A Book Burning in the South

It's usually a sad enough affair when one hears about a book burning in the South, but news of the latest book burning is particularly sad because the person who's doing it loves the books he's destroying.

Tom Wayne is the proprietor of Prospero Books in Kansas City, Missouri. Over the years, he's amassed a backlog of some twenty-thousand books. Recently he decided that it would be a good idea to donate that backlog to libraries and thrift shops but was nonplussed when he was told that they already had more than enough books, thank you very much.

Tom Wayne is a dispirited man. He has discovered that our culture no longer places much value in books. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, reading for pleasure has dropped over 57% in the last two decades. Tom says that he often goes to yard sales where there are four televisions for sale and only three books… a claim that doesn't sound the least bit preposterous to me.

Tom's book burning is a protest, of sorts. He describes it as the "funeral pyre for thought in America".

While, I can't bring myself to agree with his methods – I feel too much of a visceral connection to books to ever condone their burning, whatever the justification – I can certainly understand his frustration and the basic motive of his protest.

Unstructured Politics

I was watching a show, on the National Geographic network, about multiple births that focused on their embryological development. The show does an excellent job of showing actual (and high-quality CGI) images of embryos as they're developing.

As I was watching it I found myself growing increasingly uncomfortable. I had a very hard time looking at the images, which was odd since I'm not particularly squeemish about these things. In point of fact, I think that embryology is one of those genuinely fascinating topics that I want to know more about.

I took a moment to examine my feelings when it hit me. The source of my aversion wasn't the images, per se, it was the fact that 90% of the time I see images of embryos in the context of abortion protests which is one of my least favorite topics.

The irony, of course, is that the people who are trying the hardest to protect embryos have made them something that I -- a person who finds them interesting -- find difficult to even look at because, in my mind, they've become associated with a political topic that I don't find enjoyable.

This leads me to wonder what other sort of things we might be creating negative associations for by politicizing them. The one that leaps immediately to mind is the animal rights movement. I know quite a few people who have (what I think are) perfectly sane views on the subject of animal rights and our ethical responsibilities towards animals who, never the less, will immediately launch into self-defensive jokes about frying up critters and eating them simply because the topic is indelibly associated with PeTA, an organization that most people (animal lovers or not) can't stand.

I suspect that environmentalists have done the same thing. One can't even begin to discuss the importance of environmental protection without having to cut through layers of negative association brought about by radicalist organizations such as Earth First.

I think that this can be taken as further evidence that politicization tends to damage debate. Rather than promoting discussion of difficult topics, we resort to emotionalism and iconolization (if I may coin a word) which not only hampers rational discussion but which actually creates a sense of aversion in those who might be most inclined to discuss the topics, nor do such efforts ultimately help those who deploy them. The fact that I have developed a negative association towards embryos doesn't help those who want to protect them, nor is PeTA helping animals by making people feel subconsciously angry whenever they see a picture of a cow.

The terminal effect is that debate is ceded to the extremes and any hopes of moderation become lost in the shouting. Somehow those of use that don't find ourselves at the poles of a debate need to come up with a way to reclaim the center and to carve out a space for rational discussion.

Offsite essay: Married Dolphins: The Next Right-Wing Bogeyman

One of the more common arguments against the idea of allowing homosexuals to marry is a slippery slope argument that institutionalizing gay marriage will invariably lead down a path where the terminus is that anybody will be allowed to marry anything.

I've thought about writing my own essay on the subject (and I might, yet), but, in all honesty, the very topic depresses the hell out of me. The justice of allowing gays to marry seems so obvious and manifest that it frustrates me to see how unreasonably far otherwise rational people will go to defend their exclusion from that institution.

My good friend, Rob Berry, has taken up that challenge. The essay itself is an exploration of a recent case where a UK citizen "married" a dolphin that she's in love with, and Rob's (accurate) prediction that anti-gay groups would declare this case to be a "proof" of the slipper-slope (never mind that such outré "marriages" have been going on for a long time... but I digress).

As good as the essay is (and it is good!), the real fun is to be found in the comments section where Rob gets into an extended debate with a conservative blogger by the name of ScottG is who very much against the notion. Rob is steady and unwaveringly rational in the face of ScottG's increasingly desperate attempts to claim (among other things) that gay marriage is part of some organized agenda to destroy American values (in spite of the fact that he can't seem to produce a single quote to that effect), that gay marriage accords with the Communist agenda (based, apparently, on a single author with dubious credentials), that the ACLU is a Communist front (which is purely ridiculous), that every society that's embraced homosexuality immediately decayed (which would be a surprise to the Greeks), and that, finally, he hate's the gays because God says so and that's that (and what of us that don't believe in his god or agree with his conception of what his god wants).

