refs to give a red card to a Dutch player. At that point, down to ten men, the Dutch team collapsed, the Spanish scored, and the game was over, 1-0.

2. Also yesterday a man named Gregory Dwyer came from Concordia College to our church to preach. He spoke on the Good Samaritan and argued that the Good Samaritan had it right because he didn't limit his liability to his own specific group, or to any sum, but went all-out to help a stranger. We are supposed to do the same, he said.

The parables of Jesus are baffling to me, and I don't like the way they are interpreted, or perhaps I don't like Jesus' notions. We are finite, and yet he is infinite. He is God. We are human. Now it's true that he became human, but does that mean that we (conversely) can become God? Just because God is both, does that mean that we are both? If God is finite in the person of Jesus, are we infinite in that we share in the Godhead? Does that also mean that our authority is equivalent to that of God (who speaks in first person in the OT), or to that of Christ and the apostles, or that laypeople are suddenly the equivalent of pastors?

It is obvious to me that although there is a side of us that is infinite, we are in fact finite. At least, that is, our resources are finite. Our lifespan is finite.

If we were to go all-out to help every broken stranger on the side of every road, we would go broke, and our children would die.

3.

Gregory Dwyer suggested that just the same, we should be like the Good Samaritan.

4.

Is this possible?

5.

Is this impossible?

6.

After church, Dwyer spoke again, but this time about the college for which he works. Concordia College is one of ten surviving Missouri Synod Lutheran Colleges. It is the only one in the northeast, and the only one in the New York City area. It is about a half hour north of Manhattan in an area where a small house might have an annual tax of $40,000. Dwyer said that he himself can't afford to live in that area, but has to commute in from Connecticut. The college has 800 students. They typically leave the college with debts of about $50,000 (an undergrad B.A.). There are about ten pre-seminary students: the rest are trying to find a high-paying job (presumably).

It used to be that seminary students got a free ride, our own pastor said, through the two big Missouri seminaries (St. Louis and Fort Wayne). He himself got through with a total debt assumption of $500.

Meanwhile, our pastor learned Greek and Hebrew, and learned to preach. All to the good, but the synod is now in straitened circumstances, as are many of the churches. Attendance is down, as is the financial situation.

Dwyer mentioned that a pastor may have a debt of $50,000 and get called to a rural church in Illinois where the annual income would be $20,000. Therefore, the pastor would be on WIC, and other kinds of state help, just to feed his children.

(The ELCA also has some 40 colleges, but they are no longer in any sense Lutheran, although they do receive money from their synods. Muhlenberg College in Allentown, for instance, is technically Lutheran, but has only 1 or 2 Lutheran faculty out of a faculty of 108. Its students are mostly wealthy and Jewish. Students do not have to take any classes in Lutheranism. Still, they get a half million dollars a year from the synod. Wagner College on Staten Island is still nominally Lutheran and you see a cross here and there on the campus. They, too, receive synodic money, but they are an entirely secular campus -- neither students nor faculty are Lutheran, and there are no Lutheran core classes required for matriculation.)

6b. Concordia has a large percentage of Lutheran heritage students (not all Germans), and the rest are mostly Roman Catholic. The faculty is also composed of these two groupings. Students have to take Lutheran theology classes even if they are majoring in business in order to graduate. It looks like an excellent college, and one that I didn't know much about. If I was to choose a college today, I would certainly look closely at Concordia. It's in a good location (they have a thriving film school, apparently), and has the right ethics, or at least some ethics. A school should give you something wholesome.

7.

Gregory Dwyer of Concordia is a full-fledged pastor, with a Master's Degree in Divinity. He said he didn't agree with what seminarians taught him with regard to the division between Law and Gospel. He decided that the limitation of liability (justification) that Lutherans allow themselves (the two kingdoms notion) wasn't demanding enough, and that we have to ask ourselves to assume grace for every neighbor. He cited the notorious last passage in James, which Luther virtually banned. Dwyer mentioned "people" only in this equation of universal generosity. That is, we are responsible for every human being with whom we come into contact, but not animals or insects. Is this theologically sound? Probably. Is it fiscally sound? Not. Is it ecologically sound? (Who cares!)

