Snowmageddon …. again

There were vehicle curfews; they had to be off the streets by 9 PM.

Grocery stores were emptied. “Everybody is buying bread, milk, and eggs.” What’s that about? One wag suggested French toast is apocalyptic food.

Generators were primed and gasoline containers full.

The mayor of New York had spoken of “the storm of a life-time.” He had ordered his road maintenance crews to be alert and “not be cheapskates” in their plowing or application of salt. He solemnly warned the public that not obeying his curfew orders would be “to commit a crime.” Gasp!

Here is a short summary of all the dire warnings. Note especially Mayor Bill de Blasio’s profound utterance, “People have to make smart decisions from this point on.”

But, him? Not so much. For, oops. The meteorologists had got it wrong. The Big Apple was spared.  It turns out the storm missed NYC. Boston and points north got hammered, a bit. But, not the NYC area.

Weather forecasting is not my concern. It is not just a science, but also a mysterious art. Those folks do not read tea-leaves, but not far from it. What they do read is a mess of data which has to be interpreted.

There’s the rub.

Anyone involved in any discipline the essence of which is interpretation (reading the Bible, say, or the Quran, or the US Constitution) knows how deeply influenced the results are by the guiding principles and even, to be frank, the presuppositions if not outright prejudices of the interpreter.

No surprise here is allowed in a post-Einstein world. Relativity teaches that the observer in some central way creates what is observed.

And so it is worth noting that we are surrounded by interpretation voices. Every pundit, talking head, op ed writer, and even (alas) journalist, pours forth as “the-way-things-are” what in truth is “the-way-I-think-things-are” or, worse, “the-way-I-think-things-should-be.” The danger in this reality of so much contemporary discourse, let me be clear (to quote President Obama, who rarely is,) is not the voice, but the ear; not the speaker, but the listener.

Mayor de Blasio (and many others) heard the opinions of the weather forecasters, took it as predetermined fact, and caused if not panic at least a wild over-reaction.

To be fair to him and the others, of course, requires that we admit that only now do we know that it was an over-reaction. Had they not done what they did and said what they said and had the storm been what is was feared it would be, they would face excoriation this morning.

My focus in this post is, thus, not on them, the speakers of doom and gloom, but the hearers, us. And I am not interested in criticizing the responses either. My interest is on pointing out a phenomenon that worries me. Let’s call it apocalyptic fascination.

Not every challenge, not every obstacle, not every trial and tribulation, need signal the end of the world as we know it. After all, part of the world as we know it is our own courage, our own resilience, our capacity to discern and our determination to take difficulty in stride, to fight and overcome, to maintain and preserve, to face up to life when it is tough and to prevail.

The apocalypse? Balderdash.

Gospel news

A small article today has huge implications for biblical scholarship. Here’s the gist:

As per some experts, a recently found small papyrus fragment that contains a text from the Book of Mark could be the earliest copy of a Christian gospel. The fragment is believed to be written during the first century, before the year 90….Experts said that the gospel fragment was written on a sheet of papyrus that would have had been used to make a mummy mask. According to them, although most of the mummies that have been discovered till now had worn masks made of gold, but ordinary people of that time wore mask made of papyrus, glue and paint.

Two preliminary conclusions are being made, which further research will need to confirm:

(a) if indeed written before 90 AD, then the text of the Gospel itself must date from several decades earlier:

(b) its use as a mummy mask for a “common Egyptian” would indicate the wide circulation of the Gospel amongst “ordinary people” at an extremely early date, i.e. a date very near the time of Jesus’ life.

Whether all this indicates an Egyptian location (some Christian community) for the original production of Mark remains to be seen. If so, it would contradict the commonly held view amongst scholars that Mark originated in Rome. This in turn would raise doubts about the scholarly consensus concerning the geographical origination of the other gospels.

The dating is not too startling. For over a century New Testament scholarship has concluded that Mark’s is the earliest Gospel, written sometime between 50 and 60 AD. This new discovery could well push that date back, however, much closer to 40, a mere ten years after the death of Jesus. As already mentioned, more work needs to be done.

