Free Speech at Columbia

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, spoke at Columbia University with thousands of protesters in attendance. Spurred by comments by my blogosphere friend Chani, I got into a decided difference of opinion with Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt. Rather than clog Lipstadt's blog with an argument from a nonscholar, let me respond to her response here.

In brief, Lipstadt had berated a student who supported the presence of Ahmadinejad, arguing that it was a good way for students to become informed. From what I have gathered from her blog, Ahmadinejad's cardinal sin in Lipstadt's book is hosting and encouraging a Holocaust denial conference.

I responded:

You're on the wrong side of freedom in this one, sorry. Barring someone from speaking at a university is precisely what the Nazis would have done -- and did.

Ahmadinejad is not as simply reduced to five points as you did. He represents a form of anti-Semitism that is quite different from European hatred of Jews, that is in part related to some versions of Christianity -- about which all of us in the Western world are familiar.

Asian anti-Semitism is a phenomenon all its own. You find it in the Arab world for obvious reasons, but you also find it as far away as Japan and China. Iran is situated in the middle of Asia and Ahmadinejad's mixed policies reflect a straddling that requires some mental gymnastics to understand, let alone perform.

You can read U.S. newspapers and still be left empty. Students are well served by exposure to this peculiar form of odious speech. To beware of it, to understand the subtleties of the adversaries of our way of life.

What is the difference between your denying him a platform at Columbia and his denying you one at his Holocaust denial conference?

Lipstadt graciously replied:

I never said my list was complete. Believe me I know it is not but I wanted to keep it simple for this student.

Your comparison to my wanting to "deny" him a platform to the Nazis is staggeringly off base.

First of all the Nazis [and the many many professors who supported them] did not just deny Jews platforms at universities; they fired all of them [prior to killing as many as they could].

Unlike Ahmadinejad, these Jewish academic had not attacked anyone [verbally or otherwise]. They had not called for Germany or any other state to be wiped off the face of the map. They had not denied history. They had not jailed academics who they believed challenged the regime. They had not arrested women for smoking in public. And so forth and so forth.

Denying a platform to Ahmadinejad as a head of state is completely different than denying him a platform because of his faith or ethnic identity [which is what the Nazis did to the Jewish professors].

Finally there is no difference between him denying me a place at his Holocaust denial conference, except that he would not invite me to his conference and I would not go.

What you seem not to grasp is that Holocaust denial is not a "point of view" or a "lonely opinion." It is based on lies and distortions. Why would I go to a conference which was based on falsehoods? It would be like going to a conference which argued that men were inherently to women or whites to blacks or….

If you have any questions about that familiarize yourself with David Irving v. Penguin UK and Deborah Lipstadt at www.hdot.org or take a look at my book History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving.

Setting aside issues of the he said/she said variety -- I will grant Lipstadt that one can never outline one's thinking on complex issues fully in a blog -- I find the substance of her reply wanting and her rebuttal imprecise.

Denying the Holocaust is, first of all, silly. Of course the Holocaust occurred. One might as well question, as Macauley once jokingly did, whether Napoleon existed. However, denying the Holocaust, even with malice forethought rather than merely stupidity, is not identical to advocating it (although many deniers do), or being morally or psychologically capable of replicating it (although some deniers suggest they are).

Here's where the free speech problem begins.

No one is asserting that Ahmadinejad should be granted the right to fire Jewish professors at Columbia, much less kill them all after squeezing the last bit of useful physical labor out of them under inhumane conditions.

Thus, although we all know what the Nazis did to Jewish professors, barring someone from speaking at Columbia is not appropriately compared to the entire Holocaust. It's only comparable to the censorship of academia (and other sectors of society) imposed by the Nazis.

The Nazis denied Christians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Romano Guardini free speech in their preaching and teaching, precisely because neither one accommodate his ideas to the Nazi "new order." What happened to either Bonhoeffer (who was killed) or Guardini (who was removed from his chair) was immeasurably less than what happened to their Jewish peers in death camps. Similarly, Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia is much less than what Nazis did at death camps, too.

Speech is either free for all, even -- or perhaps especially -- for those with whom we disagree, or it's not free at all. A university in which the spectrum ideas to which a student is exposed is limited to what professors think is within a pre-determined correct range ceases to be a place of learning and becomes merely an institution of indoctrination.

I understand the vehemence of feeling against Ahmadinejad. I applaud the protesters (who are exercising their right to free speech). I understand Lipstadt's assertion that Holocaust denial is not merely a "lonely opinion"; to me it is a fool's errand often carried out by people with malicious intent of the worst order.

Yet bad ideas, lies and distortions are never satisfactorily answered by muzzling them. Like pus in an infection, they will ooze out or spread. They are only properly replied to with good ideas, truths and accuracy in the open marketplace of ideas in which speech is free.

This is what scholars such as Lipstadt have done in their admirable public rebuttals of deniers such as David Irving. It puzzles me to see such a noble figure take up the wrong side of free speech as the weapon of choice.

Live, Give Life, Multiply

Dicebamus hesterna die ... when I first began my series on ethics, the main point was to underline that the source or foundational basis for norms need not be, and historically has not been, a divine being whose very existence I seriously doubt, but the universal human imperative to survive. In examining my proposed decalogue, we have reached the point at which we touch upon the subject of norms concerning life.

Put simply, I argued and continue to argue, good is whatever enhances the prospects of my survival and bad is the opposite. The corollary to "my survival" is that I could not have survived the first few years of my life alone, would not likely be able to survive in the style to which I am accustomed by myself and it won't be long before I will once again need to be nursed until I die.

We are all accustomed by movies and television to think of the "thou shalt not kill" imperative as involving a tawdry city murder by a jealous lover, a jilted husband, a betrayed conspirator and so on.

We are less accustomed to think of war as wrong. Indeed, our government makes every effort to enshrine Horatio's encomium to the young -- dulce et decorum est pro patria mori -- in advertising that simulates video-games. (Anyone who remembers the 1992 film Toys and is aware of the astoundingly successful 2002 PC war game America's Army will no doubt marvel at how life imitates art.)

Not only that, but no one ever considers elbowing someone in the subway or dropping a snotty word to the bus driver who is running late to be "killing."

Yet I meant to include both ends of the spectrum when I changed the Mosaic injunction into something broader and more appropriate to the ethics I am proposing: thou shalt not diminish the life of another human being.

Whenever we make life miserable for someone else, for even one second, we have stolen a possibility of joy that is irreplaceable. That second will never come again, that chance at some semblance of happiness is gone forever. We have killed that person for one moment.

Of course, those who know me will wonder where I get off spouting this proposition. Dismissive words? Moi? Guilty as charged. (Although I would still maintain that some things -- let those who have ears hear -- deserve to be dismissed.)

An ethical principle is not false merely because I fail to observe it from time to time. Enhancing, protecting, giving life is still the human imperative -- and every diminishment detracts from our collective and individual survival.

The wisdom of The Picture of Dorian Gray, whose proto-gay lib motifs are today all too obvious and uninteresting, is that, indeed, we do disfigure ourselves with our killing.

Our sarcasm turns us eventually into bitter prunes, our bullying weakens us, the hunger we inflict on others when we eat their rice bowl fattens us to the point of diabetes, the war and ravaging we inflict turns us into animals and the people we execute haunt us.

Taunt, prejudice and deprivation are all merely prolonged forms of premeditated murder. Most of us, I would argue, partake of these. Similarly, through our taxes we wage war and execute.

No one is pure any more. In Christianity, Augustine of Hippo called the condition "original sin"; in Hinduism and Buddhism it is simply referred to as awareness. When we become self-aware we become moral agents, enmeshed in our foibles and co-conspirators in the foibles of the society we choose to live off and in.

Let's turn this inside out and stress the positive.

To live is the only way we can continue to be moral agents, human. (After we are dead, who knows? The body is certainly gone; the "soul," which I am increasingly convinced by personal experience and what little I know of science is merely a compound of chemicals, returns its matter back to the universe. Most of us, I'm told, becomes nitrogen.)

To make life enjoyable, worthwhile, dignified enhances one's own life by enhancing that of others. To find ways to settle disputes peacefully and to reconcile criminals with society challenges and develops our intellect and makes us better people.

The Elephant in the Blog

As I begin to write this, there are 176 comments to my post on Monday, the first 20 or so more or less in response to what I wrote, the other (amazing!) 150-something representing digressions upon digressions that have taken on a life of their own.

Fascinating to watch, although at first a little scary. The vehemence of the messages had the ring of insanity that people I know detected right away. "Crazy shit" one called it.

But then it became interesting to watch, to wonder how soon they would tire of going endlessly in circles round the same non-issues.

What drives people to such obsessions? Who are these people? What do all these messages tell us about them? Why are they not tired of this after four days?

Let's look at the data.

I counted 75 discrete commenters, including 27 Anonymouses. Among these Felicity gets the gold medal for the most comments (44), although several seemed to be continuations of the previous one the minute before and perhaps should have been grouped as one. RNM, whose vehemence and persistence in debating Felicity persuades me must be Rachel herself or a very close surrogate, comes in second (34).

