Falling from Small Heights

"Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider." -- Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

As part of an "assessment instrument," I've been reading sample essays from Oh-ficially scored sources. See, our students read four very short arguments responding to a common prompt and then write their own argument about which is the best case. We free ourselves of subjectivity by using nationally certified sources. Our old essays are now too well known by the students, and we need new ones for the exit assessments anyway, so that means reading this year's samples. The old set responded to "As people rely more and more on technology, their capacity for problem solving and creativity will surely diminish." The responses were quite different from one another in approach, and the best was different from the middle one in thought as well as expression.

This year, all the prompts are business related. The best one, for our purposes, was, "For the leadership of the future, it is imperative that children be trained in the values of cooperation rather than competition." The responses, graded by the Official services from six to one, all agree with the prompt, and the differences between them are differences of compliance with written English. The "six" has complex sentences, and the "one" has sentence fragments.

They are all dumb. In fact, the "six" would have gotten only a B from me, because even it had the "Leaders will need to be encouraged in their school" object/subject number confusion (unless all "leaders" go to the same school). Not one of the responses was analytical. Not one questioned the dichotomy of the prompt. Heck, the "five" essay began with one of those, "The dictionary defines competition as..." gambits that is only supposed to be used if a person intends to redefine a term.

Consider this my answer, and my protest to the stupids that this Official voice wanted to offer people going to its test prep site.
 

"Skepticism (is) the virtuous mean between two vices: absolute knowledge and absolute ignorance." -- Odo Marquard, "Skeptics: A Speech of Thanks," in In Defense of the Accidental

"Competition" and "cooperation" are actions incomplete in their own. They both require objects, company, friends and enemies. One competes or cooperates with. These are neither values that can be taught in the abstract, nor are they transactions that can be consistently enforced without teaching a social setting that mandates the activity.

The submerged assumption in the writing prompt is that "MBA culture" has harmed America. Well, that's hard to argue, but it's also important to follow. "CEO America" looks at quarterly profits, does not know or care what the core business is, and is pleased to fire all of the labor force and eliminate all the goods being made by the company, because those are debts. The resulting "profit" will increase the stock price, which will increase the CEO compensation, and the trading of the stock will increase the company value, which will increase its price on being bought, which will ensure the board a good package on the merger. Thus, all of those making decisions will make enormous profits. The things being made will cease, but. . . that's not the business of the CEO. The CEO and board's duty is to shareholders, not to "consumers" or "labor."

Obviously, the effects of stock traded corporations are evil. Obviously, CEO's are bad for business and bad for the larger economy. Obviously, market funds are bad for the nation. Even their positive effect on stimulating start-ups is cancelled by their decapitation of those same businesses when they begin to produce, and especially when they manufacture. The specific evil is a system we have developed of captial pitted against commodities. When capital moves and "innovates" and "is made" without any relationship commodities, then there is a separate industry of "wealth workers" who set themselves in opposition to those who work in everything else, because their fundamental task is to shake capital free from any attachment to any person. (If you don't think we are post-capitalist in this manner, I'll see you in comments.)

By nature, humans are cooperative. By nature, humans are competitive. By nature, humans compete against themselves preferentially over other people, and we do not need studies to establish this.

Look around you at lunch. How many people are playing Candy Crush or played Tetris? How many people are playing video games solo? When they play in networks, do they play against one another, or do they play with each other in teams? In general, people play against fixed goals and against their own performances, seeking to be perfect at things. It is why they go to the gym and shoot hoops or lift weights.

At work, how often are you asked for help? How often do you ask for help? The point is that people are competitive, but not hostile, and they are cooperative, but not sycophantic. Indeed, we do need to battle the damage done by the naive assumption that "capitalism" is Darwinism and the even deeper lie that Darwin's "survival of the fittest" meant survival of the biggest, toughest, or strongest -- "fitness" means toward the environment, and strong, mean, nasty critters are not very adaptable. We have to fight the fascist theme that "America" is about individuals fighting it out without any help against one another for a triumph.

More, though, we need to understand that we are under assault by a post-capitalist economic theory that is disloyal, immoral, and corrosive of all values and value.

A Consideration of "Nigger Lover" for MLK Day

I am not afraid of words. I am afraid of meanings of words.

In the 1990's, my students at UNC Chapel Hill were encouraged not to refer to all persons bereft of a Y-chromosome as "girls." The result was that I got numerous sentences like the following, "The females would like for fraternities to go away, but this is because some females are unable to get dates and are jealous." The boys who wrote for me managed to use the word "female" (not woman/women, because the Anglo-Saxon plural confused them) and intend things at least as venomous and ignorant as any man ever had when he referred to his co-workers as "the girls." At the same time, the fact that these boys knew that they were not supposed to write "girls" meant that they were aware that there was something going on, that they were conscious to some degree, even if this consciousness only resulted in reactionary knuckle dragging and chin drooling self regard in the short term.

"Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." -- Abraham Lincoln, "The Lyceum Address" 1838

I recently ran into the word "nigger lover" for the first time in decades. As you might imagine, I don't spend any time in the "Comments" at FoxNews.com, where, I gather, the term is somewhat alive. I will be discreet with the context because the context isn't actually very important: a high-up individual in a college was accused of having used the term. Students were extremely upset. In what follows, I will not say "N-word," and I won't say "n***." I consider "nigger" to be profanity. Just as I would not capriciously type "shit," so I would not capriciously type this word, but, just as I would not laboriously invoke and avoid the word, so I will not here. This post is about the meaning of the word, and therefore about the word itself.

First, do I believe that the college official used the term? No, not particularly. It's a bizarre term. It's a term that depends upon a biographical rather than geographical context, and I am pretty sure that it doesn't fit.

Here's the thing, though: what is the insult involved? Let's think through this term.

This is a picture of EVERYTHING

 If you were called a "nigger lover," as I was in 1968, would you be insulted? Would you even understand the charge? The term is much, much worse than "nigger," because it is an inescapable indictment of the speaker. It does not mean "inter-racial lover." It means, to its speaker, "traitor to the white race" and "person giving advantages to the unworthy and hateful villains, Blacks." The person who uses the word affirms two things:

1. The speaker believes in skin color race. This person believes that persons descended from formerly enslaved persons, or simply persons derived from African stock by more than two generations, are naturally different from all other persons. This difference is a matter of innate competition as well as an entrenched and immutable superiority/inferiority. The person who uses the word believes that a child born with dark skin is already, before its first word, inferior, inimical, and alien to the speaker him or herself.
2. The speaker believes that everyone else agrees with her or him. The person who calls someone a "nigger-lover" is assuming an audience, a geography, a region wherein race is not merely understood, but where the assumptions of inequality and enmity are accepted. The person who uses the word believes that history and biography can only be understood as the enactment of a race war.

