Monotonous

I could not be wearier

Life could not be drearier

If I lived in Siberia

Eartha Kitt (from New Faces of 1952)

I’m slowly recovering from a bad bout of terror when it looked as though my bank account was going to self-destruct, thanks to the non-appearance of expected money, and I’m having trouble typing as Tiberius, my grandnephew’s adopted feral cat, bit me earlier today when I gently suggested that he should not sharpen his claws on my grandmother’s heirloom quilt, but that’s par for the course. Nothing to write home about. As I get older these things just take a lot more out of me, I guess.

I’ve been chasing shadows trying to run down enough information to put together a brief biographical sketch of Dean Clarence Manion, one of the shapers of the modern conservative movement, whose Manion Forum first introduced the likes of Barry Goldwater to a nation-wide audience. This guy was important, damn it—not that I’m an admirer, mind you. But he was a major figure in 1950s America, spoken of as a possible Supreme Court justice even, a best-selling author—and as far as Internet resources are concerned, he might as well never have lived.

I remember these guys, the old right-wing radio crowd. I used to hear them a lot, especially if my father was driving us somewhere. Dear old dad was a radio engineer, you see, and we always had to have his station on, no matter what garbage was being aired at the moment, so he could monitor the signal quality, and respond instantly if something went wrong. Sometimes we’d abruptly pull off to the side of the road to a pay phone so he could call in to the station over some oddity in the transmission; in the meantime I’d be stuck listening to some crazed evangelist or right-wing commentator hawking his social or political nostrums. Dan Smoot, Billy Graham, Ronald Reagan—I used to listen (unwillingly) to them all, fascinated by them in the way you feel passing some grisly car wreck. You don’t want to look at the carnage, but somehow your eyes refuse to cooperate.

Oddly I find that I have a certain nostalgic fondness for them today, remnants of a shattered dream, political heretics to mainstream American politics. Their cause rooted in denial of reality, denial of rights to those perceived as different, denial of a fair deal to the hard-working men and women who supported them, unjust and unjustified, they nonetheless tirelessly worked on behalf of the wealthy and the powerful to carry out their designs. How well they succeeded in written in the nerves and sinews of the last quarter of the twentieth century. If free America finally goes down, they will have had much to do with its corruption. And their story should be told; it is a part of the great tapestry of our history.

Posing in the Moonlight

Ah, yes, another rant against the clueless. I’m sorry about that—but this guy illustrates something that really bothers me about this whole tribe. I’ve noted previously how people in comment threads who claim to rely on primary sources give themselves away by citing fake quotations, and the other day a perfect example of the species made an appearance in a thread at a topix.net forum. Calling him- (or her-) self Akpilot, he (or she) made a set of assertions so blindingly ignorant that one commenter suggested he should “read a few biographies of our first presidents as well as the members who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.” Akpilot claimed in reply:

Actually, biographies are riddled with errors and the personal opinions of the writter [sic]. I much prefer reading the actual writtings [sic] of the founders, I find you get a much clearer picture of them that way... You may want to try this yourself as well. [ellipsis in original]

What makes this claim absolutely hilarious is that he had given examples of his “reading the actual writtings of the founders” some comments earlier, and, as you might expect, they included a number of fake quotations—the 1956 “religionists” quotation falsely attributed to Patrick Henry, for one, and the “ten commandments” quotation falsely attributed to James Madison, for another. His use of these shows Akpilot for the poseur he is—he sure as hell didn’t get them from “reading the actual writtings of the founders”.

So, just for the fun of it, let’s see what else our poseur has to offer. He starts off with an alleged John Adams quotation:

The general principles upon which the Fathers achieved independence were the general principals of Christianity… I will avow that I believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.

While our poseur doesn’t give a source, it’s a mangled section from a letter Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson (28 June 1813), part of a famous series. Quite a bit has been silently omitted in this twisted version. Here’s what Adams wrote:

Could my answer be understood by any candid reader or hearer, to recommend to all the others the general principles, institutions, or systems of education of the Roman Catholics, or those of the Quakers, or those of the Presbyterians, or those of the Methodists, or those of the Moravians, or those of the Universalists, or those of the Philosophers? No. The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence, were the only principles in which that beautiful assembly of young men could unite, and these principles only could be intended by them in their address, or by me in my answer. And what were these general principles? I answer, the general principles of Christianity, in which all those sects were united, and the general principles of English and American liberty, in which all those young men united, and which had united all parties in America, in majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her independence. Now I will avow, that I then believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God; and that those principles of liberty are as unalterable as human nature and our terrestrial, mundane system.

The words in bold were those cherry-picked to give a false impression of what John Adams was saying. If our poseur in this case was also the cherry-picker, then he is guilty of deliberately misrepresenting Adams; if not he remains a mere poseur, guilty only of passing off somebody else’s misrepresentation as his own.

Next our poseur quotes part of a famous quip John Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson (19 April 1817)—an item so well-known that no special research in “the actual writtings of the founders” is required:

Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!” But in this exclamation I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite society, I mean hell.

This is a great passage for quote-miners; anti-religion types can quote the “no religion” portion, and Christian Nationites the “not fit to be mentioned” piece, but either way, they’re distorting the meaning of the original. Thomas Jefferson’s reply is not as often quoted. He wrote (5 May 1817):

If by religion we are to understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just, “that this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.” But if the moral precepts, innate in man, and made a part of his physical constitution, as necessary for a social being, if the sublime doctrines of philanthropism and deism taught us by Jesus of Nazareth, in which all agree, constitute true religion, then, without it, this would be, as you again say, “something not fit to be named even, indeed, a hell.”

Having quote-mined Adams Akpilot moves on to Benjamin Franklin's well-known speech in favor of prayers at the Constitutional Convention:

In the beginning of the contest with Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayers in this room for Divine protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered… do we imagine we no longer need His assistance?

This (for once) appears to be fairly quoted, as the larger context shows:

In the beginning of the Contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the divine protection.—Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a Superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? or do we imagine that we no longer need his assistance? I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?

The vote arose during a critical point at the Constitutional convention, and there was some discussion of the question, but no vote was actually taken, and the matter was allowed quietly to die. Franklin’s manuscript notes:

The Convention, except three or four persons, thought Prayers unnecessary.

I wonder why our poseur left out that item of information.

Next up Akpilot cites a saying attributed to Alexander Hamilton—a quotation in which he cruelly betrays his limitations as a scholar and student of the Founders. His version reads:

I have carefully examined the evidences of the Christian religion, and if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity I would unhesitatingly give my verdict in its favor. I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.

This item first appeared in this form (“evidences” instead of “evidence” and no ellipsis between the first and second sentences) in Stephen Abbott Northrop’s 1894 A Cloud of Witnesses (p. 208). Northrop in turn attributed to Famous American Statesmen by Sarah Knowles Bolton (1888, p. 126). She gave it like this:

To a friend he said: “I have examined carefully the evidence of the Christian religion; and, if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity, I should unhesitatingly give my verdict in its favor. … I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.”

Note that evidence is singular, and especially note the ellipsis. That ellipsis was a bit dishonest; these are not parts of the same quotation, but two different stories jammed together. They come from John Church Hamilton’s voluminous account of his father’s life and times (volume 7, p. 790):

It was the tendency to infidelity he saw so rife that led him often to declare in the social circle his estimate of Christian truth. “I have examined carefully,” he said to a friend from his boyhood, “the evidence of the Christian religion; and, if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity, I should unhesitatingly give my verdict in its favor.” To another person, he observed, “I have studied it, and I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.”

The first item is attributed to the “Reminiscences of General Morton” (presumably Jacob Morton, 1761-1836); the second is unattributed. As both anecdotes are related by his son, we may hope that they reflect Hamilton’s attitude as his son understood it, but they are second-hand at best. They are not Hamilton’s words directly, but only words attributed to him. And our poseur didn’t get them from the son—as his misquotation shows—but only from some late and derivative source.

