Everyone knows that the reason why women's hips are shaped the way they are is to provide a seat for the carried child.
Few have realized that the same reason applies to why men grow fat so differently than women do, with their bellies protruding over their belts. This came to me in a flash as we recently visited every newborn on my wife's side and watched how every new thirty-something father oh so naturally perched his little pride and joy...
* This delightful fallacy, defined as the "just-so" stories of life on the veldt back when, comes from Belle Waring of John and Belle Have a Blog.
From the "slow-on-the-uptake" department:
All may be vanity and there may be hardly anything new under the sun, painpill has changed.
Paul Goyette now hosts locussolus. Update your blogrolls. I have (in fact, my blogroll seems to be in a state of upheaval at the moment).
Today, forty years on, "I Have a Dream" will resound from every prodigious hilltop, curvaceous mountain, and molehill across the land. This will be evidence of a job well done, a river crossed, a sleeper awakened from nightmare by the bright sun of a new day.
Today, forty years on, "I Have a Dream" has passed into the archive of American consciousness, another founding text of our democracy, promising in its time what we have complacently achieved in ours. Indeed, forty years on, our nation is a different place precisely because of those words and the lives they inspired common men and women to lead. We cannot imagine the world any other way.
But, as with our nation's other foundational documents, the words are too familiar. We have lost our sense of the radical. We have forgotten that this speech, this dream, is like all the other promises of America. Our revolution is still becoming. Our work is never done.
Because we cannot any longer hear this speech, I suggest we challenge ourselves today by reading or listening to others, still dangerous and uncomfortable. In the spirit of that challenge, I offer you these words of Dr King's, taken from the speech, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence".
" A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. "
The full text of the speech is below, as well as here. It is twelve pages, so set aside some time.
. . .
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.
Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.
The Importance of Vietnam
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
Strange Liberators
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.
Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.
Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.
After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change -- especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and the aged.
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?
Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.
Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.
When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.
At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.
This Madness Must Cease
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:
"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.
The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.
In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.
Protesting The War
Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove thosse conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
The People Are Important
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:
Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the callling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once to every man and nation Comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth and falsehood, For the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, Off'ring each the bloom or blight, And the choice goes by forever Twixt that darkness and that light.Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own.
This morning I heard several frightening pops and cracks coming from the direction of Union Square. I normally have no trouble telling the difference between gunfire and firecrackers, but these sounds were just muffled enough, coming from just far enough away, and combined with the persistent traffic hum of my city, that I was momentarily disturbed. The sounds came from the direction I normally walk to work and encountering a gangwar (unlikely at that - or any - hour, but I suppose possible) or a police standoff (more likely, but still highly unusual) would certainly have begun my day with more excitement than my normal two cups.
Turning to that old and creaky source of information, the television, I hoped to see a "breaking news" story scroll across the ticker of one of the local morning news shows. Actually, I was hoping to not see such. I was not disappointed, and I walked off to work a half-hour later with a skip in my step and a song in my heart. That the TV was probably wholly unreliable on the matter one way or the other did nothing to damp my spirits. And the twenty-minute walk to work was completely unremarkable.
But I did see one thing on the morning news that caused me some confusion over whether to laugh or to cry. The traffic report, complete with telestrator drawings, informed viewers that the "lower deck of 93 is experiencing some congestion, but that's not unusual for this hour, ha ha".
Non-Boston people will be unable to parse the phrase "lower deck of 93" and should not worry overmuch, unless they choose to drive here during rush hour. Suffice to say that 93 runs through the city (where it is called the "Central Artery") and has been the subject of the Big Dig, famed in song and story and now one of our historic State's largest tourist draws. The grand idea of the Big Dig has been to put 93 underground, broaden it, and make the exits user friendly. The northbound lanes opened earlier this year to much hullaballo and festivity.
Normally, "the lower deck" refers to the southbound lane of 93 where it races through Somerville and Charlestown1, the highway swooping - double-decked - up into the sky and offering you the choice to continue into Boston on 93 or to take the Tobin Bridge to Chelsea (if you're in the wrong lane at rush hour making use of what the road "offers" may depend entirely on the largesse of other drivers, though).
