Hildegarde

Let’s put it this way:  a day always starts off a good one when it takes me this long to get around to the blog.

The blog is always what I do last, after I do the work somebody is going to pay me for, and when that work gets difficult and conflicted, I tend to give up on it before I get incredibly conflicted about the work and then can’t do anything with it for several days.

 But today things went well, and that included the fact that I dumped nearly 1200 words I’d been unhappy about since yesterday, when things did not go well.

I am, it seems, something of a weak sister about my production for the day.  Most of the younger writers I meet seem to be doing at least 1800 words, and many of  them seem to be doing 3000.  They post their totals on FB and bemoan the days when they do only 1200, which is what I do when I’m really rolling along.

This is not, as far as I can tell, a problem that’s arrived with age.  I was writing at about the same pace in 1984, when I first started writing Gregor.

On the other hand, this is also not an absolute.  One of the best books I ever wrote–Precious Blood, the second in the Gregor series–I wrote in 30 days flat, in a sort of white heat that would not quit.

That was even more remarkable than it sounds at the moment, because Matt was only a year old, and the word for Matt as a baby was: Awake.

White heat marathons, though, are unusual in my writing life.  With fiction, I seem to be the poster child for Slow and Steady Wins The Race.

But things have changed in all this, as I’ve gotten older.

One of those things is, oddly enough, that I have a lot less self confidence about my writing, and I’ve reached about zero self confidence about my ability to understand why books sell.

Things have changed so much in the last fifteen or twenty years that I no longer recognize the field.

What’s worse, I have no idea how long it’s been going on. 

When  I started out, I used to feel that mystery writers and mystery readers had a compact of sorts.  Mystery readers wanted certain kinds of things in their books.

For fair play traditionals, that meant a good puzzle plus writing that wasn’t jarringly ungrammatical or amateurish plus good characters who were both plausible and inherently interesting.

Do all those things and you wouldn’t necessarily be a best seller, but you’d do well enough and solidly year after year, and you’d even get a little respect.

Well, I do well enough and solidly, I suppose, and my reviews sometimes sound like hagiographies.  and I seem to have a small but solid core of readers who want everything I do.

But somehow, the whole thing seems wrong lately. 

Part of it is the emergence, in mystery fandom, of what I’ve always thought of as the “romance reader paradigm.”

Back in the early 1980s, I did some work on a romance line, and in the process went to a few romance conventions, and what always struck me at the time was just how completely awful romance readers were to the authors they said they enjoyed.

The attitude seemed to be: we made you, we can unmake you, you’d damned well better give us what we want.

It was as if the writers were the worst kinds of hacks, whose only function was to serve up the particulars on demand.

I remember thinking how much better off I was in  mysteries, where the fans tended to treat writers like…writers.

There are now plenty of mystery fans who treat mystery writers the way those romance fans at the conventions treated romance writers. 

Most of them don’t read Gregor, so I don’t actually come across them very often, but every once and a while one of them will pick up a book, and then the mail will start:

Politics has no business in fiction.  Novels shouldn’t mention politics at all.

What was all that stupid stuff about the guy cutting off his own leg to save his dog?  You don’t need stupid stuff like that.  Books are supposed to be fun!

I won’t even begin to go into the number of e mails I get demanding to know who I think I am  using all those big words.

I’m not saying all mystery fans are like that.  I get good mail as well as bad, and some of it even teaches me something.

But there seems to be more and more of this other stuff every year, and there is no doubt that the cozy-as-fluffy-train-wreck sort of story is selling like crazy.

Seriously, if you want to make money writing traditional mysteries these days, do what I suggested before:  tie your corpse upside down to the town church steeple with a dead pelican in his mouth, and don’t worry for a moment that you don’t have an explanation for it that makes any sense. Nobody will care.

Or, rather, lots of people will care–because they’ll love it.

One of the complaints I get now and then is that I don’t really know how to write a modern mystery book–nothing much happens in my stories.

Of course, by the end of any one of my novels you’ve go a minimum of two people dead and at least two others whose private lives have crashed and burned or sometimes even taken.

But you know, what the hell.

Unfortunately, the other end of the field doesn’t make me happy either.

Bleh.

Not high on the genre today.

Wondering if those corpses on steeples mean that romance fans followed romance writers when they changed fields–or if the genre is just plain dead.

So here we are again, at my local news, because over the week-end we had something of a story.

Around about Sunday, a couple of hikers came across a vehicle obviously abandoned on the side of a popular hiking trail. 

What’s more, the vehicle stank to high heaven, and the stink was–well, the hikers thought it was distinctive.

Not being idiots, and having a sinking feeling that the stench was, um, not something they wanted to get involved with, the hikers called the cops.

The cops came, and what was in the vehicle turned out to be a corpse, wrapped in garbage bags and stuffed inside a duffel bag.

The basic story is here

http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2013/07/24/news/connecticut/739324.txt

and if you look at it, you’ll note the news about the case that arrived yesterday:

The police have arrested three people “in connection” to it.

If you’re a mystery writer, you’re probably sitting there going:  so what?

Bodies left in abandoned cars, bodies stuffed into suitcases, bodies left dangling from English pub signs– a body in a duffel bag isn’t even all that inventive. 

True story or not,  it’s hard to know why we should be interested.

