On Ward Churchill and Fat Friends

Two seemingly unrelated stories from academicland that can be connected in an interesting way. First is the news that Ward Churchill has been fired by the board of regents at the University of Colorado for plagiarism and other acts of scholarly misconduct. Second is a article in the New England Journal of Medicine that one's chances of becoming obese increase by 57% if someone close to you socially also becomes obese.

Ward Churchill is the scholar of Native American studies who came to national prominence when his comment that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were chicken coming home to roost and that those in the Twin Towers were "little Eichmanns." These comments served as red meat for conservatives who clamored for his dismissal. When first amendment and academic freedom concerns stood in the way, his academic research was combed for actionable incidents and enough were found to bring about the current result.

Are there actually serious incidents of plagiarism and misrepresentation of sources? No clue. But to say that Ward Churchill was not fired for his comments is like saying that Einstein did not receive the Nobel Prize for his theory of relativity or that Socrates was executed for being an atheist. Those may be the official explanations and surely Einstein's work on quantum mechanics was impressive and Socrates' religious views were unorthodox, but let's be real.

The fact is that it was the Eichmann comment that was the truly operative causal factor here. Of course, it was completely misunderstood. Any German reference in contemporary American political discourse is instantly taken as an ad hominem attack. Calling someone a Nazi, Hitler, or Goebbels is meant as a rhetorical nuclear option -- it brands the other person as factually wrong, morally insufferable, insufficiently rational, and so hostile to open discussion that they cannot be taken seriously. These utterances are meant to end the conversation rather than contribute meaningfully to it.

And so when Churchill invoked the name Eichmann, Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi bureaucrat seized by Israeli special forces in Argentina and tried in Israel, the general interpretation of what he was saying was that the victims in New York were evil Nazis and deserved to die. And since they were just average citizens, it follows that Churchill is equating contemporary America with Nazi Germany and saying that all average Joes are morally equivalent to anti-Semitic mass murderers and therefore to be hated. He is a classic example of those darn liberals who hate America -- see, he thinks we're all Nazis.

Of course, that was not what he was saying at all. The reference was to Hannah Arendt's work Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which the German Jewish philosopher reported from the trial that her preconceptions of him were completely inaccurate. There was no raving anti-Semitic madman, there was no overt hatred or irrationality, not even a real attachment to National Socialist doctrine. Instead, there was just a normal guy looking for a promotion. She coined the term, "the banality of evil," for this sense that the system itself could become so incredibly morally bankrupt and evil can become so thoroughly ensconced into the fabric of daily life that one could live a plain life, be a middle manager just going to the office and doing your job pushing papers, holding the elevator for someone and the door for others, being polite, picking up the tab for lunch, and yet all the while be contributing to the most horrible of horrors. When those in power have created a corrupt system, doing evil doesn't require tying young women to train tracks while fondling your handlebar moustache and laughing maniacally; in fact, it is often observationally identical to just living day to day life. So much so, that you can isolate yourself in the minutia of your life and not pay attention to the larger project you are contributing to.

In the same way, Churchill contended, those in the Towers were just going about their lives, but their jobs contributed to a global economic system which entrenched unfairness in wealth and power. And, he was arguing, this imbalance was a factor in causing people to be desperate enough to embrace terrorism. Is the globalized economy morally equivalent to the final solution? Can the genocides in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and Sudan be linked to the distribution of wealth and power and then be compared to the death camps of WWII? Are the forced labor camps of the Nazi war effort commensurate with the sweat shops of the Marianas Islands and Asia or the forced labor of Chinese prisoners making goods for Western markets? Dunno, but the idea here is clearly to contribute to a debate and not shut it down by branding Americans as Nazis as held by those in the neo-McCarthyist camp of pre-Katrina America.

There is no doubt Churchill's head is a trophy of the conservative wall, but what he was doing was dangerous to conservatism in a much more subtle way than they realize. the danger he posed was in his argument for a systemic approach to social questions, instead of an atomistic one. Conservatives love "personal responsibility" rhetoric because it limits the scope of discourse in a fashion that removes social factors from the table. Instead of there being social problems that we need to address with policy solutions, instead, we just blame individuals, a few bad apples.

That is what is so interesting about the obesity report. Instead of looking at genetic predisposition, diet, exercise regimens or anything else that focuses on the atomic individual, the question became "how do environmental factors affect people?"

Their analysis was unique, Christakis said, because it moved beyond a simple analysis of one person and his or her social contacts, and instead examined an entire social network at once, looking at how a friend's friends' friends, or a spouse's siblings' friends, could have an influence on a person's weight. The effects, Christakis said, "highlight the importance of a spreading process, a kind of social contagion, that spreads through the network."

These researchers, like Churchill, are saying let's look at the interconnectedness if we really want to understand why unfortunate things like terrorist attacks and public health epidemics occur.

We must be careful not to fall into the trap of false dilemma and say effects are all individual or all sociological, it is not black and white. Individual choices are choices, but then again, they are deeply influenced by our environment. What we perceive as normal -- even if we are wrong about how normal something is -- has an incredible effect on what we belief, what we do, and how we react. We can choose to deviate from social norms, but it is true -- and this is the first axiom of advertising -- that there is an incredible pull from perceived normality, both internal and external. From the youngest ages, those who are different are picked on, there is incredible pressure to conform and this is internalized. When the environment around us changes, we absorb the change. Look at fashion, especially decades old fashion. you look at the pictures and think, "How could you possibly think it was a good idea to look like that?"

If we want to make this a better world, we need to take the social aspects seriously. But, of course, the fear is that it will only to lead to more "Churchillings":

It also might mean that the way to avoid becoming fat is to avoid having fat friends.

That is not the message they meant to convey, say the study investigators, Christakis and his colleague James Fowler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego. You don't want to lose a friend who becomes obese, Christakis said. Friends are good for your overall health, he explains.

So why not make friends with a thin person, he suggests, and let the thin person's behavior influence you and your obese friend?

That answer does not satisfy obesity researchers like Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.

"I think there's a great risk here in blaming obese people even more for things that are caused by a terrible environment," Brownell said.

Instead of understanding the role of the intense power of normalizing obesity, obese people will be picked out as "the cause" and deserving of blame for the unhealthiness of others. The danger is that we will again shrink down the scope of discussion to "personal responsibility" and miss the point. So there is a lesson to be taken away from these two episodes about how to think about complex problems. That being said, never ever refer to those suffering from obesity as "big fat Eichmanns." Trust me, the results ain't gonna be pretty.

This Ain't Watergate

In All the President's Men (one of TheWife's favorite films -- it got us through these last six years), there's a scene where Ben Bradlee is fed up with the fact that sources will not go on the record about the goings on in the Nixon White House. He angrily says,

Goddammit, when is somebody going to go on the record in this story? You guys are about to write a story that says the former Attorney General, the highest-ranking law enforcement officer in this country, is a crook! Just be sure you're right.

Those were tough days, back when you had to investigate to determine whether the Attorney General was a criminal.

These days, he'll look you in the eye and perjure himself...repeatedly, if you ask him nicely...or not so nicely..in fact, it seems like he'll do it you ask him just about anything.

So, this is a guy who took an agency, the Department of Justice, that is supposed to be non-partisan in order to ensure that the law is enforced fairly, to make sure that the nation has confidence that prosecution is based on evidence and not politics and fired en masse eight U.S. Attorneys -- one of whom was to be replaced by Karl Rove's assistant.

When asked about it under oath, he lied about it saying that the firings were for job effectiveness, not politics.

Then it came out that the fired prosecutors had stellar records, but were not in the words of one of his assistants in a memo "loyal Bushies," where loyalty meant pursuing false charges of voter fraud in minority heavy districts or vigorously bringing trumped up charges against Democratic candidates in closely contested districts.

So he argued that the firings were in fact for job effectiveness because they serve at the pleasure of the President and not doing what the President wants -- even if he wants it for political reasons -- is to be ineffective. So it wasn't political, it was just political. I mean if it was problematically political, then there would be fingerprints from the political part o the White House and he testified under oath that there were no such traces.

When his assistant Monica Goodling was called to testify in front of Congress about the matter, Gonzales had a meeting with her. Can you say witness tampering?

He testified under oath that the White House's political arm had no role in the firings. But now, Josh Bolton and Harriet Meiers -- muscles in the White House's political arm -- have been called to testify, but have been ordered not to by the President in violation of Congressional subpoenas.

This is a guy who when legal council for the President went to the Department of Justice to seek an ok for warrantless wiretapping. Under oath, he said there was no serious disagreement about its Constitutional legality within the administration.

But then the acting Attorney General, James Comey, said, huh? I absolutely said no frickin' way. In other words, Gonzales lied under oath about it.

But it gets weirder. Comey was acting Attorney General because the real Attorney General John Ashcroft was undergoing surgery to remove his gallbladder because he clearly had an overabundance of gall. When Comey refused to sign off, Gonzales paid a midnight visit to John Ashcroft in the hospital in order to get him to rubber stamp it while Ashcroft was under sedation.

When confronted about this, he tried to justify it. Sure, the Attorney General had transferred his powers while in a drug induced haze, Gonzales agreed, but he could just take them back whenever he wanted...even if really stoned. There are no rules against it, he argued. And besides, that wasn't what I went there to talk about. Or, so he says now.

But, of course, that was a lie...under oath and when caught in this one, he tried another lie. Trying to maintain that there was no dissent about the warrantless eavesdropping, he denied that he briefed Congressional leaders on the complete disapproval of the acting Attorney General. Then the briefed Congressional leaders called him a liar...as did the pesky notes of the meeting.

