Suffering through the Morning Paper

If you are interested in a really good article about responding better to those patients in the hospital who need help, read this article from today’s New York Times. If you would rather hear me kvetch about current language use, keep on reading because that’s what my fingers want me to talk about today.

Here’s the first one.

Whether it’s a request for ice water, help getting to the bathroom or a plea for pain relief, an unanswered call light leaves hospital patients feeling helpless and frustrated. And for nurses, often the first responders to these calls, the situation is frustrating too: Short staffing and a heavy workload often make it impossible to respond as quickly as they would like.

“…as quickly as they would like.” Is that really worth anything at all? The Mavericks are going to play the Heat tonight. Will anyone at all on the losing team say that they didn’t score “as many points as they would like?” Is the gap between what you would have liked to do and what you did really the most useful comparison? Hardly ever.

In politics, it’s mostly a gesture intended to avoid responsibility. The whip promises the Speaker that the bill will pass, but it fails. The whip tells the press the bill didn’t receive “as many votes as we would like.” Right. It also didn’t receive as many votes as you promised; as many votes as you calculated; as many votes as the people who rely on your competence and good judgment had every right to expect.” And all those bases of comparison are more useful than the one you used. Hm.

The “as much as I would have liked” gambit turns every failure into a comparison between what happened and what your preferences were. There are, as I illustrated above, other alternatives and nearly all those alternatives are more useful in finding the glitch or allocating the blame or placing the event within some shared body of expectation.

I’m really tired of “as much as they would like.” You could tell that, right?

Next up, the use of “around” as a preposition of interaction. Here’s one.

“We’ve really fundamentally changed the way we interact with our patients around their needs,” said Lauren Cates, the hospitals’ chief operating officer.

We’ve gone to “around” in many cases where one used to say “on.” I have seen people write that an argument is “based around” a theoretical premise common in the field. Why on earth would you base it around the premise when, with any diligence at all, you could base it “on" it. Is there any particular merit in placing the first floor of a house “around the foundation” you poured for it? Would “on the foundation” really be any worse? It would likely be better if you were thinking about earthquake insurance. Also, routinely making a first floor larger than the foundation will be routinely more expensive. More expansive also.

Is it just my imagination, or do “as much as I would like” and “based around” slide away from common usage in the same direction? For the same reason? Are they unrelated? Is there a conspiracy?

I probably wouldn’t have noticed this next one with anything more than a passing irritation, but I has just been treated to “rounding” as a word referring to regularly checking on patients to see if they are OK. But I was still puzzling over that—I think I was wondering whether, if they start on the first floor, they call it “rounding up” and if they start on the top floor, “rounding down”—when I got this.

Dr. William Southern, chief of hospital medicine at Montefiore, says, “Call bells are something that me and my entire staff think it’s important to answer.”

I think that is an admirable sentiment. I like Dr. Southern’s attitude. His grammar, not so much. Are call bells really something me think it is important to answer?” And not only do me think it, my staff thinks it, too. Me do and them do.

And finally, although it might be final only because it is in the last paragraph of the story, we get this: “Bottom line, never leave anyone in the hospital overnight by themselves immediately after a procedure or birth, even if they tell you it’s O.K.”

It is by now an old complaint that “they” has become the proper pronoun for “anyone.” In this sentence, it is just sloppy but there are times when you really need to know what a plural pronoun refers to. That’s why the agreement in number—singulars go with singulars; plurals with plurals—has always been a part of the foundation of grammar. Being a part of the foundation, of course, means that many uses are “based around it.”

If you are not prepared to say “he”—the old neuter form of the pronoun—or “he or she,” which is a lot of trouble, you might want to consider using a plural noun. You might say “Never leave people in the hospital…” There are a lot of alternative phrasings—as I recall, I was once baited into handing out a paper listing eight of them—that keep singulars with singulars and plurals with plurals. It’s just something you need to think is worth doing. I suppose someone needs to think it is worth teaching.

None of these complaints, by the way, should be lodged with Tara Parker-Pope, who wrote this piece for the New York Times and who writes so well that I routinely read whatever topic she is writing on. Um…”on which she is writing on.”

Blog 2

This is my second post labeled “blog.” I wrote the first one on May 30, 2010 and I titled it “Blog 1.” That’s not too adventurous, I now realize, but I was feeling my way at the time. This blog is number 128 and I want to give it over to reflecting on my first year of blogging.

Since May 30 of last year, I have written about a third of a post a day. When I think that this is something that was added to a life that already had a lot of things in it, that seems to be a lot. I have written more about politics than anything else (27); I guess that’s not all that surprising. Posts with religious topics come next if you combine the biblical studies (10), the Christian praxis (7) and the Christian theology (4). That gets you to 21 “religious topics.” The label “Words” is next at eleven. You can get another eleven if you combine Kiddie Lit, movies, books, books and movies, and reading. As you can see, I struggled with topic names.

I was completely surprised by the availability of a label “Saturday Evening Post.” It did occur to me eventually that a post I put up on Saturday evening was a Saturday Evening Post, so I started calling them that.

I routinely go fishing for pictures, now, to add to all the words. They are remarkably easy to find. In the most recent post on emotional intimacy, I typed “emotional intimacy” into Google and got a lot of pictures to choose from. Virtually any biblical account has a lot of pictures, mostly done in romantic styles. Politics is great for pictures: I put both Paul Ryan and Kathy Hochul in the most recent one. It was almost easier to put them in than to leave them out.
So what, if anything, will be new in the next Blog Year?

The best answer is that I don’t really know. I find that I am much more responsive people who write and say, “Yeah, but what about THIS?” Or, “That was interesting. Let’s have more about that.” One reader characterized my style as “jolly and mordant.” I loved that. Many more readers have characterized my style as terse and difficult. That presents me with a difficulty. I keep my posts fairly short by writing concisely and formally; I use a lot of parallelism to keep the structure clear. I provide labels for each new section, as a rule. Those, together, don’t do the job that needs to be done.

What would do that job, is a lot of examples. But examples are long and posts are short. If I really thought I could carry a reader through 7953 words rather than 2651 words—the length of my most recent post on emotional intimacy—I would do it. But 8000 words seems like a lot of words to me and I suspect that it is a price higher than the traffic will bear.

Ah well.

I’m going to play with my ten pages just a little. I’m going to change books and movies and music into “Arts.” Besides grouping them better, I like the idea that just as there is an art implicit in the book or the movie or the symphony, so there is an art in how to read a book, to see a movie, and to hear a symphony. And by “Arts,” I hope to put both kinds of endeavor into the same category.

I don’t have a favorite post. Some were easy to do; they nearly wrote themselves as I watched. Some were really hard to do, but those were satisfying when I got to the end of all the wrestling. I think the Love and Marriage ones were hardest to do. I think I’m still changing the shapes of some of the categories. In politics, by contrast, the categories are nicely stable.
I hope to write a post called Blog 3 on May 30, 2012. We’ll see.

The Loneliness of the Inframarathoner

I offer this post in the spirit of Steve Martin’s character Harris K. Telemacher, who begins his narration of L. A. Story by saying that he has had "seven heart attacks, all imagined."

