Quotation of the Day

The Senate has killed Mr. Windom’s foolish Bill for the “suppression of obscene literature,” to which we made reference some time ago, by simply letting it die, without notice—for lack of the bottle out of which tender infants are often fed. This is well—and what we expected. But how about those reformers who hold meetings to urge an Amendment to the Constitution, which shall insert the names of God and Christ therein?

Every once and a while this old beldame Earth has a fit of morals, which jerk some people like St. Vitus’s dance; and when it subsides, having the tendency rather to retard than promote the exalted aims of Christianity. Moral excesses become ridiculous. Ridicule cheapens. And when Christianity is lampooned by well meaning Bigotry, even that Holy Faith cannot entirely escape harm from contact with the keen sene of humor which is so universal in the human mind.

To see a breach of this “moral” sort made in the Constitution, and then to behold the struggle of the Sects for additional “Sectarian Amendments!” What Satirist could withhold his pen, what Cartoonist his pencil, in view of a spectacle—in this age of the world—like to that? And yet just such a precedent is sought after by the folks whom we are criticising.

Weekly Mercury, Salem, Oregon, 28 March 1873, p.2

Springtide for Himmler

Not feeling well, here. I don’t know why; there’s probably some good reason for it. Blame it on old age, maybe—my sixtieth birthday is fast approaching, but I don’t really think that’s it. The weather is uncertain and changeable, alternately threatening and inviting, and that could be darkening my emotional landscape too, but again, I don’t really think that’s it. Life here is imploding fast as well; the foreclosure grinds on, with no end in sight, taking its emotional toll, my one brother is rapidly approaching the end of his financial rope, and taken as a whole things continue rapidly to deteriorate. This isn’t even van-by-the-river time; my van’s in the shop, and everything looks chancy and uncertain.

Which makes it hard to concentrate on anything. I spent some time today organizing books, mainly getting stray volumes back on the shelves where they belong, which has something of the deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic feel to it, truth to tell. The thing is, nothing is that urgent, probably. Resolution on the house is likely to be months away, as I understand it, and my family is generally resourceful; even if we crash and burn, we’ll probably do it with a certain degree of dignity. And I’ve had other birthdays. I’ve never had a sixtieth before, but then, I never had a twenty-seventh, or a forty-second, until I actually had one. Honestly, I never really thought I’d get past thirty-three.

And so springtide cometh, where the days are more nearly equal to the nights than not, and flowers start blooming and the grass becomes ragged and in need of a mowing. A chancy, uncertain time of year at best. Storm clouds are as likely as sunshine, and sometimes both come at once. The news abroad fits with the season—gloomy and indecisive. I read how some Army commander found fifty thousand dollars and change to host a third-class hillbilly revival on government facilities with his full endorsement, but could only spare a tiny venue and no financial wherewithal to bring Richard Dawkins and an all-star lineup to the same base. I can’t say I’m disappointed; I expected no less from the customarily two-faced US military. And chaos reigns in Wisconsin, where a venal governor is determined to cut the pay for public employees, forbid future union negotiations over work conditions and benefits, apparently in order to pay off his financial backers. (My hope is that this will prove a pyrrhic victory, as the American people wake from their long slumber to fight back against the mad tea-partiers and other business-as-usual crazies—but the American people seem to be perfectly capable of long-time survival despite having their heads firmly in the sand. Or rather up their collective rectums.) Elsewhere Alan Abel wannabe James O’Keefe is promoting is latest hoax, this time aimed at PBS, though why anybody is still paying him any attention beats me. How many times are the mainstream media (Fox in particular) going to cash this guy’s bad checks? Once bitten and all that, right? Middle-East meltdown goes on. Afghanistan deteriorates. Gaddafi threatens to jump ship (jump, baby, jump!). Some guy in Portland calls 911 to report himself as a house-breaker—seems the owners have returned and he’s afraid they might be armed. None of it makes much sense—but then that’s what one would expect in this chaotic and uncertain universe.

Classic mindscum—I started with nothing in particular to say, and I ended up nowhere in particular. Pile up enough words together and sense emerges—sometimes. I don’t think this was one of them. Put it down to the weather. Maybe I’ll feel better in a day or two.

Quotation of the Day

If someone needs ancient literature for explicit moral guidance, they cannot reasonably think of themselves as able to make moral decisions. They have surrendered their moral responsibility to their holy book.

