Impossible to Verify

I stumbled onto an internet meme involving an odd use of the phrase “natural history” that led me here, to a weblog entry entitled simply “Natural History is Not Science” by somebody calling himself Dr. David Shormann. The piece turns out to be the usual claptrap about how geology and astronomy and the like are “interesting, fun, and adventure-filled pursuit[s]” but not “real science” because you can’t examine a supernova in a laboratory or watch the continents drift in real time or whatever the nonsense of the day is—as it’s retread stuff I didn’t really pay attention. The thing that did catch my attention, however, was the author’s bizarre claim that it is impossible to ever verify a historical event. Speaking about the past he says “you can theorize all day long, but unless you have a time machine, you can never verify your ideas”.

WTF? Where’d that come from? Of course you can verify your ideas—or disprove them, for that matter. Here’s an example from something I’m working on right now. I have a narrative in front of me, a narrative that purports to be the true story of a man’s life in nineteenth century America. It has some quite interesting material in it, if true. But is it? According to Dr. David Shormann there is no way on earth that I can determine this, since I don’t happen to have a time machine. I guess I just have to take it at face value.

Or do I? The author claims to have been raised by a man named Drake on a farm adjoining the land owned by former President Andrew Jackson. No way I can test this, right? Think again. Our narrator supposedly lived there from say 1836 to 1847. This means that if I look at the 1840 census I should find an entry for a man named Drake somewhere near the entry for Andrew Jackson, and there should be at least one male inhabitant in the correct age range for our narrator. Finding that would tend to confirm our narrative; not finding it to disconfirm. (No evidence of this sort of course proves or disproves a claim; proof belongs to logic and mathematics, not to history.) There was no such man, by the way, not a good sign.

Our narrator claims to have met Kit Carson in a St. Louis hotel in 1847, and to have accompanied him thereafter to Bent’s Fort in Colorado. Well, Kit Carson’s activities are well-documented for this time-period. If the narrative were true we would expect to find other records of Kit Carson staying at a St. Louis hotel, and leaving town with a fifteen-year-old boy in tow. The records do indicate that Carson was in St. Louis in 1847, but he stayed at a private residence, not a hotel, and he went from there to Arizona with an army regiment and went on from there to California—not to Bent’s Fort. And no fifteen-year-old boy puts in an appearance. Not conclusive, but a bad sign.

Again, he claims to have bought land on the Sacramento River and ranched there from 1867 to 1872. If he did, there should be a title transfer recorded in the land records there (and there isn’t). And he should have shown up in Sonoma county or thereabouts in the 1870 census. Instead he shows up in that census at the opposite end of the state, in Santa Barbara county, landless and breaking horses for a living.

And again he spent time in the 1860s fighting the Apaches with General Crook—when General Crook according to army records, newspaper accounts, and a host of other documents was fighting the Shoshones in Idaho. He was the scout who brought in the Modoc leader Captain Jack in 1873 according to his own account—but reporters on the scene make no mention of him, assigning that feat to a regular army detachment, assisted possibly by some Warm Springs Indians. This is supported by the military records, by recollections of participants, and by contemporary references, none of which so much as allude to our narrator’s participation in events.

Now, not everything in this guy’s narrative failed to pan out. He claims for example to have been in Seattle in 1888, and sure enough, his name appears there in the city directory, just as it should. He claimed to have known Buffalo Bill Cody—and there are witnesses who saw Buffalo Bill embrace him and give him a seat of honor when he showed up as an old man at one of his wild west shows. But when so many records of the time fail to bear out his story, or worse yet, place him elsewhere from the place he claimed to have been, it’s impossible to take his account very seriously.

My point is this: contrary to Dr. Shormann’s claims, it is entirely possible to verify, or to controvert, historical hypotheses. Police investigators do it every day. So do epidemiologists. Realtors. Lawyers. Accountants. It’s part and parcel of the way we do business in the world. And we don’t need time machines to do it.

Lameass Greeting Card Alert

Here’s an e-card to send to that special someone you never want to hear from again (be warned; clicking on this link will start an idiotic recitation playing over your computer’s speakers). Entitled “We Need God in America, Again” and written by somebody called simply “Carmen” it shamelessly plagiarizes that demented internet bagatelle often referred to as “Forsaken Roots” or “History Forgotten” to produce the following gems attributed to various founders:

Our country was founded on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.—Patrick Henry

Fake. As mentioned here till you’re no doubt sick of it, first written in 1956 in The Virginian.

We’ve staked our future on our ability to follow the 10 commandments, with all our heart.—James Madison

Even faker. The original fake didn’t have any of this “with all our heart” stuff; this is a fake version of a fake quotation.

You can’t have national morality apart from religious principle.—George Washington

Actually it was the Reverend E. B. Webb who said that “There is no national morality apart from religious principle.” What Washington said in his farewell address was “…reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle,” which is the text Webb was paraphrasing.

The philosophy of the school room, in one generation, will be the philosophy of government in the next.—Abraham Lincoln

Another fake, probably. At least nobody has ever been able to find where ol’ Honest Abe actually said it, or anything much like it.

And this is the crop—not a genuine quotation in the bunch. And these rags are stitched together with the worst kind of blood-and-semen-drenched jibberjabber: “rape and murder are the trend” in our public schools while “Every day, a new holocaust of 5,000 unborn die”. “[P]ornography floods our streets” and “the spirit of Sodom and Gomorra” runs amok alongside “the blood bought saints of the living God” waiting for “Jesus Christ [to come] back again, in all His glory” to “send this evil lifestyle back to Satan” because “History tells us … to live like there is no God makes you a fool” and “Astrology won’t save you”. The only solution to America’s problems is “stop handing out condoms and start handing out the word of God in schools”; that should take care of America’s high teenage pregnancy rate [which has actually been declining since the mid-fifties] and its low literacy rate [apparently the author has never looked at the literacy rates in such places as Chad, Niger, or Afghanistan].

Reading this gilded cat-vomit makes me wonder something: where was this Carmen educated? If this combination of mendacity and ignorance is a product of America’s public schools, then, yeah, it’s obviously time for an overhaul. The disinfectant of critical thinking would be more to the point than more religious hogwash—does this character really suppose that handing out Korans or Books of Mormon or whatever is actually going to help somehow in this dire situation? Especially with all those spirits and saints and whatnot wandering around loose like a scene out A Christmas Carol. Maybe Kool-Aid™’s the real answer for you, eh, Carmen? I’m just saying.

Quotation of the Day

And that is how conservatism continues. Not with some principled stand for The Way Things Were, but with an unprincipled demand for things that comfort the comfortable and protect the already-safe, all justified post hoc by insistence that this is “tradition.”

Joshua Rosenau

Staggering through Sheol

Yeah, it’s that time of year. Sheol. The pits. Cold, nasty, empty and bleak. There’s something about the light, I think. The days are cut to fall-length, but they have a hollow slant not shared by the October sun. They’re getting longer, and that’s the hope of it all, but the sunlight is cold and barren, and new buds are as likely to be stillborn by frost as to reach full bloom.

