Hildegarde

So, it’s the 13th of July, and that means it’s my birthday. 

I’m not in general very fond of my birthday.  It has tended to be a day on which Bad Things happen, and if they don’t  happen on the day, they happen near the day.

This year has been no exception, but there’s no point in going into all that, because on this year my sons and my friends are going out of their way to beat the jinx.

And that helps, it really does. 

But what I want to comment on here is the now week or two long conspiracy between  my two sons to get me a cake.

Now, I really like cake on my birthday.  In fact, I mostly really like cake.  Costco has this multilayered chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and chocolate shavings that’s about the size of Iowa that I’m very fond of, although I don’t get it too often, because it’s so large that it tends to stale before it gets eaten.

Unless Greg gets to it, in which case it’s gone in a day.

I remember being 19 and able to eat anything and everything and still not being able to gain weight.  Or even maintain it.

I want those days back.

Anyway, the point about the cake for today, it seems, is that it isn’t supposed to be a regular ordinary cake from the supermarket or even a great big superduper enormous cake from Costco.

It is supposed to be some kind of speciality cake from a local baker, made to order, to be picked up somewhere off in town in the middle of the morning somehow.

This sounds to me to be expensive, which is interesting, because I know exactly what money they have this summer and exactly what their bills are.

Leaving that aside, though, there is the immediately larger problem–I am not supposed to know they are doing this, but I do.

I know because my sons are to keeping secrets what Harold Stassen was to winning presidential elections.

THERE’S a cultural reference for you.  I wonder how many of you get it.

Showing my age.  That’s what this is.

Anyway, the boys will be going off to pick this thing up in a little bit, and I’m supposed to sit  here with Beethoven and a book, or a book and Apollo 13, and pretend I don’t know about it.

This includes, I expect, not making jokes about how obvious everything they’re doing is, never mind how obvious their little hastily erected code language is. 

There are better codes in cereal boxes with decoder rings.

I am working very hard to play the game here, but I have to admit that I’m tempted to advise them both NEVER to go in for careers as spies.

It’s not a bad way to spend a birthday, although if I keep biting my tongue like this I’m not going to be able to eat that cake when it gets here.

Still, it’s nothing to complain about, and  I’m not going to complain about their cooking.

I’m  not going to complain about that even though I know that when it gets here, Greg is going to have figure out a way to batter dip and deep fry lettuce.

I’m going to go off and listen to Beethoven’s 9th, which seems to have the right sort of theme for the day.

I’ve had a lot to do the last few days,  so any progress I’ve made on anything has been slow, but the progress through Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell has not been bad.

The experience has even improved in some ways.  Once Dennett gets going, he tends to forget to use the exclamation points (!!!) and to forget to use the egregious term “bright,” both cases of situational amnesia being all to the good.

Of course, every once in a while he seems to remember that he’s supposed to be employing these devices, and I’m stuck with how brights find all this completely bewildering!

Or some such sentence that makes me want to hurl the book i nto the fireplace.

Don’t worry.  There’s nothing lit in the fireplace.  I don’t want to burn the thing.  I just want to make the man take me seriously.

The book is interesting in a lot of ways, in spite of this kind of thing, and I’ve just finished making my why through a long section about what people actually mean when they say the word “God.”

The exposition is on the light side, and I’d really like to see a serious book about the evolution of the definition of “God” through the ages. 

I’ve seen people in my own life evolve such a definition for themselves, and in both directions.  One of my best friends from high school went from being an intensely devout Catholic to being a fervent evangelical. Her God went from being a highly intellectualized metaconception to be something much  more anthropomorphic and concrete.

Other people I know, while maintaining themselves as Catholics or Methodists or whatever, have made their God so abstract and conceptual, they might as well be Buddhists.

I, of course, have done none of these things, because I never had a conception of God to begin with.

In a country in which most people have been brought up in a religion, this can be very hard to explain to people. 

When I first went looking for fellow atheists–after Bill’s death, when I felt absolutely deluged by Catholics trying to save my soul and eliminate what they were sure was my “despair”–

When I first went looking for fellow atheists, what I almost always found were ex-Christians desperate for confirmation of the rightness of their decision to leave their religion.

I thought then, and I think now, that most of them were not anywhere near as sure as they wanted to be.  That would explain the hysteria, the hyperbole, and the utterly irrational rage if anybody suggested anything that might make a case for atheism seem less than  ironclad.

Mind you, I said seem less than ironclad.  A lot of the things that caused the most upset–maintaining that Jesus was a person who had actually existed in history, say–would not have destroyed the case for atheism at all.

But I never had to break away from a belief and declare myself an atheist, so I feel no guilt about it.

And I have no experience of believing in a particular version of God, either, so I have no need to “evolve” a definition for myself.

Religion was of great interest to me when I was growing up, but it was of interest in the same way that life in Paris and New York, or the history of WWII, were of interest to me.  They were all mostly intellectual exercises.

Religion seemed to me to be sort of fun of a kind I wished I could  have–First Holy Communion with special white dresses and veils with tiaras on them; women speaking directly to apparitions of a Beautiful Lady; rosaries, which were so beautiful in some cases I wanted to have them just to have, and did.  I collected rosaries for almost thirty  years.

God himself, however, was for me just a blank.  When I tried to conceive of him–even when I was very young, and knew only the Christian traditions–he always came up a sort of faceless blank.  Or just a blank.

Faith seemed to me to be an emotional response of some kind of which I was just not capable. 

In the years before Vatican II we would sometimes go to sung masses that were extraordinarily beautiful–but that was all they ever were to me, extraordinarily beautiful.  If I tried to force myself to feel something bigger and more important beyond it all, I got–absolutely nothing.

Over the years, I attended many different kinds of religious services in many different Christian denominations. 

A woman who came in to babysit us when my family was in Florida–half the year, every year, until I was a high school senior–took my brother and myself to African-American tent revival services.  They were literally held in tents,  out in an open marchy flat space that was well out of town and seemed to belong to nobody.

It took only the second trip before I was being slain in the spirit with the best of them, but it was only a performance, and I was incapable of “losing” myself long enough ever to forget it.

At the same time, I never became one of those people who pretends to have faith, on the assumption that faith is something to be encouraged, because it’s good for people who are too weak or undisciplined to run their lives without it.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t like the condescension, although I didn’t, even then.  It was that I lived in a world of nonbelievers, many of whom (especially  my father) seemed to me to be more moral, ethical and upright than most of the religious people I knew.

It was, therefore, obviously true that it was possible to be “good without God,” as the posters say, and equally possible to be bad with him.

In the end, I think I decided two things.

The first was that a strictly metaphysical description of God–neither male nor female; having no body; not answering prayers but just being the essence of being in the universe–while it could never be disproven, also wasn’t much use for anything. 

I didn’t need Daniel Dennett to tell me that such a religious idea rarely garners much in the way of believers, because it was obvious that there wasn’t much point in believing it, even if it was true.

There would be a point in believing in the God of the Christians, or the Jews, or the Muslims, or even the Hindus, if I could convince myself that they were true, but I never could convince myself. 

The whole idea always seemed to me to be pointless and unnecessary.

But in the end, it was more than that.

I can remember the exact moment at which I realized that I would never believe in the Christian story, that I was incapable of believing it, because it was embedded in the vision of a world I not only did not live in, but did not want to live in.

