Your point being . . .

As I was skimming the New York Times this afternoon, I ran across an op-ed piece analyzing liberal and conservative reactions to the announcement of former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman that he is gay. After the relentless campaign against gay marriage that Mehlman abetted, it is not surprising that many on the left are not charitably disposed toward his decision to come out so late in the game. Some voices on the right are more charitably disposed, and one person is quoted as saying that conservative opposition to gay marriage and military service does not equate to "hatred."

So far, so good. Such an opinion split is unsurprising and perhaps even predictable. But a comment from a certain Ralph Dempsey of Pennsylvania reveals the heart of darkness in the conservative position:

Ralph Dempsey, PA August 28th, 2010 9:35 am

"... because most conservatives don't support gay marriage and don't support gays openly serving in the military, they 'hate' them" I am so sick of being called a 'homophobe' just because I oppose gay marriage and want to keep homosexuals out of the military. The liberal Left is trying to play the same game they play with the race card. Sincere, honest, loving, genuine people oppose two men or two women attacking the sanctity of those in heterosexual marriages. That is not bigoted any more than people who opposed interracial marriages were racist. Over 85% of the country during the early 60's did not want Black men trying to procure white women - were all these people racist? Give me a break. We should be free to oppose minority lifestyles without being labelled as haters.

Something tells me that Mr. Dempsey will not soon get his wish, given his breathtaking combination of bigotry and moral blindness.

In one sense, Mr. Dempsey does get it right. The left is playing the same "game" it "played" in the civil rights movement, including the Supreme Court's belated recognition in 1967 that legal bars to interracial marriage are unconstitutional. See Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967). The name of this "game" is "equal rights for all," something which Mr. Dempsey and the rest of the scrofulous underbelly of American politics rightly recognize as a threat to centuries of white privilege. Mr. Dempsey is all about keeping anyone else out of "his" military, "his" marital institutions," and "his" women. The assumption of white supremacy is so deeply engrained in the consciousness of the Dempsey-ites that they do not even recognize it as such, and the notion that a person with a different sexual orientation or a different skin color could possibly expect the same entitlements is deeply threatening — hence the accusation of "playing the race card." Bizarrely, the implication is that in the world of the Dempsey-ites, it is the white man who is being oppressed by some sort of racial chicanery.

Of course, while the presumably unsophisticated Mr. Dempsey reveals the true ugliness of the conservative positions on race and sexuality, it is after all the smooth sophistication and polished civility of the likes of Ken Mehlman that do far more damage. One hopes, at least, that few in this day and age are likely to fall for the raw bile of a Ralph Dempsey, but far more are comforted in their prejudices by rationalizations honed by the likes of Mehlman's Harvard Law School training. It is not so hard to see why so many might regard Mehlman's belated coming out as "too little, too late."

Foxes and Hen Houses

A recent story in the New York Times states that India has threatened to block all Blackberry traffic in the country unless Blackberry's parent company, Research in Motion (R.I.M.), allows the Indian government to intercept the encrypted communications of Blackberry users. For now, R.I.M. is resisting, but it seems hard to believe that they will not succumb to the fear of losing the business of the better part of the Indian subcontinent.

A friend of mine is fond of remarking that, "if you allow the fox to guard the hen house, you should not be surprised when he dines on chicken." Laudable as R.I.M.'s encryption scheme is, it has the fundamental flaw that it is dependent on the good will of the company. R.I.M.'s intentions may be good, but what are its users to do when the heavy hand of the Indian — or the Chinese, or the American — government forces them to disgorge their users' private communications. And as the miserable history of our own Fourth Amendment illustrates, government cannot be depended upon to respect citizens' privacy rights.

Because individuals cannot rely solely on government or business to protect them, they can and should seize control of their own destiny. As the example of WikiLeaks dramatically illustrates, individuals have access on their own to free, strong encryption without depending on government or business. If individuals would only avail themselves of the encryption currently freely available, we would all be a little more free from the ever more intrusive eye of Big Brother.

