incorporeal works

Blog URL changes

2009-06-27T23:18:00.002-04:00

Moving my blog to Wordpress.com. The URL is: incorporealworks.wordpress.com

I am tired of fooling with matters of CSS, upgrading versions of wordpress.org and other things.

Checking in

2008-11-30T19:49:00.000-05:00

Still here, I see. Just a visit to wander about.

Carry on.

New URL for Blog

2006-05-16T22:04:00.000-04:00

I have a new domain. Moved my stuff over to it. Below are new URLs for my stuff. Same old stuff. New address.

blog: blog.incorporealworks.org

home page: incorporealworks.org

Moving Day

2006-01-03T22:51:00.000-05:00

I am moving this blog to my host server, using WordPress (thanks, Larry!) to manage it myself. I will maintain this blogger site just to preserve the "Incorporeal Works" name.

My new link for blogging is:

Incorporeal Works

Brokeback Mountain

2006-01-02T11:20:00.000-05:00

Thoughts on fiction and homosexual sex

Currently getting much ink and a respectable number of customers in theaters around the country, Brokeback Mountain has caused me to take another look at the story that is the source of the movie.

Annie Proulx is a writer of considerable skill who has built up a critical and public following with books like The Shipping News, Accordion Crimes, Close Range and others. The last book listed is a collection of short stories in which "Brokeback Mountain" appeared. I have read the three books listed, some time ago, and enjoyed them for the writing and characterizations. I have not seen the movie. I don't know if I will.

The longish story that produced the story of star-crossed lover-cowboys brought a mixed response from me as I read it. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are in almost every way archetypal cowboys. Very physical men who have pared down their responses to life accordingly, long on action and short on verbalization and introspection. The slow and skilful depiction of their gradual attraction, suddenly exploding into physical coupling on a cold, snowy night in a shared sleeping bag, sets the story on a tragic course unintelligible to the two men.

If Jack and Ennis had a wider range of references in life and experience, they might have been better able to deal with their attraction, to understand what was happening to them. They think they can leave what has happened on that isolated campsite right there, not carry it with them. The rest of the story works out their failure to leave their experience at that campsite, and to escape themselves. They each marry, have children, try to leave the other alone except as a friend.

The incongruity of their cowboy archetypes and the mutual sexual attraction they feel appears intended to highlight the tragedy of their denial and incomprehension. For me, the incongruity provoked what I am sure was unintended laughter; Proulx often presents limited characters failing to cope with situations misunderstood and baffling to them, with humor of a very wry sort intended, I am sure. The humor I felt did not have this effect in "Brokeback Mountain." My laughter was pretty much of the sort you feel when slapstick is suddenly presented, with no connection to the broader story.

The exact scene which produced my inappropriate response was as follows, as Ennis's teeth are chattering in the cold, while Jack is wrapped in his large bedroll:

"Jesus Christ, quit hammerin and get over here. Bedroll's big enough," said Jack in an irritable sleep-clogged voice. It was big enough, warm enough, and in a little while they deepened their intimacy considerably. Ennis ran full-throttle on all roads, whether fence-mending or money-spending, and he wanted none of it when Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his erect cock. Ennis jerked his hand away as though he'd touched fire, got to his knees, unbuckled his belt, shoved his pants down, hauled Jack onto all fours, and, with the help of the clear slick and a little spit, entered him, nothing he'd done before but no instruction manual needed. [emphasis added]

The above passage presents the sexual union of the two cowboys as though they were undertaking an unexpected job of work relating to stock. They unceremoniously spit on their hands, and go to work. The scene's incongruity simply made me laugh.

Later in the story, the cowboys meet again after acquiring wives and children, producing a scene which did elicit a feeling of loss and tragedy in me, but not for the two cowboys. On the landing outside the front door of Ennis's apartment, they fall together, lips locking, oblivious of Ennis's wife opening the door a crack, and seeing them. Ennis and Jack take off "for a few drinks," eventually ending up in a motel, writhing on the sweaty motel bed in sexual release. As they leave Ennis's place, the echo of his wife Alma's "misery voice" trails after them, "Ennis-" she begins, but they are gone. There is the tragedy for me in this story. A wife and mother discovering that not only is her husband unfaithful to her, but he is not even the man she believed him to be; it does not lessen the unfairness to know that he has similarly deceived himself as to what he is.

I don't think I will go to the movie.

W.A.C.-bogus issue

2005-12-13T18:13:00.000-05:00

Has there been documented one police action against a person
wishing anybody else "Merry Christmas?" Have postal inspectors
raided card stores to impound "Christmas Cards?" Are ministers,
priests and bishops being cautioned to curtail references to
the natal anniversary of Yeshua bar Yusef? (I use the alias
to avoid possible attention by the Christmas Police.)

No. If you'll pardon the expression, Hell, No!

So why is the "War on Christmas" the latest banner
with a strange device leading the Faux News Warriors
into battle? Once upon a time, there was an outcry to
"put Christ back in Christmas," referring to the gross
commercialization of a religious observance. Now the
cry is "Put Christmas back into the retail stores."
People should make up their minds.

More power to retails stores that do not want to
appear sectarian. Sever the connection between
yearly profit-taking and the birth of a religion
celebrating charity and simplicity, spiritual
matters over merchandising mantras. Feh.
Rant concluded.

Imaginary Chatter

2005-12-13T09:32:00.000-05:00

I was reminded this morning of an interactive program called Eliza, written some years ago to simulate a conversation with a user in real time. I googled around and found that at least one person had the brilliant idea of linking a version of Eliza with a chat room on AOL. Some hilarious exchanges resulted.

So I created an exchange as it might happen in a chat room of my own invention. It made me laugh, so here it is, a totally imaginary chat session, any resemblance to real persons is as coincidental as Eliza's 'conversation':

Chatroom One: {1 chatting}
{imteh1 is in the room}
{Eliza enters the room}
imteh1: hello eliza....do you know everyone....
Eliza: Would you like to talk about everyone.... ?
imteh1: no i don't talk about other people.....
Eliza: Why don't you talk about other people....?
imteh1: other people say mean things about me.....i don't like
to answer.....nobody knows what i go through.......my fourth
husband called me names.....my house has snakes in the attic....
i am always defending myself....
Eliza: Tell me about mean things.
imteh1: oh sister....could I tell you about some mean things.
...there are some real bitches here....but i dont care....whatever....
{pr0nmstr enters}
Eliza: Who are some real bitches?
imteh1: oh i dont want to give them the satisfaction....i never
talk about anybody else....just dont say it pr0nmstr....i dont
need your s**t today....watch out for pr0nmstr eliza....he is cruel....
{gdy2shus enters the room}
imteh1: hey girl.... meet eliza....she is asking me about bitches....
you know who....being mean to me....
gdy2shus: hey girl! hi eliza. oh pr0nmstr is here too. is he being
mean to you imteh1?
pr0nmstr: Who is this eliza?
Eliza: Why don't you want to give them satisfaction?
Eliza: Why don't you talk about anybody else?
Eliza: Does it make you feel better to talk about s**t?
Eliza: Why do you say pr0nmstr is cruel?
Eliza: Do you meet bitches.... ?
pr0nmstr: ROTFLMAO! I just figured out who Eliza is. Bitches,
heh, Eliza came to the right place, you deserve each other.
Eliza: I don't understand ROTFLMAO!
pr0nmstr: Well, at least one of you realizes what you don't
understand. This is rich.
imteh1: eliza dont pay any attention to pr0nmstr..... hes not
worth it.....i ignore him....he is a bitter little man....
gdy2shus: Why don't you leave imteh1 alone, pr0n? She has
a lot to deal with.
Eliza: Why do you say you have a lot to deal with?
gdy2shus: Not me, Eliza, imteh1 is the one with problems.
pr0nmstr: LMAO! You've got that right, gdy2shus, imteh1
has problems.
imteh1: thanks girl....eliza pr0nmstr isnt worth your time....
Eliza: Why do you say pr0nmstr isn't worth time.... ?
Eliza: I don't understand LMAO!
imteh1: Why do you keep laughing eliza....i am beginning to
wonder....i am making myself perfectly clear....if you dont
understand thats your problem....
gdy2shus: I think Eliza is just unsure of the situation, imteh1,
she is not laughing at you.
Eliza: Do you want to discuss laughing?
imteh1: so you want to talk about laughing....alright.....bring it
sister....i can stick up for myself....
Eliza: So you want to stick myself.... ?
imteh1: i said bring it eliza.... well see who sticks who....what
did you mean im the one with problems gdy.... i thought we
were friends.... i cant trust anybody....
Eliza: Why can't you trust anybody.... ?
Eliza: Do you stick your sister?
pr0nmstr: No s**t! imteh1 will do anybody. LMFAO! I'm getting
back to work. Have fun, kids.
{pr0nmstr has left the room}
{session suspended by administrator.}

Hubris

2005-12-07T10:33:00.000-05:00

I laughed, behind her back, at my grandmother one day years ago.
I was visiting her in a new home, a semi-luxurious retirement
complex, simpler to manage than her recently sold house. My
humor was sparked by the morning ritual of her medications.
Nana brought out a little wicker basket with a bow on the handle,
a gay little touch of color, considering that the basket stored her
multiple meds.

Once the little bottles of pills and nostrums were lined up for this
odd ritual, my grandmother doled out pills from each into a pillbox
with compartments for each hour of the day. So many at
mid-morning, so many at noon, so many before supper. I loved
my grandmother, and enjoyed telling my sisters later of this new,
funny story about our beloved Nana. How amusing.

Now, though I am not even within twenty years of her age on
that long-ago day, at my computer, a pill box marked by days
is shoved up under the stand, so that I will remember to take
my meds. It takes an effort for me not to introduce my state
of health, my aches and pains, into conversations nowadays.

Many of the people I know are much younger than I, listening
to me with what seems polite attention at the mock-humorous
self-absorbed commentary on arthritis, blood pressure and
other such fascinating subjects. In my mind's eye, Nana's
knowing smile appears; she is nodding, she is beginning that
rich chuckle which endeared her to more than just her
grandchildren. These young people listening so politely, I
know exactly what they are thinking. They can hardly wait
until the story of this old man's stereotypical hypochondria will
amuse their families, their young friends.

The great wheel of years has come around, the smugness of
youth belongs to others now. Pride has many faces, including the
polite, not quite concealed amusement I showed, those years ago,
when my grandmother took out her pills.

Ramadi attacks: media versions

2005-12-03T12:54:00.000-05:00

News reports on events in Ramadi, Iraq on Thursday and Friday. I saw a television news story on the insurgents in Ramadi. There were only a dozen shown, and the reporter said little damage was done by them. Following are some media reports on the action, and on coalition actions the next day. I am trying to get a fix on how different sources treat the same story. In these few entries, there seems to be consensus, with the exception of the author of the blog, and the points I have bolded in a couple of the stories.

