Category: Uncategorized

Pressure to Go Along With Abuse Is Strong, but Some Soldiers Find Strength to Refuse:

The power to resist coercion reflects what psychologists call internal locus of control, or the ability to determine one’s own destiny. People at the other end of the scale, with external locus of control, are more heavily influenced by authority figures. They prefer to put their fate in the hands of others.

And you?

Periodical cicadas? Every magazine and newspaper has an article. And they all use the term “invasion” – as if the writers welcome the chance to use this forbidden word so openly. These creatures, the beasts of Brood X, will irritate only the irritable; children will be delighted, they say. They will not even really hurt the trees, though for some of the smaller ones, when the cicadas finally die it will be a bit of a re-leaf. We are therefore looking forward to a fairly painless invasion, an un-plague of proportions not so much biblical as Unitarian: if you want it to be a blessing, it’s a blessing. Fire up the grill: these suckers are good eatin’!

Their strategy for staying ahead of predators partakes heavily of the economies of scale. As an article in The Economist – The Invasion of the Brood – observes,

Most biologists believe that the odd lifestyle of periodical cicadas is an example of a survival strategy called ‘predator satiation’: the insects emerge in such prodigious quantities that predators cannot possibly eat them all. And their curious prime-numbered lifecycles may be another anti-predator strategy.

Glenn Webb, a mathematician at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, has demonstrated mathematically that prime-numbered lifecycles could help cicadas avoid damaging ‘resonances’ with the two- and three-year population fluctuations of their predators. These would result in lots of predators being around in years when there were lots of prey. Dr Webb’s model shows that, over a 200-year period, average predator populations during hypothetical outbreaks of 14- and 15-year cicadas would be up to 2% higher than during outbreaks of 13- and 17-year cicadas. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to drive natural selection towards a prime-numbered life-cycle.

As with most insects, little is known about the habitat preferences of periodical cicadas. Fortunately, a long-term study is underway:

Dr Clay’s research builds on data that generations of Indiana’s entomologists have been gathering at 17-year intervals for over a century. He estimates, though, that he will need results from at least three more Brood X outbreaks to draw firm conclusions about cicadas’ habitat preferences. Like his forward-looking predecessors, he will have to rely on future generations of entomologists to ensure that his labours bear fruit. Many entomologists in the American mid-west, it seems, are also now on a 17-year cycle.

This is not the stuff of a 2-year master’s thesis – or even a PhD. In fact, I venture to suggest that the “publish or perish” strategy for survival differs quite strongly from “predator satiation,” and is more proper to a higher trophic level.

There is something refreshing about the cicada ethos: unlike the mentality of a horde of locusts, say, or American shoppers intent on mass consumption, the cicadas aspire only to molt, metamorphose, sing, mate and lay eggs. There’s no mistaking the mechanical quality in a male cicada’s noontime trill: this is a sex machine. His real life as a larva burrowing in the dark, sucking sap from tree roots – that’s all over. This is the afterlife; he’s in cicada heaven now. And according to the preliminary findings of Dr. Clay and his colleagues, that heaven looks a whole lot like a sprawling suburban subdivision in the American Middle West.

This post also appears on the PA Wildlands news blog.

Some good quotes from the physicist Richard Feynman today at wood s lot. I especially liked this one:

If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain… In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

Curious to see what else Feynman might have said about the limits to knowledge, I followed the link to his Nobel lecture and found this:

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature. A thing like the inverse square law is just right to be represented by the solution of Poisson’s equation, which, therefore, is a very different way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what it means, that nature chooses these curious forms, but maybe that is a way of defining simplicity. Perhaps a thing is simple if you can describe it fully in several different ways without immediately knowing that you are describing the same thing.

I’ll go along with that! The question, though, is whether this “simplicity” lies in nature itself, or merely in the mind of the observer?

This time four years ago, my friend Crazy Dave had come up from the Philly area, where he was living at the time, to help me out with a project, and ended up staying for a couple of weeks. One evening an old friend of Dave’s, Dr. D., stopped by for a brief visit. Dr. D. had been bitten by the gold mining bug, and the intensity with which he talked about panning for gold in the Appalachians was almost frightening. The following account appears in my manuscript Spoil (available for download as a .pdf document at my other site). I decided to convert it into prose – it reads better that way.

*

GOLD FEVER

Rain interlaced with birdcalls, the god-forsaken moan of a cat in heat & without warning a crash of thunder, so close it’s simultaneous with the flash.

We lean over the porch railing, crane our necks, peering into the dusk. Some black or scarlet oak must still be shivering, its newly unfurled leaves as if in the throes of a proprietary wind, with the raw stripe–sapwood laid open from earth to sky–where the lightning-tree stretched one revelatory limb.

A heartbeat later the rain turns torrential. We have to pull our chairs close to talk.

Let me tell you, some of these eastern creeks can really tease honey from the rock says our visitor, hunched around his hunger like an inverted question mark, wire-thin arms tense with current. He pulls out his portable titanium sluice box & the green plastic pan–only eight dollars through the mail. Says there’s one thin seam that runs the length of the piedmont from Georgia to Maine: in plate tectonic theory, perhaps the very line where the continents tried to fuse. Somehow you need that heat, those exact pressures.

