Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Life

  • Narratives and the American Landscape

    I watched the Bill Moyers interview of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt with great interest. Haidt tried to describe what has essentially become what might be called the Two Nations Problem—that is, that America, the United States, has become in many ways two very distinct countries.

    At its simplest, what this means to me is that people, using the same documents, the same laws, and the same presumptions of national character, have created two very different narratives about what it means to be an American.  Quite often these beliefs overlap, but at the extremes such instances are ignored or treated as anomalies or expressions of hypocrisy.

    It might be reassuring to keep in mind that it is at the rhetorical and ideological extremes where this happens, that the larger portion of the population is between the extremes, and by inference less rigid in their misapprehensions of both sides, but in reality this may not matter since it is those who establish the most coherent narratives who dictate the battle lines.  And we have come to a point where a willingness to hear the opposite viewpoint gets characterized as a kind of treason.

    As an example, try this: for the Left, any suggestion that corporations are important, vital, and often do beneficial things for society is relegated at best to a “So what?” category, at worse as an attempt to excuse a variety of evils committed in the name of profit.  For the Right, any criticism of the shortcomings of corporations and attempts to regulate activities which can be demonstrated as undesirable is seen as a direct attack on fundamental American freedoms.

    We can go down the list.  Attempts to regulate the distribution and availability of firearms is seen by the Right as a threat to basic liberties while for the Left the defense of an absolutist Second Amendment posture is seen as irresponsible at best, the promotion and propagation of a culture of violence at worst.  Environmental issues divide along similar lines—for the Left, this is, using Jonathan Haidt’s term, sacred, but for the Right is again an assault on the freedoms of Americans to use their property as they see fit.  And taxes? For the Right, taxes have become a penalty, for the Left a kind of grail for equitable redistribution of wealth.

    Tragically, none of these hardened positions—none—addresses the reality of most Americans’ lives.

    Oh, there’s some truth in all the positions, otherwise it would be simpler to dismiss them.  But the hardest truth to get at is the one being used to advance a false position.

    What Haidt suggests—and I’ve heard political strategists talk about this—is that the difficulty lies in the particular narrative embraced. The story we use to describe who we are.  In the past, that story has been less rigid, porous in some ways, and flexible enough to include a variety of viewpoints from both Left and Right, but in recent years both narratives have taken on the stolidity of religion.

    But the related problem is that really there’s only one narrative, at least one that’s cogent and accessible, and that happens to be the one best described as conservative.

    Recently, I’ve been giving thought to this dichotomy of Left-Right, Liberal-Conservative.  I’ve been uncomfortable with it for a long time, but have found myself shoved into the Left-Liberal camp as a reaction to policy proposals I find unacceptable which always seem to come from the Right-Conservative side.  In the hurly-burly of political competition, sometimes there isn’t room for the kind of nuance which, say, historians can indulge.  You find yourself defending or attacking in an attempt to preserve or change and the finer points of all positions are reduced to sound-bites and slogans.  I’ve never been particularly pleased with the welfare system, but faced with conservative assaults that seem determined to simply tear it down and leave a great many people without recourse  has found me defending it against any criticism that seems aimed at finding a reason to end it.  It has always seemed to me that people opposed to it are not interested in offering a viable alternative (“They should all get a job!”) and dismantling welfare would do nothing but leave many millions of people with nothing.

    But nuance, as I say, gets lost.  I don’t care for the way in which welfare is administered, but that’s not the same as saying we should not have a system for those who simply cannot gain employment.  And in the economic environments of the last forty years, it is simply facile posturing to suggest there are plenty of jobs.  If you want to see a real-life consequence of the kind of budget cutting being discussed, look at the upsurge of homelessness after Reagan gutted the HHS budgets and people who had been in mental hospitals were suddenly on the streets.

    But I don’t want to continue the excuse making.  The problems Haidt elucidates have to do with an avoidance of reality on both sides and a subsequent process of demonizing each other.