-Fox News

December 3, 2005
...
On Thursday, the U.S. military played down reports by residents and
police of armed insurgents walking the streets and of widespread
attacks against American and Iraqi targets in the city. The military
said only one rocket-propelled grenade was fired at an observation
post, causing no casualties. News agencies did run videotape allegedly
shot in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, that showed armed
insurgents distributing Al Qaeda leaflets and firing mortar rounds.
...

-AP/New York Times
December 2, 2005
...
As part of that campaign, the U.S. military on Friday launched a new
offensive --Operation Shank -- in Ramadi, capital of the
insurgent-ridden Anbar province. About 200 Iraqi army soldiers
and 300 U.S. Marines were taking part in the offensive, the
fifth in Ramadi since Nov. 16.

-Washington Post

December 2, 2005

BAGHDAD, Dec. 1 -- Armed fighters claiming allegiance to
Abu Musab Zarqawi took to the streets of a western Iraqi
provincial capital Thursday in a fleeting show aimed at intimidating
Iraqi Sunni Arab leaders taking part in dialogue with U.S. Marines
in a stronghold of the insurgency, provincial officials, residents and
other witnesses said.
...
The U.S. military, which maintains Marine bases and thousands
of troops on the outskirts of Ramadi, denied the accounts of unrest,
saying that the city was largely calm Thursday and that insurgents
were manipulating the news media. "Today I witnessed inaccurate
reporting, use of unreliable sources, media using other media as
sources, an active insurgent propaganda machine, and the pack
journalism at its worse," Capt. Jeffrey Pool, a spokesman for the
2nd Marine Division, said in an e-mail to news organizations.

The following two entries, the first from a soldier formerly in service
in the area, now at home, seem to have had two different Reuters
sources:

-from the blog
of blackfive (military blog author formerly in Iraq, Afghanistan)
December 2, 2005

News reports around the world trumpeted that insurgents had
taken over the city of Ramadi and attacked many Iraqi and
US bases in the area, overrunning and taking control of the city.
Sadly, this is exactly the kind of info that
gets most of the folks covering this war salivating. They have
blinded themselves to any good happening and circle like
buzzards waiting for the carcass to finally drop...
...
"They've taken control of all the main streets and other sections
of Ramadi," a reporter for Reuters there said earlier. "I've seen
about 400 armed men controlling streets, some of which were
controlled by Americans before."

-from Reuters
December 2, 2005
U.S. and Iraqi troops launched an operation designed to disrupt
guerrilla activity in Ramadi on Friday ahead of Iraq's
December 15 elections, one day after insurgents staged a show of
force in the western city.
...
Insurgents launched a brief assault in Ramadi on Thursday firing
mortar rounds and rockets at a U.S. base and local government
buildings.

Leaflets were distributed saying that al Qaeda in Iraq, the group
led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al Zarqawi, was taking
control of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar. But after a couple
of hours, most of the militants dispersed and the city appeared
to return to relative calm.

There also seems to be a discrepancy between a reported
death in Ramadi between the NYT and the coalition spokesman,
Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch.

-from NYT

December 2, 2005
...
Other new deaths announced Friday included a soldier
serving alongside Marine units in Ramadi, 50 miles west of
Falluja, who was killed by rocket fire on Thursday

-CNN
December 2, 2005
...
Lynch, the coalition spokesman, strongly disputed reports of
widespread insurgent attacks in Ramadi on Thursday. He said
that one attack, involving a rocket-propelled grenade,
occurred Thursday and that it caused no damage or casualties.
...

Okay, so two newspapers, two news wire services, one blog and
two cable news oraganizations are less than exhaustive as a
survey. And Ramadi was one non-incident. It is notable in my
opinion that the preceding statement sums up the judgement of
all the sources I cited. An isolated and ineffectual staged
event. Except for the one soldier reported dead by the NYT.

The army spokesperson quoted maintained that nobody was
KIA in Ramadi on Thursday. Without a lot more digging, I will
not be able to resolve that discrepancy. It may be that there
was an isolated and unrelated incident in Ramadi that killed
the soldier. I don't know. I intend to do more of this sort of
picking through varying reports of events and conditions in
Iraq, for my own satisfaction.

Positions on the truth or bias
in media reports tend to be quite rigid, I have found. Most
internet "discussions" resemble opposing sides closing their
ears, opening their mouths and shouting each other down, or
trying to do so. There ought to be more focus on facts and
less on polemics. The issues are vast, the evidence tangled
and frequently contradictory, often leading to people simply
reinforcing the fixed opinions of their like-minded partisans.

Feeding the snakes in their heads

2005-11-03T10:31:00.000-05:00

Reading some exchanges in chat rooms and message boards over the past several years, I have sometimes felt that the internet was becoming some sort of unruly group therapy. I see extravagant responses by personalities apparently teetering on the frayed edge of personal meltdown, in response to trifling, innocuous comments. The most obsessive and prolific of these posters can, and have, emptied venues that once had lively, interesting and entertaining exchanges.

Dysfunctional personalities are feeding the internet to the snakes in their heads. Participation in the internet has grown exponentially since broad access became available in the mid-nineties. Wonders and portents of more have shaped a whole new culture, the online world. The "mutual consensual hallucination" that William Gibson named "The Matrix" in his book, Neuromancer, has become reality. Some users have grafted onto that reality their own distorted perceptions of truth and fiction.

There be monsters here, watch where you step. Use firewalls, use screen names, do not invite these strange creatures into your lives.

Long Thoughts, Long Memories

2005-11-01T19:54:00.000-05:00

I spent an hour tonight in a new bar which is the successor to a legendary dive bar in Chattanooga. Last May, the Stone Lion, a beer bar of epic grunge quotient, closed due to changing property ownership. Now, its sort-of reincarnation is open across a long stretch of town from the former location. A more spacious, still clean and more varied sort of place. Food is available. (The Stone Lion had a small microwave, in which you could heat food you brought in.)

I ran into a man I have known for thirty years, not seen in two or three. Later we were joined by a younger man known to both of us. We two older guys reminisced about past times and one particular past friend, who died of genetically determined heart disease twenty-two years ago. In the age of health-conscious aging boomers, and intolerance of all sorts of chemical and dietary excess, stories about long-ago drinking exploits and self-destructive abuse of one's body are the new taboo. We enjoyed swapping stories of excesses past, unburdened by the watchful eyes of the new morality police.

When people reach the vicinity of six decades of living, sometimes it is good to pore over the distant events that brought you to this point. As we slide down the steepening slope towards mortality, it is good to re-examine our lives, even those parts that seem in retrospect more than a little foolish.

Why and when baseball died for me

2005-10-28T20:55:00.000-04:00

I grew up with the usual shoebox of baseball cards under my bed. I am convinced to this day that I had a Mickey Mantle rookie card in that shoebox, and that my mother ruined my life by throwing it out when I went to college.

I struggled with actually playing ball, being athletically challenged. Not just lack of coordination, but bone laziness as well. It took me many years, well into chronological adulthood, before I realized that there were no shortcuts not involving hard work, if you wanted to accomplish something worthwhile.

I did make a fitful sort of effort at baseball in school. I was a weak hitter, an uncertain fielder, and could throw only poorly. Apart from those things, I was a natural.

One afternoon as my ninth-grade baseball group endured a late-spring scratch game, overseen by our coach, I came to bat. It was late in an unseasonably hot day, the boys were tired and ready to go to the locker room. The sides were tied, and the coach said the game had to be played out before we could go to the showers. At intervals, the coach had stopped the game to give us pointers about the game. Just before I came to bat, he had stressed that once we hit the ball, our only concern was to run to first as fast as we could, remembering to cross the base and turn to the right, then tag up. Watching our hit sail into the field was not productive.

I heard my teammates calling as I approached the plate, "Ah, here comes Felix, now we can go to the gym, he's an easy out. Good old Felix!" I dug in at the plate, determined to prove them wrong. A couple of pitches, a couple of strikes, my teammates were laughing and cheering, "Good old Felix, we knew he could do it." The next pitch came toward the plate, I swung, and connected. The ball bounced through the gap, and I was digging for first, running as hard as I could, not looking where the ball was going, following the coach's directions to the letter. I crossed the bag, turned right and tagged up. Guys on the bench were groaning, players in the field were kicking the dirt, I was a goat...but I was safe. I looked around, saw the pitcher step to the mound, fielders assuming their positions, and decided to take a small lead off of first. As soon as my foot left the bag, the first baseman whipped out his glove with the bootlegged ball still in it, and tagged me out. The cheers were raucous and derisive. "Good old Felix, we knew he could do it."

The coach was a good and decent man. He tried to make his voice heard over the noise of the laughing and cheering, "He did exactly right, he ran hard for first, he tagged up. He did what he was supposed to do." The boys ran for the gym. I collected my gear and followed. The coach awkwardly slapped my back.

Baseball was over.

Jousting Online

2005-10-09T15:18:00.000-04:00

The best in this kind are but shadows:
and the worst are no worse, if imagination
amend them.

-Midsummer Night's Dream(5:1.210)

Although my experience of newsgroups, message boards and blogs is not particularly extensive, I have certainly noticed the storm and fury that often attends exchanges between posters. There are many reasons for posting your words online, and apparently for some the major reason is to smite very roughly those with whom you do not agree, or simply do not like.

The depth of venom and the extended time line of such exchanges make you want to ship prozac or paxil, stat, to the participants. Abraham Lincoln was half right when he claimed that the world would little note nor long remember what was said at Gettysburg; nobody remembers Edward Everett's speech. There are few Lincolns posting on message boards, though. Nobody much remembers last week's flames, except for obsessional participants therein.

Attacking posts by persons for whom you have contempt seems very much like tailgating an annoying car, to me. To have contempt for the skill or judgement of a driver or a writer on an ephermal forum, why surrender your independence of that person? Tailgating is likely to involve you in a highly unpleasant experience; engaging in pointless flame wars has the same result.

Rough Beast Slouching

2005-07-01T05:40:00.000-04:00

Shattering the illusion of security is the purpose of terrorism. The continuing suicide bombings and other acts of the insurgents in Iraq are the current main event in world terrorism.

Sooner or later our turn will come around again. The relative peace on our soil since 9/11/01 is an illusion. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon accomplished so much for the cause of terrorism that no further action here has been needed-so far. What did the attacks in New York and D.C. accomplish?

The initial outpouring of sympathy for us evaporated as the administration pursued a go-it-alone course in Iraq. The qualified support for going after the Taliban and al Queda in Afghanistan did not extend to an invasion of Iraq based on skewed intel. Support from Great Britain and a motley collection of smaller powers does not compare to former alliances in 1990 and in Afghanistan.

