The Dilettante's Dilemma

Microaggression! Really?

Posted on January 10, 2014 by hessd

I was watching an episode of The Mentalist this week and particularly enjoyed this one line. I’ll let you know when the line shows up. This next part is just background

So there are these two guys in a bar. What is with these guys? They are clumsy. They don’t present themselves very well. On the other hand, they are in the bar because women they might be interested in are there and it is their job, apparently, not the women’s job, to take the initiative. They do it badly.

The women are there to check up on Patrick Jane, the main character of the show, who is having a date somewhere in the restaurant. The men give their names. After a brief pause, the women give their names. The first woman’s name is Kim. The second woman’s name is Theresa. “Theresa,” says the Second Oaf, “that’s a pretty name.”

OK, here’s the line. She looks up at him and says, “Thank you.” When, in the next conversational pass, the women reveal that they are FBI agents and the men back cautiously away, the whole scene is over, but I thought that Theresa’s thanking the Second Oaf for doing as well as he could, was a nice touch. I’ve had that job myself, recently, and I didn’t always do it very well. I understood that to be treated with generosity by a woman who was simultaneously signaling that she didn’t want to have anything further to do with me was a gift from her to me and I accepted it thankfully.

If you go to this site on Buzzfeed, you will see a lot of what someone thinks ought to be called microaggression. I look at it as training in victimhood for the featured young people. I’ll show some pictures from this site later.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/hnigatu/racial-microagressions-you-hear-on-a-daily-basis

Now let’s talk about microaggression. It doesn’t have to be racial or ethnic as the examples on this site are. It could have to do with gender, with age, with social presentability e.g. fat or ugly, with being a member of the wrong class, with being—as with the two guys at the bar—confronted with a task that was beyond their ability.

“Micro” aggressions are, of course, just “little aggressions,” but it makes me wonder why it is a good idea to invent a scale that groups a lot of different behaviors together and calls them all “aggressions,” distinguishing them only by whether they are large or small. Why is that a good idea? So lynching a black civil rights worker in Mississippi is a macroaggression, right, and not being able to tell the nationality of an Asian schoolgirl is a microaggression. Is a scale that does that really a good idea?

It seems to me it would be a good deal more satisfying, and not so…you know…microaggressive, to build two scales. In my teaching days, I called them axes and called the ends of the axis, poles. On the one axis, you put people who intend to do harm to others. You could calibrate it from large harmful acts at one pole to small harmful acts at the other, but there would be nothing inadvertent on the axis at all. The other axis would measure social competence—a kind of a klutz or doofus scale—and goes from high (reliably incompetent or insensitive) to low (socially skillful).

If you don’t do it that way, you are going to be calling “aggressive,” a lot of people who are trying to do social tasks that are beyond their ability.

So here’s one. I’m guessing that the point is that she is thought not to be “American” because she is not Caucasian. If she looked Russian, in other words, she would not be thought to be an immigrant. If she were Russian, her family actually could have come from the region of the Caucasus Mountains and she would be Caucasian in a way Germans and Swedes and Italians could only envy. I wonder if she knows that rolling her eyes like that can only be an act of microaggression.

Or try this one. In my classes at Portland State, I had a lot students from Japan, Korea, China, and Vietnam and a few each term from other Asian countries. If there is a way to distinguish students from each of these countries flawlessly just by looking at them, it was not covered in the faculty manual.[1] If you are teaching political science, questions of relations between the government of the U. S. and these four countries will arise. I’m trying to think why I shouldn’t ask this question of an Asian student who looks like this.

Or how about this one? Would you really look at a person who is as far away from you as this camera shot suggests and screw up your mouth like that? Would you really? So the question of the monumental preference of black voters for Democratic candidates comes up and the likelihood that the one black student in the class will have no views on the question that are worth hearing is accepted as common knowledge? What would he know about it? What experience does he have of black voters that would not be shared equally by the other students in the class?

Of the many grievances I harbor about this piece—What! You couldn’t tell?—let me select two. People who perform a delicate or even a routine piece of social interaction badly are not necessarily “aggressive.” They might be daunted, shy, anxious, or just incompetent. That’s my first grievance.

Second, the microaggression is a notion that can have some useful applications in an experimental setting. Used generally to disparage people who said things you didn’t like is not a good idea. It exacerbates any tensions there may be. It leads the doofus who asked the stupid question to move in the direction of further alienation from “different looking people.” There are no pictures in this piece of the people who asked these questions, of course, because this is a session dedicated to training people how to feel like victims, but it is worth asking what the effect on these people will be.

Does the routine labeling of social ineptitude as “racism” really help bring the several races into productive dialogue? It does? Really”

[1] The names help a good deal more. One term, I had four Vietnamese students named Nguyen.

Posted in Political Psychology | Tagged aggression, racial comity, racism, social skill, the doofus scale | Leave a comment

Do You Understand What You Are Reading?

Posted on January 10, 2014 by hessd

I take the title from the question Philip asks the government official in Acts 8:30. The official is reading Isaiah and Philip runs up to the chariot to ask if the official is reading with understanding. The two passages I have in mind for today come from Matthew and Luke, but the question I am asking is the same question Philip asked.

In the family and the community and the culture in which I was raised, knowing what the Bible said was thought to be a good thing. You could learn a lot just by reading it by yourself, of course. Who was Tamar’s father-in-law? Um…Judah. But there were also groups who “studied” the Bible together and if you are going to pursue an activity in a group, there must be a common notion of what we are doing. You can’t do it together if you don’t have some common notion of what you are doing. Here is Gabriel, by the way. Look at the pointing finger.

What were we doing in these groups was looking at the passage under consideration and trying to decide what it meant. That seemed so unremarkable at the time. We might take a passage like Matthew 25, here in the King James Version of my youth.

³⁴Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: ³⁵For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: ³⁶Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.³⁷Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? ³⁸When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? ³⁹Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? ⁴⁰And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

We could have talked about the justice of God. We could have let our imaginations run about just who “the least of these” were. We certainly wouldn’t have paused to add “or my sisters” after “these my brethren,” although that is a perfectly respectable way to translate it if the question had come up. We might even have raised the question of whether it is really “the least of these” who is highlighted or is it “even the least of my brothers.” It is the brothers (and sisters) we are talking about and the least among these are being given particular focus. Is the passage about the disciples of Jesus, in other words?