Postscript: I have previously posted instructions for setting up encryption on home computers.

What is Good? A Coda

Image via Wikipedia

No discussion of economic good and political reform would be complete without reference to George Orwell's famous quote from his essay on Kipling:

All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment', demands that the robbery shall continue.

If our society is based on exploitation, then it is hard to break the exploitation and save the society.

Re: What is Good and How to Do It?

I don't often have the presumption to take on a topic of this scope, but having been invited by Hisham, who is known as both a frequent contributor to Global Voices and as co-administrator of Talk Morocco, to respond to his essay on the topic, I figured I would briefly give it a go.

As I read it, Hisham's essay is really divided into two parts.  The first is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of individual good from the point of view of a crumbling religious faith.  The second, illustrated through a series of three videos showing discourses by Slavoj Zizek, Milton Friedman, and Michael Albert, poses three questions respectively: 1) Is there any such thing as a benevolent capitalist? 2) Is greed ultimately good? and 3) Are there any credible and viable alternatives? My quick riff on both inquiries follows:

Individual Good

In the spirit of Voltaire, I distrust systems.  "Good" is such a polymorphic and elusive idea that it resolutely eludes any particular attempt to pin it down.  The one positive conclusion I come to is that if any person tells me that he has definitively defined "the good," at the end of our conversation I am going to check my pockets to be sure my wallet is still there.  I guess the best guide I know, in the spirit of distrusting systems, is that a little kindness goes a long way.

Sex, Drugs & Rock 'n Roll

"Living well is the best revenge" F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald's quotation is perhaps a little inapt for the present topic, since quite a few people would dispute that he had hedonism in mind.  Hedonism may be underrated, however, particularly in its Epicurean incarnation.  If one could live surrounded always by comfort and beauty, knowledge and pleasure, excitation of the palate, gratification of appetite, and stimulation of the intellect, who is to say that would be so bad?  The knock on hedonism is usually twofold: it is self indulgent and it is selfish.  In response to the former criticism, I suppose we could always have boot camp vacations.  Alas, the latter criticism anticipates the critique of economic good; it is not that hedonism is so bad, but that we have not found the means to achieve it for everybody.

The Straight and Narrow

"What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after." Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway is not bad when it comes to epigrams, but when it comes to morals, it is really Immanuel Kant who most earns my admiration, for two reasons.  First, Kant made the bold move of attempting to construct an ethics independent of religion.  His project, as I understand, was not anti-religious, but universality requires dispensing with differences of creed.  Second, the idea that one's conduct should be guided by the precept that one should only take actions what one could wish were formulated as universal laws strikes me as a profound insight.  Of course, "do as you would be done by" goes back at least as far as Jesus, but I admire Kant's attempts to systematize the notion.  For those interested purely in the pursuit of pleasure, Kant may be a bit of a spoilsport, not to mention Jesus.

Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth

"History pardons him for writing well."  W.H. Auden

Equally at odds with moral good (sometimes) is the aesthetic good.  Let's face it, for all the artists who have been pillars of rectitude, there are any number who have been rotten, selfish bastards.  Unfortunately perhaps, there does not appear to much correlation between humane treatment of one's fellows and the ability to produce awe-inspiring works of timeless beauty and insight.  And yet, would we really wish that artists were nicer people if it meant we had to live without their art?

Economic Good

"There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will."  Shakespeare.

The second part of Hisham's essay -- the series of video quotations about capitalism -- raises the question of how individual "good" affects social good.  Not being a social theorist or economist, I feel that I have a limited amount to say in response to this section.  However, I might observe that many of the evils ascribed to "capitalism" are perhaps more aptly ascribed to "corporatism."  Adam Smith had in mind a level playing field in which small, similarly situated economic actors with perfect information strove to better each other.  In the pursuit of individual benefits, they generated benefits for society. It is not that "greed is good" but that individual self-interest can have beneficial collateral effects.  This does not negate the benefit of charity; it merely touts the virtues of efficiency through individual self-interest.  Our present system is a gross distortion of Smithian capitalism in which gargantuan corporate monsters hoard information, distort the market, suppress competition, subvert governments, and create poisonous externalities.  That these monsters have been dubbed "persons" by our legal system grotesquely expands their anti-social tendencies.  If is probably fair to say that we do not really know if capitalism works, because it has never been tried.  But the drawbacks of our failure to tame the giant corporation, from Enron to BP, are clear.

