Ernst Haeckel

Last night I was looking for something else when I came on the paintings of Ernst Haeckel, and immediately forgot what I was looking for. Haeckel was a Lamarckian friend of Darwin who was smitten with the theory of evolution, and decided to paint the variety of forms, publishing a book called Art Forms of Nature.

He died in 1907. The surrealists appreciated his work.

I love how the left likes to go after the right on the evolution thing, which is meant to undermine the entirety of Christianity. If Genesis is wrong, then all of Christianity is wrong, and thus only naturalness can be a reason for everything and Christianity is unnatural, therefore anyone who believes in it is a fool.

I am a fool.

But, I like Ernst Haeckel's paintings.

One of the ways I like to get out of the scientists' wrestling hold is to argue that all of nature is God's canvas, and the different periods of evolution are like the different periods in Picasso's work. Then they say, well, that means you think all the pain of evolution is worth it -- each creature fighting for its life, struggling to attain supremacy over its predators, developing hard shells, larger teeth, fleeter feet, and wilier brains. All that is God's work?

God knows, I say, suggesting that it is above my pay grade to understand the entirety of planetary life from His perspective. I do note that the left is sympathetic to other mammals and is all Christian about saving foxes from their natural predators, and loving birds, collecting Audubon and putting up birdhouses. There seems to be a soft spot in their heads for Nature.

Haeckel apparently invented the term "ecology."

Luther stood up for animals, and said we shouldn't hunt them for fun. He also said that if this was the last day on earth, and he was alive, he would plant a tree.

How do you love pear trees, and not the carpenter ant? How do we love the lamb, and not the wild boar (esp. as it chases us up a tree)? Tusk, tusk. How do we love hummingbirds, and not the AIDS virus? The left believes that all of creation is sacred and beautiful, as part of Gaia. That is, until they get Lyme Disease from hiking (1% of Americans now have Lyme but hey it's natural so let's celebrate it).

If you love nature so much why don't you marry it?

POSTUM, a follow-up report

In 2008, I noticed that Postum had been pulled from the Wal-Mart shelves. It was an unpopular drink, and there were never more than three or four glass jars of the stuff. I liked it, because it didn't have caffeine, and it tasted like cardboard. I like the taste of cardboard.

It filled me up, and only had 5 calories.

I was bitter when they pulled it. But yesterday I had some time on my hands and decided to do follow-up research to see if any other information had come out as to why the Post company had pulled the product. It turns out that Postum had a massive amount of a cancer-causing agent in it called Acrylamide. I had never heard of this substance before. There is a long list of food that has this substance in it. Popcorn has about 185. 5000 for Postum, three thousand more points than for any other item in the list.

http://www.oehha.ca.gov/prop65/law/pdf_zip/acrylamideintakeReport.pdf

It was fairly disturbing. Apparently, anything that is baked hard develops these acrylamides. I still don't know precisely what it is that happens. Some people claim that because of acrylamides you should only eat raw vegetables, and never use the microwave. Online you get these scary sites that say if you microwave food it's like dropping a nuclear bomb on it and eating the fallout. The USDA says that the microwave is safe.

I had heard that you shouldn't grill food because even a touch of black crust and you have a carcinogen. But now almost everything that is fried or baked seems to have these acrylamides. And Postum topped out all other items. Which is probably why the substance was quietly pulled in 2008. Geez, I was quietly patting myself on the back for drinking something healthy even though it was terrible to taste. I had gotten used to the goop.

Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists also liked it, as a caffeine alternative hot drink. I felt I had solidarity with these outfits through this antiquated drink, and thought I was on to something.

I'm drinking licorice tea this morning. As the kids play with all their new toys, and we open up our packages and get the jigsaw puzzles going, it's important too that we be careful what we eat and drink if we wish to have more mornings like these with our families.

AESTHETICS OF NONAGENARIANS

I picked up a book called Aesthetics: A Graphic Guide, by Christopher Kul-Want. He gives short shrift to Augustine and Plato, then spends a hundred pages on the likes of Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard. There is a sense even in the term "avant-garde" that there is a way to be ahead of the culture, and to hector the culture forward.

I think this is wrong.

One of the things I like about ancient Japanese tea ceremonies is that they appear timeless. There's no great hurry to get anywhere.

We are all in some great hurry to arrive at a new state, and to agitate for it, and to move "progressively" toward some enlightened new state of tolerance where everything goes, especially in terms of the liberation of the libido (thought to be a great plus since Freud's cocaine-induced ramblings at the turn of the last century turned artists toward explorations of weirder and more solipsistic perversions).