He testified in front of Congress that the USAPATRIOT Act had never given rise to any abuses of civil rights, all the time knowing it was false. When the report he had been given outlining such an abuse was made public, Gonzales was caught in yet another lie.

I guess the Bush administration finally learned the real lesson of Watergate, "it's not the crime, it's the cover up that'll get you in the end." So, they simply don't cover it up, committing crimes right out there in the open, clearly, blatantly, for all to see. No cover up. No digging. There's no glory for young investigative reporters if all they do is point out the obvious. It's not news if everyone knows it.

The Attorney General, the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the country, is a crook, we're sure we're right, and he's more than happy to go on the record in this story. This ain't Watergate, it's a whole lot weirder.

Are Philosophy Blogs For Philosophy?

I don't know if you are like this, but things tend to bounce around in my head for a while in search of something to latch onto and occasionally several of them come together to have a convention. Four of these things have joined forces and seem worth reflecting upon.

One has been this post by Helmut over at phronesisiacal in which he thinks about Peter Levine's discussion about the usefulness of political philosophy. Helmut writes,

philosophy ought to be and can be more than a set of intellectual puzzles. Teaching philosophy is one thing - among other things, we want students to exercise and develop their minds, become analytical thinkers and decent people, to explore how we say things and what experience is about, and so on. Philosophical puzzles are sometimes a good way of contributing to that. They just become amusement, however...many philosophers confuse the difficulty and complexity of the puzzles with an inherent merit to philosophy when it is human experience in its difficulty and complexity that lends philosophy any merit it has.

The rest is worth reading, but I've been wanting to comment upon this idea that philosophy is, as Confused, Maybe Not is frequently fond of putting it, "just a puzzle-fuck," the linguistic/conceptual equivalent of trying to figure out what's going on in an Escher print. But, of course, it would be worrisome if we tried to equate that sort of activity with analyzing the Zapruder film for evidence of a second gunman.

The second is the departing of a playground playfriend who was a regular for quite a while in discussions. This is not unusual. People come and go all the time in the blogosphere. Games are a blast for a while, but life is busy and there are many other playgrounds. But this one seems to have left because of dissatisfaction with my sloppiness in analysis here. Philosophy done well has a number of virtues and one of them is clarity and precision, something I will freely admit much of my public on-line work does not display to a level commensurate with what I consider my best professional writing. This is intentional for a couple of reasons: (1) writing philosophy well is extremely difficult and time consuming and I would not be able to post daily or get anything else in life done if I were to try to write "proper philosophy" here and (2) I view the playground as a more informal venue like a dinner party than a professional conference in which I am less trying to "do" philosophy than to spark interesting discussions and I find that most people only respond when they think they've found an error in what you are saying and so sloppiness here in some sense is a plus.

The third is this "surgeon general's warning" that Thinking Girl has found necessary to put up over at her place.

PLEASE NOTE: This is NOT a Feminism 101 blog. This is Feminism Intermediate-Advanced. Visit the Feminism page for more information about MY feminism.

Feminist bloggers are the foreign language professors of the web -- language profs are lit scholars, experts in the context and rich meanings of fascinating texts, yet much of what they get to do is to conjugate the verb "to be" in front of rooms full of students who refuse to do the work and resent having to be there in the first place. They are authorities in a field whose insights and intricacies fascinate them, but which they never get to share because they are always dragged back to square one by people with attitudes. And so it is with feminist bloggers who are steeped in a vibrant interdisciplinary endeavor, but who are inevitably reduced to beating back the same old unschooled nonsense time after time in the comments to wonderful posts.

The fourth was driving in this morning listening to the BBC and hearing A. C. Grayling, prestigious philosopher from the University of London, reviewing the Simpsons Movie. It was fascinating hearing a philosopher put in a place that simultaneously seemed absolutely intuitive and utterly peculiar. I, myself, just edited a volume reflecting on philosophical issues and an aspect of popular culture, yet to hear a respected philosopher as a go-to guy for cultural criticism and hearing playful and insightful conversation from one of our own made me slightly giddy.

So all of these came together in the question, "Are philosophy blogs for philosophy?" Some certainly try to be. There are some really interesting blogs written by hard working philosophers (and I include in this group undergrad and grad students) who are putting up posts about technical issues. They write interesting posts about modal semantics, the concept-dependence of qualia, and set theoretical discussions of internal and external logical relations. Some of these are well-read, others not so much. A lot of these are folks who are working on papers trying to get early feedback on moves critical to their arguments. Between journals (and refereeing requests), professional conferences (and refereeing requests), list-serves for academic types in my sub and sub-subfield, and correspondences with other scholars, I get my fill of "the game" so I feel no need to play it here in front of everyone.

In fact, I'll admit my mixed feelings about public philosophy. On the one hand, it is worrisome that we don't let people see us at work often enough. People have intuitive senses of what a physicist, a psychologist, a letter carrier, a line chef, or a basketball player do at work. But it is not infrequent, even from students, that I'll get asked "But what exactly is it that you do other than teach?" People don't have a sense of what philosophy is and showing them philosophers at work is seemingly the only solution.

On the other hand, it is an odd game. When people watch lacrosse for the first time, you can see startled looks. Everything moves very fast, play starts and stops with players leaving the field for seemingly no good reason. They know there is an internal logic to what's going on, but damn if they get it. Philosophy is like that, except that instead of it being "someone else's game," people feel a sense of possession of philosophy because on sleepless nights (when not watching bad infomercials, Rutger Hauer movies, or Andy Griffith reruns on tv) they too think hard about the deeper questions of life, the universe, and everything. "These philosophers aren't high priests, they don't have special, magical routes to truth and insight that make them wiser than me. Who are they to lay claim to these questions, forcing me out of the place to find meaning in life?"

This sense of indignation only gets deeper when they see the sort of questions that philosophers work on. Usually greeted with a disdainful "huh?" the things that get philosophers all worked up seem incredibly trivial or utterly inscrutable. How could the important questions lead to such pointless wastes of brain power? This may very well be a legitimate concern.

Some then weigh in with "common sense" replies that irritate "the pros" because they get annoyed at having to go back to day two of their intro class to explain why the seemingly obvious counter-example the novice brings up with a sense of arrogance (look, I'll show these stupid philosophers why they are so wrong) is easily defeated leaving a question whose answer was debated in the 4th century B.C. and whose great-great-great-great-great-grandchild of a debate is the one that the pro is trying to discuss, only with a clever little twist he or she is proud of.

My own non-confrontational approach to this problem is to avoid talking a lot of philosophy here. Let me do something philosophers love to do, draw a distinction. There is a difference between doing philosophy and talking philosophically. I think that philosophers are important voices in areas other than philosophy (for example, look back a few years at the Dover intelligent design kerfuffle), although - or, indeed, because - their contributions will necessarily be informed by the content and methodologies of philosophy. Philosophers going back to Plato and Descartes have had an inflated sense of philosophy as the foundation for all other rational belief that is simply false, but the insights of the puzzle-masters playing their (our) insular games do sometimes have insights and ramifications that make major differences. I think that philosophers' voices need to be heard on the issues of the day, not as authorities to be deferred to, but as significant contributors to the discourse. That is what I love about this playground. I know that we have a mix of voices including pros and interesting insightful minds who have not been corrupted by academic philosophy negotiating contentious questions. Surely, it's not the only model for philosophy blogs, but I think it's one that is worth having.

So there. That's all I got today.

Is Human Excellence the Mark of Mental Illness?

Last week's Chronicle of Higher Ed featured a trio of articles on followers of Ayn Rand. In one of them, an organization fronted by the bank BB&T's CEO is bribing philosophy departments with large barrels of cash if they will add a position for a pro-Rand member. It has set me to thinking.

You see, when you get on an airplane for a cross-country flight as a philosopher, you would much rather be seated next to the person who suffers from intense airsickness the entire way than the white guy who turns and says, "Oh, I'm kind of a philosopher, too. I LOVE Ayn Rand." Turns out that those little headphones they sell to listen to the in-flight movie are insufficient to strangle such an individual and the airline magazines do not produce papercuts deep enough to slice your wrists.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you take the writings of Nietzsche and remove everything insightful, interesting, and funny, what's left are the writings of Ayn Rand. these works are a narcotic to the upper-middle class white male of above average means and intelligence because it simultaneously meets two needs:

(1) Ego-stroking

Your comfortable place in society is a result of your being a more fit human who is the model of what the species should look like. You can sublimate the insecurity you feel about whether you will remain in your little bubble of contentment because the mere fact that you are there now is (unfalsifiable and tautological) proof that you are a superior human specimen who is realizing the excellence that the rest could achieve if they were not dragged down by those inferior welfare cases. You are where others want to be because you are who they strive to be...even if you can't get laid.

(2) Rationalization for Not Being an Empathetic Individual

Not caring about the less-fortunate when you have so much more than you need might be thought to be morally problematic. Those gosh darn bleeding hearts are always prattling on about how we should consider the needy and help those who are less fortunate. But I don't want to. Yet, holding my hands over my ears and loudly proclaiming, "LALALALALALALA," somehow seems insufficiently intellectual. I don't just want "I can't hear you," I need "I shouldn't hear you." But if I mix two parts social Darwinism with one part attacks on strawmen of Communism, I have the solution. I'm left with the idea that caring about others is actually going to harm others. If only I think about nothing but myself, I'm doing the best for everyone else because the rest will become better. My selfishness is the tide that raises all boats, so it would be immoral of me to be moral. Hence, I can relax and be a jerk who never helps anyone because only jerks never help anyone truly help anyone.

