Passion and Motive

Those who are passionate about causes have an especially hard time even considering the possibility they might have bad motives. Notice that the early Christians do not say they are passionate about the cause.  They simply do things that need to be done, which sometimes has terrible consequences.

Back From North Carolina

I have emailed Bird Dog about the problem on Maggie's Farm.  I had the same thing this morning.  MF shows up briefly, then switches to a site that says "this domain may be for sale."

A tree fell on our rental while we were driving on  the Blue Ridge Parkway up to Craggy Pinnacle. It brushed the front bumper and we ran over it. Exciting.  Had it been a split second later - about 0.06 seconds, actually - it would have been on the windshield, with potentially disastrous results.

I can see why motorcyclists like the parkway, and likely parkways in general. Not only is the weaving back and forth more fun for them than for operators of autos, but the lack of businesses and side streets means many fewer hazards from people darting out in front of you from the side, not treating you as a full vehicle.

The Biltmore was ridiculously expensive and we didn't go in.  We rethought that, and my wife and son almost went two days later, but did not.  We saw the introductory video at the information center, which summarised nicely George Vanderbilt inherited a lot of money.  This is how he spent it, building a very big house. He entertained his friends and his family always loved the place. He collected art and books and encouraged scientific farming, sort of. We want you to come spend money here enjoying the place with your family, too.  As you may guess from my tone, I found this irritating. It is impressive looking, however.

The wedding was interesting.  The couple chose the text Ezekiel 47:1-12, which the officiating minister - the bride's father - admitted threw him a bit at first. He did well with it, being caught on the hop like that. There was a roast/toast/talent presentation at the rehearsal dinner, and the people from the bride's side tending strongly to talent and toast. the people from the groom's side tended more to roast - including our family.

I have dictated myself some notes and hope to write them up over the next two weeks.  There is much to catch up with around here.  I find I like traveling less and less. I don't like traveling alone for very long, and don't like traveling with people much better.  I haven't traveled with a group, which always sounded ghastly to me, but perhaps I should try. But i kept worrying about things back home.

North Carolina

We are headed for Asheville via Charlotte in the morning, returning in the wee hours of Monday. It's the wedding of Tim King, who I recently mentioned as the author of Addiction Nation. We get to see Son #2, up from Houston.  I drove through Asheville a dozen years ago, driving back from North Greeenville College and wanting to drive over the Blue Ridge Mountains. Didn't see much.  We plan to eat southern food - I understand that Western Carolina BBQ has more tomato in it.  that's fine with me. Tupelo Honey is recommended.

My time is getting sucked up by Quora answers - which is my own fault.  The more you answer, the more the questions posed to you multiplies. There are very few good questions, and the other answers are often amazingly stupid. Still, I take the bait.  It's one more person asking what they can do to raise their IQ, or treating emotional intelligence or MBTI results as real things, or begging questions about why Trump is doing such an awful and clearly wrong thing.

Part of it is my character flaw of not wanting to let wrong things remain in the air.  They should be shot down, I think. They might hurt someone if they are allowed to roam free. My other better motive is to remember that these are people, too, just like my intelligent audience here, and golly, don't they deserve decent answers, too?

When traveling, I think of things and take notes, which provide beginnings of posts for a a week or more out after I return.  I hope that is the case this time as well.

Changes in the Spirit of the Age

James reminded me in the comments under The Behavior Of People in Past Eras (a few posts below) that he had gone to Little Rock Central High School in the early 70s.  You may remember that Little Rock was the place where Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne in 1957 to integrate the schools. Only fifteen years later, the culture had changed.

I spent my junior year bused to Little Rock Central High School. An experimental class on film-making called Project Tiger wrote and produced a movie on the famous integration of LRCHS in '57. I applied and got in on the script-writing team. We went through the archives, and were duly horrified at the racist calling cards and speeches; but we also watched some footage of protestors and I had a little epiphany of sorts. The folks I was watching were no better, and no worse, than the folks I saw on the streets outside. The only real difference was what sorts of evils were fashionable and accepted. Overt racism of that '57 sort (from whites anyway) was almost unthinkable in '72. But in '57 it was almost unremarkable in that town.

 Fifteen years is not long.  It might seem encouraging that we can fix culture so quickly and make people behave.  Yet James notes this also implies that the current could be reversed on this, and a culture deteriorate and accept horrible prejudice just as quickly.  We are largely wired to go along with our prevailing culture.  It is how we get fed, find mates, have friends, protect our children.

I asked James to repost a bit about that, and he unexpectedly tied it in with an older post of mine about a Harper's article in 1941 "Who Goes Nazi." I had forgotten that, but it applies. We look back at sheriffs who gave up prisoners to the mobs in the past and say "I would never do such a thing."  Yet businesses and colleges cut people loose when the outrage machine is turned on. Losing your job over a Political Correctness  blasphemy scandal is no joke in some fields. If they can go after Sir Timothy Hunt they can go after you, also.

Update:  Plus, there is this from the UK very recently as well.

Folktales and Princesses

Those of us who read literature, including myth and folktale, have been irritated with Disney for changing the stories, draining out some of the meaning. Though Disney has kept in some of the frightening and uncomfortable portions, there are other places they just won't go.  While we all understand this, it does prompt the question "Well then why do it at all?" I have made my peace with much of this over the years. Folktales changed slightly in every generation - likely with every retelling - and would even be different from valley to valley.  There is no real version, and Disney gets to be one more story teller.

