Kylopod's Blog

Ivory tower crusaders

2012-01-05T12:00:00.008-05:00

According to Ron Paul, "Libertarians are incapable of being racist, because racism is a collectivist idea, you see people in groups."

That remark reminds me of Pat Buchanan's response to charges of anti-Semitism: "I am as aware as any other Christian that our Savior was Jewish, His mother was Jewish, the Apostles were Jewish, the first martyrs were Jewish.... So no true Christian, in my judgment, can be an anti-Semite."

Not only do these statements both demonstrate the No True Scotsman fallacy, they raise some intriguing points about how the concept of prejudice is commonly misunderstood.

Let's start with the claim that a true Christian cannot be an anti-Semite. Somehow I doubt that assertion would much impress the Jewish victims of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the numerous expulsions and pogroms and massacres committed in the name of Christ throughout the centuries. Presumably, Buchanan would respond that none of those attackers were "true" Christians. (I'm being charitable here, because I know there's a distinct possibility that he would defend the Crusades, as some on the right have.) It's a seductive argument because you can't possibly disprove it. Anytime a Christian assaults a Jew, you can either deny that person is a "true Christian" or deny that what that person did was anti-Semitic. It's one of those airtight defenses lawyers love.

It also shows a poor understanding of the historical roots of anti-Semitism. The simple fact is that most of the themes of modern-day anti-Semitism first emerged in a medieval Christian context. This happened not in spite of the fact that Christianity began as a rival Jewish sect, but in many ways because of it. Medieval Christians saw the continued existence of Judaism as an insult to their own faith which was supposed to have supplanted it. In theory this was a religious rather than racial prejudice, with the goal of converting Jews rather than killing them. And when it took on a racial character, as in 15th-century Spain, pointing out the Jewishness of the early Christians would probably not have swayed the persecutors.

Buchanan seems to be implicitly defining anti-Semitism as "the doctrine of hating all Jews who ever walked the face of the earth"--which is not how medieval Christians, even the Spanish, ever framed the issue--and then suggesting that this doctrine is logically incompatible with the theological claims of Christianity. And so it is--but only very mildly. The fact that his religion is founded upon worship of a long-deceased Jewish man does not automatically imply acceptance of the vast majority of Jews. History makes this all too clear. Centuries of persecution and bigotry can't be swept aside by one tiny, possible logical inconsistency.

That brings us to Ron Paul and his argument that libertarians can't be racist because racism is a form of collectivism, the opposite of libertarianism. If that's the case, then it's a funny coincidence how closely many of his policy views match those of the people he calls collectivist. As Stormfront founder Don Black said after endorsing his 2008 presidential bid, "We know that he's not a white nationalist...but on the issues, there's only one choice." What issues? Black mentions the Iraq War and immigration, but maybe there's just a few other things Paul has said that might appeal to white nationalists--say, his long-standing opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He insists he takes this position not because he harbors any animosity toward blacks (or "the blacks," as he phrases it in the earlier clip) but merely because he values freedom.

When you invade and violate the Constitution, you attack the personal liberties of the citizens of California and Maine, as well as the liberties of the people of South Carolina and Virginia. You cannot create new rights for one group by taking them away from another.

I am deeply concerned over the efforts of opposing groups to smear our effort with the false trappings of race hatred. We are interested solely in protecting the rights of states to manage their own internal affairs, which is a fundamental guarantee of the Constitution.

Actually, those aren't the words of Ron Paul. They're the words of Strom Thurmond during his 1948 segregationist campaign. (The first paragraph is from The Washington Post, Oct. 12, 1948, the second from The Baltimore Sun, Jul. 20, 1948--both obtained from my library's archive.) But if you read what Paul has actually said on the subject, you'll find that the above quote wouldn't sound at all out of place.

Of course Thurmond also once said, "there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches." Admittedly it's hard to imagine a remark like that escaping Paul's lips (though not so hard to imagine it appearing in a newsletter under his name). And Paul does talk favorably, as Thurmond would not have, about creating a "color-blind society."

But Paul's argument about collectivism is doubly flawed, first because it conflates a philosophy of government with a philosophy of human differences (a person can, with perfect consistency, believe that blacks and whites should be treated equally under the law while also believing whites will naturally come out on top), second because it's exactly the sort of rationalization that white supremacists have used for centuries to justify keeping racist institutions alive. They also talked about states' rights; they also depicted civil-rights legislation as an assault on freedom; they also claimed their preferred policies would benefit blacks; and they also repudiated certain manifestations of bigotry. (Thurmond, for example, opposed the poll tax and distanced himself from the racist, anti-Semitic preacher Gerald L. K. Smith.) Even if Paul's motives are entirely honorable, rooted only in his fealty to federalist principles and not to prejudice, it doesn't change the fact that racism has a long history of coming cloaked in such principles.

Paul and Buchanan both think they can refute charges of bigotry simply by identifying themselves with a favored belief system and defining that belief system in logical opposition to the charges. Their use of this defense reveals a cartoonish understanding of bigotry, and the philosophical basis on which they reject that bigotry is hopelessly feeble. They are men living in ivory towers, too attached to the elegant simplicity of their logic to appreciate its real-world implications.

Anti-smurfite

2011-07-07T10:00:00.003-04:00

Last month HuffPost ran an article about a newly published book by a French author which argues that the original Smurf cartoons were works of racist, anti-Semitic, and socialist propaganda. A few weeks later, an article in The Forward elaborated on this theory without mentioning either the HuffPost article or the French book. According to this theory, Gargamel looks like an anti-Semitic caricature of a Jew, down to his hooked nose, and this suspicion is heightened by the fact that the goal of his nefarious plans is money. As the Forward article puts it, "All that Gargamel lacks is a yarmulke."

This theory isn't new. Back in 2007, JewOrNotJew.com did a half-joking piece on the matter, concluding that "someone out there is really bigoted--the creator of the cartoon or the creator of the theory. Probably a little of both really." I myself never noticed any of this as a kid, apart from wondering why Gargamel's cat, Azrael, had a Hebrew name.

I believe it is within the realm of possibility that the Smurfs' creator Peyo could have been an anti-Semite. But I'm hesitant to endorse this theory, not because it will spoil my childhood, but because it's all speculative. I know nothing about Peyo's life, and he isn't around to defend himself against these charges. (A son of his, however, has dismissed the accusations as "between the grotesque and the not serious.") None of the articles I've seen have provided any new information, just interpretations of what I already know.

Actually, let me qualify that a little. The HuffPost article did mention one fact that I admit was pretty damning with regard to another prejudice. Apparently the very first Smurf cartoon was called "The Black Smurf" and was about a disease that turns smurfs black, where they become dimwitted and say "nyap nyap." US publishers refused to print this cartoon, and later they made the infected smurfs purple. (I remember reading a strip concerning a green smurf that bites other smurfs to turn them green--but my memory could be failing me as to the exact color. I just assumed it was the smurf equivalent of vampires or zombies.) That does sound racist, and quite similar to things on our side of the pond from Disney and Warner Bros. (many of which, such as the black centaurs in Fantasia, have been censored).

As for Gargamel's alleged Jewishness, I have much the same reaction as JewOrNotJew.com: it makes me uncomfortable, but there's no conclusive evidence to prove this theory correct. Gargamel is never identified as a Jew. He doesn't have a Jewish-sounding name or speak any Yiddish. The evidence, such as it is, apparently escaped the notice of American producers of the Saturday morning cartoons (which I watched as a kid through a VCR, an invention of great use to observant Jews in the '80s). It's also possible that the element of anti-Semitic stereotyping was subconscious, rather than part of an agenda, on Peyo's part.

I'm reminded of when The Phantom Menace came out and some critics suggested that some of the alien creatures were thinly disguised racial and ethnic stereotypes. What provoked the most ire were the inaptly (or ineptly) named Gungans, especially Jar Jar, a flop-eared, blubbering creature whom Newsweek's David Ansen described as "a kind of intergalactic Stepin Fetchit." Getting only slightly less attention were the "Asian" Neimodians and the slaveowner Watto, a winged creature with a hooked beak, a strange accent, and more than a dollop of greed. Slate's Bruce Gottleib reacted indignantly to Richard Corliss's suggestion that Watto's accent was "Turkish":

Turkish? Even without the visual clue of the hooked nose, Watto's accent is clearly Yiddish, not Turkish. Or click "No"; listen again; and you tell me: Is Corliss crazy or am I?

Personally I don't think either writer is crazy, but I didn't pick up what Gottlieb was hearing in Watto's voice, even after downloading that sound clip. I'm no expert on Turkish accents, but Watto's accent did not strike me as Yiddish. And I should know, given that my maternal grandfather had one.

Part of the problem is that Lucas made a choice in the prequels to have some of his aliens speak English in made-up accents, rather than totally made-up languages like in the original trilogy. This wasn't a bad idea in the abstract. In an intergalactic society, I imagine there would be diverse accents and not just diverse languages. But I think that whenever people hear an accent they can't immediately identify, their instinct is to compare it to accents they know. JewOrNotJew.com dismisses the theory about Watto before you can say "smurfin' awesome":

If a character is designated as Jewish and is portrayed as loving money, having a big nose, being henpecked by women, whatever, that's a negative Jewish stereotype and the creator should be called to task.

But if a character has a big nose and loves money and the anti-defamation league or whoever says that makes him/her Jewish, well, that's not the creator of the character spreading negative stereotypes. That's the Jews themselves.

But then why did this same site suggest that Gargamel is "probably" the creation of a bigot? He has a big nose and loves money and is no more identified as a Jew than Watto is. Is it because Gargamel is a human on Earth while Watto is an alien in a galaxy far, far away? Or is it because whoever runs this site has a harder time ascribing anti-Semitic motives to George Lucas than to a mid-20th-century Belgian whose life story isn't well-known?

That's part of the way I look at it, I admit. I highly doubt Lucas is consciously racist or anti-Semitic. I think it's possible the echo of ethnic stereotypes could find its way into Star Wars, a potpourri of myths, legends, and old movies. There are elements of it in the original trilogy, though mostly too vague to seem offensive: Yoda seems modeled on an Asian master, the ewoks are rather like a stereotypical African or Amazonian tribe, and the Tusken Raiders bear a clear imprint of desert nomads on earth such as Bedouins. I'm sure Lucas would be the first to admit all this. But he has consistently gotten defensive at any suggestion of racial insensitivity on his part. He did so when the 1977 film came out and some critics complained about the all-white cast (except for James Earl Jones as the voice of Vader). He did so when critics of The Phantom Menace complained about Jar Jar and co.

While I'm not ready to let Lucas totally off the hook about Jar Jar, I never noticed the stuff about Watto until others pointed it out. And I ought to have enough Jewdar to pick it up, if it was there. I don't hope to convince anyone who did see it, however. There's a heavy amount of subjectivity in these interpretations, and yet you can't totally dismiss the idea of veiled racism in a children's fantasy, because it's a fact that there's a long tradition of it. All I can do is try to distinguish those who have ill intent from those who stumble into these images by accident.

I'm all ers

2011-05-05T07:00:00.005-04:00

People who think Osama Bin Laden's death was a hoax are now being dubbed "deathers." A couple of years ago, the word "deather" referred to an entirely different conspiracy theory--the one about "death panels" in the Democratic health-care plan. That theory lives on in wingnuttia, but I guess we'll have to come up with a different name for it now. I suspect the new deatherism will prove more popular and last much longer.

In point of fact, conspiracy theories typically don't have names. For example, there's no official name for the JFK theories or the people who believe in them. They aren't called "JFKers" or "Kennedyers." Similarly, people who believe Obama is a secret Muslim aren't called "Muslimmers." These theories don't have names, yet they're as widespread as the ones that do.

But in recent years it seems there have to be specific terms for each type of crackpot, and the terms are created by adding -er to a noun associated with the particular theory. There are the truthers, then there are the birthers, then the tenthers, and now the deathers.

I think this practice started with the 9/11 doubters. They referred to their own movement as "9/11 Truth," the idea being that they were trying to get at the real truth behind the attacks. Since other people didn't want to credit it as being a "truth" movement, they began calling its adherents "truthers." By the time people began questioning Obama's birth certificate, the truther movement had been around for several years, and it was natural to dub the new conspiracists "birthers."

This way of using the suffix -er actually predates 9/11. Past examples include the terms flat-earther, young-earther, and John Bircher. It doesn't necessarily have to apply to kooks; it could be just a way of saying the person is wrong-headed. If you call someone a pro-lifer or a pro-choicer, chances are you are not one. My guess is that attaching -er to a noun has the effect of trivializing a cause that people within the cause take seriously, and it therefore carries negative connotations. There are exceptions, however. Star Trek fans have always called themselves Trekkers, while being derided by others as Trekkies.

According to dictionaries, the -er suffix is used primarily for comparatives like faster, where the stem is an adjective, and for agent-nouns like reader, where the stem is a verb. There is, however, a class of -er words derived from nouns to denote someone who has to do with something. This includes occupations (hatter), residents of a place or region (villager, Southerner, Icelander), and people associated with a particular characteristic or circumstance (old-timer, six-footer, lifer). I suspect this last usage is what the crackpot -er is based on.

One final observation is that this only seems to work when the noun stem has just one syllable, as in truth, birth, death, earth, Birch, choice, or life. When the subject of the conspiracy theory has more than one syllable, as in JFK or Muslim or Roswell, attaching -er to the word just doesn't sound right. We also don't do it if the noun stem could easily be misinterpreted as a verb. Presumably that's why the folks who doubt the moon landings haven't been called "mooners." And a good thing, too.

Changing to Disqus

2011-02-21T06:00:00.009-05:00

I have changed my commenting system to Disqus. The upgrade required me to change the look of my blog. I tried to pick a layout that looked similar to the one I had before.

From personal experience, Disqus can be an aggravating system at times, but it's free, and it's better than the one I was using before, Echo, which is not free. Before I upgraded, I manually saved all the past Echo comments to my computer. I intend to repost them in the Disqus section for old posts, but it will take some time.

I also have a few things that got eliminated from the sidebar when I changed the layout. I intend to put them back soon.

UPDATE (2/24/2011): I have now successfully exported all the old Echo comments to Disqus. Feel free to add your comments to any post, old or new.

UPDATE (3/8/2011): It turns out the comments have not been successfully imported. Only for posts from about a year ago to the present have any of the comments appeared, and even then, it is inconsistent. I'm currently working this out with Disqus through email. But you may still add comments to any post you like, and they won't be affected by the eventual transfer of the old Echo comments.

The headrooming of society

2011-02-20T10:00:00.002-05:00

From my childhood to the present, I watched the world grow increasingly science fictiony. But it happened differently than most science fiction stories imagined. Intelligent androids and intergalactic space travel are, at the very least, a long way off, regardless of how many computerized Jeopardy contestants and Mars colonization plans we encounter. Yet the rise of the Internet and cellphones has made our society much more tech-centered than before. I enjoy looking back at old sci-fi that takes place now and seeing what it got right, what it got wrong, and what it didn't even consider.

I kept all this in mind as I viewed the DVD of Max Headroom, the 1987 TV show. Given my vivid memories of the show and its frequent references in popular culture at the time (remember Doonesbury's Reagan parody, Ron Headrest?), I was surprised to learn it ran for barely two seasons of just 14 episodes. The pilot, based on a 1985 British telefilm I still haven't seen, concerns a muckraking TV journalist named Edison Carter who gets into a motorcycle accident after uncovering a scandal at his own network. A young hacker named Bryce, hoping to find out what Edison knows, unloads Edison's mind into a computer, resulting in an artificial version of the reporter. The program's first words, "max headroom," the last words Edison saw before his head collided with a parking garage barrier, become the program's name.

After Edison regains consciousness, Max develops as an independent mind who can travel anywhere on the network at will and can even jump to other networks if given the opportunity. Both he and Edison are played by Matt Frewer, a tall skinny actor with a voice like Kermit the Frog. In his dual role he gives the sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde performance that later made Jim Carrey a star, playing both a withdrawn nerd and a manic, uninhibited personality. Watching the show as an adult, I discovered that I found Max's loud talk-show-host shtick rather grating. As a kid, I think I enjoyed the series mostly for its techno-thriller plots and paid little attention to its not-too-subtle anticorporate satire.

What is the show's vision of the early 21st century? (The time frame is never identified directly, but the pilot gives one big clue, when Bryce, played by an actor of about 16, is said to have been born in 1988--suggesting it takes place around 2004 or so.) It depicts a society literally run by TV networks. In place of an apparently absent government, the networks have their own politicians elected through online voting. Money is measured in "creds" rather than dollars. A subculture of "blanks," people who have escaped registration on the central database, has emerged.

As a single-minded pursuer of truth in a society buried under propaganda, Edison traverses the city carrying around a large wireless camera connected directly to his network, allowing him two-way conversations with operators who can tell him instantly about the dimensions of whatever building he's in and where people in it are located. When conventional technology fails, his electronic alter-ego pops up on computer screens around the city, ready to help out.

I'm always amused at how futuristic speculations turn out to overestimate technological advancement in certain areas and underestimate it in others. In 1989's Back to the Future Part II, for example, we learn that by 2015 we will have flying cars, hoverboards, self-fitting clothes, convincing holograms, etc., etc.--yet the characters still use fax machines. I've come across two early-'90s novels about advanced VR games--Piers Anthony's Killobyte and Vivian Vande Velde's User Unfriendly--in which the gamers still use telephone modems. There's a tendency for futurists to be overconfident about the most exciting developments while failing to predict the obsolescence of everyday objects.

Max Headroom has some of those qualities. The title character is an intelligent, sentient being whose creation depends on advances in A.I. and mind-reading way beyond anything we have today. Yet most of the computer technology on the show looks hopelessly primitive to any real resident of the 21st century. The characters still use floppy disks--no CD-ROMs or flash drives in sight. There are no computer mice and there's no Windows, despite the fact that both existed, if obscurely, in 1987. The hackers communicate with the computers using just a keyboard, hooked to a TV screen displaying block print on a black background. There are lots of vidphones but no cellphones.

Looking at the big picture, though, the series was pretty ahead of its time. Without ever using the word "Internet," it envisioned a society that has gone almost entirely online, with signals transported through air rather than just through wires, with instant communication over long distances even while outdoors, and with a total integration of TV, video, and computers. Topics covered on the show include identity theft, cyberterrorism, video editing, and medically harmful commercials--among other things. Then there is the aforementioned GPS-like navigation tool in buildings, and, perhaps most eerily, bar graphs that get updated in real time.

In its social vision, the show follows the cyberpunk tradition of extreme paranoia about loss of individual rights in a future dominated by big corporations. In one episode, a blank faces execution for a nonlethal computer prank, and he's linked to the crime based on statistical analysis without any direct evidence of his guilt. Another episode has one of the network "politicians" placing blanks in detention camps. Privacy in this universe is almost nonexistent because there are cameras everywhere, even inside people's homes. This all looks a tad less fantastical in today's world of satellite cams, increased surveillance, and "unlawful combatants."

For all its hyperbole, Max Headroom is one of the more realistic projections of the future I've seen. Part of its secret, I believe, is that it starts from a base of real knowledge about computing. I had the sense that the writers understood the subject and weren't faking it with meaningless technobabble. Even when the show dips into outlandish territory (as in one episode in which a network is literally stealing people's dreams), it stays grounded in a way that many other sci-fi productions do not. Its most important insight was that the talking-head approach to TV journalism, with its concern for ratings over truth, would naturally worsen as the technology grew more centralized.

What the series most failed to anticipate was how the Internet would begin to replace traditional media. The fact that I'm writing all this on a blog, making my thoughts available to just about anyone on the planet, even though I'm not a journalist or politician or celebrity, illustrates how regular citizens today have the power to make their voice heard in ways that weren't possible twenty years ago. While the image of corporate takeover in Max Headroom and similar sci-fi works seems prescient in many ways, what they didn't foresee is the tool we'd have for exerting our personal identity against those who aim to suppress it.

Is "blood libel" a generic expression?

2011-01-13T10:19:00.015-05:00

linked to at DovBear's blog

Sarah Palin's use of the phrase "blood libel" to describe claims that her actions contributed to the recent shootings sparked considerable controversy yesterday. Even conservatives like Jonah Goldberg and Jennifer Rubin who agreed with the substance of her remarks felt it wasn't the best choice of words. But it earned a defense from an unlikely source: Alan Dershowitz.

The term “blood libel” has taken on a broad metaphorical meaning in public discourse. Although its historical origins were in theologically based false accusations against the Jews and the Jewish People, its current usage is far broader. I myself have used it to describe false accusations against the State of Israel by the Goldstone Report. There is nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations that her words or images may have caused a mentally disturbed individual to kill and maim. The fact that two of the victims are Jewish is utterly irrelevant to the propriety of using this widely used term.

I myself am unfamiliar with the use of the term outside a Jewish context, and Dershowitz hardly proves his case by citing his own use of it to describe a report charging the Jewish state with war crimes. But I was curious about whether his larger point holds up to scrutiny. Certainly there are expressions that have acquired a generic quality even though they have the potential to cause offense because of their historical associations. I think of when President Bush dropped his use of the word "crusade" in 2001, fearing it would offend Muslims. It was a good idea, but his usage of the term was at least understandable. To most English speakers, "crusade" is a generic term for fighting for something. Is the phrase "blood libel," similarly, a generic term for being falsely accused of a terrible deed?

I checked Google News, with its mammoth historical archive of news articles. The phrase "blood libel" gets 1,280 hits for articles between 1950 and 2009. But when I search for articles in this range that don't contain the words "Jew," "Jewish," or "Israel," the hits shrink to 76. In other words, as I suspected, it's uncommon for the phrase "blood libel" to be used outside a Jewish (or Israeli) context.

Uncommon--but not unheard of. Jim Geraghty has dug up several examples, such as when Peter Deutsch in 2000 said Republicans made a "blood libel" against Al Gore when they accused him of disenfranchising soldiers. What is striking, though, is that most of the other examples Geraghty cites concern attacks on entire groups, such as blacks or homosexuals. Charging that all gay men are pedophiles may not constitute an exact historical parallel with the claim that Jews baked Christian children in their matzo, but it isn't all that different either.

Palin is not part of a persecuted minority. She hasn't been legally charged with anything. The criticism that she may have somehow provoked the shooting with violent rhetoric and imagery was directed at her as an individual, not as a member of a group. Her usage of the term "blood libel" in this context is unusual--and certainly inappropriate.

Triangaylation

2010-12-27T07:05:00.037-05:00

When it comes to same-sex marriage, President Obama is almost as transparently cynical as Mitt Romney is on most other issues. Recently he admitted that his feelings on the topic were "evolving." If so, they are evolving toward the point where he started. Back in 1996, when Obama was running for the Illinois state senate, he affirmed in a questionnaire, "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages."

The New Republic has provided a helpful timeline chronicling his gradual move away from this position. He eventually embraced "civil unions," the term for policies that grant gay couples at least some of the benefits that married couples receive without calling the unions "marriages." Explaining his stance in 2004, he framed it as a strategic choice: "What I'm saying is that strategically, I think we can get civil unions passed.... I think that to the extent that we can get the rights, I'm less concerned about the name." But in 2008 he stated, "I believe that marriage is between a man and woman and I am not in favor of gay marriage," though he opposed the Prop 8 ban on gay marriage, calling it "unnecessary."

I find it hard to believe he was for gay marriage in '96 and later sincerely changed his mind. That might happen to someone who underwent a religious conversion and became more socially conservative. But Obama's conversion happened in the '80s, and it involved the UCC, one of the more gay-friendly denominations of American Christianity. (The UCC officially endorsed gay marriage in 2005.) The likelier explanation is that he calculated that his original position would hamper his political ambitions.

I'm not sure he was wrong. Up to now, no serious presidential contender has openly supported gay marriage, not even the supposedly progressive Howard Dean. In the 2008 election, Obama was already fighting claims that he was outside the mainstream. Open support could have easily sunk his candidacy before it got off the ground, getting him written off as another Kucinich-type flake. But now, with more and more states legalizing the practice, and with polls showing increasing support for it among the public at large, Obama probably fears being on the wrong side of history at a pivotal moment.

Other Democrats face a similar dilemma. Joe Biden recently agreed with Obama on having "evolving" views on the topic (how convenient!) and suggested gay marriage was inevitable. That's about as close to an endorsement as I ever would have imagined. But it makes sense given his history. During the 2008 vice presidential debate, he said, "We do support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do." But when the moderator Gwen Ifill asked him directly "Do you support gay marriage?" he replied, "No. [Neither] Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage," but he added that people of all faiths have the right to define the relationships as they please.

Presumably, Biden's statement that he supports benefits for "couples in a same-sex marriage" was a slip of the tongue, and he meant to say simply "same-sex couples." But it's a revealing slip, highlighting the semantic nature of the issue. Throughout the last decade, the phrase "civil unions" has provided cover for politicians who don't want to appear too radical but who also don't want to seem draconian in denying couples things like visitation rights. (SNL's version of the debate has Biden saying he would "absolutely not" support same-sex marriage, but that "they should be allowed to visit one another in the hospital, and in a lot of ways that's just as good if not better.") This balancing act has been especially painful to watch in the case of Dick Cheney, whose views have apparently been affected by his having a lesbian daughter. He declined to endorse Bush's Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004, but he avoided saying anything more about his personal views than that the matter should be left to the states and that "Freedom means freedom for everybody."

All these capitulations have an unfortunate side effect: they make it easy for people to overlook the difference between pols who nominally oppose gay marriage and pols who crusade against it. Just this year, in response to the uproar over his anti-gay remarks, New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino took a more conciliatory tone, pointing out that "I have the same position on [the marriage] issue as President Barrack [sic] Obama." But somehow I have trouble imagining Obama ever expressing his position the way Paladino did earlier:

If you elect me as your next governor, you can depend on me to protect and defend your family from those who seek to tear down our values and bankrupt our citizens. And yes, I will veto all legislation that mocks our sacred institution of marriage and family. I will veto any gay marriage or civil union bill that comes to my desk. Yes I'm angry. Real angry at the way our politically correct elites are mistreating our innocent children, and I want to protect them and give them a real future in America, the greatest country on God's green Earth.

The fact is, the kind of fiery talk that depicts gay marriage as a threat to our civilization comes mostly from Republicans. Democrats who claim to oppose gay marriage rarely explain their position clearly, much less engage in sky-is-falling rhetoric. Their strategy is basically one of damage control, trying to expand the practical rights of gay people while avoiding turning off too many social conservatives. But as the veil slips, it'll be interesting to watch who comes out on what side in the end.

The story of my political formation

2010-11-10T11:00:00.002-05:00

The fact that I came of age during the Clinton years had an important effect on my political outlook. The first presidential election I paid any attention to was 1992, when I was 15, and although I naturally rooted for Clinton because my liberal parents did, my observations were mostly superficial. I actually don't remember the 1994 Republican takeover. It just wasn't on my radar at the time. But a year later, as I was beginning college, the government shutdown had an immediate impact on my family. My father was a federal employee, as was our next-door neighbor, a single black woman with a teenage son. It didn't help things that one of my brothers had recently passed away.

For the first time, I got a very direct glimpse of the effect that politics could have on everyday lives. It was no longer just a funny game I saw on TV, featuring colorful personalities in fancy suits. I also began to have my first informed judgment on a political figure, in this case a Congressional leader by the name of Newt Gingrich, who provided me with my first taste of what it was like to deeply loathe a politician.

I also was beginning to discover the phenomenon of Rush Limbaugh, as well as Christian Coalition figures such as Falwell, Robertson, and Reed. I personally encountered people who insisted with a straight face that the president was a rapist, a murderer, and a drug addict. These people, who included a few of my parents' friends, typically spoke of liberals as if describing a distinct species of insect. Arguing with them was usually an exercise in futility, for they had a barrage of "facts" they had picked up from talk radio, which they listened to far more often than I had time to listen to anything.

These experiences left a powerful impression on me, because I couldn't help noticing that the contemporary American right was apparently run by complete lunatics and charlatans. The maligned liberals, on the other hand, were mostly represented for me by thoughtful milquetoasts like Michael Kinsley. Maybe it wasn't fair that I got such a terrible first impression of conservatives, who I know include many reasonable individuals. I was well aware that the left had its share of clowns, such as Al Sharpton, but they didn't seem to matter a whole lot. There was a notable imbalance in the political spectrum that belied the cliche evenhandedness so many pundits found seductive.

I sometimes got the sense that even the conservative intelligentsia were simply playing the good cop to Limbaugh's bad cop, saying the same stuff in gentler language. A 1995 article I read by William F. Buckley took Clinton to task for his attacks on Limbaugh. Buckley conceded that Limbaugh "induces hatred" and that "if I were a liberal, I would hate him," but he went on to suggest that FDR and Truman did the same sort of thing to the other side. Not a word about Limbaugh's lies or conspiracy theories. This from the 20th century's greatest conservative intellectual.

I made these observations long before I gave any serious thought to budgets, taxes, health care, trade, and so on. While certain causes like environmentalism and gay rights were no-brainers to me from the start, I was initially tempted in a more rightward direction on such issues as abortion, affirmative action, and school vouchers. But the disintegration of any sane right-wing establishment was formative for me, and I would watch the problem grow ever worse as the years passed.

Everything that's happening now looks to me like the logical end result of what was happening in the '90s. A very moderate Democratic president presiding over an economic boom is clobbered by conservatives as some kind of left-wing hippie and nearly hounded from office for sexual lapses of no consequence to anyone but his own family. A Republican enters the White House under highly questionable circumstances and in the course of eight years leaves the country in two hapless wars one of which he started for no good reason, unprecedented debt, and the worst recession since the Great Depression. The disaster of the Bush years is so breathtaking I almost distrust my own judgment on the matter. Maybe I'm falling prey to the same kind of partisan hatred that characterized Clinton's adversaries. But no matter how I look at it, I can't escape the conclusion that Bush truly is one of the worst presidents in history. And it's amazing to watch the conservative establishment today attempt to make us all forget that just a few short years ago they practically worshiped the man.

When it comes to the right, the most visible difference between the 1990s and today is the rise of Fox News. Yes, it did begin in 1996, but it didn't become a force to be reckoned with until the Bush years. The first sign came with the election itself, when a reporter who just happened to be Bush's first cousin called the election for Bush, and all the other news networks--the legitimate ones, that is--followed suit. This set the tone for the Florida post-election fiasco that would follow.

Fox has grown steadily worse. Before, it was a right-leaning network that pretended to be fair and balanced. Now it's just a TV version of talk radio, a calculated, large-scale attempt to brainwash its viewers through the use of misleading propaganda, outright lies, and conspiracy-mongering, nonstop 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week. It is nothing more than the right's Pravda. And it still has an astonishing influence on the mainstream networks, the ones we're supposed to believe are "liberal-biased."

So it was all set when the godfather of this mode of politics, Rush Limbaugh, said he hopes Obama fails, and not a single Republican in power had the strength to distance himself from Limbaugh, not without quickly reversing himself and groveling at Limbaugh's feet for forgiveness. This is what's truly new about the right wing: there is now no separation at all between the propagandists of right-wing media and the Republicans holding public office.