It’s been a nasty and unpleasant day in some respects, with more notices fastened to our door by unseen lurkers, harbingers of some vague and nameless doom. There’s nothing to do, apparently, but fax them to our lawyer, and hope that he knows what he’s doing. But the threats upset me, as they are intended to do, and another day’s work goes down the drain. If I could put a face to the faceless—well, let’s just say that that person would find him- or her-self faceless in a way very different from that comfortable anonymity that allows a corporate functionary to steal the effort of a lifetime from a real person with lies and false promises.

I’m not interested in excuses. There’re a lot of people out there who are only doing their jobs. And like the people who were just following orders, they should not be surprised when reality turns and bites them. To paraphrase Pseudo-Burke, the hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who were only doing their jobs.

To distract myself from all this I’ve been burying myself in an old project, my New Testament translation. I’ve tried to eschew all fanciful translations—none of this “he ascended into heaven” stuff when the Greek says “he went up into the sky.” Some words defy translation—baptism, spirit/wind/breath, kingdom, and the like—reflections of a world categorized in such a different fashion from current understandings that any modern translation inevitably falsifies the meaning. Do I turn “slave” into “servant” like the KJV, or render it as “employee” or the like? It seems to me that a modern corporation has a lot more in common with the hierarchical “kingdom of heaven” envisioned by the NT writers—a sort of vast ante-bellum plantation with Yahweh as the nearly absent slaveowner—than any governmental structure familiar to modern Americans. Decisions, decisions.

Well, anyway, it’s late, and the old Rational Ranter’s got to get up tomorrow and start packing. No point leaving things to the last minute, right? And I can always unpack if the storm clouds lift.

Voice Fiddle and Flute No Longer Be Mute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotation of the Day

I must say here that few if any in the Founding era gave a good goddam what John Adams thought or said after the Revolutionary period, when he was a mover & shaker.

You could look it up. Nobody quoted him, and his master monographs like [A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States] were largely ignored.

I like him as an inquisitive mind of the Founding era more than the Founding era itself did; it found him annoying, which he was, and voted him out of the presidency as soon as possible, America’s first one-term president. … He is alleged to be a “key” Founder. Feh. John Adams was the first Irrelevant Man, the GeorgeHWBush41 of his day. They couldn’t wait to be rid of him.

Tom Van Dyke

Quotation of the Day

…[D]oughnuts, even Spudnuts, don’t come close to the movement to improve American education inspired by the Soviet launch of Sputnik. From just getting history horribly in error, Palin came close to ridiculing American business with her idea of meeting the challenges like space exploration, with doughnuts and coffee. Doughnuts and coffee will not lift student test scores, nor are they the answer to lifting our economy today and keeping the U.S. competitive and on top, in the future.

Ed Darrell

(See How the) Good Times Roll (Away)

Like ice in a drink
Invisible ink
Or dreams in the cold light of day
The children of rock ‘n’ roll
Never grow old
They just fade away.

Ron Nasty

My word-genie seems to have deserted me; I have virtually nothing to say, and I’ve lost whatever ability I have to say it. Still, that’s never stopped me before. Plenty of other things have, but not that.

Strange news arrives from the coast. Some armed and dangerous character is supposed to be hiding out somewhere in my mother’s neighborhood—seems he shot a cop during a routine traffic stop, got chased up highway 101, abandoned his car, took a pot-shot at another fellow out crabbing, and is now lurking somewhere among the stunted evergreenery of the sandy Oregon shoreline. That’s just perfect. My mother couldn’t get out the other day for a routine medical appointment—well, actually getting out wasn’t the problem. It’s just if she left the authorities would have let her back in, and that would have been kind of a problem.

And elsewhere clueless politician Michele Bachmann babbles about how amazing it is that all who came to America were treated alike regardless of the color of their skins, what languages they spoke, how rich or poor they were. “Once you got here, we were all the same. Isn’t that remarkable?” Yeaaaah…that’s right. Everybody came over in chains, was sold into slavery, was immediately put to work in the cotton-fields—in short, everybody who came to America was treated like crap. Is that your point? Apparently slavery didn’t count, according to Bachmann—it seems that the Founders “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” Who knew? Apparently Bachmann has her own private sources of history.

And riot-police crack down on mass demonstrations in Tunis, Cairo, and Alexandria. Are the forces of democracy winning? Or are they losing? And which would be a good thing? Did it really make sense for Egypt to privatize public utilities? Are the new wealthy elites really better at running things than the old bureaucrats? And what about Naomi?

Bombs in Moscow, Lahore, Karachi. Parliament opens in Kabul after a week-long stand-off with the president. President Obama delivers a State-of-the-Union address to a Congress still subdued by the recent shooting of one of their own. It is reported that troop deaths from IEDs in Afghanistan rose by sixty percent last year. Violence, craziness. No foundation.

Discouragement and depression sit beside me as I type. Emotions flicker fitfully like a defective fluorescent tube. Something my father once said comes back to me: “As you get older, things make less sense.” It’s probably neither true nor relevant, but it fits my feelings this 26th day of January in the twelve thousand eleventh year of the Holocene Era.

This is the old Rational Ranter, reporting from Sheol.

Quotation of the Day

[Michele] Bachmann is, in fact, a lot like Reagan. Bachmann is really good at repeating all the tired old cliches of conservatism while her actual votes and beliefs stand in stark contrast to those stated principles. Just like Reagan, who preached fiscal conservatism while driving up the national debt enormously; who swore that America never negotiated with terrorists while negotiating with terrorists, trading arms for hostages with Iran; who struck the "America never cuts and runs" pose while, in reality, cutting and running in Beirut after the attack on the Marines barracks.

Ed Brayton

Celebration of a Golden Age

And it’s now the second day of Saturnalia, that old-time Roman feast where masters and slaves changed places and presents and feasting were the order of the day. I had a piece partly written with those pedantic references to forgotten authors that you’ve come to expect, but my system crashed and nothing seems to be left of it. Sic transit and all that. I don’t know that I care, really; maybe next year I’ll manage to do something a bit more coherent. Or not. At this point I’m tired and I really don’t care.

According to Macrobius (I think it was) what was originally a one day festival (17 December) got expanded to seven days in part due to the calendar change introduced by Julius Caesar in 9955 HE (46 BCE) on the advice of the shadowy Sosigenes of Alexandria. You see, he expanded December from 29 to 31 days and thus threw off the date of Saturnalia, which was originally fixed at 14 days before the Kalends of January, but then changed to 16 days before the Kalends. Some people continued to celebrate the XIIII Kal Jan date, now 19 December, while others the XVI Kal Jan date (17 December), and with two dates for Saturnalia it’s easy to see how the 18th got thrown in as a kind of bonus, like the Friday after Thanksgiving in the good old USA. But this doesn’t explain the extension for another four days, unless maybe people just plain felt that after getting the autumn field work done, it was time for a party.

It matters not. Personally I don’t trust ancient explanations of ancient feasts; they all have the stench of ad-hocery about them. I doubt very much that the ancients knew that much more about them than we do; their origins were probably as lost to them as to us.

The thing about Saturnalia, though, is the evocation of a long-lost Golden Age, presided over by Saturn, where distinctions of rank did not exist, where the earth gave forth its abundance without the need of labor, where justice reigned. A time before Prometheus brought fire to man or Pandora opened that goddamn box.

