Service Advisory

Out of town traveling for a few days. I may have opportunity to write, I may not. I'll be back at the keyboard when I can.

Prophecies of Mass Destruction

I've been meaning for a while to write more about "end-times" stuff, but it's such a big subject; the last time I sat down to write about what should be a simple topic (homosexuality and Christianity), I ended up with 500 or so typewritten pages. I learned a lot by doing that, so it was worth it. And really, this is a much smaller topic, but it lends itself to a lot of misunderstanding and misrepresentation.

Still, I'm going to duck the main event for awhile longer. Today I'm reading Elaine Pagels's newest book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (Viking Penguin, 2012). Pagels got her start as a student of the Nag Hammadi "library" of mostly Christian writings that were discovered in Egypt in 1945. Her 1979 book The Gnostic Gospels established her as a popularizer of early Christianity, both orthodox and heterodox; it also made her a convenient target for reactionary Christians who wanted to stick with a medieval version of Christian history.

In the new book she tries to put the biblical Apocalypse of John (also known as the Book of Revelation; "apocalypse" means uncovering or revelation) into its historical context. I've written before about the Apocalypse and the way it makes many orthodox Christians uncomfortable even though it is in the canon; unlike the Nag Hammadi books and others, it's an official part of the Christian (though not the Jewish) Bible. Pagels isn't uncomfortable with the material, but I'm still not very happy with her account of it, though I admit that my displeasure comes down more to matters of interpretation than of major questions of fact.

For example, Pagels believes that Jesus' prediction of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple (Matthew 24:1; Mark 13:2; Luke 21:5) is authentic -- that is, the gospel writers didn't invent and put the prediction into his mouth, he actually made it himself. She summarizes her reasons for thinking so.

First, because other prophets had made similar predictions before its destruction, as did Jesus ben Ananias, in the early 60s; second, because Mark's account is contradictory, claiming that Jesus was accused of having threatened to destroy the temple -- an accusation Mark insists is entirely false (Mark 14:56-58); third, when Mark admits that Jesus did prophesy the temple's destruction (Mark 13:1-2), the account of his words does not accord with what had actually happened, as one would expect with retrojected prophecy (there are stones standing upon others -- quite a few of them, to this day) [184 note 31].

I don't find this persuasive. Her first point, about earlier predictions, could just as easily support an argument that Jesus' predictions were inauthentic, especially since the example she gives also is known only from a source written after the destruction of the Temple, namely Josephus' Jewish War. The story also contains some dubious details that I won't go into now; click through, read it and see what you think. (People are apt to invent after-the-fact omens; there are people, for instance, who believe that John Kennedy went to Dallas on November 22, 1963, knowing that he would be assassinated there.) Her second point is strange, though it's true that Mark's account is contradictory. Notice that Mark's 'admission' occurs before the accusation was made against Jesus; and that a prediction is not a threat, though people are prone to confuse the two. Numerous scholars have argued that someone might have overheard Jesus' prediction and mistaken it for a threat, but this is highly speculative, and the gospel writers seem to be as confused about the matter as Jesus' accusers would have been.

In her final point Pagels seems to shoot herself in the foot. If the prediction isn't accurate, then it's a false prediction, and we know what the Bible says about false prophets. But a lot of Christians, ranging from laypeople to scholars, have assumed that it was accurate: that the Temple was totally destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE as Jesus foretold it. The authors of the gospels probably never saw the extent of the destruction -- Church tradition has all of them writing far from Jerusalem, so even the most orthodox Christian has no basis for assuming otherwise -- and Mark probably didn't know whether one stone was left standing upon another. And Mark put another false prediction into the same passage, namely that Jesus would return on clouds of glory at the right hand of Power before the generation of his original followers had died off. Was that one authentic, too?

