Notes & Comments

Quote of the Week

2012-01-28T11:22:00.002-05:00

From a Newt Gingrich ad running in Florida:

"What kind of man would mislead, distort and deceive just to win an election?....This man would be Mitt Romney."

This from Newt Gingrich.

Thoughts on Patriotic Song

2012-01-24T10:57:00.008-05:00

The other night I was rummaging through my shelves looking for an Elgar CD. I couldn't find it, and being in the mood to listen to some Elgar I started searching YouTube for some performances. I found some clips of the last night of the proms from recent years (the proms are a series of summer concerts in London). I had forgotten (if I ever knew) that at a certain point during the performance of Pomp and Circumstance everyone starts singing "Land of Hope and Glory," a British patriotic song whose lyrics were written to the music of P & C. I found myself staring in disbelief as members of the audience started waving Union Jacks and singing "wider still and wider may thy bounds be set/God who made thee mighty make thee mightier yet." It's fifteen years since the handover of Hong Kong, the Scots could well be on the verge of declaring independence, and a London audience is singing a prayer for imperial expansion.

I kept thinking, "The Brits really need to update their patriotic songs." I also kept wondering what was up with the people in the audience waving Norwegian flags (29 seconds in). But nationalism is about sentiment not rationality. No one in that audience seriously wants the UK to re-take India. Nevertheless it did make me reflect on the sense of national exceptionalism reflected in the some of the other songs from the proms, such as "Rule Britannia" and "Jerusalem" (the latter a Blake poem inspired by the legend that Jesus visited Britain as a boy).

Of course an American is hardly one to point fingers at the people of another country for any cultural hint they think they're better than everyone else. Hell, in this country nobody hints any such thing: they shout it from the rooftops (or on Fox News). And yet that's strangely absent from most of our patriotic songs. Our national anthem is essentially a prayer for national survival. "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and "America the Beautiful" are songs that bespeak love of a physical place ("I love thy rocks and rills/Thy woods and templed hills"). If I actually had to choose a new anthem (not that anyone's ever going to ask me) I might opt for "Shenandoah" (O Shenandoah, I long to hear you/Away you rolling river...Away, I'm bound away, 'cross the wide Missouri"). It refers to a specific, albeit prolonged historical event (the settling of the West by Americans of European descent) but it reflects the immigrant's sense of loss, the reality that to go somewhere new, however much promise it holds, you have to give up something. It's not a peculiarly American experience—but it's certainly part of who we are as a nation.

And then of course, there's "This Land Is Your Land."

Doing some cursory research for this blog post I did discover some fascinating gems of American patriotic song. I had never heard "Hail Columbia" before. Composed in 1789, it has a delightfully eighteenth century sound:

But my possible favorite among my discoveries when I googled "American Patriotic Songs" is "Stalin Isn't Stallin'" a song written to drum up solidarity with one of Our Gallant Allies during World War II:

I'm sure the songwriter was blacklisted in the fifties. Songs such as "Stalin," "Hail Columbia" and "Shenandoah" should be better known to us—provided we could think about them in some historical context.

Southern Dispatch, or The Three Stooges

2012-01-22T17:10:00.005-05:00

A friend of mine pointed out to me the "upset" language in the Boston Globe's coverage of Gingrich's primary victory in South Carolina. The paper's headline writers described Gingrich as "roaring" to his win and denigrated Mitt Romney as "formerly high-flying."

I honestly don't know why anyone thought Romney had a chance in South Carolina: he's from Massachusetts and he's a Mormon. I would add that he's a terrible campaigner, but that doesn't really make him stand out among his competitors: at the end of last year Gingrich's campaign couldn't even get it together to collect enough signatures in time to get him on the ballot in Virginia, and last spring he didn't seem to realize that the Eastern Mediterranean isn't where you go to campaign for president. He now defends his cruise by saying it was intended to test his staff and show he's a "different kind of candidate." Then there's Rick Santorum, who publicly objected to Dan Savage's creative definition of his last name, thereby causing some of his more ignorant supporters to google it out of curiosity and thereby making it the top hit when anyone googles "Santorum."

But back to Gingrich. Other than Perry, he's the candidate who best appeals to the tribalism of a particular type of Southern white voter: the man or woman who's scared at who much browner America is than it used to be, who feels threatened or alienated by politicians who talk about issues in any manner approaching complexity. Gingrich is one of them. Even his Catholicism can't eclipse his essential Bubbaness. The South Carolina primary: think of it as one of White America's last stands.

Meanwhile, the show continues....

2011: The Year in Review

2012-01-19T20:28:00.006-05:00

(A little late, I know, but bear with me).

Normally I would have opened 2012 on this blog with a list of all the books I've read, but I'm a little intimidated by some of the other 2011 reading lists out there.

Instead I present you with:

These Are A Few of my Favorite Things (2011 edition):

Favorite novel: Galore by Michael Crummey, a multi-generational novel set in Newfoundland that puts this hitherto little-known Canadian author in a league with Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Favorite book of short stories: In This Light: New and Selected Stories by Melanie Rae Thon, a collection of heartbreaking portraits of society's castoffs.

Favorite cookbook: Simply Ming One-Pot Meals page after page of simple and suprising fusion East-West fusion recipes.

Favorite political ad: Herman Cain's He Carried Yellow Flowers (below).

Favorite description of He Carried Yellow Flowers: "Dadaist meta-western."

Favorite parody of a political ad: James Kotecki's parody of Perry's "Strong" ad.

Favorite tributes to Christopher Hitchens:

This one by Christopher Buckely for its infectious warmth.

This one by Katha Pollitt for not being afraid to say the truth about Hitch's personal and intellectual failings.

Favorite political event: my native state voting down a referendum that would have criminalized many forms of birth control.

Favorite stupid thing Republicans did: Arizona Republicans selling their state capitol building for $81 million to help balance the state budget. They are now paying $105 million to get it back. That's some great financial planning there.

Favorite Internet time-waster: reading the pairings of panels from Peanuts cartoons with random tweets. Sadly there will be no more new ones thanks to those humorless dullards who run Charles Schulz's estate.

Favorite silly animal photo:

Favorite iconoclastic take on a children's toy: Barbie re-imagined as a hoarder.

The Way We Live Now

2012-01-10T10:42:00.007-05:00

Forgive me if this is old news, but I just had to write about this.

One Ronald Ball of Madison County, Wisconsin, claims that in November 2009 he found a dead mouse in a can of Mountain Dew he had just bought. Unfortunately he didn't find the mouse before he took a drink out of the can. He claims he became "violently ill" and started vomiting. Only afterwards did he or a friend empty the can and find the mouse. Ball supposedly wrote a letter of complaint to Mountain Dew (with the mouse enclosed).* He then initiated a lawsuit against Mountain Dew's manufacturer, PepsiCo, for $50,000 in damages.

Mr. Ball has apparently finally had his day in court and here's where it gets interesting: PepsiCo's representatives recently offered the defense that Mr. Ball's account of events is simply impossible. Not because their quality control protocols would have prevented a mouse (dead or otherwise) from making its way into a can of Mountain Dew, but because Mountain Dew is so acidic that within thirty days the mouse would have dissolved into a "jelly-like substance" (the words of Lawrence D. McGill, an expert in veterinary pathology). PepsiCo asserts that at least 74 days elapsed between the can being sealed and Ball opening it.

So think about that, gentle reader: the next time you open a can of soda, you could be getting a protein bonus, a rodent smoothie, if you will.

Aged to perfection.

This isn't actually as horrifying as it sounds: the company is simply arguing that Mountain Dew is an acidic beverage, far less acidic than the fluids in anyone's stomach. Nevertheless, the public assertion by its manufacturer that a drink can dissolve bones and render flesh to jelly will probably make some people shudder with revulsion at the thought of consuming it. And given that PepsiCo already has financial problems, fewer buyers of Mountain Dew is the last thing they need.

I haven't enjoyed a junk food legal battle this much since Proctor & Gamble was reduced to arguing in a British court that Pringles potato chips aren't really food in a slimy try at weaseling out of paying Value Added Tax.

Given that sales of PepsiCo products are declining overall, maybe the company can use the publicity to market Mountain Dew for less conventional uses. Instead of cremation, maybe some people will opt for "jellyfication" of their bodies after death. Or the next time a group in the developing world commits genocide, the perpetrators can order tankers full of Mountain Dew to hide the evidence.

The possibilities are tantalizing.

*Now I'm wondering how you mail a dead mouse.

The Week in Food

2012-01-08T20:11:00.003-05:00

Roadkill: it's what's for dinner (at least in Illinois).

Songs about food aren't really about food.

That gingerbread clock looks tasty, but I'm afraid it's right only twice a day.

Having addressed all of society's other concerns, the BBC News Servic conducts a groundbreaking investigation on why we eat soup when we're sick.

You think you pay too much when you buy fish? Think again.

On Bookstores

2011-12-17T18:09:00.010-05:00

I assume all of you have read Farhod Manjoo's takedown of independent bookstores in Slate. For the benefit of those who haven't, his argument boils down to this: by selling books for lower prices, Amazon has done more than any other business in America to foster reading. He goes so far as to argue that Amazon is the "only thing saving" literary culture. He also argues that bookstores are economically "inefficient:" because they spend money on utilities, rent and employees, small bookstores have to sell books at "a huge markup."

My response to his first point is that I think more credit is due to Oprah's Book Club than to Amazon for fostering reading in America. A talk show host with roughly 40 million loyal fans told them to go read Dickens, Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, and Tolstoy, and many of them actually did it. At least one academic historian credits her with democratizing reading, enabling American women who had never thought of themselves as "literary" to experience the pleasures of reading and of talking about what they've read, and to learn that their opinions matter. Oprah has also been credited with the proliferation of book groups in the U.S. in recent years.

Furthermore, to log on to Amazon and begin shopping a person must be already interested in looking for books. I doubt that Amazon's mere existence led millions of Americans to think, "Well, since I don't have to leave the house to do it, I think I'll buy some books" (If that is the case, Americans are even lazier than I thought).

As for bookstores being "inefficient," they're probably no more inefficient than any other business that doesn't operate on the scale of Walmart. Small bookstores create local jobs and bring foot traffic to neighboring businesses. They enrich neighborhoods in myriad ways—far more than they would if they were just another boarded-up vacant retail space (which is the inevitable result of the Amazon/Walmart business model). And if Amazon's labor practices are an example of "efficiency," then I want nothing to do with it.

Manjoo derides independent bookstores for having "paltry selections" and "no customer reviews." But with Amazon you have to already have some idea of what you're looking for. You can't really browse the shelves with Amazon. There are no surprises waiting for you the way there have been for me in brick-and-mortar bookstores, like my adolescent discovery of Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem or my graduate student stumbling upon Christopher Hitchens' The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice.

As for the selections being "paltry," bookstores can place orders for titles they don't have. And as for the lack of "customer reviews," bookstores have staff recommendations, which Manjoo sneers at as akin to "choosing your movies based on what the guy at the box office recommends." He's ignoring the obvious fact that people work in bookstores because they love books—God knows it's not for the money. The average bookstore employee is probably someone whose preferred leisure activity is reading. He or she is probably very well educated. Why wouldn't you welcome their book suggestions?

I will close with my childhood memories of an independent bookstore that was very important to me growing up. It was the unimaginatively named "Book Mart" in the even more unfortunately named Starkville, Mississippi. The store was roughly a forty minute drive from my home town. My parents were both avid SEC football fans, and by age nine or ten they realized I would never be one. So when they went to Starkville on a Saturday afternoon to watch Mississippi State football they would simply drop me off at the Book Mart and pick me up when the game was over. It seems shocking now. I can't even imagine the presumption that led my father to approach two owners of a business and ask them if they would babysit his nine-year-old son.

The Book Mart was owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Brown who were delighted to have me there. And the store was a wonder to me as a child. I never imagined there could be so many books in one place. And nothing about the Book Mart was "efficient." One of the top shelves was taken up with a third edition (published from 1788 to 1797) of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It was never intended to be sold. It was just there. They also refused to charge students sales tax if they were buying classics such as Hawthorne, Dickens or Tolstoy.

Every time I was dropped off there, after chatting with Mr. and Mrs. Brown for a bit, I would collect an armload of books, walk to one of the alcoves in the back and sit on the floor reading (when my parents came to pick me up after the game they would buy me one or two of the books I liked). I wasn't very discriminating as a child. I devoured a lot of dreck: G.A. Henty, Rudyard Kipling ....but that store was also where I discovered Greek and Norse mythology, the Arthurian legends, and many other stories that meant a great deal to me as a child, and that even now I can't dismiss.

I became a sort of store mascot: regular customers would come in on a Saturday, find me in the back, say hello, and ask what I was reading. I even went so far as to venture my opinions on the business: I would take books off the remainders table and tell Mrs. Brown she should raise the prices. Invariably her husband would hear me and say from somewhere in the store, "I told you..."

Years later when I went to college in that same town I would visit the Book Mart and it still had a little of its old magic. It's where I discovered John McPhee, Walker Percy, John Irving and many other writers. They don't mean as much to me as they once did, but they were steps to something better.

I look back on the Book Mart, and the Browns, and I feel grateful.

I will never feel that way about Amazon.

Quote of the Week

2011-12-14T20:46:00.002-05:00

"That's one of the things that I like about him—because he's consistent since he changed his mind."
--Christine O'Donnell endorsing Mitt Romney.

The Week in Food

2011-12-13T12:38:00.003-05:00

The forty-eight hours late edition....

Forget Greek debt, the collapse of the Spanish housing market, the implosion of Irish banks....Norway has a real problem: a butter shortage.

What's the real story on that olive oil you bought?

You call that a KitKat? This is a KitKat.

Amphorae: They're not just for wine anymore.

Admit it: you've wondered about this.

What's in a Title?

2011-12-08T20:22:00.008-05:00

I learned today that a novel that won last year's German Book Prize, Tauben fliegen auf, (Pigeons Fly) is always referred to in the English-speaking press as Falcons without Falconers. It's a savvy decision on the part of the novel's Anglophone publisher—Falcons without Falconers sounds much more intriguing than Pigeons Fly. I have no real point to make about this other than to share my bemusement at how book titles change when a book is translated into another language or published in another country. The most famous example is Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, (In Search of Lost Time), which appeared in English under a title lifted from one of Shakespeare's sonnets, Remembrance of Things Past.

And a book doesn't even have to be translated for a title to change. Beat to Quarters, a 1937 novel set in 1808 on board a British warship, was originally published in the UK under the much less martial title The Happy Return (the only reason I even know of this book's existence was that it was one of my dad's favorite novels). The 2004 Ian Rankin novel Fleshmarket Close was published in the U.S. as Fleshmarket Alley on the assumption that the original title would puzzle Americans (in British English "close" means dead-end street).

However, the most interesting title changes occur when a book is translated into another language. Stieg Larsson's books provide interesting recent examples. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo originally appeared in Swedish under the lackluster title Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women). The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest was originally Luftslottet som sprängdes (The Castle of Air that Exploded).

But my all-time favorite title change pertains to a Spanish health book I stumbled upon at work, Cuerpo radiante (Radiant Body), which originally appeared in English as Dr. Jensen's Guide to Better Bowel Care.

The Meaning of Herman Cain

2011-12-05T20:06:00.008-05:00

Well, it's over. The Hermanator has left the Republican race, and it's time to assess what his candidacy actually signified for this country. For a brief period after Obama's election, commentators loved to use the phrase "post-racial America." Well, we're not quite there yet, but Herman Cain's candidacy was another step in that direction.

However, Cain's candidacy was important not simply because he's a black man. Black men have had the public eye before in this country, and even aspired to high office. Frederick Douglass was the first black American to achieve national prominence, and he was truly extraordinary: a self-educated man who founded and edited his own newspaper, and became a successful author and public lecturer. Martin Luther King was one of the most eloquent speakers in American history, a man of outstanding courage, and a brilliant political strategist. Thurgood Marshall was a gifted lawyer who successfully argued many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court before his own appointment as a justice.

In other words, in the past a black man had to actually be intelligent and capable to be in the public eye—arguably, be better than everybody else. But Herman Cain doesn't know where Libya is, doesn't realize China already has nuclear weapons, thinks "Cuban" is a language, and demonstrated that he and his staff are absolutely incompetent at damage control.

And he was the Republican front-runner for president.

Just like Harold and Kumar showed us it's okay for Asians to be slackers, Herman Cain showed us it's okay for a black man to be an ignorant jackass. Without belittling Herman Cain's accomplishment in bringing us to this point on the long road to racial equality, he did have some help along the way. First there were all those white guys who showed us it was okay to be an ignorant jackass and still run for vice-president and president. Then there was that black guy who showed us it was okay to be an ignorant jackass (and somebody who abuses power to get sex) and sit on the Supreme Court.