Result: many of our "greatest" artists died young. Jim Morrison loved Rimbaud. I can't really take too much of either of them. I prefer artists who become at least nonagenarians. Wodehouse died at 94. I like his novels probably best out of the 20th century. He wrote about a hundred of them. I like the state they put me in.

Kul-Want describes many of the fascinating avant-gardists in his book, but never mentions Pierre Klossowski, who also lived into his nineties.

I'm quite interested in the art and poetry of the elderly. I think there's probably some kind of wisdom in it that you can't find among the fashion plates of the boho and Soho and hohoho communities. I like Santa Claus, because he's depicted as an elderly fellow who likes animals and children (but isn't inappropriate toward them).

I think aesthetics should break through to a timeless state. I like Sophocles' plays, especially the ones he wrote at age 80 or more.

I saw a neat documentary about Yoba Linda, or somethng like that, a 7th Day Adventist town near L.A., where people live to be about ten years older upon point of death than in most places. They eat a vegetarian diet, exercise quite a bit, and they have good social networks. There were four of these places studied by a guy named Buettner:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-jk9ni4XWk&feature=related

I'm not sure we can really save the avant-garde communities. They seem to want to revel in sin, and in unlikely sexual scenarios, and to promote what seems like the culture of death. I find it dull. One aspect of the surrealists that I could never understand is their promotion of suicide as an avant-garde act. I find that repellent.

I do like one of their writers enormously: Philippe Soupault. He lived to be 93.

I don't know why: I just like writers and artists who live a long life and who are still making art at the end of it.

JUDGES

Judges and lawyers have more power than anyone else in America. All of America voted in 2000 but a few judges determined the outcome. Millions of people voted for and against Prop. 8 but one person determined the outcome.

Hundreds of people send their poetry books to a contest, and a judge chooses one of them.

When we watch American Idol, we watch the Judges choose a winner.

It's strange that now when so many question judgment, and the ability to judge, and say, Don't Judge, that so many crucial things are decided by judges.

More and more the left has decided that everything is relative, and there is no God, and there is no final authority. So they've realized that if they control the judges, their viewpoint will prevail. This probably started with bussing. At least that's the first time it affected me personally. I was in a good school but was bussed an hour away into a minority school district where I was afraid to go to the bathroom for fear of getting stabbed. Some kid I knew had apparently had this happen to him. At least that was the story. I was only 10, so I don't know if it's true. But it was what we heard. I had no idea why I had to say goodbye to all my friends at the good school with the good teachers. Some judge decided that bussing was good, and the whole nation was rerouted out of its neighborhoods to promote peace and brotherly love. My family moved to a small town to escape bussing. But first I endured two lost years when my only concern was to keep from getting gang-banged in the hallways between classes.

The right keeps arguing against judicial activism, because the right believes in God and the People as the sources of authority. The left has correctly perceived that everything is a matter of who's at the switch. The judges are at the switch.

We have had aristocracies and meritocracies and kleptocracies and monarchies, and there is probably a word that means rule by a Judge, or rule by Judges, but I don't know it, and am too lazy to look it up. Whatever it is, that's where we're going. In a sense, it's back to Rome itself, when Nero was judge and jury even if he left the execution to someone else (until it came to himself, in which case he committed suicide). Is it true that as we leave behind the ability to judge, and no longer believe it's possible to do it fairly, that we in turn have turned to judges, to get them to give our agenda a green light?

Just as we no longer believe in a higher Law, or in universals, we now have judges who arbitrarily decide yeah or nay, up or down. Even Obamacare has been thrown out by a judge. Hundreds of thousands of man hours go into a law, and then a judge puts his thumb up or down. I like it when it goes my way, and don't like it when it doesn't, but I wonder why anyone bothers to do all the grunt work if at the end the judge will decide without reference to any truth rather than what he or she wanted all along.

What I don't quite understand is how this has developed. When someone judges, it's not the final say, but it's so expensive to grant a retrial. There are courts of appeal. There are circles of judgement. At each level, newspapers weigh in. Television stations weigh in. Some judges are in for life, like in the Supreme Court. Some are appointed, and some are voted in. Unlike the House and the Senate, which I largely understand, I don't understand all the different courts. Towns, counties, states, cities, have courts. There are also military courts, and federal and national courts. There is a civil court and I think the other kind has another name. I don't know what an appelate court is, and I don't understand the judicial regions of the country. There are about ten of them I think. Do all of them have their own prison systems?

I've never been on trial, and have never had any friend of mine who ended up in prison. I knew someone once who knew someone who was a guard at a small prison. I like prisons and I like the police, but I don't know any criminals who have done time.

