A Sufi story about our investment in Iraq A shiekh went on a journey east. After many miles, he found himself broiling in desert heat and yearning for refreshment. Then he saw a fruit vendor on the road selling many oddly shaped red and yellow fruits. He was so happy and amazed that he offered the vendor all the money in his turban. The fruit vendor happily handed him all his fruit and took off.

The shiekh bit into the first fruit and his face screwed up in disappointment and shock. Instead of being sweet, juicy and refreshing, the fruit burned him like the rays of the cruel sun above. He tried another fruit and suffered the same fate. Tears ran from his eyes and his face turned read as he continued walking down the road, but he kept munching on the fruit. He came across another man.

"Why are you eating that fruit?" the man asked. "We don't eat those straight, we dry them and use them to flavor our sauces and curries. It must be terribly unpleasant to eat them straight, especially on a hot day."

"You are right, they are horrible," the shiekh acknowledged. The man could see the shiekh holding his outraged belly in his hand and he could see tears running down his face.

"So why are you eating the peppers, then?"

"I'm not eating the peppers anymore," the shiekh replied, taking another miserable bite. "I'm eating my money."  ¶ 6:39 AM 0 Comments

  Rude little pig Tina read on my computer about Alec Baldwin calling his eleven year old girl a "rude little pig" on the answering machine, angry that she's stood him up for a phone appointment. We were completely shocked that he would say this horrible thing to his own daughter. I began to think about the bad things I've done as a parent, just to compare and get a better idea of how truly terrible Alec Baldwin is. In a moment I thought of a few things that easily seemed worse than what he did.

I ventured that we assume this is typical behavior for Baldwin. We imagine that this is the tip of the iceberg, but there is no evidence of that. The only fair thing is to assume that this is the worst thing he's ever done, and then think if it's much worse than things we do.

"I've done much worse things than that," Tina reported, after a moment. I was glad, because I thought I was the worst parent.

Just then this terrible smell wafted around the corner from the bathroom. It was Toby: he had taken a particularly smelly crap and hadn't closed the bathroom door. We don't tend to close the door, because the bathroom is small and the door is awkwardly close to the toilet. Still, his crap really did stink.

"Close the door, you rude little pig!" I yelled.

"What?" he asked, insolently. He knew what I wanted.

"Close the door, you rude little pig!"

Tina and I spent the rest of the day calling him a rude little pig, and he didn't even see a reason to comment on his new name. We finally told him the story at dinner.  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Richard Rorty on man on horse I'm just throwing this one up quickly in case anyone followed the link from Salon's bestiality movie interview. They have a review of some movie about the guy who got killed in Washington, and of course it touched off a debate about bestiality. The reviewer remarks that all the movie does is present the bestiality ranch guys' stories absent any moral condemnation, and this has inflamed people. He suggests you could do a movie like that about Nazi prison guards or child molesters, so why not bestiality? In my letter I answer his question: bestiality enrages liberals because we cannot explain logically exactly what is so terrible about it, although we all agree it is terrible. This drives us nuts, but it shouldn't.

Here's a little philosophical background on my position. Richard Rorty is a liberal philosopher who argues that there can be no philosophical last word, and that our moral and philosophical systems are built out of nothing more substantive or eternally grounded then our consensus favoring them. He is a post-modern. I think he's right. He would be untroubled by our failure to identify a moral or philosophical or political truth to ground our intuition that bestiality cannot be right. He would say that we cannot identify a similar truth grounding our belief that other people have minds, or that liberal democracy is the best form of government, so why should we care that we cannot find one for this? Tomorrow, having failed to ground our rejection of bestiality in philosophical truth, we'll still reject it.

Dan Savage is equally unconcerned. When Rick Santorum uttered his famous decree that if we cannot raise a moral wall against homosexuality, then we will be powerless to raise one against bestiality, Dan Savage felt no need to invoke some kind of moral principle to separate the two. He just said, look, here's a moral wall: I'm gay and proud of it, and anyone who screws animals is a sick bastard.

Works for me.  ¶ 7:57 PM 0 Comments

  The New Fatalism A guy I ride the train with announced that it is no surprise that some psycho shot a bunch of people at a college. "There are millions of people in this country," he said. "One of them is going to go crazy and kill a bunch of people every few years."

I'm sure our national discussion will try for greater subtlety than this over the next few days, but it isn't necessary. The guy on the train has it right. Crazy may come in all forms, and there may be reasons we were not surprised that a young male shot up his college rather than, say, donning a pair of adult diapers and driving toward the house of a romantic rival, but what the hell does it matter? No matter what we do, crazy men are going to shoot the place up every once in a while, and crazy women are going to drown their babies, poison their lovers or visit violence upon their romantic rivals. If a man drowns his babies or a woman climbs a bell tower, I won't take this too hard: the point I want to make is only the one the guy on the train made.

I am going to take this moment to announce what I think is a new fatalism that I hope is about to sweep the country. America left the fatalism of two millenia of human history behind when we founded our country, but I think it is catching back up. Liberals tripped over it first because they were running faster. Liberals no longer believe that government can solve the problems of gun violence through gun control, nor the problem of criminality through reforming criminals, nor the problem of insanity through psychiatry. At one time they did. Liberals also no longer believe they can solve the problem of poverty through state assistance, nor homelessness through public housing.

Conservatives are about to realize they cannot solve the problem of Islamic fundamentalist violence through military might. The religious right is about to realize it cannot solve the problem of immorality through legislation. I cannot think of any other problem conservatives thought they could solve, other than the continued existence of liberals, and wresting the mass media away from liberals hasn't solved that problem. I predict that as long as President Bush is in office, conservatives will close ranks around their obsolete idealism, and that as soon as he's gone they will start fashioning a new conservative fatalism. They shouldn't have as much trouble with this as liberals have, because conservativism, to the extent that it implies conserving the status quo, requires a certain fatalism anyway, so it will be a familiar enough attitude.

The New Fatalism, in my view, will be a welcome development in foreign policy and anti-terrorism. If we can say that every once in a while, as long as we are sucking at the teat of Mideast oil, some angry Islamics will blow something up, we will be better off than we are now. It will be welcome for me as a teacher, because no longer will teachers be told they are responsible for the unequal outcomes of student from unequal family backgrounds. A fatalist would have no trouble recognizing that these outcomes, on average, are sure to be unequal.

The New Fatalism may be a giant bummer, though, for global warming. To confront this threat, we need to believe that we can outdo centuries of our predecessor societies, most of which lived for today and let tomorrow take care of itself when it came to resource exploitation and allocation. This is one issue that requires an idealistic belief that humans are changeable and our fate is not yet determined.  ¶ 6:09 PM 0 Comments

  Theirs is not to question why Saddled with a disastrous failed policy in Iraq, Bush partisans are desperate to hide themselves and their president from criticism. A favorite tactic is to claim that any criticism of the futility of our position undermines the morale of our troops. I haven't heard anyone point out that this is an attack on the professionalism of the troops, so I will.