But while this may be a psychological explanation for the appeal, there is still the central doctrine itself which stands apart from its proponents. The view contends that human society ought to be oriented in such a way as to maximize the production of great individuals and that concern for all only causes, in a zero-sum game, the weak to be elevated at the expense of the great, an effect that evolutionarily has disastrous consequences for the species as a whole. The pivot of this view, of course, is this notion of great individuals of human excellence.

The notion is reminiscent of Aristotle who held that within each member of a species is a potentiality, the ultimate figure of that species, and through its lifespan each individual is acting to actualize that potential. The great ones are those who come closest to full actualization, who come closest to becoming the embodiment of the perfect being. Excellence, the line goes, is a mark of attaining a higher level of human perfection and the more people we have of higher levels of perfection, the more they will serve as models for even higher perfection to follow.

But the fly in the ointment here is whether it actually is true that excellent people are, in fact, better people. Let me put forward the possibility that those who achieve excellence are the last ones we would want to serve as models of lives well-lived.

Let me posit that humans are multi-faceted and that all people will have a range of projects and relationships. We are all being pulled in many directions at the same time. Excellence in any of these areas requires focus that will necessarily detract from our excellence in other areas. There is example after example of great political leaders who are terrible parents, great athletes who are horrible spouses, great academics who are pathetic teachers, great figure skaters and tennis players who are sorry excuses for teenagers. Excellence, rising above the crowd, requires a mixture of talent and determination. The determination means that there will be other parts of life that fail to receive the attention they need to help the individual flourish. Excellence in one area seems to have deleterious effects in others, meaning that this naive picture of human excellence that the Randians hold is worrisome. Indeed, it seems not to be evolutionary at all, but rather harken back to the old religious pre-Darwinian notion of the Great Chain of Being. Could it be that these objectivists are much more religious than they let on?

This leads to the next question, which is where this single-minded drive to excel in an area of life comes from. What would lead you to neglect central parts of your life in the name of excellence? I wonder how much of this disregard on the part of those we consider truly great is actually the result of mental illness or at least extremely deep-seated insecurity. I remember an interview with Lance Alworth, the hall of fame wide receiver for the San Diego Chargers, who said that the thing that always drove him was a memory of his father advising him with the old chestnut, "No matter how good you are, there's always someone better." Apparently missing the point that the lesson to be learned from the aphorism is to always be humble, Alworth was so irritated by his father's insistence that he would never be the absolute best that he was constantly driven to make sure he was. At all times, it was of paramount importance to him that he prove his father wrong. Maybe it's me, but this seems more than a little pathological...and, I would contend, not particularly unusual. Those who are so driven often have something that is driving them.

To be more than good, but truly great requires sacrifice that would make most normal (and I would argue, rational) people say, "No, thank you." I posit that "love of the game," whether the game is football, academic scholarship, attaining political power, seeking social change, or whatever else one might engage in, will only get you to really good. To become great requires more and that more requires the willingness to step away from that which would make your life, writ large, well lived.

Am I glad that there are those who have made such irrational choices -- doctors who work all night and day to develop life-saving measures, civil rights activists who gave their bodies and lives in leading the charge for equality, artists who suffered to create great beauty? Yeah, I am. But while I am glad there are such people, I am also glad I am not one. Their works should be admired, but I am not sure they should be. Let me argue from a cliche...I'll assert as a premise, "jack of all trades, master of none," and conclude that the masters don't know jack.

If these Rand lovers want idols, they should not look at excellence, but at well-rounded competence. Of course, that would mean their heroes would not be heroic and so they couldn't set themselves up as superior, and that they would have to care about folks other than themselves since success in inter-personal relationships would become one measure of human achievement. But then, what do I know? I'm just a bleeding heart, mediocre philosopher who will never achieve greatness because he has too much fun playing around.

The Arab League in Israel

Post from Confused, Maybe Not today:

Israel may be on the path to a dream come true. First, let’s go back a little. After the six day war in 1967, Israel found itself occupying the Sinai peninsula from Egypt (including the Gaza strip), the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank from Jordan. Israel quickly offered to return the occupied land for peace and diplomatic relations. In September of 1967, The Arab League met in Khartoum Sudan and said “no” to peace with Israel, “no” to recognition of Israel, and “no” to negotiations with Israel. Six years later, Israel was nearly defeated in October, 1973 when Israeli forces were initially overrun by Egyptian and Syrian forces.

The 73 war cracked the perceived invincibility of Israel, which enabled Egypt to count it as a military victory. This sense of victory paved the way for Egyptian head of State Anwar Sadat to fly to Israel in 1977 where he spoke before the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem. (Sadat was assassinated by Islamic revivalists in October, 1981.)

Egypt was and is the only Arab State to negotiate land for peace with Israel, but Egypt did not take back Gaza, even though Israel virtually begged it, too. Egypt preferred that it stay occupied by Israel. Why? Gaza is hot bed for Palestinian nationalism and religious revivalism. Egypt’s secular regime had and has enough problems with its revivalists, The Muslim Brotherhood. Plus, Gaza was to be part of a future Palestinian state, which was part of Egypt’s negotiated settlement with Israel.

Jordan has also made peace with Israel, but it did not take back the West Bank. This time Israel did not beg the country to take back conquered land. Why? Many Israelis were and are deeply attached to the West Bank for three different reasons. One, the West Bank, which is called Judea and Samaria in Israel, is the heart and soul of ancient Israel. , and perhaps more importantly, the West Bank widened a very narrow country. (Before Israel occupied it, Israel was nine miles wide at its center, which includes Tel Aviv. Approximately, 60 percent of the Israeli populous lives in this nine mile wide area.) And three, Israel has built so many settlements on it that negotiating it away would be very complicated.

But as most Israelis have come to realize that it is impossible for Israel to occupy the West Bank indefinitely, the original idea of returning it to Jordan got a little currency while negotiating peace with Jordan. But Jordan did not and does not want the West Bank back, even though it would bring a great deal of agricultural fertility to Jordan. (In 1988, Jordan ceded its West Bank territorial rights to the PLO.) Jordan does not want it for four reasons. One, Palestinian nationalism is now fully grown. Two, this land is marked for a Palestinian state. Three, Jordan is ruled by the Hashemites, a clan that comes from Arabia, where as most Jordanians are Palestinian. The Hashemite rulers do not want or need a few million frustrated, nationalistic, angry Palestinians to ignite the underlying nationalism of the majority of Jordanians against the (Arabian) Hashemite dynasty, not to mention the rulers do not want their constituents being reminded that Jordan was once 76 percent of British occupied Palestine. And four, Jordan would not want to deal with Israeli reprisals for Palestinian strikes against Israel from Jordan. (In 1970 the PLO tried to overthrow the Hashemite ruler, King Hussein, which resulted in the war called Black September.) These are some of the many reasons King Abdullah is pushing both sides to make peace and make it quickly. Another, and perhaps a bigger reason, is his growing concern over Shi’a power in Iraq. (I suspect the Iraqi Shi’a have not forgotten that Jordan was Saddam Hussein’s ally when he murdered thousands of them right after the United States first Iraq war. (However, Jordan was not involved in the massacres.) Thus, Abdullah not only needs the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolved for domestic reasons, but also for a more focused, regional foreign policy.

As Israel builds its fence/wall and continues to expand settlements, the sense of urgency for a negotiated settlement is not lost on Palestinian President Abbas, and he is beginning to truly address Israeli security concerns. And Israel is doing what it should have done long ago in making it easier for Abbas to do this. In addition, the Arab league that once said, “No, no, no,” is ostensibly aware of the closing window on Palestinian Statehood and is sending an exploratory group to Israel to go over the Saudi Peace initiative. (A more likely reason for the Arab League’s new found desire to resolve the Palestinian crisis with Israel is to transfer resources from a potential war with Israel to a regional alliance against Iran’s expanding influence.) For the first time in Israel’s history, the Arab league will be hosted in Israel and its flag will be flown on Israel’s sovereign territory. (It’s important not to get too excited about this, for the exploratory committee will be made up of Jordanians and Egyptians, the only countries who have peace treaties with Israel.)

If peace is to emerge, it will most likely come from this path. But don’t count on it. Time has a way of changing things. Israel knows this and knows how to bide its time. Here’s another scenario.


ISRAEL’S DREAM

Over a short period of time, the landscape has changed and is changing. King Hussein of Jordan died and his son, Abdullah, succeeded him. Abdullah is married to a Palestinian and their children are half Palestinian. This does not mean Abdullah wants the West Bank, but it does mean that if he ends up with it, the West Bank Palestinians will have a ruler whose successor will be half Palestinian, assuming the dynasty lasts. This is important, for it will make Jordan Palestinian from top to bottom. Why would Jordan end up with the West Bank? If the Palestinians do not unite and negotiate an independent state with Israel, Israel will unilaterally withdrawal to its soon to be completed wall/fence, leaving behind the most heavily populated Palestinian areas. Israel will pull up its own settlements and settlers, some of whom will threaten civil war, and bring them back to Israel. Israel did this with the settlers of Sinai and Gaza. (If some of the settlers resist, Israel will use its military as it almost did in Sinai and was prepared to do in Gaza. It’s important to note that many religious Jews – and there are some extreme messianic types in the West bank – are far more attached to the West Bank than they were to Sinai and Gaza. It could get messy, but the bulk of settlers live around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, which places them on the Israeli side of the wall/fence.) If this happens, what happens to the rest of the West Bank? Does Jordan sever ties with Israel? Not likely, especially with the growing Shi’a power on its border with Iraq.

