Banality

Douglas Murray has at Hannah Arendt and her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, citing research that shows she was (at best) duped. He also argues that her cute slogan has contributed to our widespread inability to call evil evil.

I wonder if she read The Screwtape Letters' 1961 preface, "I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice."

Those quiet men sometimes harbor the wildest evils in their hearts and in their minutes.

Time

I'm helping beta-read a novel, and one aspect of it headed me down a rabbit hole about time, to a 31-year-old paper presented to the NCTE about "Indian time." "Indian time" is mythic, based on appropriateness of action ("I eat when I'm hungry, I drink when I'm dry, and if whiskey don't kill me I'll live til I die."), while "linear time" contributes to dislocation and illness. As is typical, the author cites special relativity without showing the remotest understanding of it.

The problems attributed to "linear time" and "technology" are curable with "mythic time" and simplicity, of course. Patton seems to be unacquainted with Christian traditions about materialism. And Mander's comparison tables, cited in the Appendix, are not just invidious but inaccurate. Some tribes did in fact work to produce surplus for trade, and trade networks could be extensive.

You can tell that the paper is old; it doesn't try to attribute wickedness to whites, just to "technology." It probably would run into a lot of flack today.

At any rate, I didn't find what I was hunting: anything like the (surprisingly late!) idea of returning to the past. Stories of one-way time travel to the future are very old.

Of course, after making a bit of fun of the paper, I need to give an example of what she means. When I lived in Liberia, people referred to Liberian Standard Time, which in practice meant "whenever:" Maybe half an hour after the hour specificed, maybe the next day. Things happened, and meetings ran long, and part of business was maintaining relationships. And land line telephones weren't that common. When I returned, cell phones were ubiquitous, and often interrupted things. It seemed that the rule that "a meeting lasts as long as it lasts" was now something of an exception. Was maintaining relations still such a large part of business? I wasn't there long enough to find out.

Internment

We're all told about the US interning Japanese. I hadn't heard that the Canadians did too, and that some of the Japanese-Canadians couldn't return home until 1949.

Incitatus

We vote for a president; we get a team.

BBC's famous "Yes Minister" comedy assumed that the existing bureaucracy defines most of policy (and tries to perpetuate and enlarge itself). I haven't seen much evidence that this is wrong.

There's no way any human being can know all the people in a single government agency, much less the whole government. To pick people to direct an agency you have to trust someone else's vetting of them – and trust the standards by which they were measured. The reports that cross your desk are distillations of distillations: how do you know if there was a pattern to what was omitted?

We hope that the president we vote for will pick a trustworthy team to farm out the other personnel selections to and give them the general policy directions for their various underlings to implement, and then listen to what we hope is their good advice. We hope we can trust the policy statements and party brand. We hope we're not buying a pig in a poke. That's a lot of hope.

Trump seemed to have some sensible advisors, but so many of his team rotated in and out that I figure continuity had to have suffered – and then bureaucratic momentum wins. "Personnel is policy:" and the bureaucracy has most of the personnel already – and offers a pool from which one may select directors.

Perhaps instead we vote for Incitatus, with religious faith in the party brand and trusting that the team that selected Incitatus is benign. That team, invisible to any ballot, will pick the cabinet, set the policies, and try to decide on the proper reactions to the crises that will arise. The president will sign bills like a living autopen, read from teleprompters, and smile or glower on cue.

It might seem as though either way the bureaucracy dominates, but it isn't entirely just a difference in degree. In the case of a compos mentis president, decisions in the various crises would be made by the same person; there's no guarantee that the same person each time would give Incitatus the lines to say. And a forceful president might have some impact in despite of the bureaucracy.

Post-liberalism

First Things has an essay by Nathan Pinkoski "Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed. It rested on an essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction."