However, this morning, the congestion being shown on the screen as the anchor referred to the "lower deck of 93" was at the opposite end of the Artery at the south side of Boston and was of the northbound lane as it dives underground and into the new tunnel, which runs beneath the still above ground southbound lanes. We've spent $15 billion of State and Federal money to continue experiencing "not unusual" congestion. Ha ha.
. . .
For more fascinating discussions about transportation, and rail transport in particular, head over to Transport Blog. And by "more fascinating", I mean that TB gets to the point a whole lot quicker.
. . .
1 This section of the road has an official name, the "Honorable Francis W. Sargent Highway", after the Republican governor. This is a rare case where naming a public works project was not intended as an honor. In the words of State Rep Charles Flaherty:
" Too often, public officials do not receive their due recognition until after they leave office, and in some cases until after their passing. This is just a small attempt to assure that one public official gets what's coming to him. "
Whenever I hear or read that "the government/administration/police has information we don't have; we'll just have to trust them", I know that the person I'm dealing with is a complete fool and a total tool, power's bitch and probably a snitch, a real sheep.
Government officials are just as likely to prefer their own prejudices to the truth, just as damned lazy in their thinking, as the rest of us. They don't know anything you can't learn. Their vaunted "access to sources" is nothing more than knowing who to ask. And you can get a very good list of your own by asking an academic in the field. Information is easy to come by.
Admittedly, analysis is another beast altogether, but one which people in the government aren't necessarily very good at either. There are tools to help you through and you can learn those as easily as you can find the information to plug in.
"Four Moms from New Jersey" are keeping the heat on the Bush Administration and the FBI about 9/11. You and I could do as much. Why don't we?
(This link will degrade in a couple of days. I'll try to track down a permanent one.)
He calls himself "a militant moderate". Americans usually call me a flaming lefty (though Europeans never do). How is it then that I find in him a kindred spirit?
The Head Heeb is a questing, questioning, and eminently reasonable mind. I find myself on his site so often these days that he has to go on the blogroll.
On the internet a day late is more like twenty-five dollars short and I'm about twenty days late. Still, this is happening in my back yard . . .
They want people to pay $500 for what? Could they have come up with a worse - or more apt - name?
The definitive smackdown has already been written. The definitive news story has been filed.
All that's left is for me to mention that I've run professional conferences using Harvard facilities at least twice a year for the past six, so I know a thing or two about the local bang for the buck. My three-day conferences have cost not quite $15,000 for between 20-40 people (costs in Cambridge depend on seasonal hotel prices - with early October being foliage season and, therefore, popular and expensive). For that money, we pay the way of about ten to twelve participants, provide breakfast for all participants, lunch once, and dinner twice.
If we needed to raise the money for a conference out of participants' fees, then 30 people paying $500 would cover it. And no one would come.
Edward Tufte, dean of design, urges you to respect your audience and to forgo the dumbing down and the totalitarian nature of PowerPoint (he is not speaking to me, as I, naturally, do not use PowerPoint).
David Byrne, by contrast, finds a new medium for his own ambiguous art and seemingly fulfills a prediction of mine:
" An artist can, no doubt, use the program to capture nuance, organize analysis, and admit complication. "
Then again, with David Byrne perhaps just the last is applicable.
The above gives me the opportunity to remind or inform you that I had something unkind to say about our current crop of corporate politicians and their reliance on PowerPoint to do their thinking for them: "The PowerPoint Presidency".
Over the past two weeks I've spent forty-eight hours in the car. That's six full work days!
In certain circumstances, you have to make your own fun - so I put into practice the techniques of William Beaty, amateur traffic experimentalist. They work, but you won't truly understand until you get out there and try them.
. . .
