Interim Report

I

 still feel shaken up after my second visit to the emergency room the other day; I am increasingly dubious about the shelf life of that small mass of muscle that keeps me alive and up till now has not let me down for over six decades. Today’s visit to cardiac rehab went fine and everybody but me seems optimistic about my future ability to get around, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed I guess. More later, if I hold up.

Fake Quotations: Patrick Henry and the Worth of the Bible [2009]

[Originally posted at Fake History 9 July 2009]

Did Patrick Henry say

The Bible is a book worth more than all the other books that were ever printed

toward the end of his life?

No. Probably not, anyway. It’s another quotation based on a second-hand story, though better than some.

Ultimately the account appears to go back to George Dabney, one of Patrick Henry’s neighbors. (I say appears because there is an element of inference still, as we’ll see.) Captain George Dabney fought in the Revolutionary War, and afterwards was an associate of Declaration-signer and Virginia governor Thomas Nelson. According to a newspaper clipping reprinted in a Dabney family history,

Patrick Henry was his intimate friend and neighbor, and from him Mr. Wirt obtained much of the information which he has embodied in his life of Patrick Henry.

William Wirt (1772-1834) was the prosecutor in Aaron Burr’s treason trial, Attorney-General under James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, and the author of Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (1817). From its introduction we learn that George Dabney was Patrick Henry’s friend during his childhood and youth, and that William Wirt got his information from him through Nathaniel Pope, as he himself was not acquainted with George Dabney.

In this book the story first appears.  Wirt tells it like this:

Mr. Henry’s conversation was remarkably pure and chaste. He never swore. He was never heard to take the name of his Maker in vain. He was a sincere Christian, though after a form of his own; for he was never attached to any particular religious society, and never it is believed, communed with any church. A friend who visited him, not long before his death, found him engaged in reading the bible: “here,” said he, holding it up, “is a book worth more than all the other books that were ever printed: yet it is my misfortune never to have found time to read it, with the proper attention and feeling, till lately. I trust in the mercy of heaven, that it is not yet too late.” He was much pleased with Soame Jenyns’ View of the internal evidences of the christian religion; so much so, that about the year 1790, he had an impression of it struck at his own expense, and distributed among the people. His other favourite works on the subject were Doddridge’s “Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul,” and Butler’s “Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed.” This latter work, he used at one period of his life, to style by way of pre-eminence, his bible. The selection proves not only the piety of his temper, but the correctness of his taste, and his relish for profound and vigorous disquisition. [pp. 401-2, links added]

William Wirt gives no source, but when William Wirt Henry (Patrick Henry’s grandson) wrote his 1891 Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence, and Speeches he retold the same incident:

One of his neighbors going to see him found him reading the Bible. Holding it up in his hand, he said: “This book is worth all the books that ever were printed, and it has been my misfortune that I have never found time to read it with the proper attention and feeling till lately. I trust in the mercy of Heaven that it is not yet too late.”

His source for this is “Statement of George Dabney, MS. Letter to Mr. Wirt, Wirt’s Henry.”  And as he notes in his introduction that he had “access to nearly all of the material used by Mr. Wirt, including most of the communications received from the contemporaries of Mr. Henry,” it seems a reasonable assumption that both versions came from the same source.

So on the plus side, assuming that the George Dabney connection to be correct, the story emanates from a person close to the alleged source. On the minus side we still don’t know whether Dabney was the “friend” or “neighbor” who supposedly heard this, or whether he was only reporting what somebody else had told him. And, distinctly on the minus side, this is a familiar sort of legendary embellishment, the story about the man near death who seeks comfort from the Bible. If it never happened, somebody probably would have invented it.

Also, and I may be a little hyper-critical here, Henry seems to have been well-acquainted with the Bible. Certainly his reading matter (as described above) is extremely heavy-going without familiarity with the Christian scriptures, and I personally find it difficult to believe that Henry had “never found time to read it with the proper attention and feeling till” shortly before his death. To me that has a strong flavor of legendary embellishment.

Pondering Unanswerable Questions [1984]

[8 July 1984]

I

’m lying here sleepless, pondering unanswer­able questions—and not even big unanswerable questions, just puzzles like why do standard Beatle discographies insist that there are no cuts from the movie on the album Let It Be when it is obvious that at least two and more likely three cuts are found on both? or What possessed J. A. T. Robinson (the late Bishop of Wool­worths) to claim that the church’s condemnation of a narra­tive about Paul proved that the early church objected to the common Hellenistic practice of pseudepigraphy (the narrative was anony­mous, after all)? or why don’t any two Persian music theo­rists agree on the actual intervals used in Persian music?

