Seriously?

President Obama is quoted in the New York Times today as saying that the first couple is ''not that far removed from what most Americans are going through'' in terms of being affected by the economic crisis.

Seriously?

He makes roughly half a million dollars a year, not to mention free rent, gym membership, meals, etc. Now, he's the president, so I don't have a problem with him getting all that. But we also know that he and the first lady pulled over a million dollars last year, according to their publically available tax records. So that officially makes them millionaires.

Millionaires are pretty far removed from what most Americans are going through.

Cornel West, the well-known Princeton professor, public intellectual, and erstwhile rap artist, says in the film "Examined Life" (I recommend it; saw it the other day) that to read philosophy is to come alive, that thinking deeply about things helps to make us more alive. Agreed. But then he does the unthinkable in the film: he points to a random assortment of pedestrians on a New York street and proclaims that they are not really living, that they are simply going through the motions.

Seriously?

Does he know those people personally?

What about people who don't have access to philosophy, like the poor of the world? Isn't it elitist to say that "really living" requires the luxuries of time and means available to the likes of an Ivy League academic?

U.S. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee said recently that it was great how the two countries of North and South Vietnam were getting along so splendidly, even though we may not always like what North Vietnam is doing (see video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK3rTUgoQD4)

Seriously?

Geography is a neglected study in this country. If I were a millionaire president or a public intellectual cum-professor-rapper seeking to help people live deeply and suck out all the marrow of life, I would require all elementary school students to play Risk regularly, which is where I got my first bearings about world geography.

Seriously.

Political Dynamite

Without question the most amusing political story to emerge in the last year or so is the election of Alvin Greene as the Democratic candidate for Senate in South Carolina's primary last Tuesday.

Mr. Greene is a 32-year-old, unemployed, recently and involuntarily discharged military veteran who lives with his 80-some-odd-year-old father. He has neither campaign website nor yard sign nor cell phone nor Twitter account, and he didn't hold any rallies, but he IS currently out on bail for a felony charge involving pornography and stalking a "co-ed" (that's Old People talk for female undergraduate)and following her all the way into her dorm.

He also clearly does not have all of his mental faculties quite in order, as is made clear in this interview, very similar to others given on MSNBC and Fox News:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYtnrvn9xd4

Pundits and Democratic heavy hitters alike have been scrambling to find an explanation for this strangest of strange occurrences. One plausible theory to emerge is that he is a Republican plant, someone who the Republicans got to run so that they could vote for him (South Carolina has open primaries; you don't need to be registered with a certain party to participate in that certain party's primaries) and then the Republican challenger would be a shoe-in. This would be fitting with the history of dirty politics in South Carolina, and (after all) a similar feat was accomplished by the Republicans in 1990. Also, this would explain where on earth Mr. Greene got the $10,400 needed to run in the Democratic primary. He says the money is his own, but one wonders where an unemployed 32-year-old can get that kind of money from. (Heck, I'm an employed 32-year-old and I don't have that kind of money sitting around).

One problem with this theory is that the Republican challenger, Sen. Jim DeMint, is popular and well-liked and was seen as being in no danger at all of losing his seat, so one wonders why Republicans would resort to these shenanigans if their man could easily get elected without them.

Another theory, mentioned in the New York Times, is that Alvin Greene is clearly the name of an African-American, and that voters in South Carolina (many of whom, especially in the Democratic primary, are African-American) therefore voted for him, thus encouraging the rise of the first African-American senator from South Carolina since Reconstruction. The problem I have with this theory is that it could be seen to imply that black people are stupid.

Yet another theory holds that Alvin Greene's name simply appeared first on the ballot, above the name of his much better known and better financed opponent, and that Democrats simply voted for the first name they saw. Apparently, people do this, especially very partisan voters.

Whatever happened exactly (and I'm sure we'll find out soon), what's clear is that we have witnessed a fundamental breakdown in the democratic process in this country. Whether Mr. Greene is where he is because of manipulative and revolting Republican shenanigans or because Democrats voted for someone without knowing who he really is, what is clear is that the combination of ignorance and apathy is absolute poison to the democratic process. This is exactly what happens when citizens cease to be engaged in their own civic welfare. The importance of active and informed voting has never been clearer.

