Fell Rabbit, Christmas Eve Morning

The cursed rodent has found me.  For those who may not remember, I encountered the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog not long ago while mountain biking on the Hoyt Park trails.  When I escaped the white beast, I thought I was rid of it forever.  But this Christmas Eve morning, that oxymoronic time of anticipation and procrastination-fueled preparations, he returned.  I opened the door to head out and pick up some Kouign Amann from Amaranth Bakery (which, as an aside, are the finest breakfast pastries that I have tasted) when I spied the creature's tracks at my door, mocking me, as it were.

An auspicious beginning to Christmas Eve day.

I donned my battle gear for the bakery run:  Sorels, London Fog wool overcoat, and rabbit fur-lined gloves.  I am not above mocking, fell beast!  Projecting confidence, despite my wariness, I strode through the wet snow toward my car, alert for the attack I know must be coming.



"Hasenpfeffer," I thought to myself.  "Bring it on rabbit, I'll make you into stew," I muttered, like whistling in the dark.

My driveway, where it nears the road, slopes steeply.  Surely the foul creature would launch his attack while I was on that portion, strategically the least defensible portion on my walk, a fraught narrow stretch not unlike Gallipoli or Thermopylae.  "If only I can make it to the car," I thought, "I'll be able to arm myself with an ice scraper and jumper cables," an urban gladiator in this spectacle of the absurd.

Alas, the creature is a clever strategist, learned in history and cunning of tactics.  I would never reach the car before the onslaught.  In my heart of hearts I knew this was so.

What happened next was too fast to process.  Perhaps you have seen The Revenant?  In an instant it was all incisors and fur and blood curdling screams.  Instinctively I raised my hands to my face just in time, the razor sharp incisors finding purchase in my left forearm, crushing through soft tissue to bone, tearing sinew and fascia and muscle.

In a state of shock, I felt no pain and threw the beast off me.  It attacked again with lightning speed, not giving me a moment to recover my senses, gnawing deadly, teeth dangerously close to my face as I struggled to hold it back, both hands grasping its now bloody fur, streaked with the ferruginous liquid leaking from the gashes in my forearm.

I tried to find a weakness but the furry fiend's defenses were impenetrable.  I grabbed a hind foot, visions of lucky talismans filling my mind, but it merely dug its other foot deep in my exposed wrist, causing me to yowl in pain and frustration.  Again it flew at my face, gnashing its teeth.  Again I parried the attack.  The super fecund vermin once more found purchase in my left forearm.  I started to black out.  I could not take much more of this.

It was then that I saw it - my salvation, the nub of a baseball bat, the one I told the boy never to leave in the yard, sticking out of the snow bank, just barely, which I grabbed, life surging again, almost gleefully.  I yanked the Easton free and stood, raising myself to my full height, confident, hurling the beast once more from my gaping, ragged forearm, cocking my elbow, a little Joe Morgan twitch, stepping into the snarling rodent which was now enraged and flying at me to finish me off.  It may not have been a textbook swing, nowhere near level, a tomahawk really, but in the throes of mortal danger, in the sights of the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, function  trumps form and I sent the beast up, up, and away, over the bungalow across the street, over the great oak one street away, its terrible scream Dopplering away into nothing, perhaps as far as Washington Park.

I stood dripping sweat and blood, panting, my wool overcoat in tatters, my hat on the ground, but, I thought, I am alive!  The rabbit that stalked me in Hoyt Park, that found my home, the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog would not defeat me.  This would not be my hot gates, the band would not play Waltzing Matilda.  I gathered myself and, despite searing pain and a barely functional left arm walked to the car and got the Kouign Amann rolls I promised would be on the table for breakfast Christmas Eve morning.  And though I struck the rabbit with Giancarlo Stanton-like ferocity, I sense, no I know, that he is not dead.  Who knows where he will turn up next.  Perhaps it is time to find the Holy Grenade of Antioch.

Merry Christmas

Christmas as Hope, Gifts as Ethics

The way we celebrate Christmas, especially common notions as to why we give gifts on Christmas, has long struck me as problematic.  Christianity is ultimately an Easter faith.  Mark and John do not mention Christ's birth or origins.  Paul focuses exclusively on the experience of the risen Christ.  The only reason the birth of Christ appears in the Christian Bible at all is rhetorical:  to link Jesus of Nazareth to Messiah references in the Torah.  In essence, biblical accounts of the birth of Jesus reflect the Jewish nature of the earliest iterations of the Christ faith.  As a theological matter, the birth of Jesus seems practically irrelevant to Christianity as an Easter faith.

As a matter of religion, Christmas is, for me, fraught.  Principally, the birth of Jesus as the future Christ is the instantiation of hope in the world,  I take that hope to mean hope for justice in the world, the possibility that God's law will be realized or actualized.  The possibility Jesus' birth brings is not salvific in the sense of offering hope for another world, i.e., heaven, but rather is salvific in the sense of bringing the possibility of God's law, i.e., justice, to this world.  The fact that Jesus was not born as the Christ but rather as an ordinary and wholly human infant exemplifies the material or existential nature of his possibility.

As a practical matter, Christ's birthday was utterly ordinary, notwithstanding the rhetorical needs of Matthew and Luke.  This to me is the meaning of Christmas - the instantiation of hope in an ordinary person.  The redemptive or salvific possibility of Christ exists in a person who bears no special markings, a person who is wholly ordinary.  The birth of Jesus, if it is to be celebrated, should be celebrated for the extraordinary fact that the possibility of God's law, the salvific capacity for justice, is fully human and is to be realized in the world.

The idea that Jesus is a gift from God to the world [and that this is the reason for gift-giving on Christmas] turns the radical nature of Christ's meaning on its head.  Jesus was not a gift.  Christ represents an ethical choice.  We should celebrate Christmas as an acknowledgement that the condition for justice is being human and that the possibility of justice exists in all of us.  Christmas is truly a material holiday, but only in the sense that it demonstrates the wholly existential nature of God's law, that justice is human rather than heavenly.

The transformation of Jesus to the Christ was volitional.  The possibility of Christ is embodied in ethical choice.  Gift-giving is laudable but does not, for the most part, have much to do with the birth of Jesus.  Insofar as the birth of Jesus has meaning, it has meaning because it was an ordinary birth of an ordinary child whose future would be extraordinary not because of his birth-status but rather because of how he chose to act.  Jesus was not Zeus or Krishna appearing on earth with divine power and attributes.  Jesus was a man who offered an ethical choice, which was also a divine choice:  to live justly.  Christmas should be a celebration of justice, of ethical choice, not largesse.

Of course, the problem with interpretation is that it sometimes runs counter to reality.  In the case of Christmas, that means gift-giving.  Neither I nor anyone else can do anything to change our practice of giving gifts on Christmas.  That being said, the practice, insofar as it is traced to the Bible, can be made to accord with the significance of the single instance of gift-giving on the birth of Christ - that of the three Eastern wise men or kings:

Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.”When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. when they had come into the house, they saw the young Child with Mary His mother, and fell down and worshiped Him. And when they had opened their treasures, they presented gifts to Him: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Then, being divinely warned in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed for their own country another way.

NKJV, Matthew, 2:2-12.

The function of the gifts in the passage quoted above seems not to be a celebratory matter exclusively but rather a political one:  here are secular authorities pledging themselves to God's son rather than to Herod (and by extension, Rome).  Tribute, which is what the gifts of kings is, goes to god, not to the secular authorities, not to the empire.  Hence, the notion of gifts for Christmas should be a political act, a tribute to God over the secular authorities, rather than an act of mere generosity or thankfulness.  