The more frequent objection is that it sends the wrong message to the Modern Girl, that she should be waiting for some man to come and rescue her and make her life complete. My objection has been something of the reverse of that, that the main thing taught to the Modern Girl is that she should be a spunky gal, as if that one virtue outweighed the others.  It is unfair of me.  Other virtues are taught, and I am not the target audience anyway. I will note that those who observe actual girls playing at being princess will see that the primary attraction to the role is not that she get some boyfriend (booooring), but that she gets to tell everyone else what to do.

A word on the folktale in general, not so much the Disney versions.  The movies are about the pricesses more than the suitors. In many cultures of the world, the stories are told only about the young men.  In Europe the female characters get some ink as well.  In the story about the unlikely young man having to prove himself to the king in order to win the princess and get half the kingdom, there is some important information overlooked. He doesn't win the most beautiful woman in the kingdom.  He doesn't get given a pile of money. The ending is not the mere handing out of prizes to clever youngsters. That the woman is a princess matters.  We no longer live in ages where powerless people worried greatly about wars of succession, and the quality of those that ruled them. Americans are such individualists - we think the whole story is about identifying with individuals.  Not so.

When the princess weds the hero who has not merely fallen into this role but has earned it (often by being kind to peasants and unlikely people), this means there will be an heir - or at least they might now hope.  Half of this faraway kingdom will now be ruled by someone who has at least some excellent qualities, under the tutelage of another king. That would be a deeply satisfying end to the story which we no longer think about, being Americans.

It often pays to ask what does not happen in the story.

More Old Links

In light of the divisive gestures of Obama as he took office in 2009, Villainous Company posted a news report about Bush from early 2001.

Taxprof, Dean of Pepperdine, shows where our tax dollars went in 2009.  I doubt it is very different now.

The Martin Center has an essay about the groupthink of acadmics in 2009.  I don't think that's much different now either.

America's Generosity is Unmatched. Real Clear Politics 2008.

Megan McArdle made predictions what would - and wouldn't - happen when Obama's ACA was passed in 2010. I knew immediately it should be saved and looked at later. 2019 is later.

Powerline in 2010 examines some background on Elena Kagan I had completely forgotten about, concerning military recruiters on campus.  She's on the Supreme Court, remember.

Electronic Technologies are not ruining our thinking. Steven Pinker explodes some myths about the brain and learning, 2010.  I am very glad I saved this one.

One of Hans Rosling's great videos about how the lives of people around the world really are getting much, much better. Wonderful data presentation. His are among the most-watched TED talks of all time.  Which is good, when you see some of the idiocy in the other TED talks in the sidebar.

List of violence against Republicans.  As it is only up to 2010, I don't know how valuable it is now.  Much of the stuff is small potatoes - except that when similar events have happened to Democrats they are big news, and you have never heard of most of these.

No Oil For Pacifists stopped posting shortly after this one about the intensity of hurricanes because of global warming. Carl came back in a few years later, and it looks like he still tweets. As to the hurricanes, the "global" part turned out to be important.  The scientific paper (linked there) was somber and warning about how this was all going to get worse, and indeed had gotten worse since the 1940s.  Problem was, it studied the North Atlantic, and this was the only place the data held up. Worldwide, frequency and intensity were slightly down.

The Tides of History

I have liked Patrick Wyman's (no relation) history podcasts, The Tides of History but kept avoiding listening to the one about inquisitions and witch-hunts, as I thought  that a topic a secular historian would be most likely to say something that would torque me off.  I needn't have worried.  I had one largish quibble about his neglecting to even mention the growth of science paralleling the intensifying belief in witches, but it was otherwise very fair.  I learned a few brand-new things, and greatly filled out my knowledge of some aspects I had only partially known.

I have liked every episode I have listened to. Wyman was a PhD candidate at USC when he decided that being a history populariser sounded like a lot more fun than being a specialist whose work would be read by only a very few.  He also has an MMA site, surely unique in the academic history biz. Though Andy Warhol liked Big Time Wrestling, and bsking and her husband follow WWE, so you never know.

The Behavior of People in Past Eras

The argument that we cannot apply the standards of the present to people in the past does not seem to be resonating with those who believe that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and hundred others should be painted over, tumbled to earth, or excised from history books. They seem to think that it is perfectly okay to apply their current standards, which anybody who is anybody knows and agrees with.

I therefore burrow one step deeper. Most of us, including the protestors, would have done exactly the same in their shoes. It is rare for anyone to stand apart from his culture and question its basic assumptions.  It occurs mostly in the Anglosphere, and especially America. I suppose the young people adopting this new standard would not want to agree that it is an especially American thing to try and call one's countrymen to account, but it is. The Scandinavians like everyone to march together, quietly smiling.  Mediterraneans will push back against their nation, but only on behalf of their clan or region. Farther east, the matter does not even come up.

So they too would have likely been slavers, or oppressors of women, or violent bigots, or at least done business with those who were.  Because there wasn't any other way to make a living. Modern girls may fantacise that they would have imported their current personalities and attitudes and been just their same precious selves had they lived in Bruges as it was declining in power and people were scrambling to get power and influence and the future looked insecure, but no, they would have been obsessed with finding a husband, just like their friends.  A husband who looked like he might be on his way up, or at least had something stable.  The modern boy might think he too would stand nobly aloof from a degraded age as Columbus set out from Palos, refusing to participate in the expulsion of Jews, or going along with the Spanish version of the Inquisition, or watching slaves be sold in the market.  But he would.  Nearly all of us would, or would put up with it.

