Placet

My wonderfully sneaky Aunt Martha

2005-12-27T18:11:00.000-05:00

My aunt Martha is very sneaky. She sent my sister and me the exact same present--a small stainless steel flask that's perfect for carrying some coffee or soup and a bar of nice chocolate. It was beautifully wrapped in wonderfully patterned tissue paper and the card was hand-painted. She's a wonderfully talented water colorist--although she doesn't always think so. She's too shy to put her stuff out for sale; but, as she said to me, she goes to galleries and sees stuff for dale that isn't as good as what she does. So even if she doesn't think her work is very good, she might as well try to sell some of it. That's what she gave to all of her grandnieces and nephews.

Now, I was curious about the mini thermos. I wanted to see how it worked, and it's a good thing too--because, if I hadn't, I wouldn't have noticed the check inside.

UPDATE: I am now going to test out my flask/thermos with some of the Trader Joe's red pepper tomato soup. (The only link I could find was to a pdf.) It's delicious stuff.

A Fundamental Question in Basic Political Philosophy

2005-11-28T16:32:00.000-05:00

When is it appropriate for the state to do something it forbids its citizens from doing? I think about this question constantly in the context of the death penalty. I am deeply opposed to the death penalty, and I once invented a rationale that I thought was beautiful in its simplicity: the death penalty was wrong, because it undermined the integrity of the law. How could the state engage in an act of violence, of killing, especially since most of the time the death penalty was meted out to murderers? How could this possibly teach the respect for life which was embodied in the legal prohibitions against murder?

Since I’m not an absolute pacifist, I even thought through a justification for killing in war. Wars occurred between nations (not, one hoped, within them—although this too is common enough), and this meant that, in a very real sense, the existence of international law and the laws of war notwithstanding, they were activities outside of the law. In a functioning legal system, where it was possible to maintain the public safety by putting violent criminals in prison, there could be no justification for state-sanctioned killing. Self-defense is, to my way of thinking, a special exception, but it too represents a breakdown of civilization, because we would (or, at least, should) prefer to have the police there to disarm and arrest the dangerous. And self-defense is, for the most part, state sanctioned but not executed by the agents of the state. Sure, in the midst of danger police sometimes kill, but there is, or ought to be, a sense that this act represents a failure. It would be better to try the individual, to convict him after due process of law and sentence him to an appropriate punishment. It’s plenty common to see people mutter under their breath after some publicized shoot-out, “Well, at least we saved the cost of a trial.” But this always makes me shudder with some disgust. Self-defense of this sort may be necessary, but it can never be the preferred outcome.

But for many (and not just in Texas or Virginia) death seems to be the preferred option, the punishment of choice. And when we impose a sentence of death, deliberated on by a jury or judge, and marked with the authority and force of the entire legal system, something qualitatively different from self-defense is happening. And I think that that something is wrong, because it is not an action committed under duress, in the heat of passion, or in war.

I feel this distinction in my bones. And yet, sovereign states do things that individuals are not allowed to do all the time. They can force people to sell their property for public use; they can confine people involuntarily following whatever constitutes something as nebulous as 'due process of law'; they can force their citizens to pay them money, i.e. taxes--and unless you are a pure libertarian, you accept all of these things as being of the nature of governments.

So, here’s the question, when is it morally justified for the state to behave in ways that would not be tolerated if they were acting as individual citizens and how do you draw the line?

The deepest longing of my heart

2005-11-26T16:49:00.000-05:00

Elizabeth Wordsworth hit the nail in the head. I wish that she were wrong.

If all the good people were clever
And all the clever people were good
The world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could.
But somehow, 'tis seldom or ner
The two hit it off as they should
The good are so harsh to the clever
The clever so rude to the good!
--Elizabeth Wordsworth

Thanksgiving

2005-11-25T13:51:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving was lovely. I spent the day with my friend Cecilia and her in-laws and their extended cousins in Norwell on the South Shore. They had a gorgeous property which abuts the Norris Reservation. I brought my running shoes along, since we were planning to go for a walk along one of the trails. We were a bit late getting the hors d'oeuvres there and didn't manage to sit down to dinner until 3 or so. By the time we were finishing up, it was already getting dark.

