Skalduggery

Decided on an easy post for this Thursday – I wanted to take off into the hills with my wife, daughter, and brother. Too much fun, too many great photos, and Einstein the dog had a better time than we did… I think 😀

Come spring time, the water line will actually make it up pretty close to the tree line. The black spots in this photo are actually tree stumps that wind up underwater once the snow pack starts melting. Click on the photo for a full size view of the photo.

Early Morning Idyll

Cheers Everyone!

Black Market... Crime?

In the last few posts on crime, a few ideas were presented that made me “kick the can” around in the empty recesses of my mind. Posing a question on the causes of crime (in the neighborhood of poverty) Mr. Grim felt compelled to comment on “rule breakers,” Tom from Responsibility chimed in with a killer thesis concerning our American heritage, and Jeff provided insight from personal experience in a corrections environment with juveniles. All the discussion topics held a certain resonance for me – simply because elements of each are found in the various theories on crime. It also feeds my curiosity about crime and punishment.

A few of the ideas that meshed and stood out were Tom’s notion of losing trust in democratic institutions and Jeff’s observations that the vast majority of the juvenile offenders he supervises are poor. I think part of the appeal of “cultural criminology” is that it attempts to take into account the past and current cultural milieu. A theory of crime is unconvincing if it fails to function in a broad variety of conditions when it is attempting to explain the same basic phenomenon. I tend toward an eclectic view in theories of crime, but I kept kicking around Tom’s ideas that were centered on a lack of trust in democratic institutions – and changed it to government institutions. How far does the lack of trust have to go before I would commit a crime? Two ways of approaching crime are asking why people commit crime, and of course, why do people NOT commit crime.

Part of what lead my thinking here was establishing that it could be any government and those two questions apply. What if the reason to commit and not to commit a crime were essentially the same, i.e., a concern for self and for my fellow man? The other part of what lead my thinking here was remembering all the black market economies I’ve seen in totalitarian economies. How far does the lack of trust have to go before I would commit a crime? P.J O’Rourke wrote All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty. It’s an excellent book because it actually is funny; however, O’Rourke forces you to walk away thinking much harder about the things he gets you to chuckle over. In fact, sometimes the thinking afterward upsets the stomach as much as the drinking water in Viet Nam. A currently, at least nominally, Marxist country, O’Rourke interviewed several people in government concerning price fixing and central planning and… you get the idea. Here’s one short story:

Next I interviewed Le Dang Doanh, deputy director of the Central Institute for Economic Management. He was even more emphatically against economic management being centralized in things like institutes. He told me a story about a fisherman who was a Communist Party member and the head of local fishing cooperative. The government-set price for fish was less than the cost of catching them. The other fisherman sold their fish on the black market and made a living. But the party member felt the dignity of his office and couldn’t bring himself to break the law. He lost money every time he went to sea. Finally he cut off his thumb so he’d never have to fish again (O’Rourke, 1994).

Part of O’Rourke’s point – his argument for market capitalism and that freedom is almost essential to its correct functioning – is the tension between government and trade and all the trouble in the world. I’d sell my fish on the black market, I am virtually certain, because like Tom said, when it moves from disenchantment to disdain to a complete lack of trust – well, there are many things I’m willing to do to feed my family. And so, a last bit for the persons who commented whether in the comments sections or email:

Money is preferable to politics. It is the difference between being free to be anybody you want and being free to vote for anybody you want. And money is more effective than politics both in solving problems and in providing independence. To rid ourselves of all the trouble in the world we need to make money. And to make money we need to be free. But, oh, the trouble caused by freedom and money.

I’d like to end this book with a clarion call to all the peoples of the earth…. Is a clarion some kind of very large clarinet? I don’t know. And how would clarinet music solve our problems? I’d like to end this book a lot of ways. Except I don’t have any answers. Use your common sense. Be nice. This is the best I can do. All the trouble in the world is human trouble… We can fix it all and we’ll still be human and causing trouble (O’Rourke, 1994).

That’s the best that I can do today, I’m tired and confused.

Cheers All!

Once, there was only one...

Yikes! Ok, soup for you! I had initially planned to respond to comments on Friends… (Part 2) with return comments, and in fact started that process with Jeff’s comment, but *sigh* it worked itself into something a little more extensive. Part of the reason is the sheer number of journal articles everybody’s comments called to mind. I can’t say how pleasant I found it that everybody was courteous enough to be concerned about offending someone – on the other hand, I was also a little down on the fact that the concern was necessary at all in a rational discussion. If you haven’t read the above post’s comments, they are all worth the read! …and of course, reading these comments is at least in part necessary to make sense of this post.

A small caveat before we get going here – if I can find a link to the journal articles I’ll provide it, otherwise I’ll just provide the journal citation. Now then, part of what caused this excursion is a journal article entitled Boredom, Crime, and Criminology (Ferrell, 2004) and the way its contents triggered a quote Jeff gave me quite some time ago:

We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.

~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Why? It’s part and parcel of some of the ideas expressed in the journal article. Part of the point is that when a society/government impoverishes human experience then a response of some sort isn’t a real stretch to expect:

So, for example, when Reclaim the Streets illegally shut down London’s M41 motorway in 1996, the subsequent ‘festival of resistance’ featured booming music, street dancers, carnival figures and a big banner warning of enforced boredom’s apocalyptic consequences: ‘The Society that Abolishes Every Adventure Makes Its Own Abolition the Only Possible Adventure’ (Ferrell, 2004).

