Another Damn Yuletide

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nd now begins the Xmas season, with the first Sunday in Advent, which this year falls on the birthday of the Prophet. I speak, of course, of Mark Twain, who single-handedly created American Literature, as the great Ernest tells us. He was probably not that far off—certainly without Mark Twain there’d be no H. L. Mencken, no Kurt Vonnegut, no Hunter S. Thompson, to name just a few of his most obvious literary descendants.

I suppose it’s not impossible that somebody else would have accomplished much the same sort of thing—giving American literature its voice, so to speak. I don’t know that the voice would have been the same—but there were no doubt other possibilities, other paths.

That’s the trouble with trying to rerun history—there’s  no way of really knowing. And without some sort of hard knowledge, there’s no real way of saying that any one event is any more important than any other. Like the parable of the butterfly’s wings, change anything, no matter how small, and the results snowball. Or something like that.

Anyway, I have nothing to say, and I am determined to say it, even in the absence of purpose, audience, and desire.

Technical Difficulties

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ne thing is obvious—I’m not going to write anything today.

That’s probably all right. I’m feeling like crap for whatever reason and once again the words aren’t coming.

I didn’t even find anything I could use to cheat with. Some nearly-finished entry from the past I never posted. Some piece of junk I wrote a long time ago I could pass off as a contemporary comment. Not even something I could feel slightly good about reposting from my blog.

So this is my confession of failure. Sorry about that. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

I kind of doubt it, though.

Dubious Documents: The Case of the Covered Ass

 

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he Modoc War is a relatively obscure event in United States history. Boiled down to its essence—In 1864 the Indian department chose to assign the Modocs to live on Klamath Reservation, ignoring such complicating factors as the long and strained relationship between the two groups and Modoc economic ties to adjacent communities. In 1867 a place was prepared for them at Yainax station (on Klamath Reservation), probably because it was a common meeting-place for an annual gathering of various tribes to exchange slaves and other goods), and some of them went. Many Modocs refused. Some of the leaders, like Captain Jack, had signed the treaty agreeing to go to the reservation; others had not. All were considered to be bound by the treaty. Years went by while bureaucratic wheels turned slowly, but at last it was decided to use troops to force the refusenik Modocs onto Klamath Reservation. The attempt failed; the Modocs took refuge in nearby lava country, and after a long stand-off were dislodged, rounded up, and sent to Indian Territory (later called Oklahoma).

At the tipping point, right before the war started, it was felt necessary to make one more attempt to get the separatist Modocs to go onto Klamath Reservation voluntarily. The man in charge of this operation was Thomas Benton Odeneal, then Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Oregon. A long-time newspaper man (he had been editor of the Corvallis Gazette and would go on to edit the Portland Bulletin), he had ended up with the appointment through some unfathomable twist of politics. With a domestic crisis at home (his small daughter would soon die from an unknown disease), and armed with an unshakable belief in the childlike qualities of Native Americans, he nonetheless set out to make an attempt to keep the peace in southern Oregon.

On 20 November 1872 he left Salem, Oregon, arriving at the rambunctious frontier town of Jacksonville on the 24th. The next day brought him to Klamath Reservation, where he wasted no time in sending out two messengers to contact the Modocs—James “One-Armed” Brown and Ivan Decatur Applegate. Let’s let pioneer historian Frances Victor, as channeled through über-editor H. H. Bancroft, take it from here:

… he sent James Brown, of Salem, and Ivan Apple­gate to Lost river to request the Modocs to meet him at Link­ville on the 27th. At the same time the mes­sengers were instructed to say that the superinten­dent had only the kindest feel­ings for them; that he had made ample provi­sion for their comfort­able support at Yai-nax, where, if they would go within a reason­able time, they should be fairly dealt with and fully pro­tected; and if they would go there at once with Apple­gate, he would meet them there, but if they refused he required them to meet him at Linkville in order that a final un­derstanding with them might be had.

…

On the 27th the superintendent, in company with Dyar from the Klamath agency, went to Linkville to meet the Modocs, as he had appointed, but there found only his messengers, who informed him of Jack’s refusal either to go upon the reservation or to meet him at Linkville. “Say to the superinten­dent,” said Jack, who with a part of his men was in camp at Lost river, “that we do not wish to see him, or to talk with him. We do not want any white men to tell us what to do. Our friends and coun­sellors are men in Yreka. They tell us to stay where we are, and we intend to do so, and will not go upon the reserva­tion. I am tired of being talked to, and am done talk­ing.”

