Mark W Tiedemann

Category: current affairs

  • Independence Day

    It’s the Fourth of July.  I’ve been pondering whether or not to write something politically pithy or culturally au courant and here it is, almost noon, and I’ve made no decision.  I think I pretty much said what I had to say about my feelings about this country a few posts back for Memorial Day, so I don’t think I’ll revisit that.

    Last night we sat on our front porch while the pre-Fourth fireworks went off in the surrounding neighborhood.  Folks nearby spend an unconscionable amount of money on things that blow up and look pretty and we benefit from the show.  Neither of us like large crowds, so going down to the St. Louis riverfront for the big explosion is just not an option.  The older I get the less inclined I am to squeeze myself into the midst of so much anonymous humanity.

    We’ll likely go to bed early tonight after watching the rest of our neighborhood go up in brilliance, starbursts, and smoke.

    I suppose the only thing I’d like to say politically is a not very original observation about how so many people seem to misidentify the pertinent document in our history.  The Declaration of Independence is often seen as more important than the Constitution and this is an error, one which leads us into these absurd cul-de-sacs of debate over the religious nature of our Founding.  Because of the reference to Our Creator, people with a particular agenda seem to take that as indicative that this was founded as a christian nation.  Creator is a fairly broad, nondenominational label that encompasses any and all descriptions of gods or nature, but I won’t argue the idea that the men who wrote it were, if anything, more or less christians.  It’s a statement, though, that is intended not to establish that there is a god or that we are beholden to such a thing, but that there are some birthrights we all share that no mortal can blithely assume we don’t possess.  The only thing at the time higher than a king was a god, so, when you read the rest of the Declaration, it is clear that the intended meaning is that a power transcending kings grants us these rights.  They had not yet hit upon establishing a representative democracy, not insofar as every official was to be elected—they may have intended that a constitutional monarchy be used as a model, and Britain already had a history of putting constraints on its monarchs.  But to make the point absolutely clear that no monarch had the authority to take certain rights away, the went one step up.  The use of the term Creator is sufficiently vague and universal that any formulation of Natural Law is covered, even and including a Spinozan construction that makes Nature and God one and the same thing.  Essentially, the fact that people are here, part of the world, should automatically accord them certain status and rights that no one has a legal right to remove.

    But it is a document of intent, namely intent to separate one people politically from another.  The form of the new republic is not addressed in the Declaration.  That work was left for the Constitution, and the way it was originally formulated there was not one mention of god or churches.  It dealt entirely with a secular formulation and I do not believe that was unintentional.  The Bill of Rights was included later, as a deal-making document that certain states insisted on before they would ratify the Constitution, and that’s where you find the establishment clause.

    But the Constitution is a complex, legal document.  There are fine passages in the Bill of Rights, but in the body of the Constitution itself there are few phrases even close to the poetic heights of the Declaration.  The Preamble has some nice things, but we can perhaps understand why most people actually don’t know what’s in the Constitution.

    A shame, really, because it would make things clearer to most folks if they did.  Why are things run the way they are is not explained by the grand polemical declarations of the Fourth of July document, but in the closely-reasoned blueprint of the Constitution.  There is also a reason soldiers swear an oath to uphold the Constitution—not the Declaration—and likewise why politicians are sworn in the same way.

    Namely, it is because we have dedicated ourselves to an Idea.

    Not a person or persons, but an Idea, and this ought to put paid to all this nonsense we’re about to hear about how this country is a christian nation dedicated to god.  It is not.  It is a nation dedicated to the idea that we are free to choose.  And sometimes what our neighbors will choose will run counter to what we may think is right or appropriate or pleasant or…but it’s their choice, just as it is ours to believe as we wish.

    The Constitution is first and foremost a framework antithetical to cults of personality.  You want to see what cults of personality do to a nation?  Look at the old Soviet Union.  Or look at Libya.  Or North Korea.

    I don’t give a damn what kind of “character” my representatives possess—I want to know that they will obey the law and do their jobs.  That’s all.  If they do that, they can be a bland or odious as they may.  If they don’t, I could care less what their character is like or their personal qualities.

    Okay, so maybe I did have a few things to say of a political nature.  Must be in the air.  It is, after all, the Fourth.

    Be safe.