And somehow, the things said against Obama and other Democrats are worse than during the Clinton years. Back then, the attacks were merely nasty. Now, it is absolutely no exaggeration to say that Republican politicians and commentators are stoking insurrection. The tone of conservative hatred today isn't just hysterical, but contains not-very-subtle appeals to violence: talks of Second Amendment remedies, drawing crosshairs on Congressional maps with the slogan "Don't retreat--reload," explicitly defending violent overthrow of the government. The rhetoric is increasingly apocalyptic, and the very name of the opposition movement--"Tea Party"--deliberately alludes to the events leading up to the American Revolution. What's scariest about all this is that the Clinton years gave us Timothy McVeigh; who knows what's coming up now. And something will, make no mistake, because the tea-partiers will invariably be disappointed when the officials they have elected fail to stop Obama's agenda. And they don't strike me as the sorts of people to take disappointment by packing their bags and walking home.

That's why there's a lot more to the current political situation than rooting for teams. I don't mean to suggest that the past was one long Golden Age–I know my parents' generation alone went through Vietnam and Watergate–but I feel in my bones that there's something uniquely disturbing about what's happening now, even under the first president in my life I've had any enthusiasm for.

This post is based on a comment I wrote on Emily Hauser's blog last week. She suggested that I post it to my blog. I expanded on a few sections and edited the wording here and there, but it's more or less the same.

Cross-posted to Daily Kos.

With friends like these

2010-11-01T07:45:00.001-04:00

cross-posted at DovBear's blog

It appears that John Boehner is planning to campaign for Rich Iott, the Nazi-impersonating congressional candidate.

It's important to understand how offensive this is: the problem is not that Iott participated in historical reenactments, which are perfectly legitimate, or even that he dressed as a bad guy. The problem is that the whole reenactment is invested with significant historical revisionism that views these SS officers admiringly and makes only the vaguest references to the crimes they committed. The website contains a disclaimer disavowing support for either neo-Nazis or the original Nazis and condemning "the atrocities which made them infamous." What it does not do is make any mention of the Holocaust, Jews, or even genocide.

This approach to the war is Holocaust minimization, a soft form of denial that doesn't engage in any outright conspiracy-mongering about a Holocaust "hoax," but nonetheless describes World War II in a way that greatly downplays the crimes of the Nazis in an effort to make the two sides seem somehow equivalent. In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Iott argued that we shouldn't judge these officers because they were doing what they thought was right, that the SS unit he was reenacting had never been charged with war crimes (in fact, one member was recently charged with the murder of 58 Jews), and that "Horrible things...happened on both sides." If you think Iott makes a single mention of the Holocaust during this interview (other than a bare statement that he doesn't deny it), I've got a tea-bag to sell you.

After the refreshing disavowal of Iott by Eric Cantor, who is Jewish, I find Boehner's decision to stick by this guy pretty sickening. It brings to mind another story recently about the Emergency Committee for Israel, a lobbying organization that is supposedly devoted to getting pro-Israel candidates elected ("pro-Israel" in the most hawkish, right-wing sense) but in practice seems more interested simply in getting Republicans elected:

If ECI genuinely cared about electing pro-Israel members of Congress, it would launch big money campaigns against Tea Party candidates, such as Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), the source said.

Toomey, for instance, has twice voted against foreign aid packages, which are widely viewed as principal pro-Israel litmus tests, as they include large amounts of financial assistance for the Jewish state. (According to the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, Toomey said that he "feels Israel no longer needs economic aid, and should simply receive military assistance.")

Pollak, however, defended Toomey, noting that he voted against foreign aid not out of hostility toward Israel, but "as a matter of larger fiscal principles. He has never shown a particular animosity toward Israel -- far from it."

In short, vote Republican because the Republicans are better for Israel, but vote Republican even when they aren't better for Israel. If that confuses you, don't worry about it, just vote Republican.

What we need to understand is that a lot of the Israel talk by Republicans is not done for the sake of Jews. It is for the consumption of Christian Zionists who vastly outnumber their Jewish counterparts and who aren't necessarily even "pro-Jewish," as can be seen from Pat Robertson's bizarre views.

Or, to paraphrase James Baker, we don't vote for Republicans anyway, so we might as well go be fruitful and multiply.

A compendium of politically incorrect views

2010-07-21T13:15:00.005-04:00

People talk about political correctness so often you'd think there'd be a simple, consistent definition of the concept. All we know for certain is that it's bad for something to be PC, and that individuals who violate PC standards are being unjustly persecuted. Or at least that's what everyone who invokes this phrase seems to think. But what does the phrase mean?

That's what I've set out to determine. I'm not looking in any dictionaries or on Wikipedia. Instead, I've collected a sampling of quotes from various sources that use this expression, and from them I've attempted to discern its larger meaning.

Let's start with Regnery's Politically Incorrect Guide series. Among the many PI truths you will learn from these books is that the Civil War was not about slavery, that the robber barons benefited the U.S. more than any government program ever did, that the medieval Islamic world didn't contribute greatly to science, that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, and that hunters are "America's real environmentalists."

Having been written by different people, the guides do not always jibe with one another. In a rare moment of factual correctness, Clint Johnson's Politically Incorrect Guide to the South lists rock 'n' roll as one of the great products of that region. But Jonathan Leaf's Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties (whose author seems to have drifted into the PC debate a few decades too late) describes rock music as an artistic void with little talent.

In the view of some conservatives, PC is the cause of all our problems. According to Tea Party Express spokesman Mark Williams, "Political correctness is going to kill us. Political correctness led to 9/11, political correctness led to Barack Hussein Obama. Political correctness is a societal HIV." No one is immune to infection, not even, apparently, his own supporters. He wrote, in reply to one of several commenters at his site who criticized his controversial Lincoln letter, "you are crippled--mentally and emotionally--by political correctness."

Still, I suspect even Williams would be surprised at how the phrase has been used outside the United States. "It would be sad," wrote British journalist Peter Millar on the doomed libel suit of Holocaust "revisionist" David Irving, "if we allowed political correctness to condemn Irving for thinking (or even saying) the unsayable."

So now Holocaust denial is merely "not PC." It therefore shouldn't surprise us that other unsavory views have found their way into this category. Consider a notorious moment from Robert Novak's 1995 interview with Sen. Jesse Helms:

CALLER: Mr. Helms, I know this might not be politically correct to say these days, but I just think that you should get a Nobel Peace Prize for everything you've done to help keep down the niggers.

NOVAK: Oh, dear.

HELMS: Whoops. [looks at camera] Well, thank you, I think.

[both laugh nervously]

NOVAK: That was the bad word. That was politically incorrect. Can you--we really don't condone that kind of language, do we?

HELMS: No, no, no.

NOVAK: Absolutely.

HELMS: No. My father didn't condone it. When I was a little boy, one of the worst spankings I ever got is when I used that word, and I don't think I've used it ever since.

NOVAK: And you had--

HELMS: Mark Twain used it.

NOVAK: And you had--you had--you had African Americans on your staff a long time ago, didn't you? As I remember.

HELMS: Oh yes. I hired several.

Notice that neither Novak nor Helms addressed the caller's stated views. Only his language seemed to put them on edge, his use of a "politically incorrect" word. Somehow I get the sense that young Helms would not have been spanked for wishing to "keep down the blacks."

But it isn't just conservatives who talk about PC. In his unflattering review of the live-action version of Mr. Magoo, Roger Ebert wrote:

There is one laugh in the movie. It comes after the action is over, in the form of a foolish, politically correct disclaimer stating that the film "is not intended as an accurate portrayal of blindness or poor eyesight."

Though I haven't seen the movie, I agree that trying to avoid offending the nearsighted in a Mr. Magoo film is indeed an example of PC run amok. But I wasn't sure I followed Ebert's reasoning in another instance of his use of the phrase:

The beat goes on with Ron Howard's The Missing, a clunky Western that tries so hard to be Politically Correct that although young women are kidnapped by Indians to be sold into prostitution in Mexico, they are never molested by their captors.

This is interesting. In an age of revisionist Westerns like Dances with Wolves that paint a sympathetic portrait of Indians, Ebert thinks one in which they boil white men alive and sell white girls into slavery is PC because they don't behave quite as savagely as we might expect. Got it.

Then there is the 1991 New York Times review of the Dictionary of Cautionary Words and Phrases, a handbook which the reviewer attributes to "the disease of political correctness." While some of the book's advice is arguably a little excessive--it instructs journalists to say homemaker instead of housewife, to avoid the noun Jew in favor of Jewish person, and never to describe a black person as "articulate"--it also includes things we take for granted now, such as the term Asian to replace Oriental. I even once saw a documentary in which a young skinhead was bashing a race he called Asians. When you have neo-Nazis nonchalantly saying Asian, I think it's safe to say it has advanced from PC terminology to common speech.

That's actually the case with a lot of the terms that were once derided as PC. Few people today blink at Native American, Latino, diversity, homophobia, substance abuse, and vegan--all of which appear as entries in 1992's tongue-in-cheek Official Politically Correct Dictionary alongside such items as sobriety-deprived for "drunk" and terminally inconvenienced for "dead."

The most striking use of the phrase "PC" I can remember came in a blog discussion I was reading some years ago. A commenter referred to a particular author as an idiot. The blogger said he agreed with the commenter's criticism but added that there was no need to engage in ad hominem attacks. The commenter retorted, "Oh, don't be so PC." The discussion had nothing to do with politics. To the commenter, "PC" simply meant being polite to avoid offending someone.

Based on all these examples, I am forced to draw the following conclusions about the phrase "PC":

1. It is absolutely meaningless.

The amount of things the "PC" label has been mockingly applied to is truly diverse. It can mean the often amusing excesses of the academic left, in particular the weird coinages. Or it can mean perfectly mainstream ideas such as the notion that the Civil War had something to do with slavery or that the Holocaust did in fact occur. It can mean trying to avoid offending the nearsighted, or it can mean neglecting to call someone you disagree with an idiot. Since there's no set standard for when sensitivity goes too far, the phrase is a free-for-all that usually says more about the person using it than it does about whatever the person is talking about.

2. It fosters the idea that sensitivity is a sin.

In practice, the phrase has become an excuse for boorish, inconsiderate behavior. People invoke it as a lazy way of trying to imply that no one has a right to be offended, without having to justify their position. It fosters the idea that words don't matter, that they can't harm anyone, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a joyless schoolmarm out to control everyone's speech.

3. It blurs the line between taboo language and taboo opinions.

Being un-PC sometimes refers to a questionable choice of words, even when no one objects to the point of view being expressed. At other times it refers to just the reverse--a controversial viewpoint expressed without any objectionable language. As a consequence of this ambiguity, the phrase distracts attention from the content of people's speech and makes all offending statements sound like mere violations of decorum. You can see that clearly in Helms and Novak's inadequate response to the racist caller.

4. Anyone who uses the phrase is, by definition, a hypocrite.

When people label a statement PC, they are effectively trying to shut down debate and eject the statement from the conversation by making it sound unworthy of serious discussion. Thus, the term does exactly what it is allegedly fighting against. This becomes particularly noticeable when those who claim to be battling PC propaganda are in fact promoting right-wing propaganda, but it is inherent in the phrase itself.

5. It is sometimes hard to resist using.

I've used it myself on occasion, and I no doubt will use it again. Let's face it, we live in a culture where lots of people take umbrage at things they shouldn't. The pushback against racism, sexism, and all the other isms has had a stifling effect on our discourse, down to the jokes we tell. But I realize that's a biased statement, and I can offer no precise standard for when it is or isn't justified to be offended. I just know it when I see it, whether or not that's okay with any of you cerebrally challenged hunks of processed animal carcasses.

Take me to your leader

2010-04-17T21:50:00.009-04:00

If there is one scientific topic that provokes strong opinions in the absence of any direct knowledge whatsoever, it is life on other planets. Some scientists feel certain Earth is the only place in the universe where life resides; others insist the question is not whether life exists in other places, but where. You will find sane, rational people with full command of the facts coming out on either side of this debate.

I lean toward the second possibility. The notion that in the entire universe, the only planet with living things just happens to be the only one we've ever seen up close, seems a stretch to me. But I admit I have no proof. It's just a hunch.

"Just a hunch" is the best we can do when it comes to these arguments, which never stand up to logical scrutiny. Some scientists point to evidence that life arose on Earth quite soon after the planet's initial formation (say, only several hundred million years), and if it can happen that quickly, it must have happened in other parts of the universe. The problem with this argument (aside from a rather fluid definition of "quickly") is that we still don't know how life arose here, or even whether it did--one theory holds that it came from Mars via meteorite. If we don't know what happened to cause life to exist, then we have no way of knowing whether it could have happened elsewhere.

Other scientists believe the origin of life on Earth was a rare, freakish occurrence in the universe's history, because it depended on a huge number of factors in combination, including Earth's exact composition, temperature, rotation, orbit, and so on. If any one of these factors had been slightly different, so the argument goes, life on Earth either would not have started or would have perished long before it had a chance to evolve into more complex creatures like ourselves.

The answer to this objection is twofold. First, extraterrestrial life could differ from Earth life in ways we have trouble imagining. Second, the universe is just really big. What scientists call the observable universe, or the portion we have the capacity to detect because the light has had enough time to reach us since the beginning, is estimated to have over one hundred billion galaxies. Our own galaxy alone, which remains virtually unexplored, contains hundreds of billions of stars. However unlikely the conditions necessary for life may seem, there is a great deal of space out there for those conditions to be repeated.

In the movie Contact, a scientist played by Jodie Foster argues that there must be life beyond Earth, for otherwise there would be "an awful waste of space." You could interpret this statement different ways. For religious believers, the question is why God would have created all those countless galaxies when only one planet of one star would be inhabited. Perhaps it is so that people in the future will have places to go after Earth is used up or on the brink of destruction. Still, that's an awful lot of space....

A more secular version of the same argument might go something like this: In the vastness of outer space, our solar system is a mere speck in a sea of galaxies that all look more or less like ours. Given the relative uniformity of everything from afar, our default assumption should be that the basic conditions of our vicinity are not unique. This reasoning might not convince those of us who suspect the origin of life was miraculous, but it ought to be good enough for those of a more secular mindset.

One comparison is instructive. Most people have long assumed that there are planets beyond our solar system. Yet until the 1990s, with the discovery of a star that wobbled (suggesting it was being orbited by a large object), there was no concrete evidence that any of these so-called extrasolar planets existed. For all scientists knew, our sun could have been the only star in the entire universe that harbored planets. That possibility runs contrary to intuition for much the same reason the idea that we are alone does. It proved to be incorrect, and I suspect the second idea will also.

Some people will say, "Okay, maybe there's life in other places. Perhaps things on the level of bacteria or even plants have sprouted elsewhere in the universe. But intelligent life? Advanced civilizations? How likely is that?" Skeptical scientists point to some discouraging facts. Although bacteria appear fairly early in the Earth's fossil record, there was nothing but bacteria for the next three billion years--complex, multicellular life doesn't appear until the last billion. Furthermore, current scientific consensus holds that an asteroid caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, and if not for that fortuitous event, brainy mammals would never have come to dominate the planet.

Science fiction movies always assume that alien life must look more or less similar to us. In the real world there are creatures as weird as sea anemones living right here on Earth, but movie aliens invariably have a more standard appearance. Take the recent Avatar. In that film, a crew of Earthlings is investigating the exotic life forms that we're supposed to believe evolved independently in an entirely different solar system. And just how exotic are these creatures? Other than their possessing tails, blue skin, a ten-foot stature, and a few other odd features, they basically look human, sound human, and act human, right down to the mating rituals. The movie's plot is sort of an amped-up Dances with Wolves, only instead of a white man becoming part of a tribe of Lakota Sioux Indians, it has a white man becoming part of a tribe of giant alien smurfs.

I shouldn't make fun. The director, James Cameron, has said he intended the film as "science fantasy" rather than science fiction, and that they'd first designed the aliens as less human-looking before worrying it would turn off audiences. At least the film is a touch more plausible than a lot of older sci-fi like Star Trek, where aliens are shown as humans with pointy ears or ridged skin. But it's striking that more recent flicks like Independence Day and Signs continue to fall back on the most worn cliches about extraterrestrials, depicting them all as green and warty and malevolent.

The most versatile aliens depicted on screen are still probably those in Star Wars. I never fully appreciated that fact until I read Jeanne Cavelos's The Science of Star Wars (1999). Herself an astrophysicist (who also wrote The Science of The X-Files), Cavelos makes a noble effort to find scientific basis for all the major components of the series, including the ships, the weapons, the planets, the aliens, the droids, and even the Force. She doesn't always succeed--but she does explore much of the current research on subjects ranging from A.I. to quantum mechanics. (For a broader discussion about how far along we are toward inventing the technologies of science fiction, I highly recommend the 2008 book Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku, one of my favorite science writers, and one of the scientists Cavelos interviews.) Her chapter on aliens begins with the following observation about the films: "Almost anywhere you go in 'a galaxy far, far away,' alien life is there. You'll either land in it, step on it, or get eaten by it.... Even in environments as inhospitable as Tatooine, Hoth, or an asteroid, life finds a way to survive."

Of course Star Wars has always been one of the more unabashedly unscientific sci-fi franchises. There are serious difficulties in explaining certain things such as how all the creatures breathe comfortably no matter what planet they're on, which seems unlikely unless they're using some sort of technological aid we never see. Cavelos points out that planetary atmospheres may be unique like fingerprints, which would mean that no life form from one planet can breathe naturally on another. Avatar gets this detail right, having the human explorers only able to breathe with gas masks or in air-tight buildings or inside their Avatar bodies.

Still, the sheer diversity of the aliens in Star Wars is impressive, especially compared to earlier films. As Dr. Kaku explains, "the aliens don't look like us anymore. They tried to have aliens with different architectures. In that sense, Star Wars is more realistic than some of the stuff I've seen." And yet many of these aliens are simply analogues of Earth animals: dogs (Wookiees), slugs (Hutts), pigs (Gamorreans), bats (mynocks), and buffalo (banthas). Some of the organisms even look identical to what's on Earth, as in Endor's redwoods or Dagobah's snakes. Most of the invented creatures are humanoid, and those that aren't, like Jabba, are still anthropomorphic. How likely is it that aliens would look that similar to what we see around us?

The book quotes one scientist who argues that most of the visible features that humans possess, such as five-digit hands, are intrinsically efficient characteristics that evolution would tend to produce even on other planets, similar to the way aquatic mammals like dolphins acquired a fish form. Most scientists disagree. As Dr. Jack Cohen puts it, "Finding another planet with our kind of dinosaurs or people is more unlikely than finding a remote Pacific island on which the natives speak perfect German."

Science fiction literature has had the opportunity to envision alien life more broadly than the movies do. Strange life forms appear in hard sci-fi novels such as Robert Forward's Dragon's Egg, which speculates about what the intelligent inhabitants of a neutron star would look like. Part of the reason why movies aren't as daring is budgetary constraints. Commercial films have the most resources for showing aliens. The problem, as James Cameron tells us, is that mass audiences aren't interested in seeing anything truly weird.

Life as we understand it can mean different things, from simple bacteria to advanced civilizations. But since our only frame of reference is what we see around us, we have trouble visualizing aliens without comparing them to familiar creatures. If aliens exist, they might be more bizarre than anything we've ever thought of, much less seen. We can't possibly be certain what lies beyond our immediate knowledge.

Scheming, grasping liberals

2010-02-07T13:02:00.008-05:00

Linked to at DovBear's Blog

It isn't news when Rush Limbaugh says something offensive, but it is intriguing when he shows an ironic lack of self-reflection.

He wondered, in the wake of Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts, if Jews were having second thoughts about their support for Obama. "To some people, 'banker' is a code word for Jewish," Limbaugh said, "and guess who Obama is assaulting? He's assaulting bankers. He's assaulting money people. And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there's starting to be some buyer's remorse there."

In other words, Limbaugh thinks Jews are automatically inclined to perceive an ethnic insult in criticisms of an institution or profession that anti-Semites identify as "Jewish."

Curious, then, that he doesn't apply the same logic to conservative assaults on Hollywood, which often sound quite similar to attacks by neo-Nazis and their ilk. To test the parallels, I collected a series of quotes from Limbaugh and from Stormfront, the Internet's leading white-supremacist website. Any occurrences of the word "Jew" in the latter, I either removed or replaced with the word "liberal." I then shuffled up the five quotes. Try to see if you can determine which are the Limbaugh ones and which the Stormfront ones. I myself would have been unable to do so.

1. "White people, too, are debasing their own culture with some of the rotgut that shows up on TV, some of the rotgut that shows up in Hollywood movies and so forth. Who's running all this? It's liberals! Liberals run Hollywood."

2. "McCarthyism is actually correctly accusing someone of communism, identifying a communist, right? That's what it was. People that hated McCarthy were the commies that were identified."

3. "Ted Turner marries Hanoi Jane Fonda, tries to go Hollywood, push Hollywood-type liberal politics and it just doesn't work."

4. "You recall, and there have been countless movies about this and books, all the liberals in Hollywood spent decades trying to convince the American public and countless congressional hearings, committees, that they weren't in bed with the communists.... now they're embracing communists as a badge of honor."

5. "Imus made the comment about a group, not an individual, just like NRA members are called gun nuts, paranoid whack jobs and other highly insulting terms by the liberal-controlled media."

(Here are the answers: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.)

You get the point. If you have ever perused Stormfront (a lovely experience, I can tell you), you will find that a great deal of what is said there sounds remarkably, eerily similar to things said by Limbaugh, by other conservative talk-radio commentators, and by their millions of listeners. Both crowds attack liberals, socialists, and communists, usually treating the three categories as interchangeable. Both think Hollywood and the media are "run" by left-wing subversives. Both assail welfare, affirmative action, feminism, multiculturalism, gun control, global warming science, and amnesty for illegal aliens. Both consider themselves at war with "elites." Both embrace conspiracy theories, and both see President Obama as an anti-white radical.

Of course, there are also substantial differences between the dittoheads and the Goebbelheads. Limbaugh is strongly pro-Israel and supports the Iraq War, neither exactly a popular stance among white nationalists (who hate Bush almost as much as they hate Obama). He has never explicitly embraced biological racism; he rationalizes his attacks on blacks and other minorities by saying he is only against the way liberal institutions coddle them. I don't believe he is an anti-Semite, and I disagree with the ADL that his remarks about Obama and the banks were "borderline anti-Semitic." His argument was that Jews might perceive attacks on bankers as veiled bigotry because anti-Semites talk that way, not that the banking industry is actually "Jew-controlled."

I just find it fascinating that he would make such an inference, apparently blind to the fact that his very own career is built on a style of demagoguery closely resembling that of some intensely anti-Semitic groups. He spends day upon day vilifying and demonizing many of the same institutions and organizations as the white-power folks do--Hollywood, the media, the government, the ACLU, the Ivy Leaguers--only he doesn't go around describing his targets as Jewish or Zionist, even though many of them do in fact include a disproportionate number of Jews. But as soon as someone utters a word of complaint about the ways of Wall Street, in swoops Mr. Limbaugh to protect us Yids against the slander. It's nice to know someone cares.

Why ethnic labels matter

2010-01-16T19:04:00.009-05:00

One time as I was waiting in the hall for a class, I began a conversation with a woman sitting nearby, and when she asked me what I was taking, I said, "Hebrew." She then inquired, without a hint of irony, "Why do you need to take Hebrew if you are a Hebrew?"

I was struck dumb. It wasn't just her ignorance of the fact that most American Jews are less than fluent in the Hebrew language, it was her referring to me as a "Hebrew." I hadn't encountered that nomenclature before, and if I'd ever expected to, it would have been from a small-town dweller in Alabama or some such place, not from a fellow student at U. of Maryland!

Was I offended? Not really. While I'm suspicious about the sorts of ideas that might accompany her terminological illiteracy, this use of the word "Hebrew" was once considered perfectly respectable--like, oh, back in the nineteenth century. As British historian Paul Johnson notes:

From about the second century BC, when it was so used by Ben Sira, 'Hebrew' was applied to the language of the Bible, and to all subsequent works written in this language. As such it gradually lost its pejorative overtone, so that both to Jews themselves and to sympathetic gentiles, it sometimes seemed preferable to 'Jew' as a racial term. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was much used by the Reform movement in the United States, so that we get such institutions as the Hebrew Union College and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

A quick search on Google News, which has a mammoth historical archive of newspaper articles, turns up numerous instances of this usage between 1875 and 1915. For example, one 1913 article from The New York Times reports, "More than 500 Hebrews crowded Clinton Hall last night and took part in an enthusiastic meeting...in honor of Nahum Sokelew, the Zionist, and editor of the best-known Jewish newspaper in Russia." To this day there are statutes on the book that refer to things like "Orthodox Hebrew religious requirements." But in the common language this sort of phraseology sounds ignorant, if not anti-Semitic, to most people. That it once was standard usage has been all but forgotten.

If you keep up with current events, you may already have suspected where this post was leading. Two apparently coincidental news items recently have sparked a debate in the media and blogosphere about the use of outdated racial/ethnic terminology. In one, the census forms for 2010 included "Negro" as an option for racial identification, because some older blacks still prefer the term. In another, a 2008 quote by Sen. Harry Reid was uncovered in which he had stated that the country was ready for a black president, especially one who was "light-skinned" and spoke "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

If Reid had said "black" instead of "Negro," would his statement still be objectionable? Depends who you ask. (I personally think no.) But most commentators agree that there's something exceedingly strange about hearing the word "Negro" used in earnest, and not in a historical context, by the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate.

Unlike "Hebrew," which few if any individuals alive today remember as an accepted term for a Jewish person, "Negro" fell out of fashion only about 40 years ago. Martin Luther King used the word several times in his "I Have a Dream" speech, and Bobby Kennedy used it when he suggested--with considerable foresight, as it turns out--that the U.S. would elect a black president in the next 40 years. People of Reid's generation (b. 1939) had to expunge the word from their vocabulary when they were well into adulthood. Can younger people like me (b. 1977) understand what that's like? Why, yes we can. That's exactly what happened with the word "Oriental" when I was growing up.

Anyone should be able to understand why terms like these persist in the margins of society for decades after having been purged from mainstream discourse. Apart from the fact that old speech habits die hard, the changes usually seem a little arbitrary on the surface. Why is "Hebrew" more demeaning than "Jew"? Why is the Spanish word for "black" worse than the English word? Partly it may be their closeness to a slur ("Hebe," "nigger," etc.), but the real reason is probably that it is just a way of marking a shift in public attitude. Therefore, any person who continues using a linguistic casualty of this type gives the impression of not having fully absorbed the social developments that left it behind.

I molt therefore I am

2010-01-06T09:46:00.002-05:00

"They administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They nailed poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them and see the circulation of the blood which was a great subject of conversation."
-- Nicolas Fontaine, 1650

I once visited an oceanarium hoping I'd get the chance to hold a live lobster in my hands. It turned out the place wouldn't let us--something about contaminating them, I think. I did get to hold a horseshoe crab, a starfish, and a sea cucumber, all alive. The lobsters, however, we could only observe in their enclosures, snapping their claws, waving their antennae.

Our guide was eager to debunk the popular notion that lobsters scream when they are cooked alive. That is impossible, he told us, first because lobsters have no vocal cords, and second because they have no brains.

That didn't sound right to me. First of all, of course lobsters don't have vocal cords, but then neither do birds, and birds certainly emit a shrill noise when in extreme distress. I suppose he meant lobsters don't vocalize, period. Fair enough. Then what is the high-pitched sound heard when a lobster is placed in a boiling pot? He didn't say, but later I found out that many sources explain it as steam escaping from the animal's carapace.

A much bigger stretch was his second claim. I knew that not all animals have brains. We even got to see a confrontation between two such creatures. Someone placed a starfish into a tank with a mussel, an animal that looked sort of like a three-dimensional Pac-Man. As soon as the starfish hit the water, the previously sedentary mussel rocketed toward the other end of the tank, its shell bobbing open and closed with each stroke. We were told it was trying to escape because the starfish is a natural predator. It wasn't "afraid" of the starfish. As a type of clam, a mussel has no brain and therefore can have no emotion. But it did nonetheless possess survival reflexes.

The problem was that everything I knew about lobsters, insects, and other arthropods suggested they did have some sort of brain. I had done several reports in college on honeybees, who have the most complex system of communication in the animal world, involving a "dance" that conveys the location of nectar to other members of the hive. They know the dance instinctively, but it seems unlikely that any brainless creature could process that level of information.

It wasn't until a while later that I found the decisive refutation for what our guide had said. I was in my university's library when I wandered into the biology section and decided, on a whim, to check a book on crustacean anatomy. The book unhesitatingly described these animals as possessing a brain. In fact, the brain of arthropods is fairly advanced for invertebrates, surpassed only by that of cephalopod mollusks--squids and octopuses, the only invertebrates that appear to possess intelligence.

As noted zoologist Donald Griffin stated, "Experimenters have demonstrated that the central nervous systems of crustaceans, insects, and cephalopods organize and modulate information in ways that are quite comparable in complexity and precision to those of vertebrate brains" (qtd. in George Page's Inside the Animal Mind, p. 167).

Okay, so they have brains. Or at least something we can call a brain. But that leaves open a more crucial question: Do they have any consciousness? When injured, do they experience pain? Remarkably, many scientists insist the answer is no. A 2005 study funded by the Norwegian government received wide publicity, which claimed it merely bolstered an existing scientific consensus that these animals feel no pain:

[A]nimals with simple nervous systems, like lobsters, snails and worms, do not have the ability to process emotional information and therefore do not experience suffering, say most researchers.... "When you drop a lobster in boiling water, or put a fishhook through a worm, those stimuli cause those muscles to contract," Stevens said. "We describe that as pain because of the motor response, which is nothing more than neurons that have been stimulated."

Or, in the words of the Terminator, "The data could be called pain."

I guess that settles it, huh? Not quite. A more recent investigation paints a rather different picture:

[Robert] Elwood, along with Stuart Barr and Lynsey Patterson, outline seven reasons, with supportive findings, they believe crustaceans suffer.

For one thing, they argue, crustaceans possess "a suitable central nervous system and receptors." They learn to avoid a negative stimulus after a potentially painful experience. They also engage in protective reactions, such as limping and rubbing, after being hurt.

Other scientists remain unconvinced. As one puts it, "You could argue the shrimp is simply trying to clean the antenna rather than showing a pain response."

Well, of course you could argue. An alien scientist studying humans could argue that humans do not experience pain. They cry, scream, and sweat when they're injured simply because those are adaptive behaviors for getting help or scaring away predators (or whatever). If you're intent on denying an organism's inner experience, you can explain away any behavior you see. Much of what drives this skepticism, however, is scientists' unwillingness to expand their idea of what an invertebrate nervous system can do.

Proving that lobsters suffer when boiled would probably have legal consequences. They would be subject to laws prohibiting cruelty to animals (they already are in some places), and chefs might be required to kill them or stun them before boiling them. (There is even now an electrocution device for that purpose called CrustaStun.) Since there's a big worldwide seafood industry and many people consider lobsters incredibly tasty, it's no wonder discussions of this nature tend to provoke angry, knee-jerk reactions.

What do religious Jews, who don't eat lobster, think about this issue? Most don't get involved at all. We already have our own problems dealing with groups that seek to ban kosher slaughter. But the teachings of our religion do shed light on this topic. While allowing the killing of animals for food and other human-related purposes, Judaism places great value on their proper treatment. There are a range of laws about taking good care of one's livestock or pets, including feeding them on time and not overburdening them. Many rabbis prohibit hunting for sport, and none encourage it. The ritual slaughter of mammals and birds attempts to make their death quick and painless.

These rules have given Judaism a better record on animal welfare than Christianity, but they have important limitations. They allow a Jew to harm an animal for a legitimate human purpose (for example, ridding a rat infestation), and some Jews have interpreted this stipulation broadly enough to justify some pretty brutal practices. The ugliest example in recent memory concerned the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant (later shut down after the fallout from another controversy, involving mistreatment of employees). Undercover videos released by PETA showed cows apparently walking around for several minutes after their necks had been cut. Defenders insisted the animals were like chickens with their head cut off, acting on reflex but feeling no pain.

