What do Trump's promises reveal about his motives?

If there's one thing I've learned from the rise of Donald Trump, it's to trust my instincts more. I had a dream about a year ago that Trump would be the Republican nominee in 2016; after I woke up, I shrugged it off as a laughable fantasy. In early December (though the scenario had been in my head for a while) I wrote this post, where I mused about the possibility of Trump winning the nomination then suddenly announcing at the convention that it was all a giant practical joke. Even then, I was quick to add that I still saw his nomination as "unlikely."

A lot has already been written on how Trump managed to win the nomination, less about why pundits and others considered it so unlikely in the first place. Partly it was his lack of experience in political office, partly his extreme positions, partly his bucking of party orthodoxy, and partly his utter lack of support from the GOP establishment. All those are important factors, but there's another that especially had an effect on me. It goes back to my memories of an earlier presidential candidate you have probably never heard of: Mike Gravel.

Mike Gravel is a former U.S. Senator from Alaska who unsuccessfully sought both the Democratic and Libertarian Party nominations in 2008, nearly 30 years after the last time he held office. There are two things I remember most about him. One was his involvement in what has got to be the weirdest political ad of all time. The other was an interview he gave with a Jewish publication, where he declared that, if elected president, "I will bring peace between the Israelis and Palestinians and thereby diffuse the entire confrontation between the Islamic world and the West."

What struck me about this remark was its complete lack of qualification. He didn't say he was going to try to bring peace in the region, he said he was going to do it, full stop. And he assured us that not only would he singlehandedly solve this immensely complicated problem that has eluded generations of past presidents, but that doing so would all by itself diffuse "the entire confrontation between the Islamic world and the West." Did he also say something about giving everyone a pony?

In other words, it was a proto-Trumpian statement.

Why would he make a statement like this? At the time my thought was that it reflected his own cynical self-awareness of his marginal status. He could make the boldest and most far-reaching promises of what he'd achieve as president, secure in the knowledge he'd never be held to a single one of them. Candidates with a realistic path to the White House never talk that way. Despite the stereotype of politicians promising the moon before they're actually elected, serious candidates usually exercise at least some caution in their campaign pledges, because they know that when they don't ("Read my lips: no new taxes"), it can actually get them into trouble.

Donald Trump, alas, has blown that theory out of the water. In 2013, he said, "I don't think I'd be cutting Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. I think what I do is make the country so rich, you wouldn't have to bother." He began his 2015 campaign promising not only that he'd build a wall across the US-Mexico border, but that Mexico would pay for it. In December one of his spokesman told the press that Trump was going to win 100%--yes, 100%--of the black vote. He has more recently downgraded that goal slightly: "And at the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get over 95 percent of the African-American vote."

You'd think a candidate with his eyes set on the White House would avoid the sorts of statements that are very, very, very, very likely never to happen. That was a major reason why I didn't take Trump seriously when he first began running. It all struck me as a game--an exercise in provocation.

And what would be the purpose of the game? One popular conspiracy theory holds that he's a "Clinton plant," a candidate who got in the race with the secret intention of helping Clinton win. This theory provides a neat explanation for all his past heresies, not the least of which is his apparent support for Bill and Hillary Clinton in the past. In some versions of this theory, his run was part of some private deal he made with the Clintons, though what they could possibly have had to offer him is a deep mystery. In other versions, the Clintons aren't involved and it's just Trump's own personal attempt to screw with the populace. According to one Internet hoax, he told People magazine in 1998, "If I were to run, I'd run as a Republican. They're the dumbest group of voters in the country...I could lie and they'd still eat it up."

I have to admit that my (mostly facetious) post from December was expressing a variant on this theory. I never bought the notion that the Clintons were in on it, but I did at least flirt with the idea that he deliberately wanted to hurt the Republicans. And it's weird, because I'm not the sort of person usually tempted by conspiracy theories of any kind, least of all ones popular on the right. Yet there's just something about Trump that makes me think--makes a lot of people think--that he's somehow putting us all on, that it's all some kind of elaborate gag.