    And with a political mischaracterization that has resulted in the alienation of a great many people from both camps.  Often such people are given the broad and thoroughly undescriptive label Independent.  I consider myself that, though I have voted consistently Liberal-Democrat since 1984.  (Admission time.  I voted for Nixon in 1972 and I voted for Reagan in 1980.  In hindsight, it would seem I had always been looking for the Other Designation—Progressive—for which to cast my ballot, but that’s a very slippery term.  Reagan was the last Republican I voted for in a national election.  I have felt consistently alienated by GOP strategies and policies, but the reality has been that my votes for Democrats have usually been “lesser-of-two-evils” votes, not wholehearted endorsements.  Until Obama.  He was the first presidential candidate since John Anderson in 1984 who I felt actually had something worthwhile to offer rather than merely a less odious choice to the Republican.)

    Once upon a time there were Liberal Republicans.  There are still Conservative Democrats.  But I think in general we no longer know what these terms mean.  The narrative that has been driving our politics since Reagan has buried them under an avalanche of postured rhetoric designed to define an American in a particular way that no doubt was intended to transcend party politics but has instead cast us all in a bad Hollywood movie with Good Guys and Bad Guys in which a final shoot-out or fist-fight determines the outcome.

    I think it is fair to say that this America is ahistorical.  On the Left, it is a country demanding atonement, built on the backs of the abused and misused, hypocritical,  concerned only with power and wealth.  On the Right is the only country ever that has offered genuine freedom for its citizens and has stood on the principles of fairness and justice (which are not always the same thing) and because it has done more good than not its sins should be absolved if not ignored.

    Neither portrait is true, although many true details inform both.

    What perhaps needs to happen is for new storytellers to come to the fore.  I’m not sure how they’re going to be heard through the constant din of invective-laden blaming, but I think Obama took a stab at it.  He got drowned out more often than not and didn’t finish constructing the narrative, but he seems to have a grasp of how important the story is.

    Because here, almost more than anywhere else, the Story is vital.  When we broke free from England, our story up till then had been England’s story, and it was long, deep into the past.  When we stepped away from that it was into political and social terra incognito, and if there was going to be a story for us it would have to be one that looked into the future.  We had no past at that point, not one we could claim as our own.  We have been constructing that narrative ever since.

    Here’s where the crux of the problem now lies, I think.  For one side, there is the sense that we finished the story quite some time ago and that it is fine as it was and should go on unmodified.  For the other side, that narrative is too filled with burdens of a past it seems no longer applies.  This ex stasis has left us in a kind of limbo.  Neither side seems willing to admit that the other might have something of value to add to the narrative and that maybe some of the narrative went off the rails here and there.  Neither side wants to admit that their version of who we are really needs the other as well.  Until that occurs, those caught in the crossfire find themselves having to pick and choose the parts of both narratives that work for them and then figure out which way to go with the hodge-podge so assembled.  By these means we lurch on into an uncertain future.

    I’m likely going to revisit this from time to time.  For now I think I want to do without labels.  But I’ll leave off for now with this: My Way Or The Highway is absolutely idiotic when we’re all still building the road.

  • Moyers & Haidt On Moral Psychology

    I have a lot of things to say about what is discussed in this video, but first I’d like people to give a listen.

    Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

    As a teaser, let me say that what Jonathan Haidt has to say needs to be heard by both sides of current political divide in this country before we completely screw ourselves out of a functioning community. More to follow.

  • About How I See It

    This pretty much sums up my feelings about the subject.

    This was polite. The way I’d say it would be, smoke whatever you want, but don’t blow the smoke up my ass. It may be psychically carcinogenic.

  • Stepping Up

    I’ve been hesitant to write anything about the Susan G. Komen fiasco.  Not for fear of invoking controversy, but because things started unraveling so fast it was difficult to know when it would play out.  Here is a handy overview of the series of events.  The position taken by the Komen charity group shifted, mutated, and reeled in the sudden upwelling of negative response, that on any given day whatever I might have said would be irrelevant the next morning.