And the grandmothers were delightful, even if they didn't care much for Latin. One of them much regrets that she isn't able to drink quite as many martinis as she used to. I've never been a huge fan of them myself, but I sympathize with her predicament completely.

Still, it was a wondeful meal. There was even sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and they were real sweet potatoes, the light pale yellow kind. I like yams--baked and topped with butter and brown sugar they're a real winter treat with a ham steak--but these sweet potatoes were mild and not too sweet. And there were four kinds of pies--squash, apple, mince and pecan. It was very good.

And there was a wonderfully cozy fire and a prefectly mixed gin and tonic to savor as things wound down. We loaded up the back of the Saab with firewood as we headed back to the city.

Web Sites for Non-profits

2005-11-16T17:33:00.000-05:00

I've been doing a lot of volunteering lately for the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO) on their healthcare initiative. GBIO is part of the MassACT coalition, a group brought together by the lobbying firm Health Care for All. I've been out collecting signatures, and our lobbying efforts seem to have made a real difference in the Senate healthcare bill. We got them to include amendments providing for an expansion of MassHealth. The Senate Bill was much stingier than the House version. It's been a lot of fun, but our technology tools have been pretty awful. We send e-mails of spreadsheets back and forth, but a lot of the contact information ought to be managed online. When you call people to ask them to call their Senator or to show up at an ACTION, you ought to be able to enter whether people can come into a database by logging in over the internet. It's just like an election canvass. And you ought to be able to break down access to various databases by congregation. It shouldn't be too hard.

I wonder whether something like Civic Space Labs would work, but they don't really have much of a budget for technology. They've got 2.5 organizers and they're going to hire an office manager, but it's a real shoe string of an operation. Civic Space Labs looks like a great idea, but it still requires a fairly high level of technical sophistication to operate it, and the website doesn't provide easy access to consultants who can cost-effectively help you get a site up and running. It isn't exactly obvious how one would go about suggesting that they set up a list of vendors. They have a forum, but it only provides the information that people post, and it isn't organized. Open Source stuff is great, but sometimes you just want searchable, hierarchically organized information. Who's available to help with this in Boston and what do they charge? It shouldn't be so complicated.

Weather

2005-11-15T15:46:00.000-05:00

It's cold and rainy and gray. On the radio they said that snow was going to hit, but not here in Boston, in northern New England. I'm sure that all of my skiiing friends are glad, but I hate winter. The only consolation is that once Christmas hits, the days will start to get longer.

The Daily Grind

2005-11-14T09:25:00.000-05:00

I don't have anything terribly profound to say today. There's quite a bit going on in my personal life, but I don't think that it's stuff that I want to write about here. I did want to write something, though, to get in the habit of writing. I suppose that it's a bit like calisthenics: even when it seems meaningless there's some value in the process itself. Writing about nothing keeps me in shape for writing about something.

Write it

2005-11-11T17:30:00.000-05:00

One Art
Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Finding Abby

2005-11-11T11:27:00.000-05:00

There's a wonderful line in the movie Finding Forrester where Sean Connery's character William Forrester tells his protegé Jamal that the secret to writing is to write. You've simply got to bite the bullet and do it. I find this hard. I avoid writing like the plague. I love conversation and talking. I like blogs, because they are conversations with comments. I like the interaction, but I find writing really painful.

Sometimes my thoughts are flying fast and furious, and I dart too quickly from one to the other. It makes sense in my own mind, but under the calm light of day I realize that what I've written is just dreck. Other times, when I'm down I can barely string a few words together, because my head is simply too slow. The strange thing is how similar these two states are in terms of output. It's hard to get anything out, to say anything useful. I'm jealous of the hyper productive, extremely jealous.