We've come a long way.

Oh. Canada.

2011-11-22T12:37:00.008-05:00

Recently one of the cover lines on a recent issue of MacLean's caught my eye: "National Symbol Smackdown." The related article was about the campaign by Canadian MP Nicole Eaton to make the polar bear Canada's national symbol, displacing the beaver, which has formally enjoyed the honor since 1975 (but for much longer informally). The Honourable Ms. Eaton has some rather harsh things to say about castor canadiensis, calling it a "dentally defective rat." She prefers the polar bear, which she calls, "A mighty mammal...that dominates our northern landscape of cold and ice."

Her proposal has provoked widespread outrage. She's received quite a lot of hate mail. To be sure, the beaver is very much a part of Canada's national brand. To many, beavers are a perfect symbol for Canada: they're hard working, community oriented, don't harm others.* There are also sound historical reasons for associating beavers with Canada. For centuries, beaver pelts were highly prized by European hat makers. Beaver pelts were the primary reason European traders went to Canada. One could make the argument, no beavers, no Hudson's Bay Company—and thus no British presence in what is now Canada. No beavers, no French trading posts. No beavers, no smackdown on the Plains of Abraham.

Polar bears, on the other hand, played no role in Canada's economic development. Hell, you see a polar bear, you run away if you've got half a brain. Polar bears are the apex predator in their environment. They kick ass whenever they can. They see something they want, they take it. That's so not the Canadian self-image. It sounds more like...take a guess

However, I was naively surprised to read about the outraged provoked by Eaton's seemingly harmless proposal (in part because I think polar bears are fucking awesome), until I thought about how crazy Americans get about their symbols. I was a teenager in Mississippi when it was first proposed that the stars and bars be removed from the upper right hand corner of the state flag. From the outrage you would have thought every white person within the state's borders had been asked to kill their grandparents (or dance on their graves if they were no longer around). I also remember the fury provoked during my college years by what seemed to me a constitutionally protected exercise of free expression.

I was also bemused that a huge controversy could be happening in a neighboring country and Americans would know next to nothing about it. Sure, it's not an issue of substance (at least not to me) but reporting it would have been an opportunity to teach Americans a little history. But I guess it's more important that we all know about Ashton Kutcher's failed marriage.

A day or two later a new MacLean's arrived at work. This one had a picture of a gray-haired man with a cover line to the effect that Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney has been tapped to fix the global economy (specifically, he's been appointed to head the Financial Stability Board). In a masterpiece of anti-climax, the cover line concluded, "If he succeeds, he'll be our most prominent player on the world stage since Lester B. Pearson."

I imagine you have no idea who Lester B. Pearson is. I certainly didn't. The name Lester B. Pearson sounds like it should belong to the head of the Chamber of Commerce of Columbus, Georgia, or a 1950s author of self-help books. It turns out he was Canada's fourteenth prime minister, and a hell of a good one. His government introduced universal health care, the Canada Pension Plan, and student loans. He was also a diplomat's diplomat. He played important roles in the founding of both the UN and NATO. He also won the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in keeping the Suez Crisis from exploding into a full-blown war that could have pulled in the US and the Soviet Union.

I know it's a cliché to lament that Americans know so little about other countries, but Jesus, a guy from next door stopped World War III and we have no idea who he is?

*Strangely, in all the discussions I've read about beavers, no one has raised the question of whether or not male beavers bite off their own testicles.

The Week in Food

2011-11-20T19:50:00.002-05:00

According to US law, pizza is a vegetable—because it's covered in tomato paste.

With a name like Smucker's, it has to be...recalled.

Take away the butter, and give me the cheese.

Gummi Bears, battery acid, what's the difference? Not as much as you would like....

Heard on NPR

2011-11-16T20:49:00.002-05:00

In the ATC report, "Struggles in Washington Frustrate Job Seekers," Melissa Block reported that public approval of Congress is at 9%.

WHO THE HELL ARE THESE PEOPLE WHO APPROVE OF CONGRESS?

Repo Men? Mental patients? White supremacists who want civilization to collapse? The manufacturers of the orange dye that gets injected into John Boehner's face?

The Week in Food

2011-11-13T17:23:00.001-05:00

Only 2% of US imports are inspected. This is a problem.

Everybody relax: that's not koala meat.

Costco's now paying people to mold ground pork into the shape of a pig. Don't ask me why.

Does the commodities market hold the answer to the disappearance and reappearance of the McRib?

Just because it's organic, doesn't mean it's safe.

Watching Cartoons as an Over-Educated Adult

2011-11-08T09:35:00.003-05:00

On some Saturdays at the library we have an afternoon movie for the public. Normally one of my co-workers sets up the DVD projector and starts the film, but she had the flu last weekend. So that task fell to me. The movie is preceded by a cartoon, so I sat with the audience while the cartoon was showing. Once it was done I switched DVDs, started the movie, and went back to the reference desk.

The cartoon in question was MGM's "Northwest Hounded Police" (1946). It's one of the many cartoons featuring Droopy, an anthropomorphized dog who looks and sounds like he's heavily sedated.

In "NHP," Droopy plays Sgt. McPoodle, a Canadian Mountie assigned to bring in a wolf who's escaped from a penitentiary. True to the Mountie spirit, McPoodle pursues the wolf relentlessly. True to the cartoon spirit, that relentless quickly becomes unreal. It reminded me of the very thin line that separates the humorous from the horrifying (an undergrad professor of mine once said you could easily re-write Oedipus Rex as a comedy called The Born Loser). Seriously I began to feel for this wolf. He's running with McPoodle behind him, finds a cabin, locks five doors behind him, and McPoodle is waiting for him in the innermost room. He runs back out through those five doors and McPoodle's waiting for him. He gets into a plane, flies away and McPoodle's in the plane. This is bordering on the stuff of existential nightmares. Typically an existential hero doesn't know why horrible, frightening things are happening to him. The wolf doesn't know how McPoodle is able to turn up everywhere. It's the stuff of Kafka and Camus.

Come too think of it, there's something "Myth of Sisyphus" about Wile E. Coyote's pursuit of the Road Runner, except Wile E. Coyote never reaches the existentialist hero's moment of revolt.

Anyway, at the end of the cartoon you get an answer of sorts to the question of McPoodle's ubiquity, but it's weirdly sci-fi. And the moment where the wolf escapes into a movie theater and starts watching an MGM cartoon is unsettlingly meta for 1946.

I showed "Northwest Hounded Police" to a friend of mine who's a professor of religion and philosophy. His reaction: "The guy who wrote this was definitely having a crisis."

Top Ten Things I Learned...

2011-11-02T19:46:00.004-04:00

...by reading Joe McGinniss' The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin:

1. She was elected mayor of Wasilla in a low-turnout election by a bizarre alliance of fundamentalist Christians and bar owners. The Christians were told by their pastors she was God's choice for mayor. The bar owners were behind her because she was against the campaign to require Wasilla bars to close at 2 a.m. instead of 5. Palin said that telling bar owners when to close was government interference with free enterprise.

2. When she was first elected mayor, a supporter and friend was worried about Palin's ignorance of certain subjects. She tried to give a Palin a book on economics. Palin refused to accept it. The friend urged her to. Palin again refused, saying, "I never read anything that might conflict with my beliefs."

3. Shortly after her election she appropriated over $50,000 that had been budgeted for road repair and improvement to redecorate her office.

4. During her second term as mayor, she had a multimillion-dollar sports complex built. It cost $15 million. The entire Wasilla city budget at the time was $20 million.

5. She had the complex built on land the city did not have clear title to. Land that could have been purchased for $125,000 cost the city $1.5 million in legal fees.

6. Gary Wheeler, the head of the Governor of Alaska's security detail, said that Palin dispensed with the normal practice of state troopers serving as the governor's drivers. She drove herself. He said, "...she didn't want us around. She didn't want anybody to follow her to Nordstrom's when she went shopping every day....Overall, she didn't want anybody to know that she wasn't coming in until ten AM and then leaving by three to go home."

7. She once kicked out two house guests (a married couple) because she suspected them of having sex in her...house.

8. When Palin's sister Molly filed for divorce, Sarah filed a complaint against her brother-in-law (a state trooper) for professional misconduct, specifically domestic violence. When state police sergeant Ron Wall questioned her on the matter he found her account so unbelievable that he said to Palin at one point, "We don't mean to frustrate you with facts, but our life is fact-driven, okay?"

9. When making appointments to state positions, Palin appointed high-school friends with no qualifications that matched the job descriptions.

10. Many pictures have been taken of Sarah Palin when she was with child. And she looks pregnant in all of them—except for pictures taken during the eight months before Trig's birth.

Quote of the Week

2011-09-30T20:15:00.002-04:00

At a time when American Christianity seems to be all about hating gays and patriotism seems to be all about hating Islam and never recognizing that we as a country make mistakes, this seems particularly timely, even though it was written in 1823:

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry...it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others...Does anyone suppose that the love of country in an Englishman implies any friendly feeling or disposition to serve another, bearing the same name? No, it means only hatred to the French...

—William Hazlitt

The Slaves and the Civil War, Continued

2011-09-22T18:35:00.008-04:00

I recently finished reading Andrew Ward's The Slaves' War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves, which I found absolutely fascinating, although almost every account of a wartime incident left me with several questions. For example, when a slave girl stood up to her master and mistress and told them the approach of Union troops was "Judgment Day" for the way white Southerners had treated black people, what happened to her? When a black woman recounted how as a girl she put herself between her mistress and a Union soldier's cocked pistol, did she really love her mistress that much? Or was she telling a white interviewer what they wanted to hear?

Much of the information in this book comes from Works Progress Administration interviews done from 1936-38 in an effort to record the memories of the last living African-Americans who had experienced slavery. There's ample evidence that the former slaves were much more candid with black interviewers (such as those from Fisk University) than with whites. Maddeningly, Ward doesn't footnote anything. To trace his source material the reader has to note down slaves' names, look them up in the "Directory of Witnesses," note the abbreviated version of the source title, and look it up in the bibliography, which even then tells you little about the reliability of the source material. This book does have some very moving stories of slaves' loyalty to their masters, such as that of Andrew Bradley, who went off to war as the manservant of Confederate Private William Bradley. When the private was killed in battle, Andrew smuggled his master's body back to his [the private's] parents rather than let him be buried in a mass grave. I am sure many such stories in this book are true. Human relations are complicated. Some slaves were well-treated by their masters. And if people are at all decent to each other, it's very difficult for them to live in close proximity with each other and not care about each other at least a little. And then there's Stockholm Syndrome to take into account.

As for the issue of slaves fighting for the Confederacy, yes, some of them did. Apparently many a slave who followed his master to war picked up a weapon at some point and fought Union soldiers. That's pretty easy to explain: even if a slave knew that a Union victory would bring him freedom, bullets and artillery shells are colorblind. Whatever a slaves hopes in the long term, in the short term he just wanted to stay alive. And some slaves found the arrival of Union troops at their masters' farms to be a mixed blessing. One slave recounted how Sherman's men stripped his master's trees of fruit, took all the bread and wheat, and removed all the meat from the smokehouse. It was all part of Sherman's goal of depriving the Confederacy of anything that make it would possible for Southerners to continue to fight—and that included food. But as the former slave said, "That was our food too."

None of these anecdotes negate the reality that many slaves ran off to Union lines as soon as they could. Some of them worked for the Union Army as laborers, others enlisted (although General Sherman was appalled at how little training black recruits received; he considered black enlistment the equivalent of suicide). While I find stories of slaves' loyalty to their masters, moving in a strange, complicated way, I take actual satisfaction in stories like that of George Knox, a slave who found himself in Union lines and worked for the Army as a teamster. The colonel of an Indiana regiment invited Knox and some other blacks to accompany his men on their Indiana furlough. In spite of some initial difficulties crossing the Ohio River (many Union soldiers didn't want to share a boat with black men, and threatened to kill any who boarded) Knox made it across and rented a room from a doctor in the town of Boxley. He was astounded that the doctor allowed him to sit at the table and eat with the family. Knox settled in Indiana, and in spite of having to contend with virulent racism (he was threatened with death more than once) he prospered. He became a prominent businessman, published a newspaper for Indianapolis' black community, and was a public advocate of black migration to the North. He died in 1927.

As for the ridiculous question as to whether the complexity of master-slave relations or the fact of black service in the Confederate Army in any way sanitizes the Confederate cause, The Daily Show's Larry Wilmore says it better than I ever could:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The South's Secession Commemoration

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

The New (Temporary) Look

2011-09-22T18:31:00.002-04:00

I made the mistake of poking around in Blogger's templates library, hoping to find something a little less stark than the design you've all seen for years. Somehow one of their ghastly old templates (think a picture of the Paul Revere statue saturated with pink) got put on my blog and I couldn't figure how to get back to my original design. The best I could do was replace the totally sucky template with what you see now, which for all its faults, sucks less.

Crafting Superlatives

2011-09-19T19:42:00.004-04:00

A man came up to the reference desk today to complain that a page had been cut out of Cat Fancy magazine. Trying to conceal my surprise that anyone actually reads Cat Fancy, I told him I was sorry for the inconvenience. He asked, "Well what are you going to do about it?" I in turn asked, "Well what was the page that was cut out?" He said, "I don't know, it's been cut out, so I have no way of knowing."

I started over: "What I meant was that if it was a page of an article you were reading, we could trying finding the full text of the article on-line." He said, "No, I think it was just pictures." He left the magazine with me and stomped off. I just kept thinking, There are people who actually read Cat Fancy magazine. And there are people who want parts of it so badly they are willing to cut out pages. And there are people who want me to miraculously recover missing pages of Cat Fancy even though they have no idea what was on them.

Mind you, I like cats. I have known many cat owners throughout my life. But to my knowledge not a single one of them has read a word of Cat Fancy. My family never had fewer than two dogs growing up. We didn't subscribe to Dog Fancy, Mutt Monthly or This Old Dog.

But back to the mutilated copy of Cat Fancy. I glanced at the cover. In the upper-right corner was printed, "THE WORLD'S MOST WIDELY READ CAT MAGAZINE." Then I just thought, How many cat magazines can there be? "Most widely read cat magazine" isn't that big a deal. That's like saying, "Highest-circulation hamster journal."

If you add enough qualifiers you can say anything and it will be true. For example. Ben & Jerry's claim to be the makers of "Vermont's Finest All-Natural Ice Cream" never impressed me as much as it did some people. I simply took it to mean that there was better ice cream in Vermont, it just had a chemical additive or two. I also concluded from the claim that there was all-natural ice cream that is better than Ben & Jerry's, you just couldn't get it in Vermont.

I can't remember where or when I read this, I think it may have been while I was working at one of my miserable mid-nineties editing jobs that I stumbled across the sentence "Feral swine are the most abundant free-ranging exotic ungulate in the United States." Of course, then I felt I had to find out what exotic ungulate there was in the U.S. that was more abundant than feral swine that was not free-ranging.

Sadly, I never did.

Now that I've shown you the trick to making truthful superlative assertions, I must warn you that it's not a good idea to try this outside of advertising or academic writing. In the late nineties a female friend of mine began a relationship (conducted mostly via email) with an Australian guy that she thought was going somewhere. They met for a vacation in France where she floated the idea of moving to Australia. He freaked. Realizing that he wasn't serious about the relationship, she freaked. Trying to let her down easy, he said, "Look, you're wonderful. You're the most beautiful, witty, charming American email correspondent I've ever had."

Way to let a girl down easy, guy.

I wish I were making this up.

The Week in Food

2011-09-18T18:38:00.003-04:00

Easy-to-eat lobster? Real Mainers are having none of it.

From the City of the Big Shoulders, the world's biggest bratwurst.

That's a lot of money for an old cookie.

Goat cheese is good for you.

Vegetables: they're what's for dessert.

The Week in Food

2011-09-12T21:31:00.003-04:00

..the One-Day Late Edition:

Apparently there's nothing else to report on in the digital world, because Wired is exploring the burning question: which Girl Scout cookies command the biggest market share?

Forget Kate and William: the British royal who really counts is the corned beef king.

Taco Bell execs breathe a sigh of relief: the "mystery meat" lawsuit has been dropped.

It can speed hangover recovery, keep food from sticking to the pan, and can be made them into snack holder cups: bacon is a most versatile fruit.

What's harder: making Kouign amaan or pronouncing it?

Quote of the Week

2011-09-08T18:21:00.002-04:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates, on horrified responses to last night's applause when Brian Williams noted that Rick Perry has ordered more executions "than any other governor in modern times:"

The only thing that shocked me was that they didn't form a rumba line. It's a Republican debate. And it's America.