More such fragments have been discovered, but yet to be publicized. What will be fascinating to learn is whether the evidence is only of Mark. Discovery of similar fragments from one or more of the other Gospels would explode the commonly accepted model of the Synoptic Problem and its solution.

Stay tuned.

The Robin Hood lie

President Obama is being hailed as a pending Robin Hood. This article is typical.  

Hold everything.

I am not going to opine on the wisdom or otherwise of a plan to “tax the rich” to redistribute wealth to the middle and lower classes. That is not my point. The misuse of the fundamental dynamic of Robin Hood is my issue.

Robin Hood did not “tax the rich” and give it to the poor. My reading of the legend is that he robbed the government of its tax revenue and gave it back to the people who had paid it, or from whom it had been taken.

That is Robin Hoodism: give the taxes back to the people; deprive the government of its revenue. Since about 87% of income tax in the USA is paid by the top 15% earners,  Robin Hood would be doing the opposite of what President Obama is rumored to be suggesting. The government as Robin Hood is a horrid distortion of the legend and transforms Robin into Prince John. Being surrounded by a band of merry men is not enough!

This most definitely is not a message we will be hearing from the president’s State of the Union speech.

Free speech limits

Pope Francis has, once again, caused a minor kerfuffle.

I am not referring to renewed remarks he made regarding man-made global warming. I suspect his knowledge of planetary climate change is utterly dependent, as is mine, on the experts he chooses to be advised by and it cannot surprise anyone that the voices commanding his attention in this regard (short of God’s, of course) are on the leftward side of the debate. How else could he summon for governmental restrictions of free-market economic activities?

No, I am referring to the comments he made yesterday about free speech, following on the Charlie Hebdo debacle. You can read about it here.

Voices have been raised on the right, as you would expect, lamenting this papal “attack” on free speech, especially in the context of his being perceived to be in league with Islamic leadership. Where, I heard it asked, was the papal voice when the Crucifix was immersed in urine and deemed to be a ‘work of art?” The implication is clear; papal involvement now in this specific context is pro-Muslim and, perhaps, anti-Semitic, given the delicatessen victims.

I would urge caution here.

Pope Francis, it seems to me, is supporting the religious witness in his advocacy of secular limits in the attacks on faith, on any faith. Nowhere does he suggest governmentally imposed limitation on free speech. His remarks resound to my ear very much like the considered comments by Corey Saylor, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Department to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia, made in a BBC interview yesterday. The suggestion is not for legal but moral limits on free speech.

I think the knee-jerk outrage at the papal comments  is based in part on the complete absence from the critics’ intellectual armory of the notion of moral limitation which prompts them to fail to hear what was being said. For them “limits” must mean legal, governmentally imposed, limits. The notion of an internally held, personal, cohesive moral conviction escapes them.

If I am right and indeed this is what Pope Francis is speaking of, then the misunderstanding by those who criticize him is not only sad, it is frightening; for Catholics and all Christians, for Muslims, Jews, and people of any and all faiths.

Blethers

OK. For those of us living in the north (stop laughing Canadians!) scraping ice off the car windshield is a regular bother these days, especially if you have to park outside overnight. It’s not impossible or even difficult, but when it is below zero with some wind outside, it can get chilly. Result? We become satisfied with scraping a small hole on the driver’s side window, to peer through as we bomb along the interstate and before the heater melts the entire windshield. Not an optimal situation.

Not surprisingly, in light of all this, my attention was caught on weather.com this morning by a video entitled, “Best ways to get ice off your windshield.” I clicked on it. The presenter, Nick Uhas, a young enthusiast, set up an “experiment” to “use science to find the best solution” to this everyday winter problem. He chatted about “solutes” and used various mixtures, readily available, he claimed, in your refrigerator and cost efficient, to melt the ice before scraping it away. Most of them were useless (which puzzled me given his chat about solutes.) But one was a huge success.

