Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood

 
YES SIR, YES SIR, SIX BAGS FULL... of mail. Which I will try to answer this weekend. Saturday, expect mail and (in some cases) replies about: Derrida; rock'n'roll conservatism; metaphysics and/or ethics; and other stuff that I'm forgetting.
posted by Eve at 5:44 PM

 
POETRY WEDNESDAY: In honor of Halloween (see below), a poem from an excellent, short, spooky old collection of stories and poems for kids--called, I think, The Haunted House and other tales. There were some pretty terrifying scraps in there--like "The Erl-King"--but also this, from Theodore Roethke:


The Bat

By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.
He likes the attic of an aging house.

His fingers make a hat about his head.
His pulse beat so slow we think him dead.

He loops in crazy figures half the night.
Among the trees that face the corner light.

But when he brushes up against a screen,
Weare afraid of what our eyes have seen:

For something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.

and this, from W.S. Gilbert:

'Twas on the shores that round our coast
From Deal to Ramsgate span,
That I found alone on a piece of stone
An elderly naval man.

His hair was weedy, his beard was long,
And weedy and long was he,
And I heard this wight on the shore recite,
In a singular minor key:

"Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig."

And he shook his fists and he tore his hair,
Till I really felt afraid,
For I couldn't help thinking the man had been drinking,
And so I simply said:

"O, elderly man, it's little I know
Of the duties of men of the sea,
But I'll eat my hand if I understand
How you can possibly be

"At once a cook, and a captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig."

Then he gave a hitch to his trousers, which
Is a trick all seamen larn,
And having got rid of a thumping quid,
He spun this painful yarn:

"'Twas in the good ship Nancy Bell
That we sailed to the Indian sea,
And there on a reef we come to grief,
Which has often occurred to me.

"And pretty nigh all o' the crew was drowned
(There was seventy-seven o' soul),
And only ten of the Nancy's men
Said 'Here!' to the muster-roll.

"There was me and the cook and the captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig
And the bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig.

"For a month we'd neither wittles nor drink,
Till a-hungry we did feel,
So we drawed a lot, and accordin' shot
The captain for our meal.

"The next lot fell to the Nancy's mate,
And a delicate dish he made;
Then our appetite with the midshipmite
We seven survivors stayed.

"And then we murdered the bo'sun tight,
And he much resembled pig,
Then we wittled free, did the cook and me,
On the crew of the captain's gig.

"Then only the cook and me was left,
And the delicate question, 'Which
Of us two goes to the kettle?' arose
And we argued it out as sich.

"For I loved that cook as a brother, I did,
And the cook he worshipped me;
But we'd both be blowed if we'd either be stowed
In the other chap's hold, you see.

"'I'll be eat if you dines off me,' says Tom,
'Yes, that,' says I, 'you'll be,' --
'I'm boiled if I die, my friend,' quoth I,
And 'Exactly so,' quoth he.

"Says he, 'Dear James, to murder me
Were a foolish thing to do,
For don't you see that you can't cook me,
While I can -- and will -- cook you!'

"So he boils the water, and takes the salt
And the pepper in portions true
(Which he never forgot) and some chopped shalot,
And some sage and parsley too.

"'Come here,' says he, with a proper pride,
Which his smiling features tell,
' 'Twill soothing be if I let you see,
How extremely nice you'll smell.'

"And he stirred it round and round and round,
And he sniffed at the foaming froth;
When I ups with his heels, and smothers his squeals
In the scum of the boiling broth.

"And I eat that cook in a week or less,
And -- as I eating be
The last of his chops, why, I almost drops,
For a wessel in sight I see!

"And I never grin, and I never smile,
And I never larf nor play,
But I sit and croak, and a single joke
I have -- which is to say:

"Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig!"
posted by Eve at 5:39 PM

 
HALLOWING HALLOWEEN: Why Christians should embrace the "devilish" holiday. Via Oblique House.

And here are some costume suggestions from Zorak.
posted by Eve at 12:06 PM

 
NOWARBLOG: Anti-Iraq-war site that spans the political spectrum. Looks like this will be one of the must-read sites for the foreseeable future. Contributors include Ampersand, Radley Balko, Gene Healy, Jim Henley, Julian Sanchez, and Tom Tomorrow. If they do requests, I strongly suggest they get Jeanne D'Arc on board--maybe that will spur her to come out of hibernation--but she also might want to change her handle if she's going to spend a lot of time bagging on war.

EDITED TO ADD: And if you really want to add spice, what about Telford Work? Salam Pax?? (even though Raed seems to have given up on getting him to keep the warblogging off his site)
posted by Eve at 11:16 AM

 
"I hate your living guts! You're ugly! You think you're going to make a slave of the world! Go on. Try your intellect on me!"
--Beverly Garland to the giant cucumber that is trying to take over the Earth, "It Conquered the World"
posted by Eve at 11:00 AM

 
SMACKDOWN: JACQUES DERRIDA VS. MILDRED D. TAYLOR: Final thought on Derrida for the moment (although I did get some interesting mail about him). Derrida's insistence on always privileging the fissures and gaps in community, privileging scattering rather than gathering, actually seems to distance him from the oppressed people he tries to fight for. If you privilege the things that make "community" a problematic concept, if you focus on the ways in which the black community (say) is not really a community at all, you're doing a lot of good things (focusing on people as individuals rather than on "group rights," blah blah blah) but you're also dissipating political energy. You're also making it harder for the "black community" to act as more-or-less-a-unit. You're making it harder for people to identify themselves as inheritors of a once-denigrated history, and therefore you're making it harder for them to reclaim and honor that history.

Like I said, there are all kinds of reasons to downplay the importance of community. In the US now, for example, I think it's fairly obvious that "the black community" is a seriously contested term. Are African immigrants part of the "black community"? Usually not--they're competitors for jobs. Marlon Riggs's movie "Black Is, Black Ain't" explored a lot of the areas of tension, discontinuities in the circle of "community," mostly relating to how homosexuality is viewed in native-born black communities. So it's not as if Derrida is making up the idea that no community will ever be homogenous, all communities will also alienate at least some people who you might expect to be community members, all communities will have people who are half-in, half-out of the community, and it's important to keep all that stuff in mind and to allow for that individuality rather than trying to force homogeneity. This is all true enough.

But about a week ago I was struck by the title of one of Mildred D. Taylor's books. Taylor wrote children's/young adult books about embattled Southern black communities before the civil rights era; her most famous book is probably Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. And one of the sequels to that book has a title whose metaphor goes totally against everything Derrida says he wants to do: Let the Circle Be Unbroken.

In my earlier Derrida post, I pointed out some basic problems in his privileging of scattering over gathering. So I'd just like to amplify those points by saying that his stance goes against some of the basic ways that people in oppressed, marginalized, or alienated groups organize their lives and marshal their strength and resistance; he misses the needs and hopes that Taylor's title evokes.
posted by Eve at 5:32 PM

 
JULIAN RIFFS ON METHOD (AND ME). I think we've come to the end of this trail, but I do have (a bit) more to say about his "mentalities" theory of personhood/moral worth, which I will deal with... later. Maybe Friday.
posted by Eve at 4:13 PM

 
GREAT-POWER STRATEGIZING--toward peaceful regime change in North Korea. Not sure what to say about this yet; more later.
posted by Eve at 3:42 PM

 
THE ROOTS OF TODAY'S BUDDHISM--the Protestantizing of Buddhism. Really interesting stuff. Via Touchstone's blog.
posted by Eve at 3:40 PM

 
"It should interest you to know that I have visited hundreds of other worlds and your Earth seems most suitable."
"Swell!"
--Bug-eyed alien and Earthman, "The Atomic Submarine"
posted by Eve at 10:27 AM

 
IRAQ BLOGWATCH: There's even more worthwhile reading than usual at Where Is Raed, the blog comin' at you live from Baghdad. Salam Pax, the Raedblogger, also pointed me to Shi'aPundit, a super-intriguing Islamic blog. Go!
posted by Eve at 4:33 PM

 
BUILDING A BETTER BIRTHDAY CAKE: A rambling reply to Julian about epistemology and ethics and stuff. I apologize in advance for the length and rambliness--there are a lot of issues here, and I hope to hit all the major ones and some interesting sidelights.

1) What am I arguing for? My basic claim here is: There will be times, in the course of doing philosophy (pursuing truth through reason), when you arrive at an ethical conclusion that appears repugnant to you. The two examples I gave were infanticide and Stalinist purges. If your underlying metaphysical principles and reasoning appear to drive you to accept baby-killing or mass murder, that is a pretty good sign that either the underlying principles or the intermediate reasoning are wrong. So instead of accepting the evil ethical conclusion, you investigate: Did I screw up on the way from metaphysics to ethics? That's the "easy" part. The next question is harder: Are my metaphysical principles a) wrong or b) insufficient? (= true enough, but lacking some important components.) One good way of investigating that question is to look again at the moment of ethical shock (the moment when you realize your philosophy is driving you to accept infanticide, purges, etc.). What happens if you hold to the ethical principle rather than the metaphysics? What happens if you say, "No, purges are just wrong"?

If you're being rigorous, you won't just stop there. You won't stick with all the underlying pro-purge metaphysics and a conflicting anti-purge ethics. Ethical claims do come embedded in a metaphysical framework; accepting an ethical conclusion requires acceptance of its implied metaphysical foundations. So once you experience ethical shock, you need to figure out whether your anti-purge ethics can be justified by a metaphysical framework that you find acceptable. You can use the moment of ethical shock as a spur to investigate philosophies you'd previously dismissed. The "if/then" choices we often find in philosophy (e.g. "Without God, all is permissible"--that doesn't actually tell you if all is permissible!) are only the most obvious places where we are faced with a choice between two ethics+metaphysics conglomerates. (Is that the word I want? Basically you're faced with "There is no God and all is permissible"--a metaphysical claim plus an ethical claim--vs. "There is a God and some things are impermissible.")

One place where the usefulness of ethical shock is most obvious is in dealing with a philosophy that's internally consistent but false. Something from outside has to enter if the person holding the consistent+false philosophy is ever to change his mind, since he won't run across a troubling internal contradiction. Assuming that Julian believes that consistent+false philosophies do exist, I wonder if he would find ethical shock a valid way to leave such a philosophy. (Or a valid way to confront someone who holds such a philosophy.)

I fear we're skidding off into Abstract-Noun-Land, so here, have an example: Ayn Rand works hard, adding all kinds of funky "epicycles" to her philosophy, in order to justify giving your life for a cause or person you value. I think her attempts to justify these acts totally fail. Pretend that I'm an Objectivist who does not see internal contradictions in Rand's metaphysics. I really want to keep being an Objectivist (for what should be obvious reasons--keeping my fun Objectivist friends, fear of looking like a flighty idiot, inertia, embarrassment, let's say I've made a name for myself as an Objectivist speaker) but I am also utterly sure that Harriet Tubman and Harry Wu were right to risk their lives to aid others. Once I realize that underlying Objectivist principles conflict with that particular ethical judgment, that Objectivist attempts to praise Tubman and Wu are incoherent, I have to ditch one or the other. My only claim throughout this discussion has been that it is not self-evidently better (more courageous, more rational, etc.) for me to choose the underlying Objectivist principles as vs. the ethical claim that Tubman and Wu were right.

2) Is reason more trustworthy than intuition? Julian argues that even if I say I don't want blank acceptance of ethical intuitions, that's actually what will happen, because out there in real reality the emotional pull of ethical intuitions is stronger than that of metaphysical convictions. There are a couple of things to say about this:

a) I'm not opposing instinct and reason and choosing instinct. As I tried to make clear above, the "moment of ethical shock" is a beginning, not an end-stage. Moral intuitions are not get-out-of-philosophy-free cards. If you say, "I am more sure that Tubman was right than I am of Rand's metaphysics," you have a lot of work to do--you have to figure out whether there are metaphysical frameworks that explain the world accurately while justifying Tubman's heroism. So I think I can sign on to something Julian says later on: "The intuition needs to be cashed out: we need to get behind it and see what feature of the case is causing us to have that reaction. ...The point of those intuitions is to serve as guideposts in the revision of theory." But then he adds, "That is, we should make revisions on the prompting of an intuition only when we can find an internal motivation in the theory for making that change." And this I disagree with, because I do think some internally consistent philosophies are false, and also because the particular ethical shock I've experienced with some philosophy may not actually be related to any of its inconsistencies! (Dialectical materialism may be incoherent, but its incoherencies [if that's a word???] may not have anything to do with the wrongness of Stalinist purges.) Nonetheless, I think Julian and I are more in agreement than he thinks--ethical shock is a question not an answer.

b) It's hard for me to buy the "people always choose ethical claims over metaphysical claims" argument since, as I said in my previous post on this subject, I've made the opposite decision. I realized I was more sure of the truth of Catholicism than I was of the falsehood of several of the Church's ethical claims. That experience sucked, really, in terms of how it felt; but fortunately I had i) lots of reasons to be Catholic and ii) friends who offered models of philosophical rigor, models of how to accept a philosophical truth even when it's personally difficult. So I tend to think that when people do have models of philosophical rigor, and training in ditto, they will be willing to ditch ethical claims when they think they have to. Obviously this kind of rigor requires careful introspection, as well; but again, I think my own experience at least suggests that the emotional pull of ethical claims can be overcome.

c) Attempting to be rational can also lead to major, major screw-ups. I know this is fairly obvious, but it might help to explain where I'm coming from here if I point out that I've known people who seriously derailed friendships and other relationships because they were trying very hard to choose rational metaphysics over irrational ethical principles like, oh, say, charity and humility. Again, I don't see that as an argument against putting metaphysics first in any particular case (see point b!). I say it only as a caution to those who are quick to see the drawbacks of privileging ethical intuitions but slow to see the drawbacks of privileging often overly-abstract philosophical speculation. In pointing out the weaknesses of the "birthday cake" model I'm actually trying not to privilege either ethics or metaphysics in any particular case.

d) The Objectivist-Tubman-lover example should also underline one of the other problems with assuming that if a metaphysics vs. ethics fight is truly even, ethics will always win: Ethics don't always carry the greater emotional weight. If you're heavily personally invested in a philosophical system (like Objectivism; or Catholicism; or atheism; or Communism; or relativism; or whatever), you have major emotional incentives to stay put! You may actually have to work pretty hard to discern conflicting ethical intuitions and judge how certain you are of them. In this respect, someone trying hard to stick with metaphysics even when his ethical sense rebels against the consequences often becomes like Julian's "astronomer with two data tables, one for recording 'empirical observations,' which fit with his theory, and another for recording 'telescope malfunctions' – anything that doesn’t." In this case the "telescope malfunctions" are ethical shocks.

I wish there were some easy way of saying: Here's how you do philosophy. First, you derive your metaphysics... etc. But neither the philosophical claims themselves (since so many involve "if/then" choices) nor the process of reason and introspection by which we come to know them work that simply.

Finally, Julian "tells a story" of how condemnation of infanticide, specifically, may be a mere result of biology with no particular ethical significance. Sure, that might be true--although there are good reasons, as well, to think that evolution might predispose us not to care for deformed or burdensome infants. Cf. Steven Pinker's wildly controversial "Why Do They Kill Their Newborns?" article. And it's not as if there have never been cultures with widespread infanticide--especially of infants deemed unhealthy, or infants whose legal fathers suspected they were not the children's biological fathers. This line of thought only becomes really interesting if we can see that ethical intuitions are more likely than metaphysical claims to be products of outdated evolutionary adaptations. I'm not sure how Julian would go about demonstrating (or suggesting) that; if he wants to, that might be intriguing, although really it all becomes pretty tangled since (for the materialists) culture is one way evolution expresses itself in humans. So a culture based on abstract reasoning, or on various metaphysical precepts, may itself be simply a product of evolutionary change. (If the change from a God-centered worldview to a human-centered worldview is an evolutionary response to changed conditions, I doubt that would lead Julian to say the change was wrong or unfounded, no? So too with a change from valuing healthy, wanted infants whose parentage is sure to valuing all infants, which may be, for all I know, similarly an evolutionary response to changed conditions.) Anyway, this whole paragraph is probably MUCH more speculative than it should be, and not necessary to the argument above.
posted by Eve at 4:16 PM

 
AND TO YOUR LEFT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN (AND OTHERS)...: I've added some links to the blogroll (and removed Ginger Stampley, argh, gnash teeth, rend garments). They are all Catholics of various dispositions. Mark Shea is a tireless warrior for the right and true. Nordog is an occasional elbow in the ribs. Tenebrae offers lots of poetry, bizarre locutions, and Darkness. And Oblique House is the diary of a mad homeschooler. All are well worth your time.
posted by Eve at 11:40 AM

 
"Beware! Beware! Beware of the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep! He eats little boys! Puppy dog tails! Big fat snails! Beware! Take care! Beware!"
--Bela Lugosi, "Glen or Glenda?"
posted by Eve at 10:43 AM

 
We're only making plans for da da dirty dirty blogwatch
We don't like him so much cause he's very ug ug ugly
We're only making plans for da da dark brown blogwatch
He has a right to live though he's ill ill ill-shaped
He's on his way to extinction
We only want what's best for him
Bear up blogwatch never say die!

