Racial Nomenclature Eats At Me

I generally read the Oneonta Star on weeknights, but last night the local PriceChopper Grocery was out of the local paper. So I got a USA TODAY. I also bought a box of Neapolitan ice cream.

The front page of USA TODAY had a story about how happy black people are in America. About 60% are really optimistic about the future. Buried in the coverage was a paragraph that said that 42% of black people preferred to be called "black." About 44% preferred to be called "African-American."

I've always thought either term was absurd.

No one is actually black in the way that an 8-ball is black.

So the term simply isn't accurate. When I'm teaching my children their colors, I couldn't point to a black person and say, black. Otherwise, they'd get the wrong idea.

Aside from this, some white people are actually black. Culturally black. This is what Ralph Nader meant when he said that Obama is talking white. Well, is Obama really culturally black, and so is he talking white, or is he just talking the way he grew up? He is half-white and he grew up with his white grandparents in Hawaii, and he also lived in Indonesia. Is he culturally black? No. He's not. Is he culturally white? Maybe. Plus, there are white people who are culturally black.

For instance, I lived in a small apartment building in Seattle. Across the hallway was a white man. Every night he ate fried chicken, and once in a while, he barbecued catfish on the back lawn barbecue. He talked black. One day, a little unsure of how to ask, I just said, "Are you black?"

He was as fair as Steve Martin in The Jerk.

This guy's name was Steve, too.

He laughed. He said, "I am white, but my parents died in a car accident, and I was adopted by a black family. So I am culturally black. I went to Morehouse, and am now the pastor of an African Methodist Episcopal church. You should come some Sunday. We won't bite you, we only nibble."

In subsequent conversations he told me that he had a hard time with his identity. Blacks didn't think he was black, and whites didn't think he was white. He identified himself as black, and said that should be sufficient. However, as I said to him, if I went around identifying myself as black, how would he feel about that.

He laughed. That guy laughed a lot. I think he was enjoying his life. (He believed in God with all his heart.)

Meanwhile, there is the other term "African-American." This term is REALLY nonsense. First of all, there are all kinds of Africans. Some of them, too, are white. For instance, any of the Boers of South Africa or the former Rhodesia who are now in America are at least technically "African." They may have been fervent supporters of apartheid, but they must still be considered "African." There are also people from India in Africa, especially in South Africa, where they were officially recognized as of a different caste than the blacks or whites. When you get away from Sub-Saharan Africa you get people of French descent in Tunisia, and in Algeria. There are many Semitic peoples all over that northern area of Africa. When they emigrate, are they "African-Americans" too?

I think what we mean when we focus on the term "African" is that they came over on the slave ships. However, many African-Americans today came by other means. Some chose to emigrate in the last two years. Plus, some blacks in the south did have the right to own slaves. In the New Orleans area, in particular, there were thousands of black slave owners. There are African-Americans who arrived recently from Trinidad or from Jamaica or from Nigeria, or from Rwanda.

And today there are people of mixed heritage, like Obama himself, who has partial slave heritage, and partial slave-owner heritage.

I'm dissatisfied with the terms "black," and "African-American."

But I also don't really like the term, "Indian," or "Native American." "Indian," of course is simply wrong. Columbus thought he was going to India. He didn't make it but the inhabitants of the Americas still got called Indians. That's absurd. But they aren't "native," either, since they come over the Bering Strait, and are actually Asians, except that they are no longer in Asia...

The term "Hispanic" is nonsense, as well. Technically, it means "of or relating to the people, speech, or culture of Spain, Spain AND Portugal, or Latin America." Don't get me started on "Latin" Americans, since almost no one can speak Latin, and if they do, they are quite often white or black people educated at Oxford, or Harvard, or else they are Catholic priests, of just about any color. A Hispanic could be a refugee from Nazi Germany who got into Argentina or Chile after WWII, and now they're supposedly Hispanic after a mere four decades? If "Latin" denotes having derived from the Latin language, then why aren't French people "Latin Americans"?

Let's turn briefly to "Asians," which is just about the most nonsensical term ever invented. If there is nothing between Europe and Asia, then what is a woman from the Caucasus mountains? If she's an Asian, then so am I. And yet, I'm supposedly a Caucasian. The Caucasus mountains were the supposed original point of dissemination of the Caucasian people. Caucasians are Turkish, Chechen, and some ethnologists have argued that they fan out as far as Indonesia. Are these the same people I'm supposed to describe as "white"? Finnish people have the broad faces of Asians, but are otherwise in general, white. What are Pacific Islanders? How far out do you have to go to be considered "Oceanic"? Are the ancestors of the men who left the imperial navy's ship the Bounty in their mutiny to live on Pitcairn Island "Oceanic" by now?

In bird nomenclature many of the early guesses of 19th century scientists have turned out to be wrong, and now through DNA research, we can more properly align one species with another.

But if you check the DNA of the human race, we are all one species. This means we can all have children. Separate bird species cannot do this. As one species, all human beings are homo sapiens. Perhaps it could be said that we come in different flavors. Perhaps black people should be called "chocolate," or light-skinned blacks could be called "amaretto," or "hazelnut," while whites could be called "vanilla," and Native Americans could be called "strawberry," and Hispanics could be called, "toffee," using ice cream as the common designation. The "salad bowl" metaphor doesn't please me because it implies that we are separate species, as a pea and a lettuce leaf and a pepper are separate species. All human beings have the same human substance, as does ice cream.

