Plato, Dirty Harry, and Iraq

Reading over an old post at Mahablog, I was struck by the degree to which Plato foresaw our current quagmire. In the Ion and most famously in The Republic, Plato argues that the poets are dangerous to society. His two central arguments are (1) that the arts give the false impression of being able to convey truth, but are merely false imitations, and (2) they excite the passions which then suppress reason. An argument about the neo-conservative temperament that led us to the war in Iraq and away from sensible foreign policy and in large part caused the resulting loss of moral standing and influence around the world has been made by Barbara from Mahablog, Glenn Greenwald, and Digby from Hullabaloo, amongst others, pulls directly from Plato's discussions.

Digby starts with the gender piece:

The underlying premise of the modern conservative movement is that the entire Democratic party consists of a bunch of fags and dykes who are both too effeminate and too masculine to properly lead the nation. Coulter says it out loud. Dowd hints at it broadly. And the entire press corps giggles and swoons at this shallow, sophomoric concept like a bunch of junior high pom pom girls...Coulter stepped over the line because she used a bad word. But nobody on the right and most people in the media don't blink an eye at the implication of what she said. All this Claude Rainsing among certain rightwing bloggers and the press is just a little bit overdone, if you ask me. Being a "faggot" in common braindead GOP locker room parlance simply means being a Democrat and everybody knows it.

Glenn Greenwald then ties it into cultural gender archetypes:

That laughable absurdity really reveals the heart of this movement. It is a cult of contrived masculinity whereby people dress up as male archetypes like cowboys, ranchers, and tough guys even though they are nothing of the kind -- or prance around as Churchillian warriors because they write from a safe and protected distance about how great war is -- and in the process become triumphant heroes and masculine powerful icons and strong leaders. They and their followers triumph over the weak, effete, humiliated Enemy, and thereby become powerful and exceptional and safe.

He begins to attribute the source of this image as a political presupposition:

Just as what matters is that their leaders prance around as moral leaders (even while deviating as far as they want from those standards), what matters to them also is that their leaders play-act as strong and masculine figures, even when there is no basis, no reality, to the play-acting...Ronald Reagan never got anywhere near the war (claiming eyesight difficulties to avoid deployment in World War II), and he spent his life as a Hollywood actor, not a rancher, yet to this day, conservatives swoon over his masculine role-playing as though he is some sort of super-brave military hero.

Barbara, then closes the loop:

The faux masculinity celebrated by our culture equates violence with strength and power with potency. It is a rogue thing that does not honor the principles of civilization or the processes of governance. Like most John Wayne characters, or Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, following the rules is for girls and sissies. Why bother with a justice system when you’ve got a gun?...George W. Bush is an adolescent’s fantasy of what a president should be, just as John Wayne was an adolescent’s fantasy cowboy/lawman, and Dirty Harry an adolescent’s fantasy detective — easily bored with rules and talk, but quick on the trigger. Who needs diplomacy when you’ve got the biggest, baddest military in the world?

Does anyone seriously believe that those three little words, "Bring 'em on," were not intentionally chosen to evoke Eastwood's "Make my day"? Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who so vehemently objects to using International law as a source of legitimate premises in Constitutional interpretation, has no such reservations in citing precedent from imaginary places invoking the tv show 24 in his reasoning about torture. The entire picture laying behind the neo-conservative approach to governing is pulled lock, stock, and barrel out of the typical Charles Bronson, Bruce Willis, or Sylvester Stallone action thriller: there are good guys and evil guys, the evil guys are helped out by those smart, touchie-feelie morons who insist on following procedure, using fancy words, and being squeamish about the use of manly brute force and the only one who can save us is someone who don't speak the purty-talk, but throws out the rulebook by acting violently and decisively at the slightest provocation.

Our paper thin movie characters from poorly written plots designed to titillate the fantasies of pubescent boys have been mistaken for real life approaches to incredibly complex geo-political problems. We have been so conditioned by the standard Hollywood line that we confuse it for reality and so the media and much of country at large happily went along with a man dressed up to look like James Bond when dropped on an aircraft carrier, only to realize that the White House was actually occupied by our version of Maxwell Smart once the proverbial fan had been scatologically struck. Maybe Hollywood is as dangerous as conservatives have been telling us.

Of course, that point has been made before. Plato argued that drama is dangerous because it appears to present reality, but really is nothing but imitation. Truths come from understanding what is real; but when you watch a play (movies, even DVD rentals, were far too expensive back in Plato's time for the average Athenian to afford and so most went to plays), you are seeing reality filtered through a playwright's agenda-influenced mine, then produced in the limiting atmosphere of a stage with props, subject then to the actor's re-interpretation of it and finally your own limited perspective from the obstructed-view seats you sit in. Not exactly an optimal way to directly access the nature of the real.

Good governance requires the leaders to be as in touch with reality as possible, so having the rulers influenced by drama is incredibly dangerous.

If then we adhere to our original notion and bear in mind that our guardians, setting aside every other business, are to dedicate themselves wholly to the maintenance of freedom in the State, making this their craft, and engaging in no work which does not bear on this end, they ought not to practise or imitate anything else; if they imitate at all, they should imitate from youth upward only those characters which are suitable to their profession --the courageous, temperate, holy, free, and the like; but they should not depict or be skillful at imitating any kind of illiberality or baseness, lest from imitation they should come to be what they imitate. Did you never observe how imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind?

But not only does drama remove you from reality, it also whips you into a frenzy, allowing emotions like anger, fear, desire for revenge, to run roughshod over the intellect.

"When even the best of us hear Homer or any other of the tragic poets imitating one of the heroes in mourning and making quite an extended speech with lamentation, or, if you like, singing and beating his breast, you know that we enjoy it and that we give ourselves over to following the imitation; suffering along with the hero in all seriousness, we praise as a good poet the man who most puts us in this state."

When the final history of the period from Reagan to the second Bush is written, it will chronicle the unsuccessful attempt to place people who believed they were real-life comic book characters into some of the most complex, life and death situations history has ever had to offer and a public whose view of the world had been so corrupted by bad cinema that they went right along with them. War in Iran? Pass the popcorn. Hey, is that Richard Perle or Lee Marvin there on CNN?

Oversimplifying Politics

Channeling Jack Handy:

Conservatives are anti-gay marriage and anti-contraception. Liberals are anti-gun and anti-SUV. Conservatives oppose people having sex and liberals oppose what guys do to compensate for not having sex.

Lake Monsters and Science Museums

When we were up in Burlington, we took the kids to ECHO, the science museum and aquarium, at the Leahy Center for Lake Champlain. It's wonderful with lots of hands-on, active engagement activities for kids. There are great displays on the ecology, natural and cultural history of the area, and who knew there was a turtle called a stinkpot (the skunk of the aquatic set).

I will admit, I felt a bit uneasy, though, in the aquarium portion. Generally quite nice with interesting interactive shipwreck activities and tanks showing examples of the life in the lake that lay just outside the door of the museum, there was one large exhibit that gave me pause. It was dedicated to Champ, the resident lake monster of Lake Champlain.

Champ is much like his more famous but equally fictional cousin, the Loch Ness Monster, except without the Scottish brough and with a penchant for vegan Indian take-out. Champ is an inextricable part of local lore. The minor league baseball team is called the Lake Monsters. There are businesses throughout the area, like Champ's car wash, who trade on the story. He really is the unofficial mascot of the region.

But does he belong in a science museum in a display that clearly overstates the likelihood of his existence? In fact, in one room, they had a long roll of paper and told the children that it was Champ's birthday and they asked the kids to write birthday wishes and draw pictures to give to him at his party later on that night. The kids had fun, but is there a problem here?

To be fair, during Champ Week, the museum did sponsor a program called, "Believer or Skeptic" that was "A 20-minute family interactive program exploring the facts and legends of the Lake monster--celebrating Champ Week" and ran three nights during the week. But the Champ display is a standing exhibit, so the question remains.

The curmudgeon argument is clear. Science museums are for teaching science. By taking fictional characters and pseudo-scientific claims and create a false equivalence between them and real science, you make your otherwise wonderful facility into the equivalent of showing the Intelligent Design lobby's film "The Privileged Planet" in the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History and take yourself in a dangerous step towards the the Creation Museum. It would be like the Air and Space Museum having a display discussing the aerodynamic properties of Santa's sleigh.

On the other hand, there's the "lighten up, it's a silly pictorial of a lake monster that no one really takes seriously" defense, but there seems to be an even more interesting line on this side. Look, one might argue, the whole point of the museum is to excite children's interest and imagination around understanding the universe they live in. This exhibit, while propping up a myth that no scientist takes seriously, does excite the young minds and leads them to consider what else the world might hold, mysteries like those of quantum mechanics that are weirder by several orders of magnitude. When we teach physics, even at the collegiate level, we begin by teaching and testing students about Newtonian mechanics, a theory we know to be false. Why? Because it is pedagogically advantageous. In the case of college physics, it is to prepare students on an easier theory to be able to translate physical systems into mathematical models of second order-differential equations and to be able to solve those equations for easy cases, for the science museum it is the more modest goal of creating wonder in young minds and giving them the sense that there is a way to address the questions that wonder creates. If we can use falsehood to educate in the one case, why not in the other? It's just the scientific version of Plato's noble lie from the Republic.

