Riding Out On a Rail

Take a sniff of this
Then play a little riff
Don't be afraid to try
Don't need no airplane
To get off the ground
There's more than one way to fly
Have a little taste, baby,
Don't hesitate,
Every hit don`t have to be a song
Gonna take you to the cosmos, baby,
And boogie with you all night long.

...Riding out on a rail, feels so fine
Talking about that cocaine express mainline,
Taking a midnight cruise.
Never lived up in the northlands,
But I've been snowblind
Out in San Berdoo
Snowblind in San Berdoo.

Gr-t-f-l D--d (Tony Scheuren)

On 10 August 1974 I was living on the Oregon coast sharing house space with my mother, step-father, and a step-brother whom I will call for the purposes of this narrative Bill, as that happens to be his name. It was an interesting moment in time; President Nixon had just resigned and the fellow that was taking over, Gerald Ford, was largely an unknown quantity. Bill and I had marked the occasion of the resignation by eating all the frozen fish in the house; this because Bill had asked what a large red button on the refrigerator did, incautiously pushing it at the same time. Well, what it did was send the refrigerator into its defrost cycle, which on a hot summer day meant that the frozen fish had to be eaten...

We only got two stations on the radio then—I'm not totally sure why, now, to be honest—but one of them was a free-form rock station from Eugene, and I remember it playing away in the background as we frantically wrapped fish in newspaper and tried to get the refrigerator through its defrosting cycle before deciding we had to cook what we had. They had one of the best radio news people ever—I wish I could remember her name—Melinda something maybe—and I remember her dispassionate rundown on Nixon's entire career, complete with excerpts from his famous speeches—running as a counterpoint to our battle with the frozen food.

Bill and I had the house to ourselves at the moment for whatever reason, but our folks returned on Saturday, 10 August, bringing with them Aunt K, and things were festive. It was a Saturday, and on Saturdays the Eugene station played The National Lampoon Radio Hour. It was a favorite of mine at the time; I'd already discovered the albums Radio Dinner and Lemmings, and I liked the humor. I particularly enjoyed the song parodies. Burlesques were fairly common in that era; parodies were much rarer, and some of their efforts were pretty damn good. So that hot August day we all gathered around the radio and listened to it.

The episode was the one known as The Canada Show, and it started off with a lukewarm parody of something called "The Americans," a recording of an editorial written by a Canadian who was damn sick and tired of hearing the Americans being kicked around by the foreign press. To be honest I thought the original was pretty lame at the time, and the takeoff didn't impress me that much, though there were a couple of good lines: "I, for one, am damned glad the Americans had the generosity to invade Canada three times or we'd never have found out who our real friends are" for instance. And my stepfather laughed over the adventures of a Canadian library official after the nation's only copy of the Kama Sutra, now months overdue in the frozen north. And then came the moment that I, personally, have never forgotten.

There was the familiar guitar work, and then the voice—was that really the "sensitive whining of Neil Young"? He sang of his search for the ideal woman—the girl who would "keep my bed warm, and keep my shorts clean. I need a maid to give for free, ooo-ooh, and sew patches on my jeans." I was entranced. I was savagely depressed at the time, and the song suited my mood perfectly.

Gonna go home now, where I can grow old
With the cowgirl of my dreams.
Gonna stayed stoned now,
Just stare out my basement window and scream
Aa-aaa!

When the final words faded into the sunset—"Topanga Canyon freaks, you won't see me around no more..."—my stepfather remarked, "I knew Topanga Canyon way back when it was still Topanga Canyon."

The Neil Young parody was both written and performed by a relatively young singer-songwriter named Tony Scheuren. He'd been in the band Chamaeleon Church in the late sixties, along with Kyle Garrahan, Chevy Chase (yes, that Chevy Chase), and Ted Myers, and he'd been part of the final lineup of Ultimate Spinach. By late 1973 he'd joined the cast of National Lampoon's Lemmings, working alongside John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Rhonda Coullet, Nate Herman, Bob Hoban, and Zal Yanovsky. (This is not the cast that appeared on either the album or the videotape, by the way.) None of his compositions appear to have been featured in the show, however, which seems amazing to me, as he was one of the most gifted song-parodists of all time.

As Johnny Cash he mused about the true unsung heroes of the world—receptionists, locksmiths, and reupholsterers—and all black men who polish brass spitoons.

'Cause without invisible menders
And deep-fried donut tenders
Our country wouldn't stand a chance of getting by.

As James Taylor he looked forward to the coming of his methadone maintenance man; as Cat Stevens he mused over his S&M lover; and as the Grateful Dead he celebrated that "cocaine express mainline". Both music and lyrics were dead on. It's instructive, perhaps, to compare his work to others in the field—his Johnny Cash parody to Neil Innes' for example, or his James Taylor to Christopher Guest's and Sean Kelly's. In each case Scheuren is truer to the original, and cuts closer to the bone in his takeoff. Only Philip Pope comes as close musically, and maybe Liam Lynch lyrically, though that last is a tough call.

One Tony Scheuren parody I've never found a copy of is his Bob Dylan "Hurricane Carter" parody, celebrating the exploits of Patty Hearst. Ted Myers wrote about it in a piece I can no longer find, except as quoted by a Scheuren fan on YouTube:

Tony and I drifted apart for a number of years when I moved out to California in April of 1969. I didn't see him again until around 1977 when he was in Los Angeles working for the touring company of National Lampoon's show, Lemmings. He showed me his new songs, and we even did some recording together when he was in LA. But what really impressed me were these parody tapes Tony had made for the National Lampoon's radio show. They were brilliant: perfect vocal impersonations of people like Dylan, James Taylor and Neil Young. What's more, the songs they sang were completely original, new songs, with rippingly funny, satirical lyrics, and in the exact style of that artist. For instance, there was a Dylan send-up called 'Queen Of the S.L.A.,' chronicling the exploits of Patty Hearst in the style of Dylan's Hurricane Carter song, or there was a biting James Taylor parody called 'Methadone Maintenance Man' where he would nod out before the song was over.