I was watching a cable network called EWTN–Eternal Word Television Network–run by the legendary Mother Angelica and her Poor Clare cloistered, full-habited nuns. The network’s stated mission is to present orthodox Catholic Christianity to the world.

What was on was a movie about the life of Christ, dubbed into English from Spanish. 

I’d watched a number of these movies on EWTN, mostly biopics of specific religious figures.  The movies were amateurish on a technial level, but they were sometimes very interesting.  That was especially the case of the biopic of  St. Teresa of Avila, still my favorite Catholic saint.

But I was sitting there watching this movie, and there came a point where Jesus is leading his disciples over a stony patch of ground while talking to them about the mustard seed, and I suddenly saw the scene as if it were taking place directly in front of me.

It wasn’t an iconic scene about Jesus anymore.  It was just a place and a time and a way of being in the world–sandals instead of shoes, loose robes instead of tailored clothing, the threat of death from unconquerable disease at any moment, no central heating, no proper plumbing, no secure sources of food…

And it just suddenly hit me that the gulf between that way of life and mine was just too vast–it was in many ways a difference in kind and  not just in degree.

The Christian story did not move me to belief because it couldn’t.

I could take good things from it–and there are a lot of good things in Christianity, things we could not do without–but I could only take them as I took good things from Homer.

We  have certainly managed to come up with some very bad things in our pursuit of modernity, including ways of life far worse than that represented by first century Palestine.

But modernity is like anything else in one important way–the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.

The risk is Stalinism and Nurse Ratched, and that is a very big risk indeed.

The reward is the virtual elimination of death in childbirth and from things like cholera, smallpox and TB.  It’s landing on the moon universal literacy and books and movies and the Internet everywhere and for everyone.  It’s a life of reasonable comfort and spare time spread across entire populations.  It’s–

Well.

Here’s the thing.  We have made so much real progress, we have come so far, that  most of the things we argue about would be literally  nonsensical to Christ’s disciples.

And I don’t mean things like gay marriage or women’s rights, either.

We argue about whether or not our fellow citizens have “decent lives” with “decent” defined by a standard the Roman Emperors couldn’t have met on their best days.  Our problem is not what to do about diseases that strike without warning and kill without mercy, but  how to make sure our fellow citizens don’t go bankrupt getting well.

We not only do not think the way the people of Palestine thought, we can’t think the way they thought, and if we’ve got any luck and any brains, we’ll never think that way again.

In spite of the very real downsides, in spite of the colossal risks (Stalin, Pol Pot, Katherine Sebelius), this way of life is better than that way was.  We did make progress.  We made quite a lot of it.

The Christian narrative sounds like mythology to me because it lives in the world where mythology lived, and I don’t live there and never have.

And I don’t want to. 

And I shouldn’t want to.

What’s more, I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one who responds to the Christian narrative this way.

Unlike some people, I don’t imagine that it is impossible for the Christian narrative to accept reality–yes, the world is billions of years old and evolution is a fact and every decently educated Catholic accepts it.

But the fact that Christianity does not need to be stupid in order to be Christianity does not solve the central problem.

Intelligent or otherwise, it envisions a world that is lost, and should be lost, forever.

Intelligent Christianity is very intelligent indeed, and there is a lot that can and should and even must be kept from the ideas that evolved out of that story–things about how we should envision ourselves and our fellow human beings, about the obligations we owe each other as people, about individuality and the nature of guilt and innocence and a lot else.

But the narrative does not ring true to me because it is a narrative of another time, a time that is not only gone but should be gone, because that time was not only different from ours, but lesser.

I’m going to start this post with a proposition:

Once (most) people find out what rights actually are ,  they absolutely hate the idea.

 I bring this up as a way to begin answering Lymaree’s question from yesterday;  why should we put up with people who use faith  healing or won’t vaccinate their children?  We already proscribe all kinds of things families do (she included “hitting,” which is actually not the case).  Don’t I think we should move against “actual abuse?”

Let’s start with a definition.

Rights are restrictions on government power, and that is all they are.

There is a lot of confusion in this country on the matter of “rights,” because we use the words in two distinct and sometimes mutually exclusive ways.

If we pass a law that says all blondes under the age of 25 will receive $100 a month until their 25th birthday, then we tend to say that blondes under the age of 25 have a “right to” $100 a month.

But this not a case of an actual right–it’s a right-in-law, or right-under-the-act.

It is a grant of benefit that can be given or taken away.

Real rights–natural rights, individual rights–can neither be given  nor taken away.  They are not granted to us by the state.  The state cannot make them cease to exist.  The state’s only choice is to recognize rights or to violate them.

Rights are also individual, and never anything else.  Rights inhere in the person, not the family, the tribe, the group, the clan, the…pick  your “community.”

And this means that we can never have an actual right to something somebody else has to give us–to claim we do (you have to pay for my old age pension! you have to treat my sciatica whether you want to or not!) is to declare that at least some human beings have no rights at all, that they are our slaves and exist of our use.

The classic formula of rights is that they consist of “life, liberty and property.”  Thomas Jefferson changed that to “life,  liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution exists as an attempt to codify rights–to limit the scope of government–by proscribing specific government actions. 

In outlining these prohibitions, the first thing the people who wrote the Bill of Rights did was to insure liberty of conscience in the widest sense.

They not only guaranteed that the US Government would not establish any particular religion, or any religion at all.

They guaranteed that the US Government would not be allowed to prohibit the free exercise of religion.

Freedom of conscience does not mean that you will simply be allowed to go off by yourself privately and “believe” things, or gather privately with a few friends to believe them, or even publish them and talk about them.

It means that the government will not be allowed to stop you from actually living by the light of your conscience.

Almost no religious person anywhere–and most nonreligious persons–can live by the light of her conscience.  In fact, in most religious traditions,  one cannot be a practicing member without raising your children in the faith.

Since minor children cannot be recognized to have natural rights until their majority–the actual situation on the ground is a lot more complicated than that, but leave it here–

Since minor children cannot claim natural rights until their majority, the question becomes:  who has the right to raise the child?

The answer to this has always been:  the parents, by the light of whatever they deem right or reasonable.

Traditionally, therefore, government has been prohibited from interfering  in the lives of families except in very, very extreme situations.

The rule has been that parents can make any decision for their children that will not most likely result in permanent and significant physical disability or death.

Note all the qualifiers in that sentence. This is a very difficult standard to meet.  In most cases, families would have absolutely nothing to fear from teachers, emergency rooms, doctors and nurses, social workers, or other “helpers” who might disapprove of the way they are raising their children.

So, am I opposed to moving against “actual abuse”?

Well, no–

IF

a) “abuse” is defined as above

AND

b) anybody accused of abuse has full due process rights before they are convicted of it and before any punishment is meted out because of it

AND

c) it is understood up front that having your child removed from your home is punishment, as is being required to meet with your child only under supervision.

In other words, I’d forbid government from  making most of the regulations it has recently made concerning child abuse and neglect, and I’d require any such charges to be properly adjudicated in regular criminal courts.

Why?

