Things Forgotten

Some kind of solitude is measured out in you
You think you know me but you haven’t got a clue

Hey Bulldog (The Beatles)

Many things are not working—please don’t tell me what they are. I have something to say, damn it. Listen to me. Words echoing down the corridors of time, deliberately preserved, accidentally preserved, partially preserved. But mostly lost. Since the beginning of writing—apparently a cobbled-together memory crutch to help keep track of sacks of grain and cart-axles—most of humankind’s words have been lost. Legends have it that this or that emperor or king ordered writings consigned to the flames—but that really wasn’t necessary. All that it took was for the educated classes, the scribes, those capable of writing, to just stop copying them. Worm, rot, fire, flood, the ordinary wear and tear of life take their toll, parchment and paper dissolve, and the words are lost. Where are the plays of Menander, the greatest comic playwright of the ancient world? Lost, except for scraps recovered from ancient garbage-heaps. Where are the works of Democritus, whose atomic theory perhaps foreshadowed the developments of science? According to ancient gossip Plato wanted to burn his books—but that wasn’t necessary. With the triumph of Christianity anti-science was in full swing, and Plato’s mystical ramblings were copied—while the works of Democritus were allowed to rot. Where are the works of the gloomy Etruscans, about which the emperor Claudius wrote, or the busy Phoenicians, who invented the alphabet? Mani’s religion stretched from Turkey to China—and where are his scriptures now? Even the favored few suffered. We have more plays from Euripides than any of his contemporaries, yet his popular Andromeda survives only in a single scene as parodied by Aristophanes. There are more copies of Paul’s letters than perhaps any writer of antiquity—but his (or is it Deutero-Paul’s?) letter to the Laodiceans is known only from a single reference.

Listen to me. I am living tradition, humankind’s memory. I am Herodotus, who hacked away at something that would someday be history, and Aristotle, who took a stab at something that would someday be science. I am Sun Tzu, who wrote of war, and Ovid, who wrote of love. I am Kālidāsa and Terence, Qoheleth and Mencius. I am the anonymous epitomizers, editors, and redactors who shaped and transmitted the material, the scribes who copied it, and the audiences for whom it came into being and continued to be transmitted, the owners who treasured the written words.

Listen to me, damn it. I’m humankind, and I have something to say. Living tradition is only part of the story; accidental preservation counts too. The letters home by Roman soldiers stationed in Britain before the empire’s retreat, preserved in unpromising soil. The inventory lists baked in Cretan clay. Astronomical observations dug out of the rocks. Someone’s ancient to-do list preserved in sand. A famous sage’s sayings preserved on bamboo and buried with its owner. A handful of characters badly scrawled by an apprentice scribe. A local official’s panicked letter to a distant and possibly uncaring monarch. An imposing monument commemorating a long-forgotten battle.

I have something to say—listen to me. I’m recovered texts, flashbacks from memories forgotten. Codices stuffed in jars and left undisturbed for a thousand years, libraries of clay tablets buried under fallen walls, words preserved in the writings of others, hymns in unremembered languages written on the walls of tombs, fragments found in unknown garbage dumps that bring dead words back to life. Accidental glimpses into past deeds, past thoughts, past ways of being.

A person’s memory is limited to a tiny slice of time; humankind’s memory extends much further, and continues to grow the further out we peer into time and space. The moment is fleeting; the future insubstantial; what we have is memory. Listen to it; it has something to say.

An Annoying Letter from John Adams

I have too many damn tabs open, and there’s something of interest, positive or negative, in nearly all of them. Well, of interest to me, anyway, not necessarily to you or anybody else. I’ve been trying to bookmark them, which is not easy, as Google Chrome only lets me bookmark a page once, and many of my open pages frankly intersect various projects and interests. A case in point: I have in front of me a letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, written 4 November 1816, that stands at the crossroads of several things I’m working on.

For one thing, I have my idiot project of writing a commentary on “America’s Forsaken Roots,”—not the three-part thing I did earlier, but a more detailed refutation drawing on a larger variety of sources. One of the claims the document made is that John Adams was president of the American Bible Society. Well, in this letter he comments on the usefulness of such an institution:

We have now, it seems, a National Bible Society, to propagate King James’s Bible, through all Nations. Would it not be better to apply these pious subscriptions to purify Christendom from the Corruptions of Christianity, than to propagate those corruptions in Europe, Asia, Africa and America?

Ouch. Not so friendly as all that, it seems. So, logically, should I not bookmark this with the “Forsaken Roots” stuff?

Not so fast. He continues:

Suppose we should project a society to translate Dupuis into all Languages, and offer a Reward in Medals and Diamonds to any Man or Body of Men who would produce the best answer to it.

Okay, now we touch on another consideration—Charles François Dupuis was an astronomer and a proponent of Mythicism—the concept that Jesus never actually existed and that some kind of mythological figure (if I remember correctly Dupuis saw the Jesus story as a solar myth) has been given historical flesh and made to walk among men. Such things do happen—Robin Hood and Roswell come to mind here—but Jesus seems an unlikely candidate. In any case I’ve been toying with doing something with some of the old-line Mythicists at some point, and Dupuis is on my reading-list. File under Mythicism?

Or maybe not. Adams goes on:

It is more worth your while to read Dupuis than Grimm. Of all the romances and true histories I ever read, it is the most entertaining and instructive, though Priestley calls it “dull.”

Priestley, yeah, Joseph Priestley—I’m working my way through some of his stuff even now, mostly in connection with his observations on the necessity of disestablishment—and I’ve got a piece on a weird Christian meme that he has a connection with in the works. So maybe it should go under Joseph Priestley.

Or what about Adams’ religion, a subject dear to what passes for hearts among the Christian Nationite crowd? This letter has meat for that stew as well:

Conclude not from all this that I have renounced the Christian Religion, or that I agree with Dupuis in all his sentiments. Far from it. I see in every Page something to recommend Christianity in its Purity, and something to discredit its Corruptions. 

If I had Strength, I would give you my Opinion of it in a Fable of the Bees. 

The Ten Commandments and The Sermon on the Mount contain my Religion.

So that’s where it all kind of falls apart. So many places to file it—and I have to choose one. Maybe I’ll just write about it here instead. That way I can close the tab with a clear conscience, knowing that I’ll never have to look at the damn thing again, let alone make any sort of decision on how to use it. Blog and forget. It may not be the best policy, but at least it puts off the day of reckoning.

Madness and Politics

You know—just a thought. Jobs. Let me say it again—jobs. That’s what the people of the United States are looking for right now. Nobody gives a damn about this debt-ceiling nonsense. Most people are prepared for a certain number of program cuts and tax increases, but what they’re really interested in is getting back to work. Seeing the economy running again. Bromides like only the market can create jobs aren’t going to cut it any longer. People are tired of praying to a Market God that never seems to listen. This is something that both Democrats and Republicans need to deal with, but it especially applies to the Mad Tea Partiers. Sabotaging the economy in the hopes of winning elections is probably not going to be a winning strategy. People tend to re-elect when their personal finances are going well; folk who surf the wave of economic discontent are likely to crash on the rocks of broken dreams.

