POETRY VS. MATH: A ZERO SUM GAME?

My campus has a few sculptures on it. One of the neatest is Mark Beltchenko's Sidewalk II. Students describe it as a half-pipe, or a skateboard ramp, in miniature. It's apparently made of two different parts, bolted together. It's made out of A36 steel. I don't know if the primary reference is entirely to the spatial qualities of itself or if it means something beyond its odd curves set on a stage platform. One student said the hole in the center seemed like a wound, and it appeared to her to be a veteran.

Perhaps a mathematician could describe the way in which it seems to be a rectangle transmutating into a triangle. Perhaps mathematics has a language for when one form is changing into another form. It also is somewhat like a wave. Does mathematics have a language for a wave? We used to have a commenter who specialized in describing stochatic waves, but he's drifting away with the tides of time.

We could have asked Colson Tooley, too, the young mathematician and loner who shot himself at the U. of Texas at Austin yesterday. People who knew him were "so surprised." Let's see: a "loner, who never expressed emotion," who had tremendous "math skills," but no social skills. Sounds like the most common pattern imaginable for a rampaging lunatic.

It's almost a recipe for running amok. Why do people get like that? I suppose it's very simple: the repression, or maybe it's the math. I avoid math, and part of this is because I'm afraid of running amok.

I also don't know why people make metal sculptures, but I have the feeling it is more satisfying than doing pure math. Sculptors rarely run amok. I'm not saying that people should not do math, but people who do it, should do other things, too. Something should be set up on campuses for the very brilliant, very shy people who live inside the math building, finding a meaning in equations that escapes the rest of us. Doing math is like trying to find a logical meaning in the universe. We know the result equals 42.

Math is human, but humans aren't math, or can't exclusively be defined in mathematical terms, and neither can the world.

Perhaps a pyramid of 40,000 cannonballs can be described in purely mathematical terms. Perhaps Mark Beltchenko's Sidewalk II can be described in mathematical terms.

But I don't think people are contraptions, or bathyspheres, or sets of equations, although they like to make those things, and math helps us do those things, and helps us plan trips, and watch as Obama makes regular trips to the Treasury building to liberate more loot. This gets many people mad, and they stand on the street in Tea Parties and scream about it. The newspaper says THAT'S CRAZY! People are emotional, and are happier when they have other people around them who can understand their moods, and love them for them, and part of that might mean joining a political party, and howling and hooting over all the trillions. Part of this means being able to communicate the moods. Again, I don't think you can do this in mathematical equations, although understanding what a trillion dollars means, or what a few billion would mean in terms of a wall along the Rio Grande, might be important. Or that Obama has spent more money in his first two years than all the presidents in American History, might be factually true, or it may be an explosive estimate. Maybe this is better expressed in mathematical terms than in poetry. Poetry, or at least a little of it, is a life skill on a smaller scale. It will get you a little love.

Can love be expressed in mathematical terms? I think love is always unique, while math is a kind of universal, in which the numbers always mean the same things to everyone (it doesn't have a subjective aspect, and perhaps frowns on the subjective). No two lovers wish to be treated alike or as seen as alike. Love is anti-mathematical! It isn't even logical!

Long live the uniqueness of love: each love as unique and incommensurable as our fingerprints and as incomprehensible as contemporary sculpture, escaping every attempt at definition.

CREED

I believe in God the Father
The Virgin Mary
& the Easter Bunny
Thoth
Santa
Fairies
Pixies
Brownies

Quasars
Quarks
Quantum leaps

I believe in everything but Barack Obama
Some media creations go too far

Ok, this contest is a creed contest -- what you believe in, as bluntly or as subtly as possible. Contest ends October 1st, at midnight, followed by a day of votes, followed by a tally. All entrants can vote, as can those who post at least a few times a year.

We'll have ANOTHER contest as the actual election season ends its final week, and we will end it on November 3rd. The one to come will be about anything of interest in the upcoming election -- love poems for candidates, or satires, or limericks on the process itself, but the poems should be less than 22 lines. You can have as many entries as you like in this contest as well as the one to come, but you can only vote for someone else's pome (one vote per customer).

IS EVERYTHING ALL RIGHT, MAN?