I decide to save for later my polite queries about his children, whom he’s just been up to visit. He’s busy unscrewing a vial full of dust, balances a grain on his fingertip. You don’t do it for the money, just the realization: it’s been lying there on that creekbed for ten thousand years.

He runs an anxious hand through thinning hair. Here, feel how heavy, how hard the gold itself tries–this little grain! to get under your skin.

A new week begins, just as the old one was beginning to feel familiar. It had come in like a wet dog, and it shook itself so hard we all got soaked. When the conversation finally resumed we had to go back, start over . . .

I have solved for x far too often. From now on x can solve for me.
vajrayana practice

That smiling bitch. With her fingers pointed like a rifle at my cock. Humiliation and shame, it seems, are to pave the road to democracy. Who stands naked now?
The Coffee Sutras

I started to scream again. I was having a hard time breathing. I was gagging from my own bloody nose and whatever she dumped on me. My stomach turned and the woman stripped the tape from my mouth and projectile barf went flying.
A ‘Coon Named Legba

The photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib are bad enough, considering that possibly 25 prisoners have died while in American custody. However, some faked photos are also circulating, including pictures of an alleged rape by soldiers that were actually taken from a porno site.
Spin of the Day

They managed somehow to communicate with each other and to fashion (my memory fails me here) some kind of eyeball attached to a muscle that let it hop around and see things and report back to the brains.
Fragments from Floyd

This results from my need to learn about Cascading Style Sheets and structure-based page markup and buzzword-based jargon leveraging . . .
Creek Running North

Since conservative religionists blame gays for everything from AIDS to 9/11 to Tinky Winky and the Catholic Church’s sex scandals, I was wondering how long it would take for gays to be blamed for Abu Ghraib? I got my answer: oh, about a day.
Joe Perez

I’m not sure–I’m not sure that, given the same circumstances, the same boredom, the same bitterness, the same mix of factors–I would categorically not have been that woman with that leash in her hand.
Feathers of Hope

here’s the bed she lies in
the sheets might as well be snow
she’s so cold
the heat disperses above her
the ceiling blankly accepts it
she sinks clean as a stone
Ivy is here

So we each answered the questions, each one according to her opinions. The beautiful thing in this, is that our answers did not agree, but they were close. We are mothers, and we hate wars. And we want peace for our families, and for our countries. The program will be broadcast on mothers day in America – I mean, May 9. I hope it’s a happy day for all mothers in America and the world – that families gather. That nobody is absent, participating in a war or something similar. And that peace surrounds the whole world.
A Family in Baghdad

O inhabitants of al-Andalus, what happiness is yours, having water, shade, rivers and trees. The garden of Eternal Happiness is not without, but rather within your territory.
– ibn Khafaja, Valencia, 11th century
mysterium

Everybody has clotheslines; in fact the fronts of the buildings give very little clue about the vibrant life that happens in the back gardens and alleys between rows of attached buildings on two parallel streets.
the cassandra pages

[Lot for sale = Zero.]
cloudshift/photoblog

Eventually, maybe it will be recognized that those individuals who dare to blow the whistle and who refuse to participate in anti-human actions are the real heroes, the truly civilized.
Blaugustine

Khalid wanted to go and die in Iraq, not because he is a loser, not because he wants to have a 72 virgins (I don’t know where did this virgins story come from), and not because he wanted to achieve personal benefits . . .
Khalid like other hundreds before him, and thousands after him, wanted to say NO, he wanted to change his/our world, and it is our fault that we didn’t give him other means to express this protest.
Raed in the Middle

“The life of a warrior cannot possibly be cold and lonely and without feelings,” says don Genaro, “because it is based on his affection, his devotion, his dedication to his beloved. And who, you may ask, is his beloved? I will show you now.” He then performs an astounding demonstration, in which he “embraces the earth.”
Book of Life

There was a time when people here felt sorry for the troops. No matter what one’s attitude was towards the occupation, there were moments of pity towards the troops, regardless of their nationality. We would see them suffering the Iraqi sun, obviously wishing they were somewhere else and somehow, that vulnerability made them seem less monstrous and more human. That time has passed. People look at troops now and see the pictures of Abu Ghraib . . .
Baghdad Burning

Say firmly:
“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause . . . “
Helena Cobban

There is a sign hanging beside my piano. It says “Don’t shoot the piano player. She’s doing the best she can.”
Switched At Birth

First he joked that only Jews could make a holiday of a day when nobody died. (We laughed.) And then he observed that, in this day and age, when so many of us begin our mornings by turning on the radio or checking news online to see how many casualties the Iraq war has generated overnight, we might find ourselves identifying with the impulse to celebrate such a day. (We weren’t laughing any more.)
Velveteen Rabbi

We are greasy in death, and wet
and slippery and vainly named.
Lekshe’s Mistake

the darkness can go away now, the darkness can go away
Awake at Dawn — Writing Journal

I have solved for x far too often. From now on x can solve for me.
vajrayana practice
__________

This post was inspired by the late, lamented blog commonbeauty, which demonstrated the potential of the blogroll collage/chrestomathy form in the posts “twenty upanishads” (April 08) and “twenty questions” (April 12)

In little over two weeks, the view from my front porch has changed radically as leaves come out on the trees. The house sits at the edge of a large lawn/meadow/barnyard opening; the porch faces the edge of the woods some fifty feet away. When the leaves are down, I can see up to the top of the low rise we call Laurel Ridge, a couple hundred yards away through the woods. Only the solid mountain laurel understory remains green all year round, and the low winter sun catching an entire hillside of waxy laurel leaves, especially with a snowpack to provide contrast, is a sight to savor. Tree trunks in winter evoke a crowd in freeze-frame; I have only to step down from the porch and walk a few dozen paces to join their vigil. For those six months of the year, I can sit on my porch and feel the smallness of the mountain, the closeness of the sky.

