DarwinCatholic

The Awkwardness of Having a Body

2012-02-01T11:26:00.000-05:00

In 2008 Steven Pinker, a professor of Psychology at Harvard, wrote about The Stupidity of Dignity. Pinker was angry that the President's Council on Bioethics had called for caution in approaching certain avenues of medical innovation because they might constitute an assault on human dignity. Besides venting his anti-Christian bias (and, to be fair, he does pull out a rather ridiculous statement by Leon Kass on the slippery slope posed by those who lick ice cream cones in public, though opposition to ice cream licking is not generally considered to be founded in theology), Pinker uses his platform to ridicule the concept of dignity and posit that autonomy ought to trump dignity in any bioethics discussion.

Why am I bringing up an article from 2008? I never read it at the time, but I did just read Christopher Kaczor's recent response to Pinker at Public Discourse. Kaczor takes on several of Pinker's statements about autonomy and answers them intelligently, but what struck me particularly was that he never fully addressed Pinker's mistaken concept of dignity.

Pinker says:

Dignity is a phenomenon of human perception. Certain signals from the world trigger an attribution in the mind of a perceiver. Just as converging lines in a drawing are a cue for the perception of depth, and differences in loudness between the two ears cue us to the position of a sound, certain features in another human being trigger ascriptions of worth. These features include signs of composure, cleanliness, maturity, attractiveness, and control of the body. The perception of dignity in turn elicits a response in the perceiver. Just as the smell of baking bread triggers a desire to eat it, and the sight of a baby's face triggers a desire to protect it, the appearance of dignity triggers a desire to esteem and respect the dignified person.
This explains why dignity is morally significant: We should not ignore a phenomenon that causes one person to respect the rights and interests of another. But it also explains why dignity is relative, fungible, and often harmful. Dignity is skin-deep: it's the sizzle, not the steak; the cover, not the book. What ultimately matters is respect for the person, not the perceptual signals that typically trigger it. Indeed, the gap between perception and reality makes us vulnerable to dignity illusions. We may be impressed by signs of dignity without underlying merit, as in the tin-pot dictator, and fail to recognize merit in a person who has been stripped of the signs of dignity, such as a pauper or refugee.

Dignity as a phenomenon? If that's how you define dignity, of course it's a useless concept for guiding important moral decisions. It fits, however, with every example Pinker provides of "dignity", which all have to do with surface-level attributes or social perceptions.

So, despite the best efforts of the contributors, the concept of dignity remains a mess. The reason, I think, is that dignity has three features that undermine any possibility of using it as a foundation for bioethics.
First, dignity is relative. One doesn't have to be a scientific or moral relativist to notice that ascriptions of dignity vary radically with the time, place, and beholder. In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. We chuckle at the photographs of Victorians in starched collars and wool suits hiking in the woods on a sweltering day, or at the Brahmins and patriarchs of countless societies who consider it beneath their dignity to pick up a dish or play with a child. Thorstein Veblen wrote of a French king who considered it beneath his dignity to move his throne back from the fireplace, and one night roasted to death when his attendant failed to show up. Kass finds other people licking an ice-cream cone to be shamefully undignified; I have no problem with it.
Second, dignity is fungible. The Council and Vatican treat dignity as a sacred value, never to be compromised. In fact, every one of us voluntarily and repeatedly relinquishes dignity for other goods in life. Getting out of a small car is undignified. Having sex is undignified. Doffing your belt and spread- eagling to allow a security guard to slide a wand up your crotch is undignified. Most pointedly, modern medicine is a gantlet of indignities. Most readers of this article have undergone a pelvic or rectal examination, and many have had the pleasure of a colonoscopy as well. We repeatedly vote with our feet (and other body parts) that dignity is a trivial value, well worth trading off for life, health, and safety.
Third, dignity can be harmful. In her comments on the Dignity volume, Jean Bethke Elshtain rhetorically asked, "Has anything good ever come from denying or constricting human dignity?" The answer is an emphatic "yes." Every sashed and be-medaled despot reviewing his troops from a lofty platform seeks to command respect through ostentatious displays of dignity. Political and religious repressions are often rationalized as a defense of the dignity of a state, leader, or creed: Just think of the Salman Rushdie fatwa, the Danish cartoon riots, or the British schoolteacher in Sudan who faced flogging and a lynch mob because her class named a teddy bear Mohammed. Indeed, totalitarianism is often the imposition of a leader's conception of dignity on a population, such as the identical uniforms in Maoist China or the burqas of the Taliban.

Kaczor examines this section of Pinker's argument and makes good points about why autonomy has the same problems Pinker finds in dignity, but doesn't fully engage (I think) with Pinker's odd definition of dignity.

Having a body necessitates a certain awkwardness at time. Yes, it's awkward to get out of a small car. Sex is incredibly awkward when the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, or when the flesh is willing but the spirit is weak. I have a pressing sinus headache today, which dulls all my reflexes and makes me feel unbelievably stupid today. Any of these examples can cause a person to look or act ridiculous (though in my current state of la tete lourde, I'm inclined to think that a sinus affliction is the most bizarre of the three). But none of them negates a person's dignity, which is (according to the Catholic thought that Pinker finds so jejeune) a worth that is intrinsic to humans, not something that can be peeled on or off or which alters according the whims of the perceiver.

Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation Breaks Partnership with Planned Parenthood

2012-01-31T17:52:00.002-05:00

In a piece of very good news, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation has announced that they are breaking the partnership they have maintained for some years with Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood is miffed, calling the decision "deeply disturbing and disappointing." From The Hill (linked above):

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation has broken off a partnership through which it provided cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood clinics, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. Planned Parenthood blamed the political controversy over abortion.

“We are alarmed and saddened that the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation appears to have succumbed to political pressure. Our greatest desire is for Komen to reconsider this policy and recommit to the partnership on which so many women count,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Planned Parenthood said its clinics provided about 4 million screenings for breast cancer over the past five years, roughly 170,000 of which were supported by Komen grants.

Planned Parenthood said it has established an emergency fund to offset the loss of the Komen funds.

Komen told the AP that it ended its partnership with Planned Parenthood because of a congressional investigation into the organization. Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce committee have requested detailed financial records from Planned Parenthood.

This seems like an utterly obvious thing for Komen to do, and frankly it's surprising it's taken so long. Planned Parenthood is radioactive for a significant and vocal minority of the US population. There is no reason for an organization whose sole purpose is to promote cancer awareness and research to associate them with an organization so polarizing.

The Associated Press story features Planned Parenthood officials whining a good deal about the decision:

“We’re kind of reeling,” said Patrick Hurd, who is CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Virginia — recipient of a 2010 grant from Komen — and whose wife, Betsi, is a veteran of several Komen fundraising races and is currently battling breast cancer.

“It sounds almost trite, going through this with Betsi, but cancer doesn’t care if you’re pro-choice, anti-choice, progressive, conservative,” Hurd said. “Victims of cancer could care less about people’s politics.”

Planned Parenthood said the Komen grants totaled roughly $680,000 last year and $580,000 the year before, going to at least 19 of its affiliates for breast-cancer screening and other breast-health services.

Komen spokeswoman Leslie Aun said the cutoff results from the charity’s newly adopted criteria barring grants to organizations that are under investigation by local, state or federal authorities. According to Komen, this applies to Planned Parenthood because it’s the focus of an inquiry launched by Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., seeking to determine whether public money was improperly spent on abortions.

Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, has depicted Stearns’ probe as politically motivated and said she was dismayed that it had contributed to Komen’s decision to halt the grants to PPFA affiliates.

“It’s hard to understand how an organization with whom we share a mission of saving women’s lives could have bowed to this kind of bullying,” Richards told The Associated Press. “It’s really hurtful.”

It's unfortunate that it took a technicality such as Planned Parenthood being under Federal investigation in order to get this partnership broken off. One would hope that if the Komen Foundation is truly focused on cancer advocacy they would understand it can only hurt their cause to ally with a group involved in such incredibly controversial behavior as Planned Parenthood.

However, regardless of the inciting incident, one hopes that the Komen foundation will realize that Planned Parenthood is a group they should absolutely not get back into bed with.

Howard Zinn, Neo-Confederate

2012-01-31T11:54:00.000-05:00

While I disagree with him on a host of political issues, I follow Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog at The Atlantic closely because of his consistently well written and fascinating posts on history and literature. Many of these are on the Civil War, which has in recent years become a topic of great interest to him.

There was a particularly interesting pair of these a couple weeks ago in which Coates and his commenters discussed (in the context of Ron Paul's repeated statements that the Civil War was unnecessary) the fact that left wing icon Howard Zinn actually peddles the several of the neo-confederate tropes: that the Civil War was fought for Northern economic domination and had little to do with slavery, and that a the Civil War clearly wasn't necessary in order to end slavery anyway. [First post on Ron Paul, Howard Zinn and the Civil War. Second, followup post.] The specific Howard Zinn text that they go after (because it's conveniently online) is a lecture he gave called Three Holy Wars, in which he tries to make a case for why people should not see the Revolutionary War, American Civil War or American involvement in World War II as moral or just -- something he argues is important because seeing any past wars as just allows people to justify other wars on analogy.

Zinn proceeds to run through most of the standard complaints against the "War of Northern Aggression":
It was really, really bad:

Slavery. Slavery, nothing worse. Slavery. And at the end of the Civil War, there’s no slavery. You can’t deny that. So, yeah, you have to put that on one side of the ledger, the end of slavery. On the other side, you have to put the human cost of the Civil War in lives: 600,000. I don’t know how many people know or learn or remember how many lives were lost in the Civil War, which was the bloodiest, most brutal, ugliest war in our history, from the point of view of dead and wounded and mutilated and blinded and crippled. Six hundred thousand dead in a country of 830 million. Think about that in relation today’s population; it’s as if we fought a civil war today, and five or six million people died in this civil war. Well, you might say, well, maybe that’s worth it, to end slavery. Maybe. Well, OK, I won’t argue that. Maybe. But at least you know what the cost is.

The Civil War didn't meaningfully free them anyway:

But you also have to think, the slaves were freed, and what happened after that? Were they really freed? Well, they were, actually — there was no more slavery — but the slaves, who had been given promises — you know, forty acres and a mule — they were promised, you know, a little land and some wherewithal so they could be independent, so they needn’t be slaves anymore. Well, they weren’t given anything. They were left without resources. And the result was they were still in the thrall, still under the control of the plantation owner. They were free, but they were not free. There have been a number of studies made of that, you know, in the last decade. Free, but not free. They were not slaves now. They were serfs. They were like serfs on a feudal estate.

And it wasn't about slavery anyway:

After all, when the war started, it wasn’t Lincoln’s intention to free the slaves. You know that. That was not his purpose in fighting the war. His purpose in fighting the war was to keep Southern territory within the grasp of the central government. You could almost say it was an imperial aim. It was a terrible thing to say, I know. But yeah, I mean, that’s what the war was fought for. Oh, it’s put in a nice way. We say we fought for the Union. You know, we don’t want anybody to secede. Yeah. Why no? What if they want to secede? We’re not going to let them secede. No, we want all that territory.

No, Lincoln’s objective was not to free the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation came. And by the way, it didn’t free slaves where they were enslaved.

And if we'd just waited, the problem probably would have gone away:

So, the Civil War and its aftermath, you know, have to be looked at in a longer perspective. And yes, the question needs to be asked also: yeah, is it possible if slavery could have been ended without 600,000 dead? We don’t know for sure. And when I mention these possibilities, you know, it’s very hard to imagine how it might have ended, except that we do know that slavery was ended in every other country in the western hemisphere. Slavery was ended in all these others places in the western hemisphere without a bloody civil war.

Zinn is trying to build the case against war in general, and so the arguments he finds most readily to hand are the arguments of defenders of secession. Ironically, this means that he uses exactly the same neo-confederate arguments which Coates and his readers (mostly progressive and strongly influenced by the school of historians such of James M. McPherson who did the research to show that the Civil War was the ultimate civil rights issue) have spent so much time and research rebutting.

There was a certain wistfulness I sensed in Coates and some of his commenters at finding someone some of them had seen as an icon, someone who in many cases was the first one to present a version of history which complicated the simple narrative they'd heard in school, at finding that Zinn had swallowed such a clearly problematic set of justifications in order to drive his overall pacifist historical agenda. I think this underlines one of the huge, huge dangers in ideologically driven history, whether that ideology is left or right, religious or secular. Often such writers do dig up "inconvenient facts" which serve to counter the prevailing narrative. (I remember having similar "aha!" moments reading Paul Johnson's Modern Times, a book which ultimately I found frustrating because of a similar, though less extreme, willingness to settle for simplistic answers that fit with ideological preferences.) But when writers come to history already knowing what happened and just needing to find the facts to support it -- which I think is quite clearly what Zinn was doing in this case -- they end up doing their readers a huge disservice even if they do achieve some consciousness raising in the near term, because at some point, if they really do create a fascination with the past in their readers, those readers will hit the realization of betrayal.

Don't Know Much About History: War of 1812

2012-01-30T16:27:00.001-05:00

It's the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812! Contra the poor bewildered soldier here, Wikipedia actually does have a longish article on the subject.

[Hat Tip: Donald]

Till Death Do Us Part

2012-01-30T12:01:00.000-05:00

I've been consistently impressed with Msgr. Charles Pope's contributions over at the Archdiocese of Washington blog. He's one of those priest bloggers who brings a strongly pastoral sensibility to his writing without ever compromising the necessity of presenting the truth as it is.

His post yesterday, responding to a Washington Post human interest story about a woman who supposedly "learns the true meaning of 'in sickness and in health'" by divorcing her now-disabled husband in order to remarry (while promising to continue to care for the disabled husband), is a great example of this.

Playing on the heart-strings does not always (or even usually) produce a good or proper melody. Such is the case of a recently published Washington Post Article entitled: A Family Learns the True Meaning of the Vow: ‘In Sickness and in Health.’ Actually, they do not. In fact they demonstrate the exact antithesis of what that vow means.

I want to be careful here, since this is a story about real human beings who have lived through a tragic situation. And while they have made decisions that I think are wrong from a biblical and faith perspective, I do not lack sympathy for them. There’s is a human struggle here and not all of us hold up perfectly in such struggles.

Yet, they themselves have decided to go public, in a national newspaper about their decision and, as a pastor of many, I am thus compelled to speak in a public way as well, lest others be misguided as to what a true Catholic and biblical response to this tragedy is.

The article and story is a very lengthy one. The full article is available above by click there in the title. I have also produced a summary here: A Story of Misguided Marital Vows. But the basic facts are these:

Robert and Page Melton were married in 1995 and had two children.
In 2003 Robert had a severe heart attack that left him with brain injuries. His motor skills were unimpaired but his memory was devastated. He remembered nothing of his wife and children and almost nothing of his earlier life.
His behavior was also child-like and erratic which meant he needed to live in a nursing care facility.
His wife visited him several times weekly and they developed a new sort of relationship. Though he came to know that he was her husband and the father of their daughters, he was not able to resume this role in any sort of substantial way.
His wife Page was resigned to this, and still loved and cared for him as best as she was able.
But then Page met an old friend, Allan who was divorced, and they fell in love.
Allan also befriended Robert even as he was romancing Robert’s wife.
Allan proposed marriage to Page.
Page felt guilty, but wanted this new life. So she asked Robert.
Robert said she should marry Allan, but wondered what would happen to himself.
Page promised to continuing caring for Robert, but divorced him and married Allan.
Robert continues today in her care and she is his legal guardian, but no longer his wife.
The Post article assures us that everyone is blissfully happy, and will live happily ever after.
OK, a heart-wrencher to be sure. And the article is surely written to obtain our heartfelt consent by tugging at our heart-strings.
But be careful here, emotionally based reasoning is usually very blurry, and often quite wrong. And this is no exception. Lets look at some of the issues....

The rest is here.

Who's the Pharisee Here?

2012-01-27T12:16:00.000-05:00

Continuing the theme of yesterday's post on "outcasts", Jake Tawney has a great post up discussing the Hildebrands' Morality and Situation Ethics and the nature of the behavior for which the pharisees were condemned. He quotes extensively from the book, including this section which particularly struck me:

“It must be stressed, however, that self-righteousness is often met with even among those people who believe themselves to be the protagonists in the fight against pharisaism. The very same people indulge in an indignation resembling that of self-righteous zealots when it comes to their hatred of mediocrity. They are prone to view every thrifty person as a potential miser and are always eager to detect a lack of heroism in their neighbors.

“It is very important to stress this type of self-righteousness because it is very widespread today. In their fight against bourgeois mediocrity and conventionalism, they feel themselves superior. They believe they are the sincere representatives of the true Christian spirit. They do not pretend to be correct, without sins. No, they pride themselves on being true Christians notwithstanding their sins, because, as they say, pharisees alone care much about not sinning. They not only feel superior, but like the self-righteous zealot, they gloat over their indignation about mediocre bourgeois and self-righteous Christians. When they rage about the self-righteousness of others, it makes them feel free, great, deprived of all pettiness and mediocrity. The kind of vices they generally suspect is characteristic. Whereas the self-righteous zealot prefers to be on the scent of sins against the sixth commandment, of dishonesty, of unreliability, this revolutionary type of self-righteous man everywhere suspects avariciousness, lack of charity, mediocrity, conventionalism, hypocrisy, and insincerity."

Jesus Sided With The Outcasts, Which Means People I Like

2012-01-26T14:48:00.000-05:00

If there is one thing that virtually anyone can tell you about Jesus, it's that he sided with the outcasts and the oppressed. He was on the outs with the Pharisees and he hung out with tax collectors and prostitutes and Samaritans.

Simplistically applied, many people tend to take this to mean that Jesus would clearly have approved of any cause which is scorned by the wider society. Of course, we all want to imagine that Jesus is on our side, and people often feel criticism keenly, so the end result often seems to be that people consider whatever causes they consider to be important to be those which are scorned by society, and thus which Jesus would approve of.

Thus, for instance, I recall my youth group leaders back in high school explaining to us that "if Jesus were alive today" (a phrase which bugged me nearly as much as our catechist's tendency to declare that various things would cause Jesus to "spin in his grave" if only he knew about them) he would be marching in the Gay Pride parades and in favor of environmental causes. Why? Well, he was on the side of outcasts, and those movements are the outcasts. Ask someone else, and you'd get the precise opposite: mainstream society accepts gay rights and green causes, but pro-lifers and those who support traditional marriage are "the outcasts".

The big problem here, I think, is the simplistic attempt to identify outcasts and then assign virtue to whatever it is that they are considered outcasts for. However, although it's noted in the gospels that Jesus was derided for spending time with tax collectors, prostitutes and Samaritans, it's key to note that his message did not consist of telling people they should all go out and be prostitutes and tax collectors.

I think, actually, that the meaning of the "outcasts" theme has been entirely missed. In the gospels, we find Jesus spending time with a wide variety of people. There are outcasts such as prostitutes and tax collectors (which it's at least mildly interesting to note were outcasts for two reasons: they were collaborators with unpopular Roman rule, and tax collecting was a highly profitable business described in modern analysis as "tax farming" in which tax collectors tried to take as much money as they could off people and got to keep the balance between what they collected and what people actually owed). There are "foreigners" such such as the Samaritan woman, the Roman centurion and various soldiers (who may have been foreigners or collaborators). And there members of the Jewish elite like the Rich Young Man who says he's followed all the laws of Moses but balks at giving away all that he has and following Christ, or like Joseph of Arimathea who convinced Pilot to turn over Jesus' body to the disciples and gave his tomb for Jesus' burial. And then there are just ordinary folks (fishermen, relatives, women from his home town, etc.) What united the followers of Jesus was not a status as members of "outcast" groups, but rather their willingness to follow his calls to repentance and to "come and follow me".

Jesus didn't spend time only with "outcasts" nor did he spend time with them only because they were outcasts, but he was starkly different from many of the establishment religious authorities in that he saw those who were considered outcasts as being worth taking his message to in the first place. What was radical about his spending time with outcasts was not that he advocated in favor of what made them outcasts (Up with prostitution! Up with tax collecting!) but that he ignored their outcast status and preached to all -- the elites, the outcasts, and the in between -- considering all people as capable of receiving his message and being saved through his sacrifice.

This is why a focus on "Jesus spent time with outcasts" can end up leading one astray. Jesus didn't come to pick out a group of "good people" or even "interesting people to hang out with" on the basis of their being outcasts. Rather, Jesus came to present a message. He presented it to everyone, outcast or not, and he challenged everyone: Come and follow me.

How Thick is Your Bubble?

2012-01-26T09:22:00.000-05:00

I know that many of our readers are concerned about whether they're out of touch with middle America, so here's a quiz to help you assess your engagement with the mainstream culture.

How Thick Is Your Bubble?

My results: On a scale from 0 to 20 points, where 20 signifies full engagement with mainstream American culture and 0 signifies deep cultural isolation within the new upper class bubble, you scored between 5 and 8. In other words, you can see through your bubble, but you need to get out more.

Hm.

1,2. I haven't worked on a factory floor, but when I was eighteen I took a year off between finishing school and going to college and did bindery work at a printing press. I was often on my feet all day, and I did ache at the end of the day from some of the repetitive motions. I also once caught my finger in the saddle stitcher, which was the machine that stapled envelopes into booklets. My fingernail grew back but I still have a small scar on the middle finger of my right hand. Every day at that job I would think, "This is why I'm going to college -- so I don't have to do this for the rest of my life."

6. I know some evangelical Christians fairly well, but most of my acquaintance are orthodox Catholics, which is a smaller sub-culture.

8. I am not a particularly political person. Like my parents before me I vote straight pro-life, and count on Darwin to keep me abreast of the developments of the day. Taking Facebook as an indicator, most of my friends, regardless of economic, educational, or social differences, have the same concern.

I know that I have deep political differences with aunts, uncles, and cousins (many of whom perhaps are the demographic for which this quiz was written), but I'm not especially close to any of them and I avoid those discussions. None of them have to ask about my political opinions; the number of children I have does the talking for me. Taking Facebook as an indicator, most of my friends, regardless of economic, educational, or social differences, have the same concern.

9. I have eaten at Applebee's in the past year, but frankly, I'd rather eat hot dogs at home than Applebee's food.

10. Neither Darwin or I have ever bought a pickup truck, but we've never needed one either.

11. Not only have I never attended a Kiwanis or Rotary meeting, I don't even know what they do. I don't know anyone who knows what they do. What do they do?

15. Of course I've never watched Oprah all the way through. Egad.

20. I don't know anyone who smokes, except some people who go to New Orleans.

h/t Siris

The Unwelcome Discount

2012-01-25T14:11:00.001-05:00

A while back, after Jack had been in to the emergency room on two successive occasions for stitches, I got a medical bill that genuinely confused me, because I thought I'd already paid it. I called the medical billing number and the customer service rep explained very helpfully the source of the bill (the hospital and the doctor charged separately). She then offered, unprompted, to knock 15% off the bill if I paid it right there on the phone via credit card.

Well, thirty dollars is thirty dollars, so I paid by phone and figured a five minute call that saved me $30 was a good deal. But as soon as I thought about it, the whole thing started to make me a bit angry. After all, I'd just paid a whole bunch of medical bills (we hadn't hit our deductible for the year yet) and I hadn't though to call on them. Could I have got them to knock money off just for paying right away, which is what I was going to do regardless? Was I effectively paying a 15% "didn't bother to call" fee?

So now I find myself calling on every medical bill, asking for an explanation on it, and asking if I can get it reduced if I pay right away. Some places will, some won't. 15% seems to be the maximum. But although it saves money (and thus I feel like I can't avoid it) I find myself experiencing that frustrating feeling one ofter does after negotiating for a car: that if only one had been more clever one could have paid less, and that one was probably cheated somehow or other.

The Oft-Repeated Lie About Warren Buffet's Secretary's Tax Rate

2012-01-25T09:21:00.000-05:00

For last night's State of the Union Address, President Obama invited Warren Buffet's secretary, Debbie Bosanek, to sit in the First Lady's box during the speech and specifically promised in that speech to support tax changes in order to mend the injustice Buffet claims occurs allowing him to pay the lowest tax rate of anyone in his office, including his secretary. This line of attack is doubtless partly designed to pave the way millionaire Barrack Obama to make populist attacks on multi-millionaire Mitt Romney during the upcoming presidential campaign. Romney is, after all, very, very rich, and his income comes primarily from investments.

David Leonhardt at the NY Times asks both right-leaning economist Greg Mankiw and the left leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to comment on this alleged tax injustice. Mankiw makes a fairly reasonable case that the reason capital gains are lower is that investment income is based on corporate profits and corporate profits have already been taxed. Companies would have more profits to pass on to investors (either as dividends or in the form of being worth more) if they didn't pay corporate taxes, and so the tax on investment income is set lower to avoid this "double taxation". Chuck Marr of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities must know the facts aren't on his side, because instead of answering the question he provides a canned response about income inequality and how tax rates are lower than in the '70s. The column is worth a read.

However, there's another issue here which I think is worth pointing out. Progressives writing on this issue usually act as if billionaire investors such as Warren Buffet are all paying right around 15% (the capital gains rate) in taxes -- Buffet claims that he pays 17.4% -- and that "middle class Americans" are paying the top marginal income tax rate of 35%. However, that top marginal income tax rate only applies to taxable income (for 2011) in excess of $379,150 a year of which "middle class" families by any reasonable definition have exactly none. If you think in terms of gross income, a lot of middle class families probably fall in the 25% bracket, which is applied to married couples with a combined income of $69,000 – $139,350. Many others fall in the 15% bracket, which is applied to married couples with a combined income of $17,000 – $69,000.