The Agitator: Long post exploring his decision to oppose war on Iraq. I think he ignores some stuff (e.g. he doesn't explain why "we can't invade them all so we shouldn't invade the one we can get away with" is a good argument) but the post is nonetheless well worth your time. I remain on the fence, because a) I'm lame and b) I want to read the much-discussed Threatening Storm before I say anything more.

Regions of Mind: Back to school in Afghanistan.

Amy Welborn: Quick but fascinating post on abortion in short fiction. Sandra Miesel chips in via comments box. Here's an earlier take on it from me.
posted by Eve at 9:15 PM

 
MORE FUN WITH GOOGLE: The latest disturbing search requests that brought visitors to my site. In order ending with my favorites--though truly, it was hard to choose.

guatemalan laws on marriage between cousins
angry women are building paula gunn allen
free animation about IVF in farm animals
someone pierce navel in kuwait and where can I pierce my navel in Kuwait?
interracial wicca lust
christian thought thinking fun
porn movie cops search for aliens cloning human
centurions of Rome free porno
psychology and thigh boots
discussion against cloning monster
passion vs. reason
porn star Dred Scott
everyone hates the irish catholics
bill o'reilly corleone
schlock 'n' roll scalia
how to marry a moderately intellectual jewish man
posted by Eve at 8:27 PM

 
BERNARD SHAW ON PAPAL INFALLIBILITY: Found a quote in this month's First Things that offers a useful, clarifying, and humbling perspective on papal infallibility: "I had better inform my readers that the famous dogma of papal infallibility is by far the most modest profession of its kind in existence. Compared to our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before God."
posted by Eve at 8:03 PM

 
"The Terror of the Monster Rabbits--Out to Destroy Everything in their Path.... They Multiply, They Weigh 150 Pounds, They're Four Feet Tall--And They Kill.... Even Dynamite Can't Stop the Hopping of These Giants."
--Advertisement for "Night of the Lepus"
posted by Eve at 7:58 PM

 
JANE JACOBS ON CRIME IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: So the crime referred to in yesterday's post took place in the middle of the afternoon, in broad daylight. This is the criminals' MO; they've done the same crime several times, to different victims throughout the area. How did the criminals get away with it? It was easy. The area they hit is entirely residential. No stores. No gathering places. No watchful eyes. The place empties out during the day. This is exactly the kind of danger of single-use areas that Jane Jacobs described in The Death and Life of Great American Cities; it's the same reason that office areas become dangerous at night, when the office workers pour into the subways and leave the streets deserted and vulnerable. It was very odd to sit there dealing with the (very helpful, generous, and professional) policewoman and suddenly realize that I was a public-policy case study.
posted by Eve at 6:29 PM

 
CAMP: I'm confused when people try to describe something as "camp" because it treats some usually-serious thing (religion, or sex, or love, or patriotism, or whatever) as just ridiculous. That style of mockery generally has a heavy dose of contempt for people who don't find the ridiculous thing ridiculous. It also usually presents breaking away from conventional values as much easier than it really is. Camp, to me, is darker, more nuanced, more double-tongued. To be camp, rather than just plain old ordinary mockery, doesn't there have to be an edge, an acknowledgment of the force of conventional judgments (in the world, and also in the performers' own hearts and minds)? Would "Sunset Boulevard" (say) still be attractive raw material for camp if there were no real tragedy in the story, or no real grandeur in Norma Desmond?
posted by Eve at 6:24 PM

 
"A TEEN STAR FOR A NEW, BLEAKER AGE": Have been looking over the zine I used to do with my best friend from high school. It went through 26 issues (# -1 through # 24) and I said a lot of stupid stuff, oh well. But it was a good exercise in humility, like reading old diaries. Angsty, Magritte-influenced (yet still cliched) fiction; obsessive gay-pride stuff; and willful obscurity. It was fun though. Certainly a precursor to this blog. Lists of "vanished joys of childhood" (your sister making you a latchhook rug for Christmas; making kazoo noises without a kazoo; the intoxicating smell of blue ditto ink); reviews that reminded me to dig out my Severed Heads tapes, get Diamanda Galas's "The Singer," and re-read Genet to see if I still think he's terrific; "evolutionary ideas that failed" (trilobites of the tundra, rampaging squid of the deciduous forest--no, I don't know why we printed this list any more than you do); a paean to PBS because it used taxpayers' cash to run unpopular programming; bizarre rants that occasionally skidded into actual insight or oblique expression; and a music review that ended, "(This is the end of the review, in case you didn't guess)". It was strange to watch the trajectory of my high school years--junior year was totally fun, a big punk rock party, probably the happiest year of my pre-20s life, but then in senior year a lot of things fell apart (breakups, illnesses, hideous actions by ex-friends--objectively hideous, not just hideous from the perspective of melodramatic teens) and the tone of the zine got much darker and angrier. Odd to revisit the time when I could quote the first paragraph of Neuromancer from memory, shouted "Keep hell beautiful! I want it nice when I'm there!" at anti-gay protesters, and used pretentious Brit-spellings like "recognised" and "stylised." Grunt. Sigh.
posted by Eve at 6:17 PM

 
BLAH!: So Thursday evening, I was returning to the office to work and blog, and I had this cute little post worked up in which I explained that I'd gone home during the day to take a nap, which had turned into a MUCH longer nap than I'd anticipated, so I hadn't posted anything all day. I was planning to tell you all, in this cute little post, about my dream, in which I'd been at sea, on a kind of barge or cruise ship. There had been french toast there, mmmm. And I had realized (in the dream) that the barge was especially attractive to relativists, because the unstable motion of the boat upon the waves mirrored their own foundationless worldviews.

Yes, that is what I dream about.

So there I was, settling in before the computer for a few hours of work and bloggery, when the cops called. I spent the rest of the evening, and a substantial chunk of Friday, dealing with the criminal activity mentioned in yesterday's post. So no blogging until now--I've managed to get very behind in work, and am slowly, slowly catching up. Lots of fun stuff to say, which will be spread out over the next few days. Today: short posts. Monday: ethics, epistemology, and abstinence. (Oh my.)

I still want french toast, too. Grrr.
posted by Eve at 4:40 PM

 
"I think you're wondering how you might get us to reveal our knowledge of interplanetary travel. And how you might force that information from us. Others of you are estimating the heights to which you might rise if you could personally arrange for our cooperation in space travel techniques. Well, forget it."
--Helmut Dantine (as a Venusian), "Stranger from Venus"
posted by Eve at 3:00 PM

 
BACK IN A FEW: Hey there. No time to post. Spent much of last night & today dealing with extremely irritating criminal activity in my vicinity (don't worry, everyone's OK), so now I'm way behind on work and basically don't have any time for you all. However, I have at least ten things to post about! So I will be blogging late tonight, this weekend, and so forth. Weekend topics: epistemology & ethics; my punk past; sex ed; camp (the thing with feathers, not summer camp); Jane Jacobs explains my local crime; Derrida; and Jesus in Hell. Should be fun.
posted by Eve at 3:30 PM

 
Mister Trouble never hangs around
When he hears this Mighty sound.

"Here I come to watch the blogs"...

Unqualified Offerings is still your clearinghouse for sniper news. This post also argues, rightly IMO, that we should be a pack, not a herd.

For those following the Ossuary Discovery, this post from Telford Work and the comments at Amy Welborn's site provide lots of food for thought.

I'm, uh, really really glad that I seem to have mostly missed a large dust-up over left-wing anti-gay slurs. Light of Reason has several posts on the subject; my own take is probably best represented by Agenda Bender's posts. And the line, "Don't try to dazzle me with your superior minefield waltzing skills when you've never danced anywhere near it," is worth keeping in mind, all the time. I can't count the number of times I've wanted to say it. (AB is wrong about Tony Kushner though--his understanding of a) politics and b) the psychology of people who disagree with him are utterly detached from reality, but boy can he write plays.)

Black People Love Us! (via The Agitator, I think. Not to be missed.)

The Ultimate Drinking Game Homepage. (Via the Rat.)

And two free-market think tanks--one in Kenya, one in Nigeria. I can't remember where the heck I got these links, so many apologies to the blogger who first truffled them up.
posted by Eve at 2:44 PM

 
REVELATIONS. Last night I finished my travel reading: Scott Hahn's Lamb's Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth (borrowed from the Oligarch). It's a terrific book--"reads" the Mass through the Book of Revelations, and vice versa. Read it! It'll illuminate one of the Bible's wildest books, and, simultaneously, it'll illuminate the Mass we attend (at least) every week. Ignore the cutesy pun-titles ("Oath Meal"--sigh); the book is solid.

In New York, I went to the "Time to Hope" show of Spanish Catholic art, on display at St. John the Divine Episcopal Church. I hope to review the show itself for publication, so for now you just get a capsule review: Go. It's a treasure trove. The show is roughly organized into themes, so you'll have, for example, a room dedicated to depictions of the "Ecce Homo" (one of these was the most powerful work in the entire show, for me--a statue of Christ, scourged and dressed in the mocking "kingly" robe--but if you looked closely, the artist had carved the Agnus Dei on the cloak--really intense); or a room dedicated to depictions of the Immaculate Conception (Mary as Revelations' Woman Clothed with the Sun) and the Crucifixion. Pretty much all the art had the tactile, sorrowing, rawly physical quality everyone associates with Spanish Catholicism. The dates ranged from the 12th century (a small but striking statue of King David with musical instruments) through the Renaissance. The show was part of a series called "The Ages of Man," and so there was an intellectually stimulating contrast between secular and Christian humanism--how do we know what man is, what we are? Is it art that we're trying to live up to (which seemed to be the show catalog's position), or Christ (which was the position of the art itself)?

The church in which the show was housed is a grab-bag, a big vaguely Christian attic. Representations of the Platonic forms, nooks honoring Gaia (whuh?), a plaque commemorating the Declaration of Independence (ohhhkay), and, tucked away where I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't been seeking the restrooms, a terrific statue of the Return of the Prodigal Son. The contrast between the church (whose brochure proudly noted that its stained-glass windows did not depict "just" religious scenes, but also an early television [could I make that up?], Michelangelo carving the David, and other random stuff I forget) and the intensely Christ-focused, Heaven-directed art could not have been greater.
posted by Eve at 12:27 PM

 
POETRY WEDNESDAY: From Lewis Carroll, "The Mad Gardener's Song":

He thought he saw an Elephant,
That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
'At length I realise,' he said,
'The bitterness of Life!'

He thought he saw a Buffalo
Upon the chimney-piece:
He looked again, and found it was
His Sister's Husband's Niece.
'Unless you leave this house,' he said,
'I'll send for the Police!'

He thought he saw a Rattlesnake
That questioned him in Greek:
He looked again, and found it was
The Middle of Next Week.
'The one thing I regret,' he said,
'Is that it cannot speak!'

He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus.
'If this should stay to dine,' he said,
'There won't be much for us!'

He thought he saw a Kangaroo
That worked a coffee-mill:
He looked again, and found it was
A Vegetable-Pill.
'Were I to swallow this,' he said,
'I should be very ill!'

He thought he saw a Coach-and-Four
That stood beside his bed:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bear without a Head.
'Poor thing,' he said, 'poor silly thing!
It's waiting to be fed!'

He thought he saw an Albatross
That fluttered round the lamp:
He looked again, and found it was
A Penny-Postage Stamp.
'You'd best be getting home,' he said:
'The nights are very damp!'

He thought he saw a Garden-Door
That opened with a key:
He looked again, and found it was
A Double Rule of Three:
'And all its mystery,' he said,
'Is clear as day to me!'

He thought he saw a Argument
That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
'A fact so dread,' he faintly said,
'Extinguishes all hope!'
posted by Eve at 10:17 AM

 
TIME, LIKE AN EVER-ROLLING STREAM. Awesome pictorial display of individual continuity over time. Via Diana Hsieh.
posted by Eve at 10:15 AM

 
HOW TO ACHIEVE HUMILITY IN THREE EASY STEPS: Step one: Keep a diary.
Step two: Wait (at least a year).
Step three: Read old diary entries.

Repeat as necessary.
posted by Eve at 10:14 AM

 
"African vampires don't go for Chinese women."
--"Armour of God II: Operation Candor"
posted by Eve at 10:13 AM

 
OFF WE GO, INTO THE WILD BLUE YONDER: I'm off to sunny New Haven. Blogging will be nonexistent until Tuesday or Wednesday. I hope to come roaring back next week with reflections on America, art show reviews, and much other flotsam. See you then!
posted by Eve at 4:29 PM

 
JONAH MAY BE GEEKIER THAN I AM. Good to know.
posted by Eve at 3:35 PM

 
NEW CATHOLIC SITE, much poetry, another Smiths fan, etc.
posted by Eve at 12:15 PM

 
I WAS JUST REMINDED of one excellent reason to like the name "luminous mysteries."
posted by Eve at 10:54 AM

 
"We're vampires, all right, but only in a synthetic sense."
--Hippie vampiress, "The Wild Wild World of Batwoman (She Was a Happy Vampire)," a.k.a. "She Was a Hippy Vampire"
posted by Eve at 9:49 AM

 
I FIGURED OUT why I'm not a fan of Richard Avedon's photos: He manages to make people look well-combed even when they're covered with BEES.

Better pix: Weegee
Lee Miller
posted by Eve at 5:20 PM

 
LARGE BIRD.
posted by Eve at 3:06 PM

 
SOMEONE ASKED ME what I think of the new rosary mysteries. Haven't read the Pope's letter yet, so no comment on that, but... what's not to like, really? I've prayed the rosary a couple different ways; I love the way that each time you meditate on a mystery, a new aspect of God's work in the world is revealed. You see how the Visitation, or the Assumption, etc., relates to the particular situation you're in or the situation you're praying about. You gain new insight on your life and God's will. It's just awesome and I don't do it even remotely resembling often enough. Anyway, I generally view the form of the rosary as pretty flexible--there are all kinds of funky ways to pray it, as Disputations (go there!) has been discussing all month. So more mysteries is A-OK by me. I like the focus on the public ministry of Jesus. I like the re-emphasis on the fact that the Marian mysteries are themselves Christ-centered. I agree with people who think "luminous mysteries" is an odd name, and switching from three to four sets of mysteries will throw off some rhythms of prayer. If the new mysteries don't work with your own prayer life... don't use 'em! We'll see whether the new mysteries "catch on" or whether they remain one of the many alternatives to the "standard rosary," all of which have their devoted followers.

Basically, I think this is cool and I'm excited to start praying and meditating on these mysteries.

Remember, the Dominican rosary + the Fatima prayer is just another lifestyle choice!
posted by Eve at 2:52 PM

 
PS: Probably the best way of summarizing the vast post (drink!) below --the best way of capturing the fact that I'm not advocating ethical stasis--is just to repeat what I said on Monday: "Until I am convinced that I have to, I won't sanction infanticide." So far, not convinced. Still working on understanding the issues involved, and, like I said, will post in greater depth when I return from sunny New Haven.
posted by Eve at 2:39 PM

 
BITE-SIZE BLOGWATCH: Amptoons: Afghanistan: Still no place for a lady.

Unqualified Offerings: Important shooting updates and thoughts, esp. this.
posted by Eve at 2:37 PM

 
THE BIRTHDAY CAKE OF EXISTENCE: Tangentially related to the cloning stuff posted below. (To which Will Wilkinson has responded. My reply to him will have to wait: I'm going out of town tomorrow, and won't be back until maybe Tuesday or Wednesday, and I almost certainly won't have time for heavy lifting on the blog before then. But I will reply when I return.)

Back when I would spend Monday nights hanging out at OSGAY (the Objectivist Study Group at Yale), debating the nature of productivity and the whichness of the why and that sort of thing, every meeting would include at least one bizarre diagram on the chalkboard. (The most elaborate one involved the two-headed, drooling dragon of government menacing Liberal Happy Land; my favorite was a box divided into thirds, which I believe was simply labeled, "Life.") One of the diagrams that came up constantly was the Birthday Cake of Existence. I don't know why it was the Birthday Cake, since it was actually shaped more like a wedding cake, with a series of layers resting one atop the other; I guess weddings are even less Objectivist than birthdays. The "classic cake" goes in this order, from bottom to top: Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Politics. This will be familiar to anyone who recalls Ayn Rand's famous definition of Objectivism while standing on one foot--"Metaphysics: Objective reality. Epistemology: Reason. Ethics: Self-interest. Politics: Capitalism." Each layer of the cake rests on the one below it. Later we debated the ramifications of placing "aesthetics" on the cake--was it the candles on top (i.e. a kind of optional extra) or was it the frosting (i.e. an entire approach to life that colored all the layers and distinguished them from seemingly similar layers in non-Objectivist cakes)? And we argued over whether it was legitimate to include a cake plate, labeled, "Do I care?", or whether there was simply no point in talking to or about those who decided they didn't care. Then we all went out drinking together.

