Individual Vs. Community Rights

One of the dichotomies present in A World Made New is that the Soviets and their client states and fellow travellers wanted the rights of states to trump the rights of individuals in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which they were preparing. Eleanor Roosevelt, although widely regarded as a socialist, wanted individual rights to trump the rights of states. This makes her a LIBERAL rather than a SOCIALIST (the two are commonly lumped in American discourse, but I don't know why, since they are polar opposites).

"The ultimate political question of the day, and thus the question for the Human Rights Commisssion, [Charles] Malik concluded, was whether the state was for the sake of the human person or the person for the sake of the state" (41).

In general Marxists claim that the state trumps the individual's rights.

It's not yet clear to me how and why Eleanor Roosevelt and the west were generally for individual rights (LIBERAL).

I read and contributed to Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse for decades, and he is another one who would put the individual rights of the author above the rights of the state (he came from communist Romania, where things were reversed).

In one of the Corpse anthologies I remember the wonderful essay by Carl Rakosi which was originally a letter to Eliot Weinberger, and which appears in Volume I of the E. Corpse Reader, 1988-1998, in which he says that he became a member of the communist party and it basically extinguished his poetry for a long period. The communists told him his poetry didn't mean anything to the larger society so he had to do something else. It took him a little long while to break the stranglehold.

"...what value does poetry have for society? I do not hold the view, passionately held by some, that its value depends in some way on the proportion of its value to the society. To believe this is to fall into the Communist trap. Trotsky himself, that fiery revolutionist, understood this. Literature, he said, was a different thing. It should be left alone to go its own way and not be expected to be another organ of the state. ... Writing poetry and reading it are ways of living, and like life itself need no other justification. Its value is therefore existential. This is not to say that poetry has no social value ... it often does, but not always and not necessarily" (39-40).

E. Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

I'm about 50 pages into A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by Mary Ann Glendon (Random House 2001). Glendon is the Learned Hand law professor at Harvard University and has published books on family law, and human rights.

After World War II, as the United Nations prepared to set up new rules that would prevent another Nazi state from arising, one of the questions became what criteria could be used to intervene in another state's internal policies.

The UN's Charter says that, "'Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State, or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII.' Chapter VII's exception to that principle, limited to situations where the Security Council determines that INTERNATIONAL [my emphasis] peace and security are threatened, could be controlled by any of the Big Five [America, Russia, Britain, China, and France], through their veto power" (19).

This bears directly on the right to intervene in Iraq. Apparently the UN could not go in there UNLESS they threatened another country. And thus, the claim of "weapons of mass destruction." This may be also what is at stake in Iranian and N. Korean nuclear aggrandizement. Purely internal problems are left to the authority of each state. Does it mean that the Nazis had the right to commit genocide against the Jews, as long as the Jews killed were all German citizens? Did Hussein have the right to gas Kurds, as long as they were Iraqi Kurds?

Hitler had actually used the right to intervene in foreign countries to help out those who were victims inside of it. Hitler had gone into Czechoslovakia "under pretext of championing the rights of their citizens" (20). He had said something about the Germans of the Sudetanland area, who were apparently being hinkmeistered by the Czechs.

"When is intervention in a country's internal affairs legitimate, and when not?" Glendon asks (20).

At what point does the UN have the right to send troops into Rwanda, Haiti, Kosovo, or East Timor, or Iran, Myanmar, or North Korea?

Something called the Genocide Convention of 1948 obligates all the signers of the UN to intervene (signed December 9, 1948). Genocide is defined as "any of a series of enumerated acts 'committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such'" (243).

Certainly Hussein's destruction of the Iraqi Kurds would fit the "in part" designation. Kim Jong-Il's famines have resulted in millions of deaths, even if they aren't specifically targeted against a particular ethnic group. Is a leader really allowed to kill their own citizens as long as they do so in an even-handed way?

Myanmar's attempt to silence and destroy the Karen Christians in the SE of their country certainly fits the rubric of deliberate destruction of an ethnic and religious group (aboiut half of the Karens are Christian).

One could say the same thing about the Chinese attempt to destroy Tibet's culture and people (Tibetans are Buddhist, while the Chinese are Marxists).

American attempts in the 19th century to destroy various American Indian tribes, would also qualify (albeit belatedly).

Australian attempts to deracinate the aboriginals would qualify (again belatedly).

Every nation is based to some degree on its homogeneity. In America, we have many different groups, but we agree on certain principles such as agreeing to disagree. But many countries around the world have an annoying minority or two that they would just as soon wipe out. And so they proceed to do so. The UN's Charter says it must stop such occurrences.

And yet, the big five also have VETO POWER. Therefore, we cannot intervene in China, or in their immediate sphere (N. Korea, as well as Myanmar, are Chinese client states, as is Zimbabwe, and the Sudan). We can't help the Christians of the southern Sudan because the Chinese won't allow it. They are busy extracting minerals from the Sudan, and they don't want any interference with the government that is letting them do it. Same goes for Zimbabwe.

Countries on Russia's borders (such as Georgia and Chechnya) would also receive a veto if the UN were to attempt to enter.

Almost all nations have at one point or another squelched and destroyed prior nations or peoples within their borders. The French obliterated the Bretons, and forbade their language from being spoken (it's making a modest comeback). They did the same thing to the people who spoke Provencal and other languages in southern France. The Basques in Spain and in southern France would also qualify, and yet France also has veto power as one of the Big Five, and it was they who nixed the UN from entering into Iraq (they had a good deal with Hussein over oil, I vaguely recall).

Intervention is therefore a principle of the UN specifically in terms of the Genocide Convention, and yet, because the Big Five can also prevent intervention through its veto powers, it is unlikely that the UN can ever effectively intervene in any specific genocide unless it falls outside the sphere of influence of any of the Big Five. That's an increasingly small area, and also may be countries which are largely irrelevant as global players, such as Haiti (which I believe still has UN troops?).

Stalin was one of the Big Five, and his own exterminations, and enslavement, as well as forced deportations (enormous numbers of Russians forcibly moved into Estonia with little warning, famines in the Ukraine to weaken that polity, and the ongoing destruction of the Chechnyans are part of this legacy) could not be interdicted, especially during PEACETIME (many of the rules were limited to warfare).

The network of rules under which the UN works are still not well-known to most of us, and how the legality of the UN was created in the aftermath by countries which are now at one another's throat, must be recuperated. That's why I'm reading Glendon's book.

Could America have intervened in the Philippines to stop Imelda Marcos from buying so many shoes? Could the Philippines intervene in the US to stop Mrs. Obama from owning so many outfits?

Questions such as these are usually decided purely on military strength, but now increasingly we have attempted to put in place a universal system of ethics based on human rights, but even once we decide yes or no, there is still the military aspect, which frames the bottom line. The UN doesn't have its own troops, insofar as I know. They borrow troops from other nations. This makes the whole system unwieldy, and highly dependent on the willingness of its member nations.

Commenters Must Now Post ID at LS

Recently we've had one or more strange commenters on this blog who've taken other commenters' names and posted, publicly wished for the death of my small children, and had sexual fantasies about the president that they've attributed to me and others on the blog.

It's somewhat reminiscent of Deborah Frisch, the psychology prof at Arizona State University, who harassed fellow-bloggers for years under various pseudonyms, wishing someone would "JonBenet" (used as a verb) his children, and also attributed bizarre sexual conduct to conservative bloggers. Frisch's remarkable lunacy has now been documented and frames a profile of the extreme left cyberstalker. She has now lost her position at Arizona State University, and has been unemployed for several years, but this only accelerated her belligerence, and subsequent appearance before criminal courts.

Frisch has been arrested and convicted of cyberstalking, a crime which in Oregon is partially defined by the rules governing stalking (c is the most pertinent to our own case, but B is also to be used here, including remarks about individual's sexual preferences, and/or lack of ability to perform, etc.):

Harasses or annoys another person by:
(A) Subjecting such other person to offensive physical contact;
or
(B) Publicly insulting such other person by abusive words or
gestures in a manner intended and likely to provoke a violent
response;
(b) Subjects another to alarm by conveying a false report,
known by the conveyor to be false, concerning death or serious
physical injury to a person, which report reasonably would be
expected to cause alarm; or
(c) Subjects another to alarm by conveying a telephonic { + ,
electronic + } or written threat to inflict serious physical
injury on that person or to commit a felony involving the person
or property of that person or any member of that person's family,
which threat reasonably would be expected to cause alarm.


Since we have indeed been now subjected to several of these (Especially under B and c), we have instituted a new blogger ID program which should be able to help police this site, and keep it relatively safe for users, and to ID any leftist or other perpetrators who use such terroristic tactics in order to silence legal speech by commenters on this site.

There ARE further steps we can take, including making commenters sign up at Google.com, in order to comment. Another step is that we can moderate the comments, and tighten even further the identification necessary to speak. In an age when leftist goons rise up out of the swamps of the night wanting totalitarian control of discourse (this seems to have worsened since we've gotten the new president), I can only say that I will do what I can within the law, and using all the means of the law, to keep this site safe for commenters, and safe for a wide variety of legal discourse.

Anyone who steps out of that sphere (known to all normal and moral beings, but use the above statutes from the Oregon law as guidelines if you're unsure), will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

There are repercussions in the free world for attempting to silence discourse through terror. Deborah Frisch is the first leftist goon to discover this, but I'm almost certain she won't be the last. In general, I would prefer that comments here remain about ideas, and not become personal, or targeted at a specific person, or their sexual preferences, or even their lack of education, imagined or otherwise. Not everyone has had the opportunities we have had to educate ourselves, and I want the relatively uneducated to feel free to speak here. Common sense is something that academics often lack, and can learn from. Conservatives and centrists will also be monitored, but in general, I haven't had any trouble (or as much trouble) from these quarters, nor seen any trouble from those quarters on any of the blogs I've frequented. This doesn't mean that I won't! I would prefer that people who come here think of this as a teetotaler's seminar (I don't drink), rather than as a beer picnic, or free-for-all, in which anything can be vouchsafed, and in which people can and should show up in just any state, saying things about other people's mothers, and children.