I was up on Wildwood Trail running today when a redheaded runner with a race bib numbered 6063 came around a corner. “So, what’s the race?” I asked her. “Oh,” she said, “it’s an ultramarathon. I’ve done 30 miles and have one to go.” Since I knew the end of the race, given where she was on the trail, was going to be Lower McCleay Park, so I knew she had nearly two miles to go, but I didn’t say that.

I said, “Oh, I’m running an inframarathon myself and on this same trail.” I think I might have wanted her to laugh, but she had already done thirty miles, so that was asking a lot. And I was pretty sure I didn’t want her to think there was another race on the same trail on the same day. So I said, “At least if one is infra- and the other ultra-, the runners won’t be running into each other.” She didn’t laugh at that either.

I complain a lot about people who use words based in Greek but who don’t know how to handle the plurals. I get “criterias” every term in essays at Portland State. These are people who have never heard the word criterion and if they had, they would think the plural was criterions. So I complain.

On the other hand, it offers opportunities. Just a few years ago, I invented the hyperdermic needle, which was really great because, of course, it was painless. People who are more strict than I am about medicine pointed out that if it didn’t get under the skin, it wouldn’t do any good, but I think you have to balance the loss of pain against the loss of benefit.

Do the Democrats Want to Govern, or Just to Win?

So now Democrat Kathy Hochul beat Republican Jane Corwin late Tuesday in the special election for New York's 26th congressional district. Rep.-to-be Hochul gave the three reasons for her victory as, and I quote, “Medicare, Medicare, Medicare.” The two questions I want to poke at, using her explanation as a platform, are: 1) what does she mean by that answer and 2) what does that imply for the organization of the 2012 election?

Jane Corwin did not back away from Paul Ryan’s budget plan fast enough if, indeed, she backed away at all and Kathy Hochul beat her senseless with it. There are a lot of good reasons for people, seniors especially, to be wary of Ryan’s plan, but there are a lot of silly reasons, too, and I’d really like to know how those two moods played out in the New York 26th Congressional District. If Hochul means that Corwin offered too deep a cut in Medicare or flawed set of targets for the reduction, all is well. A less draconian cut or a fairer sharing of the fiscal pain will be the next topic of conversation.

On the other hand, if Hochul’s victory is only the prelude to a season of incessant demonization of anyone who is trying to rein in our exploding medical expenses, then the prospects for anything I would call “government” are bleak indeed.

Let me take a brief etymological excursion to justify that last statement. We get the English “government” from the Greek kubernatos, meaning “helmsman” or “pilot.” The helmsman—that’s the government—is supposed to steer the “ship of state.” I think that’s an excellent idea. It makes it possible for the polity to decide upon a corrective action, put in place a helmsman who will implement that action, and as a result, we avoid piling up on the rocks. There is another approach, though, which holds that having a helmsman of any sort is a bad idea. This wasn’t really Reagan’s idea but, as in so many areas, he formulated a way of characterizing it that has stayed with us. “Gummint,” said the President, “is not the solution to our problems. Gummint IS the problem.”

We are perilously close to a shipboard management scheme that could be characterized as a biennial mutiny. And I choose “biennial,” knowing that the President’s term is four years. Someone is chosen as “head of staff,” let’s say, and this sets off boisterous opposition. This opposition is successful either in lashing the helmsman to the mast—well out of reach of the helm—or in substituting another helmsman for the current one. Since the substitution sets off a boisterous rebellion among the partisans of the former helmsman, a new mutiny begins immediately. In the meantime, it is worth asking who is steering the ship of state, when no one can keep the helm long enough to maintain a course. End of excursion.

In the light of the Hochul victory, the Democratic Party needs to decide immediately whether it wants to win or to govern. The ugly fact is that demonization of your opponents works if winning elections is all you care about. The Republican Party hit a new low in the last round by their opposition to “Death Panels.” It was low, but it was successful. The Democrats could retaliate, if they wanted to, by saying that the Republicans are trying to “destroy Medicare as we know it” to adapt one of President Clinton’s best-known phrases.[1] This would probably work. Droves of Rs would lose; droves of Ds would win. Then they would be faced with trying to do something about Medicare costs, knowing that whatever they tried, the Rs would give them what they had just received, seven times hotter. When it comes to virulent invective, it truly IS more blessed to give than to receive.

On the other hand, if the Democrats really want to govern, they will not demonize the Republicans. They will use Rep. Ryan’s overshooting the mark as a way to move quite a way toward cutting Medicare expenses. The fact is that “Medicare as we know it” is bankrupting us. Everyone knows that. We are going to have to find a way to cut back on what it costs. Everyone knows that. But the Democrats can afford to take a substantial risk in drafting behind Ryan if they really want to govern.

“Our plan,” they can say, “is much more reasonable than Rep. Ryan’s plan, which has been endorsed by the Republican leadership. Our plan goes a long way toward solving the Medicare crisis, but it does so in a responsible way and without dumping the government’s responsibility to care for seniors.” [2] By positioning themselves to the left—but not too much to the left—of the Republican plan, the Democrats can get a lot of spending reduction accomplished AND retain office. They will lose more seats by what I am calling “the governing plan” than they would by following “the politics plan,” but there would be compensations.

The first compensation is that they can claim to be taking the fiscal crisis seriously. They claim that now, but no one believes them. To be believed, you have to establish your credentials in conflict. If 2012 turns on The D Plan v. The R Plan and the Ds win, they will have their credentials and enough votes to implement a substantial part of the plan.

The second compensation is that eventually, there will be political gold in being able to stand before the public and be recognized as “the party that made the hard choices and that rescued Medicare.” Eventually. Maybe not in 2012, but possibly before 2016, when they will really need it.

It’s worth a try.

[1] It is worth noting, however, that when President Bartlet was offered that same phrase, it set off a major conflict among the West Wing staff, the result of which was that Toby Zeigler talked the President out of using it at all. And Toby did that with the full support of Josh Lyman, who had been his principal opposition on this question and who ended the scuffle by saying, “I make it a practice never to disagree with Toby when he’s right, Mr. President.” Fiction is SO much more satisfying than reality.
[2] President Obama’s plan to cut the cost of Medicare by refusing to pay for procedures that the experts can demonstrate to have no beneficial effect, is not going to do it. It isn’t public enough, for one thing. And it looks suspiciously like “government by experts,” which, in this era of populist anger, isn’t going to do it either.

Emotional Fidelity II, the Inside Game

In Part I, I argued that there were things married partners could do outside their marriages to increase the chances of emotional intimacy within their marriages. It was complicated, but it wasn’t that hard to write. In this one, I am going to try to say that emotional fidelity within the marriage is the richest and best sharing of the “within-most” of the partners.[1] And when I am done impaling myself on that stake, I am going to try to say that there is a third thing—a kind of setting, an agreement, a commitment—which represents what the relationship needs. The simple way to say it (this is the only simple thing about it) is that “it,” the relationship, has needs that are not identical to his needs and her needs.

It is worth remembering that our word intimacy is built from the superlative form—the “best” in good, better, best—of the Latin intus = within. What is “intimate” in this understanding is what is “the very most within” part of us. That might seem incontestable, particularly since I backed into it from the etymological side, but it is not. The crucial question it covers over is this: does “us” mean you and me, taken as individuals or does it mean “us” as a couple?

This is actually a familiar problem in grammar. “Within,” in the context of a person, means within the person. “Within,” in the context of a group of persons, means “among the persons. It is something that is “within” all of them, not “within” each of them. Following that clue, it makes sense to look for a “within me” kind of intimacy and a “between us” kind. So I will.