For whatever reason Tony Scheuren's work has been neglected since his untimely death on Halloween, sixteen years ago. I wish I could have let him know how much I personally enjoyed his work, but he might not have appreciated it. I read somewhere (probably that same Ted Myers piece I can't find) that he regarded his parodies as throwaways, something to pass the time while working on more serious stuff. Maybe so—but it's a rare talent nonetheless.

His family has released an album of his solo (serious) work on Wham! records in 2003, which appears to be still available. When I wrote to Beacon Agency (which represents him) a while back, I was informed that an album of his parodies is in the works, and I personally am looking forward to it. For the moment, however, it is possible to enjoy his James Taylor and Neil Young parodies, courtesy of uploaders at YouTube. They should appear below this paragraph, always assuming I managed to embed them correctly.

Quotation of the Day

Modern fundamentalism is basically a series of aftershocks as cultures struggle to deal with the fall of gods.

P.Z. Myers

The Day They Knocked Down the—Liquor Store?

Exhaustion lingers, but I ventured outside today, making it as far north as Lombard to pick up a few grocery-like objects. I had second thoughts as I stood unsteadily at the MAX station, debating whether to commit myself by actually buying a ticket. Something didn't seem to be right in my immediate environment. There was something wrong, something missing.

It took me a second to figure out what it was. Across the street, where someone is leveling a city block to build an apartment-and-retail complex, a single earth-moving machine stood, claw uplifted. Most of the houses were now gone, even the debris and the naked chimneys that had marked the sites where they had stood for so long.had vanished. And that's when I noticed.

The Ice Cream Store was gone. It hasn't actually been an ice cream store for decades, but it was one for a long time, certainly throughout my childhood. The old-timers remember it for its fifty-nine flavors; what I remember primarily about it is waiting in the car while my father zipped inside to pick up magazines. The Scientific American, Mad, Galaxy—all these came from there, and I'm sure other magazines I've forgotten. When he returned, however, he would come bearing ice cream for my brothers, and a Hershey bar for me (I detest ice cream and always have). It was a treat; it was something we enjoyed, a ritual that rounded off an otherwise-mundane trip.

The geography of childhood is funny. The Safeway I remember as being a bit of a walk from our (then) home is actually just down the block and across one street, though it's a Harbor Freight today. The Ice Cream Store is—no, was—only a couple of blocks further on, but I remember it as being a long way off. And frankly, most of my memories of it do in fact come from a time when we no longer lived anywhere nearby; we would stop there on our way back from Portland to our home across the river in Vancouver. Maybe that affected my sense of location.

I can remember vividly sitting in the car, the huge neon sign across the front of the store flickering and buzzing, while waiting for my father to return. Looking out across Interstate I could watch cars stopping for gas at a station there. Up from it was an auto repair shop (the sign said it had been in business since 1924); in my memory it is always closed, but of course we stopped by the Ice Cream Store in the evenings. I can't help but think that I must have some time looked at the largish 1910 house to the other side of the gas station, but I have no memory of that. I certainly never imagined that that was the place I was going to someday own, that my brother's kids were going to grow up thinking of it as the traditional gathering place for Thanksgiving, that it would become by default the family center.

Now by the time we actually moved here the Ice Cream Store had become something else—I'm not sure what any longer. For awhile it quit being a store of any kind; the display windows were bricked up and the doors turned from glass to steel. For some of that time it was a distribution center for the Portland Oregonian, and most of the activity there went on in the early morning. For the past few years it was a liquor store. Then, this immediate past year, it was a vacant building awaiting destruction. And now, as I stood there at the MAX station, it was just—gone.

"Excuse me, sir, but I'm sixteen cents short for a ticket, and I need to get home." Real life in the shape of a rather shabby-looking guy, one half of a couple, intruded on my recollections.

I groped in a pocket for change, trying to hold on to the mood, to savor the liminal moment, and thrust a few coins blindly into his hand.

"I'm not a panhandler," he said, affronted, plucking out an offending dime and nickel too many, and shoving them back at me.

"Okay, whatever," I said. I really wasn't feeling up to this. I was committed, though; I'd bought my ticket and was ready to face the consequences. Sort of.

So, yeah, the Ice Cream Store. We didn't always wait out in the car; that was only when my father was in a hurry and just wanted to pick up a couple of things. Some times we'd go inside and look around.

The periodicals there were many and varied. Along the north wall was a rack of magazines my mother always encouraged me not to look at, bearing stories of true crime and degradation, desperate tales of survival, and pieces involving the deaths of large animals. I seem to remember one that advertised in large letters, "The Night Jackie had to Say No To Lyndon." (I'm sort of hoping that was a takeoff, but at this distance, who can tell?) Under the windows facing Interstate were a variety of puzzle magazines, children and teen stuff, glamour, TV, all like that there. Science magazines, Popular Electronics, that sort of thing seemed to move about more; you had to kind of guess where they would end up. The New Yorker, Atlantic, Saturday Review—

"Excuse me, sir, but here's your four cents." The shabby Intruder from Reality was back, giving me change from the two dimes he had deigned to accept from me.