It’s been a good day here, today, I mean. We went to a private screening of Return of the Jedi this morning, which was okay, I guess, and talked afterward with (well, listened to mostly) this character whose hobby is restoring old film projectors—mon­stros­ities from the 20s mainly.  It was a warm day, sunny and clear. Last night I dreamed about a lost tooth and a girl I haven’t seen in fifteen years.

Today's Crapfest [2011]

[Originally posted 7 July 2011]

B

eing a Republican, I vote in the Republican primary. Please rest assured that no candidate that signs the idiotic “Candidate Vow” [PDF] put out by the group calling itself “The Family Leader” (and when exactly did “family” become code for bigotry?) is going to get my vote. This anti-science anti-humanity childishly-scribbled screed wants candidates to promise to support the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (which should never have been passed in the first place), to support a Constitutional Amendment redefining marriage as between one man and one woman (and why not add in “of the same race” while you’re at it?), to suppress “all forms of pornography and … abortion” (and to hell with the Bill of Rights, apparently), to reject “Sharia Islam” (which I include only because of the mind-numbing idiocy of the phrase), and to support overpopulation as beneficial to the American way of life.

Nobody who supports the continued over-population of the planet gets my vote. Nobody who calls scientific evidence “anti-science bias” or who uses a phrase like “complete absence of empirical proof” in that context gets my vote. And nobody who thinks that he (or society in general) gets to decide on what consenting adult I choose to marry will ever get my vote.

Another United Airlines Screw-Up

I

 see in the news that United Airlines again is doing its part to make flying an unsafe and uncomfortable experience for everyone. According to its own account of events

On a recent flight from Houston to Boston, we inaccurately scanned the boarding pass of Ms. Yamauchi’s son. As a result, her son’s seat appeared to be not checked in and staff released his seat to another customer….

The result was that after Shirley Yamauchi and her two-year-old son had taken their seats she was confronted by a guy flying standby who also held a ticket to the seat sold to her for her son. The flight crew did nothing to rectify the problem. Afraid of being violently dragged off the flight like that Kentucky doctor a while back, Shirley Yamauchi gave in to the inevitable and held her son in her lap for the entire flight. All this is admitted by United Airlines.

According to the victim’s account on her arrival she received no help from customer service, but was given a hotline number to call. When she talked to them, they threatened to cancel the rest of her flight arrangements back to Hawaii.

This level of incompetence appears to me to be beyond the pale. I would expect that a company that screwed up this badly would be making a significant effort to make amends. What did United do? They are refunding the price of her unused ticket—the one they took from her son and gave away to a standby passenger—and issuing her a travel voucher of unknown value and use.

Personally I would have assumed that it went without saying that they would refund the price of her unused ticket; that doesn’t even come up to the level of the least they could do. And it seems to me that since they screwed up her flight they ought to refund the value of her ticket as well—again, that ought to be done as a matter of course. The travel voucher seems to me like an empty gesture—I mean, who would want to fly United after an experience like that?

Patrick Henry Religionists FAQ [2011]

[Originally posted 5 July 2011]

I see that for whatever reason myriads are storming the fort here and over at Fake History regarding something Patrick Henry allegedly said:

There is an insidious campaign of false propaganda being waged today, to the effect that our country is not a Christian country but a religious one—that it was not founded on Christianity but on freedom of religion. It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this great nation was founded, not by “religionists”, but by Christians—not on religion, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.

Regular readers (both of them) are probably sick of this by now, but as questions persist, I’ve thrown together a sort of FAQ on the subject.

Q – When did Patrick Henry say this?

A – He didn’t.

Q – How do you know?

A – Well, first and most important, it isn’t found anywhere in Henry’s known letters, or in the fragments of recovered and reconstructed speeches.

Q – Couldn’t he have said it anyway? Not everything somebody says gets written down, after all. Maybe it was passed down by word of mouth or something.

A – Or maybe he was misquoted. Or maybe it was said by somebody else altogether. People often make mistakes about what other people have said, or attribute something to the wrong person. That’s why giving your source is so important.

Q – I have a source that says he said it. It’s in a book/in a magazine/on a website. Doesn’t that count?

A – Not unless Patrick Henry himself wrote the material in that book, or magazine, or website. That’s why it’s so important to be able to say where he wrote it, or when he said it.