8.

Dwyer also said that Missouri Synod seminaries will not allow anyone to enter their school if they have a debt accumulation that is too large. They make you go to work first because they don't want to send out pastors who are insolvent. If the seminary is fiscally responsible, why should they ask individual families who belong to the synod to be irresponsible? Something didn't add up (but perhaps I misunderstood something).

9.

We have a seminary student that was once a member of our congregation that we are asked to help. That's fine. But we also have our own children, and car payments, and house payments, and must be responsible for our retirement, and tiny things like insurance.

10.

Jesus is often a bit irresponsible. He challenges the authorities in Jerusalem and gets himself killed. St. Paul and most of the apostles do the same. The only survivor is John (he's the only apostle who isn't martyred). I like John. When I read him, he seems to be thinking for himself. God gave us freedom of inquiry, and Luther said this was a good thing, and Lutheran colleges should promote this (even if the Marxist and crypto-Marxist ones don't).

11.

Luther understood economics. I like Luther. He understood that the Pope was bankrupting Germany and Germans in order to throw toga parties. He was against this. He got the German princes to sign on to his revolution, which in essence, saved the church from being a cash cow for the Pope. Luther understood economics and he understood the devilish Pope.

12.

When people waive economics, it doesn't mean that economics goes away. When Obama says that we will accept invaders from Mexico, it means that the people of Arizona will pay. Obama doesn't care. He's not in Arizona, and doesn't have to pay. He's hoping to cash in on the votes of the growing Hispanic community. That's all Obama cares about: cashing in. Fortunately, he can't add. There are more legal residents of the US, and they are going to vote him out. His approval rating is 44% and declining daily.

13.

The ten commandments are pretty good because they define and delimit the economics of what we're supposed to do, and how we're supposed to behave. Secularist scoffers laugh and say, well, they talk about slaves, and how you're not supposed to poke their eyes out. Call that relevant today? But if you have a business and your workers get you mad, you can't go crazy on them. If you are running a 7/11 in 2010, you have to make sure the employees aren't stealing Slurpees, but you also can't knock them around or poke their eyes out. At least not here in the US. In many countries you can. In this one, you can't. So I'd call the ruling relevant and contemporaneously so.

14.

We need a set of rules that allows us to play ball (and work) together. The rules shouldn't wreck the game, as they did in yesterday's World Cup, where the police are all over you all day. The police should be barely visible, and rarely enter into any particular transaction, but it should be felt that they are there if you need them. In Mexico, they apparently aren't, which is why their citizens come here, even if they aren't willing to abide by any rules regarding how they got here.

15.

But we do need clear rules. The rules allow for a free exchange of ideas, but there has to be limitations. There has to be clarity. There has to be some understanding of our limitations, and the rules can't expect us to be God or saints, or even demand that we be Good Samaritans in the sense that the G. Samaritan was redefined yesterday by Pastor Dwyer. God is the Good Samaritan. All of us understand that the universe is a spectacular blessing, and that being born into it is something that no one can ever deserve. And yet, our place in it remains limited, according to sound Lutheran doctrine. Not only is our authority limited (we have to obey laws), but our contributions are limited (we are not God, and didn't invent this universe -- it's His).

16.

We can be expected to take care of our own families. People who leave their families should pay child support. The law demands this. The law cannot demand that I empty my bank account for every shiftless zombie pretending to have a sick leg on the side of the road.

17.

For every no-goodnik who illegally enters the country, who kidnaps my children, demanding ransom, the police should repay them with a bullet to the head.

18.

The president should know this.

19.

We need rules. The rules have to be clear and yet flexible. They should help us play the game, but not overburden the game.

20.

