Francis D'Eramo's Blog

Happy Birthday, Dear Darwin

2009-02-11T22:54:00.000-08:00

This year marks significant anniversaries of two of the most important events in the history of science. February 12 is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the English naturalist Charles Robert Darwin; November 24 is the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his most famous work, On the Origin of Species, in which he outlines his theory of evolution through natural selection. On the Origin of Species is among the most important works in the history of science, ranking with such works as De Revolutionibus, by Copernicus; the Principia Mathematica, by Isaac Newton; and The Discourse on Method, by René Descartes. Each of these works caused a fundamental and irreversible shift in the way people thought about the world, and the consequences of each are still very much with us.

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is, in a very simplified form, that organisms have a common ancestry; that they change (evolve) over time; and that favorable inherited traits become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms, while unfavorable inherited traits become less common. Natural selection is the process which describes the way that favorable traits are passed on to successive generations, essentially because favorable traits tend to make organism who possess them survive long enough to breed more often than competing organisms with less favorable traits do. It is, to paraphrase Herbert Spencer, survival of those fit enough to survive.

The theory of evolution through natural selection is one of the most basic elements of modern biology, which cannot be taught without reference to evolution through natural selection any more than physics can be taught without mention of gravity. Despite this, it is not accepted by as true by a surprisingly large percentage of Americans. A 2006 study by Michigan State professor John D. Miller showed that about one in every three Americans do not believe in evolution. The study surveyed twenty countries, mostly Western European, but also including Japan, Turkey, and the United States. The percentage of Americans who accept evolutionary theory was lower than all of the surveyed countries except Turkey. The study also showed that, since 1985, the percentage of Americans who accept evolution has declined by 5% (45% to 40%), the percentage who reject it has declined by 9% (48% to 39%), and the percentage who identify themselves as unsure had risen by 14% (7% to 21%).

The relative disrepute of evolutionary theory in the United States is partly caused by the perception by certain religious denominations that it is in conflict with their faith. It is also partly caused by the failure of the scientists in the field that Darwin founded, evolutionary biology, to properly educate the public. This purpose of this article is not primarily to summarize the evidence in favor of evolutionary theory, though the evidence is overwhelming, but rather to clear up some of the misconceptions that have arisen in part because of the lack of public education, and in part because of disinformation spread by its opponents.

First, we will start with one of the hoariest and least informed objections to evolutionary theory, “Why aren't the apes turning into people now?” This is because neither Darwin nor any other evolutionary biologist has ever proposed that human beings descended from modern apes such as chimpanzees, gibbons, or gorillas. What is universally accepted by evolutionary biologists is that humans and modern apes share a common ancestor, and that at some point the two groups diverged into separate lines of descent and went their own ways. While it is true that some proto humans looked more like modern chimpanzees than modern humans, these proto humans were not the same as modern chimpanzees.

Next, “Evolution is only a theory.” This is, in a sense, true, but it is also usually meant in a misleading way. Every dictionary gives several meanings for the word “theory.” One meaning is the way it is used in the ordinary conversational sense: a theory is a conjecture or a guess. In science, however, a theory is a set of principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena. Examples of scientific theories include the heliocentric theory of Copernicus (that the earth orbits the sun, and not vice-versa), and the germ theory of disease (that infectious diseases are caused by the activity of microorganisms within the body). No scientist, and hardly any minimally educated person, doubts either either the heliocentric theory or the germ theory, or believes that they will soon be overthrown by competing theories. Evolution by natural selection, as a scientific theory, has a level of plausibilitycomparable to that of the heliocentric theory or the germ theory. In fact, although there are disputes among evolutionary biologists as to the mechanism by which changes in organisms occur, there is no scientific theory which competes with the theory of evolution through natural selection. The so-called “intelligent design theory,” which received a great deal of press a few years ago, has repeatedly been demonstrated to have none of the characteristics of a scientific theory. A good summation of this can be found in the opinion of the court in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover, which can be found here: http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf.

Opponents of evolutionary theory will often point out that “Darwin was wrong.” This is partly true, but largely irrelevant. This also stems from a lack of understanding as to the nature and magnitude of Darwin's accomplishment. Darwin did not, for example, originate the idea that organisms evolve; his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin had speculated about it, and nine years before Darwin's birth Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had published an extensive, although ultimately incorrect, account of his own views about the mechanism by which evolution worked. Darwin's idea of what caused changes in organisms, natural variation and inheritance of acquried characteristics, is now accepted by almost no one. But his failure to work out that evolution is caused by mutation in the genetic material of organisms is easily explainable by the fact that the science of genetics had yet to be invented in his lifetime. What Darwin got spectacularly right was the idea that the evolution of organisms occurs by means of natural selection. The philosopher Daniel Dennett calls this, “The best idea anyone has ever had.” Even in this insight Darwin was not alone. Darwin's Origin of Species was presented to the British Royal Society simultaneously with a short essay by Alfred Russell Wallace in which Wallace arrives at a very similar theory. But Darwin's fame outshines that of the admirable Wallace because the mountain of evidence Darwin had accumulated in the twenty years that he worked on the Origin of Species was persuasive in a way that Wallace's intuitions could never have been.

It is worth noting that other originators of still-accepted scientific theories got parts of them wrong. Copernicus, for example, was right about the planets orbiting the sun, but also believed that the planets had circular orbits. As this didn't fit the observable data, Copernicus posited that the planets moved in circular epicycles, the centers of which moved in circular orbits around the sun. He was wrong. Eventually this was sorted out by Johannes Kepler, who showed that the planets had elliptical orbits. But this does not diminish the accomplishment of Copernicus. Any scientific theory is subject to revision by later scientists in light of the accumulation of new data.

“Evolution is atheistic.” Evolution is an explanation of a natural process. It does not employ God as a component of its explanatory process, but neither does, for example, an explanation of how an internal combustion engine works. Although the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins claims that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, this was clearly not one of Darwin's goals. Darwin was a baptized Anglican and trained for a while to become a minister. He delayed publication of The Origin of Species for years out of concern for the sensibilities of his devout wife. He denied that he was an atheist. Later in life he was clearly a religious skeptic, although his writings suggest that this might have been more as a result of the deaths of two of his children in childhood rather than his scientific work.

The theory of evolution does pose problems for those who believe in the literal truth of scripturally-based creation accounts, be they Christians, Jews, or Muslims. A Gallup poll in May of 2007 reported that 31% of Americans believe in the literal truth of the Bible. However, a great many religious denominations have no problem accepting evolution, although they usually interpret it as a process guided by God. The Roman Catholic church has accepted evolutionary theory at least as far back as the Papal encyclical Humani Generis, published by Pius XII in 1950, and endorsed in 1996 by John Paul II in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The Orthodox Rabbinical Counsel of America has stated that evolution is not incompatible with the belief in a divine creator. Many Protestant denominations hold that evolutionary theory is compatible with their theology. It is also worth noting that the theory of evolution by natural selection propounded by Darwin had nothing to say about the origins of life, merely its development. Thus, acceptance of evolutionary theory in no way requires a particular belief about the existence of a diety.