Between the two parties we are a Tertium Quid that yokes together an art movement that is largely kaput with a Protestant group that is fragmented and disintegrating. The twin pressures of science and fashion pulverize art and religion into nihilism. Lutheran surrealism offers a watering hole that has nothing to do with fashion, no real science, and everything to do with outdated amusements: something like visiting an amusement park where all the rides are broken, no refreshments, and no one remembers why the place exists. Occasionally there's a poetry contest. Of course, no one reads poetry any more. Whatever the people don't want, that's what we offer. People do still come, and they talk to one another, surprised to find a conversation, even if they have to talk past the host with his annoying quirks (Lyme disease), and he's against everyone and everything -- except perhaps nearly extinct mammals (he said something good about golden lion marmosets for some reason). Meanwhile he bites the ankles of everything living: Catholics, Wiccans, Buddhists, Marxists, feminists, Maoist language poets, fat people, himself, dog-lovers, Anabaptists, even Lutherans of his own synod, and everybody else who can read betraying an appalling ignorance about Islam, Communism, and mathematics all the while), and of course there is little or no logic, and when there's a fact it's generally wrong. Why are you caught in his warped world?

BUSH'S SPANISH

George W. Bush spoke Spanish.

Obama cannot speak another language, and admitted this in April 2008, in a townhall meeting in Dayton, Ohio:

(DAYTON, OHIO) "I don't speak a foreign language. It's embarrassing!" Barack Obama exclaimed today at town hall meeting here. Obama, who often touts his time growing up overseas, made the confession while speaking about the importance of teaching foreign languages in schools."

People believe that Obama is the multicultural, not Bush. And yet Bush speaks another language, while Obama is trapped inside of English. Obama has lived elsewhere, but he did so as if he lived in a bubble.

"What sort of an effect must it have on a people not to learn foreign languages? Presumably an effect similar to that which a complete withdrawal from society has on an individual" (Lichtenberg: Aphorisms & Letters, p. 39).

Obama is what Virgil Nemoianu calls a "monoglot multicultural." These are people who are convinced the English-speaking world is one vast misery, and all other cultures are superior to it, without actually bothering to know anything about any other cultures, exemplified by not knowing their languages.

I have never dreamed about Obama or Bush. Are they really that important to me? I write about them here because they are common reference points. The former is supposedly a paragon of everything cosmopolitan, the latter a rube. And yet, the latter speaks a second language, has a wife who clearly loves him, and is from a family whose members tend to remain together.

The two form a common language of what we think we know.

All the great thinking of our time is shallow.

I cannot say of either president, as Lichtenberg said (of I don't know whom), "He loved pepper and zig-zag lines" (49).

I don't know either Bush or Obama from the inside, but suspect that Bush is the more authentic. I know him. Whatever or whoever Obama is, he hides it behind a facade.

Obama was yesterday's darling. His popularity is falling. I remember the music of Tiny Tim. It stunned everyone to hear Tiptoe Through the Tulips. But the tune was thin, and it began to grate after a third listen.

The country is in a fratricidal state over which is which, and whether we should love the one and not the other. To care so much about this, and so little for poetry is probably a sign of our dullness as a nation. But it's more too: one is genuine, and the other is a fad.

The people with real sensibility can tell the difference. The others have been fooled by the creepy romance of monoglot multiculturals: the RGC crowd.

When a culture can no longer distinguish between the real and the false, between a religion and a cult, between good and bad, between prudence and imprudence, it has lost its basic instincts. I think this November will show that America has not yet lost its nose even though Obama temporarily confused it with his zigzags and pepper.

The hounds are closing in on the Democrats.

Walls, Laws

The Great Wall of China was built two thousand years ago to keep out various nomadic groups. It's about 5,500 miles long.

A wall across the Mexican border would be about 2000 miles in length -- less than half the length of the GW of C, & using modern technology. About 1 million illegals slip across the border each year, of which about 150,000 are not Mexican.

Invasions have always been a concern. In Ephesus during Heraclitus' lifetime, a good lifestyle caused massive immigration. The immigrants wanted to change the laws. Heraclitus argued, "We must fight for the laws of the city as if they were its walls."

In Athens during the reign of Pericles, people flocked to the city to take advantage of its better lifestyle. They tried to knock down its walls and laws and largely succeeded, turning Athens into a backwater, which it remains today.

In World War II, America rose to prominence. The arts and the sciences were suddenly the best in the world. We beat the communists, but their refugees poured into the country. Most of these were fully integrated. Since the 1960s a dramatic schism has developed in American voters. Democrats want individual license or multi-culturalism to prevail, while Republicans increasingly want norms that have arisen out of the Judeo-Christian tradition to prevail. People from around the world move in, and they don't want to assimilate. They want us to tolerate their mosques, their practice of clitorectomy, multiple marriages, and arranged marriages, they want to practice Wicca, which means the abduction and slaughter of babies, and they want to export Hindu practices here, while sending money home to India. Buddhists come and turn our youth away from the Protestant Work Ethic toward a couch potato ethos of "being here now."