Q – Okay. My mother/my pastor/a book/somebody on the internet says he said it in a speech to the House of Burgesses in May 1765. That ought to be good enough, right?

A – How do we know he said it then and there? Where was it recorded?

Q – Well, they must have kept records, right?

A – Actually, no. Not of the exact speeches, anyway. Remember, there were no recorders, no cameras, no stenographers taking things down as people said it. Sometimes the text of a speech made it into print—more often not. In Patrick Henry’s case, only one speech from May 1765 is on record, and only a fragment of that. And that’s the famous (reconstructed) “if this be treason” exchange.

Q – And this wasn’t part?

A – No.

Q – But I’ve seen the date 1774 for it—also 1776. Couldn’t one of those be right?

A – Again you have the same problem. Where was it recorded? How do we know it was Patrick Henry who said it, and not some other person?

Q – Well, but people have been saying Henry said it for generations. When something’s been passed down by tradition, different rules apply, right?

A – There are two things wrong with that. Traditional evidence is evaluated in the same way as other evidence—and the pseudo-Henry quotation has not been passed down by tradition. It was first attributed to Henry in the 1980s.

Q – What do you mean about evaluating traditions like other evidence? How is that possible?

A – First, there is the matter of external attestation. How old is the tradition? How likely were the transmitters to know what they were claiming? Things like that. Second, there is internal evidence. Does the tradition jibe with things we know about the period from which it is supposed to have come? The pseudo-Henry quotation fails on both fronts.

Q – Well, how old is this tradition?

A – The oldest claimed source for these words as Henry’s is a book called God’s Providence in American History published in 1988 by Steve C. Dawson. It’s a long time between Dawson and Henry, and there’s no obvious chain of custody to get it there.

Q – What about the internal evidence?

A – The words don’t belong to Patrick Henry’s time. The phrase “false propaganda” for example was common from the early twentieth century on, but was unknown in Henry’s time. The author refers to “this great nation”—a nation that in Henry’s time had yet to come into existence. And “peoples of other faiths” would not be “afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here” until much later. There was no “freedom of worship” for most of the country at the time Henry is alleged to have said this.

Q – Still, if you can’t say where it did come from, I’m still entitled to quote it as Henry’s, right?

A – Not unless you have a source for it.

Q – I have lots of sources for it—websites, politicians, evangelists—don’t they count for anything?

A – You only need one source for it—the book Henry wrote, the speech he made, the letter he sent where those words appear. Otherwise you got nothing.

Q – Well, but you’ve got nothing to back your claim either.

A – Uh, actually I do. In point of fact the words were originally written in the April 1956 issue of The Virginian in a brief item about—not by—Patrick Henry. Not that that matters. The burden of proof is always on the person making the positive claim.

Q – So if you didn’t need to show where it came from, why did you?

A – It amused me at the time, and I had nothing better to do.

Hot Summer Day [2009]

[Originally posted 4 July 2009]

Long summer dream
Sliding round my mind
Those long summer dreams
Are leaving me behind
Hot summer day
Carry me along
To its end where I begin.

    It’s a Beautiful Day

O

ne hundred fifty five years ago the Civil War was raging in North America, the Taiping Rebellion was cooking away in China, and France was busy intervening in Mexico. In England Victoria was already a quarter century into the interminable reign that would wind up gasping in the very foothills of the twentieth century. And on 4 July a mathematician set out on a river excursion with a fellow clergyman and three little girls, a trip that would change the face of English literature forever.

Charles Dodgson, soon to be known to a wider public as Lewis Carroll, was already an accomplished story-teller that July day in 1862 when he started to entertain the three Liddell sisters—Lorina (13), Alice (10), and Edith (8)—with an improvised adventure featuring a girl named Alice. He had entertained his own sisters with stories and drawings when younger, and had moved on to amuse other children as time passed; we may assume his art improved with practice. These tales, as Dodgson put it, “lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon.”

What happened on this particular afternoon to make things different? Ten-year-old Alice Liddell begged Charles Dodgson to write the story down—and, as things turned out, she was persistent enough to get him to actually do it. In the first burst of enthusiasm Dodgson wrote out the headings for the book—soon to be titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground—the very next day, but how far he got past that is unrecorded. He did not start writing the extant manuscript until November of that year, and he finished it in February of 1863. Illustrating it took still longer, and it was not until 26 November of the next year, 1864, that he finally presented it to Alice. By then he was already hard at work on a revision that would become the published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Now it would be naive indeed to suppose that Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is an exact transcript of the story Charles Dodgson told the Reverend Duckworth and the three Liddell sisters that 4th of July. (And of course nobody does make that supposition.) The author himself tells us that “In writing it out, I added many fresh ideas, which seemed to grow of themselves upon the original stock”. On the other hand it must have borne some passing resemblance to the story as originally told.