  • Pathological Hypocrisy

    I thought I might leave this alone, but some itches are too difficult to leave unscratched.  Others have posted about Rick Santorum’s unbelievable hypocrisy over abortion.  You can read the article here.

    Basically, Mr. Santorum has it in mind to use the law to prohibit a medical procedure his wife had to go through in order to save her life.  As the piece makes clear, in October of 1996, Karen Santorum underwent an abortion in the 19th week of pregnancy in order to save her life from an infected fetus.  She had a 105 degree temperature.  She would have died without the procedure.

    Santorum would make that option illegal.  Basically, his position seems to be that sacrificing his wife for the fetus would be his choice now.  This overlooks the fact that had they not done the procedure, the fetus would not have survived, either.  He would have lost both.  Sacrifices to his conscience, which seems incapable of the kind of triage humans must make all the time.

    Well and good, some people just can’t go there.  But this man is running for president.  He intends that his personal inability to cope be made a national policy of denying anyone the choice of coping.

    I’ve written about my views on the anti-choice movement before, mainly here.

    I have also written before about Mr. Santorum, most notably here.

    So maybe I’ve said as much as I need to say.  But he keeps coming back, making his self-avowed moral arguments, presenting his program as if somehow this would be good for anyone, so maybe saying things just once in opposition to what seems to me to be a kind of morbid obsession and the consequences of seeing this as the guiding principle of the nation is a poor idea.  Whatever the case may be, I can’t leave this alone.

    It has been consistent with Mr. Santorum, this problem he seems to have with matters of sex.  Consistent enough that I don’t think it has anything to do with studied principle.  The whole bit about his bringing the dead fetus out to show his living children smacks of profoundly skewed inner landscapes.  Whatever it may, I know one thing in my bones—I do not want this man making laws for this country, not about this certainly, and probably not about anything else.  He does not speak for me.

    He shouldn’t be seen as speaking for women and here is where I have the deepest concerns.

    This is simple in my mind.  I am a man, I cannot become pregnant.  But I also have an imagination and perhaps sufficient empathy to put myself in the position of a woman who has a choice to make.  Hormones are a big deal, certainly, but I can state unequivocally that something as important as procreation must be entirely in the hands the one most viscerally concerned, and that—whether certain people like it or not—is a woman.  And I ask myself what I would want for myself were I female.  I can’t say with absolute certainty that I would not want to be a mother, but I can state absolutely that I would want that decision to be absolutely mine.  My body, my life, my future.

    No, I do not consider a fetus a human being with all the rights of someone who can sit across from me, breathing on their own, capable of independent action.  Certainly I do not agree that such a being’s presumed status trumps mine.

    We are hypocritical about this.  Save the fetus, then after it is born, let circumstances dictate everything else.  Poverty, developmental disorders, the lack of any future, the whole list of negatives that could be somewhat addressed if the same political will the anti-choice movement exercises in preventing one woman from deciding for herself whether or not to procreate were exercised in the cause of social progress—which many of these same people, Mr. Santorum being a prominent example, are just as actively opposed to.  “You made your own bed, you lie in it” is an old adage that speaks to the harshness of life when unfortunate choices are made, but these folks have added a twist—“We will make sure you lie in the bed you made.”  No choice.  Basically, if a woman has sex and gets pregnant, she must, by their lights, have the child.  And if she herself is a child, or the victim of rape, or too overburdened to take adequate care of another, there will be no help coming from the self-appointed guardians of imposed moralism.

    Because underlying all of this is an old, thoroughly Protestant, Puritan ethic—you fuck, you pay.

    Now, one might ask the question, “What if it is human?  How can we know?”

    Very simple, as far as society is concerned—if the mother says it is, it is.  Until then, it is none of anybody else’s business.  We assign status constantly.  With all manner of things, and who’s to gainsay us when we do?  This is no different.  Which is why I have no problem with the idea that someone can be guilty of murder in the death of a fetus and still demand choice for women—because it is the mother who says.

    That’s perhaps not very tidy and certainly difficult to codify in law, but it is a functional reality—clearly there are people who never accord their children the status of human and abuse them and sell them and often kill them.  The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, I think, was thinking something along these lines with the three trimester test—that as time goes on, the state has more and more interest in the fetus, because clearly by default the mother has decided, after five or six months, that it is a human.

