What White People Like

Maybe I'm the last person among the connected to learn about this delightful blog, What White People Like, but since I've been out attending Writer's Workshops and liking the idea of soccer, I guess I can be excused. To my mind, this site is a hoot. The author, whose race isn't entirely clear from what I've read so far, is about as far from a purveyor of white self-hate or black resentment as she can be. While I might protest that her blog would be more accurately described as "What Educated and/or Affluent, Blue-State White People Like," it's still a bit too much on-target for me to read without laughing and cringing at the same time. Frankly, I don't think the camo-wearing, NASCAR-watching crowd is all that likely to identify with these entries, but who cares?
I mention this not simply to spread the word about this site to the two and a half people who might read this entry--one and a half if my proofread is excluded--but to draw attention to the rather bizarre comments that one can find sprinkled around the various postings on the site. These range from abusive to clueless. It's astounding how humorless some people can be when someone pokes gentle fun at them. It's amazing how completely bereft of the irony gene many readers appear to be.
All of these comments simply confirm in my mind the absolutely essential nature of literacy education in our world. This blog could be used as an exit exam. Those who don't get it should be shuttled off to a remote location and allowed spend the remainder of their lives shopping at big box stores and eating fast food.

Exploiting Charity

It's Sunday evening and ABC is running hour after hour of generated generosity. First we have Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and then it's Oprah's Big Give. I admire the spirit that we have here. After all, EM:HE is miles better than the gratuitous self-indulgence that we have in the original Extreme Makeover, where people would abandon their families for weeks on end in order to get injected, nipped, and tucked.
I have two hesitations when it comes to these shows. First, there are thousands of families with problems in this world. Why do these programs feel it appropriate to shower buckets-full of blessings on one family or individual while all of those thousands of others are left with nothing. Oprah, it seems to me, is far worse about this than EM:HE. I've seen Oprah dump all manner of good things on people who have simply dug themselves into stupid circumstances. Don't get me wrong. A mistake should not be held against somebody for all time. Just because you incurred $50,000 in student loans in order to attend clown college should not condemn you to poverty for this life and the next, but does that person need more than to have their loans paid off?
I know, I know. I might be falling into that old excuse for doing nothing: "Since I can't help everybody, I'm not going to help anybody." That's not it at all. Think about the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan encountered the crime victim. He attended to the man's wounds, took him to an inn, and paid the bill. That's great, but did he also build the guy a house and put his kids through college? No. If Zeebo the indebted clown has his loans paid off and gets a new car and gets a bunch of new appliances and receives a $12,000 Panera gift card, I think that's a bit absurd, especially when some other clown has outstanding student loans.
But let's face it. Giving a modest gift to a bunch of people rather than an enormous gift to a single person just doesn't make good television. It's much more dramatic for an individual to receive a whole kitchen full of Kenmore appliances than for everybody on the block to get a new microwave.
My second problem with these shows is with motivation. Sears and various other vendors give "generously." I quotate "generously," because they're truly not generous at all. What does a house full of Kenmore's best appliances cost? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that it's a lot less than a single thirty-second ad during a prime-time TV show.
Whatever happened to giving because it's the right thing to do? Do we have to have giving that winds up putting our name on something? Giving that can be charged to the advertising budget?
Hey, it's their money. They can do whatever they like with it. And a generous person can dump huge amounts on a single individual or a smaller amount on hundreds. That's their call. In no case do I consider myself worthy of that sort of largesse, so I'm grateful in my own way. I'll still watch those programs now and again, but I'll always have the feeling that there's something not quite right about them.

Scoundrel Alert: Tax Preparation

The world, I am convinced, is full of scoundrels. My latest discovery in this area is the refund anticipation loan debit card being offered (and endlessly shilled) by H. & R. Block on television. The ad in question shows two guys sitting at a bar, one of them covered with money. This is his tax refund. It's a refund suit. His counterpart asks him if this form of refund isn't inconvenient, to which the dullard in the money suit says, "Do you know a better way?"
This question, of course, leads our hero--or at least Block's hero--into a plug of the debit card. Interestingly, however, it doesn't lead him to say, "Yeah, I know a better way. A check!" or "Direct deposit!"
How would a debit card be better than one of these traditional methods of getting your refund? First of all, Block isn't offering you your refund. They're offering a refund anticipation loan. A couple of years ago, the company got hammered for the obscene fees they were levying on these loans. Now, they've found a new way to perform income redistribution.
What a sensible consumer needs to ask is why would Block want to put money on a card. Is a card cheaper than a check? I can't imagine that it would be. It seems, from my research, that Block charges people $20 if they want their loan on a check rather than the card. I'm certain that a check doesn't cost any $20 to produce. If they do, then I'm going to get into a check issuing business.
Block wants the money on a card because then they can still get their greedy paws on it. Once that money is on a check, they've seen the last of it, but if it's on the card, they can still play nasty games, charging you for ATM usage and the like.
This company, headquartered in Kansas City I must confess, charges (too much) for doing taxes. Then they charge a fee for the refund anticipation loan. Then they charge (excessive) interest on the loan. Then they charge fees when you use the card that has your money on it.
I'm also curious as to what percentage of money on these debit cards gets used. If I get a check for $1,000, I'll put it in my bank account and I'll eventually spend all of it. If I have a debit card that's down to $2.39, however, I might never get that last $2.39 spent. That's $2.39 that Block can just keep. Imagine if a million taxpayers all left an average of $2.39 on their cards. Wouldn't that be a sweet little pile to clean up?
So why does H. & R. Block want you to take out a loan and put it on a card? Just like the guy in the money suit on TV, they want to fleece you of your dollars. They're scoundrels.

