Gay Stereotype

When I was in college, it was pretty readily observed that the arts had an unusually high percentage of gay men.  We thought the same probably applied to lesbians, though folks were less sure about that. Theories about this varied.  Some thought arts encouraged unmasculine behavior, others that people who were unusual in one way might well be unusual in another.

I tended to the view that there wasn’t anything automatic about this, and in a different culture the numbers might not be so.  If one were gay and had equal ability in both chemistry and design (or in business vs. drama), one would lean toward study and employment in the latter, because the social acceptance was greater there.  Also, those who had strong abilities in a field that was not accepting would simply be more quiet and circumspect about it, making their number appear smaller. I thought the phenomenon was therefore temporary.

Well, we have more data now. While music, dance, and sculpture are probably still more accepting of gays than other professions, the gap is much less dramatic. Yet had my theory been correct, we would have seen much more of a distribution at this point. There is some leveling, yet gays continue to be more prominent in the arts, and more comfortable making their livings there. Ability…lifestyle…association…byproduct of POV? Make your own guess.  It might be residual and on its way out, but I doubt it.  I can create theories why this might be – I imagine you can as well – but since I was wrong in 1974, I won’t venture a guess in 2014.

Suddenly Apropos

I tried one episode, and was a touch disquieted what issue came up.

Ooh, Mainstream Media

First time I have linked from ESPN.

Zero Tolerance

"Zero Tolerance" is a way of saying "I care so much more about this than others." If politicians really meant it, they would apply that standard to Hollywood, to journalists, to entertainers, and to other politicians. But those groups can cause trouble for politicians, make fun of them, embarrass them, slyly hit back. NFL Players don't have that power - they are easy targets. Charlie Sheen, Nicholas Cage, Sean Penn, Alan Grayson - no tolerance? Athletes are famous, but their power over others is nonexistent.

One group is also whiter than the other, which may also figure into it. Attacking people who can't fight back is a lot of how politicians make their living.

Community

I was looking up a counselor's phone number and noticed that the agency is dedicated to serving the LGBTQA community.  I wondered "Is it a community?" Up in this neck of the woods, gays and lesbians have set events they interact in, but don't generally hang out much.  I don't know about the other subgroups. Maybe at colleges it's a thing.

Racial, ethnic, and religious communities have varying degrees of solidarity, depending on location, and the term clearly has meaning in some places.  There is an adoption community, I suppose, though most who are eligible don't belong. Various illnesses and conditions describe having communities, but I get the impression those are also not so cohesive. Hobbyists have a certain camaraderie that might qualify them for the Civil War re-enactment community, or extreme skiing community.

I think it is sometimes used in exaggeration, to pad the numbers or influence, or to reassure members that they are not alone, but part of a caring group. That seems sensible enough, but anything that is not strictly accurate can have its downsides.

NFL Suspensions

The league seems to be embracing contradictions. Infractions that affect the outcomes of games, or how people are able to go about their business are one set of problems that sports leagues consequate: gambling, PED's, impugning the integrity (as opposed to the intelligence and accuracy) of the refereeing.

Then there are things players do that make the league look bad: use recreational drugs, abuse women, make embarrassing political or social statements.  These also have their penalties. 

But both of these have changed culturally over time.  This is more noticeable in the second category currently, where making comments that seem denigrating to groups is regarded as just as bad as actually committing crimes. Also, some crimes are apparently worse than others, and appearances matter greatly.

I absolutely get it that the leagues are selling a product, and anything that interferes with selling product is up for review.  They can insist players wear pink - okay, they already do that - or sing only funkadelic music, or sponsor hamster homelessness relief or whatever they damn well please.  They are selling a mythology (winning games is subsidiary to this), and you either fit or you don't. But then they can't turn and say "But we are disapproving of this behavior because we think it's really, really, wrong," according to some objective standard.  Because a lot of things are really wrong, but we care about different ones in different decades.