I have nothing against conversations of that kind. There are passages in the Bible where that kind of discussion is as good as any other kind. Furthermore, it is a very democratic and forgiving group process. If “the meaning of the text” is right there on the page, in English, presupposing our own cultural values rather than those of the time when it occurred, and I understand it one way and you another, the discussion goes on. I value your contribution and you value my contribution and we have punch and cookies afterward.

Then there are passages where that kind of understanding is simply not adequate. Let’s consider one so we can explore just what would be required to understand such a passage. Here’s one from Luke 1, shifting now to the New Jerusalem Bible, my current favorite.

18 Zechariah said to the angel, ‘How can I know this? * I am an old man and my wife is getting on in years.’ 19 The angel replied, ‘I am Gabriel, who stand in God’s presence, and I have been sent to speak to you and bring you this good news. 20 Look! Since you did not believe my words, which will come true at their appointed time, you will be silenced and have no power of speech until this has happened.’

How will the group I have been describing and which I have often been a part of, understand this text? I have always understood that Gabriel is chastising Zechariah for his unbelief. That never seemed quite fair to me. An angel appears to me in the middle of a work day and says my wife, who has never been able to get pregnant—we tried everything!—is going to have a baby. Now, when even menopause is a distant memory. I say, “How in the world is that going to happen?” And he punishes me. I thought it was a pretty good question.

It gets worse if anyone in the group happens to know that Abraham asked the same question exactly—word for word—without getting hammered for it and Mary asked the same question as well, of this same angel, and got a very informative answer to her question. Puzzling, of course, but an answer. There are a lot of ways the discussion in my group can go after that; all of them bad, so far as understanding the passage is concerned.

Here’s another approach to that passage. It has a lot of drawbacks. For one thing, it is scholarly. We are never going to have a church full of biblical scholars or a church open to consulting biblical scholars. Why? Remember what I said about how bracing this kind of discussion was—democratic and forgiving, I called it? The scholarly approach isn’t like that. It features the authority of scholarship. If there is more than one scholar, I probably includes academic competition as well.

But it has advantages, too. For one thing, if provides an answer to the question of why Gabriel was so snotty to that dazzled old man. Here’s what Raymond Brown says, “He is struck dumb. That seems harsh, but this is not told for sentiment.”

Matthew is trying, Brown says, to remind his hearers[1] of Gabriel’s appearance to the prophet Daniel, which was Gabriel’s only previous appearance in the Bible. Here’s how that encounter went, as Daniel himself describes it in Daniel, Chapter 9:

¹⁴“Now I have come to explain the vision to you. I will tell you what will happen to your people. The vision shows what will take place in days to come.” ¹⁵While he was telling me those things, I bowed with my face toward the ground. I wasn’t able to speak.

Gabriel gave to Daniel a vision of the last times and Daniel was struck dumb by the vision. He wasn’t being punished. He was being overwhelmed. And Brown says that Luke introduces this little plot twist into the annunciation story to remind the readers of the power, the gravity, the significance of the pronouncement. The alternative way of approaching it, the way I described as my group’s approach, is dismissed by the line, “…this is not told for sentiment.” This one line, in fact, dismisses all the kinds of understandings available to the group. We presupposed that this story was being told for “sentiment,” although that is not what we would have called it.

Let’s just say that Brown is right about Luke’s editorial intent. Where does that leave us? As you would expect, there are some good effects and some bad effects. The most immediate good effect, the one I experienced most directly when I heard Brown’s line—“…this is not told for sentiment”—is the relief of letting go of Gabriel’s snappishness. Why Gabriel said what he said now makes sense and it has nothing to do with Zechariah.

The second implication is that a group consideration of passages like this are doomed to failure if “understanding the passage” is what the group is about. No one in the group is going to know about Gabriel’s previous appearance. No one will think of Luke’s artistry in evoking Daniel’s vision of the last times as he prepares us for understanding the decisive invasion of human history that begins (again) with the annunciation of the birth of John the Baptist. No one will be thinking about Luke at all because it will not occur to anyone that the best understanding of this passage comes from the use the writer is making of it.

That means that the easy collegiality that was made possible in the Bible study group (by the presupposition that the meaning of the text was right there in the text) goes away. That’s a big loss for me. I really liked being part of a group working together on that tast. People who look back at their participation in such groups with anger think of pictures like this one. I don’t. Those old meetings are replaced by having a textual expert handy and by relying on the authority of the expert rather than our own back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Those are the gains and the losses that come to my mind first. For myself, I don’t think I have any choice any more. When I read about Luke’s intention to evoke Daniel, something snaps in place and all of a sudden I feel that I am seeing the passage clearly—very often, clearly for the first time. And there is an emotional excitement about it. I don’t want to give that up either. I don’t think there is any going back for me.

That means that no Bible study group I have ever been part of is going to work for me anymore. Maybe there’s a group somewhere. I could teach a group like that myself, if the group would allow “teaching” to be relaying to them the understandings I found in my studies among Brown and his fellow scholars. That doesn’t sound very likely to me, especially when there are so many scholars who might be chosen.

So I choose to read my books and to listen to my CDs and to have the conversations I can have based on what I have learned. I have some friends who will be glad to be a part of this enterprise, although none of them lives in Portland, Oregon. I have a blog, which serves to begin conversations with this far-flung set of friends. That’s pretty good.

But however good or bad it is, I’m sure I can’t go back to the group approach I once knew. Always, there are two questions. The second one, “What does this passage mean for the way I understand my own life and the challenges of my own discipleship?” is going to be the same in either setting. The first one, “What does this passage mean to me?” has been decisively replaced by “What is Luke trying to say by crafting this text as he does?”

[1] Father Raymond E. Brown tries, especially in his lectures, to remind us that most of the people who came in contact with Matthew’s text in the first several centuries were hearing it read, rather than reading it themselves. There weren’t many copies of these texts and most people couldn’t read anyway. This consideration of Luke’s use of the vision appears in his book, The Birth of the Messiah and in a set of lectures with the same title.

Posted in Biblical Studies | Tagged Acts, Bible study, Daniel, Luke, Matthew, seeing clearly, textual analysis | Leave a comment

The Best Practice for Dying Well is Living Well

Posted on January 7, 2014 by hessd

“Death” is the end of life. “Dying,” on the other hand, is life’s last task. I have heard it is a difficult task; difficult, at least, to do well. On the supposition that we are likely to die as we lived, the best preparation for dying well would seem to be living well.