Things I'm Reading

Dazed and confused, my sleep in tatters from having helped to lug a recycled bathroom sink six or eight blocks so we can once again have at least one full bathroom in this deranged boarding house I once called home, I now find myself limping around my little corner of the blogosphere (and does a sphere have corners?) with nothing to say. Fortunately the rest of you haven’t given up.

I see Josh Rosenau has his piece up about the Miss USA contestants’ depressing responses to a question about teaching evolution in schools—depressing in that most of them clearly had no idea what science is, what a theory might be, or why presenting “both sides” of an issue (especially an issue where there really is only one side) may be absolutely idiotic. And Duane Smith is enthusiastic about “Akkadian tagged texts and translations from royal inscriptions from Esarhaddon [being] now online". It’s fantastic how much ancient material is now accessible without getting out of my chair; I don't think people appreciate this miracle of the age. Is the internet eroding memory? I wouldn’t be surprised; I’ve increasingly got in the habit of regoogling rather than retaining stuff in the storage heaps of my memory. I thought I was just getting old, but maybe mankind’s memory is now electronic. Jason Thibeault is appalled by a recent Greenpeace action against genetically modified crops: “The whole point of this genetically modified wheat is to provide more nutrition for humans, which one would think is a noble goal especially from an environmental standpoint—less crops feeding more people means more food for less damage to the planet in the form of pesticides.” It seems like Mary Shelley has a lot to answer for--the whole there-are-some-things-man-is-not-meant-to-tamper-with bit. Frankencrops at large. You know corn is a large part of our diet these days—ever tried corn that hasn’t been genetically modified? Humankind’s been at this game a long time, guys. And J. L. Bell muses about the identity of the remains of a British soldier found in Nova Scotia—was he a Private James Simpson, who died in 1784? Can we ever be certain with a case this cold?

Okay, I’m fresh out of inspiration. It’s a good thing you guys still have things to write about. It saves me the trouble of coming up with something of my own. Thanks.

Fireflies in the Night

L’affaire Elevator-Guy continues, Congress worries over defending us from the scourge of energy-efficient light bulbs, the King James Bible celebrates its 400th anniversary, and the people rehash the Casey Anthony verdict. I’m sure all these things are important, and I intend to throw in my two bits’ wroth on them all in the near future, but I don’t really feel motivated right now. Enervation takes over. It’s hot, not July summer hot, but hot enough to sap energy and will for all that. Fitful firefly weather—not that we get fireflies here in the pacific northwest. I’ve seen them, though, eerie and silent in the summer night.

Random thoughts flicker aimlessly through my night-dulled mind. An airplane crash in 1951 that took the life of a young West Point cadet who left behind a remarkable monument to his life—a thirty-page account of an Indian war that in some respects surpassed any serious work available at that time. A proposed duel between a future president and a political opponent that would have involved broadswords and a pit on a Mississippi island. A bizarre 1966 album by some guys from New Jersey that could have changed the course of rock ‘n’ roll (well, no, but it would have been an interesting collectable if it had been released). More sightings of Christian Nationite faux quotations. A strange Supreme Court case which Daniel Webster—who once beat the devil—lost in arguing that only Christians were capable of charity. But none of it jells. I need something for each of them—some further bit of information, some way of putting the inexplicable into perspective, to do any of them justice. If History isn’t to be just “a bunch of stuff that happened” (to quote the great Homer Simpson) or “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (as a British playwright once put it), there has to be something more to it. A place to stand that puts the whole into some sort of perspective. And right now my perspective is limited indeed. Events look like nothing more than fireflies flitting fitfully through a hot summer night.

Constant Interruptions in a Sea of Crap

Every time I drift away from the mindscum principle I end up regretting it, and this July seems to be no exception. I had some thoughts—if that’s not too grandiose a term for a few disjointed and random reflections—about the birth of my nation, as seen from the perspective of its decline and fall, and I had them fitted into a scheme with themes for each of the first four days of July, but nothing is working out. The first day of July was filled with constant interruptions, and what I thought I would post early never got posted at all. The second day got aborted in an orgy of food and irrelevant festivities.

I’ve lost whatever impulse I’ve ever had to write this third day of July in the twelve thousand eleventh year of the Holocene Era. The question that keeps going through my head as I try to keep up with the noxious fumes that pass for news in the vast sea of crap that is the internet is—what the fuck? The writers I read are all obsessed with L’Affaire Elevator-Guy, my fellow-Republicans (and I hereby denounce you all) are intent on destroying the nation that supports them and allows them to thrive, and that nation is spending its blood and treasure on foreign wars of no obvious utility. And all of this is nothing but smoke-and-mirrors, meaningless sideshows to the main event—the suicide of the only species on earth capable of appreciating the universe, in any abstract sense, that is.

We’re flunking our first test as an intelligent matter-manipulating species—a species in control of its own destiny. I get that microbes will eat up their surroundings until there is nothing more to eat and then perish. They’re microbes, damn it, brainless, senseless, barely a notch above the fucking rocks. They don’t know any better. We do. We’ve always known better than our behavior. When Euro-Americans were slaughtering the indigenous peoples and piously pretending that it was God’s doing, not theirs, there were people like John Beeson to point out that their excuses were a load of shit, empty self-serving mutterings and shriekings used to keep common sense at bay. When the United States embarked on its imperial adventure in the Philippines under the guise of a noble quest to aid an oppressed people there were people like Mark Twain to call its bluff and show the enterprise for what it was. And we know now that our primary energy source—the one that allows us to exist in the billions on the surface of our planet—is running out. We know that one of the consequences of exploiting it recklessly is increasing heat here where we live. We have this amazing material, the residue of organisms that have lived and died in their millions before us, our stored capital as it were—and we can think of nothing better to do with it than burn it. We know that we cannot feed the people who are already here without some major new influx of energy—and yet we do nothing to solve our problems, nothing but hysterically deny the very existence of what is right in front of us. We are the actual embodiment of the fictional lemmings—the creatures who periodically destroy themselves by rushing into the sea and drowning themselves in large numbers. This is a test, damn it—God’s test for us, if you like—and we’re flunking it big time.

Happy Independence Day.

The Unicode and Other Mythical Beasts

I want to write something but nothing comes. A sense of impending doom overwhelms me—like the “Eli’s Coming” episode of Sports Night. Does it mean something? It never does. Random synapses firing or something (and I’m sure the smartass college students who room here would set me straight on what a synapse is). My days are eaten up with trivia as I try to get moved in to my new computer; I’m back to obsessively searching for my perfect font. The Latin characters (used for English and French) should look reasonably decent, since they’re what I normally write in. But I have to have all the Greek characters (accents and breathings, right?), the Coptic characters, and the goddamn standard symbols for the days of the week—the symbol for today being ♀. It’s surprising how few fonts have all the Greek characters, given that classical scholarship is hardly dead yet. And fewer still have the Coptic, which is perhaps not surprising, but, you know, the language is in liturgical use. A number of fonts have the astrological symbols—of which the ones I need are a subset—but those never seem to have the complete Greek collection. So once again I end up switching from font to font, using one for Greek, one for English and French, and still another for the various symbols. Does this make sense?