Even that, however, is not the whole story. That tax rate is applied to your adjusted taxable income. If you have kids, a mortgage, medical expenses, 401k contributions, student loans, etc., your taxable income can be significantly lower than your gross income, plus you may qualify for tax credits which apply directly against your tax liability.

So, to take one concrete example, although our total household income falls neatly in the middle of that 25% bracket range, by the time we took all deductions and tax credits into account last year I ended up paying actual taxes equal to 5% of my gross income. This is pretty typical. According to Congressional Budget Office numbers, the average effective income tax rate for all American households was 8.7% in 2005. Those in the bottom 40% of households got more money back then they paid (they had negative effective income tax rates) and those in the top 10% paid an effective income tax rate of 15.9% and those in the top 1% paid 19.7%. Even if you look at total federal taxes (including both the highly regressive payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare and the corporate income taxes which tend to his only the more wealthy), the total federal effective tax rate is progressive all the way up the income stack, with the bottom 20% paying 4.3% and the top 1% paying 31.4%

I don't doubt that Warren Buffet pays tax lawyers a lot of money to make sure that he doesn't pay more taxes than he has to, and as a result he may well manage to pay a lower effective tax rate as a member of the top 0.000001% than a member of the top 0.01% would, but to claim that he is paying a lower total effective federal tax rate than members of the middle class is, to put it bluntly: a lie.

Reference that Sacrifice

2012-01-24T11:35:00.000-05:00

I've never cared much for O. Henry's story The Gift of the Magi, so if Darwin and I were ever to make absurdly grandiose and mutually canceling sacrifices for each other, this is probably how it would shake out.

Understanding Both Sides of the Abortion Debate

2012-01-24T11:34:00.000-05:00

Catholic Bibliophagist had up an outstanding review yesterday of Abby Johnson's book unPlanned. It's one of those books that I've heard a lot about but haven't had the chance to look at, but this review in particular is very well written and makes me interested to read the book in a way in which others I've read have not.

Confessions of a Reluctant Romney Supporter

2012-01-24T10:20:00.000-05:00

I haven't written much of anything about the GOP primary contest, despite the fact I have been following it closely, in part because I found myself so incredibly dissatisfied with all the candidates. However, as the field narrows and appears to be actually competitive, and various people I respect line up behind candidates, it seemed like it was time to come out of the closet as something I'm not very enthusiastic about being: a Romney supporter.

This is not because I'm particularly fond of Romney. I don't trust him a great deal, I'm not clear how solid any of his principles are other than his conviction that he should be president, and I don't find him particularly inspiring. As various candidates have had their five minutes of popularity for the achievement of not being Romney, I kept hoping that one of them would manage to pull ahead and show some stature. I was particularly hopeful about Rick Perry, but he just didn't seem able to run a campaign.

So why support Romney?

I'll start with the positive. While I'm not enthusiastic about Romney, I think that most of what the GOP needs in order to oust Obama this year is simply a credible alternative who doesn't scare people too much. Given how bad the economy is and how unpopular some elements of his policy have been, "not Obama" can be a solidly popular candidate by that virtue alone. In this regard, I think Romney's blandness may actually be an asset -- especially as it's combined with very solid verbal abilities which should be able to stack up well against Obama on stage. Romney is also a company man. He is a consultant through and through, and since right now I actually trust the party more than I trust any of the candidates, I actually prefer the fact that Romney is likely to be guided fairly efficiently by the party establishment and the establishment advisers. I'd rather have a solid candidate, able to guide by his own vision, but lacking that I'd at least like to have an able executive willing to be guided by the right advisers.

That's about as positive as my feelings get. Now for the negative approach. There are at most four candidates at this point: Romney, Gingrich, Santorum and Ron Paul. Ron Paul I consider wrong pretty much from beginning to end. Santorum actually strikes me as a strongly principled social conservative, and in some ways I do like him, but I just don't see him as having the executive presence to lead the nation or to succeed against Obama onstage. Maybe in a fairer world he would be a good candidate, but in the world we're in I just don't think he'd stand a chance of winning. I have some fond memories around Gingrich and the Contract With America, since that's a period when I was first enthusiastically tracking politics as a teenager. However, Gingrich himself flamed out badly and hurt the Republican party in the '90s. His personal life shows him as being even less trustworthy. He's got strong combative instincts, and at times it's fun to imagine him going head to head with Obama on stage, but his combative instincts also apply to opening fire on his own foot. Often. With Gingrich as the nominee, the GOP would be "living in interesting times" in the very worst sense of that ancient curse. And even if he could win, I wouldn't trust Gingrich any more as president of the US than the last GOP president to have come back from utter political defeat and exile: Richard M. Nixon.

It frustrates me no end that there aren't better candidates out there in a year in which Obama should be an easy target, and even at this late date if someone better came along than Romney I'd be happy to switch to someone better, but in the current state of the race Romney seems to me like the best one.

Oh No You Didn't...

2012-01-23T23:33:00.001-05:00

Darwin (leaning over my shoulder while I'm on Facebook): Why does the ad for ultrasound tech training have an image of an elephant in utero?

Me: Maybe potential ultrasound techs think elephants are more interesting than humans.

Darwin: I guess it wouldn't be hard to find anything on that ultrasound. You know what they say about the elephant in the womb.

Me: ...

In Honor of the March for Life: The Annunciation and the Passion

2012-01-23T08:31:00.001-05:00

I have never been on the March for Life, but I'm praying today for those who are walking in DC today.
Last night I came across a John Donne poem that seemed appropriate for a day on which we remember the death of millions of the very youngest humans, written in 1608 on the occasion of Good Friday falling on the feast of the Annunciation (March 25).

THE ANNUNCIATION AND PASSION.
by John Donne

TAMELY, frail body, abstain to-day ; to-day
My soul eats twice, Christ hither and away.
She sees Him man, so like God made in this,
That of them both a circle emblem is,
Whose first and last concur ; this doubtful day
Of feast or fast, Christ came, and went away ;
She sees Him nothing, twice at once, who's all ;
She sees a cedar plant itself, and fall ;
Her Maker put to making, and the head
Of life at once not yet alive, yet dead ;
She sees at once the Virgin Mother stay
Reclused at home, public at Golgotha ;
Sad and rejoiced she's seen at once, and seen
At almost fifty, and at scarce fifteen ;
At once a son is promised her, and gone ;
Gabriell gives Christ to her, He her to John ;
Not fully a mother, she's in orbity ;
At once receiver and the legacy.
All this, and all between, this day hath shown,
Th' abridgement of Christ's story, which makes one—
As in plain maps, the furthest west is east—
Of th' angels Ave, and Consummatum est.
How well the Church, God's Court of Faculties,
Deals, in sometimes, and seldom joining these.
As by the self-fix'd Pole we never do
Direct our course, but the next star thereto,
Which shows where th'other is, and which we say
—Because it strays not far—doth never stray,
So God by His Church, nearest to him, we know,
And stand firm, if we by her motion go.
His Spirit, as His fiery pillar, doth
Lead, and His Church, as cloud ; to one end both.
This Church by letting those days join, hath shown
Death and conception in mankind is one ;
Or 'twas in Him the same humility,
That He would be a man, and leave to be ;
Or as creation He hath made, as God,
With the last judgment but one period,
His imitating spouse would join in one
Manhood's extremes ; He shall come, He is gone ;
Or as though one blood drop, which thence did fall,
Accepted, would have served, He yet shed all,
So though the least of His pains, deeds, or words,
Would busy a life, she all this day affords.
This treasure then, in gross, my soul, uplay,
And in my life retail it every day.

"You Can Do Anything!"

2012-01-20T17:34:00.002-05:00

I knew I was forgetting something in my video post. Here's Daniel Radcliffe demonstrating what happens when you go to a school with no grades. Nice American accent, Dan.

Friday Viewage

2012-01-20T11:27:00.001-05:00

It's Friday, which means everyone wants to kick back and watch videos. Here at DarwinCatholic, we're always happy to provide some mind-numbing entertainment to go with the economic analysis and interminable posts about sex.

So first up, for Brandon and Matthew Lickona, the future of internet advertising is: CATS!

Pass me the Doritos.

Whenever I get a chance to catch up with my brother Will, we waste our valuable sibling time in syncing up on Saturday Night Live videos. Here's what we were laughing at the entire last week of December.

1920s Party

Darwin is probably going to throttle me if I say "Don't make me sing!" one more time.

And here's the sequel: 1920s Holiday Party

I love Jimmy Fallon when he can keep a straight face during a sketch.

Let's add some culture to the diet. Darwin and I saw the operetta The Merry Widow in Vienna when we were schlepping around Europe with backpacks. (I remember that we misread our tickets and sat in the wrong seats, and then it turned out that the right seats were high up in the very first box to the left of the stage and some of the action was cut off by the proscenium arch.) The production we saw was in German and set in the 1920s, and some of the action included characters rolling across the stage on wooden office chairs. We understood no German and the comic plot wasn't quite intelligible to us (though I do remember several characters exclaiming "Zwanzig millionen!", which referred to the amount of the widow's fortune).

The most memorable moment of the opera for me was the Vilja-lied, in which the merry widow sings of a legend from her native land about a man who falls in love with a nymph named Vilja. Here is Beverly Sills performing this aria very slowly but beautifully.

And this is what I sing to Diana now that she's learned to walk and is padding all around the house in her soft leather slippers: O Mistress Mine, where are you roaming? from Twelfth Night.

O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O stay and hear! your true-love's coming
O stay and hear! your true-love's coming
That can sing both high and low;
Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
Journeys end in lovers' meeting—
Every wise man's son doth know.

What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty,—
Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure.

The Educated Reader

2012-01-19T15:59:00.002-05:00

I saw A.N. Wilson's Dante in Love, an overview of the world of Dante as it bears on the Divine Comedy, on the new books shelf at the library, and as I could summon up a vague memory of it being mentioned in the WSJ, I thought I'd pick it up. Here's what I encountered in the first pages.

The intelligent reader of the twenty-first century -- that is to say, you -- might or might not have a knowledge of classical mythology and Roman history. Dante expects you to remember who Briareus was, and who Cato, and how Arachne was transformed into a spider, and what was the fate of the Sabine women. On top of this, he expects you to share his knowledge of, and obsession with, contemporary Italian history and politics. Some translations and modern editions of his poem endeavour to 'help' you here by elaborate explanations of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, which soon have your head spinning. And on top of all that, there is the whole confusing business of medieval philosophy and theology -- what Thomas Aquinas owed to Averroes, or the significance of St Bernard of Clairvaux.

No wonder that so many readers abandon their reading of Dante's three-part Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso) long before they get to Purgatory. No wonder that so many who manage to read as far as the Purgatorio find that very little of it has remained in their heads. Such readers are prepared to take on trust that Dante is a great poet, but the leave him as one of the great unreads. And in so doing, they leave unsavoured one of the supreme aesthetic, imaginative, emotional and intellectual experiences on offer. The are like people who have never attended a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni, or of King Lear, never heard a Beethoven symphony, never visited Paris. Quite definitely, they are missing out.

If you belong to this category of Dante-reader, or non-reader, then this book is specifically designed for you.

Let's see how I stack up against Wilson's potential reader:

Briareus: not off the top of my head.
Cato: check
Arachne: check
Sabine women: check
Guelfs and Ghibellines: mostly check
Thomas Aquinas and Averroes: check, for the purposes of this discussion
St Bernard of Clairvaux: check
Read all of Purgatorio: check
Mozart's Don Giovanni: check
King Lear: not live, but I did see Ian McKellen's stage version on TV
Beethoven symphony: check
Visited Paris: check

Well, now I'm wondering if I should return this book to the library so it can benefit one of the educationally unwashed. I did nearly fall asleep during Don Giovanni, though, so I'm sure I'm in need of Wilson's benign tutelage.

Income Mobility Means Some People End Up Worse Off

2012-01-19T10:00:00.000-05:00

Megan McArdle has a thought provoking piece on how income mobility is a popular concept, except that no one really wants their kids to be the ones who end up much worse off than their parents.

Many people apparently agree with me: the issue of income mobility has become more prominent in policy debates over the last few years. And yet I submit that this agreement is entirely theoretical. How many of the people reading this blog would actually tolerate a one-in-five chance that their children would end up poor?

Because that's what income mobility actually means. It doesn't just mean giving a lift to the folks at the bottom--superior health care, better K-12 education. Everyone in the country cannot be above average. For the poor to have a better shot at ending up in the top quintiles, the folks in the top few quintiles have to run the risk of ending up in the lowest.

Who among the parents fighting so hard to get their kids into a good school is going to volunteer to have their kid give up the slot in the upper middle class?

It strikes me that this becomes less of an issue if mobility is more an issue of reverting to the mean: people who are poor having a decent chance of their children doing better than them, people who are quite rich having a good chance their children will be middle class rather than wealthy. But, the thing is, most people live in moderately restricted social sets, so the falling half of the equation seems like "being poorer than everybody".

The piece itself is rather long and worth reading. I'm trying to make up my mind what I think about it. Certainly, the "American Dream" tends to be all about your children being better off than you -- not about half of your children being worse off so that half of someone else's can be better off. In this sense, the American Dream is highly dependent on the assumption that the country as a whole will become increasingly well off, and that that increase will be widely shared.

Thoughts? (Are you still out there, Joel? This one seems right up your alley.)

Ron Paul's Foreign Policy: Golden Rule or Relativism?

2012-01-18T11:28:00.001-05:00

If you move about those regions of the internets in which righteous display their moral superiority by posting sixty second video clips showing just how bad their opponents are, you have probably seen headlines lately along the lines of "Christians Boo Jesus" or "Republicans Mock Golden Rule". Of course, one hardly needs to watch the clip, because in the dualism that is politicization, everyone already knows that they're right and their opponents are wrong. But after the fifth or sixth iteration, I had to go ahead watch Ron Paul (who else) present his Golden-Rule based foreign policy to boos. Here's the clip in question:

Or if, like me, you tend not to watch posted videos, here's the money quote:

"My point is, that if another country does to us what we do to others, we aren't going to like it very much. So I would say maybe we ought to consider a golden rule in foreign policy. We endlessly bomb these other countries and then we wonder why they get upset with us?"

Now, this sounds superficially high minded, and some people who really are high minded seem lured by it. Kyle, who has an genuine and expansive desire to understand "the other" has his dander up and says:

Last night, while listening to the latest debate, I heard the audience boo the suggestion that we ought to apply the Golden Rule to our dealings and relations with foreign powers and people. Ares forbid we treat strangers the way we want to be treated. Woe to those who put themselves in another’s place and consider the world from his or her perspective.

He links approvingly to Robert Wright over at The Atlantic, who quotes some of the other examples of Ron Paul's "moral imagination", which has made him the unlikely darling of the far left:

Paul routinely performs a simple thought experiment: He tries to imagine how the world looks to people other than Americans....

After observing that Israel and America and China have nukes, he asks about Iranians, "Why wouldn't it be natural that they'd want a weapon? Internationally they'd be given more respect."

Can somebody explain to me why this is such a crazy conjecture about Iranian motivation? Wouldn't it be reasonable for Iranian leaders, having seen what happened to nukeless Saddam Hussein and nukeless Muammar Qaddafi, to conclude that maybe having a nuclear weapon would get them more respectful treatment?
...
A favorite Paul pedagogical device is to analogize foreign situations to American ones. A campaign ad promoted by a Paul-supporting super PAC begins by asking us to imagine Russian or Chinese troops in Texas. The point is that this is how our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan look to locals.

If you want to see that particular piece of imagination, here that is too:

The closing line here is actually a pretty good example of where this "imagination" breaks down, so although it's a minor detail I'll begin there: "The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome's did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted."

This ties into one of our pervasive historical myths about the Roman era: That Rome was good and stable and virtuous so long as it remained a localized Republic, but that once it turned into an empire and got big, decay and debauchery soon set in and it fell. This misses out on the fact that the Roman Empire, from Augustus Caesar to Romulus Augustus, lasted some 450 years and was, for all its faults, generally more stable than the Republic had been. Moreover, it was primarily the imperial phase of Rome which provided Roman cultural to the entirety of the known world, a culture which has remained one of the foundational elements of Western Culture (and now global culture) ever since. When the Roman Empire gradually came apart, lapsing into "barbarian" successor kingdoms in the West and the Byzantine Empire in the East, this is generally seen as a bad thing, not an improvement. It's commonly called the "Dark Ages", and although there's some serious historical prejudice going on there, the period from 400 to 800 was indeed generally a lot dimmer than the period from 1 to 400. For whatever reason, however, libertarians of the Ron Paul persuasion seem to be on the side of collapse in regards to this type of history.

With that bit of historical perspective, let's think a little more deeply about Ron Paul's "moral imagination". Looked at a little more closely, I think we'll find that "moral equivocation" is a little more like it. Let's try a little moral imagination of our own:

Think on the lot of the gang leader. There he is, running a great business of selling crack on the street corners, extracting protection money, and pimping out hos, when what should happen but a bunch of cops show up pointing guns at his gangbangers, knocking down doors to his crack houses, arresting his homeboys. What can you expect him to think? If the cops have guns, he's going to want to have guns. If the cops knock down his door, he'll want to knock down their doors. If they lock up his people, he'll lock up their people. How can we go treating these gang members in ways that we don't want to be treated?

Now, as the basic level, this arguably does describe the logic of the gang leader. If he wants to keep doing what he's doing despite the pressure of law enforcement, he's going to resort to violence and intimidation in response to what he sees as violence and intimidation aimed at him. Does that mean, however, that the solution is simply to cede ownership of swathes of large cities to gang leaders because doing otherwise would involve an escalation in mutual violence between gangs and government authorities. Well, actually, with Ron Paul, he may mean that. But for those of us who are sane, there's a difference between the two side of this situation which this exercise in imagination fails to grasp: the gang leader is breaking the law of being destructive to the common good while the law enforcement is trying to enforce the law and protect the common good.

Is protecting the common good, occasionally by resort to force, a violation of the Golden Rule? Only if the Golden Rule is applied with complete moral relativism. Understood properly, arresting people who gun down their rival crack sellers or extract protection is money is compatible with the Golden Rule, because through their endorsement of the legal order those who enforce the law by arresting these lawbreakers also want to be arrested if they too break the law. They are enforcing the laws that all of us have chosen to live by, and in so doing we as a society are treating others as we want to be treated.

When we elide the moral context, we can make it look like enforcing any kind of justice or order is a violation of the Golden Rule, but as the above example shows, this is clearly not the case.

Having established this basic principle, it now remains to address Ron Paul's more specific points. After all, it might be that police enforcing the law against gang members is perfectly legitimate, but does that principle apply to the US having military bases in foreign countries, or to trying to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons? Aren't all countries, at least, basically equal and deserving of equal rights?

Let's think about Ron Paul's logic a bit here.

Wouldn't it be reasonable for Iranian leaders, having seen what happened to nukeless Saddam Hussein and nukeless Muammar Qaddafi, to conclude that maybe having a nuclear weapon would get them more respectful treatment?

Well, yes. It is logical for Iranian leaders to think this way. They're maintaining a moderately brutal dictatorship that many of their own people would like to see replaced with another form of government, and they're trying to exert greater power in the region after being moderately successful in fighting a low level proxy war against the US in the Shiite regions of Iraq. The other regional powers are Turkey and Israel, both of which have nuclear weapons, and if they could get their own nuclear weapons they would insulate themselves from outside attack (as North Korea has by acquiring nukes) while perhaps buying themselves some time from their own people if regional domination wins them benefits which can be shared around at home.

But what all that internal logic leaves aside is: Does that mean that we, as an outside power, should simply shrug and not mind if they acquire nukes with these aims?

After all, isn't it a generally good thing that Saddam Hussein's brutal Baathist dictatorship fell (as the citizens of the other Baathist dictatorship in the region, Syria, are dying in large numbers to achieve in their own country) and that Qaddafi's oppressive regime has also fallen? Isn't it generally a bad thing that the neo-Stalinist regime in North Korea has won added staying power (and the ability to continue killing tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of their own citizens every year through oppression and starvation) through acquiring nuclear weapons? Not to mention that it may yet turn out to be a very bad thing for some of North Korea's neighbors if the regime goes unstable and actually does launch nukes at South Korea or Japan?

Moral imagination can help us understand that many in the Soviet Union of the '30s really were convinced that "wreckers" were threatening the socialist paradise and needed to be stopped, that many in Wilhelmine Germany really did think that they needed to start a European war before Russia overtook them in economic and military power, and that many in the '30s really did think that "Judeo-Bolshevism" was the greatest threat to their freedom. It can also help us understand that which side of a war someone fights on (and what someone believes about the purpose of a war) often has a lot more to do with where that person was born than with any kind of cool consideration of the issues at stake.

But it does not mean that none of these issues matter, and that there is not a right and a wrong side to a dispute. (Or in the gray tones of the real world: a better and a worse side.) It's all very well to ask how people would feel if there were a Chinese or Russian military base in Texas. However, it would be most fruitful to ask people in Tibet whether they'd rather have an American military base in the area, that behave roughly the way the US military bases in Japan and South Korea do, or if they'd rather stick with the way the Chinese occupation treats them. Openmindedness is somewhat fetishized in our relativistic society, but the fact of the matter is that being "occupied" by the US is generally a much more healthy experience than being occupied by the Chinese or the Russians. This by no means should be taken to mean that the US never does anything wrong while acting as the world's policeman, but when you look at the other folks lining up to be world or regional policemen, it looks like a pretty attractive alternative.

The Christian approach is not found in pretending that there is no difference between viewpoints in disputes between nations, but in realizing that even when we are locked in combat with "the other", we must recall his humanity. C. S. Lewis, I believe, staked out the true Christian viewpoint on such issues when he said in Mere Christianity:

I have often thought to myself how it would have been if, when I served in the first world war, I and some young German had killed each other simultaneously and found ourselves together a moment after death. I cannot imagine that either of us would have felt any resentment or even any embarrassment. I think we might have laughed over it.

I imagine somebody will say, `Well, if one is allowed to condemn the enemy's acts, and punish him, and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality and the ordinary view?' All the difference in the world. Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever.

Poetry Corner

2012-01-18T10:10:00.001-05:00

The budding poetess, age 9 1/2, has been composing a book of poetry.

Introduction

This book is the cause
Of the shake
That is said
To make
Your child
Run wild,
So preparations you make
Must awake
The banshee in style.
Give it clocks
And blocks
And your husband's best socks.
So education
Be the agent
Of the cure.

Malcolm

Malcolm the dragon started to see
That he had never paid his fee.
But when he tried to pay his fee,
The man in there started to pee:
"You are too scary to pay your fee."
So Malcolm the dragon quite legally
Has never actually paid his fee.

Your interpretation is as good as mine.

Kiss Me, You Fool!

2012-01-17T14:59:00.002-05:00

Heather King, who understands so well the joys and difficulties of lived Catholicism, meditates on a strict priest and the vibrant transformational power of the Eucharist:

What's sad, though, is that he had the "right" message but he delivered it in such a way that no-one in his or her right mind would want to follow it. By his or her right mind I mean vital, interested, questing, conflicted, on to one's own myriad defects and myriad gifts, preferably with a secret incendiary devotion to some doomed love/project/cause that promises to bear absolutely no fruit, compromises your physical/emotional health, and makes you look like a fool, loser and/or psychotic in the eyes of the world, and with a sense of humor.

Anyway, I was reminded of a quote by contemplative monk Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis--now known as Brother Simeon--from Love’s Sacred Order: The Four Loves Revisited:

“Léon Bloy…once said that if we receive the Eucharist and fail to practice charity, fail to allow the Eucharist to have in us the effects that by its very nature it must have, then ‘the sacred Host we have consumed, rather than nourishing us, will become within us like a bomb exploding our hypocrisy to high heaven.’”

It will be like a bomb exploding our hypocrisy, and it will be like a bomb exploding our timidity and fear.

Catholicism is not counter-cultural in that the world is liberal and Catholicism is conservative. It’s counter-cultural in that it is explosively, wildly, anarchically radical. Catholicism is our hearts, our bowels, our erotic energy, our lives! Catholicism is not some timid, rigid, dead set of rules. The whole purpose of the rules is to allow us to explode within them. To follow Christ, to be Catholic (or catholic-in-spirit) is to hover on the edge of metaphorical orgasm and to consent to continue to hover, indefinitely, in almost unbearable tension…which paradoxically allows us to break out in all kinds of other sublimely interesting, glorious directions and ways

However, I was nonplussed by the evil the priest chose to rail against from the pulpit.

What prompted the reflection is a Mass I attended on the Feast of the Holy Family (at a church that was new to me), at which, for a full half-hour, the priest took the congregation to task (most of whom had excellent posture, were shepherding several frighteningly well-behaved children, and were dressed like Puritans) about how the girls should hide their knees and do they really want to be an instrument of the devil and as soon as young people kiss he tells them they must never EVER see or talk to that person again because they have wrecked their chances for putting God first, and in general complaining, gossiping, carping, and looking down upon all the parents with spoiled, ill-behaved children who refuse to properly discipline [super creepy emphasis] them, the result being that, unlike a couple HE knows, they will not grow up to have their very first kiss at the altar.