Here is the quote that started me thinking along this line: “The most critical task among the very old is to retain a sense of identity when confronting physical decline and the loss of loved ones…”[1] Today, I’d like to unpack that quote a little. What is meant by “the very old?” What is a “sense of identity?” Why are “physical decline” and “the loss of loved ones” chosen as the important categories?

I’m somewhere between “the days of a man are three score and ten” (70) and “by reason of strength, four score” (80), so I don’t think I am what Professor McCarthy meant by “very old.”[2] On the other hand, if dying is a task you can practice and, over time, get good at, I want to get started. I’ve never been a quick learner and being “very old” would not make me any quicker.

So, what is “a sense of identity;” the sense I have of who I am which it is important to retain. There are two important things to say about identities. The first is that they are largely fictions. The second is that they are extremely important.

I might have gone a little too far in saying that they are fictions. The fact is that they are constructs. An identity, in other words, is not something you find; it is something you make. On the other hand, you don’t always have the material to make the self you would really like to make. We all have to build with the materials we can find, earn, or scavenge. A child who wants to think of himself as lovable would do well to surround himself with people who love him, for example.

So, clearly, “a self,” an “identity” is not something that is true or false. It is true and false. The best two questions about a self are: a) is it useful and b) is it plausible? Those two questions are my version of the criteria employed by Snell and Gail Putney: an accurate and acceptable self image.[3] I have turned “accurate” to “plausible,” as you see. I think that is really the best we can do. And I have turned “acceptable” to “useful.” My sense of who I am, in this formulation, needs to help me do what I am trying to do. In this post, “dying well” is what I am trying to do—or “living well,” if you want to contrast the rehearsal with the performance.

We try to “retain,” says the quote, a sense of identity. We had it once, in other words, and we want to keep it. We want, at the very least, not to squander it. On the other hand, a substantial part of the materials we used to build this identity consisted of things we were good at and those materials tend to slip away from the very old. You can’t retain the identity you have built without the materials you need. Even identities get soiled and frayed and eroded and substantial pieces of an identity will need to be replaced, like so many shingles. So you can keep on being the person you have the materials to repair and expressions like “physical decline” suggest that the repairs you once made without thinking much about it, may no longer be possible.

What to do?

You can be the self who does remarkable and innovative work with the materials available. That’s my goal. Every morning, usually in the shower, I consider what I need to do or would like to do that day. Above is the team meeting I would like to have; below, the team meeting is more often have. I huddle with my team’s members and call a play. Some of my team’s members are not happy. The feet say they are fine if they can do it in stages; the legs say they could manage if I wear my compression socks; the eyes say somebody else is going to have to read the fine print on the warranty, and so on. Most often, I have to modify the play I first called so that it calls on the present abilities of my teammates.

Over the years, I’ve gotten really good at that. I have a better and better grasp of what they are capable of. I invent new offenses and new defenses to take advantage of their abilities. In this way of thinking of it, “I” have “retained a sense of identity” while confronting “physical decline”—an expression that now refers to the team members. I can’t run faster than anyone else any more or throw harder than anyone else. I can’t even outwork everyone else, which was my default strategy as a younger man. But I know my team better than ever. I trust them to do what they can and I am smart enough not to ask them to do things they really can’t do.

The second element—the loss of loved ones—is harder in some ways. The loved ones I have had have served—this is Putney and Putney again—as “mirrors, models, and receivers of my action.” As mirrors, they have reflected back to me who I am. As models, they show me what I could be or, sometimes, what I am going to be if I don’t shape up. As receivers of my initiatives, they accept, reject, modify, accept with conditions, and any number of other kinds of responses. To pick the simplest example, I love my wife dearly. That means she has to be willing to be loved dearly. She also has to teach me what loving her dearly, her in particular, means to her, but that is a topic for another post.

You lose the people who knew who you were. The loss of those loved ones is an irreparable loss. The saying that best captures this reality for me is “You can’t make new old friends.”

On the other hand, you will always be surrounded by people who know—or could know—who you are. To take advantage of that resource, you will have to be willing to be who you are, not who you used to be. If you fall into the trap of thinking that “the person I once was” is the person I “really am,” the resource of the people you have will not be adequate. They, who know you as you are and who are looking for a chance to like you as you are, never knew you as you were. Telling them who you used to be won’t get the job done for very long.

But if you think back, you will remember that the best friends you ever had were not discovered by telling them who you used to be. You got those friends by telling them who you were at that time and by living the life that made that identity make sense to them. That is what you did and I hope you got good at it because that is what you need to do now as a “very old person,” whatever Professor McCarthy means by that. You need to look, as a good teacher does, at just who is actually there, rather than who you wish were there.

In any case, focusing on the task at hand is going to be a good idea. This dialogue if from the movie Lion in Winter, but it isn’t the way the script has it. It is the way Toby Zeigler and President Bartlet of The West Wing remember it.

TOBY: Hey, your favorite movie was on TV last night.

BARTLET: “By God, I’m 50, alive, and the King all at the same time.”

TOBY: I turned it on just as they got to the scene when Richard, Geoffrey and John were locked in the dungeon and Henry was coming down to execute them. Richard tells his brothers not to cower but to take it like men. And Geoffrey says, “You fool! “As if it matters how a man falls down.” And Richard says…

BOTH: “When the fall is all that’s left…

BARTLET: …it matters a great deal.”

And so it does. But if you understand that dying well is only the last part of living well, you can practice.

[1] It is cited by David Matzko McCarthy in his article, “Generational Conflict: Continuity and Change.” He found it elsewhere, but I suspect that in the elsewhere he found it, it was a quote attributed to yet another where.

[2] The age markers come from Psalm 90. I’ve fiddled with the wording to improve the meter in English and I have completely ignored the point of this passage, which is that as long as it lasts, it is going to be hard.

[3] The Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society.

Posted in Getting Old | Tagged dying well, living well, losing loved ones, self image | Leave a comment

Using the Right Words

Posted on January 2, 2014 by hessd

I wish a happy 2014 to you all and as a step toward that happiness, let’s look at one of my favorite scenes from I, Robot.[1] The guiding genius behind U.S. Robotics’ (USB) success was Alfred Landingham, who appears to have thrown himself out of the window very near the top of a tall office building. Detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) has been called to investigate and Dr. Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynihan) is escorting him around the building, as you see.