Assuming that the ubiquitous Mr. or Ms. Anonymous is not one person, no one else came close to commenting even 10 times -- Wombat (if all the variations are one person) came close (6), then Alex Fear (5).

I know for a fact that three commenters, plus myself, are American. One is Australian, One French. The rest, by their syntax, their spelling and their references to British arcana, are most likely Brits.

Thirteen commenters I either know or more or less safely assume from their nom d'internet, to be women. Only five are identifiably men -- one by his pejorative reference to women.

Observing the hours comments were posted reveals something else. Overwhelmingly, the comments came in between 4 am U.S. Eastern Standard Time and 6 pm -- that's between 10 am and 12 midnight London time.

There was fairly heavy traffic for what would be 10 am to noon for the Brits and then it picks up again around 4pm to 6pm, British time. Obviously many commented from work -- or are they all unemployed?

Another thing I know from the logs is that the bulk of visitors from Britain came from servers in towns that are from about north of London to somewhere in the Midlands, although there are a few aberrant Ulster folk out there. Clearly, all small town folk who are bored to tears watching the rain fall.

The truly amazing thing reading through these comments is that they are so repetitive, so artless, so concerned with minutiae of little or no transcendence.

No one will be converted to any great new ideal by these comments -- sorry, Alex. Nor will anyone gain an insight worth remembering.

Some writers display flashes of cleverness. I particularly liked some of the nicknames. My personal favorite: "My 9/11 is bigger than your 7/7." A few others were bitingly funny.

On the whole, however, there was a tad too much trite whining and loads of absolutely boring faux legalese. Lighten up, folks!

Importantly, aside from the principals involved (and even then the tiff borders on pointless obsession), these issues have no real impact on the personal lives of the commenters. Certainly not on mine.

Someone blogs about you and you don't like it? Ignore it or blog back. Someone e-mails you and you don't want it? Delete it, filter it out and so on.

People who get riled about these things need to take a deep breath and repeat after me: "This is just a hobby." Breathe in, breathe out. Repeat three times. Feels better, no?

What is it about computers that induces this kind of behavior?

I write pretty much the way I speak. Most of you would not like me and -- surprise! -- I probably would not like you.

But I sense that some of the nonsense posted here by the commenters goes way beyond what they are accustomed to saying to someone on the street. For example, how many commenters would really go around referring to women as "tits" in the presence of women capable of beating them up or, at a minimum, shaming them?

Nonetheless, thank you all for providing a window into cyberobsessions that I never imagined existed.

I'm sure also that American visitors were also enlightened as to the appalling lack of liberties in Britain -- my sympathies. As you rise and I go to sleep, rest assured I will honor your U.S. constitutional right to rant. Let the circus continue.

Brightest and Best?

In recent weeks, I have been crossing paths with have been and wanna be Clinton folk who, true to what they have always been remain for the most part intellectually dazzling wonks. Hearing them again, as confidence builds that the future is Democratic, I was suddenly reminded of what I didn't like about the 1990s.

Few people who observe U.S. presidencies closely enough will dispute that William Jefferson Clinton was probably the brightest White House resident in the last half century or so. To go to a seminar to listen to Laura D'Andrea Tyson, former chair of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, or Robert Rubin, Clinton's former treasury secretary, provides the kind of brain food that compares easily to the caloric content -- and delight -- that comes with chocolate chip ice-cream.

One should note, however, that the runner in the presidential brains department was unquestionably Richard Nixon, demonstrating that intellect doesn't necessarily make the best of presidents -- or of people.

In fact, Adlai Stevenson (don't gape and say "who?" -- look it up) learned, as did "Clean Gene" McCarthy, that the U.S. American body politic is notoriously anti-intellectual. Wonks come up with intriguing ideas, but not necessarily solutions.

In politics ideas have to survive the compromises and Hillary Clinton's defeat at health reform is a classic example of complex thinking failing to muster votes.

In recent weeks I have run into Clintonites more obscure than Rubin or Tyson who have unwittingly reminded me what I didn't like about the last Clinton Administration and raised my fears about the putative next.

Put simply, you could describe it with the motto "It's the arrogance, stupid."

At a recent public forum, one former official described a set of social programs with which I happen to be intimately familiar as unqualified failures. I went up to him afterward to ask him for the basis of his characterization and I got the following answer:

"When I was Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy," he began, capitalizing the initials in each part of his former title with the inflection of his voice, "I read many, many reports."

Would he be so kind as to name one?

Since I had missed the cornerstone of his argument, he replied "In the White House, I was brought extensive reports."

Ah, I see, merely by sitting in a White House office in the light of those enormous 18th-century windows and in possession of an 8-word, initial-capped occupational title, knowledge just seeps into your brain, as if by osmosis, and renders your judgments infallible.

Someone should tell the pope.

This man is one of the thousands of obscure policy influencing figures so cozily ensconced in think-tank sinecures that require only repeating "regression analysis" over lunch every day and unlikely to be selected for a repeat performance. Yet his hunger for it was dripping from his sleeve the day I spoke with him.

Oh, to be in the White House again!

After several such encounters in more recent weeks, I've suddenly found myself hitting upon what appeals to me about Barack Obama and send shivers up my spine about Hillary Clinton. It's not just that New York's junior senator might lose to Fred Thompson and stick us all with eight more years of the present nonsense.

A future President Clinton she brings in tow the whole rafter of admittedly brilliant cadres. They fueled the happy days when peace was brokered in Ireland and Yugoslavia, when the stock market tripled in value and when anyone with a pulse could get a job with a good salary. All granted.

But they also failed to prevent a hypocritical bomb-thrower like Newton Leroy Gingrich from forcing poor women with children under the age of six to go get dead-end jobs and scaring millions of others off the one program that once eliminated hunger in the United States, food stamps.

Hillary Clinton now talks as if she has a plan for everything. She probably does. Good plans, too. But can she win and get them through with a bunch of weenies whose hubris is showing more than a year before the White House becomes vacant? Do I trust the former "Goldwater Girl" to show herself to be from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party?

Obama, who is charismatic, has at least the decency to admit that he doesn't know everything. That he is willing to listen and negotiate. That he is not a Boomer stuck in 1965 -- as admittedly I myself am on some days.

That's why, for all the aura of inevitability around Hillary Clinton, I'm not counting Obama out.

Johnny's in the Basement

Felicitous? -- A True Fable

Once upon the blogosphere there were two Englishwomen. One was a youngish wannabe member of the chattering class and the other was a somewhat older reclusive sort with an active imagination and sense of pique.

Let's call them Rachel Whatzername (I'm told she sues people who use her actual name but go here for hints) and Felicity Jane Lowde (who actually goes by her own name).

They had what Brits call a "row"(pronounce "ow" as in "owl"). Anywhere else it would have been a catfight. Meow!

Rachel has parlayed her claim to deep psychological scars from the London bombings of July 7, 2005, into a quasi-celebrity newspaper status in Britain, along with a column in The Times of London and a book whose launch party she has apparently postponed for reasons unknown.

Never heard of her? Neither had I. Someone could pull out the drain-plug that keeps England from sinking into the ocean and I, at least, wouldn't notice.

Not the Brits, of course. Someone else over there, namely Felicity, seems to have taken exception to Rachel's parlaying tragedy (actually a smallish, copycat 9/11-ish event, but with only 52 dead and all on surface transportation) into a PR bonanza full of emotionalism for fun and profit.

Here's Rachel's version and here's Felicity's. More or less.

It seems that Felicity thought that the physically unharmed Rachel, who was apparently somewhere about a block or so from one of the explosions, was a poseur. Claiming to be a researcher with "Special Branch" (a quasi-espionage unit of the London police), Felicity began to protest that Rachel protested too much.

Rachel began to portray herself as cyberstalked and roused a campaign of fellow Brits who raised the alarm. The salts! The salts! Mommy, mommy -- they would say "Mummy" but it sounds too silly -- someone is blogging nasty things about my blogging persona.

Brits used to be a lot more dignified. Before the bathos over the death of Princess Diana -- a talentless bad imitation Isadora Duncan if there ever was one! -- the much ballyhooed stiff upper lip did at least spare us the sight of people with sallow skin crying and despoiling the environment with millions of wrapped flowers.

(Note to emoters everywhere: take the paper and cellophane off the flowers you leave in public pseudo-shrines; the flowers will bio-degrade promptly and cleanly.)

Back to the cybertiff ... it doesn't end there.

The Rachelists managed to denounce what they perceived as malodorous blogging and, using some British law that muzzles opinions (I knew there was a good reason for the American Revolution), got the police of Oxford to go after Felicity and arrest her after she was tried and convicted in absentia. She was imprisoned on June 5 and released Sept. 6.

Sounds like out of the Middle Ages, complete with witch-hunt.

Frankly, I have no idea whatsoever who is telling the truth and it really doesn't matter. Rachel might well be trembling in a corner at the thought of Felicity blogging somewhere about her and several of her male fellow bloggers. Felicity may also well be as crazy as a loon -- although in this case, why not compassion and treatment rather than jail?