In the end, I do still believe he didn't enter the race with any intention of getting this far, that it was some kind of publicity stunt aimed at drumming up media attention he could use to funnel into some other venture. But now that he's here, there's no turning back, and whether he actually wants to be president or not, he definitely doesn't like the thought of being a looooooooooooooser. That we don't even need to speculate about.

Political correctness and sincerity

One thing I found interesting about the recent showdown between Donald Trump and Megyn Kelly is how he brought "political correctness" into the discussion:

I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I've been challenged by so many people, and I don't frankly have time for total political correctness.

What I noticed was that he didn't actually bother to defend the behavior which Kelly complained about, namely his disparaging remarks about women. He wasn't so much making a bad argument as making no argument at all. He simply observed that his behavior is "not politically correct" and claimed that political correctness is a big problem in this country--as if to suggest that his behavior's taboo status was itself proof of its worthiness.

You could use this reasoning to defend any position at all. Hey, I think a man should beat his wife with a frying pan every night! You offended? Sorry, I'm not PC. I think black people are feeble-minded, Jews are cheap, and only the rich should be allowed to vote. Don't like what I'm saying? That's just because you're too PC.

It would be a mistake to dismiss this type of thing as simply another Donald Trump absurdity. On the contrary, it lies at the heart of most arguments attacking political correctness, and it's been a feature of these arguments for the last thirty years. Whenever you say something that offends someone, you say you're "not being PC" as if pointing that out automatically absolves you of responsibility for your remarks.

I mentioned the following anecdote a couple of years ago on this blog, but it bears repeating. I was once reading a blog discussion on a subject that had nothing to do with politics. One commenter referred to the author of some book as an idiot. The blogger said he agreed with the criticism but added that there was no need to engage in ad hominem attacks. The commenter retorted, "Oh, don't be so PC."

One of the assumptions underlying attacks on PC is that you're being more authentic, more truthful, than the other person. As a result, the anti-PC trend in our society has fostered an idea that civility and common courtesy are nothing more than strategies for hiding what people are really thinking.

This idea is reflected in the repeated claims I keep hearing--and not just from Trump admirers--that Trump is "speaking his mind" or engaging in "straight talk." This is a patent misunderstanding of Trump's whole public profile. It's obvious to anyone who bothers to pay attention that Trump's antics are pure theater. I literally have no idea what he really thinks about Mexicans or PMS or Obama's birthplace. It doesn't matter. He understands something which shock jocks began capitalizing on more than a generation ago, which is that outrage sells.

That's part of the whole allure of attacks on PC: they equate sincerity with a willingness to offend. The assumption is based on a fundamental fallacy. It's certainly true that professional politicians typically behave in a canned and artificial manner by avoiding saying anything that will offend their constituents. But it doesn't follow that going to the opposite extreme, acting rude and boorish in an erratic and unpredictable way, automatically implies authenticity.

Nobody argues that when Andy Kaufman did his Tony Clifton act, he was showing a truer version of himself. Yet that's just the sort of assumption people make whenever celebrities or politicians stray outside the boundaries of what is generally considered decent behavior. Trump may be a walking caricature, but like a lot of caricatures he throws some things about the real world into sharp relief.

The challenge of old movies

Want to know how certifiable a movie fanatic I am? I actually keep an Excel spreadsheet noting every movie I see and the date on which I first see it. About a year ago, realizing I'd been keeping this list for literally half my life (since 1994, just before my 17th birthday), I attempted to identify the movies I'd seen during the first half. I got some help from Wikipedia, which has articles listing the films released every year (most of the major ones, at any rate). One thing I've determined is that I've seen well over a thousand films in my life--but perhaps three-fourths of them have been ones made within my lifetime, starting in the late 1970s.

This was a bit of a surprise to me, since I remember watching lots of old movies as a kid. But when I think about it, there are indeed an astonishing number of classics I still have not seen. And when I do get around to seeing them, the experience isn't always as satisfying as it's supposed to be. Part of the problem is a feeling of being intimidated by a movie's reputation. It's tricky trying to sit back and enjoy a Great Movie when I'm conscious of how I'm supposed to be feeling the weight of its Greatness at every moment. This is a big reason why I still have never watched Citizen Kane, and why I had the DVD to Lawrence of Arabia for a long time before I gathered up the courage to stick it in the drive.