Now, I face an ever more solid wall of green. The last few peeks of sky below the top of this wall will disappear in another day or two. The wintertime impression of limitless space has given way to a feeling of fertile and profuse mystery, veils behind veils.

Ever since I was a kid, I have been able to see faces in the trunks and foliage of trees. The crown of the tallest white pine tree off to the east always reminds me of a long-chinned, long-nosed crone. But with the great deciduous leaf-out, the anthropomorphic forms and faces proliferate. One glimpses them especially at dawn or dusk, an effect aided not merely by the dim light but by the profusion of birdsong at those times. The elaborate blending of ethereal thrush notes, the catbird’s jazz scatting, the oriole’s brassy reveille and many others, along with the profusion of new scents (now the lilac and cypress spurge in my yard; in a few weeks the dame’s rocket) – somehow the synaesthesia helps trigger this intimation of extra presence right at the edge of perception.

I hasten to add that this is without the aid of artificial stimulants, except on very rare occasions. My willingness to admit this peculiar habit of mine is sparked by a study of American Indian tree carving, Faces in the Forest, by Michael D. Blackstock (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). I had known that some First Nations possessed arborographic traditions, but I hadn’t realized what a wide swath of territory this took in: from the coastal forests of British Columbia clear across to the eastern woodlands. The Iroquois medicine society known in English as the False Faces centered on the power of very beautiful, individually unique masks that were carved directly into the trunks of living trees, and subsequently removed for ceremonial use. The False Face Society’s etiological myth makes it clear that the mask carvers were trying to borrow the spirits of the trees themselves. That is to say, the masks weren’t intended merely to represent other beings – they were the beings they represented. Blackstock gives a version of the origin story collected by Arthur C. Parker (Seneca Myths and Folktales, 1923):

“Unfolding from the trunk of the basswood, the great face stared out at the spellbound hunter and opening wide its protruding lips began to speak. He told of his wonderful eyesight, his blazing eyes could see behind the moon and stars. His power could summon the storms or push aside the clouds for the sunshine. He knew all the virtues of roots and herbs, he knew all the diseases and knew how to apply the remedies of herbs and roots. He was familiar with all the poisons and could send them through the air and cure the sick. He could breathe health or sickness. His power was mighty and could bring luck in battles. Evil and poison and death fled when he looked, and good health and life came in its stead. He told of the basswood and said that its soft wood was filled with medicine and life. It contained the life of the wind and the life of the sunshine, and thus being good, was the wood for the false-faces that the hunter must carve.

“Long the hunter listened to the giant false-face and then he wandered far into the forest until the trees began to speak. Then he knew that there were trees there in which were the spirits of the beings of which he had dreamed and that the Genonsgwa was speaking. He knew that now his task of carving must begin and that the dream-beings, the voices, the birds and the animals that he saw must be represented in the basswood masks that he must make.”

If this all sounds a bit familiar, I suggest that may be due to reading The Lord of the Rings one too many times! But of course Tolkien’s description of the Ents drew upon ancient Eurasian traditions not so different from those of Native North America. In fact, common themes crop up in arboreal myths the world over, which implies to me a phenomenological basis. (Notice how, in using this fancy terminology, I can completely side-step the question of whether that basis should be sought in human psychology, in “reality,” or in some combination of the two.) I explored the diverse meanings of trees in some detail a while back, in an essay called Notes from an Anthropologist of Trees. My ruminations there were born from the intuition that many of our public monuments are not so much phallic as they are arborescent, stemming from an age-old and deeply felt homology between the trunk of the tree and the heroic human torso.

This is not to deny that the phallus occupies a strong role in the male and female imagination, as well; I simply don’t feel that phallic images are primary. To assert that they are, I believe, is to indulge in a post-pubescent, pre-adult power fantasy. The taming and rechanneling of this fantasy would seem to be one of the major goals of initiation ceremonies and rite-of-passage ordeals the world over. Although even to suggest that this fantasy is something to be tamed and rechanneled implies primacy, and I’m not sure how many cultures really believe that adolescent behavior is somehow primary or “natural” in our sense of the word. In fact, a great many peoples hold up as their cultural ideal the figure of the Elder, who simultaneously embodies the deathless wisdom of the ancestors and the direct gaze and innocence of the young child.

