The Obama Code

Actually, this possibility bothers me more than the usual crypto-Muslim Kenyan anti-colonialist fantasies.

Weather and Posting Forecast

Maybe because of the snow and cold and generally wretched weather, I haven't felt much like writing or anything else; I was beginning to think I was coming down with something, but a night's sleep helped. I've got a couple of big posts in the works, but for now, this clip (to which I was pointed by a couple of different people) fits well. As good satire should, it cuts both ways.


New Law Would Ban Marriages Between People Who Don't Love Each Other

Individualists of the World, Unite!

Now that the Heterosexual Oscars are over, many Colts fans are in deep mourning. Such is life -- you can't have a winner without a loser, or many losers. At alicublog Roy Edroso reports on rightbloggers' reactions to the big game, and quotes one Troy Nelson:

What happened to the days of pulling for organizations, teams, and players whom [sic!] best demonstrate the virtues of team work and heart and will power? Who overcome the challenges of a determined opponent on the level playing field of competition? Of blood, sweat, and tears? I guess in our coddled, emasculated, socialist society any overt demonstration or celebration of these qualities is offensive, too Darwinian, too Randian, too capitalistic.

Ah yes, professional sports are certainly capitalistic, with the heroic players working for the Ellsworth Tooheys of America. But "Darwinian"? I thought good conservatives repudiated Darwin. What the Creationist/Intelligent Design take on team sports would be I don't know. "Randian"? Ayneleh was apparently ambivalent at best about Darwin. I'm not sure what she would have thought of the Superbowl -- surely it would have been too corporate for her, though she never let herself be hobbled by consistency -- but one of her disciples assures the faithful that "no guilt is called for, because watching sports satisfies a vital human need." And this acolyte somehow manages to turn subordination and sacrifice in the service of the group into selfishness and self-glorification; that's fundamentalism for you, which manages to interpret a text until it means its opposite. (Not all Objectivists agree, however.)

That is why the economist John Kenneth Galbraith took on the subject years ago:

I once wrote a piece of which I was at the time very proud (I maybe shouldn't go back and read it again), arguing somewhat ironically that socialism in the United States was the result of organized sports. It takes people at a vulnerable age and makes teamwork, more than individual work, the thing. It subjects people to the authority of the team captain or the coach, and as I say, this is at an age where people are vulnerable. And therefore, team sports are the breeding grounds for socialism and must be watched very carefully. And I had an organization in the piece -- this ran in Harper's -- called "the CIA": the Congress for Individualist Athletics. It was written under a pseudonym because I was then an ambassador, I couldn't write under my own name. One day the postman struggled into my room at Harvard with a pile of letters this thick that had been sent on from Harper's from people who, well, they fell into three classes:

• people who wanted to know whether it was real or not;
• people who wanted to join; and
• people who demanded that I exclude baseball from the list because baseball is not, as they said, a "socialist" sport: when you're up at bat, you're on your own.

Well, it's an example of the dangers of using irony. Under the best of circumstances, many people are going to take it seriously.

11,000 MPH, It's Not Just a Good Idea, It's the Law

Finally! I've been waiting for my ride to get here for, like, years. I'm outa here, bitchez.

(via)

Calling Dan Choi; or, Taking It Like a Man

(via)

The Murky Twilight World Between the Pages of the Promiscuous Reader

I'm feeling enervated and neurasthenic tonight, so I'm just going to paste in this little piece I wrote for the student paper back in the 90s. It's a sort of Promiscuous Reader's Manifesto.

[Wealthy 19th-century bibliophiles] were people who also enjoyed the smell of fine leather, the feel of rich papers, the colors of lustrous inks and the look of clean, crisp type.
--"Savoring Literary Treasures", The Chicago Tribune, 27 January 1995

In his younger days, the Promiscuous Reader had to concede, he had been rather indiscriminate, even reckless at times. But he would never denigrate the excitement he'd felt, after years of deprivation, prowling for whole afternoons in the poorly lit and disorganized shelves of the St. Vincent De Paul Thrift Store or the White Elephant Shoppe, where used paperbacks were 10 cents and hardcovers went for fifty cents, a dollar tops. It had begun innocently enough, with a comic book or two behind the barn; then he'd moved on to paperbacks bought from a rack at the local drugstore. Only years later, when he had a job, could he afford to move on to the hard stuff. "You'll go blind," his mother warned him. "So," he shrugged, "I'll do it till I need glasses."