It's shocking. The idea that a person might get upset with another person and reach for an insulting epithet is understandable. It's not acceptable, but it is understandable. The stressed out and angry office worker might refer to another as a Pollack or Dago or Spic in a moment of rage. The rage is the problem more than the word, and this is largely because the audience and community that believes in and accepts such terms as truths is not merely gone, but historical. That's not true for "faggot" or "nigger": there are huge populations that still hold the hostility.

I said that I had been called one in 1968. I was a little kid living in Savannah, Georgia, and the subject was Martin Luther King. It was becoming acceptable for white people to like King. My mother did. My father didn't, but he was generally not political. On my street, though, the kids were pretty clear: if you supported King, you were a nigger lover. (They didn't know what they were repeating or what it meant.) I was only six years old, but I remember being deeply, deeply puzzled by the charge.

What the heck did they mean? Of course I was a "nigger lover." Aren't we supposed to love all people? Isn't that what Jesus said? Aren't we supposed to love our neighbors?

The next year, we moved to Atlanta, then on to New Jersey, where I was accused of being a slave holder, because I was from Georgia, and then we came back to Atlanta. I didn't hear the word actually used again until last week.

Mr. Nickles: "There must be

Thousands! Whats that got to do with it?

Thousands -- not with camels either:

Millions and Millions of mankind

Burned, crushed, broken, mutilated,

Slaughtered, and for what? For thinking!

For walking round the world in the wrong

Skin, the wrong-shaped noses, eyelids:

Sleeping the wrong night wrong city --

London, Dresden, Hiroshima.

There never could have been so many

Suffered more for less. But where do

I come in?" -- Archibald MacLeish, J.B. Prolog

 Today, we have MLK Day, and we also have more overt racism than I have seen since my childhood. While we, the good guys, were triumphant during the 1980's, the bad guys were simmering and bubbling beneath closed pot lids, and they were spreading. The craziest idea of the anti-civil rights era -- the idea of races coming from the book of Genesis and there being a Christian race -- spread among the unmonitored, unlettered, uncontrollable right wing fundamentalist church networks -- reactionary racism riding reactionary religion.

I have heard, with my own ears, children seriously informing me that white people came from Adam and Eve, but Black people came from monkeys. That kind of gibberish was, in my day, hard to find if you were looking for it. Today, it walks up to you with a blonde ponytail and an ad for a Father/Daughter dance, with coupons for Chik-Fil-A.

The person who said that the college official said "nigger lover" was probably employing rumor as one of the last tools of the powerless in a situation that feels arbitrary, but I wouldn't want to judge. I do know, though, that the cultural milieu, the set of assumptions necessary, for using the word don't exist for the official. They don't exist at the college.

What frightens me more than any foul term is that the culture surrounding me is such that people are using that term, thinking that term, and believing that term's world again.

Why You Think the Internet Stinks Now

I have been active on the Internet since 1990. In those days, we had Usenet at the university and moderated private bulletin board systems (FidoNet) for amateur fun. This makes me four Internet generations ago, if we assume that an Internet generation is about five years, rather than twenty-five.

Indulge with me in nostalgia. Before the FCC decided to sell bandwidth to the .com top level domain, the Internet was a place of low or no graphics, where users were almost exclusively .edu accounts (with a few .sys, .mil, and .gov), and most accounts were a first initial and last name (mine being misspelled by the IT people at my U, so I had anonymity even then). HTML sites were usually navigated by Lynx or one of the other text-only Unix based clients. Since the entire endeavor was text on slow dial up connections or fast connections on computers with monochrome displays, it was an empire of words subordinated to either a group's activity (e.g. rec.bicycle) or a group's academic research. University and government workers created massive amounts of free information, and the early HTML systems were ways to link information infinitely. People spoke of beginning with an interesting note in the newspaper, clicking on an odd term, following to a strange fact, seeing a strange name, and spending hours “surfing” from site to site, but all of this was via reading.

When America Online and CompuServe opened their closed systems to the Internet, everything changed. There were floods of new users who reflected average America. While many snobs thought that “killed” the Internet, it was, instead, the underlying decision to commercialize the Internet, combined with hypertext, that turned the Internet into today's creature of clicks and “eyeballs.

By 1996, and certainly by 2001, most “Internet” users only knew the world wide web, not Usenet, not discussion. The world wide web itself “was” a series of commercially profitable sites, with the last of the .edu created purchased (e.g. Bartleby.com, created by Columbia University library to make all of its Columbia UP reference works available for free, was sold, then resold) or forgotten. University server sites providing information became gradually invisible to average users because they went unadvertised, and “the web” was no longer a place where persons “surfed” on an adventure of information. Certainly by the time the "tech bubble" burst, each website invested in keeping visitors on sites, in sites, and preventing outside linkages. Websites became more pictographic, with an increase in sensationalism, as the same pressures that turned superabundant newspapers in 1900 into the Yellow Press created increasingly narrow and vertical forms of discourse (“vertical” refers to information that is recursive and closed, in this case). What had been peer groups in conversation became interest groups engaged in a tailored retail experience. 

“Friendster” and “MySpace” were non-profit simulacra of the older Internet. They succeeded, to the degree they did, by offering like-minded cultures and subcultures. (There have been other simulations since, including Reddit.) However, when their host/software companies offered stock, they were purchased by media corporations that, as early as 1998, had been imagining an Internet/cable vehicle whereby visitors would be captive, ordering television shows, movies, books, radio, and the rest on an a la carte basis by the Internet. '

Neither the websites nor the delivery technologies were in place for such visions to be realized. (This vision, and its failure, was paradoxically critical to the collapse of Enron. The Amazon Kindle/Fire is getting very close to its realization today, according to critics. If they can "own the pipeline" and the store and the production, then the consumer choice is finally completely eliminated -- or "business uncertainty is minimized," if you prefer.)

 I'm no Electronic Frontier Foundation warrior or GNU freak. I haven't the money to be the first or the skills to be the second. I did join Wikipedia in 2003, though. My frustrations with it were that it was not dedicated to a common project of construction as much as it was a "community." My criticisms of capital in technology are not propelled by idealism or ideology. They are directed solely at an analysis of the deterioration of academic freedom and investigation because of a capitalized web.

One thing I've noticed is that a genuine analysis of technology cannot be found under the title of "technology" writing. For about ten years, I noticed that the writing about computer technology, in particular, fell into one of two camps. Either a new device or program was the Swiss Army Knife of Heaven -- able to turn every student into a buddha and genius -- or the next device or program will free the Fenris wolf and extinguish the sun for once and all. "Tech" writers are either reviewers or advocates. Sometimes, even worse, they're salesmen.