A parking lot observation (I've been to one or two rest stops in those long hours):
Steven Landsburg asks a very good question:
" So what's the moral of the story? To me, the moral is that we should take seriously what we tell our students (...citizens, colonial subjects, whatever - ed.) ... If it seems not to be working, the right question is not, 'Why doesn't [what we tell our students, citizens, subjects...] work?' Instead, the right question is [...] 'In what way am I being stupid?' "
This oldie but goodie via Defective Yeti.
How have I lived this long without the Real Life Preacher? This poor, good man wrestles with the Devil so you don't have to. Even more impressive - and important - he wrestles with the Angel too.
(Found via Alas, A Blog)
In April (the cruelest month) I referred to a piece in the St Louis Dispatch (briefly offline, but perhaps back here) by their classical music critic Sarah Bryan Miller. She wants to rescue the word "elitist" and reserve it to describe someone who takes the time and makes the effort to knowledgeably sample the best that has been thought and created. In the process she demonstrates exactly the sort of intellectual laziness she decries through, on the one hand, her profound and deep ignorance of pop music.
" On the other hand ", Ms Miller says, as she attempts to provide an example of what one can gain from being an elitist, but instead offering a disingenuous comparison of apples and oranges, secure in the knowledge that to her readers all classical music is alike,
" a few hours invested in understanding what one is to see or hear at a performance can yield rewarding results. ... An understanding of what was in Mozart's mind when he wrote 'Die Zauberflote' - and why it is better than Marschner's 'Der Vampyr' - might begin to dawn. "
Why revisit this brief nothing? Scrolling around the net, I stumbled on a discussion of Ms Miller's article. It included a quote from her in response to some of the comments in the discussion:
" I don't enjoy misogyny, obscenity and invitations to violence all wrapped up with a simplistic, mind-rotting rhythm beat. "
So, she's saying doesn't enjoy Marschner's "Der Vampyr" at all?
What pleasure, from beautiful eyes On flowering bosom In blissful quiver To suck new life with a kiss! Ha! What pleasure, With loving caress, With lascivious courage The sweetest blood Like sap of the roses, From red-purple lips Adulatingly to sip! - And when the burning thirst is quenched, And when the blood oozes from the heart, And when they groan full of terror, Haha! What delight! Ha, what pleasure!
Is Marschner's misogyny and violence the reason Mozart is better? Ms Miller never enlightens us on that issue. In fact, she does her level best to avoid any demonstration of the expertise that she hopes to fold into the word "elitist".
. . .
Though I confess to, at the time, not remembering the music of "Der Vampyr" at all (though I am sure I did listen to it during my vampire phase; I am no sort of fool if I am not a complete fool), I was pretty sure that I remembered it was much later than "Die Zauberflote". So I looked it up. While Mozart's last opera was completed in 1791, the year that he died, Marschner's was finished in 1828, one year after Beethoven died.
It might be enough to simply point out that after Beethoven, concert hall music (including opera) was not at all the same animal it was when Mozart was composing. But that probably doesn't mean much to people for whom "classical music" ranges from Bach to Berg, an unfortunate collapsing of several wildly different strains into a single, droning song. To offer comparisons from other musical genres, that span reaches from the Hot Six to Ornette Coleman, from Hank Williams, Sr to Garth Brooks, from "Heartbreak Hotel" to "Smells Like Teen Spirit", from "Rapper's Delight" to whatever jam is tearing it up in 2006 (the first juxtaposition offered is probably the most apropos, as jazz is almost as fantastically disparate as classical, and its giants and geniuses have never felt constrained by the limits placed upon their genre being "pop").
Ms Miller is, I am sure, aware of this distance in time. But to use the phrase "why it is better" is to skip very lightly over the fact that Marschner was not writing music in Mozart's vein and that part of what formed the backdrop for whatever was in the minds of the two composers were Europes on either side of Napoleon. Comparing Mozart and Marschner, as she does, without context strikes me as an avoidance, rather than a reaping, of the rewards of investing those few precious hours Miller recommends to us for our edification.