Western concepts of wild/natural vs. tame/civilized emphasize the repression of part of the self – rather than, say, the preferential cultivation of one part without disrespect toward other aspects. (I have to really hunt for the words to say this, so deeply ingrained is the habit of looking at life as a zero-sum game.) Why cut down the whole tree if all one needs for the mask is one small portion? Art (or, more broadly, technology) can have a symbiotic rather than a parasitic relationship with Nature. If Native Americans have no concept of the wild, it may be because they cannot comprehend the desire to impose one’s will upon Nature in the first place.

Such, at any rate, is the drift of my thoughts this fine morning as I watch the light grow, marveling at the number of variations on the theme of green. In a few weeks, washed by air-borne chemicals both natural and unnatural, the leaves will darken into a more uniform monotone. From my front porch I’ll still be close enough to distinguish one tree’s foliage from another by the shape and arrangement of the leaves – although of course each individual is familiar to me from long acquaintance. As dawn turns to day, the trees at the woods’ edge gradually coalesce, becoming ever more circumscribed and distinct. I imagine that if Sigmund Freud were here with me, sitting in the other plastic stack chair, he would listen to my ramblings about arborescent images and cultural ideals with a faint smile, then say: “But sometimes, you know, a tree is just a tree!”
__________

CROSS-REFERENCES: Mask and pageant and Divining the wild

What the hell is it with southwestern Pennsylvania these days? How is that such an ordinary place keeps get mixed up with such extraordinary headlines?

It’s rare enough for any part of Pennsylvania to make a ripple in the national consciousness. As geographer Pierce Lewis notes in Chapter 1 of A Geography of Pennsylvania (E. Willard Miller, ed., Penn State Press, 1995), “A recent study has shown that Pennsylvania conveys no very clear image of regional identity; by many Americans it is seen as an ordinary kind of place.” But in highly stressful times, such ordinariness can begin to seem attractive, as Americans search for emblematic expressions of bedrock national virtues. You want examples of old-fashioned fighting spirit and moral rectitude? The headlines say, Look no farther than your own backyard.

It may be that Americans are growing tired of being the swaggering, trash-talking policemen of the world. If that’s true, it’s no wonder that the low-key, self-deprecating style cultivated by folks in my neck of the woods might seem refreshing. When cultural geographers rank the fifty states according to the presence or absence of state pride, Pennsylvania is all the way over on the other end of the spectrum from Texas. We are the anti-Texas!

This is in part because different regions within the state are so distinct. Our veteran senator Arlen Specter – who is, whatever else one may think of him, a very bright man – once admitted in an interview that, for the purposes of campaigning, he divided the state into six distinct regions, with a different campaign style required for each. Wilbur Zielinsky, in A Geography of Pennsylvania, identifies seven “culture areas.” According to Zielinsky, geographers debate about how much of Western Pennsylvania may actually be considered an extension of the Midwest, and whether the extreme southwestern corner of the state constitutes the tip end of the “Upper South.”

We weren’t always so self-deprecating or lacking in regional self-identity. Southwestern PA first gained national notoriety in 1794 with the Whiskey Rebellion. This began as a local revolt against federal excise taxes, and quickly spread south throughout the backwoods areas of the then-frontier. George Washington – one of Western Pennsylvania’s original land speculators (today we call them “developers”), with a strong personal stake in the insurrection’s outcome – led 13,000 federal troops over the Allegheny Front to crush the revolt. Considering that many volunteers in the Revolutionary War had fought against the British precisely because of their resentment of excise taxes, some historians view the violent suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion as tantamount to a counter-revolution.

When the Whiskey Rebellion was crushed, what had been a sharply defined, separate regional identity quickly dissipated. The most rebellious elements of the population relocated to more inaccessible portions of the Appalachian chain, to be replaced by later maves of somewhat more tractible immigrants. Some contemporary historians feel that the Whiskey Rebellion’s influence on the United States may actually have been quite salutary, helping to solidify the anti-Federalist positions of Thomas Jefferson and his associates. Be that as it may, there’s a certain irony in the fact that the original stronghold of state’s rights sentiment was a portion of the country now exceptional for its lack of regional jingoism.

But the appetite for radical democratic organizing lingered. As a center of the steel industry and a bituminous coal region, southwestern Pennsylvania (including Pittsburgh) has seen its share of epic labor battles. The great Homestead strike of 1892 led to one of the bloodiest battles in American labor history, pitting Pinkertons and the Pennsylvania National Guard against 25,000 locked-out workers and their families. Although it represented a step backward for labor relations, repercussions of this battle would eventually be felt around the world. Alexander Berkman’s failed assassination attempt against strikebreaker Henry Clay Frick, and its total lack of impact on political events, helped turn his companion, Emma Goldman, against the then-popular anarchist dogma of “revolution by the deed.” Goldman subsequently became one of the world’s most influential advocates for individual freedom and social anarchism, and her thoughts on the limits of violence would influence countless other revolutionaries and social change advocates for decades to come.

