The Valley of the Uncan

This pun is available for adaptation, by the way ("The ICANNy Valley," e.g.).

The time is drawing near when I will be asked to consider technology and instruction again. I have never stopped thinking about it, of course, but once upon a time I was payed to be aware of the issues, even if no one actually wanted to hear what I had to say. (I blame myself. I probably didn't say it very clearly.) Now, though, I'm going to be caught between the cruising speed icebergs of capital and capitalized tech purchases and will need to explain why education, instruction, and the latest purchase aren't always aligned.

I got a new laptop, and for once, I'm current in software. I'm indistinguishable from consumer class, and it only took thirty years to get there. This means that there is a video camera built into the lid of the laptop, and both the NSA and Microsoft can turn it on at any time without my knowledge. Fortunately, there is a high tech defense against this. For a fee, I can relate the specs to you on the wireless network enabled BLACKTAAPE (TM) (Pat pending). By getting the properly designed, wholly chemical free and Y2K compliant BLACKTAAPE, you can place this device in front of the lens of the camera and be certain that no one is seeing anything you don't want to show.

Anyway, even if you don't keep up with college education, you know that the trend is for online classes. This trend is driven by consumer impulses and a flood of G.I. benefits, an exponential growth of for-profit colleges, and, most of all, colleges and universities seeking ways of gaining revenues by reducing labor costs and facilities expenditures. Sometimes, schools try to own the online classes teachers create, claiming that the professors surrendered their intellectual property and copyrights by using college/university computers. Even when that's not the case, the colleges frequently pay less for online classes and demand more.

In general, they are exceptionally unpopular among faculty. (Yes, commenter: you love them. That's great. I don't hate them. I'm talking about the general feeling.) Faculty generally figure out that exploitation is in the offing.

I

I want to talk about one small subsection of the phenomenon, though, and that's the technology of the online classroom.

Assume a class size of 15. Assume the class will involve laying out background information and process instruction. In fact, let's go ahead and stipulate a mid-point class, like "Survey of British Literature 2: 1750 - 1945." To teach a class like that, there will be

• Historical background, genre background, biographical background, thematic background for major authors; construction of either a thematic narrative or an historical narrative to unite the material selected into an arc that will allow the students to frame the things they read.
• Discussion with students of individual works to encourage close reading and strengthen student close reading skills; class investigations of longer works so that the students get to pioneer the exploration and discover when a reading has and lacks support.
• Explanation of "how to write on literature." A survey class is structured as a first step in a major, so one needs to teach students how to write about literature with an awareness of critical perspectives; students need to know how to read criticism without being adversarial or slavish.

Now, ignore for a moment what technology you must use. What technology would you choose to use for these tasks -- provided that "in seat class time" is not allowed?

No very good teacher is ever one-way about teaching. Giving background is close to one-way information flow, as the information in the background goes in one direction. However, the delivery, in person, is two-way. In a physical classroom, lecturers watch students, listen to whispers and groans, make personal asides to punctuate the depth of the information, slow down when students get behind, etc. However, this, and only this, can be replaced with a set of web pages or a video. Students can "watch a You Tube" of the professor and get an 80% experience, perhaps.

The third thing -- "how to write the paper" and "how to take the test" -- seems as if it is just as susceptible to one-way, static replication, but it is not. Even in highly selective schools, where students have relatively uniform backgrounds, a class of fifteen students will have ten different misapprehensions about how to approach writing about literature. This is inevitable, because the task is at the heart of the college major. In other words, students will be uniformly heterogeneous because they're not college majors. A single talk or web page on "how to write a literature paper" that addresses the misapprehensions of students will either be a work of inexplicable genius or unreproducible luck.

It's the second bullet point that's the hell.

Should I be on video, with fifteen small thumbnails of the students, to "meet" with my class? Is that better than a large chat window?

There is an irony here, because video contact is worse at reproducing the classroom than a flat text window. It is worse for my students, and much worse for me, to have video and video to recreate the in-person classroom than to have no pictorial representation at all in favor of text windows.

Think about what happens when you speak to a conference room. Think about what the people around the table are doing. The non-verbal communication is much greater than the verbal communication, and people will inaudibly negotiate a mood and behavior. This is why one class can be "mean" and another "sweet" -- with the same material presented by the same teacher, the students themselves will negotiate a mood among themselves without even knowing it, and this collective voice will hold until disturbed. This social harmonizing prevents the most egregious behaviors. (It also intimidates some students and prevents their asking for help.)

When fifteen students are fifteen picture-in-pictures, they are fifteen individuals -- fifteen television sets. They don't negotiate with one another, and each is engaged in the social behavior of "watching video."

You may think "video connection is allowing me to connect to my students," but each student has a history of viewing "video" on a laptop or desktop computer. There are conventions for YouTube and the others that overwrites the actual use made of the video link.  "Watching video" is a fundamentally solitary behavior that is subject to the egoism of consumerism. "Watching video" comes with a "like" or "dislike" button, has a comments field, and invites "snark" or forwarding to Facebook. These conventions are everywhere except the online class, so the students, at best, experience contradictory signals from the media. More likely, each of the fifteen students conceives of herself as a solo entity and the professor as disembodied, if not a commodity, and the commodity experience (i.e. monetized routine found in advertising and placed in journalism) of "watching video" acts as interference against the perception of the professor as a teacher.

The instructor for his or her part, will see fifteen separate, distracting behaviors across the screen. There will not be the corporate behavior one gets in person.

On the other hand, if students engage a large text box, the experience pre-dating the activity is "writing a text" or "reading." This is an individual experience as well, but it is what McLuhan called a "cool medium." The cool medium of reading/writing allows or forces analytical thinking. While the video presentation should replicate "conversation," the technology by which it is arriving has already etched out a set of expectation that instead dominate the intended effect.