Spooner: So, Dr…Calvin. What exactly do you do around here?

Calvin:      My general fields are advanced robotics and psychiatry[2] although I specialize in hardware to wetware interfaces in an effort to advance USR’s robotic anthropomorphization program.

Spooner: So…what do you do?

Calvin:    I…make the robots seem more human.

Spooner: Wasn’t that easier to say?

Calvin:    (reflects briefly on the question) Not really. No.

It’s not hard to make fun of Dr. Calvin’s answer and that is really why this exchange is in the movie at all. I think it is a really good answer in many ways, but it is not a good response to Detective Spooner. Dr. Calvin’s answer is formal. This is the answer she would give to a new colleague she would meet at an academic convention or a trade show. It gives the fields of her training first—advanced robotics and psychiatry. It gives the field of application second—hardware to wetware interfaces. It gives the goal third—robotic anthropomorphization. Every one of those terms leads in an appropriate and helpful academic direction. They are very nearly citations of the relevant academic work.

Detective Spooner is not someone Dr. Calvin would meet at the conferences. He is a very good cop, he hates robots, and his method is highly intuitive. This is a very bad answer for him. The good answer comes next. You can see Dr. Calvin stumble in the ellipse between “I” and “make.” She’s working on how to phrase her work in a very general way. It has been a long time since she has had to do that. When she comes up with it, however, it is a really good answer: “I make the robots seem more human.”

Spooner now knows what she does and that really ought to end the conversation, but Spooner wants to reprove Calvin for giving herself a needlessly difficult task. He has no idea that it is easier for her to give the first answer than the second. She does stop, though, and give his question some consideration. The answer she gives is not a response in any way to his discomfort with “the long answer.” It is a simple and honest answer: No, the long answer I gave was easier than the short answer you wanted.

I have enjoyed that little patch of dialogue for years. Also, robotization in general and the interactive performance of affect will be a major topic in 2014 and I wanted to get an early start.[3]

[1] For those of you who are fans of the book, I, Robot, the movie has very nearly no relationship to the book. On the other hand, the book does not have this exchange between Will Smith and Bridget Moynihan.

[2] It really isn’t that funny. Dr. Calvin’s work has produced a very difficult reality in the current movie, Her, in which, according to the blurb: “A lonely writer develops an unlikely relationship with his newly purchased operating system that’s designed to meet his every need.” It is Dr. Calvin and her colleagues who have done the designing.

[3] “Interactive performance of affect?” Are you kidding me? Well…yes. On the other hand, it is exactly what I want to talk about.

Posted in Words | Tagged communication, humanization, I Robot, robots | Leave a comment

The Neurological Infrastructure of Christmas

Posted on December 28, 2013 by hessd

I’ve been thinking for the last few days about believing in Santa Claus. You might think that “neurological infrastructure” is a little too much for a piece about Christmas, but hold that thought until you are done. If you still feel that way, read Kelly Lambert’s piece by clicking on the hypertext link. And if you STILL feel that way, I say “Bah. Humbug!”

The reference to “infrastructure” in the title, on the other hand, points to something a little less superficial. I got to thinking about this when I read Kelly Lambert’s piece (here) in the New York Times. Lambert is a mother whose young children still believe in Santa Claus. She is also “a behavioral neuroscientist, a professor and a generally serious-minded, reality-based person.”

In the column she tells the story of an enormous and inventive lie she told her children the year they discovered their presents in the attic and then reflects, as a neurologist, on how glad she was that she told that lie.

I’ll start with something we all know, beginning with “eventually, they learn that reindeer can’t fly…” The issue Lambert raises is the value of the experiences you have before you learn that.

Although children are born with a full set of 86 billion brain cells, or neurons, the connections between these neurons are relatively sparse during these early years. As their brains develop — as more and more micro-thread extensions form between neurons, and neurochemicals zap across the tiny gaps — children slowly learn about the rules of the physical world, and the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction.

Eventually, they learn that reindeer can’t fly, that Santa can’t visit every child’s home in one single night and, even if he could make such a trip, there’s no way he could eat all those cookies. Magical beliefs are pruned away as mature neural circuits reflecting real-world contingencies become solidified.

So what’s the advantage? By preserving a “Santa Claus era,” she assured “that my girls have an emotional holiday portal for their future adult brains.” So what’s an emotional portal? It’s the same mechanism that provides the infrastructure for post-traumatic stress disorder. Neuroimaging evidence shows that going through that portal—experiencing the past in its full cognitive and emotional power—is different from simply remembering an event. Everyone knows that about battlefield stress. Lambert is arguing that it’s true about Christmas memories, too.

Her children, as adults—knowing about the material world and its laws—will still retain access to those earlier times. They will still have access to that portal. It might be worth calling it a “post-tradition experiential benefit” just to keep the order of ideas in the same pattern as PTSD and thus to remind us that the same infrastructure underlies both.

I liked Lambert’s piece on its own merits, but I probably wouldn’t have written about it myself if several other dialogues had not been available. Here is one. It is from one of the many remakes of the movie Miracle on 42th Street.[1] Susan Walker is a little girl who has had Santa Claus stripped away from her too early. We know it is too early when she asks her mother, Dorey Walker, “Do I have to not believe in Santa Claus all at once?” Here’s the way the discussion goes.

Dorey: “…believing in myths and fantasies just makes you unhappy.”

Susan: Did you believe in Santa Claus when you were my age?

Dorey: Yes.

Susan: Were you unhappy?

Dorey: Well, when all the things I believed in turned out not to be true…yes, I was unhappy.

This is not the world neurologist Kelly Lambert gives us. In her world, we learn what the world is really like but we retain access to a portal that leads us back to those magical pre-scientific times. Dorey Walker ran into a wall at full speed. A “portal” back to those times would be more like PTSD for her and she wants to spare her daughter that awful experience. Lambert wants to keep her daughters’ access to those wonderful experiences. “For every year I layered another set of Christmas memories into their brains,” Lambert says, “the easier it would be for them to relive those feelings.”

The neurology works the same way in either case. That’s why I have been leaning on the notion of infrastructure. And it isn’t really about Santa Claus. I didn’t believe in Santa Claus as a young child, but I got “the magic of Christmas” completely. I got the sights and the smells and the events of excitement and anticipation. And that is the same kind of experience I wanted for my own kids, who also, if memory serves, didn’t believe in Santa Claus.