This squares with the radical message of Christ, which calls for uncompromising and unaccommodating fealty to God regardless of the secular authority's demands.  In truth, a plain reading of Christ's message puts the believer squarely at odds with the secular authority.  In fact, Christ's message could be read as a critique of all authority qua authority, which ultimately turns into a self-propagating edifice at odds with God.  All authority qua authority becomes an idol, a golden calf if you will.  The hierarchy or bureaucracy or ecclesiastical polity becomes so focused on meta-analysis of the rules governing it and justifying its existence that it effectively turns away from God.  The problem is not 'law' per se, but rather the claim to monopolize both the interpretation and administration of God's law.

The eastern kings or wise men and their tribute to a babe in a 'manger' further the Christ message that God's law is not formal or ethnocentric.  The gifts are not offered to be generous.  They gifts are offered because tributes to God are appropriate.  In this way, the tribute, the Christmas gift is a radical tribute to and tacit acknowledgement of the ethical priority of the other.  "Thou shalt have no other gods before me;" hence, kings or wise men give gifts to Jesus. The commandment is the starkest form of prioritizing the other.  Above all and first, God.  In Jesus' formulation, "The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength."  Mark 12:29-30.  The gifts of kings pay tribute to the absolute and utter primacy of God and our obligation to that otherness.  this radical alterity is the model for our gift-giving.  The gift is not an act of generosity or charity, though it may be that too, instead it is an acknowledgement of the ethical standing of the other as prior to the self.  The gift is a tribute to the material aspect of the first commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself, to acknowledge the other's absolute and inalienable status as a fully ethical being to whom tribute, and hence moral agency, are due.  The fact that Matthew specifically locates the secular authorities to the "east" demonstrates that the ethical priority of the other is not parochial but instead extends to every person.  This is extraordinary and worth emulating.

I still maintain that the way we celebrate Christmas is problematic.  Jesus was not a gift but rather the instantiation of hope in the world.  The message of the risen Christ only makes sense if Jesus was wholly human, one whose divine status centers on volition, an ethical choice, rather than a magical birth.  Nevertheless, we give gifts on Christmas and that is not going away.  Although I am not particularly religious, I will remember the model of the eastern kings or wise men when I give gifts this year:  my gifts partially fulfill my obligation to understand and treat those receiving them as ethically prior to myself, to treat them as I would treat myself.  In this way, whether we are religious or not, we fulfill that most basic and radical ethical command when we give gifts at Christmas.

Whither Milwaukee French Immersion School?

I have the good fortune to be able to pick up my son when his school lets out for the last couple of months.  Parents wait for their children in the auditorium.  I usually arrive a bit early and have time to observe the process.  It is uplifting to see the younger kids' eyes light up when they spy their mom or dad (or grandparent).  I am not certain that there can be more clear and unmitigated joy than that precise moment.  Witnessing it privileges me.

As lovely as the excitement of kids meeting their parents is, I write this post for another reason.  Chiefly, I worry about this place that has become a sort of family for my son.  My son attends Milwaukee French Immersion School, which is part of Milwaukee Public Schools.  The staff and students are a mix of races, ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, etc.  Sitting in the auditorium and watching this group of kids smile and goof and pout is heartening.  I am, however, painfully aware that this group of students and staff is all too unusual in American society where segregation, intentional or not, is the norm.

I am worried because the instances of integration in American society, when they do occur, tend to occur in urban areas.  Even in a hypersegregated city like Milwaukee, a place like French Immersion School can and does exist.  There are few, if any, other places in the State of Wisconsin where a place like French Immersion School would even be a possibility let alone an actual school.  Unfortunately, the things that make Milwaukee French Immersion School possible and other opportunities for integrated experiences in urban centers are under assault from state and federal legislators.  What is truly disturbing about the assault on urban self-government is the historical antecedent.  A similar assault occurred in Austria in the 1930's, pitting the left-leaning urban center of Vienna against the right-leaning central government.  As historian Timothy Snyder notes,

The central government (controlled by conservative Christian parties) lined its artillery pieces up on the hills above Vienna and set about quite literally shelling socialism:  firing down upon the Karl-Marx-Hof and all those other nice working class Hofs, with their kindergartens, their daycare centers, swimming pools, shops and so on--municipal planning in action and despised for just that reason.

 Judt, T. with Snyder, T.  Thinking the Twentieth Century. Penguin, 2012, p. 30.

It is difficult not to note how this parallels the struggle going on the U.S. between urban centers and the rest of the country.  The City of Milwaukee and the State of Wisconsin are good examples.  Milwaukee has enacted municipal regulations designed to benefit residents such as mandatory paid sick leave for employees of employers located in the city limits.  The measures are favored by a majority of residents and liberal politicians.  The regulations are opposed by businesses and conservative politicians, almost none of whom represent the city.  Rather than allow the city the privilege of self-governance, the conservative controlled state legislature passes state laws prohibiting municipalities like Milwaukee from enacting local laws to which conservative state legislators are opposed, such as mandatory paid sick leave.  Similarly, conservative legislators have attempted to wrest local control from local school boards such as Milwaukee Public Schools to push school districts to adopt policies conservatives favor but residents do not.

I am not entirely certain from where this animus towards local control proceeds other than the fear that the policies will prove successful and thereby undermine the conservative legislative project to privatize and deregulate virtually every aspect of civic life.  Regardless, the worrisome consequence is the stark derogation of urban residents' self-determination such legislative action represents.  The exercise of state legislative authority to trump local regulation and governance is blatantly paternalistic and infantilizes municipal residents whose political will is treated without deference or respect.  Although the legislature is not lining artillery around the perimeter of the city, politically their actions gut our kindergartens and shops and effectively shell municipal planning in action.  It is as if they despise urban communities simply for having a different vision of how to achieve the good.

What this hostility toward urban places means for Milwaukee French Immersion School is not yet certain.  Nevertheless, the historical antecedents for rural antipathy toward urban centers is disturbing.  Historically, rural populations are driven by resentment of that which makes urban centers desirable and a misguided fear that urban centers are more powerful than they in fact are (as exemplified by the results in the recent Presidential election).  Rather than allow urban centers to flourish, examples such as Vienna of the 1930's demonstrates that persons and politicians from outside the city will do what they can to cripple urban centers.  The Milwaukee Public School District has made many strides and weathered a significant assault from conservative legislators to take over the district.  Nevertheless, the question remains, for how long can it continue to do so?  Five years hence what will another father see when he sits in the auditorium and waits to pick up his child?  I fear he will see something different and less extraordinary than the sight I see because some conservative from the countryside saw the same thing and couldn't abide it.

Words Matter: White Nationalism Is White Supremacy

Words matter.  The media currently is awash in the term "white nationalism."  I prefer "white supremacy" for the simple reason that it more accurately describes the beliefs of those who profess it.  White nationalism has a vague whiff of legitimacy about it that white supremacy does not.  And to be sure, white nationalism is wholly illegitimate.  White nationalism is, ideationally, a construct that functions to justify separation.  White nationalism does not, as an idea that takes up psychic space, contain room for even segregation or apartheid.  Instead, white nationalism is of a piece with national socialism, more commonly known as Nazism.  The reason is that white nationalism, like Nazism, seeks to carve out a geopolitical space populated wholly by those it defines as "white."  There is no room in the "white" nation for persons or groups designated as non-white.  However anodyne the language white nationalists use, the fact is that a white nation has no room for non-whites; hence, white nationalists will ultimately, if they have the authority, use state power, including violence or the threat of violence, to maintain the separate geopolitical space they crave.  In this respect, white nationalism is the geopolitical equivalent of white supremacy.

