Chéim leis Leon ina dTailte Dearg

Ag deireanach, mo mhac sine ag céim amach le hIonad Mhic Eoin ag an Ollscoil na dTailte Dearg.  Thóg Casaideach dha grianghraf seo os cionn. Is feidir leat a fheicéail ár theaglach, agus Leon 'leis 'lei' agus Niall rua, an dá deartháir, ar cheile, fós.

Ina theannta sin, fheadfaidh tú ag fheicéail mise féin, Niall, mo bhean a tí Lena, Leon, agus a chailín Chaiside. Bhí an lá nios an-teo ansin. Bhi an grian gheal ansuid.

Mar sin, chuaigh muidsa ar ghrúdlann áitiúil in aice láimhe. D'ol mé gíotan na leann hIndia an-blasta ag ainmithe "Hop Daddy" nó "Hop-a-Matic." Is maith Lena agus mé an leann Beilge a thugtar "Bishop's Tipple" freisin.

Níos déanaí, thiomaint muid go bialann Mheicsiceo. D'ith iasc ag cócaireacht leis gairleog. Is brea liomsa seo agus an h-anlann.

Ar deireadh, bhí ar ais ag dul an gailearaí ealaíne ar lár ina ar baile na dTailte Dearg. Rinne Casaideach agus a cara Eric suiteáil ann. Chríochnaigh muid am i gchuimne, gan amhras.

Graduation with Leo in Redlands

At last, my older son graduated from Johnston Center at the University of Redlands. Cassidy took these two photos above. You can see our family, and Leo "with lei" and Niall in red, two brothers, together too.

Furthermore, you can see myself, Niall, my wife Layne, Leo, and his girlfriend Cassidy. It was a very hot day there. The sun was bright out there.

Therefore, we went ourselves to a local brewery nearby. I drank a bit of the tastiest India Pale Ale named "Hop Daddy" or "Hop-a-Matic." Layne and I liked the Belgian ale called "Bishop's Tipple" too.

Later, we drove to a Mexican restaurant. I ate fish cooked in garlic. I loved this and the salsa.

Finally, we went back to an art gallery in the center of the town of Redlands. Cassidy and her friend Eric made an installation there. We finished a memorable day, without a doubt.

Social Justice Bullies

My son and I were discussing a professor at his experimental liberal arts alma mater. She taught a feminist comedy course. She admitted she was open to any humor, but then she denied that rape could ever be funny. For her and her students, she insisted no humor could be found in that action.

Then my son and I joined my wife, and his classmates and me, to watch an Amy Schumer episode that my wife, who'd seen her onstage recently with her female friends, liked. It has gotten a lot of attention for the "last f-able day" actresses (hey, I like that word) commemorate their transition in one skit. But the one preceding it, parodying Friday Night Lights, is funnier: "Football Town Nights."

Even that po-faced and cynically PC-"outrage" clickbait-generating site Salon liked this skit. So that may be progress. The point is, my family and my son's friends from said college, male and female, gathered to watch what their professor judged as the one topic that was forbidden to any comic's repertoire. Not to belabor the point, but Schumer's specialty is the queasy and unspoken, made sexual. She confronts her mostly female audiences with this honesty--and she finds laughs in it.

Aristotolis Orginos the past April 8th at Medium speaks for the generation closer to my sons and their classmates. I am not sure how many of them find laughs in Amy Schumer, but they have been schooled, at least at colleges were Orginos or my sons went, in meticulously parsing any utterance according to strictures which call out any supposed or real, conscious or accidental, "privilege"-claim.

He examines claims of a campus "rape culture," he analyzes the factoid promoted that insists 1:5 women will be sexually assaulted during their university studies, and he reminds us of Orwell's Newspeak as promoted by the media (even if he leaves out Salon). He concludes: "Those who need to hear this message will probably respond that I am 1. too privileged to understand 2. tone-policing the oppressed (and that I shouldn’t tell the oppressed how to treat their oppressors) and 3. really just a closet racist/sexist in a liberal’s clothing." After four years at NYU, he's heard it all before. But, he moves forward to call on his audience to be less timid in speaking up about another type of abuse.

"The version of millennial social justice advocacy that I have spoken about — one that uses Identity Politics to balkanize groups of people, engenders hatred between groups, willingly lies to push agendas, manipulates language to provide immunity from criticism, and that publicly shames anyone who remotely speaks some sort of dissent from the overarching narrative of the orthodoxy — is not admirable." This form of ad hominem attack, Orginos emphasizes, spreads intellectual dishonesty.

He wraps it up by comparing "separate but equal" to the Left's call for "safe spaces." "But the fact of the matter is — anyone unwilling to engage in productive, open, mutually critical conversations with people they disagree with under the moral protection of liberalism and social justice are not liberals, are not social justice advocates, and are not social justice warriors; they are social justice bullies."

Greg Lukianoff on April 16th at the Huffington Post criticizes Garry Trudeau. Doonesbury's creator, speaking of privilege, carries a lot himself. Descended from the Dutch founders of New York, prep-school and Yale '70, he emerged from this background to satirize the conservatives, as not one of them, the voice of the hippies as they moved like him into the Me Decade and beyond. Trudeau's comic always struck me, like much of Jon Stewart's on Comedy Central, or shows like MASH, as smug. (However, to its credit, Inside Amy Schumer is also on that network. Just as Fox Network can be edgy too!) Even if Stewart is but a year younger than me, most who champion this orthodoxy that Orginos challenges seem either quite a bit older--as with Trudeau and his hippies, or as with the millennials, quite a bit younger than me.  I guess Schumer's right in the middle, more than a decade older than my sons, two decades younger than me. Although I'm five weeks separated in birth from Obama, I ally with another voice, closer still. Ricky Gervais and I share the same birth date/year.

Gervais also takes on those who claim to act one way and secretly get away with being another. This two-faced nature enlivens his own characters, but it reminds me too of those in power from my generation, if Obama counts, and those from Trudeau's, such as the Clintons. A frequent dissenter to these political powers (and their court jesters Trudeau once, Stewart now) is the conservative columnist at the New York Times, Ross Douthat. His April 17th column, "Checking Charlie Hebdo's Privilege," cites Trudeau's defense of Islam against those who dared to mock it. For they were “punching downward ... attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority.” This was both a moral and an aesthetic failing, because “ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny — it’s just mean.