One of the biggest barriers to understanding what evolution by natural selection really means is to envision it as a guided process. It is not by its own terms, although it does not preclude someone from believing that it is guided by something divine. It is simply an explanation of something that happens naturally. Think of erosion. Erosion can wear away rocks or take down mountains, but no one describes erosion as having a purpose. It is simply what happens. Natural selection is the same way. Species are not perfected by it; either they survive long enough to propagate and maintain a breeding population, or they become extinct. Changes in the environment, such as climate changes, alter what traits are favorable in an organism and what traits are not. And it's happening right now, before our eyes. A New York Times weblog, Wild Side, by Olivia Judson, has recently given two examples. One is that an insect called an apple maggot appears to be splitting into two species because there are two groups that find two different types of fruit to be congenial habitats. Another is the marsupial mammal called the Tasmanian Devil. It has become subject to an infectious and fatal form of facial cancer. As a result, female Tasmanian Devils are now reaching sexual maturity almost twice as fast as they used to, because females who do so propagate more often than females who don't.

For anyone wishing to know more about Darwin and his theories, I recommend “Darwin's Legacy,” a ten-part lecture series posted by Stanford University which can be downloaded from iTunes U. Also, The Origin of Species itself remains perfectly readable for the general reader. PBS has an excellent series entitled “Evolution,” which is available on DVD. The BBC recently aired two specials, “The Genius of Charles Darwin,” hosted by Richard Dawkins, and “Darwin and the Tree of Life,” hosted by Sir David Attenborough, that will likely be aired on US television in the near future. In the meantime, on February 12, feel free to hoist a glass of your favorite beverage in honor of Charles Robert Darwin for his revolutionary theories, and to your own ancestors in honor of their passing the rigorous test of natural selection.

2008-05-18T04:55:00.000-07:00

A Review of My Boy Jack

On April 20th, WTJX aired My Boy Jack, a film in the PBS Masterpiece series. The film is a fictionalized account of events in the life of the British author Rudyard Kipling starting at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Kipling, who received the 1907 Nobel Prize in literature, was a major force in British letters. By 1914 he had already written most of the works for which he is best known, the novels Kim and Captains Courageous, the story collections The Jungle Book and Just So Stories, the novelette The Man Who Would be King, and poems such as Gunga Din and The Ballad of East and West.

Kipling spent much of his early life in India, at the time called the Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire. Kipling's writings are permeated by the theme of Empire. In a 1942 essay George Orwell called him “The Prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase.” In a poem of the same name, Kipling embodied the notion, much in vogue in the 19th century, of the civilizing mission of the Western countries in the phrase “The White Man's Burden.” Ironically, the poem was written not about the British Empire, but about the conquest of the Phillipines by the United States.

The film opens with Kipling in a jingoistic near frenzy in support of a declaration of war by Britain against Germany. War indeed is ultimately declared. The film shows efforts by Jack Kipling to enlist in various branches of the service, all of which are unsuccessful because of his severe myopia. Jack's mother and sister seemed quietly relieved by this but Jack, with his father's support, persists. Ultimately Kipling's influence secures Jack a commission in the Irish Guard, and, at the age of eighteen, he ships off to the Western Front. Three weeks later, in September of 1915, he is reported missing and presumed wounded during the Loos-Artois Offensive. The film then shows the Kipling family's efforts to maintain a sense of hope about Jack, yielding gradually to the realization that he is dead, and the effect his death has on each of them. In real life, Jack Kipling was declared dead two years after he was reported missing. His gravesite is still not known with certainty. In Epitaphs of the War 1914-1918, Kipling later wrote lines which many interpret as an expression of his guilt in procuring Jack's military commission:

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Kipling's work demonstrates that he was a thoroughgoing imperialist. However, he was a complex writer, and his work also demonstrates a grasp of the paradoxes and moral ambiguities of imperialism. It also displays a genuine respect for the peoples whom the Brits warred with and conquered. In the poem Gunga Din, for example, line after line of racist slurs culminates with the narrator's admission that, “You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” Similarly, The Ballad of East and West shows an understanding of that which transcends ethnic origin:

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

In 1916 Kipling published the elegiac poem Have You News of My Boy Jack? The poem uses the metaphors of wind and tide, and is full of the gentle sadness of a father looking back on the death of his son. One line, however, is discordant:

Except he didn't shame his kind

It is the old imperialism lifting its head for a moment, like a weary lion. But Kipling, beneath the weight of grief, cannot sustain the moment, just as the empire he loved could not sustain itself in the new century. The sadness of the poem is not lifted, it ends with no sense of redemption.

Orwell, as he did with so many others, got Kipling right. He wrote, “During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.”

My Boy Jack is available on DVD and will undoubtedly be aired again by PBS in the not-to-distant future. I recommend it highly.

A Review of the Pistarckle Theater Production of Equus

2006-11-29T06:47:00.000-08:00

I saw an advertisement for the play Equus, which was being staged by the Pistarckle Theater, an amateur theater troupe in St. Thomas. My birthday fell on the same day as one of the performances, so I got the idea of flying over to see it as a birthday present to myself. I flew to St. Thomas on Saturday morning, had sushi at Beni Iguana's, and checked into Frenchman's Reef. I did nothing but go to the hotel gym and laze around for the afternoon. Part of the time I was listening to my iPod with noise-canceling ear buds. Around 5 PM I took them out and noticed that the air conditioning unit in my room was making a noise that sounded like a medium sized lawnmower was running right next to the bed. I reported it to the hotel desk, showered, and left the room. Downstairs I sat on the patio bar and had a snifter of Cruzan Rum Estate Diamond, which cost exactly as much as an entire bottle of Cruzan Rum Estate Diamond does at the Sunny Isles K Mart.

I then got a cab to Tillett Gardens, home of the Pistarckle Theater ("Pistarckle" in Dutch Creole means noise or confusion. The word is thought to have derived from “spektakel,” a Dutch word of the same meaning, which obviously shares root with the English “spectacle”). The drive took about half an hour. It was a cute little amateur theater, with just a few seats all very close to the stage. In keeping with its amateur nature it offered the playgoers such delicacies as Snickers Bars and a very fine selection of white or red Sutter Home wines in bottles the size that you get on airplanes, with twist off caps. However, I arrived to bad news. The young man who played one of the two main characters was ill. I was advised that he was vomiting violently backstage. Theater personnel were emphasizing the vomiting, probably to discourage any of the patrons from making a fuss. I was advised to wait and see what would happen. About fifteen minutes after the play was scheduled to start, they announced that the show would go on! They took my ticket money and out of the lobby and into theater we filed. Shortly thereafter the stage manager announced that the show would not be going on. I told them to keep my ticket money as a donation and went back to the hotel.

When I got back the lawnmower was still running in my room. I called the desk and was told that maintenance had checked it out, and that they needed to replace it, but didn't do so because they didn't want to be in the room when I got back and disturb me. I pointed out that sleeping next to a lawnmower was disturbing. The desk clerk asked if I wanted the air conditioner changed that night or the next morning (when I was checking out). I said that I wanted a new room. She considered the thought for a moment, as though it was new to her, and agreed. I changed rooms.

Feeling hungry, I went to one of the hotel restaurants. A couple came in and sat next to me, at a table on my left. The tables were very close together. I gathered from their conversation that they were recently married. It seemed to me that the man was making every effort to be nice. Suddenly the wife said, "Did you hear yourself? We're having a conversation and what you just said to me had nothing to do with what I said to you. You weren't responding to me!" The husband apologized and asked her to repeat what she'd said so he could respond appropriately. She said, "No, we're done. It's just that I have to teach you to communicate." I was hoping she'd go to the ladies' room so I could advise the husband to leave immediately, check into another hotel, and fly to Paraguay the next morning.