So while I say that this whole episode has been amusing, the truth is, it is more alarming than anything. Almost equally alarming has been the coverage of this story in the biased networks. Fox News actually spun this story as anti-incumbent fever and as an example of ruthless, kingmaking top Democrats trying to circumvent the voice of the people by insisting on crowning their own candidates (the party's top dogs have called for Mr. Greene to step aside in favor of the better-known Democratic challenger). MSNBC tried to spin this as clearly another manifestation of Republican ruthlessness in South Carolina. Again, active and informed citizenship is necessary in order to see through the filters that these networks provide.

A Big Loser

I made an important discovery yesterday with the aid of the internet and that indispensable tool that I always discourage my students from using, Wikipedia.

Basically, it turns out that I am a big loser.

Last Christmas, my mother gave me a CD of Joel Wizanski playing Brahms. Joel Wizanski was my piano teacher at the Peabody Prep in Baltimore when I was in high school. When I learned some years ago that he now teaches at the Yale School of Music and that his performances have been reviewed in the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Washington Post (though not always favorably), I felt like a big idiot for providing what must have been torture sessions for him hoping against hope that I would finally get my act together and actually take piano seriously. He had a lot to give, and I only took him up on very little. So I was a big loser.

But I already knew that much going into yesterday. I had already felt pangs of shame for not seizing more fully what in retrospect was a fabulous opportunity.

Yesterday's internet stalking has proved me to be an even bigger loser than I even realized, however. It turns out that Joel Wizanski was taught by Leon Fleisher, who was taught by Artur Schnabel, who was taught by Theodor Leschitizky, who was taught by Carl Czerny, whose teachers were Beethoven and Antonio Salieri. So there you have it. My musical line of authority includes Beethoven and Salieri and yet I feel proud when I can sight-read a hymn.

Someone should engraven a big scarlet L on my forehead for shame.

UVA Lacrosse Death

I have been following the UVA lacrosse death case in the media for the last few days. Not because it involves two photogenic people, not because I am happy for the opportunity to engage in the kind of class-warfare discourse that the media love to propagate (it sells, after all). Not because I am somehow more concerned when rich white people get hurt than when other folks get hurt. Not because I am scared by the realization that this sort of thing can happen "even" at a place like UVA. Not because I take an almost sadistic, voyeuristic pleasure in hearing endless recountings of just how gruesome the last moments of this lacrosse player's life seem to have been.

I'm interested largely because I am an alum of Mr. Jefferson's university and feel my part in the collective mourning that has come upon our community.

UVA has a long and storied tradition of student self-governance, with an honor code that could almost be the envy of a place like BYU. I still remember getting the honor video in the mail the summer before my first year and watching in awe as I saw recounted the almost mythical (albeit very true) story of the now-famous anonymous student who taped his coins to a vending machine when it gave him a free drink or something like that. And since nothing at UVA ever gets done without the approval of its patron saint, there were even quotes in the video from Mr. Jefferson himself about the propriety of taping money to vending machines (if I'm remembering that correctly).

My point is that with this honor code in place, merely glancing at someone else's ultimately inconsequential quiz during a discussion section could get you expelled from the University. While the community of trust and honor thus created may seem reminiscent of neo-medievalist chivalric codes better suited to the antebellum Southern environment in which the University was founded than to a twenty-first- century leader in higher education, I like the honor code and have no hesitation in confessing myself to be a proud defender of it.

So in a community where storied accounts of coins taped to a vending machine prevail and students are expelled for even the smallest acts of dishonesty, what on earth is a person with no less than three run-ins with the law (including a drunken, threatening, and ultimately tasered and arrested encounter with a police officer in Rockbridge County) still doing occupying seats in the "academical village"? The lacrosse player charged with the murder of his ex-girlfriend never should have been a student at UVA in the first place. He violated the honor code long ago and should have been sent on his way packing.

Jean-Francois Cope in the NYT Today

Jean-Francois Cope is the mayor of Meaux (pronounced "Moe"), a city ingrained perpetually in my memory for both its excellent cheese and its police officers' disdain for innocently proselyting missionaries. During the Renaissance, Meaux was also known as the locus of freedom for a circle of reformation-minded theologians and thinkers, an ironic connection considering not only my own theological experiences there, but also considering Cope's strongly-worded op-ed in the New York Times yesterday calling for a public ban on the wearing of the burqa in France and throughout Europe.