Shusaku Endo and My Guilty Conscience

In making my way through a recent short-story anthology, I encountered a troubling biographical entry. The anthology’s editor, Bret Lott, describes the Japanese author Shusaku Endo as “the internationally renowned Japanese novelist, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and short story author.” This introduction leaves me feeling quite inadequate as a literature student for I had never so much as heard Endo’s name before opening Lott’s book.
In the broader view, of course, any reader must recognize that there is an almost infinite amount of worthwhile material, an almost endless phalanx of “internationally renowned” writers whom one ought to know. I’m reminded here of the elite fighters of the Persian army, the Immortals, so called because they attacked in deep ranks. When one fighter went down, another stepped up to take his place. So it is with worthwhile writings, except that once you knock down Shusaku Endo, you discover perhaps two or three or twelve others lurking behind him. This was the discovery I made several years ago when I ventured into Japanese fiction for the first time. I read Haruki Murakami, but then realized that to fully—or even marginally—understand him, I needed to read Mishima and Kawabata and Oe. To understand the fiction of Japan, I also needed to learn something of the poetry. And to understand Murakami, I found myself frequently thrown back to Europe and America in the influences of Kafka and American jazz. In moments, I could find myself overrun and trampled by the onslaught of the Immortals.
Some twenty years ago, I sat in a class for my master’s degree, listening to the professor, Linda Voits, talk about the novels of Anthony Trollope. To this day I can’t recall why she told us this, but the story sticks in my mind. “I read the Barchester novels of Trollope while on sabbatical last year as I was taking the train from Cambridge into London each day. I’d never read them all . . . in order,” she explained, quite offhand. I’m not sure that Professor Voits actually paused between “all” and “in order,” but that’s how I remember it. I recall sitting around a seminar table with a dozen other students, all of us thinking the same thing. We’d never read any of the Barchester novels, much less all of them, much less in order. We had other things to read in order to feel as if we had some claim to those letters, M.A., after our names.
To this day, I maintain what seem like appalling holes in my reading. Proust? No. Goethe? I’ve read nothing beyond The Sorrows of Young Werther. Dickens? Only a few bits here and there. Spenser? I couldn’t get past the first book of The Fairie Queene. And I’ve never even heard of Shusaku Endo!
In the end, we who would be literary, must confess to these gaps. Unless you surrender yourself to reading eighteen hours a day, you will not read everything of significance. A bit of math will confirm this truth. Let’s take Shakespeare as an example. If we accept that Shakespeare has perhaps twenty plays of significance, that gives us a starting point. After all, who reads The Two Gentlemen of Verona? If each of these plays takes an average reader some five hours, then simply getting through Shakespeare will take 100 hours. That doesn’t sound too bad, but that’s only Shakespeare. Add in Marlowe and Kyd and Jonson and Spenser and Sidney, just to get a good grounding in Renaissance England, and you’ve taken the pile up to perhaps 300 hours.
If you had a job paying you to read forty hours a week, you could dispatch the Renaissance English—or at least a healthy sample of them—in some eight weeks. However, this doesn’t give you any time to read criticism, biographies, history, philosophy, theology, or any of the other fields important to understanding Shakespeare’s world.
Furthermore, few people can land a job that allows for forty hours of reading per week. I’ve read and taught Hamlet a dozen times, but I’m unlikely in my present employment to be able to work Titus Andronicus, which I read for the first time last year, into the curriculum. I’ll almost certainly never teach Dryden or Samuel Richardson, and I’ll never get to put Shusaku Endo on the syllabus. Those of you who do not read for part of your living have even a greater constraint placed on your achievement.
In the end, the reader cannot cover the entire field of literature. Anyone who claims to have done so is either lying or named Harold Bloom. Since your name is almost certainly not Harold Bloom—because is desperately attempting to keep up with the deluge of titles necessary to keep him Harold Bloom—you must either surrender yourself to prevarication or accept a partial knowledge of human letters as an acceptable state. (I suppose you could collapse in despair, but I don’t recommend that.)
What a sick art would be literature if it were designed to be completely mastered while at the same time making that design less attainable with each new creation. Happily, literature is not intended as some sort of obsessive mental collection. Literature helps to reveal the human condition, it explores the meaning of human existence. In that way, it is somewhat akin to human friendship. Would we consider ourselves failed humans if we were not to meet all the people on earth? Obviously not. In fact, measuring our happiness by a checklist of acquaintances would be a very facile and foolish thing indeed.
The rich literary life embraces many friends in the world’s texts. Some of these friends are boon companions, while others are passing experiences. Some we meet and don’t get on with particularly well, while others come to us, late in the day, leading us to wonder how we ever existed without their companionship.
Shusaku Endo is a new friend for me. Should I feel guilty not to have crossed his path before? Certainly not. I doubt that we’ll ever be best of friends, but that’s hardly the point. Frankly, I’m not sure that this relationship will grow further, but I am pleased to have made his acquaintance. I can ask no more from a text.