Another couple sat at a table on my right. They seemed nice, and got particularly amused when the waitress brought them a plate of nachos that appeared to have a minimum of five pounds of cheese melted over it. They offered me some, but I thanked them and declined, fearing for my arteries.

Suddenly there was a burst of activity in front of me. An older couple had been sitting there. When I looked, the wife was on all fours on the floor, running her hands over it. I waiter appeared to be assisting her. Contact lens? No, they were both wearing glasses. From the woman's wailing I deduced that she'd lost a stone on an $800 bracelet that she'd bought that very afternoon. Other restaurant personnel began to assist, as did the woman of the couple with the nachos. The bereaved woman called loudly for a broom and began sweeping around the tables, including mine, occasionally eying me suspiciously as though I'd secreted the stone among my conch fritters. A woman at yet a fourth table somehow obtained the home number of the manager of the store where the $800 bracelet had been purchased, and the husband of the purchasing couple called it on his cell phone, around ten P.M. I gathered from the husband's rather loud portion of the conversation that the manager wasn't too happy to receive the call.
And then, success! A diligent waiter finally located the stone. The woman with the $800 bracelet was happy. The woman on my right returned to her calcifying nachos. The man on my left continued to say nice things to his wife, and she continued to say things to him that made me think Paraguay probably wasn't far enough away.

As I left the restaurant, I considered the possibility that Fate had arranged this improvisational dinner theater to compensate me for the canceled performance.

Reeves, Van Dyke Win Lifetime Achievement Awards

2006-07-07T07:30:00.000-07:00

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that it will present special lifetime achievement awards to American actors Dick Van Dyke and Keanu Reeves in the category of “Worst British Accents in Motion Picture History.” Van Dyke is being honored for his work as Bert, the beloved chimney sweep in Walt Disney’s 1964 classic Mary Poppins, and Reeves for his role as Jonathan Harker in the 1992 production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “Never have two actors made such an unholy hash of the same accent,” said the Academy’s press release announcing the awards. “It was almost enough to make the British forget that we Americans pulled their chestnuts out of the fire in two World Wars.”

Critics believe that the greater achievement is that of Reeves. “We must consider that Van Dyke appeared an immortal family film that is constantly being rediscovered by new generations,” said one knowledgeable observer, “While Reeves won because he appeared in a stink bomb that dropped mercifully out of sight almost immediately after its release. Reeves’ efforts at a British accent must have been particularly inept to make such a lingering impression in the minds of the members of the Academy.” Another critic commented on what might be called Reeves’ monumental acting style. “Talk about wooden,” he said. “If Reeves went into the woods and enacted the death scene from Hamlet, birds would make a nest on his head. The role Reeves was born to play is that of Pinocchio, though I doubt he has the depth to handle the transition to Real Boy.”

The Academy also made mention of others deserving honorable mention in the area of Bad Foreign Accents. Among them were:

Gary Oldman as the Count in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “We don’t know what a sixteenth century Wallachian Count would sound like after centuries of being Undead,” said the Academy, “but if he sounded like Oldman, he must have undied from embarrassment. The worst attempt at an Eastern European accent since Boris Badenov.”

Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee in Gettysburg. “If Lee really sounded like that, no wonder they called it ‘The Lost Cause.’”

Keanu Reeves’ attempt at a Southern accent in The Devil’s Advocate. “It’s really bad, but mercifully he seems to forget to use it about half of the time."

The Academy is expected to announce further lifetime achievement awards in a similar vein, such as “Worst Performance by a White Man Playing an Asian” (Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan, Boris Karloff as Fu Manchu), and “Worst Transgender Performance” (Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, and Pal, the male dog who played the heroic collie Lassie).

From the 4.19.04 Virgin Islands Daily News

2006-07-05T08:26:00.000-07:00

This week Attorney General John Ashcroft appeared before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States and revealed, to an astonished America, that the 9/11 attacks were the fault of (gasp!) Bill Clinton.

In doing so, Ashcroft was adhering to the most sacred organizing principle of the Bush Administration, which can best be phrased as, "The Buck Stops Back There." Blaming Bill Clinton has supplanted baseball as the national pastime among certain groups of conservative politicians. There is no end to it. One Republican legislator actually made a public statement suggesting that the Enron scandal occurred as a result of the failure of moral leadership from the White House. This prompted The New Republic to comment on the ludicrousness of the notion that a major corporation was looted by its management because Bill Clinton was the recipient of extra-marital fellatio.

Clinton has not actually been blamed for Original Sin or the attack on Pearl Harbor, but Republican strategists are reportedly working to develop plausible scenarios. Ashcroft seems to be banking on the notion that the public will believe that a man who had an affair and lied about it must necessarily be responsible for the overall decline of Western Civilization. Perhaps he is unaware of the adage that holds that you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

Listening to Ashcroft, I was struck by the confluence of circumstances that allowed him to become attorney general of the United States. Many do not remember that he was only available for the job because he lost a Missouri senatorial election to Mel Carnahan, who had actually died in a plane crash two weeks before the election. The voters of Missouri are to be congratulated on their discernment.

It is also worth recalling some of the major accomplishments of Ashcroft's tenure as attorney general. He has presided over his department's bumbling prosecution of Zaccarias Moussaoui, whom they seem unable to handle even though a great part of the time he is not represented by a lawyer. There was his announcement of the arrest of "Dirty Bomber" Jose Padilla, despite Padilla's conspicuous lack of the technology or materials to build a dirty bomb. There is the subsequent detention of Padilla, a U. S. citizen arrested on U.S. soil, for over a year without being charged or having access to counsel. There was the successful prosecution of a "terror cell" in the Pacific Northwest, whose members tried to go to fight in Afghanistan, but were unable to actually find Afghanistan. I suggest that a better alternative to prosecution would have been to take them to Afghanistan and leave them there.

For my part, I think that some of the criticism that conservatives have leveled against Bill Clinton are a little unfair. Yes, he had the personal morality of a feral cat, but he tried hard to be a good President, presided over an era of peace and prosperity. Also, in his eight years as President, he never actually led us to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

And Ashcroft's efforts to deflect the mounting criticism of the Bush Administration onto Bill Clinton make me wonder if perhaps we wouldn't be better off with someone else holding the office of Attorney General. I wonder if Mel Carnahan is available?

The Gay Marriage Amendment

2006-06-07T19:06:00.000-07:00

The United States is faced with many challenges. It is embroiled in a difficult and expensive occupation of Iraq, which it invaded as a result of intelligence now known to be mistaken. World opinion ranks it only above rogue states like Iran, North Korea, and the Sudan. Gasoline prices are soaring, as is the Federal deficit. Its citizens struggle to balance concerns about possible terrorist attacks against concerns about diminishing civil liberties. This is a serious time with serious problems that require attention and vision to solve.

Thus it is no surprise that several Republican Senators and the Bush Administration have chosen to put their efforts into backing an amendment to the United States Constitution banning gay marriage.

The concept of legally recognized gay marriage seemed to be making progress several years ago with a decision in its favor in the New Hampshire Supreme Court and the issuance of marriage licenses to gay couples in San Francisco. However, the progress was largely an illusion. According to the New York Times, one state issues marriage licenses to gays, two others recognize civil unions, and three others have laws providing that gays can enjoy the rights generally granted by law to domestic partners. In contrast forty six states, including those who recognize civil unions, ban gay marriages by statute or by a provision in their state constitution. Two other states have no laws that touch upon the issue either way. Even the most paranoid opponent of gay marriages would have to admit that his side is winning the debate.

