Quotation of the Day

You wanna know why we should honor the memory of Edward Kennedy? It's not his many accomplishments, it has nothing to do with Chappaquiddick or No Child Left Behind, it's not his family legacy or even his decades of service to Massachusetts and America. It is because even though he was a really rich guy, he never acted like those who were less fortunate than him were that way because they deserved to be. That alone places him high above the entire Republican Party and many of his fellow Democrats.

Daveawayfromhome

Sorry about That

I've had things to deal with, both in the real word and online, and I've not been able to post here regularly. I have an online project I'm working on that I hope to launch shortly, and in the real world I have a massive house-reorganization project going on, so I'm not sure just how quickly I'll get back to this web log. Soon, if possible, but I've been saying that for days; even that last entry about the founding fathers and the first amendment was largely written ahead of time.

On this Day in 1789

It's Saturday, 15 August, 1789. Congress is in session in New York—the first congress under the new constitution. Up for discussion: a proposed constitutional amendment, to be inserted between the sentence guaranteeing habeas corpus and the one prohibiting ex post facto laws. It was one part of a political compromise, a series of amendments to the new constitution meant to keep doubters in the fold and to entice the undecided off the fence. We know the result today as the Bill of Rights. This proposed amendment read:

No religion shall be established by law, nor shall the equal rights of conscience be infringed.

Peter Silvester (P, NY), an Albany lawyer who had held (and would continue to hold) a variety of governmental positions in the new republic, immediately spotted a problem with the wording. The opening words could be taken two ways. The intention was to keep the new government from passing a law that would establish religion, but could it not also be taken as a command to the congress to establish “no religion” as the law of the land? He “had some doubts of the propriety of the mode of expression used in this paragraph. He apprehended that it was liable to a construction different from what had been made by the committee. He feared it might be thought to have a tendency to abolish religion altogether.”

Where on earth did this fear come from? Well, you have to remember that the issue of disestablishment (we would call it "separation of church and state") was hot at the time, and that Virginia had recently emerged from a bruising battle on the subject when Patrick Henry had proposed a bill levying a tax to support all teachers of religion, a bill famously opposed and defeated by the efforts of James Madison—the author of the present amendment. You have to remember that in European states of the time the established church was generally tax-supported, and that there was no guarantee that religion could survive without that support. (And as we will see from a later point made by Benjamin Huntington, there was some sentiment afloat that people ought to be required to support some religious institution, at any rate.) So, at any rate, the first order of business was to rewrite Madison's proposal to rule out the possibility of the Federal government being called upon to establish "no religion" by law.

John Vining (P, DE) proposed fixing the problem by “transposing the two members of the sentence.” I suppose he had in mind a wording like “No law shall be [enacted] to establish religion,” or something in that vein. Elbridge Gerry (A, MA) suggested the reading "no religious doctrine shall be established by law”—a version considerably narrower than anything else proposed so far, in that it would have allowed Congress to set standards for religious practice, presumably, or at least left that door wide open, even if it kept the government from establishing doctrine.

Roger Sherman (P, CT), Framer and Declaration signer, now derailed the discussion altogether. Even though politics had already decreed this was a dead issue, he reiterated that he "thought the amendment altogether unnecessary, inasmuch as Congress had not authority whatever delegated to them by the constitution to make religious establishments; he would, therefore, move to have it struck out.” Daniel Carroll (P, MD) quickly reminded him of these political realities, "As the rights of conscience are, in their nature, of peculiar delicacy, and will little bear the gentlest touch of governmental hand; and as many sects have concurred in opinion that they are not well secured under the present constitution, he said he was much in favor of adopting the words. He thought it would tend more towards conciliating the minds of the people to the Government than almost any other amendment he had heard proposed. He would not contend with gentlemen about the phraseology, his object was to secure the substance in such a manner as to satisfy the wishes of the honest part of the community."

James Madison, Jr. (A, VA) patiently explained again the intended meaning of the amendment: "that Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any manner contrary to their conscience." He once again went over the political necessity of the amendment: “Whether the words are necessary or not, he did not mean to say, but they had been required by some of the State Conventions, who seemed to entertain an opinion that under the clause of the constitution, which gave power to Congress to make all laws necessary and proper to carry into execution the constitution, and the laws made under it, enabled them to make laws of such a nature as might infringe the rights of conscience, and establish a national religion; to prevent these effects he presumed the amendment was intended, and he thought it as well expressed as the nature of the language would admit.”

Benjamin Huntington (P, CT) now took the bull by the horns. He said “that he feared, with the gentleman first up on this subject, that the words might be taken in such a latitude as to be extremely hurtful to the cause of religion.” The underlying fear, no doubt, was the possibility that if state support for religion was removed, religion itself might wither away altogether. Huntington made a rather lame argument that “The ministers of their congregations to the eastward were maintained by the contributions of those who belonged to their society; the expense of building meeting-houses was contributed in the same manner. These things were regulated by bylaws. If an action was brought before a Federal Court on any of these cases, the person who had neglected to perform his engagements could not be compelled to do it; for a support of ministers, or building of places of worship, might be construed into a religious establishment.” He felt that the 1663 Rhode Island Charter (then over a century old) was radical enough; it guaranteed that dissenters from the Church of England would be tolerated (as long as they kept quiet about it) but didn’t actually encourage them. “He hoped, therefore, the amendment would be made in such a way as to secure the rights of conscience, and a free exercise of the rights of religion, but not to patronize those who professed no religion at all.” And with this display of bigotry and intolerance Benjamin Huntington vanished from the debate.

If James Madison (or anybody else for that matter) thought Huntington’s remarks were worth responding to it doesn’t appear in the record. He went back to the main point of the wording, and suggested adding the word national before religion, which would have created the following result:

No national religion shall be established by law, nor shall the equal rights of conscience be infringed.

He thought (wrongly) that this “would satisfy the minds of honorable gentlemen. He believed that the people feared one sect might obtain a pre-eminence, or two combine together, and establish a religion to which they would compel others to conform. He thought if the word national was introduced, it would point the amendment directly to the object it was intended to prevent.”

Samuel Livermore (P, NH) was impatient with this nit-picking; “he did not wish them to dwell long on the subject.” He proposed a substitute amendment:

Congress shall make no laws touching religion, or infringing the rights of conscience.

This is an electrifying moment; suddenly we see the beginning of the actual language that will become the First Amendment. It's not there yet, of course; we still have "infringing the rights of conscience" rather than "prohibiting the free exercise thereof", but it's on its way. For the moment, however, the proposal just lies there; under consideration is Madison's proposal to add the word national to his version of the amendment.

Elbridge Gerry (A, MA), Declaration signer and opponent of the new constitution, who had earlier in the debate suggested the language "no religious doctrine" to replace "no religion", now objected strongly to the term national, in that a Federal, and not a National, government was under consideration. Madison defended his suggestion by observing "that the words ‘no national religion shall be established by law,’ did not imply that the Government was a national one,” but he withdrew his motion regardless in favor of Livermore’s version. The vote was then taken on that, and the amendment passed 31-20. Thus, had this been the end of the story, the First Amendment would have read:

Congress shall make no laws touching religion, or infringing the rights of conscience.

Of course as we know these were not the words that were going to become enshrined as part of the first article of the Bill of Rights; the Senate would have to pass its version, and a compromise would be hammered out between them, but for the moment their work was done, and it was on to consider such matters as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the freedom to peaceably assemble (one representative compared the last to the freedom to wear a hat). But the big effort of the day was over an amendment that would have given the right to the people to instruct their representatives. The argument over that one was heated, and ended with the defeat of the proposal. That debate in fact appears to have taken much longer than the debates about the various freedoms altogether.

And that's the way it was on this date in history two hundred twenty years ago.

More Fake Quotation Sightings

Over at A Simple Prop John M. Lynch gives us an account of a double screw-up by one Anna Falling, who is running for mayor of Tulsa. In the course of a piece about putting a creationist exhibit in the local zoo she finishes off with the following inanity:

Thank you again for your prayers as we proceed to bring God back to our seat of government. As George Washington stated on Feb. 22, 1732, “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible”

Of course you'll recognize that this "quotation" is nothing of the sort; it is in fact a misquotation of a misquotation of something attributed to Washington by an 1835 biographer on the basis of the recollection of an unknown person. (See here for the references.) But the classic touch is that the Father of his Country was himself a squalling infant on the day he is supposed to have said this, being either just born (if the Gregorian calendar is meant) or eleven days old (by the Julian calendar then in use). Epic fail, Anna. Maybe you could use a little refresher course in American History.