Combine these feelings with those of “oppression,” and a certain sense of “entitlement” we might have at least a little explanatory power with crime. The reason I put entitlement in quotes is because it represents a bit more specialized use of the word. When a person or group perceives that they have been deprived of something that another person or group possesses, this is referred to as relative deprivation in a theory by the same name. Although it is commonly associated with poverty, it need not be – it can be a comparison of relative possessions in economic, political, or social deprivations. More to the point, it “sensitize[s] us to the process and emotion of crime” (Webber, 2007). Like I said, I tend toward the eclectic view of crime explanation because specific theories rarely have the explanatory power to encompass all crime. Boredom (and risk taking), oppression (and risk taking), and entitlement (and risk taking) all have some utility in explaining crime, and pretty much all have some foundation in criminological studies.

Given these elements so far, I’ve got to start this the way Jeff did in a follow up post to Tom in the comments section of Friends… (Part 2): “For someone who claims to ‘know nothing, repeat, nothing about crime theory,’ you have some very interesting ideas.” That was an excellent post, Tom. I really enjoyed your take on a synthesis of your own observations and those of your professor’s. I wonder if your professor was a professor of sociology or political science (perhaps even a history professor). The theory placing more emphasis on why there is “more” crime in America rather than what “causes” crime is interesting in itself, and it has as its presupposition about causal factors specific cultural traits or patterns (including cognitive patterns). While this does run contrary to a lot of popular crime theory, it doesn’t run contrary to many well established but less popular theories. Like Jeff’s post, I imagine your thoughts on this might offend some people, but I think many people, both in and out of the field, would find your take on it worth a good look.

There are a number of excellent studies out there concerning voluntary risk taking behavior in terms of crime, as well as an emerging (re-emerging) group of studies choosing to call itself cultural criminology. While cultural criminology pays attention to historical narrative (Tom’s list of reasons for coming to America), it also emphasizes current cultural influences; for example, media representations of what one should believe. I am fairly certain that elements of these theories would be found “objectionable” or “offensive” to some people. Despite that, elements of these reflect Tom’s thinking about risk taking and our own histories.

The antecedents of cultural criminology lie within the longstanding recognition of the importance of cultural ethnographies and artifacts in understanding human social behaviour. This ongoing tradition acknowledges that what is important is the analysis of the way in which humankind makes sense of and, at times resists, existing and developing social structures. Such privileging of ‘culture’ enables cultural theorists to view behavior as dynamic rather than determined and opens up the possibility of other ways of ‘seeing’ transgressive and therefore criminal behavior (Presdee, 2004).

Finally, both Tom and Mr. Grim point out something that is worth quoting to introduce the last “theory” associated with their comments. First, Tom wrote:

I also believe that the breakdown of society is a big factor in crime. Most societies are constructed to maintain a certain order. Much of this is done through peer pressure. But, peer pressure will affect crime in two ways, in my opinion. One, when there is sufficient peer pressure as in small towns where everyone knows one another; it is more difficult to break the societal norms (laws). Also, in big cities, there is more anonymity and fewer peers to apply the pressure to adhere to societal norms. Two, is the situation when there is peer pressure to break down societal norms (break laws) as occurs in gangs. As Jeff, above, comments, this can be a very big cause in antisocial behavior, law breaking.

And second, Mr. Grim put it this way:

I would like to back things away from those who actually broke rules of sufficient stature to deserve punishment through our criminal justice system for a minute. Instead, I would like to point my pudgy finger at what I term “the rule-breakers”.

“Who are the rule-breakers,” you may ask?

Why, it is all of us. You, me, Hell just about anyone you may know qualifies as a “rule-breaker”.

Little things, like parking in a fire zone while you jump out to use the ATM. You know you’re not supposed to, but you do it anyway. Or driving 70 MPH on a 65 MPH zone. Bah, it’s a stupid rule anyway. Or throwing that candy wrapper in a nearby bush instead of shoving it in your pocket until you can find a garbage can. Meh, it’s paper, sort of, it’ll biodegrade.

Each of these can be seen as expression of James Q. Wilson and George C. Kelling’s ideas that came to be known as the “Broken Windows Theory.” I’ll focus less on risk taking and more on “societal breakdown” for reasons of space, but both elements are expressed in current criminology theory.

First, the broken windows concept focuses on neighborhoods and communities rather than “cities at large.” In other words, it focuses on logical patrol areas. More important, it focuses on precisely what Mr. Grim called “rule breakers.” The idea with the community policing concept was to establish the “informal rules” as well as formal rules for the neighborhood and enforce them as a community. While the reason for breaking the rules (stupid rule, lemmings, or being inconsiderate) is less important than the fact that they are being broken, the primary idea is that the community as individuals must have the moral courage to support their rules. Littering, jumping subway turnstiles, harassing passersby, etc. are all examples. It’s worth a portion of the article here:

The people on the street were primarily black; the officer who walked the street was white. The people were made up of “regulars” and “strangers.” Regulars included both “decent folk” and some drunks and derelicts who were always there but who “knew their place.” Strangers were, well, strangers, and viewed suspiciously, sometimes apprehensively. The officer – call him Kelly – knew who the regulars were, and they knew him. As he saw his job, he was to keep an eye on strangers, and make certain that the disreputable regulars observed some informal but widely understood rules. Drunks and addicts could sit on the stoops, but could not lie down. People could drink on side streets, but not at the main intersection. Bottles had to be in paper bags. Talking to, bothering, or begging from people waiting at the bus stop was strictly forbidden. If a dispute erupted between a businessman and a customer, the businessman was assumed to be right, especially if the customer was a stranger. If a stranger loitered, Kelly would ask him if he had any means of support and what his business was; if he gave unsatisfactory answers, he was sent on his way. Persons who broke the informal rules, especially those who bothered people waiting at bus stops, were arrested for vagrancy. Noisy teenagers were told to keep quiet.