Look, capitalized websites serve capital. I get it. That's just and right. But non-capitalized websites are now all but invisible, especially since Facebook learned from MyFace's failure and AOL's persistence and began to fold in a whole universe of outside websites into its "you're still on Facebook" experience. Regular people are beginning, just beginning, to realize one of the more cynical web "memes": If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product.

All of the commercial Internet is riding on public infrastructure. Ask AT&T how it feels about cable companies getting access to "their" infrastructure. Well, how should we feel, then, about commercialized Internet services working against the public's interests or the nation's constitution? EU investigators found out that a person who creates a Facebook account and immediately deletes it generations twenty thousand pages of data that Facebook does not delete. That, after all, is their data.

Windows 8.1 is roping all its users into Xbox Live accounts and beaming geo-location to Microsoft. Apple does that with iTunes. This is without even talking about a smart phone. Any person who owns such a thing is foolish, in my opinion (as a phone, it's a phone, but as a computer, is it equal to a laptop? as an mp3 player is it equal to even a Walkman? doesn't it offer imitations of a dozen functions but at inferior performance, and all with the solitary advantage of fitting in a pocket?). I'm sure you have already read that the new iPhone made news for not including a backdoor into user encrypted data for NSA and FBI. 

Going onto Google is a losing proposition. It geolocates the browser. After a few searches, Google begins to tailor results to "customize the web experience." It predicts the sorts of results this user wants. It discounts, for example, "old" web pages -- so if you're looking for a news story from 2004, you won't find it, because Google simply doesn't want that to show up, because "normal people" don't search for old information. A few more searches, and the results are "customized more." 

Google's search is used by Bing, by the way. Facebook will tailor search results and "help" the user extensively as well. 

Doesn't that scare you? Don't you see why that's the end of the world?

The limitations are being made, in the case of Amazon, Facebook, and others, on the basis of likely purchases, not what one wishes. In the case of Google, it's made on the basis of what you have been interested in before. In other words, these merchants are making decisions about the sorts of questions you can ask, and answers you can get, on the basis of likely sales, likely happiness, not answers, not knowledge, not growth.

As an academic, I have to have open searches, because the Internet has consumed the library. Once that library has then become a public library with card catalogs assembled by advertisers, whole floors of the stacks go missing. The only answer to it is yet more capital outlays in the form of JSTOR and EBSCO subscription services. 

Meanwhile, the Facebooking of conversation has pushed conversation into interest groups, where like meet like, the agreed hear from the confirmed. That is guaranteed to be sterile or frenetic.

Strippers, Cops, and a War with Drugs

I have known more prostitutes than police, more police than strippers. I have had conversations with strippers when they were off the clock, but I'm not an expert on what they do or why they do it. By the way, the number for the first two professions I mentioned is two and one. The difference is that I knew the detective was a detective the entire time I was an acquaintance of his, but I only knew one of the prostitutes had been a prostitute. The other was working, and I didn't know about it.

There are many, many documentaries by and about strippers. The most interesting facet of their profession is the labor exploitation. The psychological exploitation isn't something the women seem to cite very often, but the labor conditions would have Samuel Gompers calling out his guys. Watch any documentary on the job, and you'll come to the conclusion that the women are stolen from, subjected to poor conditions, and encouraged to spend all of the money they make on dangerous surgeries.

As for prostitutes, the subject is endlessly complicated from a labor point of view. Even the issue of trafficking turns out to be complex, as the numbers of women enacting a "Lilya 4-Ever" scenario are probably low. (Even one is too high a number.) However, again, the women face economic exploitation that leaves them constantly having to work more to obtain the big payday they can see just over the horizon.

For a while, Salon.com was a cutting edge left wing political site. Then it became a click-bait site, where every article was written by Tracy Clark-Flory. "Ten Things about 'Divergent' that Related to My Lesbianism" and "Sex Toys and Me" and "Gender Equality and My Girlfriend" and on and on and on -- every piece was, "And how this totes relates to me! I'm amazingly hip! I like sex. With girls!" Now, Salon is trying to be a left wing political site with writers again, although designed as if every person on the Internet were either blind or color blind and viewing things on a 3" screen. (Don't get me wrong, "Miracle Pasta Recipe as a Hipster Lesbian" articles still run every day.)

All along, Salon has had a "sex positive" feminism. (That means, for people who like to reduce long arguments to clickable bylines, that it is a feminism that embraces sexual pleasure as a right and believes that it is good to discuss desire and set out sexual norms that avoid shame.) They ran, back in 2003 or so, a series from a Washington call girl. They also ran a story from a woman who was a prostitute in Cuba for a while. Both women attested to the same thing: the body takes over, and there is a bit of pleasure that's simply due to wiring, and they lost intimacy. "Intimacy," according to biochemists, is oxytocin. According to everyone else, it is a bond and closeness that follows a sexual encounter that is often the best part. Sex workers stop having that, and they report difficulties in achieving it with their mates, if they are married.

Sex work is not supposed to leave women an emotional wreck. I beg to disagree, but my sample size was small, and I do not wish it larger. It is enough, as far as I am concerned, to think that, at best, the women can count on "not awful" and then pay the price of a divorce from emotional connections.

There is a movie available on Netflix that I cannot hiss enough. It's called "Whore's Glory" in English, and it's only accidentally good. The German film maker gets credited for sympathy for the women, but I saw none. I saw, instead, a voyeuristic impulse that controlled the film so that the narrative simply had to lead to some on-campus intercourse. While the documentarian was chasing down the most degraded red light districts in the world, he let the prostitutes themselves talk about whatever they talked about, and the extremely young girls in India made a case against their dehumanization that is utterly shattering. For the most part, though, the women talk about how little money they're making, gossip about each other, and talk about Johns. Their attitudes toward men is as commercial, affectionless, and dry as it could possibly be.

A stripper in a documentary talked about how she came to see her breasts as an ATM. She would shake them around, and pull money out. Every man she saw on the street, she said, she thought of in terms of whether he would tip well or not. She had stopped dating, because she was convinced that every man she met went to strip clubs and was as bad as the customers who gave her tips, and whom she despised, every night. The prostitutes in "Whore's Glory" spoke of men either in idealistic terms -- the man who would be different, who would protect her, who would give her money -- or in terms of a cully.

Strippers can get tax deductions for their breast augmentation surgery. Silicone is the real drug of choice for the industry. Sex workers, despite what apologists say, have a correlative link with narcotic use.