Kosher supervisors finally agreed to change the plant's practices, and later it received a positive review from an inspection by leading animal-welfare expert Dr. Temple Grandin. But one of their controversial practices that remained in effect was turning animals upside-down before killing them, which is authorized by Israeli rabbis but not practiced by any other kosher slaughterhouses in America.

Judaism teaches that non-Jews should observe the Noachide commandments, which include an injunction not to eat an animal while it is still alive, usually interpreted as a general statement against cruelty to animals. But the obligation is narrower than it is for Jews, and might not apply to a marine invertebrate anyway.

The important point in all this, however, is that Judaism always intended the principle of compassion for animals to go beyond the letter of the law. As Rabbi Natan Slifkin explains in his book Man and Beast:

Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi was once approached by a calf fleeing in terror from the butcher. But Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi did not take pity on it. He said, "Go; for this is what you were made for!" As a result of this he suffered pain for many years. His atonement came when his maid discovered a rat's nest in the house and was about to sweep it away; Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi told her to leave it alone.

Now it is undeniably true that the calf's purpose in life was indeed to be eaten. That was what it was bred for. This is neither wrong nor cruel; on the contrary, it assures the success of the species (cows will never become extinct) and the elevation of this animal. Yet nevertheless it was this event that brought punishment to Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi. For treatment of animals is not meant to be determined on a purely legal level. The purpose of the mitzvah of kindness to animals is to inculcate one in the trait of compassion. That cows are destined to be eaten is irrelevant. When faced with a dewy-eyed, bleating, tender calf, one's mercies should be aroused. Likewise, although there is every reason to dispose of rats, it is admirable if one feels sympathy for the poor little things and cannot bring oneself to do so.

There are other limitations in one's actions toward animals. Although a human need justifies causing pain to animals, it only justifies it insofar as it is required. Where different options are available, one should choose the less painful option. (pp. 194-5)

The prime consideration in Judaism is not what the animal is experiencing but what type of person you become in the way you treat it. People who are unaffected by seeing an animal suffer are likely to lack empathy in general. So even if the lobster's nervous system is too simple for the creature to experience pain, just the appearance that it does ought to give us pause. Whether the practice of boiling lobsters alive continues or not, there's something seriously wrong when people have desensitized themselves to the point they consider the process as casual as chopping fruit.

All wired up

2009-12-08T23:18:00.015-05:00

Sarah Palin has taken no shortage of abuse for her inarticulate remarks last year when she first rose to national prominence as McCain's running mate. Everyone who followed the campaign remembers the notorious moments from the Couric interviews, particularly when she tried to explain why being governor of Alaska enhanced her foreign policy credentials:

Well, it certainly does because our -- our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia ... We have trade missions back and forth. We-- we do-- it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where-- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is-- from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to-- to our state.

Contrary to popular belief, Palin never said "I can see Russia from my house." That was SNL's parody of a remark she made during an interview with Charlie Gibson for ABC News, when she said, "you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska." The whole argument about her state's proximity to Russia giving her foreign policy experience started as a bit of campaign bluster by McCain, and she unwisely stuck with it through several interviews.

I believe that ultimately candidates should be judged by the smartest things they have said, not the dumbest things. Our political culture obsesses on these gotcha moments, which can happen to anyone. I know I've made stupid remarks in my life, and been in situations where I've done nothing but sputter. I was just lucky never to be in front of a news camera when it happened.

That's why I decided to ask around the Internet for Palin fans to show me smart, eloquent things she has said on public policy. As it turns out, several users were kind enough to provide me with a series of quotes they believe reveal her penetrating insight. Here is one example, from a November interview with Greta Van Susteren:

Fundamentally, America's economy was built on free market enterprise. It was built on these principles that allowed the private sector to grow and to thrive and prosper and for our families to keep more of what we earn. Where we are right now in America in about the last 11 months is seeing this reversal of those principles that were applied to build up our economy.

All of a sudden, we're thinking it's OK to grow debt in our country. It's OK to borrow money from countries that we will soon be so beholden to. It's OK to print money out of thin air and think, again, that everything's just going to magically work out.

Fundamentally, everybody is equal in America. Everyone has equal opportunity to earn and produce and build. And the fundamentals of a strong economy have got to be applied again, as they were, like I just said, back in the '80s, when Reagan faced a worse recession than what we're facing today. Let's learn from that piece of American history and apply the same solutions.

Okay, where do I begin? Her premise--that the U.S. was a bastion of fiscal restraint until the day Obama took office--is quite sensible to anyone with the political literacy of a third-grade hall monitor, but to few else. Reagan added more money to the national debt than any other president in history, until Dubya shattered the record. (See here for the details.) Furthermore, economists of all political stripes agree that the government should spend during a recession.

As for the claim that everyone in America has equal opportunities for success--well, let's just say if I took the time to refute that assertion with data, it would put me in mind of the proverbial machine gun for killing a fly. Instead, I'll go back to the words of Mr. Reagan himself, in a 1985 address on tax reform:

My goal is an America bursting with opportunity, an America that celebrates freedom every day by giving every citizen an equal chance, an America that is once again the youngest nation on Earth--her spirit unleashed and breaking free.

Notice that he identifies equal opportunity as a goal, not a reality. And he argues that limiting government and stimulating business will help us move toward that goal. That's conservatism in a nutshell. Palin, in contrast, is saying everyone already has equal opportunity. If that's the case, why bother changing anything? Her rhetoric may aim for Ronald Reagan, but it ends up at Stephen Colbert.

But let's put all that aside for the moment and consider her verbal abilities. At least she's worlds more coherent than she was during the Couric interview. Whether she's more eloquent, more facile, more persuasive than the average college term paper is another matter. If I had to grade her, I'd give her a C on style and a D on content. And this is supposedly one of her better moments.

On a similar note, consider the following gem:

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being part of this quest in working with us to restore the American dream. The commonsense Republican proposals are the first step in restoring the American dream because Republicans care about America. But there is no greater dream than the dreams parents have for their children to be happy and to share God's blessings.

That last sentence, I must admit, rings nice on the ears. Unfortunately, I was being a little tricky in leading you to think this was a Sarah Palin quote. It's a real quote, but it wasn't uttered by Sarah Palin. It wasn't even uttered by a human being.

Rather, it came from a computer program that produces automatic summaries of text. In 1996, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg punched in the combined texts of the speeches from the first two nights of the Republican Convention, and the quote above is part of what the program returned. He then tried the same thing with the Democratic Convention. "In this case, though," he reports, "the summarizer software returned pure word salad--maybe because Democrats have more trouble staying on message than Republicans do, maybe because they just go on longer." (This anecdote comes from Nunberg's book The Way We Talk Now and is recounted later in his Talking Right.)

Palin is that summarizer software. At her worst, she speaks "word salad." At her best, she speaks at about the level of that last quote, a comfortable summation of stump-speech rhetoric. If this is the model of a rising political star in our age, we seriously ought to rethink our notions of what it takes to reach that position. All you need is the face of Tina Fey and the syntax of a Pentium, and you're good to go. Bill Gates's influence reaches yet new heights.

Arguing with fear

2009-11-22T13:00:00.005-05:00

Sometimes movies that don't work are more interesting than those that do. One example that comes to mind is Just Cause (1995), which seemed to draw upon public feelings generated by the contemporaneous O.J. trial, as well as by the earlier Rodney King controversy. The movie is a mess, with a ludicrous ending that leaves the impression that the film supports, or at least condones, police brutality. And yet, the movie got me thinking about this issue in a way that has stayed with me far longer than many better films.

(Warning: What follows will contain plot spoilers.)

In the opening scenes, police detain a black man (Blair Underwood) in an interrogation room. There, they beat him until he confesses to the rape and murder of a little girl in the Everglades. The arresting officer is white, but the sheriff (Laurence Fishburne) is black.

In the next scene, several years have passed, and a Harvard law professor (Sean Connery) is railing against the death penalty at a public debate. He is called in to defend Underwood, who faces execution. His conversations with the charming, intelligent prisoner lead him to talk to another death row convict (Ed Harris, trying a little too hard to channel Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs) who, after some wrangling, takes responsibility for the murder and correctly reveals the location of the murder weapon, which Connery finds in the swamp. A new trial is granted, and Underwood is freed.

Connery discovers, too late, that Underwood really did commit the murder. He persuaded the already condemned Harris to make a false confession. In return, he offered to kill Harris's parents--which Harris wanted--once he was released.

It is at this point that the movie takes its leaping nosedive down the rabbit hole. What Underwood does next is what any newly acquitted killer would do: go after the family of the man who got him acquitted. We learn that Connery's wife was the prosecutor in an earlier trial when Underwood got castrated in jail, and he has plotted his revenge ever since. (Uh, huh.) He kidnaps Connery's young daughter and takes her to the Everglades. Connery and Fishburne confront him, where he is finally devoured by an alligator.

Oh, how I wish I were making this up. Oh, how I wish.

The movie seems to suggest that the police were right to beat a confession out of Underwood, since otherwise a horrible killer would have been let loose. As Fishburne explains earlier in the film, sometime before it jumps the alligator, "This is a case that hangs together by the thinnest of threads.... You come down here, you start pickin' at them threads now, it's liable to fall apart." Because Connery sticks his liberal nose into the cops' business, he ends up freeing a monster who then comes after him--poetic justice. The message is straight from the annals of Willie Horton: If you dare to fight for such radical notions as civil liberties and due process, a black man will come and rape your daughter.

As it stands, Just Cause falls into a long tradition of Hollywood movies stretching back to Dirty Harry and beyond, which show no respect for the legal and constitutional protections on criminal suspects. The attitude of these films is that you do what you gotta do to keep dangerous criminals off the street, even if it means breaking the law yourself. Never do these films stop to consider that these protections do far more to prevent the U.S. from becoming a draconian police state than they do to instigate the contrived, paranoid scenarios these films cook up.

I am not naive about crime in America. I grew up and still live in Baltimore, which has the second-highest homicide rate in the country. I've been a civilian patrol volunteer for the last ten years. I know firsthand how weak and ineffectual the police force and justice system around here usually are. But I have seen nothing to convince me that beating up suspects will make the world safer.

You can't have it both ways. If cops get to railroad a case whenever they're convinced a suspect is guilty, it will greatly increase the chances that innocent people will be framed--and abused. Is that worth the cost of making sure guilty people always get brought to justice?

The way people answer that question often falls on racial lines, because it's a matter of what people fear the most. Both whites and blacks are scared of street crime. But blacks also carry a fear of police brutality and discrimination that many whites fail to understand, because it is not something whites normally experience.

That's why most whites are perplexed by black people's unwillingness to acknowledge O.J. Simpson's obvious guilt. Because frame-ups have been a reality to blacks for so long, many of them simply do not trust our justice system. Once they hear that an investigator to the case once used the term "nigger," that is enough to throw the entire investigation into doubt.

This reaction is not logical. But neither is the perspective of whites who take comfort at the thought of police violating a suspect's civil rights. They aren't afraid they'll ever be that suspect; they're afraid of what the suspect will do to them if he gets set free--an outcome that, in fact, may directly result from such violations. In other words, both sides to this debate are capable of being irrational, and for the same reason: because they cannot argue with fear.

An inconceivable analysis

2009-10-22T06:31:00.002-04:00

One of my favorite scenes in any movie is the Battle of Wits from The Princess Bride, in which Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) must decide which of two goblets Westley (Cary Elwes) has poisoned. Almost everyone finds the scene amusing and clever, but it has subtleties that are easy to miss. They concern the following questions: What in the name of mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwiches is Vizzini doing in this scene? How did he arrive at the choice he finally makes? And how come he's so confident in that choice when it's so spectacularly wrong?

Consider his opening argument, which makes more sense than anything else he says: a clever man would be tempted to put the poison in his own goblet, except that Westley would have anticipated Vizzini would think so, and therefore he'd put it in Vizzini's goblet instead. (Game theory deals with reasoning such as this, where you try to anticipate not only what your opponent will think, but how much he will anticipate your anticipations. Many games have this dynamic, where it's a race to determine who will do the most determining. Various webpages and books have examined the role of game theory in this scene.)

He eventually sticks with his initial conclusion (that the poison is in his own cup), but not before rambling for an entire minute about Australia and giants and Spaniards, going back and forth on which glass he thinks was poisoned. What he's trying to do, I suspect, is gauge Westley's reactions. Since Westley already knows the poison's location, he will (Vizzini assumes) fear for his life if he thinks Vizzini is guessing correctly. (That's why Vizzini secretly switches the goblets--he figures Westley will forfeit the game rather than voluntarily commit suicide if he realizes Vizzini has won.) Vizzini's strategy, therefore, is to keep changing his answer until Westley's body language betrays the correct one. As Westley observes, "You're trying to trick me into giving away something." In light of Vizzini's sureness when he finally makes his choice, we presume he does manage to detect something in Westley's behavior at crucial moments--nervousness maybe.

Westley indeed is nervous, but for a different reason than Vizzini assumes. He's worried Vizzini will stumble upon his actual secret, that he has poisoned both goblets. Vizzini almost seems to be approaching the truth as he rambles about how he "clearly" can't choose this glass and "clearly" can't choose the other one either. He even says at one point, "You could have put the poison in your own goblet, trusting on your strength to save you." His own rhetoric contains the solution to the puzzle, yet somehow he never notices. He's just bluffing (a recurring theme in The Princess Bride).

He possesses the classic fatal flaw of overconfidence, or hubris. He may in fact be smart enough to figure out what Westley is up to. Immunity-building was a practice known to the Ancient Greeks, whom Vizzini references earlier in the scene when he declares that Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates were "morons." The problem isn't so much that Vizzini is less smart than he imagines as that he discounts other people's intelligence. Truly wise people accept the wisdom of others. Thinking everyone in the world but oneself to be an idiot is folly, not wisdom.

Essential to any game is sizing up one's opponent, and Vizzini seriously underestimates Westley every time the word "Inconceivable!" escapes his lips. He never learns his lesson even as Westley continues to do everything he thought wasn't possible, including defeating a master swordsman and a giant. He reasons that a man who can defeat those "morons" still cannot hold a candle to his perfect mind. As he explains to Westley, "I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brains." It doesn't seem to occur to him that Westley used brains, not brawn, to defeat Inigo and Fezzik. Since he maintains such a low opinion of Westley in spite of all available evidence, he fails to consider there might be a trick up the man's sleeve.

Ironically, his lack of appreciation for other people's minds deprives him of a powerful tool he could use against his enemies. What makes Westley so formidable an opponent is not just that he's versatile and quick-thinking, but that he uses people's natures against them. That's how he handles all his adversaries throughout the movie: he takes immediate advantage of Inigo's fairness, of Fezzik's sportsmanship, of Vizzini's pride, of the palace guards' credulity, and of Prince Humperdinck's cowardice. In contrast, Vizzini is all tactic and no psychology.

You might think I'm reading more into the film than is there, but in the novel it's pretty obvious that the author, William Goldman (who also wrote the screenplay), put considerable thought into the themes, the traditions, and the history this mock fairy tale draws upon. There are many interludes in which he speaks directly to the reader about various plot elements and their significance. Whether in movie or book form, The Princess Bride is not just clever and entertaining, but also well-conceived. It should not be underestimated.

Harry Potter, the jock

2009-10-12T15:33:00.010-04:00

I'm sure I'm not the first to have noticed, but quidditch, the imaginary sport from the Harry Potter books, probably wouldn't work very well in the real world even if you had all the technology needed to make the game physically possible--including flying broomsticks, and a ball with a mind of its own.

In this game, each team has a group of players called Chasers who try to get a ball through the other team's goalpost. Of course every team has a goalie. This would all sound like soccer on broomsticks were it not for a couple of really exotic elements. First, there's a heavy, enchanted object called a bludger which tries to knock players off their broomsticks. To protect the players, each team has special players called Beaters, armed with a club for batting away bludgers.

The trouble is, nothing the Chasers, the Beaters, or the goalies do has any effect in moving the game toward its conclusion. A team could go on scoring goals forever, and the game wouldn't end even if the score was 440-0. A team's ultimate fate rests entirely with one player, the Seeker, whose task is to catch a tiny enchanted object called the Golden Snitch which only appears on occasion and tries to elude the Seeker's grasp. Once the Seeker catches the Snitch, his or her team earns 150 extra points and the game ends. Usually his or her team then wins the game. Only if that team is more than 150 points behind at the moment the Snitch is caught does the team lose. One of the later Harry Potter books (I can't remember which) depicts such a game.

Quidditch therefore has one fundamental flaw: the Chasers, who make up the majority of the players and whose actions dominate most of what happens, have a very weak incentive for scoring goals. As long as they manage to remain within 150 points of the other team, they are in little danger of losing. The score could be 140-0, and the team that hasn't scored could still easily win. Most likely, a typical quidditch team would hardly score at all, focusing its energy simply on preventing the other team from scoring.

To compensate for this all-too-obvious flaw, teams get ranked according to points scored rather than number of games won. But that makes it heavily dependent on record-keeping between games. You'd have to commit yourself in advance to playing many games for it to have any impact. It's not the type of sport that lends itself to casual play in the backyard.

In our world, most team sports revolve around one very simple formula: one team tries to relocate a small object (a ball, a puck, etc.), and the other team tries to stop it. That's it. Right there you have the basic description of soccer, hockey, baseball, football, basketball, volleyball, and lacrosse. Soccer and hockey are almost moronically simple games. Baseball and American football have intricate rules of progression, and baseball (along with its cousins such as cricket) is slightly unconventional in that a team's ultimate objective involves the movement of players rather than the movement of the ball. None of these games, however, allow more than one ball on the field at a time, much less more than one type of ball. And a game where regular scoring doesn't count for anything more than a team's record is hard to imagine. In sports, complexity is not necessarily a virtue.

The Potter books, nonetheless, make quidditch out to be the most dazzlingly exciting sport in the history of mankind, far surpassing any of the familiar earth-bound ballgames. No other wizard sport ever gets mentioned, suggesting the wizarding world is quite satisfied with this one. Most readers consider it one of the charms of the series, an example of J.K. Rowling's enduring creativity. Somehow it's fun to read about, even if the rules are probably too unwieldy for it to work in the real world.

Whether it's fun to watch is less clear. Only the first two movies show the game in detail, and the fourth and fifth movie don't show the game at all. The novelty of seeing the magical sport on screen makes it interesting at first. After that, there's little suspense to be generated, apart from hoping Harry doesn't get hit by a bludger. As a Seeker, most of what he does during any game is sit around waiting for the Snitch to appear. As for the other players, since they do not determine the game's ultimate fate, what's the point in watching them play? (It's no wonder the films so often show cheating and other disturbances; they aren't confident the game will be interesting on its own terms.)

Had Rowling eliminated the business with the Seeker and the Snitch, quidditch would be more believable. It would be like soccer in three dimensions rather than two, similar to what Orson Scott Card envisioned in his novel Ender's Game, in which child soldiers conduct simulated space battles in a null-G environment. But the Golden Snitch is just enough to put quidditch over the top as something truly otherworldly. If all the game consisted of was players trying to score goals, it would quickly begin to sound mundane once the novelty of their flying on broomsticks wore off. The bludgers add a level of danger you don't associate with high school athletics, and the Snitch makes the game unlike anything you've heard of.

Quidditch is really part of the whole mystique of the Harry Potter series. In a world where magic dominates and where broken limbs can be mended within seconds, physical prowess is a lot less valued than in our "muggle" world. That's why a kid who looks to us like a class-A dork can get to be the star of his school's sports team. That's why girls can play along with the boys, without anyone turning their head. That's why even the school bully is a pint-sized kid. But considering that the magic in these books is a lot like advanced technology, one must ask: isn't this where our own society is headed?

The twin straw men

2009-09-25T14:16:00.012-04:00

Jimmy Carter has helped highlight some intriguing parallels between Israel-bashing and Obama-bashing. He stated recently that "an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity" toward President Obama is fueled by racism. Israel supporters have long made a similar argument about anti-Semitism in the type of Israel-bashing that, ironically, Carter has engaged in. For their part, Israel-bashers and Obama-bashers both like to invoke the straw-man argument that the bigotry charge is being used against all criticism of the subject in question.

Israel-bashing

Soon after the release of his book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, Carter asserted, "There is no debate in America about anything that would be critical of Israel." Of course that statement is demonstrably false, as a glance at the editorial page of any standard newspaper will reveal. Indeed, Carter's own critical pieces on Israel have been carried by major papers both before and after the publication of his controversial book.

That's where the straw man comes in: following some inflammatory, over-the-top attack on Israel, the bashers insist they're being vilified simply because they had the temerity to "criticize" the Israeli government, as if calling Israel an apartheid state falls in the same category as complaining about its bus routes.

It would be one thing if these commentators argued simply that there isn't enough debate about Israel, and that certain criticisms are unfairly labeled as anti-Semitic. Instead, they make the extraordinary claim that all criticism of Israel is treated this way. This claim has been repeated so many times it has become a sort of mantra in anti-Israel circles, despite the fact that it crumbles under the slightest scrutiny.

What's striking is that virtually no one fits this description. Every U.S. president in the last four decades has attacked the building of Israeli settlements in the territories--the mainstream position in American discourse. Even the most fervent right-wing Zionists criticize Israel all the time, as their bitter reaction to the 2005 pullout from Gaza amply demonstrated. While there is basis for saying that many on the right are too quick to apply the "anti-Semite" label to people who deviate from the Likud party line, the mainstream in this country doesn't act that way, and even the rightists aren't vilifying all "criticism" of the Jewish state.

Most Israel supporters agree that there are certain types of assertions that cross the line from legitimate criticism to veiled anti-Semitism. Where that line falls exactly is a matter of debate. Irwin Cotler, commenting on the 2001 Durban conference, gives several examples of such assertions. These include calling for the destruction of Israel, attacking the legitimacy of the Jewish state, depicting Israel as the prime source of the world's evils, comparing the Israeli government with the Nazis, and singling out Israel for condemnation while ignoring or downplaying comparable or worse happenings in other countries. As Cotler observes,

For example - and apart from Durban - in December 2001, the contracting parties of the Geneva Convention convened for the first time to criticize Israel. This was the only time in 52 years that any nation was indicted. Similarly the UN Commission on Human Rights has singled out Israel for discriminatory indictment while granting the real human rights violators exculpatory immunity.

None of this is intended to suggest that Israel is above the law or is not accountable for any violations of international human rights and humanitarian law like any other state. Quite the contrary. But the problem is not that anyone should seek that Israel be above the law, but that Israel is being systematically denied equality before the law.

Convincing the average American that these sorts of criticisms are not merely unfair, but indicative of anti-Semitism, is tricky. It requires some knowledge of history and an understanding that the Israeli-Palestinian crisis has often been framed in a way that encourages Israel's perceived shortcomings to receive attention far out of proportion to their importance in world affairs. Adding to the problem is that Israel, since its inception, has been surrounded by enemy countries whose leaders have often expressed explicitly genocidal wishes against the Jews. The destruction of Israel isn't just a political goal, but a call to mass murder.

What's notable about Israel-bashing is that, unlike ordinary criticisms of a country's sins, it is usually directed, subtly or overtly, at Israel's legitimacy as a country. And since Israel was created as the world's only Jewish state, it is hard not to notice traditional anti-Jewish themes cropping up under the guise of "criticizing" Israel. Carter himself unwittingly proved this point when he claimed that "most of the condemnations of my book came from Jewish-American organizations." Which organizations he had in mind, he did not say. As Deborah Lipstadt noted, most of the strongest public condemnations of his book came from Michael Kinsley, Ethan Bronner, Jeffrey Goldberg, Alan Dershowitz, Dennis Ross, and 14 members of the Carter Center's Board of Councilors who resigned in protest. All are Jewish, but none represent a Jewish organization.

Obama-bashing

Bill O'Reilly recently lambasted two columns, one by Eugene Robinson and the other by Maureen Dowd, who believe, according to O'Reilly, that "if you criticize somebody [they like] and it's a person of color, then immediately you're a racist." In fact, neither column suggested anything of the kind.

They were both reactions to Joe Wilson (R-SC), who shouted "You lie!" during the President's health care address. Robinson's column discussed at length the open disrespect shown toward the President by Wilson and other Republican Congressmen at the speech before adding, "I suspect that Obama's race leads some of his critics to feel they have permission to deny him the legitimacy, stature and common courtesy that are any president's due. I can't prove this, however." Dowd argued that Wilson's former membership in a neo-Confederate group, his campaign to keep the Confederate Flag flying above the state Capitol, and his dismissing as a "smear" a black woman's truthful claim to be Strom Thurmond's illegitimate daughter, formed an ominous pattern that cast suspicion on his unprecedented departure from accepted standards of decorum in front of the nation's first black president.

That's where the straw man comes in: following some inflammatory, over-the-top attack on Obama, the bashers insist they're being vilified simply because they had the temerity to "criticize" the President, as if shouting him down as a liar while he's speaking falls in the same category as complaining about his tariff policy.

It would be one thing if these right-wingers argued simply that there isn't enough criticism of the President, and that certain criticisms are unfairly labeled as racist. Instead, they make the extraordinary claim that all criticism of Obama is treated this way. This claim has been repeated so many times it has become a sort of mantra in anti-Obama circles, despite the fact that it crumbles under the slightest scrutiny.

What's striking is that virtually no one fits this description. Robinson, Dowd, and even Carter have all criticized Obama before. But you wouldn't know that from reading most of the right-wing sites, which, like O'Reilly, claim that these commentators apply the "racist" label to all who dare say anything negative about The One. A more recent Robinson column explains clearly when he feels attacks on Obama cross the line from legitimate criticism to veiled racism:

Of course it's possible to reject Obama's policies and philosophy without being racist. But there's a particularly nasty edge to the most vitriolic attacks -- a rejection not of Obama's programs but of his legitimacy as president. This denial of legitimacy is more pernicious than the abuse heaped upon George W. Bush by his critics (including me), and I can't find any explanation for it other than race.

I'm not talking about the majority of the citizens who went to town hall meetings to criticize Obama's plans for health-care reform or the majority of the "tea bag" demonstrators who complain that Obama is ushering in an era of big government. Those are, of course, legitimate points of view. Protest is part of our system. It's as American as apple pie.

I'm talking about the crazy "birthers." I'm talking about the nitwits who arrive at protest rallies bearing racially offensive caricatures -- Obama as a witch doctor, for example. I'm talking about the idiots who toss around words like "socialism" to make Obama seem alien and even dangerous -- who deny the fact that he, too, is as American as apple pie.

Of course one may legitimately disagree with Robinson. Obama is hardly the first president to be the subject of vitriolic attacks and kooky conspiracy theories. Robinson's point of contrast is with Bush, but I was thinking about Clinton, whose detractors called him a murderer, a rapist, and a drug addict and likened him to both Hitler and Stalin. On the other hand, no one threatened secession, or said he had a "deep-seated hatred of white people," or accused him of having been born outside the United States. Some of the attacks on Obama seem clearly to have racial (or xenophobic) overtones, but there are those on the left who see a racial motivation in less obvious examples such as Joe Wilson's outburst, which didn't happen when Clinton was in office but conceivably might have. Irrational hostility toward Obama may be rooted in racism, but it also may be rooted in the way Republicans tend to behave while out of power.

Conclusion: the parallels

Israel supporters and Obama supporters both believe that a significant amount of the hostility they receive is motivated by bigotry. Israel-bashers and Obama-bashers react by claiming that supporters are using the bigotry charge to silence all criticisms. This claim has become a sort of mantra among the bashers even though it falls apart under the least bit of scrutiny. In reality, even the staunchest Israel supporters criticize Israel, and even the staunchest Obama supporters criticize Obama. There is, however, basis for arguing that Israel supporters and Obama supporters sometimes try to suppress some criticisms by unfairly branding them as bigoted.

Nevertheless, what Israel supporters and Obama supporters are mainly reacting to are the more extreme, inflammatory attacks, particularly those that seek to undermine the legitimacy of Israel as a country, or the legitimacy of Obama as a president. Whether those sorts of attacks are in fact evidence of bigotry can be debated, and depends to some extent on one's understanding of the history of racism in the U.S. or of anti-Semitism in the world at large. But those who do see bigotry in these attacks should at least have their views described accurately rather than caricatured to make them easier to knock down.

^{(Hat tip to Rabbi Harry Maryles for the cartoon.)}

The sushi myth

2009-07-31T10:07:00.001-04:00

Often when I mention sushi to someone who has never eaten it, I get a response like, "Well, raw fish ain't my cup of tea." It seems that every American who hasn't directly encountered sushi believes it is just another word for raw fish. They hold this belief firmly, like it's a simple fact.

I don't know where this misconception got started, but it's widespread. I myself held it at one time. Snopes even has an entry debunking it. But it takes on an added irony when it comes from people (and Jews in particular) who don't realize they have been eating a type of uncooked fish for years, called lox.

"What?!" they exclaim. "How can lox be raw? Everybody knows it's smoked salmon. Even the dictionary says so."

Okay, now wait a second: do you know what smoking means in this context? It refers to cold smoking, a preservation process that does not expose the fish to heat. Furthermore, not all lox is smoked; it is mainly preserved through curing--soaking in brine (hence the salty flavor).

Like sushi, it is an acquired taste. It's a little weird, actually: eaten by itself, it's borderline unpalatable. Add cream cheese, and it becomes delicious. The raw fish that is found in some sushi has a similar quality.

In the last ten years or so, kosher markets have begun selling sushi. To remain kosher, it must forgo traditional ingredients such as crab. The first sushi I ever ate, I made myself. I was guided through its creation while sitting in a Sukkah, in a program hosted by my college's Hillel during the holiday.

If sushi isn't raw fish, what is it? Usually it consists of rice wrapped in seaweed, with a middle that can contain just about anything--fish generally, but there is also vegetable sushi and fruit sushi. I even once tried chicken sushi, though I didn't think the combination worked.

Snopes defines it as "vinegared rice that can (but need not) be paired with raw seafood." That's also the definition offered by Wikipedia, which then links to the Snopes page. But does it really need to have rice? I once ordered something from a sushi menu, and was given simply a slab of raw tuna on a plate. I say "tuna" because that's what the menu called it, but it didn't look or taste anything like the sort of food you find in a Chicken of the Sea can. It was dark red, with a jello-like consistency, and was about as appetizing as baking soda toothpaste.

But if it doesn't need to have rice, and doesn't need to have fish, what makes sushi sushi? I tried asking this once to a sushi chef, but he didn't know enough English to explain it to me, or even to understand my question.

I made some a few weeks ago using a kit, the first time I've done it without supervision. The kit provided the seaweed and rice, and I added lox, carrots, cucumbers, and celery. The people I served it to liked it, but it was far from perfect. I put in too much rice, making it hard for me to keep the pieces together. I've asked for tips on Internet forums, and watched what the chefs at local restaurants do. The latest technique I learned is to wet the knife before cutting the rolls.

Let's face it. Sushi is just more fun to make--or to watch being made--than it is to eat. The chefs always remind me of artists, their products more visually dazzling than gustatorily appealing. But you should try it some time, just to say you've had it.