From the idiotic we move to the ought-to-know-better class of writer. J. Grant Swank, Jr. of Portland Maine is no backwoods bumpkin, having attended classes at Harvard Divinity School, where the standards are high. And yet, a column attributed to him at the somewhat shadowy Post-Chronicle contains no fewer than three fake quotations. First up, a fake George Washington prayer. Swank wrote:

President George Washington wrote a prayer addressed to "O most glorious God, in Jesus Christ" and ended it with this: "Let me live according to those holy rules which thou hast this day prescribed in Thy Holy Word. Direct me to the true object, Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth and the Life. Bless O Lord all the people of this land."

This is actually from the Sunday evening prayer in the notorious Washington prayer book, a well-known literary hoax. (The handwriting in the document bears no resemblance to that of Washington, for one thing.) Also, the passage given as the ending is in fact taken from the middle of the piece. The fraud was exposed in 1926, not long after the document's "discovery" in a trunk (shades of William Henry Ireland) belonging to a later member of Washington's family.

Next up (after a Jefferson quotation I'll deal with later on, as it's not entirely fake) comes a familiar Madison fake:

Religion is the basis and foundation of government. We have staked the whole future of American civilization not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all 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, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.

Oh mighty Jehovah, where to begin with this one? This quotation is a little like a snowball rolling down a hill, gathering bits and pieces of extraneous material along the way. There are two genuine phrases in it. Well, more-or-less genuine. The first is "the basis and foundation of government." Madison quoted these words from the title of the 1776 Virginia Bill of Rights: "A DECLARATION OF RIGHTS made by the representatives of the good people of Virginia, assembled in full and free Convention; which rights do pertain to them, and their posterity, as the basis and foundation of government." It will be noted that the words refer here to individual rights, and not to religion. Madison only used them to indicate the source of his claim that "'the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his religion, according to the dictates of conscience,' is held by the same tenure with all our other rights." For more on how the fake quote was manufactured take a look at this cool exegesis by Jim Allison.

The second genuine phrase is "the capacity of mankind for self government". Madison in fact used that phrase in The Federalist Papers (XXXIX), but nothing else in this is genuine. At some point in the mid-twentieth century somebody used the phrase as the basis for a new concoction: "We have staked the whole future of American civilization not upon the power of government, far from it, but upon the capacity of mankind for self-government." A variant version also circulated; by 1958 the two were combined into a single frankenquote with some nonsense about the Ten Commandments tacked on to the end. A more extended explanation is available here.

Other than these two phrases, the entire quotation is a fake.

Next up we have this from Patrick Henry:

It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not religionists, but by Christians, not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, property, and freedom of worship here.

Regular readers of this web log will recognize this as a 1956 comment from The Virginian. There is nothing of Patrick Henry in this at all.

So, these are the three out-and-out fakes. In addition, however, at least two of the others have serious problems as quotations. First, let's take a look at his Jefferson quotation:

God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis—a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.

You probably recognize the bulk of this as coming from Notes on the State of Virginia. But what about the opening sentence, "God who gave us life gave us liberty"? It doesn't belong here. Where did it come from? Well, it's a fragment from A Summary View of the Rights of British America: "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them." It has been forcibly joined to the Notes on the State of Virginia passage without any indication that that the two quotations do not actually belong together. The actual leading sentences ran in the original: "For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labor." This juxtaposition may have been suggested by the quotations on panel 3 of the Jefferson Memorial; it is still sloppy work.

And second comes an alleged Lincoln quotation:

The ways of God are mysterious and profound beyond all comprehension. 'Who by searching can find Him out?' God only knows the issue of this business. He has destroyed nations from the map of history for their sins. Nevertheless, my hopes prevail generally above my fears for our Republic. The times are dark, the spirits of ruin are abroad in all their power, and the mercy of God alone can save us.

Now first, I have to note once again that we are dealing with words not actually written or spoken by the alleged author, but rather words put into his mouth by the recollection of another person. In this case they are words attributed to Lincoln by the Reverend Byron Sunderland (occasional Senate chaplain) some ten years (1872) after Lincoln allegedly said them (late 1862). In a letter Sunderland recalled the visit with President Lincoln, and produced a passage of over five hundred words that he attributed to him. Is this likely? I'm going to ask the reader to engage in a little thought exercise. Think back to a speech you heard in 1999. Do you think you can recall accurately a passage of five hundred words from it? How much of it do you think you would recall accurately? A short passage, yes, a story, maybe, but much more than that? No, it's not bloody likely. The editors of Recollected words of Abraham Lincoln likewise note: "The length of this recollection alone makes it dubious as anything more than a Sunderland sermon based on a certain amount of Lincoln text."

Oh, and another thing—this is actually two sections of Sunderland's recollected speech jammed together. The first two sentences are the opening; the remainder is the closing. A great many words have been silently omitted.

All in all not a bad showing of dishonesty or ignorance. Three fakes and two problematic quotations. Swank could hardly have done better if he were trying to provide me with an object-lesson on the use of fake quotations. I do wish he could have seen his way clear to use the Franklin "primitive Christianity" quotation; it would have rounded out the fakes he did use nicely.

So we have a would-be mayor and a religion columnist each doing their bit to make sure that fake history marches on. It's hard to know what to say. Is there any likelihood that either of them will, oh, say—mend their goddamn ways? It's probably too much to hope for. Each of them made a conscious decision to abandon their principles to pimp for their faith, or so it would appear. Like all good advertisers they put their product above truth.

Update: Anna Falling fixed the minor error of attributing a fake quotation to the day Washington was born, but she left the fake quotation intact. I left this comment at her site:

Okay, cool, you fixed the minor error. What about fixing the major one? The fact is, Washington never said these words. They are an 1893 misquotation of an 1867 misquotation of words attributed to him by a biographer in 1835 on the strength of a recollection by an anonymous person. See http://fakehistory.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/fake-quotations-washington-and-governing-without-god/ for the gory details.

Will this make it through comment moderation? I suspect not. [14 August 2009]

Hudson's Bay High School Forty-Year Reunion

I am having trouble writing anything, or to be more accurate, completing anything. I've got several rants started now, but nothing that comes to any sort of conclusion. And for the third year in a row I've managed to miss Stan Freberg's birthday (7 August); last year I had a six-part appreciation written I intended to launch starting on the 7th, but the crash of my laptop took the material with it. Damn it.

I survived my class reunion (Hudson's Bay High School, class of 1969). I don't do well in social situations, being subject to random panic attacks brought on (usually) by the presence of large numbers of people, no matter whether they be strangers or people I know well. I had to de-stress for a bit, but I don't think anybody noticed. I suppose it doesn't really matter. I got to talk to several people I've known since grade school, and a couple of others I haven't seen in forty years. I even exchanged a few words with the girl I secretly wrote a symphony* for back in high school. (She remembered me, if a bit vaguely.) The organizers did one hell of a job; everything went smoothly (or if it didn't, they concealed it well). There were old school newspapers and yearbooks to leaf through, and a variety of foods to munch on, and adequate spaces to congregate in. It was too damn hot, but that was Nature's fault, not the organizers'.

I'd really hoped to see my one-time best friend there, but I got an e-mail from him saying he wasn't up to traveling, being between operations as it were. And another long-time friend comes to mind on these occasions; I haven't seen her since the early eighties, and never will again, unless time turns back on itself, or we meet again in some sort of afterlife. But it was interesting, and sometimes odd, catching up with people I haven't seen in decades.

There was one illuminating moment. I'd tried to write a piece about girls in math some time back, and I'd thought back to my high school "accelerated" Geometry course, where the boys outnumbered the girls by about a two-to-one ratio. The class was intended for the top students in math, but the thing I was struck by is the difference between the boys and girls. While the boys were all at least above-average students, the girls were pretty much only the very cream of the cream, academically speaking. (Two of them at least were straight-A students.) Where were (I wondered) the high-scoring girls who weren't at the very top of the class? Well, just as I was leaving, I talked briefly with one of my former classmates, and she had had my very thought, it seems, except that she had it at the time, not some decades later. She told me how, looking around at the handful of girls in the class, she had thought to herself in effect—they're all brains? what am I doing here? I doubt very much that any of the boys in that class would have had that reaction. Still, that's probably a topic for another day. Or never.