The question that I have wondered about for years, nay decades, is just this: What exactly was the tale that Charles Dodgson told that 4 July now over a century and a half ago? Obviously there is no way directly to find out, short of coming up with a time-machine and some sort of audio recorder, but there are hints and indications. First, we may start with what the author tells us, “I distinctly remember, now as I write, how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards.” As the long fall, the arrival in the little hall, and the attempts to get out through the small door into the garden all follow reasonably naturally from this, we may reasonably assume that they had some counterpart in the Ur-Alice.

On the other hand there is material that seems unlikely to have belonged to the original spoken story. The Mouse’s tale, for example, that weaves tail-like across the page. This is a visual joke, and while we can imagine Charles Dodgson perhaps indicating by gestures what Alice was picturing, it seems more naturally at home in the written manuscript. Again, “the driest thing I know”, lifted from Chepmell’s Short Course of History, is a joke more likely conceived in the study than while rowing up the Isis on a hot summer day.

And another thing—the it-was-all-a-dream conclusion. Did Charles Dodgson reach a conclusion on this expedition? Several things make this unlikely. Alice Liddell tells us, in her recollections as quoted by Dodgson’s nephew, that he would break off a story in the middle saying, “That’s all till next time,” to which the girls would reply, “Ah, but it is next time.” That this may well have been one of those occasions when the story did not continue at once we have Dodgson’s own diary entry for the 6th of August, over a month later, when he tells of continuing his “interminable fairy-tale of Alice’s Adventures”—some indication that this was an ongoing performance. And it’s very tempting to suppose that he told the girls the episode of the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon after the Liddell sisters sang “Beautiful Star” for him on 1 August 1862; the song is burlesqued as “Beautiful Soup.” (On the other hand it is possible that Dodgson’s burlesque of the song inspired the sisters to sing it for him correctly, or even that the two had no particular cause-and-effect relationship.) Another song (“Sally Go Up”), burlesqued in the same scene however, the Liddell sisters sang the very day before the 4 July expedition. Maybe “Beautiful Soup” was one of the additions to the written tale.

One odd feature of the book is worth noting here—there are two distinct parts to it. In the first part Alice is constantly changing size; at first she has no control over the situation, but then, thanks to advice from a caterpillar, she acquires the parts of a magic mushroom that allow her to control her own size. In the second part of the book, however, this is all forgotten. Once Alice finds her way into the garden the mushroom is never mentioned again, and in the original story her size (as far as we can tell) stays constant. (In the published version she starts growing uncontrollably during the trial scene.) She is said to be fifteen inches high in the MS (a foot in the published version), but the fact is that it is difficult to tell exactly what size she is. She interacts with playing cards as though she were in the same size range (three inches, maybe?), but the game of croquet is played with ostriches for mallets and hedgehogs for balls—are we supposed to picture them as miniature ostriches and hedgehogs? Or are the cards gigantic? The size thing, which is such a major feature of the first part of the book, has gone completely out the window by this point.

The point where this change happens has its own interest. Abruptly, just after the encounter with the pigeon in the MS (just after the Mad Tea Party in the book), Alice sees a door in a tree. She goes inside and finds herself back in the dark hall with the little door to the garden where she had been at the beginning of her adventures. This time, thanks to the magic mushroom, she is in control of her size and manages to make it through the door into the garden with ease. And it is from this point on that the mushroom and the size changes so evident up till now are forgotten.

It’s very satisfying that Alice manages to achieve the goal that frustrated her earlier, but it’s also arbitrary. The door in the tree that leads to the dark hall comes from nowhere; it has been prepared for in no way, and it’s really unnecessary. To put it another way, if Alice had never got through the door into the garden, but instead had further Pig and Pepper style adventures, we would never have noticed the omission. If Alice had come to the garden via another route, we as readers would have been perfectly happy. It is true that getting into the garden is the one element of the story that provides anything resembling purpose—but it’s hardly a major element. In fact Alice’s determination to somehow get into the garden is only mentioned once between the two hall episodes—just after the pigeon encounter.