My Latest Reading

2011-09-07T20:30:00.004-04:00

Hugh Thomas has always been regarding as one of the preiminent historians of the Spanish-speaking world. I very much enjoyed his book Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico. I also started his book Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom, and while I enjoyed much of it I eventually gave up: it's a whopping 1500 pages. I pre-ordered his latest book, The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V and the Creation of America, and have been reading it off and on since it arrived last week. I am both fascinated and disappointed.

I am fascinated because the story of the Spanish conquest of the Americas is compelling. The conquistadores were remarkable men in their relentlessness, cunning and cruelty. Tony Soprano would not have lasted five minutes around these guys. I perversely admire their determination. The men of one Spanish expedition to Florida marched until their boots were worn out. When they decided their only hope of further progress was to travel by water, they found a navigable river, melted down everything metal they could spare to make saws, hammers, and nails, then cut down trees to build ships. The conquistadores were men who would endure starvation, illness, march through hot jungles and over ice-capped mountains, all in the hope of achieving their mad dreams of conquest and riches. There's a further out-sized quality to the actions of the leading men of the day back in Europe, such as when King Charles V of Spain (who was also Holy Roman Emperor) asked for a loan from some Flemish bankers. His collateral? Venezuela.

I am disappointed with The Golden Empire because of various instances of sloppiness I see in the text. Thomas uses exclamation points, which in a nonfiction work are a sign of an amateur writer, which he certainly isn't. There are occasional difficulties for the general reader that a decent editor would have addressed. For example, there's never any effort to explain sixteenth-century Spanish currency. To say that an official received an annual salary of 150,000 maravedis is meaningless if the reader doesn't have any idea of what a maravedi was worth in 21st-century dollars (to the extent that one can realistically make such a comparision), or what kind of standard of living a given number of maravedis could provide. At other times Thomas provides details that beg some kind of explanation. For example, he writes admiringly of Cortés' rebuilding of Mexico City/Tenochtitlan in the first couple of years after the Conquest, and notes that he built two hospitals, including one specifically for lepers. Was there an extensive outbreak of leprosy among the surviving Aztec population? Did some of the colonists arriving from Spain turn out to be lepers and infect other people? Or was Cortés anticipating a leprosy outbreak?

Is Hugh Thomas so arrogant a writer that he refuses to accept edits, or has his publisher (Random House) laid off all their editors?

Another thing: on the book jacket Thomas' author portrait is an oil painting. It's credited to Hernan Cortés.* However accomplished the conqueror of Mexico was, I doubt his gifts included portraiture and access to a time machine so he could go 500 years into the future to paint pictures of British writers.

*I am not making this up.

Southern Dispatch

2011-09-05T18:13:00.012-04:00

This year is the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War—or, as it's sometimes called down where I'm from, The Late Unpleasantness. The anniversary is being observed in a number of ways, most notably in a temporary boom in books on the subject, and also in the New York Times' remarkable Disunion project, which uses contemporary sources to discuss little-known aspects of the conflict and to show how the War appeared to contemporaries as it happened.

The war was the crucible of modern American identity: whatever Rick Perry would have you think, it settled forever the question of whether being a Virginian, a New Yorker, or a Texan trumped being an American. It ended slavery, accelerated American industrialization, and was in some ways a dress rehearsal for the even bloodier wars of the twentieth century.

In spite of the fact that the original declarations of secession were quite clear about the Southern states' reasons for leaving the Union (look here to see the declarations of disunion for South Carolina—the state that started it all— Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas), there are those who still dispute the causes of the war. Many white Southerners and ohter latter-day Confederate sympathizers refuse to acknowledge the war was about slavery. It is true that many Federal soldiers fought simply to save the Union. It is true that Lincoln didn't issue the Emancipation proclamation until two years after the war began. I have no doubt it is also true that many Southern soldiers enlisted and fought simply because their states were being invaded. But that doesn't change the fact that the election as President of a member of the Republican party, a party officially opposed to the expansion of slavery, a party whose members did not hesitate to publicly call slavery "barbaric," provoked the secession of the Southern states.

Last year a history textbook that stated thousands of African Americans fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War was distributed to Virginia school children. Confederate apologists love this idea: by implication, if black people fought for the Confederacy, then the Southern cause must have been about something other than slavery, right? At least one Harvard professor (John Stauffer) is on board with this nonsense. Professor Levine of the University of Illinois effectively demolishes the myth of black Confederate soldiers:

I have two things to say about this. Even if black soldiers did fight for the Confederacy, in whatever numbers (Harvard's Stauffer says even if they were few, they were symbolic), that says nothing about the nature of the Confederate cause. Some Jews collaborated with the Nazis. Does anyone seriously believe that means the Nazi regime wasn't intent on genocide?

Secondly, 96% of all Southern blacks were slaves, and the remaining 4% were in no position to seriously challenge white authority. Whatever assistance Southern blacks provided to the Confederate forces, there's no reason to believe it was done by choice.

It is true that in 1865 the Confederate government offered freedom to any slaves who would enlist in the Confederate Army. This proposal is cited by Confederate sympathizers as proof the war was about states' rights and not about slavery. Considering how out-manned and out-gunned the Confederacy was, the Richmond government took an awfully long time before trying to enlist black manpower. All the proposal proves is that war has a life of its own: the Confederate government was willing to deal a crucial blow to the institution it went to war to protect rather than lose the war itself. I also suspect that by spring 1865 Confederate leaders were more afraid of being put on trial for treason than they were of losing some slaves.

The desire to whitewash the Confederacy springs largely (but not always) from the sense many white Southerners have that the Confederacy is a part of their identity, and that an attack on the Lost Cause is an attack on them. In spite of my family having lived in the South since the seventeenth century, I've never felt that the men in gray had anything to do—or should have anything to do—with who I am.

My first day as a graduate student in English at the University of North Carolina, I was walking across campus with the first other graduate student I met, who was from Ohio. He looked up at the Confederate veterans' monument on Polk Place (the quad in the oldest part of campus). He asked me, "Why are there so many Civil War monuments in the South?"

I sighed: "Because some people don't know how to let things go."

The Week in Food

2011-09-04T20:27:00.005-04:00

One of the few success stories of recent years is Greek yogurt—which isn't actually Greek.

Cooking: it's older than you think.

Mmmmm....Pakistani mangoes....

Forget free-range, grass-fed beef. How about test-tube beef?

The Way We Live Now

2011-09-02T13:43:00.003-04:00

As if we actually needed more media in our lives: a technology startup called Booktrack makes soundtracks for e-books:

To get a sense of what Booktrack does, imagine if the ashram scenes of Eat Pray Love were accompanied by yogic chanting, or if you could hear the wet percussion of harpoons piercing whale flesh as you read Moby Dick.

It would be a perverse accomplishment to make Eat, Pray, Love even more annoying than it already is, and I can't imagine what kind of sicko would want to hear "harpoons piercing whale flesh."

Given that ubiquity of electronically generated sound, it would have been much more original to create smells to enhance the e-reading experience. Imagine taking in the odor of verbena when reading Faulkner, or being steeped in the mingled smells of people who have never bathed in their lives when reading Shakespeare.

Hurricane Preparation, Boston-Style

2011-08-28T11:18:00.004-04:00

In North Carolina, where I used to live, during the days before a hurrican, you made sure your weather radio worked, bought water, batteries, non-perishable foods and (depending upon your inclinations) bourbon.

Yesterday I went to the nearest grocery store. The shelves were fully stocked with bread and bottled water. They had plenty of batteries.

I did notice, however, that the store had run out of low-fat yogurt.

Hurricane Preparation,

2011-08-28T11:18:00.001-04:00

Quote of the Week

2011-08-23T10:37:00.000-04:00

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
--Leo Tolstoy

"It Was A Dark and Stormy Night"

2011-08-20T12:58:00.006-04:00

I don't know how I missed this, but the results of this year's Bulwer-Lytton Contest were announced almost a month ago. For those of you unfamiliar with the BLC, it's a contest sponsored by the San Jose State University English Department. Competitors strive to write the worst conceivable opening sentence for a novel--a tribute to the contest's eponym, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). Bulwer-Lytton was quite an accomplished man--the portrait at left was painted when he was Britain's Secretary of State for the Colonies, in which post he oversaw the development of infrastructure in the Crown Colony of British Columbia. He also played a minor role in the career of Charles Dickens, persuading him to change the ending of Great Expectations to something more upbeat than the original.

But sadly (or not, depending on your point of view) it's not Canadian bridges or Pip and Estella's connubial bliss that he's known for. Bulwer-Lytton is known for really bad writing. In addition to making sure Canadians had roads and bridges and telling Dickens how to end his novels, he also wrote novels of his own. One of them, Paul Clifford, begins:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Many of you probably recognize the first clause of that sentence as the opening for many of Snoopy's forays into fiction. But I digress. Without further ado, the winners of the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton contest:

Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

Wearily approaching the murder scene of Jeannie and Quentin Rose and needing to determine if this was the handiwork of the Scented Strangler--who had a twisted affinity for spraying his victims with his signature raspberry cologne--or that of a copycat, burnt-out insomniac detective Sonny Kirkland was sure of one thing: he’d have to stop and smell the Roses.

You can read the others here.

The Week in Food: The One-Day Late Edition

2011-08-15T19:29:00.004-04:00

Okay, so it's not really food, but this history of vodka in the U.S. is a great read.

All you wanted to know about tomatoes.

E. coli: it's what's for dinner.

To this resident of Jackson, Mississippi, not all pizzas are create equal.

Food prices and the Arab Spring: the shape of things to come.

Don't Rush into This

2011-08-11T20:32:00.006-04:00

For several days now an online petition has been making the rounds urging the Sesame Workshop to let everyone's favorite muppet odd couple, Ernie and Bert, tie the knot.

Frankly, I think this is ill-advised. The wedding would be a horror show. Think about it: Cookie Monster would devour the wedding cake if he couldn't find any cookies (the guy's got an obvious eating disorder). When the minister says, "If any here present know any reason why these two should not be wed, let him speak now or forever hold his peace..." do you really think Oscar the Grouch is going to keep his mouth shut? There's also a rumor Ernie and Bert would make Gover the ring bearer. Can you imagine? He would either be in one of his totally manic phases, twitching or running down the aisle or he would trip and fall on his face. The guy's completely spastic. And then Count von Count with his out-of-control compulsion would start counting the guests out loud.

But let's look beyond the fiasco-waiting-to-happen that would be their wedding. These two have been sleeping in separate beds for forty years. Something is wrong with that relationship that a wedding can't fix.

Southern Dispatch

2011-08-08T19:18:00.008-04:00

As a native Southerner, I sometimes point out to friends from other parts of the country that racism and idiocy are alive and well in throughout the USA (e.g., the New York Republican congressional candidate who wrote an essay denouncing interracial relationships), and that the South is a far cry from what it used to be (for example, a lesbian Latina is sheriff of Dallas County, Texas).

But reading the news from down South, I've been forced to admit that during this growing season the most popular crop seems to be craziness. Last Saturday Texas governor Rick Perry held his "national day of prayer" in Houston. The avowed goal was to invoke God's help for America, which I imagine will do about as much for the economy as a planned prayer walk on Aug. 21 will do for test scores in Jacksonville, FL public schools. Most pundits speculate his prayer rally is a bid to win over the evangelical base prior to announcing a presidential run. I find it odd that Perry would want to be president of a nation he has previously been in favor of dismantling. Nevertheless, he mightily impressed fundamentalists nationwide. One attendee said, "I feel that God moved him to do this." Another said, "He showed that he's sensitive to the Lord's leading." And Perry brought a choice bunch to Houston to bolster his evangelical credentials: members of the American Family Association, a Tupelo, Mississippi-based ~~band of lunatics~~ political organization that never seems to have grasped the principal of separation of church and state.

Among Rick Perry's other partners in godliness: a self-proclaimed 'apostle' who thinks the Statue of Liberty is a pagan idol, and a former seminary faculty member who thinks this year's earthquake in Japan was caused by the emperor having sex with a sun goddess.

I was pleased that some young Texans showed up to protest Perry's open-air madhouse, but I fear they were outnumbered by the true believers.

In other news, I found this depressing pie chart that shows how much we owe the recent stalemate in Congress and the resulting Faustian bargain to lunatics from the South. The Tea Party likes to present itself as a national movement, but here's a breakdown of members of the Tea Party Caucus by where they come from:

Why do I suddenly feel like it's 1832 all over again?

Meanwhile, in Missouri—one of the quaintly termed "border states" during the Late Unpleasantness (my favorite name for the Civil War), a school board has seen fit to remove two books from the school library and reading assignments. One of the titles, "Slaughterhouse Five," is a perennial target of censors. Interestingly, many object to the book for its profanity and not for its central event, the 1945 fire bombing of Dresden by Allied forces.

Note for visitors to the South: swearing is bad, killing is okay. And some young people in Mississippi have taken that message to heart.

The Week in Food

2011-08-07T14:56:00.004-04:00

Georgia scared away its illegal aliens. Now they're wondering who's going to harvest the crops....

Happy 185th, Union Oyster House.

Forget about MOMA and the Statue of Liberty: here's the real reason to tour New York City.

No, this isn't what they have in mind when they say "fusion cuisine."

The Prison of Regionalism

2011-08-03T20:12:00.008-04:00

My good friend over at A Brilliant Shade of Red alerted me to an online treasure for lovers of Southern literature: an audio archive of William Faulkner's talks to faculty and students at the University of Virginia in 1957. I had never actually heard his voice before. I know it sounds silly but I experienced a slight thrill as I heard Faulkner himself tell students how to spell "Yoknapatawpha" or answer questions about determinism in his fiction. But it was incredibly maddening and disappointing to hear him respond to questions about integration in the aftermath of Brown vs. The Board of Education. He essentially said that the court ruling should not be enforced:

I think that the Southerner, the—the provincial backwoods Southerner, will have to be let alone because he is—he is ignorant, he is proud, and he is—is limited to where he will let nobody tell him what he must do. It's a—a childish sort of recalcitrance, that anyone—when he is told that he must do something, he will do the opposite just to show them. He knows that he is—is wrong, that he has a condition which must be changed, and he has been trying to change it by his own methods. He's too slow about it. He should've known that this Supreme Court decision would be made. There was a—a lawyer in my town that told people fifteen years ago that sooner or later the Supreme Court would have to say that, but nobody believed him. They were—in their—their slow way, they were doing things to improve the Negro's condition. When the Supreme Court decision came out saying they must do it now, people that—that were working in their slow way toward it, took the other side. They say that the government shall not tell us what we will do, can do, must do, in our own country, with our own people, with our own culture and system.

Translation: "Yes, the South is wrong in this. Yes, segregation has to end, and we were trying to do it but we were too slow. The Supreme Court decision was inevitable. But the Supreme Court really screwed things up because it triggered Southern defensiveness so that now even the Southerners who were trying to end segregation are standing shoulder to shoulder with the rednecks against those interferin' Yankees. "

As for his contention that Southern whites were dismantling Jim Crow on their own, I know of nothing in the historical record that supports that other than the token admission of three black students to the University of Arkansas in 1948: two black men to the law school and one black woman to the medical school.

The notion that the South could and should handle the racial problem on its own is one of the themes of his 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust, which you could call the To Kill a Mockingbird of Faulkner's works. Lucas Beauchamp, a black man, is falsely accused of murdering a white man. He is acquitted, largely thanks to the efforts of two teenagers, one white and one black, who set out to prove Beauchamp's innocence. The mouthpiece for Faulkner's values in the novel is the uncle of the white teenager and Beauchamp's attorney, a lawyer named Gavin Stevens. Gavin talks to his nephew about what he calls Lucas' "shameful condition" (being regarded as inferior by whites and his subordinate legal status) and the sense of impending pressure from the rest of the country to accord full civil rights to Southern blacks (in 1948 an African-American had already sued the University of Oklahoma for admission; the novel was also published in the year of Harry Truman's executive order declaring an end to racial discrimination in the armed forces). Stevens says, in effect, "We [white Southerners] need to do this ourselves because we owe them [black people]." But then Stevens says, "if Lucas' equality is to be anything other than its own prisoner inside an impregnable barricade of the direct heirs of the victory of 1861-1865, which probably did more than even John Brown to stalemate Lucas' freedom..."

Faulkner seems to be blaming slow progress in according full equality to blacks on efforts to change the condition of African-Americans by force. The Civil War, court rulings, all that does is impede black progress. What will work is for the right sort of Southern gentleman to come 'round and Do the Right Thing.

Faulkner's attitudes about civil rights illustrate the insidiousness of the Southern white persecution complex: it was capable of infecting one of the greatest literary minds of the past century, who peopled his fiction with strong and complex black characters, and who realistically and devastatingly portrayed the strength and destructiveness of racism in Southern life. And yet, once it stopped being him who was criticizing the South, but "outsiders," it was a completely different matter.