Duane Smith

Quotation of the Day

There is one reason and one reason only to read the comments on a random news site. If, for some reason, you are having a high level of hope for humanity and decide you just want to squash that right away so it doesn’t fester, go find yourself a nice Web 2.0 outlet and read away to your heart’s content.

Geds

Were They Reading the Same Book? pt. 2

Sunday’s observation about the Bible presenting “the grandest characters in all history” came from one James Wingate, Schenectady County (New York) Commissioner in 1902. The issue was mandating Bible-reading in the schools, a position favored by State Superintendent Charles R. Skinner at that time. Information was gathered from principals and superintendents and various other officials about the practice in their respective districts, along with their recommendations as to policy. Skinner supported mandatory Bible-reading “without note or comment” and saw no conflict with the New York Constitution:

The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship without discrimination or preference shall forever be allowed in this state to all mankind…

How reading from a religious text, as part of a religious service involving the recitation of a prayer, with or without note or comment, could possibly be done “without discrimination or preference” he never explained, but rather seems to think that it is somehow self-evident:

There is a wide distinction between the opening of schools with religious exercises taken from the catechism of some church according to a formula prescribed by some sect or denomination and the reading of portions of the Bible without note or comment. The first may be decidedly objectionable to parents of other denominations, while to the other it would seem no reasonable objection could be raised. … Religious freedom consists in a man’s professing and enjoying what religious faith he pleases, or in the right of rejecting all denominational beliefs. This freedom is in no degree restricted when the Bible is read in the public school.

Not everybody agreed with Skinner. Charles E. Gorton, Yonkers school superintendent, wrote:

I am quite content with the present status of the Bible in the public schools, and suspect that an attempt to do more with it would lead to endless trouble, and very likely properly so. We have children of every faith in the schools. The Bible is the foundation of the Christian religion, and the King James version is the foundation of Protestantism. The Catholics would object to the reading of that version; the Jews would object to the New Testament; other religious sects would object to any reading whatever. Except so far as relates to ethical instruction, I believe we had better let the Bible alone in the public schools, and even as a code of ethics there are many other religious sects who claim that their writings are just as sound as the Bible, and quite likely they are. In my judgment it is quite right to maintain the separation between secular and religious education.

But many administrators favored preaching the Bible. They offered a bewildering variety of not necessarily consistent reasons for this choice. One that jumped out at me—as it still does when offered by modern-day Bible-pushers—is the strong desire to proselytize other people’s children, whose parents, perhaps, did not see the value of it. Some examples:

Many argue that religious teaching should be left to the homes and churches, but statistics prove that these two agencies are not fully performing this important function and that a large number of the children of our state do not come under any religious influence whatever.—C. F. Walker, Superintendent, Elmira

As a matter of fact very many of our students would grow up with no knowledge whatever of this book were it not for what they heard read from it in the public schools.—W. C. Franklin (no location given)

Some of the children in that way may hear the precious word, who never would hear it at any other time.—E. Everett Poole, Commissioner, Chenango county, first district

Every day the teacher should impress upon the minds of the pupils the importance of leading a Christian life.—Charles B. Hanley, Commissioner, Hamilton county, sole district

I believe the Bible should be used daily in the public schools, because … [m]any children will not learn the truths of the Bible unless it is used in the public school.—Libbie J. Sweetland, Commissioner, Tompkins county, second district

In the rural districts a great many children never have a Bible lesson read, or even attend a Sunday school, and a few moments spent in the morning are not lost, but lay before the child and student a new field of thought.—Charles C. McCall, Commissioner, Wyoming county, second district

How does this square with the child’s right of free exercise of his or her religion without discrimination or preference? As is almost always the case in these discussions the rights of the child go unmentioned. Parental objections are noted, however. We saw above how Skinner steamrollered over objections by parents of other persuasions by saying that “no reasonable objection could be raised” by say Jews or Muslims to readings from the Christian sacred writings. (Would he have felt the same if the passages in question had been from the Quran or Tao Te Ching?) Some joined in blaming the parents who objected.

This recognition of the Bible as a standard of morals and as an aid in character-building cannot be reasonably criticised.—James M Crane, City Superintendent, Newburgh.

