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Saturday, December 14, 2002
• Quote of the Day "I'm sure this is funny, but at the end of this I want to have some bread crumbs leading back to my dignity." Al Gore, vetoing a Saturday Night Live skit about flatulence, according to comedian-advisor Al Franken. Actually, Mr. Vice President, since this is SNL we're talking about, there's no need to assume the proposed skit was funny. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/14/arts/television/14TTVW.html • Number of the Day: 531 Factor by which the average executive's salary exceeds that of his or her average employee, compared with 12 in 1960, according to CBSMarketWatch.com. • Previous Quote and Number My latest Tribune story: on the proliferation of pedicures: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0212120283dec12,1,6100517.story • My Tribune archive "Chronological snobbery," complacency, and The Simpsons Revisiting my daydream last week on Jefferson and postmodernism... First, on a lighter note from a recent re-run of The Simpsons, in which Moe opens a bar and is asked about his abstract art. "It's po-mo." Blank looks all around. "Ya know, postmodern?" Blank looks. "OK, it's weird for the sake of weird." Everybody nods and voices acknowledgment. Will's responses are always poignant, and his latest dispatch from Beijing is no exception: I think the thing about postmoderns is that they _think_ they're better than their ancestors. C. S. Lewis called this "chronological snobbery." Deconstructionism, which for me is the most articulate (if such a thing is possible) postmodern thought, has taught that nothing is sacred, or at least that nothing is immune from being made unsacred. That which is sacred, if you lean on it too hard, will soon become unsacred. In essence, our view of the past is not something we inherit, but something we create -- we impose meaning on it, because by itself it is a huge, lifeless void. All life is like that. God did not give us a wonderful universe premade -- he gave us the potential for such a thing, but he left the creating up to us. We've known this intuitively since time immemorial, I think, but not until people like Marx came along and made us aware of what we call "culture" actually is did we think it over consciously. We wrote novels, poems, and plays, we philosophized and scienced, we sang and danced our way through life without thinking why; we just knew life was so much better with them. We accepted the authority of the Bible without thinking why, really -- we knew authority was something good. Now we know that all human beings are under the influence of some controlling narrative -- ie, an ideology -- and that God made us that way and gave us one perfectly suited to us -- the Bible. If we are on stronger ground now, it is not our gadgets that did it for us. Postmodernism is proof of God's unflagging attention toward us, and his desire to shake us out of our complacency that we, like moths to the flame, go back to again and again. • Earlier: Thought of the Day: the ontological privilege of the postmodernist? • Arts&Culture File
Just had hit number 4,000 since Blogathon on July 27, 2002. Of course, a thousand or more of those hits are mine, but thanks to everyone else for reading. From my filing cabinet...a campaign to shame AOL by collecting 1 million of those environment-unfriendly promotional CD's, seen last month at the 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2440911.stm  • Places&Culture from 
ANTIGUA, Guatemala--The thing is, he doesn't even like rap that much. As he sees it, it's filled with sin: violence, naked women, drugs and greed. Stuff that a priest is supposed to renounce. But if you're a padre, like Fray Richard Godoy, and you want to save souls, and those souls happen to be hooked on hip-hop, then, if you're smart, and young, and know your way around a beat, maybe you'll get over your repugnance and find yourself bustin' a rhyme. In your robes. Arms up. Raising the roof. • Previous P&C • Etymology Today from M-W: emblem \EM-blum\ *1 : an object or the figure of an object symbolizing and suggesting another object or an idea 2 : a device, symbol, or figure adopted and used as an identifying mark "For forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare -- fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul." (Herman Melville, _Moby Dick_) Both "emblem" and its synonym "symbol" trace back to the Greek verb "ballein," meaning "to throw." "Emblem" arose from "emballein," meaning "to insert," while "symbol" comes from "symballein," Greek for "to throw together." "Ballein" is also an ancestor of the words "parable" (from "paraballein," "to compare"), "metabolism" (from "metaballein," "to change"), and "problem" (from "proballein," "to throw forward"). Another (somewhat surprising) "ballein" descendant is "devil," which comes from Greek "diabolos," literally meaning "slanderer." "Diabolos" in turn comes from "diaballein," meaning "to throw across" or "to slander." E.T. bonus: usage watch: A subtext to the NY Times sports columns controversy: one of the columnists, Harvey Araton, committed the offense of honoring the ghastly concoction, the virulent adjective "impactful": the cause of women membership at Augusta, compared with other feminist issues, he wrote, "is not as earth-shattering or as impactful on women's lives in America.'' *Sigh* • Previous E.T. Tuesday, December 10, 2002
Seen at Steve Rhodes' Chicago media column: quote from Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times columnist: "The Sun-Times, it's not a class act sometimes." I was in the Tribune Tower on Sunday, and sure enough, the quote had been printed out in large type and tacked to the cubicle wall of a staffer of the Trib's RedEye. http://www.chicagomag.com/pressbox/120502pressbox.htm I just realized something I should have realized two weeks ago. I've been pestering the secretary of Father Wall of Old St. Pat's, the oldest church building in Chicago, to arrange a brief phone interview with him for my Tribune story. She keeps blowing me off, consistently and transparently. I realized I should have told her I'm not writing about scandals, just some historical background of the church. But boy, is the church that touchy these days? • Politics&Culture File From my bedside magazine to the laptop screen: P.J. O'Rourke in the November Atlantic: What is obnoxious about the motives of politicians--whatever those motives might be--is that politicians must announce their motives as visionary and grand. Try this with the ordinary activities of your day: "My dear wife and beloved children, I say to you this--I will mow the lawn. Lawns are a symbol of America's spacious freedoms and green prosperity. Such noble tokens of well-being and independence must not go untended, lest we show the world that liberty is mere license and see the very ground upon which we stand, as Americans, grow tangled with the weeds of irresponsibility and be fruitful only in the tares of greed. I will give the grass clippings to the poor. -Maybe it takes a Minnesotan to put geopolitics in layperson's terms, writes the Minneapolis 
Just read Thomas Friedman's latest column on North Korea: The best way to understand the North Korea problem is to imagine a small neighborhood in which one of the neighbors, an unemployed loser, has placed dynamite around his house and told all the others that unless they bring him Chinese takeout food every day -- and pay his heating bills -- he will blow up his house and the neighborhood with it. The local policeman, affectionately called Uncle Sam -- whose own house is safely across town but who walks the beat in this neighborhood -- is advising the neighbors not to give in. 'Very easy for you to say,' the neighbors tell Uncle Sam. 'But we have to live with this guy.' "That chatty, just-a-regular-guy-telling-it-like-it-is tone has been a Friedman trademark since 1995, when he got the columnist gig that he calls "the best job in the world," says the Strib, which profiles the columnist. http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/3518802.html • Recycle Bin: August 30, 2002 • About Recycle Bin • Previous Recycle Bin • Etymology Today from M-W: voracious \vor-AY-shus\ 1 : having a huge appetite : ravenous *2 : excessively eager : insatiable "Voracious" is one of several English words that derive from the Latin verb "vorare," which means "to eat" or "to devour." "Vorare" is also an ancestor of our "devour" and of the "-ivorous" words, which describe the diets of various animals. These include "carnivorous" (meat-eating), "herbivorous" (plant-eating), "omnivorous" (feeding on both animals and plants), "frugivorous" (fruit-eating), "graminivorous" (feeding on grass), and "piscivorous" (fish- eating). E.T. Latin phraseology bonus, also from M-W: ab ovo \ab-OH-voh\ (adverb) : from the beginning "Ab ovo usque ad mala." That phrase translates as "from the egg to the apples," and it was penned by the Roman poet Horace. He was alluding to the Roman tradition of starting a meal with eggs and finishing it with apples. Horace also applied "ab ovo" in an account of the Trojan War that begins with the mythical egg of Leda from which Helen (whose beauty sparked the war) was born. In both cases, Horace used "ab ovo" in its literal sense, "from the egg," but by the 16th century Sir Philip Sidney had adapted it to its modern English sense, "from the beginning": "If [the dramatic poets] wil represent an history, they must not (as Horace saith) beginne Ab ouo: but they must come to the principall poynt of that one action." • Previous E.T. Saturday, December 07, 2002