And why on earth does the Unicode have room for chess symbols, and dominos, but not for the standard weather symbols used by meteorologists? Do these reflect real priorities? If space can be allotted for Shavian script, why not for Tengwar? I bet more people write the latter than the former (though for me it’s the other way around). And why are the Coptic symbols split up, while Greek gets not one, but two sets of letters with acute accents? Do we really need so many spaces reserved for stars and snowflakes?

And why is it that the more complete a font is, the more likely it is to have inelegant-looking Latin characters? Is this some kind of political statement?

Voice Fiddle and Flute No Longer Be Mute

I see in the world at large that some pop singer is in trouble for mangling the US national anthem at a major sporting event. To be honest I’m not quite clear on who exactly Christina Aguilera is—an ex-Mouseketeer or something?—or what is the significance of the Superbowl in American culture. Early twenty-first century US history is way outside my field of study. Still, however, no matter my level of incompetency, I feel a few observations are in order.

We don’t really require much of a national anthem. It should be singable by the average untrained citizen, for one thing—no difficult intervals, range not much more than an octave, no tricky chord changes—and the words should be relatively simple. It should sound reasonably decent whether sung a cappella or played by a military brass band. It should invite people to sing along with it. “Paint it Black” would make a good national anthem.

“The Star-Spangled Banner,” however, fails on all counts. The music, with its octave-and-a-half range, seems made for the unearthly banshee howls of a theremin rather than a normal human voice, and the words are impenetrable in their obscurity. “Oh, say, can you see by the dawn’s early light what so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming, whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, o’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?” Try diagramming that sentence sometime. Hey, now that the sun’s come up, can you still see the stars and stripes flying? You know, that thing we saluted so proudly last night and saw glimpses of it streaming over the ramparts while we watched the battle last night? That thing? Is it still there?

I mean, it must have been one hell of a moving moment for Mr. F. S. Key, held prisoner on a British ship till the battle ended, to “see by the dawn’s early light” that the American flag was still flying over Ft. McHenry, showing that the British attack had failed and at least for the moment the city of Baltimore had not fallen. But you had to be there. What does the defense of Ft. McHenry mean to a twenty-first century American citizen? Not much, apparently—as the first draft of a film presentation that escaped into the interwebs showed. Its author apparently thought that Ft. Henry (as he called it) was under attack during the Revolutionary War, not the misnamed War of 1812. The ace researcher whose account he used failed on even the simplest of facts.

And not to put too fine a point on it, Key himself doesn’t seem to have taken the thing too seriously. His piece was a double-retread—not only was the melody an old English drinking song (“To Anacreon in Heav’n”) but the words were recycled from an earlier song he’d written about the return of Stephen Decatur from the war with the Barbary pirates:

In the conflict resistless, each toil they endured,
’Till their foes fled dismayed from the war’s desolation;
And pale beamed the Crescent, its splendor obscured
By the light of the Star Spangled flag of our nation.
Where each radiant star gleamed a meteor of war,
And the turbaned heads bowed to its terrible glare,
Now, mixed with the olive, the laurel shall wave,
And form a bright wreath for the brows of the brave.

Same tune, same star-spangled flag, same rhyming of wave with brave. Originality clearly was not Key’s strong suit.

And, you know, revisiting Key’s published output, I’m struck by one thing. To describe Key as a mediocre poet would be wrong. No, not just wrong—it would be a flat-out lie. It would be such over-the-top flattery that even Donald Rumsfeld would choke on the bald-faced mendacity of it. Key was a wretched poet. Not as bad as Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford, perhaps the brass-standard of wretched poets, but a vile wordsmith from the same misbegotten tribe. Sham religiosity, pedantry, forced rhymes, pedestrian observations—gack. Consider the eighth and final quatrain of his exquisite “To a Rose-Bud”:

Then haste, and when, with anxious step,
Thy growth to mark, I next shall walk,
Then let me see thy blushing head
Bend with its dewy weight thy stalk.

Or here’s Key apparently channeling the spirit of a backwoods pre-Victorian schoolgirl:

Farewell, ye once delightful scenes! farewell!
No more your charms can soothe my aching heart;
These long-drawn sighs, these flowing tears, can tell
How much I grieve, sweet scenes! from you to part.
[—opening verse of “Stanzas”]

And here’s Key picturing some joyous future scene when the deaf will finally hear:

They shall hear the trumpet’s fearful blast,
And the crash of the rending tomb,
And the sinner’s cry of agony,
As he wakes to his dreaded doom.
[—from “Lines Given to William Darlington, a Deaf and Dumb Boy”]

I bet the deaf kid could hardly wait for that moment. Seriously, this is our best? In a country that boasts the likes of Carl Sandburg and Wallace Stevens, this incompetent hack is our National Lyricist? And as for the music—again, in the land of Charles Ives, Duke Ellington, and Kurt Cobain we have to fall back on a tune written by John Stafford Smith, a composer who is not only obscure, but British to boot?

Who picked this thing, anyway? Wasn’t that John Philip Sousa, composer of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and other patriotic marches? Why the hell didn’t he write something himself? At the very least it would pass the brass band test.

It’s not like we don’t have a wealth of patriotic songs to choose from. What about “My Country ’Tis of Thee?” It’s singable, anyway. Okay, the lyrics suck and the tune is the British anthem “God Save the King”, but even so it’s better than what we got stuck with. And there’s “America the Beautiful”, right? Samuel Ward’s music is reasonably melodic, and not too hard for the average voice to wrap itself around. But the words…

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears.

Yeah, there’s an image to conjure with. If human beings aren’t weeping, who, or what is, in these alabaster cities? Crocodiles? Okay, how about Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic”?

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”

Say, what? That’s pretty strange stuff coming from a Unitarian, not hardly PC at all. And way too much God for our modern secular state. But it's stirring, you gotta admit.

Or we could consider Woody Guthrie’s paean to mindless greed, “This Land Was Made for You and Me”. Or Israel Baline’s trite but reliable “God Bless America.” They're both noted for their sing-along qualities at any rate. I mean, there are other possibilities.

I’ll give you one example. It’s singable, it passes the brass band test, it’s got eagles flying and freedom ringing and all that good stuff.

To hear the sound of freedom many gave their lives;
They fought for you and me.
Those memories will always live inside us,
And now it’s our time to be free.

Where the eagles fly I will soon be there.
If you want to come along with me my friend,
Say the words and you’ll be free
From the mountains to the sea
We’ll fight for freedom again.

Okay, maybe it sounds a bit more like an air force recruiting song than a patriotic hymn, but what about it? Anyone for Manowar?

Sing It, Fat Lady!