These rules were defined and enforced in collaboration with the “regulars” on the street. Another neighborhood might have different rules, but these, everybody understood, were the rules for this neighborhood. If someone violated them the regulars not only turned to Kelly for help but also ridiculed the violator. Sometimes what Kelly did could be described as “enforcing the law,” but just as often it involved taking informal or extralegal steps to help protect what the neighborhood had decided was the appropriate level of public order. Some of the things he did probably would not withstand a legal challenge (Wilson & Kelling, 1982).

Second, it is worth an extended quotation to explain where the broken windows idea originates because it describes Tom’s notions of societal breakdown in terms of Mr. Grim’s rules:

…at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in run-down ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)

Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, reported in 1969 on some experiments testing the broken-window theory. He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California. The car in the Bronx was attacked by “vandals” within ten minutes of its “abandonment.” The first to arrive were a family – father, mother, and young son – who removed the radiator and battery. Within twenty-four hours, virtually everything of value had been removed. Then random destruction began — windows were smashed, parts torn off, upholstery ripped. Children began to use the car as a playground. Most of the adult “vandals” were well dressed, apparently clean-cut whites. The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in. Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed. Again, the ‘vandals” appeared to be primarily respectable whites.

Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder, and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law-abiding. Because of the nature of community life in the Bronx — its anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things are stolen or broken, the past experience of “no one caring” — vandalism begins much more quickly than it does in staid Palo Alto, where people have come to believe that private possessions are cared for, and that mischievous behavior is costly. But vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers — the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility — are lowered by actions that seem to signal that “no one cares.”

We suggest that “untended” behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers… (Wilson & Kelling, 1982).

Now those are the two elements associated with Tom and Mr. Grim’s ideas in their posts. An important element of Tom’s, and the last major idea in this post, is Tom’s statement:

He made the assumption that a very large part of our Society was made up of those who lacked a respect for ruling authority and law. Hence we had more people willing to risk going against that law and the society that supported the law. I tend to believe he is onto something.

I agree. So do Wilson and Kelling. The corollary of course is that people don’t simply pay lip service to the support of law and order. It needs to be tangible. Respect for the ruling authority and law is important. Why? In keeping with Mr. Grim’s rubric, well, a certain friend of mine once said something to the effect, “I hate cops. I have absolutely no respect for them, and if they don’t like that they should find another line of work.” Same caveat goes: “please note that the quotes are to indicate dialogue and are not meant to indicate the statement is verbatim.” Whether it’s laws, rules, police, judges, etc., that we think are stupid or useless, should we not, make use of our democratic processes to change the nature of the laws, rules, police, judges, etc?

For the most part I would say yes. Of course, like any other problem solving exercise, it’s important to start isolating those elements most in need of change and those that really won’t make a difference for each community. Also, for the most part, I would suggest that Tom and Mr. Grim have the best take on what to fix first – the broken windows in our part of the neighborhood. That was my primary reason for writing this – to note that people thinking about crime and its causes tend to bring up elements or pieces of existing theory – knowing part of the problem gets us on the way to answering: “What do we do to fix it?”

“Crime seems to me to be as complex as any other human emotion, action, or desire. That is why it deserves study.” And that “…we want our neighbors to act as we do and want to understand how to keep them from acting out against societal norms.” Mostly, it seems like many people agree, and yet we tend not to want to talk, debate, and argue over these elements that would help us produce change.

Huge thanks to you guys for an excellent discussion of the causes and correlates of crime. I really appreciate the discussion and I hope it provides some inspiration for some of the many ways we can each do our part. So a little anecdote/story about a mutual person of interest between Mr. Grim and me.

I was returning to work from lunch one day, and parked near the back of a full parking lot. As I turned toward the street I heard and saw two things that occurred in swift succession. First I saw a pop can leave the hands of a male on a BMX bike. Second, about the time I heard the full pop can strike the street, I heard my boss bellow, “HEY! Pick that up!” The teenager (I think), obviously embarrassed, stopped his bike and picked up the pop can.

Cheers All!

Ferrell, J., “Boredom, crime, and criminology,” Theoretical Criminology, Vol. 8, No. 3, 287-302 (2004)

Webber, C., “Revaluating relative deprivation theory,” Theoretical Criminology, Vol. 11, No. 1, 97-120 (2007)

Presdee, M., “Cultural Criminology: The long and winding road,” Theoretical Criminology, Vol. 8, No. 3, 275-285 (2004)

Wilson, J.Q. and Kelling, G.L., “Broken Windows,” The Atlantic, March (1982); there is also a PDF version of this article at the Manhattan Institute.