Because what we have now is this:

1) complaints can be filed anonymously

2) CPS must respond to such complaints, and BECAUSE such complaints have been made–with no proof, no evidence, no probably cause–

3) They are empowered to enter your home without a warrant

4) to search through  your house, enter all rooms, open all drawers and cabinets, to go through your papers and

5) to access all your child’s medical and educational records, and also the medical and educational records of any other minor in the house

And in the meantime

1) you do NOT have the right to remain silent (this is on its way to the Supreme Court as we speak, but one of the social wo rkers in the case complained that “if we have to give people their Constitutional rights, we couldn’t do our work)

2)  you do NOT have the right to confront your accusers (not only can complaints be filed anonymously, but even if the complainant gave his name, the CPS is not allowed to release it to you or your attorneys)

3) you do NOT have the right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures

4) you do NOT have the right to a jury trial (family courts tend to be run by judges alone)

5) and  you only SORT OF have the right to know the charges against  you.  That’s because you may be charged with “abuse” or “neglect,” but the DEFINITIONS of “abuse” or “neglect” amount to “whatever the social worker says it is.” 

Before you jump in and say that that isn’t really the definition, the definition is “the best interests of the child,” I’d like to point out that the “best interests of the child” is a dodge, and nothing more.

“The best interests of the child” by what standard?

If you start from the premise that the “best interests of the child” consist of what your social work textbook said in sophomore year, then your determination will be one thing.

If you start from the premise that the “best interests of the child” consist of his following the Word of God so that he doesn’t have to endure a raging torment in Hell for all eternity, then your determination will be something else altogether.

“The best interests of the child” is just pleasant sounding jargon meant to hide the fact that what you’re trying to do is to impose your own subjective opinion on other people’s families, and to enforce it by law.

And if that all isn’t bad enough–

What happens if the complaint was a spite complaint (the estimate is that about a third are) and the worst happens?

Back in the nineties, there was a case in Pennsylania.  Defendant A lived next door to a man with whom he was having long and acrimonious boundary disputes.  This man–Complainant B–called in to CPS and accused Defendant A of sexually abusing his six year old son, Victim C.

In spite of the fact that there was no evidence of any kind that sexual abuse, or any abuse, had occurred,  social workers immediately removed Victim C from Defendant A’s care and put him in foster care.

Several weeks later, Defendant A finally managed to get the family court to admit that a mistake had been made and have Victim C returned to his own home–but it was too late.

Victim C–who, up until the time of the spite complainant, had never known anything but love and kindness and safety–had been raped in foster care, and was HIV positive.

Defendant A tried to sue and was told that Pennsylvania law shielded CPS from lawsuits.

Defendant A then took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided that Pennsylvania had a “compelling state interest” in this system and that therefore the denial of the right to sue must stand.

In other words, CPS can violate every single Constitutional right you thought you had, punish you (and your child) before you’ve been convicted of anything and without any objective evidence whatsoever, destroy your family and finally disable your child for life or even kill him–and you can’t even sue.

(By the way–CPS can also violate your right to free speech and free press.  It’s fairly common, in cases where they are forced to admit that they’ve made a mistake, for the family judge to impose a gag order on the defendants as a condition of return of custody.)

So, yes, I do know we already outlaw all kinds of things in families, and my response is that I don’t think we should. 

I not only want the right of parents to decide for themselves whether to vaccinate or to use faith healing to stand, I want to cut back the state’s ability to regulate most of the child-family behavior they now regulate.

But in this case, the simple fact is that the system is endangering far more children than it is protecting,

And in the cases of faith healing and vaccination, government strong arming would prevent almost no harm at all. 

In most years, the number of children who die because they have not been vaccinated or because their families chose faith healing is zero.

Most unvaccinated children never catch the diseases they have been vaccinated against, and in the few cases where they do, they don’t usually die from them.  What’s more, if YOUR child has been vaccinated, he won’t catch even a very communicable disease from such an unvaccinated child unless the population of the unvaccinated in your area has reached a critical mass that is actually quite high.

The only time I ever heard of that even possibly  happening was in an upscale, high-educational-attainment community in Colorado about ten years ago.  And in that case, in spite of the fact that the critical threshhold was assumed to have been reached, there were no deaths and seem to have been no serious illnesses in children vaccinated or not.

If you think about t his, it only makes sense.  In the early days of vaccination, the chances were good that if you got vaccine at all, you were one of the very few in the community who did so.  If vaccination didn’t work more often than not even under those conditions, we’d have given up the practice as a bad job a couple of centuries ago.

So yes, there is more danger in forbidding these practices, or trying to regulat them, than there is in accepting that every once in a while, an individual will be hurt by them.

We are all of us hurt, and badly hurt, when we give yet another excuse to the people who are out there trying to curtail and deny individual rights–and they are always out there, and they never need much of an excuse.

Accepting rights means accepting the fact that they will protect people who are doing things you think are morally wrong and completely abhorent–and that you have no right to intervene and stop them,  no matter how you feel.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been reading a book by Daniel Dennett called Breaking the Spell, in which he proposes to give an evolutionary account of the rise and spread of religion.

There’s a lot wrong with this book, in different and interconnected ways.  Not the least of it is the fact that Dennett is self-consciously writing for “a wider audience,” including (he tells u) religious people, and like a lot of academics who set out to do that, he uses lots and lots and lots of exclamation points !!!!!

Okay.  He usually only uses them  one at a time, but you know what I mean.

Then there’s the absolutely cringe-making use of the word “bright” to mean “atheist”–a fad that came and thankfully went several years ago.

I’ve read other Dennett, and he’s usually a first rate writer.  I’d recommend Darwin’s Dangerous Idea to anybody and everybody. 

But he’s a philosopher and not a biologist, and it shows, in both books.  In Breaking the Spell it sometimes just makes him sound addled.

But as much fun as it can  be, at times, to beat up on somebody like Dennett–what is it about the New Atheists that makes them all so damned smug?–what the book has brought to my attention is something else altogether, and I don’t know what to do about it.

I have been, on this blog and elsewhere, as strong an advocate of leaving everybody to  make their own choices, even if their choices are flagrantly and dangerously wrong.

I am, in fact, more and more convinced that this is the only acceptable political stance.  Goverments constructed to save people from themselves always end in totalitarianisms.  There is no place else they can end.

But although I think governments must always and everywhere take stands of neutrality on their citizens decisions about their own lives–that they must let us all go to  hell in our own handbaskets, even if they think they know better–that is not the same thing as saying that I’m a cultural or philosophical or moral relativist.

I do see that some decisions are intrinsically wrong, and that some people are wedded to ignorance the way a Cleveland Browns fan is wedded to disappointment.

That was true of me twenty years ago and it’s true of me now.  What’s changed is this:  I seem to be less and less willing to call out against certain kinds of stupidity.

One of the reasons, I think, is that I get worried that if I deliver one of my once-famous acerbic diatribes against some kinds of idiotic thought or behavior, I will inadvertantly give aid, comfort and empowerment to the “we know best for you and we should get to decide” population.

This situation is more serious than it may seem at first, because one of the reasons I am so convinced that “let people make their own choices” is the best way to go is that I expect the culture at large to provide a large element of push back.

In other words, if you do something, or say something, that is manifestly stupid or wrong, I expect people to tell you it’s stupid or wrong, and in detail.