Misattributed to Voltaire, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize" still seems good advice. (Even if a variant of this as documented there comes from a source that I doubt few who cite this phrase on the Net would, thus informed, and chastened, affirm.) What Christopher Hitchens predicted when the "Danish cartoons" incited violence has come to pass: any one speaking out against Islamism, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali has from first-hand experience, is ostracized.

Demonstrating this reaction, and blaming the victim who blamed others' victimization, six writers declined to attend a recent PEN award for Charlie Hebdo. After quoting various dissenters among the prominent authors, a NYT piece concluded with a particularly credible source. “If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name,” [Salman] Rushdie said. “What I would say to both Peter [Carey] and Michael [Ondaatje] and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them.”

How "powerless" or "disenfranchised" can a significant portion, say 12%? of Muslims, be? That totals hundreds of millions out of 1.2 billion worldwide, plus non-Muslim sympathizers. If they're a "minority," so are Catholics like Douthat, a declining billion out of seven billion, by the way. As no religion worldwide comprises a solid majority in this tallying, what's to claim? Douthat continues: "Trudeau is hardly the first writer to accuse the Hebdo cartoonists of “punching down.” For: "That phrase, and the critique it implies of 'Je Suis Charlie' solidarity, has circulated on the Western left ever since the massacre. And understandably, because it reflects a moral theory popular among our intelligentsia, one that The Atlantic’s David Frum, in a response to Trudeau, distilled as follows: In any given conflict, first 'identify the bearer of privilege,' then 'hold the privilege-bearer responsible.'”

This circles back not only to Origis, but to Schumer. She deflates the force of the rape joke by her parody, as it's repeated in such doggedly stupid terms by such simpletons it loses its hurt. Similar perhaps to how the n-word has deflected racism by those allowed to use it or reclaim it from within their community, or the use of "queer" from within that community (or "Jesuit" for that matter way back!) the subversion and deployment of coded humor by its victims made standard-bearers changes the way the larger community--even if they aren't supposed to be in on the joke or twist--responds. 

Leo-in-grad

Well, my older son graduated, lei and all. His roommates over the years, another pal, and his younger brother (red shirt) sent him off in Johnston style, as the photo at right celebrates. At this experimental community, where my wife and his mother also matriculated, each grad gets to pick who does these honors. In her companion essay, my wife celebrates this: My Old School, as she compares her ceremony to our son's.

So, I point you to it, for it gives the insight into the intensive Johnston community that I, a happy fellow-traveller, with but two alumni seminars and the 45th Renewal attended, can only gaze at enviously and respectfully. I can see, certainly, firsthand how my family's experience there has enriched us all: we get half of our family at the dinner table now able to share that formation. It is one where students and faculty combine to create their education, and they take the initiative to widen their perspective so as to improve the world, in their own relationships, studies, activities, and futures. I can see from my slight remove how my son's grown insightful and more confident of his opinions over the past four years, and I'm in awe of his media and musical expertise.

At our table, we have too another quarter of the nuclear core with his own take on "My Old School" now, seeing he attends the inspiration for that song, penned by two of its many famous semi-alums. I expect, notwithstanding, in two years to type another paean to another official college graduate here.

In memory of Kathryn Green

This shows myself (in cap), Pat Harrigan, my wife Layne, and Kathryn Green at the end of the Lawrence Durrell seminar. This was held last late-June/early-July at the Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, on the coast near Carmel, California, under the aegis of Professor Bill McDonald. Sponsored by the alumni of the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies, now part of the University of Redlands, this convened with alumni and a few fellow-travelers such as me. We discussed the merits of the Alexandria Quartet.

I think at the end of this seminar, among 22 people, she, my wife, and perhaps fellow skeptics John Rubio and Brittany Greenbaum were the only ones dissenting from the view that, after all, Durrell's once-celebrated tetralogy was successful. I liked how we all listened and learned from one another, and again, I liked watching the Johnston community in its milieu.

Kathryn went to Johnston with my wife, and she was very generous with her time and good works to assist that experimental college in its past and present incarnations. I got to know her a bit, during each seminar. She was very quiet, making me seem a chatterbox. But she joshed me how well she and I would get along in a theoretical marriage made of two silent types. She possessed a quiet confidence and poise, that showed itself in her manners, voice, and tone. She got up around 4:30 to meditate. Her stillness was evident as she perched in a half-lotus pose during discussions, composed. 

My older son graduated from JC last Saturday. I was thinking of Kathryn then, for she and I walked across the quad of century-old trees, talking about audiobook versions of Durrell. We went to join Professor Kevin O'Neill's re-convening of some of us from the previous alumni seminar, held on death in philosophy and American popular culture, a year before Asilomar. It took place in Pacific Palisades, down the coast, and it was where Kathryn had been raised. She moved to Palo Alto and there she flourished. I found out yesterday she has died, after being hit by a bicycle, a few days ago.

Ludlow Massacre: 101 years ago

 

Yesterday marks the centennial+ 1 day of a crime. It was committed by those hired to not only suppress but to fire upon strikers and their families. United Mine Workers opposed the Rockefeller control over Colorado mines with their awful conditions. My father told me stories of his father, born in the aftermath of the Molly Maguires, and how he had dropped out of school around nine or ten, to work as a "breaker boy" picking slate out of the anthracite in Avoca, a company town full of immigrants from Ireland, bent over heaps for a quarter a day.