Let me just drop a small scheduling item here. Even starting with the solutions (that is plural because there is one for him and one for her and one for them) is going to make this too long for a blog. I’m going to try the his and hers solutions here and work on the “their solution” later. I hope not too much later.

And two small reminders of context. The first is that we are considering emotional intimacy within the context of a marriage. I’m not denying that it can occur elsewhere; I’m just more interested in marriages. Second, I am defining emotional fidelity the same way I defined sexual fidelity: doing whatever you can within the relationship to bring about the most robust and mutually satisfying intimacy between the partners.

The classic dilemma in American marriages is that the wives want to be more intimate than the husbands do. I don’t think that’s true, but let’s play with it a little. We’re going to need a practice couple. I’ve got Albert and Sally here.[2] The job today is to solve their problem formally, i.e., not practically.

In the marriage described above, Albert will begin by feeling intruded upon. Sally wants to get closer to him than he wants her to be. Whatever he is going to do, it is going to have to be something he can begin to do while he is still feeling intruded upon?


Albert’s Problem


The first thing Albert might think of is just to tough it out. Just get through it. This is particularly true if it is early in the relationship and she is seeking romantic intimacy and he is seeking erotic intimacy. That is one of the many good reasons not to seek erotic intimacy early in the relationship, by the way. It complicates something that is already pretty complicated. In any case, Albert puts up with what feels like emotional intrusion by Sally, thinking either that it is worth it or that there is no need for him to admit that what Sally wants from him seems genuinely bizarre.

Toughing it out won’t work. Sally will know she is not achieving the intimacy she desires and will try harder. Albert may think he did pretty well in getting through the first round, but he really should know more about tournaments that that. The later rounds require a considerably better game than he put up in the first round and he's not getting good coaching.

The next thing Albert will do is to blame her for wanting more than she should want. Wanting “more of me,” he might say, or, if he watches TV, “violating my personal space.” This won’t work either, of course. She is not going to start wanting something different because he disapproves of what she wants. And Albert almost certainly misunderstands what she wants—there isn’t a guidebook, you know, and if there were, he wouldn’t have read it. Too much time watching TV.

So step one for Albert is this: find out what she wants. Sound easy? Try it. Try it, especially, beginning from Albert’s feeling that Sally is intruding on his rightful self-space. To start down this road, Albert will have to be willing to admit that he doesn’t really know what she wants. She is speaking a language that is, at very best, a second or third language to him and he is missing some of the grammatical fine points. And the next thing Albert must do is to stop blaming her for the fact that he is feeling intruded upon.

Two really hard things, just to start with. But it gets worse, so let’s go on. In Step 3, Albert needs to let her into this space (which he has maintained very carefully since adolescence or before), trusting her not to do any damage. But, of course, she will do damage, because she’s never been in there before and doesn’t know what she’s doing—so far as this particular man is concerned—and she’s going to hurt him. At that point, Step 4) Albert is going to have to say that it hurts. Sally will be offended, but there is no help for that. Albert is going to have to say that it hurts (or was uncomfortable or scary or however it occurs to him to characterize it) without blaming her. He will also have to be open to the idea that he might get used to this and then come to like it and then come to take it for granted. If it gets to be a really good experience for him, Albert can always remember that it was his idea originally.

Sally’s Problem

Four really hard things already and I am calling these the irreducible minimum in the first steps department. Now let’s look at Sally’s problem. Assuming, still, that she wants to be “closer” than he does, Sally is going to move in to “just the right distance.” When she does, Albert will move away because she is “too close.” Sally’s feelings are going to be hurt by his moving away from her. And right then, when she is feeling hurt, she is going to have to do two really difficult things. She is going to want to push even harder for what she is calling emotional intimacy because she has not yet achieved it. She is not going to wonder why he keeps pulling away; she is going to keep on trying to achieve “the closeness we both want.” Hard thing number one: Sally is going to have to stop that.

The second thing Sally is going to want to do is to blame Albert for not wanting to be emotionally intimate with her. That’s not the right thing either although it will be immediately satisfying because it reaffirms the rightness of what Sally wants and establishes the wrongness of Albert's response to her. So hard thing number two is: Sally is going to have to try to understand, rather than condemn. That’s always hard to do, particularly when you are being held away from an intimacy you think is only right, but for Sally, nothing else will work. Besides, there will always be time to condemn after she understands him. Or to mark up helpful articles from self-help magazines and leave them on his reading table or on the back of the toilet.

Let’s pause to note the symmetry here. Sally’s job is to find out what Albert doesn’t want. In finding out what Albert doesn’t want to happen, Sally will have to forego further and more extensive efforts to achieve emotional intimacy. He can’t just tough it out; she can’t just push harder.

The second thing Sally will have to do is to forego blaming Albert for pulling away. It’s obvious that blaming him isn’t going to help him stop doing what he is doing and it isn’t going to help her understand why he is doing what he is doing. So steps one and two are, again, obvious; but doing what is obvious when you are feeling rebuffed and humiliated isn’t easy.

In Step 3, what Sally needs to do is to take as much as Albert can freely offer, trusting him to give more when he can. Sally needs to cherish everything Albert offers, every token of his emotional self, and let him know how valuable it is to her. Sally will want to say, “how valuable even this small part of him” is, but she is going to have to find a way not to say that part. Even under those circumstances, Albert is going to be reluctant to trust her and give more of himself because where she wants to go—into his intimus—hurts sometimes and he doesn’t know if he’s doing something wrong or if she’s just clumsy or if emotional intimacy is a bad idea. “That’s why,” says Lord Peter Wimsey, in only a slightly different context, “there are men’s clubs and that’s why they’re popular.” [3]

Furthermore, since this is Step 4, Sally is going to have to say that she wants more intimacy than Albert was able, even in trying his best, to provide. Sally will have to admit that it was not enough for her, that it was not what she really wanted. She will have to do with without blaming Albert and she will have to remember that what is “too little” now, may become in time, just the right amount.

Precipitous Conclusion

So this is what Albert should do, and not do, and this is what Sally should do, and not do. Is this a solution? Not even close. It is something really good, however. It is the direction in which all the solutions like—his and hers and eventually, theirs—and pursuing these first steps will help them take other steps.

This may not seem like much to you, but let me point out what has already been achieved. Albert has rejected the strategy that came first to him (it wouldn’t have worked for long anyway) and has refused to blame Sally although she is, in fact, the proximate cause of his discomfort. He has committed himself to learning what she really wants, knowing that when he learns it, it will be in her language, not his. He has chosen to say honestly that it makes him uncomfortable. He has forgiven her for the discomfort she has given him, knowing that it is inevitable if the relationship is to flourish, and he has allowed the possibility that the feelings he now has, which are uncomfortable, might become comfortable if he can adapt himself to them. Albert is a hero.

Sally has rejected the strategy that came first to her (for the same reasons Albert did) and has refused to blame him although it is he, in fact, who is refusing her what she wants and which she really feels would be best for them both. She has committed herself to learning both what he really wants (“respect” is going to come in there somewhere) and why he pulls away from her. She has committed herself to receiving graciously what Albert feels he can afford to give her and she has let him know she is grateful. At the same time, she has honestly said that it is not enough. And she has forced herself to look clearly at the possibility that in time, it may come to be enough for her, if she can adapt herself to them. Sally is a heroine.