In 2006, then prime minister Blair said that the “traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong, as just made for another age.” Soon after, his home secretary John Reid elaborated. The previous age—the postwar age—began in response to concerns about the threat the “fascist state” posed to individuals, Reid said. Today, the threat comes from “fascist individuals,” not fascist states.

This, after Pinkoski's description of the subsuming of private enterprises under government control in a way that is fascist in all but name, is telling.

Leaves

This time of year can be beautiful, with leaves changing yellow and orange and brown and red--highlighted by evergreens here and there. On the tree, with the sunlight shining through them, most dead leaves look at least great, and sometimes amazing. But dead oak leaves look so emphatically skeletal and withered and dead--they're ugly. I suppose they fit in with the ubiquitous Halloween themes, but I'm glad there aren't any oak trees in my window's view.

Mushroom song

The Internet is a wondrous thing sometimes. A fragment of a ditty about mushrooms stuck in my mind and surfaced today: I'd read it in a book about campers back in '66 or so. Searching about, there seem to be several variants, and one version claimed James Thurber as the author (?I didn't find evidence). I went to camp but once in my youth, and that camp was more about singing hymns than folk songs--not that I cared much for either--so I've no historical bias. Which, if any, of these 4 did you learn?

(The third seems slightly corrupted, but maybe the music was different.) archive.org is back.

The mushroom is a vegetable
To select it few are able
You won't know them when you meet them
You won't know them 'til you eat them
If in heaven you awaken
You will know you were mistaken
And the ones that you have eaten
Weren't the ones you should have et.

Mushrooms are a vegetable
which you eat when you are able
you will know one when you see one
you will know one when you eat one
if in Heaven you awaken
then you’ll know you were mistaken
Must have been a toadstool, tough luck!!!

Mushrooms are a veg-e-table
That you eat when you are able,
You will know when you eat them,
You will know them when you eat them.
If in heaven you awaken
And you find you were mistaken,
That the mushrooms you had eaten
Weren’t the ones you should have et.
Must have been toadstools -- tough luck!

“Mushrooms is a veg-e-table; 
to detect them few are able. 
If in Heaven you awaken 
then you’ll know you were mistaken, 
And the ones that you have eaten 
weren’t the ones you should have eat!”

Gleam again

We went to Gleam again this year. The "Star Stuff" exhibit needed to be dynamic, and with more lights shining on their metal stars, but the rest were good. The dragonflies glowed with colors as wild as real ones, the illuminated trees were beautiful, and the pond with the fluctuating strings of lights was great. My favorite was "Yield": a "corn maze" of glowing corn stalks, with colors changing in ways that seemed almost seasonal (and bright white flashes to go with the thunder sounds).

The only downsides were my forgetting a cap, and the mandatory word salad on the signage explaining why looking at this exhibit will make you a better person. Why can't an artist just say "I thought this would look pretty"?

There were interactive exhibits too, and foxglove blossoms 14" high, and they made sure the interactive things were kid accessible.

Simple cell-phone cameras do not do it justice--they haven't the dynamic range of the human eye. And anyway, it seems better to just stand and take it in.

Tired of only seeing some relatives at funerals,

we've planned some road trips. The south loop was earlier this year. We just finished the central-east trip. In retrospect, it was probably wise to not include Florida as part of the plan. Of course we dropped the North Carolina leg--I'm not in the finest shape to help out.

Gas mileage through West Virginia wasn't quite nice. Minivans... As we ate our snacks at a rest stop there, a young lady drove up in a car leaking some kind of fluid from the front, who promptly got on the phone. I asked if she was OK--she'd hit a deer, and apparently it went under her car. I'd not thought of that damage vector before. (We didn't see any deer.)

I listened a lot, and learned some things about building airports and dog training for deer hunting and building garden hardware, and about family I'd not been in close contact with for a while--some things joyful and some sad.

Allegheny cemetery

One feature not frequently remarked on is the groundhogs, who leave surprise holes here and there to twist the unwary ankle.