Today’s question comes from a long-time reader (hi, Mom!) who wants to know where the expression “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” comes from. The expression has been around for a bit, at least since the empty eighties, and it’s roughly equivalent to the old proverb, “It ain’t over till it’s over,” attributed to the well-known cartoon character, Yogi Berra. It means apparently that nothing is settled until all the accounts are totaled up, or something like that.

It’s a good point. I remember years ago as a backgammon game wound down my opponent wanted to throw in the towel, seeing that I clearly had the game won at that point. Like an idiot I pointed out that things were really closer than they looked. “If you were to throw double sixes on the next roll,” I said (and boy have these words stuck with me), “and I were to say get a two and a one on my next, well you could easily win the thing.” And much to my chagrin (I should have kept my mouth shut) my opponent did in fact throw double sixes on his next roll, and I got a two and a one or something equally useless on mine, and I ended up losing. It really ain’t over till it’s, well, over.

But the fat lady—where the hell does she come in? Personally, I first remember hearing the expression shortly after I left college, during the reign of the late unlamented Ronald McReagan, Czar of all the Americas. It was a punch-line to a joke I no longer remember, but the set-up was rather like the old Homer and Jethro routine, where the pair wanders into an opera to get out of the rain thinking they were going to see a western, and instead forty-seven people sung without a horse in sight. Hekyll nudges his buddy during a pause and asks, “Is it over yet, Jekyll?” And his buddy replies, pointing to the soprano, “Nah, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”

So, maybe, it was a bit of belated Green Acres style humor to enlighten the tedium of those dark days when nuclear holocaust lurked just around the corner. Poking fun at the rubes, as it were. Even those of us who wouldn’t be caught dead creeping into an opera house get the joke. But—but—how do sports come into it? Don’t we usually hear it in connection with some sporting event—a dramatic cliffhanger of a ninth-inning foos- or kickball spectacular? “And there he goes, [I hear this in Billy Crystal’s Howard Cosell voice] bobbing and weaving down the stretch, shedding backstops like ninepins into the goal zone and it’s all over!” “Well, Ed, [comes the reply] there’s still two seconds left on the clock and anything can happen. Remember, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”

Okay, well, according to the nearest thing we have to absolute truth written by a roomful of monkeys hitting random keys (full disclosure: I too am a Wikipedia editor) it came about something like this. Ralph Carpenter (described as a Texas Tech sports information director) and Bill Morgan (presumably the nineteenth century baseball player) were calling a game of some sort “in the SWC tournament finals” early in 1976. The score was 72-72, and the dialog went like this:

Bill Morgan: Hey, Ralph, this … is going to be a tight one after all.

Ralph Carpenter: Right. The opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings.

Bill Morgan still remembered the incident in 2006. He believed that Carpenter came up with it on the spur of the moment. “Oh, yeah, it was vintage Carpenter. He was one of the world’s funniest guys.”

A couple of years later it turned up again, after a basketball (is there such a game?) contest in April 1978 between the “San Antonio Spurs” and the “Washington Bullets”. Broadcaster Dan Cook observed after the Spurs victory that “The opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” meaning that a single victory didn’t determine the outcome of the series.

Now if you’re like me you may well be wondering, what the hell does opera have to do with sports? (Well, other than the fact that I personally detest them both.) Why would an opera metaphor end up as a sports cliché? And also, you know, the fat lady pretty much sings throughout the opera. It’s not like the soprano waits till the end before she sounds off. It’s sort of an ongoing thing.

Well, there is an alternative explanation out there, and in this one the fat lady has a name—Kate Smith. Yes, that Kate Smith, the songbird of the south, whose function in the world (if we believe the supply-siders) was to sell Studebakers and Jell-O, is supposed to be the fat lady of the cliché. She, goes the story, used to finish off sports events of some kind (something called the “World Series” is often mentioned) by singing Israel Isidore Baline’s patriotic hymn “God Bless America” to a no-doubt attentive crowd trying to beat the rush to the exits.

Smith, who weighed a ninth of a ton in her prime, could certainly have been described as a “fat lady,” so that’s one point in the story’s favor, but the rest doesn’t work very well. First, the singing, if any, is usually done at the beginning of sports events, and in fact on those occasions when she did sing for games (more typically a recording was used), it was before the game began. There was even an expression, a reference to the one under discussion, that “It ain’t begun till the fat lady sings.” And also—well, if she did sing at the end of the game, then “it ain’t over till the fat lady sings” wouldn’t actually be true, as the game would have ended before the fat lady sang. Truth may be expecting a lot from a cliché, but still, there are limits to artistic license, aren’t there?

Now I should warn you that this isn’t going to be one of those pieces where at the end I triumphantly announce Aha—it was Jacques Mallet du Pan, writing in The Virginian, and he did it with the Lead Pipe! No, on this one I’m as Clueless as the next guy. But I’ve got to say that neither of these explanations cut it. They both stink of folk etymology, after-the-fact retrojections into the unknown. Campfire stories. Legends.

Is there another option? Well, another story has it—and like the Kate Smith tale I picked this one up surfing the interwaves—that it’s an old Southern proverb that originally ran “Church ain’t over till the fat lady sings.” You see, this explanation has it, in Southern churches services ended with a song usually sung by choir members who (we may suppose) were specially selected for their weight. It was only when these ladies had warbled their best shot that the doors were opened and the parishioners allowed to finally leave, no doubt giving thanks to whatever God they still believed in after all that.

This explanation has at least one merit—church services do indeed use music to cue the audience as to when to stand, when to sit, and when to beat a hasty retreat. I personally examined many church services on this very point for a college paper I wrote for an anthropology class (Music in Culture), and that one fact stands out very clearly in my memory. Music was liminal, a delineator used to separate events. But I don’t see how the fat lady gets into it. Singing, sure, church choirs are even a cliché themselves. But unless, say, Southern Baptists have some special fat-lady tradition I don’t see how the saying is relevant. And again—in my personal observation music is used in church services throughout—not just at the end. It don’t fit—and if it don’t fit, you must acquit.

Apparently quite a few people have written on the subject, but nobody seems to have hit the nail squarely on the thumb. If anybody has something resembling evidence on the subject, let me know. Or write it up in Wikipedia. It has a whole article on the subject.

The Machine Stops

There were gradations of terror—at times came rumours of hope—the Mending Apparatus was almost mended—the enemies of the Machine had been got under—new “nerve-centres” were evolving which would do the work even more magnificently than before. But there came a day when, without the slightest warning, without any previous hint of feebleness, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they understood it, ended.

E. M. Forster

There is no salmon in the stores—rumor has it that the oceans have died and that the bounty it has supplied in the past will no longer be ours for the taking. Corned beef has vanished inexplicably too. I ventured out of my cell today in quest of my new glasses—the ones that will allow me to read again without blocking one eye and squinting with the other—but the stars were against me.