It being now apparent that nothing short of an armed force could influence these Indians to submit to the government, the superintendent sent a report of the late conference of his messengers with Captain Jack, and of the reply of Jack to his proposals, together with the order of the commissioner, to Green, with a request that he should furnish suffi­cient force to compel the Modocs to go upon their reser­vation; and in case it be­came necessary to use compul­sory mea­sures, to arrest first of all Jack, Black Jim, and Scarfaced Char­ley, holding them sub­ject to his orders. In reply to this demand, Green sent word that Jackson would at once leave the post with about thirty men.

And so the Modoc War was on. To recap: Odeneal sent word to Captain Jack and his people either to go with Ivan Applegate to Klamath Reservation directly or to meet with him at Linkville to talk things over on the 27th of November. (Note the date. This is a small matter, but sometimes the meaning of events hangs on small matters.) Why he thought Captain Jack would do either of these things is unknown—the facts are that the disaffected Modocs had already repeatedly declined to go to Klamath Reservation, and they were hardly likely to go to Linkville either, where the local settlers were prepared (as subsequent developments show) to lynch them on sight. Still the point is that Odeneal gave them a chance to talk things over at Linkville on the 27th, he showed up there along with Agent Dyar, the Modocs didn’t, and only when the dissident Modocs had refused this last opportunity to talk things over did Odeneal call for force to be used.

Now all this, as it happens, is absolute hogwash, though it has made it into the standard histories of the Modoc War. Let’s take a look at these same events again, this time as recorded in the November report of Agent Dyar:

On the 25th of No­vember superintendent Odeneal sent Mr. I. D. Applegate, a man intimately acquainted with Indian character, and Mr. James Brown, department messenger, from Linkville to the camp of the Modocs, at the mouth of Lost river, with instructions to see captain Jack, and the leading men, and tell them that the superintendent wished them to meet him at Link river, about twen­ty miles from their camp, on the 28th [!!], or, if they would not meet him there, to come upon the reservation, and he would see them here; that ample provision had been made for their subsistance and comfort. Mr. Odeneal then came on to the agency, arriving here on the evening of the 25th, and on the 27th I went with him to Link river, to meet the Indians on the 28th, should they consent to come. On the way to Link river we met Mr. Applegate returning from the Modoc camp, and he reported that captain Jack refused to meet Mr. Odeneal at Link river; that he did not wish to see the superin­tendent; that he had done talking; that he was advised by his friends, white men in Yreka, to stay where he was, and that he would not go on the reservation.

Note this: the proposed meeting was not on the 27th, but on the 28th. And Odeneal didn’t wait for that meeting—he sent his letter requesting that troops be sent out on the 27th. Now in all fairness there’s no special reason why he should have waited, given his presuppositions. He clearly never had confidence in negotiations with the Lost River Modocs. And really, what was there to negotiate? The authorities had decided that the Modocs were to be confined to Klamath Reservation; Captain Jack’s Modocs were dead set against it—there was no middle ground. No room for compromise. But the point here is that history has somehow simplified the process. Odeneal supposedly demanded a meeting on the 27th; the Modocs didn’t show up; the war was on. But in fact Odeneal demanded a meeting on the 28th, and when he received word on the 27th that the Modocs refused to come, immediately called for the troops. He did not wait for the date of the proposed meeting.

So where did Victor, Bancroft, and subsequent historians get the notion that it was only after the Modocs failed to show up for a meeting on the 27th that Odeneal sent for the troops? They probably got it from Odeneal. Here is the letter he wrote the commander of the District of the Lakes on 25 November 1872 as it appears in Odeneal’s official report:

Sir: I am here for the purpose of putting the Modoc Indians upon this reservation, in pur­suance of an order from the honor­able commission­er of Indian affairs, a copy of which is as fol­lows: “You are directed to remove the Modoc Indi­ans to Klamath Reserva­tion, peaceably if you can, but forcibly if you must.”

I have requested the head men of the tribe to meet me at Link river on the 27th instant, at which time I shall en­deavor to persuade them to return to the reserva­tion. If they shall refuse to come volun­tari­ly, then I shall call upon you for a force suf­ficient to compel them to do so. They have some eighty well armed warriors, and I would sug­gest that as large a force be brought to bear against them at once as you can conveniently furnish, in the event it shall be determined that they cannot be removed peaceably.

Immediately after the conference referred to I will inform you of the result thereof, and in the meantime I have to request that all neces­sary preliminary arrange­ments be made for concen­trating the forces at your command, and having them ready for active operations.