Well, what I’m interested in is not as clear in the link I posted as it has been in some of the stories that have come out since.  Those stories had pictures, and matching the pictures with the names, what you find is this.

The three people arrested in connection with this murder are a black man, a Latino man, and a white woman.

It’s like some sappy UNICEF poster gone horribly wrong.

And that makes me think of something else, which is that my life is much more thoroughly segregated now than it was in 1968, or even well before the Civil Rights Movement got into serious gear.

When I was in grade school, my little town–and it was VERY little–had at least two black families whose children attended our schools.  I was best friends with one of them in second grade.  One of the others introduced me to the music of James Brown a few years later.

This may sound like a little black drop in the bucket, but the ratios were not bad for a town whose high school graduating class reached an all time (until then) high of 80 whole people in 1964.

The percentages in our  high school weren’t as good, but the president of my senior class was a black woman, she certainly wasn’t the only black woman there.

(There were no men.  It was a girls’ school.)

These days, my guess is that the only reason I see black people at all is that I teach. 

If there are black people living anywhere in the town where I am  now, I have never seen them.  You can go down to Main Street any day you want, shop in the grocery store, buy stamps at the post office, wander in and out of the little shops, and never see a single African American face.

This is not the same thing as saying that the town is monochromatically white.   It’s not.  We have significant numbers of people of Asian descent, mostly Chinese, but some Thai and Vietnamese and Korean.  We have a growing number of people from India and Pakistan. 

We just don’t have any African Americans.  And the very few Latinos we have are what the press claimed George Zimmerman was, but he wasn’t–they are “white Hispanics.”  Meaning that if you saw them on the street, or even talked to them, you wouldn’t know they were Latino at all unless they gave you their last names.

This situation is even odder than it seems, because we live very close to a small city that is heavily black and Latino–heavily enough so that two of the high schools there are almost exclusively black and Latino.

There  has been so  little spillover, there might as well have been nothing at all.

In fact, I’d be willing to bet that, outside the major cities, most white Americans have no direct contact with black Americans at all, or at least none beyond the level of getting their fast food from a black counter server.

In this town, you wouldn’t get even that much contact.  The crews at the local McDonald’s and Burger King are solidly working class w hite, with an occasional “white Hispanic” thrown in.

By now I’m sure a number of you are nodding your  heads vigorously and gearing up to tell me that, yes, America is a virulently racist country and that you’ve been trying to tell me that for a long time.

But I don’t think that’s the answer here, or at least I don’t think that that’s the answer here as that answer is usually  meant.

I know a fair number of the real estate people in this town, and I know that if you ask them, they’ll tell you that in all the time they’ve been working, they’ve had very few or even no African American clients show up at the door.

It’s not that anybody has refused to sell to African Americans.  It’s that nobody has had any African Americans to sell to.

In other words, the self segregation is at least as strong among African Americans in this area as it is among whites, and it may be stronger.

And the result is that a lot of white American now live in a country where black people just don’t exist at all.

Or, worse, exist only on news broadcasts and then almost always only if they’ve been arrested for doing something wrong.

And that’s an interesting issue in and of itself, because the only black people on my television set when I was growing up were Civil Rights leaders and marchers.

If black people were committing crimes in those days, I didn’t know about it, because the local news usually didn’t report on it. 

What “those people” did was considered to be  not very i nteresting to the rest of us, and therefore not really  necessary to report.

Changing that situation, getting the local news across the country to report on African American “concerns,” was one of the big goals of the Civil Rights movement, and I sometimes wonder if the law of unintended consequences didn’t go completely haywire in that case.

In the 1950s, there were formal barriers to integration, and sometimes informal ones, and a near media blackout on the doings of one particular race,  but we lived together and we saw each other face to face, and we judged each other on the basis of what we knew of each other face to face.

Now the formal barriers are gone, and most of the informal barriers are gone, and the nighly news sometimes seems to consist of nothing but reports on what black people do, all of them bad.

And we don’t know each other face to face, so we make up our  minds on the only things we know–

Except in one place.

In the worst of the small-time petty crime pits of our dying industrial citites, integretation seems to have arrived at the place we all said we wanted it to be in 1964.

For something like the  last five days, while most of the rest of the world has been worrying about royal babies and George Zimmerman playing Good Samaritan and I don’t know what else, I’ve been following a story about a Norwegian woman who was arrested in Dubai for having “illegal sex” after she called the police and reported she’d been raped.

In fact, she was more than arrested. She was actually convicted, of that and of drinking alcohol and of making a false report to the police, and sentenced to 16 months in jail.

You can find the story here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/dubai-rape-case-norwegian-woman-receives-pardon-after-being-jailed-8726071.html

And, as you can tell, it had a happy enough ending–the woman was “pardoned” and sent home to Norway, which is probably where she wanted to be.

If you had been watching this story the way I have, however, you’d know two things.

First, getting convicted of having “sex outside marriage” and jailed for it after reporting a rape happens to a fair number of Western women working in or visiting the United Arab Emirates, and

Second, happy endings are  not the usual result of the mess they find themselves in.  In fact, in the last two years, at least six women have been charged and convicted of having illegal sex when they tried to report rapes, and all of them did jail time. 

At least one of them went to jail for eleven months. If the Norwegian woman hadn’t been pardoned–and the only reason she was was because of  the international outcry–she would have gone to jail for 16 months.