One might therefore ask why we need a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The answer, of course, is that the American people don’t, but that politicians who want to shamelessly pander to social conservatives do. This is particularly true since such an amendment has no realistic chance of being ratified. In Congress on Wednesday, a majority of Senators voted against limiting debate on the proposed amendment, thus effectively killing it for the year.

The choice of a Constitutional amendment to advance a ban on gay marriage is particularly cynical. The United States Constitution is one of the oldest and most successful plans of government used in the world today. It has only been amended twenty seven times since it was ratified in 1789. Ten of those amendments, the Bill of Rights, were all ratified in 1791. Three were ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War. The amendments generally expand, rather than reduce, individual rights. Very few amendments can be considered to be efforts at social engineering. Those that could include the amendments outlawing slavery, prohibiting the abridgment of voting rights because of race, granting women the right to vote, and lowering the voting age to eighteen. Only one amendment as patently silly as the proposed ban on gay marriage was ever ratified: the 18th Amendment instituting Prohibition in the United States. It was repealed fourteen years later, after having little lasting effect other than fueling the growth of organized crime by providing it with the perfect illicit product upon which to grow wealthy.

When it comes to proposing Constitutional amendments of little or no practical value other than for the purpose of pandering, the Republican Party seems to have taken the lead. The gay marriage amendment was sponsored by Republicans. Republicans have proposed amendments to facilitate prayer in public schools, amendments to ban flag burning, and amendments to make English the official language of the United States. Most of these proposed amendments have been targeted to win the support of social conservatives. Though I am not a social conservative, my assumption is that their average level of intelligence is exactly equal to that of the population as a whole. Therefore I must assume that many of them share my view of the basic frivolity of these proposals. Even those who don’t share my view have probably noticed that such proposals are never pushed hard enough to actually get anywhere, and are only trotted out when, for example, an administration is facing record lows in its approval ratings and can no longer improve them simply by yelling “Terrorism!” at the top of its lungs.

In a statement to the press on June 5, President Bush said, “This week, the Senate begins debate on the Marriage Protection Amendment, and I call on the Congress to pass this amendment, send it to the states for ratification so we can take this issue out of the hands of over-reaching judges and put it back where it belongs -- in the hands of the American people.” It would have been more accurate if he said that the proposed amendment puts the issue back into the hands of cynical and opportunistic politicians who have insufficient respect for the Constitution.

Free the Mouse!

2006-05-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

This article appeared in the Virgin Islands Daily News in November of 2002.

In 1998, a cartoon mouse and a Republican congressman made history of sorts.

The mouse, Mickey, had been created by Walt Disney in 1928 and was under a copyright that was about to expire, and the heirs of Walt Disney were nervous.

Sonny Bono, the congressman from California, was serving his last term in the House of Representatives. Bono, formerly part of a pop duet with his first wife Cher, entered the House in 1995 and quickly claimed the place at the intellectual vanguard of the Republican Party previously held by former Iowa Congressman Fred Grandy, who, prior to entering Congress played the role of "Gopher" on the television series Love Boat.

The combination of an animated rodent and a congressman who had regularly appeared in public in sequined jumpsuits, resulted in landmark legislation. The heirs of Walt Disney turned to Bono for help with the expiring copyright on the mouse, and he (Bono, not the mouse) introduced a bill that ultimately became the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which extended the duration of new copyrights and retroactively increased the duration of existing copyrights, by 20 years. It was perhaps Bono's greatest feat since his vocals on "I Got You, Babe."

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, the Copy-right Clause, permits Congress, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." The first copyright statute provided for a term of 14 years. Since then, Congress has repeatedly passed legislation extending copyrights, 11 times in the last 40 years. The Sonny Bono Act extended copyright terms to, in some cases, as much as 95 to 120 years.

But all of this has not gone unchallenged. Several individuals, with the support of public interest groups, brought suit against then-Attorney General Janet Reno to ask the court to block enforcement of the Sonny Bono Act. The plaintiffs included Eric Eldred, who maintains a library of free public domain electronic books on his website; Dover Books, a publisher of inexpensive paperbacks which was forced to cancel editions of works by Kahlil Gibran and Edna St. Vincent Millay because the Sonny Bono Act prevented the works from entering the public domain; a non-profit group dedicated to the preservation of films in the public domain; a company that publishes works on the history of golf; a sheet music publisher; and the choir director of an Episcopal church.

The plaintiffs have adopted the battle cry, "Free the Mouse!" which appears on pins and bumper stickers available from their website.

Although the plaintiffs lost in both the trial court and the Court of Appeals, the United States Supreme Court, surprisingly, agreed to hear their appeal. The case, now called Eldred v. Ashcroft, was argued on Oct. 9. The plaintiffs made essentially two arguments: first, that granting extended copyrights to existing works is not within the authority given to Congress by the Copyright Clause because it does not "promote the progress of science and useful arts" by encouraging the creation of new works and, second, that Congress' repeated extensions of copyrights violate the "limited times" requirement of The Copyright Clause.

The plaintiffs further argued that the public has a First Amendment interest in the passage of works into the public domain. The government argued that an extension of copyright for all works is more equitable than extending copyrights for only new works and that it encourages the owners of extended copyrights to invest in the restoration and dissemination of the works over which they hold copyrights. The government further argued that the public has no First Amendment interest in seeing works enter the public domain.

At the oral argument, many of the judges expressed the view that the Sonny Bono Act was simply a bad law. "It is hard to understand how, if the overall purpose of the Copyright Clause is to encourage creative work, how some retroactive extension could possibly do that," said Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. "One wonders what was in the minds of the Congress." But they also expressed skepticism about their ability to do anything about it. The Supreme Court may strike down congressional legislation in only a very limited number of circumstances, most often because the legislation offends some portion of the Constitution.

The Supreme Court cannot hold the Sonny Bono Act unconstitutional simply because it is an ill-conceived piece of pure special interest legislation passed without concern for its wider consequences. If it could, there wouldn't be much legislation left. Preservation of the Mickey Mouse copyright is by no means the most trivial exercise in which Congress has ever engaged, but by way of perspective, specific constitutional grants of power have been used by Congress to do such things as end slavery, annex Alaska, declare war on Nazi Germany, and create The New Deal.

Sonny Bono has passed on, dying in a fatal 1998 skiing accident, but his legislative legacy remains. The decision of the Supreme Court is expected in the next few months. Until then Mickey, still in copyright bondage, wipes away a tear as he greets visitors at Disney World, dressed in his signature bow tie, waiting for the court or, perhaps, a Million Mouse March to free him.

(Unfortunately, the Supreme Court held against the Plaintiffs and upheld the Bono Act. Cher offered no comment)

Tucker Carlson

2006-05-27T19:18:00.000-07:00

This letter appeared in the Virgin Islands Daily News:

I recently purchased and read the book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, by avowedly liberal humorist Al Franken. One anecdote related in the book is about Franken’s telephone conference with Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson after the memorial service for Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, who died in a plane crash in 2002. Franken attended the service. Though Franken relates that most of the speakers at the service made appropriate and tasteful speeches, one speaker made remarks that some in attendance considered overly partisan, and that the Conservative press subsequently reported as the functional equivalent of the composition of the “Horst Wessel Song,” a Nazi anthem celebrating the glorious death of a brown shirt in a street brawl.

