Sarah Palin

This makes the election fun.

I'm kind of sick of all the men talking about war, or not.

I'd like to hear about education.

She's got five kids, and apparently education is her top concern.

Maybe she'll have other concerns besides killing people.

Not that you don't have to sometimes send the army in.

She IS a lifetime member of the NRA (I've never fired a gun, but she has hunted and fished quite a lot -- I feel like fainting when I go fishing because I can't stand to hook the worm). Plus, she's been moose hunting. So she seems like a very untypical woman, maybe one that certain kinds of feminists will like.

She seems like a nice, centrist, maverick-type, rather like McCain himself.

The main thing is it's nice to have a woman in the race, and especially one whose central issue is education.

All over the web people are talking about her looks. I'm not sure why this matters. People make me sick when all they want to think about is whether or not they'd like to do Phelps or do some politician. It's as if people don't have souls any longer.

It'll be odd to have her talking with Joe Biden. Biden does have a soul.

And Obama talking with McCain. Obama and McCain do have souls.

VP debates don't generally decide an election, but maybe this is a push in the right direction for America.

I had wanted Huckabee for the humor, but I already like what little I've seen of this individual, and wish her the best.

Obama felt very tired last night during his nominee talk. I think I had heard every line a dozen times. He's instantly moving toward the center, but doing so in a way that belies his activist roots. He's not a centrist. He really wants to make the country into a communist one. When he starts talking about the changes he's going to make, he turns into a firebrand. Last night he realized he had to talk to the center. There were lots of images of working class people and he put in a lot of country music to try to appeal to the cornballs of Altoona. Down deep, however, he's pure Arugula.

But if he and Biden win, it won't be a disaster, because he won't be able to make every turn into socialist zombies where they do their work and aren't permitted to criticize the government. Obama'll just talk about it, and try to sneak a few weird ideas through Congress. He may be able to scuttle some aspects of the first amendment, and make us just a little more like Europe, where central committees determine what people are allowed to think. A few censorious top-down thoughts will get through, but after four years, the stars and stripes will still stand, and there'll still be some hecklers. It won't be like North Korea.

I like both couples, but prefer McCain and Palin, because to me they represent the outdoors, and freedom (I can't stand the outdoors, but I like the idea of it).

I think for me all the tired ideas of Barack Obama are more or less what I've been hearing in academia for twenty years, and it all seems to go back to the horror of the sixties. For me, the worst thing about Obama is that he is so gung ho about abortion, even wanting to kill live babies. Palin on the other hand knowingly had a baby who had Down Syndrome. I find that lovely, and I hope the baby has a beautiful life with her mom as v.p.

For me, McCain and Palin represent a refreshing change.

I can't wait to hear what my own mom thinks. She's a Hillary Democrat. She may yet switch to McCain. She's mad Hillary didn't get in.

I've only voted once in my life for a Republican. But I just may do it again.

I'm so sick of the far left I can't listen to their nonsense any longer. All they want to do is control everybody's thinking by central committee. I love leftists on an individual basis, but as a group, they just make me sick.

To me, Sarah Palin is a refreshing change. I can't even stand to hear Obama get all wound up any more, or the way he articulates each syllable when he comes to the close of a line, to make it sound profound. It's just corny.

How I Became a Christian and a Republican

Firs they came and took away the Polish jokes,
but I didn't care,
I was not a Pollock.

Then they came and took away race and gender jokes,
But I didn't care,
As race and gender were not my bag.

Finally, they came and took humor itself away,
Unless it was about Christians,
or Republicans,
So I became a Republican and a Christian,

Because I wanted to be funny.

Call This a Party?

I didn't know what the orange pantsuit meant, if it meant anything. She always tries to wear the most unnatural colors.

I wondered at some of her lines. The sisterhood of the travelling pantsuits was great. But what about when she said, "We can have illegal aliens all over the place, and yet we can have the law, too."

This seemed a huge stretch, even for Lutheran Surrealism.

Then she said, "We can get out of all wars, and sue for peace whenever possible, and yet still have a strong military."

I wondered how that could be done.

She said, "We can lower taxes, and yet we can have universal health care, too."

I didn't see how it could be done.