A nerdy examination of nerdiness

2009-06-28T11:05:00.004-04:00

What, exactly, is a nerd? Roger Ebert once attempted to answer that question, in his review of one of the Revenge of the Nerds flicks:

These aren't nerds. They're a bunch of interesting guys, and that's the problem with [this film].... A nerd is not a nerd because he understands computers and wears a plastic pen protector in his shirt pocket. A nerd is a nerd because he brings a special lack of elegance to life. An absence of style. An inability to notice the feelings of other people. A nerd is a nerd from the inside out, which is something the nerds who made this movie will never understand.

I must confess that I find Ebert's definition rather strange, especially his contention that the protagonists of this film couldn't be nerds because they were "a bunch of interesting guys." I've always thought nerds were the interesting guys. It was the popular kids who were the bores, who went on to boring, regular jobs, while their nerdy classmates went on to become the inventors, the rocket scientists, the CEOs, the movie stars. (If you don't believe me about that last one, go read an interview with Harrison Ford or Ben Affleck about their high school days.) I presume Ebert doesn't include in his definition a tubby, bespectacled guy who analyzes movies for a living. He doesn't because he seems to define nerds as dysfunctional human beings rather than the people you learn to respect when you grow up.

Ebert is afflicted with a condition I like to call lexicitis, which is the desire to provide precise definitions for words that defy any. The word nerd is little more than a loose collection of stereotypes, rooted in the superficial world of teen cliques and in-crowds, but applied to adults without any consistent, universally accepted meaning.

I wouldn't even call it a character type, for it can encompass many character types. Rick Moranis's mad scientist in Honey I Shrunk the Kids is nerdier than Christopher Lloyd's mad scientist in Back to the Future, but then Moranis made a career out of putting a nerdy spin on characters who might not seem nerdy if played by other actors. In Parenthood he played a perfectionistic snob, but a nerdy perfectionistic snob.

Like Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography, you know 'em when you see 'em. I think of nerds as social oddballs, but not all social oddballs are nerds. Nerds are often thought to be intellectuals, but not all intellectuals are nerds, and not all nerds are intellectual.

Above all, the word evokes particular images: a guy who wears glasses with a piece of tape in the middle, a guy with pens in his shirt pockets, a guy who reads comic books and plays video games and likes science fiction movies and memorizes UNIX manuals.

Nerds are traditionally pictured as male. Girls and women have been described as nerds, but nobody's sure what that means. Women nerds defy a sexual stereotype almost as much as women football players do.

Nerds are, also, usually pictured as Caucasian. Of course blacks can be nerds too (think Urkel), and in black youth culture, nerdiness blends with the idea of "acting white." As for Asians, according to Hollywood in recent years, all Asian guys are nerds (this has apparently replaced the older stereotype that they all know martial arts). And all Jewish men are nerds, except for Israelis.

The commonest explanation for the word's origin is that it came from the name of a creature in a 1950 book by Dr. Seuss. How it acquired its current sense is unknown, but by the 1960s it was being used by teenagers to describe those they considered uncool.

The twin word geek has a different history, originally referring to a performer at a carnival sideshow who bit the head off a chicken. It later evolved into a synonym for nerd, a fact that hasn't stopped people from coming up with a distinction between the two. The filmmaker John Hughes once explained it in the following way: "A geek is a guy who has everything going for him, but he's just too young. By contrast, a nerd will be a nerd all his life."

Personally, I've never heard anyone else use that definition. But I agree that the two words are not always identical. It's one of those pairs like morality and ethics that seem interchangeable but upon closer inspection turn out to have a subtle difference in connotation. Geekiness usually suggests an element of the grotesque, whereas nerdiness is something you can find endearing. The heroes of most teenage comedies are nerds, not geeks, despite what John Hughes may think.

Still, it seems like both words don't mean quite what they used to. Early in the 2000s, Comedy Central had a game show called Beat the Geeks, in which contestants would try to match their knowledge against Star Wars geeks, horror geeks, James Bond geeks, Simpsons geeks, Playboy geeks, hip-hop geeks, wrestling geeks, and so on. What was striking was how many of these so-called geeks were immersed in pop culture, something you would not associate with the geeks of old.

Nerds were once thought to make up the computer-literate population, but now that we've entered an age of iPhones, Blackberrys, webcams, Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging, you're considered uncool if you aren't caught up on the latest computer or Internet development. It's not surprising that I haven't heard the phrase "computer nerd" in a long time.

This is what happens when you take a term invented by adolescent boys and try to apply it to adults, most of whom have long lost their sense of what's cool and what's nerdy. The word may shed light on some of the qualities of today's culture, but let's not take it too seriously, lest we become a living example of the word in its negative sense.

The line between cranks and scholars

2009-04-06T04:36:00.094-04:00

What is it with some linguists and claiming a mysterious relationship between English and Hebrew? First there's Isaac Mozeson, the literature professor (I hesitate to use the term "linguist") who maintains that all English words can be traced to Hebrew. Then there's Ernest Klein, a rabbi/linguist who saw Semitic origins where other scholars didn't. I never expected John McWhorter of all people to enter the fray. But he does, in a recent book that features an eccentric theory about early Semitic influence on the language that would become English.

Superficial relationships
Even in my early childhood, I noticed resemblances between certain Hebrew words and their English counterparts: camel is gamal, wine is yayin, and earth is eretz. There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. Animal names often come from languages spoken in the region where the animal is found. Hence, moose comes from a Native American tongue, and camel comes from a Middle Eastern Semitic tongue that may or may not have been Hebrew, but was certainly related. Similarly, the ancients would have referred to wine using the term from the culture that first disseminated the drink, just as we today adopted the Japanese word sushi instead of inventing our own term using pure-English roots (e.g. "seafood roll"). As for eretz and "earth," that's probably just a coincidence.

That last statement, in my experience, often provokes the response, "I don't believe in coincidence." But it has nothing to do with coincidence in a cosmic sense. The Hawaiian word kahuna meaning "priest" sounds remarkably similar to the Hebrew word for priest, but unless you can devise a story about an ancient encounter between Semitic tribes and Polynesians, it is likely that the two languages just happened to hit upon the same combination of sound and meaning in this one instant. These things happen from time to time.

Isaac Mozeson
In his 1988 book The Word, Mozeson maintains not only that the English language (as well as all other languages) comes directly from Hebrew, "the language of Eden," but that this fact can be discerned by examining the roots of English words. According to Mozeson, "Hebrew vocabulary has as much affinity with English as it has with Arabic. More English words can be clearly linked to Biblical Hebrew than to Latin, Greek, or French."

As for the Indo-European theory of modern linguistics, Mozeson argues that it is nothing more than a racist plot by white Gentiles to segregate their languages from other cultures and undermine the eternal truth of the Torah. As Mozeson puts it, "The third son of Noah, Ham, is behind the generic term for African languages, and white gentiles in the linguistic community have no trouble with the evidence of a related Hamito-Semitic language family. Let the Blacks and Jews share the ghetto, whisper the professors, as long as Indo-European remains lily white." It never seems to occur to him what the "Indo" part of the theory signifies.

The book is filled with his unorthodox etymologies. "Sparrow," he claims, comes from the Hebrew tzipor ("bird"). The English word "lad" derives from the Hebrew yeled ("boy"). "Direction" comes from derekh ("path, way"). He even traces "samurai" to the Hebrew shomer ("guardian")--via Japanese, of course.

This is all quite clever. But I can't help thinking of the father in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding who insists that if you give him any English word, he can explain how it is derived from Greek. He shows how it's done with some easy examples, like arachnophobia. Then one of the kids says "kimono!" The father is stopped short for a moment, then he explains that it comes from the Greek word for winter, himona, and in winter you stay warm by wearing a robe--kimono!

If Mozeson considered other theories, he'd find his own wanting. For example, mainstream linguists trace the word direction to the Latin directus, which is the past participle of the verb dirigere, "to set straight." That word comes from a combination of dis- ("apart") and regere ("to guide"). Not exactly a plausible candidate for connecting with the Hebrew derekh. But Mozeson disregards the mass of historical and literary evidence, as well as the theories of systematic sound change between languages, used by mainstream linguists to establish cognates. Ironically, Mozeson's picture of language evolution makes the process seem far more random and haphazard than in mainstream linguistics.

Of course, his method could be used to "prove" that any language came from any other language. John McWhorter demonstrated this in his 2003 book Power of Babel. Not specifically in reference to Mozeson or any other crank linguist, McWhorter "proves" that Japanese comes from English, based on the following words:

sagaru: hang down (i.e. "sag")
namae: name
mono: thing, single entity
nai: not
mo: more
miru: see (hence, "mirror")
taberu: eat (hence, "table," where one eats)
atsui (ott-SOO-ee): hot
hito: man (i.e. "he")
yo: emphatic particle (i.e. "Yo!")
kuu: feed your face (i.e. "chew")
inki: dark-spirited or glum (hence, "inky")

I actually think Japanese shows a close relationship to Hebrew. In Hebrew, karati means "I read." And what people are more in need of learning self-defense than the guys with their noses in books?

Ernest Klein
Klein was a linguist and Orthodox rabbi best known for two works: an etymological dictionary of English, and one of Hebrew. He had a tendency to suggest Semitic origins for English words more often than other scholars did. Unlike Mozeson, however, he worked entirely within the framework of mainstream linguistics, and in fact his dictionaries are widely respected works of scholarship. The Online Etymology Dictionary, which has had considerable influence across the Internet, relies a great deal on Klein's research. One time I was reading a word-origin blog that traced the word traffic to the Arabic tafriq meaning "distribution." I immediately suspected--and quickly confirmed--that the blogger had gotten his information from the Online Etymology Dictionary and ultimately from Klein.

John McWhorter
In his earlier books on linguistics, McWhorter mainly attempted to explain the views of professional linguists before the general public. He does some of that in his latest book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, talking about the flaws in conventional conceptions of "correct" and "incorrect" grammar, as well as debunking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that a language's grammatical properties affect its speakers' thought processes). But he also proposes some theories he admits few linguists accept.

For the purposes of this blog entry, I will mention just one of the theories: He thinks that the Phoenicians, who spoke a language very similar to Hebrew, made their way to the area that is now Germany and Denmark and had such a profound effect on the languages spoken there that the entire Germanic subfamily (which includes modern German, Dutch, English, and the Scandinavian languages) was the result of Semitic-speaking adults struggling to learn an Indo-European tongue.

Linguists have long believed that Proto-Germanic underwent strong non-IE influence. For one thing, one-third of Proto-Germanic vocabulary cannot be traced to IE roots. McWhorter discusses several lines of evidence, including Proto-Germanic's substitution of fricatives for stop consonants (compare English's father with Latin's pater), its tendency to put verbs into the past tense by simply changing the vowel (e.g. drink/drank), and its extreme simplification of the IE case system.

McWhorter speculates on a possible connection between certain Germanic and Semitic roots, such as the English word fright compared with the Semitic root p-r-kh meaning "to fear." Particularly interesting is his attempt to connect the names of two Germanic deities, Phol and Balder, with the Phoenician god Baal. Also, an archeologist allegedly found the remains of a Phoenician cooking pot in the shallows of the North Sea.

McWhorter is quick to admit that none of this comes close to proving his case; he simply argues that his hypothesis is an intriguing possibility worthy of further investigation.

Final thought: the line between cranks and scholars
Etymology is far from an exact science. Look in any dictionary, and you will find scores of words with unknown origins. In those situations, even the professionals end up resorting to guesswork, some of it as crude and far-fetched as anything Isaac Mozeson could have dreamed up. The difference, I suppose, is that legitimate researchers try to gather up as many facts as they can, and acknowledge when the limits have been reached. Usually.

Different routes to the same destination

2009-03-25T15:17:00.004-04:00

Back to the Future Part II has one of the more bewildering plots of any movie I count among my favorites, and a wild theory about it occurred to me a few years ago. I've never heard anyone else propose this theory, but it resolves several plot holes and makes sense on its own terms, once you think it through. My theory is that Doc's true motive in taking Marty to 2015 isn't to help Marty's son as he claims, but to teach Marty a lesson that will help prevent the accident that destroys Marty's musical aspirations.

The scene at the end of the first film, replayed at the beginning of the second, raises a number of questions. In this scene, Doc assures Marty that "you and Jennifer turn out fine," and that the problem is that "something has got to be done about your kids." After he takes Marty and Jennifer to visit the future, however, these statements don't match up with what we see. The middle-aged Marty from 2015 hasn't exactly turned out fine, and only one of Marty's kids needs help. Why did Doc mischaracterize the situation?

It should be noted that the filmmakers have stated in interviews that they created this final scene before they had any real plans for sequels. As such, Doc's statements were probably just throwaway lines they found amusing at the time. But that doesn't explain why, when working on the second and third film, they chose to contradict Doc's statements.

The entire scene was re-shot for the second film, ostensibly because the actress who played Jennifer in the first film--Claudia Wells--had been replaced by Elisabeth Shue. Somebody on a message board pointed out to me a subtle difference between the two versions of the scene, which are otherwise quite identical. In the Claudia Wells version, Doc's line "you and Jennifer turn out fine" is spoken smoothly and confidently. In the Elisabeth Shue version, Doc visibly hesitates before saying the line, and he utters it a bit too rapidly to sound convincing. (You can examine the difference with this video. Pay particular attention to 1:25-1:38.)

Still, Doc's behavior in either version doesn't make much sense. Why is he interrupting Marty's life only hours after Marty returned from the first adventure just so they can rectify something decades in the future? Why doesn't he let days, or weeks, or months pass before asking Marty to come with him? Since they have a time machine, what's the rush? If my theory is correct, Doc is trying to keep Marty away from the present. That makes sense given what we learn in the third film: the pivotal car accident is supposed to occur later the same day.

You might ask why Doc doesn't just tell Marty straight out about the accident. He could say, "You know, Marty, later today you'll be involved in a car accident that permanently injures your hand and destroys your musical aspirations, all because you took a guy's dare." The reason for Doc's silence is explained during a brief exchange in the third film, when Doc blurts out the truth:

Doc: Marty, you can't go losing your judgment every time someone calls you a name! That's exactly what causes you to get into that accident in the future.

Marty: [Suddenly stops and turns toward Doc.] What? What about my future?

Doc: [Realizes what he just said.] I can't tell you. It might make things worse.

Marty: Wait a minute, Doc...what is wrong with my future?!

Doc: Marty...we all have to make decisions that affect the course of our lives. You've gotta do what you've gotta do. And I've gotta do what I've gotta do.

Doc realizes that if he interferes directly with Marty's future by warning him about the accident, Marty might manage to avoid that particular catastrophe, but he'd retain his habit of acting foolishly whenever somebody calls him "chicken." Then, with his future thrown into flux, something even worse might one day occur as a result of that habit. The only safe way for Doc to improve Marty's future is by inspiring him to grow out of the habit. And what better way to do that than to show him the consequences of his son's acquiescence to peer pressure?

In other words, taking Marty to 2015 to help Marty's son was basically a ruse. Ordinarily, Doc wouldn't concern himself with a matter so remote from their current lives. He hopes that Marty, by seeing what happens to his son, will begin to reflect on his own weaknesses.

Of course, Doc thinks they'll go straight home after dealing with the son. He doesn't anticipate the chain of events that lead them to 1885. But by the time Marty gets back home at the end of the third film, he has in fact matured enough to avoid the accident on his own, as Doc had hoped, though influenced by different experiences than what Doc originally had in mind--a different route to the same destination.

Crazy professors

2009-03-10T16:51:00.001-04:00

Just about everyone who has been through college has stories about crazy professors. I'll tell you a couple of mine.

My first encounter with one came in my second year of community college, in a required course focusing on several thinkers who shaped the modern world including Darwin, Marx, Toynbee, and Einstein. The teacher was an African Sorbonne graduate who wore his watch on the pulse side of his wrist. I had an inkling of his ideological leanings when he criticized our assigned textbook as "too Eurocentric."

There are times when even I question Eurocentrism in traditional histories. As I suspected, however, this professor was merely replacing one "centrism" with another. I could feel his frustration as he looked for openings in the assigned material to tell us about his beliefs, which included the idea that much of Ancient Greek civilization was "stolen" from black Egyptians. It wasn't easy for him, since he was assigned to be teaching us about DWEMs (Dead White European Males). I was immune to his digressions because on the first day, I had gone to the library and borrowed a copy of Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa, which debunks Afrocentrist claims about history. I learned more from that book than I did from the entire course.

He was only a moderate Afrocentrist. At the extremes is Professor Leonard Jeffries of City College in New York, who holds that mankind is divided into "ice people," comprising those of European descent, and "sun people," comprising everyone else. Ice people are violent, materialistic exploiters, while sun people are kind, compassionate peacemakers. Dr. Jeffries also maintains that Jews financed the slave trade and continue to use Hollywood to promote black subservience. It's like he took the Nazis' master-race theory and flipped it around. Around the Jews, that is.

Later on, I got an American history professor who was almost as weird as the Afrocentrist guy, though in a different way. He looked like a character out of Roald Dahl: slight build, pointy nose, pencil-thin mustache. The oddest thing about his appearance was his hair. "Never trust a professor with strange hair" should be my motto. He looked like he would have been an ordinary bald man except that he had a big clump of hair resting on top, almost like a cockatoo. Bad use of monoxodil, I thought.

On the first day, he mentioned that previous students had complained he hadn't made his teaching relevant to the current times. He promised not to make that mistake with us. He kept his promise. For one thing, he had a relentless obsession with Bill Clinton, whom he considered the most corrupt president since Nixon. (This was a while before the Lewinsky scandal.) Throughout his lectures, he kept throwing in comments about how "Slick Willy" and his wife were letting the country go to waste.

He didn't seem to recognize any boundary between fact and opinion. FDR, he taught us, was a great president, though not because of his liberalism. Truman was overrated, Eisenhower was underrated, and Vietnam was unwinnable. The prof's most fervent belief was that there was a conspiracy behind JFK's assassination. He wasn't sure of the nature of the conspiracy, he just knew beyond any doubt that there was one. And he let us argue our favored conspiracy theory on the final exam for extra credit. Accepting the findings of the Warren Commission wasn't an option.

For several years afterward, I went mad trying to read up as much as I could on the stuff we had covered, which I felt had been tainted by the guy's political and ideological proclivities. I eventually concluded that apart from his hangups about Clinton and JFK, he was reasonably fair and accurate most of the time.

I'm not implying these two professors were in any way representative of my overall college experience. After I transferred to U. of Maryland, I no longer met any ideological fruitcakes. A few of my professors there articulated liberal political views in front of the whole class, a practice I considered unprofessional (at least in non-political courses). But there was relatively little weirdness and flakiness. Yet the fact I encountered this sort of thing at all is significant. These are the kinds of experiences you hear and read about, and can't believe when they're actually happening to you.

P.S. For those who may not be aware, the picture at the start of this post is of the late comedian Sam Kinison playing a crazy professor in this scene from the 1986 movie Back to School.

Urban bubbe meises

2009-03-03T12:38:00.072-05:00

Linked to at DovBear's Blog

Blogger Wolfish Musings recently wished for a Jewish version of Snopes, the premier site for investigating urban legends. He made this wish after receiving an email listing ten "proofs" of the Moshiach's imminent arrival. As it stands, such a site already exists, and it is called Jewish Legends. Unfortunately, it lacks the scope or professionalism of Snopes.

Snopes was hardly the first urban legend-debunking site, but it took a new approach to the subject. For one thing, unlike previous sites of its kind, Snopes didn't deal exclusively with tall tales. Some of the claims that Snopes investigates end up being true. According to Snopes, what sets urban legends apart is not their truth value but their mode of transmission. They're the types of stories you "know" happened because you heard it from a friend of a friend (or read in an email forwarded to you by a friend). Occasionally such stories may in fact be accurate or nearly accurate. The problem is verifying them, and that's where Snopes comes in. It categorizes the truth value of stories with a red light for false, a yellow for uncertain, and a green for true.

Jewish Legends adopts the same color-coding, but with Stars of David instead of traffic lights. Unlike Snopes, it includes roughly the same number of "green" stories as "red" stories. Because so much of it is true, the site begins to sound more like a weird news page than an urban legends page.

Some of the green stories are reasonable choices, such as the report that Coca Cola tastes better during Passover season than during the rest of the year, because it uses sugar instead of corn syrup. Religious Jews are aware of this fact, but because it's so word-of-mouth, it's the type of claim for which verification is useful, if for no other reason than to convince skeptics.

But why do we need the site to tell us, for example, that the first pro-baseball player was Jewish? That may be a noteworthy fact in itself, but it's not a story that has been passed around by word of mouth. I had never heard the story before I came to the site, so it's probably not something that was in need of investigation.

Likewise, the site puts Christopher Columbus's Jewishness in the yellow category. That belief is not an urban legend by any definition. It is a legitimate hypothesis still being debated by scholars.

I also wonder why the site bothers itself with answering the Protocols or the business about a kosher tax. Once you start getting into the debunking of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, your task is practically endless. And it gives the site a graver tone than a discussion about urban legends ought to have. Is the site going to start taking on Holocaust deniers? That would be a perfect way to kill the fun.

The site's best entries include whether the name of the Satmar sect comes from "Saint Mary," whether the Israeli archaeologist Vendyl Jones was the inspiration for Indiana Jones, whether Mordechai was Esther's uncle, and whether "hip hip hooray" has anti-Semitic origins. (Click the links to find out the answer to each of those questions.) Those are all beliefs that have swirled around the Jewish community for quite some time, and are worthy of investigation. I just wish the site would also tackle more current stuff, like the chain emails targeted at Jews. And the weird news entries, interesting as they may be, should at least be placed in a separate section and be less focused upon.

The site seems to have an Orthodox standpoint, but it never tells you that it does. It considers the existence of the Golem to be an open question. It asserts that the actor Ben Stiller, contrary to popular belief, is not Jewish (his father is, and his mother had a Reform conversion before he was born). I suspect that Ben Stiller would disagree.

The corporatists

2009-02-13T10:52:00.001-05:00

Though a proud and lifelong Democrat, there's a point where I begin to feel just as out of step with the left as I do with the right. That point occurs when people start using the word corporate with a conspiratorial tone.

For example, I was recently in the library and saw a book on Barack Obama that didn't seem to be either attacking or praising him. I assumed it was a detached journalistic analysis, an approach I haven't seen much of these days. My interest piqued, I took it out.

I should have noticed the back-cover endorsement by Noam Chomsky.

The book was called Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics. I didn't read the whole thing, but I did happen to glance at an appendix in which the author referred to Obama's "corporate- and Empire-friendly" views on capital punishment, gun control, and civil liberties, as well as his "conservative and imperial positions on Iraq, Iran, or Israel."

These characterizations may raise the eyebrows of those who think of Obama as the latest incarnation of Karl Marx, but they are frequent in hard-left publications such as The Nation, where the U.S. Democratic Party is considered "center-right." That isn't as absurd as it sounds if you take an international perspective. As Nation writer Eric Alterman argues in his 2003 book What Liberal Media?,

The entire context of American politics exists on a spectrum that is itself well to the right of that in most industrialized democracies. During the 1990s, Bill Clinton was probably further to the right than most ruling West European conservatives, such as Germany's Helmut Kohl and France's Jacques Chirac. Indeed, virtually the entire axis of political conversation in the United States takes place on ideological ground that would be considered conservative in just about every nation in democratic Western Europe.

The 1962 movie The Manchurian Candidate was a paranoid right-wing thriller about communist takeover. The 2004 remake is a paranoid left-wing thriller about corporate takeover. In the new version, Meryl Streep plays a senator and Hillary lookalike who, aided by a Halliburton-esque corporation with family connections, instigates a plot to make her son president through blackmail, murder, and brainwashing, in which a Gulf War platoon have devices implanted in their bodies making them "remember" her son as a war hero. Throughout the movie, a sinister cable news network is seen in the background in various public places (and the anchor is played by Al Franken, no less).

Hey, I'm not saying critics like Ralph Nader don't have a point about corporate influence in society. But when they start to sound like left-wing versions of the old John Birchers seeing communist infiltration in every corner, I have to jump ship. The nice thing about being a non-ideological Democrat, by far the most common variety, is the relative freedom from paranoia. You can just sit comfortably on the left of the good old fuzzy middle.

The walking America

2009-01-21T13:48:00.014-05:00

Toward the end of his inaugural address, President Obama said, "This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed....why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath."

This is one of the only times I have ever heard Obama even allude to his race. Throughout the entire campaign, he remained remarkably silent on the subject. The only time his race was mentioned at either of the conventions was in one gracious line by Mike Huckabee at the Republican Convention. If you think that's easy, contrast it with how often Joe Lieberman referred to his Jewishness during the 2000 campaign. For example, Lieberman's acceptance speech contained the line, "I cannot express with words the gratitude that I feel in my heart today as the first Jewish-American to be honored to be a major party candidate for the Vice Presidency." Find me one moment where Obama talks about feeling honored as an African American. He not only rarely brings up the subject, but when he does, it is usually indirect, as in his quip last summer about not looking like the men on the coins.

That's why I'm astounded whenever I hear people say his candidacy was entirely about race. How did that perception come about? Well, for starters, his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father that first brought him to public attention is largely about the struggles of a biracial man to find his identity in a racially polarized world. Another reason is that his "race speech" in the wake of the Rev. Wright controversy became perhaps the most memorable moment of the entire campaign.

More significantly, though, the pundits couldn't shut up about the subject. And no matter what Obama did, there was undeniably a symbolic aura surrounding his candidacy. People were intrigued by him, who he was, and not just what he said. They found his life story, while not as heroic as John McCain's, equally fascinating.

His mantra of "change" resonated in different ways, because on one level it highlighted a substantive program to reverse the destructive policies of the Bush Administration, but on another it was a call to remake the image of the American government before the entire world. Outside the United States, Bush has always evoked the worst stereotypes of Americans--the country bumpkin, the frat-boy, the privileged son of rich whites, the member of an elite class with a callous disregard for the plight of the weak. (If any of those stereotypes seem to conflict with one another, that is partly a reflection of Bush's image-making, which cast this Ivy Leaguer as a rural American.) It may not be fair, but Obama overturns those stereotypes all at once, simply because of who he is: a walking America.

Before Obama appeared on the national stage, anyone would have predicted that the first black president would have a name like Harold Williams, or even George Washington. Obama isn't just the first black president, he's the first president with a funny name. His biological father was Kenyan, but he was raised partly in Indonesia by an Asian man, and the rest of the time on American soil by whites. I don't mean to imply that his background is unusual. On the contrary, it speaks to the greatness of America in a way that the office of the presidency has tended to conceal.

Even though he doesn't talk about his own race very often, one of his central messages has always been bringing people of different backgrounds together. That was much the thrust of his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention ("There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America"), which propelled him to national attention and convinced many people, including yours truly, that he was potential presidential material.

It isn't just rhetoric; he seems to have accomplished some of this goal in the diverse coalition he built. He didn't just attract a higher percentage of blacks than usual, he also received a larger proportion of the white vote than any Democrat since Carter. He also won every region of the country except the South, and even there, he won three of the eleven states from the Old Confederacy: Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. A black candidate could have won the presidency with a narrower band of support.

That America would eventually elect a black man as president was probably inevitable; that it would be someone like Obama is unexpected. He didn't just win, he smoothed out a range of demographics that most people considered to be deep, insuperable divisions. In this scheme, he doesn't need to talk about his racial identity because it so clearly informs how he has approached the task of trying to unite America.

Sandlerism

2009-01-19T13:37:00.022-05:00

I am going to ask a question that, as far as I can tell, nobody has ever asked before: Is Alanis Morrissette Jewish?

This question occurred to me when I visited her Wikipedia page recently. The section on her early life described her father as French Canadian. That much I knew already. But then it said something I did not know: her mother was a Hungarian immigrant named Georgia Mary Ann Feuerstein.

Feuerstein? Feuerstein?

I did some checking, and I came to a Google Books preview of Morrissette's biography, written by music journalist Paul Cantin. The book revealed that Ms. Feuerstein came to Canada as a child when her parents were escaping an anti-Soviet uprising. She and Morrisette's dad met as teenagers, but "Georgia's strict European parents did not allow her to date, and so they spent their time together playing badminton, broomball, and street hockey."

Neither this book nor the Wikipedia article gave any indication that Feuerstein--or Alanis, for that matter--had Jewish roots. I typed the words "alanis feuerstein jewish" into Google and found nothing.

This episode forms part of a bizarre pattern I've noticed. With most famous people, any smidgen of Jewish ancestry will get some press as soon as it is revealed. I remember the hoopla over Madeline Albright's discovery that her mother was a Jew who converted to Catholicism. Christopher Hitchens, too, seemed deeply affected when he found out his mother's mother was Jewish.

In 2006, it happened to Senator George Allen in the wake of the controversy over his "macaca" moment that probably cost him his Senate seat and his presidential aspirations for the 2008 election. (Since "macaca" is a racist slur in some French dialects, reporters were spurred to look into the background of Allen's French-speaking Tunisian mother, Etty Lumbroso, who turned out to be a Sephardi who had hidden her Jewishness from her husband and son all those years.) You simply don't see comparable attention given to people who discover, say, an unknown Italian ancestor.

In the 2004 presidential election, I saw at least one article describing the Jewish connection of three of the candidates: John Kerry's grandfather was Jewish, Wesley Clark's father was, and Howard Dean is married to a Jew.

There are even celebrities who have long been commonly, incorrectly thought to be Jewish by many people: Charlie Chaplin and Dr. Seuss (born Theodore Geisel) come immediately to mind. (I admit to being surprised about Dr. Seuss, who was apparently German-American. I always thought his pen name was a reference to the Hebrew word for horse. It turns out that Seuss is his actual middle name, and it is properly pronounced "soyce.")

That's why it's curious whenever a celebrity has hints of a Jewish past but no one seems to talk about it. John Goodman has a Jewish-sounding surname, but I have been unable to find any information at all about his ethnic or religious background. Ringo Starr (born Richard Starkey) might have Jewish paternal ancestry, but it is rarely mentioned anywhere, and Starr has never identified as a Jew. Michael Caine (born Maurice Micklewhite) claims not to be Jewish, but he attended a Jewish school as a kid and speaks Yiddish.

You might wonder why I'm obsessing over this topic. I am afflicted by the condition made famous by Adam Sandler's Chanukah song, of having a weird preoccupation with trying to determine which celebrities are Jewish or of Jewish descent. Jews with this condition can easily be mistaken for anti-Semites, and vice versa. (The neo-Nazi site Jew Watch keeps a list of celebrities it identifies as Jews--often unreliably. An innocent observer stumbling on the page might easily think it was written by a Jew.) It is such a prevalent condition that it's a wonder no one has coined a word for it. I'd call it Sandlerism.

Mistaking Sandlerism for anti-Semitism was the subject of a funny anecdote in David Zurawik's informative book The Jews of Prime Time. An old SNL skit, co-written by Al Franken, featured a game show in which panelists were shown a photograph of someone famous and asked to guess if that person was Jewish or not. "Our first famous personality," said the host, "is Penny Marshall, the star of television's Laverne & Shirley. Okay, panelists, Jew or not a Jew?"

The skit cut to a mock commercial parodying a series of IBM commercials at the time called "You Make the Call." The narrator says, "Sandy Koufax is on the mound for the Los Angeles Dodgers. It's Game Seven of the World Series against the Minnesota Twins. The stylish left-hander is involved in a tense battle.... Okay, IBM invites you to make a call: Sandy Koufax--Jew, or not a Jew?"

The game show returns and the host tells the audience that Penny Marshall is in fact Italian--and then awards prizes to the contestants who guessed "not a Jew."