His attitude also reflects one of the more absurd strains of American conservative thought: that enforcing something necessary and just by legislation or court ruling is an infringement on our freedoms (during the Civil Rights era, white Southerners often declared their fight against the Civil Rights Movement as a defense of their rights).

Time and again during the effort to pass health care reform, I heard various conservative objections such as, there are doctors who will cut you a break on your bills, or people who are really hurt can go to the emergency room.

Well, just as hoping that a Gavin Stevens or an Atticus Finch will step up and save you from the noose isn't a substitute for having actual legal rights, hoping a doctor will cut you a break isn't the same as confidence that being sick won't bankrupt you, and knowing you can go to the emergency room when you're hurt isn't the same as being able to get regular exams that can detect an illness before it gets serious. Sometimes we just need laws to make sure justice is done.

And I will never understand why some people don't get that.

Technology and Our So-Called Shrinking World

2011-08-02T11:01:00.014-04:00

Recently my sister-in-law in Mississippi forwarded me and several other relatives an "Open Letter to President Obama" by a former VP of Proctor & Gamble. It included several of the utterly wrong and paranoid claims about Obama common among people who watch Fox News or post to Free Republic: that Obama is "scary" because he wants to turn the U.S. into a "European style country where the government dominates instead of the private sector," that Obama is scary because "culturally" he is "not an American," that it's scary that the source of his wealth and the money that paid for his Ivy League education is mysterious, that Obama is scary because he refuses to "consider opposing points of view."

And yes, the letter actually is by a former Proctor & Gamble executive.

I've been getting wrong-headed, delusional email forwards from family members for years. And yet one simple phrase struck me: the auto-generated text that accompanied my sister-in-law's one comment "He scares me too:"

"Sent from my iPhone."

I realize that nothing I am about to say is at all original, but that simple phrase "Sent from my iPhone," made me realize anew one of the paradoxes of our times: we are theoretically more connected than ever before, theoretically the world is a smaller place than ever, and yet people are growing more isolated. In the age of the Web, smartphones, and social media, members of my family down South (and people throughout Red America) are as culturally isolated from someone living in Boston or the Bay Area as they would have been in 1948.

Yet at one time technology did break down barriers of culture and distance. Television was critical to winning national support for the Civil Rights Movement. And sometimes TV made small differences on the individual level. An on-line acquaintance told me that interviews with gay people on the talk show Open End in the late fifties and early sixties humanized homosexuality for her, leading her to question the prejudice she had been brought up with. My oldest sibling told me that seeing the TV show I Spy when she was twelve years old in Mississippi (this was in 1965) made her question all of her assumptions about race. For those of you who don't know the show, Robert Culp and Bill Cosby played U.S. government secret agents. They were partners. My sister told me it was the first time she had seen any portrayal of a relationship between a black person and a white person in which they were equals. After some initial confusion, she accepted it. She realized that after the initial surprise, there was nothing about it that was uncomfortable for her or in any way wrong. It just seemed natural. I don't doubt that for many people major changes in how they view the world have similarly small beginnings.

I'm not sure how often that can happen anymore. I would like to think that there are 12-year old kids with homophobic parents who watch Glee and find themselves questioning their parents' prejudices simply because of Kurt. I am hoping there are small white kids who will never share their parents' racism in part because they spent some of their earliest years seeing a black president on TV.

But what I see more often as a result of communications technology is isolation, people reinforcing each other in their preconceived notions. I read Salon and DailyKos. My sister-in-law watches Fox News and reads email forwards from the sort of people who post to Free Republic and Redstate. As I've probably written here before, in the early seventies everyone watched Walter Cronkite. When Walter Cronkite declared the Vietnam War a disaster, LBJ famously said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America."

We don't have a Walter Cronkite anymore, someone everyone trusts. For news on Iraq and Afghanistan, I and my friends will read Juan Cole or listen to NPR. People like my sister-in-law will watch Fox News. There's no common reality anymore.

That's what I find scary.

After Long Absence...

2011-07-31T13:23:00.005-04:00

It's the return of The Week in Food:

Come September, some kids won't be too happy about these meals, in spite of the caramel sauce.

Meanwhile, analysts are looking at Argentina and asking, "Where's the beef?"

The Wisconsin State Fair: they come for the deep fried beer, and stay for the bacon sundae.

I can't believe I missed National Lasagna Day.

The J.R.R. Tolkien Guide to American Politics

2011-07-29T17:34:00.003-04:00

American political discourse moved even further from reality this week. The Lord of the Rings now frames debate over the debt ceiling impasse. The Wall Street Journal called the Tea Party House ~~psychos~~ members who have rejected John Boehner's proposed ~~shredding of the social safety net~~ budget as a sellout to the ideas of big government "Hobbits."

Yes. Hobbits. The little guys in The Lord of the Rings. Money graf:

The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

In some ways using The Lord of the Rings as a lens through which to examine American politics makes some sense, given the black-and-white way many Americans view issues. For those of you who don't know your Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings is the story of an epic war between good and evil. There was no compromising or negotiating with the Dark Lord Sauron, the chief baddie of LOTR. And the Tea Party crowd certainly sees our ~~Eisenhower Republican~~ Kenyan socialist president as someone they shouldn't meet half way on anything. And like Hobbits, who live in this bucolic paradise called The Shire when destiny calls them into the company of the great and the wise such as the elves of Rivendell and the wizard Gandalf, the Tea Party guys are really in over their heads.

John McCain apparently liked the phrase "Tea Party Hobbits" so much he used it himself to mock House Republicans. But then freshman senator and Tea Party darling Rand Paul shot back that he would "rather be a hobbit than a troll," slyly alluding to the little known fact that John McCain will turn to stone if exposed to direct sunlight.

However, there is one big problem with the LOTR analogy, as originally presented by the Wall Street Journal:
"the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor."

As any ~~pathetic geek~~ Tolkien fan could tell you, Mordor, the land of absolute evil, is actually in Middle Earth. That's the problem. The Dark Lord inhabits the same continent, the same reality, as everyone else. Frankly you can't truthfully say that Washington (represented by Mordor in this analogy) or the Tea Partiers inhabit the same reality as the rest of us.

I think another fantasy analogy for American politics would work much better. Over the past 80 years this country worked out a basic consensus: it's in everyone's best interest to ensure old age doesn't mean poverty and illness, to provide the unemployed with financial help, to make sure poor people get at least some assistance feeding and caring for their kids.

Time and again somebody shows up contesting these notions, which are the underpinning of any society's claim to call itself civilized. Time and again, we think we've beaten them, and they keep coming back.

And those enemies of our modest welfare state seem to be making more progress than they have at any time since Clinton dismantled Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996.

Voldemort is in charge of Washington. Where's Harry?

Why Do We Say "Do?"

2011-07-17T20:05:00.014-04:00

At any given time I'm sampling at least two books that aren't on the "Currently Reading" list on the sidebar of this blog. The latest is John McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. One of the quirks of our language that he discusses is what he calls "meaningless do." Think about it: most of our uses of "do" mean nothing. In the sentence "I do like to swim," do adds emphasis, but "I like to swim" says more or less the same thing. In the question "Do you read a lot?" 'do' adds nothing. In other languages the question would be asked, "Liesst du viel?" (German) or "Lees mucho?" (Spanish) both meaning "Read you much?" which says essentially the same thing.

Another oddity of our language is the use of -ing verbs. Other languages have an equivalent construction, but English is one of the few languages that uses the -ing form (i.e., the present progressive, also considered a sort of verb-noun hybrid) of a verb to say This is what I am doing right now. Since I speak English, if somebody were to ask me what I'm doing as I'm typing on my laptop in my neighborhood cafe, I would say "I'm writing." If I were a Mexican typing on my laptop in a cafe in Mexico City or Guanajuato, I would say, "Escribo" (I write). Similarly, if I were a French speaker pecking away on my laptop in Montreal or Lyons, I would say "J'ecris."

McWhorter ponders why English is so odd in this respect, and in doing so he also tackles head-on one of the most absurd (and unquestioned) assumptions of English history. The area we now call England enters many history books as the Roman province of Britannia after being conquered by the Emperor Claudius in 43 AD. As Roman power waned in the following centuries and the Roman Empire was under constant attack by peoples such as the Germans, Huns and Visigoths, the Emperor Honorious decided the best way to defend the empire was to concentrate his armies on a somewhat smaller area of territory. In other words, the Romans left Britain, which was now defenseless against attacks from peoples from north-western mainland Europe: the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The result of these invasions was a society in much of what is now England speaking a Germanic language called Anglo-Saxon with its own distinctive laws and culture, and people in Wales and Cornwall speaking Celtic languages descended from "British," the common language spoken by the Celtic inhabitants of Britain who were there when the Romans arrived (and who saw them leave). The people of Wales and Cornwall, needless to say, had their own distinctive laws and culture. Historians have mostly assumed that the Germanic invaders exterminated most of the Celtic inhabitants of what is now England, the survivors being pushed into the hinterlands of Wales and Cornwall. However, that assumption doesn't take into account one basic fact: before the twentieth century, with its repeat-firing guns and gas chambers, genocide was extremely labor-intensive work. The one exception was the European conquest of the Americas, in which the invaders brought diseases to which the natives had no immunities: completely unintentional biological warfare.

In other words, most historians of England have assumed that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived in enough numbers to kill, one on one, by sword or axe, the vast majority of the natives of what is now England. That's ridiculous. When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico and Central America in the sixteenth century they had primitive firearms and the unintentional help of smallpox, but even today (in spite of the deaths of millions of natives) the Mexicans and Central Americans of indigenous descent vastly outnumber those of Spanish descent. The logical conclusion is that the original, Celtic inhabitants of Britain survived under new rulers and ultimately adopted their conqueror's language.

But before they became culturally assimilated by the Angles and the Saxons, they seem (according to McWhorter) to have put their mark on their conquerors' language. Interestingly, what other languages besides English have the "useless do" and use the present-progressive construction to express the present tense? According to McWhorter, only two: Welsh and Cornish, the languages of the people who were supposedly wiped off the map and pushed into the corners of Britain. In Welsh, the word "nes" means do (or did). So if you were asked in Welsh if you had opened the door (and you hadn't) you would say, "Nes i ddim agor" ("I didn't open") instead of "I opened not." And in Cornish, if a friend of yours is shopping at the farmers' market and somebody asks what she's doing, you say, "Yma hi ow prena hy losow" ("She is at buying her vegetables")—as if buying is some kind of condition she's in. In Welsh, if your daughter Mary is practicing for choir and someone wants to she's doing, you say, "Mae Mair yn cynu" ("Mary is in singing").

Now I mentioned that these constructions don't show up in written Anglo-Saxon (charming sample of which at left). So it's fair to ask, if English got these constructions from Celts wouldn't they have shown up in written Anglo-Saxon, given that Anglo-Saxon is the predecessor of Modern English? McWhorter's got a good answer for that: think about how much difference there is between how people talk and how they write (at least before texting and tweeting). Now think about how much greater that difference would be if, say, only a small percentage of the population could read or write? Furthermore, for about 150 years after the conquest of England by French-speaking Normans, most writing in England was done in Latin or French—Anglo- Saxon more or less disappeared. But during that time, the language spoken by most the population England was changing into a hybrid of French and Anglo-Saxon now known as Middle English. And when the first Middle English documents were written, what curious grammatical constructions appear?

Take a wild guess....

This book is utterly fascinating. More later.

Adventures in Food (or Stupidity, Take Your Pick)

2011-07-10T17:10:00.006-04:00

I used to consider myself a spicy food aficionado (one of my readers is already laughing, and I know who you are). I grew up in a house where jalapeños and Tabasco sauce were staples. I love wasabi. Among my college friends (for most of whom Cajun food and Americanized Chinese were the outer limits of exotic), I was considered a daring, even foolhardy eater.

Well, I'm a chile wuss. Sometimes eating a mere vindaloo just hurts. Once in Chapel Hill I ate buffalo wings that made me feel as if my mouth was about to blister. I quit, on the verge of howling with pain, while everyone else around me ate with relish.

I was reminded of how low I rank among chile eaters last Friday evening. Earlier in the day I had been in O'Hare Airport in Chicago. I had not had lunch and knew I wouldn't have time to sit down and eat before boarding my plane. I discovered, to my delight, that Rick Bayless (the Julia Child of Mexican food, for those of you unfamiliar with the name) had opened a take-out restaurant in that very airport.

I scanned the menu and ordered a cochinita pibil (Yucatán-style pork) sandwich. The plan was I would eat half for lunch on the plane and half that night for dinner. The sandwich came with salsa in a small little plastic container. I did not use the salsa on the plane for fear of making a mess. I just ate half the sandwich (and very tasty it was).

At home that night, I unpacked the uneaten half of the sandwich and the salsa. I had a Homer Simpson moment of longing: mmmmmm.....chipotle salsa (chipotles are smoked jalapeños). I opened the sandwich and poured the salsa on it. I replaced the bread and started eating.

A minute or so later, I entered a world of pain. I hurt so much I couldn't sit still. I was walking around manically. I drank milk to to try to get relief (lipids are the quickest way to counteract pepper). No dice. I put ice in my mouth for temporary relief (even though I knew the melting water would actually distribute the capsaicin.)

After about four or five minutes the pain stopped. Another two or three minutes and I stopped sweating. I thought, "God, I can't even handle chipotles now? What has happened to me?" Then I had a vivid visual memory of the Tortas menu.

I had briefly considered a chicken sandwich. That was the one that had chipotle salsa. The cochinita pibil came with habañero salsa. I should have known better: the people of Southern Mexico (where the Yucatán is) consider habañeros the only real peppers. If you eat jalapeños like Northern Mexicans do, you're little better than a gringo wuss (at least according to the good people of the Southern third of Mexico).

Check out this chart that ranks chiles. As you can see, habañeros approach the frontier that divides food from weapons.

And yes, I did finish the sandwich: I'm way too cheap to not eat food I paid for.

In the News....

2011-06-21T12:15:00.013-04:00

Yesterday my friend over at Three Good Rats emailed me. The subject line was "Important News!" In the milliseconds before I opened the message a couple of possibilities of what the news could be passed through my mind. At first I wondered if another former associate of Sarah Palin's had written a book. Then I wondered if Keith Olbermann had finally spontaneously combusted (admit it, you've been expecting it to happen for years).

But no, this was much better. When I opened the email, what to my wondering eyes did appear?

BIGFOOT!

Well, not exactly. It was a link to an AOL News story about some Bigfoot investigators who were in the Sierra National Forest over Memorial Day weekend. Snow forced them to abandon the campsite. Strangely, they left their vehicles behind (I mean, if you were leaving a place of inclement weather, wouldn't you try to drive away?)' When they returned for them two days later, they found strange markings and hair on their truck windows. So they're sending the hair off for DNA analysis hoping it will confirm the existence of Bigfoot, a.k.a. Sasquatch.

Makes sense to me. You find some stray hair out in the woods, what else could it be but something left behind by a hitherto unknown species? And they found something else that makes them think they've cryptozoological gold: the oily imprint of a strange face on one of the truck windows. Fortunately for science, one of them took a picture. "I've shown people -- non-believers -- this photograph and this totally freaked them out," said Jeffrey Gonzalez, one of the investigators.

Unfortunately for the curious, none of the news stories reporting this included the picture. However, I found a reproduction on the blog Ghost News. Sadly, this doesn't convince me. My friend at Three Good Rats thinks it looks like an ultrasound. I myself think it looks like a Mexican pro wrestler's mask. Seriously, Gonzalez: this is the best you've got?

I'll confess to being an agnostic on the subject of Bigfoot. I think it's quite possible there's an unknown species of hominid out there. No less a primatologist than Jane Goodall said she thought the existence of something like a Yeti or Sasquatch likely. What I do find staggeringly unlikely is that all the people who claim to have seen evidence of a Sasquatch have all been incredibly bad photographers. And yet here we are with ultrasound of an in utero Mexican pro wrestler.

And apparently no one else has done any better.

Here's a still from what is supposedly 1977 film footage of a Bigfoot:

Frankly, I think it's much more likely that it's Johnny Cash. The build's about right. And the man did like to wear black.

Then there's this March 2011 snapshot taken on Golden Valley Church Road in Rutherford County, CA:

If this photo had been taken in Massachusetts instead of California, I would say it's likely that this is a picture of me. I am kind of careless about crossing the street.

And there's this gem:

This could almost be a dog. But seriously, why are all people who think they've encountered Bigfoot such bad photographers? If I ever take a photo this bad, no one is ever seeing it. It will be deleted immediately.

Whatever we think of these or other Bigfoot photos, Gonzalez and company have high hopes for the DNA testing. But as Loren Coleman, owner of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine said, "If you take a DNA sample and it comes out near-human or primate, it could be Bigfoot. Or a homeless person."