Now, there is a part of me, watching this over the days, that gets a little impatient.

It’s an Arab country.  It operates on Islamic law.  Islamic civilizations are not famous for being good to women.  Whatever made THIS woman think her rape charge would be taken seriously?  Or treated as anything but a lie told by a whore?

There are things about this case in particular, too, that make me impatient–she’s in a misogynist country and she gets so drunk she can’t perceive that she’s being taken to the wrong apartment?

No, of course, that doesn’t mean she was “asking for it,” and he still had no right to use her body against her will–but, hell, any sane person would have been expecting it. 

But in the end, what really got my attention was this:  the fact that UAE authorities assume all rape reports are false and that the woman is just making excuses and ought to be jailed for behaving like a whore ISN’T NEWS.

The six or so other women who ran into this same problem, all from EU countries, should have been known to authorities in those countries, and to Brussels.

In other words, the fact that a woman who is raped in the UAE should NOT call the police was already known to both the foreign services and the companies who employ Western women to work there.

This is what orientation is for.  It’s also what state departments are for–or part of what they’re for. 

When I go overseas–or at least, when I used to–I can go to the State Department web site and get little “advisory” things that give me just this kind of information. 

Do EU countries not provide their citizens with this kind of information?  Do they provide it, but the citizens don’t go looking for it?

And shouldn’t the companies that hire Western women to work in Islamic states inform them of this kind of thing?

And hasn’t this happened often enough in the last two years–I’m talking 2011 to 2013–that there should be a GENERAL advisory given to any woman who indicates she’s going to the UAE?

This whole thing feels to me as if–I don’t know.

It’s as if all the EU countries whose female citizens had been subjected to t his nonsense decided to treat it as if it weren’t there. 

The only reason this latest case result in the woman’s being able to receive a “pardon” and go home was that there was a media outcry.  If the case had gone unreported in the international press as the others had, this woman would be sitting in jail right now.

Not all the books I’ve been unearthing in my office have been light and shiny ones like the one on Piero della Francesca I talked about yesterday.  I read a lot of books about policy, and some of those have come to the surface, too.

One of those is a thing called The Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism, by Robert T. Pennock.   Pennock is (was?) an assistant professor of philosophy at the College of New Jersey.  That  name always shakes me up a little, because at the beginning of the country, “The College of New Jersey” was the official name of the place we now call Princeton.  This College of New Jersey seems to have nothing to do with Princeton, although from what I can see from their web site, they do like to go on about how very selective they are.

At any rate, Pennock was teaching philosophy there when he wrote this book, which is an analysis of the arguments put forward by people like Philip Johnson and Michael Behe and the then newly emergent Intelligent Design movement.

I say then newly emergent, because this book is not in any way new.  It was published in 1999.  At that point, there had recently been a couple of high-profile court cases on evolution in public education.  Some of them had concentrated on positive efforts to get Creation Science or Intelligent Design taught in publc schools. Others had concerned themselves with negative efforts to undermine the confidence of students in evolution as a fact as well as evolution as a theory.

The latter are those things like getting stickers put in biology textbooks to say evolution is “only a theory” or demands by school districts that the textbooks they buy not discuss evolution in any way.

(In that last case, what textbook publishers do is to take out the word “evolution” and replace it with something like “change over time,” and then just explain evolution as usual.  They have to.  Modern biology is based on evolution.  Without it, there’s nothing you can say about biology at all.)

Very often, when I come across books I haven’t seen for a while but that I remember with admiration, I reread them. 

And I took this book into the living room with me with just that in  mind.  It was well written.  It was informative.  It had provided me with a lot of useful information.  It’s always a good idea to revisit all that.

After I’d had the book out for about an hour, I changed my mind.  No, I didn’t remember anything discreditable about the book, and I hadn’t gone off the  idea  of reading about evolution.

What became clearer and clearer to me as I flipped through the thing, though, is that the nature of the evolution wars have changed significantly since 1999.

When Pennock made his case, the great push was to find away around court rulings that  banned Creationism in public school classrooms.  It was, in fact, a lawyer’s movement.  Philip Johnson was one, and the Discovery Institute had them. 

One of the things Pennock does very well in his book is to show how Johnson, especially, uses counsel-for-the-defense strategies to try to create “reasonable doubt” in the minds of laypeople, therefore–at least theoretically–making them more amenable to installing Intelligent Design in the curriculum.

The strategy did not work, and the whys and wherefores of why  it did not work are interesting in themselves.

But Pennock’s is not a book about that.  It is set of arguments meant to be  used by supporters of evolution in the particular kind of evolution war occuring at that time.

From what I can tell, that particular kind of evolution war is no longer occuring.

I don’t mean that we’re not fighting about evolution any longer.

Sometimes it feels to me that we’re not only still fighting, but that we’re fighting harder.

It’s just that the nature of the argument has changed.

In 1999, science still  had the upper hand.  The Intelligent Design people, and even t he Creationist  proper people, usually went to great lengths to at least appear scientifically respectable. 

These days, it’s as if the Creationist side has stopped caring. More and more school districts with Creationist-friendly school boards seem to be simply installing whatever version of Creationism they want to teach and daring the other side to go to court,  or plastering their curricula with anti-evolution messages and letting whoever wants to complain complain.