Akpilot follows this with a mangled version of a resolution by the Massachusetts provincial congress for 15 April 1775 calling for a day of fasting and prayer. He has attributed this to John Hancock, possibly because Hancock was president of the provincial congress at that time. The actual resolution read:

Resolved, That it be, and hereby is, recommended to the good people of this colony, of all denominations, that Thursday, the eleventh day of May next, be set apart as a day of public humiliation, fasting, and prayer; that a total abstinence from servile labor and recreation be observed, and all the religious assemblies solemnly convened, to humble themselves before God, under the heavy judgments felt and feared, to confess the sins that have deserved them; to implore the forgiveness of all our transgressions, a spirit of repentance and reformation, and a blessing on the husbandry, manufactures, and other lawful employments of this people; and especially, that the union of the American colonies in defence of their rights, for which, hitherto, we desire to thank Almighty God, may be preserved and confirmed; that the Provincial, and especially the Continental Congress, may be directed to such measures as God will countenance; that the people of Great Britain and their rulers may have their eyes open to discern the things that shall make for the peace of the nation and all its connections; and that America may soon behold a gracious interposition of Heaven, for the redress of her many grievances, the restoration of all her invaded liberties, and their security to the latest generations.

Another stunning example of Akpilot’s vast knowledge of “the actual writtings of the founders” follows, when he quotes (and slightly misquotes) a 1956 writer as Patrick Henry:

It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.

The story of this bit of trash appears elsewhere; in my view only an idiot would be taken it by it. I can guarantee that our poseur didn’t get it from reading the Founders; it was first attributed to Henry in the 1980s.

Now next our poseur actually gets something right—he quotes a portion correctly from John Jay’s well-known letter to John Murray, Jr., of 12 October 1826. The paragraph in question:

Almost all nations have peace or war at the will and pleasure of rulers whom they do not elect, and who are not always wise or virtuous. Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest, of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.

But our poseur returns to his old ways with the next one, and it’s a doozy. Yeah, it’s the tired old fake Madison quote about the Ten Commandments—and he manages to give it a bogus source as well: “1778 to the General Assembly of the State of Virginia”. (Actually the only genuine bit comes from the Federalist Papers.” He quotes it like this:

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity…to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God. [1778 to the General Assembly of the State of Virginia]

Now I’ve never seen it exactly in this form before, but it’s still the same old fraud publicized by libertarian economist Frederick Nymeyer in 1958. And Akpilot has actually omitted virtually all of the only genuine Madison phrase in the whole piece—“the capacity of mankind for self-government”. This is about as low as it could get. It looks bad for our self-styled expert on the Founders.

Still, he recovers a little ground with his final two (basically genuine) quotations from Dr. Benjamin Rush. Dr. Rush, you may recall, was the guy who thought that the dark skin of Africans was a form of leprosy, and looked forward to the day it could be cured. Dr. Rush’s essay entitled “A Defence of the Use of the Bible in Schools” (written before 1798) included this passage:

…I lament, that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes, and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of christianity, by means of the bible; for this divine book, above all others, favours that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and all those sober and frugal virtues, which constitute the soul of republicanism.

Other than mangling the end with a silent omission, our poseur did pretty well on that one. Earlier in the piece Rush had written about “the eternal and self moving principle of LOVE,” and our poseur now backs up to catch his comment there:

It concentrates a whole system of ethics in a single text of scripture. “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another, even as I have loved you.” By withholding the knowledge of this doctrine from children, we deprive ourselves of the best means of awakening moral sensibility in their minds.

By omitting the first sentence and substituting “[the Scriptures]” for “this doctrine” Akpilot makes it look as though Rush were talking about the Bible in general, rather than one doctrine in particular, but otherwise the text is fairly quoted.

Now I’ve got to say that for a person who spends a lot of time reading the words of America’s Founders, this is a piss-poor showing. Some of these quotations are now so putrid even the loons won’t touch them. Personally, I don’t think Akpilot is ready to read serious biographies of the Founders. Not up to speed, yet—far from it. I think he should start with some popular histories of the time, something that would give him the feel for the times. Then, maybe, he could move on to some light biographies, and start working his way through some of the key essays of the Founders—portions of Franklin’s autobiography, perhaps, and some of the Federalist Papers. Once he knows his way around a bit, then he could start on some serious works. And then at last, if all goes well, he’ll have some chance of making sense of whatever out of the vast array of papers left us by the Founders he chooses to read.

Anyway, it’s worth a shot.

There are a lot of people out there who have actually spent their time reading the actual writings of the Founders and Framers and (for that matter) their opponents. Not only reading them, but locating them, editing them, and making them available for people to investigate and learn from. Akpilot would do well to actually learn from them, and not just pose as somebody who has. Especially with an effort so lame as that one.

Quotation of the Day

...what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Christopher Hitchens (h/t Jason Thibeault)

Principles for Quotations (by Martin Porter)

You may have seen the following quotation attributed to Edmund Burke (1729-1797):

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Google Books shows an example from a book called Commonism that came out in 1957 (and a quick check of library holdings confirms that a book with that title did come out at that date), but it appears to have been popularized by its inclusion in the 14th edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1968). According to They Never Said It, the 1989 compendium of fake quotes, misquotes, and misleading attributions by Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George (which unfortunately is not always accurate itself) Spiro Agnew speechwriter William Safire challenged Bartlett’s editor Emily Morrison Beck on the source of the speech, and she suggested it might be a paraphrase of something Burke said in a speech on 23 April 1770:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Safire apparently called this a “pretty long stretch”, and that does seem to be an accurate observation.

In January 2002 Martin Porter (‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’ (or words to that effect)) did an interesting piece on the variations this quotation had undergone on the web, and on his inability to trace it back to any original source by Edmund Burke. This essay is well worth reading by anybody interested in the uncontrolled transmission of texts, but a follow-up piece (Four Principles of Quotation) contains four rules that ought to be taken into account by anybody passing on a(n alleged) quotation. These are:

(1) Whenever you see a quotation given with an author but no source assume that it is probably bogus.

(2) Whenever you see a quotation given with a full source assume that it is probably being misused, unless you find good evidence that the quoter has read it in the source.

(3) Whenever you make a quotation, give the exact source.

(4) Only quote from works that you have read.

Ah, yes, words to live by.

Quotation of the Day

...we make stupid decisions when we’re innocent. That’s the nature of innocence. The innocent doesn’t yet understand consequence ... Faith like a child is highly overrated. Not to mention dangerous.

GEDS

Quotation of the Day

I’m bothered by these “God is beyond science” and “God is an untestable hypothesis” claims. No. If you can’t describe clearly the nature of something, it isn’t beyond science. It’s beneath it. It isn’t a hypothesis. It’s incoherent rubbish.

SC

Quotation of the Day

A salute to the two University of Akron scientists whose research contributed to a study reporting that some dinosaurs had feathers and stripes. The credits go to assistant biology professor Dr. Matthew Shawkey and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Liliana D'Alba. Lamentably, some dinosaurs without stripes and feathers were left out of the evolutionary process and wound up in the U.S. Senate.

Abe Zaidan

Further Fake Quotation Sightings

This site is a bit unusual for the large number of fake quotations it presents on one page. On the assumption (perhaps over-optimistic) that they are merely misinformed and not actively trying to deceive, I sent them the following statement:

I would like to recommend the elimination of manufactured quotations from your site. The following quotations are all fake:

“What students would learn in American schools above all is the religion of Jesus Christ.”
- George Washington

“It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.”
- George Washington

“Oh, eternal and everlasting God, direct my thoughts, words and work. Wash away my sins in the immaculate blood of the Lamb and purge my heart by Thy Holy Spirit. Daily, frame me more and more in the likeness of Thy son, Jesus Christ, that living in Thy fear, and dying in Thy favor, I may in thy appointed time obtain the resurrection of the justified unto eternal life. Bless, O Lord, the whole race of mankind and let the world be filled with the knowledge of Thee and Thy son, Jesus Christ.”
- George Washington, Prayer

“ ... a neat edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools.”
- United States Congress 1782

“The Congress of the United States recommends and approves the Holy Bible for use in all schools.”
- United States Congress 1782

“The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.”
- John Adams

“There is a book [the Bible] worth all the other books ever printed.”
- Patrick Henry

“It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great Nation was founded not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
- Patrick Henry

“We recognize no sovereign but God, and no King but Jesus.”
- John Adams and John Hancock

“We have staked the whole future of our new nation, not upon the power of government; far from it. We have staked the future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.”
- James Madison

“Religion [is] the basis and foundation of Government”
- James Madison

There are plenty of genuine quotations available without adulterating history with these transparent frauds.