The catch is, the letter actually received at the fort was different. In it Odeneal had written that he had called for a meeting with the Modoc leaders on the 28th, not the 27th, “at which time I shall endeavor to persuade them to return to Yainax at once. In the event they shall refuse to meet me, or shall refuse to come upon the reservation voluntarily, then I shall call upon you for a force suf­ficient to compel them to do so.” And after the sentence about the size of the force he had written, “This will, I think, overawe them, and probably render the shedding of blood unnecessary.” (The portions in bold have been excised from the doctored letter.) After the doctored letter Odeneal’s report continued blandly:

On the day appointed, in company with agent L. S. Dyer, I went to the place designated for the meet­ing, and there met the messengers, who reported that they had been to the camp of captain Jack’s band of Modocs, and had in­formed the head men of everything contained in my instructions, and besides had used every argument in their power to persuade them to meet me, or go upon the reser­vation.  That they pe­rempto­rily declined to do either.

Of course this never happened. By the 28th (the day actually appointed) Odeneal was on his way back to Salem, not waiting for Modoc emissaries. But Odeneal clearly thought he could get away with it—and he did get away with it for over a century.

The military authorities apparently expected a bit more from Thomas Odeneal. Specifically, they expected him to go out to Captain Jack’s village himself to talk with the Modocs directly, in the event that they failed to come to Link River to talk with him there. Major Jackson, who led the troops in the failed attempt to arrest the Modoc leaders, wrote that Odeneal had done so: “The Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Mr. Odeneal, visited their village and tried to induce them to comply with the orders he had received…” Of course that never happened, as we know. Another officer involved in that same attempt wrote: “…Mr. Odeneal … sent word to Captain Jack of the Indians that he was at Linkville and to meet him there. Jack not responding, he was informed that Odeneal would be at Lost River two days later to talk to him. Instead of making preparations for his suggested meeting he despatched Mr. I. D. Applegate to Fort Klamath asking that troops be sent to move the Indians.”

The Modoc leaders likewise expected Odeneal at their camp in a few days. As they told reporters later on, Ivan Applegate had told them to expect somebody (presumably Odeneal) to show up and talk further with them. The previous Superintendent, Alfred Meacham, had in fact done just that a few years before in a partly successful attempt of the same sort. (The disaffected Modocs had in fact gone to Klamath reservation, but after a few months of constant conflict with the Klamaths the Modocs left en masse, including those who had already settled there.) The expected course of events by all concerned seems to have been that if the Modocs failed to show up at Linkville, Odeneal would go to their village on Lost River, and only if negotiations failed at that point would the troops be called in.  Instead, however, Odeneal threw in the towel at the first report from Agent Dyar and Ivan Applegate that the Modocs declined to meet with him, and immediately wrote out a request to send in the troops.

Obviously something happened to change his mind. Conceivably Odeneal coolly and rationally concluded that further negotiations were pointless, and that keeping his word to the Modoc leaders would be counter-productive, and in a moment of clarity dashed off the note that started the war. But I don’t think so. What I think happened is that Odeneal, on receiving the Modocs’ refusal to talk with him, just flat out lost his temper. I think he saw red, and from then on the course of action was determined. Like South Park’s Cartman he basically said Screw you guys, I’m going home. And that’s what he did.

Only afterwards, when the attempt to bring the Modocs to the reservation ended up in bloodshed and a protracted siege did Odeneal review his actions. I suspect that’s why he left out the part about calling for the troops if they refused to meet with him; in retrospect that may have seemed a bit petty. And I suspect that his belief that a show of force would overawe the disaffected Modocs was omitted because his prophecy proved so disastrously false, though he also insisted afterwards that he had expected a much larger force to be sent out. And in any case how the military elected to carry out their job was not his department, so to speak.

But this part at least is speculation. His reasons for changing the date of the projected meeting from the 28th to the 27th—the detail that has confused historians—though unrecorded, are obvious. The guy was covering his ass, like other bureaucrats appointed through political patronage to a job they were manifestly unsuited for. Michael D. Brown, when confronted by the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina, would have understood.

Fill in the Blank

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 had things I planned to write today, but it’s American Thanksgiving, and I’ve just had the most meal-like food I’ve had in some time, so I’ve decided ust to sit here and quietly digest, like a lizard sunning herself under an incandescent bulb. It’s a quiet sort of day anyway, not one for running around and digging stuff up and rummaging through files in search of an elusive fact that has somehow managed to blend into the context.

Everyone who writes about the day seems to think he knows what he’s talking about—Thanksgiving has no connection with the recorded 1621 feast, it’s really about cultural appropriation and genocide, it’s just another over-commercialized religious holiday, and so on and so forth. I mean, yeah—sure—sort of. There are elements of truth in various assertions—even contradictory assertions—because, like any holiday, Thanksgiving is no one thing.