"Yeah, okay, thanks," I said, or words to that effect. I put the coins in my pocket, and tried to disentangle my thoughts again. The Ice Cream Store—old memories—there was nothing there. Literally nothing, in a way—a socket in the ground where Something used to be. It wasn't the Day They Knocked Down The Pallais, exactly, but still—

"Thank you." It seemed the social transaction was still not over; my new acquaintance was shouting at me halfway across the station. I peered around myopically (I've got to get new glasses). "Thank you," the shout came again. The guy was standing with his lady, glaring at me. His tone demanded a response.

"You're welcome," I said weakly. Screw it—let the dead past bury its own. "You're welcome," I said again, a bit more firmly, and that seemed to satisfy him. The transaction was closed. He turned to face the street where his train was about to pull in and I likewise turned to face my soon-to-arrive train. In the here-and-now I had groceries to pick up.

The Mouse on the Moebius Strip

Feeling a little better now, without all the buzzing and burning and shakes, but I'm still a little unsteady on my feet. I've showered and changed and feel a little human, though maybe not very. And I renewed my library books, very much at the last minute, but I got it done. And I managed to find most of the ones I actually need to take back, which is good, but, damn it, somebody wants Metzger's Early Versions of the New Testament, and I was kind of using it. I hope our local Amazing Grace Baptists aren't planning their own Halloween book-burning.

Anyway, I guess I'm sort of prepared for the coming week, though I don't feel much like it. I've got to get to the grocery in the nearby-distant future, but there's still food to scrounge around here, and a 24-hour convenience store just a couple blocks up Interstate; I should be able to stagger up to it if I have to. Somebody carelessly left a case of instant chicken soup cups lying about in the kitchen, and that's got me this far. So life is beginning to make a certain amount of sense, for the forseeable future anyway. If that future doesn't extend much past the next six to eighteen hours, well, that's how it goes. There should be time for longer-range goals when I'm up and around again. Allah willing, of course.

Absolute Idiocy

This piece from CBS News (h/t Jennifer McCreight) contains an entire month's worth of stupid. Examples:

John Boehner claimed, apparently with a straight face, that "Republicans believe that all lives are created equal, and should be defended with equal vigilance." When did Republicans start opposing capital punishment, again? I missed that day. Gee, one of the reasons I remain a Republican (though In Name Only, I'm constantly told) is that I believe strongly that certain people (mass murderers, killers motivated by ideology or money, and people who poison wells, for example) should be put to death. Most Republicans will defend a person's right to kill somebody for breaking into his home, or even for breaking into a neighbor's home. Are they willing to defend the trespasser's life "with equal vigilance"? I doubt it very much.

John Boehner's spokesman (and I suspect soon-to-be former spokesman) Kevin Smith adds that Boehmer supports existing hate crime legislation based on immutable characteristics, like religion and gender, but not on changeable characteristics like (apparently) sexual orientation or disability. (Uh, fact check: gender isn't actually covered under existing law; its part of the proposed expanded legislation.) I am again surprised to learn that the Republican Party is apparently endorsing the extreme position taken by Islamic militants—a person who has once joined a religion is a member for life. Doesn't this conflict with the First Amendment—you know, that whole pesky "freedom of religion" thing? Oh, yeah, that's right—the words "freedom of religion" don't actually appear in the Constitution; that's some fantasy cooked up by historical revisionists and activist judges. God, it's getting harder to keep up with the lunacy.

Republican Tom Price (whom I've never heard of before, thank the gods) calls all hate crime legislation "a despicable and unconstitutional bill that penalizes thought and places a premium on some classes of individuals over others". He claims to believe that "All violent crimes demonstrate hate"—this in the teeth of common sense. You don't have to hate your grandma to murder her for her money; you just have to put your own wishes above her continued existence. And what about "premeditation"—the thing that distinguishes first-degree murder from its lesser cousins? Doesn't that penalize thought? I mean, the victim is just as dead whether he was killed in the heat of an argument or in cold blood with malice aforethought. Murder vs. self-defense, rape vs. consensual sex, theft vs. borrowing—all of these involve reading minds, as the pro-hate-crimes crowd looks at it, that is, determining the motives of the people involved. All of these in Tom Price's idiotic world must then be written off as crimes, since we don't want to penalize thought, or place a premium on some classes of individuals (women who don't consent to sex, say?) over others (women who do, for example?).

And Price's spokesman Brendan Buck added a further touch of lunacy: "We believe all hate crimes legislation is unconstitutional..." I'm not sure under what clause they think the absolute right to commit crimes motivated by hate falls, but no, there is nothing in the Constitution that forbids looking into a person's motives for committing a crime, and for judging the severity of the crime accordingly. Our entire penal code is shot through with just those sorts of issues.

And finally, another gem from Kevin Smith: the present changes in the law "could eventually invite the prosecution of Americans for their thoughts and religious beliefs, basic provinces protected by the First Amendment." First I would point out that thoughts and religious beliefs are not actually covered by the First Amendment, which protects only religious expression (the "free exercise" clause). Thoughts and beliefs are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution; they are protected only by an implied right to privacy without which the First and Fourth Amendments at least make little sense. I can think all I like about how much I'd like to go out and murder my noxious neighbor. I can believe, if I like, that he is a blight on humanity and the world would be a better place without him. I may even hold as a religious view that I am required to go out and eliminate this pestilence from the face of the earth. I can make plans about how I would go about murdering him. Hell, I even have the right to go out and buy the materials I'm going to need to carry out my plan, assuming that no illegal substances are involved. But fantasy is one thing, and reality another. If I carry out the crime, if I murder this obnoxious fellow, then my thoughts and beliefs and the actions I carried out in furtherance of my plans are all fair game to determine my motive, and in particular, whether the crime was premeditated.