The night after this skit aired, SNL producer Brandon Tartikoff (himself Jewish) received a call from his mother. "I'm embarrassed to call you my son. This Jew/Not-a-Jew sketch was the most anti-Semitic thing I've ever seen." There was a long pause. "Besides," she said, "I always thought Penny Marshall was Jewish."

A stumble for the Republican Party

2008-12-27T22:05:00.026-05:00

A recent story about four of the candidates vying for the Republican National Committee chairmanship indicates the troubles that may lie ahead for the GOP in its attempt to rebuild itself after its stunning electoral defeat this year:

Chip Saltsman, a candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee, sent committee members this month a holiday music CD that included "Barack the Magic Negro," a parody song first aired in 2007 by talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

Created by conservative satirist Paul Shanklin, the song puts new lyrics to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon," and it is performed as if black activist Al Sharpton were singing it. Limbaugh played it after the Los Angeles Times ran an opinion piece with the same title, arguing that a vote for Barack Obama could assuage white guilt.

"A guy from the LA paper said it made guilty whites feel good, they'll vote for him and not for me cuz he's not from the hood," the song goes. "Oh, Barack the magic negro lives in DC, the LA Times they called him that because he's black but not authentically."

I'm sure Limbaugh thinks that Democrats who take offense at this ditty are simply proving the age-old truth that liberals have no sense of humor. (You won't get much argument there from Stephen Colbert.) And it is worth considering Clarence Page's defense of the song.

Still, I'm not sure that Republicans have earned the right to be hip and ironic on this subject. I found Sacha Baron Cohen's "Throw the Jew Down the Well" routine very funny, but I wouldn't feel comfortable if an Arab American organization began playing it. Sometimes you're just not in a position to be making certain kinds of jokes.

Another candidate for RNC chair is Katon Dawson, who recently resigned his 12-year membership in a whites-only country club.

When I read about these incidents, I have to think: are the Republicans out of their heads? They just lost a presidential election to a black man who received 96% of the African American vote. They know they cannot go on forever being the party of whites. If current projections are accurate, white Americans will be a minority less than half a century from now. To survive electorally, the Republican Party must make inroads into the African American community.

Unfortunately, a situation like this may drive them toward careless tokenism, as it has in the past. There are currently two African Americans running for RNC chair, Michael Steele and Ken Blackwell. As a Marylander, I am all too familiar with Steele. He may pass the Joe Biden test for black politicians--he is "articulate and clean and a nice-looking guy." The trouble is, he's also a bit of a nitwit.

I will mention one anecdote from his unsuccessful Senate run in 2006. A Roman Catholic, Steele was talking before the Baltimore Jewish Council when he was asked about his views on stem-cell research. His answer became the most notorious remark of his campaign: "You of all folks know what happens when people decide they want to experiment on human beings, when they want to take your life and use it as a tool. I know that as well in my community, out of our experience with slavery, and so I'm very cautious when people say this is the best new thing, this is going to save lives."

Jews did not take kindly to that remark. Somebody, somewhere along the line, should have informed Steele that Jews, unlike Catholics, overwhelmingly support embryonic stem-cell research. I think most Jews would respect any Catholic politician who took a principled stand on the issue. But if there is any sure way for a non-Jew to irritate a Jewish audience, it is by making an inappropriate Holocaust comparison. What was Steele thinking?

Still, I was willing to cut him some slack. Many capable politicians have said dumb things from time to time, and I don't like our gotcha culture where one regretful remark follows a politician around for the rest of his career. But I was not impressed by how Steele handled the aftermath. He quickly apologized for the remark, but he then proceeded to make an incoherent flip-flop on the issue. He stated that he actually supports embryonic stem-cell research--just so long as it doesn't destroy the embryo.

The rest of his campaign ran along similar lines. Maybe he didn't stand a chance: he was in an uncomfortable position as a conservative in a very liberal state. But Robert Ehrlich, a Republican, managed to win one term as governor with a good triangulation effort that attracted many Democrats. Steele didn't have that finesse. He seemed to lack both vision and leadership.

As for Ken Blackwell, the other black politician running for RNC chair, I know nothing about him. But the name! I mean, can we get any more subtle? I can imagine it now. "Meet our new token black, Mr. Blackwell."

If Republicans can find someone with the stature of Colin Powell or Condi Rice, they might be in good shape. But their credibility problem among blacks cannot be solved just by having blacks in prominent positions.

After all, polls show that African Americans tend to hold some conservative views, yet they continue to vote overwhelmingly Democrat. Though they aren't uncritical of the Democratic Party establishment, as the Clinton-Obama fight earlier this year demonstrated, they see the Republican Party as an old white boys' club. If Republicans want their votes, the first thing they're going to have to do is purge their party of any hint of racism. Since blacks are the future, a party that continues to alienate them will have no future.

The virtues of pluralism

2008-12-23T06:07:00.043-05:00

Grammar books tell us that the word media should be treated as a plural. You're supposed to say, "The media are covering the story," not "The media is covering the story." Nobody can explain what "a medium" is in this context, and the media people themselves often do not follow this rule, or they follow it inconsistently. I've read articles and even books where in one paragraph it's plural, in the next it's singular, and in the next it's plural again. It's beginning to take on the qualities of a noun like sheep, which can be either singular or plural.

The word is actually one of several Latin-derived plurals that have gradually become singular in English. Another example is data, which is a shibboleth among techies. You're supposed to say "The data are misleading" rather than "The data is misleading," and you'll get a stiff whacking if you get it wrong, even if hardly anyone uses the singular datum.

Of course, there are other examples that not even the pickiest of grammar cops treats as plural. You never hear anyone say "The agenda are ready," even though agenda is as much a Latin plural as media and data. Then there are Italian plurals like opera and spaghetti that English speakers have always treated as singular. If you heard someone say "The spaghetti are cooking," you'd give that person a stiff whacking!

But unlike any of those examples, the plurality of media is more than just a grammar issue. People almost always use the word to suggest that news coverage is distorted, slanted, or subtly manipulated. This connotation does not exist in terms such as "the newspapers" or "the networks." Although by now the plural use of media is mostly a formality, its transformation into a singular noun contributed to the popular image of the news business as a single unified entity conspiring to present the news in a particular way. All the critics left, right, and center talk about the media this way, even when they attach the term to a plural verb just to show what a smartypants they are.

Religion and influence

2008-12-21T18:20:00.016-05:00

There is a school of thought suggesting that atheistic Jews like Marx and Freud were creating essentially surrogate forms of Judaism. I was intrigued to learn that James Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man suggests a similar thing about lapsed Catholics. The protagonist Stephen Daedalus rejects the Catholicism of his upbringing, yet as he is explaining his philosophy of art to a friend, the friend coyly observes, "It is a curious thing...how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve."

When I had to do a paper on the novel in college, I seized on this idea. I posed the question of why Stephen abandoned his Catholicism, and my answer was that he found in art what he had been seeking in religion, namely a way to transcend the temptations of the flesh. Stephen's philosophy is that when examining art, a person should separate his impression of a piece from any physical or emotional reaction it may provoke. Superior art, according to Stephen, is created through a detachment between the artist and his work, whereby the artist's personality "refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself."

I traced the development of Stephen's philosophy throughout the novel. As a child and teenager, Stephen reacts to artistic pieces---books, poems, and the like--by letting himself be overcome by them. Conflict arises one day when he wanders into a bad part of town where he has his first sexual encounters. He knows he faces eternal torment for his actions, but at first he feels "a cold lucid indifference." Then his school has him attend a three-day retreat by a priest who gives a harrowing description of what Hell is like. Here is a brief excerpt from the priest's vivid speech:

In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, Saint Anselm, writes in his book on Similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it....

The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench.... Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

For all its raw emotional power, the speech has an important limitation. The priest describes the speech as being about "death, judgment, hell and heaven," but it is almost entirely about Hell, with scarcely a word about what Heaven will be like. Stephen becomes a fervent worshipper, but soon doubts begin to surface, and he wonders if his new devoutness is driven more by fear than by sincere belief. He has trouble finding a more positive basis for his faith.

What he gains most from that period of atonement is considerable practice at inhibiting his physical reactions. He walks with eyes to the ground; avoids eye contact with women; subjects himself to loud noises and unpleasant smells; and refuses to make himself comfortable in bed. By quelling his receptiveness to sensory experience, however, he undermines the very quality that allowed the priest's speech to influence him in the first place. He ultimately leaves his Catholicism behind when he satisfies his need for a chaste vantage point from which to observe life, without the "chill and order" of the priesthood that first attracted him. And he achieves that purpose through his newfound appreciation of art.

When I looked back on my essay later, I noticed a curious irony. Stephen's philosophy of art was almost the polar opposite of mine. Whenever I'm examining a work of fiction, or film, or music, the first question I ask myself is, "What effect did it have on me?" That question leads me to the most sincere and, hence, authentic, answers. Depersonalizing the process only leads to an artificial response, in my view.

In fact, that's exactly how I approached Joyce's novel. I wasn't sure what my paper was going to be about. But the point in the novel that had the most immediate impact on me was the priest's description of Hell. I knew I had to pivot my reaction to that scene into a larger thesis, and that's exactly what I did.

I wonder if my approach to art has something to do with my Jewish background, just as Stephen's has to do with his Catholic background. Judaism emphasizes the idea of a person being transformed through his actions. That's why Jewish thought is relatively weak on theology. Even Torah study is viewed in this light: you're encouraged more or less to lose yourself in it and then see how it affects you.

Then again, I could be totally off about this theory. I'm generalizing based on two limited examples, my own personal philosophy and that of a fictional character (albeit one based on Joyce himself). But I do believe that it is hard for people to escape their initial influences in life.

Opinions with results

2008-12-13T18:00:00.004-05:00

On August 11, 2008, writing for the ironically named conservative publication The American Thinker, Steven M. Warshawsky proclaimed, "As I wrote last December, '[t]he pundits can talk until they are blue in the face about Obama's charisma and eloquence and cross-racial appeal. The fact of the matter is that Obama has no chance of being elected president in 2008.' I am more convinced of this conclusion than ever."

On October 9, shortly after the second presidential debate, Warshawsky wrote, "I have received numerous emails from Republicans and Democrats alike, asking whether I still think Obama will lose the election. Yes, I do. But what about the polls, they ask? The polls show that Obama is winning. No, they don't, as I will explain." And he did.

Even by October 25, he did not back down: "In a few more weeks, the political environment in this country is likely to become a heckuva lot nastier. For there are real signs pointing to a McCain victory this year, whether or not the mainstream media wants to acknowledge them."

Needless to say, after Election Day he was shocked: "I cannot understand how a man like Obama became president. It contradicts everything I know, or thought I knew, about American history, culture, and politics." But he didn't conclude that his own thinking was at fault. He acted as if the country had pulled a fast one on him. He even made a whole new set of predictions about the damage that Obama and the Democratic Congress would do, and he ended by saying, "I hope that the Democrats will prove me wrong again." Judging from his track record, his hopes will likely be fulfilled!

He is hardly the only commentator to have underestimated Obama. But unlike any mainstream pundit I'm aware of, he continued to predict Obama's demise after primary season, and with firm conviction ("no chance of being elected"). To suggest as late as August that Obama might lose was reasonable, but to suggest that he definitely would lose was insane.

The sheer insularity is striking. Not surprisingly, The American Thinker has also been a repository for wild conspiracy theories about Obama, from the birth certificate business to the claim that William Ayers ghostwrote Dreams from My Father. I have no doubt that the people who believe these things will continue to believe them in the years to come. That's the beauty of having opinions: nothing can shake your belief in them, as long as you choose to consider them true. Making a specific, concrete prediction about the near future is another matter. Once you expose yourself to objective reality, you can't hide from it.

The fallacies in Warshawsky's analysis weren't hard to spot. His most telling statement was, "Why am I so confident that John McCain is going to win the election? In short, because Barack Obama is not an acceptable choice to lead the country." It didn't seem to occur to him that the American public might not share his standards of what is acceptable.

His refusal to believe the polls was also notable. The success of polls at predicting presidential winners has increased dramatically since the days of "Dewey Defeats Truman." In a very close race, there may be uncertainty. But by mid-October this year, McCain was consistently trailing Obama by at least five points, and the electoral map looked even worse for him. It was conceivable that public opinion might change before Election Day, but there was no reason to believe he was already in the lead.

Warshawsky may be an extreme case, but the punditocracy is littered with erroneous forecasts, and the pundits are rarely taken to task for them. I believe that the quality of prognostications can be a gauge of a commentator's analytical skill. We should pay more attention to them.

Let's consider some of the factors that inspire bad political predictions. One is wishful thinking. Another is projecting one's own outlook on the public. A notorious example of the latter was the title of conservative columnist Shelby Steele's early-2008 book A Bound Man: Why We are Excited about Obama and Why He Can't Win. Steele later apologized for the "stupid, silly subtitle that was slapped on to the book" and claimed it did not represent what the book was arguing. Not having read the book, I'll take his word for it.

Some people will predict a candidate's victory in the hopes of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's why candidates themselves rarely admit they're losing even when it's obvious they are. The final nail in the coffin of Fred Thompson's candidacy may have been when he admitted to the press that he wasn't likely to get the nomination. For a politician in those circumstances to lie is understandable, but we expect more honesty from commentators, who should always tell at least what they believe to be the truth.

None of the aforementioned factors explain why many Democrats doubted Obama would win, even days before the election when he seemed practically unbeatable. The crucial factor here was paranoia, inspired by past defeats. They felt their own party had a knack for "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory," and they believed that Republicans might steal the election again. (To this day, there are liberals who think even the 2004 election was stolen.) They also worried about the Bradley Effect, the alleged phenomenon that public opinion polls overestimate a black candidate's support because some respondents are afraid of revealing racist motivations.

One Democrat whose predictions were spectacularly vindicated was Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com. A baseball statistician by trade, Silver developed a unique method of averaging together the presidential polls to determine the winner. His final estimate had Obama beating McCain by 52.3% to 46.2%. The initial results on Election Night were 52.4% to 46.3%--within a tenth of a percent of Silver's predictions. (Subsequent counting, however, has widened Obama's lead by a whole percentage point, making Silver's estimate less accurate.) He also correctly predicted the winner in every state except Indiana, which Obama won narrowly. It's worth asking whether Silver would have been as accurate in a year that was bad for Democrats. My impression is that he doesn't let his biases interfere with his mathematical estimates.

Sometimes good predictions come from unexpected quarters. During the 1996 primary campaign, liberal comedian Al Franken correctly predicted that Dole's running mate would be Jack Kemp. He based his conclusion on a quip by Newt Gingrich that Kemp (a former NFL player) has showered with more blacks than most Republicans have shaken hands with. Franken followed this quote with a list of "Politicians Who Have Showered With Blacks," consisting of former athletes who went into politics.

In 1999, Franken released a book describing a bizarro version of the upcoming 2000 election in which Franken himself becomes the Democratic nominee, with an all-Jewish staff. And guess who his running mate is? Why, Joe Lieberman, of course. His stated reason is that he wants to balance the ticket because "I'm Reform and he's Orthodox."

After these two episodes, I began to pay more attention to Franken's musings. Maybe buried beneath the comedy was some sound insight, I figured. That's why I was puzzled when his 2005 book hinted that the next president would be Barack Obama. At the time, Obama had told the press "unequivocally" that he would not run in 2008. I thought to myself, "I guess Franken is finally wrong about something." Hmmmph. (To be fair, I should mention that the book also predicted that the Republican nominee for 2008 would be Bill Frist.)

What's Franken's secret? Good instincts, or dumb luck? You be the judge. Nobody can know with certainty what the future holds. But I value predictions, because they are opinions with results. They test a person's capacity to think objectively, without letting wishes or fears get in the way. They also tell us something about the quality of the person's reasoning. And they help us weed out the shills.

The cartoon that made science cool

2008-12-06T20:50:00.004-05:00

Stephen King and Stephen Jay Gould each wrote a foreword to a Far Side gallery, and they had such opposite perspectives on a comic they both praised that it illustrated different approaches people can take toward humor.

King, in his foreword to The Far Side Gallery 2, refused to explain what made Larson's cartoons funny. He wrote that The Far Side was a "uniquely unique" comic that "will make you laugh your butt off," but "I can't tell you why," because "There's no way to explain humor any more than there is a way to explain horror."

Gould, introducing The Far Side Gallery 3, apparently disagreed. His essay, which was twice as long as King's, examined various Larson cartoons to give a sense of why The Far Side was especially popular among scientists. According to Gould, Larson (who never worked as a scientist) understands "the intimate details of our lives and practices." As an example, Gould points to a Far Side cartoon showing astronomers fighting over a telescope, and the caption says "All day long, a tough gang of astrophysicists would monopolize the telescope and intimidate other researchers." Gould claims that this cartoon resonates with scientists because "telescopes are in desperately short supply, and...scientists (particularly Ph.D. students low on the totem pole) often wait months for a few hours of evening viewing (tough darts, and back to 'go,' if it's cloudy)."

Another cartoon showed an "average size" American family consisting of two parents, a whole child, and, literally, a half-child sitting in front of a TV set (alluding to studies that say things like that the average American family has 1.5 children). To Gould this illustrates that "language is not a neutral medium of optimal communication, but also a reservoir of illogic, cultural chauvinism, and literally senseless cliché."

Gould also talks about how Larson "places animals into human situations--using the differences to show how less than logical or universal our unquestioned practices can be." One recurring theme he sees in Larson's cartoons is the idea that "Animals have intelligence different from ours; they are not just primitive models of our achievements."

I prefer Gould's perspective to King's. Of course King is right that you can't rationalize humor. Either you laugh, or you don't, and nobody can persuade you to laugh at something you don't find funny. But Larson's cartoons are more than silly diversions. They have a point of view that resonates with people.

Larson's own thoughts on the matter can be found in his 1989 book PreHistory of the Far Side, a behind-the-scenes look at the process he goes through as a cartoonist. Among other things, he shows the doodled cartoons in his sketchbook alongside the final published versions. For example, a sketch of "If dogs drove," in which dogs are seen driving cars while hanging their heads out the window, was made into a cartoon called "When dogs go to work," in which dogs are sitting on a bus hanging their heads out the window, and the driver is also a dog doing the same thing.

Larson claims that he doesn't know where he gets his ideas: "Some cartoons spring forth from just staring stupidly at a blank sheet of paper and thinking about aardvarks or toaster ovens or cemeteries or just about anything" (p. 42). But in the process of developing an idea, he can be pretty analytical. He deals at length with how the subtle features of his cartoons--a character's facial expression or clothing, or something in the background--can have an effect on the humor.

Unlike the slightly conceited Bill Watterson in his annotated Calvin and Hobbes book, Larson is charmingly self-effacing. He kids himself a lot and never seems fully aware that he rules the field when it comes to single-panel cartoons. If you think what he does is easy, I'd like you to name another nationally syndicated single-panel cartoonist who even begins to approach Larson's mastery of the genre. I've seen plenty of comics try, but come up short.

One such comic is Mother Goose and Grimm. What struck me about Larson's sketchbook was how many of his initial ideas were at about the level of published Grimm cartoons, then he'd improve them. In one of his doodles, for example, two spiders are standing by a web and one of them says, "Nice threads." That's the sort of dumb pun I've seen in Grimm many times. But the final version is almost unrecognizably different. Four spiders are sitting around a little table next to a web that appears to have flowers stitched into it. The caption goes, "You and Fred have such a lovely web, Edna--and I love what you've done with those fly wings."

While he often starts with a simple gag, the cartoons he develops are usually more complex. They typically tell a little story that we are expected to unravel. I think of the one in the pet shop, where we see a piranha on display, and at the far end of the shop is a cat with wooden forelegs. This cartoon has no caption; it doesn't need any. The picture speaks for itself.

As Gould discerned, Larson's most frequent conceit is putting animals into human situations in order to comment on human behavior. In one cartoon, we see a mother chicken feeding a bedridden chicken a bowl of soup and saying, "Quit complaining and eat it!... Number one, chicken soup is good for the flu--and number two, it's nobody we know." The absurdity of the situation is what creates the humor, but we also end up thinking a little about human morality.

Larson admits to being flattered by his popularity among scientists, but he says it has its downside: every time he makes a scientific error, he receives a flurry of letters correcting it. For example, in one cartoon a husband mosquito walks into his house and sighs that he has been "spreading malaria" across the country. Numerous readers pointed out to Larson that only female mosquitos bite. Larson's response: "Of course, it's perfectly acceptable that these creatures wear clothes, live in houses, speak English, etc." (p. 124).

One often overlooked point is that The Far Side appealed not just to scientists but to scientifically informed laymen. Gould's favorite Far Side features a group of Protozoa watching a slide show, when one says, "No, wait! That's not Uncle Floyd! Who is that? Criminy, I think it's just an air bubble!" Scientists get the joke, but so does anyone who has ever operated a microscope.

In many cases, Larson takes a familiar biological fact and mixes it up with a stereotypical human situation. In one cartoon, an insect couple are sitting on a sofa in their house. Dad is reading the newspaper, and Mom is yelling to their daughter, who is walking out the door: "Hold it right there, young lady! Before you go out, you take off some of that makeup and wash off that gallon of pheromones!"

Larson did for cartoons what Douglas Adams did for fiction: take scientific ideas and derive humor from them that general audiences could understand. Even nonscientists appreciate Larson's attention to detail. His drawing ability is underrated, perhaps because of the crude, broad style of his faces and bodies. But when he draws animals, even highly anthropomorphized ones, the details are far more authentic than you'd expect from a syndicated cartoonist.

Larson also explains how he came up with some of his worst cartoons. A notorious example is "Cow tools," which features a cow standing by a table on which rest four oddly shaped objects, one of which looks like a saw. He admits the cartoon simply didn't work, but he explains what he intended it to mean, and while his explanation doesn't make the cartoon funny, we do get a sense of his thought processes that usually lead to better cartoons.

I've never thought of The Far Side as subversive, but a few of his cartoons have provoked controversy. Some readers are put off when he shows animals being hurt. None of these cartoons ever bothered me in the least, and I'm an animal lover. I love cats, but I was always amused by the cartoon where two dogs are playing "tethercat." As Larson points out, dogs beating up on cats is just an old cartoon convention: "I could understand the problem if these were kids batting an animal around a pole, but the natural animosity between dogs and cats has always provided fodder for humor in various forms" (p. 158).

On the other hand, when he shows some cartoons of his that his editors refused to publish, I admit he did push the boundaries of good taste. In one of them, a snake is crawling through a baby's crib and has a lump in the middle of its body at exactly the place in the crib where the baby should be. According to Larson, "editors, I'm convinced, have saved my career many times by their decision not to publish certain cartoons" (p. 176).

Other aspects of the book include the somewhat inspirational story of how he got into cartooning; examples of his first comic, Nature's Way; cartoons he based on personal experiences or short stories he wrote; some of the embarrassing mistakes he and his publishers made; and a lengthy gallery of his own favorite Far Sides.

Lastly, I should mention my own personal favorite, which happens to appear in the book. A dinosaur is standing behind a podium, speaking before an audience of dinosaurs. He says, "The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen.... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut."

I won't try to analyze it for you.

Why Obama will probably be a two-termer

2008-11-16T18:43:00.001-05:00

Obama's presidency is certain to disappoint, no matter what he does or doesn't do. The expectations for him are not only unusually high, but contradictory. His liberal supporters are happy to finally get an unabashed liberal in the White House, while his conservative supporters hope he will be a pragmatist. If he compromises on rolling back the controversial policies of the Bush years, he will disappoint many supporters, but if he pushes too hard, he risks alienating many other people. He has already made a range of promises that may be hard to implement in the current financial crisis, which may come to define his presidency regardless of how he handles it.

Does this mean he will be un-elected in 2012? Possibly. But that is less likely to happen than many people realize, no matter how far his star falls. He won by defeating the party in power. So far, our nation has seen fifteen presidents reach the office that way and not die in their first term. Those were (in reverse order) Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Nixon, Eisenhower, FDR, Wilson, Harrison, Cleveland, Grant, Lincoln, Pierce, Polk, and Jefferson. Of that group, eleven were reelected (though Cleveland lost his first reelection bid due to an Electoral College fluke). The remaining four--Polk, Pierce, Harrison, and Carter--each had unique circumstances stand in their way.

Polk never ran for reelection, due to poor health. Pierce ran but wasn't nominated by his party. Harrison was nominated and went on to lose in the general election, but he hadn't won the popular vote the first time around (due to the aforementioned Electoral College fluke). Carter is the only president in U.S. history to win the popular and electoral vote against the party in power, serve one term, get nominated for reelection, and lose (popularly and electorally)--an indication of how badly his presidency went. Even then, it took a Reagan to defeat him. In the 1980 election, Carter was actually leading in the polls until Reagan gave a strong debate performance a week before Election Day. Astonishing as it may sound, a weaker Republican candidate than Reagan could easily have guaranteed Carter a second term.

Many of Obama's opponents would like to believe he'll be the next Carter. From the evidence of the campaign, it's unlikely. In the 1976 election, Carter managed to shrink a 33-point lead down to a virtual tie, then win in a squeaker. Obama, in contrast, exceeded the expectations, winning in an electoral landslide that seemed like a stretch just months ago. Regardless of the job Obama does as president, he has proven himself to be a far more skillful politician than Carter ever was. If Republicans fail to accept that fact, they will continue to lose power. They might not be where they are today if they didn't already make that mistake.

The myth of the myth of the popular vote

2008-10-29T07:45:00.011-04:00

In making the case against the Electoral College, I frequently run into an insidious argument which states that the "popular vote" not only doesn't determine the winner but is a meaningless concept in our system. The argument goes as follows. Because of the Electoral College, candidates campaign in some states and not others, and this affects the outcome. Al Gore may have received half a million more votes than George W. Bush, but that was the end result of two campaigns that had been conducted on a state-by-state basis. We have no way of knowing what the nationwide totals would have been in a non-Electoral College system, because the campaigns would have been conducted differently, yielding different results. Therefore, Gore's apparent popular-vote lead doesn't mean anything.

I heard this argument several times from Republicans in 2000. I heard it most recently from Charles M. Kozierok, a blogger and self-described Democrat who is presumably not speaking from partisan bitterness over what happened eight years ago. I find the argument insidious because it attempts to whitewash the damage that a split between the electoral and popular vote does to public confidence in our system. The fallacy of the argument is that it confuses the causes of public opinion with the measurement of public opinion.

The purpose of an election is to ascertain the will of the people. It cannot ever be a perfect measure, since we can't read minds. A flat tire on the way to the polling station can distort the outcome. So can a medical emergency, or bad weather, or problems in the voting machines, or any number of other factors unrelated to people's intentions. Nevertheless, an election is meant to reflect as accurately as possible what the public thinks at a particular moment in time.

Campaigns do affect the outcome, of course. But they have nothing to do with the accuracy of the election in measuring public opinion. Rather, they have an effect on the public opinion itself before it is measured. For example, if a candidate campaigns in Missouri but not Kansas, the election will probably turn out differently than if he were to campaign in both states. But that simply means he has influenced the voters in a particular way, before their views were measured in the polling booths. The combined vote total in both states is still an accurate and meaningful measure of the collective will of Missouri and Kansas voters, whom the candidate helped influence. So too with the collective will of voters in all fifty states (plus DC). It may not determine the winner, but it is independently significant--a "valid metric," to use Kozierok's terminology.

Still, I agree about one thing: the state-by-state campaign strategy used by U.S. presidential candidates is the most obvious consequence of our having an Electoral College. A true split between the popular and electoral vote is in fact quite rare. It has apparently happened four times in our history. What is seldom pointed out, however, is that only once was the split uncontroversial. That was in the 1888 election, when Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote but won the election, apparently without any controversy over the results.

The other three cases were a different story. In 1876 and 2000, the election ended in a months-long battle over the voting results in Florida, and the man who finally triumphed was widely viewed as an illegitimate president, not because he lost the popular vote but because his triumph in Florida was called into question. Thus, in both cases the popular-electoral split was arguably an illusion.

The 1824 election was the strangest. Andrew Jackson received a plurality of the popular and electoral votes. But because there were four major candidates, he failed to reach an electoral majority, so the election was thrown into Congress, which made John Quincy Adams president. (Jackson would gain the presidency four years later.) Partly that was because of Speaker of the House Henry Clay, whom Adams subsequently appointed Secretary of State, an act that struck many people (including Jackson) as bribery. Constitutionally the outcome was legitimate, but an expression of the public will it was not.

Given the relative rarity of these kinds of situations, the difference between the Electoral College and a direct-vote system might seem more theoretical than practical. But one very tangible difference that shows up in every election is the suppression of third parties. The most striking example was the 1992 election, when Ross Perot, running as an independent, received 19% of the popular vote but not a single electoral vote.

Earlier that year, Perot had led in the polls. What would have happened if he had maintained that lead into November? Probably he would have won enough electoral votes to throw the race into Congress, which would then almost certainly have gone for one of the major-party candidates (probably Bush).

That outcome would not have impressed the Founders, who opposed the idea of a two-party system. Actually, the Founders failed to anticipate many things about the Electoral College. And no wonder. That was a time when Thomas Jefferson referred to Virginia as "my country," and when the term United States was treated as a plural. None of them predicted the gradual weakening of the states and strengthening of the federal government over the course of two centuries. That's why I'm amazed whenever I hear defenders of the Electoral College talk about the "wisdom" of the Founders in creating this system. If you're going to defend it, at least acknowledge that its value is due as much to luck as to foresight.

Secret Catholic terrorist

2008-10-24T06:01:00.003-04:00

It's been enlightening reading about past presidential campaigns in this country.

For example, when John Frémont ran for president in 1856, he was rumored to be a secret Catholic. (He was actually Episcopalian.)

When Al Smith, the first actual Catholic nominee, ran in 1928, people said that as soon as he entered office he would extend the Holland Tunnel to the basement of the Vatican.

Nowadays, this issue has receded so much from our national consciousness that no one seems to notice we're on the verge of electing the first Catholic vice president.

It's striking how much has changed, yet how little.

Party swap

2008-09-28T11:22:00.040-04:00

At this year's Republican Convention, Mike Huckabee said, "Abraham Lincoln reminded us that a government that can do everything for us can also take everything from us." I've been trying to figure out what he meant by that. In Lincoln's day, it was the Democratic Party that preached laissez-faire, free trade, and states' rights, while the Republicans advocated increased taxation, protectionism, and an activist federal government. Was Huckabee mythologizing Lincoln as a small-government conservative? Or was he criticizing the massive government expansion that Lincoln in fact engendered? I suspect it was a little of both, because nowadays the party of Lincoln is also the party of neo-Confederates.

I often see Republican politicians walk that tightrope, invoking the mantle of Lincoln without directly praising Lincoln's politics. It's striking that Democrats rarely do this with their presidential godfather, Thomas Jefferson, who, similarly, didn't have much in common with today's Democrats. ("That government is best which governs least.") Huckabee's reference to Lincoln was one of several during the Republican Convention, but the Democratic Convention featured just one reference to Jefferson, and it was in a speech by Jim Leach, a Republican.

I can understand why. Historians of all political stripes consider Lincoln the greatest U.S. president, who kept the nation from splitting apart and oversaw the abolition of slavery, perhaps the most important moral development in our nation's history. When reading about Republicans in the nineteenth century, it is hard not to think of them simply as the good guys and the Democrats as the villains. While the picture was more complicated than that, the Republicans did begin as an anti-slavery party and continued to support the interests of African Americans after the Civil War, even as Democrats were loudly proclaiming the inferiority of the Negro. The Democrats' racism continued well into the twentieth century, with their support for the Jim Crow laws.