So perhaps if we think of ourselves as flavors of ice cream, we wouldn't have all these melt-downs in regards to naming ourselves.

People who are spectacularly intermixed like Obama could be called Sundaes, or Neapolitans.

Already I see the problems. First off, the anthropophagous (cannibalistic) among us would feel encouraged, or even incited. Jeffrey Dahmer types would rejoice, and feel justified in keeping us in the fridge for nocturnal delectation after the kids are put to bed.

Also, my favorite flavor, mint, has not been represented among the human species (although eco-freaks are now denoted as green, their skin color doesn't come anywhere close. (Perhaps the aliens who are reported to be among us are green and may be the mint flavor I seek, but then they are probably not homo sapiens.)

With our obesity problem perhaps some would even be quite literal about this new flavoring nomenclature and begin to devour themselves. That could be a drawback to this new system of labelling I modestly propose. The autoanthropophagous (self-cannibalistic) are probably not a huge minority at this point in America. But who knows what a little encouragement might bring.

MIDGLEY ON LOVE AND SEX

Midgley ends her chapter talking about the various pitfalls of feminism. One is to announce that all intercourse is rape. Nonsense, she says. That's just being a mammal, and it's ok. We are not fish.

Another is to announce that any male attention is derogatory. Nonsense, she says. A cat may look at a king.

She doesn't like Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, or rape. She argues that pornography is bad because it trades real individuals for stereotypes, and men may get used to it. They may not understand that a real woman farts, and may get grumpy, and may not always be available, or smell good. She compares this to pictures of the country. People who view them and think wow I want to live in the country then realize they have to deal with bugs and mud then may move back to the city. Ok, fine, I got that.

But she thinks that "Sexual apartheid is not an option," (151) and she quotes Virginia Woolf from the end of her squib entitled A Room of One's Own, where Woolf sees a young man and woman get into a cab together, and depart. Woolf writes, "It is natural for the sexes to cooperate."

Midgley laughs up her sleeve at the feminist game of finding words out of context that could be considered misogynisticalalitarianesque (sorry, I got carried away). "Among this group of words 'courtesan' is of course an honorific title, suitable for describing women like the Greek hetairi, or like Skittles, who held a distinguished and secure, though informal, position in late Victorian London society, and for marking them off from streetwalkers as much as from married women" (146).

(I wondered if that's where WW got the name Skittles.)

Midgley also thought the Sexual Revolution was a turn toward dumbness. Just because you didn't get pregnant or a disease didn't mean you didn't get hurt, she writes. Maybe Norman Mailer and Henry Miller didn't because they treated women like footballs. "...interaction, like all real action, always has consequences" (139).

She thinks some of feminism is misguided, and some chauvinism is simply too much. But she skewers a lot of the problems of the 80s as not having enough of a sense of humor. Humor itself was questioned and thrown out by many women, she writes, in order to make the contents of a sentence seem like violence when it might be only an attempt to lower tension. I only wish I had read Midgley when it mattered! Do you remember all the screaming about how no one should ever see anyone else as a sex object?

"Anyone who agrees to be a sex subject must surely agree to be a sex object as well" (130).

And wanting to escape "rumbustiousness" in any context is no reason for women to make themselves dowdy.

"There is nothing sinister about beauty" (131).

She says something about "Tinbergen's sticklebacks" (134) that I didn't understand. Now and then her Britishness rears up, and I'm just like, what did you say, Midgley?

Midgley on the Gender War, continued

Midgley argues that women can choose to go to war with men, and if they are determined, they can make women hate men. And if they're really determined, all goodwill between the sexes can be rubbed out. If this does occur, what has been gained?

She argues that not much will be gained.

When men hate women, and war breaks out, and men turn into misogynists, we get a very dark fruit.

(Saw part of a documentary on Gary Ridgeway, the housepainter who became the Green River Killer. The Green River is a river near Seattle where some 80 prostitutes died in savage slayings during the 1980s. Ridgeway was caught in about 2001 after decades of search. Gary Ridgeway hated his mother who apparently tormented and injured him throughout his childhood. And he wanted to get back at women when he grew up.)

Midgley is against the fomenting of anger between the sexes, and argues instead for cooperation and love between the two as fundamental to any progress.

"Lenin is a bad model," she writes.

Lenin and Marx were willing to slaughter the bourgeoisie, and to kill the kulaks was not a problem for Stalin, their epigone. But no women (except Solanas, she writes) have ever been willing to kill men (not completely true, as I think that Andrea Dworkin argued that it was ok to kill men, and to lynch purported rapists, but perhaps she had not yet appeared on the scene in 1983).

"Anger has a role, but it has to be a limited one. Even where it is initially well justified, anger is terribly habit-forming, and grows with being indulged. The harm done in the world by corporate hatreds is startling, but most of them have grown out of justified anger. The trick of generalizing resentment is deadly. Victims of injustice tend, like the genie in the bottle, to brood on the wrong done to them to the point of taking it out on those who try to release them, and thus they tend to get shut up all over again. In this particular case, too, there is the special problem that any sort of war declared on men would also, perhaps primarily, have to be a war on those women who would not line up with it. Valerie Solanas, drawing attention to this inconvenient fact, asks plaintively, 'Why should the fates of the groovy and the creepy be intertwined? Why should the active and imaginative consult the passive and dull on social policy?" But unfortunately there is an answer to that one. Feminist tyranny, if it ever became possible, would still be tyranny. And that is just what we are supposed to be moving away from" (125-126).