Rob's ability to remain cool and civil while, never the less, being relentlessly rational is quite impressive. I doubt that I could have gone as long as he has without eventually just calling my opponent a narrow-minded idiot and ending the discussion then and there. Fortunately, I'm not the guy in the trenches this time.

Take a look. It's well worth reading.

Graffiti

Like most people, I tend to think of graffiti as an eyesore. I will admit that there is some small fraction that aspires to art but most of it is banal. For archaeologists, however, graffiti can be an invaluable tool for understanding the common language and culture of a vanished people.

Today's link is a list of gaffitos found at Pompeii.

There are declarations of love ("I don’t want to sell my husband, not for all the gold in the world"), of hate ("Serena hates Isidorus"), and of bitterness ("I want to break Venus’ ribs with clubs and cripple the goddess’ loins. If she can strike through my soft chest, then why can’t I smash her head with a club?"). There are sexual boasts ("Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion"), insults("Chie, I hope your hemorrhoids rub together so much that they hurt worse than when they every have before!"), and compliments("Crescens is sweet and charming"). There are philosophical proclamations ("Once you are dead, you are nothing"). There are advertisements ("Palmyra, the thirst-quencher") and admonishments ("heophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog"). There are some that sound like a something out of LiveJournal ("On April 19th, I made bread").

There are also the critics: "O walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed that you have not already collapsed in ruin."

The overall impression is that there were ordinary people just like ourselves, although every so often you come across an entry that's jarring to our modern sensabilities ("Take hold of your servant girl whenever you want to; it’s your right"). On the whole it is a fascinating glimpse into the lives of those who were beneath the notice of History, as are most of us.

Becoming a Goat

I've decided to become a goat.

My friends tell me that I'm crazy,
That I can't just become a goat.

Even the goats, I know, agree.

I say that that is just prejudice.
I should be able to become
Whatever I want to be.

Deep down inside,
I know that I am a goat.

I subscribe to all the goat journals.
I read goat books and watch goat news.
I chat with other goats online.

(My handle is BillyGoatGruff69)

I talk Goat,
I smell like a goat,
And I even eat goat food —

Except for a little bit of lamb
Every now and again.

I'm not a fanatic, after all.

The Leash

In real life, I am a database administrator (and I hope beyond hope that that isn't what ends up in my obituary). One of the consequences of this job is that I am often required to be "on call", which means that I have to be available twenty-fours hours a day to address problems with our databases. When I am on call, I can get calls from users complaining about technical issues, and that that does happen sometimes, but it is far more typical that I'll be paged by one of the machines with a message saying that there's a problem with it and a description of the problem. Trust me when I say that there's something eerily anthropomorphic about having a machine call you with a plea for help.

I am just old enough to remember a time before answering machines. In that ancient era, if someone wanted to get a hold of you by phone, they simply took their luck in hoping that you'd be home to answer their call. If you weren't, their only option was to try again later or to find you some other way. The critical thing about this was that the burden to contact you was on them.

I am no Luddite. Quite the contrary, I strongly believe that the overall effect of technology has been towards the enhancement of our quality of life. Nor do I believe that answering machines were a bad idea. In the days before such devices, it was very easy to miss important calls for the mere sin of going shopping or out to a movie. Once answering machines hit the market, they were eagerly embraced for the very reason that they were so utterly useful. Never the less, when answering machines became common there was a subtle shift in the burden of responsibility. Instead of having the responsibility for contact being upon the caller, the responsibility – and the expectation – to return the call was now upon you. In many ways, I think that this was the camel's proverbial nose.

My mother was a senior telephone operator for AT&T back when AT&T was simply known as The Phone Company (or, more affectionately, as Ma Bell – a name that seems more than a little Orwellian in retrospect, but I digress). One of the perks of this was that she had discounted access to a lot of things that were beyond the reach of the general public. This is the reason that I got a pager when I was eighteen. This was back in the days when having a pager typically got you mistaken for a drug dealer. This is one of the reasons that I stopped using it – the lesser reason.

With an answering machine, there was no necessary urgence to return a call if you didn't want to. You always had the plausible excuse of simply not being in until some later time. Some people even took to actively screening their calls although there was a general perception that doing so was a bit obnoxious (not that this stopped very many people). With the advent of pagers, the burden shifted again. Wherever you were, it was assumed that you would get the page. At that point, the requirement was on you to find a phone and return the call. In my own case, the convenience of being able to be reached by my friends was swiftly outweighed by a flurry of spuriously urgent pages from my father who decided that the pager was an excellent way to keep hourly tabs on where I was. I started to think of the pager as a fifty mile long leash and, consequently, started to "forget" it at home. Eventually my mother got the hint and returned it to the phone company.