It behooves us to refer to white nationalism as white supremacy so that we never lose sight of the teleological endpoint white nationalists seek:  it is the same teleological endpoint that white supremacists seek.  That the definition of "white" is wholly arbitrary and incoherent in any meaningful biological, sociological, or political sense matters little.  Like Nazism or Stalinism, the arbitrariness and incoherence become irrelevant in the face of state violence against categories of persons.  White nationalists define "whiteness" as a sort of self-referential privileging of "whiteness."  To be sure, whiteness inures in part based on appearance, but whiteness does not inure on appearance alone.  That which is deemed effete, tolerant, or skeptical is not white.  Hence, categories of persons such as intellectual liberals who might otherwise be deemed white are placed in a non-white category.  The point being that "whiteness" is used to signify a particular sociocultural experience, to privilege that experience above all others, and to use the experience as a justification of state-enforced separation.

White nationalism is of course ironic in the sense that if all those who are not "white," as white nationalism defines it, left the country, the white nationalists would find themselves in an economically and intellectually impoverished nation.  The political and economic consequences of white supremacy, however, do not assuage its danger.  White nationalists are white supremacists and will resort to violence against those deemed to be non-white in order to enforce the sociopolitical ramifications of their beliefs.  This is why it is imperative to refer to white nationalists as white supremacists.  They do not seek peace.  They seek domination and exclusion.  They do so based on a belief that they are superior to other humans.  In fact, the simple truth is that white supremacists do not consider non-whites to be fully human.  Whether such a belief is coherent or justified does not matter if one is being dominated and excluded.  Placing oneself in the "human" category and others outside the "human" category will beget violence.

One of the problems we face is that calling a white supremacist a Nazi or equating white nationalism with Nazism feels uncomfortable.  This has to do with many factors, but two seem apparent to me.  First, no white supremacists in the U.S. have, at least since the Bureau of Indian Affairs abandoned efforts at assimilation, attempted to exterminate a class of persons using state-sanctioned deadly force in the way that Nazis did during the Holocaust.  We simply have no received experience of anything so radical in its violence and extensive in its reach.  Even the violence done to black Americans does not compare to the systematic efficiency and scope of the Nazi killing project during World War II.  Thus, calling a group Nazis feels overblown.  The problem is that white supremacists would surely behave as vilely and violently as Nazis should they ever control the levers of state power in the United States.  For this reason, the comparison, while a bit jarring, is certainly apt.

Second, we in the United States have a belief that we are somehow inherently different than Germany in the Weimar era.  In essence, we believe that Nazism or anything similar cannot happen here.  The reason for the belief has to do with the vast experiential differences in representative democracies between the United States and Weimar Germany.  No one would seriously debate that the American republican system is different from Weimar Germany.  The U.S. was a historical first and has nearly 250 years of uninterrupted history as a representative democracy.  Nevertheless, this does not suggest something about the inherent quality of being American.  It simply reflects that this was the government the American people chose due in large part to historical fortuity.  What this means is that demagoguery in the U.S. is unlikely to take the same route to power that it took in Weimar Germany.

That the United States is different from Germany does not mean that Americans are immune to promises of prosperity and happiness based on ethnic scapegoating.  Donald Trump's promise to exclude Muslims and deport/keep out "Mexicans" demonstrates that we are as susceptible to ethnic scapegoating as any.  A part of the population that self-identifies as "white" is aggrieved for a variety of reasons.  That population blames Muslims and "Mexicans" for their grievances.  This is of course patently absurd.  Muslims as a category are not violent or anti-American.  Further, Muslims as a category create enormous wealth and add tremendous value to the United States.  One need only look at the roster of doctors at any hospital to understand that Muslims as a category benefit America rather than harm it.  The same is true of "Mexicans."  American produce would not make it to American tables if "Mexicans" weren't working the fields.  Nevertheless, Muslims and "Mexicans" are scapegoated as sources of white supremacists' grievances.  This is not so different from Nazis scapegoating Jews for grievances Jews were not responsible for.  Like the case with Muslims and "Mexicans" in the contemporary United States, Jews in Weimar Germany benefited the German republic but were nevertheless blamed for all grievances.

White supremacists are ultimately Utopian thinkers.  This is why white nationalism is a poor word choice to describe the white supremacist project.  The truth of all Utopian projects is that they seek to create a sort of prelapsarian community in the world.  This requires a myth of an ideal community, the prelapsarian Eden from which the world devolved, and a narrative of what corrupted the ideal community.  All such myths are incoherent from anthropological, sociological, and historical perspectives.  Nevertheless, all such myths are dangerous because they establish a hierarchical organization of human beings based on purity and impurity.

All utopias are imagined because every utopia assumes an impossible state of perfection is possible.  In this regard, every utopia is pernicious, whether left or right, because achieving utopia requires eliminating human imperfection, an inherently exclusionary and violent project.  The white supremacist utopia imagines a prelapsarian world in which prosperity and happiness were functions of whiteness.  What white supremacists consider to be white is a sort of 1950s chauvinism in which family supporting jobs were available because white males were the workforce and the jobs were good because white males were not constrained from being white males.  That is, white males were bigoted, society was segregated (though insufficiently), and economic prosperity resulted.  At the international level this translated into American belligerence which is viewed as evidence of America's strength and confidence.  Individuals were strong because they were free to be prejudiced and the nation was strong because its bellicosity was unfettered.  The Utopian project seeks a return to "white" America, which means elevating bigotry beyond the normative to the legal and intentionally removing any persons or groups with state force who would sully the new "whiteness."  Again, the fact that this idea is wildly incorrect is irrelevant because many persons adhere to it and the notion countenances segregation and ultimately violence.  It is a supremacist movement through and through.  History tells us that supremacist movements will use the possibility of and desire for a Utopia as justification for state violence.  America is no different than any other country in this regard.

How we describe the current iterations of the white supremacy movement matters.  Cloaked in the garb of an incoherent form of ethnic nationalism, those espousing white nationalism are still white supremacists and ought to be so described.  "White nationalism" tames the true yearnings of white supremacists and implies that statehood is an ethnic concept rather than a political one.  This has implications for all persons who are not considered "white."  First, it strips them of the legal standing and protections granted to citizens because it transfers political rights to an ethnic category.  Second, it suggests that every non-white would then have a place in a nation that matches their ethnic category.  In this way, white supremacy creates the conditions for legal exclusion and possibly violence if full citizenship is effectively removed for non-whites and there is no physical place to put the new non-citizens.  The violence the U.S. government perpetrated against native tribes is perhaps instructive.

The question remains whether this concern over language is hyperbole.  In this regard I return to the Nazi problem:  if white supremacists who masquerade as white nationalists espouse beliefs that designate "white" as the only fully human category of persons and they have as their goal an exclusively "white" geopolitical territory, then the Nazi comparison is fair and not hyperbolic.  That the U.S. has different political conditions than Weimar Germany does not by necessity immunize the American system from racist demagogues willing to use state power to perpetrate violence against non-whites.  White supremacy is, if not on the rise, more in the open.  Every media outlet should call white supremacy for what it is rather than using language that has even the merest whiff of political legitimacy, i.e. white nationalism.  Anything less is complicit in the white supremacy movement's attempt to color itself as even marginally legitimate when it is wholly illegitimate.  It is not hyperbole to call something exactly what it is, particularly when that thing is fraught with danger for so many.

A Note on Veterans Day

When I was around six years old, my grandfather died.  His is the first funeral I can remember attending.  He was a veteran of World War II, a man who was old enough not to go but enlisted anyway because doing so was right.  I understand that he fought bravely and was awarded medals for doing just that.  What I remember from his funeral, though, is the American flag draped over his casket.  Even then I intuited the power of this symbol.

Today that image and the feelings of pride and wonder that it engendered remain seared in my mind and in my gut, for the feeling was visceral.  I recall soldiers removing the flag and folding it carefully, ceremoniously, and presenting it to, I presume, my grandmother.  And I recall thinking even as a six-year-old that serving one's country is supremely honorable and courageous.  I thought then that I too ought to serve the United States of America as my grandfather had.