This was originally posted in 2007, and an email from a fellow blogger (Tom at Responsibility) called it to mind. Tom sent an email with a reference to a Wall Street Journal article that he thought I might be interested in – and I was so interested I decided I’d post something in response. Big hat tip to Tom 😉 While this isn’t a response to the WSJ article, it is a bit of background and foundation for an answer, which I hope to post before Monday. So, the original post from August 6, 2007:

I’ve heard that nasty word “social justice” once again, and I’m always interested enough to ask my erstwhile conversation partner what he means by this interesting compound idea. Erstwhile? Former conversation partners because I’m generally opposed to the common or popular notion of what “social justice” constitutes, and my opposition seems to color me as Satan himself to some of the liberal nutroots I’ve engaged in conversation (despite their intense opposition to religion, it is ok to label opponents as the minions of Beelzebub). Taking the adjective social away from the concept at least leaves the actual noun being modified in some fashion. Make no mistake, English works precisely this way.

“No, no, no, you don’t understand. It wasn’t simply a man; it was a little green man!”

Granted, that’s poking a little fun, but whether used rationally or irrationally, that’s the way we use our language. Clearly, progressives are trying to make it plain that they are NOT talking about the classical meaning of justice, and hence, the adjective “social.” I had always thought justice by nature and definition must be social. Something else is meant in this case – so, for comparison, let’s take a look at the origin of the word “justice.” I’ll use the Online Etymology Dictionary:

1140, “the exercise of authority in vindication of right by assigning reward or punishment,” from O.Fr. justise, from L. justitia “righteousness, equity,” from justus “upright, just.” The O.Fr. word had widespread senses, including “uprightness, equity, vindication of right, court of justice, judge.” The word began to be used in Eng. c.1200 as a title for a judicial officer. Meaning “the administration of law” is from 1303. Justice of the peace first attested 1320. In the Mercian hymns, L. justitia is glossed by O.E. rehtwisnisse.

Generally, “the administration of law” was once a common understanding of the term “justice.” On the other hand, the term “social justice” uses the adjective “social” to incorporate the notions often associated with socialism/communism. The always popular “take from those who are more prosperous and give to those who are less prosperous” – whether on a national or global scale depends largely on who is promoting the idea. For example, Anthony Brunt at the University of Iowa puts it this way:

The first component of social justice is a minimum standard of living in the realms of employment, health, housing, and education. This is the portion of social justice that is best dispensed through government agencies. According to the 1999 U.N. Human Development Report, for forty billion dollars the most disadvantaged portions of the world can achieve basic healthcare, education, sanitation facilities, potable water, and an adequate food supply for all. To contrast this amount in relative terms, last year Microsoft chairperson Bill Gates had an estimated net worth of fifty-two billion dollars. I do not believe that allocating an additional forty billion dollars will strain those living in a state of luxury.

Only somewhat tongue in cheek, Kfir Alfia and Alan Lipton in A Field Guide to Left-Wing Wackos, says that communists are “Anyone who likes the things you have, wants them for his own, and doesn’t mind if a totalitarian state is what it takes to make that happen.” This idea of using a government to accomplish their ends is highlighted by Brunt in the next paragraph of his paper, albeit for logistical concerns.

Why even mention this topic? Because I find it at least a little ironic and humorous that this unusual group of liberals shares so much in common with the very people they are so opposed to having any influence on our society. Truly, the only real difference between the liberal nutroots and the Christians in this case is the means by which they ameliorate poverty. I really cannot say it better than C.S. Lewis on this topic, and he makes the point so forcefully, I’ll close with a small portion of The Problem of Pain:

Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere “opiate of the people” have a contempt for the rich, that is , for all mankind except the poor. They regard the poor as the only people worth preserving from “liquidation,” and place in them the only hope of the human race. But this is not compatible with a belief that the effects of poverty on those who suffer it are wholly evil; it even implies that they are good. The Marxist thus finds himself in agreement with the Christians in those two beliefs which Christianity paradoxically demands – that poverty is blessed and yet ought to be removed. (C.S. Lewis, 1940, pp. 108-109)

P.S. The question to ask is: “Is poverty a/the ‘root cause’ of crime?”

Cheers!

Ever really wondered about lemmings? Why the mass suicide? After all, they’re cute, cuddly and cool. Other than knowing that they kind of looked like miniature Guinea Pigs, I didn’t know why some of the oft told tales were told in the first place. Saw the critters for the first time in Norway, as a sailor on liberty.

I could be construed as an old fart… a curmudgeon if you will – my first computer was a kit I built. I’ve actually seen a “core memory,” i.e., a matrix of little ferrous oxide donuts. I remember a nifty little game called Lemmings by DMA where the object was to save the mindless little fur balls from blindly committing mass suicide. It was an addicting game, something that a person could mindlessly play and wake up days later wondering where his wife and kids have gone. Myth has it that there were millions of people following each other into the game’s escapist abyss.

As it happens, Wikipedia has a pretty good entry on these lovely creatures that sheds a little light on their behaviors. They have another article that sheds some light on the game. The article (on the actual critters) is substantial enough, but there is a small and interesting little segment worth reproducing for your scientific, historical, and anthropological appreciation: *snort*

While many people believe that lemmings commit mass suicide when they migrate, this is not the case. Driven by strong biological urges, they will migrate in large groupings when population density becomes too great. Lemmings can and do swim and may choose to cross a body of water in search of a new habitat. On occasion, and particularly in the case of the Norway lemmings in Scandinavia, large migrating groups will reach a cliff overlooking the ocean. They will stop until the urge to press on causes them to jump off the cliff and start swimming. They then swim to exhaustion and death. Lemmings are also often pushed into the sea as more and more lemmings arrive at the shore.