Lots of very fashionable clothes and equipment are made in foreign countries under very exploitative conditions now.  When we hear of it or think of it, we wish it were not so.  We wish there were some simple solution that would not make life for those poor people even worse.  But we buy the clothes and equipment. I am betting those protestors buy lots more clothes than I do.  They have a lot of turnover, and the high turnover items are the ones most affected.  Athletic shoes. Yoga pants. Outerwear.

Therefore, they would have gladly done business with slavers, or been slavers themselves had they lived in those days. It's not pretty, but it's a very human thing to do.

Sebastian Coe

I always liked him as a runner. That was the era when I followed track closely.

I like him even better as an IAAF president.

Requiring Pop Culture

Soraya Roberts at Longreads has a frustrating article When Did Pop Culture Become Homework? She verges on understanding what she is talking about. She notices that E.D. Hirsch wrote about having a common cultural language in the 1980s, and declares him mostly wrong.  She then bemoans that Hirsch's ideas, his insistence we should all have common items to reference, have now descended to requiring popular culture in order to converse with our fellow-citizens, and thinks this is the same thing but just as wrong. 

It's not the same thing. It is what the protectors of Western Civ have always warned us about.  If you do not have good culture, you will have bad culture. When we abandon the culture that has nurtured us for generations, we do not get some wonderful open area where we are all free to choose among many exciting possibilities.We get the path of least resistance, whatever is lying around and popular at the time. When we declare that this previous era and that one had its own biases, we are like the boy in the story who is ensorcelled to fall in love with the first thing he sees upon awakening.  In this case, whatever is in the checkout line at the store, or whatever is on tonight's news.

I don't think popular culture is neutral, not in any era. It contains the Spirit of the Age in distilled form, and we too easily become drunk on it.

(Whoa.  That metaphor played out well.)

The Doom of Choice

Tolkien and the Critics, as I mentioned yesterday. It is an old paperback, but I was suspicious right from the Table of Contents.  There is an essay by CS Lewis, one by WH Auden, and… wait a minute, when did this come out? 1968, and all the essays are from 1959-1966.  As Lord of the Rings came out in 1954-55, these essays are quite early on. One clue is the first essay, which functions as an introduction by Neil D. Isaacs

It would be, then, one function of Tolien criticism to shift the emphasis from extraliterary aspects of the trilogy and its audience to a consideration of the work itself.

You couldn’t do that today. You would have to note Tolkien’s sex, race, era, country, religion, privilege and some other things I’m not remembering at present, and only discuss the work in relation to those things.* Clearly, we are reading criticism from another time. Counter-reactions always seem to be a direct 180 degrees to their revolutionaries, yet in retrospect Romanticism, Formalism, New Criticism were never opposites and often have the similarities of their eras that were invisible to them then.

Tolkien is still new to them, and to their readers. Several of them take time to explain parts of the story that are second-nature to all Tolkien readers now, such as noting that hobbits are short creatures but very much like humans, while ents are an ancient people with the appearance of trees. There is a tone of breathlessness at the sheer freshness of it all.  What kind of work is it?  Is Burton Raffell right when he says it’s not even really literature? Is the fad over, except for the cultish few? It brought me back to my own breathlessness reading Lin Carter’s Tolkien: A look behind the Lord of the Rings in the 1970s. Look! There are the names of his dwarves, right there in the Elder Edda!  Fili, Kili;  Oin and Gloin. Tolkien doesn’t just give this a Norse flavor, he uses the real stuff! He was friends with CS Lewis before either of them wrote fantasies? Far out! The Rohirrim speak Anglo-Saxon!  Those were exciting times.  Alan Garner’s and Lloyd Alexander’s books from the early 1960s were gradually becoming known, but the days when entire sections of bookstores would be devoted to Sword & Sorcery books were still far off.

There is added fun in happening upon the first example of anything that later became conventional, even hackneyed. There are several of these in the volume, where one nods and thinks “Ah, you were the first to see that, then.” Because of her horrible later behavior, I would love to tell you that Marion Zimmer Bradley’s essay “Men, Halflings, and Hero-Worship” was terrible, but it is one of the best. She has a sharp eye for character delineation and what it means, seeing interesting distinctions between Merry and Pippin, for example. She also wonders if Gollum’s plunge into death with the ring might have had some intentionality in his carelessness. He is not pushed. He cares for no danger at the literal brink of danger. He hated and loved the ring, but merely hated his life.  If he cares for anything besides the ring, it is Frodo, just a faint echo of love – and he saves Frodo.

Hugh Keenan has one about a Freudian interpretation of LOTR, contending that the works are not about good vs evil, but death vs. life.  I take the point and it is interesting, but the ideas hold up about as well as other Freudian ideas, which is to say culturally interesting, but wrong. Rose Zimbardo’s essay about Moral Vision remains strong, as does Patricia Meyer Spacks on Power and Meaning. It is from there that I would like to offer a few thoughts of my own.