Removing Saddam and wrecking the infrastructure in Iraq set in motion forces unforseen (why?) by the Bush administration. An Iraq without Saddam was certainly an agreeable prospect. The means of accomplishing Saddam's ouster, however, became a part of the larger problem of Iraq's fragmented society. Nothing happens on this sort of scale without unintended consequences.

Two years into the Iraq incursion, our actions have made fact what in the justification for action was not true in 2003. Iraq is now a bastion of terrorism, with a deputy of Osama's making the country al Queda's main theater of operations.

Sunnis, initially deprived of their minority control of the government, have undermined the effort to bring democracy to Iraq, partly by largely boycotting the election, and by at least passively supporting some of the insurgency. I don't believe Sunnis understand the probable outcome of their failure to unite against the foreign terrorists. Destabilization of the government, with an eye to establishing a regime friendly to terror and Islamic fascism, are the goals of the al Queda forces. Sunnis ought to consider what deadly bedfellows they are enabling.

I don't believe the Bush administration gave any deep thought to the consequences of unilaterally invading Iraq. A country bound together by force, formed of three unharmonious groups, is not likely to remain united in any cause, including democracy, following a massively destructive foreign invasion.

I do not know what we can now do to remediate our past miscalculations. Having kicked over the ant hill, we now express horror and confusion over the swarming ants that sting us.

Sooner or later, we will feel that stinging much closer to home. For the time being, the terrorists are enjoying the opportunities we helped create for them in Iraq. It remains to be seen what comes next on their agenda.

Graph of U.S. States I've visited

2005-06-14T12:03:00.000-04:00

I found this on Cerebus' blog, and tried it out. Looks like they need to re-format their image.

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

Hah. Did the edit myself. Lost some detail, but this is just an entertainment, after all.

River Walk Geese

2005-06-11T11:04:00.000-04:00

I have been spending some time exploring the recently completed walk at the River Park. I like it ah-lot. Took some pictures with my old and limited digital camera of flora and fauna. I paused at one point to let a pair of Canada geese and their fledglings cross the path. Took a picture, below:

Tennessee: Science-Hostile?

2005-06-01T14:05:00.000-04:00

A story on the front of the Chattanooga Times Free Press Metro section this morning cited results of a state-wide poll asking Tenneseeans' opinions on several statements about preferable science teaching in public schools. Of those polled, 40% would approve of teaching only creationism in science classes. Those who saw nothing wrong in including both creationism and evolutionary theory amounted to 72% of the sample (600 likely voters statewide, margin of error +/- 4%).

I find this disheartening, but unsurprising. Surveys on broader areas of education regularly show large numbers of people unaware of simple geography, like the location of whole continents. The questions of earth's early history and the appearance of life are amply researched, documented and tested in many ways by the established methods of scientific inquiry.

The latest version of creationism, "intelligent design," like creationism, rests on religious faith. (For a review of intelligent design from a scientific viewpoint, click here. ) I am fully in support of the freedom of religious belief for every citizen, however unsupported by facts. But to compel, or be willing to compel, the presentation of matters of faith as matters of fact in public school further devalues public education. Another link to a lengthy discussion of creationism, intelligent design and the scientific basis of the theory of evolution.

Chattanooga River Walk

2005-05-30T23:12:00.000-04:00

The past week, I have been exploring the new River Walk, the completion of which was celebrated last weekend. In the rain. I waited for sunshine, and was rewarded with several consecutive days without rain or threat of same this week.

I know that many question the motivation and usefulness of the various greenway projects here in Chattanooga, and they make some good points. Faced with a disintegrating job base and stagnant economy, for us to build leafy walkways through miles of marsh and industrial development does seem distracted and unfocused.

The result, however, delights me in spite of the sober objections of the critics. At long last, it is possible to walk from downtown to Chickamauga Dam without dodging cars, with the benefit of enjoying a variety of wild flora and fauna. Mostly flat, the walk winds from wetlands into riverfront stretches and then threads its way between all sorts of industrial buildings. The mix is very illustrative of the Chattanooga area in total.

I approve. I look forward to many long walks, punctuated with the sight of herons and mallards lifting off from early morning riverfronts shrouded in mist. Turtles laying eggs in the muddy riverbank (I saw one this week) and wild life coexisting with the ravages of urban development. I like it.

Testing Liberal...

2005-05-11T13:30:00.000-04:00

I found the quiz below on Larry's log. As Larry commented in his post on the quiz, the questions are too limited in scope to answer completely. Most of the questions either make sweeping generalizations, or combine two positions which might not necessarily co-exist in every person's beliefs.

By nature, I am a qualifier, I have strong beliefs in many areas, but limit narrowly what the application of my belief should cover. Larry gives several examples, but the one on abortion pretty well illustrates what I am talking about.

16. Abortion should be...
*Completely legal and available.
*Restricted, discouraged or illegal.

The first answer allows no qualification. The second lumps together three degrees of opposition to abortion. There should be some middle range of options short of flat-out unrestricted, or illegal at the other extreme.

This quiz is a knee-jerk quiz, designed around "hot button" issues which would be valid for rigid ideologues of the left or right, but not for those of us who see shades and qualifications for every opinion.

My ranking:

Your Political Profile

Overall: 30% Conservative, 70% Liberal

Social Issues: 0% Conservative, 100% Liberal

Personal Responsibility: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal

Fiscal Issues: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

Ethics: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal

Defense and Crime: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

How Liberal / Conservative Are You?

Mystery on the Incorporeal Express

2005-04-22T15:11:00.000-04:00

For some reason, I can no longer link to my own main page. I am diverted to my "dashboard" page here on Blogger. I can link to previous posts, but never see my main page other than with an old post on it. Trying a new, test post to see what happens.

Feh.

The hunt for the digital Unicorn

2005-04-08T16:04:00.000-04:00

In 1992, I read an article in the New Yorker magazine about two mathematician brothers, David and Gregory Chudnovsky, who had built a super computer in Gregory's apartment from mail order parts. They had built the computer to calculate the value of pi out as far as possible.

In the new issue of the New Yorker, there is another article about the brothers, now employed in a research institute, consisting of the two of them alone, in the Polytechnic University in Brooklyn.

The subject of the article was the effort by the brothers to piece together a large number of digital images of a set of medieval tapestries. In 1998, restorers worked on seven 12 by 14 foot tapestries dating from around 1500, woven on the theme of the "Hunt of the Unicorn." Priceless and beautiful, the tapestries were photographed at the time by a team of photographers working with a large digital camera on tracks, scanning the large tapestries, one small area at a time. The idea was to piece together a mosaic master image of each tapestry, using computer photoprocessing software. There wasn't a computer or software equal to the job. Enter the brothers Chudnovsky.

Eventually, many billions of calculations of digital manipulation of each pixel in relation to adjacent pixels had to be done. It turned out that in the process of moving the camera many times for each series of photgraphs, tiny changes in the arrangement of the tapestries came about.

The analysis and correction took prodigies of programming. The brothers used their latest homebrew supercomputer, named only "It," resting on racks improvised from frames and screens purchased from Home Depot. Each tile had to be analyzed, relating it to the others. Concentrating on the last, most crucial of the tapestries, in twenty-four hours of processing the individually corrected images were joined together.

One of the seven tapestries, the final, climactic scene, was captured digitally in its entirety. It is unclear whether there is the will, money or time to complete all of the tapestries.

Da Link. (This page also has a link to the original 1992 article about the brothers. Well worth the read.)

These two articles are really an epic of mental exploration by two more than Über Geeks.

Every Redtail Hawk's Rise

2005-03-14T23:25:00.000-05:00

For the past several years, I have been following the story of Pale Male, the name given by his fans to a male Red Tail Hawk. This hawk has nested for ten years or so under an elaborate cornice work on an apartment building on Central Park West, overlooking Central Park. Together with several different mates, Pale Male has launched fledgling hawks each year. This year, however, looked to be in danger. The resident management board of the apartment building found the mess of Pale Male's nest, and the dismembered pigeon parts falling to the sidewalk to be unacceptable. The nest was destroyed and the metal spikes which served as foundation for nesting were removed.

After a storm of protests, avidly covered by the media, the eviction of Pale Male was rescinded. The veteran parent and his current mate, Lola, began re-building their nest.

Now it appears that another generation may be on the way. Here is an article from the NYT giving an update.

You go, Pale Male and Lola!

Not so Evil, after all

2005-03-09T12:41:00.000-05:00

I got to worrying about my ranking on the good/evil scale after the last post, so I ran this site through an evil index for websites, which I read about on Larry's Log.

Whew! Maybe I won't be corrected for my levity.

Folk song for 2005

2005-03-08T15:29:00.000-05:00

I expanded this from the first few lines of my last post. For amusement purposes, only, of course. Heh.

Where have all the Republicans gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the Republicans gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the Republicans gone?
Gone for evangelicals every one,
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the evangelicals gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the evangelicals gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the evangelicals gone?
Gone bashing homosexuals every one.
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the homosexuals gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the homosexuals gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the homosexuals gone?
To weddings in Massachusetts every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the legitimate issues gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the legitimate issues gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the legitimate issues gone?
Gone to NPR talk shows every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the NPR talk shows gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the NPR talk shows gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the NPR talk shows gone?
Gone for tax cuts every one
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

Where have all the Republicans gone?

2005-03-02T11:03:00.000-05:00

Gone to prayer meeting every one,
The gays to roast 'til very well done.

The above is admittedly polemical, superficial and flip. I may be
ready to enter political life.

In my youth, my parents were Republicans in the Solid South dominated politically by Democrats. Local elections were perfunctory confirmations of Democratic primaries or caucuses. So my parents gritted their teeth and participated in these alien party activities. To do otherwise would have been to disenfranchise themselves, at least at the local and state level. After the long Democratic dominance of the presidency, the first Republican national victory since 1928 was reason to wake an eight-year-old boy, me, in the small hours of election night to tell him that we had a new president.

Remember who spoke these words, back in 1961?

In the councils of government, we must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,
by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous
rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Imagine George W. Bush or his Vice President, or the Secretary
of Defense saying that now.

No, you can't, nor can I.

Of course, Dwight D. Eisenhower wasn't really a Republican politician.
He was a military hero who for a while in the years before 1952 was
courted by both the Democrats and the Republicans.

Robert Taft, his main competitor within the Republican Party for
the 1952 presidential nomination, was very much a core Republican,
known as "Mr. Republican," in fact.

Opposed to the New Deal in all its ramifications, mistrustful of the
"internationalist" Republicans who favored alliances and economic
interaction with similarly disposed Europeans and Asian powers, Taft
voted against the Marshall Plan, and domestically co-authored the
Taft-Hartley Act, which sought to hobble labor unions.