The myth of lemming mass suicide is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. In 1955, Disney Studio illustrator Carl Barks drew an Uncle Scrooge adventure comic with the title “The Lemming with the Locket”. This comic, which was inspired by a 1954 National Geographic Society article, showed massive numbers of lemmings jumping over Norwegian cliffs. Even more influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, in which footage was shown that seems to show the mass suicide of lemmings. In more recent times, the myth is well-known as the basis for the popular 1991 video game Lemmings, in which the player must stop the lemmings from mindlessly marching over cliffs or into traps. A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found that the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where they did not jump off the cliff, but in fact were launched off the cliff using a turntable.

Due to their association with this odd behavior, lemming suicide is a frequently-used metaphor in reference to people who go along unquestioningly with popular opinion, with potentially dangerous or fatal consequences. This metaphor is seen many times in popular culture, such as in the video game Lemmings, and in episodes of Red Dwarf and Adult Swim’s show Robot Chicken. In Urban Terror, falling to one’s death is called doing the lemming thing.

By now the video and the commentary should make a little sense… in terms of where this post is going, that is, and if it isn’t quite there yet, take a trip to the UK’s TaxFreeGold site and you’ll find an article that lifts an awful lot of info right out of the Wiki article – to compare and describe people chasing gold on eBay. That’s it, us human lemmings, what are we doing?

Believe it or not, this post was spurred by research on felony/criminal disenfranchisement. Before I actually posted anything on the topic, I wanted to comment on the craziness of Americans wanting to be more like Europeans. “Let’s do this thing, or that thing, because that’s how the Europeans do it… “I’m pretty certain my folks and grand folks said things like, “Steven, if all your friends jumped off a bridge – would you?”

Here we gooo...

…ok, bad example. There was that train trestle in Corvallis. Still, I’m pretty sure you get the drift here – I’m hoping we’ve somehow grown up. Tom over at Responsibility, Neo over at NeoNeocon, and countless others have been spending time reasoning with us about everything from health care to cap and trade, from taxes to Afghanistan. If we’re jumping from the cliff for goodness sake, let’s look before we leap.

A tremendous body of advocacy writing concerning felony disenfranchisement spends its time comparing us to European countries and waxing long on our failure to be like them… Screw that, let’s be like us, and if we want to change the way we do business let’s keep it internally consistent! Let’s do it because it’s the right thing to do, not because somebody else is doing it. Sheesh!!

The mini rant is over. I think I needed a diversion from this disenfranchisement research – it’ll be up soon (the post on felony disenfranchisement), and hopefully it’ll achieve a certain brevity and clarity that is sometimes missing here.

Cheers all!

I opened this new version of Skalduggery with a post concerning cowardice and virtues that had as its triggering subject an article by Christopher Hitchens. It happened that I disagreed with Hitchens in that case – I found his claim that “religion poisons everything” unconvincing. More, it’s often easier to find ideological zealotry outside of religion; a god was not required for the butchery perpetrated by Mao, Lenin, or Hitler. Religion has produced some of the finest episodes in mankind’s short history; however, it has also been conducive to some of the worst intolerance in our history. I wonder how Muslims would respond to Hitchens’ most recent article and my commentary on it?

In Christopher Hitchins’ latest article for Slate, HARD EVIDENCE: Seven salient facts about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, he doesn’t just outline seven salient facts concerning the shooter at Ft. Hood, he also provides three salient characteristics of the Muslim death-squad type. Since I’m not really going to focus on the seven salient facts of the article, I encourage you to take a trip over to Slate and read the article. Hitchens opens this way:

The admonition not to rush to judgment or jump to conclusions might sound fair and prudent enough, perhaps even statesmanlike when uttered by the president, as long it’s borne in mind that such advice is itself a judgment that is more than halfway to a conclusion. What it plainly implies in the present case is that the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan should not be assumed in any meaningful way to be related to his Muslim faith. (Slate 20091116:1146)

It is easy to see that the president’s admonition not to rush to judgment is in fact a judgment. If you haven’t seen his video address concerning the “Ft. Hood Tragedy,” then here it is for your consumption.

Just to reassure my readers… I. Am. Not. Rushing to judgment. If you’ve read my posts, then you know I have little patience for chowder headed extremists of any stripe. Unlike Hitchens, I am actually quite tolerant of most religions having been a devout follower of a religion at one time myself – I gave it up for lent. However, like Hitchens, “I do not say that all practitioners of woman-hating, anti-Semitic, sadomasochistic suicide immolations are themselves insane, but I do say that the teaching itself is demented. In the same way, I do not say that all Muslims are terrorists, but I have noticed that an alarmingly high proportion of terrorists are Muslim” (Slate 20091116:1146)… especially in the last 25 years.

Hitchens then points out that the “gallant major,” the sarcasm is obvious in the original text (ok, dry humor for my fellow seminarians), may have been subject to a little ill treatment, but only up to a point. Hitchens reminds us that the major’s parents were given refuge here, that he joined an all-volunteer army, and was given permission by omission to “vent extremely noxious opinions about members of other faiths, to say nothing about his adopted country” (Slate 20091116:1146). To drive a point home that is apparently lost on some members of our citizenry, he reminds them:

Black Americans used to be segregated. Jewish recruits were mercilessly hazed, as were men or women who looked as if they might be gay. Did any of them ever come up with an act of mass murder as a response? Did any of them ever offer a black or Jewish or gay ideology in justification of it? Would they have earned sympathy and understanding if they had? By the time the mushy “pre-post-traumatic” school was done with the story, Maj. Hasan was not just acquitted of being a bad Muslim. He was more or less exonerated of having even done a bad deed (Slate 20091116:1146).