I can see no valid reason why anybody who is not planning on running about murdering gay men or beating up women or whatever depraved fantasy turns him on should be opposed to this bill. If the idea is that it may have a chilling effect on people advocating violence against women (whether from the pulpit or from any other venue), or against various minority groups, well, yeah, I kind of hope it does. People shouldn't actually urge their followers to commit violent acts. And if your religion says that you should murder your daughter for bringing shame on her family, or that you have a right to beat a man to death for your perception of his sexual orientation, then maybe it's time to change your fucking religion.

Oh, yeah, I forgot—religion is one of those immutable things.

Amazing Grace

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound,)
That sav'd a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

John Newton

My bones hurt and I'm alternately shaking and burning up—it's possible I have a disease of some kind. Could be the end of the world, I suppose; the voices in my head were saying something about that, but I'm inclined to doubt it. Mostly they keep singing this horrible Christian hymn.

The news arriving through various portals is beyond bizarre. Conservatives are supposedly rewriting the Bible again (I thought that was the point of the Living Bible?), though I'm inclined to suspect somebody is having a little fun at our expense with this one. There are very sound textual reasons, by the way, for leaving out the story of the Woman Taken in Adultery, at least as part of the Fourth Gospel, liberal conspiracies aside. And it's by no means certain that Jesus' "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" is really an original part of Luke. I personally think that textual evidence and not ideology should be the basis for making these sorts of decisions, but separating the two is not always as simple as it seems like it should be.

You know, textual evidence is important. People who simply accept the text of a piece as a more-or-less one-dimensional given have always baffled me. I really want to know what I have in front of me, where the text came from, how it got to where it was, and what its basis is. I like critical editions; I want sources, analogs, revisions, notes, second thoughts—the whole package. It's the difference between color and black-and-white, between 3D and 2D, between high definition and youtube.

Back in high school I thought it was ridiculous that neither literature nor history classes covered even the basics of text criticism. When we did Melville's Billy Budd in American lit my teacher thought an important key to Melville's point of view lay in his naming of the British ship the Indomitable. Okay, fair enough, but MS analysis shows that Melville changed his mind; at some point he decided to call the ship the Bellipotent instead. Does this make a difference to the analysis? Maybe not, but still, Bellipotent and Indomitable are not quite the same thing.

Billy Budd was quite an interesting puzzle to me at the time; the edition we read in school (Weaver's) differed in numerous ways from the copy we had at home (Freeman's). I had no idea why, but I ended up basing my paper on Freeman's edition rather than Weaver's, largely because I liked it better. Similarly, when we listened to a recording of a portion of Shakespeare's Othello while reading along in our books I was amazed at the differences between them; at the time I ignorantly blamed it on the liberties taken by our textbook editors, but in fact one was based on the Q1 text and the other based of the First Folio. Go figure. And when it comes to Murder in the Cathedral—well, maybe the less said, the better. There weren't enough copies to go around, you see, so those of us who could brought copies from home or the library and, well, confusion resulted when we attempted to read the thing aloud. Thank you T. S. Eliot for an entertaining and very confusing couple of afternoons.

Yeah, anyway, the point is—it's important to know your text. What exactly is it that you've got in front of you?

When I was working on a piece about the Modoc War I had occasion to refer to the wire dispatches sent out by the Associated Press (not the modern assocation; this one was connected with the Western Union telegraph system) from Ashland and Yreka. In a March 1873 dispatch describing the aftermath of a tumultuous meeting with the Modoc leaders it is said that Captain Jack (the principal Modoc leader) met with the Peace Commissioners in the morning wearing a woman's hat. At least that's what the Portland Oregonian version of the dispatch said. Most of the other papers I looked at (the San Francisco Call, various New York papers, etc.) however said it was a warrior's hat. Same dispatch, different reading. Which is correct?

Most people that I've thrown this out at over the years have responded that I should go with what the majority of the newspapers had, that is, warrior's hat. As one person observed, didn't it make more sense to suppose that he wore a warrior's hat rather than a woman's hat? Maybe so, but that wasn't the way I looked at it. I did what you're supposed to do in the textual world; I constructed a tree. It was easy to show that all versions of the wire stories from Yreka (not just this one) fell into three different groups. One of these was found in the Oregon papers, one in the Sacramento papers, and one in all the other papers. (This could actually be broken down still further; the Salem papers received their text from one of the Portland papers, for example, and the text that went out to New York was derived secondarily from the San Francisco text, but that gets beyond what is necessary for solving this particular puzzle.) The thing is there were three more or less independent branches to this particular textual tree. If two of them agree against the third, there is a strong probability that those two represent the correct text. And in this particular case the Sacramento and Oregon branches agreed against the Majority Text, making it clear that Captain Jack wore a woman's hat on this occasion, not a warrior's hat. (And in fact I later confirmed this through examination of independent accounts of the meeting, but that doesn't alter the significance of the textual analysis.)

The thing is that texts, whether they're being recopied or reprinted or whatever through the course of time, tend to become increasingly corrupt. Errors accumulate, and even when they're corrected, there is no guarantee that the corrections are in fact, well, correct. All that annoying apparatus that accompanies a decent edition of Melville or Shakespeare exists in the main to guarantee the purity of the text. It keeps the editors honest, and informs the reader of exactly what has happened over the course of time. Is what you're reading what appeared in the second quarto of Romeo and Juliet. or is it some editor's fix for an apparent misprint? Without the apparatus you don't know.