Packaging Crime

2011-05-31T20:03:00.001-04:00

If you're anything like me, you're appalled at how much garbage you generate in your daily life. I recently ordered a novel from Daedalus Books. Here's how much cardboard they felt was necessary to ship a mass-market-size paperback (paperback included in photo for scale).

In Honor of the Rescheduled Apocalypse

2011-05-24T21:38:00.001-04:00

Apocalypse Update

2011-05-24T15:10:00.005-04:00

The followers of Harold Camping are feeling a little adrift right now, seeing as none of them were swept into the heavens on Saturday. But Camping has re-thought the matter and has declared last Saturday an "Invisible Rapture." I have no idea what that means: if God made people invisible before sweeping them into the heavens, or if some kind of Judgment Day clock started ticking but God didn't make a big deal about it.

All I know is I found this taped to my door when I got up Sunday morning:

Oh Noes! Duh Apocalypz!

2011-05-17T20:09:00.014-04:00

In case you haven't been paying attention, kids: the world is going to end on May 21 at 6 pm. At least that's what Harold Camping, an Oakland-based preacher and radio program host says.

For months now Camping's followers have been on the road trying to warn everyone of the impending Apocalypse.

Now don't think this means that if you planned on dinner with friends Saturday night or catching Hesher Sunday afternoon, you need to find a way to that before the weekend. You can relax. According to the schema Christian fundamentalists have of the end of the end of the world (including Mr. Camping), it starts with what's called the Rapture, when all Christians are swept away into the heavens. Camping estimates that only 2% of the world's population will rapt up to bask in the Divine Presence.

Given the math, and given that I'm pretty sure only my friends read this blog, odds are that you, dear reader, will still be around on Monday morning. And here's the bitch of it all: eliminating 2% of the population probably won't do anything to reduce traffic during the morning commute. No, we the damned will still be here (some of us taking care of the pets of the saved*), hanging on for a further 153 days until the world ends completely on October 21. During that time all sorts of fun stuff is supposed to happen: some of us will become "Tribulation Saints" and fight the Antichrist (at right is an Italian Renaissance depiction of the Antichrist**), the Jews will return to Jerusalem, rebuild the Temple and embrace Jesus as their Lord and Savior--although if they're going to do the latter, I don't understand why they would bother with the former. Then Jesus comes back, and there's a huge-ass battle at a place called Armageddon, a.k.a. Meggido.

In short, cancel your vacation plans. This summer and fall is going to be busy.

Camping's Apocalypse is running on a tighter schedule than your traditional Christian fundamentalist outline of the End of Days, but he's got all the right events on the calendar: the saved vanishing, the rebuilding of the Temple, and a big battle with the Most Evil Guy Ever. If you ask any fundamentalist Christian where they came up with this timeline of events, they'll probably tell you, "It's in the Bible." Well, not exactly.

I grew up Presbyterian (a non-fundamentalist church), and while I no longer belong to any faith, by virtue of attending a Presbyterian church throughout my youth I have heard the entire Bible read out loud at least four times. And since I studied English in college I was occasionally obliged to read parts of the Bible (bottom line:knowing chunks of the King James Bible is a big help in understanding a lot of English & American literature written before 1940 or so; as a text, the KJV's cultural influence tops Shakespeare).

I would say I know the Bible a good better than the average person. And the bottom line is, most people who call themselves fundamentalist Christians don't read the Bible. They have no idea what's in it. If they did their heads would explode. They would have to start caring about poor people and minorities and stop voting Republican.

I've actually cited Scripture in arguments with fundamentalist Christians. It drives them nuts.

But anyway, back to the Apocalypse. The current roster of events for the end of the world exists almost entirely because of the work of a nineteenth-century Anglican priest named John Nelson Darby (whom I've always wanted to call Charles Nelson Darby, which then makes me think of Charles Nelson Reilly...). Darby was so obsessed with the end of the world that he devoted a considerable amount of time to selective and creative reading of passages in the New Testament to put together a coherent timeline of events leading up to the Last Judgement. Darby had a particularly good time with Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, which Darby (and modern fundamentalists) consider a sort of coded AAA travel guide to the Apocalypse.

I myself was taught in Sunday school that Revelation was just allegory written to lift the spirits of Christians during a period of persecution in the reign of the Emperor Domitian. If you've never read Revelation yourself, give it a try. It's a trip. It starts out with the narrator having a vision of seven candlesticks in the sky and a guy with flaming eyes and a sword sticking out of his mouth.

Then things get weird.

But I digress. Let's get back to Harold Camping. He admits he has predicted the coming of the Apocalypse twice before, but this time, he say's got it right. How can he be so sure? Business Insider has the math.

But if Camping's wrong again, he can take consolation in having company. Here's a list of Apocalypses that weren't.

*Seriously. Click on the link.

**And clearly up to no good—as is usually the case with Antichrists.

Art and Secularism

2011-05-15T19:58:00.006-04:00

Lately I've been listening repeatedly to Handel's Coronation Anthems. The Anthems are incredibly beautiful. I find them both energizing and soothing at the same time, if that makes any sense. Below is a clip of The Sixteen performing Anthem 4:

The Coronation Anthems are among those compositions, like Brahms' Requiem or Handel's Messiah, that leave with me a dim, inarticulate sense of loss that it's simply not possible to write such works any more. Kings in the old sense are gone. So's God.

While the recent, disgraceful media obsession with the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton shows that royalty hasn't lost all its magic, what royalty means now is a parody of what it meant when Handel wrote his Anthems for the coronation of George II and Queen Caroline in 1727. The King of England was also the head of the Church of England. One of his titles was Defender of the Faith. He was the Lord's Anointed, the apex of an order set up by God Himself. The Anthems were written for that idea, that concept of what royalty was, more so than they were for George II (who, for what it's worth, seems to have been a decent guy as kings go).

I don't want to live in a monarchy. I think all monarchies should be abolished. But it's hard not to feel a little irrationally wistful about a society that could produce music like that.

As an agnostic I also harbor similar feelings about music such as Handel's Messiah. Religion is one of the finest instruments of oppression mankind has ever devised, but secular society is never going to produce that sort of beauty.

Or as I read somewhere, atheists will never build a Chartres Cathedral.

Osama Chanted Evening

2011-05-03T21:20:00.001-04:00

Sunday night we (those of us who were up) learned Osama bin Laden had been killed by Navy Seals.* The only reason I was up was that at ten or so a friend emailed me to say that Obama was going to make a statement to the nation on an undisclosed topic. So I waited. We were assuming he was going to announce that Qaddafi was dead.

Right about mortality. Wrong about which murderous crazy guy.

This is big news. It's especially big news for the wife of Gary Weddle, a Washington state middle-school teacher who decided in the aftermath of 9-11 he would not shave again until bin Laden was killed. I can't imagine her relief at no longer....well, let's just not go there.

Among the other people who think this is big news is Dick Cheney and his homies at Fox News, who are playing this up as a vindication of "Bush-era enhanced interrogation techniques" and Guantanamo. Because even though our Kenyan overlord has been in office for over two years, he couldn't have had anything to do with this. Fox News is unequivocal ("Bush-Era Interrogations Provided Key Details on bin Laden's Location"). But numerous reports are appearing that indicate bin Laden's elimination was the result of old-fashioned, painstaking intelligence work.

But even assuming the pro-torture crowd was right, it's absurd to also assume the intelligence obtained via torture couldn't have been gotten any other way. History suggests otherwise. In 2007, the men whose job in World War II was to get information from Nazi prisoners talked about their work. How did they get their intelligence? They cultivated relationships with their prisoners. They played chess. They had dinner together. As one of them recalled, "We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture."

Of course, facts won't really change the minds of the Fox News crowd and their audience. They'll just go back home, close the curtains, and enjoy their Jack Bauer porn.

And if the Fox News audience has been living in one reality. It seems many teenagers have been living in another. Twitter was hopping today with young people trying to find out, "Who is Osama bin Laden? And why should I care?"

*Specifically Navy Seal "Team 6." Which officially doesn't exist. And yet they're all over the Internet. Go figure.

Heads of State and Heads of Government; Or, Where's Mommy?

2011-04-30T12:30:00.005-04:00

Yesterday it was almost impossible to get away from the news about the royal wedding. Even NPR, which can normally be relied upon for substance, devoted too much time to it (admittedly, five minutes would have been too much, in my opinion). It was a particularly egregious manifestation of celebrity worship, except that unlike (for example) Justin Bieber, who actually did something to become famous, William and Kate have done nothing (unless you count being born as doing something).

Earlier this week on On Point, Tom Ashbrook devoted an hour to discussing why any nations still have royal families (at least on the part that I heard, they didn't come up with an answer). Over at the Daily Dish, British-born Andrew Sullivan makes the case for the useful role a monarch plays as a symbol of the nation. Like many other countries (e.g., France, Ireland, Sweden), Britain makes the (to us) foreign distinction between the head of state and the head of government. In Britain, Spain, and other constitutional monarchies, the monarch is the head of state. In republics such as France and Ireland, an elected president is the head of state. Head of state is a largely ceremonial post, but in the case of some republics the president has limited discretionary powers. The head of state's real purpose is to be a figure of national unity, or a national parental figure, if you will. In such monarchies and republics, it's the prime minister who actually runs the country, with all the difficulty and dirtiness that such work involves. The head of state is theoretically above all that.

In the United States, for good or ill, the head of state and head of government are the same person. To many (mostly older) Americans, the president is supposed to be almost a living embodiment of the nation. This partly explains the intensity of the national grief when Kennedy was assassinated--and the disgust of many Americans at Bill Clinton's messy private life. It also helps explain why so many white Americans are outraged that we have a black man with a foreign-sounding name in the Oval Office. He embodies a demographic change that terrifies a lot of people who miss a picket-fence, white-bread America that never actually existed.

Very few men have had the personal prestige to successfully fulfill the symbolic promise of the presidency: George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt and Eisenhower come to mind, but not many others. In the unlikely event that our constitution were amended to make head of state a separate office, I can't imagine we could find anyone seen as sufficiently above the fray of politics to be a symbol of national unity.

In the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II is possibly the last member of her family capable of being a figure the entire country can rally around. As Jonathan Freedland points out in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, she's one of the last living links to the most glorious hour in modern British history: when the nation stood alone against Hitler. I don't see how her lily-white descendants will come to be as seen as anything other than an anachronism in an increasingly multiracial Britain.

Of course, all this begs the question, why do people need symbols of national unity? Are peoples around the world really that infantile that we all need some national parental figure or physical representative of a national ideal?

Apparently so.

Southern Dispatch

2011-04-07T19:27:00.011-04:00

I was scanning Salon's headlines a few minutes ago and this caught my eye:

Poll: 46 percent of Mississippi Republicans want interracial marriage ban

The article went on to explain the poll subdivided Republicans in my native state by the candidate they supported for 2012 and showed what percentage of each candidate's supporters were for or against a racial marriage ban. Guess what? Supporters of Mississippi governor Haley Barbour lead the pack in being against interracial marriage at 37%. Supporters of Mike Huckabee came in second at 22%.

Because I have a sick compulsion to read the comments thread on news stories, I skimmed what little remained of the article and went straight to the comments. Most of it was the predictable liberal outrage and horror. Others were along the lines of "So, Republicans are racists? In other news, rain falls out of the sky."

I have to admit when I read that headline I was genuinely shocked--because the percentage of Mississippi Republicans who said they supported a ban of interracial marriage was much lower than I had expected. Then I took a closer look at the figures: another 14 % of Mississippi Republicans said they were "unsure" whether they supported a ban on interracial marriage. Now to be on the fence about that issue....let's just say the math puts the figure of Mississippi Republicans with antebellum views on race relations at 60%. Of the forty percent who said they were against a ban on interracial marriage...I'm sure that includes a few respectable citizens of Jackson or Columbus who know you just can't say that sort of thing out loud anymore. And I'm sure that number also includes (say) a Greenville cotton broker or a Laurel house wife who has a son who moved to San Francisco or New York and married a black woman and [read the following italicized words with your best imitation of a Southern accent] so of course nothin's wrawng with interracial marriage and we've nevah been prejudiced...but let's just say they don't talk to their daughter-in-law often and the holidays are kind of....tense.

Southern Republicanism has its roots in racism. When Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he reportedly told an aide, "We've lost the South for a generation." It turns out Johnson was being a tad optimistic. But Southern disenchantment with the Democratic party had begun much earlier. When the Democratic Party adopted a civil rights platform for the election of 1948, 35 Southern delegates walked out of the national convention, and a splinter group of Southern Democrats calling themselves Dixiecrats supported Strom Thurmond for president. Thurmond carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina in the election. The only reason Southerners stayed with the Democratic Party as long as they did was a traditional revulsion at the idea of supporting the party that had freed the slaves.

In other Southern news, the University of Mississippi is trying to get some positive exposure for its new mascot. For those of you who don't know the back story, the mascot of the Ole Miss football team has traditionally been Col. Reb, a bearded plantation owner with appalling taste in clothes. (As an aside, I never really understood this choice of mascot. Isn't a football team mascot supposed to represent ferocity and prowess? Michigan State's mascot is a Spartan. South Carolina's Clemson University has a tiger. What is a geriatric plantation owner supposed to do to an opponent? Serve them bourbon until they pass out?) Anyway, for years critics had been deriding Col. Reb as an antiquated symbol of racism. Well, change is inevitable, even in Mississippi. In 2010 students and alumni were asked to vote for a new mascot. A few visionaries voted for Admiral Ackbar, a rebel commander in Return of the Jedi. (I think the argument went something like, well he's a rebel too, and he outranks a colonel).

In spite of campaign rallies like the one pictured below, a Star Wars character simply wasn't a serious contender for mascot of the university.

Okay enough backstory. In spite of serious competition from a land shark, a bear became the new mascot. But the football team isn't the Ole Miss Bears now, it's still the Ole Miss Rebels. Given that the historical record is silent on the role of bears in the Civil War, I think we can assume either a) that this is wishful thinking on the part of some of the more reactionary Ole Miss students and alums that white supremacy is so ingrained in nature that even wild animals fought for the Confederacy, or b) that this is a bear that has problems with authority. Probably had an absent father figure. Did some time in juvie. Or maybe just watched James Dean movies too many times.

Well, the University of Mississippi is committed to making future students as attached to this disobedient bear as their forbears were to the old plantation owner. The Rebel Bear even paid a visit to Blair E. Batson's Children's Hospital in Jackson to brighten up the day of some sick kids:

As University of Mississippi Junior Athletic Director Michael Thompson said, the goal is "to create emotional connection with little Ole Miss rebels." Because that's what's important: loving the football team and the poor sap who has to stand on the sidelines wearing a bear suit when it's 95 degrees. It's not like future students should pick a school for something silly like getting an education.

News Roundup

2011-03-12T13:17:00.004-05:00

While Japan deals with the aftermath of the largest earthquake in its history--a disaster that has left over 22,000 people missing or dead in 22 countries and thousands more homeless--we in the U.S. have problems of our own.

Across the nation, red-blooded, patriotic Americans are up in arms over being required to buy light bulbs that will lower their electric bills. Oh, the tyranny...

And Rand Paul can't have the toilet he wants, which means he has less freedom than women who want an abortion. If you're too busy to click on the link Rand Paul's specific complaint is that he can't get a "super toilet," one of those monstrosities with industrial flushing capacity. Money quote:

"I think there should be some self-examination from the administration on the idea that you favor a woman's right to an abortion, but you don't favor a woman or a man's right to choose what kind of light bulb, what kind of dishwasher, what kind of washing machine."

I don't know much about abortions, so I don't know if his analogy is flawed or not. He can still get a toilet, just not a super-toilet. Is he saying that women have a choice between abortions and super-abortions?

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives has been the scene of angry recriminations as Peter King held his hearings on radicalization in the American Muslim community. As usual, the mainstream media has completely ignored the issue on everyone's minds: have the hearings made John Boehner cry yet?

The Way We Live Now

2011-03-09T19:48:00.003-05:00

Or rather, the way they live in media-land: an hour of this morning's On Point was devoted to Republican efforts to eliminate federal funding for PBS and NPR. I usually enjoy On Point, but the devotion of an hour to this topic was typical of the media's absorption in non-issues. The Republicans tried to pull the plug on public broadcasting in 1995 and it didn't work. And that was when they controlled both the House and the Senate.

Bottom line: no Republican wants to go home at election time and find out he's known as the guy who killed Elmo.* Of course, the fact that NPR & PBS are even being discussed illustrates Republican unwillingness to tackle actual issues. They claimed to be concerned about the deficit and they waste time on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which takes less than 1 % of the federal budget?

And then there's the other "issue" of an NPR fundraiser being taped by Operation Veritas saying the truth about the Tea Party and making nice with people he thought were donors. Calling a bunch of racist fanatics racist fanatics and schmoozing with people who might give his employer money? Clearly this is a man who doesn't deserve employment.