I have had a policy of trying to write every other day at LS. The rest of the summer I'm going to write less, or at least less punctiliously. I need to swim a bit more with the kids, and do other things. I want to read more in economic theory and in law, but I also need to think about time as money, and spend it more wisely. Just because some nuts want to say that we don't need to think about these things, or that they will take care of it, don't bother to look into the laws we are passing, doesn't mean that they will go away. We need in fact to think more, not less, and try to be as precise as possible, lest we give away our shirts and pants, and walk nude on the road to Jericho, so that the people who are pretending to be hurt on the side of the road can steal our things, steal our livelihood, pretending to be victims, like the Spanish yesterday in the World Cup. There ought to be a conscience that doesn't allow people to do such things as fake a leg injury in order to get a free kick. But not everyone has a conscience. Therefore, there must be rules and laws to protect us from the many around us without a conscience or without any true regard for the spirit of the law: especially those who prey on our conscience.

21.

Luther understood this, which is why he banned indulgences as a way of getting into heaven. Don't "misunderestimate" Luther. As Lutherans, we have to listen to Jesus and also to the law of the Old Testament. But as Lutherans, we get to listen through Luther, to the ways in which he interpreted those ancient rulings, and to the almost crazy (and venal) way in which the Catholics and others have sometimes made sense of the Christ's paradoxical ethical pronouncements. Watch out for the way the Marxists, the crypto-Marxists, and the others reinterpret things. If they just want your money, and are willing to put a wolfish design on your income while presenting a sheepish face, split, as Luther did.

22.

I haven't reached 95, but I should shut up.

FAIR & SQUARE

Last night I took three of our kids to the Fair on the Square. It is every Friday night in July. They can one-putt into a cup, shoot a basket, or do some other games, and they get Monopoly money. With the fake money they can buy silly Bands, plastic dinosaurs, jewelry, and other things from a selection of thirty of forty cigar boxes full of gaudy trinkets (the kind of stuff for which the Indians sold Manhattan).

A bland band plays in the octagonal gazebo.

We used to have a world-class cornet player, but he died.

Right up until he died, he could play like a million bucks. He was over 90.

Also on the square are artists selling drawings, fortune tellers, chefs with fruit pies, lotteries for 4-H, and an ice cream truck. Kids play soccer which usually degenerates into rugby.

Sometimes someone sells musty books. (I bought one by James Hitchcock last week. He's an ardent Catholic. The book is called What Is Secular Humanism? and rehearses many of my own arguments, but it's published in 1982 by Servant Books of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has in it the awful truth that Catholics have managed to maintain most of their institutions {colleges, schools} while Protestants have caved and can no longer say no to themselves. Not only did I love the book, but I immediately went online and bought another one by Hitchcock called The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life Vol 1: The Odyssey of the Religion Clauses {Princeton UP 2004}).

Last night a group of five or six young men and women had a conservative booth. They were giving out the Constitution (the most radical literature in America, and the thing the current government least wants you to get your hands on).

The foreword is by Ron Paul. When Paul is voting for legislation he applies the Constitutional test, one young man said. If it's not constitutional, he won't vote for it.

"I believe it's worthwhile for all of us to tirelessly pursue the preservation of the elegant Constitution with which we have been so blessed" (3), the Paul foreword ends.

Many think there is a separation of church and state somewhere in the Constitution. In fact, it is just the opposite.

In Article VI, it reads:

"...no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States" (23).

As if that isn't clear enough, this again is the VERY FIRST phrase in the Amendments, or what is known as the BILL OF RIGHTS:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." (28).

The Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15, 1791.

The establishment clause means that there can be no official church. You don't have to be a PC imitator to be a politician. You don't have to be a Marxist to be in any state institution (except perhaps the mental institutions or the colleges). The establishment clause came about because Madison's Virginia wanted to disestablish Baptists from government offices, and to establish Episcopalianism as the official church of Virginia. But the principle of tolerance now holds universally (batteries not included).

Not only do you not have to believe what your coworkers or cohorts believe, but you are permitted to say what you do believe (but watch it until you have tenure, and even after). You don't have to be an Episcopalian or a creep from some liberal sport of a church. You can be a diehard conservative, and yet still have the right to speak, to be elected, or to serve in any government agency.