I do think that the "greed is good" crowd has it wrong, however.  Just because there may be unintended benefits to our baser nature, does not mean that there is anything amiss about trying to achieve individual "goodness"

Family and Friends

Last week I took my family on their first trip to Los Angeles.  For the girls, it was a series of firsts: first trip on an airplane, first trip to the West Coast, first trip to the beach, first view of the ocean, first ride on a boat, first stay at a hotel.  In addition to being sunburnt to a precancerous fiery red, highlights of the trip included a visit to the La Brea tar pits, Venice Beach, Dume Beach, and yes, inevitably, Disneyland.  (It is amazing what a cheap bailing wire and pasteboard aspect Disneyland presented in comparison with my memories of several decades past.)  And no, the years have not made me fonder of carnival rides that go high and fast.

Image via Wikipedia

But the occasion of the trip was not merely a vacation, although a vacation was overdue.  Rather, it was a rendezvous with the core of my class ("stage") of Peace Corps Volunteers assigned to Morocco in 1988.  While I have good friends from other times in my life, as a group these are the best people I know.  In 1988, they assembled to teach English and development, rebuild the water infrastructure, promote reforestation, improve infant and child care, raise healthier livestock, teach health and sanitation, and even promote sounder beekeeping.  These enterprises met with varying degrees of success, although not for lack of effort.  And they were tackled with an unparalleled joie de vivre and a robust skepticism.  I am honored to have served among them.

The cross section of people that assembled for the reunion continue to be an inspirational cadre who are promoting the common good on a daily basis. From the engineers who are keeping the water supply safe and promoting solar and geothermal energy, to the teachers who are educating our children, particularly our special needs children, to the environmental scientists who struggle to save our own wilderness heritage in the face of too much bureaucracy and too little money, this is a group that has remained committed to making a difference.  My old friends, and I say that proudly, include an eye doctor, an U.N. translator, a software executive, and an entrepreneur and are involved in endeavors that span the globe from France to Australia to China.

On a personal note, I was particularly glad to see three people who made my experience in Morocco especially meaningful, The first, a co-organizer of the event, was one of the first people I met in Peace Corps and one of the ones I have known best and seen most over the years - a crazy-assed water baby who once griped, "I am everybody's best friend in Peace Corps."  I am glad he is mine.  The second was my next-door neighbor, only four hours away by way of the derelict Mercedes known as "grand taxis."  A person of style, poise, and grace, she was the best neighbor one could have -- supportive, present when needed, and tolerant of the foibles of someone who has spent too long in an isolated Moroccan village.  Third was the volunteer who organized the program at the La Creche Lalla Hasna orphanage where I spent my summer filling in between teaching stints in the countryside, an exemplar not only of concern and compassion for children but also of grace and cultural sophistication.  (By way of example, she travels with the music of the Tuareg on her iPhone).  

Justice requires a longer tribute than space allows; there is not space here to discharge my debt to the many Volunteers who bettered my life both during and after Peace Corps.  But at our reunion, for one brief shining moment, we were again Peace Corps Morocco.  And for that moment, hijinks aside, we could remember that we were and are heirs to the clarion call issued in a simpler time by President John F. Kennedy in his Inaugural Address: "And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for
you - ask what you can do for your country."