Anyway, my point (and I do have one) is that we like our intellectual lives to proceed according to the order and the categories of the Birthday Cake of Existence. We can argue about the lowest two layers of the cake--should Epistemology come first, because you have to get that squared away before you can agree on a method for discerning the truth? Or should Metaphysics come first, because it's ontologically prior--you need Stuff before you can Think about that stuff? But intellectual types, people who argue about that sort of thing, generally don't like the implications of deriving their metaphysics from their ethics (say).

I'm not so sure. I understand the desire to keep reason pristine, sealed away from the emotional weight that ethical commitments carry; I understand the caution about one's culture or one's personal inclinations that would lead one to say, "Even if it appears repugnant to me, I've got to do it because all my premises require it." I'm definitely not saying that ethical judgments should remain static--that if accepting a certain metaphysical idea would require you to jettison an ethical stance, that in itself is an argument against the metaphysical idea. After all, I've personally changed a lot of my ethical stances, often because I was convinced, not of other ethical positions, but of underlying metaphysical claims that necessarily entailed certain ethical stances. (Becoming Christian is the big obvious underlying metaphysical change that requires lots of ethical changes, but there are others in my life. For example, my view of the nature of truth changed, which affected my view of the value and methods of philosophy, although now that I think back on it those changes came more or less at the same time--I was simultaneously convinced of a non-relativist understanding of truth and convinced out of my previous anti-philosophy stance. Anyway, I'm sure there are other examples in my life.)

But the picture of how we build our understanding of the world--and how we should build it--is more complicated than the "Birthday Cake of Existence" model suggests. First, of course, we're often convinced of ethical and metaphysical stances simultaneously (in a process over time), as I described above. Second, there's the question of "which thing you believe more." When I was trying to figure out if I should enter the Catholic Church, I had a mountain of reasons pressing me toward the baptismal font. But I also really didn't understand and didn't like the Church's teaching on some issues, most prominently contraception and homosexuality. (I think I understand the teaching on contraception a lot better now; homosexuality I'm still trying to figure out.) I had to decide which thing I believed more: that the Church's claims about itself were true, that it was an institution ordained and inspired by God and that it had the authority to teach on these ethical questions; or that condoms and same-sex canoodling were OK. I think I even surprised myself a little when I realized that I was more convinced of the former.

Many principles come to us with "if/then" clauses built in; and we have to delve into our own experiences, with not only rational questioning but also introspection, in order to figure out where to go once we accept that particular way of framing a dilemma. For example, suppose I become convinced that "Without God, all is permissible." This may lead me to a Nietzschean "overturning of the tables of values"; or it may lead me to seek God, and try to discover whether He might be found. Which journey I embark on will depend on what I believe more strongly: that there is no God, or that some things are genuinely impermissible. These "if/then" principles can't be easily reconciled with the simple bottom-up method depicted in the Birthday Cake diagram.

I'm sorry if this all sounds fairly simplistic and intro-level. I'm trying to cash out reasons, from within philosophy, why we might want to be wary of a certain sentiment that can strike intellectuals. This sentiment is an overly simplistic or cliched understanding of intellectual courage; depending on the personality of the intellectual, it can become self-congratulatory in the extreme. This sentiment says, basically, "I'm courageous enough to accept any conclusion my reason pushes me toward--even if it means accepting Stalinist purges, rape, or any other repugnant acts."

The problem here should be obvious: If you think your reason has forced you to accept Stalinism (for one example that actually happened to people trying to be rational), then maybe you should take some time to examine your premises. Maybe you shouldn't say, "OK, Stalinism then!", but should instead assume that your premises were screwed up somehow, and it's your job to unscrew them.

The connection to the cloning/infanticide debate should be pretty obvious, really. If your philosophy ends up at baby-killing, maybe it's time to take a step back and see if either a) you have screwed up in your reasoning, or b) you have taken the wrong path after an "if/then" choice.

Like I said, this is not an argument for ethical stasis. It's a strong caution. And it's a reminder that it's OK to say that you are more convinced of certain ethical claims (e.g. baby-killing, or mass murder, is just wrong) than you are of certain metaphysical claims that you thought you held but that drive you to unacceptable ethical conclusions. That's an if/then choice, not a rejection of rationality. If you believe a) historical materialism and b) that purges are bad, but you investigate and come to believe that c) historical materialism justifies purges (sorry, I think I'm massacring this example by oversimplifying it, but I hope you see my point), then you have to reject either a) or b). It is not irrational to decide that the ethical claim is the better one, the one you're more sure of, and so you need to radically rework your metaphysics in order to justify that ethical claim.

In this particular case, I'm not sure, right now, whether the "babies: they're what's for dinner" side (which may just be Julian, at the moment, but I think he's right that his premises lead to an infanticide-accepting conclusion) has failed to get from premise to conclusion or whether it has chosen the wrong "if/then" option, and, if so, what the other options are. I'm still working on it. As I've said throughout this discussion, I don't believe that the anti-killing-currently-rational-persons stance can be justified through secular reason alone (my readers are probably getting tired of this link), but I'm not sure yet how far down into the premises we have to drill before we hit the "Without God, all is permissible" level. I believe we ultimately do reach that particular if/then choice, but I'd like to forestall it a bit longer. What I do know is that I'm more sure of the ethical claim, "Don't kill Junior," than I am of the rather tortuous paths I've taken in defending that claim. And, although of course all these judgments are subject to change, I don't think that greater certainty about the ethical issue is a bad thing, or a sign that I lack intellectual courage.
posted by Eve at 2:33 PM

 
BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Stayed up late last night to finish Lauren Winner's Girl Meets God. I'll be reviewing it, so I won't post my whole take on the book here, but suffice it to say that I got a lot out of the book. It's a very easy read that nonetheless packs in lots of spiritual insight. (Winner was raised Reform Jewish, then became Orthodox Jewish, and is now an evangelical Anglican.) She also anticipates many of the criticisms and reservations I might have had about her story, which is disarming--just as you're about to put some pointed question to her, she puts it to herself! This is a good book and I suspect it would make a good gift.
posted by Eve at 12:31 PM

 
"Although his name is untranslatable to any known Earth language, it would sound something like... Zontar!"
--NASA scientist in re alien, "Zontar, the Thing from Venus"
posted by Eve at 10:14 AM

 
And what blogwatch will the poor girl wear
To all tomorrow's parties?

The Agitator found two excellent posts on the dockworkers' strike--from Julian (see, I don't just beat up on him) and Brink Lindsey.

Cacciaguida: Good post on the role of the laity and a "three-word summary of Opus Dei."

Crazy Tracy: Psychiatric nurse's take on life. Good stuff. Via Noli Irritare Leones.

Noli Irritare Leones: Quakers, technology, and reformations; and a good question about Iran.

Unqualified Offerings: How's Afghanistan going?

Telford Work: Falwell, Muslims, and "intellectual dhimmitude."

So there are these two blogs that have really good writing, and although I for sure don't agree with a lot of what's posted there, I get a lot out of reading them. So why don't I add them to my blogroll, you ask? Good question. So let it be written, so let it be done. Oh, and if you don't already know that Ginger's back--now you know.

I Used to Believe--neat site about stuff people believed when they were kids. Via AgendaBender. I may do a post on this if I have time.
posted by Eve at 6:08 PM

 
EMBRYOS AND STUFF: I'm a shank. Although I'd skimmed Julian's last post in our argument over abortion (which turned into an argument over infanticide; some slopes really are slippery), I hadn't read it carefully until I was reminded of it by his notes from his speech at the America's Future Foundation cloning debate. So I'd like to briefly revisit points he made in both those posts. I don't know that either of us will be able to make the best possible case for our respective positions--we are both struggling to hit the highest notes in our philosophical registers, and our voices show the strain. But I do think that my muddle is more coherent than his muddle....

I apologize in advance if I bring up points that he responded to directly during the panel. I wasn't there; in one of life's sardonic little rhymes, I had to volunteer that night at the pregnancy center. I'm also only going to address one of the many issues that group themselves under the heading "cloning"; I'm only going to talk about the destruction of pre-rational human individuals, whether they be cloned embryos, regular old embryos, newborns, or pre-linguistic young children. I'm not going to get into stuff like reproductive cloning, giving your baby a higher IQ or bat wings, and all that stuff, because the issues there are different. If you look to your left you'll find two longer essays I wrote on embryo-destructive (therapeutic) and reproductive cloning. I have two things to say--one thing about alien babies, and one thing about mourning.

ALIEN BABIES: Julian asked me how I would respond if I met a rational alien. He assumed, correctly, that I would not kill the rational alien. ("Rational" here means--I think, although Julian's fought rather shy of confirming this--simply being able to use language. It doesn't mean fulfilling a Randian telos, or behaving as a perfect rational actor, etc. A four-year-old is "rational" in this sense, but a newborn is not.) I should make clear that saying, "All individual humans have value," is not the same as saying, "Only individual humans have value."

I wouldn't kill the alien. But neither would I kill a baby alien! (assuming that these aliens have pre-rational stages, just as we do.) Julian wants to claim that I am really, in my heart of hearts, concerned only with rationality--with "mentality." (For a cashing-out of that term, take a look at the previous posts in this dispute; here, this is probably the best place.) If I would treat a rational alien species differently from a non-rational alien species, doesn't that mean that I really value rationality-as-such?

I think Julian is ignoring the difference between valuing individuals in a rational species, and valuing currently-existing rational mentalities. Will Wilkinson does this too, actually, when he accuses anti-cloners of assigning metaphysical status to a tangle of DNA. (Later, here, Wilkinson conflates not-gonna-be-rational-again individuals with pre-rational individuals. OTOH, he posted more complete notes than Julian did, so he wins in that regard.) The important thing about DNA is not that it happens to be a clump of human DNA--so is a toenail, or a foot, or a cancer, or a corpse. The important thing about the human DNA in, specifically, an embryo, is that it marks the presence of a living human individual. It is that individual whom I value. Individual rational beings go through more and less rational stages; our rationality develops; thus there is a period before we are rational. If I came across aliens who had rational and pre-rational stages, I would value these individual alien lives as I value individual, developing human lives. I would do this partly because the most plausible alternative--Julian's "mentalities" view--has a lot of problems which I deal with here and which I don't think he's resolved; partly because until I am convinced that I have to, I won't sanction infanticide (more on this at the end*); and partly because, as I've said before, I believe that the physical component to our individuality is both important and good.

* EDITED TO ADD: Oops, I forgot that I promised to talk about this. Will post on it later.

Moreover, let me just make a couple quick points on the alien analogy. It's striking how human Julian's aliens are! They're sort of like the aliens on the original "Star Trek," where an alien is basically a funny-colored human with a clipped, vaguely British accent. In order for the hypothetical to work here, the aliens must a) be "rational" in a way that humans can understand, and b) be able to express that rationality in a way that we recognize. In order for the parallel to really work, they need to go through pre-rational stages of development, just like humans. Now possibly an alien would tell me that its people don't have a human-like conception of "individuality"; perhaps its species really does think of itself as mentalities. I'd listen to this alien, on the grounds that it probably understands itself better than I do; but I'd also be willing to subject its self-understanding to the same scrutiny I gave the "mentalities" position earlier, because I really do think that position is incoherent. I can, if I stretch, imagine aliens for whom a "mentalities" position would be coherent--this might make an excellent science fiction premise (I mean that, not trying to be snarky)--maybe. But those aliens would be extraordinarily difficult for us to understand. How would they set up their laws? Without physical individuality, how would we handle contracts between two mentalities, who were housed in bodies but have since vanished, leaving the new mentalities housed in their old bodies to pay the consequences? And so forth. What these confusions teach me is that it makes more sense to look at what we know about human life, and try to understand hypothetical aliens in terms of that, rather than trying to understand human babies in terms of hypothetical aliens. Or to put it more bluntly, some hypotheticals obscure more than they reveal. However, if this hypothetical has allowed me to clarify the difference between "all humans have value" and "only humans have value," then it's served some good purpose.

FOR WHOM NONE WILL GO MOURNING: In his AFF notes, Julian argues: "What do we think is so awful when someone we care about is killed? What makes it worse than a hamster's death? Not, surely, the microstructure of the particular organism -- we don't lament that a particular kind of physical entity is gone. No, it's that this person -- with a unique perspective, with a way of being in the world, with projects and goals to pursue, who hated the smell of onions and liked Bob Dylan -- because THAT has been snuffed out."

Now, I think in context he's attacking a position I don't hold (the "only humans are valuable" position); but his argument would also apply to my position ("pre-rational individuals have rights too"). And I think he's just straight-up wrong here in a bunch of different ways.

First, he's wrong, factually, about what we mourn. Obviously the projects, goals, and perspectives are part of what we mourn--and a significant part, when we mourn someone who has had a chance to develop those projects, goals, and perspectives. But--what do we think is so awful when a baby dies? What do we think is so awful when a woman miscarries? It is the death of an individual who has never even had a chance to develop the projects, goals, and perspectives of a rational human.

Julian could respond that we actually value our own desires for that child--parents grieve because they wanted a baby, not because their baby died, if you see the difference. Again, I think this is just false. It is generally part of the truth--of course parents grieve partly because their hopes for their child will now never be realized. But they also just plain old grieve the death of the child. They grieve not only for their own closed-off futures, but for the snuffed-out future of the baby. Moreover, this account doesn't explain grief over an abortion. There, the woman typically is not grieving the loss of her own goal of having a child. She simply grieves for the dead child. (I have no idea what the stats are on grieving after abortion. All I know is that one of the most surprising things about my work at the pregnancy center has been how many of the women we see either are personally grieving from one--even if they are considering aborting again--or know someone who is. Some of the women we counsel are startled at how strong and persistent their grief is. Some aren't--some quickly move on, and that's OK; emotions aren't ethics, so I'm not trying to make someone feel bad about something she did that she can't undo. Anyway, this whole digression was just to explain that I'd read a lot about how "post-abortion syndrome" is a myth, and I was pretty startled to see how frequent that sorrow is among the specific population [mostly black, low-income women; about half are members of Christian churches, the other half are mostly nothing-in-particular] I counsel. Sorry for digression.) Julian can respond here by saying that our culture has conditioned us to mourn the deaths of pre-rational individuals; but that cuts both ways, of course. If we allow that culture provokes mourning (which it does; I don't know that the Romans got all too worked up over the children they exposed) then Julian can't appeal to mourning to support his own position.

Second problem: This position strays close to defining people's worth by the feelings they provoke in others. If I do not care for myself, and no one cares for me, then my death interrupts no one's plans or hopes. Does that make my life worthless? Does that make the action of killing me morally equivalent to the action of persuading me to live, or covering me so I don't die of exposure, or getting me to a hospital so I can take my medication?

Third problem, related to something I touched on above: What we mourn in other people's deaths, and what we fear in our own, to some extent varies by culture. Does that mean that human worth similarly varies by culture? I assume that Julian would argue that in fact, some reasons for mourning are the kind of reasons he would encourage and/or base policy on, whereas other reasons for mourning he would discourage (not by being a jerk to individual mourners, of course, but through influencing the surrounding cultural climate--though this distinction is hard to pull off in practice, cf. discussion of mourning an abortion as "the forbidden grief") and/or reject as a basis for policy decisions. So... how come?

AND FOR A CHEAP SHOT: In re Julian's account of "summoning reasons into being"--a friend of mine once described this position as, "He wills reason; I will tacos." She said snarkily.
posted by Eve at 5:43 PM

 
SO I REALLY LIKE unusual baby names, as I made clear in this post about gender and naming. Nonetheless, this site--eight pages of real bad baby names--had me laughing 'til I cried. Really hilarious. Even if it did slam "Jelynne," which is the only -lynne name I like.
posted by Eve at 2:49 PM

 
THE HIGH AND THE LOW: One of the sections in Deconstruction in a Nutshell (see below) concerns Plato's Timaeus, and its description of the khora. The khora is... well, it's there, and that's about all it is. "Khora is the immense and indeterminate spatial receptacle (dekhomenon, hypodokhe) in which the sensible likenesses of the eternal paradigms are 'engendered,' in which they are 'inscribed' by the Demiurge, thereby providing a 'home' for all things." And later: "For the khora is an 'abyss,' a void of empty space; it is also an infinite play of reflections in which the paradigms produce their images, simply 'reflecting' sensible things like a mirror that is not altered by the images it reflects." Later still: "It might appear at times that khora looks a little like the unknown God, the deus absonditus, the mysterious origin beyond origin, about whom we cannot say a thing. ...[Derrida's essay] 'How Not to Speak' explores the analogy and, more importantly, the disanalogy of khora with the God of negative theology.