    One aspect, however, strikes me as significant.  That response.  It came swiftly and it came from all quarters and it came with cash.  I cannot recall a similar response happening so swiftly and so decisively in this ongoing struggle over abortion rights.  One of the most annoying things about being progressive and/or liberal is the tepidity with which we meet challenges.  It would appear that all of us who espouse a progressive view, when it gets down to the nitty gritty of political position-taking and infighting, have feet not even of clay but of silly putty.  It is actually heartening to see an abrupt and united response that is categorically decisive for once.

    It would be even better if this were the harbinger of the rediscovery of our collective spine.  The Religious Right has been canvassing, politicking, and buying politicians for a long time now, absolutely dedicated to their position, over which it has been clear for over three decades that what they want is not negotiable.  What hasn’t been so clear till the last few years has been the full extent of what they want and finally—finally—progressives are beginning to understand that this is not a disagreement but a war.

    Thanks to people like Rick Santorum the full program of the antichoice movement is impossible to ignore.  If they were interested in eliminating abortion only, there would have been several points along the way over this long and acrimonious struggle where common cause could have been made.  But the fact is they wish to eliminate what they see as inexcusable permissiveness, sexual license, and immorality, and they would do this by eliminating access to all forms of birth control.  What they doubtless assume is that if pregnancy once more regained its power to scare women into celibacy then the United States would become the country they prefer to live in and their version of morality would hold sway.  They have a number of reasons for pursuing this, some less plausible than others, but at the end of the day they very much want people to stop having safe sex.

    Safe, that is, in terms of pregnancy.

    Rick Santorum has gone on record believing that even within marriage sex for pleasure is a no-no.  Probably most people think that’s just an eccentricity of his and that he would be unable to actually turn the clock back to try to make such a condition a general reality.  More and more people, I think, are beginning to realize that there is a rather large and loud segment of the population that would support him in this.  Not a majority, not by any means a majority, but the political Right acts like it speaks for the majority all the time, so it might be understandable if people in general had the idea that the majority of their fellow citizens were like this.

    They also don’t realize, probably, that the foundational Supreme Court case establishing a right to contraception—Griswold v. Connecticut—was over a married couple’s right to control their reproductive life.

    I also don’t think a lot of people, especially young women, have given much thought to the kinds of opportunities that would close up in their faces in such a regime.  They do in some states.  Whether or not abortion is  legal and a right nationally, there are some states where the anti-choice movement has made it so difficult for clinics to remain open—often using extra-legal means—that this is a right in name only.

    I’ve been wondering how much more would have to happen before the actual majority finally said enough and acted.  Planned Parenthood lost a grant of roughly $640,000 from Komen.  They’ve received over three million as replacement.  The outcry of protest has been loud enough that Komen is trying to backtrack.  They’ve made noises about reinstating the grant, but it remains to be seen if they actually will.

    In the meantime I have had some exchanges with people who think what Komen did was absolutely correct and a moral victory and the troubling thing about these was the mendacity attached to the arguments.  One response to me was that only three percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget went to non-abortion services, while in fact the reverse is true.  As argument continued, I responded with actual numbers.  Planned Parenthood performed around 325,ooo abortions last year.  They provided contraceptive services to nearly five million women.  And contraceptive services do not account for even half of what they do.  The rest are services for STDs, counseling, and related health services.  The counterargument ended there.

    These are publicly available figures and the number of abortions is a mandated report.

    Komen handled this badly.  They have suffered resignations within their own organization over it.  Brinker herself tends to the Right politically, but she hired a vice president who is on record as having run on an anti-abortion, anti-choice platform—unsuccessfully—and from appearances seems to have used her position to strike a blow against Planned Parenthood.

    Again, what I found most encouraging in all this was the sudden and clear reaction on the part of people who may finally be reaching their limit over the hypocrisy of this conflict.

    Hypocrisy?  One of the more interesting facts about the whole anti-choice movement has been the numbers of women who end up in the very clinics they have been protesting when they come up pregnant.  Some even sit in the waiting room preaching at the others there how they will all go to hell for killing their babies, and then go in and have a D and C to rid themselves of their own “inconvenience.”  I’m not particularly surprised or shocked by this.  People compartmentalize.  What seems to be the case here is a desire for the law to change to prevent them from doing what they know they’ll do if something they detest is legal.  They can’t face up to their own responsibilities so they want the rest of society to make them do it.  But for that to happen, everyone else has to be under the same restrictions.  “Somebody stop me!”