When President Bush ordered our troops into a manifestly illegal invasion, nobody questioned whether this was unfair to the troops. We all assumed that the troops would simply do what they were told to do. When the illegal war was also revealed to be unnecessary, because no WMD's were found, nobody felt a need to console the troops. We just assumed that they would continue doing what they had been ordered to do. Over three thousand of our soldiers lives later, I don't see why, as Congress tries to assign a stop date to the disaster, Bush partisans should suddenly implore us to consider how this might affect the supposedly fragile feelings of the troops. As I write this, President Bush is ordering thousands of them back early to join his doomed surge, without adequate time to rest and refit, and nobody seems troubled about how this may make them feel. We expect them to do what they are told. When Congress or the next President orders them home, I think we can expect them to obey.

The troops have rightly been regarded all along as instruments of policy, and expected to do their part to the best of their ability even when the policy appears flawed. Why the sudden change?

Labels: Iraq

  ¶ 5:34 PM 0 Comments

  Curtain hanger My psychologist is trying to get me to go easier on myself. I tend to judge myself harshly. An example might be this week at school. We had a couple days when most of our students were out for some testing, so we had to figure out what to do with a handful of kids. If you teach them something important, you only have to re-teach it to the others. If you don't teach them anything important, why are you in school? Whichever way you choose is unsatisfying. I like to feel I've accomplished something at the end of the week. So I chose, and then I felt bad about my choice, and had to remind myself that I didn't choose to mar my week by sending most of the kids away to testing, and I shouldn't blame myself.

When my shrink was first trying to get me to lighten up, he pointed at the curtain hanger in his office. It was slightly bent and it was exposed, when it should be tucked behind the curtain. He told me the curtain guys installed it wrong. He confessed that his normal tendency would be to look at it every day and feel frustrated, but he has learned not to beat himself up about little things like that. When he gets to it, he'll get to it. In the mean time, it isn't doing any harm.

It's been months now, and every time I go to therapy I notice he still hasn't fixed it.

It bothers me. Just a little. I'm only telling you because I can't tell him.  ¶ 8:13 PM 0 Comments

  On Bush and Bullshit Did our president lie his way into a disastrous war? Rather than facing the tedium of the factual record, I would like to approach this question by examining the philosophy of lies and their bastard cousin, bullshit. The key work in the area is On Bullshit, a book by Harry G. Frankfurt. Despite its title, the book is a completely serious work of analytical philosophy.

Frankfurt points out that every lie is actually two lies. One is the lie about what is the case in the world, for example, “I am entitled to a tax refund of X dollars.” This is a lie, of course, because we have exaggerated or fabricated some of our itemized deductions. In making this false claim about the world, we must also lie about our mental state. Our claim entails a second, implicit claim to be experiencing the mental state of believing our statement to be true. Such a mental state is incompatible with our actual ideation, which includes thoughts such as, “I’ll just tell them I lost the reciepts,” and “Nobody gets audited anyway.”

With this understanding of the dual nature of lies, Frankfurt turns to the question of bullshit. When we bullshit, as opposed to when we lie, we do not knowingly misstate the truth of what is or is not the case. The truth of the case is irrelevent to a bullshitter; he is not knowingly misstating the case, because he does not know or care what the case may be. A bullshitter tells no explicit lie. He only tells the implicit lie, the second kind of lie that liars tell. The bullshitter is only lying about his mental state: he wants us to believe he knows and cares what is or is not the case, when in fact he does not know or care.

Given his equananimity in the face of post-invasion revelations, it is obvious that President Bush did not know or care what was the case with Hussein’s WMDs and ties to al Qaida. But there is more.

In the run-up to war, President Bush authorized the creation of an organization that may be regarded as a kind of model institutional organ for the production and dessimination of bullshit. He called it the “Iraq Study Group.” This name itself is two-thirds bullshit, because while it was a group, he didn’t expect it to study Iraq. The stated purpose of the group was to provide access for the president and other select leaders to unfiltered intelligence about Saddam’s purported WMDs and links to al Qaida.

What does it mean to filter intelligence? Well, if someone offers a report in which someone claims he witnessed the processing WMDs in a certain building in Iraq on such and such a date, filtering this intelligence would mean considering the reports of other agents and agencies to consider whether, for example, such a building exists, where the man actually was on the date he named, whether he would have been given access to the building, or whether, say, he may instead have been a substance abuser with crushing debts who just made the whole thing up to get asylum for his family.

Or, if one were handed documents purporting to authorize shipments of uranium from an African country, filtering the intelligence might mean asking allied intelligence services in, say, Italy, whether they aren’t just a cheap forgery, or checking to see if anyone might ever have been sent to Africa to check out the story.

Unfiltered intelligence lacks the benefit of such attention. As we have seen, and as intelligence analysts will confirm, intelligence can only provide an accurate picture of what is in fact the case if it has been filtered.

For this reason, unfiltered intelligence is useless to a decision maker who wants to know or to tell the truth. It is no more useful to a decision maker who wants to lie. In order to lie, one must know the truth, so that one can distort or deny it in the lie.

Unfiltered intelligence is only useful for a decision maker if he wants to bullshit. For this it is unmatched. Unfiltered intelligence allows a leader to illustrate any position he chooses without ever shouldering the burden of knowing what is or is not in fact the case.

It is possible that President Bush told some lies on the road to war, but his favored approach was to bullshit.

At the end of his book, Professor Frankfurt notes that liars are condemned more readily and with greater vehemence than mere bullshitters. He argues that liars value the truth more than do bullshitters, because liars must know the truth to construct their lie, while bullshitters have no use for it at all. Those who value truth, he says, should fear bullshit at least as much as they do lies.

I think we should join Professor Frankfurt in asking, as he does at the end of his book, why we should bother to condemn lies if we are perfectly willing to tolerate bullshit.

Labels: Iraq

  ¶ 4:55 PM 0 Comments

  Mr. Smarty-pants shops for socks Shopping for socks I become frustrated trying to find my type and color. All I know is it's a Gold Toe wool sock named after a city in England, but almost all the Gold Toes seem to be named after cities in England. "Canterbury." "Windsor.""Cambridge." It's such an obvious ploy. A salesperson offers assistance, and I tell her I need a wool Gold Toe named after some city in England, but my problem is I can't remember which city in England is the home of my sock.

As soon as I make my little joke I feel like a dork, because I've told it to the wrong person. A department store salesperson isn't likely to share my urbane cynicism about the shallow pretensions of dress-sock marketing. It probably hasn't even occurred to her that the socks' names come from cities in England.

"Are these the ones you want?" she asks, holding up the "Edinburgh."

"Yes, those are the ones," I reply.

"Edinburgh is in Scotland," she corrects me drily. "What color do you want?"  ¶ 8:45 PM 0 Comments

  Traffic Needing to explain situational irony to my students yesterday, I told the following story:

I once had a student who almost always came tardy to first period. I raised the issue with her, and she complained that the traffic on her way to school is very bad. I suggested that since she knows that traffic is bad, she should leave home earlier. She responded that she cannot leave earlier because she can't get ready that fast. I suggested that she set her alarm earlier. "I already wake up as early as possible," she exclaimed.