The eccentricities of individuals have increasingly arisen to a new position of importance among the left. Strange characters like Lady Gaga hold rallies to push the president toward pushing the military to accept gay soldiers. (Why she should have something to say about the military is beyond me.) But since the 60s and the "Sexual Revolution" it has been a paramilitary within the Democratic party that has pushed various sexual ideas outside of Judeo-christian discourse to a new prominence, and to legal status. A few things remain illegal: statutory rape (although in Amsterdam which was the epicenter of the hippie revolt the age of consent was lowered to 11), and sex with animals. Animal brothels pop up around the country like the religious sanctuaries of a strange new sect.

Michel Foucault, one of the intellectual leaders of the new left, has argued that no sexual behavior should ever be illegal. Even child prostitution, for him, should not have been a concern for the law. Sexual desire is the new sacred impulse, and nothing must tamper with it, because it is against the law to tamper with religion.

The sexual whim of the individual citizen should allow her to give birth to an ear of corn if she can arrange for the genetic engineering.

Norms of any kind are contested. The walls of the city taken down, as are the laws. Any attempt to put walls or laws up are hotly contested.

The left would have a nude Jerusalem replace the New Jerusalem. In it, everyone will have sexual diseases. But, it's ok, because everyone will have medical insurance, paid for by the remaining citizens with a work ethic.

Against this Sodomy and Gonnorhea viewpoint, a new Tea Party has arisen to take back the country, and to rebuild its walls and laws. I'm with them.

OBAMA: A TEEN WITH A CREDIT CARD?

I keep hearing the left say that Obama's problems have to do with the debts and wars he inherited. I keep hearing the right say that Obama has spent more money than all the previous presidents combined. I heard a pundit on talk radio say that Obama is like a young teenager with a seemingly endless credit card, spending the nation into a debt it can never repay, and seemingly unaware of the consequences of his expenditures, while rationalizing his payments with all the cool stuff he's getting, and how popular he is.

Which is true?

I looked up Wikianswers:

"Did Obama spend more money than all the presidents of the US combined?"

"No. But in less than two years he has doubled the federal deficit, accumulating as much debt as all preceding administrations combined."

Since Obama is only half-way through his presidency (not quite half-way through) is his spending not profligate?

It seems to me that it is, and it seems to many that this is the real reason for the Tea Party's refulgence. Just as in the American Revolution which was about the excessive taxation without representation, and led to a full-scale break with mad King George, so the revolt against Obama has been caused by his excessive spending that is moreover not aligned with what Americans want: he thinks that because he won the election he can just spend money on anything he wants.

The left says the Tea Parties are mad hatters who have no relevant concerns and are just white men mad that a black man has power. The Tea Parties say that Obama is like a drunken teenager with a credit card, and we have to get the credit card back, pay off the profligate expenditures, and get our credit rating as a nation back under control.

Isn't the Tea Party, finally, all about the money that BO is spending? This is America, and I think that in America, no one really cares about anything except money. Money is useful, and our credit rating as a nation seems to be at risk. I think this is why the Democrats are going to get kicked out in November.

Communism is expensive. Mugabe's administration has all but collapsed, as has Kim Jong-Ils, and that of Cuba. They are beginning to think again about capitalism since after all, it is how the world runs. I think the Tea Party is an attempt to sober up the administration, and get in people who are not drunk with idealism, close the borders, pay off our debts, get jobs back into the country, and begin a process of accountability that makes us solvent.

10 Books Every Conservative Must Read, by Wiker

Benjamin Wiker, Ph.D., has a new volume entitled 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read (Regnery 2010). I was browsing in the Crossgates Mall in Albany, NY in a Borders, and came upon the volume. Many books that are written for conservatives do not strike me as well-written, or even written, but rather, blathered, with little focus on either style or content. Wiker's book is limpid and clear-sighted, and musters strong arguments. I will probably blog the book over the next week or so should anyone wish to get the book and chime in.

Although Conservativism has a deep past, it's mostly been papered over with Marxism and crypto-Marxism, obscuring its roots. I myself don't really know what it is.

Some say it's Ayn Rand. Wiker says no it isn't, but I will blog that chapter, later.

Wiker opens with a chapter on Aristotle's Politics.

"Conservatives, like Aristotle, prefer experience to theory -- in fact, conservatives cringe at utopian political schemes, which liberals tend to embrace because they vivify or justify their efforts at social engineering. And like Aristotle, conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reasoning -- that is, reason divorced from experience. Liberals see no problem with reconstituting a nation's political life on the basis of some attractive but untried rational scheme used as a tempting template to draw up programs of 'hope and change'" (14).