The robotic voice at the municipal conveyance station informed us that the Steel Bridge connection was borked, and delays of up to twenty minutes were to be expected. We would have to find our own way across the Willamette somehow, and God have mercy on our souls. It was not reassuring, far from it, but perhaps only to be expected in these Days of Decline.

The horizontal conveyance was late and crowded, but the signs of ongoing life were reassuring. We sailed past the vats of ruined beer at the Widmer brewery and deadended at the Rose Quarter, where the voice of the system—a person this time, and not the usual robot—suggested that we find whatever alternate transport we could, since he was taking the conveyance back up to the Expo Center. We dismounted at a dead run, making for the sole transport device in sight, which serenely left the platform before we could catch up with it. It was stuffed to the gills with people anyway, and there were a lot of us.

“Sign the medical marijuana petition?” asked a guy on the platform hopelessly. “We just want to get it on the ballot, a yes or no vote, right?”

“Can I read it?” I asked.

“That’s probably wise,” he said, “But I’ll have to unhook the petition from the clipboard. The text’s on the back, you see.” He was clearly hoping I would change my mind.

“I like to read something before I sign it,” I said apologetically. “It’s a quirk. I’ve been taken in before.” I was really wondering if any of these machines would actually take me across the river, or if I was waiting here for nothing.

He gingerly unhooked the document and handed it to me, while heading off in search of another victim. I read a lot of verbiage about setting up marijuana dispensaries while wondering vaguely, don’t we already have medical marijuana? What would this bill actually do? Still, it seemed churlish not to sign the petition after the guy had gone to all the trouble of unhooking it for me to read. I signed it and passed it back to him.

An ancient belching monstrosity ground to a halt on the tracks alongside me, loaded with people, and I ascended the steps and sat cautiously down while it chugged protestingly off in the general direction of downtown. There was mysterious activity going on on the bridge, and men seemed to be indicating structural elements that might be on their last legs. “The bridge was stuck open this morning,” somebody said. Best not to look, I thought, and stared bleakly out down the gray river.

Our transport device creaked and screeched as we rumbled into downtown Portland at approximately the speed that could have been managed a hundred years before by an arthritic donkey pulling a ton of coal. Walking would probably have been faster, but the scene outside was not inviting, featuring artificial chasms and crags. It was a relief to see that the municipal library’s iron gates were still hanging invitingly open, and some flickering lights showed business continuing. I clambered out and walked up the few streets to the place my new glasses supposedly awaited.

There was a badly-scrawled sheet hanging on the glass door; it communicated somewhat incoherently the intelligence that the Vision Center was closed due to the (unexplained) power outage. There were people crawling about in the ruins inside, but I was still as blind as Henry Bemis on the steps of the shattered library in the Twilight Zone episode. It isn’t fair—it isn’t fair at all, damn it.

Sometimes living in the future sucks.

They've Just Lifted the Sombrero Ban in Germany

Okay, once again I'm going to try to write more regularly here. On the other hand, today was filled up with adventures in plumbing and I didn't have time to write anything that wasn't crap. But as I've just learned from a reliable source that the sombrero ban in Germany has finally been lifted, and that thousands of sombrero-wearing Germans have just taken to the streets, I will write a quick note expressing my solidarity with sombrero-wearers everywhere. Not that I'm going to actually go so far as to wear a sombrero myself, mind you.

This leaves only Detroit and the Czech Republic as sombrero-free islands in the rising tide of oversize hats.

Various Manifestations of News

It’s cold here in the Pacific Northwest, damn cold, and I’ve spent the night periodically stalking through the house making sure the pipes don’t burst and nothing is catching fire.  The temperature is supposed to be 15 degrees Fahrenheit, and I’m really sick of it, to tell the truth.  The arctic air should be gone in a couple of days, which will be a gigantic load off my mind, and with any luck maybe things will return to something resembling normal for a Portland winter.

Strange news drifts in and piles up on my virtual desk.  Some of these things practically defy comment.  At the Sikh Temple in Vancouver (BC) a slate of relatively youthful “fundamentalist” candidates defeated the older “moderate” incumbents handily.  At issue: the use of chairs and tables instead of the traditional mats in the community dining area.  The incumbents had introduced the use of these heretical modern innovations, and the younger generation were having none of it.  People in wheelchairs, apparently, are exempt from the mat requirement.  [Vancouver Sun, Surrey Leader, The Globe and Mail]

In Nigeria witch-hunter Helen Ukpabio has filed suit in federal court against Leo Igwe, the Center for Inquiry’s representative there.

Ukpabio is seeking damages of 200 billion Nigerian Naira, more than $1.3 billion, for supposedly unlawful and unconstitutional infringement on her rights to belief in “God, Satan, witchcraft, Heaven and Hell fire” and for the alleged unlawful and unconstitutional detention of two members of her church.

It seems that she’s been crusading against an epidemic of witches among the women and children of the lower classes, and she feels that her efforts are being impeded by rationalists who deride her efforts as superstitious nonsense.

The suit also seeks to prevent law enforcement from arresting or detaining any member of the Liberty Gospel Church for performing or engaging in what they say are constitutionally protected religious activities. These activities include the burning of three children, ages 3 through 6, with fire and hot water, as reported by James Ibor of the Basic Rights Counsel in Nigeria on August 24, 2009. The parents believed their children were witches.

The witch-hunter led an angry mob to attack Leo Igwe last July; presumably this also would be a constitutionally protected religious activity. [Center for Inquiry; h/t Ed Brayton]

And, of course, as we all know now, Uganda is lined up to pass a law mandating the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”, and the people behind it have been aided and encouraged by the American lobbying group known as The Family, an outfit that has some of our most regressive politicians as members.

Sometimes I feel as though I were living during the time of Richard IV of England, when the legendary Lord Blackadder flourished.

 

Standard Rant #415

One thing that irritates me no end—and I've seen this all my life in letters to the editor, heard it from callers on talk radio, and now read it in comment threads—are people who recycle talking points and then pretend that these are their own notions, wisdom distilled from a lifetime's experience, or from wide reading, or from personal research. You know, the other day when I was casually thumbing through the writings of Lincoln (some guy will claim), I was struck by his prophetic words, "You cannot raise up the poor by pulling down the rich." Or as Patrick Henry put it (some earnest young woman will write) America was founded by Christians, not by religionists (and then act offended if you point out that Barton or Kennedy are hardly reliable sources). Well I never heard of this Barton (she will claim), I just like to read what our American Founders actually wrote.

You know why I call bullshit on these kinds of claims? Because you, Mr. Strawman, never got that from reading the writings of Abraham Lincoln; you got that from the misattribution of some ideologue. And you, Ms. Chimera, didn't get that religionists line from a lifetime reading the Founders; you picked it up from some fool with an ax to grind. How do I know that? In these cases it's easy; they're fake. You won't find the one in the writings of Abraham Lincoln, or the other in the speeches of Patrick Henry, because they're made up.