So, does a fun exhibit about a mythical lake monster that does nothing to actively dispel the myth belong in a science museum?

Matters of Semantics

One of my pet peeves is the saying "it's just a matter of semantics" which is used to say that something is a completely trivial matter. Fact is, semantics is anything but trivial.

The study of language can be roughly divided into three parts: syntax looks at the formal structure of the language, things like word order, where the punctuation goes, how to put the blocks together kind of stuff. Semantics examines notions of meaning, reference, and truth. Pragmatics looks at utterances in context, how do we clearly get speaker's meanings which are nowhere contained in the spoken sentence -- if someone turns to you apropos of nothing and says, "The train is leaving the station," you do not look for railroad tracks, but know to check your fly. There are very intricate, technical, and difficult questions in all of these areas, but semantics is probably the trickiest of the lot.

And not only difficult, but important. What we mean by our words is not a matter to be taken lightly. If we define our words problematically, the results can be tragic. Two stories this week to highlight exactly this point:

The first is this article from the BBC which highlights a debate over the definition of clinical depression.

As I have learned from reading Aspazia's research over the years, the way that mental illnesses in the DSM (the psychiatrist's Chilton guide) are defined is not the clean neuro-anatomical sort of process you might think at the outset. For the most part, a group of psychiatrists chosen by a larger group of psychiatrists sit in a room and negotiate (a) whether the behavior pattern is outside the norm enough, debilitating or dangerous enough to the person or others with whom he may come in contact with, or in some other way sufficiently undesirable to warrant classification as a mental illness, (b) if so, which symptoms, thought patterns, emotions, or behaviors that tend to be associated with those diagnosed with the problem are the ones that ought to be the defining characteristics and which are mere accidental regularities. These are renegotiated every few years and change with advances in understanding of the causal mechanisms, advances in treatment, cultural norms, and "informational seminars" given by drug companies.

In this debate, one psychiatrist,

Professor Gordon Parker claims the threshold for clinical depression is too low and risks treating normal emotional states as illness.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, he calls depression a "catch-all" diagnosis driven by clever marketing.

But another psychiatrist writing in the journal contradicts his views, praising the increased diagnosis of depression.

The defining characteristics of clinical depression as we now have them set out are so broad, that people with normal blues are being categorized as suffering from a mental illness.

On the other hand,

Professor Ian Hickie writes that an increased diagnosis and treatment of depression has led to a reduction in suicides and removal of the old stigma surrounding mental illness.

Under the current diagnosis guidelines, around one in five adults is thought to suffer depression during their lifetime. This costs the UK economy billions in lost productivity and treatment.

According to this line, the essential properties of depression are set out to make sure that all depressive cases are captured and this has significant social value.

Who is right? Don't know, but this question of semantics is certain more than trivial word play. Medicating those who do not need it and preventing suicide certain do not strike me as unimportant.

The second comes from a discussion over at the Maiden's blog. We use the term "killing" to distinguish certain acts from "murder." In both cases, someone takes life, but the former term sheds the moral component that is a part of the latter. A similar move has been tried by those who have introduced the term "enhanced interrogation techniques," into our political and cultural lexicon. The idea is to differentiate it from torture by removing any ethical connotation. This, then, allows us to torture, but because we have recategorized it, it no longer should give us second thoughts.

We have had two semantic assaults upon our social vocabulary in the last couple of generations. Political correctness sought to replace terms pregnant with the biases of the past. The labels we give to people come loaded with images and stereotypes that enforced an unfair distribution of power. Naively, it was thought to be "only a matter of semantics" that could be fixed by using new terms by all "colloquial English speaking-Americans."

That turned out not to be the case, but the plot was picked up by the right and political correctness became patriotic correctness and the same game was played. "Conservative" became "pro-American." "Civilian deaths" became "collateral damage." The damndest thing, though, was that where the first pc failed, the second one has been much more successful. The results, of course, are now out there in the world for all to mourn.

If we really want to change the world, we not only have to change politics and legislative and executive power holders, we need to reclaim our language. The path to a better world is "just a matter of semantics."

UPDATE:
And then there's this little semantic gem from LGM:

"The Anti Defamation League has fired its New England regional direction for insisting that the group recognize as genocide the circa-1915 slaughter of perhaps a million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks... A resolution pending in Congress would make it official U.S. policy to recognize that the Armenians were genocide victims. But the ADL, along with other leading Jewish-American groups, apparently considers friendly relations between Israel and Turkey--whose government takes genocide claims as a massive provocation--more important than the underlying historical question."


In other words, the Anti-Defamation League is trying to prevent recognition of the Armenian Genocide, an event that Adolf Hitler *explictly* used to justify the Holocaust.

Wow.

Wow, indeed.

Authoritarianism and the Habits of Philosophers

One of the bad habits of philosophers is to try to provide argumentation from reason alone for points that need observable evidence. I call this move the "philosophers' fallacy" and even I fall prey to it. But as a wise man once said, "Baby, even the losers get lucky sometimes." (O.k., maybe not wise, but he wrote some darn good tunes.)

Such was the case with my post Conservatives Look at "Who" and Liberals Look at "What" that dates back about a year and a half or so. In it, I argued in this way:

For conservatives, the game is never in questions; it is only a matter of who is going to win. On the line is absolute power. Control is the goal and in a dog eat dog world, it is either us or them. If you are not for us having all the power, then you are for them. You are with us or with the terrorists. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The game is invariant, it is simply a question of having the combination of the power and the will to win. We have the power, without question, and thus it simply becomes a question of will.

Liberals, on the other hand, see the game itself as that which needs changing. They see conservatives from all sides locked in the international relations equivalent of stupid frat boy games of punching each other more and more viciously to see who will flinch first and they think the whole thing stupid, childish and counterproductive to the real lives of real people, people who are needlessly suffering. It is not a question of winning or losing the game, it is a question of stopping the game and playing something else, something cooperative, a game that will not convey absolute power to any side.

Indeed, the terms conservatives and liberals are the wrong terms to use here. They indicate political left and right, but that's not what is at issue here. What we are really talking about here is authoritarianism vs. anti-authoritarianism. There have been horrible authoritarians on the left and the right. We can point to the same sort of play for absolute power by American neo-conservatives, British colonialists, Augusto Pinochet,... as by those who espouse far left ideologies like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. In the same way, you can hear anti-authoritarian views on the left and the right (Karl Popper is an example from the right). It just so happens that at this place and at this time, contemporary views line up so that nationalism and the justification of authoritarian actions by it are coming from the American political right.

The anti-authoritarian left does something that the authoritarian right cannot make sense of, they broaden the scope of discussion. The left acknowledges that the system is a human construct which we can -- by considerable political effort and at considerable financial cost -- radically overhaul. We can change the sociological factors that help create the society we live in. The right ignores sociology, instead positing only a very naive atomistic psychology of freedom to individuals. This is what is behind the conservative rhetoric of "personal responsibility," it is all about making sure that the focus remains on the individual and that consideration is never given to changing the structure within which the individuals are embedded.

The claim here is that there are different sorts of people, those who defend the foundations of the power of the authorities and those who seek to undermine it for the broader well-being of all involved. That is an empirical claim, something that is not speculative philosophy, but empirical psychology. This is the sort of thing for which one would need data from working social scientists.

Thanks to this post by Moonbat, over at Mahablog, we now know of a psychologist who has not only been doing this work, but who has written a popular account of the research on authoritarian personality types (both authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers) and has even made it available for free download.

In the first chapter, he writes:

Authoritarian followers…support the established authorities in their society, such as government officials and traditional religious leaders. Such people have historically been the “proper” authorities in life, the time-honored, entitled, customary leaders, and that means a lot to most authoritarians. Psychologically these followers have personalities featuring:

* a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society;
* high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
* a high level of conventionalism.

Because the submission occurs to traditional authority, I call these followers rightwing authoritarians. I’m using the word “right” in one of its earliest meanings, for in Old English “riht”(pronounced “writ”) as an adjective meant lawful, proper, correct, doing what the authorities said.

In North America, people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives, so you can call them “right-wingers” both in my new-fangled psychological sense and in the usual political sense. But someone who lived in a country long ruled by Communists and who ardently supported the Communist Party would also be one of my psychological right-wing authoritarians even though we would also say he was a political left-winger. So a right-wing authoritarian follower doesn’t necessarily have conservative political views. Instead he’s someone who readily submits to the established authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly conventional. It’s an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics.

Score a lucky shot for the philosophers.

The book is a wonderful read and would make a great basis for a class to be team-taught by a psychologist and either a philosopher or political scientist. Indeed, it seems to lend credence to Hanno's reading of Hobbes who argues in the Leviathan that we must have a social contract to protect us from ourselves because we are nasty, selfish, backstabbing jerks. Hanno's take is that Hobbes is not making a universal claim about all humans, but merely positing a sociological claim that there will always be some amongst us who are like that and having just a handful of such people is enough to start the political theory ball rolling. What we get from decades of research on authoritarian personality types is a modern account of Hobbes' picture.