Fifteen years ago, most people arguing against teaching evolution in the schools were convinced that their fellow citizens had a great respect and admiration for science, even if they didn’t themselves.  And they assumed that that respect and admiration had to be placated, if nothing else.

Now it’s almost as if they’re convinced of the exact opposite–that their fellow citizens disdain science just as much as they do, that to designate something as “science” now is to use a pejorative.

And, of course, that their fellow citizens will agree with them.

This would be bad  news no matter what the circumstance were that made it show up, but it makes me much more nervous because I’m almost certain that the evolution wars are not about evolution.

Dozens of good and dedicated men and women spend their time these days trying to convince people that evolution is true.  They marshal evidence, outline arguments, put up web sites with links to all the data.

And none of it matters.

I have a friend with whom I’ve been arguing about evolution for years.  Every time we do, I send her a link to TalkOrigins and their transitional fossils FAQ.  It’s all laid out there, transition after transition, transitions within species, between species,  in long descent lines from one species to another to a third.

There are nearly 30,0o0 documented cases, all properly footnoted and everything.

Every time we have this argument, I send her there.  Then the argument stops, and when it starts up again six or ten months later, it’s as if she’s never heard of TalkOrigins before.

Part of this  may be self protection.  She adheres to a brand of Protestantism that insists she take Genesis more or less literally, and she doesn’t want to endanger her faith.

But I think the bigger problem is this:  she doesn’t bother to look at the evidence, because the truth or falsity of evolution is beside the point.

Evolution isn’t what we’re really talking about.

Every once in a while, I have thi s fantasy that I will one day be able to establish a personal schedule that will never have to change. 

Part of that schedule would be what I think of as Sacrosanct Sunday Mornings, a time when I would have to do absolutely nothing but listen to music and read. 

In fact, I’d have Sacrosanct Sundays, period, where all I would have to do was listen to music, read, run a DVD or two, and mostly glide into cooking Sunday dinner. 

Since I actually enjoy cooking, the Sacrosanctness of the Sunday would not be broken by that last bit.   I could just glide right up to it and then pick something really complicated to make to round off the day.

This being the real world, I am nowhere close to my ideal. 

At the moment, I’m finishing a book on which I have a deadline.  This means the first thing I do when I get up in the morning, before the tea steeps even, is to boot up the computer and try to get into the heads of some very unpleasant people.

This morning, though, I got what I guess was a little lucky.  I usually get up around 4.  Today, I got up at 2, tried to go back to sleep, found I was wide awake, tried to go back to sleep and then gave up.

Then I came downstairs, booted up the computer, steeped the tea and did the work.

It was then that the sort of good luck happened.  Having gotten up that early, I found, when I finished work, that it wasn’t time to Start The Day.  It was only about the time I usually got up to work.

I therefore marched back out into the living room, put on Paul O’dette’s Alla Venetiana, and read the first of two essays that m ake up a little book called The Piero della Francesca Trail.

This is not a book that is new to me.  I bought it and read it years ago, at which point it disappeared into my office and was never seen again–until a couple of days ago, when I found it while plowing through the place wondering where something else was.

This is also not a book in the way I usually think of books.

What I mean is that it’s not exactly book length.

It consists of two essays, one short and one long.  The short one is by Aldous Huxley–yes, the Brave New World Huxley–and is called “The Best Picture.” It’s about the della Francesca Resurrection.   The long essay is by John Pope-Hennessy and is called “The Piero della Francesca Trail.”  It covers the entire body of della Francesca’s work.

Two essays do not a book  make, of course, and the volume is very slim, but it would have been even slimmer if it  had not included page after page after page of color plates. 

The artwork is well produced and absolutely gorgeous, even though the pages aren’t the slick stuff that sometimes feels like plastic. 

Artwork in a book about Piero della Francesca is  pretty much essential, since so much of what he did is tucked away in churches and muncipal buildings and museums in and around Urbino.  What’s  more, a few of those  places “around” Urbino are…how shall we put it?–out of the way.

Very out of the way.

The small press that put out the book still has a page up for it,  here:

http://www.littlebookroom.com/products/piero-della-francesca-trail

It markets the book as a travel volume, and The Little Bookroom seems to specialize in travel, food and wine and speciality  items.  I checked their available notecards, but there were none with della Francesca paintings on them. 

Granted,  he’s not exactly decorative. People  might find him a little intense on a notecard.

Or maybe a notecard would just be ironic, considering the message of some of della Francesca’s paintings.

For what it’s worth, I think Huxley is wrong.  I think the best picture–in the world, not just in della Francesca’s work; Huxley  meant in the world, too–

Anyway, I think the best picture in the world is this  one

http://www.wga.hu/html_m/p/piero/3/04flage1.html

It’s become customary lately to rename this painting something-or-the-other about St. Jerome, and that’s the title of it Pope-Hennessy uses, but it has been The Flagellation to so many generations that the new name doesn’t quite seem to stick except for professionals.

Under one name or the other, I still think it’s the best painting in the world, ever.  And under one name or the other, I think it still has the same underlying message. 

If you’re interested in Paul O’dette, there’s some stuff up on YouTube.  I don’t suppose it says much to tell you that  he’s he go-to guy for Lute, but he is.