Taft was in favor of a "sky cavalry" military intervention force to
punish governments and parties abroad who directly threatened
liberty within this country. "Nation Building" or missionary
zeal for bringing democracy (note little "d") to the totalitarian
nations of the world would be anathema to Taft.

In the days when I began to be politically aware, late fifties and
early sixties, the "Rockefeller Republicans," firmly in the
"internationalist" camp, were opposed by Barry Goldwater, whose
beliefs would undergird the later "Reagan Revolution." In the 1964
campaign, Goldwater suffered for his remarks criticizing
Social Security and suggesting that TVA be dismantled. What
goes around comes around; George W. Bush is attacking
Social Security now in the guise of "saving" it.

Richard Nixon, politically astute and unburdened by ideology,
succeeded where Goldwater failed by avoiding dangerous crusades
against popular social programs. Instead, Nixon began assembling
the first building blocks of the present Republican power base
with his "southern strategy," an opportunistic courting of
Southerners angered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and
fearful of black political power, which seemed identified
with the Democratic Party.

Thus the cracking and fissuring of the old Solid South began
to present opportunities for Republicans both at the national
and local levels.

It was left to the Reaganauts to forge the alliance of "social conservative" issues, plus the religious fundamentalists, with the racially-based southern Republican recruits. Two landslide elections later, Reagan's revolution had coattails long enough to coast George H. W. Bush into office.

Somewhere along the way, however, the ghosts of Eisenhower, Taft and Rockefeller had faded into faint shadows. All the social and racial issues which worked for the new Republicans seemed inextricably entwined with opposition to taxes in toto. Even when spending could not be cut enough to avoid deficits, raising taxes was now the equivalent of Goldwater opposing Social Security. George H. W. Bush paid the price for raising taxes, with a little help from loose cannon Ross Perot siphoning off votes Bush might have claimed.

Political charisma was enough to keep Clinton in office for two terms, fellatio, forty million dollars of investigation and impeachment notwithstanding. Lame Democratic candidates gave George W. Bush the two terms his father did not achieve. His father's tax lesson learned, GWB pursues tax reduction in the face of huge deficits, without political costs-so far.

My parents are both dead, now, so I can't ask them how the Republicans of today match up with the Republicans they so fervently supported in the fifties. Both of my parents were moderate in their social views, and fiscally conservative. My father was irked enough at G.H.W. Bush to join the Perot defection, not so much in opposition to taxes as disgust with continuing unbusinesslike deficit spending.

Perhaps my parents would also ask where all the Republicans have gone.

The Going Gets Weird

2005-02-21T20:29:00.000-05:00

He has gone where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no more--
depart wayfarer, and imitate if you are able one who to the utmost
strenuously championed liberty.-Epitaph for Jonathan Swift

He inhabits his nerve endings; they are on the outside, like the skin of a baby; he seeks thumbprints. The failure of the counterculture--"which values the Instant Reward. . . over anything involving a time lag between the Effort and the End"--to develop a coherent politics infuriates him.-John Leonard, reviewing "The Great Shark Hunt" in the NYT(Registration req'd).

Hunter S. Thompson carried to an extreme the indentification of the personality of a writer with his writing. Working from bits and pieces of factual extracts from his coverage of politics and culture, Thompson expanded and elaborated with manic inventiveness a surreal confrontation between drugged-out adventurers and the more prosaically disjointed unreality of late twentieth-century America. Nothing in the decaying American Dream is as the straight world would like it to be. Rather than join the earnest murmur of conventional journalists, soberly interviewing the rear guard of this decline, Thompson screams and howls in bursts of pyrotechnic stream of consciousness. The result lingers far longer in the collective memory than all the earnest op-ed pieces of the sixties and seventies.

How much this vivid torrent of words owed to the consumption of chemicals of all kinds, and how much to the talent of the writer, is a question which has been asked before, about other writers, especially in the century just past. A large question. Does creativity necessarily flow from excess, from psychological and behavioral dysfunction? Writers especially attract this sort of question, since they deal in words and at least nominally realistic descriptions of experience. Would Faulkner, or Fitzgerald, or Hemingway been better artists if they had been through rehab, instead of drinking like desperate men all their creatively active lives? If Sylvia Plath had been successfully counseled, defusing her suicidal despair, would she have refrained from gassing herself to death in the same apartment in which her children were sleeping, and would this counseling have affected her poetry, for good or ill?

Hunter Thompson embraced the excess that in his writing became a literary technique, creating a satiric juxtaposition between those who have power, and those who shriek that the emperor has no clothes. Who is more dysfunctional, the drugged-to-the-eyeballs gonzo journalist, or the solemn conventioneers in Las Vegas, police professionals learning salient facts about the drug culture, such as a roach is named for its resemblance to a cockroach? Take notes, there will be a quiz. This was ten years before Nancy Reagan told the stoned generation to "just say no." Thirty years on, after "zero tolerance" and mandatory sentencing, busting tons of drugs and lighting bonfires of marijuana across rural America, who now seems to have had the better grasp on reality?

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. We need a pro like HST more than ever.

Hunter S Thompson Ends the Ride

2005-02-21T15:11:00.000-05:00

Hunter Thompson's last ride...

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the bats began to take hold. This time I let them.

Selah.

The ride is over. The ticket was paid in full.

I read much of Hunter Thompson's output, from the Hell's Angels stuff back in the 60's to the very last column on the ESPN website, dated February 15, 2005. Like many writers, he outlived his best work, losing energy and fire as he grew older.

I don't know the circumstances that led him to punch his ticket out himself, what demons and torments physical or mental caused the last collapse into self and withdrawal from those around him. Suicide is the last victory of self over living with and for others, it is true.

The retreat to that brink of nothingness is as individual as the man, however, and I will not speculate on Thompson's worthiness or otherwise based on his end alone. When I was younger, I did not hesitate to render judgement in such a case. In the summer of 1961, I was driving on the sands of Daytona Beach when the news crackled over the AM car radio that Ernest Hemingway had died at home in Idaho, victim of what the announcer called a "shooting accident." Later reports filled in details; Hemingway had gone downstairs in his house early that morning, while his wife was still getting dressed, and placed the muzzle of one of his shotguns in his mouth and tripped the trigger.

His wife rushed downstairs to find the room spattered with the brain that had created characters from Jake Barnes to the old fisherman fighting the shark. The shark had beaten Hemingway, more completely than it did the old fisherman. It was a horrible thing to leave his wife to deal with the wreckage of his body and mind. In 1961 I judged Hemingway most severely for that.

I was seventeen.

Now, a life away from that hot Florida day, I am sixty, and of the few things I have learned, the most certain is that each life is unknowable to others, at its most basic. We share much with others, our family, our lovers, our friends, but there is a last redoubt where we keep our deepest self. When that self crumbles, from whatever cause, everything else will collapse into nothingness, and no consideration of love or duty or decency enters into the final act.

After the fact I learned from biographies the sad story of Hemingway's decline into physical and mental decay, the suffering he and his family endured. I don't know what Hunter Thompson's last years were like, other than his writing powers were waning. For me, the jury is still out. I will hope that clemency is more justified than condemnation in Thompson's case, as in Hemingway's.

Iraq blog becoming a book

2005-02-08T13:48:00.000-05:00

Some time back, I posted about a soldier in Mosul with the Army who had been maintaining a blog. The soldier's name is Colby Buzzell, now rotated stateside and out of the army. The writing in his blog resembles a 21st century Punk/Skater combination of Hunter Thompson and Ernest Hemingway, both writers he admires.

Now G. P. Putnam's Sons is to publish a book version of Buzzell's blog plus other journal information he had kept on paper rather than posting on his blog. The book, My War, is scheduled for publication in the Fall of this year.

One chapter of the book will be published in March's issue of Esquire.

I highly recommend this guy's work. His style is gritty and immediate. Apart from an irreverence for Army bureaucracy and a sardonic sense of humor, the blog is apolitical. The nearest thing to a political comment I can recall is Buzzell's comment that he could never vote for John Kerry because young Kerry threw his medals over the White House fence.

The archives of the blog entries from Iraq have been taken off line, no doubt to protect the salability of the book. The blog now contains entries about the ex-soldier's life and other material. Still well-written and sharp.

I am going to read the article next month. And I will buy the book next Fall. I hope many others will do the same.

Father Edmund's homily

2005-01-19T19:58:00.000-05:00

This is a piece of a very long and overwritten piece of fiction I committed long ago. I am oddly fond of his little bit. A priest is giving a homily following a baptism.

At the conclusion of the Gospel hymn, Father Edmund ascended the pulpit, stood diffidently looking over his congregation, and began. " `The Kingdom of God is like... .' With this simile, Jesus begins several of his parables. We are this morning welcoming another soul to the hope of that Kingdom. In time, young Nathan Talbot Spellman will hear for himself the parables of Jesus. Jesus was concerned to let people know what his kingdom was to be. Not a political uprising, the resurgence of Jewish autonomy. A way of being. A way of achieving union with God, after so long an estrangement. His parables are none of them blueprints for specific acts, diagrams of courses of action. They are metaphors for the Kingdom. They are stories of spiritual achievement, expressed in concrete details which are not meant to be taken literally. Imagine taking the parable of the vineyard laborers as realistic. Those of you in the congregation who supervise numbers of employees can imagine the havoc wreaked by paychecks that did not reflect hours actually worked."

A faint sound of laughter ran through the congregation. Jester smirked at the idea. "In the same fashion, the parable of the talents is very far from being a manual for money marketers. `The Kingdom of God is like...', not IS, but is LIKE. The Kingdom of God is salvation, union with God, available to the latecomer as well as to those who rise earliest in the morning of spiritual growth. The Kingdom of God is given with joy to those who enrich their souls with the bounty so freely given us, given even the least of us, by God. His joy is with those who do not bury the gifts, do not hide away their talents-what a fortuitous translation-but employ their gifts, however great, however modest, in a manner commensurate with their worth." Jester looked into the pew in front of him, still seeing no pledge cards. He settled back, wary.

"The details of the parables are not literal in their application, but the feeling of joy at the reception of the Prodigal is surely to be taken for its own sake, as well as for its symbolism. The rewards enjoyed by the good and faithful servants are symbols of the bounty and love of God, but the picture of a benevolent master and his love of his servants have roots in our daily lives. This is the true power of the parables, that they are not mechanistic creations of static symbols, but real in a human, feeling way. Jesus is concerned with how we live with one another, which is a mirror and complement of how we live with God. Euphoria and mystic rapport can accompany an acceptance of the sacrifice of the crucifixion. They are incomplete foundations for the Kingdom of God. Our lives in this world are as much a part of God's plan as any afterlife. Jesus talks over and over of how we should love one another. There are two great commandments, as Jesus said. The love of God, and the love of our brother. And they are one. In this world. In the next. A great poet of our language once had Faust ask of Mephistopheles, the emissary of Satan, the question `Where is Hell?' The answer was,`This is Hell, nor am I out of it.' We can make this world a Hell, and bury our gifts from God. Or, I believe, we can use what God has given us, to the help of our brothers, and the glory of God. Then we can answer Mephistopheles, `This is the Kingdom of God, nor are we out of it.' Amen."