Altmeyer recounts an his variant of the famous Zimbardo prison experiment. In the original, graduate students at Stanford were divided up into two groups, prisoners and prison guards, and put in a prison environment with the guards having complete control over the prisoners. The results were frightening. The experiment famously had to be stopped because of the increasingly sadistic behavior of the guards.

In Altmeyer's variant, he first gives a questionnaire to test the degree of one's authoritarian disposition. He then sets up a situation in which those who are on the authoritarian end of the scale are in charge and compares it to what happens when those who are on the anti-authoritarian part of the spectrum are given the chance to lead. The results are both unsurprising and incredible. Those with authoritarian tendencies destroy the whole out of selfish and vindictive aggression, whereas those with an anti-authoritarian bent are generally willing to work out creative solutions that benefit everyone. Where Zimbardo's experiment leaves us wistfully wondering if we are doomed to repeat the worst horrors of human history over and over again, Altmeyer gives us hope that if only we select the right leaders, the world can be a more peaceful place conducive to human flourishing and begins to sketch out what the qualifications look like.

Most people, of course, are somewhere in the middle of the scale and very much influenced by the world around us. We obey two masters, morality and normality, and when they disagree normality wins in the overwhelming number of cases. Consider variants the Stanley Milgram ran on his famous experiment in submission to authority. In the original, a subject is told by the experimenter when to push a button that the subject thinks applies an electrical shock of increasing intensity to a fellow subject (really a confederate). The level of intensity clearly grew as the experiment went on until the last buttons which gave what the subject believed to be lethal. In Milgram's version, the majority, 62% of the subjects followed the authority and pushed the button that they believed executed a person whose only crime was getting picked to be on the wrong side of a psychology experiment. And they only did it because an authority told them to.

In the variant, the experiment was conducted next to two confederates supposedly performing the same experiment, so as the subject was engaged in the experiment, he had a model of someone else's behavior to observe. In one set, the other "subject" would comply with the will of the authority and in the other, the he would disobey and stop the experiment. When those around them defied authority, 90% of the test subjects also did. When the "other" subject obeyed authority, 92% of the real test subjects did as well.

We are incredibly plastic beings. Alfred Adler said, "To be human is to be insecure." The pull to be normal, to fit in with the world around us is often overwhelming, even when we know we shouldn't. But when that normality contains examples of those who stand up to authority, when the norm includes rational consideration of and acting on what is right, this changes us and changes the world. Anne Herbert's sentiment "Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty" may be cheesy, sappy, and crunchy, but the research seems to support its efficacy. To quote Altmeyer,

[T]he vast majority of us have had practically no training in our lifetimes in openly defying authority. The authorities who brought us up mysteriously forgot to teach that. We may desperately want to say no, but that turns out to be a huge step that most people find impossibly huge -- even when the authority is only a psychologist you never heard of running an insane experiment, and your obedience means you probably are going to kill someone. From our earliest days, we are told disobedience is a sin, and obedience is a virtue, the "riht" thing to do.

So those of us who are authorities -- parents, professors, bosses -- can our behavior in encouraging insubordination really affect the world? That, of course, tends to be another habit of philosophers, this one seems to be a good one, though.

Comedist Festival of the Ascention: The Captain is a Very Moral Man

Brothers, Sisters, and Transgendered Comedists Everywhere,

This week we celebrate one of the holiest days of the year, the anniversary of the day Groucho took his place at the head table in Comedy heaven. We'll have more biographical details in a few weeks on the feast day of Saint Groucho, but it is appropriate at this time to recall an episode from his last years.

As an old man, Groucho had become more and more frail and more and more isolated from the world. As often happens, he became depressed. His nurse and caretaker, a woman with whom the family would have legal squabbles over his estate, had an idea. She set up a one night engagement at Carnegie Hall called "An Evening With Groucho Marx." No script, no rehearsals, Groucho would simply tell stories to whoever would pay to listen to them. He would once again have his fans. He would feel connected. He would feel loved.

Needless to say, it sold out. Marvin Hamlisch came out and played a Beethoven piano sonata that slowly turned into "Hurray for Captain Spaulding." Dick Cavett gave a beautiful brown-nosed introduction and out came Groucho. The first joke of the night, however, was not by Groucho, but on him. Unbeknownst to the star of the show, upon entering the building, each member of the audience was supplied and encouraged to wear his or her very own Groucho nose and glasses, so upon taking the stage Groucho looked out over a sea of Grouchos. For all those assembled who loved the man and who had been given the gift of so many laughs through the years, some during the dark days of the Depression, to give one back to Groucho and help him out of his own depression was an example where turn-about was not merely fair play, but exquisite play.

The actor Frank Ferrante used this performance as a model for a one and a half-man play (he has a piano player) called "An Evening with Groucho." When it came to Frederick where I live, LilBro and I bought three tickets and took TheOldMan as a Father's Day present, a Comedist guy's night out. In deference to the original "An Evening With Groucho Marx," they decided to do the same audience gag, but since plastic Groucho nose and glasses would be cost prohibitive for a small show on the road, instead they handed out pieces of black electrical tape so everyone would at least have a Groucho Marx moustache.

Let me tell you a little about Frederick, Maryland. Equidistant from Baltimore to the east and Washington, D.C. to the south, the sprawl from both areas is overlapping at Frederick and it is now exploding with sub-development after sub-development. This is changing the character of the place a bit. When I was growing up, it was out in the sticks and nicknamed "Fredneck." The changing demographics have altered the character of the town somewhat, but there are certainly parts of the region where the old Frederick is still alive and well. Places where you go to buy sheets and don't ask for twin, full, or queen, but 42 regular. Places where the pillow cases already have the eye-holes sewn in.

So, it was a little off-putting when the people handing out the electrical tape were being a little cheap with the lengths they were distributing. Now, it was certainly an innocent mistake to hand out pieces far too small to make people look like Groucho, surely made out of concern for the amount of tape on hand and the number of people in the hall; but as we sat there, clearly the only three Jews in the joint, and the small pieces of tape were applied beneath the noses, we suddenly found ourselves in Frederick surrounded by hundreds of Adolf Hitler look-a-likes.

It was all a bit unsettling until my Dad gestured towards the man in the seat in front of LilBro, a chubby, balding man with a gray thinning comb-over (think Micheal Vale, the actor who played the "time to make the doughnuts" baker in the old Dunkin' Donuts commercials) and whispered to us, "Doesn't he look like the guy from the audition scene in 'The Producers'?" HE DID! That was it for the two of us until the show started. We were rolling. A holy man, my father.

So, in the name of my father, his son, and Groucho's holy spirit, I wish all of you a happy weekend. We'll close, today with some of Groucho's words from "An Evening With Groucho Marx."

I was in Italy, I was in Rome. Wonderful city. And I'd just lit a dollar cigar, and I was walking to the corner, and somebody bumped against me. It was a dollar cigar, I wasn't gonna let it lay there, so I reached down to pick it up, and I said "Jesus Christ!" And I turned around, and there is two priests standing next to me, and one of them had bumped against me. He reached in here and pulled out two cigars, and he said "Groucho, you've just said the secret word."

I did a bond tour during the Second World War. It was Hope and Crosby and Cagney - most of the big stars. Desi Arnaz. Yeah, he was on it. We were raising money, and we played Boston and Philadelphia and most of the big cities. And we got to Minneapolis. There wasn't any big theater to play there, so we did our show in a railroad station. Then I told the audience, that I knew a girl in Minneapolis. She was also known in St.Paul, she used to come over to visit me. She was know as the Tail Of Two Cities. I didn't sell any more bonds, but eh...they didn't allow me to appear anymore.

When we did "Animal Crackers" we needed two minutes for a change - a scenery change - so I wrote a ridiculous poem. And I always think of whether the audiences really listens to the actor on the stage. I wrote the most ridiculous poem, you could possibly write, and tried it on the audience. And the first three weeks we did the show, we used to get a sophisticated New York audience, and they used to laugh and they used to applaud at the end. Then we started to get the out-of-towners, people from the middle west, and they though I were serious. Here's the way it goes:

Did you ever sit and ponder, as you walk along the strand,
that life's a bitter battle at the best.
And if you only knew it you would lend a helping hand,
then every man could meet the final test.
The world is but a stage, my friend, and life's but a game,
and how you play is all that matters in the end.
But whether a man is right or wrong, a woman gets the blame,
and your mother is your dog's best friend.
Then up came mighty Casey, and strode up to the bat,
and Sheridan was fifty miles away.
For it takes a heap of loving to make a home like that,
on the road to where the flying fishes play.

Then I used to take a chair, which the vaudeville actors used to do in those days, and I would start walking off the stage, and the last line would be:

So be a real life Pagliac'
and laugh, Clown, laugh.

Live, love, and laugh, clown laugh,

Irreverend Steve

Harry Potter, Ricky Gervais, Marcel Duchamp, and the Preconditions for Great Art

A comment by Gwydion in the Harry Potter thread the other day (that launched quite a discussion), touched upon the topic I had intended to bring up for discussion while writing that post: "What are the preconditions for creating great art, work that advances its artistic community or that impacts the broader society?" Gwydion expressed cynicism about the quality of art that generated tremendously high sales.