He knew that some evangelists loved to induce a voluptuous shiver of loathing in their congregations with horror stories about people like him: "And some of these so-called intellectuals," they would say, "read as many as five hundred books in a lifetime!" (Little did they know: the Promiscuous Reader's personal tally was about ten times that.) No decent person really needed more than one Book, they asserted, with at most a Pilgrim's Progress or Family Shakespeare for the more worldly. Wasn't that, after all, why Jesus had exhorted his followers to pluck out their eyes, rather than be led by them to sin? It was far better for your hopes of salvation if you received the divine charism of illiteracy.

The Promiscuous Reader was less disturbed by such squeamishness than by certain feminist theorists' attack on "linear narrative" and "patriarchal print media." In the same vein, some Men's Movement writers had deplored the life of the mind as an artifact of the Industrial Revolution, to say nothing of William Burroughs's insistence that language is a malign extraterrestrial virus -- though the Promiscuous Reader noted sourly that these folks' beliefs didn't stop them from writing and publishing many tedious books.

Then there were the champions of the Academic Canon, who held that Great Works of Literature, if read in the missionary position, were no fun whatsoever. This, be it noted, was intended as a compliment: by submitting to the minds of the Great Master Spirits of the Past (who by an amazing coincidence were nearly all male and white, though often not heterosexual) one might improve oneself in a way formerly associated with the effects of cold showers, castor oil. and high colonics.

Supporters of this "family-values" approach to reading cited a new University of Chicago study which supposedly revealed that Americans' favorite pleasure reading were Hamlet, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Aquinas' Summa in the original Latin; also that 95% of Playboy readers bought it solely for the articles. This study was welcomed in the media as evidence that the New York Times best-seller lists were a ruse by the "cultural elite" to make it appear that Americans preferred trash like Stephen King and Danielle Steele to the Classics.

The Promiscuous Reader bought none of it. Reading was dirty, if you did it right, and the classics were no exception. The Victorians had reason to produce censored versions of Plato, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Chaucer, just as Plato had reason to ban poets from his ideal republic. Those who wish that citizens were robots, docile and interchangeable, have always tried to domesticate literature, washing off the sweat and other unclean body fluids, turning it into in a chaste and proper bride for the virtuous reader. The real lovers of books love them passionately and messily, not for their corseted leather bindings and smooth creamy paper, but for their wicked, hairy, anarchic human souls.

The Slippery Slope

I really appreciate Taylor Harris's concern (via) for the sensibilities of religious believers. I'm sure he feels exactly the same way about the devout Christians who opposed the Civil Rights Movement because of their sincere, scripture-based conviction that God intended the races to be separate. Yet these fine people were demonized as "racists," "bigots," "rednecks," and the like. And the definition of American was changed from white to any damn color you please. You can see the decline since then. It may be too late to repair the damage now, but at least we can draw a line in the sand over sodomitical marriage and say, "No pasaran!"

But ... just a thought. Didn't the trouble really start when the Christians forcibly changed the definition of religion in the Roman Empire from polytheism to monotheism? And probably at about the same time, changed the definition of marriage from polygamous to monogamous? Or maybe it was when the Phoenicians changed the definition of writing from syllabic or hieroglyphic to alphabetic, thus allowing the common people to achieve literacy more easily? You can see how the quality of literary production has dropped since then.

Or maybe it was when the first mitosis changed the definition of life from one-celled to many-celled? Some will try to tell you, "The individual cells that make up our bodies are still alive, and the majority of organisms are single-celled. Multicellular lifeforms are just a particular organization. Hive organisms of eusocial animals (freqently haplodiploid) are a scaled up analogy." Don't be fooled! That's what the militant recruiting multicellular organisms would like you to believe: that they're really no different from one-celled organisms, and that multicellularism is an "alternative lifestyle" no different from any other. From that first fateful mitosis it was only a few million years to meiosis and sexual reproduction, and just look where it's gotten us.

(image credit; via)