They got something, though. Here is a Facebook note from my younger son Doug, put up on his page on Christmas day this year.

Remember that sense of wonder, that whole-body excitement you felt for Christmas as a child? Everything about today was special and felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It wasn’t just the presents, and it wasn’t just being together, there was something more, something . . . different, as though the air itself contained something extra, and light had properties it only had that day. The effect was intoxicating. I wish that for you today. May you and all those you care about experience that on this most wondrous day.

“Intoxicating” is the word that reminded me of the portal back to the magic of Christmas, so on this third day of Christmas—the “three French hens day”—I wish you at least nine more wonderful days of vividly remembered pleasure.

[1] Not the 1947 version or the 1959 version or the 1973 version or the 2013 version, but the 1994 version.

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged christmas, happy childhood, neurological connections, PTSD, Santa Claus | Leave a comment

He Said/She Said: the Two Narratives of the Birth of Jesus

Posted on December 15, 2013 by hessd

I have known for several decades that we have two accounts of the birth of Jesus. It had not occurred to me until yesterday that one of them (Matthew) has Joseph in the foreground and Mary in the background, while the other (Luke) has Mary in the foreground and Joseph in the background. If the principal characters narrated these stories (they don’t), we could call those versions “he said” and “she said.”

The next two paragraphs record what the two traditions actually say about Joseph and Mary. You can skip them if you like and then, if the conclusions that follow seem puzzling, you can come back and look at them. Or, if worst comes to worst, you can read the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke.

The four parts of Matthew that bear directly on Joseph and Mary are these: a) Joseph is told to accept Mary although she is pregnant with a child that is not his and he does what he is asked to do, b) he names the baby Jesus, as he is instructed, c) Joseph is warned to flee immediately to Egypt, taking his wife and son, and he does that, as we see here d) he took the family back to Israel, when he was told to do so, but not back to their home in Bethlehem, because he was warned about the Herodian ruler, and decided that Nazareth was far enough away that his family would be safe.

The nine parts of Luke that bear directly on Joseph and Mary are these: a) Mary is visited by the angel Gabriel and told that even though she is a virgin, she will conceive and bear Israel’s Messiah, b) Mary responds with a question—How can this be?—and then with willing acceptance, c) Gabriel also told Mary that her cousin Elizabeth, aged and barren, would have a son and Mary went to visit her as quickly as she could, d) Elizabeth greets her as “the mother of my Lord” and Mary responds with an extended canticle, the Magnificat, e) she leaves their home in Nazareth with her husband, Joseph, and goes to Bethlehem to register in Augustus’s census and while there, delivers her baby in a stable, f) she keeps carefully in her heart (Joseph did not) the words of the shepherds who came to see her baby and who told of a choir of angels that had appeared to them, g) on the eighth day, Joseph and Mary had their baby circumcised and Mary named him Jesus, h) while they were in Jerusalem to offer their son to God (because he was a first-born), they heard a canticle (the Nunc Dimittis) from the aged Simeon, who said to Mary (not to Joseph) that her son would be great and also a cause of division, from which she herself would not be spared, i) she reproved the preadolescent Jesus (Joseph did not) for not staying with the family as he should have when they left Jerusalem for home.

Matthew’s story (the “he said” version): Joseph’s receptivity to God’s voice and his prompt obedience are featured in Matthew. He names the child Jesus. He takes Mary, he flees to Egypt, he returns to Israel. He also makes a prudent calculation about how far the Herodian ruler’s power would extend and settles his family well outside his kingdom. He doesn’t say a word to God or to Mary or to anyone else. He just does what he is told.

Luke’s story (the “she said” version): Mary has an actual conversation with the angel Gabriel and decides on her own to visit Elizabeth. While there, she delivers a substantial speech. She goes with Joseph to Bethlehem and delivers her child there. She names the child Jesus. Several participants have special messages for her and she hears them and thinks about them. She and Joseph act as parents in circumcising him, in redeeming him at the Temple.[1] Later she rebukes her pre-adolescent son for his carelessness and is rebuked by the son in turn.

Note that there is almost nothing about Mary in Matthew’s account. She is the object of Joseph’s benevolence and accompanies her husband to all the places he is told to go. Similarly, there is almost nothing about Joseph in Luke’s account. He is named as Mary’s fiancée[2] and as the one who is required to go to Bethlehem to register and as the person who was with Mary in the stable, and later, at the temple. Nothing else. Other references are “they” and “the child’s father and mother” and finally, “his parents.” In Luke, Joseph decides nothing, not even the child’s name, has no dreams, and receives no guidance. He is a bystander.

Matthew’s birth narrative is about Joseph, in short, and Luke’s is about Mary. There is no need to be confused by the fact that the side stories are different. Matthew, for instance, adds gentile academics (Wise Men) to his account because he wants an early gentile recognition of the status of the new “King of the Jews.” Luke adds the shepherds because he cares deeply about the poor and wants them, lowly sheep herders, in this case, to get a special invitation to come to Bethlehem to see an apparently insignificant child who was born in a barn.[3] These additions make each birth narrative a little more complicated, but they don’t change the focal characters.

Matthew gives us the compassionate, visionary, and action-oriented husband. Luke gives us the divinely chosen virgin mother and her male caregiver. Each story has a focus and a strong narrative integrity. The story I heard for the first fifty or so years of my life, “the Christmas story,” has neither one focus nor two; and no narrative integrity at all.

Does that seem harsh? OK, you tell me where the tension is in a story where an angel tells Mary about her pregnancy and then tells Joseph the same thing. It is “their secret” now, since both know the same thing? No, Matthew has it better, where Joseph is told and Mary is not. And Luke has it better as well, where Mary is told and Joseph is not.

W. H. Auden gets that in the way he represents Joseph’s confrontation with Gabriel in his poem, “For the Time Being.”

JOSEPH: How then am I to know, Father, that you are just? Give me one reason.

GABRIEL: No

JOSEPH: All I ask is one/Important and elegant proof/That what my Love had done/Was really at your will/And that your will is Love.

GABRIEL: No, you must believe; Be silent, and sit still.

[1] As a first-born male, Jesus “belongs to God” and must be redeemed so he can live at home with his parents.

[2] I think fiancée is the best I can do. According to the customs of that time, Joseph and Mary were “man and wife” for a period of time before they began living together. It’s hard to find a way to say that in English.

