Mankind, pt. 1

After a while, you have to wonder whether all that tension between Israel and Palestine is religious in nature anymore. You ask yourself if anybody is actually following an ideology, or if they’re simply doing everything they can to deny the other side what they want. Why, when seeking autonomy, does one group wish to deny the same thing to others? That’s like when people who have been discriminated against pass that discrimination onto somebody else. Everybody must establish themselves above others, it seems. But that makes no sense to you. Someone who has experienced discrimination knows how awful it is, and should therefore not want to subject others to that kind of treatment. It seems that the concern is always for the individual, though. A man hates to be derided, but does not care a whit if others are derided. Man’s basic instinct is hypocrisy, because man cares not for the well-being of others while he is comfortable.

I’ve thought about Jesus, and the whole Lamb of God thing. He was the shepherd, too, right? How can he be the sacrificial lamb as well as the one guiding the lamb to the sacrifice? I think that it’s possible because every one of us is simultaneously sheep and shepherd. We are the shepherds of our own lives, yet we are part of the flock of mankind. It is our responsibility, as shepherds, to guide our fellow human beings when they err, but it is our privilege, as sheep, to be able to rely on others to help us when we are lost as well.

As a former wrestler, and as a writer, one who thinks in metaphor and symbols, I see that wrestling, as a team sport, is the perfect analogy for humanity. During an individual’s match, it is solely up to the individual to win. Yet his skill level, and even his drive for victory, is a direct result of the interactions in the practice room with his teammates. Also, for those that don’t know wrestling, each individual match contributes a certain number of points to the team, depending on the outcome. A loss, of course, contributes nothing. A decision, a win where the margin of victory is less than 8 points, gives the team 3 points. A major decision, where the margin of victory is between 8 and 14 points, gives the team 4 points. A technical fall, where the match is stopped because one individual has outscored the opponent by 15 (or more) points, gives the team 5. A pin, forfeit, or disqualification (those should be self-explanatory) give the team 6 points.

There have been many situations in my experience where the outcome of a meet rested upon an individual match. I think that we (Carmel) once beat Portage by one point. I don’t remember the matches exactly, but if one of our guys had only gotten a decision instead of a major decision, we would have ended in a tie. So, while each match is up to the individual, the individual’s performance in that match affects his entire team, and the context of the match (i.e., you're the last match, and your team is behind by five points) will influence how you wrestle, and the outcome you seek. I loved to tech. fall people, and rarely went for the pin; but if my team was behind by five, I would adjust my style during the match so that I could pin my opponent and win the meet.

The same can be said for society. This is simply another way of describing that thing from A Beautiful Mind, when Nash declares that Adam Smith was incorrect. You get the best results, Nash says, not by doing what is best for the individual, but by doing what is best for the individual in the context of what is best for the group.

Hamas Captured Gaza

How many of you have heard about the capture of the Gaza Strip by Hamas, the radical Muslim political party in Palestine? It happened on June 15. Hamas has forced Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas into the West Bank, where he has promised to set up an emergency government. He 'fired' Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, putting in his place Salam Fayyad, an economist who's spent most of his adult life in the US. Nevertheless, Abbas' actions will likely have little impact. Even before Hamas seized the Gaza Strip, Abbas, leader of the rival Fatah group, was seen as a weak leader. Hamas has ignored Haniyeh's 'dismissal.'

On Wednesday, Israeli troops raided Gaza City, killing at least twelve, in what has been the bloodiest fighting since the Hamas takeover. President Abbas condemned Israel's actions, while also condemning the agressions of Hamas, which, since the takeover, has fired five rockets and three mortar rounds into Israel.

For more information on the rise of Hamas, read this article.

European Racism

Think racism is a concern of the past? Watch this. And don't just dismiss it as a soccer thing, or a European thing.

POUND (a short film by Evan Bernard)

I remember doing this in elementary school. My friend Sullivan Kahn and I had a really elaborate one worked out.

Videos are Great! Watch this.

Triumph Insult Comic Dog - Star Wars Nerds Movie Premiere

Add to My Profile | More Videos

found this on another blog

Children

I'm amazed at the number of blogs on blogspot devoted to the blogger's child/children.

"Today, little Tate, Jr. Threw Up..."

What the fuck?

On and On

Please don't cry
We're designed to die

-Wilco

Isn't that weird? As soon as we're born, every minute is one closer to being dead. Is that a pessimistic perspective? Or a realistic one?