Which brings me to the main reason why the presence of an accurate prediction in an apocalyptic discourse counts against its authenticity, and not in its favor: in a typical apocalypse, most of its predictions are "retrojected," because normally an apocalypse is written from the viewpoint of someone who lived long before -- centuries in the case of Daniel or Enoch, decades in the case of Jesus. The predictions begin from the past figure's own time, and are taken from history, not prediction, until the present time of the apocalyptic writer. Daniel, for example, is supposed to have lived during the Babylonian exile (586-538 BCE), but most scholars believe that the Book of Daniel was written in the mid-to-late 160s BCE. The "predictions" in the book stop being accurate at the time of its writing, so there's no reason to believe that Daniel accurately foresaw historical events from 538 to 165 BCE; the author of the book retrojected them. (The New Testament Revelation is an exception to this pattern; the writer who was granted the visions is avowedly writing not about the distant future but about recent events and events very soon to come. He was wrong too.) So, when you find accurate predictions in an apocalyptic work, the best presumption is that they were written after the fact. Even if Jesus did predict the destruction of the Temple, he also evidently predicted his return immediately afterward; so either he got lucky, or Mark invented the prediction (or it was invented by someone Mark used as a source) and put it into Jesus' mouth.

We'll never know for certain because we don't know exactly when the gospels were written or what material their authors had to work with. Pagels agrees with many if not most other New Testament scholars that the gospels were written after the burning and desecration of the Temple in 70, which is another reason to conclude that Jesus' prediction was invented to fit the history.

A large part of the problem isn't Pagels's fault. Standard early Christian history is complicated by scholars' need to reconcile the confused and historically unreliable New Testament material with sound historical practice. So, for example, while discussing the Apocryphon (or Secret Book) of James from Nag Hammadi, she writes,

Here the author deliberately recalls -- and challenges -- what many Christians believe, having read the New Testament Book of Acts. For the Book of Acts says that after Jesus died, he appeared to his disciples in resurrected form and continued to speak with them for forty days, but that then he ascended bodily into heaven: "As they were watching ... a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going ... they were gazing upward toward heaven." Traditionally, Christians have taken this to mean that after that time, those seeking access to Jesus could find it only indirectly, through "apostolic tradition," as they called the oral and written accounts that the apostles were said to have handed down for the benefit of those born too late to ever speak directly with Jesus [87-88, italics and ellipsis in original].

Ay, what a mess. I'm not sure how much of this is Pagels's account of what "many Christians believe" and how much is what she thinks the New Testament actually says. Start with the Book of Acts, which was probably written by the same person who wrote the gospel of Luke. Although Acts does say that Jesus ascended to heaven after forty days, it also shows Jesus appearing to various people after that time. Not only did Jesus appear "in his resurrected form" to Paul (Acts 9:3ff), which is hardly obscure, but

¹⁰ ...there was a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias; and to him said the Lord in a vision, Ananias. And he said, Behold, I am here, Lord.

¹¹And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and enquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus: for, behold, he prayeth,

¹²And hath seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight.

Even according to Acts, then, Jesus appeared to at least two people after he'd ascended into heaven, so what "many Christians believe, having read the New Testament Book of Acts" is not what the New Testament Book of Acts says. And that's only Acts. According to the gospel of Matthew, which doesn't mention an ascension into heaven, Jesus appeared to his disciples in Galilee, and told them, "... and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world" (28:20). If the author of Matthew had written his own Acts of the Apostles, it would probably have looked quite different from Luke's Acts. One reason Christians have been able to rely on Acts so much is that, unlike the gospels, it has no New Testament competitors for the period it covers. (Except for Paul's own writings, which are also inconsistent with Acts on numerous points.)

This is ironic, considering the wrath of orthodox Christians over scholarly and popular interest in non-canonical Christian writings like the Nag Hammadi material. They claim that they follow the New Testament writings, which are the only authoritative early Christian sources -- but in fact, much of what they believe is not what is written in the New Testament: they omit and add and reinterpret to suit their needs. Not that Pagels's account, or the non-canonical books she discusses, are authoritative either: they're just different.

(One minor, maybe technical point that keeps bugging me: strictly speaking, "revelation / apocalypse" isn't prophecy, and prophecy isn't apocalypse. Scholars usually distinguish between the two genres, and I'll try to write more about this before long. Maybe more important, as Pagels surely knows, prophecy doesn't necessarily involve prediction, especially not prediction of the far future. A prophet is a human being, not always male, through whom a god speaks. He or she may have visions, but his or her function is as a messenger from the god, and he or she usually makes threats and promises about the present or the immediate future. Jonah's announcement to Nineveh is typical: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" Jeremiah's prediction that the exile in Babylon would end in seventy years is atypical, as well as arithmetically inaccurate. The Christian claim that Jesus' career was foretold by the prophets is based on some very wild misinterpretations of the prophets. Jesus himself was not a prophet, though the concept of what a prophet was had undergone some historical change since Isaiah and Jeremiah. And I concede, grumpily, that nowadays "predict" and "prophesy" are used interchangeably, even by scholars; but in a discussion of apocalyptic writings and beliefs, it seems to me that they should be distinguished.)