A pox on both their houses insofar as their original feud.

But jailing someone for blogging seems to contravene Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, of which last I checked, the United Kingdom is a signatory member. It reads

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

There's actually some sort of court muzzle in the U.K. on both Rachel and Felicity in this matter, as Felicity is appealing her conviction.

I'm writing about it freely under the theory that Britain will not extradite me from the United States for making well-deserved fun of the antics of her citizens and police. In the United States, opinion is protected speech. I am writing within the medium in which both Rachel and Felicity have sought to lead more or less public lives about writings that are extant in this medium.

My opinion, in sum, is that the whole thing is a complete waste of time, police resources and technology. If these two women would find their way to kiss and make up and the police to apologize and somehow compensate Felicity ... I'm expecting too much.

As an uncle of mine used to say, men and women are the worst people in the world. There is no exception in the blogosphere. Unfortunately.

What Is To Be Done?

With this title, given to a pamphlet on revolutionary strategy by Vladimir Ilych Lenin, memo writers everywhere (notably me) have amused their peers in multiple ways. In this instance I am using the title to respond to a question posed in response to my post Why Don't We Solve Problems.

Jen, you surely recall, asked "if caring for each other is the answer, what do we do next collectively?"

Did I want to call everyone to the ramparts? Would anyone come if I did? It seemed an awesome responsibility. So I dithered until, in the course of my meandering through Wonkland I came across a few ideas that make sense to me.

1. Change the Words We Use and the Way We Speak

Somebody reading this surely remembers how, after the 1968 riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the term "busboy" disappeared from everyday speech in Washington. While downtown buildings were still smoldering, nobody wanted to be caught dead calling a waiter's assistant "boy," especially since most of them were black for reasons that I think need no explanation.

Similarly, do we have any takers for calling Hillary Clinton a "girl"?

Those two changes alone have not made African Americans suddenly privileged nor created a matriarchy, but they have caused people to rethink the notion of diminutives for people whose socioeconomic stature has been forcibly small.

In a similar way, it's been suggested that the way we talk about poverty -- even the term "poverty" -- focuses attention on the wrong thing. Sympathy for poor people still means thinking of poor people and their problems as something that affects them, not us, when in reality we are all in this together.

Greater poverty means greater crime, poorer health and greater inequality for all of us. You and I can become poor. We can be robbed. We can suffer from class distinctions.

Instead of poverty, we need to focus on shared prosperity. The Economic Policy Institute is devoting a series of events to developing a policy agenda about it. Shared prosperity involves better wages for all. It's about food, clothing, shelter, jobs, education and health. For everyone, in a measure that allows everyone to live a life all of us can recognize as dignified.

2. Unify to Retake Our Democracy

Today I happen to have gone to hear economist Robert Reich, secretary of labor from 1993 to 1997, make an earnest appeal to activists to stop focusing on our parochial issues, no matter how important and valid, and to unite into the grand task of retaking the decision-making processes of our society for all citizens, not just Gucci-wearing lobbyists and campaign contributors. Reich, who makes a point of bringing up his diminutive height (4 ft 10.5 in) whenever he speaks or writes, is a giant when it comes to making sense.

We can't let them (and we all know who they are) pit women against blacks and Hispanics, homeless against homeowners, limousine liberals against bus-line activists.

There will be no shelters built unless we stop burning money in Iraq. No schools built unless we raise the wealthiest people's marginal tax rate from somewhere between 15% and 35% to something closer to the 76% to 91% it was under presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower -- neither of whom were wild-eyed radicals.

Everything has to be done together, organically, with everyone pitching in the areas they can help best.

3. Participate in Healthy Criticism of the Leadership

Whether it's President H. Clinton or President Obama, the next, hopefully Democratic, president will not be infallible.

Clinton brings in tow a circle of seasoned, extremely bright people whose conversation sets the mind of anyone listening to them on fire. They can take complex problems and recast them simply, surgically slicing the Gordian Knots of policy.

But they are also a tad over-confident and last time they didn't do so well.

Obama is unquestionably inexperienced, although he has something akin to the JFK charisma on his side. Let's not forget what happened to JFK. Obama is not the only pre-primary presidential candidate to get Secret Service protection for nothing. There are a lot of hate-filled people in the US of A.

Can Obama make the spark he brings set off our imaginations for good? What if the unthinkable happens?

In either case, the next president should not get a pass merely because he or she is a Blue-State president. Democratic administrations have screwed the unions, have forgotten the Mexican-American votes they solicited and have even started stupid foreign wars.

We have to all participate in holding our truly elected leaders' feet to the fire. Make them fulfill their promises. Elect more radical folks to Congress -- instead of Republicans -- if the liberals can't get the job done.

We always live in crisis because we are always growing, progressing in our lives until we die. The next few years, for our society, could be defining moments.

Will we unite to put in policies that save the environment from catastrophe, allow a generation to retire without unduly burdening those that follow, fulfill some of the basic promises of the American Dream for all of us, behave in the world in a manner somewhat gentler than a gorilla despite our 900 lbs.?

You and I have the answer. Don't mourn me, Joe Hill said, get out and organize.

A Few of My Favorite Things

Setting up a new computer the past two weekends I've felt like Maria in the Sound of Music ... "when the mouse bytes, when the keys click, when I'm surfing Web, I simply remember my favorite wares and I don't feel so blank." As I attempt to rely on freeware or open source software in my new electronic universe, I'm reminded of the growing universe of unsung programmers who have given freely so much to the world.

Few people except for those who know early computing lore realize that this was the way the pioneers envisioned the future of computing, a sentiment captured by Richard Brautigan in his poem "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" from which I quote the following:

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Such sound like a fitting paean to freeware and open source software. I'm sure you've heard of the $0 Open Office general office suite, Firefox Web browser and Winamp audio player.

Let me write a few words of praise for less well-known freeware I use.

Pegasus, one of the Internet's longest-serving and most configurable e-mail programs is not idiotically simple, but it allows the user to really control every detail of incoming and outgoing electronic communications. The program was designed by New Zealander David Harris, who nearly quit his work on this gem in January 2007.

Dutch programmer Jeroen Laarhoven, from the town of Zwolle, about 75 miles northeast of Amsterdam, has given us AllChars, which provides a quick way to type accented and foreign characters such as é Ü ç î æƒ ² ‰ © £ ± ß ° 1/2 ¿ « » ™ -- all using a U.S. keyboard, which has no keys for them.

Its name a takeoff on the DOS Norton Commander file manager, which it imitates, Servant Salamander, of which version 1.52 is still freeware is a million times easier and clearer to use than Windows Explorer to manage files, copy, rename, create folders, etc. (I purchased the pay version to encourage these clever Czech programmers, but even without the newer paid bells and whistles, this is a great little program).

Marek Jedlinski, who for 10 years taught American literature and advanced translation at the University of Lodz, Poland, has given the world the very useful Oubliette, a little program that stores usernames, passwords, URLs, and free-form notes.

PathCopy is a shell extension that once installed appears in a right-click context menu when you are in a file manager. The program, developed in Denmark, allows you to copy the full path of a document or folder -- a useful thing if you're say wanting to create a shortcut or redirect something.

From Massachusetts comes Startup Control Panel is a nifty control panel applet that allows you to easily configure which programs run when your computer starts created by Mike Lin, a researcher in computational biology, what I have just learned from the Wikipedia is "an interdisciplinary field that applies the techniques of computer science, applied mathematics, and statistics to address problems inspired by biology."

Thanks to them and more. Find more free gems at Son of Spy and Pricelessware. Enjoy!

Values vs. Ethics

In attempting to define the terms "values," "morals" and "ethics," Julie Pippert proposes what I see as three normative levels: one defined by oneself, another by society and yet another by subgroups of society. She elides, unwittingly I think, the whole point of norms in moral philosophy, namely to distinguish between right and wrong.

One of the first themes of this blog was my still-unfinished series on moral philosphy. Having chucked the existence of a god or gods out the window, I turned to looking for some basis for normative ethics. I insisted, against the grain for many people in cyberspace, on a universal grounding.

I would like to suggest three problems with the definitions as given.

If a norm only exists for you, it is useless to me. We might as well all go back into the jungle. (OK, yes, what do I mean "back"?)

If a norm is what a society says it is, then it is akin to Anglo-Saxon customary law, forged by precedent rather than by principle; it can be false, misleading and ultimately immoral. How are two societies with different norms to settle their differences?

If a norm is merely a series of ideals chosen by various clubs, they might as well not exist. We all know that clubs make awards and canonize the behavior of those members who curry popularity most successfully.

The epistemology behind these propositions is that we know truth by consent and consensus.

This is not without problems. Just believing the moon is made of green cheese, won't make it so. Even if we were to agree that the earth rotates round the moon, for example, that grass is blue and that water is dry, none of these things -- understood in their everyday sense -- would become true.

Galileo was right: "E pur si muove" (And yet it moves.) The common "knowledge" of his day was wrong.