I do know that everybody always has everybody else on trial. We judge one another by dress, by how well they follow the Ten Commandments, or how cool they look. We judge by how much money a person has, and by how friendly he or she is, or whether or not they can use decent grammar. We judge everybody. Jesus said not to judge, and yet he himself judged everybody he came in contact with (sometimes he found something of merit in people that no one else would consider meritorious). He was brilliant at this his whole life, surprising everyone with his weird judgements, and his strange way of turning everything upside down. Pilate judged him, but Pilate ended up as the bad guy, and his wife said, we're goners in perpetuity thanks to your judgement, Pilate. We'll be railroaded to hell by God Almighty. Nice going.

Judgement seems to rush toward absolute relativism on the one hand and absolute universalism on the other hand. Is there finally a higher law? Without justice, no society can possibly survive. With judges pulling judgements seemingly out of their asses, it's hard to understand how the rest of us are supposed to take law seriously.

We seem to want it both ways. We are each our own personal Nero. But no one has as much power as Nero, except a judge. It seems arbitary who gets to be a judge, and their judgement appears to be arbitrary and merely personal, rather than universal.

One of the reasons I find God so appealing is that I want an omniscient God who will judge each one of us. I find this makes sense of the world, and that nothing else does.

CHRISTMAS POEMS

Christmas Poetry Contest Closes Christmas Day at midnight, the 25th, 2010, and voting occurs on the 26th. You can only vote for one poem, not yours. Keep your poems short, less than eight lines. Anyone entering a poem longer than eight lines will be arrested and forced to work as Santa's slave in perpetual bondage. [NB: contest extended to January 6th, 2011, by request of JH.]

WALKING THROUGH A PAPERWEIGHT

Walking home in the snow the dark houses
Two of my children now know that Santa is simulacral
And two do not

Probability of Crime As Rationale for a Stop

I was sitting in a coffee shop today eating paninis and overheard a conversation at the next table. It was two large Hispanic men who were talking about getting pulled over by cops, and how they were mad, but never showed it to the police, just simply backed off. I couldn't hear very clearly what they were saying, and couldn't place the men. There was a certain warmth to the guys. They didn't seem like criminals. One of them wore glasses. When they left, they scrupulously cleaned up after themselves, took all their plates and plastic to the bins, and left their table immaculate.

I wondered about the prevalence of pull over of various minorities, and how they would be treated in various locales, by various police officers.

I could never of course be a police officer. I can't stand policing, and hate confrontation.

But I do it with my children, or with my students, or with anyone over whom I have authority, and am in some sense responsible for (including neighborhood kids who are playing in my house).

I try to be firm, clear, and kind, but keep the principle in mind. With kids I try to keep their safety and their overall good in mind. With students, I sometimes have to police a class: throwing out a disruptive student, or charging a student with cheating on a test, or plagiarizing a paper. I have to make sure they are learning, since that is what they are all there for, presumably, and what they will want after they have graduated. With kids, the job is to enjoy them, but to also make sure that when they are grown they are functional adults.

The Arizona law that was challenged by Obama as being out of line with the Constitution might lead to a probability of police pulling over more Hispanics than is warranted. That would be bad, if they were innocent law-aiding citizens. But if you pulled someone over and asked for their papers, simply on account of being Hispanic, how often would the probability be that they were here illegally? If there are really 20 million illegal Hispanics in the country, wouldn't the probability be at least 51-49? With a statistical probability that is that high, and with the border unrest now including kidnapping, murder, and drug infestation, it would seem that the police ought to be able to do something, even if they would sometimes capture a legal citizen in their net. Likelihood of illegality has been reached at 51%, if the numbers are what people say they are. If the citizen had papers, they would soon be released, and this would restore safety and sanity to Arizona within a matter of months.

Of course that means that up to 49% would be stopped for no good reason except that of belonging to a group that has a high prevalence of illegality, but the inconvenience to those few would be good for the majority, and majority rules.

In France, I often saw the flics busting black men at the Les Halles metro. Some would bolt and run. Once one of them knocked into me and we tangled and fell over and over, and the cops thanked me, even though my papers were themselves outdated, and I was technically illegal. My tourist visa had expired, but I still had money and I was working as an English tutor, but not for money. I was getting lunches and visits to museums paid for. I wasn't legal so I didn't ask anyone for money, since I wasn't legally entitled to work. I would not have wanted to break the law of the country. However, I was on several occasions too lazy to leave the country every three months in order to get my tourist visa updated. So there was the question of the spill. Should I have also had my papers checked? I spoke quite good French, and was polite, and hadn't run from the police officers and was cooperative, but was also from a group that wasn't hanging out in the metro mugging tourists, but was myself clearly a tourist.