While I’m not pretending to have exhausted the possibilities here, there is one plausible reason from the author’s perspective why it may have been necessary to return to the little hall and the exit to the garden: because that’s how the story already went. If, to put it as simply as possible, in an earlier version of the story Alice had made it out into the garden at the end of the first hallway episode, and had subsequent adventures there; and if Dodgson had decided to add at this point some of those “fresh ideas, which seemed to grow of themselves upon the original stock” that take Alice away from the hallway, then it would be necessary at some point to get Alice back to the hallway to continue with the earlier version of the story.

Let’s see how this plays out, then. On this hypothesis the pool of tears, the encounter with the mouse et al (including both the driest thing I know and the mouse’s tale mentioned above as unlikely to have been part of the original oral version), the adventures at the white rabbit’s house, the encounter with the caterpillar (including the advice about the mushroom), and Alice’s confrontation with the pigeon who thinks she’s a serpent—all these will have been additions to the earlier story. It is these adventures that contain and elaborate on the changing-size motif. The reason, then, that the mushroom and size-changing aspects of the story disappear when Alice gets to the garden is simple. They weren’t part of the earlier version of the story. Once Dodgson gets back to the earlier version of the story those elements disappear precisely because they were later elaborations.

Another point: one of the things that irritated me about the hallway episode when I was a child is this: Alice, when she’s nine feet tall, is able to unlock the door and peer out into the garden. But, when she accidentally shrinks down to about three inches and runs back to the door, it’s once again locked and the key is back again on that glass table. Now that just seemed plain arbitrary to me. How did the door get itself locked again? (Yeah, I know it’s a dream, but still—) And for that matter why on earth didn’t Alice either hold onto the key, or put it down somewhere where she could reach it when she was small enough to get through. Hell, why hadn’t she simply left it in the keyhole? We are supposed to imagine, apparently, that after looking out through the door she relocked it and thoughtfully placed the key back on the glass table where it would be inconveniently out of reach the next time she was small enough to get out through it—and all this without a word of narrative to support it.

Now let’s suppose for a moment that the original narrative had gone something like this:

As she said this, she looked down at her hands, and was surprised to find she had put on one of the rabbit’s little gloves while she was talking. “How can I have done that?” thought she, “I must be growing small again.” She got up and went to the table to measure herself by it, and found that, as nearly as she could guess, she was now about two feet high, and was going on shrinking rapidly: soon she found out that the reason of it was the nosegay she held in her hand: she dropped it hastily, just in time to save herself from shrinking away altogether, and found that she was now only three inches high.

“Now for the garden!” cried Alice, as she hurried back to the little door, and then she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flowerbeds and the cool fountains.

Although as I've mentioned size is ambiguous in this final section, at three inches Alice would have been a reasonable height to interact with playing cards. (The ostriches and hedgehogs are unreasonable whether Alice is three inches or fifteen inches high, however.)

So as I’ve indicated this hypothesis explains quite nicely some of the features of the narrative that are otherwise puzzling. Is there any reason to suppose, however, that Dodgson would be likely to work in this manner—slicing a narrative open to insert new material?

Yes, there is. The Hunting of the Snark grew from three fits to eight by the addition of episodes between the opening two fits and the closing one. Sylvie and Bruno clearly shows signs of this same hollowing-out process; the original plot-line, abandoned after chapter 12 of Sylvie and Bruno, resumes abruptly at chapter 20 of Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, picking up with the same themes and plans that had vanished in the previous volume. In each case Dodgson cut the work apart to insert new material into the innards, though in the case of Sylvie and Bruno at least some of the new material was actually older than the surrounding text into which it was inserted. And in the change from the MS to the printed version of Alice’s Adventures itself we can see the process continuing; the new Pig and Pepper and Mad Tea Party episodes are added between the pigeon and second hallway episodes. And with their insertion we can see how material becomes displaced from its original context.

In the MS we find:

It was so long since she had been of the right size that it felt quite strange at first, but she got quite used to it in a minute or two, and began talking to herself as usual: “Well! There’s half my plan done now! How puzzling all these changes are! I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one minute to another! However, I’ve got to my right size again: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden—how is that to be done, I wonder?”

Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees had a doorway leading right into it. “That's very curious,” she thought…

In other words we are reminded immediately before Alice sees the doorway leading her back to the hall of her intent to get into the garden. But in the book we have:

“…how is that to be done, I wonder?” As she said this, she came suddenly upon an open place, with a little house in it about four feet high.

Two chapters later, after the Pig and Pepper and Mad Tea Party episodes Dodgson returns to this moment:

“At any rate I’ll never go there again!” said Alice, as she picked her way through the wood. “It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!”

Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees had a door leading right into it. “That's very curious,” she thought.

Note how he gets here. Dodgson has taken the original phrase “Just as she said this” and used it twice in the resultant text, leaving on it (“As she said this she came suddenly upon…”) and then returning to the original text with it (“Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees…”). In the process of making this insertion the original preparatory text about Alice’s plan to get into the garden has become separated by two chapters worth of material from its payoff (the door in the tree), and that small duplication shows us exactly where the incision was made.

Now there’s no exact verbal duplication that seems to mark the point of the original incision (nor does there have to be, but it’s helpful when there is), but I suggest that “as she hurried back to the little door” (original episode) may well be parallel to “then she walked down the little passage” (second hallway episode). The reference to the little passage is wrong in any case; the door was behind a curtain and led to a little passage out into the garden; there was no little passage leading to the door. I suspect Dodgson here engaged in a little careless rewriting.

And another thought: we know that Dodgson continued working on the story even after the MS had assumed its final form. Note where he added the two new episodes (Pig and Pepper and the Mad Tea Party): directly at the end of the earlier new material, by this hypothesis. True, not all the new material was added here; he expanded the trial scene considerably, for one thing. But it is interesting; it is as though the MS froze the story at a particular moment in time as it was being developed. Dodgson starts writing the material for the insertion; he cuts it short so that the MS actually gets finished and he can present it to Alice; but for the book he simply keeps on going from that same point.

Okay, I could continue elaborating on my thoughts, and in fact have started and abandoned a couple of paragraphs that do just that, but there’s a barbecue waiting for me down the street and I want to get this published some time in the foreseeable future. So let me cut to the chase. Is there any remote chance that the tale as I’ve recovered it, shorn of the various parts I’ve mentioned as probable additions, represents what Charles Dodgson told Alice and her sisters that long-ago 4th of July?

Probably not. It might be a stage closer, but, well—the thing is, there was almost certainly at least one manuscript between the MS we have and the story as it was told. In pre-computer days it was standard to create a manuscript (rough draft) before typing up or hand-lettering the presentation copy. Everything about the extant MS (including the fact that it was a presentation copy) suggests that it is a final copy, and Dodgson will have prepared it from a rough draft of some kind. That rough draft will have been where he worked out the changes and revisions that created the present tale. The earlier version that I have tentatively reconstructed, even if it be valid, is just as likely to have been an earlier MS draft as the oral story itself.

And another thing—there were months between Charles Dodgson’s first telling of the story and his creation of the extant MS. Months to forget, to alter, to blur the details of the original story. Now we can assume that he had something to go by—he himself tells us he wrote out the “headings” for the story the very next day, and with any luck he will at least have had that to go by.

Now here’s my fantasy of how we might have at least the outline of the story as told on 4 July 1862. (There are too many speculative elements now for me to even call this a hypothesis.) We know Dodgson wrote out the “headings” for the story the next day. Canon Duckworth tells us that Dodgson told him “that he sat up nearly the whole night, committing to a MS. book his recollections of the drolleries with which he had enlivened the afternoon.” Now maybe Canon Duckworth is confused, and the MS he’s thinking of was the one we have, the presentation copy to Alice, and he was just flat wrong about when it was written and how long it took. But what if his story is correct? The MS book in this case would be a lost rough draft, precisely the sort of thing that could have formed the basis for the final MS copy we actually have, and exactly the sort of thing that my reconstructed Ur-Alice would look like. Maybe, just maybe, we are this close to the tale as told.

Now one of the consequences of this is that we have gradually been losing some of the best parts of the Wonderland story as I’ve been going through this. Of course we already knew that the Mad Tea Party formed no part of the story that memorable day, but now we’ve lost the caterpillar as well. And maybe the croquet scene—remember those troublesome ostriches and hedgehogs? And of course the trial was a mere sketch of what it would eventually become. And the gryphon and the mock turtle may have been part of story told at a later time. What was it about the story, then, that so enthralled Alice, whose enthusiasm ultimately enriched us all?

Well, we’ll never know, and that’s probably how it should be. For some things, you just had to be there.

Constant Interruptions in a Sea of Crap [2011]

[Originally posted 3 July 2011]

E

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

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

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

Happy Independence Day.