    I grant you many people may not be very comfortable with that, but the whole point of the law is that it’s not up to People, it’s up to the woman.  The individual.  She has to live with it.

    And in this instance, “live” is the operative word.  Late term abortions are rarely elective in the way that first trimester abortions are.  The anti-choice movement has simply lied about that.  Doctors have an interest in the welfare of their female patients and for this reason, this procedure has never been illegal.  Never.  To save the life of the mother has always overridden any presumed rights of a fetus—which, in almost all such cases, will not survive anyway.  So this is criminally stupid to argue this point.

    What Mr. Santorum seems to be suffering from is the fact that he and his family had to make a harsh choice and it traumatized them.  He wants never to have to make that choice again—and who can blame him?  But he’s carrying it several steps further—he wants to eradicate the possibility of that choice ever being made, not only by him or his wife, but by anybody.  He perhaps can’t live with the choice he made and his penance is to take it away from everyone else.  He’s trying to exorcise his demons through public censure and legal flagellation.  It will cost people their lives.

    Jocelyn Elders, one-time surgeon general of the United States, said once that America needs to get over its love affair with the fetus.  I agree.  If we don’t, we will love it to death and many, many women along with it.

    If I were a woman, you bet your sweet ass I would want the choice.  Anything less is a diminution of status.  The state telling me I may not live my life because others have discomfort with certain choices.

  • Teach the Controversy (!)

    I wasn’t sure I’d do this, but I’m really pissed off.

    This morning I opened my front door to find a flier lying on the porch.  I thought it was another local contractor ad or announcement of a barbecue-and-rummage sale, so I scooped it up to glance at it before dropping it in the recycle hopper.  Instead, I find in my hand a vile piece of unconscionable poison.  And it seemed like it would be such a nice day!

    I’m not going to dignify this crap by citing the source.  The header of the two-side sheet reads: The Holocaust Controversy  The Case For Open Debate.  What follows is a putrid example of revisionist nonsense designed to suggest that six million Jews were not systematically slaughtered by the Third Reich.  In tone, it is reasonable.  It does not make many strident claims with exclamation points, just calmly asserts one bullshit “fact” after another (plus a photograph of an open pit containing the skeletonized remains of concentration camp victims labeling it a photo of typhus victims) to lay the groundwork for the claim that the Holocaust didn’t happen, that it is all a Big Lie assembled by a Zionist conspiracy to advance the cause of sympathy for stateless Jews in order to get them a state.

    I will cite one piece of twisty nonsense from the flier.  In one paragraph, the calim is made that in 1990 the Auschwitz State Museum revised the old claim of four million murdered down to one million.  It then goes on with a list of (uncited) claims of further numeric reductions, not by the Auschwitz Museum, but by “a French scholar” and “another mainstream Holocaust scholar” all the way down to half a million.  The wording is slippery.  I advise you to go to the link provided, which is directly to the museum, and read the detailed history.  The paragraph I mention in the flier leaves off with the suggestion that only a half million people were “actually” killed in total.

    The Nazis murdered eleven million people, systematically, with calculation.  Nearly six million were Jews (the number vary above and below by a few tens of thousands, but they come from testimony given at Nuremberg, from eye-witness accounts, estimates of populations before and after the war, and many other methods of tabulations, not through “best guesses,” which is what the sheet of propaganda left on my porch would have one believe), but there were five million others—gypies, homosexuals, slavs of various nationalities, and political undesirables such as communists, socialists, social democrats, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people accused of being “asocial” or of “socially deviant type.”

    This is not disputed by any credible authority.

    Nor is Hitler’s obsession with the Jews, nor is the history of virulent antisemitism in Europe, nor are the claims made by various members of the Nazi regime, nor is the physical evidence of the camps.

    Over a million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz.  It was a large camp and has become the symbol for all the others.  But bear one fact in mind before you quibble over numbers or intent: the Nazis built 20,000 of these camps.

    Not all have ovens, not all had gas chambers, but all of them were forced labor camps and all of them were in the business of killing the inmates.  Conservatively, all you would need is a hundred deaths per camp to bring it up to two million.  Five hundred per camp and you get ten million.