The genre I find easiest to appreciate regardless of period is comedy. I was raised on classic comedy--the Marx Bros., Laurel & Hardy, Chaplin (who remains one of my favorite filmmakers to this day), Danny Kaye, the Three Stooges. I believe comedy is essentially timeless as long as it avoids topical humor, as these old movies generally did. Good 21st-century comedies like 40-Year-Old Virgin or Borat may be more profane than their predecessors, but the underlying principles of humor haven't changed. I can't say the same for dramas, westerns, romances, or horror films.

There are four basic challenges to becoming engaged in older movies. One I am not dealing with here is advancement in special effects and other technical matters. Everyone agrees movies have improved over time on that score. Instead, I wish to focus on those areas that pose significant and non-superficial barriers between modern viewers and even the best films of the past:

1. Changes in decency standards

While I find many of today's movies overly coarse, those made at the height of the Hays Commission had the opposite problem. They couldn't talk about sex in anything approaching a candid manner and were forced to employ ridiculous euphemisms, which can be hard for a modern viewer to adjust to. When I watched His Girl Friday, I had already seen the 1974 version of The Front Page with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, based on the same play. Being a big Matthau/Lemmon fan, I loved the '74 version, and while I enjoyed the older movie as well, I was conscious of its limited ability to depict certain plot points. This actually led to a couple of good lines, as when Hildy reports that a character got shot in the "classified ads." At other times I felt the movie suffered from the constraints, as when it presented Mollie Malloy as an old maid rather than (as in the original play) a prostitute. And I'm sorry, but I just can't have as much affection for a film that omits the play's hilarious closing line, "The son of a bitch stole my watch!"

Some old movies have an innocence that looks laughable today. I saw the Oscar-winning 1938 film Boys Town when Newt Gingrich hosted a showing of it on TNT in 1994. Gingrich felt people should watch this movie to learn how to help today's troubled youth. The movie tells the story of Father Flanagan (Spencer Tracy) and his heroic efforts running an orphanage. His motto is that there's "no such thing as a bad boy." And indeed, most of the boys we see in the orphanage behave like perfect angels, except for one played by Mickey Rooney as a juvenile delinquent so terrible he actually smokes, plays cards, and acts sassy toward the grownups. (As a neighbor of mine at the time put it, "Sounds like the typical yeshiva bochur.") Despite these immeasurable crimes, Father Flanagan somehow manages to get through to him in the end and make him into a good kid, a message of great relevance for today's crack babies.

2. Changes in moral sensibilities

This category covers a lot of ground, but it's most notable with attitudes about race. Movies from the '30s and '40s are often shockingly racist, and when they are, I'm thrown right out of the picture. Duck Soup is one of my favorite comedies, but when Groucho utters the line--"My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that's why the darkies were born"--the movie for me just stops dead. (Few people today are aware that Groucho was actually referencing a hit song from the time titled "That's Why the Darkies Were Born" that was supposedly satirizing racism, but it still sounds pretty offensive to modern ears.) And that's just dialogue. The stereotyping of nonwhite characters in films from this period is so awful it leads to the sadly ironic fact that films from this period tend to be more watchable when they feature all-white casts.

3. Lack of freshness

It may not be fair, but movie ideas that were once highly original can come to seem banal if they get imitated enough. Hitchcock went to great lengths to keep the surprise ending to Psycho from getting leaked, but by today's standards it seems almost trite. (As Nicolas Cage declares in Adaptation, "The only idea more overused than serial killers is multiple personalities.") I recently saw Casablanca for the first time, but it feels like I've seen it my whole life. It was like deja vu as I watched, memories from my childhood of stuff I had seen that referenced the film coming to the surface of my mind: an episode of Moonlighting, a scene from one of the Naked Gun films, parts of When Harry Met Sally, you name it. There's also something surpassing strange about hearing lines like "Here's looking at you, kid," "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship," "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here," uttered in earnest. While I did enjoy the movie, it was certainly not the same experience moviegoers in the '40s had. It was like viewing some grand antique.