One of the most extraordinary textual feats of antiquity was the freezing of the Hebrew text of what Christians call the Old Testament. A group of seventh-century scribes, called the Masoretes, made an extremely interesting decision. They'd inherited a corrupt text, but rather than trying to fix it, they decided to quick-freeze it instead. Instead of correcting ungrammatical constructions, they called attention to them in commentaries running alongside the text. They made notes on how many words there should be in a section, where the center should be, stuff like that. The point of these notes, which some people have called arid and fruitless, was to provide a check on the text. They were in a way the medieval equivalent (though crude and superstitious) of a modern textual apparatus, and the result of this work was that they preserved an ancient text-type largely intact, as modern MS discoveries have shown.

By contrast the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which goes back to an independent text-type from the Hebrew, is a mess. Sad to say, some of this is the result of the efforts of a pioneering textual scholar, Origen of Alexandria. As part of his attempt to clarify the exact wording and sense of the Old Testament he set the various Greek translations side by side in parallel columns, something that would be of enormous use to us today, if only substantial portions of it had survived intact. What it actually did was make it easy to muddy the textual waters with eclectic texts, as readings could easily be transferred from one version to another.

The New Testament provides an even greater contrast. No textual care whatsoever was taken of the text by ancient and medieval scribes, and errors simply accumulated over time. Local text-types were eventually swamped by a single type, known as the Byzantine text, and a version of it, much later called the Textus Receptus (TR), became the basis for the first printed New Testament. A guy named Desiderius Erasmus created the text early in the sixteenth century on the basis of a handful of late manuscripts; for sections of the Apocalypse of John his basis was so defective that he had to use the Latin version, retranslating it into Greek. Many of the famous national translations, including the terminally ugly King James Version (KJV), are based on the TR.

Now as the years went by new manuscript discoveries, including the two oldest Bibles extant (Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus), as well as the work of many scholars, changed the picture considerably. Whole verses fell by the wayside as better manuscripts became available. 1 John 5:7b-8a (the Comma Johanneum) was one casualty, and John 7:53-8:11 (the Pericope Adulterae) was another. Readings changed. Scholars like Brook F. Westcott, Fenton J. A. Hort, and Bruce Metzger engaged in the Herculean task of evaluating thousands of pieces of evidence to establish the best and purest text possible with the material available.

But not everybody has been happy with the results of their patient conservative efforts. Some people actually resent it. One of my fellow house-denizens, for example, burst out in a tirade the other month about how textual criticism was anti-christian—this in response to a comment I'd made about textual criticism and Mark Twain. There is in fact a not-inconsiderable movement against text-criticism, at least as far as it applies to Sacred Writ.

Actually, that's not quite the case. They may call it the "curse of textual criticism", but they can't get out of it that easily. There's no text available that didn't involve some sort of textual criticism—the only real issue is over whether it's done poorly, or done well. If you go with the TR you're using a text thrown together out of a half-dozen late manuscripts. If you go with say Nestle-Aland 27, you're using a text based on literally thousands of manuscripts, versions, patristic citations, and that is entirely transparent, since it tells you exactly where a particular reading comes from and what the alternative readings are.

So from this perspective, at least, these guys aren't so much anti-textual-criticism as pro-bad-textual-criticism. The reasoning behind this is convoluted, or rather, there is no reason behind it at all, just pure emotion. And for the most part it comes from attachment to a particular translation.

I've expressed elsewhere (though apparently not on the internet) my dislike, contempt even, for the King James Version. It is a poorly-written committee-driven hack job, devoid of style or class, except where expressions have been stolen from earlier translations (Tyndale in particular). To borrow an expression from one of William the Bloody's friends, listening to it is like having a railroad spike driven through your head. Still, some people like it. Hunter S. Thompson, the greatest prose stylist of the twentieth century, for one. And Brother David Phillips of the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Wedowee, Alabama, for another.

Brother David was kind enough to supply us with his five reasons for preferring it to more accurate translations: it is (he writes) a (1) pure, (2) preserved, (3) powerful, (4) plain, and (5) perfect book. Now Brother David seems to be using the words in a sort of Humpty-Dumpty sense, so we'll have to kind of figure out what he means as he goes along.

The purity of the text is guaranteed (he claims) because it is a translation from the TR, which he (wrongly) asserts is in agreement with 95% of all Scripture-related manuscripts. He claims (again wrongly) that modern translations are based on a text derived from only two manuscripts. "What does all this mean?" he asks rhetorically. "Simply this, the King James Bible is derived from a more accurate Greek text, not from 2 suspect texts of suspect origin. Therefore, the King James Bible is a pure Book!" He then goes on to extol the scholarship of the KJV translators—and in all fairness, it was pretty decent, for 1611. Of course their knowledge of Hebrew was extremely limited, and their knowledge of the koine dialect of Greek—in which the NT was written—nonexistent, but what can you expect? We've learned a lot in the four centuries since then. Still, apparently Brother David is impressed.

Okay, point 2—preservation. What on earth does he mean by that? The text of the NT, whether TR, Byzantine Majority, or Nestle-Aland, is derived from preserved manuscripts. The length of the preservation might be relevant; the TR and BMT are based primarily on very late texts, while the Nestle-Aland is based primarily on early, but no—it seems that Brother David has something else in mind. "God has promised to preserve His Word," he writes. But "Preservation is not present in any modern version!" Certain late additions to the text (Brother David explicitly cites Acts 8:37 and 1 John 5:7) that were mistakenly printed in the TR on the basis of a few late Greek MSS are no longer included in modern translations. But Brother David likes them. On the basis of this personal preference of his he claims "These are 2 pretty important verses and they belong exactly where the Lord put them!" Yeah, okay, whatever. He goes on to add a bunch of jibber-jabber about how the TR (which actually didn't even exist until Erasmus created it) was "Written on tanned animal skins" and "1 mistake on a page, destroyed. 3 in a book, whole book destroyed!" This is absolutely baseless, as he'd know if he'd ever actually looked at a Greek manuscript.