Lord of the Rings is about moral choices, even more than about good and evil. Good and evil are often mixed in this world, and this makes choices more difficult. There have been times that I wished Tolkien were just a bit more explicit in his Christianity, not beating the drum quite so hard about Fate and Doom. Though those fit well with the Northernness of the whole enterprise, I have thought they undermined the clearly Christian foundations of the adventure. The mix is similar to that of the Beowulf poet, reinterpreting older pagan wyrd into a somewhat-converted newer era. I immediately thought Tolkien got the mood or tone right, but had undersold the content.  After reading the essays, I am rethinking that. Setting moral choices in a more Anglo-Saxon world may highlight their importance and even desperateness.

All the choices have a moral side, even those which seem purely practical. The retreat from Caradhras is a practical matter, because of snow, but Aragorn senses an evil will pushing them to Moria and is willing to endure risk to push back against that, until the thing becomes impossible. As far back as The Hobbit, Bilbo has to navigate a very tricky morality in the standoff between the dwarves and the lake-men, of ownership, fairness, loyalty, alliance, gratitude, greed, and deserved reward. Even in the simpler tale moral choice drives Tolkien’s narratives.

In Christian belief there is sometimes an idea of destiny, stated more mildly as calling. Our freedom within that is thought to be great. Only rarely do we see Biblical personages caught up in assigned roles, and even in those instances, such as Daniel, the person has freedom of movement. Jesus is the great exception, yet even He hopes near the end that some other way might be found. As a consequence, Christians know our actions have effects downstream.  We may be called or even cornered, but Fate is not some steamroller that goes on regardless of whether we stood in front of it or not. What we choose changes the choice of others who come after.

This is far less true in Middle-Earth, where everyone seems aware of being doomed to the era and the role they are in, asking only to perform their assigned role well.  "I am not made for perilous quests," Frodo protests. ""You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have." There is a distant God behind it all, referred to only as The One. "The Valar laid down their guardianship and called upon The One, and the world was changed."  Elrond gives the idea of a Person interested in them, not merely an impersonal Fate.

That is the purpose for which you are called hither. Called, I say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world.

Yet some moral choices have resonated on into later events. Bilbo starts his ownership of the ring with mercy toward Gollum, and gives up the ring willingly, though with a wrench (Sam also gives it up freely), and Gandalf specifically notes that this may have changed fate. Frodo later echoes this with his own mercy toward Gollum, and even Sam, though angrily and threateningly, merely sends Gollum off at the end rather than killing him, even though he is a threat to Frodo, who Sam has given nearly all he has to protect. In the end we find this to be true, and the repeated mercies have each been necessary to avoid ultimate catastrophe.

In Middle-Earth people are less used to their actions having more than local and transitory effects. Even for heroes, what can a man do but die on his dying day?  The “Battle of Maldon,” both poem and actual event, depict the height of heroism against the most terrible odds – yet the Danegeld was paid shortly after anyway. In Christianity, Jesus comes back in the end and sets things right. In Norse legend, the gods are going to ultimately be defeated by the giants, yet we fight on anyway, simply because it is the right thing to do.  No reward is promised.  The moral choices thus have an added layer of temptation.  It doesn’t matter in the long run anyway.  Give up. Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, and Theoden all speak of having little or no hope at some point, and Eowyn declares it defiantly. Yet we, on the outside, never quite believe that.  We sense that this is a world where there is hope and not mere striving. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...They walk through many valleys of shadows of death.

Tolkien's Middle Earth does have hope at the end of it, almost as if it is a place where Fate and Doom have been redeemed, remaining themselves, yet changed.  Aragorn speaks in the language or wyrd, yet his content is quietly Christian under it all.   The Riders of Rohan ask him what doom he brings out of the north. "The doom of choice" is what he offers. CS Lewis fancied that Nature herself was a creature, destined to be transformed in the new creation, and illustrated that in The Great Divorce and The Last Battle.  Tolkien takes this one step deeper to the cornerstones of being that seem nearly self-existent, deeper than universes. There are many cultures and world-views, and we may not see them destroyed so much as transformed in the end. We have an inkling of that here.

So there is the choice of kindness, and the choice of courage. There is also the choice of humility, and because of it Sam and Gandalf change fate by not taking the ring to use it, Galadriel and Faramir step down from power and change the lives of entire peoples.

*This too shall pass.  A small group of critics in the future - pray it may be soon - will look over the landscape of Intersectional reading and say "We're sick of this.  We're having none of it."

Sweden Is Capitalist

I try not to use the word "capitalist" anymore, as it seems to prevent thinking.  I prefer "free market."  Despite the title, the writer of Sweden is Capitalist over at National Review agrees, and gives even better reasons.

I have written before that Sweden is not so socialist as American imagination would expect.  It was mildly socialist 1930-1970;  hard socialist 1970-1990; and since then has backed off considerably.  They have large government spending per person, and the sort of social safety net that only works when everyone looks like second cousins.  The author notes that the corruption is very low (as it is in all the Scandinavian nations), and they seem to actually get something for their money, so she doesn't object as much as she might.  I remain unconvinced, but consider it a valid point.

Ms. McCloskey gives the topic a better overview than I do. There is some of the same information I read in Debunking Utopia.

Tolkien

I have a long post on Moral Choice in Tolkien, based on reading an early collection of essays, Tolkien and the Critics. I ran across the following quote that tells you something about the man.  It is from his grandson, Simon:

I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My grandfather obviously didn't agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but my grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right.