Of Cows and the Economy

Why do we have recessions in the economy? For the past couple of months, there’s been all sort of chatter in the press. “Are we in recession?” “How bad will the recession be?” “When will the recession end?” We take boom times and busts as if they were as predictable as the changing seasons and just as fickle. Does this make sense? I don’t see why it would.
Imagine if you will that we live in a cloistered little community of perhaps fifty people. Of those fifty, perhaps forty are involved in agriculture of some sort, growing crops, animals, and the like. Some of them might be bivocational. Perhaps the community’s doctor splits time between patients and potatoes. Other people might work full-time in a field that does not involve fields. Regardless of the exact numbers, we can hope that our population of fifty will produce sufficient food, clothing, housing, and the like to meet everyone’s needs. Perhaps they’ll sell off excess cream or some other commodity in order to purchase the cloth that the people in a nearby town of fifty produces in excess, but mostly, this group is self-sufficient. Would such a community ever experience a recession? If so, how would it happen?
If an agriculturally-based community were to experience drought or potato blight or mad cow disease, then we would understand a recession. In fact, in the old days, that sort of “recession” went by a different name: a famine. Is the current recession the result of such a production shortfall? No, because we aren’t ultimately an agriculturally-based community (or economy). We’re a dollar-based economy.
In an agricultural economy, wealth is measured in terms of production. For example, if my cows produce not ten but twelve healthy calves this year, then I’m twenty percent wealthier in that category. It’s a good year. Good management and good fortune can lead to this sort of result, and it benefits the entire community. The law of supply and demand suggests that if the three beef farmers in the community all have extra calves this year, then the price of steak will go down in the future. If the supply of milk cows rises, we can expect milk, butter, and cheese to be plentiful and relatively less expensive in the future. Everybody wins! The farmers sell or barter more of their product, leading to more carrots and eggs and blue jeans on their counters, while the beef-buyers get a better price.
But here’s the rub. If Farmer Abe runs fifty head on his hundred acres this year, that’s dandy. If he experiences a ten-percent increase, then he will have fifty-five head next year. As the boom times continue, he’ll have sixty and then seventy and eventually a hundred head of cattle jostling around in his pastures. What are Abe’s options? He could attempt to buy more land on which to run his blossoming herd. That’s fine, but it’s not a long-term situation. Land, as the real estate agents are apt to remind us, is something they’re not making more of. Eventually Abe’s herd overwhelms the carrying capacity of the land at his disposal. He’ll either pen his herds up in feeding pens, creating sub-standard beef, or foul his land, rendering it less useful tomorrow in order to enjoy profits today.
Now let’s think about a money-based economy rather than a cow-based one. When we expect a corporation to increase revenue and profits year after year, don’t we eventually ask them to exceed the carrying capacity of the financial system? No, money doesn’t leave manure lying around, nor does it eat grass, but it does have limits. We can’t continue to expand forever without repercussions. Those repercussions, I would argue, are called recessions, when the chickens come home to roost (or the cows come home to graze).

