Fountains of the Deep

Hat tip to Donald Sensing

Apparently there’s some water in the mantle. About an Arctic ocean’s worth, they guess—or about 1.4% of the surface water. It sounds plausible. I’d wondered where subducted water went, and so did they.

Of course, if that were to reach the surface there’d be hell to pay. Luckily it could only rise slowly—if it came up in one big gusher/fountain it’d raise ocean temperatures by 20 degrees C (35 degrees F)—eventually. Of course that much steam in the air would fry every air-breather long before the oceans reached equilibrium.

Chicago

The Liberian consulate is a small counter in a rug and flooring shop down on 75’th street in Chicago. The shops all have rolling bars to cover the windows and doors—the few shops that exist in the 2200 block. It’s a mostly empty block in a sinking neighborhood.

The consular officer was friendly and helpful—he’d just driven off, but came back when he heard he had a visitor. He’d gone to a mission school in Cape Palmas, and we talked a little about mission schools and family. He was slow and careful as he made out the visa inserts and filled out the details of the forms, and we talked of various other things off and on through the process. I’d forgotten the rhythms of Liberian life.

He suggested that I take Lake Shore Drive, since it was easily reached from the south end. Most of my experience on that road has been from about McCormick place north, and I hated it. That afternoon the road was almost empty, and the view was gorgeous. The lake was blue shading to turquoise backed by towers wrapped in thin mist.

Of course I forgot that the Congress was also known as 290, and missed my turn; and wound up getting a phone call just as I was heading into the S-curve. No, I didn’t answer it. (By then there was a lot of traffic….) I turned around well north of the loop, and got off at a familiar-sounding street to try to wind my way back south. Familiar, but at the north end of the loop, it turned out. Pedestrian traffic was so heavy it took 12 minutes to go around the block.

I’d not approached Fermilab from 88 in so many years that nothing looked familiar. I navigated on fading memory of street names—and my memory for names is deeply unreliable. I guessed right (for a change that day).

Satire v0.1

Satire v0.1

Satire requires a “normal” lead-in. Whatever is exaggerated must have a clear connection to the ordinary world, or it loses force.

At the most trivial level, suppose you want to satirize the supposed greed of the mayor. You could do this by devising a skit about a man who can’t bear to part with a dollar even to buy medicine. So far, so good. Now how does this deal with the mayor?

If he already has a reputation for intense greed you don’t have to do much, because people can guess. But if he doesn’t, or if a lot of well-known people are thought to be greedy, you have to be more specific so your audience knows who you are talking about. You can hang a sign on the actor that reads “Mayor” or dress the actor like the mayor, if that’s distinctive enough, or exaggerate some physical feature—a Pinocchio nose if the mayor has a big one, for example.

But your skit loses any satirical bite if you actor isn’t anything like the mayor. It may be comic enough, making fun of greedy people in general, but it is no longer the specific satire of a specific man that you wanted it to be.

Going further, it seems so obvious that I’m ashamed to even remark that in a satire about a greedy man, he must be doing recognizably greedy things. The key here is “recognizably.” This depends on the audience and the culture: for a poor audience worrying about whether to buy food or medicine is a real problem and not a sign of greed.

Most people will stop to pick up a coin. A greedy person might wade into a fountain to pick one up. This is recognizable, and so you can use this in your play. But a man who uses a backhoe to excavate a yard looking for dropped coins isn’t recognizable anymore, unless you append a plot-killing amount of explanation.

It is worth looking at the fountain example in a little broader framework, in terms of feedback.

Most people regard coins tossed into the fountain as off-limits. There’s a trace of superstitious regard: it seems tasteless—almost not thinkable—to grab for what somebody has thrown away as ‘an offering,’ and it is a cold wet way to acquire a small amount of money. This attitude can change. There’s a connection of the extreme to ordinary life, because your play has used one. Suppose your play is popular, and other writers seize on the same thing: diving into fountains for loose change as a sign of greediness. The shock value of the act starts to decline. It becomes thinkable, and people who want to show off by acting a little “transgressive” will start doing it more often in real life. The culture changes—and in this case changes in a direction of less courtesy and more greed.