I hesitate to nitpick any of Heather's fine post, but the priest here does not have "the 'right' message but he delivered it in such a way that no-one in his or her right mind would want to follow it. " He is wrong. There are many actions that Catholicism forbids, but kissing before marriage is not one of them. Boiled down to its essence, Theology of the Body (referenced not by Heather, but by her commenters) states that physical actions have a spiritual dimension. Sex is an action reserved for marriage not just because the reproductive aspects are most truly realized in a committed marital relationship, but because the physical action of intercourse also bonds a man and woman together spiritually. Since all actions have spiritual effects, a kiss also can form a bond, but it is not remotely the permanent bond formed by intercourse.

The definition of a kiss is "a touch with the lips to show affection" (this I remember from my younger days of looking up salacious words in the dictionary). So in keeping with that middle-school tone, let me be clear: a kiss is not remotely the physical and spiritual equivalent of (avert your eyes!) a penis entering a vagina, no, not even a french kiss. Not even if it's an arousing kiss. A couple may choose, for mutual and prudential reasons, not to kiss before marriage, but that does not necessarily make them more virtuous or chaste than a couple who does. It makes them a couple who misses out on the joys of kissing.

... (Heather later says) The reason to save your first kiss till the altar, in other words, is not because you are so listless and etiolated and body-despising and intent on being a straight-A Catholic that you’ll suppress and deny your own God-given erotic urge, but because you are so vital, so juiced, so wild with longing, so crazy about your spouse-to-be that you want to make your wedding night a work of art. You want to offer your wedding night to the whole world.

This all sounds so delightful, and it's quite true in a sense: if a couple was to choose to save their first kiss for the altar, this would be a good reason to do so, though I think that a couple could feel this way about sex even after kissing. But perhaps a better way to describe the wedding night (even for a couple who was juiced and vital and crazy) would be the beginning of a work of art -- not the completed masterpiece. Long-time readers will be weary of my insistence that only practice makes perfect, but it's true. Just as the wedding isn't the marriage (nor even the high point of the marriage), the wedding night is only the first broad sketch for the whole married sex life, which is in turn only a portion of the magnum opus of marriage itself. Sketches can be works of art, but they don't have the full force of the whole finished work -- and that's fine, as long as one can be honest about it.

For those with less tender sensibilities than the stern padre, here's some pre-marital kissing to curl your hair.

ADDENDUM: In a comment on her post, Heather rightly points out that I'm not focusing on the main issue of the exquisite creativity that comes from living within the confines of the Church's teachings. She makes this point so elegantly that I don't think I have anything to add to it. But that leads to the issue of what, exactly, the rules are so that we may follow them. The reason that the priest's exhortation to save kissing for marriage is so antithetical to me is this: as Catholics, we are called -- no, commanded -- to wait until the blessing and seal of the sacrament of marriage to have sex. There is a serious moral component to the prohibition against sex before marriage, which gives that stricture its force and allows those living under it to live in joyful and painful expectation of consummation -- Heather reminds us that the original consummation was that of Calvary.

But kissing is not Sex Lite. What makes Catholicism come off as "some timid, rigid, dead set of rules" is when huge moral force is attached to actions that can't bear that weight. Our end is to be joined to Christ forever and to live in his love for eternity. Here on earth, to achieve the end of joining our lives to his, we have certain commandments and prohibitions. One of those, to preserve the integrity of sexual relationships between men and women and to preserve the rights of children, is that sex take place only within marriage. What strictures are applied to guide Catholics in this goal? Turning to the teachings of the Church, we find certain things condemned: masturbation, pornography. That leaves a lot of prudential leeway for couples trying to navigate their way to the wedding day.

Another issue is that there are levels of interaction that are appropriate for different ages and states in life. Humans rely on physical expression to bond relationships. In Love and Responsibility Pope John Paul II makes some excellent and pastoral observations about the necessity of a proper understanding of chastity in relationships.

We noted earlier that virtue means something more than merely curbing the promptings of bodily desire or sensual reactions by pushing their content down into the subconscious. Chastity does not consist in systematic depreciation of the value of "the body and sex" any more than it can be identified with the morbid fear which they may inspire, sometimes as a reflex. Such reactions or symptoms not of inner strength but rather of weakness. Virtue can only come from spiritual strength. This strength derives in the last instance form the reason, which 'sees' the real truth about the values and puts the value of the person, and love, above the value of the person, and love, above the values of sex and above the enjoyment associated with them. But for this very reason chastity cannot consist in blind self-restraint. Continence, efficiency in curbing the lust of the body by the exercise of the will, the capacity for successful moderation of the sensations connected with sensual and even with emotional reactions, is the indispensable method of self-mastery, but it does not in itself amount to a full achievement of virtue. (p. 197)

Later he speaks of the necessity of tenderness between a man and a woman even before the full sacramental bond of marriage, and here, I've found a reference to kissing:

Tenderness, then, springs from awareness of the inner state of another person (and indirectly of that person's external situation, which conditions his inner state)and whoever feels it actively seeks to communicate his feeling of close involvement with the other person and his situation. This closeness is the result of an emotional commitment... Hence also the need actively to communicate the feeling of closeness, so that tenderness shows itself in certain outward actions which of their very nature reflect this inner approximation to another "I". These actions all have the same inner significance, though outwardly they may look very different: pressing another person to one's breast, embracing him, putting one's arms around him (if this is only a form of physically assisting someone its meaning is quite different), certain forms of kissing. These are active displays of tenderness. (p. 202)

Though of course I skirt the danger of laying down my own unimportant moral precepts, I'm inclined to think that it is unjust for a couple, especially approaching marriage, to withhold this form of of physical affection from one another in an attempt to save as much sensual interaction as possible for the wedding night.

I feel ridiculous going on at such length about an issue which must only be an issue to a very few strangely principled people, and yet it touches a nerve to see something which is so emphatically not a stricture of the Faith held up as such.

Reading Hemingway

2012-01-17T14:20:00.002-05:00

There's a sort of mantlepiece shelf in our library -- I say a sort of mantlepiece because it's over a sort-of fireplace: a fireplace-ish niche which lacks that essential element, a chimney, because once upon a time it contained a Victorian era ventless gas heater. This shelf I claimed, not long after we started unpacking books, as my aspiration shelf, the place where I line up all the books I intend to read. There they stand until I pull them down, read them, and return them to their appropriate shelf.

One night, for no particular reason other than I realized the aspiration shelf was short on fiction and because one of the gaps in my literary knowledge is that I'd never actually read anything by him, I added The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms to the aspiration shelf, and a couple nights ago while I was wandering about the library kibitzing MrsDarwin's novel revisions, I pulled The Sun Also Rises down and started reading it.

As I say, I'd never actually read any Hemingway before, though of course I'd heard roughly the same jokes and observations that anyone who hangs around book people will have soaked up about him. He writes in short sentences. Declarative sentences. And he's a masculine writer. Writing about war. And drinking. And bullfighting. And drinking. And blood. And drinking.

Somehow I'd got it into my head that reading Hemingway would be roughly as difficult a haul as reading Faulkner was a couple years ago, only with tortuously short sentences instead of tortuously long ones. As such, I was surprised to find Hemingway's prose to be almost completely transparent. Indeed, I wouldn't have noticed him to be any particular kind of prose stylist if I hadn't been assured ahead of time that he was known for his direct and vigorous prose. It just reads... normal. Thinking on this, it occurs to me that I normally associate a distinctive style either with some kind of dialect or effort to convey thought, or with the use of especially ornate or poetic diction while writing prose. Short, clear sentences that tell you what is going on just seem like the modern norm.

Though since Hemingway is so noted for his style, I now find myself wondering if rather than being a "typical example" of modern prose style he's something of the model of what has since become common.

Either way, I find myself quite enjoying The Sun Also Rises, and it even works as a lunch reading or bedtime reading book, in a way that Literature typically doesn't for me.

Brother Can You Spare a Drink?

2012-01-16T15:08:00.000-05:00

With all budgets under severe reduction until the new boiler is paid off, luxuries are the first to go, which definitely includes expensive liquor. Scotch, my favored think these days, is an expensive habit, but Eric Felton had a great column a few years about on the topic of "recession Scotch": inexpensive blended Scotches that offer significant quality. If one has developed any kind of a taste for Scotch, many of the common inexpensive blends aren't even worth the low price tags. However there are some very pleasant exceptions.

Teachers Highland Cream was, apparently, one of the more popular blended Scotches back in the 50s and 60s. These days, it has a huge following in parts of the developing world -- an acquaintance from India tells me that is the most popular Scotch in India -- but it's unheard of in the US. It sells for around $15 for a 1L bottle, and is, to my mind, about as good a Scotch as you can generally pick up for under $40. The problem is, as I've discovered since moving to Ohio, that it isn't available in all states. It is definitely available in Texas, New Jersey, New York and Washington State, but it is not available in Ohio (though in this regard it's in good company as Ohio has a socialist approach to liquor in which all liquor is sold by the state, and the list of brands the state sells is about as consumer friendly as one would expect given that situation.) I'd gone without my bottom shelf favorite for a year, until my future sister-in-law bought me a jug in the family gift exchange. (Clearly a woman who will fit in well in the family.)

If you live in Ohio, or simply want to try another good recession Scotch, my fallback has become Ballentine's Finest, which if anything is slightly cheaper (around $14.99 for 750ml.) It's a slightly mild Scotch -- nice if you're a drinker of Irish whiskeys but lower on the caramel and iodine notes which make Scotch more appealing in my view. Still, it's a solidly good bottom shelf Scotch. And for the price, a fairly outstanding one.

First Sentence Impressions

2012-01-14T16:16:00.001-05:00

In my idle time, I've set upon the daunting task of revising my novel. The section that cries out most for rewriting is the very beginning, which was thrown together slapdash to meet the NaNoWriMo wordcounts before I discovered the muse of bourbon. My problems begin with the very first sentence:

In the summer of my twenty-second year, fresh from college with an elegant diploma in one hand and no job offers in the other, it was decided that I should become the companion to my Great-Aunt Emma.

I feel a great mortification upon contemplating this line, not because my conception of the character become far less passive as the story progressed, but because the grammar doesn't match up. Who was "fresh from college?" It? How could I have made such a bizarre error?

One thing that has become clear to me, in retrospect, is that perhaps it was inadvisable for someone who'd never written fiction to jump in for the first time by writing a novel in thirty days. It's too late to change that now, but I'm trying to educate myself by reading up on the craft of writing fiction. One thing everyone seems to agree upon is that a first sentence should serve several purposes: to pull the reader into the story; to set the tone; to capture the attention of the editor or agent or whoever is going to buy your manuscript.

Here are a few first sentences of works I've pulled off my bookshelf.

Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov,a land owner well know in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. -- The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again. -- Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier

"They made a silly mistake, though," the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory. -- Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis (a much funnier novel than the first sentence suggests)

When I reached "C" Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. -- Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh.

So. -- Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney

Two things strike me about this list. First, that many of these lines are (naturally) meant to be directly followed by other sentences, so that the first sentence need not stand on its own as a summation of the story. Second, that much of the literature on my shelf is at least fifty years old. For contrast, here are three opening sentences from novels I enjoyed, all published last year.

I have never much liked Shakespeare. -- The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips.

It was the last night of 1937. -- Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles

Today I'm five. -- Room, by Emma Donoghue

These are short, but informative: Arthur is chatty and informal; the narrator of Rules of Civility is reserved and is writing about her past; the child who narrates Room speaks in the present tense.

I have struggled in recent evenings with my first sentence. What information do I want to convey? What tone do I want to set? Since the narrative is in the first person, what do I want the reader to know about her at the outset?

The character had grown more assertive as I wrote, so I wanted to change the passive voice of the original. I liked the structure of the sentence (and so did Darwin). The first part carried crucial information about the character -- she's a recent graduate with no imminent job prospects -- so what needed to be rewritten was the second half. Oddly enough, though I found that while writing the draft I did better work when I typed, the best way for me to revise this sentence was to write by hand over and over again.

In the summer of my twenty-second year, fresh from college with an elegant diploma in one hand and no job offers in the other, I was elected to become companion to my Great-Aunt Emma. (still too passive)

In the summer of my twenty-second year, fresh from college with an elegant diploma in one hand and no job offers in the other, I turned my back to the career path and became caregiver to my Great-Aunt Emma.

...I detoured from the accepted career path...

...I rejected the career path...

In the summer of my twenty-second year, glowing with academic success if not with career enlightenment, I forsook that path to become caregiver to my Great-Aunt Emma. (at this point I was growing weary of the path image, which wasn't going anywhere)

In the summer of my twenty-second year, fresh from college with an elegant diploma in one hand and no job offers in the other, I laid down any career ambitions and took on the role of caregiver to my Great-Aunt Emma. (closer, but too wordy)

Finally I found a formulation I liked well enough, which propelled me into what I would consider not a revision, but a new first draft.

In the summer of my twenty-second year, fresh from college with an elegant diploma in one hand and no job offers in the other, I laid aside career ambitions to become caregiver to my Great-Aunt Emma. Perhaps “ambitions” is too strong a word — I was neither lazy nor incapable, but I suffered no delusions that studying literature had prepared me for much other than the tired trifecta of writing, teaching, and applying to grad school. These held no interest for me. For that matter, neither did geriatrics, but the fact remained that Great-Aunt Emma could no longer live unaccompanied, and I was the most eligible companion by virtue of being the least employed member of the family.

I was also Emma’s namesake, which was a veritable sign that my stewardship had been preordained. Various relatives made this point to me at the packing party my parents were throwing on the eve of their early retirement to Florida. My older sister Stacy was particularly pleased.

“I’m glad Mom and Dad didn’t name me Emma,” she said, as she sat in the living room and stuffed newspaper into boxes. “You were always her favorite anyway, maybe because you liked being around all those stupid books. Any time I tried to touch one of them, I thought she’d kill me.”

“Perhaps she likes me because I don’t call her books stupid.”

Hell on Earth

2012-01-13T20:47:00.001-05:00

Pity, oh pity, good souls, the poor suffering child whose parents pay exorbitant sums so she can be forced to take ballet class at the region's most prestigious schools. Consider, if you can bear the thought, the agony of the young girl betrayed by her own talent, leading her parents to conspire how best to torture her: "Let's sign her up for lessons because it will be so fun for us to drive 45 minutes each way every Saturday morning for a 90-minute class! And the best part is that our child will yell at us every Friday night!" Shed tears with this innocent maiden as she sobs, "Prestigious School is no fun! Mom and Dad are so mean! My class is hell!"

Ah, hell. Do you really want to tell me that doing drills at ballet class is comparable to eternal separation from God? You mean to say that you have the worst life in the whole world because your loving parents try to nurture your talent at a dance school that insists on a ballet bun? Let's talk, dear, about true suffering. Let's discuss the children whose parents beat them, the children who are starving, the children who are freezing on this cold cold night. Listen to Daddy tell the story of the man he knows whose father was a boy in Belgium when the Germans invaded, whose sister was shot dead on the morning of the invasion as she was walking to church with her family. Mommy assures you that you are so fortunate to grow up in a family with parents who love each other. My darling, there is suffering out there that is beyond your capacity to imagine right now. There are children whose life is almost literally hell on earth, who can only dream of the happy warm existence you have with your sisters and brother in this big house. Do not ever tell me again, please, that ballet class is "hell".

A pause, and fresh tears start. "I don't want to go to class! And why do I have to take a shower every Friday night?"

Time for bed.

Catholicism and "Neoliberalism": Strawmen Are Often Contrary to Church Teaching

2012-01-12T11:47:00.001-05:00

David Cloutier at the Catholic Moral Theology blog links approvingly to a post at dotCommonweal addressing Romney's political views which asks whether "neoliberalism" (the which is here used to mean something along the lines of free market capitalism) and Catholicism can ever be compatible. He says:

Superb exchange going on over at dotCommonweal over a post about how certain political conservatives, like Rick Santorum or Michael Gerson, try to reconcile their Catholicism with the neoliberal paradigm. For once, even the comment thread is worth reading!

I think this is an important – if not THE important – debate about Catholicism and politics in the current election. Often, the debate over particular policies dominates, but in fact, what we should be looking at are the basic principles of the economic order. If a candidate fundamentally contradicts the basic principles, Catholics should have reservations about supporting him. In the post referred to above, “neoliberalism” is cast in terms of a pure free-market conception, in which governments take a minimal role in economic activity, providing for enforcement of contracts, a stable currency, etc. – protection against “force and fraud.” Others claim that Gerson forthrightly support subsidiary actors – such as families, community organizations, and churches – and so is not in fact individualist.

The (frequently made) mistake here is one that goes back to Edmund Burke, that “father” of conservatism. Burke seeks to deal with nascent industrial capitalism by (Warning: blogging oversimplification ahead…) distinguishing between a sphere of “culture” (or “civil society”) that can be fostered, and refuses to attribute social problems to the mechanisms of the market itself. He defends the market as good, over against the landed establishment (the “nobles”) of the pre-industrial order, which is who he is opposing. But for him, the market is not all there is. (One sometimes sees a variant of this in defending Adam Smith by noting one must read both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments.)

There are two fundamental problems with maintaining this thesis today, which never seem to be adequately explained. First, Burke (like Adam Smith, in this way) is writing prior to the advent of large, joint-stock corporations. They are imagining relatively small-scale market actors. This observation is important for the second reason: it is overwhelmingly clear that large-scale corporate capitalism is destructive of small-scale community organization. As Wendell Berry has written repeatedly, community does not “have a value” measurable in economic terms, and therefore is constantly undermined by the market for the sake of its expansion.
...
Ultimately, Benedict’s work continues the tradition of CST, which maintains a balanced approach, accepting markets if they are “circumscribed within a strong juridical framework” by sound government regulation (see Centesimus Annus, paragraph 42), and if they are respectful of the institutions of civil society (including the family), which are in some sense “prior” to both market and state. This approach tends to fit uncomfortably with the rights-based individualism that sometimes contaminates Democratic attempts to work for the common good, but it outright contradicts the anti-government rhetoric of “free enterprise” that is routine among Republicans.

It was the last paragraph that threw me and sent me back to re-read what came before a bit. Living, like most people, within a world that shapes and is shaped by my own beliefs and dispositions, it's not hard to forget that people can have such contrary assumptions. That someone would think that a Catholic worldview is a "sometimes" a difficult fit with the Democratic party worldview but clearly incompatible with being a Republican is a little eye-opening for me. It's not just that I and most of the other Catholics I know are fairly conservative, it's that my acquaintances who are mainstream progressives are quite eager to make it clear that people with my views on marriage, sexuality, abortion and childbearing are absolutely unwelcome on their side of the aisle. That other people can see the division between parties as not being primarily over these issues always seems surprising to me.

Still, the topic here is Catholicism and economic ideology, and I think there's some light to shed on what Cloutier claims here. I don't bring up the cultural divide between political alignments as a red herring, though, I think it's key. Part of the issue, I think, is that the ideological polarization of our society tends to lead people to thinking of the ideas of "the other side" in very broad stereotypes. There is some accuracy to them, but they also tend to obscure what people really think by taking a simplified form of a belief and building it into a strawman.

If we cast "neoliberalism" or "free market ideology" as the belief that only things that "have value" in measurable, market terms should be regarded, and that the market should be the determining factor in all things, then yes, these will be ideologies incompatible with Catholicism, with humanism, and with civilized life. On the other hand, the very untenability of this conception of what conservatives are talking about ought to be an indicator that perhaps some mistake is being made. We can imagine that conservatives are all as whacked out as Ayn Rand, but this involves both ignoring the criticism of Randian libertarianism that comes from many conservatives, and also assuming that a lot of what conservatives say stems from false consciousness. Try measuring it, for instance, against the following quote from Santorum (the person who is being accused by dotCommonweal of holding market beliefs incompatible with Catholicism):

This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone. [source]

Now, as the linked post shows, Santorum's comments here are enough to cause infighting among different conservative factions, but clearly this kind of thinking (which could fairly be described as subsidiary rather than individualistic) that is common enough in the conservative mainstream to attract more followers than the radical individualism of pure libertarianism.

In point of fact, supporting a free market approach to economics (and indeed, I probably have a more free market approach than Santorum, in that he seems to adhere to the idea that trying to prop up teetering rust-belt industries via subsidies will stave off the inevitable rather than prolonging the painful decline) does not mean assigning no value to things that are not easily quantifiable in monetary terms (contra Wendel Berry who at times cultivates an almost willful ignorance about matters economic and technological.) Indeed, one of the areas in which even economists have sought to capture this in recent decades is in looking at the ways in which information and relationships are essential parts of economic systems and economic growth, despite the fact that they are nearly impossible to quantify in purely monetary terms. This is why the kind of corporate restructuring which Romney is being criticized for participating in during his Bain days is so prone to failure: even if it's clear that a company needs to be reorganized in order to avoid bankruptcy, the process of restructuring often does so much knowledge to the networks of relationships and morale within the company that the company is sent into a tailspin for reasons that would not be immediately obvious from a business case.

Individualism is such a natural temptation it would be shocking if we found it only on one side of the political spectrum. If on the right it is found in the more libertarian side of conservatism, on the left it shows up in the idea that the state should provide each person with sufficient support to not have to rely on others for help, making each person's primary relationship be with the state rather than with other people and institutions. (This seems to work: through a mixture of cause and effect we find that the most splintered families are among those who require government aid while the greatest tendency to intact family and social structures is found at the higher end of the income scale.) This can come out in all sorts of unexpected ways. I recall being struck by it particularly a while back when talking with a relative (relatively progressive) who lives in Germany, and who maintained that the German outlawing of homeschooling (educating your children yourself in Germany rather than at a recognized school can be grounds for having your children taken away by the state) was just because it was the state's duty to protect the right of a child to a good education from any educational delusions the parents might be under.

Radical individualism is such an attractive error in modern affluent societies, it would be surprising if we found it only on one side of the political aisle. If we imagine that the other side is completely owned by it, while ours is only occasionally afflicted, we are probably failing to understand either side well.

From the Vaults: Giant Man-Eating Bugs Bore Me!

2012-01-12T09:26:00.000-05:00

I wish I could remember who it was that told me recently that Peter Jackson's King Kong was a great movie. Whoever you are: You Were Wrong, and here's my review from 2008 to prove it. I also think that 2008 may be the last time we sat down and watched a movie (I don't count Thor as "sitting down and watching a movie", though the critiques of King Kong are also surprisingly relevant to that cinematic spectacle.)

***

So we felt like watching a movie last night. This is an increasingly rare occurrence, as we're usually too tired or preoccupied these days to tie up two hours of our precious free time post-girl-bedtime. But last night we tied up three hours watching King Kong, and all I can say is that Peter Jackson owes me back the extra hour with which he padded his bloated movie.

Peter Jackson does lavish spectacle well -- we've all seen Lord of the Rings. Perhaps he does better work when he's presented with a plot-heavy saga to whittle down into nine 0r so hours of screen time. But his King Kong is thirty minutes of plot jam-packed into three hours of increasingly distancing special effects extravaganza. A bit of action in a movie gets one's adrenaline pumping. Strata after strata of over-the-top dinosaur stampedes and ape chases and Kong fighting men and Kong fighting three dinosaurs at the same time with a girl in his hand! so ossified our suspension of disbelief that by the time giant insects and spiders and tapeworms were devouring our heroes and one guy was using a machine gun to shoot hordes of scorpions off another guy, we were yawning and checking the time. And this from the people who spent a tense half-hour in a stand-off with a single cockroach just hours earlier. (Now that was a situation with real dramatic potential.)

Oh Peter Jackson. What happened? I wanted to like your movie. But why the character development for the ship's crew who suddenly fall off the screen in the last hour? Where did all the natives of the island come from and disappear to? Why the massive and unneccesary plot holes in what should have been such a compact story? Why couldn't we see more of Colin Hanks' production assistant, who was the only character I cared about? How on earth can anyone make a movie that winds up with me skipping past a scene of a guy being eaten by multiple huge tapeworms not because I'm horrified but because I'm numbed by the preceding interminable action sequences? The mind boggles.

Perhaps in my old age I'm getting jaded, but when I chose to spend an evening of my valuable spare time with a movie, I like to be entertained or challenged or at least somewhat involved. Is that too much to ask of the exact same production team that made Lord of the Rings?

The Blog According to Us

2012-01-11T08:20:00.000-05:00

The Darwins analyze their own blog.

Darwin: We don't really tend to have long comment threads these days. But then, I guess we haven't hit any of the issues that automatically generate long controversies lately.

MrsDarwin: I have absolutely no interest in issues-based blogging.

Darwin: I like issues, but even when I get around to writing about them I seem to focus on issues that don't generate many comments.

MrsDarwin: I only write about myself, and there's only so much other people can say about that.

ABD: Always Be Discerning

2012-01-10T00:12:00.001-05:00

Back in our college days at Orthodox U., there was a process called "discernment", most commonly embarked upon by men or women trying to weasel out of awkward relationships. Actually, that's not fully accurate: I heard tell of men and women edging toward marriage who also invoked the discernment process in order to spark some romantic urgency in the other half of the relationship.