Envy is not a Lovely Thing

Last night I sprawled out in my living room and watched “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” where Ty and company built a new house for a single father/Marine who had lost a leg in Iraq. Since this family lives in the Kansas City area, our local news decided to make the most of the broadcast, running a one-hour special before-hand in which they, among other things, spoke with the two other families from the area who had been featured on the program.
One thing really struck me during that hour. The mother from one of those previous families told of overhearing somebody saying this: “Maybe we should adopt a bunch of kids and then we can get something for nothing.”
Why do so many people struggle with appreciating the good-fortune of others? If you want to be jealous of Eli Manning or Brittany Spears, I think I can understand that, but do these people really believe that somebody would adopt a bunch of kids just on the off chance of getting on that show? Do they think that last night’s dad lost a leg and a marriage for a new house?
Now I’m not totally naïve—a little bit, but not totally. I recognize that these people aren’t pure as the driven snow. Probably Mr. Gilyeat, the Marine from last night’s show, has his flaws. His ex-wife might well tell some unflattering tales on the man. Maybe he’s even bought a few lottery tickets or otherwise mismanaged his money, but who cares? Who among us doesn’t have a flaw or ten?
Envy is an ugly thing. When we can’t look at somebody who has experienced a blessing and simply think, “Wow, good for them!” we’re living with an impoverished spirit.
Don’t think that I’m suggesting that I’m perfect. I’ve looked at coworkers, neighbors, and friends who have something that I’d like to have myself with an envious eye. Since I’ll never slash their tires or steal their identities, the only harm in this transaction of envy comes to me. I’m diminished when I resent someone else’s good fortune, even if they don’t deserve it.

Artificial Drama

Perhaps the single stupidest television show I’ve ever encountered is Don’t Forget the Lyrics, the Fox program in which people sing karaoke, supplying a few of the words along the way. Okay, that last sentence isn’t true. The single stupidest show in history is a sit-com from the 80s in which a little girl plays a robot.
What’s stupid about the lyrics show is not the premise, which is kind of fun. The creators of that show must have immediately thought of the spin-off possibilities. They could—and maybe already have—produced computer-based games, CDs, and all sorts of other merchandise. What’s stupid is the artificial drama that these people attempt to pump into their show.
Here’s the scene. Somebody sings part of a song. A few words are left out. They have to supply the missing words. After a moment’s hesitation, the singer is asked to “lock in” their supplied lyrics, this show’s equivalent of Millionaire’s “final answer.” So far so good, but the host then makes them wait a painfully long time before revealing whether or not the answer is correct. In one case, a player had used two different “cheats.” His song was “My Eyes Adored You.” When he couldn’t nail the words, he asked to be given a multiple-choice menu. One of those three lines was correct. When that didn’t settle the answer in his mind, he asked to be given two words. The words supplied eliminated two of the multiple-choice answers. In other words, any sentient creature should have seen that only choice C could possibly be correct. There was absolutely no suspense here. Did that lead the host to immediately reveal the correctness of the player’s answer? Of course not. He made us all wait.
Artificial drama is the common denominator for reality shows. With a tension-evoking music and absurd pauses, we get dragged from commercial break to commercial break. Artificial drama attempts to make Donald Trump seem interesting. It drives Howie Mandel’s suitcase-opening game. Artificial drama is the stock-in-trade for Survivor, Amazing Race, and Oprah’s new reality competition.
The killer is that this main ingredient of “reality TV” is incredibly unreal. Forget the contrived situations and laughable premises, the phony suspense is what makes me gag at most of these offerings.

It’s a Conspiracy—The Weathermen

Turn on the television and tune in to some local channel at news time, especially during the winter—or the spring or summer or fall. Let’s just imagine what you might hear, between the live shot outside a courthouse where nothing has happened in hours and the vital health information regarding the importance of Upsilon-7 vitamins to the diet.
Here’s Stormy Raines with the weather.
Thanks Brice. Batten down the hatches tonight as we prepare for a real blast of winter. We’ll have all the details in just a moment.
This is when you endure the ad for a local car dealer who needs speech therapy and the announcement that local weather is brought to you by Kia. Finally Stormy reappears on the screen.
I hope you didn’t put away your winter coat and gloves yet. If you don’t need to go out tonight or tomorrow or the next day, then stay inside. Don’t even go near the windows. A vast, scary blast of winter coldness is moving this way. It’s big and it’s cold and there’s a good chance that we’re all going to die! Snowfall accumulations of nineteen to fifty-six inches are possible [in an alternate universe] with temperatures bottoming out in the low teens [in my freezer].
Fast forward twenty-four hours. Look out the window. Exactly seventeen flakes of snow are jockeying for position on your driveway, desperately seeking shade to avoid the mid-thirties temperatures and direct sunlight.
This is the story of television weather forecasts all around the country. They give us results like these:
· A forecast of extreme tornado activity yields winds too feeble to hold a kite aloft.
· A report of a killer heat wave leaves a skim of ice on the pond.
· A prediction of dimension-rupturing thunderstorms results in forty-five seconds of gentle rain.
Of course, in fairness, meteorology isn’t exactly a science—well, okay, I guess it is, but it’s not respectable like stock picking and phrenology. Still, we might expect a better track record than these people achieve.
Okay, okay, these people are predicting the future, so we should cut them some slack. They’re every bit as accurate as the experts who forecast professional football seasons—The New Orleans Saints will win the Super Bowl after the 2007 season—or political contests—Rudy Giuliani is the Republican’s most likely nominee for president in 2008. But if their misses were simply a symptom of the vagaries of winds aloft and Doppler misreadings, shouldn’t we expect Stormy and company to miss high just as often as they miss low, to overpredict the precipitation as often as they underpredict it? It makes sense doesn’t it? But this isn’t what we find.
After many seasons of painstaking research and record-keeping, I have uncovered a vast meteorological conspiracy. For every one case of underpredicting the weather, the “light dusting of snow” that turns into a blizzard, we get a dozen cases of overprediction.
But why, you might ask, would these meteorological mediocrities continuously exaggerate the future? What possible motivation could they have?
The answer here is simple. How far would they get with this forecast?
Stay tuned for weather when Stormy Raines will explain how nondescript tomorrow is likely to be.
Yeah, the “We’re All Gonna Die!” forecasts do not reflect meteorological uncertainties. They demonstrate the desire for ratings. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t begrudge the TV channels their ratings. Ratings are a fine thing. If a local weather personality fell in the forest and no one was tuned in to listen, would it make any sound? I don’t think so.
But can they justify the constant worst-case forecasts that we receive on the basis of a need for ratings? Not in my neighborhood.
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan told us. As it turns out, if you listen the TV weathermen, you can count on hearing the wind blowing hard.