Isn't that the truth: Headline in The Onion: "Presidents Washington Through Bush May Have Lied About Key Matters" http://www.theonion.com/onion3845/report_presidents_lied.html • History&Today Strom Thurmond turned 100 this week (read or listen). This summer, Maxim magazine ran Nine Things Strom Thurmond Is Older Than (what's funny is, it's Maxim, but I heard it on NPR): 1. AM/FM radio 2. Human flight 3. The Panama Canal 4. Wristwatches 5. Tea bags 6. Ice cream cones 7. The World Series 8. The states of Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii 9. Dick Clark Incidentally, this is the latest example of why Trent Lott isn't fit to be county drain commissioner, much less Senate Majority Leader. Speaking Thursday at a 100th birthday party and retirement celebration for Sen. Thurmond (R-S.C.) in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Lott said, "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." Thurmond ... was the presidential nominee of the breakaway Dixiecrat Party in 1948. ... He declared during his campaign against Democrat Harry S. Truman, who supported civil rights legislation, and Republican Thomas Dewey: "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches." • Previous History&Today Two Christmas questions: Why does Gap air jazzy commercials with the cozy lyrics, "People all over the world, join hands!" that feature individual dancers? What happened to the hand-joining? Or does "people all over the world" include the seven-year old working 14 hours in a sweatshop in Latin America who stitch the mittens being modeled? And second, since all the angels in the Bible were male, how come all the angel figurines in stores--and star of "Touched by an Angel"--are female? • Sports&Culture File: Roone Arledge, television pioneer. Obits: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/06/obituaries/06ARLE.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16092-2002Dec5.html http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/arledge_obit_021206.html http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/A/htmlA/arledgeroon/arledgeroon.htm If you read only one thing about Arledge--heck, if you read only one thing about the history of television in the 20th Century--let it be Steve Rushin's Sports Illustrated essay for his "1954-1994: How We Got Here." It appears in The Best American Sports Writing 1995. See also: http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/S/htmlS/sportsandte/sportsandte.htm -Lucid sports columnist Christine Brennan inadvertently started the Augusta brouhaha with a column last spring that prompted Martha Burk to write Hootie Johnson a letter. In the meantime, Brennan's been hearing a lot about how Burk is barking up the wrong tree, that the cause of getting (mostly) rich white women into an elite club of (mostly) rich white men isn't most people's idea of social justice--that feminists, in other words, have bigger fish to fry. I called Burk on Wednesday to ask her about this. In the past few weeks, she told me, she has appeared at a news conference regarding United Nations family-planning funds, moderated a panel on the economic conditions of working women in America, spoken at a news conference on the international women's rights treaty and written a column on how the bankruptcy bill affects women. It turns out she writes a monthly syndicated column that appears in small newspapers around the country, and, to date, she said she has not written one word about Augusta. The only reason she has so much to say about Augusta is because reporters and commentators call by the dozens and ask her for her opinion. Then some of them complain that she's spending too much time talking about the issue. Fascinating, isn't it? • Previous Sports&Culture If the media's so liberal, then how come two of three wings of the Fourth Estate--talk radio and cable "news"--are so belligerently conservative, while members of the third--the establishment newspapers and news networks--are so worried about the "liberal" label they restrain themselves into reticence? asks, to that effect, E.J. Dionne in
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16431-2002Dec5.html When not to downsize your seasonal sign-changer: Seen next to the checkout counter at Borders on the Magnificent Mile earlier this week. "Hot? Thirsty? Borders' own bottled water $1.49." It was 25 degrees outside. Thursday, December 05, 2002
• Number of the Day: 85 Percent of Saudi women who are wearing the wrong bra size, as estimated by one of the country's few female lingerie salespeople. Most women are so uncomfortable with male salesmen, she said, that they just guess their size. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/03/international/middleeast/03JIDD.html • Quote of the Day "Irony is the hygeine of the mind." Elizabeth Bibesco, quoted in The Week magazine. • Previous Quote and Number My latest Tribune story: On presidential candidates and Internet domain names. http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0212050077dec05,0,7738921.story This interesting tidbit was trimmed: Early in 1999, Republican consultant Karl Rove spent over $4,000 to register a variety of Web addresses for George W. Bush, including obscene ones he redirected to Bush's official campaign site, www.georgewbush.com. Rove also registered domains that included potential running mates, providing one of the first signs of who was on Bush's short list (though Dick Cheney was not among the names). • My Tribune archive Thought of the day: the ontological privilege of the postmodernist? Can I wax Henry Thoreau's tush? Are my amateur philosopher friends more impressive than the Founding Fathers? Does any given Washington Post staff reporter today do more sophisticated work than Nietzsche? In other words, do the finest minds and most distinctive literary voices of the past take a back seat to the most ordinary writers of today, simply because today's writers do their work in a dizzying, brain-jarring postmodern context, and yesterday's geniuses didn't? Most of the time-transcendent figures we admire most--Aristotle, Shakespeare, George Washington--tended to live in a pretty straightforward--or at least simpler--world, one of black and white, good and evil, homogenous cultural environments, linear modes of thought. Modernism, in other words, or pre-modernism, provided them a solid and authoritative definition of reality--what is true, what is good--that people alive now don't have. Few of the busts in the Thinking Hall of Fame had to deal with postmodernism--the pervasive idea that everyone's reality is relevant, that thinking and writing are not linear, that perspective, bias, and nihilism pull the rug out from under any certainty about "Truth" (masterfully clear and vivid essay on this here). Think of it this way: Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant mind, a mad genius who rose before dawn to devour books on science and philosophy. His writing and political leadership altered human history, redefined liberty, got the world thinking about democracy. But Jefferson, as many have pointed out, despite his words, never had to live in a world where all people were actually considered equal. He lived in the context of a neo-British social hierarchy, where white male landowners were up here in society and women and black people were down there. By contrast, while I am a 40-watt bulb next to Jefferson's football-stadium-floodlight, I, unlike him, share a city where people of various races are equal citizens, where democracy is deep and real extends to Chicago's South Side. I ride the El down to Comiskey Park, and right in front of me an African-American youth wearing a bandana is bellowing belligerent rap lyrics to his companion, and while I soothe my spooked wife that rap does not a villain make, that part of our discomfort is our failure to relate to the gentleman's cultural context (in which rap may just be ordinary music, not the murderous cry it sounds to us)--and balance this with the assurance that I can resent the young man's rudeness without being racist--I realize that I am in the first