And writing is a lonely endeavor. If I could spend a couple of hours a day in quiet contemplation writing away, I think I might be okay, but I would need a secretary and a cook to make sure that I was well nourished and that I saw my friends. Writing is hard, but maybe, if I resolve to do a bit every day, I will be a bit better.

Another Bush responds

2005-09-06T11:23:00.000-04:00

So said Barbara Bush:

What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality...And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."

What can you say to that, really?

Feed Me

2005-07-27T02:08:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been haunted by the aching, languid tones of the fractional anthem we've been using in church:

1. The bread which we break, alleluia,
is the communion of the body of Christ.

2. One body are we, alleluia,
for though many we share one bread.

So it's a particularly good time to think about the meaning of the Eucharist in the context of the lectionary. This Sunday we come to the feeding of the 5 thousand. Sarah Dylan Brewer who tackles the lectionary weekly with real gusto has a great meditation up. She counts three miracles, and the least is the multiplication of the loaves. The big two are that people were willing to sit down with eachother--even with the rabble and that they didn't worry about where the food came from, whether it was properly kosher.

I particularly like her characterization of Jesus as a party animal. I've been trying to find a paragraph to extract, but I can't decide what the money quote is. Just read it for yourself.

Somebody should invite this Maryland based webminstress to the Via Media conference they're threatening to hold this October. I think it's about values and vision or something like that.

Making Health Care Happen

2005-07-25T22:00:00.000-04:00

The marvellous Matthew Holt, proprietor of The Health Care Blog on Why Hillarycare failed. He explicitly rejects Clinton's own self-assessment (as reported in the New York Times) that she failed, because she rejected incrementalism and tried to do too much too fast. Matthew's basic thesis is just the opposite. Hillary didn't move fast enough.

Matthew says that Hillary dawdled by spending 6 months on a fact-finding journey with Ira Magaziner when there was 10-15 years of good research outlining what the problems were. What Hillary failed to grasp was that she had a very narrow window in which to act. Coming off of the recession there was a lot of insecurity about not having healthcare, and there was a sizable chunk of people who felt that the system needed to be completely revamped. So, it seems to me that we need to be ready to move when the next opportunity presents itself to move for universal coverage which is why I'm puzzled by the conclusion to Matthew's piece:

"Once we get it done, then we have a while to worry about sorting out the system to the purists' satisfaction later. So will you all still please stop arguing about what it should look like!"

I take his point that we'll have to work the kinks out over time, but I still think that we ought to have a few options on the shelf ready to go. We should have a basic single payer option, some sort of managed competition plan etc. and we should think about which current stakeholders would benefit from the different types. No insurance company--other than the Blues who might still play a role processing claims--would line up behind single payer, but the doctors might prefer it. So we need to figure out who our natural allies for each proposal are, and when the country's mood is right and the allies are mad enough, we need to strike. In the meantime we need the Democratic party to adopt a few of those plans and to have the borad outlines of a best and second-best option. We can't have every presidential candidate tackling it from scratch.

I fear the niceness of this man

2005-07-24T22:47:00.000-04:00

I've seen nina Totenberg talk about John Roberts twice on television. On TV she's more of a pundit and somewhat less objective than she is on NPR. The first time she was on Nightline with Ted Koppel, all decked out in a white pearl jacket, probably beamed in from some black tie event. And then she was on Meet the Press with Tim Russert this morning. Both times she described Judge Roberts as nice. He will sail through his confirmation hearings, because he is so nice. And he is all-American too, having served as the captain of his highschool football team. I'm sure that President Bush loved that. He may be an egghead, but he's a jock too. That makes it all right.