    People were worked endlessly, underfed, disease ran rampant, mass graves were common.  We have seen this kind of barbarism in our recent history, in Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia.  And yes, Stalin killed millions more.

    The offensiveness of this shit is profound.  Yet here is this scrap of paper suggesting that, like the nonsense over evolution, we should “teach the controversy.”

    Fine.  Here is the controversy I would teach.  The controversy of denial, that people would try so hard to say this never happened or, as is more likely of late, that it wasn’t “as bad” as has been stated.  The controversy that continually puts Jews under the spotlight, which is the same germinal thinking that resulted in this horrific bit of substantiated history.

    I’ve had lengthy conversations with people who believe this.  The hallmark of them is that they managed never to directly address any evidence put before them.  Direct them to the Nuremberg transcripts, they say something about not having found “those” records.  Direct them to eyewitness testimony, they haven’t had a chance to validate it.  The snake-slithers of obfuscation and refusal to confront is incredible to behold, but the question that boggles my mind is this:

    To what end do you wish to exonerate Hitler and the Third Reich?

    Is it that you can’t imagine Europeans doing this?  Look what we did to the Indians.  Is it that you simply cannot bring yourselves to believe the word of anyone not a Christian?  Look at the lies spread in the name of Christ, up to and including the abuse of children by priest (and the fact that in Rwanda there were Catholic priests leading the charge in some areas to slaughter).  Is it that you can’t believe people could be that evil for no reason?  I can see that as a problem, because if they could do something like that, then so could you.

    Here’s the ugly truth—circumstances permitting, most people can be that evil.  Just look at Rwanda.  That was over religion, birth rates, and water tables.  Cambodia was over ideology.

    Oh, but those weren’t white people?  Europeanized, educated, civilized whites?  How could the home of Kant and Beethoven, Goethe and Mann harbor such vileness?

    That’s the controversy.  The fragility of the thin veneer of civilization that keeps us “above it all.”  How easily is it stripped, broken, thrown away if we feel threatened.  (We just extended the Patriot Act another four years, a rather blatant violation of Constitutional liberties, and all just so we’ll feel “safe.”)

    I shouldn’t have been surprised.  There are Nazis in my neighborhood.  But it does shock me, every time I find it.  Turn over a rock you always thought was harmless and even pretty and there are the maggots of the soul…

    Holocaust Revisionism is evil.  It may be on par with the Holocaust itself.  “Oh, don’t pay attention to the screams behind that curtain—it’s not what you think.  Besides, isn’t it a fine curtain?  Do you really think the people capable of creating such a lovely curtain could be monsters?”

    Got one word for you:  Wagner.

    Have a nice weekend.

  • Pathetic

    Representative Andrew Weiner has admitted that the now-famous snapshot of cock-in-shorts really is his.  I have only one reaction:

    What the hell is wrong with these people?

    I am a photographer.  I photographed all sorts of things, even naked people, and I have taken more than a few photographs for laughs.  But I was never tempted to mail any of them to someone just on a lark!

    This is beyond juvenile behavior.  Sorry.  It’s not even so much that boys will play with their toys, but there must be something about being able to tweet that scrapes a few I.Q. points off.  I don’t tweet.  Maybe if I did I’d have to enter a 12-Step Program to stop myself from doing really stupid shit with it.

    Really, though.  I thought this man was smart.  I love his rants on the House floor against the inanities of the Right.  He is lucid, he is informed, he is on point.  If I had his phone number right now I’d call and say, “Andrew!  What the hell?  This is the kind of stupid shit Republicans do!”

    Not all Republicans, obviously, and not even the majority, but the ones who seem to blow the hardest and screel the loudest about FAMILY VALUES have a track record of this kind of embarrassing private nonsense.

    Oh, well.  Weiner says he won’t quit.  Let’s see if that will work.  This will likely really damage his effectiveness.

    Come on, you guys…grow up.

  • Will ‘E Or Won’t ‘E?

    Mitt Romney has declared his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination.  I don’t have a lot to say about him, other than about his declaration at the same time that one of his priorities (it’s too early to tell if it’s number one or just one of the top three or four) is the repeal of Obamacare.  My reaction:  How’s that going to get him elected?

    See, Mr. Romney put something in place for Massachussetts that is virtually identical.  The main difference is, you know, he—a Republican—did it, not someone else, a Democrat.  Oh, and it’s a state thing not national.