Anyway, there  is absolutely nothing interesting about any of this to anyone except me.  There is no grand societal message–well, della Francesca has one, but I don’t.  There’s no speculation on the death of Western civilization or moaning about endemic stupidity or arguing with the wrongheaded.

This is just  here because I love it, and it makes me happy. 

And I’m going to go spend the day with  it, at least  until  it’s time to do something about the chicken.

I thought about starting this blog post by pointing out that what we usual call a True Believer is much more likely to be a Sadist than a Masochist.

But I think that, right now, I’m going to take that as read, and go back to Socrates, or at least the Socrates of our imagination.

Let’s start here:

My best guess is that, although most people are neither Sadists nor Masochists, almost all people are hardwired to acquire some form of morality.

I think of this as on the same terms as the way we are hardwired for language. 

None of us is born with an innate ability to speak French, but we are all born with an innate ability to speak.

If we weren’t we’d never learn to speak anything at all.

I think that in the same way, we are born with an innate ability to form and conform to moral codes–not any one particular code, but SOME code.

We have an innate sense of right and wrong, fair and unfair, good and evil, and we hang the details on the framework.

I’ll leave something else up for grabs, since I’m just speculating here.

Noam Chomsky, back when he was doing actual academic work instead of making a career of foaming at the mouth in a hail of cultural cliches,  posited that our hardwiring for language came with something he called “deep grammar.”  “Deep grammar” was suppose to be a bare-bones skeleton of linguistic structure that all languages share because they must share it.  It’s how our brains  understand language and how our brains make it.

I am aware that in the years since, there has been quite a lot of criticism of this idea.  It’s an idea that has always appealed to me, though, because it always seemed to me to be logical.

And such a concept for moral behavior and moral ideas would at least explain why every known moral code on the planet shares at least a small set of moral rules.  And that’s in spite of the vast variety of other rules, some of them downright perverse.

That being said, I think that if we look around at how people grow and behave, we can see that they learn what is moral and what is not not so much from a set of rules we are given in Sunday School or at the dinner table, than by example.

I don’t mean here that we tend to follow the examples of our neighbors and friends and families, although we do.   I think we model our behavior on such people.

But the examples I mean are larger cultural ones.  And they’re not specific in the ways you would think.

Every society, every culture, every civilization has a set of heroines and heroes, villains and traitors, whose personal stories provide us with the pictures of what it means to behave well or badly.

But the pictures they provide are deeper than superficial.  When we see Socrates dying by drinking hemlock, or Christ dying on the cross, what we get is not necessarily the specific moral codes these two men operated by, but the fact of their martyrdom.

We don’t take away “standing up for your ideas is good” or “promoting peace and brotherhood is good” although we may take away those, too.

What we take away first and foremost is that martyrdom is good.

And, to take that even farther, that victims are good.

Both the highest expressions of human morality this civilization has are images of victims. 

That’s interesting in and of itself, because the idea that being a victim made you holy or righteous was not one the Greeks held in any esteem, and the Romans would have found it completely laughable. More than laughable.

It can be a hard idea to take even now.  Paul Kurtz, founder of what is now the Centers for Inquiry, once opined that if Jesus had really been God, he wouldn’t have come to earth as a poor carpenter and he wouldn’t have been executed in a shameful way by the forces of Rome.

And, yes, I do realize that Kurtz flamingly missed the point.

Still, it was an idea that the followers and friends of Socrates promoted after his death, for obvious reasons. And it was an idea that was accepted, about Socrates, by many literate people in Greece and Rome.

But the idea only really got going with the rise of Christianity.

The skeletal structure of Christianity presents us with the example of the Victim as Lord, and the Victim as Good–the Victim who is blessed and sanctified by his victimization.

Being a victim makes you good.  Being the champion of victims makes you approach the good. 

Being not at all a victim makes you–what?

I think the answer is: fair game.

I think that’s what ties those two articles together, the bullying one about Paula Deen and the masochistically self absorbed one about the young woman and her encounter with racism at the bike stand.

Large segments of this society have stripped away all the particulars from Christianity.  They don’t believe in the virgin birth or the substitutionary atonement or the resurrection of the dead.  They  have jettisoned most of the basic moral details of Christian life.  They’ve got absolutely no use for chastity and they’re not much interested in living lives of poverty and obedience, except insofar as they can recast their comfortable middle class amenities as “poor” next to the “one percent.”

But one thing they have kept is that image of the Victim as righteous–not because of what he is a victim of, but because he is a victim at all.

A victim is good by definition.  His victimhood gives him the only moral authority available to anyone. 

And that’s what I meant when I said that it doesn’t really  matter what really happened to lead Socrates to execution, or even what really happened to lead Jesus there.  More people remember the whys and wherefores of the Jesus story than remember the story about Socrates–but they don’t care, and it doesn’t stick in th eir heads.

What sticks in their heads is that image.

And that is why this civilization is not modern or secular or whatever.

It’s specifically and ineradicably post Christian.

And I feel like I’m blithering.

So, it’s just past the middle of July, and my left eye has done its usual trick for the summer. 

I don’t know what it is, but I get some kind of allergic reaction thing in it.  I would go into the details, but they get fairly disgusting, so just leave it at the fact that I start out the day with this thing sort of halfway all right.  Then by the time I get to the evening, I basically can’t see.

I mean, I can see.  I just can’t see well enough to read.  And it’s unpleasant.  And I’m miserable.