Some Old Fart Doesn't Know [2009]

[Originally posted 2 July 2009]

I

’m in a nasty mood right now, so I say thank the gods for the Alvin Sun-Times of Alvin Texas. Under the title “Young People Don’t Know” the Alvin Sun-Times presents a screed by one W. Edward Murphy so stunningly clueless, so absolutely idiotic, as to be my perfect punching-bag for this session. Of course it’s not going to surprise you that I’m off yet again in pursuit of some poor clown who used some fake quotations to enliven his pitiful attempt at an editorial. But this is even more priceless. Here’s a list of his fake quotations in order:

§  The Patrick Henry “religionists” quotation.

§  The George Washington “God and the Bible” quotation.

§  A George Washington “personal prayer-book” hodge-podge.

§  The Jefferson well-worn Bible frankenquote.

§  The Jefferson “best friend of government” quotation.

Are you beginning to get the picture? What if I added that he begins with the following claims:

§  “Of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, 52 of 55 were deeply committed Christians.”

§  “The congress formed the American Bible Society…”

§  “The congress … voted to purchase and import 20,000 Bibles for the people!”

Yes! Not only is this guy so pig-ignorant that he mistakes a 1956 newspaper for Patrick Henry, and a fake prayer-book for Washington's that isn't even in his handwriting, he gets the number of signers of the Declaration of Independence wrong and fancies that congress formed the American Bible Society! Yes, you guessed it—this W. Edward Murphy lifted his “facts” straight from that “America’s Christian Roots” e-mail that was circulating a few years back.

Unbelievable. And Murphy wonders why we don’t find these fake quotations in schoolbooks. Could it be, oh, say, because they’re all fakes? No, it has to be some sort of crazy conspiracy.

It occurred to me, like a lightning flash, reading the quotes of these great men, that the degradation of our morality, of our political corruption, can be laid at the feet of our public educational establishment.

In the next column I will be specific about the history and decline of our educational establishment, and the ravages it has wreaked on our nation, particularly our children.

Okay, fine, but I believe I’ll pass on that somewhat dubious pleasure, W. Edward Murphy. Quasi-plagiarism and fake quotations do not inspire me with any confidence in anything whatsoever you might have to say. Get your facts straight, and do your own damn research instead of lifting it from some idiotic e-mail, and then maybe you might have something to say that’s worth listening to. Until then, forget about it.

[daveawayfromhome commented on the original post:]

“It occurred to me, like a lightning flash, reading the quotes of these great men, that the degradation of our morality, of our political corruption, can be laid at the feet of our public educational establishment.”

Starting, of course, with his own education.

[And King of Ireland added:]

I used to run in these circle until I realized one thing:

One guy they all prop up as an authority states something, they all take it without criticism (because if you actually ask questions you are a rebel), and run with it before they check to see if it is true.

This is not just with the whole Christian Nation topic. Most of these people were birthed into a system and are indoctrinated. They have no belief system of their own. When they are challenged they deny the obvious if it conflicts with anything they have been taught thinking that they are on a slippery slope.

Most throw it all out in college when confronted with other ideas.

Eighteenth Century Talking-Points [2011]

[Originally posted 1 July 2011]

When, during the Wilson-Palmer saturnalia of oppressions, specialists in liberty began protesting that the Declaration plainly gave the people the right to alter the government under which they lived and even to abolish it altogether, they encountered the utmost incredulity. On more than one occasion, in fact, such an exegete was tarred and feathered by shocked members of the American Legion, even after the Declaration had been read to them. What ailed them was simply that they could not understand its Eighteenth century English.

    H. L. Mencken, The American Language, 1921, p. 388

W

hen the Committee of Five delegated the drafting of a declaration of the American colonies’ independence from Great Britain to Thomas Jefferson in June of 1776 they had no way of knowing that this “audacious paper” (as one critic called it) was going to become a foundational document for a new nation. And not just a new nation—a new kind of nation, a nation governed not by a executive answerable to a supernatural being seen by no-one, but rather a nation governed by the consent of its citizens as Hobbes or Locke or whoever had it, or in Mencken’s paraphrase, “people ought to choose the kind of government they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter.”

Theorists had talked up the concept for a long time, but nobody’d ever really put in into practice, as the American colonists were threatening. And it could easily have gone the other way. Robert Sobel’s brilliant For Want of a Nail looks at it from exactly that viewpoint—as a historian might look on it if the revolution had been lost.

A five man committee … was established to draw up a bill of charges against the King and a Declaration of Independence. The former resembled the one presented to King Charles I by the revolutionaries of his day; the latter was an eloquent restatement of contemporary French radical philosophy regarding the rights of man … a thinly disguised play to win further support from French intellectuals. In sum, the Declaration was more a political and propaganda vehicle than a serious attempt to state radical philosophy.