His third point—power. The King James Bible is a powerful book, he says. I assume by powerful he means it's a committee-written piece of Jacobean crap. But no, apparently he knows "the King James Bible has power because I have felt it and seen it at work in my life and in the lives of others. It is a powerful Book!!" So yeah, Brother David, you like it. I got that. Well, I like Pink Floyd's "Atom Heart Mother." There's a powerful work, if you like. But I don't worship it, and I sure as hell don't confuse emotional appeal with textual authenticity or accuracy in translation.

Okay, number four—plainness. The only thing I get out of his gibberish here is that he thinks the King James Bible is written at a fifth grade level. Since I don't see how that's either a virtue or a fault, I really don't get his point. It certainly isn't that difficult to grasp for anyone with a working knowledge of Jacobean English; I don't know how many fifth graders are included in that group.

And finally, perfection. Again, he is using this word in some strange manner of his own. He picks several passages where he prefers the KJV translation—Isaiah 7:14, for example, where he prefers the KJV's "virgin" to the original Hebrew word meaning "young woman". I don't know what this has to do with perfection. Determining which translation you like best on the basis of personal feelings is all very well and good, but it doesn't really add up to much. It's just really not that persuasive, especially when the evidence is against you.

I probably shouldn't try writing this stuff when I'm running a high fever and "Amazing Grace" keeps playing in my head; I've somehow wandered way off the topic. And my hands are shaking so much I'm having trouble typing. Still, it beats lying down and feeling miserable, and I don't actually have to post the damn thing.

The point is, I just like knowing where my text comes from. If you want a translation based on the accumulated crap and errors of centuries, by all means use the King James Version or the World English Bible. I'm not going to join you, but I don't quarrel with your choice, if it makes you happy. Enjoy! The world is large. There's room for all kinds at the table.

But when it comes to hosting a good old-fashioned anti-American Halloween sacred book-burning and barbecue, my mind begins to reel. Is this actual news, or are fever-induced hallucinations kicking in? Apparently a certain pastor Marc Grizzard of the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, North Carolina, is in such desperate need of publicity, that he's hosting his own holy holocaust, and all translations not based on the TR (as well as at least one that is) are going to be ceremonially burned, along with works by Metzger, Westcott, and Hort. And there's going to be music as well, a delightful variety of "country, rap, rock, pop, heavy metal, western, soft and easy, southern gospel, contempory [sic] Christian". No, they're not going to play it, they're going to burn it. Really, these are delightful people. And there will be words from the likes of Billy and Franklin Graham, Chuck Colson, and Mother Teresa—yes, you guessed it, also burned. It sounds like a lot of fun. If all fourteen members of his congregation show up, they can do a reenactment of the Last Supper, with a couple of spares.

And people wonder why Christianity has fallen to such low repute. Seriously, with people like Marc Grizzard, Fred Phelps, Jimmy Swaggart, Tammy Faye Baker, and Jim Jones as its representatives, it's not really surprising.

Quotation of the Day

It was the universal opinion of the century preceding the last, that civil Government could not stand without the prop of a religious establishment, and that the Christian religion itself would perish if not supported by a legal provision for its clergy. The experience of Virginia conspicuously corroborates the disproof of both opinions. The civil Government, though bereft of every thing like an associated hierarchy, possesses the requisite stability, and performs its functions with complete success; whilst the number, the industry, and the morality of the Priesthood, and the devotion of the people, have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the State.

James Madison, Letter to Robert Walsh, 2 March 1819

Quotation of the Day

The people who are attending rallies while crying out that President Obama was not born in the United States, shouting “We want out country back”, even packing loaded weapons while at a Presidential appearance, are not anti-socialist (as they claim); they are antisocial.

Dan J.

Passing Notes

Okay, I'm still here, still alive, still breathing, still connected with the web world. As far as I know this is going to be another placeholder entry, something to try to keep the blog alive while I scurry about looking for acorns, or something equally productive.

Well, let's see... My family has returned from visiting my mother (their grandmother) at the coast; my niece is in a foul mood, but as far as I can tell from talking with my mother things went well there, and they got her yard in good shape and the new wall on the house painted, so I'm putting it down to exhaustion.

I'd hoped to have something more solid to include, but I will note a couple of recent blog entries I've read with enjoyment. John J. McKay (archy) has a fascinating piece entitled "Zombies of the mammoth steppes" involving an interesting piece of fake history: the 1846 discovery of a complete mammoth specimen—a discovery that never happened. Although some of the details seem to be a bit fuzzy, the story originated in an 1859 children's book by Philipp Körber, entitled Kosmos für die Jugend. The discovery soon made its way into the scientific literature, and "By the end of the century, some of the details were so well established that they had could stand up against newer, and more correct, data." While certain details of the story were especially appealing to crackpots (see for example its use here at Creationscience.com), legitimate scientists also have continued to cite the nonexistent discovery. McKay attributes this to three elements:

First, the original story was well told, filled with many plausible details, and included the solutions to some outstanding mysteries about mammoths. Probably because of the verisimilitude and answers, the story was adopted and retold in considerable detail by some very influential scientists. Their credibility led to many retellings in both the popular and scientific press. Finally, debunkings of the story have been weak, made by not credible writers, or located in hard to find places.

One of the "not credible" debunkers was Henry Hoyle Howorth, a champion of the Flood and an opponent of the concept of ice ages, who wrote in The Mammoth and the Flood:

It is very strange that if genuine no accounts of this discovery should have reached the ears of Baer or Brandt, Schmidt or Schrenck, who none of them mention it, and that it should be first heard of in a popular book for boys in 1862. Until some proof to the contrary is forthcoming, I shall treat this tale as a mere romance constructed out of what we know about the Mammoth from other sources as an amusing story for boys.