Thus, it seems, just as it becomes more possible to have a video link with a class, it is less and less useful -- more and more counterproductive, in fact -- to do so, because the ubiquity of YouTube, Vine, Vimeo, and the rest automatically carry methods of interpretation in the very act of appearing by video.

More simple stuff

It appears now that raising the minimum wage increases employment. This is directly opposite of the "small bakery" micro-analogy that conservatives appeal to and everyday voters imagine.

I offered students "Raising the minimum wage will/will not raise prices or lower employment." I warned my students in advance that, no matter what they thought, no matter what "common sense" told them, if they did what I required them to do and accessed scholarly reviews, they would find virtually no support for the "will" position. I warned them that academic economists saw the issue as complex, with various effects.

Of about 22 papers that chose the topic, two chose "will not." The rest chose "will," and they either used no scholarly evidence (a consensus) -- opting instead for Hurtage Foundation and Kato Foundation papers that wouldn't fool anyone and newspapers -- or used websites. All of the "will" people, though -- every last one of them -- informed me of the Iron Clad Rule of Capitalism.

If you have someone make you pay your employees more all of a sudden, then you have to make that money up. You either have to increase the prices or fire an employee. Suppose you ran a bakery...

That little canard was inescapable. I read it and read it and read it.
The problem is that this mythical bakery didn't exist in Adam Smith's day, and it sure doesn't exist in 2014. The bakery they imagine is a zero sum, and that's typical of a childhood imagination. Actual bakeries, and we'll drop the bakery as soon as possible, pay for their materials, their labor, their advertising, their insurance, their licensure, their utilities, and then charge extra. The cost of the cupcake is not zero sum. The bakery is costs + profit = price.

Profits, in most small businesses, grow and get shared with the employees, or else they go toward growth. The owner gets richer, sure, but the small business doesn't keep very many workers at minimum wage. As it grows, it rewards its employees.

Who pays minimum wage? 1. Restaurants, 2. "big box" retail. There was a study of a local environment that showed inflation when there was a minimum wage increase, but it was of Chicago, when it mandated waiters and waitresses getting minimum wage. The restaurant business hadn't be set up to handle that, and so it did have a bulge in prices. Otherwise, true minimum wage (non-tipped) tends to show up in fast food.

Mike's Manufacturing doesn't keep a large part of his staff at minimum wage. McDonald's does. Papa John's demands it.

So, aside from some businesses with high turn over and manual labor, who holds the bag? Mal-Wart and McWendy King. The problem with worrying over their labor costs is that the true nature of capitalism is that non-publicly traded companies have the duty, as Henry Ford said, "To make the highest quality possible for the lowest price possible while paying the highest wages possible." Once a corporation is publicly traded, though, its board's duty is to gain profit at all costs, and reducing labor is the easiest way to achieve an illusion of profit. No board can voluntarily increase labor costs (pay) without facing an investor law suit or loss of stock value.

$ = Labor + Materials + Rent on capital + Profit

In low unemployment, employers are forced to increase wages. In a recession or depression, employers have no market force compelling an increase in wage. Furthermore, publicly traded corporations are compelled to increase profits. Since the Great Recession began, corporations, most especially including those that page minimum wage, have increased their profits. McDonald's has turned a huge profit, and Wal-Mart continues to be the most affluent non-oil or drug business one can imagine, but neither may pay employees more without being sued. Neither is compelled to pay more. The balance of the integers in the formula of capitalist price are out of whack. P > L, and it keeps going up.

The companies can't break the cycle.

There is a need for government (the external regulatory authority) to act as a guarantor of the continuing function of capitalism. I.e. it has to negate the impulse of boards of directors in order to make some of the vastly increased profit go to labor.

"If someone says you have to pay your people more, where is that going to come from," students would ask. It would come from PROFITS, of course. If you are one of the main industries paying minimum wage as a large component of your labor, you have been growing in profit and passing none of it down.

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.

What May Not Be Said

I am living in a world more full of words that cannot be said than words that may.

I avoided Facebook, and I'm still not there. In fact, I won't go on any comment system, whether it's Google or Facebook or anything else, that points at, much less lists, my legal name. This is for multiple reasons:
1. I am boring as a subject.
2. I am boring as a suspect.
3. I do not believe academic freedom exists, because professors, instructors, and teachers are just corporate employees in an MBA's conception of capital now, and research only exists when it produces capital in a way susceptible to corporate monopoly.
4. I have seen what the Internet offers in the form of "fans" and "intense" personalities, and that should be enough to earn Mark Zuckerberg a circle 9A in Hell.

I can't even obliquely refer to what has happened in my life.

"Suile, and mare thanne we cunnen saein, we tholeden xix wintre for ure sinnes." -- Peterborough Chronicle, Second Continuation

"... there are so many fools placed in heights of which they are unworthy, that he who cannot restrain his contempt or indignation at the sight will be too often quarrelling with the disposal of things to relish that share which is allotted to himself." -- -- Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling

". . . quotations start to rise Like rehearsed alibis." -- Seamus Heaney, "Away From It All"

I can't tell you what I'm referring to, but it is a feast of malignant intemperance.

Probably Hyperbole

I was at Mal-Wart on a Sunday morning, after church, and the lines were long. For some reason, we dumb customers simply REFUSE to go to the teller-less checkouts. Long lines'll teach us to fight Mal-Wart's obvious wisdom in going to a labor-free retail environment. (It's true: the management is decreasing cashiers and making cashiers stand by the "check yourself out" lines to "guide" people. Unfortunately, people would prefer to wait than check themselves out.)

Ned Ludd was right, by the way.

Ludd's loss isn't why I'm writing. Cosmopolitan is why I'm writing. Its cover this month is:

If I were good, I wouldn't hotlink this, but I don't think my traffic will inconvenience anyone.