For its purposes, it didn’t really have to be anything more than “a political and propaganda vehicle”. The amazing thing is that this occasional document in fact does resonate (regardless of the distortion) down the corridors of time. No guarantees of course—look what happened to Menander, after all. Two centuries is nothing in the long view. But a great many documents haven’t had half the resonance.

Mind you, a big chunk of the document is taken up with comparative trivia—long-forgotten grievances it takes a history buff to explain. “He [King George] has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary, for public good.” “He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.” “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out our substance.” (In Mencken’s restatement these come out “He vetoed bills in the Legislature that everybody was in favor of, and hardly nobody was against,” “He made the Legislature meet at one-horse tank-towns, so that hardly nobody could get there and most of the leaders would stay home and let him go to work and do things like he wanted,” and “He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they could or not.”)

John Lind, an English writer who took it on himself to reply to the statement, was scathing about swarms of officers.

To articles, thus generally worded, it is not always easy to give an answer. In the instance before us, however, we are under no difficulty. The “multitude of new offices created, and the swarms of officers sent over to America” under the present reign, consist, first, in a Board of Customs; and secondly, in additional Courts of Admiralty. … They forgot to tell us, that no new power is given to these officers; that the Board of Customs continues to exercise only the same power, that the English Commissioners had always exercised; that the new Courts of Admiralty continue to exercise only the same powers, as had been always attributed to the antient Courts. They forgot to tell us, that the salaries of the officers of the four new Courts of Admiralty are fixed; can never vary: that these salaries arise, in the first place, from the produce of the forfeitures; that if any deficiency remain, that deficiency is made good out of the produce of the old naval stores: they forgot to tell us, that this is a fund purely British: they forgot to point out to us how beneficial an improvement Was hereby made on the institution of the ancient Courts of Admiralty. They forgot to tell us, that the salaries of the officers of the ancient Courts were not limited: that they arose entirely from a certain rate assessed upon the forfeitures; were the forfeitures many and considerable? the salaries rose;—were they few and inconsiderable? the salaries fell.—See now the mighty injury done to the Colonies: Justice is brought home to them: the means of acquiring it are at hand, and cheap. The temptations to injustice removed from the officers. To the salary of the officers no honest citizen in America is to contribute. Of one class of people, and of one only, can they devour the subsistence. Will the Americans confess, that the class of smugglers is so numerous in that country, as to entitle them to be called—by way of eminence—the people?

Ah, but that’s not where the Declaration of Independence shines. No, it’s the opening statement of the revolutionary principle that the people have the right to determine what government is best for them, to tinker with it, to change it, or to abolish it if necessary, that is what stands out. Sure, it was a convenient principle for a gang of revolutionaries out to sever their relationship with the nation that brought them up. Okay, it was self-serving. But it was more than that. It gave a clear statement of the basic function of government, and thereby gave a way of evaluating whether and how well a given government was in fact carrying out its function. And it asserted that people could, in the event of failure, change that government.

Among the things that government was supposed to secure for its people were “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (or in Mencken’s translation “every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time whichever way he likes, so long as he don’t interfere with nobody else”). John Lind, predictably, scoffed at the entire concept:

The rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—by which, if they mean any thing, they must mean the right to enjoy life, to enjoy liberty, and to pursue happiness—they “hold to be unalienable” This they “hold to be among truths self-evident.” At the same time, to secure these rights, they are content that Governments should be instituted. They perceive not, or will not seem to perceive, that nothing which can be called Government ever was, or ever could be, in any instance, exercised, but at the expence of one or other of those rights.— That, consequently, in as many instances as Government is ever exercised, some one or other of these rights, pretended to be unalienable, is actually alienated.

…

In these tenets they have outdone the utmost extravagance of all former fanatics. The German Anabaptists indeed went so far as to speak of the right of enjoying life as a right unalienable. To take away life, even in the Magistrate, they held to be unlawful. But they went no farther, it was reserved for an American Congress, to add to the number of unalienable rights, that of enjoying liberty, and pursuing happiness;—that is,—if they mean any thing,—pursuing it wherever a man thinks he can see it, and by whatever means he thinks he can attain it:—That is, that all penal laws—those made by their selves among others—which affect life or liberty, are contrary to the law of God, and the unalienable rights of mankind:—That is, that thieves are not to be refrained from theft, murderers from murder, rebels from rebellion.

Yeah, talking-points. What would we do without them?