Sorry, lost my head there.  Of course they can turn and say that, because they are also subject to the rules of the mythology, and must also sell product.  They can't do it honestly or honorably, but what is that?

California Rocket Fuel

I had a post in 2008 about the all-or-nothing antidepressant combo nicknamed California Rocket Fuel.  It has been in my top ten posts most months ever since, though it has only attracted a few comments. A new one came in tonight, quite excellent, which prompted me to reprint it.

Depression is miserably hard, lying to you and telling you it is the normal state of affairs and will go on forever, when in fact is more usually has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  One of the extra discouragements is that people use the term "depression" in everyday conversation for far less painful conditions, such as grieving, feeling sad, or having low energy.  Depression does not even always include sadness, though it frequently does.  A few times a year my mood drops enough that I qualify for a diagnosis of Mild Depression, and a few times in my life that has become Moderate Depression.  Even Mild Depression, according to clinical standards, is hellish.  When I float back up out of it, I am enormously grateful that I don't have depression at the level I see at work.  Severe Depression can mean having such low energy that you soil yourself in bed because you cannot muster the energy to get up and cross the hall to the bathroom, and don't really care that much that other people are horrified to be with you.

Bear that in mind when you are tempted to describe your blue funk as "depression." You could be kicking someone one more time while they are down.  BTW, let me put in a plug for ECT's here.  They don't work on personality disorder/PTSD-style depression all that often, and only slightly more frequently on Schizoaffective Disorders.  But they can be absolutely magic for some patients. And for pregnant women who don't want medications on board while they are carrying a child, electrical treatments can be a godsend.

0.5M

I will hit half-a-million hits in the next day or so - which isn't true.  If you come to my site, hit a comments link, post a comment, and return to the main page, that counts as four hits. Even removing my own hits, which only seemed fair, the real total of visitors to the site is likely 20% of the stated number.  Still, that is more people than generally listen to me in any other context, so it's all good.  My two oldest sons have likely learned as much about me here as live over the last fifteen years.  The other three boys, not at all.  I could insult them here daily and they would never hear of it.

Thank you, one and all.  Whenever I search for a previous post I am amazed at my early brilliance and tempted to link to old stuff.  I used to, doing a "Best of December 2006" type of post in December 2007 and all that.  Yet there is something about this medium, that it is essentially a conversation, that gets lost in reprises.

Just to humor me, though, pick an month from an earlier year and just go see what I wrote then. Some of you will find that your own comments at the time were pretty sharp as well.

Beat Up By Sponge Bob

I'm betting fake. Still, I like it.

Tessie

I missed it by a few days, but ten years ago this week the Dropkick Murphys started to nail down the World Series for us.

Thanks, guys.

BTW, my grandfather's farm wasn't far from the original Dropkick Murphy's Sanitorium on Rte 27 in Acton.

Hot-button Symbolism

This comes from 2011, in this article in the Atlantic. One can argue whether it is 90-100% accurate or something more around 50%, but I don't think there would be much argument that the thing has considerable truth in it.

Why then has no major party embraced it nor new party come up that steers in this direction?

Readers here know the answer: because the tribalism and symbolism do not overlap, and those drive politics more than actual positions.  I am not being merely cynical here. It is not simply the case that some people cannot understand such distinctions - the number of people who could not grasp the point of this is small.  People have discussions every day with folks they work with, or are in their families, churches, or neighborhoods who they wish to establish some common ground with. We don't wish to be divided when we are face-to-face, and will make verbal compromises in excess of what we would actually vote for on a secret ballot. 

But it doesn't stir the blood.

OWS people want their tribe to prevail, and do not trust the folks who have 2nd-Amendment bumperstickers.  Even if they agree, as they might on some similar sentiment to that above, they fear it would all be a ploy, and they would be betrayed at the first opportunity if they allowed those people any power.  Better to support people who have the right instincts.* Similarly,Tea Partiers don't have drum circles and new fluttery-finger communication, aren't ever going to have those things, and when they get into the booth, will not vote for those guys, whatever they had worked out in conference beforehand. 

