One Cannot Go Against the Word of the Internet

Getting away from religion isn't as easy as many of my fellow atheists like to think, though, mainly because religion isn't a discrete entity that has nothing in common with other human cultural inventions.  Culture isn't made up of discrete entities, though: everything overlaps.  Sometimes you can find clear cases, but they're only part of the picture; the boundaries between the categories aren't clearly defined.  (Even putting it that way assumes that the categories have clear cases at the center, with those pesky permeable boundaries at the edges -- but this picture can only be drawn after a lot of sorting and organization of the instances.)

When I call some idea "religious" in a dismissive and derogatory way, I'm guilty of the same failing: I mean (and should probably say instead) that the idea is woolly, irrational, emotionally derived, etc.  I've often called the geek debates over the virtues of Macintoshes vs. Microsoft "theological," for example, to suggest that they are like the supposed medieval debates over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (though those debates were probably more rational than Mac vs. PC: the Scholastics were smarter and more rational than today's computer fanatics).  It's convenient to use "religious" or "theological" this way because they've acquired such connotations.  It would be just as accurate to to call anthropomorphizing and teleological thinking "scientific," because these tendencies are just as common among scientists as they are among the conventionally religious, without being universal in either group -- but if I did, how many people would recognize that I was being derisive?  Calling something "scientific" is supposed to be praise.

I'd do better to stick to terms like "anthropomorphic" and "teleological" in such cases.  Anthropomorphizing is what's mainly on my mind today, anyway: speaking of "Nature" or "Science" or "Religion" or "Natural Selection" or "Globalization" or "the Internet" as though they were conscious agents, instead of impersonal abstractions.  I recently read a fascinating new book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov, published this year by PublicAffairs.  Both his critics and his fans notice how much he's read, though I don't believe he's any more learned than, say, Mike Davis or any number of other scholars who write for an educated general audience.  I've already noted several books he refers to that I'd like to read, though -- just what I don't need.  Anyway, it looks to me like Morozov has done a normal and reasonable amount of reading for a book about a big subject; those who marvel at his erudition may not have been aware that there were all these relevant tomes out there -- unless, like some of Noam Chomsky's critics, they're indulging in anti-intellectualism: why does he have to include all those footnotes, and use all those big words?  It's so inappropriate and unnecessary.

To Save Everything, Click Here is about the cult of "the Internet," about the assumption that the Internet is an entity, and in particular that it's a new one.  Morozov quotes numerous evangelists of the Internet who personify it, such as Jeff Jarvis: "I’m a befuddled [sic] over the roots of the curmudgeons’ one-sided debate. Why do they so object to tools being given credit? Are they really objecting, instead, to technology as an agent of change, shifting power from incumbents to insurgents? Why should I care about their complaints? I am confident that these tools have been used by the revolutionaries and have a role. What’s more interesting is to ask what that role is, what that impact is" (Morozov, 56).

Technology, or a given tool, can't be an agent: they can be used by agents, but that's not the same thing.  (Notice too Jarvis's reference to "tools being given credit.")  A word like "medium" would work better than "agent" here.  Much of Morozov's argument is directed against the notion that "the Internet" is an agent in this sense: something autonomous, goal-directed, with its own determining "logic" driving social change in the direction it chooses, before which we must humble ourselves and submit.

One of the best features of To Save Everything, Click Here is Morosov's account of the history of technology and its reception, demolishing the Internet evangelists' claims that the Internet is totally unprecedented.