I couldn't figure out what that could mean, so I stopped trying to reason with her and called her mom. I told her that her daughter was often late to first period.

"Well," she said, "The traffic is very bad..."

The happy thing about this is that the students laughed when I told it. One occupational hazard high school teachers face is being susceptible to the belief that teenagers are exceptional creatures of pure unreason. Both this story and my students' response to it remind me that teenagers are just people, and more like other people than not.  ¶ 8:20 AM 0 Comments

  Headline news at Marshall High The latest news from the school where I teach:

Student IDs teacher: "You look like that white guy on that TV show!"

Buy back begins with index cards, 3 things we don't know about you

Special test prep bell schedule interrupted by earthquake awareness drill schedule

Student model of Globe Theatre discovered in cabinet predates actual Globe Theatre

This week's 'Nooner' lunchtime activity: Bumfights!  ¶ 10:43 AM 0 Comments

  So much water so close to home Last night I complained because my wife bought potato chips. I have complained about this before. In the interests of the kind of titilating confession a web blog is supposed to offer, below I shall I rank my complaints about potato chips in descending order. The descent will be from my ostensibly wholesome complaints to the atavistic ones they hide.

1) They might give our son poor eating habits.
2) While I would never go out of my way to eat them, if they are around I will eat them.
3) I fear my wife will eat them by the handfuls and get fat.
4) They are white trash food.

While I hewed faithfully to numbers 1 and 2 in the subsquent argument, I felt sure my wife suspected the loathsome presence of numbers 3 and 4, the latter of which she probably read in the context of prior aspersions I may have intimated about her extended family.

She is sometimes physically demonstrative in arguments, so she picked up the bag, crushed all the potato chips inside it, and threw it away. My son's face doubled up as the injustice of the situation overcame him, my wife left the room, and I was left to soothe him while we ate the burritos that my wife had prepared for us. She had bought the meat and tortillas on the same trip to the store in which she had also procured the disputed chips.

She didn't talk to me for an hour and a half.

That night, she came to bed with one of my Raymond Carver books. She never reads Carver. She likes to curl up in bed with a flashlight to read long, accomplished novels of fantasy, imagination or suspense. But here she was kneeling in the middle of our bed, the book opened to somewhere in the middle, just kneeling there reading it.

"Why are you reading that?" I asked, surprised.

"No reason," she replied.

"What do you mean, no reason?" I asked.

We always tell each other our reasons for everything. I thought about the Carver stories, with their couples who talk past each other while the silences between their words hold the truth of their relationships.

I watched my wife's eyes scan the page, and I decided I should speak before it was too late.

"You're going to divorce me, aren't you?"

She looked up from the page and smiled.  ¶ 5:21 PM 0 Comments

  Angelina's crusade Angelina Jolie, in a Washington Post editorial,
supports the International Criminal Court and wants to see more trials of the killers in Darfur and their sponsors. She also wants us to act to prevent further slaughter.

"What the worst people in the world fear most is justice," she declares. "That's what we should deliver."

We should 'deliver' justice, she says, and her diction is well suited to her purpose, if not to reality. It is assertive and muscular, while still suggesting a measured and objective response. Yet her choice of metaphor reveals a grave flaw in her conception. Whether one delivers something, whether a package or a message, the object of the delivery has already been formed or shaped here, and one delivers it by sending it there. We may be right to pride ourselves on our system of justice, but that does not make it a portable entity.

Sure, the ICC should hold a trial when, by accident, luck or politics they actually find themselves in custody of a killer. But since they have no police force and spotty jurisdiction, such rare marvels cannot be offered as predictable consequences for international law-breaking. This is not unjust, but neither is it real justice. It is merely an occasional chance for retribution.

Real justice would require not just the accidental justice of the ICC, but also the creation of a domestic system of justice in Darfur, which would in turn require stability and the return of law. Jolie recognizes this when she calls for airstrikes, military intervention or sanctions. Of these, only military intervention could conceivably establish stability, and there is no reason to believe even it would. Jolie joins President Bush here in making plans to invade a country without a plan for the occupation.

What would tempt liberals like Jolie into urging another foolhardy military action? Only a mistaken belief that there can be a moral requirement to act in the absence of any practical means to do so.

Foreign policy should be guided not by moral compunction, but by pragmatic interests. Doing something is not preferable to doing nothing when we cannot think of anything useful to do. If we don’t know how to run Darfur—and we don’t—there is no moral reason to try.

Justice cannot simply be delivered, but must grow from the ground up. I feel sorry for the people of Darfur, but until someone shows me how we can help without the risk of making things worse, I will refuse any moral calls to action.

If contemplating this gives you moral pangs, I suggest reminding yourself that humility was once considered a moral virtue.

Labels: Foreign policy, Morality

  ¶ 4:42 PM 0 Comments

  Opportunity cost Sorry for the lapse in posts, but I just survived three days of the worst state-mandated teacher training ever. By the end it was impoverished enough to be classified as a variant of the Brezhnev-era Soviet economy: we stopped pretending to work and the instructor didn’t pretend to care.

So I found myself sitting around with three other teachers just talking. Three of us are guys, and one is a woman—a tall, svelte, Nordic-jawed strawberry blond in her thirties. She reviewed the male movie stars she fantasized about during the boring training lectures, and then complained that there are no eligible single guys around. We guys were all instinctively doubtful of this claim, and one of us made some sort of gesture in the direction of implying that we ourselves were not dogmeat. She had to point out to us that we are all married. Oh yeah.

It may have been insensitive of her position to forget that we were married, and therefore tragically unavailable, but I think my collegue was reaching for a kind of point. Had she found any of us before our wives did, with her looks, there is no question that she could have had us. So we can fairly assume she has overlooked any number of guys with overall ratings akin to ours. I think this dulled our sympathy.

It is probably hard for her now, with fewer unmarried male cohorts. But everyone has to make a choice. Our wives made a sacrifice: they deferred gratification. At the age they were when they found us, and in the state they found us in, our worth was not exactly backed by gold. It was like the floating currency of a minor nation, perhaps one lead by a man who likes to award himself medals in elaborate ceremonies.

I’m not willing to make a strong claim as to our worth now, even as we earn stable incomes, father their children, reap the benefits of psychological therapy and are capable, after years of their tutelage, of dressing ourselves. Monogamy is a bitch, and the initial investment is made blind.

I shared this with my wife, and she suggested that nobody could get married if they didn’t go into it blind. The whole truth of it would be too terrible to bear, she says, so you have to do it when you are young and stupid, or made stupid by love. If you wait so long that you smarten up, it becomes more difficult.  ¶ 8:58 AM 1 Comments

  Solid In my previous post, I used the word “solid” to describe a 2 X 4. I didn't mean by this that somehow plywood isn't solid, but that a 2 X 4 has a kind of iconic, essential quality. If the game "Clue" had, as one of its murder weapons, a piece of wood, this piece of wood would be a 2 X 4. A 2 X 4 would have embodied the kind of clarity that the prosecution would desperately seek throughout the trial.