    What may finally be changing is the forebearance of all the other people whose lives would be negatively affected by the changes being demanded.  We can tolerate easily the hypocrisy in our neighbor—until such hypocrisy becomes a national movement and threatens our freedoms.

    I know there is a genuine disagreement over the basic question here—not so much when does life begin but when is such life Human?  If you believe that it is from the moment sperm fertilizes egg, well and good.  But if, like me, you believe “human” is more than a biological definition and requires a personality, then we’re talking about a progression from nonhuman to human that takes nine months and then some.

    That leaves the decision up to each individual, though, and I can even understand the argument that collectively we cannot endorse murder.  And yet we have numerous legal distinctions to qualify the taking of life that is not murder.  We all understand what constitutes murder and we all understand what constitutes self defense and all the shades in between.  As a practical matter, to me, abortion is self defense.  In very real terms, an unwanted pregnancy is a life-threatening condition.  Perhaps the mother will not die from it, but that does not mean her life will not be threatened with profound and in many instances unwanted and detrimental change.  In the case of the poor, this is a materially significant fact.  If you can’t feed yourself, how to you feed another that you didn’t even invite into your home?

    And the Komen decision to end that grant went straight to poor women, because that’s who received the benefit of that money.

    Let’s be clear—abortion has always been available to people with means.  It did not become an issue until the poor came into the equation.  And if it is once more rendered illegal, women with money will still have access.  Only the poor will suffer.  This is reality.

    In combination with Occupy Wall Street, there is a groundswell of populist anger directed toward the basic inequities in our society.  We will never be rid of certain inequities—that is human nature, and let’s face it, our success, at least economically, is based on such inequities and the promise of “rising above”—but we should at least strive to eliminate the grosser aspects that serve only to rub the less fortunate’s collective face in the mud of failure.  People do not have to be rich in order to be safe and comfortable and feel secure and invested in their society.  They only have to feel that in certain fundamental ways they are treated fairly and have the same rights as any one else, rights that are not exclusive to the wealthy, the privileged, or the hypocritical.

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    As a coda to all this, here is a report on one of the items offered as part of Komen’s awareness outreach.  In conjunction with a weapons distributor, a pink Walther P-22 is available for purchase to support Komen’s program.

    It has always struck me how often the aggressive advocacy of 2nd Amendment rights, support of the death penalty, and a kind of libertarian default to the power of the gun seem to be expressed by the very same people most vocal about the “immorality” of abortion.  The horror, it sometimes seems, of  taking human life is very categorical.  The apparent contradiction evaporates when seen from a religious viewpoint that centers on spiritual concepts of innocence and an oft unspoken assumption that this is a determining factor in deciding the appropriateness of killing.  Adults are not innocent by definition and fall automatically into a different category than a fetus which has never had a chance to “sin.”

    Even so, the apparent hypocrisy is even less difficult to understand when seen from the viewpoint of people determined that their ideas of public morality should trump all personal rights that fall outside of a tightly-defined range of so-called “decency”—a view advanced and backed up by the implicit threat of violence demonstrated by a political posture that sees no contradiction between a “right to life” stance on the one hand and a willingness to mete out death to the deserving on the other.

     

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    One more addendum in a story that I am sure will continue to repercuss for months if not years to come, the person at the center of the policy flap at Susan G. Komen has resigned.   Of course she is trying to spin the situation, but where there is smoke, as the saying goes.  I suspect at the core of this was a ploy of some orchestration between Ms. Handel and certain politicians—enactment of the “policy” then the move to investigate Planned Parenthood—or maybe not.  Maybe this was all just a confluence of unlikely coincidence and no one had an ulterior motive.  What’s that about pigs and air travel?

  • The Last One

    The last motion picture theater of my youth is gone.