The debates over electricity were, in fact, as dramatic and bizarre as the debates we are currently having about “the Internet,” its democratic potential, and its effect on our brains.  How else to explain the publication of a book like The Silent Revolution, or the Future Effects of Steam and Electricity upon the Condition of Mankind – in 1852! – which promised “social harmony of humanity” on the basis of a “perfect network of electric filaments.”  Or what to make of the fact that Patrick Geddes, Petr Kropotkin, and other nineteenth-century thinkers believed that electricity would usher in a brand-new age of neotechnics, where, to quote French historian Armand Mattelar, “town and country, work and leisure, brain and hand” would be reconciled?  Or what to do with Nazi engineers like Franz Lawaczeck, a founding father of the National Socialist engineers’ association, who believed that the Third Reich could promote small farms and businesses, thus encouraging a decentralization of society, by generating an abundance of cheap electricity?  This is not to mention the complex and controversial history, itself full of protracted battles and rancorous debates, over the physical infrastructure that made electricity widely available.  Only by papering over and suppressing such history can we see “the Internet” as unique and exotic [44-5].

Morosov also confirms a long-held suspicion of mine about the thinness of young people's technological competence:

Several studies show that, of all age groups, young people tend to be least informed about many aspects of digital culture.  For example, a 2010 study that investigated what users know about online privacy found that “among all age groups, higher proportions of the eighteen--twenty-four-year-olds had the poorest understanding of the privacy policy label and the right of companies to sell or share their data with other firms.”  As one of the study’s authors put it, “The online savvy many attribute to younger individuals (so-called digital natives) doesn’t appear to translate to privacy knowledge.”  In other words, it’s not that young people don’t care about privacy – they do – they just don’t have the digital savvy that Tapscott and Williams attribute to them.  These conclusions are echoed in a recent study from the European Commission that also found young people lacking in many digital competencies.  A 2009 empirical study of students at five British universities found that “it is far too simplistic to describe young first-year students born after 1983 as a single generation …. [They are] not homogenous in [their] use and appreciation of new technologies and … there are significant variations amongst students that lie within the Net generation age band.”  But conducting such studies, of course, is not as sexy as musing on “the digital revolution that is changing every institution in society.”  The latter probably pays better, too [46].

Or again, "technology pundit Kevin Kelly"

notes that “the Protestant Reformation makes for good allegory because it separates power from control; it draws on stories of catechism and ritual, alphabets, pamphlets and liturgies, indulgences and self-help in order to give geeks a way to make sense of the distinction between power and control, and how it relates to the technical and political economy they occupy.”  This is why, in many a geek debate, the state is recast as the monarchy, large corporations as the Catholic Church, startups and programmers as Protestant reformers, and the laity as “lusers” and “sheeple.”  Kelly believes that such stories are popular with geeks because they “explain a political, technical, legal situation that does not have ready-to-narrate stories” [52].

But they also explain that situation in terms that flatter the geeks' inflated sense of elite status and entitlement.

I'm not totally enamored of Morosov; I started to read his previous book, The Net Delusion, and was turned off right away by some dubious statements.  But To Save Everything, Click Here is a valuable survey and critique of what David F. Noble called the Religion of Technology.

Not My Definitive Post on Assimilation

... Nor was this. But I'm getting there.  I'm having trouble with Suzanna Danuta Walters's The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes, and Good Intentions Are Sabotaging Gay Equality (NYU Press, 2014).  As readers of this blog will know, I'm sympathetic to her position, having written critically on the same topic many times.  But already, just a few pages in, I'm hitting some stumbling blocks.  For example:

No civil rights movement worthy of the name has banked its future on being tolerated or accepted.  Women didn't demurely request tolerance; they demanded voting rights and pay equity.  African Americans continue to struggle not for some bizarre "acceptance" of their skin tone but instead for an end to discrimination in work, in schools, in housing, in the judicial system.  They want, as do all these groups, full and deep integration and inclusion in the American dream.  Disabled Americans don't want to be tolerated; they want streets made accessible to them and laws strong enough to protect them from discrimination [12-13].

Walters has already indulged in an analysis of what "tolerance" and "acceptance" mean, but all the key terms in this passage are just as loaded and ambiguous: "integration" and "inclusion," for example, to say nothing of "discrimination" and "rights."  I've criticized this kind of linguistic determinism before, whether it's espoused by academics or by laypeople: the etymology of a word tells you its history, not its meaning, let alone its use.  Most people, including academics, aren't very clear as to the meanings of the slogans they brandish.  They adopt them because they're timely, in the air, and sound good to them.