Anyone especially who mentions the death of anyone's children here will become subject to full pursuit by the law in the interests of children's safety, the highest value of Luther and Lutherans, if not of Breton and the surrealists. In this matter, we seriously side with the Lutherans. Leave people's children alone.

JUST WAR, by Jean B Elshtain

When I brought up the fact that I would blog this book I sensed less than general enthusiasm. I finished it last evening. At the end of the book is a half-decent appendix called What We're Fighting For, signed by 62 scholars across the Muslim-Christian-Jewish spectrum. To my surprise, a scholar from the UW English department named David Bosworth signed it. I shall have to google him.

The document purports to offer a universal rationale of human norms that should be adhered to across cultures. So, it's not to emphasize difference, which is the general trend in multiculturalism, but it's meant to emphasize a universal set of norms to which they believe that all peoples, of all religions, ought to adhere, since, they claim, all religions are aiming toward the same universal values. (It's hard for me to understand where voodoo and Lutherans overlap, much less Buddhists and Animists, but I'll take their word for it!)

Against the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the signatories affirm that, "Wars may not legitimately be fought for national glory, to avenge past wrongs, for territorial gain, or for any other nondefensive purpose" (189).

They also avow that American culture in its most nihilistic aspects is "unattractive and harmful. Consumerism as a way of life. The notion of freedom as no rules. ... The weakening of marriage and family life. Plus an enormous entertainment and communications apparatus that relentlessly glorifies such ideas and beams them, whether they are welcome or not, into nearly every corner of the globe" (184).

The 62 signers pledge to do everything they can to stop our entertainment industry from polluting the world with its cheap values.

They believe that there are "universal moral truths" that are "accessible to all people," and cite American texts such as Declaration of Independence, G. Washington's Farewell, Lincoln's Gettysburg, and King's Letter from the Birmingham Jail, as evidence of universal norms. The Bible isn't specifically mentioned, but does underwrite all these other documents.

The 62 signers discount the right of Al Qaeda to be taken as a military rather than as a paramilitary group, since they are not answerable to any international treaty, and have sworn to kill noncombatants. Thus the 62 affirm nationhood and the Geneva Convention as the basis of military legitimacy.

"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."

This comes out of a document assembled by Eleanor Roosevelt shortly after WWII, entitled the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1, and also forms the first article of this document, What We're Fighting For.

The book was reasonable enough. I especially liked the chapter on Niebuhr and Tillich. However, none of her points seems vivid enough to blog, except there is a strong sense that we ought to try to build responsible nations with responsible laws. Where laws break down we are eventually going to have a bother, and the longer we wait the worse it's going to get. She argues that many thought that Somalia and its capital were regional problems. But local problems such as that and other sub-Saharan nations like Rwanda do eventually create a hemorrhage that affects everyone around the globe. The Taliban, the situation in Iran, and the situation in North Korea are what she means. Once law and order break down, and a Hobbesian world results, you have an oooky wooky mess with the usual results for children and women, such as the situation in Somalia and the southern Sudan and Uzbekistan. "children are being ripped apart by explosions, people are disappearing from their homes, and women by the thousands are being violently raped and assaulted" (177).

The question throughout the text is whether a universal body can govern the world. She answers, it hasn't worked thus far. So, American military might is going to have to step up, thinking on a case by case basis whether it's going to be too much blood. Clinton wanted a zero-casualty war in Bosnia, and never committed troops, and instead released bombs from 20,000 feet to accomplish their ends. Elshtain thinks this is sloppy, and believes we should instead suffer American military casualties, in order to limit the casualties among civilians on the ground. "Real commitment of resources, time, even lives, may well be the cost of increased global stability. Homes, schools, and hospitals cannot be built unless someone is holding the forces of anarchy at bay. That someone may well be the casual Americans" (178).

If McCain had won the election, this mentality might have prevailed. With Obama in the White House, I think instead we will falsely accuse Cambridge police of "stupidity," and ignore the rest of the world, while we sit down for a sit-com and a beer. Elshtain argues that the whole world should have the right to our equal regard, as we in turn police it. Not sure there are enough Americans to go around. If America was infinite in resources and personnel, this would be do-able. Insofar as we are not, and are in fact stumbling economically, I think it's probably better to let the women and children around the world go on getting blown up. I need a new car, and am looking seriously at President Obama's Cash for Clunkers program.

Next book up: A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by Mary Ann Glendon (Random House, 2001).

LYME'S FUNDING

Lyme's funding via the NIH and the CDC is about 9 million dollars per annum. About 1% of the population has it. It's rarely fatal, and yet it slows one down quite a bit. A friend of mine who got it (a doctor from a big NYC hospital who got it hiking) reported to me that he felt like he had had the flu for fifteen years. He said he had good days when he was up for four hours before he had to lie down again.

The government is willing to spend 9 million for Lyme's (funding has nearly doubled over the last few years). West Nile disease has about 30 million dollars appropriated for funding research and prevention.

By contrast, AIDS funding is about 20 billion dollars.

AIDS is more often fatal than either West Nile or Lyme's, but there is the question of etiology. AIDS is almost always gotten via sexual contact. That is, you have to choose to perform an activity to get it. It's a disease of adults, who make poor choices. (Monogamous couples can't get it.) The other source of contact is intravenous drug use, in which a shared needle is the source of the infection.

I personally would never perform anal sex. I wouldn't do it, because I think it would hurt the other person. It just doesn't seem like the two things (penis and anus) would fit. One's bigger than the other, and the one is not designed to receive the other. So there is blood, and blood and feces then mix. Obviously, this is a lifestyle for some. Perhaps even the very thing that many people live for. Maybe even die for. Fine, but it still doesn't make any sense to me. It's as if someone was to live for jumping off an apartment on to their head, I still wouldn't think it was sensible, even if the vast majority started to do it, and even voted in a president who thought it was the best idea around. It's no more sensible than to decide to screw someone in their ear. Why should the people have to pay for the brain damage that would result if a whole sector of society decided to screw each other in the ear? There would be hearing damage. That would have to be repaired, as well as the brain damage. Should the population have to pay for self-inflicted damage?

Well, the counterargument runs: we already have to pay for fatsos who eat so much they develop heart disease. This runs to the tune of a half a trillion dollars. Who's to say that people can't eat what they want, and screw what they want.

This is a good point!

But I would also never inject an unknown substance into my veins! What kind of a lunatic would do such a thing? Still, people do it. It's a whole lifestyle for many people. Many people, called heroin addicts, actually live for the next injection! And/or die!

I don't know what to say except that that is a self-inflicted injury, too.

So let's think about outlawing self-inflicted injuries. It is already against the law to commit suicide. Why then should we allow people to get fat? I think there should be a law against being fat. I think there should be whole prisons set aside for weight-watching. It should be against the law to eat or sell a Snicker's Bar. I mean this. I am not snickering! People should be imprisoned for getting over the BMI recommendations as posted by the Federal government. If government gets into health care, they also have to have health care police. And they should slap lard sandwiches out of the hands of perps and force them on to the ground for 50 push-ups!

On the other hand, children who play outside are likely to get Lyme's Disease through no fault of their own and aren't committing any health crime. In fact, health recommendations suggest that we turn OFF the TV and have children play outdoors. Fine, but then they get Lyme's, and the government turns its back. The disease has a bizarre cycle in which it lives inside a mouse for two years and then inside a deer for a year, and then hops on the skin of a tot, and within 24 hours, the damage has been done. The disease is exploding, especially in coastal areas. It's a disease that has gotten ten times more victims this year than ten years ago, and is likely to go up that number again in ten more years. Because Lyme's disease victims don't have a lifestyle in common, they don't have a lobby.

Therefore, no funding. Well, very little funding.

Most of the people who get Lyme's live in the country, and have fewer contacts in the mainstream media, and are children, so they don't vote. The people who get sexier diseases often live in the cities, and either are journalists, or are friends with journalists, and they do vote.

Because you need to put pressure on elected representatives in order to secure funding, you need journalists, you need a voice. Funding goes through an appropriations committee. The last cycle had a Representative from Virginia named Frank Wolf who suggested we double the funding for Lyme's. So it's up to nine million measley dollars.

That's about three dollars for every American who has the disease. That's less than a Happy Meal. If 1% of Americans now have the disease, then that would mean that about 3 million Americans are suffering from Lyme's, each receiving a Happy Meal's worth of care.

Many of Lyme's victims report that their childhoods are lost, and that they cannot pursue a career. It's true that fatality from the disease is lower than that of AIDS, but the CWL is all but dead.

And now many people are living longer with AIDS and can return to their former lifestyles of rampant sex and intravenous drug use.

What about the children of Lyme's, who can't get back to playing outdoors?

Once the Happy Meal is over, their vision is often so impaired and the headaches so intense they can't even enjoy Sesame Street.

If we cannot secure research funding for CWL because of better organized lobbies that now hog well more than half the CDC's annual budget for AIDS and other STD research and prevention, is there anything else that can be done to snap the cycle on West Nile and Lyme's, which disproportionately affect children?

For West Nile, there is mosquito spray, and you can drain abandoned pools of water. And yet still last year there were about 4000 cases of West Nile from coast to coast. But with only 8 fatalities, mostly in the elderly population, it's hard to get more than a p. 13 story with two paragraphs at most.

For Lyme's, which has a much larger population of victims, and yet no fatalities, perhaps the disease is too non-dramatic to invoke journalistic empathy, especially from the government currently in position and its backs. I have a dramatic suggestion. You can't kill mice. You can't kill the ticks. They're too small. What then, about killing all American deer in order to save our little dears? What about sending up helicopter gunships and destroying every last deer population in North America? In about a week, this could be accomplished. The deer wouldn't know what hit them. And who would miss the deer? Would the drivers who hit them? Perhaps the hunters would miss them, but they already do miss them, a lot. Because deer are very tricky, and hard to hit! But not from helicopter gunships with trained military personnel aboard! Let them go after the deer, and save our children from Lyme's!