If You Chain a Dozen Right-Wing Writers to Typewriters ...

... how long will it take them to come up with Atlas Shrugged?

RWA1 just endorsed the Thanks to Starbucks campaign, an online petition supporting the Evil Scorched Caffeine Empire's support for same-sex marriage in the face of a campaign by the Christian Right. I added my name to the petition myself after a moment's equivocation, because it's a single-issue petition that doesn't do anything but give Starbucks a pat on the back for doing the right thing. It doesn't mean I like Starbucks, or would ever spend money in one; I don't drink coffee anyway, but if I did I would support independent cafes rather than an international corporate franchise. (I was about to add "with dubious ethics," but that would be a tautology.)

But here's why I mention RWA1: he commented "Thank Starbucks for resisting bigotry," but he was furious when the Susan Komen Foundation took heat for defunding Planned Parenthood, calling the reaction "the most brutal enforcement of liberal orthodoxy i have seen in fifty years." (No doubt because "I have queasy feelings about the subject of abortion".) Soon afterward he commented on the Catholic birth-control controversy that "Obama's message is that women's (and everyone's) bodies belong to the state, and there will never be an end to their intrusions on private decisions, if only to care for their "property" and to mitigate the costs of taking care of it." This indicates that he bought into the deranged right-wing meme that the contraception mandate would force women to use birth control whether they wanted to or not; of course the opposition came from ultra-conservative males whose message was that women's bodies belong to the Church. And not longer after that he commented on a state-level controversy that "The Girl Scouts have become a little PC, but this is outrageous. Bible-thumping zealots are getting too assertive in the legislature." But what about the Children, being brainwashed into Planned Parenthood Obamacare robots by the feminazis?

Oddly, though, RWA1 doesn't care about the brutal enforcement of liberal orthodoxy where same-sex marriage is concerned, even though it's exactly the same kind of issue: a virulent right-wing minority is claiming that this government action will force them to conform to liberal values. That's probably more true of same-sex marriage, in fact, than of the contraception mandate. No one will have to use birth control just because their insurance covers it, and no one will have to gay-marry if they don't want to. But it is true that the legalization of same-sex marriage will change the public face of civil marriage, and the churches will have to grapple with the issue even if they ultimately reject it. Bigots will have to explain to their kids why men are married to men and women are married to women. In principle this should be no more of a problem than explaining to them why not all Christians share their particular version of the faith, but it will be one more burden on their shoulders.

I'm not sure why RWA1 is willing to see gay marriage forced down the throats of the same people whose throats he wants to protect against birth control pills and recreational abortion. It looks like he wants there to be one issue he can appear to be liberal on (especially as he vibrates with the white racist background radiation that has been on the rise lately); this makes a person "unpredictable", which is widely considered a virtue in our debased political culture.

You Can Lead an Audience to the Theater, But You Can't Make It Think

I picked up a copy of Conversations with Edward Albee (Mississippi, 1988) at the library book sale the other day. I love reading collections of interviews, and Albee has been one of my favorite playwrights since I started reading him in my sophomore year of high school, almost fifty years ago. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is virtually burned into my brainpaths.

To be honest, though, I've neglected Albee's work for about the past decade. One happy result of reading this collection of conversations is that I checked out the third volume of his collected plays, most of which I haven't read yet.

The early interviews in the book, especially, took me back. I was greatly influenced for a while by Albee's pronouncements on critics and literature, though they seem simple-minded to me now. For example:

What I said is that I thought it was not valid for a critic to criticize a play for its matter rather than its manner -- that what was constituted then was a type of censorship ... You may dislike the intention enormously but your judgment of the artistic merit of the work must not be based on your view of what it's about. The work of art must be judged by how well it succeeds in its intention [60].