If people do not respond to the same symbols you do, they are always one step down in trustworthiness. Not for everyone all the time - if we are none of us completely rational, neither are we ever completely irrational either - but for enough of us that we will make no headway.

Sometime soon I should do a post on exceptions; that many liberals have a secret admiration for very limited types of gun use and hunting (how else would LL Bean and now Woolrich have grown without them?), while conservatives retain respect for some types of entirely useless classical learning, even while deploring the general category publicly. Guys who insist they would never drive anything but a Harley (say "Indian Motorcyles" and watch the excitement rise), yoga instructors who covet sports cars at dangerous speeds - we abound in exceptions and contradictions.

*The knock against Roosevelt for a generation was that he had been a traitor to his class. See also, the Doonesbury fury with the Bushes.

Beat Club

The same yet different. I have linked to Shindig, Hootenanny, Where The Action Is, and American Bandstand. Here's how the Germans did it in the same era. The Who, Cream, Small Faces, The Kinks, The Bee Gees.



The clothes, especially the stupid hats. The lifeless dancing. Very familiar.

Circular Time, Julian Jaynes, Greg Cochran

Back to Circular Time again.  Briefly, most peoples in the world even now, and all of us to some degree, organise ourselves in cylces of hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, years.  Christmas 1946 and Opening Day 1963 continue to have some connection to Opening Day and Christmas 2014, though nearly all the participants are different.  Primitive tribes have almost no experience of time going forward, except that people age. 

 

Those who work with Borderline Personality Disorders notice that they have some oddity in experiencing time. Part of this is the inability to delay gratification, so that everything is occurring either now or not-now, but there are other puzzles as well.  They are very aware of anniversaries, especially tragic ones, such as the death of a mother or a friend - or even a pet.  Holidays take on enormous negative value because of who is not there.  Most people do this, especially the first few years after a death, but the remembering of the exact date and the destabilising around an anniversary are characteristic of those with BPD. Additionally, they are bad at estimating time, often no better than children, as if that facility stopped developing very early. 

  

I wonder if there is something modern about experiencing time linearly that they don't have.  While it is possible to posit narratives of how they missed critical periods in their development because of their often-chaotic upbringings, some genetic factor ( or yes, sorry to be so fashionable, epigenetic factor about whether a particular bit gets turned on or not), seems a more compact answer.  There has been some evidence of heritability of the illness for decades, and other cognitive distortions also seem to be part of that problem. 

I have said (following I-forget-who, but the idea is not original to me) that the Jews and especially the Christians  were the first to add in a concept of time moving forward.  The world had a beginning, we are proceeding toward some end.  Folks blithely say that all cultures have their creation and origin myths, but I think that is suspect.  We cannot tell how important those were.  After Western Europeans, who considered the Genesis accounts important, arrived to speak with them they brought them out to be recorded.  The Europeans unconsciously assumed these would be of similar importance in other cultures.  I seriously doubt that.  Some go into considerable detail and tie the creation stories into current understandings and behavior, but not many.  Most just have a single folktale in several versions.  In their current cultures they stay mostly in seasonal, circular time. 

It may be that other Mediterranean cultures also developed an enhanced emphasis on the progression of time, and I in my nescience am simply not aware of it.  But Eastern religions from Zoroastrianism east to Shintoism have cyclic and seasonal time much more strongly than Greeks, Canaanites, or Romans, let alone Jews.  And that is, frankly, a lot, as all of those had a fair bit of agricultural focus.