4. Differences in filmmaking style

This section will be much longer than the previous ones because it deals with a characteristic of movies from the '30s and '40s that has always been obvious to me but which, for reasons that escape me, I have rarely seen discussed: they look and sound a great deal like plays. Watching a movie from today doesn't usually feel like seeing a group of actors up on a stage; it's more like looking into a window at a real-life scene. I don't just mean that the sets look more convincing, but even more that when the actors talk, they tend to sound a lot more like real people having a conversation. To show what I'm talking about, let's examine two clips, one from the 1939 version of Of Mice and Men, the other from the same scene in the '92 version:

Did you notice what I noticed? Not only is the first movie clearly being filmed on a stage, whereas the second is filmed in actual woods (or at least provides the illusion of it), the differences in acting style are striking. In the older movie, the actors deliver their lines loudly and in an almost sing-song manner; in the later film the actors speak practically under their breath, with minimal intonation. The acting in the first clip is more stylized, in the second more naturalistic. In short, the actors in the original film seem to be acting, whereas in the remake they're behaving. The second clip therefore has a more lifelike feel (despite the fact that it's the only one of the two to feature background music, a point to which I'll return shortly).

I am not cherry-picking here; this is something that has consistently stood out for me whenever I've watched movies from the '30s and '40s and compared them with later films. It is most noticeable in dramas, but it exists to varying degrees in all genres. And of course there are exceptions. Jimmy Stewart was always more naturalistic than Nicolas Cage has ever been, but in any of their films they are surrounded by actors whose style contrasts with theirs.

None of this should be surprising. When talkies were invented, movie actors naturally adopted the conventions of what had previously been the only dramatic art form involving speech. They imitated the way stage actors spoke because that was all they knew. Over time, as the technology improved and as film came more into its own as a respectable medium, the styles of stage and screen diverged and naturalism gradually became the norm on screen; I believe the transition was complete in American cinema by the early 1970s.

What do I think of the change? It depends. The two Of Mice and Men adaptations are similar overall, but as an admirer of Steinbeck's novel I always preferred the '92 version. I had an easier time connecting emotionally with characters who sounded like real people when they spoke. This standard of judging movies is surprisingly rare, from what I've seen; people just don't want to admit that the naturalism of modern film has advantages.

It also has disadvantages. Among other things, I believe it contributed to the disappearance of musicals in the 1970s. The musical is, after all, very much a genre of the stage, and to have today's movie characters burst into song can seem odd and inappropriate in a way that it never did in previous eras. Music is still important in today's movies, but most of it is in the background: the scores (one of the few non-naturalistic aspects of movies to have increased over time) and the video interludes (a form that gradually replaced musical numbers in the '60s and '70s, and which in my opinion is one of the most annoying features of modern cinema). If a modern movie character sings, usually there's a rationale within the story, such as if the character is a professional singer.

All of this has led to a looser definition of the word "musical," which nowadays often means simply "movie with lots of songs in it," even when there are no numbers. The Golden Globes, for example, have applied the term to films like Walk the Line which are only "musicals" by virtue of concert scenes, video interludes, and the like. When modern movies do feature traditional numbers, the effect is often curiously artificial.

A lot of people like to ignore this fact and pretend nothing's changed. There's not much acknowledgment that musicals didn't just happen to fall out of fashion (the way, say, westerns did), but that the whole underlying approach to filmmaking changed in a way that made the conventions of musicals seem out of place. In the olden days, making a film as a musical was such a normal and natural choice it could even be fairly peripheral to the film itself. For example, most of the Marx Bros. and Danny Kaye films, remembered primarily as comedies, happened also to be musicals. Today's movies don't have that freedom.