It’s just a time when by common agreement a lot of us simultaneously partake of a feast. We do it for a lot of different reasons—religious, secular, familial, economic—and it means different things to each different celebrant. I know I’m being trite here, but there really is no answer to what Thanksgiving really is. It’s a day off from work. It’s the time of the year when the family gathers back at grandma’s. It’s a reenactment of a long-ago moment when alien cultures met in peace instead of war. It’s a ritual in which we propitiate some supernatural entity by acknowledging its part in the bounty of the harvest. It’s an occasion when we go through the same empty ritual as everyone else and vaguely wonder why anybody bothers.

It’s all of these things. Or it’s something else altogether.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Five Authors, a Plagiarist, and a Prophet

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ow that I am bereft of my library (collected over half a century), my notes (some going back to childhood), and my photocopies (going back at least to high school), I find myself constantly going back to the sometimes dubious resources of Wikipedia. Mind you, it’s improved enormously since I first looked at it years ago, when its articles appeared to be written by junior high school kids doing unwelcome assignments and off-base more often than on.

Looking over the piece on the day (26 November) I was struck by how many people I have some interest in happened to be born today. (That’s probably true of virtually any day, really; today just happened to strike me for whatever reason.) Thus we see that Theophilus Cibber, Colley Cibber’s son, was born on this date in 1703. Among other things he adapted Romeo and Juliet for the tastes of the Restoration theater. His is not the famous adaptation (that would be Otway’s Caius Marius) nor the one that held the stage the longest (that would be Garrick’s version), but it is part of the era’s dramatic history. I remember making a special trip to read it years ago in some library’s rare book room; now you can download it from Google Books.

On this date in 1731 William Cowper was born. This guy was a poet, whose seminal work The Task would influence writers as diverse as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Jane Austen. There’s a passage in it where he talks about “sober dreamers, grave and wise” who, for example, “write a narrative of wars and feats | of heroes little known, and call the rant, | An history.” (Guilty.) He passes on to biographers who “disentangle from the puzzled skein | In which obscurity has wrapp'd them up, | The threads of politic and shrewd design | That ran through all his purposes…” And my favorite, geologists who “driill and bore | The solid earth, and from the strata there | Extract a register, by which we learn | That he who mamde it and reveal'd its date | To Moses, was mistaken in its age.” (I love his confidence that it is the geologists who are mistaken, rather than those who vainly imagine that an ancient anthology of the folk tales of an obscure people is actually word from on high.) And then there are astronomers who “tell us whence the stars. Why some are fixt | And planetary some. What gave them first | Rotation, from what fountain flow'd their light.” (Their intellectual descendants have recently landed a probe on a comet. I wonder what Cowper would make of that.) It's all “learned dust” to Cowper: “And thus they spend | The little wick of life's poor shallow lamp, | In playing tricks with nature, giving laws | To distant world's, and trifling in their own.” I think we may well disagree about who was actually trifling here.

And speaking of triflers, it was on this date in 1827 that Ellen G. White, prophet and plagiarist, was born. It was during the wreckage of William Miller’s pipe-dreams in 1844 that she first came to notice with prophecies of reassurance for the scattered faithful. Largely copied from obscure pamphlets and forgotten tomes, they eventually grew into books themselves, such as the bizarre phantasmagoria The Great Controversy. (Although her copying of the works of others is well-documented, Wikipedia currently treats the fact as though there was some doubt about it. Power to the people, I guess.) White got a section in my lost book Doubtful History (a book to which I devoted countless hours of research and writing and which my family threw out like so much trash) due to her fantastic historical notions; when writing about the purely imaginary christians who supposedly kept her unhistorical faith she noted “The history of God’s people during the ages of darkness that followed upon Rome’s supremacy, is written in Heaven. But they have little place in human records. Few traces of their existence can be found ….” Faith like that moves mountains I guess—on paper, anyway.

On the other end of the human spectrum we have a true prophet, Norbert Wiener, born on this date in 1894. One of his books—I believe it must have been Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, was an enormous influence on my thinking when I was twelve or so. I never owned a copy of it, and the library refused to let me check it out (it’s too difficult for you, one librarian kindly explained), so I mostly read it there, taking notes and committing ideas to memory. I was originally interested in using feedback to design mechanisms that could mimic living organisms; I got intrigued with the whole notion of similarities among systems whether mechanical, organic, or social.

Also born on this date were Eugène Ionesco (1909), Frederik Pohl (1919), and Charles M. Schulz (1922)—a playwright, a novelist, and a cartoonist. Rhinoceros reflected my sense of detachment from the madness of surrounding society, Gladiator-at-Law (written with Cyril Kornbluth) my feelings abotut its power-structure, and But We Love You, Charlie Brown my impressions of the tragedy of life (“The laughter of little children” my ass). All of them moved me in some way to some degree during my (shall we say?) childhood. (Well, I think I was fourteen when I read Rhinoceros.)