In a way, I suppose, there was a golden age. Gold is one of the easiest metals to work, and one of the first discoveries in metallurgy must have been the magic of gold. It’s not the most useful of metals, but damn is it pretty. And it’s not like the other rocks. The discovery could even have been pre-agricultural, when hunters and gatherers roamed the earth, and division of labor was pretty much restricted to the gender division that humankind seems to have had from before the beginning. Distinctions of rank may have depended on who was the strongest, or who had the most success in the hunt, or the gather, or whatever. A golden age of sorts, though not exactly, well, Eden.

The mythical golden age is much cooler, and it’s hard to fault the attempts to recreate it with that peace-on-earth good-will-toward-men spirit that was the stuff of Saturnalia. Present-giving, candle-lighting, gambling, free speech, masters waiting on their slaves—good times, good times. But it isn’t real, and when Saturnalia ends, all that stuff goes back in the box till the next year. Still, as Statius observed:

For how many years shall this festival abide! Never shall age destroy so holy a day! While the hills of Latium remain and father Tiber, while thy Rome stands and the Capitol thou hast restored to the world, it shall continue.

The Self-Blinded Leading the Sighted

God, it’s St. Lucy’s Day already, meaning that the holiday season is considerably advanced, and I don’t have a thing to wear. St. Lucy—bah. You may remember Lucy as the psychotic medieval woman who ripped her own eyes out and sent them to an admirer as a gift. Apparently the guy said he liked them, or something like that. Those were the days, my friend. One of those gay little old-time legends that brighten the spirits in this dark time of year.

Well, my spirits were brightened, anyway, by this strange piece—an instance of the blind presuming to instruct the sighted on the meaning of color. Some Yakima lady named Kara L. Kraemer, it seems, was so incensed by somebody daring to observe that US law was not based on the Bible and never should be, that she set out to instruct him by delivering a few choice quotations from the Founders that she’d apparently dug up from some moldering trash heap somewhere, and—you guessed it, knowing me—she’s included a couple of familiar fakes among them. And, no surprises here either, those that aren’t fake are absolutely irrelevant to the point. Nice job, lady.

She’s got John Dickenson comparing the proposed Constitution to the Bible, in that both have come under attack; she’s got James Wilson repeating the old legal maxim (shot down by Jefferson) that Christianity is part of the common law, and James McHenry pleading for the establishment of a private Bible society in Maryland. She’s got Carroll of Carrollton arguing that people won’t be virtuous on their own without the threat of “wicked eternal misery” or the promise of “good eternal happiness” to goad them on. (He was taking a swipe at the excesses of the French Revolution, by the way.) She’s got Sam Adams comparing the American revolution to the Reformation: “Our Fore-Fathers threw off the Yoke of Popery in Religion; for you is reserved the honor of levelling the popery of Politicks” (a portion of the passage that she omits, incidentally). And she’s got two fakes and one dubious entry: the Washington “god and the bible” concoction, the Patrick Henry “religionists” misattribution, and the dubious Patrick Henry story about the Bible being worth more than all the other books put together that rests on third-hand testimony from an anonymous source. Not a good showing from somebody who pretends to be combating ignorance.

If I were to make a recommendation to Kara Kraemer, it would be that if she wants to combat ignorance she should start with the person closest to her—herself. But like St. Lucy, I’m sure she knows better.

[Update: The article linked to here has changed since I first wrote and then replied to a comment here. The original introduction read only:

In honor of National Bible Week and to combat Stiefel's statement of ignorance, I offer the following quotes from our founders in regard to the Bible:

This is what I was making fun of, not the present more elaborate introduction that gives a coherent (though flawed) explanation for the quotations that follow. The author has also corrected the information about the one Patrick Henry statement, though she has incorrectly attributed the fake Washington "God and the Bible" quotation to Paulding's book (which even if correct would not be a reliable source, what with it being an undocumented children's book and all). Had I first seen the article in its present state I wouldn't have responded as I did, or indeed at all. sbh]

Things Are Getting Bad Here

Obviously I’m hoping for the best, but I’ve never been much good at hope. Dark ominous clouds are more my speed than silver linings. Tomorrow comes a meeting with a lawyer which may determine our future—whether we can continue on here as a household, or whether we lose our family home in what appears to me to be plain theft on the part of the bank holding our mortgage and Fannie Mae. I’m dispirited and depressed and things look very black to me at the moment. They may look better to me in the morning, but they may equally well look much worse.

The thing is, we followed the bank’s instructions exactly—and yet somehow we appear to have lost our home, all without going through any of the steps supposedly required by law. I can’t deal with this right now, but the stress is one reason I haven’t been keeping up, even in my usual feeble manner, entries in this blog. I have pieces in the hopper (either for here or Fake History) on Benjamin Rush’s prophetic dream, of an unknown life of Jesus discovered over a century ago in a Tibetan monastery, of a new and even more degenerate form of “Forsaken Roots,” on my preparations for blogging about Mark Twain’s Autobiography when the first volume is finally released in November, an update on the fake Washington quotation about governing without God and the Bible, a fuller account of the fake Madison “ten commandments” quotation that may given some indication of how a brief phrase in the Federalist Papers about the nature of American institutions turned into a paean to Mosaic law, on some oddities of the New Testament text, and so on and so forth. It’s just my heart isn’t in any of this right now, what with the van by the river future I’ve always dreaded closing in on me and all.

A Death-Bed Testimonial

One of the things about doing something for a long time—in this case, running down historical sources that have been badly annotated—is that after a while you start developing a sort of eighth sense for these things. There’s a moment when you open a box of documents and you suddenly get a sense that this is a hot source, or alternatively you see a quotation (for example) that just plain looks fishy, that has a bad odor about it, so to speak. (I have no sense of smell myself, so I’m going by literary descriptions of what smell is like here, but I think I’m using the concept correctly.) You see it, and something about it triggers the BS detector. It may take a bit before you can identify the specifics of it, why it’s cool, or it’s iffy, or whatever, but you get the sense of it before the logic takes over.

I got that feeling today (well, yesterday, technically) when looking at an (alleged) Andrew Jackson quotation. I’ve seen it before, but it never struck me as out of the ordinary until now. Here it is, as related by Frederic William Farrar in the introduction to a collection of his lectures on the Bible:

”That Book, sir,” said the American President, Andrew Jackson, pointing to the family Bible during his last illness, “is the rock on which our Republic rests.”

Well, that seems reasonable (and I hear this in Johnny Standley’s “It’s in the Book” voice). It is kind of a cliché however, the dying man’s tribute to the book of books and all that. Patrick Henry supposedly lamented while dying that he’d never had time to read the Bible properly—this despite his seeming familiarity with its language and content. One of my favorites in this genre came from a visiting scholar at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity in halcyon bygone days—one of the great nineteenth century biblical expositors lay on his death bed. This man had spent his life explicating the dark passages of the Hebrew text, he knew the cognate Semitic languages the way a mail carrier knows the diurnal route he’s traveled for decades, and he now lay facing the Great Unknown. A minister sat by the side of the nearly unconscious scholar, reading to him the sonorous words of the KJV Psalm 23. Something about the language caught the dying man’s attention, and his eyes opened. “That, sir,” he is supposed to have said, “is an egregious mistranslation,” and so passed on into the void.