generation or two of humankind to have to think this way, to frown upon reflexive racism in mixed cultural contexts. Thomas Jefferson, standing there on the subway, steadying his wig with one hand and gripping the overhead bar with the other as the car jostled about, would have sneered at this youth as a savage (in his Notes on Virginia he says worse things about more virtuous people). Now, none of this makes me a fraction of the writer and thinker that Jefferson was, but still, I live in this world, I think this way, and Jefferson didn't. Heck, the simple fact that I've watched television and Jefferson didn't is food for thought. Or take Thoreau. When he wanted to have an epiphanous experience, he trotted down to, what, his backyard? and sat by Walden pond. This quarter-mile (or whatever) trek was his journey to wisdom for the ages. And I think back to last week, when I took the bus a few miles down into the Loop to do a story for the Tribune on downtown churches. I wrote about how a small downtown Jewish congregation shares a converted warehouse with an Episcopal church. On Friday nights, they drape a worship banner over the cross. This is the postmodern, non-linear, multi-contextual world I and hundreds of more talented writers write about today--where irony rules and society isn't simple. Thoreau sat on his ass by a pond and pondered (root word there?) the rhythms of the soul, but never took such a bus ride as I did last week. Now, a pond may indeed be a more dynamic, complex, meditation-worthy place than a major metropolis in the year 2002, but I'm just saying that while, writing-wise, Thoreau is Babe Ruth and I'm playing T-ball, it's I who have the choice of sitting by a pond or living in a multicultural metropolis, while Thoreau didn't have that choice. And I can't decide--what does that mean? In the world of Jefferson, Thoreau, Martin Luther, Abraham Lincoln, Charlemagne, wisdom was pretty straightforward--you read the canon of the day, you read and wrote endless essays and books that were very methodical and linear, you spoke in long, dependent-clause-laced paragraphs that had topic sentences. (This is the historical utopia of Neil Postman, author of "Building a Bridge to the 18th Century"). Canon? I just wrote an article (to be published and posted here in a couple of weeks) that referred to Moulin Rouge and Shrek in the same breath as I quoted theologians Walter Bruggeman and Richard Mouw while making an argument about faith and culture. To me, television writer Aaron Sorkin of "The West Wing" can communicate truth about the human experience in one of his pithy sentence fragments and be more compelling than a long dusty book about philosophy. This morning I was thinking I should write a series of short stories as a weblog, with four or six main characters living in a mid-size city who have to negotiate technology, social issues, faith and relationships in their evolving environment (more on this later). I could link their names to character descriptions and defining moments earlier in the weblog. I could post digitally scanned pictures as scenes from their town. I could write short entries and long entries, I could write an entry today that related to an entry four months ago, and link the two, bridging everything in between. Before weblogs, no one could ever write in such a non-linear format--from Chaucer to Dickinson, Plato to Poe, as deeply spiritual as their lives and writing were, the written word was still just an inked symbol on papyrus; on the Web, it's a dynamic unit of multi-layered communication. So what does it say about the wisdom and historical transcendence of the above geniuses that they thought about politics without ever having seen a campaign commercial, thought about communication without having talked on a cell phone, thought about gender identity without ever having seen Madonna or a female Senator? Was something missing? (And what, for that matter, are we missing, not having lived in the next hundred years?) The question pivots, I think on the odd phenomenon of the resonance of these voices in an ever-changing age. Abraham Lincoln could speak to us about our country when the World Trade Center fell, even though he had never seen a skyscraper. Mark Twain and G.K. Chesterton remain two of the funniest, most ironic writers ever to write, even though they'd never seen a sit-com (come to think of it, that may be the reason they were two of the funniest, most ironic writers ever...) Shakespeare is one of the most eloquent writers ever on the drama of human relationships, even though he (probably) never met an interracial couple. Augustine shapes my faith because what he wrote centuries about about the City of God profoundly informs how I view Chicago today. (This can be taken too far--a new book about Queen Elizabeth I as CEO seems rather lame.) Put another way, a Boeing machinist isn't necessarily more visionary about aviation than the Wright Brothers simply because she knows what to do with a wrench and a rivet. It's not only that these brilliant minds may well have been brilliant in any age they were plopped down on the earth--perhaps Thomas Jefferson, riding the subway, would have been an influential multiculturalist or had a piercing insight into the current affirmative action case before the Supreme Court--it's that their wisdom directly speaks to a common human experience we live out in a different time. • Related earlier thought: postmodern awe for absolute truth • Related earlier thought: the contextual problem with wisdom • Previous thought: ambitious service an oxymoron? Aging--and previously considered dispensable--baby boomers are no longer a blind spot for advertisers, says 
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/29/eveningnews/main531266.shtml • Family and Culture File -Earlier this year, Calvin College provost Joel Carpenter e-mailed to say he basically agreed with my anti-family values column (in Det. Freep and Chimes), but... I'm not sure industrialization, per se, made for the change in roles, however. It certainly did not for the working class, at least in the early stages of industrialization, when women and children were most prized for work in the mills. The "cult of domesticity," as it has been called, was more an urban middle-class ideal, and had something more to do with the exclusion of women from the "white collar" business world, where up through the end of the century, I think, secretarial jobs were held by men. But that's a small quibble. I agree that family values has become a code word for individual nuclear family interests vs. the world, rather than the more communal, extended-family values of the village and neighborhood. Those are the "traditional values" we really have lost. -When a family goes tube-less, a few weeks ago in 
We want our daughters, Jazzy, now nearly 6, and Gigi, 3, to be as active as possible, physically and mentally. So when a babysitter asked whether Jazzy, then 1 year old, could watch [TV], we thought about it—and said no. When we look at our inquisitive, energetic daughters, we have no regrets. And our reading of the research makes us feel even better.... Kids who watch more than 10 hours of TV each week are more likely to be overweight, aggressive and slow to learn in school, according to the American Medical Association. For these reasons, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV for children younger than 2 and a maximum of two hours a day of “screen time” (TV, computers or videogames) for older kids. We are convinced that without TV, our daughters spend more time than other kids doing cartwheels, listening to stories and asking such interesting questions as “How old is God?” and “What makes my rubber ducks float?” -Cover story: TV can be good for kids: ‘Television viewing is a much more intellectual activity for kids than anybody had previously supposed.’ I dunno, I'm hanging on to the Aristotelian golden mean here: all things in moderation. I think our self-indulgent culture has forgotten what moderation feels like. -Suburban chronicler David Brooks recently in NY Times Magazine:  I don't know if it strikes you as odd that of all the arenas of human endeavor, the one that has produced the best-selling computer game of all time is the American suburb. There are other games about intergalactic warfare, supersonic-jet dogfights and inner-city car theft, but none of them attract the same fanatical following -- and no game attracts any sort of following among women -- as the Sims. You install the Sims on your computer and you begin the game, and what do you see? A subdivision. There's a little ranch home over here, a colonial over there, a larger McMansion up the hill.... There's no winning and losing in the Sims. No points, no end. In the game, as in life, you just keep doing the dishes until you die.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/magazine/24SIMS.html • Previous Family&Culture I pitched a story to the Tribune on the rise and fall of the Netscape browser--once a widespread Web icon, Netscape is now used by only 3 percent of Web users according to a recent NY Times report, with 96 percent on Internet Explorer; it was closer to 65%-35% in favor of Explorer in 1999. But my editor already had the answers to the questions I proposed to ask: In a last gasp during the browser wars with Microsoft, Netscape made its source code public in the late 90s. Then AOL bought Netscape in 1999 and the name pretty much disappeared into the AOLTIMEWARNER vortex. AOL launched a Netscape version called Mozilla but it never went very far, and Netscape is pretty much finished unless AOL decides to put major marketing money behind it. The old version of Netscape that you remember as a free download no longer exists. You can get it here, though: http://wp.netscape.com/download/archive/client_archive47x.html  The most welcome aspect of Netscape's decline is the loss of the vacillating Waiting bar at the bottom left of the browser. Bouncing back and forth like disturbed water in a bathtub or a presidential candidate waffling on the issues, it was the most annoying illusory symbol of progress since hold music on customer service hotlines. • Places&Culture File from 
