CIRCLES AND SQUARES

CDs are round, as are wedding rings, tires, and software. Generally, when we put liquids into containers, the containers are round, presumably because edges are easier for leaks. The roundedness is a durable design. We get better mileage out of circular tires than we would out of oval or square ones.

But why is the soul also generally depicted as round?

We typically think of flying saucers as round, presumably to help them with the drag of outer space. But I didn't think there was very much if any drag in outer space.

What exactly does a hard drive look like? Is its central component spherical? When I hear it working inside I hear something whirring about. Is that a circular thing that is circulating? I was drawing an inference between the soul and discs for software yesterday and was asking students whether the soul was harddrive and put in us by God, or was it software put in us by culture and education. Or do we have both? Do they sometimes conflict?

The soul of course can't be proven and therefore in science cannot be brought up without derision. It has no attributes. It can't be smelled, touched, tasted, or seen, and yet it is generally depicted as a circle (similar to the halo, which is a donut shaped circle).

Why do we put information on a disc? Why is the soul where we put our information more or less depicted as software?

Is there some reason that info fits more comfortably on a disc?

Books are rectangular cubes. Shelving is generally rectangular with hard lines, like dressers, and windows are usually rectangular. But as soon as we get toward information in computer storage we are talking circles. Why is that?

Why must the components be circular?

In the brain itself there seems to be convoluted circular passages (the head isn't exactly a sphere, but tends toward sphericality, as squareheads are often thought to be dummies by comparison).

Robots have squareheads in the older versions, but in futuristic vehicles they are more spherical as are our own heads.

In the hippy era people who lived 9 to 5 ratrace lives were configured as squares.

Is there something about the circle that makes it superior to the square, especially for information retrieval? I note that in storage, we generally take discs and place them first in plastic squares, since the edges line up and create an impression of neatness.

Dogs are square, while cats are circular. I don't know what I mean by that. It's just an impression I have. Cats are "groovy" in the old hippy slang, and hippies are considered to be "cats."

I have a number of subsidiary questions, but my central question is as follows. Why is the soul always depicted as circular? Why does software look like a soul? Is there some necessary connection, or is the connection purely accidental?

OBAMA'S SALMON JOKE

Obama's salmon joke was the best thing in the SOTUS last night: the only point of humor in the speech, one too in which he was playing to the Tea Party's argument that government has gotten too big, and we don't need any more things like Obamacare with its thousands of new agents in the IRS, and its fines on individual citizens, and its violation of the Commerce Clause, and the way it was slammed through the Congress and down the consumer's throat. It was a great moment:

"The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they're in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they're in saltwater," Obama said. "I hear it gets even more complicated once they're smoked."

Many have said around the web that they enjoyed this humor, and who wouldn't? It's a good capture of the absurd nature of government, and its vast Orwellian networks of control, and their arbitrary and irrational boundaries accountable to no one.

But in spite of his saying that he wants to cut down on Orwellian redundancy, we here at Lutheran Surrealism wondered what this means for the Interior Department and the Commerce Department. Surely there is a good rationale for the separation of jurisdiction. Materials lying outside of our national boundaries can hardly be controlled by the Interior Department. And if he tries to cut back the Interior Department and make the Commerce Department bigger, what then, especially if the salmon cross state boundaries, then he couldn't put the fish under the control of the Commerce Department because wouldn't that violate the Commerce Clause? What exactly had Obama actually proposed? Did he really mean something serious about smoked salmon, or was that just a cloud of nonsense? Who controls smoked salmon? I assume it's the FDA, among others. Was he planning to do away with the FDA so that salmonella poisoning could seep into our food?

I couldn't sort it out. Was he going to actually cut a government department? If so, how? It would be nice if he had followed up his joke with an actual suggestion to cut the bureaucracy somewhere, and if he named someone who would lose their job, and provided us with a rationale for this cut, and how it would actually serve American interests. But as usual, he told us a joke, and then went on to how he wasn't going to get rid of Obamacare, but was instead going to multiply healthcare costs to the country's businesses by mandating insurance, and building a whole new department of oversight. The whole thing struck me as fishy.

In the Parmenides, Plato defines the Sophist as a slippery fish who cannot be caught by any net. Sophists WERE funny from time to time, I guess, especially if they did not get into the government of ancient Athens (by law they couldn't because they were not native-born Athenians who could produce a certificate of live birth).

CAN CATS MOVE AROUND?

In Finland, an elderly man told me he couldn't move because his cat had imprinted the neighborhood on its brain, and if he moved, the cat couldn't learn the new neighborhood landmarks, as he'd always believe he was in the old neighborhood. I thought it was dogs you couldn't teach new tricks.

If you took a cat and moved it, it would apparently become schizo, with two maps on top of one another, causing unutterable confusion.

Is this true?

If it is true (and can be proven) then cats should never suffer a move from one residence to another as it is inhumanly cruel.