*Well, maybe Rand Paul does.

White Male Angst

2011-02-28T19:25:00.004-05:00

A nonprofit group in Texas has announced it is starting a scholarship fund exclusively for white males. The founder, Texas State University student Colby Bohannan, said that when he tried to find the money to pay for college he saw scholarships specifically for women and minorities, but none for white males. Revealing a staggering ignorance of current American society (not to mention American history for the last 300 years), Bohannan said, "I felt excluded. If everyone else can find scholarships, why are we left out?"

You could make the (weak) argument that this is no different than religious denominations offering scholarships only to their members or scholarships specifically for certain ethnic groups. However the name of this white male scholarship foundation reeks of resentment about the browning of America: The Former Majority Association for Equality (in Texas it is technically correct to consider non-Hispanic whites a minority). And since financial need is the overriding criteria (regardless of race) for financial assistance with higher education, the whole notion of white males being victimized in the competition for scholarship money is absurd. In Bohannan's specific case, as a veteran (he served in Iraq) who is attending a state school, he is almost certainly eligible to have his tuition and fees covered under the Post 9-11 GI Bill.

But here's the best part: to demonstrate the lack of racial resentment underlying the founding of Former Majority, Bohannan has said applicants who are "at least 25% Caucasian" are eligible.* This is ironic given the historical definition of race in the United States: if you had an antecedent who was not Caucasian, their non-whiteness determined your race. So if you had one black grandparent and three white ones, you were considered black. People half Hispanic and half Anglo have historically been considered Hispanic.

By making men less than 100% Caucasian eligible, isn't Bohannan's program just another minority scholarship program of the sort that makes him feel "left out?"

*Don't ask me how you prove that.

The Way We Live Now

2011-02-16T19:31:00.005-05:00

Part of the absurd fun of living after the Enlightenment is the recurring efforts to quantify the unquantifiable. At the beginning of the last century, a Massachusetts physician established to his satisfaction that the soul weighs 21 grams. And thanks to The Atlantic, I learned about this quaint 1930s metric for gauging marital satisfaction.

Two years ago Apple got a patent on sensing systems that will ultimately be able to quantify, say, the effectiveness of a karate chop. And as we all know, courts measure the unmeasurable all the time. Two weeks ago a Michigan court decided someone's mental anguish was worth $750,000.

But really all these issues pale in comparison to the question, What's my life worth? What's yours worth? It depends on whom you ask.

According to the EPA it's $9.1 million. But if you ask the Food and Drug Administration it's $7.9 million. And according to the Department of Transportation, it's $6.1 million.

Oh, well. It's not the first time the public failed to get a straight answer out of the federal government.

On the Polity and Public Violence

2011-02-12T14:43:00.019-05:00

This past couple of months I've been catching up on the series Mad Men. I love almost everything about this re-creation of 1960s New York: the dialogue, the characters, the costumes and the cast. The show is said to be remarkably accurate in its depiction of the attitudes and habits of the time: the sexism, the racism, the constant smoking, the mid-morning drinking.

But what I found most striking in the third season was the characters' reactions to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was as moving as it was anachronistic. They were all horrified. Betty Draper (the loathsome spouse of the main character Don Draper) actually wept. Bear in mind the characters are all Republicans. Don Draper's advertising firm, Sterling Cooper, was responsible for the Nixon campaign's ads. Shortly before the election Betty Draper had said of John Kennedy, "I hate him." Three years later she's crying for him. And when she sees Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on live television she screams "What is going on?"In another scene Margaret Sterling, the daughter of Roger Sterling, cries for Kennedy even as she gets ready for her own wedding.

In addition to their overwhelming grief, the characters display an innocence in their reactions that is truly touching. At one point Trudy Campbell says, "This is America, you don't just shoot the President!"

I realize these are all fictional characters, but their reactions to the assassination are representative from what I've read about the time. And Trudy Campbell's outburst is a naive echo of the remark of an elderly woman in my home town. When I was in high school she told me that her first thought when she learned the President had been shot was, "I guess we're not as different from other countries as we thought."

The Kennedy assassination marked the first time that the death of a president was brought into people's home via television, and the vigilante shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald on live television almost made it look as if a chain reaction of violence was beginning (and in a way, it was). Of course brutal violence has marked our national life from the very beginning. And the America in which Kennedy was shot was one in blacks were still being lynched, murders were being committed, wives beaten. But Kennedy's death was one of those moments when the violence and insanity that has always been in this country bubbled up, lifting the lid, and everyone was forced to see it.

The murder of John Kennedy also occurred at a time when a majority, or at least a large minority, of people in this country shared a common civil religion. National institutions and offices (if not necessarily officeholders) were accorded a certain respect, and the president was still respected as a symbol of the entire country.* Admittedly, Kennedy had his enemies. In some parts of the South men drank toasts to Lee Harvey Oswald, but I think that in this, as in so many other respects, the South was an exception to national norms.

I can't imagine that the assassination of Obama, or any other President after Kennedy, would have been met with such an outpouring of grief. That's how inured to violence we've become, and how Americans' sense of ourselves as forming a common polity has been eroded. We've reached the point at which someone as vile as Sarah Palin is not only a public figure, but she doesn't hesitate to tweet a tasteless map with gun sights on Congressional districts and the exhortation, "Reload."

I keep thinking about Trudy Campbell's anguished, "This is America." That phrase means so many things: not only will no one shoot the President, but that everyone (theoretically) has certain rights and reasonable expectations: that you won't be locked up for no reason, that if you work reasonably hard you'll always have a roof over your head. Those expectations have always been violated, whether by lone gunmen, Southern sheriffs, or the brutality of the "free market." But the violations seem to be growing more frequent.

If faith in the gods of our civil religion wasn't killed by Watergate, the events of the last ten years have quite possibly done it. Our government has assumed the power to kidnap people, under a president who promised "change," our government has grown more secretive by the day, and that same President has authorized the assassination of U.S. citizens.

We won't get that faith back for a long time--if we ever do.

*One telling incident: when Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur, people all over America wrote letters or sent telegrams to the president to express their outrage. A Western Union employee refused to send the telegram composed by a woman in Charlestown, Maryland, on the grounds that calling the President a "moron" was out of the question.

They leafed through a thesaurus together and compromised on "witling."

(I realize this is a bit incoherent and far more serious than my usual rants. But don't worry--I'll be back soon with some snark.)

The Way We Live Now

2011-02-01T19:47:00.002-05:00

At work today I got a bag of trail mix out of the staff lounge vending machine. While eating I idly looked at the back of the bag:

Ingredients: Peanuts, raisins, sunflower kernels, almonds, and walnuts.

And immediately beneath:

Allergy information: Packed on equipment that processes peanuts.

The Week in Food

2011-01-30T19:05:00.003-05:00

Oh Minimalist, I will miss you.

Slaughterhouse inspections, Chicken McNuggets, and Vladimir Putin: the strange history of dark meat.

While Cairo rages, Milad Zari bakes. And bakes.

Some are calling for a low-salt, low-sugar future. The Germans point the way.

Good times for Iowa have a down side for the rest of us.

Need to Do Some Gift Shopping?

2011-01-27T20:38:00.008-05:00

I was reading the Daily Dish yesterday and was struck by one of their posts: a photo of a rubber ducky with the DEA logo on it.

It's one of the many items on sale at the Drug Enforcement Administration gift shop. Now I knew the government sold some weird things. If you're in the market for an amphibious landing craft, the government surplus site is the place for you. I almost bought one but decided I was too busy to fulfill my childhood dream of invading New Brunswick. But I began to wonder what other things you could buy from the federal government. Although I've been in a number of national monuments and historic sites, I tend to gravitate toward the books section of any gift shop and not notice what else is available. But now that I've found the site Government Gifts and Memorabilia I have begun to grasp the breadth and variety of the retail smorgasbord offered by Uncle Sam.

I always need more office supplies, but I've never been particular about brands or makes. Now I've decided these gavel pencils from the Supreme Court gift shop are a must-have:

And with the cold weather we've been having who would pass up a chance to buy U.S. Capitol afghans? Being of a less practical frame of mind, I myself have realized that my life will never be complete without a Herbert Hoover signature magnet:

One of the best-selling items in the National Archives Gift Shop is, of course, the photo of Nixon meeting Elvis:

And from the George Bush Presidential Library you can get all kinds of goodies, such as this box that seems to have been inspired by the opening sequence of The Colbert Report:

I also noticed the Bush Library gift shop sells some books, which is fine although it doesn't really reflect the Bush spirit. When Brendan Gill recalled that when he stayed at the Bush family estate in Kennebunkport the only book he could find in the entire house was Jokes for the John (I am not making this up). A sample title from the books section: Indians Who Lived in Texas. Note the past tense. According to the Census over 100,000 Native Americans live in Texas, but I guess it makes for a more comfortable reading experience if you stick to the dead ones. Survivors of genocide tend to raise awkward questions.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some shopping to do.

The Bible in the Classroom

2011-01-26T20:33:00.003-05:00

"Oh just about everything's a sin. Have you ever sat down and read this thing?"--Reverend Lovejoy on the Bible.

Many of you probably recall the survey done by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life last summer, which revealed (surprise!) that the citizens of the most religious country in the world are rather ignorant about religion. Unfortunately, if your knowledge of religion is lacking, that handicaps your capacity to understand many other things, such as Iraqi politics, much of U.S. history, and virtually all literature written in English prior to 1870, to name three examples.

The survey merely confirmed what many educators, writers and thinkers have long known: that Americans know very little about one of the most powerful forces in human history. What's really staggering is American ignorance of a relatively small facet of the big subject we call religion: a little book known as the Bible, that book many of our boorish ancestors used as license to set up little enclaves of intolerance on the Eastern seaboard. According to the survey's findings fewer than half of Americans could name the four Gospels, and only about half know that the Golden Rule is not one of the Ten Commandments. In 2007 Representative Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) called for the display of the Ten Commandments in the houses of Congress. It turns he couldn't even name them:

I've always been bemused by Republican Bible-thumping: if they actually opened theirs (if they have them) and read them once in a while they might have to question their own political positions: for instance, according to the Christian point of view helping the unfortunate not only isn't wrong, it's a divine command.

On the surface it's a laudable attempt to address this ignorance that Texas public schools were required to offer a Biblical studies elective as of 2009. And the Texas state legislature specifically declared that the aim was not to proselytize but to "teach students knowledge of biblical content, characters, poetry, and narratives that are prerequisites to understanding contemporary society and culture, including literature, art, music, mores, oratory, and public policy," and that the classes "shall not endorse, favor, or promote, or disfavor or show hostility toward, any particular religion or nonreligious faith or religious perspective."

All well and good. However, in spite of the law mandating that the study of the Bible's impact on Western culture be taught in a manner "that neither promotes nor disparages religion...[and not] "from a particular sectarian point of view," and that this would be ensured by teacher training and curriculum standards approved by the state attorney general, there's been a problem.

In fall of 2009 the Texas Education Agency announced it would not provide the training and materials because there was no funding from the state legislature.

Some school districts promptly canceled the class. Others forged ahead. In spite of the laudable intentions behind the law--and I have no doubt many Texas teachers have attempted to teach this class in a fully objective, academically acceptable spirit--I am also sure that in many communities this has been next to impossible. In many parts of this country you say the word "Bible" and immediately the listener's neocortex stops working. This is nowhere better illustrated than in one of the first articles I read on the Bible studies elective:

"I think it is a good thing because a lot of kids don't have that experience, and they already want to take prayer out of school as it is, and you see where our kids are ending up!" said Tyler resident Laura Tucker.

And this month the ACLU began investigating a Bible class being taught at the high school in Big Spring, Texas. Some residents objected--to the investigation, not the class.

"I found it to some degree offensive that someone could come in, any group or groups and basically tell you, you cant have a class that has any faith view that might be expressed," says parent Chipper Smith.

Some people in this country (most of them white Christians) will never grasp what the word public means in this country. That there's a sphere where it's not all about them. Where they don't get to dictate to the rest of us.

The Week in Food

2011-01-23T18:09:00.002-05:00

An unlikely alliance: Michelle Obama and Wal-Mart.

Do you prefer your buffalo grass-fed or grain-fed?

There's beef and then there's "beef" (or "taco meat filling," if you prefer).

Some expensive foods are predictable: the $2800 steak, the thousand dollar mushrooms....but then there's $400 leftover pot roast.

Burns Night is coming up. Sae whit better time tae learn freish ways tae sloch haggis?

BP Oil Spill Update

2011-01-20T18:51:00.002-05:00

In the midst of all the non-news about WikiLeaks (rich people try to avoid paying taxes? REALLY?) and that Americans want to cut the deficit, but they don't want to cut a single government program and they don't want to pay higher taxes, it's easy to forget everything that's not the front page.

Remember that oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year? We haven't heard anything in some time, so everything must be okay, right? Think again. Oil is still washing up on shore. And chemicals found in oil are turning up in the blood of some residents of the Deep South:

This month the Louisiana Environmental Action Network released the results of tests performed on blood samples collected from Gulf residents. Whole blood samples were collected from 12 people between the ages of 10 and 66 in September, November and December and analyzed by a professional lab in Georgia, with the findings interpreted by environmental chemist and LEAN technical adviser Wilma Subra.

Four of the people tested -- including three adults and the 10-year-old -- showed unusually high levels of benzene, a particularly toxic component of crude oil.

Public health in the South already blows. The last thing these people needed was one more toxin.

Of course, if you listen to Southern elected officials, everything's just fine.

Terrifying Fact of the Day

2011-01-18T21:36:00.003-05:00

In the wake of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, gun sales are up:

5% increase nationwide.

60% jump in Arizona.

And here's a gun dealer in Indiana talking about his business:

His number-one seller? The Glock 19. The very make Jared Loughner used.

Karofsky, Watch Out

2011-01-17T17:48:00.004-05:00

When I went to the homepage of The Washington Post this morning I saw evidence of how much further the paper of Woodward and Bernstein has sunk into inanity--or at least poor layout and design. I saw a picture of Chris Colfer next to the headline, "Loughner Trial Likely to be Moved to California." Americans are so dumb I assume this will result in an Internet rumor that gay teens are shooting people. On the upside, maybe this will make homophobic high school bullies back off.

And if rumor spreads that gay teens are shooting democratic members of Congress maybe the GOP will warm up to the Log Cabin Republicans.

America and Americans

2011-01-08T14:06:00.005-05:00

I am always flattered when when people from other countries point out what they like about mine. Spanish friends, for example, have told me that (Arizona notwithstanding) they were pleasantly surprised by how much more assistance was extended to immigrants in the U.S. than in Spain. Upon reflection, I've decided their reaction probably says more about Eastern Massachusetts than it does about the U.S. in general. So I was intrigued when Andrew Sullivan posted a clip he called "America From the Outside," in which Craig Ferguson and Stephen Fry discussed what they liked about the U.S.:

One of the characteristics they both seem to admire is American optimism, the sense of unlimited possibility. Optimism is admirable but I find its typical American embodiment impossible to separate from a particularly unappealing naiveté. Fry notes how the phrase "only in America" always denotes something big, bold and new. I associate the phrase "only in America" with the notion of unlimited social mobility: "Only in America could a poor boy from a farm become a millionaire."

Fry finds "beguiling" the theory that attributes this sense of possibility to immigration: "[people] came here by choice. They wanted to leave Europe. Mostly Europe. And come here to start a new life. The gene pool is people who said this isn't good enough....American is a gene pool of people saying, 'let's risk it.'...It's a tempting way of looking at it."

That's not quite how I would describe the millions of Irish peasants who fled starvation or Jews who escaped pogroms. Nor how I would describe my own maternal ancestors who were transported from Ulster to Maryland in the 1680s to lessen crowding in Irish jails.*

I don't mean to discount the courage of the millions of voluntary immigrants to this country, nor the hard work of the many people who have come from poor beginnings to achieve outstanding material success. But the opposite side of this simplistic coin of optimism and mobility is the sense that if your life is anything less than what you would like, if you're poor or unhappy or have trouble paying your bills, it's all your fault. The ways in which our society is inherently unjust, the fact that certain people have the deck stacked against them from day one, isn't allowed to be part of the narrative.

There's no ugliness or pointless pain in American history, it's all Progress. Thus when the new Republican members of the House read the Constitution out loud, they somehow managed to do it without reading any references to slavery. A Mexican-American studies class at a Tucson high school has been declared illegal by the Arizona State Department of Education for addressing discrimination against Hispanic Americans. The editor of a new edition of Huckleberry Finn deleted all instances of the word "nigger."

These are a symptoms of a cultural blindness that has truly poisonous effects. It locks most Americans into a sense of tribal self-righteousness. We can never really be wrong. We can be the second-biggest culprit in leading the world toward global catastrophe, we can lock up millions of black men and make it nearly impossible for them to resume normal lives after they've "paid their debt to society," we can make hundreds of people disappear into torture chambers, but everything's all right in America.