Did it happen? I doubt it very much, but, you know, what a way to shuffle off this mortal coil. I should be so lucky. I’ll probably exit mumbling incoherently the name of every drummer for the band that became the Beatles (anybody else remember Tommy Moore?) or trying to recall the date of the third quarto of Romeo and Juliet. But what about this rock upon which our Republic rests line?

Well, there’s nothing beyond that that really leaps out at you. The language and sentiment seem to be in accord with what little I know about Ol’ Hick’ry, one of my least favorite American presidents. But I don’t find it in the biographies immediately available to me, or in standard collections of quotations, or any other source that might give me a lead to where it came from.

And maybe that’s what bugs me about it—the company it keeps. It always seems to turn up with rather disreputable associates—the Washington “impossible to govern” bit, Jefferson’s “cornerstone” and Penn’s “ruled by tyrants” snippets—bastard pieces of flotsam floating in on the tides of history, parentless, abandoned, unknown. And when an alleged source does turn up for it, it inevitably turns out to be bogus. Yeah, Jackson said or wrote the rest of it, but not that saying. It intrudes where it obviously isn’t wanted like an uninvited party guest, and ends up tossed onto the pavement by the bouncer of hard documentation.

It turns up in haunts frequented by the usual suspects—A Lawyer’s Examination of the Bible, The Highest Critics vs. the Higher Critics, Testimonies of American Statesmen and Jurists to the Truths of Christianity, and Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States—to name but a few. This last may well be the oldest source available for the incident; there are several accounts that turn up in the year 1864, and this is the only one of them to give a source. The author, B. F. Morris, gives a sketch of the last scenes in Jackson’s life written (he says) by John S. C. Abbott, a clergyman. The sketch concludes as follows:

During his last illness, to a friend he pointed to the family Bible on the stand, and said,—

“That book, sir, is the rock on which our republic rests. It is the bulwark of our free institutions.”

Yes, I see, the testimony of an unnamed friend, the bane of this sort of literature. There’s no chain of custody, no evidence of transmission. How did the story get from the “friend” to the Reverend Abbott? Even if we had the “friend’s” account directly it would still be second-hand testimony. Did he get it straight from the “friend”? In that case we’re looking at third-hand testimony—but Abbott doesn’t say that. And this is the best scenario. Or did Abbott get it from somebody who got it from the friend (fourth-hand testimony)? However you look at it, this is not good.

But Andrew Jackson did have some nice things to say about the Bible during his final days, and these rest on solid second-hand evidence taken from a contemporary diary, which is as good as it gets for anything short of a recording or written record by the subject. This comes from the 29 May 1845 entry in the diary of William Tyack, a family friend and visitor during Jackson’s final days, as quoted by James Parton in his Life of Andrew Jackson (volume 3, p. 673):

The Bible is true. The principles and statutes of that holy book have been the rule of my life, and I have tried to conform to its spirit as near as possible. Upon that sacred volume I rest my hope for eternal salvation, through the merits and blood of our blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

The next day Tyack observed (p. 674):

His Bible is always near him; if he is in his chair it is on the table by his side; when propped up in bed, that sacred volume is laid by him, and he often reads it . He has no power, and is lifted in and out of his sitting posture in bed to the same posture in his chair.

So, yeah, it sounds like he could have said it, that stuff about the Bible being a rock and a bulwark and all that. Trouble is, he could have said a lot of other neat things too, and absent evidence, we really have no basis for saying that he did say them. This little factoid may be legit, but it needs some proper ID before it can be admitted to the club of history. In the meantime it’s going to have to wait outside, with the pretenders and the wannabes. It’s the way things work in the academic racket.

Letter Thanking a Friend for a Pleasant Visit

Dear Myrtle,

You don’t know what the past few days have meant to me. The climate, the beautiful island, all the wonderful, wonderful people—your friends—are a page of my life that I shall never forget.

And your father was wonderful about the dent I put in his car. Please tell your mother that when I get to China, I shall find her another Ming vase to replace the one I broke.

In short, this week-end was wonderful.

With love,
[signature here]

[From a collection of model letters found in a 1949 college notebook]

Autumntide, or, Faux Summer

And now we have entered the season I like to call Autumntide, the eighth of the year centered on the autumnal equinox. Faux Summer. Back-To-School-A-Thon. Not a favorite time of mine, but that’s only from ancient bad memories. It has a back to work feel to it, even now. The heat is gone, as it were, and there is a new, well, something anyway, to look forward to.

The weather is playing along with all this, having dropped from blazing sun to a damp cooler vibe, suitable for the new beginning. Oh, yeah, I know for all of you who started school on a quarter system this is still summer, but I never did. K-high school, Reed and Pitzer, the new school year’s always started right at the beginning of September. I should be over it, really, what with all the years that have gone by since the last time I set foot in a school, but the old rhythms remain.

Maybe I should move.

And So It Goes On and On and On

Another clueless clown, calling himself GTAVC5947, posted this message today:

Disclaimer: I am an agnostic, and have been so for several years. However, I feel a pressing need to put delusional liberals in their place:

James Madison and John Hancock:
“We Recognize No Sovereign but God, and no King but Jesus!”

John Adams:
“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.”
“[July 4th] ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.”
“I have examined all religions, as well as my narrow sphere, my straightened means, and my busy life, would allow; and the result is that the Bible is the best Book in the world. It contains more philosophy than all the libraries I have seen.”
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Benjamin Franklin:
“God governs in the affairs of man. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured in the Sacred Writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this. I also believe that, without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel.”

Alexander Hamilton:
“For my own part, I sincerely esteem it [the Constitution] a system which without the finger of God, never could have been suggested and agreed upon by such a diversity of interests.”
“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.”

James Madison:
“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.”

It goes on and on and on and on....

And so it does. Regular readers will notice some familiar frauds here—the Madison “ten commandments” concoction for one, and the “No king but Jesus” invention for another—though the addition of James Madison is a nice touch. When somebody else asked for the source of the quotations he was referred to the Eads Home Ministry site (not exactly a primary source) and was advised to google them. And somebody else said that they couldn’t be fake because they turned up in more than one source.

That’s not the way to do it, people. If you aren’t prepared to cite the actual source of your quotation, you shouldn’t present it at all. The burden of proof, remember, is always on the claimant. And that does mean a primary source, not a conveniently unavailable book (say Liberty, Cry Liberty) or a collection of unsourced quotations on somebody’s website. Remember, anybody can set up a website, and as far as I can tell, just about anybody actually does. And multiple sources? Give me a break. You only need one source, the place where (say) James Madison actually wrote it—otherwise you’re just pissing into the wind.

But, as a public service, I’ll provide the sources for the above collection of random quotations, with the portions used by our quoter bolded. Let’s start with the genuine ones. First, John Adams:

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forevermore. [Letter to his wife, 3 July 1776]

A little cherry-picking here, but the quotation is essentially legitimate. John Adams was mistaken as to which day would be celebrated; we’ve decided on the fourth rather than the second, but Adams was no prophet. He certainly came close enough with his “shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations”, right?