That's the good news.

Here's the bad news. I asked the five young conservatives whether they'd vote for anyone the Republicans offered, as opposed to any Democrat.

No, they said. We would only vote for someone who backed our principles. Otherwise, we wouldn't vote, or would write in our vote, or vote for an obscure third party.

Young people are such wonderful idealists.

They didn't say they WOULDN'T vote for Sarah Palin, but did say they would want to read deeply, first.

Fair enough, on the Square.

Standardizations

Dreamed I was a bottle of Coke on an assembly line. I wanted the other bottles to realize that I was unique, while also conformed to all standards and expectations.

Then I was a prisoner, a number, in a uniform, and wanted the guard to understand that I was unique. I was making headway, when the guard retired.

I was released after fifty years, in a general release of prisoners. No one was waiting at the gate for me.

Something was my fault.

Catholic Definition

Man the unique animal with mercy.

Fireworks at Peter Schjeldahl's house

The poet Peter Schjeldahl (New Yorker art critic) has a house near here which he visits in the summer. My friend Gary Mayer said he blows off fireworks on the 4th. Wife and I loaded up all four kids and we went over. There were funny foods to eat and about 700 skinny art types eating things like a baked carrot.

At 10 pm we sang The Star-Spangled Banner, with the rockets red glare, bombs bursting in air, and then as soon as we hit the last word (we sang only the first stanza when it is the fourth that really gets down) all heck broke loose. Well, first six or seven Chinese-lanterns looking like peace emblems rose in the sky and went a half-mile up. THEN, all heck broke loose. An apple tree in the valley was strapped with exploding napalm. Ak-ak went berserk. Tracer bullets. My kindergartner and I oohed at the tiny boomerangs like white doves zig-zagging out of a central explosion. It wasn't that loud, either (I brought ear plugs).

It struck me that Schjeldahl might have been a Lutheran in his childhood (his name sounds Danish). I googled, and he grew up in Fargo, ND (promising) and went to Carleton (more promising) and he's been married a long time. He indeed might have some kind of Lutheranism going on. He looks like Kierkegaard: properly disappointed by life. Could he be a possible Lutheran Surrealist?

At the end of all the rockets' red glare, about 9 more Buddhist peace lanterns went up. It was a parentheses of peace, around the necessity of fighting for peace. I think it had a Lutheran structure. It reminded me of Schheldahl's poem from back in the 70s (he used to write more poems, and was always a better poet than Robert Bly), this one called My Generation:

“Vietnam/ Drugs/ Civil Rights/ Rock/ Watergate/ (in that order?)/ Are the blows of history/ That have left my generation/ Its peculiar battered silhouette.”

PHOTO BY RIIKKA OLSON.

Summer Sports Poetry Contest

This contest puts an emphasis on personal sports experience (autobiographical) and can include swimming, jogging, baseball, motorsports, or anything else that involves physical effort expended in a primarily ludic motif within the summer season.

I've decided to limit the format. This time there can be no more than two beats in a line, and the poems should be less than thirty lines in total. Two beats in a line speeds up the tempo of the lines and creates a certain giddy silliness.

Aspiring poets can put in as many poems as they like (and of course you can break the rules of the contest at the risk of being DQ'd). Contest will close on Bastille Day July 14th at 11:59 pm, and votes will be tallied on the 15th. One vote per entrant, and you can't vote for your own poem(s).

Here's my opener, which I wrote a couple of nights ago after a disastrous attempt to pitch to Little Leaguers. The other two coaches were out of action -- one on vacation, and one had a bad back. Pitching, suffice it to say, is harder than it looks. I threw fifty pitches to one kid and he just stared at me with contempt. I was not getting anywhere near the strike zone.

Ballpark Estimates

I threw the pitch
Unlike Nietzsche
The will to power
Even the flower --

The ball hit the kid
In the head
He dug in deep
I felt the thread

& hit his head
(anew)
He saw stars
I threw a strike

He belted it good
I heard the wood
Hit the leather
(Saw the)
Ball (as it) flew
Into the blue.