Al and Sal, having done these things, have headed down the road to what I am calling “emotional fidelity.” The one with the greater intimacy needs (Sally, in the example) has not blamed, but has treasured her husband’s need for “integrity.” The one with the greater integrity needs (the Albert, in the example) has not blamed but rewarded his wife’s needs for “intimacy.” They are not whole or perfect human beings, but they have achieved emotional fidelity.

These few steps are, one more time, the road that leads to the solution. They are not the whole solution although just these few steps go beyond what I have seen in many marriages. Besides, the most fundamental and necessary human understanding is that the world other live in is not the same as the world that I live in. These others are not delusional, as I first thought; they are just different from me. And, furthermore, they have the same problem with me that I have with them. This one understanding is monumentally important and it isn’t about being married; it is about being human.

Teaser

The next shot to be fired will be about a solution to “their” problems. What is emotional intimacy for Albert and Sally is like a garden that both tend. That’s an analogy my friend Sharon likes. The garden has needs that are not Albert’s needs or Sally’s needs. The garden is an “it,” just as the intimacy of their marriage is an “it.” Whatever Albert and Sally might like, the garden needs to be watered and weeded and fertilized and all that. And if they serve it well, it will serve them well.

Or, to use another analogy, is there a kind of emotional intensity that is exactly the fuel their particular marriage runs on best? Is there a way of acting that either balances Albert’s need for integrity with Sally’s need for intimacy? Or is there a way that transcends both integrity and intimacy, as they understand it, and that takes them as a couple to an entirely new area where they become people they are only learning they can be?

[1] So by “emotional fidelity,” the analog to sexual fidelity, I am going to mean doing the things that will identify, pursue, achieve, and sustain the best and most satisfying emotional intimacy possible between these two particular people. “Best” is different from “most.” My view is that “most” is not always “better,” but that “better” really is always better.
[2] Just to be clear, Bette has a sister Sally and this is not her.
[3] Lord Peter didn’t mean strip joints. He means clubs for gentlemen where everyone keeps just the proper distance and where no one intrudes.

False Alarm. My Bad

Did you ever watch a firecracker not go off? It takes a little while to decide to light the next one and a little while more to pick up the not-yet-exploded one. That’s how I felt about Harold Camping’s May 21 End of the World prediction. I was at quite an emotional distance from him; so far, in fact, that I found myself wishing that he wouldn’t hurt himself.

Ordinarily, I would be angry at someone who so misuses scriptures that are important to me. Everyone who treats scripture as if it were a book of code (which he, the author, has been able to crack) or a book of prophecy (of the telling the future kind, not the Thus Saith the Lord kind) or a guide for investment in the stock market, cheapens texts that mean something to me and set me up to be lampooned by the next jerk who wants to package me and Camping in the same box because we read the same book.

But not this time. When I saw this photograph, or one reenacted in imitation of it, I realized I was feeling more sympathy than anger. The sign I saw said, "False Alarm. My bad." I can't read all of this one.


“My Bad” seemed like a collegial sort of thing, as it is when a member of a team who has played his heart out, says, on behalf of his team, “We just didn’t want it enough tonight.”

And right after that, I had a quick little mini-vision of various slaves standing up, one at a time, saying “I am Spartacus.” This is not a sharing of the load of persecution, givien what the Romans had in mind for Spartacus, but a complete shifting of the load. It amounted to “Crucify me, not him.” It seemed an odd sequence to me, but in fact, the Spartacus image followed immediately after the "My Bad" picture.

OK, that’s not what I had in mind. Ridicule me, not Harold Camping. On the other hand, I wondered whether we—some of us—couldn’t manage to treat Camping’s several predictions as the kind of utterance a Tourette’s Syndrome sufferer might make. They are unpredictable; they are often vulgar; they are entirely out of the control of the speaker, and people often feel compassion more than disgust. “I know. He says these things. It’s a shame, but you mustn’t take it personally. And when he’s not saying them, he’s a perfectly nice man.”

Maybe I’ll be angry at him next time, but this time, I’m thinking we might just as well offer him our sympathies—especially since he has only postponed until October—and move on.

Saturday Night Live. Sunday morning, we'll see

I have been so taken by the drama of the Haddad children of Middletown, Maryland. It isn’t the “end of the world” drama. I grew up with that. It isn’t the silliness of Harold Camping’s calculations—although I will say that Doonesbury nailed it in his column this morning. It’s the diversity of responses by the people who are in the situation whether they like it or not. That was the focus of this piece in the New York Times this morning and it is the focus of my ruminations as well.

It is 16 year old Grace Haddad whose response is picked up in the Times headline, “Make My Bed? But You Say the World’s Ending.” Some things come and go, like predictions that the world will end soon. Other things endure forever, like the kinds of reasons kids give for not making their beds.

I marvel, also, at this teenager’s balance. Listen to this one. “My mom has told me directly that I’m not going to get into heaven,” Grace Haddad, 16, said. “At first it was really upsetting, but it’s what she honestly believes.” There may be some “I know I’m talking to a reporter” in the phrasing, but when you put “At first I was really upset” next to “but it’s what she honestly believes,” you get a very stable and balanced teenager.

I sympathize, too, with Kino Douglas. He is an agnostic and his sister Stacey is part of the “end of the world on May 21” group. So far, so good. But, says Kino, “She doesn’t want to talk about anything else.” Ooops. That’s really a tough one. Kino also says he plans to show up at his sister’s house on Sunday morning—the morning after the world didn’t end—to have “a conversation that’s been years in coming.” I don’t know. I don’t think I’d be up to a challenge like that. How could you drop in on a monomaniacal sister on THAT MORNING and be the brother you really ought to me. Thinkin’ of ya, Kino.

Joseph, at age 14, one of the Haddad children, says, “I don’t really have any motivation to try to figure out what I want to do anymore,” he said, “because my main support line, my parents, don’t care.” His mother says she understands that “believers lose friends and you lose family members in the process.” She is “losing a family member;” he is mourning that his parents don’t care about him anymore.

Grace would like to go to a birthday party tonight, “if the world doesn’t end,” but she’d also like to be available for her family, because she thinks they may be emotionally distraught at still

being here.

I think the thing that most caught my interest is that all these reactions are so very normal. They could all be elicited, with different timelines, by the closing of a much-loved local pizza place or the building of a skateboard facility in a nearby park of the erection of a wind turbine just outside your front window. These are very human dilemmas. The difference is that all the relationships will have to be reconfigured on Sunday morning.

Of course, that was true on the first Easter Sunday, too.

Nuclear Crisis in Japan--and Here

What shall we learn from the failure of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in Japan? Until the power of nature made itself felt, things were pretty well controlled by powerful people. As I read this account in the New York Times for May 16, it struck me that earthquakes are hard to predict, but the dominance of the powerful…that’s not so hard to predict.

Hindsight is notoriously unforgiving, certainly, but I don’t have in mind blaming the people who made these costly decisions or even praising the people who warned of the dangers. What strikes me in this account is the banal predictability of it all.