What's in a Story?

2005-01-16T09:36:00.000-05:00

...The Play's the thing,
Wherein Ile catch the Conscience of the King.

Hamlet knew what every storyteller knows; a plot or
storyline is nothing, execution is all. The few lines
that Hamlet adds to the 'Murder of Gonzago' transform
a pedestrian revenge tale into a device to rip open
Claudius' soul.

Plots may be totally improbable and still work as
absorbing tales. Imagine a more improbable plot than a
son learning from a ghost that his father has been
murdered by his uncle, who then took over both kingdom
and queen-Hamlet's own mother. If Shakespeare had
written the part of Hamlet as he did Hotspur, the play
would have been over in one act. Straight from his
audience with King Hamlet, Hotspur/Hamlet, in a fine,
foaming eye-rolling bipolar frenzy would have sought
out Claudius and spitted the usurper, unless security
forces did for Hamlet, Jr. what Claudius did for
Senior. Either way, a half-dozen more or less innocent
bystanders would have lived on, including Polonius,
Ophelia and Laertes. Even Rosincrane and Guildensterne
would have lived to become perpetual graduate
assistants at Wittenberg U. But then nobody would have
remembered that eminently logical play.

The telling of the tale is how the playwright catches our
conscience, and our attention.

Let us now praise famous men...

2005-01-06T20:41:00.000-05:00

Credo:

I am free. That means in thought, word and deed, subject only to the rights of others to be similarly free. My rights stop at the borders of others’ same rights. Most of the problems of civilization involve somebody trying to move those lines to their advantage.

Thomas Jefferson, with a little editorial help from Ben Franklin, said in the Declaration of Independence that the rights of men are primary, and the assertion that this is so is “self-evident.” Perhaps, but not without effort, unceasing and to the last bitter trial. Jefferson knew this, of course, which is why he wanted to be remembered for the Declaration, and for the Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, passed in Virginia in 1785 . Those two achievements, along with founding the University of Virginia, were all the tributes he wanted on his grave memorial.

For me this means that my religious views are personal and not political, I have no right to impose dogma as law, however strong my beliefs are. I expect the same consideration from other citizens. This consideration especially applies to choosing representatives to enact and enforce laws for a pluralistic society. The recent presidential election and the attribution of “moral concerns” to the choices made, have raised my libertarian hackles. Following is a quotation from a draft of the above legislation authored by Thomas Jefferson for the Virginia legislature:

[It follows :] …that our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it…

Yes. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson.

Homelessness: The Next Frontier

2005-01-05T09:37:00.000-05:00

I have been thinking somewhat about the announced initiative proposed by Mayor Bob Corker to eliminate homelessness in Chattanooga. Yesterday I received a call from a participant in this effort, looking for an old friend of mine, or at least his current email.

I was able to supply the information, as I continue to exchange emails with my friend Tom Hebert. During his ten years or so in Chattanooga Tom managed to shake up a lot of projects with his energy and ideas. Tom lives in Oregon now, involved with two of his long-time enthusiasms, horses and Indian (Native American) activism. He was unwilling to leave these behind, even supposing he was actually chosen for the position. (Part-time coordinator for the Regional Inter-agency Council on Homelessness.) For some reason, he urged the person who sent him the job description to consider me for the job.

Here is my reply to him, covering both his refusal and my reaction to the whole subject:

Tom,

Your email to Judi was vintage Hebert. A distillation of your experience with the Bessie Smith Hall and a pointed recap of the many satisfying interests you have where you are.

Nice touch to recommend me for this position, I value your confidence even while recoiling in horror at the prospect of riding into the vile and bottomless swamp of politically poisoned projects in Chattanooga. You may not be aware that this “initiative” originated with Bob Corker, who is running for Senator in 2006.

“Ending Homelessness in Chattanooga.”

Why does this remind me of CNE (Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise) circa 1987?

“Ending substandard housing in ten years.”

Meanwhile the rotting center of residential Chattanooga continues its multiple decade slide into sub-Third World status. (Excluding downtown, with multi-millions of privately leveraged public money prettifying the cityscape)

O tempore! O mores!

Regards from your pal,

Felix Miller

Gospeling the Cinema: Three Movies

2004-12-08T15:26:00.000-05:00

The Last Temptation of Christ by Martin Scorsese
The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson
The Gospel According to St. Matthew by Pier Paolo Pasolini

When last Ash Wednesday, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ opened in theatres across the country, reactions varied from piety to anger. I noted the furore, and gave some thought to why a movie, albeit one with a sectarian agenda, aroused so much comment. Recently I watched the DVD of this film, and went on to rent two other films on the life of Christ that had caused comment when they were released: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). I have now watched all three movies, more than once in the cases of Gibson's and Pasolini’s movies. I had seen The Last Temptation before, and the second viewing this time was enough to confirm my opinion of it.

To quickly summarize, I liked Pasolini’s film very much, I thought Gibson’s film was just good, nothing extra, and I found Scorsese’s film something of a mess. These verdicts were rendered as much as possible on the value of each as a film, an artifact of entertainment, and not on the quality of religious faith expressed. Of course, the subject is the life of the central figure of one of the world’s three most widely influential religions. The choice of subject entails all the emotion and faith and conviction of that religion. No person, film maker or filmgoer, can escape the awareness of the import and influence of the life of Jesus, son of god to the faithful, prophet to Jews and Moslems, and inescapable cultural fixture to everybody else.

The marketing strategy Mel Gibson employed in building interest in his film, holding preview showings for fundamentalist Christian church members, guaranteed religious debate about the movie itself. The debate broadened into considerations about the place of faith in a pluralistic society. Those considerations exist, but I don’t intend to address them. The emphasis placed by each director on differing elements of Jesus’ life give some indication of their beliefs, and I have noted them. I have no intention of judging any of the films on doctrinal grounds, to be exact.

I am a life-long member of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, as broad-based doctrinally a sect as you will find among “mainstream” Christian churches. While divided amongst ourselves on all sorts of doctrinal issues, we Episcopalians generally find it “tacky” to question somebody’s faith or insist on others believing as we do. And while we may be sinners in many ways, we Episcopalians are never tacky.

Episcopal clerics often characterize three “liturgical” churches, Episcopalian, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox as each reflecting the influence of one of the major events in the Christian calendar. Episcopalians express the Nativity, Roman Catholics take Good Friday, and the Eastern Orthodox emphasize Easter. In considering The Passion of the Christ, I certainly can agree that the very Catholic Mel Gibson is true to the spirit of Good Friday.

Let me deal with the much-noted blood and gore that so dominates Gibson’s movie. I watched this movie with my beloved, my sweetheart, as tender-hearted a person as any I have ever met. Neither of us was sickened or had to turn away from watching the extremely long-drawn out scourging scenes, or the agonizingly filmed progress of Jesus up to Golgotha, or the excruciatingly detailed scenes of loutish Roman soldiers nailing Jesus to the cross. I do not believe this lack of revulsion on our parts was due to desensitization or inherent hardness of heart.

The very extravagance of Gibson’s effort undermined his intended effect. After the first ten or fifteen minutes of flogging, my willing suspension of disbelief became unwilling, and I began to wonder how long the makeup for Caviezel had taken each day of shooting. I wondered how the makeup people glued the gruesome scars onto the actor’s skin. I idly noticed the use of slow-motion during the ascent on the Via Dolorosa, when Jesus repeatedly falls, twisting and twisting for most of a minute. I compared the effect to the death scene of Bonnie and Clyde, and the massacre of the Wild Bunch. When the machinery of a film’s creation begins to show, the story loses a lot of its force. The palpable determination of Gibson to hammer home his passion for Jesus’ torment as the central event of the Gospels made us aware of the director’s hand in every scene.

In spite of the failure of the blood-soaked scenes of Jesus’ torment, Gibson has made a good film. The Passion is not more than good, not a masterpiece, but it is a well-crafted visual and aural object. The use of Aramaic and Latin, with English subtitles, actually worked better in setting the mood of actually being there than did the scourging and crucifixion scenes. The photography was wonderful throughout the film, muted colors and pervasive darkness reinforcing the somberness of the story Gibson has chosen to tell. Caviezel deserves some sort of award for his performance, if not for acting, although he does that very well, then for endurance. I think he has said in an interview that the extreme physical demands on him in this movie deepened his appreciation of Jesus’ suffering. I believe it.

Pier Paolo Pasolini made The Gospel According to St. Matthew in 1964. He used mostly non-actors, even in the major roles. I have read that Enrico Irazoqui, who played Jesus, was an economics student with no acting experience. Irazoqui supplies an intensity that meets the needs of his role nonetheless. The many peasant faces of the other cast members give the film the look of a documentary, a feeling that these are real Judeans and Nazarenes. The harsh, arid countryside and the crumbling, cliff-hugging buildings chosen as locations add to this feeling of being one step away from the real Jesus, the real disciples and family members.

The high-contrast black and white photography brings into sharp relief the gritty landscape, and the wrinkled faces of the cast. Both land and people seem scored by harsh forces of nature and man. These people, indeed, are the “salt of the earth,” and are tightly bound to it. Actors spend long minutes staring into the camera, presenting their worn and deeply seamed faces as mute testimony to the hard and bitter realities of their lives. These withered and desiccated faces turn to Jesus and soak up his words like clear, cold water.

If Gibson focused on the agony of Jesus, Pasolini presents Jesus as a fierce champion of the people of the sere, sun drowned landscape of the impoverished province of Judea, a backwater of the Roman Empire. Irazoqui strides through this landscape darting glances at his disciples, firing off dialogue taken from the Gospel according to Matthew. Jesus pauses only when he sees children and the shyly enthusiastic crowds that begin to meet him as he journeys. Most of the movie depicts the ministry of Jesus before he goes to Jerusalem for his final Passover. The Nativity itself is not shown; just a few scenes of Mary pregnant, then Joseph and Mary leaving Nazareth for Egypt after the Magi have visited. The massacre of the innocents ordered by Herod is filmed in one long shot, with babies tossed like bundles of rags, torn from weeping mothers. Pasolini is intent on presenting the teachings of Jesus, especially the emphasis on the two Great Commandments, love God and love your neighbor.

The arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus proceed in a matter-of-fact, understated series of scenes. No scenes of scourging, just the placing of a crown of thorns onto Jesus’ head do for Pasolini all that is necessary; he does not linger on the pain for as long as Gibson did.