Her point would have been far better made if she had compared Mozart's operas to those of his contemporary, Salieri, or of his predecessor, Gluck - except that in those cases Mozart's superiority is not beyond dispute. She would have had to invest some of those precious hours in actually formulating a complex response, a response that addressed the mutual influence of these composers on one another and the influence on them of audience expectation, expectations fueled through familiarity with and passion about other contemporary works. In the process her readers might have in fact learned something, might have had the spark of desire for further knowledge fanned into flame, might have developed a mad curiosity for music that has almost completely escaped recording.
If the good stuff is important, then inspire people to demand the performance and recording of, for example, Salieri's operas (only five of forty-five have ever been recorded). The world would be a far richer and more beautiful place with that music in it.
. . .
N.B. I'd have offered quotes from "The Magic Flute" as well, but that is one seriously messed up piece of work and any attempt to derive my larger point from it would have failed under the weight of the surrealism.
And I think Mozart is better than Marschner too.
The next major advance in reproductive technology is on the cusp. Women will soon have the option to remove and freeze their eggs. And nothing will ever be the same.
Typically, in the face of a great leap forward for humanity, some people do not see the vista of the future because they're staring at the ground of the present. Dr. Michael Soules (director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology, University of Washington Medical Center) says, " It's a niche but not a major market. It's not going to become a big-volume business unless every 30- or 35-year-old in our culture decides to bank eggs as a rite of passage. " Dr. Soules underestimates the impact that this technology will have on the way we view parenthood and pregnancy itself.
The technique is currently being discussed as a way to put off pregnancy. Combined with the work being done at USC with postmenopausal women receiving in-vitro fertilization (showing that older women can become pregnant at similar rates to women in their twenties), the age of parenthood may be pushed back by yet another generation or two. There will be social consequences to this, but whether bad or good or whether society will simply be different, no one can yet say.
However, there is an even more radical opportunity in this technology (about which I have speculated). Abortion, and the debate about "choice", can be rendered obsolete. Every woman can have the simple and perfect choice: the choice of having her pregnancy when she wants it, and never when she does not.
Having spent about twenty-seven hours on highways in the past four days, I began to think about how to get home faster. Given that I-90 runs straight through from Buffalo to Boston, nothing was there to be gained by taking an alternate route. If I wanted to get home faster, I would have drive faster.
It will begin innocently enough...
When the internet is standard equipment in our cars, when we are uplinked to the net at all times, someone will develop copsight.com or speedtrap.com. To use the site, whenever you see Smokey, you register his location and direction. If enough people do this, then a real-time map will be generated of the location of every state trooper. Over time, the patrolling patterns of each state, each substation, and each individual trooper will become known.
The police will fight to keep this information from being broadcast and the resulting publicity will popularize the sites, turn them into just one more tool everybody uses.
And then someone will expand this idea to cities and cops on the beat. And then . . . crime wave.
This is such a good idea that it must have already been implemented!
It is clear that Liberians want options to war, but haven't been able to figure out anything while being shelled. But give war weary people the chance to throw down their weapons and look what happens!
Cynics will say that this is a momentary lull. Optimists will see this as the dawn of a new Liberia. I say that we have a lot of work to do right now to help Liberians to maintain peace, to build the structures they want, and to preserve hope. That means money, people, and, most important, reasonable goals.
Amendments to the Constitution of the United States should serve to clarify the responsibilities of the government, not the rights of citizens.
Furthermore, when contemplating any Amendment remember those words we have used again and again to right the most egregious of our historical wrongs:
" The right of citizens of the United States [...insert right denied to some by historical injustice...] shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state . . . "
Yesterday's comment about "bitch blogging" is funny because it's a dog pun, people.
Yes, my sense of humor is almost as low as that found on Cynical: a Life.
" Words can seem like lightweight little things, and you think you’re only playing with them; but if you stack up enough of them in the right order, they can up and turn real on you. "
How does Teresa Nielsen Hayden arrive at this particular point?