At the risk of putting words in the mouth of my dear friend, one could make the argument this way:

-- Great art is dangerous art in that it is both innovative and challenging of the status quo either in society or in the art itself.

-- Most people, being part of the status quo being challenged, at the time the great art is produced and first performed/displayed will be baffled or insulted by it.

-- People do not lend monetary support to art that baffles or insults them.

Therefore, great art will not be richly compensated early on.

The logically equivalent contrapositive of this claim then would be that if someone is made filthy rich off of their artistic endeavor, it won't be great art. It may be fine entertainment, but that it something entirely different from great art.

We have the stereotype of the starving artist and we have arts advocacy groups combing the culture for funding. The question then is whether significant funding would produce more art, but at the same time suppress the creation of great art. Is it more than a caricature to say that novel, exciting work requires artists with an edge, with an axe to grind and if we flooded the arena with funding, you'd see artists become complacent, become accustomed to comfort and therefore create only the art which would maintain their newly found lifestyle? By bringing artists inside the bubble, would they become invested in keeping it inflated instead off playing their real role of gadfly trying to burst it? Neil Young's "Sixty to Zero" includes the lines:

And he picked up the phone
And said, "Send me a songwriter
Who's drifted far from home
And make sure that he's hungry
And make sure he's alone
And send me a cheeseburger
And a new Rolling Stone."

The idea here is that even TheMan is well aware that if you want really good artistic work, you need someone hungry.

The question then can be moved from the personal to the sociological. On the BBC's program "World Update," there was an interesting meditation on Wednesday from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival concerning the fading influence of British humor. At one time, Brits were the leading edge of comedy world, but no longer. with a few notable exceptions like Ricky Gervais, the Isles are not the go-to location for innovative humor as it was for several generations.
One English comedian blamed it on New Labor. British society had lost its edge, post-Thatcher there has not been the sense of anxiety that currently exists in the States and this is why American comics were now funnier. Americans tend to be louder and more in your face and that style of stand-up is now more the rage precisely because there is more rage in America.

One could find evidence for this line by pointing to the rise of Dada and Surrealism as a direct response to the horrors of World War I. If we see art as reactive, does it follow that the figure of great art requires the ground of social or personal upheaval, oppression, or starvation? Can we say anything meaningful about the preconditions for the arising of great art? Does feeding an artist kill off the drive for artistic innovation?

Calendar Denial

It's that time of year. The fall is just about here. Don't get me wrong. I love teaching. I love my students (especially the ones who read this blog). But I hate giving up summer. In fact, at this point I'm simply retreating into denial. If only we think enough summer thoughts, and refuse to give aid and comfort to autumn by listening to the blame summer first crowd, the season will stay all year long. The planetary theory of the seasons is only a theory.


Ice cream

Hard or soft?

(We asked this last year, but it's worth revisiting.)

Jimmies or sprinkles?

Chocolate or rainbow?




Corn on the cob

Typewriter or rounder?

Salt, butter, both, or neither?

Zeitgeist, Harry Potter, and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I tend to do little pop culture analysis and criticism here. I wish I could cite some high-minded principle for it, but the truth is, I'm simply out of touch. I'm a late adopter, generally coming to the party long after the pop buffet is closed and the cultural keg is kicked.

Case in point, we've just now started reading the first Harry Potter book to the elder shorty, the first I've read of the series at all (haven't seen the movies either). We're enjoying it.

It's well-written and entertaining enough, but the whole time I found myself distracted, unable to shake that weird nagging feeling, "I know it's not possible, but I'm sure I know you from somewhere." Then it hit me, Harry Potter is Arthur Dent. A smart, but kind-hearted and understated nebish who gets yanked from English normality (a normality that was always stacked against him because of his sensitive nature) and is forced to find his bumbling way through a new world full of what we would consider supernatural occurrences, but which are seen as the norm in the parallel world. The Harry Potter series is this generation's Hitchhikers' Guide trilogy.

While it may not have received the marketing circus hoopla surrounding Harry Potter, it is a great mistake to underestimate the influence of Douglas Adams on popular culture. The term "Trekkie" is applied now to any group obsessed with a cultural phenomenon and the media loves to trot out Star Wars folks whenever they want to have one of those "look at the weirdos, aren't we superior" moments. But Hitchhikers' has gone largely unnoticed because the influence was much more subtle, although I would argue, much more pervasive.

Those books were read by virtually everyone in two generations who become the bulk of the intellectual community. They established the internal coolness of geek society providing the nerdier amongst us with a sense of self-confidence that arose from having a common model of snark that could differentiate us in being hip enough to get the joke without emulating the nastiness of the Heathers who sneered at us and whom we had no desire to be like. Because our hero in no way fit the mold of American strong silent types who speak in bumper sticker catchphrases, but rather came in a package filled with witty, but spot on indictments of the norm, we could be proud to be who we were and have no fear about having fun being it.

There has long been a strain of comedy for the intellectual (I hesitate to call it "hip" because that in someway denotes being fashionable, but is accurate in describing the sense that you need to be hip to get it). Stan Freberg, whom I mentioned a few posts ago, was part of a similar movement in the 40s through early 60s with others like Fred Allen, Ernie Kovacs, and the horribly neglected Henry Morgan (many, many thanks Helmut for sending along that fantastic link), and Monty Python in the 60s and 70s were also there, of course, so Douglas Adams in no way invented this slot. But the Hitchhikers' books did seem to be influential in making it a stable genre in the popular arts that would be later occupied by folks like They Might Be Giants, The Kids in the Hall, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and others across the spectrum of pop media.

I can say without reservation that Douglas Adams is one of the most significant influences on my personal writing (and teaching) style and I would argue further that he is one of the primary stylistic influences of the entire blogosphere. Think about how many blog entries out there have the same tone, the same cadence, and attempt the same relative proportions of insight and snark that you find in the "entries" in the Guide. Indeed, it's not hard to see the Internet itself as an actualization of The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, which Adams described this way:

"The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy" is a wholly remarkable book. Perhaps the most remarkable, certainly the most successful book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor. More popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-Three More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway? It's already supplanted the Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for two important reasons. First, it's slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC printed in large friendly letters on its cover.

Slap "DON'T PANIC" on the back of every blackberry or the top of every Wikipedia entry and tell me that isn't almost exactly what Douglas Adams had in snugly embedded in Ford Prefect's satchel.

I have no doubt that what The Hitchhikers' Guide is for my generation and the one that followed, Harry Potter will be for the next. J. K. Rowling's style will help shape the next generation of thinkers and popular writers. I don't know if the Harry Potter books, because they reach beyond geek culture to the mainstream, will have the same galvanizing effect upon the subset of youngsters taken to reading and thinking more deeply than is expected (or rewarded) by their peers. So I wonder what the ultimate effects will be.

One of the differences between the two is tone. Potter is much darker and heavier than Hitchhikers'. Is this just a temperamental difference between the authors or an indication of something deeper? Is the spirit of the times now heavier? Hitchhikers' was charming in its jolly cynicism. It was fantastic social criticism, but always effervescent, even in unmasking the horrible. Potter, on the other hand, is much more realist in its sensibilities. Nerds get picked on and they are filled with rage and ressentiment. This anger which takes forms from out-bursts to self-loathing are depicted with unsettling clarity in Harry Potter. A BBC report today discussed the waning British influence in the world of comedy (more on that tomorrow), I wonder if this is an effect of the same sociological shift that guided the move from Hitchhikers' to Potter, a sense that the times are more serious. It is a poor scientist who draws conclusions from two data points, but then I never claimed to be scientist. Does the move indicate something interesting in a shift in the larger Zeitgeist?

Karl Rove: Portrait of the Bullshit Artist as an Old Man

A colleague was discussing Karl Rove today and the word she kept using was "smug." Here's a man who is leaving in a hurry, which is generally an indication that one is either being pushed or chased, yet there remains the ubiquitous smugness.

What accounts for it, I believe, is a complete lack of seriousness. Not that Rove is not intense and driven, I mean a deeper metaphysical capriciousness. It is one thing to treat everything as if it were a game, it is another to actually believe it is all a game. Here is the kid who cheated his way to a championship trophy and who believes that all those who object are just jealous that they weren't gamesmen enough to beat him.

Does anyone have much doubt that it was Rove who Ron Suskind quoted in his New York Times Magazinearticle,

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

The postmoderninsts were seduced by the idea of deconstruction, convinced that the ultimate political act was to peel back the layers of belief to expose politics where epistemology was thought to be. But Rove realized that deconstruction was for losers, it was an autopsy. The job you want is Dr. Frankenstein, building the monster in the first place. Preconstruction is the place of postmodern winners, deconstruction is for whiners.

But this game requires rejecting truth and the notion of objective reality that accompanies it. Rove was the ultimate bullshit artist, in the technical sense of Harry Frankfurt.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Truth is usefulness. Reality is what you get everyone to believe. All is maleable.

Rove leaves smug because he doesn't think reality has caught up to him, after all, he hasn't let it...at least in the reality he creates.

Merv Griffin and Prostate Cancer

Sad news today. Merv Griffin died yesterday of prostate cancer. Originally diagnosed in 1996 and treated, the cancer came back and claimed the life of the famed talk show host and brain behind Jeopardy among many other great game shows.

