Cortland Review Poems Out!

The latest issue of the online poetry journal Cortland Review is out.

I have two poems in it.

This is a premier poetry journal from SUNY-Cortland, and it's a big honor for me to have my poems in it.

The unique thing about this journal is that the poets read their poems, so you can hear my voice as I read my poems. The first poem is a kind of joke wrt WCW's famous poem about the red wheelbarrow (which I take as an emblem of modernism), the second longer poem is a non-fiction piece about my son Tristan's first baseball game in which a kid named Chris caught my son's first hit. (This summer Tristan caught Chris in a double-play at third-base, so he feels partially avenged.)

http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/44/olson.html

Marianne Moore's The Steeple-Jack

THE STEEPLE-JACK

Dürer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.

One by one in two's and three's, the seagulls keep
flying back and forth over the town clock,
or sailing around the lighthouse without moving their wings --
rising steadily with a slight
quiver of the body -- or flock
mewing where

a sea the purple of the peacock's neck is
paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed
the pine green of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea
gray. You can see a twenty-five-
pound lobster; and fish nets arranged
to dry. The

whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt
marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the
star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so
much confusion. Disguised by what
might seem the opposite, the sea-
side flowers and

trees are favored by the fog so that you have
the tropics first hand: the trumpet-vine,
fox-glove, giant snap-dragon, a salpiglossis that has
spots and stripes; morning-glories, gourds,or moon-vines trained on fishing-twine
at the back door;

cat-tails, flags, blueberries and spiderwort,
striped grass, lichens, sunflowers, asters, daisies --
yellow and crab-claw ragged sailors with green bracts -- toad-plant,
petunias, ferns; pink lilies, blue
ones, tigers; poppies; black sweet-peas.
The climate

is not right for the banyan, frangipani, or
jack-fruit trees; or for exotic serpent
life. Ring lizard and snake-skin for the foot, if you see fit;
but here they've cats, not cobras, to
keep down the rats. The diffident
little newt

with white pin-dots on black horizontal spaced-
out bands lives here; yet there is nothing that
ambition can buy or take away. The college student
named Ambrose sits on the hillside
with his not-native books and hat
and sees boats

at sea progress white and rigid as if in
a groove. Liking an elegance of which
the sourch is not bravado, he knows by heart the antique
sugar-bowl shaped summer-house of
interlacing slats, and the pitch
of the church

spire, not true, from which a man in scarlet lets
down a rope as a spider spins a thread;
he might be part of a novel, but on the sidewalk a
sign says C. J. Poole, Steeple Jack,
in black and white; and one in red
and white says

Danger. The church portico has four fluted
columns, each a single piece of stone, made
modester by white-wash. This would be a fit haven for
waifs, children, animals, prisoners,
and presidents who have repaid
sin-driven

senators by not thinking about them. The
place has a school-house, a post-office in a
store, fish-houses, hen-houses, a three-masted schooner on
the stocks. The hero, the student,
the steeple-jack, each in his way,
is at home.

It could not be dangerous to be living
in a town like this, of simple people,
who have a steeple-jack placing danger signs by the church
while he is gilding the solid-
pointed star, which on a steeple
stands for hope.

Marianne Moore

Brief comments: the criticism and notes indicate that the poem's opening with a bit about Albrecht Durer (a famous painter and close friend of Luther and a Lutheran) actually went to see a whale stranded on a beach (Durer liked to do nature studies -- but which beach near his home would have had a whale? He got there late or something and the whale had already rotted. Perhaps Moore had heard about the stranding of the whales (Jonas?) and had gone to see -- perhaps this town was somewhere on Long Island, or even on the coast of New Jersey --? There are still towns that are somewhat like this one along the Jersey shore.

The poem was first published in 1932. What president would have looked the other way while sin-driven senators were not thought about? Roosevelt? Hoover? Coolidge?

The town is on a seashore, perhaps in Maine. Or it could be Cape Cod or Martha's Vineyard and the town could be Chappaquiddick. Certainly this is the East Coast of America. The church is probably Congregationalist? Could we narrow it down through the vegetation? Is it a specific church?

I don't know anything about St. Ambrose. Why did she choose him? Some of the critics identify the steeple-jack as Satan, and link it to Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter when the poem says he "might be part of a novel." I don't quite understand exactly what the steeple-jack is doing that is bad, or at least ambiguous. Is he giving false hopes by gilding the star?

Why does she spend so much time contrasting equatorial vegetation with the local vegetation? Is that purely scientific? Is there a larger rationale?

She does describe the church -- it has four fluted columns (neo-classical?) each a single piece of stone -- made more modest by white-wash. Makes me think at least of Puritan churches. She lists an increasingly sinful group that might be at home in the church -- waifs, children, animals!,
prisoners, and presidents -- and then at the end of the poem she says the place seems safe -- it could not be dangerous to live in such a town (is she serious when she says that?). The storm has "disturbed" the star on the steeple.

There is a strange scheme to the poem -- she writes in syllabics. Every stanza has six lines with a syllabic count that goes 11, 10, 14, 8, 8, and 3.

Many of her poems are based on syllabic counts, but as far as I know each poem has a unique number of syllabic counts (she varies them, even between drafts), but once she decides on the count, it remains fixed within each poem. As far as I know this is unique, at least among the major modernists. Does it work?

There's a lot of stuff I haven't looked up in the poem -- salpiglossis?

At any rate, GM asked if any of us want to talk about poetry. I do, but maybe not on the huge scale of what would count as an introduction to contemporary poetry (I liked his list). I wondered if we could somehow continue our conversation about the church and politics, but via this poem.

Is the Asshole Holy?: A Dialogue

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! ... -- Allen Ginsberg, postscript to HOWL, writ in Berkeley 1955

Question: Can the asshole serve God?
Answer: Assholes have always served God. Every part of the body can serve God.
Question: But, traditionally, it is the soul that has served God. Why do you say that the asshole can serve God, and that the genitals can serve God?
Answer: The genitals are holy. My mouthpiece Allen Ginsberg said so. Repeat after me: Holy asshole! Holy asshole! It's not so bad, is it?
Question: So everything is holy. Is the number 666 holy?
Answer: The ELCA was overtaken by NAMBLA this week by the exact percentage of 66.6%. Therefore, yes, this much maligned number is now holy.
Question: Was Allen Ginsberg a member of NAMBLA?
Answer: Yes, as was William Burroughs. You have to get over the fact that NAMBLA now is in charge of not only large sections of the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, but also the Lutheran Church.
Question: Who's next?
Answer: The Presbyterians.
Question: Will the asshole have an increasingly large role to play in the Christian church?
Answer: Assholes have always played a large role in the church. Remember, even to ask that question shows that you're an asshole.
Question: While I'm speaking with you, can I ask you one more question?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Is it true that Altamont was the true face of Woodstock?
Answer: Yes. Woodstock caught me napping. By the time that Altamont rolled around, I had all my angels ready.