Cosmopolitan is supposed to make people who view its cover think about sex. In this case, I will admit that I thought about nudity, simply because the dress-thing on Katie Perry was so offensive to the eye that I could only think about how much I'd prefer it if she took it off. I think a Burqa would be preferable. The copy on the cover explains that "Katie Perry is on fire," and this may be true, but not when she was photographed. When she was photographed, she appeared to be decomposing, as the gangrenous hair dye and the dress with cut-outs looking like a bug's eyes reminded me more of the grave than flames. (A thingamabob that's shorts, but with a long, exposed zipper, and long sleeves? Is there any element of the garment that works with any other?)

No, what made me pause is the magazine's offer to provide "20 OMFG Moves" and "Epic Summer Sex." I suspect the magazine's copy editor was drunk.

Many moves will result in a partner making the sound, "Omfg!" I believe an unexpected elbow to the solar plexus or the chin is quite effective. A sudden belly flop of one partner onto the other can routinely elicit that noise from both participants and "turn up the heat."

It's the "epic summer sex" that had me scratching my head. My fifth edition of the Holman Handbook of Literature tells me that the epic is,
1. Marked with elevated diction,
2. Invokes the gods and involves supernatural aid,
3. Deals with matters of national foundations,
4. Covers a large scope of action.

I appreciate the writers at Cosmopolitan Magazine making a contribution to the American epic. After all, the English epic has proven elusive enough. Oh, sure, everyone says that Beowulf is the English epic -- About.com says so! -- but it's about the founding of a nation called the Geats. . . in Europe. John Milton was gonna write an English epic, but he decided that writing an epic-epic -- the story of Man -- was better, so he wrote Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained. Everyone knew that King Arthur was the potential epic subject, and William D'Avenant's Gondibert had tried an epic in the a,b,c,b ballad rhyme in the 17th century. Finally, Alfred, Lord Tennyson did Idyls of the King and ended anyone trying to write an epic in English anymore, because it frankly kind of stank. American efforts have been even worse.

"Hark! we hear of hookups past in Forum and fanzines,
How Fifty Shades of Grey taught his lady much to endure,
She crouching and swooning and swatted and pierced to ecstasy,
That was good erotica. Then came she, he, and all
To America, the gods to bless, greedy for good sex, alluring. . . ."

I can't do any more, I'm afraid, because I didn't buy the issue. I am, however, looking forward to the summer sex that founds new nations and spans vast territories.

The Dumbest Argument of All Time

Wayne LaPierre, executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association, announced his current argument about gun ownership on the day after the Newtown, CT mass shootings. On December 12, 2012, LaPierre announced that what caused shootings by nice young people was mental illness and video games. The answer, he declared, was easy and obvious: "Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun."

The Republican Party, and much of the Democratic Party, has faithfully echoed LaPierre's remarks. The GOP has been relentless in saying that video games and R-rated movies are to blame. (Today is the day after a shooting in Santa Barbara, and something called The Daily Republican has an article pointing out that the shooter's father is a movie director and therefore tied to the "culture" of violence. I won't link to it.) Paul Ryan and a few others have even talked about the culture of "urban youth." Poor people outside of "urban" areas are deserving poor, but the people who are "urban" have a bad "culture."

LaPierre has been doing that "kids today and their scary movies and video joystick games" junk for a long time. In fact, it's such a stale act that, when he responded to Newtown in 2012, he did so by blaming "Natural Born Killers" and the video game "Mortal Kombat." A movie from 1994 and a game from 1992 were to blame, he claimed, for a severely mentally ill child killing his mother and then children at a primary school. It was such a lazy and slapdash evasion, blaming "media culture," that it didn't catch on. The people who have followed LaPierre have typically done so by just using "culture" as the grand conflating variable -- the monkey wrench with which they plan to deny any causality to a correlation between guns and crime (e.g. "Sure, when children have access to guns they're more likely to have gun violence, but how do you blame the gun instead of the insanely violent culture?").

What amazes me, though, is the staggering number of people -- mostly men -- who seem competent enough to hold down jobs who will say that "only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun." That is, quite literally, the dumbest argument of all time.

First, if you have been near a shooting, you know, as I do, that you didn't know it when it was happening. You are trying to sleep, and the noise you hear outside will be anything -- your brain will do its best to ignore it, as you're trying to sleep. If you can't ignore it, you'll imagine that it's a trash can lid falling, a piece of metal falling from a rooftop, anything. If you are going down a street, and someone is shooting ahead of you, you will be thinking, "Where do I need to go next? She's pretty. Do I have money to go there? Maybe I'll walk this way," and you simply won't process the sounds as gunshots. Even if you know what gunshots sound like, you won't think "gunfire" until your eyes tell you something is wrong or your ears give you other signals -- quiet, screams, sirens.

Second, if you process quickly, you have to be extremely accurate -- as accurate as you are fast, at least -- to know where the gunshots are coming from, take cover, get your own gun, remove the safety, chamber a round, and then shoot as few times as possible. Every time you miss, your bullet will continue travelling until it is stopped by something solid, like an innocent person's body. If you were in Santa Barbara and strapped, there is no way you would say, "Pistol shots," get your gun out, and aim carefully before the shooter had moved on.

Here, though, is why it's the stupidest argument in history: I'm writing this on Memorial Day.

During war, do all of the good guys come home uninjured and all of the bad guys die?

In war, we have good guys who are well trained, expecting to have to fire, armed with the best weapons, and facing off against "bad guys with guns," and yet -- amazingly -- it appears that bad guys with guns actually win some of the time and good guys with guns kill bystanders sometimes and good guys with guns are killed sometimes. In other words, in the best possible case of a "good guy with a gun" -- an armed soldier anticipating battle -- we do not get greater safety, just greater casualties and greater death.

That is what Wayne LaPierre is selling.