You will no doubt complain that this was the opposite of your intention. You wanted to make fun of greediness, not encourage it. But the satire, by becoming part of the culture, changes the balance of things people are accustomed to experiencing. It changes the culture in the direction of what you are trying to satirize. Unless the satire provoked a reaction, this seems like a built-in danger—especially in an entertainment culture like ours.

Take another example: Madonna’s “Material Girl.” She pretty obviously meant it as satire—the “material girl” is intensely selfish. The song became intensely popular: part of the atmosphere and part of the language. Most people went on their usual lives, but on the fringe some took it up as a slogan: some proudly and some with a smirk. The result was a small cultural shift as the satire became an anthem. Not for everybody, but for enough people to “pull the distribution” in the direction of materialism. I didn’t observe anybody taking the opposite approach and becoming less selfish after contemplating the song. (I doubt that Madonna cared much.)

I see a serious danger that satire can provoke the attitudes it is trying to poke fun of.

But we know that satire can be effective and useful.

When doesn’t satire risk being counterproductive?

If people feel compelled to do something about the problem, the satire will be productive. The problem for us is that our culture is an entertainment culture, in which we cultivate an aesthete’s detachment and avoid commitment.

If the satirized characters are clearly vile enough that nobody wants to be like them, the satire may be productive. The problem for the artist is that the audience will laugh more heartily for a sympathetic villain. Madonna’s “material girl” is proud and content—and not shown in an ugly light, so we smile. Nobody laughs at Elmer Gantry. The trick of creating a character that is funny and despicable at the same time is a tough one.

Good satire is hard to do—and even harder when the news is so strange. When I heard the story about the proposal to ban using iPods while walking in the city, I was sure it was from Scrappleface.

Etruscans

So maybe Herodotus, writing about people who were alive at the time, knew what he was talking about after all.

"Open covenants openly arrived at"

It sounds like a good goal to strive for, and it certainly helps keep things understandable and defensible in general. But I don't believe it makes a good absolute rule, and I suspect the recent agreement with North Korea is an example.

No agreement with Kim is worth the effort to read unless the Chinese are willing to enforce it. Nobody else is in a position to do that, but the Chinese aren't going to publicly announce that they'll chastise their client. So the only way you can come within shouting distance of a useful agreement with Kim is for some of the provisions to be under the table.

Which means, of course, that neither all the provisions of the covenants are open, nor were they all openly arrived at. Hardly ideal, but the best we can realistically get.

I'm assuming that's what's going on here. If we don't have any sort of deal with China for enforcement, then I have to question whether the US negotiators were trying to defend the country or were pressured into posturing for local political benefit. (One reason I thought Kerry was a fool...)

Unexpected Sounds

I haven’t seen my boots for 6 years. I think they were accidentally discarded during a cleaning frenzy. I haven’t missed them much—winters have been warm—until now.

When the Celsius line reads –25, ordinary rubber-like sneakers hit the ground with a rap like those of hard-soled shoes—and the rap sounds almost hollow when you’ve got them stuffed with two pairs of socks. Usually sneakers fit snugly around your feet, but wool socks space them out quite a bit. The sound carries clearly in the chill air of the library mall.

Discoveries

I spent a little over 4 hours today emptying out a room and moving the contents to the basement. The molding around the base of dressers and the desk hadn’t been dusted in several years, and when I was done the pile of dust in the middle of the floor was the size of a cat. So what did I turn up?

• Money (no surprise there) (about 64 cents)

• Expired coupons (How excited they made us when we first saw them…)

• Rusty paper clips (Why rusty? Nothing else was…)

• Sore throat lozenges (do they crawl out of the bag?)