And there was one awkward moment. I'd ridden in with a long-time friend (her sister and I had hung out together in grade school) from out of town, and as we were heading out, I suddenly ran into a couple of people I'd missed during the rest of the event. On the one hand I was really interested in catching up; on the other, we were on our way out. I cut things short by indicating that my friend was waiting for me. "Are you two married?" comes the question. For me this was completely out of left field—yeah, right, I should be so lucky. I promptly disclaimed the honor—and she remarked, "Well, you didn't have to look so horrified."

This is the part where I should say something to round things off, but I can't think of a damn thing. Hurray for the buzzards, I guess, or the eagles, or whatever it was that we were some forty years back up that winding road, and maybe we'll hook up again five or ten years down it. I won't be there—but I say that every time, and still I keep showing up. Must be the karma. It does seep in, no matter how often you seal the cracks.

*Okay, it wasn't a symphony; it was the first movement for a symphony. In D minor. And I never orchestrated it. It probably would have been saner to, say, actually ask her out, but I have my limitations, and one of them was approaching one of the most popular girls in school on that particular mission. I probably should have anyway. God, she was bright, and beautiful—and still is, approaching sixty.

Eating by a Small Waterfall

The best hamburgers in Portland were served at a place called The Carnival. You watched them cooked over leaping flames, and then you carried them over to a round carousel-like arrangement where every condiment known to man could be found. Unlimited pickles were my personal enthusiasm; none of this three doled out and spaced carefully about the bun stuff. Weather permitting you could eat outside by a small waterfall, and watch squirrels zip about in the vegetation. I know they had a variety of other food, but the hamburgers are what I remember.

The decor consisted mainly of old circus posters, possibly genuine, along with paintings of clowns and performing animals. The dining area was entirely surrounded by windows, and at least some of them looked out into the greenery. Once in 1969 my father had a flat tire not too far away, and he parked my brother and me there with cokes while he went off to get it fixed. For reasons too complicated to explain here (it's part of a whole other story) I was clutching a sack containing two infant iguanas at the time. They were now scrabbling around quite vigorously and I had visions of them clawing through the side of the sack and racing off into the depths of the restaurant. Fortunately nothing of the sort occurred, but the fantasy made an otherwise forgettable experience memorable.

A few years back I took my niece and family to the Carnival; the name had changed to the Carousel but in other respects it was much the same. The decor was somewhat the worse for wear, and the new owner was present. It turned out that we were the last customers to eat there under the old regime; the next day it was closing down for remodeling, and when it reopened, it would reopen as a teriyaki place. The new owner spoke vaguely of keeping at least some of the original menu, but it was apparent that the old days were pretty much gone. Presumably forever.

Today, for no good reason—I was trying out a supposedly new MySpace feature, actually—I tried invoking the Carnival genii, forgetting for the moment that it was no more. It wasn't there; neither was the Carousel. I googled it finally—and finally turned up a set of pictures. It seems the teriyaki place never thrived, and closed down not all that long after opening. From the looks of it the building just sat for awhile. Somebody had posted a set of pictures of the place as it looked not long before it was torn down.

Apparently there's nothing there now but parking lot. I don't think I'll bother to check it out, to tell the truth. There was always something a little sad about the place, a little tacky, but damn, they made good hamburgers.

Never Mind

I've twice started to write something about why I've started going to my high-school reunions and twice run aground on the shoals of having nothing to say. I'm going to my forty-year reunion tomorrow. And yet it really makes no sense for me to put myself through another social ordeal, this time without my Paxil shield, when I could be safe in my cocoon, hiding in my basement.

You know, it probably doesn't make sense, as Bob Newhart put it somewhere or other, but I'm going to do it anyway. And with any luck I won't collapse into a pile of gibbering protoplasm, struck down by terrors invisible to everybody else. (I hate it when that happens.) I may even enjoy it. We'll see. Stay tuned.

Writer's Blog

I can't think of anything to write about. I'm sure there are vital issues to rant about, or interesting historical footnotes to cover, or nostalgic rivers to cross. (As I'm about to attend my fortieth high school reunion, don't be surprised if there are more blasts from the past soon.) But right this moment my personal circuits are mostly overloaded by the heat. I have the lights out down here, trying to keep things as cool as possible, but it's still hotter than I find it comfortable to write in, and especially to do research in. There is air conditioning in the house, but not near my computer, so it's kind of a choice. To compute or to be comfortable, that is the question. And right now comfort is winning out.

Defending the Indefensible

Well-known literary critic Henry Gates, Jr., was arrested 16 July 2009 after a passer-by mistakenly thought he was breaking into his own home. According to the police report:

On Thursday July 16, 2009, Henry Gates, Jr. ([censored]), of [censored] Ware Street, Cambridge, MA) was placed under arrest at [censored] Ware Street, after being observed exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior, in a public place, directed at a uniformed police officer who was present investigating a report of a crime in progress. These actions on the behalf of Gates served no legitimate purpose and caused citizens passing by this location to stop and take notice while appearing surprised and alarmed.

Now at this point I imagine you're asking, so what was the crime, exactly, that he was arrested for? Well, that was it—"caus[ing] citizens passing by this location [his house] to stop and take notice while appearing surprised and alarmed."

Now arguments have erupted over exactly what was said when and to whom in this whole business, and (essentially) who was the bigger asshole, Gates or the officer who arrested him, but none of this matters. Ed Brayton puts it well:

Look, this whole issue is quite simple. Is it possible that Prof. Gates was being a jerk during the arrest? That he presumed racism and had a chip on his shoulder when the police got there and berated them for badgering him? Sure it is. I wasn't there and neither were you so we have to admit this is a possibility. But here's the thing: It doesn't matter.

Exactly. This isn't a playground dispute between two kids or a barroom fight. One of these guys was a supposedly trained professional, out to do a specific job. The other guy was an ordinary citizen at his own home. Different standards apply. If the ordinary citizen was not breaking the law—and no evidence is presented that he was—then the trained professional had no business arresting him. Period. No matter what the damage to his ego may have been.

The only reason I am writing about this at all is that there are a lot of clowns out there trying to defend the officer in this case. As far as I know this fellow may be a nice guy—but the arrest report itself shows that in this case he acted unprofessionally. That his feelings were hurt, that he was being berated and yelled at (and I have no idea whether he was or not) is no excuse whatsoever for arresting somebody. That's an abuse of power, pure and simple.

Police powers are not granted to individuals so that they can gratify their egos, or take private revenge for fancied slights. And that this officer's defenders seem to expect people to take their excuses seriously leaves me flabbergasted. Do we live in a police state? Is this what we have come down to?

A commenter called Brent put the case in a nutshell here:

Setting aside all of the other meta-discussions on race and class that surround this issue, the thing about all of this that creeps me out the most is that so many people are willing to defend this officer who, assuming the most charitable possible interpretation, arrested a guy because he didn't like his attitude. That is what Barnicle is defending. That is what the execrable Mika Brzenski is defending. That is what I have read numerous commenters on a multitude of sites from the entire political spectrum defend.

They are, as far as I am concerned, defending the indefensible and it is what Carlos and, surprisingly reasonably, Ford was trying to get through in that clip. They were saying that if you cannot agree that arresting Gates was just plain wrong then there is no possibility of moving the argument forward. There is no good faith argument to be had without starting from the point that officers do not get to arrest a guy because he says unkind things to him.

I have decided that I no longer have anything to say to people who can, with a straight face, defend this nonsense. Forget about race. Forget about class. Forget whether or not Gates or Officer Crowley are nice guys who treat their mothers well. The bottom line here is that an officer used the authority of law to restrict the liberty of a man who was expressing displeasure with him. If you think that is right, then you fundamentally disagree with the basic principle of a free society.

That is not hyperbole. If you are willing to grant any individual with a gun and a badge the authority to arrest people because they don't like them, then you and I share no common principle on liberty and the right of people to be free from oppression. None.

Damn, I wish I'd said that.

Standard Rant #415

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace of Mind

I don't know what to say. I want to get something in, but I'm upset at the moment, and I can't think of any topic to comment on. I feel as though certain people in my life are using me as a football, or perhaps a punching bag, or better yet, a pawn in their irritating games. And I just want to get on with things, both in my online life and in the real world, without all these really stupid bits of manipulation and general screwing around.