To sex workers, people look like Johns or unicorns. To strippers, men look like suckers to be played. To cops. . . .

The NYCPD detective I knew was a great guy. However, he told me himself that he had had to learn to look at the world a new way. The world inside the force looked like a war against scumbags -- that's you and me -- and victims -- also you and me -- and people trying to keep them from doing their job -- also you and me. When you see bad people and hear lies all day, you expect every stranger to be a liar. When you live and die by the idea that, like the military, you're not "fighting for" an abstraction, but for the guy next to you, the loyalty you build means that of course the witness is lying about the other cop doing something bad.

I find it rather easy to believe that a policeman shot an unarmed Black man to death in the middle of Ferguson, MO. I would believe he did it for the young man failing to obey. I know that the grounds for shooting for police have shifted since 2006, that police can now shoot if they believe they are in danger. No longer do they actually have to have their lives actually in danger; they only need to think so. Since Ferguson PD beat another Black man and then charged him for destruction of police property for bleeding on their stuff, I absolutely believe that these cops -- whose county superiors later arrested an alderman for "failing to obey" -- would kill because they weren't being obeyed.

The police have a natural psychological bias. See crummy people all day, and you'll start thinking all people are crummy. See violent people all day, and you'll assume everyone's violent.

The problem is that the police only get to enforce laws, and they have to tolerate annoying citizens. If they can't do their jobs without releasing information, without being protested, without freedom of assembly, then they can't do their jobs at all. Police who "must" get MRAPP's and Strykers and automatic weapons and LDAP's aren't police: they're paramilitaries.

The recruiting for police makes it seem like a W A R on crime. The SWAT gear and military surplus allows all of the police to go out with JSOC styled garb and point rifles at empty-handed protestors. It allows the police to say that the crowd are "f*cking animals." It seals the assumption (that the public is criminal -- an entire prison population waiting for booking) with the rituals of conquest (not occupation).

The old "war on drugs" gave us the legal abuses that glaze these affronts. The "no-knock warrant," which is now served by SWAT teams, comes from the drug war. The roving wire tap comes from the drug war. The invention of SWAT itself comes from the drug war. However, all the heavy weaponry in local cops' hands comes from the 9/11 freakout. Someone thought that it was a great idea to put military junk in Wayback, Arkansas so that it could deter the Islamic invaders. Marry the "no knock" warrant and the SWAT with that stuff, and you've got Ferguson, almost.

If strippers need breast augmentations ad infinitum and sex workers look for central nervous system depressants, then what of the Valiant Watchmen on the Wall? It's possible to see the behaviors that we've seen across America in the last five years without a widespread drug problem among the police, but, as long as we're making SNAP recipients pee in a cup, making school teachers pee in a cup, making parolees pee in a cup, why not ask the local police to be screened for anabolic steroids and testosterone supplements? It's only fair. We do, after all, want to arrest any law breakers.

Advice for the Love Shorn

No. . . I spelled it right.

I have some experience with being the one left behind at the end of a love affair. The love lorn are, you know. . . lorn. "Lorn" is from Middle English, "leosan" (i.e. "lose"). It's the past participle, and you know it most often with its prepositional friend "for," as in "forlorn." Since the love lorn are those who are without love, that's everybody. The love shorn, though, are the ones who were not expecting anything, even though they should have been.

If you are a normal, functioning human being, then when your boy/girl friend (or wife/husband) says, "It's over" -- with or without the "I'm seeing someone else" (I rather think the people who don't announce the breakup until they're in the arms of someone else are cowards; they need that other person to be a shield or an insult that will make the breakup "stick," or they aren't going to break up until they know they can "do better" (even though, of course, they never will do better than YOU)), then you won't take it lying down. No: you'll pace back and forth, throw yourself at the wall and door, and then demand that she or he tell you WHY it's ending.

You poor sap.

Think about what you're asking for. You're asking for a set of reasons for an emotional state. Second, you're not going to listen to anything the other person says, because your question is corrupt. You don't want to know why he is dumping you. You don't want to know why she feels that things are working out. Even if your former lover were possessed of Orphic clarity, even if the beloved could say why love has gone, it wouldn't mean anything to you.

What you really want is a list of reasons why you would break up with you, why you would end the relationship. You're asking to be convinced to not love the other person in the same way that she doesn't love you.

She says you're taking her for granted. You say that you're not. She says that you show no affection, and you say that real love means not having to do that.

Parse this, or its inverse (you want all her time), and what you see is that she's saying, "I feel," and you're saying, "I think" or "That feeling isn't justified." The argument only confirms the premise (the real premise: "This relationship is over") because it's taking place. What's worse is that no one can beat another person into loving.

This isn't a very deep insight I'm offering, is it? It's obvious that no one can argue another person, much less threaten another person, into liking him or her. Nor is it possible to accept the kind of damage being dumped brings without protest. All in all, it doesn't help to know the fruitlessness of arguing. What the love shorn needs and wants is to be validated, to be worthy or worthier.

This really basic dynamic works on humans from their early to their late years. In fact, I know of an institution that, having been rejected, has resorted to argument. It's hard to sue the country club into making you a member; if you win, you won't want to go.

Þæs ofereode,
	þisses swa mæg.

With respect, of course.

"9/11 Changed Everything," indeed.

To begin to write for the third time on this subject, I would need to go to the ends of the subject. As with each previous time, the real occasion for writing is obscure, as it should be, if there is going to be any use to it. Way back in 2001 and 2002, the fools who had to have something to say as they closed their thirty minute tours of news would quote governmental press releases and talking points fallen from Dick Cheney's desk and say, "It's no exaggeration to say that 9/11 has changed everything." I didn't believe them. I vaguely remember a floating head on a screen waxing poetic and summoning all the atmospheric Murrow he could (but only managing Brokaw) and saying that we would be telling our children about the event that defined their world. It was Pearl Harbor. . . or not quite that, but it was like it.

The news readers going basso profundis was inconceivable comedy to me. Even looking back, the most I can come up with by way of how I felt is a paraphrase of Lincoln, who said that, if the United States were ever to die, it would be by suicide, not conquest. 

Then again Lincoln embarrassingly underestimated the thanatopsic urge. So did I.

Oh, historians of the time in question have said that Cofer Black and the Spook Patrol began giving W. Bush daily briefings with unfiltered intelligence -- that is, with no analysts involved, no hierarchies of threats, no assessments of feasibility or reliability, just every single hateful and violent threat made by the whole world -- and this every morning before the Ovaltine. It scared Bush senseless, and he said "Yes" to every request. This is how the USA PATRIOT ACT went from controversial to routine -- even boring. The same scary people with scary reports kept working on their haunted house routine, because Obama began saying his job was, "Keeping Americans safe" in 2009. The man who campaigned on civil liberties began devouring them at a pace that his predecessor would not have imagined.