    The other potential candidates are even now working out strategies for putting Obamacare front and center as the biggest issue so they can by extension eviscerate Romney.

    Which will blow up in their faces so bad!

    Because…well, Republicans are big on states’ rights.  So why would something done at the state level by one of their own be a target for Party displeasure when at the same time Romney is talking about removing the national program?  Oh, right, it’s socialism.  I keep forgetting that.  But even so, how do you claim the states should have the right to decide how best to deal with these sorts of things and then denigrate the choice one state has made?

    You might think this is a straw man issue because none of the other potential candidates have actually gone after Romney’s health care legacy except obliquely, but that misses the point.  The entire GOP is on record repudiating Obamacare because it’s socialistic (they claim), so they are opposed to such measures on ideological grounds.  They have to repudiate the same thing on the state level lest they risk looking obviously hypocritical.  They can’t give Romney a pass on it because they’ve spent time, rhetoric, and Party effort on denouncing the idea of such a plan.  They have set themselves up to necessarily go after one of their own.

    Which leaves them with a real problem should Romney emerge as the only one able to effectively challenge Obama.  They will have spent time and energy denouncing him.  But if he gains the nomination they’ll have to pretend they think he’s great.

    Of course, that will only be a problem if Romney does win the nomination.  The GOP has other problems with him.  Like he’s more or less a moderate.  Not nearly red meat enough to go against the incumbent moderate.

    And also of course all this depends on whether Romney can make the charge stick that Obama has “failed America.”  I don’t think he can.  Obama has only failed the self-identified Left wing of the Democratic Party because he hasn’t followed through on may of his campaign promises—promises which, had he followed through on, would have made him an easy target for the Right.  Instead, he’s so center (and occasionally center right) that the GOP actually has some difficulty getting traction on him.  He actually hasn’t failed the Republicans, he just hasn’t gone as far as they would like.

    So if the idea that Obama has failed is to  have any credibility, then it will only be a matter of pointing out who he has failed and how to show that the GOP actually doesn’t have anything to offer that’s much different.

    What?  Deregulation?  I suspect they will have to tread lightly on that one after 2008, since—often ignorant though the American electorate is—most people recognize that our problems then arose from deregulation.

    But even so, if that’s their main thing, then we come back to Romney and the presumed state prerogative to act in its own best interest.  Part of the GOP (those collectively known as the Tea Party wing) are on record as repudiating the very notion of regulation, so what would make it any more palatable on the state level rather than the national level?  Regulation, as everyone knows, is simply bad for business.  To hell with all the things that may need protecting from business—like the environment or education or, well, health care—what we need are jobs.

    Well, yes, but that’s another fly in the pie—all that outsourcing?  Business did that.  It might be argued that they did that to avoid regulation, but that’s kind of a hostage approach.  The threat of job loss to forestall measures that, in bulk, protect.  It looks snotty when you get right down to it.  Besides, most of the job loss through outsourcing occurred during twenty years of the greatest deregulatory period we’ve seen since the 1920s.  Reagan, Bush, then Clinton couldn’t deregulate fast enough—and still all the ills we now suffer just grew and grew.  The coup de’ gras came under Bush Jr., who continued the deregulatory trend.  So who’s kidding who about the cost of regulation?

    Yes, it’s going to be an interesting election cycle this time around.  The GOP will have to either change their policies or we’ll be watching them eat their own in public.

  • Still Here

    old-new-may-2011.jpg

    So, it’s the 23rd of May now.  I heard on the radio this morning someone claiming that we’re now in the Tribulations and that we’ve got 153 days before the actual end of the world.  That might be just about enough time for me to finish the rewrite on my desk and the new novel I am now half-finished with.

    I thought about writing something scurrilous and amusing, but why?  People who would laugh at it don’t need to be reminded that this was silly and those who wouldn’t laugh likely wouldn’t read my blog anyway.  And there’s the story about the kids whose parents, utterly convinced that this was the weekend, had quit their jobs and went on Mission, handing out tracts and stopped paying attention to the college fund the kids were acutely aware of.  How many people have basically torpedoed their futures by reacting in similar ways to this thing?  It’s not funny, it’s sad.