I would contend that normative philosophy attempts to discover what is truly right and truly wrong. One might question whether the proposals of a given philosophical system or thinker are correct or true, but right and wrong is an irreducible dyad. One can't be equal to the other and viceversa.

As I wrote three years ago, the universal norm of human behavior is that "all behavior that enhances my survival is good and desirable, whatever detracts from it is bad and to be avoided." At the time (amazing how quickly time flies when you're blogging!), I was hesitant to affirm it, but at this writing I am every day more convinced that this is the universal norm par excellence.

I welcome contrary opinions, although I am nearly certain this is an unassailable proposition. Not because I have chosen it (OK, I do listen to myself a little), but because in my observation it is warranted as true and factual, as well as intellectually and emotionally satisfying.

The Mindset Mindset

That blogs are a colossal time-waster -- if lots of fun -- can be illustrated by reference to an excellent cyberlocale called A Commonplace Book, and my discovery through it of something called The Mindset List. In the one for the class of 2008, I learn, for example, that to my younger son's contemporaries "Castro has always been an aging politician in a suit," which -- having met the man in his perennial field-green guerrilla uniform -- is a striking thought to me.

The list takes popular culture as an 18-year-old university student would know them and compares that to what an older person would know. What if we did that for generations of the past?

For example, people my age, who turned 18 in 1970, had no recollection of Stalin as a living person or of a time without television and radio. We had no real feel for the Great Depression and if we had encountered poverty it was almost surely outside the United States.

Conversely, and here's the interesting thing for people who are younger, we could not conceive of a world that was not divided into Communist and non or of a single Germany. (DeGaulle famously said that he loved Germany so much he always wanted two of them.) There you go, we could not envision a world in which DeGaulle, Eisenhower, Mao and Kennedy were not larger than life figures.

That's fine. Everyone has heard about Boomers to death. But what about previous generations?

My father at 18 (1939) would never have imagined the atomic bomb, nor a Slurpee nor a jet plane. There had only been one World War, but he had no memory of it. The word "Holocaust" would have meant nothing to him. The United States had never been a superpower -- indeed, no one even knew what a superpower was.

Compared to his father, he was completely ignorant of a world without radio or automobiles. Unions had always existed, as had the 8-hour workday. He had never heard Ragtime music.

My grandfather at 18 (1904) could not have thought a World War possible and travel to the moon was the stuff of Jules Verne's novels. European nations were governed by monarchs and Africa had always been divided into European colonies.

My greatgrandfather at 18 (1879) probably believed people who feared the death-defying velocities of 30 miles an hour at which trains and streetcars traveled. He wasn't old enough to remember slavery or its abolition nor even Lincoln's assassination, although he had surely heard of all of them. Did he know about the telegraph?

I have always been a historically minded person. To me, the evocation of a time in the past is the evocation of music, art, architecture, as well as the famous dates and names. You get into the feel of 1759, when you think of the battle on the Plains of Abraham: the mud, the carriages getting perennially stuck, the horses whinnying, the use of strong drink to allay a toothache, the expectation that life was, indeed, nasty, brutish and thankfully short.

The same thing with languages. Humor is so different in various languages that if you are really going to get it, you have to be thinking in that language.

We are defined by our limits and our ability to transcend them.

Women Working

In another blog, the writer attempts to smooth the feathers ruffles in a debate sparked by one mother's take on how candidate John Edwards' family should handle parenting in the middle of a presidential campaign. The mother took a shot at Elizabeth Edwards (why not at John?) on the basis of the soundbite of her husband chiding their boy Jack -- the spank heard around the world.

Chani tiptoes into that debate proclaiming that she has never been a mother. I, too, have never been a mother, yet I am interested in and would like to say a few things about this.

Should women work?

That's the way the question was phrased before 1970, the year Sisterhood Is Powerful was first published. The presumption was that when women stay home to raise children and keep house they are not working. After all, in that context, the man came home with the paycheck.

Things changed. A little. Then a bit more.

In the Boomer generation women became lawyers and doctors and engineers and linepeople and mail carriers and miners in proportions never seen before. My sneaking suspicion, however, was that U.S. American women gained the lifestyle of the Soviet woman, who essentially had become an cash income-winner in the labor market on top of her traditional work as mother and housewife.

The mass entry of women into the labor market in the United States coincides with the beginning of a period of wage stagnation that has not yet ended. From 1973 to 2003, average U.S. wages declined by about a fifth.

Do these two events correlate perfectly and exclusively to the point that one can draw a line of causation from one to the other? Not that I know of, but the parallel is striking.

To a certain extent, I would conclude, Boomer women were taken for a ride.

Chani was smart not to go for it and decline motherhood. In my case, my now-estranged spouse chose to stay home and be an excellent mother; I think my sons are better people for it. But the path of both these women need not be the best one. It was the path chosen by women lucky enough to have the choice.

Despite the enhanced intellectual and psychological gratification of participating in the labor force, especially in a culture so devoted to the notion of work for pay, Boomer women for the most part were offered bad choices. Men on the job could turn off the home and the children; in my experience, women have not been able to and, frankly, I wonder whether they should have had to try.

We Boomers did not resolve the issues that arose out of the question we raised: Since women do work, why shouldn't they get paid, get degrees and prestige and so on, just like men?

The Generation X families and couples I have known seem to have begun the task of digging deeper. In some, the principal breadwinner is the woman and the principal nurturer, cook and household keeper is the man. Or they try shifting balances of work and family duties, since men have not found a way to undergo pregnancy or breastfeed. Not yet, anyway.

Of course, the men were born well after the precepts of Second Wave Feminism had seeped into every burrow of society.

The fly in the ointment was the twofold whammy introduced by the Reagan Era.

Social neoconservatism has been attempting -- so far with mixed results -- to bring women back to the famous three Ks of yore, kinder, küche, kirche (children, kitchen and church). Economic neoconservatism has fairly successfully generated a yawning divide between the wealthiest 20 percent (household income of more than $97,000) and the rest of Americans.

Worse still, Newton Leroy Gingrich's version of welfare reform, which triumphed in 1996 on the shoulders of both conservatisms I have mentioned, suddenly threw out the window the notion that mothering during early childhood -- let's say from birth to kindergarten or first grade -- is a socially worthwhile contribution deserving public assistance if the household has no other means of support.

Initially, poor mothers with children under six were exempt from work, then states began to ratchet that age down until now it has become more or less the national policy that poor women give birth and go back to their low-wage dead-end job lickety split -- or else.

I like to cite to the conservatives who are proud of compelling these women back to the workplace that no less than that wild-eyed liberal from Spain, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, instituted a policy in the 1950s whereby the state paid stay-at-home mothers a monthly stipend. The sum was only a few hundred pesetas (a few U.S. dollars today, worth somewhat more then, but never a lot of money), thus largely symbolic.

Still, when has U.S. society ever recognized or assigned any economic value to mothering at home?

My point is not that all women should stay at home, nor that all should go hold a job. My view is that the choice should be a reasonable option between two more or less equitable possibilities. It isn't yet, although we are making strides toward that goal.

In the meantime, it never ceases to amaze me that women would put as much energy berating one of their own, instead of uniting to get the necessary changes done.

Eureka: Everything!

New, multifaceted and interconnected realizations dawn upon me at just before sunrise: why we are where we are with respect to truth. I feel like Archimedes.

The Euclidean mathematician, physicist, engineer and astronomer of the ancient world, was said to have run naked through the streets of Syracuse, Sicily, when he discovered, while taking a bath, how to measure the volume of irregular objects.

"Eureka!" he yelled. (I have found it!)

Yet I have not stumbled upon my insight alone. I owe some gratitude to the commenters in what Geneviève called a "pseudo dialogue" at the end of the last post. You will recall the questions about "everything."

Everything in this context is not 42, but rather precisely everything. What is everything? How does it hold together (if it does)? What limits does it have (if any)? How and when did it start (if it did) and how and when will it end (if it will)? Let's add two more, for fun: What is everything for (assuming a purpose)? Are any of the assumptions in these questions even valid?

The answer need not be God, the One -- or 42. The answer is probably huge and, once we discover it, astoundingly obvious and simple at the same time. Moreover, the answer has to be logically and intuitively satisfying.

What really struck me about this in my sleep -- literally! -- is that we are so close and yet so far. This is why we are, as a species, divided and suffering.

We are where we are today due to the way in which our globalized world is developing knowledge. (Note here, and enjoy, how perfectly this ties into Marx's notion of the superstructure of ideas, put simply, how the structure of production needed for our survival molds our philosophy, laws and, of course, our art and so forth.)

Since the dawning of the American Age in the 20th century, the pursuit of knowledge has been pragmatic. We Americans have long agreed to disagree when it comes to first and ultimate things, leaving our minds free, as Somerset Maugham memorably noted, "for important matters such as business and fornication."

In the British Age of the 19th century pragmatism was the handmaiden to reason. This turned out not to be the French goddess some thought, but the surest path to a grand compromise -- what all the muddling through is about -- harmonizing God, queen, country and, yes, progress.

Truth lay somewhere at the bottom of it, misplaced like theater tickets in a very messy roll-top desk. The British believed everything would work out in the end if the world accepted civilization (and its synonymous artifact, the British railroad).