"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.

Misericordia, the surgeons want to be cool!

"Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit." -- George Santayana

My brother had a radical retropubertal resection of his prostate to treat aggressive prostate cancer. Due to the relationship we have, I could not have offered him any advice. If I had, it would have been ignored or operated in reverse. My opinion of his opinion of my opinions is not relevant here. The point is that I had told our intermediary, our father, that I hoped he would not get the surgery done by a DaVinci surgical robot. He did.

My dislike of the surgical robot was based on reading on the benefits of robotic vs. manual surgery. So far, the story of the robotic assistants is mixed. There has been no clinical advantage in outcomes for using robotic suites thusfar. The robot surgeries have a much higher incidence of surgical complications, though.

Additionally, I was against the idea because of how much of a fashion there is for them. When "everyone" is in favor of a brand new treatment, and the old treatment did not have noticeable deficiencies, then cui bono? Pro Publica has been watching the corporation behind the two robot prostate surgeons pretty carefully and has documented several instances of dangerous, unethical, and shady practices. Essentially, the companies that make the robots are investing in getting their surgical suites bought and used. They are also investing in medical research and ensuring that the report on whether the robots are clinically worthwhile points the right way.

As a patient, it turns out that the best bet is to go with a surgeon manually performing the surgery, if she or he has many repetitions. The robotic suites are responsible for more accidental injury than traditional surgery. However, the robotic suites discharge patients to home quickly. A patient who has a robotic surgery goes home quickly. This may give a better clinical outcome in the sense that such a patient is not exposed to hospital pathogens. However, the real benefit of the robotic surgery is to the health insurance company and, at least theoretically, the hospital administration, as both benefit from getting the patient out of the hospital bed as quickly as possible, whatever the surgical outcome.

When I was in graduate school, I was fortunately unfortunate enough to have to work full time and to do that work in a biochem lab. There, I worked with people developing bench science into a medicine, and the things had to be researched against and with everything. I was aware that any university researcher would investigate an agent every which way, so when the first Cox-2 inhibitors appeared on the market and advertised that they were good for patients taking Coumadin, I asked the local School of Pharmacy to check into the studies on patients on Warfarin. Two weeks later, they got back to me and said, "There aren't any." "What do you mean." "There aren't any." "Does that sound screwy to you?" "Yes. I wouldn't take the medicine, if I were you, and we're going to have to investigate this further." It was eighteen months later that enough people had died for the Vioxx scandal to begin.

"MBA culture" is notoriously slimey and wicked. It's the whole, "If the law lets us do it, then we have to do it" mindset. It's the mindset that leads to doing anything for this quarter's profits, even if it means destroying the productive capacity. MBA culture has been running the pharmaceuticals since 1990. Aside from a few wild-eyed hippie start ups, it runs medical device makers, too.

There are surgical fashions and fads. This fact alone ought to make every human who depends upon blood and oxygen freak out (i.e. everyone but Dick Cheney).

You only realize the perniciousness of surgical fashions and medical fads when they've passed. Where I live now, it is automatic that every hyperthyroid patient will have a thyroidectomy. It's automatic. Personally, I think that's barbarism, since there are good ways of suppressing thyroxine without hacking away at a fairly small organ and thereby making a person dependent, for life, on daily purchases of Synthroid. Oh, it's easy to say, "They have no endocrinologists in the turnip fields where you live, so let 'em get to zero thyroid function and replace physiologically," but that is admitting that "Paying every month to a pharmaceutical company" is a way of life. (Hyperthyroid patients can go into remission.) Similarly, every inguinal hernia here gets the mesh. Good old mesh. Nothing bad ever happens with mesh. Every atherosclerotic gets a stent. (Re-occlusion is less common now than it used to be, I admit, but the rates of reliance on stents is unaffected by this. It was the fashion here. No bypasses: stents.)

Whenever there is a fad or fashion in medicine, the question is who is making the decision? Usually, it's the health insuring group. They, in turn, make it for all patients, and not just their own.

Yesterday, I was at a used book store, and I mentioned that I had just had a lumbar radiofrequency ablation of nerves getting pinched by spinal arthritis. The proprietress told me about her husband. You see his problem was really that one of his legs was longer than the other.

Remember that one?

That was a scam that went around in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Faith healers and quacks alike used the gag. Put the patient in a chair, hold up his legs at a very slight angle to his body (coinciding with dominant leg/hand), and one leg will be "longer" than the other.

"He used to go to ______, where he'd get these inserts for his shoes that would let him walk right, and he'd keep them until he'd wear 'em out, and then he'd go get more. But _____ isn't in business anymore, and when he went to the orthopedist, they didn't want to do that!"

She was unhappy with the orthopedic surgeons who didn't want to feed him more rubber heels.

"He went to his chiropracter to be sure it wasn't an alignment issue."

So, because the fellow went to an orthopedic surgeon, you can guess what happened next. The surgeon wanted to surgically repair the herniated disks. Two surgeries, much pain, and the patient is still convinced that it was all a matter of walking "wrong" and needing special soles.

For my part, I just had nerves killed. There was no promise of making anything better except pain. I have arthritis in my spine and cannot take any anti-inflammatory drugs. However, commercials are airing now for all the people who don't take Warfarin but do take blood thinners to take a new pill instead.

If "everyone" is having something, someone is wanting it to be that way. Make sure you know who it is, why it is, and that you agree completely.

Galatea is "Her," and She Is Always Galatea

Confession: I live in the middle of radish fields, and the only movie theater plays nothing but "Smash and Boom III" and "Tyler Perry Presents Loud and Noisy." Consequently, I will sound like a moron if I talk about Spike Jonze's film, "Her." I will, therefore, instead, talk about reviews of the film and the premise of the film and hope that I don't miss any of the former that invalidate my commentary and that the latter is as it has been communicated.