Adding Injury to Injury

From the front page of the Sunday, 24 January 2010, issue of the Daily Star (Dhaka, Bangladesh)

Village Arbitration: Rapist spared, victim lashed

By Sheikh Md Shahidul Islam, B’baria

Eight months after being raped, a 16-year-old at Khargor of Kasba upazila in Brahmanbaria had to receive 101 lashes as “punishment”.

A village arbitration found her guilty and issued the 101 lashes fatwa (religious edict) but amazingly left alleged rapist Enamul Mia, 20, untouched.

The arbitration also fined the victim’s father Tk 1,000 and issued another fatwa that her family would be forced into isolation if he failed to pay up.

Village matbar (local leader) Delwar Hossain alias Ullashi executed the durra (lashes) on January 17.

Family sources said Enamul Mia of Gabbari used to eve-tease [sexually harass] the girl on her way to Sathgram Advocate Haroon-or-Rashid High School. He raped her April last year. Fearing the shame, the girl did not disclose the incident.

The girl’s family had married her off to a man of neighbouring Ghatiara village but after a month into the marriage medical test discovered she was seven months pregnant.

She was divorced and she had to live at her father’s place after an abortion. Following her return, a group of so-called matbars led by Manik Mia declared that her family is to be isolated until punished.

On January 17, the influential group arranged the arbitration at the yard of the victim.

At one stage of the inhuman torture, the girl collapsed and fainted. She regained her sense after two hours.

Ullashi presided over the arbitration while Wahid Mia, Basu Mia, Manik Mia, Shahjahan Mia, Dulal Mia, Maulana Md Kawser Mia, Imam of Gupinathpur Baro Mosque, Maulana Md Ishaque Mia, Imam of Khargor Jame Mosque, and a few others played key roles.

“Enamul has spoiled my life. I want justice,” said the girl as tears rolled down from her eyes.

Talking to The Daily Star, neighbours spoke in favour of the girl and blamed Enamul. They did not dare to say anything against the so-called village arbitration.

The girl’s father said members of the influential group are now keeping a watch on them so that they could not move or seek legal action.

Wahid Mia said they executed the 101 lashes on the girl following the religious edict and they did not call Enamul during the arbitration as he belongs to another village.

A team of human rights activists led by advocate Mili Chowdhury visited the spot.

Their organisation will help the victim file separate cases against the culprits, Mili said.

Kasba Police Station Officer-in-Charge (OC) Md Jahirul Islam Khan said they would take appropriate action if the victim files a case in this regard.

Three women were whipped as a result of fatwas in the district during the last six months.

A certain M. Hossain commented on this story the same day:

I love Islam but I would never support the non-Islamic activities of unauthorized Mullahs & Matbar in this poor village in Bangladesh. The Rapist Enamul must be given capital punishment for raping a 16-year-old girl. The people, who gave the fatwa against the victim, must be given exemplary punishment. They must be given rigorous imprisonment (RI). The father & the girl must be provided with due compensations and be rehabilitated in normal life and the government must stop it now & forever.

The Daily Star editorialized the next day:

Whipping of a rape victim

Court order on extrajudicial penalties disregarded

JUSTICE has been made a farce of once again. In a shocking repetition of misuse of fatwa, a rape victim was at the receiving end of a hundred and one lashes; the punishment was fixed through local arbitration participated by some village elders in a village in Kashba upazilla. And the rapist is roaming scot-free.

The incident is shocking not only for the gruesome brutality meted out to the 16 year old girl, but also because of the attitude of the law enforcing agency who did not act promptly enough to prevent the whipping or take cognisance of the incident later. It is very clear that the High Court directive to the police, issued in August 2009, to investigate all extrajudicial punishments, has not been fully implemented. Had that been the case the perpetrators would have been brought to justice and made examples of, and this would have acted as a deterrent to others.

The recent incident is disturbing on two counts. It demonstrates once again that helpless women, who are victims of rape and other forms of torture, not only cannot seek redress of law, they and their parents are further subjected to physical and mental torture including social ostracisation, as in the recent case in Kashba.

The other disturbing aspect is the role of the police. We cannot comprehend the statement the OC of Kashba PS that he would take appropriate action if the victim filed a case in this regard. He is in clear breach of the High Court directives in this regard. It is even more disturbing because three women have been victims of lashing as result of fatwa in this very district during the current month.

One cannot speak too strongly against this kind of aberrations that is being used to perpetrate violence against women. This practice must stop immediately. We join with the conscious segment of the society in calling upon the government to take steps to stop the parallel system of justice that misuse the name of religion. While the highest court has taken cognisance of the matter the police have not been quite up to the task earnestly as yet.

We suggest that the perpetrators of torture on the hapless girl be proceeded against immediately, and the OC, who is waiting for the victim to lodge a formal complaint to take action, act without delay.

“jamal” commented on this editorial:

I cannot believe this is happening in 2010 in our country, it’s as if we have not made any progress and remain barbarians of old times. The police should be brought to task, everyone knows that they refuse to take cases when they feel like it which is probably what happened here.)

Further comment would be superfluous.

(H/t Jennifer McCreight)

Manifest Destiny

I’ve been amusing myself by leafing through some of John L. O’Sullivan’s editorials on things like westward expansion, our Indian policy, and the future of America. This is supposed to be for a section on my (still very hypothetical) Modoc War book, and has been brought to me through the courtesy of the good folk at Cornell University.

I’ve been looking for a gateway to enter into the world view of nineteenth century America as it were, and I’m thinking of using O’Sullivan for that purpose. This guy was the editor and publisher of a literary magazine called The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, which was sort of a Democratic counterpart to the Whiggish North American Review. (The latter is also available at the Cornell University site.)

The book section hasn’t exactly jelled yet, but I’m getting a better picture of my quarry, at any rate. I transcribed “Annexation” and stuck it up at Wikisource, and I’ve transcribed “Territorial Aggrandizement” and “Our Indian Policy” as well, though so far they’re just sitting on my computer.

O'Sullivan, by the way, was born on a ship off the coast of Gibraltar during the war of 1812; his mother had taken refuge there from fear of a plague on shore. (What she was doing in Gibraltar my internet sources don't say.) He was elected to the New York legislature in his twenties, where he made himself unpopular by campaigning against the death penalty. He was a Van Buren supporter during the election of 1844—this was the free-for-all where the sitting president had been drummed out of his party and the white house really was up for grabs—and the Whigs were running Henry Clay. (One of the ironies of history is that neither Daniel Webster nor Henry Clay were ever president, though their names are remembered now much better than many of those who actually succeeded in getting the prize.) O’Sullivan ended up disappointed, of course, when James K. Polk, the first “dark horse” candidate (supposedly), somehow emerged from the melee the victor, in spite of his often-expressed lack of interest in the position. He stood behind Polk even so, but without the enthusiasm he’d shown for Van Buren.

O’Sullivan was a visionary. While his United States was bounded by the Rocky Mountains, he looked forward to a nation united by ties of wire and rail that spanned the continent from Atlantic to Pacific. “[T]he day cannot be distant,” he wrote, “which shall witness the conveyance of the representatives from Oregon and California to Washington within less time than a few years ago was devoted to a similar journey by those from Ohio; while the magnetic telegraph will enable the editors of the “San Francisco Union,” the “Astoria Evening Post,” or the “Nootka Morning News” to set up in type the first half of the President’s Inaugural, before the echoes of the latter half shall have died away beneath the lofty porch of the Capitol, as spoken from his lips.” Yes, not only Texas, but California, Oregon, New Mexico, Chihuahua, Yucatan, Cuba, and the British provinces to the north were all to dissolve their allegiances and clamor for annexation by the United States. There would be no need for a war—indeed, nothing was less likely—rather, the natural strength of the Saxon peoples would draw settlers like magnets to these uninhabited lands. What was more natural than that, once there, they would want to join with the United States? It was practically inevitable.