The first witness was a police officer called by the prosecution to establish the provenance of the piece of wood. He recalled visiting Mr. Meza in the hospital and photographing the wound on Mr. Meza's head, which required 13 stitches. From there he went to the warehouse where Mr. Meza sustained his injury, interviewed a Mr. Segura, and recovered the stick, wet with blood. Later, Mr. Segura would testify to having given him two pieces of wood, but the officer said nothing of this.

“What did you do with the stick?” the defense asked, on cross examination.
“I put it in a paper sack,” replied the officer.
“You put a piece of evidence wet with blood in a paper sack?”
“Yes.”
“Is this what you were trained to do with wet evidence?”
“Yes.”
“Nobody ever suggested that you should put it in a plastic bag so that the wet stuff would stay wet?”
“No.”

Of course, the defense attorney batted that one around mercilessly, and went on to extract the fact that when the officer had submitted the item to the evidence cage, he had checked a box to get fingerprinting but not the one to test for blood.

”You handed them a stick wet with blood, you saw a box for a blood test, and you didn't check the box?”
“Yes.”
“Why not?”
“I figured it was blood.”

We got to see the stick, of course, the prosecution waving it around confidently. It had a brown stain in the corner that didn't look particularly like blood. It looked more like mohagany wood stain.

All this would not end up making a great deal of material difference, since both the witnesses, including Mr. Saucedo, would testify that Mr. Saucedo struck Mr. Meza with a stick that looked pretty much like the one entered into evidence as People's Exhibit #3.  ¶ 9:23 AM 0 Comments

  Stick I've had jury duty for the last four days. I actually ended up on a jury, the second I've served on. We have now returned a verdict, so I am free to discuss the case. The defendent, Mr. Saucedo, was accused of striking a Mr. Meza on the head with what the judge initially described as a board. When he said “board,” I imagined a length of dimensional lumber—a solid piece of wood with the grain flowing lengthwise and sold by its cross-sectional dimensions, such as 2 X 4, 2 X 6, etc. The wood offered as People's Exhibit 3, though, turned out to be a strip of half-inch Baltic Birch plywood, about three inches wide by two feet long. After viewing it the judge, both lawyers and the witnesses started calling it a “a piece of wood” or a “stick.” "Piece of wood" is vague and clumsy. “Stick,” while more evocative of the size and weight of this particular piece than “board,” inaccurately suggests a small branch pulled from a tree. Plywood is not merely pulled from a tree. It is a laminated product manufactured by peeling sixteenth-inch thick slices of wood from around the trunk of a tree, and gluing them together in successive layers, alternating the grain for rigidity, to produce a laminated sheet which can be sold as a 4 X 8 foot or other standard size sheet. (Baltic Birch, as it happpens, is a European import, and is sold as a 5 X 5 sheet. It is usually used for constructing the sides of drawers.)

Nobody wants to get hit in the head with a 3 inch by 2 foot strip of half inch Baltic Birch laminate, but as the trial went along, I felt that we had to struggle to maintain our interest in a way that we wouldn't had there been a nice solid 2 X 4 involved.

More on the trial soon.  ¶ 8:52 AM 0 Comments

  Pushing furniture My wife has a habit of pushing furniture that sits against the wall up against the wall. Sideboards, beds, dressers—she believes all these should touch the wall. I believe they should sit about a third to three quarters of an inch from the wall, depending on the size of the object. Objects need to breathe, I tell her.

Stanley Fish, in his blog on the NYTimes today, (subscription only), recounts hearing Diane Rehm interview Colm Toibin about his short story collection “Mothers and Sons.” Stanley Fish is first annoyed when Toibin is cool to the callers on the radio show, most of whom want to tell stories, sometimes punctuated with tears, about how he helped them get through their own psychological traumas. On consideration, though, and after Toibin talks about his desire to craft a beautiful sentence, Fish believes he understands. The craft of writing is self-referential and self-validating, he says, so to talk about its therapeutic effects is to debase it. It is pure craft, and for the writer it is only about the pure joy of creating it.

If writing is only about crafting beautiful sentences, it must be about making judgements like the one my wife and I dispute. My wife and I disagree on a question of form, of the formal relationships between object and space. Who is right: me or my wife? Well, we can have a long, happy marriage pushing the furniture back and forth and never resolve the question. But in literary writing, the sentence has a final form. A judgement has to be made, and it needs a basis. What could the basis be? The autonomous will of the author who pronounces it finished? The taste of select readers? Some sort of mystical truth?

I think the basis for judgement must be in all the stuff that Fish wants to exclude. The judgement about which sentence will be most beautiful in a particular piece finds its basis in other writing, in history, in politics, in ethics, in morality and in the contingencies of what the writer lives and desires.

Colm Toibin is perfectly right to avoid discussing his work as therapy, but not exactly because he would contaminate himself if he embraced the effect it has had on some of his readers. He is right because he already said his bit, in the writing. If his craft in the writing is of such demanding subtlety, I'd suggest, it is because he believes the themes he treats require it. After all that joyful, painstaking effort, why would he want to muck it up by treating the same themes carelessly on the radio?  ¶ 11:04 AM 0 Comments

  I know what to say In "I didn't know what to say," below, I suggest that the collective will of teachers effected change, not argument, facts, reason, persuasion, etc. To better illuminate the principle I take from this, consider the opposite situation: a case in which reason & facts all point one direction, and it makes no difference at all.

Consider my arguments, way below, that two specific aspects of the circumcision debates cannot be reasonably argued. I believe that within our notion of reason, I am right about this. I also seriously doubt that anyone will notice, or care. Even were my ideas to gain wide circulation, people would continue to argue pointlessly about the same points I've demonstrated to be pointless.

If this sounds too self-aggrandizing, consider a different issue that I think has been resolved at the level of reason, as explained in this article in Salon. The article cites a two year old plan by a couple of Yale academics to end the corruption inherent in private campaign financing. I have been leery of campaign finance reform, because I believe that big money will always find a way around it, and I tend to suspect that campaign finance reform will end up just making things worse. Reading this proposal, though, I am convinced that big money could not find any way around it. Their proposal is constitutional and reasonably cheap. It also doesn't stand a chance. Like efforts to reform the electoral college, it will sit around gathering dust, and be pulled out every few years as a kind of curiousity. “Hey, look at this!” we say. “This could fix everything!” And in the same breath, we say, as though instinctively, “Too bad it will never happen.”

My point here is that knowing what to say is not as important as I once thought, because one can not know what to say and still impose a will, and one can know exactly what to say and find the ability worthless except as a parlour game.  ¶ 4:14 PM 0 Comments

  Jumping and barking I am sitting in my kitchen looking out my back window. My dog Kona is barking intently at a live oak tree.