"...In this essay Derrida draws our attention to the tension between what he calls two 'tropics of negativity,' that is, two opposing ways in which philosophical thought finds itself up against its limits, against something that resists being said, two things equally unsayable but for quite opposite reasons. The first is the most familiar and prestigious text in all of Plato's work--the one that makes all the standard anthologies used in 'Introduction to Philosophy' courses--the famous and sublime passage from the Republic, 509Bff. in which Plato describes the idea of the Good as 'beyond being' (epekeina tes ousias). Here the movement (the 'tropic') of negativity, of not-saying or unsayability, is upward, hyperbolic, 'obeying a logic of the sur, of the hyper, over and beyond, which heralds all the hyper-essentialisms' of Christian Neoplatonism. For the tradition of negative theology, stretching from pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite to Meister Eckhart, turned on a view of the Christian God that had been basically cast in the terms of Plato's theory of the Good beyond Being. In this first movement, thinking has run up against an excess of transcendence, a being of such supereminent sur-reality that, while giving birth to being, movement, and knowledge, it is itself beyond them all. Still, as the offspring of its father and cause, the sensible world is 'like' the Good, and, so, the excess of the Good is situated within an 'analogical community' in virtue of which the sensible world is said to be 'like' the intelligible world. Hence, the Good can be sensibly compared to the 'sun' of the sensible world; for, like the sun, the Good is neither seeing nor visible, neither knowing nor intelligible, but a third thing, viz., their light, cause, and medium.

"But the khora constitutes another way to be otherwise than Being, another kind of third thing, one moving in a fully opposite direction and submitting to different tropes. Rather than 'hyperexistence' or supereminent being, khora seems to drop below being, barely to be at all, to be if at all next to nothing.

"...The discourse on khora thus forms an almost perfect inversion of the discourse on the Good. ...On the one hand, hyperbole and the excess of being, essence, and meaning; on the other, defection, less than meaning, essence, and being."

OK. I do not pretend to understand all that very well; when people waver off into words like "essence" and "being" without giving me some sense of what the heck we're talking about, I get lost. I am also generally uninspired by, and not well versed in, negative theology; so again I am at a disadvantage when it comes to interpreting this stuff about khora vs. God.

Nonetheless, I think there are some interesting things to think about here. The suggestion seems to be that the same experiences, graspings, sense of something beyond reason or ordinary experience that has inspired so much religious thought, could just as easily be a signal of something "below" reality as something "above" it. And I don't really know what to do with that suggestion, except to say that I would need to know a lot more about what an apprehension of something "below" reality looked like before I could comment.

It's obviously useful to be chastened, to be reminded that once we spiral off into ineffable-experience-land, we may be confusing the divine with mere chaos. But I don't really have any reference points for an experience of chaos. The experiences of God's presence that I've had have been experiences of an intense, almost animal aliveness; a sense that the things in this world are arrows toward something greater (like the Jewish theological idea that objects in the world are words spoken by God); a deeply positive sense of a "greater than," not a less-than. Maybe this is just because my culture had prepared me more for the "greater-than" experience. Who can say? All I can say is what the experience actually resembled to me. It is difficult to talk about, but it can be alluded to, as when Harold Bloom (I think?) writes that Hamlet "dies upward." There is a discernable difference in a play in which someone dies "upward" as vs. a play in which someone dies "downward." So asking, "Is your 'ineffable experience' really an experience of God, or of khora or chaos?" seems to me a bit like asking, "Why do we ally the sublime with the beautiful, instead of the ugly?" After all, the sublime is painful; it is often not-beautiful; why do we give it the exalted term "sublime" rather than the degraded term "ugly"? The only real answer to that question is to describe a sublime experience. Or, more accurately, the only real answer to that question is to have a sublime experience.
posted by Eve at 2:45 PM

 
DERRIDA IS DRIVING ME NUTS. Well, not really--but I am about 10 pp. from the end of John Caputo's Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, and I think the guy's got some 'splainin' to do. The book is largely an attempt to refute misunderstandings of deconstruction (for example, that deconstruction aims to destroy reason, or religion, or science) while introducing us to deconstruction via six examples (six "nutshells")--deconstructive approaches to institutions and "the right to philosophy," Plato, community/hospitality, justice, the messianic, and James Joyce. I'm reading this book because the Old Oligarch lent it to me, so blame him if this post bores you. Some of it is taken from an email to him. This will be a series of my questions re Derrida/deconstructionism; I have a larger or weirder question/response which I'll post next.

--> The first, and broadest, question is, What is there in Derrida's work that can't be gotten better from other thinkers? I am still not clear that Derrida has actually contributed to philosophy rather than just rearranging philosophical/theological ideas or terms in a not terribly helpful way. When I did feel like I grasped what he was getting at, generally I thought other people had put the matter better, and I fairly often was just puzzled as to why he didn't seem to feel that his intentional vagueness was a PROBLEM. So this suggests that, assuming there's a point to Derrida, I totally missed it. Any thoughts on that would be welcome.

--> So Derrida speaks of these misty abstractions/prophetic pronunciations without content (justice, messiah, the other, hospitality, the avenir), none of which CAN be cashed out, because to cash them out even a little, even merely by analogy or allusion, would be to constrain them. (Though Caputo indicates that perhaps they ARE constrained despite Derrida's best efforts; Caputo implies that, merely by using terms taken from Judaic contexts, deconstruction must still be constrained [but how?] by specifically Jewish notions of justice and messiah.) And then when we come down from the cloud-hung mountaintop, Caputo gives us these specific policy
choices--affirmative action and other leftist nostrums. And there's NO connective tissue between the prophetic abstractions and the concrete policies! In fact, if I understand the book, there can't be any connective tissue, b/c to show how "a deconstructive notion of justice" should lead, via these steps, to affirmative action would be to constrain the understanding of justice. So you're left (no pun intended...) with a philosophy that says, in effect, "Do the good! Eschew the bad!"

This is unsatisfying on many levels.

--> It seems like decon. is privileging the creation of an ethos, or the shaping of a character, over against the following of a set of rules (or even principles). I felt like many of Derrida's obscurities might be clarified--if clarification were what he was after--if he just said, "Deconstruction is an attitude toward the world, more than it is a method or a principle." But maybe not. One problem is that decon. seems, at times, to be "any approach to the world that Derrida/Caputo likes"--which makes it hard to figure out how I might go about deconstruction!

--> When he speaks of traditions and institutions, is Derrida actually saying anything MORE than Jaroslaw Pelikan's line, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living"?

--> The section on the way that a gift always implicates the recipient in a debt (you have to give a gift back, or at the very least be thankful for the gift you got) would benefit from an acknowledgment that giving thanks can be pleasurable. Thanksgiving is a feast, after all. We, humans, often enjoy thanking others for the gifts they gave us. That's not the only true story of gift-giving--it's obviously true that gifts can be "poison" (apparently that's a pun if you speak German), a "commercial" exchange in which the giver manages to pat himself on the back and command an unpleasant debt of gratitude from the recipient. But the poison-gift isn't the only kind. Thus there can be such a thing as a gift of love.

--> Similarly, the section on "justice vs. law" (quickie summary: "justice" signifies perfect justice, the ability to respond to each individual's unique situation with the fullness of justice; "law" signifies codes, rules, abstractions, which necessarily prevent us from responding to individual situations--the Abbe of Digne [was he an Abbe?] was acting in accordance with justice, not law, when he said he had given the candlesticks to Jean Valjean) would have benefited from an understanding of why law is necessary. Here; let Radley Balko explain! Trying to institute perfect justice means rejecting the staid predictable rules that allow people to build lives for themselves. The criticism of the universal in favor of the particular is necessary; but the law is equally necessary.

--> Derrida is right (although I think Pelikan does this quicker and with less self-congratulation!) about the need for a second "yes" to tradition, a "yes, yes" in which the second yes is not just a robotic repetition of the first but a renewal, a re-engagement. This is part of what I was getting at in my post about "progress, return, or renewal."

--> I wonder why deconstruction engages in a kind of hyper-privileging of scattering over gathering. If you focus only on the things that show tension, dissimilarity,
disjunction, etc., your community dissolves. There then is no tradition or institution, there's just a bunch of people squabbling over which neglected bits of history they happen to like. The whole importance of the history is the fact that it's a history of a tradition and institution; if you focus solely on the "gaps" or suppressed aspects of the tradition, you LOSE the tradition, which will make your archeological work look sort of silly. (For an oversimplified example: Why are you spending all this time on problems with the Founders' leadership unless the Founders are crucially important?)

--> Deconstruction engages in a similar hyper-privileging of the avenir (future; what is to come) over the present. There are two ways, I think, of taking a decon.-like stance toward the relationship of justice to the present order. One is a constructive (!) approach, using our constant anxiety about the ways in which the present order does not measure up to the ideals of justice as a goad to get us to work harder, to investigate more intensely, to imagine new ways of approaching the fullness of justice, even if we know we'll never attain that fullness.

George Orwell had a line about the other way of approaching the difference between (what Derrida is calling) justice and law. I can't remember it exactly, but he basically responded to some pacifist arguments against Britain entering WWII by saying, "This is the carping of people who have never borne responsibility." If you focus solely on the faults of the present order, it's very tempting to remove yourself from that order, to pretend that you do not have any personal responsibility for the relative sucktitude of the current situation. You are the Prophet! and so you don't have to actually prophesy against your own failures. (Or if you do discuss your own failures, it tends to be in a self-congratulatory way--"Look! I'm big enough to discuss my own failures! Aren't I responsible and humble?" Much talk of "white privilege," for example, would fall under this category.) Similarly, you don't have to exercise charity toward those who are (stupidly or incompetently or unluckily or immaturely or...etc.) bearing the responsibility of leadership. And most importantly, you don't have to come up with positive alternatives and try to put them into practice--and watch them fail, too, and learn that you require the charity you deny to others.
posted by Eve at 2:15 PM

 
"This is bad."
--Leonardo di Caprio, as ship meets iceberg, "Titanic"
posted by Eve at 10:23 AM

 
AND THEN THERE'S DE FEO. Joseph De Feo, who is no longer turning and turning in the widening gyre, adds: "I think I would almost be comfortable with the term 'Viennese Waltz Conservatism,' except for the fact that the waltz is a bit risqué."
posted by Eve at 5:42 PM

 
ACTUALLY, "JAZZ JUDAISM" SOUNDS KINDA COOL...: Got a good challenging email from Ben A., which I think will allow me to clear up some misunderstandings and give a much better sense of what "rock'n'roll conservatism" is and isn't about. As always, Ben is in bold and I'm in plain text:

"Rock and Roll Conservatism" is a catchy phrase, and I support the desire to tell Allan Bloom to suck eggs. But, at the risk of being hyperbolic, I think it makes about as much sense as "jazz Judaism."

I suppose I am reacting to a pet concern. Too many people read their politics off their larger cultural identification: the things they like to do, the movies they watch, and yes, the music they listen too. Well, this is a mistake. Verdi doesn't have a position on the gun control, and even if David Bowie does, we shouldn't much care what it is. But sadly, people do care: about Rage Against the Machine, about the whole silly story of rock music as Symbol of Social Rebellion.

I realize you don't mean to rediscover rock and roll as a conservative voice: that's the same mistake in reverse. Rather, you seem just to be signalling that you're not a culture snob. But if so, I would think it's irrelevant to your politics. Indeed, of your listed principles, surely an appreciation for popular culture is the most trivial and negotiable, right?

Let me talk about what I'm not doing first; then I'll get to what I am doing:

1) Actually, I dig Allan Bloom a lot; I just disagree with his account of rock music, which is sloppy.

2) More importantly, I totally agree that people shouldn't "read their politics off their larger cultural identification"; I think that's one of the criticisms Jonah Goldberg leveled at Rod Dreher's whole "crunchy conservative" deal. I actually don't listen to rock all that often these days; I'm more into random shards of punk, country, New Wave, and various film scores. You can be a rock'n'roll conservative even if the only music you ever listen to is Hank Williams Sr. and "The Ring of the Nibelung," or Public Enemy and Palestrina, or what have you. "Rock'n'roll" is being used half as allusion, half as metaphor. If it is confusing, we'll have to drop the term and find something better.

3) So, OK then, what is "rock'n'roll" supposed to allude to? What are we supposed to be thinking of here? First, the dynamic quality of rock--the way it constantly reinvents itself, the way it is willing to borrow and meld and confuse genre boundaries, the way it's willing to capture good ideas, powerful hooks and rhythms, or iconic storylines wherever it finds them. Second, rock connotes a certain rough and ready quality.

4) And most importantly, rock alludes to some of the ways that the five of us came to become what we call, for lack of a better word, men and women of the right. Engaging pop culture isn't in any way peripheral to our project--it's actually a central and extremely useful method, because it relies on a) the strengths inherent in contemporary culture--it builds on what's already present; and b) surprise. Rockers, scriptwriters for movies and TV, comedians, and all kinds of other pop-culture types are, whether intentionally or not, presenting us with songs and stories that reflect the world in either true or false ways (or, of course, a mixture of truth and falsehood). Conservatives tend to deal with pop-culture stuff in one of two ways: Condemn/ignore it, or attempt to use it to prove their hipness ("I'm not a culture snob! I'm COOL!"). Both of these approaches are really lame. Condemning/ignoring, of course, totally fails to meet people where they are and to show the implications of the roles, characters, and stances they already embrace. But an uncritical, self-congratulatory approach to pop culture ("Look, this is me, enjoying a Tori Amos album!") is condescending--because it treats pop culture as unworthy of tough examination--and unhelpful.

Instead, RNRC will very often use the method of drawing out the underlying, unspoken implications of movies or books or songs that people already love--here are a few examples: "Malcolm in the Middle," a bunch of rock songs, "Vertigo," DMX. The basic idea is to show people the implications of what they already know and love. I was surprised--and intrigued--when I started investigating the underlying philosophical stances of the kids' books or TV shows or music I liked. With the companionship of friends, I was able to draw the conclusions that ultimately led me to shift from left to right politically. (And other, more important changes.)

5) The important thing to keep in mind is that RNRC is not only a list of principles; nor is it only a stance, a way of being in the world, an ethos. It's both. (And "ethos" here doesn't mean "lifestyle"! Like I said above, this is not about whether you like Pink Floyd or--shudder--Cristina Aguilera, etc.) The tension contained within the odd name is intended to draw that out--"conservatism," which we generally think of as a list of principles, lived in a "rock'n'roll" way.

posted by Eve at 5:25 PM

 
TELL TED BARLOW WHAT TO READ! Plus check out the other good stuff on his blog.
posted by Eve at 11:46 AM

 
PERSON WHO SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN THE 2002 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE: Harry Wu, in honor of this anniversary.

I'd also be cool with giving the prize to Cardinal Ratzinger. His name has brought laughter to millions.
posted by Eve at 11:44 AM

 
THE NOBEL COMMITTEE SHOULD HAVE GIVEN JIMMY CARTER to Philip Roth, as a consolation prize. Roth could have eaten him or something.
posted by Eve at 11:31 AM

 
"What a crazy day! The first time I've seen you in three years and we're buried alive!"
--Woman to ex-boyfriend, "Cave-In!"
posted by Eve at 10:36 AM

 
LEON KASS COMMENTED, "NOW THAT'S JUST WRONG, AND YOU KNOW IT."
posted by Eve at 4:50 PM

 
"The town is infested with man-eating cockroaches. Repeat: man-eating cockroaches!"
--George Peppard to Jan-Michael Vincent, "Damnation Alley"
posted by Eve at 11:52 AM

 
INTERESTING CONTRAST between this nifty Kathy Shaidle article on Jewish comic-book superheroes and this Telford Work piece on the anti-heroic "Veggie Tales."
posted by Eve at 6:02 PM

 
DISPUTATIONS is doing an awesome monthlong series on the rosary. Go! Read! Pray!
posted by Eve at 3:36 PM

 
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Shlemiel, shlimazel, Hasenpfeffer Incorporated.
We're gonna do it!

Give us any chance, we'll take it.
Give us any rule, we'll break it.
We're gonna watch our blogs come true....

The Agitator: Good wrapup of the New Jersey follies; and an inspiring story. And yes, this will keep me busy for a long, long time. (How can people prefer egg to butter???)

Regions of Mind: Pat Buchanan, American Platypus.

Uggabugga: Saudi graphic. Via Ted Barlow.

Telford Work: His review of the Veggie Tales movie. Very intriguing.

Matthew Yglesias: Is hosting a quick but interesting discussion of why people do bad things, in his comments box.

National Review Online: "Migrant sex work."
posted by Eve at 3:28 PM

 
NORM!!!! Via Shamed.
posted by Eve at 1:47 PM

 
POSTSCRIPT. So last night I was thinking about the last post from yesterday. Two things about it in particular. The first was that I forgot to mention one other good result of my early unhappiness, which is the sense of lack and necessity that drove me to philosophy. Unhappiness can make people really self-protective and risk-averse, thus averse to rigorous philosophical seeking. And I think I did that too, especially when I was in high school and on my big relativist kick. (Relativism, of course, means never having to say you're sorry.) But the more lasting effect of unhappiness for me was a sense of drivenness, a goad--something the Rat has called "being pursued by Furies." That sense of drivenness and need makes it harder to stop philosophical questing when things start seeming dangerous or unpleasant.

The second thing was that I wondered, "Why did I post that?" It seemed pretty unusual for me. I think there were three main reasons:

1) I had figured some stuff out. And at this point, I'm so used to having the blog that when I figure things out, I tend to either post them here or incorporate them into my fiction writing.