Slavery was an awkward problem, true, but so was the alternative. O’Sullivan was appalled by the conditions workers in the free north faced, and felt that there might be some features of the slave system that were superior to the wage system that produced such grinding poverty. Might not slavery, if purged of such objectionable features as “the separation of families, excessive severities, subjection to the licentiousness of mastership … contain some dim undeveloped germ of that very principle of reform thus aimed at [by reformers like Charles Fourier], out of which proceeds some compensation at least for its other evils, making it the duty of true reform to cultivate and develope [sic] the good, and remove the evils?”

If slavery goes, O’Sullivan looks forward to

the ultimate disappearance of the negro race from our borders. The Spanish Indian-American populations of Mexico, Central America and South America, afford the only receptacle capable of absorbing that race whenever we shall be prepared to slough it off—to emancipate it from slavery, and (simultaneously necessary) to remove it from the midst of our own. Themselves already of mixed and confused blood, and free from the “the prejudices” which among us so insuperably forbid the social amalgamation which can alone elevate the Negro race out of a virtually servile degradation even though legally free, the regions occupied by those populations must strongly attract the black race in that direction; and as soon as the destined hour of emancipation shall arrive, will relieve the question of one of its worst difficulties, if not absolutely the greatest.

The native Americans too pose a problem.

It [i]s impossible that two systems of governments, so diverse as the Indian and American, should coexist on the same territory. All history proved this. The most rational hope of success for this race, the only one which indeed appear[s] practical on a scale commensurate with the object, [i]s to remove them, with their own consent, to a position entirely without the boundaries of the state jurisdictions, where they might assert their political sovereignty, and live and develope their true national character, under their own laws.

And their ultimate fate? O’Sullivan is optimistic, given the abilities shown by the more progressive members to survive and thrive under the new circumstances. But

Our greatest apprehensions, we must confess, before closing this paper, arise from the peculiar geographical position of the Indian territory with relation to our own. … Our population is on the broad move West. Nothing, it is evident, will now repress them this side of the Pacific. The snowy heights of the Rocky Mountains are already scaled; and we but apply the results of the past to the future, in saying that the path which has been trod by a few, will be trod by many. Now, the removed tribes are precisely in the centre of this path. From the mouth of the Platte, or the Konza, the great highway to the Oregon must run west. Whether this new tide of emigration be successful or unsuccessful, will those who compose it spare to trample on the red man? Will they suddenly become kind to him, to whom they have been unkind? Will they cease to desire the lands which their children want? Will they consent to see the nation separated by an Indian state? Will they award honors, nay, justice, to that state? Twenty years will answer these questions.

In spite of O’Sullivan’s comments on race, he doesn’t seem to have believed in it. In a very interesting piece entitled “Do the Various Races of Man Constitute a Single Species?” he suggests that race is an imaginary construct, and that racial types are simply the extremes in the continuum of human variability. He considers it quite possible that some groups are superior to others in particular abilities, but argues that the variability within a group is greater than the difference between groups.

He’s an odd character, and one I’m glad to have encountered, in spite of his curious limitations. There’s a biography out on him that I want to read, if I can get a copy. Unfortunately my local library doesn’t have it; I’ll have to resort to buying it or getting it through interlibrary loan. It does seem to me a trifle unfair that he is remembered now only for two things—his invention of the phrase “manifest destiny,” and his magazine’s motto: “The best government is that which governs least.”

Out of Time and Ideas

I am out of time to write anything here today, and frankly out of ideas. It’s been a busy day, what with venturing downtown again to get my glasses (this time with success) and engaging in several other activities—which shall be nameless here, alas. Perhaps I will meet with more success tomorrow.

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.

Witness to History Gone

93-year-old Tsutomu Yamaguchi passed away last Monday at the age of 93. You’ve probably never heard of him. In all the world’s population there are very few people who have survived an atomic bomb attack; fewer yet survived two of them. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was one of them.

On 6 August 1945 he went on a business trip to Hiroshima. The timing was particularly unfortunate; that was the day the Enola Gay dropped the first of the two atomic bombs used against Japan in the closing days of World War II. Over one hundred thousand people lost their lives in that single blast; Tsutomu Yamaguchi was only two miles from the center, and yet survived, though badly burned. After spending a night in an air raid shelter, he went back home to his wife and infant son. They lived in Nagasaki.

Nagasaki may not be as famous as Hiroshima, but it was the site of the second atomic bomb drop, on 9 August 1945. Tsutomu Yamaguchi must have just been settling in when it happened. Seventy thousand people died, but his family was spared.

Apparently 165 people are known to have survived both blasts. It’s an odd distinction, both unlucky and lucky at the same time. Unlucky enough to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time twice over, and lucky enough to have survived the horrors. Twice over.

It is probably due to the existence of people like Tsutomu Yamaguchi—living witnesses to the catastrophe of an atomic bomb attack—that any of us are alive today. Fire-breathing patriots on both sides of the Iron Curtain were all too ready to drop the big one and see what happened during the Cold War; if there had been no witnesses to tell of the consequences, might they not have prevailed? Hiroshima and Nagasaki stood in the way; they were monuments to what the rest of the world could all too easily become. Those who had witnessed the—what? Tragedy? Horror? The words are too feeble. These are the kinds of reactions that belong inside stars, not on the surface of our green and fragile planet. These witnesses had seen what none of us should ever have to experience, and maybe from them we learned enough to hold off on the consequences of an unlimited nuclear war. When I was a child I never expected to see 2010; that the great atomic war never happened may well be due in part to those who kept the unthinkable memories alive.

Twelfth Night, and Welcome to It

And so we come at last to the conclusion of the Xmastide festivities, this night of the Twelfth Day of Christmas 2010 of the Common Era (or 12010 of the Holocene Era). The War on Christmas didn’t get as much press this year as last, it seems like, though some nuts in California apparently are lobbying to make Christmas carols mandatory. I hope they mean for the Xmas season only, and not all year. I mean, I like “O Holy Night” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem” all right, but I’m pretty well Xmas caroled out for the foreseeable future.

This is the first year since I was a child that I didn’t expose myself to some version of “A Christmas Carol” and “The Nutcracker”; I didn’t listen to “Green Chri$tma$”; I didn’t even dig out “A Christmas Garland.” (I’ve sort of lost heart a bit, what with losing most of my library this past year.) We did have a tree—still have it up actually, though I suppose we should get busy taking it down, what with Epiphany just around the corner and all. I have a hard time caring, truth to tell.

I got one really cool gift for Xmas—April D. DeConick’s Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas, which I’m really looking forward to digging into. I’ve read through it, of course, but I’m going to have to brush up on my Coptic—and there’s another annoyance, my Coptic grammar seems to have disappeared with the bulk of my library, though (thank God) not my dictionary. Roadblocks everywhere I look. Anyway, I’m going to have to get up to speed a bit to really come to grips with the subject. Still, it should be fun.

And All Was Light

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in Night:
GOD said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.

Alexander Pope

The end of the Christmas season is in sight, with Epiphany just around the corner this Eleventh Day of Christmas in the year 2010 of the Common Era. It’s Newton’s birthday according to the present calendar, though by the calendar in use in England in the year 1642/3, he was born on 25 December, Christmas Day. Across the channel in France, however, where they had long since adopted the Gregorian calendar, it was 4 January, as it was throughout Europe—the Roman Catholic parts, anyway.

It’s always seemed rather appropriate to me that Newton should have been born during this season—his work on optics fits well with the theme of a Festival of Lights, and his work on celestial mechanics connects nicely with the oddity of planetary movements that creates the winter solstice. And of course he fancied himself a theologian, wasting his talents deciphering the numbers in the Book of Daniel, for example—which gives him ties (of a sort) with Hanukkah as well.

Consulting my master list I see that we’ve shot by all seven days of Kwanzaa (26 December through 1 January), Boxing Day (26 December), St. Stephen’s Day (26 December), St. John’s Day (27 December), Holy Innocents’ Day (28 December), Hogmanay (31 December), St. Sylvester’s Day (31 December), and New Year (1 January). And we’ve also had the first through the tenth Days of Christmas. I had pieces started for at least some of these, but as the season got eaten up with plumbing disasters and other calls on my time I guess I’ll save them for next year. Or never, depending on which comes first.