It’s a Conspiracy—Bombastic

This entry involves a specific corporation, a large corporation that provides cable television, Internet access, phone service, and cheesy commercials to a huge swath of America. In the interests of privacy, politeness, and the avoidance of lawsuits, I’ll refer to them by a pseudonym. We’ll call them Bombast.
I have a love/hate relationship with Bombast. On the love side, I love having virtually limitless non-static-filled channels to surf through when I’m bored. On the hate side, I hate . . . well, let me count the ways that I hate.
1. I hate the plethora of ad-filled flotsam that they pump into my house. Here, I’m not gagging on the twenty-plus minutes out of each hour that the typical network fare carves out for endless Geico and McDonalds spots. It’s the sell-out of infomercials and home-shopping channels. Let me see if I have this right: I pay money to Bombast so that I can watch people who have paid money to Bombast to pitch products in my direction.
2. I hate the fact that I can’t get a decent signal on the channel numbers that correspond with local broadcast channels. Mostly I hate that when I complain of this to Bombast, they make excuses and eventually throw up their hands. “We can’t fix that problem, but that doesn’t change your billing status. Is there anything else I can do for you today?”
3. I hate the constant bundles, specials, and promotions that the people at Bombast advertise 24/7 while never saving me a single dime.
4. I hate—and this is the one that sent me over the edge—this little bit of switch and bait. A month or so back, the geniuses at Bombast decided to move the Hallmark Channel from channel 31 to somewhere up in the digital domain. Why would they do this? Would it have anything to do with technical needs or artistic integrity? No. They moved Hallmark into the digital realm so that I would need to get myself a digital box.
“We can offer you that for free!” a breathless Bombast rep told me.
“Forever?” I asked.
Breathless then breathed. “Well . . . not forever.”
In short, Bombast offered me less product for the same price. It’s not that I watch the Hallmark Channel. It’s the principle of the thing!
That’s when I decided to pull the plug on Bombast. Calling them, I announced the death sentence. They invited me to bring my cable modem to their service center, which I did the next day. This was nine days ago. Here’s the killer. They still haven’t pulled the plug. The TV portion of my cable bill runs around $60 a month. They’ve now given it to us for free from around a third of a month. That’s a $20 gift. Should I love Bombast for that? Not just yet.
Here’s my prediction. Bombast will not send me a final bill. They’ll pretend that I never called in to cancel my service. They’ll conveniently fail to record that I returned the cable modem. Not to worry—I kept the receipt. Maybe I’m wrong—and if I am, I’ll admit it here—but I’m sticking to my prediction.

Agriculture, Marriage, and God's Word

In reading Wendell Berry and other writers on agriculture and land use in recent months, I have been struck by the analogy drawn between marriage and the land. The marriage relationship is not one to be easily disposed of. Similarly, our relation to the land should not be a temporary one or a consumer-oriented one. My relationship with my wife must be one that works today and forever. If not, then like those who use up the land and then move on, we’re not creating a sustainable relationship.
Some people do not nourish their relationships. They’re detached from the land or the spouse, allowing the relationship to wither and die. Others see the relationship as something that should serve and nourish them. They use up the land or the spouse, eventually destroying it.
I wonder if the same sort of analogy might be made in our relationship to God’s Word. There are those who ignore the Word. In that case, it does not wither and die, but their relationship never amounts to anything. Others see God’s Word as nothing more than something to be used. They grab prooftexts to shore up their pet positions. Or they mine the Word as something to satisfy their needs. Neither of these is a sustainable, nourishing position.
A true relationship between a person and God’s Word is one that nourishes the person and glorifies God’s Word. The Word is allowed to bring forth fruit and change the person. This idea is just an idea, but with a bit of development. It might be a good idea. Let’s see where it goes.