As you can see, Wiker is using the ten books he has chosen to weigh in on contemporary debate.

The foundation of political life, Wiker says, (for Aristotle), "...is the natural union of male and female; it is the family" (18).

This is similar to the family as the superlapsarian order (the one order left from the fall) announced in Augustine's work.

Wiker doesn't give us anything on Augustine. My understanding of Augustine is that we are not to share and share alike, as in the Bible. In the fallen postlapsarian world we have three orders that are left as gifts from God, and that we must preserve. They are, in order: the family, the church, and the government. That is, our loyalty is not to humanity, but to our family first, then to the church, and finally to the government. Our job is to make sure that each of these survive. Without them, we will be lost.

Aristotle's notions of the family, are somewhat similar, though not as clear as Augustine's.

Aristotle outlines six good and bad regimes. Kings, aristocracies, and polities are three possible arrangements, but each has a negative counterpart. A king can become a tyrant. An aristocracy can become an oligarchy. A polity can become a democracy.

When one group takes over and uses its power to its own advantage, and destroys anything that opposes it, it is a perversion of government.

When one group gets into office and uses this as a mandate to redistribute the other side's money and arrogates all money for its own use, it is what Aristotle calls a democracy.

"Human wickedness is all too prevalent, and that means we are far more likely to find, as political material to work with, tyrannies posing as kingships, oligarchies posing as aristocracies, and democracies posing as republics. The reality of wickedness, or sin, makes the creation of perfect political regimes humanly impossible, and it ensures that any imprudent attempts to create political perfection, or utopia, will end in disaster. Conservatives believe in original sin -- or the simple reality of human wickedness -- and understand that this limits what good politics can achieve" (25).

He argues that the aristocrats and the lower classes are best checked by a numerous middle-class which has property and so doesn't want communism, but isn't wealthy, and so doesn't want wealth to be the only criterion of power.

"A regime can be torn apart from the side of the poor. A democratic revolution occurs 'particularly on account of the wanton behavior of the popular leaders,' who, on behalf of the poor, harass 'those owning property,' and 'egg on the multitude against them' and 'slander the wealthy in order to be in a position to confiscate their goods.' Even more ominous, the demagogues, 'in order to make themselves popular' so they can get elected, assert that the will of the people is supreme over the law (or, in American political terms, that popular political projects can override the Constitution)" (28).

Likewise, the wealthy "can do a lot of damage because they are rich," and he cites Aristotle, "the aggrandizements of the wealthy are more ruinous to the polity than those of the people" (29).

Man is a clever animal, and "when separated from law and justice he is the worst of all" Aristotle writes (cited 30).

The rich can buy the law, and the poor can use their votes to override it.

Without law, one group can tyrannize the other. That's bad.

"Without attention to virtue ... the most savage men will soon enough rule, and we will be changed from political animals to political beasts" (31).

I like Wiker's calm tone, and his even-handed descriptions. One thing he doesn't want is a fiat of some kind against the poor, or against liberals. He's intending to win an argument, and to define a deep, reasonable, even-handed tradition. So far at least, I'm willing to read more. Next chapter: Chesterton's book, Orthodoxy.

I've read all the books he discusses except Eric Voegelin, and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. I might skip those two in terms of blog-ability. I'm especially looking forward to the chapter on Hayek, and the chapter on Shakespeare (The Tempest), but am intrigued to read the chapter on Ayn Rand (he thinks she's an idiot, as do I, but I am hoping he can help me articulate to myself why I reject her work, other than her lousy style and her vicious insistence that selfishness is a virtue, when of course when it's the only criterion of action it's a monstrous vice).

TEA PARTY SWEEPS OBAMANATION

My personal experience has been that conservatives loved their families, and feel that the experience they grew up with has been worthy of safeguarding, and conserving.

Meanwhile, progressives or radicals hated their families, and feel that their own experience was hogwash, and they hope to change that experience for their own children.

I was satisfied with my own upbringing, hence I'm a conservative.

If someone was dissatisfied, they'd be a radical.

But this was my own generation. Back in 1776, the radicals wanted to overthrow the King. Today, the radicals listen to BB King, and for them Monday (a work day) is a bad day, but Tuesday, is just as bad.