In the U. S., the oil crisis of the early 1970s causes long lines at gas stations and short tempers nearly everywhere. In Japan, it was much more dire. As a result, in 1976, Japan committed to nuclear power as the power of the future. Nuclear power looked pretty good compared to oil, but, as Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismologist and now professor emeritus at Kobe University, said, “The Japanese archipelago is a place where you shouldn’t build nuclear plants,” Oil in unattractive as a fuel because Japan doesn’t have any. Nuclear is unattractive as a fuel because Japan is an earthquake zone. It’s a dilemma.

There was an earthquake near Kobe in 1995 and residents, fearing for their safety, began organizing protests again the operators, Chubu Electric. It’s not easy to protest a strategy that seems to have no alternative. Yasue Ashihara, a protester at another plant, said she believed the company is understating the danger to her city, but that “she has at times felt ostracized from this tightly bound community, with relatives frowning upon her drawing attention to herself.”

In 2007, a district court ruled against the plaintiffs, finding no problems with the safety assessments and measures at Hamaoka. The court appeared to rely greatly on the testimony of Haruki Madarame, a University of Tokyo professor and promoter of nuclear energy, who said it was unlikely that two generators would fail at the same time and, more ominously, that the concerns of the plaintiffs would “make it impossible ever to build anything.”

The protesters were successful in only two cases, both of which were overturned by a higher court. In one of the two cases, residents near the Shika nuclear plant in Ishikawa sued to shut down a new reactor there in 1999. They argued that the reactor, built near a fault line, had been designed according to outdated quake-resistance standards. The court sided with the power company, arguing that the plant had been built according to the new safety standards, adopted in 2006.

And they did meet those standards. The standards had been set by a government panel composed of many experts with ties to nuclear operators. The standards essentially left it to the operators to make sure their plants met the new standards.

It isn’t all that easy for judges either, says Kenichi Ido, the chief judge at the district court at the time. “I think it can’t be denied that a psychology favoring the safer path comes into play,” Mr. Ido said. This would be the “safer path” for the judges, please note: “Judges are less likely to invite criticism by siding and erring with the government than by sympathizing and erring with a small group of experts.”

There is a good deal of incentive for the companies to underestimate or, sometimes, simply to deny the existence of the kinds of risks fault lines represent. In the case of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, the utility that also operates Fukushima Daiichi, did not disclose the existence of an active fault line until an earthquake forced it to. In 1979, residents sued the government to try overturn its decision granting Tepco a license to build a plant there. The Tokyo High Court ruled against the plaintiffs, concluding that no such fault line existed.

“This is ridiculous,” said Hiroaki Koide, an assistant professor at the Research Reactor Institute at Kyoto University. “If anything, Fukushima shows us how unforeseen disasters keep happening. There are still too many things about earthquakes that we don’t understand.”
Until March 11, Mr. Koide had been relegated to the fringes as someone whose ideas were considered just too out of step with the mainstream. Today, he has become an accepted voice of conscience in a nation re-examining its nuclear program.

Yasue Ashihara and Hiroaki Koide are shunned as showboats or as being “out of step with the mainstream.” They bring actions in court, but the operators defend themselves by underestimating and then denying and then, finally, admitting the risks. The admitting part most often occurs after the disaster has occurred. The judges take “the path of safety” by agreeing with the operators and the government, rather than the residents.

When new estimates of the power of the fault lines are presented, new estimates of the robust construction of the power plants are presented. The standards are devised presuming the good faith of the operators, but the operator’s interest in their own success inclines them to cut corners and run risks.

Then a disaster occurs and the protesters are shown to have been right; the operators are shown to have been wrong. Now what? Japan still doesn’t have any oil. The archipelago is still a bad place to build nuclear plants. The government planners still make plans so that it will not be “impossible to build anything ever.” The operators still overestimate the stability of plant construction and underestimate the extent and power of the faults.

Which of these conditions is going to change in Japan? Do we really think any of them are different in the U. S.? Which ones? Will the residents be less vigilant? The government less permissive? The operators more forthcoming? The judges more daring?

I don’t think so.




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One Victim At a Time

Here is a familiar story from Luke 10.

33 But a Samaritan traveller who came on him was moved with compassion when he saw him.
34 He went up to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them. He then lifted him onto his own mount and took him to an inn and looked after him.
35 Next day, he took out two denarii and handed them to the innkeeper and said, "Look after him, and on my way back I will make good any extra expense you have."

There is much to learn from a careful study of the story of the Good Samaritan. You can look at the way Jesus made the members of his audience into the bad guys and a hated ethnic/religious minority into the good guys. Or why the religious people were the bad guys and the heretic the good guys. Or why Jesus, in telling this story, ignored the question he pretended to be answering. He didn’t, as we say today, “buy the premise” of the question. There is, of course, a premise underlying the answer, and we would be justified in wondering whether the lawyer who asked the question noticed that there was another premise available to him and switched over to it.

This post is not about any of those things and it is “about” the Good Samaritan only as a jumping off point. The question I would like to explore today has bothered me for some time. I suspect that is because there is no good answer to it. Here are three stories about the situation the Samaritan encountered.

Story I A Samaritan traveler came upon a victim of highway violence and, although he himself was vulnerable to the same threat, he had an emotional reaction toward the victim and stopped to help him. He administered first aid and took the victim to an inn where he gave instructions that the victim was to be cared for and that he, himself, would pay whatever it cost.
The victim was lucky, in a sense, because travelers didn’t come up that road all the time and not all who came would have stopped to help him. There are some very good reasons for not stopping, simple prudence among them. So even though the victim’s life was saved through the happenstance of a willing helper coming along before it was too late, we call it an uplifting story and name hospitals after the benefactor.

Story II Several versions of the story Jesus told circulated in Jerusalem and Benjamin, who knew the innkeeper, heard one of them and started thinking about it. Benjamin wasn’t a particularly sympathetic person and was not in any way a politically engaged person, but he was gregarious and well-known and well-liked. And while his innkeeper friend had an uplifting story to tell about the satisfactory recovery of his guest and the more than satisfactory profit he had made, Benjamin kept thinking that all the good of this story was just happenstance. What if no one had come along? What if the person who did come along just kept moving?
So Benjamin started talking to his friends at the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce who had friends at the Jericho Chamber of Commerce and they came up with a plan to take some of the happenstance out of this trip. Could encourage tourism too, you never know. The plan involved the regular deployment of groups of five at hourly intervals, starting simultaneously from Jerusalem and from Jericho. Five was a big enough group to deter bandits and one of them would be armed, in any case. All were trained in first aid and carried packs containing oil and wine, with a total value of two denarii.

You can’t stop bandits from preying on travelers, certainly, but the regular provision of medical care and transportation is something that can be done. There is an organizational burden to it, of course, and finding enough volunteers is always a hassle, but Benjamin’s plan leaves everyone better off except the bandits. And, really, who cares about the bandits?

Story III. Simeon heard about Benjamin’s rescue brigades and rolled his eyes. He had been asked to serve on one of the teams and turned it down. He was polite to Benjamin, but that evening he quipped to his wife that the brigands were doing more for economic development than the brigades were. He liked that. It kept running through his mind and eventually it stopped running and just sat down. “Why spend all this time patching up victims when the brigands are just as much victims as the travelers? Has anyone given any thought to what kind of life this must be for them? Surely they wouldn’t choose such a life unless nothing else was possible for them.”

