Who Eats Whom In The Country Of Lions?

Today's recommended dish --
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/obama-in-the-lions-den.html

In 1826, John Hobhouse, a member of Great Britain's parliament, coined the phrase, "His Majesty's Loyal Opposition." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyal_opposition) The idea is that even if I disagree with you, I will work together with you for our greater good. In order to function, democracies  must have a foundation of mutual respect and good will between those who are in power at any given moment and those who aren't. In a democracy, the people rule: all of the people. They just don't all rule at the same time.

There's a difference between being, as they say in Britain, the Loyal Opposition, and being obstructionist. It seems as if for several years now -- in fact, maybe forever -- in U.S. politics, there has been no Loyal Opposition; there's only been Opposition. From both parties. Everyone is out for one thing: self. Everything divides along the huge chasm of party differences. Of mine and yours. Democrats see Republicans as rampant fascists; Republicans see Democrats as unfettered socialists. Instead of the parties working together to advance civilization one tiny step at a time, whenever either party comes into power, it conducts its business as if its agenda is the only right one forever and ever, world without end, time out of mind.

America has always been a deeply divided nation. The Civil War wasn't about the issue of slavery; slavery was just one facet of the North and South's failure to connect since before the Declaration of Independence, and which extends, ironically, down to Vermont's recent threats of separation. What I want to know is, without Federal taxes, how will conservative Republicans and libertarian Vermonters maintain the Interstate highway system? How will they coordinate mail delivery among 50 different systems? How will they provide for the common defense? What will 50 different space agencies be able to do better than the Federally funded NASA? Ben Franklin said it best when he chided the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, "Gentlemen, if we don't hang together, we shall surely hang separately."

Maps, Money, and Culture

While browsing the news on the Web tonight, I stumbled across something which, the more I ponder it, the more puzzled I am. A story by Brett Zongker of the Associated Press gives details about a map of the world drawn in 1602 at the request of Emperor Wanli of China. The creator of the map was a Jesuit missionary from Italy by the name of Matteo Ricci, whom Mr. Zongker describes as "among the first Westerners to live in what is now Beijing in the early 1600s."

In October (presumably of 2009), the Ricci map was purchased from a private collector in Japan for $1 million by the James Ford Bell Trust, a fund started by the founder of General Mills. Eventually, the map will be housed in the Bell Library at the University of Minnesota.

Ford W. Bell, the magnate's grandson and co-trustee of the fund, explained that custodians at the Bell Library focus "on the development of trade and how that drove civilization — how that constant desire to find new markets to sell new products led to exchanges of knowledge, science, technology and really drove civilization" and so the map "fits in beautifully."

What strikes me as odd is that credit for the impetus for science and technology, even for civilization itself, is lavished on trade and the "constant desire to find new markets to sell new products". I suppose since mathematics and writing sprang up as a way to keep track of how many bushels of wheat the peasants had grown in order for the king to get his fair share of taxes, the case could be made that civilization accreted from bookkeeping. However, do we really want to credit greed and lust as the basis of art and beauty? Do we really want to say that poetry and story-telling, portraiture and music are all grounded in avarice? Are the things that make us human the same things that make us accountants?

In some sense, yes, human activity is economic activity. Having said that, though, how do we account for beauty? Why are we so impelled by it? Do we love things because they're beautiful, or because their beauty will bring a good price? Do we prize beauty for what we can get for it, or for its own sake? Is there some tiny bubble of our lives that resists reduction to commerce? What compels so avid a businessman as the elder Bell to establish a trust? What benefit would he derive from something that would outlast him by at least a couple of generations? The love of beauty can certainly be exploited by businessmen, but what about beauty itself? Is there some pure, ethereal, Platonic ideal of beauty we can't grasp? Put another way, is there some value that transcends valuation?

Happy Anniversary, Tin, wherever you are

Today is our ... let me see, Tin and I married in 1975, and this is 2010, so that makes this our ... 35th wedding anniversary. It's also the 27th anniversary of the filing for our divorce. Since I was working for a suite of lawyers at the time, I did all the paperwork myself, and arranged it so that the decree was actually signed by a judge and made official on St. Patrick's Day. For a while, I laughed about it, referring to March 17 as the 'Tearing of the Greens.' It didn't take long for the punchiness of the joke to wear off, and when my mother died on that date in 1994, all other connotations were blasted to tiny, insignificant pieces. Now, sixteen years later, even that event no longer carries the emotional charge it once did. Being human means that, given long enough, even the most searing pains scab over.

While Tin and I were married, we had a lot of fun. At least it seemed like fun at the time. We had a home, bought a sailboat, learned to scuba dive; we had a dog and three cats. We laughed a lot. Ultimately, though, mere things proved insufficient to hold our fragile coalition together. A terrible automobile accident in the middle of the Mexican desert proved the breaking point for us. I'll admit Tin stuck by me all through my recovery, but once I had healed enough to take care of myself, she let me know that it was time for her to head out in search of fresher pastures. I had no qualms about saying, "Adios." Maybe if I had shown more concern about us splitting, I might have talked her out of it, but at the time, I felt nothing but relief at her decision. It was a decision I would never have made on my own, not because of love or loyalty, but because of apathy. Things were going all right for me, so why rock the boat?