Many of the older stones were eroded by acid rain, and are difficult to make out, but there's a great deal of what is essentially public artwork honoring the memory of people you've never heard of (and some you have). I gather that the Winter mausoleum is the most famous. Winter copied the design of the Woolworth mausoleum: a pseudo-Egyptian temple with busty Greek-style sphynxes and heiroglyphs that mixed real phrases and gibberish, and doors showing the proprietor being aided by de-animal-headed Egyptian gods.

Many of the mausoleums have stained glass within, which you can view through the front door's grating--Winter's has 3 panels. Oddly, even the good Father Pitt/Dr Boli only mentioned one of them--which shows Winter as Pharoah enthroned. Modesty seems not to have been Emil Winter's most prominent virtue.

Yes, the noses of the bronze figures on the door show signs that visitors have been rubbing them, and the snooty sphynxes show similar signs, though not on the nose.

It isn't just rich businessmen who are buried in the cemetery, of course, a friend and confidant "of the illustrious Washington" is also buried there. Daniel O'Niell's statue shows him still at his editor's desk, and the (presumably recopied) stones for Ebenezer Denny and his wife Nany Denny ("Stop, Passenger! and here view whatever is admirable summed up in the character of Mrs. Nancy Denny...") tell of older ways of memorializing.

Many plots had a little walled flower garden above the grave--sometimes a painfully small grave with small numbers on the stone. Once there was a fashion for headstones shaped like scrolls, which, combined with the flower-garden cavity gives the impression of a giant sardine can being opened with a rolling key.

Karl Lennart Gronros from Finland had a stone paid for by his friends so that all would know that the 24-year-old was a mechanical engineer.

It is a bit disconcerting to see so many headstones for people younger than me.

Risks

I've heard the stories from North Carolina about officials blocking aid workers (though nothing so far on followup), and also people saying that the authorities have to manage who gets in so as to keep out looters and other predators. It hasn't been mentioned, but they need to keep out amateurs who'll get into trouble and need rescue themselves. (I've also read testimony that they haven't seen anything like that kind of friction with authorities--I'd bet it's more a function of who the folks on the ground are instead of policy.)

We need to balance risks. Predators flock to the scene--they already have. But the risks from them seem, so far, relatively low compared to the risks of locals running out of clean water and medicine. It isn't a nice way to think about things, but in an emergency you have to triage and spend your energies efficiently, and some people are going to get murdered who wouldn't have been if you spent the time to vet everybody every time, but more will live because they got uncontaminated water to drink in time, or got shelter when their home and roads washed away.

We're not always good at evaluating risks.

Grim says the Feds haven't shown up yet in his area, but local and private assistance are helping a lot.

Reminder

Their web site mentioned a 9am service, which was early enough for us to attend and still continue travelling. The service turned out to be a Sunday School, which turned out to be the pastor lecturing on background and interpretation of the passage in Revelation addressed to the church in Philadelphia.

I'm fairly bald, and couldn't tear out much hair--his background was amazingly confused. He mixed decades and centuries, put Nero in the 300's, explained that Catholic meant imperial (didn't seem to know about the Orthodox at all), explained to the assembled that Baptists maintained a parallel unbroken tradition back to the apostles and didn't break away from the Catholics, and when one woman asked him afterwards why he didn't end with prayer, asked that she show him in scripture where this was illustrated or commanded. (Acts 20:36)

I prayed I could find some way of contributing positively, and was granted such an opportunity. But the situation was also a good reminder--I know a fair bit about the Church's history, and the background for the faith, but the important parts lie elsewhere. His history was a garbled mess, but his talk about Jesus' message to the church was fine.

So far

Traveling has been calm, setting aside the occasional lunatic driver, and visits with kinfolk have been very pleasant. And the hotel stays were simple to cancel--though the Black Mountain one had to go through the national number, since the local phones were not up. See Grim for updates to the situation there--when he's able to.

Even as far away as Louisville and Cincinnati we saw trees and branches down.