Midgley is breathtaking in terms of taking apart and analyzing the feminist movement.

The last chapter, which I intend to read this evening, is about the other choice in terms of dealing with men. That is, aside from war, the choice of love and sex.

Women's Choices, by Mary Midgley

I'm reading a volume from 1983 by Mary Midgley entitled Women's Choices: Philosophical Problems Facing Feminism (St. Martin's, 1983).

Here are some distinctions she makes:

Marxism is about equality, liberalism is about liberty (p. 5). She is on the side rather of liberty, but doesn't think that we can throw the first one under the bus.

The woman's movement is both individualist (even Nietzschean) AND Marxist (p. 12). She thinks this is discombobulating.

Some feminists were arguing at the time that the litmus test of anything should be: but is it good for women. Midgley argued that most women will not denounce their husbands given that false choice, nor would they throw their children under the bus (p. 21). Midgley was herself married for 47 years until her husband's death in 1997. (It's not clear if they had children.)

Midgley argues that, "In the end men and women must live together" (52).

Extremism is a vice that appears to be a virtue in the left, she says, since the left appears with the Jacobins in the French Revolution. She argues that the right-left dichotomy should be junked, and that we should not work as a faction for any small group, but think for humanity as a whole, and we must always think it possible that we are mistaken. She's very calm, and very brilliant.

It's hard to know what Judith Hughes did in terms of writing this book. It appears to be the only book she had anything to do with. There are passages of the book that seem to be hostile to men. One passage says that Greek drama was all about men silencing women. Had she read The Medea? Had she read The Antigone? It seemed to me that in either drama those women had plenty to say, and said it straight, and that the authors (men) could relate. At any rate, any passage that seems a little weak I'm attributing to Judith Hughes.

What are the real choices confronting women today in the Anglophone world? One huge problem is children. Having one or two seriously whacks your career. In Finland, you can have your children and return to your job twenty years later. In America, you get about three months. In China, you get about fifteen minutes. We still don't say to men: hey, let the children be your career. It's unthinkable. I think she's right on this.

Is there still a glass ceiling for women? Do men still regard women as clodhoppers unfit for anything but menial work, as they apparently did for the twenty centuries preceding this one?

Do men still think that women are either whores or angels?

I like the book. I like Midgley. Passages I don't like or that I think are somewhat out of date I'm attributing to Judith Hughes. Is that fair? Probably not, but I wish the book had been written instead as a dialogue. It reminds me of the books by Deleuze and Guattari. Any passage I didn't like I attributed to Guattari.

Ten Commandments: The Secret to Prosperity

The Ten Commandments are the secret to prosperity. If a community follows them, the community will prosper. If they do not, nothing can make the community prosper.

This is why I think it's so important that Barack Obama finally got one thing right. He argued last week that "any FOOL can have a child" [his emphasis], but "it takes a man to be a father."

I was incredibly impressed by this. He had one part of the Gospel right.

Midgley Fails to Make Top Ten

Top Ten Philosophy Reads of All Time

1. Aristotle's Poetics
2. George Berkeley's Theory of Vision
3. Living Money, Pierre Klossowski
4. Robert Benne, A Paradoxical Vision
5. Andre Breton, Nadja
6. Umberto Eco, Name of the Rose
7. Philippe Soupault, Last Nights of Paris
8. Georg Bachofen, Mother Right
9. Gregory Corso, Selected Poems
10. Gospels (esp. John's)
11. Mary Midgley, Can't We Make Moral Decisions?

Mary Midgley

I've become an enormous fan of Mary Midgley. Midgley is a British philosopher who wrote her first book in her 50s and published it at 59.

She's now published about 20 books and is still going strong at 88.

She's probably most famous for making fun of the Darwinian Richard Dawkins.

She said at first she didn't want to attack him because it would be like breaking a butterfly on the wheel.

I finished her book, Can't We Make Moral Choices?, and was knocked senseless by her common sense. She takes apart Hume, Mill, and so many others, creaming Nietzsche, laughing up her sleeve about postmodernism, and so on.

Good fun, what.

Now I'm about to embark on a very early volume entitled Women's Choices: Philosophical Problems Facing Feminism (St. Martin's, 1983).

She wrote the book with someone named Judith Hughes whose work I don't know, and the book is in a series by something called "Social Democrats." (Is that an English political party? Do they distinguish themselves from the Antisocial Democrats?)

Here is the first sentence:

"Feminism is not just an eccentricity."

Here is the last sentence:

"But it is a decision that one ought to notice that one is taking" (224).

I don't know what the antecedent of "it" is in the final sentence. But I should know within a week!

The thing I like so much about her is that she sees philosophy as practical, and yet doesn't deny metaphysics. She argues that unless we get a pretty good philosophy together, we are screwing up our society. Here's a piece from Wikipedia:

Midgley sees philosophy as plumbing, that is, something that nobody notices until it goes wrong. "Then suddenly we become aware of some bad smells, and we have to take up the floorboards and look at the concepts of even the most ordinary piece of thinking. The great philosophers ... noticed how badly things were going wrong, and made suggestions about how they could be dealt with."