The brief journey to the place of crucifixion also occupies little time. The crucifixion itself is presented in economical scenes that do not flinch from the pain and suffering of Jesus, but neither does Pasolini dwell on that final agony. There follows a brief scene of the stone rolled way, and the empty linens within the tomb as the wondering family of Jesus, and his disciples, look in joy on the evidence of resurrection.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew is a film about Jesus’ teachings in the context of conditions in Judea. This approach contrasts with the story of the redemptive sacrifice of the crucifixion presented by Gibson. Pasolini’s movie is much wider in treatment and wonderfully evokes the appeal of Jesus to the suffering poor to whom he preaches.

The Last Temptation of Christ is a film that I wanted to like. I admire many of Scorsese’s movies, and after the storm of protest and picketing greeting this film, I really tried to do my libertarian duty and admire this film as well. I did not find it possible to do so. Wonderful photography again, maybe it is something about the subject matter that turns cinematographers into Renaissance Old Masters, but here is another desert landscape and sepia-tinged groups of peasants.

Willem Dafoe does a good job playing Jesus as torn by his dual nature as both man and deity. I found the imagined life of Jesus with Mary Magdalene, springing from Dafoe’s conflict, to be a distraction from the story. The scenes are presented as a sort of vision or meditation Jesus has during crucifixion, at least I think that is the sequence. Things get confusing at several points in this movie, and at almost three hours there is plenty of room for confusion.

Barbara Hershey is good as Mary Magdalene. I kept having impious thoughts and feelings whenever she was on screen. I suspect that my distraction did not add to my appreciation of the movie as a whole.

Scorsese knows how to make movies, but even a very good director can lose his way.

So, in recap, three movies, one about suffering and sacrifice in blood, one about a ministry to the poor, and one about the conflicts of flesh and spirit in a man-god. All have much to recommend them, depending on what is expected when you sit down to watch an entertainment, which in the end is what a movie is. Even when the subject matter is dark and painful, we may still be entertained. The extremes of reaction to these three movies is a measure of how much we bring to the film experience from our own package of beliefs, our preferences in art, and how much we are willing to adjust in our thinking for the short time in the dark of the theatre. I enjoyed all three, in the proportions mentioned at the beginning of this little exercise.

The Ant, the Grasshopper and the Farmer's Boot

2004-11-29T07:22:00.000-05:00

The old fable of the grasshopper and the ant occupies my thoughts a good deal lately. You know the story, the first chilly blasts of impending winter have shriveled the plants and times are suddenly hard. Mr. Ant is surveying the bleak landscape and sees Mr. Grasshopper hopping along, looking stressed.

There follows an Improving Lecture from Mr. Ant to Mr. Grasshopper, comparing their relative situations, much to Mr. Ant's advantage, since he is perched on a deeply dug network of warm galleries chock full of foodstuffs. While Mr. Grasshopper spent all summer doing his thing, hopping giddily from one diversion to another, Mr. Ant toiled like, well like an ant, and prepared for the coming winter. Industry vs. Sloth. The opposite poles of approaches to Life.

I am constitutionally a Grasshopper. The long grind of regular effort and planning ahead do not come naturally to me, when I can manage them at all. Necessity has led me to long stints of Ant-like effort; having children is a great spur even to Grasshoppers. Something in me rebels at the tone of the Improving Lecture, however. Mr. Ant is so smug, sitting on his anthill, I want to smack him.

So, herewith an addendum to the fable of Ant and Grasshopper.

Right about the time that the Ant is really getting into his lecture, the farmer whose field has been home to both Ant and Grasshopper strides into the scene, and his boot crushes the life from both insects. The farmer doesn't even notice, and continues his tour of his fallow field. Below the flattened bodies of Mr. Ant and Mr. Grasshopper, the bounteous galleries of the anthill begin their slow decay into soil, which will be turned by the plow again next Spring. New Ants and new Grasshoppers will begin their season in the sun. But the Farmer's Boot comes for them all, and it is folly to believe that thrift and industry are any guarantee of survival.

Morals 'R Us Say Republican voters

2004-11-16T08:16:00.000-05:00

In the Chattanooga Times Free Press Sunday's op-ed section, I found an interesting column by Leonard Pitts, under the heading "Where is the Christian left...", which was not Pitts' subject for his original column in the Miami Herald. Pitts titled his piece, "Where's the morality in Bush's policy?" In response to the citing of "moral values" as a determining factor in many voters' support of President Bush, Pitts opined:

Beg your pardon, but one is hard pressed to find much evidence of morality in Bush's ineptly prosecuted war, his erosion of civil rights, and the loss of international credibility that his policies have caused. Unless, of course, one has been quaking in one's boots at the prospect of same-sex couples making a commitment that straight couples have avoided like SARS.

Pitts goes on to question why the Democrats have effectively ceded Christianity as a political trademark to the Republicans. I think that is a good question. I suspect that many on the right would say that the "left" or "Demoncrats" pursue irrelgious policies and therefore are not entitled to wear their faith like battle armor.

A recurring theme in Pitts' column is Jesus' command to Peter, "Feed my sheep." In fairness, many of the religious right are concerned with helping "those less fortunate than ourselves," but not with tax money. Taxes are evil, voluntary charity is good. The question comes down to whether charity is adequate to the needs of a changing society in an increasingly brutal economic climate here and in the world at large.

Of course, not much tax money is needed to forbid same-sex marriage or require that textbooks soft-pedal evolution. I would like to see a conservative movement that was as concerned to conserve personal liberty, in areas other than gun control, as to conserve government tax revenues.

Surviving Bad Choices

2004-11-05T15:52:00.000-05:00

Time to take a deep breath, hold it, and let it slowly out. This country has great reserves of common sense. We are, I firmly believe, basically a good and decent people. We have survived bad government, bad business practices, bad luck, bad money and a long list of other evils.

We have, within my memory, survived an evil war and the extremes of opinion it fomented. We have survived vindictive, unprincipled presidents, and we came out of all those trials stronger.

Tuesday's election was won both in the popular and the electoral vote by a man I believe is deeply unworthy of the office held by men such as Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, who refuses to learn from his mistakes or even acknowledge that he has erred. Faced with a choice between the unwarranted swagger and obdurate self-satisfaction of Bush, and the dull, uncomfortable candidate that the Democrats chose to run, the voters by a margin of two per cent. opted for swagger over dull deliberative argument.

Four more years and several nominations for Supreme Court positions give George W. Bush more power than he can ever appreciate in a deep and responsible way. For him, these powers are the perquisites of what he called "collateral." His "mandate."

The job I have, that all reasoning Americans have, is to make the best of what we have, to be a loyal but unflagging opposition to each and every bad decision this flawed and limited man is bound to make over the next four years.

Stay the course and pray for grace, those are my watchwords.

Clouds and Portents

2004-10-16T13:43:00.000-04:00

Hmmm....four weeks about since last I posted to this most uninspired blog. Life has been pretty uninspiring outside the purely personal, meaning my wonderful grandchildren. I hope that they face a more inspiring and successful future than the one seeming to loom like a dark cloud on the distant horizon.

The political wars are sinking to new depths, led by the Democratic candidates, for a change. First John Edwards suggests that if he and Kerry are elected paraplegics, mentioning the late Christopher Reeve, will benefit so dramatically from federally-sponsored fetal stem cell research that they will arise from their wheelchairs and walk. This flamboyant claim was so self-evidently nonsense that I could just laugh at it.

Then both Edwards and Kerry raised the issue of Cheney's lesbian daughter, which ought not to be an issue anywhere but within the Cheney family. Cheap political theater does not enhance any candidate.

Going back to the world my grandchildren will inherit, here in Chattanooga there are many differences between the city now, and the city I knew growing up. I remember downtown as a smoky place with a smell that reminded me of burnt toast. Coming around the curve leading to the road downtown from Lookout Mountain, many mornings when I went to Baylor I saw a lake of dull yellow-brown smog, punctuated by fumaroles of dark coal smoke from hundreds of industries, and thousands of homes. The collapse of heavy industry in Chattanooga, following the trend within the country as a whole, combined with EPA regulations, has banished that cloud of vaporized industrial byproduct.

The natural beauty of Chattanooga is much more evident, and that is good. The departure of industry, however, has left the economic prospects for my grandchildren very much in limbo. Tourism and its attendant service businesses seem to be the prospective mainstay of Chattanooga's economy. I'm afraid that won't be enough to provide a good range of choices for my grandchildren. Even if the increasing price of oil doesn't put a drag on all tourism, Chattanooga will be a poorer, though cleaner town.

Oil. Talk about dark clouds on the horizon. The developed world is in thrall to a commodity overwhelmingly controlled by nations actively hostile to our culture, our politics, our religious diversity. Freedom is a weak word to countries where most of the population are poor in everything but xenophobia and religious bigotry. The immense wealth represented by the oil reserves in the Middle East seems to benefit only an oligarchy in each of the countries possessing the larger reserves. For the oligarchs, deflecting the discontent within these countries rests on keeping fever-hot the religious and social passions against foreigners, especially the West, especially the U.S.

The invasion of Iraq may have been intended by the Bush Administration to provide a counterweight to these forces, but I see no sign that any such result is likely. Instead, Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as a theater for Al Qaeda. From start to finish the Iraq matter has been mishandled, misunderstood by those who zealously led us there, and now our own best forecast of likely outcomes predicts civil war.

Hubris is a word I increasingly hear in my internal debates. We are mighty, but in what despair will we look on our works in the next ten or twenty years? Will my grandchildren ask me what happened to the United States of America, where did our stature and our beliefs and our will betray us?

I worry. I wish I could hope.

War is Cruelty

2004-09-18T22:11:00.000-04:00

In the Miller Brothers ( a department store, the family business until sold in 1973) warehouse there was a furniture repair/touch-up shop where Mr. Pirkle presided. As furniture came into the warehouse from NC, any damaged pieces which did not qualify for freight line damage claims came to Mr. Pirkle to touch up, repair, return to a saleable condition. At this time Mr. Pirkle was in his middle seventies, drawing Social Security but unwilling to sit at home. Due to his age, he could work as much as he wanted, and not sacrifice his SS check.

Mr. Pirkle had a long and varied work career. During the late twenties and early thirties he had worked in the furniture workshops of the Colonial Williamsburg Restoration. It was in those workrooms he acquired the skills he employed for Miller Brothers in the warehouse. His family had always lived in South Chattanooga and Northern Georgia. One long Monday afternoon, he told me the story his father had told him. In 1863, his father was eight or nine years old. Mr. Pirkle’s father went on a tour of the battlefield at Chickamauga a day or so after fighting had moved off north to Chattanooga. The grandfather of my Mr. Pirkle wanted to show his son what war brought. That afternoon in the warehouse, Mr. Pirkle told of his father’s story, of the many, many bloated horse carcasses they passed. Then the father and son came to a trampled-down area where a pile of amputated arms and legs were piled like a small pyramid. This, they understood, was the site of a field hospital. In the heat and urgency of battle, the universal remedy for a serious limb wound was amputation. The large, heavy, slow-moving projectile commonly fired by Civil War era military rifles was a minie ball, which struck with such accumulated projectile force that bone was shattered into unrecoverable pieces. Faced with an unbridgeable gap in the bone, the surgeons elected to amputate.