Against Confederate History Month

Thomas Nephew concludes his excellent month-long reverie in newsrackblog.com on the real meaning of the Civil War with reflections on the Lost Peace and the century-long denial of rights to African Americans that followed the bloodiest conflict in American History. The series had its genesis in Virginia's proclamation of "Confederate History Month" -- a perverse celebration of racists, slave-masters, and traitors -- which initially attempted to gloss over the grim fact that the South's "peculiar institution" was at the root of the conflict. Nephew states:

"Great accomplishments -- the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments -- lay ahead at the end of the Civil War, but they also seemed to expend the remaining anti-slavery, pro-equality political capital and energy available. As time would show, they could be circumvented and mooted by Jim Crow laws, the terrorism of lynchings and pogroms, and the accretion of legal rulings vitiating their original intent. Frederick Douglass's prophecy in war time -- "We are not to be saved by the captain, but by the crew" was good enough during war time, and while that captain lived. By 1875, Douglass would be asking, "If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?" One suspects he knew it was a rhetorical question. There would be almost nothing left over to address the needs for help and the needs for safety of a black population increasingly at the "mercy" of surrounding whites in the South."

In reflecting on the events of 1861 to 1865, Nephew reminds us that we should not celebrate of the stubbornness with which the South, and indeed the nation, for centuries has sought to perpetuate a legacy of white supremacy, but recollect and honor the lost opportunity for racial justice for which so many fought and died.

Peggy Noonan Thinks Criticizing Racists Is Racist

Former Reagan speech writer and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan apparently thinks that anyone who expresses concern over the racial implications of Arizona's harsh new crackdown on illegal immigration is in fact a closet racist:

"The establishments of the American political parties, and the media, are full of people who think concern about illegal immigration is a mark of racism. If you were Freud you might say, "How odd that's where their minds so quickly go, how strange they're so eager to point an accusing finger. Could they be projecting onto others their own, heavily defended-against inner emotions?" But let's not do Freud, he's too interesting. Maybe they're just smug and sanctimonious. "

Peggy Noonan, The Big Alienation, Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2010. Apparently, those good-hearted white folks in Arizona who want anyone "reasonably suspected" of being an undocumented alien to show their papers are not doing anything that impact a particular race or nationality as far as Noonan is concerned. And any concern to the contrary is simply some bizarre expression of internalized white liberal guilt over carefully concealed prejudice.

Noonan argues in her piece that the reason for paralysis in dealing with the immigration question at the federal level is fear of losing "the Hispanic vote," as though this were some kind of illegitimate reason. And if the politics of illegal immigration were not bound up with the politics of race and nationality, why would the Hispanic vote be an issue?

The draconian measures enacted by Arizona quite obviously put every dark-haired, brown skinned person under suspicion and require them -- citizens or not -- to prove their identity and legitimacy in ways that white citizens do not. This set of laws creates an invidious distinction based on race; it is therefore racist. And it does not take any complex concealed bias and inner guilt to reach that conclusion.

As the national debate unfolds and the Tea Party cavorts for the national press, the level of white grievance is quite easy to discern. It is quite remarkable how put upon white America feels every time a person of color catches a break. After our long history of slavery, Jim Crow, and de facto segregation, you would think white America would not still be harping on the loss of white privilege. And yet the argument proves itself every time some white yahoo from the hinterlands cries out that if a person of color got ahead, it must have been through chicanery. There's even a cottage industry in white America devoted to delegitimizing the President: what other President has been accused of not being a real citizen and of being a closet Muslim, with the further nasty implication that American Muslims are part of some kind of sinister fifth column.

If Noonan is going to pander to the prejudices of her white readers, the least she could do is confront the issue in a straightforward manner, rather than engaging in a cheap and phony jiujitsu that tries to turn the accusation of bias back on the accuser.

Racist Email Rocks Harvard Law School

The legal world was shaken today by the discovery that a promising third-year student at Harvard Law School had unleashed a group email to a number of other law students in which she discussed at some length the purported genetic and intellectual inferiority of African Americans. These views were all the more remarkable coming from a young woman rumored to be a candidate for a clerkship with a Judge on the prestigious United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. (The only Court higher than a United States Court of Appeals is the Supreme Court, and the Ninth Circuit is generally considered to be one of the most liberal Circuits in the country.) The statements in the email were shocking in themselves, but more shocking was the fact that they were coming out of Harvard Law School, a supposed bastion of liberal enlightenment and the bellwether for legal education in America. The Law School has been put on the defensive to the point that Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, a possible candidate for the Supreme Court, felt compelled to make an official statement.