So, when I learned of this event, I was curious. I had read a dramatization in Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, but few seem to have remembered this since in our nation; even USA by John Dos Passos gives this event more of an aside, although logically it was as infamous then, a decade or so after, as 9/11 today in the U.S. Layne and I stopped there last October as it was just off the main interstate as we drove north to Colorado. Only a small off-ramp and unassuming brown sign marked the turn. A slow quarter-mile or so led us past a tiny market and crossroads. The sun set as we headed west, to a place beside the railroad tracks. Dark hills behind us, as cattle and horses could be heard in the quiet distance. She took the photo above, crafted of wrought iron, at the door of the simple metal union hall next to the site. This is a haunting place, and indeed a enormous freight train rumbled past as we looked at the stone monument. It marks the site where two women and eleven children died in a fire as they hid in a dugout. National Guardsman set off flames as they killed the main camp leader and some of his fellow miners, as Brandon Weber narrates with period photos in Upworthy.

Many were Greek, so the day had begun with Orthodox Easter festivities. The blazes from kerosene lit up the tents, and more people were trapped in the flames, and then shot down as they tried to flee. Over 18 months of struggle, almost two hundred people died. The union lost, but Congress investigated. Out of this tragedy, at least the start of eight-hour workdays and no child labor began.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: "Do we tolerate another culture's intolerance"?

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about feminist opposition to "safe spaces" and free speech, within contexts of defending Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali joins this with calls for an Islamic reformation. She encourages dissent by those who reject its spurious claims of peace and who reject its political ideology of violence. A very learned friend of mine responded with his nuanced, considered comments, about the relative progress of Muslim legal and academic culture. On FB, where I posted an excerpt from Ali, others attacked Islam and defended Ali in turn. I weighed in cautiously but in favor of Ali, as deserving a hearing. For she knows firsthand the cost of sharia and the discrimination against women, rebels, non-Muslims, and freethinkers.

Today I found posted via another learned friend on FB this 3/24/15 article by Ali from the Huffington Post: "From Selma to Tunis: When Will We March Against the Segregation of Our Own Time?"
While I got blowback from citing that related Ali piece, I feel she merits thoughtful attention. For she makes, as with the Reformation, another telling analogy which may speak better to secularists today.

Here are some excerpts, with a few of my own comments. Ali compares the 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery to the recent outbreaks of "racially charged incidents" which "have prompted a near-universal reflexive response of black anger and white guilt"--but Ali reminds us change has come. I agree with her "that the president was right to push back against the idea that nothing has changed since 1965." My current and past two supervisors are black, one from Africa, two from here, two men, one woman, one an immigrant, the others a descendant of freed slaves. One is married to a white man. None of this might have happened half a century or more ago, certainly. That is progress.

Ali shows how discrimination increases across the world where Islamic jurisprudence expands. "And the discriminated group I have in mind is women, though I could also reference Jews, Christians and gays." She lists the long litany of laws limiting women's freedom: and emphasizes: "Segregation, in short, is central to sharia -- a fact that no amount of contortion by self-styled Muslim feminists can get around." She tells of the growing movements cracking down on female liberty.

"There seems to me only one possible way to react to this trend toward sharia and that is to resist it. Perhaps that is more obvious to me than to most; having lived under sharia when I was a young girl in Saudi Arabia I know just what it means to be a second-class citizen. Yet many Western liberals seem to struggle with the obvious point that if they were against segregation and discrimination in the 1960s they should be against gender segregation and discrimination now." This to me is eminently sensible. I cannot fathom, when I read certain liberal journalists or exchange views with radical friends of mine, why a stress on diversity and tolerance affords Islam such rampant intolerance.

Ali introduces Heretic. "My most recent book is an argument for a Muslim Reformation. It proposes a fundamental five-point modification of Islamic doctrine designed to remove the various incitements embedded in the Koran to engage in intolerance, oppression and violence. The book is addressed mainly to Muslims who are reluctant to follow me all the way to apostasy, but who are prepared to acknowledge, if only to themselves, that there are fundamental incompatibilities between their faith and modernity. But I am also addressing Western liberals -- and not only those at Brandeis University who last year saw fit to rescind their institution's offer to me of an honorary degree.
In their letter denouncing me, 87 Brandeis faculty members accused me of suggesting that:

violence toward girls and women is particular to Islam or the Two-Thirds World, thereby obscuring such violence in our midst among non-Muslims, including on our own campus [and]... the hard work on the ground by committed Muslim feminist and other progressive Muslim activists and scholars, who find support for gender and other equality within the Muslim tradition and are effective at achieving it.

Seriously? "Support for gender and other equality within the Muslim tradition"? As for Muslim feminists "achieving" greater equality, the evidence, as we have seen, is that women's rights in the Muslim world are being rapidly eroded by the spread of Islamism.

I echo her disbelief. All the more as the liberal Jewish university, Brandeis, would have been expected, to me at least in my naivete, as a supporter of those from marginalized and persecuted groups who challenge the unjust laws and religious demands limiting a freer exploration of human potential rather than fealty to a supposedly divinely dictated set of primitive rules and illogical regulations. Yes, I know the Torah and that may contain its own irrational codes, but in the liberal outlook informing Brandeis, I'd expect a more generous audience for Ali's congenial (to me) address.

Ali continues: "We who have known what it is to live without freedom watch with incredulity as you who call yourselves liberals -- who claim to believe so fervently in women's and minority rights -- make common cause with the forces in the world that manifestly pose the greatest threats to just those things." Now that she is an American, she admits to her new colleagues that "we Western intellectuals cannot lead a Muslim Reformation. But we do have an important role to play. We must no longer accept limitations on criticism of Islam. We must reject the notions that only Muslims can speak about Islam, and that any critical examination of Islam is inherently 'racist.' Instead of contorting Western intellectual traditions so as not to offend our Muslim fellow citizens, we need to defend the Muslim dissidents who are risking their lives to promote the human rights we take for granted: equality for women, tolerance of all religions and orientations, our hard-won freedoms of speech and thought." She goes on to sum up her thesis, and it's one I share: "Multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture's intolerance. If we do in fact support diversity, women's rights, and gay rights, then we cannot in good conscience give Islam a free pass on that spurious ground."

She compares Jim Crow to sharia, and concludes: "I want to echo Martin Luther King. Yes, we Muslim reformers are on the move and no bogus charge of Islamophobia can stop us. The burning of our offices will not deter us. The bombing of our homes will not dissuade us. The beating and killing of our leaders and young girls will not divert us. The wanton release of known terrorists would not discourage us. We are on the move now. Like an idea whose time has come, not even the marching of mighty armies can halt us. We are moving to the land of freedom.

