Cactus Juice

A little bit down.

Went to bed last night with the news that a North Carolina jury has convicted a man on the flimsiest of evidence and woke up to the news that we've assassinated a US citizen.  That's just 12 hours worth of bad news, piled onto horror after horror that came before.  It feels like unusually horrific times and I am left asking if something in the world has changed?  Or is that something has changed in me?

When I wrote my 9/11 post, I thought about that when I was a child I had no thought that someday I might be investigated for my magazine subscriptions and my despair was over the fact that my niece and nephew don't have that same security.  But of course people have been investigated for their magazine subscriptions for a long time, just not people like me.  Disturbingly unlikeable men and black men have been convicted with no evidence well before my time.  And it surely ain't the first assassination of a citizen enacted by the United States government.

For every horror of the current day, there is a past horror that surpasses it.  One of the differences is that the horrors are fed through the internet firehose directly into my brain.  My iPad makes the world yet more horrible, and yet so amazing that I could never turn it off.  I was just reading in Ellul that "every moment of a man's life is not historic but apocalyptic." (The Presence of the Kingdom)  The good of Christ draws you through the horrors of the world; the more good, the more horrors.  It cannot be avoided.

And in the internet age one is drawn to interact with horror in a way one could have avoided before.  Bonhoeffer, not long before his death, took a three hour hike through war torn Europe without seeing another person and without knowing when the ferry he was awaiting would arrive (no app for that).  Few were more fully engaged in the horror of his time, and yet he had a space that is hardly imaginable to someone like me, far less engaged but still standing before the firehose.  The evils on the internet: are they new, or is it just that every evil voice now has a megaphone?  Earlier from the Ellul:

More than ever, every person is involved in the life of the world, and the world is more penetrating, more crushing, more exacting, than it has ever been.
...
A major fact of our present civilization is that more and more sin becomes collective, and the individual is forced to participate in collective sin.  Everyone bears the consequences of the faults of others.

And you have your own megaphone, so are you continually called upon to respond?  Shortly after the previous quote ends, Ellul adds distressingly, "Modern man can no longer have confidence in the virtues of the individual..."  Most people understand this distress.  You've surely seen this comic before:

 

All these parts of modern life invite comment in a way they didn't before.  You don't get to have ignorance of government assassination, you don't read about a strange conviction in a history book, you don't assume weird laws are going to let you off for being white (okay, after 9/11 I actually did assume that and I was actually surprised to have my mail investigated, as naive as that may have been).  Everything is in real time, with enough time to write your congressman and expect him to hear you.  Does that mean you have to write your congressman?  Or can you just put Amnesty International on automatic deduction and call it a day?

Last night I finished reading Metaxas' biography of Bonhoeffer and I was certain the answer allowed respite from a moral imperative for what would turn out to be a daily stack of correspondence, and felt very free that I could feel certain from Bonhoeffer of all people that it was okay not to be so seriously engaged.  And if Bonhoeffer was engaged in trying to kill Hitler, I could survive in a world that isn't quite Nazi.  Bonhoeffer stated something about how anything so serious actually couldn't be serious at all.  It certainly couldn't be Christian, both Bonhoeffer and Ellul are clear on that.

On the other hand I am told that Metaxas' book molds Bonhoeffer into a modern evangelical ideal, and surely that ideal would be to be idealistically unengaged (contrary to Bonhoeffer's meaning and contrary to Ellul's teaching above), and that I should have read one of the other biographies instead. (Though Metaxas is surely the most readable, so unless you are very academically minded, I would go for Metaxas and just be aware that it means to idealize in a certain way... he is a children's Christian writer after all.)

And I would suggest reading Bonhoeffer (or Ellul, but Ellul is a little more lost... if one needs direction go for Bonhoeffer).  The biography contained long quotes, and Ethics is available electronically and I've picked that up.  After a little Bonhoeffer I am left feeling that despite everything I have been exposed to about what a good idea it is to be a Christian, no one before has ever given me an actual good idea for it.  Bonhoeffer makes the theology of Christianity meaningful in a way I haven't before had the opportunity to feel and believe simultaneously.  So I shall resolve to engage a little more carefully and be a little less down.

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After writing this, found this article claiming that human violence is on a long-term (thousands of years) decline.

