America the irrational

Populism is a term that still gets tossed around in political conversation, most often during election cycles. In today’s political world, where down is up, and bad is good, populism has been defanged, and neutered of much of its power, at least compared to historical populism, which constituted a real anger and backlash towards bankers and other corporate interests of the time, most often seen during the progressive era in America.

A case in point is someone like Rick Santelli, an editor on CNBC, creating political theater with his Thursday morning rant from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, and being considered a “populist” in various quadrants of the mainstream media.

I think Wonkette accurately captured Santelli, and nailed his faux populism when she wrote that “Rick Santelli hates poor people — and by poor people we mean the bottom 50-90% of per capita income earners. How else would you explain the fact that he and his trader friends are *just now* starting to worry about Moral Hazard?” Preach it, sister!

Of course, to the 50 percent out there clinging to God and their guns, no appeal to reason or logic is 'gonna work. They refuse to listen to anything that gets in the way of their desperately held predispositions.

America, for all intents and purposes has become a superstitious, fundamentalist nation. How else would you explain that more than 1/3 of Americans believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Nearly 6 in 10 believe that the portrayal of the Book of Revelation’s bloody massacre of all those who don’t accept Jesus as Messiah, will come true. Hence the amazing popularity of the Left Behind eries of books on end times prophecy.

Our entertainment media, while not necessarily promoting a particular brand of religion, seizes upon our nation’s belief in the supernatural—ghosts, the supernatural, angels and demons, and other forms of paranormal phenomena. More than half of the U.S. population believes in ghosts. Three quarters of Americans believe in angels and another four-fifths are down with miracles. I guess that explains why WCSH-6 had a news story last night on its six o’clock news about a group promoting the paranormal getting an audience before a group of kids at the Bangor Public Library.

As Susan Jacoby writes in her book, The Age of American Unreason, “Indeed popular anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism are now synonymous.”

While many on the left struggle to understand the appeal of demagogues like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and even Michael Savage, much of this emanates from our nation’s 40 year slide into an abyss that is characterized by intellectual laziness, and an almost obsessive need to have everything spoon-fed, and packaged, requiring no cerebral effort. Neither is this limited to those on the right. Many leftists and liberals are every bit as irrational, and anti-intellectual in their pursuit of truth, and supporting their beliefs.

Jacoby posits that what truly set apart our nation’s founding by the amazing group of men directly responsible for America’s birth, was the “presence and influence” of so many intellectuals among the Revolutionary generation. This amazing group of men, many of them signers of our Declaration of Independence, were truly remarkable in their respect for knowledge, and commitment to intellectual integrity. Today, intellectuals are regularly denigrated and marginalized as “pointy-headed.”

Sadly, many of the nitwits out there are fearful that Obama and Co. are going to turn America into a socialist nation, and take away their guns. Idiots like P.G. Douglas, from Darien, Connecticut fire off letters to the editor to the Wall Street Journal, denigrating historians like Alan Brinkley, when they try to put politics in a historical context.

The greatest danger facing our nation isn’t our economic downward spiral, crooked politicians, and the liberal media, it’s the abject intellectual vapidity of the man on the street.

Krugman says stimulus inadequate in size

Paul Krugman, professor of economics at Princeton University and also a Nobel Prize winner, was speaking this morning on CNBC, where he discussed his views on the stimulus package.

According to Krugman, the $787 billion stimulus is not nearly enough to fill the "well over $2 trillion hole" in the economy, Krugman said. "A fair bit of the bill is not really stimulus," he added, noting that just about $650 billion would actually spur consumer spending and other types of stimulus.

It is "pretty likely" that the Obama administration will try and pass a second stimulus package in the next few months, Krugman said.

Krugman added that the economy is likely to remain depressed for at least two years, but probably much longer than that.

I understand that "lefties" like Krugman must be discounted, at least if you've had your dose of right-wing Kool-aid today. I tend to consider people trained in economics, however, since that's not an area where I've had advance preparation. Then again, many right-wing talkers might be more believable, depending on your ideological persuasion. [speaking of right-wing talkers, JBS acolyte, GBeck begins today's show with a rant about a "socialist" company that makes solar panels that will apparently be receiving stimulus money. He's also ranting about "controlled burns," as in, let the economy experience"a controlled burn." Oh, here it comes, here it comes--the start of the rest of the broadcast (and what he does best), where he scares the bejesus out of his listeners--worldwide economic collapse, a Great Depression worse than our grandparents experienced, but because his loyal followers didn't sell out to socialism, capitalism will be stronger than ever, rooted in those great "principals" of conservatism! I'm sorry I can't share a link to today's broadcast, because Mr. Beck is an enlightened capitalist, so you have to pay to access his archived drivel.--JB]

Nicholas Von Hoffman, another "lefty" shares stories of the jobless in America, in the Feb. 4 issue of The Nation. He includes the following note about my home state: In Maine there are skilled carpenters knocking on doors, asking for any kind of work, shoveling snow or stacking firewood.