According to Franken, the day after the service, he heard Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson report on CNN’s “Crossfire” that Republicans who had tried to eulogize Wellstone had been shouted down by the crowd. Franken then called Carlson, who had not attended the service, and informed him that this was false. According to Franken, Carlson acknowledged that it might have been incorrect, but said that he had not deliberately lied, because, “If you lie, you can get caught.” Franken concluded that Carlson had not only not attended the service, but had not even seen a videotape of the service before making his report.

Initially I regarded this story with a grain of salt, since I had only been exposed to Franken’s version. However, on Monday night I had the opportunity to watch Franken and Carlson discuss this very situation on CNBC. It was truly remarkable.

Carlson admitted that he had made an error when he reported that would-be Republican speakers had been shouted down, and professed that he “could not remember” what led him to report this. Carlson said that he thought he had done the “honorable” thing by admitting his error to Franken, though he was not sufficiently honorable to make an on-air retraction of the story. Instead, he admitted that he had subsequently gone on television again to express his disgust at the speakers at the Wellstone memorial service, despite not having attended the service and despite having already demonstrated that he had no more personal knowledge about the Wellstone memorial service than he did about the coronation of Ramses II as Pharaoh of Egypt in 1304 B.C. Carlson then suggested that Franken was somehow acting unreasonably because Franken kept calling Carlson to task for his false reporting of the nonexistent heckling of imaginary Republican speakers.

By his own admission, Carlson, a journalist of national repute, reported something that did not occur. His explanation for this was, amazingly enough, that he could not recall why he reported false information. This is an explanation which ought to make a person wonder about the credibility of Carlson as a journalist. Though I am not a professional journalist, my understanding is that the ethical principals governing journalists do not as a rule encourage them to report imaginary events as though they were true.

There is a principal of logic called Occam’s Razor, which stands for the proposition that the simplest explanation for an event is usually the best one. Though Carlson claims not to remember why he might have reported something which, by his own later admission, did not happen, perhaps we can assist him. Let us consider some of the reasons why he may have done so, then let us apply the Razor.

Some explanations for why Carlson reported an event which did not occur

1. Carlson may have had an LSD flashback;
2. Carlson may have had false memories implanted in him while a prisoner of space aliens;
3. Carlson may have been brainwashed by the North Koreans, as happened in the movie “The Manchurian Candidate”;
4. Carlson may have had transitory psychotic experience; or
5. Carlson may have simply been lying.

Applying the Razor, I suggest that choice 5 looks pretty good.

Whatever the reason, it is clear that there is no need for anyone to trust Carlson’s reporting ever again, since he is either insincere or prone to fantasy. I suggest, however, that a fine career awaits him as a writer for “The National Enquirer,” available now on your supermarket newsstand. And yes, Tucker, when you lie, sometimes people do catch you.

Speech and Offense

2006-05-24T20:26:00.001-07:00

This appeared in the Virgin Islands Daily News and the St. Croix Avis:

This week an Iranian newspaper was shut down by the government because the paper published a cartoon which mocked Iran’s Azeri minority, leading to riots in several cities. In India last week, Muslim clerics pledged to aid Christian groups by demonstrating to force the government to ban The Da Vinci Code. From February to May of this year, at least 962 people were killed or injured during riots sparked by the publication of cartoons in a Danish newspaper with satirical images of the prophet Muhammad.

It couldn’t happen in America, where the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees freedom of speech. Yet something similar did happen in April; a Federal Circuit Court recognized the legitimacy of the rationale behind the Azeri riots in Iran, the efforts in India to ban a motion picture, and the violent protests over the Danish cartoons.

The case is Harper v. Poway, handed down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on April 20th. The Ninth Circuit hears appeals from Federal District Courts in several western states, including California. The issue in Harper was this: may a public high school prohibit students from wearing T-shirts with messages that condemn and denigrate other students on the basis of their sexual orientation? The court held that it could, but their logic presents major problems for free speech advocates.

The facts were as follows: in 2003 Poway High School permitted a student group, the Gay-Straight Alliance, to hold a Day of Silence intended to advocate tolerance of others, particularly those of a different sexual orientation. In that year incidents and altercations occurred on campus as a result of anti-homosexual comments made by various students. A week later a group of heterosexual students informally organized a Straight Pride Day, during which they wore t-shirts displaying derogatory comments about homosexuals. In 2004, the school permitted a second Day of Silence to be observed. A student named Tyler Harper, wore a t-shirt to school on that day on which the words “I will not accept what God has condemned” were handwritten on the front, and the words “Homosexuality is Shameful, Romans 1:27” were handwritten on the back. The following day he wore the same shirt with a slightly modified message.

The administration asked Harper to remove the shirt. He refused, and had to remain in the front office for the rest of the day. He was not suspended and no disciplinary record was placed in his file. There was no evidence of violence resulting from Harper’s shirt. Harper filed suit in the Federal District Court in California alleging infringement of various Constitutional rights, and asked for an injunction. The District Court dismissed some of his claims, and preserved others, and denied his request for an injunction. Harper filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit.

The Ninth Circuit affirmed the District Court’s denial of the injunction. While the facts of the case are simple, the substantive and procedural issues were relatively complex; this gave the Ninth Circuit several options for its decision. The Ninth Circuit could have affirmed on purely procedural grounds, but instead ruled in a way that should disturb any informed advocate of democracy and free speech.

The Circuit Court held that Harper’s right to free speech could be limited because the content of his speech collided with the right of other students to be free from injury by “verbal assaults on the basis of a core of identifying characteristics such as race, religion, or sexual orientation.” The Court held that this “right” could be violated even if the speaker of the alleged verbal assaults “does not directly accost individual students with his remarks.” The Court further stated that:

Speech that attacks high school students who are members of minority groups that have historically been oppressed, subject to verbal and physical abuse, and made to feel inferior, serves to injure and intimidate them, as well as to damage their sense of security and interfere with their opportunity to learn.

The “right” identified by the Ninth Circuit is not found in the Constitution; in fact, it is antithetical to the First Amendment. It is in fact the same right claimed by the Azeris in Iran, the Indians trying to ban The Da Vinci Code, and the Muslims rioting because of Danish cartoons. That “right” is the Right Not To Be Offended.

The Ninth Circuit held that Harper’s right to express himself was trumped by the “right” of gay students to be shielded from offensive remarks. This “right” directly conflicts with the First Amendment. I don’t agree with Harper or his t-shirt. But freedom of speech is worth letting people like Harper wear t-shirts that say foolish things to school.

In fact, offending people is not only a right in a democratic society, but an obligation. The British were offended by the Declaration of Independence. Slave owners were offended by the Emancipation Proclamation. Polite society was offended by the Suffragettes. Segregationists were offended when Eisenhower sent troops to integrate Central High School in Little Rock. Jewish residents of Skokie, Illinois, were offended when Jewish lawyers from the ACLU defended the right of American Nazis to march through their suburb. But the ACLU lawyers recognized that free speech is important enough so that it has to be defended even when the speakers’ messages are odious. There has never been a time or place when human liberty was advanced without offending someone.

Voltaire urged people to, “Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.” This is the mantra of a free society. The Ninth Circuit failed to heed it, and we can only continue to do so at our peril.