Anyway, Happy 367th birthday, Sir Isaac.

And They're Off

Remember a few years back when Muslims around the world elected to throw a hissy-fit over a handful of cartoons, some of which allegedly depicted the historical figure Mohammed? To judge from the accounts of the attempted murder of one of the cartoonists, Kurt Westergaard, the other day, most people don’t. A casual reading of more than a dozen news stories, blog entries, and other ephemera, turns up the following “facts”—

• Kurt Westergaard drew cartoons of Mohammed;
• These cartoons depicted Mohammed as a terrorist;
• The publication of his cartoons “sparked a storm of protest and violence across the Muslim world.” [see The Guardian and The Hot Joints for examples]

Well, that may be how people remember it, but it ain’t how it happened. First, Kurt Westergaard drew one—count it—one caricature of the popular conception of Mohammed. The image was depicted with a bomb-shaped turban—an obvious reference to the prophet being used to justify violence. There were eleven other cartoons in the series, but they were not drawn by Westergaard; they were drawn by other artists. At least one of them did not depict Mohammed (the prophet) at all, but rather a schoolboy bearing the same name. The publication of the cartoons occurred without incident; it was only later that Muslim riots occurred. They appear to have been organized by activists with an agenda; the images shown to the Muslim world included three concoctions (one supposedly depicting Mohammed as a pig) that were not part of this or any other published cartoon series.

Anyway, it seems that a deranged Muslim fanatic broke into Kurt Westergaard’s home wielding an axe and a knife with the attention of murdering him—this during a visit by the cartoonists five-year-old granddaughter. This (alleged) assassination attempt is only one in a series committed by Muslim fanatics in the past few years over this or that fancied grievance. (Anybody else remember Salman Rushdie, Theo van Gogh, and Hitoshi Igarashi? [“Publish and Be Damned”]) Various media accounts are now saying that the unidentified 27-year-old Somali man had “ties” to al Quada (who doesn’t?) and may have been involved in a plot to murder Hilary Clinton, but I’m skeptical of these tidbits. Nothing about this suggests the hallmark precision of an al Quada attack; it seems more like the result of a single deranged man who—like John Lennon’s assassin—has been fed on religious propaganda for too long. Time will tell. Danish Muslims don’t want anything to do with the guy, apparently: “The Danish Muslim Union strongly distances itself from the attack and any kind of extremism that leads to such acts,” at any rate [The Guardian].

A spokesman for a radical Somali group cheered him on, however—from a safe distance. “There could be some people who might say that boy was related to Shebab or other Islamic organisations, but I tell you that this incident is not something that could be related only to Shebab or other Islamic organisations. It is a general obligation for all Muslims to defend their religion and the prophet. He really did what was to be done by any other Muslim.” [“Somali Group hails attack on Danish cartoonist”]

See also:

• Danish Police Start Inquiry in Cartoonist Attack (New York Times)
• Danish cartoonist attacker charged (aljazeera)
• Danish Muslims Question Cartoonist Attack (Islam Online)
• Police foil attempt to kill Danish cartoonist (Saudi Gazette)
• This new decade not off to a real great start (Newsarama)

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.

2009: Year in Review

In my younger days, when I still kept a journal regularly, I used to spend the final moments of the year writing up a quick summary of its high points. So far 2009 has had no high points that I can think of, personal high points I mean, and it has had a wealth of low points. As a matter of fact I really believe that 2009 was one of the worst years of my life—not as bad as say 1997 (the year that started with my father dying) or maybe even 1970 (one of my suicidal years), but still pretty goddamn bad. I’ll hope for better from 2010, but I’m not holding my breath.

A Xmas Tale (Repost)

[This was my first blog entry here at Rational Rant, some four years back, in happier times. I’m reposting it now, pretty much as written then, for no good reason.]

I must have left the windows open last night, as I see that news from the outside has somehow blown in and is lying in drifts on the rug this Seventh Day of Xmas of the Two Thousand Fifth year of the Common Era. The Seventh Day of Xmas (for all you Xians out there) … let’s see, what is that? Seven geese a-laying? Seven swans a-swimming? I know it’s not seven rings; those went to Tolkein’s dwarf-kings. According to folklore these seven, uh, geese or swans or whatever—birds, anyway—yeah, these seven birds stand for the seven deadly virtues or something. The seven sacraments? The seven evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, George and Ringo? No, that can’t be right. The seven churches the Elder John wrote to in his Apocalypse? They stand for something, anyway. It’s all a sort of cipher. Let me tell you how it all came to pass.

You see, back in the old days of once-upon-a-time after Good King Wenceslas was no more, there came a king who knew not X and the ways of the Lord. And he sent a decree to all the land forbidding the practice of Xianity in all its glory, except for the one festival of Xmas. And Xmas, he decreed, must be celebrated with no mention of X, except in the word Xmas itself. And all the people groaned, for they felt sore oppressed.

How can we teach our children the true meaning of Xmas? the people cried. How can we teach them of the four evangelists, the twelve apostles, the two testaments, and the one X Himself? How indeed can we keep Xianity alive?

And a wise man among them rose and said, “If Santa and Frosty can boldly go forth this Xmastide, and only X dare not show His face, then we must craft a mask for Him. Let it be made of the fluffiest of Xmas nonsense, the nose of Rudolph, the kiss of the mistletoe, the lights of the Holiday Tree. But that will be only the outer face; inside will be the apostles, the evangelists, and even X Himself!”

“But how can that be?” exclaimed all the Xians.

“Well,” said the wise man, “let us consider the twelve points of the Apostles’ Creed, one for each of the twelve apostles. These are the points we must drum into the children. And what could be more exquisitely symbolic of these points than twelve drummers, each drumming away to beat the band?”

“Well, uh, maybe…” all the Xians said.

“And the eleven faithful disciples who carried the word to the eleven corners of the earth, are they not exactly like eleven pipers piping?”

And the people were silent, amazed by the words that came out of his mouth.

Now, somewhat nettled by the people’s refusal to understand, the wise man demanded of them, “Now, what about lords? What do they suggest to you?”

“The payment of taxes?” ventured one Xian cautiously.

“Loud drunken parties at night?” suggested another.

“No,” said the wise man impatiently, “Something to do with Xianity.”

“Our Lord and Savior Jesus X?” said another Xian.

“No no no no no,” said the wise man, “not at all. Lords, plural. Ten of them. Ten leaping lords.”

And there was a blank silence upon the crowd, and some began edging quietly away.

“The ten commandments,” said the wise man. “Do they not suggest the ten commandments, the lords of our conduct, leaping out like flames of fire to caution us?”

“Uh, yeah, okay,” said all the Xians in unison.

“Now think of ladies, nine of them, dancing—what do they suggest to you?”

“An Xmas ball!” exclaimed a Xian woman.

“No! Isn't it obvious?” said the wise man, visibly striving to control his temper. “Nine ladies dancing are the nine fruits of the spirit.”

“The what?” exclaimed the crowd, and some of them left quickly by the back way, for they were beginning to feel sore oppressed again.

“The nine fruits of the spirit—look it up,” snapped the wise man. “It’s in Galatians 5:22-3: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance.”

“This is a key doctrine?” asked a Xian doubtfully.

“It’s in the Good Book, isn’t it?” replied the wise man.

“Now I get it,” called out one Xian. “When Rudolph and Frosty and Santa go forth, we will send with them twelve drummers and eleven pipers and ten lords and nine ladies to set forth the points of the apostles creed and the nine fruits of the spirit and they will drown them out with their noise and bedlam.”

And the wise man groaned and held his head, for now he was feeling sore oppressed. “No, I’m not suggesting street theater,” he said. “What I'm talking about is a simple Xmas song, a song we can teach the children, a song that only they will know embodies the most sacred principles of Xianity.”

“How would that work?” asked all the remaining Xians.

“Like this.” And the wise man found his pitch with a tuning fork and sang, “On the first day of Xmas, my true love gave to me, a partridge in a pear tree.”