    But it’s not like this is the only thing people spend inordinate amounts of time and money on that make no sense.  Dedicated conspiracy theorists, the Area 51 crowd, Birthers, white supremacists, STURP fanatics, various fan groups dedicated to a tv show or music group among whom there are certainly members whose entire lives are dedicated to worship to the exclusion of all else, including personal relationships…

    So I think I won’t crack wise about this.  It seems to me that the truly Left Behind are all those folks who’ve basically given up on life in order to feed their obsession with  being one of the Elect.  I just can’t really bring myself to find it amusing.

  • Aye of Newt

    Okay, I’ve been trying to get some sense of how the GOP intends to retake the White House in 2012 and not having a lot of luck. Now this nonsense with Newt Gingrich.

    On Meet The Press he was asked what he thinks about Paul Ryan’s budget plans—plans which include massive eviscerations of social programs like Medicare—and he made one of his rare reasonable statements. He criticized the budget as, basically, right-wing social engineering and went on to say social engineering from the Right is as bad as social engineering from the Left. Think what you will about the merits of that in terms of national policy, it is nevertheless a self-consistent, reasonable statement. Ryan’s budget is counter to democratic expressions of support for some of these programs and Ryan and others in this Congress have been struggling to cast their efforts in terms of fiscal responsibility, which clearly has nothing to do with why they won’t axe the military budget or do anything about corporate welfare.

    Be that as it may, here is Gingrich being reasonable and setting himself up as an independent thinker.

    Then came the backlash. A big no-no to openly criticize a fellow Republican, especially someone who is seen to embody the Tea Party aesthetic of “gut the government!” And what does Gingrich do? Back pedals. Not only that, he makes a prepared statement to declare that anyone using the footage from that Meet The Press interview to claim that, (a), Gingrich believes the Ryan budget is bad or (b) Gingrich disagrees with the social conservative agenda or (c) that Gingrich himself is flip-flopping and kowtowing to the Party is lying.

    So now I’m baffled. Because Ryan’s proposed cuts in Medicare at least are unpopular, so how does aligning himself with a position Gingrich initially criticized make points with voters? How does coming out of the gate with confusion aid his campaign or reflect well on the GOP?

    And what social engineering? The idea that a popularly elected government should do nothing to promote justice—and in this instance we’re talking about economic justice—and that people who need help should just either rely on charity or go away? Well, if you look at the out-front rhetoric of the most vocal segment of the GOP, the Tea Party, they seem to be backing an exhaustively libertarian approach. But even so, at the heart of it is a desire to reduce government to little more than a few offices on the Atlantic coast that deal with rubberstamping whatever the private sector wants and is capable of doing.

    I’m still mulling some of this over, but even though I disagree with Gingrich about the nature of social engineering, I am disappointed that yet again we have someone campaigning to achieve the office and will say or do whatever it takes, front any idea, kiss any ass, subvert any consistency to reach that goal.

    This whole social engineering thing, though, is starting to annoy me. It sounds ominous, but really, every society, if it has a common vision of itself, indulges social engineering, some more benignly than others. It must be so. Consensus is necessary to have a functional social mechanism. The notion that we can be free of social engineering is a utopian fantasy that is poorly thought through. Do you know what a country looks like that has no social engineering?

    Somalia.

    Food for thought.

  • Rapture Ready

    This weekend, it’s supposed to be all over.  Harold Camping of the Family Radio evangelist organization has announced the Rapture for May 21st—at six P.M.

    In my own little patch of interest, the SFWA Nebula Awards will be given out this weekend.  If Mr. Camping is right, this will be the last of these.  Going out in grand style, that.

    I don’t have a lot to say about this other than it’s silly.  It’s one more reason that makes me wonder about the people who follow this kind of nonsense.  I can’t help but think that, beneath all the sanctimony and babble, a lot of these folks are just, well, unfortunate.  Wishing for it all the Be Over so they don’t have to deal with reality anymore.  Unfair, perhaps, but from my encounters with folks like them over the years I’ll stand by it.  This is the ultimate “grass being greener” thinking and I no longer get angry at the absurdity but feel sad at the wonders they pass up spending so much time anticipating the end of wonder.

    On the other hand, I have a pile of work that will take me a lot longer than the next three days to get done.  It would be pleasant, at least for a short while, not to have to worry about it.  But at some point I’d start to resent the interruption.