In the Gallic age of the 18th century (or the world after the Treaty of Westphalia), critical Cartesian reason -- redundancy intended -- was, if not born, at least rediscovered. Yet the French were too busy playing naughty games in Versailles to think, thus their way of life ceased to exist.

The Spanish age of the 15th and 16th (that pesky Westphalia keeps things messy) was unquestionably an era of faith, the Catholicism of the sword and the bonfire that never doubted its rightness in attempting to defeat the humanist epistemology of Protestantism, the syncretist dogmatism of Islam and the misperceived tribalism of Judaism. The Torquemadans died of their own heroic madness.

And our era? Whose broad stripes and bright stars are those gallantly streaming? The Einsteinian molecules of uncertainty.

At the core of all the strife between Western and Middle Eastern fundamentalisms, against one another as well as against the global technology of grasping, lies the kernel of uncertainty and its ancillary, fear.

We have split the atom and found inside a new world that runs by rules unknown. We have reached the stars and stumbled upon apparently endless millions of worlds.

In the wonder and marvel of it all, we are undergoing the profound discomfort of realizing that we really know nothing for certain. Thank you, Socrates, we should have listened to you.

Paradoxically and recursively our profound ignorance makes us wise.

Thinking about Truth

We are often told that the crucial divide in today's world is between the Western scientific ethos and the Western and Eastern religious ethos, particularly fundamentalism. Yet I see, at the core, a more important division: between those who assert there is truth and those who claim there is no such thing.

In modern philosophy, it's the distinction between analytical and foundational thought.

You know foundational philosophy. It begins -- and, thought Nietzsche, ends -- with the Greeks, through rafter of Germans from the Black Forest to Koenigsburg and loses its way in the marshes of Denmark and the cafés of Paris' Left Bank.

Aristotle and the other "foundationals" viewed philosophy as the mother of all sciences, forever exploring the fundamental reasons and principles of everything. On the fundamental questions, science settled on precepts or theories and moved on, yielding Newton's slaying of Euclid and Einstein's slaying Newton and so on. Philosophy soldiered on with those questions that would have paralyzed the scientists.

We can meander from Aristotle to Aquinas to Erasmus to Descartes, Kant and Hegel to Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre and we'll see -- at least until Kierkegaard and Sartre -- a common concern with capital-T truth. It may well be a truth that is difficult -- or impossible? -- to know, but it's there, the elephant in the room.

That worked in societies in which there was a common worldview. Indeed, in the middle ages, the Catholic clerics of the European West attempted to claim philosophy's spot for theology -- unsuccessfully.

But what happened when, in the 20th century, the two powers that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in 1836 would rule the world last century -- the USA and the Russia -- proposed an ethos that involved renouncing the affirmation of a particular Truth as part of the common social knowledge?

In the West, the sole remaining torchbearer for the moment, philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore and Alfred North Whitehead developed a new philosophy that drew on positivism and empiricism, that turned philosophy into an inquiry of the methods of analysis and the clarification of thought, truth be damned.

The damning was not so much an ideological battle, as it was a quiet conclusion that philosophical truths simply don't exist, and that we might as well settle for checking that our thinking makes sense, is cogent and can withstand critical evaluation. This is the portal at which I find myself at the present, a good century behind developments.

I sense that the philosophy of the future will be analytical rather than foundational, assuming that neither a natural cataclysm, nor a fundamentalist dark age, impedes what seems as the foreseeable evolution of science, technology and human endeavor. It's implicit in recursive thinking and in fields such as quantum physics.

Yet I remain stubbornly a foundationalist -- and an absolutist at that. I think there is a universally valid truth, of which some truths are levels or expressions. Such truth is difficult and may be even impossible to know; certainly, I don't happen to know at this moment what it is.

At this point, greater minds than mine are weighing whether a generalized theory of everything is possible. I would propose that merely the fact that we can conceive of it means that it is.

Sowing and Reaping

Mindful of a question that was asked of me in response to my recent minimalist post, I have been attempting to assess what exactly I have sowed, but this farm image has this city boy mightily confused.

My reader wrote "Et toi, qu'as-tu semé que tu puisses récolter?" (And you, what did you sow that you can harvest?).

We get this notion about cause and effect from a biblical phrase "For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap." Is this pastoral image true for humans as it might be for crops? What would the biblical writer have written in the 21st century? What might we write in the "bible" of our hearts?

Humans just might not seed in their lives, other than literally, in their farms and gardens.

The seeding image for human sex, for example, dates back to a biological era in which the ovum, undiscovered until the 19th century, was unknown. In the absence of the ovum, moralists, philosophers and scientists -- all men -- concluded that each sperm was a homunculus, or "little man," implanted in the soil of woman, who played an entirely passive role in reproduction. We now know better.

Similarly, it's not immediately evident that we reap what we sow in other respects. Over the past year, for example, the top 20% of U.S. earners got half of all money income and the bottom 20% got just a little past 3%. Moreover, the richest got richer, while the poorest got poorer.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told an audience of reporters in which I found myself this week that his daughters had gone to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Yet he also spoke of the poor of his city, for whom he announced a new initiative imported from Mexico, as people "who weren't dealt as good a hand of cards."

Whomever you deem the cosmic Card-dealer to be -- and I vote for humanity collectively -- it's evident that all we are and have springs largely from happenstance. We neither sow nor reap, to turn biblical again, we are like the lilies of the field.

I cannot be proud to be an American as I did not choose to be born in New York City. Any more than I chose to have parents with the means and the aspirations to see me attend university.

Nor did I choose to have linguistic abilities, nor to have the opportunity to develop them as a child, nor any number of particulars that started me off on an immeasurably higher socioeconomic plane than a child born from parents who lived in Harlem rather than Sutton Place.

I reap what has been sowed for me to reap. Gratefully. I do not deserve my good fortune. Noblesse oblige. Whatever I have suffered is, in the grand scheme of things, no more than life's hangnail.

Republicans Really Are Different

Before I get angry about poverty -- the new rate comes out today -- I want to make quick point about the difference between Republicans and Democrats inspired by the recent departures from government.

Yes, the rats like Karl Rove are leaving the sinking ship. Yes, aside from wanting to hire only Bushies, Alberto Gonzales had trouble recruiting top quality lawyers for the Justice Department.

There's an easy explanation. Republicans, who are now overwhelmingly and monochromatically mostly neo-conservatives of some sort, actually despise government and work to wreck it.

That's been essentially the deficit tactic since Reagan: create enough fiscal imbalance that the thing breaks down and all the programs are cut because "defense" (shouldn't the Pentagon be renamed "offense" or back to Department of War, at least?) is sacrosanct.

So, what honest "government is best which governs least" Republican is going to choose voluntarily to work for the gummint? Here are a few:

-- opportunists who need a job and are willing to call themselves Republican if that's what it takes;

-- crazy ideologues who convince themselves that if the gummint could persuade kids to say no to sex and drugs (bureaucrats, unlike parents, teachers and ministers are the best role models, right?) or some such project of evangelical social engineering, then ... it would be morning in America again (in the rose-tinted Elvis Presley history of the GOP);

In general, these are people who are dishonest with themselves and therefore dishonest with everyone else. You hate government? Stay out of it and let competent, interested people do the job.

This explains easily why the Repubs having, hands down, all the majority they needed in both houses last November and December, merely packed their bags after the election and did nothing.

Contrast that with Bill Clinton signing regulations until the last second before Dubya put his hand on the Bahble on that fateful January 20, 2001. Not the congressional Repubs of late 2006 ... thank Zeus!

This should explain why, for the next year or so, government will be unable to do much of anything. At this point, there's so much wreckage -- from Iraq, to a looming deficit, to the mess of post-Katrina, to (your issue here) -- that there's no more room for more.

We're not looking at the pristine surpluses Clinton left or the booming economy or peace breaking out in Ireland and even Bosnia. We're looking at sheer disaster in the face.

Hell, if there's no wrecking allowed, the Repubs just don't find governing fun.

Self-Conscious Amoebas

Knowing little about the science, but enough to understand its implications, I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that there is no free will, nor much less any individuality arising out of it. Yet I rebel at the thought that we are only distinctively self-conscious.

Everything we always attributed to the "soul," the "spirit" and that idealized thoracic muscle that beats faster when we see an attractive specimen of the opposite sex -- all that amounts to complex biochemical interactions in the brain. We are as "instinctive" as animals, responding to social conditioning and evolved genetic predispositions, as well as the immediate environment.

Self-consciousness does not seem redeeming enough. How do we know that animals aren't also self-conscious in their own way? All we know is that we are hardy, violent, we reproduce in astonishing numbers and we manage to infest any environment we colonize.

Sometimes I even wonder if we're not really bacteria in some galactic-scale organism. We might even be a cancer of sorts in some gigantic being's body or the agents of murder being sought by some humongous crime scene investigators.

I know and wonder about all this, but I don't feel it.