 

I mentioned that I am rereading  Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness In The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  It is going slowly, partly because I grow lazy and stupid as I age, but also because I want to give a fair chance to ideas I dismissed so rapidly before.  I noted with amusement apropros this topic that Greg Cochran mentioned Jaynes theory in his 2006 Edge answer to "What Is Your Dangerous Idea?"  His take at that time was that it still sounded crazy, but just maybe there is something to it, because we do seem to be different from ancient peoples cognitively, and Jaynes offers some interesting evidence of a change 2000-3000 years ago.   (Note:  Breakdown suggests that areas of the brain turned off from language functions to go do other things, rather than claiming that some new thing got added in to the brain creating consciousness.)

Even if the change started in the Mediterranean, it blossomed most fully in Northern Europe over the last 1000+ years which ordinarily would make a genetic explanation dicey.  Both waves into Europe, farmers in the south and herders in the north, came much earlier.  However there is one interesting escape hatch. The linguist Theo Venneman believes that the Germanic languages have a Semitic superstrate.  Not many linguists think his evidence is all that solid, but neither do they outright reject it.  It looks possible.  Phoenicians, likely via their Carthaginian colony, are known to have traded as far as Great Britain for tin and copper before the times Jaynes highlights, and trading even farther up into the North Sea is considered likely.  If you are wondering how much amber did they really need in the Mediterranean that they would keep wandering up to Jutland to get it, know that the area also has very good flint and worked stone.

I know, I know, it is politically correct to say that those battle-axes were status-objects, not implements of war.

 

Anyway, even really useful genes are going to be difficult to spread widely from just a few traders. Yet over a thousand years, much more possible.

Iceland

An eruption has started.  Hope it's small.  Stay tuned.

The Visit; 1984 & Animal Farm; The Lesson & Rhinoceros

I was assigned "The Visit" by the Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt in college.  It was written in 1956, with the super-obvious themes of collective versus individual guilt, and the ability of regular folks to quickly find rationalisations for doing evil things.  FD was looking over his shoulder at the recent events in Germany and Austria, with hints of accusation at some Swiss sympathy and collaboration with Nazis.

At least, I thought it was super-obvious even as an 18-year-old in 1971 and my professors agreed.  There was a famous essay at the time which I have never since been able to track down, illustrating that French writers of the 50’s had strong themes of victimhood, German writers of guilt, Swiss writers of ambiguity, etc.  It was likely overdrawn, but examples were given and it was based on something.  Durrenmatt was also a member of Olten Gruppen, a pretty reliably anti-Nazi collection of writers, even if their opposition to communism was more spotty.

Apparently I missed the memo, as the wikipedia article and other current writing about the play and its adaptations don’t include reference to the first theme.  It has become more important to discuss the themes of money corrupting us all and justice for purchase – both legitimately present – plus women’s rights, prostitution as a metaphor, and dehumanisation, which are less prominent.  Note that the accusations which are commonly leveled against America are those which have remained.

Let me assure you that if one keeps listing the same dozen faults of societies as the ones we should be concerned about, neglecting to mention another dozen which apply to other societies, most of your better students will have the first set of faults become their mental furniture and be unable to think of the others unless someone mentions those to them.  And think it was their own conclusion.  Because…in a way it was, as some of the lesser students don’t pick this stuff up even when you tell them it will be on the exam.

Those will then go forward into the world knowing that they are smart and able to understand things that the proles don’t.

It reminded me of discussions as far back as my childhood years about how 1984 and Animal Farm were intended as cautionary tales about what could happen in America and the West under right-wing governments.  More than one person told me in meaningful tones in 1980 how significant and frighteningly ironic it was that we were in danger of electing Ronald Reagan to be president when 1984 rolled in. Heck, I may have residually thought so myself up until that time. Orwell, a disillusioned but continuing socialist, could not have been clearer that Ingsoc owed more to soviet socialism than national socialism. No matter. We know where the real dangers lie. McCarthy just has to be more dangerous than Hiss.