Review of "Cape of Arrows" by Patricia Gill

2006-05-21T17:20:00.000-07:00

Budding writers are often advised to “write about what you know.” Patricia Gill’s new novel Cape of Arrows demonstrates that this is eminently sound advice for an author with a comprehensive knowledge in a variety of interesting areas. Ms. Gill is a writer, sociologist, educator, and long-time resident of St. Croix, who earned a Ph. D. in the Philosophy of Education form the University of Connecticut and a Masters Degree in the Sociology of Education from Harvard University. Her novel skillfully combines her insights into matters as diverse as the role of women in academia, the history of St. Croix, and Taino archaeology.

The novel is about the adventures of Ruth Dyer, a teaching assistant accompanying a renowned archaeologist on an expedition to St Croix, U. S. Virgin Islands. The dig is at the Cape of Arrows, now called Salt River, site of an ancient Taino settlement and of an encounter between Christopher Columbus and its inhabitants. But not all of the skeletons found by the expedition are of ancient vintage, and not all of the people of St. Croix welcome the expedition with open arms.

The novel has many of the elements of a mystery, but ultimately transcends the genre. Ms. Gill deals with serious issues of race and genre in a variety of ways: as they effect our perceptions of ancient peoples, as they influence the relationship of residents of the U. S. territories with the mainland, and as they affect the life of a woman in academia. Ms. Gill pulls off the amazing feat of making these issues real and immediate to the reader; this cannot be done unless the writer is genuinely passionate about the issues herself.

Ms. Gill is uniquely suited to addressing these concerns. She is a pioneer among women in academia, having taught sociology at Vassar College, Latin American and Caribbean History and Spanish at the University of Connecticut and the University of the Virgin Islands, and Educational Problems of Developing Areas at Fairfield University Graduate School of Education. She has written scholar works about Taino archaeology. Her love of St. Croix is evident in her writing, and still more evident to those who have had the chance to speak with her. Ms. Gill is also skilled in fictional narrative. She came to the Virgin Islands from Hollywood, where she had been working as a historical researcher and script writer for Wayne-Fellows, Inc. Her literary credits include a play, "Murder in the Embassy", which won an award in the Canadian Drama Festival, "Sabotaje en la Selva", the first full-length feature film produced in color in Latin America, and "The Liberators", a historical account of the Wars of Independence in Latin America, written for John Wayne. A historical novel, Buddhoe, based on the events leading up to emancipation of the “unfree” in the Danish West Indies in 1848, was originally published in 1977 and is now in its third edition.

Cape of Arrows is ultimately a Bildungsroman about Ruth Dyer, who progresses from a comfortable place in academia and a comfortable relationship with her fiancée to a world which is less secure, but which offers a wider variety of choices. The novel is spiced with interesting characters, and those familiar with St. Croix will enjoy speculating about the real-life island residents, living and dead, who inspired them. The novel presents a much more accurate and engaging picture of life on St. Croix than anything else I have ever read, and should supplant such old saws as Herman Wouk’s Don’t Stop the Carnival as required reading for those new to the Territory. It is a work both serious and entertaining, and I recommend it highly.

The Pervasive Influence of Judaism

2006-04-25T07:33:00.000-07:00

I'm sometimes amazed at how pervasive Judaism is in our culture. For example, my oldest daughter told me that she had learned to cantor at Pony Club. I said, "That's nice, but weren't you supposed to be riding horses?"

Faculty Doctrinal Competency Test

2006-04-09T13:41:00.000-07:00

I was once asked to review the contracts that a Catholic school had asked their teachers to sign. According to the contracts, practically the only grounds for disciplining teachers was failure to conform to Catholic doctrine in their teachings. So I made the following Doctrinal Competency Test:

FACULTY DOCTRINAL COMPETENCY TEST

1. In the boxes to the right of each name, indicate his status in the eyes of the Church by printing "G" (Good Guy) or "B" (Bad Guy):

Name

Athanasius _____

Arius _____

Diocletian _____

Galerius _____

Nestorius _____

Cyril _____

2. Giordano Bruno was:

a. A Dominican Friar
b. A Heretic
c. An early Copernican
d. Toast
e. All of the above

3. The Greek word parthenos can be translated as:

a. Young girl
b. Virgin or young girl
c. Virgin, and only virgin, and you’d better believe it if you want to go to heaven.

4. Who won the Filioque controversy? (Check one) Them ______ Us _______

5. When the Pope speaks ex cathedra, he is:

A. Defining a doctrine regarding faith or morals
B. Infallible
C. Prohibited from revealing the final scores of sporting events that have not been completed.
D. a and b
E. b and c
F. All of the above.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Holy Crap

2006-04-08T18:44:00.000-07:00

This is a piece I read at an open microphone event tonight.

This is the first time I've tried anything quite like this on St. Croix, and I'll tell you, it's kind of frightening. When I was deciding whether or not to do this, I thought, “Am I willing to risk making an idiot of myself.” In response to that, I thought, “Sure, there's nothing unusual about that.” Then I thought, “Do I have the courage to go up in front of a group of people who I like and respect, who I consider my peers and members of the community to which I belong? A group of people whose opinions I value?” And I thought, “No way.” So I decided to try it out in front you guys instead.

I appeared on this very stage at a show very much like this sometime last year. On that occasion I decided to do something highbrow, so I read poems by William Butler Yeats. I read, Easter 1916, Byzantium, and Sailing to Byzantium. And I'd like to tell you that I got a great reception from the audience. I'd like to tell you that, but it would be a lie because my poetic renditions went over like the proverbial lead balloon. I'll tell you, I just died out here. For all of the audience reaction I got, I could have been reading aloud from the instructions on the back of a box of Cream of Wheat. So I thought long and hard about why I had bombed so badly and I realized that it was because I had ventured into territory that was unfamiliar to me. I'm not a poet, so I don't know poetry. This time I decided to stick with what I know. I'm a lawyer. So I got the names of every single person who sat in the audience at the last show and watched me die here on stage, and I'm going to sue every single one of the bastards. Don't laugh. If I don't get the reaction I want tonight, I'm going to sue your asses, too.

I'm not going to make the same mistake twice. There will be no poetry and no William Butler Yeats from me this evening. However, I really do love to read, and love to talk about books. And speaking of books, there's one recent book that seems to have become an American phenomenon, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Has anyone here read it? Did you enjoy it? Did you think it was worth reading? You did?

Well, then, that's pathetic. Obviously I will never bother to read a book that you recommend.

I slogged my way through The Da Vinci Code, partly because a number of my friends said things to me like, “Oh, you like history, so you’ll really love it.” “Love it” probably isn’t an accurate phrase. Having read it, and looking at it as objectively as possible, I think I can say without any exaggeration that it sucked worse than any book in the history of the world. I think books about the pathology of genital warts must be more entertaining. If Leonardo Da Vinci had known that his fame as a painter would have caused his name to be associated with this piece of literary garbage, he would have become an interior decorator instead.

Consider how it begins. At the beginning of the book, a giant psychotic albino with a piece of barbed wire tied around his thigh shoots the curator of the Louvre, who proceeds to write an incomprehensible message with his own blood before he kicks off. Right away I thought “We are not in the presence of Great Literature.” The shooting happens within a few pages. Lots of other things happen later, mostly for no apparent reason. The book has been praised as “fast moving,” which is absolutely true. It moves very fast, without pausing for a moment to make a lick of sense.