My question to the liberals of 2015 is this. You are very sure about what side you were on in 1965.

But whose side are you on today?Will you march with us for Muslim women's civil and political rights? Or will you wait half a century -- for the movie of our march?"

Ali gets a lot of flak. Her marriage to Niall Ferguson, perhaps, has exacerbated the opposition she gets among many in the left-leaning media. He too challenges some conventions of the anti-North Atlantic/American, pro-"South" voices who deny Western hegemony and champion the anti-imperialist voices of those who join that message to one of anti-secularism, and pro-tradition.

In Arguably, another outspoken journalist, Christopher Hitchens, anticipated this. Defenses of free speech wither as PC-speak inhibits bold journalism. He predicted: "Within a short while,--this is a warning--the shady term 'Islamophobia' is going to be smuggled through our customs. Anyone accused of it will be politely but firmly instructed to shut up, and to forfeit the constitutional right to criticize religion. By definition, anyone accused in this way will also be implicitly guilty." He finds presciently in an attempt to alert the world to the danger of letting fanatics shut down the Danish press for cartoons judged offensive in 2007, that "American Muslim leaders" are canny. He cites the NY Times in explaining how PR spin is spun. ''They have 'managed to build effective organizations and achieve greater integration, acceptance and economic success than their brethren in Europe have. They portray the cartoons as part of a wave of global Islamophobia and have encouraged Muslim groups in Europe to use the same term.' In other words, they are leveraging worldwide Islamic violence to drop a discreet message into the American discourse." (706) Certainly proven by now.

While the sympathies extended more and more to proponents of the Muslim (and other faiths) suppression of those who attack its limitations disappoint me, they seem an inevitable extension of the 20th century's encouragement of the Other, those who strike back against the Empire, those on the sidelines who push forward to play on the field. Orthodox Jewish men increasingly are refusing to sit alongside women on planes in America, as their numbers grow and their confidence grows. Few are able to stand up to these manifestations of cruelty, fearing their opposition will brand them as bigots, or as in Islam however illogically, "racists." My childhood Catholic faith appears to play the role predicted by my teachers in junior high: they saw in the ebb of European devotion a harbinger, less than a decade after Vatican II had concluded, of the decreasing rather than dominant role the Church would play in my own coming of age and the coming century. On the other hand, the hijab becomes ever more common in my country, whereas the nun's habit and priest's collar seem nearly invisible.
Cartoon credit.

Stepping out of line

I asked a few days ago here "Is It Immoral to Serve?" I found this through Gerry Cappa's FB feed only yesterday: "Why a Top U.S Marine Became a Conscientious Objector" in Aeon. Lyle Rubin, a fellow Marine vet, interviews 1st Lt. Jacob Bridge. Curious about this transformation, and as my previous entry considered how many (or rather how few to date) vets I taught would in hindsight discourage others from enlisting, I excerpt highlights.

He signed up in high school, from a traditional upbringing. He went to a leftist bastion, the U. of Colorado, and his time in Boulder in ROTC made him more conservative. During training, he could not handle the disconnect between the pride of "The Fleet" and the immorality and cynicism of those actually in command and as his peers. A skilled leader who got to know his troops, he bristled at the disparity, and he sought therapy from a Unitarian chaplain, with whom he began to reveal his moral doubts as he grew more confident. He had an epiphany about his mortality and his hatred of what he was becoming in a culture of death.

"People change, especially in their early to mid-20s. When they say: ‘You signed the oath in the contract,’ I say: ‘Well, when I signed the contract I was borderline alcoholic, pretty homophobic, and a bunch of other things that I’m not now. I’m not the same person who signed that contract.’" You can see in the comments appended on the website how some refuse to cut Bridge any slack here.

Viktor Frankl's Man and the Search for Meaning helped guide his ethical progress. I like that Bridge does not identify with any particular faith, although he admits some elements from Buddhism as guiding him. Likewise, when Rubin asks Bridge if he has been influenced by previous conscientious objectors, he responds: "I’m very wary of including myself in another honoured lineage because here I am trying to break out of one." In his current posting in Hawai'i, he finds support from another C.O., Jeff Paterson, who leads a team representing Chelsea Manning, as well as Ann Wright, who resigned her Gulf War diplomatic post for the Quaker community. He concludes encouragingly: "The peace/nonviolence/antiwar community in Hawaii is about as robust as they come, and they found me in the nick of time." I wish him and fellow dissidents well, as they question what too few seem to do.

"The vision of blind sleepers such as I"

As readers of this blog know, William T. Vollmann, as a hunt with that search term here will verify, remains one of my favorite authors. Although I find his fiction and essays sometimes too sprawling, and as his fierce determination to remain free of editorial control or publication fends off brevity, Vollmann reveals a restless mind, a vast range, and confident erudition seasoned with moral humility and wise insight.

He begins an essay in the New York Times about the Gnostic scriptures in his typically direct voice: "Have you ever wondered whether this world is wrong for you? A death, a lover’s unabashed indifference, the sufferings of innocents and the absence of definitive answers — don’t these imply some hollowness or deficiency? For my part, the wrongness struck when I was 4 years old. I was at my grandmother’s house, and I saw a cat torture a baby bird." He also, in other accounts, has narrated his failure as he sees it to take care of his younger sister when he was a boy, and how she then drowned. As with me, death haunts him always.

As one who has roamed into Afghanistan before the rise of the Taliban, who has investigated the plight of the poor in Asia and in Latin America, who has roamed the rails of America, and retraced the steps of the natives into the Arctic, the Maritimes, the Virginia estuaries, and the Western plains, Vollmann counters the cant or easy pieties of many of his writing contemporaries with observation.