2) I'd been blogging about politics for days and days and I was starting to bore even myself. Wanted something different in the mix.

3) Arthur Silber of Light of Reason asked me to comment on this post, and on Richard Dawkins generally. You can read my somewhat over-strenuous and irked comments at his site; but I wanted to give some idea of why Dawkins's worldview strikes me as totally insufficient. And I think the post below limns some of my reasons for thinking that.

This last point is easy to misunderstand. The immediate response is, "So... you bought into this whole religion because of some bad experiences you had?" I tried to show, in the initial post, that my experience was part, but only part, of the evidence I use to try to figure out what the world is. And the point of that post was to show the connections between my own experiences and various philosophical or religious stances and questions.
posted by Eve at 1:46 PM

 
MARCHING TO THE BEAT OF A DEAD HORSE. Via The Rat.
posted by Eve at 11:25 AM

 
"The level of the mysterious radiation continues to increase steadily. So long as this situation remains, government spokesmen warn that dead bodies will continue to be transformed into flesh-eating ghouls."
--TV newsman, "Night of the Living Dead"
posted by Eve at 11:20 AM

 
AND I WAS YOUNG: Recently I had a bad weekend. A really, really lousy, stressed-out, low, hateful weekend. And at some point I realized something: You know, I used to feel like this all the time! Thinking over it, actually, I used to feel worse than that, all the time. Like between the ages of, say, five or six, and 20. After 20 or so, I've had frequent bad patches, grim little self-hate-fiestas, but they've been interludes between longer calm, basically happy stretches. This correlates very roughly with my entrance into the Church, which is interesting; I don't know what to say except "interesting," because entering the Church has certainly provoked new anxieties and fairly painful self-assessments. But there it is.

And so I was thinking, after the bad weekend had passed, about the particular kind of unhappy childhood I had and what I gained from it. I think it actually cleared away some of the obstacles that might have prevented me from finding truth, rather than creating obstacles as many other kinds of unhappiness might. Here are four benefits of this particular kind of unhappiness:

1) My unhappiness came from a deep sense of personal inadequacy, due to specific failings on my part. (And so this unhappiness did not come from, say, betrayals or failures by my family, who have always been just awesome.) The language of sin, when I got over my allergy to it and started actually listening to what Christians said about sin, struck me as exactly right in describing my experience: I did things, and had intense, passionate desires to do things, knowing that they were wrong. Not "knowing that other people told me they were wrong"--the sense of wrongness was, as far as I can tell, at least mostly independent from other people's judgments. It was an internal sense that something inside had warped and was inclining toward evil. So I never had to be persuaded that I needed saving. I never bought the Pelagian line that if you just work hard enough you can earn your salvation. I was never even tempted by belief systems that claimed that people were inherently good. The description of man as not good, not bad, but Fallen seemed to me much more like what I knew: People know that there is some standard of good that they have fallen away from, but they can't, by their own efforts, ever attain that righteousness. Something has gone wrong.

2) I have little attraction to or patience for nostalgia. I think this is basically a benefit, though there are probably drawbacks that I'm ignoring. Philosophically, this helped me see that Augustine's discussion of happiness (brief and probably tangled synopsis, filtered through C.S. Lewis: How do we distinguish random pleasures from true joy? We must have some standard in mind, and, because of the subjective nature of joy, the intermingling of joy with fear and similarly painful emotions, and the "sui generis" nature of most joyful experiences, our standard can't just be "what my culture tells me is joyful." We must have some memory of actual, experienced, full joy against which we can compare the flashes we receive in this life. Augustine speculates that this remembered happiness is Adam's--we share in his happiness as we shared in his Fall) is not just about missing your happy childhood. (Augustine himself is not exactly filled with longing for the carefree, innocent days of his childhood.) And politically, I think this general non-nostalgic-ness inoculated me from the longing for an imagined past that so many "social conservatives" suffer from.

3) I haven't had a certain kind of hideous, stomach-lurching moments of disillusionment, when our bargains with the world ("You're basically an alright world, so if I just behave myself, nothing bad will happen, right? You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, World...") fail. I never held the underlying "benevolent universe premise" that those bargains rest on. (For this I can also thank my mother, who works for prisoners' rights; once you've heard a few horror stories from the American prison system, you at least no longer believe that humans "can't be that horrible...") I don't want to be too cocky here--I haven't had this moment of disillusionment, but that doesn't mean I never will have it. I am sure I still have some illusions that will be painfully ripped away before the end of days.

4) I think that I try to keep those who suffer or are alienated from society front and center in my politics partly because of my own experience of deep-rooted alienation. That's not a claim of moral superiority--there are major drawbacks to that alienation as well, and there are all kinds of other and perhaps better paths to a commitment to the suffering and alienated. But this post is about the uses of adversity. And for me, personally, I think the "first tenet" of rock'n'roll conservatism is so central is in part because of my experiences.
posted by Eve at 6:01 PM

 
THE CHILDREN'S SCHOLARSHIP FUND.
posted by Eve at 5:06 PM

 
VOUCHERS: Rob Dakin writes, "Do you know who vouchers will end up benefitting? Not rural people such as my neighbors here in the foothills of Appalachia, who have no alternative schools to send their kids to, voucher or no voucher. No. The majority of the people who would benefit from a voucher system would be folks on the edge of the upper middle class, living in relatively affluent areas where private schools with high standards have already been established, and who, once they receive the voucher, would be able to afford to send their kid to that private school that was formerly just beyong the scope of their budget. This seems to me to be obvious. Whether the funding source is federal, state, or private, the same situation would exist. The people in most need will not be the ones who get the benefit.

"Inner-city parents, as opposed to rural ones, differ, in that cities can be expected to have both private schools and parochial schools available as alternatives to the public school system. The problem still remains, however, that if every public school child suddenly has the means to pay for tuition funded schooling, where will the necessary seats and faculty and private classrooms to accommodate all those children come from? And how will it be funded? How will it be made equitable? The basic idea of a voucher system is very attractive, but the nuts and bolts of implementing a fair and universally accessible voucher system quickly become more problematic than simply upgrading the public schools, in my opinion as a parent with school-aged children."

OK. There are a lot of things going on here. I'm going to address a bunch of them very fast, but I will probably miss some of the underlying assumptions or points that I would dispute, and I won't be going into much detail since at the moment I'm kind of vouchered out. But:

1) Presumably Dakin doesn't think that all public school programs should run the same way, across the country, a cookie-cutter series of programs. So why should he assume that voucher proponents want to institute the exact same program everywhere? Different areas will have different needs. I think that as the success of inner-city vouchers becomes more evident, more and more places will want to try vouchers, and so the conditions that currently make vouchers a bad idea in some areas (not enough private schools, etc.) will gradually erode. I don't want to force that process--I don't advocate a voucher wildfire sweeping through every county in the USA right this instant. I want to let that process happen at a relatively slow pace. I want vouchers to come fast to the places where there is an enormous need for alternatives to public school and where there is sufficient supply of those alternatives (= cities, generally). Suburban areas typically have the latter condition but not always the former. Rural areas may lack both conditions. So I don't think that the same methods or pacing would apply to every area.

2) Vouchers won't cover the whole cost of a private-school education. Well, Dakin does note that vouchers might cover (typically relatively cheap) parochial education. I'd also add that vouchers are not the only source of tuition money for poor families. A voucher makes other trade-offs possible. It's the same as federal grant money for college tuition: Without a grant, someone may not even be able to consider attending a ritzy private university. With a grant, that same person may well be able to combine grant + financial aid + scholarship program + working two jobs over the summer--the grant puts her over the top so she can afford a better school. Similarly, even if a voucher does not fully cover tuition, it can make scrimping and hunting for scholarships more worthwhile. Sort of like matching grants, where I raise $50 and my employer matches with an additional $50. I'm not sure why I really need to point this out, since the people clamoring for vouchers are clamoring because they know the additional money makes a difference. Dakin also doesn't take into account the possibility of means-tested voucher programs, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

3) If every public school kid can pay for private school, where will the new private school desks, teachers, etc. come from? Well, first off, I find it interesting that this question assumes that a large number of families really want to pull their kids out of public school! That aside, this claim rests on a picture of a static amount of possible private schooling. Public schooling, in this view, is suddenly yanked away with the onset of vouchers, leaving private schools to deal with an impossible flood of new applicants. What actually happens, where vouchers have been tried, is a lot more dynamic: Some students switch to private schools. Some private schools add spots. Lots of kids remain in private school. The amount of private schooling available slowly increases, as schools build on the new possibilities opened by vouchers.

4) How will it be made equitable? It won't, if "equitable" means everyone has the same shot at an excellent education. That isn't happening now, won't happen with vouchers, and can't happen without huge changes to the education system which are almost certainly impossible and would definitely have major negative side-effects. I do think vouchers help make excellent or adequate educations more available to people who otherwise would not be able to attain them. So I guess I'd need to know what's meant by "equitable" before I can really comment.

5) Upgrading the public schools: I expect that whether this is easier than implementing vouchers very much depends on where you live and what your state and local regulations are like; see point #1.

6) I'd like to point out, also, that while there are difficulties inherent in any voucher program, there are also enormous difficulties inherent in a non-voucher system. To take only one example (though one that's extremely important), without vouchers it is much easier for a rich family to find a school that reflects their values than for a poor family. Again, I don't expect perfection here--many families won't be able to find any school that perfectly reflects their values, and rich families, in general, will still have all kinds of advantages. But right now, poor families, unless they can get a hefty chunk of financial aid, are stuck with schools whose ability to teach ethics and character is constrained by the First Amendment and held hostage by local political disputes. Cf. the enormous fights over "abstinence-based education" as vs. condoms-in-classrooms. I've written about some of these issues here and here.
posted by Eve at 5:04 PM

 
"CAD" IS TOO NICE: So the software firm e*ECAD placed this charming billboard in Silicon Valley. Despite a torrent of angry emails, e*ECAD has yet to apologize or take the ad down. Here's a relevent email address: support@eecad.com

I am sure you will show them the support they deserve. Here's a list of their business partners, some of whom are apparently very unhappy with the ad.

Best lines from angry emails: "Being someone's girlfriend does not make me an object. Brides are not objects either. Nor (amazing as it might seem to you) are prostitutes."

"Are your daughters, sisters, wives, mothers worthy of the hourly, term, or perpetual payment plan?"

"Ethical conduct IS important, and it does affect your bottom line. Next time, think twice."
posted by Eve at 12:33 PM

 
"In every encounter, God asks: 'Adam, where are you? Where do you stand? How is it with you?' To answer this question, a person must be willing, lucid, transparent. Once someone has left behind the habitual prayers of childhood and has entered into the personal encounter, there is no way back. He must live in the light of God and expose and entrust himself to the light ever more unconditionally."
--Adrienne von Speyr

"Every moment of our human life is a moment of crisis; for at every moment we are called upon to make an all-important decision--to choose between the way that leads to death and spiritual darkness and the way that leads towards light and life; between interests exclusively temporal and the eternal order; between our personal will, or the will of some projection of our personality, and the will of God. ...Here the aim is primarily to bring human beings to a state in which, because there are no longer any God-eclipsing obstacles between themselves and Reality, they are able to be aware continuously of the divine Ground of their own and all other beings; secondarily, as a means to this end, to meet all, even the most trivial circumstance of daily living without malice, greed, self-assertion, or voluntary ignorance, but consistently with love and understanding. ...For the lover of God, every moment is a moment of crisis."
--Aldous Huxley

"If we remember that every encounter with God and every deep encounter with man is a judgment, a crisis, we would seek God both more whole-heartedly and more cautiously. We would not be bitter if this encounter did not immediately take place. We would approach God with a trembling heart. In this way we would avoid many disappointments, many useless efforts, because God would not give himself to us if we could not bear the encounter. He prepares us for it, and sometimes by a long wait....

"Let us be careful not to seek mystical experience when we should be seeking repentance and conversion. That is the beginning of our cry to God. 'Lord, make me what I should be, change me whatever the cost.' And when we have said these dangerous words, we should be prepared for God to hear them. And these words of God are dangerous because God's love is remorseless. God wants our salvation with the determination due to its importance. And God, as the Shepherd of Hermas says, 'does not leave us till he has broken our heart and bones.'"
--Anthony Bloom

I somehow ended up on the mailing list for the Plough Reader. There's some fluffiness, but much more food for thought there; the above is only a small sample.
posted by Eve at 12:12 PM

 
"These words of mine made [Baccio] Bandinello burst with fury; he turned on me, and cried: 'And you, what have you got to say against my work?' 'I will tell you if you have the patience to hear me out.' 'Go along then,' he replied. The Duke and his attendants prepared themselves to listen. I began and opened my oration thus: 'You must know that it pains me to point out the faults of your statue [of Hercules and Cacus]; I shall not, however, utter my own sentiments, but shall recapitulate what our most virtuous school of Florence says about it.' The brutal fellow kept making disagreeable remarks and gesticulating with his hands and feet, until he enraged me so that I began again, and spoke far more rudely than I should otherwise have done, if he had behaved with decency. 'Well, then, this virtuous school says that if one were to shave the hair of your Hercules, there would not be skull enough left to hold his brain; it says that it is impossible to distinguish whether his features are those of a man of or something between a lion and an ox; the face too is turned away from the action of the figure, and is so badly set upon the neck, with such poverty of art and so ill a grace, that nothing worse was ever seen; his sprawling shoulders are like the two pommels of an ass's pack-saddle; his breasts and all the muscles of the body are not portrayed from a man, but from a big sack full of melons set upright against a wall. The loins seem to be modelled from a bag of lanky pumpkins; nobody can tell how his two legs are attached to that vile trunk; it is impossible to say on which leg he stands, or which he uses to exert his strength; nor does he seem to be resting upon both, as sculptors who know something of their art have occasionally set the figure. It is obvious that the body is leaning forward more than one-third of a cubit, which alone is the greatest and most insupportable fault committed by vulgar commonplace pretenders. Concerning the arms, they say that these are both stretched out without one touch of grace or one real spark of artistic talents just as if you had never seen a naked model. Again, the right leg of Hercules and that of Cacus have got one mass of flesh between them, so that if they were to be separated, not only one of them, but both together, would be left without a calf at the point where they are touching. They say, too, that Hercules has one of his feet underground, while the other seems to be resting on hot coals.'"
--The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, tr. John Addington Symonds
posted by Eve at 11:58 AM

 
"This is KTTV Studios in Hollywood to Mount Wilson. We are being attacked by the Slime People. They have us walled in the city. If you have any information about this wall, please contact us immediately."
"If anybody's listening, this is no joke. I'm a Marine. I was fighting the Slime People and was knocked out. I guess they thought I was dead and left me there. The Slime People made a fog, and the fog turned to a wall. If anyone knows how to get through this thing, then I'm sure that there's a few other people just like us, that still have hope."
--TV announcer and Marine, "The Slime People"
posted by Eve at 11:46 AM

 
EXCELLENT MEMOIR-ESSAY on Martin Luther King, Jr., from the most recent First Things. Here are two excerpts, but you should definitely read the whole thing: "In my movement days, I would, when feeling mischievous, observe that I was not and never had been a socialist. This would predictably meet with startled incredulity, and the discussion would inevitably turn to what is meant by socialism. I would usually end up by saying something like this: “If by socialism, you mean reforms in the political economy that help the poor to be more fully included in the opportunities and responsibilities of society, then I admit to being a socialist.” This almost always met with great relief, my faux pas was forgiven, and I was restored to ideological communion. If the above formula is accepted as the definition of socialism, I’m very much a socialist today."

"I recall rallies when, in the course of his preaching, King would hold forth on the theological and moral foundations of the movement. The klieg lights and cameras shut down, only to be turned on again when he returned to specifically political or programmatic themes. 'Watch the lights,' he commented. 'They’re not interested in the most important parts.' But as for the judgment that King finally achieved very little, Mr. Frady might recall his own statement that the chief consequence of King’s legacy was securing the vote for all blacks. No little achievement, that."
posted by Eve at 5:04 PM

 
SMOTHERED BY MARSHMALLOWS: Ted Barlow is playing host to a discussion of who trashes the opposition in more disgusting terms--the left or the right? The discussion highlights all the problems I have with this kind of debate: 1) Confirmation bias--if you're a lefty you notice when someone on the right says something nasty, and gloss over it when someone on the left says something similar; and vice versa for us righties. 2) "Those idiot weasel lying slime-sucking Republicans are always calling us names!" 3) Should you actually adhere to a belief because you hate the most visible representatives of the alternative beliefs? I know that credibility matters a lot; I know that we (rightly) give people more credence when we generally agree with their worldview; I know that I'd be very, very skeptical of any political position that was advocated primarily by people who seemed loathsome or cruel, even if that position initially seemed to make lots of sense. But one of the reasons this debate feels both futile and bassackwards, I think, is that we should try to form our political stances in such a way that we could take a stand even if the most public adherents of that stand are lying jerks. Otherwise we're a) ignoring the non-lying-jerk people, who seem like the ones who should get more of our attention!, and b) abdicating our responsibility to judge the issues--the message, not just the messenger.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about. What I really wanted to say was just that the form of left-wing invective that I find most irritating doesn't, at first, appear to be invective at all. It's the "smothered by marshmallows" approach: "I'm a liberal because I care!" "I'm a liberal because I think about the poor!" The Yale College Democrats at one point posted recruiting signs with their name and the slogan, "We're the good guys." Frankly, I would rather they'd just posted, "Republicans are fetid hateweasels!"--it would be less smarmy. Now, Republicans have totally bought into this image--many Republicans genuinely seem to believe that they're the hard-hearted but hard-headed party. This is depressing in the extreme. So I guess my plea to "both sides" (and yes, I'm well aware that there are really innumerable possible constellations of political beliefs, so I apologize for the pigeonholing in this post) is: Don't say stuff that implies your opposition hates poor people or doesn't care or doesn't think about them. And if you're on the Right, don't think you've got an excuse--you do still have to work for justice and mercy for those in need. That isn't soft-headed--it's honorable.
posted by Eve at 4:59 PM

 
A HOMETOWN AND A DATELINE: So people are fussin' again over DC vs. NYC. I used to get really defensive about this stuff; I hope, and think, that I've chilled out on it. Here are some scattered thoughts on this perpetual argument (which seems popular only in the media and music worlds, but whatever, journalists are people too, I think).