This sort of thing impressed me when I was seventeen. Now I think it's absurd, because I don't think the "manner" can be separated from the "matter" of a work of art. (I noticed too that on a couple of occasions Albee expressed extreme dislike for the popular comedies of Neil Simon, but because of their matter instead of their manner: he grants that Simon "writes the kind of play he writes very expertly indeed" [82]; by Albee's stated criteria, that should mean that Simon's art is valid, but he doesn't seem to think so.) The reason why criticism is so hard to do well is that the critic must deal with both subject and execution -- as must the artist. But what I also see now is that the "critics" (actually newspaper and newsmagazine reviewers) who bedeviled Albee and other writers were just really bad critics, neither very knowledgeable about drama or any other art nor very intelligent on any level. They were also gatekeepers of a kind, writing for a male audience they presumed to be much like themselves.

Consider the claim, which I've often encountered over the years, that Virginia Woolf was "really" about two gay couples rather than two heterosexual married couples. Even Leslie Fiedler, who really should have known better, bought into it. It turns up in Conversations in a 1966 Paris Review interview of Albee by his former "roommate," the composer William Flanagan. As Albee said, "Only the most callow or insecure or downright stupid critic would fault Proust's work, for example, for the transposition that he made of characters' sexes" [53].

What must have been running through their minds when they discussed this question? They knew very well that they were both queer, but such a fact couldn't be acknowledged in print at that time unless you were Robert Duncan or Allen Ginsberg. (And it was irrelevant anyhow.) But in this post-2000 conversation for PBS's In the Life between Albee and Kathleen Turner, who played Martha in the 2005 Broadway revival of Virginia Woolf?, Albee says simply what was surely the main factor: homophobic critics tried to smear the play by fag-baiting the playwright, and claiming that it was really about homosexuals and therefore lacked True Universality. (This sort of thing is still with us, often involving the same offenders. And nowadays some gay critics agree that Williams, Albee, and others wrote coded homosexual works that should be retroactively de-closeted; I don't think that's an improvement.)

In a couple of the interviews, Albee contrasts his work with socially conscious plays of the 1930s, and deploys the quip that if you want art to contain a message, send a telegram. At the same time, his work was avowedly a critique of modern American society; he insisted that an artist should make the audience uncomfortable, should make them think about their lives, and so on. While I admit that this is not quite the same thing as the overt preaching of Proletarian Art, I still think it's a message. I just don't think a message is a bad thing. As Joanna Russ argued,

it seems absolutely impossible to write anything without immediately making all sorts of assumptions about what human nature is, what good and bad behavior consists of, what men ought to be, what women ought to be, which states of mind and character are valuable, which are the opposite, and so on. Once fiction gets beyond the level of minimal technical competence, a reviewer must address these judgments of value. Generally readers don't notice the presence of familiar value judgments in stories, but do notice (and object to) unfamiliar ones as "Political". Hence arises the insistence (in itself a very vehement, political judgment) that art and politics have nothing to do with one another, that artists ought to be "above" politics, and that a critic making political comments about fiction is importing something foreign into an essentially neutral area. But if "politics" means the relations of power that obtain between groups of people, and the way these are concretely embodied in personal relations, social institutions, and received ideas (among which is the idea that art ought not to be political), then such neutrality simply doesn't exist. Fiction which isn't openly polemical or didactic is nonetheless chock-full of politics. If beauty in fiction bears any relations to truth (as Matthew Arnold thought) then the human (including social and political) truth of a piece of fiction matters for aesthetic reasons. To apply rigid, stupid, narrow, political standards to fiction is bad because the standards are rigid, stupid, and narrow, not because they are political [originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1979, 103; reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (Liverpool University Press, 2007), 165].

Even when I was younger I noticed that Albee was, if not preachy, at least grinding an ax. And now it looks as though he imported some of his beliefs into his work more overtly than I'd thought. George makes some remarks about "evolution" in Virginia Woolf that I naively took for the character's opinions, not his author's. (Just as I hoped George's equation of contraception with murder wasn't Albee's opinion.) But in a 1975 interview Albee says of his play Seascape, in which a suburban married couple encounter a lizard married couple from under the ocean:

... The play is about whether or not evolution has taken place. Sometimes I've got my doubts.

Jeanne Wolf: You're not sure if we're growing?

Edward Albee: I don't share the view that we're on the way up, anyway.

Jeanne Wolf: What would be the way up? Where should we go?