Similarly, although many of his many books find him not taking on belief directly, he acknowledges here its hold on him. "Hoping to understand the purpose of our situation, I visit possessors of maxims and scriptures. Most of them are kind to me. I love the ritualistic gorgeousness of Catholic cathedrals, the matter-of-fact sincerity with which strangers pray together at roadsides throughout the Muslim world, the studied bravery and compassion in the texts of medieval Jewish responsa, the jovial humility of the Buddhist precept that enlightenment is no reward and lack of enlightenment no loss, the nobility of atheists who do whatever good they do without expectation of celestial candy — not to mention pantheists’ glorifications of everything from elephants to oceans. All these other ways that I have glimpsed from my own lonely road allure me; I come to each as a guest, then continue on to I know not where." His writings strive for compassion, cultivating one's patience for poverty and pain.

I understand his search. "Somewhere beyond us is the true God, or Goddess, who calls us to come home. She is calling me now. As I walk my own many-curving way toward death, I can’t help wondering how awake I am. Hence certain Gnostic lines haunt me. Someone beyond this world has named herself or himself the vision of blind sleepers such as I. This voice calls itself the real voice and insists that it is crying out in all of us. I wish I could hear its cry." He, like me, continues to wonder and wander and study scriptures and listen to accounts, even as he feels distant from many.

He is mature enough to acknowledge the weakness of those before us who have insisted that they channel the divine through themselves. "As a corpus, the scriptures are nearly incoherent, like a crowd of sages, mystics and madmen all speaking at once. But always they call upon us to know ourselves." And, Vollmann is perceptive enough to recognize their appeal, no matter our rationality.

(Image: Fra Angelico, Predella of San Marco Altarpiece, The Healing of Justinian by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian, Museo di San Marco, Florence. I first saw this illustration in this fine book.)

Ag cheannaigh "Pinnochio" i nGaeilge

Cheannaigh mé an cóip seo le Pinnochio le Carlo Collodi an mí seo caite. Bhí dith orm a fháil an leabhar seo ann. Tá mé ag tósu ag léamh san Iódáilis, tar éis an tsaoil.

Mar sin, cén fath ar mhaith liom an leabhar sin i nGaeilge fós? Bheul, measaim go mbeadh suimíuil seo a fháil ina dhá teanga. Is maith liom iad araon, go nádurtha.

Ina theannta sin, tá seo ag foillsiu le Coiste Litríochta Mhúsgrai ina Gaeltacht i gCorcaigh fós. Duirt sé: "Chuir Pádraig Ó Buachalla i nGaelainn an scéal san sa mbliain a 1933 agus d'fhoíllsigh fén dteideal Eachtra Phinocchio." Bhi Ó Buachalla i gcónaí i Naomh Proinsias, mar inimirceach, freisin.

Tharraing Roberto Innocenti na léaráidí an-álainn. Bhí sé leisaithe ag Dáithí Ó Cróinín agus Séan ua Súilleabhain. Is féidir leat é a cheannach ó An Síopa Leabhar na Kennys i nGaillimh mar i rinne me.

Chríochnaigh mé leagan dátheangach (Béarla-Iodáilis) ar líne aréir. Anois, mbeidh mé ag foghlaim faoi an leabhar níos mó ann. Is maith liom an scéal seo tsíog agus molaim é an thabhairt duitsa.

Buying Pinnochio in Irish.

I bought this copy of Pinnochio by Carlo Collodi last month. I wanted to get this book. I am starting to read in Italian, after all.

Therefore, why do I want that book in Irish, too? Well, I reckoned that it'd be interesting to get this in two languages. I like them both, naturally.

Furthermore it is published by the Literary Committee in the Musgrai Gaeltacht in Co. Cork too. They say: "Pádraig Ó Buachalla put the story into Irish in the year 1933 and it was published under the title Adventures of Phinocchio." Ó Buachalla lived as an immigrant in San Francisco, also.

Roberto Innocenti drew the very lovely illustrations. Dáithí Ó Cróinín and Séan ua Súilleabhain revised this version.  You can purchase it from Kennys in Galway as I did. 

I finished an Italian-English bilingual version online last night. Now, I may learn about the book more. I like this fairy story and I recommend it to you.

Is it immoral to serve?

We commonly heard it said "thank you for your service" in post-9/11 America. So, I ask my veteran or current on-duty students if they'd recommend their choice to others contemplating enlisting. They've returned to get degrees on the G.I. Bill; there is a V.A. hospital nearby campus that attracts many. At least a few after their combat come back disabled mentally, others physically. Many others are happy if a bit weary after their tours of duty, including a spirited woman tallying 37 years in the Army at present. Most say they'd encourage others. A "party girl" from Miami turned her life around by choosing to join the Coast Guard. A stalwart Texas student came back with a prosthetic leg and a year of therapy learning to walk on it, but also a determination to stay motivated; he landed a great job and convinced his cousin, also a veteran, to take classes from me a few years later; as different as the quiet, affable one, a young father and quite modest, and his boisterous, tattooed and orange-work suited and greasy pipe fitter booted relative were, they both succeeded, articulately and admirably.

As an aside, after I wrote this original post, in a threaded discussion this week with many high-achieving students in a class made up mostly of veterans, one wrote when we chatted online about the impact of globalization, competition among lower-waged workers with immigrants, the role our effort plays vs. the privilege or discrimination many claim for themselves, and the hardship of getting more than entry-level jobs (despite our government's and economy's much-touted "recovery"):

It annoys me to no end when people look for hand outs because they are X or they did Y. It reminds me of when my battalion was coming back from deployment and our Sergeant Major spoke with us before getting on the planes to bring us back. He told us with no question, but rather 100% certainty "No one cares." The speech is much longer and many other choice words are used but the main message is that no one cares. Not that people don't support the military, or that they won't be appreciative of what we did, but they can not begin to know what we went through. No one cares because they can only sympathize. No one cares because they didn't choose to do what we did. So to expect anything special is ignorant.

That full on hit me in the most when I applied at King's Fish House here in Huntington Beach. They had walk-in interviews and I started out as a server, and then a bus boy because I wasn't qualified to be a server, which I have no background as a server so I didn't blame them. But then got a call back asking me if I wouldn't mind washing dishes because I wasn't qualified to bus tables. Each time the next person would thank me for my service and tell me how much they appreciated what I did. I was very annoyed with them, and have never stepped in that restaurant since. And even though I could tell they sympathized and supported the military, they did not care and they were not going to make a business decision that would not benefit them.