THINGS I CAN'T TAKE SERIOUSLY

Here's some things I don't take seriously at all:

Communism
Religions except for Judaism, Catholicism and Lutheranism, and Anabaptists (Amish, etc.)
Scientists when they talk about anything other than science
Poets when they talk about anything other than poetry
Models
Actors
Anyone who lived in the 19th century
Swedish surrealists
Anyone who lives south of the Rio Grande
Anyone who lives north of the USA
Russians
Germans
Spanish
Italians
Red China
North Korea
Romance novelists
Governors
Senators
Dogs
People who fold their tissues instead of crumpling before wiping
The Book of Esther
Swedish speaking Finns
Finns from Somalia
People who drink soda
People who drink beer in public
Clowns
People who write letters to the editor
Happy people
Calm people
Rabbits living in suburban areas
Squirrels
Chipmunks
Moose
Deer
People with Lyme's Disease
White clouds w/o darkness
The notion of paradise
People who show their bellies
People with lots of jewelry
People who have had plastic surgery
Anybody who appears on MSNBC
Anything that appears in the NYT
People who look like other people who are trying to be individualist (punks, hippies, feminists with short hair and angry looks)
Very fat people
Happy Hour
Peanut dishes at bars
Yogurt pretzels
Clothes salesmen
Gift shoppes
Mexican restaurants
Scandinavian food (unless it is made by my wife's mom)
Motorcycles with sidecars (unless they're driven by Nazis in WWII movies)
Station wagons
Answers that appear to be complete
No. 3 pencils
Red pens
Orange pens
People whose pant length is either inadequate or too long
Men with long hair who have to shake it out of their face in order to accomplish something
Any professional whose profession is to be angry about the state of their identity group
The "Indian" Ocean
"Indiana"
Pakistan
Kuwait
Iraq
The Taliban
Billionaires
Consultants
Psychotherapists
Anarchists
Libertarians
Swedish people after about the 11th century
Romans
Canaanites
Egyptians
Algerians
Tunisians
Curling
Pink combs
Clothes with brand names printed on them
I am beginning to realize this is a gushing well of irreverence that cannot possibly be capped
But there are some things I take seriously
Lists, for instance, if they're heartfelt

UNITED NATIONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

I've been doing a lot of research on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, penned in 1948 and signed by the member states of the United Nations.

Yesterday I took a tour of the United Nations (it's 18 acres that belong to the whole world) and the guide said there were 192 member nations. I asked if any nations didn't belong. She said, Cook Islands, the Holy See (although they have observor status), and some island called Nauru or Niwi or something. The woman had a very strong Japanese accent and there were some words I couldn't understand.

I looked up the Cook Islands which are protected by New Zealand and only have 14,000 people. Their main language is English. They are only about 200 square miles.

In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights there are some rights that appear to conflict with one another. For instance, everyone has the right to express themselves and to an education. However, there is also the right of each culture to retain their ways. So, some cultures (the Taliban, for example) do not want their women to be able to read and write. Do they have the right to their culture, or must they allow women the universal right to read and speak and educate themselves? I think we mostly feel that they ought to allow the women to read. This smashes their culture.

Many religious groups are not in accord with the United Nations and their demands for absolute equality. Catholics and some Lutheran groups do not allow women to be priests for instance. Do we have the right to our cultural beliefs? If we do, why don't the Taliban?

This conflict within rights discourse fascinates me.

The United Nations was started by the winners of the Second World War: France, England, China, America and Russia were the initiators of the institution, the Japanese tour guide said. Germany and Japan, losers in WWII, do not have security coucil status and cannot veto motions, as can the big five. I wondered what she thought about this, but I was too afraid to ask.

The United Nations had a dual role at its inception. They wanted to stop future wars by making the whole world a matter of countries under self-rule. They therefore wished to get rid of European colonies. However, the central nations are European, and so some argue that the United Nations is colonialism by other means. The notion of tolerance -- beyond which we must go to war, is another UN idea. They want us to be able to tolerate each other.

The UN Peacekeeping army (an all-volunteer army) won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1998. The UN are not disposed to invade a country (but isn't that what happened in Afghanistan?) but they are supposed to use sanctions. However, it's possible to invade (especially to prevent genocide).

There were lots of contradictions. An army won the Peacekeeping prize. People have the right to their own culture, except when it conflicts with western cultural notions of education and freedom of speech. The globalization of human rights through the United Nations can be seen as a westernization of the whole world. At the same time, it has a countervalent movement to rid the third world of western colonies.

In 1945, when the United Nations was started, there were hundreds of colonies around the world. Now there are only about thirteen. One of them was the Falkland Islands off of Argentina. Is that really a colony? The people there are largely British, and haven't voted to secede, to my knowledge.

There was an exhibit about Palestine, but we weren't allowed to stop there and read it. We had to keep moving.

Meanwhile, the guide told us that the referendum in the Southern Sudan went through. So it looks like we'll have 193 nations at the United Nations soon. I wonder what their flag will look like and what they will call their country.

Some 100% good things the UN is doing: they have given insecticide treated nets to 60 million children in Africa and malaria has fallen 80%. They are working to get rid of landmines worldwide. 80% of the victims of landmines are illiterate children. They are trying to cut hungry people in half. They give school supplies to kids. They are working to provide fresh water in Haiti. In India, they are trying to get more toilets to people. 600,000,000 people in India have never sat on a functioning toilet.

The United Nations is trying to spread equality around the globe. This means that they want women to own more property, for instance. Only 1% of the world's wealth is held by women. But in America, more women than men go to college. Should the United Nations correct that second imbalance?

Everyone is constantly striving to get ahead (of others) and meanwhile, there are organizations that are devoted to absolute equality. I find these countervalent impulses comical... and yet necessary!

ROBOTS AND POETRY

I'm going to teach creative writing for the first time this spring. One of the reasons I've never taught it is because I didn't know how to grade poems. You have to be fairly certain, and give students something to aim at when you allot grades. Otherwise, they might get mad. After all, a grade means they can either get into the Nursing program or they can't. It might mean the difference between going to a good graduate school or bagging groceries.

Poetry is human, and poetry is therefore not robotic. Poetry is spontaneous & lyrical, evincing emotion and peculiarity with universality. Every good poem is absolutely new & yet feels like it has always been around.

The Turing Test was a test to see how well computers could mimic language w/o being sussed out as robotic.