I got my first cell phone in 1994. I did this because of one incident where I needed to make an urgent call and couldn't find a convenient phone booth. When I did finally find one, I got trapped in a very awkward conversation with a woman who was clearly just a little bit crazy. Back then, mobile phones (as they were more often called) were fairly bulky and the battery life on them was pretty dreadful. Never the less, the ability to place calls from wherever I was without having to search out a public phone made them well worth the effort. Once again, however, another subtle shift of responsibility was ushered in.

When you page someone, you can't expect them to immediately respond. For all you know, they could be on a rural road somewhere without access to a public phone for miles. When they have a cell, however, the general expectation is that will be there to answer you that instant. Of course, this isn't an absolute. There are socially acceptable reasons not to answer the phone or to turn it off altogether (on the other hand, all modern devices now come with voicemail, so there is an expectation that you'll return the call before too long). Likewise, when I speak of these shifting burdens, I don't want to imply that the burdens are Sisyphean in scope. The truth is that we have embraced these devices because they do represent conveniences. Never the less, the conveniences come with a cost.

In my mind, the one genuinely troubling aspect of modern telecommunications has been to blur the distinction between the home and the office. Again, it is a realm of trade offs. A perfect example of this is how I deal with those curiously anthropomorphic pages from work. If I am at home when I get one, I do not have to drive to work. I can get on my computer and connect to work via a Virtual Private Network that allows me to connect to my office computer. In most cases, this means that I can spend a few minutes solving the problem and then go back to bed (inevitably, the pages come in the middle of the night). Given that our database servers need to be running 24 hours a day, this was simply part of my job description and I understood that when I took the position.

What of other jobs though? The very clear delineation between work and home no longer exits. Where once we could look forward to being off the clock at 5 o'clock, now it's very easy for a manager to call someone at home and tell them that they need to write up a report or a spreadsheet and email it back to the office by 8 o'clock. The very fact that it is not an excessive burden means that it is a burden that a manager may be willing to impose where, in the past, it would have been deferred because it would have been far too much to expect an employee to drive the report back to the office – unless it was very important indeed.

Now wireless laptops are becoming common. You can go into any Starbucks or Borders and have effortless access to the internet. In most cities above a moderate size, you don't even need to do that. You can surf the internet from a bus or from a park bench. Once again, this is a great convenience and, yet, these devices can easily be turned into remote extensions of our offices. With powerful new PDA devices that have all the power that used to be reserved for laptops, we don't even have the excuse that they are too cumbersome and expensive to carry around everywhere we go. Our offices are poised to crawl into our purses and our pockets.

I can only wonder how much further this trend will go. Will we eventually find ourselves living in a state of perfect communicability where the vast advantages of communication will require us to permanently forgo the simple luxury of occasionally being beyond the reach of home and office or will we, finally, reach a point where we will draw a line and say "go no further!"

The future shall tell.

On the Nature of American Culture and its Place in World Affairs

One of the amazing things about the Internet is that it has such a fantastic reach. This little blog alone has been read by people as far away as Kuala Lumpur. As such, it irritates me that I have a nasty habit of writing about "we" and "us" when, in fact, I mean America and Americans (the United States of America and citizens of the United States of America if you want to be pedantic – but let us not be pedants if only to save me the effort of a lot of additional typing). I know better than to actually assume that my cultural standards are universal ones but even being aware of this it's hard not to do so out of simple habit and, frankly, for the sake that it is very hard to think about things from a non-American perspective.

It is frequently stated that Americans, as a whole, are fairly ignorant about other cultures. It is often alleged that this is a willful ignorance. While I won't dispute the first point, I am not sure that the second is entirely fair. One of the central reasons that we have this lack of perspective is that we are geographically isolated from most of the world. We are bounded by oceans on two sides and we only have one neighbor that I would describe as being significantly different from us (with apologies to Canadians – be assured that I am not claiming that you are just unofficial Americans).

Although this does, I think, explain why we tend to have a myopic and, frequently, apathetic attitude with regards to the rest of the world, I won't try to claim that it excuses us. I do wonder, however, whether there are two sides to this blurred worldview. I wonder, in particular, how other nations perceive us.