A few disagree with enlisting in hindsight, but very few to date. I stumbled across this today when searching for a different topic entirely, and so I share it. Glen T. Martin argues with Three Reasons Why it is Immoral to Serve in the Military of Any Country. I'm reminded of Max Aue's words near the start of the immense epic by Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones. In my review of this novel a few years ago, I singled out key passages, as these have often been overlooked by critics of this story  told by a gay man, blackmailed, who then joins the SS. He narrates his unsettling version of events.

"If the State one must serve is made up of ordinary folks, some will find themselves on the wrong side of history, then as now, not by a chosen career path or personal preference, but by the pressures of bureaucracy and the exigencies of the moment that pressure people into acting. Not all victims are good and not all executioners are evil, Aue reasons.

The State, both sides agree as do we, must exist, must call its male citizens to take lives in its name and its female ones to serve its demands. Free will vanishes if a soldier is assigned to a concentration camp or mobile killing battalion: "chance alone makes him a killer rather than a hero, or a dead man." (592) We give up the right not to kill and our own right to life, if male, he warns, to do our wartime duty to our masters.
"The real danger for mankind is me, is you. And if you're not convinced of this, don't bother to read any further. You'll understand nothing and you'll get angry, with little profit for you or for me." (21)

The counter-arguments are legion. Google "pacifism" into an image search for angry memes. Despite them, a Quaker image I liked via my review of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, more controversy.
P.S. Thanks to Carrie McIntyre for noting "The Lives of Others" and "Barbara" as congenial with Aue, and to Matt Cavanaugh for urging me to "The Baader-Meinhof Complex," and Four Minutes.

Professor or instructor?

Praising her college education, inspired by a professor whom she never knew was an adjunct, Carmen Maria Machado in a recent New Yorker essay tells how little those enrolled in many courses know about the status or the pay (averaging $2800) of what a non-tenure track professor--or is it, I ask, an instructor-- earns. Of course, as we all agree who do this, "it’s true that there are profound pleasures in teaching: seeing your students figuring things out, and flourishing, is like nothing else I’ve experienced." But doubt may creep in.

Machado narrates how she wrote "Prof." in front of name the first day of class, then erased it, leaving a smudge. Students call her by her first name, anyway. She explains a familiar feeling to me, as I tend to refer to myself as someone who "teaches college humanities" as my institution relies on this model of employment for all, full-time "professors" or part-time "visiting faculty" as "at-will"; this to me goes against the assumptions Machado and I agree are part of the way we regard tenure and faculty.

She admits: "I’m not a professor. If I disappeared at the end of the semester, the school would replace me without much trouble, having invested nothing at all in my career. This sensation—a great responsibility, precariously held—is also like nothing else I’ve experienced." Do we merit the title?

I can connect to Machado's unease as a graduate of a "public Ivy" with a top-ten Ph.D. program in my field. Due to the job market where hundreds of us compete for any secure position, we languish while wishing we had security. Meanwhile, we all perpetuate and worsen the situation of contingent labor.

"I don’t want to give away my expertise for so little. But I don’t want to stop teaching, and I don’t want my students to be afraid to reach out to me after we part, either—I don’t want them to do what I would have done. I thrive on their news: they’re heading to graduate school, or they’re submitting work to be published, or are publishing, or have a new project. I don’t only want to teach; I want teaching to be a career, something that I can afford to keep doing." My students do not go into schools, or higher education very often unless an MBA, but as an executive boasted recently at my employer, a BS grad landed a job. It paid more than I make after nearly twenty years full-time there.

Yes, we never go into this for the money.  Machado concludes: "The irony of this setup has not escaped me: the adjuncts who teach well despite the low pay and the lack of professional support may inspire in their students a similar passion—prompting them to be financially taken advantage of in turn. It strikes me as a grim perversion of the power of teaching. A key lesson in higher education is that few things matter more than good questions—and, if we don’t speak up, students will never know what to ask."  They think faculty everywhere get year-long sabbaticals often, have lots of non-teaching time, low enrollments, light course loads, and perks galore. Machado claims 40% of faculty now are non-tenured, but counting grad students, adjuncts, and full-time non-tenured (the last category often overlooked), it's between 70% and 75% of those teaching U.S. higher education now.

Today my older son presents himself as graduate material, to his classmates and the faculty at the experimental, community-based, liberal-arts college he has had the privilege to attend. My wife's alma mater, and one with which I am proud to have been affiliated if only as a fellow-traveler at two alumni seminars the past two summers, it represents, true, a place with some adjuncts too, and its own financial worries, but it continues to support the intimate ideal of highly qualified, tenured faculty who live and learn among their students daily, a method I wish many more of us could share.

Do as the Romans Did?

 

I share this via my friend Deaghlán Ó Donghaile in Liverpool. He posted this on FB c/o Bruce Fenton. As I blogged about this collision between conventional Christian values debased and the core of countercultural radicalism embedded at least in a few Catholic resisters, so Fenton concurs:

When Jesus was nailed to the cross by Roman soldiers, citizens of the day most likely cheered with the equivalent of "I support our troops."

This is what governments want people to do: cheer for symbols and uniforms rather than ideas. That way it is easy to do what the politicians wish, whether it's killing Jesus Christ because he was a threat to state power or bombing people who are a threat to crony profits.

Those who support symbols such as flags or troops rather than the ideas they represent always think they are doing the right thing, just as nationalist Romans trusted the government and cheered for the soldiers who crucified Jesus. They also likely had a negative reaction to anyone who questioned this. In some cases they are doing the right thing...in many cases they are simply being manipulated by politicians.

If this thought and comparison massively offends you think hard about why: is it based on logic or the feelings that politicians want you to feel? While the Roman citizens and soldiers seem so distant, make no mistake that the nationalistic spirit that supports state abuse exists today in every country, including our own. There are those politicians who do and would do evil and those citizens who would and do stand by and cheer in the face of it because they've been taught this by government.