Assassinations? Secret detentions? Suspension of habeas corpus? Phone taps on a national scale (i.e. a small nation of people, not every person in this nation)? "Why object, if you have nothing to hide" uttered as a legitimation, when it had last appeared in satire or dystopian cliche? All of this has come to be a portion of the invisible architecture of American reality -- a base condition for living for most citizens. W. H. Auden's "The Unknown Citizen" is unteachable now, both because its commentary has been bunted in front of home plate and, more, because its world of a state with an indexed population of statistics is now so far beneath the N.S.A.'s capabilities and the ostensible goals of "total informational awareness" as to seem boring.

September the eleventh thrust a cup of hemlock into national hands. Our leaders presented as a chalice, and all drank. 

I do not mean, though, that losing "the American way" or civil liberties was the death of America. Instead, I mean that, frighteningly, the vapid people were right: we changed everything on the day, soul first.

In 2011, the little people who live inside of the television asked, "What have we learned from 9/11?" We learned nothing, of course. We learned nothing because there was nothing to learn from a billionaire attacking centers of international capitalism. We learned nothing because 9/11 handed its victims suffering rather than pain, and suffering neither teaches nor presents norms. Most of all, though, we learned nothing because to learn we must first recognize our world and ourselves.

September the eleventh was suffering for those of us in New York City. I feel confident that it was for those in the affected wing of the Pentagon and for the families of the lost in Pennsylvania as well. No one can learn from suffering, only  from pain, but suffering is less focused. Rarely is suffering for a particular reason, or even for a passion. Even more rarely is suffering for a passion or reason that carries with it a moral value or heuristic principle. Instead, people may grow while suffering, but they grow by having empathy or understanding (of humanity, of self, of family) increase. 

Most of us would rather attend a seminar.

Among our problems with 9/11 is just simple recognition. "We" don't do much introspection of the moral sort. For a nation of self-help patrons and "Face the Press in Review This Week" organizers, we love to look at the individual self and the weekly events, but not much from a decade or a community.

 Why there is a new government,

and why the parties are disenfranchised

The Republican Party has variations on "self" in its definitions. It's the party of "self-reliance," of "individual liberty," of "personal responsibility," and it performs a fan dance with libertarianism. (Well, it used to. Since 2012, it has been more of a peep show, where the primaries are all access libertarian and the general elections put on a flag G-string.) The Democratic Party is the party of good governance, of community building, of ensuring welfare and commonweal. Most of its definitions feature "community" and "common" in them.

September the eleventh made both parties aliens to the United States. Unlike the United Kingdom and numerous European nations, the U.S. has no "government" distinct from its politicians. We do have a civil service, but it is weak and without an identity of its own. It is certainly not operating contrary to the political system. There could be no American "Yes, Minister" the way there was an American "House of Cards," because our civil servants have less and less job security and are beholden to political appointees who face the spoils system. Thus, most talk of "the government" Americans do has been faulty from nearly the day of Andrew Jackson. It has certainly been faulty since the 1980's. However, since 2001, we have begun to grow a government, complete with self-protection and ideology separate from the political EVEN AS the traditional civil service has been put under more political control than ever before.

This government of 9/11 begins and ends with a fiat: It is the job of government to keep the citizens safe from "evildoers"/ "those who wish us harm" (the difference is one of dialect, not language). You heard Bush say that his job was keeping Americans safe countless times. You may have even heard Cheney and others lie and claim that Bush was a good president because there were no terrorist attacks on Americans during his presidency. If you have been listening, you have also heard President Obama define his job this way, and probably as often as his predecessor. 

 

The problem is that, well, keeping citizens safe from harm is simply not one of the duties of the presidency. The president of the United States is the head of the executive branch. He is the chief cop and the chief enforcer of laws. In war, she is the coordinator of the armed forces ("commander in chief"). There is no warrior king, priest king ("decider"), or even "CEO president" function to the job. Armed forces keep us safe from foreign powers, and police keep us safe from those on our soil if they have broken a criminal law. Secret services stop agents of enemy and foreign powers. Quick: what part of the government is the Secret Service a portion of?

We all want to be safe, of course. However, we also all want to be asked how we are kept safe, if we are a democracy. A critical difference between democracy and fascism is that we do not believe that a Great Man (or woman) might, with will or strength, achieve what the people, with consent, do every day. A critical difference between democracy and the Soviet is that we do not believe that the Party or state leadership can, with critical efficiencies or expert policy, achieve what we do in our stumbling consensual manner.

Never mind my idealism, though. The parties are aliens to the government of the United States because this government dedicated to keeping Americans safe has a new question to ask. It is no longer concerned with the individual's happiness or the group's welfare, as both are irrelevant. Instead, it asks, over and over again, "Who are you? What is the identity of the citizen?"

Define for yourself the goal of N.S.A. and other agencies dedicated to defeating foreign agents in an era when "agent" no longer means what it once did. Whereas once an agent was a person not only acting in the interests of a foreign entity but acting at the behest of that foreign entity, an agent now does not need the alien entity's knowledge, much less involvement. This is because the agent is no longer of a foreign power, but a foreign ideology. Furthermore, that ideology is not named. It isn't "the Communist Party": it's "terror" or "wishing us harm."

Even though we in the United States do not have an official religion or official ideology, we have a shifting net of enemy ideologies that are largely identified solely by the willingness of anyone propounding them to, coincidentally or consequentially, advocate violence against the U.S. military, U.S. citizens, U.S. territory, or U.S. assets. Think back to 1978 for a moment and remember the anti-nuclear protests held throughout Europe. It was a weapon that made plain the fact that some of Europe would be a battlefield in a coming war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., and the people living on that battlefield were less than pleased. Some of them were infiltrated by Soviet agitators. Some of them were violent. Most of them were neither. Were that today, would N.S.A. label "Belgian" or "Social Democrat" as enemy ideologies? Under the philosophy that demands that all believers in a religion or religious sect are "enemy" today, it might. This is a consequence of 9/11 and defining the goal of government as "protecting Americans." Once that becomes the goal, violence is the only qualification for enemy status.

 

Imagine that you are floating in the ocean. Now, so long as you float, you will be rescued. However, a line is tied to you and attached to everyone you know. For reasons unclear to you, some of these people cannot swim and have weights attached to them, while others are just struggling swimmers like yourself. Even the people you are tied to who are swimming are themselves tied to all the people they know, and some of them are sinking. It is fairly likely, depending upon how many people you know, that you will be dragged down.