“And this has a secret meaning the children will recognize?”

“Yes, of course. For the outsiders this will be an ordinary secular love between one man and one woman, but the children will know that it is the love of X for the Church.”

“And the partridge?”

“The partridge is obviously Jesus X Himself.”

“And the pipers will play this and the drummers drum along with it, and the lords and ladies will sing it?”

“No, they're part of the song. There's more.” Again the wise man sang, “On the second day of Xmas, my true love gave to me, two turtle-doves and a partridge in a pear tree.”

“Oh, I see!” exclaimed a Xian. “The dove represents the Holy Spirit, and there are two of them to represent the two descents of the Spirit, at X’s baptism and at Pentecost!”

“Seems to me,” said another, “the two doves could just as well represent the two shoes we put on every morning before going to work.”

“No,” said the wise man, “the two turtle-doves are obviously the Old and New Testaments.”

“And the partridge?”

“I told you, that’s X Himself.”

“But that was the partridge on the first day—this is a second partridge. Are you suggesting that there are two Xs?”

“The partridge is always Jesus X. Now,” and once again the wise man sang, “On the third day of Xmas my true love gave to me three French hens, two turtle-doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.”

“Are you calling the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost three French hens?” asked one Xian incredulously.

“No, the three French hens are faith, hope, and love, out of First Corinthians 13,” said the wise man.

“You know, we’re going to need a special underground school to teach the kids all of this.”

“On the fourth day of Xmas,” sang the wise man doggedly, “my true love gave to me four colly birds, three French hens, two turtle-doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.”

“And the four colly birds are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?” asked a Xian.

“Now you're catching on,” said the wise man, and he sang again, “On the fifth day of Xmas my true love gave to me five golden rings, four colly birds, three French hens, two turtle-doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.”

“And the five golden rings are?”

“The five books of the Pentateuch.”

“Oh, of course,” said a Xian. “And we’re going to keep this up for twelve verses?”

“Exactly.”

“So what about six, seven, and eight?”

“Well, obviously, we’ll have eight maids a-milking to represent the eight beatitudes, seven swans a-swimming for the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, and six geese a-laying to stand in for the six days of creation. What could be simpler?”

“Well, maybe setting up underground schools to secretly teach the kids the true meaning of Xmas and Xianity without all these geese and drummers and partridges. And by the way, I still don’t get how all twelve partridges can stand for Jesus X.”

“The point is,” said the wise man, “that this simple seemingly-innocent Xmas song will help drum the true meaning of Xmas into the children’s heads, and thus save Xianity from oppression by the secular overlords.”

And so it came to pass that every year when Xmas came, the little children sang of the twelve days of Xmas, and none but they knew of the secret theological significance that lay inside the twenty-two pipers piping, the forty-two geese a-laying, or the twelve partridges in pear trees.

Saturnalia, Festivus, and Others

All right, I’ve managed to miss Saturnalia (17-23 December), the Islamic New Year (18 December), the last day of Hanukkah (19 December), the Solstice (21 December), old St. Thomas Day (21 December), HumanLight (23 December), and Festivus (23 December). The Islamic New Year is a wanderer that just happens this year to fall during Yuletide; the Islamic calendar is entirely lunar with no reference to the solar year, and so its holidays wander about, but the others are all solidly part of the season. The Solstice, with its longest night of the year, is the real reason for the celebration, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere where the bulk of these traditions originated. As the days get shorter and the nights get longer it’s hard not to start feeling oppressed. While even the most primitive of people must have noticed that the days eventually started getting longer again, it must still have been a relief to them when that dark corner was finally turned.

Much about the season is explicable as symbolic reminders that warmth and summer sunlight would eventually return. Evergreen branches recall the lush vegetation of spring and summer; the candles and lamps recall the great light of the sun and herald its eventual return, feasting and merriment in the cold barren wasteland give the finger to the ice and snow. And given the tendency winter has toward depression and despair, feasting and present-giving and lights and greenery probably offset the lurch to desolation.

But what about the other great theme of the year, the inversion of the social order? That’s of course Saturnalia’s special province—master and slave changing places and all that. But the Christian Christmas didn’t abandon that—far from it. Even setting aside the Boy Bishop frolics and all that, the whole damn season is one gigantic reversal of the normal order of things. For the rest of the year a sort of horribly perverse version of the laws of thermodynamics prevails—the economic law that says that no matter how much effort you put into something, you’re still screwed. Come Christmas all that gets set aside, and suddenly we give gifts to our fellow human beings, not counting the cost, not expecting anything in return. It is the exact antithesis of the capitalism by which we set our clocks the other three hundred odd days of the year. It is a perversion, or at least an inversion, of our most basic cultural values, and damned if we don’t make the most of it.

About Festivus and HumanLight, both celebrated 23 December, I know nothing; the former involves the display of an unadorned aluminum pole, and the latter involves lighting candles. Both are relatively recent inventions; the former was popularized by a TV show, Seinfeld, that as it happens I’ve never seen, and the latter appears to have been celebrated by a select group for the past decade or so. Both are intended as inclusive secular celebrations of the season, as opposed to what Garrison Keillor assures us is the for-Xians-Only festival of Xmas. Located midway between the Solstice and Christmas, each offers an alternative vision of the season, one not dependent on believing six impossible things before breakfast. I like the inclusive aspect; I don’t think I care much for the “Airing of Grievances” that is a traditional part of Festivus, but it ain’t a deal-breaker as far as I’m concerned.

Quotation of the Day

If the "aughts" were about the growing recognition that things are going to change, the teens, I think are now about the growing reality of that change - the recognition that none of us have the resources, or the wealth, or the immunity from changing circumstances to resist change for very long. The question is how we will change, not whether we will.

Sharon Astyk

Sightless in Syracuse

Okay, 13 December was St. Lucy’s Day, and I intended to have something up about that, though as it is another one of the holidays in the Christmas season that I’ve never celebrated, I don’t really know anything about it. It’s an odd holiday, much beloved in Sweden, that involves a girl wearing a crown of lit candles while serving an early breakfast.

The story of St. Lucy is one of those horrific legends only a medieval Christian could love. The short version is that she had a boyfriend who admired her beautiful eyes, and so in a fit of some sort of madness she gouged them out and sent them to him as a present. The longer version involves her being arrested as a Christian and then executed after a variety of difficulties—the guards couldn’t move her from her cell, and then when they decided to burn her alive the fire wouldn’t consume her, for whatever reason. God was presumably behind these miracles, but somehow he was unable to keep a guard from cutting her throat with his sword.

Note that the name Lucia means light, so we seem to be again in Festival of Lights country, like Hanukkah and Yule and all the rest of the winter frolics.

Ancient Politics; Modern Celebration

I’ve fallen behind in this “Month of Christmas” project, so I’m talking about events I missed during this holiday season now; please bear with me. Or not. I’ve got my own troubles to deal with.

Hanukkah began at sundown on 11 December this year; as the date is determined according to the Jewish lunisolar calendar, it moves about on any purely solar calendar, such as the civil calendar derived from the Romans that we use here in the good old USA. What it amounts to is that Hanukkah can occur anywhere from early in the Yule season to right around Christmas itself. It’s tied to the phases of the moon, see, much like Easter and some of the other annoyingly shifty celebrations in our current repertoire.

I’m pretty sure everybody is familiar with the candle-lighting and dreidel-spinning business that constitute the praxis of the holiday, and I could comment on how the festival seems to be taking on more and more the color of the Yuletide season, with gift-giving and even decorated Hanukkah bushes being the order of the day. Well, in the United States, at least. I don’t know what’s going on in the rest of the world, really; hell, I’m barely qualified to comment on what’s going on here, crouching in my makeshifty office in the basement of the house I once had to myself. I used to know people who, you know, celebrated Hanukkah, but not any more.

No, what interests me is the history of the thing, particularly as reflected in the three books of the Christian canon, Daniel, 1 Maccabees, and 2 Maccabees. Each of them comes from a somewhat different perspective; each of them has its strengths and its weaknesses, and none of them tell us what we’d really like to know about events. It’s okay; that’s what you expect from documents rattling down the corridors of time; a partial, incomplete, highly-biased description of events that presents an insoluble puzzle for a modern historian—with just enough information to allow him to trick himself into thinking he’s got it down.