While it is not the business of the public schools to teach religion, I am firmly convinced that they fall far short of their duty if they fail to inculcate morals, and in no way can this be done so efficiently as by the use of the Bible.—D. E. Batcheller, City Superintendent, Olean

A diploma from a high school should be a guarantee that the possessor has a reasonable familiarity with the Bible.—J. E. Massee, School Superintendent, Watervliet

...as long as we are Americans and our institutions are founded on Christian ethics let us teach our children the fundamental principles of righteous living as taught in the Bible.—Charles D. Niver, Commissioner, Albany County, first district

The preamble of our [New York] constitution recognizes God, our courts use the Bible in administering oaths and the United States is recognized as the great Christian nation. Protestants and Catholics alike accept the Bible as the word of God. What harm then can come to our children from having the Bible in the public schools?—E. B. Whitney, Commissioner, Broome county, second district

Spite of assertions to the contrary, this is a religious state, since the preamble to our constitution explicitly recognizes “Almighty God”; and since the whole tenor of our constitution is framed in accordance with the principles of the New Testament, and is at variance in many respects with the principles of any of the other religions of the world, it is also a Christian state.—J. Irving Gorton, Superintendent, Ossining

Take that, non-religious and non-Christian parents. Screw you, and screw your children too, as far as J. Irving Gorton et al were concerned. More rational observations came from other officials:

In my judgment it is hardly probable that the Bible could be taught in the public schools of the state without the instructor coloring his teaching with his personal belief. I have no sympathy with the notion that has been put forward that it is not possible to teach morals without teaching religion at the same time. It seems to me that the safe thing to do is to keep church and state work pretty clearly separate.—H. H. Snell, Superintendent, Hoosick Falls

I think it is not wise to attempt to teach any form of religion in our public schools. I question the desirability of such teaching in public schools. I certainly believe the public schools should be kept free from any religious teaching by sectarian ministers or teachers.—George Griffith, Superintendent, Utica

...controversy over its teaching is the basis of much of the most violent and destructive antagonism of the world’s history, and for this reason, and this only, it has been excluded from the public schools, which, admittedly, must be secular only.—C. B. Gilbert, Superintendent, Rochester

I believe that the Bible should not be read in the public schools, but should be left to special classes, special schools and the home.—J. C. Van Etten, City Superintendent, Dunkirk

It is my observation and belief that no moral benefit is derived from it. It antagonizes some of the patrons of the public schools. Morality and right living can better be taught by the example of upright, honest, conscientious teachers.—William R. Tremper, Commissioner, Dutchess county, second district

In my opinion the reading of the Bible in the public schools would be an occasion for dissatisfaction among the parents of the children. In as much as Bibles differ, and the schools are made up of children of different religious denominations, the home is the more satisfactory place for such instruction, where they may be allowed to follow the dictates of their own conscience.—John S. Bizel, Commissioner, Franklin county, first district

Given the difficulties at hand, you’d think there had to be a pretty compelling reason for trying to shoehorn the Bible in. And various administrators put in their two cents worth on that. Literary excellence, moral example, historical importance—these are some of the reasons given. With any luck I’ll get a chance to examine these in a later section. Uh, in view of my track record, don’t hold your breath, mmm-kay?

[Since I inadvertently published the introduction to this piece on Sunday, I figured I’d keep it up, publishing sections until I come to an end, or get tired of it.]

Were They Reading the Same Book?

When I was a child, and thought as a child, I read as a child, voraciously and without discrimination. The adventures of Freddy the Pig and his friends, the Dr. Dolittle stories, Pogo, Mad Magazine, and Sherlock Holmes, Charles Darwin and Samuel Johnson, Henry Kuttner and Willy Ley, Frank Edwards and Edith Nesbit, Middle Earth and Narnia, myths and legends of all nations—Greek, Norse, Sumerian, Judean, the matter of Britain, native American legends—it was all grist to my mill. I read quickly, taking in an ordinary volume in an hour or so, and having the sponge-like mind of a child, I absorbed all this crap with an ease and facility that I can only envy now, with my sixtieth birthday looming.