Book Review

Here is a book review I wrote for Blogger News Network.

By the mid 1950s Ray Bradbury had established himself as a premier science-fiction writer. The success of The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) had seemingly launched his career in that direction. But in 1957 Bradbury released the novel Dandelion Wine, an homage to youth, innocence, and belief, whose only fantastical elements are strictly in the minds of the young protagonist and his friends.

Dandelion Wine is a semi-autobiographical novel set in Green Town, Illinois, a loosely veiled mask for Waukegon, where Bradbury was born. It centers around the summer exploits of Douglas Spaulding, a twelve-year old with the energy of a lightning bolt. In 1974, Bradbury wrote the essay “Just This Side of Byzantium,” which became an introduction for new editions of the book. In the essay he reveals that Doug is based on himself, and Tom, Doug’s ten-year old brother, is based on Bradbury’s brother, and that John Huff, one of Doug’s best friends, was a real person (named John Huff).

The book takes place during the summer of 1928. The summer truly begins for Doug while picking wild grapes with his father and brother. During the course of their outing, Doug feels “a vast tidal wave lift up behind the forest.” When it crashes, Douglas Spaulding realizes for the first time that he is alive.

The plot of the novel isn’t entirely linear from that point on, but this isn’t a detriment. At times the book seems more like a collection of interrelated stories than one cohesive novel, and indeed, many chapters were previously published as short stories. Each chapter (or group of chapters) deals with the various goings-on of the people of Green Town. There’s Leo Auffmann, happily married father of six, who builds a happiness machine with unforeseen consequences. There’s old Mrs. Bentley, who realizes what it means to be old. There’s the heartbreaking love between Helen Loomis, 95, and Bill Forrester, 31. There’s old Colonel Freeleigh, the human time machine. There’s Lavinia Nebbs and the Lonely One. There’s Miss Fern, Miss Roberta, and the Green Machine. All the happenings of summer, to which Doug is a proud and grateful witness.

For those that dislike too much happiness, Bradbury balances all this joy with an appropriate amount of sadness. After all, a novel about life could not be complete if it did not also address death. While Doug gains awareness of his life, he also loses things which have made that life beautiful. Friends move away, loved ones die. Doug even sees the strangled corpse of a woman, latest victim to the town menace, the Lonely One. These events build up, and by the end of the book, Doug has a realization equal to his life-affirming epiphany in the beginning. Douglas Spaulding, 12 years old, will someday have to die, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

Style-wise, Bradbury couldn’t have written a more fitting book, in terms of relating the content to the theme. Doug is alive, for the first time, for a limited amount of time, and because he knows it he never wants to take that for granted again. He has a nickel tablet and a yellow Ticonderoga pencil with which he keeps meticulous record of his summer. Because of this, Bradbury’s always keen eye for detail shines forth like the light from a firefly lamp. He can masterfully set up a scene:

“He looked out at the yellow sunlight on the concrete and on the green awnings and shining on the gold letters of the window signs across the street, and he looked on the calendar on the wall…. The warm air spread under the sighing fans over his head. A number of women laughed by the open door and were gone through his vision, which was focused beyond them at the town itself and the high courthouse clock.”

Or he can describe something like the Green Machine in painfully beautiful simile:

“It glided. It whispered, an ocean breeze. Delicate as maple leaves, fresher than creek water, it purred with the majesty of cats prowling the noontide…. The machine, with a rubber tread, soft, shrewd, whipped up their scalded white sidewalk, whirred to the lowest porch step, twirled, stopped.”

He even made my mouth water:

” ‘Green Dusk for Dreaming Brand Pure Northern Air,‘ he read. ‘Derived from the atmosphere of the white Arctic in the spring of 1900, and mixed with the wind from the upper Hudson Valley in the month of April, 1910, and containing particles of dust seen shining in the sunset of one day in the meadows around Grinnell, Iowa, when a cool air rose to be captured from a lake and a little creek and a natural spring.’”

Throughout the book, the prose never relaxes its grip on detail and imagery. And when combined with the joys of summer and the heartbreaks of life, seen through the eyes of a boy who wants so badly for things to be beautiful and perfect, but who realizes that sometimes life is beyond his control, you have a novel about growing up that never seems contrived, that never panders to cuteness or gimmick. You have a novel that resonates long after you put it down. If you haven’t experienced summer yet, you must pick up this book.