The Americans Sarah Palin patronizingly called "Joe Six-Packs" understand they're getting poorer, that they're lives are getting worse, but the American Story doesn't allow them to understand the nature of their problems. Instead it provides scapegoats, such as welfare queens and over-paid union employees. Their tax dollars are being siphoned away to buy deadbeats health insurance and pamper criminals (in a telling moment during the Alabama episode of Stephen Fry in America, he remarked that Alabama was not a place where he would want to be "poor or in trouble with the law." When Fry himself was seventeen, he was convicted of credit card fraud. Yet he was given a second chance and allowed to take the entrance exams for Cambridge. I find it easier to imagine that happening in the UK than in the Land of Opportunity).
This land of optimism is seething with resentment that occasionally erupts into violence. Today Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head in Tucson. She was one of the many members of Congress who received threatening calls for supporting the Affordable Care Act.

Her assailant has been described as a white man in his twenties: just the sort of American, so the Story goes, who should have been pursuing opportunities with optimism and that can-do spirit.

*Don't feel too bad for my relatives: they quickly realized there was a really good life to be had in the Colonies if you were willing to enslave people.

The Way We Live Now

2011-01-06T14:06:00.003-05:00

At the library where I work we make it easy to steal books. The barcode and the RFID tag are both on/in the dust jacket. So slip the jacket off and you can walk out with the book without setting off the alarm.

This morning I found an empty book jacket on a shelf. The title? Do Hard Things. According to the blurb, it's a book urging teenagers to rebel "against the low expectations of today's culture by choosing to 'do hard things' for the glory of God."

More Proof...

2011-01-05T10:10:00.003-05:00

...if any were needed, that the American consumer is the dumbest animal on earth. Today's Washington Post has an article on the recent increase in auto sales. This part caught my eye:

Auto sales in the United States jumped 11 percent over the year, with the strongest single gain coming with midsize sport-utility vehicles such as the Jeep Cherokee and the Honda Pilot.

According to the government's fuel economy rankings, the Cherokee and the Pilot rank near the bottom in gas mileage among cars by their respective companies (fueleconomy.gov doesn't create firm links for search results, but if you click on "search by make" and then "2011," you'll find links to both Jeep and Honda gas mileage rankings).

And of course, gas prices are going up.

The Week in Food

2011-01-02T18:35:00.002-05:00

Finally, there may be a use for genome sequencing other than telling us how much we have in common with fruit flies: better chocolate.

The New York Times touts the virtues of bison.

Neanderthals didn't floss. But don't worry: Paleolithic oral hygiene's loss is modern archaeology's gain.

Somehow. of all the food-related questions scientists could explore, this one never occurred to me.

2011: the Year of the Tomato.

My 2010 Reading

2011-01-01T18:37:00.008-05:00

Recently a friend of mine informed me that she read 57 books in 2010. That's staggering (to me, at any rate). That's more than a book a week. Then my friend at Three Good Rats announced she had read 72. I know it's not a contest, but as someone who's always thought of himself as a reader I found myself feeling lazy and inadequate. When I compiled my own list I found myself with a paltry 28. In my defense I don't keep a list of books I read so I've possibly forgotten a few. I will also add that since I teach lit classes to a local group of retirees I spent a fair amount of time reading short stories before I taught them and dipping into some relevant criticism as well.

But enough defensiveness. My 2010 list is below.

These books I read simply because I wanted to:

Strip Jack: an Inspector Rebus Mystery by Ian Rankin

Black and Blue: an Inspector Rebus Mystery by Ian Rankin

(Detective Inspector John Rebus is my favorite fictional detective and Ian Rankin one of my favorite mystery writers)

This Book is Overdue: How Librarian and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson (an enjoyable, but perhaps overenthusiastic, look at my profession)

Homecoming by Berhnard Schlink

Germany 1945: from War to Peace by Richard Bessel (a fascinating and troubling account of the end of the Third Reich and the beginning of West Germany; it also offers an excellent account of what is possibly the only time in history that an army fought savagely against an enemy force not to win but to hold them off long enough to surrender to another one).

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines (one of the best novels I've ever read; WARNING: if you have any heart at all, this book will destroy you)

Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel (absolutely brilliant)

Twain's Feast: Searching for America's Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens by Andrew Bearhs

The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics and Religion by Matt Taibbi (Matt Taibbi is one of my favorite journalists and political commentators: he's always savagely funny and on target).

I re-read these books, some in their entirety, others in part:

A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America by Tony Horwitz (a fascinating account of European voyages to North America in the centuries preceding permanent European settlement)

The Battle Cry of Freedom: the Civil War Era by James McPherson (partial)

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann (this book is amazing)

The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré (probably the eighth or ninth time I've re-read this book)

Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud (partial; this book is fewer than 200 pages so it's kind of pathetic that I didn't finish)

The Crucial Decade--and After; America, 1945-1960 by Eric Frederick Goldman (This book is utterly fascinating. In retrospect this country seemed so secure just after the end of the Second World War. At the time it was stricken with fear: plagued by Communist witch hunts, temporary food shortages, conflicted between its traditional isolationism and its new international commitments, and stricken with anxiety about social change).

These two I re-read for the Great Narnia Read-A-Long:

The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis

The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis

These I read in my capacity as a book reviewer for The Globe:

Everything by Kevin Canty

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Early Years by Ilan Stavans

Model Home: A Novel by Erich Puchner

Bliss and Other Stories by Ted Gilley

The Hard Way Round: The Passages of Joshua Slocum by Geoffrey Wolff

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

Turbulence by Giles Foden

Gordian Knot by Bernhard Schlink

Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi W'thiong'o

Ford County: Stories by John Grisham

What else was I doing with my reading time? Magazines and blogs. The London Review of Books, The Atlantic, Scientific American (what I understand of it, that is), Americas. The Daily Dish, Political Animal, Informed Comment.

White Victimhood Gets Even Nuttier

2010-12-19T14:34:00.007-05:00

Even though they have five times as much money as black Americans, and are much more likely than blacks and Hispanics to have jobs, white Americans feel they just can't get a break. They're always finding things to grump about: a Kenyan in the White House, taking the Christ out of an orgy of consumer spending, the death panels that are going to kill old people.....

But now that they've added everything obvious to the list Stuff White People Hate, they're having to dig a little deeper. And they have. A friend recently informed me that they have found a menace to the Master Race lurking in comic books, specifically Marvel and DC Comics, the two outfits that between them produced Batman, Spider-Man, the X-Men and Superman. The contributors to the conservative website the Astute Bloggers are outraged that Batman has recruited a Muslim of Algerian descent to help him fight crime in Paris. Let me just say I didn't know Batman had expanded his operations beyond Gotham City. I guess this is Batman in the age of globalization. What's really weird about this is they're not mad at Batman for expanding his operations to France (doesn't he know he should be focusing all his energies on protecting Americans? I would have expected outrage that he's not on the U.S.-Mexican border stopping illegal immigrants.) No, they're simply pointing out that Batman could have found "a genuine French boy or girl with a real sense of justice."

Since when do white American conservatives talk as if they like the French?

But the real gem in the Week in White Outrage comes from the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group dedicated to preserving the American people's European "composition and character," and opposing "all efforts to deny or weaken the Christian heritage of the United States."*

What are they angry about?

A black Norse god. Yes, you read that right. The 2011 movie Thor is based on a Marvel Comics series that features Norse gods as characters, and in the film one of them is black. Specifically, Heimdall, who will be portrayed by Idris Elba. Not Big Daddy Odin, not everybody's favorite troublemaker Loki, nor the title character, but Heimdall.

I had no idea who the Hell Heimdall was. Apparently he is the guardian of the bridge between Midgard and Asgard.

So...a Christian right group is upset that a minor pagan god of an extinct religion is being depicted as black in a movie.

Considering that in Norse religion the bridge Heimdall guards is a rainbow, they're just lucky he's not black and gay.

*From the CCC's Statement of Principles.

Hat tip to David Harnden-Warwick for some of this information.

Harvard: LGBT Books Covered in Urine "by Accident"

2010-12-14T21:30:00.003-05:00

Earlier this week, the Harvard Crimson reported that 36 books on LGBT subjects in Harvard's Lamont Library were found "vandalized with urine." The immediate assumption was that the act was a hate crime.

However, today Harvard College Dean Evelynn [sic] Hammonds announced that the dousing of nearly forty books on gay/transgendered subjects with urine was an accident. The Crimson reported that near the damaged books library staff discovered an empty jar that is believed to have been filled with urine. And yes, there's more:

upon an investigation by HUPD, it was revealed Monday morning that "our own library personnel" had accidentally spilled a bottle, containing what was reported to be urine, that had been found on the shelf, according to Hammonds.

Of course, this raises the question, why was a jar of urine on a library shelf? The Boston Globe has a few ideas.

A friend of mine told me that he knows some people who drink their own urine for health reasons, a practice I was blissfully unaware of until he shared this information.

I pointed out to him that most libraries have zero-tolerance policies for food and drink. I'm sure Lamont Library is no exception.

More about those Carcinogenic Scanners

2010-12-12T14:57:00.003-05:00

In a demo on German television, a scanner detected a man's cell phone but not the bomb parts he had concealed on his person. Even though most of the dialogue is in German, it's readily apparent what's going on:

Meanwhile a molecular biologist has this to say about the scanners and cancer risk.

And did you know that these lovely devices cost over $100K each?

State Department: We're Sorry about the Whole Sari Thing

2010-12-11T13:29:00.005-05:00

Last weekend, Meera Shankar, India's Ambassador to the United States, went to Jackson-Evers International Airport in Mississippi to catch a plane back to Washington, DC. She had just finished a speaking engagement at Mississippi State University. According to witnesses, the ambassador attracted the attention of TSA workers because she was wearing a sari. Since Jackson-Evers doesn't yet have one of those carcinogenic scanners, she was selected to be felt up by a TSA staffer.

In public.

Because you know terrorists haven't yet figured out that white Americans are suspicious of people who look different, so they wear their funny furrin clothes for protection.

And female Indian terrorists who occupy high-level diplomatic posts are such a problem.

And humiliating people makes everything so much better.

After an initial defense of public groping by the TSA, the State Department has apologized.

Here is a link to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger's initial reporting on the story. The comments thread is quite something. Or was. Many of the more colorful ones have been deleted.

Personal favorite: "This Country was fine until other Countries started coming here" [sic]

Somehow I doubt the guy who wrote that was Indian--you know, the other kind?

Wikileaks & Misplaced Outrage

2010-12-07T21:21:00.007-05:00

For over a week now anyone who isn't a Trappist monk has been subjected to the cries of outrage about WikiLeaks from the Obama Administration and various talking heads. At first I considered most of the Wikileaks "revelations" yawn-inducing (HAMID KARZAI IS CORRUPT?? OH NO!!! REALLY????).

I've come around. And instead of denouncing Julian Assange our government should be grovelling in shame at what's been brought to light and pledging to throw the book at some of the people mentioned in the cables: for example, the American contractors who've been procuring boys to provide sexual services to Afghan policemen. Furthermore, I am glad to see the radical secrecy begun by Bush and continued by Obama dealt a blow.

This whole affair shows just how shallow our commitment is to our supposed values. That soulless wraith Joe Lieberman is demanding the Justice Department determine whether the New York Times can be prosecuted for publishing leaked diplomatic cables (has he heard of the First Amendment?).

This is not to say that Julian Assange is any kind of saint. There's been a lot of nonsense in the past week about "sex by surprise" (which I believed at first), and smearing of the women who first went to Swedish police about Assange. All of which shows that we're still incapable of being grownups in this country. If we like what WikiLeaks is doing, Julian Assange must be a good guy. If we don't, he must be a rapist. Collectively, Americans have a four-year-old's tolerance of complexity.

In any case Nitasha Tiku at New York Magazine has done a good job of clarifying the legal situation.

Meanwhile, folding like a cheap suit in the face of government pressure, Amazon has removed WikiLeaks from their servers. MasterCard and Visa will no longer process WikiLeaks donations.

However, you can still use either credit card to donate to the Ku Klux Klan (Hat tip to techdirt).

'Tis the Season....

2010-12-05T19:48:00.004-05:00

....for air travel. In a couple of weeks I'll be in Logan Airport, trying to decide whether I want to go through a scanner that might (if I fly often enough) contribute to my chances of getting cancer, or getting manhandled by a TSA staffer.

Frankly, I feel safe from being a victim of a terrorist attack, but not because of the invasive and annoying procedures we're subjected to by the Terribly Stupid Administration. I feel safe because of simple probabilities. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 527,483 domestic commercial passenger flights took off in September 2001. Divide by 30. Roughly 17,583 domestic passenger flights took off each day in the month of 9-11. So if even if I had boarded a plane on the very day, my odds would have been 3 out of 17,583 (more or less) of being on one of the hijacked planes.

This is all theater. 9-11 was perfectly preventable with the security measures already in place. Hell, if someone had just investigated Mohammed Atta when he told his flight instructor he was interested in learning to fly a plane but not in how to take off or land one, September 11 might have been just an ordinary day. Furthermore if Wikileaks had been around in 2001, that much-maligned organization might have helped prevent the attacks.

Meanwhile, our safety is in the hands of people who think breast milk could be a terrorist weapon.

News Roundup, TSA Edition

2010-11-23T16:23:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow is National Opt-Out Day.

John Pistole says "Noooooo."

Just what we've been waiting for: tungsten-lined underwear.

TSA to soldier: "You can keep the assault rifle. But you can't board the plane with fingernail clippers." (Hat-tip to BoingBoing).

Meanwhile the women of Harpyness point out the obvious.

The Way We Live Now

2010-11-21T12:48:00.003-05:00

The upper middle-class American parent will stop at nothing to give their children every experience and opportunity possible. The agonizing dissatisfaction with one's looks that torments adolescents, the unrealistic beauty standards held by so many adults?

Parents are taking extra steps to ensure their elementary school-age kids know how it feels. Does little Timmy have a scab on his cheek? Does Susie have a mole? Parents are now paying to have unsightly realities removed from their children's school pictures. For $10-20, teeth can be whitened and a cowlick smoothed down.

Your kids don't have to be troubled by scars or blemishes in their school photos--just in real life.

Because it's never too early to start feeling inadequate.

The Solution to Voter Apathy?

2010-11-20T11:44:00.004-05:00

It's generally agreed among people who don't watch Fox News that Republican successes in the recent mid-terms were less a ringing endorsement of the GOP and more a natural result of voter apathy. College student turnout was particularly low.

Obama's not very good at communicating his successes. Furthermore, while he pulled us backed from the brink of another Depression, "Things Could Have Been a Lot Worse," isn't a terribly inspiring campaign theme.

Maybe the Democrats need to look abroad for ideas on generating voter enthusiasm. In Spain, the Socialist Party of Catalonia created a TV spot for the upcoming regional elections called "Voting Is a Pleasure:"

Although now that I think about it, this might have been a better fit with the Clinton years.

Follow-Up

2010-11-20T11:23:00.003-05:00

You may recall that several days ago I posted about Nicaragua invading Costa Rica and saying it was an honest mistake because they were using Google Maps. Well, it may interest you to know that Google corrected the mistake a week ago, and instead of the Nicaraguan Army saying "Fallo mío" ("My bad") and going back across the border, their soldiers are still in Costa Rica. Costa Rica has appealed to the Hague for removal of Nicaraguan troops.

Idiot America Watch

2010-11-17T19:53:00.007-05:00

Some of the good people in Phoenix, Arizona have been protesting the construction of a mosque in their midst. Now, let's just set aside the whole Islamophobia issue, and let's ignore the apparent "refudiation" (as Sarah Palin would say) of this country's avowed tradition of religious tolerance.

Let's get to the fact that the mosque is actually an interdenominational church. These protestors were simply confused by the building's appearance. When it's finished, it'll have a dome:

You can understand why these earnest patriots are confused. I mean, churches never have domes:

And furthermore, there's just something un-American about a building with a dome:

So when you see a building under construction and you notice a dome taking shape, it just makes sense to assume it's a mosque, right?

Hat tip to my friend Simon Pride for this story.

This Is Supposed To Be Good News?

2010-11-16T12:43:00.004-05:00

According to Gallup, public disapproval of Sarah Palin is at an all-time high:

More than half of Americans, 52%, now view Sarah Palin unfavorably, the highest percentage holding a negative opinion of the former Alaska governor in Gallup polling since Sen. John McCain tapped her as the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee. Her 40% favorable rating ties her lowest favorable score, recorded just over a year ago.