I have mentioned before that something similar is up in our current understanding of the plays of Ionesco. A director of “The Lesson” at William and Mary when I was there wanted the professor’s armband to be an American flag instead of a swastika, and in a 21^st C production  “the homicidal professor dons a Republican National Committee armband”

A production of "Rhinoceros" in San Francisco - the straight characters were all reinterpreted as lesbians because...well, because SF is a very original place where they think of things like that.  "Phaedra" as a gay play, "Othello" as an African-American lesbian, "Hippolytus" as a play about forbidden love, or even the Bible redone as gay in Terrance McNally's "Corpus Christi," I'm sorry, I got distracted by the originality there.  Back to Rhinoceros in San Fran: "The rhinoceroses are dot-commers whose SUV's and cell phones signal the call of wild greed."

Pointing out the obvious is still useful, it seems

Earthquakes And Volcanoes

Retriever notes that there may be serious trouble coming in Iceland. Hopefully just a little something.

Refinement

Update:  A personal situation again comes into play.  Intelligent people, well-meaning in many ways, and not especially liberal.  Yet the style is there in criticising a public figure - insulting, condescending, mean in a way that they would not tolerate directed at other groups.  Yet no self-observation, because they are Good People, and while they would fess up to individual failings, accept without question that the road they are at least attempting to travel is the right one.  Not much to be said.

*****

(In addition to my usual caveats about who I mean when I generalise about liberals and conservatives, include a generational one.  My estimations apply first to my own generation and the one before me.  Their applicability may wane in subsequent generations.)

I have mentioned before my belief that liberal ideas are more likely to be spread socially than by intellectual argument. This is a percentage deal, of course. It may be that most ideas are spread socially rather than by force of reason, and conservatives not much different. Nor libertarians, greens, Methodists, Unitarians, or vegetarians. Could be. My observation mostly came about because the insistence by those on the left I came from was quite emphatic that they were the thinkers and reasoners, in contrast to their troglodytic opponents; this I discovered was not true, not even close, and have observed repeatedly since. Social shaming is very big there. If one imagines online or social media discussions as a cocktail party, one sees the same type of persuasions in play: uncomfortable silences, we don't say that here, the best people assure us darling - the many social signals people give to tell you that you are going over like, well like a skunk at a lawn party. Like a turd in the punchbowl.

I think it is important to mention that this does not seem to increase as one moves farther left, nor grow fainter as one approaches the center.  If anything, it is the less strident, kindly people who care about strangers and social injustice who do it more than the extremists.

On the right, being declarative is more the norm, and I think this does increase the farther right one goes. Go far enough out the trail, and you find people who make confident assertions about more and more opinions.  There are people on the left who do this too, just as there are conservatives who will treat your unfortunate opinion as more of a faux pas than a falsehood.  I know exceptions both personally and by what I read around of these methods of persuasion.

But it leads to further theory:  do people gravitate to their politics because the culture or method appeal to them, or suit their abilities.  I pick up social signals well and that was a lot of my stock in trade when I was a man of the left.  Did I abandon the left because I was unwilling (or constitutionally unable) to make my arguments that way, being a more blunt and declarative person? Was any of my move rightward - or outward, upward, anyway - attributable to rejection of that style?

It's the lack of self-observation that gets me - the failure to see that insult has been given when it was clearly the only possible point of the comment; followed by thin-skinned being insulted oneself when the obvious is pointed out. I never seemed to get over that discovery in the 1980's.  Yet I have to admit, that's not a logical argument for political premises either.

My son pointed out that country music seems to have degenerated over the last ten years into too many songs that are just lists of things the singer claims to like about America. They tick off the boxes and plant (another) flag in the ground declaring that this is who we are, dammit! It's pretty consistent right-wing fodder at this point, and not our best stuff.  Those are tiresome to the point of head-banging sure, rather like a politician who works in all the hot-button categories he can at a campaign stop. (I heard Al Gore do that really well in 1988.)

Yet the cultural left has its lists as well, just delivered differently, letting you know that they like NPR, working in the arts or humanities and supporting public funding, having people who look very different in the same picture, public health, international understanding - those are just harder to put into a song.