9/12/2011: The Devil Dances with the Groundhog

In That Used to Be Us, Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum claim that we changed on 9/11.  A Washington Post editorial claims that we had a giant collective emotional breakdown and just need to get our act back together. I don't see how that could be: we were the same people as 9/10, it is just that on 9/10 we thought we were better people than we turned out to be.  If there was an emotional breakdown (and I'm not sure there was because on that one day we were so good), it doesn't account for 10 years of moral aimlessness.  We didn't deserve our 9/10 world, though we didn't know it at the time. 

On 9/10 America seemed brave, smart and good.  Occasionally misguided, but ever re-correcting and definitely not weak-kneed, foolish, and evil.  It's been 10 years of our 9/12 world.  In case we needed some warning of how different we seem today, we got it when the Moscow News urged solidarity on the 10 year anniversary because:

“Only one thing is clear — there is no way to live calmly,” she said. “So let’s not put on airs. Whether America appeals to you or not, let us commemorate with her the decade of global fear.” (as reported in the NYT)

I don't like Russia feeling solidarity with us because we're all afraid together now.  I am certain that was not the side we were promoting when we won the cold war.  Remember, we originally paid Osama bin Laudin to be against the Russians because we didn't want to find ourselves having the same ideology.  Russia had a gulag, then.  We read about it in school and were proud to be Americans.  Now we have the gulag.  Do teachers still assign that book?  Is there something wrong with me for being disgusted, ashamed, and terrified?

I don't want to know where you were on 9/11.  If you watched it on TV, like me, and only suffered some shifting discomfort in an office chair or on a living room sofa, to be too interested in your experience is morally gross.  Grief is not a made for TV project*, and you don't share grief by telepathically feeling bad.  Though I would like to mourn with those who mourn, for the most part I don't know them.  I don't want to be part of the prurience that puts them on TV through the eyes of "someone who knew someone who knew someone who..."  And if you were actually there, I don't want to care about you any more if that means I have to hate.  A Norwegian political analyst said that Europeans used to care about 9/11, but now they have a "lack of enthusiasm, you might say, for the way 9/11 was exploited for political purposes."  Exactly, I lack enthusiasm for being told who to hate next and how.

First, we hate our own children.  One point one billion dollars spent per victim on security actions that are the subject of late night comedy routines and can easily be argued to have themselves killed more than 10,000 Americans in these last 10 years, and on sordid retaliation.  We send soldiers to battle who will come home great and strong people, but who face a country with training program and colleges and jobs and their very future all hacked away at the knees.  Two towers fell ten years ago and it was not our fault, but since then so has a city and a bridge and it was.  I am disgusted.

Then, we hate our constitution and the values it represents.  I don't believe anything I hear about an arrested "terrorist" until there is a conviction.  You have to hunt for the retraction.  I remember one interview with a "terrorist" who was pulled out of his first class seat because of a hysterical flight attendant, and later found himself listening to his fellow fliers discuss the matter as he waited for his next plane.  Kill the terrorist!  He didn't dare tell them that it was he, sitting right there, and that he was a business man just as they were, and that the ridiculous issue had been resolved in a matter of hours.  I have friends who are on terrorist high alert, miss the retractions, miss the beautiful stories of interfaith cooperation that have come up from around the world, and have become terrible bigots.  Otherwise good people who think evil thoughts and do evil things.  I know someone who started an FBI incident because she didn't like a woman in an abaya texting near her.  We are passing laws restricting religious freedom.  People are taking their dogs to piss on mosques.  I am ashamed.

We've gone to war with ourselves.  Many friends know that after 9/11 I was investigated because I had subscribed to foreign media, a magazine called the Paris MATCH (sort of Us News mashed up with People Magazine).  I was confronted by the police in the post office; treason for sure.  Of course I've flown, a lot, set off the explosives residue detector, been insulted for wanting to observe a TSA agent paw through my mother's jewelry after her death, had to explain why I carried a roll of tamper-evident tape for my job, had to explain my job.  When a congressman visited my employer, I've had to watch a co-worker ask why he wasn't doing more to restrict mosque building.  She asked this in front of her boss, her Muslim coworkers, and coworkers like me who sometimes speak French.  Researching this post, I clicked on a Muslim chat board, so maybe I should be ready to be investigated again.  I am terrified.