• Previous P&C • Recycle Bin One of my biggest pet peeves about blogs is how amnesiac they are; they place such a primacy on the latest post--indeed, in the case of the majority of blogs who fixate on political headlines or personal minutiae, the only value in what they post is how up-to-the-minute they are--that once a post slides down the screen and into the archives, it's effectively flushed out of existence. As I write at left, this blog tries to avoid the "news cycle" mentality, and instead be more randomly and consistently curious and informative. That's why I string together certain categories of this blog (such as Places and History) with "Previous" tags. And that's why I'm starting this Recycle Bin feature--digging through my archives and finding something that's worth reading now as much as when it was written. I'm not saying this first entry is anything earth-shattering, I'm just trying to question the conventional wisdom that weblog writing must be inherently ephemeral, here one moment and gone the next, with no lasting weight. Ideas and observations are powerful not for their immediacy but for their historical resonance. (Now, to the minutiae...) July 19, 2002 • Etymology Today from M-W: tantalize \TAN-tuh-lyze\ : to tease or torment by or as if by presenting something desirable to the view but continually keeping it out of reach Pity poor King Tantalus of Phrygia. The mythic monarch offended the ancient Greek gods. As punishment, he was plunged up to his chin in water in Hades, where he had to stand beneath overhanging boughs of a tree heavily laden with ripe, juicy fruit. But though he was always hungry and thirsty, Tantalus could neither drink the water nor eat the fruit. Anytime he reached for them, they would retreat from him. Our word "tantalize" is taken from the name of the eternally tormented king. • Previous E.T. Tuesday, December 03, 2002
Seen last week at G&M's Social Studies: "Civilized ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not at all suited to civilized circumstances." Walter Bagehot A corollary of sorts to the excerpts of Michael Pollan's "An Animal's Place" I posted last week: To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm is to appreciate just how parochial and urban an ideology animals rights really is. It could thrive only in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose a threat to us and human mastery of nature seems absolute. I was reading the sequel to Politically Correct Bedtime Stories at, oddly enough, bedtime last night. The revised Little Mermaid, which has become, of course, "The Little Mer-Persun," includes this observation by a mer-persun who has just surfaced for the first time: "[She] told of how humans were obsessed with making machines that saved themselves labor, then spent lots of money in special clubs for the privilege of keeping their muscles toned." And here's the PC account in "The City Mouse and the Suburban Mouse" of the suburban mouse being harassed by a homeless person: "As he stepped out of his car, he was asked for a monetary donation by someone supporting himself outside the reigning capitalist paradigm."  Interesting counterintuitive cover of Newsweek this week. I couldn't help but think, has the pressure ever been greater for two young people not to jump the gun than it is now for Chris Nicoletti and Amanda Wing, the two teen cover subjects? Imagine the scandal they'd have to endure if she ends up pregnant before they march down the aisle. It would be like Jared the Subway guy getting caught downing a bucket of wings at KFC.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/841604.asp I loathe the WSJ editorial board for its reflexive rightism, and I suppose I should, for the sake of prizing critical thinking over straitjacketing ideology, equally loathe the NYT's Paul Krugman for his reflexive leftism. It's just that I agree with him more. Today he offers a more mathematical riposte to the WSJ-ers complaints that the poor don't pay enough taxes, which I scoffed at last week. As he summarizes the WSJ: "The government mustn't do anything good, because then people might not realize that government is bad. Understand?" http://nytimes.com/2002/12/03/opinion/03KRUG.html • Etymology Today from M-W: juxtapose \JUK-stuh-pohz\ : to place side by side A back-formation is a word that has come about through the removal of a prefix or a suffix from a longer word. Etymologists think "juxtapose" is a back-formation that was created when people trimmed down the noun "juxtaposition." Historical evidence supports the idea: "juxtaposition" was showing up in English documents as early as 1654, but "juxtapose" didn't appear until 1851. "Juxtaposition" is itself thought to be a combination of Latin "juxta," meaning "near," and English "position." • Previous E.T. Monday, December 02, 2002
A sharp-witted friend with an ax to grind weighs in on my Keith Olbermann post from last week: ...2002_12_01_nbiermafile_archive.html#85381606 Sympathy for wide-waisted McDonald's litigants? Yes and no, says this letter writer to the NY Times: Re "Don't Blame the Eater," by David Zinczenko (Op-Ed, Nov. 23): • Etymology Today from M-W: cordial \KOR-jul\ 1 : tending to revive, cheer, or invigorate 2 a : sincerely or deeply felt *b : warmly and genially affable "Cordial" has the same Latin root ("cor") as "concord" (meaning "harmony") and "discord" (meaning "conflict"). "Cor" means "heart," and each of these "cor" descendants has something to do with the heart, at least figuratively. "Concord," which comes from "con-" (meaning "together" or "with") plus "cor," suggests that one heart is with another. "Discord" combines the prefix "dis-" (meaning "apart") with "cor," and it implies that hearts are apart. And anything that is "cordial," be it a welcome, a hello, or an agreement, comes from the heart. • E.T. bonus, also from M-W: origins of riot act, as in: "She read her the riot act." Many people were displeased when George I became king of England in 1714, and his opponents were soon leading rebellions and protests against him. The British government, anxious to stop the protests, passed a law called the "Riot Act" which allowed public officials to break up gatherings of 12 or more people just by reading aloud a certain message. That message warned those who heard it that they could be arrested and imprisoned for years if they didn't immediately separate and go home. By 1819, "riot act" was also being used more generally for any stern warning or reprimand. • Previous E.T. Wednesday, November 27, 2002