(See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/opinion/05cope.html?hp)

I never did like that Cope fellow. Perhaps it was his strong defense of the banning of the headscarf in French public schools a few years ago that first turned me off to him. His views, unfortunately, have become increasingly mainstream in the European Union: with the ban on minarets in Switzerland, the recently passed measure in the lower house of Belgium's legislature banning the burqa (and France likely to follow suit soon) and President Nicolas Sarkozy declaring publicly that the burqa is "not welcome" in France, religious freedom has taken some notable hits in the EU of late.

In his piece, Cope argues that the burqa must be banned because it poses a security risk.



There are approximately 1900 women who wear the burqa in France today, and I would challenge anyone to show what security threat, exactly, these women pose. Sure, some burqa-clad women robbed a post office in a shady suburb of Paris last fall and made off with 4500 Euros- wearing disguises and coverings is not uncommon in armed robbery cases. So why is no one calling for a ski mask ban then? A ban on wearing costumes in public? A ban on Halloween (an increasingly popular celebration in France, thanks to the thorough coca-colonisation of the American corporate empire)? Why is this called the ban on the burqa by the very proponents of the ban itself? If safety is the real concern, why not ban other disguises and face coverings in public as well then? That security concerns should be so closely linked to Muslims, in particular, seems troubling.

Cope wonders, "How can you establish a relationship with a person who, by hiding a smile or a glance — those universal signs of our common humanity — refuses to exist in the eyes of others?" It seems the problem has more to do with Cope's inability to allow such a person to exist than with the person's supposed refusal to exist. The reference to the difficulty of establishing a relationship with a person who wears a burqa probably says more about Cope's inability to embrace the Other than it does about any individual's purported refusal to exist.

Freedom of religion and of personal expression are also "universal signs of our common humanity," and to deny these is to deny the humanity of those whose religious expressions may be different from ours.

Cope goes on to note that many Muslim scholars contend that the Qur'an does not call for the wearing of the burqa. I'm no scholar here, but it does seem to me that the requirement that women wear the burqa is considered by most Muslim scholars to be outside the mainstream of Islamic thought. Nevertheless, it is not the place of the French government to interpret the Qur'an for individual women, or to dictate what the "true" meaning of its passages are. This is simply a violation of the separation of church and state, a principle that the secularist Cope ostensibly stands for. It's simple: no law in France should make its case by having recourse to an interpretation of the Qur'an.

Cope also states that "a few extremists" oppose the ban on the burqa, as though most U.S. citizens, Amnesty International, and many others aren't already clearly opposed to this fundamentally un-democratic legislation.

This op-ed from the Washington Post a few days ago had it right:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/30/AR2010043002131.html


France must not take the drastic steps that the Belgian parliament is currently taking; it must resist the xenophobic fear-mongering of the UMP party and stand for fundamental freedoms of religion and speech.

How I Know Napoleon Dynamite is an LDS Movie

I just recently watched "Napoleon Dynamite" with my family. It is a film so inane, vacuous, and downright offensive in its vapidity that I vowed long ago never to watch it again. Yet there it was at the yard sale last summer, staring at my then-six-year-old son who, transfixed, was somehow unable to resist the siren call of "fifty cents." He promptly purchased the monstrosity and proudly displayed it to me when he got home.
Watching this film again and ignoring, this time, the multitude of wanting elements liberated me from the chains of my own prejudice and helped me to look at this non-tour de force in a new light. What if I counted the LDS elements in the film? There are many:

1) No swearing. No violation of the seventh commandment. Chaste. And not in the "this film has no sex in it even though sex permeates the entire production" kind of way that the Twilight series is "chaste."

2) Speaking of chastity, there is a Jane Austen-like scene where Napoleon's and Deb's hands inadvertently touch each other. It is the only hint of chemistry throughout the film and is charmingly innocent, in a Jane Austen sort of way. And let's not ignore the Jane Austen-Mormon link. Mormon women like Jane Austen. They make you watch it with them. There was even a Mormon version of "Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-Day Tale," which made youth road shows look like they were stacked with talent. And Jane Austen's work was done at the same time that Wilford Woodruff did the work for the Founding Fathers and "other eminent men and women."