Modern-day Republicans like to point out these ugly facts to undermine the Democratic Party's legitimacy on race issues. But the fact remains that the Democrats, to a large extent, were the ones who first embraced the civil rights movement of the 1960s. That a white-supremacist party evolved into a civil-rights party--and, ultimately, became the first party to nominate a black man for president--is one of the more remarkable facts about our nation's political history.

How and why these realignments happened is the subject of Lewis Gould's 2003 book Grand Old Party. Gould argues that certain features of the Republican Party have remained constant even as its philosophy of government, as well as its demographics, changed. Among other things, Republicans always had a close relationship with the business community. That they initially saw no conflict between this relationship and their regulatory views suggests how radically different society was back then.

According to Gould, Teddy Roosevelt's departure from the Republican Party was a seminal event in solidifying the party's conservative philosophy. The other Roosevelt's presidency, on the other hand, represented the beginnings of the Democratic Party's embrace of welfare capitalism. That was when blacks began migrating to the Democrats. Southern whites remained attached to the party and wouldn't start to become agitated until Truman's administration.

It was in the 1960s, especially in the candidacy of Barry Goldwater and in LBJ's passage of key civil-rights legislation, that the white South became solidly Republican, while African Americans became solidly Democrat. Goldwater's role in this process was not entirely fair. He was generally supportive of civil rights, and he had helped desegregate the Arizona National Guard. But his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had an important symbolic impact.

Both parties eventually reached a consensus on the issue of desegregation. But it is hard to forget what initiated the realignment of the South. One notable Dixiecrat-turned-Republican was Strom Thurmond, famous for the longest filibuster in history to stop the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (which Goldwater supported). On the other hand, ex-Klansman Robert Byrd remained in the Democratic Party. Of course, neither of these men continued to preach racism after the 1960s.

That's what makes the question of "Where did the racists go?" so complicated. Some of them had a genuine change of heart, regardless of which party they ended up in. They all grew old while the younger generation forged its identity in a world more accepting of diversity. But African Americans have not forgotten how the parties developed to their current state, which is why the vast majority of them vote Democrat to this day despite holding some conservative views.

There is still evidence of racism among whites in both parties. A recent study suggested that one-third of white Democrats and independents hold negative views of blacks. Blogger Nate Silver has criticized the survey for both its methodology and its attempts to draw conclusions about the current election, but I have observed throughout this year that many Democrats are beginning to notice the old-fashioned racists still lurking within their own party. It is time to engage in a little reflection and stop placing the blame solely with the other party.

Tea/No Tea '08

2008-09-07T03:17:00.035-04:00

The Republican race this year has begun to remind me of a point in the old Infocom text adventure Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

In that game, you are making your way through a spaceship when you find an object called tea on the ground. You can pick it up by typing "TAKE TEA." There is also an object called no tea which you can pick up: "TAKE NO TEA." But you cannot pick up one while holding the other, since you cannot be simultaneously holding tea and no tea.

The problem is, you have to do just that in order to access the ship's computer. To make this seemingly illogical act possible, you must temporarily become a microscopic entity inside your own brain and remove the Common Sense Particle. Once it is removed, you are free to hold tea and no tea at the same time.

After campaigning on experience and deriding his opponent for a lack of it, John McCain has now selected an inexperienced running mate. She not only lacks foreign policy experience, she has virtually no record of even expressing foreign policy views. In an interview from last month, she didn't even recognize that we have an exit plan for Iraq!

The hypocrisy was so transparent it even caught the attention of many conservatives, including David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Ben Stein (who called her "the most peculiar vice-presidential choice there has ever been"), and former McCain strategist Mike Murphy. Others did 180-degree turns on things they had said, prompting a great bit on The Daily Show.

But those who thought McCain could no longer invoke the experience argument were quickly rebuffed by the RNC, which flaunted McCain's experience and Palin's non-Washington status. Somewhere along the line, he removed the Common Sense Particle, figuring he could convince voters to elect tea and no tea at the same time. The odd thing is, he may be right.

While I'm too much of a wimp to make any definitive predictions, I see Democrats falling into a trap. It's the same trap they fell into with Bush in 2000, setting the expectations so low that very little was needed to exceed expectations. You know something's seriously out-of-whack when all a candidate must do to quell many people's doubts about her readiness is capably deliver a speech she didn't write.

I won't go into a detailed refutation of the RNC's attempts to puff up Palin's record while tearing down Obama's. Many other sites have already taken up the task. What's telling is the unstated assumption that her experience must be measured against Obama's. Obama never ran on experience; McCain did. Had Palin been a presidential candidate earlier this year, McCain would almost certainly have assailed her lack of experience, as he in fact did against Romney, Giuliani, and Thompson, all of whom have considerably more experience than Palin.

"We don't have time or opportunity for on-the-job training, and the other candidates for president I don't believe have the qualifications that I do to hit the ground running and immediately address these serious challenges," the four-term Arizona senator and Vietnam veteran told reporters following a speech on the military.

"The country would be safer with me as its leader," McCain added. He said that while he respects his opponents, "this is all about who is best equipped to take on the challenge of radical Islamic extremism."

The selection of a running mate is important not just because of who gets picked, but because it tells us something about how the person at the top of the ticket makes decisions. Obama made a pragmatic if unexciting choice. McCain made a political choice. If experience matters to him as much as he has claimed, what does his selection tell us about his commitment to putting "country first"?

At the convention, Republicans adopted the Lloyd Bentsen strategy. Their message was, "We know Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is a friend of ours. Senator Obama, you're no Sarah Palin." The trouble is, that first sentence is a lie, and anyone who's been paying attention realizes it.

Design creating the designer

2008-09-04T03:42:00.009-04:00

Given the achievements of theoretical physics in the last century, it can come as a shock to realize the amount of unbridled speculation in the field. The way Paul Davies presents the topic in his book The Goldilocks Enigma occasionally gives it the aura of classical mythology. For example, tell me the following account of the early universe doesn't sound like some primordial battle between a good and bad deity:

Whenever matter and antimatter mingle, they quickly annihilate in a burst of gamma rays.... So that presents a puzzle: how did the big bang make 10⁵⁰ tons of matter without also making 10⁵⁰ tons of antimatter?.... however it is done, the story of the origin of matter would go something like this. The heat radiation released after the big bang created copious quantities of both matter and antimatter, all mixed together, but containing a slight excess of matter. As the universe cooled, the antimatter would be totally destroyed by virtue of its being in intimate contact with matter, leaving unscathed the small residue of excess matter--about one part in a billion. (p. 105)

The coincidence of my coming upon this book just a few weeks after I wrote my post about pantheism, which covers similar ground, wasn't lost on me. Both deal with the question of why the dead universe around us seems uniquely suited for life. To rephrase the old conundrum, how come anyone's around to hear the tree make a sound?

Physicists over the past few decades have discovered that many of the physical laws of the universe seem "just right" for the development of life. If the numbers had been slightly lower, or slightly higher, life as we know it could not have come to exist. I will mention just a few examples, because the topic is vast and has been covered thoroughly in numerous books:

1. If the neutron were slightly lighter, the proton would be unstable and atoms probably could not have formed. If it were slightly heavier, nuclear fusion would not be possible and stars could not have formed.

2. If gravity were slightly stronger, all stars would be giants with relatively brief lives. If it were slightly weaker, heavy elements necessary for planet formation would not have been produced.

3. If the nuclear resonance level of carbon were any different, our sun could not have produced high quantities of the element.

One must exercise caution when examining these apparent facts. Perhaps a very different sort of life, or lifelike phenomenon, would have emerged under other conditions. Perhaps we aren't exercising our imaginations enough. But examples like these have piled up, and so far they haven't gone away.

Like me, Davies isn't satisfied with the standard copout, "That's just the way the laws are, and if they weren't that way, we wouldn't be here to discuss it." To illustrate the flaw in this argument, he takes off from an idea in Carl Sagan's novel Contact. The number pi consists of decimal digits going on into infinity. The digits are completely arbitrary except for the fact that the number is derived from nature. Let's say you created a computer program displaying the number in binary, where a light pixel would represent one, and a dark pixel zero. Most likely, the screen would be flooded with meaningless "snow." You wouldn't expect to see a coherent image, such as a circle, much less a smiley face. But what if one did appear after just two minutes? Assuming the program wasn't rigged, the only conclusion most scientists would permit would be that it's just a freakish coincidence.

Davies explores several possible solutions to this dilemma. (I will deal with only a few of them here.) The most popular is the hypothesis of multiple universes. In an infinity of universes, some are bound to produce life. Those that don't will obviously go unnoticed. We're here simply because our universe is one that happened to have the right set of laws needed for our existence.

The multiverse hypothesis isn't purely ad hoc; it seems to follow from certain versions of the Big Bang theory, as well as from certain versions of quantum mechanics. But there are major problems with the hypothesis, as Davies explains. For starters, it is borderline untestable. It also seems to violate Occam's razor, the principle that theories should be as simple as possible. And it leaves unanswered the question of where the universe-generating mechanism came from.

One bizarre twist on this hypothesis bears mentioning. Davies quotes Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom as saying, "There is a significant probability that you are living in [a] computer simulation. I mean this literally: if the simulation hypothesis is true, you exist in a virtual reality simulated in a computer built by some advanced civilisation. Your brain, too, is merely a part of that simulation."

That's just a modern variation on an age-old philosophical idea, but Bostrom makes a case for it based on the multiverse hypothesis. See if you can follow this. If countless universes exist, there are likely to be ones containing civilizations that have reached the point of creating simulated universes. Any civilization with that capacity is likely to exercise it numerous times. Therefore, there are likely to be more fake universes than real ones, and so, by the laws of probability, we are more likely to inhabit one of the fakes.

Davies has fun with this idea. If we're in a simulation, who is to say we aren't in a simulation-within-a-simulation? "Logically there is no end to this nested sequence.... The real universe could be lost amid an infinite regress of nested fakes. Or it may not even exist at all. Reality might consist of an infinite sequence of simulations, period" (p. 185).

As the saying goes, that way lies madness. Bostrom's argument has many holes, but the most basic is that the conclusion undermines the premises. If we live in a fake universe, how do we know the physical laws we have discovered--on which the multiverse hypothesis rests--accurately describe the reality outside the simulation?

Davies, in any case, prefers a one-universe model, but he still suspects that the seemingly life-friendly laws cannot be due to chance. He proposes that there must be something leading our universe in the direction of producing conscious, thinking beings like ourselves. What that something is, he leaves open, but he puts forward a series of related theories that he maintains are compatible with modern physics.

While I'm not sure I understood all the details, his basic idea is that conscious life itself, in the far future, somehow influences the early universe to produce life in the first place. The laws create life, and life creates the laws, in a sort of circular time-loop with no ultimate origin. I couldn't help thinking of the following Escher drawing:

Davies contrasts this idea with the classic grandfather paradox, where a time traveler kills an ancestor. He says it is more like a time traveler saving the life of a girl who will one day become the time traveler's mother. Davies insists that this scenario, while strange, does not create a paradox.

Actually, the scenario is called an "ontological paradox." One notable example I discussed on this blog is from the movie Somewhere in Time. A man receives an antique watch from an old lady. He later goes back in time and gives it to a young woman, who will become the old lady who gives it to his younger self--and so on, ad infinitum. The paradox is that the watch was never built by anyone, at any time. It just eternally exists, fully formed. Since Davies is as bothered as I am by the question of why anything exists, I would think he'd stay far away from such scenarios, which only compound the question.

Considering the difficulties with all these theories, why not accept the traditional idea of a creator God? Davies thinks this answer presents at least as many difficulties as the others. For one thing, did God choose to create the universe, or was it a necessary act that flowed from His very nature? Either possibility leads to additional questions. Also notice the problem with describing creation as an event in time--God exists outside of time, at least according to traditional religions.

I think that such questions miss the point. God by definition is where rational inquiry ends. To believers, the purpose of belief is to transcend the rational in order to connect with the unfathomable. The usual response by scientists is that God, then, should remain forever outside of scientific discussions. To some extent, I agree. But when scientists are reduced to positing fake worlds within fake worlds, or self-created entities from an unexplainable time-loop, we are justified in wondering if the end has already been reached.

Word relativity

2008-09-02T05:26:00.003-04:00

While in college, I once gathered entries from Dictionary of Changes in Meaning by Adrian Room, a book that gives obsolete definitions of common English words and traces their evolution to their current meanings. Here are a few of the examples I collected:

algebra: bone-setting
buxom: obedient
coffin: basket
computer: person who does computations
corpse: a living person's body
friend: lover
garbage: animal food
girl: child of either sex
grammar: the study of Latin
hussy: housewife
jargon: twittering of birds
jest: noble deed
kill: to strike or beat
knight: boy, youth
lair: bed
larva: ghost
lewd: not a member of the clergy
litter: portable couch
nice: foolish
nosy: having a large nose
passenger: traveler on foot
poison: any liquid mixture, not necessarily toxic
sagacious: having a keen sense of smell
silly: blessed
snob: shoemaker
toilet: cloth wrapping
tomboy: boisterous boy

Why I love color (but not colorization)

2008-08-27T19:45:00.002-04:00

Somebody recently created an online version of Raiders of the Lost Ark divided into fourteen chapters and made to resemble those old serials that were a big influence on the film. I'm unsurprised how good it looks in black-and-white. The movie's visual style has always struck me as owing a great debt to black-and-white movies. I think of that moment when a man's shadow appears behind Marion in the bar, and we know it's Indy because of the outline of the fedora.

I thought back to the 1980s when Ted Turner began colorizing numerous classics, causing an uproar among filmmakers and critics alike--including Siskel and Ebert, who described the process as "cultural butchery." Though the technical aspects of colorization improved over time, I agree that the process inherently detracts from a film. But Ebert went further and argued in an essay (titled "Why I Love Black and White" in his Movie Home Companion) that there was something special about black-and-white that color films could never capture.

Black and white movies present the deliberate absence of color. This makes them less realistic than color movies (for the real world is in color). They are more dreamlike, more pure, composed of shapes and forms and movements and light and shadow. Color films can simply be illuminated. Black and white films have to be lighted. With color, you can throw light in everywhere, and the colors will help the viewer determine one shape from another, and the foreground from the background. With black and white, everything would tend toward a shapeless blur if it were not for meticulous attention to light and shadow, which can actually create a world in which the lighting indicates a hierarchy of moral values.

Ebert stopped short of arguing that black-and-white was intrinsically superior. As he put it, "On a properly controlled palate, a color movie can be a thing of wonder." I think his point was simply that black-and-white pays special attention to elements that color ignores, and hence colorization inevitably mars a picture. But he never paused to ask why some viewers prefer color, other than force of habit.

Unlike Ebert, I grew up in the color era, though I watched many black-and-white movies as a kid. I appreciate black-and-white cinematography for all the reasons he mentions, and I agree that black-and-white films ideally should stay black-and-white. Yet on some level I find color more pleasing to the eye.

I know I'm not alone in this. For most people, I think, the beauty of the world involves the many colors our eyes can perceive. Think of flowers in a garden, or a deep blue sky on a sunny day, or a spectacular display of fireworks at night. Black-and-white objects can also have a simple beauty to them, but I thank God I am not colorblind.

I like color for much the same reason I prefer light over darkness, day over night. In fact, one of the striking things about the black-and-white Raiders was the difficulty in distinguishing night from day. A blue sky would end up looking overcast, and everything just seemed a lot darker than it did in the original film. Granted, it was an amateur's transformation of a color film, but black-and-white movies always make me feel like I'm entering a darker world than the one I inhabit. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it begins to explain why many viewers today are turned off by black-and-white movies, thus stimulating the need for colorization.

It's a little like the dubbing of foreign films: it does hurt their quality, but it also makes them accessible to people who would otherwise not be inclined to watch them. I personally cringe at both dubbing and colorization, but I understand why others feel differently. It's the alteration that ruins it for me; I do not object to the fact that most films since the late 1960s have been shot in color. What the shift signifies, in my view, is not so much technological advancement as social change that has made the symbolism of color resonate more strongly than it did in the past.

Most black-and-white films in the modern period fall into one of the following categories: (1) experimental indie flicks, like Darren Aronofsky's Pi (2) period pieces, like The Man Who Wasn't There (3) films seeking to evoke older cinema, like Young Frankenstein.

Mixing black-and-white with color usually comes off as pretentious, though a few films through the ages have made great use of this effect. The most famous is, of course, Wizard of Oz. A recent example is the ultra-violent, noirish Sin City, where the black-and-white and color blend together so seamlessly you truly feel you've entered a bizarre alternate universe.

The convention of filming flashbacks in black-and-white was put to great use in 1998's American History X, where the protagonist's days as a racist skinhead are shown in black-and-white, and his life after he reforms is shown in color. The symbolism here is relevant, because the film suggests not only that he stops seeing the world in black and white, but even more that he stops seeing the world as divided into blacks and whites.

Earlier that same year, Pleasantville also used black-and-white to suggest both simplicity and racism. The film depicts two teens from the 1990s who get magically transported into a 1950s sitcom, and their modern behavior gradually causes other characters to acquire color. The town is scandalized by this development, and pretty soon we see a shop with the sign "No coloreds allowed." Color here represents all the aspects of modernity that '50s television tried to suppress, from racial integration to sexual liberation.

Despite Ebert's praise of the "dreamlike" qualities of black-and-white, it cannot show the full range of our dreams. A skilled filmmaker can exploit this limitation to great effect, but it's still a limitation, one that can never quite contain the nuances of our modern age. Black-and-white movies will always have their place, but for the most part they are the mark of an earlier, simpler era.

Thought-provoking quote

2008-08-24T10:26:00.004-04:00

Reuven Firestone, in An Introduction to Islam for Jews, writes (pp. 235-6):

More than once [while living in Egypt] I heard people there criticize American culture for its innately violent nature and declare that Americans are an aggressive and brutal people who lack respect for human life. Some Egyptians who made the case pointed to the extraordinary level of violence in American film and television. Some cited the results of American studies published in the Arab press that establish the murder rate in the United States as one of the highest in the world, and off the charts when compared to nations with a similar standard of living and cultural level. As one Egyptian acquaintance told me, "You Americans start wars all over the world, but you never fight for your own soil or on your own land. You exploit the fears and pain of others in order to take over somebody else's natural resources or exploit their labor."

I was shocked the first time I encountered this view because, although I consider myself critical of many aspects of American culture, what I heard is simply not the perception that I have of myself and my fellow Americans. It also gave me pause about many Americans' opinions about Muslims and Arabs, because, in fact, it is common to hear virtually the same critique by Americans leveled against Arabs: "Arab culture (or Islam) is innately violent, and Arabs (Muslims) are an aggressive and brutal people who lack respect for human life."

A shaggy-something story

2008-08-20T08:29:00.014-04:00

I had my very first bear experience at Swallow Falls State Park early this Tuesday morning. I doubt it will be my last. While I never camped until I grew up, I've heard plenty of bear stories from other campers before and since.

The prospect always excited as well as frightened me. I have a childlike fascination with wild animals, but being attacked by a large carnivore is not the way I would like to go. Travel guides claim that black bears are rarely dangerous unless you do something stupid like taunt them. A sign outside the park listing animals in the area described the black bear as "not aggressive" but warned people not to feed one.

I woke up four in the morning and left the tent to read a book by the light of a propane lantern. After about thirty minutes I decided to go back inside. I was getting cold and had no jacket, and I didn't want to walk all by myself to the shower room until the sky got lighter.

As I stood up and stretched my muscles, I heard movement. I looked into the forest, and about fifteen feet away was an animal walking on all fours. I registered it in my mind as a raccoon, though it seemed too big to be one.

After re-entering the tent, I peered outside and noticed that the "raccoon" had climbed on the picnic table to investigate the remains of our meal from the previous night. My friend briefly woke up, and I told him there was an animal outside. Right as I said that, it went away, probably having heard us talking.

By that time, I knew it was no raccoon. A few weeks earlier I had seen a raccoon on the road near my home, and it was no bigger than a cat. This animal took up at least half the table it was on. As far as I know, raccoons do not stalk camp sites waiting for campers to retire for the night so they can steal food. This deliberate, rather intelligent, behavior is associated chiefly with bears.

But I couldn't make out its color or markings, and its head shape though not its body did remind me of a raccoon's. I never previously thought of raccoons as resembling bears, even though I know scientists have had trouble deciding which one of the two a giant panda is. (Nowadays, they usually place it in the bear family.) Somehow I doubt a panda made its way to a western Maryland campground.

Only gradually did I realize what it was I had seen. For some reason, its flat-footed gait and round, bulky frame did not immediately register with me. It looked no bigger than a large dog, and it hardly made a sound the entire time. I think it was a relatively small bear, not fully grown, but I could have miscalculated its size in the dim light. It looked so innocuous I can understand why some campers make the mistake of trying to interact with them.

Trusting the enemy

2008-08-10T17:35:00.006-04:00

Linked to at DovBear's blog

After hearing some of my friends repeating the rumor that Barack Obama had a Muslim upbringing which he has concealed, I checked and found it was flatly untrue. But that was several months ago. Only recently did I discover a fact that puts an ironic twist on the whole matter: the man who initiated the rumor, designed to make Obama look frightening to Jews, is himself a rabid anti-Semite.

The Washington Post traces the rumor to a 2004 article by Andy Martin, a politician who had run that year for the same Senate seat Obama ultimately won. The article wasn't as extreme as some of the later forms the rumor took--Martin didn't attempt to tie Obama to "radical" Islam, and he acknowledged that Obama was currently a practicing Christian--but it was the beginning. Nobody knows who started the anonymous chain emails, but Martin does take credit for being the first to argue publicly that Obama was raised Muslim.

As Wikipedia reveals, Martin is quite a character. (What's printed on Wikipedia is not necessarily accurate, but in this case it provides a range of credible sources, including official court transcripts.) Numerous federal and state courts have dubbed him a "vexatious litigant" due to his having filed hundreds of mostly frivolous lawsuits. He was denied a license to practice law in the state of Illinois because of his unprofessional behavior on various occasions. But I haven't gotten to the most interesting part. According to an article in the Chicago Tribune (reprinted on an Illinois Republican Party website):

In his past, Martin also has expressed anti-Semitic views. When he ran for Congress in Connecticut in 1986, the name of his congressional campaign committee included the phrase "to exterminate Jew power in America," Federal Election Commission records show.

In a 1983 personal bankruptcy case, he referred to a federal bankruptcy judge as a "crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race." In a related court filing in the case, he also expressed sympathy to the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Though he denies having made those remarks, despite what the public records show, he is still pretty open about his views on Israel. A columnist for a Florida newspaper summed it up (the embedded links are my own, pointing to more recent articles where Martin said these or similar things):

While he touts a two-state solution for the Middle East in his "Andy Martin Peace Plan," says he's close to the peace movement in Israel, and has proposed increased compensation for Holocaust victims, the candidate also called for the Bush administration to attack Israel instead of Iraq. He has compared Ariel Sharon to Adolf Hitler and has written in defense of Hamas suicide bombers.

Here are some highlights from his rambling 1983 affidavit which makes Mel Gibson's drunken rant seem mild by comparison. (I got the text from Justia.com, a legal site with thousands of court records.)

Although I was not a Jew hater when these cases began, any love for the Jews I may have had has been dissipated by barbaric tortures inflicted on me by the Jews. I can see now that anti-semitism has a real root in the ageless manipulation, chicanery and murder by the Jews.... Jews killed the son of God, and seek to deny the fact, and seek to murder and loot and steal from anyone who opposes their efforts at world domination.... I do not believe I can receive Justice from a pack of Jew thives [sic], judges and lawyers.... "Judge" Krechevsky is not neutral or detached. He is part of a Jew conspiracy to steal my property.... I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did, when Jew survivors are operating as a wolf pack to steal my property.

There's something sadly ironic about the fact that Jews concerned about Obama's relationship with the Jewish community have accepted the words of a real anti-Semite. It may seem strange that he would appeal to a fear of anti-Semitism. My guess is that he enjoys manipulating what he perceives as Jewish power. What's sad is how many of us have taken the bait.

Escaping the cage of language

2008-08-08T01:05:00.003-04:00

The following is a transcript of a speech I gave at Toastmasters two days ago. I based it on my blog post "The cage of language," with strong help from Geoffrey Nunberg's article "If it's 'Orwellian,' It's Probably Not." My project assignment was to deliver a keynote address. I presented myself as the keynote speaker to the convention of the Language Guardians Party, who are nominating George Orwell, the first dead Englishman to run for president of the United States.

I am so pleased that you have handed me the opportunity to shoulder the burden of heading this convention so that we can face the issues of our day without knuckling under the pressure and mouthing empty platitudes just so we can elbow our way in to the American electorate.

No wonder politics gives people such a headache.

Language is a wonderful thing, but it is also a sneaky thing that can blind us when we aren't paying attention. Language can be used to express our deepest thoughts and insights, but it can also be used to confuse and distort and conceal. It's vital that we pay close attention to the dead metaphors and clichés that litter our language, because if we don't, they will take control of our thinking.

One person who truly understood this point was our nominee, Mr. Orwell, who explained his views most forcefully in his essay "Politics and the English Language." How many of you have read this essay? It's one of the most widely read essays of the twentieth century, and in many ways one of the least understood.

Mr. Orwell tells us that modern English is in a state of decay because the people who speak and write it have become trite, wordy, and vague. Mr. Orwell argues that this situation poses serious problems for our society.

I have noticed that people have three levels for understanding Mr. Orwell's message, with Level One being the most superficial, and Level Three being the deepest. I hope and believe that everyone in this room can progress to Level Three.

Level One is the idea that all Mr. Orwell was doing was telling us to communicate more effectively. Mr. Orwell says we communicate very poorly today, and he illustrates this by giving his own translation of a famous verse in Ecclesiastes. Here is the original version from the King James Bible:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Now, here is Mr. Orwell's translation of that verse into modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Let me ask all of you, does Mr. Orwell's translation make the verse more clear and understandable? [Audience: No!]

Does it make the verse simpler? [Audience: No!]

Does it make the verse more poetic? [Audience: No!]

Is this the kind of communication we want to encourage? [Audience: No!]

Should we aim to improve our English by making it clearer, simpler, and more elegant? [Audience: Yes!]

Then we've got a problem.

Why is it important to communicate clearly? "Well, uh, if we don't communicate clearly, then, uh, people will have trouble understanding us." Alright, why is it important for people to understand us? "Well, uh, if people don't understand us, then we won't be contributing to public understanding."

It's hardly self-evident that we should be clear. People can get very far in this country without being good communicators. In the academic world, it is often to your advantage to be as unclear as possible. Some of our most successful businessmen and entrepreneurs can barely string a sentence together unless it's written in C++.

Understanding the importance of good communication brings us to Level Two of Mr. Orwell's message. We need to be on guard against the people in power who manipulate the language to keep the masses in line. This is actually what most people think of whenever George Orwell's name is mentioned, the way that the power centers of society--the government, the media, the CEOs of major companies--use windy, confusing phrases to conceal their true intentions. I'll give some real-life examples of this Orwellian language: referring to a tax increase as a "revenue enhancement," or referring to deaths of patients in hospitals as "failure to fulfill their wellness potential." I can think of some of my own examples! Blackout: "precipitous circuit conclusion." Falling down a flight of stairs: "unpremeditated diagonal excursion." Forest fire: "vegetative borough ignition."

I've got another question for all of you. If Mr. Orwell were alive today, what would he think is the most Orwellian term of modern times? [Members of the audience give possible answers.]

I'll tell you. If he were alive today, he would say that the most Orwellian term is "Orwellian." Everyone today is always accusing someone else of being Orwellian. "My communication is clear and direct, but you, you're Orwellian." You hear this criticism from the left, from the right, all across the political spectrum. People use the term "Orwellian" so often that it has become exactly the kind of hackneyed, overused expression that Mr. Orwell was warning us against, the kind of expression that people use to mask lazy, conventional thinking.

That brings us to Level Three. You really thought all Mr. Orwell was telling us was to watch out for a bunch of silly euphemisms? If only it were that easy. All the Orwellian terms I've mentioned so far are so obviously ridiculous, most people aren't going to be fooled by them. The truly Orwellian expressions are the ones that pass unnoticed.

For example, the Republican Party officially claims to be "pro-life." Yeah, that's why they support the death penalty. The Democratic Party officially claims to be "pro-choice." Sure, that's why they support gun control. Pro-life and pro-choice are true examples of Orwellian language, yet very few people seem to realize it. That's why these expressions are so effective, because most of the time they pass beneath our radar. As a matter of fact, that very term, "beneath our radar," is itself an Orwellian expression, a vague, hackneyed metaphor that you just don't notice until I point it out to you.

Because we barely notice these expressions, they have the greatest potential to influence our minds without our realizing it. That's why we need to reflect, to look at our own language. The next time you find yourself calling someone else Orwellian, take a look at yourself and ask, "Am I really being clear? Or am I using vague slogans, clichés, and catchphrases? Because if I am, then I'm not thinking independently."

By appreciating all three levels of interpreting Mr. Orwell's message, we will learn to take control of our language before it takes control of us. We will learn to consider how we communicate, not just how others do. No one escapes the cage of language; the best we can do is be conscious of how it surrounds us.

God's third party

2008-07-30T08:14:00.000-04:00

The most poorly understood philosophy about God is pantheism. To pantheists, God isn't the creator of the universe, God is the universe. To other people, this sounds more like a semantic trick than a coherent philosophy, as if pantheists are simply calling the universe by a different name, without making any unique statements about reality.

Curiously, many self-described pantheists almost seem to agree with that characterization of their beliefs. Pantheism.net, for example, approves of Richard Dawkins's description of pantheism as "sexed-up atheism." According to the website, "our beliefs are entirely naturalistic, and compatible with atheism, humanism and naturalism. Also with those forms of paganism that see magic and the gods as symbols rather than realities."

Hard-nosed skeptics find pantheism infuriating. They don't know how to deal with a system that renders proof irrelevant. Not that all traditional theists claim their beliefs are provable. But the statement "God exists" at least qualifies as a truth claim. The statement "God is the universe," on the other hand, merely redefines God as something which even atheists admit exists. Yet a fellow blogger makes a strong case that pantheism and atheism do in fact differ in their beliefs about reality:

The major difference lies in the appreciation for existence. What is existence really? Is it some random backdrop in which we find ourselves or is it an integral part of who and what we are?

Pantheists are generally philosophical Monists [who believe that] everything is 'one thing' and all comes from the same source. All things within the universe are interconnected....

The ultimate difference lies in what each side considers the basic substance of the universe to be like. The atheist conceives of nothing but subatomic particles whizzing about or random quantum fluctuations while the pantheist imagines a fundamental well-structured ground of being.

In practice, there is a fine line between pantheism and the views of traditional believers. Western forms of mysticism have challenged the simple assertion that "God exists." To the mystics, God is beyond existence in the usual sense. Many of them have come to think of God as the totality of everything, including, but not limited to, the universe. This view is called panentheism. It's pantheism with an extra syllable, which apparently makes all the difference as to whether it's acceptable to mainstream Judaism and Christianity.