The quotes above aren't exact quotes, but it's how I heard them, or rather, how I remember them, in my head, today, where they ring as paradoxical, and therefore difficult to comprehend, and even my most basic bullshit-o-meter says, no way.

She also said, "The goal of all women should be to get a woman into the White House, but since we're getting that goal via Barack Obama (maybe she knows something the rest of us don't), then we should be happy that our goal is going to be achieved at last. So vote for Barack!"

Maybe she meant that Michelle Obama will be the true power in that relationship, and therefore, a woman will at last rule the White House.

It wasn't clear. In the middle of the speech my wife suddenly appeared. She said, "I am going to make you vote Democratic. Everything she is saying is right, and you are wrong. All you want is war, war, war, you and that guy with the jowls. No to McCain! No, no, no to McCain!"

She laughed and then went back upstairs. I enjoy arguments, and I like it when people try to dissuade me from my newly found centrism, and make me veer off once more into the far left. I miss the far left. But for me the far left was anarchist, never communist. I liked the free speech of the anarchists, and hated the notion of the party blueprint, that the communists always push forward, as the image of political correctness, from which you dare not divert.

Hillary is the epitome of the humorless PC jerk.

Obama is pretty bad, too.

McCain is a Spartan warrior. He doesn't care what you say. It's what you do that counts. McCain likes to laugh and tell off-color stories. I'm comfortable with that. It's relaxing.

The moral rigor of the PC left is what turned me out of the left as it began to police the thought and the vocabulary of its ranks, and to use this politicalization of any form of free speech to sideline Bohemian anarchism.

The far right is equally icky to me. I can't stand the Calvinist boneheads who want to be squeaky clean and perfect all day long. It's completely alien to me, and makes me want to find a toilet in which to puke.

Any man who won't say the f. word in common conversation isn't my friend. I don't want to hear it in every sentence, and I don't want to hear it as the focus of the conversation, but I like to hear it lightly thrown, as an aspect of human freedom, between close friends who trust one another. I don't ever want to hear it in my own family, mind you (unless it's the wife, and the kids are asleep).

I don't want to hear it from a politician, giving an Annual State of the Union Address.

But if one of my friends was a little peeved over something, and didn't say, F.! I would wonder if they had had a lobotomy. I mean, it's normal! Jesus!

I can't stand the whole idea of the holier than thou left, or the holier than thou right.

I like centrists because they're just saying: what a muddle to be in the middle!

Centrism is where it's at in terms of humor. The far left and far right don't have a sense of humor.

The middle does.

When Islam produces a Woody Allen character that has been slated to blow himself up with a bomb in some street, I want to see the comic film where the character says, "Ok, but let me have the 72 virgins first, just in case."

Then he takes off through the Casbah, as the military geniuses chase him through the streets as he wants one more night with some Fatimah or another. "Tomorrow, I'll do it, but first: 72 virgins, dudes! Or you can have half a car bomb on Tuesday for 36 virgins today!"

I mean, humans are human, in Islam, in Christianity, and everywhere else. They just want to live, right?

Lutheranism argues that people are fundamentally rotten, and that therefore we shouldn't expect too much of them.

Marxism argues that people can be perfect.

So does Islam.

So does Calvinism.

Lutheranism is therefore the most comic religion (two kingdoms) and therefore it is the best one.

Surrealism under Breton came to be a little bit high-handed too, and demanding of perfection.

That's why I like Soupault's surrealism, which was more devoted to Chaplin than it was to Nerval or to suicidal poets who took things a mite seriously. Soupault was thrown out for not being high-minded enough and writing novels to pay the rent and not sticking with high-minded poetry. Soupault's poetry actually makes sense such that children can read it and enjoy it. That's my kind of surrealist.

Hillary had one good line last night about the sisterhood of the travelling pantsuits. It was almost surreal, in the best sense, to see that even she does have a sense of humor. I was proud of her. The rest of the speech was humorless, and sucked. Michelle Obama didn't have a single good comic line, so her speech sucked. Democrats SUCK in terms of humor.

They take themselves way too seriously.

That's why I left the party. Call this a party? All they do is cry and pose as if they're the most ethical people who ever lived. It's just grotesque.

It's just a bunch of sissies and bores pretending to be perfect and posing for the camera. Edwards with his perfect hair and talking about the "meeel" that "my daddy worked in," and meanwhile he falls for some floozy with a VCR and shames his wife. I mean, that is just plain tacky, Johnny B. Entirely Too Good.