The deer would be shooting ducks! It would be a turkey shoot!

And then we could give that nine million dollars presently allotted by the CDC toward funding the diseases of the city dwellers and their STDs.

Does that sound like a win-win?

Aung San Suu Kyi

Lutheran Surrealism occasionally pipes up against southeast Asian aggression whether it is toward the Buddhists of Tibet, or by the Buddhists of Myanmar's military state, where taking of sexual slaves by the military is a common feature of everyday life, and where ethnic cleansing along the lines practiced in the former Yugoslavia is official government policy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Burma

In the days to come Aung San Suu Kyi's fate will be decided. She is the 1991 Nobel Prize Winner who won an 82% landslide election in the early 90s in her presidential bid but was denied acess to the presidential office and instead was placed under house arrest for the last 16 years. That house arrest has now been changed to a new address in one of Myanmar's worst prisons. She may remain there in spite of worldwide protests pending the outcome of a trial due to end in a few days.

We deplore the lack of true justice of any kind in Myanmar, and wish that Henry Gates and President Obama would focus on something worthwhile for a change, and make a statement with regard to the Buddhist-Marxist nightmare of Myanmar instead of worrying about a police officer doing his job correctly in the comparatively legally-sane neighborhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The American president seems to say almost nothing about Iran, and next to nothing about Myanmar, but goes on and on for days about a non-incident in Cambridge, in which a police officer tried to help an overpaid literary critic, but was rebuffed amidst taunts against his mama. The president castigated the wrong individual. But enough of that. There's a world outside of Harvard, and the president ought to also stand for freedom worldwide, and to promote human rights around the globe, especially where they are most egregiously absent.

The Map is Not The Territory

One thing is also another. If Marxism is a road map, it is one in which the signs are meant to be serious. One class is one, and the other is the other, and never shall the twain meet. However, people are both genders and more, and we absorb other races, and the signs are not so separate, even unto class.

LS is another system of signs. We think that signes are also singes (monkeys) playing about. In that, we are something like the Buddhists (playful), BUT the Buddhists have the big fatso as their ultimate sign, while we have the scrawny Christ. The Buddha looks like he's eaten everything for miles around especially in those mountain top Buddha shrines such as the one in the harbor of Hong Kong that takes up so much space.

I had this whole idea mapped out last night while sleeping, but it evaporated upon waking. I wanted to contrast fat with thin: Falstaff against Gaunt, Eastwood against Michael Moore, Kate Moss against Andrea Dworkin, Augustine against Marx. But it evaporated upon waking. I have the signs still in my mind, but not their significance.

But LS exists to some extent to "wave red flags" I remember this phrase because I wanted to signal the influx of Buddhists as to what I'm up to here. I wave red flags a bit. This pulls out the bull in others, who attack the red flags. Somehow I was going to work the term "bullshit" in, but I also wanted to stipulate that signs are both REAL and SYMBOLIC. Michael Moore is a symbol of a certain kind of fatuous thought, but he is also a real person. He's fat, but his thought is very thin.

I must have been thinking this while driving to New York City yesterday while holding a map on the steering wheel, watching the exit signs go past. All the way down, all the way back, without missing a single exit. Perfect execution. At bottom the map is a system of signs, but the road also does exist. It is more than a system of signs.

Coney Island is a system of signs, but at bottom it does also exist. The carnies are symbols of carnies, but they are more than that, too. They have a home life in which they are presumably not carnies.

Be careful what you sign up for. If Kate Moss is a sign of one kind of woman, and Andrea Dworkin a sign of another entirely, they nevertheless meet under the sign of women. And yet they are both real, too.

Some maps are better than others. The map I was using yesterday was excellent. It had all the exits in blue, and they were the correct numbers. At bottom LS is a kind of detective excursion into mapping on a global level, in which I posit that Lutheranism is a better system of signs than that of other systems. This is partially due to its authorship. Luther was a better author than others. He makes you cry he's so careful about giving direction. And yet even he got lost a few times. The remarks on the Jews are a sign that he too could get lost. Allowing the bigamy of Philip of Hesse was a wink and a nudge in exchange for protection from the Catholic armies that wanted to roll up Luther's new map, in the local dialect, which kept them from treating the citizenry of Europe the way con artists treat their marks.

Aquinas spent too much time on the afterlife. Hundreds of pages positing non-empirical reasoned out statements with regard to whether fingernails will grow in the afterlife. Luther simply said, "We'll see." He returns it to the empirical.

Luther took two books out of the Bible. One is James, and the notion of Good Works. The other is Revelations. He red flagged these as bullshit, and unreliable.

Lutheran Surrealism is a detective game, but we are only the Inspector Clouseaus of signage.

Luther allowed the arts and the sciences to have complete freedom of inquiry. This is not so in Marxist and Islamic countries. In Marxist countries the arts and sciences are under the political wing, and have to get the go-ahead from the Party for every discovery. Something similar was true in Catholic countries. Whenever you find censorship, or some parties denied the ability to read or publish (many Islamics disallow women to read, and or publish) you stunt the mental growth of your country. Catholic countries still lag in literacy. Marxist countries are totally stunted in literacy. See North Korea. Lutheran countries supreme.

It's not the Lutherans that are supreme, it's the freedom of inquiry for the whole nation that is supreme.

The World Trade Center was a SIGN which Bin Laden censored.

His is a system AGAINST the freedom of capital, and individualism. He reads against it, much like the Marxists.

Michael Berube is also against reading for everyone. His symbol of himself as a bloody hockey player aligns him with OBL. They are similar in wanting to control signage and not allow others to speak (Jacques and I banned at his board).

Coney Island is a sign with a name, and a history. It isn't appreciably better than other Amusement Parks, but its history lends it an ontological reality, but here I approach the edge of the known world and all beyond is oceanic and off the map.

In her speech before the Forum on Women in Huairou China in 1995, San Suu Kyi had Buddhist arguments that she wedged against the militaristic Chinese regime which limited her speech to 1,500 listeners. She says that, "genuine tolerance requires an active effort to try to understand the point of view of others; it implies broad-mindedness and vision, as well as confidence in one's own ability to meet new challenges without resorting to intransigence or violence" (38). She also says that Lord Buddha "did not want human beings to live in silence... 'like dumb animals'" (40), and thus instituted something like a parliament at the end of the rainy season retreat. (Quoted in HUMAN RIGHTS: Great Speeches in History, edited by Laura Hitt, published in San Diego by Greenhaven Press, in 2002).

Myanmar, which has the worst human rights record in the world, refused to allow San Suu Kyi to be president of the country although she won 82% of the vote in 1990.

Communist governments have a total control of signage. When the industrial revolution went off the rails in the early 1800s the poets and the churches spoke out against it in Britain. Communists simply imprison poets and ban the churches so you get Chernobyl and the death of the Aral Sea, without anyone to speak up. The Chinese and their colonial states such as North Korea and Myanmar are well in line with the absurd Marxist tradition in this respect.

We encourage at LS instead a certain kind of humorous rankling of conflicting signage, combined with what San Suu Kyi calls "genuine tolerance" and "broad-mindedness" in the spirit of the parliament that Buddha called at the end of the rainy season.

Everyone should have the right to read, and the right to speak while realizing that we are always able to get things wrong: getting off at the wrong exit, or getting off in a terrible jumble of signs, and the mind's circus, and the outer circus, leave us unable to negotiate or find true north. In the spirit of the blind helping the blind to disorient themselves, our humble blog exists to wave red flags, and confuse one another in a spirit of comraderie between lefts and rights, souths and norths, Buddhists and surrealists, while recognizing that all these signs are also really not so separate, but are very likely to become one another, in the changing map that's also a kaleidoscope of blue and red, of bullshit and good sense.

DO CRIMINALS REALLY LOOK JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE?

The other day was the annual day for Bovina, a tiny country village about twenty minutes away that has a teeny store and a library and about 300 people. I always go because they have a booksale and there are some readers in Bovina who give away readable books to the library and the resale price via the library is 50 cents per book.

This year along with paperback copies of Whitman and Aristophanes and Graham Greene and a book about John Dewey I grabbed a book called DISCOVER WHAT YOU'RE BEST AT, by Linda Gale. I love personality inventories! You take six tests. One is on business (they ask you hypotheticals about business quandaries), clerical (they test your accuracy in finding typos), logic (story problems), mechanical (figuring out shapes in space), numerical (simple math, but you have to hurry), and social (hypotheticals about dealing with troubled people, or how to think about people).

So far I've done Logic -- and got the Very Superior category (best), and Business at which I placed in the Well-Above Average category (two short of the top category) and I did Numerical in which I placed in High Average (three short of the top, but there are still five categories below that one). In Clerical, I also received VERY SUPERIOR (I was a Temp Sec for a decade, and was very good at it, and loved being accurate).

However, I started to do the Social category, but balked at MANY of the "correct" answers. It says in Question 18:

Most criminals....

a. have beady eyes
b. look like other people
c. have a very high I.Q.
d. have a good sense of humor

The "correct" answer is b. I object. Criminals do not look like other people. The correct answer is a. All criminals look odd. You can spot a criminal from a mile away. The social workers who made up this test think that all crime is economic, and therefore it's a question of need when people commit crimes. This however is not the case. Criminals are outsiders, who do not like other people, and their method of acting this out is crime. They are anti-social, which leads them to have beady eyes. You can always tell a criminal by their eyes. They don't look you in the eye, and when they do, it feels bad, because they don't like you or anybody else. Criminals have hard hearts. they also misbehave in other areas. If a man is cheating behind his wife's back for a decade, he's also a criminal in many other areas. Crime CAN BE economic, if a child steals an apple in a village in rural Cambodia, it might be economic, because the Buddhist system is letting them down (all the monks are eating pretty well, but the children are not necessarily eating at all).