    I asked some Jehovah’s Witnesses once if they ever thanked Zoroaster for the very idea of the Apocalypse and they returned blank stares.  What?  Zoro-who?  After all, they keep coming up with new predictions for something which, according to their founder, Charles T. Russel, should have happened back in 1914.  (This was his final guess after previously predicting Christ’s return for 1874, 1878, 1881, and 1910.)  They got that one wrong, but Russel’s successor, Joseph Franklin Rutherford (who gave the movement the name Jehovah’s Witnesses) revised the date to 1916.  Later it was moved up to 1918, 1925, 1941, 1975, 1984, and 1994. 

    William Miller, founder of the Seventh Day Adventists, had predicted the Rapture for 1843 using a complicated bit of figuring based on Daniel.  He revised it to 1844 when the January 1st rolled around and everyone was still here.

    More recently, Edgar Whisenant, a former NASA engineer and self-taught Biblical scholar, published a little book, 88 Reasons Why The Rapture Will Be In 1988.  He gave 300,000 copies away for free, but sold 4.5 million.

    There were dueling predictions about 1994, one from Pastor John Hinkle of Christ Church in L.A., who claimed June 9th.  Our Mr. Camping held out for September 6.  Obviously he’s revised that estimate.

    Still, the one to bet on by virtue of it having been figured by a true mathematical genius remains Sir Isaac Newton’s prediction that 2060 is the year.  No sooner than, Newton claimed.

    But then there are the words of Mr. Whisenant to keep in mind: “Only if the Bible is in error will I be proved wrong.”  Might turn out to be that he was the shrewdest of the bunch—unless some of them play the stock market and contrive to short stocks that might fall as Rapture approaches.  For myself, this Saturday is another coffee house at which I’ll be playing music and indulging a different kind of rapture.  Oh, and it will be in a church, in case you’re wondering.  The once-monthly event takes place in a Methodist church in the neighborhood.  So if it comes, I’ll be doing something I love, and that wouldn’t be a bad way to go.

  • Invisible Women

    I’m taking time out (already) from all the rewriting I have to do to complain and restate a principle.

    Here’s a lovely little bit of misogyny.

    Read the article?  A newspaper took the photograph of the ready room where Obama and his cabinet received the news of Bin Ladin’s death and photoshopped out the women present.  For reasons of “modesty” they claimed.  They then apologized but asserted they have a First Amendment right to have done this.

    Inadvertently—and I am sure they didn’t think about this when they did it—they gave Bin Ladin a small cultural victory out of his own death.  The religious view Bin Ladin asserted, supported, and fought for includes the return of women to second class status, to the status of property.  By doctoring that photograph, the editors of Di Tzeitung tacitly approved this idea.

    Modesty.  Really?  They erased Hilary Clinton and a staffer in the background.  You look at the photograph in question:

    2011-05-02t220238z_01_was100_rtridsp_3_binladen.jpg

    Is there any way to look at that and perceive immodesty in the way we usually use the term?  I don’t see any scanty clothing or alluring, over-the-shoulder glances at the camera.  No legs, no cleavage, no hint of sexualization, which is what is normally meant by use of the term, even—especially—within the context of religious censure.  This sort of attitude is intended as a guard against titillation and “impure thoughts”, but I’m having a hard time seeing anything like that here.

    In fact, this has made clear what the real problem is and has been all along.  Rules about “modesty” have nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power.  Secretary of State Clinton—the Secretary of State of the United States of America, the most powerful nation on Earth, is a woman!—is a female in a position of power.  She is the boss of many men.  She is instrumental in setting policy, which affects many more men, men she doesn’t know and will never know.  She wields power and that is what is feared by these—I’ll say it because I’m pissed about this—these small-minded bigots.

    And in their effort to make sure their daughters never grow up with the idea that they can have power or any kind, not even in the say over what to do with their lives (because they don’t even have any say over how they dress, who they can talk to, where they can go, what they can aspire to), these “proper” gentlemen handed Osama Bin Ladin a final supportive fist bump of solidarity.  “Yeah, brother, we hated the fact that you blew people up, but we really gotta keep these females in their Place.”

