Local Corpses are Best

When I go somewhere I’ve never been, I like to find a bookstore and ask if they have any murder mysteries set there. It is a bonus if the author is also local, but it is how local the murder and associated events are that matters most to me. I tried this first in Alaska in 2004. That is the way I got reconnected with grad school friend Sue Henry and her first book, Murder on the Iditarod Trail, became my introduction to Alaska.


And I’ve been doing it ever since. Last week, Bette and I were in the San Juan Islands, in Washington. We hit a bookstore the first day and got the name Sharon Duncan. The next day we found a copy of Death on a Casual Friday at a used bookstore.

This is a really easy way to get accustomed to local landmarks, customs, attitudes, and institutions. It is particularly easy if the book is a good book in its own right. I think Sue Henry might have spoiled me in that regard. Sharon Duncan is no Sue Henry. If is not a particularly good book, it still might be an excellent introduction to the area, but now it requires a more focused treatment.

I call it “strategic reading,” but by that term, I only mean reading the book in the way that best meets my needs, rather than in the way it was written to be read. The whole middle section of Duncan’s book, for instance, takes place in California. That is necessary for the plot to develop as she wants it to develop, but it doesn’t do anything for my interest in the geography and local cuisine of Friday Harbor. So I paged through it fast enough to make sure I knew where the plot was headed. I think the designation on my VCR would have been about 4X fast forward. Probably.

She comes back home to San Juan Island for a final showdown with the bad guy(s). At that point, I slow down again. She is dodging around the island on roads Bette and I drove on with somewhat less speed and a good deal less urgency. All turns out well for Scotia MacKinnon, the tough but feminine but haphazard but insightful heroine.

It turned out well for me, too. With about an hour and a half invested in finishing the book, I had time left over to go out and explore a little of Friday Harbor. Beautiful place, Friday Harbor. Except that the whole downtown area gets to hear the partying at Herb’s Tavern (10 Front Street) from about midnight until about 2:00 a.m.

Ms. Duncan might have mentioned that, but she didn’t. And Scotia MacKinnon never went there either, so how were we to know?

Sounding Smart

It's not all bad, I suppose. Everyone wants to be liked and included. Or, as my grad school mentor, Jim Davies says, to be a part. And everyone wants to be looked up to and admired as having a little something extra. Or, as Davies says, to be apart. So we say the quirky little things that our linguistic tribe says, the tribe to which we belong or the tribe to which we aspire.

But even so, there's a right way and a wrong way. I'm thinking of the suffix -centric. The practice of using -centered, on the one hand and -centric on the other was so routine that it never occurred to me to formulate a rule about it. You said "human-centered" if that was the expression that fit best and anthropocentric if that worked best.

If there were a rule--and there probably is--it would be that if you want to use -centric, use the Greek or Latin root from which the English word is derived and slap the suffix onto it. If you want to use -centered, use the current English form. So you might talk about an Anglocentric alliance, for example or an English-centered alliance. You would never, ever, under any circumstances, refer to an English-centric alliance. If that language is a way of aspiring to a tribe defined by careful language use, I can guarantee you that it won't work very well.

My guess is that -centric sounds smart. And you know what it means. So you just slap it on. For now, I think any reader who is used to careful use of language just rolls his eyes when, in the middle of a column about the psychiatric world view, the word "penis-centric" shows up. My concern is that if people keep doing it, it will be accepted as appropriate and the mixture of language traditions in English will proceed apace.

It will become a fait accomplished. My advice--unsought, as usual--is, if you don't know the root, just say it in English.

Michael

I have enjoyed John Travolta in nearly every part he has played. When I heard that he was going to be the Archangel, Michael, I knew I didn’t want to miss it. I saw it and I liked it and I didn’t think anything more about it for several years. Then it struck me that most of the screen time of the movie is spent on things that have nothing at all to do with the plot. That interested me.