But H. L. Mencken once said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people, and nothing proves him right as much as this fact: The Da Vinci Code has been on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list for more than three years. In fact, even though it’s now out in a US paperback edition, it was still the bestselling hardcover book in the United States two weeks ago. This brings to mind another famous quote, from P. T. Barnum, who said, “There’s a sucker born every minute." And this year all of them own hardcover copies of The Da Vinci Code. I mean, wise up people. It’s an airport book at best. Buy the paperback instead of the hardback, save a few bucks, use it to get a copy of The London Times Literary Supplement, and bring some culture into your sorry lives.

If you’ve read the book, you know that it’s a mixture of wrongheaded historical speculation about the Medieval Order of The Knights Templar, Leonardo Da Vinci, The Holy Grail, Jesus, and Mary Magdalene. It’s become quite controversial because its themes go directly against the beliefs of more orthodox forms of Christianity, Roman Catholicism in particular. It’s so controversial that there is only one thing that real historians agree upon, which is that it’s a load of manure. Despite this, a lot of people think that it really is a profound book. These are the same kind of people who used to think that I Love Lucy was real. There’s no doubt in my mind that the author, Dan Brown, knows what a mass of historical horse pucky the book is. In fact I can see him being interviewed now:

Interviewer: Mr. Brown, is there any historical truth to the themes of your novel?

Brown: Of course not, it’s simply a work of fiction that…

Brown’s Publisher, Offstage: Dan, you’ve made the bestseller list because people think it’s real!

Brown: As I was saying, yes, I think my novel explores some important historical and religious truths that have been long suppressed by the Christian churches.

Last week The Da Vinci Code was number 2 on the hardcover bestseller list. But that’s not all. The list is swamped by what appear to be clones of Dan Brown’s book. Remember, The Da Vinci Code is about, among far too many other things, Leonardo Da Vinci, The Holy Grail, and the Knights Templar. The following books are also on the hardcover bestseller list last week:

THE SECRET SUPPER, by Javier Sierra. Clues in "The Last Supper" reveal Da Vinci's heretical beliefs.
THE TEMPLAR LEGACY, by Steve Berry. A former Justice Department operative becomes involved in a desperate search for the long-lost treasure and secrets of the medieval Knights Templar.
THE LAST TEMPLAR, by Raymond Khoury. A coding device stolen from an exhibit of Vatican artifacts may hold clues to the medieval Knights Templar's long-lost treasure — and their secrets.
LABYRINTH, by Kate Mosse. A woman on an archaeological dig in France stumbles on the 13th-century secret of the true Grail.

Soon will come the self-help books and the memoirs: The Knights Templar Guide to Really Great Sex, Cooking with the Holy Grail, The Last Supper Diet, and The Messiah and Me: a Memoir by Mary Magdalene.

It’s almost impossible to go a day without hearing some mention of Dan Brown’s book, unless you spend the day in an isolation chamber, or listening to my law partner Todd Newman tell stories about the trialthlons he’s done (which is kind of like spending the day in an isolation chamber). For the last several weeks the media has been saturated with stories about a trial going on in London. It seems that Dan Brown didn’t come up with all of the themes in his novel by himself. He used several different sources, which are cited in the book. One is a book called HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. This is described as a book of “historical speculation,” a phrase which translates literally as “a crock of bullshit.” It advances the theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child who traveled to France and became an ancestor of an early line of French kings. Holy Blood, Holy Grail. As Frank Romano would say in the television series Everybody Loves Raymond, “Holy Crap!”

The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail have seen their obscure little book rise into the top ten of the New York Times paperback bestseller list after languishing in obscurity for two decades. To show their gratitude, Baigent and Leigh did what everybody does when their efforts assist another in achieving a notable success: they sued to try to get some of the money. The case, against Random House, which publishes both their book and Brown’s, was heard in London. It was a laugher from beginning to end. Baigent and Leigh were thrown out of court on their Holy butts, and now have to pay Random House’s legal bills, which ought to suck up all the money they’ve made because of the recent sales of their book. Maybe there is some justice after all.

And finally there’s the movie. It will feature Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon, the protagonist of the book. It’s rumored to be Hanks’ most significant role since his regular appearances in drag in the television series Bosom Buddies. As if all of the pre-movie publicity wasn’t enough, many members of the Catholic clergy have told their parishioners not to see and and, if their parishioners are like everybody else in the world, it’s now all the more likely that they will. There have also been protests from the organization Opus Dei. “Opus Dei” means “God’s work,” and it is a lay organization of Roman Catholics, kind of like a really weird Knights of Columbus. In the book it’s portrayed as a society of obsessively secretive and occasionally violent fanatics, not unlike the Republican Party in America today.

In conclusion, everything seems to be breaking Dan Brown’s way. He’s now become the Bill Gates of the Holy Grail. I don’t know what he did right but it must have been really good. But take my advice: read some Henry James, read some Joseph Conrad, read a comic book, but don’t waste your time reading The Da Vinci Code.

But in parting I can’t resist the urge to do something highbrow, so here it is, the most intellectual joke I know. You’ve all heard of the 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes. Descartes best-known feat is his effort to intellectually prove the existence of something, anything, and used the fact of his own mental processes to prove the existence of himself, saying “Cogito, ergo, sum.” “I think, therefore I am.” “I think, therefore I am.’

So anyhow, Descartes goes into a restaurant and sits down. The waitress comes over to him and says, “Would you like to try the soup?” He ponders for a moment and says, “I think not.” And he disappears.

PAUSES

I knew it. That highbrow stuff never works.
Good evening everyone.

All of the People Some of the Time: Totally Miscellaneous Observations on the Reagan Years

2006-04-02T18:47:00.000-07:00

With a certain amount of guilt and amazement, I make the following admission: I miss the Reagan Administration. The possibility of this never occurred to me during the actual years of Reagan's presidency, when he and his minions committed one alarming act after another. But, like the rest of the country, I have now endured eighteen years of his utterly colorless successors: Bush I, Bill Clinton, and (just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water), Bush II.

1. Ronald Reagan often talked about that there was a New Morning in America. Ronald Reagan gave America something to believe in, even if that something was, by and large, utterly false.

2. Reagan and his minions were frequent users of the tactic known as The Big Lie: if well-dressed people assert as true something that is demonstrably false, eventually the public will begin to believe that there is something to it. Otherwise, why would apparently rational people keep saying it?

3. An atheist out to prove the nonexistence of an all-good and all-powerful deity could simply use this argument: Ronald Reagan was never struck by lightning when he used the term "balanced budget." While publicly damning the tax and spend Democrats, Reagan rolled up the largest deficits in history, more than doubling the national debt. The sole nod toward a balanced budget made during his administration was the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, an act of Congress mandating cuts to balance the budget. The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act is believed to be the only Federal law ever effectively repealed as a result of everyone just pretending that it wasn't there.