The Republican party is more fun. Their leader McCain is a Spartan warrior, but he's more fun than any Democrat at the top of the party. That party hasn't had anybody funny since that sick old lady from Texas Ann-something laid into Bush family twenty years back. That was good, and that was when it was still a good time to be in the Democratic party. I loved how she said, "That dog won't hunt." I didn't know what it meant, but I knew it meant something, and I liked all the fun she was having with the phrase.

Fun! Why did Democrats forget about fun?

Now they're just a bunch of third-rate Maoists in a roach motel trying to get us to take them way more seriously than I'm ready to take almost anybody except Jesus Christ Himself.

Let a hundred Harolds Bloom into Zero Mostels.

PEOPLE SAY THEY ARE DIFFERENT

But is it true that Barack and John McCain are truly different?

I can think of a few ways in which they are the same:

1. They are both men.
2. They are both Americans.
3. They are both college graduates.
4. They are both Christians.
5. They are both athletic.
6. They are both heterosexual.
7. They are both bizarrely wealthy, and should be ashamed, but are not.

Perhaps you can add some more ways in which they are the same.

Now, let me ask a crucial question that has so far not been asked by any pollster or pundit or newscaster.

Given that if people use the bathroom (euphemism) then afterwards: do they crumple the tissue paper prior to application, or do they fold the tissue paper?

Let's make two broad classifications, and argue that all people fall into one of these two groups. (They must, unless there's a tertium quid that I haven't imagined!)

Now let's say that all Republicans fold neatly (unproven hypothesis).

Let's further speculate that all Democrats crumple.

(Or vice versa.)

Is this possible that party identification could be this simple?

What, then, about independents?

Do they sometimes crumple and sometimes fold?

(Probably!)

Let's go further and argue that Barack belongs to one group and John to the other. Will those who do the same be most likely to vote for the nominee who is most like them in this one category?

If so, how can this be best proved, and what would you use as strict evidence for your assertion?

Biden Your Time Until the Election?

Consider these facts:

1. Delaware was the last state to ratify the 13th amendment (that abolished slavery). They argued that the 13th amendment was an illegal attempt by the government to intervene in states' rights. They argued this in 1865. In 1901 they ratified the amendment.

2. Joe Biden's middle name is Robinette. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Tied Up

School's approaching. I'm writing a young adult novel called Soccer Star. I have it about finished and want to finish it in the next ten days. It's easy to write, and I probably won't even try to publish it. I'm just having fun with it, especially trying to describe soccer for younger people. I used to love to play it!

But it's using every spare minute of every day!

The dean popped his head into my office and said, "I thought you said you were going to clean your office before the semester starts?"

I have books piled up around me like I'm a nut.

"The semester hasn't started," I said.

He laughed, and slapped his hands together, and drew my door shut.

I did put one book back on the shelf today, as a gesture of good will. I also sold one through Amazon.com. Good riddance, book!

Now I'm off to go swimming with the tots. It's summer again! The last two days have felt like autumn, depressing me endlessly. Several local trees have already turned red. It's like the trees have personally betrayed me. I wonder if Al Gore's global warming theory isn't completely personal. That is, he got close to being president and was so warmed up by this idea that he sees global warming everywhere, but it's personal, rather than political.

And maybe the polar bears are just a symbol of his having fallen off the voting ledge into the cold Arctic steams of anonymity, which is even why he's grown that beard and bloated up like a polar bear.

I don't know, I just know that it's been a rather cold winter, followed by a not particularly warm summer. Today it's 83 and quite pleasantly arid. I am looking forward to plunging like a polar bear into the Oneonta pool, and not thinking about Al Gore, or anything about the presidential race at all.

Just want to play with the kids and let summer feel stupid and fun one last time, before school starts.

TWO KINGDOMS

In the nineteenth century pews of early Puritan Boston you had to pay a large annual fee to reserve your pew. Doesn't that stink? Thus, capitalism impinged on the communism of the pews. There was standing room at the back for the poor, but if you wanted a seat, you paid and you paid heavily for it. (I got this from a book called The Crisis of the Standing Order, by an author whose name I forget.)