Most philosophers are not very good plumbers. The French are the worst plumbers in Europe. Turning to a French philosophy for a plumbing job is like asking for the shit to fly. And it always does with the French. Merde! Merde! Merde!

You'd think the Finns would be pretty good with plumbing, and maybe they are. The problem is they don't write in English. Midgley does.

LUTHERAN SURREALISM: AN ASSESSMENT

After some four years of this blog, it is time for a self assessment. First of all, how successful has it been?

In the first year we had a maximum of about 4 hits a day during the first three months.

Our initial notion was that whales were our natural audience. We posited a synod pod of Lutheran surrealists swimming beneath the waves. So far we have yet to have any whales log on. After four years we are forced to come to the realization that no whales will have internet access in our lifetime, and potentially not until the Second Coming (when everybody will have internet access).

We continue to be aligned with whales, and all singing mammals.

Of the 60 million Lutherans worldwide we confess that only one has ever contacted us. The poet Tom Hunley. However, he almost instantaneously converted to the Baptist church. We grant that the Baptists have a fiery record as instantiators of the Civil War. We even grant that they may possess a poetry more in accord with Hunley's true talents. Nevertheless, we were disappointed at his departure.

No one in the surrealist movement still exists since it was disbanded in 1967 or 1968 shortly after the death of Andre Breton. A few disciples of orthodox surrealism remain perhaps. There is a movement in Chicago, and a movement in Seattle, and one that remains alive in Paris. However, we have also made no converts from any of these stragglers, and in fact have yet to be contacted by any of them. The closest continuer of the surrealist lineage to have nearly come to our rescue is Andrei Codrescu. Close, but no cigar. He mocks Lutheranism in two of his more recent books -- our only tip of the hat thus far.

We had hoped that a few Scandinavians would join our illustrious team. Early on, a very good Icelandic poet named Eirikur Northdahl contacted us and argued strenuously against our viewpoint but with a mighty humor. Ultimately, he married a Finn, moved to Helsinki, and aside from a few translations of us into Icelandic, we no longer possess an accurate radar blip as to his whereabouts or mental state.

Many other early philosophers and poets contacted us. One dear Hobbesian operating out of California bugged us for many months about the why and wherefore of the tsunami that engulfed the Malay peninsula and caused in excess of 100,000 deaths. What kind of God, he asked. We don't know, we replied, we don't know. People looking for an answer must apply elsewhere. We only provide questions on top of questions, each one tinier than the last, and balanced atop one another in an endless succession of inquiries.

Carl Sachs, a philosopher at the brink of Nietzsche and Marx, stays with us, but he is not by any means a disciple or a follower. He toasts us as perhaps an example of Nietzschean individualism, although we think we occasionally spark some atavistic impulse in his Judaic genetics. Or so we kid ourselves.

Tom -- an inheritance of my days as a small-time prof among the Seattle postmodern crowd -- continues to fire trial balloons in this direction -- ensconced in his playful San Francisco art gallery from hence he occasionally fires us a signal flare.

Another such disaffected trial balloon is offered now and then by Stephen Baraban, one of the few to stuck with me after my two year ministry at the Buffalo Poetics board. After that disaster, at which time I was asked to leave by a cabal of communists including illustrious Lutheran apostate Anselm Hollo, and a Jack Spicer biographer, as well as a few others, it seemed a nadir, and yet it led to the opening of this blague. The one way in which I am like St. Paul has to do with stubborness.

I joined Ron Silliman's blog as a commenter 4 years back, again hoping to attract converts, but also enjoying the fisticuffs and trial balloons that assailed me from that quarter especially via Curtis Faville. Silliman, to his credit, is the only socialist who stuck with me throughout and never banned or ignored me. Many people write to me and say, "What is your relationship with him?" Suffice it to say that we are both interested in the truth, and share a deep long background and a penchant for slicing a point to its finest hair. At any rate, I have nothing but the deepest respect for his poetics, his ardor for poetry (which surpasses mine as the sun surpasses in brilliance that of an aging firefly's rear end), and of course his computer skills are second to none (he can make hyperlinks that work).

Still, no true converts from that quarter in spite of my valiant and incessant effort.

The worst debacle was my attempt to divert readers from a hockey player named Michael Berube. He had 6000 hooligan university's professors with him, constituting a formidable horde. I vied with them, one to 60,000, my only aide-de-camp that of a fellow named Jacques -- whose wife Emmy still occasionally sends us an article on championship chimps (or so we hope). Berube, the boob, banned us. I live in the hope that he at least experiences some remorse now and then as he sails unseat-belted past a Lutheran church or two (he has said that he likes to drive without a seat belt as it gives him an experience of liberty otherwise denied). We don't even know why we were banned. There was no true assessment. I felt that I was making headway there, and was about to convert the entire horde of 60,000 readers. Perhaps that is why I was banned.

WW -- a vegetarian and former Lutheran (now a Vegan Presbyterian) visits us but is neither Lutheran nor surrealist in inspiration. She scratches from time to time, but that's what cats do.

Helen Losse visits, and leaves a trace. Who is she? No one knows. A Christian of no distinct denomination, she lives in the south and produces broadsides in favor of MLK and other luminaries. Her web site doesn't seem to have a known address.

Nicole Nicholson has recently been added to the ranks, and she seems to be finally opening up into full confrontation with our viewpoint (we enjoy verbal confrontations as long as they are not personal).

Thomas Basboll (Danish) is nice enough to shoot a spitball now and then.