I assume that this must be something in the air.  It always comes at the same time every year.  It always does the same thing to me.

If I could figure out what the thing was, I’d go out and make it extinct.

All this is by way of saying that I’ve been like this for the last two days, and today it looks like I’m getting to the end of  it.  This is obviously good news, but I’m still favoring the eye a bit, so what follows may or may not actually be finished today.

Then I’m going to go lie down with an ice cube wrapped in a paper towel on my eye, because that is what makes it feel better.

Let me start out by saying that the reactions to my last post were more or less what I expected them to be.

We are all, very naturally,  more worried about the harridans, as Mique called them, than we are about the tortured inward looking people who only beat up themselves.

Let us call those people the Sadists, and they are, throughout history, the most dangerous people alive.

They’re far more dangerous to your ordinary everyday thug, intellectual or physical.  Thugs know they are thugs.  They even know, at the very least, that what they are doing is at least considered morally wrong by everybody around them.  They think it’s rank idiocy to care, but that’s another issue.

Sadists are something else.  They are convinced–absolutely, unshakably convinced–that they are righteous while the rest of us are  not.  And, what’s more, they are convinced that their righteousness gives them the absolute right to whip other people into shape, and by any means necessary.

The man who wrote the Paula Deen article I posted a while back is a Sadist in this sense. 

His principle interest is in enforcing his definition of good and evil on everybody else, and to cause as much damage as possible when he thinks anybody has gotten out of line.

And he’ll have ample chances to find people out of line.  In fact, it would be almost impossible for any of us to escape being added to the “evil” column, since his standard of right and wrong is not about behavior, but about thoughts and ideas and feelings.

You can control your behavior, if you work at it.  You can almost certainly not control your thoughts and ideas and emotions. 

And Sadists almost assuredly know it.

The woman who wrote the article about her experience with the Latino man and his racially charged attitudes was not a Sadist.

She was not interesting in imposing her ideas about right and wrong on anybody else.  She was only interested in other people’s behavior to the extent that it demanded a response from her.

It was  herself and her own responses that she was worried about.  It was her own deepseated evil she was looking to expunge, while at the same time admitting that that evil never could be expunged.

She, too, defines “being moral” as a matter of thoughts and ideas and emotions, and in so doing she is stuck in the place where  nothing she can ever do will ever wipe out that guilt, or give her absolution for (supposed) crimes.

She is, in other words, a Masochist.

And about that I wanted to say three things.

First is that Masochists outnumber sadists in any more movement by a good ten or twenty to one.

Second is that Sadists could not get themselves into positions of power without Masochists.  Masochists provide the ballast without which Sadists could never get any traction. 

Your average ordinary person does not think like either a Sadist or a Masochist.  If Sadists show up and there are no Masochists to follow them, their entire movement falls apart, because it has to. 

But the third and most important thing is this–I think that the Masochist orientation is inborn and ineradicable.

It’s not something we’re taught.  It’s not the result of a childhood of abuse.  It’s not a artefact of Christianity or Islam or even B.F. Skinner’s imfamous box.

It’s a temperament, and inborn “way of being” that nothing will ever change.  

If you’re born that way, the only real question is which set of moral rules you’ll land on to express your utter and unbearable unworthiness.

This particular type of personality has been recognized almost everywhere, and in Christianity it became one of the casual proofs of the existence of God.

We know God exists, the Medieval sermons said, because we recognize in ourselves those deepseated feelings of guilt that tell us that we have transgressed the moral law.

We have those feelings of guilt even when we don’t know the moral law, or when we know one–not Christian, and therefore not true–that we t hink we’re following perfectly.

Christianity at least has a response to this dilemma.  It says that we’re right not to feel worthy, and right to feel that nothing we can do will ever make us worthy.  But in the end, that doesn’t  matter.  Christ is worthy, and Christ died to pay the debts incurred by our unworthiness, and to make us clean.

The  young woman who wrote that second piece on her encounter with the Latino man has, unfortunately for her, fallen into a moral system that provides no such out. 

The best she can hope for is to spend the rest of her life in an agony of guilt that can never be alleviated, never mind forgiven. 

But if you look a little beyond this, you will see that there is another effect–

She may spend her life in an agony of guilt and self flagellation–but it will be a life that concentrates forever and always on herself.

No  matter how much she talks about “listening” to “marginalized” people, she is never actually listening to anything but her own internal drama.

She is the star of this movie, and nothing and nobody will ever dethrone her from the central importance in that particular narrative.

The Masochistic temperament is, first and foremost, the very ultimate in solipsism.

And maybe that’s the point.

I’d better go put an ice cube on this eye.

From my sophomore year, I attended a private Catholic girls school some  miles from my home.  It was a place run by nuns still in full habit (the “change” wouldn’t come until graduation week my senior year) and filled with girls who were trying to be good.

I can remember how odd I thought that last thing was, even at the time, and I’ve thought of it on and off over the years since.  What brought it up this time was this

Okay, I’m going to try something of a tricky maneuver here.  It’s tricky mostly because I want to start in what is probably going to seem like left field, make an enormous loop around a couple of millennia of history, and end up–well, we’ll end up where we end up.

Let’s start with this

         m) Xenophon.  “Apology: Socrates’ Defense To The Jury.”