The tree is rooted in my neighbor's yard, but a few large branches hang far out over my yard. My neighbor's house is an orchard house—one of the houses that was here since the thirties. The land my house was built on was once citrus orchard land, and the owner of the orchard house would have been the owner of the orchard. In the fifties, the value of housing eclipsed the value of orchard land, and this owner must have sold the orchard to a developer, because the contemporary ranch styling of my house matches that of others which ring the orchard house and stretch to the east. The tract is also linked by a cinderblock wall, the concrete of which has a distinctive salmon color. If the wall ever needs repairs, I do not think I will be able to find cinderblock to match.

The salmon colored wall stands between my dog and the base of the live oak tree, just a couple feet from the wall on the other side. Every day, squirrels stroll out the branches of the live oak to gather the nuts, and my dog Kona barks at them. Sometimes she jumps, her squat dachshund legs carrying her only a foot or so into the air. She does not know that the squirrels interest her because although she is a mutt she is clearly a hound, and her ancestors were bred to chase small game. She does not know how to catch these squirrels, because she never sees them except high overhead. I don't think she knows that on the other side of the wall, the tree meets the ground, and that on occasion, the squirrel does the same.  ¶ 1:26 PM 0 Comments

  I didn't know what to say People who know me will be surprised to learn that the only time a newspaper ever called me for my opinion about something, I didn't know what to say.

I was working at Fremont High School in LA, and we had been assigned a bad principal. We were trying to get rid of her, and by this time the situation had escalated to the point that we had picketed outside of graduation.

My problem was trying to explain what was wrong with her. She came to the school after already having been marked as a lemon at her other school, and it was understood that her political backer on the board had lost her seat, so we assumed she was being dumped on us to either break her, break us, or both. She certainly didn't want to be at our school, and had made that clear. But I couldn't tell the newspaper any of that, because it was only gossip.

What I had to go on was my own experience with her, which was frustrating, but by itself not convincingly damning. I had approached her as the chair of the English department, full of zeal about creating classroom libraries to support student reading for pleasure. She had welcomed me by confiding her own partisan enthusiasm for this very approach. I left the meeting convinced she was completely on my side, and would champion me and my ideas against all those who doubted the power of reading. Then months dragged by, and I would send her increasingly plaintive memos, but she ignored them and me. Eventually, we got our books, but by that time I was done with her.

Looking at it objectively, though, the evidence seemed equivocal. We hadn't had classroom libraries before, so even though she dragged her feet, the fact that we had them now seemed to weigh in her favor. How could this story support her ouster?

I thought I owed this reporter a sound and rigorous argument, backed up with facts, and I worried that I didn't have one.

I realize now that I didn't need one. All I needed was the fact that all the teachers opposed her. Other teachers had become alienated from her in much the way I had. We had already made that clear, which is why the reporter was calling me. The burden was on the principal. How could she lead a school if the teachers wouldn't follow?

I now realize why I couldn't understand this. As a verbal person with control issues, I have always relished the notion that political power and decision-making are about marshaling facts and arguments and deploying them persuasively. It plays to my strengths and addresses my fears.

In this case, though, power flowed simply from the collective will of teachers to stand up and say we didn't want her. We did not stand in need of supporting facts, reasons, and arguments. The fact of our consensus was sufficient. Indeed, it proved to be so: I talked to the reporter for an hour and couldn't quite explain myself, but the principal was out within six months.

We teachers mattered. Our opinions had an overwhelming weight irrespective of how we came to them. In the last analysis, I didn't trust myself and I didn't trust my fellow teachers. I didn't feel right trying to convince a reporter because regardless of the facts, I couldn't convince myself that we counted.  ¶ 8:31 AM 0 Comments

  Writing for Robert Parker When I wrote the entry titled "The first paragraph," I had just gotten a piece accepted by a literary review, and I was worrying that literary writing had become too academic, in the sense of becoming a craft produced by trained members of a collective academy.

Now I think a big part of the problem is the nature of the audience for an amateur writer. It's hard to imagine anyone reading a lit review who isn't either an agent thumbing through looking for someone to puff, or another writer appraising the competition. Everything devolves to craft, because one despairs of engaging such savvy readers in any way other than by demonstrating mastery with the well-worn tools of the trade.

A victory in these conditions is less than completely satisfying. It just feels like you've managed to briefly impress the jaded. Writing for a lit review is like playing a football game in a stadium emptied of everyone except for a couple dozen sportswriters and a few players from other teams.

Perhaps it's not the academic form of literary writing that bothers me, but the audience available to an amateur.

At the same time, a writer's awareness of this audience encourages a certain approach to writing. It leads us to see ourselves as wine-makers instead of football players. A wine-maker would hardly resent the chance to create wine only for a select group of wine-tasters and fellow vintners.

As it happens, I enjoy wine more than I like football, but as a writer I'd rather be a football player than a wine-maker. I don't need my readers to fill a stadium, but I'd prefer a less specialized audience.  ¶ 9:12 PM 0 Comments

  A clear shot In the AP today, you can read this sentence: “Maj. Gen. William Caldwell told reporters that the investigations into the crashes of three Army and one private helicopters are incomplete but ‘it does appear they were all the result of some kind of anti-Iraqi ground fire that did bring those helicopters down.’”

If you read the news from Iraq less studiously than I do, you might be puzzled by the phrase “anti-Iraqi ground fire.” Ground fire is directed from the ground at targets in the air. A casual observer of the Iraq situation would assume almost every non-American on the ground to be Iraqi, and almost everyone in the air to be American. The casual observer would be right. So how could fire directed from the ground to the air be “anti-Iraqi?”

According to both the NIE and to Defense Secretary Gates, there are now four wars in Iraq. There is Sunni/Shia sectarian conflict, Shia on Shia internal violence, the old Sunni insurgency and widespread anarchic criminality. This being the case, it is difficult to name the enemy. President Bush just calls them “the terrorists” or “those who hate freedom,” but the armed forces have chosen the term “anti-Iraqi forces.”

The problem with this is that the vast majority of anti-Iraqis turn out to be Iraqi.

To get the proper sense of it, one has to imagine something like a Platonic concept of Iraq—a theoretical abstraction of what a true Iraq should be, rather than the unfortunate and temporary tangible manifestation of Iraq that we only think we see. This true Iraq exists only in the spirit realm: it is democratic, friendly to the US, and a model of moderation amidst the petty autocracies and seething fundamentalisms around it.

It is against this true Iraq that the anti-Iraqis train their anti-aircraft weapons. Their aim is true, for what more precise embodiment of the as-yet intangible spirit of the true Iraq exists than that of the American eagle hovering above it?

Labels: Iraq

  ¶ 8:18 AM 0 Comments

  Neener-neener? Hilary Clinton says of Bush and Iraq: “We should expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office.”

While I can see why she doesn't want the next president to inherit Iraq, and it is pleasing to imagine Bush alone having to shoulder the burden of his own disastrous legacy, this is a terribly foolish thing to say.