Edward Albee: I don't know, but the whole assumption that we're at the top of the pile just because we're the most recent animal strikes me as being a fallacious assumption. I thnk we're making sort of a mess of it. Maybe we'll stop being one of the two or three animals that kills its own kind, for example. We're the only animal that is polluting the atmosphere so that it can't survive anymore. No other animal does that. And this can't be high intelligence that creates global suicide.

Jeanne Wolf: Is it your intention then to call our attention to this predicament?

Edward Albee: In this play I'm certainly concerned with whether or not we shouldn't look to see whether as splendid as we think we are and if we don't have something to learn from our theoretical inferiors [117].

When Albee expresses "doubts" about whether "evolution has taken place," he doesn't seem to mean that he doubts that species change by natural selection, but that human beings have climbed higher on the Great Chain of Being -- which is not part of Darwin's theory. It's not easy to tell in this passage what are Albee's beliefs about evolution and what he's attributing to other people. Like many educated lay believers in Evolution, though, Albee was a Spencerian here, not a Darwinian. In any case, he definitely talks as though he meant Seascape to have a message, albeit more tastefully and subtly expressed than the vulgar Commercial Theater would dictate.

And oh yes, the Commercial Theater. Certainly Albee's right about the problem posed by Broadway's dominance, and about the way that huge production budgets adversely affect the quality of the shows. It seems obvious to me that, as with corporate media generally, the answer is to quit conceding that Broadway, or New York City, is American theater. Part of the problem is the nature of theater itself: a film can be distributed and shown widely, and every audience will see the same film. Theater is an inevitably local and transient phenomenon because of the very qualities Albee rightly stresses: every performance is unique, and it takes place in the presence of the audience, with the cast right in front of them instead of projected on a screen. (Performances can be recorded on video, of course, but that's not the same as live theater either.) The remedy is more theater everywhere, and that seems to be happening, if not enough. Albee himself has used his prominence to promote theater outside of the Broadway system, and he deserves great credit for that.

And my word, he's 83 now, still writing, still working. Which reminds me of something that I noticed while skimming over Virginia Woolf today. George and Martha often tease each other in the play about their respective ages -- George is 46, Martha 52 -- and at one point Martha refers to the 30s musical Chicago, "starring Little Miss Alice Faye." George says mockingly, "Well, that was before my time..." But think about it: the play was originally produced in 1962, so think of it as taking place in 1960. George would have been born around 1914, Martha in 1908. Both of them could easily have seen Chicago in its first run. The past is rushing away very fast.

Teacher, Educate Thyself!

There's a good post (or so it looks to me, I have no legal background) by bmaz at Emptywheel on the coming oral arguments before the Supreme Court on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka "Obamacare." Among other things, consider the irony of the Right seeking an activist Supreme Court to overturn a law they don't like. As the post concludes, "One thing IS certain, when the dust has settled, one side will say the Supremes are beautiful minds, and the other will say they are craven activist tyrants."

There's one aside in the piece that stuck in my attention, though, and merits comment. (Also chastisement.) bmaz considers an analogy, posed by an opponent of ACA, between the individual mandate (requiring everyone to purchase health insurance) and a hypothetical federal mandate to keep everyone in school until the age of 18. What do you think of that, ya libs? asks the right-wing critic. "Anyone think the government should win?"

I'd say no, but I'm not a Supreme Court Justice. And maybe, in terms of law and precedents, they should. bmaz replies (emphasis added by moi):

Actually David, yeah I wouldn’t have a real problem with that. As a sage friend related to me this morning, there is a direct correlation between a nation’s ability to compete in a world market and the level of education provided to it’s citizens. Citizens with less, or poorer, education harm the entire nation – it’s welfare, it’s defense, its very liberties and it’s ability to defend itself against threats and enemies, foreign and domestic. I think that is exactly right; if you accept the individual mandate is constitutionally agreeable, it would be hard to see how you could disagree with an “education mandate”.

bmaz may know a lot about the law, but not about educational issues, or apparently economic competitiveness. (Notice, by the bye, how the apostrophes take over the next sentence, though that's trivial; it's just amusing.) Actually, there is no direct correlation between a nation's ability to compete in the world market and the level of education provided to its citizens. bmaz's sage friend's dictum set off alarm bells in my head, and I looked up some of the late Gerald Bracey's remarks on this subject -- it was what you might call a pet peeve of his.