1) Obviously, New York City is objectively better. I mean, duh. Anything DC has, New York has more of it (except trees, deer, and sky...). But when we're asking what's the best place in the world, it strikes me that an objective measure is exactly the wrong one. This subject above all other subjects should be subjective. It is "dulce et decorum" to love one's hometown. Demanding objectivity about someone's home is like demanding objectivity about his family--it'll only annoy him.

2) I don't think Jonah Goldberg is right that "New Yorkers spend no time worrying about their rivalry with DC while Washingtonians obsess about it." I've seen the "who's bad?!" argument started up at least as often by New Yorkers as by DC-lovers. I've seen at least as many self-lacerating "DC sucks, why do I live here, New Yorkers are a master race!" articles as pro-DC, "#2, We try harder!" ones. And, of course, the mentalities are different--it's scrappy, wrongheaded but kind of admirable, to argue that the obvious underdog is actually the better city; it just comes across as bullying when the New York Times or wherever tries to make everyone here agree that DC is lame.

3) Is DC a "factory town"? Not really. There are (at least) two cities here, in uneasy conjunction: Washington-the-dateline and D.C.-the-hometown. People move here from elsewhere to work on Capitol Hill, hang out only with other political transplants, get bored with talking politics 24/7, and conclude that D.C. is boring--even as they express astonishment when they meet someone who actually grew up here. You'd think that the second part of their reaction to the city (astonishment that there are D.C. natives) would be a clue that there's a whole swathe of Washington life that they haven't found yet. I have no problem a'tall with people leaving because the hothouse atmosphere of the politicos becomes stifling and boring. I have no problem with people saying, "Sure, there might be other aspects to DC, but why should I bother finding them? I want to go somewhere else." That's natural, and shows an admirable ability to recognize the degree to which "inside the Beltway" circles can become confining and stultifying. But I do think when making broad "DC vs. the world" comparisons, even political journalists should keep in mind that they are not the sole demographic of this city.

4) The skyline. The New York skyline is a thing of beauty, for sure--ten thousand glittering windows, each one hiding a life, a story. But if you like some sky with your skyline, D.C. offers gorgeous panoramic views, bright blue sunny expanses, varied rooftops rather than endless skyscraper-canyons, and whole clouds. Really, they're pretty! Now that I think about it, of course, New York City offers these things too--in Brooklyn, for example. Or is that not what we mean when we compare "DC" to "NYC"? I suspect we're really trying to compare a narrow slice of one city with a narrow slice of the other.

5) If you try to judge DC based on whether it beats New York, you will miss out on a lot of great things this city can offer. You'll never get around to going to the Shakespeare Theater, because New York obviously has better theater. You'll never entrench yourself in a neighborhood bar for an evening, because everyone knows people just talk politics at D.C. bars. If you want New York, move there; New York does a much better New York impression than D.C. does! If you want something else, try this little city.

Here's a list of stuff I love about D.C.
posted by Eve at 4:37 PM

 
"THE DAY AFTER SADDAM": Very interesting Washington Post article profiling five Iraqis who are hoping to rebuild their country once Saddam Hussein is gone.
posted by Eve at 4:09 PM

 
ROCK'N'ROLL CONSERVATISM AND CHRISTIAN FAITH: Telford Work responds to my post on "rock'n'roll conservatism" (not to be confused with "South Park Republicanism," sigh). Here's what I sent him:

OK, well, first, thanks very much for the thoughtful reply--and I'm glad to see we agree on so much!

As for your criticisms/questions (not sure to what extent you were criticizing as opposed to wondering whether criticism was in order): Yeah, I left out the fundamental beliefs that underly, in my view, the principles/practical applications I listed. (BTW, "principles" referred to what you might call second-level principles--ethics not metaphysics--and even the "principles" list was almost entirely focused on the next steps after ethics--applying pre-existing ethical principles to contemporary
situations. "Principles" in that context wasn't supposed to imply, say, "The five of us structure our entire lives around these fundamental beliefs," but rather, "Here are some tests we use in figuring out which policies are likely to do more good than harm and vice versa." I guess that wasn't clear, so I can certainly clear that up.)

I left out specifically Christian references for three main reasons:

1) This set of political beliefs arose as an undesigned, unaimed-for convergence of beliefs between me and my friends, as described. We were actually trying to do something totally different (had to do with politicking in an undergrad organization we're all in) when we ended up becoming friends and convincing one another of many ethical and practical claims, but, so far, few religious claims. (We're working on it!) To import religious claims that my friends couldn't sign on to would be, in my view, to
be false to what actually happened as well as unnecessary.

2) I really did not want to get into a big public kerfuffle with my friends about the fact that I don't think their religious or anti-religious beliefs support their ethics. Why should I use the context of that post to do that? We talk about it privately, and I've made it clear quite often on my site that I do believe my ethical stances only make sense given the underlying fact of Christ.

3) I didn't think it was necessary to make RNRC a project only Christians could undertake. Analogy: I've prayed the rosary outside abortion sites, with a big honkin' picture of Our Lady of Guadelupe; I've also participated in pro-life activities that weren't associated with Christianity in any way. In fact, the group I co-founded in college, the Yale Pro-Life League, had an exec. board that was at least half atheist. To my mind, this is an accomplishment, not a reason to worry that I'm compromising the faith. Getting non-Christians to agree is a feature, not a bug, no?

So, no, I don't think RNRC is the product of "American ideology" or "liberal modernism" as vs. Christianity. I'm not sure whether you're just saying that Christians should never discuss politics without pointing out the ways in which those political beliefs derive from our faith (I disagree), or if you're making a specific claim that the stuff included in "RNRC" seems more American-ideological than other possible political stances that both Christians and non-Christians could agree on.

If the former, how is that different from saying, "You can't do anything until you can agree on everything"? If the latter, this sounds more promising as a criticism--where do you most sense encroaching liberal modernism? In what's said, what's unsaid?

Thanks again--do let me know if you have more stuff to say about this--I check in on you every other day or so and am always edified/challenged.
posted by Eve at 4:05 PM

 
Come on, shake your blogwatch, make it do the conga
I know you can't control yourself any longer...

Ted Barlow: Good post on Israel and the lessons of history. At least, that was the part I cared about.

Charles Murtaugh: Sin. And Iraqi inspections: been there, done that.

Telford Work: Excellent post on "liberation theology" and the dangers of focusing on the oppressor. Plus a good solid FAQ on how to read the Bible, a.k.a. How come you don't read the Bible right? Plus something I'll get to in a moment.

"South Park Republicans": I want money! And sex! And did I mention money? ...It should be obvious that I have some sympathy for a fun-loving, free-marketeering attempt to revamp the GOP. And, as it happens, most of the "South Park" episodes I've seen have been hilarious. (The movie was just OK, though The Mole was fantastic; I've heard that some of the episodes I haven't seen are stupid, and not in a good way.) Like the author of this piece, I love the "Underpants Gnomes" episode. But let's take a couple quotes from this essay, shall we, because this guy's version of "South Park Republicanism" strikes me as shallow and dull.

1) "Southpark Republicans are true Republicans, though they do not look or act like Pat Robertson. They believe in liberty, not conformity. They can enjoy watching The Sopranos even if they are New Jersey Italians. They can appreciate the tight abs of Britney Spears or Brad Pitt without worrying about the nation's decaying moral fiber."
Ohhhkay. So hanging one's identity on pop-cultural icons from HBO and MTV is a way of demonstrating a) liberty, or b) conformity? In re Britney, which is more "conformist"--a) "She's so hot! Cut taxes!"; b) "Y'know, that whole 'Look at my boobs! I'm a virgin! Look at my butt! I'm a schoolgirl!' shtik is played, gross, and irritating"?

2) "Many of these individuals can tell you why Ayn Rand should displace some other authors in high school literature classes."
[insert Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake noise.] Sorry, cheap shot, ten-point penalty.

3) "JFK was a supply-side tax cutter. His alleged private exploits would place him squarely within the Southpark wing of the Republican Party."
Tax-cutting scumbags--the new GOP! Welfare reform and adultery--it's the Republican way! Hey, wait, I think we tried that a couple years back.... Anyway, it's OK, they're only women.

4) "Hint: Southpark Republicans are more likely to get Cosmo than the Weekly Standard."
Fifty Ways to Drive Your Man Wild With Pleasure! #1: Cut taxes! #2: Get a boob job so he won't run off with a Mafia-linked younger woman. #3: Cut taxes! #4: Get over it, he's not gonna marry you. #5: Cut taxes!

OK, end rant, but c'mon, people, as a "Southpark Republican" might say, we can do bettah.

And this moving article that I found via Amy Welborn--17-year-old boy, molested by a priest, has made helping other victims his mission.
posted by Eve at 3:59 PM

 
"Where sin begets sin. Nobody cares who does what to whom. Stripped of all inhibitions, everybody swings. No matter what your kick is, you name it, they've got it. They couldn't wait to get into the hotbed of pleasure. Charged-up, sex-crazed women, driven by bizarre desires. Choice women, from the fleshpots of the world, each with their own specialty... and you can have them all. Where violence begets violence. Where for just one night of twisted pleasures, men turn into beasts."
--Announcer during a trailer for "Where Sin Lives"
posted by Eve at 11:22 AM

 
MATERNAL LIFE INTERNATIONAL: Just awesome. Please go, read, explore. Give. I found 'em in the Register!
posted by Eve at 12:02 PM

 
"After her marriage, her health seemed to rise and fall with the tide of her emotions."
"Ah, a sad case. A case not infrequent in this supersonic age we live in."
--Two doctors discussing the problems of the fifty-foot-tall woman, "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman"
posted by Eve at 12:01 PM

 
AWESOME conversion narrative--lots of generous and tough-minded thoughts on giving one's whole life to Christ, Episcopalianism, prayer, and, ultimately, why this one guy ended up in Eastern Orthodoxy. He quotes an old journal entry in which he makes the wrong kind of distinction between truths known by the mind and truths known through relationship--he views them as opposed, I don't. I think that's the only real point of disagreement I found...! Good stuff.
posted by Eve at 5:20 PM

 
FEMINISM AND FEDERALISM: Thought some of my readers might be interested in this: The Federalist Society, its Federalism & Separation of Powers and Civil Rights Groups, and the Independent Women’s Forum present "Feminism & Federalism: Should American Women Embrace or Distrust Federalist Principles?"

Is the current Supreme Court’s federalist jurisprudence harmful or helpful to women? A distinguished panel will discuss some of the many questions raised by recent events, including the Senate’s rejection of Priscilla Owen for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals:

*Is federalism a feminist issue?

*Should American women support or oppose judicial nominees who subscribe to the theory of federalism?

*Does adherence to federalist principles tell us anything about a judicial nominee’s likely rulings in civil rights cases?

Date: Thursday, October 10, 2002 3:30 – 5:00 PM

Reception to follow. Refreshments will be served.

Location: Georgetown University Law Center 600 New Jersey Ave.,N.W., Room 201 (Please enter from 2nd Street)

Accessibility: Take Metro to Judiciary Square or Union Station, Valet parking available at The Washington Court Hotel (Across the street from the Law Center), Public parking available at Union Station

Moderator: Jennifer C. Braceras, Esq., Commissioner, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Senior Fellow, Independent Women’s Forum

Panelists: Professor Vicki Jackson, Georgetown University Law Center

Professor Gail Heriot, University of San Diego School of Law

Professor Marci Hamilton, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

Isabelle Katz Pinzler, Esq., National Organization for Women Legal Defense and Education Fund

RSVP TO (202) 822-8138

Online Registration is available here.
posted by Eve at 3:11 PM

 
MYSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY: Christopher Jones notes that he discussed Eastern Orthodoxy's mysticism here.
posted by Eve at 3:08 PM

 
THE "GET A FREE BOOK JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE A BLOGGER" CONTEST has a winner!
posted by Eve at 3:07 PM

 
RNRC PS: And Paul Donnelly writes about something I know nothing about; I print his letter here so you all can see and judge, but until I know more about the general subject I'm reluctant to shoot my mouth off about it. ("Never stopped you before!" --Hey, quiet in the peanut gallery.) It's long enough that I'm going to put it all in plain text, rather than the usual "readers in bold, me in plain" schema. So, everything that follows in this post is from Donnelly.

[H]ere is a simple test: what's known as the "2nd preference" in our waaay too complex immigration law. (I've pitched you on this before, which is why it is a test of your principles.) If you MEAN what you say (particularly 1, 2, 3 and 8), you will take this up. IMNSHO, this is the most anti-marriage, anti-family issue in American politics. But you'll find that a subsidy for Microsoft counts for more than marriage, which is why I raise it to you (somewhat belligerently, for which I apologise) as what you might see as a matter of principle.

Otherwise, well...

Basically, the Rule (with many exceptions) for immigration policy is that each immigrant is invited. An American has to ask for them -- whether a citizen petitioning for a spouse, child, parent of sibling; or a legal permanent resident petitioning for a spouse or child; or an employer for an employee. There are other categories (lottery winners), and refugees and asylees, but the Rule is: individual Americans invite individual immigrants.

But not everybody gets in right away. The spouses and kids and parents of citizens do. Everybody else has to wait (the visas are distributed through ALGEBRA, of all things) -- this is NOT because the INS is inefficient (although it is), but because Congress promises more than it delivers. The MINIMUM wait for the spouses and kids of legal permanent residents is now 5-7 years. (For the siblings of U.S. citizens, it's 10-20+.)

I told you, I wrote to Cardinal Law about this a few years ago: bupkas. The Conference of Bishops, last I checked, has said literally NOTHING about the moral distinction between siblings and spouses. By way of example, I love my five brothers and four sisters -- but I live with my wife and son.

Rather than make that simple moral distinction, the Bishops (along with a coalition of self-proclaimed "pro-immigration" groups) have focused instead on MAINTAINING their coalition, which defines "pro-immigration" by preserving all existing categories -- and thus, the existing management of the system by backlogs.

Which has a simple result: husbands and wives, parents and small children, are outlawed or exiled. Last anybody checked, we were talking about a MILLION people. When folks obey their marriage vows and obligations as parents, and move to live in the SAME COUNTRY as their husbands, wives and kids, they are breaking U.S. law. Immigration lawyers in particular are fond of this (see below) precisely because it gives them more business. Immigration advocates rarely think about in detail, because they are in the business of representing the poor and downtrodden -- the more there ARE, the better their business.

And -- folks like you? The RNRC? Let's see.

ILW.Com
(an electronic newsletter for immigration attorneys)
The H-1B Is A Barrier To The IT Industry's Recovery
Even Milton Friedman Says "there is no doubt" H-1B Is A Subsidy

Computerworld
July 22, 2002
H-1B Is Just Another Gov't. Subsidy

Baltimore Sun
Baltimore’s Salvation Lies in Immigration
(w/Bruce Morrison)
June 19th, 2002

ILW.com
April 20, 2001
Time to Bury the Ratchet and Replace it with Real Reform

American Prospect
April 5, 2001
The End of Ellis Island
[This notes the failed approach which the Bishops most recently tried as "vague to the point of dishonesty"]

The New Republic
Temporary Help

One more, no longer online for free:

WASHINGTON POST

Tuesday, July 28, 1998 ; Page A15

IMMIGRATION: FAMILIES FIRST

PAUL DONNELLY
Reading Robert Suro's otherwise thoughtful article about the effect of immigration ["The Next Wave," Outlook, July 19] on our national distraction over race, I was struck by his distortion of the late Barbara Jordan's views of immigration. Suro explains the Jordan Commission recommendations on prioritizing legal admissions: "[Jordan] proposed drastic cuts in the number of low-skilled legal immigrants allowed into the country in order to remedy the plight of poor Americans who might otherwise find work in urban labor markets. Implicit in the proposal put forth by the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, which Jordan then headed, was the notion that employers, overwhelmingly white, preferred to hire low-skilled immigrants, overwhelmingly Latino, over the native poor, especially blacks."