The early church staged an early pure communism based on the belief that the Second Coming was imminent. There was sharing of food and resources in the name of Christ.

Political communism is the opposite of this.

And yet, in political communism, capitalism sneaks in the back door. It still costs money to have an apartment or to go to a restaurant. In a world of pure immanence capitalism is everything, especially when it's not.

Lutheranism gets it just right: capitalism is kept out of the church (not entirely, since the pastor must be paid, the upkeep and electricity must be paid, the organist must be paid) but there is not a continual screaming about money as there is among the tele-evangelists.

The church is not a business, as some secularists think. It is not a social club. It is not a university where you go to pay your tuition. It is not a political party. It is a community that recalls the early Christian communities where sharing in the name of the eschaton was unforced and natural.

It can probably only survive as such on Sunday mornings, but it is the leavening of the lumpenproletariat on that one day of the week that makes the rest of the week buoyant.

SECRET

The only thing worse than being a complete communist (to me) is being a complete capitalist.

CHINESE OLYMPICS

The Chinese Olympics have been one moral atrocity after another beginning with the suppression of Tibetan dissent. Then, on opening night, they replaced the singer with a cuter girl, for the sake of "national interest." Now, in order to prove they are the best country in the world, it turns out the little girls who've been chosen to be gymnasts only see their families once a year. The rest of the year they exercise, exercise, exercise. They have to do those flying flips or else they are severely punished. It's a question of whether they want to hit a crossbar flying or whether they are going to be hit, or sent back to their families, or God knows. I wouldn't be surprised if they shot a recalcitrant gymnast in the national interest and threw them on the rubbish pile in order to exact greater efforts from the surviving girls. Anything that's in the national interest appears to be justified.

MURDER IN AMSTERDAM: The Theo Van Gogh Case

While travelling over the last three weeks I couldn't continue to read Mary Midgley because she requires full attention. I didn't have any clear time most days because I was sight-seeing with four small children and almost always had one on my lap, or was taking one to the rest-room. In the few minutes I had every night before sleep, I had to teach an online class (which went very well!).

But there were moments in the day that I had time to read. Once I was stuck on the Northeast Extension (it's a highway that goes from Philadelphia to Scranton, PA), and everyone fell asleep. The traffic was going about 5 mph over a ten mile stretch (do the math), and so I read 100 pages of a book called Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance, by Ian Buruma. The book is extremely vivid, and about as difficult as eating a bag of salted chips.

Buruma teaches at Bard College, but he grew up in Holland. I'm not sure of his ethnic background. He mentions in the book that he had lived for years in Japan, too. But his upbringing in Holland was at The Hague, which is where the cultural elite of Holland are raised.

When the film-maker Theo Van Gogh had had his throat slit by Mohammed Bouyeri on November 2, 2004, Buruma decided to investigate.

Buruma interviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Van Gogh's family, various Muslims (fiery imams as well as ex-Muslim apostates) and a panoply of odd Dutch characters all of whom seem to know one another as they share the same small country for a stage. Reading the book is a little like reading a Shakespeare play insofar as each action by each character is balanced by the actions and thoughts of the others.

Holland, Buruma argues, is a small country where consensus rules. Since the 1960s however there has been a kind of PROTESTANT truth-telling, in which loudmouths say exactly what is on their mind, and this is considered to be a virtue, and at least gets you television time.

Theo Van Gogh was perhaps the greatest loudmouth. He made fun of everyone and everything, even saying things like he wanted to f. the Muslim deity.

In the midst of the 21st century, there is a kind of 12th century sensibility, too. Buruma argues that this 12th century sensibility is not relativist. It is absolutist. And it feels not only entitled to slaughter the relativists, but feels that this is mandatory.

That said, Mohammed Bouyeri, quite the opposite of Theo Van Gogh who had sex with all kinds of people all the time, couldn't score. His sexual frustration led him to find an outlet for his personality within the furthest limits of the Muslim world. In a philosophy called Takfir, there was a deadly seriousness that was opposed to the debating game played by the right and left in western states. There is no irony and no freedom of speech within the furthest reaches of Muslim fundamentalism.