July 1, 2010

Eugene Fama: The Efficient Market Hypothesis

Against the leftist notion that the state should set prices according to some a priori agreement on the state's values, Eugene Fama at the University of Chicago has "The Efficient Market Hypothesis."

This means that whatever people are willing to pay for a product or a service is its true price.

So, if you have eight hours to help decorate someone's home for a birthday, but the birthday girl won't pay you a penny for your services, then that is the true price of your services.

In other words, you are worthless, at least in financial terms.

If another birthday girl wants to give you a billion dollars to decorate her house, then you are worth a billion dollars.

That's the true price.

A soda in the desert is worth whatever you can get someone to pay.

Fama believed that when the market crashed a year and a half ago as Bush was about to leave office and the impending news of Obama's imminent win was all the buzz, and Fannie, Freddie, Goldman Sachs, came crashing down, and brought many world markets down with it, that this was a price adjustment, not a panic disorder.

This hypothesis has the virtue of simplicity, if not in fact of falsifiability.

Trade unions, minimum wage: these are thought to both help those who are protected by them, and to injure the market in general, thus reducing the number of people who might otherwise be employed.

While I am mainly a literary critic, recently I have been forced to think about these things, as an amateur, mostly because of the shrinking national circumstances, but also because of the reading I've been obliged to do. The modernist poets had bizarre notions of economics, which forces us, in order to understand their poetry, to become somewhat current with economic theory. The fact that it seems to be worse off than literary theory in the sense that it has no consensus is probably positive.

Consensus in literary theory has led to the rise of a neo-Marxist cultural production that denies individuality, and with individuality, the very possibility of genius.

But cultural production is somewhat different than the production of Silly Bandz (a mass market item that depends on mass hysteria which depends in turn on mass hypnosis via sneaky little ads which at least turn the wheels of the economy). My problem with mass cultural production that is designed to produce conformity with neo-Marxist opinions of race, gender, and class is partially that it creates a feedback loop which in turn makes people ever more aware of race differences (and argues that all black and Asian and Hispanic misery is due only to race), and more aware of gender (which does the same thing with regard to gender), creating barriers to understanding, and barriers to discussion for those of us who believe that there are other problems (dysfunctional black families, in which the father figure is too often AWOL, is the central problem of black poverty, is yet another hypothesis, and it at least to me, equally convincing, even though I have no idea of the underlying reasons for the black fathers' AWOL status). In terms of gender inequities, the iniquity of the male is less of a factor than the lack of a true killer instinct in women (women used car salesmen are less likely to occur than male used car salesmen). It's the lack of iniquity among women that leads to the inequity of their sales figures, is another equally convincing hypothesis.

But these alternative explanations are roundly dismissed and the one-framework is forced on us all by the neo-Marxists.

Two of the neat things I got from Hayek are to

a. disallow the notion that the whole nation should be united around one common notion of the good, because that's totalitarian (bad).

b. the frivolity that is unattached to any specific goal is at the very least a non-totalitarian notion, which is why I think we're theoretically permitted to like:

1. Silly Bandz, and

2. Obscure modernist poetry, especially insofar as it is not connected to a larger whole, but forms a set of disconnected fragments.

3. Kierkegaard

4. Moments at church where nothing much is happening (aporia).

Which is not to say that any system can consist of pure openings, and disconnections, and aporias, but simply to imply that consistency is not always appreciated, and that we hope that surrealist moments will occur to you, too, today, and that they will be pleasantly agreeable, and that, as the Buddhists say, "it is what it is," will be all you can say about them. Humor has no end but itself, and is thus, autotelic.

Like humor, Silly Bandz could not be predicted. Like humor, Silly Bandz will get tiring in about a week. Thus, the novelty will be filled by something new. And anything new, by definition, cannot be predicted.

Since economics must deal consistently with the new, it cannot therefore be predictable, unless there is somehow a formulation for the predictability of the unpredictable.