I wonder if the disconnect that talk radio talkers exhibit from the lives of real Americans stem from their sitting behind their golden microphones, rather than rubbing elbows with desperate people, thrown out work, through no fault of their own--like the gentleman I spoke to yesterday, Robert, who lost his job at a local manufacturer after working their for 19 years. This local manufacturer makes parts for the auto industry, and predictably, given Detroit's woes, their business is way down.

History Maker Mondays-06

Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
--Henry David Thoreau


Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts. He is widely regarded as one of America's most influential authors, philosophers and thinkers. At one time a Unitarian minister, Emerson left his pastorate because of doctrinal disputes with his superiors. He traveled to Europe on Christmas Day, 1832, where he made the acquaintance of such literary notables as Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Carlyle and Emerson would form a notable lifelong friendship.

My first brush with Emerson came during my junior year of high school. I had begun dating my wife and also had my first encounter with another intellectual giant, my late father-in-law, Joe Tarazewich.

The bookshelves of Tarazewich’s study were jammed full of books of philosophy, literary heavy hitters, and other classical thinkers. When we first start dating someone, we obviously want to make a good impression. Tarazewich was an intimidating figure—he had once played major college football for Drake and also was voted to Maine’s all-time high school football team of the past fifty years, making first team, when he played for Thornton Academy. Even as a cocky 17-year-old, I knew this giant of a man was someone important, even moving beyond my short-term goal of trying to impress him so I could continue dating his daughter.

He gave me a copy of Emerson’s essays, which I set out to read and understand. I was struck by Emerson’s essay on self-reliance. Coming from a very orthodox faith tradition, Roman Catholicism, and beginning to rebel against its strictures (much to my own parent’s consternation), reading Emerson felt like leaving a thick strand of trees, and walking out into an open field.

Emerson believed that the ultimate source of truth is within us. He believed in trusting one’s reason, and limiting the influence of the outside world. That didn’t mean that Emerson was a reclusive, intellectual hermit. He didn’t isolate himself from people, as indicated in a letter written to Carlyle, where Emerson said, “A new person is always to me a great event, & will not let me sleep."(Note 1) Updike wrote that “He lectured everywhere, and knew everyone." (Note 2)

The belief that all we can really know is within us is the foundation for what would become transcendentalism. As Emerson wrote, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.” (note 3)

This movement originated in New England, specifically Boston, although Emerson would find a home in Concord. It began as a protest against the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the intellectual culture existing at Harvard, as well as the doctrines of the Unitarian church taught at Harvard Divinity School. Transcendentalists’ sought to integrate the belief that the ideal spiritual state “transcends” the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions. This was a direct contradiction to the overriding influence of Calvinist theology that constituted American Christianity at that historical juncture.

American Transcendentalism (in addition to Emerson, other prominent transcendentalists and contemporaries were naturalist and rebel Henry David Thoreau, Amos Bronson Alcott, an educator, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as Margeret Fuller, who served with Emerson as editor of The Dial) espoused a romantic idealism that favored individual instinct, self-knowledge, and a belief in transcendent, eternal ideas. This idea was rooted in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It was Coleridge, the British poet that lent the Transcendentalists the spiritual side of Kant’s system, when he (some would argue, misleadingly) reduced Kant’s theory of human cognition to a dichotomy between Reason, and Understanding. A pious Anglican, Coleridge argued Reason—that which separates us from all other living things—reveals to humanity the mysteries of the Christian faith. (note 4)

This led the New England Transcendentalists in seeing the reflection of God, in human Reason. While many continued to hold the Calvinist belief in the divine nature of Jesus Christ, some, especially Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau, considered his ministry to be the representation of the best of humanity.

While Unitarians today consider Emerson as one of their own, history teaches us that he was at the center of a major schism that had developed within Unitarianism in the 19th century. The Transcendentalists, led by Emerson, argued against the significance of historically based miracles in the Bible.