3) Creative dating. This one is not so much Mormon as it is Jello Belt Mormon specifically. Pedro has to bake Summer a whole cake to ask her to the dance? Napoleon has to draw Trish a picture before he can ask her to the dance? That is intense. I remember a program on the Faith and Values channel back in high school that was done by some LDS folks that was targeted at high school kids. One episode talked about how you could have fun in a group date by going to the local public library and having a scavenger hunt to find the smallest book, fattest book, oldest book, etc. I remember trying to envision what it would be like if I actually asked a girl to go do that with me. My social standing was frail enough without "creative dating" making it worse.

4) And speaking of social standing, Summer Wheatley, who is supposed to be the coolest girl in school, works a part-time job at DI. I have great respect for people who work while in school and believe it is a good thing, and something that taught me good values and so forth. But cool kids in my school definitely didn't work, especially at a thrift store. Except maybe in the summer, but not during the school year. I think the Mormon work ethic still allows for coolness in this case, however.

5) The dance. Everyone was dancing like at a church dance. No hands at the waist stuff. Only gentlemanly clasped hands, with one hand awkwardly placed around the girl's back. No booty shaking. Good distances between partners. Clean music.

6) A veritable profusion of self-employed people. Uncle Rico and Kip sell tupperware-type stuff as part of their own business. Rex opens a Rex Kwon Do studio to make some money. Deb sells trinkets and takes glamour shots to pay for college. I think I read somewhere that Utah has the highest number of women who are self-employed. There's a wiff of Jello Belt culture in all this self-employment.

7) Sign Language. The Happy Hands club sings in sign language. The only places in my life where sign language has been prominent are in Primary and the MTC. There's a Mormon-sign language link that is strong.

8) References to Boy Scouts. Nuff said.

9) Hospitality for the Lamanite. The (vice?)principal is a bit mean and condescending to Pedro when he first arrives at the school, but it is Napoleon who is kind to Pedro. We also are brought to feel sympathy when Pedro gets in trouble for making a pinata of Summer Wheatley and having people beat it with a stick. He says that it was simply something that people do back in Mexico and that he didn't mean anything by it. The script clearly creates sympathy for Pedro, who wins the school election at the end. Similar hospitality can be found in the Twilight series, The Other Side of Heaven, Baptists at our Barbecue, The RM, Johnny Lingo, and others.

10) Jokes about soul mates. Kip is absurd when he talks about his "soul mate" Lawfanduh, and Uncle Rico, also an absurd character, likewise dreams about his "soul mate." The context for both of these mentions of a "soul mate" makes clear that the notion is to be mocked. As Presidet Kimball said, "Soul mates are fiction and an illusion."

11) Napoleon wears a Ricks College t-shirt.

12) Trish's mom makes her go to the dance with Napoleon because it's the right thing to do. This is so like what a Mormon mom would do.

13)Deb really stands up for herself. She lets Napoleon have it, telling him he is a very shallow friend. This kind of self-confidence and letting the guy have it is something I've seen over and over again in Mormon girls.

14) In the brief sequel at the end, the person performing the marriage ceremony tells a much watered-down version of a story I've heard in church and in General Conference.

So there you have it. MTV picked up a bona fide Mormon cinematic masterpiece (not) and probably didn't even realize it!

On the Accuracy of Language

The august body of French language gatekeepers known as the Academie Francaise has always seemed a bit silly to me. I mean, they were founded by the notorious Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, so that's already a shadowy beginning. They didn't have any women in the rank files of their forty "immortels" (as they are called in all non-humility) for about three hundred years, and just got their first Maghrebite four years ago (hurray for Assia Djebar!). Their goal is to maintain the purity of the French language by publishing a dictionary that delineates which words are or are not acceptable as French. Le Computer? Heavens, no- l'ordinateur. Le software? No again- le logiciel. And so on. And besides, thanks to my father's brainwashing, I don't believe in prescriptive linguistics anyway. Language is a living thing, it evolves according to the changes in the realities it tries to represent. You can't really prescribe language use for people or impose linguistic parameters on them since language itself comes from the people, is not artificial, and can only be measured or recorded, not prescribed. And I'm somewhat sympathetic to the leftist linguists who decry language prescription on the basis that such prescription only becomes a tool for certain groups to distinguish themselves from others, often to the disadvantage or detriment of the poor, the outcast, the downtrodden.

We certainly don't need a similar body for the English language, and though I am a fan of the OED, it doesn't perform nearly the same role as the Academie Francaise-- serving, as it does, more as a record of language as it is used rather than a prescription for how language OUGHT to be used.