As far as the security government is concerned, a person is not a person. A person is a set of associations -- a deferred identity calculated by its connective power. Each association is either dangerous or not. If an association is not dangerous, it carries no weight. If it is dangerous, it weights the person. Furthermore, the attachment's weight is determined by its own attachments. Are you an enemy of America? Well, a friend of yours who has a friend in the Peace Corps who made friends with a group of people in Yemen has sunk you. You do not know this, of course, because you do not know your friend's friends. Your friend, in fact, does not know his friends are today called "terrorist" by someone. They, indeed, do not know that they are "terrorists," necessarily. Even if they have shouted, "Death to America," they could have repented of the view. It would not matter. It does not matter because the government's role is to "keep Americans safe," not to produce an accurate risk assessment.

 

Once we take the one, small step, from "provide for the common welfare" to "keep Americans safe," safety trumps all political activities and all operations of the state. The citizens cease to have civic value and transform into menace or neutrality, and only menace or neutral. The two political parties, therefore, become entirely beside the point. Individual liberty or community building are meaningless questions to a government dedicated to detecting threats and sifting its own population into only two piles.

I could offer up homespun analogies on the philosophy of safety. I could ask you to compare a nation to a household and to think of the effects of parents who seek to keep their children safe at all costs with not a thought to the children's happiness, prosperity, or education. However, those analogies foster reductive thinking, because nations are not families, or businesses, or enough like anything except themselves to be profitably compared except to each other. In fact, nations are capable of a phenomenon that is almost without parallel in any other organism: they can grow alienated from themselves. Nations can, under the worst possible circumstances, begin to operate one way while believing another; they can begin to concentrate power in one spot while announcing it in another. The most famous, and therefore guarded against, condition of national alienation is the phenomenon of bureaucracy. When the civilization is not rule by the demos (democracy) or representative (res publica/republic) or divine person, or by select family, or by the wealthy, but, instead, by bureaus, then an unthinking, vegetable mind governs indifferently to all concerns and makes all political exchanges inefficient.

We are not in a bureaucracy. We have something else. Dana Priest's report on “Secret America,” where she began to see just how large the expenditure and secrecy is in Classified work, certainly testifies to a potential bureaucracy of safety, but, forgetting the inefficiencies of duplication and lack of oversight, we have an alienation where no one votes for safety as a national priority. Neither chamber of Congress, no election, and no presidential order reorganizes society onto safety first. All the same, it is there, and it determines the activities of all other facets of the nation.

 

One way that we can tell that our nation is alienated is the staggering bathos of the safety measures. When, two weeks after September eleventh, military with sub-machine guns were stationed in Penn Station in New York City, it did not make travelers feel safer. Coming in from Madison Avenue and having one's eye first fall on a soldier with a slung machine gun did not set a commuter's mind at ease. The harlequin pantomime that has replaced airline boarding – shoes off, hands up, standing in a booth – does not give safety, either. Crucially, both “left” and “right” react the same way to these measures. The left rejects the loss of civil liberties, and the right fears “the government” and calls for a right to have personal firearms to protect itself. These measures launched in the name of security represent no one's political idea, no one's civil goal, and deliver no one's social good, but there they are. The most conservative president in history and the current president alike have presided over measures seemingly no one has endorsed.

What began as an urge to reverse every expansion of civil liberties of the 1970's with the USA PATRIOT ACT turned into something else. It has turned into something with the power to generate itself, something that moves by a vegetative mind, with a motive (to make America safe) that is paramilitary and unconstitutional. The government that is arising now, what people call “the security state” (a misnomer, as this is not the state; it is beneath the state and beside the state), sets out an end goal that cannot be achieved without the elimination of free will.

Where's My Montage?

Cinema tries to imitate life, both as it occurs and as it is perceived. When it imitates the perception of life, it's expressionist, and some expressionist marvels have been so true, so accurate to our perceptions, that they've been repeated to the point of cliche.

You know what I'm talking about, even if the terms are unfamiliar. The person in an accident on screen has everything go into slow motion. Real time doesn't do that, but we experience time that way sometimes during traumas. Some director decides, during a climatic scene, to have a single flower in a brilliant color to indicate the real way that human perceptions work, where a detail that seems irrelevant may stand out more to a participant than the materially important events.

Well, how about the early parts of "The Graduate?" You know what I'm talking about. Dustin Hoffman puts on his new SCUBA gear and walks into a party of people speaking gibberish to him and sinks to the bottom of the swimming pool. The replica of his tropical fish tank and his private metaphor (being on view, being an object), as well as the director's (being cut off, being unintelligible, having dialog streams that belong to different languages/species) is perfect. You loved it. I loved it. After all, we were always Dustin Hoffman's character, because we were the camera.

Then came the fast motion montage. You know this, too. The framing character is impassive, stunned, catatonic, and the rest of the scene is filled with a stop-motion or slow-film-stock film of people running at sixteen times normal speed and interacting. They're all doing things, while the character (you) is out of it (out of time). The point of view character has declared a separate peace.

In the days of rock videos, the technique was a cliche, if only because the feeling was a cliche. It's a large part of what adolescence and young adulthood is: being overwhelmed, like The Graduate, and incapable.

However, the heart of it, of the humanity that affirms the cinematic gesture, that makes us resonate, is in much graver circumstances than the prom or graduation. The heart of it is the inconsolable and unreasonable. The heart of it is birth and death. The lie of it is that the point of view character who becomes a cork in the maelstrom does not end up safe and saved, but farther at sea, with dilemmas that cannot be reconciled.

In short, it is a cinematic lie. It is an expressionistic truth that is a living falsehood.

Nevertheless, I sure as hell wish I could have one right now. My mother is in hospice care for her last days, and her death is all going to be on me. All the decisions are mine, and all the financial burden will land here, but, more to the point, her death will explode my life, because my life for seven years has been devoted, first of all, to looking after her. I always figured that, after that did not really matter: my job would be done. It sure would be good if the montage were true, and not mimetic.

In Which I Step in It

See, over here, you've got your sex, and over there, you've got your gender, and the two don't always meet.

I don't know whether or not to treat my readers like sophisticates of The Second Sex who all, themselves, know that there is a construction in society and by society of roles for sexes and that these roles are more or less dormant scripts. We call these "gender," and they are, as it were, the two halves of the Dramatis Personae of the play. Within each half, there are subtypes, but each is defined ahead of time by the corporate authorship of the audience and the other players.

"Why were we crucified into sex?
Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves?" -- D. H. Lawrence, "Tortoise Shout" (in magenta, no less!)