So, anyway, right at the moment this is a sort of placeholder entry, a reminder that I'm still alive and writing, even if I don't have much to say. With any luck I will have something of more general interest soon; no promises, as I don't have any particular topic in mind, but I do need to de-stress a bit, and with that in mind, maybe I'll find something fun to write about soon.

Random Recollections of Werner Warmbrunn

I got an email from my college today regarding Professor Werner Warmbrunn.

Professor Werner Warmbrunn was briefly my faculty advisor, and not so briefly my teacher, as I went through college. I took his class in Nazi Germany, and he taught the history seminar that exposed us to a variety of ways of doing history, the one requirement for a history degree.

He grew up in Germany, and his family fled the country before the war. He told us how he regarded it as great fun to slide back into Germany for quick visits with friends, taking trains through less-traveled checkpoints, until one time on leaving the Gestapo caught up with him. Since he was on his way out the authorities contented themselves merely with telling him never to return—which was lucky—and he didn't, not till after the war anyway.

Several times he stopped to give me a lift across town or across campus as he saw me walking; on one occasion I had mentioned a particular song (I don't recall now what it was) that I got a kick out of because it was a send-up of a particular style of music. I think it may have been on the radio at the moment. The next time he dropped me off somewhere he remarked that he had been thinking about what I said about it, and about how difficult it was even after living in the United States for all these years, to pick up on such subtle details of the culture. He wondered about what else he might have been missing. All I could say is that I was born here, and I missed subtleties of the culture all the time.

When I once missed a history seminar meeting due to the flu and showed up later at his office to apologize and see if there was anything I needed to do to catch up he was deeply concerned. Not that I'd missed class; he was concerned about my health and wanted the infirmary to check me out. (He probably had reason to be concerned; I was pushing myself fairly hard at that point, eating irregularly, losing weight, and to top it all off just recovered from a short but severe bout with the flu.) I assured him that I was fine, but the incident stuck with me, and I made a point of taking better care of myself after that.

He was one hell of a teacher. Mind you, I had some damn good teachers in college, but I remember him better than most. He could seem almost woolly-minded at times, the caricature absent-minded professor, but then he would come around and put a different spin on things with an adroit comment or a penetrating question. I'm not putting this well, and I'm actually crying as I write this, damn it. He inspired real affection in his class. As the mood of the nation veered to the right he commented on how he'd seen things like this before, in his youth, and he worried about the future of our nation. One political figure in particular worried him. He had previously remarked (not in this connection) that in theory he could have changed the course of history and prevented much misery for the world, the implication being (or so we took it) through the assassination of Adolf Hitler. Once, before class, somebody suggested that we could really ease Professor Warmbrunn's mind through the timely assassination of this American politician. We could make it a class project. It was gallows humor, but our concern was real—both for our teacher, and for the nation.

He was a genuine historian. He could explain Nazi positions better than Goebbels himself, and be fair even to the lowest scum in the regime. Mind you, I don't mean that there was ever the slightest doubt where his sympathies lay; it's just that sympathies came after the business of actually doing history. When somebody in our Nazi Germany class suggested that the resources Hitler had diverted from the war effort to exterminating the Jews had cost him victory in some significant battle, Professor Warmbrunn said that it would be nice to think that. He wished that it were true; it would be a measure of justice. And then he laid out the reasons why it could not possibly be true, using hard facts and firm data. I don't know that he was right; I was merely struck by the way he kept personal feelings away from the business of evaluating information.

I did my final paper in that class on the Stab-in-the-Back myth, comparing it to other instances of beliefs firmly held in the teeth of the evidence. One key paper on my subject was long, and in German, and my German was really not up to the task of going through it all. I mentioned my problem during a paper conference, and he took my photocopy of the paper, read it, gave me a brief summary of its sections, and highlighted the parts that were key to my research. Now that was over and beyond the call of duty, damn it—although I do think he was intrigued by the particular direction I was taking with it, and wanted to see what I came up with.

God, I haven't thought of this stuff in years. He was a good guy, and a good teacher, and he passed away peacefully in his sleep yesterday afternoon.

Fifteen Books

The challenge: "Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes."

I posted my list here, and I didn't try to stick to fifteen, since that would have given me such extreme stage fright I probably wouldn't have listed anything, for fear of missing something crucial. But since I've now been officially tagged here, I'm going to take a second stab at it and see if I can't refine my original list a bit.

1. The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. It's the first book I can remember really wanting a personal copy of to enjoy at my leisure. My mother had a copy, but it was one of her treasures, and while she'd read to us from it, she wouldn't let us get our grubby paws on it. I got my own copy for my ninth birthday (I think it was) and I had The Hunting of the Snark virtually memorized in a matter of days. Big chunks of it anyway.
2. A Gnome There Was. This Henry Kuttner (I think there's some C. L. Moore in there too) anthology introduced me to science fiction. It was one morning when I got up early—two or three I suppose; it was dark anyway—to find my father doing some construction in the living room. Lots of times he'd have me help him out in these circumstances, but I think I must have been getting in his way, because he produced a book and gave it to me to read. (He later told me he'd bought it earlier that day at a used book store in downtown Portland; I think it may have been a replacement for a copy he'd lost.) I didn't stop till I'd read the whole thing by which time the sun was up and the whole household stirring. The standout stories were "Compliments of the Author," "Mimsy were the Borogoves," and "The Twonky." I had never read anything remotely like them before. I was about eleven.
3. Letters from the Earth. This was an eye-opener, and I read it the year it came out (1962?). Mark Twain was a favorite of mine; I'd read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and then been delighted to find that there were two more Huck Finn stories, even if they weren't up to the quality of the others. But this was a Mark Twain I had no idea of. He spoke openly of masturbation and described sexual intercourse as humankind's chief joy and regretted its absence in heaven. My main exposure to the Bible up till now had been in Unitarian Sunday-school, which meant that I'd at least heard about Moses leading his people to freedom from Egypt (with its civil rights connections), and we'd been through the Sermon on the Mount pretty much word for word. Twain's quotations from the conquest of Canaan were a revelation, or maybe a shock, to me, what with Yahweh ordering His people to slaughter the inhabitants of the land, saving only the virgin women alive as booty. And then there was the unforgettable flood scene:

   Then at last, Noah sailed; and none too soon, for the Ark was only just sinking out of sight on the horizon when the monsters [the dinosaurs] arrived, and added their lamentations to those of the multitude of weeping fathers and mothers and frightened little children who were clinging to the wave-washed rocks in the pouring rain and lifting imploring prayers to an All-Just and All-Forgiving and All-Pitying Being who had never answered a prayer since those crags were builded, grain by grain, out of the sands, and would still not have answered one when the ages should have crumbled them to sand again.
   