What will most likely happen is the West Bank will become a federated state with Jordan, which is what Israel has always wanted. Down the road, Israel and Jordan will negotiate a horizontal settlement over the Al Aqsa Mosque and East Jerusalem, while keeping the Western Wall and the Jewish sections of the old city. Israel has always felt more comfortable with a Jordanian solution than an independent solution with the Palestinians.

What will happen to Gaza? Egypt may accept it as a federated state. Most likely, Gaza will become a small, densely populated country. Most people in the West are unaware that there are significant cultural, economic and religious differences between the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel would like to see this separation emerge. One could argue that Israel’s greatest security asset, next to its skilled military, technological know how and nuclear arsenal, is the disunity of it neighbors. One of my (anti-Israel) undergraduate Professors once told me: “If a country is going to be surrounded by enemies, Israel is in the right spot. It’s neighbors can’t even agree to take a piss together.” And if the Palestinians are unable to unite, we may be watching the emergence of a very different status quo than what most non-Israelis hope and expect to emerge. But I wouldn’t bet on the above the possibility, especially when one looks at this from the goals of Palestinian President Abbas, and perhaps the Arab league.


ABBAS’S HOPE:

We recently witnessed a Palestinian civil war in Gaza, which is on the brink of becoming a humanitarian disaster for the Palestinians there, if it isn’t already. Gaza is the most densely populated area on the planet, not to mention one of the most impoverished. With Hamas now in control of Gaza, what little money came in is no longer coming in from Europe and the Arab states (with perhaps the exception of Syria and non-Arab Iran). Unbelievably, Gaza is more isolated today than it has been, which is saying a lot, when one considers how isolated it has been.

With this said there may be a flicker of long term hope for the loser in Gaza’s civil war; west Bank resident, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. (Abbas’s PLO still controls the West Bank.) After visiting the U.S., Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, agreed to release Palestinian tax revenues totaling over 500 million dollars. Tragically, this money will not touch Gaza, but will solely be poured into the West Bank to strengthen Abbas. Israel is also taking steps to make travel easier for Palestinians in the West Bank. Under the table, the Bush administration is pushing Israel hard to make these moves, but paying them well for such decisions. Bush has agreed to give Israel 600 million more dollars next year.

What a strange moment for the European Jews of Israel. (I emphasize European, for the majority of Jewish Israelis come from or descend from those who came from Arab countries.) In his dissertation, Abbas basically denied the Holocaust and asserted that the Zionists worked with the Nazis to destroy some Jews in Europe to facilitate the Jewish colonization of Palestine. But that was then and this is now. Abbas is now the moderate from both his and Israel’s perspective.

Olmert also recently met with leaders from Egypt, Jordan and Abbas in Egypt. The messages from these meetings are twofold. One, Israel is being pushed to negotiate with Abbas. Two, life will get better in the West Bank. This twofold message ostensibly demands that Israel can no longer claim there is no one with whom to negotiate. More than ever, the surrounding states, Europe and the U.S. want to see an independent Palestinian State emerge and for Israel to help facilitate this development, which means Israel will be pressured like never before to negotiate a final settlement with Abbas. If this happens and we see an independent state emerge in the West Bank, (which is a very big if) Gaza will count as part of this country, whether Hamas accepts it or not.

What will happen to Hamas in Gaza? No one knows, which is one reason that Abbas’s hope is only a flicker. Hamas remains powerful in the West Bank and any support Abbas receives from Israel will taint Abbas as a collaborator in Hamas circles, which includes a great deal of the Palestinian population. On the other hand, if Israel comes to final status agreements with Abbas – peace (not a feel-good conclusion to hostilities, but an agreement to avoid violence between mutually antagonistic factions) could begin to emerge, which Abbas believes will be good for Gazans in the long run.

But whatever happens, and Abbas is well aware of this, the disunity – as explained above - serves Israel. If negotiations work, great. If they do not work, Israel gets the water in the West Bank and its dream come true as outlined above. For now, Israel will ostensibly pursue the path of Abbas’s dream with the understanding that when Palestinians fight each other, their attention is not focused on Israel. It’s important to remember when analyzing this conflict that Israel does not think like the U.S. does. Israelis accept terrorism as a given, as an in eliminable part of life. They understand that terrorism will never completely be eliminated, but begin from the standpoint that terrorist acts can be minimized through security measures, such as building the fence/wall, which has greatly reduced the number of suicide bombers getting into Israel from the West Bank. This approach renders American notions like “winning a war on terror” meaningless, instead speaking in more realistic term of achieving security objectives. In this way, Palestinian fighting/disunity serves Israel’s immediate security objectives.

Despite this, Abbas hopes that international pressure and Arab League diplomatic carrots will continue to pressure Olmert to (quietly) empower him (Abbas) in ways that create the ground for him to negotiate a final peace settlement with Israel. One thing about the Arab-Israeli conflict, when all seems lost, miracles happen, e.g. Sadat going to Jerusalem, the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn, etc. Let’s hope it’s time for a miracle of peace in the holy land.

I Just Live Here

It ain't my world, I just live here. Somedays, the world seems a little too weird not to have been conceived of by the Cosmic Comic. A few news stories:

From Gwydion's Things I Love and/or Hate comes this tale out of the Washington Post of an armed robbery, almost.

A grand feast of marinated steaks and jumbo shrimp was winding down, and a group of friends was sitting on the back patio of a Capitol Hill home, sipping red wine. Suddenly, a hooded man slid in through an open gate and put the barrel of a handgun to the head of a 14-year-old guest.

"Give me your money, or I'll start shooting," he demanded, according to D.C. police and witness accounts. The five other guests, including the girls' parents, froze -- and then one spoke. "We were just finishing dinner," Cristina "Cha Cha" Rowan, 43, blurted out. "Why don't you have a glass of wine with us?"

The intruder took a sip of their Chateau Malescot St-Exupéry and said, "Damn, that's good wine." The girl's father, Michael Rabdau, 51, who described the harrowing evening in an interview, told the intruder, described as being in his 20s, to take the whole glass. Rowan offered him the bottle. The would-be robber, his hood now down, took another sip and had a bite of Camembert cheese that was on the table.

Then he tucked the gun into the pocket of his nylon sweatpants. "I think I may have come to the wrong house," he said, looking around the patio of the home in the 1300 block of Constitution Avenue NE. "I'm sorry," he told the group. "Can I get a hug?"

Rowan, who lives in Falls Church and works part time at her children's school, stood up and wrapped her arms around him. Then it was Rabdau's turn. Then his wife's. The other two guests complied.

"That's really good wine," the man said, taking another sip. He had a final request: "Can we have a group hug?" The five adults surrounded him, arms out. With that, the man walked out with a crystal wine glass in hand, filled with Chateau Malescot. No one was hurt, and nothing was stolen.

Chateau Malescot St-Exupéry, yes, a fine choice. For armed robbery, you definitely need a big red. Now if it had been, say, embezzlement, you definitely would have wanted to go with something lighter. I mean, they don't call it "white" collar crime for nothing.


Confused, Maybe Not sent me this one about Daniel Kaufman, star pitcher for the Tel Aviv Lightning who had a no-hitter going against the Netanya Tigers at the opening of the new Sportek Field until it was broken up by a solo home run in the seventh. Tuesday night marked the grand opening of Sportek Field in Tel Aviv so Tel Aviv pitcher Daniel Kaufman commemorated the night with a dominating one-hitter, leading the Lightning to a 5-1 win over the Netanya Tigers.

Kaufman tossed a no-hitter through six innings before giving up a solo homerun to Dominican Julio Guerrero in the top of the seventh. The right-handed Georgian struck out nine batters while walking just one in 6 1/3 innings of work to earn his second win of the season.

Israeli professional baseball is much like it is here except that when they hit the ball, they run to third. That and after your seventh game, they take about an inch and a half off the end of your bat. Look for Kaufman to lead Tel Aviv to the Vorld Series. Oh, and when they say that Guerrero is a Dominican, they are not refering to his country of birth, he really is a Catholic friar.


And then from the "irony can be so ironic" file comes this pointed out to me by coyotesqrl from Eric Schwitzgebel of the wonderful Mind Splinters.

Why don't ethics professors behave better?

If you spent your whole life trying to work out how to be ethical, you would think you'd be more moral in everyday life. Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has found that this isn't the case, and asks the question "Why don't ethics professors behave better than they do?". Initially, this was based on a hunch, but Schwitzgebel, with colleague Joshua Rust, has begun to do research into the question. They've found some surprising results.

At a recent philosophy conference, he offered chocolate to anyone who filled in a questionnaire asking whether ethicists behaved better than other philosophers. It wasn't long before an ethics professor stole a chocolate without filling in a questionnaire. (This reminds me of a famous psychology study that found that trainee priests on their way to give a talk on 'The Good Samaritan' mostly ignored someone in need if they were in a hurry!).

When the results came in, ethicists rated other ethicists as behaving better, but other philosophers rated them as no more moral than everyone else.

I heard it said that a significant proportion of psychology majors are really attempts to self-diagnose. Maybe it's the same sort of thing here. In the same line, I will never forget hearing one philosopher considered as "that guy teaching ethics is like a blind man teaching aesthetics."