And even when they're genuine, you guys give yourselves away again and again by quoting Adams, say, with the same sentence omitted, or by citing rule number two of the 1642 Harvard student rules as rule number one. Copying from an anonymous e-mail is not doing your own research, and pretending that it is is not only dishonest, it makes you look as much of an ignorant fool as the ignorant fool whose work you're stealing.

For those who wish to pass off other people's work as their own I do have some suggestions. First, steal from the best. The more accurate the work you're stealing from, the harder it is to prove theft. It's the mistakes and misrepresentations that give you away.

Second, cross-check your material. If the material you're stealing cites a source, check it out. Maybe you can find something a bit different from that source that you can use that will at least give the appearance that you came to it on your own. If more than one writer is making similar points, blend them. That will muddy the trail. And if you can find somebody writing in opposition, check them out. If there was a mistake in the material you're stealing they will be likely to find it out, and at the very least it will enable you to anticipate likely objections.

Third, if at all possible add some original touch to your theft. A quotation, observation, or other bit of hard data that hasn't already been circulating with your stolen talking points will go a long way toward giving the impression of originality.

And fourth, don't repeat your talking points in the same order as everybody else. It's a dead giveaway. Two people looking at the same material independently are not very likely to come up with the same exact talking-points in the same exact order. And for God's sake vary the wording. Nothing is so fatal to the impression of originality as repeating the same wording as every other writer on the subject.

And last, leave the bogus points out. If your source says, for example, that the fossil Lucy is a known fake, drop that point. It's poison. There's a lot of made-up shit out there, and nothing is so fatal to the impression of originality as repeating a bogus "fact."

Of course you could sidestep the whole problem by not stealing in the first place. If you're using somebody else's research, say so. It really looks better than a transparently baseless claim of originality. And if you're too embarrassed to admit your source, maybe you're better off not using the stuff in the first place.

I Can't Cope

News in Brief

Sri Lanka—Authorities have taken Chandrasiri Bandara, a popular astrologer, into custody to investigate one of his predictions. Defying the polls the astrologer says that changes in the alignment of the cosmic spheres on 8 October are bad news for the present government, signifying hard times ahead with rising living costs. (Economists have made similar predictions.) The prime minister, he predicted, would become president, and the opposition leader prime minister. The Criminal Investigations Department is looking into the basis for the prediction according to police spokesman Ranjith Gunasekera. It is not clear exactly what they are looking into—do they think he had political motives, or are they merely suspicious of his astrological interpretation? The arrest is condemned by the opposition. (BBC)

Los Angeles—Noted Beatles collector Michael Jackson died Thursday of possibly natural causes. The owner of such coveted Beatles memorabilia as the rights to the bulk of the Lennon-McCartney catalog, Jackson has been the subject of much speculation recently concerning the disposition of these much-coveted sentimental treasures. One theory has it that he's left at least some of his collection to ex-Beatle Paul McCartney. With the imminent re-release of the Beatles catalog in listenable condition for the first time since the advent of the CD, fans are concerned about the fate of these soon-to-be-lost tracks. Jackson's condition is unchanged. (NY Daily News)

Stockholm, Sweden—The Swedish Court of Appeals blandly ruled that Judge Tomas Norstöm, one of three judges who presided over the recent Pirate Bay trial, had no conflict of interest, despite his membership in two advocacy groups on the other side of the issue, the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property and the Swedish Copyright Association. "For a judge to back the principles on which this legislation rests cannot be considered bias," appeals court judge Anders Eka said, apparently with a straight face. Four men involved in the operation of The Pirate Bay, which among other things makes it possible for smaller artists to share their work with others via peer-to-peer networking, were tried and convicted for copyright violations earlier this year, despite the utter worthlessness of the legal claims against them. Backlash against the verdict is considered responsible for electing a member of the Pirate Party to the European Parliament. (ZDNet, BBC)

IDiocy? or Egnorance?

I haven't forgotten that third part of my dissection of "Our Christian Roots"; it's just a matter of keeping my nausea under control. Seriously. I had to reread a veritable shitload of William McGuffey's work, in order to see whether I could run down some alleged quotations, and in the process turned up some of his letters online. It's amazing what lurks in the various corners of the internet. (And let me note that I post these links as much for my own benefit as for that of anybody else.) It was interesting, in a dull sort of way, and help round out my picture of a guy I never liked that much. I never did find the alleged quotations, by the way, and I doubt very much that they are authentic, but, being me, I'd really like to know where they did come from, and not merely where they didn't.

And somebody at WikiSource screwed up the Gospel of the Hebrews page, and I spent a bit of time trying to clean it up, before I gave up and reverted it to the last reasonable version. No source given, no indication of translator (the all-important question being, are the translations in public domain?), extraneous material added, valid material deleted. A real mess.

Still, my day was somewhat brightened by this ERV post: What Makes an IDiot? It's tempting to blame people for their ignorance, especially when they sound off on a subject on which you, the listener, know a little something. ERV, however, distinguishes between IDiocy and mere ignorance:

But heres the deal. Not knowing what 'eponymous' means doesnt make you an idiot. Not knowing some really, really, really basic facts of evolution and anatomy doesnt make you an idiot.

It just means you dont know something.

I dont know lots of stuff. *shrug* Weve all had different educations and different upbringings. I wont call someone an idiot just for not knowing something, because Id be an 'idiot' on lots of topics too.

What makes one an IDiot is not knowing something, plus being arrogant-- so goddamn arrogant-- you turn up your nose at people who *do* know something, and refuse to learn.

That about sums it up. Read the entry.

The Twonky

I read in the news that China is blocking still more websites in honor of the Olympics, and I see that ERV is still at war with the semicolon, so nothing much has changed. My brother's macaw has quit squawking now that I figured out that she wanted food in her dish, which quiets things down some here. I spent the time today I would have written something trying to figure out where much of the internet had gone. I tried to check out CNN--nothing. I tried to read something in National Review--gone. Yahoo was still operating, and most of the blogs seemed to be up and functioning, but virtually all news sources (except FOX, for some reason, if that counts) had disappeared.

Being me I quickly jumped to the conclusion that right-wing terrorist militias had taken over the news outfits of the world and that from now on we would be forced to rely on government handouts for our alleged information. It wasn't at all reassuring to find that Comcast appeared to be broadcasting a news show where CNN Headline News was supposed to be on the TV. One of my nephews, however, suggested that I should try accessing CNN through an internet proxy, and sure enough, that worked. CNN was still there; I just couldn't get to it from my usual point of departure.

Feeling a little like a character in that recent episode of South Park--the one where the internet disappeared--I sent my nephew down the street to his father's house to see whether they still had the internet up there. (This is my other brother's house--not the one who left his macaw here with me for the week; he's in Pendleton for an aerobatics competition. This is the brother who keeps fish, brews beer, and cooks the most amazing Chinese food.) A few minutes later my nephew returned, reporting that there was still internet a mere three blocks away, so whatever was keeping us from CNN et al was only targeting us, seemingly. (Okay, that's generalizing from very selected instances, but still--it's a straw in the wind, an augury of the cosmic powers.)