So after four years -- what do have to say for ourselves? Nothing, and that's how we like it. We have not animated a vast horde of zombies. We have no schools, we have no permanent column within the universities (we have a very small 5th column but it's susceptible to going native) we have nothing but a bit of persistence, and continuing sense of humor. We tip our hat to ourselves. We have made no converts, in spite of ankle-biting Marxists, chasing Lutherans in circles (and even publishing in Lutheran Forum), and wailing at whales.

Lutheran Surrealism is a quixotic failure. That is our assessment. But we comfort ourselves with the notion that we are ahead of our time, and that our time will come some thousands of years ahead on some garbage planet of the future, in which some nut will pull out of a stack of abandoned Lutheran Forums, and other gazettes and books of our persuasion, perhaps even an encyclopedia article or two about our movement. His name may or may not be St. Paul. He (or she) may or may not be a saint. But we place all our hopes on that individual, and say: God Bless You of the future, for in you is Hope.

The difference between man and animal

Mary Midgley writes in her book, Can't We Make Moral Judgements:

"In spite of their differences, people do tend to suppose that at a profound level the human race is in some way one, that its basic moral structure is universal... It emerges from the way in which people everywhere are inclined to say that those who practice customs that they abominate are not really human at all but are 'animals'" (91).

This is to say that almost all human societies regard other societies as animalistic. But perhaps this is because when we are looking at other societies we actually notice that they ARE animals. That is, that WE are animals.

I remember reading SHOGUN decades back and the Japanese regarded the Dutch as monkeys, and the Dutch, likewise, regarded the Japanese as monkeys.

It's easier to see another outside group as monkeys. We are closely related to monkeys, but we don't notice this resemblance among people that we actually know, because we see something else: morality, and clothing, language and other things that keep us from being monkeys.

Midgley takes exception to Locke for arguing that we are born as a blank slate. Babies are not infinitely malleable: there is a limit to how much we can be monkeyed with. We have a common human nature.

One thing I've noticed with my own children is that (there are four of them) if I were to pass out two cookies to three of them, and half a cookie to one of them, all four of them would wait before eating their cookie before they ate their own, since the concept of justice had not been dealt with adequately. They would argue for the one who didn't get the same amount, pointing if they didn't yet possess language. Is a sense of justice therefore basic to human nature?

I'm pretty sure that pigs don't care. When I used to toss food to pigs at my uncle's farm in Iowa they would simply run after the food, hogging as much of it as possible. This is why people call people "pigs" when they hog food.

I don't have a lot of experience with monkeys. If you placed them around a table, and handed out cookies, would they understand that they have to wait for every monkey to have the same amount of food?

It's considered rude in a restaurant if you get your food first to not wait for your dinner partners to get their plate.

Is that a universal sentiment? Even among communists and cannibals?

If You Were A Character in Shakespeare

If I were a character in Shakespeare I would most like to be Mercutio, or maybe Lucio (Measure for Measure). However, the character that I really understand the most -- the one whose inner workings I completely grok, is Hamlet. It's not that I would ever BE Hamlet. I would never for instance stab someone through a curtain, or say something so mean that my girlfriend would drown herself in a lake. It's just that Hamlet is a Lutheran so I understand his worldview.

There are no characters in Shakespeare who are as fond of boredom as I am. I don't think you can have a drama made out of a character who enjoys nothing so much as to watch dust settle, or to observe a spider building its web and wondering exactly why the spider's feet don't get stuck on its own web.

Even more boring: I like to watch plants grow, and to see if I can catch them at it. Hard to make a drama out of such a thing.

And you? Do you fit into Shakespeare's scheme?

Scatterbrained

I don't have enough for a full post today, but have instead a bunch of tidbits.

1.

In the case of Nix v. Hedden, the tomato was classified as a vegetable in 1893. Botanically it is a fruit, but it is commonly USED as a vegetable. Taxes were placed on imported vegetables, and not on imported fruits. The importer, Nix, had sued the customs office who were charging him vegetable taxes on what he regarded as a fruit. He had paid the tax up front, but now wanted his money back via his suit. The court ruled that the tomato is a vegetable in common use, and so it would continue to be taxed as such, even though it is classified botanically as a fruit. Here's part of the jurist's logic:

In making his decision, Justice Gray mentioned another case where it had been claimed that beans were seeds — Justice Bradley, in Robertson v. Salomon, 130 U.S. 412, 414, similarly found that though a bean is botanically a seed, in common parlance a bean is seen as a vegetable. While on the subject, Gray clarified the status of the cucumber, squash, pea, and bean.

Botanically, a fruit is a fruit if it contains its seeds (while lettuce, for instance, clearly does not, a tomato does!). However, in actual practice vegetables are eaten with dinner, while fruits are eaten as desserts. Since tomatoes are almost never eaten as a dessert dish, the judge classified them as vegetables irrespective of their containing their seeds.

2.

The latest issue of Lutheran Forum (Summer 2008) has my first major manifesto of Lutheran Surrealism in it, and also on the cover is a spectacular painting by Panu Hemminki. This is my first appearance in a Lutheran journal. For copies, please send $7 (ppd) to Donna Roche at Lutheran Publicity Bureau, PO Box 327, Delhi, NY 13753-0327. Subscriptions are $26.95.

3.

Dogtown -- a community of prairie dogs (Webster's Unabridged).