Hemingway

"Don't do what you sincerely don't want to do. Never confuse movement with action."
-Papa

Science!

Learning is the new underage drinking. Everybody's doing it.

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Academic Freedom

Below is a link for an article at Inside Higher Ed about Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who made a lot of people angry when he said that the 9/11 victims were "little Eichmanns." He's recently been found to be "academically dishonest," and this article is a good starting point for a discussion on the nature of "Academic Freedom." I suggest that everybody read this article (it's not too long, don't let the small scroll bar fool you).

Academic Freedom Needs Defending -- From Ward Churchill

Blogger News Network

I'm writing news articles and book/music reviews for Blogger News Network. The more people visit the site, the more money me and other writers make. So check it out.

www.bloggernews.net

My Knife - A True Story, Part 1

I've got this knife, a springy Kershaw blade of stainless steel. There are small chips in the smooth part of the blade; the serrated half looks like two McDonald's bat puppets from commercials in my youth. I found the blade half-hidden in dirt on the corner of Gilbert and Greenwood. Thanks to the knife, I no longer had to use my Buck tool to cut the baling twine around the hay; the Buck tool required two hands, and often times gloves had to be taken off, which was digital (as in fingers) suicide during the winter. But the knife, the knife was wonderful.

Growing up I had lots of knives. Dad used to give them to my brother and I, and we'd whittle a few sticks till they were pointy enough to slide through marshmallows with little resistance, then the knives would sit in our desk drawers until a neighbor got one and told us how cool it was. We even bought pocket knives in Italy once, with an engraving of a gondola ride on the side. I traded that knife to my friend Peter, but I don't remember what I got in return.

The only time I'd ever seriously used a knife before the stable was my summer on the ranch in Wyoming. After seeing how often Vern and Newt used their blades, I went into Cody on a day off. The Yellowstone gift shop was having a special on knives that day, two for one. The first one had a gray rubber handle that curved like a banana, the second had a thick black rubber handle and a blade as tall (from keen side to dull side) as half my palm. I think they cost me nine dollars.

The first blade fell apart quickly thanks to a loose screw that had lost the thread. The second blade, the thick one, became my partner during those days on the ranch. The knife acted as blade, saw, screwdriver, scraper, shovel, and nail cleaner, and once or twice I used it to scrape a splinter out of my thumb. The days spent entirely on the lawn mower were filled with thoughts of how to kill a bear if I had the bad luck to run into one with no weapon but that knife.

I lost that blade shortly after returning from Wyoming. It was the first of many losses that would take me farther and farther from the ranch, and from the best summer I'd ever had.

Rube Goldberg

I was supposed to leave for Carmel at two, but the Nintendo emulator I just downloaded has kept me distracted. I have five levels of Kung Fu to play, and they won't beat themselves.

It was three-thirty before I saw a clock again, and If I'd left then I would have hit rush-hour traffic on 465. Indianapolis is a meager traffic town compared to what I've seen in Chicago and New York, but still, if I can avoid it, why not?

Most of my days involve planning like this. Set the alarm for seven, wake up at eight, study till nine, shower and breakfast till ten, walk to class and in the door by ten-twenty. Since I have no job, anything after class ends does not require structure, and I fill the time with emulators, books, and the occasional hard run.

But there are bigger things than just my days. There's the coordination of my future at stake, and in my mind it's all a giant Rube Goldberg machine. Rube Goldberg machines, for those that don't know, are those really complex devices that cartoon characters build to scramble eggs, or pour pancakes, or flip a light-switch. If there is anything out of place, the objective isn't achieved. The candle has to burst just under the balloon, the brick has to land right on the catapult, the parachute must carry the scissors right across the fishing line. And if everything works, your shoes get tied.

My objective is the Peace Corps. Specifically, my objective during these last few months in the United States, is to ensure that I am actually leaving for Africa. To do this I've had to schedule doctor appointments, get blood work, have cavities filled, obtain an eyeglass prescription, send in reimbursement forms. On top of that I have to finally get my diploma, a task which has brought me to IU, taking two French classes, in which I can get no lower than a C (B- right now in F200, we'll see what happens when the final's graded). When the second session finishes on August 10th, I'll have fourteen days to transfer my credits and get my diploma. This, of course, is assuming I'm definitely leaving, and I can't definitely leave until I get this stuff taken care of.