The next portion of the article should come as no surprise to people paying attention. A person worrying about the motives and intentions of a Muslim colleague is not “Islamophobic” in circumstances such as these. Take a gander over at the HuffPo on this subject and you’ll find assorted complaints about the right-wingnuts who mention these concerns – oh, and to be honest, there are actually a vanishingly small number of very legitimate complaints about behaviors this atrocity has spawned. I guess we Americans, whether Muslim, Christian, Jew, or atheist just can’t seem to follow the president’s advice on this one. On the other hand, it seems obvious that people will respond to an event of this magnitude – and Christopher Hitchens closing remarks seem especially appropriate:

I wrote some years ago that the three most salient characteristics of the Muslim death-squad type were self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. Surrounded as he was by fellow shrinks who were often very distressed by his menacing manner, Maj. Hasan managed to personify all three traits—with the theocratic rhetoric openly thrown in for good measure—and yet be treated even now as if the real word for him was troubled. Prepare to keep on meeting those three symptoms again, along with official attempts to oppose them only with therapy, if that. At least the holy warriors know they are committing suicide (Slate 20091116:1146).

Somehow “Cheers” doesn’t seem like the appropriate sign off for this post. My daughters and wife have a perfectly serviceable adieu –

Love and light to ALL of you.

In Search of the Lost Chord

…the Big Bang, Schrödinger’s Cat, Bacchus (the god of wine), excellence, or – dare I say it – the Lost Chord! When I was a kid, the reason I liked The Moody Blues was simple; like most other kids they were in search of something (supposedly themselves). In the case of this album, In Search of the Lost Chord, several of the songs are about the search for spiritual fulfillment. Ostensibly the search is for the lost chord, and in the cut The Word, that chord has a name and it’s found at the end of the poem… which introduces the next song – Om. Um, ok, if we accept this Hindu thingy then we’ve found the source of all, um, well language and science and, um, well… everything! KEWL! But really, we know it can’t quite be true because The Moody Blues kept searching… for something, er, um, truth?

Doesn’t matter, I still love that album and am a fan of the band. Let’s face it though, like many modern people – especially in the west – the band was more concerned with the SEARCH for the truth rather than finding and holding her close. Why bother with The Moody Blues? Well… it’s all about citizenship! More to the point I suppose, it is about the certainties I spoke of in my post Bothering with Citizenship. I’ve addressed the notion of facts being real and independent of our persons, but the postmodernists of many different flavors would strongly disagree with me – because they are certain that there is no privileged point of view.

I’m trying to keep this short and manageable, but it will be most difficult. On several occasions I’ve addressed several of the problems with the idea that because I “feel it” it must be true. Something I have only addressed indirectly is the idea that the majority determines truth. Ann Marlowe, in a recent article for The Weekly Standard (TWS) entitled Cool Gone Cold, reviewed a book called The Birth (and Death) of Cool by Ted Gioia. At its most basic, according to Marlowe, the book chronicles the notion of “cool” in terms of jazz greats of the early 20^th Century. Gioia complains that coolness deteriorated and “eventually boiled down to how one was perceived by others. Coolness, even more than beauty, is inevitably in the eye of the beholder” (TWS 20091109). Rather than quote Marlowe at length for her explanation of Nietzsche’s concept of perspectival thinking (which is excellent), I’ll settle for a quick and effective definition from the Dictionary of Philosophy by Alan Lacey:

Perspectivism: The theory that there can be radically different and incommensurable conceptual schemes or perspectives, one of which we must, consciously or unconsciously, adopt, but none of which is more correct than its rivals.

Marlowe believes that “The idea that reality is whatever it is perceived to be, rather than something with independent existence, is likely to be with us as long as our culture survives. This is a good thing, too” (TWS 20091109). Now, before I reveal why she believes this to be a good thing, let me mention a small bit of commentary from another TWS article: All Crisis, All the Time: The American addiction to overreaction by Irwin Savodnik. He first identifies what a legitimate crisis is, and then shows how our “Illegal immigration, farm, credit card, and education crises,” while substantive concerns – are hardly comparable to plague, world wars, etc. Savodnik also reports that American responses to these “substantive concerns” are overreactions that point “to mythical thinking, a way of embodying our emotions and impulses in tales of our fears, vulnerabilities, and guilt in strange, often colorful, stories” (TWS 20091102). Seriously, is the Chrysler crisis going to be resolved with a government designed vehicle?

Why does Marlowe believe that reality is whatever it is perceived to be a good thing? It’s worth an extended quotation here:

The radical subjectivism which gave birth to contemporary art and to counterinsurgency theory has also given us cultural relativism and a loss of confidence in Western values. But the skepticism inherent in perspectival culture will not be the destruction, but the saving, of Western civilization. Poseurs and, especially, their commercialization may be annoying, but they don’t blow up airplanes or commit suicide bombings. It takes a belief in the objective reality of one’s beliefs to produce fanaticism. (TWS 20091109)

Really? Take a short tour through the late sixties and seventies to notice that Marxist and other groups that were incredibly influenced by Nietzsche’s perspectivist perspective maimed, killed, and bombed scores of innocents. In August of 1970 – the Sterling Hall bombing. In 1971, the Black Liberation Army, a socialist group kills three police officers. In October of 1971 the Post Office Tower of London was bombed by the IRA. The IRA, Red Brigade, ETA, FALN were/are all left groups with perspectivist systems of belief. Although many of these groups demonstrate that subjective beliefs produced fanaticism, ultimately, these groups with shared perspectives on reality (defined in terms of their perceptions) are mere “quibbles” in this debate.

