Three Score and Ten

Back when I was in my fifties, a not-that-much-younger person once described me as "spry." I did not take kindly to the description. I guess I would now, though 70 is what I thought 40 would be like when I was 20. A bit frayed at the edges but basically sound.

Thoughts While Shaving

Is there a more 21st-century-American name than Travis Ishikawa?

The Proverbs of Questianity

"Who claims Truth, Truth abandons." 

--Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

Keeping It Secular

In a rather obtuse New York Times column today Ross Douthat argues that Judge Walker's ruling in favor of same-sex marriage amounts to the abandonment of

one of the great ideas of Western civilization: the celebration of lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate. That ideal is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve. And preserving it ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in emotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit. But based on Judge Walker’s logic — which suggests that any such distinction is bigoted and un-American — I don’t think a society that declares gay marriage to be a fundamental right will be capable of even entertaining this idea.

 But is it the business of the courts to protect one supposed "great idea of Western civilization" over another: namely, equality under the law? I submit that opposition to the latter idea is truly "bigoted and un-American," just like Prop 8. 

Responding to Douthat, Glenn Greenwald observes that

one can emphatically embrace every syllable of Judge Walker's ruling while simultaneously insisting on the moral or spiritual superiority of heterosexual marriage.  There would be nothing inconsistent about that.  That's because Judge Walker's ruling is exclusively about the principles of secular law -- the Constitution -- and the legitimate role of the State. 

Exactly the point: We live under a secular government, despite all the blustering from the right (and sometimes from the left).

There are all sorts of things secular law permits which society nonetheless condemns. Engaging in racist speech is a fundamental right but widely scorned. The State is constitutionally required to maintain full neutrality with regard to the relative merits of the various religious sects (and with regard to the question of religion v. non-religion), but certain religions are nonetheless widely respected while others -- along with atheism -- are stigmatized and marginalized. Numerous behaviors which secular law permits -- excessive drinking, adultery, cigarette smoking, inter-faith and inter-racial marriages, homosexual sex -- are viewed negatively by large portions of the population.

Of course, the wingnut defenders of Western civilization will retort that Greenwald, like Judge Walker, is gay. But for the rest of us, here's a wonderful collection of photographs of recently married couples.

Bard Thou Never Wert

The following review ran, a little shortened for space, in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

CONTESTED WILL: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

By James Shapiro

Simon & Schuster, 324 pp., $26

Let's say you're at a party and you're introduced to a Shakespeare scholar. Please don't ask her or him if Shakespeare really wrote those plays. If you do, you'll get an icy glare, a weary frown, or some other expression that clearly says: Oh, God, not that again.

They've heard it all before, the scholars, and they're sick of it. For them, the matter's settled: William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote “Hamlet” and “The Tempest,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Love's Labour's Lost,” “Macbeth” and “All's Well Than Ends Well,” the two parts of “Henry IV,” the three parts of “Henry VI,” and at least 27 other plays, plus narrative poems, lyrics and sonnets.

But the question just won't go away. It doesn't just get asked of Shakespeare scholars at cocktail parties: In 1987, three United States Supreme Court justices participated in a mock trial to adjudicate the evidence for the authorship of either Shakespeare or Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Shakespeare won that one, but in 1989 a TV program on the Public Broadcasting System again treated the question as if it were a serious one. The anti-Stratfordians have succeeded in making people think that there is real reason to doubt the authorship.

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University, firmly believes that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, but his entertainingly combative “Contested Will” is not just a rebuttal to the doubters. It's a cultural history, an examination of why there were doubts in the first place, and why authorship candidates such as Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford attracted such otherwise sensible people as Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James and Sigmund Freud.

Blame it partly on the Germans, who developed the science of textual study. And particularly on Friedrich August Wolf, whose examination of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” challenged the idea that they were written by a single person named Homer. Today it's generally recognized that “Homer” is a legend – a figure who was attached to the oral tradition that handed down the Greek epics. And after Homer's existence was called into question there came the Higher Criticism, the textual analysis of the Bible which determined that the Pentateuch was probably not written by Moses himself, and then called into question the accuracy of the life of Jesus presented in the Gospels. The German scholar David Friedrich Strauss's The Life of Jesus was translated into English by George Eliot in 1846, and, as Shapiro puts it, skepticism about authorship “soon threatened that lesser deity Shakespeare, for his biography too rested precariously on the unstable foundation of posthumous reports and more than a fair share of myths.” 