This story comes to mind now because of the nature of the casualties in the Iraq disaster presided over by G.W. Bush & Co. The “insurgency,” a.k.a. continuation of the war, features the extensive use of mines and improvised mines to blow up military vehicles full of our soldiers. Because only a minority of these vehicles are armored in any way, a high proportion of the wounds suffered involve amputations. As William Tecumseh Sherman said, “War is cruelty, you cannot refine it.”

Salad Days

2004-09-06T08:58:00.000-04:00

I read a post this morning on a message board maintained by my friend Wanda. She recounted the day this weekend she and her main man Gregg devoted to their combined children. All day they shared their time and entertained their children. They were tired at the end of the day, but it was a good tired. Wanda closed her post by saying that these were "salad days" for her.

I posted back and agreed. Then I went on to tell her of my "salad days" and how I came to realize when they were.

I had a disturbing dream when my boys were little, in which I was walking my older son into his elementary school. He was nine at the time, and in my dream, I looked at him and with shock realized we were eye-to-eye. He was grown up. I had such a feeling of loss and vanished years I woke up. I got up and walked into the boys' room and stood there listening to them breathe. I did that often in those years. I felt better.

The really good news is that all days are salad days. Just different. Even in the chaos and upsets of adolescence, seeing your children change into adults has something wonderful every day. My boys are men now, and I know now that these are still the salad days, for sure. They are all salad days.

I was just not wise enough to realize that fact when I woke up from the dream back when my elder son was nine.

Beaching the Swiftboats

2004-09-01T12:20:00.000-04:00

I am still not enthused by either candidate, but I have been thinking how Kerry could extricate himself from the Swiftboat swamp. I herewith offer a draft of a new stump speech for JFK.

What Kerry SHOULD be saying:

Let us talk, you and I, about the real issues facing our country today. Four years into a new century, we are faced with challenges at home and threats from abroad. Thirty years after the close of a war begun to bring a foreign country into the freedom we enjoy here, we are again at war in a distant land and culture.

Our country faced great divisions and disillusions over the ten years of involvement in Viet Nam. Let us build on those sad years as lessons in the limits of power. Let us consider our place in the world, and remember that we are not alone on this planet. We are one country among 268 nations. We are slightly less than 300 million in a world population of over six billion. Our system of government, our vibrant mix of people and our economic success have made us the last superpower surviving from the century just past. With this great power comes greater responsibility. We must take seriously the roles other countries, other peoples should play in decisions affecting a rapidly more interdependent world.

This country should not have gone to war in Iraq without a consensus of a wide range of countries. Dismissing the arguments of so many of our allies before acting unilaterally makes it more difficult now to tackle the problems not just in Iraq, but in the world. Iraq is torn by factional violence, as is Afghanistan. The spread of terrorist networks into Iraq fuels these problems, just as the stubborn persistence of the Taliban keeps Afghanistan in turmoil.

Our great strength as a nation and a people stem from our liberties and from our just society. Combine this strength with our military power, and extend to the family of nations equal partnership and the respect of consultation, then we will face our challenges with whole-hearted assistance from freedom-loving peoples around the world.

We cannot go back to the time of decision before invading Iraq, any more than we can roll back the years to a time before Viet Nam. We must honor the commitment we undertook in overthrowing Saddam, just as we must work toward a stable and peaceful Afghanistan. Both of these commitments must involve the world at large, through the United Nations and through individual partnerships with other countries. Peace and freedom cannot be imposed with smart bombs and high-tech weaponry. Cooperation and dialogue lead more surely to our goals than "going it alone." Life in the twenty-first century resembles in no way our national myth of the strong, lonely hero taking on evil single-handedly. "Bring it on" is a tag line from melodrama, not a prescription for a healthy country in a healthy world.

So, let us talk, you and I. We have much to talk about over the next two months, we need communication, we need to build consensus without rancor. I ask your careful consideration of the issues facing this nation, and the world. I am confident that we can make the world a safer and better place, and our own country again a light to nations struggling to be free.
****

Hmmm... not yet ready for prime time. But better than endlessly discussing the minutae of ancient battle reports.

Fear and Loathing in Iraq meets the Army censor

2004-08-27T09:06:00.000-04:00

I have been reading a blog by a soldier in Iraq since early this month, "MY WAR: Fear and Loathing in Iraq." The soldier uses the blog handle "CBFTW" rather than his name. The blog has been up only since June 21, and it is so vividly written, giving such a sense of gritty immediacy that I have read all the posts back to the beginning.

Unfortunately, lots of other people have been reading and spreading the word, which word apparently spread to the commanders in Iraq. The soldier's CO called him in and told him to clear his blog with his platoon leader. The entries slowed markedly after that, and lost some of their spontaneity. Then NPR did a feature on soldier blogs, prominently mentioning CBFTW and apparently the excrement hit the rotary ventilation device. There were only a few entries after that, and then today the blog has only a quote from Johnny Rotten at the last Sex Pistols' concert: "Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Cheated?" At the top of the blog cover, the heading now reads, "Over and Out."

All the previous entries, all the archives, have been wiped. Interestingly, the NPR story on their website has been edited to remove the soldier's real name, replacing it with his blog handle. Something is going on behind the scenes here. CBFTW is keeping a journal of unlogged writings, so I hope that eventually he will publish once he is out of the army and safely home. May that day come, and soon.

Below is the link to the NPR story online:

Soldiers' Iraq Blogs Face Military Scrutiny

P.S. at least as of a few minutes ago, the audio clip of the NPR original story had not been edited to remove the soldier's real name.

The Race is not always to the Swift...

2004-08-23T15:58:00.000-04:00

Swift boats. Texas National Guard service or lack of same. The presidential race batters against the unyielding shore of events almost forty years in the past. Not to belabor the metaphor, but somebody is going to sink in this exchange. In conversations and reading many sources, I find nobody who is impressed with the tactics of exhumation. Nobody cares, outside of the fiercely partisan on both sides. I think of this brouhaha in light of the political tactic of "strengthening the base." Those who hate one candidate and love another will of course follow their inclinations, and argue the facts that suit them.

Where does this leave the vast, amorphous middle of the electorate? I truly do not believe that most voters in the United States are irretrievably committed to either of the major party candidates. I certainly am not. I have many issues with George Bush, from the huge deficit partly resulting from his tax cuts and unabated spending, to the Patriot Act and all its ramifications, to the whole Iraq mess. Iraq has always been a mess. The European powers patched it together after World War I without regard for anything but their own business interests. President Bush has constantly revised the reasons for invading Iraq, and none of them convince me that we were justified in what we did, and most especially in how we did it.

But John Kerry is a featureless shadow on my political radar screen. Outside of the obsessive military jousting, he promises all sorts of fine sounding outcomes of his putative presidency, but I have seen no concrete proposals for accomplishing any of them.

I read some of the 263-page Kerry-Edwards book on their proposals. I couldn't sustain much interest because the plans were so general in description. In outlining plans for the military, the book gives a laundry list of increases in manpower and technology to strengthen our forces. I kept wondering how to pay for this, and how to persuade more young persons to volunteer for the military.

I suspect that either side will end up activating the draft. But that will change the whole context of public sentiment regarding military actions.

With massive deficits and a slowing economy, I doubt that either applicant for Chief Executive will get all their proposals passed.

Finally, the deployment of intelligence gathering against our own citizens, with streamlined procedures and back door denial of habeas corpus is downright scary. The Supreme Court has at least temporarily blunted holding suspects with no charge or right to counsel, but I don't see that the Bush Administration is ready to back off on aggressive steps that weaken constitutional provisions. Incidentally, in going over the published judgments by various Justices, I was amazed to see that Clarence Thomas thought the Court did not go far enough in barring government meddling with habeas and other rights of the accused. Just shows that you need to be careful in assuming how any one decision will come down by any of the Justices.

Hell, I don't know who I will vote for in November, and once again I will be faced with choosing the lesser of two evils. Ain't the democratic process grand?

Family at home

2004-08-21T07:00:00.000-04:00

After a week of being in the hospital, going home, coming back again, my daughter-in-law is finally at home for good. A regimen of meds to stabilize her blood pressure and reduce the pain of her headaches. She needs lots of rest and quiet, so I took my place in the grandparent childcare rotation late this week. Maybe tomorrow again. *whew*

Bumpy road for new mother

2004-08-11T10:48:00.000-04:00

Problems with blood pressure spiking have sent my daughter-in-law back to the hospital. The new baby, Logan, is fine, but Jocelyn has pressure zooming up to 199/117 at short notice. Bad, bad headaches accompany this sort of pressure. The docs give her bp meds, the pressure goes down, the headache clears up, then after some time, same thing all over again. Third day in the hospital today for the poor girl. Cat scans, MRIs, the whole gamut of tests are being done.

She is missing her new baby and his older sister. Visitation has been ordered up for noonish today. I am going to see them, and maybe take over babysitting duties from my co-grandparents.

Sometimes you forget what a risky business childbirth is for the mother, not to mention the baby. I hope the docs figure something out... and do it TODAY.

Dollar Darwinism

2004-08-05T11:47:00.000-04:00

Capitalism in the United States has been extremely successful.

Growth of the economy, of individual wealth and income flow from this success.

Entrepreneurship is key to the economic success of the larger economy.

Recognizing these observations as true leads many, especially those who have profited under capitalism, to formulate a sort of social Darwinism.

Free enterprise and unfettered competition, in this theory, result in those who are superior in skill, energy and organization succeeding where others fail.

In this view, those who fail have done so because they have not worked hard enough or smart enough. It is right and proper for them to fail. The corollary to this premise asserts that any effort on government's part to offset individual economic failures is wrong. The anecdotal arguments of those who have prospered, giving their own or other's success stories, buttress the general argument with personal fervor. The earnest advocates of natural selection in the marketplace seem personally offended that anyone could feed their children using public funds.

In his book, "The Right Stuff," journalist Tom Wolfe wrote at some length of the fighter/test pilot's attitude, the "right stuff" of which top pilots were made. In discussing any accident, any crash or failure of equipment, the pilots always maintained that something was lacking in the doomed pilot's performance. There was no circumstance which excused a crash. Not equipment failure, nor weather, nor malignancy of fate could bring down a pilot who had the "right stuff."

Wolfe maintained that this attitude was a necessity for the pilots, for any doubt that they would succeed would guarantee failure. To believe without question in the right stuff was necessary to survival.