And then there were those who insisted on signs and wonders, rose petals being the most popular, to confirm their vocational biases. Perhaps I am not the right person to analyze this phenomenon; I'm no romantic. In any case, the lack of a sign was rarely taken as clear evidence of divine disapproval, but as an indicator that the petitioner needed more discernment, as if the good Lord had not provided his children with such apparatus as senses, reasoning faculties, family, friends, and good old gut instinct to help them make momentous life decisions.

Brandon rejects the current infatuation with "discernment" as a state of life, rather than as an means to an end. He provides a handy checklist for those focused on the point of discernment: "to come to a clear decision on the basis of the kind of information that's needed for a good decision. For some people this will take some time, yes, but for others it won't. What people don't need are stupid exercises and long drawn out excuses; they need good, clear information in the form in which they can best understand it. That's it."

Here's a checklist on how to decide if your vocation is marriage:

1. There's no fundamental impediment to getting married.2. You've met someone really great.3. You think you'd like to be married to them.4. They think you're really great.5. They think they'd like to be married to you.6. You could meet your responsibilities as a married person and they could meet theirs.7. It wouldn't be an act of stupidity in general or a harm for yourself or the other person for you to marry them.

Here's another checklist on how to decide if your vocation is priesthood:

1. There's no fundamental impediment to ordination.2. You are interested in being a priest.3. You could fulfill the responsibilities of a priest without scandal.4. You are willing to commit to putting other people's good above your own, and especially God above yourself.5. It wouldn't be an act of stupidity in general or a harm for yourself and others for you to become a priest.

Of course, these aren't even universal; there have been arranged marriages and there have been times and places where congregations forced promising young men to be priests. But, again, it's really not that difficult to make decisions.

This is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but the point holds that any one of these points being negative is a pretty clear sign that this vocation is not for you. And discernment has to involve taking the practical steps to determine whether one is able to live out a vocation.

Back at Orthodox U., those who were serious about pursuing a religious vocation generally tested that call by trying to live as authentic a Catholic life as possible in their current state. Their discernment process was one of deep prayer, of course, but was also a matter of intense practicality: do I have what it takes to live as a priest or a nun? Can I meet the obligations of this life? Do I want this enough to spend the years it will take before I can make the final commitment? Those who had a desire to be married first had to navigate through the perils and pitfalls of a relationship with an actual other, and take the practical steps to determine whether that particular other was someone with whom they could live, for better and for worse. Each step of the journey involved prayer, but also the information gathering that allowed people to confront a decision, and then make a decision. That's what discernment is about.

Happy Feast of the Three Kings

2012-01-06T11:33:00.001-05:00

January 6th is the traditional Epiphany, the 12th day of Christmas and the feast of the visitation of the Maji -- though in these benighted times the US bishops move the feast to the nearest Sunday, thus this year the 12th day of Christmas will be the 14th day of Christmas.

In honor of the day, however, I thought I'd repost the video I put together for Epiphany a couple years ago. I first encountered this classic orchestration of We Three Kings by Eugene Ormandy when I was a child, watching my dad give the annual Christmas Star Show up at the Griffith Observatory. Since the recording is hard to find, and there too it the music provided background to a montage of artistic representations of the Three Kings, I took the liberty of putting together a YouTube video for the occasion.

Starlight and Moonlight

2012-01-05T21:12:00.001-05:00

When I was little, we lived in rural Virginia. The nights were dark miles out of town, but the sky was thick and bright with stars. My dad take us out into the warm summer air to name the constellations and point out the best-known stars, and we would slap mosquitos and stare mesmerized at the millions of vivid points suspended just out of reach.

I don't have a stellar memory, but I can usually find Orion's belt and the Big Dipper and the Pleiades when the nights are dark enough. Tonight I had to drive a bit out of town to visit a friend who'd just had a baby, a little girl with hair as thick and black as night. The night was crisp and frosty. The sky was clear and the stars glittered high and cold. Coming home, I lingered at a stop sign to look up and saw a bright object shoot horizontally across the sky and vanish in a twinkle. Again I lingered before entering the house to find Orion and his belt. The windows of the house were warm and golden, but above, the slate roof glowed silver in the light of the waxing moon.

The Facile Certainty of Scientism

2012-01-05T12:59:00.000-05:00

There's nothing like a good bloodletting review, in my opinion, and if you share my taste in this regard you may enjoy Leon Weiseltier's review of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions in the latest The New Republic. How can one not enjoy a review with lines such as:

THIS SHABBY BOOK is riddled with ... notions that typify our time.

A Poem of Pronunciation

2012-01-04T22:05:00.001-05:00

This is the most awesome thing I've read in days -- if only because it allowed me to correct MrsDarwin's pronunciation twice. (Not out of greater knowledge, but because she was the one reading and so I didn't get caught on the read-but-not-heard ones that would have tripped me up.) [source]

English Pronunciation by G. Nolst Trenité

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Fe0ffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

Weep for those who must learn our language as a second one -- which would be just about everyone who didn't grow up speaking it.

Why Not ID Voters?

2012-01-04T21:56:00.000-05:00

As we head into election season, voter fraud will become a political issue again. Each party has it's favorite way of worrying that the other is stealing the election. Typically, Democrats claim that Republicans are keeping minorities away from the polls and that sinister corporations and officials will use voting machines and "confusing" ballots to steal elections. Republicans worry that Democrats will cheat via bussing in unregistered voters or voting multiple times.

The Obama administration may be getting into the fray, as Eric Holder's Justice Department weighs whether to attack laws requiring photo ID in order to vote as alleged violations of the Voting Rights Act. Liberal opinion makers are urging on this effort, maintaining that because the percentage of minorities who lack photo ID is slightly higher than the percentage of whites, this is clearly a racist plot. The additional evidence to support the racism theory is that these laws have more often been passed in Southern states -- though I tend to think this is simply a function of the fact that preventing voter fraud is more of a Republican issue (they suspect, rightly, that voter fraud won't help them) and it's mostly Southern states that are controlled by Republicans.

Perhaps I take the right to vote a little too casually, but it seems to me that when we've already required photo Id to get a job, buy a drink, drive or travel by air, being denied the chance to vote for lack of ID is not the largest problem you would have. It's virtually impossible to get along as an adult in modern American society without photo ID, and mostly for good reasons. Having gone that far, I don't see how it's any hardship to expect people to show ID in order to vote. It's true that in recent years there's little evidence of voter fraud involving people impersonating someone else being a statistically significant contributor to election results, but nonetheless it seems like a basic element of good civic process to expect people who want to vote to show that they are who they say who they are. Frankly, the only reasons I can see for opposing voter ID laws are:

1) A partisan desire to disagree with the other party or
2) An expectation that you really do have a number of people who aren't legitimate voters who would cast ballots on your behalf.

Voter ID laws are not the grandfather or literacy tests of the Jim Crow era, and to treat them as such is simply dishonest, sensational, and corrosive to the public square.

You're Gonna Make Me Lonely When You Go

2012-01-03T09:24:00.003-05:00

More Anna, more music from Christmas. She and my younger brother play at coffeehouses under the name The Lonely Oranges, and here's one of their standards, a cover of a Bob Dylan song.

So Baby Has A Skull Fracture

2011-12-31T15:30:00.000-05:00

The drama, though not, as it proved, the events, started when I got home from work on the Tuesday night before Christmas, scooped up eighteen-month-old Pidge, and noticed that she had a soft, squishy lump on her head, slightly above her right ear. She had just started to walk consistently the weekend before -- by far the latest walker of the five -- and with five boisterous children in a house with hardwood floors the occasional lump is not unexpected, but I'd never encountered a soft lump before, except with the post-partum hemotoma our oldest had had. The lump didn't seem to bother her, however, and she had not had any notable accidents since taking a dive off the changing table the week before, so we decided to take the "wait and see" approach.

The lump remained for the next few days, and seemed like it was perhaps growing slightly, and so like the typical modern parent in times of nervousness, I began to consult Google. Soft lumps on toddler heads, I found, are usually associated with skull fractures. However, skull fractures are generally associated with vomitting, loss of balance, partial paralysis, loss of consciousness, etc., and Pidge seemed more healthy and full of personality than ever as she walked around the house talking to herself and others.

By Friday, however, with the lump no smaller and the prospect of the weekend and Christmas making doctors particularly hard to get hold of, we got nervous and took her in for an appointment at our doctor's office. Her usual doctor was on vacation, and the doctor who saw her pretty much echoed what I'd found in my online research: normally this kind of soft lump would be associated with a skull factor, but since she wasn't showing any symptoms at all, we should keep an eye on her and head straight to the emergency room if she showed any neurological symptoms. He advised we bring her on Tuesday for a followup with her usual doctor.

Pidge continued to seem as healthy as ever, but as the lump seemed to go down a little it seemed, to our nervous parental fingers and those of various visitting relatives as if there were lumps and depressions underneath. In the very center, it seemed like you couldn't feel the skull beneath it. By the time that Tuesday rolled around, we were well ready to get her usual doctor's advice.

Again, he confirmed that this kind of lump is usually only found with skull fractures, but that the total lack of symptoms seemed to make a skull fracture unlikely. However, to be sure, he sent her across the street to the hospital to get an x-ray. On the x-ray it turned out that she did indeed have a skull fracture. As best as we could figure out, it must have resulted from the fall off the changing table, at this point a week and a half in the past.

This left open the question of what, if anything, to do next. It turns out that there's not much that can be done about a skull fracture itself, other than giving the body time to heal itself. The danger comes in if the brain underneath is damaged -- either by the initial trauma itself, by a piece of bone pressing in on the brain, or by blood or other fluids building up inside the skull and putting pressure on the brain. The lack of symptoms seemed to suggest that none of these we going on, but the doctor wanted confirmation from someone with more experience dealing with toddler skull fractures, so he sent us down to Children's Hospital downtown to have them look at the x-rays and determine if a CAT scan was needed.

The specialist at Children's was able to fill in some basic questions that had built up:

- A skull fracture can result from a comparatively minor fall, one of his sons had also had a skull fracture from falling off a changing table.

- Even if it is a simple linear fracture (meaning there's a line of fracture but neither piece of bone is depressed) as the blood built up under the scalp (which is what forms the soft lump) drains and clots it can feel as if there are dips and bumps under the lump.

Once the radiologists finished looking at the x-rays that had already been taken, they were concerned that it looked like the two sides of the fracture were slightly out of alignment, which if it was causing pressure or bleeding on the brain could necessitate some kind of surgery to realign the bones. They wanted to do a CAT scan. Knowing that by this point we were going to have passed our deductible on the insurance anyway, we agreed to the CAT scan, but were seriously hesitant about the idea of signing up for skull surgergy on an apparently healthy child. If it came to that, we were going to have a lot of questions first.

Fortunately, Pidge was eminently calm as they wrapped her up like a papoose for her CAT scan. Her little face peering out of the restraints, with her yellow pacifier quietly bobbing up and down, was so incongruous in the room full of technology that I wished I could take a picture of her, but it was a "no cell phones" room.

The result of this was, thankfully, anti-climax. The CAT scan revealed that the bones of her skull were aligned enough that no intervention was necessary, and it made clear that there were no buildups of blood or fluid inside the skull. We had a very healthy (if thoroughly scanned) girl with a skull fracture, and were enjoined once again to watch out for vomitting, loss of balance, loss of consciousness, etc.

So:

- A comparatively minor fall can in fact cause a skull fracture.
- A soft lump does indeed often indicate a skull fracture beneath.
- But, a skull fracture can turn out to require essentially no treatment, so long as the brain isn't being put under pressure and the bones are aligned to heal properly.
- As the lump over even such a harmless fracture goes down, it can feel like are all sorts of depressions or lumps on the skull, but as the blood continues to clear away these go away.

Pidge continues to toddle around happily, unconcerned by it all.

Lest Anyone Should Think It's Just Muslims and Jews Who Can Get A Bit Crazy About the Holy Land

2011-12-29T10:36:00.000-05:00

Monsignor Charles Pope writes on the Archdiocese of Washington blog about his own experiences of tensions and near violence from and among Orthodox clergy over proper sharing of the holy sites in the Holy Land, in light of the recent spectacle of Greek and Armenian Orthodox priests and monks beating each other with brooms in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Music for Angelico

2011-12-29T01:37:00.001-05:00

Per Angelico's request, here are some carols.

The Wexford Carol (bell courtesy of Eleanor):

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The Coventry Carol, with outtakes:

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WWII-era? Well, it's a cappella, anyway. Sh-Boom:

And for good measure, my brother Will's funky guitar on Embraceable You:

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The Return of Anna

2011-12-28T12:39:00.001-05:00

Happiness is having all six siblings in the same house.

And here's the sort of thing that happens when we all get together: music breaks out. Here's the famous Anna Egan singing Lied Der Braut at 1 AM.

Featuring Pidge and her expressions.

Six of us, plus my brother-in-law and his twin. There will be Irish music and Christmas music and standards and my brother singing "Don't Stop Believing" in a very creditable falsetto. Put in a request, and maybe we'll record it and post it for you.

To The Man Without Morals

2011-12-27T11:20:00.001-05:00

Via audio book, I've been reading the second volume of William Manchester's magisterial biography of Churchill, The Last Lion, (I finished the first volume a few weeks ago) and am thus working through the lead up to World War II.

There was an evocative little snippet that I heard the other day in which British Lord Halifax went on a diplomatic visit to Hitler's Berchtesgaden retreat in 1937 to discuss various issues. Over dinner, Halifax's tenure as Viceroy of India came up, and in reference to the then current troubles relating to the British rule there, Hitler advised that the solution was simple, "Shoot Gandhi!"

Manchester reports that Halifax took this as a joke, and related it to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on his return as such, to good effect. With the benefit of hindsight informing Hitler's character, it seems fairly clear that the suggestion was probably meant quite seriously -- though he may well have assumed that the British hadn't the stomach to follow through on such advice.

Whether in the civic or the personal sphere, basic guardrails of moral acceptability ("You just don't do that!") can seem like boundaries of reality -- until they aren't.

One Horse Open Sleigh

2011-12-25T22:47:00.003-05:00

I'm not generally a fan of "Jingle Bells", but this version (going under the title "One Horse Open Sleigh", under which the song was originally published in 1850) I have always really loved. Sadly, it's hard to get hold of. It appeared on an album entitled A Victorian Christmas by the Robert DeCormier Singers and Ensemble back in 1984, and it is currently out of print. Some used copies are at times available on Amazon, but they can be pricey. (According to the above link, there are currently none below $20.)

However, it seems sad not to have such a good version available, so I've ventured to put it up on YouTube, hoping that this somehow constitutes fair use since there's no way to currently buy the album in a way that benefits the artists.

Enjoy. And a Merry Christmas to all our readers.

"...All occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons."

2011-12-25T14:28:00.001-05:00

From a sermon of John Donne, Christmas Day 1624.

God made Sun and Moon to distinguish seasons, and day, and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons: But God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies; In paradise, the fruits were ripe, the first minute, and in heaven it is alwaies Autumne, his mercies are ever in their maturity. We ask panem quotidianum, our daily bread, and God never sayes you should have come yesterday, he never sayes you must againe to morrow, but to day if you will hear heare his voice, to day he will heare you. If some King of the earth have so large an extent of Dominion, in North, and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and West, as that he hath day and night together in his Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgement together: He brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, though have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benummed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.

May God abundantly bless your Christmas season with his innumerable mercies.

Christmas Giveaway Winner!

2011-12-24T12:26:00.002-05:00

And the winner of The Years With Ross by James Thurber is:

Christina!

I wish I could send something to everyone who entered, but as I haven't even sent a Christmas card to my grandmother yet, I can but blow good wishes your way. (Andy, I gave the hat a special shake in honor of Jordana's youngest, but it didn't cooperate).

There are plenty more oddball or esoteric tomes that we inherited from the former owners, so stay tuned. I think we'll have more giveaways in the future.

The Christmas Music Post, Radio Version

2011-12-23T17:50:00.000-05:00

The good, the bad, and the random from the girls' favorite easy listening station, which has been playing Christmas music since before Thanksgiving, I kid you not.

Here's what I like this year: Michael Buble singing Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You". I can't stand the original, maybe because Mariah sings it, and she can't leave the vocal acrobatics alone long enough for anyone to hear the sound of her voice. But Michael Buble transforms it into something I actually want to listen to, again and again.

Carrie Underwood and her Christmas music seem to be all over the radio these days. It could be that she has a pretty voice, but pop-style belting seems an odd choice for some of the more classical carols.

Here, Carrie, let a master show you how to lilt a carol. Allison Krause sings the Wexford Carol, with Yo Yo Ma.

Josh Groban has a fine voice, and I appreciate listening to someone with good training, but I'm saddened that he's whoring out his talent by singing sugar-laced dreck like this "Believe" song. Yes, I know it's from the movie Polar Express, but I only heard it this year, and I barely restrained myself from shouting, "What the hell?" in front of my children.

It's too bad, because he seems like a genuinely funny guy, as evidenced by his send-ups of his own persona. Here he is, hosting an episode of a British music game show. (I honestly do not remember how much content is in this video, but it's late-night BBC, so be warned.)

And finally, for those of you who need to kick it like it's 1987, here's RUN-DMC with "Christmas in Hollis" (h/t to the Korrectiv Office Party playlist).

Vader, Did You Know?

2011-12-22T12:42:00.001-05:00

I really don't know what I'd do if the internet disappeared. Between a nasty sinus headache and trying to read my novel on hardcopy, the internet is the only thing keeping me awake. It keeps me awake because it amuses me. Youtube amuses me. Here's what I mean.

With apologies to anyone who likes the original song more than I do.

"Whatever would you DO if the internet were to disappear?"

2011-12-22T11:02:00.000-05:00

Wondermark is reminding me of my complaints about the social effects of Youtube.

Do Greeks Work Harder Than Germans?

2011-12-21T15:14:00.000-05:00

Matt Yglasias has a piece in Slate attempting to counter the "if the Euro is going to work, Greeks are going to have to learn to work hard like Germans" line of thinking.

It’s true that Germans and Greeks work very different amounts, but not in the way you expect. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the average German worker put in 1,429 hours on the job in 2008. The average Greek worker put in 2,120 hours. In Spain, the average worker puts in 1,647 hours. In Italy, 1,802. The Dutch, by contrast, outdo even their Teutonic brethren in laziness, working a staggeringly low 1,389 hours per year.

If you recheck your anecdata after looking up the numbers, you’ll recall that on that last trip to Florence or Barcelona you were struck by the huge number of German (or maybe they were Dutch or Danish) tourists around everywhere.

The truth is that countries aren’t rich because their people work hard. When people are poor, that’s when they work hard. Platitudes aside, it takes considerably more “effort” to be a rice farmer or to move sofas for a living than to be a New York Times columnist. It’s true that all else being equal a person can often raise his income by raising his work rate, but it’s completely backward to suggest that extraordinary feats of effort are the way individuals or countries get to the top of the ladder. On the national level the reverse happens—the richer Germans get, the less they work.

Closer to the mark is the observation that Germans (like the Dutch and the Austrians) are thrifty, net savers who consume less than they produce and therefore export more than they import.

Even if there is some sense in which Germany’s trade surplus and attendant thrift is admirable, it simply isn’t possible for all countries to emulate Germany and export more than they import. Your exports are my imports. Your saving is my borrowing. Your assets are my debts. Living within one’s means certainly sounds like a good idea, but it’s not really advice that everyone can take. If every European country strives to reduce government and private borrowing simultaneously, a severe recession and steep decline in output is the only possible outcome.

The statistics Yglasias is referencing are from the OECD and can be found here. (Just select the country you want to view and scroll down about two thirds of the way.)

I think that, first off, he's probably engaging in a bit of statistical malpractice. The data being cited here is based on a household survey of all workers, both part time and full time, so this doesn't just tell you about how many hours the average full time worker works in a week, and how much vacation they take, but also how many people are working full time versus how many are working part time. By that point, I have to think it's a somewhat un-useful measure. And the survey produces some very odd results. For instance, this shows the only two countries in which people on average work more hours than Greece as being Chile and South Korea. While notoriously slacking Japan logs only 1772 hours per year and the US only 1792. Something here just doesn't smell right to me, given what I've read about standard full time work weeks and vacation hours in these various countries.

But leaving that aside, it strikes me that there are a couple of interesting lessons which can be drawn out of here -- though none of them are Yglasias' apparent conviction that Greece is somehow more economically deserving and Germany is exerting some sort of unfair advantage over them.

Being Poor Often Does Mean Working Harder
While the common place that working hard is a good way to improve your lot, this certainly doesn't mean that people who make less don't work hard. Many comparatively low paid jobs are absolutely back breaking. Here I am, after all, composing this post off and on during free scraps of time during my workday, while sitting comfortably at a desk with my cup of coffee and my MP3 player within reach. You can bet that someone who picks fruit all day or cleans toilets or frames houses is a lot more tired at the end of the work day than I am. Many of the world's poorest people in this day and age live by small plot subsistence farming, using tools that haven't changed much in hundreds of years. Unquestionably, that is a very hard life. So if those people are poor, it's certainly not because they aren't working hard.

Value Is Created By What You Get Done, Not How Long You Do It
Let's think about that farming example for a minute. Take a look at these two pictures:

The farmer in the first picture is doubtless working much harder. However, the farmers in the second picture are making a lot more money. Why? Because the technology and work methods they are using mean that at the end of a day's work, they will have far more grain to show for their work. Their productivity is higher. So assuming that grain is itself something which people value about the same no matter who they buy it from, the modern farmers are going to make far more money than the traditional farmers, even while doing less work.

Typically, the amount that someone is paid for doing some sort of work is measured by how much other people value the product of that work. This relates not only to questions of productivity, but of the relative value of the things being produced. If someone works ten hours a day selling tourist postcards for 0,20€ each, that person is likely to make less money than someone who spends seven hours a day assembling Volkswagens that will be sold for $30,000 each, even if the former is putting in more hours. It's not just a matter of how much effort someone puts in, but of how much other people are willing to pay for the product of that labor. The amount that people are willing to pay for the product of an hour's auto assembling is more than the amount they're willing to pay for an hour's postcard selling. It's not just a matter of how hard or skilled the work is, but also how much people need a car (and how much they value a good one over a bad one) compared to how much they need postcards.

There are a host of reasons why Germany is a wealthier country than Greece, but at root, one of the most basic is that Germany produces a total output of goods and services per capita which people value significantly above the per capita output of goods and services which Greece produces. "Germans work harder than Greeks" may not be the clearest way to express that, but it does come rather closer to the truth than implying that it is rather the result of Germans just happening to save a bit more and to have got to the export table first and gobbled up all the export surplus before Greece arrived on the scene.

Christmas Giveaway: The Years With Ross, by James Thurber

2011-12-20T22:19:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas, gentle readers!

I've long wanted to have a blog giveaway with a inherited book from our library, and I think I've found the right volume for the purpose: The Years With Ross, by James Thurber.

Harold Wallace Ross was the founding editor of the New Yorker, and, if Thurber is to believed, a Character of outsized contradictions. Swearing came as naturally to him as breathing, yet he was alarmed and bashful in the presence of women, a sex he feared (and yet his marriages numbered three). He apparently couldn't bear the company of young women, whom he judged to be flighty temptresses.

"I want you to fire So-and-so," he said, changing the object, but not the subject, of his wrath. So-and-so was a young woman, long since in heaven with the angels, who wrote one of the back-of-the-book departments. "She makes me nervous," Ross said. "Last night, at Tony's, she was damn near sitting in the lap of the man she was with." It happened that I had been at Tony's the night before, too, and had seen the couple, sitting and drinking and talking like any other couple in Tony's, and I told Ross that. Then he came out with one of his accusations that were pure, patented Ross. "They were talking in awful goddam low tones," he said. It wasn't often that I laughed in the inner sanctum in those first months, but that was too much for me. Then I said, "Don't you know your Shakespeare: Her voice was ever gentle and awful goddam low, an excellent thing in woman?" Ross turned away so that I couldn't see his grin, but his torso had one of those brief spasmodic upheavals that so often served as a sign of his amusement in the art meeting when he looked at a drawing he thought was really funny. When he turned around he was scowling. "Goddam it, Thurber, don't quote things at me," he said. The firing mood was gone.

He ran the New Yorker almost by sheer force of his personality, but was so financially oblivious that he had $71,000 stolen right under his nose by an unscrupulous assistant. He had both an eye for talent, and a gift for driving it from his magazine through overwork. In the early years of the New Yorker, Ross, Thurber, and E.B. White wrote much of the magazine themselves, and the book is chockfull of big names of mid-century American literature: Noel Coward, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufmann, Henry Luce, H.L Mencken, and, a bit incongruously, the Marx Brothers. Here's Dorothy Parker making an appearance in the magazine's early days.

Meanwhile, the New Yorker kept going downhill. From an original runoff of fifteen thousand copies in February, its circulation fell to a pernicious-anemia low of twenty-seven hundred copies in August. One evening, during that summer of Harold Ross's greatest discontent, the harried editor ran into Dorothy Parker somewhere. "I thought you were coming into the office to write a piece last week," he said. "What happened?" Mrs. Parker turned upon him the eloquent magic of her dark and lovely eyes. "Somebody was using the pencil," she explained sorrowfully.

Ross, worn down by cancer, died on the operating table a month after his fifty-ninth birthday. The Years With Ross grew out of a series of articles Thurber wrote for the Atlantic Monthly.

