Wednesday, November 26, 2008

The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell

I'd been meaning to read this book, and picked it up down in the Mission: my original goal had been to visit Borderlands Books, inspect the Abyssinians, and purchase a few really cheap old paperbacks (I don't care about bent spines), but Borderlands was closed for the day, or perhaps only lunch. So I proceeded farther south to Blue Dog Books and picked up a copy of this book.

The Wordy Shipmates represents a break from Vowell's usual genre, autobiographical adventures, although the research involved its share of driving around New England. The style, however, preserves her usual liveliness and sense of humor.

What struck me most about her description of the Puritans was the way in which their values were antithetical to contemporary American culture, and particularly conservative Christian culture. The Puritans were Calvinists, and thus believed in predestination, the doctrine which states that God has already decided whether who will rejoice in heaven and who will suffer eternal torments; what the individual does affects nothing, and a Christian follows the law of God because he (the Puritans were very male-oriented) loved God. Here is the knife in the wound: the individual does not know whether he is saved until he is hauled before the Great Judgement Seat, and it is more likely than he is already damned. Calvin himself doubted his salvation. Contemporary conservative Christians, by comparison, believe that believing in Jesus as Lord and Savior is the ticket to the Pearly Gates.

This assurance of salvation leads to the next contrast between Puritans and contemporary conservative Christians: the Puritans feared and distrusted personal revelation.; the behavior and decision-making process of our lame duck leader would be abhorrent to them. In contemporary conservative culture, however, personal revelation of the Lord's will is an acceptable practice. Puritan culture insisted that the leaders of the community interpret the will of the God for the whole.

The desire for assurance, however, found an outlet in signs and portents in every day life. Some contemporary Christians condemn reading the horoscope in the newspaper as condoning divination'; the Puritans could see the struggle between a snake and a mouse on the commons as an indicator of the future. This searching for security in public fora extended to individuals' public actions as well. A successful harvest confirmed God's favor on the individual - despite the cherished Calvinist doctrine of predestination. This equation of salvation with prosperity may have assuaged the fears of the prosperous, but it redoubled the doubts of those in dire economic straits, who already bore grave uncertainty of salvation. It is possible that the correlation of physical deprivation and spiritual damnation contributed to the capitalist character of American society. Compare this to the poor woman in southern Missouri who has virtually nothing but knows that she'll cross the Jordan when the chariot come to take her home.

The Puritan leaders, unlike much of contemporary America, valued the intellect, and wrote their own books since they had brought so few. The shunning of the intellect among contemporary conservative Christians would have appalled them, especially since they founded the two primary institutions of "elitist" education which the radio pundits so despise to educate the leaders of Puritan society. These institutions perforce included instructions in Greek and Latin, even though the latter was the language of the hated Antichrist, known to his followers as the Pope. The ridiculus mus process known as "dumbing down" was not an option for the Puritan preacher or statesmen.

That last distinction surprised me when I read it. The Puritans , despite their strong theological views, made a distinction between the church and the state and tried (with varying degrees of success ) to keep them separate. The difference between their view and that of Jefferson was that the Puritans were trying to keep the state from controlled the church, while Jefferson was trying to keep the church from controlling the state. The Puritan preachers were not allowed to hold political office, nor were the political office- holders allowed to be preachers; nor was this an empty distinction, although the impressive theological depth of any prominent Puritan leader placed them in good stead when arguing with the preacher. When Governor Winston lost the election to his rival, several men sheepishly admitted that their votes had been swayed by preacher John Cotton, an antagonist of Winston; thus it was not thought quite appropriate to vote according to pastoral decree.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Richmond Police Scandal

I was reading a link from a friend's homepage about the suspension and (alleged) quitting of a white Richmond police officer over a photo in which he was hugging a Klansman (in reality a Hispanic fellow officer) at a Halloween party. What bothers me most about this incident is that the party perceived to be at fault was the white officer alone, when both the Hispanic cop and the police department should also share the blame.

According to the article, Richmond has a relatively high level of racial tension. This alone suggests that the Hispanic cop's choice of costume reflected poor judgment, and a reputation for being liberal and wearing it ironically just compounds it. His membership in a minority group does not exempt him; perhaps he's not white, but it is always possible for a black man to take offense at a Klan outfit.

The police department also should not escape censure. The article mentioned that the colleagues of the Hispanic cop laughed at costume precisely because he was known (to them) to be liberal. This statement implies he was wearing his costume somewhere that could be construed as an official police area. Policemen are public officials in both senses of the term, and although some rules may flex when policemen are off-duty, the general public will percieve them as police officers even out of uniform, in the same way as religious leaders and teachers cannot divest themselves fully of their public role. A group of off-duty police officers, therefore, among whom one is dressed as a member of a well-known and instantly recognizable racist organization, appears to approve, or at least be tolerant towards racism, especially in a community with a mixture of races and a relatively high level of racial tension.