• A cell phone charger that’s been missing for a year

• A pickle jar lid (My guess is that somebody was eating pickles out of the jar, and discarded the empty jar, forgetting about the lid.)

• Bandaids, in the wrappers

• Hair care utensils (I’m convinced that they deliberately hide. Two years ago I bought a dozen combs to try to make sure there’d be at least one available when the girls needed one. That helped a little…)

• A broken cup from Alaska

• A paper guide from a printer that’s been working just fine without it

• A decorative pull-chain handle that must have flown across the room when the chain broke and smashed the light globe

• The manual for a short-wave radio made in the 60’s (To be fair, the radio is also in the house)

• A title abstract for a property in Waukesha, with the last transaction dating to 1894. (The first entry is the sale from United States by the president, John Tyler)

Thing is, the condo is new and the room was empty 5 years ago. In a rather older house we once lived in I found an old iron in the basement: one of those you heated on the stove and quickly ironed with for a couple of minutes before it got cool again. “Old old ting;” maybe 90 years old at the time. Mostly what I found was old hardware, though. One apartment had a clip of about 5 8mm frames from what must have been an adult movie, buried in the shag carpet.

Some people find valuable antiques in the attic. I find old iron and title abstracts for somebody else’s land.

Modern Islam

The Search for Cultural Identity by G.E. von Grunebaum

This book is a collection of scholarly papers collected in 1962. You might ask why on earth would I bother reading something so old—the Middle East has changed a lot since then. The big noise then was Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism. Oddly enough, those are still around to some degree. The lurker in the shadows was Islamic reassertion.

And that’s the reason I was interested. The landscape was quite a bit different, and yet still very much similar. The Saudis had not yet succeeded in dominating the Islamic landscape, but the Muslim Brotherhood was already tagged as the main opponent of Arab nationalism in Egypt. But then, as now, the Arabs were hostile to the West.

Grunebaum’s main focus was Egypt, probably because Egypt was the center of culture and learning. The problem addressed in the book is that

• The Arabs (and Egyptians, and Berbers, etc) understand their extreme backwardness in science and technology and social organization, and resent it.

• They try to semi-Westernize themselves to acquire the powers of the West (which to some extent includes the social organization of the nation-state and the fashions of democracy).

• To assert themselves they need to reach back into their traditions to find something to distinguish themselves from the rest of the world, something that will make them superior.

• These traditions often conflict in important ways with Western ways of thought. They look back to an ideal (usually imaginary) and canonical age which needs to be imitated. This universal tendency is magnified by Islam, which generally looks back to the era of the rightly guided caliphs as an example for the ages. An example of assassination and revolution, btw.

• Islam in particular, with its focus on eternal law that can only be studied and not developed, conflicts with Western notions of analysis and refinement and redesign; and with Western notions of democracy. The intellectual framework of Islam doesn’t mesh well with that of the West.

Grunebaum studied the various approaches people used. Some people invent history. Russians and French did this in earlier centuries, the Arabs and some Africans were doing it in the last century. (Similarly Black Studies in the US is larded with lies.) Since few Muslims over the centuries had bothered to learn much about the West, making up history was quite easy. Some the Muslims concluded that their predicament was because of infidelity, and worked to try to renew Islam—notably the political aspects of forbidding and commanding. I’m aware that there are a lot of pietists, but that’s not his concern here

The Arab nationalism theorists, in the process of trying to define themselves as nations, incidentally showed clearly how central Arabs and Arabic is within Islam. Non-Arabs are second-class religionists (though the Arab nationalists were willing to consider them as honorary Arabs if they wanted to be).

Grunebaum cited other researchers as noting that newly formed nations, especially those that have recently thrown off a foreign yoke, are generally imperialist. Subsequent history of the Middle East suggests that this is indeed common (Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc) but not universal. He reminded the reader of what the most cursory reading of Middle Eastern history will reveal: that Muslims don’t care nearly as much about a universal caliphate as they say they do—Egypt and Persia and Iraq have been national rivals within the umma for over a thousand years. The family matters, then the tribe, then the tribal cluster (nation). They idealize the caliphate, but much prefer that their tribe run it.