In 2007 Bracey discussed a World Economic Forum report on global competitiveness which covered twelve factors in ranking nations. The WEF ranked the US #1 at that time (admittedly before the worldwide collapse of 2008), though our rankings varied widely in the twelve factors. In number 4, Health and Primary Education, we ranked 34th in the world; in number 5, Higher Education and Training, we ranked 5th. Interestingly, given what I've been hearing lately, we ranked number 1 in both Labor Market Efficiency and Innovation. Even if we don't have a federal mandate on education, it's not hurting us much.

Bracey also pointed out:

First, though, we have to take a look at the concept of competitiveness. Many people take it as a zero-sum game: If you win, I lose. Not so. The computer chip was invented in the U.S. Many other nations benefited. If some young medical student in Nigeria invents a cure for AIDS, the world, not just Nigeria, will win.

Which is a reminder that harping on competitiveness, internationally or locally, is basically a dumb idea. (I've written about that before. See also this post by Bracey.) Bracey had other useful things to say on the subject five years earlier.

But there is a broader, more objective means of looking for any relationship. The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) provides test scores for 41 nations, including the United States. Thirty-eight of those countries are ranked on the World Economic Forum’s CCI. It’s a simple statistical matter to correlate the test scores with the CCI.

There is little correlation. The United States is 29th in mathematics, but second in competitiveness. Korea is third in mathematics, but 27th in competitiveness. And so forth. If the two lists had matched, place for place, that would produce a perfect correlation of +1.0. But because some countries are high on competitiveness and low on test scores (and vice versa), the actual correlation is +.23. In the world of statistics, this is considered quite small.

So, direct correlation? It doesn't look like it. Sage Friend isn't so sage after all.

There are other reasons to doubt the wisdom of a federal educational mandate, apart from its legality or constitutionality. And it's not only the Right that opposes ACA's individual mandate for health insurance. As bmaz concedes,

This is about far more than Obama’s questionably cobbled together ACA law; the law is inane in how it soaks Americans to benefit craven insurance companies. Either way, sooner or later, healthcare as constructed and/or mandated by the ACA will die a painful death, but will continue to decimate American families for years, irrespective of the ruling by the Supreme Court on its nominal constitutionality. At some point, single payer, such as “Medicare For All” is inevitable.

So, while emptywheel is a very informative and intelligent blog, its writers do have their blind spots. I wish bmaz would ditch the schoolyard homophobia too.

R U Ready 2 Riot?

I can hear the yowling of the students across the street, so the IU-Kentucky game must have started. City authorities have been preparing for this one: there will be no parking on the main student avenue, to make it less likely that cars will be overturned by celebrants, as happened in December; and to make it easier for police to "control" the crowds. But don't worry, the police don't use billy clubs or tear gas or tasers on students who are high on Hoosier Hysteria. They don't even arrest a lot of them.
The front page of the local newspaper on the right (you can click on the picture to enlarge it) is dedicated to tonight's game, though an item below the fold describes the increased police presence arranged for the downtown area and campus. That includes the fountain in the photo below, because it's a campus tradition to steal the dolphins from it when IU wins an important game.
I'm not just venting because I'm a cranky old man who wants to deprive students of the only meaningful memories they'll have from their college days (though I wonder how much they'll actually remember anyway, given the level of alcohol consumption expected tonight). I live far enough from the free-property-damage zone that I probably won't hear the noise. As I wrote before, what bothers me is that the same people who denounce the Occupy movement for violence, disorder, and filth just smile benignly at the greater disorder that routinely accompanies college and professional athletics.

UPDATE: If you follow college basketball, you probably know that Kentucky defeated Indiana, 102-90. Last night around 1 a.m. I heard a bunch of young men screaming "Fuck this shit! Fuck this shit!" outside on the street. They were at a student-inhabited house across the street, and when I peeked out I saw that they were throwing trash-can lids down on the sidewalk to express their anguish at the loss. Unfortunately the lids were plastic, so they didn't make much noise, and one or two of them, bawling "Fuck them!" broke a couple of beer bottles. "Guys ... c'mon," one of them exhorted the others. After a couple of minutes they moved on. Poor babies, they didn't even get to overturn a car. Whatever happened to justice?