Whichever option a senator and presidential candidate supports for an exit date—immediate, phased, indefinite, never, etc.—the timing should be based on the need to address a problem of potentially incalculable dimensions, not on the convenience of the next officeholder or a child's notion of just desserts.

Compare the magnitude of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq with the pettiness of this utterance. Is there any hope for a country that combines such grandiose militarism with such vapid leadership?  ¶ 11:19 AM 0 Comments

  The first paragraph I stop blood.

I stop it between rounds for fighters so they can stay in the fight.

Blood ruins some boys. It was that way with Sonny Liston, God rest his soul. Bad as he was, he'd see his own blood and fall apart.

Now, if a literary agent reads this, say, in a literary review like ZYZZYVA, he's going to think, this is a guy I need to send a letter to. And he drops FX Toole's name into the open form letter on his computer, and then he keeps reading first paragraphs all through the journal until he find another good first paragraph. When he's done, he does a mail merge and runs off to the post office. I know this because I read an article in a literary review by a literary agent named Nat Sobel, and he cited this first paragraph as one that caught his eye and led to beaucoup money and success for everyone. Sobel says when he's hunting writers, he only reads the first paragraph of each piece, and suggests that this kind of skimming is industry-standard.

Actually, that FX Toole is smarter than Sobel realizes, because this excerpt Sobel quotes is technically three paragraphs. Toole tricked Sobel into dropping his guard. A bit of advice from a wily old boxing cut man: write short paragraphs.

I think many writers who write literary work want to believe that the form gives them license to do all sorts of creative things that they couldn't do if they were writing sitcoms or motorcycle reviews. Reading Sobel's piece makes me doubt this. The form of literary writing seems to be quite narrowly prescribed. Of course, Nat Sobel isn't the only agent, and there are many literary reviews, but the sum of it is an industry feeding a market for novels. A short story is really like an advertisement for a writer who wants to publish a novel, and the market for novels seems mature enough to know what it wants—maybe after reading that all-important first paragraph.

Many of the writers I feel the most kinship with didn't come up through literary reviews. Spalding Gray, Joan Didion, Garrison Keillor, David Sedaris, David Antin, George Orwell, John Fante—none of these writers wiggled their way through literary journals, and I wouldn't call all of their best work precisely novels. I don't think I can emulate any of their approaches, but I'm hoping to find some way to work that's a bit less of a Kabuki dance and a bit closer to the accidents and contingencies of life.

Maybe I need to become a cut man.  ¶ 9:08 AM 0 Comments

  Teenager grounded from TV? That was written on LA Times newspaper racks, as an advertisement. I had to think it over to figure out what they could mean. I'm still not sure, but I think they mean to offer their paper as an alternate source of entertainment for those facing any sort of television embargo.

This sounds as desperate as Bush asking us to give it one more try. I understand newspapers are having a hard time with circulation, but this ad seems counterproductive to me. You picture a bunch of ad guys sitting around thinking, OK, who might use a newspaper? Well, let's see, it would have to be someone without TV. Power outage? No, too temporary. Who, then. Who?

What's next?

"Hey homeless guy, need insulation for your cardboard house?"  ¶ 1:27 PM 0 Comments

  Amateur writing I'm reading "Death in the Afternoon," Ernest Hemingway's book about bullfighting in Spain. It happens that there were both amateur and professional bullfighters, and Hemingway neatly slices the difference. An amateur, he says, enjoys the event more than the people watching it. Only when the bullfighter can promise that the spectators will enjoy it more than he does would someone have the appropriate economic basis to start selling tickets.

Those of us who write without being paid for it often hesitate to claim our vocation. Hemingway's distinction could be useful here: we are amateur writers, because we apparently enjoy writing our pieces more than our readers enjoy reading them.

Being an amateur writer is a bit pathetic, but it's better than being a bull.  ¶ 3:16 PM 0 Comments

  Morality has nothing to do with it "Isn't this sight enough for the world to stand with us?" An Iraqi blogger named Mohammed wrote these words after the bombing at the gates of al-Mustansiriya University, which killed 70 people, mostly students. He cited accounts by witnesses that cell phones were going off in the pockets of mangled bodies. The callers were their parents, wanting to know if they were OK.

"Who pays the price?" Senator Boxer asked Condoleeza Rice on the floor of the Senate. "I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price ... with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."

Senator Boxer touched off a mini-tempest, with Tony Snow calling her remarks anti-feminist, but while she was arguably trying to poke Rice in her barren womb, she was also trying to do the same thing the Iraqi blogger tried to do: appeal to our sense of morality to sway opinion on the Iraq war. For the blogger, the murder of children at a university should convince nations like France that have stood on the sidelines to step in and save Iraq from fundamentalist Islamic violence. For Boxer, the fact that it is only the military and not the decision-makers which suffer the burden of sacrifice should weigh against a troop escalation.

With due respect to all those who have written seriously over the years about the morality of war, I think we would do best to leave questions of morality aside in looking at Iraq. We are not facing a moral problem in Iraq, but a practical one.

If our problem were a moral one, it would turn on a moral principle. For Mohammed, this would be, "Can we ignore the brutal infliction of violence on fellow human beings?" For Boxer, it might be, "Should we order someone else to make a sacrifice we ourselves will not share?" Since the supposed answers to both of these questions suggest conflicting actions were we to apply them, they might together yield a third moral quandary, "Is it worse to ignore the suffering of others or to attempt to quench it by ordering others to make a sacrifice we ourselves will not share?"

Who really thinks our problems in Iraq turn on answers to questions like these?

From the beginning, our problem in Iraq has been a practical one, not a moral one. There is certainly a moral dimension to the situation, but appreciating this moral dimension is of no real help in solving our problem. When I don't fear being manipulated into a foolish mistake, I'm as ready as anyone to agree that terrorism is bad, tyranny is evil, freedom is good, wars are sometimes justified. But these and other moral truisms, while seemingly of serious concern, are beside the point.

In the run-up to the war, I argued with a war supporter who said we had a moral duty to invade Iraq. He admitted that we didn't know how likely it was that Hussein would use his WMDs (sic) on us. But he said we couldn't afford to take chances, because if WMD's killed thousands, their blood would be on our hands. I told him I couldn't see how this was a moral problem, because the thousands killed might well include us.

It would only be a moral problem if only the lives of others were at stake, in which case he could argue that a moral principle required us to value those other lives as highly as our own. Since we were having the argument in Los Angeles, this was not an issue: we were as likely a target as any, so if I was willing to take the chance, I was taking it with my own life as well as with others' lives.

He then wanted to know why I was willing to take the chance with my own life. I replied that there were risks in invading Iraq as well, so there was no choice that did not involve risk. I chose continued weapons inspections as the best way to manage the risk. It was just a question of weighing one risk against another. Rather stubbornly, I think, he continued to argue for a moral dimension to the problem. Finally, I offered an analogy to firefighting. There are many ways to allocate firefighting money: prevention efforts, equipment, training, recruitment and retention, etc. If I were to argue in favor of more fire safety inspections, and he were to argue in favor of buying more sophisticated fire trucks, would we be having an argument that hinged on morality? After all, other people's lives are at stake!