Simeon didn’t have any of the Samaritan’s compassion and not very much of Benjamin’s networking skills, but he did know some people in the unfortunately named Jerusalem Economic Redevelopment Commission. JERC had had some success in getting Empire Redevelopment Grants (ERGs) from Rome and would be open to a new idea.

The first grant enabled economic development planning for the area surrounding the route from Jericho up to Jerusalem. They were lucky on the third try. There was not enough rainfall for the proposed barley farms. There was not enough foot traffic for the proposed water slide. But there was a good deal of silver ore in the mountains. The subsequent grant enabled the establishment of several highly profitable silver mines, which were turned over to the former brigands on the condition that there were to be no more “accidents” happening to travelers.

The outcome pleased everyone. The authorities in Rome were delighted to have ended a source of public disorder in a notoriously volatile part of the empire and to have a source of silver for the denarius coins. The bandits were happy to exchange their marginal and violent life for a stable and prosperous one as prospectors, miners, and dealers in precious metals. The travelers were not pleased because they immediately forgot how dangerous the road was, but they benefitted nonetheless. Simeon was acclaimed by his peers and enriched by his share of the new silver profits—just the merest sliver of the profits; almost as low as a finder’s fee. Simeon’s wife was pleased because Simeon finally stopped telling the “brigands and brigades” story at parties.

True Religion and Undefiled

True religion and undefiled is to feel compassion for the widows and orphans as they are evicted from their homes to make way for an eight-lane expressway. James 1:27, Hess paraphrase.
These three stories make an odd pattern when you consider them together. The “best person” is without question, the Samaritan. He saw, bloody beside the road, not a hated enemy, but a wounded fellow traveler. He was “moved with compassion” and acted on his feelings with prompt, courageous, and generous action. Benjamin’s idea that there was no trusting of happenstance compassion and also no need to, is not all that praiseworthy. Simeon’s idea that he could get an ERG and change the economic climate of eastern Judea was insightful, but not otherwise meritorious.

If you consider this to be a story about compassion, you would rank the characters: 1. The Samaritan. 2. Benjamin. 3. Simeon.

If you consider this to be a story about improving life for everyone, there is no question that you would get: 1. Simeon. 2. Benjamin. 3. The Samaritan. The Samaritan saved the life of one traveler. Benjamin saved the lives of countless travelers. Simeon saved not only the travelers, but the brigands as well.

Theoretically, there is no reason all three characters can’t have all three traits. All three characters have the compassion of the Samaritan, the social skills of the networker, and the economic vision of the developer. Theoretically. Practically, we find that different people have different gifts and that not every economic developer has the compassion of a trauma nurse. That means that most of the time, we will have to choose one approach or another; we will have to valorize one kind of person or another. We will have to rank people by the good they did or by the acted upon feelings they had.

WWJD?

Jesus told his story to frazzle the lawyer. It’s a motive we can all understand. If Jesus were to make a choice among our three characters, there is no question in my mind that he would choose the Samaritan. And that’s the principal thing wrong with WWJD. The question any Christian of our time would want to ask is WWJHMD—what would Jesus have me do? The first thing, obviously, would be to buy a bigger bracelet. But after that, would Jesus—now our adviser, not an itinerant rabbi—want to begin with compassion? Would he say that actions that don’t begin with compassion are unworthy of his followers? Would he say that what Benjamin chose to do is a good thing IF and only IF is began with feelings of compassion on Benjamin’s part?

I hope not. I can imagine myself feeling compassion for a traveler. It is harder to imagine my compassion upon hearing a story about a guy with so little road smarts that he got himself involved in a nasty incident on the road from Jericho. If following Jesus means beginning with compassion, the travelers are the only ones playing the game.

Or would Jesus—the adviser, again, not the teacher—say that providing for the needs of hundreds of travelers is better than providing for the needs of one? Would he single out for special praise the people who have the ideas that benefit many people, even if their emotions were not engaged? Would he consider the hassle of maintaining the network of volunteers to be “faithful service,” or just a nice thing to do? Sweet, but secular. I can tell you that Jesus’ body, his church, is going to have access to the services it values. Services it needs but does not value are going to be outsourced and purchased. You can’t purchase compassion at all, but purchasing networking and volunteer maintenance is surprisingly expensive and all that money comes from the evangelism fund.

Or would Jesus take compassion on the brigands, and in that compassion, praise Simeon? Simeon doesn’t have any people skills at all, but he has vision and he has Imperial contacts. There are a lot of things he could have done that didn’t help anyone on that road—either the travelers or the perpetrators of violence. What he chose to do benefitted everyone and Simeon might be a religious man or not; emotionally engaged with his fellowmen or not. Would Jesus say that the mark of Simeon as a follower of his can be seen in his care for his wife and children, not with his use of his business contacts?

Valuing only compassion is like valuing only a sugar high. And then what?

Emotional Fidelity, Part I

Recently, I wrote a post about sexual fidelity. It wasn’t all that hard to do. I played off of author Andrew Greeley’s well-polished incredulity that “fidelity” was the only virtue defined entirely by what you did not do. So far, so good. Greeley followed up with some ideas about what sexual fidelity could mean in a positive sense—actions you are committed to taking, not actions you are committed to not taking--and gave a breathless chapter or two on what such a relationship would look like.

I drafted comfortably behind Greeley in his rejection of the negative standard and his notion that sexual fidelity mostly meant putting your mind and your heart, not just your plumbing, into the project. So I liked that too.

But then I got to thinking. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

And then, to make matters worse, some people who read the blog asked me to push the relatively easy case for sexual fidelity over into some aspects of marriage that involve “fidelity” just as much, but that are harder to think about. I’m choosing “emotional fidelity.”
What is emotional fidelity? Greeley said that sexual fidelity is not doing, outside the marriage, anything that will damage the husband’s and wife’s sexual intimacy with each other, and doing, within the marriage, whatever it takes for the sexual relationship to be robust and mutually satisfying. [Footnote one] When you look at “sexuality” as “that element in a host of social relationships that bears on sex,” you see instantly that it is a complex web.

Emotional fidelity is a good deal more complicated, but I think it follows the same contours. One of the best movies I ever saw about this phenomenon is the 1984 “Falling in Love.” This sense of starving the relationship—this happened in two couples at the same time—was not something that occurred to me in retrospect. I experienced it while I was watching the movie.
Streep and DeNiro are drawn slowly toward each other, although each of them thinks it is a bad idea. There are two reasons for this outcome. One is that each has a “friend” who is pushing this match, more for their own entertainment than out of any genuine concern. The man and the woman do encounter each other casually during a commute to “the City,” as they say in Connecticut, but nothing would have come of it without the pushing of the friends. That’s one reason. The other is that there is nothing at all going on in either marriage. I’ve lost track of who the other partners are, but Streep, in her marriage, and DeNiro in his marriage, and not seeking the intimacy that will make the relationship whole and strong. They are resting on their oars while the boat drifts over the falls. Here they are meeting on the train. I really do wish you could hear Dave Grusin’s music in the background.

In the next essay, I am going to call that emotional infidelity because the partners do not seek the emotional intensity they should seek—the “not too much, not too little” level--with their mates. In this essay, I want to call it emotional infidelity for another reason. Each seeks emotional comfort outside the marriage rather than inside.