Tentatively, therefore, I want to propose the following: "Her" plays upon the Classical myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, and yet it does so in such an attenuated and developed way that reviewers either miss the model or do not bring it up. This mythic structure has a great deal to offer us, both in terms of a contemplation of art and the powers of humanity, chaos, love, creativity, and, indirectly, politics. The story occurs in Ovid's Metamorphoses X, in one of the Orphic songs. You can read a translation here.

The song is very, very short, and the tale is very evocative. Pygmalion is a sculptor who is, in some versions, very ugly. In all versions he is very skilled. He makes a sculpture of a woman whom he could love -- the perfect girl. In Orpheus's version, she is chaste by virtue of her marble-whiteness. He loves the sculpture so much that he wants no real woman for a bride. At one point or another, Venus/Aphrodite turns the statue -- Galatea -- into a real woman.

The Victorians loved the story. W. S. Gilbert did a version, and G. B. Shaw (yes, yes, a Modern in . . . and yet not) did the famously class-based satire Pygmalion that became the rather denatured My Fair Lady. Of course Rousseau had written a Pygmalion as well, reflecting the later-Romantic fascination with the limitations of creativity, and this would show up in pictorial treatments by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. For the artists of the turn of the 19th - 20th century, the theme seemed to be the power of imagination, and the dangers of fascination. "The Lady of Shallot" is, in some ways, a mirror of Pygmalion: that which can be imagined can be beautiful, but having it brings danger. Their versions of Galatea, like other products of artistic imagination, inevitably transferred human stains or impossibility when they crossed into reality. Either the human malleability of the lover or the demands of perfection would, like Frankenstein or Mr. Hyde, show the impossibility of the perfect more than they would affirm the value of the real.

The new "Her" would not be the first use of the Pygmalion theme with technology. We have a long, long, long line of silly and crude efforts, from 1970's science fiction fear films about super computers. "Colossus: The Forbin Project" from 1970 set the tone for the "Oh my gosh, it has taken over the world, because we're not logical enough," but "Demon Seed" had the best creep factor, especially with the explicit (at the end) Pygmalion/Galatea dynamic, with poor Julie Christie being the unwilling model. For the silly, we get everything from "Weird Science" (super models from a Tandy TRS 80!) to "War Games" (yes, it's silly, and the Galatea is the non-geek girlfriend).

"Futurama" had a great time with the social scourge of "robosexuality." In one episode, it was a way of discussing the hysteria and vacuity of Proposition 8's anti-homosexuality. The show even had Hubert Farnsworth do a parody of the self-parodying "storm clouds" ad from the National Organization for Marriage ("nom nom nom"). In another episode, though, Fry downloads his own Lucy Liu-bot. To discourage him, Professor Farnsworth shows him a government propaganda film, I Dated a Robot! (If you haven't seen it, you should click on the link, as it's one of the finest bits of parody in the show's history.)

For a legitimate enactment of Pygmalion and Galatea, where there is potential culpability or unforeseen implications of reality, literary fiction had a flirtation with Galatea 2.0 by Richard Powers in 2004. It is a very well written novel with extremely fine style and control. The "Galatea" of the title is, ostensibly, an effort at natural learning for an AI. The neuroscience and AI in the novel is quite good, but the real Galatea of the novel is the novelist's own wife, who breaks away from him in the course of the book, having an affair as the marriage breaks down.

"Galatea," we may understand, is every romantic love. Men attempt to make their mates. (Neil LaBute plays assure us that women attempt to make their mates, too.) Consequently, we believe we find the image, but then we believe that we create the girl/boy inside the woman/man we love. After Venus gives the gift, though, comes the problem of change, life, and the fact that what was perfect only remains perfect if people are immobile or manage to move together.

The Shaw Pygmalion has to understand that his Galatea may not remain an experiment, that language does not remake the person, that class is or is not simply a disguise (it's not clear). (This ambiguity is gone in "My Fair Lady.")

The early Modernists had a strain of rejecting reality. W. B. Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" posits a reality of art that is parallel to the reality of daily experience. It might emanate from artworks, but it isn't coexisting. T. S. Eliot would argue for a Christian mystic experience that is, again, separate, superior, informing, but away from the quotidian, where all paths lead to the same place, and the place is not any one physical place.

The Victorians and early Modernists were living in a world where empire had shown Western aspirations and appetites in action on a global scale. Whether the Belgian Congo or the British Raj, the best practices had resulted in atrocities, repression, and oppression. Appetite had triumphed over planning. For the Modernists, the high minded belief in progress had smashed into World War I, when the most "civilized" nations on earth had used chemical weapons against each other.

Today? Are we stuck reiterating the tragedy of love alone, or can we look at Iraq, Afghanistan -- not to mention Honduras, Nicaragua and other places where American best practices have been at work -- and feel a similar skepticism about projecting human will into practice itself? Surely it is the fate of love, just as love itself, to be lashed to humans who do not live in sync, but is it in the realm of any human creation to breathe without carrying with it the stain of its creators?

If we re-tell Pygmalion/Galatea simply to explore the degree to which the beautiful can only exist fleetingly, and outside of the grasp of the mind, then we do not add much. It's true that the American public is cynical, that one doubts that even the architects of the neo-liberal invasion of Iraq and the supposed vision of a spreading garden of democracy achieved by the overthrow of Saddam believed what they said, but just crossing our fingers behind our back -- swearing that we didn't really mean it when we said that we thought we were making the world a better place -- does not absolve us from having done our best and having created. We, with our names and bumper stickers attached, sent troops to destroy and enforce governments. We, with our right wing radio telling us that Jesus was involved, did what we said we believed what was right and good.