[3] Whenever I get to this reference, I am reminded that the literal meaning of the English word bastard is “born in a barn.” The Latin bastum means “pack saddle.” The –ard suffix is a standard pejorative suffix, seen also in sluggard and drunkard. So a “pack-saddle child” is born, not in the marriage bed, but in the barn where the saddles are kept.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Living My Life | Tagged Bethlehem, he said, Joseph, mary, she said | Leave a comment

Nelson Mandela: An Educated Man

Posted on December 7, 2013 by hessd

Most of what matters to me most about Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, I learned from watching—over and over—Morgan Freeman’s portrayal of Mandela in the movie Invictus.[1] But in today’s New York Times coverage (here), I learned a little more about those few themes that captured me at first. Everyone who knows anything about President Mandela will be writing about him. I don’t really know anything, but I’d like to write today about some things that have impressed me.

The big stories today are about how patient he was, how disinclined to retribution. He gave South Africa a gift that no other South African of his time could have given. Here he is, for instance, addressing the U. N. in New York. I don’t find it hard to admire such a man, but—I might as well say it—I do have difficulty identifying with him. In Bill Keller’s piece today, I did find some people I could identify with. They are little people. Functionaries. And they are white. And they are there for the purpose of preventing Mandela from escaping.

But look at this:

Still, Mr. Mandela said he regarded his prison experience as a major factor in his nonracial outlook. He said prison tempered any desire for vengeance by exposing him to sympathetic white guards who smuggled in newspapers and extra rations, and to moderates within the National Party government who approached him in hopes of opening a dialogue. Above all, prison taught him to be a master negotiator.

This is the first I have heard that there were “sympathetic white guards” who supported him. Very likely, they supported Mandela the man, rather than Mandela’s association with the African National Congress or the demand by the majority of black South Africans for the right to vote.

I think I might have been able to do that. I might have seen to it that a man like Mandela—a man who refused to play the victim, who carried himself in prison like exiled royalty—got extra news and extra rations. I might particularly have done so because I knew there were other guards who treated him differently.

Perhaps because Mr. Mandela was so revered, he was singled out for gratuitous cruelties by the authorities. The wardens left newspaper clippings in his cell about how his wife had been cited as the other woman in a divorce case, and about the persecution she and her children endured after being exiled to a bleak town 250 miles from Johannesburg.

I might not have been able to support fairness in South Africa, but I am quite sure I would want to find a way to say that I was not one of “them”—meaning my fellow guards who took pleasure in causing Mandela pain. Very likely, I would have been a guard who wished to take no action at all—neither pro nor con—toward this particular prisoner. But when I consented by my silence to the treatment meted out by the other guards, I don’t know whether I could really have stood by and done nothing.

The part in this grand political biography that I feel some identification with is very small indeed and not all that virtuous, but of the things I read about today, it is one I could see myself doing. Also, I am quite sure I would have wanted to treat this man honorably. Why? Well, consider this.

The first time his lawyer, George Bizos, visited him, Mr. Mandela greeted him and then introduced his eight guards by name — to their amazement — as “my guard of honor.” The prison authorities began treating him as a prison elder statesman.

I would have been a part of that group, the group the prisoner called “my guard of honor.” I would have been one of the group whose name the prisoner knew; a guard who was introduced to the visiting lawyer by my name. I am quite sure I would have wanted to honor him if I could find a way to do so. The extra news and the extra rations would have seemed to me only a small return for the honor he had showed me.

And I think I might not have been able to resist wondering why he did all that. He is in this prison on a life sentence, after all. And he learned my language and he learned my name and he gave me—a man whose only official function is to see that he didn’t escape—a status of honor.

In the movie, it is William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus,” that Mandela claims as a source of support. I’ve never liked the poem, but Mandela says, “It helped me stand when all I wanted to do was lie down.” However I might feel about the poem, it is hard not to appreciate the effect. Think about whatever it was that helped you stand when all you wanted to do was lie down; think about how you feel about whatever or whoever that was.

But when I think about the choices Mandela made in prison, it is Rudyard Kipling’s “If” that comes to my mind. When Mandela was on trial, he chose to be a high profile defendant and to appeal to the conscience of the world. Being convicted and sent to prison for life could be treated as a triumph in that career. On the other hand, living on a remote island under the absolute control of racist guards might be treated as a disaster.

He did neither. “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two impostors just the same…you will be a man, my son,” says Kipling. Mandela met with the prison experience and called it neither a triumph nor a disaster. He called it an education.

[1] Rolihlahla is his birth name, according to Bill Keller’s article. Nelson is the name he picked up at the age of seven when a teacher assigned that name to him. In the movie, Mandela gives his name, at the inauguration, as “Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.” I don’t know if he actually did that, but if he did it would be welding together the two sides he had and that his nation had. That weld was a personal and also a political project for Mandela.

Posted in Living My Life, Movies, Politics | Tagged guilt, heroism, Mandela, reconciliation, South Africa, the victim role | 2 Comments

Christmas, not so much any more

Posted on December 3, 2013 by hessd

More and more, as December begins, I find I am living in a time of Advent and less and less in a time of Christmas. As I ponder why that is, I don’t begin with the idea that this change in what matters to me is a good thing or a bad thing. It is what it is.

In thinking about it, though, I have stumbled over a few things I seem to have glided past before. Some celebrations, for instance, are seasonal. For many thousands of years, we and our ancestors have celebrated the longest day of the year and the shortest day of the year. These are not based on how long the day seems, by the way. If that were the case, I would nominate Black Friday, still the day after Thanksgiving but now preceded by an overlapping array of run-ups and countdowns.

You celebrate seasonal events every season they occur. You celebrate the return of life in the spring and the colorful beginnings of an eventually bleak dormancy in the fall. “Spring” itself recurs and we celebrate it each time.

Other celebrations are historical. They happened at some particular time. You were born, for instance, at a particular time and although we say we will celebrate your “birthday,” we, in fact, celebrate the anniversary of your birth. Anniversaries do not recur. When you have celebrated the 70^th anniversary of the day of your birth, you are done with that. Next year, you will celebrate a different anniversary of that day.