If the only real thing Marlowe is certain of is that there are no certainties, then it makes this kind of discussion virtually meaningless. On the other hand, we could pretend to believe what she seems to be implying here – that, like psychology, normalcy is defined by the majority. If reality is whatever it is perceived to be, then the majority view would tend to define reality… which won’t be the perspectivist “view” because they’ve lost confidence in their own Western values.

I hope we haven’t lost confidence in our Western values. I hope we stop overreacting to things that are not crises. I would equate Marlowe’s “radical subjectivism” to what Savodnik calls “mythical thinking.” It is:

…a way of embodying our emotions and impulses in tales of our fears, vulnerabilities, and guilt in strange, often colorful, stories. We dread our powerlessness and concoct magical cures for our weakness. Such thinking is regressive. That myths are the outcome of the flight from reality, that we hop from one myth to the other and supplant reason with emotion, tells us that we have regressed. We’ve chosen ways of thinking found in children, tribal cultures, and dreams.

There is a moral dimension to all this. We are not children anymore. We are not mere mythmakers. We know fairy tales don’t solve the problems that plague us. We have a choice between thinking in Dr. Seuss terms, and in reflective adult ways. When we don’t acknowledge this internal dichotomy, we are acting in bad faith. (TWS 20091102)

I wonder why so many are “going Galt?” Let’s find our certainties.

Cheers to all!

Granted that’s a bit over the top, but I love reading this guy! He manages to be deliberately disrespectful by engaging his readers with accusations that fall only a little short of gross exaggerations. In part because of his journalistic background, but largely because he believes his readers share his own disgust with hate accusations so common today, he’s not just credible – he’s fun. The print magazine has an excellent bit of art for O’Rourke’s article – I’ll risk providing that bit of art and the first two paragraphs… Click the picture to access the article – it’s a grand bit of fun!

Whew, I’m pooped. Jimmy Carter has got me run ragged with all the hating I’m supposed to do. Jimmy says I’m a racist because I oppose President Obama’s health care reform program. Even Jimmy Carter can’t be wrong all the time. And since Jimmy Carter has been wrong about every single thing for the past 44 years, maybe–just as a matter of statistical probability–he’s right this time.

I hadn’t noticed I was a racist, but that was no doubt because I was too busy being a homophobe. Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot. Since I do not want America to suffer another Sean Penn movie, I will accept that I’m a homophobe, too. And I’m a male chauvinist due to the fact that I think Nancy Pelosi is blowing smoke–excuse me, carbon neutral, biodegradable airborne particulate matter–out her pantsuit.

If that doesn’t whet your appetite for a little fun, then you need to read this just to get your smile on. And your indignation. Take a trip to a great political rag… TWS!

Cheers all, happy Tuesday!

I’ve been reading bits, blogs, and books on writing again. Thanks in part to a vacation I picked up my journal again – for more than cursory entries – and gave it a serious working out. Another part I owe some thanks to is Jeff, an online buddy over at My Nasty Romance (MNR). I took a book on vacation with me called The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo. While reading The Triggering Town, I also ran across one of Jeff’s posts concerning the “Journey” known as writing… To turn this into a nice trifecta (though I won’t necessarily give places), The American Spectator (TAS) had an article entitled Look at Me by James Bowman. Though the Am Spec article wasn’t specifically about writers, it included them in the pantheon of creative riffraff who seem not to be concerned with freedom of expression:

Our concerns lie instead with that more recently discovered but, if anything, even more highly valued freedom, the freedom to be attended to by the world at large. You will of course tell me that there is no such freedom in reality, and you will be right. I have said so myself in this space (“The Shock Is Over,” TAS, May 2008) in the course of noticing how Saskia Olde Wolbers, one of the army of mostly unattended-to artists in our heavily overpopulated “creative” world, has referred mournfully to “the meaninglessness of being unobserved.” Since then, our national crisis of inattention has only grown more acute. Now it’s not just those ever-growing numbers of obscure artists, poets, actors, and other such riffraff that the wider world is neglecting, but the once enormously popular news media, with their delightful fables and fantasies of American public life (TAS October 2009).

Bowman’s entire article is definitely worth the read, especially as it relates to the fantasies and self-indulgence of our current crop of “creative types” who seem to conflate the notion of art with publicity. He notes “It’s hard to tell whether this assimilation of art to publicity has percolated down from the high to the popular culture or risen up, like sap, from the popular to the high. But there’s hardly any difference between the two now anyway” (TAS October 2009). That’s a sad finding.

I like to write, especially poetry – guess I’m part of the riffraff. On the other hand, Jeff over at MNR wrote a post that tells a short story of conversion. In his and Joseph Campbell’s words:

I’ve heard it before. Writing is a journey. Work on your craft. Feel the story. Stock your toolbox. Create characters so real they tell the story themselves. Melt your heart down in a small lead bowl and pour it onto the paper like molten soul and then the world will ache at your truthy tellings…

Blah.