Want a chance to read more wry Thurberian wit? Leave a comment on this post (and don't be anonymous!), and on Christmas Eve we'll toss all the commenter names into a hat and draw a lucky winner. This is one of the few uninscribed volumes of the inherited books -- the previous owners of the house were fond of putting names and dates into their books -- so we'll even inscribe it, if desired.

Bonne chance!

Three Hundred Words

2011-12-20T09:30:00.000-05:00

It's time now to rectify a great error: I've added Christopher's Three Hundred Words blog to the blogroll. Christopher, whom I had the pleasure to meet once in Austin, has the gift of making little-known details of historical incidents come to life in the short space of -- wait for it -- three hundred words. Here's a sample.

Henry stood outside of his rented Richmond home staring at the approaching wagon. He’d had time to consider this moment for some time but now that it was upon him, his mind drew blank. The tears that had left their tracks on his cheeks were gone and his mouth was dry and numb, unable to form the words he’d wanted to say even if the words had come.

He stepped out into the road as the wagon passed slowly by. In the back, covered with a canvas awning, sat a pregnant woman and three children, all in chains and crying. Henry reached out and grasped the woman’s hand and walked beside them until the pace of the wagon quickened. He remained motionless in the middle of the street as the faces peering back at him grew smaller and smaller.

“Out of the way, slave!”

Henry narrowly avoided the second wagon coming from behind and he felt the hot breath of the horse team on his neck. He looked up blankly at the driver. It was the Methodist minister who’d purchased his wife of twelve years, along with their children, for work in the swamps of North Carolina. The minister leaned over and spoke down to him calmly.

“Don’t pout; you’re permitted to find another wife...”

Twenty-five years later, Henry was living the good life. He’d become a successful author, speaker, and showman in England – as a magician. He worked hard to refine his act and the crowds that came to see him as the “African Prince” had their favorite tricks and would call them out to him at each show. But Henry Brown’s best trick, he’d only performed once – on March 23, 1849, when he stuffed himself into a 3’ x 2’ box and express-mailed himself to freedom in Philadelphia.

I'd heard the story of the slave who mailed himself to freedom, but I never knew any of the rest of the story.

The Boiler, in photos

2011-12-19T21:30:00.000-05:00

Heat, my darlings! Precious heat!

In case anyone has been wondering: here is a boiler. The old boiler. It doesn't look like much, but by gum, we missed it when it wasn't doing anything.

This is the interior of the burned-out boiler. It wasn't particularly charred, but you can see the quantities of rust. We are told that the previous owner must have skimped spectacularly on maintenance, as the old thing hadn't been cleaned out in ages. Apparently the fire was caused not by the cracked heat converter, but because the valve that measured the silt and gunk in the system was so clogged up that the automatic shut-off failed. When that happened, the burners kept running until the system became so overheated that it caught fire.

The interior of the new boiler -- much the same as the old boiler, but with 100% less fail. A boiler, it seems, consists of a series of large interlocking plates through which a large pipe runs. The pipe, I presume, carries the steam to the radiators? Don't be jealous of my intense technical knowledge.

Here we see the turbocharged burner. Each pipe has dozens of gas jets.

The old boiler, in pieces. You can see the plates and the hole for the pipe. Note the extensive rust. Note also the charming crack in my kitchen window. This house has character, in spades.

The new boiler assembled. It's less than half the size of Cthulu, the old coal-fired boiler. Cthulu was never moved out because it's too big to get out of the basement.

The lovely pot was in place for the purposes of flushing out the radiator system. Several buckets of junk were cleared from the pipes; the repairman was appalled. It's pretty obvious that the previous owner had let the system languish pretty disgracefully. The inspector should have noted the problems with the boiler before we moved in (less than a year ago, still), but I guess not everyone can be an expert in PREVENTING EXPENSIVE BOILER FIRES. The little valve over the pot allows us to flush the system ourselves once a month; the intense steam occasioned by flipping the valve means that no children set foot in the basement until we can cordon off this area in a very secure fashion.

On the plus side: the whole heating system is likely to run far more efficiently now. The radiators get much hotter these days. Jack has already learned not to sit on the one in the living room to toast his bottom.

And did I mention we have heat?

The Deification of Political Opinion

2011-12-19T10:38:00.000-05:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic is discussing the legacy of Christopher Hitchens and the reactions to his death by various commentators, including discussion of whether "not speaking ill of the dead" should apply to public figures. I was struck by this quote of a quote:

As Cook put it: "it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong"

Is this someone being rather hard on Hitchen's strident atheism, which went to extremes such as loudly mocking Mother Teresa and her work in the most excessive and vulgar terms? Is some health nut going after his heavy smoking and binge drinking? Is some woman upset by the way his literary bad boy persona spilled over into his relationships? No, the topic is Hitchen's opinion on the Iraq War:

indeed: "People make mistakes. What's horrible about Hitchens' ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made..."

I could see someone arguing that the Iraq War was the "single most consequential decision" in President Bush's life, or Dick Cheney's life, or even that of some major military figure. But Hitchen's was a literary and opinion journalist. That his thoughts on the Iraq War could somehow end up being the most "consequential" in his life suggests a view in which simply having a political opinion on some issue of the day is more important in one's life than anything one actually does.

This seems like an increasingly common way of thinking. As people decide that they are "basically good people" and banish morality from the bedroom, the living room, and the board room, they come to see morality as being the alignment with larger groups on the big issues of the day. Only the scrupulous worry about the morality of the mundane. Instead, morality is determined by how one addresses the big capitalized phrases of the moment: the War on Terror, Poverty, Inequality, Gay Rights, the Environment, etc.

This, it seems to me, couldn't be more backwards. Sure, what one thinks on various matters of the day is indicative of one's moral and personal choices, but the most consequential decisions of our lives are those we make about how we treat those around us on a day in and day out basis -- and whether we accept as the ruler and guide of those decisions our Maker.

Pinker's Bogus Statistics in Better Angels of Our Nature

2011-12-16T10:32:00.001-05:00

I have yet to read Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, though I've read one or two of his articles expounding it's central thesis: that over time humans have become less violent.

I'd tend to think that the basic thesis is probably true, at least to the extent that we consider this as personal, physical violence. Humanity has become more affluent over the centuries, and in general more affluent people are engage in personal violence less. Further (and this Pinker does not seem to take into account) European/Western culture has become increasingly dominant the world over, and that brings with it a bit of vestigial Christianity and Christianity's opposition to revenge and needless violence.

However, while Pinker's central point seems to have some amount of validity, he seems to have engaged in a fair amount of "too good to check" acceptance of very shoddy figures in support of his thesis. Humphrey Clarke of Quodlibeta has been doing a very good series of posts digging into the bogus statistics, odd assumptions, and misrepresentations that crept into Pinker's work. His most recent highlights some particularly egregious claims. For instance:

The three founders of Protestantism, Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII, had thousands of heretics were burned at the stake, as they and their followers took Jesus literally when he said, “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”

Protestants certainly killed their share of heretics over the years, but as Humphrey points out, the three individuals that Pinker accuses can't really be accused of killing "thousands". More like "about a hundred". That distortion, however, is nothing compared to the next:

Christian conquistadors massacred and enslaved native Americans in vast numbers, and perhaps twenty million were killed in all (not counting unintentional epidemics) by the European settlement of the Americas.

However, not only is it hard to come up with any rational way of arriving at this number after you exclude diseases, but Pinker apparently arrived at this number simply by averaging some estimates provided on the Necrometrics.com website -- estimates which the author of the page states to be unreliable guesses on the part of the authors of the studies involved.

This may not undercut Pinker's basic thesis, but it does certainly call into question whether he had any business writing a book (rather than a brief essay or two) if his research was going to be so sketchy in places.

Mary, Did You Know?

2011-12-16T09:19:00.000-05:00

Perhaps I'm the wrong person to be weighing in on this, because I simply don't like the song very much, but I was pleased by Jake Tawney's line-by-line analysis of the pop worship anthem "Mary, Did You Know?" at Roma Locuta Est.

The Charge Mary, a faithful Jewish girl, was guilty of ignorance regarding the facts about the coming Messiah… her own Son, Jesus the Christ.

The Prosecution Your Honor, I call Mary to the stand.

Mary, did you know that your baby boy will one day walk on water?
Mary Yes, I did. The Old Testament foretold that “He alone stretches out the heavens and treads upon the crests of the sea.” (Job 9:8)

The Prosecution Did you know that your baby boy will save our sons and daughters?

Mary Yes, I did. The Lord told our prophets, “Say to those whose hearts are frightened: be strong, fear not! Here is your God, He comes with vindication; With divine recompense He comes to save you.” (Is 35:4)
The Prosecution Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new… that this child that you’ve delivered will soon deliver you?
Mary Yes I did. The angel Gabriel greeted me saying, “Hail, full of grace (kecharitomene – Lk 1:28),” so I knew I’d already been delivered, actually. I then told my cousin Elizabeth that, “My spirit rejoices in God, my savior.” (Lk 1:47)

It's a Protestant song, and so it's no surprise that it reflects an incomplete Marian understanding, but it does seem a bit twee to suggest that Mary might have been surprised by the divine origin of her son, considering the circumstances of His conception. ("How can this be, since I do not know man?")

(Darwin was recalling last night how in his Confirmation program, the teachers were very fond of the "They Didn't Know!" school of theological speculation. "What would Jesus think if he could have seen 2000 years into the future? He didn't know there would be this huge church!"

"Well, yes he did," the teenaged Darwin replied. "I mean, he is God."

There was silence. "Yes, but did he really know?" insisted the teacher.)

Melanie Bettinelli feels that Jake is taking things too seriously, though, and comes through with an interesting defense of the song.

The rhetorical questions don't really imply that Mary didn't know the answers. Sure, on a literal level they are directed to Mary; but I think the listener isn't so much meant to linger on the state of Mary's knowledge so much as be drawn toward contemplation of the mystery of Incarnation. It reminds me of the list of rhetorical questions in Pink Floyd's "Mother". The "mother" character isn't really the point of the song, we're not meant to think about who the mother is or what she will think or how she will answer; she's just a rhetorical device.
The song moves the listener away from the iconic scene of the Mother and child in the stable and toward the rest of the Gospel story. In a post-Christian culture where most people never move beyond the Christmas card picture to think about Who that little baby is, this song tries to get them to do that.
I don't think the song needs rebuttal because it isn't really making the claims you say it's making about Mary. The one detail that I agree is off is the line about "the child you've delivered would soon deliver you" and yet I can forgive the bad theology. First, because it's a pop song and not a hymn. Second, because the focus of the line is a play on the word "deliver" not on the "soon". And last but not least, Christ's sacrifice on the cross did happen in time, a specific moment that fell after the moment of Mary's conception, obviously. The grace of that act saved Mary outside of time. I think it is well within the bounds of poetic license to juxtapose the moments and is a bit tendentious to impose rigorous theological language and categories upon a song.

I don't think there can be any conflict, however, that this is not an appropriate song to play at Mass (and yes, I've heard it there), because it is not at all "tendentious to impose rigorous theological language" upon the words sung during the liturgy, especially when they conflict with a Catholic understanding of basic doctrines of the faith.

Critiques of Economics and Keeping Economics in its Place

2011-12-15T13:56:00.000-05:00

Greg Mankiw links to a brief talk given by fellow Harvard professor Steve Marglin as part of an "Occupy Harvard" teach in. Marglin offers a course via the course called "Economics: A Critical Approach", and most of this talk is devoted to explaining why he thinks it's important to criticize "mainstream economics" and how Marglin was unable to get much of a hearing from his fellow members of the Economics Department at Harvard -- indeed he says he basically doesn't talk to them. He complains that the economics profession has become monolithic in accepting certain things, such as the efficacy of markets and the importance of efficiency, which he believes should not be so uncritically accepted, and as such that basic economics textbooks and courses (whether taught by "conservative" economists such as Mankiw or liberal ones such as Krugman) offer a univocal and uncritical examination of the issues at play.

There are actually two very different types of critique of mainstream economics which Marglin says that he deals with, though it's not clear from his talk whether he sees these types of critique as distinct. Firstly, there are what I would term economic critiques of "mainstream economics". One he mentions in particular is Keynes' critique of the idea that the normal state of an economy is full employment. I'm not clear that full employment is widely assumed to be a natural state for an economy these days -- certainly, economies with truly "full employment" are virtually never seen outside of very unusual circumstances. But this is definitely an economic critique. He also mentions more vaguely some "very good" Marxist critiques of economics. He doesn't go into detail as to what these are, but I would assume that these also deal with actual economics.

Most of the critiques he discusses, however, are what I would term moral critiques of economics. He talks about a critique from inequality -- as to whether a distribution of income in which some people have much and many others have little is right. He talks about an environmental critique -- as to whether means of growth are sustainable and environmentally just. He talks about Catholics Social Teaching (and though he doesn't state what this critique is, I assume he must then talk about the concept of the "universal destination of goods"), etc.

Now, although I imagine that Marglin and I see eye to eye on few political issues, I would very much agree that "what is economically efficient?" is very from from being the sum and total of thought one should give to many economic problems. Economics, to the extent that it is a study of how things work, doesn't answer questions of "what ought I to do". At best, it gives some idea of what happens in a system when you make some change. While it may tell you what the results of an action might be, it won't tell you whether the action (or the results) are good.

Personally, I'm fine with that. I don't see that economists have any especial ability to discern "the good", and so I'd be quite happy to have them stick to "what happens" and let people go off and discuss "what is 'the good'" via more established means of philosophy and theology. I like the idea of economics being a lesser science.

Marglin, however, seems to want to pull those questions of "ought" into economics itself and address them there. In this sense, his approach reminds me a bit of the Creationist or Intelligent Design objection that the physical and biological sciences don't give sufficient consideration to God and morality. For my part, while I can see the value of addressing economic critiques of mainstream economics in an economics course (though clearly, as Marglin concedes, one would actually need to learn the mainstream economics first before the critique) I don't think that addressing moral critiques of economics in an economics course is necessarily a good idea -- other than acknowledging that economics is not itself a full life guide to policy and action.

How We See The Other Side

2011-12-15T10:32:00.001-05:00

Kyle links to a "pro-lifers are mean" comment by pro-choice advocate Amanda Marcotte and counters that while the behavior she describes is bad, it is not typical of what he has experienced among pro-lifers, that pro-lifers tend to be focused not on disdaining women (as Marcotte seems to think) but on protecting unborn human life.

Part of the problem, I think, in each side estimating the extent of unloving attitude present in the other is that people remember slights against their side far more viscerally than slights against the other.

I went to clinic prayer vigils exactly twice in my life -- protest is not something that my intellectual and emotional makeup makes me good at, regardless of the topic, and after spending those two occasions (as a college freshman at Steubenville curious about what it was all about) standing tensely over to one side with the police officers, watching what was going on but unable to really focus on praying at all, I figured it pretty clearly wasn't the place for me.

On both occasions I noted with chagrin that some of the non-University protesters were doing things I considered counterproductive: holding pictures of aborted babies, shouting "stop killing babies" at the clinic staff as they went in in the morning.

At the same time, what I remember so viscerally that I can feel my blood rising in an instant just thinking about it is the behavior of the "pro-choice escorts" who were there to make sure that sidewalk counselors didn't dissuade anyone from getting an abortion. They wore bright yellow t-shirts over their clothes (it was winter, so we were all bundled up) saying "Pro-Choice Escort" and their basic tactic whenever a sidewalk counselor got near someone was for one to throw herself between the counselor and the woman approaching the clinic, put her arms out in basketball blocking stance, and scream as loud as possible (so that the counselor couldn't get a word in) a stream of, "She doesn't want to talk to you! Get back! If you tough me it's an assault! Get back! Officer, he's touching me! [this almost invariably a lie which the police ignored] Get back! She doesn't want to talk to you, you pervert!" etc.

The sidewalk counselors were trained to take this with equanimity, but just watching it tended to wind me up. What I really remember, however, is a a middle aged pro-choice escort with close cropped grey hair who seemed to have appointed herself the protester taunter. She zeroed in on a student who showed voice and body language signs of being retarded and imitated him all morning, as he prayed or sang hymns with a guitar. She'd prance around singing back at him in a "retard voice" and every so often pause and say, "Your mother wishes she'd come here."

I imagine that if Marcotte had been at the same protest, she would have remembered the misbehaviors of some of the pro-life protesters much better than I do, and this woman she would remember not at all, or as a minor misbehavior in a trying situation. But to me, the pro-choice movement will always be that gray haired woman taunting an apparently disabled young man that his mother must wish that she had killed him.

Catholic Sexual Morality vs. Population Growth Fears

2011-12-14T11:20:00.000-05:00

Quite some time ago, a reader asked my thoughts on a New York Times article focused on the "Seven Billionth Person" milestone. Most specifically, she asked:

I will say, that, as pro-life as I am, and as religious (I am currently practicing as a Lutheran although raised Catholic with a devout mother, to whom I am very close), time and time again, I come back to the realization that the way population biology works, is that there are boom and bust cycles, with the busts driven by intense competition for resources, die-off and predation.

I acknowledge and understand the terrible consequences of the Pill, as it renders females utterly available and at the mercy of the intense male libido, however I maintain that, within a committed marriage, non-abortive birth control methods make sense.

Also, to your point about the slowing of world birthrates, and the low birthrates in developed nations: true...but this has been achieved not ONLY via women's education and later marriage, but significantly through widespread contraceptive use and sadly, abortion. If you could show me a nation where the TFR hovered around 2.2, and all or most participants practiced NFP as the sole method of limiting births, then I might reconsider. Again (I have been on your site before as mary lee I think), I have no qualms whatsoever with any specific couple lovingly, and honestly deciding to bring many children into the world, but my view is shaped by an understanding that many other couples will contracept while others never marry. I live in a state with a European-style TFR (Massachusetts), so a large family here and there is a beautiful thing to see.

If you read the comments section for the article I sent you, you see an unrelenting hatred of people who have many (or even several) children. Many seem ill-informed and ignorant, but many others truly believe that abortion and contraception are absolutely necessary to keep our numbers in check.

Also...many Catholics I know urge early marriage, as a way to stop the ridiculous prolongation of adolescence in our culture through the twenties (something I agree with), and to place the intense erotic desire of the twenties where it belongs--in marriage--rather than let it drift through numerous premarital encounters.

It seems to me that there are at least two distinct questions here:

1) Is it necessary for us to engage in some sort of conscious fertility management in order to avoid a boom and die-off cycle?

2) If it is necessary for us to consciously manage our fertility in order to avoid this kind of boom and die-off cycle, is it possible for a society to do this using the means approved of by the Catholic Church, or is artificial birth control necessary?

I'll do my best to deal with each of these in turn.

In dealing with 1), I think it is worth pausing to consider whether the boom and die off phenomenon which we see among many animal populations is in fact something we see or are likely to see among humans. At first pass, it may seem odd to ask this. We know that a human population can reach a point in which it is unable to continue to exist on the resources it has available. If resources available to human populations are limited, wouldn't we expect to see humans subject to the same population boom and bust dynamics that other animals are?

I'm not sure, however, that this is as much the case as it would at first seem. We humans are far, far more adaptable than animals. While a gazelle can eat only certain plants, and live only within a certain range, we change our ranges and our food sources radically based on need. Since the '70s we have reached a point in which world food production significantly exceeds what would be needed to feed the entire population quite healthily -- famines tend to be the result of political manipulation (some people keeping others from getting food) or from crop or climate catastrophes in those areas of the world in which people are still living on the basis of subsistence agriculture rather than participating in the global food marketplace. The NY Times author refers to this obliquely when he observes that the Earth can in fact support a population even significantly larger than 7 Billion -- just not necessarily in what we in the US consider a "normal" lifestyle. Because people tend to move around or come up with new innovations when they come under resource pressure, it seems to me that it's particularly hard to sit down and form expectations about what our problems will be in 50 years or 100 years based on population growth. Back in 1900 or 1950, deciding that we needed to radically limit our fertility would have been one "out" from what looked like a lot of space and resource pressures. However, modern technologies and the green revolution have done far more to improve living standards across the world than simply assuring that people bred less would have done. And all those innovations were the result of people who were born. The greatest resource of all, for humanity, is human beings themselves.

Starting to deal with 2): The same consciousness and flexibility which makes it far easier for humans to move to other regions or seek other sources of food also renders the question of what is "conscious fertility management" much more difficult. In our current society, with artificial birth control as an assumption, we tend to think within the context of most people entering into sexual relationships around the time they reach cultural adulthood, and we assume the main question is whether those people will have lots of children or instead use birth control or abortion to avoid that. We assume that like animals we will virtually all become sexually active at a certain point in our physical developments, and that the question is simply whether we will, like them, continue to reproduce until we exceed our resources, or whether we will use artificial means to limit our fertility.

However, when we look back to times and places where human populations found themselves under serious resource pressure, what we see is not just changes in how people comport their sexual activities, but changes in a host of cultural norms and structures that determine whether people enter into sexual relationships at all. People often married later, and a lot more people didn't get married at all. This could mean going into the religious life, or some other occupation which ruled out marriage, but often it simply meant extended families in which unmarried siblings or uncles and aunts were part of the household on a long term basis. This is how a lot of Western European countries (particularly resource poor ones like Ireland) maintained fairly steady population for long periods of the late Medieval, Rennaissance and early Modern eras. It wasn't just that people died earlier and child mortatily was higher in these societies, people made life decisions about marraige based on their perceptions of their ability to support a family. I'm short of Googling time to uncover the reference again, but I seem to recall that Ireland pre 1800 was one of the more extreme examples with an average marriage age for women around 27 and less than 50% of reproductive age women being married at any given time (as in, of the woman at any given time between 15 and 40, less than 50% were married).

Now, I'm betting that none of this is sounding like much fun. Most of us want to get married, we want to have our own households, we want to have kids. I tend to be something of a technological optimist, and so I think that our ability to provide for ourselves with the resources available will tend to grow with our needs. However, I also think that our expectations and culture are shaped a lot by signals that we get from our circumstances without even thinking about it. Things that seem standard (whether living in a stand-alone house, driving a car, or eating a meat heavy diet) will start to seem unnecessary luxuries if our society really comes under resource pressure. Getting married young would start to seem a lot less attractrive, and living with your parents while working would start to seem a lot more attractive, if we really were strapped for the resources to maintain current lifestyles.

Given our flexibility and our inventiveness, I think that rather than maintaining an unsustainable lifestyle right up to some sort of population catastrophy, we'd tend to see our lifestyles and culture change due to resource pressures being felt and responded to.

How does all this relate to Catholic prohibitions of birth control and sterilization? Well, I think that we tend to adapt to circumstances using whatever tools we think of as available. If, culturally, we think of sterilization and contraception as available, and they may form part of a "solution" to certain pressures that seems more attractive than Catholic suggestions. However, I think that taking them off the table we're still very much able to adapt as individuals or as a society to circumstances of tightening resources.

Those of us living as Catholics in the modern, secular West have a slightly different problem. We face a society in which certain coping mechanisms (contraception, sterilization, abortion, cohabitation) are often used in order for people to balance their desire for pleasure and relationships with their desire to lead a certain kind of lifestyle. Our society as a whole is built around those assumptions, and so as a small minority those who eschew these find ourselves working uphill. Many in the Catholic subculture solve this disparity by simply having more children than the norm, and accepting the lifestyle trade-offs that involves. But I don't think that necessarily means that a culture in which most people were Catholics faithful to Church teaching would look like our culture, but with most people marrying young and having 4+ children. I think such a culture would look, overall, a lot different from ours, and would achieve its own balance between resources and population through other cultural means than "just add birth control".

La Guadalupana

2011-12-12T19:55:00.001-05:00

In honor of the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, here are Emmanuel and Alexander Acha, Mexican father and son pop stars, singing La Guadalupana in a very catchy arrangement.I've become a softy in my old age, but Juan Diego here chokes me up.

Profiles in String: The Whole Enchilada

2011-12-11T19:42:00.001-05:00

Eight Cold Whiny Takes

2011-12-10T12:14:00.001-05:00

1. So here's what happened with the boiler. Several weeks ago, I woke up to a faint beeping and thought, "No wonder we have so much trouble getting up! The alarm is getting quieter and quieter." But it wasn't the alarm, so Darwin and I started scouting through the house, trying to find the source of the beeping. Turns out it was the fire alarm in the basement, which was full of smoke. Our basement is laid out like a labyrinth, so we had to wind our way around through the thickening smoke to find the source of the fire. And there was the boiler, not belching forth flames, but clearly ablaze inside. Darwin had the fire extinguisher, and was going to spray the thing, while I stood behind the wall in case of explosion, and begged, "Hon, don't spray that. Hon, move away. Darwin, come on, let's go upstairs. Hon, I'm going to call the fire department. Get away from the boiler, please." Reason prevailed, and I made my first 911 call ever.

2. In which we learned that everyone had to vacate the house. That meant waking up five sleepy children and my mom, just out of the hospital, and shuffling out to sit in the icy van while the firemen (whose sirens I heard while still on the phone with the 911 dispatcher) checked everything out. They had one of those nifty heat sensing guns which informed us that the center of the burning boiler was a cool 600 degrees. The fireman let Darwin try it. "See? You just aim it at something to get a read. Here, try it on the chief."