Ethicists stealing chocolate. Maybe they thought it would be helpful in case they needed a quick caffeine boost should they come across run-away trains and had to quickly decide whether to pull the lever and send it towards groups of infants or their sick mothers both of whom are tied to the tracks. In that case, taking the time to fill out the form would have led to unecessary death and taking the chocolate would not only maximize overall utility, but make sure the care-based relationships received ample consideration and the right to life of innocents would be figured in.

Yeah, I just live here.

Meaning and Memorial

I tend not to do too much on local politics, but this one is worth broader discussion. Frederick, Maryland was the home of the fifth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (the first Roman Catholic to hold that position), a man who was also the former Attorney General of the United States under Andrew Jackson. A man who was the brother-in-law of fellow Frederick lawyer Francis Scott Key, author of the "Star Spangled Banner." Surely such a mark of distinction and historical importance, especially for a small community, warrants prominent display of a public statue, and so such a remembrance -- and so there is a bust in front of city hall.

Nothing particularly interesting there, except that this man just happens to be Roger Brooke Taney, author of the infamous Dred Scott decision that declared any attempt by the legislatures of free states to undermine the ownership of slaves by those in slave-owning states to be inherently unconstitutional.

Taney declared that slaves could not to be considered people under the Constitution, especially not citizens of the United States (even those who had been freed or who were born in states which had abolished slavery) with the infamous words,

In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.

It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted. But the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken.

His argument is that there is such precedent in English, Colonial, and early American law (both federal and state) that considered inferior and unfit for political inclusion that the language of all laws must be read to exclude them. The framers of the Declaration of Independence did assert that

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,

but since this group of signatories included slave owners, this sentiment can only be interpreted such that

neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.

In light of his place making sure that institutional racism would be indelibly ensconced in our legal and political systems, many take it to be undesirable to memorialize him in such a public fashion. The fight is brewing and will be fought out on two questions.

(1) Is Taney more than the Dred Scott decision? He was certainly a figure of his time and while we may be bothered by the injustices of our past, the fact is that having had a local son as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court ought to be a mark of pride whether or not we are proud of his work. It is the office we are celebrating, not necessarily the results of the office. If there is something to learn from having overcome the problematic views of the past, we need to have them front and center and not whitewashed away. On the other hand, it is a celebration of the man and not just the office. Having been Chief Injustice of the Supreme Court ought to be a mark of embarrassment, not something to laud with one of the highest marks of civic pride. To overlook the decision of Scott v. Sandford is the equivalent of asking "Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?"

(2) It is a racial issue. Maryland is an odd state, neither wholly Union nor confederate during the Civil War, Frederick was a battleground. Its other historical claim to fame (beside John Greenleaf Whittier's poem of Frederick's clustered spires") is being the home of Barbara Fritchie, a resident who hung an American flag out her window as Stonewall Jackson's troops marched by and was shot to death for it. It is an area where racial tensions have never really abated. There are parts of Frederick county where you go in to buy sheets and they don't come in twin, queen or king, but 42 regular and the pillow cases come with eye holes in them. This is a case of celebrating or rejecting the areas racist history. The Dred Scott decision is a pivot point in American history for those who favor States' Rights and legal originalism. They argue that Taney was right to appeal to the framers' frame of mind and his defense of the Southern right to refuse northern intellectual aggression on its societal norms. These issues which have today been set out in much more abstract terms are not conceptual questions, but are inextricably linked to questions of liberation and equality, questions of who has the power. This move to remove Taney's bust is a power play by uppity local minority leaders to show that they now have power that local conservatives don't want them to have...and I say, more power to them.

Meanings and Experts

A cliche I detest is "its just a matter of semantics," as if the meaning of words is a matter both simple and unimportant. As someone who works on questions of semantics for a living, let me tell you that it is neither trivial nor meaningless. What we mean by our terms and what falls under them can be crucial. Consider the notions of genocide or civil war.

Meanings are social things and usage changes over time. There is no doubt that definitions evolve over time due to any number of factors, one of them being politics. This has accelerated with folks like Frank Luntz feeding ready made re-worked categories to the media who lap up anything that looks like an easy narrative with ready to apply bumper sticker soundbites. As a result, any number of notions have been redefined for explicitly political ends. Perhaps the first one to really make clear the relation between political power and the ability to redefine crucial social terms was Friedrich Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals and he was exactly right when he argued that sometimes the triumph is so complete that the change in meaning of a term becomes invisible. We become so used to the new meaning, that we forget it used to mean something else. This is why it ought to frustrate progressives to no end when we hear Democrats speaking in those very terms, and tickle us when we see people challenging the frame of a question and not getting sucked into the presupposition that the language provide, as George Lakoff suggests.

The one of these terms that has undergone semantic plastic surgery that particularly gets under my skin is "values," usually employed in the phrase "values voter." The standard media usage of the term indicates that to have values, one must oppose all abortions and favor discrimination against gays and lesbians under the law, whereas anyone who cares about the plight of those in need, the health of the environment, economic fairness, and opposes bigotry clearly cannot be considered to be one who votes based upon his or her values.

A similar and not at all unrelated change has befallen the terms "religion" and "religious." From the "Methinks the Lady doth protest too much" school of political rhetoric, those who most loudly assert their "values" are often doing it precisely because their actions run counter to morally acceptable values. The appeal to religion puts their value claims beyond dispute or at least reflects badly on those who would question them. "How intolerant, you who preach tolerance." This usurpation of religious language by fundamentalist Christians has been long in the making. In one of the finest blog posts I have read, Barbara over at the Mahablog discusses the history and politics of this move. I generally don't like to link to articles that I don't have something to add in terms of constructive conversation, but this one is an exception. Please read it.

It is posts like this one that undermine arguments like that of Matt Bai. Quoted and discussed by Mike the livid life scientist, Bai writes,

The emergence of the Internet age has been accompanied, in general, by a steady devaluing of expertise. A generation ago, you went to the doctor to find out about the pain in your knee; now you go to WebMD, diagnose it yourself and tell him what medicines you want. People used to trust stockbrokers and insurance agents; now they buy and sell at E*Trade and compare policies online. American voters who once looked to newspaper columnists for guidance on politics now blog their own idle punditry. Suddenly, experience is downright suspect -- it's the barrier that so-called professionals use to wall themselves off from everyone else.

As Mike correctly points out, the pundits who have been given the positions to shape public discourse and belief generally are not legitimate authorities. Those we see commenting on Hardball, the MacLaughlin Report, or This Week, those on Diane Rehm's Friday round table or on the op/ed sections of the major papers are generally not people with a deep education in the fields they comment on. Instead they are part of a journalistic in-crowd. There is no doubt that there are Daniel Schorrs, Helen Thomases, and Jack Germonds who are well worth listening to because they are genuinely insightful with long memories and keen minds. But they are not the rule. The pundrity has largely become a club of insiders who confute membership and access for background and insight.

Well, but they are reporters, they've been doing their homework. Ah, yeah. Read David Corn's discussion of Bill Kristol who has permanent pundit status and instant access on demand to any major editorial page. Is Juan Cole, Professor of Near East studies at Michigan and author of Informed Comment, a better voice on the Middle East? Um, yeah. Can just anyone start a blog or post a diary on Daily Kos and spout off even if they don't really know what they are talking about? Yeah. Sure. Is there a lot of that out there? Mhm. But then there are folks like Glenn Greenwald, and Digby, and Barbara, who are more astute, better informed, and more cogent arguers than most anyone you read on the New York Times' op/ed page -- or at least did before it went behind the wall (Krugman excepted).

Most blogs are meant to be individual contributions to the general discourse, as the old Yiddish saying would put it, pissing in the ocean of public opinion. These are not meant to be substitutes for expert discussion. They are a substitute for large dinner table discussions that happen less and less. It is good for us to take on more responsibility for shaping our thoughts, sharpening our arguments. It is also good to go into the doctor having an understanding of what may be wrong with us and having thought through treatment options. The web does not make experts unnecessary, rather it elevates us to the point where we can make use of their expertise instead of merely bowing down before it.

Bullshit or Not: Einstein Edition

There's an old sketch film called Amazon Women on the Moon and one of the bits is a parody of the old Leonard Nimoy show, "In Search Of..." called, "Bullshit or Not?" (found a link to it on YouTube!) with the tagline "Bullshit or not? You decide." So I've stolen it for what is seeming to be a fairly regular series of posts.

This week, Albert Einstein on the two-state solution:

I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from practical consideration, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain -- especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state. We are no longer the Jews of the Maccabee period. A return to nation in the political sense of the word would be equivalent to to turning away from the spiritualization of our community which we owe to the genius of our prophets.

So? Insightful? Naive? Utopian? Ignorant of the facts on the ground? Prophetic?

Does having a nation necessarily breed nationalism and does nationalism undermine that which we have to learn from culture? Is this an explicitly Jewish concern or something more universal?

Or...is it bullshit? As usual, feel free to leave responses ranging from a single word to a worked out dissertation. So, bullshit or not? You decide.

On Types of Love

New mommy Aspazia from Mad Melancholic Feminista has a wonderful post up today about her first days with her new little one.

What a task to write a melancholy Monday blog today; I couldn't be more euphoric as a newly minted mother. I have been falling deeply and madly in love for the past 72 hours. I catch myself just staring at my daughter's face, stroking her cheek, rubbing her back and kissing her all over. While everyone tells you that you will feel love at first sight or a love you never knew possible, the descriptions never do justice to the unbelievable emotional changes that occur upon seeing your child.

Not being one to say I told you so (I told you so), it leads to interesting questions about types of love. You hear it over and over again when you are expecting and yes, you know "your life will be different" and you know "you will love your child so much," but you don't really grasp it until you are there.