It all sounded like hippie crap to me. Writing was an intellectual pursuit. It had plot, characters, and theme. Cross those three streams and, like in Ghostbusters, you could achieve anything. Well, like most things I encounter in my life, I was wrong. Writing is, indeed, a journey in more ways than one.

First, it is a hero’s journey in the classic sense. Joseph Campbell summarized the hero’s journey, or monomyth, thusly: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (MNR 20091024).

Jeff goes on to include the journey of self-realization in his conversion story, but worries that writing might be a tad (maybe even irresponsibly) self-indulgent. Makes me mindful of Robert Heinlein’s only half jesting notion that “Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.” What immediately captures me in Jeff’s commentary is Campbell’s notion of the hero’s journey. The reason is that it is a repeated theme in both art history and art criticism… if one steps back several decades. There was a difference between personal notoriety and art worthy of notice. Bowman put it like this:

All art needs heroes. In modernist art, the artist was the hero on account of his art. Now he’s a hero if he can just figure out how to get his art noticed. That’s the whole point of conceptual art, which has little or no content qua art (in the old sense of something beautifully wrought) apart from the concept that promises to get it talked about (TAS October 2009).

Finally, the third part of this trifecta is Richard Hugo, though not my favorite poet, he is one of my favorite teachers. Ever. In The Triggering Town, his chapter called “Stray Thoughts on Roethke and Teaching” has a few things to say that tie in here:

Roethke used to mumble: “Jesus, you don’t want to say that.” And you didn’t but you hadn’t yet become ruthless enough to create. You still felt some deep moral obligation to “reality” and “truth,” and of course it wasn’t moral obligation at all but fear of yourself and your inner life.

Despite Roethke’s love of verbal play, he could generate little enthusiasm for what passes as experimentation and should more properly be called fucking around. Real experimentation is involved in every good poem because the poet searches for ways to unlock his imagination through trial and error. Quest for a self is fundamental to poetry. What passes for experimentation is often an elaborate method of avoiding one’s feelings at all costs (Hugo, 1979).

I sometimes think it’s a matter of figuring out that reality isn’t necessarily what is real. Jeff put it like this: “…you let the words come out from under your fake self – the self the world knows – and you put it all out on paper as ugly as it was born. It’s slippery with nasty juices, vulgar, and raw as a rug burn. And most of all, it’s real” (MNR 20091024). In Jeff’s worries about irresponsible self-indulgence and Bowman’s charges of art as publicity (getting noticed) there is, I believe, a commonality of interest and intent. Bowman, after sarcastically ripping up Julie & Julia and to a lesser extent the author, he concludes his article:

Hooray for Julie! Who could wish her less successful, less rich, less famous, or played in the movie by anyone less adorable than Amy Adams? But I’d prefer to rent the video of With a Friend Like Harry…, a French film of 2000 by the German-born Dominik Moll, about a poet whose comatose genius is shocked back into life by the discovery that his long-disregarded juvenile oeuvre has found an audience solely on its dubious merits and not on account of his mastery of publicity or compelling personal story. True, it is an audience of one, and that one a criminal madman, but for any real artist that ought to be enough (TAS October 2009).

That isn’t a far jump to Jeff’s closing paragraph concerning self-indulgence: “I would suppose the answer is that it’s self-indulgent, yes. But not irresponsibly so since if even one person feels a kinship by reading the story, I’ve bestowed a boon” (MNR 20091024). Whether the boon is poetry or prose or both, it will have been a shame to fail to shout in the shower those most primitive sounds we make when alone in those reckless moments that trigger our hearts to sing sentences – which maybe only the person in the shower will ever hear. Like Hugo, I hope your “truth conforms to the music” and we meet to hear it.

Cheers.

I can’t wait, I’m leaving soon to visit one of my daughters – I’m going to be a grandfather… again 😉 Had to throw that out there – and now that it is out there, I’ve another short tidbit before work instead of a nice focused post. The American Spectator had an article in their September issue that takes aim at our notions of freedom. The title of the article, What’s Your Metric, works on a variety of levels. First it really does get a person to thinking about his method of gauging his current liberty. Second, I’d bet it reveals that many of our personal measures of freedom are woefully inadequate. Like Tom over at Responsibility, the article likes to ask questions. Tom asks a series of questions to provoke thought, and Daniel Oliver opens his article with questions:

HOW DO YOU WATCH FREEDOM? How do you watch it grow? How do you watch it shrink? What’s the metric? What’s your metric? What do you think the metrics of your fellow citizens are? If you have no idea what their metric is, how do you talk to them about freedom with any sense of urgency?

Just those questions make serious thought a necessity if we are to intelligibly discuss our notions of freedom. Some of the metrics mentioned are interesting and raise questions of their own. Milton Friedman’s metric for example, “was the percentage of GDP spent by government.” Naturally it was inversely proportional 😀 Another measure offered was by either counting or weighing “the Federal Register or the Code of Federal Regulations.” Oliver then offers that “A better measure is the COST of regulations” (emphasis mine). He then gives us a standard definition to work with:

Freedom House defines freedom as “the opportunity to act spontaneously in a variety of fields outside the control of the government and other centers of potential domination.” Quick: name a field that is outside the control of government?

There’s the rub. It shouldn’t be that hard. I’d encourage you to run over to The American Spectator and read the article – it’s a short and sweet little missive, and well worth the read to get finally to:

Are those imperfect measures? Perhaps. But then, what’s your metric?

Cheers all,

I’m off to work.