    For several years, The Avalon, sitting on Kingshighway, across the street from a mortuary that has now become a church, has been shuttered and slowly decaying and finally has met its inevitable fate.

    In a way, good.  It has been an eyesore for some time, a constant reminder of neglect and a ruin of a bygone era.

    Hyperbole? Indeed, yes, but true nonetheless.  As you can tell by what remained, it was an elegant, simple building, with a lovely facade.  A symbol of an age thoroughly gone—the single-screen, stand-alone movie theater.

    The last film I saw there was back in 1986 or ’87—The Last Temptation of Christ.  The theater had passed into the hands of a single owner who was a bit of an eccentric, and he tried everything to keep it going.  He had a bit of a windfall with that film because of the timidity of every other movie theater in the city and county.  They all refused to show Scorcese’s flawed depiction of Jesus’ final days.  The Avalon announced it would screen it and it was no doubt the last time it had sell-out audiences for several days.

    By then, the wear and tear was already very apparent.  One of the speakers had been busted for years, generating an annoying buzz off to stage left, and he had never, evidently, made enough money to fix it or replace it.  For ordinary dialogue it was fine, the buzz only became noticeable during very loud sequences.  Probably a torn cone.

    But the air conditioning worked, the concession stand still operated, and the seats were kept in repair.

    After that, we never went back.  When the doors closed, I expected someone to buy it and try to restore it, but I always thought that during the ’80s and ’90s, when so many of these disappeared one way or the other.

    There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s film Radio Days that shows the family Going To The Movies during the 1930s.  In Allen’s handling, it is a reverential scene, like people going to church, slow, a processional, and while I never quite felt that way, there is certainly something of that in my memory.  Nostalgia often becomes a frame for reverence.  Going to the movies for us was a Big Deal and our major entertainment, up till the age of VCRs.  I have vivid memories of a childhood with many options for movie-going.  St. Louis was full of them.

    A few of the buildings remain.  The ultra-modernist Martin Cinerama is still there, but it serves as a church now, which pains me.  It was the most expensive theater to go to, but it was the only Cinemascope screen in town.  I remember seeing Grand Prix there.  I also saw 2001: A Space Odyssey there four times.  But not much else.  We may have seen How the West Was Won there, but my more vivid memory of that was seeing it in our local theater, The Shenendoah, and being annoyed at the peculiar warp in the center of the screen where the wide Cinemascope picture had been compressed.

    The Melvin is still there, but it, too, is a church, one of those little revival things that can barely support itself.

    And of course The Fox is still there, majestic centerpiece of our threater district, and up the street a little bit is Powell Hall, which was once The American, a movie house of the grand tradition.

    The rest?  All the stand-alone neighborhood theaters are pretty much gone.

    The ones I spent my adolescence in were within walking distance, albeit long walks:  The Shenendoah, The Ritz, The Washington, and The Columbia.  I saw Gone With The Wind in The Columbia.  To be fair, that one is somewhat still there.  The building is, anyway.  After the theater closed, it was converted into a sports facility for a while, with handball courts.  It burned.  Now it is a private home, a showcase bit of architectural bravura owned by the architect.  I sometimes wonder how many people anymore know what it once was.

    But the others are just gone, torn down.  Parking lots.  That’s also what became of The Granada, another of my favorites.  I remember when it was demolished, standing in the remaining space and trying to fit the immense theater of my memory into the claustrophobic area of the empty lot.  That’s another one I recall the last picture I saw in—Star Crash.  It rained hard that night, too.

    The Granada in particular galls.  I knew a bunch of people, my age, who had formed a company to try to buy it so they could turn it into a revival theater.  The owner, for reasons that escaped us all, refused to sell, delayed and delayed, until one year the roof fell in and the building became a hazard.  The cost of renovation at that point was too high and soon after it fell to the wrecking ball.

    The Ritz…yes, I remember the last picture I saw there, as well.  The owners had tried to convert it into a multi-screen venue, which sort of worked, but the crowd had deteriorated into a Roman mob and I was threatened with a knife in the hands of a ten-year-old I told to shut up.  The film?  Airplane II.