Even if we had had kids, I'm sure we wouldn't have stayed together anyway, and at least as it was, no one else was hurt by our decision. Actually, when you think about it, that statement is glib and hateful, isn't it? Of course someone was hurt by it. We were. Or if not hurt, then changed significantly. Whole life histories were yanked out of kilter and re-aligned. Looking back, I can't say if I would have changed anything if I had known then what I know now. Actually, if the past were that moldable, I'd change where I went to school, and so I wouldn't have met Tin in the first place, and things would have diverged to the point of being unrecognizable.

Having said all that, though, what I'm left with is the unchangeable nature of the past. And since the present is predicated on the past, that's pretty iron-clad, too. Which leaves the future as the only thing we have the option of changing. However, since we can't see past our noses, we really have no say over what our future will be. We can only float along on life's current, and hope we aren't headed for Angel Falls.

The Day Before the Day Before Christmas

December 23. Two days after the Winter Solstice so we'll have more sunlight today than we had yesterday, but less than we'll have tomorrow. I look between the slats of the blinds covering my window, and see green leaves and red berries of a holly bush. Sunlight clear and sharp. 42 degrees Fahrenheit. Beaufort Wind Scale 0. When I went outside a moment ago, I shivered; a Moscovite would have tossed off his overcoat, I'm sure, and gamboled and frolicked in such balmy weather.
When I say the word "winter," I mean something quite different than what a Russian means when he says "winter." At 34.035388 latitude and-84.665166 longitude (http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html), my winter doesn't have the frozen lakes the Russian's has, though we each mean the same tilt of the globe in relation to the solar plane. If I brought a Russian friend -- say Ivan Ivanovich -- into my home and pointed at a chair and said, "Chair," and he pointed to the chair and said, "Chair" in Russian (you'll have to use your imagination, Cyrillic being unavailable in this blog), then Ivan and I mean the same thing in an empirically verifiable way. However, if a Palestinian and a Jew were to point to the same plot of turf, and both say, "Homeland," they would mean vastly different things.
So, at what point does a language leave off being a language and become more than a language? Can words in and of themselves be extra-lingual? If pointing at a chair identifies the label "Chair," what does the label "Chair" point at? If the word "Homeland" means the same thing in two different languages, yet the speakers still come to blows over the meaning, what hope is there for mutual understanding? If a chemist says, "H2O," and a man crawling through the desert says, "Water," who has a better understanding of reality?

Excuses, excuses

Things I have been doing lately include working on the bulletin for our church (Mt. Olivet Baptist in Acworth, Georgia; if any of y'all are in town Sundays or Wednesday nights and want to stop by, please do); putzing around with my family history (trying to get out a compiled genealogy of my maternal grandfather's descendants for distribution as a Christmas present to my relatives); working on rebuttals to statements Jehovah Witnesses make about the Holy Spirit and the crucifixion. Not that I'm particularly rabid about debunking their myths; it's just that I have a tendency to hold on to the things I've been told all my life. After all, if I accept the theory that the Earth is round when it looks flat in every direction I see, why shouldn't I accept the postulation that two thousand years ago, God allowed Himself to be hung on a crux immissa (the Latin cross) rather than a crux simplex (a stake)? The fact that I'm skeptical about the story of creation as presented in the Hebrew canon doesn't mean that I can't have fun toying around with the Greco-Hebrew myths of the first century. (A.D. or B.C.E., take your pick.) Wikipedia has a good article on the various forms of the cross at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_or_stake_as_gibbet_on_which_Jesus_died . I never realized that the stake was actually used as a torture/execution instrument, so I appreciate the JW's teaching me something.

First Words

In an attempt to make my initial post memorable, the best I could come up with was starting the title with the word "First." I like the idea of first being first. Like the first word of the Bible being "Bereshiyth" (the transliterated Hebrew) or "In the beginning" (the traditional English translation.) First is first. Beginning is beginning. That kind of thing. It somehow casts the whole idea of progress in a circle rather than a straight line. Self-description describing self. A great place to start: at the first, in the beginning.

For example, my first novel, The Flaming O Motel, which begins a trilogy, uses that circle-motif: O. The title of my projected second novel has it, too: O2 (Circle Squared). [The '2' should be superscript, but I haven't figured out how to do that in bloggish yet. If I knew how to HTML, I could probably get it right, but since I don't, I'll leave it for later.] And in the third novel of the series -- kaleidOscope -- the circle will reappear. (FYI, the word 'kaleidoscope' comes from the Greek for 'beautiful-shape vision.')

By way of credentials for what I write, I graduated from the University of Arizona in Tucson with an M.A. in American Indian Studies where my graduate committee was kind enough to allow me to do my thesis as a collection of short stories. Several of my close friends were from the Tohono O'odham tribe, so although I don't feel that I have the moral authority to report for Tribal Americans, my views of Tribal Americans do have some legitimacy.

As for my credentials for how I write, short stories of mine have appeared in literary magazines such as The Madison Review, Crosscurrents, and Negative Capability. I have attended Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont, and Ploughshares' International Fiction Writing Seminar at Kasteel Well in the Netherlands. I received a Professional Development Grant from the state of Arizona, and won the first Copper Award presented by the Society of Southwest Authors.

Okay. I think that's enough for the first step.