We know there are different sorts of love. We know the love we have for our parents is different than the love we have for dear friends is different than the love we have for our partner. We figure that one of these will be the right template, the model for this new sort of love. But they're different.

The love for a parent exists before you do. You love your parent before the person you will become has a chance to come into being. It is a love in which the care is entwined with admiration on the one hand and an innate desire for separation on the other. Indeed, the process of creating yourself necessarily involves alienating yourself from this loving relationship and renegotiating it. I have deeply conflicted emotions when my older child, upon doing something creative or intellectual that earns her praise, has taken to responding, "well, I am the daughter of a philosopher." On the one hand, I am glad that she is internalizing our family's love of things cerebral, artistic, and clever and proud that (at least for now) she's not completely embarassed by me. But, at the same time, I don't want her to be a mini-me, I want her to be who she will become.

The love of a lover is also one that requires space. One is tempted at the onset to lose oneself in the loving relationship, but you realize that for yourself and your beloved, the love requires maintaining yourself as an individual. This is both because your life is more than your love and it would be unfair to you to be asked to lose your self for the sake of the relationship, but also because caring for your beloved requires providing him or her with someone to love. To lose yourself for the love, in this case, is to betray the love. You love while being separate from the love. The whole is more than the parts, but the parts must remain.

But with a child, neither of these is the same sort of love. The transformation you undergo as a parent as a result of the love is much more radical. Yes, you need to exist as someone whom the adoration of your child will hopefully lead to healthy physical and psychological development, but especially with young children, the love is not from you but becomes you. The way they sleep, the looks on their faces, there is something that resonates so deeply inside at the most mundane thing that you know your being is changed, you are different from the love.

Aspazia writes,

Now I am almost mourning the precious moments I am spending right now with this magical being--moments that seem so fragile, that are passing too fast for me to hold onto. I am already missing my baby and I have barely begun tending to her.

Gosh, I hope The Wife doesn't read this because she frequently says the same sort of thing and then gives me that look like "Maybe one more?" But what Spaz doesn't yet realize is that while each one of these magical moments are indeed fleeting, each one is followed by another that brings with it something that is simultaneously developmentally necessary and expected and also shockingly novel.

Watching the physical, psychological, intellectual, and personal growth of the child each day is breathtaking. No one can teach Locke's notion of being born a blank slate seriously after having kids. They wake up doing things they couldn't have done when they went to bed and you know you didn't teach that to them overnight. Suddenly, "dada" goes to "daddy," in an instant, never to go back. And when you see it, when they laugh, when they figure something out, when they are sly or funny, there is a welling up inside that is unlike any other sort of love out there.

I don't know if this changes once the children become adults, when they are now their own people and the relationship is different, but it is truly a love unlike any other. It is a wonderful thing and frankly a lot of fun to watch a dear friend and fellow philosopher experience it and come to terms with it. Enjoy it Spaz, and as my Dad always tells me "It just gets better and better."

When Is Thoughtfulness Morally Necessary?

Ethicists use the term "supererogatory" for acts that are above and beyond the call of duty, that is, acts that are good, but not morally required. I've been thinking lately about how we draw this line.

You're standing in line at the grocery store with a bunch of items and the person behind you has only one thing. The nice thing is to let this person move in front of you in line. It will only inconvenience you slightly, whereas waiting for you to finish would take quite a bit longer. A thoughtful gesture. But is it necessary? If you are the one with the one item and you know that the person in front of you with the basket full knows full well that you would be through in a flash and refuses to be kind, do you have reason to be upset, to think bad thoughts about this person's character?

At what point does nice turn into necessary?

The Feast of Saint Bill...Right

Brothers, Sisters, and Transgendered Comedists Everywhere,

Bertrand Russell, in his autobiography, writes that his life was changed when he found a book by John Stuart Mill in his father's library. I had a similar experience, only I found a copy of Bill Cosby's "I Started Out as a Child" among my father's albums. This week brought us Bill Cosby's 70th birthday.

Bill Cosby is the Willie Mays of comedy, perhaps the greatest complete comedian ever. He has the observational powers of Jerry Seinfeld, the story-telling ability of Alan King, the timing of Groucho, the ability to do the understated one-sided dialogues like Bob Newhart. There is nothing he can't do as well as any comedian ever.

He had a fine career as an actor in the 60s and 70s, starring in tv's I Spy and films like Mother, Jugs, and Speed and Uptown Saturday Night, but it was his stand-up that made him great. At a time where the trend was following the trajectory of Red Foxx and Lenny Bruce with acts like George Carlin and Richard Pryor, Cosby had a softer edge reflecting on the sorts of moments that were universal in everyone's experience. Those earlier albums contain absolutely classic bits like Noah (what's a cubit?), tv football (and to make it look good, they bandaged his head), and the Lone Ranger (Tonto no go to town).

But it was on the 1967 album Revenge that he tells of the neighborhood game "buck buck" in which kids from one block form a human horse while those from another block one by one jump on trying to break the horse. Horse who holds the most kids wins. Of course, Bill's neighborhood had a secret weapon, the biggest, baddest buck buck breaker of them all. And that's where he introduced...hey, hey, hey, it's Fat Albert.

Fat Albert would go on to become not only a great stand-up bit, but one of the defining characters for a generation of kids. Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids featured Russell, Rudy, Weird Harold, Mushmouth and other characters from Cosby's childhood and routines. Positive and funny, it was classic Cosby.

Then, just as you figured he was settled into a life selling Jell-O Pudding Pops, along comes his 1983 filmed routine Bill Cosby: Himself. It featured his trademark reflections on childhood:

It was because of my father that from the ages of seven to fifteen, I thought that my name was Jesus Christ and my brother, Russell, thought that his name was Dammit. "Dammit, will you stop all that noise?" And, "Jesus Christ, sit down!" One day, I'm out playing in the rain, and my father yelled, "Dammit, will you get back in here!" I said, "But, Dad, I'm Jesus Christ!"

But now, he was a father and much of the routine was about his kids.

So I looked at him. And I noticed that from here all the way around to here...there was no hair. I said, "Son?" Called him "son". "What happened to your hair?" He said, "I don't know." I said, "Son, take your hand and put it on top of your head and tell me what you feel." He said, "There's no hair." I said, "Right! Now, tell Dad what happened to your hair." He said, "I don't know." I said, "Son, was your head with you all day today?" He said, "Uh-huh." I said, "Was this the hair you wanted?" He said, "Uh-huh." I said, "A reverse Mohawk?!" He said, "Uh-huh!" I said, "Did you cut your hair off?!" He said, "Uh-huh!" I said, "Well, why didn't you tell me that in the beginning?!?" He said, "I DON'T KNOW!!"

From that routine came the Cosby show and another chance for the man to shape popular culture.

Truly the finest narrative comedian ever. You could listen to Cosby for an hour and swear only three minutes went by. What are your favorite Cosby bits?

Happy birthday Bill Cosby and thanks for all the laughs.

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

On Cute

My dear friend Aspazia from Mad Melancholic Feminista is giving birth today. The welcoming our our newest little feminista is indeed a happy, happy occasion. No matter what else she is, there is no doubt little m will be cute.

That's a word that has always confounded me. There are certainly easy cases that certainly fall in the category. The fingers and toes of babies, for example, especially the finger and toenails are undeniably cute. They look just like ours only so much SMALLER. I want to laugh out loud every time I see baby fingers.

This leads to the first question, which is more of a psychology question than one of linguistic analysis, why are small things cute? Take the most mundane thing, something that would never evoke the slightest bit of emotion upon observation, say, a box of laundry detergent, shrink it down and all of a sudden..."awwww, it's so cute. Look a little tiny box of Tide!"

That usage is a little odd since we are using cute means more than small, but what more is it? We attribute the cuteness to it, but yet the cuteness seems to be more in us, in the way we react to the smaller size.

Then there are the things that are cute, but are not smaller. People, for example, can be cute even when they are not small. Is this a completely different sense of cute or an application of the same meaning to a different category of thing? When I say that grass and a tennis ball are both green, I mean that there is a property, greenness, that they both have in common. But when I say that a pen is good and a person is good, I don't mean that they both have the same property, goodness, as a part of the description of them. Is cute like green or good?

When we do apply the term to people it is a positive attribution. To be cute is to be attractive, albeit in a way different from being handsome, beautiful, stunning, or gorgeous. It connotes a sort of innocence, lightness, and playfulness that can be found appealing. It tends to be connected to ages at the ends of the spectrum. Kids are cute, younger romantic interests may be referred to as cute, and seniors, say, an older couple holding hands, will easily be labelled cute. Why do we have a harder time being cute in middle age? Is it that this is the time when our actions are taken as having ulterior motives? Is it that they are considered the norm and cute denotes something unusual?

We use "cute" in cases of wordplay. A pun that is easily gotten and very tight will often earn "Oh, that's cute." Is this the same sense or a completely different meaning? It seems to be related to clever, something not seen in the other examples which appeal to a sense of simplicity, although it still seems to convey a sense of aesthetic attractiveness and playfulness.

Then there are the uses of "cute" that just flat out baffle me. Often, these come from women looking at clothes. Walking through mall with TheWife, "Oh, those shoes are so cute." Me: (shoulder shrug) I get "would go well with outfit X" (well, at least in theory I get it), I get "are my style and are something I'd like to purchase," but I am at a complete loss as to why expensive footwear that are the same size as the others in the closet are cute. The usage seems similar, perhaps I am simply unschooled and not sophisticated enough to experience the proper emotional response. Or is it a completely different meaning?