But in America, all crime is undertaken by wicked people. This means people that don't like other people, and do the crime because they do not like other people, and want to hurt the polity that they feel has hurt them, and now owes them.

Rapists for instance are wicked. They did not bond properly with their families and so are committing an antisocial crime. It would take a complete monster to rape someone. Bank robbers are not just normal people who look like everybody else. They're sociopaths who take because they feel they weren't given enough love by their families. Killers like the Unabomber feel that people don't understand them, and they don't fit in, so they want to blow other people up. Have you seen the Unabombers' eyes?? Just look at the guy! Are you telling me he looks JUST like EVERYBODY else? All you have to do is LOOK at the people in the Wanted Ads. They NEVER look like other people, and the eyes are the windows of the soul. They look mad as HELL, lost, and vengeful. Come on! Let's get empirical. Doesn't anybody WATCH Forensic Files? You can ALWAYS tell if the criminal is guilty by looking at their eyes. If it's a murder, at least one eye looks mad as HELL!

Almost all criminals are orphans. Sociology will tell you that criminals are people who either hate their families, or never even knew their families. Charles Manson never knew his father, and his mother was an armed robber who beat her son whenever she wasn't in jail (very rarely). And talk about beady eyes! Manson's eyes are just plain rapier points. (I'm not saying that all orphans are criminals. Some orphans have had kind foster parents, or have had God or some pastor who loves them, and this will often suffice.)

Manson's whole "Family" consisted of cast-offs who didn't fit in their own families and didn't feel loved as children, and had no religious background. They were sick. Look at a picture of them. Each one has weirder eyes than the next.

Criminals DO NOT LOOK LIKE OTHER people, and they don't act like other people. They don't know how to fit in, and don't like other people enough to follow the rules needed to get along. They don't care if other people hate them, because they already hate everybody else! Crime is NOT economic! It's spiritual and emotional. The stereotype that criminals have beady eyes is a stereotype because IT'S TRUE! The polity IS observant. If you spot a person with beady eyes, pay attention to it. You're about to be ripped off.

While I liked most of the tests in the book, the Social part is shot through with inaccuracies based on what they believe to be true about the criminal and disturbed element, but also about every other area of society. Get this question:

17. Of the following, the single most important resource for learning and growth for a college professor will probably come from...

a. the students
b. other faculty members
c. professional literature
d. television news programs

The correct answer is a!?

Why on earth are professors learning more from their students? That is just completely wrong. I VERY seldom learn anything about my subject matter from a student. Students are there to learn the subject matter. If they already know more about it than I do, why am I even in this business? I could understand that this might be true if I had graduate students. But from freshmen and sophomores? It does happen, and enough to make it a possibility on any given day, but!

Professional literature is far and away the most significant, followed by other faculty members (I learn more at a single lunch with another faculty member or a dean than I do from an entire year of teaching), and then, television news programs (especially on the History channel and Book channels, generally). Students are very pleasant and I might find out about something completely irrelevant to my own topic like what some new hip phrase means, or something about where they're from, but it's not as if Shakespeare scholarship can be crowd-sourced, or that they can explain how the blocking should go in a given play, or even what a given word might mean better than I can. The one area where this is not true is if you teach literature that is set in an area in which a student grew up and where they know the geography better, which is why living in New York State I often choose books set in NYC, so I can possibly learn more about it via my students (almost half are from The city). Once for instance I did learn the term "bodega" from an Allen Ginsberg poem in which he writes about getting mugged. It's a Puerto Rican term for a neighborhood grocery store in NYC area, and a student who grew up on the Lower East side knew that and told me. It was a big help but such a thing is once in a class period if I'm LUCKY. And that poem, simple as it was, was not something all the students I've ever had (some thousands in a group) could understand better than I did. Now that some of those students have gotten older and continued to read up, they might NOW tell me something, but it's very very rare to have a student body that stacks up against the professional literature, or other profs, or even television news programs that are germane to my area. Most students don't even read poetry, and if they do, it's Tupac Shakur at best. (I know, GM, but it IS shelved in poetry sections in bookstores.)

The entire SOCIAL test has wrong answers. They give you answers based on how the world should be, rather than the way the world really is.

Still, I enjoy books like this. When you're done, you have to tally up your answers and then you build a profile for yourself, and see which jobs are most likely to fit your profile. I will do all the tests (a total of three hours), look through, and then possibly use the book with my students in a freshman comp class in which I ask them to inventory their skills and compare them to aptitudes and write about their experiences as workers and where they want to be in ten years.

Some of them already know but at least half of the students don't know anything at all about themselves or the careers they might actually be good at. Many of them have seen a TV show about CSI (being a good investigator is a LOT about having good clerical skills, it's not about the excitement!) or about a professional singer (they enjoyed thinking about all the sex partners), and use that for their career guidance.

TIME IN LUTHERANISM, BUDDHISM, and MARXISM

Buddhist thought is about getting to the timelessness of now, and thus appears at least to outsiders as a theory of moments.

Lutheran thought posits that things "take time," but that we never actually arrive at perfection, and patience for the return of Christ asks us to think instead that we are stuck in time, perhaps for millenia. Lutheranism thus posits basic time-bound institutions: family, church, government, and argues that these will outlast our own individual selves, and that we must try to accomplish what we can through them, as our time is valuable.

Marxism posits a time when the lion will lie down with the lamb, and that history will be over. Their theory of institutions lies in the notion that all bourgeois institutions must first be destroyed for anything to rise out of the ashes. In the Soviet Union they wanted to destroy not only the railroads, but also language itself, and its subject-object nature. They wanted to free the object, and turn everything into a subject. Marxists don't have a theory of nature. They think everything can be changed, including the Aral Sea, to serve the proletarian state. Communism is aberrant capitalism without limits. All institutions are controlled by the military wing, and there are no competing institutions. Even reality itself is not considered (until too late) to be considered a rival institution.

Luther believed that competition, even within families, was the norm. He argued that a husband and wife would rarely see eye to eye, and found humor in this. Like Augustine, he didn't think peace was possible in this world, and that when it did happen, it was a temporary stay against the constant strife that this world demands. Three minutes a year of peace is about what Lutherans think is possible, and even that may be illusory.

Marxists enact five-year plans, accompanied by giant leaps forward, beggaring their peoples with planning that is centered on a single individual's ideas. Anyone who gets in the way of Cyclopsean planning, is cannibalized, or put in cold storage.

Marxism works like an ant colony in which the matriarchal queen demands what needs to be done, and you do it to the best of your ability, or face the mandibles of the state.

Lutheranism doesn't proffer a planned economy. We believe with Adam Smith that God has given each of us a talent and it is ours to suss out, and fulfill it according to our own imagination, within an ever-diversifying economy.

Buddhists don't seem to believe in progress, or in doing anything. Even swatting a fly is a distraction from the possibility of stillness which could offer a momentary nirvana, and glimpse of Nothingness. Sitting around doing nothing is considered the highest act, and so the best thing to do in Buddhism is nothing at all. Until recently the most frequent do-nothings in Buddhism were the adult men. Now of course women are also offered nunneries (even in theory in Tibet), but they don't seem to believe that they have to make a living. Like the Catholics, they think that others should support them.

In Myanmar for instance the Buddhist monks go out every day and beg for alms from an increasingly impoverished population dealing with the communist juggernaut that has been in place since the 1960s. Myanmar is a communist state run by the military (there are no other competing institutions, and the military is all-powerful -- their armament is furnished by Red China, and they can do anything they wish, and no one dares to complain). The monks don't have a prayer against the military, as they don't have rifles. The only insurrectionary movement is run out of Karen state, the only portion of the country that has a large Christian minority.

http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=82,5211,0,0,1,0

(Link furnished by Jack Daw, a newly arrived Buddhist commentator.)

There are a few powerful individuals mostly under house arrest such as Nobel Prize Winner Aung Kyi, but they lack a military wing, and their only weapons are either talking, or self-immolation. Neither of which have any effect on the military, who can imprison anyone in the country as long as they wish.

We do appear to be stuck in time and to be stuck in a natural state that is organized around competition. Therefore, it only makes sense that the state not have a monopoly on competition, and that there be many competing factions to up the ante of competition. Competition is an overall good, that sharpens our wits and ups our own level of ability. This is why Lutheran Surrealism seeks to attract the best minds from various traditions and to create an agonistic conversation in which our time on earth, and the values that it might contain, are assessed.

For us, I think, it is children and education, first. Then of course the freedom of inquiry that is the basic mandate under which education thrives. Finally, competing viewpoints must be allowed, since no two people can ever agree on anything, because they occupy different points in space and time, and have different perspectives, therefore. The ant colony is not our model. Nor is it the solitary frog, about to jump into a pond, as is celebrated in the Basho haiku. Our model is also not a barrel of monkeys, though it may appear to be that way in this particular blog.

What we want are: competing institutions (checks and balances), the revival of the notion that God has given us the gifts of various orders (in particular the family, the church, and the state), and that we must at all times keep in mind that competition will never cease, but that we want the competition to be fair, so that the best in any given sphere of life will win out, thus ensuring continuing survival, and the thriving of our individual talents within a greater perpetual motion machine called the economy.

MYSTERIOUS MOMENT

I haven't written about the moment that occurred earlier this week, because I didn't know what it meant. I was left home alone with the four children. At dinner time, my eldest daughter suggested that I make spaghetti. I did. She put ketchup on hers, the boys put horse-radish mustard on theirs, and the baby put nothing on hers. To my surprise, they all ate the spaghetti.

Then we turned on a Pilates video and did the yoga video together.

It was strange because everything felt so conjoined and perfect.