UPDATE: If you find yourself interested in rekindling your grandmother's epistolary habits (assuming you find the current state of the art unfulfilling in important ways), you could join the virtual LETTER project. But, for god's sake, be careful!
Lance Arthur has given some thought to the results of gay marriage on civilization - and on the continued existence of hamsters.
(Via Subversive Harmony)
. . .
The problem with meeting bloggers is that you feel compelled to read them. And then you find that they write like slumming angels or can see a bit farther or can hear sounds just out of your range, and even worse they send you off on a tour of sites new to you.
In other words, we need to find another hour or two in the day in order to accomodate the voice in our heads saying read this!
The blogger party Friday was fun, even if I was kind of dull. Yes, difficult as it is to believe, I was sort of boring, having slipped into a primarily observational rather than conversational mode with the added problem that the only thing I could seem to talk about was my work. Which is wicked cool, but I have a wide range of interests, dammit!
Still, I convinced Sooz to invite me out for music and I made an impression on Lorissa (obviously an incredibly perspicacious young woman - even if she is ditching the Boss for the Smoke). I stayed to the bitter end - because I always do (I like bitter better than sweet, thanks) - with Leo, Michelle, and Paul. Jokes were told, tattoos were uncovered, and drinks were drained. Don't you wish you'd come?
Photos were snapped. I was, in fact, struck by the number of photo-bloggers (Apparently Nothing, Truck808, Stacey George, coffeecorner, one small star).
Thanks are due to Christine for organizing and inviting and to Jenn for bringing Christine to Boston. And thanks to Laura, Jennifer, and Shelley for making me feel at home when I walked in.
The one priceless moment, the reference point around which my memories of the event will swirl, the fall on the floor and roll around in the muck howling moment, was when Geoffrey Allen called what he does "bitch blogging". Of course, we're all so civilized that any rolling, not to mention guffawing, was strictly metaphorical. More's the pity. I promise to do better next time.
This piece at World in Conflict on the Joint Congressional Report on 9/11 and systemic failures in general is so interesting and damning I'm going to read it again - tomorrow. You should read it for the first time tonight.
How have we survived this long? Mitsubishi is working on glasses that inform bartenders when we're nearing empty? I tell you, I need this device in my life. I will go out of my way to get to bars who install this technology - and keep the beer flowing. That's the key: keep the beer flowing.
(Via A Complete Waste of Time)
FutureMAP, the Pentagon's Dead Pool, is itself dead. I have seen the range of outrage, from those who think we should do anything we can do, to those who found the idea in and of itself grotesque. I have even seen an objection suggesting that terrorists would be steered away from the targets getting the most attention by "investors".
I have not, however, seen anyone mention what to me is the clearest reason for smothering FutureMAP in its crib. This program was going to be the gravest threat to national security since the Russians offered to show us their technique for making glass in bulk (and curiously similar to ours it was too...).
Imagine, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand geeks with more pet theories than sense, many of whom have advanced technical degrees. Imagine them analyzing the security infrastructure of the United States. Imagine them trying on the shoes of terrorists, muttering softly to themselves, "what would I do?" Imagine them debating scenario after scenario with each other, pulling down and building up, and making each one better, faster, stronger. What would you have besides the blogging community?
Open Source Terror Planning.
In the weeks after 9/11, my colleagues and I sat around and discussed the likely next steps of the world's terror groups. And we know a thing or two about conflict and about how to increase levels of violence. Fortunately, none of our worst cases came true, but there were a few places we didn't go for several weeks. Why should we be rewarded for our thinking up and disseminating scenarios of horror - especially when we get our reward after the terror attack we designed happens?
Maybe all the information about security and infrastructure is easily accessible already. But maybe the terrorists won't actually think of a brilliant target and how to attack it until we give them the idea.
. . .
Why, yes, I have read DARPA's outline of FutureMAP (pp 68-69), and, yes, I know that these "markets" weren't planned to be open to the public. Why should I (a) let the facts stand in the way of a fair rant, or (b) expect the markets to stay closed?