(In reverse, Schwarzenegger is a human who has to pass himself off as a robot, and a robot who tries to pass himself off as human in the Terminator Series -- mimicking both kinds of intelligence in an uncanny dance of hybridity.)

Grading poems I look for qualities I consider human -- deep feeling, honesty, oddness (I generally vote for JH in our poetry contests, except when his friend Sally writes. She's better than JH because her poems are more down to earth, since she is a geologist).

Aaron Belz teaches at a Christian University near Los Angeles. He is a Christian but his poetry comes out of an Ashbery-esque tradition that borders on nonsense. Here's what he has to say about grading poems:

"I don't issue grades for creative work per se. The assessment loop takes
place through discussion, self-critique, participation, and final portfolio (which does earn a technical grade). There's no way I can see assigning a
grade letter or number to a creative piece. Whitman's poems seemed like
street debris in their day; now we see them for the beach trash they really
are!" -- AB

Kookamonga AB continues (his is the smaller image up top if you're wondering):
"They're all [students] made in God's image; each one is full of wonder. No sense in
indoctrinating them with New Critical standards that stress "concrete image"
over argument. You might be silencing the next Boris Pasternak. Try to imagine teaching this course in 1910 and basically working with principles
derived from Browning and Tennyson. It's just as bad to reflect modernist
values now. We poetry teachers should leave almost every possibility
available. I mean, I wouldn't even bias a classroom of 3rd and 4th graders.
You just want to give them a blank page and a lot of encouragement. Read
and discuss a variety of canonical examples, too---from multiple centuries.
Reflect passion. Encourage them to imitate."
AB


I objected:
Aaron, my students are young nurses and plumbers who are also taking a
creative writing class. This isn't an MFA class!

I'm so confused. I thought there would be a consensus!

This is not what Tom Hunley said!
Love, Kirby

Here's what Tom Hunley said. Tom Hunley teaches poetry at Western Kentucky University:

"My students and I negotiated a co-authored rubric one semester. Here it
is:
Grading Criteria for Poetry Portfolios
The following 10-point scale will be used to judge your poetry portfolios.
10 points = A+
9.5 points = A
9 points = A-
8.5 points = B
8 points = B-
7.5 points = C
7 points = C-
5-6.5 points = D
Below 5 points = F
1. The primary language of the poem should be English. Certain phrases
that could enhance the poem if in another language could be acceptable.
2. The poems exhibit evidence of considerable revision.
3. The poem is written in complete sentences, using proper grammar and
standard punctuation. Any deviation from standard grammar must come in dialogue
and/or must be clearly done intentionally and for a specific purpose. Grammatical
errors, whether intentional or not, do not make the poem unreadable or distract
from its meaning.
4. Spelling and capitalization must be used appropriately. You are not sending
text messages (unless one of your poems is in the form of a text message, which
might be kind of cool).
5. The poems use images, concrete language, and figures of speech rather
than wallowing in abstractions, generalizations, and various techniques better
suited to analytical prose. Show, don¹t tell.
6. The poet draws on an excellent lexicon and writes as though each word
cost $1,000. Word choice is both precise and fresh.
7. The poet has control of the poetic line. A poem is not simply broken
off prose. Do you use the poem¹s line to modulate the speed of the poem? Are you
choosing your end words for emphasis?
8. The poem should be clear. If there are allusions and references in the
poem, they are either clear in context or readily accessible via the magic of modern
technology (Wikipedia, Google, etc.). Private jokes and ³you-had-to-be-there²
references are absent.
9. The packet includes at least one poem that displays mastery over a
traditional form or meter (portfolio #2) or over a sophisticated type of free verse such as projective verse, thought rhyme, or figures of repetition (portfolio #1).
10. Free verse poems in the packet demonstrate the poet¹s skill with sound
effects including, but not limited to, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, internal
rhyme, anaphora, and alliteration."

TO WHICH BELZ REPLIES:

>>>> No, that's bad stuff. You really shouldn't bias your young poets away from
>>>> abstraction, messiness, inexplicable line endings, irrational goofiness or
>>>> maudlin drowsiness, etc. This assumes that a poem is a kind of machine that
>>>> can be designed well. It's a New Critical bias and has its good points,
>>>> don't get me wrong, but more important it represents a danger for the
>>>> budding creative mind. Bad, bad, bad. But if you have trouble helping
>>>> young people think creatively, I can see how this kind of benchmarking
>>>> system might help you cope.
>>>>
>>>> I would recommend instead the use of 19th century surrealist word-games.
>>>> Things like the exquisite corpse are great fun and help people break out of
>>>> their assumptions about how language relates to reality.
>>>>
>>>> Mostly you want students to be *conscious* of what their doing -- not
>>>> indoctrinated with one or another better way of doing it.
>>>>
>>>> AB


Both of these poets are good even famous poets. I read with the two of them once at the St. Louis Museum of Modern Art, but I am the runt of this pack of baby wolves. They both have several books out, and are both tenured profs in poetry. When they talk poetry they mean business:

Tom Hunley writes, "Could you plug my pedagogy books, while you're at it? Identify me as the author of TEACHING POETRY WRITING: A FIVE-CANON APPROACH (Multilingual Matters LTD., 2007, New Writing Viewpoints Series) and THE POETRY GYMNASIUM (forthcoming from McFarland & Co., Inc.)."