MY GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT

When I first came to my college nine years ago, I noticed that the bathroom on the 7th floor of the building in which I teach did not have a book rack. I often use that bathroom. Generally, I am working on something and then run to class. Just before I go to class, I have to "go." I would run out of my office with my books under one arm and then pop in, and would be met with the problem of where to place my books. I used to stack my books on top of the paper dispenser, which had a rounded top. That done, both hands were free to unzip and guide the golden arch into the marble receptacle. But often at that precise moment before a class period, there were two or three other teachers in there, and the paper dispenser top was already occupied by their books. If someone else had used it to balance their books, then you couldn't take a whiz and had to dance about until they removed their books, or if you were out of time, you had to hold your books under one arm while finessing the operation.

So, I put in a work order. This was in 2001. The work order received an acknowledgment, called, "Acknowledgement of Work Order #717." About a year ago, something occurred. A metal book rack was placed in the men's bathroom on the seventh floor at a height of approximately five and a half feet (perhaps there is a standard height). It was a metal shelf composed of six evenly placed horizontal bars (similar to the one depicted above), and placed very evenly (he or she must have used a "level"). Shortly after, I received an email, "Work requisition #717 fulfilled."

Every time I enter that bathroom, I am blissed out.

While not an achievement that rivals the Great Wall of China, or even the Brooklyn Bridge, it is my contribution to the built environment.

A.J. Roebling designed and supervised the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. But my achievement is even greater. Many wanted a bridge, and had called for it, but he only designed it. The bookrack was my IDEA.

There are two other ideas I've added around here. One is a box to take all xeroxes over to printing once a day. Instead of us individually going over, 60 men and women, only the secretary goes over, and this saves approximately 30 faculty work hours a day. The secretary appreciates the exercise. It's a win-win.

In addition, we made too many xeroxes on the 7th floor machine, so I suggested that we each get a personal code, and only be able to use 1000 pages per semester (it's cheaper to print over in the printing office). Implemented. Savings: 100,000 sheets of paper per annum.

My next idea is an underground train for the secretary that runs from the basement of our building to the printing building. The train would be for a single passenger, and would feature a subway stand halfway over, so the secretary can have the feeling that she's in Manhattan when she makes her daily print run. The winter around here is harsh, and the walk across the plaza to printing can take place within a wind tunnel effect. I want to spare her that. I received an email the other day. "Work requisition #9923 acknowledged."

If I Could Ban One Word

If you could ban one word from the English language, which one would it be?

I would ban the word "love."

People say it to express that they like potato chips.

People say it to mean, they desire to fondle someone.

When in fact you need plumbing, refrigeration, protein, and air, as well as water and sunlight, the Beatles claimed that "All you need is love."

People still sing that song as if it has a clear meaning.

There is an experience of love: which means the " " til you part in death thing, that comes with families. But we need a new word, or set of words, to replace the L. word.

The word is all stretched out. The most suspicious things are done with that word, and it justifies almost anything. "But we were in love." With that one word, the private triumphs over the public. It allows anyone to do almost anything.

If I could ban one word in order to improve the world, I would ban the word "Love."

ELCA ALLOWS GAY ORDINATION

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America voted in the last couple of days to allow gay ordination. They needed a two-third's majority, and apparently got it by one vote.

There were about 1200 voters.

I am not a member of the ELCA, so I don't really care what they do.

I am a member of the Missouri Synod.

The reason I go to church is that I want guidance. As a kid, one part of the Bible that seemed pretty clear in that it appeared in the first passage in Genesis (1:28) was to "go forth and multiply."

We have four children. That's not that many, but it's all that will fit into the van. So Luther also argued that we have to get along in two kingdoms. So I think four will be where we stop. I mean we did technically "multiply" (4 x 1 = 4).

So I've been thinking all along that gay people are breaking that rule.

Since, by definition, they can't multiply.

But then I also wonder well if gay people don't like the other sex, why should they multiply with another person, if they won't stick with that person? And this is a conundrum.

I like rules and I want them to be clear, and the rule in 1:28 is pretty clear, at least to me. I thought it was a commandment, and binding. He didn't say, "Go and do whatever the Hell you want." I like the Ten Commandments as they are made clear in the Catechism, too. (I love the notion of the positive corollaries and try REALLY hard to follow them, though I often fail. But to have the church itself abrogate them??)

The new ruling doesn't really make sense to me, since, among other things, it seems to change the very first thing God says to Adam and Eve!

Now I admit that there is such a thing as overpopulation, and that the Malthusians among us believe that abortion and euthenasia, and limiting your output of children is probably far superior, on a logical basis, and that we should throw Momma from the Train. I know the more scientific than thou Evolutionists will show animal statistics with a pointer and show that when any animal population gets out of control then there is going to be death by starvation, and they will want to rap my knuckles with their logical ruler.

So be it. But I am following a different set of rules, and the First Amendment allows this, people.

We could change the First Amendment, and say that only Democrats can speak. That has been done in some places.

Nevertheless, that doesn't mean that God's rules change. So it's a question of whose logic is it that the ELCA has applied.

If the parameter is LOVE, then I just hope that that is held to so that those who love ten people, or twenty people, or an animal, are also accepted by the ELCA. If what they are afraid of is losing people, then they should take the multiple partner people in, as it's a three-fer. And there's probably at least a million people in the country that would be happy to have a church condone their marriages with ten and more people (San Francisco would sign up as one big marriage).

Right now, of course, it's only two people. But will they accept a grandfather who's 90 and is living with his granddaughter, who's 19, and they are sexually active even if not married? I mean, come on, it's LOVE!

I would just like to see a logical set of parameters in a church.

Other people can live without logic, or with just plain pleasure as their only sense of guidance. Good for them!

I'd go crazy.

And I'd leave any church that wasn't in some way logical, logical at least to the point that the central criteria are held throughout, systematically, in a way that I can at least understand, if not completely follow (I have trouble getting to church on Sunday and often prefer to work, even though I know it's a sin!).

At bottom, Lutheran Surrealism does make sense, if only to me. Otherwise, I wouldn't be its chief adherent.

The ECLA makes no sense at all to me.

And Catholics never made any sense to me either. By definition nuns and priests were seemingly breaking God's first imperative to his creations in 1:28. Being celibate. Where on earth did this celibacy thing come from? Does Paul trump God?

It seems like the strangest perversion of all, and yet it's at the very heart of Catholicism.