Of course time and experience have a way of changing even the best laid plans.  I toyed with the idea of enlisting when I was in high school but a girlfriend and college got in the way.  I couldn't abide the sacrifice or the commitment.  I toyed with enlisting after I graduated college (minus the girlfriend), perhaps attempting to get into Officer Candidate School.  Again, I declined to commit, beset with a sort of shiftless existential lassitude.  Eventually I entered law school and again contemplated serving my country, this time as a potential member of the JAG Corps.  Yet again I lacked the courage of my convictions and failed to live up to the example my grandfather set.

Despite my own failings, I remain to this day awed by those who have and had the courage to serve.  Nearly every day I pass by Wood National Cemetery.  Familiarity has not dulled the respect and appreciation I feel when I spy row upon row of white headstones marking the graves of those who have served.  When I take my son to hockey practice at the Pettit Center I often see men and women from the different ROTC programs in Milwaukee testing their fitness and training.  Each time I see them I am grateful they have the strength to follow the courage of their convictions and am proud of their commitment to one day serve this country; this despite the fact that they are strangers to me.  And when I see an American flag up close, near enough see the texture of the fabric, I am transported to my grandfather's casket and the symbol draped over it which reminds me that the choice to serve is not made for status or heroism, but instead is made for duty and sacrifice.  A choice made, like my grandfather's, because it is right.  So I say to everyone who made or will make the choice to serve:  thank you.

A Boy Grows Up

My son is almost eleven; at one of those precarious ages where he straddles two phases in life.  In his case, he sits astride childhood and adolescence.  I witness the balance almost daily as he does things that are still firmly rooted in the experience of childhood - having an imaginary battle against some villain or foe with a squirt gun in the shower or casting spells gleaned from the Harry Potter books on our morning walks to school with a stick he picked up along the way.  Simultaneously he moves toward independence, spurning my every attempt to help him with anything or vehemently insisting the clothes he picked, which perhaps match imperfectly "are fine, Dad."

These periods of transition, however slowly they proceed, are filled with poignance for me.  They seem both fraught and filled with possibility, but represent, when completed, irrevocable change that will influence the path he ultimately takes in the world.  Knowing they will end fills me with anticipatory nostalgia.

I am, for those who know me, deeply enamored of poetry.  Perhaps this is unusual.  I can trace it to a similar period of transition in my own life, when I was a freshman in college fully convinced my life would consist of a future in politics, starting with a political science major and being realized on completion of a law degree.  However, my freshman year I took a seminar that exposed me to great works in the Western literary canon followed by a survey course in English literature.  I fell in love with poetry in those two courses and switched majors to English, taking many courses focusing on or rife with poetry.  I found poetic expression to be a powerful means of examining the world and the way we experience it.

But what does poetry have to do with my son's transition from childhood to adolescence?  Quite a lot, I think.  Many of the best poems and poets capture such periods of transition in ways that other forms of written expression do not.  The best poetry penetrates the external realities of such periods and gets to the felt quality of them.  In particular, I am thinking of an Emily Dickinson poem:

Who never wanted,-- maddest joy
Remains to him unknown;
The banquet of abstemiousness
Surpasses that of wine 

Within its hope, though yet ungrasped
Desire's perfect goal,
No nearer, but reality
Should disenthrall thy soul.

The idea expressed in this poem seems to grasp perfectly the exquisite states of such periods of transition.  When my son passes firmly into adolescence he will not wholly abandon the wondrous and magical qualities of childhood, but they will be irrevocably changed.  This is normal and necessary for healthy human development.  Something will, however, be lost.  Reality will, to a large extent, disenthrall the boy's soul.  A razor and shaving cream will replace the squirt gun in the shower.  As a parent this prospect is poignant and a bit sad.

Being in the middle of my adult years, I appreciate the brief and fleeting nature of the transitions we experience as we mature.  Do not get me wrong - I look forward to the maturation of my son.  I can think of nothing finer than sitting down for a cup of coffee with him when he is a man or talking excitedly with him about college choices.  These too will be wonderful.  But still, there is nothing finer than hearing the silly shrill cries of the boy and his classmates as they play "lava monster" on the playground after school.

I think of the fleeting nature of these moments and am drawn to Dickinson's poem.  In the past, I have thought "the banquet of abstemiousness" had something of a negative, parsimonious quality.  Now I think I may have read it wrong.  Instead, the poem refers to the necessary parsimony of life - these moments of transition are loaded with beauty and delight, but are precious few and always fleeting; hence, representing the moments requires exquisite precision, just the way seeing a squirt gun in the shower captures this fleeting moment in my son's life perfectly.  To return to Dickinson, "hope is the the thing with feathers," joy is a ten-year-old boy with a squirt gun in the shower, and sorrow is not paying attention to either.

 

The Chimera of Libertarian "Freedom"

“I should be able to do whatever I want.”  

Aside from being a point-of-view most four-year-old children hold, the statement in part forms the basis of populist conservative and corporatist conservative ideology.  The statement has a libertarian feel to it without the constraint every serious libertarian thinker would concede must be placed on it, which can be reduced to the dependent clause “so long as it doesn’t harm others.”  The dependent clause is typically the problem with libertarian perspectives because it is an equivocation subject to interpretation regarding both its meaning and enforcement.

Even the staunchest libertarian accepts that some behavior is criminal and that the state has a right to impose punishment for criminal behavior.  The easiest category of behavior for which the state has the right to punish transgression is injury to another’s person.  Hence, nobody seriously doubts the legitimacy of laws proscribing murder, battery, and assault.  The problem with the libertarian perspective is that its proponents do not give serious consideration of the consequences of the actions that they propose to decouple from government regulation and whether the consequences harm others. 

We know that corporatist conservatives especially decry government regulation.  It is a constant refrain that government should let markets be free.  The apparent subtext is that businesses should be able to harm people without government intervention.  This is the logic of the position that government should let markets be free from any constraints or regulation.  This perspective contravenes any coherent and serious form of libertarianism.  The question from a libertarian perspective should be:  but what do we do when a business harms a person or a group of persons?  Libertarianism does not allow unfettered behaviors or actions that harm others. 

A classic example is pollution.  If a business emits a carcinogen into the environment, the business will harm persons that come into contact with the carcinogen.  The libertarian rule is that the business is free to emit whatever it wants into the environment so long as it doesn’t harm others.  A carcinogen harms others; hence, a business is not free to emit a carcinogen into the environment. 

In truth, libertarian principles do not support the idea of a market in which actors are free to produce and sell any product regardless of the cost to human health.  According to libertarian principles, producing something that injures another is no less subject to government intervention and oversight than would be physical behavior that injures another.  A company that emits a carcinogen into the environment commits an industrial battery.  The state is amply justified in regulating such behavior in the same way the state is justified in regulating injurious physical behavior.

The problem with any point-of-view that does not accept the "as the behavior does not harm others" part of the libertarian position is that it abrogates personal responsibility.  Of course we should be free to act consistent with our desires, so long as we do not harm others.  If we harm others, we bear responsibility for the harm.  This should be true of pollution, segregation, and any other behavior, economic or otherwise, that harms others.  I am in favor of a market economy.  I am also in favor of economic actors being held responsible for harm they cause to others.  The two positions are compatible.  

Malignant Marketing

When our body's cells proliferate uncontrollably, cancer results, a diseased state in which growth perversely causes death.  I recently read an article about how the claims that marketers, businesses, and medical researchers are making about the benefits of mindfulness are, according to actual research, seriously overblown.  The problem with mindfulness struck me as marketing gone malignant.  There appears to be consensus that mindfulness, as it is understood in its purest form, is a good thing.  When marketers and businesses try to capitalize it, mindfulness becomes practically unintelligible and, in the best case, of no benefit.  In the worst case, this marketed or capitalized mindfulness can be both passively and actively harmful by creating an expectation that difficult existential problems have a simple, commercial fix.