There was some gloating about this in a comments thread on the Huffington Post, but I have to agree with the commenter who was dismayed that only 52% of Americans view her unfavorably. If the survey results are valid, and if my math is right. A 42% approval rating of Sarah Palin means over 120 million Americans approve of this sociopath. Over 120 million Americans don't recognize this mean-spirited, ignorant, hypocritical huckster for what she is.

Sadly I'm not surprised: sometimes I think if a diseased Tasmanian devil switched places with Sarah Palin, people would still show up for its public speaking engagements and book signings.

God knows the Tasmanian devil would make more sense.

2010-11-13T15:10:00.006-05:00

"This beast dares to exist without shame"--W.H. Auden, "Mundus et Infans."

"There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity."--Big Daddy Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

If Big Daddy were to visit the U.S. today, he would find the stench overwhelming, from Sarah Palin's seemingly willful determination that everything she says contradict reality to the myriad lies we are told by various self-important people on a daily basis: Afghanistan is a "war of Obama's choosing;" letting the Bush tax cuts expire would be disastrous for small businesses.

But even in the factory of lies that is American public discourse these days, George W. Bush has done something unprecedented in the history of dishonesty: he's plagiarized sections of his own memoirs, an act the very idea of which is so bizarre I don't know how to even begin describing what's wrong with it. You would think that being President of the United States would give you interesting writing material: you get to meet other world leaders, a ringside seat for the pressing issues of the day, you get the occasional shoe thrown at you...but no.

Bush lifted whole passages from memoirs by former administration employees and described himself being at events he did not attend, such as Hamid Karzai's inauguration.

Even when assisted by a former speechwriter and a research assistant, he's still too lazy to even remember what happened to him and write it down. Or say it on tape for an assistant to transcribe.

Or it's possible that he's so brain-damaged he actually doesn't remember anything. Or that Cheney locked him in a kennel and only let him out for public appearances and he doesn't want to write about sitting in the dark and getting tossed the occasional dog biscuit.

Either way, the man who was our non-president for 8 years has written a non-memoir. The question is whether this will matter to any of his supporters. Partisan loyalists seem oblivious to facts.

Fortunately we're still at the stage at which some people can be offended by dishonesty. But not for long, if the current crop of college students is any indication. A professor at the University of Central Florida caught one-third of a class of 600 students cheating on their mid-terms.

And guess what? They're in the business school. Maybe that's how Dubya got his Harvard MBA.

Naturally, some students see nothing wrong this. UCF student Konstantin Rawin: "This is college. Everybody cheats.Everyone cheats in life in general. I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in this testing lab who hasn't cheated on an exam. They're making a witch hunt out of absolutely nothing, as if they want to teach us some kind of moral lesson."

I hope those words come back to haunt Konstantin. But they probably won't. I predict a brilliant career.

Meanwhile, Big Daddy--sit back and enjoy the smell.

Hat tip to Dr. Jeffrey Fisher for the UCF story.

News Roundup

2010-11-11T19:50:00.003-05:00

Move over, Muslims and gay marriage: paranoid fundamentalist Christians see a new threat to all that is sacred.

There are frivolous lawsuits, and then there are insane lawsuits.

You know the recession's been over for more than a year, right? Somebody forgot to tell Massachusetts homeowners. And the unemployed.

In other news, the new Tory Security Minister doesn't seem to be aware of what she can and can't take on a flight.

A Kentucky Tea Party group is taking on a dreaded enemy: drinking water that won't give you cancer.

Republican leaders: ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell would be a disaster for our men and women in uniform. Men and women in uniform: it wouldn't be a big deal.

2010-11-09T12:13:00.002-05:00

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." --Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia.

The good people of Oklahoma, ever mindful of the looming threat presented by the muslims who make up less than 1 % of its population, voted to ban sharia law last week. Of course, given how abysmally ignorant Americans are about religion, I'm sure most Oklahomans don't know what shariah law is.

And they certainly don't know anything about the Constitution, which wouldn't allow sharia law to be the basis for a state's legal code (or judicial descisions) in the first place.

In the meantime, a federal judge has implemented a temporary restraining order on the ban, so all those Oklahoma judges who were itching to consult their Qu'rans can go to town.

The Week in Food

2010-11-07T11:11:00.002-05:00

Recipes for a recession: think cabbage.

"It made me want to throw up:" the new bacon soda is getting mixed reviews.

At long last, we may have an answer to the question that mankind has been asking for millennia: what does the galaxy taste like?

Religious leaders say the family is the foundation of civilization. But archaeologists suggest beer provided a little help.

While the National Institute of Health tells us to lose weight, the U.S. Department of Agriculture tells restaurants to add more cheese.

The Pope Complains about Spain

2010-11-06T18:05:00.003-04:00

Benedict XVI is deeply distressed at what he sees as the increasing secularisation of Spanish society.

Gee, if only Spain had some kind of organization that could make people toe the religious line.

You Can't Always Trust Google

2010-11-05T13:35:00.005-04:00

I don't know how I missed this: two weeks ago Nicaragua invaded Costa Rica. It didn't get much news coverage up here, mainly because to the U.S. media other countries don't exist unless there's a heinous disaster or we're invading them.

And to be honest it wasn't much of an invasion: if you were picturing armed commandos storming Costa Rican strong points and Costa Rican soldiers valiantly defending la patria, you're in for a disappointment. Costa Rica has no fortified strong points to storm and they don't have any soldiers. Actually they haven't had an army since 1948.

Apparently Nicaraguan troops under the command of one Eden Pastora crossed into Costa Rican territory, dredged a river, ousted a family from their ranch, and established a camp of some sort. Pastora claims to have thought he was still in Nicaragua--in spite of the fact that his troops spent some time taking down Costa Rican flags down from buildings and replacing them with Nicaraguan flags.

His defense? He was using Google Maps, according to which he was still in Nicaragua.

I don't what's more ridiculous: the possibility that he thinks this is a plausible excuse, or the possibility that military commanders actually use Google maps.

Of course, on the scale of mistakes that a military can make, this is fairly trivial compared to some others.

(Hat tip to Searchengineland, where I first learned about this.)

The Day After

2010-11-03T19:59:00.004-04:00

"Principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, and Thomas and so forth."--Jonathan Swift, letter to Alexander Pope, September 29, 1725.

I've felt like the good Dean most of my life: principally I hate the American people, even though I love individual Americans. We're largely a nation of pig-headed morons who refuse to believe in evolution or global warming, despite there being as much evidence for both as there is for gravity. Many of us claim to be Christians, yet those same Americans are pathologically indifferent to the plight of the poor and adamantly opposed to social justice.

At the moment I particularly hate those Americans who voted Congressional Democrats out of office. These idiots told the press their biggest concern was the economy, and yet they vote into office the party that opposed the stimulus (and then asked for stimulus money) and extension of unemployment benefits.

They're worried about the economy and they vote into office a party that despises the unemployed.

They blamed the banks for the economy and they voted Republican.

The only thing consoles me is that this nationwide stupidity isn't unprecedented. As Juan Cole pointed out on his incomparable blog, in 1942 FDR had more or less ended the Depression, was well on his way to winning a world war, and the Democrats still got pummeled in the midterm elections.

And God, try reading about antebellum elections some time: 1828 was a class act, run on such "issues" as whether John Quincy Adams had pimped for the Czar of Russia.

Democracy. Sometimes it's enough to make me to think this country just needs a king again.

Says It All, Doesn't It?

2010-11-01T18:50:00.003-04:00

From a recent episode of Studio 360 on Tea Party singer-songwriters. During the segment on Chris Cassone, Derek John began pressing Cassone for specifics when he talked about the changes in American society since Obama's election and America's "enemies within." Cassone's response:

"My mother was Irish. My father was Italian. I have an Irish attitude and an Italian temper. And for me to debate, it's not for me. I've seen myself, I get all flustered, I can't back and forth with somebody...that's why I'm singing. I feel safer in that realm than trying to debate...anybody."

Translation: "I have completely abdicated my responsibilities as a rational being. I refuse to control my emotions and I blame it all on genetics. And God forbid I should actually have to discuss anything with someone else because then I might have to think. The 2,400-year-old consensus that a citizen of a civilized society is someone who exercises self-control and reasonably discusses the issues of the day with his peers--I want no part of it. I'll just sing so I won't have to listen to anyone else."

The new face of American conservatism. Yahoos like this will determine the composition of the 112th Congress.

For Aspiring Writers

2010-10-19T12:18:00.002-04:00

If you want to write a book and make any money doing it, the odds are stacked against you, I'll admit. It's tough to get an agent to look at your work. And even if you do get published...well, book sales are down. Even a writer as well known as Robert Reich is bemoaning the necessity of promoting himself.

Well, there is hope. The Pentagon made Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer a best-selling author when they bought and destroyed the entire print run of Operation Dark Heart, his account of fighting in Afghanistan, on the grounds that the book revealed military secrets. Never mind that the final version of the text passed the Army's operational security review.

So if you've written a book--no matter what it's about, say it's about Afghanistan. Because clearly what's actually in the book doesn't really matter. The publisher will know they'll have a guaranteed best-seller. Nobody will have a chance to read it, but who cares?

Another trick you can try: put pictures of train stations in your book: what reader halfway through the latest Jonathan Franzen novel or triumph-over-addiction memoir wouldn't want to take a break by look at pictures of Union Station? A couple of years ago I was taking pictures in a Chicago commuter rail station and was stopped by the police on the grounds that my pictures posed a security risk. I'm not kidding. And remember the photographer who was handcuffed for not deleting photos he had taken in Penn Station?

So whatever you're written, whether it's serious literary fiction, a memoir, a mystery, slap in some photos of train stations. Then make an anonymous tip to Homeland Security. They love those.

Janet Napolitano will be writing a check to your publisher in no time.

The Week in Food

2010-10-17T20:37:00.002-04:00

What's Proto-Indo European for "Got Milk?"

Koreans are having a...what shall we call it? Cabbage crunch? Kimchi crisis? A cruciferous calamity?

Does news get any better than one more reason to eat dark chocolate?

You've always known airplane food sucks: here's the science.

The new Halloween greeting: "Trick or Bacon."

Been There, Done That

2010-10-16T17:49:00.002-04:00

Despite definitive assurances that the recession is over, somebody forgot to tell the 14.8 million people out of work. So Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has decided he needs to come up with his own stimulus package.

Economists are speculating that the Fed effort to boost the economy will be in the form of Treasury Bill purchases. Billions of dollars worth. The idea is that these purchases will lower long term-interest rates, making it cheaper for individuals and businesses to borrow to money to (using the examples from the Washington Post article) take out a mortgage or build a factory.

However, Bernanke seems to ignoring the fact that not only do most banks seem unwilling to lend, but most businesses and individuals don't want to borrow. What makes this putative Fed initiative seem even more surreal is that we've tried giving banks lots of money before.

And they didn't lend then. Why would they now?

Religious Right on the War Path

2010-09-25T18:20:00.005-04:00

Things aren't looking good for those of us who believe in old-fashioned secular society. The Republican candidate for a Nevada Senate seat is on record as saying separation of church and state is unconstitutional, and instead of being ridiculed into oblivion, she's actually tied in the polls with Harry Reid. In Delaware another Senate candidate has views that could have come straight from Archbishop James Ussher.

And in recent months growing numbers of mouth-breathing morons--um, I mean, Americans--are concerned about the President's religion.

Meanwhile the board that writes high school textbook standards in one of the country's largest markets has determined that high school history classes will downplay Thomas Jefferson, play up Phyllis Schlafly and emphasize the Christian values of the Founding Fathers.

So the Christian Taliban has declared jihad on Congress and on textbooks. What's next? I've heard that Christian right-wingers are going to follow the Texas Board of Education lead in regard to movies: popular and classic films are going to be re-written so they'll provide Biblical messages.

The scripts for the following films have already been written and shooting is about to begin:

Twelve Angry Disciples
The Silence of the Sacrificial Lambs
It's A Sinful, Sinful, Sinful, Sinful World
Francis Ford Coppola's God the Father
The Third Wise Man
Citizen Cain
Apocalypse Soon
I Know What You Did Last Supper

I have also heard that earnest fundamentalist scriptwriters have just begun work on a bio pic about the Virgin Mary (Knocked Up).

Wouldn't It Be Cheaper Just to Keep Them on Leashes?

2010-09-19T17:23:00.002-04:00

...or even just take roll the old-fashioned way?

But that would be so low-tech....Instead, the Head Start Program in Richmond, CA has used federal stimulus money to put RFID chips (the sort usually used by ranchers to keep track of cattle) in jerseys worn by participating preschoolers.

Head Start administrators are shocked that some people have a problem with this.

Politics of Change

2010-09-15T21:31:00.004-04:00

Twenty months into the 44th presidentiad (as Walt Whitman would have called it), the American people are torn between rage and despair. The rage is mostly on the part of people who think Obama is a socialist, which is bizarre, considering that his policies are essentially those of an Eisenhower Republican, and that many of those same people who suspect he's a socialist are on public assistance. Make up your minds, people: if you truly believe in the free market, give your unemployment checks back to the Fed.

The despair is that of the people who voted for Obama, and who believed his promises to close Gitmo, end a policy that kicks soldiers with essential skills out of the military, and end the information blackout of the Bush era.

But in spite of all the anti-Obama sentiment on the left and right, his supporters shouldn't feel too glum. According to the New York Times, while most voters despise the Democrats, they hate Republicans even more. In other words, Democrat Congressional losses in the mid-terms might not be as bad as some pundits project, and Obama will probably win a second term.

This is the change Obama--and really all American politicians have brought: we've gone from the wild popularity Reagan and Clinton enjoyed, and the toxic combination of paranoia + adoration of the Fuehrer of the time of Bush the Younger, to a collective sigh of "we could do worse."

Niche-Market Print Journalism

2010-09-13T20:54:00.005-04:00

It's a commonplace among the talking heads that dead-tree publications are going the way of the mastodon, but that's not quite true. General interest publications are having a hard time. Specialized interest mags are where the staying power is, with the dedicated subscribers willing to pay for what they can't get anywhere else. Woman & Guns is doing pretty well, so is Civil War Times. And Reptiles Magazine is chugging along just fine (I know what you're thinking so I'll spare you the soul-crushing disappointment I suffered when I clicked on the link and looked at the site: this is not a magazine with a reptilian readership;* it's for the humans who keep them as pets).

This actually encourages me to pursue an idea I've been toying with for some time. It's based on two simple facts: sleaze sells and a lot of smart people enjoy sleaze. The magazine I've got in mind would basically be something like The National Enquirer or People, but written for the sorts of readers who enjoy The Economist and Foreign Policy. I've already got some articles in the works:

"Is Paul Krugman Dating Timothy Geithner's Ex?"

"From Shirtless to Chic: Vladimir Putin's Ever-Changing Look."

"Capital Requirements and Casual Sex: The Crazy World of Random Hookups at the European Central Bank."

I'm looking for financial backers.....

*I was expecting articles with headlines like, "Sunning Yourself on Rocks: Which are More Comfy, Sedimentary or Igneous?" "Irrational Embarrassment about Tail Breakage."

The Way We Live Now

2010-09-12T18:03:00.004-04:00

Heard on the intercom at my local supermarket:

"Attention shoppers. Please look down at the items in your shopping cart to make sure they are the items you wish to purchase. If you decide that you have someone else's shopping cart please bring it to the customer service desk."

The Week in Food

2010-09-05T15:07:00.001-04:00

Homer Simpsons everywhere, rejoice: a Texas cook has figured out how to deep-fry beer. Video here.

In other beer-related news, not only did the Ancient Nubians take antibiotics, they took them the fun way (hat tip to Wired Science).

Pay attention, this is important: eating jellied pork is not a good idea. And eating jellied pork that's been recalled is a really bad idea.

Loathe lactose? Need to get away from gluten? Consider kosher.

Forget about terrorists among us and nuclear programs in Iran. What you should really be afraid of is....your groceries.

News Roundup

2010-09-04T11:06:00.002-04:00

Foreigners visiting the U.S. need to remember one important rule: brown people shouldn't talk to each in public (it makes the natives get weird).

Our government may add to the $1.6 billion dollars it has already given Mexico to fight drug cartels--because everyone knows if there's anything that can stamp out drug trafficking, it's money.

I know I've ranted about Sharon Angle's nuttiness and her bizarre role as Harry Reid's political savior. But a certain nobody might stage an even more unlikely political comeback.

Unemployment is up. And Time tries to explain why that's a good thing, proving in the process that the economic statistics talking heads throw around have little relation to reality (but you already knew that, didn't you?).

The Way We Live Now

2010-09-02T11:04:00.002-04:00

Apparently some Ohio civil servants skipped geography class, or U.S. history:

Since early April, the [Ohio] bureau [of Motor Vehicles] has refused to accept Puerto Rican birth cetificates issued before Jan. 1 as proof of identity and date of birth.....