From somewhere I had an old King James Bible—this isn’t the one the Gideons gave me in sixth grade that I think I’ve written about elsewhere—that had endless stupid questions at the end that could supposedly be answered by cited Biblical verses. (One of my favorites was How can I know the Bible is true? which was answered by a string of verses, the compiler seemingly oblivious of the obvious difficulty of a book testifying to its own veracity.) I occasionally read some in it—the stories of Lot and Moses and Joshua and Samson come to mind—it never really interested me that much. The New Testament—Paul’s letters in particular—seemed so bizarre and alien to me that I never looked seriously at it. The title of one section—“Jesus curses a fig tree”—kind of summed up the thing for me. Baffling and pointless.

And I have to say that a lot of kids in my approximate age range wouldn’t have stuck it out as long as I did. The Bible is not really a kid-friendly book, especially the King James Version. (The Rheims-Douay translation, which my mother would let us borrow from her so long as we handled it with kid gloves, wasn’t any better as far as I could tell.)

Take the story of Lot, for example (Genesis 19). Recognizably an ancient variation on the tale of Baucis and Philemon, with two angels standing in for Zeus and Hermes, it was in every way inferior. (No self-refilling pitcher, for one thing.) Lot takes in two visitors whom he obviously recognizes as supernatural, from his behavior, “and they turned in unto him, and entered into his house, and he made them a feast…” For some reason the people of Sodom take offense at this and they “compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter.” They demand that Lot give them up to them, but Lot (and this is the verse that turned my stomach) offers instead his “two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes…” The citizens don’t go for it; they reiterate their demand for the strangers and for Lot as well, at which point the two angels solve the problem by striking the citizens blind. (Well, as Mark Twain might have observed, they were angels, and didn’t know any better.) They then warn Lot to get the hell out of Sodom, as they’re going to destroy it, and he does, and they do, hurling brimstone and fire on it and on Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim as well, apparently through guilt by association. (Hermes and Zeus at least drowned only the city that had shown them no hospitality, rather than burning to death everybody in the surrounding countryside.) Warned not to look back, Lot’s unnamed wife does so anyway and is turned into a pillar of salt. (Baucis and Philemon at least got to live out the rest of their lives before being turned into trees.) And then, to cap it all off, Lot’s two daughters get their father drunk so they can have sex with him, and so become the ancestors of the Moabites and the Ammonites.

There’s no entertainment here, nothing edifying, nothing thought-provoking—it’s just garbage. And generally this was true across the board—Moses competing with the Egyptian magicians to show Pharaoh who could do the best magic tricks, Elijah’s lame stunt of pouring “water” from prepared jugs onto wood before “miraculously” igniting it, David’s sending a man out to be killed in battle so he can steal his wife, Solomon’s foolish and wasteful expenditures on his house and temple at the expense of his people (who promptly rebelled the moment he was out of the way), the thoroughly disgusting story of Samson, which has not one redeeming feature from one end to the other—it was all of a likeness to Jesus using his magic powers to curse a fig tree for not producing figs—out of season. What a bunch of thugs, con-men, and out-and-out bastards.

Which is why, when I read a statement like

…all must concede that the Bible presents the grandest characters in all history, and that through an acquaintance with those characters, gained in their daily school life, pupils may be stimulated to emulate them

I have to wonder, are they reading the same book?

Quotation of the Day

Tax breaks for the wealthy add to deficits, don’t create jobs, won’t help in this economy, only serve ideological goals, and they weaken the middle class.

Michael Hawkins

You Could Look It Up

Historical ignorance abounds. One writer accuses a US president of hypocrisy on the basis of a political slogan that actually was used against him by his opponents. Yikes! Another blames the deaths of native Americans on their failure to convert to Christianity, using as an example native Americans who actually had converted—and were slaughtered anyway. Oops. And another chastises a fellow writer for his ignorance of history while attributing things to James Madison and Patrick Henry that they never said. Awkward.

Yeah. A little research could save a lot of embarrassment. Take the writer (me, actually) who incorrectly attributed the slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight” to the election campaign of James K. Polk. Polk may well be an underrated president (I think so anyway), but I don’t have to like the guy, and the hypocrisy of running on a slogan he never intended to carry out fit well with my theme of the moment. For those whose history is a bit rusty, Polk's the guy who staved off a two-front war against Britain to the north and Mexico to the south by adroitly compromising with the one side while starting a just war with the other to gain for the nation much of the far west, including the future states of Oregon, California, Nevada, and Arizona. The original dark horse candidate, he included the “reoccupation” of Oregon country as a plank in his expansionist platform, but left it vague as to what, exactly, Oregon country consisted of. Britain generally felt the Columbia River should be the boundary; expansionists in the US supported a northern boundary at 54 degrees 40 minutes, while Polk, seemingly, thought extending the line along the 49th parallel out to the Pacific was a reasonable compromise. Not everybody was happy with this idea; hence the slogan “Fifty-four-forty or fight” floated in the mid-term elections by unhappy opponents. Somewhere along the line this slogan got attributed to Polk, and a misconception was born. Despite not-so-recent debunkings older textbooks and those of us who learned from them continue the mistake. I could have looked it up, I suppose—but I was on a roll, and why let research spoil a perfectly good chance to make an ass of myself?