Wait for it. Do not watch the video. Not yet. Let me set this up even more.

I want to use the ice covered windshield issue and Nick’s solution as an illustration.

You have heard the phrase, “A solution in search of a problem.” It refers to some odd device or weird procedure that is so cool and innovative that it just has to be had or performed. I think of an automated egg boiler I once saw in one of those glitzy shopping magazines on an airplane. Automated egg boiler? Isn’t that what a stove with a pot of water is? Nick’s presentation wasn’t this exactly. It is more puzzling than this. 

OK. You can watch the video now.

Get it? Through the technological marvel that is television and online internet streaming, combined with scientific training provided through Nick, you now know the “best solution to the iced up windshield.” That’s right; just trip over to your refrigerator and grab the ever-handy jar of beet juice and you are all set.

Beet juice? Hands up if you always have some of that stacked in there behind the milk and OJ.

I do not want to gang up on Nick. I understand; he was probably asked by a producer to get a couple of minutes’ video together on winter conditions and coping with them. Fine. But, really! Beet juice? The “best way?” Beet juice is the best science has to offer?

There is a great Scottish word for language used in this dangerous mix of pomposity and pretense. Blethers. The perpetrator is a bletherskeit. Blethers seeking to pass as wisdom, as insight, as innovative advice, as the knowledge of the inner sanctum. Hocus pocus. Non-sense.

I write this post to heighten you awareness, to fine tune your ear and attention. Beware the bletherskeit. Blethers can be spoken by anyone …. the otherwise knowledgeable, powerful, and influential included.

Stay tuned. Be attuned. Do not be fooled. The bletherskeit is a waste of space.

Three quickies

Three quick, unrelated thoughts this morning.

First, yesterday my younger son sent me a link to this article.   Entitled “Charlie Hebdo and murder in the name of Islam?” it is from a website I had not previously heard of, turkeyagenda.com, and written by Dr. Hateen Bazian described as “Director, Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project.”  The location or home institution of this project is not mentioned.

The point of mentioning this piece is not simply to draw attention to it, although that in itself is worthwhile, for the article is comprehensive, insightful, and well argued. More especially I reference it in a special context, namely the oft-heard refrain in the west about the silent “moderate Muslim voice” in the face of terrorism’s rampant madness. This refrain is countered by many Muslim voices of which the article by Dr. Bazian is an outstanding illustration. Another is Dr. Qanta Ahmed’s TV interview which I referenced in my last post.

Perhaps the refrain about the silent Muslim voice is not because it is not being spoken, but because it is not being heard and it is not being heard because it is not braying the reactive message of the unreflective mind.  “Let loose the dogs of war” is nowhere to be found in Dr. Bazian’s deep piece.

Second, I want to draw your attention to a wonderfully sensitive piece about grief and  expressing it, especially in the widespread context of the assumed normality of progressing through the stages of the “grief process.”  Patrick O’Malley, writing in the New York Times, recounts  his dealing with a young woman summarizing the issue this way:

By the time Mary came to see me, six months after losing her daughter to sudden infant death syndrome, she had hired and fired two other therapists. She was trying to get her grief right …. (U)naccustomed to being weighed down by sorrow …. (s)he was …. well versed in the so-called stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. To her and so many others in our culture, that meant grief would be temporary and somewhat predictable, even with the enormity of her loss. She expected to be able to put it behind her and get on with her life …. To look at her, she already had done so. The mask she wore for the world was carefully constructed and effective. She seemed to epitomize what many people would call “doing really well,” meaning someone who had experienced a loss but looked as if she was finished grieving. Within a few days of the death of her daughter she was back at work and seemed to function largely as before …. The truth of her life was something else. Six months after her baby’s death she remained in deep despair.

I won’t repeat O’Malley’s article, but simply urge you to read it and emphasize his conclusion:

When loss is a story, there is no right or wrong way to grieve. There is no pressure to move on. There is no shame in intensity or duration. Sadness, regret, confusion, yearning and all the experiences of grief become part of the narrative of love for the one who died.

