Perfect day in Alabama

So on Friday my wife and I strolled beside a lake in north Alabama. We admired blue herons and Canada geese, we marveled at a stray sandpiper and a loon from the northern lakes, the way it vanished under water like a thought, and the wild calls it made.

It was a perfect day to be in the Tennessee River valley, car windows down, jackets unzipped, strangers beaming at one another. From a high bluff we gazed down deep into Buck’s Pocket, and even the baying of hounds and the odd gunshot sounded like part of a celebration. Alabama teems with life and beauty, and for all the blundering damage we do, we can’t spoil it all.

Only a German Lit major would think of this, but I just had to track down the devil’s complaint to Faust (in Goethe’s Faust, Part I). It’s about trying to do evil but only contributing to the good:

Was sich dem Nichts entgegenstellt,
Das Etwas, diese plumpe Welt,
So viel als ich schon unternommen,
Ich wußte nicht ihr beizukommen,
Mit Wellen, Stürmen, Schütteln, Brand -
Geruhig bleibt am Ende Meer und Land!
Und dem verdammten Zeug, der Tier- und Menschenbrut,
Dem ist nun gar nichts anzuhaben:
Wie viele hab ich schon begraben!
Und immer zirkuliert ein neues, frisches Blut.

In essence, the devil Mephistopheles is griping that despite all his efforts to trouble the earth and sea, and to wipe out the whole detestable brood of animals and humans, the earth is still serene and there is always “new, fresh blood” out there — always plenty of warm, grubby Something to overwhelm the purity of Nothing. What’s a poor devil to do?

I know cultural pessimism * has a venerable history in Western civilization, but I am inclined not to take part in it. (I guess I can claim Goethe for company in this.) Plodding mankind is not what reality is all about. Even if we succeed in doing ourselves in — and I’m not sure we could if we tried — but even then, life on earth will continue without us, thriving and changing as ever. I haven’t always believed in God, but somehow I’ve always believed in the poem “God’s Grandeur.” Or when I’ve been tempted not to, countless experiences have reminded me that “nature is never spent” and that “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

I guess my gushing optimism is in danger of making nonsense of my title: What day isn’t perfect? Why make comparisons at all? I guess it’s just that some times and places are easier for our self-engrossed selves to appreciate. For me, Friday in north Alabama was among these.

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* Vid. the (lost) golden age, original sin, the tragedy of the commons, etc., etc.

Three words

The data summary page at my favorite social networking site (LibraryThing) has a cryptic motto that I just noticed. In just three words it nicely sums up the typical relationship between any individual and the Web:

Firehose meet mouth.

The immortal bard of somewhere in South Carolina

J. Gordon Coogler at work.

For the past few years I’ve thought that one of the most glaring omissions from Wikipedia (that most praised and blamed of websites) was an article on South Carolina bard J. Gordon Coogler, who penned the deathless lines

Alas! for the South, her books have grown fewer—
She never was much given to literature.

Coogler imagined these two lines to be a complete poem. He sent innumerable booklets of his work to literary journals in the 1890s, and before long newspaper editors in the North were quoting his lines with glee. Coogler’s immortality was assured when H.L. Mencken chose this poem as the motto for his gloating essay on southern backwardness, “The Sahara of the Bozart.” *

Coogler’s name still pops up from time to time as the ultimate poetaster. Conservative pundit R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr. has bestowed the Coogler name on an annual booby prize he awards to books he doesn’t like. (The award would be funnier if Tyrell could manage to ridicule his targets without also trying to drown them in buckets of venom. † )

I thought this deficiency at Wikipedia would be remedied in time. But the other day, finding this deplorable gap in knowledge still unfilled, I stole a couple of hours, did some research, and wrote a Coogler article my own self.

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* Sadly unavailable online due to copyright.
† In other words, the kind of thing that passes for humor at FreeRepublic.com.