For those of you who don’t know, Xenophon was a writer, thinker, politician, and military professional who lived in Greece at the same time Socrates did, and who was at least an acquaintance and probably a friend of the more famous man.

I knew of Xenophon for the same reason most people of my age or older would know of him–and, okay, because my brother and one of my uncles were named Xenophon.

Leaving out the family connection, though, the thing about Xenophon is that he wrote a long treatise on a war, called, I think, the Anabasis.

The war was not a particularly glorious or famous one, and my guess has always been that the Anabasis would have retreated into the world of forever to be forgotten books, if it wasn’t for one thing.

For close to two centuries, the Anabasis was the text used for translation in first-year textbooks meant to teach British  public schoolboys how to read Greek.

The reason that mattered to me was because American classics programs used those same textbooks to teach American college students to read Greek.

I have no idea if this was true in the days when American colleges and universities required Greek and Latin for admission, but it was certainly true when they got to me.

I think the people who wrote the textbooks for English schoolboys probably thought  that translating a work about fighting and battles would be less boring to eight year olds–and yes, they went to school at eight–than Plato or Aristotle, and they were probably right.

Not being a British schoolboy and having no interest whatsoever in battles of any kind, anywhere, the thing bored me senseless.

And since Xenophon never came up in any other course I ever took–not in philosophy, not even in later Greek courses–I dismissed Xenophon as “the guy who wrote that boring war thing” and left it at that.

At least, I left it at that until a short while ago, when two things happened very close together:  I got a copy of Xenophon from the Loeb Editions as a present, and I got into a discussion about what had really happened in the death of Socrates.

Now, here’s the thing about the death of Socrates.

There is no getting around the fact that the decision of the Athenians in 399 BCE to put to death their most famous citizen is a seminal event in Western civilization, the sine qua non of vast strains of Western intellectual history.

A book I read a few years ago–and I can’t, for the life of me, remember either the title or the author–argued that Western civilization as we know it is founded on two deaths and the ways in which we understand and interpret them:  the death of Socrates, and the death of Jesus Christ.

I think the author made a very valid case. 

But the event as an event was never something I found very interesting.

When I was younger and reading philosophy on my own and without guidance, the whole thing seemed to be an exercise in stupidity.

The Athenians did not actually mean, I thought, to actually put Socrates to death.  That  had to be the reason why, after he was condemned, they seemed to be bending over backwards to give him opportunities to escape.

What’s more, Socrates had plenty of friends who were more than willing to help him escape and who had the means to make sure he got somewhere safe and was reasonably set  up.

When I finally got to college and broached this interpretion to a professor, I got vigorously and indignantly refuted.  And I am willing to stipulate that I probably got it wrong.

And I will also admit that, as I got older, the central argument of the Socrates of Plato–that he owed his life and soul to the Polis and that it would be wrong to obey her only when it suited his interest–seemed less fatuous to me than it did when I was 14.

Still, even now, reading through the material again, I get the same impression.  Socrates is sitting there waiting to drink hemlock, and I’m going: leave already.  Go.  You’re being an idiot.

Okay, let’s face it.  I’m never going to be the heroine of an epic poem.

Xenophon’s account of Socrates’s reasons for drinking the hemlock disagree fundamentally from Plato’s, although the two accounts are not mutually exclusive.

Xenophon’s Socrates does not die because of any noble reasoning about what he owes to the Polis, what all citizens owe to their socieities.

Xenophon’s Socrates dies because he thinks that such a death is preferable to suffering through the defeats and indignaties of old age.

We all get to a point where our powers fail, he says, and then it’s all misery and unhappiness and (maybe worse) a loss of stature and dignity. Dying now would be the equivalent of quitting while he was ahead.

This is an argument that is alive and well today.  I’ve heard many people voice it, and I’ve known a few who have acted on it.  It was the reason Carolyn Heilbron (scholar, activist, Columbia  professor and author as Amanda Cross of a series of mysteries) gave her friends for her suicide at the age of 77.

It is not an argument that appeals to me, or that I find convincing. But I am a good libertarian in this as in most things.  I think if it’s the choice  you want to make, you ought to be left alone to make it.

What I am looking at here is that a Socrates who made this argument about why he didn’t run away when he could have run is a different exemplar than the Socrates who spoke of the duties a citizens owes to his Polis.

What’s more, the Socrates who dies because it’s better than enduring the indignities of old age is not a man whose death becomes a foundational moment in the rise of Western, or any other, civilization.

The question becomes, for me, whether it matters which of the two versions is true, assuming only one of them is.

Even if Plato invented all of his accounts of the death of Socrates, nothing can change the fact that they have been accepted as true for over two thousand years.

And having been accepted as true, those accounts have established a standard of courage and  integrity that  has been integral to Western ideas of the best of what a human being can be.

Those ideas are embedded in our lives now to an such a significant extent and in so many different ways that there would be little point in debunking the event unless your sole purpose was to provide  people with an excuse when they wanted to behave badly.

(Nah, I’m not going to do THAT.   You know all that stuff about Socrates?  It’s a lie.)

But of course, people often do have as their motive giving themselves and other people an excuse to behave badly,  and not only the death of Socrates can be “debunked.”

The scare quotes are intentional.

This brings an end to the left field.

I’ll get to the loop next time.