I am friends with Catholics, and members of the ELCA, and even gosh-darned Episcopalians, who may as well be Satanists since their church is founded on Henry VIII's thought that if he could remarry he could get a son (but the male sperm determines the gender of the baby, but the clod didn't know).

At any rate, it'll be fun to watch the ELCA over the next two years. I assume they will schism, and their numbers will drop precipitously. But who knows? They might grow! Already many congregations and people have left the ELCA. It started decades back with a drift to Catholicism (which never made sense to me) and a drift into the Eastern Orthodox, and now I assume the major emigration will be toward Missouri Synod.

The ECLA central office has already had to cut thirty percent of its staff over the last year as they no longer have the money to pay them. I assume that that will go on dwindling, and that ultimately the ELCA will completely rewrite the Bible, arguing that each verb isn't quite what it really was back in the day, until, of course, you've arrived at a version of the Bible that Martin Luther wouldn't have recognized. At that point, I just hope they will no longer call themselves Lutherans.

But meanwhile many young people who are going through the reeducation centers of the colleges will find the ELCA does make sense to them, since it is now another crypto-
Marxist institution.

I think if you are going to adhere to Christianity, you have to have a clear set of Christian rules, and hold fast to the rules and to the imperatives that God gave us, and tht means that we separate church and state ("my kingdom is not of this world").

If you don't, then just do whatever. Marry dogs and beetles, or move Christmas to a more convenient date when nobody else is shopping, like April 1st, and make foot-bathing holy (sorry, GM), and roll on the floor speaking Carthaginian.

As for me, I have to keep going with the logic as I understood it. I'm too far into the game to allow all the rules to change at this point. I'm just glad that the Missouri Synod hasn't changed much since 1520. Luther got most things right, and I'll stick with those parameters.

Thank you, Martin.

WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR?

I picked up a copy of Paul Tillich's Wartime Radio Broadcasts into Nazi Germany entitled Against the Third Reich (Westminster John Knox Press, 1998).

Tillich is a major Lutheran theologian of the 20th century. He started out as a socialist, but never got down with the National Socialists. He emigrated to NYC during Hitler's rise, and remained here much of his life. He is often contrasted negatively with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the other great mind of 20th century Lutheran Germany. Bonhoeffer went back to Germany from America and fought a clandestine and losing battle with the Nazis, and was finally hanged for his efforts shortly before the armistice.

Tillich on the other hand, partied down in America. There are rumors of orgies, and at least long affairs (I haven't read his wife's autobiography, but she had a lot to complain about). But Tillich apparently made over 50 broadcasts into Nazi Germany which attempted to rouse anti-Nazi fervor from within the country.

On October 6, 1942 he made an address entitled What Is Worth Defending? At that point Hitler's power had spread from the Balkans to Poland, and he owned much of France and some of Scandinavia. And he was beginning to talk about defending his gains. Tillich argued that the German nation was worth defending, but only in the older sense of its traditional boundaries and freedoms. He argued that the Nazis had taken away all freedoms.

"What, then, is the Germany it would be worthy to defend? Its freedom is certainly the first answer. But this freedom was certainly taken from it when it came under the power of a tyranny. Who is free today in Germany, free from fear, free to speak, free to act? A few at the top: all others are less free than they ever were in German history" (69).

Tillich argues that Germans should participate in the liberation of Germany from the Nazi totalitarians, because then the rubble at the end of the war will not be perhaps as deep.

Reading this made me ask: why am I so against the Democrats, after a lifetime of being on their side? I think it is because they are acting like Nazis.

While Tillich may have never completed abandoned socialism, he did not see the deeper nature of the struggle. Friedrich Hayek said that socialism is invariably a form of Nazism, or that it easily lends itself to Nazism, and that Hitlerism and Stalinism were almost identical in their structure. They are both one-party states, in which individual freedom is one of the first things to vanish.

"...it would be a mistake to believe that the specific German rather than the socialist element produced totalitarianism. It was the prevalance of socialist views and not Prussiansim that Germany had in common with Italy and Russia -- and it was from the masses and not from the classes steeped in the Prussian tradition, and favored by it, that National Socialism arose" (The Road to Serfdom, 62-63).

In socialist countries the second thing to disappear after the freedom to speak is the rule of law as an objective matter. In a true democracy, law is for everyone. In a socialist system, those who are in charge, are also above the law. Once the government has "unlimited powers" (Hayek 119) it "may do what it pleases" (119), and any "arbitrary rule can be made legal" (119).

Hayek cites Locke in arguing that there are two kinds of law. One is that which is universal, and which will "enable the individual to foresee how the coercive apparatus of the state will be used" (119), and the other is a kind of "ad hoc" law, in which government decides what to do 'on its merits'" (Hayek citing Locke 119).

Locke argued that there are four basic God-given rights: life, health, liberty and property. These rights are absolute.

And yet they are increasingly and unceasingly under attack by the Democrats, who are increasingly using a Marxian rather than a Lockean value system.

(The great difference is that Locke wanted a universal system of laws available to all citizens equally, whereas Marx wanted the proletariat to have laws available to them that were not available to the bourgeoisie -- in a similar way there are now race and gender separations coming through in Democratic thinking, in which Puerto Rican female judges (for example) declare that their justice is greater than that of white male justice.)

Empathy for a given group is against the Lockean norm. Whereas this was often abandoned in practice, it was never abandoned in principle. One can see how it was abandoned in the Deep South in a novel like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. But this was never the case for the intelligentsia. Atticus Finch fought hard and nearly lost his life for the principle of universal fairness. But the left has decided that all justice is always unfair and unprincipled, so they want to corner it. Now the very notion of fairness is increasingly being abandoned in principle as well as in practice.

But these are not the only rights that are being destroyed in this country.

Life itself is under attack. Babies declared unfit, or unwanted, are being destroyed, and now it's the government of the Democrats who argue that it's ok to kill a baby for any reason whatsoever and for the government to condone and even pay for the murder. And the elderly, too, are under attack. It's now ok to kill someone whose "quality of life" has slipped (the Death Panels will decide this -- each case 'on its own merits' in an Ad hoc manner).

Liberty is under attack. Nancy Pelosi has declared that it's "un-American" to want freedom from the nationalization of healthcare, or to voice opposition to the Democratic party's mandates. And she has said that those who speak out against the Democratic party are Nazis, when in fact she's the Nazi.

Health is under attack, and is no longer a personal prerogative, but something that must answer to the state.

Property is going to be increasingly "redistributed" as the Democratic president stated off the record to Joe the Plumber.

All four of Locke's God-given rights have been rescinded, and are being destroyed under the Democratic regime at present.