4. The Looking-Glass Book of Stories. It looks like my copy may have been a casualty of that disaster that took most of my library a few months back, and I can't find a table of contents online, which is irritating. However. This fascinating short-story collection, edited by Hart Day Leavitt, introduced me to a number of favorite authors. I believe it contained Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," Stephen Vincent Benét's "The Devil and Daniel Webster," Thurber's "The Last Clock," and E. B. White's "The Hour of Letdown." (I'm sure I've left out some other gems.) It also had stories by Chekhov and Oscar Wilde and Ambrose Bierce; these don't happen to be my favorites for those authors, but it was a really excellent collection of stories in that while there was some fantasy element to all of them, they were varied stylistically, thematically, and—well, never mind, it was just a great short-story collection. Even when it was an author whose works I was somewhat familiar with, the story wasn't necessarily one I knew already (Thurber, Twain). Damn, I'd like to at least see the table of contents for the thing to refresh my memory.
5. Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm. This one comes from my high-school era—Christmas, 1967, maybe. As a kid I'd enjoyed take-offs of various kinds, and frankly called them all parodies without really thinking it over. I wrote a number myself—a take-off on Hiawatha describing the antics of modern hunters on other people's property, for example. A take-off on "America the Beautiful" lamenting the destruction of the wilderness. When I was shopping for Christmas presents I noticed a book at J. K. Gills in the Lloyd Center—exactly, this very anthology by Dwight Macdonald. I stood in the aisle leafing through it and was blown away by the contents. These were parodies on a level I had never seen before, quite different from the Mad magazine stuff I was familiar with. I dropped hints about the book, but when I dragged my parents past to show it to them, so they'd know that this was the book I wanted, not some other parody collection, it was gone. That was disappointing as hell, but come Christmas morning, damned if I didn't get the book. I read and reread it a thousand times, probably, and learned about James and Horace Smith, Max Beerbohm, Wolcott Gibbs, all the great parodists, as well as becoming acquainted with writers I'd never known before—Sherwood Anderson, for one. This is the book that taught me about style, and I spent many hours trying to write like Henry James, or Sherwood Anderson, or Beerbohm himself, once I'd discovered his essays. My teachers may have cursed the day I discovered it; I wrote one paper entirely in imitation T. S. Eliot blank verse, for example. (It was about "Murder in the Cathedral," and I did get an A- on it.) Ha.
6. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Harrison edition). Now we jump back a few years, back to when I was in junior high school. My father was chief engineer at a major Portland radio station, which meant that he could get complimentary tickets to a variety of cultural events—operas, movies, games, rock concerts, all sorts of stuff. One of the available events was the Shakespeare festival in Ashland, Oregon. It was a fair trip, some three hundred miles from Portland, but we made it our vacation one year, and headed down to see two plays. My parents cautiously suggested that we kids could do other things if we felt Shakespeare would be boring, but I at least wasn't willing to admit that there was anything in the world intellectually beyond me, and my brothers weren't about to be left out either. The first play was Macbeth, and I was not bored in the slightest. The hours seemed to pass in no time, and one speech so struck me in particular that when we got back to the motel I borrowed my mother's Shakespeare and memorized it on the spot. (It started "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," and it's everybody's favorite, but I thought it spoke specially to me.) The Harrison Shakespeare also had wonderful appendices explaining the music and the customs and the stagecraft of Shakespeare's time, as well as giving introductions to the other playwrights of the time. I read it practically to death.
7. It's getting tougher to choose, but Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark may as well come next, I guess. This one is one of those happy accidents, like the way I found Tolkein while looking for Booth Tarkington at the Vancouver public library. I was living at the Oregon coast, house-sitting, while trying to write a novel about Simon Magus. I was trying to get a text of the Clementine Homilies, but I somehow ended up with this strange book about a newly-discovered letter by Clement of Alexandria, telling of a hitherto-unknown version of the Gospel According to Mark. My very first thought on looking the book over (and this is absolutely true) was that it was a very clever hoax by the author; I was particularly impressed by the way he misinterpreted the text to support his hypothesis. That, I thought, lent verisimilitude to the whole endeavor. A forger usually creates a text that magically supports his hypothesis, but to create a text that then had to be tortured to fit—that was genius. When I checked up on Smith, though, I gradually concluded that the discovery had to be genuine; there were too many things about it that were beyond the art of any forger. Of course the question has been opened again since then, and with arguments that range from the intriguing to the utterly stupid (the Morton salt argument being one of the latter), but that's not actually relevant to the point of this particular book being on my list. This book marked a kind of turning-point in my life; researching it got me back into looking at the Nag Hammadi stuff, and that led to me barging in one day to the office of Dr. James M. Robinson in Claremont California, who was then directing the Nag Hammadi project, and he sent me to a woman named Margie Shurgot who was in charge of a little-known program for older students returning to school, and, well, five years later I emerged from the process with a knowledge of ancient Greek and Coptic and a degree in History of Religions. Go figure.
8. The Motor Boys in Mexico. This is really more of a place-holder; it could have been Tom Swift Among the Diamond-Makers or The Grammar-School Boys in the Woods. After my first failed attempt at college, while I was in the throes of the recurrent depression that has plagued me all my life, I idly picked up one of the old boys series books we had kicking around the house. In my disgruntled and alienated mood I found their casual racism and jingoism savagely amusing, and under the influence of the Firesign Theatre started to create a generic boys series parody. There was Tom Wilshire, the inventor (modeled after Tom Swift and Thomas Edison); Dick Trefoil the savage and none-too-bright brawn of the group; Harry Fletcher, a glib and facile pseudo-intellectual, short Ned Eliot who perpetually made bad puns; and Ersatz Simpson, a colored lad whose eccentricities of speech provided much amusement for the comrades. (Ersatz was the actual brains of the group, a fact never noted by any of the others or by the narrator.) These were the Motor Chums, and, inspired partly by Jane Austen's Love and Friendship and partly by Robert Fish's Schlock Homes stories, I set them loose to do battle against a rival series featuring the Jefferson Aeroplane Boys (one of whom was a girl, by the way). They did really horrible things, but the narrator was always able to justify it with some standard cliche of the genre. These stories proved to be enormously popular with friends and casual acquaintances alike, and deluded me into thinking that I had actual talent in writing. Publishers, unfortunately, never agreed with my limited audience, though I suspect that the politically incorrect nature of much of the humor may have played a role here too. Sure, I was making fun of racism and excessive nationalism and the extreme right-wing economic views that (as things turned out) were about to become the dominant mode of thought in the nation, but I did so by making my narrator a racist jingoist male-chauvinist asshole, and that didn't seem to fly.
9. Exotic Zoology. Okay, I thought I was going to just list the titles and write a couple of lines about the significance of the item, rather than launching into an incoherent autobiography. I'll try to be a bit briefer, if I can. Fat chance. All right, Willy Ley was one of the great science popularizers of the day, and I read his stuff avidly. Exotic Zoology (a revision of The Lungfish and the Unicorn, a much better title in my opinion) contained sections on fairy-tale fauna, legendary beasts, and odd critters from around the world. It informed me, entertained me, while expanding my horizons in science and in history. Brian Switek's work often reminds me of Willy Ley's.
10. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I don't remember how or when I stumbled onto Hunter Thompson, whom I firmly believe is the single greatest prose-writer of the twentieth century. In some ways it seems like I've always known his work. I don't think prose can do more than, say, the savage Lucy chapter.
11. The Space-Child's Mother Goose. "Probable, possible, my black hen; she lays eggs in the relative when; she doesn't lay eggs in the positive now, because she's unable to postulate how." Need I say more?
12. Trajectories Through Early Christianity. Helmut Koester and James Robinson reopened the quest for the historical Jesus in a way I had never thought possible, building on the work of Rudolf Bultmann. This was practically our key to the New Testament when I went to school, or our key to the gospels anyway. It was so refreshing to get out of the damn boxes of New Testament vs. Patristics, canonical vs. apocryphal, and all that pointless crap, and to have a way forward through what centuries of obfuscation had made needlessly obscure.
13. The Pogo Papers. Walt Kelly's take on the McCarthy era. It shows it was possible to be scared shitless and still laugh at the same time.
14. The Devil's Dictionary. It's really hard to make a selection from the final bunch. Still, Ambrose Bierce helped shape my view of reality, in part by forcing me to challenge conventional opinions, and his dictionary is filled with gems.
15. The Stars My Destination. Perhaps the greatest science fiction novel of all time.
    
    

The other books I came up with, in no particular order:

• The Complete Sherlock Holmes
• The Ambidextrous Universe
• Barnaby
• The Gospel of Thomas (or The Nag Hammadi Codices)
• A Christmas Garland
• The Thurber Carnival
• The Frogs (or The Complete Works of Aristophanes)
• Seven Plays by Bernard Shaw
• The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus
• Asimov's Biographical Dictionary of Science and Technology
• The Starry Messenger
• I Robot
• Behold the Man
• Mindswap
• Hear the Sound of My Feet Walking Drown the sound of my voice talking
• The Chronicle of Young Satan
  

There are a couple of books I could have included for their negative effect on my life. B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity turned me off science and towards mysticism for several years, for example. And Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged along with books by Barry Goldwater and Phyllis Schlafly helped steer me away from conservatism. (And on the other side of that coin, a hilarious book called It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand confirmed me in my loathing for right-wing libertarian bromides of all sorts.) But I took books that will always stick with me in a positive light, and so came the above list.

Freedom is a Gift Bestowed by God

I saw at ERV a reference to this story at Lost Ogle about The Baptist Messenger forging the signatures of Governor Henry and Secretary of State M. Susan Savage to Sally Kern's idiotic "Proclamation for Morality" in their display of the document. The story, about a shameful promotion held 2 July 2009 in which a group of "state leaders" prominently signed this crazy concoction which nobody reputable would touch with a ten light-year pole. Apparently attempting to give it a veneer of respectability the Messenger added the signatures of the Governor and Secretary of State (via Photoshop or the like) to a reproduction of the document. The Baptist Messenger has since printed the following retraction:

In the July 16 Messenger, the graphic representation of the Oklahoma Citizen’s Proclamation for Morality was misleading, indicating that Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry and Secretary of State Susan Savage had signed the document. This is not the case, and the Messenger staff apologizes for the oversight and error.