And further - it has been remarked by many that there is a high-school cool kid condescension from the Maureen Dowds, the Frank Riches, the TV talking heads, the Clintons and the like.  I wonder if this is part of the pattern.  Wer these the kids who caught the social nuances, down to the most subtle, of the bright kids and coolest teachers, and gravitated to their culture because it was one they could succeed in?  Was this reinforced by the similar styles of academics, especially in the social sciences and the arts, creating a powerful identification that just naturally extended to their political and social fashions? I will have to relook at the Jonathan Haidt summary data to see if there's anything there.

You kids who went to Christian schools, there may be muddied waters or even reversals on this. There is also a possible conservative counterpart, which I have only dimly worked out to this point.

The Real Casey, The Real Servant

19th C ballplayer Dan Casey claimed to be the Casey about whom Ernest L. Thayer wrote his famous poem, "Casey at the Bat." Casey was given a parade honoring him as the famed "Casey," was featured on a national radio broadcast, and participated in a "re-enactment" of "Casey at the Bat" when he was age 78. The poem's author denied that his work was based on any real player, and several sources have called Casey's claim into doubt. Casey had a career batting average of .162 and one home run.

Well, there's a reason for suspicion he might not be Mighty Casey right there.

In February 1943, a columnist in The Sporting News described Casey's claim to be Thayer's inspiration as a "myth" and wrote: "Thayer ... always declared he had no particular player in mind as his hero. But despite this evidence, original 'Caseys' continue to appear, including Daniel, who was the most persistent and told the story so often he unquestionably came to believe it (italics mine)

It remains me of Mark Twain's short biography of General Washington's Negro Body-Servant, a man who died repeatedly before and throughout Twain's lifetime. Mr. Clemens eventually concluded:

P.S. -- I see by the papers that this infamous old fraud has just died again, in Arkansas. This makes six times that he is known to have died, and always in a new place. The death of Washington's body-servant has ceased to be a novelty; it's charm is gone; the people are tired of it; let it cease.

An Old Compromise

James and T99 both mentioned that urbanites desire and perhaps require more enforced government intervention, which i knew but wasn't thinking about when I wrote.

At least in this part of the world, you worked in the city or town most of the year, but you had a primitive place out in the boonies where you went for two weeks plus weekends in the summer, or camped in the wilderness, or some other back-to-nature arrangement where you could pee into the stream if you wanted to.

That seems like a plan for everyone to get along - except that the boonies have filled up in places, unless you want to head even farther out.  But that takes time that we are no longer willing to spend - we want to hit the ground running and get to the cottage by 7:30pm Friday and not leave until after supper on Sunday.  As the boonies crowd up, they start needing the same sort of forced cooperation of more densely populated areas.

Canada's pretty empty.  They've got an incredible amount of fresh water, too. How do we get there fast?

Similarly, when I first went to Romania in 1998, one could build a new house for $6000.  We never snapped for it and it's much more expensive now, but for a certain type of getaway rural Transylvania isn't bad.  I hear people retire to places in Mexico and Costa Rica for the same reason.  I'm figuring you can be left alone pretty well there.

Hicks In The Sticks

Junior High youth group did a talent show occasional years, and I was MC in 7th grade for "Hicks In The Sticks," which I imagine was the title of many a cobbled together series of corny skits in the 50's and 60's.  I also got to sing the following song.


There is a longer version, with lyrics they would not have allowed a young man to sing at a church back in the day, though no one would bat an eyelash now.

In the sidebar at Youtube you can find a whole collection of old-timey Western Swing music, including a few by the Light Crust Doughboys (Zeke, Cecil, Snub, Parker Willson the Announcer, Abner, Bashful, Junior, and about a dozen other guys named Pappy, Doc, or CJ over the years), originally a Bob Wills band out of Texas that reconstituted in the 1990's. There's a reason they used to call it Country & Western music until gradually shortening it to just Country in the 1980's - Western music was more popular all over, not just in Texas and Oklahoma. I blame John Denver for the change.