One problem is that the documentary record of Shakespeare's life is that of a man who was all business: We have lots of documents of his existence: legal papers, real estate records, and the will in which he leaves his estate to his daughter and the “second-best bed” to his wife. But the Shakespeare of the records is bourgeois, provincial and dull. Surely a man who wrote in magnificent language about kings and princes couldn't have come from such a commonplace background. Wouldn't it be more likely that the works were those of a philosopher-statesman like Bacon or a playwright, poet and courtier like the Earl of Oxford? The question has sent people on all sides of the authorship question to scour the plays and poems for evidence about their author's life.

Shapiro is eminently fair in his portrayals of both Baconians and Oxfordians. He even comments that although one of the first Oxfordians was a man unfortunately named John Thomas Looney, the name has been “the subject of much unwarranted abuse” and that it “rhymes with bony.”  And he blames some of his colleagues, who agree that Shakespeare really was “the man from Stratford,” for encouraging the anti-Stratfordians by using the poems and plays as biographical material. Shapiro insists, “The more that Shakespeare scholars encourage autobiographical readings of the poems and plays, the more they legitimate assumptions that underlie the claims of all those who dismiss the idea that Shakespeare wrote the plays.”

Shapiro demonstrates that if you want to believe that that Bacon, Oxford, or anyone other than the man from Stratford wrote the plays you have to ignore copious evidence to the contrary and indulge in intellectual contortions. Moreover, you have to credit the entire Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural establishment with a conspiracy so elaborate and a cover-up so successful it makes Watergate look like hide-and-seek. But in a world in which even the fact of a birth announcement published in a Honolulu newspaper in 1961 won't convince some people that the president of the United States wasn't really born in Kenya, it's not surprising that the “Shakespeare conspiracy” won't disappear.

Ain't That a Kick in the Head?

Dear merciful goddess, the right wing hates soccer.

"It doesn't matter how you try to sell it to us," yipped the Prom King of new right, Glenn Beck. "It doesn't matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn't matter how many bars open early, it doesn't matter how many beer commercials they run, we don't want the World Cup, we don't like the World Cup, we don't like soccer, we want nothing to do with it."

And of course, according to G. Gordon Liddy, it's a game of the uncivilized. (G. Gordon Liddy is civilized?) 



It is, according to the right's anti-liberal-media site, NewsBusters (which you can find for yourself because I refuse to link to it), a creation of the liberal media:

The liberal media have always been uncomfortable with "American exceptionalism" - the belief that the United States is unique among nations, a leader and a force for good. And they are no happier with America's rejection of soccer than with its rejection of socialism.

And a game of the left that all true red-blooded, red-stated Americans rightly shun:

Since at least the 1970s, Americans have been told that soccer was the future, and it would soon dominate other sports. But the United States proved pretty resistant to soccer's charms, to the chagrin of its boosters on the left. (And yes, it's [sic] support has mainly come from the left; in 2002 conservative soccer fan Robert Zeigler plaintively asked in National Review, "What is it about soccer that makes it (in America) the nearly exclusive domain of liberal sports fans?")

It is a sport for poor people, especially brown ones, which means that all true Tea Partiers should learn to play polo, I guess.  It's (horror of horrors!) multicultural.

Can the republic survive? 

Things That Make Me Blow My Top

Rand Paul on mountaintop removal:

PAUL: I think whoever owns the property can do with the property as they wish, and if the coal company buys it from a private property owner and they want to do it, fine. The other thing I think is that I think coal gets a bad name, because I think a lot of the land apparently is quite desirable once it's been flattened out. As I came over here from Harlan, you've got quite a few hills. I don’t think anybody's going to be missing a hill or two here and there.

A few years ago, I reviewed Coal River, a fine book on the subject of mountaintop removal which also featured the egregious Don Blankenship of Massey Energy, the man and the company responsible for that recent and terrible mine disaster. It's an environment and economic blight, and now we have Mr. Tea Party himself opining on the topic. My head hurts. 