I hadn't intended to stop the man since I was in my usual otherworldly state and wasn't actually aware of the world around me. I was on my way to the Pompidou Centre in order to look at a sculpture by Victor Brauner of a tricycle that had the shadow of a screw attached to it. Meanwhile, a surreal event with a criminal trying to escape the long arm of the law was taking place behind me. He just barrelled into me, and we did a cartwheel together in the year 1987. I broke my glasses in the tumult. I was low on money so for several weeks I had to use the broken glasses as well as I could to read. Then, a check arrived from some arts agency in NYC and I was able to get my glasses fixed, and go and get my visa renewed.

Pulling people over without suspicion to check their papers is somewhat like checking everyone for bombs at the airport, including patting down their private parts, and photographing their underthings.

This is fairly invasive and perhaps unfairly invasive.

Should the police and the airport people have the authority to go after specifically suspicious people? Should they just check people randomly? Who would want to do such a job? I grant that someone has to do it to keep the country and the airports safe, but I would sure hate to do it, and am very appreciative of those who do.

I personally think that checkers should use profiling, and stop persons according to their probability of being illegal or of doing something illegal. I believe in the police and think they are almost always doing the best they can not to waste their own or other people's time with unlikely stops out of sheer nastiness.

We use statistics in a positive way all the time. If a major league team wants to hire a batter they'll check the batting average and number of games played per season. They'll want a healthy batter who can hit home runs and singles on a reliable basis. They will hire pitchers who have a winning record. When you hear a hit song by a singer, you might listen to another song to see if it's another hit. We all play the percentages all the time. No one wants to marry a slut because the chance of that person remaining a slut is high.

But somehow the government isn't supposed to play percentages, and this is why I think the government doesn't work. We want the government not to hire the best person, but a person that no one in business would have hired, out of fairness. We want the government to give contracts to the lowest bidder not to the person who would do the best job, so we get crummy government work that is shortsighted economically.

We won't let the police do their jobs because we're afraid they will arrest people willy nilly and harass and rape for the sheer hell of it. There is something going on about fear of totalitarian states, and the notion of the police states of Nazi Germany, and this continues to bother the left. But if you have a government that can still vote, and if you have newspapers and other institutions that can legally stand up to the police, and if even the police can be investigated, and imprisoned, I think this can in turn keep the police in check. I think we have this. We don't have a one-party state. We have a two-party state. So, we're safe, but could be even safer if there weren't so many restrictions on the police and so much suspicion with regard to how they will behave.

I trust that the police will not behave as criminals, more often than they will arrest the bad guys and keep them off the streets. There might be some way to maximize this, but simply tying their hands with regulations isn't that. It's like saying to parents, you can't discipline your kids. Or like saying to teachers, you must tolerate any kind of malfeasance on the part of your students.

We ought to let the police do their job and police.

SUNY-ALBANY CLOSES FRENCH AND CLASSICS

SUNY-Albany cut its French and Classics programs this year.

What are they up to up there?

For me, French is a valuable language. I've probably read several thousand books in that language, and lived in Paris for a year. I loved that city! When you learn a language, it's to read the literature and travel in that culture, I should assume.

Now of course dead languages don't offer the physical capability of actual travel, other than mental. But that's significant. The ancient Greeks wrote tremendous things. Even the Romans wrote good things.

A friend of mine suggested that far more valuable than French would be Arabic. But if you were a woman, why on earth would you wish to study Arabic? What would it offer you? Upon graduation, would you get a burkha and a clitorectomy, and move to Saudi Arabia, where you couldn't go outside without supervision?

I grant that someone needs to study that language so we can monitor the situation. But what aesthetic pleasures would the language offer?

If you were a woman, you could only speak with other women, or else you'd be considered a whore, and get yourself raped and killed. That's value added education.

If you were a man, you could only speak with other men, and your job would be to not get converted.

The men would either convert you or kill you. That sounds like fun. From the basic conversation book:

"Infidel, you must convert!"

"I won't!"

"Then die!"

(Muffled screams.)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali says there are fewer than 300 books published in the entirety of Islam every year. So what would you read if you could read that language? this would presumably include Pashto, Farsi, and all the other languages of Islam.

Are there newspapers with diverse viewpoints?

Do they publish comic novels by women in Tehran these days?

Do they publish comic novels anywhere in the Islamic world?

Who is the Wodehouse of Islam?

I assume that if you're going to learn to read another language, you would first fall in love with the culture, and then by way of deepening and intensifying that love, you'd learn to read their literature, just as you would have a long conversation with someone you loved. A big part of love is sharing laughs.

I can't see how you would do this with Arabic.

I could see how you would do this with French.