Prostate cancer kills more men than any other disease with the exception of lung cancer. Almost a quarter of a million men are diagnosed with the disease each year and more than 30,000 die from it.

My beach reading during last week's vacation was a wonderful book, Dr. Katz's Guide to Prostate Health: From Conventional to Holistic Therapies, by Aaron E. Katz, the director of Columbia University's "Center for Holistic Urology." I strongly recommend it for everyone, whether you have a prostate yourself or know someone who does. In fact, it would make a great present this holiday season because nothing says "Merry Christmas," quite like a book by a Jewish urologist.

The book is a study in the right way to communicate science to the public. Dr. Katz does a marvellous job clearly explaining to those of us with no medical background the processes that are supposed to be occurring when things are working properly and the mechanisms behind what goes wrong when the prostate enlarges and/or cancer develops. I'll admit that any book with the word "holistic" in the title makes me nervous because there are so many charlatans who hide snake oil behind it, but this book does a wonderful job separating "the hope from the hype," as he puts it, explaining the results of the scientific studies that have looked at the various pharmaceutical, surgical, herbal, and lifestyle approaches to dealing with cancer and with general prostate health. Here's a guy who is near the top of the ladder in mainstream medicine giving an honest appraisal of what is happening both the traditional and alternative health communities.

Good health requires active engagement. When talking of prostatitis, inflammation of the prostate, an extremely common development accounting for about a quarter of all urological visits by men, Katz writes,

Bottom line: Men who struggle with chronic prostatitis must tak their health into their own hands. They end up having to become the world's leading experts on their disease, with their doctors running a close second.

[This was actually the funniest line in the book when read in its full context, "When a man ejaculates, his genitournary tract is bathed in a substance called prostatic antibacterial factor. It does a good job killing off pathogens. In a study of men with prostatitis who abstained from sex, a prescription of twice daily masturbation for six months provided moderate to complete relief for 78 percent of the 18 subjects...Bottom line: Men who struggle with chronic prostatitis must take their health into their own hands."]

The idea here is that one cannot depend solely upon your doctor to be completely up to date on all possible effective treatments,

Men in other parts of the world, particularly Europe, commonly use natural medicines and successfully avoid prostate surgery and drugs. Even mainstream urologists are starting to hear about these therapies, because the science is sophisticated and the results are impressive.

Why haven't you heard more about these therapies, then? Because these natural medicines, which cannot be patented, simply aren't profitable enough to the large drug companies. Since drug companies can't make big profits on natural substances, they don't put the money into the research or the advertising necessary to put a natural medicine on the map.

Doctors who want to know more about natural medicines have to do their own homework -- not an easy task when added to the huge amount of allopathic (normal medical) research in which they are expected to stay current, not to mention learning how to do new procedures or finding out about new drugs.

Doctors are swamped. Few realize that they not only see patients during regular hours and off-hours on-call, but also have regular exams to test that they are up-to-date on advances in their field. Keeping current in the advances of mainstream medicine is a daunting task. Add to that, the fact that drug reps are constantly knocking on the office door to meet with them to give them free pens, memo pads, and information about the latest pharmaceuticals, and the additional fact that there is, of course, a natural bias against these hippy-dippy approaches because medicine has gotten better over time at dealing with most ailments, so why look backwards to what we did when we weren't as good at treating the problem.

Some of these remedies are old wives's tales, others aren't. Some are extremely effective, others not so much. The problem is that most of us have no way of telling one from the other and the people who can aren't paying too much attention because the system is set up so that they can't and/or won't. That's why this book is so helpful. It is very much pro-traditional medicine, but in a way that makes you realize that your health is something that you can effect by small changes in your everyday life (he types while eating his cranberries, blueberries, and pumpkin seeds). If there is a silver lining in the passing of Merv Griffin, maybe it'll be some attention paid to helping ourselves avoid this all too common disease.

The Feast of Saint Stan

Brothers, Sisters, and Transgendered Comedists Everywhere,

This week saw the 82nd birthday of one of my favorite funny men of all time, Stan Freberg. The man is a true Comedist Saint, extremely funny and extremely insightful, and a truly fine human being. Beginning his career as cartoon voiceman for Warner Brothers, he learned the subtlety of delivery and what could be done when two voices really had chemistry, something he learned from the master of comedic cartoon voice-overs, Mel Blanc (hallowed be thy name). His most famous characters were the mouse Hubie which he played opposite Blanc's Bertie and the terrier Chester which he played opposite Blanc's bulldog Spike.

He moved into radio where he was chosen by CBS to fill the biggest Comedic shoes there were, he was put in Jack Benny's slot. Unfortunately, the gig didn't last because he demanded that his sponsor not be a tobacco or alcohol company.

He made a series of fine comedy albums and ultimately ended up on television, making appearances on the Ed Sullivan show as a puppeteer. But his biggest influence on the medium came in advertising which he revolutionized by creating the first ads designed to capture the audience with their humor. Those who are reading and think they've never heard Stan Freberg, one word and you'll realize how many times you've heard him in ads.

But perhaps his greatest work was his 1961 album, Stan Freberg Presents The History of the United States of America, Part I. I've been fortunate in this life to have many delightfully enjoyable moments, but among the happiest were the many hours LilBro and I spent playing and replaying and replaying that album. I don't know the last time I heard it, but I have no doubt that the two of us could perform the whole thing straight through from "It's a round, round world" to the battle of Yorktowne without missing a beat. It is clever, sharp, and roll on the floor funny. Freberg is the absolute master of the sideways comment. His main scriptline is tight and beautifully crafted, something that would be masterful comedy by itself; but then his work is littered with pun-filled repartee that is nothing short of genius. If you've never heard History of the United States, please find a copy. It is a real treat.

The real story behind Thanksgiving:


"What do you mean you cooked the turkey?"
"I cooked the turkey."
"O.k., let me get this straight, you took our national bird and stuck it in the oven."
"Well, yeah."
"Charlie, the turkey was for the centerpiece."
"Well, I, uh,..."
"And just as everyone had their mouths set for roast eagle with all the trimmings."
"I'm sorry...well, what do we do now?"
"Well, I guess we'll have to serve it. Kind of scrawny, though, don't you think?"
"Yeah, I had an idea. I figured we could stuff it with old bread, make it look bigger."
"It might work."

"We going out on that joke?"
"No, we do reprise of song...that help."
"But, not much...."
"No."

Happy birthday Stan Freberg and many funny returns!

Live, love, and laugh,

Irreverend Steve

The Winner in Last Night's Debate? Frank Luntz

Last night on Logo, a gay-focused cable station, most of the Democratic candidates attended a forum to discuss GLBT issues (Biden and Dodd were no-shows as were all of the Republicans who were also invited to participate). The winner of that debate, Frank Luntz.

There was universal agreement on preventing discrimination in housing, the workplace, the military, on everything except...yup, gay marriage. The two bottom tier candidates, Gravel and Kucinich, had no problem with it; but the front-runners, Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, all said they're in favor of separate but equal civil unions. Why would that be? Why are prominent Democrats no longer afraid to stand up in front of an openly gay and lesbian crowd, face tough questions about their stances on human rights, but in the end gingerly tip-toeing around this one question about equal rights under the law?

The answer has nothing to do with the issue itself, but with the incredible success of a rhetorical strategy employed by the right that we can call "cage and frame." The move has, as the name denotes, two steps. One of them, framing, has been elucidated by Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, who correctly points out that the words we use are not mere "hello, my name is" stickers that we apply to objects in the world allowing us to refer to objects in a value-free way. Words, rather, are pregnant with worldviews, with assumptions about how things work and beliefs about their harmfulness or helpfulness. Our names for things are frames that cast the things we talk about in a certain light, a light that will highlight some aspect of the thing in a way that will lead us towards or away from certain views of it.

Notice how we call it "gay marriage" instead of "universal marriage." The name that we give the issue frames the debate around whether them, the scary other, those "weird gay people," should be given a right, and not about whether or not legal marriage with its privileges like hospital visitation, inheritance, and power of attorney should be free from bigotry should be a part of our laws. Of course, it is about that, but the name, like a magician's misdirection, leads your mind in one direction and not the other.

But that framing is not the only thing that is happening here. The second part to the rhetorical trick is caging. The idea here to take a collection of related issues that you want buried away from the public eye, concerns on which you not only don't want action, but you don't even want discussed, and you group them together. Of those, you pick one, generally the one that is easiest for you to frame in a way favorable to your cause and put it and it alone on the table. All other issues are put in a cage, safely beyond the consciousness of the general public because the one you've allowed out of the cage sucks up all the oxygen in the room. As long as you present a boisterous debate -- the more noisy, rage-filled, and contentious the better. Because of the displayed passion by those on both sides, people will be fooled into thinking that there is free and open discourse about all issues. Meanwhile, you've tied it all up and made sure that nothing would happen on any of them.

And that is precisely what we saw last night. The right has successfully caged all gay rights issues except for universal marriage. This gave the disappointingly cowardly front-runners the cover they needed to put on a strong face and say that they were more than willing to stand with those in favor of human rights...right up to the point of marriage. Why could they not go that step when there is absolutely no difference philosophically? Because we have allowed the right to cage all the other issues and frame this one.