I’m comfortable with letting you make your own decisions about your finances because I expect  your friends, family,  neighbors and the entirety of Facebook to rip you a new one if you spend your rent money on lottery tickets.  I’m comfortable letting you smoke yourself into oblivion because I expect the nurses to be less than sympathetic when you get lung cancer.  I’m comfortable with letting you decide to get falling down drunk every morning by ten because I expect the people around you to tell you how worthless you are for doing it and the government to refuse  you disability payments because of it.

Okay, we’ll  have to work on that last one.

A world in which you can make your own choices but can’t escape the consequences (social and otherwise) of them is very different from a world that exists to enable them,  even if the enabling only amounts to not telling you what you don’t want to hear so that we don’t hurt your feelings.

But the real mess caused by people not speaking out–for my reason, or for politeness, or whatever–against stupidity and ignorance does not come in encounters with confirmed drunkards and people w ho believe they’re going to get rich w ith the lottery.

The real mess comes with the spread of the kind of misinformation that is not only wrong but that spreads like wildfire, and that results in demonstrably, and easily preventable, physical harm.

The two things that strike me as fitting this description most clearly come from two different sides of the political aisle, but are still oddly connected.

Those things are faith healing and the anti-vaccination  movement.

I think that it’s more than a little interesting that so many of the areas that lead to significant citizen push-back against experts have to do with medicine.

But these are two areas in which the evidence is crystal clear and widely available.

It’s not just that there is “no evidence” linking vaccinations with autism.  It’s that there’s very good evidence linking vaccinations to lowered levels (much lowered levels) of childhood mortality. 

And not just childhood mortality, either.

 The year Matt was born, there were a  group of mothers in Stamford, CT, who adamantly refused to allow their children to be given the pertussis vaccine.  They were all  highly education women and their fear was of the fact that, in very rare cases, the vaccine  has caused serious illness and sometimes death.

By the end of the season, every single one of their children were dead from whooping cough.

At the moment, it is not possible to require such parents to vaccinate their children. 

And, as far as I’m concerned, the government should not be allowed to require any such thing.

Parents have the natural right to make any decisions for their children that will not result in permanent, significant physical harm or death, and in spite of a few cases like the one I just mentioned, most refusals to vaccinate result in no physical harm at all.

In fact, they so seldom result in  harm that even the one requirement the state is allowed to make–that children cannot attend a school (public or otherwise) is regularly ignored in cases where the parents are adamantly opposed.

This is especially true when the reasons are religious–in fact, most state abuse and neglect laws specifically exempt the choice of faith healing and the rejection of vaccines–but Jenny McCarthy has nothing to fear.  There may be some resistance to her refusal to vaccinate, but her convictions will be accommodated in the end.

The faith  healing cases, when they come up, always sound much more extreme and much less excusable–partially, I think, because so few of us find faith healing credible these days.

It’s one thing, we think, to be worried about the side effects of a vaccine.  We all worry about the side effects of the drugs we take. It’s a judgment call, and any of us might make the wrong judgment call one of these days.

 Faith healing, on the other hand, just sounds completely bizarre.  Most of us cannot imagine a case in which we  had a fever of 105, or our child did, where we would opt to pray instead of calling 911.

We might pray as well as calling 911, but we would most assuredly call 911.

Court cases on faith healing deaths have been all over the map.  Such incidents almost always provoke community outrage–and this is especially true in cases in which whatever t he illness was was something that can reliably cured with standard medical attention.

An organization called CHILD–Children’s Healthcare Is A Legal Duty–was started by a group of (now former) Christian Science parents whose children died in an epidemic of bacterial  meningitis.  It’s a disease fairly easy to cure with a course of antibiotics, but without the course of antibiotics it tends to lead to a prolonged and agonizing death.

The former Christian Science parents are now committed to getting the laws changed that allow parents to reject  standard medical care for their children, but by and large, I would not.

It is simply true that, in the vast majority of cases, such a choice will do no harm.  And in those cases–and maybe even in the most extreme ones–the choice to allow government to  make the requirement will do far more harm, not  just to the individual child and family, but to the community at large.

But none of this works–none of it–if people like me are  holding their tongues instead of jumping into the conversation and making the case for standard medicine.  And vaccinations.  And evolution over “creation science” and “intelligent design.”  And…

You see what I mean.

There’s a lot of stupid out there.  And none of it is being  helped by keeping our mouths shut when it blossoms onto the scene.

If I had to name the single  most destructive thing about the Nurse Ratcheds/Delores Umbrages/Mary Ewings of the world, it would be just this–

That it makes so many of us reluctant to speak up against real evils for fear of giving them an excuse.

Before I start this morning, I have a confession to make.

I do not actually know if the title of this post is correctly spelled.

I tried spell check this morning, and it steadfastly refused to admit that any such word had ever existed, anywhere.

This opens up the possibility that I am mistaken about the word I want, but I don’t think I am.  Exsanguination.  The process of being completely drained of blood.

I expect that if I’m wrong, one of you will tell me, and I’ll looked like an idiot, which isn’t out of the ordinary.

The other thing I need to do before I start is give a warning.

This post is about mystery novels, and along the way it may give one or two spoilers.

It will most definitely give a great whopping spoiler about a Dorothy L. Sayers novel called Have His Carcase.

If you haven’t read this yet and don’t like to read things where  you know the solution, or the means to the solution, ahead of time, you  might want to skip all this.

For those of you who may be new here, I’ll repeat what I’ve said  before.

I truly HATE those set ups where somebody writes SPOILER ALERT! right before they give some kind of information, and I don’t use that format.

So–proceed at your own peril.

But proceed first to this place

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Top_100_Crime_Novels_of_All_Time

That’s the Wikipedia article that gives both the Top 100 Mystery Novel lists, the one produced by the Crime Writers in the UK and the one produced by the Mystery Writers of America.

These are lists produced by professionals, but what got me started was a list by an amateur,  billboarded by somebody on FB and gone now into the mists of time.  At least, I haven’t been able to find it again.

Now, lists being what they are, they will always have drawbacks. 

Even lists produced by professionals will maintain bias, although it’s always interesting to note what people in a field think are solid and lasting achievements.

I tend to feel that the professionals in a field know one important thing that amateurs and laypersons do not:  what is hard to do. 

If you don’t actually have to deal, every day, with the realities of Making Things Work, lots of stuff is going to look effortless that is very difficult in fact.

And what is easy and what is difficult will change over time.  Agatha Christie got a lot of mileage out of the fact that the mystery readers of her time were convinced that they knew the conventions of the genre.  The narrator could not be the murderer.

I was convinced myself the first time I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, so convinced that when Christie reached about page 10 or 26 or something of my paperback and  positively hit me on the head with a two by four with the solution–I noted the two by four, but I still didn’t get it.

There are, however, other difficulties in all this that are not so easily accounted for, and that brings me to Dorothy L. Sayers’s Have His Carcase.

I read and reread mysteries from the Golden Age a lot.  I like them.  They’re what brought me into the field.  And, often, they’re better constructed than most of what I can get  now.

Yes, including my own.

Have His Carcase, however, was a book I’d read once and never come back to until sometime last week,

I am not the kind of person who gets disappointed in a mystery novel because I figured it out before the revelation, and I have read and reread many mystery novels whose killers were clear to me almost from the opening page.