Hunley writes against Belz, getting him in a half-nelson, and pushing him across the mat, driving him onto his back, and growling:

"Aaron's got some good ideas, but (a) what "19th century surrealist games"? and (b) "what their doing"? I suppose the differences between the 19th and 20th century and between "their" and "they're" don't matter when you're trying to "break out of assumptions of how language relates to reality." The rubric isn't a be-all end-all, but it helps me dialog with students about their progress. Making them conscious about what they're doing (or not doing) is precisely the point. If rewarding students for using figurative language, concrete imagery, and sound effects, while mastering a form or two, writing clearly, laboring over word choices, and avoiding sloppy spelling/capitalization/grammar = "introctrinating students with one or another better way of doing it," than I'm guilty of "indoctrinating." Students who don't get "indoctrinated" into these basic concepts should get thier [sic] tuition dollars back, in my opinion. "A danger for the budding creative mind," really? Are these little flowers so delicate that they'll wilt if they're told to check their [sic] spelling or how to use a figure of speech or what a sestina is or how to properly break a line and then graded on how well they've done so? I don't think so. "Chance favors only the prepared mind," said Louis Pasteur, and I think Andre Breton felt the same way. If their creative minds are budding, then discipline is the water that makes them grow. With all due respect..."


Hunley continues:
"In my view, (a) there are a lot of concrete things we can teach students that will help them identify and write better poems, such as the things in my rubric; (b) if we don't grade students on their work, they won't take poetry serious as an academic discipline or a real way of looking at the world. They'll revert to thinking of poetry as something trivial, with Hallmark as the hallmark."

At any rate, I learned a lot from the conversation. First, I learned that there is a variety of ways to grade poems, just as there are a variety of ways to write poems. And I decided to reveal these emails to the students on the first day of class. And here is my solution to the grading problem:

I will tell the students that I'm like a master chef, or a master painter, and they are my apprentices. And they have to trust me when I tell them their work is good or not. I will decide how creative it is. If they're trying and turning everything in, and I see evidence of effort if not genius, that's a C. If I see evidence of effort and some sparks, that's a B. If I see genius and excellent execution, that's an A.

One thing students often want in a grade is an exact answer. They want me to ask whether Helsinki is the capital of Finland or not. If it is, and they got it right, they get an A. A robot could write and grade such answers. But with any real human interaction, when we're deciding relative excellence, like in painting, or poetry, or how nicely a cake came off, or like a political opinion, it's not so neat.

When you're grading a boyfriend or how cute someone looks, it's not like there's a checklist. But a checklist might help. When you're judging a date you might ask: did he comb his hair? Did he pay? Was the meal expensive? Did he brush his teeth? Did he use bad words? Was he polite to the waiter? Did he murder any kittens during the date? Did he stare at another girl? But someone could do all or none of these things and still get a second date, depending on the judgment of the one dated. So you have to trust that this is an art, and will be judged by an artist. If you don't like my calls, or don't trust my opinions, then you drop out of the class and take another class and badmouth me behind my back (to which I'll reply, I'm the published poet!). So what I'll have them do (the ones who stay) is develop a portfolio of seven poems or stories over the semester. If I see no genius but do see effort, that's a C. Etc. Less than excellent effort, that's a D, and if they're not turning stuff in or are just hopeless, then that's an F. Late pieces will lose a grade per day.

So, in a sense, I'm going to do something else. I'm going to grade the students, but I'm going to use how I feel about the poems. I trust my feelings.

Aaron Belz has several books of poems out, including Lovely, Raspberry! (Persea 2010). A review from Midwest Books says, "You can be philosophical without ruining someone's day."

I hope I haven't ruined either Belz's or Hunley's day. Belz already accused me of contacting him just so I could kick him around! I love both of these guys. They both said I could blog their correspondence. These are the only two poetry professors I know personally, and they're also the only two Christian poets I know with books who are younger than me, by decades, so to me they are an inspiration, and I look up to them for guidance! So if one of them decides not to speak to me any longer, I just lost half my friends in that category, and a mentor or two, too. If they both decide to hate me, I lost all my friends and mentors in the Christian university poetry teacher category at other colleges.

Which means I am an idiot. And that would be poetic justice, right?

READING OBAMA: JAMES T. KLOPPENBERG

I've read three other books about the current president: one was entitled The Obama Nation, by Jerome Corsi. The second was The Roots of Obama's Rage, by Dinesh D'Souza. Whereas Corsi locates Obama's primary commitments in his family's close friend Frank Marshall Davis, and to a certain extent in his Kenyan father's Marxism, D'Souza locates Obama's deepest affiliation in his father's post-colonialism, and the mother's discipleship with the dad. The third book was Obama's book Audacity. I couldn't find any locus of values in it. He seemed to waffle on every issue. Kloppenberg locates Obama's values in his schooling first at Occidental College and later at Harvard University.

James Kloppenberg is a Harvard University historian.

Where are your truest affiliations born? In your family, or in your schooling?

I think family, and church. In school you learn technical things, but you don't learn beliefs. Those are things your mom and dad teach you, and your church teaches you. I don't think I ever learned anything in school about beliefs, and yet that's Kloppenberg's basic supposition: that Obama learned his beliefs in college.

Reading Obama (Princeton UP 2011) is a history of new left thought at Harvard University (and to a certain extent at the U. of Chicago) over the last hundred years. That part of the book is worth the price of admission. How well this actually applies to Obama is anybody's guess. Obama did go to Harvard, but how deeply did he drink of the poisons on offer?

Kloppenberg writes, "Obama ... learned ... that a culture's only home is to be found in its often tortured history" (263).

Christians would say on the other hand,

"For we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come." -- Hebrews 13:14

Kloppenberg claims that Obama is also a Protestant, but if his only home is in history, I doubt it. History is not our home.

Likewise, our principles are found not in history, but outside of history, in the tablet handed to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Ten Commandments are eternal.