No one is ever described as kind or generous or, heaven forbid, good. It is always nice, and I hate this quality. Rarely does it seem to be something positive. More often it's an absence of something bad, and in John Roberts' case I fear it. The man is smart. He kept his head down. He's never betrayed his passions, and I am sure that he is charming. He will smooth his way through. The two Joes (Biden and Lieberman) will love him. All this niceness will mean that all the establsihment Democrats will get behind him. Now maybe Roberts is the best we can hope for from a bad situation, but I fear that his being nice will make it easy for the Senators in Washington to make nice, and whenever that happens, it seems that the rest of us get screwed.

To My Blogging Friends

2005-07-20T00:03:00.000-04:00

I haven't forgotten about you. I intend to add a proper blogroll any day now. I'm still figuring out how this whole blog thing works.

Further thoughts on ecstasy--the non-drug version

2005-07-18T20:06:00.000-04:00

In a comment on my post Extraordinary Moments in Ordinary Time, Jo asked me to expand a bit on my mystical experience. My first stab wasn’t as clear as it should have been. So, I hope that I can be a bit more direct. (My apologies for the delay. The haloscan counter wasn’t registering the comment properly, and I didn’t guess that Jo had commented here until she posted a link to my post on her own blog.)

First I’m going to muck around a bit with the order of her questions in the hope that this will allow be to be a bit clearer. First

Why is it different than just reaching a moment of clarity?

I can only say that this particular religious experience wasn’t a moment of clarity. I tend to think of “clarity” as being a concept related to a process of ratiocination, as intimately tied up with thinking. My Chaucer moment wasn’t about thinking at all; it was an ecstatic experience. By ecstatic I do not mean “joyful,” although the experience is one that I treasure. By describing it as a moment of ecstasy I am calling attention to the way that the moment was ec stasis, outside of where I had been set both physically and temporally. In other words it was outside of space and time and so intense that it was beyond rational thought. Second,

Why should a spiritual experience be so sensory?

I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the use of the word “should” here. I don’t want to suggest that a spiritual experience needs to be sensory in order to be authentic. I think that moments of clarity, i.e. moments of clear thinking, are perfectly valid spiritual experiences. In fact, if I were on a diocesan discernment committee, I might find someone with a history of thinking good thoughts over many years more temperamentally suited to the ordained ministry and an altogether healthier person. As I said above my experience was an extra-rational, ecstatic one, but I firmly believe that there are many varieties of religious experience and that there is plenty of room for non-sensory, rational experiences under any decent definition of the term. I’m not even sure that I would describe my experience as sensory. I think it would be truer to say that I was outside of my senses, though not crazy, which point brings me back to Jo’s original follow-up question:

Can you tell us more about what you saw, and what you think about the visual aspect of spiritual experience?

I don’t know that I saw anything. There was no great vision. What struck me was how profoundly unvisual the experience was. I didn’t see anything in particular except, perhaps, some swirls in the dirty window. It wasn’t brought on by the beauty of the built environment. I wasn’t in a great cathedral or in a tiny chapel. I was in a dining hall, and I was staring at the tiniest, least impressive window in the place. I think the most remarkable part of the whole thing was how little it had to do with sensory input. The room wasn’t particularly loud or uncharacteristically quiet that evening. There weren’t any special odors; there was just the greasiness that always hung in the air. This wasn’t brought on by any smells or bells. And indeed, I wish sometimes that it had been, because I value the physical environment—the built, the natural and the human landscaped. I celebrate visual culture, and I want to promote the role of beauty in ours, but that’s not what my moment of fire was about. I felt simply-for an instant-that time had stopped and had no meaning.

So the format did change

2005-07-16T22:34:00.000-04:00

Ah, so I see that the template updated, and I've lost my commenters' comments. I was afraid that that might happen. So I cut and paste them into a note on my computer. Maybe I'll re-enter them manually. And now I learn that haloscan comments do last longer than 4 months. It's just that the count registers them as (0). This is supposed to be idiot-proof, right?