4.

Chuck Colson has an editorial in the latest Christianity Today (June 2008) where he talks about the crisis in the prisons. 1 in 100 Americans are now in prison. Colson argues that this is due to the rotten moral decisions that young people are increasingly making due to fatherlessness.

5.

I'm reading Mary Midgley's book Can't We Make Moral Judgements? (St. Martin's, 1993). She argues that we all help to make moral decisions every day by the language we choose:

"For instance, when Christianity wanted to introduce powerful ideas of charity and mercy into cultures uncritical of callousness and used to bloody-minded retribution, it needed to change the language of praise and blame radically -- a task that is not yet completed" (48).

6.

Irredentism is the name commonly used when a people who ought to belong to one nation are subject to another. Something like the mess in Iraq which is one big pot of irrendenta: Kurds to the north, Shia and Sunni, and Christians (Aramaic Christians) all tossed into one unlikely political bag. Good luck straightening that out without redrawing the lines.

Chinese Christians

The current issue of Christian History (Spring 2008) has for its theme, "How the Church in China Survived and Thrived in the 20th Century." It turns out that 60 million Chinese are Protestant and another 15 million are Catholic. "I did not know that, " as Johnny Carson used to say.

This means that probably many of the children buried beneath the rubble in the latest earthquake are Christians.

Communist party children went to better-built schools which did not collapse.

A million Bibles a month are sold in China.

There are a lot of undeclared Christians in China. It's something like Christianity in the Roman Empire. You couldn't officially declare yourself a Christian, but lots of Romans were Christian, and finally an emperor decided it was for the best. How long will it be until the Chinese get a Christian into the top post of Party Secretary, and the whole country converts? At present, you cannot keep a top government job if you join a Christian church.

In spite of persecution (many Chinese Christians were beheaded under Mao, and many others were tortured in prison for decades) Christianity nevertheless survived and thrived in secret churches throughout their society. Whole groups converted.

The earliest Christians came to China in 600 A.D. and yet were periodically slaughtered.

Reading through the issue of Christian History I thought again of the lone man standing up to a line of tanks in Tianamen Square. The image is so oddly iconic of the courage of the singular Christian standing up to the might of Rome. It struck me at the time that the man was a kind of Kierkegaardian knight of the faith, willing to surrender his life for his Lord. But who was this man? I didn't realize that there were so many Christians in China. Could this individual have been a Christian existentialist steeped in Lutheranism, and acting much as Luther did, himself, as he once stood up to the Pope, armed only with the Truth?

Carol Lee Hamrin writes in Christian History that in China, "People want to build up a new public morality to combat the moral self-centeredness, sexual license, materialism, corruption, and cynicism. One professor of religion believes that only the Christian framework offers both the higher purpose for the individual and positive social values, helps Chinese identify with global modernity, and preserves conservative moral values, including the priority of the family" (34).

Moreover, there is a generally benign climate of opinion in regard to Christianity throughout China. "As the Chinese search for a new social philosophy in this new century, China's resurrected church brings hope for the future. Public opinion about Christianity has turned from negative to positive. Believers report, 'Many people, including high government officials, have the opinion that Christians have an important role in dealing with matters such as family, marriage, interpersonal relationships, drug abuse, and alcoholism" (34).

Who knew?

Smith/Darwin/Marx/Nash:Competition Versus Cooperation

In the book A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory and the Modern Quest for a Code of Nature (Joseph Henry PRess, 2006), journalist Tom Siegfried writes that Darwinism is Adam Smith's "invisible hand" applied to nature.

Arguing against intelligent design theory such as that of William Paley who developed his watchmaker analogy in 1802 (still cited by creationists), Darwin looked to Adam Smith. Siegfried writes:

"Paley's point was that the biological world was so full of orderly complexity, exquisite adaptation to the needs of efficient living, that it must have been the product of an exquisite design, and hence, a designer. To arrive at his own evolutionary theory, Darwin required an alternative logic to explain the efficiency of life. Adam Smith, [Stephen Jay] Gould concluded, supplied that logic.

'In fact, I would advance the even stronger claim that the theory of natural selection is, in essence, Adam Smith's economics transferred to nature,' Gould wrote. 'Individual organisms engaged in the "struggle for existence" act as the analog of firms in competition. Reproductive success becomes the analogy of profit' ... In his famous example of the pin factory, Smith describes how specialization breeds efficiency. It seemed to Darwin quite analogous to the origin of new species in nature" (24-25).

Siegfried's elegant account doesn't go the extra step of trying to understand the widespread rumor that Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin. If Marx had done that, he might as well have dedicated Das Kapital to Adam Smith.

And if he was going to do this (there are letters to Lasalle among others in which Marx does express praise for Darwin) wasn't he in effect endorsing Smith's "invisible hand"?

If he was in fact endorsing Smith's "invisible hand" (via Darwin) then any attempt at market control (Marxism is synonymous with a planned economy) then why is it that Marxist systems so often rely on political correctness in terms of who gets to be the heads of companies, and even what gets to be made in Marxist countries rather than competence? Since the whole notion of competition seems to be what Marxist economics attempts to do away with, not much gets made at all, since the quite visibly heavy hand of the government decides what gets made, and by whom. Zimbabwe today is such a heavy-handed Marxist system. On any given day not only do you not have much of a choice of eateries, but it's difficult to find a sandwich at any price. Far worse is North Korea, or Myanmar. It is puzzling to me that if Marx endorsed Darwinism (which in turn is based on Smith) then why is it that the Marxist prescription completely denies free trade except insofar as it is overseen by the party? (I'd love to get started on Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge in which free trade of any kind was banned.)