He pointed up the irony that it was the West, which alone among civilizations has tried to achieve self-understanding by understanding other cultures, that gave the lands of the Middle East back their ancient literature and glories. The Muslims preserved Aristotle for the West, but then lost it again themselves.

The book is larded with footnotes, some amusing (see earlier post). It is larded with quotes from French and German as well. I don’t read German, but I didn’t find the French to be amazingly better phrased than English translation. Sometimes Grunebaum turned a felicitous phrase, but on the whole the book is heavy slogging.

Oh, are you, now?

\NPR ran a report this morning on the deterioration of medical conditions in the West Bank. The public hospitals run out of supplies, the doctors and nurses went on strike because they weren't paid, medicines have to be purchased privately, if available, and so on. NPR story The first interviewee said "I'm a Palestinian citizen. I'm supposed to have these services provided to me." He went on to blame respectively the EU, Israel, and the US--a unique ordering.

I must have missed the place in the contract that says that the rest of the world is obligated to fund his medical care. Whether I feel obligated to help out or not is irrelevant--he does not have the right to demand money from me. The people he wants to rule him prefer to use money to shoot each other and are quite open about hating me and my country. This isn't calculated to encourage generosity, and as it turns out I'm not obligated to pay the jizya.

You want free health care? Take it up with the folks you voted for.

SMU

Another NPR story was about professors at Southern Methodist University objecting to having the GW Bush presidential papers in a new library. They worry that Bush doesn't reflect the values of the University, and are afraid that diversity of opinion will be injured. (Apparently without any cognitive dissonance, too.) I'd have expected they'd be happy that there could be a cottage industry of researchers finding the roots of all the disasters he was responsible for (not all scholars would work through the terrifying "independent institution"). But perhaps they're afraid a researcher might find out Bush was right about something, and they don't want to think about that frightening possibility.

The anti-Oath

The Madison City Council has decided that they don't like the way the people of Wisconsin voted and so will encourage an auxilliary oath of office complaining about the referendum and promising to try to overturn it. Officials won't be required to take this auxilliary oath, of course, but ...

Bow before our betters; their ways are higher than our ways, and their judgments past finding out.

Rome

In his “Bleat” today Lileks noted how many cultures over the years had taken Rome as their nominal model. We don’t seem to have quite that urge here in the US (novus ordo etc), and they seem to have finally lost it in Western Europe (though it is hard to tell from a distance, with me not being familiar with the literature). We’ve pretty well passed them on almost all counts by now.

Rome held the imagination for a long time, and it isn’t too hard to see why.

They were rich. They could build houses and cities and roads in almost an offhand way that couldn’t be equaled through the years of chaos, and even the years of the new nations until fairly recently.

They were great builders whose relics endured, so there were always plenty of reminders. In addition, most of those relics were buildings of peace. The intervening years had plenty of castles, but until those became merely quaint they were grim reminders of the ubiquity of war. In A Distant Mirror Tuchman calls the builders of the Coucy keep “the greatest builders since Rome.” They weren’t, really—they were specialists in castles, and wouldn’t have known how to cast a concrete harbor or build an aqueduct to save their souls. Roman engineering was surprisingly good for people who didn’t have calculus. (Or did they? So much has been lost, and Archimedes came so close, that I would not be shocked to learn that Greek and Roman math had gotten as far as Newton.)

After so many years it was easy to forget that most Roman battles had been in civil wars, and remember only that for centuries a man could travel unafraid, protected by unseen distant forts. That must have seemed a golden age to travelers later.