When Obama began to attend Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ, he was able to "shed SOME of my skepticism" (quote from Kloppenberg 143, originally found in Obama's Audacity of Hope, my emphasis). That "SOME" means he was never fully immersed in the Holy Spirit, but remains someone who dipped SOME aspect of himself there (possibly his pinkie), and instead of being a true believer, "Obama had to contend with persistent ambivalence" (149).

Kloppenberg avers on multiple occasions, "Obama was a man of the left" (51, 221). Can you serve two masters? Leftists are not necessarily Marxists, but most of them think highly of Marx. Many of Obama's professors were Marxists, and he himself says in Audacity that he sought out Marxist professors. His early mentor was Frank Marshall Davis, a black poet and longterm member of the CPUSA. While Davis is a building block of Jerome Corsi's monograph on Obama, here he receives scant mention, but when Davis IS mentioned Kloppenberg indicates his centrality to Obama:

"How he intends to translate the endorsements of progressive and New Deal policies in The Audacity of Hope into a new set of Democratic policies remains murky. Has he considered the bold vision he encountered in his courses with Roberto Unger, a radically decentralized economy in which public funding of private initiatives empowers the creative potential of ordinary citizens? Or have the economic advisers Obama has brought into his administration fulfilled the prophesy of Frank Davis? Having been 'trained,' in other words, has he now been yanked by the chain of power back from the commitment to economic democracy proclaimed in The Audacity of Hope to the tepid economic centrism of Democratic Party insiders since the 1980s?" (190).

Obama worshipped inside a liberation theology church, he had substantive experience with Marxist professors, and his high school mentor was a communist. So is Obama a Christian, or a communist? Christians look to the ten commandments. Marxists look to economics, often using power to affect their means. Redistribution is a form of theft, and is not something that Christians could countenance. For Marxists, it's the basis of their system. Christians are supposed to revere their family, and especially their elders. Obama threw his grandmother and his pastor under the bus when they were no longer of use to him. Christians are supposed to turn the other cheek, but Obama describes Republicans as his "enemies" and says if they bring a knife to the fight, "we'll bring a gun." I see Obama as a Marxist, because for Marxists, power comes from the end of a gun.

But is he instead some tertium quid? There are the hardcore Marxists who want a one-party system and to destroy all others, and there are left liberals. The two groups generally despise one another. Kloppenberg locates Obama among the left liberals, because, like James Madison, he wants a representative democracy (Kloppenberg disses the prevalent notion that America is a constitutional republic instead of a true democracy). He writes that Obama likes the House of Representatives because it is proportional to the population, but dislikes the Senate since it is not proportionate (165). (Why then was he a member of the Senate? Is that pragmatism?) Also, although Obama has stated his opposition to Fox News, he has allowed senators and representatives of other parties to be seated, and has made no move to make himself into a Czar, or dictator. He apparently still believes in the electoral process and has made no move to undermine it.

John Dewey and William James thought certainty was impossible. This is where Obama stands, according to Kloppenberg. One does have the sense in the autobiographies that Obama is willing to shift with the wind. One might say that this is opportunism. One might argue that it is pragmatism. One might say that it is a lack of principle. Or one could say it's open-mindedness. This last is Kloppenberg's theory.

There are some things in the book I thought sucked: Kloppenberg's treatment of the Sotomayor nomination is too brief and dismissive of critical attention to the "wise Latina" crack; and his discussion of Crowley-Gates focuses on the fact that he knows Gates, and likes the man, and could never see him as a dangerous individual. (I'm sure Crowley's friends like him too. But that's hardly the point. Crowley and Gates met in a charged scenario in which Crowley was on the scene of a possible break-in -- it wasn't a friendly encounter in the faculty club over tea and crumpets. Gates was unruly and disruptive, and not respectful toward authority.)

Some things I liked. Obama's least favorite professor at Harvard was Edward Said.

Obama likes a few people I like: Augustine, Madison, Locke (apparently a fervent Calvinist, according to Kloppenberg). Rawls had a Protestant taproot. Obama reveres Lincoln. Dewey and James are not impossible for me.

On the other hand Obama likes some people I don't: Richard Rorty, Frank Marshall Davis, Saul Alinsky, Howard Zinn, Barack Obama Sr., himself.

We both hate Edward Said. Hatred is often a sign of where people's values stand. I mostly hate Edward Said because I see no sense of humor (a lack of humor tends toward zealotry). Said's almost as big an agelast as Michel Foucault.

There are some in-between figures such as Reinhold Niebuhr. I like the later Niebuhr after he becomes a hawk. I see war as governed by a competent authority to be a charitable thing, especially in the case of World War Two. We could not allow the Jews to be mown down and gassed. They are our truest neighbors, and we must stand with them until the end of time. I don't like the earlier socialist Niebuhr much. I think Obama likes both Niebuhrs, but sides toward the earlier Niebuhr. The very fact that Obama has heard of Niebuhr is somewhat neighborly. Niebuhr had a great sense of humor. He has an essay on humor and its relationship to the Gospel in his Essential Writings.

So, is Obama my neighbor? Corsi and D'Souza reject him outright and paint him as a kind of alien monster in our midst that threatens the very foundation of the neighborhood. Kloppenberg likes Obama but wishes he was a bit more of a programmatic leftist at times so as to improve the neighborhood by leveling the incomes of the uber-wealthy. (I don't hate this idea, but it has to be voluntary, rather than forced fleecing by a Cyclopsean state: Luther said that no one in a business should make more than ten times what the poorest person in the business makes.) Yes, Obama is my neighbor in spite of his faults many of which are not his fault. He is the product of a broken home. His mother was a flighty woman who did manage to write a Ph.D. His dad was a bigamist and Marxist who he only saw twice. Obama smokes cigarettes. But he is still my neighbor. He is a father with two small girls. I wish him the best in that role, and in his role as president. He doesn't have a very good background. His parents were communists. His high school mentor was a communist. In college he sought out communists. In later life, he worked with communists, and palled around with terrorists.