I remain as anthropocentric as ever, blogging about what I am thinking as if my thoughts, or the form of their expression (which is what copyright law protects), were so worthwhile as if to justify burning in minutes the remains of dinosaurs and glacial ages, that took millions of years to become coal and gas, into vast electricity generation plants, so that a server somewhere (in New York?) can allow me to create the electromagnetic impulses that configure into symbols of written language when seen by the human eye. Here I pause ... forcing the gigantic humming network to await my next word.

This is very important! These are my thoughts!

Yet in a blink of an eye I will be gone, soon enough forgotten, all trace of my existence likely erased from the face of the Earth, assuming the planet as we know it even continues to exist.

What is all this growing, striving, reproducing, aging and dying for? Only a hungry stomach, the pull of a selfish gene that commands me to feed myself, makes me get up for work, to earn the value-tokens that will allow me to buy carcasses of animals and plants that others have slaughtered, sliced and diced to suit the tastes I have developed through a complex of nature, nurture and happenstance. (Not to mention advertising.)

Sure, I like my work and my job. Really.

All told I am remarkably fortunate among the 6 billion specimens of my species. I have food, clothing, shelter and amusements far beyond what easily the 2 billion poorest people would find utterly unimaginable.

Among the tiny fraction of university educated people -- no more than roughly 25 percent even in the United States graduate from a four-year college -- I am fortunate enough to be one of the few who captains his own company. Even though I am merely a thousandaire, I have unspeakable unmerited freedom in the way I earn my bread.

Yet again, all this for what? To avoid pain? Point taken. Then what?

The only thing that comes to mind is what Aristotle found distinctive about humans. Maybe we live to enjoy our own laughter.

We All Belong in Guantánamo

In Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel First Circle, an officer in Stalin's secret police, unsure which of four men have tipped off a dissident over the telephone, decides to arrest all on grounds that they've surely been disloyal at some point. I'm reminded of that logic upon learning of the publication of Poems from Guantánamo, an anthology written by current detainees.

Solzhenitsyn learned the NKVD officer's logic, of course, in Soviet prison, where he ended up for sending a joke about Stalin to a friend in a letter from the front during World War II.

The notion that unjust imprisonment can be fertile literary ground first came home to me one college summer afternoon while reading a slim volume of Ho Chi Minh's prison poetry. As my father passed by, he glanced at my book and proclaimed that prison was "an excellent school." He had been a political prisoner at about the same time as Solzhenitsyn, although his letters from prison have little more than personal value.

What strikes me now, however, is not the literature but the reality of the logic of being guilty unless proven innocent. As Solzhenitsyn's NKVD officer might have said, everyone is guilty of something.

While that might not be a good basis for a legal system, in philosophical terms the idea resonates in my bones as true. All of us have contravened what we believed were the rules of right and wrong, knowingly and willingly, at some point in our lives. Most likely many times.

The men in Guantánamo might not really be menaces to the United States -- certainly no court has found them so -- but they are not innocent and the best they could hope for from a court would be the verdict of "not guilty." Not guilty as charged.

That's not innocent of all wrongdoing. Maybe some cheated on their wives or girlfriends. Maybe some swindled someone. Maybe some were bullies in the schoolyard.

President Bush also belongs in Guantánamo by the logic that holds the detainees: name anyone who has greater power who has inflicted more death and torture during his term in office. Knowingly. We know he knows because the various dissembling masks have already peeled off.

Let's not get too righteous, however. All of us are also guilty, by thought, word, deed or inaction.

There used to be a prayer in the pre-1979 Book of Common Prayer that expressed the thought majestically: "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done: And there is no health in us."

Even newborn babies? Absolutely. There is hardly a creature more self-centered than a newborn human. Or child. Or adolescent. Or adult.

A very young child, of course, has developed neither the knowledge nor the will-power to make moral choices. To some extent, being self-centered is a matter of survival. Babies cry to be cared for. Children make demands to have some legitimate needs met.

Yet they also make illegitimate claims on our time and resources that will not further their survival. Indeed, if satisfied, indulged children will become lazy, willful and helpless adults. We all belong in some Guantánamo or another.

All of which brings me full circle to the literary.

It is said that Henry David Thoreau, when imprisoned as a tax dissenter during the Mexican-American War, was asked by a visitor what someone of his standing was doing in prison. Thoreau asked the visitor what he was doing outside.

August Minimalism

The last two weeks of August in Washington have always been a quiet time: Congress is gone, the president is away, the streets are relatively empty, all of which makes commuting to work and daily life a pleasure. It also induces a minimalism that may not last.

On such quiet days, one thinks one's life is placid, the major problems are far away. It is a good time to think of pruning one's life to the minimum necessary.

At least, I have always recognized that the ascetics and monastics had something right: all our hubbub and ado, all our baubles and trinkets and technological toys, all our fretting and aspiring ... all of it amounts to very little.

A Season for Everything

"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" wrote Qoheleth, author of the biblical book of Eclesiastes. Unwittingly, Qoheleth also provided the Sixties band The Byrds the lyrics for a song that became emblematic at one time:

All things have their season, and in their times all things pass under heaven.
A time to be born and a time to die.
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
A time to kill, and a time to heal. A time to destroy, and a time to build.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance.
A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather.
A time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.
A time to get, and a time to lose. A time to keep, and a time to cast away.
A time to rend, and a time to sew. A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.
A time of love, and a time of hatred. A time of war, and a time of peace. (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)

August in the northern hemisphere seems the time to begin pluck up.

In medieval England, August 1 was Lammas (loaf-mass) Day, the festival of the first wheat harvest, when people brought loaves of bread to church made from the new crop. The proper, full feast of harvest (from the Anglo-Saxon "haerfest," meaning 'Autumn,' the season of reaping and gathering) came on the Sunday of the full moon in September.

In the southern hemisphere people are still bracing themselves through the last full month of winter. Planting season is not far away.

I feel it as a time to pluck, to heal, to laugh, to dance, to be silent and to refrain from embracing. Soon, as I always recall at this time of year, the travails of life will be upon me.

Tina's Prophecy

Many years ago, on a school summer's vacation afternoon, this bit of elementary human wisdom came to me when my friend Tina and I were lying on the grass of her family's sloping lawn, staring up at the sky.

It was still hot and there were bees about, but not the nasty bees and hornets of the fall yet. I must have expressed exasperation, for Tina then declared, as if with an oracle's inspiration, that the summer's bees and the heat would soon be gone. I still remember, I don't quite know why, my awe at her wisdom just a few weeks later, as a gentle breeze began to blow through our shady street and, before we knew it, we were back in school.

August is full of such golden memories. Six years ago I went to the movies with my wife, our Sunday afternoon ritual at the time, to see the film "Captain Corelli's Mandolin." The film and the walk back home was one of the last placid moments of the century so far. The following month a small band of Muslims performed several spectacular suicide bombings and the following year she left me.

Then came the autumn of my life. A time to harvest.

For now, it is still August, still full of summer, easing into the last breezy days of quiet. A time to enjoy solitude and good books and good films, sometimes with a friend.

Portal for Billionaires

While you are fretting about what happened to your savings this past month, with the Dow roller coaster, the high rollers are getting their own private playground, according to the one U.S. business news scoop I have ever seen the Washington Post get. It's called the NASDAQ Portal and it's for investors with at least $100 million to pony up; if you think that doesn't mean you, think again, your pension or mutual fund may be invested there.

This sort of thing affects all of us in more ways than one.

Starting August 15 NASDAQ has been offering certain investors, including "qualified institutional investors" under Securities and Exchange Commission rule 144A, the opportunity to buy and sell stock, commercial paper and other instruments without having to disclose the purchasers, the financial statements of the firms involved or of the investors.

Shhh ... it's a private club.

Combine that with the acquisition of Chrysler -- soon other major companies -- by an investor group in such away that it is now a private company. Let's forget all the tax dollars that went into saving Chrysler in the first place; when the taxpayer invests, it doesn't count. (Remember the Tom Paxton song I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler?)

Chrysler is only the first of several offerings of a similar sort, creating a corporate financing gated community of sorts, to which most people are not allowed entrance, even though they are affected as employees, consumers and taxpayers.

All right, I won't deny that current disclosures are almost meaningless. Nor that most balance sheets and profit-and-loss statements, while technically accurate in a murky sort of way, might as well have been written by the Brontë sisters.

The various investment markets are, for the most part, legalized gambling. Still, those few laws from the New Deal era that survived Reagan and the two Bushes, plus the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley rules, help catch the occasional egregious crook.

With the abandonment of any pretense that there is an insider elite that cooks the books and holds all the economic power, we are nakedly no longer living in a society of laws.

To put it in Dickensian terms, the law is an ass; but if you have enough money it doesn't exist at all.

The People of 1066

In these ruminations about ethnicity, I have attempted to debunk ideas about race, color and minorities, but also to include the so-called whites in the discussion, as I refuse to deny anyone standing to speak simply because their victimization bragging rights have been forgotten. This is a small effort to rectify an omission in my last post, the English.