We, with very sincere dreaming in print, made the Internet, opened it to the .com's, sold domains, and preached freedom. We created the world that spies on us in order to sell us pregnancy supplies before our daughters have missed their second periods. We created the super-intelligent super intelligence in our action movies, and now the 4th amendment is unknown.

An OS coming alive and loving its user sounds more like the Demon Seed than a lesson in love to me.

Nature Abhors the Vaccuum

[No one need bother me about the spelling of "vacuum/vaccum/vaccuum," as the word has three legitimate spellings. I go for the one with the most letters, of course.]

Aristotle was the one who said that nature abhors a vaccuum. The personification in the statement is interesting, because, as we now understand vaccuums, it is enough to say the noun to imply the activity. Vaccuums are absences, and thus all presences rush toward them. There is no need for any one or any thing to be horrified or angry.

When Christians imputed a directly intentional and affective value to forces in nature, Aristotle's statement had more profound rational and cosmological ramifications than a simple induction. First, his statement affirmed the plenum. (Contra the prior link, it was not "Descartes" who had the plenum. It was everyone. It was Newton, too. I hate scientists with heroes and villains stories to tell.) This cosmological outlook did not hold that the universe is varied and rich, but that it is so rich that there are no discernible gaps between orders and classes of living and non-living things. Creation is so full that there are infinite steps of quality and complexity between ranks and infinite ranks overall along Jacob's ladder. (Jacob's ladder, meanwhile, is not merely a metaphor for a vision Jacob had (Jacob sees angels of the Lord going up and coming down from heaven, and then that graduated ranking is described by means of a figure of speech, "ladder"), but a vision of the order of the universe (the universe is composed of moving ranks and graduations reaching from Heaven to earth) that is eternal and may be understood by multiple figures of speech.)

The plenum itself reflected God. This was not code, but rather nature. While the enlightened soul and those in a state of grace might contemplate God's love in the plenitude of creation or by imagining and constructing with art a microcosm/macrocosm, whereby the whole perceptible and spiritually experienced universe was, like a vast fractal, infinitely reproducing and consistent, the intent behind all things was love, being, and essence rather than a message. God is God, and the infinitely full universe might give intellectual delight or emotional solace, but the fullness was not there for a statement, but simply because of God's nature and creation.

The second effect of Aristotle's statement for Christians in the renaissance was that some popes (Leo X on, basically) grew so famously pleased with the coherence of the cosmology of the plenum that they made a Scribblerian mistake. Martin Scribblerus, hero of The Memoirs of Martinus Scribblerus, is a well read fool, and he consistently insists that whatever is logical according to deduction is true, no matter what evidence or reality says. So, too, these popes took a bold and brave stand against the vaccuum. Arguing against the real in favor of the logical is a losing proposition, but only in the end. Nobody likes to give up on logic just because some smart-Alec claims that Archimedes made a vaccuum pump.

It's grimly amusing that fractals these days make Fibonacci numbers look more and more like justification for the old faith in the plenum, but there's no irony in it. In the event, zero had enough of a reality to demonstrate, and soon scientists and mine owners began evacuating all over Europe. Volta guns and light bulbs would appear apace.

There was another kind of vaccuum that inventors played with. Boil your cabbage in a tin pot, and then seal it shut with solder. The molecules in the air will be very far apart, and, as the cabbage slurry cools, the air will compress. The can of cabbage can be sold to Napoleon, and he can take it to Russia, where it will be somewhat fresh three months after the cooking.

Canning started with Napoleon's army -- although they really began with bottles -- and that meant a need to find ways of holding seals and temperature. The Thermos bottle was the German patenting of a Scottish invention, and our Apollo rockets, like some of our missiles, are just grand Thermos bottles at heart (and you thought "Thermos" was an English word? Did you also think Robert Goddard invented rocketry?). Now we even offer to have super-cooled electrical transmission lines, and people propose liquid nitrogen in the field.

We never have found nothing, by the way, nor might we. A simple vaccuum of air is easy, and the pope could have kept his seat cushions untussled. A zero, though, is imperceptible by definition, and I agree with Kant that it's really a foul ball in intellect.

Loss, cooling, and vacuum seals are another matter. Them I believe in.

Before Christmas, during one of the freestyle bits of the liturgy, when the priest fills in the blanks ("May we, along with _____ and all your saints, be in your eternal kingdom"), he mentioned Saint Joseph, as he rightly would and should. Back in 2001, I heard a deaconess at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan talk about Joseph. She talked about his role as the patron of adoptive fathers, about the acceptance and humility he had. He did not reject Mary, and he went as a refugee to Egypt to protect her and the child that was not his. I have never since been able to approach Christmas without thinking about Joseph, or without why he stands out so.

In 1999, the children left for Rhode Island. I can't criticize. There are many gripes to gripe, but there is no point. When they left, I lost a deeper part of myself, a deeper connection, than a limb. I have a missing place where two children were, and it is permanent. That cavern is hollow, and there is no way to fill it. There isn't a way to reconnect, either, because I didn't lose friends. By 2003, I didn't mourn every day, but the stone was formed. I was a drum.

My mother's death is surprising. There are practical manifestations of such a loss. When the branch from which the leaves hang is gone, the leaves have no connection to one another anymore. Without children and wife to be interconnected, I am untied from the large mass that was family. Each holiday, therefore, sounds out against the hollows where once there was a messy complication of family.

Aside from that, when I am not working every day, I dream of her death's fact four nights a week, more or less. It might be dreaming of a tree in the backyard that is no longer the back yard. It might be neighbors casting paving stones at birds and killing the pileated woodpeckers. It may be having to drive my mother to see the family. It may show up in a dozen different disguises, but it's the same event, the same fact, the same concavity.

I wish to finish this essay soon, so that it will be nominally in 2013, because 2013 is its subject.