Although the thing that prompted me to look at how marketing works in the contemporary world was mindfulness, the lesson seems to be applicable to practically all commercial space.  Hence, the challenge is to remain attentive or alert to what is significant or substantive when one is overwhelmed with capitalized dross in what I call the malignant marketing living space.  Marketers will tend to capitalize anything that draws interest from a measurable population.  Given our interaction with "smart" technologies and digital interfaces, the measurable population can be as small as one.  It is critical to note that the connectivity we experience is no bad per se.  We can benefit from connections made or suggested through algorithms or other methods.  What is bad about the connectivity is that every connection made carries with it information that can be and usually is capitalized.  There are few if any connections that have no commercial aspect to them.  It is a constant, though not impossible, challenge to parse substantive or intrinsic value from capitalized components, features, or accouterments.

Why the ubiquitous capitalization of information and connectivity is problematic can be exemplified by comparing a search engine and a librarian.  A search engine cannot exist without exist without commercial support, usually in the form of advertisers.  Hence, the search engine will capitalize on information analysis and delivery by producing results that have been either determined or heavily influenced by the commercial concerns of advertisers or other financial contributors.  On the other hand, a librarian is human and as such will have biases, but if you ask him for help finding  books about the Battle of Midway, he is not going to direct you to titles from Amazon or Barnes & Noble that may or may not be decent resources but are practically certain to appear in digital searches because of their commercial popularity.  The librarian, though less efficient than a search engine in terms of brute strength of basic information processing, should do a better job of directing the library patron to the books most closely suited to her purpose (academic, hobby, general curiosity, etc.).  The library patron will lose the size and speed of the search engine's results, but she will gain the reliability of a non-capitalized suggestion.  This type of connection or suggestion has value because it is not driven by commercial considerations and it in turn has substantive merit based on what the content is (as a response to user need) as opposed to who produces the content and how well the content is selling.

The digital space, absent a massive ecological or planet-wide disaster, will continue to occupy a huge portion of human interaction and attention for the foreseeable future.  Suggesting otherwise or advocating that we avoid the digital space is unrealistic at best and quixotic at worst.  Nevertheless, malignant marketing can be identified and shunted our of one's intellectual space if she knows what to look for.  Additionally, citizens can demand that public officials maintain existing and create new neutral information and connectivity options in the digital space.  A library is a good example of a service that can operate in the digital space non-commercially, so long as its digital presence remains commercially neutral, i.e. public funds are used exclusively to build and maintain the digital space rather than corporate donations.

Regardless of whether the people demand and policymakers deliver commercially neutral digital spaces, individuals can learn to recognize marketing and capitalization of digital spaces and information delivery.  As such, individuals can learn to separate wheat from chaff, metal from dross.  News is a good example of where this skill is both necessary and easy to learn.  First, one can easily learn to distinguish the subject of a news story from the bias, opinion, and point of view of the author or organization.  Second, using multiple news sources with differing organizational points of view is a useful way to discern editorial bias by comparing both differing treatments of the same story and comparing the stories that actually get covered.  It functions as a sort of saccades for building a representation of what actually happened.  Although digital media conflate reporting and opinion more readily than pre-digital media which can make separating point of view from story harder, the ability to compare multiple sources is immeasurably easier in the digital milieu.

Simply knowing when one's digital interface or interaction is capitalized or commercial helps assess the quality and bias of the information presented.  Most even mildly sophisticated digital spaces that have a search function will use your past and current viewing history along with an algorithm to predict what sorts of things you are likely to be interested in.  This capitalizes our digital behavior and is not wholly bad.  If you are looking for a specific type of product, an algorithm that gives you options to choose from is useful so long as the choice is real and not the offerings of a disguised monopoly.  This maintains, presumably, competitive offerings and pricing which should be good for consumers.

The problem with algorithmic recommendations is that they are by necessity narrowed to results that are commercially relevant or viable for the organization that owns the algorithm.  Again, if one is searching for a commercial product, commercial relevance and viability are expected.  Algorithms become especially problematic when the searcher seeks more general information or non-commercial information.  In these cases, the algorithms have a blunting or stultifying effect.  General searches often are most successful when they turn up serendipitous information.  I am not sure how serendipity can be programmed into search/recommendation algorithms.  I certainly have not encountered it.

What do I mean by 'serendipity'?  I will start with an example of dinner choice.  Some of the most enjoyable meals I have had in (especially) cities that are new to me often involve little planning.  I find an interesting neighborhood and wander around until I discover a place that looks interesting, has an interesting menu, and is crowded.  This has led to some of the best dining experiences I have had.  It is has also led to experiences I probably wouldn't have otherwise had if I relied on commercial search engines or social media sites.  Recently, I discovered an excellent bibimbop place and doughnut shop in Chicago simply driving around an interesting neighborhood until something struck my fancy.

Physical libraries are another place where serendipitous searching happens.  As all know, libraries organize stacks of books by subjects.  In the past I have gone to subjects areas in which I was interested in but without specific titles in mind.  I let my eyes wander over the stacks until something strikes me as interesting.  Doing so has led to the discovery of J.R.R. Tolkien and many other tremendously interesting and useful books in many different subject areas.  The discoveries were due to chance.  That is the essence of serendipity:  finding something useful or interesting that you weren't necessarily looking for.  I think this is harder to do in the digital space because everything is targeted based on your digital footprint.

Distant searches or connections are stultified when search algorithms and other digital interactions are constantly capitalized.  This eliminates the authenticity of experience that is available.  To return to mindfulness, a search today will generate information that is less practical and more commercial.  Hence you will find articles in business publications and pop psychology, but rarely will you encounter publications that offer hard treatments of what mindfulness is and how it can be achieved authentically.  Authentic mindfulness is difficult to achieve and requires a sustained commitment.  You will not discover this from a Google-mediated search.

Marketing in the digital space is strangely ubiquitous, prolific, and self-propagating.  It is important to identify when it is occurring so that we can assess information for the legitimacy of its content.  Otherwise, all information will be mere capitalization.  In addition, we as a people should demand that our policymakers maintain existing digital spaces that are commercially neutral and, if possible, develop new commercially neutral digital spaces.  Marketing is a distortion.  We need to learn to see clearly.  It is something we should be mindful of.

"#InstagrammingAfrica: The Narcissism of Global Voluntourism," the Collapse of Borders, and the New Authoritarianism

This is an email I recently sent.  Thought it was worth reproducing:

Check this out when you have some time. It is a fairly short and interesting read.  Although it is a couple of years old, it touches on something I have been thinking about lately, especially as it relates to the current political climate in the US and across the Middle East and Europe.  The article is about the narcissism and ugly paternalism inherent in "voluntourism," especially of the medical sort.  It is worth thinking about because one of the things we are experiencing is the collapsing of the neat borders we have created for ourselves in what has been called the global north.  I hesitate to call it the developed world because it really is a Euro-American phenomenon more than it is "developed" in the sense that it does not seem to apply to the "developed" nations of Asia.  In this country, the rise of Trump and the popularity of Sanders share at least one common factor and that is a dissatisfaction with the psychosocial boundaries that we either see as collapsing (in the case of Trump) or being unnecessarily and dangerously imposed on us (in the case of Sanders).  The evidence of their collapse is most acutely demonstrated in the Syrian refugee crisis and the demonization of an entire people, in many circles pejoratively referred to as "Muslims" who are being displaced by the boundaries that we imposed on them from the global north.  I continue to believe that the dominant and subverted metaphor for this collapse of boundaries between global north and global south is the current popularity of "zombies."  They are impossibly numerous, already dead (read "not human") and threaten to subsume us into their mass of unintelligible chaos and inhumanity.  Read Trump's rhetoric and those of his ilk and it is not hard to see the parallel:  "Mexicans" and "Muslims" are not merely immigrants, but monsters with only one desire - to devour "us."  