The title of t his post is also the title of a very good book by Scott Turow, and I personally think you should all go read it if you haven’t yet.  It’s good enough so that I read it, in spite of the fact that it’s a novel about somebody falsely accused, which is the kind of story I can barely handle at the best of times.

But the title of this post is what it is, of course, because sometime overnight the  jury came in in the Zimmerman case and acquitted the man on all counts in the death of Trayvon Martin.

This is the second Florida trial I’ve watched closely, and like the first one it’s left some side questions about  how t hings work in Florida–the courts work on Sunday? and Saturday? and all night?  and only six jurors?

But these really are side issues, and matter for another time–although I do think juries would probably return verdicts faster if they weren’t allowed to leave or rest until they delivered one.  Sort of like cardinals shut up in the Vatican until they name a new Pope.

There are also other confusions related specifically to this trial.  I Googled “racial composition of Zimmerman jury” and got, not the racial composition of the Zimmerman jury, but the information that the court was not releasing the racial composition of the Zimmerman jury.

I’m not even sure how this was possible.  Weren’t reporters allowed in the courtroom?  Weren’t spectators?  Was the jury kept out of sight?  How is it possible nobody looked at the jury and said, “Oh, five white women and one Trobriand Islander”?

The other Florida trial I watched closely was, of course, the Casey Anthony case.

That trial and this one had a lot in common, of course, and they both had at least one thing in common with the O.J. trial–all three were trials in which “everyone” “just knew” the defendant was guilty.

I am on record here in about a million places as being FAR happier with a guilty defendant going free than I am with an innocent one being convicted.

I’m also on record as thinking that  it’s far MORE likely that innocent people will be convicted than that guilty ones would be set free.

Outcomes like that of the Zimmerman trial and the Casey Anthony trial and the O.J. trial don’t make me angry, and they don’t make me despairing.  They give me hope that the legal process isn’t hopelessly biased against defendants.

They give me hope that, at least every once in a while, the  presumption of innocense works. 

FWIW, here’s my take on all three.

1) When the glove didn’t fit, the O.J. jury HAD to acquit.  They really did.  Given with what they were allowed to know, and given the prosecutions absolutely idiotic handling of that evidence, they were pretty much stuck letting the guy off.

On the day the prosecution righteously demanded that OJ. don the glove and then–oops, the man couldn’t get it over his hand–the case was over.

That was prosecutorial error, not inevitability, but once the error was made, they were stuck with it.

And it would have killed them even if the jury was  made up entirely of white people.

2) The Casey Anthony case is harder to read, and the best I can make of it is  prosecutorial overreach.

I would  think the State could have easily gotten a conviction on a neglect charge, or an endangerment charge, or something along those lines.  As far as I know, nobody, not even the defense,  ever disputed the claim that Anthony left her child home alone while she went out to party.

With  or without the use of cholorform, that would have been enough.

The attitude of the prosecution seemed to be that that wasn’t good enough, and they spent so much time trying to paint Anthony as an Avatar of Evil that they ended up with  nothing at all.

In a way, that was too bad, because Casey Anthony may actually be an Avatar of Evil.  She gives every evidence of being a first class sociopath.

What she almost certainly wasn’t, however, was somebody who deliberately set out to murder her child.

Given everything we know about her now, I wouldn’t be shocked if she showed up ten or fifteen years from now having deliberately  murdered another child, but you can only charge a person with crimes already committed.

3) As for George Zimmerman, the one  really  major difference is the fact that not everybody in the country thought he ought to be convicted.

In this case, there were real, honest to God sides.

And there were certainly real, honest to God issues.

The real issue, though, was almost certainly that tape and what was or was not on it.

Both Trayvon Martin’s mother and George Zimmerman’s mother testified that they were “positive” that the voice heard screaming in agony belonged to her son.

If there really was no way to positively identify the voice on that tape, then I don’t see how the jury could have done anything but what they did.

The craziness has already started,  of course.

The Reverend Al Sharpton is calling for the Feds to file charges so that somebody can get Zimmerman on something, and double jeopardy be damned.

I’ll just note for the record that this is exactly the kind of case the Framers were thinking of when they outlawed double jeopardy to begin with.

The scarier stuff is going on on Twitter and FB with people posting what they claim to be Zimmerman’s address in the hopes that somebody will go get him.

It’s tempting to explain this by the racial aspects of the case, except the same thing happened after the Casey Anthony trial, and there were no racial  overtones there.

It’s useless to say that the racial overtones don’t matter, because they do, and they will.  That’s why I’m very  nervous that we do n’t know the racial composition  of that jury  up front. 

But even beyond the tendentious and deliberately inflammatory stuff, there are actual practical  issues in a trial of this kind.  If one of the main points is whether or not Zimmerman had a credible case for self defense, then one of the things jurors will do is to ask themselves that if they found THEMSELVES in the same situation, they would feel justifiably in danger of their lives.

And it’s almost certain that men and women, blacks and w hites and Latinos and Asians, would have distinctively different answers to that question.

I wish the  jury hadn’t been all female.  I hope the jury was not all white.

But in the end, if I had been on that jury, the only thing that would have mattered would have been the fact that we could not positively identify the voice screaming on that tape.

If the voice belonged to George Zimmerman, he had every right to fire in self defense.

If the voice belonged to Trayvon Martin, then Zimmerman murdered him.