I'm lying. The subject of this essay is, of course, the surprising vaccuum. I have not changed, as I am as baffled by career as ever. I am as honest and friendly as before. At the same time, it is shocking that some things, some events, are not plastic, that some clippings and removals are permanent; they leave their profiles in consistent places that will never more be regained. When I am alone, when I hear my own thoughts, I don't regret anymore being alone. Instead, I regret the fact that there is no use in arguing with fact, that there is no use in complaining that things do not work out justly, and I have these resonating losses, this vaccuum seal, that moors me in zero.

Grace

I can't stand talking about grace, because it gives me a headache. The problem is, we shouldn't be speaking of "grace" as a noun at all, because the moment we do, the word suffers a syntactic infection from other nouns, and then there are flavors of grace, stripes of grace, and amounts of grace. That said, I can no more avoid the nominal form of the word than anyone else.

“But a greater inconvenience it bred, that every later endeavoured to be certain degrees more removed from conformity with the Church of Rome, than the rest before had been; whereupon grew marvelous great dissimilitudes, and by reason thereof, jealousies, heartburnings, jars and discords among them” (Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity I, 2.2).

"Grace" as a word just denotes "gift." It is, in fact, what Advent is about -- a gift being given to humanity. The word "grace" shows up in "gratias" (for free) in Latin (which becomes gratis in UK/US parlance -- "no charge"), "gracias" in Spanish, and "grazie" in Italian. (The Romans used "gratis" for "thanks" in the same way that Spanish uses "de nada" -- "no problem/charge/burden" -- or English says "no big deal." Spanish and Italian derived their words from Latin.)

Celebrating Christmas is strange. In a churchly setting, there is the mass of Christ -- the church service with eucharist/communion -- held to honor the feast of the birth of Jesus, but that is a single day of obligation. It doesn't necessitate, or bear, a great deal of wittering and frittering. On the other hand, Advent is the liturgical season leading up to the feast of Christ, and that does have pageantry and a series of themes. The traditional theme, and the one you will hear in your lectionary readings, is the fulfillment of prophecy, the kairos, or rightness and fullness of time.

The more Protestant side of the celebration is the theme of grace. Advent shows God giving a gift. Jesus's birth as man is neither obligatory nor deserved. It is something given by God for God's will. Man was dead set against the birth and the message.

You cannot ask for a freely given gift, and you cannot earn a gift. If you ask for it, or earn it, it is not a gift. Therefore, while Paul ends some of his epistles with, "May the ... grace of our Lord" be with the congregation, it's a strange idea. We have to assume that Paul is hoping only and not actually petitioning. In the Book of Common Prayer used by all in the Anglican communion, parishioners ask God for grace for repentance after confession.

Salvation had been possible before the incarnation, but only for the Chosen people, and only by the law. God gave a superabundant gift in being born and breaking the first major falling of man in the process. (When man fell, the first great consequence was being divorced from the presence of God. Being unable to speak directly to God and to know that there is a certain moral universe is the profound fall of the soul and undergirds all else.) God gave a second gift on top of that by giving salvation to any and all who would but follow the Christ. Men still had and have a choice, and they could -- as most did -- continue to insist that the messiah had to be a Davidic king who would conquer Rome and set up material wealth for Judea/Israel. Third, of course, in the death and resurrection, Jesus gave a gift of eternal life and the Kingdom of the spirit rather than the law. He sent thereafter the paraclete, or Holy Spirit. Since then, nothing has fundamentally changed or needed to change: through the comforter, we have access to God; we still must choose the Christ; gentiles and Jews alike are called.

This is grace. Man did not earn it. Man did not even know how to ask for it. What was given was given by God for God's will.

This is not how I hear people use the word "grace." I hear it, instead, used as "state of grace" and mumblejumble grace for salvation. I hear the word "grace" used to talk about a sort of rocket pack or Flubber for the soul. What's worse is that all of this comes out of the most perverse need to justify assumptions rather than observation.

One line goes like this: If men are born with a sin upon them, then men are born fit for Hell. If they are fit for Hell, then they are depraved. If they are depraved, then they are depraved through and through. If they are depraved through and through, then they can't choose to accept the Gospel and believe on their own. Instead, "grace" has to do it. Because grace, and grace alone, is responsible for the conversion of the depraved sinner to the saved elect, it is irresistible and total. What's more, it is "abounding" and "abiding," and that means that, having been the rocket pack that makes the person seek God, hear God, and accept God, it sticks around to steer.

The other line says, If men are born with sin upon them, then they are born erring. If they err by nature, they cannot see the good from the evil reliably. Their conscience now, their intellect then, and their bodies another time will alternately fail. Therefore, the seeker needs help -- a bit of extra bounce to get above human capacities -- but the seeker must then be peak human to decide on salvation. This grace is flubber, and it sticks around, too, but it is a special force that God brings to bear only when the human is in most danger of being lost.

The first of these theologies leads to abuses whereby people argue that their salvation is permanent, no matter what they do. As Fielding's Parson Adams says, they'll meet their Savior and say that, though they never acted on any of his commandments, they believed 'em all. The second one leads to further qualification and quantification of the types of human and supernatural flickering and sparking. Both lead to folks being the judge of their own grace and, if possible, other people's.

I lean far more toward the grace that resolves to the human soul's free will, but I mainly lean away from any discussion of "grace" as a thing. The arrogance involved in saying, from this example in the Bible or that one, that God affects a turning heart by doing exactly this for each and every heart is staggering. What Job went through is not what Mary went through, and what Peter went through is not what Thomas went through. For people to argue what "must" be the case with God's operation in the Holy Spirit is shocking.

We should, instead, be ashamed that we don't know how to respond to a gift. It is with gratitude and celebration.