As one who does a milder version of that, retaining the old language sometimes when hymns are sung - and especially Christmas Carols - I understand entirely.  There is one modernisation of a carol I endorse, however, because of Tolkien.  "Born to raise the sons of earth" makes me think of dwarves, and I happily go along with the more modern "Born to raise each child of earth."

Too True

Age

I am so old that they didn't play "Stairway To Heaven" at my senior prom.

Assumptions

In the continuing debate about Intelligence, IQ, Wisdom, Smarts, and Education, I would like to add in a neglected bit.  The assumptions one starts from may be more important than one's formal intelligence.  Consider: the Soviet Union had many scientists who were smarter than I am, some in general, and many many more in specific training. Yet they exiled or even killed those who would not start from the correct Stalinist assumptions, so all the remaining ones were a restricted pool. So they got many things deeply wrong.

Still, they were brilliant people.  In those fields where they could keep away from the inquisitors, such as historical linguistics, they exceeded the efforts of those in the West who were under the thumb of different assumptions here.

Similarly, the State Department, CIA, FBI, NSA, Military Intelligence and other agencies contain many, many people who know more than I do and some who are smarter than I am to begin with. Yet if they do not start from correct assumptions, they will reach bad conclusions, and doubly bad because 1) they have pre-emptively defended those positions against criticism already,  though starting from a point too far downstream makes this useless, and 2) they cannot listen to critics who do not know the details they do.

When I speak with family members who do not know much about mental health, or newish Christians or Seekers who do not know much theology, Bible, or church history, or newcomers in many fields I know something about, I don;t find it hard to be patient in my explanations and assiduous in trying to create clear analogies. Where I get irritated is with people who think they know something, yet who have started from wrong assumptions that they seem unable to question.

I'm not good with that.

Havlicek

Johnny Havlicek steals the ball!  This is how weird aging is. He was always old to me, because I was a child, and he was already a professional basketball player.  He has just died at 79 years old, which no longer seems all that old. Half a generation.

Notice he is from that other genetic group good at basketball, the Slavs.  Also strange how that is. He retired after two terrible seasons for the Celtics, filled with knuckleheadds, just before Larry Bird came in.  He'd had enough.  He later said he hadn't believed the Bird hype but after seeing him, wished he had stuck around for three more years to play with him.  Had that happened, Hondo would be even farther up the all-time statistical lists, top-ten and top-twenty in a few categories. I think the example of how to ease out might have extended Birdie's career as well.

He played some pickup, but mostly just stayed active, and amazed everyone at the Celtics all-time reunion game in 1986, when other players kept shaking their heads and saying he could still play! in his mid-40s.

Old Links

I have a bookmark category called "proofs" which is lengthy.  They really aren't proofs, they are evidences, arguments, and explanations.  They sit there until I need them to provide evidence in an online discussion.  Usually, I forget they are there and don't bring them out when I should.

They probably shouldn't just sit there.  I saved them for reasons that seemed good to me at the time, and some especially seem to call for another look. Thus, I bring them forward, these items from the past.  I will do ten at a time and spread them out over a few months. Maggie's, Instapundit, and other sites do this better, and I should probably stick to my strengths.  Which I will, whenever I fully identify them.

Internet Surveillance Law: Oren Kerr. Late 2002.

The Patriot Act wasn't new.  Basically, we ate that banana ten years earlier.


The Last Word on the Iraq War: Norm Geras 2004.

Well, it cost lots more than projected, we gave victory away in 2010, and we didn't find the WMD all the best people assured us were there. They were trying, but hadn't the skill. Yet some of these points still stand.


The Bush "Guard Memos" are Forgeries. Joseph Newcomer, 2004

Remember those? September Surprise? Some people still believe they were real. The posting starts off in real time, during the first hours when Rather brought them out, and multiple challenges to the accusation of forgery were raised. All were refuted, yet people wave their hands vaguely and say they heard it was all proved. Numerous updates over the next few years.


CNN Election Results: Demographics, 2004
 
Mildly interesting now.


Profiles of Typology Groups. Pew Research 2005

Pew does this every few years, breaking our political groupings down into finer categories. Here is their most recent, for 2017.


Bowling With Our Own.  City Journal 2007

Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone, did not want to release his subsequent research, because of its implications and feared misuse.  Not to worry.  Since then, the uncomfortable information has been largely ignored, and those who still refer to it are called bigots.


Dissecting Media Bias: The case of Eric Alterman.  Oliver Kamm 2007.

Common theme.  Still interesting.


The NYTimes Editorial from July 2001, The Declining Terrorist Threat.

Oh my. Whatever could have happened to the page?


The Power of Because.  Tyler Cowen 2008.

Still interesting research.


Who Lied About Iraq? American Thinker, 2008.

It is fair to counter that many people believed that the Bush Administration was making the larger claims, and this influenced their opinion. But looking at the actual record, now that history has been successfully rewritten, is always interesting.