And a second John Adams quote is close enough for jazz, maybe:

Philosophy is not only the love of wisdom, but the science of the universe and its cause. There is, there was, and there will be but one master of philosophy in the universe. Portions of it, in different degrees, are revealed to creatures. Philosophy looks with an impartial eye on all terrestrial religions. I have examined all, as well as my narrow sphere, my straitened means, and my busy life would allow me; and the result is, that the Bible is the best book in the world. It contains more of my little philosophy than all the libraries I have seen; and such parts of it as I cannot reconcile to my little philosophy, I postpone for future investigation. [Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 25 December 1813]

Again, a little fakery, but all things considered, I’m inclined to forgive GTAVC5947 as a fellow agnostic. And a third John Adams quotation is pretty much dead on, though stripped of its vital context:

But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. [Letter to the officers of the First Brigade of The Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798]

And now GTAVC5947 draws from Benjamin Franklin’s famous plea for prayers at the Constitutional Convention:

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? We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings, that “except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed, in this political building, no better than the builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded; and we ourselves shall become a reproach and by-word down to future ages.

Interestingly GTAVC5947 doesn’t bother to mention that virtually nobody went along with Franklin on this, and that group prayers were not a feature of the convention.

The next legitimate one comes from a letter Alexander Hamilton wrote in defense of the proposed Constitution:

For my own part, I sincerely esteem it a system, which, without the finger of God, never could have been suggested and agreed upon by such a diversity of interests. I will not presume to say that a more perfect system might not have been fabricated; but who expects perfection at once? [17 October 1787]

No complaint here, except perhaps as to what relevance it has.

The next couple of quotations are borderline-fake. The first consists of a few phrases cherry-picked from one of John Adams’ letters that give a misleading impression of what he wrote, and the second consists of some mangled second-hand reminiscences long after his death of things Alexander Hamilton supposedly said.

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. I could, therefore, safely say, consistently with all my then and present information, that I believed they would never make discoveries in contradiction to these general principles. [Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 28 June 1813]

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.” [John Church Hamilton, History of the United States, volume 7]

For more on the first see this entry at Fake History, and for more on the second see my previous entry here, "Posing in the Moonlight." [Update: Or this entry at Fake History.]

And finally the two out-and-out fakes. The first, usually attributed to either an unnamed minuteman or to John Adams and John Hancock, is apparently a very modern invention:

We Recognize No Sovereign but God, and no King but Jesus!

Almost certainly no older than the twenty-first century, there is not the slightest evidence that John Adams, James Madison, or John Hancock ever said such a thing. It was a slogan of the Fifth Monarchy Men, a century before the American revolution. (Though an unknown demonstrator is said to have shouted something like it during the Stamp Act riots in Philadelphia.) For more, see this entry at Fake History.

The last is the classic fake quotation so much beloved by Christian Nationites and popularized by David Barton:

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government: upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.

The words the capacity of mankind for self-government come from Madison, the rest is an interpretation of what Madison supposedly meant by it, as expounded (for example) by Dean Clarence Manion in a pamphlet from the early fifties.

So now let me bid a fond farewell to one more clueless clown, whose failed attempt to "put delusional liberals in their place" ran aground on the shoals of a heap of out-of-context, second-hand, misquoted, badly-researched bits of wreckage dumped by bamboozled zombies who accidentally created a snare for the unwary. Thanks for playing, my fellow agnostic, and better luck next time.

Quotation of the Day

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

George Washington

Phil Brennan: Reporting from Fantasyland

Over at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, one of my favorite blogs, Ed Darrell has spotted an online editorial so clueless I couldn’t help but take a few potshots at it as well. The author, Phil Brennan, worries about what would happen if the birthers were successful in their quest to have President Obama declared ineligible if “it turns out that Obama can’t come up with a legitimate birth certificate showing that he was indeed born on U.S. soil in what was then the territory of Hawaii” in 1961. According to the provisions of the Constitution, he claims, all bills signed by Obama and all appointments made under Obama would be nullified, “John McCain would be declared the legitimate President of the United States and Sarah Palin the Vice President starting with Inauguration Day, 2009,” and to top it all off “there would be blood in the streets as the labor union and the rest of the thuggery that supports him would erupt in violence”.

Now I don’t really expect any sense or sanity from a birther—and Brennan in earlier outbursts shows that he has drunk deep of that particular flavor of Kool-Aid™. In one he writes that the location of Obama’s birth “remains questionable. Proof of United States Citizenship hasn’t been provided”—this despite the fact there is an accessible public record of his Hawaiian birth. (Why do they think states place birth notices in local papers, anyway?) But this clueless clown thinks that Hawaii was a territory in 1961—this despite the fact that his own claims about his personal history show he must be old enough to remember Hawaii becoming a state, as I am. (Hell, I remember our school proudly unfurling its new forty-nine-star flags just after Hawaii became a state, rendering them obsolete before they could even be properly displayed.)

And Brennan worries about strange things. The Republicans, he thinks, may blow their chances this year by being too cooperative with the Democrats. (In what alternate universe does this Brennan live?) If Universal Health Care was already in effect, he writes, he, Brennan, would now be dead, thanks to its Death Panels, a necessity when health care will be rationed. (Does he really think health care isn’t rationed now?) He imagines that the “climate change threat” is “non-existent” and that any effort to prevent disaster will “drive millions of American jobs overseas and impose crippling costs upon the American people” (and yet the temperatures keep on rising). Brennan in fact is far more worried about the possible “eruption of the simmering mass of magma that is edging slowly upwards beneath the caldera at Yellowstone National Park” which will “devastate much of the U.S., spreading massive clouds of volcanic ash across a huge swath of the nation” thus causing a “new ice age” resembling “what we know as the Little Ice Age which occurred between the 16th and the 19th centuries”.

This self-described veteran reporter seems to have problems distinguishing probable from improbable, and fact from outright fantasy. Suppose, for instance, that Obama were to be determined (for whatever reason) to be ineligible to serve as president. In that case the Constitution does not specify in some strange Ruritanian fashion that the state must revert to a villain, no matter whom, but rather provides that the vice president (in this case Joe Biden) would assume the office. Nor would laws and appointments suddenly become null and void as in some bizarre Y2K scenario nor would chaos reign.

Get a grip, Phil. Take your medications. There are no bomb-throwing Bolsheviks waiting in the wings to execute the royal family. Oh, and by the way, the “Little Ice Age” has been greatly exaggerated. You could look it up, if that didn’t get in the way of your, uh, journalism.

Stan Freberg Presents...

When I was growing up my family was always ahead of the crowd, or else way behind it. We were one of the first in our neighborhood to get an automatic dishwasher, for example, and we were among the last to get a television. (I don’t think my father actually believed in television till he became chief engineer for a Portland television station in the eighties.) For many years we were the only family I knew (outside the radio business) to have a tape recorder in the house, and we were definitely the only family I knew where the children were allowed to play with it. Friends would come by to record their voices and hear them played back at them so they could giggle hysterically at the result. (As a matter of fact my whole second-grade class made a field trip to our house just to be recorded and listen to the playback.) When I started a band in imitation of Spike Jones around fifth grade or so we often recorded the ongoing mayhem for our own entertainment.

To save wear and tear on our records, as well as to create anthologies of favorite pieces, my father used to make tapes bearing typed labels like “Mostly Eddie Lawrence” or “KOS and chipmunks.” One of them was titled simply “Mostly Stan Freberg.” This one was a collection of comedy singles by the great satirist, Stan Freberg, interspersed with songs—I think. It’s been a long time. I’m pretty sure it had Freberg’s version of “Yellow Rose of Texas” (lampooning Mitch Miller), “The Great Pretender” (targeting the Platters), and “Rock Island Line” (aimed at Lonnie Donegan). Oh, and I’m quite sure it contained the Lawrence Welk takeoff as well.