And it was easy to forget the many lapses from the ideal, and remember only the ideals of justice. Our fashion is to detail the failures and injustices, but perhaps the happy memory is more fair. Without trust you have little trade and many fortresses. Without at least an attempt at administering uniform justice there is no trust. That ideal, and the attempt to achieve it, seems to have created that necessary order and trust that lasted for a surprisingly long time in the face of bureaucratic ineptitude and draconian economic laws. Without the ability to make and enforce contracts you cannot build an enterprise much bigger than a family. They did.

Add to these the fact that, for whatever cynical political reasons, Rome tried to care for its poor, providing bread and water and sewers. Who had that luxury after it fell? The skeletons tell us that the rich and powerful during the centuries of chaos after the collapse lived worse than peons under Rome.

Nothing lasts forever, and I suspect that includes the current civilization of the West. In everything but longevity it has surpassed Rome. I wonder if it will pass the torch gracefully, or shatter and leave behind a thousand-year yearning for vanished glory.

New dish

I was hungry, and went to Coreana to try something new. I like the bibimbap, but maybe something with noodles ... Aha--here it is! Oops. The gol-dong-myun was gol-dang salty.

What Elysian land is this?

And who were the people who saw it that way?

". . . that part of the world whose long years of civilization had taught the nations the folly of war, whose people lived in splendid houses, free alike from the dangers of fire and robbery, and whose rulers devoted themselves entirely to benevolent plans for the welfare of their subjects."

An unhelpful hint: this is from a footnote (p127) in Grunebaum's Modern Islam: The Search for Cultural Identity.

Answer

The hope of Youngest Son

Snow days, snow days

Please give us two-in-a-row days

Squabbling and fighting to drive Mom nuts

Or video vegging on lazy butts

Till she yells at us “Go

And play in the snow”

Where snowmen just beg to be rolled.

Threaded wisdom?

Youngest son asked what the difference between male and female fittings was. I explained that the male threaded fittings were like screws and the female threaded fittings were like nuts: the male fit into the female and the female fit around the male. He replied that he’d thought the male and female went in opposite directions. I told him there was some wisdom in that…

Infernal Music

OK, this is cool. A Vatican composer will stage an opera based on Dante's Divine Comedy, using a variety of musical styles. Guess where rap fits. (Not Purgatory...)

Uses of fantasy

Youngest daughter spent a few years running all ideas she couldn't quite fathom through her imaginary zebrahan herd--the queen would pass some law dealing with a question and she'd imagine the dramatized setting. It didn't always--or even often--seem to result in an understanding that reflected the real world, and we tried to explain why laws that demanded that zebrahans had to sacrifice to give their children an education were misplaced. (OK, see, yes they should do their best for their kids, but how is a queen going to know what their best is, and who died and made her God?)

Youngest son is now doing the same thing, except with his colony on Mars. We've had some very interesting discussions as a result. Of course, on Mars in a fragile colony you lose a lot of freedoms you take for granted on Earth (no pets, for example), but we've had some interesting times explaining to him why freedom of speech is a good thing, and why capital punishment for theft is a bit excessive.

I've noticed that when youngest son wants to imagine something new, put himself in a story, combine characters from different stories, and so on, he doesn't say "What if." He says "I had a dream that."

The light of the world

How much would we give to live back when Jesus lived, hear His voice, ask Him questions (and be able to understand Aramaic too)?

And yet in John 16 Jesus says we're better off with Him not around that way anymore. It seems odd, but that's what He said.

We can't bring gifts to Him like the Magi did, but He said in Matthew 25 that whatever we do to the least of those around us we do to Him.

We can't see Him, but wherever two or three are gathered in His name He's with them--and in Israel He could only be in one place at a time: as though He showed up in Walnut Street but not in Door Creek.

We can't hear Him answer our questions and teach us, but the Holy Spirit is with us now, and we can learn if we humbly listen. And that humility includes listening to each other.

Jesus said that we would do even greater works than He did (excepting His atoning sacrifice, of course). What ought those works to be, and where are they?

Odd.

There was no hint that the post would appear twice--no hint of a glitch. This is blogger beta, so maybe there's a few hitches yet.