Buruma delineates the shifting loyalties and concerns of various players in the panorama very well. On the left, many moved to the right after 9/11:

"But the real shift came when a well-known sequence of events drove many former leftists into the conservative camp. First came the Salman Rushdie affair: 'their' values were indeed clashing with 'ours,'; a free-spirited cosmopolitan writer was being threatened by an extreme version of an alien religion. Then New York was attacked. And now Theo Van Gogh, 'our' Salman Rushdie, was dead. Leftists, embittered by what they saw as the failure of multiculturalism, or fired up by the anticlericalism of their revolutionary past, joined conservatives in the battle for the Enlightenment" (30-31).

I could recognize myself in this shift.

But it is easy to overlook the shades of difference. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Muslim apostate who had written the screenplay for the film for which Theo Van Gogh was murdered. After the murder, she had to go into hiding, and finally had to leave Holland, and now lives in hiding in America. Hirsi Ali has an odd history. She fled an arranged marriage in Germany to find refugee status in Holland, and quickly learned Dutch so well that she became a member of parliament.

At first the leftists welcomed her as a beacon of anticlericalism and free speech, but Ayaan Hirsi Ali sided instead with the far right:

"It was only to be expected, then, that Ayaan would leave the Social Democrats to join the free enterprise party, the VVD. Delighted to have a beautiful black critic of the welfare state and Muslim radicalism in a party that was, overall, very male and very white, she was welcomed as a walking Statue of Liberty. But this move alienated her even further from the progressives on the left, who saw her now not just as an enemy of multiculturalism, but as a renegade as well. It gave rise to the common slur that Ayaan was the darling of middle-aged conservative white men -- professors of Enlightenment philosophy, guardians of European values, advocates for the rights of Dutch 'natives' who live in fear of the alien threat" (170).

But Hirsi Ali did not even accept God. "Her real ambition was to be the Voltaire of Islam, to attack the faith" (170).

Ahmad Aboutaleb is another character in the vast panorama on this tiny stage. Born in Morocco, he has become a kind of moderate figure, although he remains a pious Muslim. His basic argument is that tolerance should not be a one-way street, and he continually asks the Muslims to tone down their rhetoric. He is considered a turncoat by Muslims, and has a price on his head. He is considered a Jewish sympathizer, and is hated by the far right of Holland, too.

Underneath all the rhetoric is a frequent turning to the Jews of Holland during World War II, and to the myth that the Dutch helped the Jews, and that they are multiculturalists since the 1620s, the first society to be so, and as such, a beacon to the world. In the face of this myth, 70% of Dutch Jews died in World War II, including the likes of Anne Frank. Although many Dutch did care, there was also an active and enthusiastic Nazi movement within Holland. Buruma therefore keeps asking: what is the myth, and what is the truth, not only of their time, but ours, within this supposedly enlightened country?

If this is the description of the society (it is only 260 pages in length, but it's incredible how much description is packed into those easily read pages), then what is the prescription? What is Buruma's argument? What should we do or think differently, after we've read this book?

Buruma argues that Holland gratefully sought out illiterate and backwards men and women from the lowest reaches of Muslim societies in order to exploit their labor within Holland. Mohammed Bouyeri saw his father's broken back as he had spent a lifetime laboring within Holland as a guest worker doing grunt work. Moreover, the Dutch claim there is a way to the top for hard-working foreigners, but in actual fact Muslim youth are rarely successful in Holland. They get sidetracked into lower level jobs, and this in a sense forms a kind of unofficial apartheid.

The religious traditions of Islam form in addition a kind of extra restraint on Muslim women. They want to join the free society, but they also experience guilt toward their fathers and families when they become too western. Even learning Dutch too well and going out with Dutch men is all but forbidden. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's sister committed suicide after making a bolt for freedom and having briefly a Dutch boyfriend, and then reeling in remorse. The Dutch state does give subsidies and free housing to the poorest of the working poor from Arabic countries. However, they do not give them respect.

And so the Muslims of Europe, or at least of Holland, do not feel at home. Their only image of home is that of the afterlife, to which they are all too willing to go after having blown up in resentment the false images of freedom and beauty that the west has temptingly offered to them and to their parents.

The book made me think of Mexicans in America, or Pakistanis in England. The idea is to bring them in and have them do the worst and most denigrating labor for cheaper wages. The first generation is willing to do this because it's better than starving at home, and it gives them hope for their children. The children see the pain of their parents, and wonder if it's worth it. If not, they go on rampages. This may be also what is happening with Mexican crimes in our own country.