With Have His Carcase, however, my problem was that the entire mystery is completely transparent from off if you know what the vital clue actually  means, and the entire book is spent with  Lord Peter Wimsey NOT knowing what it means, or anybody else, either, and it always seemed to me that there should have been no real confusion to begin with.

Have His Carcase is the second of Sayers’s mysteries featuring both Wimsey and Harriet Vane.  In the first, Strong Poison, Vane is on trial for murder and Wimsey gets her off.

In Have His Carcase, Vane is on a walking tour when she stumbles on a corpose on a rock in the middle of the wet sand revealed by the low tide. 

The corpse has had its throat cut “from ear to ear,” as they put it, and the blood is still splashing wet and uncoagulated all around the rock.

Some pages later, we discover that the dead man was a naturalized British subject who had come from somewhere in Russia, and that he always hinted to people that he was of noble birth.

Then Lord Peter Wimsey shows up, and Wimsey, Vane and the local police run around trying to figure out of this was murder or suicide and running into brick walls everywhere.

Their biggest brick wall is the time of death, which they are convinced must have been no later than 2 o’clock, because if it had been any later, the blood would have at least started to clot.

Beating their heads against the brick wall of this time frame becomes the subject of the rest of a very long and involved book.

For me, it becomes the subject of a very long and interminable book, because of course I know what the answer is before Wimsey ever gets to the scene.

I don’t know who the murderer is until another fifty or so pages in, but I know that the time is wrong right away, and it makes me crazy that  nobody in the book ever seems to.

Russian emmigre.  Noble Blood.

Am I really the only person whose first thought is haemophilia?

For many years, I gave t his book a pass on the assumption that haemophilia is something that’s general knowledge now, but maybe wasn’t then.

This time, I paid some attention to the dates.  The book was written in 1932, which  means that anybody then an adult had lived through the Russian Revolution and the literally thousands of newspaper and magazine stories about the deaths of the Tsar and his family.

This included the death of the Tsar’s son, who was, in fact, a haemophiliac. 

Hemophilia wasn’t a little known condition in 1932, and its connection with the Russian royal family was legendary.

I have a hard time believing that the reading public didn’t catch on just as I did, and I have a really hard time believing Lord Peter Wimsey took that long to get it.

This is, after all, a man who is supposed to have done (and be doing) high level intelligence work in just that part of the world.

The fact that I “got” all this right at the beginning meant that most of the rest of the novel was completely irrelevant for me.  Vane and Wimsey and the local constabulary work out elaborate theory after elaborate theory to explain why this murder could have taken place at 2 o ‘clock, and I yawn because I know there’s no reason why the murder has to take place at 2 o’clock.

While this is going on and on and on, I get no new information that I might  need about the murder. 

The action of the novel is, when I read it, useless in a way that the action of the plot of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd or Murder on the Orient Express is not, because in those last two everything the detective does is in fact necessary to figuring out what went on, even if I know what went on in advance.

Have His Carcase is a weak book in many other ways, not the least of which being  that the whodunnit part is much too elaborate and unbelievable.

But in a way it doesn’t matter, because that time of death thing is what most of that novel is about, and that time of death thing always seems to me to be so obvious, nobody could miss it.

Now, that’s the kind of thing I expect professionals to complain about.

Have fun with the lists.

One of the more bemusing thing about living in a largely rural area is watching the vast disconnect between local and national news.

Last week, two tornados touched down in Connecticut.  One of them hit in Greenwich-Stamford, but the other hit just outside Hartford.  The local CBS station, WFSB, is in Hartford.  The tornado became their lead story for days, in spite of the fact that it was an F0, only sporadically reaching an F1, and not much damage was done, and nobody died.

Yesterday, I was looking almost desperately for news about Egypt, never mind about Brazil and Portugal and the eighty other places around the world that seem to be mired in riots and coming apart at the seams.

The big headline on the local news stations was about a man, aged 25, who had been picked up “acting suspiciously” in a local amusement park, and whose camera had later been discovered to have pictures of the chests and rear ends of numerous “teenaged” girls,  some of them more girls than teenaged.  Some of them, in other words, seeming to be about eleven.

I say seeming to be because the incident is even more bizarre than it seems on the surface.

If you want, you can go here and read one of the longer and more detailed news pieces:

http://www.wfsb.com/story/22762989/pd-man-accused-of-taking-photos-videos-of-teenage-girls-at-quassy-beaches

There is definitely a creep factor here that is more than the usual sort of thing–hiding in the woods, that camera full of what amounts to child pornography (if soft pornography), the various aliases.

The story itself is, I think, a little confusing. 

The very first headlines out of the case harped insistantly on the picture taking angle, but the story itself seems to indicate that what initially attracted the attention of staff at the park was other behavior entirely. 

Granted, that behavior was equally bizarre, if not equally creepy. And it was certainly exacerbated by the way the man behaved once the police caught up with him.

I’m  not even going to do that thing where I fret about criminalizing this kind of behavior.  Quassy is privately owned and run.  It can admit and retain, or refuse to admit and eject, anybody it wants to.

Given all the reports, if I’d been the Quassy staff, I’d have wanted him out of there, too.

What’s been puzzling me over the last twenty four hours are the charges. 

Granted that my sons are right and the issue, at the time, ws to find something they could use to lock the man up and keep him away from the park and the very young girls while they sorted everything out, the “voyeurism” thing makes no sense to me.

What voyeurism means–or what I thought it meant–is that thing where you drill a hole in the wall behind one of the stalls in the women’s bathroom, or peak through somebody’s windows at night when they’re not aware that you’re there.

In other words, I thought the entire point of voyeurism was that the perpetrator invaded somebody’s private space, a place where the victim had a reasonable expectation of being unobserved.

 But the last place you could have a reasonable expectation of being unobserved is a beach which is open to the public, no  matter how privately owned.

If I was this guy’s lawyer, I’d be all over the “reasonable expectation” thing.  I don’t see how they can make that one stick, and I’m wondering why they’re even bothering to try.

They seem to have even otherwise to hold onto him–forgery, giving false information to a police officer, etc–and they might eventually end up with more.

It looks to me that they’ve  held back from filing child pornography charges because they can’t yet prove that any of the pictures belonged to an actual child.  The one intelligent thing the man seems to have done is not to take pictures of faces.

The one person whose face he did take a picture of seems to have been definitely over the age of eighteen, although if she knew nothing about the video he took of her, that would at least be voyeurism as I’ve always understood it.

Part of the time, I’ve been wondering how else you could structure a law to make this kind of thing illegal, and all I come up with are “solutions” that aren’t really solutions.  To make it illegal to take pictures of people you don’t know and without their permission would not only shut down photojournalism, it would put a lot of completely innocent tourists in jail.

Part of the time, I’ve been thinking about something else.

For centuries–and still, in many parts of the world–women and girls did not leave the house “scantily dressed” precisely because we were worried about who might be watching and with what intent.

We devised and enforced dress codes for children that clearly demarcated children from adults, sort of like big neon signs yelling JAIL BAIT for everyone to see.

The last of those I remember disappeared in the early Sixties, and I remember, at the time, being glad to see them go.  That was the ban on nylon stockings on girls who were not yet out of high school. 

Until you left for college, you were supposed to be restricted to bobby sox and knee socks, and that was that.