"Oh, sure," says Darwin. "There's an icy blue spot right in the center of his chest."

The chief rolls his eyes. "Somehow everyone who tries it knows that gag."

"Every office has the same jokes."

3. So now we're running space heaters, and living shut up in the back of the house like distressed nobility. The kitchen and breakfast room (where we do schoolwork) can close off, and so can the library. We heat two bedrooms, and they stay tolerable. Lots of blankets work well, but getting up in the morning is more difficult than usual.

4. We are not the 1%, nor yet the 5%, but we do pretty comfortably. However, having to rustle up umpteen thousand dollars for a new boiler is trying to anyone short of Donald Trump's economic level. We're at the awkward point right now where the money for the boiler has been procured and forked over, but we're not yet receiving the benefit of forking out an amount of money that would have more than paid off my remaining college loans. So it's cold and we're in debt, and I'm not only reluctant to go stock up on sweaters at Lands' End, I'm reluctant to go stock up at Goodwill. Darwin thinks I'm overreacting a bit -- it's not like we're going to starve -- but we have had to make a strategic realignment of spending priorities. Like that twelve-seater van we were hoping to trade up to next year? Um, no.

5. Living in an old house is fun! We tried to run a heater to the dining room last night, but the outlets in the dining room are unimproved, so we plugged the heater in in the hall. The result was that we blew the breaker (not just the fuse, no) -- the breaker on which resided the hall outlet that the library heater is plugged into. (We can't plug the heater in in the library for fear of frying the computer circuit.) So we're running an extension cord from the kitchen to the library, but people keep tripping over the cord and unplugging it.

6. Our house is a cool 4000 sq. ft., and right now all seven of us habit an area that's about the size of a two-bedroom apartment. We can, of course, walk through the frigid core of the house (48 degrees this morning, according to the thermostat in the dining room), but the warmish space is smallish. One gains a new appreciation for the pioneers, or anyone who lived before the advent of consistent heating. The one bathroom we're all using upstairs has a ceramic wall heater, but lately I've been loathe to subject any of the children to the rigors of the chilly bath.

7. But hey! The new boiler should arrive Monday, and then the guys just have to remove the old one and get the new one regulated. Darwin nearly had a fit on the phone the other day, when the manufacturer asked if it were important that they ship the boiler before they closed for a two-week inventory period. Alway something, friends! Always something.

8. Everyone is invited up to pat our boiler once it's up and running. Why should we keep such riches to ourselves? Heat for all!

Sebelius' Morning After Pill Decision: Politics or 'Anti-Science' Pro-Life

2011-12-09T12:03:00.001-05:00

On Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled an expert panel at the FDA which had recommended allowing children under 17 to purchase the "morning after pill" Plan B One-Step over the counter. Under current regulations, Plan B is available without a prescription to people 17 and over, but those 16 and under would need a prescription in order to purchase it. The pill is designed to be taken within 72 hours after having "unprotected" sex and is claimed to reduce the chances of pregnancy from such sex from 1 in 20 to 1 in 40. It does this by preventing ovulation through a boost in hormones. Like other forms of hormonal birth control, it also serves to make the uterine lining more resistant to implantation by a fertilized egg, so even if ovulation does occur (or has already done so) it can make spontaneous miscarriage/abortion of the zygote far more likely. As such, it is often considered potentially a form of early abortion, though the frequency with which it acts through preventing a zygote from implanting (versus acting through preventing ovulation) is not known.

In prior policy moves in relation to Plan B, the Bush Administration had originally overruled a request that the pill be made available over the counter, but eventually allowed it for purchasers who were 18 or over. The Obama administration acted in 2009 to make Plan B available to those 17 and over, but until now has continued to require a prescription for those young. This means that the pill (which costs around $50 per dose) is generally held behind the pharmacy counter and provided without a presciption to those who show ID proving they are 17 or over.

This latest move on Plan B has many left leaning commentators up in arms, accusing the Obama Administration of ignoring 'science' and bowing to the interests of the religious right. James Fallows at The Atlantic compares the move to something one would expect from a Michelle Bachman administration and suggests Sibelius and Obama should be criticized accordingly. The New York Times says:

“Very few medications are this simple, convenient and safe,” said Dr. Kathleen Hill-Besinque, an assistant dean at the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy.

Jeanne Monahan of the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group, said that making Plan B available to young women without a prescription would mean fewer chances that doctors would be able to save them from sexual exploitation, abuse and related diseases. “Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was right to reject the F.D.A. recommendation to make this potent drug available over the counter to young girls,” she said.

Kirsten Moore, president of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, said Ms. Sebelius had no credible scientific rationale for her decision. “We are outraged that this administration has let politics trump science,” she said.

It's probably inevitable that people will ask whether pro-lifers should consider this an olive branch from the Obama administration, though this seems hard to credit given Obama and Sibelius' hard line support of abortion in all circumstances and the recent moves by Sebelius' DHHS to punish the Catholic bishops for political support for moral causes by defunding Catholic run charitable programs.

The far more likely explanation is that this represents a basic political and cultural calculus on the part of the Obama administration as it nears reelection season. While on the cultural hard left, the only question may be a scientific one of whether Plan B will work as intended on children and young teens, for much of the country situations in which young teens would think they need to take Plan B have a moral dimension as well as a scientific one. While in some sectors of our society there is an almost magical belief that "birth control and abortion make anything better" (I actually read commenters on some articles suggesting this was a bad decision because it might force a 11 or 12 year old girl being sexually abused to have to talk to an adult about the fact she feared she needed Plan B, rather than being able to purchase it without trouble) a lot of people would react against Obama if Republicans were able to claim, "Obama wants your twelve year old daughter to be able to buy the Morning After Pill without talking to you or a doctor!" While most Americans are fine with birth control and probably accept as a given that their teens will eventually have sex outside of marriage, the idea of the government actively making it easier for their children to pursue birth control and abortions without talking to their parents is not widely popular among those parents.

As such, this can be seen as some mainstream positioning by the Obama administration. The cultural far left, after all, has no where else to turn to. Obama is reaching for the cultural center. If he wins, this decision may well get reconsidered in 2013.

Assuming Meaning

2011-12-06T11:03:00.000-05:00

A while back, Jennifer Fulwiler wrote a piece about her conversion from atheism to Catholicism, in which she talked about how Christianity answered the question of why we act as if life has meaning when in a strictly materialist world it would appear not to. This post drew a fair amount of criticism from atheists (and some believers) who insisted that even if we assume that humans are strictly material, deterministic organisms (with free will, goodness, etc. being mental constructs/illusions) that doesn't mean that life isn't beautiful and full of meaning. After all, we naturally act like life has meaning, why not just assume that life has meaning to the extent that we act like it does? (via Leah) Ross Douthat tries to put together a thought experiment to address this line of argument:

Suppose, by way of analogy, that a group of people find themselves conscripted into a World-War-I-type conflict — they’re thrown together in a platoon and stationed out in no man’s land, where over time a kind of miniature society gets created, with its own loves and hates, hope and joys, and of course its own grinding, life-threatening routines. Eventually, some people in the platoon begin to wonder about the point of it all: Why are they fighting, who are they fighting, what do they hope to gain, what awaits them at war’s end, will there ever be a war’s end, and for that matter are they even sure that they’re the good guys?

…At this point, one of the platoon’s more intellectually sophisticated members speaks up. He thinks his angst-ridden comrades are missing the point: Regardless of the larger context of the conflict, they know the war has meaning because they can’t stop acting like it has meaning. Even in their slough of despond, most of them don’t throw themselves on barbed wire or rush headlong into a wave of poison gas. (And the ones who do usually have something clinically wrong with them.)… Instead, given how much meaningfulness is immediately and obviously available — right here and right now, amid the rocket’s red glare and the bombs bursting in air — the desire to understand the war’s larger context is just a personal choice, with no necessary connection to the question of whether today’s battle is worth the fighting.

One of the things that strikes me about this exchange is the extent to which it underlines different modes of thinking. From Douthat and Fulwiler, we have have an essentially teleological mode of thinking, one in which the question "why is that?" and "what does that mean?" in some final sense are the most important human questions. The opposing view in this case is a functional view which seems to draw a lot from engineering and scientific methods of the more procedural sort: "Okay, look, we're not really sure why we should think any of this has meaning, but clearly we do so that's functionally good enough to go with for now. Let's get on with other stuff."

I'm somewhat flummoxed as to how one would find it remotely satisfying to address a question such as "meaning" from a strictly functional perspective. Though perhaps that just shows how much in the former camp I am. However prone to skepticism I am, and it's a straing that runs strongly in me, one of the things that makes Catholicism so much more intellectually satisfying to me than the alternative of agnosticism is that I don't see how one can answer questions like "why do we exist" and "what is our purpose" with a shrug of "Well, we seem to be here, so who cares."

I Remember MrsDarwin 7: Epic Edition

2011-12-05T13:12:00.001-05:00

We are told that when Julius Caesar was 33, he wept at the sight of a bust of Alexander the Great, mourning that he had accomplished so much less than Alexander had by that age. Poor Julius. His problem was that he didn't have any lying friends to comfort him with mendacious tales of their world-famous exploits. Fortunately, I don't lack this consolation. So for this year's I Remember MrsDarwin challenge: Tell me what epic feats we accomplished before my 33rd birthday. Why should I have all the fun writing fiction?

As always, here are the rules:

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL MEMORY OF YOU AND ME.
It can be anything you want--good or bad--BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE.
When you're finished, post this paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON'T ACTUALLY remember about you.

Brush up on six previous years of egregious falsehoods.

Profiles in String 30: The End

2011-12-05T03:42:00.001-05:00

With thanks to Darwin, who wanted to read it more than I wanted to write it sometimes, and to Nicole and Brandon for sharing their writing as well, so I didn't think I was the only crazy one.

Dedicated to Blanche Hodge and Elsie Bennett.

...

The haze of the last week was beginning to clear as I journeyed home through the quiet morning streets, and so was the mental fog that had enveloped me since Emma’s death, or before. As I drove I whispered the story to myself, adding details and spinning words so that the threads became woven into a tapestry of experience, and the isolated events that had buffeted me over the past weeks were revealed as mere slubs in the texture of the fabric. Even Emma’s death seemed to trace out, however tortuously, from the tangled cords of her sickness. Only Martin stood out, a strange golden string knotted ostentatiously into the front of the tapestry and weaving a shining, incongruous, gorgeous line across the whole.

I arrived home, unremarked, and sat on the edge of my bed. It was 8:00 -- I didn’t need breakfast, it was too early to call my parents, and I didn’t have the serenity to fall back asleep. I showered, got dressed, and went to Emma’s room. Jane Eyre was sitting on her bedside table. I dropped into her cozy chair and snuggled under the quilt that had been laying over the arm, and took up the book. At first I was conscious of the still house and the faint sounds of the neighborhood coming to life, but soon I was reading as I used to do before grades, before professors and classes and cold analysis; I was reading for the sheer joy of reading, pressing along too fast, skimming passages and having to go back; reading favorite bits aloud; absent-mindedly answering the anxious calls of my parents and oblivious to their presence once they arrived; skipping meals and mechanically gnawing the sandwich from the plate my exasperated mother banged down on the table next to me. I read until I finished, and when I finished I stretched my cramped limbs and looked with red and bleary eyes at the clock to discover that it was 3 AM. I staggered to my room and fell into bed with the weary satisfaction of one who has done a good day’s work.

The next day, after Mass, my mother was firm. “You’ve had your day of rest,” she proclaimed, “so don’t even look at that book today. You can go through Emma’s closet for me and start sorting out what needs to be donated and what should be kept.” She parked a complex organizational system of boxes in the doorway to keep me from wandering out of the room.

I sorted diligently for a time, checking the pockets of pants and dresses for hidden items and winnowing out the clothes that were too worn to give away. I inspected shoes. Half the morning and half the closet were gone before I decided to reward myself with a break from clothing to take down some of the boxes at the top of the closet.

The first box held mementos: souvenirs, papers, lacy handkerchiefs, old birthday cards and address books and photos, and beneath them lay a vintage Girl Scout sash covered with round badges. The next box contained photos and letters, but I didn’t recognize any of the faces or names. I dug through the contents, looking for letters from Howard, but perhaps she had stored them somewhere else, or thrown them away. Then, as I fished around in the sea of envelopes and snapshots, my hand closed on a little box, and I drew it out.

It was a small cardboard box of the sort that that held jewelry. I lifted off the lid to reveal two pads of cotton wool, between which were sandwiched two rings. With care I laid the woman’s ring upon my palm and held it under the lamp to inspect the glittering channel of diamonds set across it. As it caught the light, I realized that the inside of band was engraved in a tiny, flowing script: As long as we both shall live.

The man’s thicker ring echoed the details of the woman’s, and when I placed it next to its more delicate counterpart the two rows of diamonds flashed at one another. This ring also had an inscription: I, Howard, take thee, Emma.

A note, much folded, was hidden underneath the bottom pad of cotton wool. I opened it carefully and read: “He didn’t say much at the end, but he did tell me he wanted you to have this, since you always seemed to honor the ring and the vow more than he did.” It was signed “Barbara”. I hunted through the letters but could find no indication of who Barbara might be. Sitting back on my heels, I puzzled over the two circles of gold in my hand. Who was Barbara to Howard? Was she the other woman?Why had Howard kept his ring so long? Why had Emma kept hers? The kind of sentimental impulse that would lead one to keep hold on to the keepsakes of a broken marriage seemed alien to Emma’s character. I stood up and navigated my way past the boxes to get to my bedroom, where I carefully tucked the box in the back of my drawer. There was something private and sad about the pair of rings nestled under their woolen blanket, and I wasn’t ready to expose them to speculation and shame.

Dad had worked himself up to the conviction that we were sitting on a gold mine with the library, and would not hear my demurring. “I’ve called in an appraiser,” he announced as we gathered for dinner. She’ll be coming tomorrow morning.”

“I thought you were talking to the lawyer tomorrow morning,” my mother objected.

“Emma could handle it,” Dad averred. “She knows the books better than anyone else in the family.”

“Dad,” I protested, “I don’t think the books are going to be worth as much as you think.”

He made the excuse that he needed an appraisal for tax purposes anyway, but his eye gleamed with an avaricious light.

The next morning, I opened the door to a short brisk woman in low heels and a big necklace. Her earrings bobbed as she grasped my hand and pumped it once.

“I’m Carolyn Ferrer,” she said in a tone that brooked no doubt. “I spoke to a Mark Trapnel about appraising his aunt’s book collection at this address at 10:30.”

“This is the house,” I confirmed, “and that is the time. My name is Emma Trapnel. Let me show you to the library.”

She stepped in and cast a practiced eye over the shelves. “About 2000 books,” she stated, setting her bag on the table. “Now. I charge by the hour, so I don’t like to waste your time. It helps me sometimes if there’s a list or catalog to go by. Did your aunt keep records of her acquisitions?”

“She didn’t, but I did.”

I brought my notebook to her, and she paged through it. “These are detailed notes,” she complimented, stopping here and there and asking to see the particular book described. “You have a good eye.”

“Thank you. My father is convinced that the library will make us rich, but I doubt it. Almost all the books have literary value and are well-preserved, but they don’t seem to be extremely uncommon editions or to have many distinguishing features.”

We assembled a stack of the volumes that interested her most, and she examined the title pages, gently flipped through the books to ascertain the condition, and checked the bindings.

“Your instincts were right,” she said, laying aside one book and sizing up the rest. “This is a fine collection for reading, but it’s not going to make your family a fortune. Most of the books are under $100, so for those I can offer you an appraisal as a lot.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“I bet it doesn’t.” She regarded me with a keen eye. “Have you done this kind of work before?”

“No,” I answered slowly. “I graduated last year, and for the past six months I stayed here at the house caring for my aunt, who had Alzheimer’s. She died last week.”

“You compiled this list while you were watching someone with Alzheimer’s full-time?” She seemed almost impressed.

“It wasn’t difficult. I’ve always liked to read.”

“Hmm.” She had been packing her bag, but now she asked me, “Are there any other books in the house I should look at before I finish up?”

“She kept a few things in her room.”

We marched down the hall, but she shook her head at the books in the room. “Sorry, same story.” I turned to go out, but instead of following she crossed to Emma’s bedside table and picked up Jane Eyre.

“Is this one of hers?”

“It was. She gave it to me when I was 14. Her ex-husband gave it to her about fifty years ago.”

She examined the title page. “Did this book come with a slipcase?”

“Yes, I still have it in my room.”

“What kind of shape is it in?”

“I’ve kept it safe, so it’s held together well. Of course it’s old, so it has a few dents and scratches.”

“Can I see it?”

I brought it from my room. She slid the book and admired the effect, then gently removed it.

“Look,” she said, almost mildly, showing me the title page. “This is a numbered copy from a limited run by a French publisher, in 1923. It has the Gabain lithographs. It’s been kept in very good condition, almost like new. The slipcase is as good as can be expected.”

“It’s been inscribed,” I said doubtfully.

“Well, yes, that does reduce the value,” she conceded. “But Jane Eyre is a popular book and there are people who wouldn’t mind the inscription if they could lay their hands on a clean copy like this. It should fetch close to $1000.”

I gaped.

“I can give you the names of some reputable book sellers who would be happy to make you an offer on this,” she said, handing it tenderly back to me. “As for your aunt’s collection, I’ll write up a formal appraisal for your father, but it would probably bring in $5000, $6000, not more than that.” She strode back to the library for her bag.

“Was this volume valuable fifty years ago?” I asked as I trailed her.

“Oh, I’d have to look up the prices, but very likely, especially if it were still uninscribed then.”

“It was.”

“Well, whoever bought it must have thought a lot of the recipient to write in such an expensive gift.” We stepped to the door, and she gave my hand another brief shake. “I’m sorry about your aunt’s death.”

“Thank you.”

“Here’s my card,” she said, presenting me with that item. “When you’re free after you wind up your aunt’s affairs, call me and I might know of a few opportunities in the book and appraising line, if that sort of thing interests you.”

I sat in the living room, reverently handling my Jane Eyre. Had Emma known how much it was worth when she’d given it to me? Had she trusted me that much to watch over her beautiful book, or did getting rid of the memory of Howard take precedence over mere financial concerns? Howard himself must have known what it was worth, yet the black scrawl of the inscription betrayed no hesitation in marking up a book of such value. It seemed a waste that this doomed relationship had not only affected the lives of Emma and Howard, but had devalued the book as well. Why couldn’t he have left it blank? Maybe then she wouldn’t have felt compelled to get rid of it.

“I wouldn’t get rid of you,” I whispered to the book. It rested warmly in my lap, and its very presence helped me ignore the fuss in the kitchen. The low appraisal value of the books had caught Dad in an already bad mood, and he was complaining in the kitchen about the legal travails of the day.

“The line at the county clerk’s was out the door,” he growled, pulling a can of Bud Light out of the fridge and popping the top. “It was as if everyone in the county suddenly had to go clerking.”

“Why were you at the county clerk’s?” asked Mom, who’d spent all day in the garage with her laptop, listing items on online auction sites.

“You won’t believe this,” said Dad, flinging himself into one of the chairs at the table. “As we’re going through the documentation and paperwork and whatever at the lawyer’s office, it turns out that he doesn’t have a copy of Emma’s divorce decree. He doesn’t even think she was ever divorced.”

I snapped to attention on the couch.

“What?” asked Mom. “Didn’t she tell you she was divorced?”

“Well, no,” Dad admitted. “Howard just left, a long time ago, and she never said anything about it, and we all assumed... But just in case, I had to check to see if the record was on file at the county clerk’s, and it wasn’t. Now we might have to file for his death certificate just to cover all our bases.”

I found my feet and my voice, and lurched to the doorway, abandoning Jane Eyre on the cushion.

“Are you saying,” I demanded breathily, “that Emma never divorced Howard?”

“Why would she have stayed married to him when they were separated for all those years?” Mom asked incredulously.

“I don’t know,” Dad grumbled. “Why did Emma do anything? Probably only to give us trouble after she was dead.”

“Couldn’t he have divorced her?” wondered Mom.

“I don’t take it that Howard cared much whether he were married or divorced,” said Dad. “Why should he go to the bother if she didn’t?”

“That’s no answer,” I said shrilly.

“That’s all the answer I have,” snapped Dad. “I don’t have my crystal ball. I can’t see back in time. Nothing about it makes sense. All I can tell you is that she never got divorced.”

In a daze I picked up my book and shut myself in my room. I set the book on top of the dresser, and I pulled out the box of rings and laid them softly on top of the book, and I sat and contemplated them: Howard’s extravagant gift and the round symbols of fidelity. Then I did the only thing that made sense. I called Martin.

“I can’t hear a word you’re saying,” he bellowed. “Sorry, I’m stuck at this birthday party with Grace and kids are literally bouncing off the walls.”

“I have something to tell you,” I shouted as best as I could without being overheard in the kitchen.

“Come do it in person, then,” he roared. “I’ll text directions.”

So I dashed out the door clutching the rings and the book, calling vague excuses to my startled parents, and found myself at a birthday party at which fifteen four-year-olds (and one newly minted five year old) were hurling themselves around a big indoor playground. The echoes were deafening.

“You see the problem,” he said as I stood by him in mild shock. “But you were saying...?”

“You must know I can’t tell you anything in here,” I accused. “Why did you tell me to come?”

“Because I wanted to see you,” he said. “Look, it’s cake time, and that’s always the last step. Come on.”

We watched as the youngsters scarfed, smeared, and picked their way through garishly frosted cake.

“I don’t know that I’m cut out to be a parent, if I have to love this kind of thing.”

“Oh, everyone parent hates this kind of thing.”

Grace didn’t seem surprised that I should show up unannounced to such an odd occasion. “Are you going to our house?” she asked as we stood outside the party and Martin and I waited for our ears to stop ringing.

“Yes,” I said. “Your dad owes me dinner, at least.”

“Daddy, are we still getting pizza?” she begged.

He raised an interrogative eyebrow at me.

“I love pizza,” I said. “But not with anchovies.”

“Eww!” she shrieked in delight. “Are you going in our car?”

“Nope, I brought my own. But I’ll meet you at your house.”

Dinner was a more festive affair than last time. Grace was somber for a moment on hearing that the old lady from last time had gone to heaven, but sorrow did not linger naturally on her small face. She told me everything she knew, and then some, over dinner. She showed me her room and all of her toys and games and books, until Martin hovered uneasily and made threatening noises about bed time. She moped and fussed a bit, and brushed her teeth and showed me her pajamas. Martin read to her, I read to her, and finally he had to hold the doorknob while she kicked and raged.

“Is it like this often?” I asked him over the doorknob.

“She’s wound up tonight from the party and the company,” he said. “Most nights she goes down easily.”

“I’m sorry to throw off your schedule.”

“If you were here more often, you could become part of the schedule,” he suggested.

“If I were here more often, I wouldn’t have to wait all night to tell you something.”

“You might,” he said, and he slumped so wearily against the doorframe that all my sarcasm melted away.

“Here, come see what I brought,” I urged, peeling his fingers off the doorknob. He treaded downstairs slowly while I ran out to the car and brought in my treasures in to display on the coffee table.

“Sit down, and I’ll tell you a story.” I recounted the events of the day: the value of Jane Eyre, the finding of the rings, the ambiguous note, the discovery of the un-divorce. He listened attentively and with rising excitement, and once I’d finished he took the last point first.

“She was never divorced?”

“Looks that way.”

“She stayed married.”

“Yes, but why?”

“Because she understood!” he exclaimed, suddenly animated. “She wouldn’t break her vows. That’s the key thing.”

“But why?” I cried. “There’s so much of the story we don’t know yet.”

“I don’t care,” he declared. “I don’t have to know the whole story to know that this is the part that matters most. She said, ‘‘Til death do us part’, and she meant it. Oh, I admire that woman, Emma.”

I pondered. “She didn’t want his book around, though. She gave it to me.”

“She gave it to you because she thought you deserved it. And she was right. Look at the care you’ve taken of it. What are your plans for it? A thousand dollars is a pretty chunk of cash.”

I looked at him, with his greenish-gray eyes warm behind his glasses, and that one lock of hair falling over his forehead again. He had picked up the book and was holding it respectfully, letting the pages slip through his fingers as he studied the lithographs. Closing the book, he stroked fine leather of the cover and spine with gentle fingers. Then he glanced up and met my eyes, and I was caught and tangled in his gaze.

He broke away first, and dropped his eyes to the book. “Are you going to sell it or keep it?” he asked, a bit huskily, but I couldn’t reply until my whirling thoughts had crystallized.

“Neither, I think,” I replied slowly, with a hot flush rising in my cheeks.

He looked, not at my eyes, but at my hands. “And how does that work out?”

“I’ll show you.” Kneeling beside the coffee table, I pulled my fountain pen out of my purse and opened to the flyleaf of the book, and before either of us could stop me, I placed the pen under Howard’s inscription and wrote: “To Martin, with love from Emma.”

“Emma!” he cried, snatching the pen from my hand, “That’s a thousand-dollar book!”

“Not anymore,” I said shakily, with a little despairing gesture. “I’ve just decreased the value for everyone but you.”

He took up the volume and stared at it, and his hands too were shaking slightly. “But this was a gift from Aunt Emma.”

“I hope,” I said awkwardly, capping my pen and twisting it with warm and nervous motions, “I hope I might be keeping it in the family.”