Reading Tocqueville has caused me to reconsider some of my animus against the immortals of the French Academy, however. He points out that democratic societies(and the United States in particular) inherently do not achieve the level of precision in their language that other societies (particularly aristocratic societies- at least in 1835 when he was writing- like France) reach:

"An author begins by slightly bending the original meaning of a known expression, and, having altered it in this way, he does his best to adapt it to his subject. Another author comes along and bends the meaning in another direction. A third takes it down yet another path, and since there is no common arbiter, no permanent tribunal that can fix the meaning of the word once and for all, the situation remains fluid. As a result, it seems as if writers almost never stick to a single thought but always aim at a group of ideas, leaving it to the reader to judge which one has been hit.

"This is an unfortunate consequence of democracy. I would rather see the French tongue bristle with Chinese, Tartar, or Huron words than allow the meaning of words to become uncertain." (Goldhammer ed., p. 550).

It seems that Americans have an almost horseshoe-like quality in their expressions of language. Often, we do not aim for precision in our speech, but rather for approximation. With the meanings of words only approximate and not fixed or regulated by a "tribunal" as in France, everyone is free to imbue words with their own personal or individualized meanings. While this may please the deconstructionists among us, it would cause disaster, and in fact, it already has begun to do so. I am sickened, for example, to hear talk of people buying or selling a "home." You can't do that! You can only sell a "house," a thing made out of earthly materials-- walls, linoleum, stone, siding. A "home" can neither be sold nor bought; it is something that money simply cannot buy. When realtors promise you a "home," they are lying and corrupting our language at the same time, as well as guilty of profanation and simony for promising to sell that which is sacred.

The lack of linguistic regulation in our country and the resultant approximation in language use may help to explain the (post-)adolescent affinity for the word "like," as in "I was, like, going to the store today, and I like saw these apples, and like they weren't expensive, so I like bought them." (Post-)Adolescents can't seem to commit themselves to stating that they simply went to the store, saw some inexpensive apples, and then bought them. They live in uncertainties and often experience only approximations. This is why I try to emphasize precision in language in my students' papers, because approximate thinking won't do in a world and a life full of complex challenges requiring clarity and discernment.

Sports slogans, trade jingles, and soundbites only make things worse. I once had a student tell me that the message of a certain film was that "through education, you can achieve your destiny." I told her I didn't really know what that means. Did she believe in destiny? If you believe in destiny, then why can you only achieve it through education? I thought destiny was destiny, and not something to be achieved. It turns out that she meant that through education, people can reach their greatest potential (still only an approximate and cliche-ridden phrase, but a step upward nevertheless). And yet our very own universities, in their glossy brochures, commit such egregious crimes against the English language all the time when they promise students that their institution will help them precisely to "achieve their destiny" and other such absurd Jedi-talk.

Corporate interests, or at least our collective lack of resistance against them, have also contributed their fair share of the corruption of our language. My grandmother once asked me to go get her her "Skin So Soft," since her skin was dry and she needed some lotion. I wished she had simply asked me to get her her lotion, because to include (false) advertising in the very name of an object is a rank perversion of language. I want to eat chicken, not "I Feel Like Chicken Tonight," have sugar cereal, not Lucky Charms (think about it- eating lucky charms actually sounds kind of gross), and drink orange drink, not Sunny Delight. I give people tissues, not Kleenexes. And the corporate perversion of our language has gone so far that I sometimes find myself standing completely mystified at the Ben and Jerry's counter, wondering what the heck Chunky Monkey is doing on the menu (sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie) and why I can't just have a scoop of banana ice cream. I was once drinking a Mountain Dew in Germany, and my friends had no idea what it was, and wanted to know what the German translation for it was. When I explained it to them, they thought it was weird that a drink (especially one produced in a chemical laboratory) would be named after the moisture found in the grass on a mountain in the morning.

George Steiner commented on the corruption inherent in the German language during and after the fall of the Third Reich. So did Henry James, during Word War I, anticipating Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. James writes

One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one's words as to enure one's thoughts. The war has used up words: they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through an increase in limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk.

George Orwell likewise criticized the perversion of language in 1984- isn't that where he used the neologism "superdoubleplusungood"? I have oftened wondered what the Nephites meant exactly when they said that the Mulekites' language had become "corrupted," but the above reflections, I think, may bring me to a nearer understanding of just what was going on.

Maybe the Academie Francaise isn't such a ridiculous institution after all.