    Not sure about all the others.

    The litany is long, like absent friends.  The Crest, the Crestwood, the Ambassador,  all the Loews theaters, Midtown, State, another one that eludes memory just now, the Mark Twain, the Creve Coeur…

    I remember the first time I went to a multiplex.  I didn’t know then that it was the wave of the future.  My dad took me to The Des Peres to see 2001, on a screen not much larger than a widescreen LCD you can put in your home now.  They were known as “Jerry Lewis Intimate Theaters” and we thought they were a joke.  Well.

    Movie houses, as they were once affectionately called, suffered, I think, the demise of the B Picture more than anything else.  In an era where the cheapest Hollywood production can only be done for close to ten million, the need for box office returns simply will not support the way theaters used to operate.  Oh, there are certainly B pictures, but they go direct to television (cable) or direct to DVD.  No one is going to pay the cost of an evening at the theater for less than a major motion picture, so the bread-and-butter of the former age is gone.

    I can understand, intellectually, what happened, and if I had been a businessman in the movie house business back then I probably would have taken the same series of decisions that has resulted in the current loss of what for many decades was an American institution.

    Going to the movies is a social activity.  It’s not like gathering a couple friends at your home to watch a DVD.  It is a civilizing activity when conducted the way it once was.

    One benefit of this, probably unforeseen (I didn’t see it), is the revival of live theater.  If you’re going to pay a lot of money to go be entertained, the novelty and impact of the stage is the thing that draws the audience.  Not, perhaps, large audiences—many local theater groups struggle—but devoted audiences, and this, I think, is a good thing.  Live theater is about the story, the characters, not the special effects.  At live theater, you have to pay attention.

    I miss going to the movies.  We stopped doing it years ago because, frankly, it was just more convenient to rent the video.  The “pause” button has spoiled us, weakening out bladders, giving us opportunity to replay what just happened because we don’t pay as close attention as we used to, and avoiding sitting in a hall with people who don’t know how to shut up during the film.  It became expensive and a bother.

    Now it’s a special event, something we might do once or twice a year.  (I have every intention of going to see John Carter of Mars at the theater.)  And, yes, there are still theaters—multiplexes, often in shopping malls (although that peculiar institution itself is struggling, so who knows what may happen)—and they are expensive.  Now we have OMNIMAX theaters, which, impressive as they sometimes are, is nevertheless part of an ongoing tradition in film to try to coax people to leave their homes and go to the movies, like VistaVision, Todd-AO, Cinemascope and a dozen others, all trying to offer people what could not be had on television.  The current revival of 3-D is such a gimmick.

    Anyway, I thought I’d take some space to lament the passing of yet another monument from my youth.  The intersection where The Avalon once stood was home once to a remarkable piece of urban architecture, a Famous-Barr department store that, when it was built, was shocking for its modernity.  That’s gone now, too, a strip mall in its place with a Walgreens and an Office Max.  Around the neighborhood you can see the architectural motifs on apartment buildings and private homes that speak of a more optimistic, confident time—and, perhaps, a more thoughtful time.

    Or not.  Nostalgia is deceptive and memory a dangerously mutable realm.  But there is still some comfort there, to go along with the melancholy.

     

  • Equality Means Just That

    Cory Booker is the mayor of Newark. I’ve seen him on other occasions and he is articulate and, from what I’ve seen, fearless, a rare combination today in politics. In this excerpt he’s talking about gay marriage.

    No, that’s not right. He’s talking about equality. And that’s what is at the heart of so much today. Listen:

    He says what I believe. Being an American, to me, means something very basic and unequivocal. Equality is not a commodity, available for a price, which some folks can afford more of than others. it comes with the territory and the idea that we still, after all this time, have to have special legislation to defend various aspects of what should be presumed without question irritates me.