Now I have to say that as a kid I didn’t necessarily know the originals of the people Freberg targeted, but I still found the situations funny. Lawrence Welk patiently explaining to Larry Hooper why he couldn’t perform the same song that the Lennon sisters had just sung for example (“I’m sorry, that number has been taken”) and receiving the resentful reply, “Well, I’ll sing ‘The Funny Old Hills,’ then.” Harry Belafonte desperately trying to placate his over-sensitive bongo drummer by leaving the room to do his calypso shouts. Ben Franklin trying to avoid Thomas Jefferson, who wants him to sign some kind of declaration of independence—“Too late—he’s seen you. We’ll have to let him in.” Lonnie Donegan explaining to a skeptical A&R man why the recitation is so important—“Well, it makes a difference to the sheep.” A witch replying to a protest by another character that the piece had to have a happy ending: “Why? This isn’t the Shirley Temple Storybook.”

At his worst Freberg could be clichéd (“The Lone Analyst”), obvious (“Which is the Girl and Which is the Boy”), or preachy (“Yulenet”) but at his best (interviewing the abominable snowman about his choice of footwear, say, in a devastating satire on celebrity interviews, or discoursing on the unreasonable demands of wives as Hermann van Horne, Hi-Fi expert, who will deny their husbands new speakers to buy shoes for the children or perhaps a second dress) no-one can touch him. Few even come close. George Washington clashing with Betsy Ross over the design of the American flag (“Stars? With Stripes? … I deliberately said polka dots”), Johnnie Ray coming apart during the performance of the parody “Try” (where the single word “more” manages to stretch itself out over a full two measures), Freberg offering to show the door to a sleazy record promoter (played by the inimitable Jesse White) and receiving the reply, “No, I’ll just slide out under it”—so many unforgettable moments.

Thanks, Stan—and, oh, by the way, happy birthday.

Sing It, Fat Lady!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picking on the Clueless pt XXX

Picking on the Clueless

Over at my other blog, Fake History, I get a certain amount of traffic, and even an occasional commenter. Yesterday some guy calling himself “David d” left a comment on my entry about a quotation falsely attributed to George Washington:

What students would learn in American schools above all is the religion of Jesus Christ.

I pointed out there that the fake is based on something George Washington did say during a difficult meeting with a delegation of Delawares intent on preserving the peace with the Euro-American colonists:

You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ.

Nothing here about students, American schools, or the like of course. As I pointed out in my entry it would be an unlikely topic for George Washington to have commented on, given the circumstances of his time and place. I noted that as the “American schools” quotation is fake, and apparently recent, I felt no need to research its actual provenance, beyond noting that the earliest source Google Books could come up with was a 2006 book by a guy named Bob Klingenberg.

Now this David d got all bent out of shape about this simple declaration, and he showed up crowing:

You really need to learn to perform some due diligence before you write of things you no [sic] very little about.

You misleadingly wrote, “The fake quotation is very modern, probably twenty-first century in origin. I’ve made no special effort to run down its history; the oldest reference Google Books turned up was from 2006, in a book called Is God with America? by Bob Klingenberg (p. 188)”

That set off the “truth alarm”. So I did just a little research NOT using google which many believe has a liberal bias programmed into its search engines. And found a reliable source going back over 70 years. Nice try.

Now I have to say that that would have been interesting. Not impossible by any means, but interesting. Some fake quotations do indeed lurk for long periods of time in obscure corners of the intellectual web, before springing out to ensnare the unwary. And reliable sources sometimes do transmit unreliable information.

But this was not such an example, alas. No, David d was so colossally inept that he got caught in a trap of his own making. His reference for the fake quotation? It was Fitzgerald’s edition of Washington’s papers, the very source I linked to in my entry, and it did not contain the fake quotation at all, but only the genuine one, as I’d already explained ad nauseam.

What the hell was David d thinking (assuming that that isn’t giving him too much credit)? Did he suppose that nobody would check up on him? Fitzgerald’s edition is actually online, so there is no difficulty in checking it out. I can only assume that our clueless clown was just making things up and hoping nobody would actually call him on his bluff. Clearly his claim to have done “just a little research” was a vast overstatement, unless his definition of “research” is “bullshitting”.

Now David d adds a crowning touch to his display of ignorance and incompetence. Allow me to let him hang himself with his own words:

You know a big problem I have with many skeptics and naysayers is their willful ignorance on many topic that they pretend to know something about.

Read the facts man!

http://www.wallbuilders.com/libissuesarticles.asp?id=8755

Peace out.

Ah, yes, the infamous Wallbuilders site, the source of so many lies and misinterpretations. That’s really convincing.

But—and this is the cream of the jest—David d apparently never bothered to check out his own link. Because Wallbuilders does not back him up on this fake, not in the least. What’s given at his link is the same genuine quotation given by Fitzgerald and by my own site, and not the fake quotation at all.

Epic fail, David d—and, by the way, I don’t believe for a moment that you are really the homeschooling advocate whose name and email address you’re using. I took a brief look at his site and I doubt that he’d be either as incompetent or as, well, illiterate as your comment is.

Peace off, man.

Insomniac Dreams

I’m awake now, when I should be asleep. Irrelevant images run through my head—an uncaring doctor scrawling the wrong dosage on a clipboard, Spiderman taking on the Vulture with a broken arm, a small white dog running excitedly around in the back yard. I’d like to bury these images in the darkness of unconsciousness, to not think and not worry. But I’m worrying about my little dog, and I’m also worrying about how in hell I’m going to pay for her surgery. Nothing is ever simple, it seems.

Earlier this week Zephyr, our miniature American Eskimo dog, started losing energy and stopped eating. It was really noticeable Tuesday, when I hand-carried our ballots to the drop box, a longish walk but nothing out of the ordinary for Zephyr and me. We weren’t even half the way there when Zephyr began hanging back and refusing to continue; I was beginning to think I might have to carry her. (Where is Spiderman when you need him?) At one point some North Portland denizen stopped to ask, “You all right, man?” I was—it was my dog that was the problem.

By Thursday it was obvious that she was in some sort of difficulty, though she was still enthusiastic about going on walks and willing to eat special treats. She was just getting tired too easily and not eating her regular food. Not eating her regular food isn’t totally surprising—she’s learned that people will give her treats or scraps of food for doing tricks, and there are a lot of people in the house, so many opportunities for begging. Honestly, I just figured she was pigging out on treats and I’d need to watch her more closely. But her slowing down—well, she is approaching eleven (next month), people pointed out, and maybe she’s just beginning to feel her age.

But damn it, old age doesn’t normally creep in between say Thursday (when she was running ahead of me, tugging on the leash, chasing squirrels, generally excited), and say Tuesday (when she was dragging behind me, wanting to go back home, ignoring other dogs, and generally listless). That’s comic-book country, where Dr. Doom invents some sort of aging ray to incapacitate our hero. I had the same sort of argument—and with the medical authorities at that—when my father was dying. “He’s just old,” one alleged physician told me when I wanted to know why he suddenly couldn’t get around, couldn’t remember things, couldn’t function. Well, he hadn’t been “old” two weeks before when he was working on the KOBP transmitter, tools in hand, sharp as ever. You don’t get old overnight, damn it. (Although it feels like it sometimes.)