One of the few communist countries that seems to work right now is Red China. It has a baffling mix of extreme capitalism and extreme communism. And yet it shares many of the problems of communism. Because of a lack of oversight (the government does not play watchdog but is instead in charge of production) its toys are dangerous to children and have been recalled in the billions of dollars, its unfairness in Tibet and in the Darfur have given it significant public relations problems (Mia Farrow has called the forthcoming games the "Genocide Olympics"), and even within its own borders the recent earthquakes killed 50,000 due largely to the shoddy manufacture of schools in Sichuan Province.

If Marx praised Darwinian competition why is it that in Marxist societies everything down to the institution of government is a party monopoly?

Competition of course isn't everything. Within a family there ought to be cooperation. The older people at the dinner table shouldn't elbow the baby away from the apple sauce. The elderly or disabled shouldn't be kneed in the groin by the young and able if they go after a second helping of cranberries.

If the family unit in Darwinian terms is the necessary extension of the individual since a family shares genes, and thus is a kind of de facto congregation of shared DNA, then it makes biological sense for its members to share and share alike.

But outside of the family, production of goods works best when the "invisible hand" is at work. Vigorous invention and robust competition (overseen by a government that punishes dishonest or dangerous products) is what traditionally has given America its commercial viability. "Business is the business of America," as Calvinist Coolidge put it.

But one step ahead of Marx Darwin and even Smith, comedian and math wiz John Nash offers the notion that long-term cooperation is a natural aspect of the "invisible hand" and that one hand washing another is a viable analogy even in the marketing sphere. Trust between the supplier of plastic and the shaper of toys, and the company that sells the toys, is not necessarily something that remains purely within a family. There is a mysterious synergy afoot in that most humans are benevolent to one another as they want their long-term reputations to survive.

I'm only on p. 92 of a 225 page book, but what Siegfried is seemingly after in his description of Nashian economics is that this is not simply a dog eat dog world. As a youth I liked Kropotkin's notion of "mutual aid," as it made common sense that in most functioning relationships people care more about each other than they do about themselves. Even the notion of holding a door open for a small child you don't know is a natural aspect of human behavior. Exactly where and how communal support trumps individual gain is something I still don't understand but I'm hoping that the book builds an adequate model. I used to sit on porches in summers gobbling comic books. Now I gobble volumes like these on summer vacation. Whereas once my superhero was the Green Lantern, now it's mathematician John Nash.

Sex and the City

One of the reasons I read Silliman's blog is that I almost invariably disagree.

In yesterday's posts he was writing about the film based on Sex and the City that has recently come out. I haven't seen it. But he suggests that Charlotte (far left in picture) is an AIRHEAD.

I've only seen the show a few times.

But Charlotte always struck me as the only with ANY sense. One of the women (Amanda, far right) had to go once to a sex clinic because she had crabs. She was asked how many partners she had had and she couldn't even count the number of partners she had had in the last month.

Her math wouldn't go that high.

And in one episode, the three women to the right were talking about how they liked to lick men's asses in their encounters. It was the latest thing.

Charlotte looked like she was going to puke. I agreed with Charlotte. But the other three thought she was naive, and an airhead, for having such scruples. Charlotte was always looking for a relationship, and a family. The other three were busy licking men's asses!

Now it's true that dogs smell one another's asses. And maybe they even lick each other's asses. They have a very powerful digestive system that must enable them to survive such encounters. And maybe they can't determine much about a potential partner because they don't have language, and they can't even figure out zipcodes, or check the police blotter as they screen potential mates. So maybe there's something they smell in an ass that is important to them and which helps them to decide whether to mate. But people aren't dogs (well, some people ARE dogs, apparently).

Charlotte is the only human member of this quartet. She gets married and goes to a synagogue. She wants babies and struggles with infertility. She understands basic hygiene, and she's averse to fecal bacteria. Does this make her an airhead?

INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS VERSUS COMMUNAL RIGHTS

If an individual has the right to do just anything then that means there aren't any laws.

Laws, by the very fact of their existence, represent a check on the individual's right to do anything they want.

I've only been on a jury once. The trial was about a man who on New Year's Eve drove drunk through Seattle, crisscrossing the Aurora highway, and causing a pile-up of ten cars in which several people were seriously injured and two children died. The jury was hung because one elderly woman said, "I drink and drive all the time. Why shouldn't this man be allowed to do it? If we convict him, he might lose his license to drive, and then how will he work?"

I argued that she should balance her sympathy for the driver with a sympathy for his victims and for the victims that he could kill in the future if he were permitted to go scot-free for this offense.

The woman's mind changed and she said, "Ok, he's guilty."

We went before the judge and each of the six of us had to say, "Guilty."

The drunk driver lost his license for two years. That was the only penalty.

While the realm of art does not need to be normative, the legal realm does need to be normative. It needs to establish and reinforce norms so that not only do individuals have rights, but that each member of the group also has rights. The right to be free of drunken drivers is one such right.

What principle is this based upon that an individual's rights stop where another individual's rights begin? In John Locke, the principles (which he claims come from God) are life, health, liberty and property. That is, a good government ought to protect those four things for each individual.