What we saw last night was not only evidence that their strategy is successful, but also a reinforcement of the frame from our side, reinforcement in the Pavlovian sense that only makes the bigoted and morally problematic political baggage more deeply entrenched in how the issue is approached anytime, anywhere. Who won the debate? Frank Luntz, the man who masterminded the strategy, and all those who stand against full and legitimate equality under the law of all Americans. I am thrilled that the step was taken to bring GLBT issues out into an open forum widely attended by most of those vying for the Democratic nomination, but deeply disappointed at what they ended up doing with the opportunity.

Thoughts on the Asterisk

Want to add my two cents on the asterisk question. The hard part is keeping straight exactly what the asterisk is being applied to. Is it the home run record? Is it the claim that Bonds is one of the greatest ever? Is it his claim to being Hall-of-Fame worthy?

Jeff Maynes is exactly right that comparing players of different eras is often an act in futility, although as Hanno is fond of saying, you can compare apples to oranges...they're both round, they're both fruit... Baseball is baseball (deep tautology), but that doesn't mean the game isn't different in important but non-essential ways. The 90s and early 00s just happen to be different in a big, let's say, an unnaturally suddenly very BIG way.

If someone gets ahead by cheating, then they generally are not to be considered one of the legendary players since it was not his skill that made him what he was. But what is to count as cheating? It cannot simply be breaking the rules. Sometimes, as in fouls late in the game in basketball when losing by a small amount, breaking the rules is necessary for playing the game well. Then what is it?

The conflict about Barry Bonds is the conflict we have between two definitions of cheating. On the one hand, cheating is when you do something that brings an increase in performance without a similar increase in effort or skill. Corking a bat, for example, allows one to hit the ball farther without being stronger or any more skilled at hitting. It is in this way that we consider performance enhancing drugs to be cheating. Shots that would have been long fly balls to the warning track are now suddenly back a few rows in the stands. Jeff Maynes notes the sudden jump in numbers and there's little doubt that some of that is attributable to more than hard work in the batting cage and weight room in the off-season.

On the other hand, the other definition is acting counter to what Fred D'Agostino calls the "ethos of the game." Every game has a set of unspoken rules. Those unspoken rules tell you a number of things including when it is acceptable to break a spoken rule. Contrary to what your mother told you, sometimes "because everyone else is doing it" does make it ok. Games, especially organized leagues, run according to a social contract that is as important than the rules of play, and you can be technically following the rules of the game and break the contract (hitting too hard in a friendly touch football game) or breaking the rules but following the contract (everyone is entitled to the occasional mulligan).

In the 90s, the players, the owners, the fans, everyone who was a party to the social contract governing Major League Baseball was more than happy with McGuire and Sosa pounding the ball out of the yard at unprecedented rates. I was in Baltimore when lead off hitter Brady Anderson suddenly hit 50 dingers after it looked like he sat on the air hose at a gas station or accidentally found some of Popeye's spinach. Fans paid more to come to the games to watch more long balls, owners paid higher salaries to those hitting them, and players knew that everyone else is doing it. Juicing was part of the ethos of the game.

Of course, a game's ethos may violate a larger sense of fair play and that's why we try to clean up baseball, professional cycling, Olympic swimming, track and field,... But Bonds was one of the best of his generation, playing as that generation did. So we are left with the dilemma of having something that was cheating in that it derived superior results without superior effort or skill and something that was not cheating because it was within the bounds of the ethos of the game at the time. The tension comes about when we try to compare the achievement across time, a question that is always problematic, but made more so now that we feel the need to adjust down their numbers in order to make them really comparable. The question of the asterisk is two questions: (1) by what factor do we need to modify the numbers to make a fair comparison, and (2) how much responsibility can we lay on an individual for playing according to the unspoken rules of the time which we now hold to be unsportsmanlike, but which we were happily a party to when the homers were flying.

Thanks!

Vacations are wonderful, but it's always nice to be home again, sleeping in your own bed, writing on your own blog,...

I want to thank my guest-bloggeers Confused, Maybe Not, Jeff Maynes, Confused, Maybe Not, C. Ewing, Lil'Bro, and Confused, Maybe, Not for their time, insight, and for bringing a little class to this joint. At least for a while. Thanks friends.

Now, back to the normal abnormal.

Kool-Aid on a hot day

posted by confused, maybe not

Barry and 756

Posted by confused, maybe not

At LGM http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2007/08/756-hold-askterisk.html, Scott Lemieux writes:

"756, Hold the Asterisk
Yglesias proclaims all-time HR leader Barry Bonds "the greatest offensive player in the history of baseball." I don't actually think that this is true. Ruth and Williams, as you can see, have decisively higher EQAs, and I think any good offensive metric will show the same thing. You can still make a case for Bonds -- because of Ruth's first career as a pitcher and Williams's military service, Bonds has a longer career, and his 02-04 peak is almost certainly the highest level of offensive performance ever reached. But overall, I still have to rank Bonds slightly below Ruth and Williams as a hitter. (Bonds was certainly a better all-around player than Williams, and clearly remains behind Ruth, given that the latter was at least comparable offersively and also a great pitcher.) Of course, the other case for Bonds is that because it's harder to dominate modern baseball than baseball in the 20s or 40s he should be moved ahead. I can't argue with that; at some level, these discussions rest on unfalsifiable assumptions about the quality of play. But in terms of dominance of their era, I would still rank Bonds slightly behind Ruth and Williams. "


Asterisk? Legitimate?

Any thoughts?

Sparky

Sparky

Philosoopher from catastrophe: Franz Rosenzweig, 1886-1929

Posted by confused, maybe not

I first heard Franz Rosenzweig’s name while sitting on a bus next to the philosopher, Emil Fackenheim.http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1059938,00.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Fackenheim. Asking all types of questions about Hegel and Buber, Fackenheim interrupted me and said, “….if you want to read someone really great, read Franz Rosenzweig.” I thought, how can he be great if I haven’t heard of him? But I was in Fackenheim’s class, respected him, and wanted to be smart. Rosenzweig was impenetrable. I kept reading, though, and by the time I arrived at graduate school and was turned on to the later Wittgenstein, I was like, wait, I’ve heard some of this before. Returning to Rosenzweig, the parallels between the two were striking, especially regarding speech and epistemology. (Rosenzweig’s theory of speech is probably closer to Austin’s.) The same thing happened when I was exposed to Derrida (not in the comp. lit sense, but philosophically), I was like, wait, I’ve seen this before. I was then introduced to Levinas, which brought causality to the Derridian connection. As For Wittgenstein, who knows. Hilary Putnam suggests in the preface to Rosenzweing’s Understanding the Sick and The Healthy that the later Wittgenstein may have been influenced by Rosenzweig. Interestingly, although they did not know each other, WW I brought Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein to logger heads with the tradition of philosophy, even though they were products of two very different traditions. Like many in 20th century European dialogic and Jewish philosophy, I feel a debt to Rosenzweig. I assume you all know Wittgenstein’s story, to whom I also feel a debt, so today I introduce you to Franz Rosenzweig’s general critique of Western philosophy.

While fighting on the Balkan front in the Spring of 1916, Franz Rosenzweig and his Catholic friend Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy who was fighting on the Western front, (and later became a Dartmouth professor) http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED290194&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=eric_accno&accno=ED290194), began a correspondence in which they discussed Jesus as the Christ from a Jewish and Christian perspective. (Their correspondence was later published by Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity.) Their first letters were polite, tame, and boring, so they began to write their honest opinions about the matter. It was nasty at times, but they concluded when one speaks from one’s standpoint, never pretending to speak objectively, but “prejudicially,” one learns more. This theme is throughout the work of Rosenzweig. He wrote:

"I really believe that a Philosophy, to be adequate, must rise out of thinking that
is done from the personal standpoint of the thinker. To achieve being objective,
the thinker must proceed boldly from his own subjective situation. The single
condition imposed upon us by objectivity is that we survey the entire horizon;
but we are not obliged to make this survey from any position other than the one
in which we are, nor are we obliged to make it from no position at all. Our eyes are,
indeed, only our own eyes; yet it would be folly to imagine we must pluck them out
in order to see straight."