What Changes

Brought to you in GLORIOUS

The utterly inexplicable Stand by Me opens with gang #2 mesmerized and propelled into action by the question, "Hey! Want to see a dead body?" Gang #1 has claimed the corpse, they discover after their Odyssey. I would like to reiterate, here and now, my initial reaction to the movie, since no amount of pay could have moved me to read the book: Who the hell would want to go see a corpse?

Oh, sure, might as well ask, "Who the Hell would read a Stephen King novel," since the questions are equivalent. After all, what is the question except a promise that, some pages ahead, King is going to describe a corpse? In that regard, he is providing pornography for virgins. If he gets it right, the readers who know he did will not get any reward except a trip to a place in memory that cannot bring any joy, and, if he gets it wrong, his readers by and large will be none the wiser. He is not, generally speaking, describing a corpse as much as he is describing what pathology photos look like or what a corpse feels like to an objectifying gaze. Thus, the virgin gets the joy of self-fulfillment or self-abhorrence, but no real experience has changed hands.

The little blighters of the story are supposed to Change and Learn, and the experience Refines the character from the dross, revealing, like Buonarroti's marble chips, the prisoner within. The thing is, King missed everything. I know, or suspect (I cannot really speak to the man's state of mind, only the narrative), because of what has changed in me.

You see, we think of the dead and living, and we fear thinking of dying, but Death. . . death the thing, the moment, the extinguishing, is something we cannot think of. For centuries, poetry has spoken of the pale rider, the midnight visitor, the hungry stranger, the guttering wind, and we have mistaken these as parables. They are not. They are as literal as our minds can accept of death itself.

At the time of her death, my mother and I had nothing unsaid. We were sympathetic to an enviable degree. There were still times, of course, when she would refuse to say and I could not intuit, but our feelings were open, and I had no apologies to give or accept. This does not, of course, take even an atom off of the scales (on my eyes or that I eye) whereby guilt is measured. It was my job to keep her alive, to swat away medical mistakes, to hear all the doctors and translate into English, to call in the family when deathly ill turned to moribund but then to be wrong. I knew that I couldn't win, but I also knew that losing, as I had to, was going to be bad -- very bad. When, therefore, my mother's death did not cripple me, I knew that this was just a sign that what was coming was going to be a wave spawned from a deeper shock -- slower to arrive and higher when it arrived. 

I tread water furiously as she died. I fairly ran from the deathbed. I told myself a true lie -- that I was giving up my place to her sister and to the rest of the family. I had nothing to say to her, nothing to hear, for we had spoken often of our love, and my own prickliness was something she was finally understanding. (I confess: she still could not tell my "exasperated" and "sad" faces from "angry" faces. When your own Mama thinks you're pissed off all the time, the problem might be in the face. (Then again, I've never been too in love with this one. (A very short line of ex-girlfriends can endorse the sentiment, by the way.)))

In truth, more was happening. (I cannot, by Goggle, find the true source of the definition of a swan as "Grace and calm above; furious paddling below." I was told it by an absent friend.) I was trying to avoid the evidence. If my mother was going to die, I didn't want to see it. I simply didn't need to, I thought. Let it be a fact, as abstract as my own death. Let it be a case of here and then gone. Let me drive in to the funeral and comment on the coffin. That's the modern thing, after all.

As I'm sure you know, I was there at the death. I arrived fifteen minutes after the actual death, but it's not long enough that the stranger was not still in the air. The skin's color changes in a flash, and the full relaxation of the face into a droop did not suggest rest, to me. My mother's life force was five times that of anyone else I've known. It was furious, and she barely had any flesh. Without animation, the corpse was and is a negative affirmed. It wasn't loss: it was lostness.

Prior to my mother's death, I had put two dogs to sleep in my arms, and the swooping in of death in those circumstances was frighteningly sad. This is similar, because now there is a body that bears only a resemblance to a being whom you love passionately and fully, but this is worse, because the body fights. Even as the hospice personnel were making it "easy," there was nothing easy at all. If I were to have an angelus that said, "All was well at all that time," it would not change the effect on me, because what struck deeply was the core of the core -- life itself versus ceasing. 

Prior to this grief, I would sing odes to death (mine only) daily. I considered it rather normal. After all, I knew that I was praising rest, not death, really, and, when I last came near to genuineness, I had shuffled away from suicide as being an insufficient improvement over living. Nevertheless, I had, and still actually have, little relish for the days. I have a mighty slate board in my mind of wins and losses, and the latter have been etched, while the former keep getting erased or forgotten. Every month, my poverty runs me against abject failure as an adult, and without feeling qualified as an adult, asserting my skills as anything else are unlikely.

That has stopped now. Now, I think that I want to live. I don't have a good reason for it. I won't even say, "I'll quit when the stupid people do." After all, they replace themselves, and more. I can only say that we should know Death. We should know the unreasoning enemy who bears us no malice. Death is behovely. We are the ones who fight it with more than just our will.

Tolstoy wondered what value any of his work had, in the face of death. The Death of Ivan Ilych is one explanation, but it's not Tolstoy's own. No, that story is not about meaning, but about meaningfulness during life. It is about one very, very narrow question: "What are you living for?" The contemporary Kierkegaard would say,

"And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not." -- The Sickness Unto Death

Despair is any state wherein the infinite (soul) and finite (mind and body) and the barrier between them (self) are unaware of their own heterogeneity. (It works out much more simply and profoundly than it seems, but you can do that on your own.) Tolstoy was right, though, that we will never get out of despair if we never see death.

I am miserable (sum quod eris) (non posse non peccare) ("I am a man -- reason enough to be miserable" (Menander's Epitrepontes, I think, because it isn't Dyskolos), but to even feel that requires the flame. I have changed from my experience with dying, but not heroically. I am grieving, and not myself. Instead, I am, I think, far, far sadder than I was, because I have seen the inescapability of the flesh, the way that the rock refuses to let go of its figure, and I have heard the groans that must accompany the liberation.