The Obamanobles want to create a whole new world, an America that they can be proud of because it's one in which there will be no more work. All work will be sent overseas. Michelle Obama hated the America in which she was raised because her dad had to work. Hers is a new America that her husband is building for her, in which she won't have to work any more. She and he can have beer picnics, and settle policy between stints of playing amongst the geraniums. It's an America based on redistribution of wealth, in which everyone has insurance, and in which there are no more foreign interventions, and most of all, in which there will be no more work. Domestic interventions by the government will be far more intensive. Everything from insurance to what we eat will be overseen by a nanny state, or in this case, by Michelle Obama herself, who will be certain that everyone eats, and not only vegetable burgers and beer, but lobsters and caviar, while smoking pot would become an intoxicating after-dinner option.

Against this are the new notions of the Tea Party, with an austere bare bones government, in which free enterprise is more robust, and taxation is minimal, and work is far more prominent. Jobs will return to America. People will work, and work ethic will be paramount. On days off, people will hunt for their food. Crime will be more severely punished, and freeloaders will be repaid with buckshot.

The Tea Party is patriarchal and looks back to the Founding Fathers and God.

The Obamanobles are matriarchal and look to Mother Jones and worship Gaia.

DEMOCRATS Vs. REPUBLICANS

I suppose it's unfair, but this is how I see the Democrats and the Republicans.

Democrats:

True contemporary center of weight, their avatar: Ward Churchill.
Most important recent thinker, who continues to supply them with a plan of action: Lenin
Most powerful overall thinker: Marx
Origins (nothing new under the sun) classical avatar: Pelagius

Republicans:

True contemporary center of weight, their avatar: Glenn Beck
Most important recent thinker, who continues to supply them with a plan of action:
Abraham Lincoln
Most powerful overall thinker: James Madison
Origins (nothing new under the sun, is now and ever shall be figure): Augustine

And you? How do you see it?

SUNDAY THOUGHTS

Albrecht Durer, the Renaissance painter, was a close colleague of Luther's. In 1518 he was already a follower of Luther (followers however were not yet called Lutherans). In T. Sturge Moore's biography of Durer (Duckworth, 1905), Durer outlines his faith:

"Seeing through disobedience of sin we have fallen into everlasting Death, no help could have reached us save through the incarnation of the Son of God, whereby He through His innocent suffering might abundantly pay the Father all our guilt, so that the Justice of God might be satisfied. For He has repented of and made atonement for the sins of the whole world, and has obtained of the Father Everlasting Life. Therefore Christ Jesus is the Son of God, the highest power, who can do all things, and He is the eternal life. Into whomsoever Christ comes he lives, and himself lives in Christ. Therefore all things are in Christ good things. There is nothing good in us except it becomes good in Christ. Whosoever, therefore, will altogether justify himself is unjust. If we will what is good, Christ wills it in us. No human repentance is enough to equalize deadly sin and be fruitful" (130).

What I like about this is that it says that we are 100% evil, and that if there is something good in us, it isn't ours. It's Christ's. Only Christ is good. We are thoroughly depraved. So if there is something decent in us, we owe it to God. We ought to be more open to God, so that we can be more open to the good.

*

Dogs cannot be good. Their very name is God's name backwards. They are therefore rotten, and without the possibility of being good. Is this right? In Ronald Firbank's Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (Duckworth, 1926), a papal spy is observing the doings of a certain Cardinal Pirelli, who is baptizing the dogs of wealthy dowagers in sunlit Spain for a price:

"Head archly bent, her fine arms divined through darkling laces, the Duquesa stood, clasping closely a week-old police-dog in the ripple of her gown" (2).

The dog is baptized with white menthe, and the dowager DunEden is dismayed by the stickiness. Other dowagers line up with their chows and sundy other pets, hoping their dogs will become good due to the baptismal font of white menthe that the Cardinal will pour. The papal spy has much to describe.

"Before the white facade of the Dun Eden Palace, commanding the long, palm-shaded Paseo del Violon, an array of carriages and limousines was waiting; while, passing in brisk succession beneath the portico, like a swarm of brilliant butterflies, each instant was bringing more" (23).

*

May God protect the Church.

*

It hit 50 degrees last night in the Catskills. Cucumbers are still growing in the garden. They appear to enjoy spurts of strange growth where they double in size in a day, and then hit a plateau. Very hot dry weather seems best.

*

Many postmodernists do not believe that science can be objective. News certainly can't be objective (at least not these days), but science? What about poetry? Can poetry be objective? Should poetry attempt to be objective? Can we at least agree that there is such a thing as Truth?

DREAMS OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

My dreams reflect my intellectual life, but in perverse ways. I am against illegal immigration, but I am not sure about how or if the Christian laws of neighborliness apply.