The decline and fall of radio

So no sooner do I write about Rush Limbaugh than I find Nate Silver fencing with another conservative motormouth, John Ziegler, whose pet project is a documentary-style film called How Obama Got Elected. (You can see an overlong clip here on YouTube.) Ziegler actually sought out Silver, the pollster behind FiveThirtyEight.com, in a bid to legitimize his finding that surveyed Obama voters were ignorant of basic political facts and deluded by the biased liberal media. When Silver asked probing questions about the survey, Ziegler grew frustrated and abusive, as if astonished that Silver would be skeptical. Ziegler’s intemperate remarks about the meeting speak for themselves. Silver, on the other hand, offered up a thoughtful essay posing the question, “Did talk radio kill conservatism?” It’s well worth reading.

As someone said in the year of my birth, “the medium is the message.” And every medium has a history. When radio made its debut in the 1920s, Americans sat beside their receivers giving their full attention to the novel sounds coming over the air. But as the fascination wore off and radios became more portable, we became accustomed to doing other things as the radio played. Radio had to compete with tasks that demanded our attention, like driving the car, working, making dinner, answering the phone. In the 1950s television usurped radio’s delivery of story and spectacle, and only old people sat riveted by the radio. The rest of us could now see the Lone Ranger with our own eyes.

Radio held its dominance of breaking news coverage until TV cameras became more portable and efficient. Now the “live” TV news report has all but killed off the radio reporter, except those attached to the likes of NPR or the BBC. Portable music players, satellite radio, and Pandora have undermined broadcast radio’s dominion over music. Talk radio may well be radio’s last stand.

Could this aspect of the medium — the sense of losing ground to rivals and being on the losing side of history — have something to do with the content of political discourse on the right? Or is it the other way around, with the message of doom and decline finding an affinity with the embattled medium?

If you think about it, “talk radio” is a misnomer. With its thumping vocal cadences, pregnant pauses, mesmerizing locutions, and general aura of menace, talk radio resembles ordinary talk about as much as reality TV resembles reality.

Doing something about Rush Limbaugh

One of my near-and-dear sent me an email about the “diabolical and destructive” acts of Rush Limbaugh, who is “a threat to our nations’ future.” It concluded, “We should all send letters of condemnation to every station which gives him a voice” and demand equal time. I wrote back:

Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. I think that’s an important point to keep in mind when thinking about how to deal with him. It’s absurd that so many people take his rants seriously. But that’s because they are confused about the difference between entertainment and reasoned discourse; they don’t have the experience to tell the difference. Like most American voters, they make their political decisions on the basis of how a candidate, or a pundit, makes them feel about themselves. They don’t think much about the community or the nation. They think about how they expect to feel if so-and-so is elected or such-and-such happens.

Limbaugh poses as a political soothsayer, but he knows he’s just an act. His livelihood depends on keeping people stirred up, one way or another. He thrives on attacks from political opponents. What he can’t take as easily is ridicule.

Probably no one ever did him more harm than David Letterman, who once had Limbaugh on his show as a guest. After several cordial exchanges, Letterman asked, “Do you ever ask yourself, ‘Am I just full of hot gas?’” The audience roared, and Limbaugh was speechless for most of a minute. Probably the longest silence he’d kept in a public setting since 1982.

Actually, it’s likely that Limbaugh himself has done the most to discredit Rush Limbaugh, with the revelations of his drug abuse and general dishonesty. The mainstream media did a lot for him by taking his opinions about the 2008 election seriously, repeating his really quite outrageous recommendations to listeners. But whenever he’s backed into a corner (meaning his audience is in decline) you can count on Limbaugh to try something outrageous to win back the spotlight.

I think the best way to deal with Rush Limbaugh and those like him is to ignore them or mock them — not as evil geniuses, which they aren’t really, but as silly egoists with nothing to say that’s worth hearing. After all, the only thing they dread is becoming unpopular and losing their audiences.

There’s nothing original about my instant analysis. Since then I’ve thought of a 600-year-old precedent. It’s a remark by Thomas More: “The devil … the prowde spirite … cannot endure to be mocked.” (In the 1940s C.S. Lewis chose it as the motto for The Screwtape Letters.)

So let us grant for a moment that Rush Limbaugh really is diabolical. In that case he wants either your submission or your hatred. Don’t give him either. Laugh at him, or turn your back and get on with your life. But don’t give him the kind of attention that assumes he’s significant.