Christmas is, properly speaking, seasonal. Christian missionaries came across societies celebrating the shortest day of the year and dumped a celebration of their own on top of it. Let’s call the people celebrating the solstice (literally “sun stand”) “pagans,” meaning no disrespect. Pagans were villagers, people from the country, and the term was used to distinguish them from Christians, who were more prominent in the cities.[1] Since the Christians had cultural hegemony (and military and economic and political dominance) they simply placed Christmas on top of an already existing celebration.[2]

I’m sure the missionaries thought that was the smart thing to do, but in doing it, they changed the celebration from historical to seasonal. Jesus is not, in fact, born every winter. The church celebrates his birth every winter. How we do that and why we should do it will have to wait for another time.

“Pagan” and “Christian”—again without prejudice to either term—have undergone an astonishing reversal. If we persisted in looking at the distinction in demographic terms, we would say that the Christians are more prominent in the rural areas and the Pagans in the cities. The more important distinction, however, has to do with cultural hegemony. The missionaries were able to dump Christmas right on top of…oh…the “Feast of Sun-return,” because they had the power to do it. That’s what cultural hegemony means. Now the Pagans have cultural hegemony and they are acting in their own interest just as the missionaries did. They are dumping Xmas right on top of Advent.

The power exercised by the Pagans, especially the control of advertising dollars, defines what the celebration is about. It is about spending and getting together and eating too much and drinking w-a-a-y too much. It is about getting presents for yourself, too, because “it’s the season.” For many years, a resisting part of me would mumble, “What season is it?” That battle is over—long over, probably—and the Pagans have won that one. For that reason, I am now content to give up the name Christmas, to which I have clung as much for cultural reasons as for religious ones, and accept Xmas as a legitimate designation.[3]

I don’t want to be all grinchy about losing this one. There are lots of parts of Xmas I enjoy. I enjoy the excuse for giving presents, for instance. Getting presents was the big thing for me when I was a boy, but it has been a very long time since getting them gave me the same pleasure of giving them. There is a lot of music that would otherwise be “sacred,” which is brought out during Xmas. You can hear “O Little Town of Bethlehem” over PA systems almost anywhere. There is a lot of Xmas music, like “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” or “Frosty the Snowman” or “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which could be a lot of fun if they didn’t start playing it before Thanksgiving.

But most of Xmas, I don’t enjoy. It’s like a very well done, but dark and discouraging, movie. Everyone says it is an artistic triumph and I agree. But I don’t want to have to go see it for myself. I don’t want to participate in it. At the shopping mall nearest us, the shopping already looks frantic and you know it is going to get worse. The lists of things to buy—not things you want to buy, but people you NEED to check off your list—drive your days, and deeper into the Xmas season, your nights as well.

Advent isn’t like that for me. Christians have two really good Advent stories. Most Christians like to puree them and feast on a version of the two that obliterates their differences and their strengths. I don’t. I like to keep them separate and enjoy each one. To help me do that, I have assigned the Matthew story to the odd-numbered years (we are doing Matthew this year) and the Luke story to the even-numbered years. My own church is a pureeing church, so I rely on family members and tolerant friends to help me celebrate the integrity of each of the stories.

I like Advent for a lot of different reasons. I’m really proud of some of those reasons. Here’s one I’m not so proud of. It gives me a quiet place to sit to watch Xmas. Once you realize that the Xmas-celebrants are celebrating a different holiday, you can just sit and watch them. You can enjoy their pleasure, when you find it, and mourn their exhaustion and self-sacrifice when you see it. It feels more like watching a parade and much less like being in the Bataan death march.

I heard, once, of a little child who had been run over by the family’s Christmas frenzy for several weeks before Christmas day. His father heard the child murmur, as he said his prayers at bedtime on Christmas eve: “…and forgive us our Christmases as we forgive those who Christmas against us.” Way to go, kid.

[1]Heathen probably derived from “people who dwell in the heath,” i.e. out in the country. From a demographic standpoint, then “Christian” translates to “urban” and both “heathen” and “pagan” to “rural.”

[2] Culturally as well as physically, rolling friction is less than starting friction. It is easier, in other words, to adapt the meaning of an already existing celebration than to start a new one.

[3] I freely confess that I began thinking of the distinction when I was a teenager and first read C. S. Lewis’s snarky little parody, “Xmas and Christmas: a Lost Chapter from Heroditus.” Lewis was still protesting the expropriation of Christmas so he placed its strange customs in an imaginary country. It wasn’t all the imaginary: Niaturb is Britain, spelled backward.

Posted in Living My Life, Words | Tagged christmas, consumer culture, shopping, Xmas | Leave a comment

The Land of the Free

Posted on November 27, 2013 by hessd

Here’s a thought experiment. It’s an imagined scenario that is going to offend some people, but I think it’s worth the risk, particularly because: a) I’m not sure anyone who reads this blog is going to be offended and b) I’m not likely to find out about it.

Imagine the beginning of a high profile sports event. Football is now the iconic American sport, so let’s make it a college football game. At the beginning someone sings “our national anthem.” Or maybe everyone sings it. It’s been so long since I’ve been to a football game that I honestly don’t know how it is done any more. Let’s have a vocalist and a band of some kind.

The song goes like this:

Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight, O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming? And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave Hm, hm, hm, hm, hm, hmmmmmmm, and the home of the brave?

Obviously, the first question we would want to ask is why a part of the song was replaced by hummed syllables. We note that the omitted words are, “O’er the land of the free,” and we begin to suspect social protest. Why did the singer leave that part out? The band played them without any difficulty? Did she forget those particular words? It’s certainly possible.

It becomes less likely when the pamphlets get passed down the row the way the hot dogs and the beers will get passed down later. On the front of the pamphlet, it says, “We are NOT the land of the free.” Inside, it has this chart. It is calibrated in prisoners per 100,000 of population.[1]

1	United States	716
2	Seychelles	709
3	Saint Kitts and Nevis	701
4	U.S. Virgin Islands	539
5	Cuba	510
6	Rwanda	492
7	Anguilla	487
8	Russia	484
9	British Virgin Islands	460 c.
10	El Salvador	425
11	Bermuda	417
12	Azerbaijan	413
13	Belize	407
14	Grenada	402
15	Panama	401
16	Antigua and Barbuda	395
17	Cayman Islands	382
18	Thailand	381
19	Barbados	377
20	Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	376
21	Bahamas	371
22	Sint Maarten	369
23	Dominica	356
24	Palau	348
25	Greenland	340

On the final page of the tri-fold, it says, “We pay such attention to the top 25 in this sport. This is a top 25 we really don’t want to be a part of, let alone to lead. Please join us is refusing to sing this blatantly false phrase of our official song until we have given up our #1 ranking.”