Or even with Classics. Aristophanes is a hoot. Plautus was a hoot.

Since there are so few books published, why would anybody want to enter the Arabic world? Ali claims that most of the books are just commentaries on the Koran. sounds like a barrel of laughs.

If you became a Muslim, of course you'd want to do this, since you'd fallen in love with the one who can't be drawn.

Seriously, I'm sorry they scrapped the French program at SUNY-Albany. Apparently, there weren't many people taking the program. They were graduating just a few students every year. I don't know why. Maybe there wasn't enough outreach.

So let's replace it with Arabic?

I can imagine millions of women students lining up to take COMIC NOVELS OF SAUDI ARABIAN WOMEN WRITERS, PART II.

I see the closure as part of the damnation of the west by the so-called postcolonials. The west is evil. Hey ho, hey ho, western civ has got to go, as the Maoists chanted on the ramparts of 1968.

So let's study Arabic, and see if we can get in on their comic literature. Seems like a great idea. Still, before we leap in and commit ten years to the project, who is their Jane Austen?

WCW AND HIGHER VALUES

WCW's empirical poetry and just the facts m'am style left on the cutting room floor all discussion of values. This is in a sense exactly what the American Medical Association was accused of doing -- neglecting the meta-physical dimension of health and illness.

ADD A CHARACTER TO THE BIBLE

If you could add a character to the Bible, who would you add?

At the Virgin Birth, I would add the Communist Cousin from Kansas to the Three Wise Men.

This would appear in the Simplified Lutheran Surrealist Translation.

COMPETITION AND EQUALITY: SPORT AND RELIGION

There is one strong force in human society.

This is the need to separate oneself from the common masses and to move upwards in the pecking order. As a social species, we differentiate from the rest through outstanding achievements in sports, arts, personal beauty, money-making, etc.

Some of these achievements can be created through hard work, some through natural talent, some of it is a genetic legacy.

Michael Jordan was the best basketball player possibly ever. He wasn't that good at first, but worked at it and became the best. Even LeBron James and Kobe Bryant are doofuses by comparison.

This, most people think, is a legitimate achievement. There was no Affirmative Action involved, there was no legacy that allowed him to piggyback his grandpa's success, it was just plain merit based on hard work and individual genius.

Some examples of illegitimate merit would include the caste system of India in which those on top (the Brahmin) were supposedly divinities in human form. This is similar to the notion of the Divine Right of Kings, or to the idea that slaveholders held that the children of Ham were in bondage in perpetuity for some obscure crime in the OT.

So there is legitimate merit and illegitimate merit.

In sports, this is relatively clear. Those who play basketball well, can do this in such a way that the scoreboards reflect their level of play.

In the arts, it is less clear. Some scumbags might take over the arts, or one section of it, by operating as a group: writing good reviews of one another's work, and moving through the field like a phalanx, silencing critics, taking over funding agencies, distributing the goods only to themselves.

In a classroom a teacher should set clear standards of merit and be objective.

In law, a judge should attempt to decide on the merits of the case, rather than let personal prejudices decide the outcome.

Objective merit is important as it makes people work harder. Lutheran Surrealism believes in meritocracy, rather than in aristocracy, or in the divinity of given groups whether they be based on race, gender, and class, or on disability, or some other outward mark.

There is another force in society that is weak.

This force wants everyone to be equal.

Communists speak in the name of this secondary force, and often try to kill everyone who doesn't believe in it (Pol Pot is the most salient example). The communists redistribute grades, money, beauty (mandating dreary dress) and other marks of beauty so that there is sameness, and no pecking order. But the pecking order reasserts itself into an inner and outer group. Progressives think that because they are more progressive (closer to what God intended), that they are divinities in human form. You can get a glimpse of them in this video:

Steve Martin plays a progressive Marxist thrown back into Egypt to illustrate the progressivist as Pharoah:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgTPH5y1-ZI

People naturally form into pyramids (is this the reason the pyramids were originally built? to show that there IS a human pyramid and that it was built by slaves to illustrate the greatness of the pharoahs and their consorts mummified therein). The pyramids are colossally beautiful depictions of an ugly fact about human nature: we want to build pyramids to our greatness, and to believe we are great, even if it seems stupid and ugly and nonegalitarian. Mao and Stalin and Lenin were all enbaumed, just like the pharoahs, and meant to be kept in perpetuity as an exemplum of human perfection and divinity. Kim Jong-Il, likewise. Try to remind Robert Mugabe that he's only human and see what happens.

I don't think you can take the need for pyramids of achievement away from people, but you can ask whether or not a given pyramid is legitimate.