• History&Today: Thanksgiving edition • The menu for the first Thanksgiving dinner included fish, venison, corn, squash, berries, and corn bread. There's no record that turkey was on the table. • Benjamin Franklin, advocating the turkey as the national bird: The Turkey is in comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America.... He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on. http://www.clickondetroit.com/sh/holidays/stories/holidays-20001113-135438.html • From this morning's Chicago Tribune: the disappearance of the true turkey: Glenn Drowns and other preservationist farmers fear the old-fashioned gobblers will vanish forever--unless more people can be persuaded to eat them. The factory birds are engineered to grow up fast and with lots of white meat. They spend their entire lives inside, being conceived, hatched, reared, slaughtered and packaged without spending a single moment in sunlight.All white and with short legs, they little resemble the darker, colorful, fan-tailed turkeys of the past. And according to Drowns, they aren't nearly as flavorful. • But of course, you can't really understand Thanksgiving's place in American lore without understanding the antithetical day that follows it: the king of all shopping days, The Day After Thanksgiving. Lest there be any doubt about which is the more American day, remember Thanksgiving 1939, which was officially moved up one week by President Franklin Roosevelt in order to lengthen the shopping season. Ever since, we've been similarly hurrying our gratitude and hastening our gratification, as I pondered in this post-Thanksgiving walk around the mall I took a few years ago: http://nbierma.freeservers.com/america/mall.html Related: What if Friday were Buy Nothing Day? and Anna Quindlen on the problem with patriotic consumption Previous History&Today • Etymology Today from M-W: benison \BEH-nuh-sun or BEH-nuh-zun\ : blessing, benediction "Benison" and its synonym "benediction" share more than a common meaning; the two words come from the same root, the Latin "benedicere," meaning "to speak well of, bless." But which of the two words do you think has a longer history in English? If you guessed "benison," give yourself a pat on the back. Records show that "benison" has been used in our language since the 14th century, but "benediction" didn't appear in print until nearly a century later. • Previous E.T. Tuesday, November 26, 2002
Seen at the Globe&Mail's Social Studies, clipped from the LA Times: Refrigerator rights: A degree of intimacy that permits some people to freely help themselves to anything at your house without scorn. "[Y]our best friend from second grade, the woman you've talked with every Sunday evening for 25 years, would have instant refrigerator rights even if you hadn't actually seen her for months or years," writes Joy Dickinson in The Dallas Morning News. Dr. Will Miller, a U.S. therapist, ordained minister and corporate speaker has recently published Refrigerator Rights: Creating Connections and Restoring Relationships (Perigee). Earlier in Slate, Virginia Heffernan wrote that "Everybody Loves Raymond" seems benign, but it is actually a very dark world: The Barones' horizons seem awfully close, the ceilings very, very low. In these cramped quarters, Robert, the gloomy cop, cycles through obsessive rituals—chin-tapping, most obviously—to placate himself. Marie and Frank openly wish for each other's deaths. Debra periodically makes efforts to get a job, but she's foiled by Ray, who once botched her effort to write a children's book and more recently voted against her in an election for school board president. When asked to list his own goals, the sportswriter Ray can't come up with any. As he puts it, "I got nothing; I got no dreams." No problem, says Debra—that means you're happy. That, in short, is the insistent moral of Everybody Loves Raymond. The studio audience, composed of maniacal laughers, heaves a long "Awww" every time it's revealed. Of course, no sitcom can exist without a major chord to which to return—a status quo—but this one is unnaturally enervating. I guess it's supposed to keep a person on the couch, remind him or her of home—no progress, no forward motion, no dreams. "We've never had arcs or yearlong plots," Ray Romano has explained about the show. "It's the usual crap that drives you crazy about your family." This isn't just a matter of being "about nothing" as Seinfeld famously was--Seinfeld at least had recurring moments of delight, bright humor, and illuminating irony to give tension to its playful nihilism; ELR's nihilism is more sincere and unbroken. I'm getting the Wall Street Journal on a trial subscription, and although I'm enjoying the fine feature writing, editorials like last Wednesday's "The Non-Taxpaying Class" are enough to lead me to cancel happily. The WSJ editorial board, which last had an independent thought and orginal insight years ago, complained that the poor don't pay enough in taxes. In other words, says Slate's Timothy Noah, "cleaning ladies [should] fork more over to Uncle Sam." As Noah points out, the WSJ's beef is that making someone pay "only" 4 percent in income taxes on a $12,000 salary is not "enough to get his or her blood boiling with tax rage." So if the poor don't pay high taxes, they'll never know the rich's unique agony of high taxes. It seems to me that this is the logical equivalent of saying you should light a fire in your living room so you know what it's like to complain about heat. I'm just fooling around with some math here, but 4 percent of $12,000 is $480. Now, I need to find out what the annual income of someone in the top 1 percent would be, but let's say, oh, $10 million--28 percent of that is $2.8M. I've never known what it's like to be rich, but it's not a stretch to say it's less of a trial for a multi-millionaire to part with a couple million than a "cleaning lady" living paycheck-to-paycheck to lose two weeks' pay. Plus, what the market-worshiping WSJ-ers won't factor in: the multi-millionaire probably got to where he or she is mostly via inheritance and education, while the poor get to where they are largely because of lack of inheritance and education. I'm not a pure socialist, but in that light, sharing the wealth and improving education is the best thing to do for the sake of equality, and last time I checked this country was founded on equality. Back to Noah's column; he brings in Robert McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice to do this math: In 2001, the top 1 percent earned 19 percent of the nation's income and paid 26 percent of the nation's federal taxes. (The Bush tax cuts will drop the latter to 24 percent.) Everyone else earned 81 percent of the nation's income and paid 74 percent of the nation's federal taxes. "The rich are paying an amount roughly comparable to their share of their income if you do it right," McIntryre told Chatterbox. "That's not exactly socialism." That "if you do it right" is a little unsettling, but overall, point taken. http://slate.msn.com/?id=2074593 This is an interesting spin on the Augusta National debate and the blame of Tiger Woods--Anna Quindlen suggests it's almost racist to expect Woods to do something because of his color more than we expect powerful white men to do something. To me, though, the point is not that Woods should do something because he is black (he's only partially black, actually)--he should speak up because he's the most visible golf star ever, and being a star means being a leader, like it or not. Plus, he's made loads of money off Nike commercials that criticized discrimination among golf clubs ("there are still courses in this country where I am not allowed to play because of the color of my skin"). It's crassly commercial and most distasteful to make social statements like these only when you get a Nike check for doing so. http://www.msnbc.com/news/839140.asp • Etymology Today from M-W: lacuna \lu-KOO-nuh or luh-KYOO-nuh\ *1 : a blank space or a missing part : gap 2 : a small cavity, pit, or discontinuity in an anatomical structure Exploring the etymology of "lacuna" involves taking a plunge into the pit -- or maybe a leap into the "lacus" (that's the Latin word for "lake"). Latin speakers modified "lacus" into "lacuna," and used it to mean "pit," "cleft," or "pool." English speakers borrowed the term in the 17th century. Another English word that traces its origin to "lacuna" is "lagoon," which came to us by way of Italian and French. • Previous E.T. Saturday, November 23, 2002
• Weekend Reading • Previous Reading "An Animal's Place" by Michael Pollan, New York Times Magazine This is a fascinatingly well-written and well-argued response to animal rights ideology. It stands apart as a thoughtful, informative analysis in the bilious and polarized animal rights debate because Pollan takes such care to interact with and voice the points of argument of the animal rights movement. He even agrees that the most common practices in raising meat and poultry for sale are primitive at best and barbaric at worst. ["Dominion" author Matthew] Scully calls the contemporary factory farm ''our own worst nightmare'' and, to his credit, doesn't shrink from naming the root cause of this evil: unfettered capitalism. (Perhaps this explains why he resigned from the Bush administration just before his book's publication.) A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency and the moral imperatives of religion or community, which have historically served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is one of ''the cultural contradictions of capitalism'' -- the tendency of the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward animals is one such casualty. More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. But Pollan moves convincingly keeps going and deconstructs the problem with the animal rights line of thinking: it seeks