The problem is that have to come to terms with the fact that we must share the globe with everyone on it.  Paradoxically, we have created the conditions that by necessity are pushing people to demand that we start sharing what we have with them.  I worry that the impulses of bigots and authoritarians will control our response to the very conditions of necessity that they and we have created.  I fear these impulses because they will be bigoted and authoritarian and most probably violent in a martial sense.  I don't think this response is guaranteed because there are a good many people and political actors that are striving to respond in decent and humane ways.  I have never been much of a fan of Angela Merkel, but I have to say the decency and practicality she has shown in her response to the Syrian refugee crisis has caused me to reevaluate my opinion of her.  She is truly a beacon of hope and example to be followed.  I am particularly impressed with her insistence and commitment to the idea that a democratic and developed society not only can absorb those in need but that it must and in so doing will not collapse but will succeed and demonstrate a path for the rest of the global north to follow.  I am also more deeply impressed with Pope Francis than I was even a year ago.  His confidence and humility in the face of the global dislocations we are seeing serves as another model that we can become a better and stronger global population when we act justly and generously.  It always hurts when you have had everything to yourself and suddenly are forced to share that which you have thought of as being wholly your own.  What Pope Francis and Angela Merkel demonstrate to the global north is that we have never really had everything to ourselves, merely that we have taken everything for ourselves and this isn't right.  If we want to change the world, it won't be through short trips to economically disadvantaged places where we take proud selfies to show how selfless we think we are being.  Instead, if we want to change the world we should ask ourselves how we can divest ourselves of the privilege we have taken and accept the fact that this means we will have to acknowledge the claims of others as being equal to our own. It is true that boundaries are crumbling, but the answer isn't to build a wall.  The answer is to build bridges. 

I am worried and I am scared.  I worry about the world my son is inheriting, but I am not without hope.  Angela Merkel shows that we can be generous and tough.  Pope Francis shows that we can be brave and humble.  For all of its faults, the Milwaukee French Immersion School that my son attends shows that we can embrace each other, even when so many of us are so radically different.  Trump notwithstanding, walls are crumbling.  This shouldn't be scary.  Zombies aren't coming in, people are.  I say let's get to know them.

It's Not the End of the World, So Why Don't We Feel Fine?

Americans engaged with the political process seem particularly prone to cataclysmic thinking.  I am not a political scientist or a historian, so I do not know if this is something that has been characteristic of Americans generally or whether this is a new phenomenon.  Some aspects of contemporary culture are considered to be detrimental to civility in politics and society generally.  These aspects included the 24 hour news cycle and social media (for its combined ubiquity, immediacy, and unfiltered nature).  These same aspects are blamed for a cultural short attention span, which certainly could lead to or increase the sense that every piece of information is somehow crucial or influential.  This, in turn, would seem to predispose persons to cataclysmic thinking, or the notion that every decision, every change, every political fight is of the utmost importance to both present and future.  The problem is that this type of thinking is neither accurate nor healthy.

One current issue about which Americans engaged with the political process are currently thinking and debating is the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.  Justice Scalia died unexpectedly and it is an election year.  This has the right, in particular, in hysterics over the possibility that President Obama will appoint a 'liberal' justice who will influence the Court's decisions in a wholly untoward and dangerous manner, potentially for decades.  The vacancy and the nomination are cast in stark terms, as if the country would somehow fail or cease to function if the makeup of the court were to become more liberal.

It is undoubtedly true that the decisions of the court would skew more liberal if President Obama appointed and the Senate confirmed an appointee before the election.  This of course fails even to consider the possibility that a Republican wins the presidency and is able to appoint a justice when a member of the liberal voting block leaves the court.  While predicting the future can be difficult, one would think that the actuarial tables are suggest we should not be optimistic that she will live through another presidential term, and certainly not two terms.  The point being that the hyperbolic worry about a President Obama appointee being confirmed to the court is not the guarantee of a long-lived liberal majority on the court that it is made out to be.

Still, what if President Obama appoints a justice and the Senate confirms the appointment and it creates a liberal majority on the court that lasts for a couple of decades?  Would this really doom us?  It seems silly to think it would.  The current makeup of the Supreme Court has been reliably conservative for at least 30 years now and it has not plunged us into the abyss.  The Supreme Court was reliably liberal during the 1950s and 1960s and did not plunge us into the abyss.  Certainly segments of the population have not been happy with decisions that either type of court issued, but the Republic did not dissolve into chaos and life has gone on.  For example, conservatives bemoaned the expansion of rights afforded to criminal defendants under the Warren Court.  Noteworthy among the decisions was the finding in Gideon v. Wainwright that criminal defendants have a constitutional right to legal representation in state criminal proceedings.  Despite expanding criminal defendants' rights, the criminal justice system did not grind to a halt and violent criminals did not go unpunished.  As any moderately aware resident of the United States knows, the reverse occurred in the last two decades during which huge numbers of criminal defendants were charged and convicted of crimes, which caused an explosion in the United States' prison population.  It must be noted, that these criminal defendants were guaranteed legal representation and were still convicted.

The same holds true for the left.  Justice Scalia authored the opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller in which the Court explicitly found that the Second Amendment extends an individual right to bear arms unconnected with military service.  Many on the left concluded that the sky would indeed fall, or at least would be filled with an unremitting hail of bullets.  I personally do not find the need to bear arms of any sort and think the idea that one needs a weapon for personal safety in a civil society suggests at the very least that the society is not civil; nevertheless, the worried panegyrics from the left struck me as hopelessly overblown.  The United States already had a huge number of persons who owned guns.  The United States already had a huge number of persons who died from gunshots.  It struck me as inconceivable that a technical change in the law would change either fact substantially, and it did not.  The most reliable predictor of an increase in firearm ownership is not a loosening of the Second Amendment but rather threats to tighten the rules applying to firearm purchase and ownership.  The bottom line is that most of what the Court decides will not have an impact on the daily life of citizens and that the decisions that do impact daily life are often not as profound as we think they will be.

People need to relax a bit about the political issues and choices with which we are faced.  They are not insignificant, but they are often not as earth-shattering or radical as we make them out to be.  Of course there are exceptions.  In keeping with the U.S. Supreme Court, there are decisions that have a profound impact on American life.  Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Lochner v. New York, West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, Bush v. Gore.  Each of these cases had profound and discernible effects on the lives of Americans.  The problem is that we cannot know when these profoundly significant cases will arise and be ripe for decision one way or the other.  Neither can we always know how courts will decide them.  King v. Burwell is such an example.  Perhaps the Affordable Healthcare Act is not as significant as the aforementioned cases.  Still it was a seminal issue of this political generation and the fact that the decision was 6-3 and that Chief Justice Roberts not joined the liberal block (with Justice Kennedy) but also authored the opinion upholding the availability of tax credits to individuals purchasing health insurance on federal exchanges was not a predictable result.  Whether and when the sky is falling is unfortunately not something that is often knowable in advance.  As such, we should stop acting as if it is constant danger of coming down.