It wouldn’t be all that unusual if the singer, without the knowledge of the band, had given no notice of what she intended to do. She could, after all, pretend that she stumbled on the words at the time. That might give her time to get out of the stadium before people put the song together with the pamphlets.

You can imagine a lot of intermediate forms—the teams did/didn’t know, the university presidents did/didn’t know, the league executives did/didn’t know—and so on. But let’s go to the far end of the possibilities and say that everyone knew except the fans who showed up to see the game. The NCAA said they thought it was a good idea, the PAC 12 said it was a good idea, as did the coaches and a majority of the players of both teams, and so on. Imagine further that they launch an appeal to all other teams in the top 25 of the national rankings to follow their example. No more singing of that phrase at our games. We will sing all the other phrases with gusto, and we will add that phrase back when the U. S. drops out of the top 25 most incarcerating countries in the world.

Now that I have imagined this scenario, I have to say that I can’t really see it. I can close my eyes and try to picture the events I have described. Nothing comes. Even why I try really hard, I can’t see it in my mind. You try it. I’m sure some of you can summon the inner vision I cannot.

Wouldn’t it just be amazing? Unprecedented, I think. This isn’t like burning your draft card or your bra. This isn’t like sitting on the steps of the U. S. Capitol until the police come and haul you away. This is more like a coup by the leaders of the most popular sport in America. It’s a cultural coup, rather than a political one, but it would get political really fast.

[1] I, for one, don’t like being that far ahead of Cuba.

Posted in Politics | Tagged cultural coup, football, freedom, patriotism, prisoners, subversion | Leave a comment

In Florida, Oceans and Premiums Rise Together

Posted on November 21, 2013 by hessd

When I was in grad school at Oregon, I read a footnote that changed my thinking forever. It was in Robert Heilbroner’s An Inquiry into the Human Prospect. The text, as I recall it, was talking about how we were going to run out of copper. The footnote said that actually, we would never run out of copper, but that the cost of copper per ounce would rise to levels that would prohibit our using copper in all the ways we are not using it.

Formally, these two positions are contradictory. We will run out of copper; we won’t run out of copper. Practically, the second is just a specification, a more careful explanation, of the first. There will always be copper, but we won’t be about to use it any more.[1] This brings me to coastal properties in Florida and, eventually, just to Florida itself. All of it.

Will coastal Florida continue to be available for newly constructed housing? Yes, it will. Will the dramatically rising costs of insuring homes on the Florida cost make new housing there virtually impossible? Yes, it will. And the cost of insuring modest homes that have been there for a long time.[2]

Here we see precisely the play on “available” for coastal housing that Heilbroner used for “available” copper. Yes, there will still be dry land at the Florida coasts that is zoned for individual residences. No, insurance on those houses will not be available to the people who are now living there. They are going to have to move. And they will have to move not as the ocean rises (which it is doing in increasing rates) but at the insurance premiums rise. You were looking for examples of art imitating life? There you go. People who thought the greenhouse gases would not cause in increase in insurance premiums just weren’t thinking the way insurance people think. Here’s a piece from the New York Times that lays out some of the fundamentals.

Insurance people think that the risks they incur in insuring coastal homes should be echoed in the premiums the homeowners pay. That doesn’t sound all that unreasonable as a business model. Residents who are looking at a quadrupling—from last year to this year—of their insurance premiums are not thinking about business models. They are thinking that the Sheriff has come to the family home, based on a speculative article in a journal of meteorology, and thrown them out of their house. They may have heard of climate change, but it hasn’t been any part of the discussions the governor and the legislature have been having.

So the insurance nerds are being prudent and the homeowners feel like they are getting mugged. But even in Florida, “stand your ground” is not a strategy that will deal effectively with rising oceans and the insurance companies are going to do what they are going to do.

The federal government is also going to what it is going to do because Congress has assigned itself the job of maintaining a national flood insurance program. After the costs imposed by Hurricane Katrina, Congress passed the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, the goal of which was to keep down that part of flooding costs that the feds were liable for. The program does have to remain solvent, after all.[3] The Congress is truly sorry that people are being priced out of their homes, but Congress cannot bear the cost of keeping them in place. We are, after, all trying to reduce the size of the federal government.

The government is working on this issue in Florida as well. House Insurance and Banking Chairman Bryan Nelson, R-Apopka is trying to get Congress to postpone implementation of the Biggert-Waters Act. If you want to call that “working.”

Americans are accustomed to finding technological solutions for problems that would otherwise be intractable. Part of that effort involved talking to Dutch engineers because The Netherlands is famous for its flood control technology, but (see the New York Times account) “the very different topography of Miami Beach and its sister coastal cities does not lend itself to the fixes engineered by the Dutch.” In addition to which, points out Miami Beach city manager, Jimmy L. Morales, “Ultimately, you can’t beat nature, but you can learn to live with it.” Learning to live with it currently costs The Netherlands $1 billion a year for flood mitigation and they are working with about 280 miles of coastline. Florida is working with 1197 miles of coastline; more than four times as much.

This is not a problem that “government” at any level, or at all levels together, can solve. We made the choices that have producing the rapidly rising seas a long time ago. Even mitigation is going to be horribly expensive and mitigation is a short term response.

A governmental response is going to require that government be trusted and funded at levels we have never contemplated before, except in wartime. Is this wartime? If I lived anywhere in Florida, I think pushing for increasing levels of trust in the only government that can summon the will and the resources to help me, would be a prudent thing to do. Florida, of course, is not known for its prudence, so we will see.

[1] Actually, “we” means industry. There will always be individuals who can afford huge expenditures on copper for the most frivolous of reasons. Heilbroner doesn’t include these individuals in “we.”

[2] JFK speechwriter Ted Sorenson found the slogan in the writings of the New England Council during Kennedy’s career in the Senate and began to insert it into Kennedy’s speeches. Everyone was expected to be enthusiastic about that. In Florida, it is going to lift all houses and no one is expected to be enthusiastic.

[3] The “waters” in the Biggert-Waters act is Maxine Waters, Democrat of California. She is apparently well-known so nothing I have read commented that a Waters sponsoring flood control legislation was at all funny.

Posted in Paying Attention, Politics | Tagged flood insurance, flood mitigation, Florida, rising oceans, trust in government | 3 Comments