Aside from that, it's not obvious to me that the current gay movement puts "tolerance" and "acceptance" ahead of demands for rights and equality and an end to discrimination.  "Rights," "equality," and "discrimination" are frequently invoked in the drive for marriage, entry to the military, and calls for the passage of ENDA, as well as in areas such as religion where they aren't especially relevant.  "Acceptance" and "tolerance" wouldn't have been particularly relevant to the women's movement because women were already part of everyone's everyday life, whereas gays were largely invisible and presumed to have no connection to straights.  "Tolerance" was part of the rhetoric of the movement for African-American equality, though like everything else it was contested.  Martin Luther King Jr. said to an interviewer, for example, "How could there be anti-semitism among Negroes when our Jewish friends have demonstrated their commitment to the principle of tolerance and brotherhood not only in the form of sizable contributions, but in many other tangible ways, and often at great personal sacrifice?" (quoted in A Testament of Hope [HarperOne, 2003], 370).  He also described how "a situation that many had predicted would be the end of the [Montgomery Improvement Association] left it more united than ever in the spirit of tolerance" (ibid., 454).  It wasn't a central theme of his, but he did use it as a term of approval.

 "Civil rights" has come to be understood as referring to the rights of black people only, which supports what I just said about people not understanding what their buzzwords mean.  It's no wonder that many hostile people have come to think that "gay rights" refers to some supposed "special rights" for gay people, when it's at best shorthand for "the civil rights of gay people," and that's still misleading because civil rights laws cover majorities as well as minorities: whites as well as blacks, straights as well as gays.  Many gay people have been surprised when they found out that, when "sexual orientation" was added to civil rights ordinances, they couldn't discriminate against straight people, or even against bisexuals.  And civil rights are only a subset of what any movement for social justice must concern itself with.

Walters must also know that movements for social justice have always been divided internally, not just about tactics but about goals.  Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Dubois represented different conceptions about the struggle for black equality, as did Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.  Feminists have always been divided between radicals, liberals, and conservatives, as have advocates for homosexuals.  Walters mentions Magnus Hirschfeld (once), but I haven't gotten far enough yet to know whether she realizes how different the post-1945 European homosexual movement and organizations have been from her ideal of a "civil rights movement worthy of the name."  It seems that her political analysis is less than fully informed historically.  (So, it appears, is her account of what "how it went" to come out in a major American city in the 1970s, which is reminiscent of skewed accounts I've addressed before.)  I'm sympathetic to her complaints, but already she evinces conceptual muddling that forebodes hard reading ahead.  I will try to finish the book, though.

The Morlocks in Our Midst

Ironically, it never seems to occur to American Punctuation, Spelling, and Grammar (PSG) obsessives that the supposedly correct English they champion and defend is itself a debased, barbaric corruption of real Standard English.  Surely they know that their British counterparts have long been fussing about the malign influence of Americanisms on the real deal?  In his fascinating book Standard English and the Politics of Language (Illinois, 1989*) Tony Crowley, quotes one such, R. W. Chapman, who wrote in 1932:

Whether standard English will long be able to maintain its position and integrity seems open to doubt.  It is exposed, as we have seen, to dangers from within … As the speech of a very small minority of English speakers it is obviously exposed to gradual absorption by the surrounding mass, and perhaps also to deliberate attack.  It is well-known that English vocabulary and idiom are undergoing penetration from America and elsewhere … Even our grammar is threatened [quoted in Crowley, 195-6].