Against this we have what's left of the other party (we have only two, and it's foolish to think that any third party can compete in our winner take all system). Freedom of speech has never been under attack by the right, whereas the left has made the campus systems into a virtual Gulag in which only leftist speech and leftist professors may get jobs, publish, or receive tenure. The situation is even worse for students, who are frequently refused the right to gather as Christians, or to publish a newspaper whose thought doesn't coincide with the Democratic regime.

The Republicans want health care to be left as a personal decision, rather than something to be monitored by a gigantic state apparatus on an ad hoc basis by increasingly proliferating committees.

The Republicans want personal property to remain in the hands of those who have earned it. The Democrats want to redistribute property, seizing the wealth of the middle and upper classes, and redistributing it to the poor and to illegal aliens, in order to secure their votes. Voting is one remaining block to total power by the Democrats, but even that is under attack by groups such as Acorn, who are increasingly not only abided but condoned by Democratic party members.

The Republicans are still Lockean in nature. The Democrats are increasingly Marxian.

I was never loyal to one party or the other. I was loyal to Democratic pluralism, and remain loyal to that notion. I simply prefer Locke to Marx, because of the freedoms that Lockean systems enjoy, and because of a well-founded fear of the lack of freedoms that Marxians employ for everyone but the few at the top.

Socialism is slavery. It may present itself as benign. It may argue that your children will be better off protected by the state. It may argue that it's a good trade-off -- your freedoms for your life. But it's still slavery. Any chicken or pig can get a roof over its head and its life may be protected by the farmer. But the farmer doesn't really care in the long run about the chicken.

He's just using it, until such time as he wants to cut its head off.

Marxian thought resembles that of the benign farmer.

But we are human, and we are not chickens. We are individuals, and cannot live a truly human life unless we are allowed to be individuals in terms of our thought, our choice of career and mate, our choice of lifestyle, and what we value.

Let's not let the Democratic state and its institutions decide these things for us, even if they crow that its for our own good. Let's fight the encroaching powers of the totalitarian Democrats, and return to Locke, away from Marx and his minions in the Democratic Party.

WHAT HAUNTS YOU?

"Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.'" (Andre Breton, NADJA, opening sentences)

Who you are, let's say, is what haunts you.

Name a book,
a joke,
a scene in
a film,
a city, or one specific place in a city,
an hypothesis,
a passage from the Bible,
a role model,
a sex symbol,
a musical act,
a politician, or an industrial plant,
etc.

That haunts you, and has haunted you for at least ten years (if you're under 30, then as long as you've been an adult).

Not just something you admire or think is great, but something that you can't get out of your mind for a long long time, and that you keep returning to, without your consciously willing it.

Add some other categories, if you like, or if you can think of some category of thing that haunts you. Sculpture, or dance, or a kind of perfume, might haunt you. Perhaps a bicycle, or a pair of sky-blue gloves, or a noun, or a steeple, or a grave, or a shoe, or an oddly-shaped animal, such as the opossum that once looked at me at 2 am, or the rat's eyes as it fell upon the French fry in Spokane, Wa in 1987 outside a Dairy Queen.

ENNEAGRAM

Some years ago (maybe ten) I was browsing in a bookstore in Portland, Oregon called Powell's. I picked up a book called Karpov on Karpov, about the Russian chessmaster. In the book Karpov argues that all the top grandmasters have a similar level of skill, but they have different personalities. So that in fact you are playing against their personality rather than their skill. Every personality has an Achilles heel, in other words, and your job is to exploit it.

I wondered then if those with certain weaknesses are always individual in their weaknesses, or whether there are types of weakness which can be categorized.

Then, a few years later, I was browsing in a bookstore in Helsinki, Finland called Akateemia, and found a very good psychological typing book called The Enneagram, by a woman named Helen Palmer. Palmer is a Buddhist who operates out of San Francisco. She has been screening panels of people for years who divide themselves into one of nine Achilles' heels which can be placed on a nine-sided figure called the Enneagram.

It's what I was looking for, so I read that book several times through, and then read about thirty other extant books on this system. I have corresponded with some of the authors of the books. I have even written a few articles for their flagship newspaper, The Enneagram Monthly. In brief, the system breaks down like this:

1s are perfectionists. They place law and order above every other value, and believe that right is might. Their homes are tidy, and there is a certain obsessiveness about conforming to what is right. Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird is often used as a symbol for this type. Some put Luther and Calvin also into this type. There is a strange side to this number. They are very right and true on the surface, but they have a trapdoor into sin. That is, they are busy being right, and so can be surprised by sin. Elliot Spitzer is an example of a one who falls into sin. Many evangelical preachers find this, too.

2s are helpers. They help others, and place a high value on giving. But they are generally giving to get. They want others to love them for what they are giving. I'm going to skip over this number because it's rarely found on the internet. They are characterized by King Lear, who gives his kingdom away in order to be loved by his daughters. They think you are loved for what you have given others. In fact, as Lear finds out, love is a given. It doesn't depend on anything. Cordelia loves Lear in spite of what he's done to her, while his other two daughters can't be bought.

3s are performers. They think you will be loved if you outperform others. Most top athletes fall into this category. Almost all of the Olympics is predicated on this personality. They will work for years to perfect their backstroke. They often have a Barbie and Ken style of personality -- that is, they seem perfect, but are also a bit on the empty side. Many newscasters look like this. Empty suits who want to look good, and want to be admired. But who are they? Nobody knows. But they are the fastest one on the track. Salesmen who think about the bottom line of success, they can be found in ashrams, too. They are the most enlightened one, they want everybody to think.

4s are artists. They want to look and be unusual. They want to be remembered. Most poets fall into this category. They generally write well, and are dressed with unusual style (especially the women). They are deep. Not so good at thinking clearly, they can nevertheless create enormous firestorms. The women and the men both are drawn to Goth, and alternative lifestyles. Most of the Beat poets were fours (except Burroughs).

5s are logical thinkers. They are often quite removed and don't have a strong public presence. They are generally quiet, and like to be by themselves. They often find work as computer programmers, or anything that requires a lot of logic, and little time with others. Many top scientists, top mathematicians, and almost all the best chessplayers would be in this category. Apparently, they initially pull away from emotional life because of an overbearing mother.

6s are paranoids, who try to find safety in numbers. They look just like everybody else in their group, and try to present themselves as members of a group. Generally they are missing the father, or the father was in some way very arbitrary (perhaps a drunk) and they couldn't count on him. So they are looking for safety in some other group. Churches are filled with them, as are political parties, and any kind of large group that has a bottom line in terms of acceptance.

7s are funny gluttons for experience. They can't stand boredom. They are always up. A figure often cited is Robin Williams, the comedian. But many comedians fit into this category. They are irrepressible. I think Paris Hilton is perhaps this type. They can't sit still, and are always looking for fun. Lindsay Lohan, perhaps, too. Comedians, they are capable of saying what no one else is thinking, and cracking everybody up. They are terrified of boredom, and are likely to fill up places like Las Vegas.