So Friday we got an appointment with our veterinarian (whom we haven’t been seeing as regularly, damn it, since the money got tight) and managed to get her there, my grandnephew and I, thanks to my brother (his grandfather). And that’s when things turned nightmarish.

My little dog had a condition called pyometra, which apparently is essentially an infection of the uterus. It is, it seems, extremely dangerous, and the treatment of choice is immediate removal of the organ—rather like appendicitis, I guess. (It is, of course, obvious that I am not a physician—actually, I barely remember what little anatomy I learned in school.) But it’s Friday night, and I have sixty dollars in my pocket and my credit union is closed till Monday, and I can’t get hold of anybody who might be able to help.

So emergency treatment was out of the question. Even though my grandnephew’s parents had now arrived and taken over, neither of them had resources available for the task, and we all bombed on the credit-rating front. (I apparently have no credit rating of any sort, as I’ve never bought anything on payments. Go figure.) Our own veterinarian could handle it, but not that night, so we ended up scheduling surgery for the next day and then went home to spend the night sleeping fitfully in the music-room while sort of taking turns watching the dog to make sure that nothing ruptured during the night.

Well, she seemed fine—if I hadn’t seen the x-rays I would never have guessed that she was in serious trouble. Zephyr seemed fairly pleased with all the attention, and when I put my shoes on to head out in the morning she got excited, figuring that we were going for a walk or ride. She was happy with the trip there, and only mildly concerned when I handed her over to go off for her operation. She watched me to make sure I thought it was all right, and I attempted to be reassuring. My niece and grandnephew and I had originally planned to hang around till the operation was done, but once we’d put Zephyr into their hands all the tiredness seemed to catch up with us, and we broke for home and sacked out, did laundry, and tried to catch up with other activities that had abruptly come to a halt. The basement drain backed up—well, actually it’s the main outflow for the entire north side of the house, but it shows up as the bathroom drain backing up—and my nephew and I snaked it out.

Somewhere in there we got the call that the operation had been successful, that the uterus was greatly enlarged (it weighed four pounds—this from a twenty-four pound dog), and that it had come out cleanly and successfully. We could pick Zephyr up in the afternoon.

We did. We were actually waiting for her in the same place we’d handed her over, and Zephyr seemed unsurprised to see us—she actually seems to be taking the things that are happening to her in stride a lot better than I am, though of course she’s on drugs. We’d had an earlier discussion on how to handle Zephyr’s recovery, and we’d decided that my grandnephew’s father should look after her for the moment, his house not having stairs, other pets, and suchlike hazards. We were hoping to get Zephyr to urinate before we took her anywhere, but once outside she walked determinedly over to a car—not ours as it happened—and indicated that she wanted to go home now. We took her to our car, where my niece’s cat River was waiting (Zephyr and River for some reason seem to be fond of one another); River was obviously pleased to see Zephyr, and Zephyr clearly recognized River, though once she was in the car she seemed mainly to want to rest.

When we got home Zephyr seemed to acquire a sudden burst of energy and would have leaped down if my grandnephew hadn’t caught her and gently lifted her to the driveway. Zephyr sniffed the lawn with interest, picked a place, and finally peed—which was reassuring, in a way. She then lay down in the grass, so I gathered her up in my arms and carried her onto the porch. She lay quietly in my lap, but was very interested in the people that passed by periodically along the sidewalk, and the household residents that came out to check on her. She wanted off my lap after a bit, and alternated between standing up on the porch, and lying back down again. I think she wanted to be up and about, but her exhausted body wouldn’t bend to her will, strong though it is.

We hung around there waiting while my niece got stuff ready for the drive and my grandnephew decided between finishing his weekend here or staying with Zephyr. (He decided to stay with Zephyr, which meant cutting short his stay, but also that there is somebody else to keep an eye on the dog during her recovery.) Both their pet cats (River and Tiberius) remain here in my care. River is surly—she likes rides, Zephyr, and my niece—but it’s probably for the best. River went outside with me for a walk in the evening, but she spent it jumping into mud-puddles and getting wet and muddy. Once I got her back inside and she’d dried off she came downstairs and tried tapping the keys on my keyboard with her paw while watching the screen; I don’t know why unless she was trying to figure out what I find so interesting about the activity. She kept tapping the F1 key, which brings up a help screen—it looked purposeful, but was no doubt coincidence.

Anyway, after looking after the pets that are here, I sacked out, visions of hospitals and waiting-rooms dancing through my head. I slept well—at least till I woke abruptly and the day’s worries returned. I really ought to be asleep now—well, I suppose I’d be waking up fairly soon at this point—but I’m worried about my puppy. And I’m worried about the goddamn bill for this operation. It would be something if Spiderman and Iron Man and the rest really could come to our rescue. A pipe-dream perhaps, but—I can’t help wondering if maybe those silver-age comics I have stashed away are worth something.

Very Bad News

There are only a handful of intelligent, skeptical, rational bloggers out there who can also write well—and who are equally at home with portraiture via scalpel or meat-cleaver. One of them is Dan J of Relatively Unrelated, whose relatively recent web log has rapidly become a favorite of mine. I admit, one reason is that he seems to share my enthusiasm for picking on the clueless, as his posts on the woman who was trying desperately to get by on only $300,000 a year (“I’d like to welcome some people to the real world, but they aren’t here yet”) and the writer for Renew America who describes biology as the science of magic and madness (“Congratulations and Kudos to RenewAmerica.com”) show. Or the way he recalls the glorious life and cruel death of one of my favorite historical figures (“Sometimes Persecution ends in Death: Remembering Giordano Bruno”). And how he neatly eviscerates certain primitive theologians who masquerade as scientists in pieces like “What is Biological Evolution? (and Why Do Creationists Not Understand the Answer)” and “Your Religion is Not Science”. And who can forget his depiction of the despair of poor troglodytes forced the consider the possibility they may have to someday treat gay, lesbian, or transgendered people as, well, people (“Won’t Someone Please Think Of The Bigots?!?!”), or the pitiful attempts at something resembling rational thought by the delusional (“How Fucking Thick are These People?!?!!?”), done with equal facility and a kind of foul grace. And there was his savage demolition of a certain internet troll who masquerades as a concerned christian—I couldn’t find it at the blog, so maybe it was on one of the comment threads he’s also contributed to. (As a matter of fact it was his comments somewhere or other that led me originally to his blog.) Clarity—he likes to cut through the bullshit to zero in on the actual point of an argument—succinctness—a point I’d dwell on in a three-part series Dan J disposes of in a sentence or two—and the willingness to call a spade a fucking shovel (as somebody once called it) are the hallmarks of his writing.

He hasn’t been writing much lately. On 28 March we had this note:

Yes, I’m still here. I haven’t been feeling well lately, which leaves me with little enthusiasm for making posts that scathingly blast one thing or another. Back to the doctor on April first, then maybe I can get back on the road to posting regularly.