Clearly, liberty has its limits. Liberty of an individual must be limited where it transgresses against the rights of others to their life, health and property.

Vehicular manslaughter clearly transgresses against the life, health and property of others on the road. While I don't think that capital punishment is exactly called for in this case (even though two children's lives were lost) it still galls me that the man got off with his license suspended for only two years.

I imagine that the sentencing guidelines have changed since I heard this case in about 1985. But what are the precedents? What are sentencing guidelines for such offenses today? I wouldn't know, but I do think they should take into account the price of a child's life, and the incurable sorrow of the father.

Ultra-Competent Paul

My friend Paul came to visit over the weekend. He loves to fix things. In the space of 6 hours he fixed two toilets (one leaked, and one was a hole in the floor) but now both are completely functional. He took apart the downstairs shower, cleaning the entire thing -- scraping off the old glue, and re-gluing the apparatus. The shower has been leaking for three years, and I haven't been able to repair it. Paul repaired it.

In between fixing things, he played catch with my two boys, and then made dinner: mashed potatoes, chicken with peas, a salad with Balsamic dressing. Although I was saddened that there was no dessert, I also appreciate the savings in calories.

Paul is my oldest friend: I knew him in kindergarten. We're now 50.

He had to drive down to New York City today to visit his son, otherwise I was hoping to get him to help me with repaving the driveway. Paul is like the Cat in the Hat in reverse. Instead of showing up and destroying the house, and leading the kids astray, he shows up and fixes the house, and the kids cry when he leaves, saying, "But Paul is our family, where does he think he's going?"

GEOGRAPHIC LOYALTY

It's very funny to me that people identify with a local team such as The New York Mets simply because they live near there. I still identify with the Philadelphia Phillies. I grew up just north of there, and though I would never allow myself to follow a season with the Phillies (what even IS a philly -- is it a baby horse?) because of the time and boredom involved,

I still feel warm when I hear the name, remembering sweaty nights listening to the radio in the dark with my dad as he lay on the bed with his arms behind his head listening carefully to the scene as described by the announcer, while I sat on the floor sorting and resorting my baseball cards as Johnny Callison popped another foul ball into the stands.

Sports are like stories with antagonists and protagonists but we identify with one or the other compared to which set of bleachers we're sitting on, identifying with a team for no other reason that geographical loyalty.

Is geographical loyalty really such a strong aspect of human nature that every arena in America can virtually bank on it, and thus will we always have two sides, one diametrically opposed to the other?

Why is such an arrangement so completely fascinating to the human mind so that billions every year are spent on the exhilaration that this set-up allows?

A FEW TINY QUESTIONS FOR RON SILLIMAN

In light of the fact that SDS and the Berkeley Free Speech movement catapulted Ronald Reagan into the governorship of California, and later into the presidency, was it really a success?

Is there something that could have been done differently that wouldn't have provoked such an extreme reaction?

In light of the fact that you said the other day that the various Bantustans of identity politics now militate against one another within the Democratic party, do you think that the various ethnic studies and women's studies departments are not isolating and creating an internecine political struggle within the left that are increasingly reducing it to impotence?

What do you think should be the goals of the left today? If Michael Harrington's attempt to get the early left of SDS to clearly differentiate itself from the Marxism of the Soviet Union and North Vietnam, and to renounce communism in all its forms was not successful (Tom Hayden among other leaders refused to do this), do you think that SDS would have been better off if it had not been so ardently radical and macho (Shapiro's photo that you put on your blog the other day is extremely macho and threatening, almost guaranteeing a counter-reaction).

Since the right is increasingly able to bring members such as Condi Rice and Colin Powell and Clarence Thomas and others to the top without making any fuss at all about their ethnic identity, is it not possible that they are doing something right, rather than the left attempt to focus so much on demographic criteria?

The move toward the Weather Underground and toward a bombing campaign is still somewhat lyricized in Michael Lally's comment in your blog. Do you think that there was something laudible about taking such extra-legal steps as Michael Ayres and his wife took? Do you think that terrorism can ever be a good thing? Do you think the Weathermen served the left well with its bombing campaign?

What is the role of poetry today in terms of political actions? What should be its strategy in creating political goals that you would support? How would this best be done without slipping into propaganda?

On many campuses today various "Bantustans" are in place in regards to the formation of identity politics. Do you think this is a strategic mistake for the left? Should they concentrate on some kind of conceptual framework that runs in some other direction, instead?

If the Republican party continues to be in step with Locke, should the Democratic party deliberately distance itself from any kind of Marxist identity politics, and focus instead on life, liberty, health, and property, using Locke as their avatar, since that would be more in line with classical liberalism, and more acceptable to the wide majority of Americans?

Just a few tiny questions. (Although I pose them to Ron Silliman, I also ask them of my own commenters and visitors.)

And two more: did you ever go to the national meetings of SDS? I note that there was one in my birthplace of Clear Lake, Iowa in 1966, and another in Pine Hill, NY, about 40 minutes east of where I sit, and which presently has a population of about 300, including a Pakistani family that runs a fabulous buffet for 12 dollars a head (children under 8 eat for free). Why were the meetings held in such backwaters? Can you explain the strategy behind this?

Another Note on Paul Blackburn

"The flaneur is drawn to mass transportation."

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Harvard UP, 2003, p. 455