In addition, there is a social play going on, whereby one sex or gender gets to be the normative one and the foreground object to the organization and the other is the supporting role. This is an elaborately negotiated and continually adjustable script as well. Both of these together constitute gender.

Or should I treat my readers as people who believe that "gender" and "sex" are synonyms and that "masculine" is simply an adjective of "male?" I kind of need you guys to buy into the first set of assumptions, at least for what follows, because, even though it might sound airy fairy, it's actually the conservative position.

I know how the complaint that "the boys look like girls, and the girls want to be boys" goes back to the 1960's in the U.S., and then the 1760's, and then Juvenal's Satire II, where "Gracchus has presented to a cornet player-or perhaps it was a player on the straight horn-a dowry of four hundred thousand sesterces. The contract has been signed; the benedictions have been pronounced; a crowd of banqueters seated, the new made bride is reclining on the bosom of her husband. O ye nobles of Rome! is it a soothsayer that we need, or a Censor? Would you be more aghast, would you deem it a greater portent, if a woman gave birth to a calf, or a cow to a lamb? The man who is now arraying himself in the flounces and train and veil of a bride once carried the nodding shields[21] of Mars by the sacred thongs and sweated under the sacred burden!" (By the way, all you right wing flip-outs, the second satire is not about homosexuality. It's about hypocrisy and gluttony and the chasing of pleasure in neglect of duty while, at the same time, pretending to being a moral authority. Read with both of your eyes open.)

However, things have sped up thanks to our wonders of technology. Medicine -- the science, and art, of eliminating physical maladies, sought, caught, and targeted the very serious diseases that industrialization had made ubiquitous among women. Estrogen, progesterone, prolactin, and a host of hormones secreted in amounts previously undetectable are now known, pretty well understood, and reproducible from biological sources. Cancerous conditions and failures to survive infancy led to the laudable pursuit of testosterone's cousins and children, and all of the growth hormones and muscle mass factors, which the body orchestrates so subtly that it would take a fetal heart monitor in a concert hall to hear the notes, are comprehended, cataloged, and producible on demand. Plastic reconstructive surgery -- impelled by the viciousness of our military technologies and their own responses to medicine -- learned to make faces, shape cartilage, and craft features, and, because of cancer's ravages and Oncology's growing successes, how to mold soft tissue and bring sensation to it.

In short, boys can be girls. Girls... not entirely.  The spongy mass down below on men remains an unique signifier so far, but it will fall to persistence and desire.

I mentioned some time ago that I was posting essays at DailyKos. There are several recurrent themes to the essays there. One of them is job loss. One is death. One is, "I just got a vagina," or "I just bought my son her first bra," and I'm so proud. I was not shocked at this last. After all, at Wikipedia a shocking number of editors and chatterboxes were transsexual (compared to international norms). One was thirteen and undergoing transition from male to female.

Indeed, the wider world has largely been buffaloed into silence on the issue of transgender for good and bad reason. There is a lightning quick accusation of anyone with any question of any sexual reassignment of either homophobia or patriarchy or repression. A long list of stories of misery and repression will follow. The dire and genuine instances of grievous wrongs done are now serving to disable any consideration of any expression of reassignment. This is a mistake. The world cocked an eyebrow only when a pair of parents joyfully began sexual reassignment on their five year old boy who was or felt or wanted to be a girl.

If one knew of no real biographical case and only considered transgendered as a phenomenon of biology and brains (sex and the squirts of hormone), then we would expect it to be roughly evenly distributed between men and women, and yet male to female vastly outnumber female to male transsexuals. Given the potency of male hormone and the exquisite balance and perfect recipe of female sex hormones it requires to manifest in a brain/behavioral change, it would seem far easier, biologically, to err in female to male, not male to female.

Additionally, we would not expect to find sexual orientation and gender identification to be at odds at any great degree. In other words, there shouldn't be a great many male-to-female lesbians, and yet there are quite a few. Obviously, sexual orientation and sexual identity are not the same, and gay men are not really women any more than lesbians are pseudo-men.

Me? I'll be the one. I'll step in it. I'll say what no one will say. I'll say that no child should be given sexual reassignment therapy. Puberty and menopause/andropause are the two biggest biological revolutions we experience, shy of birth and death, and darn near everything can change. Puberty is also the time when gender is its worst, and where both sexes might wish devoutly to be the other.

Specifically, though, gender -- the code of behavior -- is freer for girls than boys, from a boy's perspective, but it is not freer for boys from a girl's perspective. The actual sex of female or male is equally awful and annoying or pleasant and liberating, but the gender...that's different.

What a male child sees is that girls get attention. They can act out and be the center of attention and be admired. Boys are not allowed to do that. Girls can also opt to stay home, can be retiring, and can be wounded, where boys must be vigorous, outward looking, and strong. They see the ability to appreciate art and giggle, where their own code demands that they ride skateboards and break their knees. The male adolescent sees feminine as being free to choose, as girls can be boyish or dandy and be acceptable, while their code tightens on them and demands muscular competition. They see feminine as offering, again, attention and the freedom to feel, while their world has only the category of "man enough" and "fag." Only the adult man sees feminine as no greater than what he has, because only the adult is free from (one hopes) being defined by others.

A female child sees boys being allowed to go out, when they must watch their clothes and looks. She sees that boys can go screaming at full voice into a muddy stream without a thought in their heads, and people applaud it, where they have to worry about every detail of how it will look to other people. They see masculine as being unlimited and free. The female adolescent sees masculine as powerful. Boys can ask for what they want, and no one will judge them for it. They can go out whenever, and they can say whatever they want, because no one is keeping score on them. Boys don't have to take an hour getting dressed so as to not be made fun of by the other girls for having some fashion that they can fault. Only a woman can see masculinity's restrictions and adjust her own degree of participation in the codes she passed through.

Now, if a boy child says he wants to be a princess, then no stinking wonder! If a male adolescent is miserable and thinks girls have it made, and he'd be such a dyke, if he were a girl... then that's just poppycock. We have found ways of making each other miserable and suicidal, of gouging out chunks of affection and memory from one another through gender, simply because we're all enslaved for five to ten years by a wild, flaming itch of desire.

Are environmental estrogens and endocrine blockers doing a number on the males of the United States? You bet your "Just Bitten" lip gloss they are! Are little boys ready for the joy of buying their first breast forms and picking out their vaginas? No. That's sexual reassignment, and sexuality isn't, I think, the issue, as much as gender.

By the way, below is a photo of your author holding The Ladder he built and described in the post below.