Sing a stanza of Rule, Britannia in the shower and you won't quite feel the English deserve much coddling. It's the impression they've been busily cultivating over the centuries they confronted peoples with larger numbers and territories much more vast than fair Albion. Think of the 139 British soldiers defeating 5,000 Zulu warriors at Rorke's Drift, South Africa.

Yet you'd be wrong. The pivotal nation-building event of English history, the Battle of Hastings in 1066, was as understated as everything English.

The event occurred on a slope surrounded by hills and forests. Historian David Haworth, in his priceless little book 1066: The Year of the Conquest, nudges the reader out of modern ideas of battle, with cannonades and great explosions, in noting that anyone as near as half a mile away would not have noticed that anything was happening. The Anglo-Saxon army consisted entirely of infantry and the Normans had only a few cavalry units. The loudest thing to be heard was the thumping of hooves, the clanking of metal and the cries of wounded men.

Deep within their phlegmatic demeanor the English harbor a hidden grief for King Harold, the last of the Saxon kings, for the Welsh and Picts the Germanic Angle and Saxon immigrants displaced to the west and north centuries earlier, and for their subjugation under the Romans.

How else to explain the oh, so, un-British flailing of emotionalism upon the death of Princess Diana, essentially a talentless pretty face tethered to a decidedly unphotogenic family?

Yes, Britain bears the historical burden of countless misdeeds. Perfidious Albion engineered the slave trade to America and gave it up only when they no longer reaped the profit. They invaded Ireland, North America, India, much of Africa and were twice the would-be conquerors of what is now Argentina. They seized and still hold onto Gibraltar.

Surely, also, not one former British colony has emerged from British rule without a hate-laden fissure -- European versus African, Pakistani Muslim versus Indian Hindu, Irish Catholic versus Ulster Protestant, Quebecois versus Anglo-Canadian. Even the Scots want independence now.

Yet what is at the heart of all this grasping and seizing of land and resources, and the accompanying dividing of others, if not an inherent self-belittling and disregard for England's "green and pleasant land"?

Living in England, I observed that the English express their priorities in their well-fed, fat dogs, who are allowed in pubs, and their scrawny, pallid children, whom they send away to school if they can afford it or notoriously mistreat at home. Is it not possible that what so often passes for arrogance is merely a resentful self-doubt, a forced shyness?

What to make, also, of a country that is gray year-round, save for those mid-year afternoons after the 3 o'clock rain in which the skies part to paint pre-Raphaelite clouds dabbed with weak yellow sunlight, an occasion the English quaintly call "summer"? Or a land in which central heating was still somewhat of a novelty even in 1980?

Shabby and unloved, mired in their muddy byways, the English deserve compassion without pity. Hug an Englishman, or woman, or one of their descendants, today.

(Note: This will be the last post on ethnicity for a while. To those who have ears, let them hear.)

Who is an Anglo?

Ask "Who is a Jew?" in a circle of rabbis and you will get the kind of discussion that, as the Fiddler on the Roof's Tevye put it, "would cross a rabbi's eyes." But do that many Anglos, WASPs, the misnamed "whites" or "Caucasians," know just how much suffering is buried in the anglophone world concerning those labels?

This first came home to me as a young man, when I invited a proud-to-be-Celtic Irish-American colleague home for a beer. My boys were playing a tape of folk songs that included the classic working song "Drill, ye Tarriers, Drill," that laments the demands of bosses.

As the song replayed the refrain, this acquaintance sang along. To my horror, he replaced the word "tarrier" with "nigger." That's when I turned to him and said, "No, Pat, you don't understand. That song is about exploited Irish workers."

He gave me the Dan Quayle deer-in-the-headlights look. All his life he had thought that having pinkish white skin and an Anglo-sounding name, as many Irish names became after English conquest, meant that he was a bona fide member of the predominant and entitled U.S. "majority"!

So I proceeded to tell him about railroad chain gangs and the Molly Maguires and the whole nine yards, about how thoroughly his ancestors were once abused in the United States. This man came to admit he was racist and wrong -- more important, that he had a lot in common with the many who have suffered throughout the history of the anglophone world.

Much the same thing, but with less open acknowledgment, happened with a now-retired Episcopal priest,  a Rev. Arpee. As a geneology buff, I am always pondering the origins of family names and I innocently asked him about his, since Arpee is an unusual name with no obvious origin and almost certainly not English, as English names usually have meanings that are obvious to the historically inclined.

He told me privately that it was originally Arpinian, from -- you guessed -- Armenia. It's not the lineage an Episcopal priest would want to broadcast, given the penchant among many Episcopalians of asking individuals with a family name that is not obviously English whether they are "born and bred" Episcopalian, code for "Are you really one of us?"

To me, Armenia summons to mind the tragedy of the 1915-18 murder of 1.5 million Armenians in what is today Turkey, which the government of Turkey continues to refuse to even acknowledge. When I asked Arpee why he didn't change his name back, he brushed the question aside. Yet imagine the indignity of his father, a cobbler, fleeing for his life, then hiding who he was.

Like these two, there are legions of hyphenated Americans who "pass" for Anglo-Saxon but whose families had nothing to do historically or culturally with Albion until the Ellis Island experience.

Even Brahmin WASPs aren't WASP. The Roosevelts are Dutch and the Astors German. No educated person needs to have the Gallic origin of the DuPonts (in French "of the bridge') pointed out.

The Mellons are that curious and invented origin known as Scots-Irish. This was the predominant origin of rebel colonial America, but it was really a cover for Ulster Irish. In a few instances, it denoted an ancestry tracing back to those foot soldiers in Cromwell's Puritan army who decided to stay in Ireland after their military campaign to subdue rebels. Ulster legend has it, however, that the "Scots" part comes from (entirely mythical) Scots who, it is claimed, were the eight counties' "original" inhabitants.

This amply explains how it came to be that the Scots-Irish in America badly mistreated and discriminated against the Irish Catholic immigrants. Hell hath no fury like a feud among cousins! (If you have any doubt, check out the Arabs and the Jews in the Middle East.)

It also explains why the Scots-Irish migrated to America. Most of the Ulstermen were starving and the British Crown didn't give a farthing for their fate. Indeed, many who stayed participated in the Irish rebellion of 1798.

Here's the kicker: today less than 25 percent of the U.S. population is genuinely WASP. Indeed, the "majority" is a minority!

We all know we are really mongrels of one sort or another. What we don't face up to is the vast conspiracy of silence concerning the horrific pain, in the denial of various national and cultural identities, of past injustices, in plain human suffering that so many "white" Americans have undergone.

In the family history of many of us who do not have a physically identifiable ethnic origin, such as so-called black skin, someone made the uncomfortable attempt to "pass." My own mother, on grounds that she was partly French (one-eighth, to be exact), disliked it when I began to proudly call myself Hispanic.

In turn, I don't call Anglos "white" if I can avoid it. I don't even call Anglos Anglo, if I can avoid it. So many Anglos aren't Anglo at all. Their forbears suffered at the hands of the English or their descendants, some to the point of wishing to hide their own rich ancestral cultures and languages.

Now there's the real white man's burden!

Blogging the Last Word

In the wake of the digital tempest at Bloghret, of which I became aware late, I would like to round out the argu ... um ... discussion with a few clarifications, personal insights and a general theory about what has made issues of race and ethnicity so problematic even among otherwise reasonable bloggers. Let's start with a little debunking.

First and foremost, there's no such thing as "race."

Since the 1970s scientists no longer accept race as an appropriate or useful way to describe human groupings. Indeed, in 1996 the American Association of Physical Anthropologists issued a Statement on Biological Aspects of Race that, among other things, stated the following:

Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogeneous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past.

Let's be specific. The members of the group most tragically identified as a "race" in the Western world, the Jewish people, are not a race as formulated in the 19th and 20th centuries. Jews do not even share the same genetic material. Tay-Sachs disease, a devastating neurological disorder of genetic origin, has a relatively frequent incidence among Ashkhenazic Jews, who are of Eastern European origin, while it is not known to occur at all among Mediterranean, otherwise known as Sephardic, Jews.

Moreover, the biblical stories are not to be taken as literally factual. Modern archaeological scholarship rejects the notion that the Chosen People were a single group that invaded Palestine; instead, scholars suggest that the biblical Jews were really a confederation of Abrahamic heirs and the native peoples of Canaan. Karen Armstrong's 2006 book The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions offers the most accessible summary.

Secondly, the 17th century division of people by skin color is absurd.

There are no whites. Most people of European background from the colder, sun-deprived climates are a whitish pink (or pink and red if freckled); Europeans from the sunny Mediterranean and Black seas tend toward an olive hue. There are certainly no truly yellow or red people. There are no blacks. The majority of people of African descent are darker than Europeans, but these are varieties of brown.

Note to skin color die-hards: the lighter skin of Europeans and East Asians was scientifically proven in 2006 to be mutations.

Much as I know these things intellectually, as an American I did not grow up immune from the social constructs of race, color and ethnicity, which lead to prejudices. Even those that are positive ("Asians are inscrutable geniuses") are burdensome.