The documents come from the last period in which there was an independent Jewish state in antiquity, loosely speaking. Not until modern times would such a state emerge again. As with most things in antiquity it’s difficult to write any short summary of matters that does the slightest justice to the complex and downright messy reality, so the following paragraphs should be taken with a large allowance of salt.

The ancient kingdom of Israel is a slippery entity to get a grip on. In its earliest stages is very existence is in doubt, and it’s very hard to see exactly what sort of thing we have under our historical microscopes. The first of its incarnations, the legendary kingdom of David and Solomon, has left us virtually nothing to go on but legends and reconstructed documents best explained as creations of that kingdom. This entity, whatever its exact nature, seems to have been short-lived; by the tenth century BCE it had split into two states, Israel and Judah, with the latter ruled by descendents of David.

Both states came to ends after a few centuries, Israel in 721 BCE (or 9208 HE) and Judah in 586 BCE (9415 HE). The former was destroyed by the Assyrians and the latter by the Chaldeans (or neo-Babylonians). A remnant (the Samaritans) claiming descent from Israel persisted (and persists to this day, though now under a thousand people), and a more substantial group (the Jews) claiming descent from Judah likewise continued.

Now the critical thing in all this for our purposes is that Solomon supposedly had a temple to Yahweh constructed to Jerusalem on his watch. This temple remained a center for the worship of Yahweh (at least for the state of Judah) for centuries to come. (Israel had its own shrines, and the Judean writers who are responsible for much of material incorporated into the Biblical corpus wrote eloquently and bitterly about them.) When the Chaldeans destroyed Judah they also demolished the temple—which, however, as things turned out was not the end of that particular story.

The Chaldeans deported the ruling classes from Judah, but they didn’t disappear. Instead they formed an enclave in Babylon, where they wrote various psalms and the P narrative of the Pentateuch. Some of its members were eventually allowed to return to Jerusalem under Persian rule, and they had the temple rebuilt, rededicating it in 515 BCE (9486 HE). Not that much is known about the history of the Judean province under Persian rule, though quite a bit of Hebrew writing is more or less plausibly assigned to that period.

This era ended about 332 BCE (9669 HE) with the Macedonian conquests under Alexander the Great; the consequent breakup of his empire ultimately left Judea in Seleucid hands. Again we have little narrative history for the period, though the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek can plausibly be assigned to it.

It’s during this time that the events immediately relevant to our narrative occurred. This was during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (9826-9837 HE [175-164 BCE]). Throughout the history of the ancient world international forces (trade, imperialism) warred with parochial interests; in this period Greek influence was paramount in the process called Hellenization in the textbooks. In Judea traditionalists and Hellenists duked it out with the High Priesthood as the ultimate prize; each party tried to get its own candidate in, with bribery and assassination among the political arsenal employed. As the High Priest was appointed by the emperor, Antiochus was inevitably involved. Seeing the traditionalists as troublemakers, Antiochus ultimately decided that the correct solution was the elimination of the religion they practiced, and the replacement of their cult by one that was more accommodating. Had this plan worked out it is quite likely that history as we know it would have been very different.

It didn’t. The actual result was an uprising that led to a short period of independence for Judea under a dynasty known as the Hasmoneans. One of the products of this struggle is the biblical book of Daniel, a curious production designed to look superficially like a traditional religious tome, but actually something quite different. Written in Aramaic, the language in use since the Persian conquest, the beginning and end were translated into bad Hebrew, presumably so that the casual observer would see a classic religious text no matter whether the scroll was rolled tails out or tails in. The author’s take on history was disguised as prophecy to carry on the pretext of antiquity, but his original readers can have had no doubt what they were reading. The disguise is superficial; the bulk of the book is in Aramaic and the figures mentioned are clearly identified, even if not by name. Empires were identified as beasts by their astrological signs; this is similar to modern political cartoons depicting the United States as an eagle or Russia as a bear.

Whoever exactly was responsible for this book, he was not a Hasmonean supporter. In fact, nothing obviously emanating from the winning faction in the struggles made it into the Hebrew scriptures that have come down to us. This canon seems to have been framed to exclude the Judean leaders of the era. This is in striking contrast to the larger collection found in Greek Christian bibles; the books of 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees tell of their struggles and triumphs at length. Presumably some sort of ancient factionalism is involved; the details hardly matter at this distance.

Now had Antiochus succeeded in stamping out the traditionalist party it is unlikely that Yahweh-worship would have survived as an expression of piety distinct from the general religion of the ancient world. Picture a Judaism absorbed in polytheism; we’d have (presumably) no Bible, no Jesus, no Christianity—or at the very least, we’d have different writings and a different savior. The concepts were out there, after all, but the particular historical crystallization would have been different. No doubt that’s true of many ancient events that don’t resonate as loudly down time’s hallways. Still, this one we know about, and something of it is still celebrated.

Hanukkah supposedly celebrates the rededication of the temple, after it was retaken from the Hellenizing party and returned to the form of worship the traditionalists thought was important. At this distance it’s hard to care that much over which outfit controlled a long-destroyed piece of physical and social real estate. But the consequences live on. And while that may not be the traditional meaning of Hanukkah, that’s the part that interests me.

Still More Picking on the Clueless

A couple dozen people showed up for a meeting in the Rockwood School District of Ellisville, Missouri, to protest teaching students about the standard designations CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era). According to a news story “Citizens stated they want the district to use B.C. and A.D. as a standard when talking about dates in history.” One of them complained “I just think it’s trying to pacify being politically correct and I don’t agree with that at all. It should not be taught.” A petition on the subject has “attracted hundreds of signatures”.

The odd thing is that the school district in question does not in fact use any nomenclature other than AD/BC in referring to dates in history. “There is no policy or plan in place to remove the use of B.C. or A.D. in the Rockwood School District or to enforce the use of any other designated dating system,” according to Kim Cranston. Apparently the school does teach about the existence of the standard CE/BCE designation, in use among historians for centuries, as well they should, if they want the kids prepared for college. A spokesman for the district, however, seems to say that they intend to enforce the use of the AD designation to provide historical clarity—whatever that’s supposed to mean.

The two comments on this story are stupid in the extreme. One reads:

Enough of this political correctness. Why don't we use the terms PCE/BPCE. Political Correct Era and Before Political Correct Era. Let's start teaching BP Before Present and ACE After Common Era. We need a Superintendent and Board of Education who have a backbone and stand up for what is right. This is a symptom of a larger problem.

The other:

The only thing the school district will understand is taxes. Vote against them and protest your taxes.

I contributed the following comment:

If historical clarity is the issue than students should be taught the standard CE/BCE system used by historians for the past four centuries. It’s a distinction without a difference, really; AD 2009 is the same date as 2009 CE; 146 BC is the same date as 146 BCE. (Both nomenclatures involve the omission of the year 0, making calculations between years AD/CE and BC/BCE needlessly cumbersome.) Historically the Common Era or Christian Era has also been known as the Vulgar Era; the system was devised by some sixth century monk so he didn’t have to use the emperor’s name in calculating dates for Easter.

And by the way if the kids are going to be taught the AD/BC nomenclature, I do think they should be taught that the AD goes in front of the date, not after it. So many times I’ve seen people mistakenly write 2009 AD instead of AD 2009. It would probably also be helpful to remind them that AD stands for “Anno Domini” and not “After Death”.

My comment has not yet shown up as I publish this entry.

(h/t Afarensis)

More Picking on the Clueless

Even as I wrote the “Picking on the Clueless” entry the other day, another member of the Clueless Brigade, one Michael Aprile, was contributing his two cents (and that’s overvaluing it considerably) at Pharyngula. This guy, who obviously knows nothing about the topic, had the temerity to lecture P. Z. Myers, a practicing biologist, on the subject of “Macro evolution”. An excerpt follows:

There is nothing wrong with being a fool, but teaching others to be one is unacceptable and irresponsible, at the very least. Furthermore, to have a degree or degrees in biology and to still believe in Darwinian theory, shows ignorance in the worst degree. Macro evolution is founded on absolutely nothing but blind faith. No evidence has ever been provided for it. Several hokes and false attempts, but no real evidence. A large group of sciences, including biologists, have concluded that the theory is false.