to transfer the idea of individual rights to animal species, which is in fact a most unnatural transaction. In doing so, he illustrates the highest form of persuasion--not to convince the opponent that the good they seek is invalid, but to convince them that the good they seek is best brought about by your opposing view. I'm a liberal, but/and I'm convinced. Here are excerpts, but Pollan's piece is so nuanced and descriptive it bears a full reading. However it may appear to us, predation is not a matter of morality or politics; it, also, is a matter of symbiosis. Hard as the wolf may be on the deer he eats, the herd depends on him for its well-being; without predators to cull the herd, deer overrun their habitat and starve. In many places, human hunters have taken over the predator's ecological role. Chickens also depend for their continued well-being on their human predators -- not individual chickens, but chickens as a species. The surest way to achieve the extinction of the chicken would be to grant chickens a ''right to life.'' http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/10ANIMAL.html Digging through my files...here's an informative article on false confessions from the NY Times. So far, the polarities of [the false confession] debate can be roughly summarized in two words: Coercion. Impossible.... In place of the rubber hose, the law grants wide latitude in the use of psychological pressures -- the kind of cajoling good-cop-bad-cop routines seen on "NYPD Blue" that are part of standard police training manuals. That these techniques produce thousands of authentic confessions from criminals every year is beyond dispute. That these same techniques also produce a number of false confessions is also beyond dispute. I usually don't think much of Paul Harvey's hyper-nostalgic populist act, in which the Everyday American is angelic, but this is a great story about the man behind the name of Chicago's O'Hare Airport. (How is it that a nation rewards a hero by making his namesake one of the most disdained locations on the continent, so that his name is muttered bitterly with every delayed flight?) ...2002_11_17_nbiermafile_archive.html#84929683 • Previous Reading On Writing: One of my favorite columnists, Anna Quindlen, last month in the NY Times. The connection between the two incarnations, between the newspaper and the novel, is clear to me but confusing to readers. Here is the question they ask most often, the one that underlines the covertly snobbish way in which we delineate the professions from the so-called arts: How did you manage to make the leap from journalism to fiction? I used to answer flatly that there's not much difference between the two, that good writing is good writing wherever you find it. But that answer really threw people into a swivet, speaking to their deepest suspicions about both lines of work. It turned out that when I was writing about the people I actually met and the places I actually went, the enterprise was enshadowed by reader suspicion that we reporters made everything up. But when I made things up as a novelist, readers always suspected I was presenting a thinly disguised version of the facts of my own life. So the facts were assumed to be fiction, and the fiction fact. The truth is that the best preparation I could have had for a life as a novelist was life as a reporter. At a time when more impressionistic renderings of events were beginning to creep into the news pages, I learned to look always for the telling detail: the Yankees cap, the neon sign in the club window, the striped towel on the deserted beach. Those things that, taken incrementally, make a convincing picture of real life, and maybe get you onto Page 1, too. • More On Writing American politics is nearly a tie ball game, says Juan Andrade in the Chicago Sun-Times, and the numbers prove it: Conservatives and conservative-leaning moderates now own 49 percent of the political landscape. Liberals and liberal-leaning moderates own 49 percent. Whoever wins most of the other two yards rules.... In the latest issue of The Almanac of American Politics, Michael Barone, arguably the foremost authority on modern political history, notes that Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996 with 49.2 percent of the vote. That same year, Republicans retained control of the House by a vote margin of 48.9 to 48.5 percent over the Democrats. And while House Republicans held their vote margin in 1998 at 48.9 percent to the Democrats' 47.8 percent, they actually lost seats and forced Gingrich to resign as speaker. In 2000, Al Gore's vote margin over George W. Bush was 48.4 percent to 47.9, while the vote margin favored House Republicans over Democrats 49.2 to 47.9 percent. As Barone concluded, Americans have not witnessed ''such stasis in successive elections since the 1880s.'' Rick Telander says there's more than meets the eye with the Augusta controversy. For one thing, 56 percent of college students are female; women have made so much progress in society that now boys are lagging behind. For another, the two focal points of the story, Hootie Johnson and Martha Burk, come across as caricatures rather than people. In fact, Johnson is actually an intelligent, fairly progressive, thoughtful person who has helped women's sports in many ways and even invited the University of South Carolina women's golf team to play at Augusta. But you never would know any of this from his statements in this debate. And Burk no doubt feels she is pursuing the right thing--fairness, equity, opportunity--as she hammers away at Augusta's men-only membership. But you don't sense that as much as you sense her relentlessness. http://www.suntimes.com/output/telander/cst-spt-rick22.html • Places&Culture from
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- Nearly 300 years ago, this city began to rise from the Neva's boggy delta. Thousands of workers labored in a monumental effort against time and the elements to satisfy the autocratic will of one man: Peter the Great. Today, thousands of workers are involved in an endeavor nearly as monumental: to restore the city's elegance and Baroque grandeur. Once again, they are laboring against time, as well as a bureaucracy and corruption. Once again, they are doing so largely to satisfy the will of one man: President Vladimir V. Putin. In time for the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg's founding next May, the city has embarked on its largest reconstruction and restoration project since the German siege of Leningrad — as it was known during Soviet times — was broken near the end of World War II. • Previous P&C Friday, November 22, 2002
• Number of the Day: 1.7 Unemployment rate, in percent, in Fargo, North Dakota, the lowest rate of any American metropolitan area. Fargo's job growth has been 5% this year, while the national rate is 2%, according to the Wall Street Journal. • Quote of the Day: "He is a friend of mine, he is not a moron at all." Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, about President Bush, responding to several reports that his communications director, Francoise Ducros, called Bush "a moron." http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-canada-usa-bush.html • Previous Quote and Number First of all, just because I have one of the longest-running Keith Olbermann fan pages (olbermann.freeservers.com) doesn't mean anyone cares what I think or that I have any special insight into his stunning "ESPN: Mea Culpa" column in Salon this week. But being something of a student of his career and his journalistic voice, it's hard to leave the column alone. Because it rambles, wanders, and raises almost as many questions as it answers, it will take some time, follow-up columns from him, and feedback to put it into context. But here's my initial thoughts. 1) Olbermann gave too much ground. Whereas he simplistically saw ESPN management as too evil and himself as too righteous while working there (as he now admits), now he simplistically sees management as too righteous and himself too culpable. Granted, he stands by everything he says in Michael Freeman's scathing book, but says it must now be taken with this grain of salt: he was so insecure about his personality and his career that he impulsively blamed everyone else and was blind to his own problems--his conversations with Freeman were, Olbermann says, "the ultimate act of somebody who lived in terror of being blamed." This may obscure the fact that Olbermann was a moral fixture in a 90s environment at ESPN where rapid expansion into a multimedia corporate empire and residual sexism and rampant sexual harassment in the Bristol subculture seemed to sway the broadcasting colossus to the point where few within it seemed to be guided by much of an independent moral compass. Olbermann's presence was in part a redeeming one--or at least an aggravating one, sometimes nobly so and sometimes not. In his column, he sells himself short. 