The raison d'être of pantheism concerns two interrelated questions about the universe. Why does anything exist? And why is the universe that does exist capable of producing conscious beings--in effect, becoming aware of itself? Theistic philosopher Roger Scruton ponders this second question in a recent essay:

Dawkins writes as though the theory of the selfish gene puts paid once and for all to the idea of a creator God -- we no longer need that hypothesis to explain how we came to be. In a sense that is true. But what about the gene itself: how did that come to be? What about the primordial soup? All these questions are answered, of course, by going one step further down the chain of causation. But at each step we encounter a world with a singular quality: namely that it is a world which, left to itself, will produce conscious beings, able to look for the reason and the meaning of things, and not just for the cause. The astonishing thing about our universe, that it contains consciousness, judgement, the knowledge of right and wrong, and all the other things that make the human condition so singular, is not rendered less astonishing by the hypothesis that this state of affairs emerged over time from other conditions. If true, that merely shows us how astonishing those other conditions were. The gene and the soup cannot be less astonishing than their product.

Since atheists have no answer to the question of why anything exists, all they can do is neutralize it by asking "Who created God?" But the idea of an uncreated Creator as the conscious source of everything raises fewer questions than the idea of an uncreated universe which happens to have the properties needed to become conscious of itself.

It's no wonder so many atheists fall back on the hypothesis of multiple universes, even though an infinity of time and space in which anything can happen is little different in effect from an infinite Creator. Others pretend the question isn't objectively meaningful. "The world exists because it exists," they say, and they go on to suggest that our ability to come up with such questions must have evolved in our primitive ancestors.

That's a major point of divergence from pantheism, which attempts, however imperfectly, to bridge the gap between theism and atheism. Its tenets superficially resemble those of atheism, but it has a greater appreciation for the mystery of existence. The consequence of viewing existence as one interconnected whole, of which conscious beings that can reflect on the matter are an integral part, and not just a byproduct, is subtle but real.

Apt author

2008-07-24T17:06:00.001-04:00

A woman once told Stephen King that she enjoyed his anthology Skeleton Crew but skipped the section where he explained how he came up with the stories. "I'm one of those people," she said, "who don't want to know how the magician does his tricks." Recalling the experience later, King remarked, "I am not a magician and these are not tricks." (Nightmares and Dreamscapes, p. 675)

I suspect many authors would disagree. But it speaks volumes about King's outlook, a key reason he's one of my favorite writers. I went through a phase reading rival fear-meister Dean Koontz before I realized he was all technique and no soul. With King, I'm barely conscious of technique even though his books are more powerful than Koontz's.

These thoughts came back to me recently as I read "Apt Pupil" from Different Seasons, a collection of novellas with a more serious bent than his horror fiction. Three of the novellas have been made into movies, two of them quite excellent: Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption. But I never got around to reading "Apt Pupil," partly because of the unfavorable reviews the movie received, and partly because I doubted King could handle a subject as weighty as the Holocaust.

I am pleased to report that "Apt Pupil" brought into focus all the things I admire about King: his vivid imagination, his sharp attention to detail, his perverse sense of humor, and his mastery at crafting a battle of wills between two characters. But I was also impressed that he tackled material this challenging. He not only had to present a believable Nazi, he also had to confront the question of what makes people evil, all the while telling a compelling story about two unsympathetic characters surrounded by idiots.

The story is set in the 1970s. A pampered suburban youth named Todd Bowden discovers that an elderly neighbor of his is an escaped Nazi commandant named Kurt Dussander. Instead of turning him in, Todd blackmails him into recounting his hideous crimes. Todd once did a research paper on the camps and greatly impressed his teachers, who don't realize he is fascinated by the subject for all the wrong reasons.

The story tempts us to ask which character is more evil. Though Dussander has done worse things than almost any human being alive, Todd has ghastly potential. King depicts both characters as lacking in guilt but filled with fear, haunted by the threat of exposure. Dussander, unlike Todd, rationalizes his actions, giving the standard line about having been just following orders. Todd is simply a sneaky bully who puts on a public face of being a nice, well-adjusted kid.

Even I, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, almost found myself rooting for Dussander. He's smarter and more charming than the boy, and since he begins the story as victim, I had to marvel at the way he maneuvers the situation and turns it to his advantage. It is easy to forget that his cold rationality is in many ways more frightening than Todd's sick perversion. King exploits this deceptive quality of fiction by not letting us get to know any of Dussander's victims until late in the story.

Another question left unanswered is how much Todd's descent into violence is influenced by Dussander. He might have become that way on his own, but we can't be sure. His most obvious internal change surfaces when he privately rationalizes his lack of attraction to his girlfriend by thinking she must be secretly Jewish. (The real reason is that he has violent homoerotic fantasies which take the place of ordinary sexual feelings.) Did he get his anti-Semitism from Dussander, or was it there to begin with? His liberal parents show no signs of prejudice but are trapped in a world of empty platitudes that keep them from seeing what's in front of them. Joseph Reino's book Stephen King (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1988) explains:

King is not saying that benign and "liberating" clichés are inherently wrong or that they cause Todd's inclination toward social misbehavior. Rather, his gothic perspective is that benevolent philosophies, reduced to thoughtless aphorisms and innocuous clichés, are utterly powerless against the boy's adamantine malevolence. (p. 123)

There are political overtones to the story, set at the end of the Vietnam War. Dussander defends himself by accusing America of hypocrisy: "The GI soldiers who kill the innocent are decorated by Presidents, welcomed home from the bayoneting of children and the burning of hospitals with parades and bunting.... Only those who lose are tried as war criminals for following orders and directives" (p. 130). Here and elsewhere, King hints at the idea that Americans tend to have a sense of incomprehension at evils committed by other countries yet fail to see the parallels when the evil is homegrown.

The introspective nature of the story may help explain why the movie (set in the 1980s) didn't work. Ian McKellen gives a fine performance as the aging Nazi, and some of the early scenes are very effective. But the movie quickly becomes artificial, contrived, and tasteless--all the qualities I worried the novella would exhibit.

The problems are various. The process of abridging the plot for screen time makes certain elements seem arbitrary. The racial aspects of Nazism are largely ignored. Most significantly, the film softens the character of Todd, depicting him more as a confused kid who gets in over his head than as an unrelenting psychopath. This change leads the movie to have a very different ending than in the novella.

I suppose the producers felt that audiences needed to be able to relate to the young protagonist, but it creates an imbalance that obscures the story's message about the nature of evil. The film can't even decide what exactly Todd and Dussander are guilty of doing. There are several confusing scenes that leave us unsure whether the two have been murdering animals or simply imagining doing so.

I had the feeling the filmmakers were interpreting the novella as a typical horror story because it was written by Stephen King. They underestimated the source material, a thoughtful fable with something valuable to say about the world. King applied his talents as an entertainer to a subject requiring more depth, and he would not have succeeded if he were merely a magician doing tricks.

The chicken-and-egg of language

2008-07-20T17:01:00.000-04:00

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist involved in research into the human mind, but he is also an unabashed popularizer whose books are full of pop culture references (especially comic strips). Apart from a few tedious sections, The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window into Human Nature (recommended to me by a fellow blogger who merely read an article about it) is one of his best books. It applies a scientific perspective to a favorite subject of mine, the relationship between language and thought. But it does it with style, exploring a range of Americana from the semantics of Bill Clinton's lies (a topic that has already received far more attention than it deserves) to the grammar of profanity. I find the following hard to read without smiling:

Woody Allen's joke about telling a driver to be fruitful and multiply but not in those words assumes that Fuck you is a second-person imperative.... But Quang makes short work of this theory. For one thing, in a second-person imperative the pronoun has to be yourself, not you--Madonna's hit song was titled "Express Yourself," not "Express You." For another, true imperatives like Close the door can be embedded in a number of other constructions:

I said to close the door.
Don't close the door.
Go close the door.
Close the door or I'll take away your cookies.
Close the door and turn off the light.
Close the door when you leave tonight.

But Fuck you cannot:

*I said to fuck you.
*Don't fuck you.
*Go fuck you.
*Fuck you or I'll take away your cookies.
*Fuck you and turn off the light.
*Fuck you when you leave tonight. (pp. 362-3)

The book's overarching theme is how the human mind influences the structure of language. Like most linguists, Pinker largely dismisses the notion that the influence goes the other way. That notion is the basis of the controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which predicts, for example, that if you grew up speaking a language like Hopi, which lacks verb tenses, you would end up with a different perception of time than if you grew up speaking a language like English.

Pinker discusses some of the alleged evidence for this hypothesis before disposing of it. For example, one Mayan language has no words for left and right. The speakers orient themselves using the mountain slope where they live, with the words "upslope" and "downslope" corresponding roughly with south and north, respectively. Researchers found that the speakers have trouble distinguishing left from right but can locate north and south after having been spun around blindfolded while indoors!

Pinker spoils the picture by revealing that another Mayan people with the same aptitudes does have words for left and right. Apparently, since both groups spend most of their lives outdoors, they have a stronger sense of north and south than we do but little use for the concept of left and right. The absence of those words from the language of one group is an effect, not a cause, of the group's traits.

Distinguishing cause and effect is the subject of the book's most fascinating chapter, where Pinker explains how the whole concept of causality, so central to our common experience, is tantalizingly hard to define. We perceive the flow of time as consisting of nothing but causes and effects, and this intuition is deeply entrenched in language. But "the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event.... The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns" (p. 215). The challenge of identifying which causes are most relevant and guessing what would have happened if not for certain events--effectively imagining an alternate universe--underlies everything from scientific knowledge to moral responsibility.

One of his examples is President Garfield's assassin, who argued that "The doctors killed him; I just shot him." The wound was potentially nonfatal, but the doctors were wildly incompetent even by the standards of their day. Did this get the assassin off the hook? The jury didn't think so, and they sent him to the gallows.

A more recent example came in the aftermath of 9/11. Insurance companies were pledged to reimburse for each destructive event. But was the destruction of the Twin Towers one event or two? This question held billions of dollars at stake.

Questions like these are almost unanswerable because the world, contrary to our perceptions, is a continuum without clear boundaries between things. This dichotomy can be seen in the two categories of nouns, count and mass. Count nouns are words like book, which you can count: you can talk about one book, two books, etc. Mass nouns are words like jello which lack that property. You can't talk about one jello or two jellos; there's just jello.

Curiously, some mass nouns, like furniture, refer to material that should be countable. (We get around this problem by talking about "pieces of furniture.") And many nouns can perform both roles: rock is a mass noun in the sentence "The ground is made of rock" and a count noun in the sentence "I'm holding two rocks."

Speakers will occasionally transform a count noun into a mass noun by imagining that something discrete is made up of an amorphous substance. Pinker's example is the distasteful statement "After he backed up, there was cat all over the driveway." His point is that the count/mass distinction doesn't force us into any particular way of thinking, because we can escape that thinking by manipulating the language. But the distinction does reveal how we choose whether to view matter as a collection of objects or as a lump of "stuff."

I've only mentioned a fraction of what the book covers. With each topic, Pinker builds on the thesis that language reflects more than affects our minds, which can see past the constraints it imposes on us. (You might think this undercuts the point I made in my post "The cage of language," but actually I think it reinforces it.) Identifying these constraints helps us understand how we perceive the world and thus provides a way for us to transcend those perceptions.

More bigotry chopping

2008-07-16T08:01:00.002-04:00

[If you visited this blog Monday morning, you may have seen a post appear and disappear. What happened was that I decided to use the post as the basis for a letter to the Washington Post. I immediately received an automated email from the paper telling me several guidelines, among them that they would not publish my letter if I had posted anything similar to a website. I quickly deleted the blog post, though the paper's staff subsequently told me I could reinstate it as soon as the letter was published, and today it was. Here is the original post.]

At a 2000 conference, James Watson asserted that dark-skinned people have stronger sex drives than light-skinned people. "That's why you have Latin lovers," he said. "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient." When I first read about this incident, I was sure he was jerking people's chains. Only gradually did I learn that he has a long history of defending theories linking race with behavior and intelligence. But in a recent column, Henry Louis Gates argues that Watson is not a racist but a "racialist."

I'm familiar with the term "racialist." White supremacists use it all the time to describe their own beliefs. But I've never before heard anyone in the mainstream suggest it is distinct from racism. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it was coined in the early twentieth century to describe British and South African discriminatory policies. The word racism emerged later, in reference to doctrines of the Third Reich. There was no essential difference between the two words (and according to many dictionaries, there still isn't). Racism simply became the more popular of the two.

But the meaning of racism has changed with the social climate. Few people today openly espouse racist beliefs. Instead, the perception is that racial prejudice lurks inside many people without their necessarily being consciously aware of it.

According to some observers, virtually everyone is a little racist. Blogger Julian Sanchez recently elaborated on this point: "It's the subliminal reaction of the manager looking for a new cashier who, for some reason he can't articulate, just doesn't think the minority candidate seems quite trustworthy enough." Megan McArdle considers this argument overkill: "With civil rights, we were asking people to slay dragons. Now we're asking them to spend the rest of their lives exterminating mosquitos." And it puts those accused of racism in a Catch-22 where denying the charges is practically tantamount to admitting to them. As Geoffrey Nunberg remarked, the statement "I'm not a racist" has come to sound like "I don't have any homosexual anxiety."

Not everyone takes such an extreme perspective, but most people these days do think of racism as more of a mindset than an ideology. The latter is reserved for the older term racialism. But you'd think it would still be considered at least a form of racism.

Gates, incredibly, doesn't think so. He admits that he doesn't agree with Watson: "Watson's error is that he is too eager to map individual genetic differences (which do exist) with ethnic variation (which is sociocultural and highly malleable), and to provide a genetic explanation for ethnic differences." But despite some skepticism about Watson's motives, Gates refuses to call him a "garden-variety racist."

Gates avoids the question of why Watson would be tempted by racialist theories in the first place. One of Watson's comments in particular suggests that his beliefs do not stem from science: "people who have to deal with black employees find that [the belief that everyone is equal] is not true." That's nothing more than good old-fashioned bigotry, and it refutes the idea that Watson is an openminded truth-seeker interested only in the data.

Gates writes that his conversation with Watson has reluctantly convinced him that "the idea of innate group inferiority is still on the table." But why reach that conclusion simply because a great scientist does? Has Gates examined other views? Scientists are human like the rest of us, and, in principle, just as capable of believing erroneous things as anyone else.

When I read articles like this, I begin to wonder if we've all lost sight of what racism means. When we talk about it as a defect in thought or behavior, we forget that the intellectual justification for such attitudes was once widely accepted in society. That changed for intellectual as well as moral reasons, and we ought to remember what those are.

(Note: The title of this post is taken from an earlier post of mine, which happens to converge in theme.)

Suffixism

2008-07-07T07:51:00.001-04:00

Ferris Bueller says, "A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself." But nobody can totally escape -isms, not even Bueller (who is basically preaching individualism). Still, many people find something ugly about the suffix, which is why they keep adding it to words to make existing ideologies sound more ideological.

Take Islamism. It's supposed to suggest the politicized, theocratic version of Islam that has taken hold in places like Iran. Journalists have been using the term for a while now, though I'm unaware of anyone who self-identifies as an Islamist. More recently, some bloggers have begun using the term Christianist to denote the politicized Christianity of some of the more extreme evangelicals in this country. Daily Kos defines Christianism as having the following goals:

1. The establishment of a state religion. This state religion, of course, is not to promote Christianity, but rather to consolidate power in order to achieve their second goal.

2. Legislation of their repressive moral agenda. The Christianists plan to destroy the system of checks and balances in the Constitution, and they plan to do this in the name of Christianity.

A definition like that isn't likely to go very far. It shows too much contempt for what it's supposed to be defining. (What person would ever admit to promoting a "repressive moral agenda"?) You can't expect the term to catch on without at least a pretense of neutrality. Other commentators, like Andrew Sullivan, have made more eloquent attempts to define the concept. Sullivan identifies Christianism with the Christian Right and argues that the proper response is not the Christian Left but a separation between religion and politics altogether.

So far there's no comparable term to describe a politicized Judaism. Partly this is an accident of semantics, since Judaism, unlike Christianity and Islam, already ends in -ism. "Judaismism" would never work, and neither would "Jewism" or "Jewishism." One blogger proposes "Judaicism," but even he seems to realize that it probably sounds too academic to catch on. He doesn't think it's necessary, anyway, because he thinks the term Zionism already fills that slot.

The problem is that Zionism is not in any way the Jewish equivalent of Islamism or Christianism. It began as a secular movement, primarily the work of activists who didn't believe in the Torah. Even the religious variety of Zionism, far more prominent today than it was in the past, is not inherently theocratic, and some of the most theocratic Jews today don't consider themselves Zionists and are hostile to the State of Israel, at least in its current form.

Zionism, in any case, isn't a politicized form of Judaism but a political movement aimed at advancing the Jewish people. That's why you don't even have to be Jewish to be a Zionist, any more than you have to be a woman to be a feminist. Islamism and Christianism are, in contrast, intrinsically forms of the religions that precede their -isms.

In the end, our language won't allow us to create a single word to describe Judaism's more theocratic sector. Maybe that's a good thing. It prevents people from lumping together different groups, one of the more unfortunate consequences of terms like Islamism and Christianism. The real problem with -isms is not that people believe in them, but that they make separate factions seem more unified than they actually are.

Y'all look alike to me

2008-06-25T20:16:00.000-04:00

Will Smith has claimed that an older couple mistook him for Barack Obama. I'm not kidding. I hope that he was. I suspect most Americans would agree that the two men look nothing like each other. Then again, the article makes a noble effort to find a photo pair that highlights their similarities:

Though an isolated incident, this kind of story always feeds the common perception that a substantial amount of white people think all black guys look the same--or, in this case, all black guys with ears that stick out.

The popular explanation is that people are more sensitive to differences within their own race. I'm not so sure. I think it has to do with exposure. The more you're around people of another race, the better you are at noticing the features that distinguish individuals.

Maurice Berger's book White Lies contains an essay by African American artist Renee Cox, who complains that white people often mistake her for Whoopi Goldberg, even though their only common feature is their braids. According to Cox, "I wouldn't be running down the street screaming...'Oh, that's Marilyn Monroe,' just because she's a blonde." Maybe not, but somebody recently wrote a letter to Parade Magazine claiming that Jenny McCarthy and Chelsea Handler "look like twins." Parade showed the following picture to compare:

I don't know about you, but judging from this photo I don't think the two women look even remotely alike. I guess some people think all white girls look the same.

The fact is that many people are just plain rotten at telling people of any race apart. The average person, when asked to describe someone, will usually talk in the broadest, most general terms. "She's a blonde." "He's tall, dark, and handsome." "She's got a big nose." My father was once talking to a friend at an Orthodox Jewish wedding and asked him to describe someone he'd seen. The friend said, without a trace of irony, "He's the guy with the beard and the dark suit."

I, a white guy, have had plenty of experiences where other whites have confused me for someone else. Whites may make these kinds of mistakes more often with blacks than with other whites, but it's a matter of degree. We needn't jump to the conclusion that it's always due to race.

A virtue worth defending

2008-06-22T13:49:00.000-04:00

Previously, I mentioned James Carville's notorious "Judas" remark. ("Mr. Richardson's endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic.") A commenter named Jimmy got on my case for dismissing the remark, and I would like to clarify my views. I first thought Carville's remark deserved only ridicule, but now I believe it's a good starting point for a larger discussion.

I've never heard anyone defend Carville's remark before. Other members of the Clinton team backed away from it, probably figuring that for a campaign that has presented its candidate as the experienced Washington insider and policy wonk, fire-and-brimstone imagery might give the wrong impression. Obama supporters were predictably unimpressed, and as for Republicans...well, they could just sit back and enjoy the spectacle from afar, content at the comparatively dignified fight happening on the Republican side, like Huckabee seeming to insinuate that Romney was a shade away from Devil worshipper.

Carville, however, wrote an entire op-ed defending his remark, and the column must set some kind of record for its utter absence of anything remotely resembling a logical argument. He went on and on about the importance of loyalty, but he didn't bother to define the concept, nor did he explain why calling the wife of your former boss the second-best candidate in the race is a prime example of disloyalty, much less why it merits comparison to a Biblical villain. His column could be summed up in two short sentences: "It's an old-politics thing. You wouldn't understand."

As it stands, Carville's definition of "loyalty" is as vague and slippery as Bush's definition of "the enemy." Just because you worked for a president doesn't chain you to him for life. And what's even more ridiculous is the idea you're also chained to his wife. That's what was so unsettling about Carville's logic: it reinforced many people's uneasy feeling that Bill Clinton was seeking a third term.

Judas's real crime wasn't disloyalty; it was aiding and abetting murder. I struggle to understand how that applies to the current election. "Murdering" a candidacy--which Richardson's endorsement was far too late to do--isn't a crime but a civic duty, one we practice every time we go to the polls. Of course, the term "murder" is absurd in this context. Hillary didn't have a "right" to the nomination the way people have a right to life. No candidate does. Being nominated isn't a right but a privilege. What is a right, and an absolute one at that, is the right of all citizens in a democracy to choose any candidate they please. The notion that anyone "owes" anyone a vote or an endorsement is fundamentally undemocratic.

I can predict one possible response. "Get real. Richardson wasn't honestly expressing his preferences. He was kissing up to the Obama team, perhaps anticipating a vp slot or some cabinet position." I would disagree, but I'm not interested in debating the point, which would be impossible to prove one way or the other. What's clear is that Carville implied that Richardson's preferences were irrelevant. Hillary could be the most dreadful candidate imaginable and Richardson would still be obligated to endorse her (or to endorse no one), according to Carville's way of looking at things.

Of course, if we accept that logic, how can we be sure even Carville likes the Clintons? Maybe he secretly despises them but feels obligated to continue supporting them. That's what happens from this brand of "loyalty": you can no longer tell who your real friends are. How ironic.

Loyalty has never been an absolute virtue that trumps all else. (Compare, for example, the loyalty of the Nazis who claimed to be just following orders, with the disloyalty of the Founders who waged war against the country that nurtured them.) The loyalty that deserves our admiration is the kind tempered by honesty and integrity. A friend who never criticizes you, who never says what he thinks of you, who just blindly follows you wherever you go, is no friend at all.

A lot of people who were once big supporters of Bill Clinton now believe that Obama is the best candidate to bring America forward. These people haven't necessarily changed their minds about the Clintons; they have simply moved on, as our nation must always do. Carville is entitled to disagree. We can respect his beliefs without calling him names--and that, not his twisted understanding of "loyalty," is a virtue worth defending.

Musical rorschach

2008-06-17T09:33:00.000-04:00

One of the paradoxes of contemporary popular music is that lyrics are both necessary and irrelevant. I can't remember the last time an instrumental piece made the charts, and yet most listeners pay little attention to a song's lyrics. It's no wonder that when they do, they usually get it wrong. I'm not talking about "mondegreens" or misheard lyrics--a fun topic in itself. I'm talking about misunderstanding a song's message.

Somebody on a lyrics discussion page suggested that Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" was about Freddie Mercury contracting AIDS. The person seemed unaware that the song came out in 1975, long before anyone knew what AIDS was. I suspect the person first heard the song through Wayne's World in 1992 and assumed it was brand-new. Another person suggested the song was about Mercury's bisexuality. That interpretation is harder to disprove, but it still doesn't fit.

Why assume this mock opera is autobiographical? The opening lines could hardly be clearer: "Mama, I just killed a man, put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead." The song is about a man who killed someone and is pleading for mercy. I guess some people are just so attuned to interpreting songs metaphorically they don't even consider the plain meaning.

One thing I've noticed on these lyrics sites is that for every song, there is at least one person who thinks it's about drugs. And why not? If people can interpret an innocent children's ditty like "Puff the Magic Dragon" as a pothead anthem, they can do it with any song. On the other hand, I found people denying that Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" is about smoking pot. (That's the one where he sings, "Everybody must get stoned." If you think he means death by stoning, you're on crack.)

Some interpretations are so obviously wrong you wonder if the people who came up with them were paying the slightest attention. One example that comes to mind concerns one of Nirvana's strangest songs, "Rape Me." According to Songfacts.com (where all the information is user-submitted), "Kurt Cobain wanted to make a strong statement in support of women and against violence toward them.... A guy rapes a girl. He ends up in jail and is raped there."

I've seen this explanation going around the Internet for years, even though it doesn't make the least bit of sense. While I'm not sure what the song is about, the lyrics make no mention of women or jails or really any context to the "rape" being described. Frankly, I don't think the song is even about rape. It sounds more like some kind of sadomasochistic desire, assuming it's to be taken literally at all.

Curiously enough, there is a song from around the same period that is clearly about a man who rapes a woman then ends up getting raped in prison. The song, Sublime's "Date Rape," uses straightforward storytelling, leaving no doubt what's happening. Maybe somebody mixed the two songs up.

I have heard people claim that Cobain himself gave the rape-as-poetic-justice explanation for his own song, but that could be an urban legend on par with the one about Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight." The latter has many variations, but the commonest is that Collins was singing about a brother who drowned. Rolling Stone has listed this belief as one of the top 25 urban legends of rock music, alongside "Paul is dead" and "Mama Cass died eating a ham sandwich." It's so widespread it even made its way into Eminem's song "Stan."

According to Collins, who had no brother who drowned, the song expressed his feelings after a divorce. The source of the urban legend is the line, "If you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand." The funny thing is, even if you ignore the rest of the lyrics, that line doesn't sound like it's talking about literal drowning. I'm amazed how many people accepted the false interpretation when the evidence against it was staring them in the face.

In some cases, the feel of the music can mislead. That may help explain why so many people incorrectly thought "Born in the USA" was a patriotic anthem rather than a bitter criticism of our country. The song has such an upbeat, energetic groove it's easy to gloss over what the verses are saying. But really, what did people think Springsteen meant with lines like "Sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the yellow man"? Did anyone seriously believe he was celebrating the slaughter of Asian people?

I often suspect that a large portion of the public is unable to understand irony. I was shocked when I learned that Billy Joel's "Only the Good Die Young" was widely perceived as anti-Catholic. Sure, the song's narrator, a young man trying to seduce a nice Catholic girl, complains about her religion's restrictions. But I never assumed that Joel himself was endorsing that attitude. Part of the song's humor stems from the narrator's failure to veil his true intentions, which we realize are cruder than he wants to reveal. It is a song about sexual frustration, not a critique of Catholicism or any other religion.

Still, I can understand why listeners tend to assume that a song speaks in the songwriter's voice. That is the standard convention in popular music. Making a distinction between the songwriter and the narrator isn't always convincing.

Take the controversial 1992 record "Cop Killer." In a widely circulated essay, the sociologists Mark Hamm and Jeff Ferrell defended the song by asking why no one ever complained about the Bob Marley/Eric Clapton hit "I Shot the Sheriff." Well, I would think the answer should be obvious to anyone who knows the difference between swearing you acted in self-defense and boasting about committing premeditated murder. Nevertheless, defenders of "Cop Killer" argue that if you think the song is advocating what the narrator is boasting about, you simply don't get it. My response is, guilty as charged.

I've observed that many people who fall back on the "irony" defense don't understand what the word means. You can't even depend on Alanis Morrissette, who thinks irony is what happens when it rains on your wedding day. (As the comedian Ed Byrne put it, that would be ironic only if you were marrying a weatherman and he set the wedding date.) If a songwriter as gifted as Morrissette can't get the concept straight, what hope is there for the rest of us?

I'll tell you what's ironic. When people think a song is about drugs, it isn't, and when they don't think it's about drugs, it is. When people interpret a song metaphorically, it is literal, and when they interpret it literally, it is ironic, and when a song is titled "Ironic," it is anything but.

The pursuit of weird happiness

2008-06-13T03:45:00.001-04:00

It seems like in every discussion about gay rights, opponents raise the specter of sex with youngsters, siblings, sheep, goats, dogs, corpses, and just about every other forbidden--and sometimes not-so-forbidden--union. As Justice Scalia wrote in his dissenting opinion to Lawrence v. Texas, "State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise...called into question by today's decision." Imagine that: if we're soft on homosexuality, next thing you know they'll be allowing masturbation.

Commentators usually call this type of reasoning a slippery slope, but it is more of a reductio ad absurdum. The difference is subtle but important. With a slippery slope, you're opposing a policy on the grounds that it will lead to worse policies--regardless of logical connection. With reductio ad absurdum, you're attempting to expose the flaw in an argument by showing that its logic leads in unacceptable directions. The classic example is the cliché response to peer pressure: "If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you follow them?"

People often use reductio ad absurdum to hide the weaknesses of their own arguments. It's pretty easy, with the help of a little self-delusion, to shut your mind to nuanced distinctions. Then all you have to do is tell your opponent, "If you hold X, you might as well hold Y." While he's busy explaining why he doesn't hold Y, he doesn't notice that you've shifted the discussion away from X.

Over at DovBear's blog, I recently had a debate with a fellow who calls himself Lawyer-Wearing-Yarmulka. He reiterated an argument he made two years ago in which he suggested that the philosophy of consent underlying gay rights could be used to justify sex between men and cows. His point was that we never demand consent from cows for anything else we do to them. If we can turn them into burgers without their consent, why shouldn't we be allowed to have sex with them?

LWY fails to understand that consent has a particular significance with regard to sex acts, which doesn't apply to other types of acts. By their nature, unwanted sexual experiences are highly traumatic. The notion that there's something inconsistent about opposing cruelty to animals while condoning slaughter of animals is an argument I would expect from a PETA member, not a Bible-believing Jew.

I'm astounded by LWY's suggestion that the law against raping a cow is entirely for the human's benefit, not the cow's. (It brings to mind Lord Macaulay's statement, "The Puritan hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.") This certainly is not the common view in our legal system, where bestiality is typically classed under "animal abuse." While that may differ in some ways from the traditional perspective, that just goes to show that our society has over time shown an increasing concern for the treatment of animals, even if it is still far from perfect.

Notice how far this discussion has drifted from its original topic. In that whole time, LWY didn't offer even one justification for his position on gay rights. All he did was make an egregiously poor analogy, but because it concerned treatment of animals, an area of public policy that is controversial and by no means perfectly consistent, he was able to keep the discussion pointed away from himself.

I've repeatedly encountered this sort of evasive attitude from critics of gay rights. Instead of explaining their own point of view, they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to catch defenders in an inconsistency regarding other sexual deviances. What's especially surprising is that they tend to jump on the least relevant examples, where there is clearly a victim.

Ironically, LWY dismissed the importance of incest, a much better example to create the sort of reductio ad absurdum he was trying to establish. Let's say an adult brother and sister become lovers. Let's say they're not going to have kids: they use birth control, or one of them is infertile, or the woman is past menopause. Their affair would still be illegal in most places. Yet it is a purely victimless act between consenting adults, and so, by the standard argument in support of gay rights, it should be allowed.

What would happen if we did allow it? We might then have to make provisions to ensure that incestuous lovers never have children. Further, we would have to deal with the competing argument that they have a right to have kids, even ones who will likely have genetic defects. And I haven't even mentioned the marriage issue. This is all a big can of worms to open up in the name of consistency (according to Wikipedia, this form of incest is extremely rare), but it is something our society might have to face, if we are to remain committed to the principle that people have the right to pursue their own happiness as long as it doesn't hurt others.

Some gay rights activists, of course, would object to this example on the grounds that incest is "sick" and "disgusting." That's what critics of gay rights want the defenders to concede, that there are certain acts that just fall outside the bounds of civilized behavior, even if they seem to harm no one. But it's unlikely that this example will persuade anyone to abandon a belief in gay rights. This reductio ad absurdum at best reveals an inconsistency in the views of some advocates, but it doesn't come close to dismantling the philosophy behind gay rights.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and yours is wrong

2008-06-03T09:15:00.001-04:00

In the season finale of Boston Legal, a show I've never seen before, a judge files a motion to have the town of Concord, Massachusetts secede from the Union. Alan Shore (James Spader) argues for the defense. Denny Crane (William Shatner) takes the opposing side. Their arguments get so heated (at one point Alan tells Denny to "just shut up") it threatens their friendship.