What is the answer?

If you're going to invite someone into your home you can't expect them to lick your toilets for generations. You have to either welcome them on equal terms, or keep them out. You have to do one or the other. Buruma doesn't arrive at such a strict black-and-white lesson as I've just put here, but doesn't it make sense? People are especially vulnerable in another person's house. If the host treats you like garbage, or forces your parents to lick the toilet for your supper, you want revenge.

A culture is like a private person's house. If you want true multiculturalism, you have to not only put up with alien traditions, and tolerate them, you must elevate them to equal status with the 'native' traditions. You can't expect guests to give up their language, their culture, without resentment. One of the slydog tricks of multiculturalism is that we expect everyone to come to the west and join the melting pot, which means that our laws will trump those of Sharia, that clitorectomies will become a thing of the past, that Muslim women will be free to engage in sex with whomever they wish, and that Mexicans will speak excellent English and yet still work in orange groves almost for free without social security. We trumpet the "literature" of people who come from countries where freedom of expression is almost without precedent, but we look down on their religious ceremonies, especially when they conflict with our own. Voodoo is still looked down upon, as is head-shrinking, and cannibalism.

Not that these aren't demented.

Buruma doesn't really provide a prescription, nor do I have one. But I at least wanted to describe the problem that Buruma presents, since it's not going to be simple to resolve.

Nicole Nicholson's Raven Feathers

I just received Nicole Nicholson's first chapbook. It's a lavender shade, 33 pages, available from 1601 W. Fifth Avenue #247, Columbus, OH 43212-2310. No price is mentioned, so send her 5 dollars, just to be nice.

There are poems about the mythological monster the kraken, and about her house, and there is a poem called

MIDWEST CITY FROM A HOTEL BALCONY

This sure ain't Paris -- I see spread before
me concrete blocks of hotels, motels, and
strip clubs. This part of town is where the whores
and truckers hang out -- you must understand

that they are usually looking for stands
of the one-night variety, hence they are
looking for each other. Hot wind gusts and
rain have scrubbed the asphalt blank and clean. Bars

flash their neon signs like breasts, to tempt and
lure hapless good time seekers inside to
drink flowing fountains of beer, wine, scotch, and
whiskey -- the kind that turns your face into

stone as you drink. I can't stand the smell
of the room. Next time: another hotel.


(p. 12).

I liked the sharp observations in the poem. I wish that the city, the exact street address, the date, the hotel, and even the room number and the price paid for the hotel were added in a footnote. I like to collect travel information!

One of the things that I like about the postmodern poets like Charles Olson and Ginsberg is that they brought time, and place, back into the foreground. This occludes the timeless aspects of a poem, but they also allow you to zero in on a time and place, and see it through the eyes of a poet. This poem does that, but I would like even more information.

About the kraken: I didn't know that the kraken had once been a beautiful woman. The kraken appears in the mythological film The Clash of the Titans, one of my favorite mythology films. It requires a beautiful young woman once a year -- to eat.

Here are two bits from the poem I Believe:

I believe
that a Supreme Being does exist and that
he
she
or it
is waiting for us to make the first move
because he/she/it is not a deus ex machina

Note: this notion that God could be either a female or gender neutral is widely discussed in the Lutheran church at present. Jesus clearly says I am the son, and He is the Father. This is quite weird, I know -- because he is both his own son, and his own father, according to the idea of the trinity established by St. Augustine. Moreover, Jesus seems to need the Holy Spirit to communicate between these two aspects of himself. However, the Nicene Creed demands that we believe it, and so, I believe it.

But there are a lot of infiltrators in the Lutheran church these days. They have not yet reached a plurality, but many women Lutherans do want to get rid of the male and female pronouns for the deity. I personally believe this is a mistake. The male symbol (according to Bachofen) is the symbol for principles, whereas the female symbol (according to Bachofen) is the symbol for mad desire.

Mad desire is naughty, naughty unless it has been tamed by a principle.