I know that it's practically impossible to ignore our existence. A given American may have no need to think about, for instance, the Seychelles, except as a potentially vacation destination, but I would be equally confident in supposing that it is a rare Seychellian that hasn't given thought to America. We are simply too large of a political and economic presence in the world for people to easily ignore us. It would be a bit like trying to studiously ignore an elephant in one's living room. Be that as it may, I don't think that awareness necessarily equates to understanding. The world can't help but to notice us, but what does the world know of us?

I suspect that most non-Americans encounter us via our media, our corporations, and our tourists. It worries me that our cultural ambassadors are Britney Spears, McDonalds and assorted random yahoos. I have a terrible feeling that other nations have an image of us that is as accurate of a portrayal of the reality of America as Main Street USA in Disneyland is.

Our own school textbooks to the contrary, the view that we are a melting pot isn't quite accurate. Immigrants who come to America do tend to become assimilated, with time (as happens anywhere) and there is a tendency for certain aspects of immigrant culture to get incorporated into the wider cultural milieu. The error is not in supposing that American culture changes as a result of immigrant integration. The error is supposing that there is a single thing that could be accurately called American culture.

We are a nation of sub-cultures. Some of our cultural boundaries are geographical: Birmingham is not like San Francisco is not like New York is not like Dallas, etc. However, where geography was once a good indication of a persons cultural outlook, in modern times the cultural identity of a typical American is going to be determined by a myriad of factors including income, occupation, political view, ethnic identity, geographical identity, and so forth. I suspect that one of the reasons that opinion surveys are such a prominent industry in America is precisely because Americans don't, ourselves, know what America "believes" on any given subject from one moment to the next.

None of this is to deny that there is a kind of meta-culture, in America. So long as it is understood that any statement about Americans is going to, typically, be contradicted by a non-insignificant subset of Americans, I think that we can draw some broad lines of consensus. I believe that we can, in other words, sketch out a kind of American identity.

We love our country. American's really do tend to believe that we are the best country in the world and any challenge to that notion is apt to be rejected out of hand. Most of us, I think, understand that we are not the best in all domains. We are well aware that our education system, for instance, is not the best in the world. Where we fail to be demonstrably the best, however, we feel that we ought to be. Most importantly, it is in the arena of intangibles that we sincerely tend to think that we are without compare.

We are proud of our system of government. We are proud of it even as we have made it a national past-time to criticize the actual members of our government. We love democracy and deplore politics all at the same time.

We feel that we are a just nation. Again, this is simultaneous with our general (and genuine) contempt for the day to day running of our legal system. We esteem the American principles of justice while seeing absolutely no contradiction is hating our herds of lawyers and having nothing but contempt for any number of perceived miscarriages of justice (recall the very divisive anger over the OJ Simpson trial).

We think of ourselves as a society without class in both the literal and the figurative sense. We have a kind of plebian snobbery in our culture. Everyone aspires to the American dream and most of us have immense respect for entrepreneurship (certain feelings about Bill Gates not withstanding). At the same time, we look down upon inherited wealth and we tend to consider refinement of taste to be a kind of affectation. Although we like to be able to experience the good things in life, we expect that a given person will be able to appreciate the common things in life. This is why, I think, the world tends to see our politicians as cowboys and bumpkins. They fail to appreciate that a good politician must, absolutely must, not appear to be above his constituents. Even Kennedy was sure to eat hot dogs every now and again.

Above all else, we think of ourselves as a good nation – as a good people. If there is one thing that hurts us and makes us angry, it is that we are so often hated by others in the world. We have a hard time understanding why. Most Americans are not entirely naïve when it comes to the history of our nation. We know that we have a tarnished past. We are well aware of our treatment of our Native population and know full well that slavery is a permanent blot upon our legacy. We know that in the world of international politics, our government has often failed to live up to our own ideals. We are as inclined to distrust the CIA and the NSA as anyone else. Even as we tend to love our troops, our fictions often cast the Military-Industrial complex as villainous and sinister. We are ashamed when our own people get caught doing something despicable, as happened in Abu Ghraib. Never the less, we do believe that we are a good and generous people and we want our government to live up to that standard.

I think that one of the biggest challenges that is facing my nation in this new century will be that we must learn to think internationally. In truth, we lost that luxury by the start of World War II, if not earlier. Unfortunately, we've been willing to let international affairs be the domain of the experts. It is a luxury that can no longer be afforded. At the same time, however, the world is going to have to accommodate itself to our presence. If we (and there I go with that "we" again) must become cognizant of the world than, I think, the world must learn to see past Britney and McDonalds as well as Earl and Ethel from Idaho. The world is a complex place than we are often willing to admit but we, also, are more complex than the common perceptions of us. Simplistic stereotypes don't do anyone any good.