In an even darker episode, the Johnstown Strike of 1937 provided industrial bosses with the first opportunity to see if a new, “scientific” approach to strikebreaking pioneered by the Rand Remington company in Elmira, New York could be successfully copied elsewhere. The National Association of Manufacturers would later cite the Johnstown Strike as a model for how to employ the so-called Mohawk Valley Formula:

“A citizens’ committee is formed under the slogan of ‘law and order.’ Mass police powers are invoked against the strikers by dramatizing real, imaginary, or provoked instances of ‘violence.’ Back-to-work sentiment is stimulated by the presence of massed vigilantes, a pretense of normal plant operations, mass meetings, press and radio publicity, dissemination of demoralizing propaganda, the circulation of back-to-work petitions, and a well-timed dramatic opening of the plant so prearranged that a substantial body of non-strikers or outside recruits marches into the plant en masse. The employer manipulates pressure groups to discredit the strike as the ‘lost cause’ of a ‘radical minority.’ With public support, he can, if necessary, employ extra-legal means of thwarting unionization.”

This procedure became an essential tool for industry to defeat unions after the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935, which for the first time required management to bargain with workers’ representatives. Again, the outcome of the Johnstown Strike had impacts around the world. Elements of the Mohawk Valley Formula are still routinely employed, not merely against labor organizers but environmental activists as well.

I’ve had ample opportunity to reflect on this history over the last nine months, as I’ve become involved in a fight to maintain public control over a popular state park in southwestern Pennsylvania. Despite strong local opposition to a proposal to build an exclusive, country club-style resort in the park, and despite the fact that three-quarters of the 19 groups in our anti-resort alliance are based in the local area, resort proponents have sought to portray us all as “outside agitators” intent on imposing our effete, anti-jobs agenda on a vulnerable populace. And an informal “citizen’s committee” of wealthy local elites has formed to try and concentrate influence on state-level decision makers and outflank us “agitators.”

Although I have been known to question the value of patriotism, I don’t deny that questions of national, regional and tribal identity play a key role in politics, especially in helping to shape people’s willingness to fight or to refrain from fighting. Who are we – a nation of jack-booted thugs and trigger-happy sadists, or the valiant firefighters of the world? As individuals, should we follow our leaders and root for the home team no matter what, or must we obey the dictates of our own consciences, even rising up in revolt if the circumstances demand it?

For many Americans, events in southwestern Pennsylvania have helped to crystallize these questions. First came the Quecreek mining disaster of July 2002, which drew television reporters from far and wide with its dramatic story line. Focused on the horror of being trapped deep underground, the nation was unprepared for the miners’ successful rescue, and many found their nonchalance and stoicism inspiring. (The extent to which this disaster had been precipitated by the extreme incompetence and callousness of the mining company, encouraged by newly-relaxed safety standards championed by “President” Bush only weeks earlier, unfortunately never garnered much publicity.)

Then came September 11. Whatever the exact circumstances surrounding the crash of Flight 93 at Shanksville, PA, transcripts of phone conversations with the passengers leave little doubt that a coordinated uprising against the hijackers did take place. Local firefighters and first responders became linked in the public imagination with the heroes of the World Trade Center disaster in New York City, as well as with “the 40 brave souls [who] fought armed terrorists to save the lives of others and some unknown national landmark,” as the Flight 93 Memorial Information Center puts it.

The latest example of the “ordinary heroism” of southwestern Pennsylvanians emerged just this week. Somerset County native alerted officers of Iraqi prisoner abuse, trumpeted the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“Bernadette Darby said she received a phone call from her husband, Spc. Joseph M. Darby, about three weeks ago, informing her that something was going to happen with his unit and that she shouldn’t worry.

“‘He said he wasn’t in any trouble and I shouldn’t worry,’ said Darby by phone from her home in Cumberland, Md. ‘I asked him what was going on but he wouldn’t tell me.’

“According to details of an Army report released yesterday, Darby, 24, a Somerset County native and member of the 372nd Military Police Company, was the one who alerted officers about the alleged torture of Iraqi prisoners of war by others in his Cresaptown, Md.-based unit, leading to criminal charges and possible court-martial of several soldiers.

“Bernadette Darby, who along with her husband grew up in Somerset County, said she had heard of the incident on the news, but was not aware of her husband’s role until a reporter from the Baltimore Sun phoned her yesterday.

“‘I was shocked and proud,’ said Darby. ‘I am behind him 100 percent. He felt something was wrong and I couldn’t be more proud of him.'”

In his expose of the prisoner abuse scandal in the New Yorker, Seymour Hersch quotes from a transcript of a military hearing. “A government witness, Special Agent Scott Bobeck . . . told the court . . ‘The investigation started after SPC Darby . . . got a CD from CPL Graner. . . . He came across pictures of naked detainees.’ Bobeck said that Darby had ‘initially put an anonymous letter under our door, then he later came forward and gave a sworn statement. He felt very bad about it and thought it was very wrong.'”

If we look at cultural rather than political boundaries, intertwining story lines form an even more interesting weave. Like Joe Darby and the Quecreek miners, Jessica Lynch also hails from these mountains. To me, Lynch earned her hero status when she repudiated – in a firm, if understated manner – the false heroism that the military propagandists had tried to attach to her story. According to her Iraqi nurses and doctors, Lynch’s extreme naivete and lack of affectation made a deep impression on everyone who came into contact with her. In contrast with the brutality and cynicism of the U.S.-led invasion, these very ordinary virtues seemed extraordinary.