Then  Lynn Clark showed up in sixth grade with nylons and ballet flats, and the school did nothing about it.  By the following fall, we were all struggling with garter belts.

I am not in the least bit interesting in going back to that way of life–although I do think panyhose were an invention of the devil–but it continually surprises me that we have so  much changed our underlying understanding of human nature that we’re shocked when things like this happen.

I have a gut feeling that this actually says something good about  us, something about how were are not as decadent or depraved or as sinking into the abyss of destruction as I sometimes think we are.

On some level somewhere, our day to day lives are still mostly well ordered and trustworthy.  Faced with what I would call ordinary scuzz ball behavior, we respond to it as an anomaly.

In the meantime, we’ve managed to lock this guy up where he won’t bother anybody in the immediate future, and I’d be willing to bet we’re going to be able to lock him up long term.

So, it’s the fourth of July.  I was up late last night, partially because the boys went out somewhere together and didn’t get back until ten thirty, and I find it kind of odd being in a silent house by myself.

And yes, that does  mean I usually go to bed before ten thirty.  In fact, I usually go to bed before nine thirty, because I get up at four thirty in the morning, and earlier on days when I have an eight o’clock class.

But the being weirded out by being along in a silent house thing bemuses me a little.  For most of my young adulthood, that was my favorite way to be in the world.  I had an apartment by myself–several apartments over the years–and no television set.  I had a small stereo, but I played it only very late at night and n ot very often.  Mostly I just like being by myself in the quiet.

In the apartments I had my worktable–my worktable goes whereever I settle for a while; it’s moved continents–but during this same period I took off for Greece several times on my own, and I was the same way there.

I used to stay at this place called the Achilleus Hotel, on Lekka Street, near the Syntagma.  It was cheap and convenient to my favorite parts of the city.

The Syntagma is a square on one of the main traffic arteries in the middle of the city.  There are cafes there with outdoor seating, which I’d use even in the winter.  Winters in Athens tend to be very cold and very wet.

But the best thing about the Syntagma is that you can walk to the Acropolis from there–or I could at 26, at any rate.

The Acropolis is on a steep hill and the Syntagma is at the bottom of it and a bit along into the city.

But only a bit.

The first time I walked up there I did it without a plan and without really much thinking of it.  I left my hotel, walked to Nikkis street to my favorite restaurant, finished eating and walked out again.  Then I looked up and there was the Parthenon,  high above me, and I thought that if I just kept walking in that direction I’d probably get to it.

It was probably a stupid move. I didn’t know the city except as a tourist, and even as a tourist I only knew that one small part of it. Anything could have been in the neighborhoods up there.

As it turned out, what was up there was a section of the city called the Plaka,  the oldest part of the city and the one that has been longest inhabited.

In those days–and for all I know, still–it was a crazy rabbit warren of tiny, narrow streets lined with everything you can think of:  open air market stalls; little restaurants; small apartment houses; high-end art dealers…

I bought a lot of things in the Plaka once I discovered it.  It was a fifth the price for useful household articles, like bottle openers.   There was also a truly astonishing amount and variety of food, with no concessions made to the tastes of tourists, American or otherwise.

On the Syntagma itself there was “Pitsa” (transliterated just like that) and an “American Roast Beef” sandwich place.  In the Plaka there were restaurants the size of postage stamps and street vendors selling goat meat souvlaki and thiplis with so much honey on it you could use what you didn’t eat to take a bath.

(I had one of my Personal Best All Time Embarrassing Moments over the thiplis.  I went out looking for some on the night before Christmas Eve, wanting to have some for the hotel while I sulked.  I had come to Greece that time with a return ticket for Christmas Day itself and then, at the very last minute, was informed by Olympic that of course they weren’t flying that day. This required one of t hose endless conversations, half in Greek and half in English, that leave both parties glad they aren’t face to face and armed.

At any rate, Olympic Did The Right Thing and got me a seat for Christmas Eve, and I was annoyed at having my schedule upset.

So I went out into the Plaka to get some thiplis, and all of a sudden I couldn’t remember which way the conversion from pounds to kilos went.   No matter how often I tried, I couldn’t remember whether pounds were heavier than kilos or kilos were heavier than pounds.

I ended up deciding to be safe, since this was what I was going to eat instead of dinner, and bought two kilos of the stuff.

I had to leave three quarters of it in the room for the maid.)

The point of all this rambling is that I was alone in Greece that December, and I was happy to be alone. 

A friend of mine came through during an early part of my stay and I was happy enough to see her for the couple of days she was there, on her way to Israel, but I wasn’t sorry when she left.

My hotel room had a window facing the very narrow street and just across the way was the barracks for the Tourist Police. My room faced their television room. When I left my window open and they left theirs open, I could listen to the sound of Jimmy Cagny movies dubbed in Greek almost all night long.

Since that was in the days before VHS, I have  no idea how that worked.

Maybe Greek television was having a special Jimmy Cagny Movie Week.

I don’t know what’s happened to me in the years since, but I find that I no longer really like the feeling of being alone and quite in the house. 

Some of that must be having lived so long now with children.  No noise at all no longer feels natural to me. Instead, it starts to feel like something creepy, as if Jason or Freddie might be wandering around the house.

Of course, the boys eventually came home, since they’re both here for the week-end, and there was noise in the house again, mostly about how one of them is mad at the other for not liking some movie they’ve both seen that I’ve never heard of.

This is what their conversations are usually about.

Of course, by then it was only ten thirty or so, and I could have gone to bed and gotten some sleep, except…

There was too much noise.

Around eleven, our road erupted in fireworks–unplanned, incoherent and decidedly loud.

They made fireworks illegal in this state a few years ago, but that seems to have had no effect on teen-aged boys with decent wheels and enough gas money to get them to and from North Carolina.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone.

So,  here it is, a couple of days late.  With notes, too, of a sort.

JUNE

 33) Henry James. Washington Square.

 34) The Rig Veda. Edited and translated Wendy Doniger. Penquin Classics.

          k) Camille Paglia. “The Joy of Presbyterian Sex.”

 35) Joan Hess. Strangled Prose.

 36) C. Northcote Parkinson. East and West.

 37) Dorothy L. Sayers. Strong Poison. (rr)

 38) Bruce Catton. The Coming Fury.

 39) William L. DeAndrea. Killed on the Rocks. (rr)

As usual, I’ve commented on some of these before, so I won’t go into them again. 

I didn’t care for this Parkinson as much as I did the last one.  It’s heavy on prediction and the predictions are often–now that we’ve reached the time when they’d either be actual or not–just plain wrong.

He has a particular kind of British disdain for the United States that leads to a lot of nonsense, particularly the thing about “Britain was Greece and America is Rome” leading to “the United States doesn’t actually invent anything it just builds on what others have invented.”

Those aren’t direct quotes.  I was just trying to find a way to set them off.

At any rate, that last thing had to have been demonstrably untrue even when Parkinson said it, and by now it’s downright ludicrous.

I found a lot of the things he said very interesting, especially the one about how declining societies tend to go in for gambling and superstition, but it was hard to take the  man seriously in any global way when he handed me things like the don’t-invent-anything line.

When I think about what may or may not happen to us in the next fifty years, the one thing that always strikes me is that we are probably the most inventive society the world has ever known–and inventors from elsewhere often pull up stakes and move here.