Despite being dressed up in a certain amount of scientific jargon, however, such sentiments are nothing new to America, and in fact served as a principal justification for Southern entry into the Civil War. Particularly noteworthy was Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens' Corner-stone Speech in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861, proclaiming the Southern States to be founded on the principle of white supremacy. In relevant part, Stephens explained his theory of white supremacy as follows:

"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal."

Since the Southern defeat in the Civil War, white racists have been more hesitant to avow such sentiments openly. Today's news, however, shows that a young, white woman in America's most privileged educational institution, the crucible of the profession dedicated to upholding the rule of law, could casually espouse justifications in support of white supremacy and assume they would not arouse objections among her fellow students. A candid observer of white America would not be surprised that such attitudes, while decried when they become public, are widely held, at least tacitly, among white Americans, and occasionally even receive a patina of intellectual respectability with the publication of such books as the controversial Bell Curve published in the mid-nineties.

It would be comforting to believe that notions of racial inferiority -- indeed, of race as a biological concept -- had been laid to rest as part of our benighted past, or that they had been effectively marginalized to the point where they were limited to such economically disenfranchised and intellectually impoverished groups as the Tea Party and the Klan. To castigate the young woman at Harvard without a deeper examination of our beliefs as a society is to miss half the point; as a privileged young white woman at America's most elite institution, who appeared destined to dwell in the inner sanctum of privilege and power, she reveals that the corrosive stain of racism in the white American soul is with us yet, and that racism is a problem we have yet to deal with as a people not merely as a person. Thanks in part to such courageous leaders as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis, we have been to the mountaintop, but we are still a long way from the Promised Land.

Thanks to my friend Thomas Nephew for first pointing me in the direction of the Corner-stone speech. (He is otherwise not responsible for any of the views in this post, which are mine.)

Linux Likes and Loathings

I was recently having a conversation with a friend who makes his
living as an IT support person for Microsoft systems. I casually mentioned that I use Linux at home and acknowledged that there are some trade-offs. The response was that, well, maybe Linux is O.K. if all I have to do is a little word processing and web surfing. I did not pursue the discussion, but it did cause me to reflect a little bit, particularly since this was a response from a person who has forgotten more about computers than I will ever know.

Linux meets all my basic computing needs: email, web surfing, downloads, word processing, a little basic spreadsheet use. But it goes far beyond that, offering for free an array of powerful software that I could never afford to buy in commercial versions. It's not even a question of my being cheap (which maybe I am), it is a question of come software simply being out of reach. With Linux, I get an array of databases, a web server, an email server, an ftp server, image and video editing tools, and programming tools, to name a few, that would be both difficult and expensive for me to obtain for Windows. All of these are tightly integrated into a highly flexible and customizable operating system. One of the great blessings of my Linux system is that I can get to all of my data, all of the time, anywhere there is an Intenet connection, without being required to store all of my data on someone else's giant server. And with Linux, while I know a problem may be difficult to fix, I also know that it is almost always fixable.

I do run Windows occasionally in a virtual machine (which comes free with Linux). I need Internet Explorer to connect remotely to my server at work and I use WordPerfect for work-related word processing. I also do have good Free Software quivalents for TurboTax or iTunes (for my iPhone). Otherwise, my home computer time is usually strictly Linux.

My first step in writing this piece was to compile some of my Likes and Dislikes about Linux in tabular form, which as a final step, I have listed as follows:

Likes	Dislikes
Infinitely Customizable	Requires Customization
Free as in beer	Less choice of applications
Free as in Freedom	Not the industry standard
Powerful software I can afford	Not always the most powerful software
Intellectually challenging	Learning curve
Stable	Occasional hardware limitations
Community Support

Google Tech Talk: Carsten Dominik on Emacs org-mode

A Little Pessimism

At this juncture, I think a little pessimism is not unhealthy. Health care, even in a watered down form, has not passed. We lost Massachusetts. The banks we bailed out are earning record bonuses. Everyone is nervous about losing one or more houses of Congress. The Justice Department is preparing to whitewash the authors of the torture memos. And our guy is still trying to "engage" the Republicans rather than obliterate them. A little grumbling from the base seems to be in order.