We Americans have a long and twisted history with race, color and ethnicity that we are sometimes a little overeager to forget. Much as I try hard to forget those aspects that most rile me, I have been recurrently reminded that the ugly chapters are not entirely over.

If you saw me on the subway, you would not be able to tell from what part of continental Europe my ancestors came. However, my name is unmistakably Spanish (except to the stupid police officer who decades ago asked me if I was Italian).

Because I am Hispanic, for years even colleagues I supervised challenged my most elementary editorial corrections of their English. One memorable fellow worker insisted that the word he pronounced in his Baltimore accent as "canidate" was not actually spelled "candidate." He insisted the spelling was a Spanish-ism of mine until I brought out the Webster's Dictionary.

This pales by comparison to, say, 400 years of slavery or 12 years of near-extermination, but it remains annoying. Moreover, others who have brushed with polite versions of prejudice, such as I have encountered, have undoubtedly lost job opportunities that I was lucky to get.

In my opinion, we can't pretend that race and color, unscientific as they are, simply do not exist as concepts and motivators of ugliness. Nor can the problems be laid solely at the foot of capitalism: racial and color prejudices existed in many pre-capitalist societies, in the West and elsewhere.

Nonetheless, I would like to propose that ethnicity (from the Greek "ethnos," meaning nation or people), a still accepted if loosely used anthropological notion, is economic in origin. We humans have long chosen, largely for survival purposes, to identify with people with whom we felt a kinship of blood, historical experience or religion, and to compare our group favorably with any other. Us vs. Them.

Yet tribalism is, we must hope, dying in an interdependent globalized world. Most of us who blog no longer depend on tribal kinfolk to bring us food, protect us or imbue our lives with meaning. We communicate across oceans instantly and with equal ease across social distinctions.

Although I am of the male persuasion and done with parenting, I feel a comfortable kinship with the members of Blogrhet, most of whom are mothers in their 30s. Anyone who has read Kate Chopin surely realizes how incredible this would have been a mere century or so ago.

Grasping for the last word, through all the chagrin and troubling emotion that race and color prejudices have been and may yet be capable of arousing, I see a future that inspires hope.

(This post is related to Julie Pippert's Hump Day Hmm and BlogRhet's "Let's Talk About Race, Baby" week long initiative.)

The Rest of the Century

In the August doldrums of a Congress-less Washington, pundits who must continue filling the airwaves and putting ink on paper (or pixels on screens) speculate that for "the rest of the century" we will be combating a jihad or losing trade share to China and India or watching glaciers melt -- or whatever. Since I am not likely to be around for the bulk of this century -- certainly not to see its outcome -- I wonder what would have been said in 1907 or 1807 or 1707 of centuries whose outcomes I know.

In 1907 my maternal grandfather, as a very low-grade middle-aged poet, had composed a poem to the match; he feared its disappearance with the spread of electric lighting.

Did he imagine Hiroshima or Auschwitz? I doubt it. His notebooks show he lamented the decline of the noble steeds of the countryside, where he had grown up, and harbored some well-founded pessimism about humanity. He might not have been surprised about 9/11.

Of course, for the 20th century he would have expected progress, a word of which he was none too fond. Most strikingly, his vision of the 20th century would have been very different from a view of the 19th in 1807.

For 1807 I imagine my paternal great-great-grandfather as a young man across the ocean in one of the territories threatened by a Corsican military genius.

"This will be the century of Napoleon and war," he might have ventured -- meaning perhaps merely an imperial Napoleonic France looming over Europe -- had a television reporter stopped him in the street.

Of course, there were no television reporters, or "twinkies" as we print folk call them. In any case, his forecast would have missed the entire Victorian century and the concert of Europe devised by Metternich just eight years later -- all by miles.

Then again, would he have thought in centuries at all?

Weren't the roads he traveled on horseback as dusty in summer and muddy in winter as they had been in 1707? Had anyone he knew traveled more than the 30 miles to the nearest port that was the villagers' limit in 1607? Weren't the meals his mother and sisters prepared just as limited by the local livestock and produce as they were in 1507?

When had life last memorably changed? I know for certain his family traveled from distant lands and in 1407 would not have had that meal I just speculated about where they likely had it in 1507.

What about earlier? Did they live in roughly the same country throughout the entire Middle Ages?

If so, perhaps, to them the years 1407 and 407, when Latin was still the lingua franca (even if it was in a form Cicero would hardly have recognized), bore the same relationship that 1807 bore to 1907 or 2007.

All I know is that by 2107 people better have solved the problems of 2007, or there won't be people. I just read in the Harper's Index that this year China is expected to overtake the United States in carbon emissions; it was only in 2004 when this was not expected to happen by 2024!

Time is accelerating as my time is slowing down to a crawl.

Let me venture without risk that by 2107

• Osama bin Laden and his pals will not be known by schoolchildren, or their parents;
• the European Union, not China and India, will be the economic powerhouse;
• quantum physics and astronomy combined will provide for energy needs and conservation.

And whatever will not happen. I may be wrong. So sue me. In 2107.

Fools on the Hill No More

Ever since Newton Leroy Gingrich brought his schoolyard bully tactics to Congress in 1994, I had been calling the folks there the "fools on the Hill," after the eponymous Beatles song. I was building up steam to do some bipartisan clobbering in and post a scathing attack on the Democratic majority when, in the last few weeks before heading off to their recess this month, they finally got some important things passed.

Day after day,
alone on the hill
The man with the foolish grin
is keeping perfectly still

Unlike the "Nowhere Man" -- about whom the Beatles asked "Isn't he a bit like you and me?" -- the fool of the song never gives an answer and no one really likes him. A bit like Congress throughout the decades.

Part of it is that it's pretty hard to follow the antics of 535 mostly older guys who know their way around the arcane rules that allow them to do pretty much whatever they want. They can't do that? Sure they can, they make the laws; if they don't like 'em, they can tweak 'em to their liking.

This year the Democratic majority came in like gangbusters with their 100 hours of introduced placeholder bills which, in the tradition invented by Gingrich's fellow bullies, consisted mainly of catchy titles and bill numbers -- for the most part, no legislative language.

It's a trick they learned from the Republicans. You run a blank sheet through all the hoops with your majority until the "bill" gets to the floor; then you dump 400 pages at the clerk's office the night before and let the opposition burn the midnight oil, while you strategize on how to block their amendments anyway.

That's how Congress ran under the GOP majority and that's part of the source of the much storied and truly distasteful acrimony -- I always felt I left Capitol Hill with bile all over my clothes. It wasn't that the politicians were being childish, it was that the GOP ran circles around the constitutional process in order to govern as a one-party state, as every party that has come to power through a coup (remember the 2000 election?) has always done.

The Democrats have changed the feel of things. They are holding themselves to at least the letter of fiscal discipline under "PayGo" rules that require that every new expenditure be offset with either a cut or new taxes. No more Reagan and Bush deficits of hundreds of billions; you want a balanced budget, vote Democratic.

They are also being pretty reasonable about debate. When the Repubs held the majority, every hearing was stacked with witnesses who were each more right-wing than the next, and you didn't see anyone goose-step into a hearing chamber just because it's not the American style. The Democrats are smarter; sure they hold the majority, so most of the witnesses are their hand-picked folks, but they allow the minority a voice or two.

It's a debate that the Democratic majority will win push come to shove, but it's one in which liberals aren't afraid to let the conservatives shoot themselves in the foot with the facts -- because face it, it's not just that I don't like conservatives, it's that on the facts they're wrong, wrong, wrong. And they know it (which is why they didn't like debate when they held the reins).

The feel of Congress has been better. The Democrats get the coveted "can play well with others" in their report card.

But what about substance? Bush has essentially stonewalled them on the attorneys and Gonzales (see a cute column about his name here); the Democrats have gotten nowhere with Iraq.

Of course, some supporters' want presidential impeachment proceedings on reasonable grounds. After all, which presidential lie has had more dire consequences: "I did not have sex with that woman" or "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant"? Yet the wisdom of the Democrats' course of inaction becomes obvious about as fast as you can say "President Cheney."

When I was beginning to get steamed even the federal minimum wage hike -- the first in 10 years, count 'em -- was stalled.

What were these Democrats elected for, if not to show some spine?

I am mildly pleased to report now that they finally got the minimum wage through -- veto threat notwithstanding -- and the raise became effective last month. Indeed, the recurrent and fatuous warnings of the restaurant industry didn't pan out: employment in their very own food and beverage sector increased after the wage hike went into effect.

There's more, just this month they renewed the food stamp program -- OK, so they gave it a silly new name, the "Secure Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program," and paid pork to some big agribusiness interests to get it through.

Just this past week they fought off Bush and the insurance lobby and expanded the state-run Children’s Health Insurance Program, which will provide free health care to an added 4.1 million poor children -- albeit using an extremely tortuous legislative method in the Senate.

This is clearly B+ work. Anyone who can't abide the moral ambiguities should not, as Bismarck recommended, watch sausages or legislation being made.

Now if they can fix some of the spending bills in September and override Bush vetoes (he wants to veto CHIP expansion, for example), I'd say these folks are no longer merely fools. They might just earn an A.