But yes he's my neighbor and a loving father and husband and unfortunately he's also the president.

This is a good book and I recommend it even though the writer's viewpoint is very different from my own. You get a very strong intellectual history of Harvard (worth the price of admission), a new take on our president (Obama can be friendly toward conservatives so there's no reason we can't be friendly toward him), and you get a bibliography toward the end for further reading. The main criterion of a book for me is: did I learn a lot? Yes, I did, and it was a very easy read. I read the whole book (270 pages or so) in three hours. Buy it. Read it. Otherwise, you're missing out.

CAR WASH

The neatest thing that happened yesterday is I went into an automated car wash while my daughter was in ballet. I loved the pink and blue colors of the soap, the giant whirling pads, the spray. It was like Disneyland for ten dollars, and was good for the car. The last thing applied a layer of wax to the underside of the car that was supposedly good for preventing rust.

Arizona Shooting: Some Preliminary Remarks on a Sickening Event

Apparently someone opened fire in Tucson, Arizona and shot at least 11 people. One was a Democratic congresswoman, and another was a federal judge named John Roll, appointed by George Bush (the elder). We don't yet know who was the target, or what the motive was, or the identity of the shooter (who is in custody, and is a young man). No surprises that it is a young man. Lots of speculation is flying because the Congresswoman was on Sarah Palin's hit list. However, John Roll had received death threats for allowing an illegal immigrant family to file a lawsuit against an Arizona rancher. So we don't know who the target was or what the motivation was. If the central target was Roll, I expect the controversy to die down. If it was the Democratic congresswoman, it will be headlines for months in certain quarters, and may cost Sarah Palin her chance at the presidency.

What's amazing about America is that we don't shoot each other more often. Reagan was shot (but lived) by Hinckley. When you get close to the notions Hinckley held -- he wanted to impress Jodi Foster -- it's impossible to put it into any kind of political calculus. Foster apparently hated Reagan, but she never asked anyone to shoot him. The madman that shot Garfield was angry he didn't get a job. When politicians get shot it's usually a madman. It was an anarchist who shot the president (McKinley) in Buffalo in 1896 (date?). Czolgosch thought McKinley had unfairly sided with big business, and killed him at the Buffalo World's Fair. And with JFK it was -- probably a Russian job, or had something to do with a fellow who was enamored with communism, or was mad about the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, or maybe it was the mob. We will probably never know, since Oswald was in turn shot by another figure, who was in turn shot by another.

Left and right use these assassinations to gain yardage with the independents by painting the other side as irresponsibly violent. I think this is in itself irresponsible, as no one should be shooting another person on the basis of their politics. It doesn't help your side. We shouldn't even use methods such as shunning. Two of the women on The View used shunning against Bill O'Reilly a few weeks back. That was dreadful. The idea is to keep open to other people, and to argue with them, but to do so in a civil manner. But this has never been very easy. In Athens, banishment was common. In the Congress leading up to the Civil War, a northern senator was beaten half to death by a southern senator (Preston). It's not at all uncommon for the first amendment to segue into the second amendment. This doesn't mean that either amendment is bad, or should be curtailed.

The right have guns, but generally use them responsibly. Palin's metaphor is only a metaphor. Of course there may be kooks who can't understand metaphors, but to what extent do we bear responsibility for kooks? Did the left hoist Hinckley on their shoulders after he was shot even though they hated Reagan? Did Jodi Foster thank Hinkley? Did the right think what John Chapman did to John Lennon was a good idea? Generally speaking, political shootings are squirrelly things done by squirrelly people. Nuts. Did feminists jump up and down when Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol? A few did, even a few national figures in NOW were excited, but they were reviled.

Some Americans point to John Brown as a responsible act, and argue that such actions are mandatory in certain circumstances. This is a difficult call, because usually when people act outside the law, even when they do so in the name of the Gospel, as Brown did, they are still overriding the separation of church and state on which our nation is founded. I don't think it should EVER be done.

There were those who equated "W." with Hitler. Even some of my close friends did it. I thought it was irresponsible, because Hitler (I think we will all agree) needed to be assassinated or silenced by any means necessary because there was no other process by which to get him out. The newspapers had been shut down. The churches had been shut down. It was a one-party state. NO American figure can be equated with Hitler and to do so is wrong, but also the circumstances in which it was done were so different. We can't equate our own robust democracy with the circumstances of Nazi Germany in which all dissidents were finding themselves in gas chambers or hanged or shot by firing squad. That's not happening here, (which is not to say that it couldn't).

Instead of opening fire on one another, we should keep talking with each other, as the details unravel. But whatever the details are, we have to see them in the context of our entire history, which, except for the Civil War, has been one in which talking (and especially listening) has been the method of our democracy. Even after the Civil War, Lincoln said we ought to help our fallen comrades up easy. We were not to continue to punish them, or hold them as demons. We were to respect them, and to help them up, as after a schoolyard brawl. We were to be one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

All that said, I'm not surprised this happened in Tucson. Law and order has broken down (and with it the perception of justice) along the Mexican border as violence and illegality spills over. There is the perception that the administration has sided with Mexican illegals over Arizonans. Words are heating up because there is no perception of freedom from disorder. Something has to be done to put the very notion of law and order back in place in that state and along the border generally. If individuals have to do it through vigilante justice, then it's the wild west all over again. Aside from the cartels, I can't see who that would serve. We need a wall, and we need a crackdown.