My favorite moment within the moment was watching the 3-year old slurp spaghetti. It started as a huge glob on her fork, and she sucked it all in, and ate it in one smooth motion, the entire glob disappearing and not leaving a trace on her plate or mouth.

(I think the part that is a mystery is that I expected to be rejected as the leader of the pack. Instead, I was accepted. The kids ate the food, and ate all of it. Later, we did the Pilates video, and everyone rallied. I didn't think they would accept my leadership, but they did rather completely. It was a tremendous feeling. I can't explain it, but it was one of the perfect moments in my life.)

THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN AND SOCIALIZED MEDICINE

I watched an hourlong press conference with Larry Summers last night explaining how the economy is getting better, and what we should do next.

He said we needed to spread the wealth so that everyone has an equal chance to invest in emerging green technologies, and that if everyone has medical coverage our economy will be more competitive.

At least I think that's what he said. Did anybody else see the press conference? Larry Summers is Obama's pointman on the economy.

I can't understand how creating a trillion dollar equal-access nationalized medical establishment will help America. It WILL take the burden off of small and large businesses who now must contribute something toward the insurance of their employees. But it will also create an enormous bureaucracy which increases the power of the government to control every aspect of our lives.

It seems to me that competition keeps prices down. With government intervention in the medical care sector, competition will disappear, and we'll be dealing with a huge and incompetent bureaucracy in which innovation will be about as likely to emerge as it has in any communist set of tentacles from Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge to Myanmar's enterprising leadership today.

As for spreading the wealth -- I still think that entreprenurial individualism is better because it rewards initiative, and get up and go.

I'm leery of huge new government programs, and fail to see how it will help the American economy.

It does centralize power and authority, and I can see the appeal of that for those who want Chavez-style authoritarian power in the hands of a single tyrant who thinks he knows what's good for everybody and if you don't agree you disappear.

Michael Jackson's Beat It

There has been a lot of controversy over the late Michael Jackson, so I decided to watch one of the videos called Beat It:

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=michael+jackson+beat+it&hl=en&emb=0&aq=1&oq=michael+jackson#

The dancing was good, but I thought it was unrealistic that gangsters would dance so beautifully. In the Sopranos, for instance, there isn't a lot of dancing. So I wondered how accurate the vid was about gangsters. Secondly, the motivation attributed to the gangsters seemed incorrect. Two gangsters are having a turf battle when Jackson arrives to tell them that it doesn't matter who's right or wrong. I get the feeling with gangsters that right and wrong are not particularly germane, but that they are thinking instead purely about power without regard to right or wrong, and without regard whatsoever to the law in general, or to the rightness that their actions may or may not represent and which might reinforce their power with legitimacy. Power is the only legitimation for gangsters.

If a gangster did dance, and cared about right and wrong, I still don't think this is how gangsters would dance. I couldn't for instance understand the elongated motions of the leg through raised arm meant in terms of the signification of power especially when the hand that has been raised wasn't in a fascist salute. The softness of the swaying bodies as they inched across the stage also struck me as artistic, but not connected to gangsters in a specific or in a general sense. So the choreography seemed uncorrelated with the theme, and the logic of the ideas (that an artist type could intervene in a turf battle and reposition right and wrong as the locus of the discussion, and yet to also deny that anybody could ever actually be right or wrong, just beautiful in their dancing, seemed oddly incorrect, and out of any true relationship to what might be happening in such an instance, or to the values to which such gangsters might subscribe).

If it did seem relevant to the gangsters that they should just "beat it," because it didn't matter what was wrong or right in this instance, then what does matter to the gangsters? If they should beat it because they couldn't dance as well as Jackson, I wonder too if that is true. The top two gangsters were doing very nicely. They were trying to knife one another for material power, which does not seem to the singer/dancer in red represented by Mr. Jackson to be at all relevant to HIS values, and yet they all end up in unison dancing together shortly after his intervention into the scene, and their dancing is rather advanced. I might even say that in certain sequences it supersedes that of Mr. Jackson himself, who is wearing light socks under black trousers. I can imagine the gansters' fashion sense would be offended if not their innate sense of Realpolitik as the only arbiter of right and wrong.

The illogical motivations, the irrelevant gestures, and the lack of any unifying argument in the dance made me wonder why someone didn't say something at the studio level. I won't deny that Mr. Jackson could dance, or that it was interesting on a purely physical level, but as a philosophy of non-violence, it didn't seem to even attempt to get to the bottom of the turf battle's issues, nor did it seem realistic that such a dancer would actually succeed in getting gangsters to dance at all well, much less so well.

I watched the video, stupefied. It seems to be a kind of childish daydream that war can cease if everybody takes dancing lessons from Mr. Jackson.

Imagine Hamas agents dancing with agents from Mossad. Imagine communists and capitalists getting it on in a darkened disco. Imagine Sioux and Custer's men, dancing it out, and finding harmony in geography through choreography.

Not many people can really dance any more. Michael Jackson could dance. If we could only dance out our anger, the film seems to say, all war would cease. Wouldn't you have to be on all kinds of medication to believe this?

A HEADS UP

In about ten days I plan to have a seminar (within my blog) on Jean Bethke Elshtain's JUST WAR AGAINST TERROR. Elshtain is a professor at the University of Chicago and is one of sixty academics who signed a document in 2002 entitled What We're Fighting For, which is included at the end of the book, and which opens with a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (first published in 1947 just after the Second World War).

Elshtain's is a mind formed around Lutheranism. I am not certain to what degree she is a practicing Christian or actually attends a church, and if she does, whether or not she belongs to the Missouri Synod, ELCA, or some other synod (there are four or five others). But she's Lutheran to the bone.

Her people are or were "Volga Germans," those Germans living in Russia who were forced to walk out of the Soviet Union through China during the Stalinist period, or else face extinction. I don't know her work very well, and this is the only book of hers that I've read. Her name popped up here about a year ago provided by a socialist of sorts named Carl Sachs, who used to come and argue with me, until he got disgusted by my primarily anti-socialist outlook. For some reason, Sachs liked her work, and when I discovered she was Lutheran, I thought well perhaps we can find common ground through this book.

The tradition of Lutheranism is itself founded on the Augustinian tradition (Luther was an Augustinian monk).

Here's a bit of Elshtain's writing, just a tempting morsel:

"The primary responsibility of government is to provide basic security -- ordinary civic peace. St. Augustine calls this form of earhtly peace tranquillitas ordinis. This is not the perfect peace promised to believers in the Kingdom of God, the one in which the lion lies down with the lamb. On this earth, if the lion lies down with the lamb, the lamb must be replaced frequently, as Martin Luther opined with his characteristic mordant wit" (46).

What distinguishes Lutheranism from all other denominations and religions is its emphasis on human imperfectibility. Buddhists, Catholics, Marxists, and seemingly all other religions (even parts of the Protestant movement itself such as the Anabaptists) believe that human beings can arrive at a state of perfection. Some call it Enlightenment, and others call it Beatitude, or saintliness, and still others a state of non-alienation. Luther thought we were permanently and essentially fallen, and half-cracked, and essentially monstrous, and he refused to deify any human being as a saint. We don't have saints in the Lutheran tradition (although increasingly the ELCA does this about Luther himself). Because of this fallen aspect, we need a government that protects us from the creepiness of our neighbors and ourselves. We need checks and balances. We need the police. We need an army. We need to be able to judge.

Judging through the fog of our own fallen nature is always complex, but we have to do it nevertheless, because, "our condition of fallibility and imperfection precludes a world in which discontents never erupt" (47).

The book is brief (about 187 pages) and is clear and straightforward. The basic question the book asks is, "If our neighbor is being slaughtered, do we stand by and do nothing?" (51).

Elshtain is quite good in providing the counterarguments, and in providing a rationale for a limited, and provisional, account of what a just war can mean. She doesn't want carpet bombing for instance (she was opposed to the atomic bomb, and also to the firebombing of Dresden as she believes that noncombatants should be kept out of harm's way to the maximum extent possible, and that it is better to put our own soldiers into harm's way than to allow the children of the enemy to be decimated).

Hers is not a black and white world, though. It is not one in which reason will always triumph (as even certain strands of contemporary Lutheranism in the ELCA aver).

"Augustine also tells us that Christians, if called upon, should take up the worldly political vocation of judge. This is a tragic vocation, since a judge can rarely be absolutely certain about the guilt or innocence of defendants. Truth is often hidden, or the full truth is. Inevitably, a judge winds up punishing some who are innocent and releasing some who are guilty. ... Responsible public authorities are always compelled to act in a kind of fog. As with waging war, the most certain thing about governing is its uncertainty. It is the armchair critics commenting from the sidelines who think that the choices are absolutely clear. ... The just, or justified, war tradition recognizes this difference by giving us an account of comparative, not absolute, justice" (52-53).

At any rate, anyone who wants to join in on the conversation from whatever perspective is welcomed. We will begin on about July 25th or so, and keep it going for about five days. Get a copy of the book from a library or a bookseller, and throw in your two cents if you like. All perspectives welcomed.

SOTOMAYOR'S NOMINATION

I've been watching it a bit and it seems that her entire testimony is done with an anxiety about falling into the pit of judicial activism. She says in every answer, this is what judges do. We apply the law. She's totally backed off the idea that she is somehow different and better than a white male judge or that even appellate judges make new law. Now, all judges are the same and they are extremely traditional. Until these hearings are over.

Either she's lying now, or she's become a born-again strict constitutionalist.

Perjury is when you knowingly lie under oath. Perhaps she really means what she's saying, but I think she's committing perjury. Her whole life she's been a judicial activist, and now suddenly she isn't?

Democratic Senator Feinstein didn't say it was wrong to be a judicial activist. She just said, well, the Republicans are just as bad, or worse.

Two wrongs make a right?

It would be better if we had a court we could count on to make universal laws based on precedent, and founded on the Bill of Rights, and the Ten Commandments. As we proceed forward, however, I think we will increasingly have something like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland.