Rosenzweig grew increasingly disdainful towards western philosophy, most notably Hegel’s work, while studying and fighting at the front, where he wrote his major work, The Star of Redemption. Rosenzweig’s work both addressed and challenged Greek and Hellenic philosophy from his Hebraic standpoint. In a letter to Rosenstock-Huessy, he wrote: “The conceptualizing human being, that great and most enduring achievement of the Greeks, enduring because it remained without antithesis in itself (even the “ideas” themselves already found their negation in antiquity itself)-this “theoretic man” has now at last cesse de regner. The poetical mind now has to do everything¸ even think; the conceptualizing mind is no longer part of the human soul.” By poetical mind, Rosenzweig was talking about the poetic creativity of the prophets in the Bible. In the trenches, philosophy was of no help in addressing his fears or concerns for human life, or his concern for his own life. It was as if Rosenzweig called the philosopher for help, but the philosopher did not respond. Fearing death, Rosenzweig wanted nothing more than to remain alive. If philosophers did not address his fear of death, it followed that philosophy did not address his most primal desire, to live. He found it irresponsible, writing:

"Why should Philosophy be concerned if the fear of death knows nothing
of such a dichotomy between body and soul, if it roars ME! ME! ME! if it
wants nothing to do with relegating fear onto a mere ‘body’? Let man creep
like a worm into the folds of the naked earth before the fast – approaching
volleys of a blind death from which there is no appeal, let him sense there,
forcibly, inexorably, what he otherwise never senses: that his I would be
but an it if it died, let him therefore cry his very I out with every cry that is
still in his throat against Him from who there is no appeal, from whom such
unthinkable annihilation threatens – for all this dire necessity Philosophy has
only its vacuous smile. With index finger outstretched, it directs the creature,
whose limbs are quivering with terror for its this-worldly existence, to a Beyond
of which it doesn’t care to know anything at all. For man does not really want to
escape any kind of fetter, he wants to remain, he wants to live. "

Rosenzweig moves beyond the philosophical impulse to conceptualize humans; the impulse to reduce humans into studied objects in which one seeks the essence of the human/object. The poet exposes that the self-conceptualizing man – “the theoretic man” (as Rosenzweig wrote) – now no longer reigns over us. Unlike the “theoretic man,” Rosenzweig’s poetic prophet does not reign over people, but takes responsibility for others, reminding people of their responsibility for one another.

Leaping out of the trenches of World War I and disallowing anyone from calling him a philosopher, Rosenzweig made an exodus from the Academy in the same vein that Levinas (decades later) said to Derrida, “Basically you reproach me for taking the Greek logos in the same way one takes a bus, in order to get off.” Rosenzweig’s disillusionment was manifest in rejecting his University position after the War, which he explained in a letter to Friedrich Meinecke:

"The one thing I wish to make clear is that [philosophy] no longer holds the
center of my attention…. The man who wrote The Star of Redemption…is
of a very different caliber from the author of Hegel and the State [A work by
Rosenzweig]. Yet when all is said and done, the new book is only – a book. I
don’t attach any undue importance to it. The small – at times exceedingly small –
thing called [by Goethe] “demand of the day” which is made upon me in my
position at Frankfurt, I mean…the struggles with people and conditions, have
now become the core of my existence…Now I only inquire when I find myself
inquired of. Inquired of, that is, by men rather than by scholars… [T]he questions
asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me. "

Right after the war, Rosenzweig started the Lehrhaus, a free Jewish school in Frankfurt, Germany. Theodore Adorno attended classes at the Lehrhaus, where he found Eric Fromm, heard lectures from Walter Benjamin (who said Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption is one of two books one should read in one’s life), Martin Buber, Leo Strauss (yep, the very neo-con idol from the Univ. of Chicago), Gershom Scholem, Nahum Glatzer, and other leading Jewish intellectuals. This school was filled with many thinkers working philosophies from Judaism that tried to resist their perception of nationalism and their perception of western philosophy’s totalizing impulse to know, conceptualize and categorize; that which subordinates persons to theories of ideology and knowledge. Philosophy stood accused of being like a “blob” trying to absorb or freeze everything into knowledge, or as Rosenzweig said, “essence.” Trying to expose the limitations of philosophical “language-games,” he argued that the telos of traditional Hellenic-Philosophy was the philosophical search for essence(s). He explained:

"The true concern of the philosopher is with the “essence,” the “essential”
being of his[her] subjects.” The philosopher is caught up in the tension
between appearance and reality, never trusting what reality appears to be;
'the philosopher asks: what then actually is? He welcomes any answer that
does not destroy the value and meaning of this single question.' The answer
to the question “what actually is” is the essence, which is – most of the time –
a lifeless, abstract idea. “Remove this immovable question and the lifeless
subject, artificially detached, must inevitably disappear."

In Rosenzweig’s horizon, most philosophers were “selficating” in the market place of ideas, an “egotistical”, abstract world making life into mere thoughts without gestures. Rosenzweig’s other, one who breathes and has a name, is not paralyzed by the pursuit for essence.

"That which has a name of its own can no longer be a thing [essence], no
longer everyman’s affair. It is incapable of utter absorption into the category
for their can be no category for it to belong to; it is its own category. Nor does
it still have its place in the world, its moment in occurrence. Rather it carries
its here and now with it. Wherever it is, there is a midpoint and wherever it
opens its mouth, there is a beginning.
…thinking is always a solitary business, even when it is done in common by
several who philosophize together. For even then, the other is only raising
the objections I should raise myself, and this is the reason why the great
majority of philosophic dialogues-including most of Plato’s – are so tedious.
In actual conversation something happens. "

In his work, Understanding the Sick and The Healthy, Rosenzweig – anticipating the later Wittgenstein - has the philosopher infirmed by uncertainty in a hospital. The doctor in the narrative is trying to help the sick, solitary philosopher move beyond thinking in uncertain abstractions and essences and return to life, not merely philosophical life, but to disclosures that manifest concrete deeds that exceed any idea of such a deed. In other words, for Rosenzweig, getting out of the search for essence means the philosopher has to leap into life, a sort of backward Kierkegardian leap of faith, into that where one’s actions exceed one’s ideas – at least to the point where the philosopher must verify his or her theories in everyday life.

"Everyone should philosophize at some time in his [or her] life, and look around
from his own vantage point. But such a survey is not an end in itself. The book
is no goal, even a provisional one. Rather than sustaining itself, or being
sustained by others of its kind, it must itself be “verified.” This verification takes place in the course of everyday life. "

In everyday life, and everyday discussion, the philosopher will find that life or reality”, writes Rosenzweig, “is” unessential.

In the early 1920’s, Rosenzweig was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Lou Gehrig’s disease. Yet, he continued to write with the aide of his wife, Edith Hahn. She would recite the alphabet “until he indicated for her to stop, continuing until she could guess the word or phrase he intended (or, at other times, Rosenzweig would point to the letter on the plate of his typewriter).Rosenzweig's final attempt to communicate his thought, via the laborious typewriter-alphabet method, consisted in the partial sentence: ‘And now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep, the point of all points for which there—‘. The writing was interrupted by his doctor, with whom he had a short discussion using the same method. When the doctor left, Rosenzweig did not wish to continue with the writing, and he died in the night [December 10th, 1929 at the age of 43], the sentence left unfinished.” (Wickipedia)

Here Come Da Judgement

Brothers, Sisters, and Transgendered Comedists Everywhere,

Whilst Brother Steve enjoys the tranquility that accompanies an 8-hour drive with two small children, it has been bestowed upon me, a mere student of the Comedist arts and sciences to speak to you today.

As religions go, you have to admire the big ones for their ability to develop iconic images. The pits of hell have been portrayed by a wide variety of artists, and yet they all seem to look the same. So many versions of any religious stories will conjure the identical image, even though the image is far from that painted by the initial text. And what’s more interesting is that many of these scenes have been popularized, normalized, secularized and then played out over and over in comic sketches, scenes and jokes. Comedists have to not only respect other religions, but also thank them for their contributions to the greater Comedist good.

One of my favorite secularized images is that of the judgment unto heaven and the ever so popular pearly gates. This image, more than most, has been so frequently immortalized in comic strips and jokes. How many lawyers have been purported to approach St. Peter only to be turned away for the most comical of reasons?

A lawyer dies and approaches the pearly gates of heaven. St. Peter looks in his book and is amazed. “Congratulations,” he says. “You are the oldest man ever to come to heaven. No, wait, those are your billable hours.”

How many jokes lead to the punch line with “Hey, how come he got that in heaven, and I only get this?”

A preacher is killed in a car wreck while riding in a cab. The preacher and the cabbie approach St. Peter and both are escorted in. They are given the full tour and then are led to an immaculate palace with all the luxuries one could ever desire. St. Peter turns to the cabbie and says, “Welcome to heaven, this luxurious mansion is yours.” The cabbie is delighted and immediately starts jumping on the furniture and making himself at home. The preacher is led away and can hardly contain himself with the anticipation of what must await him, a man of God. At last they arrive at a rundown, ramshackle tenement. “And here, father, is your house.” The preacher is taken aback and asks St. Peter how it is that after he devoted his entire life to the church that he is given such humble surroundings while the coarse and shady cabbie received an estate? “Preacher,” he said, “Here in heaven we go by results. You gave your sermons every week, and preached the gospel, but when people got into his cab, they prayed.”

And how often do you get to poke fun at the very figures of the religion with their own imagery?

3 ministers and their wives were just coming back from a convention when they were involved in a terrible car crash and were tragically killed. All 3 couples stood in line waiting to get into heaven. As they approached, St Peter opened the book of Judgment and said to the first man, “I can see that you were a good man, but you had one problem. You lusted after alcohol your entire life. You never drank, but your lust was so strong that you would never marry until you met a girl named Sherry. I’m sorry, but you can't come in.” The second minister approached St Peter and was told, “you were a good man also, but it says here that you lusted after money and your lust was so strong that you would not marry until you met a girl named Penny. I’m sorry, but you cannot come in either.” After hearing this, the third minister turned to his wife and said: “Come on Fanny, let’s leave.”