None of these people maybe have anything real in common, only the false connection of sharing a common date of birth. But what the hell—it gave me something write about something to distract me from the horror of the present, during the dark hours when I should have been sleeping.

“I Am Darren Wilson”

Lt. Ray Albers (from Wikipedia)

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s the grand jury has finished up going through its appointed motions in the whitewashing of Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed an unarmed teenage boy in Ferguson Missouri, officers throughout the United States have been proclaiming their solidarity with the killer cop by putting out the logo, “I am Darren Wilson.” It seems like an odd point of pride. Are they also confessing—perhaps boasting—of the unarmed civilians they’ve killed? Or announcing their intention of killing unarmed civilians in the future? Or asserting their right to open fire on random members of the public? Or what?

I’ve got to say that I’m not really interested in what was going through Darren Wilson’s mind at the time of the incident, or what exact events led up to it. I’m not interested in whether the victim was a strong-arm robber or a model college-bound student. I’ll leave it to others to wade through the thousand pages of whitewash produced by the world’s worst stage-conjurer. (I can see the wires, goddamn it!) I don’t care that the laws of Missouri apparently allow an officer to use lethal force to effect an arrest. This killing shouldn’t have happened. It is a law-enforcement failure.

The focus shouldn’t be on Darren Wilson at all. The focus should be on reforming the Missouri systems—legal and otherwise—that allowed things to come to this pass.

Pigs for Cronus, Goats for Dionysus

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nd so as we wind down the road of darkness this year toward the inevitable winter solstice (at least those of us in the Northern Hemisphere) we come to the Roman holiday of Bruma, celebrated on this day in the time of Tertullian, a sort of bleak harbinger of the darker days to come. As time went on the Bruma was expanded to the Brumalia, a twenty-four day era ending neatly with the beginning of Saturnalia. I suppose in a primarily agricultural society you’ve got to invent things to do during the fallow times.

As there were twenty-four letters in the Greek alphabet each of the days could be correlated with one of them, and the custom was to throw a dinner for people whose name began with that letter. I don’t know how this worked in practice; it seems unlikely that a person would necessarily have only one friend with a name beginning with delta, for example. The prospect opens for slights and hurt feelings that could outlast the joyous season well into the darkness beyond.

But as far as I can tell the old pre-Byzantine festival was confined to this single day, and involved no such complicated scheme. I could easily be wrong; I’ve never looked at the primary sources on this thing, but have only accepted what standard reference works and stray scraps of forgotten papers have to say.

Sixth-century pop-historian John of Lydia tells us some interesting details of the thing. Farmers, he wrote, sacrificed pigs to Cronus and Demeter, civic officials would collect wine and honey and olive oil “and as many [products] of trees as endure and are preserved” for the priests of the Great Mother, and the vine-dressers—well, they had a bizarre custom. In honor of Dionysus they would kill goats, skin them, fill the skins with air and jump on them. Their excuse was that “the goat is the enemy of the vine”. It probably made some sort of sense at the time.

The festivities, he wrote, took place at night—not because the nights were long and the hours of darkness exceeded the hours of light, but because “in truth, the Brumalia are festivals of the subterranean daemones.” Nice to have a scientific explanation.

Darkness and Bullshit

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he more people know about what’s happening, the harder it is to control them,” Lao-Tse put it two and a half millennia ago or so. And make no mistake about it—he was on the side of keeping people in the dark and feeding them bullshit. Lao-Tse would have hated the internet. How do you keep people in the dark when they can find out what is going on with the click of a button? You can still baffle them with crap, of course, burying key information under tons of of garbage, as the mad tea-partiers have figured out, but it is a problem that remains to be resolved in human affairs, as Judge Story might have observed, whether a nation can be permanent where keeping people uninformed and suppressing information constitute no part of the policy or duty of the state in any assignable state. Future experience should settle the problem, I suppose.

Today is the International Day to End Impunity on the five-year anniversary of a mass murder in the Philippines in which thirty-four correspondents, editors, cameramen, writers, and other journalists were murdered by supporters of a thuggish politician who apparently figured this was the best way to influence the vote. (Mad tea-partiers take note! Why stop with merely suppressing the vote, when murder can put an end to voting altogether?) Their party seems to have expelled the (alleged) perpertrators, and the trial is still going on, despite the diminishing list of witnesses, whose mysterious murders continue to plague the prosecution.