It was one Bryan Fischer who recently wrote a column defending genocide, and in the course of arguing that native Americans were morally unfit to inhabit the land, claimed that they got what was coming to them by failing to follow George Washington’s advice to convert to Christianity. This is essentially the same “moral unfitness” argument employed by so many frontier types and apostles of Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century to justify extermination, with the Biblical example of Yahweh’s orders to destroy the Canaanites always lurking in the background. Hey, if God approves, it’s got to be okay, right? So following in that tradition Fischer blames the native Americans for their extermination by Euro-Americans, citing their refusal “to leave behind their superstition and occult practices for the light of Christianity and civilization” as justification for genocide. Speaking of the Lenape chiefs who petitioned Congress in 1782, Fischer claims “They rejected Washington’s direct counsel ... ‘You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ.’” Extermination was the consequence. Now I’ve written about this episode elsewhere, but the thing is, Fischer has got it about as wrong as it is possible to get it. Washington was not advising them, but commending them; the Moravian Brethren had set up a mission amongst the Lenape and many had converted. And what happened to those Lenape steeped in the religion of Jesus Christ? Well, actually, they were the ones who got murdered by a gang of Revolutionary War era militia. You could look it up—but maybe that would get in the way of a good diatribe.

And back last June or so one Jonathan Fickley of Chatanooga—who may teach American History there, if it’s the same person as the guy mentioned here—wrote very confidently about the faith of the Founders, decrying “people [who] speak about things that they know nothing about”. He rattled off a string of alleged quotations including a mangled Franklin and a Jefferson frankenquote including among them the fake Henry “religionists” quotation and this doozy allegedly from James Madison:

Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ.

Now this anti-education sentence has been kicking around since at least 1844 (see here for details) and is usually attributed either to John Witherspoon or Jonathan Dickinson, both presidents of Princeton University. I hope for the credit of either that neither actually said it, or perhaps were in jest, but in any case it is not until very recently that anybody attributed it to Madison—apparently on the grounds that as Madison attended Princeton, anything its president said could be attributed to him as well. Or something. “Please read again Patrick Henry’s quote,” Fickley wrote with overweening pride. “My advice to you is do not challenge people to research history of the founding fathers about Christianity to prove some anti-Christian bogus nonsense. Their own words repudiate your argument.” Oh, man—Henry’s quote? You gotta be kidding. That thing shows its bogosity every which way from Sunday. You could have looked it up—but why waste a good chance to display your own ignorance while chastising somebody else for his?

Now being careless, or foolish, or ignorant may not be crimes as such, but with the resources of the internet at our fingertips, what does a little research actually cost? Even ten years ago fact-checking often involved trips to libraries or other record repositories, long-distance phone calls, inter-library loan requests, and the like. Sometimes it still does. But often a quick trip to a search engine is all it takes to dispel some misconception, or verify some detail. It is possible to look these things up. Maybe you can’t be right all the time—but you can avoid many a baseless accusation, or idiotic claim, or piece of foolish posturing. And frankly, can’t we all do with a bit less of these things? I like to think so, anyway.

Impossible to Verify

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lameass Greeting Card Alert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotation of the Day

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

Joshua Rosenau

Staggering through Sheol

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

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

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

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

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

Voice Fiddle and Flute No Longer Be Mute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotation of the Day

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

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

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

Tom Van Dyke

Quotation of the Day

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

Ed Darrell

(See How the) Good Times Roll (Away)

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

Ron Nasty

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the old Rational Ranter, reporting from Sheol.

Quotation of the Day

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

Ed Brayton

Celebration of a Golden Age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Self-Blinded Leading the Sighted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things Are Getting Bad Here

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

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