In sports (with the exception that a coach lets his son play more than others who are more deserving) talent outs. (In some cases as in the Maravich case, the son really was the best player on the team, so I'm not indicting all coach-player father-son combinations.)

In the arts, merit is less clear. Having amazing people skills, as Warhol did, is good, but also being able to fit into a given phalanx of people, probably also helps. Warhol and many of his art critics such as Geldzahl moved in the same social circles and saw one another as gods in human form.

The great rugby scrums of race, gender and class are arranged sportively, but are they really fair? Do they attempt to substitute a newly divine group (with the ONE as their representative) for a newly sidelined divine group (WASPS)?

Outside of the realm of sports, it is difficult to discover true merit.

I think this explains the fascination of sports in the arts, and why we see in films such as Victory (1981) in which POWs play a soccer game against Germany's finest in Nazi-occupied Paris. Heart, and talent, even in terrible conditions, vie to be the best with the self-proclaimed master race.

Talent triumphs (to a degree).

In Invictus, a more recent film, something similar takes place in which a black team plays a white team (I haven't seen this film, but I assume it illustrates my thesis).

Jesse Owens running in the 1936 Olympics helped to challenge the Master Race's notion of their own triumphal place in the human hierarchy.

Art is often weak in its portrayals of justice, and is often unjust insofar as certain people have insider tracks. It is often considered elitist, and therefore to be merely one more way for the wealthy to lord it over the poor. Some novelists from wealthy families with insider tracks to education, go to Harvard and the other Ivies and end up garnering prizes through their connections with others who end up going into publishing. Outsiders have relatively little chance against them.

IQ tests are also thought to be elitist.

Marxism anointed the poor, so some of the rich dressed up as the poor and tried to get a double whammy. Beat writers went to excellent schools (and some of them came from money): Harvard (Burroughs and Corso), Columbia (Kerouac and Ginsberg). Beats who went to other schools or didn't go to school, were less well-placed, and are comparatively unanointed in the pantheon).

Art is at its best when it depicts sports. Sports reveal the true merit in any given person, or in any given group. Art should be more often about sports.

Art and sports were not so divorced in ancient Greece.

I'm not saying that sports stars should become our new gods, or that they should be entitled to act like them. Tiger Woods shows where that leads: to a golf club upside the head.

The Greeks liked sports because it has SOMETHING to do with Democracy. Fairness, decency (be a good sport), in which the real nature of a person comes forward. Even in Rome this was held to be true (think of the film Gladiator in which Emperor Commodious wants to fight Crowe's character in the Coliseum to show his true worth, but skews the process by wounding Crowe's character in advance, and yet he's still killed in the contest). We like it when true merit disestablishes false merit. In sports, more than in any other arena, we frequently see this to be the case.

Christianity argues that we should try to see one another as equals. This creates solidarity. But it is a weak force. Perhaps Christianity can only give us equality of opportunity. Each person has infinite value and is made in the image of God. It's not just a few, it's all. If that's the case, why do we still play sports?

Why do we exult when our team wins?

Why did the feminists exult when Billy Jean King beat Bobby Riggs?

Why do we look at comparative incomes?

Why are we so unhappy with the equality scenario?

The Myth America Contest

Write a poem about the myth of America. Deadline is Sunday the 12th of December, at midnight.

Poems can reference Gettysburg, Lincoln Monument, Central Park (NYC), Cooperstown NY, Harper's Ferry, Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, Valley Forge, or other defining places or events in American History. Here's a few jots and jags to start an idea for you.

July: Last Baseball Game

Tristan knocked a shot past the short-stop
And made it to second standing up

10 million of 20 billion is expressed as .0005
As a fraction, but as .05 as a percentage

The country is ten trillion in debt

I sit in my chair and burp
Voter fraud in Ohio
Allegations of felonies.

Say it ain't so, Joe.

My head itches.

My gut's a little thick.

The spiraling economy
A perpetual motion machine
Dots & curlicues

The country seesaws red and blue
Purple, apoplectic

Everything says Made In China

A fly inches along the Roman nose of the sleeping Senator

The boulevards bristle with Eastery paranoia.

Rabbits in the tree.

REFUDIATE: OXFORD DICTIONARY'S WORD OF THE YEAR

Oxford's word of the year is "refudiate," a term popularized by Sarah Palin, but which dates back to printed sources in the 1890s. More on the term, and its close contenders, is here at the Oxford web page:

http://oxforddictionaries.com/page/woty_us

It's unusual for anyone to make up a term by themselves. Shakespeare's writings coin 9000 words, but few of us will contribute a permanent word. It's not even clear that Palin's neologism will catch on and become widespread in usage.