In short, the Hispanic cop should have shown better personal and professional judgment and the department should not have allowed him to wear this costume in a context in which many policemen were involved.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

La Exploración para el Acontecimiento del Alimento

El sábado en la ocho menos cuarto fui a las escaleras en la esquina de Broadway y de Lyon para encontrar con a la Tropa Catorce para la primera parte de la Exploración para el Acontecimiento del Alimento. Los grupos fueron a sus vecindades en la nueve y cuarto, pero Bruce y yo permanecíamos en la esquina para supervisar progreso. En la onze cada uno volvió y terminamos el acontecimiento. El domingo, después de que hubiera atendido al servicio linguístico chino en San Jaime, en la tres de la tarde debo haberme encontrado con mi amigo para leer al Griego, pero ella era atrasada. La encontré en la tres y cinco de la tarde y leímos el primer libro del Iliad por una hora en un café en Clement.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Book review: Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan, Courtney Humphries

Book review: Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan … and the World, Courtney Humphries

Most of us think of the rock dove (aka the pigeon) as merely an urban pest, on par with rats and Woody Allen; this book fleshes out the history of the pigeon. In religion, the rock dove has fallen from the status of a divine bird in the walled cities of Sumer to the feathered equivalent of a noxious weed. Many factors contributed to this descent; including the careful word selection of the Bard and the decline of doves as a food source. The biological history of the rock dove involves an unusual course of domestication, in which the rock dove’s homing ability negated the need for secure pens and inderctly allowed them to survive better than other feral species. I don’t want to spoil any more of this book, insofar as science books have spoilers, so I will say this: reading Superdove has made me appreciate to a much greater degree this inevitable avian companion of mankind.

Afghan Exhibit, Asian Art Museum

Today, after Scouting for Food, during which the boys found a faster, more efficient way of covering the territory - good for them!), I went to the Asian Art Museum to see the Afghan treasures exhibit with my dad (who had been willing, available, and nearby when I had asked). We went by car, instead of by bus, as we had planned. At the front desk, we ran into Deb, Damon’s lovely wife, although this was not a surprise, as she works at the front desk. I waved at her. We headed to the Afghan exhibit. It was a smallish, visitor-friendly size. The first section of the exhibit demonstrated the synthesis of Greek and Indian sculptural traditions, with numerous examples of jewelry and figurines, much of it gold. The second section augmented these elements with glass drinking vessels and an ingenious mechanical device which created the illusion of fish swimming in a very shallow pool. The third section displayed the fragments of an ornate chair, complete with computer reconstruction of the object. The fourth section addressed the contents and occupants of a tomb of a rich nomad and his women. This section had by far the greatest quantity of gold jewelry.

The exhibit runs through January.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Book Review: A Handmaid's Tale

A Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

I’d been meaning to read this for years, but was put off by ignoramuses who assumed that I couldn’t appreciate anything serious because I also read “fluffy” science fiction. Finally, it came up as a choice for my monthly book group. So I read it at last, although I don’t wholly regret the delay: nothing sucks the enjoyment of a novel like the autopsy of an English class, presuming that one has the capacity to enjoy literature.

A Handmaid’s Tale presents a fable rather than a straightforward future dystopia; the difference between the two is that a fable stretches the effect and obscures the details of the cause. The milieu of the novel is an extension and exaggeration of the policies of the Moral Majority, the evangelical conversative movement of the 1980’s. The protagonist is Offred, the eponymous “handmaid”, a survivor from the previous regime. Both the current society and the past one are exaggerations, to an extent that would be comic in another setting. I am uncertain, however, how much Offred’s perception of the past society has been contaminated by her present circumstances. These present circumstances consist of an oppressive patriarchy in a world,(or at least the “Republic of Gilead”) rendered increasingly sterile by chemicals and radiation, in which the remaining potentially fertile women serve as “handmaids” to the wives of Commanders, a structure borrowed from the Book of Genesis. Perhaps the effect was more chilling at the time, or perhaps it is more dependant on gender than such dystopian classics as 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, but I did not receive quite the same level of oppressive fear as I did from those works; it still reaches impressive levels of oppression. There are elements, such as the color coding explicitly outlined in the beginning of the book, which could have benefited from expansion. The penultimate chapter was suitably Orwellian, and the last chapter drew more inspiration from the twenty-first chapter of A Clockwork Orange. The last chapter of A Handmaid’s Tale feels forced, even though the collapse of the Republic of Gilead is implicit in the other chapters.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Saturday At the Legion

Although I was greatly fatigued by the festivities the night before, I nonetheless attended the California Classical Association, North (CCA-No.) event at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. The place has a wonderful; the weather wasn’t so wonderful. The current special exhibit is one in honor of James Simon, a Berlin Jewish collector form the days of Kaiser Wilhelm who helped to found the museum on Museum Island in Berlin. Simon, like many collectors of his period, had a range of interests in which his wealth allowed him to indulge. His collection included Egyptian, medieval, Oriental, and modern arts (I.e., Renoir) materials. He also died before the Nazis ruined the Jewish subculture of old Berlin. I was glad to see Miriam Bernstein, now retired, from whom I had taken Egyptology courses along the very attractive Nicole Rau. One of the biggest surprises happened while I was sitting in the auditorium. Suddenly a voice started speaking Latin to me. I turned around , and it was Gertrudis Bataviensis, whom I met at Conventiculum MMCVI (that’s Latin immersion camp to you, whippersnapper!). I learned that Gertrudis was a colleague of my classmate Andrea from San Francisco State!

Halloween Party in Cole Valley

I went to the Carleton Alumni Halloween party in Cole Valley. Believe it or not, I‘ve never been much for Halloween parties, and nowadays I‘m guaranteed to miss any Christmas parties beyond that of my own company, so I made my way down there through the Panhandle. I met up with old friends, and met new ones. Anne Buffington (as Peter Pan/woodsy Maid Marian) was there with a guy named Chrysalis (Prince) from her Marin commune. Shilpa Kamat was there too, with her friends Nim and Sadia. So was Trevor Peace. Lien Ly ’04 Marcus Ly’s little sister, was there in a bumblebee costume - thank goodness her school on Mare Island isn‘t actually funded by Vallejo. The biggest surprise to me was the presence of Emily Johnson ‘06 (a Brite-Lite), whom I met a couple of years ago when I went to Carleton and attended the folk dance reunion. I also met “Bud” (a woman!), whose Velma costume I quite admired, and Cheer (a Fairy Godmother).