According to the official site the day is intended “to demand accountability for the journalists, media workers, activists, lawyers and many others who have been targeted for exercising their right to freedom of expression, and empower organisations, government bodies and individuals to help dismantle systems of impunity around the world.” It’s an uphill struggle. I live in a country where impunity is handed out like party favors to corrupt prosecutors who connive to sent the innocent to the death chamber, to high officials who order prisoners tortured in the name of national security, to companies that spy on their customers illegally at the behest of shady politicians, to celebrities who drug and rape young women for their private amusement, to businesses that poison our air and rivers and oceans, to criminals of all stripes and breeds and credos. It’s some comfort that the US hasn’t descended to the depths of the Philippines, I guess, but I’d feel a lot better if the city set on a hill was a beacon of light, rather than a den of darkness.

The Broken Earphones Crisis

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ords are failing me. It’s the end of another wasted day, in which the main feature has been the broken earphones crisis, which has forced me and one of my roommates to share earphones much in the manner the Graeae used to share their common eye. It’s raining here in Portland, and water runs over the sidewalks and into the gutters like small but substantial streams. That doesn’t affect me much here in my basement suite, but I know it’s going on, and the damp seeps in at least in spirit, if not in the physical realm.

And words continue to fail me. They’ve been failing me now for at least two years; as though my access to the realm of symbols had been somehow cut off—nonpayment of dues or something. Having my library tucked away in some metal chamber in a different state doesn’t help either. I reach for familiar volumes that aren’t here, and honestly the internet doesn’t help much in this. I had those volumes for a reason, and at least one of them is that the information in them isn’t readily available in other forms.

I keep hoping the words will come back. They haven’t so far, and forcing them to dance for me isn’t really working either. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; and so it goes. Maybe tomorrow. Sorry about that.

Quotation of the Day

… the Reagan Administration’s economics team regarded it as a good thing all those families were losing their livelihoods and their homes because it was weeding out the “inefficient.” Ronald Reagan, the great Nostalgic, champion of traditional, small town, family values, supposedly leading America back to the glorious days of his own idyllic boyhood in an America defined by small towns and family farms, friendly Main Streets and crowded church pews, was, with his patented genial chuckle, presiding over an epidemic of foreclosures, the economic devastation of many small towns and the shuttering of countless businesses on every Main Street across Iowa, and the overwhelming of churches’ ability to help the inefficient among their congregants. … those “wonderful” food pantries and clothing drives were helping people who only a year before were hardworking, self-reliant members of the middle class put food on their tables and bundle up their kids in jackets and coats, hats and mittens before sending them out to wait for the bus in the cold and dark of a Midwestern winter made colder and darker by the need to turn off the lights and turn down the heat in order to save on the heating and electric bill.

Lance Mannion (“Joni Ernst’s Iowa Dystopia”)

Thought for the Day

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oday is Transgender Day Of Remembrance. Since last TDoR, over 200 women like me were killed for being who we are … If you can take your gender identity for granted, it is a privilege. If you don’t have to explain your anatomy or history to partners or even random people, all the while not knowing if they will react violently to your explanation, that is a privilege. … I have to hope that next year that fewer of my sisters will be murdered, fewer of us will be stalked, fewer of us will be harassed, and that the world will be a little less hostile to us.—Kat Haché (Thoughts on TDoR 2014)

Psycho-Killer, or Frightened Old Guy? What's the Difference?

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ome years back I was sitting quietly at home when a strange car pulled into my driveway. And when I say pulled into my driveway I don’t mean that it came up the driveway in a normal way—no, I mean it came through the hedge separating my driveway from the parking lot next door, taking out a small tree, crossed over my driveway, and finally came to rest at an angle across my front yard. It was about three in the morning.

Now I could have taken a gun, gone outside, and shot the driver. To judge from today’s reports that would be, apparently, a fairly reasonable thing for a frightened elderly person to do. At least, that’s what one Philip Sailors did, with considerably less reason than I had to be frightened, when a strange car pulled into his driveway in a normal fashion. And while the justice system didn’t exactly give him a medal for it, it did allow him to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter—a mere $500.00 fine and a suspended sentence. Apparently it was important to keep this crazed loon out of jail for some reason.

According to news accounts it was about ten in the evening when the car pulled up into Sailors’ driveway. Inside were four young people, three of them high school students. Sailors looked out the window and saw the car.

Did he do what a sane person would do—go down and ask what the kids wanted, or whether they were lost or something? No. He did not. Did he do what a frightened elderly person would do, and call 911? Again, no. Not at all. No, he did what a psycho-killer in a bad movie might do—grabbed his gun, went outside, and started shooting as the car took off down the driveway in a futile attempt to escape. Then, to add to the deranged quality of it all, after killing the driver Sailors held the three high-school kids at gunpoint. According to one of them Sailors made no attempt to help the dying man.