The resurgence of movie musicals following the success of Chicago happened in part, I think, because the 2002 film found a unique way to reconcile the conflicting conventions. In this film, a woman played by Renee Zelwegger dreams of one day becoming a vaudeville star, and most of the song-and-dance numbers are presented as fantasy sequences where she imagines herself and other people performing on stage. As a result, the distinction in this movie between a musical number and a music video is blurred to the point of irrelevance. One IMDB commenter suggested that the film was "ashamed to be a musical," but I'm not sure it would have been as successful if it had simply ignored the problem.

Alas, many of the movie musicals since then have done just that. When I first saw Dreamgirls, I noticed it wasn't until about thirty minutes into the film that a character starts singing on the street (as opposed to on a stage or in a studio). Up to that point, the movie had seemed like a low-key, serious drama, and I have to admit I found the sudden break in realism that late in the story rather jarring. I thought to myself, "Wait a second...this is a musical?!" I've had that sort of experience with at least a couple of today's musicals, but I've never had it with the musicals of old. They don't have anything to apologize for.

Conclusion

My point here isn't that modern movies are intrinsically "better" than older ones, or vice versa. I just think there needs to be more recognition of the effect that the evolving conventions have on different generations of moviegoers. For sure, younger people who consider older movies boring or incomprehensible are missing out on something. But people who celebrate the old stuff as some kind of gold standard that nothing today could match up to, and imply that anyone who disagrees is simply lacking in culture or taste, aren't exactly helping matters either. Speaking personally, as I continue to enrich my knowledge of films of the past, I've had the best experiences when I've understood the movies in the context of their time and was prepared to adjust as needed. Holding them in godlike esteem doesn't do the trick for me.

The story of my political formation

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.

Why ethnic labels matter

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

"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.

Arguing with fear

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.

The sushi myth

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.

Crazy professors

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.

Religion and influence

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.

A shaggy-something story

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.

Y'all look alike to me

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.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and yours is wrong

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

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 small but significant influence

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.

Limited interpretations

I occasionally listen to a college radio station in my area. Whenever I turn to it, I expect to hear songs I've never heard before. It plays music from different genres and eras, with an emphasis on indie or obscure or up-and-coming artists--things that fall below the radar of the mainstream.

One day, I heard on this station an odd song with striking, evocative lyrics that I assumed were directed at President Bush. The genre was hard to place: it sounded like folk, but had a certain jazzy quality. Featuring a synth riff and a sort of pop-gospel chorus, it was sung by a man with a very low, raspy voice that might have become annoying if not for the infectiously catchy melody and complex chord arrangement.

I learned that the song was Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows," and that it was recorded in 1988, kind of early to be talking about Dubya. What made me think it was an anti-Bush anthem? Well, read the first two verses:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

If this song were part of the current Bush-bashing bandwagon, it would probably be the best thing along those lines ever written. Most such music today just sounds cranky and self-righteous. (Green Day is the worst offender in that area.) This is surprising when you consider the many great protest songs from the Vietnam era. Those were better in part because their grievances had less to do with a specific U.S. president, in part because the threat of censorship encouraged more subtlety.

I'm not the only person to have interpreted Cohen's song this way. The only Youtube video currently playing the studio version consists of slides attacking the Bush Administration. Whether Cohen would approve of his song being used for that purpose, I have no idea.

If the song isn't about Bush, what is it about? Commenters on Youtube said it was about the AIDS virus. While I do agree that the song alludes to AIDS (especially in the fifth verse), I don't think that's the whole picture. The pivotal line "Everybody knows the war is over / Everybody knows the good guys lost" would seem to encompass more than the battle against a disease. At least I like to think so. Listen for yourself if you want. (It is five-and-a-half minutes long.)



A popular cover version by alternative rock band Concrete Blonde, done for the 1990 movie Pump Up the Volume (which I have not seen), provides a somewhat different take on the music and lyrics. I go back and forth on whether I prefer this version. On the one hand, the female lead, Johnette Napolitano, is a far more polished and expressive singer than Cohen (who sounds like he has laryngitis, and not in a charming Louis Armstrong sort of way). On the other hand, the cover omits two of the six verses and rearranges the remaining ones so that it ends with the one about infidelity, which almost makes the song sound like a failed-relationship ballad. (Here is the official video, which is four-and-a-half minutes long.)