Crowley traces the history of the study of language mainly as it was done in England starting in the late 1700s, with a focus on the history of English.  His thesis is that these scholars, despite their scientific pretensions to impartiality, were strongly prescriptive, driven by their class and other political biases.  They were sure that their dialect of English was superior -- more elegant, more subtle, more sonorous, easier to understand, and the dialect that foreigners seeking to learn English preferred to acquire.  Among the more amusing aspects of the quest to define and exalt Received Standard English, or RSE, was the tendency to limit its speakers to smaller and smaller groups of the English population.  So, for example, the early twentieth-century linguist Henry Wyld defined RSE as the dialect spoken by men who had studied at English public schools, but later he narrowed it even further:

If I were asked among what class the ‘best’ English is most consistently heard at its best, I think, on the whole, I should say among officers of the British Regular Army.  The utterance of these men is at once clear-cut and precise, yet free from affectation; at once downright and manly, yet in the highest degree refined and urbane [quoted in Crowley, 204].

Yes, but which officers?  Lieutenants?  Colonels?  Generals?  Surely Wyld was not being precise enough here.

Another writer quoted by Crowley (246) declared:

If any one wants a definite example of standard English we can tell him that it is the kind of English spoken by a simple, unaffected young Englishman like the Prince of Wales.

Given the date (1925), I presume that the "simple, unaffected" prince this writer had in mind was the future Edward VIII, perhaps because of his willingness to serve in the military during the First World War.  But Edward was also a racist, though not unusually so for a person of his station in his day; and notorious for womanizing and reckless behavior, including affairs with married women.  Later he took up with a married American, and abdicated his throne upon her divorce so he could marry her.  Because of his Nazi sympathies, he was sent to the Bahamas as governor for the duration of World War II.  Ah yes, a simple, unaffected young Englishman ... but I digress.

What I found most interesting and useful in Crowley's book was his account of the ambivalence such writers felt about teaching Standard English to the lower orders.  On one hand, they believed that everybody should be taught Standard English so that all Britons would have a chance at social and economic success.  Social success was perhaps more important than mere economic success in their eyes:

Thus for Kington-Oliphant the self-made men of the mid-Victorian period (particularly the millocracy) were a major social and linguistic threat.  He argued therefore that ‘many a needy scholar might turn an honest penny by offering himself as an instructor of the vulgar rich in pronunciation of the fatal letter.  Our public schools are often railed against as teaching but little; still it is something that they enforce the right use of the h’.  ‘H’ then, the ‘fatal letter’, was a highly important social signifier and thus according to the same writer, ‘few things will the English youth find in after-life more profitable than the right use of the aforementioned letter’ [153f].**

In other words, you could be very successful in business but still be regarded as "vulgar" because of your accent.  As Henry Wyld wrote in 1909, "It is probably wise and useful to get rid of these Provincialisms since they attract attention, and often ridicule, in polite circles" (quoted by Crowley, 180).  So it’s polite to make fun of someone who speaks differently?  It seems very provincial to me, especially when the supposedly neutral standard is a dialect spoken by a regional minority.

On the other hand, the advocates of universal training in RSE were ambivalent: could it be done without diluting and debasing the purity of English?  Indeed, could these ignorant peasants and vulgar parvenus learn to speak 'properly' at all?  (Bernard Shaw played with this issue in his comedy Pygmalion, originally staged in 1912, in which an expert in phonology teaches a Cockney flower girl to speak like a lady.)  The project was blocked in any case for more than a century by the resistance of those who wanted the curriculum to stay based in the classical languages, Latin and Greek.

An analogous situation in the United States was the system of Indian schools, which took young children from their families, forced them to speak English and punished them for speaking their native languages, and trained them for domestic service.  As Tim Machan writes in What Is English? And Why Should We Care? (Oxford, 2013, p. 237),

Beyond the irony of English as an instrument to civilize Native Americans for menial jobs is the irony that in many cases even these jobs didn’t exist.  Girls trained as domestics could find little work if they returned to reservations with dirt-floor houses, where boys taught to be shoemakers, carpenters, and blacksmiths had little opportunity to exercise their craft.  Trained as a tinsmith at Carlisle and accustomed to send to his family the goods he produced, Standing Bear notes, “After I had left the school and returned home, this trade did not benefit me any, as the Indians had plenty of tinware that I had made at school.”  Equally telling of Anglophone Native American marginal status is the fact that in some areas the only speakers with whom students might use their new language were their teachers or other students.  Acquiring English invited them to join a group that didn’t exist.