2) The column confirms what many at ESPN, according to Freeman's book, believed: that Olbermann was a tortured genius, with psychological issues in addition to award-winning talent. But what they assumed to be a matter of insatiable ego may simply have been a case of massive insecurity. I'll leave it to Dr. Phil to do the pop psych--actually, you have to wonder about the appropriateness of publishing this kind of intimate introspection in a forum like Salon--it really sounds like he's on a therapist's couch (and a direct letter to friends and enemies at ESPN would have seemed more sincere). But it is a lesson in how the broadcasting world is a jungle of titanic egos, dizzying stress, complex office politics, all magnified by the lens of the camera. 3) Some are tempted to see the column as an indirect (or direct; Olbermann says he'd like to host a show once or twice a week) plea for a job at ESPN. It probably isn't that simple, and Olbermann has never been that tacky. Still, one can imagine cooler heads prevailing in the next few months or years, given that there's been this much time to cool and that Olbermann for the first time is offering an olive branch. Sentimentality aside, the two parties need each other--ESPN needs more distinctive anchoring after several years of so-what cookie-cutter youngsters and a proliferation of studio shows that has diluted its flagship product. And Olbermann seems ready for a return to visibility. But his letter seems to illustrate just how oblivious outside observers are to the dynamics of broadcasting politics. Well, this is just the first draft of history. It will be interesting to see how ESPN, particularly ex-partner Dan Patrick, responds to the column, and if ESPN and Olbermann are able to mend fences, or even find, under the rubble, the moorings those fences were in before their, um, intense 1997 parting. http://www.salon.com/news/sports/col/olbermann/2002/11/17/meaculpa/ Halls of Fame aren't what they used to be. To evoke the proper tone, these hubs of nostalgia should feel old, should smell like a basement and be just as poorly lit. If we want glitz we can go to one of today's games. Alas, the new Basketball Hall of Fame doesn't seem to get it: The new building, nearly double the size of its predecessor, sits between Interstate 91 and the Connecticut River, immediately recognizable by a 93-foot sphere at its entrance. The sphere has hundreds of colored lights that can display millions of sequences, even giving the appearance that it is spinning. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/travel/10ADVBX.html Love the mitten state: Says a friend on a group e-mail list, responding to the assertion that Michigan governor and Canada native Jennifer Granholm had the "sense" to move from her homeland: Yeah. Real common sense, moving from the land of friendliness, free health care (Frith, how I long for it!) and sexy women who swear a lot, to a frigid, gas-smelling outpost of a war-hungry union. The only cultural advantage Michigan offers over Canada is Motown Records, and that stopped being an advantage about the time Boyz II Men released "Motownphilly." Ick. (Actually, I dearly love this state. It's a sort of geographical discount store, offering the best of many climes: in West Michigan in the summer you can pretend you're in Dutch California, then drive down to Detroit and pretend you're in Pittsburgh; head to the UP and pretend you're Ernest Hemingway ...) Says another friend: Michigan isn't so bad. Compared to Ohio, it's Canada. • History&Today File Lewis and Clark were all the rage this year, on the eve of the bicentennial of their continental exploration (see links to Time cover story and Chicago Tribune travel piece below). But Slate's David Plotz says all the attention is overinflated. "If Lewis and Clark had died on the trail, it wouldn't have mattered a bit," says one author. http://www.time.com/time/2002/lewis_clark/ http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-0207270022jul28,0,7659279.story http://slate.msn.com/?id=2069382 • Previous H.T. • Etymology Today from M-W: flagrant \FLAY-grunt\ : conspicuously offensive; especially : so obviously inconsistent with what is right or proper as to appear to be a flouting of law or morality In Latin, "flagrare" means "to burn," and "flagrans" means "burning" or "fiery hot" (both literally and figuratively). When it was first used in the 16th century, "flagrant" had the same meaning as "flagrans," but by the 18th century it had acquired its current meaning of "conspicuously bad." Some usage commentators warn against using "flagrant" and "blatant" interchangeably. While both words denote conspicuousness, they are not exact synonyms. "Blatant" is usually used of some person, action, or thing that attracts disapproving attention (e.g., "a blatant grammatical error"). "Flagrant" is used similarly, but usually carries a heavier weight of violated morality (e.g., "flagrant abuse of public office"). • Previous E.T. Tuesday, November 19, 2002
• Quote of the Day "A football is a prolate spheroid having cylindrical symmetry with tapered points," University of Nebraska physics professor Timothy Gay, who has produced a a program for NFL Films called "The Physics of Football. Quoted in the Wall Street Journal. • Number of the Day: 20 billion Disposable diapers dumped in American landfills each year. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/national/10RECY.html • Previous Quote and Number • Faith&Culture: Today's NY Times ridicules Alabama evangelicals for putting up a fascimile of the Ten Commandments in a courthouse as a monument, and rightly so. But listen to yet another example an East Coast media elite reporter regarding a Southern fundamentalist as, well, a lower species (people talk of media bias, but it's cultural bias more than anything): "Evangelical Christians still set the agenda here. This is the state, after all, where high school science books have stickers on them saying evolution is just a theory." For the record, while small-"E" evolution--the biological change of species over time--is a fact, as Christian scientists will attest, big-"E" Evolution as the authoritative explanation of how life began is most dubious (though I like this version I saw on a cartoon once: "And God said, 'Let there be evolution.'") http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/national/19COMM.html Then the Times redeems itself with this fascinating example of Christians working for social justice in fuel economy standards (noting small-minded pietists and their holy huffing that fuel economy isn't in the Bible). The slogan is almost a satire of the sentimental wristband craze of a few years ago that evoked pious contemplation but didn't have the social bite of this campaign: "What Would Jesus Drive?" http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/business/media/19ADCO.html (It's like an answer to my cry for social justice as a form of end-times living, and it's music to my ears.) Thought of the day: ambitious service: an oxymoron or a duty? I've been talking with various mentors lately about the fine line between a healthy ambition for positions of influence and a humble rejection of corporate culture's norms of ego and success. On the one hand, the defining narrative of our hyper-capitalist, hyper-consumptive society is to work hard, get ahead, get rich, and then enjoy the high life, and all the power and luxuries that come with it. (How we get off calling ourselves a Christian nation with these kind of national values will forever elude me.) On the other hand, I'm a believer in Christians being broad-minded and socially engaged--not reducing the gospel to a matter of "having Christ in your heart" and keeping a Bible by your bedside, but embodying Christ's transforming power in every area of life--including business and politics. Here's the rub: How is a Christian to go into politics, or business, or in my case, the establishment media--as good people must do if these structures are to ever get any better--and nurture a healthy desire to attain a position of influence to work for justice and goodness rather than prideful folly? And since we are all broken creatures, how is it possible to enter such contexts and defy all the elements that feed the ego--the power, the money, the recognition? In the case of journalism, I imagine someone rising to the stature and influential voice of a Bob Greene at the Tribune--only having something useful to say. (And not being hypocritical about it, as Greene was by romanticizing so-called traditional values and but actually living at a certain distance from them.) But look at how large Bob Greene's perception of himself and his place in the universe grew to be on his way to where he was. One of my mentors advises me to look for