I dreamed I was bicycling in Paris & found a long geometrical tunnel of medieval stone curlicues (like the sloping tunnels that are used by artistic skateboarders) there were octagons and circles, and I was busy ricocheting through these tunnels when I came to a stop in a large circle, like the one in the Place de la Concorde (near the obelisk that Napoleon stole from Egypt). A paramilitary group asked for my ID. I gave it to them. I was holding Julian's hand (my kindergarten-age son), and the group asked if I could defend the notion that France was for the French. Since I was not French, but could pass as French, I was in the position of a Mexican in the US. Julian was also targeted. I didn't know what to say.

I was profoundly nervous, when soft multicultural church people (also French, but not Lutherans, they were from a Quaker-like group) came and fluttered over us, politely protesting our treatment (they were like nuns, only not wearing habits, they had diaphanous dresses of those who are devoted to poverty, who tried to protect us from skinheads).

I realized Julian and I were not in either category: we were not French, and we were not illegal aliens. We were tourists with tourist visas and I showed these to the quasi-official officials, along with a bribe of 500 francs. They took the bribe, and we were allowed to pass.

December 12, 2009

Last night (September 9, 2010) I was passing by my high school. The edifice of the building was immense, as if it was the facade of Notre Dame de Paris. I realized I had never taken a French class even though I speak French and have translated books from French. I knew that my papers were not in order even though I had a Ph.D. and many books. I was not legitimate, and thought: I need to go back and take real French classes. I need to get all the documentation up to date. Then I realized that no one cared, and relaxed, and went into a bar where four older tough men with sheriffs' badges said they would teach me a lesson. Then they laughed, pounded me on the back, and went up to the bar, completely forgetting about me. I was a small child, maybe 9. All around me were poor children from undocumented countries sleeping on the floor of the bar, and I wondered how they would ever be educated. Where were their parents? They were cartoon characters. One of them looked like Fat Albert, but he had a sombrero. I wondered if I should wake them up, but I didn't know how to help them. My own parents were missing, and I didn't know where I lived. I went into the bathroom to comb my hair. In the mirror I was a homeless Mexican child.

There He Goes Again: "They Talk About Me Like A Dog"

BO barks, "They talk about me like a dog."

W was hated by the left, but he never once whimpered, and though he was frequently hit on the rump by the newspapers for being a moron, he always stood it bravely, and kept his dignity.

BO whimpers continually, even though the papers treat him very nice.

What is this dogged, continual whimpering from Obama? Does it really make the left want to defend him, and rally around him? Doesn't he protest too much?

And anyway, why would anyone speak badly of dogs? I'm not the biggest fan of canines (I was a paperboy), but I would never malign them in print, nor do I ever say anything bad to dogs (although I wish their owners would take them somewhere other than my lawn for their dumps). Nor would I talk about them behind their backs. Are the Obamas talking badly about Bo Obama, the Portuguese water dog that is their personal pet? Was that the origin of his remark?

The remark should be monitored by PETA. Obama has created a negative environment for dogs. It is speciesist, at the very least, to seemingly confirm that it is ok to make disparaging remarks about another species. What does BO think is the matter with dogs? I don't think anything is the matter with dogs. Or cats. (Actually I can't stand dogs, but that's another story. Cats are ok, but are a bag of allergens. That, too, is another matter.)

16,000 Children Die of Hunger Every Day

The Sunday Oneonta Star has a mini-page with stories for children. Yesterday, there was an article about how the United Nations has developed Millenial Development Goals. "Every day, 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes -- that's one child every five seconds."

189 countries have signed on to help prevent this.

Where are the countries where children are starving to death? In this country, the opposite appears to be happening. Starving to death would probably be worse than dying from obesity. Twinkies are fun to stuff. But think that every five seconds, another child starves to death.

Let them eat Twinkies! We have plenty. (Our kids don't need them. More than half of the kids in New York City are obese.)

Arrangements are being made so that half of the starving children will not starve. Soon, if the Millenial Development Goals are met, a child will starve to death only every ten seconds.

But what about the increased population? Will that mean in a certain number of years there will be increased levels of starvation, so that then twenty children will starve to death every second?

In Ghana, a lunch program at school had helped to stop much of the starvation in that country, the article said. The article didn't say where the children were starving to death.

No one is starving to death in the USA. And probably nowhere in Europe. And probably nowhere in South or Central America or the Caribbean (not sure about Haiti). In Asia, I think some people probably starve to death in North Korea, and in Myanmar (centralized planning creates famines).