8s are power zombies. They generally grew up in a power vaccuum but decided to fill it with their own muscle. They take people under their wing. Almost all Marxist dictators are eights. Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Il, and many others fit into this type. So does Tony Soprano. Or Pablo Escobar. The only thing they might really care about is their children. They are tender fathers and mothers. Roseann Barr is often described as an eight, as is Rosie O'Donnell. They fight before they have thought about it. Confront them, and you're dead. They don't care once you're dead. They do not have consciences. They think life is either kill or be killed, and that ther'es nothing else. McCain is often thought to have been an eight.

9s are peaceniks. They can't get much done, because they want peace. Hippies, and the marshmallow kinds of folks you see more and more now in Wal-Mart, they tend to fill up their lives with food. They like other people, and like to surround themselves with family. They want peace, and rarely start trouble, but can throw a sharp elbow in terms of trying to stop trouble. Ringo Starr is often cited as a nine. They are people who like drummers, provide a backdrop, or a steady basis for the others.

At any rate, there are a number of tests online. What I like about the system is that it argues that people fall into a number of types. As opposed to finding a one-size fits all psychological theory, in which everyone is more or less the same, it tries to differentiate. I think it's a very interesting theory, and it has helped me understand other people better. I didn't know that twos and eights even existed. Now I see them all around me, and it helps me negotiate them better.

If you google "enneagram test" a number of free online tests will pop up. My favorite is the one at Eclectic Energies. It was done by a retired Dutch jazz drummer. It's fairly accurate, I think. The one at Similar Minds is not so hot. There are many others. If you take one, you can start to perhaps think about yourself, and some of your issues. Not that you have any! But it might help you figure out how others see you, and the problems you pose, as well as your strengths.

OLD NEW BORROWED BLUE

The role of the colleges is difficult to assess since there are so many departments, but suffice it to say that in every discipline there is not only progress but also a history, and a tradition.

I don't know much about mathematics, but I do know there is a history to mathematics, and that it has grown in increments, with significant innovators like Archimedes, Descartes, and others, forming pinnacles of achievement.

In the humanities it is similar. A pinnacle such as Shakespeare is not purely an individual achievement, but without the individual known as Shakespeare that pinnacle would not exist.

In the humanities we don't want literature that is just true about class relationships, or true about gender relationships (although I think Shakespeare is as true as anyone else on that score), I think we also want literature that provides a MAP of life to those who are about to go off into a life and want to live useful lives. Shakespeare can help because he shows what a loser Falstaff turns out to be in spite of his wit and thunderous merriment. He is a man without a moral compass and he dies in a whore house without any true friends.

Prince Hal on the other hand turns England around and gets married, and develops secure and solid relationships. Individuals matter, but friends matter too (true or false friends).

Meanwhile, many scholars today tend to spend their time on lesser texts that represent a particular area of society with which they are exclusively concerned.

The writer William Burroughs was noted for his innovation in terms of stream of consciousness and his discovery of new modes of orgasm (the orgasm by hanging motif in Naked Lunch comes to mind). I don't know what use this would be to a student preparing for a life, except to pervert them into avenues of experience that would lead to an early death by drug addiction or death in a Japanese hotel closet.

Another word for innovation is mutation. Mutations tend not to survive. William Burroughs' son was born with a heroin addiction, and lived until age 35 or so, after having had several kidney transplants. Some mutations are cancerous, or in some way, not conducive to life.

How does one tell the difference? Under the new command of "tolerance," any sort of mutation is regarded as an innovation, and thus as progress.

But there has never been a literary critic quite as sharp as Aristotle, nor any dramatic writer quite as strong as Shakespeare.

Sometimes going forward means going backward.

No theologian since Luther has been quite so clever in terms of how to parse the state and religion relationship. Many newer theologies such as Reverend Wright's Liberation Theology are terribly crude and brutal by comparison and will destroy the economies of any country that puts them into use.

If the poet or theologian is to the flock a kind of lookout, and one who holds the heart of the matter in his or her pen, we cannot think of those who are writing as merely a playful luxury.

"In 1967 poet allen Ginsberg wrote, 'Let the Viet Cong win over the American Army! ... And if it were my wish [America would] lose & our will/ be broken/ & our armies scattered" (cited in America's Victories, by Larry Schweikert, p. 250.

Even in math we want to find what is true rather than what is purely novel. If Marxism is at the heart of the mathematician, then perhaps it will not destroy the flock, although it might skew the math, and even the particular mathematician, into irrelevance. But Marxism or Lutheranism in the heart of a poet or a professor will determine the tilt of the verse, the tendency of the discussion, its truth.

And either the flock will thrive, or it will be broken and scattered.

Is It Genocide Yet?

Tom asked me when the UN calls mass murder a genocide. Here's a partial definition from the UN Convention on Genocide first written in 1944:

"Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.[9]"

I got this off of the Wikipedia page under Genocide.

It was written by Raphael Lemkin (image above), a Polish Jew who was one of two surviving members of his entire family after World War II. But his central inspiration was not the destruction of European Jewry. What most upset him was the Kurdish genocide of the Christian Assyrians of Iraq (around Mosul) in August 1933. It's a totally unknown genocide to most Americans, but it was a genocide nevertheless, and it had deeply upset Lemkin when it had taken place. Even today, few know about it. It's never been written about, never made it into the movies.

One wonders what would fit under Lemkin's definition. Could the colleges and universities of America be considered cultural killing fields? Few students get through four years of college without having their religion viciously attacked, mocked, and belittled. Few conservatives can make it through. Many professors are openly eager to join in on this attack. Professors such as Richard Rorty are completely unapologetic about it. Is it a genocide?

Around the world it seems that when it is Christians being attacked, our government tends to look the other way. In East Timor it was the Christians of that island nation who were deracinated and largely destroyed by the Muslim majority. No one in our media cared. In Iraq, a major genocide of the 20th century were the Assyrians, in 1933. No one seems to know about this genocide. When the Armenians were destroyed, again no one much seemed to care, presumably again because they were Christian.

In the Darfur region, it is largely Christians who are being destroyed.

The Karen people of Myanmar are largely Christian. They are all but destroyed, helicopter gunships and thousands of mines working on finishing the job every day. Even small children are forcibly raped, and shot and beaten. On the other hand, many seem to worry about Aung San Kyi, but perhaps only because she is Buddhist. The Hollywood left has taken up Buddhism, and sees it as a good thing. The Beatniks liked Buddhism. It is fashionable, and dressy. No one cares at all about the Karen people because they are Christian. They have lost half of their population in the last twenty years. No one seems to know about this. The media look the other way.