The Obama administration has to make it a top priority to put law and order back into this country, and especially along the border, where "illegality" has become a norm. Without legality as the norm, we have the perception of chaos. This administration may not have the vocabulary to do it. They tried to make the illegals legal, but lost it in a fair vote, and with the new congress, are unlikely to ever get a second chance. The Obama Administration may not be able to reconcile the patriarchal role of government with the matriarchal role of tolerance. If they can't do it, locals will attempt it. The result will be a loss of law and order itself, which is a loss for everyone.

Nussbaum on Polygamy

Martha Nussbaum is a very important contemporary philosopher who teaches in the Law Department at The University of Chicago.

I read her book Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge UP 2000) over the break. It's a study of human rights issues in India, especially as they relate to women's rights. Some things came up in it that baffled me. In India there are five or six different kinds of courts. There are Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Parsi, and secular courts. That sounds very expensive. But I also wondered how it was possible to adjudicate an issue if one of the participants was Hindu and one was Christian, for example. Whose court would you use?

The book is deep, rich and full of wondrous detail, but one detail in particular popped out. Marriage in the different systems has a different meaning. In the Islamic system, polygamy is permitted, while it is not in the others. Although Nussbaum is Jewish (there are very few Jews in India, as they mostly went to Israel, so they don't have their own courts), she accepts polygamy!

"What is objectionable about polygamy is that it is often available only to males, and that it is typically connected with a legal and traditional regime under which women have unequal property rights and rights of mobility, association, and self-determination. But it is also the case that the reasons for opposing polygamy have often been very bad reasons, connected with fear and ignorance about a group whose practices are different. Thus, I believe that Mormon polygamy should have been permitted so long as the legal equality of women, and their freedom to leave the community should they wish to, were securely established and protected, and so long as the law extended similar opportunities to women who for some genuine religious reason wished, themselves, to contract polygamous marriages" (229).

Although Nussbaum is rather reasonable throughout the volume, she sometimes skips over things. What, for instance, is a "genuine religious reason"?

Elsewhere in the book she defends the taking of peyote by Native Americans because of seemingly "genuine religious reasons," even if it is against state and federal law.

If religions are permitted to make laws of their own that defy or contradict local, state and federal law, who's to prevent someone from making up a religion in which they must practice arson, or murder children, as some ancient religions used to do (in the form of sacrifice)? Would the Mayans be permitted to rip the hearts out of little children because they had "genuine religious reasons" to do so?

Would an auto da fe be practiced once again if someone were to resurrect the Inquisition and began to put heretics once more to the torch? Or if as happened with the Green Man faiths in pagan England they began to torch Wicker men once more with human sacrifices attached? One cannot doubt the genuine religiosity behind such things. But I can't see how American law could countenance it.

To return to the polygamy problem: Nussbaum has problems limiting marriage to one man and one woman and comes out in favor of polygamy so long as it can be practiced by women, too. If this is the case, I can't see why she wouldn't also allow group marriages composed of many different men and women, or even a whole city, as was the case with the French theorist Charles Fourier's phalansteries, which also claimed a bizarre religious rationale (he claimed to have had his notions dictated from God).

What happens to insurance if one partner in a group of 100,000 has a job that gives insurance to the spouses (the spice)? State Farm Insurance would rapidly go under if there is only one payment in, and hundreds of thousands of potential payments out.

I find the thing unworkable. Do we really want to go the pluralistic multicultural route in law, as India has done? When people talk about changing the marriage laws, I can foresee worst case scenarios where -- if you change the laws for one group, you have to accommodate all groups, including multiple partners, enormous communes full of people, as the polygamists and the others come in demanding their rights based on traditional religious rationale or some whimsical thing based on love. "We all love each other, the whole ten million of us." Perhaps Nussbaum believes that there should be only one person -- either male or female -- on one side of the gender line, who can make many contracts with the other gender, as long as he or she can handle the phynances. It wasn't clear.

Nussbaum means "nut tree" in German. (Just saying.) She's so important now that she's in basic histories of philosophy as a must read. So, I read one of her books. I'll probably read two or three more. It was fun, if somewhat alarming in its details.

Strange Metal Piece: Identification Needed

About a week back I was coming out of the grocery store when I heard a clump clump clump during every tire rotation. I thought I had a flat, but it was dark out, and the tires were firm, so I drove two miles home, with the clump clump clump sound. The following morning I checked the tires, and found a strange metal cup that had bit into the back right tire, without popping it. The cup had not been flattened entirely but had held its shape. The metal "rings" if I fillip it with a finger, but it's very solid. I provide a nickel to give you a perspective on its size. What the heck is this object? I've never seen anything like it.

The outside of the metal is lustrous, while the inside is not. I pried the thing off the tire fairly easily because although it's purchase was very keen, it was not deep. There is a kind of lip around the open mouth of the thing. There is a small gash in the metal on one side, too, probably from the repeated smashing it took as I went home with the thing stuck to my tire.