Heath Ledger

Don't get me wrong. I'm not some sort of heartless meanie, but I don't care all that much that Heath Ledger died yesterday. Let me rephrase that. I don't care more about Ledger's death than about the demise of any other twenty-eight-year-old with a lot of talent to offer the world. If this were my nephew in his mid-twenties, I'd care a great deal, although he doesn't have Ledger's talents.
I mention this because both of my twenty-something daughters found out about the news from my mouth. Daughter number two complained of having a bad day. I indicated that she didn't have as bad a day as Heath Ledger.
"What's up with him?" daughter number one asked.
"He died."
You'd have thought I died. Frankly, I'm not sure they would have reacted more strongly had they learned that a family member--say that twenty-something cousin--had died.
Why is it that a guy they've never met and probably never will meet drew that sort of a reaction from the girls? I'm not sure, but it's an interesting topic to mull over.

Global Warming Validation Redux

Who'd have thunk that a mere twenty-four hours after pounding out that last post, I would stumble across this story indicating that between January 1998 and December 2007, average temperatures actually went down by a tiny fraction. I'm no climatologist, but this seems pretty fishy to me. That's all.

Global Warming Validation

I've been reading a good deal about global warming recently, ranging all over the map of ideologies and scientific disciplines. What I've come to recognize is that a significant number of media types, governmental functionaries, and non-climatologist scientists have declared that the debate over global warming is over while the actual scientists who study this sort of stuff remain much more divided on the matter.
When the dust settles, we'll know which side had it right, but I'd really like to know before then. You see, if we decide that global warming is real--and if we turn out to be wrong--then we'll pour a huge amount of money into fighting it. If global warming turns out to be simply an Al Gore hallucination, that money will be largely wasted. And if it winds up being real but not fixable, then we might as well invest in bigger air conditioners.
On the other hand, if we opt to reject the current consensus on global warming then we all fry, drown, or otherwise die. I don't want to be wrong on this one, and since meteorologists seem to struggle to forecast tomorrow's weather, I can't get real excited about their prognostications regarding twenty years out.
So here's the question that I'd drop in the lap of the debaters: What results in what time frame can we agree on to demonstrate who is right? Let me explain. I recall somewhere back in my science education that Einstein theorized about light being affected by gravity. Most physicists accepted this theory as correct as they embraced relativity, but they still performed an experiment. During an eclipse, they noted, the light from a star, traveling past the eclipsed sun, should be bent slightly therefore making the star appear to be in a different spot in the sky. They performed their measurements and waited for the eclipse to see if, indeed, the star's light bent. And it did. Einstein's theory was vindicated.
Today, at my house, the temperature is a balmy twelve degrees, hardly the stuff of global warming. However, I'm not so naive as to believe that one cold day disproves an overall warming trend. But 2007 was not warmer than 2006, which in turn was not warmer than 2005. Presumably, global warming should produce some . . . warming, right? But again, we don't need to see each year inexorably warmer than the one before. But what sort of warming trend should we be able to observe to know that the earth is indeed heating up? Will a five-year trend suffice? A ten-year trend?
I'd like to hear both sides of this debate set out figures that say, essentially, "If we don't observe at least this sort of movement, then we'll shut up and concede defeat." I think they owe us this much. After all, if the Gore crowd is wrong, we're going to flush a lot of money down the toilet, while if the denier crowd is wrong, oodles of people will die. It seems like some level of accountability is the least they could offer.