Latest Blow from the Supreme Court

I am still trying to parse the Supreme Court's decision striking down corporate campaign spending limits. A bigger problem than how much money the corporations and unions have is that they are not representative of their constituents. The shareholders and employees have no voice and cannot express their political preferences, instead the officers and board use the corporation's vast wealth to amplify their own voice and silence all other members of the group. There should be less money in politics, but the fundamental problem here is allowing corporate leadership to hijack the voices of the citizenry. There is a reason corporations are called "special interests."

Politically Correct

Once perhaps a witty riposte to liberal excess or hypocrisy, the term "political correctness" has devolved into a reflexive right-wing defense of unmerited privilege. To champion the rights of any but one's own insular clique, to uphold equal opportunity, to oppose the vilification of the weak or sick, to believe that even one's enemies should be treated humanely, to suggest that the government has a positive role to play in the welfare of society, all these are "politically correct."

Those who wield the label "politically correct" ironically represent the dominant strain of political thought in the country. Blame it on John Winthrop and Max Weber, who together gave us the notion that privilege is equivalent to merit. The recent banking crisis should have gone a long way toward shaking this faith, as our generation's "best and brightest" precipitated the country toward financial ruin. But no, neither this nor our bloated, expensive, and inefficient health care system will persuade the American people to express any concern over the fact that the foxes are in charge of the henhouse. After all, the fox is just behaving according to his nature, and suggesting any other fate for the poultry would be hopelessly politically correct.

The politically correct label, with its whiff of the Party and the commissar, is most offensive coming from the highly disciplined, ideologically rigid, and morally sanctimonious American right. They are the one's who would have us all hue to the tenets of their particular superstition (which even they do not observe) and would deny to others the rights they themselves enjoy.

So if we cannot retire the term politically correct, let us at least recognize it as the reflexive tribute privilege pays to virtue.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

They Also Serve

We live in extraordinary times, if only we can lift our eyes from the press of the mundane long enough to see it. As I write, I have just finished reading a series of "tweets" broadcast by a friend in besieged Kabul, one of many friends in the international diplomatic/aid community working to ameliorate conditions in the most desperate places in the world.

Image via Wikipedia

Although I spent two years in the Peace Corps, I was always particularly impressed by my Peace Corps colleagues who went on to make careers of international service. Over the years, I have intermittently followed their careers as they narrowly cheated death from landmines in Zaire, tried to patch up Rwanda after the genocide, stimulated agricultural production in Mozambique, and tried to foster democracy in Afghanistan. And while I am amazed that Google can rescan the Haitian landscape within hours in order to give rescuers a detailed map of the devastation, I recognize that the key element in repairing the frayed edges of the international community is the people on the ground. With their unique blend of courage and compassion, they are my heroes.

John Milton, one of the most prodigious intellects of the seventeenth century, who played an active political part in one of England's greatest political upheavals, spent the latter part of his life confined to comparative inactivity by total blindness. Like Beethoven composing symphonies he could not hear, Milton dictated Paradise Lost from memory. In his sonnet On His Blindness, Milton wrote, "They also serve who only stand and wait." But among the vast majority of us who effectively "stand and wait," at least with respect to the world beyond our borders, let us have a moment's reflection for those who go forth and do, at their peril, and wish them a safe return.

Isaac Newton and the Tyranny of the Trivial

A moment's reflection is enough to reveal that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the universe's longest running cosmic joke. No matter what puny efforts we make, in the end everything falls apart. Some may take comfort in the hope that in the ultimate hereafter the Divine Joker who inflicted the Second Law on us will make everything all right. In the meantime, we are confronted not merely with our eventual disintegration but also with the daily mess.