In Africa, I bet, is where the great majority of the starving occurs (due to disruption of law, anarchy, and lack of grocery stores?). No starving in Ghana. Ghana's food delivery system is working. But in Somalia, in Eritrea? In Zimbabwe, again, due to centralized planning, you have a massive famine.

For the centrally-planned economies it's hard to penetrate places like Myanmar or North Korea or Zimbabwe in order to deliver food. With a sophisticated air defense for the first two, it would be hard even to do a food drop. But for places like Somalia and the southern Sudan, why not just drop Twinkies on them? Is that where starving is taking place? Would Twinkies be the best answer? If one hit you on the head, it wouldn't hurt much, and children would like them, especially the inside.

When you imagine a child that you actually know starving to death, the pain is unbearable. The almost mechanized horror of a child starving to death every five seconds creates an anaesthetized sensation, almost comic in its bad taste. And yet, it happens. Where? What's the solution? Can Lutheran Surrealism and Lutheran Surrealists inch us toward a solution?

THE ILLOGICALITY OF CHRISTIANITY

This is a post from a couple of years ago along w/ an opening comment by JH that I think we were too tired to deal with at the time:

-- I AM OFTEN reminded by non-Christians that Christianity isn't scientific, can't be proven, doesn't speak in logical terms.



Everywhere I go, I run into this THING called logic. It's supposed to be an insuperable argument, and on its own terms, it is.


That is, if you are going to believe only in what's logical, then it's only logical that you can't be a Christian.



Again -- it's not just Max. It's Christopher Hitchens, it's Richard Dawkins, it's the culture, stupid.


The problem is that Christianity IS stupid. That is, it was never an extension of Greek logic emerging from Aristotle. It was never even an extension of Jewish wisdom extending out of the OT. It's something else.


Jesus said, "I will bring to nothing the wisdom of the wise, and destroy the cleverness of the clever."


What did He mean by this?


He was ushering in the realm of the surreal. Jesus was the world's first surrealist. He ushered in a realm of the marvelous that was beyond understanding.


On a simple logic basis, it makes sense to kill a foetus. If the mother is young (as was Mary) and there was no clear dad, let's kill the baby, so Mary can go to college, and get on with her career.


If we are not powerful, and haven't got a lot of property, it makes sense that we should not ride into Jerusalem on the back of an ass, and upset all the applecarts of the city, and presume to upbraid our elders.


If we are the son of God, it makes sense that we would end up running the world, rather than being nailed to a cross to die in utter devastation.


I'm reading a book by Alain Badiou, called St. Paul. (Stanford: SUP, 2003). Badiou is a Marxist who is trying to use St. Paul to discuss the notion of "universalism." He admires St. Paul but wants to hijack the logic of St. Paul to use it as a intervention in Marxist discourse (I'm not yet done with this wonderful book so I don't know precisely where he's going).


Paul, Badiou writes, was stuck between Jewish wisdom, which consisted of signs, and Greek logic, which consisted of logical discourse.


"The philosopher knows eternal truths; the prophet knows the univocal sense of what will come (even if he delivers it only through figures, through signs). The apostle, who declares an unheard-of possibility, one dependent on an evental grace, properly speaking knows nothing" (45).


Paul's "knowledge" consists of having been blinded by grace on the road to Damascus. (Evental, in this translated text, stems from the word "eventiellement," in the French original, which means of or having to do with an event.) A single event, rather than being caught up in logic, or having looked to the future for a sign, is what determines Paul's scandalous news that he seeks to spread throughout the Roman empire.


Everywhere he is met with Greek and Jewish resistance. His only weapon is a kind of outlandish love, an eternal love that he brings into the finitude of Greek logic in order to cause it to explode, and into the communal savvy of the Jewish upper crust of Jerusalem (about to be dispersed only ten years later when they finally provoke Roman fury to its limits with their riots in the years around 60 AD, just a few years after Paul's head is lopped off and bounces thrice to herald the Trinity).


Paul declares a new kind of truth that has nothing to do with science. It is not concerned with the niceties of logic or the proof theories of science. It has nothing to do with the priesthood and its elect.


This is a new truth, one that flies past logic like a dove. It is not part of any elite. It is for the poor, and the outcast, and argues that God arrives in the form of an outcast in a tiny province, and was born in a barn, and that its only message is universal love.


Badiou cites Paul, "Knowledge will disappear!" (1st Corinthians, 13.8).


In scientific terms, in terms of knowledge, in terms of verifiability, Christianity is a form of retardation in politically correct parlance, we would have to say that it is severely "mentally challenged." It is, in the words of a current film, "religulous." But that is precisely its point. That is precisely its sublimity.