But then there are those soldiers in the now-notorious photos, also from the mountains. One of the soldiers under investigation is from southwestern Pennsylvania, in fact. Four of the others are from rural Virginia, and one, Lynndie England, is from Fort Ashby, West Virginia – less than twenty miles from the Pennsylvania border. England is the inanely smiling young woman posing with the degraded bodies of her captives whose only crime was to be identified as “outside agitators” . . . and to be dark-skinned. This, too, is the face of America – we might as well own up to it. But that’s another, far less heartwarming story . . .

For those of you with actual lives and actual careers, I understand that Wednesday can be particularly tough to get through. In the spirit of helping all of you’ns weather the day with grace and good humor, I’ve decided to post some links to stuff a few shades lighter than the usual somber fare here at Via Negativa.

First comes a review of a new satire on the poetry business – admittedly sort of an obvious target for satire (“like shooting similes in a barrel,” notes the reviewer.) Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z., a first novel by Debra Weinstein, is racking up the glowing reviews, perhaps in part because so many reviewers still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a legacy of their own tenures in MFA programs. According to The Christian Science Monitor’s Ron Charles, “In this brilliant elegy to the abuse of subordinates, all of Z.’s requests rhyme with ‘absurd.’ She’ll sign her letters only in a particular order.

“She sends Annabelle back to the Salvation Army to paw through piles for her favorite pair of shoes. The buttons on her blazer must be replaced because she can’t ‘live with the constant jangling.’ Several times, she castigates Annabelle for failing to keep sufficiently close watch on the supply of hand towels in the bathroom. ‘I like the paper to be thick and textured,’ Z. cautions. ‘The feel should be more cotton than paper.’

“‘A less noble person would feel degraded,’ Annabelle says without missing a beat, ‘but I take Z.’s assignment as a challenge.’ In fact, she’s flattered to be ‘the guardian of Z.’s psychic space,’ thrilled to be enjoying status unlike anything she’s ever experienced before.'”

It sounds as if the eponymous Z. has received special training of her own. New Age “Magick” guru Philip H. Farber actually leads workshops on How to be a Megalomaniac; I have an old flyer advertising one of his seminars in upstate New York several years back. “Whether you’re a full-tilt guru wannabe or a former follower with the will to know how your mind was warped, you’ll agree that this seminar is the ONE TRUE WAY. Learn the hypnotic secrets of the televangelists! Perform miracles that will amaze your friends and entrance your followers! Learn to sling total absurdity in a way that will have them reaching for their checkbooks!”

Now you can get the entire course on just two videocassettes – at $50 postage paid, a fantastic savings!

Now, let’s say you’ve taken the course, you’ve assembled your inner circle of worshipful disciples, and you’ve purchased your first gold-plated, “green” Hummer – itself the charismatic focus of a brand new cult. But you still feel strangely empty. What to do?

Why not consider purchasing a fine military aircraft? Don’t worry, no background checks are required. Just fill out a few, brief forms.

If that’s not enough to get you fired up, you might want to check in with the Guy Upstairs – in some people’s estimation, the world’s original megalomaniac. Fill out a questionnaire and get right with the LORD. Then, why not while away a pleasant hour or two with Friedrich Nietzsche – after God, possibly the funniest megalomaniac that ever lived?

O.K., just kidding! But there are actually some very serious people out there who have written very serious books about Nietzche’s alleged sense of humor. Check out Comic Relief: Nietzsche’s Gay Science at Amazon.com. At least one reviewer seems to suffer from Nietzsche’s own malady: “This book is not funny. Higgins is not funny. Nietzsche’s Joyful Wisdom is not funny. This book, as discussed in the preface, was contracted by a silly university press — one of the silliest of them all.” (Jesus, buddy, go buy a McDonnell-Douglas military aircraft or something.)

Incidentally, there is one – just one – Nietzsche joke out there, from what I can tell. It’s the very same joke I first read on a bathroom stall in the first floor of Sackett building at Penn State’s University Park campus back in June, 1984. A post at O Mundo de Claudia has the original; someone in the comments suggests a faintly amusing variation.

But it is, after all, hump day, and perhaps megalomania would seem more exciting if you saved it for the weekend. Here in the Northeast, at any rate, it’s a cloudy, rainy day. If you can manage to take off early, what could be better than to spend the rest of the afternoon curled up with a nice, light romance novel? The White House invites you to peruse the Second Lady’s stirring tale of the Old West, “when men were men – and women were property!” I’m getting hot already . . .

But whatever you do, try to keep your priorities straight. Here are the Top Ten Reasons Why Beer is Better Than Jesus. I think I’ll go get me some religion right now.

The inadequacy or inappropriateness of qualifiers need not imply the absence of attributes.

Today I’m feeling more focused than I was yesterday, so I’ll take the risk of putting down some fairly scattered impressions and seeing if I can make some sense out of the whole.

To begin with, here’s something for Dale, in reference especially to a recent comment thread at Vajrayana Practice. Actually, it’s an encore presentation, as they say on Car Talk. This odd epigraph appears as a preface to the first part of my book Spoil (which is beginning to give off a bit of a musty odor, I must say). I was picturing two stone buddhas – or perhaps two stoned buddhists – facing each other . . .