World’s greatest blogroll

This week I discovered Cliopatria’s History Blogroll, a two-part marvel posted at the History News Network. It’s my nominee for Best Blogroll. Maybe you don’t have to be a historian to agree with me.

Chicken joke: Foucault

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher and all-around intellectual whose work has perhaps been more often cited than understood.

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Michel Foucault: The discursive practices of the farm, which led to the development of chicken wire, the fenced barnyard, and the institution of the chicken coop, also constructed the authority which both invented the idea of the chicken and exerted power upon that chicken to compel it to cross the road.

[More chicken jokes]

Moe’s don’t know no Spanish

It’s funny to find bad Spanish on a sign in a burrito restaurant.

’Course, this was that chain restaurant where employees are trained to holler “Welcome to Mo-o-o’es” every time the door opens. The one where you order menu items with names like “Joey Bag of Donuts.” The place is about as Mexican as a frat boy sucking down his fourth Corona.

But still. The sign was one of those bathroom notices that employees must wash their hands before returning to work. This one was designed and distributed by Moe’s central command, to keep any uncool poster designs by state health bureaucrats from disturbing the restaurant’s laid-back atmosphere. To satisfy those same bureaucrats, it had to be in Spanish as well as English. And the Spanish was pretty terrible:

Los empleados deben lavarse los manos antes de regresar a trabajar

My own Spanish is only passable, but I noticed that los manos should be las manos, an error they warn you away from in first-year Spanish. Besides that, the sentence is technically correct, but not idiomatic Spanish. If similar errors were made in an English translation, the result might be:

Employees ought to wash the hands before returning to working

Clear enough, but crude. Not that I’m the best judge of giros idiomáticos españoles, being a gringo and all. Still, Moe’s ought to have done better than this — especially on a notice that gets reproduced hundreds of times.

What really struck me, though, is that this notice is the only Spanish I’d ever encountered at Moe’s. (Borrowed words like “burrito” and “salsa” don’t count.) The chain’s controlled imagery bleaches all the Latin elements out of what they are careful never to call “Mexican” food. Recent TV advertising talks up the fictional Moe as a steak-lovin’ Anglo from cattle country. Moe’s is just the place for people who like burritos but can’t stand Mexicans.

So I wondered: Could the bad Spanish be deliberate? It seems hard to believe that the sign never got double-checked for accuracy before it was printed. Incompetence and indifference are the likeliest explanations. But one can’t rule out deliberation.

Why did the chicken…

Several years ago I was teaching students in my web-design course how to use frames. The frameset is a dodgy way to cut a browser window into smaller pieces, each piece containing its own web page. (The internal frame, or iframe, is the accepted way to do this today.)

Even back in the day, before frames were formally deprecated by the W3C web gurus, I encouraged my students to believe that frames are evil. But they still had to know about them. So instead of a canned exercise, I gave students an archive of text files containing alternative answers to the classic chicken joke, and I told them to present them in a website using frames.

You already know what I’m talking about, right? People sometimes invent answers to the chicken joke that make fun of some philosopher, artist, politician, or celebrity. For example:

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Karl Marx: It was driven by the lash of economic necessity.

After creating a few versions of this chicken joke assignment (for successive classes), I became a connoisseur of chicken joke answers. For instance, the Karl Marx answer cited above is the best of three or four that I’ve seen.

Before long I went from evaluating other people’s answers to writing my own. I think I’ll post some of them here occasionally.

So there’s not enough money in politics?

Barack Obama’s campaign, with its record-setting war chest, is likely to change the nature of campaigning in a way most of his supporters may have trouble appreciating. The role of big-money donors in campaigns is likely to become greater, and balancing them with a legion of online donors may not be enough to maintain more than a pretense of democracy. John McCain, who engineered the existing ban on “soft money” in federal campaigns, unaccountably missed an opportunity to distinguish himself from Obama on this issue and strengthen his (otherwise feeble) case that Obama was an elitist.

Now McCain’s party wants to tilt the field further toward big donors by getting the Supreme Court to overturn McCain-Feingold. The Wall Street Journal Law Blog comments on the story. A previous attempt failed, but with Samuel Alito replacing Sandra Day O’Connor on the bench, the Repubs think they may pull it off this time.