Not that Howorth was the only one; still, given his biases, he didn't help matters much. Anyway, the piece is a great follow-up to McKay's earlier Mammoth on Ice (also very much worth reading, if you haven't seen it already).

On a completely different note this piece (h/t James McGrath) took me back a good many years to Dr. James M. Robinson's class in Q when the subject of the western non-interpolations came up—why, I don't remember. (The western non-interpolations are a group of passages, mainly in Luke, that don't appear in the western text, but do appear in most new testament manuscripts.) Most of the class was unfamiliar with the term, and Dr. Robinson pointed out that it wasn't exactly a neutral term for the group, as it basically presupposed that these passages had been interpolated into the Alexandrian (and Byzantine?) texts, and that the Western text preserved the original readings. If I'm remembering correctly Dr. Robinson felt they should be considered on a case-by-case basis, rather than making sweeping pronouncements—though I would point out that getting his own views on anything was always tricky. He was great at clarifying the positions of other scholars, and at showing what the consequences of those views might be; he was amazing at picking up suggestions thrown out in class and presenting how they might fit in with the larger body of knowledge; getting him to pronounce on what he thought was another matter altogether.

Anyway, to get back to the matter at hand, James D. Tabor muses over the restoration of these passages to certain modern translations, based largely on the testimony of P75, which, though an early representative of the Alexandrian text, is still, when all is said and done, just another representative of the Alexandrian text. There may well be good reasons to restore these passages to the text of Luke, but in the end the matter should not rest exclusively on the age of a particular exemplar of a text.

Recovering the original text of any ancient document requires a number of related approaches, and one is clearly the careful dating of the sequence of manuscript witnesses and variants. But the “older” is surely not the more original, and judgments of content and substance must finally prevail. I remain convinced, after all these years, that my initial judgment that Wescott and Hort’s position on the Western non-interpolations was self-evident remains the case.

Personally I've veered on that topic over the years, but the secondary nature of some of these passages (at least) seems manifest, whether supported by textual evidence or no. I mean, is it really likely that the original author of Luke-Acts would have had Jesus twice rise up into the sky (Lk 24:51 and Acts 1:9)? I mean, I can understand if he did why some scribe might remove the first reference in the interest of harmonization, but isn't it easier by far to suppose that some scribe added it to the end of Luke after Luke's separation from Acts? I mean, come on people, just because it was ancient times doesn't mean that everybody was batshit insane.

Anyway, James D. Tabor's piece is both interesting and relevant and is well worth reading. I enjoyed it, anyway.

Quotation of the Day

Don't talk to me about government-instituted "death panels". The real death panels are the ones in that building in downtown Philadelphia, and similar ones belonging to other health insurance companies around the nation. The ones who attempt to stymie you at every turn in your efforts to access your "covered benefits". The ones who hope you will give up, go away, or die before they ever have to get around to paying anything on any of your claims.

Zuska (h/t Dan J.)

Mark Twain's Literary Afterlife

One of the books I mentioned as influencing my life, certainly my literary preoccupations, was a 1962 Mark Twain collection entitled Letters from the Earth. The story behind it is an odd one, and takes us down some bizarre pathways of history.

In his own time Mark Twain was known as a comic writer and lecturer. There were a lot of them around then, most of them forgotten. They were very roughly the equivalent of present-day stand-up comedians, and for the most part were relatively harmless. One of my favorites—and certainly a more typical example than Mark Twain—was an Oregon lecturer named Elisha Applegate. His most famous routine was on the topic of "Mohammed and the Koreish". The lecture was so popular in Oregon that when Applegate was appointed to be a sort of cultural ambassador for the state in 1873, Portland's leading citizens urged him to deliver the lecture one last time before departing for the nation's capital. The content of the lecture is not apparently available, but we do know that he took a somewhat tolerant view of Islam, sometimes comparing it favorably to Christianity. One much quoted bon-mot regarding Islamic polygamy vs. Christian infidelity was to the effect that Islam had the harem system, while Christianity had the harum-scarum system.

Humorous lecturers were, well, not uncommon, and not especially respected, and it was to this class that Mark Twain was seen to belong. The genius of, say, Huckleberry Finn was recognized in Europe long before it was recognized in the United States. And, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of Mark Twain's success in the United States was as a harmless necessary comedian.

But funnyman Mark Twain was a creation of Samuel Clemens—and Clemens was a much more complicated fellow than the comic lecturer. As a child young Samuel had trembled at each thunderstorm, fearing the wrath of God. And as he grew up he more and more came to lose his childlike faith in the god he had learned about in Sunday school. The mindless workings of nature—the young spiders who preyed on their mother, the parasitic wasp who laid its eggs in a living but paralyzed host—convinced him more and more that God was not merely wrathful, but downright malevolent. Tormented by visions of the worthy being punished while the unrighteous prospered, of the unworthy motives behind even the most seemingly altruistic actions—in short, by the way the world actually worked, he relived these images in a series of works destined to remain unpublished in his lifetime. Some of them—The Chronicle of Young Satan, for example, or "Letter from the Recording Angel," are among his best work.