The police arrived in response to two 911 calls, one from one of the kids in the car and another from a neighbor who had heard gunshots. Sailors claimed that he believed the high-school kids were home invaders and that the fleeing car was about to run him down. As a former missionary to Panama he ought to have been able to tell high-school kids out ice-skating from dangerous criminals. As a Vietnam veteran he should have been able to distinguish a car fleeing from a car approaching—you’d think. But no.

When the police arrived it came out that the driver had come to pick up another student at a nearby address. The car’s GPS system misdirected him to Sailors’ driveway. And Sailors was arrested for murder.

Sailors was reported to be grief-stricken—but he offered no apology when he accepted the plea deal that let him off with manslaughter. A news report says “Sailors did not want to comment after the hearing. He was surrounded by friends and family who came to the hearing as a show of support.” It also reported that he paid the victim’s family an undisclosed sum of money in settlement of a lawsuit. Nice.

Oh, yeah—for the record I did what a frightened elderly person would do—called 911 and waited. It turned out that the guy driving the car was not so much a crazed madman as a fellow who suffered a stroke, thus missing a turn and ending up in my yard. Probably just as well I didn’t shoot him, then.

Christianity and Common Law (guest post by Stevens and Brady)

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e have political Sabbaths, such as the 4th of July, and 22d of February. We reverence them as days of great political events. But we do not enforce their observance by legislation. But the act in question compels all to observe Sunday as a sacred day. To oblige men to refrain from labour out of regard to its holiness, is to “control” their religious observance, as much as if they were ordered to kneel before the altar, or the images of the Saints. And to all those who conscientiously believe that it is not a holy day—that it is not the true Sabbath of the Lord, it is an “interference” with, and a constraint of their rights of conscience. It is no answer to say that the day of rest should be uniform among all. If it were a mere civil regulation, there might be some reason in it; but then it would be made a day of recreation—of relaxation; and most probably those days would not come so frequently. The French, when they discarded its religious character, when they worshipped the Goddess of Reason, and provided only for the rest of the people, fixed the tenth day. But I suppose it requires no other argument than reading the several acts upon this subject, to prove that our legislation looks to enforcing the religious observance of the day. If the legislature can direct that religious observance, then there is no limit to their power over religious subjects. If they can direct the people to stay at home quietly, they can direct them to go to church, and if they can direct them to attend church, they can indicate the church to be attended. In short, if they have any power over religious subjects, they have all power. Such power would be a perfect union of church and state, so much abhorred by the people of this republic. It would inevitably lead to religious persecutions, and finally to civil and religious tyranny.

The doctrine that the “Christian religion is a part of the common, law,” is, I suppose, the foundation and justification of this act. That doctrine was promulgated in the worst times, and by the worst men of a government that avowedly united church aad state; in times when men were sent to the block or the stake on any frivolous charge of heresy. To deny transubstantiation or the supremacy of the Pope, was a capital offence under one reign; and to admit them was a capital offence under another. Men were punished as blasphemers for denying the divinity of our Saviour, because the “Christian religion was a part of the common law.” Men were executed in great numbers by the civil power for denying the real presence, because that was a part of the Christian religion—and the Christian religion was a part of the municipal law. When the Protestants gained the ascendancy, to believe in the real presence was contrary to the Christian religion, and therefore a violation of the law, and punished by the secular arm. For it is truly observed: “That no set of men were ever found willing to suffer martyrdom themselves for conscience’ sake, who would not inflict it upon others the moment they obtained power.”

As late as the nineteenth century, this pernicious doctrine led Lord Eldon to decide that Unitarians may be punished as blasphemers at common law, and not treated as Christians, notwithstanding the repeal of the statute of 9 and 10 Will. 3: 3 Merivale, 353, Atty. Genl. v. Pearson.

How dangerous, therefore, is the apparently pious doctrine that the “Christian religion is a part of the common law!” If it be true, all who disbelieve that religion are habitual breakers of the law. The Jew, the Hindoo, the Pagan, are perpetual malefactors. They, of course, are beyond the protection of the law, or continually subject to punishment for conscience’ sake. These consequences of the doctrine were very satisfactory to the English government, in its origin. They enabled the tyrants of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to find a convenient excuse for sending to the block any one who became obnoxious to them. If such tyrant were a Roman Catholic, the heresy of the reformation was sufficient. If he were a Protestant, adhering to the church of Rome was equally so. This lauded principle found ready advocates in such bloody tools of tyrants as Jeffries, Audley, and Rich.