In the same way, there cannot be a theory of humor, or, if there is, it would be similar to an economic theory that totalized the unpredictable.

How can one explain "Silly Bandz" without a general theory of humor and mischief? No one has ever been able to explain humor -- it is a kind of postmodern phenomenon. Jesus can make us wryly smile, perhaps, but he never launches us into mad laughter of the kind that the Sufis, for instance, prize.

I used to hold this against Christianity as a rationale for with-holding belief. And I thought if I am to become religious: I will be either a Buddhist or a Sufi, because laughter (if not batteries) is included. But then I thought: you cannot have a community without predictability. You need some common set of rules that are normative. The ten commandments, the tale of the Good Samaritan, function well to create good communities, if not necessarily great jokes.

Great jokes cannot make a good community. The ten commandments can.

Against uniqueness, there must also be similarity. The trees in a forest must be similar enough or else we can't call it a forest. The English-speaking community must all be able to speak English. We can't all just speak our own language.

A functioning economic thesis has to provide for a theory of general prosperity (if you follow the ten commandments you will be generally prosperous) and has to allow for sudden strikes of fortune (if you capitalize on the talents God gave you, you may be able to be awesomely rich -- the Black Swan thesis).

Incompleteness is therefore a necessary if not a sufficient aspect of any given economic or literary thesis. There has to be parts of the theory that do not act according to known laws, and which allow for preposterously absurd moments, but yet nevertheless, the thesis has to provide enough norms for a minimum of predictability.

Unlike Silly Bandz, we don't need two of the exact same poem.

We need to allow in economics for the rich to get richer. Few of us are working for ourselves alone. We are actually working for our children and spouse. Anyone not doing this is an idiot.

So an economics that disallows inheritance is idiotic, because it isn't operant on top of any true human motivation.

Not only are we working for our families, but also, for God. I don't know what this means. But no one works for themselves alone, except if they are a complete idiot.

It is by now well-known that we cannot perceive any individual data without a larger general theory. Coming up with such a theory can easily lead us into confirmation basis. The theory of race, gender, class, shoehorns most data into a set of theories that is self-confirming. (Obama cannot understand or comment on Deepwater horizon because it lies outside of his general theory of reality.)

A company like Silly Bandz cannot continue to expand (the bandz themselves burst if you stretch them sufficiently). But a country has to allow for individual creativity because it is the sole source of innovation. No two people can have an idea. Only individuals can have an idea. And these ideas must be allowed to expand if the economy is to be allowed to expand.

Any form of centralization (North Korea, or the IFB) which disallows individual creativity, will stifle the individual, and thus kill creativity.

Rotten products that kill our citizens should nevertheless be discouraged (I think we shouldn't ban cigarettes because a black market would grow for them, and with that, a loss of tax revenue, but I do think that the sale of heroin should be outlawed because it too often kills its users before we can get tax revenue out of them).

Most leftists (I'm still thinking of Burczak) want a monopoly on production, as well as set prices. This in turn implies a centralized authority, which will in turn not permit much in the way of individuality. Individuality will lead to hilarious and insincere products, like Silly Bandz. They are a necessary evil.

But I have confidence in Silly Bandz. They give me a sense that all is right with humanity. I cannot put my finger on exactly why this is. It means that something outside of race, gender and class is still being produced. Fish, musical instruments, crowns and tiaras, and other items, all unnecessary and connected only by the idea of FUN.

Most importantly, I could never have predicted this product, or my citizens at home being overwhelmingly needy of them. When I see them on the floor, or on their arms, I feel at home in the universe. This is all to the good. My kids had little say in their creation, but have a big say in their sales. I would be willing to read an autobiography of the person who created Silly Bandz. This person had a certain kind of genius along with the person who creates a joke, a new novel, a piece of art like the Mona Lisa which everyone must see once in a lifetime.

The demand curve for this product will likely not spiral for more than a year at most. (I predict three more months.) On the other hand, they may become a mainspring of the American economy, like baseball cards, and tricycles, or the car (not yet gone the way of the Edsel).