The hedonist bows to the image of the ascetic–& vice versa.
It turns out that the buddha in the mirror is an agent provocateur.
You find yourself grimacing, baring your teeth.
Anything to wipe that smile off its face.

***

It turned out that The Buddha in the Mirror was the title of a popular book explaining the tenets of Soka Gakkai. Now, if there’s one branch of Buddhism that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, it’s this sect (and to some extent the other followers of Nichiren as well). Why? Because they are just like Christian fundamentalists: their praxis is basic in the extreme, admitting of little nuance, and they state outright that if you don’t belong to their little club, you’re more-or-less screwed. To which I always have the same reaction: if salvation means I have to spend eternity with self-righteous pricks like you, who needs it?

***

Beyond the quicksand claims of fundamentalists and other true believers to possess a monopoly on the Truth stretches a somewhat less treacherous swamp: the almost universal tendency to assume that others would be happier if only they were more like us. I approached this from one angle with my screed on classism and racism the other day. But many of us simply get caught up in our enthusiasms. And of course there’s nothing inherently wrong with trying to “convert” others to various forms of fandom, as long as one is reasonably respectful about it. But sometimes I do worry that I can be awfully obnoxious about it.

Yesterday I found myself once again trying to nudge a friend of mine into starting a blog. She gently reminded me that she has a variety of very good reasons not to keep one. In some of her remarks about her own reticence I heard echoes of the Amish critique of our “English” cult of self esteem. For an Amish, to sign one’s name to a creative product is suspect (though the nature writer and organic farmer David Kline gets away with it), and to publish one’s photo is virtually impossible. Why? Such gestures are seen as too “prideful.” Now, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to bend my pride and submit to communal authority as the Amish do for one second. But that doesn’t mean I’m content to be a puffed-up asshole, either. And I do like the fact that the Amish emphasis on peacefulness includes a profound disinclination to try and convert others to their way of thinking.

In this regard, they differ sharply from even their closest cousins-in-faith, the more conservative Mennonite sects. Not entirely coincidentally, most old-order Amish honor the Bible’s exhortation to “works” as well as faith. They tend not to want to take the easy way out and say, just believe this one thing and you’ll get to heaven. Submitting to communal authority does not invariably entail mindless obedience, it seems. But I suppose one must expect a certain mental agility from people who are so un-American as to agonize over the possible social consequences of every new technology.

***

Speaking of faith and works, here’s rich irony. The April 20 Christian Century reports:

On the presidential campaign trail, Senator John Kerry (D., Mass.) is using the New Testament’s Letter of James to imply that the Bush administration may be long on expressing faith but lacks compassionate deeds in dealing with hunger and joblessness. Following Kerry’s appearance in a St. Louis church, a White House spokesman decried the ploy as “exploitation of scripture.”

To shouts of approval on March 28 from worshipers at New Northside Missionary Baptist Church, Kerry cited two verses from James, first 2:14, then 1:22.

“The scriptures say, ‘What does it profit my brethren if some say he has faith but does not have works?’ When we look at what’s happening in America today, where are the works of compassion? Because it’s also written, ‘Be doers of the word and not hearers only,'” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Likewise, Time magazine’s Web site reported that Kerry told a Mississippi congregation on March 7 that President Bush does not practice the “compassionate conservatism” he preaches. The Massachusetts senator then cited James 2:14, saying, “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds?” Bush, a United Methodist, has referred to his beliefs while promoting his faith-based initiative and on other occasions.

In speaking at the St. Louis church, Kerry vaguely criticized “our present national leadership.” But a spokesman for Bush, Steve Schmidt, said the senator’s comments were “beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse and a sad exploitation of scripture for political attack.”

Rrrrrright.

In other news, a bunch of Christian pastors concerned about the environment sent Bush a letter encouraging him to actually read the Bible.

***

It’s always interesting to hear Republicrats make solemn pronouncements about “the bounds of acceptable discourse.” What does this mean? Could anyone give me an example of unacceptable discourse?

O.K., how about this: Iraq would probably do just fine if the occupying troops pulled out tomorrow. Civil war is highly unlikely to break out. The Sunnis and the Shiites are not at each other’s throats. And somehow Iraqis managed to rebuild almost all the country’s infrastructure destroyed during the 1991 war, which was far more devastating, in less than a year – without the help of Halliburton, Bechtel, the United States Marines, Blackwater/CIA agents, or even the United Nations . . . which was doing its darndest to prevent said reconstruction through economic sanctions and by giving carte blanche to the U.S. and British to continue bombing the crap out of the country for the next ten years.

But perhaps you, like Senator Kerry, consider yourself a liberal and a humanitarian. Don’t we have a responsibility to fix what we have broken? Sure. But exercising such responsibility would be almost unprecedented for the United States (with the exception of the Marshall Plan, which we can debate about). So maybe we’d better experiment, first, and try to fix things up in Afghanistan some – say, commit to paying, dollar-for-dollar, as much as we paid for the ordnance we dropped. That might sound sort of minimal, but it would probably prove impossible to get the bipartisan warhorses in Congress to sign on to anything more ambitious. If it works out and we decide to apply our new-found expertise in reconstruction elsewhere, I’m sure any new, sovereign government of Iraq would be more than happy to accept reparations. (But I forgot, Iraq was supposed to pay for its own reconstruction!)