Questianity

I'm going to start a new religion. All the other ones are too sure of themselves for me. (Well, maybe not the Unitarians or the Buddhists, but there's something too starchy about the former and too detached about the latter.) Its symbol (i.e., its cross or crescent or six-pointed star) will be this:

Its god will be the one Rabelais proposed to meet when he spoke his last words: "I go to seek a Great Perhaps."

Its deadly sins will be the same seven:

1. Pride: the assumption that one has found the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
2. Envy: the preoccupation with whether what other people believe makes them better off than you are
3. Wrath: the willingness to start a fight over beliefs 
4. Avarice: using a community of belief, like a church, for one's own personal gain (e.g., most politicians)
5. Sloth: being too lazy to search and question 
6. Gluttony: pigging out on the perks of being a true believer (e.g., most politicians)
7. Lechery: using the powers of a priesthood for sexual gratification 

Welcome to Questianity, fellow Questioners.

Catch of the Day

The Fish 

I caught a tremendous fish 

and held him beside the boat

half out of water, with my hook 

fast in a corner of his mouth. 

He didn't fight. 

He hadn't fought at all. 

He hung a grunting weight, 

battered and venerable 

and homely. Here and there 

his brown skin hung in strips 

like ancient wallpaper, 

and its pattern of darker brown 

was like wallpaper: 

shapes like full-blown roses 

stained and lost through age. 

He was speckled with barnacles, 

fine rosettes oflime, 

and infested 

with tiny white sea-lice, 

and underneath two or three 

rags of green weed hung down. 

While his gills were breathing in 

the terrible oxygen 

-- the frightening gills, 

fresh and crisp with blood, 

that can cut so badly -- 

I thought of the coarse white flesh 

packed in like feathrs, 

the big bones and the little bones, 

the dramatic reds and blacks 

of his shiny entrails, 

and the pink swim-bladder 

like a big peony. 

I looked into his eyes 

which were far larger than mine 

but shallower, and yellowed, 

the irises backed and packed 

with tarnished tinfoil 

seen through the lenses 

of old scratched isinglass. 

They shifted a little, but not 

to return my stare 

-- It was more like the tipping 

of an object toward the light. 

I admired his sullen face, 

the mechanism of his jaw, 

and then I saw 

that from his lower lip 

-- if you could call it a lip -- 

grim, we, and weaponlike, 

hung five old pieces of fish-line, 

or four and a wire leader 

with the swivel still attached, 

with all their five big hooks 

grown firmly in his mouth. 

A green line, frayed at the end 

where he broke it, two heavier lines, 

and a fine black thread 

still crimped from the strain and snap 

when it broke and he got away. 

Like medals with their ribbons 

frayed and wavering, 

a five-haired beard of wisdom 

trailing from his aching jaw. 

I stared and stared 

and victory filled up 

the little rented boat, 

from the pool of bilge 

where oil had spread a rainbow 

around the rusted engine 

to the bailer rusted orange, 

the sun-cracked thwarts, 

the oarlocks on their strings, 

the gunnels -- until everything 

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! 

And I let the fish go.

--Elizabeth Bishop

Why the GOP Keeps Winning the Blame Game

Blogger Dennis G. at Balloon Juice nails it: 

Look, I know that we face many difficult challenges. A lot of things have gone wrong and more will go wrong. This is to be expected because Republicans have been in charge for most of the last four decades.
Do you really think that you could have Anti-Government Republicans in charge for 30 plus years and actively working to destroy the infrastructure of government without causing system failures? If you do, then you are living in candy land (or a tea infused lotus dream).
The oil spill in the gulf is is just another result of snorting deregulation fairy dust with a Markets-Are-God hi-ball chaser night after night for decades. When you let industry capture regulators and dismantle effective governance, you guarantee a catastrophic failure. The spill is evidence of this, so was that mining disaster in West Virginia, same thing when it comes to that financial meltdown and the same thing will be true when the next system fails.
And when it does, like idiots, we will not blame the failed philosophy of the modern Conservative movement. Nope, we will blame President Obama, liberals and Democrats—because that is what we are used to doing. More than that, we will ignore facts and worry whether or not the optics of the response are right. We will all ask: is we yelling loud enough yet?