I hate the daily mess. I have never been good at dealing with it, and my failure to master the petty organizational details of my life has been a lifelong irritant. I am particularly irritated because I am quite aware that the petty organizational details of life can be mastered, at least in the short term on a day to day basis. Going to college really brought this home, since I spent four years rooming with someone who was not only scientifically brilliant (and amused himself in his spare time by picking up Chinese) but also impeccably organized. Since his homework was generally done before dinner, he could relax in the evening reading science fiction before going to bed at 9 p.m., about the time I was sweeping the mess off my desk so I could start working.

Nevertheless, perpetual optimist that I am, I spent today picking up, throwing out, and cleaning off in the oft repeated hope that if I established a baseline of tidiness and organization, at little maintenance would preserve order in my life. But I do not really believe it. I am still good at the flash of concentrated effort. (Not as good as I once was, but as good once as I ever was, as Toby Keith put it.) But the daily nit-picky, habit forming, regimen following discipline that maintains daily order, while I long to embrace it with my programs, checklists, reminders, planners, schedules, and calendars is as elusive to me as the glimmering girl to Aengus. Ben Franklin, why has thou forsaken me?

Something Old, Something New

Once again the time has come to upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type. As with most software upgrades, this one is more a matter of vanity than practicality. Version 4 was perfectly functional and more than satisfied my modest needs, but as with so much of human life, the restless desire for something new, the itch for the latest thing, invariably impels me toward an upgrade. (To be fair, the new interface is quite elegant and easy to use, although some have suggested that it is an unduly close imitation of rival WordPress.) Naturally, having insisted on upgrading, I fully expect my customizations to be lost, my feeds to break, and my plugins to be obsolete, so that I will be obliged to engage in a new round of creative destruction as I try to restore the meager design elements of my blog. So gentle reader, I ask that you bear with me patiently until we return to the predictable routine of ordinary blogging.

1,000 Ways to Say Nothing

I wish I could remember who first observed that modern life has endowed with thousands of new ways to communicate and nothing more to say. At this moment, however, it seems particularly apropos. I finally decided to integrate my blog pages with the notes feed in my Facebook account. Some weeks ago, I displayed my twitter feed on my blog page. I have four private email accounts -- my own domain, gmail, yahoo, and hotmail -- plus a Google Wave account. I keep a list of public bookmarks on Del.icio.us. I am connected and integrated on my home computer, my laptop, my blog platform, and &mdash God help me — my iPhone, which I tote around from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, and not because I am making phone calls. I have word processors, CMS systems, text editors, version control systems, and email clients. True, I get a certain perverse pleasure out of setting all this up and keeping it running; it's a hobby. But to what end? Shakespeare was able to accomplish more with a quill pen in a day than the Internet in all its digital glory will in a lifetime.

Blogging to Happiness

I have been a big fan of Gretchen Rubin ever since reading her slim biography of Winston Churchill and her somewhat less slim biography of John F. Kennedy. At present, I am about half way through her latest book: The Happiness Project, in which she chronicles a year spent thinking and trying ways to live a happier life. One thing which brought Rubin more happiness was starting a blog, also called the Happiness Project. Given that one of Rubin's principles of happiness could be paraphrased as the journey is more important than the destination (though the destination counts!), it is not surprising that one of the ways she found greater happiness was through her blog.

America Launched on a Sea of Words

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ronald Reagan had a great gift for reducing powerful ideas to shallow platitudes. So perhaps it is no surprise that, like some verbal reverse alchemist turning gold into lead, he could debase the Puritan fear of accountability to a stern deity to a bland notion of modern celebrity. When John Winthrop spoke of a City on a Hill, it was equal parts aspiration and admonition. Yes, he intended the Massachusetts Bay Colony to be an example of godliness to others, but he was also firmly persuaded that if the Colony abandoned the the path of righteousness, that God could make it an example of another sort after the fashion of, say, Sodom and Gomorrah. Reagan, in contrast, basically viewed the "City on a Hill" as a variation of the Magic Kingdom. Reagan's platitudes are just one of many ways in which modern America has watered down and caricatured the Puritans' high minded, if sometimes oppressive, ideals.