Third, Mike Huckabee, rumored to be seriously considering seeking the nomination for president from the Republican party, made a statement the other day about President and Michelle Obama’s parenting of their two daughters. While asserting that he regards them as excellent parents, Huckabee expressed shock and disapproval that they allowed their girls to listen to and watch music videos of frequent White House visitor, Beyoncé. He is quoted as having earlier made this assessment of Beyoncé’s work: that it is “obnoxious and toxic mental poison in the form of song lyrics.”

Know what this reminds me of? The Taliban. Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher, may be pandering to an evangelical base imagined or real, but is this moralizing what the presidency is about? Does he really imagine that this is what the country needs to be hearing from a presidential contender? Sad.

Absent

I guess he hears a different drum. Sad. Embarrassing. Frightening.

 

Je suis Charlie

Do you remember these tee shirts?

I

 

NY

Or this hashtag?

#Bring Back Our Girls

The former, worn widely across the USA and in many other parts of the world right after 9/11, embodied a stiffened resolve and determination to defeat Al Qaeda. The latter, which never quite caught on despite Michelle Obama’s espousal, captured a sentiment and never brokered a policy. The girls never came back, although some managed to escape the clutches of their Boku Haram captors.

Despite the killing of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda clearly was not defeated and Boku Haram is rampant in Nigeria, as witnessed to by events reported today.

Which brings me to the recent horrific events in Paris and these:

Je Suis Charlie Hebdo (remembering the magazine slaughter victims)

Je Suis Ahmed (remembering the policeman shot on the ground.)

Are we witnessing more of the same in response to atrocity? Sympathy, sentiment, and even serious insight, as testified to by the flowering of brilliant cartoon responses in support of the Charlie Hebdo victims, but once again the mere blossom of a desert flower, so fragile under the withering brilliant sunlight of harsh reality? Or, is this time different? Do the demonstrations across Europe signal the beginning of a change, of the transformation of the victim? And if so what might this transformation lead to?

Right-wing, nationalistic political structures are in place across Europe to seize the day. But, this hardly is a wholly agreeable prospect, given the sad, brutal, and murderous recent history of such ideology’s triumphalism. I liken the appeal of this reaction to that of eating a donut when you are hungry. It looks good, is so easy to eat, and satisfies immediately, but the hunger pangs are merely masked for  a moment. A donut is not a steak, nor even an apple or a tub of yogurt.  (Yes, I love donuts!)  But if not the donut of reactionary nationalism, what? Where is, if you will, the truly nutritious response?

The soft apologetics, articulated most clearly by President Obama, that “Islam is a religion of peace” and the fanatics wreaking such havoc are simply aberrant criminals will not do. The violence is so widespread, threatens to become even more common, and is so utterly indiscriminate that such verbal sops have lost their power to steal resolve and merely permit populations to put up with more slaughter. Besides, an influential, but so-called radical, spokesman such as Imam Anjem Choudary has reminded everyone that, in his view, “Islam is not a religion of peace, but of submission to Allah.” Apart from the Quran, Choudary makes clear that for him and his supporters this entails the imposition of Sharia law throughout the world, as an eventual goal. It is Sharia that, amongst other things, mandates death for certain behaviors,  such as conversion to Christianity by a Muslim and insulting the prophet Muhammad.

The point is that the soft apologetics approach totally ignores and indeed fosters willful ignoring of this attitude within Islam. It is illustrative to note that even when death is not advocated, the free speech ideal nurtured in the western concept of a democratic society is to be attacked as made clear by the comments made the other day in Wisconsin by a Muslim leader seeking to take to court journalists who had reproduced some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

On the other hand, anti-Islamism voices speaking in far clearer and harder tones are being heard more and more. They rise from the heart of Islam itself. For example, Dr. Qanta Ahmed said on US television this morning, in an interview that everyone should see, that western democracies have to wake up and understand that Islamism is a “hijacking of Islam and turning it into a totalitarian political ideology.” (She makes clear, by the way, that the most numerous of Islamism’s victims are Muslims.)