I don't think the song can be reduced to one topic. It's more of a general meditation on the endless cycle of suffering and betrayal in the world. (I suspect it was partly inspired by the old black spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen.") In limiting its scope to war or infidelity or AIDS, listeners overlook the poetry. They ought to sit back and lose themselves in the words and imagery before intellectualizing the experience.

Entertainment about entertainment

Vivian Vande Velde's science fiction novels User Unfriendly and Heir Apparent brought back memories of the computer adventure games I used to play as a kid. I enjoyed even pure text adventures better than arcade-style action games, because of the unique mixture of creativity and logic required to win them. I will briefly discuss these games before reviewing Vande Velde's two books.

When I first began playing Infocom's text adventures at age nine, I felt hopeless without the clue books that came with the software. In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for example, Mr. Prosser would have his bulldozer in front of my house, and no matter what I typed into the command prompt, he would demolish the house. So I consulted the clue book, which told me the solution: "Lie down in front of the bulldozer." It makes sense, if you think about it. Prosser won't kill to get his job done. But I simply didn't consider that possibility--partly because I lacked experience or cleverness, partly because I had never read the Douglas Adams novel on which the game was based.

Beyond Infocom, most text adventures did not come with clue books. But they helped prepare me for games like The Legend of Zelda that are part arcade-style action, part strategic adventure. With or without graphics, computer adventures all have the same basic setup. They can have any storyline, though they are traditionally magic tales featuring kings and castles and wizards and dragons. You always make your way through some kind of complex setting and collect various objects in your path. Figuring out the solutions to problems usually involves trial and error. Find a piece of cotton? Try throwing it, or eating it, or sticking it in your ear.

How well do science fiction books fare in portraying these sorts of games? A few weeks ago, I discussed Killobyte, Piers Anthony's 1993 novel about characters who become trapped in a role-playing VR game. I decided to dig up a particular young adult book with a similar plot, Vivian Vande Velde's User Unfriendly, which I first read in 1992. I remembered very little about it other than that I enjoyed it.

The gaming machine in this novel actually places you into REM sleep and hooks directly to your brain to make you think you're in the virtual setting. The session lasts no longer than an hour, but feels like five days. You can see, hear, smell, feel, and taste your surroundings. You're able to experience pain, and you must eat and sleep in the course of your journey. You are provided with new memories and skills, corresponding to the character you occupy.

That almost makes the technology in Killobyte sound primitive by comparison. It brings to mind Orson Scott Card's warning to novice sci-fi writers about presenting an extraordinary invention without considering other uses it might have. If one hour can be made to seem like five days, then (doing the math) three days can be made to seem like an entire year. Such a device could in effect greatly prolong a person's life--or at least provide a little extra time for reflection.

As for the implanted memories, if a computer can do that, what need is there for school (much less Jeopardy)? Just hook your brain to a machine, which will feed you all the information you need to know.

Needless to say, the book does not deal with any of those possibilities.

The narrator is Arvin, an eighth-grader who enters the game along with several of his friends. One of his challenges is figuring out which of his friends appear as which characters. His mom is also playing, much to his chagrin. I may have missed it, but I didn't catch what she thought of the fact that they're using a pirated version of the software.

Vande Velde's greatest strength is her attention to detail. She has plotted out the game in great depth. She structures the book in numerous short chapters that end in cliffhangers, as the characters encounter wizards, elves, trolls, orcs, goblins, and dragons, not to mention enchanted boots, sand hands, and giant rat zombies. The book kept me reading, with its fun blend of excitement and humor. (One example of the latter involves a dwarf who feels compelled to recite his entire genealogy any time someone asks his name.)

But the book compares poorly with Killobyte, which spent many pages in the real world, fleshing out its two main characters. User Unfriendly begins in the game itself and stays there until the very last few pages, without any flashbacks along the way. There are more than a half-dozen characters, all vaguely drawn. Arvin comes off as a typical teenager, embarrassed in front of his mom, eager to prove himself before his peers.