Brilliance

In Taleb's discussion of IQ, and the continuing repeated discussions of intelligence and testing it over at Quora, there is a constant undercurrent of "But intelligent people are often jerks. And they don't get important things right. Possibly, in their arrogance, they get even more things wrong that the average person, and create more damage when they do."  That is very much so.  The assumptions that anyone starts from may be more important than their actual intelligence.  Thus, the many brilliant people in the CIA, NSA, military intelligence, and the State Department can get things very badly wrong, even if they are much smarter and more knowledgeable than you or I. Their track record is not good - yet they clearly wildly outpace us in knowledge of the abilities of Croatian hackers, or the power of unions in Germany versus France, or the history of communist movements in Indonesian since 1970. We could not stand five minutes against them in debate.  And yet they have proved indisputably wrong, repeatedly.  I think it is their assumptions.  If you think you are in Chicago and headed for Denver, but you really started from New Orleans...you aren't making it to Denver, no matter how well you have memorised the route.

I say this because Daniel Mallory Ortberg is simply brilliant when she, now he, starts from the right assumptions. His/her understanding of literature is excellent, and the treatment of it uproarious, as with this short essay on Keats. I am convinced. On other issues, where feelings triumph over facts, because they are like feelings, I am unconvinced.  Yet that is another story.

CS Lewis Academy

It has been in operation 33 years. That would have been just about the starting date for our children.  Had we known it existed, we might have been tempted to move to Oregon.

I found it while looking up a CS Lewis quote about chapel attendance.

Changes

Bird Dog put this up over at Maggie's, and it's fun.


But let's look at the changes since 1942, almost 80 years ago.

Tap dancing.  My 2nd granddaughter takes tap (her older sister takes ballet), but let's face it - it's a curiosity now.  No one does this. I learned a bit as a theater major in the early 70s, and I had a roommate who was actually good at it and still used it after college in his career.  (I just looked him up to see what he was still doing and that is absolutely going to be the subject of another post.) But even in 1973 it was outdated, passe. Couldn't do this today.

That costume, especially the hat, and secondarily the low inseam, is weird.  Necklines, waistlines, and hemlines go up and down for women, but this has never come back, seldom even in direct imitation trying to capture the era. Costumers choose different 1942 hats and pants to do that.

That strong left hand piano/blues intro is in the composition background of a lot of music since then, but pretty much long gone. Also, it is all on a stage, with a curtain, which is only used in very limited contexts now. People put live shows on stage, certainly, but the stage itself is not a focus.  In the early ages of movies and even TV, there was still this convention that entertainment takes place on a stage. Using pianos as set props is a Busby Berkeley thing, see below for a more extreme version

One hundred men dancing with a woman (or one hundred women dancing with a man) also never happens.  It is sort of a cool thing, that could endure a retro re-use, but it still just isn't done now.

Ego Vs Money

As the NFL contract season warms up, it becomes clear again:  most athletes cannot actually do the arithmetic to figure out what they need to live on quite nicely and then decide from there what other things are important to them in life that they might trade off - being near family; business opportunities; weather and familiar culture...there are many others. Le'Veon Bell did not make money in one of the most valuable years of his career, because he wants the ego stroke of having a higher "score" over other players in his contract. 

It is described as "respect," or "a team showing that they care about signing me," or some other synonym for "ego." Even with agents, who can do the arithmetic and tell them what their actual best deal is, they insist on the contracts that look like they are for the most years, at he most dollars-per-year, for the highest potential total, So that their $18M looks like a bigger swinging dick than the guy who gets $16M.

Now the 49ers kicker is insulted that the team tried to pursue another, better kicker briefly, so he's not sure he wants to play there.  He has to think of his family, he says.  Except he was fine with leaving his wife and young children in Chicago when San Francisco was stroking him.

Spring

My son in Nome tells me it was -1 up there this week and they are waiting for the snow to go away. He keeps trying to talk his wife into moving to Anchorage, at least.

Church Coffee

I do better than this when it's my turn, but I tend to be minimalist for a specific reason.  If you start putting out good snacks, then it suddenly becomes a competition (especially among women of my generation), and people are intimidated from volunteering to do coffee this week.

I did fat grapes for the children until I realised we are not well-places to do choking hazards.  I did cheap donuts, Nillas, or sugar wafers but got tired of the sugar-grumblings from the young mothers who still believe the myth that it causes their kids to be hyper.  So now I do Goldfish, and cheese and crackers.

Swedes care about coffee, but we aren't as Swedish in the Covenant as we used to be.

The Last Gift of Mary Magdalene

Reprinted most years.

When Mary of Magdala went to the tomb on Easter morning, hoping with the other women to give the body of Jesus a proper burial (Friday afternoon's preparations had been hurried and the bare minimum), her situation was different than all of Jesus's other followers. The men could go back to their previous jobs and families. At least I can go back to accounting/fishing/building again. They would be humiliated, of course, but that would pass. They grieved for their friend, but lots of people grieve. Some of the men had wished to go back to their previous lives, and wanted assurance from Jesus that what they had given up to follow him was worth it.

Jesus had at least attempted to provide for his mother at the end. "Mother, behold your son; son, behold your mother" he had said to John. As far as we can tell, the other women had come from some sort of families, and after suitable punishment by their patriarchs, would be accepted back. Mary the mother of Jesus would have the greatest grief, of course, but no worse than a thousand other mothers in Jerusalem who had lost sons.

Mary had nothing to go back to. There were always job openings for Beggar, of course, but the other beggars would have been schooled for a lifetime in eliciting pity by appearance and tones of voice. She might not be able to make even a subsistence living. She might give herself as a slave, if anyone would have her - the woman of the house in any rich family might have something to say about the master taking on one of the girls from the Pampered Palestinian Escort Service, no matter how temporarily reformed. Ms. Magdalene had seemingly stayed somewhere the last two nights. Perhaps she had stayed with one of the other women, or one of the disciples - if she could find one out of hiding. But it could have been that she had nowhere, nothing, starting in about two hours.