Pursuit of Happiness, Part 4

So far we've looked at the height and width of happiness, leaving us with the length or depth as our remaining dimension. So what is the length or depth of happiness? For reasons that will quickly become obvious, I'd prefer to use the world length in this situation, because of its double meaning. The length of happiness refers simply to how long it lasts.
We've talked already about how the thrill of riding a roller coaster is a a reasonably high bit of happiness, but it is not a piece of happiness that lasts very long. If you're a coaster addict and you truly enjoyed a ride, then the natural thing for you to do upon exiting the coaster is to dash around to the entrance to ride it again. I can remember a couple of times in my life when I actually didn't have to get off a roller coaster since no one was waiting to get on. That's sweet!
But why do we dash around to the entrance again? If the thrill were not simply high but long, we'd walk out of the ride exit quite contented. "Well, that was great. Maybe I'll try it again next year!" we might say. But we don't.
On the other hand, when I walk out of a pizza buffet, I don't ever dash around from exit to entrance, eager to start my eating all over again. The thrill of the pizza, unlike the thrill of the roller coaster, lasts for a while. Last semester, I ate at a pizza buffet just about every Thursday for lunch. Once a week is enough pizza buffets for me, but come Thursday, I was ready to hit the slices again.
What lasts longer than a pizza buffet? What happiness have you ever experienced that remains in force for more than a few days? If you buy a new computer, you're probably ecstatic about it for a few days, but gradually the thrill wears off. The same thing goes for a new car or a house. There just aren't very many things that make you happy and keep you happy. The Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl in 1969. For Chiefs fans, that happiness has long ago worn off. In fact, although that victory was before my time, I'm pretty sure that it didn't stick very long at all.
We now have three dimensions to our happiness. The next step is to explore the world of solid happiness. But that's for another day.

Homeowners' Association

I've been thinking a little bit about clotheslines lately--clotheslines and homeowners' associations. In my neighborhood, we have a rule against clotheslines. Now I understand the rules and the need for them. I'm glad that people can't put a car on blocks in the front yard or leave derelict appliances on the porch. I appreciate that we have to mow our grass and that we can't burn lawn gnomes at Halloween. That's all good.
But what's this deal with clotheslines?
What is it that clotheslines conjur up in the minds of the czars of suburbia? In television ads, clotheslines are romantic and heartwarming. They're associated with love and family and better days. And what about dryers? Does anybody get all misty-eyed about clothes dryers? I don't think so. Oh, sure, when somebody wins one on The Price is Right, that's a good association, but who's going to paint a painting of a washer dryer pair? You'll see that painting of an oven or a kitchen table, but not the laundry room.
Are clotheslines ugly? Not really. Is the sight of a bunch sheets or shirts swinging in the breeze a real eyesore? Sure, Aunt Lulu's knickers might be a bit hard to take, but she could surely have the sense to put those on an interior line. No, most people seem to agree that clotheslines aren't ugly.
So why is it that something romanticized in TV ads and other venues, something that isn't ugly, is banned by the all-knowing protectors of tract-house sanctity? I think it's really simple and simply stupid. Homeowners associations want to maintain the appearance of affluence and value. And what do clotheslines signify? Today, they signify time and care and love. In a previous day, they signified that you couldn't afford to buy a washer and dryer.
Today, few people hang out their laundry because they can't afford automation. So why does the rule remain on the books of so many homeowners' associations? I think it's because they either don't know or want to admit the roots of their rules. They don't want to think that the preferences that they codify in the rules are all that much about economic class and appearances. That's what I think. What about you?

The Pursuit of Happiness, Part 3

Having examined the "height" dimension of happiness, let's take a moment to think about the breadth or width dimension. While "tall" or "high" happiness engages my whole being, "wide" happiness transcends my person.
In the last post, I suggested that, if only for a short moment, a good roller coaster can make me very happy. (If I didn't suggest that, then I should have.) If I happen to be on the roller coaster with a friend or three, then they may very well experience the same sort of happiness that I do. Of course, they won't necessarily have that sort of happiness.


But the happiness that I experience on the ride doesn't infect anybody else. It's my happiness. For others to experience that narrow happiness, they'll have to get on the ride themselves and get their own little sliver of happiness.
Similarly, when I eat a Chipotle burrito, the happiness is mine alone. Rarely will you see someone sitting at a table contentedly watching someone else chow down on their bedroll-sized burrito.
What is an example of something that creates wide-ranging happiness? Let's try this one on, even though it will seem to stumble over the speed bump of my previous Chipotle argument. Last night my family went to dinner at Olive Garden, where we gorged ourselves on bread sticks and cheese-laden pasta. (Yes, there was salad, too, but who wants to muddy the waters with talk of vegetables.) I would suggest that the happiness incurred there was a broad happiness, covering the five of us who sat around the table. Now you'll want to argue that one given my previous comments, but there's a distinction to be made. My fourteenth breadstick gave me a measure of happiness not quite as tall as number thirteen and pretty much restricted to me. Penny did not sit there enjoying that breadstick along with me as I ate it. However, the happiness of the entire experience lapped over all of us. The happiness of Alyson's entree was hers alone, but she shared in the happiness of the whole experience. Similarly, when I took my kids to Worlds of Fun last summer, I decided did not enjoy riding some of the rides. In fact, I honestly thought I might hurl all over one particular spinning hell called Cyclone Sam's. At the same time, I very much enjoyed sharing time with Thomas and Olivia. Their ride on the Mamba was happiness that only they--individually--enjoyed, but the day at the park was happiness shared by all.
So you get the idea of the breadth of happiness. I would argue that just as tall happiness is better than short happiness, broad happiness is better than narrow happiness. When something makes 100 people happy as opposed to making 1 person happy, then it is better. That seems pretty obvious, but we often forget it.