"It's got to be the router," my nephew explained, launching into a short dissertation that conveyed to me little except that apparently tiny demons live in our router and one of them had got lazy and was refusing to do his job. A high-ranking demon, apparently, or there wouldn't be so much of the damn internet missing. A few minutes and a couple of resets later the internet was back up and running again, and I was back at my keyboard launching data into cyberspace.

So I guess there were no terrorist right-wing militias clamping down on my news--this time, anyway. And it wasn't an evil corporate plot to destroy the internet either. Still, I've got used to living my childhood fantasy of having all the news of the world brought to my doorstep and available at my command--The Guardian, the Times of India, The Podunk Gazette and Cross-Time Wanderer--and it's downright unnerving to have it taken away from me at the whim of some internet demon. What if next time it's my ISP making decisions about what I should or should not be reading or listening to over the magic intertubes? Or some anonymous functionary in the depths of the great bureaucracy that passes for the free enterprise system here? The Department of Appropriate Content has decided that your choice of information is not acceptable by the community standards established by Free Information Act of 2007 and from now on you will abide by the Decency Provision (Subsection 3A, Paragraph 72) as determined by a committee of your peers....

A million years or so ago, in the golden age of sf, a fellow named Henry Kuttner wrote about a futuristic record player that took it upon itself to censor its owner's choice in music, books, and--well, everything. It ended badly. The day that the machines that bring us content, whether it be food, music, or news, start telling us what to eat, listen to, or read, is not yet. Still--

I can't help wondering, what the hell is it like to live in China?

Crazy People Got No Reason To Live

At least, that's the opinion apparently entertained by one Kristin Butler, a proud graduate of Duke University. Duke of course is known mainly for its outstanding work in the field of parapsychology, the science of matter over mind. According to Kristin Butler a "mentally unstable" person--or "loony" as she apparently prefers--has no business receiving a diploma, whether she has completed the requirements or not. This is an interesting attitude, and I would really like to know exactly why having bipolar disorder--that's the lunacy in question--disbars a student from receiving a degree. I got a degree, in spite of having undergone treatment for depression, and in spite of suffering from unreasonable fears and compulsions. And frankly, I take that kind of crack personally. I have a cousin with bipolar disorder, and while she's never received a degree from a prestigious university like Duke, she is in fact one of the most outstanding researchers I've ever met. I personally have respect for people who make it in spite of drawbacks and disadvantages over which they do not have control, and I am very much unimpressed when some scatter-brained young know-it-all sounds off with a moronic screed like Summa cum loony. Grow up, Kristin Butler.

[Thanks to Chronicle Column Damages NCCU/Duke Relations and "Summa cum loony" - the Duke lacrosse case lives on for alerting to this garbage.]

So What Else is New?

I don't get this furore over Dr. Jeremiah Wright. The headline: Pastor of Church Once Attended by Presidential Candidate Talks Crazy. And, I may add, the sun rose this morning. Is this news? Really? Pastor says crazy stuff? What about Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, or Billy Graham, for god's sake? Preachers have been saying really crazy stuff for as long as I can remember, certainly for as long as I have been listening to them. The new morality is really the old immorality. Nixon (of all people) is appointed by God to lead America. Don't understand the Bible--believe it. Herpes, or AIDS, or the flu, are God's punishment for sin. Homosexuals caused nine eleven. And snakes once walked upright.

See, what we who weren't raised in an unhealthy atmosphere of religiosity don't get is what is the difference between one crazy and another? Religious parents stand idly by and watch their eleven year old daughter die an excruciating (and entirely preventable) death and this is supposed to be okay somehow? How is this different from the mother who locked her kids in a car and pushed them in a lake to drown? At least she had the excuse of postpartum depression or something of the sort--what on earth is these idiots' justification? Or what about those muslims in Pakistan who beat a co-worker to death in front of the police, and then excused it by claiming that the dead man (a Hindu, by the way) was a blasphemer. Forgive me, but as far as I can tell the overly religious will do anything, so long as it is utterly vile and absolutely insane.

So tell me again, why should I be upset about something some pastor said? I don't care who attended his church--the guy is a religious nut. Of course he talks crazy. That's his job.

Silence is Golden

One of the things that irritate me--and there are many--is the way certain people seem to think that they are privileged to do things to others that would annoy the hell out of them if the situation were the other way around. Like distributing bibles at school, for example. People who would be horrified if their little angel came home from school carrying her brand new Koran or The God Delusion under her arm claim to see no problem with sending other people's kids home with a Gideon Bible. "But it's THE BIBLE," they exclaim, with much arm-waving and gesticulation, as though that somehow made things better. Maybe so, but remember, it's somebody else's Necromonicon, and their horror is no different from your horror.

Not that I have a lot of sympathy with people who want to be protected from running into ideas they may find uncomfortable. There are lots of them out there, and one way or another we all have to develop thick hides to protect us from somebody else's notions of reality.

But there are many times when a little peace and quiet are appropriate, and as a bus rider myself, I feel strongly that people should be prepared to shut up rather than disturb other passengers. This especially applies to people who seem to think that it is appropriate to read from their chosen text, whether it be from the Bible or from a syndicated advice columnist, in a loud carrying tone, just in case there are people at the other end of the bus who can't hear it.

Which brings me to this story: A Fort Worth woman is claiming religious discrimination because she was asked not to read to her children from her Bible in a loud voice while riding the bus. When she refused to desist a supervisor came and escorted her off the bus, then drove her and her children to their church, allowing her to read on the trip as loudly as she liked. This woman is now demanding an apology. "She said in her mind, what happened this past weekend was religious persecution, and she refuses to go along for the ride." Her representative, a person from the Liberty Legal Institute, proclaims:

I'm extremely shocked that a bus driver would pull over and take time out of his busy schedule in order to kick off a lady and her two kids while they're trying to read the Bible on their way to church.... They should be ashamed of that.

Richard L. Ruddell, president of the bus company, however, sets the matter straight:

It was not what she was reading, it was the very loud and disruptive volume. She was asked to lower her voice, but refused. Other passengers on the bus were looking to the driver for proper enforcement of the rules.

This driver acted in a very courteous and professional manner to properly deal with the situation. The T, as a public transit authority, has no policy against reading any type of material on the bus. Only when behavior of a passenger reaches an extreme volume, such as in this case, is a supervisor called.

On this same excursion into Internetland I turned up this story:

BEIJING - A Chinese Christian businessman has been released from detention after police grabbed him from his home in the early morning hours over a month ago, says his wife. Zhang Jing said her husband, 37-year-old Shi Weihan, was set free on January 4 after being held in a cell for 37 days, the legal limit in China before formal charges have to be filed. He was arrested on November 28, while his two young daughters cowered in their bedroom, for "illegally" publishing Bibles and Christian literature for distribution in home churches. His family had been worried he would be sentenced to at least five years.

Now that sounds more like persecution to me.