Norman Rockwell's The Connoisseur

Part of coming out of the closet as a conservative is a newfound respect for art by conservatives. This is a 1000-piece puzzle of a painting by Norman Rockwell entitled The Connoisseur. It was painted in 1962. The thing took me three solid days to put together, and that was with my wife's help. She mostly built the frame of the picture, and the parquet floor, and did a lot of the abstract painting which is meant to recall Jackson Pollock (who had died in the 50s). The thrown quality of the painting's paint hides the letters JP and also PU (a joke I think on JP and on holding your nose and saying PU). The connoisseur looks like Steve Martin from behind, although the neck is slightly fat. I love the balance he's holding as he appreciates the painting. The journal is entitled something like Art of Our Century. There were two pieces missing in the puzzle. One is next to his left shoe. The other might be harder to see. It's about at his cufflink on his right hand. I called the company and they told me they would send replacements for those two parts but it would take three weeks. The company is called Pomegranate. They have many fine arts puzzles. The lady on the phone told me that their work crew worked on the Rockwell puzzle for three months during lunch breaks before it was completed and they were surprised to hear we had broken the thing in just over 20 hours. The hard part is that there is almost no logic to the swirling paint in the abstract composition, and since Rockwell was seemingly making fun of the abstract painting, I had a few dark moments as I completed it, wondering if it was really worth it.

One of the strangest things is the contemplation of difference and there could almost be no aesthetics so divergent as that of Rockwell and the abstract expressionists. One is devoted to small town life, the other to big city cosmopolitanism. Difference stinks, is what the painting seems to say, and yet at the same time, relishes the exact nuances of the connoisseur who is invested in that appreciation. The ability to hold back judgment and yet continue looking. One of the amazing things about the painting is that the abstract expressionist painting that Rockwell achieves is quite good, and very exciting to contemplate, even if he is ridiculing it simultaneously.

HOW MANY ANGELS CAN DANCE ON THE HEAD OF A PIN?

This question turns out to contain an infinite number of secondary questions.

It seems to be a mathematical question, since it begins with an inquiry with regard to number.

Then, it opens up the question: what is an angel? Is an angel a figure with form, but no substance, as Aquinas apparently claimed? Can two angels occupy the same point in space? Do angels take up space, or are they immaterial? Can something be infinitesimally tiny, and yet still exist? At what point is something so small that it doesn't actually exist?

As if these questions are not enough, it segues into an aesthetic question: what constitutes dancing? The question appears to ask us to evaluate the dancing of angels. How many angels can dance? In other words, some angels might just stand there. Other angels might do something rhythmic, such as callisthenics, but fail to actually achieve something that Simon (on American Idol) (for instance) would consider dancing. This raises yet further questions: is dancing in some sense angelic? Isn't it also devilish? Many denominations banned dancing, and for good reason, as it tends toward the lewd. Some might call this "divine" in the same sense that some people call what's good bad, and what's bad good. Is bad dancing good dancing? It would seem that every person would evaluate the dancing of any given angel differently.

Then the two questions have to be considered together. Can you dance and still be an angel? If so, how many angels can achieve this state? Can some angels achieve this state, but only for a few moments? What duration can angels dance? Can some dance for twelve seconds at a time, and others two minutes, and still others for years at a time, and still others permanently? Are some angels inspired by the dancing of others? And still others rendered lugubrious by the same phenomenon, so that they no longer wish to dance?

Are some angels (in the process of dancing) dropping down into the categories of the demonic? If angels have hips, and move them, can they remain angelic, or do they become demonic, or animalistic? Do angels have hips and knees? (The above drawing by Elizabeth Chandler hides these characteristics in all but one figure under billowy clothing so we are not certain, and since the drawing is made by a human, we are not certain that this is an empirically valid drawing of an angel.)

Dancing (as far as we empirically know) is strictly human. Animals can move. Their name appears to derive from the word "animate." Even worms are animate. Sheep can move, and giraffes can run, and a fox can trot. But could they be said to dance? Dancing, it would seem, requires an aesthetic capacity -- just as verse is different from prose. Dancing requires the ability to reflect on what is beautiful, and to achieve this state. Is it objectively angelic when humans dance? Let's look at specific dancers.

Michael Jackson could dance.

Elvis could dance.

But neither of these men were angels.

A walrus could not be said to dance. A polar bear cannot dance. A butterfly cannot dance.

And yet we say that if we put a drop of water on hot grease that it "dances" across the surface of the grease.

Is this true dancing? Or is it only "something" that mimics dancing? Dancing requires an inner conception of dancing. Or does it? Does it depend on the intention, or only the outcome? If a lughead steps on a pin, and leaps across the floor, howling in pain, do we have the right to evaluate the lughead's steps in terms of their aesthetics?

The inquisition continues, without any clarity, and with a growing formlessness clouding the question(s). What constitutes the "head" of a pin? How wide can the head of a pin become before we call it a tack or a nail? What in fact is a pin? Can a pin be thousands of feet in length, as long as it is still used to pin two things together and maintains the long elegant form of a pin? How many kinds of pins are there that go under the heading of "pin"?

The subtlety and immensity of this medieval question is numbing. It was originally used as a discussion device for the nominalists to attack the realists (realists believed that categories were more real than were the individual members of a category, and so angels [as forms] superseded any specific angel). John of Salisbury (AD 1115-1180) claimed there were as many answers to the question (in his time) as there were heads.

The realists would tend to put each of our conceptual categories above any specific member. (Their claim was that only categories were real, while the nominalists claimed that only specific things were real, and that categories were necessary but arbitrary fictions.) So, the realists would tend to emphasize the universality of angels, rather than to focus on the ability of any given angel to "dance." Dancing, too, would be a broader category (a Platonic form) that either could, or could not be achieved, by the category of "angel" (broadly speaking).

The slipperiness of categories such as the dance, or the angelic, tends to be undermined by any specific candidate, and as we as wardens attempt to police these categories we are often caught unawares by the moccasins of thieves who steal upon us in the silence of the night on tiptoe, attempting to open up any given category, and release all of its occupants back into the chaos that precedes and supersedes human thought, leaving our judgment fallible, while the Infallible One alone can bring daylight into our fallen world.