Training non-standard speakers in Standard English often alienated them from the people they'd grown up with.  Crowley stresses that "discrimination was not a unidirectional practice and Sweet for one noted that ‘northern speakers often reproach Londoners with mincing affectation’" (155).

Furthermore, the argument that ‘sub-standard’ speakers reacted to the stigmatization of their usage by passively accepting it and thus ‘standardising’ or ‘correcting’ their speech is not supported by much evidence.  There is, on the contrary, evidence for a reverse process since those who did ‘correct’ or ‘standardise’ in any but the most necessary contexts were the recipients of the mockery and stigmatization of their peers.  Barnes, for example, noted that the dialect, ‘will not, however, be everywhere immediately given up as the language of the land-folk’s fire-side, though to outsiders they may speak pretty good English, since fine-talking (as it is called) on the lips of a home-born villager, is generally laughed at by his neighbors as a piece of affectation’ [161].

Most disturbing, I thought, was this passage by "the early sociologist C.F.G. Masterman" (208), published in 1901:

Our streets have become congested with a weird and uncanny people.  They have poured in as dense black masses from the eastern Railways; they have streamed cross the bridges from the marshes and desolate places beyond the river; they have been hurried up in incredible number through tubes sunk in the bowels of the earth, emerging like rats from a drain, blinking in the sunshine.  They have surged through our [!?] streets, turbulent cheerful indifference to our assumed proprietorship [quoted in Crowley, 209].

It's many years since I read H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), but when I read this I immediately thought of the Morlocks in that story, who "are described as 'ape-like, with little or no clothing, large eyes and grey fur covering their bodies. As a result of living underground they are albinos and thus have little or no melanin to protect their skin, which makes them extremely sensitive to light."  Masterman's description is similar to racist diatribes of today (or of his own day), but the notable thing is that he's not talking about immigrants from abroad, he's talking about his fellow Englishmen (who a century later are vilified as "chavs"), just as American PSG obsessives today rail most violently against the linguistic offenses of other Americans.

Since I figured this out, I've become increasingly aware of, and bemused by, the fury and hatred of other human beings expressed by many PSG obsessives, at home and abroad.  Crowley quotes quite a bit of material from linguistic puritans who worked themselves into a frenzy over the letter h, for example; Kington-Oliphant, quoted above, wasn't unique.  It's one thing to be bothered by other people's differences or even errors (however you define them) of pronunciation, spelling, punctuation, or grammar; it's quite another to justify it by declaring those Others to be stupid, low-class, inferior, subhuman.  I'm sure you've heard of Stanley Milgram's infamous obedience experiment, in which two-thirds of his subjects were willing to administer strong electric shocks to a person who answered questions incorrectly?  These PSG obsessives would probably have been among the punitive two-thirds.

*The second edition, published in 2003, is available online as a PDF.
**In this and other quotations I've silently removed the references.

This Is the End

I ought to mention another book I've liked recently, Marlen Haushofer's The Wall.  Originally published in German in 1963, it was translated into English in 1990.  Haushofer herself died young, not quite fifty years old, of cancer in 1970, and her work attracted little attention until years later, when it was taken up and championed by feminists and environmentalists.  Until very recently, The Wall was her only work available in English, but that changed at around the time Julian Pölsler's 2012 film adaptation was released, and now several other of her books have been translated.  A review of the DVD made me aware of The Wall, and I decided to read the book before I watched the movie.

The premise of The Wall is that the narrator, a fortyish widow, goes on vacation in the mountains with her cousin and her cousin's husband.  She stays in their cabin one evening when the others drive into town.  When they still haven't returned the next morning, she discovers that there is an invisible but impassible barrier between her neighborhood and the rest of the world.  Through it she can see an elderly couple, seemingly frozen in place. There's a radio in the cabin, but all she can find is static.  Gradually she realizes that she's probably the only human being left alive, perhaps on the planet, and must figure out how to survive with very limited resources.  For company she has only her cousin's dog Lynx, and later a cat and a cow.