The Challenges of Mormonism to Fundamentalists

The reactions we are encountering to Mitt Romney from "evangelical" Christians are not surprising, largely because of prior experience, for the nonreligious and apathetic and parochial. They sure don't surprise me. I actually think the pastors who say that Mormons are nice folks, but doomed to Hell, are simply following their convictions. No one in favor of tolerance has much of a position for denouncing someone whose monotheism is jealous, simply because it is jealous.

No: people in churches are allowed to think members of the congregation down the road are all heathens. Speaking as a person who is viewed locally and increasingly as "unsaved" because not having a conversion experience but rather believing in the truth of Christ Risen, I know that opposing the right of people to think what they want will do no good anyway. I also know that making fun of Baptists and Assemblies of God folks is missing the mark. The outrage is not that a group has an identity with an include/exclude criterion. That another group disagrees isn't news, is it? For how many centuries have there been groups that think of themselves as Christian but which other Christian groups either wish to or do exclude?

We don't need to start with Martin Luther for that one. We can go to the Docetists, if we want.

In churches with hierarchy, any revelation has to go through channels, as it were. Further, any logical argument with dogma must also go through the process. This means, of course, that the channels limit what gets through, and what comes out tends to look like the pipe it traveled through. Dogma strengthening bishops is approved by bishops, etc. Sometimes, though, some really revolutionary material gets through. Sometimes the power, the spirituality, or the popular spirit of a revelation or reform will overtop the levees, and reformers like Francis of Assisi or visionaries like Julian of Norwich or Juan de la Cruz or Theresea of Avilla will pass into the body and change the world.

However, when churches without "papist" hierarchy encounter revelation, they depend upon the Bible, naturally, and the congregation to discern the revelation.

 Further, the nature of the "evangelical" movement is to assume a few critical intellectual positions that are by no means common to all churches:

1. When Jesus commissioned His disciples to go out and heal the sick and spread the news, that commissioning is open-ended to all who would follow Jesus always.
2. When Jesus commands that His followers carry the good news of salvation to the corners of the earth, that is a specific sanctification of each believer to be an evangelist.
3. The Apostolic Age either has never ended, because the Holy Spirit performs the same miracles now as before and the same state of "spiritual warfare" exists now as in 32 AD, or because there is a special dispensation due to "end of days" whereby a new Apostolic Age has emerged.
4. "Witnessing," which is to say telling another person about one's own conversion story is the principle form of spreading the Good News, as this Good News is a converting news.
5. Exposing the unbeliever to the Good News is efficacious by itself in affecting a conversion.
6. The efficacy of the Word is known by the converting of the person from sin to non-sin, accompanied by a change of essence, whereby an old human nature is lost and a newly perfected one comes in, accompanied with a vast emotional change.

Many Christians can and do argue with several of those assumptions. This is why we have separate denominations and churches. I do not want to argue these points, except that I, myself, am growing weary of 4-6 in their effects on me. You see, I recall that Jesus also had a story about the "good seed." The seed (the Word) is good, and the sower may be fine, but that doesn't mean that there is a return.

Anyway, to return to my subject, these assumptions are very important. It means that we know the truth of the message from the response to the message. In other words, the way we know that the minister's vision and visitation were holy is that he "brings people to the Lord." Efficacy is attributed to holiness.

We have all long ago noted the consequence of this assumption. Elmer Gantry and "Dusty Rhodes" are examples of this natural, if not superstitious, habit of assuming that the person who sells a lot of units must have divine blessing. What Sinclair Lewis noted first has not changed: the emphasis on gathering bodies to the church encourages the adoption of hucksterism and puts a pressure on the minister to study advertising and psychology and sales. It takes the slight theater that is inevitable in any positioning of a priest before a church and turns it into full on circus, as the speakers go into trademark gestures, patented cadences, and jumps and leaps that would surprise an orthopedist.

The ministers are sincere, I am sure. However, the assumptions of their church put a pressure on them to conform to a Westmoreland-like body count. "Last night, forty-two young people came to the Lord!" someone gushed recently and concluded "___ is a really special speaker." Hrrrm.

So far, it probably seems more like I'm interested in belittling evangelical churches than I am explaining the heeby-jeebies they get with Mormons, but I really do need to explain these peculiarities of practical theology (beliefs about God as they are manifest in action) before I can explain. You see, if the message's validity and the messenger's holiness are both proven by the convert without any hierarchy or history to check it against, then the Mormons are frightening.

How do you -- yes, you -- explain the fact that Mormonism is the fastest growing religion in the world? How do you explain the relative uprightness of the flock?

It's tough for anyone who isn't a Mormon.

I was driving today (told you all my ideas come in the morning), and I was thinking about how I could explain "kairos" in "Little Gidding," and I was reflecting on the fact that, in the 19th century, a lot of people were beginning to see History as a series of circles. I then thought, "The Mormons are big on that 'it happened before and will happen again' thing." I then thought about how that religion started and spread. Here's the problem: the foundation story of the religion is very, very... implausible [warning: link auto-plays].

So, a man in New York claims to have seen an angel who led him to buried golden tablets that he can only read with magic stones and in the bottom of a hat, and from that he can dictate the Book of Mormon, which is a sequel to, or "further adventures of," the New Testament. No one can see the golden tablets, or the magic stones, and no one sees the angel but him. The revelation consists of giving permission for multiple wives, commands for clean living (a common 19th century temperance movement feature), and gleeful mistreatment of American natives. It gains adherents, is immediately attacked, gains more, and begins moving with, and then ahead of, the frontier.

Why did it keep growing?

A person with access to "secular" theories would say that the religion incorporated many of the movements of its age and so appealed to many of the psychological and social pressures of its adherents. Such a person would point to other groups nearby who had similar calls. However, that doesn't do much. Then, of course, there is what having multiple wives and as large a family as possible will do for a religion. Then there is what mandatory mission work will do.

What, though, if you do not have such a theory to use? What is using such a theory is fearful, because it might be used against oneself?

Mormonism puts revelation and enthusiasm into the crucible. If the only test a person has of the validity of a belief is the Bible and the effect on a person, then Mormons are hard to challenge. Mormons fall all to pieces if they have to be squared with tradition, with the writings of the Fathers, with rational analysis, and with the test of confirmation (does no one remember that Paul says that a person with a prophecy has to have corroboration? the Holy Spirit isn't, so far as I know, in the business of keeping the truth a secret from those who seek).

When a Christian evangelical looks at a Mormon, it is looking at a mirror of fear. Mormonism itself is an extension of evangelical assumptions, and so there is nothing that an evangelical may say, except, "You're going to Hell." There is no mechanism by which she or he can speak with the Mormon, no reasoning he or she may offer, because, at base, there is too much similarity in frame.