The baseball metaphors of John Roberts who said that a judge is like an umpire in baseball provide a clear illustration of what should be the case.

"Judges are like umpires," Justice Roberts told senators then. "Umpires don't make the rules, they apply them" (cited in WSJ, A2, July 13, 2009).

"Senator Dianne Feinstein criticized Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, saying they have ignored precedent, made new law, and generally acted more like player-coaches. 'It showed me that Supreme Court Justices are much more than umpires calling balls and strikes,' Ms. Feinstein said" (ibid.).

The notion of fair play in baseball in which an ump simply calls it as he sees it, according to the rules, will be replaced by judges who make up new rules after the fact, and apply them according to their desire, or according to which team they favor. All power to the people will be replaced by all power to the government and its judges, who will say anything to get on the court, and then they will decide the whole ballgame according to race and gender.

Will the strike zone change from day to day? Will the homerun wall be moved willy nilly? In poetry and fiction, anything can be considered a masterpiece if the player in contention matches the race, gender, and disability profile that a given critic is trying to promote. Foul balls become home runs. Balks can be considered pauses for wisdom as long as the ump has empathy for the pitcher, and may be considered a reason for saying "Off with their head!" if she doesn't.

Hemingway can't write a decent sentence, and everything that Toni Morrison writes is pure genius. Many will say that the Olympics gymnasts are already judged along these lines, (at least in China). Why not law itself?

It will be a lot of fun for Sotomayor, calling them as she sees them. A crooked and prevaricating Justice without any belief in truth or justice will soon join the Court. But that's ok, that's how it's always been all along, many argue. Baseball's always been a crooked game, from its beginnings.

Say it ain't so, Joe.

A Poopy Summer Sunday in NYC

Summer got a slow start here. In June it rained 25 out of 30 days. Last night it went down to 50 degrees again. Both tomato plants are yellowing. I've gotten two tomatoes off one plant, and only one from the other.

The only thing growing is the grass, which I have to cut every six days.

Sunday we went down to Washington Square Park in NYC. I spent the afternoon there with my boys, while the girls with their mother shopped in SOHO.

The boys and I watched a juggler who spoke French in the children's park. He would do seven balls at a time, and shout, Voila! We got a popsicle called the Maxi-Rocket from a vendor. They cost two dollars each, one for each boy. The bathroom at the park was a scandal. Not just smelly, but SORDID. The doors had been taken off the stalls to prevent liaisons so you had to poop in the open with strange men milling about. When I say strange, I mean like Wimpy of the old Popeye series after having had a lobotomy strange. None of the three of us could handle this, so we went to a McDonald's over on Lafayette Street. We needed some privacy. However, the doors had also been taken off the stalls there. There was a single toilet with a line of oddball men speaking unknown tongues waiting to use it, while stroking their beards. So we walked over to the IFC movie theatre and went down into the weird basement there, but it was so weird that still none of us could function. The light was an off-green, and there was a hum in the silence.

The bathroom situation in NYC has always been abysmal but it appears to be reaching a crisis point.

We went back to the fountain in Washington Square Park, and waded through the water. There was a crisis of another kind forty odd years ago when Robert Moses changed the fountain from a purely ornamental one to a wading pool. Jane Jacobs among others fought Moses over this because they didn't like anything that Robert Moses did whether it was run the Long Island Parkway through a town, or whether he was about to pick his nose. It got to the point that anything Robert Moses did was considered wrong. He was the George W. Bush of his day. But I think it was nice to wade in the pool, and I thought Moses had many good ideas. A lot of other kids and adults thought so, too, as we waded about, pleasantly cool on a 90 degree day.

At the end of playing in the park, I saw a very odd but friendly looking man who was selling his paintings. His name was Arthur Robins. He has a website called ArthurRobins.com. It said that he had free psychic advice. I was interested in the psychic advice more than the paintings, but ended up flipping through the paintings. Some were more subtle than others. At just that point my wife emerged from shopping and said, "I want this painting!"

It was called "The Pain of the Cross" and was a shocking depiction from above of Christ on the Cross screaming at the point of death. It was more than what I wanted to live with. Arthur Robins, who was a tie-dyed blond waif of 58 years of age, was surprised at my wife's choice. We whittled him down to 30 dollars and bought the painting. He was a born-again Christian. I asked him how do I know how to get a better situation in publishing and he said to get a better relationship with Christ, and just ask him anything you want. That was his free advice! It seemed to me to be a bait and switch of sorts, as it meant he didn't have to do any of the heavy lifting. Plus, I'm not sure that Christ is really involved in the consulting business for finding a big publisher for my novels. Especially insofar as all the big publishers are violently anti-Christian.

Later, we went up to Central Park and threw a frisbee on the lawn for a half hour. Many people screamed that no one should ever be able to walk or play on the grass of Central Park, and that it was designed as a purely decorative park, for the eyes alone to enjoy, as that was the original intent of Olmsted and Vaux. Again Robert Moses stepped in and said, let's have a little recreation. And there is now softball, whiffle ball, cricket, croquet, and many other ballgames in progress all over the park. Robert Moses wasn't all bad. We always pretend that someone is either all good or all bad, and Moses has definitely become the guy that has led the Victorian aesthetics back into a Babylonian capture on many scorecards. But I'd say he did some good and some bad. Moses also tried to block Shakespeare in the Park, and that was the nicest thing I did all summer that I didn't do with my family.

I like the park better with sporty activities, but then I loved Shakespeare esp. without any contemporary political accretions, which is exactly what I got in this summer's Twelfth Night.

Then, walking by the Rambles bathroom, some of us finally managed to poop. There were still doors on the stalls, but I don't know to whom this decision was owed. It was a good decision. Some of us have a little shame when pooping. What a relief! Renewed, we could then toss the frisbee for another hour within a stone's throw of the Metropolitan Museum of Art while a gentle sunset faded through the Victorian trees and people came and went thinking of cold potato soup Michelangelo beeswax fax the frisbees to Hoboken.

Going home was the fastest yet. 2.2 hours. I googled GW Bridge and also Palisades Parkway. You have to go over the lower bridge (there is also an upper deck), as it is ONLY the lower bridge that communicates directly to the Palisades Parkway. Then went all the way up to the Bear Mountain turnabout before getting on the Long Mountain Parkway over to Harriman, from which I caught Route 17 up to Roscoe.

You can look up ROADS on Wikipedia, and it will tell you the history of specific parkways, and tell you about their controversies and easiest connecting points. Why hadn't I thought of that years ago? Wikipedia is like a genie that's been let out of the bottle if you can just ask the right questions.

Sam Kashner's When I Was Cool

About two years ago a friend of mine in my department (Mike McKenna) mentioned that he had read about a book called When I Was Cool, by Sam Kashner, in the NYT Book Review. It was about Kashner's life as Allen Ginsberg's poetry apprentice at Naropa Institute in the years from 1975 to about 1978. Published by Harper Collins, I got the book from Amazon.com, where it sat in a pile of unread books ever since. Part of the problem is that when I got it I was in the middle of a semester, and was snowed under. Other things kept popping up, and it was only about ten days ago, that I happened to see it, and think, I'll read the first 50 pages.

So I read the first 75 pages non-stop. I didn't like it. I loved it. It was kind of like the way I love Kierkegaard. When I'm in it, I read it without stopping, but later think, wow, what a sad writer, and it's hard to go back into such whirlwind intensity.

Kashner was sort of a cool dude at Naropa when I went there in 1977. He was often invited to read his poems in the big poetry classes, as were poets like Jim Carroll, who had a hit on the radio at the time about dead people, and poets like Diane di Prima would pop in, too. Many of these poets were good. Kashner was a mystery to me. I didn't think his poems were great. They had a kind of pop style, and referenced pop music. I've never liked pop music, but he appeared to revel in it. They were clever and beautiful, but I thought they were kind of skating on the surface and never risked saying anything that would make him vulnerable.

Kierkegaard risked everything, on the other hand, although generally under a nom de plume. And Kierkegaard can be hilarious. But Kashner can also be hilarious, at least in this new volume, where he risks everything. In spite of my initial reservations, this is an important book in a minor key.

I went out to lunch with Kashner in New York City with a group of famous poets probably thirty years ago. We were both probably about 22 years old. I don't think I said a word during the meal, and later left in a darkened state, sad to have even been there, and been so square. Dinner with those famous guys including Sam was like watching fireworks go off for two hours. I never got a word in. Kashner and his friend Jason Shinder were very funny throughout the lunch. I'm almost never funny when there's more than one person present. I just stare at the wall. Which is why I like writing. At least there is no one to interrupt me.

Kashner himself felt a bit unnerved by the company at Naropa. He says that he had never read William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, and couldn't stand it. He was prepared for Naked Brunch, at best, when he first went to the Buddhist poetry college. I myself never read Naked Lunch. I read about thirty pages tops, and put it down. It was just so icky.

Kashner realized too right away that the Buddhist college had a frightening hierarchical aspect (an icky aspect). If the guru Trungpa liked someone in the entourage, they were called in for sexual duties.

"In fact, I would soon discover that one problem with having a girlfriend who was a Buddhist at Naropa was that, if she was really attractive, Rinpoche might ask to see her, well... no self-respecting student of Rinpoche's would turn him down. So don't even bother asking her to choose. I would later come to know about this form of suffering" (41).

Suffering is something that Buddhists believe that all beings must experience, and apparently your guru doesn't mind adding to your suffering, as long as it temporarily relieves his own.

At Naropa Kashner was the only poetry student for about a year or two. So he got in on the ground floor. He hung out with Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs and others as more or less their equal, and he did get to know them fairly thoroughly since there were no other rivals for their time. Since he was basically the only student, the various poets sought him out all the time, so as to have someone to fetch something or to read and type their poems. Kashner also knew the guru, Trungpa, and had to vacuum his house on command. All the poets were hungry, but Gregory Corso constantly ate out on Sam's Father's Diner's Card. At night Corso wet his bed and Kashner had to help on that front, too!