We might hope that the followers of Jesus would remember at least something of what he taught, and that someone would take a poor woman in and provide for her. But if not, her own family was unlikely to take her back. She had shamed them already and was dead to them. Whatever friends she had formerly had among her customers wouldn't want to be that close to her new holiness, unless they were utterly depraved and would enjoy even more trying to take advantage of her need. You thought you were something for awhile there, didn't you - better than the rest of us, huh? Now look at you.

And yet out of love and duty, which are not as incompatible as we make them appear in our era, she wants to give what last little she has in the pointless gesture of doing things up properly for someone who wasn't even a relative. Just because it was the right thing to do. Just to show gratitude one more time, even if only only she noticed.

It was a gift of generosity unmatched by any of Jesus's other followers, a pouring out of her own self, probably pointlessly, in imitation of his own pointless sacrifice. Just because it had to be done. We lose too quickly in the immediate discussion of the resurrection how great must have been Mary Magdalene's despair at finding the tomb empty. Even this last ability to give a little gift had been taken from her, and she must have thought as well "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

No wonder that Jesus's words to her are "Touch me not." What other impulse could she have had but to wrap her arms around his ankles, touch his face, burrow into his chest, weeping? How did even the Son of God move quickly enough to prevent her?

There are no tears that will not someday be dried, no lonely depths that will not somehow be filled. We hunger; food exists. We thirst; water exists. What else then could hope be for, but for completion?

New England Voting by Town

The map comes to me via Barry McMillion, who deserves the credit. Bsking sent it along.

To those outside of New England, this might be interesting only to note that there are strongly red sections even in very blue states. Even I, who am a geography nut, have to strain at some of these sections to figure out which towns are intriguing exceptions in their areas. The yellows tend to be wealthy towns. It also pays to remember that "rural" in New England does not automatically suggest farming - it sometimes just means "almost empty." So I wouldn't work too hard to get your head around what is going on in the minds of those pale and dark purple towns in Maine.  They are 50-50 red/blue to begin with, so small movements in the electorate can flip them. They have few people, and include much rural poverty, folks depending on five side businesses and food stamps to get by. You can also see why we in NH consider the towns along the Connecticut River to be practically part of Vermont, and why I call them the West Coast of NH. No surfing or beaches though.

Many of the darker blues and reds have more population, and illustrate the continuity of voting for the Democrat even if they hated Hillary (as many in Vermont do after her treatment of Bernie) or voting for the Republican even if they hated Trump.  Donald captured an interesting group that other candidates might not have, but most of his votes still came from people whose families have voted Republican since Harding.

As for those who switched, I am intrigued by that dark purple stretch that covers Eastern Connecticut (fancy prep schools there), Western Rhode Island, and Central Massachusetts. It is not broken up by blues that much or yellows at all, but by red, even creeping over the border into NH.  I don't have a good sense for who those people are, but they look like a consistent demographic a candidate might cultivate. (For those who like such things, there is a similar cluster at the borders of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin that was usually blue but not deeply so.  If a candidate could figure out what they have in common and win them over, s/he could make deep inroads in four states. Trump sort of did that, and it was key to 2016.  Holding rallies in that 100-mile radius wouldn't hurt him going forward, and I have to think some Democratic strategist (they have some very good ones) has figured this out for later, though it's pretty useless in the primaries.)

Interesting patterns you might notice are welcome.

Susan In Narnia

I have not read the Chronicles of Narnia aloud for almost thirty years, but have the current good fortune to be reading The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe to my granddaughters, and double fortune to be reading the sacrifice, death and resurrection chapters during Holy Week. I notice different things when I read aloud, especially in the descriptions. LWW is about Edmund's betrayal, but once one has read the entire series, Susan's eventual betrayal of Narnia is in the background upon rereading. I choked up today reading to the girls the section where Susan and Lucy walk at night with Aslan to the Stone Table, touching his mane, stroking and comforting him. Susan's affection for him is so powerful in that scene. How could you? I thought. How could you turn away from what you once knew?

Well, how could any of us, but we do it all the time.

If anyone wants to go down the rabbit hole of JK Rowling huffily accusing Lewis of sexism in his description of Susan no longer being a friend of Narnia, I wrote a defense Sexism in Narnia in 2007.  I still agree with what I wrote then, though I might write it up differently. Bsking commented knowledgeably at the time - more important, she agreed with me - and my son Ben, who used to read this site and is deeply knowledgeable about children's literature, commented as well. He commented at enough length that it became a post at his own site, Books for Boys, Books for Girls, and the comments there inspired me to write a further post on Female Characters in Heroic Fantasy.

Notre Dame. Update: Revised. New Title "Fr. Jean-Marc Fournier"

I didn't have much opinion on the cathedral a week ago. Places of worship that have become mostly art and history retain some religious value, as we can contemplate those who built them, the "countless legions of the faithful, crossing every generation, hand-to-shoulder, in an unbroken line." From those vantage points, and supported by the art and architecture if they are done right and we are prepared, we can see God more clearly as well. However obscured a place becomes by culture and the ambiguities of history, that is not a small thing.