There's almost no action in The Wall, aside from a brief moment of violence towards the end, which the narrator foreshadows early on, and some readers (mostly, I suspect, younger males) have objected to this.  No exploding heads, no car crashes, no explanation of where the wall came from, no rescue, no romance.  But Haushofer meticulously depicted the narrator's achievement of her survival, along with her fears and doubts and abandonment of hope.  The book is tightly written, and I found it fascinating but also profoundly disturbing.

Some critics have compared The Wall to Robinson Crusoe, and there's some validity to that since the appeal of the story lies largely in the narrator's account of her survival strategies.  Haushofer wrote to a friend that the writing was hard work because "I must continuously inquire whether what I say about animals and plants is actually correct."  Her attention to detail gives the novel a very rich texture.

The Wall is often called "dystopian," which is correct insofar as the narrator's situation is far from idyllic, but a dystopia usually refers to a society, and the narrator is alone except for her animal companions, with whom she gets along quite well.  With some irony the book could also be seen as utopian, as the narrator reflects on her troubled relations with other people, her happiness with her animals, and the freedom solitude gives her not to worry about how she appears to others.  She is often lonely, however, though not for romance; at one point she reflects that she wouldn't mind the company of an older woman.

Is The Wall a feminist novel?  Yes, in the sense that it puts a woman's experience and perspective in the foreground of the story without apology.  Is it about humanity's relation to nature, as some readers have said?  Yes, but I'm not sure it's therefore an environmentalist novel any more than, say, Robinson Crusoe would be.  I've seen its spiritual aspects stressed too, and that's accurate enough, as the narrator reflects on the nature of self and her place in the universe.

For me, though, the most prominent theme of The Wall was its contemplation of mortality.  I often thought while I read it of The Turin Horse, Béla Tarr's 2011 film about an old farmer, his daughter, and their horse, who find that their already restricted lives are being narrowed even further as a mysterious (allegorical?) night descends on them.  As the film proceeds, they discover that they can't leave their land as the horse refuses to move, and eventually they're trapped in their house in complete darkness.  Like The Wall, The Turin Horse has little action of the kind that would appeal to fanboys; it's structured around the characters' numbing routines, which they continue as best they can to the bitter end, depicted in long takes that show everything they do, more or less in real time.  And it seemed to me that The Turin Horse was about death, which is also the end of the world, and vice versa.  The inexorability of the end's slow approach was quietly terrifying. 

The same is true of The Wall: the narrator knows that she must work hard to sustain herself and the animals, which she feels both as a burden but also as a reason to carry on.  She doesn't mind dying herself so much, but worries about the dog and cow, who are dependent on her care, and the deaths they'd suffer if she gave up or died before they did.  She gradually gives up hope of escape or rescue, let alone knowing why the world changed as it did.  The claustrophobic feel of the story symbolizes the approach of individual mortality for me, and like The Turin Horse, the effect is both frightening and fascinating.

I don't, however feel a need to reduce The Wall to a single theme.  What makes it a great book, in my opinion, is that it contains all these aspects, intricately woven together in a deceptively simple tale.  I expect to reread it at least once before very long.  I'm very glad I found out about it.

Whimsy with Teeth

 

Since I'm so often a cranky curmudgeon, it seems important to mention when I find something that I like outright.  Right now I'm reading Pot Shots at Poetry by Robert Francis (1901-1987), whom I discovered when May Sarton quoted some of his poems in her journal After the Stroke.  I was taken by them, which doesn't happen to me often enough with poetry these days, so I looked him up on the local library catalogs.  I decided to start with Pot Shots, which is a collection of short essays on poetry (plus a tale and an interview) published by the Michigan Poets on Poetry Series in 1980.  Some of the essays are apparently from an earlier collection, The Satirical Rogue on Poetry; the second half of this collection, The Satirical Rogue Again, is the sequel to that one.