I don’t think that will save us from Western Civilization’s descent into the insane, but if we have to settle for something less than getting it right the first time, this is the second best I would pick.

Other than that, I just want to do something I don’t very often–recommend a book and a writer and shill for them for all they’re worth.

William L. DeAndrea was, of  course, my husband, but I knew him as a writer before I ever met him face to face.

And he’s a very, very good writer, with a commitment to the kind of light mystery favored by Nero Wolfe (also a big Wolfe fan and a long time member of the Wolfe Pack).

Killed on the Rocks is from his Matt Cobb series, and about halfway through.

The first in the series, Killed in the Ratings, won the Best First Novel Edgar.  The second, Killed in the Act, is my very favorite one.  Killed on the Ice is, very beautifully, dedicated to me.

Bill  had a lot of the kind of bad luck that can sink a career, and ended up winning three Edgars anyway.  He had even worse luck in the realm of hereditary predisposition to disease, and that he didn’t survive.

Before the coming of the e-reader, I thought bringing Bill back to the notice of the wider public was going to require waiting for the boys to grow up so that they could do something, but e-readers are here, and Otto Penzler over at Mysterious Press has brought out a whole set of Bill’s books, the Cobbs and the Benedittis and the Philip DeGraves and the one shots, available for download.

I hope some of you, sometime, will try them.  They’re worth the bother. 

Now it’s the day before the fourth of July, and I’m getting that distinct feeling that I should be off somewhere doing something.

I finished the course of antibiotics for the tooth problem yesterday, and I woke up this morning expecting to be less tired and floaty than I’ve been since I hit the emergency room last week.

Instead, I woke up just as washed out as I have been for days, and with more to do, and it’s interfering with the one thing I can’t have it interfere with:  proofreading.  I’m not good at proofreading at any time, but today I’ve been a positive menance.

What I was going to do today was put up the June reading list, but I find I can’t concentrate on it at the moment. 

So let me go into some details instead.

1) My students don’t learn that  not everybody is in it for the money by seeing people around them choose professions like teaching or social work, because they think people who choose professions like teaching and social work are in it for the money.

Given the socioeconomic status that most of my students come from–especially  my deep remedial students–these are “good jobs” that are stable, pay more than anybody they know of has ever earned, and promise both stability and benefits.

Even those of my students from slightly better off families–often families in which the parents are teachers and cops themselves–look on these jobs this way.

Of course, nobody is going to make a million dollars doing that kind of thing, but–

2) My students also tend to consider these the best of the options they’re going to have. 

If their luck had been different–and they do think it’s mostly luck–and they’d been able to go to Harvard instead of Little Noprestige U–they’d definitely have chosen to be a doctor or a lawyer or something that raked in a lot of cash.

But it’s not this kind of thing that’s the real problem.

The real problem is

3) They truly believe that everyone, everywhere, make decisions maximizing their immediate and obvious self-interest and nothing else.

Last year, we had a number of scandals, including one in the small city where the university is located, involving teachers and principals in public schools falsifying answers on the state and federal competency tests.

They do–or say they do–understand that this is “wrong,” but at the same time they assume that anybody stuck in the situation (jobs and funding depend on test scores, school not going to make minimum) would do what the teachers and principals in the scandals did, and that it is somehow “not fair” for  people to get upset about it and punish the perpetrators.

But the real kicker comes when I give them stories like the one about Jonas Salk refusing to make money on a polio vaccine because it was more important to him that all children in the country could have access to it. 

This kind of thing doesn’t shock them so much as it puzzle them.  If they were in Salk’s position, they’d have sold the formula to a big drug company and made a pile they could live on without working much for the rest of their lives.

To them, that only makes sense.  Why else would you do all the work to invent such a vaccine if not to make money from it?  And why would you live the rest of your life in relative poverty if you didn’t absolutely have to?

The whole thing is even more confusing to them because there don’t seem to be the kinds of possible off-explanations that would cover it.

Most of them haven’t  heard of Mother Teresa, but when I explain her to them they brush it off with “oh, that’s religion,” in much the same way they would explain somebody else (Adam Lanza, maybe) as “mentally ill.”

4) If I gave the impression that they don’t like stories or can’t get into them, I was wrong.

They love stories, and spend most of their time pursuing them–in television and movies, admittedly, but still.

What they don’t do is see stories as in any way saying anything true about real life.

A story is, by definition, made up.

You can have unicorns in stories, and creatures from black lagoons, but those things don’t appear in the world they live in, because they don’t exist.

Give them a character that is, say, Jonas Salk, and they just assume the writer made him  up–like unicorns, such a person does not exist in the real world. 

The very fact that the character has appeared in a story is proof positive for them that he doesn’t exist outside of stories. 

And it doesn’t matter what kind of story the character appears in. Science fiction, fantasy, romance, mainstream,  literary–it’s all the same to them.

It’s “just stories.”

 I do think there’s a lot of value, at this point, to introducing them to real people who have lived by principles they have seen nowhere around them, on the (very optimistic) assumption that such examples will result in at least a couple of them realizing that there is another way to be in the world than the one they’re used to.

But–

5) They won’t get introduced to different ways of living and thinking by things like Jersey Shore.

Snooki and friends provide them no alternative to the way they live, because Snooki and friends operate on exactly the same assumptions they do.

They may be  more in  your face, or less well organized, or seemingly outside the day to day grind, but they still inhabit a world in which money and stuff are the only standards of value.

They also present a world in which it doesn’t matter how you get your money and stuff–curing cancer and dropping the F bomb 40 times in 30 minutes on national television are all the same thing.

In fact

6) If you’re not really working at it, the chances are that you can grow up in this country these days without being aware that any other standard of value has ever existed anywhere at any time for any reason.

You can certainly miss the fact that there are  people in the world around  you right now who are actually living out other standards of value.

I think that is partially due to the fact that there are fewer people around these days who do live by other standards of value.

But it’s more than that.

7) Since no society anywhere could exist in this kind of moral void, we get more and more pseudo-moralities and irreligious religions to fill in the gaps.

Morality becomes that bullying Puritanism from the post on Paula Deen I gave a link to yesterday, where  no redemption is to be had, because we are all stained with an original sin that can never be washed away.

We are to be judged decent only by living our entire lives in agonizing and unrelievable guilt, apologizing for our very existence.

They don’t actually swallow that sort of thing, of course, but it’s all they know of “morality,” so they’re fairly sure they don’t want any part of “morality” no matter who’s talking about it.

The meaning of life is, to them, unmistakeable.

He who dies with the most toys wins.

I knew almost as soon as I hit the “publish” button yesterday that I was going to be misunderstood, but I’m still on antibiotics, and I was tired.

Okay, that’s no excuse.

But let me untangle some things.

First, when I used the word “aristocratic,” I was NOT talking about professional snobs like Edmund Wilson who seemed to make a career insulting everybody else’s taste and sneering at just about anything.

Wilson was even distinctly left-wing. 

And I suppose it wouldn’t be surprising if somebody like that,  starting out vaguely “right” wing, switched sides and became a Marxist, because his commitment is to the sneering, not to the work.

I can’t recall Allen Tate ever sneering at anyone.  I can’t recall T.S. Eliot doing it, either.