One of Lutheran Surrealism's deepest disappointments is that aside from our actual name, which dates from the 1990s when it was first used in the Exquisite Corpse web conversation, we haven't really added any new terms to the language.

We did seek to bring TWO KINGDOMS into widespread usage within humanities discourse as part of our attempt to sideline one kingdom philosophies such as Marxism and Calvinism.

But we've been refudiated!

Refudiation actually represents a stronger verb, or a stronger intention, than to merely ignore.

Aside from this blog, and its handful of readers, most of whom refudiate our very notions, one and all, I have been unable to smuggle this manner of thinking into the central thought of literary journals. Which is not to say that I've given up on this idea, but just that I have yet to pick the lock.

Palin has such enormous media clout -- through her vice-presidential run, her daughter's successful dance season on Dancing with the Stars, and now her own hit TV show Alaska -- that my blog cannot contend with her media savvy. Perhaps if I could somehow get Sarah Palin to say "what we need in the humanities is to think more about two kingdoms," I could get on with something else.

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In other news, several of my published poems over the last year have dealt with sports. One such venture was published in a beautifully designed journal titled AETHLON, Journal of Sports Literature, published by East Tennessee University. This poem was entitled "Poetry & Motion" and references Zeno, the Eleatic philosopher who argued that motion and time were equally impossible. I am halfway through Zeno's Paradox: Unraveling the Ancient Mystery Behind the Science of Space and Time, by Joseph Mazur (Plume 2008) in an attempt to understand my poem.

Motion means to move from one place or state to another. A growing vegetable can be seen to move. If something deteriorates (if an avocado deteriorates) it is also in motion. Displacement counts! Mazur makes the case that time and motion are difficult to measure, but that we are getting better at it. Before we had watches, and steady energy devices such as batteries, people used water and sand in clepsydras and sand clocks. But they had to be turned over, and couldn't be used so easily as watches. My watch has been on my hand for close to a year, and although it is deteriorating, it is not in need of a new battery (how many remember when we used to have to wind the spring?).

The medieval era men who had to rewind the springs of the big town clocks.

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Another sports story that appeared was in Ampersand, an online journal. Entitled The Champ, it is about a boxer:

http://ampersand-books.com/ampersand-review/

I first wrote this story about thirty years ago, but recently discovered it in an old cardboard box, & found it funny enough, & sent it off to the editor (a chap named Jason who writes witty letters).

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I have never actually boxed, nor been in a physical fight. I don't believe in punching, and have never punched anyone. If you punch the other person and hurt them, you are a criminal. Plus, you will probably hurt your hand. If they punch and hurt you, then what's the use of that? I can't see any good in punching other people. I prefer talking with the other person, and recommending that they watch where they are going, and if they're too thick, I just avoid them. If they press on, I would call the cops, I suppose. (It may seem in the story that I am the Champ, or the boxer, in question, since the narrator uses the term "I" and some readers may confuse me with the narrator. However, I am not a pugilist.)

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Which reminds me of basketball, another game I can't stand to play, because you get rib bruises. Will LeBron James and the Heat get going this year? I don't think LeBron James will ever matter. There is the great physical talent, but I don't think he has the sharp focus needed, and which you can find in Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant. I think LeBron loses concentration in clutch moments.

He reminds me of the windmill dunks of Shawn Kemp when I watch him. All talent and no strategy. No thinking.

In this case, we don't have to personally refudiate LeBron, but wonder if the game itself will reject His Awesomeness and instead install a perhaps less stellar player who can think. Many terms have been coined to indicate this much needed quality. "Mental toughness," is one of these. Refudiate that.

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When I speak in French with someone else, I become aware that they tend to go back to the same words over and over, but that these words, which are the cornerstones of their vocabulary, are different for each person. What words do I use over and over? What key terms define my thinking? What key terms define yours? In philosophy Heidegger uses the term "etre" for instance, over and over. People's key words would seem to indicate a philosophy.

60s adages and attitudes critiqued

1. "Make love not war," came to mean the wish to get "laid," outside of any longterm commitment. Love became a synonym for an orgasm outside of any meaningful context, or mutual caring.

Like fast food, the idea was to stuff one's own face ASAP.
Like not caring what happened to the Vietnamese.
The evolution of selfishness in one area were seen as symptoms in others:
Abortion, and euthanasia, and suicide.
Diseases (the government should fix my sexual diseases, and pay for my abortions).

2. "'Sup?" Became the new mode of address.

The form of address used to be, "How are you?"

This was changed in the sixties to the context of getting high. What is up? What is high in this area that I can horn in on? The highs of various things: sex, drugs, and rock n roll.