If You Go Hanging Pictures of Chairman Mao, You Ain't Gonna Make It with Anyone Anyhow

Ethical question today. A student of mine just returned from a research trip to China. I donated a bunch of books for her to take (English language books, especially logic books apparently, are in short supply and, when given as gifts at universities, are greatly appreciated). To thank me for the books, the student brought back a poster of Chairman Mao for me. This student shares my love of irony and the poster absolutely drips of it. It is super-cheesy. A smiling Mao with red book in one hand and waving with the other in a fashion that looks more like he is greeting the Fuhrer.

Aside from the fact that something so campy was treated as serious propaganda, it isn't even the real deal. It's a cheap reproduction made to sell to Western tourists. Yes, Mao's image is now an iconic commodity used by enterprising Chinese capitalists. Irony can be so ironic.

The further thought of going to a local craft store and getting a cheap Chinese made plastic frame to put it in only makes me want to giggle more.

But I hesitate to put it up for two reasons. First, this is the man who led the cultural revolution during which so many died unnecessarily. Is it disrespectful to treat this piece of propaganda, real or not, as a joke, to revel blithely in its humorous sense given the current context? Does it trivialize the fate of those innocent people who suffered and those who were killed dismissing their plight for the sake of a laugh? Or could it be that by mocking such cults of personality, I would be making a statement against dictatorship? Would I be honoring their deaths by standing against tyranny or is that just rationalization?

Secondly, yeah, it'll give conservative students something to titter about. "He's got a Mao poster hanging in his office. The guy's a complete Commie." While I write this blog and my political views are quite public, still there is the real likelihood that the poster will be misinterpreted as admiration or endorsement of his deeds and methods. Are we responsible for misunderstandings that we know will occur? If one is, say, an artist, and your work will be widely misunderstood, say the biting satire of racism you present is so hip and subtle that you foresee its being lauded by the bigots thinking you are really supporting their cause, are you responsible for the results? If you know your work will be misinterpreted and you produce it anyway, does that knowledge then saddle you with the thing you didn't say?

What do you think? Should the poster hang in my office or not?

Bullshit or Not: Nietzsche Edition

There's an old sketch film called Amazon Women on the Moon and one of the bits is a parody of the old Leonard Nimoy show, "In Search Of..." called, "Bullshit or Not?" with the tagline "Bullshit or not? You decide." So I've stolen it for what is seeming to be a fairly regular series of posts.

Inspired by Aspazia's discussion yesterday on "brain sex," it seemed only fitting that this time it would be one of my favorite passages from Friedrich Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. I've taken two paragraphs and reversed their order for purposes of presentation.

As is well known, priests are the most evil of enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent. From their powerlessness, their hate grows into something immense and terrifying, to the most spiritual and most poisonous manifestations. Those who have been the greatest haters in world history and the most spiritually rich haters have always been the priests — in comparison with the spirit of priestly revenge all the remaining spirits are, in general, hardly worth considering. Human history would be a really stupid affair without that spirit which entered it from the powerless.

Among the priests, everything mentioned above becomes more dangerous—not only the remedies and arts of healing, but also pride, vengeance, mental acuity, excess, love, thirst for power, virtue, illness — although it’s fair enough to add that on the foundation of this basically dangerous form of human existence, the priest, for the first time the human being became, in general, an interesting animal, that here the human soul first attained depth in a higher sense and became evil — and, indeed, these are the two fundamental reasons for humanity’s superiority, up to now, over other animals.

One of my most memorable teaching moments is connected to these passages. In order to keep students from making strawmen out of arguments and to force them to take the texts seriously, one of my techniques is to assume the character of the text. Hence, when I was teaching a mandatory ethics course at a quite conservative Catholic college and seminary (about a third of my class consisted of seminary students), there I was on top of the desk screaming and pointing my finger, "priests are the most evil of enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent." Oh how much fun is that short angry self-loathing German genius with the very large moustache.

So much here. It is the last sentence that always struck me. Is there a relation between (over?)intellectualization and repression? Is it really ressentiment and frustration that makes us "interesting" and superior to all other animals? We are driven beyond ourselves through insecurity more than any other force, no? If we can take the notion of "priest" and "religion" broadly considered to include all forms of belief structure based on hierarchical political power, does this sort of intellectual enslavement make us dangerous? Is it our most dangerous elements that make us most interesting?

As usual, feel free to leave responses ranging from a single word to a worked out dissertation. So, bullshit or not? You decide.

Marriage and Metaphysics

Today is my anniversary. Interestingly, it is also TheWife's anniversary. We did that on purpose in order to make it easier to remember.

The story of our meeting is long, but suffice it to say that despite living quite far from each other, over the course of several years our paths crossed an eerie number of times. We know that we were in the same room, parked in adjacent spots, and and walked past each other at a couple of different institutions. Yet, it was not until we were both in precisely the right places in our lives and personal development that we actually met at which point it was extremely quick to deep meaningful exclusive relationship-for-life-land. An incredible stroke of dumb luck says I, fate says she.

And so this is our question for today. Is there any meaningful sense of fate? Is there a metaphysical master plan? Is there a sense of karma in which the universe makes sure you reap what you sow? Are there biological or sociological factors that irreversibly lead to non-trivial end results in terms of life choices or actions?

When Is Good Enough, Good Enough?

The deep questions are often not the technical, complex ones, but the simple ones that challenge the technical complex answers that arose from earlier "simple" questions. In grad school, I was very lucky to study ethics with Susan Wolf, a philosopher who made a reputation by considering a "simple" question, "how good is good enough?"

Consider two of the most famous attempts to work out what we mean by an act being morally right. Immanuel Kant's duty-based notion rests on the rule that rules over all rules, what he calls "the categorical imperative:"

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.

Act ALWAYS so that you NEVER...

Or the "principle of utility" that plays the central role in the systems of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill:

Always act so that you maximize the overall good.

Maximize? Suppose I create an overall balance that produces lots and lots of good, but not quite as much as possible?

Do we always have to be perfect to be good? Is there an ethical version of "good enough for government work"?

On the one hand, the line is, "no, the purpose of ethics is to define 'ought,' to set out the ultimate picture of perfect human behavior, of what a human life could be at its best." To lower the bar would be to undermine the very purpose of ethics, we want to know how to live a good human life not just a good enough human life.

On the other hand, the argument is that ought needs to entail can. If we are talking about how people should live, then it must be possible for people to actually live that way. If not, then what is the point of ethics? If everyone begins by knowing that they can't live up to expectations, then there is no sense in condemning anyone's actions since they had to fail to meet moral muster. Morality loses its teeth.

So is there an ethical sense of good enough where it would be nice if we did more, but are not require to do so?

Feast of Saint Dan

Brothers, Sisters, and Transgendered Comedists Everywhere,

This week saw the birthday of Dan Aykroyd. Born on July 1, 1952 in Ottawa, he gave us some of the finest comedy of the late 20th century. Intending to be a Catholic priest...until he was expelled from seminary for dressing a pig up like the Pope, he only turned to comedy late in life. Dan Aykroyd is genetically predetermined to be funny, born with both webbed feet and different colored eyes, he went on to work with the Second City and National Lampoon troupes before...

Except for Sid Caesar's Show of Shows with writers like Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon (who also celebrated his birthday this week), Woody Allen, and Larry Gelbart, I'm not sure there has ever been as concentrated a density of comic talent as in that first Saturday Night Live cast and Aykroyd was truly at the heart of it.

The coneheads, point-counterpoint (Jane, you ignorant slut),Bag-o-glass, and Fred Garvin, male prostitute are nothing short of classics. Here are two of my favorites, the swinging Czech brothers,
and Bass-o-matic, .

If he had stopped there, he would have had a career and a half, but then there are the films. He starred in many, but then there are the big two. Ghostbusters (You never studied) and of course,
(We're on a mission from God) And then there was his work with House of Blues.

Happy birthday, Dan Aykroyd. What are your favorite Aykroyd moments?

Modern Day Peter Pans: Social Retardation or Ironic Undermining of Social Constraints?

Crystal, a former student, sent me this article from the Washington Post on the recent trend towards recreating childhood activities and treats for adults. From adult kickball leagues to gourmet cupcakes to companies that arrange recess for corporate employees, the idea is that those who were supposed to have grown up and acquired more mature sensibilities and preferences have refused.

This trend is nothing new. A stone's throw from the campus at Gettysburg is the Boyd's Bears superstore, a three story massive indoor orgy of stuffed animals of every shape, size, and species. The average age of consumers of these plush playthings, like the beanie babies of a few years back, is closer to 60 than to 6. Adult clothing with Pooh Bear or other cartoon characters may be easily spotted being worn at malls.

What accounts for this? Is it social retardation among gen Xers? The articles' attempt to correlate it with some post-9/11 psychic phenomenon seems utterly spurious to me. But what could it be?

My theory is that we have the baby boomers to blame. They were such a massive demographic and happened by just at the time when mass marketing really came into its own and so were marketed to incessantly, taking it as a mark of pride (and vanity) that they deserved such attention. This attention began when they were young and the cult of youth they spawned has never died down.

That gets coupled with the fact that the the successes of social feminism not only introduced women to the workplace, but did away with the formality of the home. No longer was there someone whose full-time job was to perpetuate the bizarre image of life with a formal living room reserved for entertaining and special china for dinner parties. Now women were living lives and living rooms became the places we live and play. Space was taken up with more and more everyday leisure time toys (and more and more crap) and relations became increasingly informal. The same forces that have the negative effect of making us highly anti-intellectual as a culture, also have the positive aspects of weeding out unnecessary pomp.