People ask, "Why can't we have the unity we had then?"  Maybe it was never real to start with, but if it was real it was squandered.  After 9/11, I cried when they played the National Anthem at the circus.  I wanted to know about that first 9/11 baby born two days later.  In what could of been a symbolism of what could have been us, a Muslim baby, but in a symbolism of what has become us a baby who now lives in a state that has passed religious restriction laws.  In the world that 9/12 has become, "Remember 9/11" has been a constant ploy to get one hand into my wallet and the other hand up my skirt, all the while lying to me about everything.  You don't need to follow some strange 9/11 conspiracy theory to feel that you have been lied to- everything that has happened since is more than enough.

We could have done something great, but instead we humiliated ourselves.  Osama thought we would be that stupid.  He thought we would spend ourselves into oblivion if our rage could be incited.  We were extraordinary for one day.  No one could ever humiliate America by attacking it. But after our 9/12 choices and the subsequent economic destruction, we are on a short leash of our own making.  Our options are limited.  Each day that passes it would take something more great than the day before to be as great as we thought we were on 9/10.  That Used to Be Us makes the argument that this is possible. I wish I could believe it. I know only one person who is still truly motivated by 9/11 to do good.   I wish I could climb out of the horror of 9/12 to join her.

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*This article really captures a lot of what I think is important about the reality vs. unreality of 9/11.

Media Consumption: Should One or Should One Not?

I don't want to read the daily paper, but I have to do it.  Relevance requires interacting with the false and the absurd.  This is the primary reason I write very little about politics.  Why should I sit down and write something which I know will be relevant today and stupid tomorrow?  Especially when no one is going to read it today but someone who might have thought I was smart could read it in the future.  No.

If one wants to be relevant, one has to know the current conversation.  If one ignored every foolish and evil idea today, one would have more time and energy to be better educationed not only about the absurdities of the moment, but about everything.  And there is the problem with keeping up:  Relevance is directly contrary to knowledge.  So should you read the news?

Like all good answers, this one is "yes and no".  Relevance is important.  Note the existentialist reference at the top of the page.  Existentialism is about knowing that your experience is of your time and place, and one of the ethical outcomes of that is the idea that you can commit to time and place.  This is the philosophy version of "be here now."  It is your ethical duty to respond to evil, and that requires being educated in its workings which are closest to you.  This is explained in the news.

Knowledge is also important, and goodness is important, and to make room for these relevance has to be contained.  One doesn't need to be quite so pleased to be the first to know something; it is better to know the right thing.  And of course it is best to be the right thing.  One can step away from the conversation for a week or so and come back when the main points have crystallized and a few thinkers who are on top of that subject have already provided the context, that is, placed the relevant into a larger image of the world.

I mentioned in my previous post some good places to purchase context, such as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.  As to linking the context to what is true, that's the readers' job.

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(Image: The Cordoba Mosque-Cathedral.  A historic structure which has been the subject of some recent foolishness.)

Ipad: Consuming the News with Flipboard, Pulse News, and Evernote

There are plenty of people who consume my weekly media diet before breakfast on Monday.  Whether my consumption level is good or bad and what the consumption of news media is good for anyway will be addressed in a future post.  This post is dedicated to describing what my current consumption is.

What is is an awful lot and some of it is awfully expensive.  I would be toast without a plan.  On the iPad, you can make a web shortcut show up as a button right next to your applications.*  This allows you to order your buttons in a way that organizes your consumption.  Mine start with what I consume multiple times a day, through my once a days, and into my occassionals.

Central to my plan is Twitter feed into Flipboard, both free (click on the screenshot above to see).  Where do you get your news?  Local newspapers, local TV stations, industry specific news?  Set up a twitter account and link in their feeds.  Here is what I follow, if you're interested.  Flipboard will also allow you to add some other "channels" (up to 18 total) including some pre-selected multi-streams such as "Lifestyle" that pulls from Apartment Therapy, Whole Living, bon Appetit and others.  You can also pull in your Facebook and Flickr feeds, and others.  Click on an article beginning and it takes you to the entire article in Flipboard.  Swipe up and you go to the webpage.  If desired, go over to the web browser to look at that page further.  And then go back Flipboard and it has saved your space.  For serious Twitter maniacs I have to note that it can be about an hour behind on your Twitter feed.

One of the problems with Twitter, Flipboard and the rest are lack of context.  So I also have buttons for a local TV station website and the two local newspapers. (Remember, you cannot get Kindle newspapers on the iPad.)  International newspapers such as the New Zealand Herald and the FP News (Canada) have free apps and can provide some perspective.