Second, when I used the word “aristocratic,” I was NOT talking about people with lots of money and servants who go hunting and that kind of thing.

I do find that particular misinterpretation to be very interesting, though, because what I was thinking of was specifically examples of ways of thought and being where the standard of value was NOT money.

I am old enough to remember a time when some very prestigious and socially important things relied on something other than wealth–when the richest man in Philadelphia couldn’t get his daughter an invitation to come out at the Philadelphia Assemblies if his money was new, while the daughter of a greengrocer in Wayne was welcomed with open arms because she was a one-l Cadwalader with seven generations of Assembly debutantes in her family tree.

My guess is that this sort of thing died out some time ago, but it was amazingly persistant for longer than you’d think, and it was especially persistant in the South.

Most of the aristocratic intellectuals I know anything about were not rich, and some of them–like Allen Tate–were downright poor for most of their lives, and proud of it. 

Their poverty was proof positive that whatever it was they were committed to, it was not about the money. 

And entrance into the group was not about the money, either.  There were lots of rich frat boys at Vanderbilt who didn’t find their way into the Southern Agrarians–but Tate, whose father had gone bankrupt a couple of times and left the family destitute in the end, did.

I was not presenting this way of living, or the attitudes represented by people like Tate and Eliot, to be admirable, or something I want my students to admire.

I was just point out that “hating commerce” does not lead automatically to an embrace of Marxism. 

It’s not something we’ve “come to,” either.  It’s one of the oldest prejudices in human existence.  The Greeks and Romans looked down on people who engaged in “trade,” and so did the ancient Chinese. 

Again, I’m not advocating this, I’m just pointing out it used to exist, and it now seems to have disappeared.

As to the real–my students don’t want stories with realisitic settings rather than fantasy or science fiction ones.  THEY DON’T WANT STORIES AT ALL.

To my students, stories are just “made up,” and have no relevance to how anybody does or should live.  You can imagine all kinds of things, but that doesn’t mean that they relate in any way to the way they  live their own lives in the world.

What my students need is BIOGRAPHY–examples of actual people who have lived actual lives that are actually different from theirs.

My guess is that they don’t believe that any such places have ever existed in the world, and that no people have ever existed.

Sure, they exist in stories, but that’s just made up.

No real people would ever turn down lots of money if they were offered it, no matter what for, except maybe sometimes if the thing was illegal and they thought they might get caught.

The fact that this is how they think may make them provincial or unimaginative or intellectually limited–and in fact probably makes them all three.

But no amount of bemoaning their limitations will make them other than what they are.

And that brings me to the other thing, and to the title of this post.

Because it’s related, I think.

I only think because the whole Paula Deen Mess went right by me in its first few days. 

I’m still not entirely sure what happened, or in what order, and googling it has only made me more and more confused.

At first, I th ought she had actually used the N word, apparently on Twitter.  Then it seemed as if she had only admitted to having used the N word, some time in the past.  I couldn’t find out how long in the past.

There was, however, an enormous fuss, and Deen’s empire came crashing down as Target, the Food Channel and others dropped their deals with her.

Then somebody posted this to FB, and I found myself–well, bemused.

http://www.stonekettle.com/2013/06/a-certain-kind-of-hate.html

Now, reading through this, I’d like to head you off at the pass on one item.

Some of the misreadings here are so blatant that it’s hard not to wonder if the writer is misreading on purpose. 

I’m no fan of Pat Buchanon’s, but the writer manages to get the sense of his comments exactly backwards.  Buchanon isn’t holding up the Third Reich as a moral example.  He’s saying that even the Third Reich, the most evil government in the history of the world, didn’t practice the particular evil (women in combat) that he’s deploring.

And that misreading is not a small thing, because it’s part of what’s being used here to brand an awful lot of people–in fact, most of the country–as racist, sexist homophobes who really want to go back to the age when “those” people “knew their place.”

The assumption seems to be this:  if you indulge in nostalgia for some era, the Fifties, the Antebellum South, Greece in the age of Pericles or whatever, then you’re automatically nostalgic for all the policies of those eras. 

If you sigh over the elaborate, stylized weddings of plantation-era Virginia, you must also want to bring back slavery, whether you admit it to yourself or  not.  If you like to immerse yourself in icons and imaginative works of the Fifties, you must also want to return to the days when abortion was illegal and women were systematically required to stay in the home and put up with sexual harrassment.

Is this true?

I’ve actually written about this, on this blog, on and off, because I often find myself in the exact dilemma–I do get nostalgic for the Fifties, at the same t ime I intellectually know that  (on most counts)  I didn’t like living there at the time and wouldn’t go back there if I were offered the chance.

The answer to the dilemma is, I think, in that “most.” 

When we are nostalgic for a period in the past, we are not nostalgic for its totality, but for some small part of it, and that small part is almost always emotional rather than intellectual.

It is certainly not the case that I can wish to live for a few hours in a world where people were less cynical and less attached to judging all things by money only if I also wish to live in an era of back alley abortions. 

The implication, of course, is that such worlds existed as they did only because the evils in them were present.  As soon as the evils are abolished, all of  the rest of it comes crashing down.

That’s a matter for investigation–it’s hard to tell what is or isn’t necessary in such cases, because we know what we got, but not if we would have gotten it differently under different circumstances, or sequences of events, or different cultural conditions.

But the other assumption the writer makes is much more serious. It’s also got wider implications for life as we know it.

To wish for a quiet life, the writer says, to just not want to be tense and on guard any more, is in itself “a certain kind of racism.” 

It means that you want to go back to a time when minorities “knew their place” and kept their mouths shut.

But, again–does it?

Because the underlying assumption here is that racial and sexual equality ARE NOT POSSIBLE without making people (or maybe white people) tense and on guard all the time, making them live in a state of constant wariness.  This will be true whether the white people are “racist” by the writer’s definition or not.  Racist white people will be tense and on garde because they’re racist.  Anti-racist white people will be tense and on garde because they’re racist too, they just realize they  have to do their penance for it by being made to feel bad by nonwhite people, gay people and women.

I’ll  leave aside the other issue here–which is  that the implied definition of “not racist” in this essay represents a mental and emotional state not possible to any human being anywhere, ever–and just point out what should be obvious.

IF it is true that racial and sexual equality REQUIRES the majority of people to live in a constant and unrelieved state of tension, then racial and sexual equality are doomed.

This is not because people are racist and evil, but because nobody really likes feeling bad, and nobody will put up with it for long unless they have a strong motive to endure it.

There are certainly some people (apparently, this writer) who do have such strong motives, but those motives are essentially religious.  They put on “dialogue” and “listening to the silenced” much the way–and with  much the same emotional charge–as Medieval monks put on hair shirts.

But just as most people in the middle ages did  not put on hair shirts, most people now will not willing adopt a life of perpetual penance, whether the priests of our church think they should or not.

Most  people put up with it now only sporadically, and only on the unstated assumption that we’ll work through it in the end, that a day will come where we’ll reach some kind of equilibrium and we can all relax.

Of course, that day would come a lot faster if we stopped trying to read people’s minds and emotional states and based our judgments not on what they may or may not think but on what they do–but nobody listens to me, so whatever.

In the end, though, I think we can choose to live for a while in other eras without automatically (if unconsciously) willing their worst parts.

Some of us like to live in other eras most of the time.