Now personally I wouldn't call deliberate forgery an "oversight and error," but it's better than nothing. I suppose. I noticed also that that the Baptist Messenger said nothing about the numerous forgeries and false statements that permeate the document, two of which were mentioned in an earlier entry here.

As I was staring at the bogus "graphic representation" another quotation caught my eye. It was a saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin, "Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God." It rang a bell, but something about it didn't seem right. Where had it come from?

William J. Federer, a notorious purveyor of fake quotations, has it in America's God and Country in the form "Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature." (Note the key words omitted in the proclamation.) And he attributes it to a 1927 book by William S. Pfaff, entitled Maxims and Morals of Benjamin Franklin.

So where did Pfaff get it? Well, I don't have the book, and as far as I can tell it isn't available online (it may well still be in copyright in the US, thanks to our archaic copyright laws), so I decided to start at the other end and see if I couldn't find it in Franklin's own writings. And it is, in fact, there, sort of:

The great deference, which Cicero paid to the judgment of the Roman people, appears by those inimitable orations, of which they were the sole judges and auditors. That great orator had a just opinion of their understanding. Nothing gave him a more sensible pleasure than their approbation. But the Roman populace were more learned than ours, more virtuous perhaps; but their sense of discernment was not better than ours. However, the judgment of a whole people, especially of a free people, is looked upon to be infallible; so that it has become a common proverb, that the voice of God is the voice of the people, Vox Dei est populi vox. And this is universally true, while they remain in their proper sphere, unbiased by faction, undeluded by the tricks of designing men.

Thank God! we are in the full enjoyment of all these privileges. But can we be taught to prize them too much? or how can we prize them equal to their value, if we do not know their intrinsic worth, and that they are not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature?

The point of the piece is that political power rightfully belongs to the people, not to a monarch, and the author draws on the example of the Roman republic:

We find that their dictator, a magistrate never created but in cases of great extremity, vested with power as absolute during his office (which never exceeded six months) as the greatest kings were never possessed of; this great ruler was liable to be called to an account by any of the tribunes of the people, whose persons were at the same time rendered sacred by the most solemn laws.

This is evident proof, that the Romans were of opinion, that the people could not in any sense divest themselves of the supreme authority, by conferring the most extensive power they possibly could imagine, on one or more persons acting as magistrates.

All this is taken from an essay entitled "On Government No. I" that was published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on 1 April 1736 as it appears on pp. 278-282 of the second volume of the Jared Sparks edition of The Works of Benjamin Franklin (1882). (Sometime I hope to do a piece about Jared Sparks as editor of the writings of the Founders; he was industrious, but he had his limitations, and was not above rewriting a text to improve on the words of the original.) But here's an interesting anomaly—this work does not appear in Alfred Henry Smyth's edition (1906-1908). Is there a reason for this?

Well, let's see. As Sparks notes in a footnote to this very item:

What proof there is, that the two essays on Government were written by Franklin, except that they appeared in his Gazette, I have no means of determining. The internal evidence does not appear very strong. They are included in Duane's edition. — Editor.

You see, the original essay was anonymous. The Pennsylvania Gazette, of course, was Benjamin Franklin's paper, but not everything that appeared in it was his. And as we learn from the first volume of Smyth's edition, "'The Essays on Government' which were published by Sparks and Bigelow, are acknowledged in a later issue of the Gazette to have been written by John Webbe." John Webbe was then an associate of Franklin's, later a bitter rival.

So this quotation, slightly mangled, comes not from Benjamin Franklin, the guy whose picture is on the quarter and whose name is known throughout the world, but rather to John Webbe, an obscure lawyer and newspaper publisher.

If Sally Kerns was really determined to use this quotation, it should have read:

Whereas, [the privileges of representative government] are not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature (John Webbe)...

And so on. Of course that wouldn't have had the same ring to it, the same sense of authority. It would have been better left out, along with the fake Patrick Henry and James Madison quotations previously alluded to.

So, what is the upshot of this tale of chicanery and forgery? Well, first, shame on the Baptist Messenger for adding the signatures of public officials to a very unofficial document. And also, shame on the Baptist Messenger for calling the protesters at this event "pro-homosexual". Again, shame on them for not mentioning the many distortions, lies, and forgeries in this tinkertoy document. Shame on Sally Kerns for spicing it with bogus quotations. And finally, a double helping of shame on each and every signer of this vile thing (over a thousand as of this date). Traitors to America, all of you.

Eternal Truths

When I was growing up people filled my head with information—the days of the week, the months of the year, the alphabet. Stuff like that. Eternal truths.

I liked memorizing stuff, once I got the hang of it. When I had the alphabet down through W X Y Z, I wanted more. What comes after Z? (And no, I didn't know of Dr. Seuss's On Beyond Zebra or I might have his extra letters memorized to this day.) My mother told me (probably to shut me up) that there were no letters beyond Z, but there were other alphabets, and gave me the Greek alphabet to memorize, which I did, two letters at at time through upsilon, and the last four all at once. I memorized other things that caught my fancy—the sequence of geological ages, the order of the planets outward from the sun, and probably other stuff. In school I learned other eternal truths—the words to the pledge of allegiance, that our President was Eisenhower and our vice-President Nixon, that our country consisted of forty-eight states.

Now I've got to tell you, it's kind of hard to shake the stuff we learn in our formative years. Even though I was a child when Alaska and Hawaii became states, somewhere in my mind they are "extra" states, so to speak. The "real" states are the forty-eight, and Alaska and Hawaii are somehow—I don't know, honorary states or something like that. Jupiter has twelve moons and Saturn nine; it's just like the seven days of the week and the twelve months of the year—these are basic facts.

On the other hand there are certain things I never bought into as a kid. The books we had showed ages called Mississippian and Pennsylvanian between the Permian and Devonian periods, but for whatever reason I never considered them real. To me the "real" period was the Carboniferous, which wasn't even mentioned in our texts. (I might have got that from my father; he had a considerable knowledge of the geological periods and the kind of fossils that turned up in them, and maybe that was his take. But I don't really know.)

And by the same token, I never regarded the words "under God" as part of the "real" Pledge of Allegiance; even though we were taught them in kindergarten, visiting adults never seemed to know them, which made them seem bogus to me. (In real life they had just been added, but I didn't learn that till many years had gone by.)

What got me thinking about all this is a pointless matter. I keep up with scientific developments, sort of, as best I can. I'm aware, for example, that birds are regarded as descendants of dinosaurs, and that Pluto is no longer a planet. Both of these are changes from what I learned as a child. And yet my, shall we say, emotional reaction is very different to the two developments. Somewhere, deep inside, I remain unconvinced about the bird-dinosaur thing. Something inside me "knows" that dinosaurs never had feathers, that they were oversized cold-blooded reptiles like modern-day alligators and they looked and lived very much like the pictures in Life's The World We Live In. On the other hand Pluto not being a planet—that feels right to me. Pluto as a planet has bugged me ever since I can remember.

I don't absolutely know why. We had some very old reference books around when I was young, and some of them (I'm quite sure) predated Pluto's discovery. Maybe the old solar-system diagrams without Pluto influenced my thinking. Conversely, there were so many things that were uncertain then about Pluto in contrast to the other planets; maybe that made it seem less real to me. Or maybe it was something really lame. None of the other planets, after all, were named after Disney characters. A planet called Mickey Mouse might have given me the same feeling.

Another thing that bothered me as I learned the sizes and characteristics of the various objects in the solar system was how arbitrary the division between planets and satellites seemed to be. Some of the satellites—our own Moon, Ganymede, Titan—were pretty substantial objects in their own right. It seemed like a fairly arbitrary distinction to consider them a different class of things from say Mercury just because they orbited another planet instead of orbiting the sun. And however you wanted to look at it, Jupiter and Saturn seemed like very different creatures from say Earth and Mars. At one point I sat down and "classified" the objects of the solar system into three groups (not counting comets): gas giants, real planets, and space junk. (I don't know what terms I actually used, if any; I just remember the categories.) The gas giants were Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The real "planets" would have included Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Io, Ganymede, Europa, Callisto, Titan, and Triton. Things like Phobos, Oberon, and Ceres were just so much space junk as far as I was concerned. Pluto made me uncomfortable; there was too much that was simply unknown about it. Even its size was uncertain, if I remember correctly. (I think the inspiration for this was a book my Uncle Marvin helped me buy on a visit to California; it was called Pictorial Astronomy, and I still had my old copy of it us till very recently. I'd like to take a quick look at it and confirm (or deny) my impressions, but alas, it is gone.) I'm pretty sure, though, that I included Pluto in the planet category, but I really don't know now.