Now of course I would point out that no evidence has ever been provided that there is a distinction between macroevolution and microevolution; the assumption behind that is the notion that there is something, some sort of mechanism, that would prevent many small genetic changes from accumulating until two populations are no longer capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. Until such a mechanism has been observed in action the term “macroevolution” is essentially hand-waving and gas.

P. Z. Myers rips the poor fool apart in the manner of Yahweh speaking to Job out of the whirlwind:

I’ve split half-billion year old stones to expose the shells of trilobites, I’ve seen the bones of Tiktaalik, I’ve held in my hands the skull of Neanderthal. I’ve compared the genes of mice and flies, I’ve studied the embryos of grasshoppers and fish, I’ve read thousands of papers produced by a scientific community that values curiosity over money. I’ve also read dozens of books by creationists, and I can say with complete confidence that they, and you, Mr Michael Aprile, are full of shit.

Ah, yes, way to go, Dr. Myers.

A Sad and Wasted Life

Pioneering television con-man and itinerant faith-healer Oral Roberts died today, leaving the world worse off than when he came into it. With the advent of television opportunities to make a fast buck off the gullible abounded, and men like Oral Roberts were quick to take advantage of it.

His death came none too soon for his many victims. It is sad to have to say this about any person, but had his life been cut short say fifty years ago, the world could have been saved a great deal of pain and suffering, and at least one fake institute of higher learning would never have opened.

The great C. E. S. Wood once pictured the scene in heaven when Billy Sunday, the inventor of televangelism, entered. “I’ve been sending a stream of souls up here, like they was played out of a fire nozzle and at a discount, too,” he boasts.

“I never heard of you,” says God.

“Why, this place must be jammed with souls I sent here,” Billy protests.

“No, not one.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know. I never heard of you.”

“Are you sure that this is heaven, and you are God?”

“No," says God. “Not sure I am God—but this is heaven … and none of your souls are here.”

“They must be somewhere,” Billy protests.

“Not necessarily,” says God. “The cosmos is so very large, and fanatics are so infinitely small.”

It would take a writer like Wood to do justice to this theme, and I am not him. The colossal waste of a long and misspent life is too appalling to contemplate. The ruin Oral Roberts has spread to the lives he touched is even harder to look at. I won’t mourn the death of this sleazy trickster. There’s nothing left there to mourn; rather I regret that a unique individual who was given the chance to experience the universe and leave something of value behind him instead squandered it selfishly in such a shameful manner. Sad to say, he will not be missed.

Picking on the Clueless

I have a number of open tabs in my browser that I’d like to get rid of; two of them are witless comments on science. The first comes from one Bill Belew, who writes for Examiner.com. This extremely short piece has got to be one of the stupidest I’ve ever read on any scientific topic. Bill asks: “Who or what is making the natural selection?” Rather than take the time to brush up on the topic he blunders on:

Selection implies there is a selector, no? Choice implies chooser, right?

And on what basis does the selector make his/her/its selection?

It seems to me folk do not want to acknowledge a Creator or Designer to the universe but would very much like to personify all that is around us and give it the ability to design. What’s up with that?

Well, I don’t know, Bill—the question that strikes me is, Have you ever thought of, oh, doing a little homework before publishing? I guess not.

Almost as idiotic is the following paragraph from Kent Hovind’s doctoral dissertation:

The idea that evolutionists try to get across today is that there is a continual upward progression. They claim that everything is getting better, improving, all by itself as if there is an inner-drive toward more perfection and order. This is totally opposite of the first and second law [sic] of thermodynamics. It goes against all scientific evidence that has been accumulated. Yet, this lie is what many men believe today. We don’t see it happening anywhere in our universe today. We don't see any evidence of this in the fossil record.

And yet, people who gibber like this expect to be taken seriously. The mind boggles.

Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men

10 December is Human Rights Day, commemorating the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN General Assembly on this day in 1948. And how appropriate it is to the season. Consider Article 1:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Damn right. In a way it’s sad that the remaining twenty-nine articles have to exist at all, spelling out that people should not be tortured (Article 4) or enslaved (Article 5), or deprived of employment (Article 23) or leisure (Article 24) or education (Article 26). Shouldn’t this all go without saying? Apparently not; when the nation that prides itself on being the city on the hill and the beacon of hope for the world descends to torture and degradation of human beings for political ends all bets are off.

In many ways a noble document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has a couple of anomalies. Consider Article 16 section 1:

Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

There is nothing here that any segregationist of the Post-Reconstruction South or strict Roman Catholic could object to; whites are free to marry whites just as coloreds are free to marry coloreds; Baptists are free to marry Baptists just as Roman Catholics are free to marry Roman Catholics, “without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion”. Nobody is stopping African-Americans or Baptists from marrying, so long as they marry within their own kind. As interracial marriage was prohibited in most states of the union at the time the United States voted for the UDHR, this almost has to have been its understanding of this passage.

Or again, consider this from Article 26 section 1:

Elementary education shall be compulsory.

I know there’s a story behind this; the idea is to prevent parents or employers from depriving children of an education by exploiting their labor on farms or in factories when they should be in school. My father used to tell of an old farmer in North Powder who saw no reason why his kids should be wasting time in school when they could be doing chores at home. But this seems to me to be a mite on the extreme side. At the very least it seems odd to see anything described as “compulsory” in a list of human rights. And as an ex-homeschooler somewhat in the tradition of Neill and Holt, I find this concept a trifle troubling. There’s something akin to slavery in it, seems like.

But on the whole the UDHR favors good things—equality before the law (7), equal pay for equal work (23), the right to privacy (12), freedom of thought (including the “freedom to change his religion or belief”) (18), freedom of opinion and expression (19), freedom of movement (13), the right to an adequate standard of living (25), the right to enjoy and arts and share in scientific advancement (27), and so on. It lies squarely in the tradition represented by classic US documents like The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

If there’s a single document that spells out the meaning of the season in practical terms, this is it. It was supported in 1948 by states as disparate as Afghanistan and Mexico, Egypt and Thailand, Syria and the United States, Iceland and Turkey. No one voted against it, though a handful of states (including unsurprisingly Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union, and the then-segregated Union of South Africa) abstained from voting.

The UDHR is said to be the most-translated document in the world, having been put into more than 300 languages. (The “complete” Bible [minus the Apocrypha / Deuterocanonical works] has been translated into 438 languages according to the United Bible Society, however. Parts of the Bible have been translated into many more.) It is probably the most generally accepted statement of basic rights anywhere ever (and my Wikipedia editing experience immediately pops up with “citation needed”.) Oh, yeah, there are critics out there, especially among the states committed to a single religious tradition, Islamic states being the noisiest current offenders. Consider the Cairo Declaration version of religious liberty (Article 10) as a contrast:

Islam is the religion of unspoiled nature. It is prohibited to exercise any form of compulsion on man or to exploit his poverty or ignorance in order to convert him to another religion or to atheism.

How degraded is that? The filth of that document makes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stand out all the more brightly, holiday lights in the darkness of winter ignorance.

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.

 

Attention: Time Travelers

It is also possible that this is Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day, in which the objective is to try to blend in unobtrusively with current customs and mores.  Some suggested activities include:

• Greeting people by referring to phenomena of the past and future; some examples might be: “What spectrum will today’s broadcast be in?” or “Is this song available on 78?” or “Can you direct me to the nearest sleep deprivation chamber?”
• Walking up to random people and asking them, “What year is this?” and on hearing their reply, muttering (after a moment’s pause), “Then there’s still time” before hurrying off.
• Standing in front of a statue, falling to your knees, and yelling “Nooooo!”
• Dressing in moderately anachronistic clothing and speaking in slang from varying decades.

This one really appeals to me; I think it was my father who used to suggest that one way of appreciating the mundane world was to imagine oneself as a time traveler experiencing the past (or future) for the first time.

And much thanks to Dave Away from Home for this one.