Cataclysmic thinking also perplexes me because many of the persons who think in cataclysmic terms about politics do not have it all that bad and are not likely to be significantly impacted by either political party gaining ascendancy.  This is not true of persons at the margins of society, of those who are vulnerable and rely on the state to protect and provide for them when they are unable to do so for themselves.  The strange thing is that the most vociferous voices on most things political, the ones who worry excessively and loudly, who engage in perpetual hyperbole and panegyric, are not the marginalized.  If a person has a college, professional, or advanced degree and is in any number of white collar fields where upper middle class and upper class salaries are the norm, it really doesn't matter much which party is in charge of the government from a class-wide perspective.  Members of this class will enjoy home ownership, safe neighborhoods, comfortable retirements, health care, reliable transportation, good-to-excellent schools, reliable public services, and myriad other benefits, both public and private, regardless of whether a Democrat or a Republican are president.  For this cohort, it is not the end of the world as they know it and they really ought to feel fine.

I worry about cataclysmic thinking because it creates a socio-political environment that is filled with unnecessary stress and strife.  This cannot be good for us as a nation because it causes our thinking to be clouded with fear and other emotions when what would be best is for us to take a longer view.  Cataclysmic thinking is the ultimate short-term perspective because it focuses everything on the battle at hand without giving any thought to our future as a socio-political collective.  Politics in this country has an internal corrective to bad decisions:  regular and free elections.  Ultimately, if any one party gains ascendancy and behaves so irresponsibly as to damage significant and discernible portions of the population, that party will not be able to hold on to power.  And if they somehow manage to maintain power, they will be forced to modify their positions, at least in part.  The current support for criminal justice reform among elements of the political right is a good example of this.

Civic and political engagement is a good thing.  It is an even better thing if it is well-reasoned and fully informed.  And it is best when we realize that politics is a process, not an endgame.  For Americans not at the margins, things are not that bad.  Stop acting like the sky is falling.  It almost certainly isn't, and it if is neither political party will be able to stop it.

Looking for Salvation in Medicine

Several months ago, Atul Gawande wrote an interesting article in the New Yorker on why people seek unnecessary treatment.  He questions why patients will willingly undergo unnecessary treatments that are objectively more dangerous than undergoing no treatment at all.  He discusses why this is the case and posits, among other ideas, that part of the problem is that people generally don't know what statistics in medicine mean.  Having thought about the piece myself, I question whether it is so much that we don’t know as it is that we want to know about certain things in certain ways.  Alan Levinovitz, author of The Gluten Lie:  And Other Myths About What You Eat, remarked about a similar issue involving diets:

And I thought to myself, you know, it’s funny, people are trying to debunk these fad diets with scientific evidence, but what they’re not realizing is that really these beliefs aren’t scientific at all. They’re wrapped in scientific rhetoric, but ultimately they’re quasi-religious beliefs that are based on superstition and myth.

In his piece, Gawande notes that a patient from whom he surgically removed a benign thyroid cancer that was only discovered due to an unnecessary test “thanked me profusely for relieving her anxiety.”  She was not concerned about her actual physical health condition.  If she were, she would have recognized that the procedure to remove the benign tumor carried with it higher risks of death and physical harm than leaving the microcarcinoma alone and monitoring it.  The need for treatment was not medical.  Her understanding of the condition was conditioned on a belief system about cancer (and medicine) that is mythic.  Dr. Gawande was fulfilling a function perhaps closer to shaman than surgeon.  The problem, if it is a problem, is with modes of understanding and typologies of knowledge.

It is too easy to blame greed.  Certainly greed in medicine exists.  So does false hope and unrealistic expectations.  Charlatans take advantage in medicine as they do in the revival tent (or on the revival screen, as the case may be). 

The idea of medicine in America is, or has become, salvic.  Christ on the Cross is no longer intercessor or savior or redeemer.  Now it is the busy doctor dispensing antibiotics for viral upper respiratory infections or the cardiothoracic surgeon putting in a stent or the plastic surgeon cheating time with a Botox injection who intercedes, saves, or redeems.  The Rosary replaced by the Rx b.i.d.  The actual state of health is unimportant compared to the reassurance of an explanation, the ritual that allows us to feel as though everything is okay, that everything is in order, that we are being taken care of.  The soul has become the body.  Our quest for health is, as Levine notes with diet, quasi-religious.

And pain.  Pain is more than nociception.  Pain is a modality for expressing discomfort, physical or otherwise.  Complaints of pain alone seems not to establish physical pathology.  However, we have learned that when something hurts we go to the doctor.  Unhappy marriages hurt.  Financial distress hurts.  Is it any wonder that we somaticize?  Seeking understanding and counsel in medicine is normal behavior for persons acculturated as we are; that is acculturated to believe every problem is medical and every medical problem has a solution.

One of Foucault’s profound insights in The Clinic is that the patient went from being a person in the pre-clinical era of medicine to a specimen when medicine became “scientific” or clinical.  As a specimen, the patient became an object of inquiry rather than a person in the world.  The goal of treatment became a disease-free state rather than well-being.  Thus, questions about the patient’s overall well-being that were not directly related to the disease state were subverted and minimized.  “Treatment” would only be proffered in the presence of objectively verifiable disease, regardless of the patient’s degree of actual suffering.  Consciously or not, patients came to understand that if they wanted relief from pain they would have to characterize it as a disease-state.

Members of all societies suffer, some more than others, but suffering is a constant.  No society is Edenic.  Nevertheless, contemporary American society seems to predispose its members, at least those members not living in abject poverty, to a certain anomie.  For whatever reason, traditional American cultural institutions seem unable to ameliorate this state.  Instead, this cultural disaffection seems often to be medicalized in forms such as low back pain, arthritis pain, or depression.  

Unfortunately, medicine treats the manifestations of anomie as disease states, with predictably poor results.  Despite the predictably poor results, medicine treats manifestations of anomie with the same confidence and professional brio with which it treats broken bones.  Hence, a perversity of expected outcomes is created for both doctors and patients.  Doctors offer something approximating science while patients seek salvation for existential discomfort out of the firmament of superstition and myth.  Unfortunately, never the twain shall meet.

A Penurious Spirit: the Closeness of Conservatism

The inherent closeness of conservatism amounts to a worldview premised on the twin beliefs that people don't need to share and that nothing should be done to fix things that aren't fair.  Oddly, nothing about the psychological underpinnings of conservatism are democratic, despite the constant prattle about freedom and democracy that comes from those on the right.

Life as we know it contains hardship and can be a struggle, but these facts do not suggest that life is also not replete with wonder or that we should not attempt to assuage hardship and struggle.  Neither does the fact that life has difficult aspects suggest that we ought to respond with dour self-righteousness to the whole of life.  Such a gross and derelict puritanism bleeds life of what makes it interesting and worthwhile.  Contrary to the conservative animosity toward generosity and happiness, there is much to enjoy in the world, enough to go around for everyone.

What is it that I enjoy?  I yearn for expansive experiences.  I yearn for soul-satisfying laughter.  I yearn for hours and hours of conversation with interesting people about interesting things for no other reason than to experience the pleasure of good and thoughtful fellowship.  I yearn to share lovely memories with my family.  I yearn to take my son out early in the morning with a fishing pole to see the sun peak over the horizon as our lures splash into the water.  I yearn for the marauding rhythm of Whitman's verse.  I yearn for the meditative splendor of Yeats at his best.  I yearn for the earthy humor of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."  I yearn for the insatiable desire to keep reading, ceaseless, without rest or breaks, that I experienced when I picked up the Snopes trilogy or the Lord of the Rings or The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  I yearn for the excitement I felt when I was in college and first experienced the humanities from an open-ended critical view.

But the inherent closeness of conservatism suggests that these pleasures should not be democratic.  They should not be available to all of the people.  If this is not the de jure position of conservatism it is at least the de facto effect.  Why should any person who is capable of sensing beauty and experiencing joy be deprived of the opportunity to do so?  I remain convinced that no humans should be treated as or be allowed to become societal detritus.  The best society, it would seem to me, is one in which all members are given the opportunity to live freely and in modest comfort, with access to an education that ignites curiosity and inspires the desire to learn more.  In short, the best society is one in which we share with strangers and strive to make things better for persons other than ourselves.