He closed the book and put it on the table. He took the pen from my hand and put it beside the book, and then, sliding off the couch to kneel beside me on the floor, he combed my hair out of my face with his fingers, and kissed me long and deep.

I still have the book. I still have the rings. I still have the mystery of Emma and Howard’s marriage, but Martin was right: the marriage matters, in the end, more than the mystery. And Emma was right too: there’s always another woman, and I often wake to find her in my bed, red curls dangling in my face, begging me to get up and make breakfast for her in Martin’s kitchen.

My kitchen.

Profiles in String 29: Penultimate Chapter

2011-12-04T01:40:00.005-05:00

I think I was wrong that all my shaking of last week was from weariness. It's cold in the house. We seem to hold around 50 degrees in the big unheated rooms and spaces. But, the boiler is ordered and may even be installed by late next week. We're getting heat, and nothing else, for Christmas this year -- next year too, probably.

...

There’s something very disconcerting about waking up in a strange bed, no matter how comfortable. The shock of entering consciousness in an alien place is enough to offset the effects of a night’s sleep, no matter how sound. My sleep was not particularly sound. It was broken and troubled with dreams, and I would drift in and out of awareness that I was in a place I ought not to be.

I opened my eyes and laid still, trying to place the dark room in my mind. It was neat enough, if neat meant “nothing on the floor”. Clothes were draped neatly over chairs and books were stacked neatly on most available surfaces. Several mugs were stashed on the bookshelf, accompanied by a few shot glasses. There were only two photos in the room, both on the dresser: a black and white image of a gargoyle with an icicle erupting from his open maw, and a snapshot of a girl with vibrant red curls holding up a big fish on a line. A clock told me it was 6 AM.

I suddenly sat up in the bed and remembered, appalled, that it belonged to Martin, that he had put me there last night after… I remembered hurling myself at his head, and I groaned and hid my face in my hands. Now I was stuck in his room, in his shirt, and there was no way out except past him where he must be sleeping on the couch. I found my shoes, unbuttoned his big shirt and hung it on the chair, shivering a bit in my camisole, and left the room to tiptoe downstairs. My coat was right by the door, and my keys were in the pocket. Except they weren’t, and Martin wasn’t on the couch.
He was sitting with his coffee at the table, feet hooked over the rungs of his chair, reading the paper while crunching toast. I hesitated awkwardly at the edge of the room, and he looked up over the paper.

“Are you hungry?” he asked, as easily as if I came down to breakfast every morning.

I sat down while he rose and poured coffee.

“I hope you weren’t too uncomfortable sleeping on the couch last night,” I faltered.

“Oh, no,” he replied. “It was infinitely preferable to Grace’s toddler bed.”

I hid behind my mug, calculating how quickly I could get out the door. It was hours before my parents would expect to hear from me, but the fact remained that I was going to have to drive home in my pajamas... I blushed and wondered if the floor would be so obliging as to swallow me now.

“What I did miss last night,” said Martin, slinging a plate of toast in front of me, “is brushing my teeth.” He started up the stairs, then turned and eyed me. “If I go up and do that, are you going to run out on me?”

“No,” I lied.

“Ah, in that case I didn’t need to hold onto your keys,” he said, disappearing from sight. I sighed and went over to rummage in the fridge. Soon I had milk, eggs, and butter on the counter.

“Can I help you find something?” He had come down as I was rattling through the pans in a lower cabinet.

“If I’m to be stuck here,” I said, extricating myself from the cookware, “I intend to eat something more than toast. French toast, to be exact. Where is your sugar?”

He handed me a sweater he’d brought downstairs, and then reached into the pantry and tossed a bag out onto the counter.

“Thanks,” I said, pulling the sweater over my head.

“Not at all.” He had his back to me, preparing to brew fresh coffee. “Nothing gives me greater satisfaction than to see you making breakfast in my kitchen.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to touch that one, so I kept my mouth closed. In silence I whipped up the eggs and milk with sugar and vanilla and dipped the bread in the mixture, and he tended the slices in the hot pan with equal dedication. When the batch was finished, we carried our plates and mugs to the table and sat opposite each other.

We chewed with great concentration for a moment, then Martin put down his fork.

“So,” he said, “who starts the conversation about last night: you or me?”

I leaned my tired forehead against my hand. “I suppose I don’t deserve to get out of it, after my behavior last night.”

“You make it sound so very horrible.”

I lifted my head to glare at him. “Yes, it was appalling, okay? I’m sorry about it.”

“I’m not.” He looked down at his mug, twisting it as he spoke. “It would be hard for me to be sorry that when you were desperate and lonely you came to me. I know how difficult this past week has been for you, when it seemed like no one cared that Aunt Emma was dead. I could see how much you were struggling yesterday at the funeral and at your house. All that emotion and grief had to come out sometime. It means more to me than you know that you trust me so much as a friend that you could depend on me to be a safe outlet.”

I stared. “A safe outlet?”

He pushed away the mug. “Even you can’t deny,” he said, with a faint edge in his voice, “that I was as safe as I could be.”

I rose from my chair and retreated from the harsh glare of the kitchen light to stand facing the living room, arms clasped across my chest. “You’re right that I was overwrought last night,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “I hold things in at the best of times, and this week has been one blow after another. I’m not ashamed that I was upset. Anyone would cry over these things.”

He was quiet, but I didn’t turn around. Finally he too rose and carried his plate of half-eaten toast to the sink. “Then I guess we’ve had our conversation,” he said resolutely.

I twisted around to face him. “I came over here,” I said with repressed vehemence, “because I wanted to kiss you. And I threw myself at you because I wanted you to kiss me back. I accused you once of pushing and pushing, but last night I would have kept pushing until I was broken if you had let me. You did keep me safe, from myself and from yourself. I put you in the position of having to stop things if they were going to be stopped, without even thinking about what it might mean for you. That’s the behavior I’m ashamed of.”

He was standing at the sink, regarding me intently as the water coursed unheeded over his plate. Suddenly he dropped it in the sink and crossed over to me, taking my face in his wet hands. I waited, but he studied my face for a moment and said, “Let’s have a different conversation, then.”

“About what?”

He exhaled. “I’m attracted to you, Emma, don’t doubt that. I would love nothing more than to act on that, but I have to be honest with you about what that entails. I’m not free to move in and out of relationships at will or to take years to figure out where I stand. I have to play for keeps, because of Grace.”

“What do you mean by playing for keeps?” I asked, tracing his lower lip with my thumb. He took my hand away and held it.

“You’re almost six years younger than me. You want to be self-sufficient, to start a career, to be productive. I’ve known too many women who see those things as being in conflict with marriage and children. What I mean is, if you want to start this, would you, at twenty-three, think seriously about having a step-daughter and getting married -- about marrying me -- sooner rather than later?”

“Are you... proposing?”

He gave a shaky laugh. “No. Do you want me to?”

“Wait.” I wriggled out of his grasp and sat on the couch. “Slow down. Are you saying that you won’t kiss me again unless I can be sure I want to marry you?”

“I’m saying I don’t want to start anything unless I have a good chance of finishing. And that Grace and I are a package deal.”

I sat and tried to ponder having a four-year-old daughter, but the concept was as bouncy and elusive as a rubber ball. “That’s a great deal to have an answer for right away.” Rising, I pulled on my coat over his borrowed sweater. “Are you going to give me back my keys?”

He took them out of his pocket and held them out to me. I took the keys, and his hand.

“I think it’s manipulative of you,” I murmured in his ear, “to bind all this up with one little kiss.”

“Right now,” he said, turning me by my shoulders and marching me out the door, “there are no little kisses.”

And Now For Something Completely Different

2011-12-03T15:43:00.000-05:00

While there's been lots of good fiction content posted recently, perhaps you've been feeling a lack of social and scientific commentary. To fill this need I present: two Tesla coils playing Hungarian Rhapsody.

Profiles in String 28: Antepenultimate Chapter

2011-12-03T01:52:00.002-05:00

I steered a fine line, and I hope you'll agree I stayed on the right side.

...

The Funeral Mass proceeded apace. Few tears were shed; Emma had been old and ill, and though her death was sudden, it had caught almost no one but me by surprise. In short order we were following the casket out of the church and preparing to join the procession to the interment. I wasn’t able to speak to Martin on my way out, but he smiled at me past the press of people as I followed my parents to the car. The motorcade was not very long, and all the way to the cemetery I watched his silver car in the rearview mirror.

My dad parked the car behind the hearse and the gathering mourners observed quietly as the casket was carefully unloaded. Again the pallbearers took up their burden. My mother asked me, “Are you coming?”

“You go ahead,” I told her, watching Martin making his way past the line of cars. “I’m waiting for someone.”

I leaned back on my hands against the car and he came and leaned against it too, arms folded against his chest, not quite touching me. We stood silently as everyone else began the short, slow journey across the grass to the grave site. I longed to rest my head against him, to feel his arm through the rough cloth of his coat, but instead I said, “The woman standing over there in the red jacket is my mother.”

He flicked a casual glance at the knot of people assembling at the grave site. “You mean the one trying to look as if she’s not watching us?”

I almost smiled.

“Your veil is very becoming,” he said. I wasn’t ready to answer that question today, and I wished he wouldn’t look at me with such a grave and unreadable expression in his gray-green eyes.

“I hope it wasn’t too much trouble for you to come back early for the funeral,” I said, awkwardly twisting the conversation away from myself. It was difficult to stand so near him and yet be separated by this careful distance he seemed to be maintaining, so different from his usual light and irrepressible demeanor. I gave him an opening. “I’ll try not to stage a repeat performance of the way I bawled like an idiot last time I saw you.”

His voice was as soft as a caress. “There’s nothing wrong with crying at a funeral.”

“If I start, I won’t be able to stop,” I confessed in a hoarse whisper, turning my head away from him to study the way the edges of the asphalt road crumbled into the new green grass. He straightened up and slid his arm behind my back, and I dared to hope that he would pull me to himself and hold me safe, shutting out all the noise and chaos and numbness of the past week, and pushing aside all memory of the battered body in the casket. Instead, he found my hand I was leaning against, and pulled it out to intertwine his fingers with my own. “We should go,” he said, and tugged me gently away from the car. As we walked over to join the people milling around the grave, I was sure I could feel his thumb lightly tracing minute but electric circles along my palm.

I endured the burial by clinging to his hand and giving into the urge to lay my head against him. When tears threatened to overwhelm me, I closed my eyes and pressed my forehead against his arm and focused on the fact of his presence beside me, warm and solid and real. After Emma was consigned to earth and the priest had prayed the final blessing, the mourners began to drift back to their cars. Peggy had come up and touched my arm, her eyes red with weeping, and followed the rest. I remained by the open grave with Martin, purposefully ignoring the sight of her and my mother in furtive gossipy conference.

“Do you think I was wrong to keep Emma’s rosary?” I asked Martin, finding my voice after the silence by the grave. “Perhaps I should have let it be buried with her.”

“Keep it and use it,” he said. “That would please her most.”

We wandered slowly back toward the car. “There’s a reception of sorts at Emma’s house,” I said. “Are you doing anything after this? Will you come?”

“My whole day is free,” he answered. “Will you ride over with me?”

“Yes, but what about Grace? Don’t you need to pick her up this afternoon?”

“No. Since I wasn’t supposed to get into town until late tonight, Tom and Janice decided to take her with them to Janice’s sister’s house this weekend.”

In the car it occurred to me that the combination of insular family gathering, and Martin, in town for the first time in two weeks, might not be the most felicitous mixture. The family atmosphere had been very thick last night at the house, and today gave every promise of being louder and longer. And then there were Uncle Larry and his boys...

“You don’t drink Bud Light, do you?” I asked anxiously.

He was indignant. “I’ve been accused of many things in my life, but that’s low even for you, Emma.”

“I wasn’t trying to be offensive,” I apologized meekly.

He glanced at me in surprise. “You are wound about as tight as you can go. Let’s drive around a bit before we go back.”

I breathed out a sigh of relief. “I’d like that.”

We took the scenic route home, and as we drove our easy camaraderie started to reestablish itself. He bantered and I snapped, and I felt more alive than I had in the past week, and perhaps even since I’d seen him last.

“Let’s just keep driving,” I suggested suddenly. “Let’s go somewhere. Anywhere.”

“We can’t do that, Emma. Your family will miss you soon.” He turned us in the direction of the house, and soon we were parked in front of Peggy’s house. The entire curb and driveway of Emma’s house was overflowing with cars bearing license plates from several different states. I sat in the car while Martin opened my door, and only reluctantly took his hand when he offered to help me out.

“Shall we?” he asked. I hung back.

“Please, let’s not go in,” I whispered desperately, clutching his hand in both of mine. “It’s quiet out here. We can talk.”

“You need to go in,” he said, and tried to lift my chin to make me look at him, but I refused to meet his eyes. He took my arm and ushered me along before him toward Emma’s front walk.

“People are expecting you,” he reasoned with me.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” I said grimly as we neared the door.

My predictions were without error. The house was bursting with relatives and a few old friends, people who’d know each other in the good old days and were reliving them with manic zest. And it wasn’t just the good old days that were revived -- Dad and Uncle Larry has started on the first wary round of an old political argument that threatened to blow up into full-blown feud before the evening was over. The warmth of so many bodies opening so many beer cans in so little space was oppressive. Martin and I were jostled and joshed as we retreated to the big plate glass window at the back of the living room. The basketball crew behind us roared their approval of the game and talked utter trash about the abilities of the competition, and each other.

“There’s nowhere to go,” I told him bitterly as we looked out at the smokers in the backyard. “Every seat is taken. Even the easy chair in Emma’s room is occupied by vultures picking through her things. The only quiet space in the house is my bedroom, and you don’t seem like you’d approve of that today.”

“Maybe they’ll leave soon,” he murmured.

I scoffed resentfully. “This could go on all night, believe me.”

We stood in widening silence as the house behind us seethed with life. My mother came pushing through the crowd toward us. “Emma, I’ve been trying to find you all afternoon! We’re sorting out the kitchen stuff while everyone’s here, and we all decided you should have first dibs, so come tell us what you want.” She smiled in a non-predatory fashion at Martin. “I’m Emma’s mother, Jennifer Trapnel. So nice to meet you.”

He made polite reply, I made brief introductions, and we moved into the kitchen. The scene reminded me of Thanksgiving dinners of yore, except with an added acquisitive edge as the women circled the sets of dishes and glassware. I wanted to retreat to the corner with Martin, but I was dragged into the center of the negotiations. Martin stuck it out as best he could, but finally, during a lull in the proceedings, he came up behind me and spoke in my ear.

“It looks like you’ll be busy for a while, so I’m going to head home,” he said. “Do you think you’ll be free tonight?”

“I highly doubt it,” I snapped.

He rested his hand on the back of my neck and massaged his thumb up and down my spine. “Well, good night, then,” he said quietly, and was gone.

His touch lingered all evening, through the sports madness and memories and beer cans and increasingly acrimonious debates. My dad slammed into the kitchen to gather his strength for the next bout with Uncle Larry, and saw me wilting quietly next back near the pantry as the ladies reshelved the china and started to make plans for a late dinner.

“How’s it going, hon?” he asked, putting his arm around me.

“I’m so tired, Dad,” I moaned. “I’m going to bed.”

“Poor baby, you’ll never get to sleep with all this commotion,” he commiserated. Raising his voice, he called to Mom across the kitchen, “Jennifer, Emma is exhausted.”

Suddenly everyone was all solicitation. Plans were formed for reassembling in the lobby of the hotel and bringing in food. The sports fans offered to get hot wings for the whole group. Soon the crew was cleaning up and packing up, and I went to sit in my room until I heard them all clattering out the door.

Mom and Dad were the last to go, and she came in to see me before they left, her face soft with concern. “You just get some sleep, sweetie,” she urged me. “Get up as late as you want in the morning, and don’t mind about us; we’ll probably want to sleep in too. We won’t expect to come over tomorrow until we hear from you.”

Finally alone in the house, I discovered that the promised rest eluded me. I kicked off my heels and tossed my funeral dress on a chair, slipping into soft pants and a snug camisole. My neck and fingers and face all burned where Martin had touched me, and I prowled restlessly as I brushed my teeth and got ready for bed. He had not called, and would not call, but still I carried my phone obsessively. The long-awaited stillness of the house began to grate on me as a stinging reminder of Emma’s absence. After pacing an hour in this desolation of loneliness, I grabbed my keys and pulled on my coat, and in ten minutes I was trying Martin’s door.

It was locked. I rapped hard, and after a moment the light in the hall was switched on and he opened the door in his t-shirt and jeans. “Emma,” he said, hand on the door, and his voice and expression were a mixture of surprise and, for one fleeting instant, sudden longing.

I brushed past him into the entryway. “I hardly think it’s fair of you to lock your door when you’re always walking in on me without knocking.”

“Only when I’m expected,” he said guardedly, closing the door softly and remaining with his back to it. I let my coat fall to the floor and took a step toward him. He tensed slightly, and the Polish eagle on his arm rippled.

“I would never have known you had a tattoo if you hadn’t had your shirt off the night we met,” I said, running my hand up his arm to brush the eagle with my fingertips. “Peggy said you weren’t shy about taking off your shirt. When would you have showed it to me?”

“Emma, what do you want?” he asked, keeping his voice steady with effort, and I felt a desperate thrill to see how hard it was for him not to let his eyes wander down my body.

“You,” I whispered, cupping his face in my hands. “Oh, Martin, only you.” I pulled his head toward mine and kissed him, hungrily. As I melted into him, I could feel him responding, meeting and matching my eagerness, his hands thrust in my hair and then sliding roughly from my shoulders to my waist. My lips moved along his jaw and down his neck to...

“Emma. Emma, stop.” His breathing was ragged and he spoke as much to himself as to me, holding my face away from his. “Calm down. You’ve had a hard day. You need time to think.”

“No I don’t,” I insisted, pulling him toward me. Once more I caught him with his defenses lowered, and it was a moment before he jerked away.

“Up until today,” he said, in a voice harsh with desire, “you’ve been the soul of caution, and I could scarcely get you to stand near me. And here tonight you’re suddenly throwing yourself at me hard, way too hard.”

“You were the one who said you would be delighted if I responded in kind,” I challenged, my breath keeping pace with his. “Have you changed your mind, or can you only fit in flirting on your own schedule?”

“This is more than flirting, Emma.” He stood back, and this time he let his eyes rest on my body, taking in every curve through my thin clothes. Then he leaned forward against me, and I lifted my face toward his in anticipation. But he lifted a dress shirt from a hook on the wall behind me, and tucked my arms into the sleeves. Settling the shirt on my shoulders, he ran his hands down along the front of my body and starting from the bottom edge of the shirt, he fastened every button up to my chin. Then he kissed me once, gently, and steered me over to sit on the couch.

I was almost shaking with frustrated passion and embarrassment and rage, but he said nothing, only looked at me as I hunched in a tight ball with my knees drawn up to my chest. Then he sighed and kissed my hair and held me, murmuring, “It’s okay.” The tears that I had been fighting down all week poured out in rising waves of hysteria, and I cried against him for the second time, wailing in grief until I was almost sick with exhaustion. How long I wept I don’t know, but by the end I was dimly aware of him shepherding me upstairs and tucking me into his bed.

“Good night, love,” he soothed, brushing my hair off my forehead. Then he stepped out and shut the door behind him, and I slept until morning.

Profiles in String 27

2011-12-02T01:03:00.001-05:00

My father took over dealing with the business end of death. I would have had no idea where to begin, but he was Emma’s trustee and could talk to the lawyer downtown and the bank and the mortuary with ease. The funeral was set for the following Friday, and I spent the week in a quiet haze. Nothing was demanded of me. My mother was pleased to baby me, and I accepted it as I had accepted her care when I was a child. After the building months of tension and watchfulness, it was a relief to release all responsibilities for a time and allow myself to be provided for. Mom was full of schemes for my well-being and emotional health, ferrying me around to the salon for a hair cut and a facial, or to the mall for a dress for the funeral.

“This looks like something you’d like,” said mom, plucking a black sheath dress off a rack and inspecting the fabric. “You can get a lot of wear out of it after the funeral, too.”

“Not black.”

Mom was surprised. “I thought you preferred black.”

“I’d rather get something with some color.” I was firm. “Black makes you look dead.”

Phones rang all week with updates from relatives making travel plans. Uncle Larry, Dad’s brother, planned to come in with some of his grown kids; some distant cousins were making the trip. Everyone was planning to stay at Mom and Dad’s hotel. It was turning into a big family reunion, and of course everyone wanted to kick back and catch up. “We’ll all be meeting up at Emma’s house following the graveside service,” Dad told anyone who called. “It’s empty.”

Of course, there was the issue of Emma’s empty house. It was held in trust now, but it would have to be sold before any inheritance could be realized. No one really wanted to live in it: Mom and Dad had just settled in Florida and had no plans to move back; Uncle Larry had his own place; Stacy and Brad liked New York and were already babbling excitedly about the quality of the local school district. And I, even if I could have afforded to live there, didn’t want it either. It was a house filled with memories, but they were Emma’s memories, not mine. Of course there was plenty of work to be done before the house could be sold, and short of other plans, it seemed natural that I would stay on and oversee the fix-up and cleaning out of the house.

By Thursday funeral preparations had assumed a festival atmosphere. Uncle Larry had blown into town with a few of his adult children, and after the rosary and vigil at the funeral home they had pulled up to the house with a stack of pizzas and a 24-pack of Bud Light. Mom had poured her ferocious energies into clearing out the cabinets, and a trove of lost and forgotten items were assembled for the amusement of the company. The basketball game was switched on, and the cousins who weren’t crouched in front of the TV, pizza in hand, were helping Dad clear furniture from the front room to the garage so Mom and Jocelyn, Larry’s second wife, could vacuum and rearrange and keep themselves busy in the way that in-laws do at big family occasions.

I helped out a bit, but eventually my mother urged me rest up. “Don’t worry about all this, sweetie, we’ll take care of it. Go lay down before you bite someone’s head off,” she ordered, escorting me to my room. I flopped on my bed and stayed there for the rest of the evening. The laughter and commotion and shouting of the sports fans drifted into my room even through the pillow I rammed against the crack at the bottom of the door. I could catch snippets of conversation from the front room where Mom and Jocelyn were hiding out from the boisterous mass of Trapnel guys working themselves up to a lather over the game.

“...Still in shock, you know....been a hard week for her...living with Aunt Emma for six months would be enough to drive anyone crazy...seeing anyone?...nephew of the lady next door, he has a little girl...did you want to look at those dishes now?”

I rolled over and looked at the clock. It was 9:30 PM, and the crew in the living room might not leave for hours. I had retreated as far as I could get without having to walk past everyone and leave the house. Martin wasn’t answering his phone, doubtless because he was out somewhere having a better time than I was.

Ten bitter minutes later, I received a text from the man himself: Coming home a day early for funeral. Brief layover in Charlotte NC. Get in after midnight. See you tomorrow.

We arrived at church early the next morning. I sat with Mom and Dad, clutching the rosary with the clear green stones, which I’d taken off Emma’s bedside table and claimed for my own, to no protest. I had also taken a black lace chapel veil from a drawer in Emma’s room, which did occasion some complaint. My mother had asked pointedly, “Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic, Emma?” as I pinned in on before Mass. Now I parked defiantly in the front pew, daring anyone to challenge me on my right to wear Emma’s veil to Emma’s funeral.

As it turned out, no one was particularly interested to talk to me about Emma. Old friends and visiting relatives were chattering around the nave, catching up on years of gossip in what were intended to be hushed tones, and the cacophony of their murmuring filled the large stone church with whispering echoes. I stiffened my spine and let the beads of the rosary slip automatically through my fingers as I waited for Martin. Peggy and John were already there -- she had caught my eye and smiled encouragingly as I craned around to watch the door -- but perhaps it was unreasonably early to expect him. My dad gave my hand a consoling squeeze. “Not too much longer, hon,” he said as he rose to gather with the other pallbearers in the back.

The congregation rustled to its feet in waves and turned to watch as the priest began by blessing the coffin in the back. I turned as well, but I didn’t see at the coffin. Martin was standing next to Peggy and John, looking exactly as when I’d first met him at Christmas, in suit and tie with his fair brown hair falling over his glasses, and his eyes were fixed on me.

“You go ahead,” I told her, watching Martin making his way past the line of cars. “I’m waiting for someone.”

Profiles in String 26

2011-12-01T02:38:00.001-05:00

I wrote 50,000 words, and all I got was this little badge!

And Darwin's back, so those of you who are heartily sick of Emma and Martin should be cheered. For all four readers of this story: I can't wrap it tonight, but I think we're heading for a close over the weekend.

...

There had been little for me to do after the accident. The police were mainly interested in talking to witnesses, and I had seen nothing. Emma’s body was loaded into an ambulance. I had been wrapped in a blanket and tucked in the back of a heated squad car while the officers gathered accounts. The distraught driver, a petite ponytailed blond on her way to a gig as a personal trainer, had sobbed in hysterics.

“I never saw her,” she wailed. “It was pouring so hard, you know? And I had the wipers on high, but I just couldn’t see anything. And then -- oh my God! -- she just stepped out in front of me, she didn’t even look at me. I barely had time to even hit my brakes. She just appeared in front of me,” she repeated, appealing through tears to the officers, the bystanders, and me. “I never even saw her until it was too late.”