Much better known are the Jewish holocaust in Europe during the Second World War, presumably because of the many movies and TV programs that have been produced. Many Lutherans also lost their lives in that holocaust, but this is not well known. Instead, people tell me all the time that Germany was Lutheran, so Hitler must have been a Lutheran. Hitler was a secular socialist who never had anything to do with Lutherans.

Why is it that so few programs have been made about the Karens, or about the Assyrians of Iraq, or the Christian people of the southern Sudan, or about the Lutherans who stood up to Hitler? Although America is still predominantly Christian, when we get an actual Christian candidate like Sarah Palin, she is mercilessly mocked, even her children are subject to ridicule, and the media conspires to shred every statement that she makes, every smile on her children's faces is subject to the assault machine.

No one would dream of attacking President Obama's children.

But Palin's children are fair game for a media that is utterly violent with regard to any practicing Christian. All pretense of "tolerance" is gone, and the gloves are off when it comes to Christians and their children.

Doesn't this constitute a genocide? It is certainly a destruction of a way of life, and a way of thought, that has given much to the world.

In the universities, it is very rare to find an openly Christian professor (especially in the humanities) although we live in a country that is 80% Christian. What has happened?

The planning stages for a genocide include the endless pronouncement of the stupidity and disease-like nature of a given group. This is broadcast interminably until it is decided to move on the group, by which time it is generally too late to save them.

Numerically, the two greatest genocides of the twentieth century were the Maoist genocide during the Cultural Revolution, which killed upwards of 50 million people. Although many times greater than the Jewish holocaust of the 1940s, very few TV shows or movies have been made about this time. This is presumably because the left was behind it, and Hollywood has always been, and continues to be, tilted to the left. The Stalinist purges have also been numerically superior to most of our other genocides, with estimates in the 30 million range. But again, comparatively few movies have been made, especially if you compare this with the films made about the McCarthy Era, which was an attempt to stop the Red Menace in America.

A handful of moviemakers were blacklisted and had to work under other names for about ten years during the McCarthy period. This is by many on the left considered to be far worse than the 80 million that the Maoists and the Stalinists killed: presumably justified by sharing the leftist ideology.

One wonders when and how something is to be defined as a genocide. Those who are perpetrating such things at either cultural or physical levels are never going to admit to it. It requires those who are being destroyed to bring their case to the court of public opinion, and to focus awareness, and to call it what it is.

Aung Suu Kyi just the tip of the GENOCIDE

I would have bet that President Obama would say nothing about the generals of Myanmar acting "stupidly," in terms of extending Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest for another 18 months. This time it's because some American dumbbell swam up to her house, and she gave him some food and let him stay overnight without reporting it to the authorities.

However, I'd be wrong. The White House did release this mini-statement (it would be more effective if Obama would have said something in a national press conference, but he's too busy putting Gates-Gate to bed, no doubt). Still, it's something! It's quite amazing. President Obama is actually aware of the larger world in which we live, and seems to care about human rights in places other than Cambridge, Massachusetts enough to squib 165 words to that effect:

For Immediate Release: August 11, 2009

The conviction and sentencing of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi today on charges related to an uninvited intrusion into her home violate universal principles of human rights, run counter to Burma’s commitments under the ASEAN charter, and demonstrate continued disregard for UN Security Council statements. I join the international community in calling for Aung San Suu Kyi’s immediate unconditional release.

Today’s unjust decision reminds us of the thousands of other political prisoners in Burma who, like Aung San Suu Kyi, have been denied their liberty because of their pursuit of a government that respects the will, rights, and aspirations of all Burmese citizens. They, too, should be freed. Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. I call on the Burmese regime to heed the views of its own people and the international community and to work towards genuine national reconciliation.

I am also concerned by the sentencing of American citizen John Yettaw to seven years in prison, a punishment out of proportion with his actions.


[- U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama]

The Kangaroo Court gave her 18 months in solitary confinement because she herself had to put up with an "uninvited intrusion into her home" (actually, this wasn't like the Crowley thing in which he entered Gates' house, and still seems to be on the president's mind -- she INVITED HIM IN, from what I understand).

I don't think Obama's statement is very strong, or even accurate. He could have said something about the genocide of the Karen people, and the mass rapes in the country. He could begin to mobilize against the Red Chinese, who prop up Burma with trade, even when the rest of the world sanctions them. The Chinese also prop up Zimbabwe and the Sudan and North Korea, the world's worst human rights violaters. The Chinese are the ones responsible for the genocide of the Tibetans. Bush could connect all the dots. But Obama doesn't seem to be able to do this. If this was the best of all worlds, we would bomb Peking. Isn't that what Lincoln would have done? He would have at least written something stronger than Obama's spank-note, if he didn't write the Gettysburg Address (shorter than Obama's note). As it is, we owe China so much money we can't really say anything but must dance to their tune, just like the rest of the world. They are the puppet masters, and Obama is just another puppet to which they control the purse strings.

The Buddhists of Burma (it appears that they shave their heads, which gives another meaning to the term "Burma Shave") will probably try to prevent any kind of personal attachment to anger over the situation in Myanmar -- let's hope they do not get mad, and violate their own non-attachment principles (almost everyone there is a Buddhist, except for the tiny Karen population [7 million] which is largely Christian), and which is undergoing a GENOCIDE with mass rapes, destruction of thousands of villages, and other atrocities, while President Obama has a Lite Beer and discusses how the Boston police and a Harvard professor could have better understanding of one another if only they tossed the grape together more often).

Say a prayer for the people of Burma, since our president won't lift a finger unless it's to destroy our medical industry and replace it with hoboes on oboes. He did at least release a memo about Burma, probably tossed off while shaving. Bush would have done a lot more, even if he did nick himself on occasion in his closer shaves. He would have bombed the Burmese at least.

In general, the UN doesn't have the right to do anything about the internal affairs of a country, unless it's GENOCIDE. Then they MUST do something according to their own charter. If this isn't GENOCIDE (the Karen people are being DESTROYED, hello), then what is?

What is Justice?

I'm reading two novels simultaneously, and am only half-way through one of them, and 50 pages into the other.

The one I'm half-way through is called The Giver, about an Orwellian planned society. It's for Young Adults. My daughter and I are reading a chapter every night. It opens with a family that has been put together by the state (they are not united through blood). The son at age 12 is given the surprising position of being the Receiver of Memory, the top position in the community. While everyone else in the community has only the book of rules, the Receiver of Memory has thousands of books to read. In last night's chapter, the boy is given the memory of snow from the previous Receiver of Memory, who is now old.

The Receiver presses his hands into the boy's back, and the memory of snow is transmitted.