If you arrange all the events of the plot, some explicit and others only implied, you get something like this. Michael, the Archangel (THE Michael) likes earth and wants an excuse to come back. He makes a bet with someone. He tells it as the old story of the North Wind and the Sun betting who can get a man to remove his coat. In this story, someone—Michael doesn’t say who but he is an advocate of coercion—bets that by treating Frank Quinlan (William Hurt) harshly, he can get Quinlan to open his heart to love. It doesn’t seem all that plausible, but there must be a bet so Michael can come to earth. Michael plays “the sun” in this bet. His idea is that Quinlan can be brought to vulnerability and love in a more caring way.

So Michael comes to earth in response to Pansy Milbank’s insistent prayers that the bank not be allowed to foreclose on her little motel. While Michael is there, Pansy writes to Quinlan, a reporter for a supermarket tabloid, saying the there is an angel living with her and that he should come and see it. Quinlan shows up with his buddy, Huey Driscoll (Robert Pastorelli) and a supposed “angel expert,” Nancy Winters (Andie McDowell). All are satisfied that Michael is, in fact, an angel and they get him to agree to go to Chicago with them. He gets them to agree to go by car. “We need more time,” he says, not saying what the “more time” is for. We know that it is so he can shine on Quinlan long enough for him to take his jacket off.

At that point, all the rest of the movie happens. Quinlan and Winters fall in love. Then Michael dies (goes home) and they fall out of love again. This shows good judgment on Winters' part because Quinlan instantly returns to being the cold manipulative SOB he was at the beginning of the story.

Now comes the part that really interested me this time. Michael is gone. Quinlan has been fired from his job. He and Winters are “over.” Quinlan and his buddy Driscoll meet at a bar and discuss all that happened. All those days and nights of unforgettable wonder.

Quinlan.: As far as I’m concerned, it never happened.
Driscoll: But we were there. We saw it.
Quinlan: No. Never happened.
Driscoll: So…where’s your raincoat? (he gave it to Michael)
Quinlan: It never happened and you know why? Because if it happened, I’d have to believe that wonderful and unaccountable things could happen to me for no reason at all. And I don’t want to believe that. I refuse to believe that such things are possible. So I resolutely deny what you and I both saw and lived for all those days.

What Quinlan actually says is played out on the screen as an alternative and unacceptable chain of events, but I have described what it really means. He’s right, in a way. If he continues to remember all those events with Michael, he would have to believe in the possibility of a fundamentally different life than he is living.

It is easier to deny the facts you know are true than it is to allow for the possibility wonderful gifts you didn’t deserve.

Fortunately for Quinlan—and for Winters as well—Michael hasn’t “gone home” yet and he has not because his work isn’t done. Really, that means he hasn’t yet won the bet, but the plot requires him to be more serious, here at the end. So Michael leads Quinlan on a wild goose chase through Chicago and simultaneously leads Winters on a similar goose chase, the result of which is that they run into each other on the street corner where both thought Michael was. They reconcile. Quinlan “opens his heart to love.” Michael wins the bet. And the movie is over.

Choking

“Choking” is a really bad habit if you ever want to win the Masters. Those little three foot puts that you can put in the cup 999 times out of a thousand—they rim out or stop short. It makes you feel bad that you missed the shot, but you feel a lot worse because you can’t escape the feeling that you were the weak link. The ball was good, the green was good, the putter was good; the bad part was you. You choked.

That’s a bad thing, no doubt about it, but let me offer another line of work by contrast. I’m thinking of gunfighting. You choke there and you won’t have to worry about the Masters next year or the press coverage this year. For the last couple of days, I have been reading Blue-eyed Devil, by Robert Parker. Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) is the principal gunslinger in these books and his deputy, Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), is the narrator. Here’s his assessment of Virgil’s state of mind at the crucial moment. "Virgil was in the place he goes when it might be time to shoot. Everything registered and nothing mattered." That sounds just perfect to me. If Virgil golfed, I’ll bet he would be a superb putter.