In fact, most legal immigration is based on family ties, not on skills; and the core issues of immigration reform concern priorities, not numbers. With legal admissions approaching 1 million a year, the commission did propose to eliminate 10,000 unskilled employment-based visas. Continuing to import workers because of their lack of skill is certainly not Congress's smartest move going into welfare-to-work; but American families ask for four to five times as many immigrants as employers do. And so they should.In characterizing an "implicit notion" about immigrants' skills and employers' racism, Suro skipped over what the commission explicitly recommended: uniting husbands and wives, moms, dads, and little kids -- adding 150,000 nuclear family-based visas a year until nearly a million legal immigrants now waiting in line are here legally. These folks are overwhelmingly Mexican American (and a substantial number are also unskilled), and now face being exiled for four to 10 years or even permanently outlawed under current law.

What Jordan actually said: "We believe there are three priorities: reunification of nuclear families, admission of highly skilled workers needed to increase the competitiveness of U.S. business, and refugee admissions ....The number of immigrants should flow from these priorities."

"For family-based immigration, the priority has to be the nuclear family. First, the spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens. Second, the parents of U.S. citizens. Third, the spouses and minor children of legal permanent residents."

What was so unclear about these priorities that Suro and others consistently misconstrue them? Immigrants are people, not simply economic units. Ultimately, the immigration debate boils down to just three unavoidable questions: Why do we want immigrants, anyway? How many do we want? And -- most important -- are we willing to treat them like Americans when they get here?

Ask a congressman why we want immigrants, and you are likely to get a soaring but equivocal speech about Ellis Island, his grandparents and the melting pot. Yet the law provides a practical, not an ideal answer. Americans primarily want immigrants to unite families and fill jobs.

Ask how many we want, though, and you discover the dirty little secret of immigration policy: Congress promises far more immigration than it delivers. Nearly 1 million husbands, wives and minor children of legal permanent residents wait as much as a decade for legal admission -- while the siblings of U.S. citizens face a wait measured literally in generations, (which means they enter toward the end of their most productive years).

This isn't rocket science. There are only two ways to resolve the inexcusable, un-American separation of immigrant families: add visas or prioritize admissions. That is what the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform dealt with. Why? Because the answer is a lot more important than mere economics.

Are there American families, other than immigrants, where U.S. law forces husbands and wives apart and makes parents choose between jobs and their kids? Between obeying their marriage vows and U.S. law? The Jordan Commission warned Congress and the nation that we are replacing our historical approach toward immigrants -- that they become us -- with a policy that is pro-immigration but anti-immigrant; that flirts with a guest worker model and blurs the difference between illegal aliens and legal
immigrants while drawing a dangerously bright line between legal resident and U.S. citizen.

Suro is right on, of course, in pointing out that we need a new way to talk about race and ethnicity, to reflect what will unite us in the 21st century. But ignoring the centrality of immigrants' nuclear families -- moms, dads and little kids -- and focusing instead on economic skills and prejudice in the workplace is not the way to build it.

The writer was communications director of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.
posted by Eve at 3:06 PM

 
ROCK'N'ROLL CONSERVATISM MAILBAG: Rob Dakin: I would define myself as an unattached believer in the truth of the gospel message, with strong Gnostic tendencies. I think that the material world is a fallen one, possibly "created" by some kind of demiurge, rather than the Ultimate One; that Jesus had little, if any regard, for things material; and that He came to show men how to overcome that death which is attachment to matter. That said, here I go, parachuting directly into the muck of the world:

1) Rock'n'Roll Conservatism: I am old enough to have been around for the entire history of rock music as popular entertainment. When I was a young boy, the most subversive music on AM radio was probably Hank Williams. Perry Como was huge. I remember very distinctly when Elvis first came upon the scene. In the art class at my grade school some of the girls used their crayons to draw brides, some drew horses, but the brightest ones began drawing Elvis. You can love rock'n'roll and be "conservative" at the same time, I suppose. But, to me, that is only to say that no person ever achieves total consistency. I believe that genuine rock'n'roll is subversive of conservative values in its essence. It is a distillation of adolescent angst arising from the rebellion against authority and resultant separation anxiety that is an unavoidable part of growing up, combined with the relentless horniness that gives rise to it all. Music that is anything other than that may SOUND like rock'n'roll, but it's pure Parkay--not butter. I am sure you are well aware the that the very term "rock'n'roll" is a transparently descriptive blues euphemism for the sex act. In short, the horror with which the conservative communities of the mid-1950s greeting the advent of rock'n'roll was consistent with the values of that community and justified according to those values. It was also prophetic: rock'n'roll was the sound track of the sexual revolution, the drug culture, and the accompanying excesses of the 1960s.

2) School Vouchers: This is a bad idea, as just about anybody who, like me, has school-age children and does not live near a big urban center will tell you immediately. Moreover, I believe that the voucher movement is not given impetus by legitimate grassroots organization. Vouchers are being pushed by corporate interests, backed by Republican politicians: very much top-down. If you gave me a voucher for ten times the kind of amounts that I've heard proposed, I would not be able to use it to send my girls to any school other than the one they now attend, unless I put them in a boarding school somewhere--a thing I would never do. There are no private schools here. The public schools in the southeastern Ohio counties surrounding mine are almost all in deplorable condition, and there are no alternatives. If there were some mechanism by which alternative schools could be first funded, built (the physical plants of the schools around here are mostly not salvageable), equipped, and staffed (by whom? there is already a teacher shortage; the teachers who working are all unionized, etc.), and this done everywhere, simultaneously, so that nobody is deprived of the opportunity. If, if, if--then I'm with you.

Well, insofar as I don't think there are any proposals on the table for a national voucher system, you needn't worry. Places that have the resources (= private schools) to support voucher systems should implement them. Other places can see what has worked and what hasn't, and decide whether vouchers fit their needs and capabilities. I suspect that the success of vouchers where they are tried will inspire lots of places that had previously thought such a system impossible. As for where this movement comes from, all I can say is that some of the strongest voucher supporters are, unsurprisingly, totally ordinary parents who want their kids to have a better education. Did inner-city parents originate the voucher idea? No--Milton Friedman did. Do many, many inner-city parents support his idea now? Yup.

Michael Yaeger, RNRC founding law student: Two [...] specific comments. First, the title "rock n' roll conservatism." It's obviously cool in that it gets at the point that we like pop culture, but to non-sympathetic (i.e., lefty) folk it would probably provoke dumb jokes along the "military intelligence" line. Oy. On the other hand, it's a cool name and I certainly can't think of anything better. Names such as "Modern Conservatives" (like modern orthodox), etc., are lame. Nothing else seems to get at how we don't have a perfect moment in mind, that we're not standing athwart history yelling "stop!" ; we're saying that we can do better than we ever have, but only by using the wisdom of the past.

Second, I completely agree with your statement on the law--i.e., that, when possible, judges should not "make" law. There's no better way to say it short of a three volume set on jurisprudence. I do wonder, though, if all those talk show commentators realize how complicated the whole thing is, and how hard it is not to make law. I guess this is a non-point for the Rock n' Roll Manifesto. But in any event, sometimes the right doesn't give the left enough credit on this stuff. We really had to change the Constitution to deal with economic and demographic changes--not as much as we did, but still. Paper money, the SEC, the FDA, the Federal Reserve, and other parts of the administrative state seem to do more good than harm. And there are some benefits to not amending the Constitution too often, much less passing whole new Constitutions. Do the French, with their five official republics, have the same reverence for the law that is so common in America, land of at least three unofficial republics since 1789?
posted by Eve at 2:54 PM

 
FEMINIST BOOKS MAILBAG: Here's my post, "Ten-Cent Tour of Women's Studies."

John W. Brewer: What, you never read Mary Daly? She was by far the most flamboyant/ridiculous/self-parodic feminist Deep Thinker I read when I was in high school. (I see also no Simone de Beauvoir, but she may have been so hopelessly pre-Second-Wave as to be irrelevant by the time you were reading this stuff.)

I've never tried de Beauvoir, but as for Daly--if you ever figure out what the heck she's talking about, feel free to let me know. And people think Joyce is hard to read!

An anonyreader: This was my (straight-female, young-and-confused-but-angry) favorite feminist passage in my years of angry young womanhood:

"Our preference for mechanical and pharmacological agents of birth-control is irrational. Our position with regard to the function of sex is absurdly confused. The other systems which have occasionally been referred to (in this book) have had a certain internal consistency, outlandish though some of them may seem. There is no logic in a
conceptual system which holds that orgasm is always and everwhere good for you, that vaginal orgasm is impossible, that no moral opproobrium attaches to expenditure of semen wherever it occurs, that considerable opprobrium attaches to the bearing of unwanted children, and at the same time insists that 'normal' heterosexual intercourse should always culminate in ejaculation within the vagina. These are the suppositions which underlie our eagerness to extend the use of modern contraceptives
into every society on earth, regardless of its own set of cultural and moral priorities....

"Another name for this kind of mental chaos is evil."

(Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility, p. 128-9)

And Jendi Reiter: You might enjoy "Cognition & Eros" by Robin May Schott --- British philosophy professor (I think), basically critiques the ascetic tendency in Western classical and Christian philosophy, saying that the devaluation of the body has meant the devaluation of women and a fear of admitting that one is dependent and mortal. Marred slightly by Marxist jargon, but a great book nonetheless.

If you're a horror fan, I recommend the 1950s French film "Eyes Without a Face." Creepy, beautiful example of the mad-scientist genre, whose impact comes from suspense and tragedy rather than gore. Also Doug Clegg's book "Neverland."
posted by Eve at 2:44 PM

 
MAILBAG: Rock; Hitch + Vatican; Miguel Estrada; "High Noon"; religion in New York; mysticism and Christianity; working mothers; and Scalia. Soon I will post separate mailbags on feminist books and rock'n'roll conservatism. As always, I am in plain text (though I don't think I have any replies in this one) and my readers are in bold.

Rock: An anonymous reader writes: [T]he blues is not about despair. It's about melancholy and resignation. The latter is the opposite of despair, in a way. Despair wrecks (objects, others, and finally the self); resignation accepts. If it didn't, surely black Americans would have died of grief long before they found their freedom?

Do you know the John Lee Hooker song called "The Fog"?

...Can't resist pointing out that my SERIOUS musical friends all tell me that the complex rhythms of American popular music are actually too simple and repetitive for them. But I can never quite agree with this; think they're missing some subtlety. I once found a critic's comment (perhaps banal to those more knowledgeable than I am) saying that the European musical tradition aimed to make the voice as pure and accurate as a musical instrument; the American tradition (under its African influence) aimed to make instruments as supple and expressive as the human voice.

One point you may never have noticed: Canadian popular music differs from that of the US in that it never had a significant African influence until the 1950s (with the exception of jazz). Our dominant tradition in popular music is Celtic. What we have is what American music would be, minus the influence of African rhythms and vocal styles.

Hitchens testifying at the Vatican against Mother Theresa's canonization: Dave Lull writes: He wrote about it (not on the web): Vanity Fair, Oct 2001 i494 p166(4) "The Devil and Mother Teresa." (role of devil's advocate during the canonization of Mother Teresa), Christopher Hitchens.

Abstract: Issues concerning the investigation of Mother Teresa by the Catholic church before she could be granted sainthood by Pope John Paul II after her death in 1997.

Estrada. The Talking Dog writes: Good call on my fellow Brooklynite Senator Chuck Schumer; he is being an intellectually dishonest doberman-- though I tend to think you overestimate the voters of my beloved Empire State by saying that if he out and out said "I'm going to trash ALL of George W. Bush's nominees until he sends me one I like," it would cost him votes. I think it would HELP him here in the State that elected you know who as its junior senator!

My problem with Estrada is more basic and personal: this guy was supposedly in my college class (dear old Columbia '83 [...]). Anyway-- despite the fact that I supposedly spent three years in the same college with the guy-- and I saw his picture here: I am absolutely unable to place him. I don't think he REALLY went to Columbia College at ALL (which is f***ed up-- because let me tell you,
being in Columbia's last all-male class is not something you'd ordinarily make up!)

Besides-- if this guy was really as rabid-ass a conservative as he claims to be (vetting judicial clerk nominees on politics, for God's sake!) [I thought the whole point was that he claimed he didn't do that.--ed.], then I would have known him for sure (as I was one of perhaps 8 members of Columbia '83 who were not to the left of, oh, Mark Rudd; I have moved left over time, on my theory that if you're not a liberal at 21, you have no heart, and if you ARE a liberal at 39 you have no money). Unless, of course, Estrada is a situational conservative-- in which case he surely can't be trusted with life tenure on the D.C. Circuit either!!!

So-- regardless of Chuck Schumer's disingenuous "double bind" bullshit question (the correct answer would have been "I'm sorry senator, could you repeat the question," followed by, "No, I still didn't get all of it--could you break it down for me? Harvard Law wasn't as good when I went there as when YOU went there." This would have brought down the house (and cemented his nomination)), there are serious issues about Estrada's credibility (i.e., just where DID you go to college-- and if you went to Columbia, why doesn't Farber know who you are?)

But having a sense of humor vs. NOT having a sense of humor is why I am here (an associate at an 8 lawyer firm in Manhattan, albeit with a cool blog [...]) and Miguel is a kick-ass partner at Gibson Dunn in Washington, and is up for the DC Circuit (well, the last part is because he is probably one of, oh, 3 or 4 guys with Spanish surnames and kick-ass legal credentials who seem to be THAT conservative). But I can resent him anyway.

High Noon. Rodney Welch writes: I didn't read the City Paper review of "High Noon," but I assume when they refer to the "liberal cliches" they're referring to the fact that it was made in the McCarthy Era, when liberals (most of them Democratic, I'd guess) were the only ones standing up to Tail Gunner Joe. Will Kane is somewhat in the mold of how Hollywood viewed liberalism, as more or less being equated with peaceful, live and let live decency. (Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird is another example.) It's interesting to compare the movie with "On the Waterfront" -- they were made just two years apart, both had a theme of loner versus an evil that had cowed the rest of society, both were influenced by Cold War politics, and yet the directors were at diametrically opposite political perspectives. Fred Zinneman's bogeyman was McCarthy; Elia Kazan's was Stalin.

Jonah vs. Clinton + Enron: Ed Graham: I think Jonah had tongue firmly in cheek -- he was taking a shot at all those who were happy to ascribe every excess of the 80s to the "Reagan era of greed."

Similarly, Rand Simberg: You wrote, quoting Jonah Goldberg, "...That's what the era of Clinton-greed brought us..."

And then castigated him for blaming the greed on Clinton.

I think you missed his point. The comment was tongue in cheek--a dig at the fact that Bill and Hillary got into office by (among other lies) calling the Reagan eighties the "decade of greed." I suspect that if you asked Jonah, he would tell you that neither president actually caused their respective "decades of greed," but that demogoguery is cheap.

David Klinghoffer on religion in NYC: John W. Brewer: I agree with your points re DC and furthermore with the overall proposition that his take is idiosyncratic to the point of being bizarre. By considering Manhattan "secular" he seems to mean no more and no less than "I didn't know or run into very many white evangelical Protestants when I lived there. I run into more of them in Seattle." Once you discount Catholics, Jews, and non-whites (groups which are not inherently 100% secular, at a minimum), you have very few people left to work with in New York. The percentage of the NYC population which is "white Protestant" (with "Protestant" understood purely as a statement about ethnicity/ancestry rather than current faith or practice [...]) is, I think, something like 6-8%, and I doubt the Manhattan percentage is dramatically higher than the citywide average. The comparable figure is something in excess of 50% nationwide. Not only is the nonwhite (perhaps technically "non-Anglo," given the Census Bureau reminder that Hispanics can be "of any race") population much larger in N.Y. in percentage terms, but something north of 75% of the white population is Jewish, Roman Catholic (at least "culturally") or "other" (Greek, Armenian, etc.). By contrast, I would expect that 75%+ of the Seattle-area white population is "culturally" Protestant. I would tend to doubt that the percentage of actual believers/ regular churchgoers among the Seattle-area cultural-white-Protestant population is higher than the equivalent percentage in Manhattan (at least as adjusted for age & marital status), but there's simply a dramatically smaller population, by an order of magnitude, to draw from.

Now, it is true that the population of actual churchgoers among the c-w-P population in Manhattan is notably more mainline and less evangelical/fundamentalist/Pentecostal than with the country as a whole, and perhaps Seattle. For better or worse, mainliners are less likely than fundies to be outwardly demonstrative in the way Klinghoffer identifies. [...] However, it's not that nonmainline Protestants don't exist in NYC, they just tend to be black or, increasingly, Hispanic.