The Pursuit of Happiness, Part 2

So what is happiness? Economists talk about something called "utility," which can be roughly defined as goodness or usefulness or value, but these are not the same as happiness. I'd like to think about happiness as an object. Not a garden-variety object of the sort that you'd find loitering under a twenty-five-cent tag at a garage sale. No, I'm thinking of a more metaphorical, more abstract object, but still an object with three dimensions.
Happiness, I would argue, has height and breadth and length. We'll take a few minutes now to examine the first of these three dimensions, height.
The height of happiness seems to me pretty obvious. Imagine for a moment that you're driving along a busy road. If you're like me, you simply hate red lights, recognizing them for what they are: a conspiracy by public works types to foul up your schedule. As you drive along, coming up to one of those intersections that doesn't really need a stoplight but has one anyway, you see the scowling visage of the red light. "No," you think to yourself. "I do not want to stop for this ridiculous light at a cross-street where one car comes along every four hours." And then something magical happens. The light turns green and you drive through unimpeded.
Happy? Of course you're happy. I'm happy when I'm waiting for some slow webpage--some blogger page perhaps--to load and it finally pops into view. Yes, that's a little chunk of happiness, but it's not a very tall chunk.
What would be an example of tall happiness? You've just gotten engaged to the most fabulous person on earth. That's a tall chunk of happy. You've just found a bag with $187,000 in it. Tall happy!
But here's where the limits of the height of happiness come in. When I'm riding a great roller-coaster or hooking a fish or biting into a Chipotle burrito, I experience a significantly lofty bit of happiness. It's tall, but that's all it is. To get really great happiness, we'll have to go beyond tall happiness. And that's where we'll take this investigation next time. Unless I decide to take it elsewhere.

Political Punctuation

This has nothing directly to do with the pursuit of happiness. Instead it has to do with the current political season, specifically with the teacup of hot water that Mike Huckabee found himself in recently. You might remember that in early December Huckabee, after being asked for his opinion regarding Mormonism, asked, "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?" What a hue and cry we heard then. Mitt Romney was incensed. The LDS church cried foul. Huckabee apologized. Every pundit in the Western hemisphere weighed in on the significance of the question and the sincerity of the apology.
What nobody seemed to bother to ask was do "Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers"? Do they?
FAIR, a Mormon apologetic cite, lists the "Jesus-Lucifer spirit-brothers" criticism among the unfair attacks to be refuted. They trace the criticism to a couple of anti-Mormon apologetic sources, but how did those people get this (apparently) crazy notion.
It seems that in 1870 Brigham Young, whom the LDS hold up as a prophet, described Jesus and Lucifer as brothers. In 1945, Milton Hunter, another high LDS official referred to the pair as "spirit-brothers." We can find similar proclamations from LDS apostles John Widstoe, George Cannon, Joseph Merrill, Joseph Young, and Bruce McConkie, and another of their prophet-presidents, Spencer Kimball.
So what do the Mormon's teach today? Apparently they teach that all sentient creatures are in one sense "children of God" and therefore brothers and sisters. According to that logic, Lucifer-Satan would be a brother of Jesus. That's not my theology, but they're welcome to believe whatever they want.
Here's my point. If two Mormon prophets and a fist-full of apostles have published materials that pretty clearly state this as their belief, why should anybody take exception to Huckabee's quite natural question?

The Pursuit of Happiness, Part 1

I've been thinking a good bit about the pursuit of happiness in recent days. I'm not talking about the recent Will Smith movie here. I mean that phrase from the Declaration of Independence--as in, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
According to Jefferson, the pursuit of happiness is one of the rights bestowed on all of us by our Creator. That fact, he argued, was "self evident." Clearly, Jefferson did not mean that happiness was some sort of inalienable right for all people. If that's what he meant, then he would have said "life, liberty, and happiness." Instead, he mentions the "pursuit of happiness." As an analogy, I could note that the state of Missouri guarantees me the right to pursue largemouth bass. They don't guarantee that I'll catch anything when I put a line in the water, but I have every right to pursue them.
While I have some sense of how to pursue fish, I don't find it nearly so clear how to pursue happiness. In fact, I'd suggest that most people don't have a real clear notion of how to pursue happiness. In order to pursue happiness, we have to know pretty clearly what it is, and I don't believe that most people have that very well in mind. Over the next few posts, I'd like to explore this notion of what happiness is and how one goes about pursuing it.