What else was it but the doctrine “that the Christian religion. was a part of the law,” and to be enforced by the civil arm, that gave the Holy Inquisition such horrid force, and placed the civil and religious liberty, and the lives of nations of men, at the mercy of the bloodiest power that ever inflicted misery upon the human race, in the name of Demons or of Gods!

This eonvenient doctrine enabled Henry the Eighth to dispose of all whom he chose to call his enemies, whether they were learned and conscientious gentlemen, like Sir Thomas More, or were wives of whose beauty he was weary. His successor, after robbing all the Jews of the kingdom of all their wealth, either sent them to death or banished them from the empire. And he was right, if this principle be right, for they were always violating the law, and of course deserved punishment.

If this doctrine is to be the rule of action, where do you find its interpretation? Where are to be found adjudged decisions of what this law teaches, so that the people may escape the perils of its violation? Are they to be seen in the doings of the Council of Nice or the Diet of Augsburg? Are they in the bulls of Hildebrand or the writings of Luther? in the rigid doctrines of Calvin, or the more liberal opinions of Wesley? Does this part of the “common law” (adopted in Pennsylvania) command us to bow down before the image of the Virgin and the Saints; or, discarding all visible symbols, to worship the Unseen God? This doctrine must drive us for refuge to the infallible church of Rome, where the decrees of the Pope are the unerring rule of this part of the “common law.”

—Thaddeus Stevens and J. E. Brady, 1848

Quotation of the Day

Hitting on women at conferences who have made it clear that they don’t want to be hit on does not say, “Sex is awesome!” Making video games where all or most of the female characters are helpless victims or scantily-clad sexual prizes does not say, “Sex is awesome!” Getting women drunk or high so you can have sex with them does not say, “Sex is awesome!” Treating the idea of enthusiastic affirmative sexual consent as ridiculous does not say, “Sex is awesome!” The exact opposite is true. All of this says, “Sex is a minefield. Sex is a battleground.”

Greta Christina
(Notes from a Pornographer on Sexism)

International Day for Tolerance

Step up and shake the hand
Of someone you can’t stand;
You can tolerate him if you try.—Tom Lehrer (National Brotherhood Week)

T

olerance is rather an odd thing to promote as a virtue. To tolerate someone seems like the least—the very least—we can do. Tolerating something is putting up with it—an adult tolerating the screams of a child, a pet-owner tolerating his iguana crapping in the shower.

Noah Webster nailed the concept in his 1828 dictionary: “…the allowance of that which is not wholly approved”. Indeed. He goes on to define toleration is its then-current incarnation:

… the allowance of religious opinions and modes of worship in a state, when contrary to or different from those of the established church or belief. Toleration implies a right in the sovereign to control men in their opinions and worship, or it implies the actual exercise of power in such control. Where no power exists or none is assumed to establish a creed and a mode of worship, there can be no toleration, in the strict sense of the word, for one religious denomination has as good a right as another to the free enjoyment of its creed and worship.

So what place does toleration have in a world where “me and you is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better” (as H. L.Mencken put it, channeling Thomas Jefferson)? What business do I have to tolerate you, or you to tolerate me, unless one of us is in a position to dictate to the other? Mind you, living in a nation in which mad tea partiers fly into hysterical rage at the mere sight of a dark-skinned person voting, I am aware that for some people at least tolerance would be a good first step. Better would be the realization that you have no right to privileges you would deny to others.

The UN vision of tolerance (PDF) is a bit wider, however:

Tolerance is respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world's cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human. It is fostered by knowledge, openness, communication, and freedom of thought, conscience and belief. Tolerance is harmony in difference. It is not only a moral duty, it is also a political and legal requirement. Tolerance, the virtue that makes peace possible, contributes to the replacement of the culture of war by a culture of peace.

Further:

Tolerance is not concession, condescension or indulgence. Tolerance is, above all, an active attitude prompted by recognition of the universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of others. In no circumstance can it be used to justify infringements of these fundamental values. Tolerance is to be exercised by individuals, groups and States.

All right, all that seems pretty straightforward. Hard to take exception to, really, And yet there are those who somehow have managed that. Take this website from Kjos ministries, for example. It finds something sinister in the replacing intolerance with tolerance. “Can Christian children really ‘appreciate’ what God forbids?” it wants to know. The author seems to be especially worried that if “one's views are not to be imposed on others” it would mean the end of “shar[ing] the gospel”, and that “Christian moral values” might be “equated with violence”. (Why on earth would that be, unless the author feels that violence is somehow a vital part of Christian morality?) It appears there’s always some raving loon out there prepared to take exception to the blandest and most innocuous of statements.

Anyway, today is the International Day for Tolerance. Show your support. Let’s get out there and tolerate somebody.