This reminded me that a week or so back I was awakened in the middle of the night by a chorus of male voices chanting rhythmically, "Fuck the Boilermakers, Fuck the Boilers!" as they walked home from the downtown bars. Too bad, it looks like Calipari creamed on Crean's face last night, har har har. It's the sort of thing that made America great. ... I am so relieved that IU is out of the competition; it could only have gotten worse as they moved to the finals.

UPDATE 2: I just found this post-loss lamentation on the student newspaper's website:

It just wasn’t the same.

The Bloomington Police Department cars were there, the crowds were there, the cream and crimson shirts were there, but it just wasn’t the same.

Four months ago, the last time IU Coach Tom Crean and his Hoosiers took on the Kentucky Wildcats, this street had to be closed to vehicular traffic because an army of Hoosiers had stormed the intersection of Kirkwood Avenue and Dunn Street.

Four months ago, cars were destroyed, music blared out of apartment windows and fans jumped and sang and danced and shouted.

But this time, after IU fell to Kentucky 90-102 Friday night, fans held their heads low and migrated from Nick’s English Hut and Kilroy’s on Kirkwood to go back home after a long, hard evening.

Let me hear ya say "Awwwwwww...." Poor babies.

If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, Come Sit Here By Me

Democracy Now! reported this morning that President Obama has announced his support for "the southern leg" of TransCanada's Keystone pipeline, to run from Oklahoma to Texas:

President Obama: "There’s a bottleneck right here because we can’t get enough of the oil to our refineries fast enough. And if we could, then we would be able to increase our oil supplies at a time when they’re needed as much as possible. Now, right now, a company called TransCanada has applied to build a new pipeline to speed more oil from Cushing to state-of-the-art refineries down on the Gulf Coast. And today, I’m directing my administration to cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic hurdles, and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done."

I thought I'd done a cynical post when Obama rejected the Keystone XL Canada-to-Texas pipeline, to predict that he'd back down very soon; but it seems I didn't. What I wonder now is how many liberal Democrats will attack him for pronouncing "oil" as "ole", the sort of thing he usually does when he wants to sound populist. (The video clip is accessible through the link above.)

What Obama didn't mention was that those "state-of-the-art refineries" are in what's called a foreign-trade zone in Port Arthur, Texas, and that the oil they refine will be shipped to Asia, not to retailers in the US.

At a congressional hearing in December, [Representative Ed] Markey asked the president of TransCanada if he would agree to allowing Keystone XL oil and its refined products to stay in the U.S. He said no. So Markey then proposed an amendment to that effect, and Republicans said no—that it couldn’t be done, because the market for oil is not just domestic; it’s global. What Canada wants to do, says Markey, “is create a connection between Alberta and Asia and use the United States as the place where the pipeline gets constructed. And so if that’s all we are is a middleman in this transaction, then the American people should know that.”

Either the President doesn't know this, in which case he's incompetent, or he does know, in which case he's lying about the benefits that the Pipeline will bring to Americans. (Of course, by "we" and "our" he might just mean "American oil companies and the politicians who get campaign donations from them." I wouldn't rule it out.)

There's another aspect of this issue that shouldn't be ignored: Obama's supporters and apologists have been arguing that the President doesn't control oil prices in the US. Even I, who am not an Obama supporter, have been saying this to people who attack Obama for not approving the pipeline. But what Obama is saying now is that he does have at least some influence, if not control, over oil prices, and that by taking this action he'll help to drive them down. FAIR did a segment on this week's Counterspin investigating this very point.) Considering how dishonest Obama's line on the pipeline is, I don't think anything he says about it should be believed: he's on the campaign trail, after all.

One of the strangest things about some of Obama's critics on this issue is that they've been hinting -- they refuse to say it outright when I challenge them -- that Obama secretly wants gas prices to rise, in the service of an undefined agenda. But it's the oil companies, and the speculators who deal in oil futures, that want oil and gasoline prices to go up: that's where their profits will come from. Obama's right-wing critics are oddly reluctant to admit that explicitly.

There's also reason to believe that oil prices will continue to rise no matter what the government does. There is still a lot of oil under the surface of this planet, but it's not as accessible as the oil we drilled before was. Offshore drilling requires expensive, high-tech equipment to get at the oil far beneath. Tar sands oil is also more expensive to get at and process. The costs of those technologies will be passed on to the consumer in high prices at the pump; that's what capitalism is all about.