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It turns out that a lot of work has been done on the choking phenomenon. Today’s (June 13) New York Times reviewed the work of Sian Bielock at the University of Chicago. It won’t surprise any of you, I imagine, that it is the activity in the prefrontal cortex that causes the problem. When you get to thinking too much about an activity that you can do well only without thinking about it, it’s the prefrontal cortex you are using. Well, overusing.

Bielock says that are ways to train yourself not to overthink. She says you can train your brain to react more productively. You can give it something else to do, just to keep it busy and out of your way. You can practice under pressure. You can act promptly, rather than delaying and analyzing too much.

But I think Virgil has it right. There is a place you can go when you might need to shoot. It’s quiet there. You are aware of everything, but you really don’t care all that much.

Context is Everything

Don’t leave home without it.

This is a brief reflection on a movie I like very much. None of the critics shared my feelings, it seems, but I reserve the right to admit I like things that only a simpleminded person would like. This is The Joneses, starring David Duchovny and Demi Moore.

The plot, in brief, is that Steve and Kate (that’s Duchovny and Moore) are pretending to be husband and wife and parents to two perfect kids. It’s a stealth marketing scheme. The idea is that this perfect family—the Joneses—have a lot of toys and you too, if you buy all those toys, can be perfect. And, if you are Mr. Jones, you can have the perfect toy as your wife. That is the dialogue underlying this scene,

What nobody seems to have foreseen is the possibility that Steve might really fall for Kate. Not just take advantage of pretending to be her husband, but actually want a real relationship with her. That is just what happens, though. And no sooner has Steve realized that this is the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with than he realizes that the demands of pretending to be “the Joneses” will prevent him from doing that. They can’t really be husband and wife while they are pretending to be Mr. and Mrs. Jones.

That’s the first horn of the dilemma. The second horn is that this “family” works for an outfit called LifeImage and KC (Lauren Hutton) works for LifeImage. Her job is to see to it that the Joneses and all the other families she supervises reach their potential as marketers of a certain style of life and all the toys that are necessary to sustain it. KC thinks Steve Jones really hasn’t focused the way he should, so she gives him a pep talk.

This is the point where context is so important. Had KC realized that Steve had fallen or would fall so hard for Kate, she would never have said this: “The question you have to ask is, “How far are you willing to go to get what you want?” She assumes that “what he wants” is going to be the money and the reputation that goes with being the top salesman for LifeImage.

In fact, what Steve wants is Kate. And when he has grasped the meaning of the question—How far are you willing to go?—he wrecks the whole family by telling all to the neighbors. Kate and “the kids” escape and set up another Jones family with a new Mr. Jones. But Steve finds them and comes in the back door for a heart to heart talk with Kate. After which, she leaves LifeImage as well and the two of them drive off together into the sunset.

Had KC known what Steve really wanted, she would no doubt have found a different motivational question to ask him. You really have to get the context right because, you know, it’s everything.

Small Government Odyssey (SGO) Creationism

This post continues my Small Government Odyssey (SGO), a series of reflections on what it would take to reduce the size of government on the one hand, while seeing to it that the legitimate needs of the citizens are met (by someone, but not by the national government) on the other.

The diagram shows economic, social, and political sectors. My argument is that to the extent that the needs of the citizens are met in the social sector (families, schools, neighborhoods, clubs, etc.) and in the economic sector (producers make money, consumers receive affordable goods and services, employees receive a living wage), there will no appeal to the political sector. The size of government, accordingly, will shrink. So will the proportion of the GNP it consumes and the power it gets from making authoritative decisions on the appeals made to it by dissidents in the economic and social sectors.

This view does not distinguish between legitimate dissidents and illegitimate ones. In the small government business, the focus is on reducing the appeals to the national government made by people who think they aren't being treated fairly in the social and economic sectors. It is what they think, not what a panel of fair-minded citizens decide, that makes them want to invite government in--an action we all pay for in higher taxes and fewer freedoms. You can do that by simple repression, of course, but repression gets expensive after a while, so that is self-defeating. You can do it by lowering expectations, but the principal commercial strategy involves raising expectations, so that isn't a sure thing either. You can do it by coopting resentment or by deflecting it to other targets, but whenver that fails, the federal government is there, looking for an invitation to substitute their judgment for yours.