Elijah's Chair

 On April First, after Alex Gibney's HBO documentary on my hometown's most famous "tax-exempt religion" founded by a pulp novelist aired, noted atheist Neil DeGrasse Tyson dismissed scare claims. “But why aren’t they a religion?” he asked. “If you attend a Seder, there’s an empty chair sitting right there and the door is unlocked because Elijah might walk in. OK. These are educated people who do this. Now, some will say it’s ritual, some will say it could literally happen… It looks like the older those thoughts have been around, the likelier it is to be declared a religion. If you’ve been around 1,000 years you’re a religion, and if you’ve been around 100 years, you’re a cult.” I have some hesitation with Tyson's glib argument, as critiqued since by Steve Neumann. However, as I listened last summer to an audiobook, Janet Reitman's similarly thorough expose that confirms much of what Lawrence Wright's study has uncovered, I wondered about Mormons, and Jesus, Mohammed, and Moses in the same way. Or this documentary on one of my hometown's more recent, odd, spiritual set of seekers, The Source Family. If a cult survives a decade it's on way  to being a sect, and after a century, a religion. As the founders fade and memories get mythologized, in the past, invention replaces oral history with either more of the same or, as in Buddhism, belated compilation and codifications. (Yes, we keep two traditions defying logic: kosher and Elijah's Chair.)

The trouble with the Exodus, like those tablets Joseph Smith claimed to have translated before they vanished, or the historicity of Jesus, the veracity of Mohammed, or what the Buddha really said, all fall into the abyss, lacking first-hand testimony. As I wrote last year, the Exodus may not have happened, at least as we celebrate it with 600,000 fleeing Pharoah's hardened heart and actions. There might have been a small slave revolt, and few hanger-ons, the borderers called "ivrit" could have well hung out with the fugitive rabble.

Two nights ago, we held our seder. My wife narrated her version, complete with a prank she and my older son engineered well on me. But, tired of the triumphal "they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat" storyline, we decided to host our older son, his college friends, and two older, secular Jews with a different take. We've evolved over a quarter-century of this, and so we shared this activity, I post it as it may inspire others out there, who approach with not a fixed identity but an evolving imagination how we tell this story commanded to repeat each year for thousands of them, relevantly:

"The Seder is the annual Jewish celebration commemorating the Exodus from Egypt, which freed the Jewish people from slavery. The story is that God subjected the Egyptian people to plagues which grew more brutal, culminating in the death of the first born son. The tears of thousand mothers finally softened the Pharaoh’s heart. 

We look forward each year to taking a breath, dining together and reveling in the freedom we enjoy.  Jews are commanded to tell the tale, not once, but twice. We have done so dutifully for a quarter of a century. We clean the house and get rid of bread and noodles and cookies in order to simulate the Jews hurried Exodus from Egypt. We do this though because we've always done it. We are proud that at this time Jews all over the world are reflecting on their freedom but the story we're commanded to tell might as well be Cinderella or Hansel and Gretel. The fairy tale trivializes our wonder at our own blessings and brushes the struggle of those less fortunate than we are under the rug. We long for something more real and meaningful and we come to you." (So my wife wrote, and proposed for us to fill out in Comic Sans below. I did so as an example, trying to keep my guest list limited, hint-hint.)

My Seder

My name is:

I would have my Seder at: under the redwoods where my friends Bob + Chris live

The living or not living people I would invite are: 7 Living: Bob, Chris, my wife and sons and girlfriends as applicable; 7 Not-living: Hypatia of Alexandria, "La Malinche," Emma Goldman, Hans + Sophie Scholl, Michael Dillon, Thomas Merton. 

We would eat: a vegetarian meal but a delicious one, cooked by my wife (with help!)

We would celebrate our freedom by: playing music we could all agree on in the background, while discussing ways to advance justice, equality, tolerance, and other genteel values while taking into account our own earnestness and blinkered minds

We would acknowledge those who are not free by: gathering our funds and actions to support the righteous cause of our choice, but neither for profit nor for a politician.

Instead of matzoh for affikomen we would hide: a dog's chew toy as one will be nearby.

Whoever finds the affikomen will get: to donate the amount to a favorite charity

Holy Anger

I opened FB today to find a headline from Mother Jones: "Bernie Sanders goes biblical on income inequality." The elderly Jewish socialist senator from Vermont hangs with the Democrats mostly, sure. But he critiques Obama, Hillary, and his usual allies as too soft on bankers, and too craven to the rich who control more and more of our present fealty and who limit many of our future prospects.

He tells Josh Harkinson, when asked why we should care: "I think this goes back to the Bible. There is something immoral when so few have so much and so many have so little. I don't come to San Francisco very often, but we've driven around the city and seen people sleeping out on the streets. In my state, you've got people working 40, 50 hours a week and going to emergency food shelves because they don't earn enough money to feed their families adequately. You have millions of young people graduating college deeply in debt. They can't get their lives started, can't get married. So I think the issue of income and wealth inequality is in fact a moral issue." He adds that with the losses since my childhood in unions, cheap college tuition, wage equality, and stable employment, that "It's not a question of have we lost the will; it's that the billionaire class is much more aggressive now than it used to be." So, as I have watched during my adult life and my own career, "in the last 35 or 40 years, there has been an increasingly aggressive effort on the part of the top 1 percent to take it all."

I blogged regarding another resister, Franciscan friar Fr. Louis Vitale, six years ago about Passover, peacemaking and identity. I even wrote the priest, sending him a printout of my thoughts, but I never received a reply. My wife remarked: "Maybe he's in jail." For all the careful diplomacy the new Pope Francis has shown, at least he spent a Holy Thursday washing the feet of inmates in a Roman prison.

How social protest gets allied with or against the religious majority, or is it now a minority, rouses us. There's a lot of contention about the First Amendment, as what in the North of Ireland in a similar situation called the "gay cake debate" gets repeated here in Indiana. I remain mystified why the boycotts accelerated against the Hoosiers when 19 states preceded theirs in protecting businesses to not serve those who the proprietors claimed violated their freedom of belief. Regardless, against this,  progressives fought back and denigrated, trolled, and have shut down already offending enterprises.