In Killobyte, the characters weren't just trying to win the game but were literally fighting for their lives. The stakes are lower in User Unfriendly. Because the game is pirated, some bugs and glitches appear, and the kids cannot exit the game prematurely. But the book bases a great deal of its plot around our vicarious experience of the game rather than anything more urgent.

The game itself is lacking in the qualities of computer adventures I mentioned before. Most of the time, the kids seem to be winging it, and their successes feel arbitrary. Again, Killobyte does a better job on this front, which is doubly impressive since Piers Anthony admits to having very little gaming experience.

In 2002, Vande Velde published Heir Apparent, about another game from the same company. It is narrated by a fourteen-year old girl named Giannine, who was a relatively minor character in the first book. It makes no mention of the events in User Unfriendly, and it may take place earlier. The front, inside, and back cover do not mention the older book at all.

Vande Velde writes on her website that she does not consider Heir Apparent a sequel, just a story taking place in the same universe. I have another theory. I think she was attempting to do User Unfriendly over again, but better. If so, she has succeeded. It improves on User Unfriendly in all the areas I mentioned.

For the first time, we get to see the world these kids occupy when they remove their VR helmets. In the first chapter, we encounter a robotic bus driver and a tiny, genetically engineered dragon. The setting can't be too far in the future, however, for we also see conventional-looking email, Windows Freecell, and a $50.00 gift certificate enabling Giannine to play a VR game of her choice. (By the time all this advanced technology exists, wouldn't fifty bucks be pocket change? Never mind.) She chooses a medieval fantasy about a peasant girl who becomes king. The session will last thirty minutes but will feel like three days. The catch is that any time her character dies, she will have to start over from the beginning, which she can do indefinitely.

That reminds me of the old Atari game Pitfall II. Possibly compensating for the fact that the original Pitfall was almost unwinnable, Pitfall II was made literally unlosable. Any time you'd get hit by an enemy, you'd merely be transported back to the last red cross you touched. The only way to end the game without winning was by turning off the computer. In the VR game depicted in Heir Apparent, however, you cannot just turn off the machine, or leave it sitting and come back to it later. You're stuck until you win the game or a technician pulls you out. That's practically asking for trouble.

The trouble comes in the form of an activist group called Citizens to Protect Our Children, or CPOC (pronounced "sea pock"), who feel that VR games are corrupting the youth. To show just how concerned they are for the children's welfare, they break into the arcade and sabotage the equipment. The problem is, Giannine is already hooked up to the game.

A technician briefly enters the virtual world to inform her that if they detach the equipment, she may suffer brain damage. But if she stays hooked up for too long, her brain will surely fry. All she has to do is win the damn game--and avoid getting killed too many times.

Easier said than done. The game is set up so that that there are many ways to succeed, and a lot more ways to fail. At first, it seems that every time she stumbles, a character pulls out a knife and slaughters her. Then she finds herself back on the sheep farm at the beginning, where she has to do the whole game over again. This aspect of the novel has an intriguing Groundhog Day vibe to it, as she meets the same characters in a host of different situations that change depending on all the little choices she makes.

There is, for example, a boy caught by guards who claim he stole a deer. The evidence is lacking, and Giannine has no desire to sanction the boy's execution, even though he is only computer-generated. But if she simply frees him, more problems will occur.

The technician gives her only two clues on how to win the game: find a magic ring, and keep a weird, mystic nun away from Kenric, one of Giannine's three half-brothers vying for the throne. (The nun, who seems to worship Oneness rather than God, is made nondenominational by the game's manufacturer so as "not to offend anyone.") Among the many challenges she faces is a knight who will chop her head off if she does not create a poem he likes. The poem can be absolutely inane, so long as it's original.

Unlike User Unfriendly, she is the only real person in the game--the rest of the characters are computer-generated. But they all have personalities, and they seem able to carry on nuanced, naturalistic conversations. I presume they're simply responding to cues in her speech, but the effect is quite convincing.

One way or another, I enjoyed the book much more than User Unfriendly. The game is still not much like the computer adventures I remember as a kid. It's ten times better! Maybe that's the point of books like these, to depict games we wish we could play, but which exist only in the author's wildest imagination.