Context is the one thing you can buy.  Context has value.  How much value in dollars, I am not certain.  I currently subscribe to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on the iPad.  Some other options that I think would present similar value are The Economist and the Financial Times.

There are a few other apps I have found which give you some daily "stuff" (all free):

• Discover is an app that provides a visually attractive front-end to Wikipedia.  Every day it posts the random Wikipedia entry of the day.
• MyCongress provides the recent news references, YouTube postings and Twitter feed of the congress people you select (it helps you find yours using your zip code).
• Life provides the top photos of the week. (There is a different paid app for the magazine).

For philosophy and work there are (all free):

• Artsandlettersdaily.com, web link.  The feed just doesn't have the same effect.
• AMA News, web link
• Science Daily, web link
• NEJM App (weekly postings for free)
• Medscape (news and drug database)

For blogs I follow, I have gone with Pulse News, a free app which does much of what Flipboard does only differently.  Flipboard does it better, except for blogs.  Both pull in your selected blogs from your Google Reader account.  Flipboard then shows the posts in time order.  In contrast, Pulse keeps each blog in context on it's own row and allows 60 different blogs to be listed, 12 per page on five pages (compared to Flipboard's 18 channels).  Here's a screenshot:

Just like with Flipboard, you can click on an item to open a full view or go to the original webpage, or go out to Safari to view the webpage.

The final part of my media plan is Evernote, used for two purposes.  First is as a media trail.  If I don't save what I read, I will never ever find it again.  Anything that captures my attention goes into Evernote.  First, I go to the original article (in Flipboard this requires going into the article and then swiping up or clicking on the go to article link, or sometimes copying the link to Safari).  If there is a printable version, I select that.  Then I copy the article.  This is usually done by touching the blank space at the top of the page, but sometimes you have to select the text you want to copy.  Touch "copy".  Then email the article to Evernote, and paste the copy into it.

The second use for Evernote is read-it-later.  I could have all those articles go to different places (you just add the pound sign and the name of the folder to the email title), but I send them all into one inbox and sort them out later.  I keep a folder for articles that I would like to read when I have time to concentrate.  Instapaper is another way to do that and may even be better, I just haven't gotten into it.

I use the above two items for anything I read on paper also, using my scanner to put the articles into Evernote.

And that's my media consumption plan.  What is yours?  What are your tips?

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*In Safari, click on the arrow to the left of the web address and select "add to home screen".

Myplate: Ignore or stab out eyes with a fork?

It is so awful I would rather just crawl under my desk and pretend I never saw it.  One diabetes magazine editor noted wryly that every nutritional study that came out the week of its issue contradicted it.  Today's "helpful hint" on the Myplate website is something directly related to causing obesity. CNN is hosting an amusing iReporter contest which illustrates just how absurd it is.  There is nothing good to say.

The antidote: Gary Taube's Good Calories, Bad Calories.  It's a bit of a scientific slog, but at least it isn't complete...

Right then, I should just be ignoring it.

Rape and Not Rape: The Sound of Schrodinger's Cat Hissing

A famous man has been arrested on charges of rape and here come the brigade of male friends to argue that "he's not like that."  Today it is Bernard-Henri Levy on behalf of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  His essay has been called sexist, etc., but my beef is that it is illogical.

In making this argument, a man is making the case that he is able to form an opinion about behavior which specifically occurs only when he is not present.  This is something like the case of Shrodinger's cat, who is both alive and dead until you look and see that she is either alive or dead.  That is a quandry for the philosophers and physicists to deal with seriously.  In the apparently more intellectually trivial matter of rape, the male making the truth statement cannot look, yet he makes the truth statement anyway.

Since knowledge of rapist or not rapist is not possible for this man, one has to ask what other criteria he is using to make the statement? Also, if this criteria is viable it requires that he has been able to use the same criteria to identify rapists.  I would like to see some journalist ask him if this has occurred.  It would seem this criteria would be useful to women and juries.  Of course, no such criteria is admissible to a jury because in fact no such criteria exists (I have not been able to interview the non-witness, but it seems logically viable to reach this conclusion).  And so these men are speaking nonsense and in doing so literally make fools of themselves.

Is it going to be politics?

Perhaps I'm emotionally fragile, but I don't like being jerked around.  Cable television, reality TV, popular movies- not for me.  Part of me wants to write about politics, again, despite the fact that this was never meant to be a political blog, and part of me wants the entire subject to just go away.