In this case, neither Streep nor DeNiro is finding in the marriage enough intensity to make the meter tick over at all. But let’s imagine it another way. Let’s say that Streep’s need for emotional intimacy is very great and DeNiro’s is not. In a situation like that, what would the standard I am developing for “emotional fidelity” imply? It seems to me that it is Streep’s job to do whatever she can outside the marriage to reduce her intensity needs to levels that her husband can accommodate. It seems to me that DeNiro’s job is to do whatever he can outside the marriage to make him ready both to want more intimacy with his wife. [Footnote two]

I’m not saying what, outside their marriage, would have those two highly desirable effects. For one thing, anything I think of could be turned into a horror story and I don’t want to be responsible for that story. For another, “what would do that” for Streep and for DeNiro is impossibly varied. If collegiality among his fellow workers sharpens his appetite for emotional intimacy with his wife, fine. Fine, especially, if he knows about that effect and does it, in part, for that reason. If exacting pursuit of an art project burns Streep’s intimacy needs down to a level where she can share them with her husband, rather than inundating him with them, fine. Especially if she does that with the knowledge that reduced level it is a gift to her husband as well.

So as dicey as this proposition is, the outlines are simple. Deal with your appetite for emotional intimacy, in your life outside the marriage, in a way that will give you a better chance to share emotional intimacy with your partner inside the marriage. I am hoping that the simple good sense of that will carry the day.

On the other hand, I’m not naïve. I know that it is much easier to blame your partner for not being “what you need” than it is to work at needing what your partner has to give. First, blaming is easier than doing anything about it; but beside that, it is true that you the “too muchness” or the “too littleness” of your partner in the marriage and at the time. It is pretty sophisticated to say, while you are experiencing the conflict at home, “Oh dear, this is not good. I’m sure he (I flipped a coin to see which sex was going to be the example) is doing the best he can right now, but he has not been able to nurture at work, the feelings that would be expressed here at home as a desire for emotional intimacy with me.” This would have to be something she said to herself; saying out loud would be like kicking him where it would really really hurt.

On the other hand, what I am calling emotional fidelity really can be affected positively by planning for your time with your mate and using the time away from him (still using the same example) to help you bring home an emotional appetite that will be a gift and not a demand. And it really cannot be affected by blaming your partner for not having the same kind of emotional needs you have.

So if there is an outside facet to emotional fidelity, it is this: doing, outside the marriage, the things that will support the most rewarding and satisfying sharing of emotional intensity within the marriage. Not doing that is infidelity. Not caring enough to do it is infidelity. Not knowing how to do it, is just work to be done, but refusing to take the trouble to learn what will work—I think that’s emotional infidelity, too.

[Footnote one] I should remember to add, every time I write one of these, that I know these questions come up in relationships that are not marriages. I am presuming marriages when I write these because I am more interested in these issues as they appear in marriages.
[Footnote two] It might be worthwhile to point out here that it is not at all uncommon for the husband to need more emotional intimacy and to be better at giving and receiving it than his wife is. But it is wearisome always to be making both cases when I am arguing that the contours are symmetrical, and the relationship in which the wife wants more intimacy than her husband is more common. At least, it is more commonly written about.
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Living Without God

The easiest way downtown from our house is along Barbur Boulevard. You are going mostly north on Barbur—it weaves a good bit because of the Willamette River just below and the West Hills just above—and just to your right as you pass the Seventh Day Adventist Church, you encounter this sign.

I laughed out loud. I really love this sign. I deeply respect the questions underlying it, since I bear most of them myself. When I imagine myself in conversation with the folks at the Center for Inquiry, I don’t imagine it going very well. Still, when I saw the sign, I felt a wave of collegiality come over me.

First, these guys are in favor of inquiry. I like inquiry. Let’s get to it.

Then, “you don’t need God” for any of the four specified actions. I want to get to the specified actions later, but I want to think now about the position they are attacking. Someone is arguing, apparently, that you need God. Note the instrumental approach. The covenant God made with Israel selected then to be—Tevye’s memorable complaint aside—a chosen people and it was their delight and privilege to be that people. Is there a “need” there I am missing? The gospel, in its most gentrophilic form (occasionally, there just isn’t the word you really want, and you have to dip into the etymological tool kit for your own) form tells the new gentile Christians, “You, who were no people {at all) are now God’s people.” Any desperate need there?

In the perspective of the Center for Inquiry, God is a utility. God is asserted by some to be necessary to some of the most deeply human actions we are capable of: hoping, caring, loving, and living.

You can hope without God. There are some things you can’t hope for without God—maybe I should pause here to note that the sign imagines a “God/god/gods” with no context at all, but I am presuming God as He is known to Christians, so these remarks do not bear at all on God/god/gods” as He or She or They are known to other traditions. You can’t hope to be accepted as “family,” of course. You can’t hope for the “life from above,” as Jesus described it—not because there is anything wrong with Jesus’ description, but only because there is no “life from above” if there is no “above.”

There are other things you can’t hope for either, but I want only to pause here to note that I will have nothing to say here about attaining heaven or avoiding hell. Those are both instrumentalist notions of God, like the notion held by the Center for Inquiry and by all the villains in C. S. Lewis’s compendium of instrumentalists, The Great Divorce.

You can care without God. You can even care deeply about other people without God. Altruism is a part of our genetic inheritance, along with homicidal rage. We wouldn’t have become what we call “human” without learning to care for others without concern for our own welfare. If Christians want to make a case that “caring” and God are connected, we will have to get to doing the kind of caring that wouldn’t otherwise get done.

You can love without God. Of course you can. Humans love. They love good things and bad things. Of course, you can’t love God without God. In the Christian notion, God is both the source of the love we draw on—the ocean from which we draw our little pails of lovingness and stagger back with those pails to our needy families and communities—and the proper object of our love. Christians teach that there is a godly love, agápē, which is characteristic of God and of our rightful love of God.

The hitch about loving is what you love and how you love. Ordinarily, love is a transitive verb and the complications come mostly with what you transition to.

You can live without God. This can’t be the trivial point in which live is equated with exist. It must mean “really live,” in which case, it is the opposite of “really die,” a prospect the serpent tried to assure Eve against in Eden. “Really live” must mean a life of significance and I affirm that heartily. I believe a life of significance is of utmost importance and if it were not, then the people who are “living” in the pods the Matrix has prepared for them are “living” in the same sense as Morpheus and the other members of the Nebuchadnezzar IV, who “live” by avoiding Agents when then can by dying when they can’t. Also, a life of significance is a life that signifies something and if there is no meaning, there is no signification—no sign-ification, if you will allow that.

So the Center for Inquiry is on the hook for a universe of meaning within which we find ourselves and within which we may have “significance.” I wish them well. It is a struggle that means a lot to me and which is, in my own theological commitment, the principal referent of “salvation.”

So good luck, guys. People who as good questions are even more valuable than people who give good answers. Nothing against good answers.

Oh, It's Just Spin

I might be on a roll on what I am calling “polar words.” I raised the question recently of the Oregon campaign against a measure that was “too extreme,” for instance. This is going to be one of those deals where you tentatively call an experience something and as soon as you call it something, you start having it every time you turn around.

I’m thinking of a You Tube video I saw recently called “The Power of Words.” It’s a beautiful little two minute clip of a woman who re-writes the sign of a blind beggar, resulting in a lot more people stopping by to give him money. Interestingly, she didn’t give him any money. All she did was re-write his sign. I’m sure there’s a moral there somewhere, but I’m in a hurry.