Given that the Unitarians controlled many of the conservative Congregational churches in New England, bastions of Calvinist orthodoxy at the time, to depart from the most conservative of beliefs, such as miracles, might lead to them losing their institutional control of their churches. Hence, they opposed the Transcendentalists’ push to deny this element of theology.

Reform-minded Unitarians—many of them being younger members of the denomination, and not part of the fight to gain control of the congregational churches—were open to crossing conservative theological lines. They had read Emerson's book Nature and were attracted to his ideas, ideas that stated that “Man is a god in ruins,” and that man should be self-reliant and follow his intuition and feelings as well as his reason to reach full self-development. Like Emerson, they thought that dried-up doctrines of an earlier time should not get in the way of original insights.

In 1838, the seven graduating seniors of the Harvard Divinity School selected Emerson as keynote speaker at their graduation, passing over older and more conservative Unitarians. The invitation was an act of defiance against their elders and teachers, and Emerson was well aware of it. With the chapel filled with the graduates and their families and all the most noted Unitarians in attendance that beautiful July day, Emerson took the pulpit and calmly and confidently lay siege to some of the Unitarians’ most cherished ideas.

While innocuous by today’s standards, Emerson called for religious self-reliance, and urged those in attendance not to depend on the worn-out doctrines passed down but to seek out our own convictions. To the hearers and those reading it in the newspapers of the day, however, the address was pure transcendental heresy.

Emerson’s address ignited a furor in newspapers, pulpits, and pamphlets against the talk and Emerson was roundly and regularly condemned.

The controversy found Emerson retreating to his study, quite calm and above the storm, and refused to respond publicly. He called the fuss “a tempest in a washbowl,” (note 5) but his journal shows us today that he was upset by the vehemence of the attacks against him. Repeatedly he wrote in his journal, “Steady, steady!”

Emerson's former Harvard professor, Andrews Norton, usually a cautious and sober man, wasted no time blasting the address in the Boston Daily Advertiser. He called the graduates accessories to a crime for inviting a “man who attacks Christians and the Clergy” to “deliver an incoherent rhapsody.”

The importance of Emerson’s ideas for our time shouldn’t be discounted. During his time, a time when print was the primary means to disseminate ideas, he urged independent thinking and stressed that not all life’s answers are found in books. In his The American Scholar address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge in 1837, Emerson states that: “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.” He believed that a scholar learns best by engaging life.

I’m afraid many that live a stunted life, seeking through the pursuits of prooftexting, and securing points for their preconceived notions, will miss the value of Emerson. In his essays on The Conduct of Life, he outlined a pathway for “engaging life.” To Emerson, thinking was the hardest kind of work. I think he was accurate in his statement of this fact. Additionally, he spoke highly of the value and the importance of work, as a means to leaving behind a life worth living. He spoke of the importance of “those who love work, and love to see it rightly done, who finish their task for its own sake; and the state and the world is happy, that has the most of such finishers. The world will always do justice at last to such finishers; it cannot do otherwise.”

My hope is that some of my readers, regardless of political ideology, will seek out Emerson, and learn from some of his timeless ideas.

________________________________________

Notes:

1 Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for Self-Reliance, by Kenneth S. Sacks; Princeton University Press, 2003
² John Updike, “Emersonianism,” New Yorker, 4 June, 1984, 115
3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” an essay.
4 Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People; Yale University Press, 1973 5 Kenneth Sacks, ibid.

Sunday night vocab lesson-Brainyflix

A group of MIT alums are trying to make SAT prep fun and free for all. The MIT Alumni Association is allowing them to run a SAT Vocab Video Contest as a charity event by MIT.

Corporate sponsor, Salesforce.com, is funding the prize award and incentives.

Tonight's word: Abridge

The stroke

It was tempting this morning to make yet another futile attempt to help half of America, most of them part of the rabid right, understand that the passage of the Obama stimulus package isn’t the end of civilization, or the start of some sinister, socialist takeover of the United States. I made the mistake of turning on our local right-wing AM blowtorch, WGAN, and John McDonald’s Saturday program. As a Maine storyteller, McDonald is quite compelling. But his weekend alter ego sees morph into just another right-wing shill, a poor man's imitation of Rush Limbaugh. I even called in, but then I came to my senses. It’s Valentine’s Day and Mary and I are headed out later, to learn the tango. Tohell with politics, at least for now.