In fact, school boards are governments, so they are part of the polity. The force of these questions, however, has to do with the national government, so for the purpose of this question, I am going to consider the school boards as part of society, rather than polity. If we want the national government to stop interfering with the preferences of local boards and the parents who elect them to office, what would we have to do?Since the Constitution forbids any promiscuous mixing of religion and government, we would have to find that Creationism is not a “religious doctrine.” It is a theory, like any other, about the origins of our world and the species of plants and animals that have come to live on it. Evolution is a theory and Creationism is a theory and which theory is to be taught is to be at the discretion of the local voters. That would work. The national government does not intervene in local school district decisions to mandate balanced histories or any particular approach to art or any of several methods of teaching arithmetic.

Under this scenario, biology would work the same way.Once the political hysterics had quieted down, however, the professional side of the question would have a chance to emerge. Just as there are pharmacists who refuse, on personal grounds, to dispense drugs they disapprove of, so we might find some biologists who refuse, on professional grounds, to teach poorly supported theories in place of well-supported ones. Just as the voters who elected the judge must share their authority with the judge’s professional promises, so the school district voters would have to share their authority with the teacher’s professional promises. It wouldn’t be an altogether bad idea if science teachers adopted “First, Do No Harm” as their professional motto.

If there were a professional certification by the Biology Teachers of America (so far as I know, a fictitious organization) and if you couldn’t teach biology without a professional certificate, then schools would have to choose between certificated biologists—who would emphasize the value of well-supported over poorly supported theories—and noncertificated biologists, who would teach anything the school board demanded of them. Parents might gather in silent protest at the home of a certificated science teacher who refused to teach Creationism in his biology class, but the teacher has his oath to protect him and the parents would have to choose between a well-prepared teacher for their children and an ill-prepared one.

Presumably, colleges and universities would not be forced to treat applications equally—those from school districts with professionally certificated teachers and those from districts without them. It would take action by the national government to require them to accept students who were, in the judgment of the university, ill-prepared for university work. We are trying to do without national government intervention and besides, there is the question of the grounds on which the government might intervene.

The Constitution requires the intervention of the national government in the affairs of the school districts IF Creationism is a religious doctrine.[1] If it is not a religious doctrine, then the present appeal to national government authority falls short and local preferences prevail. This provides a wonderful opportunity for biology professionals to decide what they are willing to do, as educators, and what they will need to refuse to do because of the harm it would cause.

For myself, I would rather see a conflict between a popularly elected school board, on the one hand, and professionally accountable biologists on the other than a conflict between a national government wielding the Constitution and local school boards wielding parent preference. I think it would be a more useful conflict and I am quite sure it would be more fun.

[1] It wouldn’t have to be religious. There are agnostic versions. “The earth and all subsequent living things were created at a single recent time, but the data now at hand provide us no way to say how that happened.” There are thousands of theistic versions. Nearly every culture, no matter how small or how isolated, has an account of how the god [name of local deity] or the gods [name of college of local deities] created the world and all that is therein. There could be a rotation of Creation myths, using each in turn.

D-Day and Global Warming

Questions don’t aggregate the way purchases do. When you have a million purchases, they push up “consumer demand.” When you have a million questions, they might not aggregate to anything at all.

Democracies are better in crisis conditions. The Framers devised a government that wouldn’t work very well under most circumstances, but when a crisis loomed, cooperation would span the chasms that normally separated the branches from each other and the states from the federal government and “considerate and virtuous citizens” from the uneducated rabble. Madison’s republic is built on social distrust and Newtonian mechanics. In a crisis, we get to keep the mechanics, but the common threat does temporary duty as “trust” and we work together. That’s the idea.