Jeb! Likes Education Choices (If He Gets to Make Them for Parents)

"The conservative conundrum-- if you allow freedom and choice, you have to accept that people may choose things you don't like..."

The quote is lifted from a blog post about Jeb! Bush's education plan.  His candidacy seems more and more irrelevant as each day goes by, but his "plan" offers a great opportunity for Peter Greene to discuss why the conservative fetish with choice is both oxymoron and bad policy.  I thought the first post was better, but both are worth reading.

Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

When I was an undergraduate, I read some Dylan Thomas poems in a modern poetry class.  Of course we read "Do not go gently into that good night."  I enjoyed the poem immensely.  I have always been drawn to things demonstrating what might be called a rebel impulse, especially when I was young.  For me, "rage, rage against the dying of the light" could effectively have been read as "rage, rage against every injustice" since injustice was the chief vice to be opposed.  I was full of rage and fury; Dylan Thomas seemed to be speaking to me.  I would rage, rage, rage.

I hadn't thought of Thomas for some time when my father reached the end stage of the colon cancer that had been consuming him for several years.  The poem struck me as inapposite.  What could my father rage against?  Had my father raged, it would have been futile and weird, like Lear on the heath.  There is no raging against a disease that you have lived with for nearly a decade, a disease that you have known for some time would take your life.  Instead, there is gnawing pain and existential anxiety.  There is occasional regret and occasional insight.  Mostly, there is simple adaptation.  Waking and getting through each day because each day keeps coming and that is what we do when we live.  We wake, we get through, we wake, we get through.

Watching my father waste away did not diminish Thomas' words, but it demonstrated for me that the way of life and death is not binary.   Life is not a question of desire or its absence.  Were it so, my father would be alive today.  He had much desire to live.  He may even at times have had rage.  However, desire, even at the extreme edge, cannot guarantee life.  Neither is it even a possibility with the slow waste of metastatic cancer.

I have, however, recently been reminded that there are things worth raging against.  Not too long ago, Kraft-Heinz announced that it would be closing the Oscar Mayer facility in Madison, Wisconsin.  Executive jobs will be located in Chicago and all production jobs in Madison will be lost.  On my way into work around the time of the news, I heard a piece on public radio mentioning that the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation ("WEDC") did not attempt to work with Kraft-Heinz to keep the plant open.  This despite the fact that at least two other states successfully offered tax credits and other benefits to keep their local Oscar Mayer plants open.  I feel like Wisconsin's light is dying and there ought to be more raging.

The Wisconsin legislature and the governor continuously tout themselves and the policies they contrive to be better for Wisconsin businesses and hence better for Wisconsin because they will lead to job growth.  This is complete and utter baloney.  The Walker administration and the Wisconsin legislature have no interest actually doing anything that will preserve decent union jobs in Wisconsin, especially not in a city that votes heavily Democratic.  They do not care and are almost certainly happy to see those jobs go so they can continue to drive decent jobs with decent benefits (and the Democratic voters that often hold them) out to be replaced by lousy jobs with lousy benefits held by resentful workers who seem to think that progressive social policy is the reason for their economic insecurity.  Oddly, white persons holding non-union blue collar jobs in rural Wisconsin are reliably Republican despite Republican policy being responsible for much of their economic insecurity.

This is messed up and is worth raging against.  Buying the Republican line of political reasoning amounts to implicit racism.  When you think the reason that you don't have a good job is because of Obamacare or welfare, you are a racist.  You are effectively saying that you would have a good job if income was not being redistributed to pay for handouts to black people (because that is who the anti-welfare crowd assumes all the benefits are going to).  You know what, though:  you are not only a racist, you are a moron.  The reason you don't have a good job has almost nothing to do with social programs and almost everything to do with political policies that maximize the wealth of businesses and the wealthiest individuals at your expense.

I have for too long attempted to be nice about this stuff.  I'm done.  I don't think Wisconsin has much left to commend it.  This saddens and angers me.  Losing Oscar Mayer and knowing our state government did nothing to prevent it from happening sickens me.  I recommend that everyone write to the WEDC and Governor Walker and tell them how disappointed you are in their lack of caring for Wisconsin workers.  Tell them how disappointed you are in the direction Wisconsin is heading.

More importantly, call out all the people who voted these kleptocrats into office.  Tell them they are racist if they oppose social welfare benefits because they think they disproportionately benefit black persons and other minorities.  Tell them they are fools if they believe welfare benefits have anything to do with their own economic insecurity.  Tell them they are fools if they believe unions have caused or contributed to Wisconsin's current economic woes.  Tell them they are making Wisconsin into a sluggish backwater that is a national joke.

I feel like I am losing something meaningful as Wisconsin drifts right and becomes more know-nothing.  I also feel like nothing I or anyone else can do or say will change things.  Nevertheless, I can remain silent no longer.  Like the wise men and the good men and the wild men and the grave men, I will not go gently into that good night; I will rage against the dying of the light.

Free Play, Organized Sports, and the Death of Joy

I took my son to an outdoor ice rink a couple of nights ago and we played some pick-up hockey with a couple of his teammates and their older brother.  It was magnificent. We had the rink to ourselves for 90 minutes.  I had a great time, but watching the kids play was even better.  Later that night, I thought about the seeming diminution in free play that kids engage in today.  I know, I am nostalgic crank.  Now get off my lawn, etc.  But seriously, the loss of free play seems less nostalgic than an observable phenomenon.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in youth sports.

In many ways, youth sports have become routinized to the point that playing can seem more like a job than an enjoyable diversion.  This is shameful for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that the primary purpose of sport is play, which is generally supposed to be fun.  As youth sports have become more routinized and formal, kids spend less time engaging in free play.  Historically, free play is where kids learned to love the games they played and where they taught themselves the individual skills necessary to participate in particular sports.  Athletes were born on the pond or the playground or the schoolyard.  It is there that they developed love for the game and self-reliance.  If a kid wanted to learn a move, they essentially had to teach themselves.  Free play was essential both to learning the game and learning to love it.

Now, many kids spend little or no time playing sports outside the organized setting.  If they cannot pick up the game in formal practices or official games, they are not likely to pick up the game.  The exception is the kid with the driven parent who sees that his daughter could use more time and pays for her to have private lessons.  Rather than finding time for her to play, the driven parent finds more time for formal instruction.  Certainly all this time will lead to improvement and produces many exceptional athletes, but it also sends the messages that athletics are about something other than fun and that the player is incapable of self-improvement.  I think this is a mistake that first and foremost hurts kids, but also damages sport in general.

I am partial to hockey because it caused me to think about this and I love it, but all active free play is glorious:  no coaches, no instructions; just happiness, creativity, and passion.  This is the genius of free play:  doing something because you alone are moved to do it.  The experience is both greatly satisfying and enormously valuable.  As a purely athletic endeavor, free play spurs creativity like nothing else.  The whole point of free play is to have fun and the way you have fun is trying to beat your opponent, which gives you an incentive to do something clever.  It breeds experimentation.  It also breeds self-reliance because the only one who can figure it out is the player him or herself.

Free play is also satisfying in ways that formal games are not.  Nobody wants to lose, but in true free play the stakes are essentially personal so the consequences of games are much less stressful.  Free play is one of the few venues in sport where what in fact matters is simply playing the game.  Stepping off the ice after an impromptu pick up game feels good.  There is no worry about how you defended or played offense.  The only thing that matters is that you played.

This is the nation that gave the world jazz.  We are improvisational specialists.  We are at our best not when we are carefully following a script, but when we are allowed the freedom to react and think for ourselves in whatever situation are in.  I for one will continue to find opportunities for us to just play and I suspect that in the end my son will be better for it.  I know he will be happier.