Yet it's not everything, and had I ever visited Paris I would likely have visited Notre Dame more out of obligation, or to see the art work, than for spiritual desire. Other, obscurer houses of worship may have been more important in the cause of Christ over the centuries. I can understand it meaning more to Roman Catholics.  I can well understand its importance to those who have a desire to preserve Western, especially French culture, even if they are now largely secular individuals.

If we are preserving something, that doesn't mean we are changing it. adapting it, or reinterpreting it. Change, adaptation, and reinterpretation will happen on their own, and we needn't hasten that.  Unless, of course, our desire is not to preserve something, but merely hollow out its insides and put it on as a mask. Dave Burge said that better:
1.  Identify a respected institution
2. kill it
3. gut it
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.

Because of the ridiculous things that have been said about how to rebuild the cathedral, or more precisely, the ridiculous things about how not to rebuild it, I find myself drawn to having an opinion after all.  Roman Catholics should have more say than others - odd, that this is not obvious.  The French (and I do not mean self-appointed spokespeople) should also have their views count for more than others. Again, obvious, except apparently not. One could argue that those two groups, and especially their intersection, should have controlling authority and everyone else should bug out. After that other Christians, other Europeans might be allowed to speak if not vote at this town meeting.  The rest of the crew - the artists, other religions, historians, architects and the like are free to speak up.  File amicus briefs (to switch metaphors) if they like.

Yet this looks like everyone is going to want to get their Spelling Reform in. The design should reflect a stronger environmental concern. This has previously been such a male-dominated place, we should stress the involvement of women. Well, yes.  Catholic women and French women, I think.  The point deserves some explanation.  If I, a Protestant, were asked or allowed to offer some opinion on what they should do, I would restrict myself to whatever general Christian insight I might have. That would certainly be influenced by my Protestantism - can't help that, even with effort - but I would not dream of trying to intentionally make it more Protestant. That would be cheating, intrusive, deceitful. French women and Catholic women might indeed see things a little differently than men, and that may come out in their opinions and contributions.  That's not only okay, it is good. That is the sort of change and adaptation that is inevitable and allowable. But an American female architect, speaking on behalf of women in general, should have no audience. Speak as an American, and the tiny voice that gives you, or an architect, and the tiny voice that gives you, and then also as a woman in general - but understand that this is also a tiny voice. Just because there are a lot of women in the world doesn't mean that those who appoint themselves spokeswomen should be listened to.

My method gives the current Pope far more say than I would like in this, but I don't see anything else for it. The priest who ran into the fire to save relics - maybe they should just give him the final say on everything. Let him choose the architects, the advisors, the committees. Yes, that's my revised opinion: Fr Jean-Marc Fournier is in charge of it all.

Remember The Future

The theme for Maundy Thursday service tonight was that Jesus was not creating a moment of nostalgia for the disciples to look back on when he told them to remember him in the supper. He connected the event to previous times, to his present, and to the future. Remember The Future was the repeated phrase. I wrote something a bit similar last week, inspired by the message at Vespers at a church near Madison Square Garden when we were in New York.

I have tended to treat Lent like Advent, a time of preparation for a big day. I often get frustrated Holy Week, realising that I have squandered this preparation time and am "not ready" for Easter. Yet it is not a time of preparation, it is its own season. At most, it is a preparation for all of Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday. When they first occurred, those events were separate instances, but now they are tied together. Jesus still had the wounds after the Resurrection; we cannot help but connectt Good Friday to the Resurrection now.  Indeed, we could not even call it Good Friday without that knowledge. Hoshia Na they cried on Palm Sunday: "Save us, we ask" from the last of the Passover Psalms, 118:25. On Maundy Thursday Jesus declared that this salvation was related to his body and blood.  All four events are now tied together, no longer sequential, but joined.

Cling Wrap

I noticed that the cling wrap was nearly out, so I efficiently bought more. Two weeks later, the old one still wasn't out. As there is not enough space in the drawer and we didn't want the new one on the counter anymore, my wife suggested we throw the old one away.  Just to see how near to the end we were, I unspooled the rest of it.  Yard after yard, and the amount on the cardboard cylinder kept looking exactly the same.  It looked the same all the way to the end - thirty feet of wasted cling wrap. Even at the last few inches, it didn't look any different.  Apparently visual cues are insuffficient.

Toqueville

Barrister over at Maggies posted this excellent article from Tablet. It grabs one by the shirt collars and upends some easy assumptions we make. 

It is too simple to say that Tocqueville presented equality and freedom as principles sometimes in tension with one another. His point was different. Equality was not merely a moral principle. Nor was it merely a material fact. More fundamentally, equality was a passion that gave rise to a certain dynamic in politics. Freedom, on the other hand, he portrayed as a set of skills and habits that required practice, an art that could be learned but also forgotten. The danger of democratic life, Tocqueville thought, was that the passion for equality would lead us to stop practicing the art of freedom.

Toqueville believed that the art of freedom was learned by Americans in their smaller associations of New England towns, juries, and voluntary organisations. It is a romantic and repeatedly popular idea (and not only in America), that salvation comes from outside the city. It is one theme of the Old Testament, and of Islam. But is it so? Is it not the cities where cooperation is exponentially more necessary, and the balances of freedom and equality more under stress and thus strengthened?

Different arts, different stresses, different meaning of freedom and equality, perhaps.