Dinosaurs, on the other hand—I don't know how much I really knew about them. Of the major dinosaurs I knew which belonged to which geological period—Brontosaurus belonged to the Jurassic and Tyrannosaurus to the Cretaceous, for instance. (And yeah, Brontosaurus is the real name, not that unreal Apatosaurus thing.) I knew the difference between Saurischia and Ornithischia, and that Pterosaurs and Ichthyosaurs weren't actually dinosaurs, even if they lived at the same time.

For many years I had a little booklet my brother had started, but then was finished by a kid who lived across the street from us and was a couple of years older. It had everything in it I mentioned above, and quite a bit more. Each dinosaur was assigned to its period and family, and details of its size and presumed habits (meat-eater, swamp-dweller) were included. For quick reference it was invaluable, though it had its limitations. The pronunciations given for each beast, for example, were the way the kid across the street pronounced them, and differed from those given in actual printed works in some cases. I may still have the booklet somewhere, though I don't have it right in front of me, but I've seen it recently enough to have some idea of the things we knew and didn't know about dinosaurs.

And there was nothing in that booklet about dinosaurs having feathers. Or being warm-blooded. Or looking after their young. They were big reptiles, scaly toothy critters out of some surreal nightmare. They probably would have eaten their own young if they could catch them—the carnivores anyway. It was hard to picture how they could have fit into a world that had people in it. It was a good thing they'd all died out at the end of the Cretaceous period.

And that was another eternal truth. We would never know what killed the dinosaurs off. There were theories. Maybe tiny egg-eating mammals had done them in by preying on their unprotected unborn young. (Yay for our egg-eating ancestors!) Maybe the climate changed, becoming cooler, so that the cold-blooded dinosaurs couldn't cope and just died off. Maybe they just plain got too big and died off from over-specialization. Maybe disease did them in. Maybe it was some combination of causes. Whatever it was, it had undoubtedly been a gradual event taking millions of years, not some catastrophe like a gamma-ray burst from a nearby supernova.

(My brother and I were both fond of the idea of some extra-terrestrial cause, even though the authorities were against it. I see from a quick bit of googling that gamma-ray bursts weren't discovered until we were in our teens, but I know we discussed possible extra-terrestrial causes from way back. My favorite was that an alien race had used Earth as a big-game hunting ground until they had driven everything huntable into extinction and moved on.)

In any case, we would never know. That was one thing you could take to the bank; whatever had happened, it had happened so long ago that there was no conceivable evidence that could ever be produced that would give any plausible answer. Fossil skeletons could tell us the size and shape of the critters, radiometric dating could tell us how long ago they lived, comparison with living beasts could give us some idea even of what they ate and how they lived, but there was nothing, nothing at all, that could solve the mystery of their extinction.

Now I don't go by my childish feelings about stuff to decide what to consider as probable or what to reject as impossible. I'm perfectly willing to accept that some dinosaurs had feathers, or that astronomers now classify Pluto as a dwarf planet. Pluto, yeah—that fits with some long-time prejudices. And a comet causing the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction—that feels satisfying But there is a very basic part of me, deep inside, that knows damn good and well that dinosaurs never had feathers. And that there are forty-eight states in the union. And that the words "under God" are not really part of the Pledge of Allegiance. And I don't think anything—not seeing the feather impressions, not hearing the pledge—will ever entirely shake the eternal faith of the child inside me.

John Quincy Adams' Highest and Most Important Role

One of the problems with being self-educated (and I use that term very loosely) is that I have great gaping chasms of ignorance surrounding various isolated peaks of knowledge. I've read quite a bit in James Madison's writings, public and private, for example, and in Thomas Jefferson's, but in John Quincy Adams'—not so much. I have nothing against the guy, but Jefferson and Madison were architects of the nation I live in, and Adams was merely its sixth president.

Quick—name three things he did. (No cheating now.) If your first thought was the Alien and Sedition Acts, you're wrong—that was his dad. (Adams was the first and only son of a former president to be seated as President until George W. Bush came along.) Think Tariff of Abominations and you'll be closer. But really, it wasn't an administration given to the stuff of legend.

So, anyway, when I read in "History Forgotten" (or whatever name you want to give it) that Adams was the chairman of the American Bible Society and regarded it as his highest and most important role I wasn't inclined to challenge it. Of course he wasn't actually chairman (strictly speaking the ABS doesn't have such a position, though there are chairmen of various committees); it turns out he was a vice-president. One of twenty-five vice-presidents.

Okay, but still—maybe he threw himself into the work with enthusiasm and gusto? Something of the sort?

Well, it kinda doesn't look that way. I had a hell of a time finding anything about Adams and the ABS, but in a book by Samuel Hanson Cox called Interviews: Memorable and Useful; from diary and memory reproduced (New York, 1853) I found on pp. 270-73 an address Adams delivered to that organization in 1844. In his opening comments he said:

Thirty-five years have passed away since, in the State House at Boston, the capital of my native commonwealth, I became a member of the Bible Society; and although I have followed, with a deep interest, their continual exertions and the various fortunes of their success in distributing this Book, I think I have never been able to attend another meeting of the society from that time to this. Since that time one generation of mankind has passed away—another has arisen.

Two meetings in thirty-five years? (Actually that thirty-five years can't be right; it would place the date of his membership before the organization was formed.) It doesn't really sound like he was that involved with the group. He justified himself by observing that

in the maturity of manhood I associated with my brethren of that age, for spreading the light of that gospel over the face of the earth, by the simple and silent process of placing in the hands of every human being who needed, and could not otherwise procure it, that Book, which contains the duties, the admonitions, the promises, and the rewards of the Christian gospel.

He expressed his view

that this book has been furnished him [mankind], by the special providence of his Maker, to enable him, by faith in his Redeemer, and by works conformable to that faith, to secure his salvation in a future world, and to promote his well-being in the present. If this be true, the improvement of successive generations of men in their condition upon earth, and their preparation for eternity, depends in no small degree in the diffusion and circulation of this volume among all the tribes of man throughout the habitable globe. This is the great and exclusive object for which, in the last generation, this society was instituted. The whole Book had then existed upward of eighteen hundred years ; and wherever it had penetrated and heen received, it had purified and exalted the character of man.

And he looked forward to the point of the society's labors,

that consummation of human felicity promised in this book, when—The wolf, also, shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf, and the young lion, and the failing together; and a little child shall lend them.

Now all this is all very well and good, but there is nothing in any of it that shows any special activity on his part in the society. Adams admired the Bible. He respected the work the ABS was doing to spread it to the four corners of the earth. He did his part by supplying Bibles to people who needed them, and who, for whatever reason, were not otherwise able to obtain them. But it's really hard to square this with the claim that he regarded his position in the ABS as his highest and most important role. On the available evidence he invested more energy in his position as Massachusetts' representative in Congress (this after his presidency, by the way) than he did in his vice-presidency of the ABS.

Oh—and by the way, one thing I did know about Adams: he was a Unitarian. (Score one for Unitarian sunday-school after all these years.) And it's said that he refused to take his Presidential oath of office on the Bible, using instead a book of laws. Not exactly congenial company for the average "History Forgotten" buff. He was no atheist either, though—by all accounts a deeply religious man. Some day—should I live so long—I'll have to look into the guy a bit more. But for the moment, this was an interesting glimpse of an early American president—and the last of the bunch before Ol' Hick'ry Jackson launched the infamous spoils system and started shipping native Americans off west to clear the way for honest god-fearing rednecks to—what was that Firesign Theatre line?—oh, yeah, to carve a new life out of the American Indian. By contrast Adams had his points. But if he really regarded his tiny part in the ABS as his highest and most important role, he had a skewed sense of priorities. There's no getting around it.