    His remark about the utility of popular votes is also spot on. We like to assume democracy is applicable in all cases, but it is not. This is one reason we have a republic rather than a full-blown democracy. A democratically empowered republic, yes, but in a republic the passions of the moment do not hold sway, or should not. Lest anyone thinks otherwise, for a vast portion of this country slavery existed by dint of popular mandate. So did the chattel condition of women. While it may be true that these things would have (and did) erode in time, that is not the same as saying democracy worked. Other factors were involved, but in the case of slavery a war had to be fought in order to enforce what ought to have been recognized as a fundamental right.

    Americans are no different in many ways than any other person on the planet. We have our foibles, our prejudices, our blindnesses. Many of us really don’t think through the meaning of our convictions and in some uncomfortable areas we would rather the issue never come up than have to deal with it. And doubtless a great many of us want to feel special if not superior in relation to others. We have many euphemisms for those with whom we wish to have no association, and most of them are class-based, some are race-based, others are behavior-based. None of them should be permitted to dictate legal status.

    Equal means equal. Until we internalize that, breathe it like the very air we take for granted, we will continue to suffer the kind of strife that often renders our politics abusive and fruitless.

    Just sayin’.

  • Writers On Religion

    This a collection of excerpts from interviews with a wide range of writers, some science fiction, some fantasists, several so-called “mainstream,” on their belief—actually disbelief—in a deity.

    I think the most difficult thing for many people to grasp is the idea of purposelessness, the concept that the universe simply Is and has no other purpose for its existence. Humans like to have a sense of where they’re going, what they’re supposed to do when they get there, and why. To say that these answers must come entirely from within is, to put it mildly, a bit unsettling, especially as in the first part of one’s life someone has kept stressing that there is an innate purpose, that “nothing happens without a reason,” and that this purpose comes from what we call god, a being who first made the universe entirely with us in mind that we might live according to some plan. I admit, this would be very comforting. Life is a confusing collection of event and reaction and it would be nice if there were an instruction book. Barring that, simply trusting that it all leads to something is one way to get through a day, a year, a life. To then have the idea that this is not the case dropped on us is understandably discommoding.

    But is it? I found it liberating, since now I no longer had to worry about living up to a standard kept mystically hidden. And I could do my own work figuring out what “it all means.”

    Anyway, I found this thoughtful and interesting, so…enjoy.

  • Just So You Know…

    Recently I’ve received a spate of those nasty politically-naive, rather insipid yet clever emails that go round and round, forwarded from one to another to hundreds, spouting off about the woes of the country, the supposed sins of the Left, and all containing a germ of truth wrapped in misinformation, outrights lies, and substanceless assertion.  Mostly I delete them without a second thought.  They are noise, distraction, mud thrown into the waters of discourse where above all clarity should be our goal.

    All of them have to do with what liberalism has done to our country.  All of them are concerned with telling anyone who will listen what the Right is trying to “save us” from.  And all of them are pretty thoughtless.  It would be funny if there wasn’t so much at stake.

    Below is a post from Lawrence O’Donnell, a newscaster and polemicist who I have listened to occasionally.  I don’t follow such people, on either side.  From time to time I listen to someone from both camps.  I’ve found Mr. O’Donnell more reasonable than most.  But I thought he really captured something with this, so I’m borrowing it to express my own views.

     

     

     

    For the record, I am very tired of the attempt to make me feel guilty for the progress I support.  The only charge I ever heard that had any traction with me about the problems with liberals was the “tax-and-spend” one, but that doesn’t even hold water anymore with me.  Conservatism these days seems—may I stress seems—to be all about preventing people from doing things, about taking rights away from those deemed undeserving.  Liberalism has always, even traditional free market liberalism (which, yes, free market enterprise is a liberal  invention), been about letting people do more, have more rights.  I don’t see much wrong with that as a fundamental principle.

    So, just to let anyone interested know…

  • Keith Emerson’s Band

    Just because I really like Keith Emerson.

  • Stacks and Time (or Time and Stacks, whichever…)

    I am probably never going to read all the books I own.

    The last few years I’ve been dealing more and more with that realization.  I have thousands, maybe several thousand, and the ones in the house are certainly not all that I’ve ever owned.  I have culled a few times over the years and I’ve slowed down acquiring new ones, but it’s a kind of compulsion.  I mentioned once in a post, I think, that owning books for me is a sign of wealth.  By that standard, I’m moderately well off.