Stand-up comedy replaced the sermon. Piety became impiety. Reverence became irreverence. The notion of the high, and the orgasm became the new communion wafer of a church of selfish solipsistic pagan communism. The event "'Sup?" replaced the state of being in relationship to God "How are you?" has all but disappeared.

3. "Love of nature" became zoophilia, or bestiality. Nonhuman diseases advanced through the human sphere, and people became more animalistic. Sports replaced farming. Barn-building was no longer a community issue. Instead the people of the sixties turned toward art. Art became a kick, but a solipsistic kick divorced from a wish to understand or be in communion with God.

Beauty became an end in itself, the thing in itself, it became synonymous with the orgasm.

Nature tourism became a kick.

French philosophy becomes cool: Foucault said that there should be no such thing as a sexual crime. It's all good. Whatever gets you through the night. Locke and Smith are opened by Keynes, and savings deposits disappear. Banks no longer have money, they have credit.

4. "All you need is love." Simplification of lyrics slurred by instrumentation that is too loud. The leader of Black Sabbath bites the head off a chicken. (Love becomes something savory and desire-based, but innerly empty, like the empty calories that come to dominate the palate in cereal boxes in which the primary ingredient is sugar. Sugar, becomes the way people talk about the one they "love.")

Food becomes louder: snack food and vending machines and microwaved dinners replace family meals and conversation and concern for one another. Candy is popular. 57 new varieties of ice cream. The notion of "fun" replaces the "work ethic."

Candy replaces nourishing food.

Henry Miller and Mickey Spillane replace Isaiah.

Food becomes entertainment: cheese doodles! Pretzels! Animal crackers! Caramel popcorn.

Spectacle replaces ethos.

5. The explosion of flavors in the snack machines is equaled by the explosion of drug use, promiscuity, and the 57 new varieties of religious sect in the name of diversity (fun), while divorce (plentifulness and emptiness) becomes the new norm. Children turn to sno-cones, Sponge-Bob, yogurt-sticks, and get green gooey eyeballs to distract them from the problem that their father has left. A consensus of the new left centers on Zen as the elevation of couch potato-dom to an art form as men and women look for "perfect moments" outside of meaningful narrative.

"What a rip-off!" is often heard, because the economy turns to quick knock-offs and rip-offs: pet rocks, cotton candy, steroid-enhanced baseball players, plastic surgery, haiku, telling jokes, Tarot Readings, and giggling while sharing a joint.

6. Against this tendency to turn life into a sit-com stands the old Protestant religions. "What God has united man must not divide" (Matt 19: 4-6).

"Oh man that's so square" the hipster sayeth in response.

"My kingdom is not of this world."

"Mine, neither, dude."

Obama's mother Stanley divorced twice.

Divorce goes over 50% in many communities, becoming the new norm.

"Love never ends." Corinthians 13:8.

7. "Peace," came to mean we're not willing to fight for anything. Hitlerism triumphs in the universities. The superiority of nearly every splinter group! All humility gone, all sense of fallenness disappears, as everything and everyone falls apart, & waist lines blow up to absurd new proportions, until the Callipygian Venus looks like a realistic sculpture of a contemporary woman.

8. The pilgrims were an amazing group. Once a year we eat like them (larger portions?) while the rest of the year we snack on cheese doodles. What would the pilgrims think of cheese doodles and saying to each other, "'Sup?"

Was their central value, "Fun"?

LIFE

I'm not sure how to define, "Life."

Webster's dodges, "The quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body."

So what is that "quality"?

In order to eat, we must eat living things, whether they be beans or tomatoes or turkeys or other people.

Life lives on life. And yet, in the afterlife we will supposedly be separated from the chain of incarnation that Darwinians characterize as accidental, arising from algae, and from a spurious accident of some kind, that then gets more and more complicated through competition of the fittest until we reach our own kind who can compete on blogs in terms of argument. A spiritual existence would also qualify apparently as "life" but will we still have access to the internet after death?

I don't know of any internet ghosts who contribute to blog discussions (not sure about one individual).

Jesus arose from the dead. He still cooked food for the apostles.

Philosopher Peter Singer at Princeton argues that it is unethical to eat anything that suffers in the process of eating it. So he argues that it's ok to eat a clam (no nervous system), but not to eat a horse or pig, unless no pain attended the horse or pig's upbringing or its slaughter. The horse or pig should have had a perfectly satisfying life, composed of good playtime, good bedtime stories, and decent repasts, as well as comfortable shelter and a whole lotta love.

Meanwhile, he thinks it's ok to kill babies through abortion if that is the mother's will.

Is life accidental in its origin, or was there some design to the cosmos, and to our place in it?

What IS life?

What IS death?

Is there something we're supposed to accomplish here while it lasts?