We would not, because we have no argument about the value of the lives, only about the most practical way to protect them. In the same way, we, as Americans, are not facing a moral conflict in Iraq. We all agree it would be a good thing if Iraq was a decent place to live for its people and an ally to us. The problem is bringing that about.

We are now asking whether that is more likely with us or without us, and exploring the vital corollary questions of what to do if we stay or of how best to leave. It is a difficult discussion with no easy answers, but most everyone agrees it is a question of choosing the least worst option, whichever that is.

We need clarity to sort this question out. We won't get clarity by pumping up our rhetoric with irrelevent talk of morality. We all agree on the relevent points of morality: the problem is that nothing moral can be accomplished by a failed policy. The only important question now is how to limit the extent of our failure, and that is a practical question, not a moral one.

Labels: Foreign policy, Morality

  ¶ 8:11 AM 0 Comments

  Free story idea I don't write fiction, but I had this stray idea for a character, so whoever gets it first can have it. All I know about him is that he's a retired high school English teacher and he buys a ticket for every night of a run of "Death of a Salesman." Each night he sits quietly through the performance until Willy Loman comes into the kitchen and tells his wife, "I slept like a dead one." Then the retired teacher stands up and yells across the theater, "Foreshadowing!"  ¶ 7:23 AM 0 Comments

  The last word on circumcision In yesterday's post, I pointed out that circumcision is the kind of bottomless hot topic that people just cannot stop themselves from arguing about. I claimed that two of the major issues in circumcision cannot be discussed reasonably. This, I think, is why so few of us can avoid trying, and also why the discussions never end. Yesterday, I tried to show that it is senseless to argue about the pain the infant feels. Today, I'd like to end discussion about whether or not circumcision lessens the pleasure of orgasm.

The idea here is that snipping off the foreskin, which is rich in nerve endings, dulls the intensity of sensation. To judge this claim requires that we compare the way an orgasm feels to a circumcised man to the way it feels to an uncircumcised man. This poses a special problem.

By point of contrast, consider a related objection to circumcision, which is that the foreskin serves as a handy lubricated sleeve for the glans. This claim is perfectly amenable to reasoned inquiry, because the evidence needed to judge it is publicly available to both the snipped and the unsnipped. An uncircumcised man can experience the benefits of his foreskin, and imagine what it would be like to forego these benefits. The circumcised man can sample the benefit of other forms of lubrication, and picture the convenience of having this feature built in. Both can weigh this benefit against the cost of routine hygienic maintenance. This is an argument that at least makes sense, and I encourage people to argue about it as much as they like.

No such comparison is possible, however with the claim that an uncircumcised orgasm feels better. It is not enough to merely compare two alternate physical arrangements: we also must consider the brain’s interpretation of sensation. We cannot assume that having fewer nerve endings necessarily means experiencing less pleasure. It may be, for example, that the brain calibrates itself to register sensations based upon the number of nerve endings extant, so that altering the number of endings from days after birth would do nothing to alter the experience of the intensity of pleasure.

As an example of this possibility, consider the eye’s interpretation of color. Take a roll of daylight color slide film, and shoot three photographs without using the flash. Take the first outdoors, the second indoors under incandescent light, and the third indoors under fluorescent light. The first photograph will have what we consider normal color, the second will be yellowish, and the third will be green. This is because each light source has a different color temperature, and the daylight film is balanced for daylight and electronic flash, which share nearly the same color temperature. Our retinas physically register the same differences, but we do not usually see these differences because our brains calibrate for the discrepancies without our even being aware of it.

In the movie "This Is Spinal Tap," Nigel proudly exhibits an amplifier that he has had custom made. He shows the character of the filmmaker the volume knob, and it is marked not up to the usual 10, but to 11. In the dialog that follows, the filmmaker tries to gently question whether the amp is any louder than other amps just because the knob is numbered up to 11. His point is that the volume knob does not measure a specific quantity of volume at each numbered level, but merely represents a proportion of the total volume available on that amp. It may be that there is a baseline minimum of the appropriate type of nerve ending to afford any orgasm at all, and if we physically meet this threshold, the brain affords us a ration of pleasure proportionate to the percentage of our endings that are stimulated. If so, then the uncircumcised who claim they are having a more pleasurable orgasm than their circumcised brethren are making the same mistake as Nigel.

This speculation may be completely untrue, but it is impossible to know, because verifying this would require comparing the private sensation experienced in one person’s brain with the private sensation in another person’s brain.

Suppose I claim to have a higher tolerance of pain than you do. I offer as proof that I went to work with a headache, while you stayed home with one. You suggest that your headache was more painful than mine. I disagree, claiming that mine was more painful than yours. You say that you could not stand up without unendurable pain. I say I couldn’t either, but I was able to endure it because I have higher tolerance for pain. How is this argument to be adjudicated?

Or, try this one, borrowed from the philosopher Wittgenstein: Imagine that we each have a box, and in this box is something we all call a 'beetle.' We all say we know what a beetle is only from looking in our boxes, and we cannot look in each others' boxes. We could each have anything in our boxes. There is no way I could ever know how the contents of my box compares to the contents of your box.

The intensity of pleasure provided by an orgasm is like this 'beetle.' We know it only from looking in our own box, and we cannot look in anyone else's box.

Not even the stories of men circumcised as adults can resolve this problem, even if these men were to be unanimous in their reports. These reports only reveal what it is like to experience sex first as an uncircumcised man, and then as a man circumcised as an adult. This might be a different experience than that of only ever having been the one or the other. It is possible, for example, that the brain trains itself with one experience, and then must re-train itself for the other experience. A re-trained brain might interpret signals differently than a once-trained brain.

Arguing about whether or not circumcised orgasms are less pleasurable than uncircumcised orgasms is pointless. No amount of rational inquiry could resolve the question.  ¶ 8:56 AM 0 Comments

  The second to last word on circumcision The online magazine Salon recently published an excerpt from Neal Pollack’s new book Alternidad. In the excerpt, he recounts a bitter fight within his family over whether his baby son should be circumcised or not. The piece received over 450 responses. Some of them take sides in the family drama, and some of them recycle the various pro and con positions on circumcision. A remarkable number of letters began by expressing dismay that so many people consider circumcision a topic worth discussing, when there are so many more important things to worry about. These letters inevitably proceed, you know, as long as they are posting anyway, to explain why circumcision is obviously either beneficial or horrific.

I will not offer an opinion one way or another, but I would like to show how the intuition that it is frivolous to debate circumcision may be justified logically.

Specifically, I would suggest that it is senseless to argue about two aspects of circumcision. My arguments may require close attention, as they are philosophical in nature, but they have an important benefit over other arguments you’ve heard on the subject. Regardless of what your position is on circumcision, once you’ve read my arguments, you will never have to argue about it again.