The essays charmed me right away.  The Poetry Foundation bio calls Francis's poetry "often charmingly whimsical," and that describes these essays, though I'd add "often mischievous."  Here's one of them in its entirety (page 39):

Somebody -- Nobody

Somebody, hearing that Emily had called herself a Nobody, decided to be a Nobody too -- not just any Nobody but a Nobody who really was a Somebody, like Emily.

His tone is always (deceptively) light, and his barbs are often directed at himself, as in "The Satirical Rogue" (85):

I asked the Irish poet if he would be surprised to hear that I was one-quarter Irish myself.  Could he tell by looking at me?

After scrutinizing me for a moment, he remarked: "There's something humorous in your right eye."

"My right eye?" I cried.  "What about my left?"

"That one's more serious," he assured me.

Obviously Francis isn't for everybody, but I feel he's a kindred spirit.  Cute, too.  Odd I've never encountered his work before.

The New Colossus, This Time with Improved DNA

“The basic idea of welcoming immigrants to our shores is central to our way of life ... It is in our DNA. We believe our diversity, our differences, makes us stronger by a common set of ideals.”
- President Obama

You know, that second sentence doesn't really make sense.  It appears that our eloquent president got lost somewhere between the beginning and end of his thought, very much as George W. Bush used to do.

But what riled me about this quotation in the first place was "It is in our DNA."  No, it's not in our DNA.  Even giving Obama the benefit of the doubt and supposing he was speaking metaphorically, he's wrong historically.  If anything, what is central to the American way of life is Europeans invading the continent and displacing, enslaving, and killing the people who already lived there.  And each wave of immigrants tries to turn away the next wave, vilifying its successors as dirty subhumans who are congenitally incapable of grasping our Anglo-Saxon heritage of freedom.  Even if "the basic idea of welcoming immigrants to our shores" could be encoded in one's DNA, American history shows abundantly that it's not encoded in Americans' DNA or (metaphorically speaking) in that of our government.

One More Time, with Feeling

Israel is now attacking Gaza and the Occupied Territories as vengeance for the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers from an illegal settlement, blaming the deed on Hamas even though another group has claimed credit for it.  But who did it isn't all that important.  If I condemn the killing of those three kids, and I do, then I must condemn even more the long history of atrocities by a country that has killed far more than three teenagers along with babies, young children, old people, and adults; that has violated most of its agreements, including ceasefires; that has used torture on an administrative basis; that uses civilians as human shields; that has refused negotiated settlements for decades, secure in the knowledge that it can get away with its obstructionism; and that refuses to recognize the right of its opponent to exist.

When Israel attacked Gaza a couple of years ago, I encountered a move by apologists for Israel that I hadn't seen before.  Apparently, they'd finally decided they needed to engage with the fact that Palestinian and other casualties of Israeli violence greatly outnumber the Israeli casualties of Palestinian violence, by a factor of ten or more to one.  The apologists retorted that this was because Israel is better at defending its people than the dirty Arabs are.  It's not a very good move, since an obvious response would be that in that case, the Palestinians need to find ways to get past Israeli defenses and kill a lot more Jews.  I don't think the hasbaristas really want anyone to draw the conclusion from what is, after all, their logic.  But they were certainly granting that as far as they're concerned it is okay, in a conflict, to kill as many civilians on the other side as you can, which means that Israel has no moral case to object when its people are attacked: Israel can't honestly complain that killing civilians is a sign of intractable evil.  But it appears that Israel has largely abandoned the pretense of a moral high ground in its conflicts.

At around that same time a Jewish friend on Facebook objected to some criticism I'd made of Israel, responding with the prepackaged claim that Israel is a "vibrant democracy."  (He also deployed the equally prepackaged pinkwashing move.)  That's dubious in any case, but even if an overwhelming majority of Israelis favor the slaughter of Arabs (and I gather they do), it doesn't legitimize it.