Calls had been made. I said I know not what to my father, who offered to take care of calling other family members and promised that he and Mom would make flight arrangements that day. I fielded anxious calls from my mother and Stacy, who seemed to be under the misapprehension that I’d been injured, as they kept asking if I were all right. I spoke in a clear, pinched voice to Peggy, who drove immediately down to the scene, took one look at my white face, and ran interference for me and contacted whoever needed to be contacted -- the parish, the doctor’s office, I don’t know. I shook and made shrill wisecracks, and Peggy spoke soothing words to me and asked if I was okay to drive myself home.

That night in the living room, the green brocade sofa was still frayed and shabby. The green carpet still matted with age and the massive television still bore up under the weight of the remote, a TV Guide, and a box of tissues. The large dining table still stood in its usual spot between the living room and the kitchen and every chair was tucked in its place. Every individual aspect of the space was substantially the same, but the essential character of the room was altered. It was not a place of joy or anger or tension or grief. It was empty, a place of nothingness.

I wandered aimlessly, touching an item here, pausing in a doorway there. There was nothing I wanted to do. No one needed anything from me. I was free.

After a time my phone rang. It was Martin, calling at the usual time. It rang, and I looked at it as it rang. I would have preferred nothing more in the world than to suddenly find myself laying beside him, quietly sheltered in his arms, but to talk to him on the phone at that moment was beyond my abilities. The sound stopped after a moment, but I wished it would continue for hours so at least I could know that he was thinking of me.

There was a knock on the door. I laid on the couch. The door opened, and I heard Peggy calling, “Emma? I’ve brought some dinner for you.”

I appeared in the hallway. “That’s kind of you, Peggy. I don’t think I’m very hungry.”

“You probably don’t feel like eating, but when you do, you won’t feel like cooking.”

She told me a few things about the calls she’d made, and the expressions of sympathy she’d heard. I nodded and carried on competent conversation.

“Do you want me to stay here tonight, Emma?” she asked, getting ready to leave. “I could sleep on the couch?”

“No, but thank you. I think I’d like to be by myself.”

She accepted that, but at the door she added, “If there anything you need me to do for you tonight -- run to the store, do the laundry, anything?”

I hesitated. “Could you... would you call Martin and tell him about it?” She looked surprised, so I rushed on, “I... I can’t talk to him right now. Tell him I miss him and I wish he were here.”

“Of course,” she said, so gently and simply that I had to set my face to a rigid blankness until she left.

I went into the kitchen and poked through paper bag of food. Peggy had made macaroni and cheese -- from scratch, apparently -- and salad, and there also was a bottle of sparkling juice and a box of good tea. I tried to eat a noodle or two, but the effort of stabbing a noodle onto the tine of a fork and lifting it to my mouth was just more bother than I wanted to put myself through. I left everything sitting on the table and threw myself face down onto the couch. After fifteen minutes my phone buzzed with a text message from Martin.

I’m so sorry. I understand.

I laid on the couch and refreshed the screen until the battery ran dangerously low and whispered the words to myself as if they were an orison to with which to summon him.

Sleeping on the couch wasn’t really as attractive in theory as in concept, so eventually I staggered down the hall to the bathroom to brush my teeth. My reflection in the mirror was strange and pale and desolate. I felt as if I’d never truly seen my face before this moment. Emma’s cup for cleaning her dentures was on the side of the sink where she’d left it this morning, and I did not move it. I didn’t move any of her things, or touch them, in case -- I couldn’t clearly formulate the reason in my head -- in case they might be needed again. They were still her things.

My parents flew in the next day, Saturday. I was glad to see them; I had missed them more than I realized. They each held me in turn when they arrived, and I felt warm and protected, safe and weightless for a brief time. Mom set immediately to cleaning the kitchen, fascinated by the odd assortment of items stashed away among the dishes and the pantry. Dad sat with me on the couch while I told him the whole story of the accident, what little there was to tell.

“I didn’t even see it happen, Dad,” I told him, my head resting on his shoulder. “I was doing just what the doctor told me to do, making sure that she had her walker, so she wouldn’t fall and hurt herself. What a stupid reason, right? If she’d fallen at least she’d still be alive now. I should have locked her in the car until I got the damn walker open.”

“Aunt Emma always had a mind of her own,” he pointed out. “She could have unlocked the door if she’d wanted to get out.”

“At least that might have given me time to catch her.”

My mother entered the living room carrying an item enclosed in its tupperware container. “Emma, this bag of flour expired five years ago!” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t you get rid of it?”

“Emma didn’t like the things to be moved around too much, and she seemed to know if I threw anything away. It was easier not to upset her.”

“Well, I’m tossing it now,” Mom proclaimed, heading back into the kitchen. I opened my mouth to protest, then stopped.

“It can’t possibly matter to Emma now, hon,” reasoned Dad, seeing my twitch. But it seemed wrong to start clearing out her things so soon. That was her expired flour, after all.

Mom and Dad were staying at a hotel, since they weren’t particularly keen to sleep in Emma’s bed. Dad, like Peggy, offered to stay on the couch, but I still wanted to be alone. Their vitality affected me strangely. I knew that Emma’s death mattered to Dad. She had been a favorite aunt of his, and he had many fond memories of her. But it seemed to me as if, for them, Emma had been dead for years. They weren’t shy about touching her things or throwing away junk, or speculating on who might get her dishes or furniture. They had not lived with her for the past six months, feeding her and clothing her and fighting with her and loving her.

I had no desire to sit up alone in the empty house, so I got ready for bed early. Sleep didn’t come instantly, though. My active imagination wrote and rewrote Emma’s last moments, crafting new endings or magnifying minute details of that morning into glaring portents of impending catastrophe. I should not have let her get out of the car. I should not have bothered with her walker. I should not have taken my eyes off of her. I knew, better than anyone, how unpredictable she could be. How could I have been so careless?

The mental fidgeting became so disruptive that I couldn’t lay still, so I sat up and swung my legs out of bed, preparatory to making some of Peggy’s tea, when my phone rang. I snatched it up. It was Martin.

I tried to sort out my emotions. After the day with my parents, I wanted to talk to someone who knew Emma as I did. But I still didn’t know whether I was ready to handle the vulnerability of having to express myself to him in words. Without having come to a full decision, I took a deep breath and answered the phone.

“Hey.”

“Emma,” he said, his voice warm with concern. “I’m so sorry. I wondered a bit when you didn’t answer the phone last night, but I didn’t expect anything like this.”

“Neither did I.”

There was a pause.

“I keep wanting to ask if you’re all right,” he said, “but that doesn’t seem like a good question right now.”

“No.”

Another pause.

“Do you even want to talk now, or should I let you go?”

“I... I’d rather just listen to your voice, if you don’t mind.” I curled up in bed again and laid my head on the pillow.

“I’d be happy to oblige, if I could think of the right thing to say.”

“How’s Grace?”

“Oh, she’s fine. I don’t think she really misses me when I’m gone, which is one of the reasons I decided to stop traveling so much. She’s not used to me being around all the time, and I want that to change.” He waited for a second to see if I would respond. “I had some barbeque here in Kansas City.”

“Was it good?”

“Our clients took us to this restaurant where you can order sausage wrapped in bacon and barbequed up with way too much sauce. I like bacon as much as the next man, but I couldn’t even look at it. You would have been appalled.”

“That’s just vile.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it almost put me off bacon, and that takes some doing.”

I had nothing to say to that, and the silence stretched on.

“Emma,” he said at last, “I really am so sorry. I know you don’t want talk about it, but I don’t want you to think that I don’t care. I hate the thought of you being all alone right now.”

“My parents were here,” I said with difficulty.

“That’s good. I’m glad you had some company.”

“They weren’t good company. It doesn’t really seem to matter to them that Emma is...” I hastily reached for a safer formula. “...isn’t here.”

“My poor Emma,” he comforted, with a catch in his voice that nearly undid me.

Now my words rushed up and forced their way past the tightness in my throat. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, Martin. This wasn’t how Emma was supposed to go. She was supposed to die of Alzheimer's, and now she’s one more traffic statistic. I would have taken care of her until the end. Instead she died because I was taking care of her.”

“Emma,” Martin said gently, “you’re blaming yourself, but this isn’t your fault. It isn’t anyone’s fault. She might have died at Christmas when she got lost; we just happened to find her in time. You kept her safe as long as you possibly could. That’s what matters.”

He was right, of course, but it was no solace to me.

I laid with my eyes closed and listened to him breathe.

“Do you want me to let you go?” he asked finally.

“No,” I said. “I wish you could read to me until I fell asleep.”

I heard a faint rustling. “Well, here are your options,” he said. “I have on the one hand a half-completed draft of ‘Supply Chain Efficiencies and Warehouse Management Technology’ and on the other, a copy of The Tailor of Gloucester I picked up for Grace.”

“You went on a two-week trip and didn’t bring a book for yourself?”

“I don’t think,” he said simply, “that you really want to hear about five years in a Vietnamese prison camp.”

Pages turned.

In the time (he began) of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets -- when gentlemen wore ruffle, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta -- there lived a tailor in Gloucester.

I pulled up my blanket and wrapped myself in his voice.

Vincero!

2011-11-30T21:45:00.001-05:00

Profiles in String 25

2011-11-30T02:15:00.001-05:00

48,728/50,000. After getting three hours' sleep I had a few moments of hating everything today, including my kids, Darwin, and all of you, until I realized that I was going to be able to bring it in tomorrow. Today.

Here's a picture of me with the radiant Sarah Reinhart taken two weeks ago, after I'd spent a good deal of the weekend in the hospital with my mom. I'm the bleary-looking one on the right. You can imagine how haggard I look now.
...

Every night when Martin called me, I had new and strange stories about Emma to relate.

“Last night she was dozing in the easy chair in the living room, and her walker was standing in front of the fireplace. She doesn’t like the stupid walker, and she often parks it right there. As I was passing through from the hall to the kitchen, she plucked at my sleeve to get my attention, and pointed at the walker, and she asked me, “Do you see that orangutan? He’s just sitting there.” And then she started waxing eloquent about the orangutan on the hearth. Stop laughing, Martin. It was extremely disturbing. I tell you she must see these things. She’s so serious about it, as if there were nothing to debate.

“Okay, you’ll like this one. Emma was sacked out in the same easy chair in the living room, and she was looking at one of the chairs pulled out from the big dining table, in that space between the kitchen and the living room. And she turns to me and says, “Doesn’t that chair look just like the Holy Family?”, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that a chair should bear any resemblance at all to the Holy Family. I tried to get her to elaborate, maybe point out which leg looked like the Virgin Mary, but she couldn’t be any more specific. It’s as if she’s seeing omens.”

“Tonight it was a rhinoceros. No, in the kitchen this time. I don’t know why you’re so amused; don’t even try to tell me you weren’t shaking like a little girl over the man in the closet.”

The evening was a witching time for Aunt Emma. She wandered and kvetched and growled some nights; on others she sank into a tearful depression. This odd sundowning began to take its toll on me. She and I both became nervous and apprehensive as the skies darkened and stars begin to twinkle and night rolled in. Some evenings we sat rigid in the living room, Emma in her own world and me in an agony of frayed nerves over the impending upset or vision that might not even occur.

I described all these things to Peggy as we stood in the yard, her with the paper and me hauling the garbage cans. She grew worried at my nervous laughter and shaking hands. “Emma, you need to get out,” she prescribed. “Let me sit with your aunt tonight while you do something. Get a massage or have your nails done” (I guiltily thrust my ragged fingers behind my back) “or do the shopping or something, but do something for yourself, without Aunt Emma.”

I murmured my acceptance of her offer and retreated inside, where I seethed as I watched her right a fallen flowerpot on her porch and establish herself in a rocker to read the paper in the crisp morning air. How easy it was for her to tell me to take care of myself! Even if I went out tonight, when I arrived home Emma would still be waiting for me. My going out would not solve the problem of Emma’s decline, nor would it fix what ailed her, nor would it stop the twilight madness. When I came back home everything would still be the same. My going out would solve nothing except to give me a slight taste of the carefree life of anyone who was not me. I resented Peggy for her easy life with her happy healthy family and loving husband. I resented Emma for the disease which required someone to wait on her hand and foot. I resented Grace for living with Martin and siphoning his time away from me. I resented Martin for his unconscionable good luck in finding a job that let him travel to exotic locales like Kansas City, where at this moment he was probably having intelligent conversation with polished and professional and non-needy women...

“Stop!” I ordered myself, clutching my arms and rocking a bit. “Stop it, Emma! Get a hold of yourself. You’re being stupid and you know it. Stop now.” But I moved through the afternoon with hot tears brimming and a tingling jittery ache radiating out to my fingertips and feet. I would snap at Emma even as I enjoined myself to resist such behavior. My agitation kindled her own, and she grew restless and angry, which, in turn, keyed me to a pitch of irritation hardly to be endured. By the time Peggy arrived late in the afternoon, I was barely fit to speak to her as I rushed out the door.

I drove aimlessly through Emma’s neighborhood, passing up and down the pleasant residential streets with their lacy covering of venerable branches starting to swell and burst with new foliage. My meandering route brought me around to the cemetery, and without questioning, I parked and passed through the flaking iron gates into the still peace of the abode of the dead. “Resquiescat in Pacem,” bid many of the gravestones, and indeed, I seemed to be the only unquiet soul walking amid the tombs and monuments to grief. I brushed the brittle lichen off the markers and studied the tiny memorials of heartbreak in the children’s section. I passed up a hill crowned by a vast and spreading tree, and at the summit looked down at the sun glinting off the steeple and arches of Our Lady of Lourdes.

Though I had had no firm intention of doing anything in my precious free time, my feet drew me to the heavy doors of the church and to the rear of the line of penitents awaiting their turn in the confessional. A woman intently studied a pamplet entitled “An Examination of Conscience for Mothers”, and a trio of older gentlemen carried on a quiet but spirited discussion of the impending baseball season, which seemed to vie for importance in their minds with the entire Triduum. A small knot of college students preparing to enter the Church at Easter clung to each other for moral support in the face of their first time in the confessional. I allowed myself to be pushed forward along the line until I was before the tripartite box with the ornately carved doors, the leftmost of which opened to emit one of the college students with a joyous, tear-stained face.

I had barely had the mental wherewithal to think of anything in the confession line, much less examine my conscience, and it was not until I found myself kneeling in the dark cubicle and being blessed by the priest on the other side of the screen that finally confronted the reality of the present moment. I took a deep breath and opened my mouth and spilled out all my failings of the past months, the jealousy and anger, the envy and bitterness, the petty grudges and spites. I enumerated the times I’d failed Emma and the ways in which I’d hurt Martin. I dredged back into my past and hauled up times I’d lashed out at Stacy or disobeyed my parents. And then I waited for the judgment to fall, braced against the consequences.

“The Lord has already forgiven you,” said the priest.

And when I emerged from the confessional with a joyous, tear-stained face and knelt with bowed head in the wash of jeweled light pouring through the stained glass window, my ridiculously simple penance of three Hail Marys , so little to offer the One against whom I had truly offended, became sufficient by the very merit of their inadequacy. They were not enough, but I offered them, in that present moment, with everything I had to give, and the peace I received in return was extravagantly out of proportion to my meager gift.

Aunt Emma was planted in her chair with her evening face on when I arrived home. Peggy greeted me with undue warmth as I walked in the door.

“Oh, Emma, I’m so glad to see you,” she said, with the slightest hint of hysteria in her voice. “She’s been saying the oddest things, stuff you wouldn’t normally pay any attention to, except that it’s as if she really sees something. I feel as nervous as a cat. Is she always like this anymore?”

“That’s how it is most nights,” I commiserated. “It can really wear on you.”

“I don’t know how you do it,” she said reverently as she gathered her coat and book. “I think I’d go crazy. You let me know the next time you need a night out, and I’ll make sure John is available to come over and sit here with me.”

“You’re too sweet, Peggy.”

At the door, she took my hand. “I’m serious, Emma. Please let me know if you need me to do anything for you. You’re so competent that I don’t always remember to offer help, but I’m always to give it.”

“I appreciate that, more than you know,” I said. “I think I’ve been trying to be too self-sufficient for too long.”

Even the promise of rain could not dampen my newly strengthened spirits the next morning. The morning was cool and cloudy and temperate -- the first true day of spring. Emma too seemed heartened by the change in weather. She consented to eat, to take her pills with no fuss, and to select her own outfit from the closet. We were going out.

Nurse Linda has expressed concern, at her last visit, with Emma’s increased moodiness and torpor. “This could be just the normal progression of the disease, of course,” she said, “but I think she needs to go in and have her medications evaluated. Maybe we can find a different dosage that will help keep her from these big emotional arcs and mini-depressions.”
“I hope so,” I replied, watching Emma shuffle sullenly around the living room with her book. “It’s painful to see her so unhappy.”

It was more than the usual production to take Emma places anymore, since she had been prescribed her walker. It was apparently a standard-issue model, down to the tennis balls on the front feet, but it seemed less wieldy than the average beast. To fold it for travel took a combination of Rube-Goldbergesque maneuvers, none of which I ever mastered. Every time I set out to collapse the thing it was as if I was confronting it afresh. Emma, for her part, disdained the walker and avoided using it as much as possible. She preferred to travel under her own reduced speed.

Today was no different than usual. I pulled up to the curb at the doctor’s office and wrestled with the walker while she climbed out of the car and started for the door.

“Emma, wait a minute while I get your walker,” I commanded, but she shuffled doggedly on toward the door. Finally I abandoned the half-opened walker and hastened to take her elbow.

“Is it all right if I leave my aunt here for a moment while I park the car?” I asked the receptionist in the waiting room. Emma, safely in a chair, cast a benign eye on the fish tank, the reception station, and the magazines.

“Of course!” replied that lady, with professional cheer. “I’ll keep an eye on her.”

A light drizzle was starting to blow as I parked and hauled the walker with me back into the office. Emma, unbudged, reposed like an angel, cherubically turning the pages of a children’s activity book. The bright colors and simple illustrations pleased her, and she carried it back into the exam room with us.

The doctor and I discussed her strange new behaviors and her recent fall in front of her, as if she were a child, but there was no answering indignation or even interest on Emma’s part as she sat on the paper-covered exam table peering nearsightedly at an image of children ice skating on a small pond on a snowy day. He scrutinized her current prescriptions and asked questions as he checked her over.

“How’ve you been feeling, Emma?” he asked heartily.

“Howard ice skates,” she said, holding the magazine close to her nose.

“Does he? That’s great!” the doctor boomed. Emma paid him no mind, searching, perhaps, for Howard among the hooded and mittened children cutting figures on the frozen pond. “How’ve you been getting around? Okay?” he persisted.

“She hates the walker,” I told him.

“It does mean a certain loss of independence,” he conceded, “but especially with this recent fall I think it’s crucial that she use it any time she’s trying to get around. She was very fortunate not to have been injured the other night, but as the body gets older, even minor shocks to the system can have very serious effects.”

“I’ll do my best to make sure she’s using it,” I promised.

Emma touched the picture in the magazine gently as the doctor and I discussed different options for her new medication routine. He tapped the prescriptions into his computer. “We send ‘em right to the pharmacy for you,” he assured me. “You should be able to go right over and pick them up, and we can get her started on these today. Now you’ll want to call me if you start noticing any of these effects...” By the time we were ready to leave I was awkwardly clutching a sheaf of papers in one hand and guiding Emma’s walker with the other. To complicate the situation, Emma, previously so accommodating, had become attached to the children’s magazine and would not give it back.

“Here, Emma, let’s leave this for other people to look at!” I wheedled, trying to pry it from her fingers. She demurred and fussed and began to protest loudly.

“She can take it with her,” offered the receptionist, with professional cheer. “We’ve got plenty more.”

The drizzle persisted as we stepped out the door, and I looked with dismay at papers, Emma, purses, and walker. Out of the mists of time floated up a memory of my mother trying herd Stacy and I around a store when we were small and rousty. Someone had said to her, “My, you have your hands full!” Standing by the doors just out of the drizzle, I suddenly felt a surge of understanding for my mother wash over me. No wonder she had seemed hassled and frustrated so often, all those times we had thought she was overreacting to what seemed normal childish games. “You were right, Mom,” I acknowledged, shaking my head.

The solution seemed to be to leave Emma parked by door while I drove up to the curb again. After being given her way over the magazine, she was biddable again, and even chatty as we rode over to the pharmacy, commenting on the buildings, the people, and the scenery. Only once did she seem to rise out of her bland affability, on seeing a man with a dark suit and a hat darting out of the rain into a building. “There’s Howard,” she exclaimed, leaning toward the window and craning her neck to follow the figure.

“No, Aunt Emma, it can’t be Howard. He’s not around much anymore.”

“Where’d Howard go?” she asked, puzzled. “Where’s that man now?” And she continued to brood over the question as we pulled up to the pharmacy.

Urban’s is an institution, founded in a brick storefront nestled amid an assortment of small family-run businesses back when Milton Avenue was still a sleepy neighborhood lane. Even as the street grew to be a thoroughfare, and then a four-lane artery, the small historic district has maintained its plateglass charm, though the once broad sidewalks have been reduced down to strips that tuck comfortably under the striped awnings. Tourists and connoisseurs flock to Urban’s now to sit at the vintage soda counter and order phosphates and egg creams, but it is still a working pharmacy. Emma was a long-time customer of Urban’s, and the druggist and cashiers knew her well.

The rain had increased to a steady downpour, and I hoped we’d be able to find a parking space somewhere near the pharmacy so I wouldn’t have far to struggle with Emma and her walker . The street was busy today, however, and there were no gaps along the curb as we approached Urban’s. And then, a stroke of luck: a car backed into the street and pulled away, leaving a vacant meter directly in front of the big glass doors.

“Hang on, Emma!” I called cheerfully. “It’s time for some parallel parking action.”

I pulled up, flipped on my right turn signal, and waited for the irritated driver behind me to get a clue and move on. Then I began to maneuver the car back into the space.

The instructors in my high school driver’s ed class had presented parallel parking in very technical terms, thus producing a classroom full of navigational idiots, but I learned the proper technique on spring break junior year from a white-haired gent in New Orleans who observed from the sidewalk, plastic beer cup in hand, as I made several fruitless attempts to wedge an SUV full of coeds between two compacts on Amelia Street. Whether he took pity on my incompetence, or he just thought I was cute, I don’t know, but he taught me the trick of parallel parking, and I’ve used it to impress people ever since.

Parallel parking is a science first, but there’s a measure of art in the execution. First the car should be even with the car in front of the space. Then, before the driver starts reversing, the wheel needs to be cut all the way to the right. When the car is backed halfway into the space, the wheel needs to be cut all the way to the left. Once the nose is smoothly in, the wheel is straightened out, and the car is adjusted in the space.

“Piece of cake,” I bragged to Emma.

“That’s nice, honey,” she said, leafing through her magazine.

We were nestled nicely against the curb, and Emma would be able to exit the car right under the awning so she wouldn’t get wet. I patted her shoulder. "You stay here and look at the pictures while I get your walker set up."

"Howard ice skates," she said, finding the winter pond scene again.

"That's a good idea, Emma. You look for Howard.

Cars splashed past me, raindrops gleaming in their headlights, as I tried to wrangle the walker out of the trunk without scratching up the car behind me. Emma let herself out of the car and stood watching the street as I fought to unfold the recalcitrant thing. “I’ll have this in a second, Emma,” I promised as I tugged at a sticky latch.

“Okay, honey. That man is Howard,” she said.

“What do you mean, Emma?” I asked, glancing toward her. But she was gone, and before I could even call out for her, I heard an onrushing shriek of brakes and the soft and sickening thud of impact.

Being a Dad Without a Father

2011-11-29T12:16:00.000-05:00

Being out in Southern California again, and for another funeral, I find myself thinking in particular about the experience of being a man, particularly of being a dad, who has lost his father.

I find myself wanting to say that in addition to the natural grief we always feel at death, that there is a particular feeling of disconnection or incompleteness that comes from being a man who loses his father comparatively young. The process of growing up and having one's own family is one which brings a new pespective on one's youthful life. The inexplicable actions and words of parents suddenly fall into place and make sense as we find ourselves facing our own adult problems and raising our own children. "Hey, Dad, I get it. Is this what you were thinking?" you want to say. "I'm like you now."

With your father dead, this becomes a one sided conversation. You reach these epiphanies and think, "Yeah, this must be what Dad was going through," but with no answer back, you never feel quite sure. The distance of childhood perception stands between. Is this how Dad felt? Maybe I look to my kids now like he looked to me then. Maybe I don't even remember right.

In some sense, the image of "Dad" fixes at the extent to which you were able to understand and share experiences when he was alive -- a slight distance or idealization, something you never quite feel you can inhabit the inside of or live up to.

This is how I've come to think of it. Though as I watch my uncles in their late 40s and early 50s talking last night about losing their father at the age of 84, I wonder if I've built up "what it would be like to have your father longer" into some sort of ideal in its own right. From these men not much younger than Dad was when he died, I get the same sense that "Dad" is a figure never quite felt to be fully understood or lived up to. That the gap between "my dad" and "trying to be a good father" persists through life.

In the end, it is doubltess most important simply to be thankful to have had such a good one at all, for any length of time.