None of which is to do justice to the bitingly funny and deeply compassionate narrative of life in early America recounted by Sarah Vowell in the Wordy Shipmates. Vowell has a keen understanding both of how radically different the Puritan outlook was from our modern sensibilities and yet how deeply ingrained Puritan notions of their special place in the world are in modern America, with both comic and disastrous consequences. And in the end, some of the characters Vowell is most fond of are the rebels and misfits - Ann Hutchinson and Roger Williams -- who were forced out of the Massachusetts to Rhode Island, where they established a precedent for religious tolerance that has been a significant thread in American history ever since.

Contrary to today's secularists, Roger Williams was not concerned with limiting the state's power in matters of conscience because he was irreligious. Rather, he was, if anything, too religious, so scrupulous about his own salvation that at times he would refuse to pray even in the company of his wife and children less they tarnish the purity of his thoughts. Williams recognized, however, that the tyranny of the state in religious matters corrupts both religion and government. False doctrines can be imposed by force, but more importantly religion comes to serve secular ends.

No account of early New England would be complete without confronting the colonists' encounters with the Native Americans. Vowell acknowledges that the early epidemics that wiped out huge numbers of the native population were inevitable once initial contact was made between Indians and Europeans. However, she also observes that the subsequent genocide was not, and she vividly describes the incineration of virtually the entire Pequot tribe - men, women, and children - in one monstrous conflagration as a horrifying precedent for the centuries of massacres to come.

For any person willing to take a lighthearted look at early America, and its underside, the Wordy Shipmates is a volume not to be missed.

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Ripeness is All: Zorba the Greek

Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The only universal experiences are pain and death. Those of
us who are lucky experience a minimum of the former and put off the
latter as long as possible. Sadly, our chances of escaping pain and
evading death are not solely determined by the caprices of an
indifferent nature but are also subject to the folly and more
significantly the cruelty of our own verminous little species. At the
outside, the Marquis de Sade was so convinced of the universality of
cruelty that he made it a principle that cruelty was not only the
shortest route to pleasure, power, fortune, and fame, but itself and
inherently sensual and gratifying exercise. Though in our sunnier
moments we may doubt the wisdom of the Good Marquis' observations, the
dismal history of the past century alone -- an unparalleled
century of mass murder, global conflict, and exquisite torture that
would make a medieval inquisitor blush -- is enough to bolster
the arguments of even the most faint-hearted pessimist. The recent
folly in Iraq, followed by the embrace of torture, secret prisons, and
extraordinary rendition, while it may be a peccadillo compared to the
monstrous crimes of the mid-century past, nevertheless should quiet
any Pollyanna who would exempt us from the general disease of human
cruelty. So is there a reason, as Monte Python so memorably put it,
to "always look on the bright side of life."

Zorba the Greek is an extraordinarily life-affirming story. It
also has an rich appreciation for human folly, cruelty, and
narrow-mindedness. Amidst frigid aristocrats, mad monks, brutish
villagers, and vain adventurers, Zorba stands like a rock of conjoined
masculine power and compassion. A former soldier, he has had his
fill of killing. (An inveterate serial romantic, he has certainly
not lost his interest in women.) As a mine boss, he is first to
share the danger of the miners; as a man, he is the first to stand
against the village on behalf of a persecuted woman. Along with his
backer, a mine owner tormented by a bookish vision of Eastern
mysticism, Zorba cheerfully runs one enterprise after another into the
ground with great gusto and joie de vivre, literally extracting every
ounce of pleasure from wine, women and song, for he is a master of the
Greek instrument the Santuri and is enthralled by dance. Even as the
shadow of the First World War looms, Zorba is undaunted. Better than
his bookish companion or the cloddish villagers, Zorba understands not
only pain and death but life, pleasure, and love. For this, he towers
above the Lilliputians who surround him.

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