There you have it. The question is not how to deal with Muslims or with Islam or some nut-job murderous criminals. The question is how to deal with aggressive, hardline, political totalitarianism. It is an old question.

Are the terrorists right? They are counting on our culture being too corrupt and our civilization too weary to hear and implement the old answer.

Rights and duties

All of you reading this post will have heard, I am sure, of Prince Andrew, brother of Prince Charles heir to the British throne. Few of you, I imagine, will have heard of Ched Evans. Together they illustrate a mighty ethical conundrum. I will start with Mr. Evans.

Ched Evans is a professional futbol player. He has represented his country, Wales, and played for several English clubs (or “teams” if you speak North American.) He is currently being considered for a place on the second tier, League One, side Oldham Athletic. This has raised a firestorm. Why? Because Mr. Evans is a convicted rapist. Sentenced to five years in prison in 2012, he was released in October of 2014 and is appealing his conviction, steadfastly asserting his innocence. The relevant legal body, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, is currently reviewing his case and has announced that the process could take thirty-five weeks, a very long time in the life of a professional athlete. Mr. Evans is twenty-six.  The proposed signing of Mr. Evans by Oldham has drawn wide attention; thousands have signed petitions against it; his local Member of Parliament has called for a postponement until the review is completed, and one national UK politician, Ed Miliband leader of the Labour party, has blasted Oldham. So far as I can tell there has been no explicit support for Mr. Evans, apart from the offer from Oldham.  The arguments against him are based on the nature of his crime (rape), not the mere fact that he has been found guilty of a crime.

Then there is the Prince Andrew situation.

It is more complicated to unravel legally, but my understanding is that he has been named in a law suit being brought against a Mr. Epstein in Florida by several women alleging that they were systematically used as under-age prostitutes for celebrity clients in a ring run by him. Amongst the list of such clients Prince Andrew (along with Harvard criminal law Professor Alan Dershowitz) has been named. None of these clients, let it be noted, is under any criminal accusation in this case. Buckingham Palace, whose normal procedure in cases of accusations of any kind is to remain mum, has issued several vigorous denials of any involvement by the prince. The suggestion of impropriety by Prince Andrew comes in the context of a cascade of sex-with-minors scandals in the UK, centering on BBC and other media celebrities over several decades in the recent past.

Thus to the ethical conundrum: let me come at it this way.

The word “rape” suggests an act of extreme violence. The rapist brutally physically overwhelms and then forcefully violates the victim. This, however, is not always the case. “Date rape” has come to be used to describe the act occurring between one conscious person, the rapist, and one semi or unconscious victim, the latter having willingly consumed too much alcohol or unwillingly been drugged in some manner. Physical violence preceding the actual rape may be minimal in the date rape situation, but in no sense is the violation any less. What connects these two modes of rape is violation. Sex with minors, it seems to me, falls under this same umbrella. In the absence of either the pre-rape physical violence associated with the traditional concept or the inebriation of the date rape concept, the intellectual, emotional, and psychological immaturity of the victim is overwhelmed in other more subtle ways and the reality of consensual agreement cast aside and, once again, violation triumphs. In other words, while a punch in the face is clearly violent, no less so are emotional manipulation, psychological coercion, and domination by status.

All this, it seems to me, is clear and, I assume, time will tell the truth in both the case of Mr. Evans and the allegations against Prince Andrew. I use the word “allegations” and this raises the conundrum.

Innocent until proven guilty is a foundational principle of justice in most, but not all, of the world. This clearly applies to Prince Andrew. Indeed the allegations against him are not even in the form of a criminal charge. Trial by media besmirching is an all too common aspect of culture these days, witness the Ferguson, MO case. Does the public’s “right to know” sweep all other rights before it?