Native Violence

hbdchick links an article from Science 2.0, The Most Violent Era In America Was Before Europeans Arrived. That's a bit of an overdramatisation.  The article focuses on enormous violence in a single region: southwest Colorado and the Puebla Indians.

Writing in the journal American Antiquity, Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler and colleagues document how nearly 90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms. "If we're identifying that much trauma, many were dying a violent death," said Kohler. The study also offers new clues to the mysterious depopulation of the northern Southwest, from a population of about 40,000 people in the mid-1200s to 0 in 30 years.

Still, it is a counternarrative to the expected one that there was very little conflict until natives learned it from the Europeans. Peoples is peoples, and they don't seem to nicen up until A) they stop marrying their cousins, and/or B) start engaging in specialised trade, from which many benefit.  From the landing of the Puritans until King Philip's War in 1673, the Newenglanders had conflict but little warfare, in contrast to both the Europeans back home or the native tribes just inland from the coast.  Perhaps death, disease, and starvation held them together, as well as a desire for each others' goods.

Marshall Applewhite

The wikipedia article-of-the-day sometime last week was Marshall Applewhite, leader of the Heaven's Gate cult that all committed suicide almost twenty years ago when the arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet convinced them that it was time for them to go up to the spaceship and get new bodies.  Something like that.

Looks pretty much schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type to me, at least from a distance.  Actually pretty much just from his photograph one might take that as a working guess.

Poor sexual control, omnisexual, check.
Grandiosity, check.
Performing arts, check. (Sorry. Includes me, too, y'know.)
Fluidity of beliefs, changing repeatedly, check.
Charm based on intensity that is a bit much for many folks, check.
Lack of insight or willingness to consider alternatives, check.

Here's an interesting bit about psychotic prophets.  A large part of their prophecy revolves around - them being the prophet. That's all.  Believing in them.  One of my patients today assured me quite angrily that I would be kneeling in front of him someday. He is furious at his wife for being "in rebellion" for fearing that all his money-and-fame schemes won't work, when the Bible clearly teaches not to fear. Believing in him is really the only teaching of this prophet.

It's interesting because that's where God starts out in Genesis, and where Jesus starts out when he starts his ministry.  Consider that Lot gets just about nothing right except somehow clinging to this one God YHWH. Yet that is good enough, at least in that stage of the covenant.

The difference is that Genesis gives way to Exodus, and a whole lot of learning to understand just what is important to this God; and Jesus moves pretty quickly to deeper lessons. Yet perhaps mere identification is the only start we can make.

One Cheer More

Update:  However, If I Were King...

Folks of a libertarian bent are fond of rhetoric claiming to dislike just about everything about government. Certainly, the ultimate extension of libertarianism would be some form of anarchy, though that comes in several flavors. More commonly, there is a fondness for quoting one political thinker or another about a sharply limited role for government – defending the borders, issuing a currency, and some sort of system for resolving disputes.

Yet almost no one actually means this. People like roads - including Interstates which were constitutionally controversial when they came on the scene – and have little objection to police and fire departments in principle, however badly they think things are managed. I doubt you could get much of a percentage on a referendum to stop funding public schools, even if you had a fully-ready, more efficient alternative advertised. People who say “no cheers for government” actually mean “one cheer for government.”

That plays out similarly at the other end of the spectrum. No one wants to get caught looking so uncynical and easily-duped as to say “three cheers for government,” so folks retain their self-respect by saying “two cheers for government.” There are elaborate rituals and disclaimers that go with this, sighing ruefully that yes, yes, government and bureaucracy do complicate matters and sometimes make things worse; that the people who go into government are not our best sorts; that most of all, government usually only partly delivers on its proposed goods and is very expensive. Alas, alack, and well-a-day. But what else shall we do? We must have these things, and we can improve the government problems by having more Accountability, which is of course just more government.