"Allen turned back to me and began explaining my new duties vis-a-vis Gregory. First off, he warned me about the bed.

"Gregory will ask you to keep it dry for him," he said. I didn't understand at first, but Allen explained that Gregory was a constant bed wetter.

(70).

Corso was 46 years old at the time!

Corso had a wife named Lisa, and a girlfriend named Calliope, who was a prostitute. Calliope apparently turned her money over to Corso so he could buy drugs. Corso liked to mainline heroin, which can be expensive.

I knew Sam Kashner only very slightly (he probably took no notice of me) and I felt such intense envy of him because he was obviously everybody's favorite poet among the faculty. The Diner's Club card was probably a bit of the draw, but he was obviously very witty. I had no money, and was too shy to speak. Corso and the other impecunious poets were constantly trying to chisel money out of the students by any means necessary. I think I gave Corso five dollars once for his signature, and he threw a fit until I gave him ten. Kashner himself hated a poet called Antler because he was even further up in the hierarchy, and was getting a book published at City Lights. I hated Antler, too! It was fun to share in Kashner's hate! But I felt the same thing (even worse) toward Kashner!

I knew Calliope, but I didn't know she was a prostitute! I thought she was a nice girl who fell in with Corso because of his genius.

At one point the poet Diane di Prima blows Kashner after she and he have dinner on the Diner's Card. First, she ate her own dinner, and then she ate half his dinner. Apparently, she was rather corpulent, but her eyes were steamy enough for Kashner to overlook it.

At another point Gregory Corso kidnaps Sam, and takes him with girlfriend Calliope to a shack in the mountains above Boulder, to try to ransom him off to his wealthy father. Meanwhile, they try to get Sam to shoot heroin and make love with Calliope. The motivations struck me as squirrelly. Kashner escapes and runs back to town, and then is friends with Corso and Calliope all over again the following week. (Jewish humor of a kind that recalls Woody Allen is spread thick through the book.)

Kashner has sharp insights into all the Beats, but particularly wrt Corso. The reason that Corso liked the book Gilgamesh, Kashner speculates, is not just that it's the oldest book in recorded western history, but that it delineates a friendship between Gilgamesh and his wildman friend Enkidu.

"In the story there is a Wild Man who is created by the gods because he's the only one who can match Gilgamesh. They become best friends and travel together.... It suddenly dawned on me. Everyone keeps thinking that Allen is the Wild Man, but he's not -- he's Gilgamesh" (107).

And Corso is Enkidu, the real Wild Man, and the better poet, not only on his own score card, but that of many others.

In the class I took with Corso back in 1977, Corso used this relationship to talk about Kerouac and Cassady (with Cassady as Enkidu), but he didn't identify himself as Ginsberg's Enkidu. Top shot.

One could say that it was what Nietzsche picked up on in the relationship of Apollo and Dionysos, but this being an older text, it puts the friendship of wild and civilized man on a more enduring and fresher basis.

The Beats used Rinpoche to create a BAD AS I WANNA BE college that drew punks and would-be poets from all over America and the world to Naropa Institute. The place was crazy, but I was never an insider on the gossip, or what was really going on. I never fit in, because I was about as wild as domesticated corn. I had grown up Lutheran, and though I put it on the back burner for a few years, I never intended to completely abandon it, and become a Wild Man. This wasn't in the itinerary. Not only does Kashner provide a pretty good account of a big part of his own growing up he clarifies a lot for me, too, about that period.

Kashner is insightful in talking about how much it cost the Beats to live and act in the outlaw way they did. They were always in someone's bed, but were also always alone, unable to bond over time, and were tricksters, Houdinis of the sheets. But they were often drunk and weepy, too, because their lives didn't work, and they were getting diseases. Burroughs says they were just old men working on prostate cancer. Ginsberg got Hepatitus C. Orlovsky lost his mind. Corso died from prostate cancer.

I have about 40 pages left, and I don't want the book to end. I'm about to read about the W.S. Merwin incident in which Trungpa forcibly stripped the mediocre poet apparently to humiliate him and let him know who was boss. Merwin fought back and gave 600 stitches to various Buddhist guards. It almost got Naropa Institute closed down, and at the time, instigated commentary from all over. It will be interesting to see how Ginsberg handled this behind closed doors. I arrived at Naropa shortly after the incident, and have read all the extant documents about this case (the central ones by Tom Clark and Ed Sanders are hard to find, and out of print, by Ginsberg's request), but as usual, I think that Sam Kashner will provide juicy and telling details.

The book reminds me of the hilarity of Punch and Judy shows, with Kashner himself as a Jewish schlepp and schmo and shlemiel and mensch. Perhaps the most interesting thing in the book is that Kashner loves his parents, and can't quite square his love for them, with his fascination with things Beat. At one point the two come together and Kashner's dad plays harmonica with Ginsberg's band. The vulnerability Kashner feels in that scene as his two worlds come together is worth the price of the book.

"Seymour got a standing ovation, which wasn't hard seeing that there were no chairs, but they were really digging him. I was embarrassed, but I was also secretly proud of my father.

I suddenly saw Gregory Corso across the room, mingling with the crowd... Gregory sidled up to Seymour and told him that he played the harp like a Negro, then he asked him for ten bucks. Seymour gave it to him. That night my father met all the people who had been wining and dining on his credit card the past year" (252).

BUDDHISM BAD!

I don't like top-down authoritarian structures. I've written against Catholicism, against Marxism, and against Islam because of their top-down authoritarian structures.

However, possibly the worst of all with regard to the top-down structure is Buddhism. Buddhism is very attractive to the youth of today, who think it's going to offer them something called Enlightenment, whatever that is. It seems to mean not wanting anything, and becoming a vegetable, or a mineral. Buddhists actually consider rocks and stones to be citizens I think this is because they want to be about as inert as a rock. Perhaps rock music is Buddhist to some degree. People become animals, then vegetables, and then minerals, when they listen to it. But in Buddhist monasteries, they sit on pillows and say the same word over and over until their minds disappear into a state called Nirvana. From the outside at least, these people are difficult to discern from geological structures.

Looking around at the Buddhist countries none of them work. Myanmar is a socialist Buddhist amalgam. Calorie counts are very low, and there are no freedoms. Vietnam was Buddhist, and now look. Another socialist quagmire. Most of Southeast Asia is more or less the same. Thailand has no freedoms. Buddhists don't seem to care about freedoms. They don't really even care about freedom of inquiry. They don't invent anything, they don't have any enterprises unless you call sex tourism an enterprise. It's a sell-out, but not of one's mind, but of their wives and daughters, and it's poisoning the children and women of those countries with AIDS and other maladies. As many as a fourth of the prostitutes of Thailand have AIDS, according to one report. This may not be as bad as many countries in Africa where a fourth of the normal population has AIDS, but it's still bad, especially if you're a prostitute.

You never hear about anyone in Thailand who is mad about this. There are no criteria for anger within Buddhism. You are never supposed to be angry. You just stay calm, and focus on your own inner peace. Buddhism doesn't even have moral criteria. The ten commandments has no correlative in Buddhism. Everything just is. If someone chops your leg off, your job is to remain sanguine. If someone kills a child, try to see everything as transience, and stay in the groove. There are no jeremiads in Buddhism. Say om again and get on with nothingness.

Tibet itself was once a martial nation before Buddhism came, but it's become a bunch of marshmallows sitting around on pillows.

Buddhists have gurus, and the gurus give you something called a mantra, which is supposed to be your key to turning off your brain. Even the Dalai Lama has no brain. He was asked if he thought prostitution was ok, and he said, sure, as long as you pay the woman! It's all la-la land in Tibet, except for the fact that Tibet no longer exists.

At Naropa Institute, where I went in the late 1970s, they had a crazy Tibetan guru called Trungpa. He was mentally ill, but people thought of him as wise, because it was claimed that milk buckets had fallen from the sky when he was born. He had weight problems, to put it politely, and he liked to throw his authority around. I suppose he wasn't actually as bad as a Yakuza, but Tom Clark's book on what he did to the poets of that time makes you wonder. He forcibly stripped W.S. Merwin and Merwin's girlfriend. He had no remorse on the matter, but when the gurus do something to you, you are just supposed to go along with it. If you don't, you're some kind of jerk. Tom Clark's book is called The Great Naropa Poetry Wars. It's been out of print for decades, but is one of the great books on how Buddhism looks the other way away from any evil, or reframes it. Buddhists don't have any way to evaluate anything.

Therefore, Buddhists don't have a journalistic tradition. Even if they did have one, they wouldn't have any newspapers, because freedom of the press doesn't exist in any Buddhist countries. We used to have freedom of the press, at least, in the Protestant west, but now that Buddhism and Marxism have combined to wipe out our intellectual class and turn them into followers of the Pied Piper, I don't expect much from that sector any longer. Does journalism still exist somewhere in the world? If so, why hasn't anybody done a report on the evils of Buddhism, and how it turns its practitioners into mental marshmallows? Maybe when you are doing the research, you turn into such a marshmallow you can't finish the report.

I used to think that Buddhism was something good when I was about 12. But at Naropa when I actually went there to see for myself at 17, Americans seemed to think of the Buddhists as preternaturally wise, and fell at their feet, grovelling. It was honestly bizarre. I never did this, and always thought, thank goodness I already have a religion. I did try sitting on a pillow and saying om several times. It made me unable to think critically. Was that the intent? It was definitely the effect. I realized if I went on, I would end up a mushroom, so I stopped, and prayed for deliverance from the Buddhists!