You know who talks about politics?  Your uncle Alfred, who doesn't have a damn thing going on in his own life.  Through this long hot summer, that's what I've realized about why you don't talk politics or religion at the dinner table.  It's because if anyone has invited you anywhere, you should show up with your own story to tell.  Politics as a topic is the last refuge of the truly boring and aimless.

It may seem that the quadrennial presidential election cycle (hint to the truly checked-out: they actually have elections every year in this country) jerks us around enough, but the professional media (labeled the "professional left" by Gibbs, LOL) adds to it.  Most paid-for writing about politics is written in the language of politics, consequently it is not capable of injecting perspective.  Instead, it just increases the whip-saw effect.

Consider how stunned the public was by the Citizens United case, when it was pretty much the only way the ruling could go based on the Constitution and all that.  The President chiding the justices is an eye-roll given that their fundamental purpose is that they don't work for him, but what excuse does the Fourth Branch give for failing to distinguish between politics and law?  This American Life did a show about stories that were bound to fail, and one of them was explaining Citizens United.  They let the professor get rolling until I actually believed I was going to learn something new, and then pulled the boring-professor-bail.

I see the same thing happening with Prop 8.  The decision is 150+ pages long and I sure haven't read it, but all I'm seeing analyzed is about 1.5 pages of findings of fact which are not relevant (and should not be relevant- does anyone really want judges determining justice based on communitarian evaluations of social expediency?).  The only discussion of justice I have seen has been in an analysis of an interview which occurred on Fox TV, because that moron on Fox brought it up.  For the barely interested reader such as myself, if the decision is upheld we are going to have no idea why and if the decision is overturned we will be equally ignorant.  Memo to the people who get paid to give me information: Please read about 149 pages more and let me know what is going on.  TIA.

The fact finding divides people  in a way that justice does not (anyone too pleased with the fact finding should think about that for a minute).  There's a pleasure to outrage that Uncle Alfred understands best.  It's self-aggrandizing and also inept.  In The New Yorker this week a so-so article (you can only get a lill' bit if you don't subscribe, but the relevant section is there)  by David Sedaris.    I could write an entire essay on that topic, but what I mainly care about today is that it is exhausting.

Throwing Away the American Dream

Since the idea that the American Dream is dead for college graduates arose, I have contended that it was a load of hooey.  Today in the Raleigh News and Observer an article which I can precisely debunk with my own life story.  In the article, a recent graduate turns down a $40,000 claims adjuster job as a dead-end job and meanwhile sends out four or five resumes a week while living off his parents.

When I graduated in 1996 I couldn't get the claims adjuster job.  I had a degree in "would you like fries with that" and no business experience.  I sent out 500 resumes without a bite (that would be five boxes of resume paper that I couldn't afford) and started working as a substitute school teacher.  The only on-campus corporate interview I got was for that claims adjuster job.  I put on my one suit and my hose and a girdle I had bought just for the occasion.  The interviewer spent our time together picking at her skirt where the hem was dropping out and at the end of the interview told me she couldn't hire me because I didn't seem to know where I was going with my life.

Where I went was a used mobile home and a $275 a month lot rent.  The young man in the article who turned down the job?  His parents are putting him up in a $1,000 a month half-apartment.  I finally took the only job I could get, which was selling car insurance for minimum wage with the promise of a commission if I got my license.

I am now what I would call fairly successful.  Against any expectations that I had, I have a "career".  I just recently decided to move up to a $1,000 a month mortgage, though by scrupulous additional payment I've been able to knock it back down under $1,000.  In the article, the father of the young man tells how it is done: "You maneuvered, and you did not worry what the maneuvering would lead to.  You knew it would lead to something good."

My fifth job after college was the one that started my career.  Each one before that was a blind maneuver- a little more skill development, a little more responsibility and opportunity, a little more money.  What those first four jobs gave me was an opportunity to not starve while I did evening study programs.  These were not classes, not certificates or degrees, just basic skills to turn me into a reasonably competent office worker.

Those jobs also gave me motivation.  I didn't think I was chasing the American Dream; my goal was to get away from the poverty I saw in the trailer park and from the worry of not being able to pay the bill at the bottom of the stack.  The parents of this young man have taken away even his motivation to take a $40,000 job in the Great Recession where 37% of people his age have no job at all.  Emasculation is not too strong of a word for it, and it's emasculation of their own line.  In other words, they have helped him throw away their own American Dream.