Shouldn’t we get the U.N. to send peacekeeping troops? But as long as Iraq is occupied by foreign powers, there won’t be any peace to keep. If the U.N. had armies of peacemakers, they could send those. You know, people with experience in democratic organizing, building the cultural infrastructure of a pluralistic society: unions, public libraries, grassroots advocacy groups, zoning boards, all that boring stuff. Such folks could really be quite useful, I think. But for some reason, we in the “international community” of “civilized nations” always leave such essential functions up to poorly funded (and not always democratically run) non-governmental organizations. (Talk about an abrogation of responsibility!) And peacekeeping troops under the aegis of the U.N. would probably be even less effective than the U.S. and British troops who are there now, because not only would they be acting under false pretenses, if recent incidents in Kosovo are any guide, they wouldn’t even be willing to do what occupying armies must do to maintain “peace” – kill people.

Now let me go wash my mouth out with soap, and examine the other side of the coin. What constitutes acceptable discourse?

Money! That’s what the Supreme Court – and the “liberal” ACLU – have said. Money is a form of speech. You can look it up.

What else? How about: Bombs! Great big bombs! All kinds of bombs, and mortars, and grenades, and live ammunition, and things that go explody-boom! That’s what G.W. said over a year ago, wasn’t it, at the very beginning of the bombing campaign, when the evil not-so-genius Wolfowitz convinced him that Iraqi generals would turn Saddam in if we gave them half a chance. We weren’t just bombing, Bush said, we were “sending a message to Saddam.” Then when that didn’t work – something got lost in the translation, perhaps? – we dusted off the not-so-moderate Secretary Powell’s “shock and awe” doctrine. The thinking there seems to have been along the lines of, “These superstitious heathen believe in an angry, punishing sky god. If we drop lots of things from the sky that go boom, they’ll think we’re God and fall down in awe! Then, they’ll welcome our troops with flowers!” Don’t believe me? Check out the original brand name – oops, I mean code name – for the bombing campaign: Operation Infinite Justice.

The foregoing rant was triggered by a remark from Christian Science Monitor reporter Scott Peterson last night on NPR. Reporting from Fallujah, Peterson admitted that the “cease fire” was a fiction – but a useful fiction, he said, because it was a way of keeping communication channels open. If words don’t work, the Marine commander told Peterson, we drop 100-lb. bombs for a while. It’s the only language these people understand.

***

As long as I’m depressing the hell out of you, I ought to mention another article from the same issue of The Christian Century cited above. “Church Failure: Remembering Rwanda,” by David P. Gushee, concludes that the presence of Christian institutions did nothing to prevent genocide either in Rwanda or in Nazi Germany. “It cannot be assumed that the people gathered to hear the Word proclaimed and to participate in the sacraments are serious about the Christian faith. . . . Jesus himself said that the seed of the gospel is scattered on all different kinds of ground; only one of the four kinds of soil that he mentions has the quality needed for fruitfulness.”

This is a crucial point all too often ignored by both religious and non- or anti-religious people. Religions are, inevitably, an imperfect means to achieve highly provisional ends. At best, we should expect that religious institutions work to provide healing. Complete and irreversible transformation of self or society seems not only unlikely, but quite possibly dangerous as well. I would go so far as to suggest that people who believe in such totalizing transformations, be they secular revolutionaries or religious folks, are precisely the sort of people most likely to heed calls to war, genocide or ecocide.

Unfortunately, folks in every religion have a tendency to believe that a profound conversion, or a mystical experience, or satori, or the achievement of any number of other exalted states will solve everything. Thank goodness that religions also produce people like Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Gustavo Gutierrez and Desmond Tutu to perennially remind us that God’s agendas are very different from our own.

Now, perhaps some of you are wishing I would stop making these political remarks and restrict myself to spiritual speculations, nature poetry and the like. I wish I could! But I’ve just never been very good at keeping things in separate mental compartments.

We have our work cut out for us. Get right with God or the Universe or the Emptiness of the Self if you must. But don’t keep your mouth shut about everything else – and whatever you do, don’t let the sons of bitches get away with claiming it’s all in our name! If you’re a Christian, pressure your priest or minister to join in efforts like the one I mentioned above – and write the White House and the newspapers yourself. (Never underestimate the power of a well-written letter-to-the-editor!) Agitate in whatever way and to whatever degree you can, without losing your sense of humor, your compassion or your religion.

As David Gushee notes, history shows again and again that “when a ruling elite decides to target a group of people in a society, most of the people who are not targeted will not resist, whatever their religious affiliation. To put it bluntly: politics usually matters more than religion does; or, politics co-opts religion and thus neutralizes it. To put it even more bluntly: people are sheep. Most will go along with what their elites tell them to think and do. Few have the intellectual, spiritual or moral capacity to resist either the genocidal thinking of elites or the genocide itself once it begins.”

May I strive with all my might, through this weblog or otherwise, to help bring about a world where this would no longer be the case – and where treating any injustice, no matter how seemingly minor, as the price of progress would be beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse. Inshallah.