    Cultural relativism be damned.  I’m one hundred percent with Sam Harris on this.  Subjugating half the population to some idea of propriety and in so doing strip them of everything they have even while hiding them head to toe and keeping them out of the public gaze is categorically evil.  The fact that this is resisted so much by otherwise intelligent people—on both sides of the issue, those who perpetrate it and those who refuse to outright condemn it for fear of being seen as cultural imperialists—is as shameful as the defenders of slavery 150 years ago.

    Now, at least, they’ve made it hard to miss.  This wasn’t a photograph of some beauty pageant or a spread in Playboy or the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue; this wasn’t a still from the red carpet runway at the Golden Globes or the lurid front page of a Fleet Street tabloid.  No, this was a photograph of powerful people doing serious work and two of them do not have a penis.  This is the issue—power.  Women the world over have no say in their lives.  They are wives, concubines, prostitutes, slaves.  If they wish to change the way they live, they are forbidden, sometimes killed for their ambition.  In many places still their daughters have their sex organs mutilated so they won’t ever fully experience sexual pleasure and, theoretically, never want to stray from the men who own them.  They are denied the vote, denied a voice, denied even the courtesy of Presence in life.  They are made background, wallpaper, accoutrements for  the men who are set against yielding even a token of consideration toward the idea that “their women” are people.

    People who happen to be women.  People.

    I am sick of this crap.  I am sick of people who don’t understand the issue.  I am sick of the tepid response among people who should see this as an unmitigated evil who won’t speak up to condemn it outright.  By their reluctance to condemn they allow this sickness to grow in their own backyard.  There are groups in this country who but for a few “inconvenient” laws would—and in some cases do—treat women exactly the same way.  I am sick of the constant onslaught on family planning services and the idea that women should not be in command of their own bodies.  I am sick of the feckless insecurity of outwardly bold and inwardly timid males who are afraid of the women around them, that if these women actually had some choices they would leave.  I am sick of men who can find no better use for their hands than to beat women, no better use for their minds than to boast of their manliness, and no better use for their penises than to keep score.  I am sick of women who are made to appear at fault for their own rapes because of the way they dress or walk or talk or because they thought, just like real people, they had a right to go anywhere they chose, free of fear.  I am sick of seeing the human waste of unrealized potential based on genital arrangement and the granting of undeserved rights and authority based on the same thing.  I am sick of being told by people who obviously haven’t stepped outside of their own navels that this is what god wants because some preacher or imam or shaman told them and they like the idea that there is someone who can’t say no to them no matter how abusive or failed they are as human beings.  I am sick of seeing women pay the cost of men deciding for them what they should be.

    For those of you who read this and agree, excuse the rant.  Shove it in the faces of anyone who gives even lip service to the idea that women are somehow other than and less than males and that maybe a little “modesty” would be a good thing.  Modesty in this context is code for invisibility.

    Back now to our regularly scheduled Wednesday.

  • Atavistic Pleasure

    Since hearing the news this morning I’ve been trying to find a calm space wherein reason and judgment will allow for a rational response, but for the time being I can’t help it.

    Osama Bin Laden is dead.

    I can’t help feeling glad about that.  There is an atavistic part of me responds to this kind of thing.

    I have a number of other thoughts—for instance, where they finally found him is suggestive of a whole bunch of negative assessments about out “allies” and the uses to which historical fulcrums are put—and there will doubtless be backlash over this, but done is done and I cannot find it in me to feel in the least sorry.  He seemed to have become the ultimate in revolutionary narcissists and chose to believe his “wisdom” trumped the lives of all his victims.  There has been and is much that is wrong in our relationships with the Middle East, but slaughter frees no one, and where clear heads and earnest consideration are needed to solve problems, terror guarantees their absence.

    Burying him at sea was a clever move—there will be no grave to be turned into a new shrine.  In the end, he harmed his own people far more than he hurt us, and the last thing this planet needs is another monster elevated to the status of demigod.

    What we need to do now is take those sentiments to heart—slaughter frees no one, terror banishes reason—and stop reacting like offended adolescents.  We must be careful that we ourselves don’t fill the void left by Bin Laden’s death with our own self-justified nationalism and continue what we know to be bad policy.

    But for now, I’m a little more pleased by this than not.

    That’s the way I feel.  I’ll have a more rational response some time down the road.