4. That Reagan's second term ended on such downbeat notes is as a result of a simple set of facts. Reagan was the diametric opposite of Jimmy Carter. Carter was a man of rare intelligence and moral fortitude whose cabinet consisted largely of people whose talents would have been better utilized in the role of cast members for the television program Hee Haw. Reagan had none of Carter's gifts, but came to power backed by a group who even I must confess consisted of One Smart Bunch of Guys. By Reagan's second term, the Smart Bunch of Guys had largely left his service for the greener pastures of illegal lobbying, their last gestures of loyalty to their revered chief being a series of unflattering Tell-All books. In Reagan's second term, his advisors were on an intellectual par with the Twenty Mule Team featured along with Reagan in Borax commercials on the 1960's television program Death Valley Days. Chief among this group was the redoubtable Ed Meese. Meese's ascension to office embodies the notion of Lowering the Bar; he became chief law enforcement official of the United States of America by virtue of the fact that several grand juries and special counsel never actually got around to indicting him. As Attorney General, Meese sparked widespread debate among legal scholars with his assertion that the Attorney General's interpretations of Federal law were somehow coextensive with those of the Supreme Court of the United States. The debate centered around a single issue: was Meese's assertion the stupidest thing ever said by someone serving in the Presidential cabinet, or could there have been others? The debate was quickly resolved in favor of Meese.

5. The Iran-Contra affair showed the Reagan Administration at is most basic level: unconcerned both with the rule of law and the existence of facts. Reagan told the American public, "I know in my heart that we did not trade arms for hostages." Yet Iranians got arms, and Iranian-backed paramilitary groups released hostages thereafter. Try this for a thought experiment. Go to McDonald's. Order a Big Mac. Give the person behind the counter U. S. currency equaling the purchase price of the Big Mac. Now eat the Big Mac, telling yourself all the while, "I know in my heart that I did not exchange money for the Big Mac." Convinced? It's the Big Lie at work, albeit unconvincingly, once again.

6. Reagan's mantra for deregulation was Unleashing the Genius of the American people. The genius of the American people, once unleashed, appears to have turned primarily to the looting of S&L's.

Profiles in Cowardice

2006-04-02T17:01:00.000-07:00

This is an article I published in my local newspaper a few years ago.

Profiles in Cowardice

In 1957, Senator John F. Kennedy published Profiles in Courage, a book containing eight accounts of outstanding acts of bravery by elected officials. It won a Pulitzer Prize. A sequel, edited by Caroline Kennedy, is twelfth on the New York Times Bestseller List as of this writing. Each of the vignettes in these books describes one of those comparatively rare moments when a politician transcends politics and self-interest, and makes a difficult choice on the sole ground that it is the right thing to do.

Such displays of courage are rare at the best of times, and from my own observation, they are not becoming any more frequent. While it is altogether fitting to recognize them, I propose to give a moment in the sun to one of their opposite number; a moment of craven, tail-between-the-legs political and moral cowardice. In that spirit, submitted for your consideration are the Elian Gonzalez Senate Hearings and Senator Trent Lott.

In the early morning of Saturday, April 22, 2000, armed agents of the United States Department of Justice entered the Miami home of Lazaro Gonzalez and took his nephew Elian into custody. They did this for two reasons. First, Lazaro Gonzalez, in order to become Elian’s temporary guardian, had signed a document pledging that he would surrender Elian whenever and wherever the Immigration and Naturalization Service directed. The INS directed him to surrender Elian, and he refused. The second reason was that Elian’s father Miguel had come to the United States and wanted his son back. Two months later, Elian and his father flew back to Cuba together.

When the raid was over, all of the real people had done essentially all of the real things that would be done to reunite Elian and his father. At that point the stage was set for the entrance of the politicians.

Trent Lott, then Senate Majority Leader, immediately announced that Senate hearings would be convened within a week’s time. "We have a responsibility to ... try to find the truth because there are a lot of questions out there," said Lott, a Mississippi Republican. "I just wish I knew the truth." Senator Connie Mack a Republican from, not surprisingly, Florida said, “"Are we going to settle a legal dispute at the point of a gun? I think the question is so fundamental that it would be a dereliction of duty not to conduct an investigation." Lott ordered Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, to schedule hearings. With Truth and Duty at stake, there seemed to be no avoiding them.

Then an even more compelling factor intervened: the Opinion Polls.

Polls showed that an overwhelming number of Americans approved of the Justice Department’s raid on the home of Lazaro Gonzalez, and an even more overwhelming number agreed that Elian Gonzalez should be given into the custody of his father. Now, Republican Senators Lott, Hatch, and Mack were faced with a dilemma: should they go forward with the hearings for the sake of Truth and Duty, or slink away like a craven curs in the face of public opinion. The outcome was never in doubt.

On April 28, 2000, a spokeswoman for the Judiciary Committee announced that the hearings, planned for the following week, had been postponed because the Justice Department was unable to provide all of the documents that the Committee had subpoenaed in time. The Clinton administration, faced with the unheard-of opportunity to actually avoid a Congressional investigation of something it had done, played right along (“Documents, yeah! That’s the ticket!”). The spokeswoman announced that the hearings would be rescheduled "in the coming weeks," but that no specific date has been set.

And it still hasn’t been set. It never will be set. Eventually the entire idea of hearings was allowed to die a quiet death.

Why did Mack, Hatch, and Lott, experienced politicians all, make such a blunder? Connie Mack’s motivation was transparent; in calling for hearings he was simply toadying to the large Cuban American community that voted in elections in which he ran. Hatch, to his credit, never seemed particularly enthused about the whole thing. Lott was simply unable to control himself. A man with the temperament of a schoolyard bully, he had attacked the Clinton administration so often that his immediate reaction, flying in the face of all common sense, was to try it once again. Like many bullies who are confronted, he slunk away. Final tally, Political Expediency over Truth and Duty in a landslide.

A bit of recent history might help to put this in perspective. Richard Nixon, while president, appointed an Appeals Court Judge named G. Harrold Carswell to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Carswell’s nomination, which had to be confirmed by the Senate, ran into two problems. One was evidence that he was racially biased. Another, admitted even by his supporters, was that he just didn’t seem very bright. Republican Senator Roman Hruska, a supporter, said, "Even if he is mediocre there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance?” Despite Hruska’s stirring endorsement, Carswell’s nomination was not confirmed.

The spineless, unlike the mediocre, have never lacked for representation. With Trent Lott in the Senate, they never will. And that’s today’s Profile in Cowardice.

POSTSCRIPT: In fairness to Lott, we should now revisit the issue of his cowardice in light of his public comment that America would have avoided "all these problems over all these years" if it had elected segregationist Strom Thurmond in 1948, instead of Harry Truman, who sponsored some of the earliest civil rights legislation enacted in twentieth century America. These remarks cost Lott his position as Senate Majority Leader. So the question arises, was Lott bravely espousing an unpopular, but deeply felt view when he said this? Or was he shamelessly pandering to bigots and stupid enough to think that he wouldn't get caught? You be the judge.

My Daughters

2006-02-11T13:13:00.000-08:00

My daughters, as I think is evident from their pictures, are supernatural beings.

Nina is a Fairy. But I don't mean a little winged creature out of a children's storybook. I mean a Fairy out of Northern European Folklore: dangerous and self-willed. The folklore is full of stories about people who spent what they thought was an evening dancing with fairies, only to wake the next morning to find that a hundred years had passed in what seemed to them to be a single night. Nina is the most completely self-willed creature in the world. Beside her a house cat would seem a marvel of rectitude, a veritable St. Bernard. Had Nietzsche known Nina, we probably would have gotten a few more books out of him before they carted him off to the asylum.

Thea is an Elf. Again, not a pointy-shoed-bell-capped elf, like the ones who live with Santa at the North Pole. I mean an Elf as J. R. R. Tolkien envisoned them: beautiful and grave, wise and with ancient souls. Thea resembles nothing so much as Tolkien's descriptions of Galadriel in The Fellowship of the Ring.