Cut and Paste Blogging

2005-07-16T21:57:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to change the formatting here, but it doesn't show up when I republish. I'd also like to dump haloscan's comments now that blogger allows pop up comments. (I didn't realize that haloscan's comments became inaccessible after 4 months.) I don't really want to hack around with the code. I love languages and might have liked to be a programmer, but this is supposed to be a simple hobby.

Why does it require so much effort to modify these things? It's free ice cream, as Brad DeLong would say, and I shouldn't complain, but this is really a pain. Why can't I do this visually? Here's a bleg. Can anyone explain to me how I re-enable blogger's own comments but keep haloscan's trackback features? I'd really like to get the pop-up option to work. I even created a sample blog without haloscan comments, and it won't let the comments pop up, even though that's what I checked off or ticked, as the English would say. And in the thoroughly American sense, I'm pretty ticked off about that.

U.S. Airmen banned from London

2005-07-12T02:01:00.000-04:00

Their commanders have told them not to go inside the M25. Their civilian relatives are being strongly urged not to go into the city. How absurd. I thought that those comments about British stoicism in the face of terrorism were horribly clichéd, but the hysteria of the American military in England reminds me how much truth there is in that cliché. I do wonder whether the British are all that stoic. Really, I think it's just that we Americans are wimps in comparison.

Extraordinary Moments in Ordinary Time

2005-06-14T13:28:00.000-04:00

Over at her blog Stratego, Jo Guldi writes about a sort-of outer-body experience she had while taking morphine prescribed for a nasty jellyfish sting. And she poses some questions about the appropriate sort of visual culture to respond to these experience, questions that I don't fully understand.

I've never done "drugs," and I'm at least as square as Jo, if not more so. The closest I've ever gotten was reading Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, an extended meditation on his mescalin trip, in which he does spend a lot of time thinking about the contours of a bamboo chair, and for me, I think that's close enough.

Jo asks whether those of us "who never did drugs: whether indeed it was really about respect for one's body and one's elders, as the Nancy Reagan literature preached, or because those people had already accomplished access to a spiritual dimension: if they already paid attention to their dreams, wondered about ghosts, and had experiences in church. And so thought of the spiritual world as accessible to them." I'm not sure that it's really an either-or proposition, at least it's not for me. I've certainly had experiences where the mechanism which filters out the biologically useless seemed to be turned off, and it was my feeling that this profoundly spiritual experience reflected the nature of my brain chemistry. The fact that I was able to feel these things without the aid of drugs meant that it would probably be very bad for me to add anything else to the mix.

What sort of visual culture supports our spiritual experiences? I'm not entirely sure. I believe passionately in the importance of beauty, particularly gardens, but the most profound spiritual experience of my life happened in the Winthrop House dining hall, a submerged basement sort of room. It was a Spring evening, and I was staring up at a tiny, dirty window that was just barely level with the grass of the courtyard above. And for an instant I felt that time had stopped, that the fabric of time had been rent. I felt connected, deeply connected to Chaucer and Shakespeare, and I knew what Pascal meant when he wrote of the God of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac, the God of fire, "not the God of philosophers." It was like a lightning bolt, and that experience of stopped time was the closest I've ever gotten to the eternal. I think that Emily Dickinson must have had similar experiences. How else could she have written poem 800?

Two -- were immortal twice --
The privilege of few --
Eternity -- obtained -- in Time --
Reversed Divinity --

That our ignoble Eyes
The quality conceive
Of Paradise superlative --
Through their Comparative.

My Inaugural Post

2005-05-30T04:37:00.000-04:00

This was supposed to be a non-political post, since this here blogger blog, is supposed to be about stuff I wouldn't post on BOP News, but it won't be. I'm listening to Radio 4's Start the Week. It's a contentious episode. Germaine Greer is on with Christopher Hitchens. Hitch is proving yet again that he's gone off the deep end.

The weird part is that he is as gung-ho on on Iraq as he ever was, but he also made a point of condemning the immorality of Vietnam, particularly the evils of Agent Orange. I can not follow his logic. His brother Peter is at least a consistent reactionary.