You’d think we could do it better than that after a while. Still, every looming (as opposed to an actually occurring) crisis takes power from some and gives it to others. That means that the industry of pointing to and describing the steady advance of a “looming crisis” is a rapidly growing industry. Taking one step in any direction is hazardous if there is a slippery slope two steps in every direction. And if experts, now widely reviled as the tools of [fill in name of group] can’t be trusted—and they can’t if there is always a group of “my experts” opposed by a group of “your experts”—then every uneducated opinion is as good as any other.

Under those circumstances, questions don’t aggregate. Therefore answers don’t aggregate. Therefore planning for crises that are certain but not immediate, is stuck in the governmental dilemma the Framers built for us.

I have global warming in mind. The idea of the canary in the coalmine is a warning sign from the standpoint of the miners. When the canary dies, we miners feel an urgent need to get out and get some fresh air. But with global warming, everyone feels that someone else is “the miners.” We are prepared to mourn the loss of that innocent canary, but we still believe in coal and we aren’t the ones in the mine. But, of course, we are.

It is a difficulty, particularly in the case of global warming where we actually ARE the miners, but it is not a new difficulty. Here are a couple of clips from Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War. It’s a fictional account, but Wouk continually faces the dilemma of making up “new facts” when the actual ones are widely known, or just using the correct ones. In those circumstances, he simply fills in the true history as the context for his characters, some of which are fictional (Pug Henry) and some of which are not (FDR).

On Memorial Day, 1940, the actual President Roosevelt asks the fictional Pug Henry to join him in the President’s reviewing stand. During the parade, Roosevelt handed Henry a slip of paper with these numbers on it.

Public Attitude Toward War, 28 May 1941
For getting in if no other way to win 75%
Think we’ll eventually get in 80%
Against our getting in now 82%

Here’s a little speech Roosevelt gave to Pug Henry along with the slip of paper. So far as I know, the speech is fictional, but the concerns were thought to be strategically plausible.
“If we get into war, Hitler will at once walk into French West Africa. He’ll have the Luftwaffe at Dakar, where they can jump over to Brazil. He’ll put new submarine pens there, too. The Azores will be in his palm. The people who are screaming for convoy now (“screaming their opposition to U. S. convoys,” he means) simply ignore these things. Also the brute fact that 82%...of our people don’t want to go to war.”

This is May 1940. In August 1940 the Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, just in case the United States might need an army if it were to enter the war. The bill passed the House of Representatives by a single vote, and even that might have benefited from the very agile gavel of Speaker Sam Rayburn. In December, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and we declared ourselves in a state of war against “the axis powers.” Roosevelt in his little speech was looking at the seemingly unstoppable German army on the one hand and the implacable opposition to war by four fifths of Americans on the other.

In this instance, Japan provided us the canary in the coal mine. That is what got us from that 82% to D-Day in France, 67 years ago today. The attack on Pearl Harbor wasn’t just a catastrophe; it was an act of war. It was the infliction of harm by a navy willing and able to inflict it. Being attacked, like the prospect of being hanged, “concentrates the mind wonderfully. I chose a landing craft view for D-Day, by the way, because a friend of mine at church piloted one of those on D-Day. It's not the most graphic picture of the invasion I have ever seen, but it is the one he saw, so it matters to me.

Global warming isn’t like that. No one attacks. Polar bears drown. The mythical “Northwest Passage” becomes actual. Investors are buying up land on which wheat has never been grown so they will own it when the temperatures and the rainfall at those new latitudes will support wheat farming. The water at Florida’s coastlines is rising, by my best recollection, at the rate of an inch a decade. Here is a collection of more scary stuff.

But the questions about global warming and what to do about it don’t aggregate into a single national concern. No one has attacked us. The canary hasn’t died. And most of the people think there will be plenty of time to “do something” when the crisis in upon us. Then they will demand that Congress pass HR 1, the “End Global Warming Now” Act. Then they will complain about the untrustworthiness of government when the climate doesn’t turn around, as Congressional mandate has instructed it to, and return to the values of 1700 A. D.

If it was a real crisis, someone would have warned us, right?