Instead, I think I’ll update you about Bernie. For those of you new to my blog, Bernie, my trusty 13 and soon-to-be 14-year old Sheltie is doing remarkably better. For those who don’t have a dog, or aren’t dog people, you won’t understand the bond that develops between dog owners and their pets. It’s no accident that saying “dog’s are a man’s (and woman’s) best friend” is accepted as canonical.

Four weeks ago, Bernie had a stroke. It happened in the middle of the night. He had been restless all night and woke us about midnight, by throwing up, first in our son’s former room (now my office) across the hall, and then next to our bed. When we got up, and turned the light on, it was obvious poor Bernie (aka, “The Mayor,” or “Mr. Schmellie”) was in obvious distress. He was disoriented, stumbling badly, and quite agitated, breathing heavily. All we could do was clean up his mess, try to comfort him as well as we could, pat him and then take turns on the floor with him. It was a long five hours until the alarm notified us of another day of work.

I heard one time that most dogs recognize about 30 words. Bernie, before he lost his hearing completely about 18 months ago, seemed to know twice that many. When he was gradually going deaf, our biggest fear was that he’d lose his gregariousness and personality. In order to ensure that didn’t happen, Mary and I spent more time interacting with Bernie than ever—patting him, giving him hugs, and letting him know he was loved and doing our best not to startle him, which is hard, when you have a dog that is deaf.

[Bernie, sound asleep on the couch]

Bernie sleeps alongside our bed, on the carpet. Now, when he wakes up in the morning, often about 4:30, he’ll shake his head, stretch, walk out into the hall, and then make his way back into the darkness, going first to my wife’s side of the bed, nosing alongside the mattress to see if she’s awake. Being a heavier sleeper than I am, given my “bionic” ears, I’m awake and eventually Bernie makes his way over and gets his head rubbed, which he usually expects about five minutes worth, and then he’ll go back to sleep for another 20 minutes, or so, until the alarm goes off at 5:00. While Bernie was always friendly, and enjoyed being rubbed and spending time in close proximity to family members, his deafness has made him much more affectionate in a way that he wasn’t before. Now, like a cat, he rubs up against our hands, and arms if we cease with the affection as if to say, “please don’t stop—I like it.”

Just after Bernie’s stroke, we read as much as we could about strokes in dogs, and one of the common threads we found was that dogs often recover and show improvement in 2-3 weeks. Given that Bernie was struggling to stay upright, and even struggled to eat, one of the things he lived for that didn’t seem very optimistic, but we clung to that timeframe with hope.

A vital dog with limitless energy, and one that loved being outdoors, even during winter’s coldest and snowiest times, now, it was a struggle for Bernie to not topple over on the ice, or get blown over in the wind.

Our son, Mark, Mr. Everyday Yeah, actually posted a couple of humorous takes on Bernie’s situation. Mark, in his inimitable way, took something negative, or sad, and made Mary and I both laugh with his section he called “Dear Bernie,” written as letters to his dog.

I’m happy to say that four weeks after Bernie’s stroke, he’s made remarkable improvement. Just after suffering his stroke, his head had an odd cock to one side, and he was unable to navigate the stairs, without falling back down. This necessitated some alterations, like carrying him up and down the stairs every evening and morning (the things we do for our pets) and installing a gate at the top, as well as barricading the bottom of the stairs, so he wouldn’t injure himself trying to go up and down.

I’ve been walking Bernie up and down our 300 foot driveway, as well as taking a few strolls on our road. Given the snow conditions and lack of shoulder room, and the usual assortment of speeding drivers, I was hesitant to take him out on our roadway in the morning, in the dark, or after work during the week. Last weekend, we walked a ½ mile and Bernie did quite well. His gait has been getting steadier, and in fact, he has started going up and down the outdoor steps, which are three in number, with a semblance of his old self. Just the other night, he made it up the stairs to the second floor landing, on his own, without hesitation. Yesterday morning, he came down with little difficulty.

This morning, we took a walk of just over a mile, after sunrise. Bernie had his swagger back, walking rapidly, doing his usual investigations along the sides of the road, and at times, forcing me to walk rapidly to keep up. He seems to be 90-95 percent back to normal, pre-stroke.

Closing in on the 14-year mark, we know that Bernie won’t be with us forever. But we’re thankful that he’s recovered from something that we feared might be the end for him.