    Here’s the thing now.  I don’t read particularly fast.  I can be dogged, and from time to time manage to read a book in one day, but honestly my average lo these last few decades is about one or two a week.  This is down considerably from the few years between 16 and 19 when I could speed read.  I took a course in high school that increased my reading and comprehension to a ridiculous level.  The machine they used to bring us up to speed only tracked at two thousand words a minute and I went past that.  At peak, I was probably reading close to three thousand words a minute, which is about eight to ten pages, depending on typeface.  I was reading all my assignments in home room or study hall.  A book a day? How about an average SF novel in an hour or two?  I’ve talked about my senior year before, during which I cut maybe two thirds of it.  Most days I walked up the street to the local library and spent the day reading.  By the time I graduated high school I was reading a book a day there and another one at home in the evening.

    The problem with that is, I have pretty much forgotten all those books.

    Oh, some of them stuck, certainly.  I went through most of the “classics” section at the library and I can conjure images from a good number of them, but the rest?  I know I read a great many ACE Doubles, a lot of Ballantine SF works, and so forth, and any number of detective and Other, but do I have any memory of them?

    I post my reading lists on-line now.  I have two accounts, one at Shelfari and one at Goodreads.  You may notice that the numbers are different.  I did a much more thorough job of recovering lists of past reading for Goodreads, so there are several hundred more books there than Shelfari.  (I keep the Shelfari account because I’ve been participating in some of the discussion threads.)  Even so, the Goodreads list is incomplete—because I cannot remember all those books.  It lists about 2700 titles.  I conservatively estimate that this is short by nearly a thousand.  Partly, I’m making myself be honest.  I know of a couple of hundred titles that I did read, but I frankly can’t remember anything about them beyond the title (most of Thomas Hardy, a number Theodore Dreiser novels, Trollope, and the like) and so I won’t list them unless I either suddenly remember something about them or reread them.

    Then there are all those paperbacks I flew through that I can’t even remember the titles.  Now and then, in conversation, one of them will pop up and I’ll have an “oh, yeah, that one” moment, but to be truthful I think a book should stick somewhere in your memory for you to claim it.

    Why can’t I remember them?  Probably because I went through them so fast there was no time to form a longterm impression.  Some of them were over my head and I passed through them without having grasped them (I read Joyce during that senior year and it made no impression other than the sense of being completely out of my depth—I’ve since reread Ulysses and so I can claim it).  I read a number of science books that left behind a lot of general scientific information, but nothing about the specific texts.  And then there was a considerable amount of what one might call “trash” fiction—which term I loathe, but I use it here as a handy marker, since I think everyone, whether they admit it or not, knows exactly what I mean.  For instance,  Anne and Serge Golon’s  Angelique series.  I don’t think I read them all, but I read a number, and aside from a vague costume drama residue and a lot of erotic imagery, not a bit of their plots or characters remain in memory. The same can be said of any number of antebellum novels, like the Kyle Onstott/Lance Horner Falconhurst series, some of which I read back in grade school, but again, little of that stuck.  (There was a fad for these things in the mid to late Sixties and several writers indulged–Ashley Carter comes to mind, and Boyd Upchurch.  Ah, well.)

    Sometime after I turned 21 I consciously slowed my reading down.  I realized even then that I was retaining little.  Oh, it stuck for a while, it was the perfect “cramming” technique, but even then I could barely remember what I’d read two years prior.  That, and I was simply not enjoying it.  Everything reduced to “textual experiences” that held none of the real pleasure of reading a good book.

    So I went too far in the other direction.  In a good year I read between 70 and 80 books cover to cover now.  If I estimated all reading, it probably comes up to the equivalent maybe 120 or so.  A far cry from when I read four or five hundred a year.

    But I’m enjoying each one now, and remembering them more clearly.  I would hate to read certain books too fast—books that should be savored.

    So I won’t be getting through my stacks.  Ever.  But I find I am appreciating the journey a lot better.