High culture has been reduced largely to popular culture, but there is some very smart popular culture out there in addition to the nonsense. Irony has taken its rightful place where social graces used to stand. It is not 9/11, but Nixon that brought on the sense that none of it is real, it's all peculiar artificial silliness. And if it is silliness you want, then we'll give it to you in spaces. To see adults engaged in the activities of the young is on one hand ridiculous. But the twist is that those of us who were weened on irony are able to laugh at and with simultaneously. We know how absurd it is, but can appreciate it at the same time as we authentically enjoy it.

Questions About Ties

A couple of seemingly simple questions:

If a contest ends in a tie, does that mean that both competitors won or that neither won? If you think that it means that neither won, then does it make sense to say that two teams are tied for first place in a league? Shouldn't they be tied for second with no one in first?

Is there a difference between a tie, a draw, and a stalemate?

Happy Independence Day

Happy independence day, everyone. To show that there's no hard feelings, here's a couple of thoughts relating to Great Britain.

The first is truly a celebration of freedom. Alan Johnston, the BBC reporter who has done some of the best work in the world from the West Bank has been freed. He is truly one of the good guys and through the efforts of Hamas, he has been released. We rarely get good news from that part of the world, so this is truly something to celebrate.

My younger asked what independence day celebrated. I explained that at one time this country belonged to England and they told us what to do. He said that didn't seem nice. Then I told him that there were a group of people who decided to make this land its own country that made its own decisions. He thought about it and asked whether we now tell England what to do. I replied, "Not exactly." He then asked, "Do we tell other countries what to do?" My response was, "Sometimes, but it usually doesn't turn out so well."

Hanno with a similar sentiment:

The Bush administration has argued over the last several years (as a last resort) that fighting the war in Iraq was keeping the war on terror away from our shores. It is better to fight in Baghdad, than in New York. I have always been suspicious of this claim. For years, I could not see how creating the Iraqi Proving Grounds for terrorist techniques, allowing for on the job training, exacerbating violent opposition to the US and fulfilling the war rhetoric of Muslim extremists were making us safer. But the notion that if we were not fighting the terrorists there, they would be fighting us here seemed almost silly. Why cannot they do both?

I now admit I was wrong. What I did not see that the Bush Master Plan actually had Great Britain in mind all along. We fight the war in Iraq, and get the UK to help, so that the terrorists would attack the UK instead of us! They are keeping the good ol' US of A safe after all! We need to keep fighting the war in Iraq so the terrorists will attack London, not New York.

Have a happy and safe holiday everyone.

When It Says Libby, Libby, Libby

on the label, label, label,
you subvert justice, justice, justice
under the table, table, table

Boy, I feel old. I remember the days when a member of the executive branch (anyone else remember when there was an executive branch to our government?) lying to a grand jury and obstructing justice served to undermine the entire rule of law and remove the possibility of a functioning government. I guess there's some sort of difference I don't quite get between blowing the cover of a CIA agent protecting us against nuclear proliferation and blowing the President.

And doesn't it seem like just a few years ago when the possibility of a Middle Eastern nation acquiring nuclear weapons (or were those nucular weapons?) was so incredibly dire a situation that it warranted a pre-emptive invasion. Yet now, making it easier for easier for a Middle Eastern country to get nuclear weapons is so trivial that one deserves less jail time than Paris Hilton.

For the times they are a changin'.

The German Obsession with Organic Food and Environmentalism

Jonah Golderg has a book coming out entitled Liberal Fascism. The original subtitle "The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton" was changed to "The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods." The New Republic's Brad Plumer (as well as a number of other bloggers) have taken Goldberg to task for the Whole Foods reference noting that Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackie is a free market libertarian, not a raging lefty.

The response to Goldberg violates the principle of charity. While it is certainly true that the corporate head of Whole Foods is not a liberal, what Goldberg most likely critiques (and none of us have seen the book, yet) is the insistence by those damn liberal do-gooders that we all care about the environment, labor conditions, and health effects of the normal American lifestyle as it has emerged at the beginning of the 21st century. This hostility to liberal do-gooderism is something worth thinking about and I'll write more about it later this week (if this is not the line he is pursuing, I apologize to Goldberg -- but the inference seems a pretty straightforward one).

What strikes me as fascinating is Goldberg's actual reply,

As you may have heard, my book's full and official title is Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods. The subtitle with Hillary in it was originally a working title I never liked — for the thousandth time this isn't a book about Hillary Clinton (even if there is a chapter about her) — but the title got away from me for bureaucratic reasons. I'm glad I could prevail in getting the name changed, as this covers the spirit of the book more. Brad Plummer is having predictable good fun with it. Of course, he doesn't really seem to know what he's talking about (oh, and it's not like it's news to me that the owner of Whole Foods is a self-described libertarian but maybe the German obsession with organic food and environmentalism, for two examples, is news to Plummer). But that's okay, it's what I expected.

"[T}he German obsession with organic food and environmentalism," hmmm, interesting. It is true that in contemporary Germany, the Green party is a force to be reckoned with and also true that the first nature protection laws came out of the pre-war government of Hitler. Does this show a fascist/liberal link? Let's look at it.

A few years back, I wrote with a colleague in the Environmental Studies department an article entitled, "The Greening of White Pride" that looks at the differences between Nazi-era environmentalism, contemporary racist environmentalism (The American Nazi Party and the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, are overtly concern with environmental concerns), and contemporary liberal environmentalism and found interesting similarities and striking differences. Too much for a blog post, but the nature of the Nazi picture of nature is an interesting one.

Germany had always been last kid picked for kickball in Europe. Everyone else -- the Italians, the French, the British, the Portuguese, the Austro-Hungarians, the Spanish, the Dutch -- had been given their turn to be the big power in Europe, but Germany always seemed left out and looked down upon. Then came industrialization and the rise of a united Germany with science and culture. There was a new sense of pride and power that accompanied it.

But there was a downside to industrialization, pollution and factory work with its terrible working conditions had created conditions that undermined the health of those who had moved to the cities -- and there had been a major shift in population to the cities. This resulted in a significant public health crisis. If you examine the number of young men being given exemptions from military service for health reasons as a rough measure, you would see deeply troubling trends.

At the same time, there had been a baby boom. You had a generation that out-numbered anything their parents had seen coming up and this had an effect on German culture similar to what we saw here in the post-WWII era. The pull of the social gravity of such a large group caused there to be youth-based focus in the culture with fashion and popular culture idolizing everything youthful. With this power, they rebelled, seeking to overturn the power of the elders.

Seeing the industrialized future as not terribly bright and seeing the health problems dogging them and those slightly older, it resulted, much like the American version, in a back-to-the-land movement amongst the youth which included hiking, nudity, free love, and folk music. The Free Youth and Wandervogel movements gave rise to groups of youth who would take to the country, honoring the farmers whose fields they traversed, hiking long-distances, playing guitars.

This is the generation that would grow up to dominate the political scene in the 30s and 40s and they brought with them this deep-seated sense of the importance of the land and a very romanticized picture of nature. The notion of Heimat, literally meaning home but having the nationalist connotation of fatherland, not only includes the notion of a strong paternal parent that inspires and requires devotion, but is also deeply enmeshed with the sense of the land.

But they were very, very different from our hippie movement whose core values were much more communal and democratic bordering on anarchic in its radical distrust of centralized power. The Wandervogel groups, on the other hand, organized themselves around strong, charismatic leaders who were seen to rule over their members. There was a hierarchy, a strict leader who was the focus of political control in each cell. This meant that different groups had radically different ideologies. You had Wandervogel groups across the political spectrum.

Where the notion of radical freedom was the hallmark of American counter-culture ideals, for many of the groups, there was very of much of a militaristic nationalism to the earlier German counterpart. Again, while it was not universal, there was also a strong sense of anti-Semitism to many pockets. This came not only from German nationalism, but also a sense that bodily harm was being done to the German people and the nation as a whole by factories which were owned in caricature, of course, by money-grubbing Jews.

So, when these folks came to power, it is no surprise that nature protection laws would be something they would look to. Such laws had several political meanings. First, it was seen as a a nationalistic move, protecting the land is protecting the country. It is quite similar to contemporary conservative corporation-protection policies because as American conservatives hold to truism like "As goes General Motors, so goes America," the German nationalists held as goes the land, so goes Germany. But it was also clearly intended to be a slap to Jews; it was perfectly clear to Germans at that time who the land was being protected against.

The notion of "Jew," though, had a larger sense than believer in the God of Abraham. "Jew" in German political-speak at the time clearly referred to Weimar-supporters. It was under the Weimar government that many of the long-standing laws were lifted limiting Jews in much the same way that Jim Crow laws did in the US. Indeed, Walter Rathenau, a Jew had been made prime minister under Weimar. The Weimar government was liberal in both the contemporary and classical senses and this enraged the German conservatives who (1) never conceded that Germany lost WWI, but (2) held that if they did, it was because those damn liberals weren't patriotic enough in their support of the war effort that cost Germany (the superior and Divinely endorsed force) the war.

So, the Nazi nature protection laws came out of a context very different from contemporary environmental protection efforts. It more resembles gun-owner rights legislation than endangered species policy. As such, Goldberg's retort referring to "the German obsession with organic food and environmentalism" probably does not really support his case the way he thinks it does.