This is a beautiful message which the mentally challenged of the world are more likely to understand than the scientists and Ph.D.s. It operates at a strangely tilted angle to knowledge-centered societies, and "brings to nothing the cleverness of the clever." The clever look at it and say, "But this doesn't make sense! It must be banned! Please make it stop! It's so STOOOPID."


And to the consternation of the clever, it continues to grow. Throughout Africa, there are people who get it. It's racing through the ranks of the untouchables in India, where the number of adherents continues to grow. Christianity tumbles men and women like dominoes in order to lift them up in the name of the Lord.


This most baffling and paradoxical of religions is defiant toward Greek knowledge and toward hierarchies of wisdom. It mocks the caste system in India, terrifying and embittering the Hindu hierarchy. Even the Buddhists look upon Christianity as a bloody mess filled with pain and sorrow, and can't see past the finite aspects of blood into the eyes of eternity itself. Christianity turns the tables on everyone and everything, and the "tables once turned, keep on turning" (apologies to Mike Kettner for stealing his long-lost one-line poem, and redeploying it in a different context), never coming to right, making it difficult to eat anything and not consider it a miracle, loaves are loves, coming to light.


The Christian isn't required to be from any class, any race, or any sex. Unlike Nazism, it doesn't speak for a self-selected elite. Unlike Judaism, there is no chosen race. Unlike Marxism, it doesn't even speak for a class. It is infinite in its line of flight, constantly deterritorializing every settled structure, turning all conventions on their head, and instantiating a laughter that can only be seen as mentally challenged by the Greeks, and as impossible by the Jews.


When I read the astonishment and anger of the Christopher Hitchens', and the Richard Dawkins', I am reminded of the astonishment and anger of the authorities in Athens who laughed Paul out of the city, and of the astonishment and anger of the authorities in Jerusalem, who had Christ put to death for the audacity of his hope.


But in the strange face of Jesus I nevertheless see something infinite, something that can never be known, something so vast and puzzling, that the human mind looks upon it, and can only combust before its endless surrealism. Hosannah! Hosannah in the highest!

NOTE: JOHN HANSON WROTE A REBUTTAL OR REJOINDER IN THE COMMENTS (Oct. 14, 2008) WHICH I THINK IS IMPORTANT IN OUR DEBATE ABOUT THE reasonableness OF CHRISTIANITY Vs. THAT OF ISLAM:

i'm just thinking in broad sweeps here this morning
the early church fathers justin athanasius jerome basil gregorys of nyssa and nazianzen john chrysostom ignatius of antioch macarius florentius theodoros of mopsuestia and many others
all used very logical frameworks within which to express their theological awareness

one can easily launch into mystical reference with how mysterious the faith is but in human terms it has been worked out within the realm of rational thought
then
the scholastics who revived retained and creatively built upon a philosophical tradition already 1500 yrs old
the various treatises on the TRINITY
then later the interminable arguments jesuits waged with the world of doubters in the 16th and 17th centuries all attest to the reliance on sound rational argument for the dictates of christianity
without actuslly ignoring the given precept of god's unknowability
men have applied their minds to understanding what has been given to man by way of reason and revelation

it is sort of romantic to get lost in the ethers of mysticism and ecstatic possibilites...at some point when contemplating god we all just want to swoon in the arms of reckless abandonment to the possibility of love

but the "meat" of christianity is something rather existential and boring...the working out of the everyday world by individuals and communities as a way of continually expressing wonder and hope without descending into hapless mental derangement over the matter...which i will admit happens sometimes

the face of the dying christ is too much to look upon
but it is asking a very logical question:
"do you love me"?
he's even willing to express in that look:
i'm willing to agree that the conditions right now are not too friendly and i would understand if you have to look away

but still the heart's logic
is rooted in the events
of reality lived by real humans

NONSENSE POETRY CONTEST

This contest will close on 9/11, now known as Patriot Day. All the usual rules apply: no more than 21 lines, as many poems as you want can be entered.

Poem entries will close at midnight on 9/11 and votes (one per entrant, but you can't vote for your own poem) will be tallied on 9/12.

The idea is that nonsense is a form of patriotism in that it's a freedom we enjoy thanks to our soldiers, and amounts to nothing other than freedom itself. Don't ask me why that's patriotism. It seems patriotic to me!

HEADLIGHTS

The road curves
Cars collide,

Waterfalls fall,
Clouds cloud,
Rivers arrive.

The ankle
Is macaroni,

The 3-dollar bill
Is balogna.