It may be significant in all sorts of ways that the religious/ethnic mix of NYC is dramatically at variance with that of the country as a whole (the religious/ethnic mix of New Amsterdam was different from the rest of the East Coast way back when), but that's not "secularism." Anyone who lived anywhere in the world other than Brooklyn (including in Israel) would be struck by how many observant orthodox Jews actually live in Manhattan. It's not not just the ones who commute in from the outer boroughs, but the ones I see from my window every Saturday as they walk to and from the synogogue at 94th & Lexington. The fact that Klinghoffer apparently doesn't count these people as affecting the secular tone of the place is just weird, and says something about him and his own relationship with Judaism rather than something about Manhattan. (So Manhattan also has more secular Jews than anywhere else. We have more of everything. Someone else can address whether practicing Roman
Catholics are simply a low-class outer borough phenomenon with no relevance to Manhattan.)

Oh, and not only do I read the Bible on the subway (admittedly a practice disproportionately practiced by black women), I have been known to say the office from the Book of Common Prayer (in a low but audible voice, complete with appropriate head-bobbing, crossing myself and the like) while riding the subway at rush hour. People look on impassively, without eye contact. They've seen weirder. This is New York.

And Avram Grumer: I noticed that Klinghoffer kept talking about "Manhattan," as if one island with about a fifth of New York City's population were the whole city. I wonder if he knows that Brooklyn's nickname is "The City of Homes and Churches."

Mysticism and Christianity: Lynn Gazis-Sax: FWIW, I tend to think of the meaning of the word mysticism in terms closer to your definition than Brink's (though I suspect there is probably no shortage of people who use the word in terms closer to Brink's definition). Just a few things that struck me:

[Quoting Eve:] "I wonder if there is some lack of awareness of mystical elements in Catholicism (which I displayed in my earlier posts on this subject...) because many of the practices and language de-emphasized by misguided 'spirit of Vatican II' types were more obviously mystical: traditional devotions like the rosary, an understanding of the Mass and transubstantiation, talk of submission in Christ, talk of God's otherness. But a lot of that stuff is being revived, thank God!"

I've always thought that, if I ever were a Catholic, I'd be a "spirit of Vatican II" Catholic. I like the National Catholic Reporter, some of the things that bother me most about the Catholic Church (e.g. lack of ordination of women and its views on birth control) seem to be things that lots of "spirit of Vatican II" Catholics also disagree with, etc. But I'd have to say that the mystical aspects of Catholicism are, from my point of view, part of what's positive in the Church; I'd hate for the "spirit of Vatican II" to mean sloughing all that off.

[Quoting Eve again:] "Well, I'd say Gnosticism is all around us, cf. Harold Bloom's intriguing studies of 'the American religion,' but hey."

Very much all around us among liberal Quakers. I don't mean that in a derogatory way (taking something I don't like about the liberal side of Quakerism and calling it Gnostic as a way of expressing what I dislike about it). I mean it in the sense that, among the more liberal Quakers (as opposed to the more evangelical ones), there are people who would, for example, read Elaine Pagels, and feel that her relatively positive take on Gnosticism expresses the kind of faith that they value. (I'm ambivalent -- I
find Elaine Pagels interesting, but, despite any flaws in the choices the Church took, I still see value in an incarnational view of Christianity, which Gnosticism lacks.)

Working mothers: Jendi Reiter: Your exchange with Lisa Powell on working mothers is more nuanced than most, but what's usually ignored in this debate is that it's a delicate balance between too much and too little parental attention. It's unhealthy for a relationship when one person sacrifices her outside interests or commitments to focus wholly on the other person. This is true whether it's a marriage or a parent-child relationship. The right balance will be different for each family. Especially when the child grows older, it can be a major burden for him to feel that he is his mother's sole "mission in life." As a general rule, our families should take priority over our jobs, but it's a big leap to say that therefore mothers shouldn't have jobs at all unless financial need compels them.

And Scalia: A different anonymous reader writes: I think that Scalia's rule-based notions of jurisprudence do have more than the paltry, grudging moral content that you ascribe to them. That case would depend on the kinds of "natural law" arguments posited by, among others, John Finnis, who argued that neutral, rule-based systems of justice faciliate reciprocity and cooperation, and hence contribute to the formation of a "flourishing" community capable of effective coordinated planning (on an individual basis). Finnis reasoned that such planning is moral in an important sense because, as I'm sure the poor bastards who have lived in Afghanistan for the last 20 years can also testisfy, it is an essential prerequisite for the fullest realization of friendship, community, pursuit of knowledge and the like.

This is a "baseline" morality to be sure, but nothing to sniff at--and, in our far-flung heterogeneous society, may yeild far more of a net moral outcome than a possibly arbitrary system in which federal judges legislate their own version of morality (these are lawyers we are talking about(!)) under the guise constitutional or statutory legal interpretation.
posted by Eve at 2:39 PM

 
TO QUOTE SAM THE EAGLE, "It is at times like this that I am proud to be an American."

Via the Rat.
posted by Eve at 12:53 PM

 
"I shall keep you, Bortai. I shall keep you unresponding to my passion. Your hatred will kindle into love."
"Before that day dawns, Mongol, the vultures will feast on your heart!"
--John Wayne (as Genghis Khan) and Susan Hayward, "The Conqueror"
posted by Eve at 12:43 PM

 
POETRY WEDNESDAY: Four different translations of the same poem, by Hwang Chin-i. Here's where I got 'em. The first three are more freestyle, the last one more literal.

I cut in two
A long November night, and
Place half under the coverlet,
Sweet-scented as a spring breeze.
and when he comed, I shall take it out,
Unroll it inch by inch, to stretch the night.
--Peter Lee

I cut in two a long November night
And place one half under the quilt,
Sweet as the spring breeze.
Whe he comes I shall take it out
And unroll it inch by inch
To stretch out the night.
--Peter Hyun

I will break in two the long strong back of this long midwinter night,
Rollit up and put it away under the springtime coverlet.
And the night that my loved one comes back again I will unroll it to lengthen the time.
--Richard Rutt

I wish I could cut out the waist of this deep mid-winter night
And curl it softly, softly under the spring quilt,
And then slowly, slowly spread it on the night my love comes back.
posted by Eve at 6:11 PM

 
THE HEART OF ROCK'N'ROLL IS STILL BEATIN': So a reader sent me this essay: "Body and soul: The musical miseducation of the youth," by Martha Bayles. It's a critique of Allan Bloom's takedown of rock music (click here and here for previous, much longer Eve rants on this topic); Bayles chastises Bloom, but also sympathizes with him, and agrees with substantial portions of his criticism.

I found the essay to be a mixed bag. Bayles makes lots of excellent points, many specifically directed at Bloom's attempt at a Platonic approach to contemporary music. She notes that Bloom attempts to smuggle in romanticist music even as he denounces romanticist philosophy, for example. She picks up on the way he tends to lump all "the old European music" together, blessing it all, while similarly lumping all the new American music together in order to damn it. She identifies three "distortions" (I wonder if she intended that as a rock reference?) that lead Bloom to false and overhasty conclusions: a belief, Marxist in origin, that anything popular with contemporary "masscult" audiences must be bad; a denunciation of rock rhythms and an ignorance of the complexity of those rhythms; and an inability to see, or even to consider, that in the 20th century the Western musical "center of gravity" shifted from Germany to black America.

But then Bayles goes and lumps lots of disparate things together just like Bloom did! When she's defending music she herself loves, she is attuned to nuance; she points out that Bloom's take on Louis Armstrong's hit recording of "Mack the Knife" ignores not only Armstrong's singing style but also the many hit instrumental versions of the song. She writes, accurately, "In the same chapter, Bloom waxes indignant at the German condescension that views America as 'a nonculture,' a collection of castoffs from real culture.' Such indignation is ironic coming from someone who has just reduced Louis Armstrong to a hollow conduit through which the elixir of German philosophy flowed into an empty American vessel."

But Bayles's own stance is too narrow, because it's based on a defense of jazz over and against other 20th-century musical forms. Bayles mentions the blues, but they more or less drop out of her narrative; jazz clearly has pride of place. She locates the greatness of jazz and suitably jazzlike rock in its "rhythmic counterpoint, or swing." I find this too confining. An assessment of great music should allow for a wider variety of moods and expressions--lament, meander, laughter, rage, gallows humor, resignation, and much more. Not all of those moods and expressions require, or work well with, counterpoint/swing. Toward the end of the essay she writes, "Most jazz, including the highly developed strains that appeared after 1930, is less emotional than" the 18th- and 19th-century European music beloved by Bloom. She adds that "Afro-American music" exhibits the classicist virtues of "wit, elegance, playfulness, lucidity, detachment."

In the margins at this point I have written, "When did the blues disappear from this essay?"

Even if you just stick to jazz, can this description really cover the sultry, knowing humor of songs like "My Daddy Rocks Me" ("I looked at the clock and the clock struck ten/I said 'Glory, amen...'/He kept rockin'/With one steady roll...")? Where does "Strange Fruit" fit in here--where's its detachment and playfulness?

Bayles charges contemporary rock with being preoccupied with murder and suicide, as rock was not until the late 1960s. Before then, she claims, rock "was not a musical and cultural revolution." She doesn't tell us much about why contemporary critics of "Elvis the Pelvis"--who certainly did believe he represented a musical and cultural revolution--were wrong, so it's hard to evaluate her stance here. But I note that murder and suicide aren't exactly unusual themes in popular music, from "Sheath and Knife" to "Stagolee." Her account of punk as "performance art, not music" is most accurate as regards the Sex Pistols; it doesn't have much to say about the horde of groups and styles covered under the "punk" umbrella. (Part of the problem with the essay is that it treats genre boundaries as much more real than they are. Even if I grant that different genres have different specialties--say, rock is better at anger, blues is better at despair, synth-pop is better at ironic distance--few actual groups or genres stick within one genre.) The artistic or cultural value of an alienated howl is limited, for sure. But I do think it's possible for actual music, actual art, to be mostly composed of alienated howl. It helps if the musician has accurately identified at least some of the sources of his alienation; I think the Pistols did that, which is part of what makes them so compelling. A final, parenthetical weirdness of her take on punk: She blames it partly on the Velvet Underground, and then later praises jazz because "in the Eastern bloc, jazz became quite literally the Voice of America." So... what was the Velvet Revolution again?

That said, I wholeheartedly concur with this statement, toward the end of the essay: "At bottom, my gripe with Bloom is that he pays no real attention to the musical battles being fought in the souls of youth. He finds his students lacking 'strong prejudices' against which to test serious learning. Yet he dismisses their passion for music as a moral and cultural dead end," rather than viewing that passion as precisely the kind of love through which he could draw students to "serious learning."

Two possibly-significant postscripts: Bayles writes that she agrees with Bloom "that music should not be used to whip human beings into a mindless frenzy." She doesn't discuss whether she thinks there are forms of ecstasy that are not mindless--supra- rather than sub-rational.

And I wonder whether Bloom wasn't subjecting music to stringent criteria he would not apply to Shakespeare, Giacometti, or other artists whose works often inspire longings, passions, or alienations that Bloom would find unsavory. Bloom also didn't tell us if he liked any 20th-century art. What was in between Othello and Ayn Rand, for him?
posted by Eve at 4:40 PM

 
PROGRESS, RETURN, OR RENEWAL?: More on rock'n'roll conservatism. Leo Strauss has a famous essay, "Progress or Return?", contrasting the metaphor of progress (which tends to imply historical determinism, disdain for the past, and denial of an inherent and ineradicable corruption in human nature) and the metaphor of return. He was playing on the Jewish understanding of return, teshuvah, which has connotations of repentance. A return to the source.

But in contemporary political discourse, "return" has been downgraded to nostalgia. Conservatism, mostly due to its unfortunate name, has been accused of being little more than a desire to return to some imagined past--the 1950s of "Ozzie and Harriet" is the usual suspect. And many varieties of conservatism play into that stereotype, making a fetish of medieval guilds, 1950s diners, or Victorian sexual mores (eep). There are worthwhile ways of drawing on the past for inspiration and examples--I think The Tragedy of American Compassion effectively mines the Victorian era for a sense of the possibilities, needs, and challenges of private charity. But it's easy to slide from that kind of inquisitive, imaginative investigation of the past to an idealization of the past and a demonization of the present. So one aspect of rock'n'roll conservatism is that it's focused on the future, not the past. It's not about a return to some past era--real or imagined.

The Franciscan Friars of the Renewal specifically use that name, rather than talking about a "restoration" or some such, precisely because they emphasize that they are a new thing that is nonetheless tied to a pre-existing tradition. They are a response, from within the Franciscan tradition, to new circumstances; they're open to new ideas; they have an attractive vigor that can't be gotten from groups that view the 1950s as a lost Eden and the present day as a "Slouching Toward Gomorrah"-style wasteland. Their very name connotes hope, and engagement with the culture around them. And those are key elements of RNRC.
posted by Eve at 3:35 PM

 
WHAT I LEARNED LAST NIGHT: Last night I saw "Privates on Parade" at the Studio Theater. It's a musical about SADUSEA (Song And Dance Unit, South East Asia), a British military-entertainment unit that tromps and/or flounces through Malaysia leaving a trail of heartache, smuggled weaponry, and women's underthings. Here is what I learned from this play--the good stuff first:

1) Floyd King is still fantastic. He's like a force of nature.

2) The other actors were uniformly (ha ha) very good. The Washington Post review linked above is right about Sunita Param.

3) Costumes, sets: Also good. The Studio is a real class act.

But then there was the play itself. What I learned from the play:

1) You actually can't make a play about racism, Malaysian history, war as theater, intra-gay debates about assimilation vs. flamboyance, liberal male wuss-outs, Christianity, longing, abortion, the British postwar malaise (oy, I'm very glad they didn't try some malaise/Malays pun, it would totally be in line with the show's humor), domestic violence, Communism, and masturbation. I mean, Tony Kushner could probably do it, but he's a horse of a different feather. The play included scads of potentially biting, moving, complex, and/or hilarious moments, but all received too little time and attention. Scenes were abandoned the moment they threatened to develop into something poignant or funny. If you've seen it, I think the clearest example of this unwillingness to do anything with the issues and emotions the play raises was the "Black Velvet" almost-a-scene. Where did that scene go? Nowhere.

2) In 2002, in the District of Columbia, in an artsy independent theater, there is nothing challenging about mocking imperialist Christians, British racists, or anti-Communism.

3) It's possible to write a musical that is partly about Communists which leaves the impression that: a) The East German government had something to do with "the working classes," and was possibly even on the side of said classes; b) Cuba's Batista was replaced by Vaclav Havel; and c) Clement Atlee was more threatening than Mao. I really would rather not even mention this, since it sounds so predictably right-wing, and since the Commie stuff is only thrown in for local color as far as I can tell--Cold War scene-setting, a flash of Red--but it did get in the way of my enjoyment of the musical. I mean, I must have missed that time when British peasant families traded babies with the neighbors so that no family would have to eat its own children to survive. I'm not sure I'm being fair here, since I can't think what I wanted the show to do--I mean, mass death isn't all that funny--but this aspect of the evening really did feel "off."

4) Gay people are funnier in real life. Like, a lot funnier.

5) So are British people.

6) So are gay British people in the military.

7) If your characters are forced to carry too much symbolic weight, eventually anything you do with them will appear stereotyped. "Privates on Parade" made fun of the amount of symbolic baggage its characters held--there's a very funny bit of dialogue that goes something like, "I'm not just representing a woman being raped--I'm also an Atlantic ship convoy!"--but ultimately several of the characters are the sum total of their Dramatis Personae descriptions: The Eurasian Girl, The Heroine's Gay Best Friend Who's The Only Man Who Ever Treated Her Right, The Uptight God-Bothering Empire-Builder Who Prefers Bloodlust To The Other Kind. By the end, pretty much anything the author could have done with these characters would have struck me as fairly crass. If the girl gets the boy, it plays as the native girl needing a white knight to save her; if she gets only the tender care of the Gay Best Friend, well, hello, how cliched is that little "the noble victims of this world stick together!" script?; and if she ends up with no one a'tall, she's just another tragic mulatta. It is possible to avoid this cliche Catch-22 by writing better characters in the first place.

8) Satire should cost the audience something. (See #2.)
posted by Eve at 3:15 PM

 
"Abjure this woman and her idolatries. Tear down the obscene abomination she has erected!"
--An elder to Yul Brynner, "Solomon and Sheba"
posted by Eve at 11:18 AM

 
QUICK HITS. Non-violent steps to "regime change" in Iraq. Plus much cogent, pointed criticism in the comments boxes. In case you somehow missed this on InstaPundit.

The Old Oligarch on why Father Tucker's church rocks.

Excellent Stuart Buck column (also from InstaPundit...) on why we shouldn't care who's the smartest Supreme. (Personally, I favor Diana Ross--d'oh, wrong Supremes.)
posted by Eve at 5:28 PM

 
WHEN IDIOTS BAKE.

When New Mexicans bake.

Both links via The Rat.
posted by Eve at 1:31 PM

 
"An intelligent carrot--the mind boggles."
--Douglas Spencer, "The Thing"
posted by Eve at 11:51 AM