I showed this video to a friend who immediately renamed it “The Power of Spin.” Spin. Hmm. How long has it been since you heard that word used in a positively connoted way? Other than as a preparation for weaving, I mean. So “spin” is bad. We will now begin looking for “un-spun” communications.

How’s it coming?

No, it’s OK. It’s a slow MONTH. I can wait.

We could dicker a little, I suppose, about how to define spin, but I don’t see the point to it. Besides, wouldn’t you just try to spin the definition one way, while tried to spin it the other? Spin is a message that has a context or a subtext or an intention and in which the words are chosen to push any of the three either into the foreground of the message or into the background. When it word was coined, in its present context, it referred to some extreme state of message-mongering. You don’t have to tell ME about spin. I grew up during World War II when absolutely everything was marketed with the war in mind: beauty products, pens and pencils, financial instruments, motor vehicles. The subtext of nearly everything was “Win the War” or “Kill the [favorite ethnic slur here]”

Bob Newhart nailed spin in one of his monologues where he led off an account of a disaster on a submarine by saying that the most important thing to be said was that it happened on a slow news day. OK, Bob.

If I ran the world, spin would be (again) a name we use for an emphasis on the effect of a word that is wholly out of keeping with the meaning of the word. “Slow news day” is not what you want most to know about a submarine disaster. “No product is better than X” is not what you want to know about a line of products that are all equally effective. “Not as good as he hoped” is not what you want to know about a disastrous outcome of someone's project.

And if we call things like that spin, we get to have our regular old language back, where it is taken for granted that words have contexts and subtexts and intentions and that’s just fine. It is the perversion of those stable features or our language that deserves to be called spin. Now, as you might have noticed, I do not, in fact, run the world so my hopes for this proposed return to sanity are not high.

The Death of Osama bin Laden

I’m having trouble knowing how to feel about our finally having killed Osama bin Laden. I’m having trouble knowing how to think about it too, which is more immediately troubling, because I usually know what I think before I know how I feel.

I’ve been thinking about this day since President Bush first began to characterize the American response. Here’s a clip from CNN.U.S.

Osama bin Laden is the "prime suspect" in last Tuesday's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and the United States wants to capture him "dead or alive," President Bush said Monday.

Speaking with reporters after a Pentagon briefing on plans to call up reserve troops, Bush offered some of his most blunt language to date when he was asked if he wanted bin Laden dead.

I want justice," Bush said. "And there's an old poster out West I recall, that said, 'Wanted, Dead or Alive.'"

So that’s where I start. A cowboy president talking about a wanted criminal, equating his capture or his death, and calling either “justice.” That’s what President Obama called it too, in his speech last night: “justice.”

Maybe this is the place for me to say that I missed 9/11. I was at the hospital helping to prep my wife for the first of several cancer surgeries. I saw the report on the hospital TV monitors, but I didn’t care very much at the time. I had more pressing matters. As a result, I don’t feel the sense of closing of the circle of this event the way I might have otherwise.

Certainly, I don’t feel bad about bin Laden’s death. He declared war on the United States and we have been killing his followers as fast as we could find them ever since. Our assassination of bin Laden is part of the same war as his attack on the World Trade Center. Wars produce casualties.
On the other hand, successfully prosecuting a war against your enemies is not ordinarily called “justice.” Why is it not “revenge?” Certainly that is the way bin Laden thought of the 9/11 attacks; he was avenging some group—you can almost take your pick—for the acts of war against it/them by the United States.

The good thing about “justice” as an explanatory term is that it suggests a natural ending. A criminal commits a horrific act; he is apprehended, charged, convicted, and sentenced; then “justice is carried out,” whatever that means in practical terms. And then it’s over. The sheriff comes to town, challenges the bad guys, kills the bad guys, and rides off into the sunset to the accompaniment of applause from grateful townspeople. Justice was done, we say.

The bad thing about revenge is that there is no way to punctuate it. With what act does it start? Does it end while there are still potential combatants available? Is it over when the sense of honor that requires it has finally waned to levels that don’t show on the meter anymore? It is over when “what honor requires” has moved beyond tit for tat?

All of our stories begin with 9/11. Everything was fine before that and then a bad person did this awful thing and now we have done an awful thing back and now it’s over. Does that sound at all plausible? I offer the following comparison, not to equate the gravity of the two offenses, but only to point to the difficulties of punctuating events “correctly.” Everything was fine and then Pastor Terry Jones desecrated the Koran, so we retaliated by killing some people from his “group”—that would be the infidel West, I guess—and now it’s over. Does that sound at all plausible?

I appreciate President Obama’s sober approach to this event in his speech. I admire the speech itself. Having written a fair number of speeches, I admire the craftsmanship. Had I written the speech, I am sure I would have advised him to use the word “justice” just as he did.

But the fact is, “justice” is a term in a certain kind of story and this is not that kind of story.

Roman Agriculture in Early Britain

It is well known that many English words come to us from the languages of other nations and from other periods of history. Sometimes entire phrases are lifted out of one specialized context and placed in another and come, in time, to seem puzzling.

Take the case of Roman agriculture in Britain, for example. Much more is known about the routine practices of their agriculture once established than about the Romans' first development of virgin farmland. It is therefore not well known that their customary procedure for first putting the plow to new land was the "round' system. A plot of land thought to be capable of cultivation was chosen first; then the farthest perimeter of plowable land was established. This perimeter was called the first round. The second was just inside it, toward the originally chosen plot, and so on. Depending on the ambitions of the Roman agriculturalist or his access to sturdy native labor, the first round might be as much as 10 or 12 rounds away from the center.

Native labor was quite important because the horses were kept exclusively for the use of the Roman army and the rocky British soil would have, in any case, daunted even a sturdy draft animal. Still, as in the United States many centuries later when human beings were called on to do what animals could have done better had they been available, so in Roman Britain humans were used as draft animals.

Not Roman humans, as a rule. There was always the 'sturdy native labor" alluded to earlier. The sturdiness of the natives was never in doubt. Hadrian's Wall was built in testimony to the ferocity of the northern tribes, some of whom objected to the Roman presence in the most colorful and direct ways. Of these tribes, the Picts were among the fiercest and most relentless. Pict warriors were quite strong as individuals and together, as a fighting force, they challenged even the legendary military discipline of Rome.

Building a wall to keep them out was, therefore, only a short term strategy. Finding some way to use them as "agricultural laborers,” if serving as draft animals can be dignified by such a term, was the preferred long term solution. A standard part of Roman strategy,
once that was seen, was directed to dividing the attacking Picts, not simply holding them off. Then an effort was made to capture isolated Pict warriors and carry them south to serve the Roman cause by putting new fields to the plow.

Often it took several captives to drag the crude plow on the long first round because the perimeter was so long and the ground so hard. Occasionally, a particularly powerful Pict would show himself capable of making the entire first round by himself. It was a point of pride for a Roman landowner to have acquired such a powerful worker and he was very reluctant to part with him. Since he would be valuable to any Roman agriculturalist, however, there was sometimes a brisk bidding for the services of such a worker and on occasion the price, driven by an amalgam of ego and necessity, reached ridiculous heights.

Although the circumstances in which the expression first arose have been forgotten for centuries, there are many owners in America even today who would sell their souls for a first round draft Pict.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.