I'm Mad as Hell and I've Lost My Paxil

I spent a bit of this morning reading about a fellow in Lima--this is Lima, Ohio, by the way, here in the good old USA--whose life savings was stolen. Four hundred grand and change. And what are the authorities doing about it? Well, nothing. No, actually it's worse than nothing. The authorities--specifically the FBI--are the ones that stole the money.

Now I want to stress that this guy--Luther Hicks--has not been convicted of any crime. He has not even been charged with any crime. It is the mere fact of his possession of a large sum of money that appears to have excited the interest--might I say the greed?--of the FBI. They have presumed, without any evidence that I know of, and certainly without actually going to the bother of presenting any evidence to a court, that Hicks must have obtained it illegally, and are demanding that he present some sort of evidence to prove that he didn't. That is, they're demanding that he prove a negative, a difficult task at best, to get his money back. This is more anecdotal evidence, anyway, for a sort of crime that has become all-too-common under the bizarre forfeiture laws here in this once-great nation--laws that appear to be unconstitutional on the face of it several times over--violations of due process, excessive fines, unreasonable seizures at the very least.

Now there may well be more to the story; I haven't been able to find out and to be honest I'm not interested. Not unless it involves the presentation of hard evidence to a judge or at least some sort of legal cover. If Luther Hicks has not been convicted of a crime, then agents of the government have no business seizing his assets. Unless he owes back taxes or something of that sort, in which case the IRS should be doing the job. Not that I have any vast sympathy for the IRS approach to ripping people off first, and then asking questions about whether they owed the money, but at least owing money is some kind of excuse. A government lives on taxes; it's not surprising that it reacts to nonpayment like a dog deprived of a bone.

And as if that wasn't bad enough reading the inane comments here pissed me off even more. A certain Thomas writes, apparently seriously, "You are not supposed to have more than $10,000 in cash. Any amount over that and the government has the right to take it unless you fill out the proper currency transfer requests. You break the rules, you lose the money, period, end of discussion." Uh, no, Thomas; it is not illegal to have large amounts of cash on hand in this country. How do you think banks function? Stores? Other businesses? If it represents unreported income or something of that sort--or a payoff for a kidnapping, or the result of extortion, or whatever--then yeah, it can be illegal, though it would be just as illegal if it were in a bank or invested in stocks. An even more idiotic comment comes from a certain Cesar McKinley. In response to somebody who suggested that the NAACP should get involved (Luther Hicks is black), he wrote "They're too busy trying to get a pardon for six thugs who happened to be at a school where a noose was hung before they beat up a random kid." Apparently facts are of no concern to Cesar. What actually happened in the case he's referring to was that a racist kid picked a fight with a black jock and ended up with a black eye and other superficial bruises. (Had this kid actually been set upon by six jocks intent on doing him serious damage--attempted murder as the prosecutor claimed--he would have received some actual injuries, which didn't happen.) This minor schoolyard scuffle got blown up out of proportion by an overzealous prosecutor who appears to have been intent on making political capital from the case, though I don't pretend to know his actual motives. Maybe he was just the racist jerk he appeared to be. Who knows? But if Cesar and Thomas want to sound off, they might do at least a little research on the topics in question before waxing indignant.

And still another fellow pissed me off with this comment: "The '90s called...they want their paradigm back." Whenever I read an alleged joke in this form I hear David Spade's voice. Were these things ever funny? For me these are right up there with "I've heard of [fill in blank] before, but this is ridiculous." For some reason I hear those in Alan Alda's Groucho Marx voice. That's neither here nor there, I suppose, but the formula is tiresome. I'm reminded of an old movie parody, maybe from Humbug, in which a character asks "What language do you speak on this island?" "Here we speak fluent cliché," the native girl replies. If formula follows dysfunction, can misinformation be far behind?

But I digress. That's generous, maybe, in presupposing that I ever had a line of thought to digress from. Another thing--what is this fixation that readers of reason.com seem to have with Ron Paul? I was going to say that I don't get it, but on second thought, maybe I do. With all the unprincipled thugs wandering about, it could be refreshing to see a principled thug. Of course I mistakenly thought Robert Bork had principles, based on inaccurate media accounts, until I took a look at the guy's own words. And actions. If he has principles, they must be made of rubber. At least you know where you stand with Ron Paul. He's done right things for the wrong reasons, and wrong things for the right reasons, but at least most of the time you know where you are with him. Which is a lot more than I can say for some politicians I'm more likely to vote for.

But let me get back to the craziest of the comments at reason.com. A certain Joe at Joe.com (right...) claims to "work for an agency that seizes property under these exact circumstances." (I have my doubts.) "[N]o the us attorney's office," he writes, "nor my agency [whatever that is], would support a ridiculously unjust seizure like that. i don't know all of the facts of this particular case, but there is ALWAYS more than what is published in a simple news blurb." Now I'm not sure what "Joe" means by a "simple news blurb"--there's no such thing--but I'm sure there's more to the case than we've heard. However, as I said above, unless it involves due process or something strongly resembling it I'm just flat not interested. "[F]or all you conspiracy theorists and government haters," he goes on, irrelevantly as far as I can tell, "there has to be a substantial reason to seize that money; the punishment has to fit the crime. it's not as simple as this article makes it seem." But that's the problem with these seizure laws--the punishment does not have to fit the crime, nor does there have to be a substantial reason--or indeed any reason--to seize money. As I've seen in cases that have come to my attention the mere fact of possession of cash is often deemed proof of criminal activity, and it's up the the accused to prove that he is not up to something. If "Joe" has any evidence to support his claims, he ought to have presented it. As it stands his unsupported assertion backed by all the clout of an anonymous "agency" is singularly unconvincing. I'd love to know what his "agency" thinks would justify seizing substantial assets without criminal charges being filed. Still, "Joe" assures us "there is no possible way this seizure would be supported in the manner it is presented in this article." I don't believe it; I've seen too many instances in the real world of houses being seized from elderly grandmothers because a grandchild was growing a pot plant in the basement, and stolen cars seized because the thief used it to pick up a police officer posing as a prostitute to have any conviction that justice, or anything remotely resembling justice, is being served. Oh yeah, there's always supposed recourse--the grandmother can sue her grandchild for the value of the house seized by greedy government officials, or the car-owner can sue the thief for the value of his vehicle. That's justice for you, in some bizarre Humpty-Dumpty sense of the word. Ha. Put up or shut up Mr. "Joe" of the secret police.

Oh yeah, and another one--"Hit & Run-euphemism for moron infestation" writes in response to "Big Nanny"'s comment "If the founding fathers came back to life today...they would get sent straight to Gitmo", "Indeed, because as we all know, the Founding Fathers were notorious for slaughtering innocent civilians and harboring those that did the same." No shit. Has "moron infestation" ever looked into what the Founding Fathers did to win their revolution? Slaughtering civilians and harboring terrorists was indeed part of it. Not pretty, maybe, but history often isn't. I do agree with "moron infestation"'s shot, "The more I read this site, the more I realize it is chock-full of assholes so stupid, they can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground." As asshole-in-chief, he should know.