Well, I’m in no position to criticize, with my erratic performance here at Rational Rant, and god knows I haven’t been feeling well either, what with horrific panic attacks and sporadic vision loss (apparently visual migraines but not entirely reassuring). Still, I’ve been looking forward to Dan J’s posts resuming—and now I learn from a post by Jason Thibeault (“That Helpless Feeling”) that he has more pressing things to worry about: he “likely has lymphoma. He’s been getting the runaround from a clinic for the past two weeks in that country with ‘the greatest health care system in the world’, America.”

Damn. I don’t know what to say. Part of it is the fucking uncertainty, of course—I looked up lymphoma on various internet sites, but nothing there has any meaning without knowing its type or how developed it is, or for that matter even if it’s lymphoma at all. We’ll just have to wait and see. (And of course Dan J may not wish to share his medical situation with the world at large; please forgive me if I’m intruding here.) But the personal catastrophe aside—and that is by far the most important part of it of course—anything that takes a voice like Dan J’s from the Babel of the Blogosphere is to be regretted. It’s very bad news. And I hope that proves to be transitory and temporary, and Dan J is once again up eviscerating the demons of unreason soon, and not just for the sake of his friends and family and acquaintances, but also for those of us who value the all too few voices of reason and sanity in a world increasingly hostile to both.

"Son, Let's See Your Identity Card"

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has just released an appalling new survey that says that nearly three-quarters of Americans polled approve of a law requiring all Americans to carry documents showing that they are in the country legally. Two-thirds think the police should be allowed to detain anybody who does not have such a document on him or her.

Now I have to say that this requirement is something I’ve always thought of as characteristic of a police state. I don’t even have such a document, unless you count my certificate of live birth, and I normally keep that locked away safe somewhere. I sure as hell don’t carry it around with me. Is the government supposed to issue some sort of new universal ID card certifying to our citizenship? Or are we all supposed to get passports? Or what?

For no good reason I’m reminded of somebody’s—James Thurber’s maybe—description of a scene from a French novel set in the American Old West. The setting is a small town somewhere in the southwest. A stranger has arrived, and people are wondering who exactly the newcomer is. Some of the townsfolk are convinced that he’s the notorious Billy the Kid. The sheriff comes by, listens for a moment, and then says, “I’ll settle this.” He strolls over to the newcomer, and says to him, “Son, let me see your identity-card.”

The humor in this is that nothing of the sort could possibly occur on American soil. And yet, and yet, apparently damn near three-quarters of the American people now think these sorts of police powers are just dandy. The American Way incarnate. Prove that you’re a citizen on the sheriff’s demand, or spend the night in jail—or however long it takes till you can get a copy of your birth certificate mailed out to you.

Actually I don’t think appalling begins to cover it. What are we trading our rights for, here, exactly? What the hell are we so afraid of? I’m just asking—because I, for one, don’t see anything whatsoever to justify this level of response. As somebody-or-other is supposed to have once said, anybody who trades in his liberty for a little gilt-edged security deserves to be walled up in a dark cell with the rats and the spiders—or words to that effect. If America can’t do better than this, it doesn’t deserve to survive. And it probably won’t.

Pete Tchaikovsky’s Blues

P. I. Tchaikovsky came up here one day
With something he called the “Swan Lake Ballet.”
Man, what a drag! It was real bad news,
Till we changed it to “Pete Tchaikovsky’s Blues.”

Allen Sherman, Peter and the Commissar

When I was young I used to celebrate—well, observe, anyway—my heroes’ birthdays. 15 February was Galileo’s birthday, for example, and I usually made a point of observing something celestial with a telescope, even if it was only the girl next door. (Okay, we didn’t actually have a girl next door—on the one side we had a vacant lot with an abandoned or burnt-down house, depending on the year, and on the other a gravel pit.) For some reason it always seemed to be overcast on Galileo’s birthday. It didn’t stop me from dragging out my telescope and trying to observe something, though. 7 May was Tchaikovsky’s birthday, and at least one year my mother baked him a cake and we threw him a party—though I think that was also partly because it was the last day of our extracurricular Spanish class. Anyway, whatever the reason, I have a photograph of me and my friends gathered around Tchaikovsky’s birthday cake to prove it. Or prove something anyway.

I don’t know when I first discovered Tchaikovsky—it seems like I’ve known his music all my life. The first piano concerto, the sixth symphony, Romeo and Juliet, even the Nutcracker—these were the soundtrack to my life at one time. I was listening to the Nutcracker when the Columbus Day Storm knocked our power out. (My memory tells me that I was doing homework at the time, but as it was a Friday, I’m very much inclined to doubt that.) I was blown away by the (reconstructed) seventh symphony in the early hours of the morning when it was played on KPFM’s all-request Music Out of the Night. The third movement of the sixth symphony inspired me to an act—well, anyway, I have many memories associated with the Russian composer’s music.

One of the curious things about the library at John Rogers school (K-6) is that it actually had interesting books in it. It had at least two books about Tchaikovsky, one of which was the story of his relationship with his long-time patron, Madame von Meck. At least one of them, maybe both, were open about the composer’s homosexuality, a subject that usually didn’t come up in the 1960s, at least not when children (such as myself) were present. I learned that Tchaikovsky suffered from horrendous bouts of depression, that he had irrational fears, that he was downright neurotic in many ways, if not actually psychotic. Artistic temperament is one thing, but a story that stuck in my mind over the years is the one about his first attempt to conduct a piece in public. As he faced the orchestra he became overwhelmed with the belief that his head was about to fall off and rolling down into the string section, something that would no doubt cause considerable alarm and confusion among the musicians. To prevent that eventuality, he grasped his head firmly with one hand, while with the other he gestured with the baton to direct the orchestra. It worked; at least he managed to keep his head and get through the piece without mishap, but his unusual conducting style became the subject of some comment. It wasn’t until decades later, when reading a review of his performance in the New York Herald, that he began to think he might not be utterly incompetent as a conductor. The reviewer noted his self-effacing manner, but added that he was a changed man when he took the baton and showed his entire mastery of the orchestra and control over the piece. It was only then that he began to think that he was not as bad as he’d always thought he was.

Okay, I probably have it all wrong—this is stuff I read as a child filtered through many years of memory fog and dust. But I felt affection for the guy who created the music that moved me then, and I enjoyed celebrating—or at least remembering—the day of his birth. “How old is Tchaikovsky?” my father asked one 7 May long ago as we sat at the table for breakfast.

“I don’t know,” I answered, not having figured it out.

“Well, what year was he born?” asked dear old Dad.

I always knew the dates of everything; my memory was sticky like that, but put on the spot I couldn’t remember that particular information at that particular moment. I knew Tchaikovsky was a younger contemporary of Lewis Carroll (1832) and Mark Twain (1835), but the year of his birth escaped me. Then something came to me—the number thirteen. You see, I’d learned a trick for testing divisibility by three and had been randomly checking out numbers that came to my attention—

“I don’t remember the actual date,” I answered cautiously, “but I do remember one thing. When you add the digits of the date together they total thirteen.”

My father stared at me. “Okay,” he said, “I always thought that kind of thing was so implausible when it came up in one of those mathematical puzzles in Scientific American. It’s so obviously a device—people don’t talk like that in real life. That’s not how people’s minds work. It’s one thing coming from Martin Gardner; I don’t expect it from my own family.”

Since then I’ve never forgotten the year of Tchaikovsky’s birth. He’s 170 today. Happy birthday, Pyotr Ilyich.