As Thyme Goethe Bye

When I did a series a while back on "Forsaken Roots" (or whatever you want to call it) I ended up establishing a text for it, mostly because there was no authoritative source, and I'm picky about my texts. If I'm going to take the time to write a commentary on something, I want to be sure that I have something resembling a definitive text to work with, else what's the point? For my purposes at the time I simply picked four texts sort of at random—but not quite. I looked for older examples, and I wanted examples that were textually divergent. If the textual tree had branches, I wanted samples from as many as possible.

Actually I already knew that the tree had at least two branches, a longer recension and a shorter one. I'd picked that up pretty quickly when I went to Ed Brayton's commentary with questions from the longer recension only to find he didn't cover them; his commentary was based on the shorter recension. I suspected the most likely explanation was that the longer recension had grown by accretion from the shorter recension, but I didn't assume anything, which was just as well, as that hypothesis proved incorrect.

Since for technical reasons (the width of my screen mainly) I wanted to restrict my comparison to four versions, I decided to pick two from the longer recension and two from the shorter. If I could construct something resembling a reasonable text from them then I'd be off and running with my real purpose—doing the commentary. Close enough for jazz.

When my laptop died one of the things I lost—I'd never bothered to copy it—was the "Forsaken Roots" synopsis I'd used to construct the text. I figured I was done with it. But as I see new versions of it surface again like a goddamn hydra my textual sleuth keeps being activated—there's another one of those, I say to myself, noting the missing word "Supreme" in front of "Court" and the telltale period after "first" and before "Harvard". Where are they coming from? Idle Googling produced some answers (those missing-Supreme copies for example all go back to a website published by one Mary Jones), but I kind of wanted to know a bit more. I didn't particularly want to repeat the work I'd done, but I wanted something. I decided to see if I could establish a text for the longer recension.

So I went back to hunting for these things, examining example after example, looking for particular textual characteristics. Most examples turned out to be either from the shorter recension or from the Mary Jones family, neither of which were any use to me. A kind of sadness came over me as I examined these things in their original context, often a blog entry or a comment thread. First the text itself would appear, typically cut-and-pasted from the Mary Jones or some other familiar site. Next would come the admiring comments. This one is pretty typical:

Thanks for sharing. This was very informative. Neither in my secondary or college education, do I recall this information be read, taught or discussed. It shines a brighter light on the foundation of America for me.

(If you're wondering about the text of the version immediately above this comment, it's from the longer recension, but not part of the Mary Jones family, which, if the date is correct, had yet to be established.) All the elements are there—gratitude, admiration for the research, enthusiasm for the Christian light on early America, and curiosity (or anger) about why this information had been suppressed. Missing is the clear light of common sense which, for some reason, nobody ever seems to think to switch on. Is it bloody likely that these guys would have said or written the sorts of things attributed to them here? Would Patrick Henry really refer to this "great nation" before it had been established? What conceivable set of circumstances would have prompted Congress to pass a resolution recommending the Holy Bible for use in all schools? (The "1782" is a particularly nice touch on this one.) What on earth does it mean for the Bible to be quoted 94% of the time?

Sometimes the next question will be, Did you write this? And the reply comes (if at all) No, I got it from the internet. From the internet. Words from on high, I guess, supplied by the Internet Genii for the benefit of us lesser mortals. What do you mean, you got it from the internet? You might as well have said you found it blowing in the wind alongside the road one day, or you found it scurrying through the fields of Elysium. The internet? Somebody wrote those words, and somebody did the research behind them, and, you know, that somebody deserves credit.

Now, in all fairness, in this case not a lot of credit. The writer/researcher here has simply bundled together a clutch of remaindered misinfo, and retailed the package to the gulls. He or she may even be quoting from memory for some of them; there are pointless variations in them from the authentic text (though speaking of the authentic text of a forged passage seems a bit on the paradoxical side). The fake Madison is a case in point:

We have staked the future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments

sounds more like a fuzzily-remembered

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, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God

than a poorly-copied one. (It is quite possible that a skip of the eye from the first capacity to the second caused the omission of the one genuine bit of Madison in this whole farrago—the capacity of mankind for self-government; that wouldn't explain the mangling of what follows, however.)

Occasionally—not often, but occasionally—somebody will question the item. Once I noted somebody actually asking the key question—what are your sources? More often it will be a remark to the effect that this can't be true, since the Founders were all deists, and anyway, what about the treaty of Tripoli? or something like that. And then maybe somebody will contribute a story about some kid they heard of from a friend of a friend who wasn't allowed to bring her Bible to show-and-tell, or some such idiocy. (Okay, I made that one up, but it's always something in that vein.)

But the thing that really gets me is the pitiful sense of gratitude emanating from these comments. Children picking up pretty pieces of broken glass and telling themselves they are diamonds. Playing with them, passing them around. The pathos of it all starts to overcome me. I almost want to depart from my rôle as observer and help out. The "Forsaken Roots" I could write for them! Oh, it probably wouldn't have Madison in it, but there are many famous names among the Founders, and I can cherry-pick with the best of them. Of course that would only be what Archie Goodwin calls fancy lying, rather than Forsaken's plain lying—a matter of taste, really, I suppose.

But, getting back to the textual issues at hand—the one thing that really bothers me, and for which I can see no answer whatsoever, is—what on earth created the shorter recension in the first place? Some horrible and malign force, early in the transmission history of this bagatelle, blew two large holes in it, seemingly at random. And yet, and yet, the disseminators of this savagely shattered version went right on distributing it, never noticing its broken condition, as mindless as those ants who, upon running out of food, start cutting off the back ends of their larvae to try to keep the front ends fed. And the hosannas of joy were just as heartfelt, regardless of the presence of palpable nonsense like

Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed ... to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation for our children to follow the moral principles of the Ten Commandments?

(And that question-mark is part of the original text.) Did they not read what they were writing? How do you go about instructing a student to lay Christ as a foundation for our children to follow anything at all, let alone the moral principles of the Ten Commandments? It's madness—but nobody seems to notice.

And the other hole that makes it look as though Thomas Jefferson, rather than John Quincy Adams, was an officer in the American Bible Society—this is greeted as a welcome new discovery, rather than as a sign of the corruption of the text. And they say random mutation can't generate new information! Tell Jefferson! He never would have made president of the ABS without it.

The whole thing reeks of corruption. Fake quotations, themselves misquoted, and then further mangled through copying errors. False interpretations given new false twists, without anybody apparently bothered enough by any of it to even check the goddamn internet, their source for it all. Random holes fixed by random guesses—

Seriously, how much trouble is it to Google something? No, it looks like it's easier to just plain guess. Here's an example. The original text read:

However, in 1947, there was a radical change of direction for the Supreme Court. It required ignoring every precedent of Supreme Court ruling for the past 160 years. The Supreme Court ruled in a limited way to affirm a wall of separation between church and State in the public classroom. In the coming years, this led to removing prayer from public schools in 1962. Here is the prayer that was banished: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Thee. We beg Thy blessings upon us and our parents and our teachers and our country. Amen.”

The Mary Jones version dropped a piece of it here, producing:

However in 1947, there was a radical change of direction in the Supreme Court. Here is the prayer that was banished: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Thee. We beg Thy blessings upon us and our parents and our teachers and our country. Amen."

(Note also the change of "direction for" to "direction in"; this is one of the seven distinguishing characteristics of the Jones text. Of course the omission that follows is another.) And here's how one transmitter "fixed" the problem:

In 1947, it all changed! The Supreme Court removed the prayer that had been used for over 100 years at the opening of each session of the Court. "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Thee. We beg Thy blessings upon us and our parents and our teachers and our country. Amen."

Again, is it likely that the Supreme Court began each session with a prayer begging the blessings of God upon parents and teachers? Doesn't this sound more like a school prayer? Hello? Is nobody awake in there? And this version is supposedly reprinted from the February 2005 edition of the Liberty Tree newsletter. No checking, even with the quasi-immortality of print in view? Just guesswork?

I guess. Sometimes my sense of exasperation overcomes my feelings of pathos. People this unreflective deserve to eat garbage.

But nobody deserves this. Not even those poorly-informed clowns who blather on about how Jefferson invented the concept of separation of church and state when he wasn't even in America at the time the Constitution was being written—how would he know anything? And besides, wasn't it some unknown justice named Hugo Black who decided to pull it out of an old forgotten letter written to the Danbury Baptists, of all people, and foist it off on all of us as settled law?—yeah, not even these crackers deserve this kind of treatment. Even canonical critics and flat-earthers deserve better.

Well . . . maybe not canonical critics.