One of these was something he called "Letters from the Earth." In it a supernatural being visits our planet and writes back to his fellow super-beings about the religion he finds there—specifically about Christianity as it was practiced in nineteenth-century America. Naive views of heaven, prayer, and the nature of God are satirized freely. He wrote to a correspondent (Elizabeth Wallace) on 13 November 1909 about it:

I've been writing "Letters from the Earth," and if you will come here and see us I will— what? Put the MS in your hands, with the places to skip marked? No. I won't trust you quite that far. I'll read messages to you. This book will never be published—in fact it couldn't be, because it would be felony to soil the mails with it, for it has much Holy Scripture in it of the kind that . . . can't properly be read aloud, except from the pulpit and in family worship. Paine enjoys it, but Paine is going to be damned one of these days, I suppose.

Albert B. Paine was Twain's biographer, and he certainly seems to have enjoyed "Letters from the Earth." He made no serious attempt to get the work published, however, though he did include one short passage (with unmentioned excisions) in his biography. Other than that the work remained unknown for decades. Several of Twain's unpublished pieces made their way into print, often with rather dubious editorial emendations (see my piece on The Mysterious Stranger for an example), but not that one.

In 1939 literary critic Bernard Devoto made a determined effort to get it out. He put together a collection of unpublished Twain fragments and provided it with notes and explanations. But Samuel Clemens' daughter Clara objected to it strongly, and the volume didn't appear. She felt it presented a distorted reflection of her father's views. She may well have been right—but Samuel Clemens did write these pieces, and they by no means stand alone.

Now Devoto made some interesting choices in several of the items. "Papers of the Adams Family" for example are somewhat unrelated sketches written many years apart, having in common only that they were attributed to various antediluvian figures. It's not exactly bogus (and Devoto was straightforward about what he was doing)—but it's not exactly Twain either. "The Damned Human Race" is likewise made up of fragments—various vaguely philosophical notes Clemens wrote late in his life—assembled in their present form by Devoto. "Cooper's Prose Style" is made up of two manuscripts—an unfinished lecture and the original ending to "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses."

Which takes us back to "Letters from the Earth." To provide the letters with a prolog, Devoto turned to another earlier MS of Twain's—an unfinished piece called "The Creation of Man." This describes the Creator's invention of the universe and the reactions of Gabriel, Michael, and Satan to it. At the end of it Satan heads off to earth and starts a letter back to Gabriel and Michael about what he finds there. The MS breaks off in mid-sentence.

Paine wrote about the two pieces that "Letters from the Earth" was suggested by "The Creation of Man," but was "not a continuation of it." Devoto overruled Paine, however, commenting "Nevertheless the transition is direct and the continuation unmistakable"; he therefore omitted the final lines of "The Creation of Man" and attached it to "Letters from the Earth." In point of fact it is nowhere stated in "Letters from the Earth" who exactly is writing to whom; the focus is on mankind as seen from a supernatural perspective. The author only becomes Satan as a result of Devoto's combination of the two MSS.

Some of the material slated for the book, also entitled Letters from the Earth, made it into print during the next couple of decades. (Should you be interested, and I feel quite certain that you are not, they were "The Gorky Incident" (1944), "Cooper's Prose Style" (1946), "Letter from the Recording Angel" (1946), and "A Cat-Tale" (1959).) Nothing of "Letters from the Earth" itself seems to have escaped.

Oddly enough it was cold war politics that at last allowed the appearance of "Letters from the Earth." Mark Twain was something of a hero in the old Soviet Union, and charges of censorship stung in America, the land where free speech was a valued right. Not willing to give the Soviets a talking-point, Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch finally relented, and the book at last appeared.

It made ripples, but it was by no means as shocking in 1962 as it would have been in 1939. I read it with considerable interest as an eleven-year-old; it was a side of Mark Twain I'd never seen before, though people who had read more of Twain than appeared in The Little Golden Library (or whatever the real name of the series was) would not have seen much that was new. In an earlier entry I wrote about the effect the book had on me; especially the violence and injustice recorded in the Bible about the conquest of Canaan. The effect on more sophisticated (or at least more adult) readers was not so striking. One reviewer parodied The Screwtape Letters (1942) to express his disappointment that this book was not really the devilish concoction the demonic realm had been hoping for. And many reviewers observed that the naive views of religion and the afterlife attacked in it were not the views of sophisticated theologians—as if those views were actually shared by the majority of the American people. Certainly the delay helped blunt the effect of the work—though in point of fact, it may never have been as unpublishable as Twain thought it was.

One of the oddities of this publishing history is that this piece, "Letters from the Earth", a hundred years old this year, is still in copyright in the United States. It will be in copyright in the United States until 2057—a fact that would please Mark Twain no end, as he was a great believer in perpetual copyright. Samuel Clemens has been dead for nearly a century now, and most of his works have quite properly entered the land of public domain, but not this tiny handful. Clemens' dead hand will hold these works with an iron grip for more than a century and a half before they become part of the general heritage of the American people. It's interesting—but tough.

Things Continue

Okay, I'm going to be honest here (not that I'm usually dishonest here)—I don't know when I'm going to get back to making regular entries here again. Things are hectic around me, and I may be moving on soon—or not. I feel the need for a break, and I want to get back to something resembling normal for me. I'm trying to get back to having a laptop—writing at my desk is never that comfortable, to be honest. I need new glasses; I can't see with the ones I've got without zooming in so far the text barely fits on the screen. And I've got to seriously reduce the amount of stuff in my life to something a bit more portable. I've lost the bulk of my library, so that's taken care of—though not in a good way. I've lost an unknown portion of my files, including works in progress (my Dubious Documents project for one) and many notes I need in order to write these things. I've been trying to limp on, but it isn't working, and I'm more or less reaching the end of my rope.

I'm going to try to sell of some of my remaining collections, and maybe find homes for other material that I don't particularly want to sell. Times are tough, though, and I don't know how feasible any of that is. We'll just have to see.

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.