Thus, I don’t think we should be fooled. Two Cheers For Government is really just one of those moustache and glasses disguises over Three Cheers For Government.
There is cheer-deflation going on, with everyone pretending to dislike government more than they actually do. The upshot is that the people claiming 2 cheers get to think of themselves as calm, reasoned, and measured, even if they actually are extremists. I would say that they get to paint their opposition as extremists, but as the zero-cheer folks seem to actually be embracing it, it’s hard to blame it entirely on others. Still, there are attempts from the 3 Cheers people (Stop. That’s not fair. I’m only a 2 Cheers person. This is my real nose, glasses, and moustache.) to make lists from time-to-time of how much everyone likes government stuff, as if there actually were movements afoot to board up town hall, knocking down a man that’s at least mostly straw. Boarding up Washington DC, maybe.

Without the deflation, however, it would be clearer who was arguing for what among the 1, 2, and 3 Cheer contingents. I like clarity.

People’s reasons for looking to government are often naïve, starry-eyed, and refusing to engage reality, but they aren’t entirely crazy. Guaranteeing various civil rights usually comes up, not unfairly. It may indeed have eventually but more slowly occurred that blacks got fully voting and other rights in the 60’s, as the state-by-state trend was clearly in that direction, and courts were consistently ruling against legislatures. (Thurgood Marshall believed for that reason all the protests were unnecessary and put people at risk, for example.) Schools might have gradually integrated, or at least the states could have done the gradual mandating instead of the feds. Yet it does seem in retrospect that the federal solution was efficient. Lots of unfortunate downstream effects from things like affirmative action did indeed occur, and ignoring those is not being fully upright and realistic. But the simple fact is that the less-dramatic strategies had not in fact yet worked.

People might have eventually worn seatbelts – but they weren’t. It’s a slippery slope that leads to limiting soda cup sizes in restaurants, but really, requiring people to wear seatbelts in order to use community thoroughfares doesn’t bother me.

It irritates me greatly when people make arguments for a new government service or regulation that they should know aren’t true, but ignore because they want what they want and they are willing to say anything. (“What? People still use the emergency rooms unnecessarily just as much even when they’ve got health insurance? That can’t be true. And we never said it would save money…oh, we did? No, that’s not possible. You must just want poor people to be sick so that you can have more money to pollute the environment with your pickup truck... The new job training and scholarship programs are actually costing us about $250K per $25K job? Well, at least they have jobs and are contributing back to the economy, right?”) Irritates is actually not a strong enough word. But I’m a one-and-a-half cheers for government guy.

Sans plastic nose.

Pennant Races

Pretty much six teams left for five spots on each side.  The only excitement is that some new teams are in the mix this year.

LLWS

In retrospect, the cutoff for Little League at 12 years old is the worst possible. 10% of boys have hit the first steps of puberty and can dominate the others come playoff time, even if they are only moderately talented. It discourages the smaller ones who may be more talented, and creates unrealistic expectations for the stars.

I suppose it is good for teaching the lesson that life isn't fair.

Limerick

For those of us of a certain age, the fact that Meghan Trainor is from Nantucket is just hysterical.

Testimony Escalation

Fundies, revivalists, and camp-meeting attendees still have this unfortunate tendency to brag about how terrible was the previous life they got saved from.  You think that's a testimony?  Well listen to this.  It filters down into all evangelicals, where your "past" is referred to more artfully, but still with this competitive air.  In the first weeks of my Jesus Freak days, Stew went on with great seriousness about how he had been involved with "white slavery" before he came to Jesus.  Yeah.  Hard rain's gonna fall, eh?

I keep hoping it will go away, but it clearly has some enduring appeal. Looking for completely unrelated information today, I ran across "Since coming to faith as a 16 year-old, heroin-shooting Jewish rock drummer..."

Reaching for every trump card, there, aren't ya, fella?