One important issue is the question of what value should be placed on the pain the infant feels during the procedure. People who oppose circumcision suggest that this pain must be taken so seriously that only a medical necessity would warrant its infliction. Circumcision supporters do not think pain should be inflicted on infants wantonly, but see the momentary infliction of pain to be a minor cost that is eclipsed by the value they ascribe to the procedure, even in cases when they judge this value to be minimal.

If two people disagree on this issue, there is no sense for them to debate it. The reason is that nobody remembers the pain of infant circumcision, and this fact has a different meaning to different people. This becomes clear when one asks who is experiencing the pain of infant circumcision.

There are many views of selfhood and identity, but many stress the roles of memory or causation in allowing us to assemble the disparate moments of our life into a coherent identity. I am me, I might claim, because I climbed a tree in front of a brick house, cried in bed while wearing headphones, made a classroom full of his students laugh, etc. I remember these things, so they happened to me, and my memory projects this me backward through time, just as my imagination supposes this me will extend forward in time, at least for a while. These experiences also affected me, and I bear evidence of these effects in my psychology and physiology.

The circumcised have no memory of circumcision, and the pain of circumcision leaves no readily identifiable causal effect on them. Even if we suppose some sort of subconscious memory, or the pain has some sort of hidden effect on their post-infant selves, it is not possible to separate the presumed subconscious memory or hidden effect of this pain from the memory or effects of other infant pain, such as that of colic or of childbirth itself.

Those who wish to counter this argument might put forth a theory of identity that doesn’t require memory or causation, or they may simply demand that we embrace the infant in the moment of his suffering as a human, without worrying about whether he’ll remember it in the future. I have nothing to say against these arguments. All I want to do is point out that they routinely make no impact on anyone who doesn’t already agree with them, in the same way that being asked whether the adult remembers the infant pain makes no impression on others.

The situation is comparable to the horror that some people experience when they learn that surgical anesthetic often includes an amnesiac along with a painkiller and a sedative. These people fear the idea of experiencing pain and having no memory of it later. Other people, given the same information, feel that if they will have no memory of having had any pain, then it won’t have mattered. People with different views on this issue generally terminate their conversations about it with disbelief that the other could believe as they do, and then go their separate ways.

Conversations about the morality of abortion that turn on the humanity of the fetus seldom end so amicably, but they share the same result: mutual expressions of disbelief that the other could believe what they claim to believe.

These two arguments share with the argument about infant pain the problem of being conducted across an unbridgeable divide. The opposing viewpoints are grounded in opposing basic, underlying beliefs about the nature of being, beliefs that are themselves located beyond the reach of merely rational inquiry.

Tomorrow, I’ll show how why a second issue central to the circumcision debate is senseless to discuss.  ¶ 5:53 PM 0 Comments

  Margaret Cho overdraws her black account I love Margaret Cho, but I found myself cringing while watching her "Revolution" DVD today. She shifts her voice/gesture/body language rapidly between stock characters, sometimes so rapidly that for a moment you aren't sure who you are hearing. For example, in one moment she straightens her back, opens her eyes wide, and purses her lips, and she is a shocked, prim Asian woman. Or she might spread out her arms, bend her elbows up and her wrists out, extend her thumbs and her first two fingers, thrust out her chest and cock her head to one side to momentarily become a black ghetto chick with attitude.

This is where I think she runs into trouble. This particular characterization, to which she returns again and again, is what a friend of mine would call 'unearned.' Her other various poses as Asians or gays all riff on more fully realized characters she has previously introduced in the body of her work. The black ghetto chick with attitude, though, appears without context. She is just a trope, presumably available to Cho only because she has watched Jerry Springer.

I can see the allure of this role for her, because she can employ it as an inversion of a demure Asian character. But there is a problem with this. When she borrows from our cultural stereotypes to enact a demure Asian, she is simultaneously investing her own created persona back into our cultural conception of the Asian female. She enriches our concept of the Asian female. But she offers no fully realized black woman character in “Revolution,” or anywhere else in her work as far as I remember. She merely helps herself to an alter ego borrowed from black female identity, with all its history and its struggles, without making any concurrent investment back into that same black female identity.  ¶ 9:39 PM 0 Comments

  Oprah's Burden Check out Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post, who is disappointed in Oprah. She is funding a $40 million school for girls in South Africa, and she explains her choice in this quote: "I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn't there," she said. "If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don't ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school."

Robinson feels she is unfairly slighting inner city youth, whom he reminds us are predominantly black and Hispanic, and counters that if she is complaining that these children are materialistic, then the same is also true of American children and American society as a whole.

What troubled me was not so much Oprah's allegation that inner city kids are materialistic, but her insistence that beneficiaries of her charity be free of this flaw. The cause of this insistence is perfectly clear. Like any philanthropist, she doesn't merely want to help someone: she wants to be part of a narrative. In her case, she wants to feed the hunger for knowledge among the impoverished.

Alas, narratives have their imperatives. This one requires that she dismiss other hungers as vulgar, even such hungers as she herself might otherwise court, such as when lining up advertisers for her media empire.

Having spurned the vanity and philistinism of our domestic poor, she has been forced to extend her search for properly noble paupers in the imperial manner. Away to the dark continent!  ¶ 9:10 AM 0 Comments

  Infant jokes Some suggest that laughter is a kind of nervous response, bubbling out of us when we experience fear despite being in no actual danger. The things we fear in social settings are the perfect catalysts for this, which is why most of our humor is about sex, racism, politics, bodily functions or stupidity—all the things we are anxious about blundering over in social situations.

Even such thin jokes as puns can be explained by this anxiety theory, because puns reveal instabilities in our language. Any joke that depends on shift, imbalance or incongruity is covered, since our brains must be wired to scan for these as possible indications of a threat.

This fear theory of laughter also explains the jokes infants enjoy. My boy is eight now, but I remember the two jokes he liked as an infant, and I am sure they will be familiar to anyone reading this. One of them might be thought of as crude and the other sophisticated, but they both play on situations so primal that we already fear them just weeks from birth.

Both jokes are, of necessity, physical comedy. The crude one goes like this: with baby lying on back, adult nuzzles belly while making growling sounds. "Oh shit," baby thinks, "I'm being eaten by a wolf! Oh, no, it's just Daddy."

My dad kept this joke up until I was ten years old, by which time the basis for the humor had shifted. By then it rested solely on our mutual awareness of the absurd incongruity between my soft, delicate skin and the coarse sandpaper of his unshaven face. He even had a name for this: a schwattermoggle. This, I gather, is German for, "Ha! Watch as I torment a helpless child."

The sophisticated joke also has a name, one you will effortlessly supply as soon as I describe the joke. Adult makes eye contact with baby. Adult suddenly secludes eyes behind hands or natural barrier. Adult reveals eyes again and simultaneously rejoins eye contact.

Baby thinks, "I am joined in the world by others of like consciousness to mine. Oops, no I'm not! I'm alone—alone in a world empty of consciousness other than mine! Oh, wait—the eyes are back again."  ¶ 11:22 AM 0 Comments