Everyone has to speak precisely in the book. One boy says in playschool that he's "dying of hunger," and he is hurt by the teacher because this isn't literally true. The book was written by someone named Lois Lowry, and won all kinds of YA awards.

The other book I'm reading is To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. I hadn't ever read this famous classic, but am now about 50 pages in. I know the outline of the story. A black man is accused of raping a girl. But her crummy white dad did it, and blamed the black man. It takes place somewhere in Alabama, and is based on a true story. Atticus Finch is the attorney for the black man, and takes the case pro bono. He saves the black man, but nearly loses his life in the process.

The story is told by Atticus Finch's daughter.

The daughter has quite a knack for description, and the book is filled with a certain kind of idiosyncratic word-choice, a sort of loving recollection of the mad verbiage of the southern precinct in which she lives.

Here she's talking about Boo Radley's house, a mysterious neighbor who many think has lost his mind:

"The old house was the same, droopy and sick, but as we stared down the street we thought we saw an inside shutter move. Flick. A tiny, almost invisible movement, and the house was still" (19).

At one point someone leaves her a package with two Buffalo head nickels in the knot of an old tree, along with a stick of gum. They find it on Boo Radley's property.

"Finders were keepers unless title was proven. Plucking an occasional camellia, getting a squirt of hot milk from Miss Maudie Atkinson's cow on a summer day, helping ourselves to someone's scuppernongs was part of our ethical culture, but money was different" (47).

This book is quite unique in every way. It's the only book ever published by Harper Lee, who was a childhood friend of Truman Capote. Her book is much more interesting than anything Capote wrote. Why is that? I think part of it is that Capote was working within the Hemingway sentence -- clear, cold, and objective. It's functional, but it's not amazing. Harper Lee's writing is almost irrational at times, and yet you sink into the voice, and takes you places you've never been.

But is it just?

Capote slaved over his books, and drove himself wild trying to get good Hemingwayesque sentences. Harper Lee on the other hand feels possessed by a single story, and just lets it wail from page one. I'm on about page 60 now, and I've never read anything quite like it.

Meanwhile, my summer is ending. I have to write up a bunch of program descriptions, and mow the yard, and repave the driveway. It's hot here today, about 90, and muggy. We drove back up from Philly an odd route to get around the highway work in Scranton and in a crummy town called Port Jervis on the corner of NJ, PA and NY, I stopped to ask if a tiny road on the map was too wiggly for my wife who gets carsick. It was one of the convenience store/gas station situations that you find everywhere in small towns and in the corners of big cities. You can buy slightly overpriced tea and snacks, along with your gas. Some gristly sandwiches sit under a hot glass with a dead fly. The local paper is at the foot of the cashier's counter. The crummy overweight woman behind the crummy counter laughed and handed me a paper bag, and said, "Well, I'll give you a free bag for your wife to puke in!"

It was a vicious thing to say, I felt, and it ruined my day, and the basic indecency of it came close to ruining my whole life. I hope I never end up in Port Jervis, NY ever again. The remark was coarse and cruel.

Am I overreacting?

ARTISTS BAD

I USED TO THINK THAT ARTISTS WERE ADMIRABLE.

This morning I realized that art is mostly only used to SUMMON ADMIRATION for the artist.

Which means the artist is rather pitiable. If the whole purpose of GENIUS is to be a GENIUS, it seems like a waste of time. Nero was good on the lyre. As he died, he said, "What an artist dies in me!"

If you change the word "artist" into "creep" you'd have a more accurate sentence, but perhaps the two terms, "artist" and "creep" are synonymous. If I were to need help from someone -- let's say my car broke down, and I needed someone to risk his neck to help me, and there was either a businessman from some highrise, or an artist, which one do you think would be more likely to help me?

Not lower than artist (but still very low) in terms of regard for others (artists are all about self-regard), would be WESTERN BUDDHISTS with TRUST FUNDS, and PROFESSORS OF MULTICULTURALISM who play RAQUETBALL TO STAY IN SHAPE.

At the very bery bery vottom of the heap would be Barack Obama. Not just because he's president. But because he's so artistic in his inclinations! But in any incarnation he would be self-absorbed, with every move calculated to create admiration. Imagine him pushing a broom, and you asking if he could help you keep your luggage safe at an airport while you went into the restroom.

"Sorry, I'm too sad about America. It doesn't see my earth-shaking importance!"

Bush, on the other hand, was the salt of the earth. You could trust him to do anything for you, no matter what position he was given in life. He was loyal to America, and put America first. Obama, I feel, puts the rest of the world first, hating his homeland and loathing all the people in it who are the most decent, like the police officers. He actually prefers the multicultural professors and the trust-fund Buddhists riding around in adult tricycles (name of biggest Buddhist magazine is actually called TRICYCLE, which tells you something about their clientele).

Imagine asking Picasso to help you with something. Imagine asking Cocteau, or Proust, or Carravagio, or Tom Ripley, or Nero, or Andy Warhol. They'd look at you about how a cat looks at you.

Ask not what Barack Obama can do for you. Ask what you can do for Barack Obama.





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GOVERNMENT AS UMP REDUX

Equality can mean to the government that all games end in a tie, and that all players have exactly the same number of hits, and the ERA is artificially stifled, and all players are paid the same.

Or it could just be that the ump judges the rules fairly, no matter who's hitting. He calls a strike a strike, and a ball a ball, and a foul ball is foul even if you know him close.

I think Obama thinks equality means the games will always end in a tie, and no one ever wins. Winners mean losers, and that means someone is going to cry. So he wants to fix the game.

Isn't he thereby wrecking the game?

If we are a species, and life is a Darwinian competition, then we have to play by nature's rules. Striving is not so bad, and of course there are losers, and strikeouts, but if everybody is a homerun king, then what does it matter?

I can understand that in playschool we want to de-emphasize competition and winning, but by the time people are adults, we have to strive to do our best, or else we just collapse into anomia. The old way of thinking is that we had a calling, and that we had to find our calling, and then strive.

In all other species this is still the case. May the better owl win. Of course there was also luck.

Empathy is a very fine thing for playschoolers. But when we're grown ups can we really not stand the fact that some of us are better baseball players, better gymnasts, better businessmen, better writers, better leaders, better soldiers, better carpenters, better postal workers, than others? Can we really not stand the fact that the American car industry is making more clunkers than the Japs and the Koreans combined?

Is everything and everyone really equal? Would the world be better if everyone was identical, and thus equal?

THE LADYBUG SUMMIT

If you could talk to a ladybug for ten minutes via some special translation device, what would you say? I think instead of inter-racial talks, we need more interspecies talks, and would like to see the president talking with a ladybug on the White House lawn.