The case centers on questions we've all encountered over the past several years. Has Bush put our country on a road to tyranny unlike any previous president? Do we face a uniquely dangerous enemy that justifies Bush's actions? Is attacking the president wise in a time of war? Can dissent be patriotic?

Denny privately tells Alan why the case bothers him so much. His explanation is so heartfelt we realize their differences go beyond mere politics. Whereas Alan views the case as an intellectual exercise, for Denny it runs much deeper.

Denny: Something I thought you understood but you clearly don't understand: for people of my generation, being an American is personal.

Alan: I realize....

Denny: No, you don't. You don't. In your life, growing up, you just took for granted that America would always be. Why not? It's a superpower, strongest country in the world. In my lifetime, with Hitler trying to take over the world and having the means to do so, we went to bed scared at night that America would end. Imagine that feeling. The tragedy for me here is, you have no idea how deeply offended I am by the idea of a town wanting to secede...which means you don't know me, Alan. Not really. Our friendship has all the depth of a jigger of scotch.

I wondered why the show wanted to explore how two people of very different political persuasions navigate a friendship with each other. Some in the audience will relate to the situation, others will marvel that the feat is even possible. I'm sure there are Americans who go through life without ever having a close relationship with someone with a different political outlook. How frequent this is, I don't know. It sure doesn't describe me, a lifelong liberal from a conservative community, Orthodox Jews.

I think that political diversity among friends is healthy. It helps prevent people from dehumanizing the other side. Let's say your friend seems like the most decent and reasonable guy you know until he starts talking about politics, and suddenly he sounds to you like an ogre with asinine ideas. You may never come to respect his opinions, but at least you realize that a person you respect can hold them.

Political differences mean a lot to some people. Sean Hannity actually runs a dating site for conservatives. I can't judge that choice--after all, some people cannot understand my decision to date only Jews--but it still seems odd to me.

One couple who'd agree is James Carville and Mary Matalin, who not only belong to different parties but have worked for opposing candidates. They claim not to talk politics at home, though sometimes you wonder at his motivations. When Bill Richardson, a former member of the Clinton Administration, endorsed Obama instead of Hillary, Carville said, "Mr. Richardson's endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic." Carville subsequently wrote an entire op-ed piece defending this idiotic remark, but nowhere in the column did he explain what we all wanted to know: if Richardson is Judas, then who's Christ? Bill or Hillary? Or is that Billary? I must have missed the rule which states that political loyalty must be extended to the person's spouse--unless, of course, your name is Carville.

The last person you'd think of as a poster child for inter-political romance, Ann Coulter, has had a series of them. You begin to wonder about her statement that liberals have "joyless sex." Either she's no selfish hedonist, or we've been right in suspecting that her venomous persona is some kind of act, though if so, I have no idea what it means. Ask her suitors.

I have little patience for villain-style politics because I see most issues as complex. I didn't always feel that way. As a kid, I perceived my own views as nothing more than common sense. But I gradually discovered that views I considered indefensible turned out to be quite defensible once I listened to the other side. This happened to me over and over again. That's why I'm amazed at the number of people who maintain a black-and-white outlook into their old age.

Not that I'm a moderate. I opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, and I'm annoyed by politicians from both parties who started criticizing the war only after it became fashionable to do so. At the same time, I understand why good and reasonable people were led to support it. The decision to take out Saddam is not something I can just dismiss as evil, no matter how unjustified I believe it was.

On the other hand, I may be guilty of over-intellectualizing. I don't have loved ones stationed in Iraq. I haven't been personally screwed by Bush's policies. Thus, it's a bit too easy for me to think of the debates as an intellectual exercise rather than something serious that impacts lives.

Manimal

2008-05-29T04:19:00.000-04:00

One time when I was a kid, a younger boy I was hanging out with insisted that "Insects aren't animals!" after I referred to them as such. Where did he get that idea? Well, according to some dictionaries, animal sometimes means "mammal." On rare occasion, this definition even shows up in professional writing. (For example, my 1993 edition of Compton's contains the following sentence: "The birds of Australia are even more diverse than the animals.") But this is an obscure definition that sounds pretty strange to me. Why would a child adopt it? I think it has something to do with Jewish education.

When teachers at Jewish schools discuss the laws of kashrus, they almost always say that a kosher animal must have split hooves and chew its cud. But this is only true of mammals; there's a whole different set of laws for birds, fish, and insects. If they mean mammal, why don't they say mammal? Partly it reflects the classic Bible translations, which were written before the word entered English. Hebrew itself didn't have any such word, and "animal" is a pretty accurate translation of chaya, which is derived from chai, meaning "life."

While mammal isn't a totally erudite word, the category has a fuzzy existence in many people's minds. When I once suggested feeding chicken to my parrot, I was asked, "Wouldn't that be cannibalism?" I replied, "Is it cannibalism when humans eat beef?" We tend to think of birds as basically one thing, but mammals as many different things, even though Aves and Mammalia are at the same taxonomic level: class. The presence of mammary glands is just not as memorable a trait as feathers. Substituting animal avoids this problem, because the word is taken to denote any creature that isn't a person, a bird, a fish, a vermin, or a plant. It's the default category that's left over after you've taken away the "special" categories.

This isn't just a semantic quibble; it can affect life decisions. At age eight, my brother decided he was a vegetarian, and he considers himself one to this day, even though he never gave up fish. He reasons that fish isn't meat, and according to Jewish law, he's right. The law against mixing milk and meat is derived from the Bible's injunction not to boil a baby goat in its mother's milk. The law originally applied only to mammals, since only mammals produce milk. But an old rabbinic decree extended the prohibition to birds. As a result, the Hebrew word for meat--basar--usually denotes the flesh of mammals and birds, but not fish. This dichotomy carries over into the English that Jewish kids learn, and my brother based his brand of vegetarianism on it.

My reading preferences

2008-05-23T11:50:00.001-04:00

Around the time The Da Vinci Code came out, people kept telling me, "The writing isn't very good, but it's got a great plot!" That is not an effective selling point for someone like me. It's like saying, "The singer has a bad voice, and the instruments are out of tune, but the song is catchy as hell!" I'd rather read a book with vibrant prose and a boring plot than the other way around.

I don't claim my outlook is the only valid one. It's just a personal prejudice. You may feel differently. I have always been drawn to books with vivid sensory prose that pulls me right into the page. One of my favorite authors as a teenager was Ray Bradbury, whose prose sparkled with possibilities. Here is a quote from The Martian Chronicles:

A man squatted alone in darkness. Out of his mouth issued a blue flame which turned into the round shape of a small naked woman. It flourished on the air softly in vapors of cobalt light, whispering and sighing.

In this story, explorers from Earth enter a Martian colony, whose inhabitants proceed to lock them in a Martian asylum. Since Martians are telepathic, the hallucinations of the mad and deranged are visible to everyone. Therefore, the fact that the Earthlings have a spaceship doesn't convince the Martians that the men come from Earth. The Martians simply assume that the spaceship in front of them is a figment of the men's diseased minds. The problem, of course, comes when one of the Martians touches the ship and discovers that it is a bit more substantial than vapor.

The psychologist emerged from the ship after half an hour of prowling, tapping, listening, smelling, tasting.

"Now do you believe!" shouted the captain, as if he were deaf.

The psychologist shut his eyes and scratched his nose. "This is the most incredible example of sensual hallucination and hypnotic suggestion I've ever encountered. I went through your 'rocket,' as you call it." He tapped the hull. "I hear it. Auditory fantasy." He drew a breath. "I smell it. Olfactory hallucination, induced by sensual telepathy." He kissed the ship. "I taste it. Labial fantasy!"

He shook the captain's hand. "May I congratulate you? You are a psychotic genius! You have done a most complete job! The task of projecting your psychotic image life into the mind of another via telepathy and keeping the hallucinations from becoming sensually weaker is almost impossible. Those people in the House usually concentrate on visuals or, at the most, visuals and auditory fantasies combined. You have balanced the whole conglomeration! Your insanity is beautifully complete!"

You'd think fiction this clever would work on screen. But so far I've never seen a movie do justice to any of Bradbury's works. Even when the ideas are there, there's something missing, and that something is the prose. Taking the prose out of Bradbury is like taking the dough out of bread.

I had a somewhat different experience recently as I read Elsewhere, a 1991 novel by Will Shetterly. It is part of a series by several authors about a place called Bordertown, existing between the human world and the land of Faerie. The extreme prose minimalism of this book surprised me, because I associate the urban fantasy genre with Charles De Lint, whose prose swirls and engulfs the reader.

Elsewhere is told in first person, for reasons that escape me. The narrator does little more than describe what happens, with only occasional entries into his inner thoughts. His attitudes, his feelings, his personality are seen mostly through his actions. A third-person approach would have worked better, but even then, I would have trouble picturing the events. The story concerns a teenage runaway who flees to Bordertown. After being thrown off the train, he is met by two half-elves, who are described as follows:

Two people in dusty black leather straddled dustier black bikes on a road maybe two hundred feet uphill. In the shadow of an ancient oak tree, they'd been invisible until one of them clapped. Their skin was almost as dark as their hair, which rose from their heads like raven's wings. Their ears came to perfect points.... A small difference in pitch and attitude told me that she was female, and the other, male. From where I stood, they looked identical.... They were both lean and strong and bigger than me.

It isn't until well into the story that the narrator hints that he's attracted to the female. I found this rather odd, considering her initial description. There was nothing that made me picture her as a beautiful woman, though she is finally described that way--on p. 183! As I read the book, I repeatedly felt I was getting a less-than-complete picture of what was happening.

Though I have a clear preference for lavish prose, I am able to appreciate other styles. I have no problem with Hemingway's famously terse prose. It's still good writing. It still gives a complete picture of what's happening. (It reminds me of Einstein's remark, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.") What I don't like is bad writing, whatever the style, and even if the work has other good qualities.

My Amazon reviews

2008-05-18T00:44:00.000-04:00

I have just added a sidebar link to my Amazon book reviews. There are only nine so far. (I may in the future review other types of Amazon products.) I have already discussed some of these books here, though the reviews are never exact replicas of my blog entries. If you don't go to the sidebar, you can also click here:

Amazon reviews

My small but significant influence

2008-05-04T03:46:00.001-04:00

As a casual Wikipedian, my most frustrating project has been maintaining the anti-Semitism section in the article on Roald Dahl, one of my favorite authors as a kid. Dahl made several widely publicized anti-Semitic remarks in the 1980s, such as "there's a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity.... even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason." For years he insisted he was only anti-Israel. Finally, in 1990, he admitted in an interview that he was also anti-Semitic. He didn't say this in a regretful way; he spoke as though his anti-Semitism was justified. It was a striking remark, since very few public figures openly admit to anti-Semitism.

I remember reading about this interview at the time. A few months later, he died. (I thought to myself, "Good riddance.") But curiously, I stopped hearing about this final admission of his. A biography I purchased years later talked extensively about his anti-Semitism but didn't mention the interview. When the Wikipedia article on him appeared, it featured several of his notorious quotes but made no mention of the one where he admitted to being an anti-Semite. I couldn't find the quote anywhere on the Internet.

Checking the newspaper databases at my university, I found a letter to the editor by Abraham Foxman in The New York Times quoting him as having told the British newspaper The Independent, "I am certainly anti-Israel, and I have become anti-Semitic." I inserted this citation into the article, though it was questioned by some because it was an out-of-context quote from an activist trying to discredit him.

Some time later, I obtained the full text of the interview from LexisNexis. Here is the entire quote: "I'm certainly anti-Israeli and I've become anti-Semitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism." That's a tad more ambiguous than the Foxman version. But I put it into the article.

Every now and then, anonymous users try to delete the information in the anti-Semitism section. Many try altering the title to "Criticisms of Israel," ignoring the fact that his attacks were specifically directed at Jews, not Israel. It seems that anytime someone gets accused of anti-Semitism, people swoop down and call it criticism of Israel, whatever the facts suggest.

But I have managed to keep the section intact, and I am gratified to see how it has influenced others. Until I dug up the Independent interview, that quote was nowhere to be found on the Internet. Now it is mentioned on various websites, all because of yours truly. It's funny the effect you can have on the world from just your computer.

Lions and tigers and bears

2008-04-28T17:11:00.001-04:00

A book I was reading a while back referred offhandedly to Frank Baum's conception of Oz as a dream. The writer must not have read Baum's book, where Dorothy's journey to Oz is never suggested to be a dream. That idea came from the 1939 film. It's striking that so many people remember The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, one of the most beloved stories of the twentieth century, through the famously interpretive screen adaptation.

Ironically, Baum disliked the "it was all a dream" convention in literature. (He must have turned in his grave in 1939.) I agree with him. It's a much overused device that has the smell of copout. I can understand its use in Alice in Wonderland, which deals with absurdity. But Oz, beyond being magical and impossible, is hardly absurd. Dorothy's adventures seem far too coherent to plausibly represent a dream. Therefore, why did the 1939 film work so well?

My theory is that it worked by largely ignoring the dream motif. Sure, it linked several characters in Oz to people Dorothy knew back in Kansas, none of them from the book. But once the movie reached Oz, it portrayed the book's events more or less faithfully.

Had the movie been made today, I don't think they'd have gotten it right. Modern movies--from the 1970s onward--are much more naturalistic than old ones. It's a prime reason for the decline of musicals. In recent musicals like Dreamgirls, there's a certain awkward, pretentious quality that didn't exist back in the 1930s, when audiences found nothing strange about seeing characters burst into song. That kind of casual surrealism doesn't jibe with the style of modern movies, which aim to evoke a feeling of reality. Acting is more understated, scenes more slow-paced. In this climate, movies about dreams try to approximate what dreams actually feel like, which is to say, fleeting and bizarre. This approach limits the possibilities in some ways while broadening them in others.

Many sitcoms have featured at least one episode in which a character is dreaming. The classic example is the "Twilo" episode of Dick Van Dyke, where Rob dreams of going to work and discovering that all his friends have turned into pod people, in a hilarious sendup of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

But what works in a twenty-minute sitcom doesn't necessarily work in a feature-length film. The conceit of having a story take place almost entirely in a character's head has inspired some dreadful films. Two that come to mind are Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) and Delirious (1991). The first is more or less an extended music video by Paul McCartney. The second is a spoof in which John Candy plays a soap writer who dreams he finds himself trapped inside a real-life version of his own show. In both films, the story becomes increasingly jumbled as it progresses, and the protagonist wakes up before he completes his mission. That's just what dreams are like, but what fun is there in watching a movie with those qualities?

The problem with using dreams as a basis for comedy is that comedy requires rules, and dreams have no rules. You can get a quick laugh out of the absurdity of a dream, but dwell too long on the conceit and it starts to become more strange than funny.

Nowadays, the more ambitious films about dreams tend to embrace the weird factor. Three that come to mind are the Spanish thriller Open Your Eyes (remade in the U.S. as Vanilla Sky), the David Lynch drama Mulholland Drive, and Richard Linklater's Waking Life. In all these films, we're led to suspect that a significant amount of what we see is a character's dream, but the extent of it is left tantalizingly ambiguous. These films greatly exploit the old philosophical conundrum that it's impossible to know for sure at any moment in our lives whether we're dreaming or not.

Exploring that kind of dilemma would have tanked The Wizard of Oz. Unlike modern movies on dreams, it retained a straightforward approach to the storytelling. Because it wasn't bound by the belief that a movie about dreaming must display dreamlike qualities, it didn't try to alter the story to fit a preconceived idea of what dreams are like. This kept the essence of the story intact even as the dream motif gave the story an added psychological dimension, a balancing act that today's movies have forgotten how to achieve.

Language and its needless but inevitable watchdogs

2008-04-23T08:36:00.000-04:00

Love of language, like love of country, is most often expressed by bashing those perceived not to have enough of it. You practically can't go anywhere without meeting someone who thinks the language is "going to the dogs" because people no longer write or speak it correctly. The fact that critics have been voicing this complaint for hundreds of years, yet the language hasn't withered away into dust, does nothing to quell their belief that something is seriously wrong today.

There's no way to reason with these critics, who will probably always be with us. So I just leave well enough alone. But I take satisfaction in being among the few who know the truth. Here is my favorite quote from Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English, a book by linguist John McWhorter:

"What we must realize...is that during these changes, because renewal always complements erosion, all languages are eternally self-sustaining, just as while our present mountains are slowly eroding, new ones are gradually being thrown up by the movement of geological plates. Thus at any given time, a language is coherent and complex, suitable for the expression of all human needs, thoughts, and emotions. Just as linguists have encountered no languages that do not change, they have also not encountered any languages whose changes compromised their basic coherency and complexity. We have encountered no society hampered by a dialect that was slowly simply wearing out like an old car. Anthropologists report no society in which communication is impossible in the dark because the local dialect has become so mush-mouthed and senseless that it can only be spoken with help from hand gestures. In other words, there is no such thing as a language 'going to the dogs'--never in the history of the world has there existed a language that has reached, or even gotten anywhere near, said dogs." (pp. 17-18)

Color is in the eye of the beholder

2008-04-10T17:08:00.000-04:00

Last year, The New York Times ran an article on the debate over Columbus's ethnic origins. It featured a chart (which doesn't appear in the Internet version of the article) listing pros and cons to each hypothesis. When it reached the hypothesis that Columbus was Jewish, it mentioned the following as a con: "Most Jews in Southern Europe at the time were Sephardic Jews of North African descent, but preliminary analysis of Columbus's DNA suggests he was Caucasian."

This ill-informed remark stopped me short. I don't know what's more ridiculous, the assumption that Sephardic Jews in medieval Spain were of "North African descent," or the implication that this made them non-Caucasian.

I'm not trying to pick on the article, which was just trying to be balanced. And I have no stake in the question of Columbus's origins. I mention this quote only because it raises some interesting points about how the public perceives Jewish ethnicity.

First, there's the confusion over the meaning of Sephardic, a term that comes from the Hebrew word for Spain, Sefarad. In the strictest sense it refers to medieval Spanish Jews and their descendants. Following their expulsion from Spain in 1492, they went everywhere--as far west as Holland, as far east as India, even to the New World. But the bulk of them settled in the Middle East, and consequently, Sephardic has become a general term for Middle Eastern Jews.

Actually, the common convention is to apply the term to all non-Ashkenazic Jews, whatever their origin. That includes Dutch Jews, Italian Jews, Greek Jews, Turkish and Moroccan and Yemenite Jews. I grew up knowing only this binary way of classifying Jews, which still permeates the media. But careful writers use the term Mizrahi or "Oriental" to describe Middle Eastern Jews who don't have a family history in Spain.

How does race factor into the discussion? Mizrahi Jews even more than Sephardim tend to look relatively dark compared to the common Western image of the Jew. The convention of calling them Sephardi, coupled with the association of dark skin with Africa, is probably what led the article to think that medieval Spanish Jews were of "North African descent."

The fact is that many Jews physically resemble their non-Jewish countrymen. Russian Jews often look like ethnic Russians, and Iranian Jews often look like ethnic Iranians. This fact may seem surprising when you consider the religious and political barriers to mixing with the native population. Not only does Judaism discourage conversion and prohibit intermarriage, the countries themselves often enacted laws against those things, and in many places Jews lived separately from Gentiles for centuries.

But conversion and intermarriage did occur, occasionally on a large scale. Some scholars have maintained that modern-day Jews are more closely related to their non-Jewish neighbors than to Jews in other parts of the world. This hypothesis, which has been used to support as well as refute anti-Semitic beliefs, looks increasingly doubtful in light of genetic research over the past few decades. The research suggests a close kinship among Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Mizrahim, despite their diversity in appearance. Only a few groups that don't fit any standard classification--the black Jews of Ethiopia, the Bene Israel of India, the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng--do seem racially distinct from the rest of world Jewry, and their origins remain a source of debate.

If Jews of different colors are fundamentally related, can they be called Caucasian? Well, it depends how you define the term. Its meaning has shifted over time, as has "white." Originally it encompassed not only Europeans but also the darker skinned inhabitants of Mediterranean lands. But in early twentieth century America, Jews, Arabs, and many European ethnicities were classed as non-white or non-Caucasian. Nowadays, Ashkenazic Jews are usually considered white or Caucasian, as are most indigenous Europeans, but the perception remains that Arabs and other Middle Eastern groups are people of color. This dichotomy has contributed to the curious notion that Ashkenazim belong to a different race than Sephardim.

But that just goes to show that the boundaries of whiteness are more political than biological. I saw a telling example in Nelson Mandela's criticism of U.S. intervention in Iraq: "Israel has weapons of mass destruction.... Why should there be one standard for [Iraq], especially because it is black, and another one for another country, Israel, that is white?"

The idea that Israel is a "white" country while Iraq is a "black" country is laughable. If you define Iraqi Arabs as black, then how can you call Israel, whose Jewish population is about half Sephardi/Mizrahi, a white country? Anyone who's lived in Israel can tell you that it is sometimes impossible to tell the Jewish and Arab residents apart. That's because Jews and Arabs are ethnically closely related. But for political reasons, one group is seen as white and the other as non-white.

And when it comes to political classification, it seems Jews can never win. They came to be regarded as part of the white majority around the same time that being a minority started being fashionable. (The term minority itself is far more likely to be applied to blacks and Asians than to Jews, even though in a worldwide sense Jews fit the definition far better, and even within the United States are far fewer in number than blacks.) It is in situations like this that Jews remind me of the kid who isn't accepted by either the in-crowd or the nerds.

Lucasbert, evil SW director*

2008-04-04T14:55:00.001-04:00

There are Star Wars fans who hate the prequel trilogy far more than I do, but few seem to question why it was made in the first place. Years before The Phantom Menace, I wondered why Lucas wanted to make prequels instead of sequels. I would have preferred to see the continued adventures of Luke, Leia, and Han.

Would that have resulted in better films? It's hard to say. The series was already showing signs of wear and tear by Return of the Jedi. But at least we would have been in the company of characters we had come to know and love. The prequel trilogy failed to create any new, engaging characters, and even familiar characters like Yoda and Obi-Wan seemed curiously flat.

There's no obvious reason why Lucas needed to make movies about the events before A New Hope. Put differently, there's a good reason why he began the series at the point he did: that's when all the interesting stuff starts to happen. If the prequels fail to come alive, it's because he conceived them more as history than narrative.

That's why you can practically hear the crankings of the plot. Padme and Anakin must fall in love, whether or not they have chemistry. Anakin must turn bad, whether or not his transition will be believable. The story cannot progress on its own terms; it is weighted down by inevitability.

I don't mean to imply the films could never have worked. There simply needed to be more effort to give the events and characters the spark of life. This challenge, however, goes a long way in explaining why prequels are so rare. Lucas himself helped popularize the term as well as the concept. Temple of Doom takes place a year before Raiders, but its prequel status is a technicality. There's no story arc, not even a single reference in one film to events from the other.

The Star Wars prequels are better described by an older term, coming from comic books: the origin story. They don't merely depict events from before the first trilogy. They aim to explain how the situation from the first trilogy came to be.

That required skills that I don't believe Lucas ever possessed. Vader was a convincing character as long as Lucas kept him mysterious. Many of the Star Wars novels, written by authors with more depth than Lucas, portray Vader as morally ambiguous. But on the evidence of the films, he seems almost purely evil, an unrepentant mass murderer. Despite Luke's repeated claim that "there is good in him," what turns Vader against the emperor is simply love for his son--hardly a sign of true goodness.

The first trilogy gives no information on how Vader turned evil. It doesn't need to. The Star Wars films have always worked best when they've stayed at a basic, archetypal level. Explaining complex moral transformations is not their strong suit.

Film critic Stephen Hunter disagrees. In his review of Revenge of the Sith, he writes that Lucas successfully "answers The Question," which was previously addressed by "Melville and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare," who "could never agree on the answer." That question is, "What makes man evil?" According to Hunter, the depiction of Anakin's fall from grace "explains how you could fly a plane full of mothers and babies into a skyscraper and think you were going on a date with 72 virgins, or how you could goose-step your way toward conquest and genocide while singing schmaltzy oompah music."

I agree with Hunter that the film attempts to answer this age-old question, but I cannot imagine what makes him think it succeeds. Beyond its solid understanding of the seductive qualities of fascism, the film provides little insight into the nature of evil.

In a previous post, I pointed out that real-life killers usually perceive themselves as the good guys, whereas fictional villains tend to know they're evil. (This tendency was satirized in the Star Wars parody Spaceballs when Dark Helmet says, "Now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.") The Sith don't so much think of themselves as evil as think that darkness is good--sort of like Satanists.

That's about the extent of Lucas's insight into the subject. So it's no wonder that Anakin's turn to the Dark Side proceeds as if a light switch gets flicked off. One moment he's a conflicted individual unsure where his loyalties lie; the next he's slaughtering children without breaking a sweat. Not exactly the most profound explanation for Al Qaeda or the Nazis.

We shouldn't be too surprised. Back in the early '70s when Lucas began work on his Buck Rogers-inspired screenplay, I doubt he had any idea he'd one day have to deal with these issues. He was seduced by the power of his unforeseen success.

^{*Dilbert reference. See "Catbert, evil HR director."}

In defense of celebrating black identity

2008-04-03T19:24:00.002-04:00

Cross-posted at DovBear's blog

In 1994, National Review editor David Klinghoffer wrote a refreshingly candid piece about Orthodox Jewish racism. Klinghoffer is a baal teshuva¹ who was shocked by the casual racism he encountered in the frum² world. I mention his article now because it hits upon some of the themes that Obama covered in his race speech. While not condoning bigotry in any form, Klinghoffer argued that some of the bigotry coming from Jews should be understood in the context of their experiences, a consideration he did not extend to American Jews who denigrate blacks.

I began to wonder what Klinghoffer, as a conservative, is saying about Obama now. It turns out that he has defended Obama, sort of, but from a perspective I find highly problematic. In a recent article, he argues, "The Bible makes it clear...that God has chosen some races to teach important lessons to the rest of the world.... [W]hatever unique contribution Africans have to give to the world, it is not racist to suggest that a black church, even a black theology, could be a vehicle for making that contribution."

I think Klinghoffer isn't exercising anywhere near as much caution as he should in using the term "race." The Torah talks about different peoples. The ancient concept of a people is not equivalent to the modern concept of a race. What we call race arose largely as a means of establishing differences where there needn't be.

Klinghoffer was addressing the charge that a "black church" should be considered racist in the same sense that most of us would consider a "white church" to be. But his answer was inadequate. The main purpose of black pride is to raise up a group that has been pushed down.

Whatever the white power movement may insist, whites do not fall into that category. Individual white groups might; there's nothing wrong with ethnically Irish or Italian or Polish people having their own organizations to express pride in their heritage. But an organization for white people is a different matter. Whiteness is an elusive concept that tends to be defined as whatever is left over after you've excluded "other" groups. In practice, it usually ends up excluding many Caucasians.

Some people try to apply the same argument to blacks. Why should we recognize black or African identity at all? Why not talk instead about ethnic Nigerians and Kenyans and Ugandans? In a perfect world, this argument might hold water. But blacks were brought to this country by force and stripped of their previous ethnic identity. No matter where they came from in Africa, they ended up as one group, today known as African American.

You might ask why Obama, who is not descended from slaves, should be considered a part of this group. It's a good question. I will answer it with an anecdote from several years ago. Tiger Woods insisted he was not black but "Cablinasian," an acronym he coined to highlight the many races in his ancestry. Gregory Kane, a black conservative who writes for The Baltimore Sun, retorted that Woods should be given "the cab test": "Stand him on a street corner in any large American city and have him hail a cab. If he gets one, he's Cablinasian. If he doesn't, he's definitely black" (Apr. 27, 1997, pg. 1B).

For the vast majority of people, even those of mixed ancestry, racial identity is not a matter of choice. It is something thrust upon them. Let's get real: when most Americans look at Obama, they see a black man. The notion that he chose to call himself black to advance his career is preposterous.

Whatever you may think of hip hop music or contemporary inner-city culture, African Americans as a group have made significant positive contributions to America. They are as much a legitimate cultural group as Jews, Italians, Irish, and all the rest that make up this great country. Group identity of any kind has a danger of turning into chauvinism, and often does. But that's the price we pay for having a heterogeneous society. The solution is that people should learn to respect differences, not that they should stop having differences.

Glossary
¹returner to the faith
²religious

Hitchens is not great

2008-04-02T22:14:00.001-04:00

I have never understood the adulation accorded to British pundit Christopher Hitchens. An ex-leftist who turned somewhat neo-con in his later years, he has acquired begrudging respect from people across the political spectrum, who see him as a sharp-thinking curmudgeon. He has always struck me as an obnoxious creep a bit too preoccupied with tearing others down and trying to prove his smug superiority to the masses.

But there are jerks, and then there are dishonest jerks. Until last week, I would not have placed him in the latter category. (But then, I'm far from a regular reader of his writings.) That was when he reached for one of the oldest and crudest tricks in the hatchet-man grab-bag, where you select a portion of a quote to make a person appear to be saying the opposite of what they're really saying.

In this essay ("Blind Faith"), he comments on Obama's recent "race speech." The essay is not a partisan attack on Obama. It is a rambling hate-fest against organized religion, in which he takes shots at both parties. But one paragraph caught my attention:

Look at [Obama's] accepted choice of words for the ravings of Jeremiah Wright: controversial, incendiary, inflammatory. These are adjectives that might have been--and were--applied to many eloquent speakers of the early civil rights movement.... But is it "inflammatory" to say that AIDS and drugs are wrecking the black community because the white power structure wishes it? No. Nor is it "controversial." It is wicked and stupid and false to say such a thing. And it not unimportantly negates everything that Obama says he stands for by way of advocating dignity and responsibility over the sick cults of paranoia and victimhood.

Ouch. To think that all this time we took Obama's speech to be condemning the views of his former pastor. How gullible we were to think so, until Hitchens came along and showed how Obama's word choice suggested nothing of the kind. All Obama did was use adjectives that could just as well apply to Martin Luther King! My God! How stupid could we have been to have fallen for this?!

But then I decided to check Hitchens' quotes against a transcript of Obama's speech. I did not find any mention of the word inflammatory. All I found was one incendiary and two controversials, the second of which appears in the following statement:

"But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial.... Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country...." (emphasis added).

The speech goes on to condemn Wright's most notorious remarks in quite clear, unequivocal language.

Did Hitchens actually hear or read the speech, as opposed to merely skimming it over? Or is he just a plain old liar? The most charitable judgment I can muster is that he was quoting from a highly selective memory.

My only remaining question is how he could get away with such a flagrant and obvious distortion of the most talked about speech in the campaign so far. Even hatchet-men usually don't commit their nefarious acts in broad daylight. I guess there are just a lot of things you can get away with when you're an already esteemed commentator whose current piece goes unexamined under a mountain of punditry.

Update (4/8/2007): Someone suggested to me that Hitchens was directing his criticism not at Obama himself but at the "phalanx of reporters" and "men of the cloth" who fawned over the speech. Therefore, he was not distorting Obama's words, but commenting on a general trend.

Nice try, but no cigar. His criticism would make no sense if applied to reporters, who would never be expected to call anyone "wicked" or "stupid" in a news report. As a reporter himself, I'm sure Hitchens understands that. And if he wasn't directing his criticism at reporters, there's no way you can possibly read his paragraph as limiting the criticism to "men of the cloth."

The only way his paragraph can make the slightest sense is if it's criticizing Obama for using ambiguous language, and criticizing reporters and clergymen for overlooking this flaw.