Here's the ending to the poem I Believe:

I believe
in standing tall
and reaching up to the sky
and grabbing the sun by the hand
and like a lamp, adjusting the direction of its rays
to make them shine on you
if others have occluded those golden rays
from shining on you
in the first place

I believe
that you might think that I'm naive
but that doesn't matter
I still believe

The pro-active image of grabbing the sun and getting it to shine on you is wonderful and reveals a powerful imagination, with a sharp intellect.

I personally don't think that God is waiting for us to make the first move. I think it is better to be passive and to accept God's grace, rather than to go after it, grab it, and make it shine on you. I think that God meets us half-way.

However, these are theological differences. The book is quite a treat, and I love having this book. You may like having one, too.

Finding a Balance Between Autobiography and Theory

The key problems are probably autobiographical. For me, for instance, a key problem was the death of Michael McKeon. He was 19 when he died of a methodone/alcohol overdose. He had been the valedictorian of the class two years before mine in high school. When he died, I got very suspicious of the hippy movement.

This meant that I went to Naropa to study their poets. I worked with Ginsberg, Corso, burroughs, Ed Sanders, and tried to figure out what was wrong with them. They were like those robots that spit sparks and head towards the edge of the table, taking a generation with them.

I then went to Seattle based on something that Burroughs said. I had thought I should go to Paris, but he said go somewhere where there's nobody else going, so that the apartment rentals won't be too high. A friend had written from Seattle, and off I went.

What plagued me in Seattle were the feminist separatists. They hated men. There were scads of them. They had presses, and were organized, but each one was loopier than the next. I had no idea where they came from, or why they were so mad. I largely got along with them on a one-to-one basis, but as a group they were impossible.

I studied French with a guy named James Winchell, who got me interested in theory. He was a graduate student in French. One night he suggested I go to a theory lecture by Rene Girard. Girard was a Catholic whose dad had run the Museum of the Popes in Avignon. Girard had been the one with Derrida to set off the theory explosion at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore in 1966. People don't read Girard as much as they do Derrida, but he's about a thousand times more useful to me. Which is to say that he's useful to me.

Girard developed the notion that communities develop scapegoats that they then place all their sins upon. This is a basic Christian notion, but it helped me to understand the feminist separatists, and also all the Marxist bird-brainism I had been hearing about in the Seattle left, in coffeehouses, and in the rock music which wasn't yet grunge, but which was very grungy.

I then met Steven Shaviro at a party. He had green hair, and I thought, I can deal with this guy. He was teaching at the University of Washington English department, and seemed to have a brain, as well as a sense of humor, and I liked how he was vulernable, and open.

So I went and got a Ph.D., following Winchell out of the Seattle bohemian left, and into academia. And then getting a job in Finland, and now in upstate New York.

At each point there are key junctures. When McKeon died just out of high school I came to doubt Bohemia, and the LSD solution. I doubted the Marxism, too, that college teachers had tossed at us. I had read the anarchists, and they had taken the MArxists apart. But I always secretly preferred the liberals.

My dad is an independent, as is my mom. They both came out of Iowa, on the G.I. Bill, in the fifties. My dad taught sports education in colleges, my mom taught 1st grade. They had basic common sense, thrift, the notion of Lutheranism was peripheral, but we were dropped off at Sunday school and occasionally had to sit through the whole service. It was the only thing like philosophy I was ever exposed to as a child. Pastor Leopold died recently. I remember thinking he was not a healthy person, but then, if you're in the ministry, you have to have one foot in the beyond.

I played sports growing up. My dad taught all those sports, and liked to teach them to me, so I was good at them, and always had peer acceptance as a result. I was a soccer standout in high school, and wrestled with a winning record, and so I was never what you would call a nerd.

I might have been, but escaped that designation.

And just went along, escaping one box after another that were set by the despots of the left and right. Occasionally finding something or someone sentient. Attracted by the Bohemian left, but stunned by the thought of Rene Girard, while thinking Derrida was basically a goof-up. Not impressed by Pound or Eliot, but liking Marianne Moore. It was the humor, and the basic sense she had of her family, and buoyantly balanced. How can you not be buoyantly balanced? The buoyantly balanced people live long lives. I like those people. Moore lived to be 88. I wrote my dissertation on Pierre Klossowski who lived into his late 90s. I also like P.G. Wodhouse, who died at 94. And I like Mary Midgley, who is 90, and just getting started.