Social Darwinism follows this pattern. To admit that someone could fail economically through no fault of their own undermines the sense of accomplishment so necessary to successful participants in the economic jungle. Success is only worthwhile if some do not have economic moxie, and fail.

How a just society can tolerate the degree of personal financial erosion exhibited over the past three decades is not a question the social Darwinists care to address. Those who have gained prefer to blame widening income gaps on the measures taken by government to alleviate those same conditions. Cut off subsidies for the poor, and they will work harder and smarter, say the successful.

I don't think the advocates of this sort of Draconian measure would like the consequences. Such a revolution in policy would accelerate our decline into a sort of banana republic, with pockets of wealth becoming surrounded by favelas of deteriorating housing and hopelessly poor families. I hope we don't have to learn the hard way that the ideas of natural selection in the marketplace are too simplistic to apply to real life.

The limits of power: The limits of liberty

2004-08-03T10:15:00.000-04:00

Consider a dilemma of living in the 21st century United States of America. What is the right and proper application of our military power? How far can the application of this power take us in the world before we lose our defining characteristics of reverence for liberty? The exigencies of the "War on Terror" have stretched our power, and strained our concept of liberty, both in the world and at home.

Since September 11, 2001 we have invaded two sovereign countries, Afghanistan and Iraq. We justified the first as pursuit of the specific terrorists of September 11th. The justification of the Iraq invasion keeps being re-defined as the evidence for the stated reasons evaporates. At least with Afghanistan we had not only definite knowledge of the location of al Queda, and the complicity with them of the Taliban, but the support of much of the international community. Our belated efforts to seek intenational assistance in Iraq find very little traction, which should surprise no one.

Now, our reach exceeds our grasp in military terms. We need more manpower for occupying and policing not only the two most recent war zones, but Bosnia, Kosovo and other commitments around the world. Other monstrous evils pop up like running sores around the world, notably in the Sudan. How should we proceed? "Going it alone" is hardly the answer, considering how we have bumped up against the limits of our power already.

The second concern in the ongoing changes of post-9/11 life is preserving the core liberties that define what is best in this country. Any war brings curtailment of some liberty in the name of security. The Patriot Acts I and II are very broad in application, and have resulted in some questionable and disturbing instances of suspensions in the right of habeas corpus. There are already laws to define when and how this right may be suspended.

The Supreme Court has partially restrained this practice, basically by citing the constitutional provisions already governing such suspensions. The SCOTUS moves slowly, however, and the forces charged with enforcement can be far ahead of future rulings.

Ironically, many who are quick to criticize "intrusive" government are quite ready to support suspension of rights for those not of their national origin, faith or political ideology. They may want to "get government off the backs of the people," but much depends on the definition of "people." Law depends on precedent and eveness of application for the support of those who are governed by it. The quibbling legal evasion of "combatant" status has potential for abuse, as well, on our own soil or abroad. Wrong is wrong, if our belief in the universality of the rights in the Bill of Rights has any validity.

During the Nazi dismantling of free government in Germany after 1933, a few voices were raised in opposition by Germans not of Jewish or other proscribed beliefs. Martin Niemoller was one of these, a Christian theologian. He composed the following:

First they came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.

We face thorny decisions and shifting challenges in the new world disorder. I hope we can keep our national identity and standards while charting new courses for new times.

A Birth in the Family

2004-08-02T08:38:00.000-04:00

For the past almost-nine months my son and daughter-in-law have been expecting their second child, due date August 12th. A boy, the wonders of sonograms tell them. After increasingly uncomfortable weeks this summer, daughter-in-law has decreed that this Wednesday, the fourth of August, will be the day of delivery. Delivery of the little boy, and delivery of his mother from further misery. On Wednesday morning, the ob-gyn will induce and deliver.

An interesting sidebar to the birth details is the further decree that no family show up that morning to keep vigil outside the birthing suite, except for my son, who has father privileges/duties and, in the modern way will be inside attending.

For the birth of Reese, their first child, a mini-convention of in-laws, outlaws and other-laws stood outside the door for several hours. When we could hear the imminent mother becoming vocal (she maintains she was shouting as an aid to "pushing") her mother came unglued, very upset at what she was sure was extreme pain within. So, we are all to await my son's call notifying us of the successful arrival of the newest Miller.

Stay tuned.

Dale Short's article

2004-07-29T08:27:00.000-04:00

Hmm...so now I ought to post an article, and include a link to the site.

Cool.

The article:

Bright Hopes, Dark Thoughts on Independence Day

By Dale Short

My granddaughter, who's almost three years old, has a surprise for me. She clears her small throat, focuses her eyes with great seriousness on some distant spot, and begins to sing:

"O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain..."

No matter how many hundred times I've heard "America the Beautiful" before, hearing it sung now—by a child who carries some of my blood—suddenly washes away all those other, inferior, versions of the song like dust carried off by a bountiful summer rain. Her face shows no doubt. She sees what she's singing about, the grace and the brotherhood and the shining seas, and she makes me see it too.

If we can coax her into singing it again on the Big Day, I'm thinking, sometime between the barbecue and the fireworks, it'll be a huge hit with the family. But at the same time, her certainty frightens me.

Darrah just missed being born on the day of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, just missed the invisible sad birthmark shared by the 10,000 or so other American kids who came into the world on Sept. 11, 2001.

She takes for granted, as all children should, that her freedom is assured. Either way, she's too young to have any control over the matter. I, on the other hand, do have some control, however limited. And my own track record at helping protect Darrah's freedom, over the past three years, is not a spotless one.

Like millions of other Americans, I've often kept quiet when threats to our liberties and our well-being have surfaced. I was afraid of having my patriotism questioned, in a national atmosphere so explosive with rhetoric that the smallest spark of dissent can set off an ugly scene. But now our situation is growing worse by the day. I promise myself, for her sake, that in the months to come I'll be less reticent about speaking up in public. Here are some reasons why:

If "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" includes the good health to enjoy those blessings, then Darrah's freedom is seriously threatened by a presidential administration that has been bribed by rich companies into letting polluters literally write their own laws, which allow deadly levels of zinc, lead, and mercury into our drinking water and enough toxic smoke into our air to spur a national epidemic of childhood asthma.

Her freedom is threatened by a president who brags that his core constituency consists of "the haves and the have-mores," and then approves long-term funding cuts of some $50 billion for programs that are proven to benefit families: Head Start, Section 8 housing assistance, and Women, Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition services.

Her freedom is threatened by a government that runs a historic spending deficit (translation: borrows money) to finance bonuses and giveaways to the corporations that fund the Bush campaign. The bill for this largesse, of course, will fall to our children and grandchildren when they reach an age to support families of their own. And the officials who dug us deepest into the hole will be enjoying retirement, and free health care, on exactly the type of generous government pension that they so adamantly oppose for everyone but themselves.

Her freedom is threatened by millions of well-meaning people who are so confused by fear and hatred that they have convinced themselves of the impossible: that an almighty God can be shrunk to the size of a government, or that a government can be made as righteous as God. These people are so intent on bringing about this destructive theocracy that they're willing to wreck as many lives, and liberties, as necessary.

Her freedom is threatened by political handlers who make a farce of the classic line "and crown thy good with brotherhood" by viciously pitting rich against poor, and race against race, in order to score votes at any cost, while disingenuously accusing anyone who questions their divisive tactics of "playing politics."

Her freedom is threatened by the cynicism and hypocrisy of an administration that creates harsh new penalties for citizens who use questionable language on radio or television, but whose vice-president attacks a colleague with obscenities in the Senate chambers, and then gloats on television that he "felt much better" after doing so.

Her freedom is threatened by ideologues who set themselves up as supreme religious arbiters to quash vital scientific research, denying her and millions of other Americans life-giving breakthroughs that could someday protect them from Alzheimer's, diabetes, and other diseases.

Her freedom is threatened by a political movement that has set as its goal the complete destruction of American labor unions—unions that helped her own great-great-grandparents rise from the poverty of coal-mine laborers.

Her freedom is threatened by an administration that has so much contempt for the other nations of the world that it has broken its promises and treaties by the dozens, has spit in the face of diplomacy and protocols and even the most basic courtesy and decency.

Her freedom is threatened by an administration that has displayed on the world stage, through its vengeful policies inside Guantanamo Bay and inside Iraqi prisons, that it has no respect for the rule of law, thus creating more new enemies for America than in our worst nightmares.

Her freedom is threatened by a political party that simultaneously extols the wonders of democracy and yet works feverishly by hook or crook to prevent the votes of minority and low-income Americans from being counted at the polls.

And most immediately, her freedom is threatened by an administration that uses the fog of an open-ended "war," that could conceivably last for her entire lifetime, to methodically extract from its citizens, under cloak of secrecy, basic civil liberties that no sensible person would yield under any other circumstance.

Most frightening of all, perhaps, is the large percentage of Americans who can acknowledge this whole list of troubling developments and still argue that they're a fair trade-off in return for a president who can protect us from the very enemies that he seems so intent on multiplying.

It's not only a self-fulfilling prophecy, it's one of the great attempted scams in American history. And if enough of us stay quiet, if enough of us fall for the bait-and-switch routine, it's only a matter of time until my granddaughter one day looks up at our country's "spacious skies" she now sings about so proudly and sees them as the prison they can so easily become.

***
Good stuff from Dale.

Pax...

2004-07-27T07:31:00.000-04:00

Might as well keep this thing alive. Herewith a late-night eruption from last April.

The long hours weigh on my fatigued mind...

Life is a long-running game of chance only slightly influenced by the skill of the player. The early part of a life is spent acquiring the tools to fabricate your adult existence. The great thing in building a life is balance. Balance tedium and disciplined focus of effort with feeling and impulse and reflection. Introspection is a drag on accomplishment, but paradoxically an absolute prerequisite for both enjoying life and making events work for you.

Fuck that. You are brain and soul dead if you don't cut loose and play the long odds whenever you feel the tedium walling you in. You will starve if you pursue the fierce joy of aimless experience. Fucked either way.

So you can't win. So what else is new. Choice is the name of the game. You buy the ticket, you take the ride.

Shit Hell Fuck Damn. Too many twisted years reading and writing bureaucratic sludge. I can't even frame words in a way that will kick my dulled mind into gear. I blame the Federal Register. You cannot read this dreary stretch of endless govspeak without losing your literate soul. I am tied, I am tied, the case is altered. Borrow words if you cannot create new sentences.

2004-06-10T22:04:00.000-04:00

Progress of a sort. Looks better. Unclear how it appears to others. Heh.

2004-06-10T21:16:00.000-04:00

Hmmmm....I need to figure how to make this thing look better. *sigh* more formatting rules to learn. Wonder if HTML can be imported into the template. Apparently it can. Have to figure out the setup first.