RACING TO THE RIGHT AND LEFT

Now the whole country has just been through the Beer-Gate with Professor Gates, and Sergeant James Crowley. I don't know how it worked out between them personally, but I've been watching the coverage, and it seems to largely break down along the same lines as the OJ case. All the white people (except my parents) thought that OJ had done it. All the black people thought OJ had been framed. My parents watched the whole trial and felt that OJ had not been clearly guilty, and thought that the police may have planted the evidence. I thought OJ did it (killed his ex-wife and her friend, Goldman) based largely on a strange letter that OJ had written using block print letters. I thought anybody who uses block print letters has to be a killer, and left it at that. Now that OJ's in prison for the violent raid on the man who owned his memorabilia, it does seem (to me) that he got his just desserts. Kind of like getting Capone on tax fraud, but at least the gangsta is in prison. Maybe there, he will learn to write in cursive.

This time around there is a little more nuancing. Juan Williams on Fox News thought that Gates was more responsible than Crowley, but if you go over to CNN, there are black guys there talking about how Crowley faked his police report, and on MSNBC, it's all about how awful the police can be, and are. And Gates' dad is reported to have implied that the 800,000 black men in America's prisons are there for no reason except being black.

But then again some of Officer Crowley's friends are black in the police force. They've backed him, and he's hugged them on TV.

Black and white are difficult to think about. I don't think any two people are alike, and race gives a kind of outer sense of someone, but doesn't tell you anything about what they're like on the inside. Inside the white race a Norwegian and an Italian are very different. Inside the black race a Jamaican and a Puerto Rican are very different. Race doesn't even apparently have a genetic marker. But it's not like a sun tan, in that, it doesn't pass on like a sun tan. It's not Lamarckian. There's something "real" about race.

So there must be a gene for it.

I have always had a few black friends, mostly through sports. In order to have a friend, you have to have a hobby in common. When I wrestled, I had black friends. In badminton, too. But they were usually too good for me. I am not that excellent an athlete, and don't care so much about it.

Two weeks ago I took a Finnish teenager to shop in SOHO and we went down the parkway across the Inwood bridge (very top of Manhattan) and the tollbooth agent was black. He gave me directions while holding my hand. That seemed unusual.

We then went into Inwood, and a black guy had the gas station there (a Getty), and while my kids were emptying their bladders, he suggested that I stay in Inwood and go to a restaurant across the street. He kept patting me on the shoulder as he talked. That seemed unusual.

I'm a Norwegian American, and find it odd that some cultures touch. Ours doesn't touch. We might shake hands, but we don't do five finger-touches followed by elbows and a little dance down the sidewalk. When people do this to me it feels unusual.

I think the news of black-white relations getting somehow better is something like global warming. Sometimes I see personal evidence of this, and sometimes it appears to be a crock, some kind of wish-fantasy, thrown up by the left. We do make up two cultures with as vast a chasm between as that between poetry and mathematics.

We have our own vocabulary, and ways of looking at the world. But there are all kinds of fragmentation between people. But perhaps especially between black and white because of the much-fraught history (slavery, followed by reconstruction, and now, affirmative action, and the comparative crime rates, and difference in terms of family structures, create an enduring difference).

It's been in the news a lot recently, with the death of Michael Jackson and his faux-white facial reconstruction (he had apparently no nose at all, but was just wearing a fake nose of some kind). And then there are the white rappers who act and talk black. Something's happening but I don't know what it is. Please don't call me Mr. Jones.

It seems that every time I turn on the TV there's another story. It's a lot to absorb. CNN is having a series called Black in America. And then there's the Michael Vick case. And another football player from Chicago has been in the news. He had about five white girlfriends (somewhat known to the others?), and one of them shot the woman who was pregnant with his baby. He cried. They had a special about which one of the women did it. It seemed that a fitness builder did it. She had a long history of stalking and injuring men. But I didn't finish the program.

I'm kind of tired of the issue, I guess, and would rather watch the weather channel. I like to see the clouds going over, and look at the maps, and watch the tornadoes take out small towns in Oklahoma. Like global warming, I suspect that there's an enormous agenda behind even the simplest statement and that no one really cares about the truth. I want the truth to be there, but in race relations, it seems to all be about spin.

I would rather think about people as having specific interests in which there was a common denominator, rather than constantly focusing on the superficial aspect of the fraction (skin color), which in turn makes us into constantly divided hyphenated-beings. I don't think you can be friends with someone else on the basis of race. I'd rather think about whether or not someone was a Lutheran, or a poet, or a mathematician, and what I could then learn from them that would then lead to something objective. I don't think that anything true can be said about race. It's too big, and too nebulous, a term, much like gender, or class.

LUDIC & LUCID

Lutheran Surrealism aims to be both lucid and ludic, al'tho it's a pain. We don't know which one is more painful (to be ludic or to be lucid), but for now we will say lucid.

In terms of rights discourses, Lutheranism and Surrealism are both fashionably retro, like Jesus Himself.

And yet, we do often look over at the fence of our corn pasture, and try to see what the Progressive Buddhists are up to, or the Hindoos. Leaning on the Gate, while quaffing an O'Doule's and Biden our Time, we look at the crows, and think, what are rights?

Hindoos crack me up because they grant almost no rights to the untouchables, and yet they consider cows sacred.

The Jain Buddhists have insect hospitals, in case they step on a bug.

Animal Rights people stampede all night about elephants' rights, but apparently some of them also feel that ants should have rights, and yet, elephants step on ants unawares, and ants would have no compunctions eating an elephant if they could get through its tough skin to the succulent meat underneath.

Will the Supreme Court end up adjudicating such animal disputes? If you put an elephant on one side of the scale and colony of army ants on the other, which side would prevail in their rights against the other?

Often lucid, rights discourses in various religious and irreligious spheres, never fail to strike LS as ludic.

What are human rights? Can we say that there are universals?

The Chinese feel perfectly comfortable munching on dogs and monkeys, so it's incorrect to say that the Chinese treat the Tibetans like dogs or think of them as monkeys. To my knowledge, the Maoists have yet to eat the Tibetans, even as tender as the Tibetans might be.

In Vietnam, they eat insects! I've seen this on the TV.

They say that you are what you eat, but all that that means is that we and our food are biodegradable. After someone dies, and their last living molecule has through entropy become difficult to discern as still personally belonging to the personality to which it once belonged, are rights still something that we can say exists for that person, or that they ever Really Did?

The left is sinister, but rights are right, even for the left, if I'm right, and if I'm not, who's to say if I'm wrong?

THE MORAL: Karl Popper among others has argued for science and that our thinking within science should remain within the grounds of the falsifiable. But important values like rights can't be falsified, which must mean that Science has limitations, and that we need some other grounds upon which to determine rights. If not religion, then ... What?