At Naropa Institute, the gurus had sexual rights over their students, both male and female. One guru there, who has now passed on from AIDS, a man named Osel Tenzin, was thought to have passed AIDS on to hundreds of students. He ordered males to sleep with him, even if they weren't gay, in order to receive Enlightenment. But nobody minded. AIDS was wisdom itself, or something, just like everything else you got from these gurus, and so it was something that was reframed as a gift. At least the Catholics realize that they had been abused. Buddhists who got this treatment just fell for it, and thought of it as groovy all the way to the cemetery. Peace, baby!

I never fell for it. Of all the religions and faiths on earth, Buddhism is the dumbest, and the cruelest, precisely because it's the nicest. It turns you into a vegetable, and you like it! In the Odyssey this was the land of the lotus-eaters. This was a particularly seductive land for the Beat poets. Many of them ended up there. Ginsberg did, as did Burroughs, and Gary Snyder, and Joanne Kyger, and even Corso ended up there (Corso was never a Buddhist, and laughed a lot about the Buddhists, but he did do a lot of heroin toward the end which is the same thing). Kerouac thought Buddhism was peaches. There is almost not a single Beat poet of the last fifty years who hasn't been involved in Buddhism (or its correlative of getting stoned) to some degree. These people were all individualists. And yet, Buddhism is the worst of all the authoritarian religions. You are supposed to chop off your head and replace it with a smiley-face button.

I thought it was Jonestown, only the song was, "and put on a happy face." I got grouchier and more paranoid around the Buddhists because they turned people dumber than rocks. A similar thing was the marijuana everybody of that ilk seemed to want to smoke which made them "stoned."

Why did everybody want to be dumb as a rock, and stoned, in a city called Boulder?

THOUGHTS ON TRIP TO NYC'S JFK

JFK is tough to reach from the Catskills. Most of the directions tell you to go down to the George Washington Bridge, and take the Cross-Bronx Expressway to the Whitestone Bridge, and then go down the Van Wyck Expressway. This is suicide. The GW bridge often takes an hour to cross, and then the Cross-Bronx is a parking lot, and the Whitestone Bridge generally has at least one lane closed, and it's bumper to bumper and it gets worse on the other side when you take the Van Wyck (Expressway!) which is also bumper to bumper. The trick in going to New York City is to remain only on PARKWAYS, since trucks are not allowed on them. All commercial traffic is banned. This means they are much more manageable. My trick is to cross the Hudson in the rural upstate areas, around Bear Mountain, or even further up at Rhinebeck (an hour north of NYC), since the fee is less (a dollar as opposed to eight), and then you go down a parkway like the Taconic. Trucks simply can't go on them because they have pedestrian overpasses that are 10'6" in height, and are made of brownstone. So if you try to go under them with a truck, you're going to be all over the highway.

Yesterday I had hoped to get going at 8 am so as to take in the Eleanor Roosevelt estate at Val-Kill. But I awoke at 9:30 and had to write that off. I still wanted to see the Neuberger Art Museum at Suny-Purchase. I did, though I had a little trouble getting there for reasons too complicated to describe. It's about twenty minutes north of Manhattan right off the Hutchinson Parkway, but once you arrive at the campus you find a parking lot bigger than my whole town, and no directions. So you have to sniff your way toward the art, using free-standing sculptures as likely directionals. Entrance was five dollars for adults. They had a very decent collection of 20th century art: a Jackson Pollock, a Joseph Stella, and an Edward Hopper, among others. There was so little you could spend time with each piece, and the signage was superb. A notice said that of all the art of the 20th century what Neuberger didn't want is regional painting along the lines of Thomas Hart Benton (see picture above) and Grant Wood (and one other whose name I forget). It was mentioned that this regional work celebrated America, and was often Christian in inspiration, and that drove Neuberger out of his mind (Neuberg has written an autobiography about his collection, but I haven't read it). Neuberger preferred angry agit-prop of the Ashcan school, and then surrealists (there was a Matta, and some pieces by a Romanian woman whose name I can't recall, and other small remarkable pieces by other women who worked in the big movements but didn't achieve much recognition). One piece was particularly good by a woman named Ayn something. It was tiny, and was a collage of fabrics. I wanted to look her up, but didn't have a pen to write down her name. The signage said her work was dimissed as craft because it resembled miniature quilting. I liked all the work in the permanent collection. A separate show had thirty prints by William Wegman that told the story of Little Red Riding Hood using his Weimaraners (spelling?) as actors. It made me uncomfortable to use the dogs in such a perverse way, but it was also funny, and dissociating, which I squeamishly enjoyed.

Back on the road the NPR station had an interview with Maya Lin, the artist who had built the Vietnam Memorial, and more recently had designed part of the just-opened Museum of Chinese in the Americas, and she talked about how the title of the museum made it seem like it was about the language rather than the people, but since Chinese doesn't have articles, they left it. The museum has just opened in Chinatown in NYC. Lin said she's now an environmentalist, and I thought, yeah, that's like saying you watch your weight. Who doesn't? I flicked it off, annoyed by her self-righteous tone.

I then drove down the Hutchinson Parkway, but thought it was now a straight shot, and began to think about the exclusion of regionalists, and whether I am a Christian regionalist. At just that moment I saw a forking path, and took something called the Cross-Bronx PARKWAY, and ended up in Riverdale. At the end of the exit ramp was a Hispanic woman and I asked her where I was. She said she no speak da English, and pointed at a Hispanic man across the street parked behind a trash can. I parked the car, and went over to the 400-pound man in a clean white t-shirt with my map, and he said I was just north of Manhattan, and had to get back over to Yonkers, so as to go down to Queens. He explained what to do. I had to go north on the Henry Hudson, and take the Cross-Bronx Parkway back across to the Hutchinson, and then go down Rt. 95 to the Throg's Neck Bridge, then take the Cross Island Parkway to Conduit St., and wham, I would be there. He was nice enough, and I loved his accent. I wanted to slap five but didn't know if he would think it appropriate. Meanwhile, a terrific thunderstorm started, and I saw an almost black sky over Manhattan, and zigzagging lighting bolts that appeared to hit the sea south of Long Island.

The Finnair plane was supposed to land at 3:50. I arrived at the airport at 4:30. I ran in, but the monitor said the plane hadn't landed. I went up to the Finnair desk and they said the plane had landed in Connecticut for refueling. Refueling? They had lost fuel on the flight? What? Then my cellphone rang. It was my wife. My wife has the most beautiful voice in the world. But I'm not going to describe it! She said they were in Connecticut because a lighting bolt had hit their plane and the plane had wobbled. They wanted to be sure the plane was functional. I wanted to just drive up there and get them, but they had to go through Customs at JFK, and couldn't deplane. I informed the Finnair woman that it wasn't about refueling, it was about a lightning strike, but she didn't care and shrugged her shoulders. She looked like she didn't want to know what was happening, or like I was some nut for wanting to know. I said my wife was from Seinajoki, and her face lit up, and she repeated the town's name in very good Finnish accent. I didn't understand why she wasn't more helpful.

So I waited until 8:50, about four hours. I got a fruit parfait for 3.25, and a copy of Newsweek, and read it cover to cover, including the ads, twice. The font had changed, which I found disturbing. Most of the issue was about summer reading, and it was surprising how conservative the choices were. Trollope, and Dickens, were big on the newsmen's list. I suppose that newsmen would like that kind of documentary style of writing. Lots of the books they liked were non-fiction. (My God, if I could just once list the books that I THINK are worth reading in such a mass culture magazine, instead of these dweebs with their 19th century dusty junk, and their sports books by coaches and players!) The editorial dissed Michael Jackson as a freak, but admitted they put him on the cover to cash in on newstand sales. There was an article by Quincy Jones, and one by another black woman. I don't follow pop culture, but they had a photo of his glove from the Thriller campaign, and I felt odd. Almost sad. Pop culture aims at the lowest common denominator and I don't think it's about thinking. I don't think people should listen to music, or even hum, unless it's church music, or blues-oriented, so that there is some authentic emotion, and you cry. I think people should sit around and think and talk about the state of their souls and cry. Pop music just strikes me as bizarre and it never makes me cry.

The fruit parfait was plain yogurt but I was surprised to discover blueberries hidden at the bottom.

When the family finally came out of the gate, I was surprised at how tanned my children were. The boys wanted to run, and did, flying out of the airport, tugging luggage. My 5-year old hit a crack in the sidewalk and landed heavily, skinning both knees. Hugs later, we were in the car, heading out for the 4-hour trip home up through the Catskills. I got out on Parkways without incident, and flew over Bear Mountain but goofed up at a traffic circle, and ended up in Ramapo (close to New Jersey), then went north on 202. I got on 87 North, a superhighway. A thunderous rainstorm blinded my windshield and I followed a truck's backlights through the storm, up Highway 17 to Roscoe, and then over County Route 7 to Downsville. The rain stopped. In Downsville I spotted an opposum at 2 am crawling along the edge of the curb. It was sniffing at something as it hobbled along.

The four children and wife were asleep, but I remembered my wife had brought me a potato pie from Finland. They are called Karjalan Piirakka, and I missed them. I opened it, and ate one, then two. They are bland, and yet perfect. The reception of potatoes in Finland in the 19th century would parallel the reception of potatoes in Ireland, but is not as well-documented since their potato never crashed, and there was no corresponding famine. The Finnish population tripled as a result of the potato. Milk, and potatoes, is an entire nutritional program, and most of Finnish cuisine at the most basic level relies on this fact.

I listened to the radio as we took the Downsville road over to Hamden, and home. Conservatives were talking with liberals about Sotomayor's nomination. I still don't understand how she can justify her comment that she is wiser simply on the basis of being Latina. Imelda Marcos was a Latina. Was she wiser? To my mind she was closer to a centipede than to a human, which is probably why she needed all those shoes. It's possible for someone to be wiser on the basis of a wise analysis of experience, but I don't see how this is related to their gender or the color of their skin. Such demographics don't tell us anything. It's the state of their soul that will tell us something. The more mature people will judge others based on their merit, rather than on the color of their skin, or their gender.