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