We're nearing the end of the fmaily reunion and no one here plans to vote for Obama, and no one much likes McCain. McCain's too old, and Obama is either extremely naive to be in his church and not know what was going down, or else he's playing us. I suspect it's the latter.

I liked the peach pie, the potato salad, sitting next to my dad and watching badminton on the Olympics that I swore I would boycott because of the bad way they treated the Tibetan monks in the spring, and talking to my brother who runs a big bookstore in DC.

My DC brother can't stand politics at all, and thinks it's all flibbertigibbets high on themselves.

Who knows?

Delaware, I read in the newspaper this morning, has a new official macroinvertebrate, called the stonefly. This widget of info seemed somehow worth all of Derrida, and most of Charles Olson. The stonefly is an important indicator of water quality in the Chesapeake. Where they exist, the ecosystem is sound, and balanced.

Is McCain the Liberal?

James Madison's Princeton Mentor John Witherspoon

John Witherspoon was the professor at Princeton who had the largest impact on the thinking of James Madison, who squibbed the Bill of Rights. The first and therefore most important of the rights has to do with freedom of speech, and freedom of religion. This means that no one faction should be allowed to take control of the government, or to establish their religion (or politics, as they frequently amount to the same thing) as the one POLITICALLY CORRECT mode. Madison argued in Federal Letter #10 that "factions" should be allowed to compete in the public sphere.



Scott Crider in his book "The Office of Assertion," (ISI Books 2005), asks:



"What causes 'faction'? Two causes: liberty and intellectual diversity."



If one group imagines that they are saintly, and that all other groups are demonic, then they give themselves the right to take over power and squelch all other factions. This is what happened in most communist countries and now in many Islamic countries (such as Iran).

Everything in communist countries is controlled by the faction in power including the right to speak. In communist countries such as North Korea there is even a nationalization of literature itself. If something gets printed, it gets printed by the government. No one else has the right to print anything. Here's a poem called Falling Persimmons by Byungyu Chon, from the book Literature from the Axis of Evil (The New Press 2006),



Persimmons fall
thump, thump
where the demarcation line cuts
across the weedy hill, above the Kwanson Ferry...



(I cut four stanzas about the sadness of the demarcation line)



The girls in this village used to marry
before the feasting table
on which were heaped delicious persimmons
then cross the Imjin River, bound for Paju.
Now wrinkles have furrowed
faces once as red as persimmons.



Where have they gone -- the girls of yesterday?
I search for them across the river -- in vain.
The persimmons I touch in dream
thump in my heart.

Calling for the owner, for unification,
the persimmons
cut into this land
thump, thump.

(pp/ 173-174)



This political correctness in which literature and art are controlled by the faction in power is something that I think all Americans (even Democrats) should be united against. It is un-Democratic.



When the New Yorker printed its Barack Obama cartoon on the cover last week one got the sense that the left of this country felt that one of its organs of control had slipped, and they censored the New Yorker. This is only a mild censorship -- one of strenuous and withering criticism of the SPIRIT of comedy itself. One wonders however whether Obama realizes he is not a liberal. His wife is clearly not a liberal. His pastor is clearly not a liberal. At least not in the Madisonian sense in which "liberty and intellectual diversity" are values that trump all others. Obama didn't like it that a cartoon appeared in which he wasn't able to control the image.

The nationalization of industry under Marxism is swiftly followed by a nationalization of speech (which includes all art). "Intellectual diversity" is swiftly destroyed in favor of "correct speech," which means speech that has been directed by the selfish motives of the faction that enjoys power. Against this there is a long tradition in the Republican party that reaches back to Witherspoon, and is for liberty, and INTELLECTUAL diversity. My sense is that this is where McCain stands. Correct me if I'm wrong.



"Witherspoon's reading and conviction and the scars of battle from Scotland made him an opponent of what he called 'sacerdotal tyranny' and he comprehended in one cause civil and religious liberty. His orthodoxy -- his moderate Calvinism, for want of a better term -- in religious matters should not lead a modern reader to the mistaken conclusion that such a man would be conservative in politics; there is an old tradition, important to the Protestant beginnings of America, that combined Reformed Christian belief with republican (which then meant progressive) politics" (51).The Business of May Next: James Madison & The Founding, by William Lee Miller (Charlottesville: U of V Press, 1992).