So what’s your favorite story of ole St. Pete? The Pope, the President and the toilet repairman may have walked into a bar together, but what happened when they all arrived at the pearly gates? Your donations are greatly appreciated.

May the Gracie of Allen be with you,

(Are you sleeping) Brother Paul

do men get pregnant?

Posted by confused, maybe not

I had a recent (fun) argument with an ex-girlfriend. We were talking when a male friend approached and announced that he and his wife were pregnant. After a brief stop and chat, he left and I said,

Me: “I hate it when men say, ‘We’re pregnant.’ Men are not pregnant. They’re having a baby with a pregnant woman.”

Ex: You’re missing the point. Men don't always take responsibility for having a baby and saying, ‘We’re pregnant’ is an expression of responsibility.”

Me: “Then do I get to say, “We’re having our period, our cramps are killing us, etc.?” Or, “Honey, don’t forget to pick up some tampons, we’re about to have our period?”

Ex: “Shut up.”

Me: “But men aren’t pregnant. We get to watch.”

Zuzu, (http://www.kindlypogmothoin.com/) put it differently and a bit more incisively at Lawyers, Gun$ and Money http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/ when commenting on an Ohio bill that (if passed) will require women to obtain written permission from the father when choosing to have an abortion http://feministing.com/archives/007480.html.

“…you had no role between your ejaculation and the child's birth. The entire pregnancy took place within your wife's body. Sorry that offends you, but that's the way biology works….The child, incidentally, who results from the sperm that the father leaves inside the mother's body. It's not a mystery how these things happen. Yet men who refuse to wear condoms because they interfere with their experience swear up and down they never meant for her to get pregnant and therefore shouldn't be responsible for the child that rather predictably results from depositing sperm inside a woman's vagina. That the person to whom the sperm was given did something with it that the donor didn't like does not mean that he's not responsible for the outcome. So a man who complains about child support would be well advised to consider the male-controlled contraception options available to him, or at least stick to blow jobs.Which, incidentally, is not the same argument as "she should have kept her legs shut." It's a "be careful where you let your sperm go" argument.If some guy is going to colonize my body for his reproductive use when I have been quite clear that I intend to terminate, he damn well better be willing to foot the entire bill for putting me through that. As explained above, however, a woman electing to continue a pregnancy after she has been given sperm involves no colonization of anyone else's body. Unless you're advocating the right of a man who doesn't want to become a father to force a woman to undergo an abortion.”

Any thoughts?

After Virtue but Before Friday

Hello boys, girls, ladies and gentlemen; persons and poultry; sundry and assorted apes of all types, shapes, sizes; and yes, hello to you there, the dodecahedron in the corner sipping the Mai Tai. It's time for the Friday edition (posted a day early) of, "Those who love wisdom, and the women who love them", and oh, boy, do we not have a doozy, a dozy or even a dozer for you today.

O.K., my comedist quota aside, this is a post in the tradition of, "Bullshit or Not?", where I post a little quotation for you, and you tell me in as few or as many words as you like, whether you believe it is bullshit or not. Feel free to explain, complain, even restrain (though that's not recommended), but please, do not be (overly) profane.

From Alasdair MacIntyre, and his book After Virtue (I bet you didn't see that one coming):

"Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a political and moral action."

I've been running up against this very idea again and again. I think we ought not get bogged down in the word "action" here, since it seems obvious the sort of action being discussed.

So, bullshit or not?

Contributed by C. Ewing. Although, technically, this is the G-man's blog; so all hate mail should be directed his way.

Comedy and Convention

Posted by jeff.maynes, 8.2.07.

In tribute to the blogger, Steve, I offer this reflection on humor and language. It all began with some thoughts on fruit cake jokes (after a recent Comics Curmudgeon entry). In initial drafts of this post, I considered doing a brief tour of various theories of meaning to explore whether the term “fruit cake” exhibited a semantic or pragmatic ambiguity, or neither. Then I decided that it was getting out of control, and perhaps not that interesting anyway. So I returned where I started, fruit cake jokes, and the realization that I have never heard a good one (though the faithful comedists in the audience might be able to find one).

This theological (at least around these parts) insight has led me to the central question of this short reflection. What is the role of convention in humor? I'll consider a couple of ways to think about jokes and their relationship to convention, and see what these different approaches can tell us about the dearth of funny fruit cake jokes.

So the first way to go might be to suppose that jokes are essentially nonconventional. Instead, they operate similar to Grice's notion of conversational implicature. Grice noticed that a lot of the things that we communicate are not part of what we say in any meaningful sense. That is, there are things we communicate that do not contribute to the truth conditions of sentences which include those terms. Rather than saying these things, we implicate them. These implications can be either conventional or nonconventional. Conventional implicature is a limited class, including the famous “but” / “and” distinction. Grice points out that the truth conditions of both “but” and “and” are the same as the conjunction operator, but that “but” conventionally (it is part of the meaning of the term) implicates a contrast between the first and second conjuncts.

The second type of implicature, and the one that Grice devotes the most attention to, is nonconventional. Whenever we converse with someone else, we typically follow the cooperative principle. This principle basically states that we act in a way to maximize the effectiveness of information transfer, and can be fully worked out in a series of maxims (for example, only give as much information as needed, speak the truth, etc.). Not only do we, as a matter of course, follow the cooperative principle, we presume that others do as well. So when our conversation partner flagrantly violates one of the maxims of the principle we interpret their utterance in such a way that makes their utterance conform to the maxims, rather than in the conventional way. Perhaps Grice's most famous example is a hypothetical (I hope) letter of recommendation. The letter is short, and merely says “This student has excellent handwriting.” The conventional meaning of the utterance is that the student has excellent handwriting. Since this information is neither sufficient for nor relevant to a letter of recommendation, the reader will infer that the speaker actually is communicating the fact that the student does not have any other noteworthy attributes.

This model is, generally speaking, rather adaptable to humor. Plenty of jokes trade on misdirection and ambiguity by highlighting a conventional interpretation and then violating it. (I have here equivocated on the notion of a convention. My point is that Grice's point can be used on analogy with this different notion of convention, which I will further clarify below, in my discussion of Lewis on convention). Is this the right way to think of fruit cake jokes? One might suppose that it is. Fruit cakes are, after all, food and are quite edible. Implying that the characteristic hardness of the cakes makes them inedible allows for jokes in which they are used in a number of circumstances not befitting of food (e.g., a doorstop). The conventional meaning of “fruit cake” does not include the description “inedible” and instead we infer that the speaker intends us to apply this description to fruit cakes in order to make sense of the joke.

Is this right for fruit cake jokes? I suspect that it is not. As I noted at the outset, this reflection was inspired by a post on the Comics Curmudgeon blog (a comedic delight). Josh, the owner of that blog, remarked in reaction to a particularly inane B.C. that he wasn't sure whether anyone actually knows what a fruit cake is anymore. The place the term is most often used is in jokes. Has the role the term “fruit cake” plays become conventional? Has “inedible” even become a semantic feature of the term? Let's look at one way to cash out the notion of a convention.

David Lewis gives us one of the most useful frameworks for thinking about conventions, particularly since his criteria applies both to linguistic and non-linguistic conventions. Lewis argues (the “Languages and Language” formulation) that a regularity R is a convention for some population P if and only if it satisfies the following six conditions: (1) everyone conforms to R, (2) everyone in P believes that everyone else conforms to R, (3) belief (2) constitutes a reason to conform to R, (4) the members of P have a “general preference” that the rest conform to R, (5) there could be another regularity that satisfied these conditions and (6) this is all common knowledge (or potentially so).

What can we make of fruit cake jokes in light of this definition? Let us suppose that the regularity in question is 'the term 'fruit cake' can be used in place the name of some hard, inedible object for humorous effect.' How does this stand up to Lewis' criteria? Surely we do not use the term “fruit cake” as synonymous for “hard object” and we do not all make fruit cake jokes. What I will suggest, however, is that the widespread usage of “fruit cake” in place of the name of an inedible object has had semantic consequences. However this cashed out, in whatever theory of meaning you prefer, the term “fruit cake” (or “fruit cake'” which is homonymous with “fruit cake”) means something along the lines of “inedibly hard pastry.” All of us conform to this meaning of the term both in making fruit cake jokes and in understanding the utterances of others. This is a result of a shift in the predominant usage of the term from a kind term used to refer to fruit cakes to a joke term.

The rest of the conditions follow rather simply if we make this move. Believing that the meaning of “fruit cake” implies R is a good reason for conforming to R. Our general interest in communication accounts for (4), and (5) is a mere arbitrariness condition. Condition (6) also seems to present no challenge.

What is the outcome of this walk through Lewis and convention? Namely the hypothesis that the reason jokes like fruit cake jokes become so poor is precisely because the conventions governing the usage of the term have come to include the joke. Unlike other jokes, fruit cake jokes no longer implicate the punchline, they say it. The result is the passing of a joke.

[Now, of course, I have not done enough to show that there is a legitimate semantic ambiguity. Showing any such thing would require a number of assumptions about a theory of meaning, etc. As a result, the conclusion of this blog entry is no more than a fun guess.]