I was just on the verge of writing, "When did my life become like this? Hinting of serious responsibility?" I'm glad I didn't, because I hate questions like that. Another thing I don't like is when people say they need a vacation from their lives. I'm reading Steinbeck's The Log From the Sea of Cortez right now, and one thing he mentions before he and his shipmates cast off is that so many people stand on the dock with this look of envy in their eyes. They are saying, "My life is nothing but boredom, and I wish I were going with you." Steinbeck says that these people are fools, because a bored man is bored everywhere. If you feel victimized by your life, do not blame the circumstances, blame how you've reacted to them.

I understand that that's an easy thing for someone like me to say. I've not gone bankrupt, or had a drug problem, or grown up in a dysfunctional environment; but I've known people who have, and those kinds of people can be divided into two categories: those that blame the state of their lives on their problems, and those that leave their problems behind and take responsibility for themselves.

I won't give away any names, but two women I've dated have had undesirable childhoods. Absent, abusive, or unfaithful fathers, discrimination, poverty. You name it. All the ingredients for a best-selling memoir. I won't go into any details either, but each girl takes a different approach to the Rube Goldberg machines of their lives; one has modified a flawed design, while the other designs around the flaw.

I wrote in an earlier post about Ulysses that, thanks to language, every man is an artist. One could say that every man is also an inventor. Our lives rest upon a Lego-block foundation built in childhood. Sometimes the foundation is unsound, and it is up to the inventor to build his machine to accommodate those weaknesses. Some machines are simpler than others, and some never reach the main objective. Some build machines all their lives, hoping an objective will eventually be discovered. I feel like I'm building many small machines that will someday be connected. Years ago, the machine took me to Wyoming. Another machine made me fall in love. Now, I'm trying to get to Africa, and I feel like I'll be building this damn thing up to the day I leave. But I don't mind. I like to invent. It gives me something to fill the days.

Jesus of Montreal

This movie came out in 1989, but I've just watched it for the first time this afternoon. It's stunning. You should watch it now. For anybody that has any interest in truth, the purpose of life, Christianity as a religion, or Christianity as a (more) modern mythology, you need to see this.

Morality

Sometimes I wonder if morality is nothing more than not acting on our impulses. I've just finished The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Steinbeck's last novel. The main character is Ethan Allen Hawley, a man of integrity, whose honesty has prevented him from receiving the wealth that people have offered him. Yet a bribe he refused in the beginning is accepted at the end, and Hawley's deceits are at times nothing short of betrayal (or even murder, in a way, in the case of his friend Danny Taylor). It was Hawley's intention to rob the bank behind the grocery store he clerks, but his plans are compromised, not by his own integrity, but rather by an honest act performed by his boss Marullo, who is being deported, and whose deportation he owes to none other than Hawley. A government man comes to tell Hawley that Marullo is giving him the store. Because Hawley is a good man. An honest man, the government agent repeats several times. And here he was about to rob a bank. The only thing that kept his morality intact, in that specific instance, was his immorality in another instance.

I was talking to Laura yesterday, or maybe it was Scott, about how I sometimes consider myself a bad person for the thoughts I have. Oh, the people I'd love to swindle, back stab, cheat. But I never do it. So is morality noble thought or simply noble action? And is noble action really action, or simply the passivity of one lacking the guts to follow his impulses?

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), the government has solved the problem of dishonesty and emotion and passion by 1) strict conditioning, and 2) allowing the masses to indulge in their every impulse. The conditioning is essential to keeping part 2 from exploding into chaos, because people are conditioned to only have certain impulses, depending on their caste. In this world, orgies are condoned and monogamy criminalized. For them, morality is based on impulse.

I think it is generally considered that an essential part of morality is honesty. Honesty is generally advocated as, not only the telling of truths, but also of "being true to oneself," of not allowing the wishes or actions of others to shape you into a person you don't want to be. But how can we be true to ourselves if we don't follow our impulses? By denying the things we want we are allowing ourselves to be shaped by the majority vote of society, whose morals are drawn from nothing more than tradition, which is a proud way of saying the consensus of the powerful. It seems, then, that we have two choices: be honest, or be moral. But never the twain shall meet.

Wilco

Read reviews of Sky Blue Sky here.

Mine will be up soon.