opportunities to rise within the structures of the media and work for change. But in just three months at the Tribune Tower this summer I sensed what a numbing, corporate, ego-engined place it is, and I wonder how I would reach the point where I was altering the subculture more than the subculture was altering me. And yet, small-mindedness is not an option for the Christian servant. It's hard for me to see classmates who have interesting potential for kingdom service lackadaisically settle for less. Some people could actually use an infusion of ambition. To whom much has been given, the biblical adage goes, much will be required. (Or was that a line from Spiderman? "With great power comes great responsibility.") I remember the parable of the person by the river who sees someone drowning and wades in to save them. Five minutes later, another drowning person comes by and is rescued, and then another. Finally the person walks away from the riverbank. Where are you going? someone asks. Are you turning your back on these drowning people? No, the person says, I'm going to go upstream to see who's pushing them in. That's exactly it: going upstream to work for a larger good. I'm advised that this all boils down to how you define success: in American terms, in which success is how much money and power you can hoarde, and how quickly? Or is success a question of how much redemptive good you can bring about while embodying the person of Christ--his humility, love, and wisdom--and how faithful you are to Christ's lordship wherever life takes you? This idea is so familiar and almost trite that it is easy to forget how radical a vision it is for serving in God's world (heck, Ken Lay, a Southern evangelical, did and still would agree with this, before and after the evil he enacted at Enron). To try to balance humility with courage, to retain an bold imagination for a just society in a broken world where our ambitions are loftier than sobering reality, to fulfill our duty to rescue the drowning and the need to change the structure upstream--is to understand how complicated it is to be a human being. Footnote: By all accounts (including this one) the late Congressman Paul Henry, from my hometown of Grand Rapids, Mich., was someone who was respected for having a feel for this balance of humility and boldness in the corridors of power better than most. Meanwhile, this Fortune article tackles the question of the dueling motives of faith and fortune in the corporate world. Related earlier thought: Save the world? Start by making up your mind Previous thought: God's will and self-amplification • History&Today: Only now are we learning how frail the young, animated John F. Kennedy really was: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/politics/17JFK.html • Previous H&T • Places&Culture from 
IRBID, JORDAN -- If you ask a Jordanian about the Internet, he'll invariably tell you how this college town in the country's north holds the Guinness world record for "the most Internet cafes in a single kilometer." In fact, the Guinness folks in London say there's no such record. Too bad, because Irbid deserves it. Irbid, with its three big universities, is a busy, vigorous, but frankly, not very pretty small city. Plain brick buildings dominate, their facades usually plastered with billboards, most in Arabic but many in mercantile English, like the "Big Taste of America" Viceroy cigarette ads. Internet cafes are everywhere, like pay phones, with names like Apollo and StarGate. One two-story minimal had five. The cafes are an easy way for someone to have a small business. It helps that Jordan's young, Western-educated King Abdullah II is a big techno-buff. ...2002_11_17_nbiermafile_archive.html#84777439 DUBAI -- There's a buildup going on in the Persian Gulf these days, but this one has nothing to do with a possible war with Iraq. A mile off the coast of this thriving emirate, huge dredges are sucking sand off the bottom of the sea and spraying it along the edges of one of the world's most unusual construction projects -- a giant, artificial island in the shape of a palm tree. Due to open in 2006, the Palm Island resort will stretch roughly three miles from base to tip and is expected to include 49 hotels and nearly 4,500 luxury villas and apartments, with a total price tag of about $5.5 billion. ...2002_11_17_nbiermafile_archive.html#84777479 • Previous P&C • Etymology Today from M-W: garner 1 a : granary b : a grain bin *2 : something that is collected : accumulation Many English speakers are familiar with the verb "garner," meaning "to acquire by effort" or "to collect," but not everyone knows the verb's older meaning, "to gather into a granary." Fewer still know the noun "garner," which is less common in contemporary use (even though it dates from the 12th century and is older than the verb). The original "granary" sense of the noun "garner" is found mainly in older literary contexts, such as these lines of verse from Sir Walter Scott's "The Bride of Lammermoor": "Or, from the garner-door, on ether borne, / The chaff flies devious from the winnow'd corn." • Previous E.T. |
FRANKFURT-YOU are what you buy. If that truism describes life in a consumer society, so does its corollary: you are how you buy. Artists have long been intrigued by this latter notion — that is, the aesthetic aspects of how we look at, savor and acquire the temptations and rewards that the material, and materialistic, world has to offer. Now, "Shopping," an exhibition perched between art and everyday life, has brought together a range of contemporary works that address these themes. The show originated at the Schirn Kunsthalle here, where it recently closed, and will open in England at Tate Liverpool later this month. It proposes that every discerning shopper is something of an artist, too — or at least a natural aesthete.
On Friday ... Alexander Payne's screen adaptation of Mr. Begley's book is released in New York, Los Angeles and, fittingly, Omaha, Schmidt will receive an exquisite comeuppance. In transferring his story to film, Mr. Payne and Jim Taylor, his screenwriting partner, have exacted a karmic payback for the character's snobbery and insularity. Albert Schmidt has been reincarnated as Warren Schmidt, a newly retired executive at a medium-size insurance company in Omaha. ... Culturemongers, in the meantime, both mock and celebrate the ordinary guy, the average American, who is at once an allegorical figment and a person who lives at a specific address, holds a particular job and drives a readily identifiable kind of car. He is both scapegoat and tragic hero, martyr and buffoon — an archetype whose manifestations include Willy Loman and Homer Simpson. He struggles and strives, but he can never win: when he is happy, his contentment reflects the lamentable (and often laughable) constriction of his soul; when he is sad, his suffering indicts the cruelty and materialism of the social order.
Charles Sheeler was trained as a painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts — and throughout his life that is what he chiefly considered himself to be. For the most part, art history tends to treat him the same way. The show of Sheeler's photography that runs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through Feb. 2, then moves to New York City, Frankfurt and Detroit, is the first major museum exhibition devoted entirely to his work with a camera. ... In 1927 the Ford Motor Co. commissioned Sheeler to spend six weeks photographing Ford's immense new River Rouge assembly plant near Detroit. Ford Plant, River Rouge, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, one of the most famous images in 20th century photography, divides the plant into a multitude of planes, angles and openings with an unmistakable resemblance to the buttresses and steeples of a soaring medieval church. It's no surprise that the next lengthy photo series that Sheeler worked on was a study of the great French cathedral at Chartres. He had already treated the Ford plant as a house of God.
VOI, Kenya--There are chubby elephant footprints all over Jacqueline Mwaviswa's farm. But she doesn't think they're cute or even interesting. Love of the floppy-eared, six-ton elephant is something for tourists and wildlife conservationists, says this grandmother of 15. She's upset because an overnight elephant rampage around her village last week left her entire food supply for the next two months -- her cashew nuts, her cassava and banana trees, her mangos and maize -- trampled and devoured by the world's largest living land mammal. In Voi and the other poor rural villages that ring Tsavo National Park in southern Kenya, elephants...have not only destroyed $30,000 worth of food, but have also killed four people since April, causing schools in the area to close and local leaders to urge villagers to arm themselves against marauding wildlife.