Another foundational concept in the justice system is the notion of paying a debt to society. Commit the crime, do the time. But, once the time has been served, what then? Has the debt not been paid? On what basis then can the debtor continue to be punished? Mr. Evans case (his review notwithstanding) clearly raises this issue. The released guilty criminal is, of course, not suddenly innocent of the crime which led to incarceration, but is innocent of any other crime. Does such a person not have the right, once again, to the presumption of innocence?

It is an axiom of ethics that if I have a right, then you have a duty to allow me to exercise that right.

Do these cases not raise the challenging conundrum that while we may seem to want to believe these things, on the one hand, we actually set them aside in practice, on the other?

The changing face of beauty

I cannot begin to guess the total number of hours I have spent browsing in book shops.  My wife is the same; we find it almost impossible to walk past one when strolling through some town or city. They are like bakeries without the delicious smells, drawing you in with the elusive promise of mystery discovered.

This is especially true of second hand book shops, Collett’s in Glasgow and Thins in Edinburgh (both now gone, alas), Blackwell’s in Oxford, The Dawn Treader in Ann Arbor, to name a few favorites, each located not far from a great university which seems a prerequisite for a really good book shop. You can wander into these places and lose any sense of why you crossed the threshold  as musty and dusty friends are spied crammed onto a shelf, or lying in a teetering stack on the floor leaning perilously against another equally unbalanced peak, it in turn against another and so on like some mountain range caught in mid-earthquake collapse. Entering a second hand shop, such as those mentioned above, was like sinking into a comfy chair in a club of old companions, people you understand and are comfortable with, whose language you know, sense of humor you share, and whose wisdom is reliable.

So, it was not untypical for us the other day while out visiting family in California to find ourselves strolling into Bell’s in Palo Alto, not far from Stanford University. It was a revelation moment for me.

For quite some time now I have lost patience with the new design of the contemporary bookstore.  Too much open space; too much square footage devoted to the coffee shop; too many magazines and trinkets and, most damning, too few shelves with really good books. “Oh, I can order that for you” is no solution to my need to handle a potential book for purchase. All this I understand, of course: it must be almost beyond impossible to revamp a sales outlet to compete with the online ease of book-buying these days or, frankly, the slick ease of reading eBooks.

This growing dislike within me of the book store for new books was balanced with an inner glow of affection for the second hand shops. Until my revelation moment the other day out in Palo Alto.

Strolling from section to section, I was greeted. There they were; volumes I expected to see and have seen many times, indeed many of which I have owned myself and sent off to such establishments. Maybe I could find one of my own! And then it struck me.

I remembered visiting my old mother (in her 90’s) as she lay in her institutionally impersonal bed in an institutionally impersonal room, as she had for months and months, breathing and looking but very probably not seeing, but if seeing struggling to remember whose face I bore.  She was one of so very many in so very identical beds and rooms and geriatric wards.

Standing there in Bell’s in Palo Alto the identical sensation swept over me. I was not in a jovial club of old friends. I was in a geriatric ward.

I should not have been surprised. Many young students I teach never read books, but only words delivered on some device or other.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, and yet ……. something is missing.  What is that “something?”

The aesthetic of the information garnering experience has changed.  Reading an eBook is to reading a book as flying the Atlantic is to sailing across in a liner. Both get you from New York to London, one far more efficiently than the other. But who do you know who has flown to Europe and has afterword been full of stories about the actual plane they travelled in? People used to fall in love with ships, with their quirky individual characteristics, their sights, sounds, lay-outs, and nuances of design.

 This, of course, is not to argue against progress. In no way do I advocate the impossibility of putting some sort of artificial brake on the advance of technology. One might as well yell at the tide to stop coming in and going out. Besides, I read nearly all my books on an e-reader too and to cross the Atlantic today I would certainly hop on a plane, the quicker the better. I am a huge fan of the Elon Musk approach to travel.  I am simply making a point about a change in aesthetics.

And also raising a question:

Is the aesthetic upheaval I have alluded to in the realm of reading simply part of a broader phenomenon in our culture? Are we experiencing a revolution in what Beauty means?