Jay Michaelson, a Jewish Buddhist gay rights lawyer-activist weighs in: "On the LGBT side, it’s time to stop calling religious people bigots and homophobes. I oppose the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, with every fiber of my ideological being. But there is still an enormous gulf between socially conservative believers and homophobic thugs. We need to take these beliefs seriously.

On the conservative side, it’s time to recognize that the vast majority of Americans — three- quarters, according to polls — believe it is wrong to discriminate against gay people. The people have spoken, the courts have (mostly) spoken, and this is the law of the land." As often, he offers a sensible view.

I'm not here to rant on. I've written about my own beliefs and how they shift often. It's easy to take potshots at organizations promising us pie in the sky and fewer worries here, as long as we sign on. I supported last year some entities from within the Catholic Church who do good works, and who need more sponsorship than the Jesuits, Franciscans, or government grants can support. Maybe some see me as hypocritical for that, but firsthand I have witnessed and benefited from their outreach in my own coming of age, so why not pay back a bit to those who gave their lives to help youths like me?

I realize the difficulty as the few friars become a global order, or the reforming clerics turn the pope's  trusted operatives. Yet, today many strive to take in whomever needs a boost, among the poor, and they ask for no surrender of one's mind or identity. However, the bad press generated by others duping the needy in terms of enlightenment and salvation rouses me to what my dad said, in the context of Jesus driving out the moneychangers, as "holy anger." But the continued tension between institutions bent on profit, as the Alex Gibney documentary based on Lawrence Wright's study of my hometown's biggest success story making a concocted "religion" tax-exempt shows, will perpetuate itself no matter if it's the LDS 180 years ago, or the past 60 years creating a relentlessly celebrity-craven and prison-camp supported "church." Lynne Stuart Parramore at Salon concludes: "even if we got rid of" that offender, "somewhere, out there in America, is another young hustler searching for meaning and money. Someone with charisma, stratospheric ambition and a few screws loose. As surely as the sun rises, her religion is just now slouching toward Hollywood waiting to be born."

The war on the humanities

 
The war on the humanities, as I have had cause to observe during my career in the trenches or tranches as a student with a Ph.D. in English and thirty-plus years teaching at every level from basic ESL to upper-level college, continues. Alex Preston, in the Guardian, documents the situation in Britain. Margaret Thatcher's regime implemented a relentless march towards imposition of practical rather than philosophical (in the root sense of the term) programs. These push STEM rather than liberal arts coursework, and force the remaining majors outside the vocational strata into a systematically applied set of standards demanding accountability and measurable results. In the U.S, as I can testify from my campus experience, it's not "downsizing" when administrators get the word out to the masses during a "downturn," but timely "right-sizing" given market demands for careerism.

"Currently fixed in the crosshairs are the disciplines of the humanities – arts, languages and social sciences – which have suffered swingeing funding cuts and been ignored by a government bent on promoting the modish, revenue-generating Stem (science, technology, engineering, maths) subjects. The liberal education which seeks to provide students with more than mere professional qualifications appears to be dying a slow and painful death, overseen by a whole cadre of what cultural anthropologist David Graeber calls 'bullshit jobs': bureaucrats hired to manage the transformation of universities from centres of learning to profit centres. As one academic put it to me: 'Every dean needs his vice-dean and sub-dean and each of them needs a management team, secretaries, admin staff; all of them only there to make it harder for us to teach, to research, to carry out the most basic functions of our jobs.' The humanities, whose products are necessarily less tangible and effable than their science and engineering peers (and less readily yoked to the needs of the corporate world) have been an easy target for this sprawling new management class."

Marina Warner is cited by Preston, from her time at the U. of Essex, which when I contemplated (alas I could not afford this, as it was the height of Thatcherism, a year before the miner's strike) attending graduate school there. I also was told by a British professor about East Anglia, and Birmingham. All three were a bastion of freethinking, interdisciplinary education. Now, administrators crack down, and demand profit. Austerity rules and restricts. Dame Warner laments. For me, it's as if time travel back for me thirty-plus years happened: "the management structures being imposed on universities are nothing like one would see in a real business in the current economic environment, but one from 30 years ago. 'It’s so 80s. It’s Reaganomics.”'

As Graeber elaborates in "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs": "A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well." His work strives to advance anarchism that challenges the corporate stranglehold.

If as we in the West are told, we need to be more like China, what avails us?  Preston warns: "Only 10% of Chinese college graduates are deemed employable by multinational businesses, according to research cited by Yong in his book. The main complaint? They are too regimented, predictable and lack the creative spark."

At East Anglia, Sarah Churchwell weighs in as Preston quotes her at length: 'What has changed radically in the last 10 years is that they’re trying to turn everything into a for-profit business,' said Churchwell. And that’s bullshit. Universities are not for profit. We are charitable institutions. What they’re now doing is saying to academics: ‘You have to be the fundraisers, the managers, the producers, you have to generate the incomes that will keep your institutions afloat.’ Is that really what society wants – for everything to become a marketplace, for everything to become a commodity? Maybe I’m just out of step with the world, but what some of us are fighting for is the principle that not everything that is valuable can or should be monetised. That universities are one of the custodians of centuries of knowledge, curiosity, inspiration. That education is not a commodity, it’s a qualitative transformation. You can’t sell it. You can’t simply transfer it.”

Where I teach, a different model rules vs. that where my sons attend. They revel in small classes led by professors, many of Ivy League training and at one institution, some of the leading writers and thinkers that the proximity of New York City to the Hudson Valley can entice under a nationally-known president and an innovative approach. And the other model is student-driven, community-based, and radically collaborative. While they like their parents will graduate into the kind of employment prospects that may in Graeber's estimation make our world more than a "lesser place," I hope they sustain the legacy in which I have been prepared and which I try to transmit to STEM and accounting students, a glimpse at least of "centuries of knowledge, curiosity, inspiration" which I believe all students, no matter their major or career, can learn from.